Obama sings Monsanto Protection Act

Sea Bird said:
This is what you get from capitalism. Don't be surprised. :p
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What was the one decision that Obama made that prevented him from being a one-term president?

The auto-bailout .. which gave him Ohio.

An act of socialism.

Too bad that he isn't the socialist the right claims that he is.
 
WinterBorn said:
And which one of the dems worked to stop the bill? Which one of the dems tried hard to prevent this travesty from going thru?
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I don't think I implied that I supported it or the inaction by democrats. I'm simply saying it was stuffed into a huge bill that had to be signed. They (Blunt and Monsanto) pulled one over on all of us.
 
Howey said:
I don't think I implied that I supported it or the inaction by democrats. I'm simply saying it was stuffed into a huge bill that had to be signed. They (Blunt and Monsanto) pulled one over on all of us.
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There was publicity before the bill was signed. Every politician knew the Monsanto Protection part of the bill. They simply did not care enough about the people to go against the people who fund them. This is simply more proof that our politicians have been bought and paid for. But as long as we keep our focus on the squabbling between dems & repubs, or between liberals and conservatives, we never see that neither side works in our best interest.
 
Howey said:
Cite?
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http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/stop_the_monsanto_protection_act/

This article discusses the bill being debated in the House.


http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50865/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8644

This was published prior to the Senate voting.


http://rt.com/usa/monsanto-protection-act-may-be-voted-for-this-week-in-congress-271/

This article discussing the upcoming vote on the bill.




The point I was making is that the politicians cannot plead ignorance.
 
WinterBorn said:
There was publicity before the bill was signed. Every politician knew the Monsanto Protection part of the bill. They simply did not care enough about the people to go against the people who fund them. This is simply more proof that our politicians have been bought and paid for. But as long as we keep our focus on the squabbling between dems & repubs, or between liberals and conservatives, we never see that neither side works in our best interest.
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They may have, but they're denying it. And as someone waaaaay too involved in progressive/liberal causes, I knew little about it. That said, over the years here, (on my forum and elsewhere) there's been a barrage of anti-Monsanto propoganda that is nothing more than conspiracy theorist fodder. Given my extreme dislike for all things conspiracy-related, I paid little attention to it.

In this particular case, the outrage *seems* to be partially rooted in the real world and partially in conspiracy land.

Here's a surprisingly impartial article I came up with investigating my thoughts that fairly and succinctly examines both sides...

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-...r-week-monsanto-protection-act-170146036.html

Earlier this week, a group named "STOP the 'Monsanto Protection Act'" began circulating the following paragraph on Facebook (FB).
"I am truly upset that the majority of Americans who were aware of this expressed concern (to put it lightly) and nothing was done by our elected officials. Our mainstream media outlets haven’t barely even so much as mention it (sic), let alone mention the numbers of people who (sic) DO NOT SUPPORT THIS ACT OF TREASON!!! This is them openly telling us they no longer represent us and we do not have the power to stop them ..."
Clearly, the section of the recently signed H.R. 933 budget bill that has become known as the "Monsanto Protection Act" by its opponents, due to its favorable impact on companies like Monsanto (MON) and DuPont (DD) and the multibillion dollar genetically modified foods industry, has aroused serious passions.
But it takes a special kind of outrage for an obscure rider in a government spending bill to cross over from the topic of wonky lunchroom discussions to the wide world of social media.

That’s exactly what has happened this time around. A petition to stop the act before the vote even took place collected more than 250,000 names, according to Food Democracy Now, the pro-sustainability food group that was behind the petition as well as much of the uproar on social media since.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) even issued a statement last week expressing her displeasure with the rider. "Senator Mikulski understands the anger over this provision. She didn’t put the language in the bill and doesn’t support it either," it reads in part. A Tea Party blogger also has come out in opposition.
But why has the issue of genetically modified foods gone mainstream this time around? After all, this isn't the first time that GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have come up for a vote in Washington, and the very rider at the heart of this debate was included in a farm bill that was defeated in 2012.
A lot of it has to do with timing, explains Mira Calton, a licensed certified nutritionist and co-author of "Rich Food, Poor Food." That, and the fact that consumers are becoming more interested in what they’re eating.
"Right now is really just such a hot time for people to get educated on what's in their food, and the Internet has given us the ability to do this very easily," she says. "What may have flown under the radar before, now you can just look up online -- 'What is the Monsanto Protection Act?'"
We reached out to Monsanto for a comment on all this but had not heard back from them as of press time.
Here are the concerns at the center of the debate.

1. The government is turning a blind eye. According to the Austin Chronicle, the act "essentially deregulates GMOs by allowing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to override judicial rulings and grant temporary permits for conventional farmers to plant and grow genetically modified crops while pending review."

2. Monsanto itself may have written the provision. Although it is still unclear who exactly in Congress added the rider into the spending bill, Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told Politico recently that he worked with executives at Monsanto on the language. "What it says is if you plant a crop that is legal to plant when you plant it, you get to harvest it," Blunt told Politico. "But it is only a one year protection in that bill."

Government working with big business on regulatory language? Fact is, this is what lobbyists do for a living. But the publicity surrounding this issue has shone new light on this long-established fact of Washington life and brought new questions about the reality of the political process.

3. It's all about money. The biotech industry as a whole -- which encompasses pharmaceuticals, biofuels and food sciences -- is massive and global in scale, accounting for $83 billion in revenue in 2012, according to the Ernst & Young Global Biotechnology Report 2012.

The other side of the argument on the legislation is that the rider "was specifically designed to prevent egregious abuses of the court system and regulatory process." That's from Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a genetics and biotechnology advocacy organization.

"The legislation does not, as critics allege, allow farmers or Monsanto to sell seeds proven to be harmful," he writes in a recent column. "Rather, it provides legal consistency for farmers and businesses so that they will not be jerked around by temporary findings by competing court systems as activist challenges make their way up the legal food chain. Going forward, the provision will protect farmers who buy GM seeds and plant them under the belief that it is legal to do so because the seeds have been subjected to extensive USDA scrutiny and approval."

Entine says the act isn't about consumer safety or attempting to limit the biotech industry's potential liability for what it makes. No product, he continues, is going to be protected by the law should health or environmental problems arise.

"If the USDA or a court determines that a biotech seed or crop or food does not pass environmental or health muster, it will be pulled from the market and banned," he writes. "But until that happens, because of this provision -- let's call it the Food and Farmer Safety and Health Protection Act -- USDA safety determinations cannot be arbitrarily overturned by rogue courts responding to activists."

As for the rider itself, the publicity may be just the beginning. Labeling requirements for genetically modified foods are already being considered in more than two dozen states, and the federal government is expected to review the issue again once the act expires next year. Anti-GMO advocates say they are re-energized.
"We've seen in about 30 states that grassroots genetically engineered food bills have been introduced," says Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch. "These issues kind of snowball until they reach critical mass, and I think that’s what’s happening here."
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Where do I stand now after hours of investigating this?

The same place. *I think* it sucks. *I think* Monsanto and a shitty republican pulled a quick one on Congress, the President, and the public. *I think* it's been blown out of proportion to the real needs of the country, including getting this overall bill passed. *I think* those opposed to this pulled the heartstrings of America with their message and subsequent gloom and doom moniker "The Monsanto Protection Act" when in fact it was but a paragraph of a much larger bill and will most likely be repealed in six months.

Aoxomoxoa said:
You can't surely be saying that Obama was ignorant of the contents of the Bill?
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I *I think* the President should know every single word of every single piece of legislation.
 
blackascoal said:
What was the one decision that Obama made that prevented him from being a one-term president?

The auto-bailout .. which gave him Ohio.

An act of socialism.

Too bad that he isn't the socialist the right claims that he is.
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I wouldn't consider the auto bailout an act of socialism. If he had nationalized it, it would be. But as it was, the auto bailout was just taxpayer support of vertically manged corporations.
 
PolitiFact takes it claims of anti-Mosanto Facebook posts...

Have you heard of the Monsanto Protection Act?

That’s the name critics have assigned to a section of the continuing resolution which Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed on March 20, 2013, that keeps the federal government operating through the end of the fiscal year.

Tucked into Section 735 of the law is a provision relating to the regulation of genetically engineered crops that has food safety activists up in arms.

We’ve seen a number of claims about this legislation, on Facebook in particular. This one, from the group Grow Food, Not Lawns, caught our eye:

The law "requires the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled against the crop as being dangerous to public safety or the environment."

That’s a hefty statement about a hot issue. We decided to look further.

Sugar beets and the regulatory process

Missouri-based Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of genetically engineered seeds, which are regulated by the USDA. The agency is required, under the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA, to study them for environmental impacts, such as their effect on other crops and their risk of becoming a pest plant. (The USDA does not assess the seeds in terms of food safety -- that’s the job of the FDA and is not addressed in this law.)

This process landed in court in 2009, when Monsanto petitioned for approval of a sugar beet genetically engineered to be resistant to a Monsanto brand of pesticide. The USDA conducted a preliminary environmental study that found that the beet’s introduction into agriculture would have no significant impact on the environment and gave its approval. The Center for Food Safety sued USDA, saying it had not completed an adequate NEPA review, and the courts agreed, sending USDA back to complete the study.

It’s important to note that the court ruling didn’t say the beets were unsafe; it simply said that an adequate environmental review hadn’t been done.

"It took USDA more than a year to do the analysis, but farmers were growing these sugar beets," said Greg Jaffe with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "USDA issued temporary permits while they continued the analysis, with conditions to ensure it didn’t impact the environment. They had the discretion to do that."

Ultimately, Jaffe said, USDA finished its study and approved the crop.

So, what’s new?

The attachment in the budget bill, known as a "rider," essentially puts into law the practice described in the sugar beet case.

"The language in Section 735 codifies existing USDA authority and elements of a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that lower courts should not automatically prohibit the planting of biotech crop varieties, or the harvest and sale of biotech crops already planted, if/when their commercial use is temporarily banned because of a lawsuit," said Karen Batra, spokeswoman for the Biotech Industry Organization. "This applies to products that have ALREADY gone through the approval process and already been deregulated by FDA and therefore deemed to be safe for human health and the environment. If the secretary believes that the crop at issue poses a risk in any way, he can forbid its use."

Jaffe added, "I don’t think it provides USDA with any new legal authority that they didn’t already have, although clearly it’s Congress telling USDA that they should use that authority wherever possible."

The text of the law says "In the event that a determination of nonregulated status made pursuant to section 411 of the Plant Protection Act is or has been invalidated or vacated, the Secretary of Agriculture shall, notwithstanding any other provision of law, upon request by a farmer, grower, farm operator, or producer, immediately grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation..."

The words -- "shall immediately grant" -- are alarming activists who are already suspicious of genetically modified products dominating the food supply.

"It goes a step beyond by forcing the agency to approve those permits or partial deregulation," said Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs at the Center for Food Safety, the group that filed suit in the sugar beet case. "There’s an urgency written into the law that is going to stifle sound science and science-based regulation."

"It kind of takes the courts out of the game," added Patty Lovera of the group Food and Water Watch.

Jaffe, however, noted that the USDA would still have to adhere to existing guidelines in the approval process, such as ensuring that products comply with the Plant Protection Act.

When we contacted the USDA about this claim, a spokesman sent us this statement:

"(Agriculture) Secretary (Tom) Vilsack has asked the Office of General Counsel to review this provision as it appears to pre-empt judicial review of a deregulatory action, which may make the provision unenforceable."

Our ruling

The group Grow Food, Not Lawns claimed that the budget bill "requires the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled against the crop as being dangerous to public safety or the environment."

We learned from experts that the USDA issuing temporary permits for products in litigation is not new with this law. That was already the agency’s practice. And in the sugar beet case that went to court, the dispute was not over the safety of the food but the environmental review procedure.

However, the language in the law saying the USDA "shall" issue permits escalates that policy, with one expert telling us it "compels" the agency to allow the use of disputed products while litigation proceeds. And now the USDA itself is now questioning whether that provision is enforceable.

The Facebook claim rightly describes the effect of the new provision, but lacks some important context. We rate it Half True.
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tinfoil said:
http://www.ijbs.com/v05p0706.htm

Abstract

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.



Results
We have previously reported indications of toxicity in rats fed with MON 863 GM maize for 90 days [5]. However, these signs of toxicity alone do not constitute proof of adverse health effects. We have therefore extended our initial analysis on the MON 863 feeding data by collectively compiling the significant differences observed in the physiological and biochemical parameters measured in feeding trials of rats with each of the three GM maize varieties MON 863, MON 810 and NK 603 (Tables 1, 2; Annex Table E). When we then initially compare all p-values in our calculations with those of Monsanto (significant and non significant differences, Annex Table E), we obtain ratios of 432/452 (NK 603), 435/450 (MON 810) and 442/470 (MON 863). By employing our statistical methods even if we reached a concordance with Monsanto's results (Annex Table E), the level of precision of the main effects and their interpretation are highly different. Therefore, we then progressed to consider only relative differences over 5% (Tables 1 and 2).
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This doesn't appear to be the flawed French study? In that study, rats presented with tumors, but it was later determined that those specific types of rat were prone to tumors. Is this study supposing that the corn actually has Roundup uptake? Or did they add Roundup to the corn? BT (bacillus thuringiensis) is a benign bacteria that I apply to my Broccoli to rid it of cabbage loopers. It's safe to ingest, unless you're a caterpillar. Monsanto put BT DNA into the corn, and it is now showing up in the bloodstream of women/children who drink milk from cows fed Monsanto's corn. I don't care if it's a benign bacteria...I don't want it in my bloodstream. If GM corn now has herbicide in it, then this is more dangerous than I had previously thought. I hadn't heard that before.
 
Howey said:
PolitiFact takes it claims of anti-Mosanto Facebook posts...
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Even if GMO corn doesn't have pesticide in it, I can't see the sense in poisoning the soil and planting poison resistant crops in it. Where does the poison end up? And Monsanto is quickly learning that Mother Nature always wins. There are now Roundup resistant weeds growing in Monsanto's fields. So they're using stronger poisens now. Likewise with the BT infused corn. They've created super insects that are now immune to the BT DNA laced plants.
 
blackascoal said:
What was the one decision that Obama made that prevented him from being a one-term president?

The auto-bailout .. which gave him Ohio.

An act of socialism.

Too bad that he isn't the socialist the right claims that he is.
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I fear that, not only is he not the socialist/communist/america hater/kenyan/muslim your right wing tries to say he is, but he is sliding inexorably closer to the right. Soon you will not be able to discern a difference. Blair did the same in the UK which is why there is now a price offered for his (citizens) arrest of £2400.00.
 
Lowaicue said:
I fear that, not only is he not the socialist/communist/america hater/kenyan/muslim your right wing tries to say he is, but he is sliding inexorably closer to the right. Soon you will not be able to discern a difference. Blair did the same in the UK which is why there is now a price offered for his (citizens) arrest of £2400.00.
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Obama has always been right-of-center in his thinking. Democrats simply fell for the con.

He's not sliding to the right .. he's always been there.

He walked in the White House door on day one with Tim Geithner and Larry Summers.
 
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