All Hail to Monsanto
Wisconsin dairy farmer and poet Mike O’Connell, a Dartmouth College and University of Wisc. graduate, saw Monsanto upclose and personal in the early 1990s when he, like thousands of other farmers, witnessed how Monsanto gained FDA approval for bovine growth hormone despite their many objections. O’Connell, who died of leukemia in 2011, wrote a poem about the sordid Monsanto episode in his 1995 collection of poems: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It.”
ALL HAIL to MONSANTO
— by Mike O’Connell
(Arranged by the Univ. of Wisc. Extension Choir)
The deep pockets of the chemical companies allowed them to buy influence for approval of Bovine Growth Hormone injections in State Legislatures and at the Food & Drug Administration. More discouraging was the way they were able to silence any dissent from within Land Grant Universities, institutions founded to preserve, protect, and defend family farms.
BGH had no redeeming social or economic value for farmers, cows, or consumers. But the prospect of a $26 million Biotech Center on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus was enough to guarantee undivided support from career-conscious faculty and extension agents.
Mammon will not be deniedScience must not taste defeat.Principle must step aside —Stand back and let the Big Dog eat.Do not rile the Juggernaut,Kneel and worship at his feet.Who can know what God hath wrought?Stand back and let the Big Dog eat.Ours is not to reason why,Let us make our meek retreat,We must submit or we must die –Stand back and let the Big Dog eat. *****The Biotech Bully from St. Louis
The bully from St. Louis has pushed small farmers around and manipulated science long enough. We’re as tired as you are of Monsanto fooling and bullying real farmers, buying science, government officials and industry influence. We’re tired of Monsanto and other Biotech companies’ spending millions of dollars to confuse the real issues of food safety in order to trick citizens into voting against their own best interests. Fully 80 percent of Americans want to know what they’re eating, while Monsanto spends and obfuscates to prevent us from finding out. The long-term cost of not finding out, of blindly eating GMOs, is far greater than any short-term cost increase(s), even if there were a grain of truth in Monsanto’s strawman arguments about food costs and labeling. The truth does not favor the pig-headed Bio monster. The truth cannot help Monsanto. The only way Monsanto can win, can continue to make outrageous profits with its failing farming methods and toxic products is to hide the truth, to continue fooling the public.
