In response to AlterNet’s Paul Buchheit’s article 8 Things Mainstream Media Doesn’t Have the Courage to Tell You
Don’t accept mandatory vaccines, Take Action Here.
Right.
Here’s No. 9: Vaccines are a dangerous hoax, killing and maiming their recipients. In fact, they have been a dangerous hoax since the days of Edward Jenner, the mountebank who bought his MD degree from the University of Edinburgh for 25 Pound Sterling and published the “results” of his “experiments” before he did them, if he bothered to do them at all.
When the British Government, which had made smallpox vaccination mandatory, was confronted with the fact that by jabbing babies with needles dipped in open syphilitic sores (there is no such thing as “cowpox” – the pox was “the great pox”, syphilis”, after a 2 year Blue Ribbon Panel investigation, the British Parliament debated whether to admit its mistake or cover it up.
Predictably, as politicians, they chose the latter, enacted stricter penalties, including jail time, for non compliance by parents and doubled Jenner’s life time stipend from 10,000 Pound Sterling per year to 20,000 Pound Sterling per year.
The only thing that has changed is that there are more vaccines, they are more toxic individually and in the aggregate and the stakes are higher.
They didn’t work then, they don’t work now and the cover up is just as vicious and wrong headed. Oh, and, by the way, as part of the cover up, no court of law will ever be able to demonstrate their dangers since vaccine manufacturers are covered by blanket immunity to the dangers their vaccines cause, no matter how clear that causality is. Vaccines are, in fact, an uninsurable risk for which the tax payer has already paid out nearly $3 Billion US in a special Vaccine Masters Court where almost no victim gets their day in [Master’s] court.
No. 10: Chemtrails are real, they are wildly dangerous and they are not for our own good. Geoengineering is destroying the planet.
No. 11: Agenda 21 is not for anyone’s benefit except the Globalists’ who will gain total control of all resources and labor while the rest of those allowed to survive the depopulation which is a part of it, will be limited in every aspect of life while Malignant Sustainability is used to corral and control us.
Under this insane plan, humanity will be restricted to “Transit Villages” comprising 1% of the land mass of the planet while the rest of the planet will be returned to the wild. Schooling will produce workers (Common Core Education) and children will be under fed and under educated to prevent them from consuming “more than their fair share” of the global resource base, as the well educated and well fed now do.
Hard to believe? Read the 40 chapter blueprint for the most tyrannical system ever devised here, www.TRUTHAboutAgenda21.com.
No. 12: Psychiatric and other drugs are expensive, ineffective and toxic, accounting for the majority of deaths in the US, according to sources like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Chairman of Merck and the British Parliament.
Orthomolecular medicine and psychiatry, natural treatments like herbs, homeopathy, frequency medicine, vitamins and minerals, clean unadulterated food like fish oil, nano silver, biofeedback, chelation and frequency medicine make these dangerous drugs unnecessary except in emergency or surgical situations.
I have been practicing drug free medicine and psychiatry for 44 years, as have a forward-thinking group of colleagues and we typically accomplish what other doctors fail to do: cure the underlying cause of the patient’s disease or condition.
No. 13: Genetically Modified Plants and Animals represent a massive danger to personal and biosphere genetic integrity..Every independent study conducted by reputable scientists makes it clear that GMOs and the chemicals that are used in GMO plant cultivation pose massive risks to us all. Yet governments and the lap dog media act as if their safety were established.
The scientifically illiterate George Bush, Sr., declared that GMOs, which can be patented, are “substantially equivalent” (a scientific oxymoron) to naturally occurring organisms, which cannot be patented.
Because they are “substantially equivalent”, their safety cannot be reviewed by the FDA once a preliminary safety assessment is given to them by the patent holder which can withhold data with impunity.
There are more. Conspiracy theory is a wonderful way invalidate inconvenient truths. But if the mainstream media were anything more than a government-legitimized propaganda machine, it would be investigating, exposing and, where necessary, disproving inaccuracies, where they exist.
I invite you to visit the website of the Natural Solutions Foundation, www.DrRimaTruthReports.com and subscribe to our Health Freedom Action eAlerts for more documented information that you need and that the mainstream media is not giving you.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Natural Solutions Foundation
2009 Legislative Educational Agenda
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Three for Liberty!
Three weeks to save food AND freedom
Action eAlert: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=3230
08/08/09 Update: 3 Leaflets for the Three Weeks to Save Health Freedom Campaign
http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=3241
1. The House of “Representatives” passes draconian (sic) food safety bill…
Take Action Here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26714
2. And mass forced vaccination comes closer…
Take Action here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275
3. BUT… Dr. Ron Paul offers a prescription to Congress: two new bills, HR 3394 and 3395 – regulate the regulators and promote Free Health Speech!
Take Action here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27732
Note: the first two Action Items have been revised. If you submitted them before, along with one for each member of your family or household, we urge you to do so again since, once revised, they count as new items. These actions could save your life, assuming we all act together to speak the power of our collective truth to legislative power.
Are you the one? Are you the one person who makes the difference? Are you the one person who alerts your neighbors like Paul Revere and defeats the forces threatening our lives, our liberty and our sacred honor?
If you are, then you are mounted up and ready to ride – only this time, it’s a freedom mouse that will carry your message to your neighbors and to the heavens because we need both your neighbors and the support of the Universe to make sure that our cause, our just cause, survives.
We are talking about literal survival here: if our food is poisoned we will not survive. If our bodies are poisoned, we will not survive.
We just lost the first part of the last stand for food freedom: The House passed HR 2749, a bill that combines the worst of all of the bad food “safety” bills that were before the Congress. Although it was removed from the voting docket on Tuesday, and defeated on Wednesday, on Black Thursday, July 30, it passed the House of Representatives.
In 3 weeks, the Senate has a chance to vote on this atrocity, which completes the industrialization of America’s food, from sea to contaminated sea.
Twisting the House of Representative’s Rules to prevent meaningful debate, the governing party adopted the martial law (sic) “food safety” bill, HS 2749.
You can read the final bill at:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h2749rh.txt.pdf
Congress will be in recess for about three weeks; after that the Senate will take up the bill. We must flood the Senate with so many emails, and visit sitting Senators in their home offices during the August recess in such enormous numbers that they back off. If we make it strong enough, our Push Back WILL work. But that takes you being the one to push!
We have three weeks to assert our 2009 Legislative Educational Agenda.
Printable Leaflets: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=3241
Read more about Dr. Ron Paul’s two Health Freedom bills: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=3226
We have much to do to and little time; but we know PUSH BACK WORKS and even the horrid Food Fascism bill now contains language somewhat protective of some local food solutions. Not enough! But this is a start and we can finish this process in the Senate. Thousands have joined the Health Freedom Action eAlert in the past few days. Now it’s time to act!
Repeat: We have 3 short weeks to add to the more than 1 million emails which the Natural Solutions Foundation has already sent to your Congressmen and women, The Secretaries of Health and Human Services, USDA and Homeland Security and the White House. 1 Million emails is a good start, but obviously not enough.
We need 10 million emails. Please go to http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27134, fill out the revised action item even if you did so before. Then fill it out again for EACH member of your family or household. Then go the next step and send a brief one or two line email with that same link to everyone you know who eats.
Leave out anyone who does not consume food… ;)
Explain something like “Please take a moment to click on the link I am sending to you in order to deluge Congress and other Federal decision makers with our opposition to the industrialization of the US food supply. Under the bill which the House has just passed, FDA would have the power to declare marshal law if any food contamination occurred in the US, seize cars and other property, invade home kitchens to demand recourse on chain-of-custody, cold storage and other absurdities, forbid private farmers to save seeds without million dollar facilities, and on and on. Small farmers will be driven out of business through extreme costs and draconian penalties for record keeping failures of half a million dollars or more and jail time up to 8 years for a first infraction!”
We cannot let this happen. Please fill out the form once for each member of your family and household and then forward this email and link to everyone on your email list.
Here is the First Strike for Liberty Food Freedom Action Item Link:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27134
Through the power of multiplication of effort, we can generate the necessary fire storm of protest to stop this insanity.
The second strike for liberty and freedom requires the identical action: go to this link:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27275
Submit an email for each member of your family or household and then share it with everyone you know. This link is a little different than the other one you just completed, however.
The previous one opposed a law. This one demands a law: a law that says that you have the right, which you do not have now, to refuse a pandemic vaccine without risking incarceration or involuntary quarantine.
Right now, that is the case: both the state and federal law makers have set things up so that if you are offered a vaccine in a declared pandemic emergency such as the one we are in right now [Swine Flu], refusing that vaccine is your right, but the consequences will be either quarantine or incarceration, which are really the same thing. We want to protect your right to Self-Shield instead of accepting the jab.
Further, the CDC will have, under a law pending before Congress, the right to send teams to your door with the authority to vaccinate you and everyone else in the household whether you want to be vaccinated or not.
Forget about the fact that vaccines are, in my opinion, without scientific or medical merit. Even if you agree with vaccination for yourself and your children, I doubt very much that you agree with forced vaccination. You probably believe, as I do, that vaccination, like any other medical procedure, should be voluntary, must be voluntary, may not be compulsory for any reason. That has been the law in civilized nations since the defeat of the Nazis.
Yet your State and Federal Governments see things differently. Based on an outdated, hundred year-old case (Jacobson v Massachusetts) they erroneously believe they have authority to do with us whatever they want, so long as they concoct an “emergency.”
So I urge you to send another email to those same people saying something like,
“Please go to the link below and submit an email for each member of your family or household on a matter or great seriousness: forced vaccination with a vaccine for a disease which has failed to produce a pandemic, but which is being used as a way to make huge amounts of money for vaccine makers (who have been relieved of all liability for any harm their vaccine does!) and very possibly to introduce serious or even deadly, but highly profitable) diseases into an unsuspecting populace.”
These vaccines will be approved before any safety testing has been completed and will be used first, without any safety data, on pregnant women, children, those with chronic illness and on first responders.
No responsible government would engage in such reckless, uninsurable vaccination unless they did not care about the consequences.
Please take a moment to submit these emails demanding the right to remain at home in the event of a pandemic instead of accepting either vaccination or quarantine and then forward this email to everyone you know.
The Third Step of our Three for Liberty is to urge your Congressional representatives to support Dr. Paul’s Health Freedom Free Speech bills.
Take Action here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27732
We are asking for your active assistance in preserving life, liberty and the ability to be healthy enough to pursue happiness. We need your help to keep on providing these campaigns.
Please click here: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189
Make your tax deductible recurring donation in any amount. Your support is our life line and we appreciate each gift, large or small. We are all in this together, after all, whether we are large or small.
Thank you.
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Dr. Rima
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
Valley of the Moon(TM) Eco Demonstration Project
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.Organics4U.org
Wake Up to Health Freedom
www.ValleyoftheMoonCoffee.org
PS – Our Counsel Ralph Fucetola JD just read through the 134 page Food Fascism bill which the House just passed and found these exemptions (and one interesting paragraph about HARMonization!)
Thus, this horrific bill has one slightly bright spot and you helped to put it there. The farm to consumer exemption listed below was added because our more than 630,000 emails demanding protection for small farmers tied the bill up in committee. To get it out to the House floor for a vote, the Section 107 exemptions had to be added. It is not what we want, but some protection, after all.
So thank you for that. Now, let’s pour on the steam and get what we really want: the defeat of this bill in the Senate.
Exemptions and Requirements of Food Safety Bill – HR 2749
Sec 5 – Meat, poultry & eggs regulated by USDA – exempt
Sec 6 – distilled spirits, wine & beer – exempt
Sec 743 – Max registration fee is $175,000.00 [Easy for Big Ag Biz; hard for anyone else. REL]
Sec 418A – “INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS.—In issuing guidance or regulations under subparagraph (A), the Secretary shall review inter national hazard analysis and preventive control standards that are in existence on the date of the enactment of this Act and relevant to such guide-lines or regulations to ensure that the programs under sections 418 and 418A of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (as added by
paragraph (2)) are consistent, to the extent the Secretary determines practicable and appropriate, with such standards.” [This is the HARMonization clause – note: it only applies to existing Codex standards. rf]
Rules phased in over 3 years
Page 116 – Registration of Importers
EXEMPTIONS.—The Secretary, by notice published in the Federal Register—
(A) shall establish an exemption from the requirements of this subsection for
importations for personal use.
Sec 107 (page 57)
EXEMPTIONS.—
(A) DIRECT SALES BY FARMS.—Food is
exempt from the requirements of this subsection if such food is—
(i) produced on a farm or fishery (including
an oyster bed, a wild fishery, an
aquaculture facility, a fresh water fishery,
and a saltwater fishery); and
(ii) sold by the owner, operator, or
agent in charge of such farm or fishery
directly to a consumer or to a restaurant or
grocery store.
(B) OTHER FOODS.—The Secretary may
by notice in the Federal Register exempt a food
or a type of facility, farm, or restaurant from,
or modify the requirements with respect to, the
requirements of this subsection if the Secretary
determines that a tracing system for such food or
type of facility, farm, or restaurant is not
necessary to protect the public health.
Here is what GMO technology brings: crops (and animals) controlled by corporations like Monsanto whose superficial commitment is to generate as much money as possible but whose deeper commitment is to accomplish a level of control never before seen: total control of the world’s food supply. Who lives and who dies clearly is of no importance to these corporations. Who controls the lives and deaths of farmers and consumers is literally at stake here.
We are well on the way to seeing the “Suicide Belt” of Maharashtra, India, in our own farmlands. If you think that this tragic and horrifying scenario cannot occur in your community, think again.
Monsanto takes over 500 family farms per year away from their owners because their GMO seed “volunteers”., that is, trespasses and invades, the fields of the family farmers. Claiming that their patented intellectual rights have been invaded, Monsanto seeks damages against the farmer which are so steep that the farmer looses his home and his farm – another win for Monsanto. And, of course, Codex, driven by the US FDA, allows all GMO FrankenFoods as if they were safe and wholesome.
What you are about to read is real and is coming to a farming community near you. But the final word is not yet in. Although more (much more, we believe) of the US food supply contains, or comes from, genetically modified “foods” (aptly called “Frankenfoods”), consumer outrage can, if properly harnessed, literally save the day.
Here are the steps you can take to prevent this disaster:
1. Band together with others of like mind. No one of us can do this alone, but as an electronic community, we have immense power.
a. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=187) to become part of the rapidly growing Natural Solutions Foundation Health Freedom eAlert Community. It’s free, it’s secure and it’s powerful!
b. Take the Action Steps in each free issue.
c. Pass the eAlerts along to your entire email list, urging them to join and take the Action Steps, too.
2. Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=25920) to urge your Congressional Legislators to become co-sponsors of the GMO labeling and safety study bills proposed in the House of Representatives by Denis Kucinich (D-OH). This is a trans partisan issue and only public pressure will compel Congress to support our health instead of the BioTech industry’s profits
3. Commit yourself, without exception, to buy ONLY products which are labeled “Organic”, or “GMO-Free.
a. Many nutrients and supplements are made with, or sourced from, Genetically Modified Organisms like yeast, corn, soy, bacteria modified to produce vitamins, etc even if those products do not appear on the label. GMO ingredients are literally torn apart in vats and new “foods” assembled from them. If the word “organic” is not on the label, it isn’t organic. If the words “GMO-Free” or “Free of GMOs” are not on the label, then the product IS a GMO product.
b. The Natural Solutions Foundation has created an online store, www.Organics4U.org, where you can find GMO, organic health products. All profits from www.Organics4U.org sales go to this battle.
4. Purchase only fruits and produce whose code number on the small, oval tag (UPC code) begins with the number “9”. This signifies that the item is organic. If the UPC code begins with “4” it has been raised with conventional farming techniques (including fluoride sprays, herbicides, pesticides, soil de-mineralizing synthetic fertilizers, possibly mercury sprays and other toxic substances and procedures).
5. Write to the companies whose products you buy and ask if they use GMO ingredients in their foods. If they tell you that they “meet or exceed FDA standards” that means that the products are made with GMOs.
a. Write back to them and tell them you will not patronize them any longer and that you will share this information.
b. Send a copy of their letter to me at releyes@gmail.com and we will add the company and the specific product to either the Natural Solutions Foundation “GMO Hit List” or our “GMO Kiss List”. We’ll publicize these lists to help others make GMO free food choices as well.
6. Talk to your friends and neighbors, parents of other kids your kids play with, folks in your Seniro Center, people in your church or community organizations. Spread the word. Most people have no idea that they are eating foods which are killing them, making them infertile and damaging their loved ones as well as themselves.
a. Become a Natural Solutions Foundation Community Organizer. Hold meetings, get on the radio, start letter writing campaigns. We’ll show you how. If you write to Kathy Greene at kathy.greene@usa.net and put “Organizer” in the subject line, Kathy will send you a Natural Solutions Foundation Community Organizer’s Handbook and help you get started.
b. Use your creativity to organize your community awareness. Tell us what you are doing and we will assist you in any way we can.
7. Donate here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?page_id=189) to the Natural Solutions Foundation so that we can keep on keeping on to make sure that our health freedoms stay free. Right now, it is illegal to label GMO containing foods to say that they are toxic industrial force feeding products. We need to change that and we need to eliminate Bio Tech altogether for our sake, the planet’s sake and, perhaps most of all, our children’s sakes.
8. Become involved in, visit, participate in, and/or lend your support to, the Natural Solutions Foundation Valley of the Moon Eco Demonstration Community (http://naturalsolutionsfoundation.org/) in the beautiful, fertile and temperate Chiriqui Highlands of Panama where we will
a. Create a demonstration BeyondOrganic Bio Dynamic Zero Emissions(TM) Farm and Farm School to help farmers from around the world re-learn how to grow food without chemicals and teach pollution-free Zero Emissions farming
b. Share the techniques of intensive “foot square gardening” to eliminate under nutrition in people who do not live on farms so that people everywhere can grow fresh, organic vegetables and fruits in very little space and at virtually no cost
c. Create a natural healing and wellness center
d. Offer seminars to guests from the area and beyond on a large number of topics (If you want to run a seminar at our new facility in Volcan, Panama, contact me at releyes@gmail.com!) with an all organic restaurant providing outstanding food in the near future
e. Raise pure, unadulterated food for ourselves and others. For example, we are already harvesting the chemical free, delicious Valley of the Moon Coffee. Every bag supports your health and your health freedom at the same time. Click here (http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=1130) to make sure that you put A Little Taste of Heaven in a Cup(TM) and give everyone on your gift list the same delight in their cups, too!
f. Create a small boutique hotel where guests at the medical center and the seminars can stay.
How can you support this innovative effort to help farmers around the world reclaim the production of clean, safe food? By one of more of the following options:
1. Become personally involved by bringing your skills and abilities to the Valley of the Moon
2. Provide tax deductible donation or “friendly financing” support which has significant financial return
3. Connecting us with Foundations or potential donors who will find what we are doing interesting and worth considering for support. Visit www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org to find out more and then contact me at releyes@gmail.com with questions, suggestions or thoughts.
It’s really up to us. Reclaiming the production of food worldwide is essential to solving the problem. But so is making sure that we are buying clean, unadulterated food. Every time you make a food purchase, you are either helping the Bio Tech companies to destroy your health and the planet while they take over our food supply or helping to keep them from doing it.
Every time.
If we buy the food that the Bio Tech companies have poisoned we are giving them a profit from harming us. Let’s not do that, shall we?
The FDA and the USDA are worse than useless – the are literally paralyzed by a 1992 Executive Order by then-President George H. W. Bush which says that GMO foods are “substantially equivalent” to unmodified ones and forbids them to require or examine safety testing except for the most basic evaluation early in the development process which has been done by the Bio Tech company itself. There is no safety testing, there is no clinical testing, there is only a Bio Tech Fox in the consumer health hen house.
Think about it: the employees in Monsanto’s UK Headquarters in London refused to eat food in the cafeteria made with, or containing ANY GMO food. What do they know that you need to know? That all GMO food is dangerous, can have astonishingly high levels of pesticide, that this technology can cause hidden and as-yet unsuspected diseases, horrifying environmental damage, antibiotic resistance, birth defects, sterility, kidney, gut and immune system damage, infant deaths, cancer and on and on and on.
Read the article below, take it very, very seriously and then let’s get started putting an end to this collective nightmare which has been foisted upon us by a government to weak to stand up for any of our rights or for our health, too corrupt to care about either and too industry-friendly to even ask questions. It’s really up to us.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
The GM genocide: Thousands of Indian farmers are committing suicide after using genetically modified crops
By Andrew Malone
When Prince Charles claimed thousands of Indian farmers were killing themselves after using GM crops, he was branded a scaremonger. In fact, as this chilling dispatch reveals, it’s even WORSE than he feared.
The children were inconsolable. Mute with shock and fighting back tears, they huddled beside their mother as friends and neighbours prepared their father’s body for cremation on a blazing bonfire built on the cracked, barren fields near their home.
As flames consumed the corpse, Ganjanan, 12, and Kalpana, 14, faced a
grim future. While Shankara Mandaukar had hoped his son and daughter would have a better life under India’s economic boom, they now face working as slave labour for a few pence a day. Landless and homeless, they will be the lowest of the low.
Shankara, respected farmer, loving husband and father, had taken his own
life. Less than 24 hours earlier, facing the loss of his land due to debt, he drank a cupful of chemical insecticide.
Unable to pay back the equivalent of two years’ earnings, he was in despair. He could see no way out.
There were still marks in the dust where he had writhed in agony. Other villagers looked on – they knew from experience that any intervention was pointless – as he lay doubled up on the ground, crying out in pain and vomiting.
Moaning, he crawled on to a bench outside his simple home 100 miles from Nagpur in central India. An hour later, he stopped making any noise. Then he stopped breathing. At 5pm on Sunday, the life of Shankara Mandaukar came to an end.
As neighbours gathered to pray outside the family home, Nirmala Mandaukar, 50, told how she rushed back from the fields to find her husband dead. ‘He was a loving and caring man,’ she said, weeping quietly.
‘But he couldn’t take any more. The mental anguish was too much. We have lost everything.’
Shankara’s crop had failed – twice. Of course, famine and pestilence are part of India’s ancient story.
But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops.
Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.
Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiralling debts – and no income.
So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.
The crisis, branded the ‘GM Genocide’ by campaigners, was highlighted recently when Prince Charles claimed that the issue of GM had become a ‘global moral question’ – and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.
Speaking by video link to a conference in the Indian capital, Delhi, he infuriated bio-tech leaders and some politicians by condemning ‘the truly appalling and tragic rate of small farmer suicides in India,
stemming… from the failure of many GM crop varieties’.
Ranged against the Prince are powerful GM lobbyists and prominent politicians, who claim that genetically modified crops have transformed Indian agriculture, providing greater yields than ever before.
The rest of the world, they insist, should embrace ‘the future’ and follow suit.
So who is telling the truth? To find out, I travelled to the ‘suicide belt’ in Maharashtra state.
What I found was deeply disturbing – and has profound implications for countries, including Britain, debating whether to allow the planting of seeds manipulated by scientists to circumvent the laws of nature.
For official figures from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture do indeed confirm that in a huge humanitarian crisis, more than 1,000 farmers kill themselves here each month.
Simple, rural people, they are dying slow, agonising deaths. Most swallow insecticide – a pricey substance they were promised they would not need when they were coerced into growing expensive GM crops.
It seems that many are massively in debt to local money-lenders, having over-borrowed to purchase GM seed.
Pro-GM experts claim that it is rural poverty, alcoholism, drought and ‘agrarian distress’ that is the real reason for the horrific toll.
But, as I discovered during a four-day journey through the epicentre of the disaster, that is not the full story.
In one small village I visited, 18 farmers had committed suicide after being sucked into GM debts. In some cases, women have taken over farms from their dead husbands – only to kill themselves as well.
Latta Ramesh, 38, drank insecticide after her crops failed – two years after her husband disappeared when the GM debts became too much.
She left her ten-year-old son, Rashan, in the care of relatives. ‘He
cries when he thinks of his mother,’ said the dead woman’s aunt, sitting listlessly in shade near the fields.
Village after village, families told how they had fallen into debt after being persuaded to buy GM seeds instead of traditional cotton seeds.
The price difference is staggering: £10 for 100 grams of GM seed, compared with less than £10 for 1,000 times more traditional seeds.
But GM salesmen and government officials had promised farmers that these were ‘magic seeds’ – with better crops that would be free from parasites and insects.
Indeed, in a bid to promote the uptake of GM seeds, traditional varieties were banned from many government seed banks.
The authorities had a vested interest in promoting this new biotechnology. Desperate to escape the grinding poverty of the post-independence years, the Indian government had agreed to allow new
bio-tech giants, such as the U.S. market-leader Monsanto, to sell their new seed creations.
In return for allowing western companies access to the second most populated country in the world, with more than one billion people, India was granted International Monetary Fund loans in the Eighties and Nineties, helping to launch an economic revolution.
But while cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have boomed, the farmers’ lives have slid back into the dark ages.
Though areas of India planted with GM seeds have doubled in two years – up to 17 million acres – many famers have found there is a terrible price to be paid.
Far from being ‘magic seeds’, GM pest-proof ‘breeds’ of cotton have been devastated by bollworms, a voracious parasite.
Nor were the farmers told that these seeds require double the amount of water. This has proved a matter of life and death.
With rains failing for the past two years, many GM crops have simply withered and died, leaving the farmers with crippling debts and no means of paying them off.
Having taken loans from traditional money lenders at extortionate rates, hundreds of thousands of small farmers have faced losing their land as the expensive seeds fail, while those who could struggle on faced a fresh crisis.
When crops failed in the past, farmers could still save seeds and replant them the following year.
But with GM seeds they cannot do this. That’s because GM seeds contain so- called ‘terminator technology’, meaning that they have been genetically modified so that the resulting crops do not produce viable seeds of their own.
As a result, farmers have to buy new seeds each year at the same punitive prices. For some, that means the difference between life and death.
Take the case of Suresh Bhalasa, another farmer who was cremated this week, leaving a wife and two children.
As night fell after the ceremony, and neighbours squatted outside while sacred cows were brought in from the fields, his family had no doubt that their troubles stemmed from the moment they were encouraged to buy BT Cotton, a geneticallymodified plant created by Monsanto.
‘We are ruined now,’ said the dead man’s 38-year-old wife. ‘We bought 100 grams of BT Cotton. Our crop failed twice. My husband had become depressed. He went out to his field, lay down in the cotton and swallowed insecticide.’
Villagers bundled him into a rickshaw and headed to hospital along rutted farm roads. ‘He cried out that he had taken the insecticide and he was sorry,’ she said, as her family and neighbours crowded into her
home to pay their respects. ‘He was dead by the time they got to hospital.’
Asked if the dead man was a ‘drunkard’ or suffered from other ‘social problems’, as alleged by pro-GM officials, the quiet, dignified gathering erupted in anger. ‘No! No!’ one of the dead man’s brothers
exclaimed. ‘Suresh was a good man. He sent his children to school and paid his taxes.
‘He was strangled by these magic seeds. They sell us the seeds, saying they will not need expensive pesticides but they do. We have to buy the same seeds from the same company every year. It is killing us. Please tell the world what is happening here.’
Monsanto has admitted that soaring debt was a ‘factor in this tragedy’. But pointing out that cotton production had doubled in the past seven years, a spokesman added that there are other reasons for the recent crisis, such as ‘untimely rain’ or drought, and pointed out that suicides have always been part of rural Indian life.
Officials also point to surveys saying the majority of Indian farmers want GM seeds – no doubt encouraged to do so by aggressive marketing tactics.
During the course of my inquiries in Maharastra, I encountered three ‘independent’ surveyors scouring villages for information about suicides. They insisted that GM seeds were only 50 per cent more
expensive – and then later admitted the difference was 1,000 per cent.
(A Monsanto spokesman later insisted their seed is ‘only double’ the price of ‘official’ non-GM seed – but admitted that the difference can be vast if cheaper traditional seeds are sold by ‘unscrupulous’ merchants, who often also sell ‘fake’ GM seeds which are prone to disease.)
With rumours of imminent government compensation to stem the wave of deaths, many farmers said they were desperate for any form of assistance. ‘We just want to escape from our problems,’ one said. ‘We just want help to stop any more of us dying.’
Prince Charles is so distressed by the plight of the suicide farmers that he is setting up a charity, the Bhumi Vardaan Foundation, to help those affected and promote organic Indian crops instead of GM.
India’s farmers are also starting to fight back. As well as taking GM seed distributors hostage and staging mass protests, one state government is taking legal action against Monsanto for the exorbitant
costs of GM seeds.
This came too late for Shankara Mandauker, who was 80,000 rupees (about £1,000) in debt when he took his own life. ‘I told him that we can survive,’ his widow said, her children still by her side as darkness fell. ‘I told him we could find a way out. He just said it was better to die.’
But the debt does not die with her husband: unless she can find a way of
paying it off, she will not be able to afford the children’s schooling. They will lose their land, joining the hordes seen begging in their thousands by the roadside throughout this vast, chaotic country.
Cruelly, it’s the young who are suffering most from the ‘GM Genocide’ – the very generation supposed to be lifted out of a life of hardship and misery by these ‘magic seeds’.
Here in the suicide belt of India, the cost of the genetically modified future is murderously high.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Andrew+Malone
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Th
ousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.h
tml
UPDATE: Rally a Huge Success!
See: http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2008/10/no-forced-vaccination-rally.html
Tell your State Representatives that you want strong exemptions from mandatory vaccination (Action Item works for you no matter which State you live in):
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=21833
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This is the latest announcement about this Thursday’s Pro Health Freedom Rally in Trenton. Please forward this information to anyone in the region who can get to this important show of solid support for health freedom.
One Thousand People Expected To Rally For Vaccination Choice
at the State House in Trenton, NJ on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 12:00 p.m.
NJ Assemblywoman Charlotte Vandervalk, Board-certified Pediatrician Dr. Lawrence Palevsky and National Vaccine Information Center co-founder Barbara Loe Fisher, will join NJ parents and professionals at a rally in Trenton for vaccination choice. Nearly one thousand people are expected, requiring Trenton to close the streets to accommodate the crowds.
The speakers represent a cross-section of society including medical doctors, nurses, chiropractors, scientists, clergy, educators, soldiers, politicians, journalists, autism activists, homeschoolers and many parents. The NJ Coalition for Vaccination Choice (NJCVC) invites you to rally with them by the steps of the State House, outside Gov. Corzine’s office.
The group opposes the four new vaccine mandates including an annual flu shot for children ages 5 and under, required for daycare and pre-school. NJCVC supports the passage of bill A260/S1071, a conscientious exemption to mandatory immunization which will permit parents to select all, some or no vaccinations for their children. A form of this parental right already exists in 19 other US states. All legislators will be in Trenton for a Special Session. Fox News plans to cover the event. Fox aired a live segment on vaccination choice in NJ on October 9 (see http://tinyurl.com/3nmgqb and http://tinyurl.com/45ca5y).
Press urged to cover this high visual impact event: signs, banners, balloons, photos, children, music, personal stories, legislator appreciation ceremony. Rally Information: Rain or Shine, Thursday, October 16, 2008, Noon- 2 pm, 125 West State Street, Trenton, NJ, www.njvaccinationchoice.org for more rally details.
Contact Louise Habakus vaxRSVP@verizon.net 917-553-4634.
Max will be speaking at the Rally. Natural Solutions Foundation Trustee Ralph Fucetola, representing the largest health freedom organization in the world, The Natural Solutions Foundation, will be speaking at the rally.
Max’s Storyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YswnGsfZsQI
Here is our anticipated
–x–x–
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
Media Release: End All Forced Vaccination
Trenton, October 16, 2008 – Natural Solutions Foundation participates in the Rally for Vaccination Choice at the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey today. Through its www.HealthFreedomUsa.org web site, the Foundation is the largest international ‘netroots’ Health Freedom alliance in the world.
Foundation trustee and life-long New Jersey resident Ralph Fucetola JD delivered a special message to the Rally from Foundation President Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine (USA, ret) and Medical Director Rima E. Laibow, MD. The message stated,
“Natural Solutions Foundation supports the efforts of people around the world who oppose forced vaccination for any purpose. As an educational, nongovernmental organization we seek to inform legislators and decision makers about the dangers of vaccine induced disease and the necessity of a Universal Right to Vaccine Exemptions, including strong religious, philosophical and medical exemptions for all vaccines. We congratulate New Jersians on their efforts to stop the uninsurable risks of mandated vaccines.â€
Counsel Fucetola continued, “The fact that the insurance industry, our society’s experts in risk, will not insure vaccines is a very telling fact. Without the special Federal Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) tax that every person who is mandated to buy vaccines is forced to pay, there could be no mandated vaccines at all. Public companies cannot invest in uninsurable risks, so Congress, ever supine to the interests of Big Pharma, mandated that the victims have to pay a tax to guarantee pharmaceutical industry vaccine profits. So far, over two billion tax dollars has been paid out to the families of children maimed and killed by vaccines. This must stop now!â€
The Natural Solutions Foundation, along with other health freedom advocates, declared, a year ago, that ending forced vaccinations must be a top priority of all freedom activists. The Tiburon Statement, named after the California town where it was written at an emergency meeting of nongovernmental organizations, can be found at: http://drrimatruthreports.com/index.php?p=460 – it states:
Convening for Health Freedom of Choice, Protecting our Children from Forced Vaccination
Health and Freedom leaders and advocates, meeting in an emergency strategic session at Tiburon, California and electronically, declare –
– We collectively call upon Congress and State Legislatures to take immediate steps to restore and guarantee freedom of choice in vaccination and health care and to protect our children and us against forced treatments.
– The moral imperative embodied in the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki forbids involuntary medical treatment or experimentation in the absence of fully informed, voluntary consent.
– We have a right to legal protection against mandatory inoculations of our children, such as those which occurred on November 17, 2007 in Prince George’s County Court House, enforced by police.
– Taxpayers have paid nearly $2 billion to compensate families for the death or disability of their children due to vaccination.
We, the undersigned, call upon the Congress of the United States and legislators of each State to adopt the strongest possible legal protections to ensure health care freedom of choice, including the universal right to vaccination exemptions.
Further information: Ralph Fucetola JD- ralph.fucetola@usa.net – http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/
Irradiated food is really bad stuff. Of course, it is not radioactive, but it is filled with disease-causing free radicals caused by the process of bombarding it with high energy radiation, the contents of dead organisms killed by the radiation, inactivated, worthless enzymes, and the bits and pieces of what is known in the legal trade as “filth”: insect parts, rat excrement, hairs, dead vermin, etc., which careful handling would eliminate or minimize.
Food that is going to be irradiated, however, does not receive careful handling typically since it will be “sterilized” by the irradiation. If your food is not only irradiated, but genetically modified and stuffed with toxic chemicals, in other words, meets FDA, USDA and Codex standards, now THAT’s as bad as it gets. That’s fully weaponized, “loaded and locked” food. Don’t go near the stuff.
UGH!
Consumers do not want irradiated food. So the ever corporate-friendly agencies of the government, and of course, Codex Alimentarius, take the crafty step of not telling us whether food is irradiated or not if they can get away without doing so. Once food is processed, it does not have to have the familiar “radura”, the radiation symbol, which the law previously required.
Now that fresh lettuce, spinach and other greens are defined as a “health hazard” by a berserk FDA, they, too, will be irradiated before we can eat them. All of them, unless consumed locally or grown by you or your friends.
What does that tell you? Eat locally. Grow your own food.
Print bumper stickers that say “Grow or Glow” and tell people what that means. Get good at “4 foot square” gardening, or growing on your patio or balcony. Organize window box growing for your community or community gardens. You ARE in control of what goes into your body. If you are not, get yourself organized and get into that position. Meet with your neighbors to make this happen for all of you. You and your neighbors are something else besides neighbors: you are CONSUMERS.
Consumers are very powerful when they take the time and effort to be. Since your food is being weaponized against you and your family (!) GET organized.
Email Kathy Greene, kathy.greene@usa.net, the Community Organization Coordinator of the Natural Solutions Foundation and let us help you get your neighbors motivated and activated. We have an excellent eBook on Community Organizing that we will send you if you ask. Just put “Organizing” in the subject line.
Consumer organizations perform valuable services. Not only can they be watchdogs and whistleblowers, they can provide significant information to other consumers, government officials and agencies, university decision makers and the people who attend and shape policy at national and international meetings. According to our West African sources, in that part of the world, consumers organizations who become upset about an issue can literally bring down a government.
Of course, what that takes is a strong sense of ownership: this is MY body, this is MY environment, this is MY child, this is MY body. And the people living right next store to me, and across town, and across the country care about what happens to me, and to themselves, too.
If companies and governments are lying to me, or poisoning me or corrupting my food, or my field or my child’s body, or keeping deadly secrets of putting me in harm’s way for your own good, we, the Consumers, should, can, will, say “NO!” to what is bad and “YES!” to what is good for us.
Up with consumers and consumerism, I say.
The diametrical opposite to consumerism, of course, is “corporatism”. What is good for corporations, which is generally what governments decide is good for them since so much money is involved, is very often exactly NOT what is good for people, for consumers, for you, for me. And, oh, by the way, it may not be at all good for the environment. In fact, when their decisions and actions are good for the consumer or the environment, that is the cause for press releases and hoopla.
It’s up to us.
The Organic Consumers organization has published a very useful compendium called “WHAT’S WRONG WITH FOOD IRRADIATION, http://www.organicconsumers.org/Irrad/irradfact.cfm. Although food irradiation is presented by government and industry, and, of course, by the ever corporate-friendly FDA and USDA, as benign and helpful, it is neither. Read below and see why irradiation, sometimes misleadingly called “Cold Sterilization” or “Cold Pasturization” is neither.
And then start eating and growing organic!
Check it out and take control of your health by taking control of what you eat!
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
www.NaturalSolutionsFoundation.org
www.Organics4U.org
www.NaturalSolutionsMedia.tv
www.NaturalSolutionsMarketPlace.org
What’s Wrong With Irradiated Food?
Irradiation damages the quality of food.
· Irradiation damages food by breaking up molecules and creating free radicals. The free radicals kill some bacteria, but they also bounce around in the food, damage vitamins and enzymes, and combine with existing chemicals (like pesticides) in the food to form new chemicals, called unique radiolytic products (URPs).
· Some of these URPs are known toxins (benzene, formaldehyde, lipid peroxides) and some are unique to irradiated foods. Scientists have not studied the long-term effect of these new chemicals in our diet. Therefore, we cannot assume they are safe.
· Irradiated foods can lose 5%-80% of many vitamins (A, C, E, K and B complex). The amount of loss depends on the dose of irradiation and the length of storage time.
· Most of the food in the American diet is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for irradiation: beef, pork, lamb, poultry, wheat, wheat flour, vegetables, fruits, shell eggs, seeds for sprouting, spices, herb teas. (Dairy is already pasteurized). A food industry petition currently before the FDA asks for approval for luncheon meats, salad bar items, sprouts, fresh juices and frozen foods. Another petition before the USDA asks for approval for imported fruits and vegetables.
· Irradiation damages the natural digestive enzymes found in raw foods. This means the body has to work harder to digest them.
· If unlabeled, raw foods that have been irradiated look like fresh foods, but nutritionally they are like cooked foods, with decreased vitamins and enzymes. The FDA allows these foods to be labeled “fresh.”
· Irradiated fats tend to become rancid.
· When high-energy electron beams are used, trace amounts of radioactivity may be created in the food.
Science has not proved that a long-term diet of irradiated foods is safe for human health
· The longest human feeding study was 15 weeks. No one knows the long-term effects of a life-long diet that includes foods which will be frequently irradiated, such as meat, chicken, vegetables, fruits, salads, sprouts and juices.
· There are no studies on the effects of feeding babies or children diets containing irradiated foods, except a very small and controversial study from India that showed health effects.
· Studies on animals fed irradiated foods have shown increased tumors, reproductive failures and kidney damage. Some possible causes are: irradiation-induced vitamin deficiencies, the inactivity of enzymes in the food, DNA damage, and toxic radiolytic products in the food.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for poultry on only 5 of 441 animal-feeding studies. Marcia van Gemert, Ph.D., the toxicologist who chaired the FDA committee that approved irradiation, later said, “These studies reviewed in the 1982 literature from the FDA were not adequate by 1982 standards, and are even less accurate by 1993 standards to evaluate the safety of any product, especially a food product such as irradiated food.” The 5 studies are not a good basis for approval of irradiation for humans, because they showed health effects on the animals or were conducted using irradiation at lower energies than those the FDA eventually approved.
· The FDA based its approval of irradiation for fruits and vegetables on a theoretical calculation of the amount of URPs in the diet from one 7.5 oz. serving/day of irradiated food. Considering the different kinds of foods approved for irradiation, this quantity is too small and the calculation is irrelevant.
· Even with current labeling requirements, people cannot avoid eating irradiated food. That means there is no control group, and epidemiologists will never be able to determine if irradiated food has any health effects.
· Science is always changing. The science of today is not the science of tomorrow. The science we have today is not adequate to prove the long-term safety of food irradiation.
Irradiation covers up problems that the meat and poultry industry should solve
· Irradiation covers up the increased fecal contamination that results from speeded up slaughter and decreased federal inspection, both of which allow meat and poultry to be produced more cheaply. Prodded by the industry, the USDA has allowed a transfer of inspection to company inspectors. Where government inspectors remain, they are not allowed to condemn meat and poultry now that they condemned 20 years ago.
· Because of this deregulation (continued under President Clinton, a protégé of Tyson Foods), the meat and poultry industry has recently lost money and suffered bad publicity from food-poisoning lawsuits and expensive product recalls. Irradiation is a “magic bullet” that will enable them to say that the product was “clean” when it left the packing plant. (Irradiation, however, does not sterilize food, and any bacteria that remain can grow to toxic proportions if the food is not properly stored and handled.)
· In 2000, seven meat industry associations submitted a petition to USDA to redefine key regulations relating to contamination. If accepted by USDA, this petition would permit unlimited fecal contamination during production, as long as irradiation was used afterward.
Labeling is necessary to inform people so they can choose to avoid irradiated foods
· Because irradiated foods have not been proven safe for human health in the long term, prominent, conspicuous and truthful labels are necessary for all irradiated foods. Consumers should be able to easily determine if their food has been irradiated. Labels should also be required for irradiated ingredients of compound foods, and for restaurant and institutional foods.
· Because irradiation can deplete vitamins, labels should state the amount of vitamin loss after irradiation, especially for fresh foods that are usually eaten fresh. Consumers have the right to know if they are buying nutritionally impaired foods.
· Current US labels are not sufficient to enable consumers to avoid irradiated food. Foods are labeled only to the first purchaser. Irradiated spices, herb teas and supplement ingredients, foods that are served in restaurants, schools, etc., or receive further processing, do not bear consumer labels. Consumer labels are required only for foods sold whole (like a piece of fruit) or irradiated in the package (like chicken breasts). The text with the declaration of irradiation can be as small as the type face on the ingredient label. The US Department of Agriculture requirements have one difference: irradiated meat or poultry that is part of another food (like a tv dinner) must be disclosed on the label.
· The US Food and Drug Administration is currently rewriting the regulation for minimum labeling, and will release it for public comment by early 2002 [now long past – REL]. They may eliminate all required text labels. If they do retain the labels, Congress has told them to use a “friendly” euphemism instead of “irradiation.” [Hence “cold sterilization” or “cold Pasteurization” and similar inaccurate terms on foods which must be labeled, a small minority of foods which are consumed after irradiation -REL]
Electron-beam irradiation today means nuclear irradiation tomorrow
· The source of the irradiation is not listed on the label.
· The original sponsor of food irradiation in the US was the Department of Energy, which wanted to create a favorable image of nuclear power as well as dispose of radioactive waste. These goals have not changed. Cobalt-60, which is used for irradiation, must be manufactured in a nuclear reactor.
· Many foods cannot be irradiated using electron beams. E-beams only penetrate 1-1.5 inches on each side, and are suitable only for flat, evenly sized foods like patties. Large fruits, foods in boxes, and irregularly shaped foods must be irradiated using x-rays or gamma rays from nuclear materials.
· Countries that lack a cheap and reliable source of electricity for e-beams use nuclear materials. Opening U.S. markets to irradiated food encourages the spread of nuclear irradiation worldwide.
[Codex Alimentarius supports the universal irradiation of all foods moving through international trade except those which have been fully processed to an end product like roasted coffee. The USDA requires all fruits and vegetables (with very few limited exceptions) to be irradiated before they are imported into the United States. -REL]
Irradiation using radioactive materials is an environmental hazard
· The more nuclear irradiators, the more likelihood of a serious accident in transport, operation or disposal of the nuclear materials.
· Food irradiation facilities have already contaminated the environment. For example, in the state of Georgia in 1988, radioactive water escaped from an irradiation facility. The taxpayers were stuck with $47 million in cleanup costs. Radioactivity was tracked into cars and homes. In Hawaii in 1967 and New Jersey in 1982, radioactive water was flushed into the public sewer system.
· Numerous worker exposures have occurred in food irradiation facilities worldwide.
Irradiation doesn’t provide clean food
· Because irradiation doesn’t kill all the bacteria in a food, the ones that survive are by definition radiation-resistant. These bacteria will multiply and eventually work their way back to the ‘animal factories’. Soon thereafter, the bacteria that contaminate the meat will no longer be killed by currently approved doses of irradiation. The technology will no longer be usable, while stronger bacteria contaminate our food supply.
· People may become more careless about sanitation if irradiation is widely used. Irradiation doesn’t kill all the bacteria in a food. In a few hours at room temperature, the bacteria remaining in meat or poultry after irradiation can multiply to the level existing before irradiation.
· Some bacteria, like the one that causes botulism, as well as viruses and prions (which are believed to cause Mad Cow Disease) are not killed by current doses of irradiation.
· Irradiation encourages food producers to cut corners on sanitation, because they can ‘clean up’ the food just before it is shipped.
Irradiation does nothing to change the way food is grown and produced
· Irradiated foods can have longer shelf lives than nonirradiated foods, which means they can be shipped further while appearing ‘fresh.’ Food grown by giant farms far away may last longer than non-irradiated, locally grown food, even if it is inferior in nutrition and taste. Thus, irradiation encourages centralization and hurts small farmers.
· The use of pesticides, antibiotics, hormones and other agri-chemicals, as well as pollution and energy use, are not affected. Irradiation is applied by the packer after harvest or slaughter.
· Some so-called Free-market economists say irradiation is ‘efficient’: it provides the cheapest possible food for the least possible risk. But these economists are not concerned about the impaired nutritional quality of the food. They are not considering the environmental effects of large-scale corporate farming, the social costs of centralization of agriculture and loss of family farms, the replacement of unionized, impartial government inspectors with company inspectors , the potential long-term damage to human health, and the possibility of irradiation-resistant super-bacteria. All of these developments should be (but are not) considered when regulators and public health officials evaluate the benefits of food irradiation.
In a truly free market, consumers would have access to truthful and not misleading information about all their food choices and could decide for themselves what risks to take. Honest companies would be free to truthfully tell that their products are organic, non-GMO, non-toxic, non-irradiated. Free people are free to choose risks… or to reject them. Slaves, of course, have to take whatever sh-t is dolled out to them.
Which are you?