Bush's FDA starts its own country

Apparently, the Food and Drug Administration under Bush thinks it can start its own fake country. Newt Gingrich did it by claiming he had a "mandate" to exercise more power than President Clinton, so why not?

The FDA is about to circumvent Congress by approving meat and milk from cloned animals. Last month Congress passed appropriations legislation that said this approval should be delayed until more studies can be made. The Senate version of the farm bill would completely block FDA approval of clonal frankenfoods. But the FDA wanted no hold-ups in its attempts to serve large agribusiness corporations by approving clonal milk and meat.

This is the latest battle in the FDA's war on healthy food that was discussed in The Last Word of 12/31/06. This piece followed years of genetic tampering with food that had already contributed to serious health woes in consumers. Bush's FDA had just approved clonal foods then, so it's unclear why it's approving it again now. The public opposed this plan, but the FDA seemed undeterred. (It's stacked with Bush's arrogant cronies, so it's not exactly known for caring about public opinion.)

Several other countries have released reports calling clonal vittles safe for human consumption. You know what I think about this? I don't believe it. How ya like that? The reports were backed by commercial cloners like Cyagra and ViaGen, to name a few. It reminds me of when Big Tobacco claimed cigarettes were safe. Other genetically engineered foods have already been proven dangerous to consumers, so why would cloning be any safer?

Cloning is bad for animal welfare too - notwithstanding the media's cover-up of Dolly the Sheep's early death and of the FDA's own findings that cloned animals are more likely to have birth defects.

While the FDA approves these new frankenfoods, it's refusing to require them to be labeled. So how are consumers going to know what they're getting?

America deserves a government worthy of its name. It needs one that'll act in the people's interests - and not in the interests of the frankenfoods industry, which, as this drawing shows, is only concerned with its nonexistent "right" to have the government protect its profits:


(Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/04/AR2008010403685.html)