Truth, Transparency & Trust: We Need It, And In the FDA

Genetic Hybridization has been a long standing pillar of those who use farming, herding and ranching to supply their means to make a living.  Unfortunately, it is no longer the “mom and pop” farms which manufacture the bulk of this nation’s produce.

Since the development of global agribusiness, which has been steadily encroaching upon the local output of the total production base of livestock, fruits and vegetables since the 1980s, the one agency which has been slated to regulate the quality of these consumer items, the Federal Drug Administration (as well as the USDA), has been rendered wholly toothless as a result of the incessant putsch for deregulation, perpetrated by those who stand to gain the most in the business.

Now, and particularly within the last 10 years, GMO foods (GMO is Genetically Modified Organisms) have penetrated our supermarkets, and GMOs are present in pretty much all non-organic preprocessed foods.

We are now exposed to more GMOs in our foods and produce than ever before, with little to no oversight of what actually comprises them.  We know that right now, most corn (corn and canola oil), alfalfa, soybeans (soy, soy lectin), sugar beets (sugar other than pure cane sugar), papayas, cotton (cotton seed oil), yellow squash, and some kinds of non-organic Golden Rice are either wholly or partially composed of GMOs (see the list).  All meat products produced in the US, since they are all fed 100% GMO feed stocks, are essentially 100% GM meats.  I think it’s time to go vegan.  Organic Vegan, that is.

We also know that somewhere in the neighborhood of 93% of Americans support the labeling of GM products.  Europe (the EU) already requires labeling of GM foods, and since the mid 2000s, the EU has banned most types of GMOs from being grown or produced within its boundaries.

So why does this matter?  Let’s go back into history a little bit.

In 1901, Monsanto was founded.  It started off making an artificial sweetener called Saccharin, which it marketed to Coca-Cola.  In the 1920s, Monsanto started producing vanillin, salicylic acid, aspirin, and basic industrial chemicals like sulfuric acid and rubber processing chemicals.

Odd that a company which makes food additives would also be making sulfuric acid (which will eat through your skin) and rubber processing chemicals (which can kill you), isn’t it?

Since the 1940s, Monsanto become a leading manufacturer of plastics, including polystyrene, synthetic fibers, the herbicides 2,4,5-T, DDT, Agent Orange, the artificial sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet), bovine somatotropin (bovine growth hormone or BST), PCBs, LEDs, 2,4-D, BT-Toxin, and most profitably, Round-Up and Round-Up resistant GM seeds.

Obviously, DDT (an “insecticide”) and Agent Orange (a “defoliant”) are no longer being produced, but 2,4-D is a very close cousin to Agent Orange, and what the BT-Toxin does to insects makes DDT look humane.  BT-Toxin is a GM toxin which alters the DNA of insects so that their internal organs turn to gel and explode.  Somebody at Monsanto really has it in for bugs, huh?  They put this stuff in Round-Up, and the GM seeds which are constructed to be Round-Up resistant have this same GM BT-Toxin in them.  It has been shown that when GM plants grown with these BT-Toxin-infused genes are consumed by some animals, the bacteria in those animals’ stomachs get their DNA altered so that they become miniature BT-Toxin factories.  Yes, that’s pretty gross, right?

So it is conceivable that if you eat enough, say, GM corn chips, your stomach bacteria will start producing BT-Toxin, causing your stomach to explode, just like the insects.  This will cause a very painful, and very certain death.  Maybe somebody at Monsanto really has it in for everyone who eats their GM seeds, actually.  Just as an aside, there were several Monsanto scientists who, having learned from their research the effects of BT-Toxin in the feeds which were then fed to cows, stopped buying non-organic beef and milk altogether, and one even went so far as to buy his own milk cow.

Now, it should be noted that they did have some help, from the inside.

From Wikipedia:

• Justice Clarence Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 1970s.  Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion in the 2001 Supreme Court decision J. E. M. Ag Supply, Inc. v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc. which found that “newly developed plant breeds are patentable under the general utility patent laws of the United States.”  This case benefited all companies which profit from genetically modified crops, of which Monsanto is the largest.
• Michael R. Taylor was an assistant to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner before he left to work for a law firm on gaining FDA approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone in the 1980s.  Taylor then became deputy commissioner of the FDA from 1991 to 1994.  After he went back to Monsanto to become Vice President for Public Policy, Taylor was later re-appointed to the FDA in August 2009 by President Barack Obama.
• Dr. Michael A. Friedman was a deputy commissioner of the FDA before he was hired as a senior vice president of Monsanto.
• Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before she was a vice president at Monsanto from 1995 to 2000.  In 2001, Fisher became the deputy administrator of the EPA.
• Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was chairman and chief executive officer of G. D. Searle & Co., which Monsanto purchased in 1985.  Rumsfeld personally made at least $12 million USD from the transaction.

One would wonder why the Republicans wanted to get rid of the EPA under Dubya, when their corporate cronies were actually running it, at least from afar, and mostly from the inside.

Not only this, but Michael Taylor is currently heading the FDA and has been appointed Food Czar by none other than Obama.  With Taylor leading the FDA, giving the FDA more money will not help unless all vestiges of Monsanto are removed from government.  Taylor will undoubtedly just continue to green light all Monsanto foods, without regard to the health and safety of the people who are eating the food.

And as for the poor who live on USDA subsidies?  Well, just talk about shoving it down their throats….

To achieve the Truth, Transparency & Trust which are required of the FDA, Taylor must go, along with Obama, and we must replace the void with real leadership who have actual respect, and not this apparent disdain, for We The People.

But all is not yet lost.

There is also a California Initiative to require labeling of all GM foods.  The theory is that food producers would rather not admit to the US public that they have GMOs in the foods they make, and rather than label them, the food producers would rather remove the GM ingredients from all their foods than admit they were there in the first place, and Monsanto will simply go out of business or something.

Now you would think that passing this initiative would be a no-brainer, but lobbying and false advertising by Monsanto have defeated a similar initiative in Oregon not but a few years ago.  Monsanto has and will claim that the companies who produce the food will have to charge, look out, way more money to print new labels, and therefore the food will become, oh, so much more expensive.  Pity then for the poor consumer, no, no.

The opposite is actually true. Not to mention that food producers change their labels all the time with no increase in consumer cost, the labels will not change (since the food producers will not want those labels on their foods), and the food producers will actually save money by not having to pay Monsanto extra money to put their GM foods in the food producers’ products in the first place.  Labeling is a win-win for everyone but Monsanto.  That must be why they at Monsanto really have it in for us.

Then there is SB 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.  This act will require little oversight by the FDA of GMOs, will encourage GMOs to be added to foods, will require organic farmers to submit to a litany of overburdensome regulations regarding the supposed “safety” of their foods which have been perfectly safe for millennia, and will actually outright prohibit anyone from growing their own food in their own garden.  If you grow food, you go to jail.

No, unfortunately, I am absolutely serious.  I wish I was kidding.

So obviously, SB 510 needs to be stopped in its tracks, and we need to get its sponsors and supporters out of office.  Immediately.  You really have to wonder if this is yet another Bilderberg ploy to cull more of the population.  Getting death into our foods would easily enable them to take out all but one of fourteen.

In the meantime, please protect yourself by making sure that you never buy GMO foods.  Please check out:

• nonGMOshoppingguide.com
• seedsofdeception.com
• responsibletechnology.org
• intrepidmag.com

for more information, and remember, as always:

With Knowledge and Love, We Can All Take The Power Back!

Vote Green!!!  Vote Oatman!!!

On “Change”, Understanding, and Personal And Corporate Responsibility

Hello, my name is Michael Oatman and I am running for President of these United States of America.

People in this campaign are using the word “change” so much anymore that is becoming nothing more than a buzzword.

But speaking about change without understanding the true nature of the problems facing this nation is really nothing more than giving simple lip service.

Similarly, talking about these problems without addressing the root cause is much the same, like pulling up a weed but neglecting to take up the roots.

The root causes of which I am talking stem from the policies of several organizations in this country — and abroad — and the members of those organizations are often in government and are leaders of big business, and often their allegiances cross party lines, because of a dialectical policy, which is the nature of these organizations.

I will name some of the organizations of which I speak, and some names may be familiar to you: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project for the New American Century, the Bildeburg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Heritage Foundation.

These organizations’ primary objective is to attempt to control and direct the future of this nation and the world.

Their goal is to eventually form a one world government, a New World Order, over which they will have a direct control, or they may have an indirect control, but if so only through the same manipulative practices.

The manifestation of that goal in this nation is seen in what Greg Palast so adeptly calls “The Bush Cycle”, where we see leaders from business becoming lobbyists or even presidents and vice presidents, or secretaries of defense, and then when their term is done — or their lies are discovered and they are forced to resign — they retreat back into the business sector.

Now, at first blush, that seems fine, to augment a distinguished career in the business world with one in public service, but this is not the sum of it.

What happens is that these people will bring their industry’s concerns to their roles as head of some oversight agency or another, but that agency which they are heading seems always to be the one which provides oversight to the industry of which they had just been a part. As such, industry always gets its way.

Then when they retreat back into the shadows of the world of big business they are rewarded handsomely for providing taxpayer-funded windfalls to that industry.

Now, why this mechanism happens to be the vehicle for control in this nation is because of the nature of corporations in the United States.

The laws in this nation are largely written by corporations, for corporations, and at the expense of the public and the resources of the public, with the blessing of the judiciary.

There is legally no liability of a corporation to the public at large, but only a responsibility to the stockholders to maintain the highest return possible to those investors.

Corporations are neither required to recognize any externalities which may figure into their computations on how to maximize their profits, nor are they required to work for the public good.

In fact, corporations are essentially required to do neither of these things in order to keep the profits up for shareholders.

What a quandry.

Some people consider this to be a “Culture of Greed” which started in the 1980s under president Ronald Reagan, but it goes much further back.

Please see the Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers for detailed information on this subject.

Corporations used to be chartered for a specific, time-defined purpose, for a particular common good which was spelled out in their charter, and would dissove after that.

Nowadays, corporations are global in scale, timeless in scope, and We the People seem to be getting more powerless against their collective will, all with the help of the judiciary, but mostly the Supreme Court.

This is why we see that this so-called “Culture of Greed” has manifestations in all areas of corporate malfeasence, namely: the mortgage and housing crises, global outsourcinng and national job level migration to the service sector, the health care crisis, the worsening quality fo good and particularly toys, environmental destruction and climate change — or if you prefer — Global Warming, the skyrocketing prices of oil and gas, and the total lack of development of alternative energies in this nation to name only a few.

Furthermore, this influx of corporate leaders into the highest echelons of government has produced: all of the wars and secrecy surrounding those wars, spying on the people of these United States of America, massive constitutional subversion and an extreme rise in power of the executive branch of the federal government, the absence of any meaningful campaign finance reform or restrictions on lobbyists, and massive, massive foreign policy errors which have the potential to set our nation back for years before those errors are healed.

When I am elected, I will call on all of us to teach and or require that corporations begin and continue to act responsibly toward the people of this nation and toward the resources of the people of this nation.

We can do this if we are determined and we act as if we are even more determined.

Let us all vote for Michael Oatman on election day 2008 and let us all Take The Power Back!

Thank You,
Michael Oatman

————–

Michael Oatman For President of
these united States of America!
Blog: http://blog.MichaelOatman.com/
Website: http://2008.MichaelOatman.com/
MySpace: http://ms.MichaelOatman.com/
Take The Power Back!