MONSANTO DEMOCRACY

international | environment | opinion/analysis Thursday July 17, 2003 13:53 by ollie - katalyzer

as our pal greg says, the best democracy money can buy

The following short quote is taken from Organic Bytes, a weekly mail out from the good ppl at the organic consumers website....and, with the new US offensive against (Good) old europe's desire to _label_ (and perhaps even... ban :-0 )genetically engineered products, its time to remind ourselves, once again, of what the bastards are at:

QUICK QUIZ: HOW U.S. DEMOCRACY WORKS

Question: How is it that every industrialized nation in the world has banned
Monsanto's rBGH as unsafe, but it's legal (and unlabeled) in the United
States?

Answer: In order for the FDA to determine if Monsanto's growth hormones were safe or not, Monsanto was required to submit a scientific report on that ntopic. Margaret Miller, one of Monsanto's researchers put the report together. Shortly before the report submission, Miller left Monsanto and was hired by the FDA. Her first job for the FDA was to determine whether or not
to approve the report she wrote for Monsanto. In short, Monsanto approved its own report. Assisting Miller was another former Monsanto researcher, Susan Sechen. Deciding whether or not rBGH-derived milk should be labeled fell under the jurisdiction of another FDA official, Michael Taylor, who previously worked as a lawyer for Monsanto.

you can subscribe to this excellent, (once a week only) mail-out at http://www.organicconsumers.org/publications.cfm

and if you go to http://www.organicconsumers.org you will find the necessary links.

btw I couldn't shorten this as it seemed so concise ,I have contextualised it with newsworthyness , and, sadly, it didn't come with a specific url link - otherwise I would have (tried) to shorten it and give a link....so don't start ;-)

Along with http://www.panna.org, this crowd are 'ar an liathroid', ;-)....

for eg, if you hear strange dribbley drivvel coming from a group calling itself 'the centre for consumer freedom' ,organic bytes tell us that they are monsanto backed. We need to know these things.