Trends I'm Watching

Monsanto Infects Our Food Supply with Mutated Seeds

The Obama administration is actively promoting Monsanto’s efforts, just like Clinton and Bush, who also did everything in their power to help Monsanto. It's just another example of why Americans are fed up. The FDA and politicians in both parties are on the take, selling out the health interests of its citizens.

Byron J. Richards at NewsWithViews.com describes how our politicians and the FDA have "steered" our food supply to the highest bidders. If you think Americans need better healthcare now, wait until we see the effects of eating genetically-modified foods for many years.

Link: Byron J. Richards -- Health Scandal - Monsanto’s GMO Perversion of Food.

In the 2010 growing season Monsanto plans to unleash its latest Frankenfood experiment on the American and Canadian public, a new version of genetically mutated corn with eight abnormal gene traits called Genuity SmartStax corn. It is the culmination of an astonishing scandal that has been steadily building over the past decade. During this time Monsanto’s mutated seeds have grown to 90% of the U.S. soy crop and 85% of the corn crop – and wheat is next on their agenda. Their efforts have been marked by corporate bullying and have drawn the attention of the Justice Department who is conducting an antitrust investigation. All the while they have been spending millions on lobbying to fast track their agenda before the American public even realizes what hit them. Monsanto is making an ominous power play to corner the worldwide market on food and seeds. In the process they are adversely altering the very nature of food itself.

Few people would eat Monsanto’s “food” if they understood what it was or knew that they were eating it. President Obama and his family won’t eat it. Neither did the Bush family. Even a Monsanto employee cafeteria rejects it. This is no laughing matter. Your health and the health of your children and grandchildren are at stake. It seems more like a scene from a horror flick than something happening in modern day America. Imagine your digestive tract turned into a Roundup Ready herbicide factory and other warped genetic signals slowly and progressively rotting away your health. Unlike acute food poisoning from infectious E.coli, it is a slow and insidious poisoning.

Why GMO Food is Dangerous

Monsanto’s GMO (genetically modified organism) technology inserts non-food genes, genes from other species, into the DNA of food, altering the very nature of food itself. In some cases these genes make the crops more tolerant to the Roundup Ready herbicide made by Monsanto and in other cases the genes abnormally cause the DNA of food cells to produce toxic proteins that act as pesticides.

Most people are not comfortable with the concept of altering the nature of food in a grand genetic experiment with unknown consequences. The idea of food producing its own internal toxin is equally abhorrent. After all, who wants to eat toxic food? Even fewer trust this technology in the hands of Monsanto, a company with a history of blatant disregard for human health. It was Monsanto that knowingly poisoned the planet with toxic PCBs.

The process of making GMO seeds also poses health risks. Viral promoter genes are used during this production process and become part of the DNA mix, posing a risk for new types of viral disease. An unintended side-effect of this production technology is chronic activation or suppression of normal genes in the modified plants. This alters the actual nutrient structure of food and the function of the proteins within that food – a very serious matter.

Corporate Cronyism - A Corrupt FDA Places the Public in Danger

We now know that FDA scientists originally working on the issue of the safety of GMO food had considerable concerns that included allergies, toxins, adverse nutritional effects, and new diseases. They urged long-term studies but were ignored by FDA management who instead decided that GMO food was “substantially equivalent” to normal food. In 1992 these managers issued the following policy statement in the Federal Register, “The agency is not aware of any information showing that foods derived by these new methods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.” In retrospect, that policy, which stands to this day, was a flat out lie and a treasonous betrayal of the public trust.

Court cases have forced into public view the documents expressing the concerns of the FDA scientists. You can read them all at this link to the BioIntegrity.Org website. In fact, rushing GMO foods to market also represents a serious breach of scientific integrity by the overall research community.

Today, the FDA is a world leader in proteomic technology, the advanced analysis of protein structure and function. Italian researchersusing proteomics have already proven beyond any question that GMO food is so genetically different from normal food that it cannot possibly be considered substantially equivalent. Certainly the FDA could discover this fact for themselves in a matter of hours. Why are FDA scientists in handcuffs and not taking action?

Part of the FDA management team’s culture of corruption is a revolving door with the various companies they are supposed to be regulating, the very definition of corporate cronyism. These shenanigans have had the net effect of the FDA acting primarily as a police force bully representing various powerful lobbies that buy protection and marketing favors, while stomping on the rights of the little guys like organic family farms and consumers. In the case of food, Monsanto wins the gold medal for influence pedaling at the expense of human health.

There Is No Good Reason for Monsanto’s GMOs

If you listen to Monsanto and their business cohorts such as Cargill, they state they are trying to feed the world. In reality, the world could eliminate Monsanto’s mutated food tomorrow and it would be a better place. It could also do without Cargill acting as an unregulated food banker, profiting on the manipulation of food sales at the expense of farmers in a way that is every bit as bad as the worst of Wall Street. There is no need for Monsanto’s GMO mutated seeds. They offer no advantages. It is an industry being propped up by unelected bureaucrats and elected officials on the receiving end of Monsanto’s multi-million dollar lobbying operation.

Michael Taylor is one example of corporate crony influence, there are many others. The USDA is profiting from Monsanto’s seeds that cannot be used the next growing season (the Terminator aspect of the problem). The EPA’s failure to regulate the amounts of Roundup Ready used on food is yet another scandal. It’s all about profits and control – while undermining the world’s farmers and the biodiversity and sustainability of crops.

Contrary to the Monsanto and Cargill propaganda, GMO technology does not increase crop yields, as has been fully documented in the Union of Concerned Scientists report titled Failure to Yield. And GMO crops are very bad for the carbon footprint.

Health Care Costs Shifting

Trend: Employers are transferring health care costs to employees.

John Markman as MSN Money recommends a drug company with products that are not optional. Excerpts below.

Link: The Fed's desperation move - MSN Money.

There has been a widespread shift of health care responsibilities from employers to employees at cost-cutting companies. Yet there are still some drug companies whose products are so necessary that they are battling the trend and profiting handsomely.

One that has caught my eye is Endo Pharmaceuticals (ENDP), which focuses its research and production efforts on pain-management drugs. Where you might skip a visit to a doctor if you have the flu or other minor ailment, chances are you will fill a painkiller prescription for a broken bone even if you have to pay out of pocket.

Endo's portfolio of drugs, which includes Percocet (oxycodone with acetaminophen), generates annual sales in excess of $1.2 billion. The company's top-selling product is the Lidoderm patch, a lidocaine patch with Food and Drug Administration approval to treat shingles that is commonly used off-label for general pain relief. Sales have climbed from $40 million in 2001 to more than $700 million last year. No generic alternative is expected until 2013, which gives the company time to invest in its next generation of pain relievers. Other drugs include Frova, which is approved for use in the treatment of menstrual migraines, and Voltaren Gel, with is a topical anesthetic used to treat joint pain associated with osteoarthritis.

For better or worse, pain relief is a growth industry as the baby boomers age. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 8,000 individuals turn 60 each day. Their health care expenditures typically rise from $2,695 when age 45 to 54, to $3,262 when 55 to 64 and then to $3,899 when 65 and over. Endo has recovered nicely from a swoon in October and is still cheap at around $24 a share. It could probably get to $30 over the next year if it gets any kind of broad-market help at all.

Disclosure: We may own ENDP at any time.

Obama's Plans

Trend: The president elect reveals some specifics about his plans to increase employment by fixing and upgrading infrastructure within the US.

Obama plans to: increase energy efficiency, fix roads and bridges, modernize school buildings, improve the information superhighway, and modernize medical record keeping.

Link: President-elect Barack Obama lays out key parts of Economic Recovery Plan | Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team.

 First, we will launch a massive effort to make public buildings more energy-efficient. Our government now pays the highest energy bill in the world. We need to change that. We need to upgrade our federal buildings by replacing old heating systems and installing efficient light bulbs. That won’t just save you, the American taxpayer, billions of dollars each year. It will put people back to work.

Second, we will create millions of jobs by making the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system in the 1950s. We’ll invest your precious tax dollars in new and smarter ways, and we’ll set a simple rule – use it or lose it. If a state doesn’t act quickly to invest in roads and bridges in their communities, they’ll lose the money.

Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.  We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.

As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.

In addition to connecting our libraries and schools to the internet, we must also ensure that our hospitals are connected to each other through the internet. That is why the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system – and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives. We will make sure that every doctor’s office and hospital in this country is using cutting edge technology and electronic medical records so that we can cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help save billions of dollars each year.

Google and Microsoft to store medical information

Trend: Some major players have recently unveiled initiatives to store medical information online.

On Feb. 28, Google debuted a long-anticipated health Web site, just three days after Microsoft announced the launch of a $3 million fund to fuel development of Web programs for its four-month-old HealthVault recordkeeping service. Some excerpts from a BusinessWeek article are below.

Link: Google's Rx for Health Data

Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have unveiled what on the surface may look like competing efforts to improve how electronic health-care information is stored, shared, and disseminated. But the products would probably be more effective if they worked together.

Both are designed to help keep better track of patients' medical data. As any patient who has switched doctors or visited a specialist knows, health records are frequently stored in paper files that are neither easy to read nor transfer from one physician to the next.

But beyond sharing a larger purpose, the efforts by Google and Microsoft are different—and possibly complementary.

Google Health is an online tool that consumers can use to store personal medical records, as well as search for doctors and health information.

Microsoft's service, on the other hand, is more a platform for helping health-care providers and other professionals move information online in the first place. A care provider could use HealthVault, for example, to build a program that takes data from a blood pressure monitor and share it electronically with physicians. The system could also help users send that information to online databases such as Google's site. "HealthVault is not designed to be a place where you store all your health information," Conn says. "It is a platform and it is going to be successful if and only if lots of applications are built on top of it."

Reducing Emissions

Trend: Reducing emissions will be big business in the next several decades.

Joel Makower at Two Steps Forward describes Princeton scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala who have calculated that a series of bold actions over the next fifty years are needed to reduce climate emissions.

Link: Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: A Stern Warning on Climate (and a Word about Wedges).

Socolow and Pacala argue that stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations will require reducing emissions by 7 billion tons a year by 2054. To make this more understandable, they identified 15 potential "wedges," each of which could handle one billion tons of the total. Thus, it will take seven such "wedges" to accomplish their goal.

The wedges are sobering in their scale and scope. Here are just five examples of things we must do worldwide, each of which, when phased in over the next fifty years, will prevent the release of 25 billion tons of carbon:

Double the fuel economy of 2 billion cars worldwide from 30 mpg to 60 mpg

Cut electricity use in all homes, offices, and stores by 25 percent

Replace 1,400 large coal-fired power plants with gas-fired plants

Increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal

Increase wind power 80-fold to produce hydrogen for cars

Keep in mind that this isn't an either/or proposition. We'd have to do ALL these things -- plus two more -- to keep greenhouse gas levels stable in check below 550 parts per million, double pre-industrial levels.

Medical Breakthroughs

Trend: Medical technology that significantly reduces disease-related deaths and increases life expectancy will revolutionize the practice of medicine.

John Mauldin describes a book, The End of Medicine by Andy Kessler, which predicts huge changes for the practice of medicine as technology is applied to disease prevention. John suggests that pensions based on outdated actuarial tables will be hit hard by extended life spans.

Source: Thoughts from the Frontline by John Mauldin

What happens when you go to the doctor today? He uses a stethoscope to listen to your heart, looks down your throat and ears, and asks you questions. These were all 19th-century technologies, with some minor updates. X-rays? 80 years or more ago.

Medicine today is focused on fixing what ails you. If you have heart problems, let's put in a stent or repair a valve. Lipitor to help control your cholesterol. Chemotherapy to deal with your cancer, if we can't cut it out.

In short, we spend $1.5 trillion just in the US on trying to fix what goes wrong, and precious little on preventing things from going wrong. Health-conscious people try to eat right, exercise, take supplements, have regular check-ups, and avoid things that are bad for us; but if there is a problem, we go to the doctor to get it fixed.

That is going to change, and it is going to change at an even faster pace than did our cellular phone service. It will come one innovation, one small step at a time; but in 10 years, 15 at the outside, we will be more focused on preventing illness than fixing it.

Your front-line doctor is going to be displaced by technology. It is going to be one of the most massive disruptions in history. We all know how bank tellers have been basically replaced by ATMs. There are far fewer bank tellers today, and the ATMs are open 24 hours.

But as a species, bank tellers were relatively few. Not so with medical professionals. They are a huge part of the economy. And many of them are just as endangered as bank tellers. (If you are in the health care business, read on. The news gets better.)

How does all this happen? Early detection, and then "fixing" the problem before it becomes a problem.

First, let's get rid of heart attacks and strokes....It will not be long before they can "see" the plaque building up in your heart or veins. Long before it would be a problem. And running hand in hand with this technology is the work being done to develop drugs and targeted therapies which will remove the plaque.

Right now, scans are expensive. We don't usually get one unless there is a problem. But in the very near future, those scans will be able to give you a very early warning signal about heart problems. And while in the first few years it will only be those people who can afford or whose condition dictates an expensive scan, the cost will come down. Think cellular phones.

Within ten years, a regular part of your check-up will be a full body scan. Yes, I know that full body scans have a bad reputation. And deservedly so at lower resolutions. But that will change as they become much higher resolution, as well as relatively cheap and ubiquitous. Certainly cheaper than letting a problem build up.

But it will not just be hearts and plaque. Soon, a database will start building a real map of what a body should look like. We will know the body far better than Gray's Anatomy, down to the cellular level.

What is it worth to avoid a heat attack or stroke? Not just to the individual, but to the insurance company or Medicare?

Right now, nature is a brutal screen for the expenditure of health dollars. You have to get sick to get someone to spend money. Very little is spent on prevention.

We trade off an ounce of prevention for a pound of cure. But that ounce will not be cheap. At least not at first. However, it will get cheaper by 30% a year. And once cheap enough, it will be better than the alternative, not only for patients but for payers as well.

In less time than it took for cell phones, we will have cheap chips where we test ourselves regularly. Plug and play. Cheap diagnostics on the internet.

My dad's generation made a deal with my children's generation that they would support my generation with Social Security and Medicare. And the baby boomers' part of the deal was that we would die at an average 79 years or so.

We are getting ready to break that deal. ...the implications for society are big, not just in the US but in the entire developed world. We may have seriously underestimated the cost for Social Security. Pension plans which assume boomers will die at 79 are going to get to wake up in 15-20 years and find out they have another 10 years of average lifespan to deal with, and not enough put away, and no one putting any more money into the plans. It will be a very rude awakening for those who count on those pensions.

How will Europe deal with an even greater unfunded government-guaranteed pension problem than they already have? Will the youth of that time be willing to pay for what looks like healthy adults to be retired for 40 years, while their own retirement keeps getting pushed further and further away?

E-Health Systems Can Communicate

Trend: When medical records are stored electronically, the data can be shared by health care providers nationally using current technology.

IBD describes the Connecting for Health project, which created and tested a model for exchanging patient information. Excerpts below.

Link: Investor's Business Daily: Prescription Near For E-Health System?

In November, the Health and Human Services Department awarded $18.6 million in contracts to four groups for development of national health information network prototypes.

The Connecting for Health project was part of one group, which also included Computer Sciences Corp., Microsoft and Sun.

"The power of the Connecting for Health model is it accommodates a variety of technologic solutions," said Dr. Marc Overhage, president of the Indiana Health Information Exchange, on a Feb. 8 conference call.

Participants planned and built a secure network that could be reached through the Internet. For anonymity, they scrambled the data they used — 20 million records for some 500,000 patients. Then they started running tests.

The groups looked at things like how hospital A could find and get a certain patient record from hospital B using only basics such as a name, birth date and ZIP code.

They ran hundreds of thousands of queries via medical facilities that are part of MA-SHARE (the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium), the Indiana Health Information Exchange and Mendocino HRE (Health Records Exchange).

The group focused on trading two common types of health data that often aren't handled well: medication lists and lab results. Shirky says that in Massachusetts roughly 15% of overall health spending is redundant or unnecessary. At times, tests are repeated because a worker can't get access to the original results.

Pollution Prevention an Economic Boon

Trend: Efforts to measure the real costs of pollution are yielding some results that could influence policy-makers.

GreenBiz News reports that preventing air pollution lowers health care costs, and reduces damage to agriculture, ecosystems, and infrastructure such as buildings. Excerpts below.

Link: GreenBiz News | Pollution Prevention an Economic Boon, Says U.N. Report

Countries and cities that adopt air pollution busting measures can make significant economic savings, says the latest GEO Year Book from the United Nations Environment Program.

Economic gains include cuts in premature deaths and lower health care costs, as the toll from pollution-related diseases is brought down.

Other benefits come from reduced damage to agriculture and ecosystems like forests, along with less damage to infrastructure and public buildings from corrosive pollutants.
Energy generation and use is a major source of air pollution. Overall, the economic benefits of tackling air pollution are likely to be six times higher than costs of introducing pollution control measures in factories, power stations and cars, says the Year Book.

The findings come from work by the United States' Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the experiences of Mexico City and Santiago, Chile.

The US EPA for example estimates that the benefits of America's Clean Air Act will be around $690 billion over the period 1990 to 2010.

Nissan trims medical coverage and retirement benefits

Trend: Employees cannot expect employers to cover health care and retirement expenses in the future.

IBD reports a move by Nissan to place more responsibilty for health care and retirement on the workers.

Link: Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news

North American manufacturing plants of the Japanese automaker will stop offering comprehensive medical coverage for retirees. In a bid to cut costs, Nissan (NSANY) also is switching its pension plan from a defined benefit to a contribution plan, similar to a 401(k), for new hires. The health care move affects employees who turned 65 after Jan. 1.

Quick Takes from the Rojo Blog

Quick Takes

Link: RojoBlog

The housing market is slipping and taking 800,000 U.S. jobs with it. Mortgage defaults are up. And Fast Company points to these signs of what the economy will do next year (good news: no recession; bad news: it doesn’t matter). Here’s where bloggers were following the money this week:

More than half of all Americans think Wal-mart is bad for America and that’s a very bad thing explains Cafe Hayek. But that hasn’t stopped consumers from shopping there. The Big Picture analyzes whose online sales are really growing.

Why does GM build cars that cost too much...and suck?  PrestoPundit's readers weigh in. But if you're considering a Prius instead, consider this: It would take 10 years at $5/gallon for gas to pay off the $9,500 premium on its hybrid drive, according to Deep Green Crystals.

Forget CNBC's TV shows—Solitaire Trader parses the business network's ads, which may predict which companies tank next. (Enron used to be a biiig advertiser.) And it's a good thing most Web 2.0 companies don't advertise in Wired yet. Once they do, they’re toast says The Post Money Value.

Bone marrow transplants are $2.5 million in the U.S., but India's docs can do them for just $26,000. Time for medical tourism, blogs Marginal Revolution. Speaking of rackets, here's a visual representation of the leadership of Black Gangster Disciple Nation, a crack-cocaine gang-corporation modeled on material from Freakonomics via Freakonomics Blog, naturally. And are VCs worth the money for startups? A Harvard prof says no on alarm:clock.

Are you wealthy? Political Calculations has a year’s worth of calculators in one spot that answer that question and others including: Is It Worth the Drive? How Much Is That Idea Really Worth? and Should You Keep or Sell Those Stock Options?