Russia Warns Obama: Monsanto

http://topinfopost.com ^ | May 28th, 2013

[lowbridge]

The shocking minutes relating to President Putin’s meeting this past week with US Secretary of State John Kerry reveal the Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

According to these minutes, released in the Kremlin today by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation (MNRE), Putin was so incensed over the Obama regimes refusal to discuss this grave matter that he refused for three hours to even meet with Kerry, who had traveled to Moscow on a scheduled diplomatic mission, but then relented so as to not cause an even greater rift between these two nations.

At the center of this dispute between Russia and the US, this MNRE report says, is the “undisputed evidence” that a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine, known as neonicotinoids, are destroying our planets bee population, and which if left unchecked could destroy our world’s ability to grow enough food to feed its population.

So grave has this situation become, the MNRE reports, the full European Commission (EC) this past week instituted a two-year precautionary ban (set to begin on 1 December 2013) on these “bee killing” pesticides following the lead of Switzerland, France, Italy, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine, all of whom had previously banned these most dangerous of genetically altered organisms from being used on the continent.

[bert]

My statement had no inference concerning genetic engineering

It is a true statement refuting post that the plants in question are not man made

[editor-surveyor]

GMO is junk science, and those doing it should be held liable for all that results from their franken crops.

[editor-surveyor]

They are most certainly not “man made.”

They are produced by natural biology, not gene manufacturing.

[editor-surveyor]

Heirloom is the term used for seed that is only modified by natural cross polination, and reproduces in kind.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks lowbridge.

Russian leaders “extreme outrage” over the Obama regimes continued protection of global seed and plant bio-genetic giants Syngenta and Monsanto in the face of a growing “bee apocalypse” that the Kremlin warns “will most certainly” lead to world war.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'd heard of this World War Bee before, from someone who received the information from radio transmissions hidden in the 60 cycle hum of the power grid.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

In the St Louis area, I sold coal to Chrysler, Monsanto, a couple of breweries (east and west of the river) some grain processors.
A good place to have a dock full of compliance coal !

[Pontiac]

GMO is junk science, and those doing it should be held liable for all that results from their franken crops.

I am all for holding companies liable for producing a defective harmful product.

But I want un deniable scientific evidence.

What I see here is a trumped up smear campaign designed to scare people.

You can tell by this quote.

“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a songbird,” Palmer said. “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the oldest neonicotinoid — called imidacloprid — can fatally poison a bird.

Let’s get out the harps and violins to tug on the heart strings of the people. Everybody loves the song birds.

If these pesticides are so dangerous farms should be littered with the dead bodies of birds every spring. My family has farms in Ohio’s prime corn farming area and I just don’t see this happening.

[piasa]

The campaign against GM crops is by European farmers & politicians who are afraid they cannot compete with American farmers. They prefer people in Afirca starve rather than eat American-developed GM crops or use American GM seed.

To that end it looks like they’ve hired what I call “anti-PR firms” - companies such as Fenton Communications, to run scare campaigns against companies that have developed these amazing products. Look up Fenton - a collection of far-left kooks, but very skilled propagandists.
Fenton is the same company that created the scare, on behalf of Ben & Jerry’s, against the use of hormones in Dairy cows. These anti-PR firms create biased “studies” to promote their claims and anything in a lab coat will do as a source. It is easier and more profitable to trash competitors and push for legislation to keep them down than it is to promote your own product, which is why they did it.
Fenton was also hired to go after the Washington apple producers.
Various econut groups like the Sierra Club- a HUGE industry though one that produces nothing of value- also hire Fenton to trash American businesses they deem harmful to the environment [even when they are not] or more importantly, harmful to their political cronies.

[piasa]

* David Fenton : [] a Marxist-Leninist who has been on the payroll of the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and the Soviet-Backed Maurice Bishop who tried to turn Grenada into another Cuba.
He was also on the payroll FMLN (Farabundo Marti Liberation Front), a pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist terrorist group that murdered thousands of El Salvadorians. Never to turn away a dollar from any friend of the Soviet Union, our Mr Fenton cheerfully worked for the Soviet-supported Sandinistas who planned to turn Nicaragua into a Central American base for the Soviets....
.————— “John Kerry brings in former communist agent to slime Vietnam vets and smear Sinclair Broadcast Group ,” Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor, BrookesNews.Com , Monday 25 October 2004 http://www.brookesnews.com/042510fenton.html

[piasa]

1960s : (DAVID FENTON & THE VIET CONG — See ABBIE HOFFMAN, FENTON COMMUNICATIONS, MOVEON.ORG, WWW, PROPAGANDA [See ALAR SCARE, DAIRY HORMONE SCARE {See BEN & JERRY’S ICE CREAM}]) But while he currently [in 2004] poses as a fervent environmentalist, Fenton has a militant political past and has cut his radical teeth in the 60s as a photographer for the pro-Vietcong Liberation News....
According to Frontpage Magazine’s Thomas Ryan:
“[Fenton] began his ‘journalism’ career as a photographer and media specialist for the Liberation News Service, which was named in admiration of and loyalty to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The anti-American, Communist movement Fenton and his colleagues emulated called for the ‘overthrow [of] the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists and the dictatorial power of Ngo Dinh Diem, servant of the Americans, and [to] institute a government of national democratic union [in Vietnam].’”
Fenton was also a member of the White Panther Party (a Caucasian-led offshoot of the Black Panthers), and even did photography work for the Weathermen, the Communist/anarchist group which bombed the U.S. Capitol building, along with other prominent U.S. institutions in Washington, DC and New York City. ————— “America’s Red Army,” Frontpage Magazine.com ^ | 9/1/04 | Jennifer Verner

[piasa]

It’s not just about Monsanto, it is a manufactured scare campaign, see my posts above

[piasa]

baloney...here’s what’s happening:

1989 + : (FENTON COMMUNICATIONS : DISINFORMATION, PROPAGANDA, POISONING THE INFO WELL) Since 1989, Fenton and his company, Fenton Communications, has been largely preoccupied with creating media strategies for left-wing groups, including one of his primary clients, Environmental Media Services. Its anti-biogenetic message, which claims that genetically engineered foods are dangerous to eat, has made millions of dollars for Fenton’s clients, which include such health food producers as: Whole Foods Markets, Honest Tea, Kashi Cereal, Green Mountain Coffee, and Rodale Press, a magazine publisher of periodicals concerning organic gardening and foods.
This approach has also worked for ice cream producers Ben & Jerry’s, another client of Fenton’s. Starting with a series of press conferences in the late 1990s, Environmental Media Services promoted the idea that a hormone given to dairy cows to produce milk could cause cancer, despite the fact that the FDA had shown the hormone to be safe. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream stood to gain from the bad press aimed at the dairy industry because their ice cream is made with hormone-free milk. ————This profile [of David Fenton] was adapted from the article titled “Peaceful Tomorrows, Leftists Todays,” written by Thomas Ryan and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on March 17, 2004.

1989 : (ALAR SCARE PART OF FENTON COMMUNICATIONS EFFORT TO FUNNEL MONEY TO THE NRDC — See ECONUTS, LIBERALS/LEFTISTS , FENTON, WWW) One of Fenton’s most publicized achievements was his 1989 attack against the producers of Alar, a preservative used in apples that he  erroneously reported as carcinogenic. The misinformation Fenton fed to the news media triggered mass hysteria and caused the apple industry to lose over $200 million in revenue. Later, in a memo uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, Fenton bragged, “We designed [the campaign against Alar] so that revenue would flow back to the Natural Resources Defense Council from the public.” The Natural Resources Defense Council was another of Fenton’s primary clients.  ————This profile [of David Fenton] was adapted from the article titled “Peaceful Tomorrows, Leftists Todays,” written by Thomas Ryan and published by FrontPageMagazine.com on March 17, 2004.

[piasa]

2002 : (REPORT IDENTIFIES FENTON COMMUNICATIONS AS THE JUNK-SCIENCE-PUSHING PUBLIC RELATIONS RING LEADER OF A WEB OF NONPROFIT GROUPS -— See DAVID FENTON {see WEATHER UNDERGROUND, JOHN KERRY}, PROPAGANDA) Fenton presently makes a name for himself as a champion of environmental junk-science scare campaigns - the type favored by trial lawyers and “earth-friendly” companies like Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream. In a 2002 report titled, “Fear Profiteers: Do ‘Socially Responsible’ Businesses Sow Health Scares to Reap Monetary Rewards?” a highly respected panel of research scientists found “a tangled web of non-profit advocacy groups with a public relations ‘ring leader’ playing spider.” The web spinner was none other than David Fenton. ... ————— “America’s Red Army,” Frontpage Magazine.com ^ | 9/1/04 | Jennifer Verner

[piasa]

Many plant species contain insecticides, antibacterials, and other things for their defense and were created that way by God. So it's not a "bad thing" to put the genes responsible for that into a crop so it an grow its own insecticide, fungicde, etc. That's why you can spray a solution of tobacco juice onto your plants to prevent insect infestation. Tomatoes are a member of the deadly nightshade family and their leaves contain some interesting stuff. Passion vine is toxic to some species because it contains a chemical defense. Moss contains antibacterials.

As for bees, if you really want to help bees, quit mowing your grass all the time and let the dandelions & wildflowers grow. There's no shortage of bees here, and there are more than just the European honeybees here as well- one of my biggest citrus pollinators is a native green bee. They're not for making honey but fabulous for pollination.

[piasa]

The biggest problem fireflies face isn’t insecticides, it is artificial lighting.

[piasa]

"I’ve read where Monsanto tried to take over a farm where some of it’s seeds or something somehow got into their corn and they wanted to take his farm to protect their seeds."

No, that's not it. The story was that a farmer violated an agreement he signed with Monsanto, and Monsanto held him to it.

Does not surprise me one bit. When I read about Monsanto and its experiments, its seldom good news.

Well, if you read econut sites and books and magazines you wouldn't expect them report anything good about Monsanto, and if you read sites made by people selling heirloom seeds then they are likewise promoting a product and they often choose to do it by trashing their competition same as they accuse Monsanto of doing. As someone earlier on the thread pointed out this very thread began with an article written by a wongnut conpiracy theorist named Sorcha Faal.

Corn is particularly tampered with.

You know why corn has been the most tampered with? Because the American indians were VERY good plant breeders even if they never mastered draft animals and wheels. They developed many varieties of corn most of which people don't grow today but from which all modern corn varieties descended. And they started with a plant that didn't look much different than foxtail or wheat, that long before the first white person ever set eyes on it looked VASTLY different from its wild ancestor. So yes, corn has been "under development" longer than most things in your garden.

I read, somewhere, that an African tribe's main crop was corn. The people did not thrive and cattle were very affected by SOMETHING!

You know what they were affected by? Same thing that American indians were affected by when they shifted from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies ... CORN! And HEIRLOOM corn at that!

Corn is naturally deficient in certain proteins. Like almost all grain and sunflower seeds there is also little or no vitamin A. So when indians in the midwest river valleys traded and acquired corn from the southwest, they planted it in their fertile land and it grew so abundantly they thought their problems were solved - suddenly they had so much food they could STORE it, and no longer had to move from campsite to campsite when game became scarce or to follow the harvest of beech nuts and pecans. They settled down, and instead of having children in the more or less seasonal, sporadic way of hunter gatherers, they had lots and lots of children, making them more and more dependent on corn rather than meat.

But corn was deficient in proteins and vitamins so gradually, they began to suffer and it shows in the bones, each generation with more problems than the one before, most obviously in the teeth. hunter gatherers had pretty good teeth but corn growers had a lot of cavities and abcesses.

There's no way to blame this on Monsanto - it didn't exist yet. It's a NATURAL problem associated with an unnatural reliance on a single crop. So your folks in Africa whose main crop is corn just did to themselves what American indians had done hundreds and hundreds of years ago. They found a crop that produced abundantly and deliciously, were pleased, dropped a lot of the less tasty crops and foods they had previously gathered from their diet, and invested fully in producing corn, not knowing the consequences.

The Indians figured it out eventually, and resolved the problem by adding beans and squash to their diet. While each one alone is deficient, all three together- corn, squash and beans- provide a more nutritionally complete diet. The indians call them the three sisters, and grown together they complement one another : squash shades the ground and reduces weeds, corn provides support for pole beans, and beans add nitrogen to the soil which corn in particular needs. What your African tribe needed was beans and squash or additional crops that would serve the same purpose.

An investigation explored GMO seeds, removed those crops and gave untampered corn to the tribe and heritage seeds.Peoples' heath began to improve significantly and the cattle began to thrive. Their diet was very corn oriented. I call BS, as I doubt they had GMO corn to begin with, and also because it would not matter if the corn they had was GMO or heirloom. The problem never was "GMO" corn it was the simple fact that they were eating corn too exclusively, and heirloom corn would NOT provide them with complete proteins either.

[MD Expat in PA]

No, that's not it. The story was that a farmer violated an agreement he signed with Monsanto, and Monsanto held him to it. Well, if you read econut sites and books and magazines you wouldn't expect them report anything good about Monsanto, and if you read sites made by people selling heirloom seeds then they are likewise promoting a product and they often choose to do it by trashing their competition same as they accuse Monsanto of doing. As someone earlier on the thread pointed out this very thread began with an article written by a wongnut conpiracy theorist named Sorcha Faal.

Here is an interesting article, from NPR no less:

Top Five Myths Of Genetically Modified Seeds, Busted

Myth 2: Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen.

This is the idea that I see most often. A group of organic farmers, in fact, recently sued Monsanto, asserting that GMOs might contaminate their crops and then Monsanto might accuse them of patent infringement. The farmers couldn't cite a single instance in which this had happened, though, and the judge dismissed the case.

The idea, however, is inspired by a real-world event. Back in 1999, Monsanto sued a Canadian canola farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for growing the company's Roundup-tolerant canola without paying any royalty or "technology fee." Schmeiser had never bought seeds from Monsanto, so those canola plants clearly came from somewhere else. But where?

Canola pollen can move for miles, carried by insects or the wind. Schmeiser testified that this must have been the cause, or GMO canola might have blown into his field from a passing truck. Monsanto said that this was implausible, because their tests showed that about 95 percent of Schmeiser's canola contained Monsanto's Roundup resistance gene, and it's impossible to get such high levels through stray pollen or scattered seeds. However, there's lots of confusion about these tests. Other samples, tested by other people, showed lower concentrations of Roundup resistance — but still over 50 percent of the crop.

Schmeiser had an explanation. As an experiment, he'd actually sprayed Roundup on about three acres of the field that was closest to a neighbor's Roundup Ready canola. Many plants survived the spraying, showing that they contained Monsanto's resistance gene — and when Schmeiser's hired hand harvested the field, months later, he kept seed from that part of the field and used it for planting the next year.

This convinced the judge that Schmeiser intentionally planted Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser appealed. The Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's patent, but had obtained no benefit by doing so, so he didn't owe Monsanto any money. (For more details on all this, you can read the judge's decision. Schmeiser's site contains other documents.)

So why is this a myth? It's certainly true that Monsanto has been going after farmers whom the company suspects of using GMO seeds without paying royalties. And there are plenty of cases — including Schmeiser's — in which the company has overreached, engaged in raw intimidation, and made accusations that turned out not to be backed up by evidence.

But as far as I can tell, Monsanto has never sued anybody over trace amounts of GMOs that were introduced into fields simply through cross-pollination. (The company asserts, in fact, that it will pay to remove any of its GMOs from fields where they don't belong.) If you know of any case where this actually happened, please let me know.

He also busts a few other myths regarding GMO seeds and crops.

Here is another good article that discusses and refutes some of the econut arguments against GMO.

Genetically Modified Organisms: Jeopardy or Jackpot?

You know why corn has been the most tampered with? Because the American indians were VERY good plant breeders even if they never mastered draft animals and wheels. They developed many varieties of corn most of which people don't grow today but from which all modern corn varieties descended. And they started with a plant that didn't look much different than foxtail or wheat, that long before the first white person ever set eyes on it looked VASTLY different from its wild ancestor. So yes, corn has been "under development" longer than most things in your garden.

A good visual of what you are talking about (Maize vs. Modern Corn):

In truth, we’ve been genetically engineering plants for many thousands of years and that is a good thing. GMO is nothing more than a more efficient way of doing what we’ve been doing since we stopped being hunter gathers and “put down roots” as it were.

Many plant species contain insecticides, antibacterials, and other things for their defense and were created that way by God. So it's not a "bad thing" to put the genes responsible for that into a crop so it an grow its own insecticide, fungicde, etc. That's why you can spray a solution of tobacco juice onto your plants to prevent insect infestation. Tomatoes are a member of the deadly nightshade family and their leaves contain some interesting stuff. Passion vine is toxic to some species because it contains a chemical defense. Moss contains antibacterials.

This year my niece and her husband rented a garden plot at a local “community garden/farm. It is actually a great idea for townhouse and apartment dwellers who want to have a vegetable garden but can’t and or those who want to teach their kids about gardening and its pretty cool place as it is not just garden plots for rent but also a learning center that teaches the history of farming in York Co. PA. But recently they’ve gone all “green” and “sustainable” and “eco-friendly” and “organic”. So you can’t use “commercial” pesticides or fertilizers of any kind and they strongly prefer that you use “heirloom” seeds and plants.

They suggested using tobacco juice for insect control (and isn’t tobacco allegedly poisonous to humans?) and “companion planting” (not in and of its self a bad idea) to deter pests and they also suggested planting mole plants or castor bean plants around the perimeter of the garden to deter moles and other pests. But both plants are highly toxic not just to moles but also to humans – the deadly poison Rican comes from the castor bean plant BTW, and is not recommended to be planted anywhere near where small children or companion animals might be around as a small child or dog ingesting even a few castor beans can prove fatal. My nephew in law didn’t think it was a good idea for his garden since they have four little kids.

[greeneyes]

Monsanto is trying to make it illegal to save seeds. Keep an eye peeled for info on that. I think they managed to get some kind of amendment into the food safety act or affordable care act, but I just can’t remember what it was now.

I have been reading Seeds of Deception. This all kinda reminds me of where we were at in the 60s with tobacco. Industry studies saying all is well, and dissenting voices. So I just decided no thanks to cigarettes. Same with GMO, no thanks. I only plant heirlooms now, and I plant some varieties mainly for the seeds, so I will have them if I need them.

[editor-surveyor]

What is now happening is the birds are avoiding areas with GMO crops.

[editor-surveyor]

Everything you posted from NPR is falsehood.

The Monsanto crops are invading neighboring fields massively, and all of those neighbors have been penalized.