Open Letter to America

An Open Letter to America:

I am very angry at President Obama and his deputies for bowing down and paying fealty to Monsanto. Please indulge me just a bit and allow me to tell you a little of why I say this.

We do not need genetically modified alfalfa, 93% of it is grown without herbicides anyway, so we really don’t need to buy millions of pounds of glyphosate to spray onto our soils in order to produce GM-alfalfa. Glyphosate kills the micro-biology in the soil. And without living soil we cannot produce living food. This same glyphosate doesn’t kill 100% of the weeds, a few survive, and their seeds select for resistance to or immunity to glyphosate and so we then have what is known as Super-Weeds, which in turn needs a stronger dose of chemicals. Thus the fight is enjoined, and so please remember this truth, “Mother Nature always bats last.”

What you have here is not farm policy, it is money policy. Monsanto has a patent on life itself, something that I find egregiously wrong politically, ethically and morally in itself.

It is now entirely possible that Monsanto could own all of the seeds needed to produce all of the major food crops all over the world in just a generation or two, since we now have an aspiring global economy and a quasi global governance that tries to control global trade. It is also conceivable under the document, long proposed by that International Body, known as Codex Alimentarius, that I as an American citizen-farmer would have to respond to an international body of arbiters over a dispute with my American farm products, completely bypassing my constitutional right to due process. And a common farmer in India or China or Mexico will have to borrow money to pay Monsanto for his seeds, or he or she will die and his family with him or her.

Our very own elected members of the U.S. House of Representatives are “…worried that our products will be rejected by the EU and Asia if we brand them as Genetically Modified.” - paraphrased from numerous public accounts. The name of the game is unfettered greed for both money and power, international.

Now imagine thirty years down the road, all of you who may have drinked of Monsanto’s cool-aid pseudo-science publications which absolutely assure you that if we, all of America, do not buy their Genetically Modified seeds, and then the Chemicals needed to allow them to grow, then we could positively not produce enough food to feed nine or ten billion people. I am surprised that more intelligent people have not questioned that assumption more closely. I am ready to challenge this as propaganda at best and a blatant lie at worst.

Alexis de Touqville deduced that democracy carries the seed of its own destruction. An example of this at work is; Politicians meet the ‘Citizens United’ decision of our tarnished U.S. Supreme Court, won against a very weak foe, in the Federal Election Commission. Thanks to this court decision, Monsanto, who now has first amendment rights as an “individual” of ‘free speech’, and they are doing the speaking with their new Money – which this court has equated with talking or writing in the public square. Instead, Monsanto gives our Senators and Representatives and President and many others the monies that they have taken from you and me, to speak for them. The politicians who are speaking now understand Monsanto’s goals and approve of their practices. Now the “freedom of speech” – written by corporate lobbyists and delivered by your elected official - is in making of laws and rules and regulations that promote Monsanto’s best interests. The rest of the populace has to live with the results – farmers, producers, consumers, all of us – with whatever foods are left, grown in dead soils that are mere placeholders for the chemically grown plants. Our United States government has been corrupted by this blatant in-our-face corporatocracy.

Living soil has an energy that is an integral and essential part of the cycle producing grasses that grow with energy from the Sun and rains. All life is grass. Grass in living soil reaches down deep into the Earth and draws to itself micro-nutrients that we try desperately to mimic with pills and chemicals – can’t be done – Mother Nature is at bat.

Some of the people’s most trusted warriors at the forefront of this battle, Whole Foods Market, Stonyfield Dairies and Organic Valley, fought until they were battered and then with last breath wrested a compromise from the USDA and Secretary Vilsak, to “Co-Exist.” That is to grant Monsanto their right to plant Genetically Modified Alfalfa, but with some restrictions that would allow the rest of us some assurance that we could grow the kind of food crops that didn’t include Monsanto’s seeds or chemicals. Hubris, meet greed; that was not enough for an emboldened Monsanto.

They not only wanted their rights, they demanded and got mine too. I am calling on every man, woman and child in America to rise up and demand a stop to this injustice foisted upon us by an ever increasingly corrupt federal government – tainted beyond democracy by corporatocracy.

My deepest desire is that this letter go ‘viral’ and that it is read by millions of people, who like the brave peoples in other countries who are in revolt against unfair governance, that we too revolt against this Corporate-Political hegemon, and demand, by whatever peaceful means necessary our Constitutional right to grow our own food with our own seeds in healthy soil.

Will Rogers said that, “God must have loved the common man, he made so many of them.”

God bless the American commonweal, your family and mine,
Jerry Cunningham
Farmer