Terrifying Technofascist Acts

 

Welcome to George Orwell’s “1984,” where “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”

In her “Dear Prole” letter to the proletariat, Maryam Henein painstakingly documents how Google, owned by Alphabet—which also owns a number of pharmaceutical subsidiaries—is rejiggering algorithms in ways intended to control what health-related information you can—and can’t—find online.

Henein, investigative journalist, activist, functional medicine consultant, filmmaker (“Vanishing of the Bees”) and entrepreneur writes:

Big Tech is collaborating with Big Pharma to suppress free speech. They’ve now modified search algorithms to align and appease an arguably sick agenda in the name of the supposed safety and protection of the public.

The future is now. The zombies are here.

What can consumers do to stay informed in a world where the dominant search engine intentionally restricts your access to natural and alternative health remedies?

Bypass Google. Use other search engines. Get your information directly, by subscribing to our newsletter and to the newsletters of organizations like HoneyColony, Mercola.com and Greenmedinfo.

Read ‘Terrifying Technofascist Acts Against Health Freedom You’ll Probably Never Learn About’

Abuse of Power

 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security operates “fusion centers," which monitor the activities of suspected terrorists or others perceived as potential threats to U.S. security.

Apparently, so does Monsanto (now owned by Bayer).

The Guardian just published a new report on how Monsanto’s “intelligence fusion center” monitored the activities of journalists, nonprofits and activists. Monsanto’s targets included Neil Young, an outspoken critic of Monsanto’s GMOs and toxic chemicals, Carey Gillam, author of “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science” and the nonprofit, U.S. Right to Know (for which OCA provides partial funding).

You won’t want to miss this story. It reveals the mind-boggling lengths to which Monsanto has gone to silence its critics.

Michael Baum, one of the attorneys involved in the Roundup trials that uncovered the records, told the Guardian the records were further “evidence of the reprehensible and conscious disregard of the rights and safety of others.” Baum said:

“It shows an abuse of their power that they have gained by having achieved such large sales. They’ve got so much money, and there is so much they are trying to protect.”

Read ‘Revealed: How Monsanto’s ‘Intelligence Center’ Targeted Journalists and Activists’

Make a tax-deductible donation to OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto campaign

Hot Topic

 

Whoa! Did you hear that?!

A presidential candidate on the debate stage talked about soil as a solution to climate change! One extolled the environmental benefits of cover crops and conservation easements! Another even name-checked two regenerative organic farmers!

The climate emergency is our most urgent crisis. It deserves its own debate—and that debate must include a discussion of the power of regenerative agriculture to reverse global warming.

We’re right there with the Sunrise Movement in demanding that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hold a #ClimateDebate.

Let’s keep the pressure on the DNC to schedule that debate—and also to make sure there are plenty of questions for the candidates about what they plan to do to change the way we produce food. Because as candidate Tim Ryan said in the last debate, “ . . . you cannot get there on climate unless we talk about agriculture.”

Read ‘Most Presidential Candidates Get It: We Can’t Solve the Climate Emergency Without Regenerative Agriculture’

SIGN THE PETITION: Tell the Democratic National Committee: Hold a #ClimateDebate & Include Agriculture!

Fried Fish

 

The climate emergency is big. It touches on every aspect of human survival, from food security to what George Monbiot described this week as record temperatures that "test the thermal limits of the human body."

Let’s be honest. If we fail to throw the climate-change engine into reverse, and fast, it won’t much matter if we’re eating GMOs, or if our food is drenched in cancer-causing chemicals.

We’ll have bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

The good news is, if we think big, if we expand our understanding of what’s causing the climate crisis (it’s not just the fossil fuel industry, it’s Big Ag, too), and if we expand our understanding of how to fix the crisis (reduce emissions, yes, but also scale up regenerative ag practices that can draw down and sequester the CO2 already up there), we might stand a chance of slowing down the climate-crisis train—and we’ll get healthier food, cleaner water and stronger rural communities in the bargain.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we’ll never succeed in preventing an all-out ecosystem failure unless we take on both Big Oil and Big Ag. And do it in a big way.

Fortunately, thanks in large part to a younger generation that has the most to lose, politicians are feeling the pressure to at least talk about climate change.

Now, if we can just get them to do something.

It won’t be easy. The path to Washington, for most politicians, anyway, is paved deep in lobbying dollars—millions and millions and millions of them. As Monbiot writes, those dollars buy protection for Big Oil, whose sole interest is, well, self-preservation:

But in many nations, governments intervene not to protect humanity from the existential threat of fossil fuels, but to protect the fossil fuel industry from the existential threat of public protest.

It’s no different in the world of Big Ag, where people are jailed for exposing the widespread animal brutality and environmental violations perpetrated by factory farms. And where local laws protect the corporate factory farm operators, not the citizens whose health is compromised when their air and water is polluted by a toxic soup of factory farm runoff.

But protest we must. And at the same time, we must also make it clear that we have a roadmap to a better place.

We’ve taken a fair amount of heat for our unabashed support for the Green New Deal. But we think this resolution, which aims to address so many of the crises we face, is our best shot at creating a detailed roadmap to a better place—a place where air and water are clean, where abundant nutritious food grows in healthy soil, where farmers and food workers earn a decent living, where biodiversity fosters resiliency.

Big Oil and Big Ag don’t want a Green New Deal. If we do, we’re going to have to build a movement so massive and so powerful that politicians will have no choice. They’ll either get to work and get it done. Or we’ll put them out to pasture—where maybe they'll learn a little something about how nature works.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Support Citizens Regeneration Lobby, OCA’s 501(c)(4) lobbying arm (not tax-deductible)

Click here for more ways to support our work

Big Questions

 

In a sit-down interview with Dr. Mark Hyman, food writer and guru Mark Bittman covers a wide range of issues—including this big question: If we had a food system in this country, what would it look like?

Bittman argues that we don't have a food system in this country:

"What we call a food system is a bunch of rich people just trying to get richer. The goal of the people who determine what we eat is to make money, and they make money by selling chemicals, by selling feritilzers, by selling seeds, by selling equipment, by selling us hyper-processed food that makes us sick."

If we did have a food system, Bittman asks, what would it look like? He argues that most people, if you asked them, would say that the overarching goals of a food system would be to "feed as many people as we can, as well as we can, while doing as little damage as possible to the environment."

How do we bridge the gap between that vision for a food system, and "a bunch of rich people trying to get richer?" Bittman does a good job in this interview of connecting the dots between the problems with our food system, and so many other critical issues facing us—including income inequality, epidemics of obesity and chronic illness, soil degradation, climate and on and on.

We think the Green New Deal is the best roadmap to come along since the original New Deal—and our best shot—for the the kind of transformational change we need in order to have a real food system, based on what people really need and want, while at the same time addressing a host of other problems, including and especially, our current climate emergency.

Watch ‘Why Food Matters More Than You Think: From Plate to Planet’

TAKE ACTION: Sign the Green Consumers for a Green New Deal petition

'No One Dares'

 

Why do we need to end factory farming? So many reasons.

But the one reason that’s getting the most attention from public health officials these days is this: Drug-resistant infections from food are growing. And, as New York Times reporter Matt Richtel laid out in his article this week, powerful industry interests are blocking scientists and investigators from getting information they need to combat the problem.

Richtel tells the story of Rose and Roger Porter Jr., whose 10-year-old daughter, Mikayla, nearly died from the fastest-growing salmonella variant in the U.S.—“a strain that is particularly dangerous because it is resistant to antibiotics,” according to Richtel.

Mikayla was one of nearly 200 people reported ill in the summer of 2015 in Washington State from tainted pork.

As the Times reports:

The surge in drug-resistant infections is one of the world’s most ominous health threats, and public health authorities say one of the biggest causes is farmers who dose millions of pigs, cows and chickens with antibiotics to keep them healthy — sometimes in crowded conditions before slaughter.

We know industrial meat is contaminated with all manner of drugs, including antibiotics. A Consumer Reports investigation last year exposed the failure of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to act on information gleaned from its own test results.

FSIS testing on meat and poultry sold in the U.S. turned up everything from ketamine, an antidepressant, to Phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory pain medication, to chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that, at any exposure level, can trigger life-threatening aplastic anemia (the inability to produce enough new blood cells) in some people.

Why doesn’t the USDA crack down on the use of drugs in industrial meat production? And why did the public health officials investigating Mikayla’s illness in Washington run into so many roadblocks?

Dr. Parthapratim Basu, a former chief veterinarian at FSIS told the Times:

“When it comes to power, no one dares to stand up to the pork industry, not even the U.S. government.”

What will it take for the USDA to act? More illnesses? More deaths?

Read ‘Tainted Pork, Ill Consumers and an Investigation Thwarted’

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress: Healthy Farm Animals Shouldn’t Get Antibiotics that Sick People Need!

Essential Reading

 

Cannabis Provides Strong Pain Relief

To Deliver 'Fundamental Message' for 'Survival of Future Generations,' Greta Thunberg to Sail Atlantic for Americas

Common Over-the-Counter Drugs Can Cause Dementia

After Plant Blood Gets FDA Approval, the Impossible Burger Is Set to Hit Supermarket Shelves

We Must Change Food Production to Save the World, Says Leaked Report

First Human-Monkey Chimera Raises Concern Among Scientists

An Inside Look at How Monsanto, a PR Firm and a Reporter Give Readers a Warped View Of Science