Read up on Monsanto's history of introducing and profiting from products with harmful effects on the environment and realize this is the company that apparently intends to control what farmers can grow and what we can put on our dinner table.
Welcome to the Spin MachineBY MICHAEL MANVILLE
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The oldest and most aggressive of the food biotech companies, Monsanto deserves a close look from anyone interested in genetic engineering. It was founded in 1901, as Monsanto Chemical, to make saccharin, a substance whose production was at that time monopolized by Germany. It began as a small concern--the initial investment was $5,000--but grew rapidly and diversified. In 1929 it began to produce polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and eventually became the world's largest supplier of them. PCBs had a variety of uses, but were used mostly to insulate electrical transformers. Evidence of their toxicity was first reported in the 1930s, and in the 1960s Swedish scientists documented high levels of them in dying wildlife. PCBs were finally banned in 1979, and the United States has classified them as a "probable human carcinogen." PCBs have left a broad legacy of environmental degradation; they are the major pollutant at a number of Superfund sites, and most notoriously in the Hudson River, where years of PCB discharge from General Electric has left 2.6 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment.
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In 1985 Monsanto purchased G.D. Searle, the chemical company that held the patent to aspartame, the active ingredient in Nutra Sweet. Monsanto was apparently untroubled by aspartame's clouded past, including a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry, comprised of three independent scientists, which confirmed that it "might induce brain tumors." The FDA had actually banned the drug based on this finding, only to have Searle Chairman Donald Rumsfeld (currently the Secretary of Defense) vow to "call in his markers," to get it approved. On January 21, 1981, the day after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, Searle re-applied to the FDA for approval to use aspartame in food sweetener, and Reagan's new FDA commissioner, Arthur Hayes Hull, Jr., appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the board of inquiry's decision. It soon became clear that the panel would uphold the ban by a 3-2 decision, but Hull then installed a sixth member on the commission, and the vote became deadlocked. He then broke the tie in aspartame's favor. Hull later left the FDA under allegations of impropriety, served briefly as Provost at New York Medical College, and then took a position with Burston-Marsteller, the chief public relations firm for both Monsanto and GD Searle. Since that time he has never spoken publicly about aspartame.
In 1982 the town of Times Beach, Missouri, which ia located adjacent to a Monsanto plant, was found to be so contaminated with dioxins that it had to be evacuated. An investigation into Monsanto's culpability was stalled when the Reagan Administration, citing Executive Privilege, ordered EPA Administrator Anne Burford to withhold key documents from a House Committee that had subpoenaed them. Reagan, it should be noted, had long wanted to destroy the EPA, and absent his ability to so he appointed Burford to run it. She was cited for contempt of Congress for her refusal to cooperate in the investigation of Monsanto, and later forced to resign in 1984 amid charges of misusing Superfund money. Her top assistant, Rita Lavelle, spent four months in jail for perjury for the same reason. Lavelle had been suspected of destroying documents related to the Times Beach case, and she regularly attended luncheons with Monsanto executives.
In 1990 the EPA's regulatory division reported that Monsanto had "submitted false information to EPA," and "doctored" samples of herbicides given to the US Department of Agriculture. In urging a criminal investigation of the company, the division noted that:
Monsanto covered up the dioxin contamination of its products. Monsanto either failed to report contamination, substituted false information purporting to show no contamination or submitted samples to the government for analysis which had been specifically prepared so that dioxin contamination did not exist. http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=234(You have to page down about a third of the way down the page to get to the part about Monsanto's questionable track record).
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