MILLIONS AGAINST MONSANTO

Farming Without Roundup and Herbicide-Drenched GMOs

Current Regeneration International Director Andrew Leu, former President of IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements) tells it like it is:

Crops have been genetically modified (GMOs) to resist herbicides while they kill weeds. An immense body of published science shows the multiple ways these synthetic poisons cause numerous health problems in people and adverse environmental effects.

GMOs have failed as a technology as the constant use of herbicides as the only weeding strategy has caused the development of many species of herbicide-tolerant super weeds. The response has been to genetically modify more crops to be tolerant of multiple toxic herbicides. This has dramatically increased the use of these pesticides with all their adverse health and environmental outcomes.

There is no need to use herbicides in farming. There are multiple cost-effective strategies to manage weeds without them.

Herbicides are pitched as the basis of no-till farming systems where the poison kills the weeds instead of tilling them out. The advocates of these systems state that these herbicide no-till systems are better for the environment than systems that till the soil as they can sequester carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas (GHG), and store it in the ground as soil organic matter (SOM). Studies show that these systems have better SOM levels than industrial tillage farming, which mostly loses SOM, releasing it into the atmosphere as CO2. However, studies also show that certified organic tillage systems have better levels of CO2 drawdown than most herbicide-tolerant GMO no-till systems.

The best regenerative agricultural systems can sequester more significant amounts of CO2 without killing the weeds than any other farming system.

Pasture cropping is an innovative regenerative agriculture system where the crop is planted into a perennial pasture instead of bare soil. There is no need to till the pasture species or kill them with herbicides before planting the cash crop.

Colin Seis in Australia first developed this technology. The principle is based on the sound ecological fact that annual plants grow in perennial systems. The key is to adapt this principle to the appropriate management system for the specific crops and climate.

Another Australian farmer, Neils Olsen, further innovated pasture cropping. He developed equipment that combines cultivation, mulching, aeration, and mixed species seeding into narrow tilled strips in the perennial pasture in one pass. The field is grazed down or mulched before planting to reduce competition with the crop.

Pasture cropping is excellent at increasing SOM. Olsen was paid for sequestering 11 tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year (11,000 lbs. per acre) under the Australian Government’s Carbon Farming Scheme in 2019. He was paid for 13 tons of CO2 equivalente per hectare (13,000 lbs. per acre) in 2020. He was the first farmer to be paid for sequestering soil carbon under the Australian or any other government-regulated system in the world. His figures for sequestering CO2 are significantly greater than any herbicide-tolerant no-till GMO system.

Pasture cropping can be used on permanent pastures and arable cropping lands. Regenerative systems such as this should be the future of agriculture rather than herbicide-tolerant no-till GMO systems.

COVID-19

Rapid Rollout of New COVID Boosters with No Human Trials — “A Tale of Recklessness”

Dr. Meryl Nass warns:

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cooperated to issue Emergency Use Authorizations (EUA) and roll out new, bivalent Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines without any human trials, which is unprecedented.

• There is international coordination regarding bivalent boosters, and a major effort will be undertaken to get them into arms, despite historically low levels of severe COVID-19. Why?

• These vaccines continue to enjoy extraordinary protection from liability, while the recipient has no access to the legal system in the case of injury.

• There is no evidence the new vaccines are safe, while there is limited evidence that they may be more harmful than earlier COVID-19 vaccines. However, in the absence of human testing, there is no way to truly predict their safety. Safety data are being concealed by federal health agencies. Messaging by them is misleading.

• There is no evidence the new bivalent vaccines will be more effective than the older vaccines, and existing evidence suggests that any efficacy they provide will persist no longer than one to several months.

• COVID-19 vaccines appear to increase susceptibility to COVID-19 infections, on average starting six months after inoculation.

• Perpetual boosters briefly stave off the negative efficacy that develops a few months after a COVID-19 vaccination. This may be why frequent boosters are being pushed. But frequent boosters may also weaken overall immunity and may even contribute to rising mortality rates in the U.S. and U.K.

Even ABC News (Sept. 7) is now finally admitting that repeated booster shots may be dangerous: What You Need To Know About ‘Original Antigenic Sin’ With Fall COVID Boosters Around the Corner

STOP TOXIC SLUDGE

PFAS-Contaminated Toxic Sludge Distributed as “Organic Compost” or “Natural Biosolids”

OCA and our allies have campaigned for years against the dangerous use and mislabeling of toxic sewage sludge as “organic compost” or natural “biosolids.” In 1997-98 we successfully pressured the USDA to back off from allowing toxic sewage sludge on certified organic farms. In March, 2010 OCA, joined by local gardeners, donned biohazard suits and dumped toxic sludge on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco, protesting its distribution to schools and inner city gardeners.

Mother Jones covered our protest.

As Mother Jones reported:

“Activists wearing face masks and haz-mat suits dumped a pile of sewage sludge on the steps of San Francisco’s city hall today to protest the city’s practice of marketing the material to home gardeners as ‘organic compost.’ The US Department of Agriculture’s organic standards explicitly prohibit organic produce from being grown on sludge-treated land. ‘The City of San Francisco owes an apology to all of the food consumers in California who have been eating non-organic food grown on sewage sludge,’ said Ronnie Cummins, president of the Organic Consumers Association. He was wearing a haz-mat suit on which he’d written a message to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: ‘Organic gardens aren’t toxic waste dumps.’

“Using sludge as fertilizer is a common practice; more than half of the sewage produced in America ends up being treated and applied to gardens and farmland. The EPA considers sludge to be safe, but many food activists and some of the EPA’s own scientists disagree, pointing out that it can contain trace amounts of almost anything that gets poured down the drain, from heavy metals to endocrine disruptors–and that only a portion of these contaminants are screened for in sludge.”

Now a recent Chicago Tribune story reveals that Chicago and other cities have continued the California tradition of fraudulently calling PFAS-contaminated sewage sludge “natural biosolids” and distributing it, free of charge, to city schools and city gardeners. Their excuse: the EPA hasn’t issued any regulations.

GOVERNMENT POWERS

First 9/11 and Then COVID 19: What Comes Next?

John and Nisha Whitehead report:

“First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security…”

Even David C. Unger from the Editorial Board of the New York Times (quoted by Whitehead) has expressed alarm: “ ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.’”

PLANTING PEACE

Give Ukraine Peace Talks a Chance

Medea Benjamin (Code Pink) and Nicholas Davies report:

“Six months ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. The United States, NATO and the European Union (EU) wrapped themselves in the Ukrainian flag, shelled out billions for arms shipments, and imposed draconian sanctions intended to severely punish Russia for its aggression.

Since then, the people of Ukraine have been paying a price for this war that few of their supporters in the West can possibly imagine. Wars do not follow scripts, and Russia, Ukraine, the United States, NATO and the European Union have all encountered unexpected setbacks.

Western sanctions have had mixed results, inflicting severe economic damage on Europe as well as on Russia, while the invasion and the West’s response to it have combined to trigger a food crisis across the Global South. As winter approaches, the prospect of another six months of war and sanctions threatens to plunge Europe into a serious energy crisis and poorer countries into famine. So it is in the interest of all involved to urgently reassess the possibilities of ending this protracted conflict.

For those who say negotiations are impossible, we have only to look at the talks that took place during the first month after the Russian invasion, when Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to a fifteen-point peace plan in talks mediated by Turkey. Details still had to be worked out, but the framework and the political will were there.

Russia was ready to withdraw from all of Ukraine, except for Crimea and the self-declared republics in Donbas. Ukraine was ready to renounce future membership in NATO and adopt a position of neutrality between Russia and NATO.

The agreed framework provided for political transitions in Crimea and Donbas that both sides would accept and recognize, based on self-determination for the people of those regions. The future security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed by a group of other countries, but Ukraine would not host foreign military bases on its territory…”

Learn more: We Urgently Need To Give Ukraine Peace Talks a Chance

LABOR RIGHTS

Public Support for Unions Highest in 50 Years

Julia Conley writes:

“Amid a continued high-profile push for workers' rights at U.S. companies including Starbucks and Amazon, polling released Tuesday showed that Americans' approval of labor unions is the highest it's been in nearly six decades and has risen substantially since a low point in the 2010s.

Gallup's annual Work and Education Survey, conducted between August 1-23, found that 71% of Americans now approve of labor unions.

Support for workers' rights has steadily risen in recent years as the public has watched a fired Amazon employee lead his former colleagues to a historic union victory in April and Starbucks baristas at more than 200 stores vote to unionize despite facing aggressive—and illegal—retaliation by the coffee chain…”

CENSORSHIP AND TRANSPARENCY

Judge Orders Fauci to Turn Over Documents Telling Social Media Giants to Censor Information About the Lab Leak at Wuhan

As we’ve reported earlier, yours truly, Ronnie Cummins, Dr.Mercola, and RFK Jr. are suing Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts over her illegal threatening of Amazon and U.S. bookstores with legislative penalties unless they acted to depress the sales of what then became our best-selling book, The Truth About COVID-19.

Now a Federal court is reacting to the allegation that the entire Biden Administration leadership team on COVID 19 was apparently actively engaged in suppressing the evidence that the COVID-19 epidemic was likely the result of a reckless U.S. and Chinese funded “gain of function” lab-engineering, a weaponization of viruses that somehow escaped (either deliberately or accidentally) and detonated a global disaster.

Suzanne Burdick of Children’s Health Defense writes: “A federal judge on Tuesday ordered top-ranking Biden administration officials — including Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre — to hand over their communications with five social media giants within 21 days.

The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed earlier this year by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry alleging the Biden administration colluded with Big Tech firms Twitter, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn to censor certain viewpoints under the guise of preventing the circulation of “misinformation” or “disinformation.”

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in July ordered the Biden administration to swiftly produce records requested by the plaintiffs as part of the discovery process.”

Learn more: Judge Gives Fauci 21 Days To Turn Over Emails With Social Media Giants

INTERVIEW

What Could Go Wrong?

Monsanto's first genetically modified organism was a synthetic growth hormone engineered to make cows over-produce milk. It went on to stuff the human diet with vegetable oils, sweeteners and grains that had been engineered to absorb herbicides or produce insecticides. Since merging with Bayer, the company has vowed to go much further, replacing animal products with lab-grown synthetics and restructuring soil biology with synthetic microbes.

Bayer is taking the GMO technologies developed in agriculture, combining them with advances in big data, artificial intelligence, the internet of things and wearable tech, and applying them to the health care sector, as well as food.

Why stop with fake meat when you can use genetically engineered pigs to grow new organs for people who need transplants?

The first wave of GMOs exposed us and our environment to more pesticides than ever, triggering an epidemic of diseases linked to pesticide poisoning. What can we expect from GMO 2.0?

Find out in this conversation with Jeffrey Smith of the Institute for Responsible Technology.

Watch the live Facebook video here.

Or register on Rokfin to watch the video here.

Watch the YouTube video here.

SUPPORT OCA, CRL, & RI

OCA: 25 Years of Exposing the Bitter Truth & Offering Up Organic & Regenerative Solutions

As we’ve written recently “A new 21st Century populist counter-culture and politics, potentially strong enough to overturn business as usual, is starting to emerge. Left and right, liberal and conservative, green, red, and blue, have suddenly lost their meanings. Corrupt and cowardly politicians from both major parties have destroyed their credibility, along with all the major institutions…”

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