Could human beings exhibit a similar, delayed response? No one knows. Another, unrelated study showed that the pesticide used in large quantities on engineered Roundup Ready crops is toxic to male testicle cells and threatens both testosterone synthesis and sperm count.
The FDA tries to remain as silent as possible about GMOs, while the US Department of Agriculture and other parts of the US government are doing everything they can to promote them. The USDA under both George W. Bush and Obama has sought to speed up the automatic rubberstamping for new GMO products, to "deregulate" them, and to provide immunity from lawsuits over the spread of GMO crops to adjoining organic farms. Immunity from lawsuit was quite ironic.
For decades, GMO producers had threatened, intimidated, sued, and in every imaginable way attempted to bully adjoining farmers. If any of the patented seeds drifted and were found on the neighboring farm, that farmer would be charged with "theft." The clear message: buy the patented seeds or face destruction through legal costs. Remarkably, courts were buying this specious argument. But finally the persecuted began to counter-sue successfully, at which point, the all-too-compliant USDA rushed to provide legal immunity to the GMO producers in the form of an insurance policy that organic farmers would have to buy; that would be their only available form of compensation.
Thus, our focus on the remarkable revolving door career of Michael Taylor at the FDA and Monsanto shows that it has potentially affected the future health of hundreds of millions of people; stories like his are not uncommon.
A Chicago Tribune article from 2012 is headlined: Chemical Firms Champion New EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) Expert. It describes how Todd Stedeford worked at the EPA from 2004--2007 under the George W. Bush administration, then joined chemical firm Albemarle Corp. While at Albemarle, which makes flame retardants, he defended chemicals used in many products and even suggested that the standard set by the EPA for flame retardants was 500 times too high. After returning to the EPA in 2011 under Obama, he was put "in charge of a ... program studying whether dozens of industrial chemicals, including flame retardants, are too dangerous." One must ask: what were the EPA and the President thinking when they made this appointment?Bill Ruckelshaus, twice EPA head, once said that "at EPA you work for a cause that is beyond self-interest. ... You're not there for the money; you are there for something beyond yourself." However, after leaving the EPA, Ruckelshaus became a Monsanto director.
Meanwhile the Geneva-based Covalence group placed Monsanto dead last on a list of 581 global companies ranked by their reputation for ethics.
[Source: The Market Oracle, November 9, 2013 Author: Hunter Lewis
Hunter Lewis is cofounder of Against Crony Capitalism. He is the former CEO of Cambridge Associates and the author of six books. His most recent book is Where Keynes Went Wrong. He has served on boards and committees of 15 not-for-profit organizations, including environmental, teaching, research, and cultural organizations, as well as the World Bank.]
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Taylor's appointment by Obama incurred a lot of shock and dismay in those sections of the journalistic world who remain both conscious and cognizant:
You're Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It's Not So! by Jeffrey Smith in a superb article in Huffington Post; I consider Jeffrey Smith to be THE BEST journalist in America writing about these matters!
The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar. When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply -- the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods --documents reveal that the experts were concerned. Memos described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried "serious health hazards," and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms could be safely released into the food supply.But the biotech corporations had rigged the game so that neither science nor scientists would stand in their way. They had placed their own man (Michael Taylor) in charge of FDA policy and he wasn't going to be swayed by feeble arguments related to food safety. He was going to do what corporations had done for decades to get past these types of pesky concerns. He was going to lie.
When the FDA was constructing their GMO policy in 1991-2, their scientists were clear that gene-sliced foods were significantly different and could lead to "different risks" than conventional foods. However, no official policy declared the opposite, claiming that the FDA knew nothing of significant differences, and declared GMOs substantially equivalent.
This became the rationale for allowing GM foods on the market without any required safety studies! The determination of whether GM foods were safe to eat was placed in the hands of the companies that made them -- companies like Monsanto, which told us that the PCBs, DDT, and Agent Orange were safe.
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