HOW BILL CLINTON FUCKED UP OUR FOOD SUPPLY

Open Letter to Hillary Clinton From a Wellesley College Alumna

February 19, 2008 · Filed under Agriculture & Food, Politics, Industry, Health by Linn Cohen-Cole

by Linn Cohen-Cole

Dear Hillary,

By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.

I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide [see here and here]. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto’s Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they’d ever experienced.

And farmers couldn’t collect seeds from their own fields [see here and here] to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto “patents” their DNA-altered seeds as “intellectual property.” They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers [here]. Since the late 1990s (about when industrial agriculture took hold in India), 166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land.

Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.

What does this have to do with you?

You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned withTroutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.

Genetic engineering and industrialized food and animal production all come together at the Rose Law Firm, which represents the world’s largest GE corporation (Monsanto), GE’s most controversial project (DP&L’s - now Monsanto’s - terminator genes) [here], the world’s largest meat producer (Tyson), the world’s largest retailer and a dominant food retailer (Wal-Mart) [here].

The inbred-ness of Rose’s legal representation of corporations which own controlling interests in other corporations there and of corporate boards sharing members who are also shareholders of each other’s corporations there, is so thorough that it is hard to capture. Jon Jacoby, senior executive of the Stephens Group - one of the largest institutional shareholders of Tyson Foods, Walmart, DP&L - is also Chairman of the Board of DP&L and arranged the Wal-Mart deal. Jackson Stephens’ Stephens Group staked Sam Walton and financed Tyson Foods. Monsanto bought DP&L. All represented at Rose.

You didn’t just work there, you made friends. That shows in the flow of favors then and since. You were invited onto Walmart’s board, you were helped by a Tyson executive to make commodity trades (3 days before Bill became governor), netting you $100,000, Jackson Stephens strongly backed Bill for Governor, and then for President (donating $100,000).

Food and friends, in Clinton terms: Bill’s appointed friend Mike Espy, Secretary of Agriculture, who immediately significantly weakened federal chicken waste and contamination standards, opening the door to major expansion of Tyson’s chicken factory farms. Espy resigned, indicted for accepting bribes, illegal contributions, money laundering, illegal dispersal of USDA subsidies, …. Tyson Foods was the largest corporate offender.

But what Bill did for Monsanto “genetic engineering” goes beyond inadequate concepts of giving corporate friends influence: He unleashed genetic engineering into the world. And then he helped close off people’s escape from it.

Genetic engineering is many orders of magnitude different from “normal” (even polluting) business in its potential biologic ramifications. The warning myth of Pandora’a Box - letting irretrievable things rush out into nature - has become real. The harrowing change to the world from nuclear fission and fusion is the closest parallel.

What did Bill do?

1. Bill’s put Monsanto people in at the FDA, as US Agricultural Trade Representatives, on International Biotechnology Consultive Forums, and more … (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072600-03.htm) or http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9904b/monsantofda.html or http://www.mindfully.org/GE/Revolving-Door.htm

2. Bill’s FDA gave Monsanto permission to market rBGH (a GE bovine growth hormone), the first genetically engineered product let loose on us (or did tomatoes with fish DNA get there first?).

3. Despite reports of bovine illness and death, Bill’s FDA did not recall it or put warnings on it. Even “a very angry, very vocal nationwide consumer base” had no impact.

4. Bill’s FDA wouldn’t even label rBGH as “present” in milk.

5. When dairy farmers tried to label their own milk rBGH-free so the public could choose [more on rBGH and labelling here], Bill’s USDA threatened all dairies that their products could be confiscated from stores. Michael Taylor, USFDA Deputy Commissioner, was formerly Monsanto’s counsel.

6. How were consumers to protect their family, given Bill’s FDA enforced public blindness, except to buy only organic? But Bill’s FDA tried to close off that last escape, proposing to include in “organic” standards, “the dirty three” a: genetic engineering of plants and animals, use of irradiation in food processing and use of municipal sewage sludge as a fertilizer. The FDA backed down.

Had this gone through, Monsanto could have finally labeled rBGH milk … as “organic.” And animal waste from factory farms, a pollution nightmare for Tyson and others, could have been sold as fertilizer.

USDA head Dan Glickman: “This is probably the largest public response to an [Agriculture Department] rule in modern history.” In fact the response was 20 times greater than anything ever before proposed by the USDA.

Personally, I resent years of effort to protect my children and now grandchildren, from that crap.

Politically, Bill sided against small farmers and against the public’s right to know, and with Monsanto.

Rest here:How Bill Clinton fucked up the food supply

Indigenous feminism without apology

Indigenous feminism without apology BY ANDREA SMITH
We often hear the mantra in indigenous communities that Native women aren’t feminists. Supposedly, feminism is not needed because Native women were treated with respect prior to colonization. Thus, any Native woman who calls herself a feminist is often condemned as being “white.”
However, when I started interviewing Native women organizers as part of a research project, I was surprised by how many community-based activists were describing themselves as “feminists without apology.” They were arguing that feminism is actually an indigenous concept that has been co-opted by white women.
The fact that Native societies were egalitarian 500 years ago is not stopping women from being hit or abused now. For instance, in my years of anti-violence organizing, I would hear, “We can’t worry about domestic violence; we must worry about survival issues first.” But since Native women are the women most likely to be killed by domestic violence, they are clearly not surviving. So when we talk about survival of our nations, who are we including?
These Native feminists are challenging not only patriarchy within Native communities, but also white supremacy and colonialism within mainstream white feminism. That is, they’re challenging why it is that white women get to define what feminism is.
DECENTERING WHITE FEMINISM
The feminist movement is generally periodized into the so-called first, second and third waves of feminism. In the United States, the first wave is characterized by the suffragette movement; the second wave is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments. Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of colour make an appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement.
This periodization situates white middle-class women as the central historical agents to which women of colour attach themselves. However, if we were to recognize the agency of indigenous women in an account of feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. This would allow us to see that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of colour which intersect at points and diverge in others. This would not negate the contributions made by white feminists, but would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.
Indigenous feminism thus centers anti-colonial practice within its organizing. This is critical today when you have mainstream feminist groups supporting, for example, the US bombing of Afghanistan with the claim that this bombing will free women from the Taliban (apparently bombing women somehow liberates them).
CHALLENGING THE STATE
Indigenous feminists are also challenging how we conceptualize indigenous sovereignty — it is not an add-on to the heteronormative and patriarchal nationstate. Rather it challenges the nationstate system itself.
Charles Colson, prominent Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship, explains quite clearly the relationship between heteronormativity and the nation-state. In his view, samesex marriage leads directly to terrorism; the attack on the “natural moral order” of the heterosexual family “is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America’s decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.”
Similarly, the Christian Right World magazine opined that feminism contributed to the Abu Ghraib scandal by promoting women in the military. When women do not know their assigned role in the gender hierarchy, they become disoriented and abuse prisoners.
Implicit in this is analysis the understanding that heteropatriarchy is essential for the building of US empire. Patriarchy is the logic that naturalizes social hierarchy. Just as men are supposed to naturally dominate women on the basis of biology, so too should the social elites of a society naturally rule everyone else through a nation-state form of governance that is constructed through domination, violence, and control.
As Ann Burlein argues in Lift High the Cross, it may be a mistake to argue that the goal of Christian Right politics is to create a theocracy in the US. Rather, Christian Right politics work through the private family (which is coded as white, patriarchal, and middle-class) to create a “Christian America.” She notes that the investment in the private family makes it difficult for people to invest in more public forms of social connection.

For example, more investment in the suburban private family means less funding for urban areas and Native reservations. The resulting social decay is then construed to be caused by deviance from the Christian family ideal rather than political and economic forces. As former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed states: “The only true solution to crime is to restore the family,” and “Family break-up causes poverty.”

Read rest here

Indigenous Feminism without apology

Organic Farming In Egypt

Vitality of the Sun - Organic Agriculture in Egypt
January 31, 2008 · Filed under Agriculture & Food by Joe Turner


Editor’s Note: Joe Turner, our newest writer, is based in the UK, and has a strong background in soil science, green clothing, fair trade and more. Joe is off to a great start with this interesting profile of a very successful project in Egypt. Welcome Joe!

How does sustainable agriculture look in developing countries? Do local people actually see any benefits or is it all a fad to meet the demand for organic food in western countries?

Last year I went to Egypt to find out. I went to visit Sekem, a 300 hectare farm near Cairo airport.

The story goes that Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, a wealthy Egyptian pharmacologist, spent most of his early life abroad and was visiting Egypt in 1975 having made a successful career in pharmaceutical research. He was amazed at the poverty and saw how problems of education, unemployment and health were entrenched in Egyptian society.

Leaving his profession, he set about building a better world in a little part of Egypt. In 2003 Dr Abouleish was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes also called the Alternative Nobel Prize.

“SEKEM is establishing the blueprint for the healthy corporation of the 21st century. Taking its name from the hieroglyphic transcription meaning “vitality of the sun”, SEKEM was the first entity to develop biodynamic farming methods in Egypt. These methods are based on the premise that organic cultivation improves agro-biodiversity and does not produce any unusable waste. All products of the system can be either sold or re-used in cultivation, thereby creating a sustainable process.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, SEKEM deployed a new system of plant protection in cotton, which led to a ban of crop dusting throughout Egypt. By 2000, according to UN and FAO reports, pesticide use in Egyptian cotton fields had fallen by over 90%, while prior to the ban 35,000 tons of chemical pesticides were sprayed yearly. Furthermore nearly 80% of Egyptian cotton was being grown organically and average annual yields had increased by nearly 30%.” — Right Livelihood Award 2003

Dr Abouleish founded and continues to provide inspiration and enthusiasm to a movement which attempts to meet all of the needs of the Egyptians that live and work at Sekem. The farm grows soft fruits which are then made into juice and herbs which are used to produce inexpensive herbal remedies. In the middle of the farm is a clothing factory - perhaps the oddest location for a factory anywhere in the world. Clothing is produced using cotton produced by a network of organic and fair trade cotton farmers they have established throughout Egypt.

Rest here:Organic Farming in Egypt

Think on these things...

How come violence between groups in Africa and Asia is nearly ALWAYS characterized as "tribal" whereas those between groups in Europe is characterised as "ethnic"?

Promethus 6 flips the script a bit:


Tribal Violence roils Central Europe