Monsanto Is Satan (Part 2 of a 10,000 part series...)

04/04/11 • -1 min

Don't Piss In My Pocket And Tell Me It's Raining

Apsartame, better known as Nutrasweet, or AminoSweet, and its new cousin, Neotame, a much larger, much sweeter, and potentially even more toxic update of the Aspartame molecule, are all over the place. Virtually everything you put in your mouth labeled ‘sugarless’ or ‘diet’ contains these pernicious, toxic substances.

Nutrasweet’s original manufacturer was Searle corp. They tried to get Nutrasweet declared safe for consumption, but the body of evidence against it was too strong. In the lab, it caused the following forms of cancer tumors in cellular cultures: brain, pancreatic, breast and uterine. In more recent tests, leukemia, lymphoma and kidney cancers were discovered.

If one examines the structure of the Aspartame molecule itself, it’s easy to see why it could be so deadly. The molecule mates what is essentially a precursor to wood alcohol, the type of alcohol that causes blindness and seizures, to two amino acids, so that your body readily recognizes it as a nutrient. During digestion, this deadly methanol and also formaldehyde form from these precursor chemicals.

I happen to know a researcher who worked in Cornell’s neurochemistry program when Searle came calling with their new product. They asked the chairman of the department what percentage of people would be adversely affected by ingesting their new sweetener. When he replied that he thought that 15% could suffer ‘irreversible neurological damage’, the Searle people actually smiled. 15% was a reasonable number to these people, given that the Cyclamate artificial sweeteners had just been pulled from the market, and there was pressure to do the same with saccharine. There was just too much money to be made to let the health of a few million people get in the way.

Since those early studies were not encouraging, (and in fact the FDA was set to rule against them), Searle started paying for their own studies, and to increase their chances of getting to market even more, they hired consummate Washington insider Donald Rumsfeld as CEO. The day after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the FDA (with the hasty addition of a 6th voting member) abruptly reversed course, and legalized Nutrasweet.

Nutrasweet, Neotame and the venerable Monosodium Glutamate are all classified as Excitotoxins, toxic compounds mated to amino acids in such a way that the body sees them as nutrients and absorbs them readily. It’s like some kind of diabolical Trojan Horse, ushering in the most potent poisons masquerading as nutrients.

Many people know of the MSG headache, or the fuzziness that can accompany a Nutrasweet binge, but are unaware what these warning signs really attest too. They portend potential cellular changes, neurological destruction, endocrine imbalances, and immune system chaos.

There is striking evidence that Nutrasweet can also cause or help cause Macular Degeneration, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease (it’s been shown to produce pinholes in the brains of rats), Graves Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and several other neurological and autoimmune conditions, as well as the numerous, aforementioned cancers.

Both Searle, and their later parent purchaser, Monsanto, vociferously fought any attempts to get this highly-toxic substance off the market. Their only concern is shareholder equity; Profits, growth and dividends trump any moral qualms.

If the FDA really cared about you and I, every cow would be tested for mad Cow disease, factory farms would be forced to deal with their huge waste lagoons, cruelty to animals, and antibiotic and steroid use. Nutrasweet, Neotame, and a host of other dangerous chemicals including trans fats, Olestra, and genetically-modified crops would be illegal. Instead, we have all become unwitting lab rats, with a stew of biochemical experiments and genetically modified substances combining and recombining in completely un-knowable ways in our guts, our bloodstreams, our nerves, and in our brains.

There was a hoax on the Internet that Neotame would be allowed, unlabeled, in Organic foods. I’m very relieved to know that this is not true. But beware: Monsanto, and all of the big agribusiness companies are constantly working to weaken the USDA Organic standard to the point that it’s as utterly meaningless as the word ‘natural’ has become on food labels.

Rid yourself of these toxins. Grow your own food and get involved with your local organic food growers and purveyors, and petition the federal government to maintain and enhance the integrity of the USDA organic standard, and to return the FDA to its mandate: serving and protecting the people, instead of furthering corporate interests at the people’s expense.

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Monsanto Is Satan (Part 1 of a 10,000 part series...)

High on my special list of pathologically destructive corporations is Monsanto. Though their sins are legion, I’m going to focus on perhaps their most evil activity of all – their attempt to control virtually all farmers and all crop seeds, and to force those same farmers to use their genetically altered crops and toxic agri-chemicals.
Although this is hard to believe, farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when Monsanto’s genetically-modified soybean and canola plants have shown up in their fields, carried there by birds and the wind. One Canadian farmer, who had been selectively breeding his own canola plants with his wife for decades, was sued when some of these Monsanto plants were found growing in a ditch alongside his property.
This is where the entire affair, which is not unique to this one farmer, becomes positively Kafkaesque. Monsanto contended that this man had essentially stolen their seeds. They asked the court to levy a hefty fine, take all of the profits from his current canola crop, and most insidiously, they also asked the court to seize the man’s own proprietary canola breeds, the product of 50 years of careful selective breeding.
Because of a few plants found in a ditch, Monsanto not only wanted to bankrupt this farmer, they wanted to steal his intellectual property as well.
As utterly bizarre as it seems , the court upheld Monsanto’s claims in full. But this was no ordinary farmer. He appealed to Canada’s Saskatchewan appellate court, where the 3 justice panel again upheld Monsanto’s position.
He appealed once more, this time to Canada’s Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. Somewhere along the line, Monsanto must have felt the winds of change, because they suddenly agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Not only will this brave farmer keep his seeds, and not pay any fines, but Monsanto will be legally liable for eliminating any of their contaminating GMO canola that finds its way onto his land.
He has won, but thousands like him are daily being bullied, stolen from, and often bankrupted by this giant company that literally seeks control over the world’s seed supply.
Monsanto’s contracts, signed by any farmer who wants to use their seed, say it all:
The farmer cannot use his own seeds at all; he must only buy seeds from Monsanto
The farmer can only use Monsanto chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides.
Monsanto’s private investigative force, mostly composed of highly-coercive ex-law-enforcement officers is permitted to search their land whenever they want, without notice, for 3 years after they stop using Monsanto seed.
Most incredibly: The farmer can never sue Monsanto. He must waive all rights to future lawsuits for any reason.
When Monsanto and the other big GMO companies first started pushing their ‘Frankenfood’ products, they claimed that they would never interbreed with other strains, and would never ‘escape into the wild’. Just the opposite is true: all over Canada and the USA, their GMO canola can be found, spreading like an invasive weed. It’s in ditches everywhere, and it’s crowding out other strains. Indeed, it looks as if it’s now virtually impossible to grow completely non-GMO soy or canola anywhere on this continent.
And just what are their seeds genetically modified to do? In the case of their canola, it’s called ‘Roundup Ready’, which means that the plants have been genetically modified to be highly resistant to Monsanto’s toxic Roundup herbicide. This allows canola farmers to blitz their fields with heretofore unheard of levels of toxic herbicides, a sort of slow-motion agent-oranging of the entire American and Canadian heartland.
The creation of plants that will allow even more poisoning of the land, even more toxic residues in our foodstuffs, even more depletion of bees, butterflies and other natural pollinators is doubly, triply evil.
The Europeans have been way ahead of us on this, banning GMO foods. A small band of Organic farmers is currently suing Monsanto for destroying their plant strains and infecting their fields. Not only do we need to support this David and Goliath struggle, but it’s time we revisit the entire GMO question. It’s time to ban all new GMO crops, and not just from commercial use, but from research plots too. GMO wheat is growing in small plots all over the US and Canada. Wheat is, of course, a relative of grass, and spreads just as readily. The fallacy that GMO plants can be segregated has been proven over and over. It’s time to take action and petition the Obama administration to follow Europe’s lead and ban GMO crops and crop research.

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Noble Savage

Recently I attended a very touching world-prayer service at a church in Woodstock. Representatives of all of the major faiths spoke and prayed. Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Native Americans prayed together for peace, and for the healing of the earth, especially the Gulf of Mexico.
I was very touched by the earnest and forthright prayers from all of those present, but one presentation, though equally well intentioned, stuck in my craw nonetheless.
A women who is actually from England but part of a local Native American community got up to speak. The first thing she said was that indigenous peoples the world over have always had reverence for the environment and for human dignity.
This is a patently absurd statement. Entire indigenous cultures have imploded due to overuse and misuse of resources. And, of course, there is the egregious example of the Northwest American tribes Potlatch ceremonies. These ceremonies sometimes devolved from simple giving away of goods and food (and, I might add, slaves) to the actual destruction of food – a sort of keep up with the joneses frenzy wherein two tribes tried to outdo each other in the wanton destruction of foodstuffs to prove that they were the most prosperous and powerful.
Oprah Winfrey seems very proud of her Zulu roots, though the Zulus were famous for raping and pillaging their enemies, and zealously practicing impalement and other forms of torture. Other tribes viewed them as human locusts.
The obvious truth, if one looks past a sort of paternalistic ‘Noble Savage’ reductionism that reveres anyone non-white as implicitly wiser, kinder and gentler, is that white people have no lock on evil deeds in this world, and people of color have no lock on grace, decency or environmental sensitivity. To me, such idealizations of any ethnic group are at their most benign the product of simplistic thinking, and at their most malignant, the bases for prejudice, war, and terror.
There seems to be a self-hating aspect to many white people. They see how their race’s dominance on the planet, economically and technologically, has decimated the world’s species, and caused untold human suffering and death. Yet to implicitly blame this on the color of the perpetrators skin by putting all non-whites on a sort of pedestal not only flies in the face of the historic record, but indulges in the same style of racist thinking that these same people would find reprehensible in an unreconstructed Klansman or Nazi.
Blacks seeking reparations only seem intent on getting them from the white countries involved in slaving, never from the African countries that of course made the entire slave trade possible through their collusion with whites.
A white researcher in the southwest is virtually pilloried for proving that the ancestors of the Navajo practiced cannibalism against the Anasazi. Yet all he did was find the evidence, not fabricate it; And one has only to visit places like Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly to see the evidence of a people under siege, living not on the open plain, but clinging instead to high cliff faces, walled into houses with tiny windows.
And all was not peace and love among the bloodthirsty Incans and Mayans either.
The truth is that all humanity shares linked proclivities for evil as well as for good. None are immune from the violence and hierarchical nature we’ve inherited from our primate forbears, just as we all share a divine spark capable of the most exquisite love, creativity, and caring for all living creatures.
The reductionist Politically Correct thinking that denies this universal human duality has been the cause of much suffering, whether used in the service of supporting slavery in the nascent United States, or in drumming out white farmers in Zimbabwe, which turned that country into a famine-wracked ruin.
As a Taoist I find it odd that people seem to focus on only one side of things. Some see humankind – or some subset thereof - as inherently evil, some as inherently good. I see a duality well reflected in nature itself. Look to the lioness, tenderly playing with her cubs , and ruthlessly ripping out the throat of the zebra, to see the duality of all creation manifest all around us.

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