coming soon Tribunal Monsanto Oct 2016

Tribunal Monsanto in The Hague –12th -16th of October 2016

For an increasing number of people from around the world, Monsanto today is the symbol of industrial agriculture. This chemical-intensive form of production pollutes the environment, accelerates biodiversity loss, and massively contributes to global warming.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Monsanto, a US-based company, has developed a number of highly toxic products, which have permanently damaged the environment and caused illness or death for thousands of people. These products include:

•  PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl), one of the twelve Persistent Organic  Pollutants (POP) that affect human and animal fertility;
•  2,4,5 T (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid), a dioxin-containing component of the defoliant, Agent Orange, which was used by the US Army during the Vietnam War and continues to cause birth defects and cancer;
•  Lasso, an herbicide that is now banned in Europe;
•  and RoundUp, the most widely used herbicide in the world, and the source of the greatest health and environmental scandal in modern history - this toxic herbicide is used in combination with genetically modified (GM) RoundUp Ready seeds in large-scale monocultures, primarily to produce soybeans, maize and rapeseed for animal feed and biofuels.

Monsanto promotes an agroindustrial model that contributes at least one third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; it is also largely responsible for the depletion of soil and water resources, species extinction and declining biodiversity, and the displacement of millions of small farmers worldwide. This is a model that threatens peoples’ food sovereignty by patenting seeds and privatizing life.

According to its critics, Monsanto is able to ignore the human and environmental damage caused by its products and maintain its devastating activities through a strategy of systemic concealment: by lobbying regulatory agencies and governments, by resorting to lying and corruption, by financing fraudulent scientific studies, by pressuring independent scientists, by manipulating the press and media, etc. The history of Monsanto would thereby constitute a text-book case of impunity, benefiting transnational corporations and their executives, whose activities contribute to climate and biosphere crises and threaten the safety of the planet.

The Monsanto Tribunal, which will be held in The Hague from 12 to 16 October 2016, aims to assess these allegations made against Monsanto, and to evaluate the damages caused by this transnational company. The Tribunal will rely on the “Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights” adopted at the UN in 2011. It will also assess potential criminal liability on the basis of the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 2002, and it will consider whether a reform of international criminal law is warranted to include crimes against the environment, or ecocide, as a prosecutable criminal offense, so that natural persons could incurr criminal liability.
Recognizing ecocide as a crime is the only way to guarantee the right of humans to a healthy environment and the right of nature to be protected.

 

Aware of these planetary stakes, the initiators of the Monsanto Tribunal are appealing to civil society and to all citizens of the world to participate in financing this unique operation throughthe biggest international crowd-funding campaign ever carried out.

 

Defending the safety of the planet, and the conditions of life itself, concerns us all. Only collective action can stop this machine of destruction!

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MSM Fails Again on $MON

It’s no different than Fox, NBC, CNN, or ABC refusing to cover the DARK ACT which would give Monsanto legal immunity and disallow states to demand GMO labeling.

You would think that coverage of something the whole world wants to see – the first step toward the successful downfall of Monsanto –would be a hot news item; a newsworthy tidbit that every paper, radio station, and blog would want to spread across their pages with double bold headlines. But wait. . . just six corporations own ALL of the media in America, so there isn’t much luck there.
That’s why you have to go to sites like Russia Insider or Al Jazeera to find real news outside of certain alternative news channels in the US, and even those are white-washed from Facebook pages, and given secondary ratings on Google pages.

Matthew Phillips, the attorney suing Monsanto in California for false advertising on Roundup bottles, has asked the LA Times, New York Times, Huffington Post, CNN, and Reuters, one of the world’s largest news agencies to report on the lawsuit (Case No: BC 578 942), and most enforced a total media blackout.
When I spoke with Phillips over the phone, he said that he has tried posting the suit in Wikipedia’s Monsanto litigation section, but it keeps ‘disappearing.’ He says that he has also noticed posts on Facebook about this lawsuit get removed.
Phillips points out that as long as Monsanto can keep this lawsuit off of most of America’s radar, then his client base would be relegated to just the citizens of California.

If other attorneys were to follow his template-style lawsuit, which he wrote in English, devoid of extraneous legal-speak to encourage others to also take action against Monsanto, then suddenly the plaintiff count could be closer to several million. That is if you were to tally up all the citizens in the US who have purchased a bottle of Roundup from their local DIY store (Lowe’s, Home Depot or Ace Hardware, for example) in the last four years, not suspecting it could demolish their gut health.

Another possibility, according to Phillips, is that Monsanto could try to bump the case up to federal court in order to try to side-step a likely adverse judgment. But in this case the class action suit would also be open to residents other than those of just California. This is surely an idea that Monsanto doesn’t want seeded in the American psyche.

Phillips is extremely confident he has the goods on Monsanto in this case, and barring a sold out judge:

“This is a slam-dunk lawsuit that exposes Monsanto for LYING about Roundup. Contrary to the label, Roundup does indeed target and kill enzymes found in humans — in our gut bacteria — and this explains America’s chronic indigestion!”

His enthusiasm is palpable, as many well-known scientists and professors emeritus have offered to be key witnesses in this suit when it goes to trial. The attorney says he refuses to ‘settle’ the case and hopes that 49 additional attorneys in 49 states use his case as an example. He joked:

“When we allege that Roundup’s targeted enzyme is found in humans, it’s like alleging that the Golden Gate Bridge is found in California.”

The facts of the case really are that obvious.

Phillips also states that ‘false advertising’ and ‘misleading’ are synonyms in California law, so the fact that Monsanto has stated that there are enzymes in its product that don’t target humans – well that’s beyond just misleading. This obvious misjudgment by Monsanto is a well-known secret among many anti-GM scientists. This enzyme is definitely found in humans.

Here is how ‘misleading’ Monsanto’s statement that, “Round Up targets an enzyme only found in plants and not in humans or animals,” truly is:

EPSP synthase, also known as (3-phosphoshikimate 1-carboxyvinyltransferase) is found in the microbiota that reside in our intestinal tracts, and therefore the enzyme is “found in humans and animals.” It is partly responsible for immunity activation and even helps our gut and our brains communicate with one another.
EPSP synthase is among other beneficial microbes that produce neurometabolites that are either neurotransmitters or modulators of neurotransmission.

“These could act directly on nerve terminals in the gut or via ‘transducer’ cells such as enterochromaffin cells present throughout the intestinal tract and are accessible to microbes and in contact with afferent and efferent nerve terminals. Some of these cells may also signal and therefore modulate immune cell activity.”

Furthermore, although this will not be addressed in Phillip’s lawsuit:

“There is increasing evidence that exposure to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, may be an underlying cause of autism spectrum disorders (see [19]).  Glyphosate, the active ingredient, acts through inhibition of the 5-enolpyruvylshikimic acid-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS synthase) enzyme in the shikimate pathway that catalyses the production of aromatic amino acids. This pathway does not exist in animals, but it does exist in bacteria, including those that live in the gut and are now known to be as much a part of our body as our own cells. A widely accepted dogma is that glyphosate is safe due to the lack of the EPSPS enzyme in our body. This however does not hold water now that the importance of our microbiota to our physiology is clear.”

Though Monsanto is only being sued for false advertising in this case, it is an important precedent to set in order to eventually take down one of the biotech giants that is poisoning the planet. It should send a clear message to Dow, Bayer, Cargill, and Syngenta as well.

Please show the corporate media that we will not be silenced, and pass this information along however you can. If you live in California, consider being a part of the suit yourself. If you are an attorney, Phillips is happy to discuss his suit with you in hopes that you will add your state to the growing list of those standing up to Big Ag.

You can read more about Phillips’ his case, here. The plaintiff also has a go fund me site for this lawsuit.

This article (Major Lawsuit Against Monsanto Completely Blacked out by Media) originally appeared on NaturalSociety.com 

Stock Tips: $MON