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Monsanto Returns to the Scene of the Crime
Whenever I hear the name Monsanto I can’t help but think about one of the greatest environmental crimes in the history of the United States. Back in 1935 Monsanto bought out a small chemical company located in Anniston, Alabama, a struggling town of about 22,000 poor and working class people. Monsanto spent the next 36 years using Anniston as its manufacturing headquarters for PCBs, an industrial coolant. Tragically, the company was also recklessly poisoning the local community, environment and its own workers with hundreds of tons of this highly toxic material.
For decades Monsanto used Snow Creek, a small local waterway that flowed past its plant, to dispose of PCBs. The company claims that they just didn’t know any better – that as soon as they became aware that PCBs were a human and environmental health problem, they took steps to stop the dumping and to protect local residents and workers. But as documents that the company was forced to turn over during a series of lawsuits that began in the late 1990’s show, their claimed ignorance of the harmful impacts of PCBs is just another in a long, ongoing list of Monsanto’s endless lies.
As early as 1938 Monsanto knew from researchers that PCBs caused liver damage in rats. In the 50’s they started to tell their own workers to wear protective clothing and respirators when working around PCBs, while at the same time they continued to dump their poisons out into the West Anniston community. In 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist to dunk fish into Snow Creek. The study found that “all 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3 ½ minutes,” their skin broken and bleeding. The fact the Creek was lethal didn’t stop Monsanto. By 1969 the company was pouring 250 pounds of PCBs a day into the creek that feed into the area’s drinking water supply and which many local residents, including children, used for fishing, playing and recreating. That year, Monsanto researchers found fish in the local community fishing spot with PCB levels 7,500 times the legal limit. A company memo concluded, “there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.” Instead, Monsanto executives enlisted state officials to try and “handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public.”
Monsanto’s toxic legacy continues to date – there’s never been a proper cleanup. Many of the people who live in West Anniston today are told to wear masks when cutting their grass; their children are told not to kick up any dirt when playing in the yards for fear of breathing in carcinogenic dust left by behind by Monsanto after they packed up and moved out.
Unfortunately, Monsanto’s reprehensible conduct in Anniston was simply a precursor for its current diabolical deeds. What the company did, and is still doing, to the people of West Anniston underscores a corporation devoid of any decency and honesty. Throughout the world they have continued to engage in false adverting, bribery, cover-ups, threats, deceit and outright illegal business practices. Sadly, perhaps its worst is yet to come.
Today, Monsanto is busy trying to commandeer the world’s crop supply through the development, patenting and sale of genetically modified plant seeds and food products, or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). If Monsanto gets its way, virtually every consumable plant on the earth – every soy bean, ear of corn and kernel of wheat -will have the company’s brand of ownership burned into it. And there isn’t any twisted tactic the company won’t employ to obtain its greedy goal of controlling our food sources. They’ve bribed governmental officials, threatened media outlets, intimidated researchers and crushed local farms with frivolous patent lawsuits.
Monsanto’s latest effort in its quest for world food domination is GMO sweet corn. A 2010 study in the International Journal of Biological Sciences links Monsanto’s GMO corn to liver failure in rats. Monsanto, of course, discounts the study in the same way it purposefully ignored the 1938 PCB study that showed liver failure in rats. Seems as if a biotech company like Monsanto should have a little more respect for science, but not when it impacts their massive profits. Despite indicators that GMO corn will have many serious human and environmental health impacts, Monsanto’s lobbyists convinced USDA to approve it for human consumption, so now Monsanto has permission to peddle its contaminated corn to us. It’s in negotiations with Walmart, the largest grocery retailer in the country, to carry the corn throughout its US stores.
The ironic tragedy is that if they’re successful, Monsanto will be returning to Anniston, Alabama to the Walmart Supercenter on McClellan Blvd. to continue the job it started in 1936, poisoning the people of a town that has already suffered enough.
Act now to tell Walmart, “Reject Monsanto GE Corn!”
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10 Comments so far
Show AllIsn't Obama in the process of appointing a Monsanto VP as a senior advisor to the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ?
Monsanto was one of the leaders in the gang rape of Rachel Carson. - And my father, who came to her editorial defense.
Trylon
Headline sez: "Monsanto Returns to the Scene of the Crime"
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Um, anywhere Monsanto happens to be at any given time is a crime scene.
Clarence "Long dong Silver" Thomas was Monsanto's Chief Counsel, deflecting law suits resulting from their litany of crimes. SCOTUS' Sphynx today
I remember reading Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in 1965 while working for my hometown newspaper. Today I consider it among the classics of true journalism. I also recall the vilification of her at the time, Trylon.
........... The years since publication of "Silent Spring" have been a never-ending struggle between Empaths and Psychopaths. (Not that no gradients exist...) The Monsantos, DuPonts and Dows (and Syngentas) of the world have a God-Complex. They are smart, rich, educated, sophisticated, and they have bought off nearly the entire federal government at every level. With the help of the industrial polluters, Big Ag, Big Pharma, the auto companies, etc.
........... Ironically, the publication of "Silent Spring" and the furor that followed created whole new industries, new government agencies, new academic departments, new social movements. Even more ironically, it was Nixon who created the EPA, while during his tenure Congress passed the Clean Water Act. Since then, PRIVATE contractors have made many, many billions installing sometimes massive water and sewerage treatment plants all across the country, municipality by municipality. And each one of those treatment plants requires a constant infusion of industrial chemicals to operate. (Don't tell me that governments are not "job-creators"!)
.......... When I read "Silent Spring" in 1965, my hometown's water supply came from the aquifer of a small local creek. They used Ranney Wells, had a settling pond, and a vertical sand-filter. In the mid-1970s my town-by-now-city permitted a metal-plating factory to be built upstream from its water wells. Through a federal NPDES permit system administered by the state, the metal plating firm was permitted to dump heavy metals and toxic chemicals into the waterways upstream from the city water supply, a shallow sand aquifer. Accidents could not be discounted. Meanwhile, on the municipal Output side, downstream, the sewerage treatment systems have been a toxic goldmine for the "job-creating" private sector. In the U.S, the 99-percenters of the fish population living downstream from a muny sewerage treatment plant are trying to survive in chlorinated, fluoridated, and pesticide poisoned streams. The primary goal of such sewerage treatment systems is to kill off downstream pathogens such as e-coli, NOT to clarify the effluent-water.
........... One of the sad aspects of growing old these days while "aging in place" is the realization that Rachel Carson was a Prophet. In our society, it is extremely difficult to write about the human consumption and disposal system as a cycle. It is even hard to discuss the CAFO systems used to isolate and manage cow manure. As a Culture (if you call it that), we seem unable to acknowledge our environmental degradation and our self-destructive bad habits. We are alienated from our ultimate Surround, daily devoted to earning a buck, listening to the early morning traffic reports, trying to plan the route to work given the 18-wheeler pile-up on the Interstate and the SUV that jumped across the grass divider and slammed into an oncoming car resulting in a conflagration.
......... Those who can afford it in this country buy bottled water. A couple of weeks ago I observed a middle-aged woman loading a 24-bottle case of water into her Wal*Mart shopping cart. I stopped to ask her why. She said she had a son in college who had to walk down the dorm hall to get water from the bathroom. She was just making it easier on him by delivering the bottled water to his dorm IN THE SAME TOWN WHERE SHE LIVED AND HER SON HAD BEEN RAISED. We had a brief discussion in which I recalled the town's water history, and discovered that the recently built house she lived in was built with a pre-installed REVERSE-OSMOSIS water purifying system. I thought, Why not tell your spoiled-brat son to bring his empties to your house for a manual refill from the faucet? Hell, if you want control, you do the driving! After all, bottled water in this country is badly regulated. Your MUNICIPAL FAUCET may well be SAFER! I saw that for this woman, to ask her son to refill his own water bottles would seem an imposition. This, in a college town, wife of a Prof.
.......... Since "Silent Spring" things have gotten worse. Around my midwestern college town species extinction is REAL. It is hard to explain to my urban-raised daughter that the fish and crawdads and the snakes and the frogs and the toads I grew up with around here are MOSTLY GONE! Or that if I use a spade in late spring to lift the soil in my back yard, there will be visible worms, while if I lift 10 spades in a local cornfield there will be NO INSECTS, let alone a worm!
........... How do Monsanto employees explain their employment to those around them? Are they COACHED by Monsanto on how to deal with their employment by Monsanto? Is there a LIST of Monsanto employees? (There was an infamous LIST of Commies!) In their projection of power into Society, these companies seek regimentation that fits the corn and beans crop rotation (nitrogen fixation). Never mind the trace-mineral depletion of the soil. The chemical shills can take care of that. (The interlocked Big Pharma sell you mineral supplements.) They really are invaders and destroyers of the land. They might as well be SALTING NORTH AFRICA! "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds." "Mr. Kurtz. He dead." We fail to comprehend The Commons at our own peril. It is also called, Mother Earth. Who are the REAL "terrorists" here? Enjoy your summer corn.
....... -30-
There are lots of other reasons to reject GE corn.
A lot of them have to do with farmers. Monsanto will once again design the GE corn so that it will not reproduce properly. Therefore farmers will have to buy Monsanto corn every year. Corn is another plant, like canola, that scatters pollen to the winds. So when the winds blow, anyone raising corn near a field of Monsanto GE corn will have to expect that a good part of the corn seed will not germinate.
In the past, Monsanto has gone so far as to sue farmers whose crops have been damaged by such practices.
As another point, if GE products are not at least labelled and inspected for labelling, those of us with allergies to foods will not be able to distinguish which foods have allergens by the species of the food item.
Your post is fine except that Monsanto has not at this time marketed a "terminator" seed. One does not want to save seed from hybrid corn since the seed is virtually always inferior to the parent. With soybean seed anyone can save seed from gm plants and have the exact same seed. The problem is that Monsanto wants cash for their patented seed and will threaten to sue farmers who save this seed.
God I hate Wall Street. Greed makes a horrible ruler.
I wonder if Monsanto execs and their families eat the Monsanto products. Buy your own seeds now, before it's too late, save them in the refrigerator at the end of each season and grow your own fruits and vegetables while you can.
I'm adding my comment before reading down the thread because few companies raise my ire to the degree Monsanto does. If our nation was not beholden to the MIC and its merchants of death, a company like Monsanto would have been dissolved, its charter erased, and its key officials held for WAR crimes.
Monsanto, along with Dupont (I believe) had its hand in the development of Agent Orange. You know, the gift that keeps on giving, medical infirmities wise, to U.S. troops exposed to it, added to the estimated one million Vietnamese citizens who succumbed to cancer as a result of its exposure.
As if this wasn't enough in the way of ringing up a karmic tab that will resound for eons, Monsanto, not long ago, was also contracted by the U.S. government (i.e. the MIC) to develop a chemical polymer, cousin to Agent Orange, to use in a campaign of aerial spraying (part of the diabolically deluded War on Drugs, precursor to the War on Terrorism) aimed at the plant life of Columbia. Now farmers and those dwelling in the rural climes will know a derivative of chemical-caused disease.
The chemical and bio-engineered trails of this Bringer of Death ought to be tried at The Hague since our own Supreme Court confuses money with the legal rights of access. Monsanto is part of a plague that's infused our nation with the morally diseased disorder of "profit pursuit at any price." There is no remorse, no sense of the sacred, nor the slightest concern for humanity in their calculus. They just pay off lawyers to work the magic of instilling doubt when all the data doesn't absolutely line up to fulfill the legal definition of "the burden of proof." And then, like Mafioso hired assassins, they merely move on to the next job.
For profit only.
I await the day that the karmic blowback they've so richly earned, returns to them.