May 8
Is there no end to the greed and corruption? Or how low those who are supposed to be stewards of our food will go to line their pockets? I am so routinely beyond speechless that I’m almost afraid I’ll go mute soon.
May 5
There’s nothing they are leaving untouched: the mustard, the okra, the bringe oil, the rice, the cauliflower. Once they have established the norm: that seed can be owned as their property, royalties can be collected. We will depend on them for every seed we grow of every crop we grow. If they control seed, they control food, they know it – it’s strategic. It’s more powerful than bombs. It’s more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world. The story starts in the White House, where Monsanto often got its way by exerting disproportionate influence over policymakers via the “revolving door”. One example is Michael Taylor, who worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1991. While at the FDA, the authority that deals with all US food approvals, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, becoming the company’s vice president for public policy.
Thanks to these intimate links between Monsanto and government agencies, the US adopted GE foods and crops without proper testing, without consumer labeling and in spite of serious questions hanging over their safety. Not coincidentally, Monsanto supplies 90 percent of the GE seeds used by the US market. Monsanto’s long arm stretched so far that, in the early nineties, the US Food and Drugs Agency even ignored warnings of their own scientists, who were cautioning that GE crops could cause negative health effects. Other tactics the company uses to stifle concerns about their products include misleading advertising, bribery and concealing scientific evidence.
Watch the full documentary now
If you watch no other Documentary this year — or ever — this should be one you watch. We cannot let corporations this greedy, this evil, continue to exist (personhood or not). We just cannot.
Apr 12
In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.
The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”
The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.
Most shocking, the farmers were ordered to discard leftover herbicides and pesticides in locations in which they leached directly into the water supply. With Monsanto’s Roundup already known to be contaminating the groundwater, this comes as a serious threat to pure water supplies.
The farmers end their landmark case with an explanation as to why the tobacco companies allowed Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides to be unloaded on the small family farms in such vast quantities and purchased in excessive amounts. In their claim, the farmers state that the tobacco companies were ”motivated by a desire for unwarranted economic gain and profit,” with zero regard for the farmers and their infant children — many of which are now suffering from severe birth defects from Monsanto’s products.
Heartbreaking in the extreme. I’m in favor of the death penalty for corporations like this.
Apr 11
LAS VEGAS — Supervalu-owned Albertsons announced that 30 stores located in the greater Las Vegas area, Henderson, Nev., and Boulder City, Nev., have diverted more than 90% of all store waste from local landfills.
Through recycling, organic composting and food donations, the stores combined to keep more than 21 million pounds of waste out of local landfills and donate 3.5 million meals to local food bank and hunger relief efforts in the past year.
At the end of 2007, the 30 Albertsons stores were generating an average of 1,588 pounds of waste each day per store, but today each store is averaging just over 100 pounds of landfill waste per day, a 93.2% reduction. Albertsons has thereby eliminated 978 full garbage truck trips annually to the landfill, equivalent to a line of trucks stretching five miles long.
Albertsons will celebrate this accomplishment by sponsoring an Earth Day coloring contest called “How My Family Reduces, Reuses and Recycles” for Las Vegas students in grades K-6. The students are being invited to draw a picture illustrating “How my Family Reduces, Reuses and Recycles at Home” by April 18. Ten winners will be selected and each will receive $150 in Albertsons gift cards.
“Albertsons’ ultimate goal is to eliminate waste from store operations and I couldn’t be more proud of the leadership our Las Vegas Albertsons stores have show in this area,” said Sue Klug, president of Albertsons Las Vegas and Southern California division, in a statement.
This is almost surreal to me. I don’t know why Albertsons undertook such a project, but I am astonished at the results. And imagine, all this by doing (in part) what helps Mother Earth AND (in part) what helps other people. Whodathunkit? Got to be some big, big cost savings in there too, including for whatever government entity takes care of garbage pickup (city or county probably). Makes me wish that chain were in my area.
Apr 10
Watch Us Move Our Millions
Cities, churches, and colleges take steps to move their money home.posted Apr 10, 2012
Photo by Jonathan Clark.
Since the big corporate banks crashed the economy in 2008, they’ve been rewarded with bailouts, tax breaks, and bonuses, while American workers lose jobs and homes. Little wonder that many Americans—and now, institutions and local governments—have been closing their accounts at big corporate banks and transferring their money to community banks and credit unions. The idea is to send a strong message about responsibility to government and Wall Street, while supporting institutions that genuinely stimulate local economies.
Bank Transfer Day was publicized over five weeks, largely through social networks. In that period, credit unions received an estimated $4.5 billion in new deposits transferred from banks, according to the Credit Union National Association.
More articles from 9 Strategies to End Corporate Rule, the Spring 2012 issue of YES! Magazine.
Encouraged by the popularity of the “Move Your Money” campaign, citizens are calling for institutions to be accountable and “Move Our Money.” A number of schools, churches, and local governments across the country are transferring large sums, or at least considering it, in what looks like the beginning of a broad movement to invest in local economies instead of Wall Street.
It’s not too late to move your own bank accounts if you haven’t already. And if there are any institutions you’re involved in you could help persuade to move their money, by all means step right up and do so. I’m all in favor of solving the “too big to fail” problem by helping banks become not nearly so dangerously big.
Apr 10
Privacy is eroding fast as technology offers government increasing ways to track and spy on citizens. The Washington Post reported there are 3,984 federal, state and local organizations working on domestic counterterrorism. Most collect information on people in the US. Here are thirteen examples of how some of the biggest government agencies and programs track people.
One. The National Security Agency (NSA) collects hundreds of millions of emails, texts and phone calls every day and has the ability to collect and sift through billions more. WIRED just reported NSA is building an immense new data center which will intercept, analyze and store even more electronic communications from satellites and cables across the nation and the world. Though NSA is not supposed to focus on US citizens, it does.
Two.
Hey, I just had an idea. What if we created something like a Constitution that governed the nation and had a provision in there against such invasions of privacy, and unauthorized searches and seizures and stuff? That’d be great, wouldn’t it? Well, we can dream, can’t we? (In other news, the list of issues that the Occupy Movement — we, the 99% — need to address just grows and grows and grows.)
Apr 7
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Researchers recreate bee collapse with pesticide-laced corn syrup
Jeremy Hance
mongabay.com
April 05, 2012
Honeybees in an apiary in Germany. Photo by: Björn Appel.
snip
Past research has shown that neonicotinoid pesticides, which target insects’ central nervous system, do not instantly kill bees. However, to test the effect of even small amounts of these pesticides on western honeybees (Apis mellifera), Harvard researchers treated 16 hives with different levels of imidacloprid, leaving four hives untreated. After 12 weeks, the bees in all twenty hives—treated and untreated—were alive, though those treated with the highest does of imidacloprid appeared weaker. But by 23 weeks everything had changed: 15 out of the 16 hives (94 percent) treated with imidacloprid underwent classic Colony Collapse Disorder: hives were largely empty with only a few young bees surviving. The adults had simply vanished. The hives that received the highest doses of imidacloprid collapsed first. Meanwhile the five untreated hives were healthy
“There is no question that neonicotinoids put a huge stress on the survival of honey bees in the environment,” lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, an associate professor at the HSPH, told mongabay.com. “The evidence is clear that imidacloprid is likely the culprit for Colony Collapse Disorder via a very unique mechanism that has not been reported until our study,”
That mechanism? High-fructose corn syrup. Many bee-keepers have turned to high-fructose corn syrup to feed their bees, which the researchers say did not imperil bees until U.S. corn began to be sprayed with imidacloprid in 2004-2005. A year later was the first outbreak of Colony Collapse Disorder.
It doesn’t take much to eventually kill the bees accord to Lu, who said an incredibly small amount (20 parts per billion) of imidacloprid was enough to lead to Colony Collapse Disorder within 6 months.
More evidence… at link
This absolutely terrifies me in terms of our food supply. Besides that, it’s an incredibly cruel thing to impose on a species that serves mankind so well. Our hubris and our callous and ignorant disregard for the life of the planet and her creatures will kill us all yet.
Apr 4
“Farmers worldwide are resisting for food sovereignty, but the rest of the world must join us.”
A report released today shows that worldwide opposition to the biotechnology giant Monsanto and “the agro-industrial model that it represents” is growing.
(photo: Alexis Baden-Mayer / Millions Against Monsanto) La Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International, and Combat Monsanto, the groups who issued the report, show that small farmers, groups and communities in every continent are rising up to resist Monsanto’s products and environmental harm. While Monsanto’s — and other giant agribusinesses’ — approach, including genetically modified crops, has been shown to hurt biodiversity, local food knowledge and the environment, the report shows that “food sovereignty is a real and feasible alternative.”
“This new report documents the intense opposition to this powerful transnational company, which peddles its genetically modified products seemingly without regard for the associated social, economic and environmental costs,” said Martin Drago, Friends of the Earth International’s Food Sovereignty programme coordinator.
“This report demonstrates that the increasingly vocal objections from social movements and civil society organisations are having an impact on the introduction of GM crops.” said Josie Riffaud from La Via Campesina.
The report notes that an “unprecedented agribusiness offensive underway, under the banner of the new ‘green economy’” positioning giant agribusiness companies like Monsanto to have even greater control. The report’s highlighting the “offensive” echoes a report issued last month on global water security from the Defense Intelligence Agency that also pushed biotechnology and agricultural exports rather than agroecology and food sovereignty.
“Who will hold Monsanto responsible for the global depletion of biodiversity, soil erosion, and violations of peasant rights wrought by the application of petroleum-based inputs required by industrial agriculture?” asked Dena Hoff of the National Family Farm Coalition / La Via Campesina North America. “Farmers worldwide are resisting for food sovereignty, but the rest of the world must join us,” she added.
Great News. NOW WE MUST ALL JOIN IN. A crack in the wall! We must become the lever to force it wide open.
Apr 3
orporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and a leading expert on the business corporation, along with journalist Ken Jacobson and AlterNet’s Lynn Parramore, will examine the foundations, history and purpose of the corporation to answer this vital question: How can the public take control of the business corporation and make it work for the real economy?
Excellent, MUST READ.
Mar 30
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