The diary I refer to is replete with links and no matter how many it has, it fails to capture the extent of the harm being done by Monsanto to this country, to other countries and to nature itself.
Mark Penn says he is taking a break from working for Monsanto to run Hillary's campaign, suggesting that would make him "clean" politically. Of course, no one is taken in that such a "pause" in his long-standing financial life and ties with that corporation means he is disconnected in any way from its purposes or from his own financial future as beholden to fulfilling its goals, PR-wise.
Two points:
First:
Given that Monsanto operates extensively and quite powerfully by subverting information - about food (as in threatening farmers who say honestly that they do not use rBGH so the public cannot know which milk is which, about genetic engineering of crops (as in suggesting GE requires less pesticides that normal crops or that GE-crops are the same as normal crops or that studies do not show any problems), about labeling (as in working at the state, national and international level to prevent knowledge of which food is genetically engineered, etc. (see my other diaries for many more instances and for references and understand this is a short list ...), to do PR for Monsanto is to be extremely deep into how they mislead people and governments and how they maintain monopolies by hiding information or operate to gain them. (as in lying for years to people who worked with PCBx that there was no evidence of danger while having thousands of secret corporate documents detailing the extreme opposite).
As GE-crops are being pushed in India, I have been told by someone involved in fighting their incursion, that the public is being told that they will be able to reject GE-food in the groceries if they want, but as we know from how it has worked here, that is the precise opposite of the case. Monsanto's modus operandi is to hide its product in order to sell it to a helpless-to-know and increasingly helpless-to-find-alternatives public.
Monsanto is famous for hiding and denying its harm. Mr. Penn's company, Burson Marteller, helps Monsanto with its operations in presenting "information" about the company to the public or government.
Second:
One cannot just take a break from working with Monsanto anymore than anyone can take a break from any abuse, and be somehow considered "clean" during that time. And obviously if one is going right back to the same work, the suggestion of having a "clean" period, of bringing a clean heart or hands or mind to something that will ultimately involve laws that will impact the abuser, is absurd on its face.
To take a quite emotional example, but appropriate given what is at stake for all of us, would anyone let someone working for a known pedophile "take a break" from representing and working for them, to run a campaign for someone who will, if elected, have the power to make national and international laws involving pedophilia?
Mark Penn cannot take a break from working for a company involved in what are immense and diverse and global sins (crimes?) against humanity and nature.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/...
Only today, in a report from Brazil after Lula's government approved two varieties of Monsanto's GE-corn:
"against the advice of two governmental agencies: the health ministry's ANVISA health vigilance unit, and the environmental ministry's Ibama institute. In fact, Health Minister, José Gomes Temporao, a member of the Council wanted further studies on the possibility that these varieties of maize might be toxic or allergenic. Environment Minister Marina Silva, who opposes cultivation of transgenic species, chose not to even attend the meeting.
Via Campesina said the companies behind the engineered corn had presented studies that were "completely inadequate and insufficient to guarantee the safety of these products in terms of human health."
... The measure, it said, is a "flagrant and unconstitutional imposition that sets the economic interests of companies interested in growing GM maize commercially above the health of the population, the need to protect the environment, and also the interests of farmers and consumers who do not want to plant or eat transgenic foods."
According to da Costa, considering the "harm done to people" due to soybeans and other transgenic crops in Brazil, "the disasters that will be caused by the authorisation of GM maize will be of far greater proportions."
She said that maize, in particular, which was first domesticated in Latin America, will now suffer "a great loss of biodiversity, as well as genetic degeneration and impoverishment."
She said that native seeds cultivated by small farmers and indigenous peoples "run the risk of disappearing through cross-contamination."
Unlike soybean plants which are almost entirely self-pollinating, maize is generally cross-fertilised, and its pollen "can be carried several kilometres and contaminate other types of maize at great distances, transported by insects and the wind," she said.
Furthermore, she said, farmers will have no legal recourse for any complaints against contamination of their crops, because jurisdiction is unclear.
And if contamination of their maize does occur, they will have to resort to other seeds, and they will become dependent on the transgenic species, because GM seeds are designed to produce a second generation of seeds that will not germinate.
"The food sovereignty of small farmer communities will be endangered, because they will have to buy seeds outside the community, and they will have to pay royalties to the transgenic seed companies," said da Costa. At present, farmers save their seed from year to year for the next planting.
She also called attention to the technical studies cited by the Science and Technology Ministry in support of the authorisation of transgenic maize, noting that most of them were carried out abroad, and fail to take into account the uniqueness of Brazil’s diverse ecosystems."
http://www.infoshop.org/...
Mark Penn isn't taking a break. And Hillary Clinton's acceptance of such a nonsensical proposition, is consonant with the Clinton Administration having appointed Monsanto to run the FDA and agriculture trade positions. and with having scuttled the 1996 BioSafety Protocol which was being demanded worldwide, in the first place.
It gives the lie to her saying she is the one to protect us, based on her experience.
Her experience is written in milk - from cows with Monsanto's rBGH which a 2007 citizens petition has now linked to a 7-fold increase in breast cancer risk, and for working at all with a corporation like Monsanto - after it did Agent Orange and PCBs and toxic dump sites.
Does her "experience" not give her even the most basic common sense or human decency to reject donations from and such close dealings with a corporation which is, more than any other, responsible for the greatly increasing loss of our biodiversity around world, which is ... ahem ... slightly, somewhat, just a little, critical to human life altogether?
Would that protocol being protecting farmers around the world, the only ones out there trying to save normal food, the unbelievable gift of biodiversity that protects us all?
Monsanto makes pesticides that affect land for years. For organic farms to be considered "clean," they have to lie fallow for a number of years, and then be tested. The same needs to hold true for anyone corporate functionary for them.
And "taking a break" to run a PRESIDENTIAL campaign, is no break, but multiplying one's power on behalf of the thing one is purportedly "taking a break from." Like not using pesticides for a few months while stewing up a worse batch to use afterwards.
The astounding thing is that anyone at all would buy this garbage about "taking a break."
But we have been so lied to so much, led around by the nose so often, we are "swallowing" a whole lot of things (including GE-food, GE-milk, cloned animal meat, pesticide laden crops, steroids, hormones, water with drugs), because we are constantly kept from knowing enough to say "no."
If we are serious about deploring corporate control of our government, when do we begin saying no?