The Monsanto Connection

I recently published an article “Grandmother Scores Huge Victory over Monsanto.” The article was a magnet for controversy because I claimed the best way to fight Monsanto and HR 875 was by growing your own food and saving seeds.

Linn Cohen-Cole, the libertarian grandmother at the forefront of the anti-HR 875 campaign called me “dangerous” for fostering complacency by encouraging readers to grow their own food instead of send e-mails and faxes…that no one reads.

The Cornucopia Institute and the Organic Consumers Association has already assured organic advocates that HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act, is only “trying to improve the safety of food products derived from large industrial processing facilities and does not intend to trample organic farmers, backyard gardeners or consumers of fresh local foods.”

Following the April 3 Cornucopia press release, “Family Farmers Fear Being Run over by Food Safety Juggernaut,” organic food activists received a mass e-mail exposing the role of Linn Cole in spreading disinformation about HR 875:

Subject: RETRACTION: URGENT! Monsanto Bill to Ban Organic Food:

“Monsanto, or one of their proxy groups, is actually feeding libertarian groups disinformation on this bill.

The bill doesn’t ban organic. When you make that misinformed, but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist. Monsanto is making a last-ditch effort in this PR war, but they have already really lost it.”

Monsanto lost it because 43 million Americans, including First Lady Michelle Obama, have risked going to jail for growing their own food!

This will help you understand what really happened:

   1. Monsanto is one of the most powerful multi-national corporations in the world. The Global One-World Government New World Order conspiracy, of which Monsanto is a part, is aimed at controlling millions via the food they eat. “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people,” said Henry Kissinger in 1970.

   2. Monsanto uses overt and covert strategies to accomplish their goals. Monsanto is behind both sides of the battle over HR 875. They don’t leave important matters like these to chance.

   3. Monsanto’s tentacles reach into every aspect of our society: government, private industry, the military, law enforcement and, of course, agriculture. Large, small, organic and non-organic farmers—and don’t forget libertarian grass roots activists—are all influenced directly and indirectly by Monsanto. The company that rose to power in the 20th century as a leading chemical giant now focuses on agriculture. In Monsanto’s world, there is no room for the family farmer. The company’s well-known corporate bullying tactics have made this clear. Just ask Percy Schmeiser, the brave Canola farmer who dared to take on Monsanto.

   4. HR 875’s vague wording was intentional.

   5. Family Farmers (organic and non-organic) are under attack, but not by Congresswoman DeLauro, the author of HR 875 whose husband was a political consultant to Monsanto 10 years ago.

   6. The timing of HR 875 coincides with the slow food, Locavore, and urban gardening movements in the United States and, for that matter, any slow food movement anywhere in the world.

   7. The E-coli and salmonella outbreaks related to spinach, tomatoes and peanuts are the work of Monsanto’s agents: Things don’t happen; they’re made to happen.

   8. Healthy Family Farm owner Sharon Palmer was arrested for selling raw goat milk, and the Ohio food co-op raided Gestapo-style was obviously instigated by Monsanto agents in a move designed to intimidate urban gardeners.

It doesn’t matter if libertarian grandmother Linn Cohen-Cole, or Paul, a farmer from Wisconsin, were accidental dupes or knowing agents of Monsanto’s disinformation campaign. It only matters that the disinformation campaign was discovered before it wounded the health freedom movement.

Spreading misinformation, misleading or outright false information is not the way to defeat “food safety” legislation, because when you make that misinformed but well-intentioned call to your Congressman, you are doing exactly what Monsanto wants—coming across as an ill-informed and hysterical extremist.

The very clear and present danger is that our “unelected representatives” will be forced to sit down and actually read HR 875. But when they do, they won’t find a ban on heirloom seeds, farmers markets or backyard gardening, because it isn’t there. Does anyone think Monsanto would actually put in writing that we are going to arrest Michelle Obama for planting a garden?

If they did, our representatives wouldn’t need a flood of frantic messages hollering that HR 875 is the bill that will “kill all farms and eat your babies.” No, believe it or not, our representatives eat and go to farmers markets just like we do.

So who is behind this disinformation campaign?

The Natural Solutions Foundation (NSF) originated the Linn Cole articles.

The Organic Consumers Association and other legitimate heath advocates have been questioning the NSF for several years, and the criticism is universally the same: Why does the NSF keep turning out factually inaccurate, hysterically grim articles such as Linn Cole’s?

The answers start with the NSF founders, husband-wife team Albert Stubblebine and Rima Laibow. Now, when I accuse these people of being disinformation professionals, let me explain. I’m not saying they’re doing sloppy research, and I’m not saying they’re being overzealous. What I am saying is that they are working, for pay, to spread false information and to make their organization look like a legitimate activist group.

My conclusion is Stubblebine and Laibow are using the Natural Solutions Foundation—and Linn Cole—to undermine the health freedom community by spreading disinformation about HR 875.

Stubblebine is a retired U.S. Army major general who designed AEGIS, “a major Homeland Security private initiative.” Given this background and his ties to the U.S. intelligence community, eyebrows were raised in the health freedom community in early 2005 when, along with Laibow, Stubblebine launched the NSF website and began to promote his wife as an expert on Codex Alimentarius, the commission working to adopt strict new guidelines for vitamin and mineral supplements.

Dr. Rath, founder of the 4.dr-rath-foundation, a legitimate health advocacy group, and the author of A Modern Major General Exposed? writes: “It quickly became apparent to experienced health freedom observers that Stubblebine either hadn’t done his homework properly, or that he and Laibow were intentionally spreading inaccurate and misleading material about Codex and other related dietary supplement issues via their website and press releases.

Moreover, despite repeated concerns being expressed by more experienced health freedom observers, Stubblebine and Laibow continued to disseminate this material, and pointedly ignored requests to remove it from their website.”

In my “Scared to CodeX Death” article, I refer to Dr. Rima Laibow when I write: “And although the effects of Codex are devastating and will result in humans dying from starvation and preventable diseases from under-nutrition, any claims that WHO or FAO have released epidemiological projections are untrue.”

Dr. Rima Laibow, to the consternation of those fighting Codex, is the source of the untrue claims about the “epidemiological projections” in her YouTube video “Codex Alimentarious & Nutricide.”

The NSF pair want to discredit HR 875, because when the cleverly worded HR 875 finally goes to committee, Monsanto will unleash a massive PR campaign aimed at, guess who? Linn Cohen-Cole and the other lefties who, according to Monsanto, are spreading false and misleading information about an innocent food safety bill.

Later, the headlines such as “HR 875 doesn’t criminalize small agriculture” will warn the population about health freedom activists who, by spreading misinformation, are threatening our food safety and free speech. Then, HR 875 and the real threat, HR 859, are passed without fanfare.

End of story.

And when the son of HR 875 is born, the one that really makes it illegal to grow your own food and have a garden, activists will gear up for another war, but it will be too late.

The battle cry from Monsanto will be heard loud and clear:

“Remember HR 875! Don’t listen to these reactionaries. They will do anything to cast Monsanto as the Agent Orange-eyed monster. Vote here.”

And the epitaph will be written: “The Grandmother Who Cried Wolf”

So if you want to fight Monsanto, take up your hoes and join the 43 million urban gardeners.

You see, what Monsanto is really afraid of is that we are starting to cooperate with each other and grow our own food. It’s called the Power of Community.

Robert Singer is a retired information technology professional and an environmental activist living in southern California. He can be reached at: rds2301@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert, or visit Robert's website.

3 comments on this article so far ...

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  1. tal said on May 2nd, 2009 at 12:06pm #

    Thank you Robert! I have been trying to expose Cohen-Cole’s disinformation since it first came to my attention but too many people have already been gripped by their fear and seem disinclined to read the bill for themselves. The fact that Cohen-Cole’s articles were/are posted and linked across the internet makes it even more difficult to refute her.

  2. Mulga Mumblebrain said on May 2nd, 2009 at 4:08pm #

    Those who have read ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats’, will be acquainted with the euphoniously named Mr Stubblebine. Yet more evidence of the unbelievable malignancy and the steadily steepening flight-path to destruction of the widely disseminated cancer known as market capitalism. I’m a seasoned cynic, and I thought organic agriculture would simply be marginalised and demonised, not banned outright, but nowadays no level of fascistic interference in the interests of the parasite class, who clearly have gone stark, raving mad, seems beyond possibility. The author is correct-only by actively fighting back, peacefully, by planting and growing our own, and boycotting anything to do with the psychopathic, anti-life system, do we have any chance. But here in Australia, and I’ll bet everywhere else, if not already, surely inevitably, boycotts against corporations for their evil actions, have been banned. So much for the ‘Free World’ surely the most effectively emetic obscenity of the age.

  3. RiHo08 said on May 3rd, 2009 at 7:58pm #

    Hmmm. If I plant my tomato garden again this year, I will be in violation of Federal Law. This article certainly flows from a paranoid mind set with a cornucopia of conspiratorial “truths.” I do hope the author has a green thumb as the kind of green he envisions in Monsanto’s or any other agribusiness behaviors is based in his own mind, where, I might add, these ideas originated and belong.
    Evil doers do exist, so do people with dishoveled minds. They frequently talk to themselves.