Bovine Growth Hormone, Genetic Engineering and the New World Order
by Mitchel Cohen
Page 5
Media & BGH
In February, 1997, two veteran news reporters for Fox TV in Tampa, Florida, were fired for refusing to water down an investigation reporting that rBGH may promote cancer in humans who drink milk from rBGH-treated cows. It is the link between rBGH and cancer that Monsanto pressed Fox to remove from the story.
Award-winning reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre had been hired by WTVT in Tampa to produce a series on rBGH in Florida milk. After more than a year's work on the rBGH series, and three days before the series was scheduled to air (starting February 24, 1997), Fox TV executives received the first of two letters from lawyers representing Monsanto saying that Monsanto would suffer “enormous damage” if the series ran. Monsanto's second letter warned of “dire consequences” for Fox if the series aired as it stood. Despite the fact that WTVT had been advertising the series aggressively, the station canceled it at the last moment.
According to documents filed in Florida's Circuit Court (13th Circuit), Fox lawyers then tried to water down the series, offering to pay the two reporters if they would leave the station and keep mum about Fox's censorship of their work. The reporters refused Fox's offer, and on April 2, 1998, filed their own lawsuit against WTVT. The Wilson/Akre lawsuit charges that WTVT violated its license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by demanding that the reporters include known falsehoods in their rBGH series. The reporters also charge that WTVT violated Florida's “whistle blower” law, and that Fox ordered them to remove all mention of “cancer,” changing it to “human health effects” -- whatever that may be. [Many of the legal documents in the lawsuit including Monsanto's threatening letters -- have been posted on the world wide web at http://www.foxbghsuit.com. See, “Milk, rBGH, and Cancer,” [MI]Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly #593,[D] April 9, 1998.
http://www.monitor.net/rachel.]
What Can We Do?
There is a growing movement to fight the use of rBGH. One way to hammer the final nails into rBGH's coffin is to force New York City public schools, which buy 750,000 half-pint containers of milk each day, to buy milk only from companies that do not use rBGH-treated cows.
1) Call the NYC Board of Education today: (718) 729-6100. Demand that the Board purchase milk and other dairy products only from companies that sign a contract not to use rBGH milk. (You might add that you want all milk purchases to be “organic” as well.) You can also write to: Mr. Kevin Gill, Office of School Food and Nutrition Services, 44-36 Vernon Blvd., Long Island City, NY 11101.
Boycott School Milk and all rBGH-derived dairy products. In New York City, the Green Party has been regularly leafletting parents coming to pick up their kids at public schools, and they have flooded the Board of Ed bureaucrats with phone calls and letters. The NY Greens/Green Party of New York has already distributed more than 9,000 brochures in Brooklyn schools. Many people have been calling the Board of Education. The same can be done anywhere; it is an excellent way of getting out there and mobilizing a huge grassroots constituency.
That is an effort easily overlooked by many non-profit organizations, who are often so intent on directly communicating with the policy-makers that they lose sight of building the alternative power-base needed to force through changes. People are outraged that their kids are being used as guinea pigs, that there never was any long-range testing, that rBGH milk is unlabeled, and that there's no need for rBGH to begin with; they are beginning to raise a ruckus.
It's important that boycotts not be passive. Parents cannot just say, “I won't let MY kids drink the milk.” For one, rBGH-induced hormones are also at higher levels in ice cream, cheese, and other dairy products. For another, ALL kids are being affected. We have to force a change in policy. One way, which we are now about to implement in New York City, is to encourage high school kids to set up direct action environmental organizations in their schools and then link those schools with each other, take them to candidates' forums, and raise hell. The point is to turn individual concern over what one is putting in their body into "political concern" for what is being produced and how to stop it that is, turning individual concern into a mass movement.
2) Call the Green Party's rBGH toll-free hotline for the latest updates and activities: 1-888-NY4-GREENS. Learn the Facts. Become a Green activist. Help distribute brochures in your school, around your neighborhood and in front of local stores. Invite us to speak at your meetings. Spanish language pamphlets and speakers also available.
3) Support legislation banning rBGH-dairy products. NY City Council Intro #766 would prohibit city agencies from purchasing from companies that use rBGH in milk. Resolution #1605 calls on the Board of Education to purchase only rBGH-free milk. Both have been prevented from coming to a vote by the Democratic Party, under the leadership of Peter Vallone who is now planning to run for Mayor, after having lost the previous election for governor. Democrats and Republicans are united in blocking similar legislation in the State Assembly and Senate.
4) Support NY State Assembly bill A.2668 requiring mandatory labeling of all dairy products derived from rBGH cows, and certification and inspection of all dairy herds. The label should state: “Contains milk from cows treated with genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone.” Demand mandatory labeling of all dairy products derived from rBGH cows. Fight for legislation banning rBGH-dairy products and all genetically-engineered foods.
5) We need to throw the bums out of office. But our fight cannot be limited to the electoral arena or we'll lose. We need to leaflet stores and target them for more militant action if they continue to stock dairy products derived from rBGH cows. If they don't respond, organize picket lines at the stores. Make “No rBGH” part of the powerful unionization campaign of immigrant workers now underway at local markets. (Leaflet the WORKERS on the picket lines, too!)
6) Bring up this issue at every opportunity. Circulate petitions against rBGH at PTA and Community School Board meetings. Get your friends to carry them in school and around the neighborhood. Confront candidates as they run for elected office. (The upcoming Senate campaign in New York provides an excellent opportunity for this type of “issue-raising”.
7) Every college has some connection to pharmaceutical corporations and biotechnological research and development. Organize campaigns on your campus against them, as well as against such facilities as the former Audubon Ballroom, across from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital -- New York's newest and one of its most dangerous centers for genetic experimentation -- and the genetically-based National Violence Initiative Project, which is headquartered at the hospital and University.
Pharmaceutical corporations and biotechnological research and development facilities provide sitting targets, just as ROTC buildings and Department of Defense research and recruitment once did. Every college now has some connection to them. We need to begin a similar campaign against the privatization of our universities and colleges, and especially against their collaboration with pharmaceutical and biotech corporations.
8) Hold contests for the best parody of the “Got Milk?” advertisements. Put up posters and “improve” existing ones. Organize your building, school, workplace and neighborhood.
9) We are now launching this campaign throughout New York City. The Greens are in need of funds, so please send what you can. For more information, additional copies of this brochure, in-depth fact sheets, lists of companies pledging (or refusing to pledge) to be rBGH-free, and public speakers, write to NY State Greens/Green Party: c/o Afrime Derti, 755 Washington Ave. #503, Brooklyn NY 11238, afrime2@aol.com; or to Andy Zimmerman, at turtle@westnet.com.
Remember: In every danger there also resides opportunity, if only we learn to look for it and develop it correctly. The issue of rBGH in milk is so straightforward that it is an ideal place from which to launch a much greater campaign against the genetic engineering of foods, vaccines and medicines, privatization of knowledge through “intellectual property rights,” patenting of synthesized genetic sequences for private profit, the consolidation and concentration of farmland, who controls our food?, mistreatment of animals, the growing domination of corporations and, in general, the system of exploitation that rules our lives.