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Corporate Power and Our Food
What if people knew?
Profit over animals, the environment and people
UCCS - Winter 2012Mike Callicrate.com
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At a conference in Philadelphia last October [2011], a Wharton professor noted that one of the country's biggest economic problems is a tsunami of misinformation. You can't have a rational debate when facts are so easily supplanted by overreaching statements, broad generalizations, and misconceptions. And if you can't have a rational debate, how does anything important get done? As author William Feather once advised, "Beware of the person who can't be bothered by details." - Motley Fool contributor Morgan Housel
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USDA, Inc. : How Industry Captured the U.S. Department of Agriculture
“Thanks to its political influence, Big Agribusiness has been able to pack USDA with appointees who have a background of working in the industry, lobbying for it, or performing research or other functions on its behalf. These appointees have helped to implement policies that undermine the regulatory mission of USDA in favor of the bottom-line interests of agribusiness.”Released At the Food and Agriculture Conference of The Organization for Competitive Markets, July 23, 2004, Omaha, Nebraska
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“The world now is more complicated and dangerous than the world of 1961. Communism is almost gone, but capitalism in America has evolved into a toxic system of poisoning and devouring the earth for profit while, for the Wall Street oligarchy, it is a method of enrichment.
Delusions of the Corporate StateSunday 17 February 2012 by: Evaggelos Vallianatos, Truthout | Op-Ed
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“The America I discovered during two years of work on Capitol Hill and 25 at the US Environmental Protection Agency was a mean-spirited place caring very little about the natural world or human beings. In fact, the rulers of America thought it was perfectly legitimate to embrace the flag of business, including the mission of agribusiness, even though that entailed the systematic poisoning of all nature and humans.
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"Agribusiness and other large corporations have now resurrected a "modern" version of feudalism. By which I mean they have so much power that they poison democratic institutions. In addition, this global oligarchy is not merely putting the peasant and small family farmer out of business, but it is aiming at total control of the world. It is doing in the open what armies of conquest do in the cover of darkness.
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“Aristotle would say America no longer serves the public good, its government being held hostage by an oligarchy on the verge of becoming a tyranny, by far the worst form of organization or constitution or government.”
Delusions of the Corporate StateSunday 17 February 2012 by: Evaggelos Vallianatos, Truthout | Op-Ed
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"This book explains how food companies use science as a political tool to oppose requirements to keep harmful microbes out of food.....
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“In this book, we will see how the failure of food companies, scientists, and government agencies to recognize the need to address values as well as science in matters of food safety leads to widespread distrust of the food industry and its regulators.
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"We will see how food producers repeatedly deny responsibility for foodborne illness, invoke science to promote self-interest and divert public attention from harm caused by their products, and express outright hostility to federal oversight.”
Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety - Marion Nestle
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“Fast food has hastened the mauling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled a juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad.”
The Dark Side of the All American Meal
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Industrial food is killing us…
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What if people knew…
Beef Products Inc.’s ammonia-treated beef
Feeding pet food, pathogens and fertilizer to people
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Upgrading the round, By Alan Newport
New research in Oklahoma may help upgrade one of the largest segments of the beef carcass: the round.
Meat scientists have been working with a system that injects finely ground fat and lean tissue combined with a brine solution essentially to add marbling to the lean muscles in the round.
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Cook to well done!USDA ignores serious health threatTenderizing technique puts eaters at risk
Surface pathogens are now inside
Most food service/restaurant steaks are blade tenderized“Stampede Steak Co. recalls 739,000 pounds of steaks for e-coli”
- IDPH Press Release -- 7/3/2003
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Confessions of an E.coli Terrorist
HACCP Hoax
“We have the safest food supply in the world.”
HACCP: From inspection to non-inspection
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…but what about our food?
Performance Enhancing Drugs
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Powered by the fast foods of modern commerce…
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What if people knew that in order to communicate in the typical big slaughterhouse you had to speak 110 different languages?
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The Wages of Food FactoriesBy Don D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway
Online publication date: 21 April 2010
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How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration
Fausto Limon looks at his bean plants, knowing they need more fertilizer, but lacking the money to buy it.
January 23, 2012 edition of The Nation.
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What if people knew…
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At the 2011 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Rajiv Shah, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the CEOs of Monsanto and other agribiz corps in support of GE crops. Sound sinister? That’s because it is.
What if people knew that the U.S. looks to Monsanto to feed the world?
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Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning in France
(Reuters) - A French court on Monday declared U.S. biotech giant Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides.By Marion DouetPARIS | Mon Feb 13, 2012
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Genetically engineered maize: New indication of health risks Bt protein toxic to human cells 15 FEB 2012According to the new publication, even extremely low dosages of Roundup (glyphosate formulations) can damage human cells. These findings are in accordance with several other investigations highlighting unexpected health risks associated with glyphosate preparations.
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Mystery Disease In Central America Kills Thousands
In this Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012 photo, relatives mourn for Segundo Zapata Palacios inside his home in Chichigalpa, Nicaragua. Zapata, who worked as a sugar cane cutter for 20 years at the San Antonio sugar plantation, died of chronic kidney disease on Jan. 26 at the age of 49. Huff Post - Thursday, Feb 13, 2012
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The Scary Danger of Meat (Even For Those Who Don't Eat It)
The government has rolled over once again for Big Meat and we may be in more danger from antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
January 30, 2012
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Thanks to Obama, cattlemen lose out
"We always lose. If we win, we still lose, because these big corporations get the final vote. They own this government," said Callicrate, who participated in a price-fixing lawsuit against Tyson and who has led efforts to reform the meatpacker monopoly.
News - November 22, 2011 by Stephanie Paige Ogburn
When four companies control 80 percent of the supply in a marketplace, even the most conservative economists would admit there's a high potential for market manipulation.
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When we lose our markets, we lose our freedom!
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"You should be suing Wal-Mart [instead of IBP], they are the problem. They tell us what they will pay and we have no choice but to pay you less.“- John Tyson, 2002
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"These guys are nothing but old-time gangsters, thugs and thieves. They beat your brains in with their market power and take your money." - Mike Callicrate
http://www.nobull.net/CattlemenLegal/news/2004/1-31-04MikeResponse.htm
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What if people knew about Sodexo?
Sodexo is an international food and facilities management company with 380,000 employees in 80 countries. Around the world, its workers argue that Sodexo’s employment practices violate their workers’human right to their own livelihood.
Student movement to Kick Out Sodexo
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Barry Lynn's Cornered is..."A manifesto for our time."
--Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal
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How to feed the world?
Agribusiness-Industrial Model:Diminishing global resources,inequality, hungry people, declining health
orTraditional Family Farming-Community Model: Proven ecological practices, people feeding themselves, good health, healing the earthPhotograph by Louis Daria, Your Shot
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Changing the way we eat canchange the way food is produced
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Manure - A cow’s greatest gift!
In praise of cow dung - Vandana Shiva told Hillary Clinton that India’s cow dung was worth more than her Wall Street stocks.
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What we support prospers, what we feed grows!
More info at www.MikeCallicrate.com
We cannot separate what we believe from how we act in the marketplace and the broader community, for this is where we make our primary contribution to the pursuit of economic justice.- U.S. Bishops 1986
