Clintons and Monsanto--a match made in hell

Well.

I hinted back in January about Hillary Clinton's shady choice to align herself with Joy Philipi, the fourth-generation "family farmer" whose hog farm is home about 2,000 unfortunate pigs. Philipi is also the former president of the National Pork Council, a "poster organization for corporate agriculture." (If you are unfamiliar with industrial pork production, you might take a painful look at this provocative piece that Rolling Stone put out in late 2006. Warning: this will likely put you off bacon for awhile, or at least have you running for the nearest small family farm).

Now, even more damning ties to agribiz are popping up--this week, the second of two scathing open letters to Senator Clinton, written by former supporter and fellow Wellesley alum Linn Cohen-Cole hit the internets (read the first here). Prompted by an emotional reaction to a PBS special on farmer suicides in India (the result of farmers being tricked into buying expensive biotech rice, which didn't grow, leaving the farmers desperate, starving, and drowning in debt), Cohen-Cole spent the last few months digging up information on Clinton's ties to Monsanto, the biotech company that sold the GM rice to the Indian farmers. And she did a bang-up job--these letters are full of juicy (and scary) links that read like a primer on Monsanto's evil doings--of connecting the dots.

Sigh. I can't say that I'm shocked as much as saddened by this information. Sometimes it really does seem like we're just fucked--I doubt that Obama's nose is much cleaner than Hillary's--and even if by some miracle, Monsanto went out of business today, their GM seeds would continue to drift through the air, contaminating natural crops, and the chemicals they've tricked and bullied farmers around the globe into buying would continue to leach into ground waters and otherwise sicken us.

If you don't know much about Monsanto, and most people don't--they spend about $50 million in PR every year to keep us misinformed--they are the evil scientists who brought us DDT (outlawed in the 1970s, but due to a long half-life, still sickening people around the globe), rBGH and Agent Orange. And they are as powerful and insidious as they are tricky and ruthless. Right now, Monsanto is fighting on a state-by-state level to keep family farmers from labeling their dairy products "rBGH-free." They also make massive donations to university agriculture programs, but only if they're doing biotech research. And (shudder) who knows what those crazy fuckers are cooking up these days.

A few years ago my dad, who was drafted into the Navy during the Vietnam War, joined the ranks of thousands of fellow veterans who've developed prostate cancer since being exposed to Agent Orange while serving in that conflict. Of course, prostate cancer is not the only increased health risk for vets, and things are even worse for the Vietnamese still living with contamination, over 3 million of whom suffer its consequences (cancers, diabetes, spina bifida and other birth defects) today. In the 1973 Peace Accords at the end of the war, Nixon acknowledged America's responsibility for Agent Orange's destructive impact and promised $3 billion in reparations to the devastated country.

But the US has yet to cough up a dime of that sum (and needless to say, neither has Monsanto). If you are of a mind to take action on the Agent Orange issue, check out the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.

To learn more about politicians with ties to Monsatan (including Clarence Thomas, Jon Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and former Secretary of Agriculture Anne Veneman) and see what else you can do, check out the Organic Consumers' Association's Millions Against Monsanto campaign.

What else can you do? Support your local small-scale family farmers. Get yourself some organic/heirloom seeds, share them with your friends, tend them carefully, doing your best to protect them from GM contamination, and save them, Lorax-style. They are the best hope we got, as far as this mouthy femme can see.