Letter to Hillary about Monsanto connections (02.03.08)

[Joanne98]

by Linn Cohen-Cole
Speaking Truth to Power
Sunday, 03 February 2008

Original post: An Open Letter To Hillary Clinton From A Wellesley College Alumna

Submitted by a Truth To Power Subscriber From Yahoo News Groups



Dear Hillary,

By polling logic, I should be your supporter - Democrat, older woman, white, liberal. I was even in a dorm with you in college. I have pulled for you for years. But something this past summer fundamentally changed my responsibility to my children and grandchildren. In the time I have left in my life to protect them and others, I need to speak out.

I saw a News Hour piece on Maharastra, India, about farmers committing suicide. Monsanto, a US agricultural giant, hired Bollywood actors for ads telling illiterate farmers they could get rich (by their standards) from big yields with Monsanto’s Bt (genetically engineered) cotton seeds. The expensive seeds needed expensive fertilizer and pesticides (Monsanto, again) and irrigation. There is no irrigation there. Crops failed. Farmers had larger debt than they’d ever experienced

And farmers couldn’t collect seeds from their own fields to try again (true since time immemorial). Monsanto “patents” their DNA-altered seeds as “intellectual property.” They have a $10 million budget and a staff of 75 devoted solely to prosecuting farmers. http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/01/17./). Since the late 1990s (about when industrial agriculture took hold in India),166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left the land.

Farmers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Indonesia,South America, Central America and here, have protested Monsanto and genetic engineering for years.

What does this have to do with you?

You have connections to Monsanto through the Rose Law Firm where you worked and through Bill who hired Monsanto people for central food-related roles. Your Orwellian-named “Rural Americans for Hillary” was planned with Troutman Sanders, Monsanto’s lobbyists.

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/letter-to-hillary-about-monsanto-connections-020308/

[tekisui]

1. Monsanto, Wal-Mart, NAFTA, Colombia Free-Trade, Iraq War Recission

Data Mining, Strip Mining......She is bad for America.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. All the flack recently brought the "Rural Americans for Hillary" gathering back to my mind too

Thanks for posting this. It may do some good for others to remember this too.

[justinaforjustice]

3. Thank You for this Important Information on The Clintons' Horrifying Connections to Massive Suicides

I am a white, 60 year old feminist who very much wanted to see a woman president elected. But it has become increasing clear that Hillary Clinton is just "another old boy" in a pants-suit who does not represent either feminist or democratic values.

Hillary's hiring of a campaign adviser who made his money fighting unionization and even now representing a country where trade unionists are routinely assassinated with impunity appalled me. Then, it turns out, a second advisor's company is also on Colombia's payroll to gain support for an anti-worker free trade agreement, and even worse, her husband, Bill, has taken huge sums of money to lobby for that country and its coveted free trade agreement.

Hillary is surrounded by, when not literally in bed with, corporate lobbyists and agents of foreign interests. These are all smart, articulate guys. They will no doubt convince her to change her mind on the Colombia free trade agreement, she will come to believe, if she does not already, that exporting American jobs is really good for American workers so more free trade agreements are needed.

But, shipping American jobs overseas almost pales in comparison to the horror of the Clintons' making it possible for Monsanto and similar companies to poison our milk and cattle and potentially decimate the entire world's food supply. This article details how that has occurred and what the Clinton administration did to allow it to happen. I hope you will read it and pass it on.

Thanks to Hillary's old law firm, Monsanto, a Rose firm client, has iron clad patients preventing farmers from re-using their homegrown seeds, forcing them to buy new seeds each year from Monsanto. Monsanto has even designed seeds which will not reproduce seeds, forcing yearly purchases of more from Monsanto.

As a result, over 166,000 Indian farmers, devastated by debts for seeds and required pesticides, committed suicide and their deaths continue at the rate of one every two minutes.

While in office,Bill Clinton put Monsanto and Tyson food executives in critical positions in the FDA and Department of Agriculture to make sure that their corporate interests, and not the interests of consumers, were the guiding policies of those departments. One result is potentially carcinogenic hormones in our milk and meat. Companies which do not put hormones in their milk and meat are prohibited by law from telling consumers that fact to protect the profits of companies that do.

As a result of reading this article, I conclude that, female or not, Hillary Clinton, like John McCain, is downright dangerous to the health and welfare of the majority of Americans. We must work to insure that neither Clinton nor McCain lobbyists are put into power and that Obama, as president, remains true to his commitment to prevent special interests from continuing to buy our politicians and thus continuing to control our government.

[brindis_desala]

4. Thank you for this.

[truedelphi]

5. Long before Hillary "ignored" the voting reform movement

And instead encouraged Carville to chide Kerry into conceding, the Clintons were suck ups to Monsanto.

The Clintons don't mind killing off the democratic processes as long as it might let her win the WH in 2008.

And the Clintons don't mind Monsanto -even though the entire world needs to have healthy crops rather than the GMO garbage that Monsanto ensures will be the only foodstuff that Big Agro provides.