At a recent rally in Downtown Colorado Springs... Mark made some good points about Monsanto. Here's some more. You remember, as do I, how exactly Monsanto got busted back in the late 70s with the Paraquat Pot? Paraquat is one of their signature lines of "weed" killers, herbicides, such as Agent Orange and Roundup. The company li(n)e is and was that there was no evidence that soldiers exposed directly to Agent Orange had (significantly) higher incidence of cancer than soldiers not exposed to it. Denial because they were being sued. Well, other herbicides they make, RoundUp and Paraquat, contain the same type of chemical, not the active ingredient, but a side-product of the chemical reactions to manufacture the "goodies". A class of chemicals called Dioxins. Their harmful nature ranges from damn that's freakin' scary to OhMyGod we've kicked open the doors of Hell and those are esoteric chemical-talk terms. If you don't recognise them then you're not a chemist. At the high end of the spectrum is where the product was burned. As in, soldiers usually on punishment detail raking up the dead plants and burning them. Monsanto didn't out themselves, nor did the Army. The DEA did instead, by publishing a warning that they had been spraying Paraquat JUST LIKE AGENT ORANGE and J.L.A.O, if you inhaled the burning product it could cause you to die and cited an Army Agent Orange study. The one the Army and Monsanto and Dow and Dupont were denying ever existed. So, the Army stopped using Agent Orange. Big deal, they still use the other chemicals that have that same nasty little add-on, the part they can't get rid of without destroying the goodies, the Dioxins. Now how much would you pay? Monsanto and the U.S. (taxpayers) government paid a settlement in 1983 that equalled about a weeks worth of hospitalization for each veteran who was diagnosed before then. NONE for anybody diagnosed afterward and certainly none for the South VietNamese, Filipino, Thai or other allies who were also sprayed with the shit. They sprayed it around U.S. bases so the native vegetation wouldn't be so overgrown that people could walk right up to the fence. They Still Do. Then there's the Monsanto and Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds connection, tobacco bred to be resistant to A.O. or more specifically, RoundUp. Yep, there was a video article on the NOVA television program in 1990 describing Genetically Modified Organisms and of course, Monsanto was the star of the show. One of their projects was with Big Tobacco growing successively more resistant plants. See, with the herbicides, they only work when the plant is above ground, sprouted. After the cash crop, in this case tobacco, WHICH IS TYPICALLY USED BY LIGHTING IT ON FIRE and inhaling the toxic smoke, has sprouted, no more Agent Ora RoundUp. So they have to kill the weeds before the cash crop sprouts. Doesn't, however, kill the seeds of the weeds like the farmer needs. But at the end of the show, there were tobacco plants being sprayed
Tag: Corporate Hegemony
Boehner says “Mandate to Kill the Disabled! Hooray!”
So, what was the first thing the Korporate Kash Klub putting on their agenda today? Destroy any hope of actual Health Care. Why don't the Republicans take out their 2nd Amendment Specials and just shoot any disabled people they see on the street? It's not because they don't want to hurt us. They showed that at every one of their TeaBag rallies, with their willingness to KILL 120 Americans every single day, and that's just those of us who had Corporate Health Insurance. The rest of us die undiagnosed and uncounted. Miss Johnnie got a quote on health "insurance" yesterday, 485 dollars a month at the lowest, and that's with a $5k Deductible. That's three weeks pay at minimum wage, the Minimum Wage the Right Wing want to abolish in favor of paying us an even smaller fraction of what it costs us to work for their profit. So if it's not an unwillingness to kill us, then the reason they don't do it directly is really obvious. They're too God-damned YELLOW. Any speeches they want to make about compassion or not wanting to hurt the cripples, are bullshit. It's trying to make themselves look good while they're (temporarily, until they can do it somewhere out of the public eye) backing their shit down. The Rand Paul action last Monday, where they ganged up on Ms Lauren Valle for DARING to question His Royal Highness about the Korporate Kash Klub backing he receives. There were Kentucky COPS there watching, but were the coward bastards immediately arrested? Nope. Pigs take up for Other Pigs. It's typical behavior for their Cowardly Sort. They made a big issue of Terri Schiavo, said they had offered to pay her long term care forever, but those of us who aren't rich or aren't ripe for being a Public Example of their Fake Charity, like Martha Jamie Helton Brown, we're simply told to fuck off and die. Mrs Brown was denied health care the same way Boehner wants to continue denying health care, forever, and his Tea Party backers are cheering at the prospect of Killing More Americans. They sure do love them some American-killin'. It's why they took automatic weapons to their Hate Rallies, they were hoping for yet another excuse to Kill Americans.
How come Pottery Barn rules don’t apply to Haiti?
When Tony posted nearly three years ago (!) about how shocking conditions in Haiti had become, it was a magnet for people saying the starving kids pictures (from Medicins sans frontiers, internationally respected medical aid agency, just not so much here in America) were recycled pictures from Ethiopia 3, 2 and one decade ago. Then when that was refuted, and before they raised that Stupid Response again, the people of Haiti were blamed for their own misfortunes. As though their LEADERS had actually been empowered by popular vote instead of installed, against the expressed will of the People, by and for the profit of American Corporate Hegemony. Alternating with French Hegemony until the AmeriCorp bought out the French. We broke it, we supposedly bought it, right? That's the one of the irRationale for staying in Iraq and Afghanistan. (rationale is both plural and single, I checked, you didn't, kiss off) Of course, it's not the American Corporations who are Paying the bills "we" ran up by breaking all the pottery, although they seem to be getting quite a lot of public funding to manipulate the Public Army and the Public intelligence community and the public "rebuilding" campaign, which mostly consists of taking very expensive videos and photographs of Other People moving the shards around. Much the same way they're paid to watch and take pictures while other people bury the Dead "shards" in Haiti. Through public funding for their private "efforts". Some have seen fit to criticize my frequent use of Capitalization and italics and bold type and ComBinatiOns Of tHem but some people need a little help finding juicy nuggets amidst the kibble. Both are Nourishing Mind Food but the juicy bits are more fun. Sometimes. Some of the people have difficulty seeing, which is a condition with which I can easily relate. Others are just kind of inured to reading and hearing Bullshit from the likes of Glenn Beck and need a little help finding emphasis in NORMAL thoughts. It's not that Glenn Beck is mentally defective, it's what he's paid to say, in the Corporate anticipation of the Audience being mentally defective. In a way, though, the situation in Ethiopia and Haiti is the same case, revisited. "Conservative" (their own code word for Racist Right Wing Extremists) Pundits insist that black people are incapable of governing themselves so it's up to the Great White Father in Washington to guide and assist and let's face it, outright Rule Over the poor little darkie savages. But Ethiopia has for several occasions been the richest nation on earth and in cumulative time they managed to do it for longer than the Americas have actually experienced European Rule. Intermittently because the times Ethiopia has been devastatingly poor have been periods of colonial rule. Like the Romans exacting tribute from them, and in the past couple of centuries European and European-American Corporate Rule turning Their nation into Our plantation. Same with Haiti. When the U.S. went to war with Hawaii and deposed their "tyrannical"