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 directly with RoundUp and living.
Tobacco is stupidly poisonous just by itself. What Monsanto isn’t telling anybody, you won’t see it in that warning label the Big Corporations like to whine and snivel about when they say how badly picked upon they are at the hands of liberal judges and juries waa waaa tort reform waa waa waaa had to pay a couple hundred bucks for every dead person in Bhopal waaa waaa waaa..
You won’t see that warning label saying “Warning: this product probably contains Dioxins from herbicide spraying”.
Monsanto was also doing something with Genetically Modified Organism potatoes. Who’s the biggest single market for potatoes? McDonalds. Think about that the next time you’re chewing those fries.
Go ahead and smoke you a ciggie afterwards, it’ll help you to not think about it.