Obama and His Abominable Appointment

When Barack Obama's Presidential campaign was getting into high gear, I understood perfectly why so many of my friends and family in the U.S. were backing him. After 8 years of horror under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld regime, he seemed like a breath of fresh air. He promised "change you can believe in." One of those changes was to put a stop to the "revolving door" between agribusiness and the government. Well, he has - in a way.

With the appointment of Michael Taylor as senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA, the revolving door has been removed and replaced with a wide open door. Now the former chief lobbyist for Monsanto doesn't even have to bother with lobbying.

I don't know about you, but I've never trusted Monsanto or genetically modified foods. From the beginning, messing with the genes of plants that did a perfectly good job of growing already didn't seem like a very good idea. Yes, I know, Monsanto enthusiastically told us how they were going to be the answer to the world's food supply problems, but it looked more likely to me that they were going to be the answer to Monsanto's profit problems, so I wasn't surprised in 2008 when I read about a spate of suicides by Indian farmers who had been conned into switching to GM seeds. In case you missed it, here's a report from the Mail Online: The GM genocide. The reason they were committing suicide was because they had borrowed heavily to buy Monsanto's GM seeds, having been promised unheard of crop yields. After their GM crops repeatedly failed and they fell hopelessly into debt, they committed suicide - by the thousands.

Not long ago, I was asked to write a short article about the safety of soya products. It was to be in response to an email to a website I write for. A concerned reader wanted to warn the public about the dangers of consuming soya products. He had contracted cancer and his oncologist attributed it to his vegetarian diet and over-consumption of soy beans. I did a lot of research on this one. What I discovered was that there was no historical connection between soya and cancer, but there is a modern connection. What is the connection? It is between GM soya and cancer. Worse, I learned about how Monsanto's GM soy was indirectly killing farmers in Argentina. You see, one of the genetic modifications made to the seeds is to make them resistant to the glysophate herbicide, a herbicide that is sold by, you guessed it, Monsanto, under the name Round Up. Argentinian farmers and families who lived near the fields where Round Up was being sprayed were contracting serious and deadly illnesses. According to summary of the official report, GM Soy. Sustainable? Responsible, "people living in soy-producing areas of Argentina began reporting problems in 2002, two years after the first big harvests of GM RR soy."

Just the other day I ran across a video called GM Crops - Farmer to Farmer. In it, Michael Hart, a Cornwall farmer, travels across the heartland of America talking to farmers about GM crops. The conclusion he comes to based on his interviews is that they are a con. The farmers get suckered into buying the seeds, find they don't perform as well as their natural seeds did and find it nearly impossible to switch back. In the meantime, the price of everything Monsanto goes up each year and they find it harder and harder to make a profit. You can read the summary here, but I urge you to watch the video. These are ordinary American farmers who know their business and never suspected they were being conned until it was too late.

And now President Barack Obama installs the chief lobbyist for Monsanto in a position of power within the FDA. For me it was beyond the last straw. I was already sick of Obama's murderous wars and weary of watching his well-rehearsed speeches, longing for the days when I watched GWB make a public fool of himself on television.

Issues like this are far larger than the occasional band-aids Obama delivers to his constituents. When a corporation takes control of our food supply, we are as good as doomed.