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Percy Schmeiser stands up to -- and takes down -- Monsanto
No you don't have anything better to do so let's do this:
Forbes magazine recently admitted their mistake in naming Monsanto company of the year in 2009. They released an article stating they were “wrong on Monsanto … really wrong,” citing not only the problems with resistant superweeds but also investigations over antitrust issues and a potential flop in an expensive new variety of GM corn seed.
"FORBES WAS COMPLAINING ABOUT MONSANTO PROFITS WERE DOWN BECAUSE THEY DON’T MAKE SO MUCH MONEY FROM ROUNDUP ANYMORE.."
Thanks for clearing this up. Forbes was just complaining about losing money??? Oh I thought it was because all of these crops that were supposed to be increasing yields in Africa that were more resistant to plant viruses and some even claiming to have more nutrients all failed.Some of the corn was 100% loss.And all those claims about the GMO crops doing so well? Lies by Monsanto scientist.This among other dubious practices was why Forbes retracted. As for resistant weeds, yes you do create a super weed when you have GMO plants that can take 10x the amount of herbicide. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, an Iowa State University weed scientist, told the New York Times.
So, with clear evidence that overuse of pesticides has created these strong, mutant plants, what does Monsanto suggest? More herbicide!
The “Roundup Ready Plus” program provides weed management recommendations for Roundup Ready crops by pairing products from Monsanto with those of competing companies like Valent and Syngenta.
According to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Monsanto bribed at least 140 Indonesian officials or their families to get Bt cotton approved without an environmental impact assessment (EIA). In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.5 million in fines to the US Justice Department for these bribes.
"THIS IS SOMETHING THAT MONSANTO REPORTED TO THE SEC. THEY FOUND IT OUT – FIRED THE EMPLOYEE AND INSTITITUTED SOME SORT OF TRAINING PROGRAM …YOU SHOULD COMPLEMENT MONSANTO ON SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE – ALERTING THE GOVERNEMNT OF A PRACTICE THAT IS VERY COMMON IN INDONESIA AND WHEN THEY FOUND OUT THEY REPORTED IT. YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT SINCE THEY ARE SO SECRETIVE (SO YOU THINK) THAT THEY WOULD HAVE COVERED IT UP) BUT THE OPPOSITE."
So an employee, not Monsanto, took his own money to bribe 140, yes, 140 Indonesian officials? And why would he take this upon himself? He just really didn't want that environmental impact assessment that bad huh?
As for the "new" Monsanto, "old" Monsanto, if they changed their name to "Fred" you couldn't argue it? Why? If your wife "Sheila" cheated on you yesterday but today calls herself "Nancy" could you not say anything to her? That's the new Nancy, not the old Sheila from yesterday.
As for the food safety there have been no safety studies conducted that prove GM foods are safe.
There are plenty of studies that show allergic reactions, lowered fertility increasing with each successive generation(After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.) ,increased still births in animals and smaller birth weights:In 2005, Irina Ermakova, also with the Russian National Academy of Sciences, reported that more than half the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks. This was also five times higher than the 10% death rate of the non-GMO soy group. The babies in the GM group were also smaller and could not reproduce.
In a telling coincidence, after Ermakova's feeding trials, her laboratory started feeding all the rats in the facility a commercial rat chow using GM soy. Within two months, the infant mortality facility-wide reached 55%.
When Ermakova fed male rats GM soy, their testicles changed from the normal pink to dark blue! Italian scientists similarly found changes in mice testes (PDF), including damaged young sperm cells. Furthermore, the DNA of embryos from parent mice fed GM soy functioned differently.
An Austrian government study published in November 2008 showed that the more GM corn was fed to mice, the fewer the babies they had (PDF), and the smaller the babies were.
Central Iowa Farmer Jerry Rosman also had trouble with pigs and cows becoming sterile. Some of his pigs even had false pregnancies or gave birth to bags of water. After months of investigations and testing, he finally traced the problem to GM corn feed. Every time a newspaper, magazine, or TV show reported Jerry's problems, he would receive calls from more farmers complaining of livestock sterility on their farm, linked to GM corn.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine accidentally discovered that rats raised on corncob bedding "neither breed nor exhibit reproductive behavior." Tests on the corn material revealed two compounds that stopped the sexual cycle in females "at concentrations approximately two-hundredfold lower than classical phytoestrogens." One compound also curtailed male sexual behavior and both substances contributed to the growth of breast and prostate cancer cell cultures. Researchers found that the amount of the substances varied with GM corn varieties. The crushed corncob used at Baylor was likely shipped from central Iowa, near the farm of Jerry Rosman and others complaining of sterile livestock.
In Haryana, India, a team of investigating veterinarians report that buffalo consuming GM cottonseed suffer from infertility, as well as frequent abortions, premature deliveries, and prolapsed uteruses. Many adult and young buffalo have also died mysteriously.
Monsanto is considering using what’s known as terminator technology on a wide-scale basis. These are seeds that have been genetically modified to “self-destruct.” In other words, the seeds (and the forthcoming crops) are sterile, which means farmers must buy them again each year.
This solves their problem of needing “seed police,” but they are obviously looking the other way when it comes to the implications that terminator seeds could have on the world’s food supply: the traits from genetically engineered crops can get passed on to other crops, and often do.
You can also find other scientist that were fired,harassed,had their seeds and research destroyed after finding something negative about
GM food.
Monsanto(or maybe it was Fred here) was a producer of the horrific Agent Orange, the lethal herbicide and defoliant used by American forces in the Vietnam War for ten years up to 1971. It contained dioxins that have caused great damage to health among the civilians and troops exposed to it.
As a result, lawsuits were filed against producers like Monsanto and Dow Chemical with American veterans winning $180 million in compensation in 1984. Australian, New Zealand and Korean victims also won compensation, though not the Vietnamese.
Studies indicate the increased risks of cancer and genetic defects from exposure to dioxin, but Sir Richard Doll wrote to a Royal Australian commission investigating the Monsanto Agent Orange to say there was no evidence that this was the case. He did not mention that every day he was pocketing $1,500 from Monsanto.
Documents revealed this month also show that Sir Richard Doll was paid $15,000 by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, Dow Chemical, another Agent Orange producer, and the British chemical giant ICI.
For this money, he produced an ''independent'' review that largely dismissed claims that the vinyl chloride used in plastics could be linked to cancers, apart of those of the liver. The World Health Organization challenges that assertion, but it suited his paymasters and they used his report to defend the chemical's safety for a decade.
Then there are terminator seeds. Once the terminator seeds are released into a region, the trait of seed sterility could be passed to other non-genetically-engineered crops, making most or all of the seeds in the region sterile.
Not only would this mean that every farm in the world could come to rely on Monsanto for their seed supply, but if the GM traits spread it could destroy agriculture as we now know it.Monsanto on Terminator has been mixed and confusing - simultaneously "making a public commitment not to commercialize sterile seed technologies", even stating "We stand by our commitment to not use genetic engineering methods that result in sterile seeds. Period" whilst also stating "we 'constantly re-evaluate this stance as the technology develops'" and "we do not rule out their future development
Percy Schmeiser stands up to -- and takes down -- Monsanto
It may be a small amount but for Monsanto it means that farmers could be entitled to reimbursement when their fields become contaminated with unwanted Roundup Ready canola or any other unwanted GMO plants. This could be a big deal and could also drive investors away.
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| March 31, 2011 7:38 PM
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| March 31, 2011 7:38 PM
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Percy Schmeiser stands up to -- and takes down -- Monsanto
Expert Jeffrey M. Smith, author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, reveals shocking facts about genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Studies have produced thousands of sick, sterile and dead laboratory animals; thousands of people linking toxic and allergic type reactions to these foods and damage to virtually every system in the laboratory animals studied. Despite this alarming evidence 70% of the foods in our supermarkets have genetically modified organisms in them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7rXIujvXGc&feature=player_embedded
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| March 31, 2011 7:52 PM
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Forbes magazine recently admitted their mistake in naming Monsanto company of the year in 2009. They released an article stating they were “wrong on Monsanto … really wrong,” citing not only the problems with resistant superweeds but also investigations over antitrust issues and a potential flop in an expensive new variety of GM corn seed.
Monsanto was found guilty by France's highest court of false advertising, for claims that Roundup, its toxic weed killer, is biodegradable and leaves "the soil clean."
In 2007, the South African Advertising Standards Authority also found Monsanto guilty of lying when advertising that “no negative reactions to Genetically Modified food have been reported.”
According to one EPA scientist, Monsanto doctored studies and covered-up dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. She concluded that the company’s behavior constituted “a long pattern of fraud.”
In 1999, the New York Times exposed that Monsanto’s PR firm, Burson Marsteller, had paid fake “pro-GMO” food demonstrators to counteract a group of anti-biotech protesters outside a Washington, DC FDA meeting.
In 1996, the New York Attorney General fined the company $50,000 for claims that Roundup was, you guessed it, biodegradable and good for the environment.
An EPA scientist found Monsanto doctored studies and covered-up the dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. She concluded that the company’s behavior constituted “a long pattern of fraud.”
In response to the publication of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking indictment of the pesticide industry, Silent Spring, Monsanto and other chemical companies launched a major p.r. offensive. The industry sponsored public forums with purported “independent” experts speaking on the benefits of pesticides; the company’s propaganda tools included publication of a pamphlet called The Desolate Years, which posited a world of massive food shortages resulting from over regulation of pesticides (the company continues to repeat this lie to this day, in countless ads and public statements suggesting that food shortages will result unless the world unquestionably accepts its genetic food experiments).
As the Washington Post reported,
"…for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as 'CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy' — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew."
A Monsanto-hired public relations firm, the Bivings Group, conducted an email campaign to pressure the science journal Nature to retract a paper showing that GMO corn had contaminated natural corn varieties in Mexico.
1991: Monsanto is fined $1.2 million for trying to conceal discharge of contaminated waste water into the Mystic River in Connecticut.
1997: The Seattle Times reports that Monsanto sold 6,000 tons of contaminated waste to Idaho fertilizer companies, which contained the carcinogenic heavy metal cadmium, believed to cause cancer, kidney disease, neurological dysfunction and birth defects.
According to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, Monsanto bribed at least 140 Indonesian officials or their families to get Bt cotton approved without an environmental impact assessment (EIA). In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.5 million in fines to the US Justice Department for these bribes.
Six Government scientists including Dr. Margaret Haydon told the Canadian Senate Committee of Monsanto’s ‘offer’ of a bribe of between $1-2 million to the scientists from Health Canada if they approved the company’s GM bovine growth hormone (rbGH) (banned in many countries outside the US), without further study and how notes and files critical of scientific data provided by Monsanto were stolen from a locked filing cabinet in her office. One FDA scientist arbitrarily increased the allowable levels of antibiotics in milk 100-fold in order to facilitate the approval of rbGH. She had just arrived at the FDA from Monsanto.
In 1966, court documents in a case concerning Anniston residents in the US showed that Monsanto managers discovered that fish dunked in a local creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as dropped into boiling water. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB level. But they never told their neighbours and concluded that “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges – We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business”. In fact court documents revealed that the company withheld evidence about the safety of their PCBs to the residents of the town that were being poisoned by their factory to keep their profitable dollars. On February 22nd 2002, a court found Monsanto guilty on six counts of NEGLIGENCE, WANTONESS AND SUPRESSION OF THE TRUTH, NUISANCE, TRESPASS AND OUTRAGE. Outrage
according to Alabama law is conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."
In Europe it refused to reveal the results of its own secret animal feeding studies, which revealed serious abnormalities to rats fed GM corn, citing CBI (Confidential Business Information) until forced to do so by a German Court. One of its Bt corn products (the only GM crop grown in the EU) was subsequently banned for planting in France and other EU countries based on the appraisal by Seralini of Monsanto’s own dossier.
In order to maintain its 1971 position that "PCBs are not and cannot be classified as highly toxic," Monsanto engaged Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, to do safety studies on its Aroclor PCB products. Seven years later, IBT Labs would be at the center of one of the most far-reaching scandals in modern science, as thousands of its studies were revealed through EPA and FDA investigations to be fraudulent or grossly inadequate. One of IBT's top executives was Dr. Paul Wright, a Monsanto toxicologist who took a job at IBT Labs in part to supervise the PCB tests, and then returned to Monsanto. Wright was eventually convicted of multiple counts of fraud in one of the longest criminal trials in U. S. history - with his legal fees paid by Monsanto.