From Cradle To Grave, Monsanto Is Always With You: Glyphosate Found In Baby Food, Oatmeal

From Cradle To Grave, Monsanto Is Always With You: Glyphosate Found In Baby Food, Oatmeal

By Kurtis Bright

We Are All Monsanto’s Children Now

Regulators and investors are still attempting to sort through the various legal and financial implications of Bayer’s proposed blockbuster merger with Monsanto, even as bad news continues to dog the agrichem giant.

For starters, the usually docile Indian government under the leadership of neoliberal Prime Minister Narendra Modi--a government that never met a genetically modified seed it didn’t like--has suddenly sprouted a backbone and started offering up some pretty stiff opposition to Monsanto’s proposed introduction of GMO mustard seed there.

In addition, the latest studies have found that glyphosate, the star weed-killing chemical in Monsanto’s Roundup brand herbicide is indeed likely responsible for the deaths of millions if not billions of honeybees in recent years, jeopardizing food production both commercial and personal.

However, don’t cry for our agrichemical overlords just yet, although it is truly amazing how they manage to so consistently bring this stuff on themselves.

For instance, yet another paper has backed up a blockbuster study from a few months ago showing that glyphosate is present in numerous samples of oatmeal--as well as baby food.

In the original study, a Food and Drug Administration chemist discovered a residue of glyphosate in a broad variety of oat-based cereal marketed for infants, some of which had concentrations of up to 1.67 parts per million.

That may not sound like much, but the fact is that for developing children who have weak immune systems and a body weight that is a mere fraction of that of an adult, any amount of what the World Health Organization has called a probable carcinogen is too much.

I mean, put it this way: is that too much for your child?

This of course also comes out on the heels of the news that samples of U.S. honey have also been demonstrated to be tainted with glyphosate--little surprise there, given the mounting evidence that honeybees have been contaminated via the copious spraying that has blanketed the crops of the nation with literally billions of pounds of glyphosate over the past 20 years.

What many observers found to be particularly alarming on that front was the revelation that these tainted honey samples often came in with glyphosate levels double what is legally allowed in the E.U.

For its part, the EPA has stated that the glyphosate residue tests they are currently officially conducting do not include oats or honey, and thus they would not comment on the aforementioned studies that were not conducted under their purview.

The EPA is currently testing for glyphosate residues in corn, soy, eggs and milk, they say, and so far none of them has shown levels that exceed what is legally allowed, although the analysis is ongoing.

Of course, the agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs recently released the conclusion that glyphosate is “...not likely to be carcinogenic to humans at doses relevant to human health risk assessment,” and that the WHO study was wrong, regardless of the fact that their own research is ongoing.

Which is conveniently--and suspiciously--good news for Monsanto. But it is not at all surprising, coming as it does from a captive government agency that is staffed with dozens of former and future Monsanto employees, especially when you consider that people are just starting to awaken to the fact of how much glyphosate we are ingesting every day.

The takeaway here is probably that, despite the reassurances of the FDA and its allegedly ongoing research, perhaps staying away from oat products for your infant is in order.

Hell, for yourself too, really.

We can thank Monsanto for poisoning even baby food for us, but let’s not forget to offer a slow-clap, sarcastic round of applause for the FDA to for its ponderous foot-dragging, and relentless efforts at providing cover for these sociopaths as they poison the entire land.

Your tax dollars at work, working hard to benefit big corporations--as usual.

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Monsanto-Funded Glyphosate Study Pleased to Inform the World That Glyphosate Is Completely Safe

Monsanto-Funded Glyphosate Study Pleased to Inform the World That Glyphosate Is Completely Safe

By Kurtis Bright

Thanks For Clearing That Up, Monsanto

 

They just won’t give up, will they?

Once again Monsanto is in the news, and this time it isn’t about their proposed merger with Bayer, a troubling enough development to anyone who thinks food and the means to feed ourselves shouldn’t be controlled by a half-dozen chemical corporations.

And weirdly the news isn’t about their genetically modified seeds either, the seeds that the rural people of India call “suicide seeds” due to the rate at which impoverished farmers in hock to the corporation because of their usurious patent fees kill themselves.

For once it isn’t even about their lawyers continuing to avoid the corporation’s culpability in the poisoning of millions of acres of U.S. wetlands and waterways with their PCB chemical runoff.

No, Monsanto is in the news this time around due to something they actually want to see in the news--which is there thanks no doubt to their massive PR department. The chemical concern-turned-seed-company recently made headlines due to the release of a study that has shown that glyphosate, the active ingredient in their signature herbicide Roundup has been determined to be perfectly safe.

If you’re wondering why that doesn’t sound quite right, given that the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm found that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen, or because you’re aware of the mounting evidence that keeps piling up indicating that glyphosate is largely responsible for the massive bee die-offs of recent years, well, you wouldn’t be alone in your confusion.

What you should probably know is that Monsanto funded the research and paid the scientists who reached this conclusion, so there’s that.

Miracle of miracles, they sided with Monsanto’s long-time claims.

Of course disclosing their financial interest in the results isn’t something Monsanto’s pet scientists felt compelled to do, at least not in any clear, transparent way. Published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, the study conveniently didn’t mention these blatant industry ties until the very end of the article, in an obscurant “Declaration of Interests.”

And those confessions were anything but candid. In part:

“...it should be recognized that each individual participated in the review process and preparation of this paper as an independent professional and not as a representative of their employer.”

And who are those employers? Well you’d have to read on to find the Monsanto name on there. But at any rate, how big-hearted, how clear-eyed and objective of them to dig deep and find their independence while working on this study--despite living in homes paid for by Monsanto, sending their kids to high-end schools financed by Monsanto, and eating food put on the table by their Monsanto paychecks.

And in case you didn’t take the point about how liberated the scientists were from the constraints of pleasing their bosses in their day jobs, there were multiple, prominent  references to the “independence” of the study’s authors, a curious use of the word to say the least.

And this “independent” study couldn’t have been released at a better time for Monsanto, as the company attempts to justify its sale to Bayer. Given the current ongoing cultural context of glyphosate being found in more and more consumer products, including baby food, wine, beer and oatmeal, and more and more people questioning GMO farming versus organic methods, and expressing an overwhelming preference not to eat these chemicals, Monsanto could be viewed as somewhat desperate to make sure the deal goes through.

But another place the company has found more of that much-vaunted “independent” corroboration that glyphosate is as safe as mother’s milk is at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Recently the EPA announced that it would be holding a four-day open forum with public meetings to address citizen concerns over the cancer risk of glyphosate.

Luckily, just to keep things crystal clear, the agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs was able to reach the conclusion that glyphosate is “...not likely to be carcinogenic to humans at doses relevant to human health risk assessment” just before the hearings began.

Such a convenient “independent” conclusion to come to for both Monsanto and the EPA, especially given that the EPA is complicit in allowing billions of pounds of glyphosate to be dispersed all over the planet over the course of the last 20 years.

Imagine how ashamed they would be if some independent study were to find that glyphosate causes cancer.

Oh, wait. That already happened, and neither entity has shown the least scrap of shame.

But then that’s one of the traits of great liars: their inability to be ashamed of what they’ve done.

When the government agency in charge of protecting people from corporate poisons is providing cover for those same corporations, we’re no longer living in a liberal democracy nor even a free-market capitalist society.

That is what you call fascism (from Wikipedia):

“Fascist economics supported a state-controlled economy that accepted a mix of private and public ownership over the means of production. Economic planning was applied to both the public and private sector, and the prosperity of private enterprise depended on its acceptance of synchronizing itself with the economic goals of the state. Fascist economic ideology supported the profit motive but emphasized that industries must uphold the national interest as superior to private profit.”

The only difference between the economic side of this neo-fascism and that of pre-World War II Italy and Germany is that back then, the state called the shots and controlled the corporations.

Today the corporations control the state.

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Cancer Hiding In Your Kitchen: Avoid These Foods At All Cost

Cancer Hiding In Your Kitchen: Avoid These Foods At All Cost

By Kurtis Bright

How These Foods Hide Their True, Cancer-Causing Nature

 

As more and more information about how the powers-that-be really operate comes to light, more people are beginning to suspect that maybe they don’t have our best health interests at heart. Forget about politics--look at the ongoing fights against Monsanto, Big Pharma, Big Soda, Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and more.

Do you ever wonder why we are paying billions of dollars to government regulators who are supposed to protect us from these entities when they threaten our health? It’s almost like their jobs aren’t to protect the public, but rather to protect businesses, even as they poison us and the environment.

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to the fact that we are going to have to be responsible for watching out for our own health.

What this means in practical terms is that we are going to have to do our own research and make our own choices--for instance, when it comes to shopping for food--while taking what labels tell us with a giant grain of salt. These days it has become all too apparent that just because something is on the shelf of your local supermarket that doesn’t mean it is safe for human consumption. The corruption of the USDA, the FDA, Congress and other regulators is without end, as proven over and over again as in the Vermont GMO labeling battle.

Having said that, here are a few foods that have been proven carcinogenic--and yet are still widely available on store shelves--foods you may not typically think of as unhealthy.

• Microwave popcorn - The fact that this product is still available with no warning label or media campaign against it is downright criminal. Those convenient bags that cause your microwave popcorn to pop so quickly and evenly are lined with perfluoroctanoic acid, a toxin found in Teflon and which has been linked to infertility along with a cornucopia of cancers, including bladder, kidney, liver, pancreas and testicular cancer. Also, let’s not forget that the popcorn itself is rife with chemicals and likely contains GMOs, for instance soybean oil.
• Canned tomatoes - Tomatoes and the lycopene they contain in particular are good for the prostate and other health functions, so it is easy to understand how a person might want to take advantage of a quick and convenient option for getting a dose of tomato goodness. However, the sad truth is that canned tomatoes--along with almost every other canned fruit and vegetable--comes in cans that are lined with bisphenol A, aka BPA, a chemical that has been linked to endocrine problems as well as cancer. This is a serious enough issue that the use of the chemical has been discontinued in children’s items. But for industry-friendly regulators, the health of adults--and any children who are fed canned veggies and fruits, it should be noted--allowing its continued use in all manner of plastics and other consumer items that come in contact with food is A-ok. The problem with tomatoes in particular is that, in coming into contact with BPAs, their natural acidity causes the chemicals to leach out into the food.
• Processed meats - Sorry, lovers of meats like prosciutto, cacpicola, salami or even plain old hot dogs: these highly processed foods are likely to contain sodium nitrates, which have been shown to be cancer-causing in rat studies, increasing the chances of early death by 44 percent. Do keep in mind also that even unprocessed red meat causes you to run a risk: a recent bombshell of a study showed that red meat actually causes a toxic, allergic reaction in humans eliciting an immune response, one that may be the precursor of cancer among red meat eaters.

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Absolute Power: Monsanto And Bayer Combined Would Control 29 Percent Of World’s Seed

Absolute Power: Monsanto And Bayer Combined Would Control 29 Percent Of World’s Seed

By Kurtis Bright

Merger Of Monsanto And Bayer Would Mean A Third Of The World’s Seeds Controlled By One Entity

 There is plenty of reason to find the Monsanto corporation worrisome.

There’s the way the company poisoned the earth from top to bottom at least twice (PCBs and glyphosate), the way they screw the poorest farmers while literally squeezing the life out of them when the company’s wild promises of unprecedented bounty fail to materialize, and then there’s the company’s seemingly endless power to call the shots when it comes to humanity feeding itself.

All that’s bad enough, but it’s about to get worse.

A new study has revealed that if the proposed $66 billion Monsanto/Bayer merger goes through, the combined company would then control 29 percent of the world’s seeds, and 24 percent of its pesticides.

And these are not the seeds your grandfather sowed on his farm.

When we talk about Monsanto and seeds, we have to note that the company has spent decades altering the genetic profile of their seeds, creating strains that have pest resistance engineered into them, as well as an in-built ability to withstand repeated dousings with its powerful Roundup brand of glyphosate herbicide.

And as it becomes more and more evident that Monsanto will stop at nothing to further its grip on the various markets it occupies as well as its profits, it’s not hard to imagine how this hypothetical control over the seed market might play out.

Of course the combined entity of Monsanto and Bayer would push for production and sales of its own seeds, the seeds that are engineered to be sterile, and thus come with the inability to regenerate new seeds for planting the following years’ crops.

These are the seeds that also come with a Monsanto patent attached, and thus hefty licensing fees. These are the same fees that broke the spirits of hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers and drove them to suicide, the ones that cause those farmers’ widows and orphaned children to refer to Monsanto products as “suicide seeds.”

Closer to home, the U.S. sugar beet industry is pretty much already lost to the forces of Monsanto: a staggering 95 percent of the sugar beets grown there are genetically modified to resist the glyphosate found in Monsanto’s Roundup.

And despite more and more people becoming aware of Monsanto’s reputation for a rampant anti-humanity, anti-environment corporate ethos, the company still isn’t shy about pulling strings to get its way.

Consider one example: the company and others like Bayer and BASF poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating a modest, unremarkable county-level anti-GMO ballot issue in Oregon in 2013. Eight times more money went to fight that one issue than had ever gone into any previous county ballot issue.

And there’s a lesson to be learned about the company’s determination not to allow people to know what is in their food: the Vermont GMO labeling bill was preempted by a fully supine Congress passing the Dark Act II.

The proposed merger would mean Monsanto/Bayer would have more money, more power, and more control over our food and thus our lives--not to mention more control over the lawmakers who are purportedly our representatives.

That sounds like a very bad idea.

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