Wednesday, December 17, 2008
My wish in sharing this is not to give you sadness.
It's not to give you images of horror.
My wish for you is hope.
My wish for you is vision. Clear vision and understanding.
My wish for you is hope. Hope for us.
Hope that we can do better.
Hope that we can be better.
Hope that we can remember. Not just at the holidays. Not just when we see media images.
Hope that we can remember always that we are the priviliged. We are ones.
We can do better. We can change.
We can stand up and we can speak the truth.
We can look in the mirror and we can understand our role. That we can understand the need for a new way.
That it isn't something that happens "There"
That no war is rightous.
That Just because it doesn't say "Made in a factory by a 9 year old boy" DOES NOT mean that is made by a happy grandmother is Switzerland. That no plastic walmart toy is.
It's hope. Yes Hope.
Hope for you. Hope for me.
Hope that we remember that nothing is free. Nothing is cheap. Except Freedom.
Yes, that's right. Freedom does not come of money. It does not come of war. It does not come of pain.
Freedom comes of changed minds.
It comes of freed minds. Freed souls. You cannot free anyones but your own, but you may inspire.
The flight of your soul may inspire and lift thousands and by the thousands shall lift millions.
You need not rescue or heal a child. You need only give them the hope that they may... because you do.
This is my hope for you. For me.
For us all.
Free your soul. Walk through the pain, look it in the face, hear it's words. Fear is the only evil and you do not need it.
Knowing will never hurt you it can only free you of the fear of what lurks in the shadows. My wish is that you will look bravely inward and find that unaskable, unthinkable, unfathomable and ask, see understand. Don't look away, but let it seep out into the light... through your tears...through your questions...through your sobs or your screams...but let it disolve in the light and the power of you. Be thankful if you will, but don't believe that because it is "there" it could never be here.
My wish for you is hope.
I love you.
In this Christmas let us remember not what was but what could be.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Oh, Storm Clouds!
Have I ever told you how much I love a good storm?
I love a good storm. Crave them actually.
The excitement I feel when I see an ominous black storm cloud looming on the horizon!
I can feel the energy, hours before it reaches us, and my whole being becomes electrified with it.
The Power! And yet, I feel most at peace during the height of a crashing, whipping, booming thunderstorm.
I love to stand in the doorway, or even better, on a patio, letting the wind whip my hair as it howls through the trees and overhead. I get goosebumps at the pounding, drenching, earth cleansing downpour!
The smell of a thunderstorm can hardly be described, but I will try.
It begins in the distance...that a storm is coming sweet, wet, green smell in the air...then becomes something altogether more obvious...a heavy, woody, refreshing scent that I seem to smell with my heart as much as my nose.
A storm is a pleasure for all the senses. Striking contrast of black sky and electric light... scent that cleans and refreshes the soul... thunder; soft, distant, promising at first, then earth shaking, body quaking claps and cracks...and Oh! the feeling of it all! Heavy, thick, warm air leaving a layer of damp stickiness to your whole body... push your hair back from where it's stuck to your forehead...wait for the cool clean rain that is promising to come... Then it does. Complete with wind that takes your warm damp skin and turns it to goosebumps and if you dare, a shower like none other!
Summer storms are on the horizon here in TX already.
Mmmm, my heart thumps in my chest at the thought of it.
Monday, March 31, 2008
My Heart's Desire
I long for a soul sister.
I long to have that feeling of complete love and understanding from another woman.
A soul sister to laugh with, to cry with, to dance and paint and talk with.
To love and crave and play with.
To share my secrets and hide away hers.
I long for a woman to admire and be admired by.
A friend who knows the right thing to say and is there to say it.
A friend who can call me at any time of the day or night and know that I will be happy to hear from her and who wishes the same of me.
A friend who wants and tries to know what is at the heart of me.
My soul is crying out for you.
Where are you my beautiful friend?
I long to have that feeling of complete love and understanding from another woman.
A soul sister to laugh with, to cry with, to dance and paint and talk with.
To love and crave and play with.
To share my secrets and hide away hers.
I long for a woman to admire and be admired by.
A friend who knows the right thing to say and is there to say it.
A friend who can call me at any time of the day or night and know that I will be happy to hear from her and who wishes the same of me.
A friend who wants and tries to know what is at the heart of me.
My soul is crying out for you.
Where are you my beautiful friend?
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
For All the Water and Air In the World
All the water and air on earth gathered into spheres and compared to the
On the Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometers of it)
including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.
On the Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it)
gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as
the Earth.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Dear Hillary,
This is scary stuff. Stuff we all need to act on.
An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton from Another Wellesley College Alumna
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman,
white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled
for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my
responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left
in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.
I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing
suicide. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads
telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from
big yields with Monsanto's Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The
expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto,
again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers
had larger debt than they'd ever experienced
And farmers couldn't collect seeds from their own fields to try again
(true since time immemorial). Monsanto "patents" their DNA-altered seeds
as "intellectual property." They have a $10 million budget and a staff of
75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers. http://www.grist. org/comments/
food/2008/ 01/17./). Since the late 1990s (about when industrial
agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed
suicide and 8 million have left the land.
Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America
and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.
What does this have to do with you?
You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you
worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related
roles. Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" was planned with
Troutman Sanders, Monsanto's lobbyists.
Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come
together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world's largest GE
corporation (Monsanto), GE's most controversial project (DP&L's - now
Monsanto's - terminator genes), the world's largest meat producer (Tyson),
the world's largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart).
The inbred-ness of Rose's legal representation of corporations which own
controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards
sharing members who are also shareholders of each other's corporations
there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior
executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional
shareholders of Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the
Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens
Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L.
All represented at Rose.
You didn't just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of
favors then and since. You were invited onto Wal-Mart's board, you were
helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill
became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed
Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).
http://www.financia lsense.com/ editorials/ engdahl/2006/ 0828.html
Food and friends, in Clinton terms:
Bill's appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who
immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination
standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson's chicken factory
farms (www.financialsense .com/editorials/ engdahl/2006/ 0828.html) . Espy
resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money
laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, .... Tyson Foods was the
largest corporate offender. http://www.engdahl. oilgeopolitics.
net/GMO/Monsanto /monsanto. html
But what Bill did for Monsanto "genetic engineering" goes beyond
inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed
genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people's
escape from it.
Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from "normal"
(even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The
warning myth of Pandora'a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into
nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear
fission and fusion is the closest parallel.
What did Bill do?
1. Bill's put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade
Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and
more ... (http://www.commondr eams.org/ headlines/ 072600-03. htm) or
http://www.monitor. net/monitor/ 9904b/monsantofd a.html or
http://www.mindfull y.org/GE/ Revolving- Door.htm
2. Bill's FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth
hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did
tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).
3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill's FDA did not recall
it or put warnings on it. Even "a very angry, very vocal nationwide
consumer base" had no impact. " http://www.wafreepr ess.org/14/
Envirowatch. html
4. Bill's FDA wouldn't even label rBGH as "present" in milk.
5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the
public could choose, Bill's USDA threatened all dairies that their
products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy
Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto's counsel.
6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill's FDA enforced
public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill's FDA tried to
close off that last escape, proposing to include in "organic" standards,
"the dirty three" a : genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of
irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a
fertilizer. (My emphasis.) The FDA backed down. http://query. nytimes.com/
gst/fullpage. html?res= 9C0DEED91E31F933 A1575AC0A96E9582 60
Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk ...
as "organic." And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare
for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.
USDA head Dan Glickman: "This is probably the largest public response to
an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history." In fact the response
was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA.
http://www.orpheusw eb.co.uk/ john.rose/ orglab.html
Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now
grandchildren, from that crap.
Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public's
right to know, and with Monsanto.
A snap shot of our food:
Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields
(http://btcotton. blogspot. com/). We feed our children Bt cotton, as
cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies.
Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French
study proved Monsanto's GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity
(http://www.organicc onsumers. org/articles/ article_4790. cfm). Soft
drinks and candy have highly concentrated Bt corn, in the form of high
fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy
(90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60%
GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). "[E]ssentially our entire food supply
is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company." The Grocery
Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70 percent of US food
contains GM traits. http://www.organicc onsumers. org/articles/
article_9716. cfm
Meat: Steroids bulk up athletes. Monsanto steroids bulk up animals - more
weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why
our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel?
Poultry: Bill's USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards
and attempted to allow sewage sludge as fertilize crops. I will say more
about disease from industrialized poultry farms waste, at the end of this
letter.
Milk: Over 30 scientific publications have shown increased levels of IGF-1
in milk with rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold,
also increasing colon and prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European
nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South
Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill's USFDA put no restrictions, no
warning labels (not allowing labels at all). (My emphasis.)
http://www.sustdev. org/index. php?option= com_content& task=view&
id=2127&Itemid= 35
American children eat that food and drink that milk, Hillary.
Coincidentally, American children are increasingly fat and sick.
Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense
international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports -
badly straining trading relations. Monsanto's "good ole boy," he betrayed
American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family's
health and their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and
American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over
honesty and clean farming.
But, Hillary, it is one thing to not label a regular ole food product to
sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product
(rBGH), but Bill's administration didn't label (or stop) a well-known,
terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease.
Bill's FDA's August, 1997 regulation permitted "known TSE-positive
[Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food,
pig, chicken and fish feed," only requiring the label to read "Do not feed
to cattle and other ruminants" in the US.
Monsanto added to the problem. "There is evidence that rbST use
[Monsanto's GE bovine growth hormone] reduces the useful lifespan of a
dairy cow. ... Given that the incubation period for BSE is at least three
to five years and perhaps longer, rbST-treated cows could harbor "hidden"
BSE. That is, they might be infected but still asymptomatic when sent to
slaughter." (My emphasis.) http://www.consumer sunion.org/ food/bgh-
codex.htm
Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and
slaughter and genetic engineering corporations which benefitted?
Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship
or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to
this?
With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world,
which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly
immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was.
"Even for the biggest "winners," it is like winning at poker on the
Titanic." Jerry Mander: Facing the Rising Tide
He had no right.
Do you hear that?
Bill had sex from Monica Lewinsky. That's "dinky immoral." That's chicken
feed immoral - excuse the Tyson pun, excuse the TSE-laced pun. Bill let
genetic engineering lose on NATURE itself.
"Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the
next several decades than in the previous one thousand years.Tens of
thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could
be released into the Earth's ecosystems.Some of those releases, however,
could wreak havoc with the planet's biospheres." Jeremy Rifkin, Biotech
Century
Bill did this to us, like it was some nothing and he, some big dumb ass
Southern boy, just smiling and getting in good with the Big Boys, thinking
about as much about the consequences of something this immense and about
us human beings out here, as he thought about you, when he was unfaithful
with Monica. Just one big fool getting off on the power and used to
getting away with things.
Terminator genes, developed by DP&L, a Rose Firm client, prevent seeds
from "working" after only one season. Farmers "must" repurchase (patents
and suing not certain enough control, it seems). Those "killing" genes
pose the apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. Natural seeds could
fail, too. Nature could fail.
Far-fetched?
GMO fields are already contaminating normal species (http://www.foodfirs
t.org/pubs/ backgrdrs/ 2002/sp02v8n2. html. Berkeley Professor of
Microbiology, Ignacio Chapela, wrote an open letter, warning the Mexican
government about just this breaking out phenomenon happening in maize
(http://www.slogefre e.org/newsletter s/News_Item. 2004-12-21. 4353/).
And it has already happened with weeds - pesticide resistant GMO seeds
break lose and weeds become pesticide-resistant Superweeds
(http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/dn1882- geneticallymodif
ied-superweeds- not-uncommon. html).
But Bill's USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps said the USDA wanted the
technology to be `widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many
seed companies.'
http://www.globalre search.ca/ index.php? context=viewArti cle&code=
ENG20060827& articleId= 3082
"Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that
feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the
truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is
to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent
farmers." David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University
Hillary, one third of the world's bee colonies have collapsed. Gone.
Farmers in India are killing themselves. Farmers and bees. Since organic
farmers in India are fine and organic farmers report no colony collapse,
what does these farming catastrophes say about "industrial agriculture" ?
Mad Cow Disease is another direct result of industrial agriculture. And
now ....
... transnational poultry factories are implicated as the source of bird
flu. ... Small scale poultry farms and wild birds seem not to be the
problem [just as small farmers are not the issue in Mad Cow Disease], and
yet "initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small
producers and restock farms with genetically modified chickens. ...
http://www.ens- newswire. com/ens/feb2006/ 2006-02-27- 01.asp "Of the few
outbreaks that did occur in [Laos], more than 90% broke out in commercial
poultry operations, not free-ranging flocks." http://www.birdflub
ook.com/a. php?id=75
Monsanto (and others) is currently working with the USDA
(http://www.farmandr anchguide. com/articles/ 2006/01/30/ ag_news/updates/
update01. txt)
to force small farmers to tag every animal with a global tracking device
(NAIS - National Animal Identification System). Allegedly related to food
safety, Monsanto and others would be creating a vast corporate digital
library on every move of small farmers' livestock. http://goexcelgloba
l.he.net/ ~natpropg/ nonais.html
But small farmers do not create the contaminated environments, do not
supply the feed, do not grind up diseased animals into feed (how Mad Cow
began) and then sell it. In fact, their farming methods, free range and
small scale, are significantly healthier and safer for animals and food
than the massive concentration of animals by corporate industrial
agriculture.
Monsanto is also aggressively pushing for state laws to limit farmers'
right to choose what to plant and the public's right exclude GE plants
from their communities http://www.rense. com/general65/ righto.htm
Cattle bloated by steroids, lapse and loss of 10,000 year old normal
seeds, immense pollution from factory farms, deadly-disease- ridden feed,
world-wide bee colony collapse, poisoned soil and depleted water supplies,
Superweeds (http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/dn1882- geneticallymodif
ied-superweeds- not-uncommon. html), lawsuits against farmers, loss of
family farms, and ... India farmers killing themselves in what may be the
largest mass suicide in recorded human history (on average ... one
farmers' suicide every 30 minutes since 2002 - The Hindu 1.30.08) - that
is industrial agriculture.
Monsanto and Tyson are two of the largest industrial agricultural
corporations in the world. Industrial agriculture is represented by your
Rose Law Firm.
Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what
Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of
Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate
connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but "foreign"
food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You
talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable way and
prevented minimally sane labeling.
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a
media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and
children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened
those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced.
Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing
them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay.
http://www.indiares ource.org/ issues/agbiotech /2003/monsantoun
ilever.html But you take donations from their lobbyists. You say you care
about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are
least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods
Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has
a boycott out on all Monsanto products.
Do you eat organic?
So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or
Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto?
Women exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto?
Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in
cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering from lives in
filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones
and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy with high
fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or
Monsanto?
Edwards was right about your corporate connections. I just didn't
understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how
personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around
the world, have been.
I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit
themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent
treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare
that is taking us off a cliff.
Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta
Disclaimer. I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject,
and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have
learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps
things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is
great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am
scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an
obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it
had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by
industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and
hope, for all our children's sake, we are not too late to pull back.
An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton from Another Wellesley College Alumna
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Dear Hillary,
By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman,
white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled
for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my
responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left
in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.
I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing
suicide. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads
telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from
big yields with Monsanto's Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The
expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto,
again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers
had larger debt than they'd ever experienced
And farmers couldn't collect seeds from their own fields to try again
(true since time immemorial). Monsanto "patents" their DNA-altered seeds
as "intellectual property." They have a $10 million budget and a staff of
75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers. http://www.grist. org/comments/
food/2008/ 01/17./). Since the late 1990s (about when industrial
agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed
suicide and 8 million have left the land.
Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America
and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.
What does this have to do with you?
You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you
worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related
roles. Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" was planned with
Troutman Sanders, Monsanto's lobbyists.
Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come
together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world's largest GE
corporation (Monsanto), GE's most controversial project (DP&L's - now
Monsanto's - terminator genes), the world's largest meat producer (Tyson),
the world's largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart).
The inbred-ness of Rose's legal representation of corporations which own
controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards
sharing members who are also shareholders of each other's corporations
there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior
executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional
shareholders of Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the
Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens
Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L.
All represented at Rose.
You didn't just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of
favors then and since. You were invited onto Wal-Mart's board, you were
helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill
became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed
Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).
http://www.financia lsense.com/ editorials/ engdahl/2006/ 0828.html
Food and friends, in Clinton terms:
Bill's appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who
immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination
standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson's chicken factory
farms (www.financialsense .com/editorials/ engdahl/2006/ 0828.html) . Espy
resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money
laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, .... Tyson Foods was the
largest corporate offender. http://www.engdahl. oilgeopolitics.
net/GMO/Monsanto /monsanto. html
But what Bill did for Monsanto "genetic engineering" goes beyond
inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed
genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people's
escape from it.
Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from "normal"
(even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The
warning myth of Pandora'a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into
nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear
fission and fusion is the closest parallel.
What did Bill do?
1. Bill's put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade
Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and
more ... (http://www.commondr eams.org/ headlines/ 072600-03. htm) or
http://www.monitor. net/monitor/ 9904b/monsantofd a.html or
http://www.mindfull y.org/GE/ Revolving- Door.htm
2. Bill's FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth
hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did
tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).
3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill's FDA did not recall
it or put warnings on it. Even "a very angry, very vocal nationwide
consumer base" had no impact. " http://www.wafreepr ess.org/14/
Envirowatch. html
4. Bill's FDA wouldn't even label rBGH as "present" in milk.
5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the
public could choose, Bill's USDA threatened all dairies that their
products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy
Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto's counsel.
6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill's FDA enforced
public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill's FDA tried to
close off that last escape, proposing to include in "organic" standards,
"the dirty three" a : genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of
irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a
fertilizer. (My emphasis.) The FDA backed down. http://query. nytimes.com/
gst/fullpage. html?res= 9C0DEED91E31F933 A1575AC0A96E9582 60
Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk ...
as "organic." And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare
for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.
USDA head Dan Glickman: "This is probably the largest public response to
an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history." In fact the response
was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA.
http://www.orpheusw eb.co.uk/ john.rose/ orglab.html
Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now
grandchildren, from that crap.
Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public's
right to know, and with Monsanto.
A snap shot of our food:
Oils: Sheep died in India after feeding on Bt cotton fields
(http://btcotton. blogspot. com/). We feed our children Bt cotton, as
cottonseed oil in peanut butter and cookies.
Grains: 49% of US corn acreage was planted in Bt corn in 2007. A French
study proved Monsanto's GMO corn causes kidney and liver toxicity
(http://www.organicc onsumers. org/articles/ article_4790. cfm). Soft
drinks and candy have highly concentrated Bt corn, in the form of high
fructose Bt corn syrup. The US food system depends most on two crops, soy
(90% GMO, 90% of traits owned by Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60%
GMO, nearly 100% Monsanto traits). "[E]ssentially our entire food supply
is genetically modified, to the benefit of one company." The Grocery
Manufacturers of America in 2000 estimated that 70 percent of US food
contains GM traits. http://www.organicc onsumers. org/articles/
article_9716. cfm
Meat: Steroids bulk up athletes. Monsanto steroids bulk up animals - more
weight, more profit. We feed our children steroids in meats. Is this why
our children are fattening, like Hansel and Gretel?
Poultry: Bill's USDA weakened chicken waste and contamination standards
and attempted to allow sewage sludge as fertilize crops. I will say more
about disease from industrialized poultry farms waste, at the end of this
letter.
Milk: Over 30 scientific publications have shown increased levels of IGF-1
in milk with rBGH increases risks of breast cancer by up to seven-fold,
also increasing colon and prostate cancers risks. Canada, 29 European
nations, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and South
Africa ban U.S. rBGH dairy products. Bill's USFDA put no restrictions, no
warning labels (not allowing labels at all). (My emphasis.)
http://www.sustdev. org/index. php?option= com_content& task=view&
id=2127&Itemid= 35
American children eat that food and drink that milk, Hillary.
Coincidentally, American children are increasingly fat and sick.
Here, Bill ignored pleas for labeling. Abroad, Bill ignored intense
international objections over the same issue - unlabeled US food exports -
badly straining trading relations. Monsanto's "good ole boy," he betrayed
American families at the deepest levels conceivable - their family's
health and their democratic right to know. He betrayed our rural life and
American family farmers - backing corporation deceit and control, over
honesty and clean farming.
But, Hillary, it is one thing to not label a regular ole food product to
sell it, and quite another to sell a suspected-dangerous food product
(rBGH), but Bill's administration didn't label (or stop) a well-known,
terrifying threat - Mad Cow Disease.
Bill's FDA's August, 1997 regulation permitted "known TSE-positive
[Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy] material to be used in pet food,
pig, chicken and fish feed," only requiring the label to read "Do not feed
to cattle and other ruminants" in the US.
Monsanto added to the problem. "There is evidence that rbST use
[Monsanto's GE bovine growth hormone] reduces the useful lifespan of a
dairy cow. ... Given that the incubation period for BSE is at least three
to five years and perhaps longer, rbST-treated cows could harbor "hidden"
BSE. That is, they might be infected but still asymptomatic when sent to
slaughter." (My emphasis.) http://www.consumer sunion.org/ food/bgh-
codex.htm
Bill let TSE into our entire food chain. And who owned the feed and
slaughter and genetic engineering corporations which benefitted?
Please, tell me, Hillary, what he could possibly have gotten in friendship
or favors, that could ever justify his exposing millions of people to
this?
With genetic engineering itself, Bill did something to the whole world,
which tried to object. Words are inadequate to express how astoundingly
immoral, beyond human bounds and conceit and power, that was.
"Even for the biggest "winners," it is like winning at poker on the
Titanic." Jerry Mander: Facing the Rising Tide
He had no right.
Do you hear that?
Bill had sex from Monica Lewinsky. That's "dinky immoral." That's chicken
feed immoral - excuse the Tyson pun, excuse the TSE-laced pun. Bill let
genetic engineering lose on NATURE itself.
"Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the
next several decades than in the previous one thousand years.Tens of
thousands of novel transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants and animals could
be released into the Earth's ecosystems.Some of those releases, however,
could wreak havoc with the planet's biospheres." Jeremy Rifkin, Biotech
Century
Bill did this to us, like it was some nothing and he, some big dumb ass
Southern boy, just smiling and getting in good with the Big Boys, thinking
about as much about the consequences of something this immense and about
us human beings out here, as he thought about you, when he was unfaithful
with Monica. Just one big fool getting off on the power and used to
getting away with things.
Terminator genes, developed by DP&L, a Rose Firm client, prevent seeds
from "working" after only one season. Farmers "must" repurchase (patents
and suing not certain enough control, it seems). Those "killing" genes
pose the apocalyptic risk of breaking out into nature. Natural seeds could
fail, too. Nature could fail.
Far-fetched?
GMO fields are already contaminating normal species (http://www.foodfirs
t.org/pubs/ backgrdrs/ 2002/sp02v8n2. html. Berkeley Professor of
Microbiology, Ignacio Chapela, wrote an open letter, warning the Mexican
government about just this breaking out phenomenon happening in maize
(http://www.slogefre e.org/newsletter s/News_Item. 2004-12-21. 4353/).
And it has already happened with weeds - pesticide resistant GMO seeds
break lose and weeds become pesticide-resistant Superweeds
(http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/dn1882- geneticallymodif
ied-superweeds- not-uncommon. html).
But Bill's USDA spokesman, Willard Phelps said the USDA wanted the
technology to be `widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many
seed companies.'
http://www.globalre search.ca/ index.php? context=viewArti cle&code=
ENG20060827& articleId= 3082
"Genetic Engineering is often justified as a human technology, one that
feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the
truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is
to increase sales of chemicals and bio-engineered products to dependent
farmers." David Ehrenfield: Professor of Biology, Rutgers University
Hillary, one third of the world's bee colonies have collapsed. Gone.
Farmers in India are killing themselves. Farmers and bees. Since organic
farmers in India are fine and organic farmers report no colony collapse,
what does these farming catastrophes say about "industrial agriculture" ?
Mad Cow Disease is another direct result of industrial agriculture. And
now ....
... transnational poultry factories are implicated as the source of bird
flu. ... Small scale poultry farms and wild birds seem not to be the
problem [just as small farmers are not the issue in Mad Cow Disease], and
yet "initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small
producers and restock farms with genetically modified chickens. ...
http://www.ens- newswire. com/ens/feb2006/ 2006-02-27- 01.asp "Of the few
outbreaks that did occur in [Laos], more than 90% broke out in commercial
poultry operations, not free-ranging flocks." http://www.birdflub
ook.com/a. php?id=75
Monsanto (and others) is currently working with the USDA
(http://www.farmandr anchguide. com/articles/ 2006/01/30/ ag_news/updates/
update01. txt)
to force small farmers to tag every animal with a global tracking device
(NAIS - National Animal Identification System). Allegedly related to food
safety, Monsanto and others would be creating a vast corporate digital
library on every move of small farmers' livestock. http://goexcelgloba
l.he.net/ ~natpropg/ nonais.html
But small farmers do not create the contaminated environments, do not
supply the feed, do not grind up diseased animals into feed (how Mad Cow
began) and then sell it. In fact, their farming methods, free range and
small scale, are significantly healthier and safer for animals and food
than the massive concentration of animals by corporate industrial
agriculture.
Monsanto is also aggressively pushing for state laws to limit farmers'
right to choose what to plant and the public's right exclude GE plants
from their communities http://www.rense. com/general65/ righto.htm
Cattle bloated by steroids, lapse and loss of 10,000 year old normal
seeds, immense pollution from factory farms, deadly-disease- ridden feed,
world-wide bee colony collapse, poisoned soil and depleted water supplies,
Superweeds (http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/dn1882- geneticallymodif
ied-superweeds- not-uncommon. html), lawsuits against farmers, loss of
family farms, and ... India farmers killing themselves in what may be the
largest mass suicide in recorded human history (on average ... one
farmers' suicide every 30 minutes since 2002 - The Hindu 1.30.08) - that
is industrial agriculture.
Monsanto and Tyson are two of the largest industrial agricultural
corporations in the world. Industrial agriculture is represented by your
Rose Law Firm.
Your claim to care about food safety is terrifying double-speak given what
Bill did and who you take donations from. Your idea of a Department of
Food Safety would centralize control of food - in whose corporate
connected hands? You talk tough about labeling food - ah, but "foreign"
food - a sleight of hand tricking a public desperate for safe US food. You
talk about food safety but Bill degraded food in every imaginable way and
prevented minimally sane labeling.
I am a person before I am a woman. Your gender means nothing. It is a
media distraction. Your policies on health and food and women and
children, are meaningless in the face of connections that have threatened
those groups profoundly, connections you have never denounced.
Monsanto uses child labor in India, primarily very young girls, exposing
them to a lethal pesticide 13-14 hours a day, for pennies in pay.
http://www.indiares ource.org/ issues/agbiotech /2003/monsantoun
ilever.html But you take donations from their lobbyists. You say you care
about black people but as the poorest people in this country, they are
least able to buy organic and are forced to eat the contaminated foods
Bill let into our food system. The National Black Farmers Association has
a boycott out on all Monsanto products.
Do you eat organic?
So, who are you with, hapless black consumers and black farmers, or
Monsanto? Mothers left to give their children rBGH milk, or Monsanto?
Women exposed to 7 times greater risk of breast cancer, or Monsanto?
Desperate farmers in India and young children forced into child labor in
cottonseed factories there, or Monsanto? Animals suffering from lives in
filthy cages and disgusting feedlots, shot up with steroids and hormones
and antibiotics, or Monsanto? Our children who eat candy with high
fructose Bt corn syrup associated with kidney and liver toxicity, or
Monsanto?
Edwards was right about your corporate connections. I just didn't
understand until I saw that PBS show and read about Monsanto, how
personally affected my children and grandchildren, and all people around
the world, have been.
I will not vote for you. I will vote for someone who will commit
themselves to work on behalf of small farmers and real food and decent
treatment of animals and to end this industrialized agricultural nightmare
that is taking us off a cliff.
Linn Cohen-Cole
Atlanta
Disclaimer. I am not a scientist. I have read for months on this subject,
and am including only a tiny portion of the horrifying things I have
learned. I am expressing my opinion as person and may be wrong. Perhaps
things are swell out there and rBGH is fabulous and TSE-laced feed is
great, and genetic engineering is the best thing since manna. But I am
scared for my family and I have not only a right to say so but an
obligation to do so. I am angry that Monsanto was allowed the influence it
had and has done the things it definitely seems to have. I am disgusted by
industrialization of every tender and beautiful part of our world and
hope, for all our children's sake, we are not too late to pull back.
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