Recombinant Straw Falling on a Sick Camel's Back

Recently it's come to my attention (thanks, Randall!) that Monsanto, Cargill, and the rest of the nutritional vandal lobby have been pushing hard for the passage of three new food regulation bills that will, in essence, turn America's growing legions of organic farmers into unwilling indentured servants of the agricorps. The bills are up for vote soon, violating Obama's campaign promise to allow lots of time for the review of legislation before bringing it to vote, but one more violated promise? That's already getting old, and he's barely over a month in the Oval Office.

Phew! I thought. Thank God I'm in Canada. I'll just have to be especially careful in the future to avoid any and all American produce, as if those bills get passed every last vegetable will be sprayed with biocidal chemicals and every last cow will be force-fed antiobiotics. Well, that was pretty much true of anything the US has been exporting for a while anyways, and with full knowledge of that I've been avoiding American agricultural exports like the plague they are for some time now. So, really, for me, those bills don't change anything. Living in Canada doesn't mean I'm home free, but it does buy me some time, right?

Well ... maybe not so much as I thought.

Monsanto's been on the warpath in Canada, too. Here's one venerable old farmer's story, mostly a familiar tale of disingeuous accusations and insane high court rulings until, near the end, he drops the following bomb:

But I think the greatest curse is still coming. And that's coming in the line of prescription drug plants or 'pharma-plants'. There are six major drugs that are now being produced by genetically modified plants: vaccines, industrial enzymes, blood thinners, blood clotting proteins, growth hormones and contraceptives. What if somebody has had major surgery and they then eat food that is contaminated with genes from a plant manufactured to be a blood thinner? Or what about a pregnant woman who eats food contaminated by genes from a plant that is manufactured as a contraceptive? Remember, there is no such thing as containment or co-existence.

Contraceptives in food? My blood ran cold when I read that, and I'm hoping that wasn't some heathen mixture of blood clotters and blood thinners from last night's broccoli. The first image that came to mind was watching five, ten years down the line as my beautiful wife suddenly miscarries after eating the wrong tomato and hemorrhage's to death in the process due to an impurity in the wheat germ that was used to make her sandwich.

I'd love to chalk all this up to the short-sighted obsession with quarterly profits of a few amoral suit-wearing psychopaths. It would almost be comforting. Sure, they're throwing monkey-wrenches into the biosphere that will carome around in the gene pool for eons to come, but that's just because they're clumsy, stupid, and misguided, right?

Sure. Except then you read something like the following:

Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The "mistake" (if you can call it that, see below...) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?

This incident was not and could not have been accidental. Read the article to find out why. Whether Baxter's motivation was merely a venal lust for profit, or whether it was part of a larger, darker aim is a determination I'll leave for the reader to make.

This is getting serious. Whether our adversaries are too stupid to be trusted with power and wealth, or simply too evil, is almost immaterial. The Enemy is making their moves, fast and furious; and while the mad caperings of the men behind the curtain are revealing their presence to more people every day it's not clear that matters. Certainly they don't think so, or they wouldn't be getting so blatant about it. They've softened us up for the kill in every conceivable way: our bodies poisoned by toxic food and adulterated water, minds dulled with pharmaceuticals entrained by mass media, communities atomized by economic exploitation at every level. We lie prostrate before them, and like a pack of wild hyenas they're circling in for the kill.

So, do we just stay on our backs and get eaten? Or....