Who grows your food?

Thanks in part to my vote (Shooter abstains from online voting) Monsanto was voted to the top of the 2010 Corporate Hall of Shame. Why? They grow GMO food and now they own the patents to your food.

Monsanto is far-reaching into the very agencies and branches of government that should be protecting our food supply and protecting the farmers that grow our food.

Obama's Monsanto pick: Michael Taylor as Senior Advisor to the FDA on food safety....

Michael Taylor is a lawyer who has spent the last few decades moving through the revolving door between the employ of GMO-seed giant Monsanto and the FDA and USDA. Taylor is widely credited with ushering Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) through the FDA regulatory process and into the milk supply — unlabeled. A Government Accounting Office (GAO) investigated whether Taylor had a conflict of interest and or had engaged in ethical misconduct in the approval of rBGH. The report’s conclusion that there was no wrongdoing conflicted with the 30 pages of evidence that Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described as proof that “the FDA allowed corporate influence to run rampant in its approval” of the drug.

Taylor is also responsible for the FDA’s decision to treat genetically modified organisms as “substantially equivalent” to natural foods and therefore not require any safety studies. The “substantially equivalent” rule allowed the FDA to ignore evidence that genetically engineered foods, including soy, are in fact very different from natural foods and pose specific health risks.

George W. Bush also had a number of former Monsanto execs and lawyers to gift jobs to, among them:

	Prior to being the Supreme Court Judge who put GW Bush in office, Clarence Thomas was Monsanto's lawyer from 1976 to 1979. He refused to recuse himself from "Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, no. 09-475.
	The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (Ann Veneman) was on the Board of Directors of Monsanto's Calgene Corporation.
	The Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) was on the Board of Directors of Monsanto's Searle pharmaceuticals. He reportedly received a $12 million bonus when Searle was sold to Monsanto.
	It's your turn to vote, keep an eye on Monsanto, they're sure to be a candidate again in 2011. Just ask France.