World According to Monsanto, pt 6, Lies and Lying Liars

This portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary covers Monsanto's ruinous lies about dioxin, an acutely toxic carcinogen and a chief ingredient in Agent Orange. They falsified data to say that the chemical wasn't carcinogenic. The US government took them at their word and many Vietnam veterans were denied healthcare claims based on those lies.

Ask yourself: if they'd lie about giving US soldiers cancer, what else would they lie about?

As it happens, their entire line about how genetically engineered crops are needed to feed the world and save the poor. Their products are simply unnecessary.

In a world where the USDA's and FDA's idea of safety checking is tantamount to voluntary self-reporting, why trust without verification?

I linked recently to a Seed Magazine debate between sustainable food activists and GMO supporters, at the link, participant Tom Philpott notes that no well-credentialed academics invited such that a false front of scientific unity could be projected in favor of crops that are 'just the same' as other crops, yet require ferocious intellectual property protection. Yet what I noticed about reading the opposition arguments in the full discussion was how defensive they were of the biotech corporations:

Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis: ... My overwhelming sense is that public skepticism about GM crops, and the foods derived from them, is not about the science—it is about US corporations. Some consumers have not forgotten that Monsanto was a producer of Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War. Others worry that corporations will control the global seed supply. ...

Yes, Dr. Ronald, I am worried about that. If you're worried about my being worried about it, then something must be getting through to the industry. Their exceptionally bad previous and current behavior, as well as their stranglehold on academia, combined with widespread regulatory breakdowns at every level of food safety monitoring in recent decades, seems to lead naturally to positions of deep skepticism.

Where's the immediate evidence of harm, industry boosters say? Do the independent safety testing, I say.

MTBE was introduced in 1979. In 2005, the EPA finally got around to realizing that it was a 'likely' cause of cancer.

That's 26 years of a product being on the market before definitive proof of harm was discovered.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been provided to menopausal women since the 1930s, giving them low doses of estrogen, a compound their bodies naturally produced when they were younger. It took forty years for suspicions to surface that it caused cancer, but until the beginning of this decade for the link to be conclusively proven and long-term HRT therapy stopped.

That's somewhere around 70 years from introduction to definitive proof of serious harm.

I give these examples in connection with cancer, but there have been studies linking pesticides with organic brain diseases as well as gastrointestinal and liver diseases. There was a cholesterol medication pulled from the market after the FDA approval process which was found to cause renal failure and myopathy. All this damage from chemicals introduced to our environments with the purported goal of improving our lives.

If you're an older person who gets a brain disease at about the usual age, or suffer muscle degeneration, die of renal failure, the cause could easily be masked if someone wasn't looking carefully for one. Even young people die of fluke diseases, everybody's heard of that happening. Even if there are synthetic chemical-related clusters of deaths, it can take a lot of investigation to uncover that and not all local governments keep the sort of statistical records needed to uncover patterns of increased long-term illness.

Point is, bodies are complicated and we don't always know what will happen if we introduce a new variable. We might not know for many years. That's just how it goes.

Consider what happened with bovine growth hormone. In 1998, two Fox News reporters in Florida were fired for refusing to kill and never again speak about a story they recorded about the potential cancer effects in humans and damage to the health in cows of Monsanto's drug Posilac, (a.k.a., bovine growth hormone, rBST, rBGH, bovine somatotropin) because Monsanto threatened Fox. The story was highlighted as part of the documentary, "The Corporation", and you can see the clip below:

It wasn't until last year that Monsanto lost their fight to get states to pass laws against labeling milk rBGH/rBST-free, so that consumers who had concerns could choose to buy milk that wasn't contaminated with their potentially carcinogenic product. They fought, literally, to make it illegal for you to know if their drug's breakdown products were in your milk.

Has anyone you know dropped dead from drinking milk? Probably not. Might they, or you, have an elevated risk of certain reproductive system cancers from being unknowingly exposed for a number of years? Maybe. You wouldn't know a thing like that for a very long time. That's what they're counting on.

In almost every case where companies have had to recall these synthetics because of unwanted human health side effects, investigators have often uncovered evidence that the possible damage was already known to the company in question. Yet these products are still sold to an unsuspecting public over and over because, dammit, a lot of money was invested in their research and manufacture and if they can sneak a few more years of profit in under the wire, well, go for it.

They make enough money from selling their lousy junk for a few years than they have to pay in fines to regulatory agencies or, usually, in court settlements to their victims. Often, there is no penalty beyond having to stop selling in the US.

These are the people we're entrusting with the safety of the world's crop DNA.

Umm, no. Not that anyone asked me, but I prefer not to take these people at their word. Not that anyone was willing to label the food they sold me so I could make my own choice, but the food-equivalent concoctions of the people who brought us Agent Orange? ... Do. Not. Want.

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