Look Only at What The System Does (Pesticides and Bees)

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The goal of technocracy in general and its agricultural manifestation in particular is to replace all natural processes with technospheric ones. Soil ecosystems and the ecological cycles of carbon and nitrogen are wiped out and replaced by synthetic fertilizer. The balancing of “pest” insects and “weeds” within a biodiverse ecology is wiped out and replaced by pesticides. Diverse and resilient landrace and heirloom genetics are wiped out and replaced by the hyper-narrowed genetics of hybrids and genetic engineering, eventually by synthetic genomes. Whole foods themselves are wiped out and replaced by manufactured calorie packs. Tang is indeed the quintessential “food” of this ideology.

 

It follows that insect pollinators are to be wiped out and replaced by synthetic modes of pollination. When we understand technocracy’s goals this way, we understand why the system continues its drive to maximize pesticides in spite of the proof going back to the 1940s that pesticides kill and impair bees. Technocracy wants to wipe out bees, and no amount of rational argument about how suicidal this is for humanity will change this imperative, any more than rational argument works in the cases of soil health, pest control, genetic diversity.

 

 

You want to understand reality? You want to know the truth? Never listen to what anyone who represents power says about what power wants to do. This is always a lie. Look only at what power consistently does. Look at the consistent results of this pattern of action, and then assume those results to be the real goals of the campaign. This is the Strict Intent of the actions of power. It’s the one and only objective measure of truth.

 

Therefore if the consistent result of an action is destruction and death, then destruction and death is the real goal of the action. QED.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glyphosate and the General Poison Paradigm: Destroy the Soil; Destroy Antibiotics; Drive Climate Chaos

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The end goal

 

 

“Field studies cited in the report show the half-life of glyphosate in soil ranges between a few days to several months, or even a year, depending on soil composition. The authors say the research demonstrates that soil sorption and degradation of glyphosate vary significantly depending on the soil’s physical, chemical, and biological properties.”

 

Who would’ve thought the effects of pesticides and GMOs depend on environmental factors! Certainly not our flat-earther scientific reductionists and biological determinists.

 

 

1. As an antibiotic and general animal poison glyphosate wrecks critical soil ecosystems, from bacteria to earthworms and beyond. Therefore it takes its place as part of the corporate campaign to destroy all soil, whose continued existence depends upon these soil ecosystems. All actions of industrial agriculture directly destroy the soil. Therefore this is a primary goal of all participants and supporters of this mode of agriculture.

 

2. Along with antibiotic abuse in CAFOs and genetic engineering, glyphosate and other pesticides are part of the general corporate campaign to wipe out antibiotics as an effective medical treatment. Glyphosate does this two ways: (1) As an abused antibiotic itself, it drives microbial resistance among botulins, salmonella, and other pathogenic bacteria. This effect is related to how glyphosate decimates our essential gut bacteria while selectively sparing those pathogens. (2) The main source of antibiotic agents is the same soil bacteria which are being decimated by glyphosate. By destroying soil ecosystems, the glyphosate campaign works to destroy the very basis of antibiotic research and development.

 

All actions of industrial agriculture work to eradicate antibiotic medical technology. Therefore this is a primary goal of all participants and supporters of this mode of agriculture.*

 

3. Soil ecosystems are essential for the cycling of carbon in forms other than the atmospheric release of carbon dioxide. Proximately, soil organisms draw CO2 down from the air and build soil organic matter in the form of humus. They help maintain healthy, prolific plant growth with maximum incorporation of carbon in the plant biomass. This comprises the proximate carbon sink. Over the longer run, soil organisms greatly enhance the process of carbon being incorporated into water solution (in the form of calcium bicarbonate), carried to the ocean, and from there incorporated into the microscopic shells and skeletons of oceanic algae whose shells then rain down to the ocean floor where they solidify as limestone. This is the ultimate carbon sink, from which the carbon doesn’t volcanically return to the air for many millions of years.

 

By decimating soil ecosystems, glyphosate and other pesticides stanch both the proximate and long run processes of carbon sinking. They maximize the atmospheric release of CO2.

 

All aspects of industrial agriculture work to drive the climate crisis by destroying sinks and maximizing the emission of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. Therefore this is a primary goal of all participants and supporters of this mode of agriculture. Indeed, climate change takes its place alongside the mass forced eviction from the land as a deliberate disaster capitalist campaign of the corporate technocracy.

 

Destruction of the soil, destruction of medical antibiotics, climate chaos: These are deliberate, systematic crimes of the political and economic leaders. They’re the crimes of every profiteer, executive, engineer, and propagandist of corporate industrial agriculture.

 

 

*As for the scientism wingnuts, mainstream media, and academics and public intellectuals, it bears repeating as often as possible that they support the campaign to eradiate antibiotics. Remember this next time you see someone shrieking about the alleged threat to public health from a handful of non-vaccinators. Demand to know what he’s doing about the systematic campaign of governments and corporations to wipe out antibiotics via their profligate abuse in CAFOs and genetic engineering. This is a campaign which intentionally generates maximal antibiotic resistance among pathogens. And yet the cultists do nothing and say nothing about this. On the contrary, they actively support all the crimes of corporate agriculture including the campaign to wipe out antibiotics. This proves that they couldn’t care less about public health, and that their hysteria and hatred toward non-vaccinators has zero to do with public health. Rather, as authoritarian cult members they’re enraged by this form of civil disobedience as an affront to their statism and scientism. These fundamentalists see non-vaccination as blasphemy against their religion. So the surface arguments about vaccination are just a proxy for a religious culture war. The culture war over vaccines is used by the corporate technocracy as an organizational gambit, same as with the idea of genetically engineered eugenics and GMOs. It’s meant to organize fascist-type hatred toward dissidents against the technocracy. That’s why the techno-cultists, insofar as they shriek about non-vaccinators, should be called proxxers. Always let your first thought be: “These supporters of the CAFO/GMO system want to eradicate antibiotics. They want antibiotics to cease to exist. They are mass murderers.”

 

 

 

 

 

A Dispute of Detail Amid a Clear Panorama

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I’ve been hearing for several months about a gathering dispute. Stephanie Seneff and Anthony Samsel are two scientists who have written a series of papers theorizing about how glyphosate may be the cause of “pathways to modern diseases”, as the title of the first in the series had it.

 

Some fellow scientists also involved in analyzing the health harms of glyphosate, in particular Robin Mesnage and Michael Antoniou, have questioned what they see as some of Seneff’s less evidenced claims.

 

Seneff is more of a theorist than someone who sticks with what’s immediately provable, but everything she’s written is plausible and fits the evidence we do have. Mesnage and Antoniou are good scientists and do what good scientists should do. If Seneff overstates the evidence for her theses then she should be held to scientific standards. But obviously the struggle to abolish poison-based agriculture is overwhelmingly a political and cultural struggle, with science being only a small part of it.

 

Far too often, anti-poison people endorse scientism’s lie that science is the most important tool, even the only tool. This is even though the deployment of pesticides and GMOs has zero to do with science, while genetic engineering itself has very little scientific theory. It depends almost completely on genetic determinist junk science and brute force empiricism. Today’s scientific establishment and mass media have only one system and depiction of science, and this is the corporate science paradigm. Any scientific fact or knowledge which contradicts this paradigm is ruled out by the system as unscience.

 

So for a movement with very limited resources to focus narrowly on science not only accepts the enemy’s fraudulent choice of battleground but it demonstrates a confusion about what the mainstream is willing to accept as being part of science in the first place. It’s not just bringing a knife to a gunfight, it’s bringing a chicken to a chess game.

 

Meanwhile, since governments and corporations systematically have refused to devote a modest amount of their vastly more than ample resources to test all this and produce the evidence (and starve independent researchers of funds and deny them access to materials), but instead systematically lie about having performed tests, invent anti-scientific religious dogmas like “substantial equivalence”, and refer to “evidence” they allegedly do possess but somehow cannot publicize (but “secret science” is a contradiction in terms; if it’s secret, it doesn’t exist as part of the scientific record, by definition), this all proves that they know or suspect the worst, and gives skeptics and critics the right to assume the worst. And I say we should do so, as a matter of methodological principle. That’s what I call Strict Proof. I don’t see any other principle being sufficient for this crisis, this war.

 

Therefore, the strictly scientific critique of the work of Seneff and Samsel is naturally only a quite narrow part of our entire range of evidence and counter-attack. It doesn’t invalidate their theories on the whole, it only reminds people to be cautious about assuming what they say is proven scientific truth. This critique must always be placed in the perspective of the complete refusal of corporations and governments to perform legitimate science, a campaign of refusal which strictly proves that they know or believe the worst of their product. This conduct on their part gives us far more scope, as a matter of rational method, to speculate far further about how bad the effects must be, than if the supporters of the product had been more upfront.

 

It’s a simple principle: If someone demands you do something (in this case, eat GMOs and food containing glyphosate residues, and accept the wholesale infiltration of glyphosate into the soil and the rest of the ecology) and yet refuses to publicly test the effects of all this or to tell you whatever the results of their secret tests were, you can and should assume the worst. I call this Strict Proof, and I regard it as the right principle and method for humanity’s situation up against poison-based agriculture (and a lot of other things).

 

Therefore I’d say that to make a primary effort (and with such limited resources) out of testing Seneff’s theses is barking up the wrong tree in the first place. For anti-poison campaigners in general to regard this as somehow affecting our overall struggle would definitely miss the forest. This is merely one data point which goes partially against one detail of what remains the logical theory. Remember what Galileo and Einstein warned about, as Einstein put it (p.4), being “too restricted, in constructing one’s conceptual world, by adherence to an epistomological system” whose framework at first might seem adverse to what remains rationally the best theory.

 

By the way, to the best of my knowledge the pro-poison activist scientists haven’t done any work to scientifically test Seneff and Samsel. Why not? I’d say it’s primarily because they recognize it’s beside the point (though also because they may fear the results if they really did perform such tests). I say if there really is anything fundamentally unsound about Seneff’s theories, let Monsanto prove it. Monsanto forced this whole situation on us and therefore assumes the great bulk of moral and philosophical responsibility for it. Let’s stay within the bounds of our responsibility.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dicamba Crisis Part 2: GMO/Pesticides Vs. Evolution

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The final step would be no plants and therefore no humans.

 

 

Part one, describing the crisis.

 

 

Contrary to modernist religion evolution does not “progress”, but barring extreme events it tends in a linear way toward greater diversity. It doesn’t make great leaps outside of its own limits and laws. This is why scientifically sound agriculture is based on soil-building, biodiversity, attracting beneficial insects and other organisms, and putting natural stress on pests. These are the basis of agroecology.

 

Poison-based agriculture comprises, in theory and practice, the radical repudiation of science and wisdom. Rejecting biodiversity in every way and exalting monculture, it is anti-evolutionary and counter-evolutionary. It seeks to break out of evolution and nature completely and replace these with a technological desert. We see this most clearly with the GMO campaign.

 

One of the core cult faiths of genetic engineering cultism is that the engineers can lift themselves and their product out of the framework of natural evolution, leap over all its processes and safeguards, and superimpose their own anti-evolved, non-contexted product over the entire globe in minimal time. The GMO ideology is based on a technological leaping-out of natural evolution, in the same way technocracy as an order of social engineering wants to leap out of human politics, indeed out of human nature as such. As we see with the unfolding dicamba crisis, the results are likely to be disastrous.

 

 

The networked organisms of the ecological system are always reacting to changes in their environment. Their organic reactions generally sum up to relative stability over evolutionary time, and this is part of the process of evolution. Where a change radically leaps over the dampening effect of evolutionary time including its many safeguards and diminishing feedback loops, especially where this radical change is combined with many other drivers of chaos and destruction, the network becomes overstressed as many component organisms find it difficult or impossible to adapt.

 

Naturally evolving organisms and the conventional crop breeding which necessarily is done within the framework of evolution must encounter the naturally evolved safeguards against mutation and ecological disruption. Changes need time and effort to run a gamut of naturally imposed challenges, or the challenges of breeder selection, to become established. Genetic engineering, on the contrary, aggressively seeks to override these safeguards and leap over these challenges. It seeks to deploy the infected genome in the environment over vast regions as fast as it can. This is such a difference of magnitude, speed, and geographical reach as to comprise a qualitative difference. It seeks to maximize mutations and chaotic effects in the environment, along with the great disruptions the impresarios deliberately premeditate.

 

Black Swan author Nassim Taleb co-authored a paper on the systemic risk of genetic engineering. Genetic engineering has zero in common with conventional breeding, physically or ecologically. The lies and denials of pro-GMO activists with regard to this fact demonstrate their general ignorance of evolution and flippant disregard for its implications. The most extreme manifestation of pro-GM evolution denial is this incapacity or refusal to recognize the great difference between adaptation to a wide range of natural environmental hurdles encountered over evolutionary time, as opposed to seeking to leap over all the hurdles in an instant, with the entire process from genetic extraction to insertion to breeding to distribution taking place in a totally artificial, hermetic, alien, non-contextual bubble, and from there to deploy a biological technology developed in this anti-environmental way all at once on a global basis in the real world. Under such circumstances a rational person would expect nothing but disaster.

 

No one even slightly familiar with ecology, biology, genetics, agronomy, or history could take this seriously for a moment. Any natural allele, mutation, horizontal genetic transfer, must run a long gauntlet of safeguards developed by evolution including the genome’s own repair mechanism, then the greater hurdles of the local environment, and must adapt and spread over millions of years. Farmer selection and conventional breeding have followed such a pattern for 10,000 years.

 

But the genetic engineering technique which has existed for just a few years now claims to supersede these thousands and millions of years. It claims to be able to leap over the evolutionary genetic hurdles using technology. This is impossible. Therefore the genetic engineering project implicitly seeks to maximize the harmful mutations, latent weaknesses, unfit traits, and hazards.

 

Similarly, genetic engineering and the political-economic GMO deployment system claim to be able to leap over the evolutionary environmental hurdles, as well as the geographic hurdles, using economic brute force. This means it wants to spread the infected, harmful genetic and biological material, and the agronomic and ecological destruction which follows from it, as globally as possible as fast as possible.

 

Genetic engineering ideology wants to leap over the entire evolutionary time and action during which all matters of fitness, quality, and toxicity are worked out by nature, or by human thought and labor in conjunction with nature. The hubris and contempt for science on display with these persons is staggering. Genetic engineering has nothing in common with conventional breeding. GMOs can be only a debilitating parasite free riding on conventional breeding and destroying its work.

 

Therefore with GMOs we have a phenomenon where politics and economics meld inextricably with ecology. Ecologists, and those whose science is sculpted by an ecological mindset, are the only scientists qualified to speak about GMOs. Beyond that this technology is fundamentally a political and economic phenomenon. GMOs as deployed in the real world, rather than in the depraved minds of their idolators, have very little to do with science. This renders it all the more ironic when the pro-GM activists go hysterically braying about how even the most modest questions or criticisms are “anti-science! anti-science!” We see the evolution denialism of the pro-GMO activists.

 

 

The pesticide model of agriculture is conjoined with the GMO ideology of technologically leaping out of natural evolution. Pesticides are dedicated to the scorched earth monoculture model of agriculture and the ideology which regards the natural world as something to be wiped out. Poisonism is a radical rejection of biodiversity in principle and practice and comprises the will to wipe out all life except that specially selected to be part of the technocratic socio-ecological engineering.

 

The primary privileged organisms in this anti-evolutionary order are the bacterium A. tumefaciens (used as the main insertion vector in genetic engineering, thus using the engineers for its own purposes) and the proprietary GM crops themselves, along with the corporate persons (dogmatically declared to be “real” life forms) and the few humans who are monetarily wealthy. Ironically, the other main group of life forms privileged under this system are the pests, weeds, and diseases whose eradication is the alleged reason for deploying pesticides in the first place.

 

Corporate industrial agriculture denies weed and pest resistance in principle, even as its monoculture provides the best terrain for these organisms to prosper. (It does the same for rats, now the subject of a pro-CRISPR propaganda campaign against “invasives”; more on how the corporate system deliberately privileges rats for its own purposes in an upcoming piece.) Where forced by reality to discuss resistance, the corporations and media blame farmers for sloppy pesticide application and thus pretend that proper application can forestall the development of resistance. But everyone knows the pesticide treadmill, the endless arms race between the escalation of poisons and the resistance the targets inevitably develop against these poisons, is an intrinsic element of the system. In fact this is deliberate planned obsolescence. Everyone knows that no poison works longer than a few years and then must be supplemented by additional, more destructive poisons. The entire model of agrochemicals and GMOs is based on this malevolent dynamic. Therefore weed and pest resistance is the phenomenon upon which they are completely dependent for their continued profit and power. By contrast, if farmers switched to agroecology and dealt with pests and weeds by balancing them out within the framework of evolution rather than a scorched earth arms race running directly counter to it, agriculture would be far more productive, constructive, efficient, and profitable for the actual growers, and it would be the end of the power of agribusiness.

 

We see the horror this prospect strikes in the minds not only of the corporate operatives and scientism cultists themselves, but of the entire governmental, scientific, academic, and media system. That’s why, in spite of some lip service here and there about mixed systems like integrated pest management (IPM), the only truly allowable response to the patent failure of each pesticide and pesticide/GMO system is to deploy even more and worse poisons. The deployment of the Xtend/dicamba system is in response to the collapse of the Roundup Ready system as glyphosate-resistant weeds make a mockery of even the most copious slatherings of the poison. Dicamba and 2,4-D (upon which Dow’s Enlist system is built) both, Monsanto and the USDA promised in the 1990s, would be rendered obsolete by the Roundup Ready system based on the allegedly less harmful glyphosate. All the weed scientists researching and publicizing the dicamba disaster nevertheless agree that the dicamba deployment is the necessary response to Roundup’s collapse, even as they acknowledge that dicamba inevitably will fail and, implicitly, that the herbicide-tolerance GMO model itself is a complete failure. Dicamba’s revival is just the latest proof. For the corporate-technocratic system the only allowed response to failure is to escalate on proven failure. Poison-based agriculture is the most clear and extreme example.

 

Sure enough, weed scientists already are touting the upcoming corporate poison escalations.

 

Scott talked about the HT3 soybean from Monsanto, a “triple stack” soybean that will tolerate three herbicide chemistries: glyphosate, glufosinate and dicamba. Glyphosate is known commercially as Roundup. Glufosinate is known as Liberty. Scott said these beans may be available as early as 2019, but likely in limited amounts.

“We observed very good pigweed control with these technologies”, he said.

Also on the horizon, possibly as early as 2018, are the Enlist soybeans. Scott said these beans are “only awaiting Chinese approval for their being legal to use in the U.S.”

Syngenta and Bayer are working on HPPD-tolerant soybeans, “which are further down the line.” The timeline for availability may be 2020 to 2023, Scott said, and the beans are likely to be stacked with other traits.

Still, the message was hopeful at a time when current weed management methods are dividing the farm community.

“This is the first time in a long time that I’ve heard the chemical companies say they’ve got some new tools in the pipeline,” he said.

 

And if these are commercialized, just as surely as glyphosate and dicamba before them these too inevitably will fail, causing even more extreme damage along the way. And so they ratchet from poison to poison, each allegedly representing the end of all other poisons.

 

This proves that the system’s mode of action systematically selects for weed resistance (just as the Bt refuge scam and the entire insecticide model select for insect resistance). This is the one and only point of contact between the poison system and evolution. The system denies evolution in principle and claims some magic combination of poisons will overcome it, even as in practice the system intentionally drives the evolution of resistance in order to sustain and increase its own political and economic power.

 

Therefore, just as monocultural cropping provides the optimal terrain for pests and weeds, the pesticide treadmill fosters their accelerated evolutionary resistance to poisons. In the same way dicamba, like all herbicides and like the entire industrial system based on CAFOs and the antibiotic resistance markers used in genetic engineering, drives the evolution of antibiotic resistant microbes. This too must be seen as an intended goal of the system, a way it manipulates evolution even while denying it. This affects most of all those people directly in contact with the herbicides – farmers, applicators, and in the case of dicamba’s atmospheric loading, all people who live in the dicamba zone. Herbicides decimate our microbiome, selectively sparing pathogens and boosting their resistance to antibiotics. The greater the drift effect, the greater the antibiotic resistance effect. Therefore the dicamba deployment, and the entire glyphosate/2,4-D/dicamba campaign, must be placed in the context of the systematic campaign of governments and corporations to wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment. No one who understands and respects evolution could be in any doubt about this goal.

 

 

We understand the insanity of the dicamba GMO crisis. It builds on the failure of Roundup and of the pesticide model as such. It simultaneously denies evolution and drives a specially destructive mode of evolution. Herbicide tolerant GMOs systematically select for weed resistance. Sure enough, dicamba-resistant weeds already are on the rise. The greater the atmospheric loading of volatile dicamba vapor, the faster it’ll drive weed resistance along with every other ecological and health harm.

 

Dicamba’s inherent volatility renders it impossible to control even assuming the greatest care in spraying. Contrary to Monsanto’s lies, all dicamba is volatile including the name brand formulations of Monsanto and BASF. Indeed there’s evidence that dicamba’s volatility is essential to it having any proximate herbicidal effect on weeds in the first place. The more dicamba is sprayed under the warm, humid conditions which cause it to become volatile (i.e., the way it’s intended to be used with the Xtend system), the more the atmosphere in the dicamba zone will become suffused with dicamba vapor and the more completely it will settle over the entire countryside. Under those conditions it will become impossible for any other soybean variety, GM or non-GM, to exist. Farmers will be forced to purchase the few soybean varieties engineered with the Xtend trait. This is Monsanto’s deliberate campaign of biological extortion. (“Xtortion”, as many soybean farmers are calling it.)

 

Therefore Monsanto’s goal is to wipe out all non-Xtend soybeans and attain a monopoly. But that’s just the beginning. We also see the system’s implicit will to destroy vast swaths of vegetables, ornamentals, and trees. However senseless this might seem from the point of view of any textbook profit motive, it’s an expression of the fanatical monoculture mentality which wants to wipe out all natural plant growth and reduce all cultivation to corporate-controlled industrial monoculture.

 

What alternative intent can we infer from the system’s will to escalate the deployment in 2018 after 2017 already proved it so indiscriminately destructive? All USDA and Monsanto projections and proclamations continue to prove that their strict goal is to maximize dicamba’s use and destructiveness. If all goes according to corporate plan, by fall 2018’s seed increase 80% of the commercial soybean seed and 90% of the cotton will be engineered to maximize spraying of dicamba or 2,4-D. Monsanto’s rebate plan for 2018 is further proof that the goal is to attain a complete monopoly over soybean seed, and dicamba’s complete geographical and biological domination, as quickly as possible in order to forestall all social resistance and agronomic alternatives. Any advcacy of full speed ahead with business as usual proves the will to drive out all non-Xtend soybeans and from there all other broad-leaf plants, period. (Meanwhile 2,4-D threatens/promises to do the same for grasses.)

 

We see what an extreme renunciation of evolution’s process and diversity this campaign is. The ultimate monoculture goal is nothing less than to wipe out all biodiversity except for the pests themselves and replace it with a technocratic blank slate. The cultists and operatives first deny evolution in principle, then seek to wipe it out in practice. The goal is to use violence (technological and where necessary conventional) to force their nightmare vision of technocratic “progress” onto natural succession.

 

They cannot succeed because their program seeks to defy evolution. In spite of their pretensions to, as one of their leaders in the Bush administration said, “create our own reality”, they cannot do so. However grim things look right now, their anti-nature, anti-evolution program dooms them to destruction.

 

 

We mammals must wait it out, taking every opportunity to destroy the dinosaurs’ eggs.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

The Dicamba Crisis (Part 1)

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Decades of experience prove the model of agriculture based on pesticides doesn’t work and is unsustainable. A rational, honest person would long ago have rejected poison-based agriculture in favor of agroecology. They would have had a “Show Me” attitude toward Missouri-based Monsanto’s proposition that the GMO version of this poison model would be any different, and they quickly would have realized it’s the same failure.

 

That’s how we know support for GMOs, and continued support for pesticides, has zero to do with reason and science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the resurrection of such herbicides as 2,4-D and dicamba which the GMO paradigm previously declared obsolete. Nowhere is the big lie more obvious than in the case of how dicamba’s new GMO-based escalation immediately precipitated the most acute American agricultural crisis since the Southern corn leaf blight epidemic of 1970.

 

In the 1990s Monsanto rolled out its glyphosate-tolerant Roundup Ready product line of GM crops. One of the big selling points was that glyphosate allegedly was less harmful to human health, the environment, and other crops than dicamba and 2,4-D. Monsanto and the USDA promised Roundup Ready would permanently supersede these bad old poisons. Monsanto and the USDA also promised weeds never would become resistant to glyphosate.

 

As anyone could have predicted and many did, these were both lies. Within a few years Roundup-resistant weeds began to proliferate. Soon the same old arms race was on between ever more commonplace and resistant weeds and escalating glyphosate applications. A few more years and Roundup Ready was in ruins, glyphosate near worthless, glyphosate-resistant weeds on a triumphal march across America’s farmland.

 

Monsanto was lying when it claimed Roundup Ready was the final word on weed control. On the contrary, as per the standard corporate program of planned obsolescence the company developed a new type of herbicide tolerant GMO in anticipation of the obsolescence of Roundup Ready. Monsanto’s new flagship product, designed to rescue the company from its Roundup dependency and lift it to new heights of dominion and profitability, is the Xtend system of dicamba herbicide and dicamba-tolerant GM cotton and soybeans. In 2015 Monsanto put Xtend cotton seed on the market, in 2016 Xtend soybeans. The EPA was uncharacteristically slow and didn’t approve the new Monsanto and BASF dicamba formulations until autumn of 2016. In 2017, in tandem with the new and allegedly improved brand-name dicamba, Monsanto was able significantly to escalate the acreage of Xtend soybean sales.

 

Knowledgeable commentators long forsaw problems. Pesticide drift has always been a problem, and this problem is especially acute with dicamba. Prior to the advent of the Xtend system dicamba was used only early in the season before crops had sprouted and under weather conditions which didn’t maximize its drift potential. As early as 2011 farmers, scientists, and industry figures warned that any large-scale spraying of dicamba under the warm, humid conditions of late spring onward was likely to maximize drift and the damage to other crops and plants this drift would cause. Dicamba kills all broad-leaf plants. Soybeans are especially sensitive to it, but it easily damages and kills most crops, ornamentals, and trees.

 

Right on schedule, as dicamba began to be sprayed during the growing season the drift damage to innocent bystander crops began to be reported. There was significant damage in 2015 and far more in 2016 as the acreage sprayed greatly increased. But this was only the prelude to the full blown disaster of 2017. By May a flood of damage reports was coursing in to the agricultural departments and university extensions of the major soy producing states, especially Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Tennessee. Soybeans everywhere not engineered to be tolerant of dicamba were sustaining often lethal damage, along with peanuts and vegetable crops such as tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and leafy greens. Arkansas’ largest peach orchard was decimated for the second straight year. Symbolically, the University of Arkansas test plot where researchers were studying the drift potential of name-brand dicamba succumbed to drift and was wiped out.

 

By July Arkansas and Missouri issued emergency bans on further spraying of dicamba, but Missouri quickly backpedaled under Monsanto pressure. The damage reports continued to pile up across more than twenty states. By season’s end weed scientist Kevin Bradley of the University of Missouri tallied 3.6 million acres of non-Xtend soybeans damaged or killed by drifting dicamba.

 

Throughout the destructive year Monsanto ran its standard campaign of denial, lies, and scapegoating. Forced to take some kind of action the EPA announced a voluntary agreement with Monsanto and BASF to impose new certification requirements for dicamba applicators. More substantially, the Arkansas Plant Board unanimously recommended that its existing emergency ban be made policy for 2018, banning dicamba use from April 16th through October 31st. (This proposal is currently in limbo as Monsanto-subservient state legislators are trying to gut the ban. Monsanto also has sued to prevent its enforcement.)

 

 

Dicamba can move off site in several ways. One typical way for pesticides to drift is when applicators are careless about spraying under windy conditions and the poison immediately is wafted away on the wind. This is what is properly called “drift”. But dicamba has a far more insidious and destructive mode of drifting. Under common conditions of warmth and humidity liquid dicamba resting on plants and soil is prone to volatilize, turn into a gas, lift off the surfaces, and float on the air often many miles from the site of spraying before weather conditions change and cause it to resettle on whatever plants are in the vicinity. The more dicamba is sprayed in a region, the more all-pervasive the suffusion becomes. This is called atmospheric loading.

 

Dicamba’s volatility effect is well known. Monsanto and BASF promised that their new dicamba formulations, XtendiMax and Engenia, had solved the problem and would not be volatile. But Monsanto immediately signaled it was lying when it forbade university researchers pre-market access to XtendiMax in order to test it for volatility. They were allowed to test only its herbicidal capability.

 

Sure enough, in 2017 when researchers were able to purchase XtendiMax and Engenia at the store and test it themselves they found that these brand name formulations are nearly as volatile as the earlier cheap formulas. The fact is that all dicamba is volatile. It’s impossible to use it under warm humid conditions, i.e. the way it’s intended to be used under the Xtend system, and not have it promiscuously volatilize, move off site, and kill any broad leaf crops and plants it resettles upon.

 

Many farmers already have filed suit against Monsanto and BASF, as individuals and in class actions, seeking to hold these poison-peddlers accountable and make them pay for the damage they willfully have caused.

 

 

The Xtend/dicamba GMO series is the most extreme manifestation yet of what is typical of all commercial GMOs. They’re pesticide plants designed to escalate poison use and escalate the futile arms race between pesticides and the resistant pests and weeds. This absurd and destructive treadmill clearly is, in itself, the purpose of poison-based agriculture and especially its GMO-based incarnation. The pesticide treadmill ensures incessant product obsolescence, constant escalation of the potency and amount and cost of the pesticides which must be deployed, maximal dependency of farmers on the most artificial, vulnerable mode of agriculture which requires the maximum of the costly inputs supplied by agribusiness.

 

In this way agribusiness consolidates maximum control over farming and the food supply and launches a general assault on the ecology, all toward the goal of maximizing human and ecological monoculture. This is the scorched-earth terrain which provides the best habitat for pest, weed, and disease infestation, and therefore the maximum ideological and political habitat for the power claims of agribusiness, the scientism cult, and all who hate humanity and nature and who seek total domination. Poisonism therefore generates the maximal habitat for the propaganda campaign of lies, fear-mongering, and fraudulent promises that the solution is right around the corner if farmers and society only stay the poison course. This is proven every day in a hundred new articles and press statements from corporations, governments, Wall Street, academia, and the mainstream media, all speaking as one proclaiming that the only solution to the escalating crisis is to escalate the poison.

 

 

This doesn’t cause those of the true faith to falter, because beyond mundane profiteering poisonism is an ideological cult. Monsanto of course has responded with a campaign of lies. They openly deny that brand name dicambas are volatile and instead blame farmers for improper application which leads to regular wind drift, and for using older dicamba blends which are volatile.

 

The response of pro-dicamba activists across the board has been to promulgate new certification requirements and restrictions on how and when dicamba can be sprayed, in accord with the right wind conditions, temperature, time of day, and the right equipment. The EPA’s voluntary agreement with Monsanto and BASF enshrines these kinds of restrictions which allegedly will solve the problem.

 

But the whole notion of new regulations is based on the false premise that volatility isn’t the main cause of the off-target damage. This already has been proven false. The 2017 research demonstrated that no amount of care in the application can prevent dicamba from volatilizing and moving off site. Therefore the entire campaign for new restrictions is conjoined with Monsanto’s primary lie. In other words the entire campaign is bogus, nothing but a sham. As usual, EPA is the lead government propagandist backing up the corporate lies.

 

The most direct proof that these restrictions don’t work comes from Missouri. I mentioned earlier how in July Missouri instituted a temporary spraying ban but quickly lifted it. At the same time it rescinded the dicamba ban Missouri imposed the now standard set of new restrictions on its use. But this accomplished nothing: Within weeks the damage reports surged anew. This is the most proximate proof that the extra regulations don’t work.

 

But then we didn’t need that extra proof. Contrary to Monsanto’s lies, most farmers who spray dicamba do their conscientious best to spray so that it doesn’t spread beyond their farms and damage their neighbors. (Besides, if you’re going to pay to spray a pesticide, of course you’re going to do your best to keep the maximum amount on your site in order to get the full extent of what you think is the benefit.) In spite of this dicamba has drifted promiscuously, in many cases miles away from where it was sprayed. This is in spite of every care taken, and it certainly will continue in spite of any added care short of a ban on spraying past mid-April.

 

This proves that all dicamba is highly volatile and nothing can prevent it from moving off site and killing other crops and plants. Co-existence with the Xtend system is impossible. If dicamba continues to be deployed the way it was in 2017 (and Monsanto is projecting a doubling of the Xtend soybean acreage in 2018, from 20 million acres to 40 million), all soy farmers will have no choice but to buy Xtend GM seeds, while much vegetable farming and gardening as well as the existence of many other plants and trees will become impossible in the soybean zones. This proves that Monsanto’s goal remains the same as it’s always been, the goal it enshrined in what it calls its “Expanded Trait Penetration” program. Monsanto’s goal always is to force farmers to buy as many stacked GM traits as possible. Xtend is the most extreme version yet of this program. Monsanto’s goal is to extort all soybean farmers, under threat of the drift destruction of their crop, into buying the Xtend seeds and the XtendiMax herbicide (along with Roundup; Xtend is tolerant of both dicamba and glyphosate).

 

 

We see their wickedness. The dicamba crisis is the epitome of all that’s bad about GMOs as such and herbicide tolerant GMOs in particular. Agronomically this system shackles farmers to a destroyed soil and weak, denuded crops which constantly must be goosed with fertilizer, irrigated water, and an ever greater slathering of pesticides. It drives the monoculture of crop varieties as Monsanto seeks its goal of forcing seed growers to increase and farmers to buy only the few varieties into which the Xtend trait has been crossed, as only these will be viable in an atmospheric zone suffused with dicamba vapors. Weeds are guaranteed to evolve to resist dicamba, indeed already are doing so. This will require an even more complex, expensive, toxic brew to be deployed. Sure enough, in 2017 the corporations already were touting the poison plants slated to replace Xtend in a few years.

 

Socioeconomically the herbicide tolerance GMO model is designed to destroy hand-weeding jobs and force farm consolidation by driving out smaller farmers and rendering giant plantations more easy to manage. In this way agribusiness works to attain domination over farming. The fewer and bigger the farms, the easier they are to control.

 

Ecologically this poison-based monoculture wipes out habitat for monarch butterflies and many other animals and plants, kills honeybees, and directly poisons the soil, water, and air, causing havoc among these ecosystems. During spraying season humans and animals continually breathe the atmospheric load of vaporized dicamba. This aggravates dicamba’s known irritant effects on the eyes, nose, throat, and lungs. Dicamba causes cancer and birth defects. We can expect to see a spike in birth defects in the dicamba zone in 2018. Along with glyphosate and 2,4-D dicamba, as a grossly abused antibiotic, drives antibiotic resistance among many strains of harmful bacteria, thus contributing to the general campaign of corporate industrial agriculture to wipe out antibiotics as a medically effective treatment.

 

These crises are endemic to massive herbicide use in general. Dicamba, by spreading beyond where it’s sprayed to a far greater extent than other herbicides, represents a great escalation of all the crises of agronomy, farm economy, ecology, and public health.

 

 

The system offers no solution, whether it be to the acute dicamba crisis or the general chronic crisis of corporate industrial agriculture. Even the weed scientists who have been doing the volatility research, tallying the destruction, and sounding the alarm offer nothing but the meek suggestion that poison use, while “necessary”, should be reformed and limited. In a mass manifestation of Stockholm syndrome damaged farmers still say the same. But the scientists’ own research demonstrates that the standard reforms can accomplish nothing, while the corporations will never accept such limits. Even as Monsanto pretended to endorse the EPA-brokered voluntary agreement it continued defiantly to assert there should be no restrictions beyond its own label.

 

Nothing within the system can meet the challenge of a crisis inherent to the core premises of the system itself. Poisonism has no future. The only way forward for weed and pest control is soil-building combined with organic pest management. The health of the soil, so ravaged by industrial agricultural practice, is the foundation of all sustainable agriculture and agriculture’s entire future. Everything else is a footnote.

 

Only a new movement built completely from outside the corporate agriculture system can meet the challenge of the day. This movement must be based on the rising ecological, agronomic, cultural, spiritual paradigm centered on the necessary transformation to agroecology and food sovereignty and the necessary abolition of poison-based agriculture.

 

 

We started by pointing out that anyone motivated by reason and the scientific mindset would long ago have concluded that poison-based agriculture doesn’t work, does far more harm than good, and should be rejected in favor of agroecology. They would have been skeptical of GMOs based on escalating this already disproven agricultural model. They would’ve found quickly that the GMO version of this model is no different and simply intensifies the same failure while rendering it even more destructive.

 

The continued denial and defense of the dicamba outbreak on the part of the pro-poison activists proves that for today’s cultists reason is the last thing any of them care about, and actual scientific evidence a close second to last. It proves that support for GMOs has zero to do with reason and science and everything to do with religious/ideological wingnuttery, where it’s not just a gutter profiteering motive. They have proven this true with every step of the genetic engineering deployment. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than the way they’ve seized upon the collapse of Roundup Ready, by any rational measure a catastrophic discrediting of the entire GMO and pesticide paradigm, as an opportunity to exalt an even more destructive poison product, one which they themselves started out promising Roundup Ready would render obsolete, and whose doom at the stems and vines of the same resistance-evolving weeds is already on the horizon.

 

The already disastrous advent of the dicamba GMOs, and the fanatic will of the GMO cultists to push forward such an insane, disproven, short-sighted, destructive project, is the best proof that the scientism/technocracy cult, just as much as the poison corporations, is the enemy of humanity and the Earth. Humanity must organize against this cult as surely as against the corporations themselves, as a key part of the corporate totalitarian cabal against humanity and the Earth. The ecocidal and genocidal monoculture aspiration of this cabal is self-evident, as is clear from the dicamba onslaught.

 

 

 

 

Superficial and Systemic Corruption Among Regulators

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You’re Pre-Approved, if you’re a big corporation.

 

 

Ex-GM developer turned critic Belinda Martineau is intrigued that the New York Times, in discussing Henry Miller’s role in Monsanto’s regulatory ghost-writing, doesn’t mention that Miller was an FDA cadre in charge of biotech regulation from 1989-1994. She’s right, the mainstream media systematically avoids placing any “abuse” it’s forced to acknowledge into any broader context.

 

But by the same token I’m similarly intrigued that Martineau, along with most other GMO critics, still thinks that the main problem with regulatory agencies is particular “corrupt” cadres like Miller or the EPA’s Jess Rowland (or, to add everyone’s favorite, Michael Taylor), rather than the congenital institutional structure of an agency like the FDA or EPA. But these agencies were designed to “manage” poisons (and the politics of poison), not to protect the people and environment against poisons. The only thing distinguishing the likes of Miller or Taylor from a regular career cadre is that these are examples of de jure “corruption” who transcend the standard institutional banality-of-evil structure. But this de jure corruption is only a minor if more politically visible appendage to the systemic corruption.

 

Therefore, while reformists by their nature will be content to emphasize only the superficial appendage, since they want only superficial reforms (i.e. they agree that poisonism should continue, it merely needs more and better “management”), abolitionists must highlight the inflammatory yet superficial corruption only as an introduction to the facts about systemic corruption.

 

 

Propagate the necessary new ideas.

 

 

 

 

The Need to Renounce All System Hierarchies (EPA-Monsanto Example Again)

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Basically a symbiotic creature.

 

 

The notions expressed in this article aren’t factually false, but it remains amazing that anyone ever could have been surprised, as these authors profess to be, at such a phenomenon as “When questions have been raised about [glyphosate’s] safety, Monsanto has ensured that the answers serve its financial interests, rather than scientific accuracy and transparency.”

 

The system based on productionism, technocracy, and in particular the capitalist mode of these chose to develop profit-seeking corporations as the main organizational mode for this paradigm of civilization. Corporations, a creation and extension of government, were explicitly designed to be sociopathic and totalitarian, exalting profit as the one and only value. They were designed to enshrine a Mammon theocracy, which means the total domination of all human-to-human and human-to-ecology relations by reducing these to monetary exchanges.

 

Implicitly, corporations were designed to become the repository of all real economic and political power, while nominal “public” government is retained only as a facade. That’s the procedure and goal of neoliberalism as a system of power, while the ideology of neoliberalism is based on the notion that this is how things should exist, and the only way they can exist. The historical record is unequivocal.

 

Therefore it’s also no surprise that the EPA consistently has covered up and lied on behalf of Monsanto and other poisoner corporations, or that

 

The record suggests that in 44 years — through eight presidential administrations — EPA management has never attempted to correct the problem. Indeed, the pesticide industry touts its forward-looking, modern technologies as it strives to keep its own research in the closet, and relies on questionable assumptions and outdated methods in regulatory toxicology.

 

But the authors are naive to attribute this to “capture”, as if there was ever a pristine morning where the EPA was born innocent and pure of heart. On the contrary, regulatory organizations like the EPA are designed to serve corporate imperatives, organizing the government subsidies and exemptions from legal responsibility upon which all corporate sectors are 100% dependent, and helping to pilot them through any hazardous political shoals. Of course the strong pro-corporate bias is hard-wired into the very principles of regulatory ideology, based as they are on “managing” poisons and ecological harms, always assuming one can find the right “tolerances” for these. To put this in perspective, all one need to ask is what’s the right tolerance level for child molestation, rape, murder? Do we assume there’s a non-zero “tolerance” for these? In action, yes, the US system assumes exactly this. But not in principle. Yet the regulator ideology assumes in principle that every corporate action has its proper tolerance. This tendentious ideology, in turn, is then stretched and “abused” in practice the ways this article describes. But these pro-Monsanto EPA actions aren’t really abuses; they follow logically from the original principle.

 

Anyone interested in the history of the EPA would do fine to start with E. Vallianatos’ Poison Spring. Vallianatos was an EPA cadre who for years was maverick enough actually to try to carry out a public health mission, and his book details the institutional rejection of any such mission. For example, he describes how, when the EPA was originally founded with such fanfare in response to public outcry about several high-profile environmental disasters, it was staffed by imports from the USDA in order to ensure that it understood its real pro-corporate mission, which had nothing to do with the pro-environment, pro-public health propaganda.

 

Because people refuse to understand these realities, we continue to be mired in the slough of such reform prescriptions as this:

 

The only way to establish a scientific basis for evaluating glyphosate’s safety, as a group of 14 scientists suggested in 2016, would be to make proprietary industrial studies public, put them up against the peer-reviewed literature and conduct new studies by researchers independent of corporate interests—in other words, force some daylight between regulators and the regulated.

 

But the scientific establishment is no more capable of avoiding “capture” than the regulator. Parallel to the inherently pro-corporate, pro-poison regulatory ideology, system science is completely beholden to the corporate science paradigm which directs it to the exact same biases, cover-ups, frauds, political lying, and similar “abuses”.

 

Therefore it’s of no avail to correctly renounce the regulator but immediately repose the same vain faith in the scientific establishment. When you finally realize this establishment is equally pro-Monsanto, to which system hierarchy will you turn next? And how many times must you repeat the religious experiment before you realize the evil (the corruption, the capture, or however you choose to see it) is congenital and universal to the corporate-technocratic system?

 

The only solution is to renounce this system completely, based as it is upon a totalitarian will to destroy humanity and the Earth, and commit to the abolitionist necessity in thought and deed.

 

 

Propagate the new and necessary ideas.

 

 

 

Train in Vain, If That’s Your Only Mode

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Reuters continues its Monsanto-instigated campaign of slander against the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency IARC.*

 

1. This study is a lie, as has been proven by the history of herbicides. Even the USDA admitted, even before Roundup Ready crops were commercialized, that these poison plants wouldn’t reduce farming costs but only make it easier to manage greater acreage. Herbicide tolerant GMOs were designed to destroy jobs and accelerate farm consolidation. But the costs never were intended to be lessened, only shifted from labor wages to corporate inputs.

 

2. Even if it did “cost” people more when they’re in the mode of being train passengers to have workers mow and otherwise tend the rail lines, this would then be money those workers would spend as consumers, thereby increasing the velocity of money and rendering the economy more healthy to everyone, including those same “train passengers” insofar as they are also workers, consumers, citizens.

 

This propaganda campaign (the fake “study” and the fake “news article”) is a typical example of media dissemination of corporate austerity ideology, austerity lies. It’s designed to strangle all thought in order to strangle all attempts to free the economy and particularly the food supply from the corporate death grip.

 

But if the train passengers reading it believe the lies and see themselves as living on an island of pure passenger-dom, they’ll find out soon enough that there is no island. Like it or not they’re subject to the forces of the economy far beyond what they pay for train tickets, and in all those ways the bell tolls for them too, not just for people with mowing jobs. Pretty soon they won’t have to worry about the price of a train ticket, since they won’t be able to afford it at any price. That’s what corporate austerity, as propagated by media campaigns like this, has in store for them.

 

 

*Although the WHO as a whole has been consistently pro-poison, the IARC is out of step with the dominant corporate/reductionist ideological framework, instead emphasizing environmental factors in cancer causation:

 

Emphasis is placed on elucidating the role of environmental and lifestyle risk factors and studying their interplay with genetic background in population-based studies and appropriate experimental models. This emphasis reflects the understanding that most cancers are, directly or indirectly, linked to environmental factors and thus are preventable.

 

The proposition that cancer is preventable runs directly counter to the dominant science ideology which views cancer as arising from genetic determinism and/or “bad luck” and the only acceptable response to be massively expensive and interventionist “cures” supervised by Big Drug and other corporate sectors. This ideology is driven by the need of the poison-peddling corporations to obscure and deny the fact that profitable products like glyphosate are in fact major cancer drivers. The corporate flacks are abetted by scientism’s religious zealots who refuse to hear any evil spoken of their technological rabbits’ feet.

 

For example, the fraudulent depiction of oxidative stress as having only “random” effects is typical of corporate science. By contrast, the WHO’s IARC considers oxidative stress to be one of the environmental factors causing cancer and applies this to its assessments of pesticides and other cancer agents. There we see one methodological divide between real science and fake corporate science. This is why the corporate scientific establishment, regulators like the EPA and EFSA, and the corporate media all despise the IARC. And this is why Reuters has embarked upon a vendetta against the agency.

 

I often ponder the irony that even among “decent” people the great heroic metaphor is “curing cancer”, while someone like me who has dedicated my life to preventing cancer is beyond the pale. That’s because even your good people do demand their worthless expensive destructive junk, and the basic template applies not just to corporate-controlled institutions but to everyone. Even cancer must be dealt with only within the framework which exalts productionism, consumerism, technocracy, corporate rule as normal and normative. Even efforts against cancer must never hinder this imperative. Among the people of the system, its supporters and its tacit followers, there is consensus on this.

 

 

 

The EPA Stalls for Monsanto

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Stonewalling the people, building a wall against the future.

 

 

The EPA’s most common practice is to receive PR copy from corporations like Monsanto and launder Monsanto’s lies to the public with its own “regulatory” imprimatur. But sometimes the collaboration is more actively hands-on, as in this long-running delay of a toxicological review of glyphosate. The new review was promised for 2015. The delay leaves in place the EPA’s 2013 proclamation denying the fact that glyphosate causes cancer. This proclamation was a prime example of the stenography and rubber-stamping of the corporation’s own self-description I mentioned above. This new information about EPA/Monsanto collusion is the latest to come out of the many cancer lawsuits Monsanto is now fighting.

 

Note well, this is Obama’s EPA in action. The Obama administration was the most aggressively pro-pesticide and pro-GMO to date. Trump certainly will try to catch up and surpass Obama, but as with so many other crimes against humanity and the Earth, he has a long, long way to go.

 

 

 

 

 

Your EPA in Action

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It’s been common knowledge for years that the EPA knew at least since the early 1980s that glyphosate causes cancer, and has been helping Monsanto cover up this fact ever since. Glyphosate doesn’t work in practice, and the brain-dead cult of it is driven only by profit and power.

 

The flood of cancer lawsuits now ongoing against Monsanto is providing more information about the EPA’s pattern of crime. In one of the suits the plaintiffs’ experts are reviewing one of Monsanto’s own original studies which found evidence of glyphosate’s cancerousness.

 

This 1983 study, entitled “A Chronic Feeding Study of Glyphosate (Roundup Technical) in Mice”, was conclusive enough that in 1984 EPA toxicologist William Dykstra wrote in a memo: “glyphosate is oncogenic…in a dose-related manner.” Other EPA scientists concurred over the next year. In 1985 they officially signed a consensus review classifying glyphosate as Category C, “possibly carconogenic to humans.”

 

In response, Monsanto cadre George Levinskas, the company’s cover-up artist who previously led the campaign to lie about the devastation wrought by PCBs, suborned doctor and academic Marvin Kuschner to whitewash the evidence. Levinskas assured colleagues that Kuschner’s testimony was in the bag even before Kuschner actually looked at the slides. Sure enough, Kuschner claimed to find a tumor in the control group which previous researchers, including Monsanto’s own, had not located.

 

At the same time as this alleged control group tumor was being “discovered”, Monsanto sent the EPA a secret report which blamed the tumors found among the experimental group on how the study allegedly used “aged mice”. Why, praytell, would a scientific toxicology study use “aged” experimental subjects such that tumor evidence, if found, would be overdetermined? Precisely for that reason – so that in the event of experimental trouble Monsanto could dismiss the evidence as caused by the age of the subjects. In other words, this is Monsanto openly admitting that its study was a deliberately designed to be a fraud, because they intentionally used experimental subjects which could not provide legitimate scientific evidence. In legitimate science, of course, the goal of experimental design is to isolate the experimental variable(s) and control for every other variable. Legitimate researchers therefore select their experimental subjects in order to prevent any overdetermination of the results. In a cancer study, the subjects would be selected from the demographic which has the least actuarial incidence of cancer. But if you select older mice who are statistically more prone to tumors in general, you’re intentionally designing a fraudulent study. Here we have Monsanto openly avowing that it perpetrated such a fraud, and claiming that therefore the evidence of its own study should be dismissed.

 

Any society which respected science would drive them out with a whip. But we see how things function in a system of establishment science dedicated to the corporate science paradigm.

 

Monsanto also bombarded the EPA with “historical control data”, a standard methodological fraud. Standard in industry tests, this tactic is designed to generate irrelevant noise in order to drown out any toxicity or cancer signal which does arise.

 

 

These Monsanto lies gave the EPA enough of a pretext to reclassify glyphosate into Category D – “not classifiable as to human carcinogenicity.” But they still asked Monsanto to repeat the study, which Monsanto refused to do, thus implicitly validating the original results. In other words, Monsanto believed that even with all its chicanery and fraud, a new study would still produce evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. If the company didn’t think that, it would happily perform the study. The same goes for the fact that the GMO corporations have absolutely refused ever to perform a single safety study upon any GMO. This proves that the corporations and governments believe that such studies would produce evidence of the health harms of GMOs.

 

In 1989 the EPA dropped its request for a new study. The EPA was warming up to its whitewashing role. In 1991 the agency finally performed a complete inversion, dubbing glyphosate Category E – “evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans” – a bald-faced lie.

 

The EPA has held fast to this pro-glyphosate line ever since, reaffirming it most recently in 2013.

 

Meanwhile the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), one of the few public bodies dedicated to legitimate science*, has deemed this same study, along with a 1981 study finding evidence that glyphosate causes testicular cancer in rats, as evidence that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen”.

 

 

Since at least the early 1980s Monsanto and the EPA have known that glyphosate causes cancer. Every US president, agriculture secretary, and other government officials also have known this at least since then. All of them have systematically covered up this fact ever since. They are all complicit in mass murder by poisoning. This is indelibly what the EPA and other regulatory agencies are, just as it’s indelibly what the Corporate One-Party is, regardless of its fake “Democrat” and “Republican” groups. There is no path forward for humanity with these criminal organizations. The regulatory agencies are dedicated in principle to “managing” the infliction of deadly poisons upon the people, and in principle are supposed to keep the number of deaths and injuries at a politically tolerable level, thus the regulatory concept of “tolerances”. But in practice they make no attempt even to manage the death toll, but strive to maximize the use of every kind of deadly agricultural poison. This is indelibly what they are.

 

There is no path forward for humanity in seeking to “co-exist” with these poisons and poisoners. The only solution is total abolition. Therefore there is no path forward in trying to “reform” these indelibly poisonist agencies. They too must be abolished along with the vile poisons they inflict upon us.

 

 

 

*Although the WHO as a whole has been consistently pro-Monsanto, the IARC is out of step with the dominant corporate/reductionist ideological framework, instead emphasizing environmental factors in cancer causation.

 

Emphasis is placed on elucidating the role of environmental and lifestyle risk factors and studying their interplay with genetic background in population-based studies and appropriate experimental models. This emphasis reflects the understanding that most cancers are, directly or indirectly, linked to environmental factors and thus are preventable.

 

The proposition that cancer is preventable runs directly counter to the dominant “science” ideology which dogmatically views cancer as arising either from genetic determinism or “bad luck”, and which considers the only acceptable response to be massively expensive and interventionist cures supervised by Big Drug and other corporate sectors. This ideology is driven by the need of the poison-peddling corporations to obscure and deny the fact that profitable products like glyphosate are in fact major cancer drivers. The corporate flacks are abetted by scientism’s religious zealots who refuse to hear any evil spoken of their technological rabbits’ feet.

 

 

 

Help propagate the abolitionist idea.