• Protecting Food and Agricultural Truth, Wisdom, and Justice for the Benefit of Everyone in the United States and in All Other Nations.
• Repairing the Public Health Damage and Environmental Destruction caused by Monsanto’s “Expediently-Myopic, Abusively-Exploitive Transgenic and Chemical Technologies.”
(This is the assertion needing to be examined in the public interest in a court of law, but so far, three courts, including the Supreme Court, have prevented that examination as if it would pose a dangerous threat to the nation’s most important sacred cow: the controlling power of corporations within the U.S political system.)
Below is a layman’s presentation about the issues raised in the public interest by the 83 co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit:
OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto
And Still Needed Future Lawsuits Against Monsanto’s Agricultural and Food Tyranny
When a new lawsuit is filed, it will need to address the same issues as the initial lawsuit. The first lawsuit did not accomplish enough, because the judges did not do the job required of them in service to the public need. The issues are so important to the future of life on the planet, the health of the people and other creatures, and the protection of the environment, the effort must not stop until the work is completed. This is not to claim the judges did not do the best they understood to do. All the judges probably did do the best they could see to do; they just did not understand enough, and due diligence failed them in digging as deeply as was needed to discover essential truth and prior negligence on the issues at stake in the lawsuit.
Courts need to be about truth more than they are the politically collaborative servants of the economic establishment, but they have not been able to pursue truth, wisdom, or justice on the issues being raised against Monsanto. When judges become part of the political establishment in serving the interests of the economically empowered, judicial independence and also judicial integrity is trashed. Needed is an investigation to find out what has gone wrong and why it has happened.
In short, doing the best one understands to do is not sufficient to overcome prejudice, wishfulness, and the tendency of too many people to go with the cultural flow. The pursuit of truth, wisdom, and justice demands more than is commonly exhibited and better than was offered in any of the decisions made in response to the contentions asserted in our initial lawsuit. Now we will need to find out if better is possible on a second try. In the U.S. judicial system, much depends on the judges assign to the case.
Apart from the patent-related issues laid out in the filed court complaint on invalidity, unenforceability, non-infringement, and “no damages,” the lawsuit should be seen as a straight-forward trespass case the same as if a randy, mongrel bull jumped the fence to mate with purebred cattle in a neighboring field. It should also be seen the same as it would be if someone spattered a neighboring house with spray drift when he was painting his own house next door. The right to free, unfettered use of one’s property without that right being compromised by transgenic contamination and trespass was the underlying issue being raised and still needing to be raised.
Because of the long-term damage done by transgenic contamination, it is worse than either of the above property-damaging, trespassing events used as illustrations of trespass, but they help illuminate the central property rights issue. This is a 5th Amendment issue of taking private property for a flagrantly abusive but government-supported use without restriction, just compensation, or public debate about the enormous health and environmental costs.
Not only does the government-sustained behavior by Monsanto, their allies, and their customers fail the 5th Amendment test, but aggrieved people are forced to pay the cost of buffer zones and other protections without having any right of redress against the posed threat of transgenic contamination. In response to this, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack created a commission to propose a way to enable co-existence even though co-existence is impossible. Proposing it is can be no more than a ruse by those wanting to continue unrestrained contamination of the gene flow.
Co-existence between transgenic and non-transgenic agriculture is no more possible than co-existence between a mouse and a rattlesnake after they have been put together in a box. The only question is about how long the mouse will be able to last. Despite this reality, the commission recommended an insurance program to pay organic and other farmers growing non-transgenic crops for the damage done to them. This would be like giving the mouse a food pellet for every minute he managed to remain alive. It would be only a way to quiet the opposition until time permitted it to be killed off and disposed of. This would be the Monsanto objective, and the government, with Secretary Vilsack beating the drum, has been assisting them.
Under the proposed insurance program, farmers concerned over the possibility of transgenic contamination would be required to pay a premium and taxpayers would be required to subsidize the program, but this proposal has the issue backwards. Monsanto and their customers should be paying for the caused damage, not the farmers who have been damaged or the taxpayers expected to make up the difference between the total premium payments and the expected payout to damaged farmers.
The proposal by Secretary Vilsack and his AC21 Commission creates a subsidy to Monsanto and their customers and a transfer of wealth from both the premium payers and the taxpayers to insurance firms. The project is another way to fund corporations at the expense of the people. This is done so the corporations can then be tapped for campaign contributions.
Because of the extensive, long-term public health and environmental issues at stake, the contentions are viewed as more important than anything past wars and international struggles have ever been fought over. This is the ultimate health, food safety, and environmental issue as well as a human rights issue more important than all the others people have worked on for decades. The matter is more important than past civil rights efforts or the effort to end the war in Vietnam. Both issues were minor by comparison in their impacts, destruction, and costs.
The damage caused by Monsanto’s biotechnology and the related chemicals is more important than any prior environmental issue or calamity including the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill and the destruction, risks, and damage related to chaotic climate disruption. Climate could be reversed if the political will would exist to do that, but the damage being caused by Monsanto may not be easily reversible. It may get worse has time passes. Not enough was known before transgenic crops were released onto the open market to be planted anywhere. Scientists at the FDA opposed the release and warned of many potential dangers, but they were overruled.
The concerns are more important than any of the issues leading to the U.S. War of Independence in 1776. This is the asserted reality because the issues have to do with the preservation of life itself. They are no less serious than that in their potential and actually occurring genetic consequences, and the political will to wisely examine the destruction has been missing in the courts, the Congress, the White House, the FDA, the USDA and beyond. All aspects of this need to be examined as a public service.
“What Do You Know About Monsanto?” It turned out that most people in the United States did not know much in 2012 when a movie of this name was made about the OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto lawsuit and views of a sampling of mostly U.S. people in several location. The included photographs are all frames from the movie. Click on any of the photographs in this first section of the Home page to play the movie.
The importance of the issues being raised should not be ignored, underestimated, or impugned, but that is what three U.S. courts have done. Now, the U.S. people and the people of the world must address the issues the U.S. federal courts, the Congress, and the White House have negligently, exploitatively, and abusively refused to address. Many more people now must understand the high public costs related to their failure.
All the cited past issues and events were minor compared to the health, food safety, and environmental issues being raised against Monsanto and their allies in industry and government. Their allies include paid public relations and security consultants, many diverse astroturf organizations they have created to help them produce continuing profit at the expense of the people and the environment, and they include many in the media as well as in political parties. The destruction is greater than any past health or environmental disaster, and that is the reason it has needed to receive attention in a responsible, prudent public forum, but the judges have prevented that.
Instead, for whatever reasons, including possibly undiscovered prejudices, scientific misunderstanding, or habitual disrespect for nature, the courts have protected Monsanto and others pursuing similar impunity. Against that, we stand to blow the whistle, but our effort has been blown off because the protection of Monsanto’s interests has seemed to be more important than public service, pursuit of truth, and discovery of essential wisdom. No other possible interpretation can explain the rulings by all three courts. At great public cost, justice has been denied.
If people have been made physically and also mentally dysfunctional or less functional because they lack the physical health they need to work or think effectively, nothing else can matter. People need the nutrients essential to the maintenance of health, and they must get these from their food. When that is not possible, ill-health is the result. Very few people are functioning optimally with the knowledge they need to protect that capacity, and even if they feel good, their ability to function is likely to be cut short too soon by one or another chronic afflictions or dysfunctions such as obesity, pains of many kinds, or a range of mental dysfunctions.
This is the reason why the nutritive quality of food is fundamentally important above all other needs. Medicine cannot take its place and neither can nutritionally-deprived, genetically-engineered, industry-fabricated food. Scientists have no idea how to give food the nutritional benefits it would need to take the place of the food millennia of co-evolution have matched to human and animal needs. Even if they believe they have avoided all the pitfalls, they are no more likely to have delivered benefits without unforeseen problems than the programmers of the world's Internet computer systems have been when they have thought information security was tight.
People need the food, they have evolved biologically over millennia to recognize and healthfully assimilate. The right to valuable nutritionally dense and healthful food should be the first human right; it is so important, this principle would have been the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights if anyone in the 18th century had anticipated a future threat against the nutritionally uncompromised, safe, and healthful quality of the food supply. This is an elementary and fundamental principle before the health impacts of Monsanto’s transgenes, chemicals, transgenic Bt pesticide, and business tactics are brought up for public scrutiny in all the places that should have happened.
Translation if it is needed: “Monsanto—Keep Your Punk-Ass Green Revolution.”
The latest astroturf organization created by Monsanto and its allies in February 2014 is the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food. Designed to promote voluntary labeling of transgenic food under federal legislation, it would preempt state action to establish mandatory labeling. Voluntary labeling is already possible and has amounted to nothing. Here is a presentation by Dr. Oz on the topic. The industry project is an end run around the state efforts, and given all of the friends Monsanto, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and other biotech agribusiness companies have in the government, citizen effort is needed to stop their health destructive agenda. When the government punts, people need to act.
The states want mandatory labeling because voluntary labeling has proven useless, and the federal government has failed to protect the public interest, but a long line of astroturf organizations serving the corporate agenda on both food labeling and other aspects of the controversy over transgenic food are now doing much as similar organizations did in the past to protect the profits of the tobacco companies. One example, the Center for Food Integrity, was created in 2007 for the purpose of convincing the public not to fear agribusiness products and especially transgenic food. Films like Food, Inc., The Future of Food, and others increased public worry about that, so the Center for Food Integrity was an industry attempt to override them.
In 2011, the U.S. Farmer and Rancher Alliance (USFRA) was created with help from the Farm Bureau in many states and funding from biotech agribusiness corporations as well as the federal crop check-off program that comes from all farmers growing particular crops and livestock. The organization seemed at least partly aimed against our lawsuit, but it was not needed: the judges did almost everything Monsanto and all those helping them evade scrutiny could have required—without any astroturf help.
On January 31, 2012, the day of the oral arguments on Monsanto’s motion to dismiss before Judge Naomi Buchwald, citizens gathered near the courthouse to support the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Media attention was hoped for, but very little resulted. Mostly, the only coverage was on the Internet. This could be part of the corporate strategy to provide the people with only the information the corporations want them to know about.
The USFRA organization was also aimed at the publicity given to the Bowman v. Monsanto lawsuit, and the Supreme Court might not have reviewed that lawsuit if it had not been important to Monsanto to have the high court fully reinforce the rulings by the two lower courts against a farmer without the money to even hire a lawyer to represent him. He represented himself pro se, and only when his case got to the Supreme Court did a patent attorney in Seattle volunteer to represent him pro bono. Bowman’s case was never going to be successful, and the Supreme Court was the final hammer used to make sure that message was pounded into the heads of all farmers.
The fact that check-off funds were given to USFRA shows the close collaborative relationship between agribusiness and the USDA. It showed that farmers not growing Monsanto's crops were considered unimportant if not virtually irrelevant.
Some of the created astroturf organizations have focused only on state campaigns and others have been national in focus. At the time of the ballot initiative I-522 in Washington state in 2013 to label transgenic food, two organizations were set up that focused both nationally and locally on the ballot initiative: Alliance to Feed the Future and GMOAnswers.com. Others were designed to assist only in Washington state against the ballot initiative.
Various astroturf organizations have been routinely created to help to confuse the discussion about food safety, healthfulness, and nutritional quality or to present industry propaganda instead as the chosen way to confuse people. All these creations have helped muddy the debate enabling corporate interests to appear to be doing the opposite of what they have actually been doing. Now, courts have facilitated that.
The astroturfing strategy was originally created by APCO Worldwide to help the tobacco industry when they were defending themselves against charges that tobacco was harmful to health (as everyone now knows it is), and APCO touts as its specialty the organization of grassroots campaigns and coalition building. This sounds democratic enough, but these campaigns are organized to serve corporate interests that pay to have them created. The Alliance to Feed the Future and the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food are typical of the kinds of organization APCO has created in the past.
When our OSGATA et al. lawsuit was filed in March 2011, “researchers” from APCO Worldwide contacted at least one of our co-plaintiffs in what seemed to be a fishing expedition. Our attorneys contacted Monsanto’s attorneys and told them to stop it. Such activities targeting plaintiffs in a lawsuit are not legal, so the company did desist when they were called on it, but they probably would have gone forward if action was not taken to stop them from gathering whatever information they were seeking.
A new lawsuit now needs to continue the work of the initial lawsuit because the first lawsuit accomplished only one percent of the change needing to be achieved. It was prevented from accomplishing more because the courts said the plaintiffs lacked a sufficiently immediate contention against Monsanto to be given the right to a trial. We intensely disagree with that judgment and find it atrocious, but we have to do as the courts demand with the plaintiffs they require. The court rulings on our right to a trial were like telling a women she has no claim against a rapist unless she has delivered the baby and can definitively prove the rape through DNA analysis, but it does not matter if the courts are right or wrong—or if justice exists in their decision.
Judges have the power to do whatever injustice they think is required of them, and plaintiffs must comply with their requirements. They can also call it “justice” even if it is not anything close to that—for anyone apart from the intended corporate beneficiary. Deference for the authority of judicial office does not overrule the patriotic and moral requirement of citizens to stand up against negligent, irresponsible, dysfunctional, sophist, myopic, insufficient, blind, prejudiced, ill-informed, or politically-expedient judicial decisions. This is a necessity of citizenship.
If the courts are wrong, they have been able to get away with it because the U.S. people and those they have trusted to protect their interests are disconnected from much they need to know about the healthfulness, safety, and nutritional quality of the food they are fed. The public is not paying enough attention to food sources, food processing, and other health-related details to correct the agribusiness failures to serve the public interest, especially when the government routinely puts corporate interests ahead of the public interest and sells the needs of the people down the river.
The public disconnection results in part because the press and the media have continuously helped to keep people in the dark. When the institutions essential to democracy are dysfunctional or have been bought up by corporate interests with concentrated control over most of the money in the nation, the information needs of the people will not be met. Worse, democracy is turned into cruel illusion and a joke.
In this case, the public needs have been intentionally ill-served by collaborating media corporations supportive of the broader corporate brotherhood and the facilitating plutocratic pro-corporate oligarchy that is now the U.S. government. Importantly, decisions by the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, have flagrantly and intentionally turned the government into a money-driven monster.
With corporations made more important than the people, the public need for honest and trustworthy pursuit of the truth has been subverted. Money-dependent, pro-biotech, pro-corporate, pro-patent prejudice has trumped truth, and this reality is a worse and more dangerous reality than racism and racial bigotry have ever been in past even though they have undermined and subverted U.S. democratic ideals—and still do. This is a massive human rights failure, but most people do not yet understand it.
Food healthfulness is more important than the kinds of acute human rights abuses against the Syrian people during their civil war or any other past or present human rights abuse anywhere in the world. This is because many more people in many nations can be and are affected—not just in their own lives but in the lives of their descendants over multiple future generations. The Syrian failure is one example of a major, unresolved, international human rights issue, but it is insignificant compared to the food and agricultural issues needing to be addressed as soon as possible.
While the Syrian abuse is immediate, violent, and highly visible to the world with millions of refugees and half of the children in Syria with no school to attend and maybe no home, the Monsanto abuse is largely hidden and hard to know about at least until the multiplying future impacts show up more massively in unborn generations of people and animals. In a nation noted world-wide for many short-term expediencies and values matching a preference for letting the long-term take care of itself, no one should be surprised that unseen health and ecological costs are ignored by the U.S. government.
Five million people have died as a result of the civil wars in the Congo, but far more than that number have suffered slow death and functional impairment from the chronic health impacts of faulty nutrition, obesity, and more. These are malnutrition issues resulting from diet and food quality, and Monsanto has played a major role in the deterioration of food quality. A half century ago, autism in the United States occurred in about one in 100,000, but now that number is down to about one in fifty. It could be 1 out of 2 by mid-century, based on the current statistical trajectory. Much of the available evidence suggests a nutritional and intestinal health connection or correlation with this serious affliction. Monsanto’s role in it is strongly suggested.
Most people are not affected immediately by Monsanto’s behavior, but the long-term genetic and health effects are proving more damaging than any short-term impacts, and they are more widely dispersed. Even though much more study about the health destruction is needed, the scope of the understood impacts, especially the environmental impacts, dwarfs even the BP-Halliburton Gulf Oil Spill as a health and environmental disaster. The destruction is worse than it was with DDT even if more independent, objective research is needed, but the necessary research has been stonewalled as a result of patent-related control and money-driven contractual control over research institutions in the United States. As a result, reliable research has been needed from many other nations, but it has not yet been accomplished because the research resources in other nations have been insufficient to the need.
Monsanto’s behavior and impacts have not been studied in the United States as should have been required, and that is because they have used their money power, political influence, and patent rights to perform or control all the investigation into the health, safety, and nutritional questions raised about their products. They only do short-duration, 90-day studies, and those are not long enough to find the dangerous and destructive impacts. The long-term consequences of biotech food and agriculture are mostly understood only from research in other nations, but some recent U.S. studies and the statements of retiring researchers and former government officials have been helpful pending more independent, objective and reliable U.S. research. That may be possible if the pro-Monsanto, pro-biotech government bias is ended.
The impacts probably needed to be studied for 30 years or more before transgenic food was ever sold or the seeds were publicly planted. That could be the amount of time needed to understand everything important to know about the impacts of the transgenic technology Monsanto has irresponsibly deployed with irresponsible government permission and support. If prudence had been more important than profit-promoting profligacy, no transgenic crops might have yet been able to prove themselves wise or risk free, but the immediate focus is on Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural technology, not on any other. This work focuses on the Roundup-Resistant trait and the Bt trait that are at the center of all Monsanto’s biotech seeds. As the expedient result of corporate negligence and blindly supportive government policy, the U.S. people and others have been enrolled as lab rats in a risky, long-term biological experiment without their knowledge or any right of informed consent.
Monsanto has shown they are not concerned about the health impacts related to their transgenic food or the toxins, allergens, nutritional deprivations, new diseases, and other matters, including the soil impairments related to it; they have shown they only wanted to quickly move their seeds to market, so they can profit from the sales to farmers as soon as possible. They tout the benefits to farmers and sweep the larger, far more destructive consequences of their technology aside. The government has assisted them with this public abuse, and through it, they have been able to use patent law illegally to help them establish a virtual monopoly over major commodity crops.
As one related detail, three times more people die or are impaired every year around the world from the use of agri-chemicals like those Monsanto sells than have died in Syria as the result of their civil war. These chemical deaths should not be viewed as tolerable collateral damage or as an essential consequence of feeding people. The deaths are unconscionable, and they do not include the health impacts caused by the chemical residues in food. Only the farm-related deaths are counted in the number. Monsanto’s patented Glyphosate herbicide, Roundup, is the world's most widely-used herbicide, but weeds now resist it, and that has caused more of it to be used. Worse has been the engineering of new crops resistant to much more toxic and dangerous herbicides. This is a vicious cycle because weeds will also soon adapt to the more toxic chemicals the same as they have adapted to the current market dominant chemicals.
The same facts need to be presented as were presented from the moment when our first lawsuit was filed, and the same precedents need to be cited until the neglected, ignored, and stonewalled issues are finally confronted in service to the public and environmental health and safety. The key immediate need is for a different group of plaintiffs able to support a more immediate contention of threat and damage from Monsanto. Co-plaintiffs are needed who have their neck already in Monsanto’s existing and court-sustained noose and could actually be sued by Monsanto for patent infringement. If the daily threat of crop contamination is not enough to satisfy the court’s immediacy requirement, the only other group able to stand up are those who have suffered damage from actually contaminated crops and could be sued for possessing Monsanto’s patented transgenes without having paid the required royalty. This is the “strict liability” requirement existing without reprieve in U.S. patent law.
The matter is no different than it was with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP before they finally succeeded at winning their first school desegregation decision in 1954 with Brown v. the Board of Education. They had to file many lawsuits before they finally achieved the success they pursued and before the fundamental democratic importance of their issue was recognized. Before that, the lawsuits were stone-walled repeatedly by bigoted and racist judges. The issue confronted now in the courts is no different. Biotechnology prejudice and pro-corporate bigotry is still bigotry. It is not that different from the pro-plantation racial bigotry of the past. Both are self-serving, exploitative, and negligent about truth, wisdom, and justice in service to basic human rights.
The raised issues now are more important than even the pressing effort to label transgenic food, so people can understand the content of the food they are being fed. Everyone needs to know why the transgenic content of their food is important to understand. The need to know is ultimately more important than the right to know. People need to know about the allergens, toxins, and the anti-nutrients in their food. They need to know about the health impacts and the ecological destruction because these issues are important to the preservation of life. Our lawsuit would illuminate these issues, promoting public debate about them in the public interest. Monsanto could also present its arguments, so they can be assessed on their merits, but they have shown they do not want that. They want the facts to be hidden. That preference should immediately raise a red flag for everyone—if they are paying attention.
Even if food is labeled, it will make no difference if people do not know why they should be paying attention to the content of their food. People need to understand why the ills of Monsanto’s transgenic technology should matter, and they need to know what has been hidden from them through government collusion for decades. The courts have now shown they want to be partisans in this collusion. No other conclusion is possible. Likely, they have stonewalled our lawsuit because they are a cause of the problem, and they do not want their complicity and negligence exposed, but that cannot be known without unavailable insight into the motivations of judges.
People need to understand the issues, because they have been denied that opportunity for decades. If the issues were broadly understood, Monsanto’s patents would never have been granted. The Supreme Court could not have allowed that to happen and neither would the U.S. Patent Office. The public abuse and exploitation has gone on long enough, and even if food is labeled, that is not enough if few people understand the wholesale destruction of the Commons for the benefit of biotech corporations, their shareholders and their self-interested collaborators, including their political collaborators. Monsanto is one leading corporate example of the abuses, but it is not the only one. It is probably the most visible and destructive example for those wanting to see it.
The debate between the two sides needs to conducted in a place where the arguments can be reported to the people and understood by them. That is why the stonewalling of the issue by the press and the media is as important as the stonewalling by the government, including the courts. This is centrally important because of the current government commitment to keeping people in the dark would not be possible if the press and the media did not support and sustain it through their own failure to pursue truth. That is the way exploitive enterprise works; they need government officials, including judges, to support them as committed enablers of the exploitation, and they have received that support.
Companies like Monsanto can only promote their zero sum game when their victims are ignorant about the issues needing to be raised. To change that, people need to be able to evaluate for themselves all the arguments on both sides. The truth needs to be known—for the benefit of everyone, and that is what we want. A real democracy would require that, but it has not been required in the United States. That means real democracy is AWOL in the U.S.A. A real democracy cannot be functional unless the people are informed, but the U.S. people have not been informed about transgenic food and agriculture, and that, in turn, can affect their functional ability as citizens.
The difference between the two sides in the arguments we have been raising is this: Monsanto’s side is wishfully hopeful, at best, about the ability of their version of genetic science to improve on nature and deliver benefit to the world, but they have not wanted to take the time needed to investigate the possible and often intentionally hidden consequences of what they do. They do not even engage in discussion about that. They do not want to allow any of the problems to be known. They have been in a hurry to profit from the transgenic project, so destruction of the Commons has proceeded at great public expense–as shareholders have been delivered their exploitive dividends and share price appreciation. This is the great national shame.
The observed negligent and exploitive outcome is inevitable when the liberties of corporations become more important in the nation than people’s rights. Corporations have been made more important in the United States because the money they generate creates jobs, dollars for the GNP, and funding for politicians as well as political parties, but this asserted benefit and the short-term benefit for farmers comes at an enormous public cost. The public costs need to be understood, but that does not happen easily in a nation always dedicated to short-term benefits and the expediency enabling them. The nation does not have an accounting system designed to capture the costs of the destruction companies and also people now do. These have been ignored as if they should not matter.
Collaborating government officials have joined in the unconscionable profligacy because the money corporations generate is important to their ability to get elected and reelected. Discussion of these political issues has also been swept aside at public expense for much too long. The politicians do not want it to be discussed any more than Monsanto wants the profligacy of their transgenic food project to be discussed.
The ills of the system cannot be fixed until both failings are addressed, but only the people can force the needed changes. The political insiders will not do it. The story of our legal effort, so far, and the decades of prior experience establish the historical truth of this statement. If justice could have prevailed against the government-supported Monsanto tyranny, the miscreants would be prosecuted, but they are not. Instead, they are rewarded with the opportunity to pursue their myopic destruction.
The other side of the argument opposing Monsanto’s methods demonstrates respect and gratitude for traditional farming methods that have served civilization for millennia. Instead of fighting against nature in a battle of wills with man-made technology as the weapon of choice, the advocates for this view believe in working in harmony with nature and learning from it. They celebrate nature and its gifts. The details on both sides of this discussion have not been heard by many people, and they need to be. That is the result in a culture where people are disconnected from their food sources. That is also the reason our effort is important to everyone in the United States and other nations; maybe it is more important than any lawsuit ever filed in the past.
With the chance to know more than the pro-biotech prejudice and propaganda denied the people by the courts, the rest of the government, and the corporate media, those wanting to wage war against nature show they do not want an alternative message to be heard. They have the political control to prevent valuable historic ideals from being promoted, but the politics they pursue are not democratic, honorable, moral, ethical, virtuous, public-spirited, or wise. They depend on information suppression.
The issue is much the same as it has been when the empowered have rushed the nation into war while others have wanted to show prudence by seeking more facts and pursuing diplomacy first. Since 1776, the United States has built its place in the world by pursuing the capacity to wage war as a primary implement of national policy. This capacity and attitude have become fundamental to the U.S. national identity, and it has been used much the same way cavemen used a cudgel. The same defensive instincts are built into the U.S. national DNA despite their now widely-feared capacity to destroy civilization. International polling shows this fear in many other nations.
U.S. corporations, including media corporations, have become a major modern institutional manifestation of this reflexively tribal, exploitive, and myopically destructive behavior, and they have pushed the nation to embrace these values with increasingly destructive consequences. Better is needed, but it is not likely to be found as long as corporate power is entrenched politically, as it is in the United States. The capitalist corporate model is a form of tribalism pursuing the same basic instincts as more aboriginal forms of tribalism.
By habit and governing philosophy, the United States has favored war against nature the same way they have favored military war to enable economic dominance over other nations and the sale of weapons as a means to create income, but these preferences have consequences. They stimulate attitudes now widely seen and accepted in the culture. They are seen in many activities and attitudes. As a result, many people in the United States relate to nature the same way they relate to other nations and to violent threats against their own security—and their ability to dominate other people and other threats both economically and politically.
This attitude is even prominent in marriage relationships in the United States and other similar nations where competition is more important than collaboration, and if it were not, divorce would not be as common as it is. This is part of what happens when competition and alienation between and among people becomes more common than collaboration, community building, and harmony.
As if by divine entitlement, people have pursued competitive corporate and individual interests ahead of mutual cooperation and morality, and they are pugnacious more than humble in understanding the wisdom of nature and the importance of collaborating with nature’s gifts. The observed behavior is basic to capitalistic self-assertion, and because U.S. democracy is tied to Capitalism, both have been harmfully discredited through this mutually oblivious and destructive interconnection.
Many people in the United States think defensive and competitive pugnacity is central to the way things need to be accomplished, and they would not want it to be different. At best, they may view the world much like a football game, and that could be a reason football has become the U.S. national game. The observed behavior and attitudes are in the nature of people who put competition and competitive success above other national or personal values, including, for example, the creativity and finesse needed in a game like soccer. That stands in contrast to the brute force important in football.
When people are following their defensive instincts, they may not see how the combined impact of these instincts, tribally, corporately, and individually are running the nation and the world off a cliff. In the United States, people do not understand how pursuit of personal and corporate success at the expense of the Commons is diminishing the collective benefit. They want the right to continue doing as they do, and Monsanto is one bad example of these destructive but competitive values in action.
The people of the nation and the world have suffered from this U.S. attitude and the business values it fosters. Worse, the empowered people they have trusted have not permitted them the opportunity to see what they need to see. Public access to reality has been prevented by an allied corporate, political, and judicial wall. It is like a wall of omertà. Officials and judges in alliance with corporations refuse to provide what the people need to know to sustain common interests of the larger community; they have done it in mutually self-defensive lockstep to advance their own narrow interests, and judges have acted to protect that standard with the same brutal defensiveness as any jungle tribe protecting its turf. The consequence of it is as bad as an horrendous criminal enterprise, but people have only pursued their defensive instinct. They can continue to do that as long as others are unable to see the consequences of what they have done.
The polar difference between two basic ideals and attitudes is at the core of our court contentions—and also the court-supported, allied corporate and government stonewalling against our fundamental right to present our arguments in court. The people’s basic right to know the facts and to have the arguments stated publicly in court has been overridden the same as if they were being taxed without a right of representation. Worse, the issue is more serious than any of the issues leading to the War of Independence in 1776. Those were all minor compared to the right to a healthful, safe, and nutritious food supply. This is the issue needing to be addressed by the people when dedicated, abusive government negligence is finally ended—if it still can be in a nation where so many people are passive and tolerantly accepting in the face of the self-defensive values asserted in alliance with others of the same mind.
Needing to be understood by everyone are the complexities of gene inaction; these are among the facts to be illuminated once the court stonewalling ends, if it can end. The goal of subverting basic food and agricultural reality has to end, and if it does not, the controlling arrogance and hubris observed in the United States can only cause growing world-wide disrespect for U.S. behavior. Ultimately, other nations may be driven to rebel against the exploitation being forced on them by the United States. In 2013, international polling showed the majority of people in many nations fearing the U.S. aggressive role in the world more than they trust it. This happens when aggressive people feel entitled to force their views on others as the United States has done over recent decades. Monsanto is one of the U.S. companies exemplifying this behavior, and modeling it as if it should be desirable and tolerable. They could not do as they do if their behavior was not accepted as a cultural norm.
Monsanto’s technology is based on an out-dated, disproven belief one gene equals one trait, and this idea has been forced on the world without informed consent as part of Monsanto’s governmentally-sustained way of doing business. From that erroneous idea, farms have been raped and milked in pursuit of the opportunity to sell chemicals the same way politicians have milked Monsanto and other companies for campaign funds in exchange for a profligate right abuse the Commons. Every time politicians are reelected they do more of it, and they allow companies to do more destruction as part of the process. This is basic to the way the money-driven U.S. political system now works, but it is worse than amoral; it is atrocious.
Patents have been given to Monsanto and others as if by governing entitlement or as if the Patent Office was Santa Claus delivering patents like candy, and the privilege has been abused to enable pursuit of monopoly (and oligopoly) at public expense. Patents are given out like water on a fish farm in the United States and as if the free and almost unexamined right to them was written into the U.S. Bill of Rights. In this, U.S. courts have abusively amplified morally irresponsible and destructive corporate tyranny against the public welfare, the collective health, and the natural world.
Monsanto portrays their opponents as anti-science Luddites clinging to antique and backwards ideas from the past, but that is propaganda to cover up their destructive and abusive failures to understand the science essential to honorable and prudent protection of the world’s genetic heritage. The destruction has been allowed as if it could be good, and that needs to be revealed in the public interest. Hopefully, the people will not need to march in the streets before they can bring change, but more will be needed than has been seen so far from many happily ignorant U.S. citizens and judges who seem to have absorbed like sponges only the party line Monsanto and their political allies provide.
If correction was not needed, the Supreme Court and the two lower courts could not have done as they did in stonewalling our lawsuit. They would be interested in knowing the truth about the issues being raised, and they would not have asserted reprehensible evasions to prevent that. Through the decisions they have made, they have shown they are willingly in bed with Monsanto and want to impose their pro-biotech prejudice and bigotry the same way courts in the past imposed racism.
In contrast and in strong opposition, we want to present our contentions, so people can consider them. We ask no one to accept our view without examining it; we want to provide our information so others can draw their own conclusions. This is the difference between us and Monsanto. We want to know the truth about biotech agriculture and the impacts of the chemicals used as part of it; they want to hide it.
When politicians run for office in the United States, they have routinely and emptily promised change in the way the political system works, but that has proved to be mostly a ruse even though change can be far more difficult than some have made it seem. Few have delivered the needed or promised changes when they get into office. The only changes they make are those the elites with the largest money-empowered policy leverage will permit them to make. Those are the changes delivering more benefit to the empowered than they deliver to the rest of the people, and that is how admirable democracy in the United States has been subverted, undermined, and finally even destroyed and willfully abandoned in favor of plutocratic oligarchy. No one can claim the nation has more than a thin, superficial veneer of democracy maintained as a window-dressing image.
Even the progressive hero, Elizabeth Warren, has promoted voluntary labeling of transgenic food, and that suggested she, too, had made her own political compromise with the corporate interests she has been praised for working against. The same abandonment of principle has been seen from President and Mrs. Obama. They feed themselves from an uncertified organic garden on the White House lawn, but neither of them has protected the people’s need for safe, healthful, and nutritious food through their public-policy advocacy.
Michelle Obama has campaigned against obesity but only in the abstract without wanting to identify the real causes of the problem. That would have been politically inconvenient. Through their behavior, they have both shown themselves pursuing politics ahead of the truth. They have both revealed themselves as hypocrites, and so did the Romneys during the 2012 Presidential campaign. The Romneys also prefer organic food, and Mrs. Romney has found it helpful in addressing her health issues, but Governor Romney for decades has been a promoter and apologist for Monsanto.
The policy changes allowed by both Republicans and Democrats often only transfer wealth from the poor to the wealthy even if they sometimes allow some more limited transfer in the other direction. Obamacare and the Bush-Cheney prescription drug program are examples of this, and in many ways the people are more exploited than served. This is the rule because the system is built on a premise mandating trickle-down from the top instead of bottom-up egalitarian sharing of opportunities and burdens. The power of wealth at the top has been sustained regardless of whether history has shown it to deliver the touted benefits to everyone. It has not done that, and Monsanto is a prime example of how the Commons has been destroyed, so they can prosper. They are not the only company guilty of this behavior, but few have been worse or more destructive.
More about the exploitation of poor farmers in India. For more on this topic see the film “Bitter Seeds.”
Mostly, the U.S. political system only allows the wealthy to decide what the rest of the people will be allowed to receive, and it allows the money-empowered elite to reserve the largest benefit for themselves no matter the public costs. The story of Monsanto’s biotech project illustrates this point, and so has the behavior of other companies. Apart from this in the United States, the middle class would not be evaporating as the poor get poorer and the rich grow richer.
The contentions we have asserted are far more important to the people’s welfare than the arguments in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial in Dayton, Tennessee that captivated the nation, but our contentions are not about whether all transgenic engineering is good or a bad. That is an important issue to discuss, but it is secondary to the current contention against the behavior of Monsanto. The issue at hand is about the way Monsanto’s transgenic engineering has been destructively, abusively, and irresponsibly used with supportive help from the U.S. government and its courts.
If the importance of the issues being raised was understood, they would get as much attention as Scopes received, but that does not happen in the United States when it prefers to follow Monsanto’s biotech agricultural chimera. This was seen back in 1980 when President Carter’s domestic policy advisor in the White House, Stuart E. Eizenstat, at a meeting with farmers was virtually proud about the way technology was going to soon enable political control to be exercised over farmers and food.
Eizenstat did not say that corporations were going to be the vehicle of this control, but corporations have become allied with political leaders in the United States in much the same way they were in past with fascist politicians in Nazi Germany and Italy. On this Eizenstat appeared in harmony with the idea expressed by Henry Kissinger when he discussed ability to control the people through control over food. This would be consistent with the role Eizenstat has played since leaving the Carter White House. He is senior strategist at APCO Worldwide, and that puts him in the same category as the Wizard of Oz.
Because of the way biotechnology has been misused by Monsanto and because they have also abusively employed the privileges given them under patent law, they should not be allowed to retain the patents they have been given on their biotech processes and transgenic crops. This is a contention needing to be argued in court. Monsanto’s project has no long-term public value; it only offers short-term, myopic benefit to farmers and shareholder profit at extremely high but long-suppressed public cost.
Insight may be gained into the larger issue about the rights and wrongs of transgenic technology as a result of the presentation of our arguments in court, and if so, that could be valuable, but the issues being raised now are whether or not Monsanto’s patents ever should have been granted—and whether or not patent law serves the public interest when it is used to promote and protect transgenic food and agriculture destructively against the Commons. The present focus is on serving the public need in patent law and preventing patent abuses corrupting, subverting, and preventing the sustainable, enduring production of safe, healthful, and wisely nutritious food.
At the core of the contention is dedication to protecting the ability to preserve life on the planet and the kind of democracy needed to ensure that. At present, the U.S. political system and the judicial system have functioned to do the opposite. Both have served to help generate and protect corporate wealth and power at public expense. On the issues being raised, admirable democracy is missing in action, and elected officials in the government have foreclosed on it for their own self-serving reasons.
Monsanto says their transgenic food is safe, but we seek to prove in court it is harmful and fails to meet the basic test required to gain a patent: the ability to deliver public value and public utility in the collective interest. The damage and destruction has more than offset the short-term benefit to farmers in briefly but unsustainably lowering their production costs. We want to illuminate the long-term public costs for people, animals, the environment, and the Commons, but the courts have supported Monsanto and its political allies in abusively denying us that opportunity. Real justice should exact a penalty for this betrayal of the public trust and the need for truth.
What should be the penalty in a democratic nation, if such an ideal would exist again in the United States, for the behavior seen from four judges, perhaps nine or more Supreme Court justices, several Presidents, many past and present members of the Congress and also many government appointees in the executive branch of the government? Here is a proposal: at the time of their death, they should all be denied the self-protective right to be buried in a coffin! Instead, they should be required—for the rest of eternity—to get directly and immediately intimate with the important value of soil microorganisms, worms, ants, bacteria, fungi, and all the other tiny biological workers needed to make soil healthful and more rich in the public service that is more important to the preservation of life than all the corporate money they have served in the course of their careers. They should be required as a permanent assignment to collaborate with natural biology instead of thinking of the soil as a dead medium needing to be made agriculturally useful through the artifice of man. This is the dominant hubris, and the time has come to require an accounting for it.
In fact, the work of soil life is needed to mediate the process of making food healthfully and nutritionally beneficial, but the importance of the soil environment to the maintenance of life is only minimally understood even by soil scientists. Applied nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus are not enough to accomplish the preservation of healthful soil, and the use of man-made chemicals destroys it. Both much more and much less are required to make the soil balance sustainably productive. Monsanto’s system of agriculture damages the beneficial and essential role of soil microorganisms, worms, and more, but most people, including judges and profligate politicians, have been so disconnected from the source of their food, they do not understand what is essential and what is destructive.
The trouble is: all the above listed people are products of their culture in the offenses they have committed and allowed to be committed against the wisdom of nature. Because of that, maybe the proposed penalty should be imposed on everyone in the culture. Instead of burying people in massive cemeteries that take land out of useful production or wasting fuel to burn them in crematories, everyone could show their respect for valuable regenerative natural processes by being buried in a compost pile. That would make it possible to finally turn everyone into something genuinely useful and beneficial to all the other long-suffering creatures of Mother Nature’s world. They would then help to restore the natural wisdom that has patiently and forgivingly sustained decades of ignorant and extravagantly destructive human wastefulness, negligence, and profligacy.
But first and immediately, while everyone is still alive and no one has yet died as the result of their hubris and arrogance or inattentiveness to food quality, a Truth and Reconciliation process is needed; it would promote Reconciliation with Mother Nature. Truth would be established first, and Reconciliation would follow. The process would be publicized like Reality Television, so no one could miss the point or be absent from the reckoning.
Stonewalling the pursuit of truth, rationality, wisdom, and justice, especially by judges, who should be committed to all these ideals, might be made a criminal offense more important than drug dealing and grand theft. A panel of citizens might be created to adjudicate the performance of the life-tenured, formerly unaccountable adjudicators. This is needed because they have become too much allied with the economic elites at the expense of the people and the Commons. Ways are needed to address the culturally-sustained tyrannies and oppressions and to fix the enormous destruction and harm created especially by the prodigal under the influence of U.S. hubris and arrogance.
Actually, what Monsanto does and what the judges and others in the government have helped them to do is a form of drug dealing and the life destructive accommodation of it. They have allowed and enabled the destructive drugging of the soil; they drug nature, they drug animals, and they drug the people with allergens, toxins, new diseases, intensifying many chronic inflammatory diseases and afflictions, damaging human organs, including the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas, and also reproductive function leading to infertility. Most seriously, the immune system is damaged, and even mental function is affected. Out of ignorance and obliviousness, people have allowed the drugging of themselves unless they are extremely vigilant and well-informed about what they need to eat and what they need to avoid. Through blind negligence similar to the negligence exhibited by both elected leaders and appointed judges, essential resources have been destroyed and made unhealthy or unhealthful.
Monsanto’s activities and those of the government officials supporting them is a form of grand theft more important than the theft from the Commons routinely pursued by Wall Street banks and others in the name of capitalist free enterprise. Denial of the right to seek and establish the Truth is not only a theft from the people; it is a theft against democratic principle. That may be the greatest of the crimes against nature and health committed by the three courts against the public need. These are the issues the U.S. people must look at and make right—if they still care and have not become too drugged by various poisons, other substances, or deployed entertainment to do it anymore.
Interviewing citizens to find out what they know about Monsanto in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2012. To learn what was said by the interviewees shown in the photograph above and the other photographs to follow, please see the movie, “What Do You Know About Monsanto.”
The Resources Available on the Web Site
To explore the range of resources available on this Web site, please pull down the Co-Plaintiff menu to read the co-plaintiff statements and see photographs—and click on the Co-Plaintiff button to see a full list of all of the co-plaintiffs together with their own Web site URLs. On the Video pages are both shorter and longer documentary video about events and issues. Then there is a page with even more video by many others. These are mostly shorter. Another page, Transgenic Trespass? explains why our Web site is named “End Transgenic Trespass” and why the terms we use matter.
For those wanting handout information, there is a page for that as there is also a page for those wanting to hear music. To learn about the arguments as stated in the filed court documents, and to read the court decisions, go to the Legal Documents page, and to read a layman’s discussion of the arguments, go to The Case Against Monsanto and to Our Objectives—or continue reading this Home page for a more complete and detailed book-length discussion about the government supported Monsanto tyranny against the people as well as the corruption of the U.S. government resulting from it.
This is not just an argument about the welfare and human rights of a few thousand farmers; it is much bigger than that. It is about the welfare of everyone including the people who work at Monsanto and in many corporately obsequious, shamefully irresponsible government agencies. Monsanto’s customers also need to be protected by the manifestation of biological truth, cultural morality, and agricultural wisdom.
Then, there is a page reviewing the bizarre divergencies between the two lower court decisions. That will help people understand why the Supreme Court was negligent and irresponsible in its failure to review and rectify the two lower court decisions. Because the Supreme Court has added to the shame perpetrated by the lower courts, the work is more important than ever before, and failure is not an option, not ever.
All the reading on this page and all the others is important in challenging Monsanto’s behavior and the behavior of its allies in government. A record of opposition needs to be created, but this is not a review of the legal issues in contention; it is a review from the perspective of citizens whose needs have been ignored and whose government has been subverted to serve corporations at continuing public health and ecological cost.
Of course, all the applicable legal precedents have been studied to understand how they comport with the court treatment seen in our lawsuit, but the detailed review of the lawsuit in relation to all these precedents is left to be addressed in a legal journal or a scholarly book written by an academic lawyer. That article or book is needed and should be written because it will be a damning story about the cherry picking of precedents to fulfill an agenda. This writing applies a simpler and more basic test: sometimes, it has been called “Grandmother’s Smell Test.” If the work of courts does not serve the people’s needs and instead abuses them with fabricated sophistry at high public cost, the people have the right to blow the whistle on it the same as they need to blow the whistle on Monsanto and their political allies. In the end, history will decide whose logic should be considered the most honorable, worthy, and wise.
The judges of the two lower courts and the justices of the Supreme Court are viewed as Monsanto’s judicial allies supporting their other political allies in the continued public abuse and exploitation without the benefit of any independent, objective evidence proving the public utility of their project. The public presentation of the evidence to show whether or not the public has been served by Monsanto’s activities was the goal of our past lawsuit and still will be the goal of whatever future lawsuit is filed—whenever that is possible. When a new lawsuit is possible, hopefully it can find judges willing to cut through the divergently diversionary judicial nonsense created by two courts and sustained tragically and heedlessly by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the meantime, the provided videos may be of greatest interest to many people, and because of that, the illustrations provided in the first two parts of this Home page are screen shots taken from the the movie “What Do You Know About Monsanto.” Part I of the movie discusses the issues raised by our lawsuit and Part II allows a group of citizens to tell what they know and what they think about Monsanto. The movie was made in early 2012, and each of the two parts of the movie are 51 minutes in length.
Screen shots from Part I of the movie are used mostly on the Introduction page, and screen shots from Part II are used more between the text sections on this Home page. This page is a book on a Web site, and it is needed to state preliminarily for the record some of the material that would have been stated in court. Because the court failed to do the job the public interest requires, some of the arguments must be stated in another way even if they are not laid out fully in scientific detail. That way the people can read it to make up their own minds at least preliminarily about the merits of the arguments needing to be stated against Monsanto's activities. The issues are complex, so a book-length presentation is needed, but it cannot cover all of the arguments to be presented in court. Also, it covers grave political issues likely needing to be addressed before the courtroom presentation can become possible. This is only a beginning.
Table of Contents (for the book posted on this page)
1. The Court Bias and Failure Resulting from Political Failure—and the Cost of the Problem for Functional Democracy, the Public Health, and the Environment—Including the Scope and Source of the Dysfunction
2. U.S. States and Other Nations Might Get Something Valuable Done While the U.S. Government Is Mired in Dysfunctional Prejudice, Self-Serving Evasion, and Money-Dependent Corporate Subservience
3. The Necessary Requirements of Political Change in the United States and Other Nations—and the Places Leadership May Be Coming From
4. The Subversive Government-Facilitated Establishment and Worship of the Bought and Paid-For Biotech Sacred Cow
5. Dred Scott and the Parallel Denial of Democratic Citizenship Rights
6. The Minimally Useful 1% Against the Overpowering 99%
7. The Unrestrained Government-Promoted Freedom to Perpetrate Transgenic Rape of Farms, the People, and the Environment
8. Asserting the Power of Truth, Justice, and Wisdom Against Those Preventing the Fulfillment of That Fundamental Patriotic Obligation
9. Monsanto is a Dangerous Superweed and the U.S. Government with Judicial Support Has Watered and Fertilized It
10. U.S. Government Complicity and the Answer to It
11. The Power of Money in the U.S. Political System, Our Struggle Against It, and the Thinking of the Supreme Court on the Matter
12. The Status of the Litigation and the Broad Health Issues Being Raised
13. The Health Damage to Consumers and the Continuous Work by Monsanto and its Allies to Maintain Consumer Ignorance
14. Three Central Questions Needing Immediate Answers if Truth, Justice, Wisdom, and Honorable Morality Should Once Again Matter
A. Why does Monsanto want to evade the presentation of evidence about the value of their technology?
B. Do we or do we not face an immediate daily threat from Monsanto’s technology and is the threat sufficient to give us the right to bring our contentions to court?
C. Should Monsanto be allowed to maintain their ability to bring patent infringement lawsuits when they use them to maintain market domination and to prevent contaminated farmers from bringing damage suits over trespassing transgenic contamination and related chemical contamination?
15. The Need for Studies from Other Nations to Repair U.S. Negligence and the Greater Need for Honorable and Reliable U.S. Studies to Confirm or Check Their Findings
16. Building Monopoly by Exploiting the Strict Liability Principle in Patent Law Vs. the Nutritious, High-Quality Food People Need
17. Protected and Promoted Citizen Ignorance and Bamboozlement As If It Should Be a Central Democratic Governing Necessity
18. The Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit Produces a Paltry Binding Covenant as if the Judges Were a Chicken Laying an Almost Empty, Easily Broken Eggshell—and the International Ramifications
19. What Farmers Growing Non-Transgenic Crops Do When Their Harvest Is Contaminated, the Need for a Better Standard, and the Corporate Agribusiness Effort to Discredit Organic Agriculture
20. The Weakness in the U.S. National Organic Standard on Transgenic Contamination and How It Benefits Monsanto While Compromising the Public Health and Helping to Undermine the Organic Ideal
21. The Destruction of the Immune System Health of People and Other Living Creatures, the Intention of the Courts, and the Failure of the Courts to Be Concerned about the Many Health Impacts Resulting from Monsanto’s Seeds and Chemicals
22. Continued U.S. Government Failure for Two Decades Starting with the Original Shameful Deregulatory Bush-Quayle Negligence in 1992 and the Disgraceful Denial of Informed Consent
23. The Pressing Need to Examine the Evidence from Both Sides in an Independent, Objective Forum and the Essential, Necessary, Inescapable Role of the People in a Democratic Nation
24. Facts and precedents—plus common sense and basic humanity—support a fundamental human right allowing our arguments to be heard before a judge, but the courts have preferred abject, obsequious, myopic, pro-corporate, pro-Monsanto surrender and subservience over the pursuit of nutritional and healthful truth, real food integrity, justice against transgenic trespass for farmers and consumers, and respect for millions of years of evolved natural wisdom
25. The Tragic Error of Technologically Wishful Court Decisions and the Disconnection of the People
26. The Response to Monsanto’s Technology in Other Nations and the U.S. Marginalization of Morality
27. Employing Divergent Court Tactics to Blow Plaintiffs Off and What Exhibited Attitudes Reveal
28. A Polarized Culture Increases the Power of Prejudice But Reprieve is Still Possible For Some
29. The Appeals Court Decision Was Only A Small, Partial Improvement Maybe Resulting from the Gap Between Rural and Urban Sense of Reality
30. The Cultural Issues at the Core of Courtroom Failure—And the Place Where They Lead
31. How the U.S. System Works to Empower Wealthy Corporations over the People
32. The Growth of International Disrespect for the United States and the Results of that Disrespect
33. The Product of U.S. Hubris
34. The Intensifying International Motive to Marginalize U.S. World Leadership
35. U.S. Internal Alienation, Polarization, and Isolation Facilitates Corporate Exploitation
36. The Inevitable Cultural Impact of Discriminatory Court Decisions
37. Eroding the Commons through the Intrusion of Myopic Capitalist Amorality
38. The Misunderstood Link to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
39. Under Modern U.S. Tutelage, People Now Embrace Amorality as Easily as Corporations Have
40. The Propaganda-Driven Triumph of Negligent Pseudo-Science
41. The Weakness of a Tiny Farming Minority in Being Heard by Blind and Deaf Men and Women
42. The Importance of Citizen Knowledge in Restraining Corporate and Political Profligacy
43. The Genesis of Inadequate, Abusive, Misconceived Science—And What the Supreme Court Could Have Done About it If it Had Wanted To Take Action
44. The Demand for Informed Judges in the Face of Cultural Complexities They Lack the Background Knowledge to Understand and Decide About
45. Tracking the Troubles Arising from Monsanto’s Transgenic Bt Toxin
46. The Unstudied Implications for Human Health Resulting from Meat Raised on Monsanto’s Transgenic Feed—And the Hapless, Erroneous Gift of Utility Patents in 2001
47. The Toothless Supreme Court Decision in the Geertson Seed Case and the Oblivious Habit of Judicial Stonewalling
48. Overcoming Monsanto’s Political Power, Incessant Lobbying, Monetary Leverage, and Continuing Decades of Enforced Public Ignorance
49. Monsanto’s Galloping Trojan Horse—and Judges Flying Under the Public Radar
50. Media Collaboration, Propagandistic Exploitation, and Political Manipulation
51. Tarring Monsanto, their Political Allies, and the Corporate Media with the Same Brush—Before They Deliver Civilization to Self-Destruction
52. Non-Consenting Human Guinea Pigs Worse Than Feudal Serfs—and the Now Emerging Technological Answer to It
53. With a Spectrographic Scanner Now on a Chip—Public Ignorance Could Be Ended
54. Worse than DDT, King George III, and Al Capone
55. As the Gene Pool is Corrupted, the Future of Life is in the Balance as the Presentation of Evidence is Demanded from Both Sides
56. The Discrediting of U.S. Democracy as the Naked Emperor Destroys the Commons
57. Demanding a Moral Accounting from Monsanto and the Government as the Supreme Court Could Have Done But Did Not—From This, U.S. Moral Values Will Be Known in the Historical Record
58. Finding the Off Switch—and the Right to Present Arguments Against the U.S. Government’s Pet Transgenic Sacred Cow
59. Bringing an End to Monsanto’s Alfred E. Newman Technology and Their Abusive and Exploitive Use of Patent Law
60. The Foundations of the Needed Judicial and Political Restoration Affecting Transgenic Food and Agriculture
61. Overcoming Judicial Sophistry and Restoring Respectful Democratic Rationality in the Public Interest
62. Government and Corporate Failure to Address the Pressing Public Health and Environmental Reality
63. Finding the Way to Stop Government-Supported, Court-Sustained Abuse and Negligence Against Farmer Rights
64. The Parallel Between Chemical Weapons in Syria and Chemical Agriculture in the United States
65. Overcoming Transgenic Damage and the Political Hypocrisy When the Media and the Government, Including the Courts, Are All Complicit
66. The New Slavery and the Establishment of Pro-Corporate Totalitarianism in the United States
67. The U.S. Constitution Was Designed to Enable Elite Control With Minimal Democratic Checks Against Abuse, But It Was Not Intended to Allow the Flagrant Exploitation Seen Now
68. The Anatomy of Anti-Democratic Totalitarianism in a Nominal Democracy
69. Citizen Docility, Arrogant Official Negligence, and the Historical Link to Founding Federalists
70. The Courts As Agents and Facilitators of Corporate Political Domination—As a Natural Result of the Federalist Ideal
71. The Federalist Genesis for Modern Pro-Corporate, Pro-Agribusiness, Pro-Patent, Money-Driven Elitism—and the Court Support for It
72. Rebelling or Not Against the Modern Slavery the Same as the Farmers of the Daniel Shays Rebellion Did in 1786
73. Restoring the Democratic Citizen Voice and Ending Politically Collaborative Pro-Corporate Totalitarian Autocracy in Favor Once Again of Jeffersonian Democracy
74. Judge Naomi Buchwald, Simon Legree, Gouverneur Morris And the Effort to Protect Elite Economic Privilege
75. The Profligate Triumph of Myopic Expediency in Service to Monsanto’s Agricultural Monopoly
76. Following the Common Anti-Elitist Mission of Daniel Shays and Thurgood Marshall
77. The Shameful Public Disrespect Shown the People by the Judges and the Courts—Especially by Judge Buchwald
78. The Core Issue with “Strict Liability” in Patent Law and the Protection of Monsanto’s Interests by Its Allies
79. Achieving Democratic Respect Against Judge Buchwald and Others as American Colonists Did Against King George III
80. The Shameful and Tragic Results of “Pay-to-Play” Bought and Paid for Politics
81. Placing Responsibility Where It Needs to Be—On the Companies and the Facilitators Causing the Problem
82. Picking Up the Tempo on Both Sides—The Question Now is About Who Will Win: The People or the Money
83. How Monsanto’s Transgenic Project Gains Profit, Imposes Long-Term Risks, and Inflicts Unconscionable Damage
84. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, his Trojan Horses, and Other Agents of Monsanto’s Transgenic Advancement
85. The Sword of Damocles Over the Farmers Growing Organic and Other Non-Transgenic Crops
86. Standing Up Against Monsanto’s Purchased Modern Indulgences and the Political or Judicial Agents of their Unreasoning and Unreasonable Delivery
87. The Modern Secular and Amoral Religion of Corporate Subservience with Judges as Its High Priests
88. The Results of a Culture and Government where Alfred E. Newman is the Patron Saint
Epilogue:
Establishing Accountability in the Face of the U.S. Transgenic Shame—A Personal Conclusion
A. Living Up to the Promise of Human Capacity for Moral Integrity in the Face of the New Enslavement
B. The Challenge of Overcoming Propaganda and Getting Accurate, Reliable Information to the People
C. Fiddling As Rome Burns, the Supreme Court Sustains Abusive Autocratic Government of King George III
D. How Things Came to Be as Bad and Destructive as They Are And What Might Be Done to Fix Them
E. The Modern Origins of Farm Policy And the Subversion of the Goals of the Farm Program
F. The High Cost of the Long-Standing U.S. Preference for Short-Sighted Cost Ignoring Policy
G. Now is the Time to Find Out if the U.S. People Can Live Up to the Best Ideals at the Core of their Heritage
H. Fixing the Embarrassment of Multilateral Government Dysfunction
More interviewing of citizens of all ages in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC.
The Court Bias and Failure Resulting from Political Failure—and the Cost of the Problem for Functional Democracy, the Public Health, and the Environment—Including the Scope and Source of the Dysfunction
Chapter 1
On January 13, 2014, the Supreme Court decided not to review the assertedly “abusive, anti-democratic, negligent, prejudiced, insufficient, ill-considered, ill-informed, and inflammatory lower court decisions” rendered against our lawsuit, the public interest, and the environment. The Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit did do a little bit better than the Federal District Court in the eyes of the co-plaintiff group and their attorneys at the Public Patent Foundation, but not nearly well enough to respond to the pressing asserted public need on an issue with major public health and environmental consequences in the United States and elsewhere around the world. At issue is much more than patent infringement lawsuits against farmers and contentions about the invalidity of Monsanto’s patents that are at the core of court complaint filed initially in March 2011.
The bigger issues are the reasons why Monsanto’s patents should be rescinded as invalid. Something needs to be done to end the government negligence as soon as possible, but the courts would not permit that to happen. Instead, they supported and sustained it. All three courts ignored the enormous public costs resulting from what they failed to allow and could have allowed if the lawsuit could have proceeded to trial. Most likely, the Supreme Court and both lower courts rode on a bias heavily in favor of transgenic agriculture and the patents it depends on.
The thinking of the judges would likely be backed by the belief non-transgenic agriculture is out of date and ready to be replaced by man-made “improvements,” but the judges were not required to disclose their view on the science. It can only be guessed by reading their decisions and imagining the underlying motivations. The question is whether or not a pro-Monsanto belief or prejudice in favor of biotech food and agriculture would be justified when only Monsanto’s internal research and other tightly controlled studies have been used to support it.
Because a review of the facts has not been pursued by the federal government for over two decades, we have sought to promote that review in court, but now they have not permitted it any more than several Presidents or the Congress. A range of Congressional committees could have called hearings about transgenic food and agriculture the same as the British Parliament did in 1999, but they have not done that. If they were concerned about the risks, they would have held hearings and sponsored legislation, but instead, they have preferred to do nothing. They have not shown any worry about the public health and environmental destruction.
Patents have been given to Monsanto as if nothing could possibly go wrong, and that is why we took the issue to court. Many things have gone wrong even if the stories about them are only anecdotal in the United States. The problem is: the patent owner has been able to control the research and prevent independent, objective research serving the public need for fully reliable and complete information. Research has been done in other nations but not in the United States. Two decades ago, scientists at the FDA wanted to do this research because of the health problems they anticipated, but the political decision makers overruled them, allowing the release of transgenic crops on the basis of a so-called Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence that was no more than a political contention without the benefit of evidence from independent, objective research findings.
A statement of judge’s assumptions accompanying many court decisions would be valuable, and it might be required if democracy was strong and courts served the people ahead of the corporations. Instead, a myopic, harmful, and reprehensible technology been given to the people as if they were mushrooms being treated to a cellar full of horse manure. The mushrooms would be better off; they would get something they can utilize nutritionally. They are designed to make good use of it, but people have not evolved biologically to know how to handle transgenic food.
If the people were respected and the judges addressing our lawsuit thought of themselves as public servants rather than being condescending and disrespecting tutors or schoolmasters, enforcing the corporate agenda, the court decisions might have been less obliviously dismissive and logically impenetrable. Maybe, the results from all three courts should be expected in a culture where various recreational or prescription drug dependencies are often tacitly accepted despite laws existing to the contrary. Monsanto’s biotech/chemical farming system is, after all, a form of chemical dependency that has hooked many farmers.
The result of biotech agriculture is a toxic chemical dependency and now also an addiction to an easy transgenic farming method despite the long-term public health costs and even the long-term costs to farmers themselves have long been negligently ignored. They have been ignored the same as all addicts using legal or illegal drugs commonly override or ignore the long-term health consequences of their chemical dependencies. This happens easily in a culture addicted to many things including sugar, some foods, petroleum fuel, sex, multifarious modes of entertainment, tobacco products, various drugs, household products, and more.
If a statement of underlying bias was required from judges, the problems we have encountered could be overcome, but that is not possible when motives and biases are obscured as if that should be a good idea. The corporate, mainstream press and media have helped to egregiously hide both the facts and the politics when they fail to cover a story about a grave and publicly important controversy. The performance of neither the major media nor judges can democratically justifiable.
Both lower court decisions most likely rode on the pro-technology, pro-corporate, pro-chemical, pro-Monsanto, and anti-democratic bias because all four judges were likely dedicated to making sure money remains king in the United States and within the U.S. political system. This prejudice in favor of money may be read between the lines in underlying attitudes, diversionary tactics, hostilities, hubris, and a sense of arbitrary, autocratic entitlement going with lifetime appointment. It would not be made transparent for everyone to see, and that is a serious issue.
Likely, one kind of arbitrary behavior automatically begets others the same as rats beget other rats. This is seen also in the way politicians behave after they have been elected, so there is no reason to think it would not be found similarly among judges. The first arbitrary act in this case occurred when the Reagan-Bush administration decided transgenic food would require no independent, objective testing to determine whether or not it should be considered safe and healthful.
Hidden as part of the self-serving political game has been the way the political system and the affiliated judicial system have been corrupted by the power of corporate money, but this is not a charge that money is being taken under the table. No claim about that can be made. Even if the money is legally paid into campaign funds, it carries with it gravely destructive consequences destructive of admirable democracy, and both political parties are almost equally guilty.
The people are beginning to see through this political game even if they have not yet taken action. The game has been getting worse over more than two centuries, and now the costs have overrun any perceived short-term benefits without any cost-benefit analysis investigating the political transactions ever being required. The consequences are routinely ignored and evaded especially when no active public oversight has been able to demand more responsible official behavior.
When elected officials need to spend more than 50-70% of their time every day raising money for their next campaign, they are not doing the business they were elected to do, and when they are dependent on a small handful of givers with the most money, they do not pay attention to the needs of the majority unless they can do it while they deliver benefit to those most generously funding their political campaigns. These are the people routinely, obsequiously, subserviently served.
The most wealthy and empowered are delivered the most benefits unless large numbers of voters become exercised against it as they sometimes or occasionally have. Judges have helped the system work as as atrociously as it often has, and they may do that because their political philosophy tells them everyone will be made better off if the economic elite are in a position to deliver trickle down to everyone else. The questions are: what are the public costs of this idea even if it may sometimes prove more constructive than destructive; is it right, and can such a system ever be called democratic? Does it not establish an insiders’ club mostly dedicated to managing policy and political processes in their own private interest?
Pro-Monsanto court decisions and government policies have been mercilessly anti-democratic because they allow the company to pursue its technology and business strategies as it wants without any public oversight or constraint—and at measurable public and environmental cost even if much more research on it is needed. Monsanto has been allowed to evade demands for independent, objective investigation into the healthful and nutritious safety of their products, and they have enabled it to use patents abusively to establish a controlling monopoly over major commodity crops in the United States and elsewhere. (They have been aiming for years to produce at least half of their revenues from other nations.)
The courts and the rest of the government have facilitated the rapacious domination of farmers and helped to prevent consumers from knowing about the transgenic content of their food. They have helped the company win benefits favorable to their interests without the people being able to have a voice in it. The corporate interest has been continuously served at the expense of the public, and no judicial system doing that can be seen as just, honest, prudent, wise, truthful, moral, or democratic. It is seen as lacking integrity, and that is the way many people in other nations have come to see it—even if most in the U.S. are oblivious.
In both decisions written in response to Monsanto’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit, the overriding pro-Monsanto attitude was hard to miss. The case documents can be read to see if agreement can be reached on this conclusion, but if the thinking behind this assessment is important to know, please continue reading on this Home page. This page is dedicated to discussing the posed food and farming threats, the governmental causes of them, the health and nutritional compromises, and all the many impacts urgently needing to be publicly and humanely addressed. Moral action is called for without waiting for it from others, but this is not a detailed discussion about the scientific details; it more about the underlying politics of the issues and it addresses the science only lightly.
Included in the discussion are the grave threats to democracy resulting from the political influence Monsanto has exercised through the power of its money. That is another form of cultural, court-supported substance dependency and addiction characteristic and cultivated within the U.S. political system. Money is a systemic drug in the United States, and it is allowed to buy and promote other expedient and myopically-employed drugs, regardless of the harmful public consequences.
Lobbying is also a systemic opiate purchased by money, and political campaign funding is another. Anything that is diversionary against the public interest performs like a drug. It prevents people from honestly and effectively addressing adverse reality. Campaign speeches and other messaging can deliver opiating deception, confusion, and misdirection. Campaign advertising is often anti-democratically destructive against the public interest in promoting the opposite of civic virtue and informed citizens. The result is shameful in the image it projects and the destruction it advances. Formerly admirable democracy is undermined, marginalized, subverted, and destroyed, and that has been the reality the people of other nations can see even if many U.S. people have been asleep or in denial.
Political campaigns are like medicinal drugs used to hide symptoms without doing anything to confront the causes of the problems needing to be repaired. Because of the way many things work in U.S. culture, people routinely expect to employ expedient short-cuts and myopic quick fixes. Expediency has become the ruling U.S. ideal, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is an example. Like much medical practice, it addresses symptoms of the problem more than causes. It addresses the need to provide healthcare to the uninsured and to fix various dysfunctions without confronting the reasons why so much healthcare is needed.
Politicians do not want to address the real issue because the healthcare industry is a politically powerful and growing contributor to the gross domestic product. Thirty years ago, healthcare was about five percent of the economy, but now it is almost 20%. When an industry becomes that big, politicians and parties would be at risk of being defeated if they were to try to take away its power and kill off its cash cow. That is part of the problem being confronted. Monsanto and biotech agribusiness is not the only actor; other sectors are in tacit alliance with them.
When the American Medical Association was asked to take a position on the dangers and health damage associated with transgenic food, they demurred even though the American Academy of Environmental Medicine has suggested the avoidance of transgenic food by everyone. That group has spoken out strongly with a position paper sent to members in 2009 before many others became active.
Without trying to lend credibility to any of the arguments causing House Republicans to hold more than 50 votes to repeal Obamacare, there are many healthcare issues needing to be fixed that neither the law nor the Congress have addressed. Politicians in both parties do not want to address these issues because they are politically inconvenient to the wealthy interests they need to rely on for campaign funding. These evasions and expediencies work the same as the one serving the biotech industry and especially Monsanto as the leading biotech firm.
The evasions have caused the pursuit of deregulation and other amoral abuses of the public trust. They have allowed the healthcare system to become a way of milking the public both as consumers and as taxpayers the same way Monsanto’s farming system has become a way of milking farmers, consumers, and taxpayers].
The opiating reach and power of much the U.S. political system promotes and condones in service to corporate interests goes beyond anything Marx could have ever imagined when he was launching his attack against the Capitalist ideal. Since then, the close relationship between Capitalism and the U.S. government has become the heart of the trouble. The problem lies in the failure to know how to fix it without undermining the importance of capitalism internationally. The problems are solvable, but the empowered people do not want to make the needed changes because they are the system’s major beneficiaries. They are the high priests of the political system, and they do what they need to keep it running.
The drug-simulating, opiating aspects of the controlling religion in the past were benign by comparison with the all-powerful marriage between modern secular religion with political ideology as its theology. Organized theological religion was not the opiate Marx most needed to worry about. The secular version is now much worse because it has allowed amorality to replace morality, and part of it is the blistering hail storm of fund-raising and constituency-building used to exploit issues for as long as possible before effort may finally be made to address the public need to solve them. These efforts are marketing campaign used to sell the modern form of church indulgence: campaign contributions used to win favors.
This reality illuminates an exploitive if inexplicit motto of the system: Allow no issue to be solved until every possible dime has been rung out of it. A corollary requires people to get exercised over issues so they can be exploited for funds before the problems are fixed. Until that happens, important issues are ignored with impunity as if that was a responsible, wise, or honorable way for leaders to behave. When issues are ignored, citizens are forced to organize around them, and when they do that, they are ripened for fund-raising exploitation by those promising to address them. The process is corrupting and shameful, but it is the result of a competitively-motivated, heavily polarized, and money-driven system. The Supreme Court has operated to help create and strength the abusive result.
Everything is commonly turned into a hot button issue with fund-raising value before anything constructive can be eventually done to address it. The political worth of issues is measured by the amount of money they can generate, and major issues like gun safety, climate change, and immigration reform will not be solved as long as they continue to have as much fund-raising value as they do. If they did not have fund-raising value, they would be ignored like transgenic food labeling and the other issues surrounding transgenic agriculture have been. The politicians are likely waiting for the biotech issues to ripen enough to begin to be exploited, and the courts have helped them to do that by stonewalling our lawsuit.
In the meantime, the flow of funding from Monsanto and the other biotech companies has been protected by the effort to keep the public ignorant about what is going on. Behavior on other issues works similarly, but many of them are not as dangerous to public health. The interest groups would not be able to do what they are doing without paying regularly and substantially into campaign treasuries. This is not illegal, but it is worse than illegal in the way it corrupts democracy.
The observed results are inevitable in a money-driven political system. The issues being raised about transgenic food are no different than they have been about any of the other long-ignored and then long-exploited issues, but the results have been more destructive. They are even a major contributor to global climate change, because the farming system has been greatly important in destroying the capacity of the soil to sequester carbon. Soil is more important in this role than than has been commonly acknowledged. Until the people inform themselves and get organized, Monsanto and others can be exploited for funds to protect their interests, and they will pay because they are raking in billions in sales revenue, and campaign funding is a cheap way for them to keep their gravy train rolling.
Neither the politicians nor the companies have shown any care about the damage to the environment or to the public health; in fact, they work hard in claiming their is none and avoiding the pursuit of studies that would show differently. That need is ignored to keep the money flowing. Only the money flow matters; that is the reigning expediency at work. Through this process, politics become myopic.
Monsanto and other companies give money to politicians the same way small businesses in a city pay protection money to the Mafia. The benefit delivered in exchange for biotech money paid to political campaigns and for related purposes generates and nourishes the continuing political commitment to stonewall the public need for labeling and safety testing of transgenic food so corporate profits can be both generated and milked for needed campaign funding. The game will not end until the U.S. people force it to end. Hopefully they will change the system.
The public health and environmental costs may be viewed as a good thing because they will eventually stimulate an opposing flow of money, and policy often follows the most powerful flow of money. This is especially true in cases where votes are not determinative, and the votes on transgenic food labeling in California and Washington in 2012 and 2013, for example, would have shown many politicians they could afford to continue to milk biotech companies as they have been. They would only need to worry if the share prices started to fall or sales revenues fell.
Gridlock allows that, and it is promoted for that very reason. It is part of the “divide and conquer” strategy that depends on preventing both sides from working together to find consensus and get anything done for the people. This is another inevitable consequence of money in the political system. When the nation is equally divided and immobilized in its polarization, gridlock is facilitated and corporate interests served. Monsanto and other would have to accomplish that objective to keep their gravy train rolling if it had not already been accomplished with the help of the Supreme Court. Every additional day gridlock persists is one more day biotech Monsanto’s revenues can continue to flow without any interference from policy makers, and it is another day candidates remain dependent for corporate money to help them win reelection or be elected initially.
With the benefit of hindsight, the goal of transgenic food labeling might have been better served if the ballot initiatives in California and Washington were never brought to a vote. Before that, polling showed about 90% of voters (including Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) favored transgenic food labeling. After the votes, the polling numbers were shown to be soft and subject to manipulation. The results were favorable to Monsanto and their allies, except that they helped the public to become more informed than they were, and that means, eventually the tide will turn in the other direction. The days of biotech agriculture are numbered as long the efforts to learn the truth about it can continue, and that would have been the reason Monsanto’s allies would have wanted to prevent us from bringing our issues to trial. With that, the story would begin to get coverage, and the people would begin to be exposed to the facts they have not yet known.
The trouble was: the polling measured a common sense position, not an informed, strongly motivated position supported by the major activism and full understanding of the relevant details as is needed to give the issue much fund-raising value, and until it would gain fund-raising value, the Congress and the White House would continue to ignore it. A few senators have used the issue to raised funds, but not many yet. Most will not take an interest until people are alarmed and motivated enough to take political action, talking to others, writing letters, protesting more, and putting money on the table for those who assist.
More than a million signatures, even two million signatures on petitions was not enough overcome the money flow the politicians are able to gain from Monsanto and its industry allies. Signatures are cheap, so many more would be needed before they can begin to make a difference in the observed political behavior. Neither farmers nor consumers have been able to match that corporate biotech money flow, and until they can, things will continue as they have been for years.
When President Obama said in 2007 in Iowa he favored the labeling of transgenic food, it followed a fund-raiser Hillary Clinton’s campaign had with the biotech industry, and it was a way of sending a message to the industry telling them they needed to come to the table with the Obama campaign and make some money flow in their direction. Voters cannot know what happened after that, but they can know Senator Obama never spoke another word about the need to label transgenic food, and when he was elected President, he appointed a host of biotech industry personnel and allies to key USDA, FDA, EPA, trade negotiation, AID, and other government positions at both high levels and lower levels.
The appointments made instantly clear that industry funding during the primary campaign was not sent to only the Clinton campaign. They also made clear industry funds had also supported the general election campaign because favorable appointments are not given without that happening. Since then, the Obama administration has stonewalled all consideration of transgenic food labeling, and they have taken many decisions favorable to biotech agriculture and to Monsanto. Maybe President Obama has become convinced about the unique value of transgenic agriculture since 2007. Maybe he has sat down with Bill Gates, and Gates has persuaded him not to do anything adverse to the promotion of biotech food. Most people cannot know what happened behind the scenes.
People can only know that President Obama eats from an uncertified organic garden on the White House lawn but has not supported that ideal in any other way at the expense of Monsanto and biotech agriculture. In the White House policies he has been on the side of transgenic farming, and that decision may reflect the 250,000 farmers cited as Monsanto’s customers as opposed to less than 10% of that number farming under the National Organic Program and otherwise growing non-transgenic crops as far as the statistics can be accurately known. The White House may believe they cannot afford to alienate Monsanto’s 250,000 customers.
Maybe federal policy does not follow only the power of biotech money, but it cannot be said to pursue prudence, truth, justice, or wisdom either. It has not sought to determine the clear public interest on the merits of the contentions from both sides, and it has not responded to the petitioning on transgenic food labeling from over 1.2 million voters. All that has been totally stonewalled.
The President has shown he does not want to promote prudent debate on the merits of Monsanto’s farming system, and neither have any of the Presidents preceding him since the idea of transgenic agriculture was first introduced. That goes all the way back to the Carter-Mondale administration in 1980 following the Diamond v. Chabrabarty decision on the patenting of a man-made bacterium.
Back then, the possibility of patenting food was prospectively anticipated as the way to gain increased control over farmers, farming, agriculture, and food. That much was made cryptically clear to farmers at a White House meeting with the Carter domestic policy advisor, Stuart Eizenstat. President Carter was an agribusinessman, and he favored agribusiness over farmers partly because of the abuse he had taken from farmers during his Presidency. He had been bruised politically by farmer action against him (one of the first big tractorcades was by Georgia farmers taking their protest to Plains, Georgia, Carter’s hometown), so he wanted to constrain the ability of farmers to ever again do as they had done.
Politicians in both parties saw the amount of money many farmers had spent to lobby against the government, and they wanted to send a message telling that money should have been funneled into political contributions. They were intent to see that the massive farmer lobbying effort would yield no major benefit for them as long as they produced no campaign funding to back up their demands. No one said this in so many words, but the message was made clear in many other ways.
The trouble was that farmers had to be creative because they had no way to produce the kind of money needed to match the political power of agribusiness. They would not have been able to come to Washington on tractors and lobby as they did unless they were able to win substantial community support at home to do it. That money would never have gone into PAC funding instead, because the farmers would never have wanted to do political business that way. They wanted to come to Washington explain the problem and the logical fixes, so Congress could act. Anything beyond that would have been seen as corrupt by most of the involved farmers. They later came to learn how the system had to work if people wanted to get something done through policy, but they still did not like it, and they could not compete even when they tried to raise money in a political action fund.
Because of the existing understandings about the way the political game works, the major players on both sides of the mutually supportive political transactions have no incentive to want to change anything. Both the companies and the politicians are milking farmers, consumers, and taxpayers as if they were suckers at a circus, and they will do that for as long as possible. It is a collaboratively-pursued mutually symbiotic project, but it is also a parasite or a leach sucking the lifeblood of the U.S. body politic diminishing prior international public respect for once hopeful, respected, and admired U.S. democracy. It is subversive activity.
This is how the U.S. political system works, and public health and environmental compromises have resulted from it. When the courts turn money into political speech with First Amendment rights, they force it to work that way. The result is not democracy; it is the destruction of democracy and democratic ideals and the virtual death of democratic integrity. The core issues being raised now against the power of the court-sustained and money-drugged political system are about the continuing misuse and abuse of patent law, but under that is the biggest, most destructive, and dangerous human rights abuse found anywhere on the planet.
This is the problem needing to be addressed, and until it is addressed, the United States will be on the wrong side of history in the eyes of people in many other nations. In many of these nations, organic agriculture is stronger than it is in the United States, and that is a factor in the public thinking. That gives a clue about the thinking of many people in those nations. Sixty-four nations also require the labeling of transgenic food; that provides another clue about anti-U.S. attitudes. In April 2014, Russia decided to ban transgenic agriculture, and other nations, including Sri Lanka banned RoundUp and other Glyphosate-based herbicide.
Banning Glyphosate herbicide makes Monsanto’s system of agriculture impossible and useless, so it is the same as a ban on transgenic seeds. Russia opted specifically to go organic, and Prime Minister Medvedev said basically: the U.S. people could eat transgenic food if they wanted to, but the Russians were choosing not to eat it or allow it in the country. Monitoring was initiated to make sure the ban was not violated. That meant Russians were not to grow it even for export to feed to the people of other nations. This stood in contrast to the U.S. farmers and leaders who have been willing to grow it to feed to others even when they do not want to eat it themselves or feed it to their friends and families.
The opposition to transgenic agriculture is focused in the United States because that is where the trouble started, but the adverse impacts are world-wide. This is why the decision by the Supreme Court to punt on the needed examination of our filed complaint and our right to a hearing in court is centrally important. It may be more important than all past lawsuits ever filed in U.S. courts, but that contention would have flown over the heads of all the judges and justices because they could not possibly have understood the reasons it could be true. Based on their action, they would have invested their faith in the promise of biotechnology, and if they would not have studied enough to know about any contrary impacts.
If the governing realities, risks, and destruction resulting from two decades of biotech agriculture had been sufficiently and publicly understood, none of the three courts would have been able to do as they did. The people would have stopped it. Most likely, the lower court judges and the majority of the Supreme Court have taken Monsanto’s Kool-Aid the same as if they were the captive cult-believing citizens of Jonestown, but beyond that, the majority of the Supreme Court might not want anyone focusing public scrutiny on the results of their past erroneous biotech-related decisions. That suggestion can only be guessed, and other possibilities exist, but desire to hide past failures could be a likelihood.
Most important for now are the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision for everyone in the United States and other nations. In denying the opportunity to pursue the truth about transgenic agriculture in a U.S. court where both sides can present their arguments and evidence, the Supreme Court’s decision punts the opportunity for moral, intellectual, academic, and agricultural leadership on the raised issues off to either the U.S. states or other nations. In the states, discussion of the issues has been mostly stalled for the same reasons it has been evaded federally. The discussion is also easily stalled because the issues are complex.
Interviewing citizens in front of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia.
U.S. States and Other Nations Might Get Something Valuable Done While the U.S. Government Is Mired in Dysfunctional Prejudice, Self-Serving Evasion, and Money-Dependent Corporate Subservience
Chapter 2
The power of corporate money and lobbying may be no less dominating in state legislatures than it is before the Congress or in the White House, and the array of allies Monsanto has in the states could make their power even more daunting. Nonetheless, the states are the only place in the United States where actions seems possible as long as all three branches of the federal government are intransigent and immobilized. Narrow defeat of the ballot initiatives in California and Washington means the struggle must continue wherever possible the same as if it were a guerrilla war against a corrupt autocracy in a Third Word nation.
The result of the effort in California and Washington is almost as if no money had been spent at all in those states, except that it did help some people to become more informed than they had been previously. Much educational effort was done even if was not enough and even if much more is needed to deliver future victory.
Most important is the establishment of prudence, safety, nutritional wisdom, truth, and healthfulness, but it is easy to lose sight of that need when the struggle is against the tactics displayed by the biotech industry and food manufacturers. Oregon has stood up to see if it can succeed through the same ballot initiative process in 2014. Perhaps, they will benefit from the campaigns to the north and the south of them in 2013 and 2012, and maybe they will also refine the strategy.
Success in Oregon could provide momentum when California tries again in 2016, but defeat in Oregon could also provide increased motivation in many places in addition to California. The defeats in California and Washington did not prove to discourage or demoralize the effort to obtaining labeling; they seem to have only shown the need to work harder to make success possible. Also, the more people learn, the more they believe labeling of the food is essential. Only the limitedly informed, the confused, and those with an interest in transgenic farming seem to be the people who resist labeling, though some are dedicated to opposing all initiatives sometimes because they think they will always result in higher taxes.
The labeling campaigns have served to get a more people better informed on the larger issues and when the campaign is ramped up in more places, the result a rising number of informed people, and that effect extends to other states. If maybe only a million more people see one movie about the health issues, that could help to build a better informed constituency in support of the need and demand for labeling. That will depend on the manifest level of citizen activism or docility. When the government fails to do the job it was elected to do and the courts support them in their failure, the people must stand up. Many have done that, but many more still need to. The job requires a massive effort by millions! Nothing ever says elected representatives or their appointees will do what they should do unless the obligation to do it is made fully clear to them by the people.
The trouble is: the people have depended on the media to keep them informed about everything they need to know, and the media have stopped doing that anymore. That is not where the profits are in broadcasting or publishing. Increasingly, the profits have been in serving the corporate interests, so that advertising revenue can continue to flow. That is what happens when people want the news to be given to them for free without concern for whether they are getting everything they need to know. Often, they may only be getting infotainment.
The truth has been easily lost on many of the most important issues, and this has been particularly the reality on transgenic food and agriculture where Monsanto and their allies have continuously promoted their own messages while working to prevent the opposing messages from being given exposure. They can use their combined advertising power to accomplish this goal, especially when the press and media have been financially stressed by the growing role of the Internet news.
In a climate where citizens are not informed enough to play their part and corporate money is ever more powerful with legislators, most of the roughly 25 states where labeling bills have been introduced will probably not get them out of committee until major citizen activism forces them out. Heavy lobbying would be required. That has been seen in Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont, but it has not yet been seen as much in many other states. As a result, the passage of bills in most states seems highly unlikely for the same reason states have subserviently passed food libel and ag-gag bills to serve agribusiness interests at public expense.
The 13 states with food libel laws gives a clue about attitudes in the state legislatures; those laws were promoted by some of the same companies fighting against transgenic food labeling. That same pro-biotech, pro-corporate, pro-agribusiness political subservience serves Monsanto on whatever it needs to get done. That’s how the power of corporate money speaks in the system, and millions of informed voters are needed to counteract that power, especially when it is myopic and self-interested at highly destructive public cost. When citizens are docile and passive, corporations win. The reality is no more complex than that. The antidote is many well-informed voters with time to answer corporate power.
Food libel laws are also called food anti-disparagement laws, and they require the defendants to prove themselves innocent of the charges against them. That’s one reason why they are considered unconstitutional by legal scholars, but no case has yet gone to the Supreme Court so their foundational premise can be tested. Most likely, the advocates of the laws do not want to find out if they are constitutional or not. They want to use them more to intimidate than to prosecute or sue for damages, and if they sue, they would only do it if they could seek and maybe win a big and chilling damage claim like the one they sought against Oprah Winfrey.
The promoted goal by agribusiness would be: protecting themselves against public scrutiny and criticism. The laws provide a way for the companies to chill and impede their critics, but they could also possibly be used against transgenic food labeling advocates under a contention that labeling is a way to disparage the food. Even if the defendants won in the end, a lawsuit would consume time and money, and it would delay the process of passing more labeling laws until the court process was completed. Companies have a variety of stalling court tactics to apply. They can use the constitutional Commerce Clause arguments and also rights of free commercial speech, and all of them could be used serially as a stalling tactic.
Again, even if the plaintiffs lost, the lawsuits would be a form of harassment and intimidation and way to stall the achievement of important policy objectives; they would buy time for Monsanto and their cohort companies, and if the plaintiffs used lawsuits to argue the safety and equivalence of their food with a big, wealth-enhanced megaphone, they might find the effort worth even a high cost. Much depends on the comparative strength and arguments of the two campaigns.
Monsanto and their corporate allies have lots of money to do whatever they want to do, and the defendants do not. Even if they are killing their own customers, they can still make lots of money off of them before they are dead. As long as the promoted death would take a long time, they can count on few people paying attention to the slow rate of speed it is happening. At least, that can happen as long as most people can be kept in ignorance about the health issues. The more companies can muddy the waters, confuse the debate, and delay both political and legal processes, the more time they have to produce the revenues they need to fund more of the same activities in their own interest. They regularly spend a great deal of money and time on this effort through every venue available to them.
Reportedly, Monsanto, alone, has a full-time staff of more than 50 people at their hired PR agencies working to protect their interests. In February, 2014, the most recent pro-biotech media assault was in the MIT Technology Review where two articles and an editorial appeared on the subject, but one of the articles was not on the side of Monsanto. It pointed out Monsanto’s failures, and emphasized instead the next generation of biotech ideas, some of them cisgenic rather than transgenic. Cisgenic technology uses faster biotech breeding techniques to bring traits from another plant in the same species. Transgenosis brings traits from a different species that never would have come together via natural plant breeding.
(Even though the MIT Technology Review would appear to be an official publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], it is not; it is private publication only using the MIT name to enhance its caché. Partisans at the Hoover Institution have used their physical association with Stanford University similarly until they have been required to desist. They did that during the California campaign against Proposition 37 on transgenic food labeling in 2012.)
The only states where laws on transgenic food labeling were passed in 2013 were Maine and Connecticut, but those laws do not go into effect until at least three other states join them, but the five states need to have a total of 20 million citizens, and all of the New England states do not reach that total total population number. They need New York or New Jersey to exceed the threshold number.
The votes in Connecticut and Maine were bipartisan, but some other New England states have not shown the same bipartisan commitment to the issue. The anti-labeling forces geared themselves up since the laws were passed in Maine and Connecticut, and they will focus in on New York and New Jersey as they did in New Hampshire early in 2014. These forces focus mostly on capturing votes from pro-business Republicans, and that made the vote in New Hampshire partisan.
The debate in New Hampshire prior to the defeat of the bill by 23 votes was not fully detailed with much misinformation and propaganda infecting the outcome much as it did in California and Washington. That means a higher level of citizen activism would have been needed in New Hampshire to address the influence of incomplete information and the robust well-funded effort to sow misinformation.
The most promising immediate possibilities in early 2014 may be in other northeastern states where the strongest pro-organic and anti-transgenic constituencies exist. The Vermont Senate will be acting on a labeling bill that was voted out of the Vermont House in 2012. The support movement in Vermont is strong and energized with about 200 organizations signed on. That is likely to be enough to stand up against the opposing corporate and organizational lobbyists.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts would be next, but the labeling proponents are not so well organized there. They are like most other states where bills have been introduced. They need to build effective political coalitions, and that has not yet been seen. In any case, labeling bills only advance the right to know about the transgenic content in food, not the public need to know or why it should matter.
One of the problems, so far, lies in the ease of advocating for the right to know and the complexity of pursuing the need to know, but both elements are important when many do not understand the importance of the health and environmental issues. Another issue is the danger resulting from monopoly control over the international seed market, but that is another challenging issue to sell to people.
Under the provisions of the bills passed in Connecticut and Maine in 2013 and voted down in New Hampshire, the need for at least five regional states with a total population of 20 million would enable the states to work together on the legal effort if Monsanto and their allies were to bring a lawsuit against them. A lawsuit was threatened against Vermont in 2011, and that was intimidating because Monsanto had successfully sued Vermont in 1994 when it passed a law requiring dairies to label their rBGH milk. The governor, more than some others, feared a repeat of that episode, so action in the state House was put off until 2012.
The court-nullified rBGH law from almost 20 years earlier was passed because of public concern over the health risks from rBGH (Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone). It is another genetically engineered product that has proved to have imperiling health implications, but the Circuit Court ruled in favor of Monsanto and its clients, saying they could not be forced to label milk from cows injected with rBGH. The law was found to be a violation of their commercial speech rights, and that enabled rejection of a state mandate against their commercial interests.
State health and safety concerns did not overrule corporate commercial free speech rights, and that made clear where the court’s constitutional priorities lay: they favored corporate power to poison the people without informed consent. That was shocking to know, but the 1996 court decision has been decided law ever since, and it was central to the 2011 threat against Vermont’s food labeling law.
The Circuit Court ruling was like rejection of the requirement to put health warnings on cigarettes based on the commercial speech rights of tobacco firms. The court made the health concerns of citizens subservient to Monsanto’s unrestrained, unencumbered right to sell its product to dairies. They were also able to patent it without concern for the impact on consumer health, and with the patent, they were able to prevent research on the product to determine the health impacts. These same constraints on the truth are operating against the ability to learn the the health and nutrition-related truth about Monsanto’s transgenic food.
Despite the fear caused by the prior rBGH decision in Vermont, the Vermont Law School and a Washington, DC law firm, Emord and Associates, have both issued opinions stating the Vermont labeling bill, as passed by the House, should be able to overcome a court challenge, not just against an asserted First Amendment right of commercial speech but also against a second challenge under the Commerce Clause. If a Commerce Clause challenge was successful, it would prevent states from passing any transgenic food labeling laws. It would give sole power over the issue to the federal government, and the federal government lawyers could possibly join in arguing for that position given its stance on the issue so far.
The federal authority is supported by a decision of the Marshall Court in 1824 in Gibbons v. Ogden, but in the face of federal inaction protecting the health of citizens, the states are viewed as having an overriding right to do what the federal government has not been willing to do. Attention to the welfare of state citizens has been found by the lawyers and legal scholars to trump the federal Commerce Power provided under the Constitution. States are seen to have a right and responsibility to protect their citizens, but much depends on what judges will think. Only the reasoning of the presiding judges matter in the end. Others do not.
A remaining question is: whether or not Vermont will want to pass a law requiring labeling in Vermont without wanting to join Connecticut and Maine in waiting for two other states to make up the total of five with at least 20 million people. That restriction has been viewed as a victory for the biotech industry and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) because it delays the implementation of the law pending action by states where their lobbying can have significant leverage.
No other states apart from New York and New Jersey are regionally continuous with the New England states, and that works in favor of industry objectives to delay or prevent action. Now that New Hampshire has voted its bill down, Maine is cut off from the other New England states even if they all join together in mutual support, but a new bill in the New Hampshire Senate could still advance.
While the story plays out in the states, the biotech industry and the GMA are pursuing a strategy designed to win federal action to block state initiatives and impose a voluntary federal labeling program. That would be an end run around the demand for mandatory labeling. With the people of the United States unable to obtain information about transgenic content of their food and with many not knowing there is any already in the food (even though it is in about 75-80% of the processed food sold in most grocery stores), most of the leadership on both labeling and the health issues related to transgenic food has come from Europe.
Starting with many of the European nations, labeling laws have been enacted in 64 nations by 2014, and they represent a majority of the world’s people. Because of the manifest attitudes in Europe, Monsanto has made the strategic decision to try to make an end run around Europe by focusing its energies on other continents, but despite this, the EU is poised to approve a Dow transgenic corn variety as only the second transgenic crop it has approved. EU officials in Brussels have been more liberal on transgenic crops than many of the EU members nations where the governments are more responsive to the views of the people. EU officials have also been more responsive to biotech industry lobbying than officials in the nations.
Despite the strong stance taken by EU member nations, the weakness of the EU government and the U.S. government on transgenic crops means four economically emergent nations could play a leading role in determining the future of transgenic food around the world. They are Brazil, Russia, India, and China, although Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Haiti, and other nations in South America and Africa have also played a compelling and central role in the still unfolding story.
Australia could play a role, but they could also be immobilized the same way intellectual, moral, and political leadership in the United States has been immobilized by the power of Monsanto’s money in the political system. A different government in Australia might have made the emergence of national leadership from Australia easier. The current government is pro-business and pro-biotech with attitudes and ideologies similar to those found in the U.S. Republican Party.
Many Democrats, including President Obama, in the United States have been little better than Republicans on transgenic food and agriculture, but some U.S. Senate Democrats (and Independents caucusing with them) are better, and a similar array of attitudes has been found among some in Australia. While, Australian laws do not protect farmers growing non-transgenic crops against transgenic contamination any better than laws in the United States, the defenses against damage lawsuits are not as strong as they have been in the United States, and that provides a possible opportunity for a damage award to be won. The first lawsuit over transgenic contamination damages has a high-profile in February 2014.
The burden of self-protection still rests with the farmers growing the non-transgenic crops in Australia the same as in the United States, but an organic farmer, Steve Marsh, who had 70% of his acreage contaminated by a neighboring farmer growing transgenic canola, has filed for the costs incurred. In a strong wind, the neighbor’s transgenic canola was blown across Marsh’s land and it seeded itself. Because the soil was contaminated by the canola transgenes, it was not enough to pull up the canola plants and continue farming. Marsh’s oats and wheat were contaminated via the soil even though the neighbor contends Marsh could not have been contaminated because he does not grow any organic canola. The science of contamination will be an important factor in the lawsuit’s outcome.
Apparently, the neighbor, Michael Baxter, or his attorney do not understand how the soil can be contaminated. They must imagine contamination only by pollen, but Marsh lost his organic certification as the result of the experience, and the economic impact was catastrophic for him. Others have come to his aid with legal support because they have an major direct interest in the outcome of the case.
Marsh’s lawsuit is the first such damage suit brought anywhere in the world, and the case went to trial before the Western Australia Supreme Court. The neighboring farmer growing transgenic canola has also gained support from his advocates and supporters to pay legal fees and make sure he has access to all the help needed. Monsanto is likely to be involved in some way, but their part has not been prominent in the publicity so far. The case will be watched by farmers and others worldwide, and even before the trial started the story gained international media exposure, especially in Great Britain on the BBC and on other new outlets.
The result could have influence over the filing of damage suits in other nations, but no guarantee exists the support for biotech agriculture will be any different in Australia than it has been in the United States. Australian politicians have said the answer to the problem is for the organic standard to be changed to permit transgenic contamination, but that answer is resisted by organic farmers and consumers in Australia and elsewhere, especially when no studies prove it safe. If the proposal were to succeed, the value of the organic ideal would be destroyed.
Most organic consumers want the strongest possible assurances against transgenic contamination, and the organic market is growing partly because of this concern. In the United States, the nation’s first organically certified grocery chain, Whole Foods, logged a 13% revenue improvement (2013 fiscal year over 2012). The trouble is: the total size of the organic market in the United States is still small. Less than 20,000 U.S. organic farmers farm about one percent of the farmland, and they grow only about 5% of the marketed food humans consume. Wal-Mart is now aiming to increase that number by making the price of organic food options more affordable. The effort could erase the organic price premium, but it might also increase pressure to establish more farmers markets and CSAs.
The total number of organic farmers does not include uncertified organic food grown for direct sale through farmers markets and CSAs, and of course, it could not include the food grown in gardens or even flower pots by people working to feed themselves. It would not include the Obama’s uncertified organic garden on the White House lawn. If only fruits and vegetables are counted, the percentage of certified organic sales double to over 10% in the United States, but the number is much higher in most of Europe because food quality is more important there.
In contrast to the U.S., about 2.6% of Australia’s farmland is farmed organically, but that land in Australia totals about 38% of the world’s organically farmed land. Most of it is used for the extensive grazing of livestock. The organic farms in Australia are worked by about 7000 farmers and ranchers. Even though organic agriculture is growing in both Australia and New Zealand, the court in Australia could still bend over in support of the farmer growing transgenic canola for the same myopic, unsupported and unresearched reasons long seen in both the United States and Canada where Monsanto’s own research and its sponsored research has been accepted as adequate. The Australian bias in favor of biotech agriculture could be similar to the U.S., or it could follow the European model.
Needed is long-term, fully responsible, objective, public-spirited research into the health and environmental issues by independent, objective investigators, but that work has been slow in arriving because no nations have yet passed laws requiring the biotech companies to pay for it. In an environment where everyone wants to pay lower taxes, no one else wants to pay for it—just as most people do not want to provide the money politicians need to conduct their election campaigns. They do not see why they should when the politicians are more responsive to the corporate money than they are to the needs of the people. The decision seems fully rational, but it is another case where the Commons suffer because of individual attitudes.
As long as the political system runs on money and corporations are the dominant source of it, the system will continue to work as it does. The biotech companies have been allowed to control all the research related to their products under their rights of patent ownership, and the U.S. Patent Office has been run as a corporate candy store with more patents better than fewer, because it runs on its revenues.
The U.S. patent system has been designed intentionally to run as it does, and that is why it needs to be challenged. Political advantages for corporations and their political allies, including the promotion of a seed monopoly by the biotech companies and other supportive political assistance even in the design of the organic program, are the result of the way the system has been designed to favor the corporate objectives. When the America Invents Act (AIA) was passed by the Congress and signed by the President in 2011, it was touted as reform of the patent system, but it made it worse because only monied parties had voice in the changes.
The court system has been similarly engineered from the beginning of the republic to serve the interests of the elite, and judges have served the needs of those who appoint them and fund their budget. Most do not want to bite the feeding hand. They are a willing and supportive part of the system without wanting to examine opposing evidence any more than members of the Congress or the officials in the Executive. Most judges would not have been appointed if they were not trusted to be supportive of the system both Republicans and Democrats have worked out, and if judges think about the possibility of appointment to a higher judgeship, they might want to avoid any offense against their sponsors.
Both judges and their political sponsors have worked to prevent insurgent threat to the way political business is routinely, intentionally, and expediently done, and the judicial and the executive branches might want to avoid political antagonisms if they can. That would be more important to them than paying attention to the thinking and the needs of people in other nations. The governing system was intended from the start to be an insiders’ political club with only enough associated democracy to provide a thin, hopefully satisfying, and not too troublesome veneer. Changes have occurred since then, but they would not have occurred if the empowered elite thought they would lose control because of them.
Likely, the most dangerous decision from the modern point of view of the male political elite was the empowerment of women, but the differently interested political approach of women has not been asserted quickly or uniformly. It is not mostly confrontational in the way it is used, so it has only slowly become a problem for the male-dominated boardroom and the political party leadership.
Because security against threats is important to women, they have not been quick to challenge the male-initiated policies perpetrating chemical and biotech war against weeds, insects, and other farming inconveniences the same as they have made war against many external threats or created a deterrent against them. The empowerment of women would not have been allowed by many men if they did not think they would be able to keep control over their women, and that is part of the reason older, married women vote differently from younger, single women. In this may lie hope, because younger women have shown more interest in high quality healthful food. They read labels more and have been more wisely active.
Interviewing citizens in front of the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC.
The Necessary Requirements of Political Change in the United States and Other Nations—and the Places Leadership May Be Coming From
Chapter 3
In the absence of needed understanding about the consequences of Monsanto’s technology from disinterested research institutions, industry research has filled the void as if it should be trusted or ever should have been considered trustworthy. It has been too widely accepted as sufficient to the need, especially within governments where officials have benefited from Monsanto’s campaign contributions and have also been the target of intensive biotech industry lobbying.
Many people in government and outside it have shown the wishful desire to believe in biotech farming and believe the Monsanto fox would be able to take good and universally reliable care of the hen house, so everyone would have plentiful eggs and chickens. Monsanto has been treated as if they had a magic remedy or quick fix to all the challenges facing farmers and the sustainable long-term future need to feed the world with no health or ecological consequences.
In the United States and elsewhere, Monsanto has fanned the flames of wishful hope in the biotech promise, and it is in their commercial interest to do that as much as they can. Beyond that, biotech agriculture has benefited from more than just its own diligent public relations and political efforts. They have been aided by their political allies in government, and they have worked to get their own people appointed to key government positions. That put them inside the political game.
More beneficially for them, when the U.S. Supreme Court required the USDA to do an environmental impact study (EIS) before the release of transgenic alfalfa, the study only pasted in findings from industry-sponsored studies. That is all the USDA-APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) officials said they could do as long as Monsanto and Forage Genetics were allowed to control the research investigating their patented product. To do more, the law would need to be changed, but the political will to change U.S. law has been entirely missing.
Now, why could that possibly be what has happened? Because the system is designed to work that way. Almost nothing in politics ever happens accidentally or unintentionally. Mistakes may sometimes be made, but they are not likely to have happened unconsciously. They happen for a reason even if the reason is criticized. Often, the needs of the people have been negligently compromised to allow Monsanto and others to maintain control. If that had not been the goal, the FDA scientists would have prevailed when they recommended the careful examination of the risks associated with transgenic food back in 1992 before a political decision was made by the Bush-Quayle administration to given it an arbitrary green light.
The official attitude is widely regarded as a reflection of the power of Monsanto’s campaign contributions and its lobbying as well as the wishful desire of officials to believe in the world-saving value of biotech agriculture and the toxic chemicals it depends upon. Change does not seem likely without a strong citizen demand for it, but citizens in the United States are not much concerned about the source of their food, so they are not like to assert the needed demand for political change. The most they are likely to do is to incrementally change their food buying and eating.
So far, the public health and environmental costs of the transgenic agricultural system have been acceptable collateral damage in exchange for the perceived benefits of the chemically-intensive transgenic farming system, but this view has been clouded by public and official disconnection from the skills, commitments, and honorable, honest, and wise restraints needed to produce healthful, safe, and nutritious food. Thus, the culture needs to change before food politics can or will.
The efforts made by Monsanto in Australia have been similar to those made in the United States, and the Australian judges could be influenced by political considerations the same as they have been in the United States. Both political cultures have a strong tendency to follow the power of corporate money, and so do officials in many other nominally but limitedly democratic nations. Monsanto has understood the way to exploit the weaknesses resulting from the current system’s dependency on the power of money, and they have employed that knowledge continuously for their own benefit. The courts have commonly helped them do it.
The issue could be similar in Brazil, India, Russia, and even China despite the differences in the system, particularly in China, but so far events have played out differently in all of these nations despite the similarities in the corporate lobbying being used in all of them. In Brazil, farmers have argued for and won from the courts a right to save and reuse transgenic seed without paying an annual royalty, and the Brazilian Supreme Court has called for past royalties to be paid back. If this idea were to spread from Brazil to other places, a major aspect of the Monsanto business model would be torpedoed. Basically, the court in Brazil did what the U.S Supreme Court did not do in deciding the Bowman v. Monsanto case.
In response to the ruling in Brazil, Monsanto wrote an adhesion contract requiring farmers to give up their right of royalty repayment as part of their purchase of the next generation of Monsanto’s seeds, but that has been blocked by an ensuing court decision. As a result of the adverse outcome, Monsanto and others have moved to introduce terminator seeds in Brazil. This is being done with help from companies wanting terminator technology for non-food trees and medicinal plants. If they are successful, the international ban on terminator seeds would be broken, and other nations could be expected to follow Brazil’s lead.
Terminator food seeds have not been used yet because of the understood risks associated with their use. This particular transgenic technology shuts off the ability of plants to reproduce, and that has implications for other plants, including bacteria that become contaminated. Soil bacteria as well as gut bacteria of people and animals could be impacted. Transmission of the terminator trait has not been objectively and independently studied any more than the other transgenic traits Monsanto has put on the market. The trait could spread to other plants in all the ways transgenic contamination has been able to spread. Bugs could pick it up, and soil microorganisms could serve to move the plant to different species of plant.
The Marsh v. Baxter lawsuit in Australia is about this kind of transgenic trait transference. The soil became contaminated and non-trangenic (organic) crops growing in the soil picked up the contamination. The defense has shown a desire to assert this kind of transference is impossible, so arguments over the operational realities will be fundamental to the outcome of the lawsuit. Marsh and his organic certifiers will be required to provide evidence of what did occur.
A similar issue is at stake in Australia as Monsanto has chosen that nation as a place where its transgenic wheat will be first introduced. That introduction is scheduled for 2017, and the transgenosis used in the wheat turns off genes in the wheat. This is a worry among people who fear other gene expressions could be turned off in people as a result of unanticipated and uninvestigated impacts when the wheat genes infect the intestinal bacteria essential to human immune health.
Independent, objective, long-term studies on this subject are needed in Australia as much as they have been in the United States where an effort was made in the past to introduce transgenic wheat, but they cannot be made because Monsanto’s patent control prevents them. The introduction of transgenic wheat was fought by U.S. farmers because of the high volume of export sales to European and other nations where transgenic wheat would not be accepted. Beyond this, issues of gluten intolerance are arising from the high-yielding hybridized wheat similar to the wheat that will most likely serve as the host for the new transgenic traits.
Hybrid wheat bred to increase yields is no longer the same wheat as the heritage and landrace wheat human biology knows how to digest and assimilate. Just as high-yielding hybrid corn no longer has enough protein in it to nourish hogs without the addition of some other source of protein, so have nutritional compromises been made as the result of the myopic hybridization of other crops. This is the result in a culture where food quantity is more important than quality.
As events play out in Australia, the Environmental Court in New Zealand has ruled that local councils can take action under the prudence principle to regulate the growing of transgenic crops within their jurisdictions. In the face of this decision, the federal Minister of the Environment wants to seek legislation to preserve federal control over the actions taken by localities. This is similar to the U.S. Senate votes wanting to protect their authority over state transgenic food labeling even as they have shown they want to do nothing, and states want action.
Centralized control over issues is essential to the ability of federal politicians to milk them for campaign funds and serve the corporate needs in the process. Once federal authority is preempted by states or localities, fund-raising control over an issue is lost by the federal authorities; that is like it is for a business when a profit center would be closed or competitively put out of business. The income is lost.
A similar issue was at stake in the crafting of the McCain-Feingold bill passed in 2002 to control the flow of money in politics. Among the provisions of the law, also called the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, were limits on the role of state and local parties in the political process. This increased federal control over elections, and that concentrated election regulation in the federal government.
The change, in turn, gave federal politicians an issue with fund-raising value for them to milk in the future, and it weakened the ability of the states to assert political and funding control over campaigns for federal office. As the states and localities were weakened, and federal politicians were given another empowering arrow in their fund-raising quiver. Even reform legislation can contain provisions providing political benefits working in the opposite direction from the apparent or cited objectives of the legislation. The political system often hides such tricks.
In India, strong opposition to transgenic agriculture has developed, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has spoken in favor of it as a valuable way to promote economic development in the rural areas. Actually, it favors wealthy farmers and has served to displace poor farmers that are the vast majority in the nation. Singh would certainly understand the fund-raising value of the issue, so his advocacy would be ignoring the interests of poor farmers to embrace and use the political fund-raising value of transgenic technology the same as in the United States. The issue could be used with wealthy farmers, Monsanto, and the seed selling or development companies under contract with Monsanto or partly owned by them.
Singh seems to favor a process and policy similar to the one in the United States that has forced farmers to “get big or get out,” but he has been challenged by the opponents of transgenic agriculture to prove the value of the transgenic idea. If such a demand would be made in the United States, it would be ignored because the supporting constituency would lack leverage to get a response, but in India the powers opposing the government may be strong enough to prevail before India does as the U.S. has. If, on the other hand, India follows the U.S. path, it will be choosing to follow the same path the U.S. has in embracing capital-intensive agriculture and agribusiness dominance over the nation’s agriculture policy.
The politics in India will play out over the months ahead, but in the meantime the Indian Supreme Court appointed a Technical Expert Committee of highly qualified academics and professionals that recommended against acceptance biotech farming. They pointed to the already existing failure of biotech regulation by the government and to the threats that failure poses for those wanting to avoid transgenic contamination; they recommended against even experimental growing transgenic crops until effective regulation could be prudently and safely assured. Meanwhile, the government is attempting an end-run around the expert concern.
The issue is felt acutely in India because of the experience there with Monsanto’s transgenic cotton. That caused contamination of non-transgenic seeds farmers had saved for as long as cotton has been grown, and the result forced farmers to buy new seeds every year. That would have been the goal. With all the Indian seed companies under contract to sell only Monsanto’s seeds, that was the only seed available to buy and the contaminated heritage seed needed to be turned over to the company for disposal. None of it could be used because Monsanto’s patent rights give it ownership control over even minimally contaminated seed. This is the rule because other nations often follow the same patent practices as the U.S. These rights prevent the saving and replanting of any seed with Monsanto’s traits.
Transgenic cotton has been heavily promoted in India, and as a result of the experience, a backlash has resulted, but the transgenic program also has supporters among the most wealthy farmers best able to use it. They have the resources needed to provide the timely irrigation Monsanto’s seeds require, but the benefit is only short-term, as it is for all the farmers using Monsanto’s system. The herbicides destroy the soil more than they kill the weeds, so Monsanto’s promoted use of transgenic seeds and chemicals is a form of agricultural suicide.
In support of the Indian concern is the experience in the United States with Bayer’s Liberty-Link rice. All the testing protocols were followed, and rice is a crop that is mostly self-pollinating, but nonetheless, much of the nation’s rice crop was contaminated by the unapproved rice. The response of the government was to go ahead and issue approval for release of the crop ex post facto on the basis of its similarity to another approved crop resistant to the same Bayer herbicide, but the export market did not accept the formerly unapproved rice, and Bayer was in the end obligated to pay $750 million for the losses suffered by farmers and exporters. The damages were not paid until after long negotiation, but they were finally paid.
In Russia, a bill has been introduced in the Duma in early 2014 calling for a total ban on all transgenic crops and food, and the bill is even more strict on the prohibiton than the recommendation for a 10-year moratorium made by a panel of Russian scientists following a request from President Putin. The bill is expected to pass with broad, bi-partisan support across the Russian political spectrum.
No doubt thinking in Russia has been influenced by attitudes in nearby European nations as well as by research work done by Russian scientists, most notably neuroscientist Irina Ermakova whose work was supported by the Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association of Gene Security. Her findings have been criticized by Monsanto and its allied scientists, but she has, herself, wanted additional research to follow up on her study. She has not demanded acceptance of her findings without confirmation. Monsanto has expected blind acceptance of their findings, but independent scientists do not demand that. For them, verification is fundamental.
In an example that also highlights the negligence and corporate subservience in the United States, the government of China requires labeling of transgenic food, so the people can be informed, and it has also implemented a policy of doing its own testing of transgenic crops before they will be allowed into the nation. An imported shipment of U.S. transgenic corn for animal feed was rejected in late 2013 because it was contaminated by a variety of transgenic corn that had not yet passed Chinese testing; thus, it was not allowed in China. The government issued a statement expressing their commitment to doing their own independent testing and maintaining a policy of transparency in both testing and labeling, but it is not yet clear what this could mean in a nation where corruption has been common.
Originally, transgenic crops became permitted in China because so much contraband transgenic seed was being planted; the government finally made it legal virtually by default. In the face of the fact that Monsanto closely tracks the purchasers and and purchases of its seeds, it is impossible that Monsanto did not know their seeds were going to China. Most likely, they were promoting it as a way to gain entry into the Chinese market. They could have been taking advantage of the way things work in that nation. Chinese fforts to root out corruption of all kinds have been initiated, but they may not succeed in all places or circumstances.
In many nations, corruption at ports of entry has been notoriously hard to stop. Borders have often been porous, especially if a chain of accountability is not rigorously maintained as part of the controls needed to protect the public interest. Corruptible border officials may open a way for transgenic seeds to be introduced in many nations where permission to plant them has not yet been established.
In The Philippines, the promotion and propagation of transgenic Bt eggplant became under contention with active public opposition. When the issue came to court, reputed experts came from the United States to support the advancement of field trials, but the court was not persuaded by their arguments. The plan was rejected, and as a result the opportunity to use the Bt eggplant in Bangladesh was sought. That is viewed as a way to make an end run around a stalemate over the planting of the crop in India where it was developed with Monsanto participation.
The project in Bangladesh has been advanced with commercial release begun in early 2014. A more prudent and cautious approach with field trials was rejected. Monsanto and its Indian affiliate have been able to take advantage of political turmoil between the Bangladeshi government and the opposition to advance their project. This overriding circumstance has prevented the people from becoming alerted to the issues as they were in both India and The Philippines. Opponents of the Bt eggplant do not see a way for this crop to be more healthful and safe than Bt Corn and Bt Potatoes have been found to be when independent research has been conducted with both laboratory animals and people. In Canada, Bt toxin was found in the blood of women and their unborn babies despite Monsanto’s contention claiming the toxin would be neutralized and eliminated without harm.
Finally, Tunisia has put centrally important human values in their newly written democratic Constitution released in early 2014. Foremost, protection of the environment has been stated as a fundamental constitutional requirement and priority. They are only the third nation in the world to take this step. Secondly, healthcare has been made a basic right of all Tunisian citizens with both preventive medicine and treatment available to all as a fundamental human right.
The healthcare provision follows the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but it also could mean the Tunisian state will have a commitment to maintaining the health and welfare of its people. At best, that would mean they would not want to exploit the health of the people to promote profits for corporations as has been seen in the United States where both insurance companies and healthcare providers have milked the people for their own benefit through the way the healthcare system has been designed. They have used their money-empowered political leverage to protect their profitable interests.
No policy on transgenic food has been established by the democratic government of Tunisia yet, but European thinking on the matter could prove influential. Legislation has been on hold since 2010 while matters of more pressing urgency have been dealt with following the ouster of the former dictator, Ben Ali. As a result, policies set by the prior autocratic government are still in place. More details about transgenic food and agriculture policy in Tunisia can be read here. In the report, U.S. biotechnology promotion can be understood as can the status of the prior 2008 legislation required the labeling of transgenic food in Tunisia.
If Tunisia builds a political culture where serving the common good of the community is placed ahead of elite ability to milk the people and exploit them for corporate benefit and the collaborating benefit of associated politicians, the nation could set a model for others to follow. They might help embarrass the United States for behavior it has allowed to become entrenched at the expense of the Commons and the people. That is the behavior serving to discredit the United States in the eyes of many people in other nations, and that is also a reason many are looking for new models they may hope to follow in their own interest.
A democratic example different from the United States is found in Brazil where citizens can introduce legislation directly into the National Congress if they get the signatures of 500,000 fellow citizens through a petition campaign. Once introduced, the legislation must be brought to a vote within a set period of time. This becomes a way to deal with inaction by the politicians and the exploitation of issues for partisan gain and fund-raising advantage while deferring policy action on them. Direct bill submission is an expression of citizen intolerance against political gamesmanship, and the people have manifested the leverage to put it in place. A similar event would seem unlikely in the United States given the long-standing tolerance of elite political dominance widely-noted public docility.
The Subversive Government-Facilitated Establishment and Worship of the Bought and Paid-For Biotech Sacred Cow
Chapter 4
The United States has long been critical of corruption in other nations, and it benefits from rankings showing low levels of petty corruption while completely overlooking the higher levels of much more serious and damaging kinds of government corruption long afflicting the United States. Those pass under the radar as matters of political controversy and contention, not indicators of a moral corruption seriously in need of repair because of the public harm being caused.
The Monsanto story is about a political culture so arrogant and exploitively committed to its corporately-responsive and profitably self-serving abuses, all respect and appreciation for the value of the nation’s natural agricultural, environmental, and food heritage has been ignored and forgotten as if they should not matter and were part of a backward past. Its as if the artifice of men is routinely expected to be more important than the gifts of nature. The observed legal result of this attitudinal atrocity is breathtaking in its tutorial hubris, and that is what three U.S. courts demonstrated in their rulings against our lawsuit. Time and human motivation will tell if better can become possible in the future.
The attitudes of Great Britain’s King George III against the North American colonies and colonists were honorably benign by comparison with the Monsanto behavior continuously supported by their government allies. It is as is they were king and the government was their obsequious court. King George III was doing the duty he perceived to the monarchist ideal. That to him was centrally important to maintaining law and order. He was not destroying the capacity of people to feed themselves without full public debate and a right of informed consent, and the contention over “taxation without representation” was not nearly as serious as the current contention against Monsanto and their political allies in government.
Given the political climate of the 18th century, the position of King George III is more readily forgivable than the anti-democratic offenses against justice, reason, and pursuit of truth the judges and justices of three U.S. courts have committed now in service to their far more audacious, autocratically destructive tyranny. A new lawsuit is now needed because no other way exists to confront the problem Monsanto presents against the public welfare in the United States. With the Congress and the President unresponsive on the issues needing to be raised, the courts are the only venue where redress might be possible. So far, it has not been, but that does not mean it cannot be in the future. Just as courts have changed on other issues, they can change on the present one. They can lead cultural change.
A citizen march on Washington like the one organized on civil rights in August 1963 might help, but it is not likely to be enough under current political alignment in favor of corporate empowerment. Back in 1963, the Kennedy administration supported the ideas underlying the civil rights march and allied with them to support their own policy initiatives, but on transgenic food and agriculture, the Obama administration is on the opposite side much as if they were fully dedicated to advancing human slavery. Just the courts are needed to drive change the same as they did on civil rights starting in 1954 with their Brown v. Board decision. Back then, the rest of the government did not change until the courts changed.
Forcing food on people without their knowledge or informed consent is a form of abuse not greatly different from slavery, and that is the reason for confronting it in every way possible. Right now the courts are the most important of these ways.
The 1963 civil rights event was attended by an estimated 250,000 people and was memorialized in world history by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It became a touchstone moment on the path to U.S. social change, but it could not have moved the culture forward if action by the courts had not set the stage for it.
Now a much worse human rights abuse needs to addressed as if the prior events had taught nothing. The need for action now and the weight of the governing failures has no historical parallel because of the number of non-consenting people and animals exploited and abused by it. Other tyrannies have been more violent and immediate in effect but none have been more broadly intensive and extensive in the numbers affected. It results from a sense of corporate entitlement the government has supported much as it long supported many civil rights abuses.
In place of agrarian slavery organized under a plantation system with political and legal collaboration, the United States now has a new corporately-organized, governmentally facilitated kind of slavery organized to produce similarly abusive profits for a few at the expense of many. Really it is a new corporately-driven feudalism and serfdom. Billions more people are affected than were by past chattel slavery or the discriminatory segregation and sharecropping that were entrenched in its wake. The comparative impacts should not be evaded, but they have been even by First Lady Michelle Obama when she addresses the national obesity affliction without seeking to identify and call out the food-related causes.
In contrast to the 1963 Civil Rights March and the ensuing Poor Peoples Campaign five years later, millions marched against Monsanto in nations around the world in 2013 and over a million more have petitioned the FDA and the White House on the labeling of transgenic food, but no action has been taken by the government to provide people with information about the content, safety, and healthful quality of Monsanto’s essentially synthetic, man-made food. In this negligence, the government operates under a deceitful, fraudulent fiction called “The Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence,” and that has enabled inaction on transgenic food safety as if it were honest, wise, and truthful to do as has been irresponsibly done.
Since 1992 and even before that, U.S. government officials have been closed-minded toward non-corporate views about the safety and healthfulness of transgenic food. Deregulatory preferences have been politically determined because of the value they can have in promoting an increasing flow of political campaign funding from the biotech industry. Due to the political considerations, independent science has been ignored, marginalized, and impugned. Included among those ignored and run over by the political steamroller have been the FDA scientists whose fears have been proved correct by subsequent objective studies.
The bogus so-called Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence is the cornerstone of the new slavery of destructively arbitrary and anti-democratically enforced citizen ignorance, and it is worse than “Separate But Equal.” That was the legally-enforced abusively fraudulent fiction of its era, but at least it did not destructively harm the public health and the environment people need to sustain life. It only harmed the opportunity and civil liberty to vote, be educated, and be served in restaurants and other public facilities otherwise freely open to many others.
During 2012 and 2013, millions organized and voted against the efforts of about five dozen corporations and their trade associations the same way 19th-century abolitionists organized against the commercial power of the slave system, but the capacity of even millions to organize and vote was not a match for the financial power of the biotech and junk-food corporations in maintaining their control over the food system to protect their own profits. They were able to use their power to persuade many people to prefer ignorance, but the role of a democratic vote in the political decision should provide no solace. It is only a case study in the way many people can be led astray against their own public health and ecological interests.
Hitler and Mussolini did similarly in exploiting the people for their own benefit, and even some in Russia have wanted to return to the days of the Soviet Union. Some Russians also like President Putin because he feels to them like an elected Czar; that is comforting to some in Russia. They may like the Russian Orthodox Church for the same paternalistic reason. In Russia, both governmental and church paternalism has been preferred by many—particularly in rural parts of the nation where both Putin’s support and church support have been the most robust.
Similarly, rural parts of California and Washington provided the most support for the paternalistic imposition of public ignorance by Monsanto and its corporate allies. Many people rural people in both states put misplaced confidence in fictitious propaganda repeatedly drilled into them through broadcast advertising. This can work especially well when no countering arguments are being heard, but most important, the people failed to demand an open publicly broadcast debate on the contentions from both sides, so that the truth could be effectively determined. The power of corporate money was allowed to govern, because the opposition did not have enough money to match the corporate advertising budget or the leverage advertisers have in influencing editorial policy of newspapers and other media.
If the United States was an admirably democratic nation where the facts mattered more than powerfully amplified but unsupportable assertions, the public airwaves would have been used in both California and Washington to permit and facilitate Lincoln-Douglas style debate about the contentions being aired. The people would have wanted to get to the truth, and they would not have been satisfied with less. They own the airwaves, so they would have wanted them used to reveal the truth. Instead, they have allowed them to be used for only profitable corporate benefit. This is an anti-democratic cultural flaw allowed as if citizen ignorance was good.
The United States does not demonstrate commitment to learning the truth and allowing or demanding evidence to be presented. That is a measure of how anti-democratic the U.S. nation has become. Any nation allowing the power of self-interested money to drown out truth, wisdom, and justice or the pursuit of them is little different from the kind of nation Benjamin Franklin pointed to when he said any people willing to give up liberty in exchange for security deserve neither.
The modern version of Franklin’s statement would be: Any people willing to tolerate and respond to clever, deceptive 30-second broadcast messages and the virtual equivalent on the editorial pages of corporately subservient newspapers reveal that they do not have the skills or educational disciplines to make themselves worthy of democratic citizenship. When democracy does not have a reliable way to know the truth definitively, it is no better than any other tyranny.
Voting on the transgenic food labeling initiatives in many rural parts of California and Washington showed a ready willingness to accept the arguments presented by Monsanto and its food industry allies without closely scrutinizing the underlying reality. For many in the United States, as in other nations, the responsibilities of democracy have been shown to be a chafing burden they are unready to fulfill or maybe even want. Those willing to be led by the nose on a corporate, government-supported tyrannical leash are not worthy of the benefits democratic freedom can offer them, but this is the kind of nation the self-aggrandizing power of wealth has created in the United States. Many showed they were so poor they were easily panicked by the fear labeling might increase the cost of their food a few points.
By itself, that realization showed people were not buying the fresh unlabeled fruits and vegetables they most need to stay healthy. Maybe they do not know what they need to know to stay healthy because the system in the United States has been rigged to prevent them from being healthy. Maybe, also, they have been intentionally denied the education they would need to live up to the democratic opportunity and the collective democratic responsibility. Without the education and time commitment citizenship requires, functional democracy is impossible.
The system in the United States would not operate as it does if powerful political forces did not want it to operate as it does, and as seen in our case, the courts want to collaborate with that subversion of democracy. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the government and corporations worked together the same way they do now in the U.S. Both work against the welfare of the people to promote their own common interest in amassing wealth for their own benefit and advancement. Both U.S. political parties have collaborated in the fulfillment of this objective even if they both may not be dedicated to the subversion in the same damaging measure.
Companies have used their revenues to enable and promote deceitful, amoral propaganda much as the plantation system used the 3/5th rule to leverage and amplify political empowerment for its own benefit. In that, the plantation culture enslaved itself as much as it enslaved others. That can be understood now. Slaveowners were the victims of their own system as much as those they depended upon to produce their livelihood. We all advance best when we empower others, not when we hold others back and propel ourselves forward at their expense. Life does not have to be understood as a zero-sum game even though many do that.
Much as the plantation economy used political power to write fugitive slave laws and maintain elite white control over the economy and the political system, the perpetrators of the modern food, health-related, agriculturally-harmful, and environmentally-destructive enslavement fabricate sophistry to arbitrarily declare their laboratory expediencies “generally recognized as safe”—and substantially the same as all other food even though it is unique enough to be granted a patent. They have co-opted the nation as their lab rats in a massive biological experiment, and we will not likely know the result of it until the grandchildren of the youngest citizens can be examined or maybe autopsied.
The votes propagandistic corporations garnered to defeat the food labeling initiatives in California and Washington can be compared to votes tacitly cast in the past by subservient house slaves and so-called (but mis-named) Uncle Toms to maintain racial injustice and abuse just because the small, protected privileges delivered to them within the known system were preferred over the ambiguous uncertainties resulting from greater freedom and the need to assume unwanted responsibility. Many people may always be persuaded to prefer a tyranny they know to the uncertainty of liberty and the pursuit of justice and truth they do not know. That behavior has been seen repeatedly in the United States and elsewhere.
By its nature, the human enterprise enables some people to prefer a known abuse or tyranny to an unknown alternative, and that is the reason most institutions even in a nominally democratic nation are organized under autocratic hierarchy. As the Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering stated 70 years ago, “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are under attack and denounce peacemakers for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country....”
Fear can often be sowed, and once sowed, it can be readily exploited. The managers of the corporate campaign against transgenic food labeling in California and Washington would have laughed up their sleeves as they gathered the money, propaganda messages, allies, and media power to apply Goering’s principle. They knew what they were doing, and from experience they would have known the resources required to accomplish the objective. Like Joseph Kennedy, Sr. in 1960 speaking about John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, their financiers might not have wanted to pay for a landslide. They likely knew the exact amount required.
Autocracy is preferred in most institutions because it is expedient and efficient even if it has been found to be less likely to achieve excellence in performance or prove to be optimally beneficial either externally or internally. The preference for it, even in government, undermines democracy and the disciplines it requires to serve the public need. This does not mean democratic discussion is always valuable in accomplishing all work, but it can be needed when it is not offered.
To show the scope of the problem in the United States, many people even allow their doctors to have a large measure of autocratic control over their personal health without learning the impacts, participating in the decisions, or exercising informed consent. When this is the governing reality for many people, it can be no wonder people have tolerated the combined government-corporate-biotech industry tyranny over what they get to know about their food and the health-destructive chemicals used to grow it. Many have accepted abusive paternalistic exploitation against their interests as if that should be their desired objective.
At best, the U.S. system of government is a plutocratic oligarchy or corporatocracy with a thin veneer of easily manipulated, marginal, and nominal democracy spread over it like basting fluid on a Christmas turkey. Generally, it has been enough to make the government dysfunctional and rarely enough most recently to make it admirable and worthy of respect. Worse than that, it is no more than it was ever intended to be. The most the founding Federalists wanted in 1787 was the ability to protect against an autocratic tyranny with no way to replace or overturn it short of violent revolution like the one seen most recently in Syria or the one they had successfully participated in on their own communities starting in 1776.
Apart from that, they wanted only enough of an image of a modestly republican democracy to satisfy the then existing will of the people following their success against the abusively anti-democratic but comparatively mild British tyranny. They wanted a centralized government able to be managed aristocratically by a relatively small and easily manageable and unified elite. At the time, they all knew each other from working together before and during the war, and they expected to be able to elect their candidates. That worked for 12 years until 1800 when they were thrashed, and the Republicans took over. Of course, not everyone at the Constitutional Convention was a Federalist, but most were. They were in control.
The extent of the Federalist control is evident in the selection of Gouverneur Morris to draft the document we have been taught to revere as our Constitution. Morris’s world view can be summed up in a statement he made saying: There never was and never would be a nation not dependent on an aristocracy. To him, that was in the nature of the way things needed to work. He did not want it to be any different from that. Maybe he reflected the thinking of his time, but he also reflected his wealth and the fact that he had left his native New York because it had turned Republican, and he did not feel comfortable there anymore. That is how it came to be that he was at the Convention as a delegate from Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania was dominated by the Federalists, some of whom were former Quakers who had removed to other religions better fitting their Federalist ideas.
They wanted to protect the power of the elite because they believed the system could not serve anyone if it did not first serve the elite. They believed they could best decide what everyone else would need and deliver it to them through trickle down. That’s where President Reagan got the idea. The corollary was: the people needed to remain mostly content, docile, and well-entertained while leaving all decision making to the Federalist elite, and so that is the system they created.
Since then, a greater measure of democracy and democratic idealism has been injected into the system by the people, but it would not have been allowed if the empowered elites had not learned from experience about how to keep it under their control. Importantly, that control would not have been possible to maintain without help from the Supreme Court. For example, the Citizens United decision would have been unlikely if the power of the people had not been effectively expressing itself in politics through small giving over the Internet. With most of that funding going to Democrats, the Republicans and their allied elites needed a way to stay competitive and prevent too much democracy from being imposed on the nation at the expense of the corporately-empowered elite and their interests.
Under democracy, the pursuit of equality, reason, justice, truth, wisdom, and morality should matter more than money, power, and seniority, but they do not in the United States. The Supreme Court has effectively said they should not. If that was not the court’s thinking, they would have ruled differently in many cases, including ours—but especially on Citizens United. Many court rulings have found in favor of money-driven elite power at the expense of democratic values, and from that can be seen a defensive desire to protect against too much democracy.
In 2014, the financially-privileged elites and the majority of the Supreme Court appear as frightened about the excesses of democracy as if the Confederation was still in existence and as if more democracy should be understood as unworkable and undesirable. Many in the empowered elite want to maintain the illusion of democracy but if its functional reality existed, they would not be able promote the polarization they need to divide and conquer. Their strategy needs to be fully recognized for what it is. Without it, Monsanto would not be in the position it is.
Even most religion is still managed autocratically because many people at both ends of the economic and political spectrum prefer it that way. Many like being taken care of by the hierarchically empowered, and they do not want either the responsibility or the challenge of having to be involved in decision making on their own behalf. They like paternalistic religion for a reason, and if they did not, they would want to be part of a different kind of religion. Those other kinds of religion have been marginalized in the United States because they do not fit the dominant cultural preference set to fit in with the original Federalist ideology.
The elite seem to like religion working as it does because it prepares people for the subservient role they have been assigned within the U.S. political system. When the war party took over in the Second Continental Congress and made war against Great Britain inevitable, they also established elite political power over those whose religion and political philosophy favored more democracy and the skills it would need if a peace-building, harmonious community would have been wanted. Hierarchical and mostly autocratic ordering of the culture was preferred because it followed naturally from a culture believing in the importance of military power. Military management favors expediency, and it is not likely to become democratic.
As a result of the religious preferences within the culture and within associated theologies, the people have acquiesced under accepted and autocratically imposed ideas as much as they are now do under corporately-controlling secular religion enforced in collaboration with a money-dependent government. The U.S. court system is part of the structure assuring the maintenance of this system of virtually enslaving anti-democratic, money-driven domination. The religious composition of the Supreme Court may be happenstance, but it reflects an anti-democratic and hubristically autocratic preference nonetheless. That preference, in turn, is easily married to the observed pro-corporate, pro-control, wealthy aristocratic elitism.
The irony is that the now dominant elites include different religious elites from the ones that wrote the Constitution and founded the nation in 1788. Back then, despite the dominance of Christian churches among the population, the dominant religious thinking of the Founders was Deist. Now, the Deist ideal has passed into history, but the dominant Christian theologies fit comfortably with the elitist leadership ideal. Many people are more secular than most were in prior centuries, but they may still have a nominal religion of convenience or of family heritage. At the same time, secular religion uses ideology the same as theology, and this shows how easily the churches and the political patterns of the nation flow together in their asserted Federalist pattern of thinking, organization, and management.
The court system, at least in relation to rights we are defending and likely many more, has shown itself to be an anti-democratic, autocratic, authoritarian vestige of the past still employed in a time when mediation and other forms of cooperative, collaborative conflict resolution might serve the public need much better. The courts are organized according to an antique conception, and they are an instrument of elite domination created by people who were frightened by democracy in the 18th century. They needed a way to maintain control over democratic impulses, and no better way existed than to give judges autocratic authority for life. No one should be surprised to find this profession attracting people who may be more suspicious about democracy than they are advocates for it. If they do not want to undermine it, they might still often want to constrain it.
People of autocratic temperament are most likely to find their way into service as judges, and they would also be likely to see themselves as members of a kind of aristocracy with affinity toward others who are part of a similar aristocracy. They may be less likely to be strong democrats even when they are Democrats, and they may prefer to use the courts to protect money-empowered aristocratic interests.
This attitude could be the reason three courts told us: Monsanto is a sacred cow of the U.S. money-addicted secular religion, and judges are the high priests empowered to fabricate whatever argument they may need to make sure no one can touch it or say anything against it in a courtroom. This is important because Monsanto is now a symbol of more than it has been able to successfully model.
Monsanto is perhaps the most self-assertive and destructive of the elite corporations among the Fortune 500, and it is outspokenly aggressive in asserting rights like those claimed by the rest of them. If its power were successfully challenged, then the power of the rest of the money-driven pro-corporate elites might start to unravel much as the successful challenge against King George III started the unraveling of European monarchy. Similarly now, the virtually feudal power of the established plutocratic regime must be defended the same way monarchy was defended in 1776 with the courts as a primary instrument of it.
In writing the lower court decisions set in concrete by the concluding decision of the Supreme Court against our lawsuit, it did not matter how irrational and unworkable the judicial decisions were or how worthy and reasonable the asserted plaintiff arguments may be against them. Neither did it matter how consistent the plaintiff arguments were with common sense, common law, or any other past legal principles. Both lower courts produced false and arbitrary anti-logic to decide our group of co-plaintiffs lacked a sufficient, meritorious, and immediate grievance against Monsanto. That was issued dogma the same as if it had been a papal degree insisting the world is flat or the universe is Earthcentric.
Arbitrarily and tutorially while ignoring uncontroverted facts and disrespecting just democratic rights, judges denied us the right to bring our lawsuit to court. This was as it was when the Nazis came for the socialists, and Paster Martin Niemoller stood silent in Germany as they were eliminated. It showed corrosive erosion of democratic rights in service to autocratic power and functional, anti-democratic enslavement under the empowered elitist thumb. As part of it, the enslaved and abused of one era may collaborate with the enslavers in the next. By this, they may redeem themselves in their own eyes. This can be the reality no matter if the self-redeemed may be a Catholic justice or a black U.S. President.
Where the Federal District Court decision was emotional and imperious to cover its abusive, anti-democratic failures of reason and rationality, the Appeals Court judges were only slightly better as they tutored the lower court how to do the same job more artfully and less confrontation ally. Where District Judge Naomi Buchwald intolerantly impugned and condemned our filed complaint for its impertinence against the power of the secular sacred cow, the Appeals Court judges were more cleverly soothing in their still democratically-dysfunctional sophistry. They came with an eye-dropper when they needed a magnum, but they must have hoped a few drops of benefit would suffice to appear as if justice had been done, even if Monsanto’s negligent abuses were securely affirmed in place.
The results of both decisions were almost equally unsatisfactory and unresponsive to the public need, but the Appeals Court did administer just enough benefit to grant an admitted public service and affirm the need for our lawsuit. Despite the larger judicial failure, the result was not a total failure, and it denied Monsanto the chest-pounding victory Judge Buchwald compliantly delivered to them. The trouble is: most people, including the press, media and even the legal blogs, have not paid much attention to the details or the significance underlying them. In that, they are all as negligent as the government, and that contributes to the continuing disconnection people have from the sources of their food and the way it is grown.
In particular, the mainstream corporate media are as intentionally abusive of the need to seek the truth, wisdom, and justice as the Judiciary, the Congress, and the Executive. That is the way it will be when they are all lockstep in their blind commitment to sustaining elite corporate power for their own tribal benefit, monetary empowerment and self-aggrandizement. All these realities measure the extent democracy is dead or well-constrained among their objectives and aspirations. Likely, they want it dead lest the living reality would diminish their position, elitist control, and the dominance they wish to possess over others.
Typically, people behaving as elitists do cannot feel good about themselves unless they see others losing as the result of their activities. They need to see others losing before they can measure their own gain. That is why they only want limited democracy and only for purely defensive reasons. They cannot feel positive about win-win outcomes, and they would not do as they do if they could feel gratified by the advancement of other people. Neither would they be so careless about the erosion of the Commons as part of winning. They are committed to seeing life as a zero-sum game. Monsanto is a clear corporate example of this kind of thinking.
To its minimal credit, the Appeals Court at least saw some merit in the plaintiff contention, but it upheld the dismissal without providing more than minor, almost irrelevant relief against Monsanto’s patent abuses. They did not allow the truth about Monsanto’s technology to be sought, and in that lies their shame. Maybe gratitude should be felt they did not limit their Binding Covenant to one-tenth of one percent instead one percent, but that would be like a waiter feeling gratitude for being tipped a penny instead of getting a few copper shavings from it.
The Appeals Court decision was more creative and less explicitly abusive in its elitist condescension than Judge Buchwald’s decision, but it was no less negligent in its failure to serve the public interest against the judicially-sustained autocratic assertion of corporate biotech agribusiness power over the people, the public health, the environment, and all poor creatures unable to stand up for themselves.
Both lower courts failed to address the presented and uncontroverted facts in our filed complaint or the established precedents. They side-stepped both to reach two bizarrely divergent decisions that can be seen as no more than manufactured artifice aimed to protect Monsanto’s interests. The result is as it was at the Temple of Jerusalem 2000 years ago when the arbiters of religious law asserted iron-clad power of their written law as the means to maintain domination over the people. The wisdom of Solomon they did not demonstrate and neither did the courts now.
Instead, the courts invented unjust and unworkable judicial nonsense and arbitrary, imperious, and flagrantly elitist protectionism to mean-spiritedly establish a cruel joke with destructive effect. They blew off the threat our lawsuit posed against allied pro-Monsanto empowerment as if it were a black ant on the wedding cake, and they could not have made their hostile intent more plain if they had stated it on a Times Square billboard. If that had been the venue, more people might have understood the message and linked it to their own health and safety.
More interviewing of citizens in front of the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC.
Dred Scott and the Parallel Denial of Democratic Citizenship Rights
Chapter 5
The observed judicial sophistry imposing unquestioning collaborative U.S. government and Monsanto information denial and transgenic food enslavement on the U.S. people as well as the people of other nations is not much different than the decision made against Dred Scott. The current abuse has been sustained by the federal judicial system from bottom to top the same as the federal courts did against Scott and others, including Homer Plessy about a half-century later.
Anti-democratic decisions entrenching prejudicial U.S. judicial hypocrisy and elite subservience for more than two centuries need to be ended, but that cannot happen until the attitudes and failures firmly set at the core of the U.S. republic are addressed. Only the people can address them because most people in positions of power have a long-established interest in maintaining them in place, and as soon as they are elected or appointed, they immediately gain a stake in protecting the status quo politically and judicially—if they did not have it already before that.
Most federal judges come from law practices where they have served clients that have conditioned them to think in terms of the typical business attitudes. They have had a life of living with these blinders on, and that shapes the way they see the role of the law. Less than four percent of judges have a background in public service, and often lawyers in this area are not thought of as people with the right background to become federal judges. In a pro-business culture, pro-business people with a range of business experiences are thought of as the best candidates.
From all three decisions against our lawsuit, a desire is seen to lend state power to a biotech food future without rational investigation or informed public consent. That much can be interpreted from the three decisions, and with it is understood a desire to subvert and foreclose on prudent, respectful, traditional farming methods that have served civilization for millennia. The power of corporate money in the political system has allowed that core bias to be readily accepted.
The result has been the persistence of Monsanto’s technology for more than two decades and perhaps more in the future until the system finally collapses—as it will ultimately do. Its persistence is literally impossible. The only question is the amount of time needed to understand that. Monsanto and their allies, especially at the USDA, promote coexistence between transgenic and organic agriculture as if it were possible, but it cannot be—anymore than an eagle and a captive mouse will be able to coexist. The only question is: how long the mouse might be allowed to live before it will be put out of its helpless, hopeless misery and finally eaten.
Monsanto brands as anti-science Luddites those respecting the wisdom of nature, and against that attitude, we hoped to contend in court if that right had not been denied by the action of 13 hapless people in black robes. They showed themselves to be partisans with the same views as Monsanto and the same disdainful and condescending view toward us as might be shown toward mice by a hungry eagle.
Judges may see themselves as the eagles of the system, even if others may see them as only crows. They do not see themselves as hapless; they see themselves as fulfilling the systemically protective mission intended when they were appointed, but history will not be that benign if they cannot show consistent ability to make valuable decisions. If they can only make ideologically grounded decisions, they are not likely to succeed. They cannot manifest the wisdom of Solomon without more humanitarian grounding than that. Without that, the only question is how long it takes before their myopic vision pins on them the image of their failure the same way blindfolded children pin the tail on a donkey. Times move faster now than they have in the past, so the grace period on failure will be similarly shorter.
The effort to stand up against Monsanto’s technology or allow it to be questioned in an appropriate legal forum has been blocked, so the question is: who will be most remembered because of that if the technology proves to be a destructive blind ally, those who blocked the pursuit of the truth or those who did their best to promote it. Without doubt, the judges did as they believed they should do, and they would feel justified and satisfied if they want to protect systemic dependency on the power of corporate money for the benefit of both the U.S. political and the economic system. They know who butters the nation’s political bread, but in their behavior, they could have revealed intentional lockstep internal subversion of judicial independence even as they believed their decision was fully independent.
Since 1976, if not before that, the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo decision made money equal to political speech in the United States, and subsequent decisions, including particularly Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, reinforced this anti-democratic, elitist principle. The system was rigged by these decisions to empower the elite, and that was done more by court decisions than it was done by the Constitution, but the Constitution provided supportive sense of justification.
Especially some justices of the Supreme Court would have understood the Constitution’s intention to protect the empowerment of the elite, and so they would have wanted to reinforce that objective. This view would go with people who have an originalist reverence. Under the observed judicial and political values, restraint against the power of the financial elite would have been made impossible in our case, but this is not a new issue; the promotion of elite power has been a goal at least since John Marshall became Chief Justice in 1801; no one should be surprised to understand the aristocratically protective attitudes of the founding Federalists have continued. Similarly, none of us should be surprised to know the leading national association of lawyers is called the Federalist Society.
Only the people could act to change the founding Federalists’ imposed originalist limitations if they think something else beyond elite control is needed. Certainly the nation’s founders did not anticipate a time when the people would look at the elite and blame them for their exploitations against the public need, but most of them lived to see that only 13 years latter during the election of 1800. In that year, the Federalist were thrown out not just from the Presidency but also from both the House and the Senate. Because they were thrown out of the Senate, change was also needed in most of the states internally, but since then, the people have been taught to treat the Constitution as if it came down from God on stone tablets.
This habitual pattern of citizen thinking was not cultivated by accident, and it makes action to promote change highly unlikely. As a result, the Jeffersonian logic hoping to promote frequent constitutional improvements to refine and stimulate greater democratic wisdom has been continuously evaded. Some have made a long-term profession out of the effort to prevent the Jeffersonian democratic ideal from ever reaching beneficial fruition, and many have reinvented Jefferson’s ideas to make them fit comfortably into their preferred ideology and philosophy.
In 1787, without Jefferson participating (because he was in France), the Constitution was the best that could have been expected from a self-aggrandizing elite wanting to protect their own interests from the perceived democratic excesses seen under the Confederation when the wisdom, diligence, and discipline to make democracy work in the collective, common interest was lacking almost as much as in the modern era. Yet, until change is possible, U.S. democracy has lost the ability to be internationally admirable to those hoping to see democracy work. Only those wanting to see it subverted will be satisfied by what they see. That will include Monsanto and those wanting to join them in their wishful, chimeric idea.
Those hoping to see an inspiring model from the United States are not getting it, and that leaves them needing to figure out how to do better on their own without U.S. help. Public-spirited morality and community building are needed to make democracy work, but instead of that, self-serving exploitation, polarization, and partisan alienation have prevailed instead. With them as come money driven political warfare costing more than $19 billion dollars during the 2012 political campaign season. That is a moral issue; that $19 billion that could have gone to meet other pressing needs aiming to make the United States a respected nation. That is more money than should be needed to inform people about candidates, but the Supreme Court has wanted to given more leverage to big political funders.
The majority of the court has turned money into speech the same way they might have turned thrown bricks or Molotov cocktails and bombs into a form of constitutional, First Amendment political speech. The courts have also given commercial speech rights to corporations under the First Amendment and allowed those to be employed against the public interest in service to corporate shareholder interests. These are decisions designed to destroy democratic community and to undermine morality. That is why they need to be challenged.
The Congress, the White House, the courts, and other governing institutions in the 21st century suggest many people in positions of authority have learned little yet from past history. President Obama is widely-known to have been a professor of constitutional law, but the impact of that experience remains AWOL on major issues where the power of the elite need to be confronted. Even if he did publicly rebuke the Supreme Court majority for their Citizens United decision, that was only window dressing compared to the hard work needing to be accomplished.
Court decisions in our case and more have been shown to be the court’s way of protecting pro-corporate, financially-enabled political power against the people. Justices, judges, members of the Congress, and Presidents might believe the empowerment of corporations is the best way to deliver benefit to the people, but that would be an ideological bias allowing money to be used as a weapon to overpower, control, and suppress those who do not possess it. Revealed is a continuing belief in the trickle-down method of wealth building. When companies are empowered to turn earnings into political speech, the result cannot be seen as democratic. It can only be an anti-democratic subversion benefiting the corporate elite and their elected or appointed political allies for their own mutual advantage.
The court decisions and the accompanying judicial attitudes have allowed citizen pursuit of justice, wisdom, knowledge, and truth to be overpowered and denied in favor of unbridled corporate power with Monsanto as leading poster child. By giving money First Amendment empowerment, the Supreme Court allowed those with money to decide the functional definition of justice, wisdom, truth, and even valued knowledge. By denying us the right to have our lawsuit heard, the justices and the two lower courts decided we should have no right to challenge the definition they want to provide. This is abusive, negligent, and prejudiced to the point of turning marble inscriptions on the Supreme Court edifice into fraud.
Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” In the United States now, courts and government agencies work together to protect the empowerment of wealth against the public need. That is the issue we are raising, and against this anti-democratic assertion of power, Thomas Jefferson said, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves: and to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.” Jefferson’s idea was promising and hopeful, and many still pay it lip service, but now even major universities are commonly part of the pro-corporate, anti-democratic threat more than they are part of the solution to it.
Reliance on funding from pro-corporate elite has made university administrators and teachers obsequious to the point citizenship education has been sacrificed in favor of corporate job skills, and many students have shown they want it that way. In response to the Jeffersonian ideal at the primary and secondary levels, some of the pro-corporate elite have argued against the need for quality education for all citizens or the need for more than trade school or basic secondary education.
In dumbing down and narrowing the educational process, “No Child Left Behind” has, in the interest of standardization or achieving basic educational standards, eliminated the individual attention, support and encouragement needed to make education exciting, fun, and inspiring to student. Personal attention is needed to motivate students, and without it educational quality is undermined, not fostered. Maybe the intentions were good, but the project has been destructive of education much as Monsanto is subversive against healthful food and the environment.
As a result of “teaching to the test,” formerly-respected citizenship education and the creation collaborative democratic community has suffered from the kind of horrific cultural agony putting more people in prison in the United States than in any other nation. When people fail in school because the education process has let them down, they are more likely to be on the so-called school to prison pipeline. More people are under the supervision of the U.S. justice system than have been displaced by Syria’s civil war, and that war has created over six million refugees, over a third of the nation’s population. Those who have been failed by the school system will almost certainly lack the tools to be productive and responsible, civically-committed citizens, and they may not want to be. When they see others entitled to exploit instead of serve, they may soon embrace the same values.
Reflecting elite, pro-corporate employment values, “No Child Left Behind” has emphasized robotic job skills over citizenship skills even more than many colleges and universities. The result is student and teacher disinterest and boredom. Schools have been made uniform, sterile, dry, routine, and destructive of needed motivation, and that is not the way to inspire quality citizenship or stimulate constructive creativity. The aspiration to work a low-paying job is not enough to satisfy. Classroom manufacture of dull human robots aimed to be replaceable industrial spare parts in a system erasing hopeful humanity, canceling the former democratic promise, and treating students like feedlot livestock is a dead end.
The system wants cheap workers, so U.S. workers are forced into competition with workers from everywhere in the world. As a result, the middle class has been pushed into poverty, but the poor will not be needed at all after actual robots can be developed with the capacity to do the same work at a lower cost. To a greater measure than would be seen if the valuable potential of people was important, the point of the system has been exploitation, and that shows a goal only only slightly different from slavery; its not an idea with hopeful, fulfilling democratic potential. The court decisions in our lawsuit have shown judges thinking about the role of farmers much as public schools have come the think about students. We have been told to shut up and do as we are expected to do with Monsanto in control.
When people are not allowed to assert their right of citizenship any more than students in a cookie-cutter school system or inmates in a prison, they can see no future in the values they would like to hold essential. The court decisions against us show the nation’s power structure is hostile to food ideals important to us and to the evidence we need to present. Asserted, especially by Judge Buchwald’s animosity toward civil liberty to contend against our oppressor, is a systemic preference for citizen docility and passivity in response to corporate domination.
With these observed values in the United States, the government has been dedicated to keeping people in ignorance on issues more important than all others: the health-protective quality of food and the life-protective healthfulness of the natural environment. This is what the judges and justices have supported. Instead of allowing truth to be transparently sought and made available for all, four judges and nine justices have prevented its rational pursuit. They abusively blocked the public need for basic knowledge as if that should be the objective.
The observed national credo has become: Give the Masses the Lowest Possible Wages Working in the Most Unrewarding Jobs and Feed Them The Cheapest Possible Junk, so They Can Be Exploited Coming and Going Through The Work They Do and The Food They Need to Live On. These would be the values in a culture where the allied economic and political system has been designed to make a few richer and the majority poorer. This is the established U.S. governing model.
Three courts have acted to entrench Monsanto’s political power allowing them to continue doing as they want without honest, honorable oversight. Responsible review, investigation, and presentation of evidence in a public forum examining the merit of Monsanto’s unconfirmed claims has been denied. That is what we have sought, and the right has been usurped. The basic issue was whether or not the daily threat of contamination from transgenic crops is meritorious enough to provide legal standing to file suit against Monsanto. We insist it is; the courts have said it is not. Needed is an international court where this abusive injustice can be appealed to an objective higher authority free of biased interest in elite control.
The U.S. courts have supported and sustained a pro-corporate, anti-democratic coup d’etat. They showed it does not matter to them how legally inconsistent or ludicrous Monsanto’s arguments may be or how absurd the court arguments may be in support of them. All three courts have shown financial power means more to them than establishing truth, wisdom, or justice. Under the asserted standard, these virtues and even accepted knowledge are turned into whatever a monied corporation and their allies want them to be for their own benefit. This is the rule.
If we file a new lawsuit with a new group of co-plaintiffs who have suffered crop contamination, we would see if the courts would find another false and abusive reason to deny our contentions about the invalidity of Monsanto’s patents and our right to be heard. In the process of learning that, the co-plaintiffs could be eligible to be sued for patent infringement, even if only as a retaliatory, punitive act by Monsanto. That is what the U.S. system of promoted injustice has come to. The only thing stopping Monsanto from bringing patent infringement claims might be PR embarrassment following their courtroom claim they have no interest in suing farmers not wanting to use their patented traits without paying a royalty, but they have not specified exactly what that would mean in actual practical, daily reality.
If an organic has a contaminated crop, and he or she knows it is contaminated, it cannot be sold as organic. Most likely, it will not be dumped in the landfill. It will probably be sold in the way all transgenic grain is sold, but that is not easy. As soon as that happens, Monsanto’s traits have been used without paying for them. The farmer will be eligible for prosecution as a patent infringer, and that is the reason farmers have to find ways to move their crop into the market without the truth about them being discovered. Sometimes, they have mixed the crop with a non-contaminated crop to get them below the threshold accepted for export to Europe, or they may be sold to companies willing to accept the contamination.
Maybe the contamination will be hidden in some way. Many ways exist, and they suggest the existence of more crop contamination than is publicly reported. The challenge exists for Monsanto to try to find all the contamination and sue the farmers over it. Because of that, they have turned rural America into a police state where agricultural transparency no longer exists. Many people have lived in fear over the possibility that Monsanto’s security police will knock on their door, but few have voluntarily paid a royalty as soon as they find the crop contamination.
We say they would want to file patent infringement lawsuits against any farmers suing their customers for damage to a non-transgenic crop. They would have to do that because they would lose their customers if they did not use that defense. Farmers would not use Monsanto’s seeds if it exposed them to that liability. Because of that, Monsanto’s courtroom claims could have been only propaganda designed to influence ill-informed, oblivious, pro-corporate judges too biased in favor of biotech agriculture to want the truth about it investigated or exposed.
Even though Monsanto’s customers would no longer want to take the risk of using transgenic seed once they can be defenselessly sued for contamination damage, most cannot quickly change back to the kind of agriculture they did in the past, because it costs more, and it cannot be competitive in the market anymore. That change could be a bigger risk than they would want to accept, depending partly on how soon and how many damage suits are filed. Those suits can now start for any damage below one percent, because that is what the Appeals Court has decided.
Beyond that, contaminated farmers could argue any contamination more than that was between zero and one percent before it grew to become more. If that argument would prevail, no defense against contamination damage suits any longer exists. Now, it would be necessary to see what legal contortions or courtroom Body English would be employed to escape this elementary logic.
Patent infringement lawsuits are the only tool Monsanto has to protect their seed market against the risk of contamination damage claims. Protection of that tool would be the reason the Appeals Court might have limited its Binding Covenant to contamination of less than one percent. That is a level unlikely to be found or sought in many cases, and it is costly in time, diligence, and money to try to find it.
Monsanto’s attorneys said in court they are not interested suing people not wanting to make use of their patented traits, but they have done that, and worse than that, they have both erroneously and intimidatingly harassed people they consider guilty of possessing their patented crops or seeds without having paid a royalty. That is how they came to harass David Runyon. Bullying people has been part of their business plan, and for years it has worked. Many have accepted the pressures to buy Monsanto’s seeds in part because they did not want to take the risk of being sued for patent infringement if their crops would be contaminated.
The number of farmers who have hidden the fact of their contamination out of fear of being sued is not known, but it could be happening more than some might think it is. This has been the reality in the farming community. Farmers do whatever they feel they need to do to avoid getting on Monsanto’s radar, and some have quit farming to avoid the environmental mess Monsanto’s technology has created. Monsanto’s tactics and so-called security consultants have turned the rural community into a place of multilateral distrust where people no longer trust their neighbors. They do not know who might become a Monsanto informant, and Monsanto maintains a hotline so tips about contamination can be provided them.
Monsanto has used whatever intimidation they can get away with to force farmer compliance with their transgenic agenda, and many farmers have caved in to them because they do not have the money or the time to fight them in court even if they could win. Most have not won, because many courts have had the same pro-corporate, pro-biotech, pro-patent attitude we have encountered in our lawsuit.
Monsanto has made intimidation work for them, but now that a Binding Covenant has been determined even at a minimal one percent, it could be enough to begin to turn the tide against them. Up until now, many have felt it less risky to give in to the pressure Monsanto has used its financial power to impose, but that reality might begin to change. Among farmers, including its customers, Monsanto is not a widely loved, trusted, or respected company. Mostly, its friends are corporate allies, including the Farm Bureau, trade associations, politicians and judges.
Everything will depend on what farmers growing non-transgenic crops now start to do in response to the Appeals Court’s decision. In the meantime, it should not be necessary for plaintiffs to put themselves in legal jeopardy before they have the standing to file a lawsuit like ours, but that is what the courts have required. That is the horrific, atrocious, and bizarre injustice of their now sustained decision, and they would not have been able to get away with that abuse if farmers were not a small, routinely-abused cultural minority with those farming non-transgenic crops an even more tiny minority yet more eligible to take abuse unless the public decides to stand up more massively than they have to provide needed support.
The people are not likely to do what needs to be done without learning about the health and environmental destruction Monsanto’s biotech project has been causing. That is a massive public education project, and Monsanto and its allies have been doing all they can to prevent the truth from being investigated. So far the courts have helped them with that as much as the politicians have, and that means the destruction could need to grow much worse before better can happen.
In our lawsuit, as it was filed in 2011, we did not want any co-plaintiffs who had suffered crop contamination because we feared the possibility of retaliatory countersuits by Monsanto for patent infringement if contamination was admitted, but once the courts said Monsanto’s threat against us was not sufficiently immediate to allow us the right to bring a lawsuit, rational protection of plaintiffs against a real threat is no longer possible. The only people with a more immediate threat of damage and a more immediate need for court protection are those whose crops have been contaminated by pollen drift or some other means, but the only people protected by the Appeals Court’s decision are those contaminated less than one percent, and that is not enough protection to provide certainty of relief.
This small an amount may be difficult to find because the contamination does not spread itself uniformly; it might have to be found in only a small part of a field, but it will have to be found before it grows to more so contamination claims can be filed when they are timely. This would be necessary unless it is possible to successfully argue that the contamination was less than one percent before it grew to more than that. If that argument is successfully made, then the amount of the contamination will not matter at the time the damage suit is filed, but no one can be sure any rational argument would work given the observed court attitudes.
The contamination is a living biological product of nature and will not remain static; that is the reason the “strict liability” standard in patent law is perverse and counter-intuitive, and that is why it should be changed. This should be the minimal court ruling even if the patents are not determined to be invalid, but the right to bring the invalidity argument to court is centrally important to the public health, the protection of the gene pool, and the common, collective environmental interest. Both the patent validity and the the “strict liability” standard must be confronted and overturned, and that is what our lawsuit has attempted to do.
Because of the public importance of the arguments to be stated, the denial of legal standing to a group of plaintiffs continuously under daily and costly threat of contamination can be only a ruse aimed to protect Monsanto and their technology from being challenged. That is a serious wrong abusive against the people of the United States and all other nations, and that is the reason all three court decisions are misfeasant or malfeasant in their inadequacy. All three should be called to account for their failure to serve the international public need, and because the issue is international it should rightly be eligible for adjudication internationally.
This is not an issue only for a few malcontent farmers; it is a question about the rights of a minority to be heard, but it is much more than that. The questions being raised are about the ability of people, animals, and all life to persist, and the longer the review and the investigation continues to be blocked, the worse the damage and destruction can become and the longer the long-term suffering will destined to continue. The evidence on this needs to be presented, and in a nation where truth, wisdom, and justice was important, that would have been allowed.
In seeking redress somewhere when it is not available in the U.S., a major problem is: the available international venue only tries war crimes, and the only war involved in this case is a government-supported corporate war against nature. Perhaps, the Permanent International People’s Tribunal would find this to be a meritorious issue worthy of their attention the same as they adjudicated the case against Monsanto and other chemical companies for their chemical crimes against humanity and concluded by encouraging many nations to bring the same charges in places real penalties would be imposed and the truth made fully clear.
Interviewing citizens in front of the Department of Agriculture building on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
The Minimally Useful 1% Against the Overpowering 99%
Chapter 6
Historically, farmers have feared allowing anyone to know about contamination they have suffered for fear it would lead to a patent infringement lawsuit, but now that the Appeals Court interpreted Monsanto’s court statements as conveying a minimal, tiny Binding Covenant not to sue people like us, they have perpetrated a cruel joke without creating a reasonable way to address it. The ludicrous part is: this imputed Covenant only covers contamination from zero to one percent with no logic explaining why that should be a sensible, rational, or acceptable limit. In effect, the judges thumbed their nose at farmers growing non-transgenic crops even if they did deny Monsanto the undivided victory Judge Buchwald gave them.
The court set its one percent limit because that is the standard set for the level of contamination allowed in the United States for exports to the EU and for products certified by the Non-GMO Project, but that is like setting a speed limit for airplanes based on the highway speed limit for automobiles. Its a non-sequitur. The only logic would be the need to set the limit as low as possible for Monsanto’s benefit. The decision tacitly admits Monsanto prior policy was not even minimally rational, but the new rule the court has provided makes only a tiny beneficial step.
The other 99% of possible contamination remains unprotected against the possibility of patent infringement claims brought by Monsanto, and no provided rules explain how contamination less than 1% should be found or measured if it is found. Under the rule of estoppel, the court found that Monsanto could not do something tomorrow they promised not to do today. That means they could not sue farmers for patent infringement after they said in court they were not interested in doing that, but the court interpreted the commitment so minimally and arbitrarily, it may have little practical, real-world meaning. This will depend in part upon subsequent future court interpretations given the court's meaning.
The Supreme Court might be waiting for some of those cases to be appealed to them before they consider what is wrong with the Appeals Court decision, but that does not absolve them from the negligence related to the failure to allow our lawsuit to go forward. As everyone is forced to wait before they can learn more, the Appeals Court ruling might minimally temper the existing Monsanto business model making it slightly less aggressive, but that remains to be seen. The longer-term outcome cannot be known until the court’s decision is used to bring damage suits against Monsanto's customers. These damage suits cannot be brought against Monsanto directly because the company has prevented that by contract.
If the rule of estoppel had been applied to what was actually said instead of only to a nonsensical, arbitrary, and unjustified abbreviation of it, then it could have delivered significant value. Monsanto’s attorneys said the company was not interested in suing farmers who were not trying to use the Monsanto technology without paying for it. That statement would have covered the full 100% of the farmers in co-plaintiff group and any others like them, but the court let the Monsanto attorneys off the hook by reducing their stated commitment to 1% of what they actually said in court. The difference between the court decision and the statement it was based on needs to be tested through the filing of damage suits by farmers who have suffered actual contamination. This needs to happen A.S.A.P.
Nothing said in court by Monsanto’s attorneys explained why the Court-set Binding Covenant should be so absurdly and inexplicably minimal, and nothing written to their attorneys in 2011 by our attorneys implied that a Covenant of only one percent would be in any way sufficient or adequate to meet the stated need. Back then, a Binding Covenant had been sought from Monsanto’s attorneys before finalizing the filing of our lawsuit. If they had been willing to negotiate reasonable terms and put them in an enforceable Covenant, the lawsuit could have been ended, but they were not willing to discuss the idea. That meant they thought they could win against our contentions, and that might mean they believed they had the system wired in their own favor before the case was even heard in a courtroom.
In sum, a pre-trial settlement effort was made to see if Monsanto would be willing to replace its meaningless Web site “promise” not to sue for undefined “trace,” “inadvertent,” contamination with an enforceable commitment, but they were not willing to even consider that. That meant they only wanted to fabricate undefined, useless propaganda appearing to the naive as if it was a useful Binding Covenant.
Again, for emphasis, Monsanto’s refusal to discuss the issue or consider it could have meant the company and their attorneys were confident they could get what they wanted from the courts no matter how unreasonable, illogical, and absurd their argument and no matter how inadequately it might serve the public need. This is worth stating again because it is outrageous, and its outrageousness needs to be allowed to sink in. Its like Al Capone being able to thumb his nose at the FBI because of the power he felt he possessed over the federal courts and the judges.
So far, the only person tangibly appearing to have been fooled or maybe wanting to have been fooled by Monsanto’s “promise” may have been Judge Buchwald in New York. She told us in her decision we should be comforted by Monsanto’s phony “promise.” We regarded that statement as laughable, and to us, it only showed the flagrantly paltry insufficiency of judge’s understanding of the issues at stake in the lawsuit as well as the basic facts underlying it. That misunderstanding was corrected minimally by the decision of the Appeals Court, but it was corrected more in minimal principle than it was corrected in actual fact. That was because the Appeals Court, to find as it did, had to admit the issues being raised had merit. That was a reversal of a core element of Judge Buchwald’s district court decision.
The trouble was that the Appeals Court’s paltry finding of an admitted Binding Covenant by Monsanto could be only constraining sophistry when it prevented the the trial of the case from going forward on the merits of the broader contentions. Thus, the Appeals Court could only have been protecting Monsanto’s interest in avoiding pursuit of the truth slightly less than Judge Buchwald was. As long as the decisions of both courts can be found to have no justifiable merit in relation to the presented facts, precedents, and contentions still needing public attention, the only possible conclusion is that evasion of justice, truth, and wisdom was the goal. This is the outcome the justices of the Supreme Court have chosen to sustain.
In the face of this history, the Appeals Court judges made a tiny baby step in the right direction when they found a Binding Covenant Monsanto had not previously been willing to offer. Even if it was not big enough to have much real value, it was better than nothing and better than Judge Buchwald had provided in her Federal District Court decision. The 1% limit had to have been pulled out of thin air by the Appellate judges, but it was slightly better than worthless even if it is a bad joke much the same as the decision against Dred Scott turned fundamental national ideals on their head as if they were only convenient, propagandistic hot air.
Because the minimal terms of the interpreted Binding Covenant did not come from anything Monsanto’s attorney’s had committed to or stated, the court’s decision should elicit serious gratitude from Monsanto and celebration by them. The judges saved Monsanto’s neck from a much worse interpretation under the rule of estoppel. If justice had prevailed as it should have, the most logical interpretation of the statements would have been worse for them. The decision shows justice was understood by the court, but it also shows they did not want to deliver it. It shows they were more interested in protecting Monsanto than pursuing either justice, truth, or wisdom in service to the public health and safety.
The provided interpretation could only have come from the rules governing the Non-GMO Project in the United States and imports of non-transgenic commodities into the European Union, and that is where the court said they came from even if the matter was the difference between apples and oranges. Both allow a contamination limit of just under one percent (.9%), but that does not mean that a completely different issue should be governed by the same number.
This amount of contamination does not even make any sense beyond arbitrary expediency in the two places where it is used. No studies have ever been made to determine if this amount of contamination is safe. It is as nonsensically arbitrary as the decision by the Appeals Court judges in our lawsuit. Known amounts of transgenic contamination has no other allowance in existing U.S. law or practice.
No known contamination is allowed under the organic rules even though a loophole exists for unknown contamination a farmer has not learned about and has not been required to find. Organic farmers are not required to test their crops to find out if they are contaminated; they are only required to act in the case of contamination they happen to have learned about as a virtual accident. Under the organic standard, best efforts are allowed to suffice, and unlike the rule governing pesticides residues that may have spread into fields of an organic farmer, no action level exists for transgenic contamination. This is a nonsensical weakness in the standard, and it needs to be fixed, but for political reasons, it remains in place.
Biodynamic farmers, in contrast, have no similar loophole, and that makes their standard safer for those concerned to make sure they avoid any and all transgenic contamination. They have to take more care to make sure no transgenic contamination of their crops has been able to creep in. They are required to operate in a more self-protective and prudent way than organic farmers, but now the Appeals Court’s decision in our lawsuit encourages organic farmers to learn the truth about any possible transgenic contamination as soon as may be possible. They need to do that, so a damage claim can be filed against the contaminator.
If farmers would take diligent action under the 1% standard set by the Appeals Court, the result would be the discovery of contamination that is not found as long the organic standard has created a virtual incentive not to know about any possible contamination or to try to find it. The only people dedicated to finding it are those who feel a high measure of personal commitment and sense of integrity about the products they take to market, but the Appeal Court’s decision could help to improve that if farmers would have the funds and the time they need to find a very small amount of contamination before it turns into a larger amount.
In the meantime, a major question remains: should the limit the Appeals Court specified be one percent of the field, one percent of the total annual crop, one percent of the truck load, the bin, a bag of seed or what? Nothing in the decision answers this question or implies an understanding of the need to answer it. The ambiguity is another part of the reality serving to make the court’s decision a cruel joke and a charade benefiting Monsanto much more than it can benefit farmers. At least, that is the result until someone provides an administrative rule book to explain to farmers what to do to protect themselves under the new standard.
Equally important is the question about who should pay the high costs of the effort to find the contamination before it becomes more than one percent. Under an honorable, uncorrupted legal system with similarly respectable enforcement, the costs would be born by those responsible for causing the contamination, but Monsanto has protected themselves by imposing all liability on the purchasers of their seeds, and the established practice has required organic farmers and others growing non-transgenic crops to bear the cost of buffer zones and other barriers as if they were the cause of the problem. This has become the common standard in the United States. Under the same principle, people are required to pay the medical costs of the health damage done to them by Monsanto’s transgenic food.
Similarly, people are expected to pay the medical costs resulting from everything they may choose to eat. This is the principle of “buyer beware.” Consumers are required to pay the cost of contamination from can linings, from chemical residues in food because of the way their are grown, or from a host of issues that may result from the way food is prepared. Most of this results as it does because the sources of the any specific health troubles cannot be directly traced, but in the case of crop contamination on farms, contamination sources can be more easily traced to an immediate source even if Monsanto is the more important source.
So far the courts have protected Monsanto from the liabilities of their abuse because they do not want to dampen the opportunity for biotech train to roll. That has happened because many people including judges and others in government want to believe there are more benefits than costs from transgenic agriculture. As a result of this belief, they want to allow the poor to subsidize the rich. In effect, all liability has been transferred from those most able to pay and those most responsible to those least able to pay and those least responsible: that is the farmers planting transgenic seeds in the effort to lower their farming costs. They have been forced by Monsanto’s adhesion contract to assume all damage liability.
Transgenic contamination should be seen as a trespass, but by law, Monsanto is allowed to sue anyone possessing their patented crops or seeds without having paid a royalty, and the courts have sustained this principle in both the United States and Canada. The courts in both nations have shown they want to subserviently pave the path for Monsanto’s contaminating technology without holding them responsible for trespass or allowing damaged farmers legal leverage against them. Law could have been written to provide justice on the issue, but it has not been, and it will not be as long as the U.S. political system serves well-monied and politically-leveraged corporations and money-dependent politicians ahead of the people. This is what happens when the empowered are given a government-established entitlement to exploit those without ability to prevent it.
Against this political reality, the Appeals Court fixed one percent of the problem, and that was slightly better than doing nothing even though three courts made clear: farmers with an immediate daily threat of contamination from Monsanto’s transgenic crops do not have the legal right to pursue justice, wisdom, or truth in a courtroom even when they are acting to serve the public’s health, safety, and environmental interest. Neither do farmers who have stopped growing crops they want to grow have an honorable right to bring a contention against Monsanto. Because that has been denied them, they have been made second-class citizens.
The threat of contamination and the possibility of being sued because of it has been found insufficient to convey the right to seek court protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act. Atrociously and flagrantly, no amount of potential future contamination was considered immediate enough to merit the requested court relief, and until that changes, farmers live under a Sword of Damocles.
For conscientious farmers growing non-transgenic crops, Monsanto’s transgenic contamination is a threat against the health and safety of the food they grow or want to grow, and the people who want to buy that food for trustworthy, safe nourishment of themselves and their families are threatened just as much as the farmers. Monsanto claims their transgenic food is safe, but no independent, objective studies support their claim. Only their own controlled and contracted research supports it. That research lacks proven merit, and part of the need is to establish in court and in detail the reasons why it is not adequate and why the research done by independent, objective researchers should be more trusted.
Following the Supreme Court sustained dismissal of the OSGATA et al. lawsuit, the only possible co-plaintiffs the courts might find eligible to file suit are those who have been actually contaminated, but the Catch-22 has not been removed and maybe the judges dismissing our lawsuit do not want it to be removed. They might want it to exist as a roadblock against us and any future lawsuit similar to our initial lawsuit. The fact remains: if a farmer admits contamination, he or she becomes eligible for a patent infringement lawsuit if the contamination is over one percent, and if it is not more than one percent today, it soon will grow to be more than that. Monsanto would only need to wait and watch for its opportunity.
Monsanto or their customers could tie claimants in knots over the way the measurements were made, or they could wait until the amount of contamination grows and then prove it to be above one percent. They might only need to show a different way of measuring would have come up with contamination of more than one percent, but all this will depend on the way the court decision is interpreted.
Anyone who would file a damage claim against Monsanto’s customers could find themselves on a watch list with the expectation they could soon be counter-sued for patent infringement if Monsanto wanted to take action to protect their farming customers, and as part of that, their own seed markets. Most likely, they would want to do that. Because transgenic contamination is not static and can grow or spread freely, continuing liability for patent infringement exists as long as Monsanto is protected from assertion of the rule of estoppel for contamination greater than one percent as they would not be if justice was important in the U.S.
Monsanto has said they are not interested is suing people like us, but they were not willing to provide a broad Binding Covenant affirming that when the request was made of them, so that made clear they would be interested in filing patent infringement lawsuits at will if that was the only thing they could do to prevent their customers from fleeing from them in droves once the damage liability issue would become too big a threat. The threat could grow if the case brought by organic farmer Steve Marsh in Australia wins in court becomes the accepted governing rule in other nations, but to win Marsh will likely need to do more than establish the justice of his case. He could need to prove the superiority of organic food in meeting the need for public health, safety, and environmental protection.
This change in perspective is only likely to happen if the blind faith of many in the prospects for transgenic agriculture is undermined by an established understanding of the harm being done by transgenic food and farming. Our lawsuit would have helped Marsh by addressing that issue, but it cannot be any help when the U.S. judges are committed to stonewalling pursuit of the truth and want to protect a pro-corporate, pro-technology, pro-biotech prejudice instead. This, again, is the same as the courts did in the case of Dred Scott and Homer Plessy—and in many other cases where prejudice has ruled ahead of the truth.
Until better is possible, the Binding Covenant the Appeals Court provided is only minimally and expensively useful. That is true because it takes a great deal of time, money, and fortuitous good fortune to find contamination before it grows to more than one percent. Finding it is not easy, and an increase in the quantity is fully inevitable. When the amount is greater than one percent, farmers who filed damage suits could have marked themselves for a patent infringement lawsuit.
This is especially true when the contaminated farmer has to find a way to sell his contaminated crop. That becomes an effort to profit on the crop without paying a royalty even though the farmer has suffered a loss compared to the sale of a certified organic crop or other customer-preferred non-transgenic crop with premium market value. As long as farmers do not tell anyone about the contamination, they may be able to find a way to sell the crop in the market for transgenic product without anyone finding out who grew it. This problem will prevent farmers from filing damage suits as long as the one-percent rule is allowed to continue. That’s why the rule is wrong and should be over-turned.
When our attorneys at the Public Patent Foundation asked Monsanto for a meaningful Binding Covenant in 2011 and they were unwilling to consider that remediation or even discuss it, that made clear Monsanto’s desire to continue using the combined elements of patent law as a legal cudgel to enhance their market domination and control and to prevent farmers growing non-transgenic crops from being able to file trespass and crop contamination damage claims the only way they can: against Monsanto’s clients growing their transgenic crops.
In the face of this reality, the courts have said the law is going to be the unchallengeable instrument of elite pro-biotech corporate protectionism in the United States, and that is the same as it was in the hands of the elite Sadducees in the Temple at Jerusalem. The hoi polloi have been told to crawl back into their compost pile and stay there before the courts take away the rest of what they thought would be the honorable and inspiring American Dream with rights of equality in pursuit of justice, truth, wisdom, happiness, and protection under law.
The pursuit of happiness necessarily includes the right to enjoy the free, unencumbered privilege to use their property and the right to grow what they want without threat from transgenic trespass. A transgenic invasion carries worse consequences than an invasion of music fans wanting to hold a rock concert on the property without paying for the right to do it. It is worse than a plague of locusts, because that goes way sooner. Both of these events would be more temporary in their impact, even if they create major temporary destruction.
Farmers should not have to live under the constant threat of transgenic trespass, but the courts have now said they are allowed no rights of redress against it. As a result of the court decision against them, they can only wait for some group with a threat the courts deem more immediate to enable them the opportunity to gain court protection as a result of a lawsuit they would bring. The courts have suggested those who have been contaminated could have a claim against Monsanto, but they have not yet decided they could or certainly would.
The courts have only decided that those threatened with contamination do not have an immediate enough experience of damage, even if the likelihood of contamination is high and even if the actuality of contamination is greater than has been reported. Many believe contamination is inevitable and some consider it common even though it is forced into the darkness by the continuing threat of patent infringement lawsuits. The question in the mind of many farmers growing non-transgenic or organic crops is about how soon the contamination will occur, what the means of contamination will be, and what will be the price of recovery. In this lies the abusive, unconscionable injustice of the negligent court decisions.
More interviewing in front of the Department of Agriculture building on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The discussion included mention of a Monsanto advertisement seen in the subway station next to the Agriculture building.
The Unrestrained Government-Promoted Freedom to Perpetrate Transgenic Rape of Farms, the People, and the Environment
Chapter 7
Monsanto could be counting on getting from their government supporters the time they need for the contamination of major crops and most of the nation’s or the world’s agricultural soils to occur. That would enable them to assert patent-related control over much of farming. Their patents do not expire as other patents do because they incessantly make small changes and apply for a new patent. That is all they need to do to gain continuous, unending patent control, and this is the agenda the courts have sustained under existing law. The circumstance could only be made different by changing the law, and that should have happened three decades ago under the Reagan-Bush administration, but it did not happen, and subsequent U.S. administrations have been no less negligent on the matter.
Any of the subsequent Presidents also could have changed the law and so could the Congress under both Republican and Democratic leadership, but they all failed to do it for the same reason the Reagan-Bush Republicans did not want to. They could use the giveaway to Monsanto and the biotech industry as a cash cow. Worse than that, the Supreme Court sustained in 2001 the ability of Monsanto and others the obtain utility patents on transgenic seeds. That improved their leverage because a utility patent conveys more rights than the seed patents that were formerly used by agribusiness to protect their hybrid seeds and to force farmers to buy new seeds every year if they wanted to benefit from higher yields.
The right to a utility patent was given in the face of the long-standing principle against the patenting of life forms, but that principle had been overturned in 1980 when the Supreme Court allowed the patenting of a bacterium designed to consume spilled petroleum. This 1980 decision was Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
The 2001 decision was J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., and it was only an additional hubristic, oblivious, destructive, biologically negligent, and disrespectful step in the wrong direction. Both decisions favored biotech profligacy and corporate empowerment, and soon after the first decision, Monsanto started work on the development of their first transgenic seeds. More than a decade later in 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle in a politically motivated decision, arbitrarily called them “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS). The so-called Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence was cited as the governing justification, but it was not based on any independent, cautiously prudent, objective science.
To fully understand the decision, insight into the mind of President George H.W. Bush would be needed, but he was just going with the deregulatory ideological flow that was politically dominant during his era. Business hated government because of the regulatory burdens it had imposed, and pro-business politicians and judges wanted to give business the freedom they needed to create wealth. Once the wealth was created, politicians could point to what they had done to make it possible, and from that they could press for campaign contributions as a quid pro quo. They could also point to the creation of jobs, including jobs for their own associates, and to the resulting contribution to the gross domestic product.
No systematic process required examination of the public costs resulting from the governing deregulatory ideology, and nothing required a determination of the victims. Responsible review of the long-term issues was out the window; the only thing that mattered was the short-term gains, and justifications were fabricated to promote them. That is how the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence was created. It was not the result of science; it was a politically contrived statement, and some scientists were lined up to rubber stamp it. These scientists did not include the scientists and the FDA. They were on the record at the FDA already as opposing the release of transgenic crops without research into the impacts. They listed the problems they anticipated from transgenic crops, and time has proved them right.
Because of the sad state of scientific integrity in the United States, some can usually be found who are willing to do studies or make statements favorable to whatever interest has the money to pay for it. The meta-study comparing organic and chemically-raised food used in 2012 to support the campaign against the transgenic food labeling is a good example of how this works. The major problem lies in using a large number of studies as a reliable and honest proxy for the truth without doing any basic, independent, objective research to find out if they are.
In a climate where most agricultural research is paid for by agribusiness and is designed to sustain whatever point of view the sponsors want to promote, no collection of such studies can ever be a good indicator of where the truth lies. Beyond that, the point of view of the study is made more clear from what its agenda leaves out it is by what it includes. Susan Clark, then executive director of the Columbia Foundation and now director of the Gaia Fund, wrote:
“The researchers started with a narrow set of assumptions and arrived at entirely predictable conclusions. Stanford should be ashamed of the lack of expertise about food and farming among the researchers, a low level of academic rigor in the study, its biased conclusions, and lack of transparency about the industry ties of the major researchers on the study. Normally we busy people would simply ignore another useless academic study, but this study was so aggressively spun by the PR masters that it requires a response.”
Mark Bittman of the New York Times also provided a summary response saying:
...even within its narrow framework it appears the Stanford study was incorrect. Last year Kirsten Brandt, a researcher from Newcastle University, published a similar analysis of existing studies and wound up with the opposite result, concluding that organic foods are actually more nutritious. In combing through the Stanford study she’s not only noticed a critical error in properly identifying a class of nutrients, a spelling error indicative of biochemical incompetence (or at least an egregious oversight) that skewed one important result, but also that the researchers curiously excluded evaluating many nutrients that she found to be considerably higher in organic foods.
From his vantage as the food writer at the Times, Bittman concluded:
That the authors of the study chose to focus on a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison is regrettable. That they published a study that would so obviously be construed as a blanket knock against organic agriculture is willfully misleading and dangerous. That so many leading news agencies fall for this stuff is scary.
Finally, a major sponsor of the group performing the criticized study was Cargill, and that made the study immediately suspect to many people for the same reason Monsanto’s research is uniformly suspect. This sponsorship resulted in a petition drive to have the study rescinded by the journal that published it. If Monsanto, Cargill, and other agribusiness companies had a record of making reliable studies serving the public interest, people would not be so suspicious and angry, but that record is entirely non-existent. The studies sponsored by agribusiness companies routinely support their own agenda, and the people who make the studies for them are also suspect because the work they do is understood to be dedicated to producing findings favorable to the corporate objective. In this particular case, one of the co-authors of the study had a history of performing biased research in service to corporate sponsors, particularly in the past for the tobacco industry.
The agenda seen from Monsanto and other agribusiness companies is one aimed to promote their own advancement at the expense of the people and the environment, and that is the pattern of exploitation the U.S. Government and its judges have supported and sustained with no more honor than the companies.
The circumstance is not much different than it was in 1786 at the time of the Daniel Shays Rebellion. Back then, the power of the courts was arrayed on the side of elite creditors and tax collectors against working farmers who had made sacrifices to fight the War of Independence and had not been paid for it. They had been given only an IOU because the government had no funds to pay them, but this did not absolve them from the requirement to pay their debts and their taxes.
To convert the IOUs to cash, a market was developed where exploitive investors bought the IOUs from the farmers at discounted rates. Through pressure from the creditors in court, the farmers were forced into a corner where they had to sell their compensatory bonds at cheap prices. The investors then held the bonds until the government later redeemed them at full value. The Federalist investor elite, with John and Abigail Adams notable among them, created wealth for themselves by abusing the farmers. Abigail did the investing from money John sent to her.
Recent farm policy in the United States has been used similarly to transfer wealth from farmers to the wealthy elites, including agribusiness corporations like Monsanto, and the effort to produce research favorable to chemical agriculture is seen as a hand-maiden of that effort. For decades farm policy has been used to drive farmers out of business and into the industrial labor market where they work for industrial-level wages, and concentrated control over their land can be increasingly asserted by the wealthy who may then lease the land back to farmers willing to take all the risks associated with farming it. These farmers then add the cost of leasing land onto the cost of farming, and that has often handicapped them in relation to those whose land has been owned in their family for generations.
Monsanto’s project has been made possible by the way farm policy is managed in the United States, and by saving farmers money on tillage, they have been able to squeeze out for themselves a premium price for their seeds. If farm policy was not managed to maintain a cost-price squeeze on farmers, Monsanto’s technology would have less appeal to farmers, but because they could deliver a cost advantage, that translated into a competitive advantage that farmers were forced to employ either by their bankers or in their own effort to survive financially.
Monsanto delivers a short-term cost-saving benefit to farmers, allowing them the chance to survive against the economic pressures imposed on them by farm policy, but the benefits are short lived, causing damage to the ability of the soil to grow healthful food and causing the evolution of both herbicide-resistant superweeds and pesticide-resistant insects which eventually leave farmer worse off than they were before they decide they had to accept Monsanto’s technology.
Because the soil is compromised through mineral deprivation caused by use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, costly amendments must soon be paid for to keep the crops healthy against disease, but the full quality of the soil with organic matter and microorganisms cannot be restored that easily. Both the farms and the farmers are exploited for the enrichment of Monsanto and its shareholders. Generations of politicians have been another beneficiary, because they have benefited from the campaign contributions Monsanto’s revenues have produced.
The trouble is: none of the benefits are close in equivalency to their high public costs. The people have suffered in multiple ways from the destruction of the agricultural resource base, the public health, and the environment, but all this has been ignored because expediency is more important than wisdom under the myopic and routinely exploitive agriculture model promoted in the United States. As seen as the result of our lawsuit, the courts do not want to allow these abuses to be publicly examined. They want the gravy train to continue without any scrutiny.
Farmers are put on a production treadmill causing them to use of more chemicals and ever more toxic chemicals with high environmental and public health costs, and the produced food is also damaging to the health of the people, animals, and living creatures unable to adapt to it or unable to quickly adapt to it. Mammals cannot adapt quickly as the weeds and insects, so they are afflicted by it, and that is why 80% of the antibiotics made in the United States are fed to meat animals. They are used to keep the animals standing long enough to get them to slaughter.
Advocates for antibiotic use say antibiotics are used to improve the rate of animal growth, but that is because sick animals cannot thrive, and antibiotics provide a quick fix for the symptoms of illness without addressing the inconvenient causes the political culture wants to ignore. Claiming value for antibiotics as a growth promoter is no more than unrestrained propagandistic spin, like lipstick and a ball gown put on a pig. Its a fraud perpetrated on the people because they have not known enough to blow the whistle on it. The system of confined animal feeding has eliminated the humane raising of meat and also dairy animals in the United States, and the resulting meat is anti-nutritious because the animals are fed on feed they were not designed by their evolved biological nature to well-utilize.
Animals and poultry can be made fatter through the use of factory farming, but the meat cannot be made more healthful for the consumers. The confined animal feeding system virtually guarantees a supply of less healthful and less safe food as if that should be a good idea, but the system persists because cheap price has been more important than human health as long as most of the health consequences take so many years to emerge and the results are not easily traced to the causes.
Even if encountered sickness in people is not traced immediately to a dangerous pathogen like salmonella or botulism, it will be from other unhealthful issues caused by the way the food animals are raised and fed. Even the stresses of animal confinement result in the delivery of less nutritious meat, and a price is paid for that in human health. Then, also, grain-fed beef increases the risk and likelihood of cardiovascular issues in people, but this is only one example of the issues needing to be addressed before the U.S. food supply can once again be made reliably healthful, nutritious, and safe in the public interest. The economies promoted by the factory farming of meat animals and poultry carries many public health and environmental costs more than offsetting any benefits to companies.
Because farmers have come to understand the health issues related to eating transgenic food, many of them, according to polling, will not eat the food they grow, but they do still grow it, and much of what they grow goes to feeding meat animals in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Then the farmers who do not want to eat what they grow may eat animals fed on what they have grown, and they may get the impacts on their health indirectly instead of directly. This is how the food system works, and the morality and ethics of it should have long ago been a subject of national and governmental concern, but that has been evaded.
The politically empowered have been so unconcerned about the healthful quality of the food created that 13 states have passed laws making it illegal to criticize the food that is grown under the modern anti-nutritional, health-destructive system, and healthcare laws have been passed to deal with the problems created for the nation without ever mentioning or dealing with the causes of the increasing amount of ill health. Mentioning that would be politically inconvenient, and it might get people sued under the so-called Food Libel laws as Oprah Winfrey and Howard Lyman were after Lyman appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the sources and dangers resulting for people from man-caused Mad Cow Disease.
After the discussion, beef prices fell in the United States, so a Texas feedlot sued under the Texas state Food Anti-Disparagement statute. The resulting court decision was finally in favor of the defendants, but it took six years, and it was not finally ended until August 2002. Mad Cow Disease or BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) is a disease resulting from feeding of offal and manure to meat animals as part of their ration. Exploitive corporate corner cutters figured out that manure still had unused food value in it, so they started mixing it into the feed ration with maybe some molasses to hide the flavor. Slaughterhouse wastes were also fed, and that is how the disease was propagated, but no one can easily know the existing extent of it in the population, because 30 years or more may be required before the symptoms are visible. It may look like Alzheimers Disease.
Because of similarities to other forms of dementia, the source of the disease or the diagnosis of it cannot be known definitively without an autopsy. People get the disease from eating the meat of a diseased animal, but they cannot know where they got it or what they ate and when because it commonly germinates for so long before people will know they are its victims. Hopefully now, the feeding practices causing the problem have been stopped, but new health problems caused by the feeding of transgenic corn, soy, cottonseed meal, canola, alfalfa, and sugar beets remain to be addressed. Based on the research available so far, their combined effect appears to be much worse than Mad Cow Disease, and they are also a result of exploitive, profligate agricultural corner cutting against the public interest.
The problems caused by Monsanto’s transgenic food also do not appear immediately, but they may not routinely need 30 years before they can be known. They need people to know what they are looking for and why they need to be looking for it. Much needs to be understood by many more people, and the understanding of it by the government should have been required long ago before Monsanto’s transgenic food was ever allowed onto the market. All the problems FDA scientist warned about have become reality based on research done mostly in other nations, but reliable research is still needed in the United States before the nation can be considered a honorable, respectable, admirable member of the international community. In the meantime, the U.S. has used the power of its wealth and international status to force the transgenic abuse onto other nations.
The mechanism of exploitation of today’s working farmers is different than it was in the 18th century or over the years since then, but the underlying attitudes are not different and neither is the court’s support for them. No cannon has been rolled out and fired at farmers yet as it was during the Daniel Shays Rebellion, but the modern equivalent might have been used if thousands of farmers and their supporters had gathered in protest at the Supreme Court following the court’s decision on January 13, 2014. If farmers had camped there for weeks and months in the effort to achieve justice, force could have been rolled out against them.
Maybe farmers in the United States would not protest in that way anymore because they saw what happened when they gathered in large numbers in Washington from 1978-80. When they first went to Washington, many thought they would only need to explain the problem to lawmakers and they would fix it. A farmer and Baptist lay minister from Arkansas, Odis Chapman, told his wife he was going to stay in Washington in 1978 “as long as it took, even if it took all week.” Three years later many farmers were still there trying to get the job done, and they saw how the politicians sweet-talked them and waited them out until they had to go back home to plant their crops. On the other side were the corporate agribusiness lobbyists in Washington all the time and at the campaign fund-raisers all the time. Farmers wound up with relatively little to show for all the effort they made, and they certainly did not do anything to reform farm policy.
After Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, the management of farm policy got worse than it had been under President Carter and before that. When the Republicans have been in control of the Congress, they have done more than Democrats to use farm policy not just to advance the interests of agribusiness but also to employ it to funnel money to their favored rural constituencies the same as they funnel money to business and seek to get some of it back through campaign contributions. They also used the faith-based initiative to get money to their religious constituencies. It is all part of the same game to establish entrenched political advantage for their own benefit and the benefit of their political allies.
Farmers seeking farm policy with a long-term vision serving the public interest have had to recognize the difficulty confronting the power of agribusiness and their allies in farm organizations like the Farm Bureau and in commodity groups like the National Corn Growers and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Instead of gathering in protest and anger, most farmers growing organic, biodynamic, or other non-transgenic crops and their supporters are still putting faith in the court system the same way Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP did for years before they finally achieved the landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education in 1954. They are are too few in numbers to do otherwise. Full-time farmers were less than a half-million in 1979, and they are fewer now. Farmers growing non-transgenic crops are a tiny fraction of them.
Whenever a new lawsuit is filed on the same issues asserted in the first one, everyone will have a chance to see if faith in the U.S. system of justice is justified or if some new judicial sophistry will be asserted against the right of farmers to be heard. The Brown v. Board decision took decades and multiple lawsuits before its time finally arrived, but it enabled faith in U.S. justice and democratic equality to be restored at least partly even if much more than one court decision was needed.
The decision also helped restore international faith in the United States during the Cold War, and it helped in building a more collaboratively productive nation able to win the Cold War contest against the Soviet Union. Now the same thing is needed again, but the present issue is worse because segregation did not destroy the public health. It only ignored human rights and human potential. That too is worse now with many more people affected, but many people if not most people still do not understand the issue now needing direct and immediate attention. If attention is not paid, public health and environmental costs will continue to grow.
The court’s Brown decision in 1954 took a belated step toward ending the status of second or third class citizenship demonstrating U.S. anti-democratic hypocrisy and advertising it for the whole world to see and condemn. Others could easily see the violation of stated U.S. principles memorialized in the Declaration of Independence. The failure was not overlooked by other nations, and neither is the current U.S. failure. The United States could not become a respected world leader after World War II until its racial problem was fixed or at least addressed, and a similar problem exists now as if no human rights lesson had yet been learned.
The food-related public health, human rights, and environmental exploitation is now far worse than it was on civil rights issues 50 years ago. The right to safe, healthful food is a more fundamental, important, and essential right than the right to equality in education and to desegregated public schools. That would be understood if the U.S. people were not so disconnected from the sources of their food and disrespecting of the gifts Mother Nature has made available to them.
Monsanto poses a worse assault on human rights than the discrimination against black citizens in the United States for a century following the Civil War and more than two centuries before that starting soon after the founding of the first North American colonies. The issue is worse than chattel slavery because more people are affected and the impact against them is more fundamental and damaging. It is worse because the impacts are more insidious and hard to see. When the people have been denied the right to know about the issues not only have basic human rights been denied, but democracy has been trashed with government support and collaboration. Having an African American President in charge of it is worse than if he were a slaveowner walking around the plantation cracking a bull whip.
The civil rights abuse of the past century was about equality and justice in enabling full democratic participation for about 10% of the nation’s people. Monsanto’s human rights issue is about the right to know what is needed to protect basic health so healthful longevity and long-term political participation is possible. It is about the right to health and to life for everyone in the U.S. and elsewhere. All we want is the chance to present our arguments about that, so our evidence and Monsanto’s can be examined to find the truth in the public interest.
This right has been negligently and anti-democratically denied to us as if we were second or third class citizens without a right to redress of our grievance; we have been told our complaint is not important enough to warrant court attention. Yet, there is no bigger or more important issue in the history of the nation or its short two centuries of jurisprudence. If food, health, and nutrition were as important to people as they should be, that would be understood, and it would be instantly important. It is not important in the United States because many people think they can eat whatever they want and fix any caused problems with medicine.
The court decision against us is like telling women who have been constrained and imprisoned under continuous threat of rape for years and even decades they do not have any claim because no rape was ever actually documented beyond the asserted claim of the victim, but the issue is worse than that because all the rest of the people are also victims. The younger people are, the greater their stake, and the less people understand, the more their risk. We are only the messengers trying to get a chance to adjudicate for everyone’s gain the now available evidence. Instead, we have been basically kicked in the face and told to crawl back into our hole. Farmers in Washington from 1978-80 were effectively treated the same way.
Against the publicly essential objective we have raised, the courts have said, the threat of farm rape and the associated inability to escape it is not bad enough to permit any meritorious claim to be heard by the courts. This is the decision three unjustly collaborative courts have perpetrated, so now the only option is gather a new group of co-plaintiffs who have actually experienced transgenic rape of their farms from Monsanto’s seeds and see what additional legal sophistry might be produced by the courts against the new group. If that effort fails similarly, the only remaining choice may be to march in the streets, but before that can happen the consuming public will need to understand their stake in the issue. Elections cannot be enough to bring change given the way the U.S. political system works.
In the face of the need to know the truth about Monsanto’s system of transgenic agriculture, the food it produces, and the destruction it causes, the courts have said: aggrieved farmers have no right to challenge Monsanto or the ruling corporate establishment whose interests have been protected by a corporately- obsequious government and its subservient courts. In sum, the courts have said Monsanto’s interest in pursuing profit at public expense is more important than the people’s interest in obtaining prudently safe, healthful, and nutritious food. Because of the power of corporations, they have been denied the right to know the truth about it, and that, in most people are fed much the same way livestock are without being given a right of informed consent or a right to know the impacts.
This is what the power of money in the U.S. governing system has wrought. The courts have said farmers and all of the people need to accommodate themselves to Monsanto’s corporate interests without a right to challenge or question their abusive and destructive biotech project, especially when it is governmentally endorsed and facilitated. This is worse than past slavery in its total social impact.
The established court standard is like the one in some places requiring a raped woman to marry her rapist with all rights of preventive or corrective redress denied to her. This assertion of corporate wealth against those without wealth and the knowledge needed to defend themselves is worse than the assertion of male power over women or past and continuing white racist power over people of color.
The observed principle making agribusiness corporations more important than farmers has been established politically for many decades, and it has massively and destructively changed the nature of farming, food, and public health in the United States, but the courts and the rest of the government want to continue with it as if the enterprise was beneficial. In our lawsuit, all the judges have affirmed the operating principles of their destructive jurisprudence the same as the money-dependent political system has done. They act like ancient Sadducees, and the system they have created cannot honorably be called a democracy. It has become an arbitrary, tyrannical, autocratic, pro-corporate plutocracy or corporatocracy.
Both judges and politicians have acted as if their behavior could be supported by respectable logic, but it is only supported by money-driven expediency and collaboratively self-serving prejudice at best, and at worst, it is pro-biotech bigotry. By extension, they both have said consumers do not matter any more than farmers. This is true because our lawsuit intended from the start to protect the interests of consumers as much as the interests of farmers. The truth needs to be determined more for the public than for farmers, and an honest, trustworthy, and fully-informed connection with the source of all food should be a basic right.
This right would have been written in the Bill of Rights if concern had existed about it at the time the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written. An amendment to the Constitution on this issue is now needed, but as long as Monsanto and their allies have as much financial power and political influence as they do, it would not pass in the Congress or in many state legislatures just as votes for transgenic food labeling and independent testing have not been passed.
This is the result when most public officials have been kept in ignorance about their food as much as any other citizens. Pressures to drive change could come from others nations, but the United States bas been habitually too arrogant and shameful to want to listen the ideas from people and scientists in other nations. They continuously and shameful suggest the man-made transgenic creations are smarter than anything offered under the wisdom of God. Instead, U.S. ideas have been forced on others using whatever leverage is possible. Wikileaks made that clear in its first revelation of government documents, but no correction resulted.
Many think that the work of government is only about interests, but if it is only about interests, it has failed.
Asserting the Power of Truth, Justice, and Wisdom Against Those Preventing the Fulfillment of That Fundamental Patriotic Obligation
Chapter 8
The mission of our lawyers at the Public Patent Foundation is the protection of the public interest in patent law. They would not have taken our case if it was a narrow dispute between two special interest groups. That would not have been worthy of their attention, but the case is worthy and for reasons three courts want to hide. They are all dedicated to subverting truth and undermining the pursuit of justice for the same reason the Congress and the White House has hidden the truth, maintained public ignorance, and prevented pursuit of truth and wisdom.
Judge Naomi Buchwald in New York treated us condescendingly and abusively making clear that our lawsuit did just have no merit sufficient to be heard but that it was impertinent of us to want to challenge the corporate authority figures of our culture. She told us that our contentions should not be tolerated, and it was as she wanted to beat us like dogs and send back under the porch. From her expressed perspective, we needed to learn our place the same way black citizens have been expected to in the past and the same way women have needed to in relation to men. She treated our attorneys much the same as she treated us, and it did not seem that the only issue was her prior reputation of being hostile toward civil rights and human rights contention. She seemed to be strongly pro-corporate.
In sum, black-robed gargoyles in three courtrooms might as well have stated in black and white that corporations like Monsanto are the new Gods of a neo-polytheistic, deceptively secular pseudo-religion, and what they want comes ahead of whatever the people need. They presented no honorable logic or proven findings to support what they have done, but they did it nonetheless. Judge Buchwald’s decision seemed more emotional and punitive than it was logical, and the judges of the Appeals Court seemed to want to create only dismissive artifice.
Neither court addressed the underlying science of transgenic agriculture, and they offered only wishful pseudo-science and the power of the associated money as if both should be assumed and taken for granted. By extension, the courts have stated: the truth does not matter, only corporate interests matter and only powerful financial interests will have any leverage under the U.S. system—because money is King in the United States. They have basically said: anything working against the interests of the money-empowered idolatry needs to be impugned, disregarded, and suppressed. That is the principle asserted against our lawsuit.
That means truth, justice, and wisdom do not matter when they conflict with the interest-driven power of money in the hands of a major Fortune 500 corporation. The ranking of companies by revenue is the way the high priests in the judicial temple establish the pecking order of the demi-gods as they assert their authority over the people. Negligent, interest-driven law is the asserted instrument of their control. The bottom line has been: how dare any miserable farmers crawl out of their holes to challenge the financially-derived powers defended by the courts; the judges said contrary ideas aimed to seek important truth, wisdom, and justice should be scorned and rejected as irrelevant. Especially Judge Buchwald said this.
The courts essentially said they have the authority on behalf of Monsanto’s established corporate power to define truth, wisdom, and justice as best serves corporate profitability without people like us having any right to contend against their abuses. The assertion of democratic rights on behalf of the people was not allowed a voice or even an opportunity to state the fundamental need for one.
This is the same thing judges did when they protected the rights of slave owners under the Fugitive Slave Acts and the rights of northern traders whose income was dependent on the work slaves did. Back then, state and local governments stood up against the federal government, refusing to return fugitive slaves and arresting bounty hunters. The same thing is beginning to happen now on the current issue as states begin to pass their own food labeling laws. Federal authority was rejected in northern board states before the Civil War, and similar opposition against federal pro-corporate behavior is emerging now. Corporations like Monsanto are the new plantation, the new feudal fiefdom, and political behavior in support of their interest is much as it was in the early 19th century.
Federal judges back then, the same as they have been now in our lawsuit, were not agents of justice; they were agents of the plantation system, and they defined justice to serve the economically dominant for own benefit. That is why the Dred Scott decision resulted as it did. It defended the system at the expense of justice. This exact same thing has happened now in response to our lawsuit. Judges and justices have sat in their fortress-like temples of secular law pretending to render justice, but they have made a joke of it as the politicians have also done when they promised paternalistic trickle down and other supposed but fictional benefits like those promised by Monsanto and its political allies. The problem must be fixed.
The issues being raised are greatly more important than most people, including many judges and justices, members of Congress, officials in government agencies, and national Presidents have understood or wanted to recognize. They are going along with the system, serving the interests of established political power at the expense of the people. The observed behavior makes all other previous public health and environmental disasters and tragedies look minor, even insignificant, and yet we have been hubristically stonewalled in our effort to present the honest, objective, independent science required to get to the truth. That is what self-serving tyrannies do. They discredit and deny everyone opposing their authority.
Fascist nations have done and Popes before that when they persisted in their belief the world was flat, pursued the Inquisition against Jews and others, and treated Martin Luther’s Reformation as if it were a criminal enterprise. Autocrats of all kinds have done similarly to protect their own privilege ahead of the truth, and they write law to serve their own purposes as they have done to protect Monsanto’s exploitation. Now, the theses against them need to be nailed to the door of the Supreme Court, the Congress, and White House, and the lower courts.
In the interest of truth and justice, our lawsuit would require Monsanto to present their evidence in support of their contentions, so the court and the people can decide about it, but the courts have shown they do not want to allow that anymore than the Pope at Rome wanted to hear the arguments of Martin Luther. They want to allow no questioning of any other aspect of their money-driven governing idea.
If we were to prevail against the autocratic U.S. power structure, Monsanto would not any longer have the free pass they have been given by the political system and the courts. They would finally have to prove the merits of their contentions as they have not yet been required to do. That would matter if democracy mattered, but it does not in the United States on this issue and maybe also others. Anyone thinking democracy exists on transgenic food and agriculture is either a fool or a charlatan. They are promoting profitable, exploitive, expedient myth over honest knowledge.
Pursuit of truth in a public forum is necessary because the government has whitewashed the story for decades and greased the skid for biotech agriculture, refusing to permit or require independent, objective, defensible investigation of the truth. All research into the safety of transgenic crops has been conducted by Monsanto or under contract for them, and the studies have been too brief to prove anything. Yet, without doing confirming research in the public interest, the government accepts whatever Monsanto says. The USDA simply affirms whatever Monsanto has claimed, as if it should be enough to know whatever Monsanto chooses to define as the truth. Government officials have been subservient, obsequious, compliant putty for Monsanto to mold for their own ends. This is the outcome when money is king, and democracy is as dead—as it is on this issue.
When the Supreme Court required the USDA-APHIS to perform an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) before releasing transgenic alfalfa onto the market, they only cut and pasted Monsanto’s own sponsored studies and did no independent work of their own to check Monsanto’s work. They said they had no authority under the law to do more than they did, but if the wanted to serve the public need, they would have asked the Congress for the authority they needed to do the independent, objective work an acceptable EIS should require of them. They did not want to do that, so the Supreme Court’s decision was a cruel joke perpetrated against the people the same as the decisions have been in our lawsuit. The result shows dedicated commitment to serve only the financially empowered.
This is a public travesty worthy of both prosecution and revolt; yet, the courts have sustained the continuing negligence as if it were wisdom. In a responsible, honest, public-spirited, and honorable nation, the failures of responsible diligence would be criminal behavior, but we do not live in that kind of nation anymore—at least, not on food safety, healthfulness, and nutrition issues. We live in a corporately servile nation as much as in the days when cotton was king and slavery was protected in the interest of the cotton economy. Back then, many said change was impossible because economic imperatives were too powerfully important and entrenched to make concern for human rights principles possible. That was the amoral, passive public docility of that era, and the same is seen now.
Plantation owners and associated northern traders held the politics, economics, humanity, and morality of the nation in a slavery-dependent death-grip that compromised the nation’s moral integrity the same as the corporately-empowered neo-feudalism does now. Maintaining control over people and keeping them ignorant so they can be exploited against their own interests is condoned now as much as it was in the era of chattel slavery and racial bigotry in the United States. Back then, also, people were denied what they needed to know to assert their basic human rights, and as a result, the society as a whole could not fulfill its potential.
This is the problem always seen among people who see the world as a zero-sum game. This what Monsanto does, and others like them have done similarly. President Obama has sustained this zero-sum view of the world and provided no leadership against it. They and their allies take away from others and also from the public health and the environment, so they can produce a gain for themselves. This is the disgrace they perpetrate for benefit of the empowered, exploitive elite.
Either public officials have been negligent in failing to investigate and understand the consequences of their actions or they have imposed a servile, pro-Monsanto, pro-biotech tyranny on the people without regard for the damage it causes. In fact, they have been eager to obsequiously deregulate companies and win campaign contributions in exchange; they have showed they do not care or even calculate the public health and environmental costs of what they have done. They hide that.
Because of collaborative government and court failures to serve the public need now and in the past, Monsanto has done more damage than nuclear holocaust. A full statement expressing this point of view by a botanist in Kashmir can be read here. If half of the chronic disease and affliction in the United States can be traced to Monsanto’s products as has been a minimum estimate based on the growth in those ailments since Monsanto’s products were first released onto the market without any independent, objective testing, the result would be equal to multiple nuclear holocausts. Obesity should be added to the tally whether or not it is a disease. Half of the U.S. people are considered obese and a many young people also. The problem has reached the point it has poses a threat to national security.
Because patent owners can prevent research, much is not known yet, but much is now known even if the full details take time to develop. Some things will not be explained until it is possible to make them clear in extensive court documents. Meanwhile, Monsanto’s governmentally-supported atrocity is worse than all the other public health and environmental stewardship failures in human history, and through the promoted agricultural methods, it is a major contributor to the problem of climate change and global warming. Even a limited, underfunded, and suppressed process of evidence gathering enables this assertion, and all we want is the opportunity to present the evidence so the truth can be collectively decided.
That has not yet been possible anywhere in the United States because of political/judicial collaboration with the aggressively profligate deregulatory promotion of the Monsanto chimera. The only public benefit from Monsanto’s project is a short-term, myopic cost-savings for farmers, and because it comes at enormous long-term public cost, it should not be given the benefit of government facilitation.
Many companies exist that do not give back as much as they take, but that does not mean the government should assist them in doing as they do. This is a moral issue, and by it, the nation is judged. Patents are a form of subsidy; they provide a defensive shell and allow companies to operate for a long time within that shell. In Monsanto’s case, ability has been shown to use it virtually forever without constraint. Based on the evidence, survival of life on the planet is being affected, and no one has enough knowledge yet to understand all the implications. That is the result of the U.S. failure of prudence and also the result of U.S. arrogance.
The public health and environmental costs need to be established in a public forum, especially when the press and media are as negligent and supinely subservient to Monsanto’s profligacy as the government has been. With obscene, blind disregard for the public welfare and the environment, corporately-dominated, subservient politicians and judges show they do not want to allow the presentation of evidence in opposition to their pro-biotech, pro-corporate, secular religion, arrogant and self-satisfied bias, and derelict, health-hostile tyranny.
The pro-corporate ideological, political, and philosophical tyranny is as bad or worse than the biological, commercial, economic, nutritional, environmental, and public health tyranny, and it is worse than chattel slavery in the past because it affects the healthful, safe, and nutritional well-being of many more people in many nations. The people need to rise up against the impairments imposed on them, and they need to inform themselves, but they have been intentionally kept in ignorance for decades, because Monsanto is a sacred politically-sustained cow.
Because of the importance of the issues, work must continue against Monsanto’s destruction and negligent disservice to the public interest. Contrary to Monsanto’s contentions, their products are not safe for anyone or any living creature, but some people believe them safe because Monsanto has used its patent rights, contracts with research institutions, and money-driven political influence to prevent objective, independent, truth-revealing studies in the United States. This is abusive, reprehensible subversion of public responsibility with government support and collaboration. Monsanto’s government-supported power has given them an enormous megaphone. Without it, their large client base would not exist.
The decision by the Supreme Court against the public responsibility to examine the issues at stake in our lawsuit makes public resistance against Monsanto more imperative than ever. The battle must be waged also against Monsanto’s allies in the government and the media, because they are as profligate as Monsanto and the government in causing harm to the public health and the environment. Press and media failures have continued recently just as negligently as in the past. Worse, in the U.S., amorality and even fraudulence is virtually taken for granted.
The facts supporting these contentions would have been presented if our right to bring our lawsuit to court had not been stonewalled by the Judiciary as much as Monsanto’s abuse and destruction has been ignored and even promoted by the U.S. Congress and the White House. Collaboration with this outrageous tyranny can only be ended when the presentation of evidence is possible. That is the first step in allowing the people to be informed. Years of shameful, atrocious, bizarre, governmentally-enforced public ignorance must end before the ensuing steps can be taken to reduce the public health costs and ensure environmental protection.
The United States is supposed to be a democracy where the free flow of honest and accurate information matters, but that has not been observed on the issues related to transgenic food and agriculture. The opposite has been the rule as if the U.S. people had voted to become a Fascist nation where people are fed both manufactured food and fictitious information as abusively as if they were chattel livestock in a confined, disease-ridden, horrendously inhumane, feeding factory.
Because of the seriousness of the issues, we cannot cease in our continuing effort to help people understand and investigate the truth about transgenic agriculture in their own essential interest. This is true because only the people can repair the failures wrought willfully by their governing institutions and the self-serving irresponsible officials nominally managing them. In the process, we will promote food and farming wisdom and the re-establishment of justice in service to essential public health and environmental protection. Patriotism requires that.
The Supreme Court decision not to review our lawsuit shows all three branches of the government in lockstep support of Monsanto’s transgenic technology without wanting to allow anyone to present evidence against it or independently examine it. If Monsanto was confident about the value of their technology, they would want to present their evidence about it everywhere possible, but they do not want to do that. They have been dedicated to hiding the impacts of their transgenic project.
Monsanto only green-washes their project with propaganda about short-term advantages, and they actively seek help from their government allies, the media, and other companies in fulfilling that objective. This would not be possible if the United States did not emphasize short-term expediencies, neglecting long-term risks and damage. Monsanto has made clear they do not want the courts to hear any evidence failing to support their own profitable interests, and the courts have supported them in this negligent atrocity. This is the shameful national reality.
This is a sad result for U.S. democracy when the government has proved itself irresponsibly closed-minded in service to the interests of political insiders and corporations at the expense of the people. The Supreme Court and the two lower courts have essentially said to us and the world: Our minds are made up; do not confuse us with any facts or any fair process serving to reveal facts to anyone else.
The same as they did in the 19th century to sustain slavery and bigotry, judges and justices have said they want to allow prejudiced science and transgenic tyranny to prevail and thrive without any questions raised about it. Monsanto is like a mad scientist in pursuit of doomsday, and neither the Congress, the White House, the media, nor the courts have wanted to blow the whistle on it. They are all like intimidated and controlled employees in their monetary dependency Not only have they shown no interest in knowing the truth or allowing the objective pursuit of it, they have done much worse than that. They have protected deceitful anti-science because they are subservient to corporate money and its neo-feudalism.
This is the image created of to portray U.S. pseudo-democracy to the world, and it has worked to destroy respect for the United States in many other nations. It could not have worked better if it had been sponsored with subversive intent. If the people in other nations agreed with blind, myopic, intentionally deceptive U.S. model, they would not require transgenic food to be labeled, but they do—in 64 nations. No modern, developed or aspiring nation is worse than the United States on this issue, and that shows how far out of step the United States is with the majority of the world’s people. Even nations with a history of tyranny require transgenic food labeling, and they also know the need for independent research.
In Russia, President Putin asked scientists for a recommendation about the safety of transgenic food, and they recommended a ten-year moratorium against the introduction of it, so the necessary research could be done and the past research could be confirmed. Other nations have done similarly, and Ecuador banned it in their Constitution. These actions show the perceived need for prudence in many other nations, and they show respect for the large amount that is not sufficiently understood yet, but beyond that, the decision in Ecuador reflects a firm belief man-made, transgenic agriculture will never be able to serve the public interest. That could be true, given the complexities of gene interaction and the range of toxins, allergens, and new diseases created as a result of the raised health issues.
The strongest opposition to transgenic food may reflect knowledge the most nourishing food is the food the digestive system of animals, people, and other creatures has evolved over millions of years to utilize. Life is a delicate balance of interactions needed to maintain it, and this is the balance Monsanto, its corporate allies, and its government collaborators are willfully and ignorantly disrupting.
Against this, to support the goal of forcing their transgenic creations into the diet of the human population and its domesticated dairy and meat animals, Monsanto and their allies accuse their opponents of being anti-science Luddites, but their’s is the out-of-date, negligent, reprehensible, and dis-proven science entirely based on an antique preconception about the way genetics work. Their technology arises from the theory suggesting one gene equals one trait with no other impacts. They view biotechnology as if it was no different from putting on a hat, a coat, or shoes.
In this vastly over-simplified conception lies Monsanto’s failure and the long- cooperating government failure. In the U.S., honorable, necessary prudence is AWOL, and one of the measures of the failure of public responsibility is in the increase in human infertility and the hundreds of clinics in the United States helping people to address this health issue. In the past, these were not needed, but the reason why not has not been explored. That would be politically inconvenient to understand or even seek to know in a nation where corporate wealth is king.
Monsanto is a Dangerous Superweed and the U.S. Government with Judicial Support Has Watered and Fertilized It
Chapter 9
The U.S. political process has pursued subterfuge to hide the facts about the transgenic trespass against people and animals from the public for more than two decades, and apart from the role played by money in politics that most likely would not have happened. Ongoing abuse of science and the continuing political collaboration between corporations and politicians needs to end, and patriotism is needed to accomplish the change. Transgenic tyranny is more exploitative than the tyranny of British King George III, and that is the reason people must inform themselves to resist it—if their health has not already been eroded too much.
Our court action against Monsanto has been filed by farmers, seed companies, and farming and food-related organizations dedicated to protecting farming and food wisdom, justice and integrity. Injustice against everyone in the United States and others nations has been perpetrated by Monsanto’s abuse of patent law and by the government in support of them. Negligent administration of patents by the Patent Office is as bad as the negligent administration by the FDA, USDA, EPA and other agencies. Worse is the failure of the government to get the authority it needs to protect the people ahead of corporations. Citizens need to demand real change.
So far elections have not been able to produce the change needed, because both parties are almost equally dependent on corporately-derived campaign money.
The atrocity of corporate subservience needs to end, and this is important to everyone. We have been been doing our best to stand like Horatio at the bridge until the next steps in the campaign against Monsanto’s destruction can be advanced. The pursuit of food labeling is important, but it cannot do everything that is needed to end Monsanto’s tyranny against the people. That cannot happen until people understand the long-term costs and harm. Also, the effort needs to waged on every front possible. The issues are too important not to do that, and more people need to join the effort.
When a new lawsuit or maybe more than one is filed to continue the pursuit of justice, they will likely be filed by plaintiffs much the same as those of us who joined in filing the initial lawsuit. The same commitment to healthful, nutritious, and safe food will be central to any future effort. As part of that objective, the challenge against Monsanto’s patents must continue along with effort to end their right to file patent infringement lawsuits against 99% of the organic, biodynamic, and other farmers growing non-transgenic crops. Because they can sue these farmers, they are most likely going to be able to chill and prevent contamination damage suits, and that allows them unrestrained marketing freedom to promote their crops despite the damage they do and despite the continuing transgenic trespass against everyone.
The effort must continue also to protect even the farmers who have been buying and using Monsanto’s seeds. This is important because they have run themselves up a blind alley of false promises and self-abuse pursuing Monsanto’s agricultural system, and now they see the result is 50 varieties of herbicide-resistant superweeds and also resistant insects able to withstand the Bt toxin Monsanto injects into crop DNA without regard for the extensive environmental and public health destruction studies have shown it to cause. Studies on this matter go all the way back to twenty years ago.
Many farmers are coming to understand Monsanto’s scientific bankruptcy as they struggle against super weeds, super insects, and the dead, mineral-deprived soil caused by Monsanto’s farming system. Most farmers have been found by polling to avoid eating transgenic food even though they grow it. They feel they need to grow it because federal policy has forced them to use the lowest-cost methods regardless of the public costs and destruction. This is the myopia promoted by the dysfunctional, servile U.S. government; it is as if the Congress and the President were elected to subvert their own nation in service to corporate profits with courts dedicated to help.
The answer to the problem Monsanto has created is not worse subservience to even more dangerous herbicides and seeds, but that is the course they want to pursue with prostrate, fast-tracked government support. Many farmers’ practices are so addicted to chemicals and biotechnology, they think that is the best way to farm, but even those who do not like it feel forced to use the Monsanto system because they do not see an alternative given the economic pressures imposed on them by federal farm policy.
This shows how far the government and those serving in it are from prudence, necessary objectivity, and independent judgment on the issues being raised. The time is now to get back to the wisdom of nature and to end the continuing destruction, but it will likely require a public uprising to get it done. Before that can happen the people need to finally become informed. As a result of three years of delay by the court process on Monsanto’s dismissal motion against our lawsuit and supine refusal by the courts to stand up against it, the need is greater than it was in 2011 when our lawsuit was originally filed and when enough years had passed for reliable, objective, independent research to be gathered from the work of scientists in other nations.
Continuing work is important because Monsanto’s farming practices are a major factor in destroying the ability of the soil and bodies of water to sequester carbon dioxide. Among the issues, the Monsanto methods encourage the continuing use of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer in mono-crop farming; this creates nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas hundreds of times more potent than carbon dioxide and also far more potent than the methane gas being released from the melting of polar ice and from animal feed lots. Monsanto’s chemicals also directly kill the ability of the soil to work as it should to both create nutritional food value and to protect the ability of the soil to sequester carbon dioxide. Instead, the health promoting life in the soil is killed.
This destruction of soil culture further motivates the work we need to do and have been doing for the past four years—and now, we need to advance it more intensively. The response to government negligence cannot be capitulation. That would not be a responsible legacy to leave our children. Better than that is required without delay.
History will remember Judge Naomi R. Buchwald of the Southern District of New York and the Judges Dyk, Bryson, and Moore of the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit as well as the nine justices of the Supreme Court for stonewalling the responsible concern over a tragedy that makes the BP-Halliburton Gulf oil spill look like a child’s bed wetting accident. They will be seen as worse than the judges in the past who sustained Jim Crow laws and other manifestations of error and injustice, but they are only blind and myopic participants in a culture that has lost connection with the food essential to healthful nutrition and food safety for people and creatures.
Many people have even been weaned away from an expectation about the food flavor necessary to know nutritive value exists in it. This has been accomplished through the deceptive use of salt, sugar, chemicals, flavoring agents, and also addictive substances of various kinds. For example, people like to eat pizza in part because the cheese in it is addicting, but most pizza is not a source of balanced healthful nutrition.
Companies in the food industry have the creation and marketing of anti-nutritional food down to an art with undefined, ambiguous terms like “all-natural” as part of their scam. In 2014, Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, along with their new organization called the Coalition for Safe Affordable Food have been lobbying the FDA to allow transgenic content to fit within their promoted definition of “natural.” This could become yet another example of corporations being allowed to define truth and wisdom to serve their own interests against the public health need.
In addition, the industry lobbying effort is trying to preempt state transgenic food labeling laws by getting federal law establishing voluntary labeling as the federal standard. Voluntary labeling is possible now, but no sellers of transgenic food has taken advantage of it to tell the consuming public about transgenic content in food. Mandatory labeling is required, but industry is making an end run around that need.
Before Monsanto got started with transgenic food, the problems with compromised, deceptively-advertised agribusiness food was already so bad Monsanto could fit right into the ongoing project as if their additional abuses should not matter and no one should care, but their game is far worse than anything done before. They raise anti-nutritional negligence and health destruction to a new level of myopic imprudence.
Decades have been needed to start repairing past errors on civil justice and human rights, but on the present matter, decades are not available before the point of failsafe may be passed. The judgment of history will be rendered faster than previously. Many of the irresponsible people may still be alive when their error and negligence is finally established. Some might want to see them tarred and feathered once the failure of public responsibility is fully understood. If the failures were not so pervasive with so many profligate and blind collaborators, prosecution and jail time would be in order.
The trouble is: the jails do not have enough space for all of the guilty, and measuring the more guilty and the less guilty becomes a big challenge. The question becomes: how would it ever be possible to prosecute an entire culture or nation, but people in other nations will want to do that unless the United States changes course and does the moral work to understand the implications of what is happening to agriculture and food as a result of the observed U.S. dependency on corporate political funding.
In a world of nominal democracies where the people should bear ultimate responsibility for all political decisions, an international court should exist for the adjudication of cases against nations. The United States would fight that the same as it fought against the International Criminal Court in the end because it feared the likelihood of its own people being brought to trial there, but some day enough people in other days will probably stand up to require a system of justice able prosecute the negligence of nations. The more the need is seen, the sooner Judgment Day will come.
When that day comes there may be no mercy even though the judges and justices are also victims of their culture as much as they are perpetrators of massive abuse, injustice, and ignorance; they know little more than all the other victims of the systemic failure. If they did know, they would have done differently than they have done, and they would want to serve the public better than they have so far been able.
Judges and justices may be hubristic in style because of the authority they have, and all other judges may be the same way, but that does not mean they know all they need to know to make wise decisions. It only means they can get away with their ignorance because it afflicts the whole culture and the whole nation just as much. Just has some judges and justices have not wanted to learn from the knowledge and perspectives of other nations, so have the people of the United States shown disinterest in respecting and learning from others. This is a cultural affliction associated with being citizens of a wealthy nation. Citizens of ancient Rome felt the same way, and so did the citizens of Great Britain when their empire was at the height of its great international power.
As soon as possible, more litigation will be required to try again to address the hubris the judges have shown against us, but a new group of plaintiffs is also required to bring any new lawsuit, and that could take a year of work if it requires the same amount of time needed to gather the first group of co-plaintiffs in the first lawsuit. The work could be harder, because the courts have essentially said plaintiffs need to at least have their neck in the guillotine with the knife on the way down before they can have standing to file a lawsuit. Because the co-plaintiffs will they need to put themselves in direct risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Monsanto before they can have the legal standing to present their complaint and arguments in court, the number of people willing to stand up could be severely reduced. That may have been the intention of the decisions the court reached and the Supreme Court sustained.
Possibly, if we present a group that has suffered contamination because that is what they seem to have said they require, they will say, “No, you must have plaintiffs who have actually been sued by Monsanto.” They could say that even those who have been harassed and bullied by Monsanto are not eligible, but they have not said that yet. The question is about the size of the injustice they will be willing to perpetrate against a group they perceive as too small to be worthy of consideration. As long as they feel able to ignore our issues with impunity, they will probably fabricate a way to do that.
This is what we are up against when the courts have shown they want to use whatever arguments they can conjure to deny us the right to present our arguments in court. This is the mark of a system where justice is readily denied to protect the interests of elite corporations no matter the cost to the people and the environment. This abusive system of injustice will be able to persist as long as docile and passive citizens allow it.
The current group of co-plaintiffs was found by the courts to have an insufficiently immediate grievance against Monsanto even though they are in daily threat of contamination and some have refrained from farming activities they want to pursue because the risk of contamination is too great. The finding is atrocious, but it is expected under the values of a judicial culture committed to protecting some at the expense of others. That is what exploitive, unjust cultures do, but it is not democratic.
The observed behavior is a repudiation of democratic principles, but the courts can get away with it because there is no countering vigilance to make sure the whistle is blown on such abuse. This is what happens in an urbanized and suburbanized culture that is disconnected from its life-support system and takes it ignorantly for granted. The judges know the people are too docile, passive, and compliant to pound down the doors in the face of the injustice against their welfare, but the people are as they are because they have been kept in ignorance by those they have trusted to protect them.
This is also what happens in a nation where farmers are less than two percent of the people and most of the growing is done by only a few hundred thousand. That is too small a minority for most politicians and citizens to want to worry about. In addition, most farmers have been educated under a system denying them knowledge about the requirements of a wise, prudent, healthful, and sustainable food system. This kind of education inoculates them only with the ideas of the chemically-dependent, transgenic farming system. That, again, in the result of the power of corporate money in the system. In this part of the story, the educational system is corrupted the same way the political system has become corrupted because of its dependency on money.
If justice, wisdom, knowledge, and diligence had prevailed—as it does not, the opportunity to examine our contentions would have been welcomed, and many people would have been interested to hear the story we have to tell. That is not the way the system now works in the United States. When effort is made to maintain public ignorance for corporate benefit, information is institutionally unwelcomed.
If this were not the way the system works, our right to a full court hearing would have been automatically understood and sustained, but in an urbanized and suburbanized culture, multilateral ignorant arrogance and hubris takes the place of respect for farming and the essentials of quality food. Modern farmers have been abused the same way slaves were anti-democratically abused. They were the farmers of their era, and not many plantation owners did as Thomas Jefferson did, paying his slaves for food they grew in their own gardens on their own time. In this, Jefferson introduced the idea of over-time work even within the slave system. He also allowed some of his slaves to have businesses from which they could profit. This was part of his way of promoting social change even within an economic system he was unable to change.
Jefferson shows an element of respect others did not and still do not. Today, when no communication is promoted among mutually alienated rural and urban groups, the ills of the culture cannot be fixed, but the empowered do not want them fixed. Division and conquest by the corporations would not be possible if that was promoted, but the result cannot be called admirable democracy. Because of the way things work in the United States, it cannot be called a real democracy, and a large number of prejudiced people and politicians do not want it to become one. They need the system to work as it does because their power within the system depends on that they same way the past power of slaveowners depended on retaining the status quo.
Some will even say: the United States was not even intended to be a democracy; it was always intended to be a republic where the elected representatives and appointed officials are chosen to do the thinking for the rest of the people and serve their interests as they think they should. The trouble with this is: they have shown they think the best is a system keeping most of the people on a permanent treadmill of dependency, and that is not a culture with citizens who would be capable of making a democracy work. Thus, the preferred republic based on citizen dependency could not ever be likely to become a democracy unless the citizens both require it and gain the skill needed to make it work. That is not a system that yet exists in the United States.
In sum, the U.S. system has been worked to ensure it cannot live up to any democratic promise, and even when the Constitution was written in 1787, the intention was to protect the financially-empowered, governing elites at the expense of the rest of the people. Democracy requires respect for the wisdom of the people and trust in the ability of the people to serve the public interest without voting themselves largesse at high public cost, but the United States has a system where the governing elites are the only ones entitled to vote themselves largess at public expense, and that is the way they want it to be. They have worked for centuries to keep it permanently that way.
The denial the legal standing against our lawsuit is a symptom of an anti-democratic culture that will ultimately promote and ensure its own demise. It is too defensive of its own pattern of empowerment, short-sighted, and expedient to prevent the self-destruction from occurring. Many people may they think they can force into permanent existence the republican reality they prefer, but if so, the truth will ultimately catch up to them. In this case, that is likely to happen sooner rather than later and with higher public costs rather than the lower costs that would have been possible if the empowered people were open-minded and dedicated to seeking the truth before they plunged ahead arrogantly in pursuit of their own harmful follies.
Judge Buchwald is a better poster image of this preference than the other judges and justices, but the others are not far behind her. The Supreme Court is only saved by the ambiguity of its decision. No one can know for sure what they were thinking; observers can only be sure what they were not thinking. Demonstrably, they were not motivated by the need to seek truth, justice, and wisdom by giving our contentions the right to be heard in court as soon has reasonably possible without more delay.
The legal arguments asserted against us by the lower courts and by the decision of the Supreme Court not to review the decisions in our case are no more than a measure of the nation’s collective moral, ethical, empathetic, and democratic temperature. They reveal to the world what is important in the United States and what is not. Most likely, more people will have been paying attention to that statement in other nations than were paying attention to it in the United States. That is because more people are concerned about the raised issues in other nations and more interested in the truth about them than are concerned about the facts and implications in the United States.
This circumstance could mean the elements of functional, respectable, admirable democracy are more important in other nations than they are in the United States. Likely, the people of other nations also know more and are not kept in ignorance as the U.S. people have been. Democracy requires informed citizens, and when citizens are not informed, democracy cannot exist at least on the topic in question even if it may exist on others. Maybe the false image of democracy can exist, but the reality of it is not possible. That is true because the people can be easily exploited and abused when they are ignorant. When they are not informed, they can be led to vote against the public interest and the public need as they have been in at least two U.S states, California and Washington, by deceptive, manipulative corporate propaganda efforts.
People can be led to believe ignorance is better, and that has been seen in both of the states, even if only by a narrow margin. The situation is like raising rabbits in a cage and expecting them to be turned loose in a forest without being eat by a fox within hours. As long as they are in their cage, the rabbits are free to think what they want about the competence of their own judgment, knowledge, and superior skills. They are free to deny reality and believe any folly they want. That is the way it is for judges. They live in a cage, and as long as they behave like everyone else in the protected cage, the surrounding culture may accept and even like or take for granted what they do.
Both judges and politicians can persist as they do until their entire culture comes to pay an astronomical or unpayable price for the promoted folly, but the story is worse than that now. Judges are part of an entirely caged culture where the vast majority, including even most farmers are isolated from what they need to know to protect the long-term public welfare and serve the health needs of the nation and the world. They are like a truck driver who is vulnerable to tragedy because of his or her blind spots. The United States exemplifies an entire culture living in its own fabricated blind spot.
In the past, when judges rode circuits and had occasion to connect with the realities of all the people over whose lives they had to make judgments, justice had some chance to prevail, but now things are different. Judges lives in a judicial cage for a major portion of a lifetime and that judicial cage is a cage within the larger urbanized, suburbanized cultural cage, and just as the rabbits in a cage grow lovely fur, unskilled minds, and soft muscles, the judges in their cages grow pride in their oblivious and disconnected wisdom with their hubris and arrogance as the witnessed measure of it.
Humanitarian humility may become uncommon in such an environment, and that was seen in dramatic, Oscar-worthy detail in the two ludicrous decisions the judges wrote in support of Monsanto’s dismissal motion. In full technicolor, they showed how much they did not know and did not want to bother to learn. If it did not impact the nation so painfully, the tragedy of it to one or a few hapless judges might not much matter. Maybe in most of their decisions, it does not matter to more than a few people or special interests, but that is not the way implications work out in this case.
In relation to raised food and agriculture issues at hand, none of the required discussion about the importance of the asserted contentions has been found in the print press, the broadcast media, or the online legal blogs, and that is a further indictment of the self-destructive reality existing in the urban-suburban cage. Given the importance to everyone of the issues being raised and the low level of public understanding about them, better was hoped for, but it was not found. The Internet media have done better but not well enough to fill the information gap. The Internet cannot meet the need because not enough people use the Internet to obtain the news the other news outlets do not cover. In part, the Internet is a more promising source of all the needed or essential news because it is international in scope and range of coverage. Because of that, it can escape the confines of the U.S. urban-suburban cage.
Things are so bad, the corporate, mainstream media may be tracked only to know what the corporations want the citizens to know and not know. They are no longer a good source of everything people need to know. They may be filled with whatever they think their readers and listeners want to know, but they may have little if anything they truly need to know. Worse, some of them may be only organs of corporate and ideological propaganda and entertainment or infotainment designed to lead people astray, so the corporate rapists can pillage the Commons at will regardless of the public damage. In other words, they are more designed to put people to sleep than to serve their essential informational needs. This is what U.S. “democracy” has enabled.
Often when discussions about the lawsuit and the underlying issues has been seen in the mainstream corporate media they have been flagrantly limited or maybe intentionally limited or erroneous in service to the biotech agribusiness agenda. The need to responsibly inform the people has been forgotten or intentionally ignored, and that is the reason this Web site is needed. It cannot state all the arguments to be presented in court, but it can try to do more than has been possible in filed legal briefs and the brief media interviews so far published mostly only on the Internet.
Some of the interviews have provided valuable summaries, but they cannot get deep into the detail needed by people who are desperately disconnected and even alienated from the sources of their food. Those who are tolerant, submissive, and docile in the face of the abuse by chemical companies and negligent scientists practicing disproven and out-dated genetic ideas may not even know what Monsanto is or what it does, and surveys have proved that to be the reigning reality. The best journalism on the Internet has been better than the reporting in corporate mainstream media organs, including even formerly-trusted publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times, but even the best coverage has not offered enough to fulfill the people’s need for information. People need more than they have been able to get if they want to learn the truth, gain wisdom, foster justice, and build a prudent sustainable culture.
The problem cannot be blamed only on the media; much of the trouble also relates to the large amount of information needing to be understood and assimilated before the responsibility of democratic citizenship can be fulfilled. This problem confronts judges just as much as citizens, but until the problem has been publicly identified and collectively addressed, the repair of it remains impossible. Better is needed than has been seen, and this, too, points to the quality and breadth of citizenship education.
We are grateful for the coverage that has been possible in the places where it has been accurate and honest, but this lawsuit and any to follow in the pursuit of truth, wisdom, and justice on the raised issues will continue to be about a complex collection of facts that cannot be covered even in 30 or 60 minute broadcast interviews. Deeper digging is required, and many news organizations do not want to spend the time or the resources that would be necessary to find the truth about such a complex story. For the same reason, they have wanted to cut back on their international news coverage. As a result, they have rested their poorly-informed news judgment on myopic, erroneous, and even deceitful prejudice and propaganda sometimes directly fed to them by Monsanto and their public relations consultants.
If the media had done their job over the past two or three decades on the issues being raised, no lawsuit like ours would probably have been necessary. The problems would have been fixed in the normal course of work within a political process guided by informed citizens and informed lawmakers, but informed citizenship on the issues surrounding transgenic food and agriculture does not exist among more than a small minority, maybe as small as 10%, and even transgenic food labeling is not enough to inform the people. That will answer the right to know but not the reasons to know.
Journalistic failure on the raised issues has been observed in many leading news organizations, including the major news sources of record like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, as well as others. Some outlets based abroad have done a bit better because their constituencies demand it of them, but none has covered the story thoroughly or well enough to illuminate everything. Sometimes, the pursuit of the truth even in well-regarded academic journals has been atrocious and incredible beyond responsible belief.
This was especially true in the case of the politically driven decision by the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology to rescind its publication of the French two-year rat feeding study that did exactly as it set out to do: use the exact Monsanto protocols but extend the study from 90 days to the two-year lifespan of the rats. If the study was inadequate, so were the Monsanto studies before it. In fact, they were worse because they were too short to learn anything they needed to find out, but no fault was found with them for their failure to reveal essential long-term information about the impacts of transgenic food on the health and well-being of people and livestock.
Interviewing citizens in front of the Whole Foods Market in Alexandria, Virginia. Whole Foods shoppers might have been expected to be smarter than shoppers at many other grocery chain stores!
U.S. Government Complicity and the Answer to It
Chapter 10
If a culture is incapable of promoting and ensuring morality in the food it provides for people to eat when food is the foundation stone of everything people do, it will be incapable of morality in much else it may hope to accomplish. Morality will not be important in its system of values, and that has been evident in the United States. It is particularly evident in the court decisions against our lawsuit. Amorality has been taken virtually for granted, and the political decision makers in the United States have done that routinely. When the President of the United States endorsed the need for transgenic food labeling in 2007 while he was campaigning for President in Iowa but has done nothing about it once he was elected, he showed he is only concerned about protecting corporate interests and not about public morality or public health.
President Obama showed himself willing to make disingenuous commitments to win primary votes without being willing to act on the commitment once he ascended to national office. The basic integrity to follow up on commitment has been absent. He is not the first President failing to fulfill campaign commitments, but when the failures happen, they have a corrupting moral influence on both national behavior and the cynicism produced among the nation’s and the world’s citizens. A price is paid for it in perceived moral quality and respected admirability of the U.S. governing ideal.
The failure is not just reflected in food and farming; it is reflected in many places, including maybe particularly international relations. As the world gets smaller and more interconnected, morality becomes more important in the way people and nations relate to each other. Interests are not enough to promote adequate outcomes. Neither people, companies, nor nations can be respected, admired, nor appreciated if they cannot do more than pursue their own interests. Something is needed to separate people and now particularly nations from animals and wild packs of them.
If President Obama did not know enough to be committed to the position he took on transgenic food labeling, he could have done what he needed to do to learn the facts. He should have been better qualified than most people to escape the propaganda trap even if he was and still is ignorant about agriculture, biology, environmental science, and genetics. Deception by political candidates is no better than deception by self-promoting corporations; they discredit the nation and the culture spawning them.
Maybe it would not matter so much to fail on a minor commitment during an election season even if candidates do keep a record of the commitments they make, so they do not forget them, but on a commitment like the one on food labeling, the issues in the balance are not minor. They are sickness and health, life and death issues, and anyone willing to be slippery on such big issues makes clear their own moral failings.
Without doubt, the White House spin machine would say that Monsanto’s customers and the company’s huge array of political allies have more political leverage than the people and organizations on our side of the balance, but that should not be the determining issue when the health of the people and the welfare of the environment are being sold out. On this, the Obama White house has been no better than any previous Presidential administration in the United States, but President Obama promised change in the way business would be done. On that matter, he has failed.
On the issue that is most important: the food people need need to live healthful and fruitful lives for the time needed to do important work and build an admirable, respected, and moral culture, a President cannot afford to be ignorant, oblivious, or disregarding of the essential facts. This is especially true if he wants to honorably address the politics of healthcare. The trouble is: the President addressed healthcare without wanting to address the causes of ill-health. He was the same as his wife when she addressed obesity without addressing the farm and food policy-related causes of it and the other related failings. The result is political fluff without substance. It is like a campaign to favor apple pie and motherhood, and it is also like addressing poverty without examining the sources of it or finding the funding to create jobs.
President Obama has facilitated the destruction of the public health to the point Obamacare will not be able to make enough improvements to fix all the health problems that have been made worse by the continuing public ignorance and government negligence in service to the power of corporate money, but the point should not be to pick on one President more than all the others with a hand in causing the problem; he is little worse than those preceding him over three previous decades.
All the recent Presidents have wanted to milk the corporate cow for campaign funding. President Obama is as bad as the others but maybe not much worse. The problem is a system that does not require any better and tolerates atrocious, blind, and egregious health and environmentally destructive failure as if that should be normal. The problem is a system that makes corporate interests and the power of money more important than honest morality and ignores big public needs to do it.
On something as basic as food, the nation cannot wait for a President with the guts and the integrity to stand up against corporate power when the health of the nation depends on it, and the nation is drowning in healthcare costs. President Obama has shown whose side he is on by the appointments and decisions he has made, and he has also shown his shameful comfort with the reigning national food expediencies.
During his first term, President Obama said some things were more important than winning a second term, but those values have not been seen in his actions on major issues and especially not on the transgenic food issue. They have not been seen even during the second term when reelection is no longer an issue. “Going-with-the-established-flow” has been the rule, and that is not a mark of respectable leadership.
For the same reason, the administration did not fight for the needs of people who still need food stamps because of the state of the economy leaves them in jeopardy. The cuts were less than the Republicans wanted, but cuts were still made when the need for the program is still great. The brunt of the Great Recession has been carried by the people at the bottom; yet, they are the people whose benefits have been cut. The people who have been hurt the worst by failures of policy are being cut off, and the people who have caused the problem are beneficiaries of government largess the same as Monsanto has been. The most dangerous give away to Monsanto in 2013 was the relaxation of the standard on Glyphosate residues in food. That will have grave health and continuing environmental consequences. This is what happens when politicians listen more to those with the money they need to fund their reelection.
These things could have been fixed or noise could have been made about it, but that has not happened. No proposals have been made, and from that everyone can know most people in positions of power want no change. They probably do not worry about the consequences of what they are doing either. On that President Obama probably is trapped in the urban, suburban cage as much or more than many others, including judges. He is not a farmer, and based on his policy choices, he cannot have the best ideals about high quality food and farming even if he does eat from an uncertified organic garden on the White House lawn and that has set an example to show everyone with a lawn what they could do to feed themselves if they wanted to do it.
Without doubt, President Obama has been beaten down by those opposing him just because they do not want him to be able to claim success for anything, but in the face of it, he has not been able to find the moral fiber to stand up against them with the arguments necessary to accomplish change and help the people know the truth. He needs to be leading from the front and using the platform the Presidency provides, but he has not done enough of that. He has not shown the vision Presidents need to show even though not many others have been much better and especially not on the food and farming issues. If any others had, the United States would not be where it is on the integrity, healthful safety, and nutritional quality of its agricultural products.
The government has not wanted to examine the safety of food in the way it does or is supposed to do with drugs and food additives, but transgenic ingredients in many processed foods are fundamentally food additives in the way they are used, so they could be evaluated and regulated under that existing authority if government officials wanted to do that. The problem is: they will not make the needed change until the people force them to do it, and so far, no large constituency has stood up on the issue. Action will not happen until millions of people are activated the way they have been on many other issues of greatly less importance and causing much less destruction.
Notably, both the EPA’s relaxation of the Glyphosate standards and the planting of transgenic crops in the wildlife refuges have been public atrocities with the future impacts of both swept under the national rug. Mild words should not be used about them; that that would pretend the destruction did not matter. Unless strong language is used, the failure to take needed action will continue for longer. President Obama could have exercised responsible health-conscious leadership on both issues, but he chose not to. The reasons for that could only have been political and designed to serve corporate interests. This is before even getting to the continued market release of new transgenic products without the necessary independent, objective testing. On that, too, responsible Presidential leadership could have been exercised for years.
The observed behavior means the 2007 promise was at best only empty pandering and at worst an outright lie. Maybe the President would say he cannot invest political capital in the issue until he can see more support from the people, but he has made willful compromises subservient to Monsanto’s political influence, lobbying, and campaign funding. He has evaded the need to fix the system. He has also helped to keep the people of the nation and the world in ignorance, so they cannot know what they need to know on food healthfulness and nutritional quality. That is shameful, and it can only mean he wants to support Monsanto’s transgenic project regardless of the costs. Information about the costs could have been studied, but it has not been.
The President is a victim of political pressure he does not seem strong enough to buck, but he has also accepted, tolerated, and accommodated the transgenic tyranny and the failure to learn the truth or allow it to be learned in the interest of the people. He has worked within the system for his own political benefit and the benefit of other politicians without rocking the boat even if the people are harmfully enslaved by the health and environmental consequences without their informed consent and against their public health interest. Citizen well-being and longevity have been compromised by to President Obama’s behavior and by the behavior he has negligently condoned.
The Web site includes discussion of a core precedent underlying our lawsuit, a precedent that should require all patented products to have proved their public utility before they can receive a patent and be released onto the market. Also, there is a Conclusion. At the end of the day, the larger story is about whether or not U.S. democracy is capable of informing the people as is necessary to be functional in service to the public interest and in promoting the value of functional democracy so the people of other nations can believe in it and will want to believe in it. At present, given the performance seen in the United States, it would be embarrassing to stand up in an international forum and try to recommend U.S.-style democracy to others.
A respectable example needs to be set before that would be possible, but the United States has failed abjectly and miserably, at least on the food and health issues under discussion if not many others, but no vindication is yet in sight. The promise felt when President Obama was elected in helping the nation fulfill international and domestic hopes has been left unfulfilled if not dissipated. This suggests the people’s faith in him was misplaced—unless the task of trying to swim against the system is too large for anyone. After all, the original hopes placed in President Obama did not contemplate a Republican opposition dedicated to oppose everything he proposed just to promote national failure for the benefit of their own partisan objectives.
Just as products need to prove their valuable public utility and show positive promise in service to the public welfare before they should be allowed to get a patent, so should governing systems and policies show similar promise before they can win international respect. The U.S. governing system has failed at that. The limited esteem shown the United States in international polling proves this point. U.S. policy is set more by making compromises between ideologies and in response to empowered interests than it is by seeking to optimize the public utility of its behavior and figuring out who is right and who is wrong in the ideas being promoted. As a result, the conflict of ideologies and the resulting polarization undermines the governing system when it should be helping through the contribution of the fullest possible range of ideas to serve fundamental public needs. That ideal is AWOL.
Observably, ideological conflict has been promoted to keep issues alive as long as possible for fund-raising and constituency-building purposes. Seeking policies with the greatest public utility has not even been desired in a nation where corporate interests like those of Monsanto are placed ahead of the public interest. Hardly, anything can be passed without the approval of the corporate powers, and the lobbyists can be watched sitting in committee hearings like vultures on the fence to make sure their interests are served. In this climate, the formerly respected democratic ideal is discredited and trashed under the hammer of its own dominant, corrupting, and obscenely destructive behavior with full judicial consent, facilitation, and affirmation. Better should be possible, but it needs to come from somewhere.
Many people need to blow the whistle about this, but too many of them are too blindly unconcerned, and maybe their minds have been fogged by the food they have been fed. Maybe they are as personally dysfunctional as citizens as their political system is. Certainly, too many are docile and passive as if their own health and nutritional safety should not matter and they can eat whatever they want without worrying about the consequences of it. If they were not unconcerned, they might have stopped eating much of the food offered for sale in the United States, especially the processed food, and they would be demanding better every day and non-stop. They would patronize businesses providing what they truly need and not those that do not serve their need.
If people would know what they need to stay well-nourished and healthy, they would begin to understand why food is more important than medicine, but they have commonly been taught the opposite of that. Many doctors have told their patients diet will not make much difference with the problems afflicting them, but that is not true.
If consumers would demand better because they know better, the market would provide it. Better products are not provided only as long as consumer ignorance is allowed to prevail or is forced to prevail and no form of education yet helps to fix the problem. The nutritional information made available is often responsive to interests the same way policy and political behavior is, but worse than that is the willingness of companies to sell nutritionally deprived and unhealthful food as if it should not matter. As a result the public health is destroyed and exploited for corporate benefit and at the ultimate expense of the whole nation and the ability of people to do useful work to serve the public need. The nation and morality are destroyed by the behavior.
On food and health issues, the Supreme Court has now shown it wants to be part of the problem and not part of the answer to it. The issue is simple: should responsible work to hear and determine the truth be allowed or not. It was not, but if we were to give up in the face of irresponsible court decisions, we would be just as irresponsible as the courts have been. As patriotic citizens, we must continue to do everything we can, and we must hope other people will join us, because victory is not possible without more people understanding what is needed before success can be possible.
To read many pertinent articles on the issues, please go to the Bibliography pages and pull down the menu to access the Bibliography for 2010-11 and the Bibliography for 2012-13. The Bibliography for 2014-15 has just been started but already it includes both shameful and promising journalism. There, a summary annotation provides basic information about each of the articles and sometimes a critique or comment.
Reading or even scanning the bibliography pages can be a good way get an idea about the range of information available in many different places about the issues being raised by the lawsuit and by a future lawsuit raising the same issues with the support of a different group of co-plaintiffs. Information on the issues is available for those who want to inform themselves and take the time or set the personal priority to do it. The commitment by citizens in inform themselves in every way possible is essential to success in protecting the public health and the environment. This work is especially important when people are getting no help from media sources they have relied upon.
Facts, studies, and articles are more readily accessible than they have been in the years before the Internet made research easier, but still a majority of U.S. citizens get their news from the mainstream corporate media or the so-called tribal or political, ideological, propagandistic media. Often these sources have been more a part of the divide-and-conquer pro-corporate strategy designed to alienate people and disgust them about the prospects of democratic participation. These news channels have let people down on the issues they do not want to investigate or they prefer to distort, and in the process, they have subversively destroyed the ability of democracy to function. They are subversive against the nation, and that must be exposed for all.
Democracy has suffered inevitably because of the way the media have failed to do their job. Even if the job is difficult to do in complex times, the way to do it must be found. Failure of essential information access results in people being led down a blind alley against their own welfare as if destruction of the public health and democracy should be the intended goal, but the main problem arises from corporate power and money within the political system. That is a core issue before everyone.
An e-mail message received today said this: “Four years ago (in 2010), the Supreme Court opened the floodgate for corporate money to flow into our political system with its Citizens United decision and sent politicians scrambling to keep up. Just last week, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle revealed, ‘A senator has to raise $10,000 every day that they’re in office—every day of their six years—to make the average amount that’s spent today in a Senate race.’ Our political system is rigged so politicians pay attention to donors who can contribute the highest amount -- not everyday people who can only give $5.” This defines the problem but not the answers.
Here are some possible answers:
1. End all political advertising of all kinds and replace it with statements by candidates in a public forum on each of the major issue areas. Perhaps 10 to 20 candidate forums could be conducted before every federal election, and written transcripts and/or statements on the issues could also be provided for publication. The main point is that political advertising is not helpful; it is not illuminating. It only muddies the water. It is destructive of democracy, and for that reason it should be abandoned without regard for the First Amendment.
No one will be prevented from speaking; they would only be regulated in the way they can speak. They would not be able to speak through paid or published advertising anymore. No TV or radio spots, no slick brochures, no brochures at all, no bumper stickers, no billboards, no lawn sign, not even any lapel pins, though the last of these listed items are not the worst of the problem. What matters before Election Day is the opportunity to see how the candidates think and handle themselves on the issues, and that is the reason for a forum on all the major issue areas prominent before the nation, but a final forum should also be provided for the candidates to state (with answers from their opponents) whatever they want that has not been covered earlier.
All negative advertising would be eliminated, because there would be no advertising of any kind. Negative ads only alienate people from the democratic ideal, so they only help tear down democracy and reduce participation, and for that reason, they are especially important to terminate. The arguments should be available but not with a big megaphone money enables in causing voters to say home. Emphasis should be placed on solving problems not on keeping them in place endlessly so they can be milked for political funding and constituency building. That is nothing more than political corruption blocking the focus on informing people and meeting real needs.
Even positive advertising often serves to distort the issues and confuse people more than it helps to inform them. Before democracy can work as it should, voters need to be constructively informed, and nothing should be allowed that serves undermine that basic public interest. Political advertising is more destructive than valuable, and that is why it needs to be entirely terminated. Above all, money in politics would not be needed if advertising did not need to be paid for and was made entirely off limits. Deceptive political distortions would largely be ended, too, as part of end the advertising cessation. Now, politicians pay more attention to a small group of major funders than they do to the 99% of smaller funders, even though smaller contributors provide as much of the money in politics as the large funders do. This must be ended.
Both negative and positive statements could still be made in an established forum, so those statements could be read and/or watched by anyone coming straight out of the mouth of the candidates. Fund-raising events would be eliminated, and all the scheduled events would be held in different places large enough to allow as many people to attend as would want to. The events would also be televised. The difference is: neither negative nor issue distorting positive statements would not be given a big megaphone against the public interest and against the interests of a community-building, harmony-promoting, collaboratively problem-solving democratic culture.
The statements would be made available, so people could put them on their iPods and think about them carefully, but that is not costly to do, so the need to raise money for distribution of the information would be eliminated. This should not be viewed as a violation of First Amendment rights because the rules would be administered equally toward all without prejudice. Only plain statements on the issues would be allowed. Nothing more than that would be allowed from anyone—not from candidates, campaign organization, political parties, or any other groups. No 501.C4 or Superpac spending would be needed or allowed. Everyone would be on a level playing field.
Ads and flyers would no longer be the way people are informed about the candidates running for federal office. The idea that 30 second spots or slick brochures should be used to decide election outcomes is absurd in an intelligent culture. It is only a way to measure the brute power of money; it is not a way to measure the value of ideas.
2. No media should be allowed to be owned by corporate conglomerates because they promote corporate interests ahead of the public interest. Stations providing the people with news should be transparently regulated public utilities within each state, and they should be publicly-owned and outside the reach of government to impact. Also, the Fairness Doctrine should be restored as federal law. Stations providing entertainment and infotainment should be separated from those providing hard news, so stations offering only hard news are always available to everyone under the publicly-regulated authority of the people through independently elected bodies.
Fox News, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, Comedy Central, and all the other stations could continue doing as they do under the Infotainment provision, and they could all freely quote the hard news public utility stations or their Web sites. Citizens could still speak on the issues and about the candidates. They just could not advertise. They would have provide their contributions in a provided forum. The hard news stations should be publicly owned like a co-op with everyone able to participate in the management and all citizens given an equal ownership share in them as a birthright.
This means: everyone should be given a non-sellable share in the hard news companies at birth, and the shares should move automatically to the state where they live. People should be able to hang their share certificate on the wall if they want. It should be possessed as a point of democratic pride and guarantee of free information flow 24 hours around the clock. The focus would be on objective news reporting. The shares could not be sold, and they would not be given any tangible monetary value.
The hard news stations should be funded by a percentage tax on income, say .3% from everyone paying federal income taxes, and the percentage should be voted on by the people without elected representatives having a voice in it. The hard news stations should carry no advertising, and they should be able work together to set up news bureaus around the world or acquire qualifying hard news from other networks or news organizations like AP, Reuters, AFP, RT, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera and others.
All news sources should carry attribution with additional information made available on the station Web site. A culture requiring accurate information to function should demand no less than this, and rigorous barriers need to be established to prevent politicians from having influence over the hard news stations. They should be run cooperatively by the people, and unhappy politicians should not be able to impact their funding or their editorial policy. Major management issues might be voted on.
The goal is to prevent any groups from controlling the news; information is too important in a democratic nation to any longer permit distortions and constraints to be imposed by either companies or government. This is especially important when so-called news organizations have been used to change the political character of the nation and change the spectrum of views, particularly among members of some vulnerable or prejudiced demographic groups like white males, for example. Because groups have proved particularly susceptible to biases, emphasis should be placed on education and information, so the observed subservience to propaganda can end.
This is the reason for ending the existence broadcast cartels and station ownership by large corporations. All broadcast companies should be owned locally with ownership diversity standards required under law. These provisions would govern the existing entertainment and infotainment stations, and they could be less stringent than the regulations governing the hard news stations, but they would not be as loose as they are now. In a nation where the flow of information is centrally important to governance, wealth-dependent, concentrated control over the media needs to end.
The networks would be owned by the stations they serve, so the current top-down ownership pattern would be broken up entirely and replaced by a bottom-up structure. The airwaves are owned by the people and made available for their benefit; therefore, they should be exploited against the public interest. They should be monitored and critiqued to analyze the quality of their public service. Regular ratings of objectivity, management transparency, and independence should be standard.
Robust criticism of the hard news stations should be possible on an open forum to prevent them from straying into propaganda, and they should have an ombudsman or a similar committee hired by the people with no connection to the station management or to the public utility governing the stations in each state. Among other responsibilities, the stations should be required to provide to the public the pre-election statements by candidates. All states should be required to meet the same specifications in the public interest, but the way the job is done would be up to the elected station authority in each state. The states could compete with each other in the interest producing the best programing, and all stations would be available on the Internet as well as the airwaves, so anyone anywhere could listen to any of them.
3. All lobbying contacts with elected officials should by recorded and archived, so that all related communications can be rapidly and immediately accessed by anyone through keyword search. With the need for campaign funding eliminated, no lobbyists should be favored over others, but any person or group not able to gain access should be able to file a statement that would become part of the public record. Lobbyists could file comments or critiques about the results to their lobbying, and officials could reply with their view of the matter. Everything would be transparent.
4. Each federal candidate and office holder would have a small, set, publicly-funded allowance to cover the cost of their travel and campaign appearances at the fora and elsewhere, and the activities of closely associated surrogates would also be reported and recorded, so that could be made part the searchable archive. This would promote government transparency and help prevent continued subversion of the public need for private gain and public loss. To prevent officials from voting themselves too much money for this purpose, the line item would not be set as part of the federal budget. That would put too much authority over it in the hands of those with an interest. Perhaps, the amount could be set by a multiple choice popular vote on Election Day, and the salary compensation of the elected officials might be voted in the same way.
Voting on these matters would help to make clear that elected representatives work for the people. For the same reason, pay scales might also be voted on by the people with a commission offering several levels of choice with an explanation or justification of each provided. The abuses of democracy resulting from the way the current system has been managed against the public interest means the system needs to be changed with authority removed from those who have failed to serve the public in the way they have mismanaged their responsibilities. Much better is possible.
The pay scale of judges should also be set by the people, because the politicians have used them against the public interest for too long. The judicial budget has been a way for politicians to assert control over judges and promote political subservience. When the budget is used for partisan ends the same way the partisans have tried to prevent appointments to major courts, judicial independence is subverted. Bad enough is the political appointment and confirmation of judicial appointments. That has also been used abusively for partisan ends against the needs of the people. Better is demanded.
5. Issue groups would be required to make full, easily searchable and detailed public disclosure of their activities, public statements, and funding sources. They would not be allowed to do any campaign-related advertising, but they could make well-reasoned statements of about an issue for posting on their own Web sites and for furnishing to others through a distribution mechanism that is available to everyone equally, including large groups and small. There could be a place for these on the Web site of the hard news organizations. The goal would be to neutralize the power of money over information distribution. This would eliminate any argument that money is speech because it will make the same dissemination mechanism available to all.
The same as with candidate advertising, nothing would be allowed to force its way before the public through paid advertising, billboards, or through printed matter sent in the mail or distributed door to door unless the way is established through each state to provide an equal voice to all with equal dissemination for all authorized organizations and nominated candidates. Money should be given no more power over issue discussion than it should be over the power of candidates to state their message.
All groups would be required to use the same format and the same distribution channels, following the same objective rules. Everything would be plain vanilla, so the ideas and the character of the candidates would not be overpowered through the use of advertising money on behalf of issue-oriented groups or through the use of flashy design. The associated distortions or corruptions and lies would be placed under established constraint and set rules. The candidates would have to voice them.
6. As it is now in some other nations, citizens should be allowed to submit bills to the Congress if they gain 500,000 signatures at a specified on-line location in support of them. All these bills should be put through the committee process, so that amendments can be worked on, but the basic bill as submitted should be allowed an up or down floor vote within six months of its submission to the Congress. Both the originally submitted version and the committee amended version should both be put to a vote at the same time, so the connection between them is not lost. The reasons for the committee’s proposed changes should be made clear to everyone transparently.
None of these things will be done by the currently elected officials because they mostly have a stake in keeping the system as it is. The system is designed to protect incumbency and to promote close relations with the monied interests. They do not want any change even though it is a moral issue when they have to spend up to 70% of their time raising campaign funds. That prevents them from spending the time they were elected to spend serving the public. The time allocation as well as the design of the system is a moral indictment against those not acting to change it, but they have not acted—and they do not seem likely to act until they are forced to. Accordingly, the people now need to take action to fix the failures. If this is not done soon, the nation and its governing system will be further discredited in the eyes of the world’s people.
Major changes are needed whether or not any of the above proposals are found to be valuable. If change does not happen, U.S. democracy will continue to fail to live up to its potential and more important, it will fail to set an admirable example for the people of others nations struggling to create a workable governing system in their own nations. Inasmuch as the United States needs to provide an inspiring example of the way its political system can work, so people of other nations are encouraged to believe in it, better is needed. Right now, everyone would be a fool to think the U.S. governing ideal is any more than a dysfunctional disaster. No one should want to promote it with a straight face. For that reason, serious change is needed before the U.S. opportunity to serve the needs of the world’s people is lost without reprieve.
The answer to the current institutional failure has to come from the people asserting themselves against the combined political power of companies like Monsanto and their allies in the government. Companies are expected to pursue their own interests, but government officials should be expected to serve the people, and the terms of their oath of office should require that. Oaths should be rewritten to reflect this requirement. Loyalty to the Constitution is not enough, especially when the Constitution was designed from the start to protect elite interests and only include enough democratic checks and balances to hopefully prevent long-term tyranny. This was not accomplished, and that is the reason change is now needed without delay. If small changes are not enough a new Constitutional Convention would be needed.
The people have been abused by the power of corporate money, and that money is the corrupting grease making the evasion of truth, wisdom, and prudence the preemptive and disrespectful objective of the governing system. Because the media have been as much a part of the problem as the government, Seymour Hersh called for firing 90% of the news editors in the nation. The problem was he did not sufficiently cover all the money-related issues at the root of the information flow failures in the United States.
Publishers and reporters are as much part of the trouble as the editors and network news organizations. Pandering for access is epidemic. Hersh’s main stated problem is: the U.S. habit of pathological lying, and he calls on the nation’s news people to address it, but distortion of the truth and neglect of the truth are only a part of the U.S. moral affliction. The nation has lost the belief that morality should matter. The ruling ethic asserts that all policies and activities can be governed by interests, and that is the biggest lie of all. The smaller the world becomes, the less the pursuit of interests is acceptable domestically or internationally. Both people and nations need to exhibit morality, but instead, the political and financial prominence of corporations has infected both with amorality as if that should be the better standard.
More interviewing of citizens in front of the Whole Foods Market in Alexandria, Virginia. The people interviewed at this location were not found to be any more informed about Monsanto than the people interviewed at other locations.
The Power of Money in the U.S. Political System, Our Struggle Against It, and the Thinking of the Supreme Court on the Matter
Chapter 11
Some might advise no criticism of the media if coverage from them is sought and hoped for, but the truth of the picture is more important than pandering for access to news outlets. There has been too much of that pandering already in too many places. Editors and publishers will do as they want to do without regard for what is said here. The nation and the world would not be under threat on food and agriculture if needed discussion of the issues had been facilitated. That essential truth needs to be stated. Beyond that, the truth needs to be found, because that is the problem with Monsanto and their obsequious government allies. They have ignored truth in favor of money.
Because the people are isolated from the sources of their food, they do not demand information about the things they do not know from their core media outlets, and because the people in the media organizations are ignorant on the food and farming issues and treat them as if they are matters from a different planet, the people cannot be informed about what they need to know. This is what happens when essential knowledge has been stonewalled in service to the corporate transgenic project.
In this environment, corporate propaganda has been made more important than truth, and that will not be easy to repair especially when the courts are as much a part of the problem as the rest of the U.S. political system and the media. Thomas Paine may now need to be found to do as he did in 1776, and the sooner the better. He served the people and not the elite when he spoke his truth and spelled out his vision in Common Sense. That is what is needed again now against the current tyranny. Paine was not a friend of the Federalist elite working to help them protect their own interests against the interest of the people. He envision bottom up democracy instead. This issue is the same now as it was in 1776 except the problem is at home in the United States and not in Great Britain on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The food failures are a direct result of the power of money in the U.S. political system, and the Supreme Court has been as big a cause of those problems as any other governing institution. When they equate money with speech, they are dedicated to the destruction of democracy and the disempowerment of the people in favor of the empowerment of the monied pro-corporate elite. The reasons they have done what they have cannot be known, but it is possible to guess. Most likely they are afraid of a world where bottom-up democracy is allowed to work. Probably, they do not know what role would be remaining for them and the other people like them in that world.
Many of the justices of the Supreme Court might not feel they can have power over people if they have worked to empower others against the domination of the elites. They most likely believe in the importance of the elite role in the world. Now, because they have failed to allow the pursuit of truth on food and farming issues and the empowerment of people to understand the health and environmental issues they need to understand, the answer to their imposed tyranny rests with the people the same as it could have after the Bush v. Gore decision or the same as it has been in other nations where the abuses of the elite have run rampant over the people and the people have not known how to stand up against it. Abuse can only happen when people allow it to happen to them. When people allow victimization, it will happen.
Even more important is the will to stand up and do the work needing to be done to fix the preservation of political power by some at the expense of others. Through its behavior the Supreme Court has shown commitment to a zero-sum ideal, and that is fundamentally a fundamentally anti-democratic ideal. Democracy depends on the belief that the welfare of everyone can be advanced without taking away from anyone.
This is different from the ideal embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Most of the people participating in the Constitutional Convention were afraid of democracy, and they wanted to limit it in defense of elite interests that had suffered under the prior Confederation. They wanted only enough of it to prevent specifically feared tyranny and to provide the minimum amount of it the people demanded because the appetite for it had been inspired in them by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, and others, but as a result of what the founding Federalists did at the Constitutional Convention and the way they did it, they virtually guaranteed creation of a new tyranny against the people by their empowered elites.
The empowerment of the elite against the people has led to the empowerment of companies like Monsanto. This site is like a book with chapters, but it is loaded like a wagon with concerns and contentions in opposition to Monsanto’s continuing effort to abusively and yes, also illegally, misuse patent law to monopolize seeds, intimidate farmers, and compromise the health of food, meat animals, and those eating them.
The patent-related illegality lies in the use patent rights to establish a virtual monopoly over major commodity crops, but when the Justice Department launched an anti-trust investigation into the way Monsanto has used its power, they ended it without issuing a public statement. The public need was abused by that behavior. To not tell the people what was found or not found suggested collaborative wrongdoing.
The contention is: Monsanto is destroying the integrity and healthfulness of crops, soil, air, water, and functional, uncorrupted democracy. Discussion of the issues needs to be heard in court, because that is the only possible remaining potentially respected place to determine where truth, wisdom, and justice reside. It is the only remaining way to know how to seek them unless the people would start assembling in the streets as they have in other nations. To some, the food, nutrition, and health issues being raised might seem to be the concern of a small number of farmers and not a national matter, but it is a concern on behalf of all people in the United States and in all other nations. That needs to be understood before it is too late. This is because the attention of more people is needed to make the needed repair possible.
Monsanto’s destruction results from the combined use of transgenic seeds, the associated chemicals, and the promoted farming methods. They imperil farmers through patent infringement lawsuits, patent-related threats and harassment, controlling adhesion contracts, contractual money-driven control over research institutions, and influence over politicians through campaign contributions and lobbying. All Monsanto’s efforts are aimed to maintain and expand their patent power and control over seed, feed, and food for their own benefit—but at enormous public cost. This issue now needs to be addressed in a future lawsuit because the initial lawsuit was unjustly and irresponsibly blocked as a result of court prejudice.
Most important is the question about whether Monsanto’s patents ever should have been granted and whether their crops should have been released onto the market. Forgotten has been the now largely and amorally ignored public utility requirement in patent law. That requires all patented products and technologies to serve the public. Evading this standard is a measure of cultural and bureaucratic moral failure.
The standard requires patents to be beneficial to the public and not just beneficial for some at the expense of the great majority. If there are positive benefits with negative side effects as there are with drugs, they should be spelled out for everyone to know, but that has not been required in the case of Monsanto’s products. The truth about both sides of the matter must be made clear for everyone to know; if that would have been done, the cost of the astronomically destructive trade-off could could have been known and the project ended before it got started. This has been the publicly destructive reality with Monsanto’s patented crops. It must be recognized and fixed.
Monsanto has benefited, and their farming customers have benefited over the short-term at the expense of the public and the environment over both the long-term and the short; Monsanto’s allied politicians have benefited from campaign contributions, and retired politicians and other officials have benefited from lobbying jobs and other fundamentally destructive opportunities exploiting the people for private gain.
Similarly, as Monsanto’s employees have been given powerful jobs in the government and have been able to serve the company’s objectives in those jobs, they have pursued costly and destructive abuse of the public interest, and that needs to be ended. It has gone on for too long, and the cost of it has been far too great. This needs to be clear.
The issuance of the patents on transgenic crops was a tragic and terrible mistake as was the failure to perform independent, objective research examining Monsanto’s technology before allowing it to be released onto the market. This is the point we need to establish before justice can prevail in preserving our constitutional right to present our arguments, but the beneficiaries of the exploitative arrangement between the government and Monsanto do not want that to be allowed. They want total control in service to their own collaboratively protected interests, and this is a corrupt project.
If our lawsuit would be allowed, it would focus public attention on the abusive workings of the mutually self-serving and collaboratively-enabled political gravy train. Because of this reprehensible and democratically-destructive political game, we do not accept for one minute any of the three court decisions rendered against our lawsuit. They are a virtually criminal public atrocity because of the large amount of public health and environmental destruction they are allowing to continue without restraint or commitment to public examination. Once again, everyone is invited to read the decisions and all the briefs in the lawsuit to draw their own conclusion.
Note: Most of the rest of this page and the Web site have not yet been edited to reflect Supreme Court complicity in Monsanto’s governmentally-supported tyranny, but that work will be done. In the meantime, reflection on the Supreme Court decision could be valuable even if it cannot find a valuable justification for the decision. Possibly or even probably, as the first possible supposition, the Supreme Court did not look at the lower court decisions because they did not have the five votes they needed to return the lawsuit to the Federal District Court. This would be a logical guess based on the past history of the court’s decisions on related issues and on the justice’s ideologies.
The justices or their clerks might not have wanted to change the Appeals Court decision unless they knew they could avoid making a worse hash of the issues needing to be addressed. Only the concurrence of four justices is needed to take a case, but in this case four might not have wanted to review the lower court decisions unless they had a fifth member ready to agree with them. Deadlocked divergency of perspective on the court could prevent examination of some cases. Without agreement about what should be done, the justices could have decided to let the Appeals Court decision stand. Because controversy exists in the culture on the raised issues, it could also exist on the court. This is part of what happen when public debate is constrained.
Divergency might have existed in more than two directions without the emergence of the ability of one of the factions to persuade others. The court could have been as disunified as the Congress in their views and attitudes on the issue. Maybe, also, the court preferred to allow more time for the views of the nation on the issues to emerge or for the controversial facts to be clarified from more too slowly emerging studies.
Courts, after all, need to pay attention to public attitudes and to everything else that can affect their ability to make well-reasoned and defensible decisions. They cannot afford to be apolitical in their judgments, and because of that, they may side-step awkward issues that need to be subjected to a political process. Maybe, also, they could not or did not assess the facts presented in the complaint even though none of those facts had been challenged either in briefs or in the courtroom. We cannot know.
Because the lower courts had not addressed the facts presented and had made their decisions on different and widely divergent grounds, the justices and their clerks could have felt they did not have a record they could work with to fix all the problems, and it is known that some judges and justices would rather escape the need to wade into the complexities of patent law if they can avoid it. This might not have been likely in this case because all the case required was a Yes or No on the issue of the plaintiffs right to file their case, but it is possible. Comparatively, the most recent 2013 Bowman v. Monsanto case was easy to decide, and the justices could grandstand politically by taking it, but the issues in our lawsuit were greatly more challenging.
The complexity of the case would have meant the court had more reasons to want to evade it, especially when they did not need to explain why they evaded it. This could have been what happened even though the issue of legal standing should ride mostly on precedent. The core question was: should pursuit of the truth about Monsanto’s technology and their business practices be allowed or prevented—especially if the exposure of it would reveal much past negligence and error by the court and others.
Maybe the justices did not think the contentions of a small group of farmers growing non-transgenic crops was worth their time, especially when they were up against a Fortune 500 company with 250,000 U.S. large farmer customers and a proclaimed 17 million world-wide customers (half of whom they say are small). Given Monsanto’s political influence and the number of their people in government positions, the decision could have been purely political, but if so, it could not have escaped reigning prejudices about farming and biotechnology. The way to address those is awaited.
Alternatively, those making the decision at the Supreme Court might have made a conscious decision they did not want to send the lawsuit back to Judge Buchwald’s courtroom and possibly from there to St. Louis (Eastern District of Missouri) because Monsanto had announced their plan to seek a change in court venue. Maybe, they would have been able to know that plan, and they might have felt that would not be promising way to establish public respect for the Judiciary on an important matter.
Maybe they did not want to see the case go to either the New York or the St. Louis court. That might be a stretch in imagining possibilities, but it is not impossible to propose in the case of some justices. Given the attitudes they could perceive from Judge Buchwald’s dismissal decision, they might have preferred to let the Appeals Court decision stand. They might have wanted to wait for a better case from a different court, and maybe they decided to let the Appeals Court decision stand because they wanted to see what would happen as a result of it. That could be a way of measuring the importance of the threat of transgenic contamination and the ability of coexistence to work as Secretary Vilsack has wishfully hoped it will be able to work.
If a new case is filed based on the lessons of the current one, it would assert the same arguments but with a different group of co-plaintiffs, and it could face the same evasive routine from both Monsanto’s attorneys and the courts. This could be true despite the fact that Hugh Grant, Monsanto’s CEO told the Financial Times in February 2014 he felt the company had made a mistake by evading the opportunity to engage with the public. Our lawsuit would have given Monsanto the perfect opportunity to engage with the public on the issues the public is concerned about, but they did not take it. Instead, they chose to pursue a dismissal motion. They could have even filed a different brief to the Supreme Court in late 2013 if they had a change of heart on their dismissal motion, but they did not do that. That fact suggests that the Monsanto stance assumed by their CEO a few months later is only image creation.
Monsanto is known to have hired some new public relations consultants to help them address their public image issues and their relationship with the public. Despite that, based on the observed behavioral realities and ignoring the puffery, no reason exists to believe they would change their strategies unless public understanding of the realities would greatly change. The only question is about whether the courts would find a new way to support Monsanto’s agenda the same as they have done so far.
Whatever the dedicated court commitment to continuing injustice for Monsanto’s benefit, the contention against them must continue in every way possible, because the issues at stake are too serious to be responsibly escaped. This must be done because any other course would be as obnoxious as the one taken by the courts and by Monsanto so far. They must be strongly opposed in service to the public interest.
Nonetheless, if the court would have wanted to wait for a case with a different set of particulars, they might have understood the Appeals Court decision had some limited value, and they might have wanted to see what would happen over the next year or more if contaminated farmers would file damage claims pursuant to that decision. If they were paying close attention to the politics of transgenic agriculture (which could be doubtful), they might have also wanted to see what would be the response from the USDA following their planned objective to create a taxpayer-subsidized insurance program to pay farmers suffering from unwanted transgenic crop contamination.
A conflict exists between the Appeals Court’s decision and the proposed insurance program in that the court opened the door for damage suits to be filed in the case of contamination of less than one percent, and that means farmers could prefer to be more vigilant in seeking the contamination as a preference over paying an insurance premium to protect against the contamination damage. Possibly, the court would have wanted to see how these conflicting ideals would sort themselves out, but beyond that, the court might have felt the current case was proving to be a poor vehicle for an effective decision given its trajectory so far in the two lower courts. Again, this might be a stretch to imagine, but it is not impossible in the circumstance.
Many conjectures could give the Supreme Court more credit as strategic analysts than is deserved, but the possibility of a complex and cautious decision exists even if the decision appears negligent and erroneous in failing to promptly serve the public need. With the justices no less polarized or dysfunctional than the rest of the U.S. government and other courts in their inability to create a wisely unified body of law best serving the public interest, no confidence can be felt in hoping for a sensible and thoughtful decision even if better would be wished for. Responsible patriots can only aspire for a way to soon create something better as a result of their continued effort, but the recent emergence of a new national and international problem as serious but more endangering than the past slavery is not something to be grateful for—especially when the will, commitment, and understanding to responsibly confront it is absent.
The decision makers at the Supreme Court would have probably wanted to project a likely outcome before they took the case, and they could have assessed the likely result if they did not take it. Evaluation of a range of factors might have informed their decision even it was not a broad enough range, but they have lots of cases to review, so no one can know how much thought went into any one contemplation of failure no matter how erroneous, costly, and negligent a particular decision may be.
Yet another possibility is: the Supreme Court would not have wanted to get tangled up with all the corporate forces sharing a political interest in Monsanto’s agricultural project. These forces involve not just biotech agribusiness companies but all the others with a stake in the continued operation the money-driven political system. These are the forces the court empowered through its 2010 Citizens United decision and also through their 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC decision). They were also greatly empowered by the 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo and other subsequent decisions.
No decision to seek the truth about transgenic agriculture could be made without also engaging the way the power of money works in the U.S. political system. In the McCutcheon case, Coal magnate Shaun McCutcheon and the Republican National Committee sued to open the floodgate on the power of money in the political system through relaxation of limits on individual total personal contributions. That would mean a small number of people (about 400) who give large amounts of money during elections would not need to find a conduit for their indirect funding of campaigns. They could be empowered to spend millions more directly to candidates. This is expected to enable the buying of elections as long as voters would allow it and would not carefully evaluate the campaign advertising being showered at them daily.
Through the decision made in the McCutcheon case, an attitude was understandable about the authorized role Monsanto has played in the political system. They have already played a role similar to the one McCutcheon has wanted. The decision was a current updating indication about the guiding court philosophy and whether or not the resolutions by many states and cities in opposition Citizens United had any impact on the way the Supreme Court now thinks four years after their decision on that case. The backlash against Citizens United has been strong among Democrats, and also many Independents, and because of that, the McCutcheon decision will be watched for a sign public views about campaign funding are moderating or showing concern about the impact of unlimited campaign money on the democratic ideal.
Through all its campaign finance decisions, the Supreme Court has shown a belief in the value of elite money in the political system. The majority shows the opinion this money is only constructive in making the political system more and more responsive to those in possession of money and against those without money. Arguably, the court has wanted to encourage people to create more wealth, so they can use it to their own advantage in the political system. The flip side of this would be a desire to punish those who have not done whatever they needed to do to create wealth for themselves and others. As part of this, the court has shown relatively little concern about the work people have done to create the wealth. They might not want to promote blatantly criminal activities to generate wealth, but neither have they wanted to concern themselves about the gray areas between moral and amoral wealth creation.
Finally, even if the justices would have possessed a better grasp of the pertinent precedents basic to our lawsuit than the the lower court judges, that did not mean they or their clerks would have done the work needed to understand the centrally important facts. They are products of the same culture that has imposed ignorance about Monsanto’s transgenic and chemical destruction on everyone, and that climate of misinformation and prejudice is not likely to enable wisdom, justice, prudence, and truth to emerge, so the best guess is: incomplete knowledge of all the important realities would have governed the decision the court made not to review our lawsuit.
When a bias has been systematically cultivated for decades and it has been backed by as much money as Monsanto’s prejudiced and out-dated science has been, the failures of judgment and prudence cannot be repaired easily or quickly. The problem is similar to repairing the inhumanity and amorality long existing on slavery and civil rights. Monsanto’s project is a new form of slavery far worse and more far reaching in its impacts and destruction than the previous one. This is the contention, and in addressing it, courts may be just as biased on the issues as they were on Dred Scott.
Hopefully, a war will not be needed to straighten the matter out, but that is not impossible. Reportedly, Prime Minister Putin has threatened the possibility of war just over the bee destruction issue, and that is only one part of all the issues raised by Monsanto’s behavior. Monsanto and Bayer are together at the heart of that threat. Bayer is the maker of the neonicotinoid pesticides believed to be the major cause of the bee deaths, and Monsanto is the major user of them as a protective coating on its seeds. The United States would probably not want to wage war over bees, but in other nations where people are more concerned about the future of their food, the issue is much more serious and angering than it has been in the United States where most people take the source of food obliviously and blindly for granted without any worry.
The Status of the Litigation and the Broad Health Issues Being Raised
Chapter 12
On February 24, 2012 and June 10, 2013, Monsanto gained help from two courts in advancing their destructive biotech project. Then on January 13, 2014, when the Supreme Court decided to let the decision by three judges of the Federal Circuit stand, the justices were as likely to have wanted to join the rest of the government in bed with Monsanto as they were to have favored any other thinking on the matter. They have favored the power of corporately-derived money in the political system more even than the Congress and the White House; most members of the Congress and all recent Presidents have been more victims of the system than beneficiaries.
Polling shows politicians have suffered a major loss of public respect as a result of the the way the political system works. Perhaps, the Supreme Court even expected and wanted this outcome to follow from the way the decided to invoke First Amendment rights. Commonly, in the past the political elites have sought ways to turn people negative on politics as a way to lower participation. The more people they can encourage potential voters to stay home on Election Day, the more they can rely on their own loyalists to elect the people they want elected. This is also the reason why negative campaigning has become so prominent in U.S. electoral campaigning.
All aspiring politicians, including both those who want to deliver benefit for others and those who are in it for themselves, are forced to play the game as it has been created, and once they have learned how to play it, they do not want to bring it to an end because they are better at it than the others they need to defend against. Some are better at it because of the help the courts, including especially the Supreme Court, have given to them through the way they have required the system to work and the way they have favored the most wealthy. Without any doubt, the courts have wanted to tilt the playing field in favor of the people with a philosophy favored by the most wealthy people. This is the political philosophic seen most strongly on the so-called conservative wing of the Supreme Court and also most strongly among Republicans.
The political right wing in the United States should not be rightly called “conservative” when they are as profligate as they are about the public health and the environment in support corporate interests like those of Monsanto. The question becomes: what are they conservative about, and the answer to the question is: they are only seeking to protect and preserve their own liberties, freedoms, and ability to exploit others for their own benefit and at the expense of the Commons. That should not be called “conservative” by any non-propagandistic definition. Libertarian is also not a good description of the myopic, irresponsible, self-serving values exhibited. Many alternative words could be chosen, but “conservative” is only self-serving in promoting an image of something that is not the evident, justifiable, prudent reality.
If protecting the power of wealth was not the motive supported by the judges and justices, they would not have done as they have against the interests of most people. They would have respected the judgment of the people and worked to make it better through education, but instead they have favored the views of the most wealthy and have worked to force the system to serve their interests all the more obsequiously. At the same time, they have increased public dependency and helped to create a system that keeps people on a work, diet, and lifestyle treadmill similar to the one created for the political system and everyone involved with it. This is how exploitation works.
Everyone is made to run like rats in a motor-driven cage where the speed is always slowly increasing so they must continue to run harder, but the rate of speed is increased slowly enough so abrupt changes in speed do not cause protesting. The tacit underlying worry of the wealthy and their advocates is that most people would do nothing if they were not forced by the design of the system to continue running.
Because of the way people come to have a stake in the way the system works, changing it would be worse for them than keeping things as they are. They need the rewards and the protections the system provides, and they always prefer what they know to the alternative they do not know. It is the same as the plantation system was for slaveowners. They were also victims of their system just as much as the slaves were. It was a system with no internal incentive to improve itself; it was dependent on permanently protecting the status quo, and it aimed at protecting and maintaining the established economic system as if nothing better would be possible or wanted.
The current system favored by the Supreme Court is the same kind of system with the same deficiency. It is also a system aiming to maintain the economic status quo permanently even when the public costs to the Commons are enormous. They want to protect an unsustainable system for the same reason the political and judicial establishment in the past wanted to preserve the former system of plantation slavery.
Both lower courts reached a common conclusion despite greatly divergent reasoning, and the Supreme Court would most likely not have declined to review the logic and the unworkability of the decision if the justices or their clerks had not believed Monsanto’s biotechnology project more important than the rights of the farmers opposing their transgenic agricultural idea. At their annual shareholder meeting on January 29, 2014, Monsanto represented the issues being raised by organic farmers as a competitive issue aimed at increasing the organic market share, but it is not that.
They made the same claim against us and our lawsuit when it was first filed. They called it “a publicity stunt,” and in that, they showed the way their own minds work. They revealed that such an effort would be no more than a publicity stunt if they had conceived of it, but it is a truth, wisdom, and justice issue, and that is what Monsanto and its supporters and advocates do not want to acknowledge or examine. These are people with the same mindset as the plantation owners of the past. The revealed understanding shown by Monsanto and the other defenders of elite economic empowerment comes from people who want money to be the measurement of all worth. Such a system can only be myopic, defensive, and alienating of all the people being exploited by it. This is why the system is fundamentally anti-democratic.
As long as this narrow standard of measurement prevails in the United States, the nation can be neither admired or respected for anything more than its ability to generate amoral money without regard for the public health, environmental, and other costs even over the short run without getting to look at the long-term costs. The system has put the United States and many others who follow its values on a treadmill toward human extinction. That is why the system and its underlying values must change before the fostered policies and associated governing behavior can change.
Especially in the government and clearly in the courts, more are concerned about money than they are about truth, wisdom, and justice. For this reason the Supreme Court should be required to remove from the outside of their building the carved inscriptions memorializing commitment to justice—or the word “justice” should be replaced by the word “money.” They have shown a belief that money is more the guardian of the kind of licentious corporately-driven liberty they want to protect than justice is. As they are, the statements have become fraud, and that is why they need to be changed. They are no more than the same kind of false propaganda Monsanto has spread about their products—with continuing government support and against the needs of the people in the U.S. and elsewhere for safe, healthful, and nourishing food.
Most likely the judges and justices ruling on our right to have our contentions heard in court did not do anything to examine, one way or the other, the need to serve the people’s welfare. If the Supreme Court had examined the facts and the issues any better than the lower courts, they would not have been able to do as they did. A reasonable conclusion would be that all three courts just wanted to find the easiest way to get rid of the case as quickly as possible without trying to understand the issues. If that is true, the Appeals Court’s subversion of justice was the most creative.
In the end, the Supreme Court would not have done as much as they have to open the door to corporate money in politics if they wanted to protect the political rights of the people. They likely would have favored corporate political power on the premise that the people are best served when the corporate elite are able to create paternalistic opportunity for them. This was the premise animating the Founding Federalists when they wrote the Constitution in 1787, except that the economic elite were not yet so corporate back then and they were not so disconnected from the rest of the community. In line with this history, it should be no surprise to find the same idea is still among the central beliefs of their originalist followers over the ensuing two centuries. They would not even need to be advocates of constitutional originalism.
Perhaps the court majority would assume the superiority of any idea serving the corporate elite and dismiss any contrary idea. The strong pro-business record the Roberts Court has suggests that likelihood. The assumption would fit with a court having a very pro-corporate, pro-business record. The assumption might be virtually automatic, and it would like also be strongly supported by ideology and philosophy.
That would be the easiest logic to believe for most people; under this logic, the justices would likely have wanted to sustain the lower courts, but if they would have wanted to reconsider the divergent logic of the two courts, examine the facts the lower courts neglected, establish their own view of the precedents, and/or enable a determination of the truth on the issues being raised by the lawsuit, they would have wanted to take the case and write their own decision. They would have especially wanted to address the questions raised about the precedents central to the lawsuit.
If the justices would have wanted to promote discovery of the truth about transgenic agriculture because that had been prevented in a political environment where the power of corporations is now routinely greater than the collective power of the people, they would likely want to allow court discussion to see if Monsanto’s patents should be rescinded. From their decision on our petition, a reasonable guess is that they would not want to allow a determination about that, because that would not be the typical pro-business, pro-corporate stance the Roberts Court has been known for.
Any assertion suggesting the court’s decision was made purely on legal principle would not be credible in light of the court’s record because nothing truly workable or sensible is to be found in the Appeals Court decision even if it does open the door a crack to damage claims from contaminated farmers. Most important, the major issues important to the public interest were neglected entirely, tragically, and blindly, and that would have mattered if truth, wisdom, and justice would also have mattered.
If review of the decisions would have been the court’s pleasure, the justices would have supported the contentions in our Supreme Court petition and our court complaint. On the other hand, if they were defensive about the past Supreme Court decision allowing Monsanto’s products to be patented, they could have wanted to stand firmly against our court contentions. The question is: would they have wanted to look forward toward finding out the truth for the people or would they have preferred to look backward to protect the power of established wealth and corporate opportunism as they have done when they have allowed Monsanto’s interests to be advanced without any objective research to prove its value or determine its failings.
Strengthening our contentions, even Monsanto’s own customers are abused by the aggressive assertion of patent-related demands and requirements stated in the adhesion contracts many farmers do not take time to read. The terms of these contracts are automatically accepted when farmers open a bag of Monsanto’s seeds, and they would not be accepted by many people if time was taken to read the terms or consult an attorney about the provisions—so they could be carefully considered.
The onerous terms would not be able to exist apart from the patents Monsanto has gained, and without the patents, Monsanto would not have been able to pursue a substantial monopoly over five major commodity crops: corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, and cotton. The patent power and the threats related to it have enabled the creation of a virtual monopoly, but it is illegal to use patents to establish monopoly as Monsanto has done. A patent is a protected temporary monopoly right, but it is not intended to permanently prevent competition. Yet, that is how Monsanto has used their patents. They have established unchallenged dominance through both the patents and the licensing or cross-licensing agreements associated with them, but this concern might not be an issue for a highly pro-corporate and pro-business court.
Among the many interrelated abuses associated with the Monsanto business model, the company imposes all liability for transgenic contamination on their customers and accepts no liability beyond seed replacement. The contract terms provide Monsanto full access to the farmer’s fields and accounting records for three years after a crop is grown—and even if the farmland is sold. The adhesion contract and technology stewardship agreement are binding on everyone in the production chain, and pro-business, pro-corporate people might admire their clever ingenuity on this.
The majority of the court might also admire anyone able to assert control and domination over pesky farmers in the same way feudal lords asserted domination over serfs, and they probably would not want to recognize it as the establishment of modern neofeudalism. They would not want to see the conflict between democracy and Capitalism because, in their eyes, Capitalism would be more important.
Through control over seed dealers and distributors, Monsanto has been able to eliminate competing seed from local markets. They have the power to do this because they are the world's largest seed company having acquired over 70 other seed companies controlling a quarter of the international seed market. Together with a few other biotech companies, they control about half of the world-wide seed market. As a result of this and also because of the increased reliance on hybrid seeds, healthful plant diversity is sacrificed. Yet, when the U.S. Justice Department examined Monsanto for anti-trust violations, they closed the investigation without making any public report about the findings and without taking any corrective action.
In other nations, Monsanto contracts with local seed companies to accomplish their controlling objectives, and in India, they have pursued domination of the cottonseed market through contracts with 60 Indian seed companies. All the Indian companies sell the same transgenic Monsanto cottonseed containing Bt insecticidal toxin extracted from a soil bacterium. The toxin never would have naturally crossed genes with a cotton plant. The cross is only possible through DNA-disrupting transgenosis.
When Indian farmers buy seeds, they often do not know that all the sellers are selling the same seeds, so when they have bad results, they buy from a different seller in the effort to fix the problem. When the bad results continue, they may not figure out the reason why even after they have bankrupted themselves from misplaced trust in advertising promises made by Monsanto and the companies they contract with. Monsanto’s Bt cotton can only yield well when it is regularly irrigated, but poor farmers in India are reliant on rain to provide all the irrigation available to them. Rains are not reliable in Indian cotton-farming areas, and that is the reason yields have not materialized as advertising claims have promised. This is deceptive abuse.
The transgenic Bt toxin has more poisonous characteristics than the Bt spray used commonly to control insects even in organic agriculture. The traditionally-used spray dissipates quickly and can be washed off, but the transgenic Bt is incorporated into every cell of the plant where it remains toxic without dissipating. Thus, Bt has been turned from a relatively benign product into a highly damaging, health destructive poison, and because insects have evolved resistance to the transgenic version, the traditionally-used natural bacterial version of the product will no longer be effective.
As a result, organic farmers will be denied a remedy they have used prudently and judiciously without health risk to consumers or livestock. Some believe Monsanto wants to destroy the effectiveness of natural pesticides, so they and other allied firms can sell chemicals to replace them. That is a logical conclusion based on observation, but the strategic thinking of the company on this has not been publicly revealed.
Monsanto has claimed the Bt toxin in their corn and cotton would be destroyed in the digestive tract of humans when they eat food containing it, but that has not happened. In Canada, 93% of a group of young pregnant women and women of child-bearing age were found to have the toxin in their blood, and 80% of their unborn babies also had it in their blood. The toxin has been found to be breaking through the gut wall of people much as it does when it kills insects. The result is called “leaky gut,” and it has been found to be a growing U.S. health issue. Multiple damaging impacts result.
Most of the toxin is suspected to have entered the Canadian women through meat fed transgenic corn and cottonseed meal, but it could also be reproducing in the intestines, turning people into a biological pesticide factory. More research is needed to know the full facts, but this research is prevented in the United States by the power Monsanto possesses under their patent rights established under law and precedent.
Harm has been found especially to the functioning of the pancreas, but the Bt also impairs immune function and growth rate in addition to the observed impacts on the lining of the stomach and intestinal tract, kidney, liver, and testes. Studies on this damage go back fifteen years, but no attention bas been paid to the findings in the United States. The first studies were initiated in Great Britain in 1995 with taxpayer support, and they resulted in what became known as the Pusztai Affair. Monsanto and the U.S. authorities have virtually ignored the foreign studies on this subject as if they did not exist, and this health issue adds to the issues resulting from the Roundup-Ready crops and the unhealthfully dangerous use of Roundup on them.
The Bt cotton plants have killed animals when they feed on the plants, and the toxin has also caused allergies and skin ailments among field workers. When promised yields have not been realized, 250,000 Indian farmers (according to the Indian government statistics) have committed suicide because they could not pay back the debts incurred from buying Monsanto’s seeds. This is the number of suicides over a total of sixteen years, and it includes those resulting from the purchase of Monsanto’s hybrid seeds as well as their transgenic seeds not sold in India until a market for them was already established in the U.S. Neither hybrid nor transgenic seeds can be saved. They must be purchased afresh every year by the farmers wanting to use them.
The farmer indebtedness began in the late 1990s when farmers started to buy Monsanto’s hybrid seeds in response to aggressive salesmanship touting improved yields, and the number of suicides increased when transgenic seeds arrived to add pesticidal and herbicide-resistant traits to the hybrid seeds. Major health impacts in India were encountered with livestock because Indian farmers have been in the habit of allowing animals to graze on cotton stubble after the cotton harvest is finished. Transgenic cottonseed is the only Monsanto transgenic seed sold in India. Their other commodity crops have have not been introduced, but they could be in the future. As in the United States, Monsanto has political advocates as well as critics in India.
Even worse over the long term could be the impact of Monsanto’s transgenic project for seed and plant diversity. That increases vulnerability to crop disasters like the Irish potato famine when all the available varieties of potato were susceptible to the potato blight. The threat against plant diversity affects not just cotton but all of the major commodity crops Monsanto’s technology has come to dominate, including their corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, and potentially now also alfalfa. The biotech response to this is the claim that they can use transgenosis to modify seeds more quickly than traditional plant breeding can, so they can immediately engineer whatever they may need to create to solve any disease problem that may arise.
The problem is Monsanto’s commodity seeds have not used transgenics to solve any disease problems. They have addressed two basic objectives: the creation of Roundup-Ready seeds able to withstand their herbicide and the creation of the Bt seeds with their own built-in pesticide. All the other traits have come from the hybrids they use as the host to be injected with the transgenic traits. They make claims about feeding the world and more, but these statements only bamboozle people who lack the knowledge to resist them and who want to believe the claims.
Meanwhile, many varieties of non-transgenic seeds have become so contaminated they are no longer usable by farmers wanting to grow only non-transgenic crops. Some have lost the varieties they like best and find most suitable to the own climate and soil. The dismissal decision against our lawsuit ignorantly and obliviously ignored this kind of damage, and these facts are part of the issue needing attention.
Monsanto’s transgenic canola has gone feral in many places, making it difficult to grow a crop of non-transgenic or organic canola that will not be cross-pollinated with the wild-growing transgenic canola. All alfalfa is similarly at risk from transgenic contamination. It could also become a hard-to-control transgenic weed even if total sales volume for transgenic Roundup-Ready alfalfa remains small. Because alfalfa is pollinated mostly by bees and other insects, the pollen spread happens much faster.
In the past, only 7% of alfalfa has been grown with the use of herbicide, but Monsanto has promoted the use of Roundup as a fast curing agent to speed the harvest and evade weather problems during the normal drying period. The non-transgenic crop has been sprayed before harvest to kill it and dehydrate it quickly and help prevent mold from growing when it is turned into haylage. The Glyphosate in Roundup is a patented antibiotic used to prevent the growth of bacteria, but when the feed is fed to livestock, they get a heavy dose of the Roundup herbicide in their diet, and that has damaging health impacts Monsanto has not acknowledged or warned farmers about.
Monsanto has claimed there would be no harm from the Glyphosate in the Roundup, but studies now show that is not true. The chemical is passed on to people when they eat the meat, and they suffer from it also. Meat is believed to be a major source of the Glyphosate found in humans, but other sources of Roundup’s active ingredient are also possible. It can be spread as vapor in breathed air and via fog, rain, and water.
Alfalfa is the fourth largest crop grown in the United States behind corn, soy, and wheat. It is the nation’s most important forage crop, but it can be transgenicly contaminated much more easily because it is pollinated by insects and it goes through more frequent growth cycles every year. Plant pathologists have said all U.S. alfalfa could be contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic alfalfa in as little as five years.
The export market for alfalfa was threatened in 2013 when non-transgenic alfalfa slated for shipment to Japan was found to have been contaminated. That caused Japan to suspend imports until more could be learned. Alfalfa is an important crop both as animal feed and in rotation with other crops to fix nitrogen in soil, and the export markets want the non-transgenic version because they do not trust transgenic food or animal feed. This picture shows why co-existence between non-transgenic and transgenic crops is not merely a fictional fantasy; it is fraudulent impossibility. Because Monsanto and their government allies want to pursue it anyway, they have shown they do not care what happens to others not wanting to grow transgenic crops.
Some believe work for Monsanto should have disqualified Justice Thomas from participating on the J.E.M. decision, but standards of recusal have been liberal for justices. They have been able do as they see fit to do. Justice O’Connor recused herself from the decision because of a possible conflict of interest that was not specified further. It did not need to be.
The Health Damage to Consumers and the Continuous Work by Monsanto and its Allies to Maintain Consumer Ignorance
Chapter 13
Worse than the threats to farmers is the impact of Monsanto’s products on consumers, and that is why, according to polling, most farmers, growing transgenic crops will not eat what they grow. Apparently, they have learned enough to now prefer to eat organic food or at least some other non-transgenic food. When the impacts are fully known, people will understand how Monsanto’s agriculture system might be more destructive than heavy-metal pollution from lead water pipes was to ancient Romans. Without repair, it could be enough to destroy modern civilization. The truth about these issues needs to be scrutinized by everyone—not stonewalled.
In the face of the irresponsible U.S. reality and as if it did not matter, the government has collaborated with Monsanto in helping them evade independent, objective research needed to examine the long-term risks associated with Monsanto’s products. In 1992 and ever since, government officials have overruled the safety concerns of the FDA’s own scientists using a fabricated, unscientific ruse called the “Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence” to evade the need to know the truth. More than two decades later, the FDA still uses this doctrine despite strong opposing views.
As a public service and as part of both past and future lawsuits—and related public outreach, we need to illuminate the health and environmental destruction wrought by Monsanto’s transgenic crops and the associated chemicals. This is part of showing why Monsanto’s patents never should have been issued. The issuance of the patents was negligent just as the the release of Monsanto’s transgenic food onto the market was negligent and an unconscionable, reprehensible failure of public responsibility.
In illuminating this failure through the presentation of evidence, we will need to utilize research reports from other nations because Monsanto has been able to use patent rights, financial power, campaign contributions, political influence, contractual control over research institutions, and insider political relationships with government officials to prevent sorely needed independent, objective U.S. studies from being made. The corruption of many research institutions through dependency on the power of corporate money backed by controlling contracts is as abusively destructive as money-driven political corruption and the subversion of democracy.
The existing way needs to be changed, and that could happen if the political will existed to do it, but that will has not existed. Neither the President nor the opposing party has mentioned this issue in their State of the Union speeches or their party platforms. That is shameful because healthful food and wise nourishment is more important to the health and working functionality of the people than anything else.
The observed results are the mark of a dysfunctional system where the facilitation of corporate profit and corporate deregulation has become more important than the protection of the public from serious health and environmental dangers. Protection of the public interest has been sacrificed and lost on the altar of corporate political power. The issue is as important as it was in the Temple at Jerusalem when the tables of the money changers were overturned, and bee deaths are a strong public advisory.
Monsanto does their own product safety research or they contract for it to be done for them by agricultural research institutions. Then, the government rubber stamps the result of this biased research much as corrupt customs officers in some countries can be bribed to look the other way as elicit contraband is allowed to enter their nation. No arguments can be asserted to sugar coat the enormous public cost of what has been done, and no corrupted journalism can hide the truth forever. If the arguments existed, the judges issuing decisions on our lawsuit would have stated them; they did not state them. They could only resort to sophistry in the absence of valid arguments.
Similarly, the U.S. government does nothing to verify Monsanto’s claims. They only affirm and blindly sustain whatever the company says. They are partners much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, except that the Hole in the Wall Gang only stole money; they did not destroy the public health, the public welfare, the soil, the beneficial insects, and the environment as part of a major theft from the Commons.
This is what a once honorable U.S. democratic ideal has come to under increasingly concentrated corporate political power, so the question is: who will blow the whistle? The issues we are raising are important not just to farmers growing non-transgenic crops; our efforts will also benefit Monsanto’s customers by reducing the onerous Monsanto control over their lives and basic rights, including their right to know and understand the implications of Monsanto’s technology for all people and all life.
For farmers, the right to save seeds for future use is centrally important to the future of civilization, and so is the Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure, but Monsanto has used their political leverage to freely enter farms to test for contaminated crops farmers may be growing unknowingly and without having paid for a license. If people have done wrong, they should be prosecuted, but the system has worked to allow flagrant abuse and establish fear beyond the prosecution for wrong doing. It has allowed a climate of distrust and alienation to grow in most rural areas. Many have found the imposed situation is like living in a police state where Monsanto’s security contractors pursue rumors and reports they elicit from their collaborators. This is not a climate of able to promote healthy, promising democracy.
Our lawsuit against Monsanto is more important to everyone who eats in all nations around the world than it is to farmers. You would not know that from the press coverage given it, but it is true, and that is why this Web site is needed to help explain the issues to those who want to understand them. Multiple studies, mostly in other nations, have shown Monsanto’s transgenic, chemical-laden food is unhealthful nutritionally and imperiling via allergies, toxins, new diseases, and increased susceptibility to many chronic afflictions. More about this is found on the pages of this Web site and in the linked information. Video and bibliographic references address it in detail. Needed is the time of citizens to learn what they need to know.
Functional citizenship requires the investigation of these sources especially when the observed negligence of courts will not permit hearing of the issues in a court of law. The threats come not just from the transgenic technology or even just from the chemical herbicide used with the crops; the synergies between them compound the health and environmental damage. Monsanto’s toxic chemicals are ingested in multiple unexpected ways. Among the many issues to be understood by citizen diligence in service to everyone’s need, the chemicals get into the air people breathe and the water they drink and cook with. Cooking is especially dangerous because it concentrates the water-borne dangers. Because of the adjuvants used, the chemicals penetrate crops, so they cannot be washed off. The impacts are manifold and terrible.
We need to emphasize again: necessary studies in the United States have been prevented by Monsanto’s assertion of patent rights and through contracts used to control agricultural research institutions. They have commonly threatened to sue those opposing their interests. They have hired not only “security contractors,” but also lawyers, public relations firms, and others to harass scientists, authors, publishers, farmers, seed cleaners, government officials, politicians, and others. That is how they advance their profitable agenda; it is part of their business plan, and they also create well-funded astroturf organizations to support their control over food.
When Vermont was about to pass food labeling legislation in 2012, they were chilled by the threat of a Monsanto lawsuit, and California and Washington state might have faced lawsuits if their ballot initiatives on transgenic food labeling had passed. Instead, Monsanto and allied companies broke spending records buying advertising to prevent the initiatives from passing, and they also lobbied the press, using their advertising leverage to strengthen ability to promote the editorials and biased news coverage they wanted to support their massive broadcast advertising campaign. Then when a shareholder vote took place at Monsanto’s shareholder meeting on food labeling, only 4% of the shareholders supported it. That shows the shareholders are just as dishonorable on the need for food transparency as company executives.
The companies involved in the campaign used the Grocery Manufacturers Association as a way to launder money given to the campaign against transgenic food labeling, and this was against Washington state laws ensuring funding transparency. When they were caught, the list of givers was published, but they would have persisted with it if they had not been caught by the state attorney general. He might not have been alerted to the issue apart from an action taken independently by a group of citizens.
In California, the margin of the defeat was 2.8% and in Washington, it was 2.18%. The 62 companies their trade associations fighting against labeling spent about $1.20 per California citizen (about $8.00 per vote), and in Washington, over $3.00 per citizen (more than $22.00 per vote). They know many people will not want to eat food with transgenic content, so they spent about $66 million against the two initiatives to prevent people from knowing the truth about the transgenic content in their food.
Sadly, many people supported this promotion of ignorance because they have been led to fear an increase in the cost of food. That was the principle opposing contention in both California and Washington, and it would not resonate as it has without many people, especially in rural areas, living on tight food budgets. That is a measure of dysfunctional democracy because democracy cannot work unless people are secure. When citizens feel insecure, they can be easily abused and exploited as they were.
The government has collaborated with Monsanto by failing to pass legislation requiring independent, objective studies funded by Monsanto but not controlled by them to investigate the company’s food safety claims. Especially needed are long-term studies, because Monsanto’s own studies are too brief to find out what needs to be known. Most of the serious health issues are long-term, not short-term. In fact, the worst impacts may be multi-generational, but more needs to be known about that.
Both the government and Monsanto have poorly served the nation by making false and unjustified statements and by perpetrating propaganda. With evasion coming from both, the worst part of the faulty research is the failure to inform the public about the destructive, combined impacts from Monsanto’s technology and the chemicals used with it. The time is now to end this failure, but the people need to lead the effort because the courts have proved to be as much in bed with Monsanto’s biotech project and those of their allies as the other two branches of the government.
The government’s collaboration is like a pro-corporate effort to increase healthcare expenditures and healthcare profits by destroying the public health to do so, and it happens because of the power of corporate money in the political process and the need for the money by politicians to conduct political campaigns. This is how the people have come to be abused when the role of government should be to serve them.
This is the reverse of economic development. This is stealing from the welfare of the people to empower companies like Monsanto, because they provide the funding political campaigns need to get candidates elected. Gross Domestic Product GDP may increase in the short run—but at high long-term cost to the public health and the environment. The result is a massive reduction of net public welfare, but GDP does not have a way to measure these net effects, so they are ignored. The government and its subservient judges must be exposed and called to public account for their failure.
The corporate, mainstream media have also been just as negligent and subservient in collaborating with the Monsanto agenda and the government complicity. This has been seen repeatedly through the absence of coverage and the slant given when news coverage, editorials, and op-ed columns are sometimes offered. The point of journalism should be to help citizens find the truth, so intentional collaboration in preventing its discovery is an abuse of essential public trust. This must be fixed.
Too commonly, the press and media have been in bed with Monsanto just as much as the government. They have run articles and op-ed columns sent to them by Monsanto’s aggressive public relations consultants. Monsanto should be completely entitled to having their message heard, but effort should also be made by the press and the media to determine where the truth lies, and that is the part of their important public service role that has been missing. For this reason, ownership of the media by corporate conglomerates needs to be ended. It emphasizes the need for profits and news control in service to corporate interests, and it undermines the need for public service. The needed changes will not be made as long as the power of corporately-derived money in the political process is more important public health.
This is another aspect of the destructive co-opting of institutions needed to make a democratic nation functional and publicly beneficial for its own people and others. Here again, advertising revenue from allied companies can be used to pose a threat against the publishers and editors, forcing them to do as the corporations want done. In that, lies the damage to a democracy-building, public-serving flow of information, but the worst result lies in discrediting U.S. democracy in the eyes of people around the world. Others view things differently, because they have not been kept in enforced ignorance as the people of the United States have been. As a result, they have acted to protect their public health, the environment, and the quality of food more diligently.
Three Central Questions Needing Immediate Answers if Truth, Justice, Wisdom, and Honorable Morality Should Once Again Matter
Chapter 14
The most fundamental questions raised by Monsanto’s dismissal motion against our lawsuit are only three:
1. Why does Monsanto want to evade the presentation of evidence about the value of their technology? The answer to that would be: they cannot prove their crops have any social utility beyond the ability to lower short-term costs for farmers and produce income for Monsanto’s shareholders. That is the only established benefit from Monsanto’s transgenic seeds; none of the other claims have proven merit, and this would be made clear in court through provided research into all claims.
Monsanto’s technology cannot prevent world hunger; instead, it destroys the capacity to feed more people. With the health of the people destroyed, some think the Monsanto goal is population reduction. Monsanto’s promotion of mono-crop agriculture can only cause damage while promoting only expedient short-term profit-related interests. Only small-scale, diverse, organic agriculture from local sources can reliably feed the people of the world over the long term. This will be established in court based on well-established, peer-reviewed studies. Monsanto’s counter-arguments will need to be debunked, and the problem with that work is that money has been able to buy them many subservient allies in the work they do.
Among other destruction, Monsanto’s chemically-dependent system has been proven destructive to human and animal fertility, and at least one study shows massively increased mortality over successive generations as a result of consuming transgenic food. More studies are needed, and they would have been conducted if the United States was an honorable and responsible nation and not politically dominated by self-serving corporate amorality at the cost of integrity.
Research is needed to confirm the long-term health impacts seen from the shorter studies in other nations and to show the faults with Monsanto’s own studies. Research on this would have been conducted in the United States if corporately subservient deregulation was not more important than honorable service to the people. Most of the studies have only lasted 90 days or less, and that is the reason long-term studies are needed to duplicate and confirm the suggestions established from the initial studies. Short studies do not reveal enough information to suffice.
Some believe birth control and population control is the objective of transgenic agriculture, and they consider this to be the reason the Gates Foundation has taken a strong interest in it, but this theory cannot be proved. It is only a speculative, conjectural hypothesis to examine. The Gates Foundation advertises “the right of people to safe, healthy lives” but they do not establish productive longevity as their goal. That failure is a loophole in their stated agenda, and it raises more questions than they have answered. The answers need to be demanded before their commitment to transgenic agriculture can be respected.
Heavy Gates investments have been made in Monsanto and other transgenic projects, and Bill Gates seems to think about transgenic technology in the same simplistic way he thinks about computer technology. To him more technology is better than less, but his failure of prudence needs to be called to account the same as Monsanto’s lack of respectable prudence. Perhaps, Gates’s college education was cut short before he got to study the biological complexities Monsanto has similarly ignored. The power of money to do as it wants do without regard for the consequences needs to be ended. The costs are too high, the destruction too great.
We will establish known facts in court and allow Monsanto to try to refute them if they can. We only need the right appear before a judge, but so far, Monsanto has wanted to deny us that right, and two courts have supported them in that work. The world’s people can only speculate on the reasons for the observed behavior; they cannot respect what they see from Monsanto, their allies, or the U.S. courts.
Monsanto has said we do not have a judicable dispute with them, but we say we are at immediate continuing risk from their technology in multiple ways every day. For that reason, we want the public health and environmental need faced scientifically with no more delay. Monsanto has said science is on their side, but their science is decades out of date, and has been discredited by up-to-date science. This needs to be made clear in a courtroom. It needs to be proven; no one should take Monsanto’s word for the truth, and they should not take our work for it either. Every citizen has a responsibility to themselves to study the evidence and to get the education needed to enable them to study it. Citizenship requires that.
The one benefit in lowering costs for farmers could be enough for Monsanto’s technology to be beneficial if it was more than a short-term benefit and if it did not come at a high health and environmental cost to the planet and its inhabitants. In a culture dominated by short-term thinking and a habit of incessant expediency, the high long-term cost even to Monsanto’s own farmer-customers is exploitively ignored. This marks the U.S. cultural amorality now understood in other nations.
Transgenic agricultural technology would have less appeal to many farmers if national farm policy had not turned them into the vulnerable victims of intense competition policy has designed to force them to try to make up with greater sales volume what they have lost in profit margin. Because of the incessant pressure to get bigger and more capital intensive along with the need to lower marginal costs per unit of production, farmers can be easily exploited by a technological chimera like the one Monsanto offers. Policy has set farmers up to be abused by Monsanto’s destructive exploitation; maybe it would not matter if they were only people being damaged by the destruction, but it does matter; they are destroying the Commons against all people in all nations, not just the U.S. people.
When the high costs and limited benefits of Monsanto’s technology are finally understood, as they should have been decades ago, the health and environmental costs will be understood to far exceed any benefits. These are the issues we need to make clear in court. For this reason, none of Monsanto patents on transgenic crops should have been issued, and none of their crop seeds should ever have been released onto the market. Apart from the political power of Monsanto’s corporate money and widespread pro-technology prejudice in the United States, transgenic agriculture could not have gained a foothold without thoroughly reliable and objective research. Science would not have been overruled by politics as it has been. That has resulted from the political power of Monsanto and others.
Monsanto’s destruction is ongoing, and all people are immediately and directly under threat from it; so are all living creatures right down to essential bacteria in soil, insects, animals, and people. Bees and monarch butterflies are the most visible canaries in the agricultural coal mine to die, but they will not be the last.
The destructive process is as inexorable as if it were a death wish posted on highway billboards for all to embrace; yet many cannot see it yet. Pro-Monsanto bias is common, and ignorance about Monsanto is even more common despite the large numbers of people telling pollsters they want transgenic food to be labeled. Polls also have shown that only about half of U.S. citizens think transgenic food is unhealthful. The other half is either unsure or positively hopeful about its value. Truth is needed on this subject, and everyone needs to possess it. That is the reason our lawsuit is needed, and it is the reason the court stonewalling of it is a negligent, pro-technology bigotry and a multi-lateral international travesty.
The split judgment of the people about the value of transgenic food is not in conflict with the polling showing over 90% of the U.S. people want transgenic food labeled, because labeling is a right to know issue and a desire to know issue. It is separate from the judgment about the nutritive and healthful value of the food. This second judgment about the value of the food depends on more knowledge than most U.S. people have. Their disconnection from the sources of their food has left them in ignorance about the basic realities of farming, food, and biology.
Unseen soil life, microorganisms, and nutrient value have been killed as part of Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural system for two decades and longer than that from the use of their herbicide. The question is: when will it be brought to an end; when will democracy be restored on the core issues related to life and public health, so the people can have a voice on the issues so central to their own future.
In bringing our lawsuit, we are advocating for all life, but two courts have denied us the right to state our arguments so the truth can be determined for the benefit of all. Given all the government officials who will be shamed and made liable when the truth is determined and agreed upon, the stonewalling by the courts can be understood as part of the collaborative political defense of Monsanto’s interests and the interests of the politicians who have collaborated with them for a piece of the political money and no other credible or reasonable objective. Everything else is wishful at best; it cannot be called rational, moral, responsible or honorable.
Judges, government officials, and companies have all worked together to deliver mutual benefit at the expense of the people they should be serving if their oath of office should mean anything to them or anyone else, but the more they stonewall the pursuit of the truth, the more they put off the day of reckoning and make the public costs higher. The money-pursuing conspirators cannot postpone or prevent the emergence of the facts forever, but they seem not to care as long as they can profit in the meantime. Expedient, short-term thinkers typically ignore the long-term future public costs. These are the values now dominant in the United States.
To stop all the future damage, the presentation of the evidence is needed in a place where the result of the trial can win international respect among all those whose understanding of the facts is not clouded by campaign contributions, corporate lobbying, and established interests—as it has been in the United States. Only when that happens can attitudes about the United States around the world be improved.
The people in many other nations see the U.S. Congress and the White House in bed with Monsanto at the expense of everyone else. The U.S. government and Monsanto are elephants in the living room for them, while most people in the U.S have remained oblivious in their happy, well-entertained ignorance of the issues.
Understanding of this reality in many other nations is the reason 64 nations require transgenic food to be labeled while the United States does not. These 64 nations represent the great majority of the world’s population. It is also the reason why farmers in other nations often have resisted transgenic technology. It is all part of the perceived U.S. failure of truthfulness, wisdom, prudence, justice, integrity, morality, trustworthiness, and honorability. That makes the United States part of the problem, not part of the solution, but money talks in the United States, and the wealthy elite, including particularly powerful U.S. corporations, have more money and influence to help amplify their voice than most people do.
When four judges have served Monsanto in preventing the truth from being presented and established, they have sustained the failure of the U.S. government in preventing independent, objective, reliable investigation into the astronomical long-term public costs of using transgenic seeds and the associated chemicals. We have taken the issue to court because government has been negligent now for more than two decades; we would not have needed to go to court if any branch of the government had done its job. When government fails, people must stand up.
Three courts have obliviously, ignorantly, and negligently sustained multiple continuing governmental failures as if only pro-corporate politics should matter, and that behavior could be intelligent, safe, or healthful. It is no more than pandering to Monsanto’s profligacy, and it flagrantly discredits U.S. democracy. The time has arrived when the unasked questions finally need to be answered, but the courts have shown us they do not want them to be either asked or answered.
2. Do we or do we not face an immediate daily threat from Monsanto’s technology and is the threat sufficient to give us the right to bring our contentions to court? The lower court judges have said we do not face a sufficiently immediate threat, but, based on both facts and existing precedents, we say we do. We say they are sophists, evading their public responsibility to instead serve Monsanto’s corporate interest and the interest of their political allies. This is a public atrocity, needing to be addressed. The truth must be established either by the courts or by the people, but it has not been, and so far the courts have made the work harder.
The logic under both lower court decisions is neither meritorious nor capable of holding any water. If the Federal District Court decision had been backed by logic instead of imperious prejudice, it would not have been so hostile, impugning, and antagonistic, and the Appeals Court would not have needed to replace it with a different argument establishing the same negligent and dysfunctional outcome.
People often show animosity as a substitute for logic, and this reality of human nature is not altered when impugning statements are delivered by people in black robes. If the exhibited judicial logic was a bucket it would leak like a sieve, and the opportunity to debate this contention in detail before a public forum needs to be welcomed. An honorable courtroom would be the best place to do so, because that might attract the interest of the press and the media as no other forum has done.
This reality has not been exposed by the media or a congressional investigation even though it could have been if finding the truth was more important in the United States than the protection of established corporate interests. This is part of the problem needing to be addressed, but improvement will be impossible until the U.S. people show greater interest in the nutritive quality, healthfulness, and safety of their food. They also need to show more interest and commitment to knowing the constructive truth about the one thing everyone needs to survive: food. When food is made unhealthful in exchange for profit, the culture allowing it is condemned in the eyes of people able to understand the moral compromise.
As long as most people are willing to buy and eat the unhealthful, wellness-impairing food provided for them by profit-mongers and as long as they are kept in the dark about the source of its shortcomings, the problems will not be addressed and healthcare costs in the United States will continue to rise. The abuse can only persist as long as the political system works as it does to protect profitable negligence, and this means the U.S. political system will continue to be discredited internationally in places where prudent food quality is more important than it is in the United States. More than the U.S. political system is discredited; the U.S. people are also discredited for their collaborative negligence.
The lower court judges have suggested we need to have been contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenes and have placed ourselves in jeopardy of being sued by Monsanto for patent infringement before we would have the “legal standing” needed to bring our lawsuit to court. This is like saying we can have no claim against the hangman and his agency for false detention and prosecution unless our neck is in the noose and we were standing on the platform with the trap door about to be triggered—and our spine snapped. It is a ludicrous, amoral court contention and especially so when Monsanto has been allowed to come onto people’s farms to test crops for contamination or has done that clandestinely.
Under the observed court reasoning, maybe we could only have standing if the trap door had already dropped and we were on the way down. The two lower court decisions are just that flagrant in their abuse of justice. This flagrancy needs to be called out even if we have limited power to do anything about the failure of justice.
Because we are almost powerless in the face of the confronted abuse of justice and wisdom, we need help from many others. More voices in support of truth are now needed, but that does not happen easily in a nation where many people have a habit of docility even in the face of great abuse. It was this way also in Nazi Germany, but a nation of people who do not read or pay attention to court decisions impacting their direct personal interests is not a promising, pro-democratic reality. Yet, this is the reality in the United States when the media do not cover the information people need to know about. The media would cover the news if that was demanded of them by the people. Biased, prejudiced news coverage would not be permitted if it would be publicly condemned by the people.
Pastor Martin Niemoller spoke to the issue in his famous but sometimes misquoted statement about Communists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists all being taken away while he was silent about it. People have many reasons why they do not stand up against injustice and tyranny and especially so when they think the issues are only about other people and do not affect themselves. Now, everyone is affected, but still, majorities in California and Washington voted for ignorance. Believably, the majority of people there voted against labeling because they did not study the issue carefully enough to know how to protect their own interests.
Many people were willing to give up their right to know about the content of their food if they thought that knowledge might cause an increase in the price of food. This attitude can be called a deliberate preference for ignorance without assessing the costs of that preference, and it can be compared to people who prefer imprisonment to freedom or the compromise of liberty in exchange for security. Such people do exist; they do not have to take care of themselves if someone else is doing it for them; similarly, in the past, some have been content to live under slavery if they were among the favored slaves in their own plantation community. They preferred the certainties of what they knew to the uncertainties they did not.
Benjamin Franklin spoke to those preferring ignorance when he said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Democracy is dysfunctional unless people can know and do know whatever they need to know to protect whatever they value most, and especially so when they need to know it to protect their own health and ability to function intelligently as citizens. If they do not value their own healthful life, it cannot be known what they would know enough to value, but maybe most do not value their own health. If they did the majority of the nation’s adult people would not be classified as obese and they would not be dependent on doctors to provide them everything they know about health. They would take personal responsibility.
Even if others similar to us have been both threatened and sued by Monsanto as a result of uncontrollable crop contamination, the four lower court judges have said that is not enough to give us the right to bring our arguments to court. They do not recognize the peril caused by Monsanto’s transgenic contamination, even though some of us have given up farming activities we want to pursue because we do not want to face the serious risks and dangers Monsanto has imposed on us. Under this is a serious moral issue, but the courts blew it off, and through that, they said that the entrenchment of negligent corporate amorality is not a problem for them.
The circumstance is the same as if someone were walking around with a hidden and silenced gun in a noisy crowd of people and pulling the trigger at random without regard for whomever would be hit. Three courts have shown they would not allow the people in the crowd any redress. The only difference is that bullets deliver immediate impact, while Monsanto’s contamination has been shown to deliver worse long-term impacts extending to future generations. If people knew what was happening in the crowd of people being shot, which of them would be denied the right to confront the perpetrator and bring him to trial for their crime. No one would be denied that right, but we have been denied a similar right to serve the public need. In this lies the oblivious, court-sustained public atrocity.
Prominently among the risks is the threat of a patent infringement lawsuit if our crops become contaminated, but that is not the only risk. Another risk is that we might unknowingly produce contaminated food and provide it for other people to eat. The Appeals Court ignored these risks as if they should be seen as irrelevant. In acting as they did, the three judges showed their own oblivious or inattentive disconnection from the nutritional and healthful quality of the food provided in the United States. They did not show any concern about that, and that would fit with the expedient amorality observed and now taken for granted in many places.
Many of us have made a moral choice to avoid endangering others in addition to seeking to avoid the possibility of a patent infringement lawsuit if our crops are contaminated, but Monsanto’s attorneys and the judges have said we have inflicted unnecessary damage on ourselves by making the decisions we have. The statement they have made only shows the difference between their morality and ours. The revealed attitude is morally obscene. Perhaps they do not understand what morality should mean or the diligence it should require, but then they also say Monsanto’s products have been proved safe because their own inadequate studies say so. That is also a failure of diligence. No independent, objective, long-term studies have said so. Those have been evaded by government and Monsanto.
The government says it does not have the statutory power to do more, but over the past three decades they could have sought the laws needed to protect the public interest if that was their objective. Instead, their objective was facilitation of the corporate agenda in exchange for corporately-derived campaign contributions, and in that behavior, the responsible officials discredited themselves worldwide.
If Monsanto and their customers cannot control their transgenic technology and their overspray of chemicals, they should not be allowed to sell them, and no one should be allowed to use them if the healthful use of them is impossible. If public health were the concern it should be, the use of neither would be allowed. At stake in the long-run is the future of civilization including the physical and mental capacity of the people who create it and function within it, but the seriousness of the health and nutritional issues has been ignored, impugned, and disregarded.
Centrally important is the principle of transgenic trespass and chemical trespass. This should be the same as requiring farmers to control the behavior of their livestock keeping them inside fences and requiring drivers of cars to control their vehicles. With government support and in flagrant neglect of this essential principle, Monsanto has pursued uncontrolled trespass for their own gain while leaving everyone else to pay the costs of their negligence. This is criminal behavior with the government as an accessory. Yet instead of being prosecuted, they have been assisted in advancing their destruction as if it should not and did not matter.
Monsanto’s behavior impairs the ability to grow the safe, healthful, nutritious, and unpoisoned food needed by every person and every living creature to sustain health and life; a baseline understanding of these issues is a culture’s most important commitment to its people. Failure to focus on the pressing need to lower rapidly rising healthcare costs is also a violation of public responsibility by all who are agents of it, but that is only a part of the issue needing attention. We want and need the unencumbered right and ability to grow food that is prudently uncompromised by Monsanto’s contamination, but with government help, they have hung a Sword of Damocles over that right and ability. No one can honestly say that should be tolerable; they do not yet know the needed truth to say that.
If we do not have the right to bring our lawsuit, a homeowner should have no right to bring charges against a burglar caught in his house before the burglary has actually occurred—and no one would have any claim against an armed attacker unless the attack had caused damage. Both flagrantly abusive court decisions against our lawsuit are themselves flagrant abuses added to the Monsanto abuse.
The decisions, if not the judges, have revealed a Judiciary as much in bed with Monsanto as the elected representatives in the other two government branches. Citizens should examine this view for themselves to see if they do not agree with it. It should be examined to see where truth and logic lie. This is basic citizenship.
If any court existed to do it, the three court decisions need to be reversed. Now that the Supreme Court has shown it is on the side of Monsanto and against the needs of the people just as much as the lower courts, only the court of public opinion can fix the problem. The issue is as simple as that, but it is also a question about whether there should be a democratic right and a moral obligation to present and allow evidence in pursuit of the truth necessary to serve the public health and safety. If that right is important and three courts have mistakenly denied it, the reparation of the matter needs to come from somewhere. When the Supreme Court does not act, only the people are left to take action. The issue is that same as it was in Bush v. Gore. That was another case where the right to find the truth was denied and democracy was then also discredited around the world.
Stewardship on behalf of the environment is also at stake, and that has been as fully neglected by the courts as the other parts of the public need. Patents should not gain a presumption of public utility unless the environment is protected in the course of the patent’s normal use. In the case against Monsanto, the environment is not protected. The failure is so negligent, the damage is far worse than all other previous environmental disasters. It makes BP’s Gulf Oil Spill into a minor event, and everyone would know that if they were not so disconnected from their food.
In sum, the public interest requires discovery of the truth, and that pursuit has been stonewalled as if the public health and environmental destruction do not matter. Three courts have said the welfare of a wealthy corporation is more important than the right of the people to learn the truth about food and to have related matters fairly and wisely adjudicated as the courts were created to do. The behavior may require revolutionary action perhaps in the form of a Constitutional Convention to repair all the systemic dysfunctionality and neglect of honest duty.
3. Should Monsanto be allowed to maintain their ability to bring patent infringement lawsuits when they use them to maintain market domination and to prevent contaminated farmers from bringing damage suits over trespassing transgenic contamination and related chemical contamination? The power to pursue patent infringement lawsuits at will is important to Monsanto even though they have passed all liability for and damage over to their customers and limited their own liability to seed replacement. The power to bring the lawsuits is important to the protection of their seed market. Without the power to threaten patent infringement lawsuits, Monsanto would lose customers from the contamination damage liability. As soon as the first damage suits would be brought, Monsanto would need to try to chill them as they always have. If the contamination was less that one percent, they would likely try to prove it was not.
Monsanto likely only will have customers as long as they can use the threat of patent infringement lawsuits to protect them from contamination damage claims. Once that ability is lost, Monsanto’s transgenic seed market would begin to collapse, and at least some of the judges and justices may have understood that. That is a reason they would have to be prejudiced in favor of biotech agriculture. Otherwise, they would not have written the decisions they have written, and the Supreme Court would not have punted as they did. Without the protection they have provided, Monsanto transgenic technology is dead at least until its nutritional and healthful quality can be assured. That cannot be determined about the current technology they are selling. The evidence is fully clear on this issue.
To establish the truth, Monsanto needs to come to court and present their evidence for scrutiny; that must be required inasmuch as the USDA, the FDA, and EPA have not required it and have not asked for the authority needed to require it. Understandably, they do not want to have to prove the safety of their products because the company would collapse if it failed to show the evidence needed to prove their products healthful. That would be the reason they have pursued dismissal instead of the healthful truth. They have proceeded as far as they have by getting the government to do as they have done, and it has been profitable, so they would not want to end their scam now any more than the Mafia would.
They have fought the need to present evidence by filing a dismissal motion against our lawsuit, and if they had been sent back to the Federal District Court, they had planned to file another one. This is the opposite of beneficial transparency. Also, as long as a threat of patent infringement lawsuits continues to exist, the extent of existing contamination remains hidden. Farmers with contaminated crops cannot risk allowing anyone learn they have been contaminated because they fear the prospect of a patent infringement lawsuit. Because of that, they sell their compromised crop however they can and try to fly under the radar of Monsanto’s investigators. By that, the public interest in transparency is negligently disserved.
This is the governing reality, and it results in the suppression of information about the amount of contamination that is occurring. Much more of it could be in the market than is known. Beyond that, Monsanto’s project has created a police state environment in rural areas of the United States. This is what happens as a result of the intimidation, threats, and investigations they use to defend their patents. People now fear their neighbors, because a neighbor who learns about a case of contamination might report it to Monsanto in exchange for a reward. None of this would happen apart from the wishful, pro-technology government bias.
Most of Monsanto’s collaborators do not snitch out of a charitable desire to help the company advance their agenda, though some customers may be loyal to them. Motivations can be complex, but interests have become more important than neighborly relations, and that has become destructive of formerly admirable and collaborative rural community relationships. The fabric of rural communities has been compromised by the Monsanto business model and all the enforcement pressures attendant with it. That is, in turn, destructive of democracy as if that should be the goal. It destroys the relationships democracy requires to succeed.
Monsanto is reported to annually investigate about 500 cases of what they call “seed piracy,” and they do not know who to investigate without getting help. When they get a tip, they can send their “security consultants” to either collect a royalty, assume ownership of the crop, or find the evidence needed to file a lawsuit. When farmers do not agree to settle on Monsanto’s terms, a patent infringement lawsuit is filed, and that escalates the pressure on farmers who may not have the money or time to contest over Monsanto’s contentions—even if they are being wronged.
Income from the pre-trial settlements is used to provide scholarships to rural students and to fund other charitable giving, and that also works to Monsanto’s advantage. It sends a message that Monsanto is watching and wielding a big stick. If the farmers do not settle promptly before going to court, a message is sent that they are denying the community opportunity to gain a charitable benefit. This serves to transfer the onus from Monsanto onto the farmers seen as recalcitrant.
Typically, Monsanto’s agents demand to see the targeted farmer’s records, and in some states the company has used their political power to gain legislation giving them the right to enter at will onto a farmer’s property to test for transgenic contamination and the use of their technology without a license. Some fear they will or might sow intentional contamination and others have believed Monsanto has been caught using false or erroneous test results just as Monsanto’s lead attorney in our lawsuit misrepresented in court the results of the testing conducted by Monsanto on Percy Schmeiser’s farm in Saskatchewan. Those results are available publicly, so the truth can be known about what they say.
The Need for Studies from Other Nations to Repair U.S. Negligence and the Greater Need for Honorable and Reliable U.S. Studies to Confirm or Check Their Findings
Chapter 15
Because of the studies available from other nations, Monsanto’s own studies about the safety and wisdom of their technology can be found to be faulty. They have been too brief and short-sighted as well as academically insufficient methodologically and designed to serve Monsanto’s corporate interest. When adverse findings have resulted the presented findings have been discarded along with the studies finding them. They have hidden the truth, and evidence now shows the crops are destructive of health and the environment far beyond the value of any claimed farmer benefit.
Suggested is an intention from the start to produce biased research and exploit both weak U.S. laws and facilitating officials to get away with it. The public need has not been served, and in that is observed flagrant, pro-corporate, pro-biotech amorality at public expense. Monsanto has been shown to be the same as a wild animal needing to be controlled inside a fence, but instead the government has given them full freedom.
Monsanto’s crops have done enormous harm while providing only limited, short-term, and short-sighted benefit for Monsanto’s farming customers in exchange for the much higher long-term destruction to the public health and the environment. An abbreviated, partial summary of some of the important but neglected issues needing to be considered is here in an opinion column by Curt Ries published by Truthout.
When all the environmental and health impacts are considered, Monsanto’s transgenic seed project has been subversive and hostile to the collective common interests of all U.S. citizens and all people in every other nation, including the judges who have ruled against us and the politicians who take campaign contributions from Monsanto, listen to their lobbyists and allies, and then support their destructive agricultural agenda. These abuses happen because of the way the money-dependent U.S. political system works to subvert democracy, truth, justice, and wisdom in favor of deceitful corporate pursuit of profit. Four judges and nine justices have now been facilitators of this system. They have collaborated in helping to keep it in place in direct opposition to the public interest in learning the truth about transgenic food.
Above all, Monsanto should be prevented by law from suing organic, biodynamic, and other farmers growing non-transgenic crops for patent infringement when their crops become contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic crops. To accomplish this, a Declaratory Judgment has been sought from the court stating farmers growing non-transgenic crops have done no wrong when their crops have become contaminated by Monsanto’s crops, but first, we need to win the right to bring our lawsuit to court. That has proved to be more difficult than was originally expected. At the outset, we had an overriding faith in the fairness of the U.S. Court system, but we were wrong.
Based on our understanding of the facts and pertinent precedents, legal standing to bring our arguments before a court should have been easy, but that has not proved to be the case in either of the two lower courts, and the Supreme Court has not helped. We believe the judges of both the Federal District Court and the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit side-stepped and ignored basic facts and essential precedents with prejudiced, insufficiently-informed but arrogantly asserted views ahead of them.
Both courts showed they did not feel any need to know more than they thought they already did. They must have their own reasons for doing as they did, but to find out about that, a congressional investigation with the power of subpoena might be required. Either that or a prosecution for negligence would need to be pursued in an effort to establish the truth about the underlying motives. Clerks and others would need to be called to tell what they know about the motivation of the judges. If the U.S. governing system worked better than it does, such an investigation might be routine in all cases where an independent panel found the public to have been poorly served.
If independent critical review of court actions was possible and routine in the interest of promoting the establishment of unified precedents and effective, honorable court behavior, the integrity of the court system might ultimately be strengthened. Whenever people operate with impunity and without effective oversight to make sure the public interest is served, a better designed system needs to be publicly demanded.
Alternatively, the goal of a prosecution or congressional hearing would need to be: discovery of underlying reasoning, but the record shows the Congress would not be interested in learning about that lest the trail of failure lead back to themselves. They would want to hide the governing reality the same as the cooperating judges have and for the same reasons. The story is a case study in how U.S. democracy has been corrupted, so the system is unlikely to ever want to fix itself. With restraints against the autocratic powers of judges and other officials needed, the question is how best to impose them and how to design a system able to work better than the current one does. One way or another, something is needed be for the public faith is entirely lost.
Instead of ruling on the issue presented to them in our complaint, both courts established their own view of the issue they wanted to rule on, and from that, the judges developed their own arguments with the effect of allowing Monsanto to remain unchallenged. If the two courts did not have their own view of the issues and the need to suppress public discussion of them in a courtroom, they would not have emerged with highly divergent logic supporting the same conclusion. The net result, with full support from the Supreme Court, shows no authoritative official federal forum exist in the United States enabling a review of past errors, failures, deceit, and intentional exploitation of the public need to create and maintain a wise food and agriculture system capable of producing optimally healthful and nutritious product.
This outcome would imply the felt lack of a need for wisdom and only a need for corporate profit with the campaign contributions that can result from it. Shown almost certainly in the decisions by the courts is a desire to escape and obscure the truth in service to both the corporate interest and the collaborating political interest. The judges in both lower courts showed they would not have wanted to do anything that could derail Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural technology including both the seeds and the associated chemicals. This demonstrates both a pro-technology and a pro-corporate bias, and that has been clearly seen also in other Monsanto lawsuits decided by other lower courts as well as by the Supreme Court. This is not always the finding, but it has been the result in enough cases to establish a standard pattern.
The exhibited and unexamined prejudice seems to be almost seamlessly supported by established and mutually-reinforcing precedents set by many courts, including the court rulings on 145 Monsanto patent infringement cases brought against farms and farmers. These cases would not have gone to court if the farmers had not felt they had an argument they wanted to assert. Otherwise, they would have settled without going to court. Farmers do not spend money and time pursuing frivolous claims; most of them do not have money to burn on legal matters that are only whimsical. The ultimate outcome in the courtroom may not have been as important as the reasonable logic of the assertions established on both sides of the argument. Because the law has proved to be unjust and unreasonable against the public interest, better is needed.
Because of the biases shown by most judges and by the legal precedents they have established, the public need for justice must be assessed independently. The issue is the same as it was for the colonists in the North American colonies before 1776. The king’s courts required the payment of taxes whether or not any representation existed, and issue is no different now. A tyranny has been imposed, and a way is needed to address it even if the oppressed would be only a small, powerless minority.
Systemic change would serve to protect against unprincipled discrimination much like the discrimination shown against Dred Scott when he sought to assert his right to freedom. Sally Hemings could have asserted the same right to freedom if she had wanted to. She had lived in France and could have claimed her freedom there. If she had done that, she would have been free if she would have chosen to return to the United States after that, but more important is the question about whether or not the United States was living up to its own principles about human rights and equality.
The Dred Scott decision exhibited judicial prejudice and discrimination to protect chattel enslavement when a different determination could have freed people and enabled the nation to live up to its own founding ideals. At least, that would have been an honorable step in that direction, but freedom was denied to Dred Scott. Now, our contentions confront an even more basic and far reaching human rights issue: whether people are entitled to protect their own understanding about what should be considered healthful, nutritious food or the whether the government has the right to impose a new tyranny on them the same as all past tyrannies have been imposed.
Both lower courts have protected a similar form of modern discrimination that needs to be contested even more strongly because it affects many more people and the damage is much more pressing because of the public health and environmental costs. At stake are not just the interests of a small group of farmers growing non-transgenic crops out of a personal moral sense of commitment to agricultural wisdom. At issue is the welfare of all citizens and all life, but that detail would have been missed by the courts if the judges all have a pro-technology, pro-chemical bias infecting their thinking—or if they have a desire to preserve the established U.S. political system without regard for its perpetrated abuses against billions of people around the world.
The behavior of the lower court judges needs to be challenged to try to discover the operational prejudices behind their decisions and to expose the systemic failures. The technology of large, well-funded corporations is not always automatically better even if many are committed to believing in it. It can be destructive, and Monsanto’s technology is provably and definitively destructive just as the cultural addiction to petroleum consumption is destructive environmentally and negligent in its abuse of a natural, God-given endowment. We aim to illuminate Monsanto’s destruction in court, but we have to find the way to get there before the arguments can be presented. The exhibited effort to prevent us from getting there needs to be fought more than the tyrannies of King George III and the civil rights tyrannies were fought in the past.
More than a dozen mostly foreign studies now reveal much that has long needed to be known. All of it should have been learned before Monsanto’s transgenic seeds were released onto the market, but even after the fact of profligate release, multiple independent, objective, disinterested U.S. studies would still be a responsible idea to confirm, review, or further investigate the findings from all the foreign studies. That would have been honorable, but instead, the decision in the United States has been to insist on the validity of the ruling prejudice without requiring any reexamination.
This is a failure of principle and the assertion of corporate amorality in the place of it, but the need to review the foreign studies does not mean they are unreliable; duplicating them would be the minimum necessary to show contrite humility in the face of a circumstance showing the United States failed to do the job it should have done in the first place. Because the studies done in other nations have been conducted independent and objectively, they are likely to be more reliable than any studies so far in the United States, but even so, the findings should be confirmed.
Confirmation is needed because the U.S. behavior has been embarrassing, irresponsible, reprehensible, and tyrannical, and that shame needs to be fixed before the United States can reestablish a reputation as an honorable, responsible, and trustworthy nation. Needed research cannot be AWOL without consequences both internationally and domestically. The failure is a matter of continuing, unremitting, and criminal arrogance and also stupidity in the case of some people. It is a crime against the Commons as well as a crime against the people and all of Mother Nature, and it is also the product of irresponsible pro-biotech, pro-corporate arrogance.
Even research examining the causes of major chronic disease and widespread health affliction has been missing, presumably because it would identify the powerful players the political system labors to protect from anything inconvenient to their interest and revenue flow. As long as the nation’s major corporations possess the self-aggrandizing political power of super-citizens, this will not change, and the people will be in servitude against their own health interests. It is a new form of inhumane slavery sustained under the power of a black U.S. President and others before him.
The new slavery of denied information and denied consent can be observed in the collaboration between government officials and corporations like Monsanto. They are not the only corporation pursuing their own interests through money-leveraged access to political power, but they are one of the most destructive if not the very most destructive when all the issues are fully tallied. The public has been kept in the dark about more than the transgenic content in most of the processed food sold in all typical, mainstream grocery stores. Even more, they have been kept in ignorance about the presence of Monsanto’s Roundup and its related adjuvants in much of their food as well as the feed animals eat before they are turned into food for humans.
The industrially-raised, grain-fed and grain-finished meat most people eat is as destructive of health as transgenic crops, but studies about this are not made in the U.S. because the power of the patent owner is continuously deployed to prevent the studies from being made. If anyone wants to study Monsanto’s crops and publish the results, they are required to give Monsanto control over the study and over the publication of the results. As a matter of historical record, Monsanto does not want to allow the publication of any results that are adverse to their corporate interests, and the courts have ruled against such disclosures because they violate Monsanto’s commercial speech rights. This right allows perpetration of consumer ignorance as if the entitlement to do that was firmly established as principle in the Bill of Rights.
When Vermont wanted to require the labeling of milk produced using Monsanto’s transgenic bovine growth hormone (rBGH, also called rBST), because citizens there were concerned about the health implications of it, the courts required the state to withdraw the rule because Monsanto’s rights of free commercial speech protected them from having to comply with it. This was the virtually same as withdrawing the health warnings on cigarettes because of an asserted tobacco company right to sell health-impairing products regardless of the dangers. This would be as if to say a primary entitlement of civilized society is the right of people and companies to exploit each other for their own personal gain even unto client and customer death. This is little different than it was in the past when Kings routinely plundered each other’s kingdoms for their gain and bankers funded the project for their own monetary gain.
If this would be a sensible rule, doctors would have a commercial speech right not to inform their patients about the side effects of medicine. They would have no Hippocratic obligations, even though it is true that these obligations are not felt as intensively as they have been in the past. The weakening of such obligations goes with a culture where many cut corners at the expense of public health and the natural environment. Monsanto gets away with it because many others have also done so.
The health issues associated with rBGH were deemed less important than the right of Monsanto to sell its products freely regardless of the dangers that had not been studied before the product was put on the market. Vermont was not banning rBGH; they were only wanting to label milk produced at dairies using it, so citizens could make their own assessment of the risks and make their own choice about whether to take the risks. The same principle has governed the government decision declaring transgenic food labeling unnecessary and undesirable without any studies about it.
In the public interest, transgenic food should be labeled because of the health impacts resulting from the process used to create transgenic crops and because of the health impacts of the herbicide used on the crops. Keeping the public ignorant about the issues does not make the issues go away and neither does willful government and court irresponsibility about them. Among the other issues, Roundup binds up and makes unavailable the minerals in the soil that plants need to stay healthy, and then, they cannot provide the minerals to people and animals eating the food and feed.
A broad host of health problems are caused by this mineral deficiency, but one of them is the unconscious impulse of people to eat more food to try to obtain the missing minerals from an increased quantity of food. Serotonin production is also impacted by the mineral deficiency, and it is the hormone responsible for appropriately and healthfully suppressing appetite. Obesity is only one result of the mineral shortage. Many other health impacts are also important to know about. People could know about them if they wanted to take the time to learn about them, but few spend that time because they commonly turn over their healthcare to others. They also trust the government to protect them honestly, but they should not do that.
Among the worst of the health impacts, herbicide in food attacks the good bacteria in the intestines the same way it attacks weeds, and that prevents them from playing their healthful role in digestion of food and protection of immunity from disease. The beneficial bacteria essential to life and health are replaced by the Roundup-resistant transgenic bacteria able to co-exist with the Roundup herbicide. This is the pathway enabling the destruction of health in both people and animals, and it is a reason antibiotics are extensively used in the raising of commercial livestock. They keep animals upright long enough to slaughter after their own natural immune defenses have been destroyed through the feed they have been fed—and the chemicals on it.
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is patented as an antibiotic by Monsanto, but it is most effective at killing the good pro-biotic bacteria, and it is not effective against against the most pathogenic bacteria like Salmonella and Botulism. That is why the additional antibiotics are needed. When the pro-biotic bacteria are killed, the bad bacteria are free to grow explosively, so something is needed to overcome them. This is the reason 80% of antibiotics made in the United States are fed to livestock, and it is the reason antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten the future value of antibiotics as a medical health implement for use with both people and animals. The practice has been horrendously and profligately myopic, but in a culture that is freely expedient in both thinking and behavior, it is not easily ended.
They say the antibiotics are used as a growth promoter, and of course that is true, because sick animals always fail to thrive. The trouble is: the characterization hides the full truth underlying the reality. The issue is the same as doctor-caused disease requiring additional medication to overcome. The use of antibiotics in livestock production is needed because of the Monsanto-caused disease and the same results can occur in people when they ingest the same herbicides damaging to the livestock.
This disruption of healthy digestive function results in impaired assimilation of the already compromised food, and that, in turn, also leads to obesity among other ailments. The fattening of animals is promoted the same way, but that does not mean the animals become healthful, nutritious food. They can be fat and malnourished at the same time the same as human beings may be. Some may eat great quantities of food, defecate like a horse, and still be malnourished as a result of both mineral and vitamin deficiencies in their food. That is part of what happens when the food has been compromised as the routine accepted result of Monsanto’s agricultural system.
This is the reality underlying the Monsanto contention their transgenic food is safe. It is only safe in the sense that it might not kill anyone by tomorrow morning or in the short term. The short-term is all they care about. That is also part of the way things work in a culture routinely taking expediency for granted. Monsanto’s research only looks at the short-term, and they operate in a political culture where many people are interested in no more than myopic, short-term results on anything. Commonly, anything that will happen after the next election might as well be a projected issue in the next millennium after everyone will have forgotten who caused the problem.
Perhaps the biggest problem caused by U.S. democracy is the short-term perspective it perpetrates, and the problem is further compounded by the 90-day time horizon found governing the way most publicly-held businesses operate. The election cycle and the 90-day performance numbers important to business reinforces the cultural habit of expediency if it did not cause the problem from the beginning. As the United States has pressed the rest of the world to embrace its political system and associated economic model, the same emphasis on short-term expediency has been picked up by others. A result is the hostile impugning of cultures with a longer-range perspective.
The U.S. cultural habit of expediency is part of the reason Monsanto only does 90-day studies. As long as nothing flagrant is found in 90 days, they feel they are home free without worry, but in cases where trouble has been found, the results of the investigation have been commonly discarded. This is how they operate, and the government has enabled them to operate this way as if it was a good idea. As long as they can control all the research done on their patented products, they are free to discard anything adverse to their agenda. No one and no law says they cannot do that.
Even worse as it turns out, the major chronic afflictions documented in the U.S. can be caused or intensified by the disruptions of healthful body function resulting from Monsanto’s impact on the food supply. Yet, when Monsanto introduced its Glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup, it claimed it would be harmless to people. That claim said weeds are attacked through their Shikamate pathway and thus deprived of the minerals needed to defend themselves against pathogen attack. The weeds are not killed by the Glyphosate; the chemical simply weakens their immune defenses through mineral deprivation, so they can be killed by invading pathogens that are always present but usually overcome when the immune system performs as it should.
The broader implications of this biological process were evaded, but they should not have been. The problem was limited knowledge by Monsanto and others about the way humans and animals function to defend against disease. Since mammals do not have a Shikamate pathway, Monsanto said their herbicide would be harmless to them, but they did not pay attention to the fact that people and animals are mostly made of bacteria—and all these health-essential bacteria do have the Shikamate pathway. The protoplasmic lumps we call people are a form of ambulatory skeletal scaffolding housing roughly 10 life-essential bacterial cells for every human cell.
The health of pro-biotic intestinal bacteria, for example, is essential to the health of the people housing them and to the maintenance of life. These beneficial pro-biotic bacteria are like a house full of cats needed to keep an army of mice from coming in to steal the cheese. Beyond the central role they play in protecting immune system health, they are also central to brain function and emotional stability. The same way genes in an organism work together in complex, inter-relationships, so do various parts of the human body, but until recently few suspected the gut-brain relationship.
From top to bottom, Monsanto’s project is based on out-dated, poorly researched, inadequately grasped genetic science that can shorten human lives if people are not meticulously diligent in avoiding food that could contain Monsanto’s transgenic content and the herbicide enabled by adjuvants to penetrate into it. This is only a short summary of the issues, but the most important matter is the inadequacy of Monsanto’s operational genetic understandings. They have enrolled everyone in their massive biological experiment on the basis of elementary, sadly insufficient science. As the author and film producer Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Technology, has said, “They have bad science down to a science.”
Genes work in teams with all kinds of complex interactions, but Monsanto has no idea where their injected transgenes are going or what they are going to do when they are incorporated into the DNA of a plant. The technology used to inject their alien DNA is like a rocket fired in the dark without knowing who might be injured or killed as a result of the random firing. They cannot know how all the members of the disrupted team of genes will be affected, and they only care about the reliable persistence of the desired transgenic trait that is important to their bottom line, including their continuing sale of chemical herbicide and their market control.
Monsanto has shown they do not pay close attention to all the diverse subsequent interactions among all the members of the disrupted colony of genes or how those interactions change the nutritional and healthful quality of the resulting plants. They know new proteins are created, but they do not care about that, because they are interested in the reliability of the sought traits—including mostly only the herbicide (Roundup) resistant trait and the insecticidal (Bt) trait. These two traits are Monsanto’s bread and butter. Everything else comes from the underlying hybrids employed as the host for the introduction of the transgenic traits into the crops.
Because of Monsanto’s irresponsibly simplistic understanding believing that adding a trait would be like a person putting on a shoe or a hat, they have never studied or publicly contributed to the science about the complexity of all the gene interactions. Their work is still back in the days when scientists believed one gene equalled one trait—and a desired trait could be added without affecting the way the other genes in the plant would interact. The truth has been known for many years, but Monsanto has proceeded with their transgenic project as if their original idea had been proved true.
For Monsanto, investigation examining or revealing greater genetic complexity would have been inconvenient. It would have derailed their agenda, so they have pretended more advanced genetic knowledge does not exist. Their science has been rigged to serve their own negligent, blind, destructive, but profitable transgenic objective, and they have exploited customer farmers and the Commons for their own advantage. Whenever people try to discuss the neglected complexities, they are mercilessly attacked and criticized as anti-science Luddites dedicated to living in the distant past.
People, animals, and all life have been Monsanto’s victims and their test guinea pigs, and the victims pay the costs with their health and maybe their lives. Everyone has been co-opted against their will—and without informed consent—into Monsanto’s blindly irresponsible biological experiment conducted with negligent, oblivious, Alfred E. Newman-style U.S. government support. All elected and many appointed U.S. officials are responsible for the atrocity. In addition, many judges have aided their continuing atrocity as if their behavior should be a good idea, but it cannot be.
Building Monopoly by Exploiting the Strict Liability Principle in Patent Law Vs. the Nutritious, High-Quality Food People Need
Chapter 16
Beyond the need for reliable, credible, and honest research, Monsanto’s exploitation of patent law has been abusive in promoting their own monopoly over major commodity crops at the expense of crop diversity. Under the “strict liability” standard existing in patent law, Monsanto is able to sue farmers possessing their patented genes if no royalty has been paid to them. It does not matter how the patented genes in their seeds and crops came to be possessed. That is irrelevant even though it is unjust and counter-intuitive, and it has been ruled irrelevant by the courts in both the United States and Canada. Percy Schmeiser in Saskatchewan was one of the first victims of this offensive, nasty jurisprudence, and he is now the most world famous.
The “strict liability” law is perverse in the case of biological products propagated when pollen is spread by wind, insect pollinator travel, air convections, and other forms of biologically-mobilized activity, but it has been enforced against farmers nonetheless. This has been abusive, but many judges have shown the same blind pro-technology bias seen from the judges assigned to adjudicate our initial lawsuit. Included are the five Canadian Supreme Court judges who decided against Schmeiser in his lawsuit against Monsanto Canada in 2004. They sustained decisions by the lower courts in Canada, and they followed established principles practiced in the U.S.
Judges have employed the “strict liability” principle as if it could pass a fundamental common-sense test, but it cannot—and it will not ever pass a logical test justifying its applicability to self-reproducing biological matter, and that is a core contention we have planned to bring before the court as soon as it is possible. “Strict liability” is a principle of patent law that was designed originally to be used in the case of mechanical inventions, and in that context it made sense. The trouble is: it has not been challenged in the lawsuits Monsanto has brought against farmers. The lawyers they have used were not patent attorneys, so they have not based their defense on challenging errors in patent law. That’s why our past lawsuit was important, and the issue continues to be important in a new lawsuit because it has not been addressed.
The use of the “strict liability” principle in relation to biological contamination and trespass is no more than a conveniently established gimmick Monsanto has been able to exploit for its own advantage, and they have gotten away with it because no one stopped to think about the rationality of the argument being used. In that was seen the public and the judicial disconnection from agriculture and from biological science. Also seen was a bias in favor of man-made biological creations and a pro-corporate, pro-patent bias. Judges have facilitated profligate, irresponsible, destructive technology as if it were virtually the same as motherhood and apple pie.
The failure could not have happened if farmers were not an easily ignorable, readily disregarded constituency in the United States. This is what has happened as the result of policy that has turned farmers into an increasingly ignored and tiny minority. The practice of ignoring farmers and basing farm politic on the interests of agribusiness has been a central pillar of U.S. farm politics since about 1952 when the Republican Eisenhower administration was able to reinstate policy set back when Andrew Mellon was Treasury Secretary in the 1920s. He was dedicated to forcing people off the farm so they could join a larger, more robustly competitive, urban, industrial workforce.
The Mellon labor strategy was part of the creation of an industrial economy, but it was also a Federalist project committed to the destruction of the Jeffersonian democratic ideal with yeoman farmers as the empowered independent citizens a democracy would need. Farmers have played that reinforcing Jeffersonian role in Europe, but policy in the United States has worked against the Jeffersonian ideal.
The opponents of the egalitarian Jeffersonian democratic philosophy have wanted to empower the elite and increase worker and farmer dependency under the thumb of corporate power. The existence of independent farmers has been a threat to corporate empowerment, and no recent event better manifested this threat than the 1979 Tractorcade to Washington by the American Agriculture Movement. Thousands of farmers and and over 6,000 tractors came from farming states all across the nation to try to get the intention of the New Deal farm program working again for the benefit of farmers and the economy. That event motivated agribusiness to do even more work to further disempower farmers as an independent political force. Monsanto’s biotech project aimed from the start to help accomplish that objective.
The disempowerment of farmers is part of the clash of vision about the best way to build the U.S. nation and enable it to defend itself against enemies based on a different kind of collaboration between government and industry. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Communist Soviet Union suggested ways the state and industry could collaborate with each other for their own collective advantage, and the United States had to find a way to successfully compete against their manifestation of state military-industrial power. To do that, industries needed to be built. The United States could not have succeeded if it had stayed as a rural, agrarian, small-farm economy.
A major goal of the industrialization of the economy became the industrialization of food production, as if food could be an efficiently produced industrial product as much as widgets, toasters, and automobiles. As can now be understood, a byproduct of the effort to move most farmers into the urban, industrial economy while mechanizing and industrializing food production is compromised food quality, the creation of unsustainable, unhealthful, environmentally-costly agricultural technologies, the destruction of rural communities, and the disconnection of people from their personal source of food, nutrition, and health. To free people to work in industry, food had to be provided through the labor of fewer people and at lower monetary cost per unit. This expedient, myopic goal led to the neglect of long-term environmental and public health costs, and that is still happening with costs growing.
Exploitation of the public health and the environment could not have been promoted apart from a monumental human arrogance believing humans can create something better than the products of millions of years of evolved natural wisdom. Reflected in the behavior of Monsanto, other agribusinesses, their political allies, and their cooperating judges is grave disrespect for this evolved natural wisdom. That goes with a culture that has become habitually arrogant about the inventions of men and dismissive about the intelligence of the natural world. This is the easy result in a culture that takes man-made, modern technologies for granted as the way of the future and has lost all awe about natural, past, long-celebrated wisdom of the ages.
This reality has been overwhelmingly apparent in both of the lower court decisions dismissing our lawsuit and in the Supreme Court acquiescence in accepting and promoting of their intolerable error. The court decisions reflect a culture that is dedicated to stampeding as hard as it can like a herd of buffalo toward a cliff that will lead to their death. That is where the pursuit of destructive technologies has been leading, and few have worried about it as long as they continue to survive for today.
Many farmers have thought only about short-term survival and not about the requirements of tomorrow, and government policy regulating and organizing farmer behavior has been worse than decisions made personally by farmers. In lockstep with biotech agribusiness and other myopic agribusiness enterprise now ofter referred to as factory farms but also including unsustainable capital and energy-intensive exploiters of the Commons as well as environmentally-destructive chemical companies, government has promoted the national stampede as if the United States was dedicated to national suicide through public health and environmental collapse.
The worst part of this reality is the refusal of the courts to be willing to seek the truth. In that, they have shown themselves to be just as negligent as the rest of the political system and the culture. The behavior is similar to the residents of Jonestown in the Guyana, and only method of the suicide is different. When autism rates that were formerly maybe one in 100,000 a half century ago are now one in 50, anyone can see that the children are being sacrificed first the same way they were in Jonestown. Only the poisons and the oblivious, inhumane public attitudes are different. They are no less subversive in promoting an unwise, ill-informed, irrational, destructive, and agonizing outcome, but autism is not the only health issue. It is one of dozens of promoted and intensified afflictions most people do not yet know to trace to a source.
Just as some patent infringement lawsuits by Monsanto against farmers have involved windblown seeds, and that was the issue when Percy Schmeiser was sued in Saskatchewan by the Canadian Monsanto Company in 1998, many consumers of Monsanto’s crops have been victimized by transgenic trespass they did not know to defend against. Schmeiser saw the event on his farm as a case of transgenic trespass against his livelihood, and he sued Monsanto for it even though the court held him liable for possessing Monsanto’s patented genes without having paid a royalty, but the individual consumer victims of Monsanto’s trespass through food have not understood enough about biology to realize the source of their health afflictions.
Individuals might be sued, too, for possessing Monsanto’s patented genes in their gut without paying a royalty if that was part of Monsanto’s business plan and there was economic benefit to be derived from it, but there is not. Instead, Monsanto has needed to keep the consuming public in ignorance, so they would not be able know the sources of their health troubles. As long as the public ignorance could continue, so could the exploitation of the people, the environment, and the Commons for their own benefit and for the benefit of the other biotech companies and their allies, including most importantly their political allies feeding on their campaign funding.
This is the reason why the established precedent against farmers was important in both the United States and Canada. It has continued for decades because of the money it means for all those involved in the partnership. Many nations, including Canada, follow the U.S. lead on patent law because they have a stake in the money flow the same as in the United States. The decisions are not made because they are wise; they are made because of what they can generate for the political system.
The same thing can be seen in Great Britain where the Minister for Food and the Environment, Owen Patterson, immediately upon his appointment paved the way to relax restrictions on transgenic agriculture much as he has been a denier of the science on climate warming and a promoter of other exploitive policies. He shows a bias toward pro-business, pro-corporate positions, and this will have partisan political benefits for political funding in Great Britain the same as it has in the United States and other nations. The same result has been seen in India and Argentina among other places, and the only question is about the organized ability of the people to stand up against it in service to their own health and environmental interests.
When Percy Schmeiser was made to pay Monsanto by the lower court in Canada, no strong national and international support had yet arisen to assist him. He had to mortgage his farm to take on the fight against Monsanto. His issue was the inalienable right of a farmer to same his seed whether or not it had been contaminated, but in response to that contention, the court said he could not save it once it had been contaminated by Monsanto’s patented genes. Instead, a different and more important test should have also been applied to his circumstance: the test of farmer intent. Schmeiser was not using Monsanto’s transgenic technology because he never used Roundup on his fields to kill any weeds. Because that necessary event never happened, he showed he had no interest in using the Monsanto technology.
Monsanto’s transgenic trespass against him destroyed 50 years of seed breeding work designed to create the best quality canola seeds for his regional climate, and in a fair world, Monsanto should owned him compensation for that destruction. Now, he does not grow canola anymore, because he does not want to accept the contamination risk when many of his neighbors are growing transgenic canola. He only grows crops that cannot be contaminated by Monsanto’s transgenic canola, and that prevents him from using his land as should be his right: to grow the crop with the greatest economic potential. Without that right, he has suffered a theft, and so have other farmers in a similar circumstance. So have consumers suffering health compromises as a result of the consuming Monsanto’s food technology and chemical residues without knowing how it will affect them and their family for generations in the future.
Many former growers of non-transgenic or organic canola have stopped growing it, because of the same risk Schmeiser encountered, and now that transgenic canola has gone feral, the risks of contamination are even worse than they were from pollen drift and blowing seed. Many organic farmers believe it is no longer possible to grow organic canola in the United States, but worse than that is the range of crops that can be cross-pollinated from transgenic canola because they are also members of the same brassica family. No systematic testing of these crops is done, so no one knows how much transgenic contamination of them may exist. That could be a big issue.
In 1999, negotiations to settle the Monsanto claim against Schmeiser broke down, and when that happened, Schmeiser counter-sued for libel, trespass, and contamination of his fields. History now shows the Canadian courts did not want farmers opposing the Monsanto agenda through lawsuits like that anymore than the U.S. courts have. They wanted to pave the path for transgenic food technology, and at best, they did that on the basis of a wishful hope the transgenic technology was worthy or some day would prove itself worthy. In that interest to their great shame, they ran over the farming rights of Percy and Louise Schmeiser as if they should be seen as disposable roadkill. They also showed responsiveness to the power of corporate money, and maybe the judges were intimidated as much as many farmers.
At one point in the trial process, Monsanto Canada is reported by Schmeiser to have had 19 lawyers in the courtroom compared to Schmeiser’s one lawyer. That number of lawyers could have impact on the thinking of a country judge. When Schmeiser put his money for his defense in the local branch bank of a major banking company, Monsanto called them as said they would withdraw all their accounts with the company unless the closed Schmeiser’s account. That showed the power they could wield against those standing up against them. In addition, Monsanto hired security to provide heavy surveillance over Schmeiser, his wife, and their farm operation. At one point, when they were not at home, Monsanto’s representatives came onto the farm unannounced to take samples of the crop from various parts of his canola fields.
No clear genetic knowledge was used to support the court decisions, and the long-term multilateral social benefits of Monsanto’s transgenic technology never have been independently and objectively proved. To this day, no movement in that direction has been initiated. Needed is long-term, disinterested testing to learn the results of all the altered gene interactions, but that would be inconvenient to the profitable agenda that is a money tree not just for Monsanto but also for politicians of both major parties in the United States—and also in Canada. Partly, because of this, the Green Party has established a small foothold as an opposition party in Canada.
At least, the Green Party leader from British Columbia is member of Parliament, and a second member arrived in December 2013 to create a two member caucus. This additional member was formerly an NDP member who changed to Independent before becoming a Green Party member. He represents a riding in Ontario. Whether or not the Green Party will continue to grow in Canada remains to be be seen. If the major parties continue to be unresponsive on issues central to the people, they could.
In the United States, no similar national movement away from the two major political parties has yet been seen, and it would have to start through the election of party members to the Congress. The U.S. Green Party has one elected state house member in Maine and 133 members in other lower offices around the United States. An Independent with views compatible to the Green Party is running for a Congressional seat in California and the Democratic incumbent, Henry Waxman, has decided to retire after 40 years of service in the Congress. That suggests he feared a loss in 2014.
Since Dennis Kucinich was defeated in 2012, House leadership against Monsanto on food and farming issues has been handicapped, and the California Candidate, Marianne Williamson, promises to restore that leadership even as a single member in an alien environment. She plans to caucus with the Democrats and has been a life-long Democrat even though she is running as an Independent in a Democrat-leaning district. She promises to give high public visibility to food-related issues including the labeling of food with transgenic content, but more people need to join the effort.
Most important, people need the food that their bodies evolved over millions of years to handle, and even traditional plant breeding and hybridization have affected that destructively. Nutritional quality has been diminished continuously as plants have been bred to have a desired trait, mostly high yield, unrelated to their nutritional quality and healthfulness, but with transgenic crops the assault on health has been stepped up to a greatly more imperiling level. With novel proteins the body does not recognize, an immune reaction is triggered against them and with that comes imperiling inflammation as the body grapples with the unrecognized new creations.
The process is like warfare with the troops mobilized and activity intensifying as they are moved to the front to confront the military inflammation, but a certain amount of adaptational evolution in crops is occurring all the time. Because of that, Monsanto probably assumed the introduction of their crops onto the market would result in the evolution by people and animals to accommodate them. The trouble for Monsanto is: natural evolution in response to natural threats does not greatly change the biological and genetic character of the plants. They stay within the realm human and animal biology knows how to utilize, and the change does not cause the health destructive response and the inflammation caused by Monsanto’s new kind of transgenic crops.
These are issues needing independent studies so the reality can be commonly known with the details widely understood, but this cannot happen as long as research institutions are subservient to agribusiness. The worst part for the health of people and animals is they do not evolve as quickly as bacteria, other microorganisms, weeds, and insects. Human and animal evolution is a higher form and takes longer, maybe thousands of years of natural selection. That is the source of the dangers Monsanto has caused, and if they do not care, someone else needs to be concerned.
If people have not yet evolved to accommodate and utilize centuries of nutrient-compromising agricultural plant breeding and resulting evolution needed to adapt to the yield-related priorities of agricultural production, they will not evolve any more quickly to handle the more radically-changed technological creations made by Monsanto and thrown out into the market as if they should be part of massive living game of Craps gambling life, health, and well-being of animals and people for corporate profit. This is why Jeffrey Smith named his book and film “Genetic Roulette—The Gamble of our Lives.” Without public consent, individually or collectively through a responsible government decision, Monsanto has forced people to gamble their lives unless they know how to avoid transgenic food and its impacts.
Protected and Promoted Citizen Ignorance and Bamboozlement As If It Should Be a Central Democratic Governing Necessity
Chapter 17
Most people have not known how to avoid the dangers of transgenic food, and many of them do not even know they are being fed transgenic food virtually every day if they eat the way most typical U.S. citizens do. Many of them believe transgenic food is still in the future and the great majority have at least as of 2012 not known anything about Monsanto’s development of transgenic seeds. Even if they know they sell chemicals they have not know about their focus on becoming the world’s largest seed business with interlocking contractual relations with other major seed companies.
Most prominently over recent decades and longer, as crops have been hybridized to increase yield, their starch content has been increased while their protein content has been sacrificed. The modern crops taste differently from the crop varieties available even 50 years ago, and valuable nutritional content relates to flavor. That is part of the evolution needed to know which plants are valuable, healthful, and nutritious, and which are not. Sense of taste is a protective trait, but food manufacturers have learned how to destructively and deceitfully trick the human sense of taste at the expense of health, human understanding of nutritional wisdom, and prudence.
Modern food science, some of it now centuries old, has figured out ways to trick the human tongue to desire things that are not healthful. This is part of the way refined sugar and other refined sweeteners, including now the transgenic corn and sugar beet sweeteners, have found such a prominent place into the human diet. They have become such a major factor many young people are reported to get half of their calories from the sweeteners in soda. Work on transgenic sugar cane is also underway, so it could add to the list of transgenic sweeteners containing novel allergenic, toxic, disease-causing, and anti-nutritional proteins as part of their DNA.
Salt is another simple and harmful chemical used to trick the human tongue. Basic sodium chloride is not a balanced nutritional food; fulfilling the nutritive need for mineral salts requires a complex of different salts needed in combination to meet complex needs. When sodium chloride is used alone, it is out of balance and unhealthful, even health destructive as many medical studies have long established.
Sodium Chloride is used because it is easy and seductive, not because it is valuable or healthful. This is just one of the unhealthful short-cuts afflicting the food supply with amorality as companies pursue their own profits through the manufacture of food that is not as healthful as it could be if the pursuit of health and nutritional wisdom was the main desired and overriding goal within the commercial food industry. Resistance against it should be made manifest, but instead many people are oblivious and ill-informed, so they do not know enough to resist or even seek more knowledge.
The press and the media in response to the agenda of corporate advertisers have played a role in this public ignorance and the motive of exploitation promoting it. The needed information is available, and it could be provided, but it is not provided because powerful food and agribusiness companies use their political leverage and their patent rights to prevent it from being provided. That leaves citizens in the dark and unable to protect their own health. This is only an example of the way people are bamboozled unhealthfully by the behavior of corporations and their political allies. Of these, the political allies are the most shameful because they should be pledged to serving the public interest ahead of the corporate profit interests, but they are not.
The quality of the soil plants grow in also fundamentally affects the quality of the resulting food, and if a crop is grown in inadequate soil for continuing generations, it will sometimes be able to evolve to survive in the conditions it is subjected to. In the past, for example, spinach was a good source of nutritional iron, but when it is grown in soil deprived of iron, the spinach is also deprived of it. That means Popeye has needed to find something else to rely on for his power. Otherwise, he would need to accept the weakness imposed on him by the change in his basic dietary staple food. The biggest trouble is that Popeye has been replaced as a national icon by Alfred E. Newman and diet could be a major factor in stimulating his “What Me Worry?” view.
Weeds adapt to their circumstances, and sometimes they are able to pick up the transgenic traits in Monsanto’s crops through the soil where they grow. They can also adapt without picking up the transgenic trait. Both methods have enabled weeds to tolerate Monsanto’s herbicide when they have been continuously exposed to it. Either way, they can transfer the resistance teait to other plants in their same plant family.
Plants have a certain kind of biological intelligence aimed to help them survive the threats their environment delivers, so they make the adaptations needed. In the process, healthful environmental wisdom can be lost. It has also been lost as part of an agricultural system emphasizing only three nutrients: NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium). These three nutrients are sufficient to make plants look healthy, but they are not enough to make them as nutritious as they should be. Depending on the condition of the soil where the crops are grown, they could be greatly deprived of essential mineral nutrients basic to plant and animal health.
Because weeds have adapted to Monsanto’s herbicide, they and other chemical companies are now making crops tolerant of stronger herbicides, but it is a fool’s errand pursued at high public cost for short-term, myopic private gain. That should be illegal, but it is not and will not be as long as the political culture also profits from the transgenic gravy train and also from the broader corporate political gamesmanship with campaign funding and other benefits at the heart of it. That’s why the political system needs to be changed before the problems it causes can be fixed. Until that happens, the promise of “change” by politicians will continue to be no more than a seductive fraud perpetrated against the people—and enslaving them.
No one should be surprised to see what is happening because only citizen vigilance can stop it, and that citizen vigilance has been AWOL. Despite the reverence shown by many toward the nation’s founders in 1787, the U.S. political system was designed from the start to protect elite interests and the trickle-down benefits they were expected to deliver. In the summer of 1787, when the Federalist elite gathered in Philadelphia (without many of the Republicans joining them), they asserted the need for elite management of a government based on the principle that elite empowerment would be able to protect the nation against the self-serving excesses of too much short-sighted democracy. The elites saw the Confederation as harmfully democratic.
The gathered Federalist majority at the Constitutional Convention did not imagine a time when democracy would need to protect the nation from the self-serving and destructive excesses of the wealthy elite, but that time as now arrived. They saw a need to use a limited amount of democracy to protect against the ascendency of a tyrant, but they thought of themselves as they guardians of moral wisdom—and of the economic trickle-down the rest of the nation needed to depend on for a good living.
When elite interests were served, they thought the interests of others would automatically be served, and the economic ideals of Adam Smith were prominent in their minds in support of this ideal. Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776 just in time to contribute an economic philosophy to the War of Independence and the emerging U.S. nation over the years following the war.
Just like the perversity of Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural project, the governing corporate elite have evolved to embrace an amorality that is widely taken for granted even within the government or maybe especially within the government. The better lights of the past when all people were part of a more closely interdependent community have given way to a time of everyone for themselves with offshore banks, exported jobs, presumptive exploitation, and amorality as broadly expected cultural, economic, and political norms. Instead of building value, the nation is subverted.
Monsanto has become a pre-eminent poster child of this self-serving and destructive political ideology. It has evolved easily from the work during the summer of 1787, and its emergence, along with the emergence of other companies like it, should have been foreseen from the start, but it was not. Instead, the people have been bamboozled for two centuries by the limited amount of democracy the founders, in their own interest, saw a need to include in their governing ideal. Some change has occurred since then but not enough to create the framework of protection the nation needs against the greatest dangers to its healthful and sensible persistence. Much more is still needed.
The process of U.S. economic and political evolution has been as inexorable as night at the end of the day, and as part of the inexorably emergent amorality, Monsanto and other companies feel they need to find a way to work around the fact that weeds are no longer killed by the Glyphosate-based herbicides. When more applications of Glyphosate are required each year at ever higher cost, myopia leads them to seek some other life-destructive and more threatening chemical to take its place. No prudence can be seen in this behavior; the agenda driving it is about the pursuit of profit without concern for the victims. The victims are only collateral damage as if the companies like Monsanto were conducting fully authorized war against the people.
Monsanto wants to sell more chemicals to increasingly chemical-dependent farmers, but the question not asked is: what is and what will be the public agony resulting for the environment, wildlife, and the people from their sense of economic entitlement to do as they do. Their deceitful effort to promote co-existence with organic and other non-transgenic farmers is the same kind of co-existence the fox would want against the free-ranging rabbit or the unfenced chicken. This kind of co-existence wants its victims deceived and close at hand, so they can be eaten easily when the time comes.
Necessary questions are not asked, and few in the United States want to force the asking of them. The system is accepted as if no better idea would ever be possible, but other nations are in the process of developing better ideas as their own way of overcoming the abuses wrought by the Monsanto-allied elite in their own nations.
Those responsible for protecting the public welfare in the United States should have been asking many needed questions, but they are a core part of the problem. They will never want to fix it until the people require it of them or force them out of office in search of others willing to take the needed action in service to the public. Even newly elected representatives might not be enough to deliver change until the system is changed. As long as the system is part of the problem, it will continue to cause trouble as long as the forces it shapes and the elected officials it elects do as they have long been doing. The system could be designed to do better; human nature is not the whole source of the trouble. The court system does not have to work as it does and neither does the Congress or the executive branch of the government and its agencies.
Morality and ethics are a part of the problem, but even without either better could be possible if more oversight and checks and balances were designed into the operation of the system. The U.S. political elite are the key collaborating beneficiaries served by the operation of the system. That is why the people are plied with the opiate of promised political change without any credible intention to ever deliver it. That is a reason why the best healthcare system the people can get in the United States is one enriching corporations first while delivering maybe only relative crumbs to patients.
Patients is a good word for the customers of the healthcare system, for they must be continuously patient in the hope they will receive what they need and not something they do not need. For example, the drug companies have been a major factor in enabling both the abuse of prescription drugs and the proliferation of “meth” labs. At the bottom, the responsible politicians have to be hoping the people will be content with whatever they can get even if the system still transfers more wealth from the poor to the rich than it delivers back to those in need of effective, reliable healthcare.
Even if many millions of people get more than crumbs against those who are allied with the elite, the questions needing to be asked about the cause of ill-health are not being asked because the asking of them would be politically and economically inconvenient to the empowered. They cannot be answered until they are first asked.
When political officials and those helping to support their agenda are in bed with Monsanto and their allies, they will not ever be asking any questions about the failures and exploitations in what Monsanto and their allies do. They are likely to be the first people into the lifeboats when the Titanic sinks, but they are the beneficiaries of the system as much as Monsanto is. As a result, they will not question the basic premise continuing to drive the agricultural system, the political system, and the healthcare system toward inescapable disaster. They will ride it forward for their own advantage as long as possible, and their allied government officials, including judges, will ride it with them the same as if they were loyally committed maids and butlers.
Monsanto’s biotech project is as destructively addictive for farmers as any destructively addictive drug promoted by the drug industry. The persistence of these health-destructive industries depends on political symbiosis and the participation of enabling members of the financial elite. All the players become entitled to the same perquisites and memberships in the elite insider clubs. For example, they all like to play golf and enjoy the other benefits of being members of the same country clubs. All those relationship help them to promote the continuation of their self-serving destruction of the Commons, and their efficiency at the work is ever increasing.
Relatedly, because of the overriding importance of yield above all other attributes in the U.S. agricultural system, Monsanto needs the most high yielding hybrids to use with their transgenic traits. The yield of their transgenic crops can be no better than the yield of the hybrids they use as the host for their transgenic traits. Other traits, like drought-resistance also come from the hybrids, before the transgenes with the desired trait are injected into them. This is a major part of the reason Monsanto has acquired so many seed companies; they want to control the source of all the best hybrids and prevent any threatening competition from arising against their project.
If they do have any competition, they want them locked into cross-licensing arrangements to establish a form of patent-protected cartel. For the same reason, they have used their patent power to overwhelm and supplant the plant breeding activities of the universities formerly prominent in developing hybrid seed. It has all been another fool’s errand pursued because ever-increasing yield has trumped sustained nutritional quality in the minds of most commercial seed developers, but this is where the health destruction starts. People only need to look around to see the results of it in the physical attributes and health afflictions of their fellow-citizens.
They do not need to look far to see in the U.S. prevalence of adult obesity, the rapidly rising amount of autism, the infertility troubles and birth defects, the prominence of diabetes, pancreatic cancer (among other less aggressive types of cancer), liver disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s disease, and many other afflictions discussed in more detail in the text to follow and in other places on the Web site. This is only an contextual introduction to the topics needing to be investigated in much more detail.
Part of controlling the seed market to push transgenic seeds involves controlling the source of the hybrid seeds. Monsanto wants all the best hybrids under their control before they start the transgenic part of their program, but both the hybrid and the transgenic parts of the program compromise nutrition, and that has made heirloom and landrace seeds increasingly important to a growing but small number of people.
As the truth about Monsanto’s biotech agribusiness project is understood more widely, efforts are being made to protect heritage seeds. Many of our co-plaintiffs are dedicated to this public-spirited work, and in doing it, they are like Noah with his antediluvian ark. They have the same vision as Noah had, and the judges we have confronted are the same as the myopic skeptics and disbelievers Noah faced in his time. We need to persist against them in the same interest of preserving life.
Interviewing citizens on Florida Avenue in front of Nora’s Restaurant in Washington, DC. Nora’s was the nation’s first organically-certified restaurant. The restaurant opened in 1979, and the decision was made to become organic in 1999. That required a reliable supply of organic food for everything on the menu.
The Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit Produces a Paltry Binding Covenant as if the Judges Were a Chicken Laying an Almost Empty, Easily Broken Eggshell—and the International Ramifications
Chapter 18
Three judges of the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit in June 2013 provided tiny, inadequate relief against the “strict liability” standard affecting only contamination between zero and one percent, and this paltry relief fails to make clear how that amount of contamination should be measured or even found. The decision is bizarre to the point of being a cruel joke worthy of treatment by Jon Stewart on the “Daily Show,” and maybe it could eventually be discussed there once a new lawsuit is filed to seek redress of the abusive injustice. No issue would be more important for the people of the nation to understand and realize why it is basic to their health interests.
Stewart is not known to have grown up on a farm anymore than any of the judges are known to have that background, but he has done more to address Monsanto’s abuses and the related food issues than most others in the broadcast media. When the issue is not understood by reporters and editors, it would be hard to teach viewers why it should be important to them. Jokes are only funny when facts surrounding them are understandable. Sometimes tellers of a joke lack the needed understandings, and that seems likely to have been the case with the three appellate judges. They most likely lacked the background to know why their decision would be a joke to more informed people expecting the delivery of justice in pursuit of truth, wisdom, and public health.
The court showed through its decision a belief in the need to protect Monsanto and maintain rules allowing the trespasser to benefit while the abused victims of the trespass pay the costs resulting from the transgenic violation against them. Without showing any humility about the biological issues at stake, the judges blew off their decision as if they were asserting the wisdom of Solomon, because that is what judges do to cloak their decisions with an aura of authority. In doing as they did, centrally important practical realities were side-stepped. A rule book would be required to make the decision minimally intelligent and administratively rational, and before justice could be found in it, a requirement is needed making Monsanto and/or their customers pay for the testing needed to learn about any possible transgenic trespass.
Without a rule book, the court’s decision cannot be reasonable internally, even if it could never be made sensible in the public interest, but in a docile nation, decisions by courts are accepted because of the cloak of authority they are routinely given even if they do not deserve it. Maybe that is the reason the press, media, and the even the legal blogs paid no attention to what happened. This is what happens when people are disconnected from the source of their food and do not know how to assess its nutritional healthfulness in their own interest—and the interest of their families.
Maybe confusing and irrational verbiage often covers meritless decisions with teflon. From that, criticism against them is deterred, diverted, and maybe also intimidated. This response has been seen too often in a democratic nation where service to the public interest should be basic. Democracy and its institutions are made meaningless as a result of the seen behavior. Nevertheless, ridiculous, shameful decisions need to be called what they are. If that does not happen and the way is not found to make it happen, the judicial culture producing the decisions will be eventually discredited for its buffoonery along with the people who have allowed it to pass for justice. That will happen because the truth will emerge eventually. When it does, the judges serving to hide it establish a permanent place for themselves throughout all ensuing history—even if others may feel sorry for them and their failure to serve the nation as needed.
Often in the past, judges have been dead by the time their errors and injustices have been exposed and the reptilian cultural story about it is in the historical record. Maybe that has been more merciful than things can be in faster moving times. As a result now, bad and negligent decisions get no chance for such a reprieve. Their place in history will become fixed as if it were carved in Granite after they may have lost the opportunity to do anything about it but maybe before all the perpetrators have died.
Try as they might, Presidents, members of Congress, government officials, judges, or Monsanto will eventually be unable get their fraudulent lid on the truth. The international movement to promote sustainable agriculture has become too strong to be stopped even if it looks weak now compared to the monetary power of Monsanto. A question still remains about the amount of time needed before truth and wisdom can be learned and established. That is up to the people when those they have expected to serve them have only been negligent. They need to learn the truth and establish it. The question is about the amount of time that will require given all the constraints.
Four federal judges have been looking hopelessly backward with the same frightening elitist dedication seen when white judges repeatedly upheld the Jim Crow laws, and the Supreme Court has supported them as if they were dedicated to protect their past legacy of misguided, destructive decisions, but only the people can blow the whistle on it. They might get a chance to redeem their record of passive docility, but to do it they will need to show increased interest in the food they are being fed. They are also going to need to start making democracy work to serve their own interests instead of the corporate interest. It cannot be a minor effort. People need to know enough to get mad about the way they have been treated by those they have trusted to serve them.
Those expecting court help have not received it. Three Federal Circuit judges ruling on OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto failed to decide what their one percent rule should refer to: one percent of a bag of seed, one percent of the crop in a field or one percent of the entire annual harvest of a farmer’s crop? Ridiculously and obliviously, the decision made it seem as if determination of one percent contamination would be easy or maybe almost automatically known. Maybe they did not contemplate the cost or the difficulty, but if they did, the decision would be even more shameful. It is not easy or cheap even in the case of a bag of seed or an ear of corn. The answer to the question about contamination can be Yes or No for every single kernel on every ear.
The multiple practical elements of negligence are all part of the cruel joke the court administered. Maybe they were only trying to make sure none of the co-plaintiffs would try to raise their head ever again. That is the abusive way farmers have often been treated by the judicial system and the urban culture, so there has been little reason to think respect would be found under the decisions by the two lower courts or the the Supreme Court’s support for them. Hostile attitude could be read in all three of the decisions even if the apparent attitudes were different from each other.
To be certain about the percentage of contamination, every kernel on every ear would need to be tested, and that imposes an impractical, laughable requirement as if that was the court’s intention. That is part of the cruel joke the court imposed against recalcitrant reality. Because the decision is so bizarre, the reasoning process is as hard to grasp as the agricultural and biological understandings used to support it.
Commonly, when transgenic contamination occurs, only a small portion of a crop or a field is initially contaminated, and that makes it hard to find or know about. It is not visible, and it does not fly a red flag to identify itself. It cannot be seen through a magnifying lens or with an infrared lamp, and accurate testing is expensive and time consuming under the most reliable technology. Cheaper testing is possible, but the results are as crude as the method. They can only provide a rough idea of the truth.
Transgenic contamination is stealthy, and it may not be found until it has become much more than one percent. Great likelihood exists it will not be found even when it has become a significant percentage. Search for it generally relies on the use of sampling techniques, but these are highly unreliable. This is the pragmatic reality, and the cruel joke of the decision lies in the extreme cost and difficulty of finding such a tiny amount of contamination before it spreads more widely and may only be found after the crop has been shipped a long distance on its way to market. In 2013, a shipment of corn was not stopped until it arrived in a Chinese port to be unloaded.
If this level of vigilance is necessary because the asserted Binding Covenant attributed to Monsanto is limited to one percent, then Monsanto should be obligated to pay the cost of it. That is unlikely to happen as long as the court’s obvious goal is the protection of Monsanto. When extreme, embarrassing, shameful, and laughable judicial contortions are performed in service to Monsanto’s interest, the courts in a docile and oblivious nation are likely to get away with it at least until the people stand up against it. The question is: how long will it be before history catches up with the embarrassment and the shameful U.S. behavior. Action will be needed to repair it in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the question is how bad it will get before it is started.
When that day comes, the blame cannot be assigned only to the judges; they are part of a system, and they have acted as the system encourages them to act to defend their own future prospects within the system. They have to show gratitude to those appointing them to office. That appears to be more important than serving the public and learning what needs be known to do that. The sacrifice of justice under the U.S. system has become routine, especially on food and farming issues where Monsanto is involved. Defense of the corporately-responsive political system has been made the primary obligation, and judges would likely not be appointed if they were not expected to serve that purpose. In this environment, the needs of the people are required to take a back seat and so is justice, rationality, and the democratic ideal.
Blame should not fall on the attorneys representing Monsanto; the company is entitled to the best representation money can buy them, and that may be what they have obtained for the money they spent. They bought the ability to craft the arguments they think they needed to protect their interests, even if the exhibited legal arguments were as myopic as the genetic technology and business planning Monsanto has continuously exhibited, but serving the public has not been their interest. Their goal has been service to their shareholders, and morality was not required. That is the way the Capitalism works, and it will continue as it has until the people change it.
Nonetheless, at least some nominal responsibility to find truth and wisdom rests with judges. They should have to find their way through the arguments presented to them to discover what is right and what is wrong. Their decisions should not be about who has the most money and who has the greatest political influence and dominating power. As the nominal agents of the people in a democracy, judges need to stand up against injustice. They have not demonstrated the commitment to do that in this case, but that should be their responsibility if they would be concerned about systemic integrity. Instead, they have delivered shameful sophistry or maybe worse than that.
Against the protection of elitist establishment interests, judges should be responsible to produce wisdom from the arguments asserted by both sides in the lawsuit. They should be required to avoid anything that would discredit the reputation of the judicial system, the nation, or themselves as judges, but that discipline has not been found in this instance. The easy national convention of amoral, pro-corporate, pro-biotech, and pro-patent expediency has pushed it aside without means of reprieve.
Monsanto and their customers have caused the contamination, so they should pay to clean it up—and they should pay for the damage done, but that is not what the pro-corporate, pro-technology habit now dictates. The assignment of trespasser responsibility should be automatic; otherwise, farmers will clog the courts with damage suits every time a small amount of contamination occurs and is found. That is the implication resulting from the Federal Circuit decision. It is not a constructive way to try to address the seriousness of the issue needing to be confronted. It would only be confronted as it has been when the objective is hiding truth at public expense.
The court’s decision has impelled people to start finding contamination while it is between zero and one percent even if that work is difficult and costly. That makes the decision into a full employment act for judges and testing laboratories. That will be the result as long as farmers will not be able to sue for damages once the contamination is greater than one percent. Under the Federal Circuit mandate, farmers will have to pay the extra costs of the extreme vigilance because the judges have made that virtually mandatory, and if farmers cannot afford the cost, services could make themselves available to do the work in exchange for the a part of the claimed damages. Some could start to see a profit opportunity in the court’s ruling.
If farmers want to collect damages from the trespasser for the found contamination, they are forced to find it before it exceeds one percent, and at least some will gear up to do that maybe even if the insurance program recommended by Secretary Vilsack’s AC21 Commission is put into place. That insurance is aimed to pay the damages for contamination in exchange for payment of a premium, but the costs of the program are expected to exceed the total revenue collected from farmer premium payments, so a taxpayer subsidy of the program bas been part of the recommendation. The subsidy is a benefit to Monsanto, because they are the cause of the contamination.
The solution the Appeals Court created may be one percent better than the ambiguity existing before, but that is all it is. It is still 99% bad. It is not a just, administratively practical, wise, intelligent, reasonable, adequate, ethical, or moral answer. It is pathetic in its patently useless and costly, pro-technology stupidity, and the judges would only have needed to ask one farmer to know that. For this reason, judges need to know more about the subjects they are ruling on before they write hopelessly ludicrous decisions embarrassing to their profession, the judicial system, and the nation. If the citizens of the nation was in the habit of paying attention to the decisions made on their behalf, they would want to create a way to fix costly stupidity.
A similar failure of attention to pertinent knowledge was seen in Judge Buchwald’s Federal District Court decision, but in an environment where only the politics of a decision matter, the practicality and the delivered injustice of the resulting decisions do not matter. This is what happens in a nation where farmers are only a tiny minority, less than two percent of the people, and the farmers growing non-transgenic crops are only a tiny fraction of that tiny minority. In the rest of the world, where farmers average 20% of the population and consumers are more concerned about the quality and source of their food, the behavior seen in the U.S. looks bad.
Still not understood in the United States even by judges is the importance of foreign constituencies to the well-being of the United States and the respect it is able to win from the people of those nations. The arrogant internal habit still exists to think of the United States as if it were king of the world just because it won the Cold War and has the wealthiest economy, but there is more to life than money, hubris, and military or economic power. The point is reached where that fails to influence people or win friends. The observed U.S. attitude is as harmful as Monsanto’s technology. The rest of the world does not and cannot afford to assess everything according to the dollar signs attached to it. In other nations where a sense of right and wrong still persists ahead of the power of money and what it can buy, morality still means something.
The difference in perspective and level of public knowledge about food and agriculture between the United States and other nations is part of the reason the United States has lost major international credibility in the 21st century. Many hoped President Obama would be able to repair the previous damage, but they have not seen that happen on several important matters. Monsanto’s transgenic technology is only one important issue among many, but on that one, the results stem from the way government officials have handled or failed to handle the obligation to honorably investigate the safety and wisdom of Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural technology.
The problems have been compounded when U.S. arrogance assumes with prejudice all opponents of the arbitrary and capricious, governmentally-imposed transgenic technology must be Luddites—or easily dismissible, ignorant farmers needing wealthy corporations, leading newspapers, and subservient judges in a money-worshipping political, economic, and judicial culture to tutor them. An example of this tutorial attitude was seen on the front page of the New York Times on Sunday, January 5, 2014 in a story about the ban on transgenic agriculture on the big island in Hawaii. The story was written by reporter Amy Harmon, but the attitudes were the same as those revealed by Judge Naomi Buchwald in her dismissal of our lawsuit.
Most likely, the New York Times has helped Judge Buchwald over the years shape her attitude, and the Times would likely hope to have enough influence over judges to achieve that. That would also be a reason Monsanto and their PR consultants would pay attention to the Times. The paper is the national newspaper of record, so whatever they report is widely trusted, whether or not it deserves to be trusted.
Affirmation of the truth in news reporting requires sufficient knowledge of the facts to separate truth-seeking journalism from propaganda, but there is a worse affliction needing to be addressed. Newspapers and other news organizations have constituencies the same as politicians do, and they both achieve success by serving their constituencies and winning their approval. Politicians pander to their constituents as a way of winning support and getting elected, but they have two different constituencies they need to serve and pander to: the funders and the voters.
Much work has gone into the effort to cause voters to see their own interests as consonant with the interests of the funders, and when this can be accomplished, the gerrymander is used to separate the pro-corporate, wealth-supporting constituencies into durable, unchanging voting blocks reliably voting to protect the interests of the wealthy campaign funders. Talk shows, think tanks, publications and networks have been designed to serve this objective, but even before that news publications also had two constituencies needing to be served in the same way: advertisers and readers.
The funders and the advertisers may often be the same group. Funders are the people delivering most of the money political candidates need to be elected. The effort has been made to create enough reliable pro-funder districts to enable elections to be repeatedly won, and various other manipulations, including the purging of voting lists, use of onerous, burdensome voter identification requirements, and the elimination of convenient voting locations, have been used to increase the voting power of the pro-funder voters and weaken the voting power of the rest of the people.
Negative campaigning is also used to intentionally sour the least informed voters about the political process in the hope they will decide not to vote. A vote not cast by those opposing the interests of the funders is the same as a vote gained among those supporting the interests of the funders, and some people vote on the side of the funder class because they want to see themselves as one day becoming a member of that class. This hope is promoted as the American Dream, even if ever fewer people can now achieve it as their own personal reality. The net result of negative campaigning is more beneficial to the Republican Party than it is to the Democratic Party because Republicans have a more committed and reliable electorate supporting their candidates. Natural Democrats are more easily turned off from voting at all.
The funder group is a tiny segment of even the most wealthy one percent of the nation’s citizens, and their interests are commonly divergent from those of most of the rest of the nation’s citizens, and yet, they have outsized political impact, because politician have been forced by their need for money to pander more to this small group than they do to those providing them with votes. This situation is similar to the situation confronting newspapers and other print publications. They may also pander more to advertisers than they do to readers, but they need to be careful not to ignore readers too much. Readers have shown they will tolerated advertiser and other elitist pandering as long as they can see sufficient balance to chalk it up as fairness to all.
Publications will most likely need to keep both groups happy if they want to stay in business. If the advertisers put pressure on editors to get the kind of stories and editorials serving their interests, an effort must be made to prevent the readers from becoming unhappy about the resulting coverage if that is possible. This was observed in the way different newspapers in Washington state chose to cover the news and editorialize on the issues surrounding the campaign to label transgenic food in 2013.
Similarly, in California in 2012, many of the major newspapers in the state proved to be more responsive to the point of view of advertisers and their trade associations while many of the smaller newspapers less dependent on national advertisers showed a more independent position responsive to the point of view of their readers. Without understanding the motivational factors, the illogical polarization of the different news outlets would not be understandable. Some are disciplined in keeping news coverage separate from editorial policy, but many are not. Examination of the news reports and the editorials easily shows which papers are most valuable to readers.
The objective of the publications has been served best when the readers are not informed enough to tell the difference between pro-advertiser propaganda and real truth-seeking journalism and editorial policy. Readership revenues and advertiser revenues can often be maximized over recent years when most readers are easily persuaded to support the pro-advertiser kind of coverage, and that fits with the same process used to win the support of voters for the pro-funder kind of public policies.
As the result of this evolution in readership viewpoint and the use of the power of money to both influence elections and shape the information publications and the media provide, political attitudes in the United States have been pushed to the right end of the political spectrum, but there is a problem with this outcome for the nation: it has isolated the United States from the views of many people in other nations around the world and diminished respect for U.S. values. The result has often been a certain alienated tolerance for the United States because of the power of U.S. money but not respect for what U.S. government does or what most of the U.S. people think.
One question now is about how to determine the international political price being paid for the outcome. The tally on that started emerging sooner than anyone in the U.S. expected. As a result, the United States needs to decide if money and the interests driven by money are going to be more important than the interests of the people and the environment. So far, the power of money has been winning, and the high cost of that outcome has not been understood by the majority of people in the United States. The U.S. people are five percent of the world’s people, and sooner or later consequences will result from the divergence between population numbers and level of policy control. Because of the way the U.S. people and leaders see themselves and see their own self-importance, they have not yet anticipated these consequences.
For certain, it cannot take a century as it did in the case of the hapless slave named Dred Scott or even a half-century as it did in the case of the New Orleans shoemaker, Homer Plessy. Both of these men were the victims of similar money-driven and exploitative political values in the 19th century, but justice, truth, and wisdom will need to prevail in the United States unless it is ready to recede into the international role of a pariah nation. Already international polling has shown people around the world see the United States as the biggest threat to international peace, posing a larger threat to others than any other nation. That is not a promising outlook if the United States wants to retain an international leadership role, and this is before the other impacts of observed and entrenched U.S. values and policies are weighed.
Monsanto plays a major role now in the way the United States is perceived, and that can be understood when 64 other nations representing the majority of the world’s population require the labeling of transgenic food. They require it for a reason, and that reason diverges from the values seen in the U.S. policy. Back when the scourge of slavery had to be overcome in the United States, time was still available for values to evolve. Novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin could be written and discussed, and a Civil War could be fought over the issue, but that amount of time is not available in relation to the ills of transgenic food and agriculture. The faster rate of contemporary change and the extent of the health and environmental destruction will not make it available.
The facts and the scope of the reality have been hidden by the power of money for two decades or more, but there is a limit to how long that can continue when research in other nations hammers against the rampart of the U.S. corporate fortress with the force of a trans-oceanic battering ram. If even another decade is needed to enable truth, wisdom, and justice to be restored, the rise in healthcare costs by itself, without concern for any other impacts, will bring the United States to the brink of financial collapse. At the current rate of growth, rising healthcare costs cannot be sustained any more than the environmental destruction can be sustained. They need to be promptly reduced to less than half of the current total. That is an imperative.
The power of money in the U.S. political system wants to continue hiding politically inconvenient truth when that serves the interests of the funder and advertiser class, but the costs imposed on everyone else will soon make evasion impossible—with or without the potential systemic improvements in healthcare wrought by Obamacare. The trouble is: Obamacare still continues to hide the causes needing to be confronted, and it does that in much the same way right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reject the value of international perspectives in shaping U.S jurisprudence. Both behaviors are like living in a community and refusing to pay any attention the views of the member of the surrounding community. That is the definition of arrogance.
What Farmers Growing Non-Transgenic Crops Do When Their Harvest Is Contaminated, the Need for a Better Standard, and the Corporate Agribusiness Effort to Discredit Organic Agriculture
Chapter 19
At present, if contamination is found in a field, farmers either sell their crop at a lower price in the transgenic market, or they mix the crop with an uncontaminated crop to get it below the level of contamination the market for non-transgenic, conventional commodities will accept. With less than .9% (less than one percent) of contamination, a crop can be exported to Europe, or it can be sold in the United States to a company trading under the Non-GMO Project label. (The percentage contamination in a shipment is determined by testing and averaging sample results.)
Both the foreign market for non-transgenic commodities and the U.S. domestic, non-organic market for them use the same .9% standard, even though no one has determined if even a small amount of transgenic contamination is safe and healthful. It is likely to be dangerous because even a small amount of contamination can enable self-replication. Studies about this are needed, but they are prevented by the patent owner. That is the reason for the dependence on research done in other nations.
The crop cannot be sold as organic once it is known to be contaminated even slightly; the organic standard does not permit any food that knowingly contains transgenic content. This is called “zero tolerance,” but there is a loophole in the standard that is endangering to all organic consumers and to the credibility of the organic program. No one has made a published estimate of the amount of contamination enabled or made virtually routine as the result of this loophole in the national organic standard.
The National Organic Program (NOP) permits transgenic content in sold products if the farmer is unaware of it; only known transgenic content is not allowed. This is the rule because the organic program establishes a “process-based” standard where best efforts are good enough. Transgenic testing is not required, so farmers are not required to know if their crops have been contaminated. No “action level” exists for transgenic content, even though an action level does exist for pesticide contamination. The action level sets the point when farmers are required to know about contamination of their crops. Crops contaminated above the action level cannot be sold as organic. Efforts have been made to get an action level set for transgenic contamination, but the corporate forces in the industry have resisted.
In the face of this unsatisfactory reality, Monsanto says the labeling of transgenic food is not needed, because people can buy organic food if they want to avoid transgenic contamination, but that is not a guarantee transgenic content will be avoided. When the National Organic Program creates a virtual incentive not to learn about or know about any transgenic contamination that might exist, the embrace of food grown and certified as organic does not provide a guarantee establishing the absence of any contamination in it. Some are conscientious about testing for contamination, but many are not. Testing is costly, so an incentive not to test exists.
At the same time as Monsanto has promoted the use of organic food as a way around the need for transgenic food labeling, they and their allies have also worked to discredit the organic standard. They have argued organic food is no better than chemically raised food, and they produced a meta-study in 2012 to support this claim. During 2012, before the vote on Proposition 37 to require transgenic food labeling in California, the meta-study was produced by a scientist associated with the Hoover Institution and others at Stanford, the university where Hoover Institution is housed.
The Hoover associate involved with the study had a prior of history of deceptive, whitewash-type studies on other issues including tobacco-related health issues, and when the study was released, the deceptive aspects of the study were attacked by critics. Because of the way the study was used in advertising opposing Proposition 37 the criticism did not have the same reach as the wide broadcast of the study findings.
The university’s name was used because the Hoover Institution is located at Stanford physically and some Stanford investigators were employed to work on the study, but it is an independent organization with no ties to Stanford organizationally. When the flaws in the study were exposed (for example, it excluded pesticide contamination from the issues examined), the managers of the industry campaign against Proposition 37 would have known that the media power of their advertising would greatly overpower the reach of the critics to broadcast their message in opposition to the study. Likely, also they would have been counting on the response to the study taking time to gain any coverage, and by then the election campaign would be over.
The industry campaign only needed their message to work for a few weeks at most. The critics would have been understood as a mere whisper responding to daily shouting through megaphone. Likely, the allied companies opposing labeling did not care what would be said against the Hoover study as long as it would take time before the comments would appear and they would only be seen by a small audience. They would have known the responses would never catch up with their own ability to disseminate their message through targeted advertising. The goal was to quickly use the study for a brief period following its well-timed release. The timing precisely fit the advertising plan they created in opposition to Proposition 37, and it worked.
The ads reporting the results of the study were run during October 2012 when half of the voters were voting by absentee ballot and the pro-labeling ads were not yet being broadcast. Whatever comments about the study were published after Election Day would not have mattered. Even responses published before Election Day would not have been seen by many people because they were published in obscure places on the Internet and required a dedicated search to be found. If they were seen, they would not have influenced the people who already voted in-person or by absentee ballot.
More early ballots were cast in California in 2012 than ever before in state history, about 30% of the total votes according to reporting by the U.S. Elections Project at George Mason University based on Election Day numbers. This number did not include late arriving absentee ballots not counted until after Election Day. That was reported to be almost another third of the ballots. People had learned from previous elections to avoid possible polling station lines and other potential troubles by voting early, so as of Election Day about half of the votes had already been cast and counted earlier and the other half were cast on Election Day. The remainder was the number cast and received when required but not yet counted until the days after Election Day.
The Hoover study served its intended and devious purpose; it helped to change the views of enough voters to defeat Proposition 37 by a 2.8% margin, but it was a pyrrhic victory for the food industry and the trade associations, because the campaign informed many people about both the issues and the tactics of the opponents against labeling. Like Monsanto’s transgenic technology, the campaign against labeling was myopic for many of the companies involved with it, and afterward several of them decided to avoid participation in the campaign against labeling in Washington state a year later during 2013. That was because it caused a consumer backlash purchasing boycott by many people against the brands owned by the 62 anti-labeling companies.
The backlash caused many of the companies to want to put their contributions in a blind fund for use against the Washington state ballot initiative, but that was illegal, and they were caught at it by the Washington state Attorney General. After that, the list of the evasive companies was published, and it gave additional impetus to the consumer boycott. That could end up costing the companies more in the long run than they hoped to gain from the cheaper cost of the transgenic content used in their products. The trouble for the companies was: the activist boycott was nation-wide and not just in California and Washington, and it impacted many brands. Those encouraging the boycott posted a full list of all the brands owned by the companies.
If ten million people were to divert $100 each away from the brands of the offending companies over the course of a few months, that would add up to a revenue loss of $1 billion. Many people have diverted thousands of dollars away from the company over the course of a year. That could explain why several companies, including Mars and Kraft declined to participate in the effort to defeat the the ballot initiative in Washington state in 2013. They are highly visible brand names, and they could suffer more than some of the less well-known brand names from resulting consumer anger.
The bad publicity generated by the story about the effort to evade Washington state campaign financing laws probably did not get to the many rural voters in the eastern part of the state whose votes were strongest in enabling the initiative to be defeated by 2.18%. Maybe of these voters may have been partisan enough on the issue not to care about the devious activities by the companies or maybe they were influenced by the advertising saying the price of food would greatly increase as a result of the labeling. That could happen in rural counties where many voters are Farm Bureau members strongly influenced by the Farm Bureau’s pro-Monsanto politics, but here again, the corporate victory was pyrrhic because of the millions able to become more informed about the serious health and environmental issues by the ballot campaign.
The problem for the companies is the challenge of containing the truth against the public interest. The question is: how long can they continue to spend large amounts of money in state after state to persuade more than half of the state’s voters to prefer ignorance over dangerously unhealthful truth they can continue to try to suppress. The next state up is Oregon in 2014, and then Californians plan to run at the issue again in 2016 if a labeling measure is not passed by the state legislature before then. Washingtonians could also want to try again to pass the measure a second time, especially if labeling gains momentum in other states over the next year or more.
Meanwhile, states in the Northeast are pushing labeling bills through their legislatures with Connecticut and Maine leading the way. Vermont’s bill was passed in the House in 2013 and is coming up in the state Senate in early 2014. After that, only two more contiguous, regional states are needed before the labeling requirement would go into effect, but one of the states needs to have a larger population than any of the New England states. That means New York or New Jersey will need to act.
The New England region of the nation favors labeling more strongly than most other states partly because the organic ideal is stronger in those states, but that does not mean the focused campaign funding and lobbying power of the companies is not also overwhelmingly powerful among the members of the state legislatures. The power of corporate money still could be stronger than even activist voters in some states, but if that happens and it is highly visible on an issue of high concern to an activated minority, the result could be angering and more strongly activating. Concern about issues may build only very slowly at first, but then it can begin to grow geometrically.
Meanwhile, as more people become informed, the leading northeastern states, along with other northern states, could drive efforts to improve the organic standard and depoliticize it. This is only a question about the numbers of people deciding to get involved. As the market for organic food grows, more people have a strong interest in strengthening organic food integrity because they grow and eat more of it. The issue is bigger in most of the blue (Democratic) states than it is in red (Republican) states. Markets show Republican citizens to be somewhat less concerned about transgenic food, and this would go along with their greater support for the funders/advertisers.
An organic crop is also more likely to become contaminated in the more Republican states because they have more farmers growing the transgenic commodities than is likely in the New England states where agriculture is more diversified and less consistently transgenic. In Iowa or Nebraska or even Illinois and Indiana, people may drive for hundreds of miles without finding fields of a non-transgenic crop, but that would be less likely to be the rule in New England and some other places. Even though only one percent of farmland in the United States is farmed organically, more than that amount is found in some states and less in others. The picture is changing.
In states where less contamination is likely because of the terrain and the diversity of the land uses, the challenges of dealing with it are fewer. At present, if organic farmers sell a contaminated crop in a market for transgenic crops, they have to find a way to do that clandestinely, so the contamination will not be discovered. If it is discovered, then the farmer could be sued for patent infringement for possessing a transgenic crop without having a paid a royalty to Monsanto. In that case, Monsanto can take ownership of the crop or demand the sale revenue, as they did with Percy Schmeiser in Canada and have also with many similar others in the U.S. They reportedly investigate about 500 cases of what they call “seed piracy” every year, and very few of those cases go to court. The court record shows farmer success unlikely.
Responsible attorneys would not encourage their farming clients to go to court against Monsanto once they look at the record. They would encourage the farmers to settle the claim even if the contamination was not the farmer’s fault. That is the reason the number of patent infringement lawsuits has fallen off in recent years compared to what it had been over previous years after Monsanto first started suing farmers for possessing their patented genes without having paid a royalty for them.
The risk of this circumstance has caused many farmers formerly growing non-transgenic crops with chemicals to cave in and go along with Monsanto’s program. Most farmers have changed to transgenic farming because it lowers costs and makes farming easy, but some were holdouts for a while until they decided they did not want to try to raise a non-transgenic crop that might be contaminated and cause them to be sued by Monsanto. The risk for them was not balanced by the revenue, but now some are going back in the other direction because of the rising cost of more herbicide applications and because of the growing increase in the number of resistant weeds.
As the risks and the headaches became greater for some than the price premium they hoped to earn from selling a non-transgenic crop (often in a foreign market), some decided to go with the transgenic flow, especially when the organic market was not yet able to accommodate more sellers and the three year transition time was also a big added cost and challenge. Another factor was the economic downturn since 2008. That put pressure on the market for organic and other non-transgenic crops, but this was also before the problem with herbicide-resistant weeds greatly increased in size.
When farms were smaller in the past, they could be more flexible because they were more diverse with both animals and crops, but as farmers have been forced by federal farm policy to “get big or get out,” (to use the words of Agricultural Secretary Earl Butz), they have lacked the same flexibility in their options and the most risky dangers have been compounded. Over the short term, especially for mono-crop farms, the Monsanto system has been less risky, and in the United States, as matter of policy-driven, cultural preference, the short-term always matters more than the long term. That is built into U.S. thinking alongside the clear cultural habit of expediency.
Once transgenic farming became the accepted convention among many farmers, even if it was myopic, others were encouraged to give up their resistance, especially when alternative seed became harder to obtain. Monsanto’s control over the seed marketplace and ownership of so many seed companies has made dealers responsive to Monsanto’s agenda. This has been the reality even though one U.S. survey found 95% of the farmers growing transgenic crops are unwilling to eat the food they grow.
This is a measure of the state of the amorality now afflicting agriculture. Farmers are no longer committed to growing food they know to be nutritious and healthful. Instead, they do whatever they need to do to survive financially and give the market what it seems to be demanding. This shows farmers absorbing or being forced to absorb the same amoral values as the corporations they depend on for everything they need to buy, sell, and borrow. As corporations have become more politically, culturally, and economically dominant, many people have absorbed their values.
In Great Britain, a survey by Barclays Bank and Farmers Weekly showed 85% of farmers unwilling to eat transgenic food, but more (39%) were not willing to grow it under any circumstances, and an additional 24% did not want to grow it but would if they had to. That left roughly 20% willing to grow it for others without reservation even though some of them would not eat it themselves or feed it to their families. This picture leaves U.K. farmers less amoral than their counterparts in the United States. They can be proud of that, because it shows a higher sense of supportive community morality and mutuality in Great Britain than exists any longer in the United States.
Against this picture of farmer opinion and behavior, Monsanto has continued to assert the safety of transgenic food even though most farmers, according to the polling, do not believe them, and their supposed “proof” comes only from studies they have made themselves or have sponsored. In the absence of independent, fully objective, and reliable studies, holes are easily punched in Monsanto’s credibility.
Maybe some consumers still believe them or are confused about the topic, even if they want labeling of transgenic food, but a majority want transgenic food labeled so they can avoid it and not just because they are asserting a right to know. Monsanto knows the attitudinal reality among most consumers, and that is the reason they have fought so hard to prevent labeling from being enacted or passed by ballot initiative—and also to protect the power of the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence among policy makers.
The fight is likely to continue for years, even if more states pass labeling laws. Those laws will likely be fought in the courts for as long as possible, and maybe Monsanto and its allies are counting on the same outcome they achieved against Vermont on rBGH. The duration of the struggle could depend on the level of public knowledge about the credible, informative, or frightening studies reported from other nations.
If more people start to be overcome by the brain fog that has been one of the widely noted symptoms from eating transgenic food, the court battle could last as long as the appeals process takes, and it may last that long anyway regardless of the level of public impatience with the government and biotech agribusiness recalcitrance. The people may need to take stronger personal action to deliver change if the courts continue to defend the biotech corporate interest as they have done in our lawsuit. If people remain docile and passive, waiting to be told the truth by others without demanding it, little will change. The politics of the issue are like a game of chess.
If studies would start to be made in the United States, the picture could change as the result of that, but that does not seem likely as long as patent-related control and corporate contractual control over the research institutions continues. Findings like the one about brain fog and others about many wide-ranging afflictions have not yet been established by multiple U.S. studies; they have come from reports by doctors based on their experience with a large number of patients they have observed. Many veterinarians have also reported findings from the observed behavior of animals, but none of these rise to the level of an academic study. They are anecdotal reports even if they come from many different places at the same time. Before studies can be made, someone needs to fund them, and those with the resources do not want any studies.
Meanwhile, both the organic and biodynamic standards establish zero tolerance for transgenic contamination even though the organic standard has a loophole that does not exist for biodynamic farmers. That means no one is required to test for transgenic content in a organic crop unless they have strong reason to believe it exists. This liberality does not exist for biodynamic farmers, and that could be the reason why the number of biodynamic farmers is greatly fewer than the number of organic farmers.
The greater integrity of the biodynamic standard also could be a reason why Whole Foods in some locations has expressed increased interest in selling biodynamic food. They see the growing desire from consumers to have food that is guaranteed to be without transgenic contamination, and they want to serve that demand as soon as possible. Whole Food has promised to label the transgenic content of all food in their stores by 2018, but that does not mean they are waiting until then to capture the market for food without transgenic content. The faster sellers comply with the labeling rule, the more likely they are to benefit from increased sales. At present, too many processed food choices exist at Whole Food that customers no longer want.
The management of Whole Foods has seen growing sales of food with the Non-GMO Project label, and they also see demand for more organic choices. This means they have to change to meet the demand they are seeing. A few years ago, they were emphasizing local food over organic food, and they rode that horse as far as they could. The trouble is: other grocery chains can pursue that objective as much as they can, and the other grocery chains are also moving into the organic market as fast as the market grows to demand it. Very often, the other chains have organic products Whole Foods does not have. This is a question of buying leverage to close sales on the available supply. New supply needs to be found before this problem can be fixed.
An action level could easily exist for transgenic contamination if the empowered people wanted it and the market was outspoken enough in demanding it, but so far change on the matter has not occurred. The foot dragging comes not just from the members of the National Organic Standards Board; it also comes from the major trade associations where the largest companies often have played an out-sized roles.
Until better rules are written, organic farmers are not required to test their crops for contamination. This is the governing reality, and if testing was required, someone would have to pay for it. If farmers have to pay for it, the market price of their products would have to support the cost. Maybe the cost should come out of the pockets of government officials because their negligence is at the core of the need as much as is Monsanto’s negligence, but that is not going to happen any more than it is likely to happen that Monsanto’s volunteers to pay the cost out of the awesome goodness of their corporate heart. Those who caused the problem should pay for it—if the world worked as it should work, but does not work that way and it is unlikely to.
At the same time, according to polling, the nation’s people are now more concerned about transgenic contamination than they are about pesticide contamination. They should be concerned about both and especially about Glyphosate herbicide contamination, but until more information is widely available about all the dangers, people do not know what they should fear the most or why. This is what happens when the government and the media collaborate with Monsanto and their allies to keep the people in the dark. With that, the Internet is the most informed source, but not enough people make use of the Internet sources as diligently as they need to.
If justice existed on this issue, the cost of all testing to know about Monsanto’s transgenic contamination and Roundup contamination would be paid by Monsanto as a basic cost of doing business from the start of the problem, but because of the way corporate politics work in the United States and the way the courts work in support of them, justice has been evaded. Worse, justice has been defined as the corporations want it to be defined. The design of the national organic standard is part of the problem. That is also a justice and truth issue up against inexorable corporate power.
The organic ideal can be and has been discredited as long as the farmer incentive to remain ignorant persists. That undermines public trust, and it appears to be what Monsanto wants. Even though they have not said so publicly in so many words, they would want organic agriculture out of their way, for as long as it exists, their domination and control over agriculture is blocked, and they have an opponent able to stand up against them. Even if organic farmers are weak in numbers, they are better organized, and they have more consumer support than any other farmers.
Because of opposition to so-called farm subsidies which really and mostly only make up partly for what farm policy manipulations have taken away from fair farm income, most consumers have been alienated from chemically-dependent commodity farmers, and that is what agribusiness has worked to achieve as part of a divide and conquer strategy. That has not happened the same way between organic farmers and consumers. Understanding the workings of farm policy is a bigger topic aside from the issues being discussed here, but it is also important for citizens to understand.
To protect the integrity of the organic ideal in the United States, the farmer and distributor ignorance loophole in the organic standard needs to be closed, but the large food companies, including especially those with organic subsidiaries have not wanted it closed. They have worked to keep the loophole in place because it serves the interest of the non-organic part of their business. The only thing preventing transgenic contamination of organic crops from being a bigger threat to consumers is the commitment of organic sellers to do the testing to protect their own reputation among their buyers. That is not enough to provide full assurance about the absence of transgenic content, but it is better than nothing. For now, it is all there is available.
The major food companies with smaller organic subsidiaries use those subsidiaries as a Trojan Horse to prevent the organic standard from undermining their larger corporate ability to continue unrestrained, unscrutinized sales of transgenic food for as long as possible. This is an integrity issue, but it is also a public knowledge issue. As long as some people and companies think transgenic food content is safe, they can continue evading the need to address food integrity, credibility, and responsibility.
The Weakness in the U.S. National Organic Standard on Transgenic Contamination and How It Benefits Monsanto While Compromising the Public Health and Helping to Undermine the Organic Ideal
Chapter 20
When the National Organic Program became a government program, it became a political toy to be abused by the same money-driven, insider self-serving politics Washington, DC is now infamous for, but the government, especially the FDA, the EPA, and the USDA are not the only problem. The major organic trade associations have also failed to serve the public need, and evasion of that responsibility has been their intention. They have often served the member companies in the same way the biotech trade associations have served their member companies ahead of the public.
The organic trade associations have become part of the problem largely because of the power of the major food companies within those associations, and when smaller companies and farmers have a larger role in the associations, they have a greater interest in serving the interests of their consumers. Before the National Organic Program was created, many different standards were possible, so a unified national standard was needed to prevent fragmentation of the ideal—and even the intentional corruption of it by the unscrupulous, but the creation of the national program did not solve all the problems, and sadly, it created some new ones. The problems and the threats to the integrity of organic food can only be addressed by informed people.
Larger corporations are more likely to press their own interests ahead of the public need because that is what larger corporations feel entitled by law to do in service to their shareholders. They cannot be and should not be trusted to serve the public interest. Pretenses to the contrary need to be examined on their own merits one at a time. A pertinent axiom might be: the larger and older the corporation the greater the amorality and the sense of self-serving entitlement empowering it. The trouble is: the failures of some younger and smaller corporations are worse than some of the older and larger. That is why the performance of all of them must be examined on the merits of what they do product by product. Also important is establishment of a way to make sure the expensive burdens they impose are no longer transferred to others.
Monsanto in its current role as a biotech agribusiness dog with a dog-wagging chemical tail is slightly more than a decade old, and so it might be absolved by many from the sins of the prior company it was not directly involved with. Maybe they hoped to shed the reputation of their parent company even though the kept its name. They are the child of the parent the same way an oak tree is related to an acorn that came from its parent, and that tree grows in the same forest soil where it fell. The new Monsanto company is a new oak tree created from an acorn that fell from the old oak tree and it persists in the same cultural climate that enabled the prior company.
The amoral virus it caught from the soil where it is growing is the same virus the old company was infected with, and both the law and the culture says the virus is allowable even when it has infected the political culture and and many others—including individuals. Because of the amorality it is infected by, it was quickly able to gain the size and significance of a Fortune 200 company. That would not have happened apart from the work done by the old company over many previous decades.
The new Monsanto company was launched from a cannon or a rocket launcher built by the original company. No doubt they kept the same name because it had the value of enabling their investors to continue delivering to them the same support they had previously delivered. Because big companies have more money, they and those associated with them also do more to promote a common self-serving interest with politicians. At public expense, this works to grow the power of money in politics, and that may help explain why the National Organic Program is a corporately-subservient government program, not immune to the amoral afflictions damaging to much the government touches. As long as money is more important than morality in the way politics works in the United States, governing reality will continue as it has been.
The ridiculous, shameful, and dangerous abuse of organic food consumers resulting from what they know and do not know comes directly from the way the National Organic Program operates under its “process-based” rule. When best efforts are good enough to suffice, people are abused and the standard will eventually lose credibility—unless the rules are changed. The present trouble is: the full facts are not known by most organic consumers, so they invest more faith in the standard than they should.
Maybe they are not so much wishful as they are grateful for some hope or some crumb in the midst of the chemically-compromised food wasteland that now allows toxins to be injected into food so they can no longer be washed off. The problem is created when the rule on transgenic contamination creates an incentive for some organic farmers not to find out about whatever transgenic contamination may exist in the products they sell. With that comes an amoral desire to evade worry about whatever is not known. Actually, the number of people who do not and cannot know about dangerous food they consume would be astonishing if they could know about it.
Even the nation’s first and only organically certified grocery chain, Whole Foods, is not a help in fixing the trouble. As part of their transition to the full labeling of all products with transgenic content by 2018, they have said the immediate way to avoid anything transgenic is to buy organic, and that would be good if it were completely true or guaranteed to be true. In fact, it may not even be true in the case of foods that have been tested, because testing only looks at samples, and the sampling techniques may not find the places where contamination is hidden. Organic food is still the best readily available option even if it cannot provide a guarantee of its healthful safety.
Under the existing circumstance, purchasers of organic food need to know more than the fact that the food is certified organic. They need to trust the scrupulous integrity of the people and companies they buy from, because the same corner-cutting and profit-pursuing incentives that exist for chemically-dependent agribusiness also can exist for farmers and companies in the organic sector. Most consumers may not focus on these details because they want to trust the people and companies selling the products they want to buy. But eventually, the facts will be known, and when they are, a backlash against both the perpetrators of the corner cutting and the inadequacies in the organic rules could result. Anger could be the result until consumers have the hand-held capacity to test and firm the quality of their own food before they eat it.
Until the technology to know the truth about food is in the hands of any consumer who wants it, there can be good and bad organic food, and even if organic food is generally safer and more healthfully nutritious it cannot be automatically better. Once consumers can have this technology at their finger tips, farmers will also be able to have it, and only farmers giving consumers what they want will be able to survive. Consumer ignorance will not be as exploitable as it has been since corporate agribusiness came to play the role it has been able to play in food production. Because of the domination of food by agribusiness, chemically-raised food has been called “conventional” when it should be called exactly what it is: chemically-dependent food.
To be successful, organic farmers need to know more about what is required to create high quality, healthful food products; they need to understand nature better than farmers growing transgenic food, and in that lies the appeal of growing transgenic crops. They make agriculture easy, and that is captivating for many farmers, especially those who have lost their connection with the wisdom of nature and have become just as expedient about the choices they have made as many corporations.
This transformation has been made easier when the values of the entire culture have become myopic and amoral the same as corporate values. As this happens, both health and democracy become impossible. In fact, the health of people becomes a way of measuring the health of the democracy. A democracy cannot be healthy unless its citizens are healthy enough to play the role required of them—unless they are able to know what is required of them in their daily lives. They have to be able to promote and maintain the existence of a moral community, and without that democracy persist. This is the reason corporate amorality is the agent of democratic subversion.
Because the contamination of organic food is possible in multiple ways, and even seed can be contaminated, it cannot provide security against unhealthful, anti-nutritious consequences, but that does not mean it cannot generally provide benefits chemically-raised food cannot provide. Despite the incentive to not know and not find contamination, the most conscientious farmers and venders pay the cost of testing because they want to make sure, the best they can, that nothing they sell is at all contaminated by anything they do not want in their food. That is not a guarantee, but it is the best that can be reasonably hoped for under the current circumstances at least until they can be improved through easier and cheaper food testing techniques.
Beyond that at present are many farmers who do not want to participate in an inadequate government-run program at least until it can be made more reliable. Some of them talk about being “better than organic” even when no one certifies the products they create. They depend entirely on trust from the consumers they sell to, and the consumers rely equally on knowing their providers or hoping they know them well enough to fully trust them. The trouble with this system is: no one can be sure about possible contamination unless they are testing for it. Even the weeds can become transgenicly contaminated, and livestock might be able to eat them. The contamination can then spread through the soil culture or through animal manure.
Once weeds pick up the contamination, it can spread among other related weeds, and no one is testing to find out the extent this is happening. Some farmers rely on their relative isolation, but that is not a guarantee given all the ways pollen can spread and all the other ways the transgenic traits can be spread. Monsanto has created a nightmare and the implications of it are not yet fully understood by most people.
When farmers say they practice an uncertified farming model better than organic, they have offer no viewable records or publicly-stated testimonies to affirm the methods used—as organic farmers do. That could be improved if farmers markets and other points of sale were required to post a declaration of employed methods and possible risk factors. Maybe they received a load of manure that was contaminated or maybe the rain, the morning fog, or the birds and the deer conveyed chemical or transgenic contamination onto their farm. The birds are not a small issue, because transgenic canola has been spread widely by bird droppings especially along migration flyways. Insects can also spread contamination from one place to another.
Unless farms are testing and being inspected, no record exists about what is really happening. The self-proclaimed “better than organic” farms have no trained inspectors examining what they do on a regular basis. At the same time, testing for transgenic contamination still does not prove contamination does not exist in some part of a crop or in the animals being produced. It could exist in a part of the crop or in an animal that was not tested. That is the problem, and no easy answer exists, but this is a reason why biodynamic farms operate under a closed system importing nothing from other farms. Everything they do and everything they feed is created on the farm, but this cannot provide complete protection either. Air and rain can still bring unwanted contamination for other places, and so can insects, especially bees.
Contamination can even be substantial in an untested part of the crop. Because it does not mix itself evenly into all parts of the harvested crop, the location of the contamination cannot be known, and because the testing is only conducted on a sample of the crop, it could be the wrong one. In some markets, a test sample is taken from every load, but that does not guarantee no contamination exists in some untested part of the same load. No magnet or special probe can be used to ferret out the place the contamination may be hidden. Some buyers have reported significant contamination revealed in the testing they do, and that suggests there could be more in parts of the load s that were not discovered. Testing by sample is unlikely to find more contamination than actually exists if more thorough testing was possible.
This is the reason the court decision by Judge Buchwald in New York was ludicrous, irresponsible, and ill-informed even worse than the decision by the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit. Judge Buchwald said all plaintiffs and others like them should be grateful for Monsanto’s ill-defined, unreliable, and unenforceable promise not to sure of trace, inadvertent contamination, but in saying that she effectively participated in the fraud Monsanto has perpetrated. This behavior should be exposed for what it is, three courts have ignored and dismissed it as if it should not matter.
Monsanto has used the probable widespread existence of contamination to argue that transgenic contamination should be accepted as a fact of life even under the organic standard, and that would be one possibility if transgenic content could be objectively and independently proven to be safe. As long as serious evidence exists about the dangers existing from transgenic food, contamination has to be intolerable in an ethical nation; otherwise expediency is made more important than morality.
Reliably objective epidemiological studies to prove safety or definitively pinpoint the dangers have not been conducted in the United States, but they should have been long before transgenic crops were given a patent or were allowed to be publicly released. The only possible conclusion to be drawn from this negligence is: the United States is not an honorable, morally responsible, or ethically admirable nation. It cannot be.
On the basis of their own controlled and so far entirely untrustworthy science, Monsanto contends their products are safe, but that is not credible proof. The studies they have produced are not convincing to anyone who looks carefully at the protocols and the details. The trouble is: in the United States, both many people and the media generally look only at the summary or the conclusion. They do not examine the details or the protocols. That is a common habit, and it has been seen for decades.
When this is the habit exhibited by both the public and the media, the government can easily get away with doing no better. Again, for emphasis: studies that have been conducted, mostly in other nations, show the opposite of the corporately-sponsored U.S. studies, and no one knows if even a small amount of contamination, less than one percent, is actually safe. No studies about that matter have ever been required.
Given the way transgenic DNA behaves, no reason exists to believe a small amount of transgenic contamination is any more healthful or tolerable than a large amount. This is because transgenic contamination is self-replicating, colonizing the gut bacteria and spreading its traits the same way they are spread to soil bacteria—and to gut bacteria of animals, birds, and insects. A small amount of contamination can replicate itself as well as a large amount; it just starts from a smaller initial quantity. The issue is like a cockroach in a house or a colony of ants, a mouse or a rat. If a small amount of contamination occurs in a field, it will inevitably spread to become more.
If one one roach is brought into the house in the seam of a grocery bag, it will likely soon multiply into many more. Transgenic replication is not much different from that, and based on the available studies, the dangers of it are likely to be worse than those that might usually be spread by cockroaches. Much as roaches can find places to hide, the Bt toxin in Monsanto’s corn can penetrate the gut wall, get into the blood, and go anywhere, doing whatever damage it may, in its nature, be able to accomplish.
Based on what is known, Bt toxin, in its transgenic form, is severely destructive. That has been known at least since the studies between 1995 and 1998 coordinated from the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland and led by Arpad Pusztai. The group of studies were conducted at multiple locations and paid for by the British taxpayers with the objective of informing the public about the safety of transgenic food, but when Pusztai was honest with the people about the findings, he was fired and his study data was confiscated—at least for about six month until the British Parliament returned the research data to him and asked him to testify about it along with others.
The Destruction of the Immune System Health of People and Other Living Creatures, the Intention of the Courts, and the Failure of the Courts to Be Concerned about the Many Health Impacts Resulting from Monsanto’s Seeds and Chemicals
Chapter 21
As a result of the colonization of necessary pro-biotic bacteria by Monsanto’s transgenic bacteria, the bacteria needed to protect the immune health of people and animals are corrupted. The Roundup herbicide commonly consumed with transgenic food are also destructive of the beneficial bacteria in the same way non-transgenic plants are destroyed. This circumstance is believed to have caused the great increase in bowel inflammation, digestive disorders, and autism (a condition believed to relate to the connection between intestinal health and the brain), but this is only a tiny, suggestive portion of the health impacts resulting from Monsanto’s transgenic agricultural project. More a dozen ignored afflictions are caused or made worse according to studies in other nations and some recent studies in the United States.
This is not the place to go deep into the science; that will occur in the courtroom once we are able to achieve legal standing and the right to be heard. However, Monsanto has patented its Glyphosate as an antibiotic, so it does kill bacteria. The trouble is: it does not effectively kill the worst pathogenic bacteria like botulism and salmonella. It is more effective at killing the good pro-biotic bacteria, and that is how the transgenic Roundup-Ready bacteria have come to replace them. Then, Bt transgenes make the problem worse. Together, they are a one-two punch in the gut, and the impacts of both punches need to be addressed without delay before more health damage is caused. The public recognition of this need the three courts have prevented; instead, they have acted to defend Monsanto against that possibility as if that was their job.
The same thing happens in the soil where valuable bacteria are essential in building the nutritive value of the crops growing in the soil. When this bacteria is disrupted as it is by the Glyphosate herbicide, the health of the crops is also impaired at the subsequent expense of the health of the people and animals needing to be healthfully nourished when they eat the transgenic food and feed. In addition, the Glyphosate is a powerful chelator originally used in the mining industry to bind minerals, and it does the same thing in the soil. That is the way that it dissipates: by binding up the soil minerals, but these minerals are needed to protect the immune health of the plants.
These impacts of Glyphosate or Roundup are a disaster affecting both the mineral and the bacteria important to nutritive quality. The chemical disrupts the processes essential to the creation of healthful food, and Roundup is worse than the major active ingredient Glyphosate because it contains adjuvants designed to enable the chemical to penetrate into the plant instead of just remaining on the surface where it could be washed off. For example, when Roundup is used on potatoes to kill the plants before harvest the chemical penetrates into the tuber and causes the skin to harden. This is considered desirable because a harder skin resists damage during shipping and improves the appearance of the potatoes as they are displayed in stores.
The shelf life of the potatoes is also increased as a result of the chemical use. The potatoes are protected against spoilage by the chemical, and that is good for merchandizers but not for the people consuming the potatoes. The facts of the story are not understood by most people, and the health impacts are not immediate, so they are not easily traced to the cause that can be cumulative over many years depending on the amount of exposure and the effectiveness of the body at eliminating toxins. The toxins may be stored in body fat and remain there continuously, and this will happen more when people are eating more food than they need or should need to live.
When food is nutritionally deprived because the soil lacks available minerals, people eat more of it. Automatically, they continue to seek the nutrients they need but are not getting from the poor quality, mineral-deprive food. This is one explanation of the epidemic of obesity seen in the United States and now also in other nations. In Mexico, for example, people are getting fatter over recent years, and that could be a result of eating tortillas and other corn-based foods made from transgenic grain and containing herbicide that impairs the proper functioning of the digestive system.
Recent studies have shown obesity is linked to the health of the intestinal bacteria people need to live, and when the gut is in an unhealthy state, more of the food it should be processing into valuable nutrition is instead converted into fat. A range of issues join together in causing a perfect storm of unhealthful, anti-nutritional issues. Among them are the problems caused by modern hybrid crops bred to increase yield and thus to have more starch content and less protein. All these matters go with the lower quantities of mineral nutrients and the damaging chemicals to create food that is multilaterally deprived nutritionally. This is the result of the chemically-dependent agricultural system standard in the United States and many other nations but not as much in Europe because many Europeans now have the knowledge to demand better.
The Roundup-Ready transgenic crops growing in the soil pass their genes through the soil to the microorganisms in the soil, and that is how soil bacteria and other soil life is corrupted the same as the digestive bacteria in people and animals. If a non-transgenic crop is grown in the soil following the growth of a transgenic crop, the transgenic trait can be passed to the new crop through the microorganisms in the soil, and that is one among several of the ways contamination of the crops can occur, but no systematic testing is done to find or even seek this kind of crop destruction.
Time and remediation are needed to restore health of the soil, and the process is similar to the process of restoring the health of the intestinal flora after they have been corrupted through the eating of chemically-laden transgenic food or killed by a course of medical antibiotics. Time, knowledge, focused effort, and farming discipline are needed to repair the soil damage, and similar knowledge and effort is needed to repair the flora damage in the human gut. The damage to both is similar.
Extensive soil damage makes the fix harder, but some, including the Rodale Institute, have been focusing on processes needed to accomplish the soil repair. Without diligence using the techniques that have been developed, many years, even decades, can be required to enable the Glyphosate in the soil to break down and release the minerals bound up over many prior years of chemical agriculture. Repair is possible, but without beneficial facilitation, it can take a quarter century of natural breakdown. This is the reason the damage being done to agricultural soils in the United States is worse than the damage caused by the BP-Halliburton oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Because of the complexity of the issues needing to be addressed and the understandings needed to begin addressing them, the Appeals Court decision was even less than one percent helpful, and to the extent it pretended to solve the problem, it produced a dangerous and abusive ruse as bad as the so-called Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence that allowed the Monsanto abuse to get started and persist over the past two decades. In addressing only one percent of the trouble by finding a Binding Covenant through the rule of estoppel for one percent of the contamination and leaving even that part administratively difficult and ambiguous at best, the court allowed the larger and more important part of the issue to be neglected and ignored.
This is the source of the perpetrated injustice and evasion of important agricultural wisdom; it is the part that adversely impacts everyone and all life, and it is the reason the court decision have been negligent and at least misfeasant in their judicial failure.
If a Binding Covenant had been negotiated with Monsanto back in 2011 when the opportunity to do that was requested by our attorneys at the Public Patent Foundation, it the result could not have been as laughably limited as the one the Appeals Court specified. If such a limited answer had been proposed, it would have been rejected as insufficient. A Binding Covenant of only one percent can only be a pro-Monsanto action by the court, and that would have been the intention. Otherwise, a more appropriate, honorable, and less negligent answer would have been provided.
The court’s view of a good answer could not have been based on any biological or agricultural knowledge. It could have only been the product of intentional brush-off and subterfuge similar in its intent if not its content to the dismissal decision by Judge Buchwald in New York. Objective, informed examination, and analysis of the decision finds no other way to see the matter. Any workable covenant needed to address the full size of the problem or at least a substantial enough portion of it.
Administration of the “zero to one percent” standard would likely need its own book of regulations, rules and definitions, and that could soon be realized when the first damage claim is brought to court for contamination between zero and one percent. The testing required to find a small amount of contamination will require great vigilance and costly testing, but it could be worth it, inasmuch as damage claims must most likely be filed before the contamination becomes greater than one percent—unless it will prove to be possible to argue the contamination was less than one percent before time enabled it to grow to more than that amount. This must be tested.
If a justice-seeking rule book were written, it would require Monsanto to pay the high administrative costs of the required testing because they have caused the damage. The cost of the testing should be part of the recoverable damage from the claim. If that is not required, the cost of the testing would have to be passed on to consumers in the price of the food, but they are not the responsible party. They should not be the people required to pay for the caused damage and neither should the taxpayers.
Consumers are victims of the travesty as much as the contaminated farmers are, and just as they should not pay for the problem as taxpayers and citizens, they should not pay as consumers either. Monsanto and their customers caused the problem, so they should pay for the trouble they have caused, but Monsanto’s customers were duped, intimidated, and often virtually forced in many cases into accepting the technology. That might be able to give them grounds for escaping responsibility even if they made a decision to accept the technology and may also have been anxious to make use of it.
More difficult to escape would be the contractual terms accepted by adhesion contract upon opening a bag of Monsanto’s seed. Apart from that, the farming customers should not be liable either. Because an adhesion contract is a tricky way for Monsanto to transfer liability to seed users and most of them probably have not read the terms of the adhesion contract, they probably do not understand the terms they have accepted, but they would find out in a hurry if a damaged neighbor were to file a damage suit against them the same as the organic farmer, Steve Marsh, has done against his neighbor in Australia. The same thing could happen now in the United States because of the decision made by the Appeals Court in response to our lawsuit. The only question is about how soon the first damage suit could be filed.
The rules governing the filing might have been specified in the court decision if justice was important and court decisions needed to make sense, but that clearly was not the objective. The only thing that was important was the facilitation of the Monsanto agenda and teaching everyone else that they need to accommodate the transgenic, chemically-dependent farming system no matter the pain, damage, and cost to be paid for doing that. This was explicitly apparent in the District Court decision, and it was just as negligently if inexplicitly apparent in the Supreme Court’s refusal to take the case and assume responsibility for straightening out the mess.
Maybe the Supreme Court did not want to take responsibility for an abomination created by the lower courts, and maybe they did not feel any obligation to do so. They have the option to choose what they do and do not do with the same whimsy as a medieval prince, and so they may have decided to allow the results of the created mess play out in the lower courts over the years ahead. If that was the thinking, it was a costly way to think. The result will be an increased burden on the courts as contamination damage suits are filed in a variety of places. That is likely to bring the matter back to the Supreme Court again with the requirement they need to resolve various divergent decisions from the lower courts into sensible, workable precedent.
The misguided, irresponsible, court-sponsored tutorial process is all part of the pro-biotech favoritism and bias now abusing farmers growing non-transgenic crops and everyone who eats them or wants to eat them, but it is abusing the farmers growing transgenic crops even worse in the long run. It is part of the imposed and politically-supported pressure designed to force farmers and everyone else to cave in to Monsanto’s technology as if it were known to be safe, healthful, nutritious, wise, and not overwhelming destructive of the environment and the health of all living creatures that come in contact with it. This is the picture the facts reveal, and we seek the right to appear in court, so the evidence can be presented for public assessment.
This is not a minor matter because transgenic crops mostly from Monsanto are now grown on 175 million hectares in 27 nations (8 industrialized nations and 18 developing nations). In 2013, the total number of hectares in developing nations exceeded the number in industrialized nations even though the leading nation cultivating transgenic crops is still the United States—with 70 million hectares.
The next largest users of transgenic seed are Brazil (40.3 million hectares), Argentina (24.4), India (11), and Canada (10.8). The total number of farmers using the seed world-wide reached 18 million in 2013 with most of them in China and India. In both nations, sales have been made to mostly small farmers, 7.5 million total in China and 7.3 million in India. These farmers grew Bt Cotton on 15 million hectares, but another large group in the Philippines, 400,000 total, grew transgenic maize. This is a larger number than the 250,000 customers Monsanto has claimed in the United States.
Against this backdrop, any and all of Monsanto’s chemical and transgenic contamination of the soil and the biosphere can be viewed as an enormous and flagrant act of transgenic trespass that should be terminated before it becomes more destructive than it already has been. Up against their governmentally facilitated market power, we have been denied equal protection by two courts in collaboration with the hand-and-glove Monsanto-U.S. government relationship. Together, they have been collaboratively destructive of healthful, safe, nutritious crops and food, costing money for soil remediation while undermining conscientious, sustainable, trustworthy certification of the non-transgenic, organic, and biodynamic food supply.
All this destruction has resulted in only a myopic, short-term benefit for farmers, and it will lead ultimately to greater chemical dependency and ultimately farmer demise. In the face of this contention which we have been blocked from presenting in court, the people of the United States and its officials need to decide what they want to do, because the longer it takes to decide about it, the more it will cost in remediation.
Either people want to pursue Monsanto’s biotechnology chimera, or they want to protect the wisdom of the ages. If they think they can do both, they need to figure out what it would take to try to do that prudently. Above all, they need to establish a way to know where the truth about both methods lies. As long as an understanding of the truth is neglected, hidden, and ignored, the nation is discredited by its abject failure of admirable integrity. That is inescapable, and Monsanto’s claim that all foods contain toxins cannot solve it. All foods do contain components that can be toxic to some people more than to others, but that should not allow Monsanto to do as it has.
The man-made toxic properties of transgenic crops are of a different order from even the toxic and unhealthful properties resulting from hybridization and other plant breeding over the whole history of agriculture. Needed now is better knowledge to be able to distinguish the good from the bad, but that knowledge has not emerged quickly. Neither has understanding of what goes on in the soil. Soil scientists say they have not yet learned one percent of how soil works as part of an integral agricultural system, so scientists are likely to be just as deep in the dark on other biological processes. That ought to inspire humility, but that has not been seen at Monsanto. Instead, only arrogance about the ability of men to improve on nature is much visible.
The more rigorous biodynamic standard is threatened by Monsanto’s transgenic technology as much as the more lax self-impaired organic standard, but both are more respectful about the value of healthy soil than Monsanto’s transgenic technology is. They treat soil as a dead medium to use any way they want as if it did not matter, and their collaborators in the government are no better. Because they show no respect for the miracle of the soil, they also show no respect for other aspects of biology that are basic to the preservation of life. They have not shown concern about contamination, because they do not know any better. The level of myopic imprudence—and impudence—about the complexities of nature and the damage they can do has been shocking. They behave as if all risks should be dismissively ignored.
When problems have arisen with transgenic technology, the Monsanto response is to deny their existence and charge ahead like a bull in the china shop. It is so shameful it is no wonder the people of other nations with a greater sense of connection with natural biology and a greater interest in maintaining long-term sustainability have lost respect for the dominant attitudes observed in the United States, especially in the biotech corporations using Monsanto’s technology and among the oblivious facilitating government officials lacking the responsible public commitment needed to discover, protect, and sustain wisdom, truth, and justice in the public interest.
Of course, it does not help to have these same people condescend toward the concerned people of other nations and blow them off as Luddites. Part of the trouble is that many in the U.S. want to jam nature into a mechanistic conception following the prejudice designed to inform them about the way things should be forced to work.
For example, transgenic contamination can travel in many ways well beyond wind-driven pollen travel. It can rise on a convection and come down with the rain, it can get into the water and be spread to crops via irrigation. Many pollinators do the work; bees are valuable but so are others. Yet, instead of celebrating the magnificent complexities and intricacies of nature, they are forced into a simplistic preconception that has been out of date and superseded for decades. Monsanto with the help of the U.S. government has assumed the right to contaminate everything the same as if they were allowed to drive down the street spraying their toxins on all the people at will.
Worse than that, the transgenic crops use an antibiotic-resistant marker gene, and this can widely spread the antibiotic resistant trait, further serving to weaken the ability of antibiotics to cure infections. Thus, the problems lie in more than the chemical and biotech toxins and the transgenes. Beyond that, it lies in the design of the transgenic biotech process. Insects, birds, and animals can spread the risk, and if a field is fertilized by manure from animals fed on transgenic crops, that can spread the contamination, but none of this compares to the risks and destruction spread by Monsanto, their allies, and their customers. They have been agents of the spread in water and air; not enough attention has been paid to these complexities; in fact, they have been flagrantly ignored, and that is what our lawsuit was designed to confront.
As long as the gut bacteria of animals and birds can be corrupted, their feces may continue the contamination even if they have not eaten anything transgenic recently. No studies have been made about the time it takes to work the transgenes out of the system just as no studies have been made to help people know how to eliminate Monsanto’s chemical toxins from their bodies after they have ingested it. The only way to fix it in manure is through intensive composting hot enough to properly, fully, and reliably denature the transgenes. Significant care and knowledge is required.
The integrity of the gut bacteria of animals and people is essential to immune system health, but it is worse when the Bt transgenes cause leaky gut and enable the Bt toxin to have other destructive impacts as it is transported by the blood. These impacts can include everything from Arthritis and allergies to chronic fatigue, diabetes, endocrine disruption, hormone imbalances, migraine headaches, nutritional impairments, obesity, and much more. One short discussion of the issues is in a video conversation between author and film director Jeffrey Smith and the nutritionist Tom Malterre.
The combined impacts of the transgenics and the herbicide in any transgenic crop are seriously endangering and more so than they would be separately. Suggested are reasons Monsanto’s transgenic project is destructive of public health and the health of all creatures. Inasmuch as one of the doctor-documented impacts is “brain fog” in people, maybe that has afflicted even courts and court decisions—and maybe many government officials who are not careful about the quality of the food they ingest.
Two very brief but valuable discussions of the health and hormonal issues with Monsanto’s agricultural system are on the site of an MIT and Harvard-trained gynecologist, Dr. Sara Gottfried. She focuses on the hormonal impairments, but none of this is new knowledge. Arpad Pusztai explained the troubles almost two decades ago to those wanting to learn from the research produced by his team, but he was hubristicly ignored in the United States. Only in Europe were the findings tracked.
Gottfried’s work focuses on maintaining an undisrupted balancing of the regulating hormones in the body, and she notes the extensive thyroid health issues among her patients. This could be related to the herbicide. It acts as a hormone replacer, and of the adjuvants used with it allow the chemical to penetrate into the crop so it cannot be removed by washing the food before consuming it. The Glyphosate herbicide cannot be washed away. People are forced to consume it when they eat the crops, and they ingest it from processed oils like the soy, canola, and cottonseed oil used in many prepared or processed foods, including commonly also much typical restaurant food.
Inattention to high quality, safe, fully healthful, and nutritious food is virtually taken for granted as part of the standard and customary U.S. food expediency. This exploitive attitude goes with a money-driven, profit-pursuing culture where cost cutting is the most important of all values. As a result of food libel and ay-gag laws, public discussion of these issues is commonly evaded because people are afraid they could be sued if they bring up anything controversial or negative. Government nutritional guidelines are also impacted by the political power of companies who can prevent recommendations adverse to their political interests from being published. All this results from the political power of corporate money in the U.S. political system, and the people pay the price of this abuse their increased levels of illness.
A lecture by Dr. Michael Antoniou at an October 2013 conference in Iceland investigates the sustainability of transgenic agriculture examining the issues in greater detail. The lecture addresses the healthful safety of transgenic food answering a more pointed question than whether Monsanto’s system of agriculture is sustainable. If the attempt is made to sustain it as the oblivious U.S. Judiciary now has promoted, enabled, and facilitated, the question is: at what cost and to whom?
Dr. Antoniou broadened the question raised by the stated purpose of the conference. He suggested sustainability should not be considered apart from the healthful safety of the food and animal feed the Monsanto system of transgenic agriculture creates. The goal needs to be: healthful and safe sustainability with regulatory protocols in place to assure it, but in the United States deregulatory ideology trumps prudence.
Dr. Antoniou is a molecular geneticist in the Gene Expression and Therapy Group at King’s College London School of Medicine in the United Kingdom. He has 28 years of experience investigating the use and control of genetic engineering technology. More can be found at: Earth Open Source where the focus is on truly sustainable, high quality, healthful, and optimally nutritious food, not whatever can be produced for the cheapest cost, processed, packaged, marketed, merchandized, and sold for the lowest cost with the cheapest ingredients and often also in containers that impart dangerous toxins of their own as if that should not matter and no one should be accountable for doing whatever an habitually negligent commercial culture allows.
The hard-won wisdom of many serious people in other nations should not be dismissed, but it is in the United States. That has been done repeatedly by Monsanto, especially when they contend that there is a scientific consensus supporting the safety of transgenic food. The only visible pro-Monsanto consensus is among those who are obsequious in their dependency on agribusiness funding to support their rigged research activities. After the Monsanto contention had been heard finally once too often among many, especially in Europe, the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility issued a statement on the point. As of December 10, 2013, 297 scientists from many nations had signed it. They all affirm that no such scientific consensus about the safety of transgenic crops and food exists.
Continued U.S. Government Failure for Two Decades Starting with
the Original Shameful Deregulatory Bush-Quayle Negligence in 1992 and the Disgraceful Denial of Informed Consent
Chapter 22
With continuing U.S. government support, Monsanto has abused the U.S. people and the people of the world, not just the 27 nations where transgenic crops are grown but also the many more nations where Monsanto’s toxin and herbicide-laden transgenic food is consumed. The FDA, the USDA, and the EPA could have controlled Monsanto’s flagrant destruction in the United States, and that would have affected the impact in other places. Instead, they have all aided and abetted it for no other reason beyond the power of agribusiness money in the political system and in the political parties.
In 2013 at the request of Monsanto, the EPA subserviently increased the amount of Glyphosate (Roundup) herbicide allowable in food by 3000%, but even tiny amounts of it can be harmful. The scientific literature has made that clear, but studies have been ignored. The EPA claimed it was safe because their studies showed the chemicals in Roundup were not carcinogenic. No other issues were of any concern.
As has been the standard government practice, the studies have come from industry sources, and the government gives them a routine rubber-stamp blandly suggesting they have been done reliably, objectively, and independently. Like the USDA and the FDA, the EPA has not seemed interested to investigate beyond that, and if they had been, they would have sought the authority needed to do that work. They make it seem as if the health and environmental consequences resulting from the use of Roundup are of no concern. Maybe they are desired because of the economic stimulus they provide for the healthcare industry. That is another politically powerful engine of political facilitation, and they are all in bed with each other to generate both profits and the resulting flow of campaign funding. That is more important than integrity.
The EPA also does not seem to care if the U.S. standards on Glyphosate are massively out of step with more prudent policies in other nations, including particularly E.U. nations and Canada. While the United States has opened the flood gates on Glyphosate herbicide, some have suggested that European nations could start banning entirely. When available studies are reviewed, there can be little doubt that it is at least as dangerous or if not more dangerous than D.D.T. That has been banned in the United States for four decades, even while it has been exported for sale elsewhere.
Studies into the impacts of Glyphosate have shown infinitesimal levels cause sea urchin eggs not to hatch. Multiple studies on this subject are listed by Google. The fertility of frogs and birds is similarly impacted with birth defects and embryo corruption common. Dr. Andres Carrasco in Argentina has shown the affects on human fertility and the birth defects resulting from spray drift. A report about this by several authors including Carrasco is here. The chemical has also been used in Colombia as part of the war on drugs, and the chemical used there includes additional chemicals to make the effect more powerful than the chemical employed in the United States for agricultural and other domestic purposes. The health impacts are accepted as if they were no more than collateral damage wars commonly tolerate.
Because the chemical can move in fog and clouds coming down in the rain, it can be spread widely beyond the areas where it is applied. As a partial result of that form of distribution and also because the distribution through food, including the meat from animals fed on transgenic, chemical-laden feed, people in Germany have been found to have Glyphosate in their urine at 5-20 times the amount allowed in drinking water. One of many reports about the German study is here along with links to others.
Despite this, Monsanto is promoting widely expanded use of Roundup to speed ripening, reduce handling costs, and extend shelf-life, and that is the reason they sought and were granted the increase in the allowed U.S. human tolerance level. A summary report relying on coverage by RT is here. The United States is so morally decrepit and corporately subservient, that it needs Russia Today (RT) to provide better coverage on dysfunction at the EPA than is provided by U.S. corporate media. Readers can make their own independent assessment about the truth of the matter.
All the many other health issues related to the use of Glyphosate were ignored, even though they are substantial and a study about them was released by MIT in 2013. The EPA does not seem likely to have investigated studies like this, and if they did not, their approval of the Monsanto request for a relaxed standard was objectively negligent regardless of the accepted protocol. The point is not the governing rules but they reason they are allowed to exist when they only facilitate the corporate agenda. At the same time, effort has been made to discredit the MIT researchers because they have approached their in none traditional ways and their findings have not been backed up by confirming biological and agricultural studies of traditional design.
MIT is one of the few places where money and contractual control from Monsanto and other agribusiness companies have not reached. They are not an institution where food and agricultural research has traditionally been done, so they have fallen outside the web of their control. Their techniques are based on drawing connections through the use of computerized literature search, and this is why they are criticized. They are not conducted by people with the traditionally-accepted academic credentials. They are computer scientists applying their skills to investigate health issues. An article discussing their methodological approach was published by Alternet on February 27, 2014. It spells out the source of the scientific controversy, but it focuses on the health impacts of Glyphosate and Roundup, not on transgenics.
FDA scientists, from the beginning, were concerned about allergies, toxicities, new diseases, and impaired nutrition resulting from Monsanto’s transgenic crops, but they did not so much examine the combined impacts and the synergies between the transgenic crops and the chemical cocktail they have been designed to tolerate. Perhaps that was because the contention claiming Glyphosate and Roundup were harmless was still widely accepted without independent investigation of the issues.
When the need for independent studies about transgenic technology was ignored by the political decision makers, the need for the related independent studies about the impacts of the chemicals and the pesticidal toxin was also ignored. All of the concerns of the FDA scientists have proved true, and more than that also appears to be true, but their warnings are still ignored two decades later as if they had not been exposed in all necessary, stunning, and compelling detail via discovery in a prior lawsuit and sustained by studies mostly in other nations. The chain of causation has not been cited even though it can be fully understood if the people in responsible government agencies did not want to avert their eyes as if that is what they were paid to do. The issues have been negligently ignored and even suppressed as politically inconvenient.
If Monsanto has no way to control their technology and to prevent it from destructively and unhealthfully contaminating non-transgenic food and the environment, they should not have ever been allowed to sell it. No one should have been allowed to grow it as long as the health and environmental threats persist, and if justice prevailed, their assets would be seized to pay the cost of repairing all already existing damage, but that is not likely to occur as long as corporate political influence is arrayed as it is in the United States. Most recently, more power has been accorded to companies like Monsanto and others, and little suggests that might be changing.
If justice were to prevail in addressing the damage Monsanto’s transgenic technology and its related chemicals have done, they do not have enough money to do all the needed work. The damage could not be fixed with all the revenues Monsanto has ever received for the sale of their products, and that is why the problem is far worst than the BP-Halliburton Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. Even if the reparation was to begin immediately, years would be required to accomplish all the work. Much more than a Superfund is required to meet the need, and yet as long as Monsanto’s revenues and the revenues of allied companies enable political campaign funding, the U.S. political establishment from the White House to the Congress and the courts will be blind to it.
Getting the Glyphosate out of the soil and broken down can take as long as 25 years without remedial efforts to shorten the amount of time required. Instead of becoming a responsible citizen addressing the impacts of their technology, Monsanto has proclaimed and pursued their ambition to control the seed market under patents and associated contracts. They want to make all seeds transgenic without any proof their technology has anything to offer to anyone beyond a short-term, exploitive, and short-sighted benefit for their customer farmers. They have not been obligated to prove the value of their technology over the longer term, and that is what our lawsuit would have demanded—if it had not been reprehensibly stonewalled by corporately obsequious judges. Maybe a new lawsuit can do better, but that is not guaranteed.
Unfortunately, the campaign contributions of Monsanto and others have spoken and continue to speak louder than truth with the political decision makers, and that is the reason the destruction was able to get started in the first place. It is also the reason it is still being made worse. The only other benefits, apart from the short-term benefit to farmers and campaign funds, go to Monsanto’s shareholders, employees, lobbyists, contractors, and the allied politicians some of whom are given board seats or other jobs after they have retired from their political career. The tragedy needs to end, but the people will need to force the change to happen because unbridled corporate deregulation is visibly more important than the public welfare to both political parties. People should be going to jail for their negligence, but that is not likely either.
To advance their program, Monsanto has promoted and paraded their negligently erroneous, science-ignoring “Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence” the same as if it was the Emperor’s New Clothes. Stretching this doctrine in 1992 on behalf of the George H.W. Bush administration, Vice President Dan Quayle declared transgenic food “generally recognized as safe,” even though file cabinets at the FDA were filled with documents showing the FDA scientists did not agree and had recommended prudent studies before any release of the crops was made. The flatly fraudulent statement by Vice President Quayle became U.S. policy despite the absence of any independent, objective studies proving the statement true and the despite thousands of documents from the FDA’s own scientists stating multiple ignored concerns.
Dishonorably and negligently, this body of scientific dissent was not revealed at the time, but the documents have since become known as the result of the discovery in an earlier lawsuit. A whistle should have been blown on this failure, but it has not been. Even multiple lawsuits have not been enough to enable that to happen. As long as the courts are in the tank with the politicians, it will not happen unless the people make it happen. That means judicial independence on the money-driven issues involving companies like Monsanto is dead in the United States until the people decide to resuscitate it if they still can. Two decades later the whistle still waits to be blown.
Over the years since the FDA document discovery, the Bush-Quayle administration’s deregulatory failure of prudent judgment and other political negligence by both Republicans and Democrats has continued under the three subsequent Presidential administrations, and for the same reasons: because Monsanto and the biotech industry is a powerful political cash cow. Both political parties want to milk it, and now one seems to care about the health impacts resulting from the Monsanto project.
Previously, because of the way the facts have been hidden, denied, and ignored, few have possessed the needed evidence and scientific knowledge to publicly oppose Monsanto’s transgenic project, but now more is known if government officials wanted to be looking at it. If they cannot find the documents in the files, the Center for Food Safety has copies of them from prior court-authorized discovery process.
Many researchers who could have stood up to illuminate the issues being ignored have been controlled, basically gagged, under research contracts and under their own need for employment. They know their careers would be over if they were to do as Edward Snowden decided to do on the NSA surveillance issues. In the end, those issues could prove to be less serious and threatening to the national security and the public welfare than the negligence at the FDA, the EPA, and the USDA. The only hope for more revelations will come as people start to retire and tell the story they felt they could not tell earlier if they did not want to lose their jobs and be put out in the cold without any career prospect in their chosen field—or ability to support their families.
In modern U.S. political culture, whistle blowers are not celebrated—and especially not when they blow the whistle on a President’s ideological preference for corporate deregulation without looking at or worrying about the astronomical future public costs. Given the projected campaign contributions resulting from the deregulatory agenda, blowing the whistle on a President’s pet project would not be welcome.
Thus, hope has rested with those willing to speak after retirement. That has begun to happen in both the United States and Canada. One of the first was Dr. Don Huber, now an emeritus plant pathologist from Purdue University. Another is Dr. Thierry Vrain, formerly a department head with Agriculture Canada. More reports from Dr. Vrain are here (shorter) and here (longer). Yet another is Dr. Elaine Ingham, formerly at Oregon State University and now the chief scientist at the Rodale Institute. A longer interview with Dr. Ingham conducted by Dr. Joseph Mercola is here. Other retiring pursuers of truth are expected to be emerging, but none can arrive too soon in relation to the public need. Their testimony is important to hear, but nothing can take the place of multiple independent, objective studies still AWOL.
In January 2011, before Monsanto’s transgenic alfalfa was released onto the market by the USDA, Dr. Don Huber sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack alerting him to a discovered disease agent needing more research than it had been able to receive. He asked for time to do the research before releasing transgenic alfalfa onto the market, but that request was denied. The results of the research are still awaited three years later, but this is an example of the kind of trouble the FDA scientists had feared back in 1992 when the issues they raised were left as roadkill.
Worse than all the political facilitation of abusive business opportunism has been the abusive attitude toward science and scientists. Honest science has been marginalized and discredited while inadequate, dishonest, poor quality science has been favored. For example, Monsanto’s internal studies and sponsored studies have been limited to 90 days or less, but that is not enough time for the dangerous genetic issues to start to appear. Even worse, they have discarded findings and ended studies when the results have not served their profit-pursuing objectives. From all evidence so far available, no one should think Monsanto’s objective is the performance of a valid pubic service.
From the way Monsanto has conducted research and directed its sponsored research under contract, they have shown they do not want to learn the truth, and if they do happen to learn it, they have shown they do not want to share it with anyone; they want to hide it, and the government has helped them with that by passing no awkward laws to derail their deregulating agenda. Treat this as a hypothesis to verify with information from this site and elsewhere. A Google search on “Faulty and Monsanto and Research” finds 10,800,000 items to investigate. Information is available; the missing part is the public will and the political will to do the work needing to be done.
As a result of decades of abusive U.S. government negligence, the U.S. people and the people of the world have been co-opted into a massive biology experiment without their informed consent. Enough time has passed for the results of this experiment to be assessed, but the political will to perform the assessment is AWOL and MIA, or if anyone has collected information they are not reporting it to the people to help them know everything they need to know to protect the public and environmental health.
Against this reality, officials in both major parties treat Monsanto as if it were the King, allowing them to get away with their abuses and failing to connect the dots on the damage they have caused. Now that the endangering reality can finally be publicly understood and addressed because enough independent research has been gathered to allow that, the best place possibly available to do it would be a courtroom, except that the courts have shown they want to march in servile pro-Monsanto lockstep with the Congress and the White House. No priority has ever been be more important to examine, understand, and repair, but it has been neglected and ignored for decades.
If hot wars were underway to protect U.S. interests in other nations, they should be abandoned so the resources could be redirected toward examining the imperiling biological threat posed by Monsanto’s transgenic biotech profligacy. No war the U.S. has ever fought has involved issues that were any more important to quickly address. If a Manhattan Project was needed to do the needed work, it would not be too much or too soon. It should have been important before transgenic food was ever eaten.
So far, Monsanto and their allies have only been successfully opposed when the people have risen up in large numbers as they did when the so-called Monsanto Protection Act was surreptitiously and anti-democratically slipped into the Continuing Budget Resolution in March 2013 by Missouri Senator Roy Blunt working in collaboration with Monsanto’s lobbyists. Because of his loyal and supportive service to Monsanto, Blunt is sometimes referred to and thought of as the Senator from Monsanto, and under the provisions of his budget rider the Secretary of Agriculture was required to release transgenic crops onto the market at the request of farmers even when a court had imposed an injunction against their public release.
This was one instance when the obsequious subservience to Monsanto’s interests was successfully stopped but not until it came up for renewal, and the end of it may have been possible only because the provisions were so blatantly and aggressively offensive in their attitude toward the legitimate, historic role of the courts. As if it did not matter, it effectively overturned the principle of judicial review accepted as a matter of settled law since Marbury v. Madison during the early years of the Jefferson administration. The Congress backed down after Senator Mikulski, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee apologized publicly for the incident, but that has not stopped Monsanto and their allies in the Grocery Manufacturers Association from working behind the scenes to get other policy ideas of theirs written into law.
An effort in early 2014 has been aimed to circumvent the emergence of state laws on transgenic food labeling passed because of the failure of the federal government to do anything on the issue despite a 2007 promise by Senator Obama when he was campaigning in Iowa. They are promoting a federal policy allowing voluntary labeling that would also contain a provision preempting state action. Meanwhile, the Congress has continued to stonewall food labeling bills that are opposed by the biotech agribusiness and the food industry lobbyists. The people have been kept continuously in ignorance on the transgenic content of their food as if the U.S. was a fascist nation run by an abusive collaboration between corporations and politicians the same as the one seen in Nazi Germany under its combined military-industrial empowerment.
If Monsanto’s transgenic agriculture is allowed to continue, they could persist in their ambition to patent all food, and as Henry Kissinger once said: If you control the food, you can control the people. This objective was designed into the Monsanto business model since they first started developing their destructive pro-chemical technology.
The Monsanto project is a totalitarian agenda perpetrated within a nominal democracy, and Monsanto has shown Joseph Goebbels was right: if you have the money and power to pound a fiction hard enough, people will accept it as the truth and fail to do their own research to find out if it is accurate, beneficial, or honest.
The investigation of Monsanto’s project is long overdue by citizens and by the government. The agonizingly slow state campaigning to promote transgenic food labeling is not nearly enough to fix the problem though it can help marginally to help citizens become better informed. The U.S. government did not initially do the pounding of the fiction, but they allowed it to be done—and so they have been an accessory. Government officials have not done anything to correct it, question it, or examine it. For wishful, delusional, biased, lazy, financially-dependent, and morally corrupt reasons, they wanted to allow Monsanto’s transgenic technology a free hand.
Objective, independent evidence was needed to show the project was no more than a highly profitable scam made possible by the way U.S. politicians routinely marginalize, exploit, and disrespect scientists to do what they want for political reasons. This is how the “Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence” was created, and it is also the way it has been abused and exploited. It has long been only a dishonorable political fabrication of convenience, never a respectable, admirable scientific finding.
The Pressing Need to Examine the Evidence from Both Sides in an Independent, Objective Forum and the Essential, Necessary, Inescapable Role of the People in a Democratic Nation
Chapter 23
Because diligent investigation and thoughtful analysis is essential to a wise, functional democracy—not that the U.S. system of government can be called functional at present, we would not ask anyone to believe our word about any of our contentions about the dysfunctionality of Monsanto’s transgenic technology without doing their own personal work to investigate and verify the arguments. Everyone needs to seek and affirm the truth for themselves; there can be no substitute for that.
This requirement is especially true in a nation where the political class serves its own reelection interests ahead of the public interest, but it is required in any nation that would want to be a democratic in its governance. That requirement is essential because no substitute exists for informed citizens. Ignorance and democracy are mutually incompatible, and if the citizens in a nominally democratic culture are ignorant about the major issues affecting their lives and the functionality of their nation, their system and processes of government will be no less ignorant. Our statements should be taken as a suggestion designed to encourage people to start their own examination and maybe or hopefully to help overcome the inertia of habitual collective negligence on the issue being raised here and also many others.
We seek the opportunity to present our evidence in court before a judge, so more detailed information can be publicly revealed in a place where a culturally responsible judgment can be made in the public interest. The trouble is: we have not seen any culturally or socially responsible judgments yet on the issues we have tried to raise; we have only seen pro-technology, pro-biotech, pro-corporate prejudice and an unforgiving effort to sweep the real destructive issues under the rug. No doubt, that is to be expected when many people will look like fools, idiots, and amoral criminals when the truth is exposed. Disservice to the public interest and destruction of the Commons, like corruption, never voluntarily exposes itself or admits anything.
As long as judges and courts are dedicated to protecting and sustaining the same fiction as the rest of the government without being willing even consider an alternative view, the United States is on the way to its demise as a world power and as a respected nation. It cannot survive and neither can the democratic ideal in the United States. This is inescapable, unequivocal reality, because the government has dedicated itself to protecting its established prejudice for financial reasons without permitting any other idea to be investigated, asserted, or considered. This is subterfuge; it cannot persist because it is dedicated to the preservation of falsehood.
If the process seen so far in the courts on our lawsuit is emblematic of the best thought process the courts are capable of exhibiting, a Constitutional Convention or some similar process is needed if only to improve the way the court system works. Certainly, the Congress would not be capable of doing the needed work because its members are not capable of agreeing on most significant common objectives beyond motherhood and apple pie. Further, it would take decades before they are finished milking the problem politically as they now must do for as long as possible before they finally try to fix anything. Even worse, dysfunctional polarization is a governing intention of the system as it has been made to work. Without it, issues could not be milked as they have been, and corporations could not be milked for political funding.
The political process is no more dedicated to finding the truth than Monsanto and their agribusiness allies have been; that can be seen as a collective but personal failures of ethics, morality, and community-building. All of these attributes are necessary to create workable and admirable democracy, and when the corporate values destructive of these are favored over them, democracy cannot survive. Maybe the hollow image of it can limp along for a while as it has been doing in the United States, but the torch of future democratic promise will have been passed to other nations where people still want to try to make the democratic governing ideal work.
Under the values exemplified in the United States, the protection of the public interest is sacrificed at very high public cost as has happened in favor of Monsanto’s corporate interest and financial interests of elected representatives needing to be reelected. Now that the Supreme Court has shown its dedication to maintaining the existing abuse and democratic destruction, everyone everywhere around the world can know the entire U.S. government is in bed with Monsanto and its allies because of the monetary benefits to be delivered for the benefit of the corporate elite and the political elites. This is a system admirable only by people aspiring to join the elite and not by people who want to serve the great majority of the people while making the community work better for all and protecting the Commons in the collective interest.
The majority of the nation’s citizens know they have no power to win against the power of organized corporate money given the way the system is rigged against them, so many of them do not want to try. Because of the extent of their alienation, they may not even be interested in voting. They will likely see no point in trying to participate in the political community, because they feel they will only be abused as the result of it.
The consequence of that decision made independently by many millions of people is the further disempowerment of the people relative to the corporations and the allied elites, and this has been the intention. Negative campaigning is one of the strategies designed to achieve it. In this climate and given the power of the money-driven political system they have enabled and promoted, the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court probably would not have wanted to support an idea favoring democratic equality and participation for the greater good of the nation. Probably, it would have been the greater surprise if the justices would have wanted to look at our lawsuit and stand up for justice and truth. If they are only interested in protecting the elite corporate and pro-biotech interests, they would have done as they chose to do.
Doing differently would have given voice to a group of people, companies, and organizations primed to give the political philosophy of the Supreme Court majority a black eye, and because of that, it might not be possible to get a fair hearing before the Supreme Court until the composition of the court is changed. That might not happen until the nation changes. The likelihood that President Obama would get to fill a seat on the Supreme Court currently filled by the pro-corporate, pro-business majority is not great. Even if a member of the group would die, they might want to prop him up in his seat with enough embalming fluid to keep him upright and odor-free until January 2017 when they would hope to have a Republican President to replace him.
Beyond this reality, the nation’s attitude toward food and agriculture might need to change before the court attitude can change. That means the results of the current destruction would need to be understood by many more people than has been possible so far. How long the change might take is anyone’s guess, but thirty years ago, it would not have been possible to project the changes that have occurred over the past thirty years. Some of the changes have been valuable, and some of them have been destructive, but the extent of neither could have been projected. We can only know that agriculture is the heart of all culture and all civilization, so no one can for long afford to make a destructive mistake in the way they sustain their food supply.
As a result of what is known and not known, people determine whether they will create health or destroy it, and the United States is inexorably destroying it despite many positive and beneficial changes. The nation is also in denial about damage that has been caused. When ignorance is mixed with denial, positive benefit cannot have a long reach. It will only reach those informed enough to take advantage of the benefit.
This is said to advance the cultural process of providing information that has long been unavailable and suppressed for the benefit of the empowered elites. Much detail must be provided to fill the gap between what is known and what needs to be known, but in the courtroom, if we can get there, Monsanto will be able to present their countering evidence, so a judgment can be made based on the best information available from both sides of the argument. That is the way it should be, and the debate has been stonewalled and suppressed for too long—and at blindly extravagant cost.
From the presentation of the evidence, if the proceedings are covered by the press and the media, as they mostly have not been so far, everyone will be able decide whose science is trustworthy, prudent, healthful, safe, and wise. Over the past four years, the press and the media have blocked the arguments and the required discussion of the issues the same as if they were as partisan as Monsanto, its political allies, their co-opted science, obsequious politicians, and the collaborating judges.
If the mainstream, corporate media would cover the lawsuit, as they could have done if they had the wisdom and the vision to understand the importance of the issues, the public would be better informed as a result of it, but they showed a preference for helping the government and the allied corporations keep the public uninformed and misinformed. Deeper citizen examination of the issues will prove this statement, and the evidentiary revelations in court will show how poorly the public has been served by its governing and information-disseminating institutions, including many schools.
Schools, including law schools, have been influenced by Monsanto’s funding, and that makes known the moral state of the culture as much as any other detail. If the schools have been influenced the same as politicians and the appointed government officials, then the students are also impacted to their detriment. The most affected schools are land-grant agricultural schools, but research money can have impact in many places.
Even the public broadcasting stations have been negligent on the issues we are raising, and some of their programs may have been influenced by Monsanto’s public relations consultants as well as by their funding. For example, the “Marketplace” program has been funded by Monsanto, and coverage favorable to the company’s interests has been broadcast more than once. A cause and effect is suspected. People can listen to the reports and make their own judgment about the objectivity of the reports and coverage priorities. One difficulty is the challenge faced by the broadcast media in covering biotech agriculture in enough depth to do more than summarize.
To enable reporters, editors, and many citizens to do what they have not yet done even in their own personal interest, much material is provided on this Web site. Most of it is from secondary sources to make the investigation easier for those with little time, but the secondary sources point to the underlying primary sources, so people can dig as deep as they want and have time for. Even though the information provided is extensive, it is not close to being exhaustive, so people are also encouraged to reach beyond it through their own independent searching. The Internet can aid with that.
This additional work is recommended, but it is nonetheless a substantial work even if the ease of the investigation is improved like never before. This is still not a five minute quick study; all the related issues are complex, but if people and institutions are not prepared to handle the complexity, they are not yet ready to manage a free democratic government in their own collective interest. If the work is not possible, cultural survival against the imposed threats will be impossible. That is the challenge.
Becoming informed on the issues important to the preservation of life on the planet and the protection of civilization should be the foremost responsibility of every citizen above all others. Indeed, that is a root definition of what it needs to mean to be a citizen in a democratic nation. If people allow others, including their own elected government representatives, to feed them misinformation they should have been responsible enough to investigate, verify, and confirm on their own or with the collaborative support of those they can fully trust, they have become the agents of their own subversive self-destruction, the destruction of their nation and also the welfare of many other nations. This is the problem, and limited time exists to fix it.
When as many as 90% of the people have allowed themselves to be kept ignorant of the details about what Monsanto does and how they have done it, they are no better off than 18th-century slaves. The result has not been exemplary democratic behavior, so the people have been culpable along with the government and Monsanto. The buck stops at the people because they are ultimately responsible for the integrity of the government including the courts. If they cannot work together and prefer to be polarized against each other, then the government they create can only reflect that.
Finally, our attorneys at the Public Patent Foundation, Daniel Ravicher and Sabrina Hassan, have not been involved with this public outreach work; they focus on the legal work related to the court process, but all the legal documents in the lawsuit are provided under “The Case Against Monsanto” pull-down menu just as a summary of the issues is also available under that heading along with handout materials to help people share pertinent information with others who will hopefully be interested.
Everything said about the OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto lawsuit will apply to any future lawsuit. The contentions will be the same. The only difference will be in the plaintiff group. The plaintiff group will be changed to address the outrageously unacceptable and unreasonable requirements set by the courts so standing to file suit can be won. The set requirements are viewed as subservient to Monsanto and their allies, but they are the requirements that must be met even when it puts people in direct jeopardy.
The governing circumstance established by the courts in their negligence and blindness is like telling a soldier he will not be allowed on the battlefield until he takes off his helmet and his body armor and subjugates himself to the armored power of the forces he is opposing. Because of what the judges have decided, the courts now have proved themselves no better than they were when judges and justices ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sandford. The prejudices are basically the same.
Facts and precedents—plus common sense and basic humanity—support a fundamental human right allowing our arguments to be heard before a judge, but the courts have preferred abject, obsequious, myopic, pro-corporate, pro-Monsanto surrender and subservience over the pursuit of nutritional and healthful truth, real food integrity, justice against transgenic trespass for farmers and consumers, and respect for millions of years of evolved natural wisdomChapter 24
In all three court decisions, a strong pro-Monsanto bias was revealed. For patriotic, thoughtful, citizens, this should be embarrassing. Pride in our nation and our national integrity has been attacked from within its own formerly trusted institutions; this can only happen when judges are isolated from essential food and farm reality.
In a 2013 interview Justice Clarence Thomas stated that his only access to cultural news comes from AM radio and the Wall Street Journal. That is the size of the porthole he uses to understand the nation and the world.
In fast changing times, limited access to information is an affliction as much as transgenic agriculture is a politically-spread affliction and AIDS or Typhoid are socially-spread diseases. Politicians and government officials are the Typhoid Mary this biotech farming disease, and they are also pushers because the disease is an addiction Monsanto has sold to the addicted farmers as if it were Crystal Meth, Crack Cocaine, or Heroin.
Similarly, Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is an addictive agricultural drug pushed by Monsanto and its political allies. Monsanto’s former chief lobbyist, now the Obama “Food Safety Czar” is a virtual kingpin as is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and others promoting biotech and chemical farming addiction from government positions.
Maybe President Obama and others at the White House are only patsies, though President Obama has praised Secretary Vilsack for his service to the biotech industry and he would not have done that if he were not a part of the project as much as the others. The same as Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri has showed himself to be the senator from Monsanto through his promotion of the so-called Monsanto Protection Act, Secretary Vilsack has also showed himself to be a cabinet secretary dedicated to serving the biotech agribusiness industry against the health and environmental interests of the people.
First Lady Michelle Obama should not be left out because she talks about obesity without putting her finger on the leading cause of it in the nutritional compromises and mineral deprivations resulting devastatingly from Monsanto’s system of agriculture. She has been careful to avoid making any awkward political waves with corporate funders as the result of her obesity project. She is smart enough to know the truth if she wanted to and to speak it effectively if that was important to her.
With a network of kingpins and maybe some patsies at work in the government serving the objectives of corporate power, no one should be surprised to have judges lining up obsequiously to help them advance their agenda. That may be what they feel the need to do as a way of showing gratitude for their appointment, and maybe they must behave as they have if they hope for an appointment to a higher judgeship in the future. They show the political/judicial system is an old boys club even if it also now includes some subservient women.
If all the other justices and judges throughout the Judiciary are similarly subservient and deprived of contextual, cultural knowledge, the nation is in trouble, and a way needs to be found to fix the shortcoming. Perhaps, lifetime judicial tenure cannot work in fast-changing times. Possibly, judges need to be elected at regular intervals, so they have a frequent electoral need to get out among the people they need to serve. Maybe judges should also alternate between other forms of employment. Working a garbage truck a week each year might help them to improve their contact with reality.
Some way is needed to help judges maintain a connection with lives and realities of the people they should serve. When their perspective never changes because of the professional role they play and because of the deference extended to them, they cannot help but gain an inflated sense of their own self-isolating wisdom. They seem to have become the intellectual eunuchs of the modern U.S. governing system, and that is the tragedy.
If judges have come to identify with the political power structure the same as dogs identify with the people who feed them, they would see themselves as part of the power structure the same way loyal dogs are part of the household. They are likely to socialize with other members of it, including the corporate members, the same way dogs participate in all relationships in a household. From this vantage, perspective and humility could be lost— especially in this case when disconnection and alienation from food and farming is fully apparent. In this environment, arrogance could be inevitable.
The Tragic Error of Technologically Wishful Court Decisions and the Disconnection of the People
Chapter 25
Given the elementary weakness of the science supporting Monsanto’s transgenic seed project, all three court decisions are blindly and technologically wishful in their support of the Monsanto agenda. Because of the health and environmental destruction being caused, more wise, better informed judicial workmanship is demanded. Government officials, including federal judges, have been trusted to serve the public interest, but their failure has been clear. In all three courts, the failure is a part of a larger and more short-sighted governmental failure.
People want to hope their elected and appointed officials have done what they need to do to protect the public interest in safe, healthful, and nutritious food, but that hope has been as blind and insufficiently informed as the evident prejudices of the judges encountered so far during our legal travail. Part of the problem is that issues at stake are more complex now than in the past, and that means more is demanded of both citizens and judges to avoid being bamboozled and sold down the transgenicly corrupted river like chattel slaves. Against this reality, no one remains to protect the interests of the people.
An even bigger threat exists in the public expectation that valuable, healthful, wholesome food will be more or less automatically delivered without any vigilance or concern about wise food choices. Many want to eat whatever they choose in the full belief that medicine can fix whatever problems may be created, but if officials and judges place more trust in the value of drugs than they do in the importance of nutritious, healthful, and safe food, priorities have been skewed at public expense.
Doctors and others have encouraged this view, but Dr. Sara Gottfried, for one example, is concerned about the health impacts of food choice, especially oblivious food choices resulting in the consumption of the national annual per capita quota of 150-200 pounds of transgenic food. This diet is disrupting balanced hormone function while also causing many other issues. She says the biggest food issue she confronts in her practice as a gynecologist is the craving for sweets. This is a result of unhealthful junk food subversion of the public appetite .
Most sweets are now made sweet through the use of either transgenic corn syrup (high fructose corn sweetener that would be called “corn sugar” if an industry lobbying campaign had succeeded) or sugar from transgenic sugar beets. Sugar beets supply half of the total sucrose supply, and sugar cane supplies the rest. Work has been underway to make sugarcane transgenic the same as sugar beets are. All these transgenic crops are grown with Monsanto’s herbicide, and they are all anti-nutritional and unsafe to health.
In the United States, many people do not concern themselves with the source of their food and the composition of their diet. They seem to think they should not need to be concerned because they want to eat whatever they want to eat. This attitude has been widely accepted as normal in the United States even though it is not as much the norm in many other nations and it is now understood to be dangerous in the U.S.; this is the public attitude about food that both results from and leads to increased public ignorance about agriculture. This is the ignorance Monsanto has been able to exploit.
Attitudes are different in Europe and some other nations, and for that reason, Europeans and people in other nations have not been found to cave in as easily in ill-informed acceptance of transgenic technology. It only happens in the United States because most U.S. people are disconnected from their food sources and ignorant about them. They are also ill-informed about the kind of food they need to sustain optimal health. Because of ignorance, many people have been susceptible to deceptive marketing propaganda from food companies.
The Response to Monsanto’s Technology in Other Nations and the U.S. Marginalization of Morality
Chapter 26
In some other nations, where people live close to the sources of their food, transgenic exploitation has been more difficult to accomplish, and that has left some asking how farmers in Haiti and some places in Africa are smarter than farmers in the United States. Maybe U.S. farmers have fogged brains from eating transgenic food, but polling shows they do not eat it even if they are willing to silently and carelessly grow it for others to eat.
Maybe they have learned the hard way the results of eating it, but if so, should not patriotism require them to say something about that, so others can learn from them. Reportedly, brain fog goes away when the consumption of transgenic food is terminated, and if so the only idea left is: the United States has descended so far into “Each For Himself” anti-morality that little community concern remains in the nation. If so, that is also the way the U.S. democratic ideal has been subverted and undermined.
In India, many cotton farmers easily swallowed Monsanto’s Kool-Aid about improved yields even though nothing about Monsanto’s transgenic technology has anything to do with improving yield. The yield characteristics of the crop come from the characteristics of the hybrid used to create the transgenic crop. That is the reason Monsanto has wanted to control the competition for hybrids in whatever way they can.
Inasmuch as Monsanto controls the Indian cottonseed market through contracts with about 60 Indian seed companies, they have locked up the market and made alternative seeds unavailable. Monsanto’s Bollgard seeds are sold by all of the companies under their own label. In the United States, competing seed companies have been acquired, but in other places, contracts have been able to accomplish the goal with greater U.S.-style expediency.
Of course, Monsanto and other biotech advantage seekers also have political collaborators in the governments of other nations much the same as they do in the U.S. Some of those collaborators may be judges with the same wishful ideologies as the politicians.
If judges want to protect companies like Monsanto and their political allies, putting their agenda ahead of the needs of the people and the pursuit of truth, they can practice the devious arts of subterfuge and sophistry to do that. They have that prerogative in their toolbox. They can do it the same and as much as other elected and appointed officials. Both have control over the law, and both can work as hard as they want to ignore morality and the reality of the agricultural and health destruction.
Employing Divergent Court Tactics to Blow Plaintiffs Off and What Exhibited Attitudes Reveal
Chapter 27
Some may use one diversionary technique and others may use a different one to blow off plaintiffs whose truth they want suppressed, but the net results of divergent techniques can be similar. This was the case in the two lower court decisions we encountered. The exhibited goal was the same despite the differing judicial tactics. One was harshly critical of our arguments, and the other cleverly or perhaps deviously diversionary as if we could be easily tricked by the judges’ legal razzle-dazzle.
That might have worked if the main goal of our lawsuit was to find a way promote success with contamination damage suits. It could have worked especially if it would have been possible to suggest a case of contamination at any level meant the contamination between zero and one percent had existed at one time in the past and that reality could be used to justify any and all contamination damage suits no matter the current level of the observed and measured contamination. This argument needs to be tested in the courts. It should be logically defensible.
Whether or not the judges of the Appeals Court wanted to craft an idea that would be accepted as good enough to suffice for bringing damage suits, they were at least respectful of our effort to serve a public purpose despite ruling against us. In contrast, Federal District Court Judge Naomi R. Buchwald impugned us and said our contentions should not be tolerated. She seemed unable to perceive a public purpose or a public need for our lawsuit. In response, we believe her attitudes would be found intolerable and tragic if the important core issues in contention were correctly and fully grasped. Apparently, she did not want to take that much time.
Perhaps Judge Buchwald is like some others in history who have thought their food providers should be seen but not heard, the same as household servants, slaves in the past, and others who do menial work for a living. The revealed attitude of Judge Buchwald suggested farmers should take what they are given by the economically empowered and should not be allowed to think about the wisdom of what they are required to put up with. This is the attitude of too many in the managerial classes who want to do all the thinking while others obediently do as they are told to do. This becomes the thought habit of the elite in a culture where most of the institutions are run by an autocratic hierarchy with democracy disrespected.
With a more democratic and egalitarian attitude, Judge Buchwald might have treated us like good stewards who had come to deliver an important message everyone needs to hear, but instead she chose to shoot the messenger. She did not want to hear a message that did not fit her prejudice, and for fear of unruliness at oral arguments, she called for security guards to be present in the courtroom. That, by itself, showed an alienated attitude suggesting a belief that farmers would be a part of an unwashed rabble she needed to protect herself against. It was the presentation oral arguments on a dismissal motion, not the delivery of a verdict following a controversial trial, but still she wanted to be protected or maybe have protection for Monsanto’s attorneys.
The attitude was ludicrous because plaintiffs in a lawsuit like ours do not file a court case because they want to do violence against others. They file because they are seeking justice and trust the system enough to believe it will be possible to get it. Against this understanding, the revealed attitude suggested a belief that we needed to be treated like criminal defendants or people who had come to court with pitchforks on the opening day of trial. No doubt, she was thinking the same as the judges when they confronted the attitudes of Daniel Shays’s rebels.
We were a diverse group of 60 co-plaintiffs from all over the United States, but only the paranoid would likely have viewed us as a threat to their physical safety. If security in the courtroom had been the routine, no comment would be made about it, but the start of the proceedings was delayed while the arrival of security was awaited. Maybe this is just the nature of the time we live in now. Maybe everyone fears everyone else.
Maybe all judges no longer trust the people who appear in their courtrooms, and the people appearing there may not trust the judges either. If that is the case, it is a measure of the destruction of the U.S. democratic ideal. That destruction does not occur from the bottom up. It occurs first from the top down and only then stimulates a hostile and defensive reaction from the bottom up.
A Polarized Culture Increases the Power of Prejudice But Reprieve is Still Possible For Some
Chapter 28
Destruction of democracy may be what happens when the culture is polarized and alienated so many people are unwilling to even talk with those they see as part of the other. When people can no longer work together to solve problems anymore, democracy is dead. If this is where the nation has arrived, U.S. democracy is on the ropes at best, and it has little to recommend it as a model for the people of other nations to follow anymore. No respect or admiration will be possible on the basis of seen behavior.
Just as terrorism in one place has led to both terrorism and terror in other places, so has the same thing become true when the polarization and antagonism is only verbal. The result of both is dysfunction and the destruction of the relationships needed to work together to solve problems in the common interest. Fear and hostility replace them. In the United States now, hostility and alienation are both expected as the accepted norm.
The civil statement of differing viewpoints in the interest in finding unity and harmony has been lost. As a result, politics and even relationship are seen as a zero-sum game where one side can only pursue a goal if it is going to make the other side lose something in the exchange.
This outcome is the natural result of a majority-rule system that tends to make all debates ego-centrically or group-centrically partisan. Arguments become weapons of partisan destruction the same as guns in one place have led to guns in others until everyone needs to arm themselves as their basic means of self-protection.
Similarly, prejudice in one place leads to countering prejudice because the dueling prejudices are weapons of attitudinal self-defense. This leaves both sides talking past each other without anyone becoming constructively informed in the collective interest. That is what happened in our lawsuit. Judge Buchwald ruled against us on the basis of her prejudice, and she tutored us accordingly in the decision she wrote. She wrote much the way the Republicans in the Congress would tutor President Obama on the perceived ills of Obamacare.
Judge Buchwald never got to the point where the issues were sufficiently understood to enable or achieve a wise resolution in the collective interest of all, but that was seen as necessary because seeking the collective wisdom would have undermined the established financial interest of Monsanto. The standard prejudice forced money to be more important than either truth or wisdom, and that meant justice was sacrificed to protect monetary power. The result is further destruction of democracy in service to corporate power and interests.
The Appeals Court got a bit farther in understanding the issues but not far enough to want to risk the serious compromise of Monsanto’s corporate interests for the benefit of the public or even the potential public benefit. Most likely, the Supreme Court let the Appeals Courts decision stand for the same corporately-biased reason.
Perhaps none of the judges and justices will not like having their decisions criticized by a plaintiff, especially when they expect to be treated with deference, but they would be grateful if they were interested in a debate or discussion designed to protect and sustain the pursuit of truth, wisdom, and justice. Judge Buchwald might have been grateful in the hope she might have received a second chance to get the issues straight and overcome the ruling prejudice. That did not happen as a result of the way the Supreme Court decided, and all the involved decision makers will be remembered by history for what they did not do or allow to be done for everyone’s good.
To begin with, nothing about our case seemed to arouse curiosity or sense of injustice for Judge Buchwald. It seemed to stimulate only animosity and bitter grievance against us for having the impertinence and the audacity to bring our lawsuit to her courtroom. If that is a correct understanding of the revealed attitude based on what was written in the court decision, maybe nothing anyone could have said would have possibly made a difference.
If the judge was not interested in the perspective of plaintiffs and only wanted to tell all of them what they need to do in response to her own view, the process is rigged from the start. If our lawsuit was no more than another item on the docket needing to be dispatched with hostility against the bother it caused, that attitude would likely remain the same in the future. If so, the achievement of justice and wisdom was also impossible.
The only alternative left would be to march in the streets and rally at the Lincoln Memorial the same as people did on civil rights and against the Vietnam war, or maybe it would have been just as good an idea to take potluck with a change of venue to the federal court in St. Louis. The most prejudiced judge in Missouri would have been likely to be any worse than Judge Buchwald. Monsanto’s attorneys had announced their plans to make a motion to change the venue, if the lawsuit had been sent back to Judge Buchwald’s courtroom, but perhaps they would not have done that once they had seen how supportive of their own interests Judge Buchwald proved herself to be.
Some might have warned against criticism of a court’s decisions lest the judges and justices become more punitive in the future if our future lawsuit comes back to them, but the truth needs to be stated as it is seen whether or not deference appears to be compromised. In any case deference should be to the office and not to the person chosen to fill it. Respect for the person chosen to perform the duties of the office should never be automatic; it must be earned by behavior and fulfillment of the public trust. Without that, no respect is possible.
We live in a nation where people should have the right to state their views, and pursuit of the truth in this case is more important than the lawsuit. The lawsuit is only one possible way to promote agreement about the truth.
Our lawsuit was filed as a way to promote discovery of the truth in a place where both sides would have a chance to present their evidence for the benefit of everyone. When that effort was foreclosed by those who did not want to allow the truth to be discovered and did not want to find wisdom and justice for the benefit of everyone, the right to be heard in another forum was retain, and it should be. This is that forum until the right of access to a more significant forum is made available.
More important, Judge Buchwald and the other judges should be grateful to hear commentary on what they did. Their own best interests are served by that. At least, that would be the case if they would have the humility to consider the possibility they made a regrettable mistake.
If all the judges committed grievous error, they need to consider the place in history likely to result from it. Judge Buchwald, for example, could end up alongside Marie Antoinette, because her decision was much the same as the famous statement made by the last French queen. Actually eating cake would be benign compared to food products resulting from Monsanto’s technology. That needs to be considered when the history of Judge Buchwald and the other judges is ultimately written.
This reality needs to be made clear, and our lawsuit could be able to do that—if it is not stonewalled in the future the same as it has been in the past. If Judge Buchwald is wise and not arrogant in her own apparent self-certainty, she would be grateful for guidance on an issue she seemed to lack the background knowledge and scientific competence to correctly adjudicate or even understand. This is an affliction found in many courtrooms given the technical complexities of many modern lawsuits. Something must be done about that.
Especially in the case of patent law that is viewed as an arcane thicket by many judges, technical competence is particularly important. That may mean that a way is needed to turn cases over to judges who know enough to avoid embarrassing themselves on the basis of what they do not know. Bluster cannot be an allowable substitute for knowledge without embarrassing and discrediting all of the courts, judges, and the entire judicial system.
Given the plain fact that the central issues in our lawsuit were missed or ignored as if they were passing gamma rays, the chance of judges turning themselves into history’s poster image of official neglect cannot be set aside as a minor or impossible likelihood. Because of that, Judge Buchwald should have hoped our lawsuit would have been sent back to her so she could reconsider what she had written. She had two choices if the case had come back: either she could have done the work needed to figure out the truth, or she could have persisted in her prior condescending prejudice and be judged for it by history without any likely hope for a merciful reprieve.
With the unfolding of history occurring faster than it has in the past, some of those judged by it might still be alive to see what has been done to them in the record. The passage of time has been gentle on error in the past and perhaps also more humane, but now the quick emergence of events makes judgments more brutal, and President Obama might think about that as he contemplates the legacy his Presidency is known for.
Food Safety Czar Michael Taylor and Secretary Tom Vilsack may be beyond reprieve already given the history already established in the record, but maybe President Obama and the First Lady still have a merciful chance to redeem themselves if they start to change what they do. They will need to make better use of the time remaining for them at the White House. Making up for their failures in the post-Presidency will not be good enough.
The Appeals Court Decision Was Only A Small, Partial Improvement Maybe Resulting from the Gap Between Rural and Urban Sense of Reality
Chapter 29
In a display of pro-corporate, pro-Monsanto prejudice, the three judges of the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit employed devious gamesmanship to do with finesse and greater politesse the same thing Judge Buchwald chose to do more rudely with words in the role of attack dogs and water hoses as if she was Bull Connor in Birmingham trying to defeat the Civil Rights Movement. In response, both need to know: the right to grow and eat healthful, safe, wisely nutritious food is a human rights issue—more fundamental than any other.
If life is not preserved or if it is cut short through unnecessary disability, nothing else matters. If the importance of this central issue was understood, all four of the lower court judges would have wanted to take time to understand the facts and the controversies underlying our lawsuit. With a visible belief in an overreaching privileged entitlement to do as they did in support of an elite financial interest, they jumped to a preferred conclusion, writing their decisions based on biased and self-certain preconceptions. Maybe flagrant injustice like this commonly results from lifetime judicial tenure.
Studying more deeply would have been time consuming, but it was necessary if service to the public need had been considered important beyond the need of the co-plaintiffs. This is part of the problem confronting the entire U.S. culture. As issues become more complex, not only do citizens fail to understand them enough to play their role as citizens, but judges and other officials do similarly with much greater damage and disservice to the nation. Morality is no longer as easy as in the past.
Judges may confront an even more challenging problem: the longer they serve on the bench, the more tangibly disconnected from the culture they are likely to become. This is especially threatening when the corporate, mainstream media are also willfully and negligently oblivious about all matters disconnected from the collaborative corporate interest they share with other elitist partisans of the controlling corporate enterprise.
Those who rely on the corporate or tribal media for all their cultural information can only be handicapped by the combination of circumstances routinely biasing the news coverage they provide. The problem is made worse when a disconnection gap exists between rural reality and the reality perceived by urban and suburban people. That has been unbridgeable for decades, maybe most of a century despite the importance of it in determining the workability and the collective wisdom of U.S. democracy.
The Cultural Issues at the Core of Courtroom Failure—And the Place Where They Lead
Chapter 30
This circumstance is imperiling when people are so disconnected from the sources of their food some act as if it grows in a box or in the bed of a truck. This sad, impoverished disconnection leads readily to companies cutting any corners they want in the production of food, and as long as it does not make people immediately sick, few care or take time to pay constructive attention to everything they would need to know to impact their own functional health and durable, useful, valued longevity.
The issues with transgenic food are mostly unseen, and when they are in the distant future, the causes of disease and affliction are not identified and do not need to be in a culture where myopia is routine. This thoughtless reality has allowed power over U.S. food policy to rest within the 90-day time horizon of food manufacturing and agribusiness corporations. The devil is left to take the hindmost—along with the majority of the people.
Sometimes, officials in all three branches of the government act as if they understand everything they would need to know, but if they did, policy would be different than it is. This can be seen in the self-defensive bluster and hubris written into both policy statements and court decisions, or it can be tactical to serve an agenda with bluster used as a cudgel. It can also be seen among politicians so busy with fund-raising they do not have the time or desire to learn about anything beyond the interests of major funders and their lobbyists.
In this political environment, the perceived role of some judges is to stop anyone who might derail the system by presenting an alternative view of inconvenient truth or enabling debate about it. Both courts blocked the presentation of evidence that could expose scientific and political error, administrative failure, and decades of continuing moral ineptitude. If they see their primary role as the need to protect the dominant elites and their political allies, this is what they would naturally do.
Likely, they would say they have done their job as they were hired and paid to do it, but that is the agonizing trouble. If that is the governing rule, the United States has become a corporately subservient fascist state, and with only a veneer of dysfunctional, meaningless, deceitful democracy maintained for propaganda value.
How the U.S. System Works to Empower Wealthy Corporations over the People
Chapter 31
Observably, the United States has become a defensive political system much like a football team where Presidents are the Strong Safety, the Congress the Defensive Line, and judges are the Linebackers, Free Safeties, and Cornerbacks all organized to protect the position of the favored elites whose ability to put up large amounts of money is worshipped like a sacred cow. The team mascot is a monetarily-inflated sacred cow.
This is the way the system has appeared to work in overriding the idealogical differences designed to prevent most anything else beyond service to the power of money from advancing. This is all a system organized around the pursuit of money can do or wants to do. The defensive objective as the most important of all job requirements and the dysfunctional partisan polarization would have been designed to assist with it.
In the past, slavery was a sacred cow in the United States, and the present corporate domination of the people is a new form of slavery allowing the interests of companies like Monsanto to be put ahead of the people much as the interests of slaveowners were empowered before the Civil War. They had the 3/5ths rule increasing their political power, and politicians in the North helped to sustain it in service to the power of wealth in the same way the system works now to serve the power of wealth.
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was passed to support the power of wealth genuflectively, and the federal courts were also supportive of the status quo ahead of morality. The courts were part of the problem then the same as they are part of the problem now. During the years before the Civil War the total value of all slaves was a greater repository of total wealth than all the other assets in the nation combined. This was the wealth political system then served to diligently protect.
When federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law came up against opposing values in northern counties, the local forces in opposition to slavery sometimes prevailed, and these sentiments against slavery drove the morality leading ultimately to the election of anti-slavery candidates to federal office and then to the Civil War. A similar local process is building now against the power of Monsanto and other amoral corporations empowered by their wealth to sustain their own political dominance.
If the courts were not part of the problem before the Civil War, and if they had exercised independent morality and the pursuit of justice, the Supreme Court would not have issued the Dred Scott decision. Similarly, they are part of the problem now, and they are showing themselves to be no more independent of the power of money than they were for decades before the Civil War.
Exposure of Monsanto’s subversion of truth, justice, and democracy has now been prevented by three new federal court decisions, and the path was greased for Monsanto’s technology to continue its domination over farmers and all citizens. These are two results perpetrated without regard for the way Monsanto’s unbridled activities have won adverse publicity for the United States in many nations around the world.
In many other nations, the attitudes about transgenic agriculture are different than they are in the U.S., but these attitudes are rarely reported in the United States. Some coverage resulted when Wikileaks showed how the U.S. diplomatic corps was used to promote Monsanto’s products, even employing strong arm tactics to do it, but the over-riding U.S. public assumption suggests the people in the other nations are too dumb and backwards to appreciate the value of modern science being offered them for their own good as a product of U.S. wisdom.
This has been the observed attitude among many people in positions of political power in the United States, but the attitude is not based on any reliable science. It is built only on arrogant hubris without ability to sustain itself when invited to present evidence to prove its value.
The trouble is many of the U.S. people and their officials are too disconnected from reality to have figured out where the truth lies. They have not wanted to listen to the point of view or the research of Europeans, and when research reports are issued in Europe, the U.S. media spring into action to support the attack against them.
Most of the coverage is either dismissive or impugning—as if the affected corporate interests in the United States know everything important to know about how agriculture should work and no one else knows anything. If this attitude was sustained by anything more than prejudice, it would not have stonewalled all demands for evidence to prove the value of the biotech agriculture.
In the face of this behavior by Monsanto and their allies, ignorance is supported by arrogance as if it should be the U.S. birthright. If respect for others came easier than it does in the United States, humility would come with it.
Then if humility flowed more readily, the United States might be willing to learn from others as they could have since 1999 following the edification made possible by the Pusztai Affair in Great Britain. The research work led by Arpad Pusztai was widely publicized in Europe but not in the United States, so the question is: why was it blocked from getting as much media attention in the U.S.?
People in other nations, especially the 64 with transgenic food labeling, now show hostile disrespect for the U.S. anti-democratic subversion of truth and wisdom. The United States has defamed itself as the impacts of Monsanto’s control over the U.S. government and its mismanagement of transgenic food and farming are understood around the world. People in other nations have not been kept in ignorance like the U.S. people have, and in the modern globalized village, that changes what many people think about the U.S. governing ideal.
The Growth of International Disrespect for the United States and the Results of that Disrespect
Chapter 32
The U.S. democratic ideal cannot be respected when it produces and enables destructive and endangering results, and when it reveals to everyone how it is controlled by corporations in their own interest more than by citizens in the collective public interest. When the observed result of the U.S. governing system is myopic amorality failing to protect the one precious thing everyone needs to survive, it cannot be appreciated, and people will not want to emulate it.
As a result of what they have seen, the people of other nations want to push the U.S. aside, and they are doing that by setting up structures to bypass U.S. power. For example, they are working to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and when the U.S. government is destructively dysfunctional against its own interests, more people want to take their money elsewhere. The United States cannot be out of step with the rest of the world and maintain a leadership role. It needs to see the people of other nations as a constituency and not as part of its fiefdom or ownership entitlement.
Many things have caused people in other nations to lose their former respect and admiration for the United States, and the relations with Monsanto and other biotech-chemical companies are among them. When companies are found to be controlling the U.S. government, the people of other nations separate themselves from that—even if their own governments have similar troubles or worse. They want the United States to be exemplary, a model to be looked up to, and when it is not, they want to seek other models to follow.
Meanwhile, in the United States, most people are not much concerned about the worries and needs of people in other nations— even if they need to be for their own welfare. Just as the U.S. people are disconnected from farmers and agriculture in their own nation, they are also connected from the people of other nations. This attitudinal isolation has been sustained when two oceans separate the United States from the rest of the world, but relations with Mexico and Canada are not greatly closer than relations with Europe or other parts of the world.
Similarly, many white people in the U.S. often show little interest in the lives and concerns of minority citizens who live close to them every day. These two attitudes are related, and they reveal people’s ability to show empathy toward others. They are visibly reinforced by the demographics of U.S. voting patterns and by attitudes toward foreign aid. These realities reflect fragmented, groupish, self-centeredness and a failure to build a sense of community among diverse groups, but this is needed before democracy can work for the benefit of all citizens.
Alienation kills democracy, but it has been exploitively encouraged in the United States as a way of binding together defensive, threatened political constituencies, especially white, southern, and mid-western Republican constituencies. Initially, it was a way to bring blue collar and southern Democrats into the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and before that Barry Goldwater, but it has become more than that with the appeal broadly systematized by stimulating and appealing to fears.
The politics of alienation has many partisans including perhaps most recently in March 2014 Sarah Palin when she attacked President Obama as a weak “mom jean wearer” and compared him unfavorably to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Law professor Ian F. Haney-López has shown how the system works in his book, Dog Whistle Politics—How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. A short 20 minute Ted talk about the idea is on YouTube.
The observed self-alienating attitudes go with an arrogant, hubristic, or defensive and self-isolating sense of self-importance characteristic of particularly the white U.S. citizens who identify with the power of wealth and self-reliance in making their nation strong and themselves, too, through citizenship in a strong nation. They do not have to be wealthy personally as long as they identify with a rich nation and rich corporations in a culture where strong, wealthy, deregulated corporations are believed to be the key source of national strength.
This is the philosophy that has allowed Monsanto to exercise unconstrained power. They have been able to take advantage of this philosophy for their own benefit, and they can do that as long as voters continue to vote the interests of the wealthy as part of the effort to feel good about themselves and their nation. This is what white voters in the United States do even when they sell themselves out and destroy the middle class by doing it.
These voters are selling themselves out to whatever sounds good to them, but it is actually destructive of everything that should be important to them. They are voting on the basis of prejudice and not on the basis of analysis. Their philosophy of strength, wealth, self-reliance, independence, and small government is also destructive of democratic community and the need to exemplify democratic values to people in other nations.
The majority of these people are voting the ideals of the people they wish they were and not the people they are. Before they can make their ideal work for their own benefit, they would need to have resources like the one percent. That is what they would need to take care of themselves as strong, wealthy, independent, self-reliant citizens able to get along with a government that only concerns itself with national defense and little else.
When white voters in the United States voted for Romney-Ryan by nearly 60-40 in 2012, they were voting for lower taxes, less regulation, and smaller government delivering fewer services, but this program mostly only benefits a small minority. It shoots the rest of its own supporters in the foot. Most do not have the income or resources to benefit or be well-served by these ideals.
Before most people can take care of themselves without government programs, they need more income and wealth; they need to create a culture where everyone is wealthy before they can make their ideal work for the collective benefit. Instead, their ideals have created a culture where only a small minority are becoming more wealthy; all of the rest are becoming steadily more poor.
Even to buy health insurance in a nation facing greatly increased healthcare costs, people need more income and wealth. They cannot afford it; their hopes are not realistic. They are only being wishful. As healthcare costs approach 20% of the gross domestic product (GDP), they are becoming unsustainable. This compares with about five percent of GDP after World War II 70 years ago.
U.S. culture is not working anymore to build collective benefit, and this result traces directly to the wishfulness of the Reagan Revolution which has been continued destructively by all the ensuing Presidents of both parties. Denied and undermined is the celebration of the melting pot ideal and the mutual respect that creates what everyone actually needs to make democracy functional and beneficial to the collective interest.
People who see themselves as rich or associate with the values of the wealthy often exhibit a lack empathy for the needs and concern of others, and they often do not want to feel a need for others in their own lives. They want to see themselves as something they cannot afford to be.
This attitude afflicts the whole nation in its attitude toward other nations when many people perceive their nation as “exceptional” in its possession of wealth and power. They view the role of nations in the world according to their same political values, but most other nations do not have the wealth needed to play the game.
Foreign policy in the United States depends on the need to buy whatever may be needed because that is what strong, independent, deregulated nations should do when they follow the asserted values. They think others should do similarly and stop whining, and they also think others need them more than they need others, but this is not true. The United States needs to be admired and honored by others to retain its respected position.
This is how U.S. attitudes work to alienate the nation from the rest of the world, and it is made worse when the United States identifies with the interests of wealthy, exploitive corporations and the people who run them or profit from them. The more the United States becomes polarized between the rich and the poor, and the more court decisions serve the already empowered corporate interests at the expense of the world’s people, the worse it becomes for the kind of world relations the U.S. needs.
Judge Buchwald, especially, showed herself to be a partisan in this hostile and impugning, wealth-serving attitude, but the Supreme Court may have shown the same attitude in their silence. If they were not partisans of an attitude singing the words of an Ethiopian proverb, they would have done differently than they did. The proverb says: “Each for himself and God for all of us, cried the elephant as he danced among the chickens.” This is the attitude revealed by all of the court decisions.
The Product of U.S. Hubris
Chapter 33
When people think of themselves as extraordinary, superior to others, and entitled to force their agenda onto others, the motivation to create functional community diminishes both in the nation and in relation to other nations. This attitude causes people to build self-defensive, self-isolating fortresses or the psychological equivalent, but a sense of community and mutuality is essential to make respected, admirable democracy work. Attitudes and decisions like the one from Judge Buchwald wantonly destroy this ideal.
Self-separation, alienation, and polarization are inevitable killers of the ability to model democratic ideals for others. This is especially pathetic and shameful when people who were born on home plate think they have hit a home run, and it is even worse when they make destructive, exploitative, and abusive investments in other nations instead of helping to improve the lives of the people in all nations through their personal efforts.
Exploitive destruction and abuse is what wealthy citizens of commonly banana republics do, so it is sad to see U.S. people modeling themselves after this behavior. When people export wealth to other nations, set up off-shore banks, exploit the people of other nations for their own advantage, and promote the export of jobs by moving companies abroad in search of cheap labor, they are destroying the foundations of democracy in their own nation and others—without creating admirable benefit.
If the exhibited model were able to be beneficial in other nations and agreed to by the people in them without being destructive in the United States and elsewhere, the results could be more hopeful. Sometimes in the past, better has been—but not lately. After World War II the values behind the Marshall Plan were hopeful about creating strong, independent, self-governing European nations, and it was guided by the failure of a more punitive policy following World War I. The missing element now is relational empathy, morality, and ethics.
The current values do not want to give anything unless more is gained than is given. The same desire to build collective benefit and sustain the Commons for the common benefit does not exist anymore. It has been replaced by a sense of entitlement accruing to the wealthy, and these are the values exhibited in the all the court decisions against our lawsuit but especially the decision written by Judge Buchwald. The perfume of wealth-related entitlement was as strong from her as it is from a giant porcine feedlot on a hot summer’s day.
As long as a destructive, exploitive, self-entitled model is exhibited by U.S. people and companies, the U.S. role as world leader is on the way to being terminated, and Monsanto has played a major role in this compromise of the U.S. leadership role in the world. They can pretend they are helping to feed the world, but many of the citizens of other nations are not buying the idea. Many see the United States and Monsanto promoting their own collaborative control over others for their own self-enrichment, controlling advantage, and domination.
Even the massive expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in much the same way as Monsanto is, and even if nations are expected to pursue their own interests, they are not expected to trample over the interests of others in the process. They are expected to try to create a win for everyone and to use moral methods that can be admired and respected. The use of drone attacks do not meet this prescription. They reduce the possibility of human connection by impersonalizing the conflict.
Maybe it is asking too much for military operations to show the empathy and morality able to inspire respect even from opponents, but when President Jefferson defended U.S. interests by sending the Navy to the Mediterranean, he succeeded in achieving that despite the more difficult communication challenges of that era. The same is needed now before the United States can be seen as doing more than serving itself disrespectfully.
Jefferson paid attention to the way Muslim culture would look upon the U.S. action, but that has not been seen during the current engagement either under President Bush or President Obama. The difference is striking, but if any modern U.S. President were known to have been reading the Qur’an as Jefferson did to help understand Muslim attitudes, he would be instantly attacked from the opposition if not impeached for it.
The difference and the failures of attitude is the result of interest-driven politics both at home and abroad, and when corporate values are preeminent in the culture, morality is lost. Yet, the smaller the world gets the more empathic morality is needed in all foreign relationships.
When the foreign aid budget is cut as part of the pursuit of self-interest and as part of the reduction of the size of the government, the short-sightedness of the U.S. agenda is made apparent, and the biggest price will be paid by the U.S. people. The people in many other nations do not have as much at stake as the United States does, so they do not have as much to lose from U.S. leadership decline.
The behavior of U.S. corporations like Monsanto is part of the moral issue as is government behavior in support of them, but this is not the whole of it. The attitudinal failures reach beyond that, and if they did not, Monsanto would not have become the destructive threat it now is.
The text in the photograph is a comment on Judge Buchwald’s failure to address the facts and the precedents central to the complaint of the OSGATA co-plaintiffs.
The Intensifying International Motive to Marginalize U.S. World Leadership
Chapter 34
While the U.S. people are not paying attention, the U.S. place in the world could soon begin to slip away the same as it did in the past for Great Britain. The end would come when the U.S. dollar is replaced as the world’s reserve currency. That would terminate the U.S. ability to fund its deficit through international borrowing from people who trust the security of the U.S. dollar and the wisdom of the U.S. nation. The United States needs to get its attitudes figured out before they result in a bigger disaster for themselves than most have yet imagined.
If charitability could be perceived in the attitudes of U.S. people and companies, the fall would not be likely to happen so fast, but only the pursuit of opportunism is seen in much visible behavior. The fabric of democracy is destroyed at home as the people in other nations are abused, and the attitudes shown toward people in other places are also revealed toward disempowered people in the United States. Similarly, the abuse of animals follows the abuse of people, and the moral character of a culture is known by the way it treats domestic animals.
The same as people are made to take care of themselves under the observed values, so are animals and also the natural environment. This is an extension of the myopic, self-serving corporate amorality to all relationships.
This was the same disrespect that allowed chattel slavery to persist, and the same exploitive U.S. attitude has been seen in other nations when people have died as virtual slaves in locked, unhealthful factories working long hours to produce low cost goods for the U.S. market. This is a moral issue, and it shows that U.S. slavery of the past has only been exported to other places with U.S. funding providing the support to sustain it elsewhere.
A version of this has been seen in India when Monsanto sold its transgenic seeds to poor cotton farmers and the promised higher yield did not result for them. Monsanto’s transgenic cotton requires regular, timely irrigation to deliver promised yields, but poor farmers have to depend on the whimsical arrival of rainfall. Monsanto’s partnering seed companies sold them seeds anyway—as if it was part of a plan to push them into bankruptcy so their land could be taken over. Routinely, the land is signed away as collateral on the seed debt.
The yield failure was bad enough, but Monsanto has worked to remove alternative seed options from the market in India the same as in the United States, and a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide when they have not been able to pay off the debt from buying Monsanto’s high-priced seed. This is like foreign aid in reverse. Even if U.S. foreign aid has rarely been administered well enough to effectively deliver as much public benefit as it could, reverse aid is worse.
Monsanto claims about seven million cotton-farming customers in India, but even against that total number, 250,000 suicides is not a small number. Farmer suicides have also been an issue in the United States where the rate has been twice as high as the population average even though suicides in the nation as a whole now exceeds car accidents as the leading cause of death.
Suicides have long been the leading cause of death on U.S. farms despite high numbers of farm accidents, and use of agrichemicals correlates with higher rates of mental depression among farmers. This depression level is cited as leading to suicide, and the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors to treat the depression has been suspected by doctors of increasing the U.S. suicide rate.
Much as Monsanto has tried to downplay and explain away the suicide problem in India, so has the coverage about the issue in the United States and other nations been part of the disconnection between urban and rural reality. It gets less coverage the same as other farming issues get less coverage by the urban media. Included among the stories getting limited media attention is the story about damage caused by Monsanto’s technology.
Above all else, if democratic values were important in the United States and had not been undermined by ideology designed to increase personal self-reliance and more rugged independence, the need to build a common sense of local, national and international community would be observably more important than it is. That would be visibly admirable in other nations, but U.S. anti-government ideology has corroded these values.
Judge Buchwald showed a particular desire to lend her efforts to this idealogical erosion of democratic community-building and community-responsive values, and to make it worse, others have commented on her lack of sympathy toward civil rights concerns when other previous cases have brought them into her courtroom. That is the same elitist, condescending, supercilious, and arrogant attitude that sustained U.S. slavery until the Civil War and northern attitudes brought it to an end.
The more economically polarized the nation is, the more essential democratic values become eroded—and the more the nation becomes ideologically polarized in lock-step with economic and social self-isolation and self-polarization against both government and alien groups with a different view about government’s role in helping to build the prerequisites of functional democracy. The process of U.S. democratic self-destruction has been advanced with Monsanto as one of its poster children.
The text in the photograph is a comment on the inadequacies of Judge Buchwald’s jurisprudence as exhibited in her dismissal decision on the OSGATA et al. v. Monsanto lawsuit.
U.S. Internal Alienation, Polarization, and Isolation Facilitates Corporate Exploitation
Chapter 35
People escaped to the suburbs in the United States to evade the costs and responsibilities associated with life in cities, and they were also driven into the cities and the suburbs by the policy-imposed pressures on farmers. Both these population movements have had moral implications for both democracy and political ideology.
The movement off the farm has undermined the quality of rural community Jefferson hoped would be a source of robust democratic independence and stability, but he was also in the classic liberal and even libertarian mold captivating modern Republicans ever since Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan brought it to prominence starting in 1964. The difference was that Jefferson hoped rurally-grounded citizens would have the wealth and the resources to make the independent, self-sufficient ideal a reality and not just the impossible and exploitive chimera it has been turned into in the modern era.
Jefferson did not anticipate the use of farm policy to squeeze the farming community unmercifully with the goal of increasing the size of the urban, industrial labor force and then concentrating elite, corporate control over both the agricultural system and the food supply. He wanted to build genuine foundational strength into the community of independent farmers, but now modern Republicans have exploited the Jeffersonian ideal to lead wishful and hopeful constituencies astray against their own interests and in service to elite plutocratic interests.
In the U.S. under the reigning modern Republican values that have been embraced only slightly less by two recent Democratic Presidents, commitment to political party, ideology, and other tribal groups is more demonstrably important than democratic community. The result is the division of the nation into two separate virtual nations each sustained by the Gerrymander. The result is like two divorced and alienated refugees of a former marriage living distrustingly, antagonistically, and dysfunctionally in different parts of the same house.
This model has sustained the same destructive, anti-democratic attitude that sees wealthy people and corporations as more important than the less wealthy, unincorporated, and disorganized citizens. This outcome would not have been possible if wealth had not been made more important than people. These are the values enabling Monsanto to become politically, agriculturally, and economically powerful without any moral desire or commitment from either political party to prevent it.
These social and political values cause polarization between the rich and the poor as well as dysfunctional polarization between divergent political ideologies and the two parties. The result institutionalizes racial disharmony as well as other divisions, and it is all part of the divide and conquer strategy Monsanto has exploited.
Both lower court decisions in our lawsuit were wrought from the kind of anti-democratic and dismissive condescension that favors the rich over the poor and corporations over non-incorporated individual people. These attitudes speed the destruction of functional democratic community, creating an anti-democratic nation for the benefit of wealthy and empowered elites, but they need healthful food to survive the same as all others. As the result, the observed political attitudes and exploitive ideology sow seeds of everyone’s destruction.
Perhaps the wealthy think they do not need to be concerned about it, because they have acquired the land they would need to grow their own food no matter what happens. If so, they should not be sure they will be able to escape ubiquitous transgenic contamination of the gene pool, soil, animal and insect life, and food supply.
Nonetheless, the advocates for transgenic agriculture all need to put on the record a personal accounting of what they choose to eat and feed their own families. From this information, much can be understood, and the the same question should be asked of the judges ruling on any lawsuit involving Monsanto’s interests. Needed is a clear understanding of the identity of the hypocrites, so their names can be written and published for all to know.
Already known is the preference of President Obama and his family; they eat from an uncertified organic garden on the White House lawn. They were urged by the chemical industry to use chemical on the garden, so the public would gain more trust in the use of chemicals, but they demurred. Also known is the organic preference of the Romney family even though Mitt Romney has been a strong advocate for Monsanto’s transgenic technology as well as a consultant to the company during past years.
Other politicians need to put on the record beside their votes on the issues important to Monsanto a statement about the food they choose to eat, and if this question is asked of elected officials in the government as it should be, the appointed officials ruling on Monsanto-related issues should also be asked. No right of personal privacy on the matter should be allowable, but if one is claimed, it will stand as an indictment of the person claiming it.
Judge Buchwald’s statement on the matter would be viewed with greater interest than the statements by the three judges of the Appeals Court because of the difference in the two decisions, but the justices of the Supreme Court should not be off the hook just because they demurred from taking the case. That decision was as central and influential as any other they could make.
The Buchwald decision was worse than the Appeals Court decision, but neither should stimulate patriotic pride by defining admirable, unifying, empathic democratic wisdom, justice, or truth. They are both a tragic anti-democratic, condescending, destructive, exploitive, and disrespectful embarrassment as if that reality should reflect admired, preferred national values.
In much the same supercilious way the rich in the United States and elsewhere are commonly dismissive of the poor, the court decisions showed two different and divergent ways to disrespectfully and condescendingly blow plaintiffs off when they stand up against the controlling Monsanto interest. More detailed discussion of the two court decisions is here (or under the pull-down Home page menu). In the end, the Appeals Court merely showed Judge Buchwald how do what she did more creatively and deviously—and less brutally.
The Inevitable Cultural Impact of Discriminatory Court Decisions
Chapter 36
The trouble with the behavior of the judges in both courts is that the victims of decisions like theirs inevitably shape alienated attitudes, and eventually those attitudes have consequences. For one example, the dismissive, arrogant, community destructive, self-serving behavior of the Venezuelan oligarchy resulted in the election of President Hugo Chavez, and that carried adverse governing consequences for the nation as the poor became newly empowered. Polarization was promoted from the Left the same as from the Right.
The poor in Venezuela needed to be empowered because Venezuela is at least a nominally democratic nation and remains one even if sweeping powers have been given to the current President Nicolás Maduro, but as the long-disempowered people, they have not known how to handle their empowerment in the way they would have needed to if they would have wanted to build a better nation for everyone. They only have known how to exploit it to gain the rights they have long been denied.
This is the same as it was in the United States during and after the Great Depression when the Roosevelt New Deal worked to empower the poor and build back democratic equality in the nation. When the poor were empowered they began to treat their opportunity as an entitlement and not as a chance to create something valuable for all. This is the way things commonly work out when the previously exploited and abused gain a chance to benefit from a change in political fortunes and organization.
People do not think events could unfold in the United States now as they have in Venezuela, but the only reason would be: many people identify with the wealthy and hope they will be able to ride the American Dream to gain wealth for themselves in the future. In the meantime, they vote and behave like people they are not. Wishfully, they vote against their own interests, and that keeps the plutocrats in power. Among other results, Monsanto is empowered to behave exploitively.
Once the American Dream dies for many more people, as it already has for some, the voting coalition sustaining the wishful fantasy will fragment. This fragmentation is already seen in Speaker John Boehner’s inability to manage his caucus. They manage him more than he is able to manage the divergent factions within the caucus.
This fragmentation—and even continuation of the same kind of polarization seen also between the two parties— happens because they cannot agree among themselves anymore than they can find a way to achieve agreement with Democrats. This kind of division has existed in the past among Democrats, too, but it did not generally reach the same level of alienation, dysfunction, and immobility, though it did on Civil Rights legislation. That is the reason Republicans were needed to help pass it .
Neither political party has a permanent corner on divisive dysfunction even if the Democrats appear more functionally unified at the moment. Both have been prone to splintering off third parties just as the Presidential election in 2000 was lost by the Democrats in part because of the Presidential candidacy of Ralph Nader and Democrats won in 1992 because of the role of Ross Perot. Either the factions splinter off or an accommodation is reached with them, and the way this works is a measure of the admirability of the nation.
Through their political abilities and disabilities at home, people show how they will relate to people of other nations in working out international differences. Different coalitions can emerge in the process of working things out at home and abroad, and this happened in Maine on the labeling of transgenic food. There, the enabling coalition was made up of Tea Party Republicans and liberal Democrats. No doubt, that was only a temporary coalition of convenience on one issue, but it was constructive in reestablishing the ability of people to set aside their differences and work together.
Much other fragmentation has not been as constructive. When people become alienated and fail to collaborate to find a solution able to advance the public interest, the process is destructive or immobilizing as it has often been lately. The present Congress has been more unable to get work done than all others before it, and part of that is the time spent on more than 50 different votes to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
Monsanto, their political allies and the federal judges supporting them are among those promoting political the fragmentation and destruction of unifying political community. Their contribution is through health and environmental impoverishment of the people’s interest, the destitution of farmers through damage to the soil they need to remain productive, and the destruction of the fabric of trust and cooperation in rural communities.
All these impacts erode the collective capacity to build functional democratic community at all levels, because events in one local community inevitably impact events also is other spheres of government and mutually respecting citizen participation. Improvement is only possible when the created total benefit is greater than the sum of the parts and greater than any costs needing to be debited against the realized benefits; when the sum of the debits is more than the benefits, the culture moves backwards—as it has on everything Monsanto has done.
Eroding the Commons through the Intrusion of Myopic Capitalist Amorality
Chapter 37
When some advance at the expense of others and at the expense of environmental protection, the Commons is eroded. Monsanto has caused increasing numbers of people to lose hope in the future, but the number of people who have connected the dots about their transgenic farming project is still relatively small, maybe still as small as only about ten percent of the U.S. people.
Those with an integrated understanding of the impacts see Monsanto as an engine of long-term, cultural destitution, self-alienation and ultimately death through farm, health, and environmental degradation. This is viewed as greatly worse than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and all other oil spills, worse than mercury from the burning of coal, and worse also than climate change.
Maybe acidification of the oceans could be worse if it cannot be reversed, but other aspects of climate change could be reversed if the will existed to do it. Required is a radical reduction in energy consumption. That could be manifested by changes in individual behavior and by law.
Many changes could be achieved starting immediately. For example, home and office conservation of heat and cooling could be advanced if people inserted insulation panels on the inside of windows at night or when the rooms are not being used. That could save at least 50% of the fuel consumed to heat homes and other buildings. Installation of insulated windows could add more saving.
To be admirable, democratic cultures need to be sustainable, and at present they are profligate and not sustainable. This is the first change needing to be made manifest. The preconditions of functional democracy are lost when companies like Monsanto can pursue profit at public expense and the expense of the Commons. On the other hand, when the lot of the poor has been improved, they have tended to behave in the same abusive wasteful ways as others have behaved toward them in the past.
This was seen in the United States when welfare and other social and economic programs attempted to rebuild a strong, unified, collaborative democratic culture following the impoverishment of the Great Depression. The benefits given to people came to be viewed as an entitlement, and the government came to be viewed as employer of last resort with employment viewed as a right whether or not the created culture would be sustainable. Mostly, sustainability has not been centrally important among the values being pursued.
Sustainability would never be a matter of likely importance among people who emphasize short-term objectives in everything they do. Among other impacts, the permanence of military-industrial power in the United States has been insured through the entitlements given to military retirees, but emphasis on military defenses and military solutions to problems is not a sustainable ideal even if it is considered necessary. Something more is needed to achieve sustainability.
When the economy tanked in 2008, the people at the bottom paid the biggest price, and when they began to recover some wanted to extract retribution through their own opportunist exploitation of those who caused the problem, but mostly they have not possessed the needed political power to do anything. Political power remains with those who have exploited them and continue to exploit them as part of their personal wealth-building.
If it would have been possible to change the allocation of political power following the economic abuses of the past, those able to gain power would be likely to do toward the newly disempowered as the formerly empowered had done toward them. This is the way revolutionary change has commonly worked, and the Reagan Revolution brought this kind of change from people who felt abused by the Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Monsanto became one abusive beneficiary of the Reagan Revolution’s deregulatory, small government objective, but the Reagan Revolution was not any more sustainable than the pro-industrial Andrew Mellon Revolution that caused the New Deal Revolution. Sustainability was not the objective of any of these revolutions; they were only designed to empower people or companies and to deliver short-term benefit that was considered necessary under the reigning economic and political philosophy.
As if by blind habit, when people achieve political power, they commonly do toward others as they have seen others doing toward them or toward others like them, and when all the examples are bad, the bad behavior will be continued as if it should be the norm. In the United States, the examples are guaranteed to be bad as a matter of established law because companies are required to put the interests of their shareholders ahead of the interests of everyone else, including the Commons.
As long as this is the rule, sustainability will not be possible, because the goal of increasing short-term shareholder value is inevitably in conflict with the need to achieve sustainability. Thus, sustainability can never be achieved and democracy in its alliance with Capitalism will never be admirable to anyone believing sustainability centrally important or basically essential.
Our lawsuit is a conflict between the need for sustainability to protect the public health and the Commons and the entitlement of Monsanto to pursue short-term shareholder value no matter the cost. The courts have shown they are on the side of Monsanto and the short-term pursuit of wealth and against the importance of sustainability. This is a more fundamental conflict than Samuel Huntington’s perceived clash of civilizations between Muslim and Christian culture, though Muslims have tended to be more interested in sustainability while modern Christian cultures in their alliance with Capitalism have been dedicatedly myopic.
Because of the adverse tendency of people to do toward others in their own way as others have done toward them, the New Deal, President Truman’s Fair Deal, and President Johnson’s Great Society Poverty Program ultimately could not succeed. Success was prevented because the assisted people did not immediately and charitably help build a nationally unified, admirable, and mutually supportive, democratic community. They pursued their own advantage as others had done, and they took these dedicatedly Capitalist values for granted.
The common impulse of most people in the United States and also other Capitalist places is to use their newly improved circumstances to advance themselves in competition against others. When people are poor they need each other, so community is important to them in their struggle to survive the competitive circumstance, but as soon as they move out of poverty, they need each other less, and they start to want to propel themselves upward above others and at the expense of others.
This attitude is destructive of community, and it is also severely destructive of democracy, but it is encouraged by capitalist values if no countering discipline balances it. Alexis deToqueville noticed this issue and wrote about it in his book Democracy in the America almost two centuries ago. He expressed disappointment about the paltry, uninspiring competitive ambitions among the upwardly mobile citizens he observed. He hoped to see admirable nobility of a democratic, community-building and culturally unifying ambition, but he did not see that.
The virtue deToqueville hoped to see is still is not seen. The U.S. nation has advanced despite the dearth of sustainable community-building virtues. People mostly want to competitively build something for themselves and often at the expense of others, but they have joined together in their common desire to exploit the Commons for their own benefit, and that is the defining character and unifying principle of U.S. culture. The trouble is: it only works as long as the Commons can be exploited endlessly and forgivingly without any bill coming due.
The climate of fear is a direct result of the way Monsanto designed its business model.
The Misunderstood Link to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
Chapter 38
Sometimes benefit for the Commons has been created as the result of collective action and public policy, but it is not automatic or easy. The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland is not flammable any more, and that is progress. It is also progress that the city’s electric utility was not privatized.
Public-spirited discipline and moral commitment is required to make public policy and collective action work for the common collective benefit, but too often the observed values in the United States have been destructive of the Commons as if nature could be forever tolerant of all transgressions and exploitive abuses. These values have allowed Monsanto to prosper at public expense, and if the community were to advance under the observed values, it would only happens when the benefits happen to become greater than the destruction.
With Monsanto, the benefits have not been greater than the destruction, but the company has continued to produce propaganda suggesting they will be, and because they have been able to suppress and subvert the flow of necessary public information, their propaganda has been able to prevail. The more powerful technologies become, the more destructive they can be, and that is the story of Monsanto, but propaganda would not have been enough if politicians and judges had not protected them.
If the community would have happened to be improved through collective effort, people might have been able to feel good about that, but the first objective most people and companies reveal is the goal to advance themselves and to collaborate mostly only as is necessary to help themselves build their own wealth. In the United States, this has been taken to be the way things should be, and out of these values, Monsanto has both advanced themselves and helped the political partisans advance the destructive polarization of the political system.
Both these outcomes have helped to increase Monsanto’s profits and the profits of other companies like them. Along the way, people and companies feel entitled to climb over others, exploiting their opportunity for private gain at the expense of the community. That has been the model commonly demonstrated by many in the empowered elite of the past, so it is not surprising to see it magnified by Monsanto and all their political allies. They are copying established values including values that were written into the U.S. Constitution from the start.
This ideal has been touted by the economic elites when they self-servingly sing the song of Adam Smith as they have understood it—or have wanted to understand it. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, Smith suggested the pursuit of self-interest will inevitably improve the collective interest, but that has only worked under very particular and benign economic and social conditions: when information about everyone’s economic activities is readily available, production functions are small-scale, mostly agrarian, and close to home, and all economic participants are governed by collaborative moral values.
Under modern economic conditions, different, more complex, less attractive, and more destructive events more readily happen or they often can. When newly empowered people and companies in the modern economic context pursue their own self-interest, they can and do destroy the Commons and undermine the collective benefit as they impose increasing public costs.
This outcome has resulted on large scale and small in the United States. Morality can sometimes provide help against it, but as corporations have become larger and more dominating in the U.S. economy and in the political system, the needed morality has been dissipated. When corporations are entitled to put their shareholder interests above community morality, the morality of the entire culture is compromised, and that is the problem.
Monsanto has done more damage with this freedom than most others, probably all others ever, but as more people become involved with corporations and identify with them, they absorb corporate-style amorality and begin to take it for granted. As a result, they all begin to collaborate in the destruction of the Commons the same as if they were corporations, and they feel it is their entitled right to do that. This is the extent amoral corporate values have become culturally entrenched. As a result, people become destructive even of themselves.
Under Modern U.S. Tutelage, People Now Embrace Amorality as Easily as Corporations Have
Chapter 39
The easy willingness of the people to abuse themselves through bad diet and other lifestyle choices is part of the problem. Everyone is a member of the Commons, so when they abuse themselves, they abuse the Commons. If people were diligent in studying the way food affects them, they would not have allowed Monsanto or the U.S. government to do as they have done against the public interest and the Commons. Many whistles would have been blown. Examination of the issues would have been demanded, and negligence could not have been allowed.
People would have been marching in the streets over both of the court decisions we have confronted and the defeat of the labeling campaigns in California and Washington would have been impossible—if they had ever been needed in the first place. Instead, the court decisions have elicited almost no response apart from a few brief on-line postings with no comment on the impacts and implications. As if by habit, many responses have been cynical or resigned “ho-hum” responses.
If people were not disconnected from the sources of their food, from farmers, and from the need for sustainability, outrage would have been expressed when all three of the court decisions were released. Instead of bland, passive, and docile acceptance, comments needed to be written on public billboards, posted on dirigible airships, stated in full-page adds—and expressed on lapel pins, signs, and placards, but they were not. None of that happened.
In the end, Judge Buchwald got what she wanted from the day her decision was released: she wanted all of Monsanto’s impudent opponents to crawl back under the porch like beaten dogs and accept whatever is given to them by those like herself with the authority to give it. When she wrote her decision she was writing as an authorized defender of a destructive and myopic ideal, and she showed the intent to use the full power of her office to prevent it from being challenged by anyone.
The attitude from Judge Buchwald would likely have been little different if the plaintiffs in the lawsuit had been terrorists throwing bombs and Molotov cocktails. The punitive response might have been different in that case, but the exhibited attitude likely would not have been much different. From her point of view, tutorial instruction was needed about the rules of the system and about what would be tolerated and not tolerated. The result might not have been any different if she had been the Queen responding to a petition stating the concerns.
The market for recreational drugs is a blatant example of abuse of the Commons in the United States, and the market for transgenic seeds and their associated chemicals is an even bigger one. Both are drug markets, and both are profligate agents of long-term destruction.
The destructive impacts of Monsanto’s technology are seen among large commercial farmers who lease much of the ground they farm. They may not take care of leased ground as well as they might want to take care of land they would own, and this abuse is exploitively damaging to the Commons—with the repair is left to others later. The great public cost is not accounted for; it is swept aside and ignored as if it did not exist. These are the values established by U.S. culture, and with public costs ignored, the accounting system supports them.
In all three of these examples, people and companies have done as they think best serves their own interests and the established interests of the system while neglecting the collective, long-term public interest. They have watched others do this, so they follow the same model as if they had a divine right and a virtual obligation to do that. This is corporate amorality spread broadly as if it should be acceptable. The public accepts it without comment or criticism. Few know enough to be grateful for the stewardship of the soil provided by alternative farming ideal, and this includes the judges.
In these cases and others, the building of unifying, morally responsible democratic community and the protection of the Commons has been undermined by both primary and secondary behavior. The creation of common collective value is replaced by exploitation and destruction of health and the environment for private gain. That is what Monsanto has done, and to get away with it, they spin devious propaganda about how their methods will feed the world. They would not to get away with it if more were conscientious in their citizenship.
Interviewing citizens in Northvale, New Jersey.
The Propaganda-Driven Triumph of Negligent Pseudo-Science
Chapter 40
Monsanto’s contentions about the value of their transgenic crops have not been proven, and maybe they think they might be able to live up to them sometime in the future, but they have not proved them in the past. Several organizations have stated this as a result of their work disproving the claims, and among them Navdanya has published a report, The Emperor Has No Clothes, but many people have wishfully and hubristically wanted to believe Monsanto’s contentions just because they want to believe the works of man can out-perform nature.
If men can go to the Moon and to Mars, maybe they think they are smart enough improve on the works of God and Mother Nature. Many people, including President of the United States and members of the Congress have invested in this wishful hope, and they have defended it as if proof should be an easily ignorable inconvenience.
Monsanto claims scientific consensus backing its profligate kindergarten science, but they do not have it. The claim would fail everywhere if people knew enough to reject it, but in the absence of that, 95 scientists from around the world in October 2013 made a public statement denying the existence of such a consensus. Since then the number of signers has more than tripled.
Monsanto’s claim comes straight from the propaganda playbook of Joseph Goebbels: if an unproven, unsustainable fiction is repeated often enough and hammered hard enough, many people will believe it, and especially if they want to believe it. Monsanto counts on people not knowing enough to question their assertions.
This was the method used to defeat Proposition 37 in California in 2012, and it was also used in 2013 in Washington state against Ballot Initiative 522. They use the tools available to them, and the truth is not among them. The tactic works the same as all other negative campaign tactics. When people are turned off by a controversy, they do not vote. This happened in Washington state on I-522. Some people said advertising from both sides was obnoxious, and that would have reduced the number of ballots voters cast on the issue .
Wishful judges are among those who have wanted to believe Monsanto’s propaganda despite their failure to learn enough to sort out the issues, and our contentions have come before four of them so far. Their decisions cannot be explained in any other way. They would not most likely have wanted to do as they have done if they did not think the public interest would be best served by the Monsanto project. That perspective could exist alongside a desire to support conventional corporate wisdom whether or not evidence had been examined.
All four judges had to be pro-Monsanto as well as pro-corporate and pro-patent, and they had to want to help advance Monsanto’s agenda. They could not possibly have understood the public and environmental cost of doing as they did, or they would not have done it. They could not have been that negligent or corrupt—even if many politicians before them had been more negligent. They had to decide who to believe. On that, they made the lazy choice to sustain the power of corporate money.
Both decisions had to have been made blindly and wishfully without enough study to have figured out all the issues. The work to find wisdom, truth, and justice could not possibly have been done. Maybe the judges felt they did not have time to do more than they did given the pressures of their other work, and maybe they thought their best efforts in the time available should suffice. Possibly, they would have been cynical about the issues.
If short-cuts were acceptable to the judges, they have would have been following the same negligent values as the National Organic Program on transgenic content, and those values are irresponsible no matter where they are seen. They both manifest the reigning amorality.
Both courts opted to find precedents serving the conclusion they wanted to reach, and in that, they contorted themselves politically as much as the Supreme Court did on Bush v. Gore. The judges could have done as they did only if they wanted to protect Monsanto and evade the presentation of evidence potentially adverse to Monsanto’s interests and the interests of Monsanto’s political allies. Judge Buchwald beat us up verbally to force us contritely back under the porch, and the Appeals Court was deviously clever to serve the same objective.
Both techniques failed, and because of that a petition was filed with the Supreme Court seeking their review of the decisions. When they chose not to take the case, they showed a desire to support the decision made by the Appeals Court. In that, they embraced the same values.
The courts tried to beat back Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP for many years in case after case using the same tactics, but ultimately the truth could not be evaded. The same will be true with the contentions in our complaint to the court. We cannot quit anymore than the advocates of racial justice could responsibly walk away from their contentions. It could have helped if public support had resulted, but that would be asking a great deal when only five percent of the food market is organic and most people do not understand what is being done to them.
We are not Rodney King, and we do not have a video of an aggressive Judge Buchwald with night stick in hand. The words she wrote were flagrant enough, and in response to them, we need to contend in the only way available: the same way advocates for racial justice did.
More interviewing of citizens in Northvale, New Jersey.
The Weakness of a Tiny Farming Minority in Being Heard by Blind and Deaf Men and Women
Chapter 41
We are part of a tiny minority of an already small farming minority within an agriculturally oblivious nation, and most people do not know enough to support us for their own benefit. The media have not covered our lawsuit or the issues underlying it, so few understand why the issue should be important to them. Both the corporate and tribal news have been mostly lock-step on the side of Monsanto, despite the erroneous and inadequate evidence used to support their position.
Years ago, many newspapers did similarly on civil rights; they pandered to their constituencies the same as politicians do, and for the same reasons. No reason exists to believe they will not pander to either readers or advertisers the same way now. No bolt of lightening has changed basic human nature, so publishers will need to go down in history the same as their negligent, pro-biotech corporate and political allies, including judges.
All farmers are less than 2% of the U.S. population and organic farmers are less than 1% of all farmers. Nonetheless, nearly half of the voters in California and Washington state have voted for transgenic food labeling despite heavy industry efforts to confuse the issue and persuade a majority of the voters to prefer ignorance.
Not all of those voters could possibly be organic consumers; most would want to know about possibly dangerous content in their food—most likely so they can avoid any food with transgenic ingredients in it. The vote on the issue and the campaign would have served to educate many more people on the concern than had been educated previously, and that, by itself, would have changed public buying behavior adversely for the few dozen companies and trade associations that funded the anti-labeling campaign in California and Washington.
If this conclusion is accurate and most people would not simply forget about the issue after the election, the effort would show the losing nature of the campaign in the long run. Beyond that, the issue is about basic human rights, especially about the right to avoid unhealthful food if people decide they want to do that. This is not a right that should need a majority vote to convey. It should be a basic right. Everyone should have the right to know if their food is being poisoned or made unhealthful and anti-nutritious. Anybody should be able to demand that.
No person or group should not be able to control whether people can have that fundamental right. If the U.S. people still accepted this principle the same way they resisted the British king in 1776, public rebellion might have resulted if citizens were paying attention and were not habitually docile in accepting whatever food is given to them—the same as if they were pigs at a trough.
The trouble is: most people are observably, habitually, and deferentially docile in the face of court decisions—even if they should not be. Too often the rulings of judges come down as if the were carved on stone tablets like the Ten Commandments—with rational assessment and critical analysis withheld if not abjectly abandoned.
When judges are treated like Kings and Queens whether or not they should be, when they are above criticism, reproach, and resistance, U.S. democracy suffers both at home from the perspective of its own internal rationality and in the eyes of others observing from other nations. No doubt citizens behave as they do, in part, because they are not sufficiently informed or educated on issues that should be more important to them than they are, but the issue of food quality and healthfulness in essential to the ability of people to perform as responsible citizens.
This is the reason the right to know about food safety and healthfulness should be a fundamental right that no one should be able to take away. Natural food may contain various lectins and other content that can impact health, but that fact should not convey to companies or people the right to engineer food the grow their own profits without concern about the impact of the alien and destructive substances, toxins, allergens, and disease agents it may contain. A line must be drawn about that.
This should be common sense, but in a nation where the power of corporate money in politics trumps common sense, the right to know about transgenic food has been trampled. Education may be able to help fix this failure of democratic responsibility, and the percentage of voters with a college education is growing even if it needs to improve more. On the issue of food healthfulness, the amount of disciplined and thorough study needs to be greater than it has been often on many other subjects.
If citizens assert conclusions without good evidence and without solid knowledge they are no better than Monsanto when it perpetrates bad science to support its project. When people engage in debate from a position of insufficient knowledge, they are living the story of the deaf and blind men each groping on their part of the elephant and proclaiming the truth they perceive as if it were sufficient to establish the whole truth by itself.
Before elected and appointed officials can be required to do better than they have done, the people need to set the required example. This is the reason education is basic to democracy, but citizenship skills and disciplines are too often AWOL in the education being provided in many places. They are also too often simplified and simplistic.
The Importance of Citizen Knowledge in Restraining Corporate and Political Profligacy
Chapter 42
The ability to get a corporate job often seems to be the more important objective resulting from education in many places. That has become more important to the educational agenda and to students than being informed, able, committed, disciplined, and responsible citizens.
If most people understood their own importance to the national democratic functionality, they might want to do better, but if these things were important, dysfunctional members of the Congress would not be elected in the first place. If they were accidentally elected, they could not be re-elected. The Congress cannot think straight and work together unless the people can think straight and work together well enough to demand better of their elected representatives. If the people are ignorant, similar ignorance will be tolerated in their government.
Monsanto knows a lawsuit like ours would help to educate people more than anything that has so far happened in the United States over the past two decades. They know discovery will be possible in their company files and through interviews with company personnel. They would want to avoid that in every way possible, but the votes in California and Washington have also helped to change the level of public knowledge. That created an incentive urging people to start learning what they have not known before, and many have done the needed work.
In the face of a more informed public, Monsanto should be grateful for the help they have received from the judges in avoiding discovery. Discovery would be like it was when decades of lies by tobacco executives needed to be exposed. The Supreme Court would have understood that as much as the lower courts did; their decision suggests a desire to save Monsanto from that exposure.
Through the decision not to take the case, the Supreme Court suggested but did not establish a clear preference to serve Monsanto ahead of the people. Their decision was suggestive of complicity with Monsanto and the judges supporting their interests, but it was still ambiguous enough to protect them from the full weight of the harsh judgment of history likely to be born by the Appeals Court as the result of their negligent decision.
The issue at stake is about the rights of a minority to present their complaint against a corporation putting them at risk and causing them to give up activities they would like to pursue were it not for the threat of patent infringement liability and other liability resulting from uncontrolled transgenic contamination that is also damaging to the public health and the environment.
Because its clear inability to demonstrate public utility beyond a short-term benefit to farmers in lowering their cost of production, the complaint argues that Monsanto’s patents on transgenic crops should not have been issued. The lawsuit asks the court to affirm this contention in the public interest and in the environmental interest.
Evidence would be presented in court to support this argument. Even though the pursuit of a Declaratory Judgment is made on behalf of farmers continuously damaged by the existence of Monsanto’s transgenic contamination and the threat of its spread, the courts found the plaintiffs were not sufficiently damaged to need relief from the court. This judgment is considered to be atrocious in the extreme extent of its injustice.
Because of the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto without any offsetting public or private benefit or compensation, farmers need to be protected against the threat of a patent infringement lawsuit from Monsanto if and when their crops would become contaminated. Even Monsanto agrees that contamination is ultimately likely, based on the odds. Scientists also agree it is eventually likely to happen when farmers are growing susceptible crops in open fields and not in a closed greenhouse.
Even though the lawsuit was filed by farmers at daily risk of contamination and by farmers who have given up activities out of the need and desire to avoid the risks, the liabilities faced by farmers are not as great as the liabilities confronted by consumers and the world-wide environment. For that reason, consumers would be the silent beneficiaries if the lawsuit would be won, as it was under the Appeal Court decision, even only to a modest and insufficient extent. This makes the lawsuit into an contention between the 99% and the self-serving 1%.
The uprising against autocratic rulers in Arab nations is an example of what can happen when the 99% rise up against the 1%. Now, the people need to rise up against Monsanto and their government facilitators the same as Egyptians did against President Hosne Mubarak. The result in the Arab nations has not been automatically constructive, and opposing factions within those nations may show destructive internal divisions. Some may advance themselves at the expense of the public interest, but that does not mean the uprising was not justified.
U.S. reality against Monsanto and its political allies is not different, except the Monsanto tyranny has gone on for two decades instead of three as in the case of Egypt under President Mubarak. Monsanto’s developmental process started three decades ago, but the government did not definitively provide ideologically-justified and politically-motivated support for the project until 1992.
In May, 2002, Vice President Dan Quayle opened the floodgate for Monsanto’s patent power to create a virtual monopoly over major commodity crops and corner the market for Glyphosate herbicide through adhesion contract even after Roundup’s patent expired. Speaking in his capacity as the Bush administration overseer of business deregulation and competitiveness, Quayle announced without independent, objective evidence that transgenic crops were “Generally Recognized as Safe.”
The statement was made on the basis of the politically crafted Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence asserted despite thousands of pages of memoranda from the FDA scientists cogently arguing the contrary viewpoint. All of the health and environmental concerns were pushed aside to enable Monsanto’s project without constraint.
On this issue if no others, the United States should not be immune to a rebellion similar to the one seen in Egypt. If the U.S. people understood what is at stake for the public health and the environment and had not been kept in governmentally-sponsored ignorance, they would rise up as much as they did a half-century ago on civil rights and against the war in Vietnam. If people were not blind and myopic about the conspiracy against their health and the natural heritage, people might have risen up already.
Awaited is public realization establishing that transgenic exploitation and oppression can no longer be tolerated. This is not to say transgenic science cannot have a place even if its products would need to be grown in careful isolation; the issue is: Monsanto should not be allowed to put it into food without thorough, careful, objective, responsible, independent, and reliable investigation.
That should have been a basic requirement from the start, and it probably would have been if politicians did not want to use corporate deregulation as their way to enable campaign funding for themselves and their political allies. Because of the cooperating synergies between corporate ambition and the political need for money, two symbiotic, collaborating abuses were allowed against the collective public need for safe, healthful, optimally nutritious food, sustainable agriculture, and honorable environmental protection.
Once people believe they can wield power against their oppressors and can become organized to protect their own interests, they could start to make changes. If they understood the size of the issues, they would have started already. The negligent injustices perpetrated by judges would have stimulated them to action, but they cannot act when they do not yet understand the need to act. The campaigns for transgenic food labeling have emphasized the right to know but not yet a need to know.
The Genesis of Inadequate, Abusive, Misconceived Science—And What the Supreme Court Could Have Done About it If it Had Wanted To Take Action
Chapter 43
The need to know about the health and environmental destruction caused by Monsanto’s transgenic crops arises from the original misconception when Monsanto started their transgenic project. At that time, one gene was believed to correspond to one trait. From this, view of reality, arose the idea that a new trait could be added to the DNA of a crop without affecting the functionality of the original and remaining plant DNA. Traits were thought to be added the same way a person might put on a hat or a pair of shoes, but this not the way genetics works, and that is now well understood scientifically.
Many complex interactions occur, and from this complexity, toxins, allergens, new proteins, new diseases, nutritional impairments and other impacts can be unleashed. Some of them may not emerge until future generations, or they may be compounded or enabled as a result of interactive evolution. Much is still not fully or adequately understood, but it should have been before Monsanto’s transgenic crops were put onto the market.
Some impacts may be primary and relatively immediate, but they might not be understood or expected if no one understands enough to be looking for them. If the connections are not understood, the results of them will not be seen, and that has been the observed situation.
Other results may be secondary and revealed in subsequent generations. This group has not had enough time to fully emerge yet in the human population, but one red flag in the great increase in the incidence of autism. This could be the result of the diet consumed by the children and by the diet eaten by the parents. Both could be a factor. Centrally important in the view of recent studies is the relationship between autism and intestinal health. Until recently, little had been known about the relationship between the gut and the brain.
In the face of emergent reality, review of the lawsuit by the Supreme Court was hoped for as a way to address the blatantly destructive abortion of justice, wisdom, and pursuit of truth resulting from the lower court decisions. Outrageous abandonment of essential democratic accountability and respectful natural wisdom were also understood in both of the lower court decisions, and this would have resulted in part from court short-comings in technical competence and judicial independence.
The core question for the Supreme Court was whether Monsanto’s tyranny against the Commons should be assisted or repaired—and whether the former image of U.S. moral and democratic integrity would be important enough to permit our arguments to be brought to court. Judging by the decision made, they must not have been.
The Supreme Court was provided an opportunity to stand up for the pursuit of truth or show the nation in naked support of the self-serving assertion of Monsanto’s exploitive, patent-abusing, corporate power. There was no other choice for the Justices. Through their inaction, the nation was shown to be flagrante delicto in bed with Monsanto. Otherwise, the lawsuit would have gone back to Federal District Court for a trial on the merits. With that, Judge Buchwald would have been able to redeem herself in the eyes of history, but first she would have needed to rule on two motions.
Monsanto had stated plans to file a second dismissal motion and to also ask for a change of venue to St. Louis where judges have always been friendly and supportive toward Monsanto. No doubt, they felt they would have a home court advantage and also a psychological benefit in their home city close by their corporate headquarters where thousands of people are Monsanto employees.
If Judge Buchwald permitted the change of venue, perhaps out of disinterest in the case on her part, the lawsuit and our attorneys might have been thrown into the arena with the lions, but we have an attorney whose name is Daniel. That might have been hopeful at least from the perspective of the resulting media coverage.
If the lawsuit would have done to trial either in New York City or St. Louis, the result of the trial would have been appealed to the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit again by whichever side would have lost and maybe by both sides if they were both dissatisfied with the outcome in Federal District Court. This would have given the appellate judges another bite of the apple. Like Judge Buchwald, they would have needed that if they wanted to appear more like Moses than like Nero in the historical record. They should also have wanted to do the needed homework on the second try, so not to appear as toads.
The Demand for Informed Judges in the Face of Cultural Complexities They Lack the Background Knowledge to Understand and Decide About
Chapter 44
At the earliest, based on the history of the initial lawsuit, a new lawsuit would likely not come back to the Appeals Court until at least 2017, so that gives plenty of time for the homework to be done during nights and weekends. Because of the complexity of the issues, the judges will need to get started. There is much ground work to do. Watching films could help, too, but it will not be enough.
Some of the material needed is on this Web site, but more should be sought on both sides of the issue. The bibliography on this site is suggestive, not exhaustive. It is designed to show the range of the available materials with a short summary or some initial quoted text from each article. The goal is to provide a starting point.
The project could be treated like a Master’s thesis with a similar amount research effort required. Judges may not be accustomed to that amount of background work, but no one should want to be sorely unprepared when their moment in history arrives. They would not have wanted to be at Normandy beach on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) in a bathing suit and sunglasses holding a beach chair. That would have been the wrong level of preparation for the provided moment in history. No one, including judges, can know when opportunities will arrive to be on the right side of history, so readiness is unforgivingly basic.
If the judges ruling on the initial lawsuit were not caught
with their pants down on their first try, they would have done differently than they did, or they would have been dedicated to promoting Monsanto’s agenda—and they might not want to admit that publicly. Better for them if they would not want to look bad in the eyes of history a second time. Because all four lower court judges came to their historical opportunity blind to its requirements, they have already missed their first gifted moment to stand proudly in the right place in the historical record.
Accordingly, they should want to fix that on the second round, and they should be grateful to have a second chance provided for them. Many others have not been as lucky in getting a second date with destiny. General Custer is one example, and he even brought his own publicity agent, so no date with history was unpublicized.
When the Supreme Court missed its date to pick up the cudgel after the four preceding judges had dropped it, they guaranteed a longer delay before anyone would get a second chance. They have often had to repair what the judges of the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit have done wrong, but that did not happen this time even if the justification for it was greater than any other in the past.
When the repair has been needed on other occasions, the decisions have sometimes been sent back to the Federal Circuit for reconsideration with instructions. When that happens, the appellate judges can reconsider what they did, or they can insist the Supreme Court was wrong. The differences in perspective can be striking. Often, the judges of the Federal Circuit Court see the trees while the Supreme Court is commonly better at seeing the forest.
This time, the decision making process was left to be repaired at some time in the future when better understandings and greater wisdom become possible. Few are paying attention now, but that will not be the circumstance forever. History will eventually sort it out. The truth cannot be hidden forever, and the studies needed to seek it will not be blocked indefinitely either.
The remaining question is about the cost of the delay and who will pay that cost. Monsanto has been pursuing its weak, outdated kindergarten science, jumping to exploit it before they understood the consequences or wanted to worry about them—and before they found the moral prudence needed to avoid them. Both the courts and politicians have helped them to do that, so now the judges might start to feel obligated to repair what they got wrong—if they are yet able to see it that way. They may not be, and if hubris overrules, they will not be.
In eventually addressing the legal and moral issues, the justices, too, will need to reveal more than short-sighted ideology and defensive persistence on behalf of their past failures. They will need to see the consequences of their past decisions, morally, legally, environmentally, nutritionally, healthfully, politically, and economically, understanding the way to admit them and correct them in the public interest. The presented image of U.S. democracy at home and the prevented admiration for the capitalist ideal abroad may be as important as any other part of Monsanto’s perpetrated transgenic tragedy.
The repair of past failure will require more than hiring technical support personnel to help judges and justices master complex subjects they do not understand. The morality of the issues will also need to be addressed. Important will be a desire to stand up against companies like Monsanto and their political allies in the Congress and the White House. Truth, wisdom, and justice will need to become more important than money and political power. That could be the greatest challenge.
Tracking the Troubles Arising from Monsanto’s Transgenic Bt Toxin
Chapter 45
World respect for U.S. Capitalism has suffered as people have perceived what Monsanto does and as they have suffered the impacts of it. Even in Europe, where many nations have banned transgenic crops, people are suffering the impacts. Most of the meat they eat is fed in feedlots on transgenic corn, soy, and maybe cottonseed meal. If the blood of Europeans was tested, it would likely reveal the same Bt toxins revealed in Canada during 2011 when the blood of women of child-bearing age was tested. Over 90% of them tested positive.
Monsanto assured people the Bt toxin in their crops would be destroyed in the digestive tract of humans and would not punch holes in their gut wall the same as it does in gut of insects, but that claim has proved to be untrue. If the Bt toxin is found in the blood of people, it is getting through the gut wall, and the transgenic form of Bt toxin is known to be more poisonous than Bt in the non-transgenic bacterial form long used to combat pests.
In its natural form Bt has been used acceptably and prudently in organic agriculture; it does its job and is washed off, but Bt in its transgenic form, incorporated into the cells of plants is a different matter. It is like the difference between a poisonous snake and a non-poisonous snake or an alligator and a lizard. Canadian researchers showed organ damage and damage to human cells, but they were not the first to reveal the adverse consequences of Bt toxin in the human body.
In 1998, after a three year, multi-center, taxpayer-funded study led from the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, Arpad Pusztai reported on the health impacts resulting from feeding rats on a balanced diet including a portion of transgenic Bt potato. The study showed: multiple kinds of organ damage, impaired immune function, sacrificed fertility, inflammation of the gut lining, and among other impacts, particularly an impact on the ability of the pancreas to perform. Bt toxin was shown to travel in the blood directly to the pancreas.
The studies performed under Pusztai’s leadership only lasted 90 days, so they were not long enough to see an impact on obesity or on future generations, but they did reveal conditions leading toward diabetes, and they did show the opposite of obesity: a failure of rats to thrive.
When Pusztai said in a television interview with the ITC he would not eat the Bt potatoes, a scandal erupted in Britain that is known as the Pusztai Affair. More is in a 40-minute video here. Since then, more confirming studies have been needed to understand more, and the Canadian study more that a decade later has begun to address that need. The shortage of necessary studies is a direct result of the ability of biotech companies, particularly Monsanto, to control the research agenda.
If the United States had been an honorable and diligent, truth-seeking nation and not the captive of Monsanto, studies would have been conducted in the United States following up on the work of Pusztai and his co-workers to verify and confirm the results, but that did not happen. Reportedly, President Clinton called Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Blair called Rowett to have Pusztai fired, gagged, and discredited. The gag lasted six months until the UK Parliament called a hearing to examine the underlying facts and find out the truth.
That event was covered by the media, and it resulted in over 700 news stories throughout Europe. That is how the European market for the transgenic potatoes died, and the European public attitude toward all transgenic food was also shaped. Prime Minister Blair changed his mind, too, but Monsanto did not finally decide to end its efforts in Europe and withdraw its European lobbyists until 15 years later in the summer of 2013. Maybe it took that long for the message from Europeans to penetrate.
Some say they have just backed up a distance so they can prepare for a running start in the future. That could happen if nothing is done in the United States to examine the merits of transgenic food. More likely for now, they are focusing resources on the battles in the United States and trying to expand their markets in other places.
Maybe they believe they can penetrate other markets around the world enough to be able to force their way into Europe after that. With sales in developing nations exceeding U.S. sales for the first time, small Chinese and Indian farmer have proved to be an easier mark, and clearly 15 million of them make a much larger market even when the amount of seed sold to each is smaller.
The text in this photograph refers to the company decision in 2002 to keep the Monsanto name, when the new Monsanto company was created to carry on the agricultural part of the business, focusing on transgenic seeds and the associated chemicals.
The Unstudied Implications for Human Health Resulting from Meat Raised on Monsanto’s Transgenic Feed—And the Hapless, Erroneous Gift of Utility Patents in 2001
Chapter 46
Several years ago in about 2011, Monsanto announced the intention to earn half of their corporate revenue from developing nations within five years, and in 2013, they achieved that goal. That could be a more promising strategy in Monsanto’s corporate mind than pounding against the steadfast determination among many in EU nations to avoid growing or consuming transgenic food.
The trouble is Europeans are consuming meat raised on transgenic feed, and that may be just as bad or worse than consuming transgenic crops directly. The needed meat studies have not been made in the United States or elsewhere, but they should have been as important as any other studies about transgenic farming and food. The failure to do the required research before Monsanto’s transgenic crops on the market may be the biggest mistake ever committed in all of world history, but more information is needed to be sure. Nonetheless, the high costs can be projected based on what is known.
The bottom line question is whether or not the United States is in the tank wanting to support consolidated corporate, monopoly control over food and farming around the world. That issue should have been as important as any other when the Supreme Court read our petition for review of the two lower court decisions.
Whether or not transgenic food is healthful and safe may be secondary—even as important as the health, safety, and nutritional consequences are. The primary issue may be about Monsanto’s domination and control over the seed market and the implications that issue has for crop diversity, resiliency, and gene pool corruption.
At present, Monsanto and a small handful of other biotech seed companies own half of all the world’s seed supply, and Monsanto owns half of this biotech half or a quarter of the total world seed supply. That control has been gained through the use of utility patents that were enabled in 2001 by a 6-2 Supreme Court decision in J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a decision written by Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who had worked as a Monsanto attorney a quarter-century earlier in their Government Operations office.
Some have said Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the decision and from all other decisions where Monsanto has been the major beneficiary. This might have happened for the sake of appearances if nothing else, but it did not happen, even though Justice Breyer recused himself from the Geertson Seed decision because his brother had ruled on the case in Federal District Court in California. That connection would seem to less close than the connection established by Thomas.
Instead of being a liability at the time of his appointment to the court, Justice Thomas’s Monsanto experience was viewed as a supportive recommendation when he was elevated to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 after hardly a year serving on the Appeals Court of the D.C. Circuit. This was a time when politics were heavily motivated by deregulatory ideology favoring the opportunity for corporations to be free to profit without government oversight or meddling, so Thomas’s corporate experience was viewed as a virtue.
The pro-Monsanto stance, shared in the past by a majority the Supreme Court Justices and by the White House during recent Republican and Democratic Presidencies, is at the root of the problems caused by Monsanto. They have been able to do as they do because they do their own research into the safety and value of their transgenic crops, and the government only rubber-stamps that work without examining, reviewing, confirming, or commenting on it. Patents have been given to them the same way without extensive review.
For their own propaganda purposes, Monsanto likes to turn the issue around, saying there is a scientific consensus affirming the safety of their transgenic food, but it is a consensus only among those they have employed or contracted with in service to their own interests. To the contrary, through a public statement issued in Europe, hundreds of scientists around the world have established the lack of any independent, objective consensus showing the safety of transgenic food.
The Toothless Supreme Court Decision in the Geertson Seed Case and the Oblivious Habit of Judicial Stonewalling
Chapter 47
In the Geertson Seed lawsuit over the public release of transgenic alfalfa by Monsanto and Forage Genetics, the Supreme Court required an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before the crop could be released, but the EIS had no objective, independent meaning because it was prepared by cutting and pasting Monsanto’s research or the research from their sponsored and controlled studies. The USDA claimed it had no authority to do any more than that, but that has been disputed.
Additional regulatory legislation could have been called for either after the Geertson Seed decision or long before it, but it has not been requested. If the Congress were asked to pass it, the power of money in the U.S. political system would likely make it impossible. The United States has the best political system money can buy, not the kind admirable and respected integrity should need. As long as those with money have political power, and those without money are exploited and abused in their weakness, the system will remain as it has long been.
Even if many people give small contributions to support candidates, as they can do now through the Internet, they do not have influence matching the total volume of their contributions; they are not organized to wield it as the corporations are. That is how they are overpowered.
The reigning money-empowered distortion of the democratic ideal has created a genetic monster that should have been addressed by additional federal legislation to enable appropriate and admirable review, examination, and regulation of transgenic agriculture. In the absence of that, a forum is needed to enable the work, the Congress and the White House have not done.
The courts could provide the needed forum if they were not committed to the same pro-corporate perspectives, preferences, and ideology as the rest of the government.
Required is the thorough review of the issues governing whether or not Monsanto’s crops should have been given utility patents and should have been released publicly.
When the Congress and the Executive do not do their job, the only recourse is to the courts, but so far the courts have stonewalled the need to adjudicate the raised issues. They have protected Monsanto’s interests as if that should be their primary purpose regardless of the costs to the world-wide public health, the environment, and the international reputation of the United States.
The issue is no more complex than this, but four judges and nine justices have so far egregiously missed the point; they have not wanted to do the needed job any more than the rest of the government has, and they have also shown they do not understand the job needing to be done. They have given Monsanto a free pass on safety, healthfulness, environmental protection, and nutritional quality as if failure to look at the issues does not matter.
The Supreme Court essentially said they want to sustain Monsanto’s transgenic tyranny without allowing it to be examined in the public interest. The whole history of civilization may not ever face a more important decision, and yet the courts have been obliviously dismissive of the concern. It could dwarf the importance of decisions on all other issues routinely receiving much more attention.
To understand this, people must see and agree about the extensive damage. That requires investigation, but when people are disconnected from food and farming, taking both for granted, the need for that work is not perceived.
Many would not like to be charged with serving Monsanto’s corporate interest during their government service, but neither would they like to be faced with the need to prove—based on the available evidence—they had not done so.
Overcoming Monsanto’s Political Power, Incessant Lobbying, Monetary Leverage, and Continuing Decades of Enforced Public Ignorance
Chapter 48
Now that the Supreme Court has chosen to punt on the issues being raised for court attention and inasmuch as time will be needed to file a new lawsuit, the issue will need to be addressed in the meantime by the people and also the angels, because the Congress and the White House have already shown supine acquiescence under the heavy, oblivious, profit-pursuing, destructively-expedient feet of Monsanto’s egregious transgenic trespass. Facilitating this lack of concern, most citizens have not known what is going on or how it affects them.
Most people have been oblivious because the impacts and consequences have been hidden from them as if they should not matter, but they do matter. The facts must be illuminated and the ruling attitudes changed without delay because the core necessity of strong, credible democracy is: accountability to the people and responsibility to keep the people are informed about all matters important their health, safety, and welfare.
Without accountability, participation, inclusion, and community, the value of republican democracy evaporates—as it has. Once people become aware of the ways they have been abused and exploited, they will likely become angry and alienated, and then that also will assist in undermining and destroying democracy. The behavior by the government in collaboration with Monsanto is no better than the behavior by the Wall Street banks when they took down the economy in 2008.
When people start to wake up to their reality, the decades of politically promoted, anti-democratic, pro-Monsanto ignorance will begin to end, and the tyrants will ultimately be disposed of. The end could come like a wild-fire or a massive nationwide political tornado, but it could also continue to be retarded as it long has been.
Because of Monsanto’s power, many important events could be retarded. In New Hampshire that happened November 2013 when a legislative committee voted down a bill on transgenic food labeling on a party-line vote.
The same bipartisan coalition seen in Connecticut and Maine did not take shape, and that was because stiff corporate lobbying was activated against it. A response is needed from the public to counter the corporate strategy, but that will depend on the level of public attention to the importance of the issue in their lives.
The 2012 defeat on Proposition 37 in California helped grow the anti-Monsanto movement, and so did the campaign on Initiative 522 in Washington state. Possibly, defeat was better than easy victory in helping many people understand what has been happening, how it has been happening and for whose continued benefit.
The closeness of the vote in California sparked outrage and anger among many as people learned more about the issue and realized how the victory was achieved by five dozen companies and three trade associations armed with an overwhelming amount of money five times greater than the proponents of labeling had raised. The money gap was narrower in Washington state, because the proponents of labeling had more time to organize, but they still lacked enough time and money to win. In the U.S., money is required to reach people.
In the wake of the defeats, anti-Monsanto sentiments may have begun to spread more widely, but a positive outcome from the changing attitudes depends on how well people get organized to become fully informed to protect their interests against Monsanto’s depredations against agriculture, the food supply, and democracy. As a modest measure of what has happened, in early 2012 only a few songs could be found on the Internet or on YouTube about Monsanto, but by mid-2013 dozens of them had been written and posted. All movements to promote political change need the support of music.
Some of the songs were aired as commercials and spread virally in support of the transgenic food-labeling campaign. Against this grassroots rising of popular sentiment, the brutality Monsanto employed in the past to attack critics no longer works, and when it is attempted, it backfires, but the power of Monsanto’s campaign contributions and political allies can still work in legislatures the same way they have worked to control and dominate the U.S. Congress and the White House.
This is the final photograph from the interviewing in Northvale, New Jersey.
Monsanto’s Galloping Trojan Horse—and Judges Flying Under the Public Radar
Chapter 49
The history of the Monsanto attacks on critics and even scientists doing their job and coming up with findings adverse to Monsanto’s interests is now understood by a larger group of people, though not nearly large enough. Through its unreasonable harshness and Nazi-style propaganda tactics, Monsanto has given itself an identity at least in the eyes of a growing minority and maybe as many as almost half of the nation’s voting population.
Among other details reported as part of the history, Monsanto is known to have employed Blackwater (now called Academi—following a second name change) and other similarly aggressive and flagrant groups to infiltrate and disrupt opposing organizations. More about this story is in the film, “Scientists Under Attack” by Bertram Verhaag of Denkmal Films. Even if the film cannot report everything, it highlights much. The film trailer is here, and still more about it can be found here.
As a result of its tactics and business methods, Monsanto cannot be forgiven by many people. For that reason, their goose may be cooked as more people learn the history and learn about their tactics. The company is credible with a diminishing group of people but that group still clearly includes at least four judges and maybe five justices; it has diminishing public support or trust, especially when it has been found by some non-scientific polling to be considered an evil corporation.
The “polling” is the result of a readership survey participated in by 16,000 readers of the online publication Natural News. Fifty-one percent considered Monsanto to be the most evil corporation with the U.S. Federal Reserve second at 20%. Monsanto depends on their biotech corporate allies, paid shills, purchased advertising, deception, political funding, collaborating politicians, lobbying, astroturf organizations, and public relations groups like APCO International and others.
APCO is the organization used by the tobacco industry when they were fighting against the emergence of truth about their products, but it is only one of several organizations they have plied with massive amounts of money to help them sustain their agenda. They are reported to employ a full-time staff of about 50 to help them protect their public relations interests in the U.S.
Confidence has not been inspired among many who understand the impact of the Monsanto PR effort. Among those assisting them has been the Farm Bureau, and without its help the ballot initiative campaigns in California and Washington state likely could not have been won. The Farm Bureau is their loyal Trojan Horse.
Now, to follow up on the direct voting by the people, Monsanto can next try to file lawsuits against the states passing labeling laws, but that tactic can only work as long as the public is passive. Once the people get outraged about the issues at trial or the way decisions are being made by judges, both the plaintiffs and the judges will become more discredited. When judges are seen serving Monsanto’s corporate interest ahead of the people, they build the same negative sentiments seen for many years against the Congress and the White House.
In the past, the public commonly has showed little interest in the outcome of court cases, but that has been changing over recent years, and it is partly a function of the amount of attention the media pays to the cases. As more coverage is seen, more people have started to understand the power of the court to affect their lives. Then when people see their own ox in the arena, and they understand the issues at stake, more note is taken.
Citizens have not taken note of our lawsuit because they do not understand how it relates to them, and the media have not helped them to understand that. A conclusion must be reached from this: either the media does not to understand any better than the people or that they do not want to understand, but that could also change.
Public docility has given judges latitude to perpetrate pro-corporate, pro-Monsanto abuse, and they have used it with impunity to sustain corporate power against the public need. Without risk of public scrutiny or criticism and with the corporate mainstream and tribal media steadfastly pro-Monsanto, judges fly under the radar.
This is the first photograph from interviewing of citizens and visitors in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Media Collaboration, Propagandistic Exploitation, and Political Manipulation
Chapter 50
More citizens need to be exposed to the health and environmental issues through the news outlets they depend on, and that needs to happen before they would understand why our lawsuit should matters to them. Our lawsuit would be hard for the media to ignore if it would go to trial, and that would be the reason Monsanto has wanted to prevent it from coming before the courts.
Until now, they have been able to influence the coverage provided by the corporate mainstream media, and they have an extensive stable of flacks shaping the coverage and influencing both what is covered and what is ignored. They place op-eds by allied scientists stating the Monsanto arguments, and they use allied groups with advertising leverage to assist in applying pressure.
Monsanto’s press and media organization is a difficult juggernaut to fight. They are highly professional, and they have been doing the same job for years. They hire multiple agencies, so they can compete with each other for needed results. They make an insider sport of it.
News affects Monsanto’s fortunes, so they find it worth the funds to do whatever they need to do to influence or control news coverage and editorial opinion. That is why they spent so much to defeat Proposition 37 in California and Initiative 522 in Washington. They were particularly successful there at shaping major newspaper editorials.
Nonetheless, the media climate is changing. The Monsanto claim that their critics are anti-science Luddites cannot work when more people are informed and standing up against that assertion. Many people now realize more and better science is needed, and when that is broadly clear to many people, Monsanto’s deceptive manipulations, ad hominem attacks, and propagandistic diversions become exposed for what they are. The truth about it can be suppressed for only a limited time. Via the Internet if not yet in the news media, word spreads.
Eventually, the emergence of truth can no longer be prevented, and when it does emerge, it burns hot. As an example, when the so-called Farmer Assurance Provision (AKA The Monsanto Protection Act) was clandestinely inserted into the Continuing Budget Resolution through the collaboration between Monsanto’s lobbyists and allied farm groups like the Farm Bureau and the American Soybean Association. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was the inside man serving as the weasel, but the backlash was definitive.
The project did more to expose Monsanto’s tactics and help build the opposition against them than anything their opponents could have done by themselves in six months or a year. When the attention of the “The Daily Show” is attracted, and the project gets lampooned there, it might have been better to think twice about the project in the first place. When Fox News starts to cover the issues you want ignored that becomes a second reason to better reassess your political strategies.
To do as they did, Monsanto and their lobbyists needed to fly under the radar and not be found out, but that has happened more easily in the past. They have undermined themselves, but that experience will not probably end their use of the same tactics again anymore than a leopard can change its spots. They have to use the only tools they have available, and once all the so-called research they have propped up over the years is shot full of holes, they are left whistling Dixie like tobacco shills.
The tactics Monsanto uses have become virtually habitual and driven by inertia, and they do not have any other tools in their toolbox any more than Josef Stalin had more than brutalizing hammers to sustain his tyranny. A poisonous snake cannot turn itself into a purring kitten. They have to live with the image they have created. To enable something different, they would have needed to show dedication to the truth many years ago before their corporate image was established through the behavior they have chosen to pursue.
They have hired new agencies to help them craft a new, more positive image, but given the baggage of the past, it cannot work unless they would make real change and want the become truly transparent. That they do not want to do, because it mean the end of their company. Accordingly, they only want to project the image of transparency without allowing the reality of it—ever.
Tarring Monsanto, their Political Allies, and the Corporate Media with the Same Brush—Before They Deliver Civilization to Self-Destruction
Chapter 51
If Monsanto was honorable, they would want the truth about their products to be known, and they would want to deliver real long-term benefit before they offered anything, but they know they could not sell anything if they were honest and transparent, so their only hope for success is through the power of money and devious subterfuge. The will continue to do that until the rope runs out on them; that is their only possible strategy.
No other strategy is possible when they have no other benefits to offer. The question now is how long the courts want to collaborate with these tactics and lend their support to them. The more the people figure out what is going on, the more judges will be tarred with the same moral brush as Monsanto is. The same issue will soon be before the Congress and the White House as the food-labeling campaign gathers momentum, but it will likely take more than the votes seen so far on labeling in a few states to move the national project forward.
The next step is to move beyond the need for labeling information to clear knowledge of the damage and destruction being done. Those facts are available, but mostly not from studies in the United States. Because many of the studies come from abroad and they have not been reported in the United States, the knowledge gap is wide even though some U.S. researchers are beginning to retire and are starting to tell about what they know.
The Food Revolution Network led by John and Ocean Robbins organized an on-line symposium on Monsanto’s system of agriculture at the end October 2013 in collaboration with Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette. With free interviews broadcast on the Internet every Sunday through the beginning of December, the project reached a significant audience even if it needs to reach millions more. The first day attracted 45,000 participants around the world.
The number of U.S. participants was not made clear and it may not be known. Possibly most of the interest was from abroad, but maybe some of it came from Washington state where people were focusing on transgenic food labeling. One of the speakers was a retired Canadian government former advocate for transgenic agriculture who retired and changed his view as the result of seeing the full picture in greater detail.
Monsanto’s myopic, exploitive, government-assisted tyranny is not only against farmers; everyone is the victim of it though some are collaborating victims. Many farmers are self-destructively collaborating victims against their own long-term interests because the short-term benefits are more important to them than the long-term costs. They join with Monsanto in exploiting and abusing the public health, the environment, especially the soil, domestic livestock, wildlife, and all of the world’s citizens, but the issues are not well understood.
Codified and common law legal principles plus the morality and responsible ethics formerly protecting farmers, citizens, animals, bees, butterflies, soil health, even microorganisms, and basic property rights have been trampled. This has happened as even many family farmers have become collaborators in the industrial agricultural and monocultural destruction. They have been forced by the government-imposed pressures of the U.S. farm program to get bigger and more destructive.
These pressures are designed to produce profit for agribusiness, and now Monsanto is the leading beneficiary. The abuse of farm law for the benefit of agribusiness started before Monsanto joined in it, but they have become more adept at the exploitation than many others before them. As a result, much of the food produced is dangerous to consume, and people must exercise more care in food purchasing than in the past.
The U.S. agricultural system has become an engine of national and international self-destruction through its health and environmental damage. The trouble is most people, including judges and justices, do not yet have the tools and the breadth of perspective to understand what has been happening. As a result the need for knowledge is supplanted by arrogance, but no one else’s word should be taken on this assertion. That’s why our lawsuit was brought to court. Other wise a book would have been written, and the issue would have been left at that.
Non-Consenting Human Guinea Pigs Worse Than Feudal Serfs—and the Now Emerging Technological Answer to It
Chapter 52
Evasion of the damaging cultural reality has prevented and stonewalled reliably independent, objective, disinterested investigation of the abuses resulting from Monsanto’s patented transgenic crops. With governmentally enabled and aided misinformation and denial of information, the people have lacked the knowledge they need to protect their own welfare and the welfare of their descendants throughout continuing future generations. As the full truth begins to be understood, Monsanto must be called to account for it.
When the people understand they have been virtually enslaved as non-consenting guinea pigs in a massive biological experiment nobody told them about or enabled them to consider, everyone helping Monsanto should deservedly go down with them. Even if they do not go to jail as many should, they will be remembered in the history books—or in the future archeological record of what happened to the present civilization when it may be discovered under the glaciers of some future Ice Age.
Both farmers and citizens have been abused, controlled, dominated, and exploited worse than feudal serfs, and it is only a question of time before they start to understand that. Then the rats will start to jump from the sinking ship—if they can. Already Mars, Kraft, Unilever, and others have ended their participation in the multi-million dollar campaign against the labeling of transgenic food. They demurred in Washington state after being large contributors in California in 2012.
Mars gave a half million dollars to fight Proposition 37 but nothing against Initiative 522. Ben and Jerry’s prevailed on their owner, Unilever, to remain on the sidelines, and Ben and Jerry’s have announced the elimination of all transgenic ingredients from their products by the end of 2013. Changes in company policy have occurred in part because of a consumer boycott against all products made by the companies opposing the ballot initiatives, and this has happened not just in California and Washington but but also in other states.
The impact may have also been felt in other nations where the impact may have been cumulatively much greater than it has been in California and Washington. Those opposing transgenic food are a large enough group to cause a significant impact on sales volume.
Most of the drop-out companies may have decided that fighting over transgenics is a losing idea in the long run, and that coupled with the backlash impact would have been the key reasons for dropping out of the project. Few would likely have had a moral “come-to-Jesus moment” that suddenly introduced moral consciousness into their manifested thinking, but that would not be impossible.
In addition to other pragmatic considerations, the market for food products carrying the Non-GMO Project label has grown by 15-30% according to a report from Whole Foods. The only trouble is: this food can, under the rules, have up to .9% of transgenic content, and no one knows if even that small amount of transgenic contamination is healthful. If that much was not allowed, companies would not collaborate with the Non-GMO Project. That is the practical reality of the program and not a guarantee of anything for the benefit of consumers.
Companies can mix shipments to get the transgenes minimized or below the .9% threshold, but they still may not be able to lower the transgenic content to zero even if they wanted to. Most important, they cannot ferret out that content and remove it from the rest of the product.
The technology to do that does not exist even though a way to do it can be imagined. The cost of doing it could be prohibitive at least until the clear necessity for doing it can be understood. That could be established once the needed studies are no longer evaded by Monsanto through the use of its patent ownership defense strategy.
Because of the testing done by the Non-GMO project’s participating companies, they may be less contaminated than some organic products that can pass the looser standard set by the National Organic Program (NOP). With the NOP allowing an unlimited amount of transgenic content if no one knows about it and no one has tested for it, it might open the door to much more potential contamination than the Non-GMO Project will.
Testing is not required under the NOP, and the zero toleration for contamination is only in effect when producers know that transgenic contamination exists. Monsanto has often said the answer for those who do not want to eat transgenic food is to buy organic, but that is not true, and they know it is not true. They also do not want a more stringent organic standard to be established because that would focus more attention on the issue.
The executives at Whole Foods have also advised people to eat organic food if they want to avoid transgenic food, but that is only a reliable solution to the problem in the case of those sources that reliably, fully, and carefully test every shipment. Because the testing involves only a sample from a truckload or a bin, the test may not find amounts of contamination that could be missed by the sampling. The problem will not be ended until everyone can have their own reliable and accurate hand-held device to test all food before they buy it or consume it.
With a Spectrographic Scanner Now on a Chip—Public Ignorance Could Be Ended
Chapter 53
This answer is not beyond the realm of technical possibility, and the cost of the devices will not be prohibitive either. Already devices are in development that can recognize chemical pollutants, gluten, allergens, and other things people want to know about their food from a spectrographic scan. In time, the analysis algorithms will recognize the signature of transgenic food and compare the nutritional content of the same food from different sources. When that is possible consumers will know much they have not yet known.
The device will not work through packaging, but once the power to test food is in the hands of the people, they will be able to buy packaged food, test it, and post the results of their testing for the benefit of others. If the government wanted to perform a public service, they could be doing this already using larger scanning equipment that is more costly. Generic food is scanned so a rough idea of the nutritional content can be posted but processed foods are yet not scanned, and that may be the most important foods to be scanned for many people.
The only possible reasons the government would not be providing this public service are:
1. the public has not demanded it, even though it would be technically possible if nutritional quality was important to most people to know about or
2. government officials do not want to provide this service because they want to support the agribusiness desire to keep the public in ignorance. For political reasons that have been made clear for decades in the United States, the second reason is most likely to be the biggest reason. That would be the reason when exploiting people for corporate profit is more important than public service and the need to lower health costs.
Until recently, scanners cost as much as a house, but now that is changing so people can be empowered. Hand-held scanners are democratically empowering in a way that has never been made possible before. The result could be a food revolution, because more people will become focused on the quality and content of their food.
The government has released tables showing the nutrient content of different foods, but this information depends on the soil the food was grown in. No one can know if the kale or turnip the government analyzed has the same nutritional value as those in the store today. The only way to know the true content is to analyze the food at the time when it is going to be eaten. Food loses its nutritional quality as the result of storage and shipment; it is not the same later as it was when it was picked. For this reason, food freshness is important.
The ability of people to test their own food will increase the importance of farmers’ markets, and it will increase the competition between sellers at a farmers’ market as well as the competition between farmers’ markets and stores. The food scanning device will likely be able to recognize pathogens on food as well as chemicals in them, so it could be a tool in the fight against botulism, salmonella, and more. Once the amount of Glyphosate and its adjuvants in food can be known, people will be able to have a choice about that as well as about the transgenic profile of the food or the transgenic content.
Technology will have accomplished an end-run around the fight by industry to prevent the labeling of transgenic content, and then their lobbying and expenditures will aim to regulate the use of the technology. They can be expected to want to buy the companies developing the technology the same way they bought Beelogics and other companies with technologies pertinent to their agricultural system, but they will be fighting a rear guard defense unless they can tighten the extent of their totalitarian control over both people and government.
Because elected and appointed officials have ignored the responsible public service demanding investigation of transgenic food safety and nutritional quality and because public ignorance has been promoted and sustained as chronic illness in the United States has nearly doubled alongside over 80 transgenic crops or varieties of crops publicly released without a single denial, the growth in public knowledge will have electoral implications. As long as Monsanto’s claims are rubber-stamped without examination, this will happen.
Worse than DDT, King George III, and Al Capone
Chapter 54
The released transgenic food and feed crops include varieties of corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, cotton, alfalfa, zucchini, crook-neck squash, papaya, and Kentucky blue grass. All these crops and forages have either been developed by Monsanto or using their technologies. Additional varieties and other crops, including some resistant to more health-endangering herbicides are in the USDA approval pipeline. A Dow variety of corn resistant to the herbicide 2-4D is first up for approval.
In addition to these crops on the market for sale, as many as 50 weed varieties have developed Roundup resistance either by picking up the trait from soil bacteria or from other micro-organisms—or by developing their resistance through conventional evolution. If someone were to find a way to commercialize weeds with the patented Monsanto trait, Monsanto would certainly claim patent infringement. They would have to do that to defend their patent rights.
One commercial venue could be the use of fast growing super weeds for cellulosic ethanol production. Cellulosic conversion is many times more efficient than the use of corn to make ethanol. Corn ethanol is economically marginal at best depending on the corn price, and it is even worse as a net energy issue, given the large amount of energy needed in the chain of production. Mostly, corn ethanol has been dependent on subsidies, and the subsidies started as a Republican political project to cement political support in heartland farming states.
In the past, Monsanto has made clear their goal to establish patent-protected control over all seeds. In pursuit of that objective, with government assent and assistance, they have acquired more than 70 seed companies including other seed company aggregators. Seed diversity is the victim, and eventually its consequences will become painful along with the other destructive, high-cost consequences of Monsanto’s technology. The truth cannot possibly be evaded forever.
If democracy and republican idealism was more than an empty shell on the issues we have raised through our lawsuit, government officials would not want to be Monsanto’s toads, but for now they are in bed with Monsanto as if it were a Mafia Godfather. Government collaboration with Monsanto is both the cause and the direct, tragic result of the pro-biotech, pro-corporate deregulation and facilitation. None of it would have been if Monsanto and its allies did not have a large amount of money to spread around within the U.S. political system.
Monsanto also could have never become what it is apart from the promotion and aggressive establishment of a money-subservient, corporately obsequious, wealth-as-speech, plutocratic oligarchy in the United States. The process of its ascendency has not been that much different from the ascendant domination of Sicily by the Mafia or the rise and empowerment of Al Capone in Chicago. Money talks, and that is why the people have been made politically weak in the United States. They do not have the ability to play the money-empowered game.
The agricultural cornerstone of all civilization is under intensive threat as the result of this political game with Monsanto and their pro-biotech, pro-corporate allies creating a tyrannically oppressive governing autocracy on all matters related to their naively-conceived and expediently-exploitative transgenic seeds. The seeds have been no more than a ruse to help them sell more increasingly damaging chemicals—worse than DDT with subversive, sycophantic, unrestrained government help.
Historically and still, gangsters always find facilitators and loyal followers who feel they have something to gain from their patronage, and that lasts as long as there is a patrimony to sustain it. It is not a perpetual motion machine, and neither is Monsanto. When the costs of its exploitation are clear, its gas will run out—terminally.
Then, the main question will be: who is going to be left to cover the costs related to all the health and ecological damage. Eventually if not soon, the provable culpability will be sufficient to justify many damage suits, and a hand-held spectrographic scanner could make small amounts of transgenic contamination easy to discover.
Aided by a government filled with contribution-dependent, money-worshipping, corporately-loyal lackeys, Monsanto sits for now on its U.S. throne with more aggregate power than King George III had in 1776. From that vantage, they fight our lawsuit because it would pave the way to making damage suits against them easier to file. In service to their shareholders, they need to prevent that as long as they can, but they cannot do it forever anymore than King George III could preserve monarchy as the world’s dominant governing ideal.
As the Gene Pool is Corrupted, the Future of Life is in the Balance as the Presentation of Evidence is Demanded from Both Sides
Chapter 55
King George III was a tin-horn dictator by comparison with Monsanto, and the War of Independence was fought over much less important abuses and exploitations than those now seen from Monsanto. When that is finally understood, the end for them will be near. Given the high continuing costs, it cannot arrive too soon, but most people are still lost in the nightmare without seeing its significance. The continuation of the nightmare was unconscionably aided and abetted by both Judge Buchwald and the Federal Circuit’s Appellate judges.
Both courts should be among those receiving the bill for the health care costs and the continuing environmental damage, but others in the government should be in line ahead of them. If they were, and if they shared in real, monetary liability for what they do in their official capacity, much greater effort would be made to make sure they made good decisions in good faith and in the public interest, but as long as money rules whether or not truth, wisdom, and justice is promoted, the tragic U.S. story will continue to be written as it has been.
The agony cannot end until the dawn comes and more people, including judges, wake up to the tragic reality they have allowed to persist. The future of life is at stake, but when policy makers spend half their time and most of their energy raising money for the next election campaign, they do not have time to understand the mess resulting from their money-distorted, time-restricted, and otherwise distracted political or personal priorities.
The values of pro-corporate, pro-biotech judges are as poorly or insufficiently informed and misplaced as those of much of the rest of the government, but the arrival of sunlight will focus disinfecting rays on all of them. Their work will be known for what it has been. The judgment of rapidly unfolding history will become inescapable.
Based on observed history, elected and appointed officials, including judges, usually do not wake up from the perpetuation of their nightmares until the people force them to wake up. Until then, they run on inertia without much will to be visionary leaders or wise decision makers on anything. They are followers of whatever the political and economic status quo has given them to follow. People are herd animals, and judges are no less herd-bound followers than any other groups.
The well-established judicial sense of self-importance may prevent judges from learning anything more than they think they already know, and most of what they may think they know may also be no more than ideology or prejudice. For many, that has proved to be good enough or maybe all they have either the time or appetite for when they see their role as defending the establishment.
The amount of time needed to keep up with important transformative moral complexities is beyond the evident available capacity of many, and especially so when they rely on the mainstream, corporate, and tribal media to provide whatever information they feel the need to know. Bringing internal change in this information environment is like turning around a big ship in a small harbor. It takes a great deal of cautious finesse, but the most important detail is the will to finally take action.
Judges cannot possibly obtain everything they would need to understand on the issues we are raising from the briefings and amicus filings of the two contesting parties. They need to be more broadly informed than that, and they would want to be if they preferred to be accountable to the people ahead of amoral corporations.
Through their decisions, judges fly their political colors, but they do not usually want to fly them very high because they are partisans of the need to do as they do without alerting the public to the impacts of it. They try to fly under the public radar the same as Monsanto does, and they have been able to get away with that for more decades than Monsanto has. The system was designed to work this way; the operational reality is not an accident.
The people have paid the price for this behavior, and that is why the accounting of history will require judges to stand in the dock alongside companies and politicians. King George III could have done differently than he did when his moment in history came, but he preferred the preservation of monarchical tyranny. The judges ruling on our lawsuit have made a similarly regressive choice.
The Discrediting of U.S. Democracy as the Naked Emperor Destroys the Commons
Chapter 56
As long as court decisions do not get much public attention, as has been the case so far with both decisions in our lawsuit, Monsanto’s profitable tyranny has been allowed continue. Through continuing public obliviousness, the pro-corporate elite can rig the system to serve their own advantage. That enables the mutually-beneficial exploitation to continue, and that is why asserting and maintaining control over the media has been centrally important in advancing their project.
Visibly, Monsanto does not care if democracy and community die as a result of what they do. They only care about opportunistic advantage, control, and domination. As part of this political landscape, the judges of the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit, as the judges who hear all patent-related appeals, are likely to be proud of their judicial fiefdom even if they do not have the technical knowledge they would need to do well with it.
Because the judges of the Federal Circuit hear about 400 patent cases every year, they think they know a great deal more about the requirements of patent law than anyone else. Some have shown a clear belief suggesting they know more than the Supreme Court might know.
Many of the judges may not realize they spend so much time among the trees they have no view of the forest and little opportunity to gain the larger vantage they would need if they wanted to concern themselves about protecting the Commons for the benefit of everyone. Both judges and citizens have needed much more information than has been easily available or sought out by them, and this promoted denial of information or willful disinterest in knowledge has been both an intention and a flagrant failing of the political culture.
Democratic government cannot work without full access to the information necessary to its success. When that is blocked, the U.S. democratic ideal becomes impossible and even shameful. As an inescapable result, it can only be discredited and public officials along with it. They will go down with the ship of state the same way King George III went down two centuries ago. That is foreordained, because the nature of the era demands more education, information, and knowledge than was true in the past.
The difficulty is: the people on the inside of the system do not know what they look like to the people on the outside and in other nations. They are in the same position as the fabled naked emperor, but they do not know enough to realize that. They only know enough to feel gratified by the systemic self-importance of their role, and that can be seen between the lines of both lower court decisions. Because of that, the decisions needed to be reviewed by the Supreme Court if the justices of that court did not suffer the same affliction.
Whatever the perceived limitations of the Supreme Court may be from the perspective of one ideology or another—or one group or another, the justices have exhibited a better capacity to see the forest and avoid getting stuck in the trees or getting down among the squirrels, acorns, and chipmunks. In that broader reality lies the possibility and the opportunity for finding hope the United States can still live up to the promise it formerly exhibited at least sometimes—if only weakly.
Maybe great hope is impossible, but as long as some is available, it can be turned into the moral fuel needed to keep the fire burning. Hope is the only thing we have to live on—not just for ourselves but for everyone. In that, we are with Jesse Jackson doing our best to “keep hope alive.” No more is available when fate is in the hands of empowered others who may not know enough to do responsibly and effectively everything they need to do.
The more complex and detailed the adjudicated issues become, the harder it is to know everything needed to make the correct decisions about them. Very few judges probably went to agriculture school before they went to law school, and if they did over the past half-century since agricultural education has been dominated by agribusiness, they would have learned the wrong things. Unfortunately, this problem is not new. Even Jefferson, when he founded his university, did not put the emphasis he could have on agricultural knowledge.
Farming and food were important to him personally, but he did not make it centrally important in the curriculum of his university. Actually, he made it important in a way that was not much understood by those who followed subsequently as the stewards of his idea. He elegantly included the space necessary for kitchen gardens, but the importance of that core ideal has been sadly neglected.
So many things are on the wrong track in the United States, it hard to know how to straighten it all out or where the effort needs to start. The work is harder when those who should have the greatest wisdom, interest in justice, and commitment to truth are more a part of the problem than they are a part of the needed solution to it. This is the tragic U.S. affliction, but despite the problem now encountered with the courts, the people are doing better than they were doing 30 years or more years ago.
Demanding a Moral Accounting from Monsanto and the Government as the Supreme Court Could Have Done But Did Not—From This, U.S. Moral Values Will Be Known in the Historical Record
Chapter 57
The more people are focused on past history and not on the future, the harder it is to make the best decisions for those needing to live in the future. Those with long teeth and white hair can indulge in the choice to live in the past, and the older they get, the more nostalgic about the past they may become. This is the problem with seeking wisdom from the empowered elderly in rapidly changing times. Not only do they get lost among the trees; they get lost among the dead and dying trees and all the blind alleys of the past badly needing to have been swept aside.
This failing might not be so bad if its partisans were not arrogant about it and certain that only they possess the ideal other need to follow. They would only need to be willing to expose their ideas to public scrutiny, but they have denied the need for that. That is where they went wrong, and that is where they have led democracy astray.
Even worse, a vested government interest in the distortion and denial of information about transgenic food and agriculture has been established in the United States. That is the now self-evident tyranny against the people. If this was not the reality, a small cabal of 62 companies and their trade associations would not have been able to spend over $1.20 per citizen in California in 2012 to beat Proposition 37, and they would not have not spent over $3.00 per citizen in 2013 in Washington state also to persuade voters there to prefer food ignorance.
In the Washington balloting, the “No” forces spent more than $20 for each vote they won, and if the money had been used for what used to be referred to as “walking around money” they might have been able to buy votes out-right from some people for less money than that. That would have at least bought some vulnerable people a hot meal or two. Instead, the spending went from one plutocratic and oligarchic corporate pocket to another.
Our fight against the shameful and unconscionable moral atrocity of spending this much money to defend out-dated, mistaken, disproven, and damaging science is a patriotic requirement viewed as essential to cultural survival and the preservation of life. An accounting has become mandatory, but two court decisions beg a core question: is that still possible when amoral, exploitive, manipulatively dishonest corporate power is sustained and abetted by an equally amoral, obsequiously subservient, and exploitatively negligent government.
The challenge is made harder when the government and those running it are blinded by the continuous need for campaign contributions and by the self-serving depredations of incessant wealth-funded lobbying. This is what has become of the once honorable and admirable U.S. democracy under the weight of corporate financial domination and the similarly abusive power of other corporately-derived wealth in myopic service to itself.
The behavior is against the interests of the people to the extent of not even wanting to allow an objective examination of the issue in an open public forum where the truth can be found. If there were ever a greater justification for citizen protest and revolution against a government, that justification would be hard to find.
In turn, this is the self-distorted U.S. political culture created inevitably and sustained collaboratively by court decisions, including Supreme Court decisions making the rich richer and the poor poorer—while further empowering the already empowered financial elite. The political result is a Frankenstein Monster as bad as the biotech monster wrought by transgenic farming and food technology. The Supreme Court should want to fix or at least examine the abuses and damage they have helped to cause, but they have shown they lack that desire.
The justices may want to continue hiding the truth from the people and evading open debate on the contentions, and if so, the people need to know that is their choice. The truth is important to know on this matter as much as it is on the patent-related issues our lawsuit has raised. Favoring inertia in the face of past error compels the continued protection of Monsanto’s health destructive transgenic fantasies, and following that, pro-Monsanto, culturally habitual, wishful, and nationally self-deceiving scientific arrogance also persists as if it were a wise idea.
In the end, the Supreme Court showed they did not want to be part of the solution; they only wanted to reinforce their position as part of the problem, but this is not initially or centrally a question of finding the truth about transgenic agriculture. The more fundamental question is whether evidence can be presented against a protected fiction that has been allowed to become a sacred political cow. The self-corrupting distortion of democracy is a separate and more important matter needing separate but associated and more centrally important attention.
This more fundamental problem likely will need to be addressed before the problems with transgenic food and agriculture can be addressed by the government, including the courts. The people may get smart enough on the issue to do an end run around the government, but if so that will leave the larger problem unsolved.
The question seeks to know if the courts want to allow the truth to be sought and affirmed in the public interest or if they prefer to protect a lie just to sustain and insist on the protection of prior errors. The issue is much the same as it was between the Dred Scott decision and Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, but revision of that anti-democratic sophistry took most of a century. Now, change of past error must occur faster than that, or it will be too late. After 20 years of biotech, transgenic, and chemical destruction, delays are costly.
Monsanto wants all debate evaded, all discussion stopped, and all contrary, opposing information denied. In contrast, we want to promote debate, open discussion, and the free flow of information. We want both sides to be able to present their evidence, so the truth can be collectively and publicly determined. That is the difference between the two sides, and that was the full scope of the issue put before the Supreme Court. Either they wanted to allow the truth to be sought or they wanted to continue preventing it from being sought.
No matter what the internal issues were within the court, the decision made made the answer to the question clear. Now the issue is before the people at least until it is possible to file a new lawsuit to bring the same issues before the courts again. That will take some time to accomplish, and every delay adds to the public costs.
Finding the Off Switch—and the Right to Present Arguments Against the U.S. Government’s Pet Transgenic Sacred Cow
Chapter 58
The decision the Supreme Court made allows the U.S. people and the world’s people to know if their needs are less important than the profit-pursuing depredations of Monsanto and their shareholders. They will also be able to know from the Supreme Court decision that the U.S. democratic ideal is a fraud. They will know the people’s needs are secondary and subservient to Monsanto’s—as if by a divine right of aggressive, brutal, dominating pro-corporate, pro-biotech, and fully totalitarian autocracy.
We believe the off switch on Monsanto’s agenda must be found the same as if it were a runaway train, but we do not ask anyone to take our word for anything without studying and becoming persuaded about the accuracy of our arguments. This is about the patriotism required to serve an essential public need for food safety, healthful, nutrition, and environmental protection: we only want the opportunity to present our case and our evidence.
In the public interest, we believe the path to recovery must be found as soon as possible because the many costs of continuing the current course are:
• politically intolerable if democracy matters,
• economically unsustainable when the public and private costs are astronomically greater than any presumed or asserted benefits, and
• emotionally unbearable given the massive growth of healthcare costs, now a fifth of national GDP. This final fact alone is intolerable, and evidence now suggests that the doubling of chronic illness in the United States is associated with Monsanto’s system of agriculture and the food created from it. The chemicals and the seeds are both responsible for increased health risks, even if much of the human evidence so far gathered in the United States has been collected from doctors only anecdotally.
Needed studies on the issue do not exist because Monsanto’s political power, patent power, and contractual power has been deployed to prevent them from being made. Worse in the United States, the appalling statistics on the growth in healthcare costs is treated as if it should be a celebrated hallmark of a promising growth industry. Because of the combined power of the healthcare industry and biotech agriculture, investigation to determine the causes of many afflictions, allergies, and toxicities is unwanted.
If healthcare profits were not seen as more important than the afflictions being addressed, many people and institutions would be working harder to figure out the causes, but in the United States, knowing causes is undesirable because it fingers those responsible. Finding the people responsible is not politically convenient. Instead of working to learn causes, the U.S. healthcare model addresses only symptoms while neglecting causes.
In service to the corporate agenda, the U.S. healthcare and nutritional model does not want to understand causes or impacts, and that is the ethic allowing Monsanto to persevere with its health-destructive, environmentally-damaging transgenic seed project. Because Monsanto uses its patent power and research contracts to control both research and the release of information from the studies it does allow, U.S. studies are not initiated to learn what everyone needs to know.
Historically, Monsanto has only done 90-day studies, and those are not long enough to understand the impacts that are long-term and multi-generational. The employed research model is, in itself, an anti-democratic abuse, but Monsanto and its technology are a U.S. sacred cow.
Instead, they should be seen as a Trojan horse, and if that were not the truth, Wallace Hayes, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology would not have rescinded publication of the French rat feeding study by Seralini and others without scrutinizing all the prior Monsanto studies using the same protocols.
The text in the photograph refers to the student who was afraid to appear in the movie for fear it would impair his employment opportunities. This photograph is the last from the citizen interviewing in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Bringing an End to Monsanto’s Alfred E. Newman Technology and Their Abusive and Exploitive Use of Patent Law
Chapter 59
Monsanto does what they do for the same reason President Clinton played with Monica Lewinsky: because they think they can get away with it. What they do is like giving a loaded Uzi or a Glock to a four-year old. The odds they can do something constructive based on what they understand are zero. Their work is based on long out-dated and discredited scientific understandings. They can only be destructive, even when the project is profitable and some continue to buy the products out of a myopic wishfulness like the one used to create them.
Farmers have bought into Monsanto’s project because they have been kept in the dark about the long-term consequences even for their own farmland. Farmers have even recently been told by Monsanto’s apologists that Roundup is safe enough to drink. Likely no one saying that has ever tried to drink it, especially when it is commonly used in India by bankrupted farmers to commit suicide. This is known definitively, because the chemical can be smelled in their mouth after death.
Farmers have been abused for Monsanto’s benefit worse than if they were serfs or slaves. Serfs and slaves were treated benignly by comparison. They at least had healthful food to eat as a result of what they grew. The abuse of modern farmers is not delivered with a whip or a rod; it is delivered via seeds, chemicals, and adhesion contracts supported by government policy, court decisions, corporate political domination, and worse.
The profit part is a reflection on the state of public and private morality in the United States. If amorality had not replaced morality in the code of national values, Monsanto and their supporters in the government would have understood the need to know more than they do before any of their transgenic crops were released onto the market. Their technology is horrifically primitive, like using a pointed stick to do heart surgery, and those who have bought into it are among those hurt the worst.
Apart from the culturally and governmentally assisted habits of expedient negligence and wishful, Alfred E. Newman science, a whistle would have been blown on Monsanto’s abuses of law and science before they got started. Among these abuses are not only public health abuses, environmental abuses, abuse of law governing trespass, and abuse of formerly admirable democracy; they have also abusively and aggressively asserted their patent rights illegally against the people and the Earth.
These abuses drive our lawsuit, and in the absence of any public utility, with only destructive impact, someone must be compelled to blow the whistle. This is our service to the public interest, and the claim we do not have a sufficiently direct or immediate damage to be given the right to bring our lawsuit to court is an inexcusable sham as is the claim that we do not need to have the raised issues adjudicated because Monsanto has tacitly provided a Binding Covenant only one percent sufficient. Both decisions are an unconscionable sham.
The abuse must end, and it would have if the U.S. government was not as pathologically culpable as Monsanto. Our lawsuit blew the whistle, but the response to it was the same has it has been in Third World nations when a whistle has been blown by citizens against abuse of their human rights and need for justice.
An example is the abuse of Nigerians required to pay a high manipulated price for the kerosene they need for cooking fuel. That is a scam allowing the insiders to rake off money at the expense of the people. Another example was behavior in the past by Enron in the United States and in other nations. The project wrought by Monsanto and its political allies in the government is no different.
Wisdom requires action to protect the future of civilization from transgenic tyranny or at least allow the arguments to be heard on that contention with Monsanto able to present their countering evidence the best they can. If the opportunity is prevented, the question is: what is Monsanto and its government sponsors afraid of? The answer to that question needs to be made clear to the people of the United States and the people of the rest of the world. Respect for the U.S. values, morality, and behavior cannot be restored until that is finally possible.
Play Theme Song (while reading), or:
As a break from reading, click here to see the movie: “What Do You Know About Monsanto” about the lawsuit. The movie is also an introduction to the issues needing attention and the troubles being encountered, and that is the reason it was made.
Permaculture Teacher and Designer Andrew Faust speaking to lawsuit supporters in Foley Square, New York City near the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse on January 31, 2012, the day when oral arguments were held on Monsanto's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis of the claim that no meritorious or judicable dispute existed between the Plaintiffs and the Defendant.
The Foundations of the Needed Judicial and Political Restoration Affecting Transgenic Food and Agriculture
Chapter 60
Up against Monsanto's well-funded public relations juggernaut and the astroturf organizations their consultants and associates breed like rabbits, we need the U.S. people to understand the issues raised by our past lawsuit and by planned future lawsuits. These issues are important to everyone in the United States and around the world. Even with a large group of plaintiffs, including organizations with hundreds of thousands of members, we are a small group against a politically and judicially empowered Fortune 500 corporation (Ranked 206 in 2013 with $13.5 billion in revenues). The profits from that much revenue can be used to buy enormous influence and to deny opponents a fair hearing on the merits of their essential health-related and pro-environment arguments.
The manifested corporate power and particularly the abusive misuse of it needs to be ended; it exploits the people, destroying democracy, and establishing a form of pro-corporate totalitarian autocracy in its place. This subversion depends on keeping the people uninformed about the insiders' political game, ignorant on the issues basic to their health, and without any right of informed consent. People are not being allowed to know about the transgenic content of their food, and they are not able to have information about the health and environmental impacts or potential impacts. At its core, the word totalitarian means: tightly controlled by a unified and unaccountable elite able to do whatever it wants without any oversight or accountability. That is the U.S. situation on the issues in question. On transgenic food and agriculture, Monsanto and its allies have been able to main total bipartisan control over policy, information flow, and adjudication of complaints against them. This is a uniquely egregious historical circumstance.
The control and the accompanying ability of the people to inform themselves has persisted through Democratic and Republican administrations for decades. Even though Monsanto’s RoundUp was introduced before President Ford left office, it began in the Carter administration even before the first patent on a life form was allowed by the Supreme Court in 1980, but that court decision put the project on roller skates. Maybe it shot it from a cannon. Monsanto’s RoundUp herbicide was approved for use in 1974 and made it onto the market soon thereafter. Because it was marketed as environmentally benign, it soon became the leading herbicide for general use in many places, not just in agriculture where it became a centerpiece of the No-Till farming idea.
The start of Monsanto’s system of transgenic agriculture came when Monsanto discovered a bacterium in one of their waste dumps that had developed resistance to RoundUp. With this discovery, Monsanto’s corporate voice said to itself: Aha! Eureka! (A rough English approximation of “Allah Akbar” in Arabic) We can introduce this herbicide-resistant gene into the food supply and make it possible to spray RoundUp on the food to kill the weeds but without killing the food. What geniuses we are!
The Diamond v. Chakrabarty Supreme Court decision allowing the patenting of a petroleum-eating bacterium “invented” by an engineer at General Electric opened the gate for the pursuit of the Monsanto idea. The bacterium’s inventor, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty was widely lauded for his invention even though it has never been used to address an actual oil spill in the wild. Too much is unknown about the environmental implications of the idea, so the chances of benefit without dangers have made the use of the idea risky. For example, it is a rhizobacterium with the capacity to produce substances that chelate iron in the soil. This would make the the chelation of iron in the soil self-replicating, and that would be upsetting particularly to Popeye and his followers who would like to find a way to get iron back into spinach instead of taking more of it out.
The touted advantage of Chakrabarty’s pseudomonas putida is that it can consume oil one or two orders of magnitude faster than the other existing bacteria relied on to perform petroleum clean-up in the environment. The patent given to Chakrabarty was not the first patent on a living life form, but it was the first in the United States. Pasteur had been given two patents on bacteria, and Great Britain had given Chakrabarty a patent for his invention before the United States did. The central question was whether the United States would maintain a competitive edge against other nations also wanting to develop new opportunities in biotechnology.
The Diamond v. Chakrabarty lawsuit resulted because the U.S. Patent Office had contended against the patenting of a life form under U.S. law, but the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled, “...the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of patent law.” The Supreme Court supported this judgment despite its implications. The ruling enthused Monsanto and their supporters in the belief their idea would also be patentable under the same desire to give legs to the emergent U.S. biotechnology industry. The trouble was: no prudent controls were put in place to make sure there would be no unforeseen consequences from the Monsanto project. There have been consequences, particularly related to Monsanto’s simplistic misunderstanding of genetic theory that have now been established beyond any reasonable doubt.
In the face of this reality, Monsanto has persisted with the world-wide sale of its transgenic seeds. Yet, this persistence is based on the original now discredited theory that one gene equals one trait and that a trait could be added to a crop without changing the functioning of the pre-existing genes in the crops or interfering with healthful and nutritional value of the genetically re-engineered crops. This is the place where our past and future lawsuits enter the arena to assert the need for a presentation of evidence the U.S. government and Monsanto have continuously prevented. We hoped the courts would be open-minded enough to consider the need for this presentation of evidence given the history of U.S. government negligence, but that did not prove to be possible.
The courts chose to ignore the negligence of the other two branches of the government in not allowing the pursuit of the needed investigation of genetic reality and its implications. In this can be seen a preference for defending the past genetic fantasy as if it could be made to exist by force of corporate and governmental will. Inexcusably and blindly, the courts persisted in their desire to defend past legal and scientific error. This is worse than the Citizens United and the McCutcheon decisions allowing wealthy people to try to create the best government their money can buy for them because it is a reckless or an oblivious effort to overrule the laws of nature to serve corporate profit and related, money-driven government and political convenience.
Advancing the power of money in the political system is legitimized graft, and that is how it has operated. That is why the courts would not want to allow it a hearing. The hearing would expose court complicity in the political project, and it would focus sunshine the ability of the wealthy elites and their political allies to control the political process for their own benefit. The consequences would affect more than Monsanto and a few other companies in the biotech industry. The citizens of the nation might even be awakened from their passive docility, and the result of that could be dangerous for the nation’s power structure, but truth is the victim.
Because we have been blocked by the courts, we now need to get the message out to the public directly. We hoped a court trial would stimulate greater public interest in the issues, but now we need the people to help make it impossible for the courts to continue doing as they have done. If we cannot get the basic importance of our message out to the public, we will not gain the public support needed to change the flagrant corporate subservience of all four of the judges we have encountered so far and others of the same persuasion. The judges adjudicating our right to “a day in court” may believe the fortunes of major corporations are essential to the national economic well-being and much more important than the well-being of individual farmers and consumers. If this is the underlying attitude, it is an anti-democratic subversion to the point of treason. It is not respectful of either competitive Capitalism or democracy as we have come to idealize them in the United States. Admirable Capitalism depends on competition, not the facilitation of monopoly and oligopoly for the benefit of a few, and democracy depends on the respectful, informed participation of the people.
Maybe the judges cannot imagine a corporation causing damage and destruction greater than any benefit, and maybe they do not have time to learn about that. We cannot know their thinking; we only know the result of it is wrong and dangerous to the public interest. Our lawsuits intend to illuminate that damage and destruction as part of presenting the evidence proving Monsanto’s patents never should have been issued. This Web site was planned originally during the summer of 2011 when we believed the simple logic and basic natural wisdom of our case would win us the right to bring our issues to trial, but now we can see an established and overriding interest among companies, politicians, and supportive judges to see that we do not get a chance to air our issues or present our arguments. If we did get that opportunity, many people would be exposed on account of their negligence, sophistry, and pursuit of self-interest. If the facts were to come out, some might be prosecuted, and that could be the reason for both ignoring the facts presented in the court complaint and stonewalling the presentation of even more facts in court. Because of the need to defend against that possibility, sophistry designed to protect the pro-corporate profligacy and deceit would have likely been continued.
At least, this is the most likely logic of those seeking to collaboratively defend their own interests in enabling the political system to continue working as it has, but this should not be the objective the Judiciary was designed to fulfill if democracy was important. The courts have told us unequivocally that is not important to them. They have made clear: the defense of the insiders and the wealthy is more important to them. Against our simple expectation of justice, reason, and pursuit of truth, Monsanto filed a dismissal motion, but if they had been confident about the value of their products and their agricultural methods, they would have welcomed the chance to prove their case in court. Instead, they have seemed confident the judges would understand the issues so minimally, they could spin arguments to prevent anything adverse to their interests and the interests of their political collaborators from being made public. Either that or they counted on the courts wanting to help them protect their interests. Everyone can decide for themselves which of the two objectives would have been the controlling one. Even without presenting supporting evidence to back up their contentions, Monsanto and their attorneys must have believed the courts would act one way or another to serve their needs.
As citizens, we have a patriotic obligation to learn why that would happen; it is an international judicial embarrassment as bad as the dysfunction in the Congress, and because billions of people around the world have a stake in our lawsuit, the result has been damaging to U.S. national integrity and credibility. At best, making the Congress work is like herding cats and working constructively with the executive branch of the government is like herding a different breed of cats, but it is worse than that when the government is polarized within itself between one group intent to limit the capacity of the government to serve the needs of the people and the other is wanting to improve the ability of the government to serve public needs or at least look like it is doing that. The gridlock between the two is used to divide and conquer on behalf of the corporately empowered and their capacity to use the government to serve their own interests. In the face of continuing governmental dysfunction and subversion against the public interest, getting the truth straight in one small courtroom should not be that hard, no matter whether before one judge or three, but if the goal of the courts is to facilitate the empowerment of corporations against the interests and needs of the people, they will not want to find out the truth.
If the goal of the courts is subversion of the public interest, they will want to help both the corporations and the collaborating politicians to hide the truth. They will want to continue the exploitation against the people as long as they can get away with it. Prudent rationality should have been the guiding principle, but it has not been. Changes are needed to make the system democratically functional, but that will probably require a Constitutional Convention with changes in the Judiciary and well as in the other governmental branches before the current and tragically self-impairing dysfunctionality can be ended. If less than that is needed to enable improvement, some one needs to establish what it would be and how it could be made to work.
Judge Diane P. Wood of the Seventh Circuit in Chicago has proposed sharing the patent-related workload among the other regional Appeals Courts. She says patent appeals are not so arcane other judges cannot handle them. In her view, the monopoly on the patent-related appeals at the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit has proved to be a mistake, and as evidence she points to the number of their decisions addressed by the Supreme Court. The conflict between the two courts has been shocking, but it could result partly from the inability of President Obama, until his second term, to fill vacancies on the court. Now, half of the Federal Circuit judges are Obama appointees, but that is a new development, but maybe all these judges will be just as pro-corporate, pro-patent, and systemically defensive as many of those who have been appointed by earlier Presidents of both political parties.
Previously, the Republicans in the Senate blocked the Obama appointees even when they were obvious moderates. They seemed to hope President Obama would be a one-term President and that would enable them to continue loading the court vacancies with appointees with their own pro-corporate ideological views. This would be an expected result when the two political parties occupy extreme polar ends of the political spectrum, but even appointees by President Clinton have served the corporate agenda at the expense of the people. The politics of the nation and of both parties have been pushed to the right over the past 30-40 years, and that means the ideologies of appointed judges have also moved to the pro-corporate right as corporations have become the nation’s most powerful and preemptively preeminent super-citizens. Inevitably, this happens when money is made more important than people.
With this movement has come anti-democratic, pro-corporate judicial sophistry designed to serve the interests of the corporations at public expense. Monsanto’s interests have especially benefited from the resulting decisions, and the most egregious of these was J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer Hi-Bred International in 2001 allowing transgenic seeds to receive a utility patent. That decision delivered monopoly and oligopoly power over food quality, farmers, and the farm economy into the hands of a few companies with Monsanto as their leader. The result has been the destruction of the underpinnings of Jeffersonian democracy and the destructive establishment of controlling oligarchic corporatocracy at the heart of agriculture, the foundational cornerstone of all civilization.
The central objective of our lawsuit is the restoration of democratic rationality and as part of that, we need to overcome the observed sophistry seen in two court decisions so far—and in the Supreme Court support for them. Better respect for the rights of the relatively disempowered and politically unorganized minorities is needed as part of that. That would begin to restore the original two century-old understanding about the essential meaning of constitutional democracy as a system respecting the role of minorities in the pursuit of governing wisdom. To accomplish a change away from a system allowing destructive dictatorship by a majority or dictatorship by the monetarily-empowered corporate super-citizens in collaboration with elected and appointed officials alongside the marginalization of minorities, particularly the politically powerless, financially disempowered minorities, collective public vigilance will be required with collective public commitment to both the pursuit of truth and the building of rational consensus. That can only happen when citizens possess a level of civic and scientific understanding and mutual respect able to sustain it. At present, even reporters, pundits, and commentators show a lack a commitment to this ideal. They seem to prefer the polarization as much as the political parties do. Maybe the preference results because it allows the news to be treated superficially like a sports contest.
Too few of the political and judicial decisions about transgenic agriculture have been carefully reviewed and scrutinized by the media, and without that the capacities of citizens cannot be constructively informed. The result is an absence of agricultural and environmental vision within the culture. What does not exist within the culture cannot exist within the media and the opposite is also true. Both failures feed each other. Maybe commenting on complex issues would take too much work in the modern media environment where cost savings are more important than news coverage. Maybe publications believe little revenue would be derived from making the commitment, but as a result, democracy as a governing system can only be as myopically expedient as those it has depended upon to inform it. Everyone in the United States and all other nations is the victim of U.S. citizen ignorance about centrally important issues. Whatever the U.S. people are ignorant about affects the ignorance and negligence of their government.
The behavior of the corporate, mainstream media suggests they are part of the project intended to preserve public ignorance in service to the profit-pursuing corporate agenda. The people have a right to expect objectivity in the coverage of transgenic agriculture provided by the corporate media, but they have not been given that privilege. Change would only come because the people have demanded it, but the people have not known the reasons why they should need to demand it. They have trusted both the government and the corporate media to serve their interests, but instead they have been abused, controlled, and denied the knowledge they need.
With more knowledge would come greater public vigilance, and less public willingness to passively accept and tolerate court decisions like the two recklessly divergent and irrational lower court decisions in our lawsuit that the Supreme Court failed to see any reason to repair. People will not stand up to play their citizenship role when they are habitually docile and prevented from knowing whatever they need to know. Before officials can do better on the issues we have raised, citizens, including particularly civically-minded attorneys and independent, non-subservient judges, will need to demonstrate outspoken appreciation for diverse arguments and wide-ranging debate aimed at creating a unified and sensible body of patent-related law. This debate would include discussions of the issues in many places. The debate could start in law schools if it were considered important to the preservation of life on the planet and as important if not more important than the discussion about law and policy affecting global climate chaos.
Overcoming Judicial Sophistry and Restoring Respectful Democratic Rationality in the Public Interest
Chapter 61
The appellate decision confronted by us on June 10, 2013 is a judicial monster even if it was a better and more respectful decision than the one issued by Judge Buchwald in New York on February 24, 2012. The Appeals Court decision is frightening and almost useless in its failure to grasp the important issues in the lawsuit; yet, it received virtually no competent commentary and only superficial coverage on legal blogs. The public attitude seemed to be “Ho-Hum,” as if the human rights issues were not perceived any more than the food issues fundamental to everyone, the survival of civilization, and the functional participation of citizens in the democracy. The same cultural limitations causing the problems to exist in the first place were still firmly and widely in place.
Maybe the failure to engage should be expected in a culture where entertainment and diversionary activities are more important than citizenship and civic vigilance. Perhaps, the views of the disempowered are more feared than celebrated by those who have acquired political power. Certainly, the knowledge needed to reflect with constructive vision on the meaning and impact of judicial decisions has been AWOL. In fact, edicts from particularly the Supreme Court but also the lower courts have been generally accepted as if they were the unchallengeable rulings of a king. Worse, many citizens may automatically expect money to speak louder than people in the courts just as it does in political campaigns, in the Congress, and at the White House. This would be expected especially in the wake of Citizens United v. F.E.C., but when money speaks louder than the people, republican democracy is on the ropes and plutocratic oligarchy has been established. When corporate money and corporately-derived money is empowered, corporations are inevitably turned into preemptively overpowering political super-citizens at the expense of the people and also their right of informed consent.
Apart from the power of money in the U.S. political system, the 16-day government shutdown in October 2013 might not have occurred. The prospective votes reflecting the public need for the government to do its work would have prevented the shutdown from occurring, but when a large number of people have been led to hate the government and see the government as the enemy, those needing to be served and protected by the government are made less powerful. That would have been the objective. That is the way the financially empowered corporate overlords and their political allies must have wanted it to be. They would have wanted people to be dependent on them, not on the government. When the power of money is respected more than the people, those who vote with the money must trust money to equate with wisdom. Either that, or they would favor the use of money to manipulate the public will and promote public docility. That has happened often, so those who place their faith in the political power of money will expect and want its political power to continue to be dominant. The power of money in politics enabled the Affordable Care Act to be discredited for helping people get insurance, but it also enabled the same law to be created and favored over the possible alternatives.
Obamacare was not the best possible healthcare law; it was the best corporately allowable and therefore politically feasible healthcare law. The power of corporations over the politicians was the controlling factor in what they would vote for when the law was passed. Many people have not wanted the government to force them to buy health insurance, but in April 2014, polling showed 47% favoring Obamacare. Maybe this was the 47% Governor Romney spoke about as the people wanting a handout from the government. On the other side was 51% opposing the law, many of them opposing it strongly, but a minority of 7% opposed it because they wanted a single-payer or Medicare-for-all type of healthcare system. That meant that the right-wing opponents of the law were at 44%, and this was in the face of heavy continuing anti-Obamacare propaganda from Republicans, Fox News, and right-wing talk radio.
The financially subservient political bias enabling Obamacare plus the power of the gerrymander enabled delivery of a Republican congressional majority in 2010. Gridlock and government dysfunction have been assured ever since then. When the government is dysfunctional, the corporations and the other members of the financially empowered elite are given greater freedom to do as they want. Inaction has been the goal of the House majority; that is part of their goal to discredit government and shrink its size. That so it marginalizes and minimizes it against the political power of corporate super-citizens. The courts have supported this empowerment as if corporations were the repository of political wisdom the same as the Federalist aristocracy favored by the founding Federalists at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Corporations are the new feudal aristocracy of the recent era. Because of the way judges are appointed by corporately dependent politicians, failure of informed and diligent judicial independence seems likely to continue. The future for judges who oppose the financially-empowered political establishment is not bright, and they know that. Little incentive exists to serve the needs of people because they are no longer important in a money-driven and corporately-dependent system.
Given the manipulations of the political process money makes possible, history shows the election of judges is unlikely to be any better, but something is needed to restore the rational objective, respectful, democratically-responsive independence of judges and courts. The system does not work as it needs to in service to the people when judicial decisions are corporately-subservient as much as the work of scientists has recently been. If these problems are not fixed, the former democratic idealism