If Monsanto Poisons Us All, Who Will Buy Their Horrible Products And How Will They Make The Money They Need To Bribe So Many Politicians?

Last year, Monsanto was named the Worst Company in America by Natural Society. They are a threat to human health and to our environment. They also happen to be a grave threat to democracy and corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle with a stream of bribes to keep support for their toxic agenda. In 2010 Monsanto's PAC gave $108,499 to Democratic House candidates (mostly corrupt reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems like John Barrow, Bobby Bright, Joe Donnelly, Larry Kissell, Mike McIntyre and their #1 top favorite shill of all, Collin Peterson), $91.500 to Republican House candidates (like Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, Rick Berg, John Boehner, Steve King, and right-wing closet case Aaron Schock), $38,000 to Democratic Senate candidates and $67,750 to Republican Senate candidates. Very "bipartisan," although almost all the cash went to corrupt corporate whores. So far this cycle, we see the same "bipartisan" contribution pattern-- although far more to Republicans (since most of their Blue Dogs from 2010 were defeated). Their top recipients (at least $10,000 each) are:
Eric Cantor (R-VA), Lacey Clay (D-MO), Tom Latham (R-IA), Frank Lucas (R-OK), Mike Simpson (R-ID), Rick Berg (R-MT), Roy Blunt (R-MO), and Ben Nelson (D-NE). So far they've spent $161,500 on House Republicans, $57,000 on House Democrats, $64,500 on Senate Republicans and $33,500 on Senate Democrats. They also maxed out to the Blue Dog PAC, to Collin Peterson's PAC (which Peterson uses to fund corrupt Blue Dogs), to Frank Lucas' PAC, Roy Blunt's PAC and Claire McCaskill's PAC.

[Monsanto is] responsible for 90 percent of all genetically-modified (GM) seed in the US, the biotechnology giant is also the leader in developing genetically-modified (GM) seeds and the resulting crops worldwide. But Monsanto is perhaps best known for its herbicide Roundup, which many experts link to soil damage and herbicide-resistant superweeds, not to mention potential health problems.

Contrast “Worst Company of 2011” to Forbes Magazine’s listing of Monsanto as one of the “World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies.” Monsanto may be innovative if you consider its genetic modification of the world’s food supply without concern for the environmental and health impacts “innovation.” (As an aside: you may recall that Nazis were called “innovative” too yet look at the atrocities they committed!) More and more scientists would disagree with Forbes.

In a recent study of genetically-modified corn, scientists found that the genetically-modified food may be linked to organ damage, namely liver and kidney damage, in rats. Published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences, this study is calling into question the safety of “Frankenfoods” as they are also known.

As we mentioned last month, Monsanto is spending big to defeat California's Prop 37 with a slick campaign of crass deception. A group called No on 37: Coalition Against the Deceptive Food Labeling Scheme is launching a full-court press against the measure beginning this month. The group’s major donors are Monsanto, DuPont, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (a trade group that represents the interest of PepsiCo, General Mills, Kellogg and several other large food and beverage companies), but most of the large U.S. chemical and food manufacturers have donated, including Dow, BASF, Cargill, ConAgra, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, Hormel, Syngenta, Bayer, and the list goes on (you can view a full list of who’s donating what here), for a grand total of just under $25 million to be spent on ads and other materials aimed at convincing Californians to vote no on Prop 37. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been the most persuasive voice against Monsanto's onslaught against America. And who has been Monsanto's biggest allies? Well aside from the corrupt reactionaries mentioned above in the bribery section of this post... wouldn't you just know: Willard "Mitt" Romney.

Though Mitt Romney has been campaigning for president since 2006, it’s alarming how little is known about critical chapters of his business biography. Nothing spells that out more clearly than his ties to Monsanto-- the current target of a mid-September Occupy nationwide action-- whose dark history features scandals involving PCBs, Agent Orange, bovine growth hormone, NutraSweet, IUD, genetically modified (GM) seed and herbicides, reaching back to the 1970s and ’80s. That’s when Monsanto was the largest consulting client of Romney’s employer, Bain & Company, and when Romney helped move Monsanto from chemical colossus to genetic giant, trading one set of environmental controversies for another.

This history matters not just because of the light it sheds on Romney’s self-ballyhooed business experience but because of the litany of Monsanto corporate objectives that clash with planetary concerns. If Romney is elected, this bête noire of environmentalists will have a very old friend in a very high place.

The romance between Romney and Monsanto began back in 1977, when the recently minted Harvard Law and Business School graduate joined Bain, the Boston-based consulting firm launched in 1973, the same year Monsanto became one of its first clients. One of Bain’s founding partners, Ralph Willard, described to the Boston Globe in 2007 how “Romney learned the technical aspects of the chemical business so thoroughly that he sounded as if he had gone to engineering school instead of business school,” and that Monsanto executives soon began “bypassing” him to go directly to Romney.

John W. Hanley, the Monsanto CEO at the time, has said how “impressed” he was with the 30-year-old Mitt. Hanley became so close to Romney that he and Romney’s boss Bill Bain devised the idea of creating Bain Capital as a way of keeping Romney in the fold. Unless Mitt was allowed to run this spin-off venture firm, Hanley and Bain feared, he would leave. Hanley even contributed $1 million to Romney’s first investment pool at Bain Capital. Monsanto’s Hanley is in fact the only business executive outside of the Bain founding family to so shape Romney’s career-- jumpstarting the two companies, Bain & Company and Bain Capital, that account for all but two years of Romney’s much-ballyhooed business experience. Bain and Romney whispered in Monsanto’s ear until 1985, when Hanley’s successor Richard Mahoney says he “fired” them and when Romney moved on to Bain Capital.

A year before Romney began to work with Monsanto, Congress passed a 1976 bill banning PCBs, a liquid chemical monopoly of Monsanto’s, exposing the company to an onslaught of litigation throughout the Bain years. Monsanto was also besieged by charges that its decade of Vietnam War defoliation with Agent Orange dioxins-- branded by a Yale environmentalist “the largest chemical warfare operation” in human history-- had contaminated as many as 10 million Vietnamese and American people, leading to a $180 million settlement covering the claims of 52,000 troops in 1984.

Dr. Earl Beaver, who was Monsanto’s waste director during the Bain period, says that Bain was certainly “aware” of the “PCB and dioxin scandals” because they created “a negative public perception that was costing the company money.” So Bain recommended focusing “on the businesses that didn’t have those perceptions,” Beaver recalls, starting with “life science products that were biologically based,” including genetically engineered crops, as well as Roundup, the hugely profitable weed-killer. “These were the products that Bain gave their go-ahead to,” Beaver contends, noting that Romney was a key player, “reviewing the data collected by other people and developing alternatives,” talking mostly to “the higher muckety-mucks.”

...During the presidential primaries this past March, Romney named an eleven-member Agricultural Advisory Committee that was packed with Monsanto connections, including its principal Washington lobbyist Randy Russell, whose firm has represented Monsanto since its founding in the 1980s and has been paid $2.4 million in lobbying fees since 1998.

...Romney won’t answer our questions, or anyone else’s, about where he stands on the two pending farm bills—the Senate version backed by Obama that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support (including Johanns and Blunt), or the House bill that made it through the agriculture committee with two Republican amendments dubbed “Monsanto riders.” Having lost the alfalfa and other GM lawsuits, Monsanto spent more on lobbyists, including Russell, than any other non-tobacco agribusiness and convinced House Republicans to add these riders, which would virtually immunize its products from regulation, allowing farmers to plant crops even if a court has ordered an environmental review and short-circuiting the reviews, as Johanns tried to do.

...When The Nation questioned Monsanto spokeswoman Kelli Powers about the role played by Bain and Romney at the company, she said that “Monsanto is a different company than the one” of the Bain period. That’s partially because of the Solutia spinoff and partially because the “Old Monsanto” briefly went through two acquisitions around 2000, only to recreate itself in 2002. But the “New Monsanto” has many of the same product lines, facilities and executives as the old one, and much of the same problems. Geneva-based Covalence ranked the company dead last of 581 multinationals in its 2010 reputation and ethics index, which is distributed by Reuters and Bloomberg. Powers said a search of its archives found “no reference to Bain anywhere.”

And even the conservative Forbes Magazine backed Prop 37: The Customer Is King, And Label Need To Reflect That. That isn't what the corporate dominated-- Romney wing-- of the GOP believes and they hate the libertarian wing almost as much as they hate progressives.

[W]e have Prop 37-- the GMO labeling debacle that California will vote on this November that will impact a colossal number of prolific brands if passed. If you ask people what they ate last Wednesday they likely will not remember, but ask them about ingredients, and it’s clear we’re becoming concerned about what’s in our food: 85% of people want to know the truth about what’s in their food. Is funding “No on Prop 37” the beginning of a high-profile protracted debate?

On one hand the Prop 37 debate provides us with an honest chance to shed the shackles of unhealthy labeling habits and finally stare the issue in the mouth. With food there’s no better way to be authentic than to be (naturally) honest about what makes up the product. PepsiCo, the world’s second-largest food manufacturer, is funding “No on Prop 37” and has a huge swathe of brands manufactured by its Frito-Lay and Quaker divisions, including “all natural” brands such Mother’s, Sun Chips and Naked Juice, through to its granola bars and yogurts containing significant GMO ingredients, especially corn. Change it, they argue, and the impact on costs would be significant.

...In contrast to their GMO transparency in Europe, Big Food America should not flail around like a loose-fitting part in its home turf, USA, leaving consumers with a nasty taste. Commerce without conscience can no longer be tolerated. Although food producers are applying the letter of the law, they need to pick a lane before the November vote is cast to avoid handling this debacle scandalously. To best serve today’s agitated customers, Big Food CMOs’ actions need to be heroic, with principles that make their all natural brands known for being remarkable, authentic, and followed by the laggards of the category for not saying “No on Prop 37,” but rather deploying a hide-nothing, tell-all approach that’s shareable by all so that “it does what it says on the can.”

The latest polling data shows Prop 37 winning, although the big money propaganda campaign against it is just getting started. As of now a SurveyUSA poll shows 51% are certain to vote Yes, 16% are certain to vote No, and 33% are uncertain.