Dear Hillary:
By polling logic, I should be your supporter -- Democrat, woman, white, liberal. But this past summer I saw a News Hour show on farmers committing suicide in Maharashtra, India, which affected me deeply. I started learning what was happening to farmers and to food and how the Clintons are connected.
The News Hour piece said Monsanto, a US agricultural corporation, hired Bollywood actors to sell illiterate farmers Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds, promising they'd get rich from big yields. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto's) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had immense debt and couldn't collect seeds to try again because Monsanto seeds are" patented" as "intellectual property").
"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.
Monsanto has a $10 million budget and 75 person staff to prosecute farmers. Since the late 1990s (as industrial agriculture took hold in India),
166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land (P. Sainath, The Hindu). Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia, South America, Central America and here, have all protested Monsanto and genetic engineering. What does this have to do with you?
Your Orwellian-named "Rural Americans for Hillary" were Monsanto's lobbyists. My greater concern, though, is you former-employer, Rose Law Firm, representing Monsanto, world's largest GE (GE - genetic engineering)
corporation; Tyson,world's largest meat producer; Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer. Rose is home to Industrial FOOD. Rose's cozy connections: Jon Jacoby, senior at the Stephens Group - one ofthe largest shareholders of Tyson, Wal-Mart, DP&L - is C.O.B. of DP&L, arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens' Stephens Group staked Walton, financed Tyson. Monsanto bought DP&L. Wal-Mart's board invited you on, Tyson executive helped you do $100,000 trade just before Bill' governorship,Jackson Stephens backed Bill for Governor, then President (donating $100,000).
Monsanto made Agent Orange, PCBs, nuclear weapons components, pesticides, and with that diverse background in death, are now "doing" food. During Bill's term in office: USDA immediately significantly weakened chicken waste/contamination standards, easing Tyson's poultry-factory expansion.
1. Monsanto people were put in charge of food.
2. FDA okayed Monsanto's rBGH (bovine growth hormone), first GE-product ever approved.
3. Despite bovine illness/death, FDA didn't recall or warn.
4. When dairymen labeled milk "rBGH-free," USDA threatened confiscation.
5. Organic food was the last way around unknown danger. FDA tried to
close that escape with new "organic" standards, to include: genetic engineering of plants/animals, food irradiation, sewage sludge fertilizer. USDA backed down from response 20 times greater than to anything before.
In American food:
Oils: Indian sheep died eating from Bt cotton fields. Our children eat Bt cottonseed oil in peanut butter.
Grains: 49 per cent of corn acreage planted in Bt corn in 2007; French study indicates it causes kidney and liver toxicity. Monsanto controls US's two main crops, soy (90% GMO, 90% of traits "belong" to Monsanto) and corn, the largest crop (60% GMO, nearly100% Monsanto "owned" traits).
Meat: Steroids bulk athletes, Monsanto steroids fatten animals, and our fattening children eat steroid-laced meats. FDA allowed "known TSE-positive (Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy Mad Cow Disease)
material to be used in pet food, pig, chicken and fish feed." Monsanto's GE-hormone increases risk sick cows are entering US food chain.
Poultry: USDA weakened waste/contamination standards. Waste from transnational poultry industry is now implicated as the source of bird flu. The poultry industry is using the crisis to push out small farmers.
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