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A discussion about Monsanto arose in a private technology forum that I attend, which dredged up the following from me and that in turn I’d like to share with my regular readers. DS
My great uncle was one of the original chemists of Monsanto… the boss had no money for the payroll and he paid them in shares… my great aunt had to work in a sweatshop for two years so that they could eat…. they all ended up rich. In those days there was a rotating board of directors, so every so often my relative, like the other original chemists, was chairman of the board…only in America, eh what? He was a lovely old guy, when I was a little kid.
I just mention this so you could understand how painful it is for me to know that Monsanto is one of the most villainous, monstrous, harmful corporations to ever have existed, which is causing thousands of Indian farmers to commit suicide (this is just a tiny sample). For me this is like discovering that my dear old, Horatio Alger of an uncle was Heinrich Himmler. Watching the wonderful “Food Inc.” made my skin crawl and spoiled a hundred lovely, childhood memories for me.
There is a Spanish saying, “con las cosas de comer no se juega”, which translates literally as “don’t play with your food”, but in Spanish “jugar”, “play” also means to gamble.
The heart of our humanity in civilization is born in agriculture and naturally, being so fundamental to our deepest needs, physical, cultural and spiritual, it has a religious aspect… seen that way Monsanto is beyond blasphemy.
A few years back incensed by what I was reading about the old family “milch cow” and giving free rein to my dark journalistic arts, I used a social-hack to fool then WTO head Mike Moore into giving me the private email address of then Monsanto CEO, Bob Shapiro, the creator of the field to dinner plate “Roundup” concept. We carried on a civilized dialog for several years.
Shapiro is a very pleasant person to correspond with and I came to the conclusion, which I communicated to him, that he was an idiot-savant like the Dustin Hoffman character in “Rainman”. A commercial genius, but completely tone deaf politically… When he got canned more or less for this defect, he was inclined to agree with my analysis.
He didn’t seem to see the connection to his business model of thousands of Indian farmers, on losing their lands because of debt incurred by Roundup, committing suicide by drinking the stuff and that millions of other Indian country folk who have been forced by this agriculture to flee to cities with poor sanitation, where they defecate in the streets, threatening a worldwide 14th century style pandemic. He couldn’t see what a storm this would raise.
My impression from my dialog with Bob Shapiro was that he saw his mission on earth solely to “create value for shareholders” and could see no other responsibility to humanity and mother earth than that… I am much reminded of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the “banality of evil”.
Finally I think if Monsanto could they would patent oxygen and charge us all to breathe. It’s like something out of Kurt Vonnegut.
The irony of all this is that I have heard classic Marxists maintain that this is an inevitable stage in the completion of the capitalist cycle and that simply by nationalizing Monsanto and Walmart we would have a perfect, planned economy… in other words we are all dressed up and waiting for Lenin.
Cross posted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com
Image by ARA 3Xilos under Creative Commons license
53 Comments
What fun for the decadent bourgeoisie, to put their words in the mouths of their conquered enemies!
Quels imbéciles.
Posted: 29 January 2013
Quietly, globally, billions of bees are dying, threatening our crops and food. But in 24 hours the European Union could move to ban the most poisonous pesticides, and pave the way to a global ban that would save bees from extinction.
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/hours_to_save_the_bees/?crBaebb
Thanks for this and BBF think the german conpamy Ber and yes I missed spelled it.
Then there is Nestle CEO:
Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck thinks that all public water should be privatized, and that viewing water as a human right is “extreme”.
“The one opinion which I think is extreme is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution.”
“I’m still of the opinion that the biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise. For only if we can ensure our continued longterm existence will we be in the position to actively participate in the solution of the problems that exist in the world.”
Let’s see: You can live 3min w/o air three days w/o water and 3/weeks w/o food.
So, pay the man at the moment of birth or die in 3 to 5 minutes.
Yep
What an interesting post. Do you think it’s possible, Dean, that possibly a conglomerate like Monsanto might be simply an extension of its patent and trademark legal department? Many patent lawyers have training as scientists and are good at manipulating our patent system. The ones I’ve met also lack any sort of soul or moral compass.
i dont have time to find it now but i read something last week that REALLY REALLY REALLY disturbed me.
Most people probably dont know that crops are not pollenated naturally in big aggro biz. What I mean is that there are companies that supply bees. They literally drive trucks around the country and release bees for crops.
Now we also know that the “natural” bees have been dying off. There are many who blame Monsanto’s products. IMO its isnt definitive whether its Monsanto or a fungus or what. but regardless….
Monsanto has bought the biggest bee company in America. This is alarming for any number of reasons. Frakenbees, Monsanto controlling what crops get pollinated or simply covering up the dangers of their products.
Just from a political stand point, this is basically the old Standard Trust applied to food!
I really wish Monsanto and all their doings would get more airtime
Last year I read the book “Dirt” (I think that was the title) and it really made a clear case that since way back when, some people in different societies always learned and knew how to grow food sustainably – and tried to tell others. However, money and hierarchy and armies that needed to be fed, and profits that needed to be made caused the land to be impoverished or destroyed. No one ever really respected the soil – it’s all about profit and power and this would only change when we no longer treat everything as a resource to be exploited – I will probably not live that long.
It’s capitalism, senor. What do you expect? For them to be nice people?
As far as your shot across the bow at Marxists goes in your last sentence, that’s way out, in the parlance of my older cousins. Lenin? Really?
Lenin’s dead, dude. I, on the other hand, am still alive for some mysterious reason. I don’t believe that some perfect, planned economy can ever be achieved.
I do believe, however, that we can make one far better than the one we have now, at least better for me and the likes of me, and if it’s at your expense as well as at the expense and existence of Wall Street, so be it. If it’s not at your expense, it will still have to be at the expense, and probably existence, of Wall Street. So be that as an alternative.
I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. But what we have now doesn’t work. It must be destroyed. I have little to lose, and I speak for billions.
:) At least I have numbers.
Sudden change of subject:
Bet your weather’s better than mine right now. Rain changing to snow. Ugh. Have a nice morning, Senor Seaton. I truly bear you no ill will. Would only raise my blood pressure if I did. That could be bad.
… hmmm … this Peter Brabeck?… what a nice guy who is CEO at Nestle too
Peter Brabeck’s Nestle Water Concept — “all public water should be privatized”
You can’t pay for the water? Then you don’t deserve / get water.
How AHIP like in motive and method
Really it wasn’t a “shot across the bow”, but rather a salute to the old boy’s powers of analysis. As to “Lenin” being dead, here the word “Lenin” is a signifier meaning a revolutionary force that gives a decadent system the last little push.
For example, it might be a great idea that the world’s water be regulated, the question would be who would own it? Private, extractive elites? Or the public, IE, the people?
In 1990 saw a play called “Gasping” By Ben Elton at the Haymarket Theatre in London, about the privatization of air. At the time I thought it was somewhat overblown.
Now we have Monsanto contaminating organic crops with genetically modified traits, and when the farmers complain that their produce is now worthless they get sued for stealing intellectual property.
Now we have congress at the beck and call of people who regard the melting arctic ice as an opportunity to drill for oil.
I’m starting to wonder if humanity is collectively any more intelligent than the yeast in a beer vat. If there’s one cell that doesn’t know when to stop expanding, everybody ends up dead.
er…
That’s it.
Monsanto’s cause indirectly championed at the Supreme Court by Obama’s then Solicitor General, Elena Kagan. On the other side, organic farmers, charging that the FDA allowed Monsanto to sell its engineered seed without EPA approval, which was required by law.
In theory, Kagan represented the FDA. Why the FDA and not the EPA?
Organic farmers said that sale should be delayed pending the EPA analysis as required by law. Kagan and Monsanto said, allow sale now. Worry about the EPA later.
The organic farmers explained that artificial seed ruins organic crops. No one cared.
At about the same time that the SCOTUS handed down its decision in favor of Monsanto and Obama’s FDA, farmers as far south as Oxaca Mexico were complaining that Monsanto’s engineered seeds had contaminated corn grown organically for centuries, maybe millenia.
Neoliberals, aka neoconservatives, aka New Democrats, aka DLCers, aka Third Wayers, aka No Labels. Lots of aliases, just like most other criminals.
Here is a cause for hope, if our organized repulsion lowers shareholder value, behavior may change accordingly:
If we look at what we are talking about in this thread, we see that our sense of what is right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust, is offended. These are values which have been developed in our culture over thousands of years. Our sense of humanity is offended by corporate behavior and that this is creating a strong backlash. Even if an investor is totally amoral, she would have to take into account what effect these feelings — even if she shares none of them — would have on her investments. For example;
My analysis is that we are entering a political period of deep reform similar to that which followed America’s “Gilded Age”.
Monsanto isn’t evil. Monsanto’s products help feed more people by making crops better, for example, drought resistant. The campaign(s) against Monsanto are a combination of a strain of Ludditism on the left and organic farmers that want to force the public to have to buy their far more expensive products, by forcing GMO products out of the market. If people want to minimize their exposure to GMO, they have the option of buying organic products at supermarkets now.
Thank you, you can pick up your check now.
Which is why Monsanto and others spent millions of dollars preventing a law to accurately label GMO products so people COULD choose.
Last little personal note on Monsanto:
I like to think that my great uncle, who was one of their original chemists, would be totally horrified by the direction Monsanto is taking. His lifetime day dream was to be a farmer, during his working life he owned a peanut plantation if Florida, but sold it because of the hateful racism there. When he retired, he bought a small proving farm from the University of Illinois near Albion and raised sheep… One of my most magic childhood memories (I was about 5 or 6) was of him waking me up at about three in the morning and carrying me down to the barn in his arms to watch a ewe giving birth to her lamb, it took about an hour and was fascinating. I just can’t see him approving of what Monsanto is doing to small farmers.
It turns out that Monsanto’s new drought tolerant maize is no more drought tolerant than conventional drought tolerant hybrids already in use. The new drought tolerant GM maize has just been approved and will only be planted this year so it has done nothing yet.
Your claim that GM crops are feeding more people is clever nonsense since there is no proof of higher yields from GM crops, they only control more of the market.
Non GM doesn’t mean organic cal, organic crops are only a small fraction of what is grown and i buy organic bananas at the same price as regular ones.
Your paternalistic attempts to brand people who oppose GM crops as luddites is pathetic.
Many of us who grew up in the ’50s were influenced by the myths that science and industry would solve all the worlds problems. Large improvements were made but Capitalism warped the direction of those improvements away from the most good for the most people towards the most profit for some.
I’m not opposed to GM, it could have benefits. I am opposed to the way it is being implemented as a tool to increase profits and control insted of a tool to really improve crops.
I agree with you entirely. Good comment.
Liar, liar, pants on fire. Maybe you think you can get away with broadcasting claptrap bullshit in some places, but I’ll call you out for the load of lying hogwash that is.
See the documentary, Food Inc, which has an excellent segment on how the “great” Monsanto is ruining family-run smaller farms & farmer right here in the good ole Yew Ess Ay by filing lawsuits against them when some Monsanto GMO strains of crops show up amongst the small farm crops. Think that’s “fair” bc the small farmer “cheated” Monsanto or something?
Why no. The small farmers have little ability to control winds, which blow seeds around, sometimes from far away. These seeds get “planted” naturally & then show up in small farm crops. Monsanto then steps in and sues the farm away from the small farmer due to the farmer “stealing’ their precious GMO seeds. And there’s bought off Judges to hand down rulings… Judges “appointed” conveniently at the behest of Monsanto.
Not evil? Pull the other one. Hope you go to sleep tonight and have good dreams because YOU are telling big fat LIES of epic proportions.
Monsanto is evil. Now Bill Gates is in cahoots with Monsanto to promote more GMO crops world-wide. They do so to make it “seem like” they are doing “good,” bc the GMO crops will allegedly “feed” more people better, cheaper, whatever.
It’s a clever ruse. They’re all getting rich off of running small farmers out of business, like those in India and here in the USA & Canada.
Wake up, lil Susie. Not all of us are stupid and foolish enough to believe fascist corporate propoganda.
Thank you for that convenient truth. Indeed, Monsanto spent billions upon billions to prevent CA voters from passing Prop 37 which would have mandated GMO labeling.
If citizens can “choose” between GMO & Non-GMO, then why the bloody great fight to prevent GMO labeling?? Because Monsanto doesn’t want citizens to KNOW what the feck they’re eating. Gimme a break.
I think your claim of Monsanto spending billions is a bit inflated.
While GM labeling would have been informative it would also have been depressing since most of our major brand foods contain GM grains. If you look up non-GM brands they are few and rare so there is little choice for most consumers.
If the resistance to GM crops had been stronger 20yrs ago we might have had a chance to affect its introduction but Capital is supreme in Amerika and people are mere pawns in the game.
Ok. I concede. My mistake. But I believe, collectively, Monsanto and some other corporations spent well over $20million to defeat Prop 37, and it ain’t small bucks.
There may be few choices for consumers, and consumers, then, would’ve most likely continued buy GMO food. I have no doubt that, even though I’m a picky shopper, I am sometimes eating GMO. That said, AT LEAST, we would be informed. Right now: it’s a big fat old crap shoot. I believe that Whole Foods now doesn’t bother to label GMO or not.
Agree about resistance to GMO coming sooner. Amongst a largish group of friends, who generally well informed, I am the LONE person who knew anything about Monsanto & GMO. I got involved in protests over GMO crops way back in the ’70s. And yes, we were always fed the propoganda that GMO “had to happen” in order to “feed” the world’s growing population.
It’s too bad that this issue has only caught on more recently, but sad to say, it was difficult, at best, to generate interest on this topic many years ago, even amongst those who tended to be more interested in such information and more willing to take action.
C’est la vie. But don’t tell me Monsanto isn’t evil. It is.
Thanks for this!
And thanks to David for this diary.
Calling a company like Mansanto evil is vague since a corporation is a constructed entity not a being. The people who control Monsanto may fit that description and they are certainly greedy and sociopathic in their actions.
The saddest part of this is that GM could have been used wisely and for the benefit of all people not just for the enrichment of the few.
Kennan:
Scientific conquest was the exoteric ideology for the hegemonic New Worlders and realpolitik their esoteric ideology. Science is thoroughly polluted with the conquistadores ideology. This evolution of Monsanto should have been no surprise to l’homme etoile’s great uncle.
What use is his surprise, then, to our l’homme etoile?
Mock disappointment. All the systematic dreadfulness of capitalism is cast into personal failings: “A commercial genius, but completely tone deaf politically”. Are these apologist shenanigans themselves, “journalism”?
No.
But is this realistic for a thoroughly politically inept and exploited “society”?
Capitalist ponerology is a pathetic discipline.
Probably not Mon Frere, but i can still dream in the face of harsh reality, it’s either that or cease to exist.
Again I concede. You are more precise. I fume bc this is an issue that I’ve been battling for decades. My frustration knows no bounds.
Greedy sociopaths running Monsanto? Certainly, at the very least, they are that.
There is certainly evidence that GMO produce crops that are more predictable, so yields are less volatile year over year; and yields continue to go up, despite predictions from some that yield increases are over.
I did watch Food Inc. and wasn’t as impressed with it as you obviously were. Basically it was a bunch of, to use your term, claptrap. Like the person who wrote the diary, it’s all well and good to wax nostalgic about how things “used to be,” but to use another phrase it’s the way it never was. The good old days never existed on the farm, only in the folk memories of people such as yourself.
Not all dreams are sighs of the oppressed creature.
That isn’t what would have happened, though. What would have happened is the companies would have removed GMO material from all the food in California, which would have raised the price of food for Californians by about $400 a year per household. And it would have ended up affecting other states as well. That’s what the organic farmers really want, to see if they can eliminate the competition and force everybody to buy their products instead, or at least raise the price of food and make their products more competitive. And even if some of the resulting products are not certified organic, obviously they would be closer to what the organic types say they want. Which is fine, except why should the relatively few people who worry about GMOs get to impose their priorities on everybody else? That’s why the companies put serious money into fighting the labeling drive; and I’m glad they did.
Let me think about that. Yeah, the people. Good argument for eco-friendly-powered desalinization, too. There’s LOTS of water on this planet. Just have to get the salt out of most of it.
Your last sentence still seems to be a case of snark, though, implying that nationalizing the likes of Monsanto and Wal-Mart is thought of as a cure-all by Marxists; you know, planned economies are the cure-all, silly Marxists. At least that’s how I read it.
For the record, I don’t think totally planned economies work any better than capitalism does. I’m married to a woman of Ukrainian ancestry, after all. There’s that whole Hroldamar thing to think of.
Cal i got a good laugh from your statement that food processors would have to remove GM ingredients from their products if labeling passed in Cali. You apparently know very little about how pervasive GM crops are in the US or how little consumer preferences are considered.
Your statement about the Organic Growers Cabal is beyond ludicrous.
According to the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” verdict corporations are people and thus can take on such human qualities as “good” and “evil”.
The idea of a nationalized Walmart being a “planned economy” is based on that the new technologies, which the soviets never mastered, would make it possible. The idea really assumes that Russians are incompetent and that with “American know how”, and its genius for logistics being applied, the whole thing would work smoothly.
“Planned” economies have been demonstrated to be marginally less optimal than “market” economies. The marxists you refer to were showing that the calculation argument could be defeated by the computer. They had no intention of “nationalizing” Walmart to make a planned economy, dear l’homme etoile.
Aren’t you hoping no one will dance on your grave?
Actually what it appears we have now is a socialism of the rich. Losses are socialized and profits are privatized. We have a great centralization of economic power tied by lobbies to political power to craft laws to the benefit of both lobbyists, their clients and the politicians, but not to the benefit of the public (sanitized name for “The People”). If we look at the control that is accumulated in this system we see that we already have a “planned economy”, but not exactly planned for our benefit.
The idea, for the moment merely amusing, is that by the state simply taking control of a few corporations, as might happen during a war, we would have a planned, socialized (if not socialist) economy.
The marxist argument is not that they can do better than the rotted capitalism; it is that they can do better than capitalism. It would have been better if you had recognized the wisdom of their argument before capitalism rotted as they predicted.
Capitalists want their businesses “taken control of” during a war, not marxists. Neither would marxists think that taking control of a few corporations would produce a “socialized” economy.
I thought journalism was supposed to clarify.
In the case of the United States, because of its size, diversity and institutional solidity (petrification?) capitalism will just have to take its own sweet time to rot. At bottom, Americans are practical people and if something doesn’t work, they either fix it or throw it out and get something new, preferably the second option.
I think that if the capitalist era is ever to end it will happen in the USA, because America is the vanguard of capitalism, its most complete expression. And I don’t see it happening violently, but in the same way Americans passed from horses to Model-T Fords, from Wang word processors to PCs and from cassette players to Iphones. America is just one revolution after another, if you think about it.
They wouldn’t have to under the law, but it would have been more expensive for them to label than to just remove GMO material — according to the measure’s directive, which contained exceptions. The companies believed that people would have viewed the label as a warning and perceived such food as unsafe, and that situation would have ended up being more expensive than changing the ingredients. I am aware of how much GMO material is in food, which is why when they say it would have raised people’s food bills that much, I believe it.
Actually it gave them the rights of a human being but not the responsibilities.
You must be a tool or a fool to believe Monsanto’s propaganda. Putting a GMO label on food is no more expensive than putting a, may contain peanuts, label on food. If you knew much about our food supply you would know that there is no source of non-GMO large enough to replace GMO in most products.
Labeling may have helped competition from non-GMO products to fill increased demand but real competition or choice is not allowed in out Free Market system.
Americans’ are practical? The Spanish are more politically practical – active than Americans. What distinguishes Americans now is their lack of practice.
Anyway, clever mish-mash of platitudes is definitely not intellectual, so, maybe that makes you American. The vanguard of capitalism is in revolution, it is violent, and being the last to change is reactionary.
Platitudes don’t even make good editorial, dear l’homme etoile.
You are pushing your luck with the homme etoile business Ludwig, but anyway, revolutions are not always violent, sometimes they are velvet and I have trouble imagining an American Pol Pot. Although you may not agree, Americans are really famous all over the world for being practical and innovative and when and if the system spins off its wheels as old Karl has predicted, I think that those qualities will surely come to the fore.
You are a funny pumpkin, comrade. So, why are you not in America, the epitome of pragmatism and creativity?
Ha ha ha ha ha.
You really like the name-calling, don’t you? It reveals the kind of lower level intelligence you’re all about. Monsanto isn’t the only company against the labeling effort, it’s also the non-organic food companies in particular. They spent more money on it than Monsanto. It may be that companies wouldn’t be able to replace GMO material in some of the products right away, while they would be able to with others. But no matter the mix of solutions, the price of food would go up, and it would go up quite a bit. And, as I said before, that is why the food companies did the public a favor and fought against the labeling effort.
And just a comment about your statement that there’s no competition allowed in this regard. If that’s true, then what accounts for all the organic products available now in supermarkets? I shop at a national chain, and their organic sections are readily visible. So, if the masses of people are afraid of GMO material, they can readily choose organic products to minimize their exposure to that, and get more shelf space as demand increases further.