Poland Says No to GMOs
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Continuing a trend of GMO bans sweeping across Europe, the nation of Poland has officially announced its decision to join 13 other nations so far in excluding Monsanto’s controversial crops from its nation’s farmland.
Poland will now “opt out” of growing GMOs, with a specific focus on Monsanto’s genetically modified maize, which many countries fear will contaminate its natural crops if allowed to grow within their borders.
Opposition to genetically engineered foods has been strong in Europe and has resulted in mass protests including widespread participation in previous incarnations of the March Against Monsanto movement.
The announcement is being celebrated by the GMO free and organic movement, but it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise based on what’s been happening across Europe.
Poland is now the 14th nation to exercise a ban on GMOs, joining Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia, Italy, Germany, Scotland, Wales, Lithuania, Austria, Ireland, France, and Greece.
The Polish people have long been opposed to GMOs, and that opposition came to a head earlier this year as Polish farmers protested in the streets, even taking to their tractors and shutting down motorways to send a message about foreign influences taking over their industry while also showing their disapproval of GMO crops.
The country is already among numerous European nations that prohibit GMOs, but this announcement makes it official that Monsanto’s genetically engineered crops will not be allowed in Poland in the future.
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CALIFORNIA MAY SOON LABEL ROUNDUP CARCINOGENIC
For decades, Monsanto has kept consumers in the dark about the health risks associated with glyphosate, the key ingredient in its top-selling Roundup herbicide.
In California, that could soon change.
The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) is poised to become the first U.S. regulatory agency to recognize that glyphosate causes cancer by requiring products containing glyphosate to be labeled as “known to cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm.”
Documents recently uncovered at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency archives show that Monsanto knew about glyphosate’s cancer risks as early as 1981, when the company first submitted glyphosate to the EPA for approval.
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A SCIENTIST STATES ‘THE TRUE REASON FOR GMOS’
Writing in Independent Science News, Jonathan R. Latham, PhD, defined “the true purpose of GMOs” accurately. He wrote:
“Science is not the only grounds on which GMOs should be judged. The commercial purpose of GMOs is not to feed the world or improve farming. Rather, they exist to gain intellectual property (i.e. patent rights) over seeds and plant breeding and to drive agriculture in directions that benefit agribusiness. This drive is occurring at the expense of farmers, consumers and the natural world. US Farmers, for example, have seen seed costs nearly quadruple and seed choices greatly narrow since the introduction of GMOs. The fight over GMOs is not of narrow importance. It affects us all.”
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USDA TRYING TO ALLOW CONTAMINATED COMPOST ON ORGANIC FARMS
A federal court in California recently denied a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) motion to dismiss the Center for Food Safety’s (CFS) lawsuit challenging its allowance of pesticide-contaminated compost in organic food production without a formal rulemaking and a public comment period.
USDA had argued that it could unilaterally open the new loophole through a guidance document, without giving the public and organic stakeholders the opportunity to participate and object. The plaintiffs, CFS, Center for Environmental Health, and Beyond Pesticides, were jointly represented by legal counsel from CFS and the Crag Law Center.
CFS senior attorney George Kimbrell, counsel in the case, lauded the decision: “We applaud the Court’s decision denying USDA’s motion, and ordering the case to move forward. The agency’s unilateral action to allow compost contaminated with pesticides in organic production was contrary to federal rulemaking requirements as well as contrary to the high standards of organic integrity. We will continue to represent the organic community in holding USDA accountable.”
My question—why is the USDA trying to allow pesticide-contaminated compost in organic food production? What does that say about the USDA?
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FARM WORKERS CLAIM ROUNDUP CAUSED THEIR CANCERS
Lorraine Chow, reporting in EcoWatch, writes that two U.S. agricultural workers have slapped lawsuits against Monsanto, alleging that Roundup—the agribusiness giant’s flagship herbicide—caused their cancers, and that the company “falsified data” and “led a prolonged campaign of misinformation” to convince the public, farm workers, and government agencies about the safety of the product.
The first suit, Enrique Rubio v. Monsanto Company, comes from Enrique Rubio, a 58-year-old former field worker who worked in California, Texas and Oregon. According to Reuters, he was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1995, and believes it stemmed from exposure to Monsanto’s widely popular weedkiller and other pesticides that he sprayed on cucumber, onion and other vegetable crops. Rubio’s case was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Sept. 22.
That same day, a similar lawsuit, Fitzgerald v. Monsanto Company, was filed in federal court in New York by 64-year-old Judi Fitzgerald, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012. She claims that her exposure to Roundup at the horticultural products company she worked for in the 1990s led to her diagnosis.
Fitzgerald’s suit states: “Monsanto assured the public that Roundup was harmless. In order to prove this, Monsanto championed falsified data and attacked legitimate studies that revealed its dangers. Monsanto led a prolonged campaign of misinformation to convince government agencies, farmers, and the general population that Roundup was safe.”
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POLITICAL NOTES FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY
America’s struggle to become “a more perfect union” includes changing our agriculture from the unsustainable, chemical and poison-drenched mess run by giant agribusiness and biotech companies to a wholesome, sustainable, healthy, eco-friendly, and benign organic system. But this struggle also cuts across many other lines. Here’s a round-up (excuse the term) of some of the areas where the good fight is being won and lost.
The ColorofChange.org, a civil rights organization, reports that Alabama just took a major step to block black residents from being able to vote.
Effective immediately, Alabama will stop issuing driver’s licenses in every county where 75 percent of registered voters are black. This is a devastating blow to Alabama’s black voters as Alabama is one of 17 states that require a photo ID to vote. Voter ID laws already disenfranchise black and low-income people by making voting extremely difficult and costly. Now Alabama has made it next to impossible for black voters to get the necessary ID to vote.
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From Robert Reich’s blog, as reported on Reader Supported News:
“The biggest threats to academic freedom on college campuses these days aren’t coming from government. They’re coming as conditions attached to funding from billionaires and big corporations that’s increasing as public funding drops.
“When the Charles Koch Foundation pledged $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, for example, it stipulated that a Koch-appointed advisory committee would select professors and undertake annual evaluations. The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.”
What the Kochs are doing is training the next generation of their Congressional lap dogs.
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Congressional funding for the World Trade Center Health Program has expired because the Republican-controlled Congress failed to renew it. Its expiration leaves tens of thousands of its beneficiaries, who have health problems resulting from exposure to toxic chemicals at Ground Zero, wondering how they will continue their medical treatment.
First responders and others who spent time in the area when the World Trade Center towers fell have contracted many kinds of illnesses. Often, they are respiratory in nature — from asthma and acid reflux disease to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and a condition that is known as World Trade Center cough.
For many of the WTC Health Program’s beneficiaries, their illnesses did not become apparent until years after their first exposure. Without the program, many will lose health coverage. “Stress is not even the word. It’s beyond stress,” Nick Polisano, 37, a first responder who has sarcoidosis, a respiratory condition involving abnormal cell growth in the lungs, told The New York Daily News. He spends four entire days every month receiving treatment at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., one of seven treatment centers for first responders set up by the program.
The New York Daily News said Polisano’s treatments will end when funding runs out. “My life depends on this,” he said.
Congressional Republicans are obviously too busy trying to defund Planned Parenthood, eliminate the Voting Rights Act, and give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans to care about 9/11’s first responders.
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Today’s NRA stands astride some of the ugliest currents of our politics, combining the astroturf activism of the Tea Party, the unlimited and undisclosed ‘dark money’ of groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, and the sham legislating conducted on behalf of the industry through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council. “This is not your father’s NRA,” says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a top gun-industry watchdog. Others are more succinct, calling the NRA a “cynical, mercenary political cult.”
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Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, Congressional scholars, write: “One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Folks, we have got to watch out. The modern Republican Party is headed down that dreaded road to fascism. Please read Mann and Ornstein’s paragraph again and absorb its meaning. The answer is for all patriotic Americans to vote these undemocratic outliers out of office. It’s well within our means to do so.
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