The three bibliography pages containing mostly journalistic reports represent three time segments: 2010 and 2011, 2012 and 2013, and 2014 and 2015. All are annotated, but the first is more formally organized than the others. A fourth page will be added when it is possible covering 2016 and 2017. Additional materials can be found on the Web pages and Facebook pages of various co-plaintiffs. For the URLs, go to: https://endtransgenictrespass.org/page1/page1.html
Stephanie Hartwick of co-plaintiff Southern Exposure Seed Exchange organized a collection of articles (gathered by co-plaintiff Don Patterson) into the annotated bibliography for the period from March 2010 to the end of 2011, but the work could not be finished in the time available, so a volunteer (or more than one) is still needed to help complete the work and possibly also expand it.
An annotated bibliography is believed to be valuable in helping people: • to quickly understand the available range of published materials addressing the raised issues and • to know a bit about each of the available articles, video, documents, and other materials. This is the reason this bibliography has been assembled. Some tangentially or distantly-related materials are also included to try to cover a diverse range of pertinent materials. The bibliography is focused on the issues raised about transgenic foods and farming methods, including the related chemicals and other toxins, not on the publicity about the lawsuit, but some articles about the lawsuit are occasionally included, especially if they provide more than just the preliminary basics about the issues at stake. A response to the lawsuit by Monsanto is included, but this body of articles does not attempt to include the large body of pro-Monsanto and pro-biotech literature that has been generated at research institutions funded by Monsanto and other biotech companies. Much of that material is not considered to be objective or independent, and thus it is not believed to be reliable, though it can be more or less unreliable.
The biggest problem is the control exercised by the patent owners. They only permit the publication of studies serving their interests, and they withhold the rest. Studies need to be assessed individually to fully understand their flaws and their potential value. This is important work to do, but it is time consuming, and given the control exercised by the companies and the biases built into the process, it may not be worth the time required to make careful evaluations of the work.
Because of the way the research system operates now, integrity has been widely compromised, and there are no protections in place to make sure the integrity of the scientists and their research instutitions is preserved. Both need to earn money, so they do what those with the money require of them. The operation of the system is a national embarrassment, and as a result much of the more reliable research comes from other nations. Nonetheless, the work from abroad also needs to be carefully reviewed and replicated to make sure all errors and flaws are found. There is no short cut in finding the truth.
Patterson has had over 40 years of personal and direct experience with the way research is done at agricultural research institutions, especially at the land-grant universities, and he has worked at one of them as a researcher, so he well understands from the inside how they operate and how they are motivated. He has known, worked with, talked to, and participated in fora and conferences with many researchers working at these institutions. Much of that experience was long before Monsanto started its transgenic seed business, so he knows the well-established pattern was started and entrenched in collaboration with agribusiness companies long before biotech agriculture entered the arena.
Once transgenic crops were given utility patents, the problem was made worse than it had been before that. Likely, the controlling empowerment of corporations was intentional as part of the effort to reinforce the political power of corporations and undermine the power of the people. Many elected officials would rather work policy out collaboratively with corporate lobbyists, and as a corollary of this preference, working with citizens is increasingly an unwanted inconvenience.
Accordingly, citizens have become angrier and more cantankerous, and as a further result of that, officials and respresentatives are less and less inclined to meet with voters at public fora. These events have become too unpleasant for them to want to tolerate. Thus, the political process is not just alienated and dysfunctional as a result of the partisan polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Another axis of polarization has emerged between voters and governing officials and even more so between non-voting citizens and both groups.
In addition, many other kinds of divergency and polarization exist to animate anger, hostility, and inability to communicate. The financially empowered corporations are advantaged by the way political relations with voters have broken down, and they clearly like it that way. They try to reinforce it as part as a divide and conquer strategy.
As U.S. democracy has collapsed, so has the former international admiration for U.S. leadership. The failure looks as if it has been led with subversive intent to increase corporate power at the expense of the public and the commons. The process of encouraged dysfunction has increased emphasis on myopic expediencies and convenient amorality. This is what happens when corporate values become more important than human needs and ideals.
Because of the way operational methods and manners have become entrenched, change may no longer be possible, but some people will not give up, and we are certainly among those. Many may not have faith in the possibility of change, especially when they have repeatedly thought they were voting for it only to find themselves bamboozled and led astray again.
In the face of this circumstance, the only possible way to maintain hope is to try to provide the information people might want to study to protect themselves and the people they care about. We would not want anyone to take our word about the dangers and the destruction. We want everyone to review all the available information and make up their own minds. For the same reason, we are seeking the opportunity to be heard in court on the merits of our contentions.
We strenuously object to any jurisprudence that denies us that right, and for that reason we find the dismissal decisions by the Federal District Court and the Appeals Court of the Federal Circuit as democratically intolerable as the 19th century Dred Scott and Homer Plessy decisions. We need to continue struggling in every way we can until the truth can prevail. As part of that, we need to make information available for others even if the facts and the legal details are as complex as they are. Patterson’s rough preliminary bibliography is appended after the systematically organized work done by Hartwick for the benefit of those who want a more chronological listing of article that more or less tracks the articles as they appeared. Traditionally, bibliographies are are arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, but that may not always be the most useful way to understand the flow of information.
Both parts of the first page of the bibliography contain references gathered from March of 2010 to the end of 2011, and they duplicate each other to a major degree, though not entirely because the formal bibliography is still unfinished. The first part is an alphabetically organized bibliography and the second is like a shoe box where items were placed as they have been found.
For references after the end of 2011, see the Recent Bibliography covering 2012 and 2013, but that only contains Patterson’s rough preliminary “shoebox-style” bibliography without any formalization yet. The formalization awaits the time when someone has the time to do the organizing, and in the meantime, keyword searching may help people find particular articles. Most importantly, the purpose of the bibliography is to provide a document people can read relatively quickly to gain an idea about the range of available materials. Then, they can choose which articles they want to give more detailed attention.
(Patterson’s work is only roughly chronological, because no attempt was made to put older articles in their correct place in the chronology. Following the plan to ultimately organize everything into the kind of bibliography Hartwick’s work represents, the need was not felt to make the rough bibliography perfect in pursuit of any particular organizing principle. Patterson’s annotations are also often preliminary and quickly written, and sometimes they quote from a pertinent portion of the articles. Quoting was utilized more in 2013, and it is favored even if it makes the annotations longer.)
Before posting, Hartwick’s work was edited and formatted by Patterson, but Hartwick did the hard work of organizing a proper bibliography and writing a clear, understandable annotation. Some of the listed articles are academic journal articles, but this is not mainly an academic bibliography. It is mostly a collection of summary reports explaining the discussed issues for the benefit of the lay public. The goal is to make the bibliography readable as a summary of the articles, even though many of them are are already an abbreviated summary. Much of the material was only published on the Internet, so those who rely on the corporate, mainstream media to provide their information will probably never have been exposed to it.
The urban media are often as isolated and insulated from the farming methods practiced in the hinterlands as urban dwelling people, so editors may assume their readers and listeners would not be interested in the complexities of raising food. As a result, they help fulfill a viciously cyclical expectation by keeping people less informed about matters essential to their own nourishment, health, and longevity.
Citizens are chronically ill-informed about the food they are fed even to the point where companies like Monsanto and their allies have a profitable interest in keeping them that way. They may commonly solicit the aid of the corporate media in fulfilling their objective. Reportedly, they have employees at their public relations firms dedicated to their account full time with the goal of helping them fulfill their public relations objectives, including the placement of op-ed articles by those supporting their agenda.
Because of the way the U.S. information system works, and the way it has come to be controlled in the corporate interest, Monsanto and the biotech industry capture more attention from the mainstream corporate media. Because of that those on the other side of the issue have needed to make a place for themselves on the Internet and in the street with signs, placards, and videos posted on YouTube.
The demographics of the different communities accessing the different sources of information determines who knows what and what they think. This contributes to a polarized culture where one group employs one news source and the another group employs a different one—or more than one. One gets their news chosen for them by editors, and the other is more likely and more able to do their own choosing from a wider range of available information from many sources, nationally and internationally.
To some degree, these two groups coalesce into the two major U.S. political parties helping them to become more polarized in their view of reality. On one side is the pro-corporate view, and on the other is a more anti-corporate view, except that both parties are dependent on corporately-generated funding, and that is the impetus causng Democratic officials to pursue pro-corporate policies often to the detriment and disservice of the constituencies electing them. As a result, the political dialogue in the nation has been pushed more toward the right end of the political spectrum, and this has not been contested by the people because they have become more and more dependent on corporations for their well-being, employment, and comfort. The corporations have counted on this docility to help them pursue their program.
Because people have become loyal to various corporations in much the same way serfs in the past became loyal to feudal lords and princes, they come to think like corporations and exhibit similar values. This has been seen in the public docility toward the policies on transgenic agriculture pursued by the Obama-Biden administration and in the appointments they have made to key positions. On this, Democrats have been little different from Republicans, because both parties want to pursue corporate campaign contributions from the biotech and agribusiness industries and those deriving their income from them.
The orientation of the two political parties reflects to some degree the age of their adherents with Republicans representing older, wealthier, and whiter people while Democrats represent more a younger, poorer, and darker demographic. Because of these patterns, the Republican citizens vote in greater numbers and give more money to their candidates. Democrats have needed to make up in numbers of people what they lack in wealth, but in the nature of being young and poor, voting turnout is lower and less focused. This affects the way democracy works and often makes it nonsensical between the Presidential and the Non-Presidential election years—just because the turnout of Democrats is much greater in Presidential years than for he off-year elections.
If Democrats would be more diligent and focused on the requirements of citizenship, it would result in changes in the flow of information, and that, in turn, would change the content of a bibliography like this one. If education were easier to attain and less costly, he quality and quantity of the available information might change, but then the elite would worry about who would do the menial work. Over past decades, they have arranged farm policy to create a larger urban workforce and lately they have used trade policy similarly to push the people of other nations into the corporate workforce one way or another.
In the interest of becoming better informed on a matter of great public concern, if people would be able to learn why it should be a concern, some people may want to print out and share the bibliography and other materials from this site with people who may not normally have access to information on the Internet. That is hoped for and encouraged, and it is a reason for including video in the bibliography and on the video pages of the Web site, but the sum total, even with a fairly long bibliography, is more suggestive of the available resources than it is exhaustive.
Much more can be found, so everyone should be encouraged to do their own document searching. The Internet makes that easier than it was hardly more than a couple of decades ago. The bigger issue for readers may be in coming up with the time to become informed on issues affecting and protecting their health, welfare, and longevity. To help with this challenge, an annotated bibliography can briefly summarize a range of information that many (even probably still a very large majority) do not know about yet.
Even if the included list of items is not complete or exhaustive, it does cover many of the stories, core issues, and reports on transgenic food and agriculture while more of the needed long-term research is awaited. Lately, most of that has come from other nations where greater moral integrity and commitment to learning the facts has been seen and less corporate control is manifest. While research in the United States has been corporately funded and often corporately restricted, research from other nations has been more likely to exhibit the independent objectivity many people in those nations want.
Because this bibliography does not cover most of the corporately-funded and corporately-controlled studies and associated propaganda serving the corporate interest, it focuses more on the material believed to be more reliable, but once again, everything needs to be reviewed to make sure it is accurate and has affirmatively discovered the truth. The full and most needed truth rarely reveals itself automatically and quickly. Diligence is needed to find it and especially so when some have a vested interest in preventing it from being revealed.