How Monsanto genes grew into DC monsters

Monsters by Matte (Wiki Commons)

By Laura Harrison McBride, editor/publisher of Eating Their Young: How the Greatest Generation Made the Baby Boom Into a Moveable Feast.

Yesterday, I wrote about the capitulation of three of the largest organic food companies to Monsanto’s horrific pesticide, Roundup, by agreeing tacitly to allow a level of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) approval for Roundup Ready alfalfa. 

There are, of course, many vectors that caused those organic companies to do as they did. Whole Foods claimed it was a tactical maneuver, intended to keep even worse things from happening to the animal feed industry in the United States. I think, during World War II, such actions regarding Hitler’s drive for world domination were called appeasement.

Regardless of the intentions of Whole Foods Market and their partners in capitulation to Monsanto, there is probably only one thing any thinking person needs to know about how Monsanto became the de facto USDA. It is this:

Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies.

That was from a long and well-researched article in Vanity Fair in May, 2008 by  Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele. (Read the entire article here.)

The strange bedfellows who warmed Vilsack’s sheets

Bartlett and Steele link Monsanto firmly not only to Daddy Bush’s regime, in which Thomas was appointed to the Court and confirmed by a gormless Congress, but to Junior Bush, who carried the torch for the Greatest Generation of Corporate Criminals admirable. The Greatest Generation could not have chosen a better shill than Boy George to infect the once-activist Baby Boom with its father’s dedication to the rise of a corporatocracy.  Boy George supposedly served during Vietnam; he was ONE OF US, a sham to which unfortunately many Baby Boomers responded. (John Kerry actually did serve in Vietnam, but Boy George found a way to shoot him down, amazingly, since Boy George had no actual working knowledge of the military, having been unaccountably absent and/or on extended leave from his stateside place-holder assignment. But then, it wasn’t military tactics they were using, but Orwellian dishonesty, pure and simple.)

Boy George’s hand-picked warmonger, Donald Rumsfeld (born on the cusp of the Greatest Generation), was well-connected to Monsanto. Here’s how:

Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale. (Bartlett and Steele, 2008)

That’s just a small part of the USDA/Monsanto breeding program that ended in Mr. Obam'as ineffective choice, Tom Vilsack. Its effects, and the effects of other Greatest Generation maneuvers against their children and grandchildren, are exposed in Eating Their Young: How the Greatest Generation Made the Baby Boom Into a Moveable Feast.