Slashdot Mirror
Happy Independence Day, Jose
Now and then, even among the cowed, comfortable and generally unconscious citizens of the Corporate Republic, a hero arises. On this July Fourth, let's award the Slashdot Order of the Penguin to one Jose Bove, whose international crusade began last year in protest against U.S. duties on Roquefort cheese.
Bove, a French farmer and union leader, may seem like an unlikely figurehead for the emerging political struggle of the 21st Century. Even though he isn't an American citizen, he's got a pretty good grip on what used to be considered American values, and is thus an Independence Day icon for the increasingly-resented United States, the Corporate Republic's world headquarters. The United States is now a place where a robust economy, conformity and market research are national religions, and a nation where kids who dissent and act strangely are routinely tossed out of school or thrown in jail.
Bove spent a week in jail last year for his assaults on a McDonald's under construction in his hometown of Milau (he faces up to five years in prison). For obvious reasons, McDonald's has become an international symbol for the globalization, mass-marketing and homogenization that U.S.-bred corporatism is spreading like the measles. Now Bove is drawing an odd agglomeration of supporters worldwide as he stands trial. His day in court is drawing thousands of anti-globalization protesters, environmentalists, trade unionists, students and other campaigners cramming into Milau, a small market town in southern France.
"This is not just about food," Bove told the demonstrators. "It is about the struggle of small people, leading simple lives, to free themselves from the dictatorship of the multi-nationals."
Bove's particular issue is what he calls the industrialization of agriculture. He could just as easily be talking about the industrialization of education, technology, law, medicine or work. He's dubbed his town "Seattle-on-the-Tarn," a reference to the local river and to the protests he joined during the World Trade Organization's Seattle summit last year.
The struggle of small people to free themselves from the multi-nationals has a lot to do both with technology and independence. From market monopolies like Microsoft to giant entertainment conglomerates like AOL-Time/Warner that will seek to dominate information and its distribution to corporatist invaders of privacy, the struggles of small people will increasingly resonate around the world. And this is all before the rise of the gathering bio-tech conglomerates, soon to dominate genetic research and try to use the Human Genome Project to mass market the perfect human, all the while screening their work behind talk of cancer and aging cures.
Corporatism threatens to overwhelm individuals all over the world, from cheese farmers to outspoken employees to bright and idiosyncratic students -- its virtues are promoting conformity, corrupting the political system, suppressing dissent and creativity. Its primary target is individualism, its primary enemy individualists -- which means hackers, programming entrpeneurs, renegade teachers, small businessmen and farmers like Bove, odd-ball filmmakers. Bove has put the struggle as eloquently as anybody could.
So have his supporters, carrying signs through the streets announcing "The World Is Not For Sale." This message stings in the United States on Independence Day. What in this country isn't for sale?
It's strange to be watching this odd drama in another country, when the issue itself is so American. Perhaps Bove will sail over here when AOL/Time-Warner opens its first franchise office in the United States and give us all an example to live by.
Happy Independence Day, Jose.
This form of direct action is actually quite common in France, it has not been long since French farmers stopped lorries carrying lamb entering France from the UK and burnt the (already slaughtered) contents.
At the moment it is not just french peasant farmers that are suffering. In the UK small upland farmers are going bankrupt at an amazing rate. One of the problems is increased new legislation, which I believe has been heavily lobbied for by the multinationals and large producers, which is forcing smaller abatoirs to close. Small farmers have to then take their produce a long way to get it slaughtered, and they cannot afford this.
There is also a problem with the buying power of the supermarkets and multinationals. You sell at our rates on our terms or you don't sell at all.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Organic produce is more popular than ever, and the rise of farmers markets in many towns is throwing a lifeline to the smaller producers.
I've already read many comments on this topic that seem to basically say "This guy is an anticapitalist nutter. Fuck him". This is a topic that many people in the EU (including myself) care passioately about. I visit the states regularly on business, and I have seen what unconstrained capitalism can do. Jose, I salute you and say "Vive le Roquefort".
And one more thing - beer guy, this is one thread where you will be so on-topic it will hurt!
regards,
treefrog
Yeah, sure, biotech is full of wonderful wholesome potential. So was atomic energy.
Now let's look at what these things are used for in the real world. That is, if you don't mind referring, now and again, to the real world, just for a break for variety's sake from the glowing-monitor Metaverse of free-floating theory. But if you do mind, please skip what follows, as it is sure to distress you.
Atomic energy - remember atomic energy? - was supposed to make electricty too cheap to meter, to irrigate the Sahara, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. But in reality, the very first application of it was to smash and/or incinerate about one hundred and fifty thousand defenseless civilians to bloody pulp. Later in its career, atomic energy was used to politically terrorize half the globe, and as a side-benefit, in a mere half-century it has heaped up upon the face of the earth vast volumes of pervasive high-intensity pollutants, which to this day no one knows how to safely store for decades much less hundreds of millennia, that will require something in excess of twenty times the length of recorded history to subside in toxicity to where they are no longer an acute threat to the continuation of mammalian life.
Biotech is supposed to make it possible to grow crops in the Sahara, and to cure all known diseases, and in general to usher mankind into a new era of prosperity and contentment. So let's take a look at the very first two commercial products of this wonderful transgenic technology which the Monsanto Corporation has brought to the marketplace. The first is something called "Roundup-ready" soybeans. These soybeans have been modified so that factory farmers can hose down their soybean fields with hitherto unusable quantities of another Monsanto product, a toxic herbicide called "Roundup," in order to kill off all the weeds. Without the "Roundup-ready" gene, the quantities of the herbicide "Roundup" that are employed would render the field as sterile as a patch in the middle of the Sea of Tranquillity, but the artificial gene makes the customized soybeans immune to this toxin. If you're planning on eating these crops, I hope you too are immune to that "Roundup" herbicide. Not that you'd know, however, because the chemical companies have lobbied our legislators so vendors of this Frankenfood are not required to inform you that that package you plucked off the store shelf contains a product not of nature but of the lab.
If you think that's sinister, contemplate the second commercial application of biotech. It's called "Terminator" . It has precisely one purpose: to render food crops sterile. See, ever since the days of the Sumerian Empire and even before, humans practicing agriculture have saved a certain amount of year X's harvest as seed for year X+1's planting. But Monsanto sells seed to farmers in eighty-plus countries, and, insanely, Monsanto claims that one hundred percent of the genotype of these seeds they sell ("developed," in the main, by nature and evolution across geological eras of time) is all Monsanto's "intellectual property". Well, just like any other greed-crazed industrial megalith, Monsanto is pathologically protective of its "intellectual property" and the profits which flow therefrom.
Suppose I am a farmer in, say, India, and I buy a load of Monsanto-brand seeds and plant a crop. When I harvest my crop, as farmers have done since prehistoric times, I save a portion of the grain for next year's seed crop. Now I don't need to go back to Monsanto and buy more, right? Which God forbid! Why, that would be like allowing a heroin addict to grow his own poppies. Where's the big profit for the drug lords there? The only difference being, of course, one can kick heroin addiction, but who can kick the eating habit?
So to prevent the catastrophe of a Fortune 500 corportation losing any potential profits, the genetic engineers at Monsanto inject a special gene - the "Terminator" gene - into the seeds I bought, so that they are fertile in the first generation but totally infertile in the second.
That's pretty bad in itself, my farm becoming helplessly addicted to purchasing Monsanto's seeds, but it gets worse. You're an adult, you know about the birds and the bees, right? Even plants have sex, dreamy plant-like sex, and sex means they trade their genes back and forth. So when the pollen from "Terminator" treated food crops drifts over the fence into my neighbor's field, his crops can end up infected with the diabolical "Terminator" gene. Now his next year's crop comes up OK at first but suddenly it all drops dead after about eleven weeks. Gee, won't he be happy! Now imagine this effect taking place en masse all across a continent. It would take the psychotic sensibility of PKD's "Null-O" to dispassionately contemplate the vast and unprecedented human catastrophe that would occur if, say, one year a third of the Asian rice crop were accidentally wiped out by the uncontrollable dissemination of this destructive gene.
OK, those are the very first two applications of biotech out of Monsanto. Have I made my point yet? Sure, biotech is full of promise. But biotech is not being employed by civic-minded scientists with benevolent goals. Today biotech is owned and operated by capitalist corporations, despite the fact that the entire scientific foundation upon which it rests, and half of the innovations, are the direct product of research paid for by the taxpayers in general - just like with the Internet, the taxpayer pays for the basic research, then after it becomes commercially viable corporations patent all the good parts and stuff the profits in their pockets. And as everyone knows, everything that capitalism touches it turns to shit.
In theory, biotech may have potential for good results, but so long as it is employed solely to deepen the wealth gap between the investing class and the rest of us, I am convinced that it will only yield evil results.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You know, the real way to protest McDonalds opening in your neighbourhood is - don't eat there.
Yeah. That's worked so well with Amazon.com over their "One-Click Shopping" patent. Ooo! Ooo! I don't use Microsoft software. How much longer until they're gone?
You know, the odd thing is that I already don't eat McDonalds because I don't like the food. I wonder why the ones near me haven't closed yet?
Reality is funny that way.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You know, the real way to protest McDonalds opening in your neighbourhood is - don't eat there.
You don't eat there, they close up shop and go home. You eat there, Micky D's makes some money, and opens up another franchise down the street.
Capitalism is funny that way.
France banned hormone-injected American beef that was not labelled. Instead of labelling our meat properly, our government childishly responded by adding a 100% tax on Roquefort cheese and other French delicacies.
Yes, he broke the law when he vandalized a McDonalds. However there is one very American thing most of you forgot about: Civil Disobedience - breaking the law as a form of protest. It is indeed a valid, time honored way to get your point across, and as long as you aren't directly hurting anyone and are willing to pay the consenquences, is a noble act.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
To the French, culture is all important. I suspect they would rather starve than allow anything to destroy a distinctively French culture.
They see Micky D's as more than just an abomination of the local cuisine. They see McDonalds as the first wave of an american cultural invasion which caters to the lowest common denominator and rolls like a bulldozer over parochial cultural concerns.
They look to the United States and see that, since about the 1990's, you cannot tell the difference between a shopping mall in Long Beach and a shopping mall in Atlanta. Of course in the United States, we strove for this sort of bland conformity in order to make it cheaper and easier to manufacture goods and services to a larger audience. And nothing better exemplifies this sort of bland conformity than McDonalds, where you couldn't tell the difference between a hamburger made in Japan from one made in Baltimore.
To the French, this sort of comformity is a form of walking death.
The French protest McDonalds because they fear a world where walking into a shopping district in Moscow is no different than walking through the French quarter in New Orlenes, where the Lobster and butter is a standardized bland flavor throughout the world, and where we all wear clothes from the Gap.
And to a certain degree I can't say that I blame them. While I appreciate a corporate culture which is attempting to cater to as many people as possible, it bothers me greatly that there is no place to go to find something different. I can drive for almost two hundred miles (I'm in Los Angeles) before I find anything that isn't the same damn shopping mall/fast food/tourist crap/mass produced electronics/mass produced art stuff. Hell, I bet in 10 more years, downtown Tiajuana looks like downtown San Francisco and downtown Honolulu....
The point is that while Jose may live in a republic, that republic has increasingly little control over Jose's society. The real control is held by corporations, and they are not democratic in any way.
Many corporations are richer than many countries now. General motors is richer than Denmark.
Increasingly, corporations are making decisions 'in partnership with' local government, because local government is poor and disorganised.
It is a true thing that increasingly, our lives are not blighted by fat, greedy mayors taking back handers in the town hall, but by greedy companies that simply walk all over the town hall.
The interesting parallel between the US Revolution and Jose is that both occassions were primarily about money. If the UK had been smart, they'd have cut taxes on the US, opened up the trade, and all would have been well.
And if people weren't so desperate to have tasty burgers with 0 effort required, there wouldn't be giant companies walking all over us so much.
-----