Corporate Liberals for Monsanto (the CSPI, et.al.)

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Not that I have much use for petitions, other than as educational media. But this one, calling for the removal of Monsanto cadre Michael Taylor as government “food czar” (which the Food Control law empowers him to be), has a simple, benevolent demand. It fits the definition of a worthwhile “demand” on the system in that it would be easy for the system to comply, yet the system will refuse.

 

But this benign simplicity is far too much for our corporate liberal front groups. The so-called Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI – but they’re actually anti-science and most definitely against the public interest; but they certainly do support Centralism, so that part of their name is accurate) is leading the counterattack of a bunch of typical myopics, in the form of a pro-Taylor, pro-Monsanto and pro-GMO “Open Letter” asking MoveOn to back off. (To be sure, this petition is rather daring by MoveOn standards. So maybe some blowback from colleagues among that rancid system-liberal class might persuade them.) 

 

The CSPI has been notoriously soft on almost all of the most critical food issues. If you go to their website you’ll look in vain for much concern with workers, citizens, democracy, environmental destruction, CAFOs as pandemic vectors, animal cruelty. As for GMOs, they were pushing the “co-existence” scam even before Whole Foods took it up. One might think they’re just focusing on the nutrition issue, but no – they aggressively attack broad-based citizen activism, as we see here. They’re at best “useful idiots”, objective corporate front groups. More likely they intentionally chose this deal with the devil.

 

This is well-demonstrated at CSPI’s Biotechnology page, which is straight corporate propaganda.

 

That unique technique for manipulating hereditary traits can provide significant benefits, but also raises environmental, food safety, and societal concerns. Genetic engineering has the potential to decrease adverse environmental effects of conventional agriculture, increase yields for farmers (especially in developing countries), improve the nutritional quality and taste of crops, and contribute to sustainable agriculture.

 

These touted “benefits” have all been disproven, and are now flat out lies on the part of anyone who spews them, for example that GMOs increase yield (disproven by the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others). Meanwhile the brochure also expresses support for the continued enslavement of small farmers, especially in non-industrialized countries, to corporate commodity agriculture. You’d think the historical record would already have proven the evil of this, but that can’t stop our CSPI technocrats from continuing to call for what’s already been proven not to work, if the definition of “working” is the betterment of humanity and democracy.

 

As for the claim that doubling down on GMO monoculture, the ultimate oil-dependent and biologically vulnerable hothouse flower, makes for “sustainable agriculture”, the CSPI’s idiocy and malevolence speaks for itself.

 

Meanwhile, the CSPI is all about food labeling, so they must be for GMO labels, right? “Providing consumers with better label information”, as their Food Labeling page says?

 

On the contrary, few things could be more eloquent than the CSPI’s absolute silence on the GMO labeling efforts citizens are launching all over America. Just look over this list of “press releases and resources” going back to 2008. 

 

At best, CSPI is a statist “reform” organization. All its policy advocacy involves begging government for better top-down regulation. Corporatism as such, and corporate domination of our food, they take as normative. They just want it better regulated. They don’t call upon us to take back our food as democratic citizens and human beings. At most they make the meager suggestion that we be Better Consumers, to pay more attention to the nutrition labels on processed “food” in the big box aisle. The big box, and processed food in general, they represent as normative and desirable.

 

So it follows that whoever is in power, like this Taylor thug, they’ll look to as their Master and grovel before him, begging him for Kinder Gentler Tyranny. They’ll demonstrate their obedience and loyalty by attacking anyone who wants to abolish tyranny as such and create democracy.

 

This fundamental difference between the appeasement and collaboration mentality, vs. the human citizen mentality, is demonstrated in this amazing statement from the Open Letter:

 

Frankly, the petition represents the baldest sort of character assassination and plays right into the hands of those who are bent on convincing the public that all government officials are corrupt.

 

That all government officials are, not “corrupt” but pro-corporate and anti-democratic by their very nature, is a self-evident truth. But to the corporate flunkeys who signed this letter, to state such truth is “bald character assassination”.

 

Here we see an unbridgeable divide between those who would live as free, prosperous human beings and citizens of a community, and those who are dedicated to our terminal atomization and enslavement. There can be no compromise across such an infinite abyss. 

 

The letter is loaded with concern trolling. “Some of us” oppose this or that, are concerned about this or that. But the letter’s real message is that its signers oppose democracy and are concerned about citizen action. If they’re so upset about a picayune petition, imagine how they must get the vapors over anti-GMO direct action, or the Occupy movement, or any other real activism.

 

Monsanto has “some bad policies”? I challenge anyone to name a single good one. The fact is big corporations as such are evil, the corporate form as such is evil, the revolving door as such is evil. To stick up for them is to side against humanity and the earth, and to side with our enemies.

 

This is a lie:

 

It is far more relevant that in the Clinton Administration he headed the Food Safety and Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he stood up to the meat industry and fought for strict controls that help keep E. coli and other pathogens out of meat and poultry.

 

On the contrary, the Clinton administration sought to increase concentration in the meat industry. The HACCP has had that result. Since it hasn’t been revoked, and was instead extended to produce in the recently passed Food Control law, proves that such concentration and domination was its real intent. Corporate food outbreaks, meanwhile, have increased.

 

This is an Orwellian statement:

 

Since joining the Obama Administration, Taylor has been working extraordinarily hard to transform the FDA from a reactive agency that chases down foodborne‐illness outbreaks after people fall ill, to a proactive public‐health‐based agency focused on preventing foods from becoming contaminated in the first place.

 

What this really means is that the FDA will handle Big Corporate producers with kid gloves while aggressively “policing” (i.e., acting as a corporate goon against) small producers, for example real milk dairies. The Food Control law seeks to empower the FDA to escalate this war on the small producer.

 

We see here that part of the motivation is astroturfing for Obama:

 

While the Administration has not accomplished everything we food safety advocates would like to see done, Mike Taylor, along with President Obama, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen, and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, have made great progress on food safety in a rather short period of time. They deserve the chance to keep on doing it, despite the conspiracy mongering to which Mr. Taylor is now being subjected.

 

Yes indeed, in just a few short years Obama and his thugs have accomplished more on behalf of GMOs, CAFOs, ethanol, Big Drug (as pusher of hormones and antibiotics), corporate concentration, and Big Ag monoculture as such, and against small farmers and the food relocalization movement, than George Bush did in 8 years. That’s an accomplishment indeed, and we see the record of what the criminal signers of this letter consider “accomplishments”.

 

(I’ll remind the reader, however, that the petition itself is to Obama. So to some extent this is a squabble among those who claim to consider Obama a decent citizen and Better Leader rather than what his entire record establishes him to be, a criminal against humanity.)

 

If this is shaping up to be a fight to the finish (and it is), I want to obliterate everything obscuring the line of fire. We have two trenches, and between them should be nothing but no-man’s-land. But front groups like the CSPI want to run interference, obstruct our shots, and help the corporate assassins fire from cover.

 

Nor am I much interested any longer in the difference between premeditated front groups and stupid liberal myopics who are “just” objectively pro-corporate tyranny. If anything the latter are even more destructive.

 

The petition points out that one constant throughout Taylor’s career has been his aggression against transparency and consumer information, one of the fundamental elements of democracy and true food safety. So he fits right in with the Obama administration’s vicious hostility toward transparency and whistleblowers. Meanwhile we see what kind of citizen information the CSPI and allied groups support, and what they really mean when they use the Orwellian term “food safety”. They, just as much as Monsanto, mean safety for corporate profits and state power. That’s what this ironically titled “open letter” is all about.