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As the Cancer War begins to be joined, the first priority of Western governments is that Roundup must be sustained, literally at all costs. Some upcoming posts will assess the current status.
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Finally in 2015 the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) rocked the Poisoners’ world when it caught up with the evidence and issued
its finding that
glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen”. This is a major threat to the Poisoner campaign in general and to Monsanto in particular, dependent as the company is for the great bulk of its revenue on sales of Roundup and its accessory Roundup Ready GM seeds. Monsanto’s government, academic, and media lackeys have spent the year scrambling. The EFSA is first up to officially attack the IARC.
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The
attempts to obfuscate and deny the IARC’s assessment of the scientific evidence are all rooted in a purely political, anti-scientific document, the fraudulent whitewash of glyphosate composed by the industry’s own Glyphosate Task Force (GTF). Germany’s Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BfR) was already working on its own glyphosate report which it would then submit to the EFSA, in Germany’s capacity as the EU’s “rapporteur state” for glyphosate. When the BfR released a summary of this report later in 2015, it
openly admitted that it simply copied wholesale from the GTF, merely adding a few remarks of its own. In other words
they did nothing but serve as Monsanto’s stenographer and then put their own name on the result. The report itself, as well as the alleged evidence that went into it, have all been kept secret because transparency would reveal the extent of the scientific fraud involved at every step of the assessment.
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(One of the basic rules of scientific method is that by definition science is transparent and public so that it can be critiqued and perhaps falsified. This publicity is also necessary in order for science to serve as a legitimate part of the input for the political decisions of an open society. “Secret science”, by extreme contrast, is a contradiction in terms. By the definition of science, anything secret cannot be part of science and is anti-scientific. Those who aspire to decide based on secrecy are the apostles of the closed society and enemies of the open, as well as of science.
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Therefore, a basic rule of rational method is that, confronted with secrecy and/or the refusal to perform scientific testing in the first place – the GMO/pesticide cartel and US and EU governments are systematically guilty of both – we must on principle assume the worst. We must assume that whatever secret data they have proves the great harms and dire risks of their products or endeavors. We must assume that wherever they refuse to seek data in the first place, it is because they assume such data would be similarly adverse to them. These are rational facts which apply to any corporation or government which invokes secrecy, and these are the facts we the people must act upon.)
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The EFSA then accepted the GTF/BfR propaganda pamphlet wholesale and,
based upon nothing but Monsanto’s uncorroborated claims, declared that glyphosate is not carcinogenic. So we have a direct conveyor belt for Monsanto’s PR department: Monsanto —> Glyphosate Task Force —> BfR —> EFSA. It’s not even a game of telephone. The lies are passed along immaculate, and are then delivered to your doorstep via corporate newspapers declaring, “European regulator finds glyphosate does not cause cancer.”
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The political heat has become so sweltering that we’re seeing some mad dog behavior from the crooks. In particular we have the bizarre public outburst of the EFSA’s director Bernhard Url, who
sputtered incoherently about his critics and accused them of engaging in “Facebook science”, by which he meant “You have a scientific assessment, you put it in Facebook and you count how many people like it”.
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This is a typical Orwellianism. As
Hannah Arendt and others have often noted, a totalitarian always accuses his opponents of the exact action he himself is perpetrating or intend to perpetrate. It’s standard for the pro-poison, pro-GMO activists, in attacking critics and skeptics, to talk really about themselves when they accuse others of wanting people to starve, of wanting people to become sick, of wanting to hurt farmers, of wanting to make agriculture impossible. These are all the things which poison-based agriculture has been doing for fifty years and more, and these are all the pathologies and crimes which GMOs are designed and intended to aggravate.
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1. The epidemiological evidence, although limited (by system-imposed funding constraints, I might add; a good example of the way establishment science chooses which lines of inquiry to pursue, almost always basing this choice on political and economic factors, almost never on scientific or public health factors), indicates glyphosate probably causes cancer in humans.
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2. Lab tests on mammals sufficiently establish that it does cause cancer in mammals.
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3. The experimental evidence also sufficiently establishes that glyphosate is genotoxic and causes oxidative stress. These are both carcinogenic mechanisms.
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So we have proof that glyphosate causes cancer in mammals and the very strong probability that this includes humans. We have two documented mechanisms through which glyphosate causes cancer. We can add a third, that
glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor. All pesticides are endocrine disruptors, which means they’re all carcinogens. Since endocrine disruption occurs at very low doses, this also means
there’s literally no safe level of exposure to glyphosate or any other pesticide.
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Combining (1), (2), and (3) and in light of the fact that it’s not ethically possible to perform a lab test on human subjects, the IARC has concluded that within the limits of science, the evidence is that glyphosate “probably” (a term of art) causes cancer in humans. The lab evidence is already sufficient, and the WHO is confident that better epidemiological study would reinforce and confirm the existing “limited” evidence.
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The regulatory agencies have done nothing but carry out the imperatives of
the corporate science paradigm. In particular they genuflect before the two great frauds and abominations of the whole concept:
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1. The insane notion that the fox can guard the henhouse. According to regulator religion the corporations, who historically are proven to always lie wherever their power and profits are at stake, can be trusted to regulate themselves, while the “official”, “public” regulator’s role is to do nothing but rubber-stamp this fraudulent self-policing. This is self-evidently absurd and insane to any rational, honest person.
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2. That “secret science” not only exists and is valid, but indeed should be considered superior to transparent, legible science. This too is self-evidently absurd and insane.
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The position of these criminal agencies and their criminal cadres is parlous. The more the people learn about the cult of the Fox and His Secret Science, the more the legitimacy and authority of the regulators and establishment “science” as such will be destroyed. The IARC has joined the efforts of civil society to devastate the credibility of these basic elements of
the corporate science paradigm. This is a clear and present danger to the Poisoner endeavor, which is the ideology and policy which seeks to maximize the deployment of industrial and agricultural poisons, which deployment is at the core of Western capitalist ideology and all its policy initiatives.
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In the end, the BfR and EFSA have nothing. All they have are the lies they’ve been spoon-fed directly by Monsanto and its industry front, the “Glyphosate Task Force”.
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1. They have literally zero evidence. On the contrary 100% of the direct evidence, as well as the implicit evidence of their own propensity for dereliction, lies, secrecy, and stenography, proves against them.
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2. They’ve been reduced to the Big Tobacco playbook. We know for a fact that anyone who must resort to this most discredited of strategies and tactics, whether it be on behalf of pesticides, GMOs, or any other product, is peddling something at least as toxic and cancerous as cigarettes.
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What to do? (I plan to include at least one suggestion with each piece.)
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The campaigns to end municipal spraying of glyphosate are gradually attaining successes. Two towns which have committed recently to ceasing from municipal spraying in parks and other public places are
Barcelona, Spain, and
Edinburgh, Scotland. Interestingly, these countries are at opposite ends of the spectrum of support for GMO cultivation. Spain is the only major GMO cultivator in Europe, though the acreage of MON810 cultivated is in some dispute. MON810 is not a Roundup Ready variety, but still the society’s willingness to tolerate it would seem to indicate more support for poisons in general. By contrast Scotland has the closest thing to a broad social consensus against GMO cultivation. So the fact that major cities in both countries are regarding glyphosate with a jaundiced eye is an interesting development.
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Such campaigns, along with pressure on retailers to stop carrying glyphosate formulations for residential and garden use (also finding success in Europe), are a promising start. Of course these don’t touch the vastly larger agricultural market, but they can serve as publicity vehicles toward the broader goal of a total ban on glyphosate. Just as we abolitionists should use support for GMO labeling as
an educational and organizational vehicle toward the
necessary abolition goals, so we can start small with agitating for glyphosate bans, using every occasion to spread the news about the need for the complete abolition of this extreme cancer-causing poison.
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