Eric Zuesse
One of the major barriers blocking U.S.
President Barack Obama’s campaign for his mammoth international trade
deals — the TTIP with Europe, and the TPP with Asia — is: other
countries want the freedom to make up their own minds about the safety
or dangerousness of the foods they allow to be sold within their
borders.
The Obama Administration is insisting
that no nation have that freedom. In fact, all participating nations
would be removed from that responsibility and authority. The Obama trade
deals propose to replace that national authority, and basic national
sovereignty on these important matters, by decisions that would instead
be made by international panels, whose members will be appointed by
international corporations, which have their own profits at stake in
these matters. Consumers and others will be ignored: they will not be
represented in the proposed panels. Nor will any government be
represented there. That soverignty will instead be transferred to the
billionaire families who control and derive their income from these
corporations.
On Friday, April 24th, Agence France Presse headlined “US Stresses Opposition to EU Opt-Out for GMO Imports,” and
reported that, “The United States underscored Friday its opposition to a
new European Union plan to allow member states to block
genetically engineered imports after bilateral talks on a transatlantic
free-trade pact.”
President Obama’s Trade Representative,
Michael Froman, who is a Wall Street banker and a longtime close
personal friend of the President, said on April 22nd that he was “very
disappointed” that the EU wants to allow individual EU nations to “opt
out” of automatic approval of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) that
the international panels will approve to be marketed everywhere.
Furthermore, Froman’s assistant said that the U.S. rejects “a proposal
to allow EU member states to ban products deemed safe by Europe’s own
scientists.” He was referring there to the half of scientific papers
that find GMO foods to be safe. However, those papers were produced by
companies that manufacture and market GMOs. The other half of the
scientific papers on GMOs, the half that were produced independently of
the GMO industry, have not found GMO foods to be safe — to the exact
contrary. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative ignores those
papers.
On 8 July 2009, Agence France Presse headlined “Scientists Warn of Hazards of GMOs,” and reported that an article in the International Journal of Biological Science
co-authored by world-leading scientists, reported that, “Agricultural
GM companies and evaluation committees systematically overlook the side
effects of GMOs and pesticides.” An accompanying study, “How Subchronic and Chronic Health Effects Can Be Neglected for GMOs, Pesticides or Chemicals,”
found “a significant underestimation of the initial signs of diseases
like cancer and diseases of the hormonal, immune, nervous and
reproductive systems.”
The United States does not regulate GMO
foods, because the patents are owned mostly by U.S. companies, and the
U.S. Government doesn’t want to get in the way of their selling their
patented products. Consequently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
takes any given GMO manufacturer’s word for the safety of its GMO
products. U.S. President Obama wants to promote U.S. trade by convincing
all other countries to sell GMO foods. His TTIP and TPP are supported
by the GMO industry, which has approved their GMO foods and allowed
their product-labels to not mention that some or all of the ingredients
are genetically modified crops.
One of the major advantages of GMO crops
is that they can survive the use of herbicides — weed-killers — that
kill natural crops. (The GMO-seed manufacturer also markets the
pesticide or herbicide; these are chemical companies, and GMOs are a
complementary or synergistic product-line for them. For example, the leading herbicide “Roundup” is from Monsanto which produces the GMO seeds that tolerate it.) Another advantage is that the foods can stay longer as looking and smelling fresh,
which also lowers the cost of production, and yet the consumer doesn’t
even know that the food is actually stale — the food is competing
against costlier-to-produce non-GMO foods and so driving them off the
market by the lower price, which leaves more and more food-production
dependent upon GMO makers such as Monsanto, DuPont, and Dow Chemical.
The lower price is obvious; the lower quality is hidden. It’s
race-to-the-bottom international ‘competition,’ in which the aristocracy
reap all the winnings; the public get the losses.
A recent news report from independent food scientists was bannered “FDA Product Safety Declaration Misleads Nation—Again” and it contains references to many recent scientific papers that find GMO foods to be dangerous, and harmful to human health.
An international analysis, “A Comparative Evaluation of the Regulation of GM Crops” was published in 2013 in the scientific journal Environment International,
and it concluded by saying that, “Regulatory bodies are not adequately
assessing the risks of dsRNA-producing GM products. As a result, we
recommend a process to properly assess the safety of dsRNA-producing GM
organisms before they are released or commercialized.” The Obama
Administration is trying to prevent that from happening; and their
proposed TTIP and TPP international-trade treaties are crucial
components of achieving this objective. In the United States,
GMO-producers are granted the right to self-regulate, and this practice
will become the standard worldwide practice if the TPP and TTIP become
passed into law.
The U.S. Government is doing everything
it can to spread to other nations the same deregulatory policies that
American companies rely upon to market their products inside the United
States. On Friday, April 25th, a key U.S. Senate Committee approved a “Trade Promotion Authority” bill
to help rush through the U.S. Senate the approval of Mr. Froman’s TPP
trade deal with Asian countries. For a summary of the regulatory
practices around the world regarding GMO crops, see here.
A discussion of the votes in the U.S. Senate on the measure that was
proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders to allow individual states to
establish their own regulations requiring the labeling or indication of
whether or not particular food ingredients are GMOs (since the federal
Government refuses to consider such a proposal), is here, and
it shows that even some allegedly progressive U.S. Senators voted the
GMO industry’s way on that bill to regulate it, which failed, on a vote
of 71 to 27.
One might call this the Monsanto Congress, because the U.S. House is
even more conservative than the Senate. Of the 27 U.S. Senators who
voted for the Sanders bill, 24 were Democrats, 2 were Independents, and 1
was Republican. 43 Republicans, and 28 Democrats voted against it. The
Obama Administration had lobbied against the bill, in order to continue
the GMO industry’s free reign over America’s food-supply.
When
Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in 2008, he said, “Let folks
know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a
right to know what they’re buying.” But as soon as he won the Presidency
“The new president filled key posts with Monsanto people, in
federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA
and the FDA.” And whereas Republican
news-organizations such as Fox ‘News’ criticized him as being a Muslim
Marxist, he was actually implementing policies that continued those of
the Republican George W. Bush Administration on this and on many other
issues. Yet, no matter how far to the right Mr. Obama actually was, he
was portrayed as a ‘leftist’ in Republican ’news’ media. And yet, still,
even today, the vast majority of Democratic voters approve of his
actions as President. They still believe his rhetoric, even though he
has lied to them constantly and even filed
a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that
lying in politics must continue to remain unrestricted not only at the
national level but also in each and every one of the states.
Consequently, in the United States, there is no effective political
opposition to the large international U.S. corporations. (And, under
the Republican Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision,
corporations now have virtually unlimited freedom to use stockholders’
money to purchase politicians.)
Hillary Clinton is a
big supporter of the GMO industry, and the response of liberals to that
is to ask her to give them rhetoric they like on the matter, just as
Obama had done when he was running for President in 2008. In other
words: they will campaign for her to become President if she will only
lie to them as Obama did to them. What liberals are demanding
is rhetoric; but if they get it from her, then the industries that are
funding her Presidential campaign won’t be worried, because she has a
solid record of doing what her financial backers want her to do. As long
as Americans don’t care when a politician has lied to them, lying to
them will continue to be the way to win public office — especially
considering that America’s international corporations now have been
granted by the Republican U.S. Supreme Court a ‘free speech’ right to
purchase the U.S. Government. And now that the Supreme Court has also ruled that political lies are a Constitutionally proected form of speech,
those ads don’t even need to be true. If the American people don’t care
about honesty, then they won’t have an honest government, because
America’s corporations can then buy any U.S. Government they want —
they’ll have total impunity if the U.S. public don’t even care about
honesty in their government. There are no legal penalties for political
lying; so, if there are also no political penalties for it, then the
U.S. can only be ruled by lies and their liars. Should that be called
“fascism”?
According to the generally progressive
Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (who, along with Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders is one of the Senate’s three leading
opponents of Mr. Obama’s proposed international-trade treaties),
President Obama has been lobbying Senators more insistently and more
intensely on getting them to grant him “Fast Track Trade Promotion
Authority” to ram these treaties through, than on any other single issue
since Obama first became President in 2009. No issue, not even
Obamacare nor any other, has been as important to Obama as is his
getting signed into law the TPP and TTIP. It would certainly be the culmination of his Presidency if he succeeds.
It would be his crowning achievement. He and his heirs will be amply
rewarded if he succeeds; and that’s apparently what he really cares
about. He has shown it by his actions as the President, not by his
rhetoric to voters. After all: Americans, it seems, don’t really care
about honesty. All they really care about is rhetoric that pleases them.
They merely want to be told what they want to hear.
Perhaps this is the reason why no
progressive has entered the Democratic Presidential contest against
Hillary Clinton. If the only realistic possibilities to become the next
President are her and her Republican opponent (whomever he will turn out
to be), then America will continue to be a de facto one-party
State, and this will be the U.S. international-corporate party, in both
of its factions or nominal varieties, controlling the U.S. Government. The
only comprehensive scientific study that has yet been done finds that
the U.S. has, in fact, already been ruled in this way for some time. (The history of how it came to be this way, starting gradually after the end of World War II, is the subject of my latest book.) Obama is merely implementing it more; he didn’t start it. He is implementing it more than even Republicans were able to do.
Obama wouldn’t have been able to do this
if he didn’t come bearing the label ‘Democrat.’ And Hillary Clinton’s
husband Bill was the key person to subordinate that Party to Wall
Street. Hillary and Obama are following in his footsteps. Obama’s
“Change” occured actually when Bill Clinton became President in 1993. It
simply hasn’t been much recognized until now. Today’s Democratic Party
started when Bill became President. That’s when the one-party State,
with the national Democrats playing the role of the ‘Good Cop’ to the
national and local Republicans’ role of the ‘Bad Cop,’ in the eyes of
the Democratic Party’s electoral base of deceived liberals, actually
began to take over the U.S. Government, for the benefit of, and service
to, America’s aristocracy.
This is why both Obama and Clinton are
big supporters of essentially unregulated GMOs. It’s sort of like
unregulated Wall Street: the profits get privatized, while the losses
(poor health etc.) get socialized.
———-
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
0 comments:
Post a Comment