HomeAbout JeffContact

GMO Corn Found to Be Toxic (Duh)

Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on GMO Corn Found to Be Toxic (Duh)

A team of Egyptian scientists has found that Monsanto’s GMO (Bt toxic) corn is not substantially equivalent to its non GMO parent as Monsanto claims.

While Monsanto also insists there is no evidence of toxicity in its voluntary safety assessments, these independent scientists tell us otherwise. By the 91st day of their studies, they found evidence of kidney, liver, and intestinal toxicity, as well as male infertility in laboratory animals fed the GMO corn.

The results were published in the Journal of American Science 2012; 8(9).

***

MONSANTO USES DECEIT TO FURTHER THE DARK ACT

The following is part of a letter sent to organic activists by Ronnie Cummins, National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

“When the first email came in describing Monsanto’s latest campaign of trickery and deception, I thought it sounded far-fetched,” Cummins writes. “But then other activists chimed in, and I realized it was true.

“According to reports from our activists on the ground in California, Washington State, and Oregon, Monsanto is organizing its own powerful ‘astroturf’ movement.” (An astroturf movement is a fake grass roots movement used to achieve political goals.)

“It’s no amateur campaign.

“In a detailed email, with pdf images of documents sent to one of our activists from a Monsanto astroturf leader, we’ve learned that Monsanto is calling moms who are pro-labeling, pretending to be on their side, then rushing overnight documents to them that include letters containing their personal stories, addressed to their members of Congress, asking them to support H.R. 1599.

“It’s a direct attempt to deceive and confuse busy moms, and deluge Congress members with letters of support for a federal bill that would not only ban labeling forever, but also preempt bans on GMO crops, preclude pre-market safety testing of GMO foods,, and take away food companies’ right to voluntarily obtain independent GMO-free certification.

“Monsanto is spending millions to create its fake grassroots movement. We need to fight back. Because if Congress passes H.R. 1599, the Mother of all Monsanto Protection Acts, the GMO labeling movement will effectively be shut down.

“For decades, I’ve been working to defend our soil and our food from the onslaught of Monsanto’s toxic chemicals. By now, you’d think that nothing would surprise me.
And yet . . . this fight has now moved to defending not only our health and the right to know what’s in our food, but our very democracy.

“H.R. 1599 takes ‘attack on democracy’ to new heights. The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. It outlines the principle of federalism, the basis for the original Constitution, by stating that the federal government possesses only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution. All remaining powers are reserved for the states or the people.
States’ rights, and your rights, will be obliterated if Congress passes H.R. 1599. Monsanto will stop at nothing to pass this bill.”

H.R. 1599 is known among organic activists as the DARK Act, or Deny Americans the Right to Know.

***

SOCIAL ACTIVIST AND CATHOLIC CARDINAL TEAM UP ON CLIMATE CHANGE

From The Guardian:

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

“The fact that they invited me indicates they’re not backing down from the fight. A lot of people have patted the pope on the head, but said he’s wrong on the economics. I think he’s right on the economics,” she said, referring to Pope Francis’s recent publication of an encyclical on the environment.

Release of the document earlier this month thrust the pontiff to the centre of the global debate on climate change, as he berated politicians for creating a system that serves wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest.

***

A NOTE ON CHARLESTON FROM A VISITING IRISHMAN

The following appeared in the comments column accompanying a news story on the Charleston massacre in The New York Times. I think it bears repeating here:

“I am Irish. For many years in my native land the Rev. Ian Paisley spouted bigoted hatred about Catholics in Northern Ireland, but then claimed innocence when some militant sectarian group massacred Catholics. Speech was not murder, he said. He would never condone killing, he said. Then he went right back to feeding the attitudes that spawned the killing. Few were fooled.

“We should not be fooled in America today.

“In this country the ‘mainstream’ right-wing has made an industry of demonizing African-Americans as ‘thugs’ and criminals – just look at the divergence in tone between the recent coverage of Ferguson or Baltimore and the (mostly white) biker massacre in Waco, TX. For decades, white America has been told that black Americans are lazy leeches, dependent on hand-outs funded by your hard-earned taxes to bankroll their immoral lifestyles.

“The first black president was greeted by the right not only with diehard obstructionism but a chorus of color-coded abuse (‘lazy,’ ‘food-stamp president,’ etc.) and questions about his very American-ness: he was ‘not one of us,’ a foreigner adhering to a foreign religion who has no right to be president.

“The siren song of racial hate relentlessly put out by the ‘mainstream’ right finds echo in the gunshots that rang out in Charleston.

“Rightists will, of course, deny the connection, the way Paisley did. But we are not fooled.”

***

HOUSE VOTES TO REPEAL COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN FOOD LABELS

Big Ag’s allies in the House of Representatives recently voted to repeal the rules for mandatory country-of-origin food labels (COOL) for chicken, pork and beef, according to Amanda Byrnes at Food & Water Watch.

Consumer and family farm advocates fought for years to make this labeling mandatory to ensure our right to know where our food comes from. Now it’s up to the Senate to block Big Ag’s attempts to take away our right to know. Send your senators a message: Protect mandatory country-of-origin labeling.

The House vote followed last month’s World Trade Organization (WTO) decision that said labeling which country Americans’ food comes from is a “trade barrier.”
Rather than wait to see how the WTO’s decision plays out, the House acted to repeal our popular, common-sense labels.

And now the Senate has a bad bill of its own that would make country-of-origin labeling for most beef and pork voluntary. A voluntary labeling program effectively means no labeling, since most meat companies and retailers don’t want to provide this information. We fought for years to make labeling mandatory for exactly that reason. Make sure your senators know that you want country of origin labels to stay — and that you want them to be mandatory.

Big food companies are concerned that people prefer locally produced food to food produced halfway around the world, and they’ve been challenging our labeling laws for years. When the World Trade Organization issued its most recent ruling on country-of-origin labels, it decided that our labels negatively impact livestock imports from Canada and Mexico, even though these imports are at higher levels now than before COOL went into effect.

Despite the questionable merits of the WTO decision, Big Ag’s allies in Congress are using it as an excuse to push even harder to get rid of country of origin food labeling. That’s why it’s so important for your senators to hear from you. Demand that your senators say NO to repealing or weakening COOL.

Country-of-origin labels are popular with consumers and farmers alike. And our senators need to stand up for us instead of caving in to corporate interests. If you don’t think that foreign corporate interests should have veto power over our domestic laws, make it clear to your senators that you want our common-sense food labels protected.

***

A SIMPLE AND INGENIOUS WINE KEEPER

Oxygen is the enemy of wine. Open a bottle, especially a well-aged bottle, and the wine you don’t drink tonight will start to lose quality within a day or two. By day four or five, cook with it.

Then along comes an invention called Savino (save vino, get it?) that keeps air away from your leftover wine. It’s a food-grade plastic cylinder with a float that exactly fits the interior when it contains wine, functioning like an airlock. So no matter how much or how little wine you want to preserve, the float protects it. Place the device in the fridge and it will keep the wine fresh twice as long.

It’s available on Amazon for $16.

###