From the April 2008 Idaho Observer:
Seeds of Destruction:
The Gene Revolution: The biggest crime of all time
It is morbidly fascinating, isn’t it, how the secrets of our modern world keep revealing themselves in an endless stream of ruthless, power and greed-driven evil flowing downward from the very top of the human feeding chain? As our journal reports each month, the freedom, dignity, solvency, health, happiness and reproductive viability of the world’s common people are under attack from just about every imaginable angle. And now, at this very moment, the most monstrous secret, ever, is unveiling itself in all its horrible splendor. The plants, animals, vitamins and minerals that people depend upon for life have come almost completely under the control of global agribusinesses that take their direction from a handful of the world’s most powerful and ruthless families. It is important to us that our readers understand what has happened to our food. For some, more information will be necessary and the books and DVDs mentioned can provide that. For the vast majority, however, the best lesson you will ever receive on this subject will be right here and now. With that in mind, doing a book review would not do this subject justice. We were about to write this story, taken primarily from Seeds of Destruction by F. William Engdahl, Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey M. Smith and The Future of Food by Deborah Koons Garcia. Then we saw an article in Australia’s cutting edge magazine Nexus that tells the story in a way that will service both those who will want to know more and those who prefer the condensed version of this, "the greatest crime of all time."
From Stephen Lendman
F. William Engdahl’s newest book "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation" is the diabolical story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply. The book’s compelling contents are being reviewed in-depth so readers will know the type of future Henry Kissinger had in mind in 1970 when he said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people."
Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power and ruthless intent to use it—Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and our money, Big Oil controlling our world energy resources, Big Media controlling our information, Big Pharma controlling our health, Big Technology controlling our state-of-the-art everything and watching us, Big Defense supplying the weapons of our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators exploiting our lives for profit.
Initial opposition silenced
In 2003, Jeffrey Smith’s "Seeds of Deception" was published. It exposed the dangers of untested and unregulated genetically engineered foods most people eat every day with no knowledge of the potential health risks. Efforts to inform the public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider what happened to two distinguished scientists.
Ignatio Chapela. In September, 2001, UC California Berkeley microbial biologist Ignatio Chapela was invited to a carefully staged meeting with Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico’s Director of the Commission of Biosafety in Mexico City. The experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he explained how Monasterio attacked him for over an hour. "First he trashed me. He let me know how damaging to the country and how problematic my information was to be."
Chapela was referring to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate student David Quist discovered in 2000 about genetically-engineered contamination of Mexican corn in violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico; the country is home to hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed naturally and GM contamination is permanent and unthinkable—but it happened by design.
Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a dozen state of Oaxaca communities and discovered 6 percent of the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca is in the country’s far south so Chapela knew if contamination spread there, it was widespread throughout Mexico.
It’s unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported U.S. corn. At the time, 30 percent of imported U.S. corn was genetically modified. Now it’s heading for nearly double that amount and, if not contained, it soon could be all of it.
The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish Chapela’s findings. Monasterio wanted them quashed, but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was intimidated not to do it and threatened with being held responsible for all damages to Mexican agriculture and its economy.
He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article appeared in the publication on November 29, 2001, the smear campaign against him began and intensified. It was later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the Washington-based Bivings Group PR firm was hired to discredit his findings and get them retracted.
It worked because the campaign didn’t focus on Chapela’s contamination discovery, but on a second research conclusion even more serious. He learned the contaminated GM corn had as many as eight fragments of the CaMV promoter that creates an unstable "hotspot." It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter throughout the plant’s genome and, if proved conclusively, would wreck efforts to introduce GM crops in the country. Without further evidence, there was still room for doubt of the second finding’s validity, however, and the anti-Chapela campaign hammered him on it.
Nature buckles. Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented action in its 133-year history: It upheld Chapela’s central finding but retracted the other one. That was all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They denounced Chapela as incompetent and tried unsuccessfully to discredit everything he learned including his verified findings. Chapela’s vindication was not reported, but his vilification was and Monsanto and the Mexican government scored a big victory.
Bittersweet vindication. Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after Nature’s partial retraction, the Mexican government announced there was massive genetic contamination of traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Puebla. It was horrifying as up to 95 percent of tested crops were genetically polluted and "at a speed never before predicted."
The news made headlines in Europe and Mexico. It was ignored in the U.S. and Canada.
The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him tenure in 2003 because of his article and for criticizing university ties to the biotech industry. He then filed suit in April, 2004, asking remuneration for lost wages, earnings and benefits, compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for his action. He won in May, 2005, but not in court. The university reversed its decision, granted him tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to 2003. The damage, however, was done and is an example of what’s at stake when anyone dares challenge a powerful company like Monsanto.
Dr. Arpad Pusztai. The first scientist to be attacked was the world’s leading lectins and plant genetics modification expert, UK-based Arpad Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his research position at Scotland’s Rowett Research Institute for publishing industry-unfriendly data he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO foods.
His Rowett Research study, which began in 1995 with a budget of $1.5 million, was the first ever independent one conducted on GMOs anywhere. He undertook it believing in their promise but became alarmed by his findings. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them because Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future biotech revolution wasn’t going to allow the world’s foremost expert in the field derail the effort. His results were startling and contained considerable implications for humans eating genetically engineered foods.
The first canaries were rats. Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues, including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened after 10 days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110 days. That’s the human equivalent of 10 years.
Spreading like a plague. GM foods effectively hit the market in 1996. Already, over 80 percent of all supermarket processed foods contain them. Grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat and other animal products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut butter) all contain GMOs. They’re unrevealed to consumers because labeling is not required yet the more of them we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health.
The lack of labeling grants the industry plausible deniability for the damage being done. Since no one knows the long-term effects of GM food consumption and there are no labeling requirements, we’re all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment, the results of which are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it will take many years to learn them, and when they’re finally revealed it will be too late to reverse the damage if it’s proved GM products harm human health as independent experts strongly believe.
Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.
Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and growing numbers of governments around the world in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa now allow these products to be grown on their soil or imported. They’re produced and sold to consumers because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgriSciences and Cargill have enormous clout to demand it and a potent partner supporting them - the U.S. government and its agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture and State, the FDA, EPA and even the defense establishment. World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) patent rules also back them along with industry-friendly WTO rulings.
Rockefellers have sown the seeds of our destruction
In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful job explaining the dangers of GM foods and ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes much deeper into this topic with Seeds of Destruction. It’s the story of a powerful family and a "small socio-political American elite (that) seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival"—future life through the food we eat. The book’s introduction says it "reads (like) a crime story." It’s also a nightmare but one that’s very real and threatening.
This review covers the book in-depth because of its importance. It’s an extraordinary work that "reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue (and) government corruption and coercion" that’s part of a decades-long global scheme for total world dominance. The book deserves vast exposure and must be read in full for the whole disturbing story. It’s hoped the material below will encourage readers to do their own research and to marshal mass consumer actions to place food safety above corporate profits.
Seeds of Destruction (see ad page 14) is an excellent research tool and is a sequel to Engdahl’s earlier book, "A Century of War" (see ad, also on page 14). Seeds of Destruction covers the roots of the strategy to control "global food security" that goes back to the 1930s and the plans of a handful of American families to preserve their wealth and power. But it centers on one family in particular that, above the others, "came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of the emerging American century" that blossomed after WWII. Its patriarch began in oil and then dominated it in his powerful Oil Trust. It was only the beginning as the family expanded into "education of youth, medicine and psychology," U.S. foreign policy, and "the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications" in plants and agriculture.
The family’s name is Rockefeller. The patriarch was John D., and four powerful later-generation brothers followed him - David, Nelson, Laurance, and John D. III. Engdahl says the GMO story covers "the evolution of power in the hands of an elite (led by this family), determined (above all) to bring the entire world under their sway." They and other elites already control most of it, including the nation’s energy, the US Federal Reserve, and other key world central banks. Today, three brothers are gone, David alone remains, and he’s still a force at age 92 although he no longer runs the family bank, JP Morgan Chase. He’s active in family enterprises, however, including the Rockefeller Foundation which continues to underwrite the patient plan to control the world’s people by controlling the food supply.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon U.S. Central time.
The excerpted articles above and below were taken from parts one and two of a three-part article that began running in Nexus magazine in March, 2008.
Nexus is a cutting-edge journal of excellent quality from Australia. Nexus can be found online at www.nexusmagazine.com and is available through many retail book and magazine sellers throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Washington launches the GMO revolution
This section of the review by Stephen Lendman covers a period of time everyone over the age of 45 remembers, but had no idea that the pieces of a diabolical plan to control the global food supply—and by extension control the people—was coming together. It is important for us to recall what we perceived was going on in the 70s and 80s—Vietnam, oil embargo, Cold War, Iran/Contra—and realize that the groundwork for the biggest crime of all time was laid right under our noses. We must understand what happened in the 70s and 80s to understand what is happening now. With that knowledge, we can better predict what fate these Creation criminals have planned for us. When enough of us find out what’s going on and decide that their plans are not in our best interests, we can change them. Until then...
(Note: Comments in quotes are attributable to Seeds of Destruction author F. William Engdahl unless otherwise indicated)
The origins of the sinister scheme to patent genetically-altered plants and control the world’s food supply began decades ago as the "Green Revolution,"—an attempt to scientifically increase crop yields through lab-driven hybridization projects.
The science of "biological and genetic-modification of plants and other life forms first" came out of U.S. research labs in the 1970s. The Reagan administration was determined to make America dominant in this emerging field. The biotech agribusiness industry was especially favored, and companies in the early 1980s raced to develop GMO plants, livestock and GMO-based animal drugs. Washington made it easy for them with an unregulated, business-friendly climate that has persisted ever since under Republicans and Democrats alike.
The perfect government partner
Food safety and public health issues aren’t considered vital if they conflict with profits. So the entire population is being used as lab rats for these completely new, untested and potentially hazardous products. And leading the effort to develop them is a company with a "long record of fraud, cover-up, bribery," deceit and disdain for the public interest: Monsanto.
Its first product was saccharin that was later proved to be a carcinogen. It then got into chemicals, plastics and became notorious for Agent Orange that was used to defoliate Vietnam jungles in the 1960s and 1970s and exposed hundreds of thousands of civilians and U.S. troops to deadly dioxins, one of the most toxic of all known compounds.
Along with others in the industry, Monsanto is also a shameless polluter. It has a history of secretly dumping some of the most lethal substances known in water and soil and getting away with it. Today on its web site, however, the company ignores its record and calls itself "an agricultural company (applying) innovation and technology to help farmers around the world be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture’s impact on our environment."
In spite of its past, Monsanto and other GMO giants got unregulated free rein in the 1980s and especially after GHW Bush became president in 1989. His administration opened "Pandora’s Box" so no "unnecessary regulations" would hamper them. Thereafter, not one single new regulatory law governing biotech or GMO products was passed then or later despite all the unknown risks and possible health dangers.
Substantially equivalent
In 1992, GHW Bush signed an executive order stating that GMO plants such as corn, wheat and rice are "substantially equivalent" to their natural counterparts. This established the principle of "substantial equivalence" as the "lynchpin of the whole GMO revolution." It was pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo enforced by executive fiat.
Since that time, the industry has essentially been "self-regulating."
Problems with Prosilac. Monsanto chose milk as its first GMO product by feeding milk cows recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), which was marketed under the trade name, "Posilac." In 1993, the Clinton FDA declared it safe and approved it for sale before any consumer use information was available. It’s now sold in every state and promoted as a way cows can produce up to 30 percent more milk. Problems, however, soon appeared. Farmers reported their livestock burned out up to two years sooner than usual, serious infections developed, and some animals couldn’t walk. Other problems included the udder inflammation mastitis as well as deformed calves being born.
The information was suppressed, and rBGH milk is unlabeled so there’s no way consumers can know. They also weren’t told this hormone causes leukemia and tumors in rats. A European Commission committee concluded humans drinking rBGH milk risk breast and prostate cancer. The EU thus banned the product, but not the U.S., despite clear safety issues. And still, this was just the beginning.
Of foxes and henhouses
Engdahl reviewed the Pusztai affair (see previous page), the toll it took on his health, and the modest vindication he finally got. Already out of a job, the 300-year old British Royal Society attacked him in 1999 and claimed his research was "flawed in many aspects of design, execution and analysis and that no conclusions should be drawn from it."
Damage control.The attack had no basis in fact but Pusztai’s qualified findings threatened to derail Britain’s hugely profitable GMO industry and do the same thing to its U.S. counterpart.
As for Pusztai, after five years, several heart attacks, and a ruined career, he finally learned what happened after he announced his findings. Monsanto complained to President Clinton who, in turn, alerted Tony Blair. Pusztai’s findings had to be quashed and he discredited for making them. He was nonetheless able to reply with the help of the highly respected British scientific journal, The Lancet. In spite of Royal Society threats against him, it’s editor published his article, but at a cost. After publication, the Society and biotech industry shamelessly attacked The Lancet for printing what was then the only independent study ever conducted on the health effects of GMO consumption.
As a footnote, Pusztai now lectures around the world on his GMO research and is a consultant to start-up groups researching the health effects of these foods.
Pusztai’s co-author Professor Stanley Ewen also suffered. He lost his position at the University of Aberdeen. Engdahl notes that the practice of suppressing unwanted truths and punishing whistleblowers is the rule, not the exception. Industry demands are powerful, especially when they affect the bottom line.
The Blair government went even further. It commissioned the private firm, Grainseed, to conduct a three-year study to prove GMO food safety. The London Observer newspaper later got UK Ministry of Agriculture documents on it that showed tests were rigged and produced "some strange science." At least one Grainseed researcher manipulated the data to "make certain seeds in the trials appear to perform better than they really did."
Shooting messengers becomes code. Nonetheless, the Ministry recommended a GMO corn variety be certified, and the Blair government issued a new code of conduct under which "any employee of a state-funded research institute who dared to speak out on (the) findings into GMO plants could face dismissal, be sued for breach of contract or face a court injunction."
In other words, whisleblowing was now illegal even if public health was at stake. Nothing would be allowed to stop the agribusiness juggernaut from proceeding unimpeded.
"Tricky" Dick and the Rockefellers
President Nixon took office at a time of national crisis. Along with the Vietnam morass, the economy was in trouble after the "golden age of capitalism" peaked in 1965 and corporate profits were declining. The globalization phenomenon began at this time when American companies and the nation’s wealthiest families found investing abroad more profitable than at home because more opportunities were available outside the country.
Food was one of them and was about to be renamed "agribusiness." Engdahl called it "a paradigm shift" with one man having the most decisive role—former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.
Nelson and his brothers ran the family’s Rockefeller Foundation and various other tax-exempt entities like the Rockefeller Brothers Trust. Nelson and David were the most influential figures and their power center was the exclusive New York Council on Foreign Relations. Engdahl states: "In the 1960s the Rockefellers were at the power center of the U.S. establishment (and) Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (was) their hand-picked protege."
Enter the "crisis of democracy" or, as right wing Harvard professor Samuel Huntington called it, an "excess of democracy" at a time when masses of ordinary citizens were protesting their government’s policies. It captured media attention, posed a threat to the country’s establishment and had to be addressed.
The Trilateral Commission. In 1973, 300 influential, hand-picked Rockefeller friends from North America, Europe and Japan held a meeting. They founded a powerful new organization called the Trilateral Commission with easily recognizable member names.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was its first Executive Director, and other charter members included Jimmy Carter (who became David Rockefeller’s favored 1976 presidential candidate over Gerald Ford), George HW Bush, Paul Volker (Carter’s Fed Chairman) and Alan Greenspan who was then a Wall Street investment banker.
The new organization "laid the basis for a new global strategy for a network of interlinked international elites," many of whom were Rockefeller business partners. Combined, their financial, economic and political clout was unmatched. Trilateralists laid the foundation for today’s globalization. They also followed Huntington’s advice about democracy’s unreliability that had to be checked by "some measure of (public) apathy and non-involvement (combined with) secrecy and deception."
The Commission further advocated privatizing public enterprises along with deregulating industry. Trilateralist Jimmy Carter embraced the dogma enthusiastically as president. He began the process that Ronald Reagan continued throughout the 1980s.
Food for peace(?) In 1973, Nixon was in office with Kissinger as his Svengali. One observer described Kissinger at the time as "like sludge out of a swamp without a spark of life....no soul, a slip of life, a kind of ghoul (and) a sort of lubricant (to keep the ship of state running)."
So he did by "tak(ing) complete control (of) US foreign policy" as both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. Further, he "was to make food a centerpiece of his diplomacy along with oil geopolitics."
In the Cold War era, food became a strategic weapon by selling it to the public as "Food for Peace." It was cover for U.S. agriculture to engineer the transformation of family farming into global agribusiness with food the tool and small farmers eliminated. World agriculture domination was to be "one of the central pillars of post-war Washington policy, along with (controlling) world oil markets and non-communist world defense sales." The defining 1973 event was a world food crisis.
The great grain robbery. The shortage of grain staples along with the first of two 1970s oil shocks advanced a "significant new Washington policy turn." Oil and grains were rising three-to-fourfold in price when the U.S. was the world’s largest food surplus producer with the most power over prices and supply. It was an ideal time for a new alliance between U.S.-based grain trading companies and the government. It "laid the groundwork for the later gene revolution."
Enter what Engdahl called the "great grain robbery" with Kissinger as the engineer. He decided U.S. agriculture policy was "too important to be left in the hands of the Agriculture Department" so he took control of it himself. The world desperately needed grain, America had the greatest supply, and the scheme was to use this power to "radically change world food markets and food trade." The big winners were grain traders like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Continental Grain that were helped by Kissinger’s "new food diplomacy (to create) a global agriculture market for the first time." Food would "reward friends and punish enemies," and ties between Washington and business lay at the heart of the strategy.
The global food market was being reorganized, corporate interests were favored, political advantage was exploited, and the 1990s "gene revolution" groundwork was laid. Rockefeller interests and its foundation were to play the decisive role as events unfolded over the next two decades. It began under Nixon as the cornerstone of his farm policy, free trade was the mantra, corporate grain traders were the beneficiaries and family farms had to go so agribusiness giants could take over.
Bankrupting them was the plan to remove an "excess (of) human resources." Engdahl called it a "thinly veiled form of food imperialism" as part of a scheme for the U.S. to become "the world granary." The family farm was to become the "factory farm," and agriculture was to be "agribusiness" to be dominated by a few corporate giants with incestuous ties to Washington.
An economy of enslavement. Dollar devaluation was also part of the scheme under Nixon’s New Economic Plan (NEP) that included closing the gold window in 1971 to let the currency float freely. Developing nations were targeted as well with the idea that they forget about being food-sufficient in grains and beef, rely on America for key commodities, and concentrate instead on small fruits, sugar and vegetables for export. Earned foreign exchange could then buy U.S. imports and repay IMF and World Bank loans that create a never-ending cycle of debt slavery. GATT was also used and later the WTO with corporate-written rules for its own bottom line interests.
A Secret National Security Memo
In the midst of a worldwide drought and stock market collapse, consider Henry Kissinger’s classified memo in April, 1974. It was on a secret project detailed in National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) that was shaped by Rockefeller interests and aimed to adopt a "world population plan of action" for drastic global population control—meaning to reduce it. The U.S. led the effort by making birth control in developing countries a prerequisite for U.S. aid. Engdahl summed it up in blunt terms: "If these inferior races get in the way of our securing ample, cheap raw materials, then we must find ways to get rid of them."
Kissinger’s scheme was "simpler contraceptive methods through bio-medical research."
NSSM 200 was tied to the agribusiness agenda that began with the 1950s and 1960s "Green Revolution" to control food production in targeted Latin American, Asian and African countries. Kissinger’s plan had two aims: Securing new U.S. grain markets and population control with 13 "unlucky" countries chosen. Among them were India, Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia; exploiting their resources depended on drastic population reductions to reduce homegrown demand.
The scheme was ugly and pure Kissinger. It recommended forced population control and other measures to ensure strategic U.S. aims. Kissinger wanted global numbers reduced by 500 million by the year 2000 and argued for doubling the 10 million annual death rate to 20 million.
The strategy included fertility control called "family planning" that was linked to the availability of key resources. The Rockefeller family backed it, Kissinger was their "hired hand," and he was well-rewarded for his efforts.
Besides his better-known crimes, consider what he did to poor Brazilian women through a policy of mass sterilization under NSSM 200: After 14 years of the program, the Brazilian Health Ministry discovered shocking reports of an estimated 44 percent of all Brazilian women between ages 14 and 55 were permanently sterilized.
USAID directed the program and organizations like the International Planned Parenthood Federation and Family Health International were involved. USAID has a long disturbing history backing U.S. imperialism while claiming to extend "a helping hand to those people overseas struggling to make a better life, recover from a disaster or striving to live in a free and democratic country."
Even more disturbing was an estimated 90% of Brazilian women of African descent sterilized in a nation with a black population second only to Nigeria’s. Powerful figures backed the scheme but none more influential than the Rockefellers, with John D. III having the most clout on population policy. Nixon appointed him head of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future in 1969.
Its earlier work laid the ground for Kissinger’s NSSM 200 and its policy of extermination through subterfuge that was based on a "decades old effort to breed human traits" by the Nazi "eugenics" process.
Note: There you have it: The Gene Revolution is ultimately a eugenics project sponsored by eugenicists like Rockefeller and Kissinger who enlisted the support of agribusiness by dangling the carrot of immense corporate profits to provide the necessary incentives that advanced their sinister agenda. (DWH)