Get out of our genes:
biotech in San Diego

Protesters march near the San Diego Convention Center, where a Biotech Conference was held on Sunday, June 24, 2001.

Compiled by Sean Marquis

San Diego, California, June 25— A day of reckoning has come for biotechnology. As anti-biotech protesters confronted police to make their views known in the streets outside the San Diego Convention Center, inside Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), welcomed some 12,000 delegates to the annual meeting.

BIO represents more than 950 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations in all 50 U.S. states and 33 other countries. BIO members are involved in the research and development of health care, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products.

Despite police tactics, protesters were determined to confront what they see as a corporate agenda to control “our bodies, our futures, our food.”

“The whole downtown of San Diego has been militarized,” said Han Shan, spokesman for the Ruckus Society, a group that trains protesters in nonviolent demonstrations. “There are a lot of people out here who feel we’re being criminalized for simply expressing concern with biotechnology.”

Police presence was strong, but largely unnecessary, with only eight arrests on Sunday. Hundreds of colorfully dressed demonstrators marched and danced with signs, puppets and songs used to call attention to issues such as biopiracy and genetically modified food. The demonstrators called it “a celebration of life.”

Feldbaum and the biotechnologists he represents claim their work also is a celebration of life, as they develop techniques to do things such as transfer cells or organs from one species to another to save human lives.

BIO is against human cloning for reproduction, said Feldbaum, but not against the genetic modification of stem cells for therapeutic purposes. He made it clear that the organization will lobby in Washington to win the support of lawmakers for its views.

Feldbaum acknowledged, people are not entirely grateful. “Many are suspicious. Some are even angry,” he said.

The BIO convention has been accompanied by protests for several years. Last year in Boston, 2,000 protesters spent an afternoon attacking biotechnology with speeches, marches and songs.

The movement is backed by a loose coalition of groups with varying political positions. Some object most strongly to genetically engineered food, others to the patenting of genetic information, and still others to the global spread of capitalism.

Adam Hurtler, a Connecticut college student and a spokesman for the campaign said, “The biotech industry is seizing control over our bodies, our futures, our food. . . . We have enough food. We have enough medicine. The real roots of the global health crisis are inequality and injustice, and that’s what the biotech industry is perpetuating.”

Carl Feldbaum, president of BIO, acknowledged that biotechnology advances pose real issues worth debating — he named access to drugs and the fear of genetic discrimination as being among them — but said the technology offers promise for solving some of mankind’s oldest problems, including disease and hunger. “Some of the protest groups know absolutely nothing about biotechnology,” he said.

On the transgenic food issue, biotechnology critics such as those in the Organic Consumers Association say that with little or no legal restraints, labeling requirements, or scientific protocol, biotechnologists are creating hundreds of new genetically engineered “Frankenfoods,” oblivious to human and environmental hazards, or negative socioeconomic impacts on the world’s farmers and rural villagers.

Protesters pointed to studies showing that genetically engineered foods can cause unexpected allergic reactions, compromise immune systems, and irritate the digestive tract. Industry supporters talked about golden rice, so-called not only for its yellow hue but because it is genetically infused with Vitamin A in the hope that developing nations will take to it to stave off malnutrition.

Critics view golden rice and other genetically modified foods as potential health hazards, and argue not enough research has been done to determine whether they are really safe. “The biotech industry is conducting a real time experiment with our biosphere,” said 26-year-old Shannon Service of Boulder, Colo., who was dressed as a Monarch butterfly. “They don’t know the results, they can’t possibly know the results.”

Proponents such as the Grocery Manufacturers of America say genetically altered crops reduce the amount of water and pesticides needed to grow the nation’s food.

The demonstrators call their protest “biodevastation,” and say that biotechnology will not ensure food security, that distribution of food is the problem. They object to genetically altered fish, tomatoes, wheat, canola, corn and cotton because these foods are not natural and may cause health and environmental problems yet unidentified.

They insist that genetically altered foods should be labeled in the United States, as they now must be in a growing number of other nations.

Sources: Associated Press, Environment News Service, Washington Post

Firm’s Iraq deals greater than Cheney has said

By Colum Lynch

United Nations, June 23 — During last year’s presidential campaign, Richard B. Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a “firm policy” against trading with Iraq.

“Iraq’s different,” he said.

According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company.

Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq. One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them.

Mary Matalin, Cheney’s counselor, said that if he “was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, ‘No.’”

“In a joint venture, he would not have reviewed all their existing contracts,” Matalin said. “The nature of those joint ventures was that they had a separate governing structure, so he had no control over them.”

The trade was perfectly legal. Indeed, it is a case study of how US firms routinely use foreign subsidiaries and joint ventures to avoid the opprobrium of doing business with Baghdad, which does not violate US law as long as it occurs within the “oil-for-food” program run by the United Nations.

Halliburton’s trade with Iraq was first reported by The Washington Post in February 2000. But UN records recently obtained by The Post show that the dealings were more extensive than originally reported and than Vice President Cheney has acknowledged.

As secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein’s government. After Cheney was named in 1995 to head Halliburton, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.

But in 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton’s acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., which exported equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large US equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.

The subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, UN records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts — later blocked by the United States — to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that US-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War.

Former executives at the subsidiaries said they had never heard objections — from Cheney or any other Halliburton official —to trading with Baghdad.

“Halliburton and Ingersoll-Rand, as far as I know, had no official policy about that, other than we would be in compliance with applicable US and international laws,” said Cleive Dumas, who oversaw Ingersoll Dresser Pump’s business in the Middle East, including Iraq.

Source: Washington Post

CIA risks new embarrassments from Montesinos

Opponents of Vladimiro Montesinos show a poster of him behind bars as they protest in front the National Police air base in Lima, on Monday, June 25, 2001.

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, June 25 (IPS)— While US officials hope Washington’s role in the tracking down and arrest of Vladimiro Montesinos will help its image among Peruvians, the CIA must be concerned about what the fugitive spy-master might say about his ties to the agency.

Montesinos, who was arrested Saturday in a police raid on a hideout in a Caracas slum, has long bragged about his close ties to the CIA, which began as far back as the 1970s and ended only last year with the collapse of the government of President Alberto Fujimori.

During Fujimori’s reign, Montesinos acted as the chief Andean partner of the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the US war against drugs. They, in turn, appear to have turned a blind eye to corrupt dealings through which he built a personal empire of hundreds of millions of dollars from arms trafficking, death squads, blackmail, and protection rackets.

“Will he reveal information that will shed more light on his relationship with the US government and especially with the CIA?” asked Coletta Youngers, a Peru expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights group. “There’s a great deal we don’t know about that he has the power to tell us.”

“The CIA has a lot to lose in an open prosecution of Vladimiro Montesinos,’’ said Peter Kornbluh, an intelligence expert at the non-governmental National Security Archive (NSA), which recently obtained several hitherto secret government documents about the former spy chief. “He may want to divert attention for his own crimes by saying the US knew about and approved about what he was doing.’’

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has often been at loggerheads with the CIA, especially in Latin America, played a key role in tracking down Montesinos, according to officials both here and in Peru, although its headquarters refused comment on the arrest.

The FBI, which launched its own criminal investigation of gun- running by Montesinos earlier this year, was given a tip about Montesinos’ whereabouts in Venezuela by an associate in Miami whom it arrested last week, enabling Peruvian and Venezuelan security forces to close in on him over the next several days, according to Peruvian special prosecutor Jose Carlos Ugaz. The State Department confirmed this account Monday.

“I think the fact that the FBI played an important role in this should help considerably in rehabilitating the US image in Peru,’’ said Cynthia McClintock, a Peru specialist at George Washington University here. “The Peruvians had become quite skeptical of US officials who kept saying ‘we’re doing what we can,’ and many Peruvians thought the CIA was trying to hide him.’’

Indeed, the US embassy played a leading role in efforts to obtain asylum for Montesinos in Panama at the peak of the political crisis sparked last September by the television broadcast of a video, apparently made at Montesinos’s behest, showing him bribing a congressman to vote for a constitutional amendment that would enable Fujimori to run for a third presidential term.

Peruvian and US human rights groups were infuriated by Washington’s intervention, arguing that the administration of President Bill Clinton was trying to shield Montesinos from investigation and possible prosecution and that his own history of abuses as the head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service (SIN) disqualified him for asylum status.

The State Department said it facilitated Montesinos’s departure to prevent a coup by military officers loyal to him.

After initially accepting him, Panama moved to cancel his visa, and he returned very briefly to Peru in late October, only to disappear. During the following months, it was reported that he had undergone plastic surgery in Venezuela to alter his appearance.

While activists here welcomed the FBI’s role in his arrest, they also stressed that Washington’s long-standing ties to Montesinos should not be forgotten. “It’s a little disingenuous for Washington to claim credit on this,’’ noted Youngers. “The US led the whole effort to get him political asylum. The important question is, what have other agencies in the US government done to help out?’’

Montesinos first came to the CIA’s attention as an army captain during the rule of the leftist military government led by Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado. He was cashiered from the army after being convicted of selling secrets to the US agency.

During the 1980s, Montesinos practiced law with a specialty in defending alleged drug traffickers. He represented Fujimori in a tax case in 1990, the same year that the relatively unknown academic was elected to the presidency.

Montesinos became Fujimori’s right-hand man, setting up SIN, masterminding his 1992 “self-coup,’’ which dissolved Congress, and establishing his authority over the military. At the same time, according to published accounts, he re-activated his CIA connections and extended them to the DEA and Pentagon, as well.

At that time, Washington’s main concerns in Peru were the growing power of Sendero Luminoso rebels and cocaine production and trafficking. While some in the State Department and the National Security Council objected to the new government’s human rights record, its ruthlessness against opponents, and manipulation of the judiciary, they found themselves outgunned by Montesinos’s defenders at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DEA who were pleased with his performance.

That balance of power within the Clinton administration remained unchanged throughout the 1990s, although support for Fujimori in several agencies began to decline sharply as he and Montesinos began to prepare a third term. When, in the summer of 2000, evidence surfaced that Montesinos was running guns to Colombia’s main insurgent army, backing for him here completely collapsed.

Now, a major concern here is the possible existence of videotapes of meetings Montesinos may have had with CIA and other US government officials similar to the scores of videos found in Montesinos’s offices that have discredited dozens of Peruvian politicians, judges, and military officers since he fled the country.

“People believe he has a lot more videos under his control,’’ said Youngers, who added that his mania for recording his meetings probably extended to foreign officials as well as Peruvians.

Montesinos is hardly the first Latin American intelligence director with close ties to the CIA. Last September, the NSA’s Kornbluh published documents showing that General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, Chile’s former secret police chief and the first chief of Operation Condor, a network of all southern cone military intelligence agencies, was a paid CIA informant in the mid-1970s when Condor was used to assassinate leading dissidents abroad, including former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier in Washington.

In the investigation that followed, the FBI attaché in Buenos Aires was the first to report evidence to Washington that Sepulveda and Condor were behind the assassination, while the CIA, which knew about Condor even before the assassination, dragged its feet on providing follow-up information for the investigation, according to Kornbluh.

Millions worldwide march to celebrate gay pride

Paradegoers in costume make thier way down Peachtree
Street in Atlanta's Gay Pride Parade, June 24, 2001.

Compiled by Brendan Conley

June 27— Millions of gays and lesbians marched around the world in gay pride celebrations last weekend. The festivals combined fun and politics, as parades, music, and flamboyant costumes mixed with demands for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

“This is a great opportunity to raise the visibility of the gay community,” said San Francisco city supervisor Mark Leno, who is openly gay and served as one of the parade’s five marshals. San Francisco’s gay pride parade, the world’s largest, drew an estimated 1 million people this year, the 31st annual celebration for the city. The parade was led by a lesbian motorcade, which included topless riders waving rainbow flags. The annual festival is California’s largest public event. The city’s large gay and lesbian population has made it a leader in gay rights. Last month the city approved sex-change benefits for city employees.

The gay pride event in New York featured three dozen gay couples celebrating their same-sex partnerships in a commitment ceremony. The couples were blessed by ministers and a rabbi at the entrance to Central Park just before the Heritage of Pride parade. New York is considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. In 1969, patrons of Stonewall, a gay bar in Greenwich Village, fought back against a police raid. A parade commemorating the event the next year was copied by other cities in subsequent years.

The New York marriage ceremonies were not legally binding, but served as a rallying point for activists who would like to see same-sex couples accorded the same legal rights as heterosexual couples.

Vermont is the only state that offers gay couples the option of civil unions, which give them the same rights as married couples.

Paris and Berlin celebrated gay pride on Saturday with rollicking parades that drew revelers who held hands, waved rainbow banners and danced to techno beats. The cities’ mayors, both gay, were at the center of the festivities.

Bertrand Delanoe — the first Paris mayor to participate in his city’s parade — held a banner reading “All together against discrimination,” as he led a parade of tens of thousands in the French capital. Police said there were 250,000 demonstrators and the same number of spectators.

In Berlin, the brightly striped rainbow flag symbolizing the gay rights movement flew over city hall for the first time, as hundreds of thousands turned out to watch or participate in the parade.

In 1999, France passed a law giving unmarried couples - including gays - some of the same rights as married couples, including the right to file joint tax forms. But France’s efforts are considered a step behind several of its neighbors’ attempts to promote gay rights.

On Friday, the Belgian government approved a bill to fully legalize same-sex weddings, a measure that, if approved by parliament, would make the country the second in the world to recognize gay marriages, after the Netherlands.

An estimated 180,000 people marched to booming disco beats and the flutter of rainbow flags through Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sunday in Latin America’s biggest gay pride parade.

Eighteen floats, with music, go-go dancers and drag queens, marched to the city center for a colorful stage show on a square that is home to many gay bars.

On Gay Pride Day in Israel’s most cosmopolitan city, dozens of black-clad Israeli and Palestinian gays linked arms and marched Friday to protest Israel’s continued occupation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Whistling and chanting under the banner, “There is no pride in the oppression of others,” the group of about 150 lesbians and homosexuals was in stark contrast to bare-chested cupids and fuchsia-haired drag queens featured in a larger parade.

A 34-year-old Palestinian lawyer from the West Bank town of Ramallah said Palestinian and Israeli homosexuals found it easier than their straight counterparts to find common ground.

Gays and lesbians from Asheville and from across the American South flocked to Atlanta this weekend for the South’s largest gay pride event. Fifteen candidates for public office mixed in with AIDS service organizations and party floats from gay bars in the Sunday parade through the Midtown district. On Saturday, tens of thousands packed Piedmont Park, where more than 50 musicians and performers entertained the crowd from two stages. The event is a celebration with a political message.

“I think, surprisingly, the city of Atlanta seems to be more welcoming to the gay and lesbian community,” said Donna Narducci, executive director of Atlanta Pride Inc. The city offers health benefits to partners of gay and lesbian employees, as do several major corporations headquartered here, including Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines.

Friday, there was also a somber reminder of the devastation AIDS has wrought. At a 7:30 candlelight vigil in John Howell Park in Virginia-Highland, speakers talked about the struggle against the disease.

“The real focus of the vigil is the contributions that lesbians and gay men have had in the fight against AIDS,” said Jeff Graham, executive director of the AIDS Survival Project in Atlanta. Graham said federal data show that at least 10,000 people in metro Atlanta have HIV or AIDS.

In Chicago, a crowd of about 300,000 marched in that city’s gay pride event. Protesters took the opportunity to confront Cook County States Attorney Dick Devine, accused of failing to prosecute police officers who commit hate crimes.

Gay pride events take place in more than 200 cities each year, according to Interpride, an organization that coordinates the events. Many take place on the same weekend in June.

In North Carolina, an OutCharlotte cultural event is planned for October 3-7 in Charlotte, and the North Carolina PrideFest is planned for September 29 in Durham.

Sources: Associated Press, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Industrial Workers of the World News Service, Interpride (www.interpride.org), NC Pride (www.ncpride.org).

Jesse Jackson calls Vieques bombings acts of colonialism

By Ian James

Vieques, Puerto Rico, June 23— Calling the US Navy’s bombing of its Vieques firing range the “arrogant” act of a colonizer, the Rev. Jesse Jackson denounced the bombings Saturday and said the treatment of detained protesters is an effort to break their spirit.

Jackson said Saturday that he was lobbying Attorney General John Ashcroft for a meeting to air complaints that the US government is trying to intimidate detainees, including his wife, Jacqueline, with excessive jail terms, fines and cruel treatment.

“It’s gratifying to be here on Vieques, in Puerto Rico, where the people have met the challenge of those who try to break their spirit and have not given up,” Jackson said when he arrived for a day on the outlying island of this Spanish-speaking US Caribbean territory.

“To bomb Vieques is a colonial act,” he said, and “arrogant.”

The Jacksons are the latest celebrities to embroil themselves in protests to force an immediate end to six decades of bombing exercises that activists say have harmed the environment and islanders’ health.

Jackson charged that the bombing “has resulted in a high incidence of cancer, in a high incidence of asthma.” Later he visited the Lujar neighborhood, said to have the highest cancer and asthma rates on Vieques.

The Navy says health studies on the island have been biased and unscientific.

Decades of subdued resentment exploded into island-wide protests after two stray bombs killed a civilian security guard on the range in 1999, which forced the Navy to stop using live bombs.

Protesters have taken to invading Navy land to prevent sorties from dropping inert bombs of up to 1,000 pounds. More than 100 protesters were arrested in the last exercises in April and May. Since exercises resumed Monday, at least 55 trespassers have been arrested, including Jacqueline Jackson.

Mrs. Jackson, 57, was jailed Tuesday when she refused to pay $3,000 bail. On Thursday, her husband said, she was put into solitary confinement for refusing to submit to a strip search.

A Federal Bureau of Prisons incidence report, supplied by the Jacksons’ Rainbow/Push Coalition, quotes a prison officer as saying Mrs. Jackson stripped and complied until “I asked her to bend over and spread her buttocks. Inmate Jackson just stood facing me and told me ‘No.’”

Protests have continued despite President Bush’s announcement this month that the Navy must withdraw from Vieques in two years.

Bush’s decision was largely interpreted here as a move to win Latino votes and avoid embarrassment if Vieques islanders reject the exercises at a federally organized referendum scheduled for November. The referendum would give residents the opportunity to vote for the Navy to remain and resume use of live ammunition, or leave in 2003.

Puerto Rico’s Gov. Sila Calderon is organizing a local referendum in July that offers the additional option of voting for an immediate withdrawal of the Navy, a position she reiterated Friday at her first meeting with US Navy Secretary Gordon England. England, who flew to San Juan unannounced, repeated his position that the Navy was ready to withdraw, but only in 2003, Calderon said.

Meanwhile, England has said the Navy will search for alternative sites, though the Navy has repeatedly said there is none to match Vieques, where it can practice amphibious landings and aerial and sea bombardments simultaneously in an area unhampered by much commercial air and sea traffic.

Source: Associated Press

FCC fines Portland radio station for airing “indecent” material

June 25— The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently fined a community radio station for airing a political rap song that attacks sexual exploitation and degrading lyrics in popular music.

On May 17, the FCC issued a $7,000 fine to Portland, Oregon’s KBOO, a listener-sponsored station, charging that Sarah Jones’ “Your Revolution” violated the Commission’s decency standards, which were revised in April. The song, which challenges the sexualization of women in rap, asserts that “your revolution will not happen between these thighs.”

The FCC ruled that “Your Revolution” contained “unmistakable patently offensive sexual references” that “appear to be designed to pander and shock.” This ruling came after the FCC issued an order, nearly seven years in the making, to “provide guidance to broadcast licensees regarding compliance with the Commission’s indecency regulations.”

The FCC’s indecency rules define indecent speech as “language that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs.”

Far from clarifying the FCC guidelines, the Jones case reveals how unqualified the FCC is to determine the bounds of decency. Much of what might be considered “indecent” in the song are references to the sexism in the songs Jones is criticizing.

The Jones case received less attention than the FCC’s June 1 decision to impose a fine -- also $7,000 — on commercial radio station KKMG in Colorado Springs, Colorado for airing an edited version of “The Real Slim Shady,” a song by rap artist Eminem. The FCC determined that the song violated its indecency standards, despite the fact that expletives had been bleeped out or removed. Ironically, “The Real Slim Shady” also includes an anti-censorship message, pointing out what Eminem sees as double standards about what kinds of speech are considered acceptable in popular culture.

The FCC’s new “get tough” policy stands in sharp contrast to FCC chair Michael Powell’s earlier statements about indecency. As Salon (Salon.com) pointed out, Powell expressed skepticism about taking action on decency at his first press conference as FCC chair: “I don’t want the government as my nanny. I still have never understood why something as simple as turning it off is not part of the answer.” His changed may be due to pressure from conservative groups. “This is probably a result of pressure from this organization,” Morality in Media’s Paul McGeady said of the Eminem decision.

While cracking down on “indecency,” the FCC’s interest in regulating corporate control of the public airwaves seems to be at an all-time low. Powell has advocated a deregulatory strategy that would likely remove the remaining legal limits on media consolidation.

By penalizing KBOO, the government is punishing an attempt to respond to offensive speech with more speech. Sarah Jones’ critique is likely to be a more effective response than censorship to the cultural violence and misogyny represented by Eminem— but if the FCC fails to uphold its mandate of maintaining a diversity of voices on the public airwaves, there will be fewer and fewer places where such a critique is likely to be heard.

Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: www.fair.org

Six arrested while protesting Monsanto’s role in Plan Colombia

By Betsy Taylor

St. Louis, Missouri, June 25— Six protesters were arrested outside of Monsanto Corporation headquarters Monday morning during a protest over the company’s role in fumigating South American fields as part of Plan Colombia. Protesters also said the demonstration was staged in solidarity with anti-biotech protests in Sand Diego, CA, and against the World Bank in Barcelona, Spain.

The arrests were made when a few protesters attempted to cross a line of security and police officers at the company’s front entrance. Plastic restraints were placed on the protesters’ wrists, and they were led away without incident.

Several dozen people met outside Monsanto headquarters in west St. Louis County this morning, and attempted to turn over a petition with roughly 2,500 signatures.

It asked Monsanto to take responsibility for its role in the fumigation efforts in Colombia.

“We’re concerned about the sales and production of Roundup Ultra. It’s being indiscriminately sprayed on families and farms, not just on growing coca plants,’’ said Margaret Hill of the St. Louis Inter-faith Committee on Latin America.

The fumigation is part of a United States-backed effort at eradicating the plant used to make cocaine.

Michael Joseph, who has spent the last nine months in Bogota, Columbia, with Witness for Peace, said he’s seen agricultural fields destroyed by the product. Colombians are reporting respiratory and skin problems as a result of the spraying, he said.

Opponents also say the spraying is adversely affecting water, soil and farmers in the region.

Monsanto spokeswoman Janice Armstrong said the company will not divulge information about who buys its products. She referred questions to the State Department and Plan Colombia, which is a $7.5 billion campaign to cut Colombian drug production in half by 2005.

Roundup has a documented history of safe use, as long as it is being used according to directions, Armstrong said.

She said the decision to make the arrests was one made by the Creve Coeur police, not by Monsanto. “The company is happy to have people express their views as long as it is peaceful,’’ she said.

Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

CEO of Enron pied

San Francisco, California, June 21— Inspired by the former actions of the Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB) and other pie wielding individuals across the nation, Agent Chocolate Supreme generously delivered a Blueberry tofu cream pie to the CEO of the Enron Corporation, Jeffrey Skilling, this evening at The Common Wealth Club, where he was scheduled to speak on “The Roles and Responsibilities of the Energy Industry.” Agent Chocolate Supreme gave Jeffrey Skilling his just deserts with the announcement, “This is for the millions you’ve stolen from California’s real working people.”

The Enron Corporation, a Texas-based energy conglomerate, is one of the largest beneficiaries of California’s energy crisis. They reported an income of $777 million in the fourth quarter of 2000, while citizens were simultaneously facing substantial rate hikes and rolling blackouts. “Mr. Skilling, who personally made $132 million this year, creamed us — so I, Agent Chocolate Supreme, felt obligated to cream him.” He added, “energy companies, such as Enron, are the ones who lobbied for deregulation. they bought off our politicians to make laws in their favor, and are now getting rich off us, everyday working people, as our rates are going up up up.”

As proclaimed before by the Biotic Baking Brigade, “The BBB is a movement rather than a group. We have no members, though there is an underground network of militant bakers who provide us with nothing but the best vegan and organic pies. The BBB is not elitist or sectarian. In Fact, says Agent Lemon Meringue of the famous Cherry Pie Three, “Anyone with a pie and a vision of a better world can be a member of the BBB.”

The focus of the current pastry uprising, says Agent A La Mode, is to hold corporate crooks, and their lackeys in government, accountable. “Our track record shows that unlike them, we don’t just promise ‘pie in the sky’ — we deliver.”

Source: Whispered Media: www.whisperedmedia.org