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Monsanto and PCBs
blamanj writes: "While
this story isn't about the gadgetry that typically appeals to /.ers, it's worth a look. The Washington Post has acquired documents showing how a
Monsanto Corp. PCB plant polluted a small town in Alabama with full knowledge of what it was doing. Their own tests showed that when fish were placed into a local stream, "Their skin would literally slough off." They showed no concern for the residents, only about potential expensive regulations or bad publicity. Why is this relevant? Well, Monsanto is currently one of biggest proponents of GM (genetically modified) foods." Very thorough investigative article about how a corporation reacts when a profitable business line is threatened, or a cautionary tale about wonder technologies, take your pick.
Unfortunately, stuff like this happens all too often. Here in Ohio our EPA is so bad that they actually fired someone for reporting that a school was built on a Military waste dump. I work for a group that deals with these political and corporate problems everyday, and it's really eye-opening to see the disregard some people have for public health and the enviroment.
My comments were aimed at the people making the decisions. They are the ones who should take responsibility, not people who just do what they are told.
The best way to punish corporate fuckwits is not to impose financial penalties. That can be factored in as an expense and risk factor. These people should be made to live in their own filth. We should show them complete disregard for their lives, just as they have for others.
Why is it that if I kill someone by accident, I'll go to jail (most probably). But if some corporate idiot kills tens or hundreds of people in a cimmunity, he'll still get his bonus?
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More interesting and relevant from the article is the premise that they were aware as early as the late 1930's that they were doing lasting damage--and worked very hard to keep that from surfacing--since they had a complete monopoly on PCB's period. And production continued until two years before PCB's were banned for good in 1979.
Good corporate citizenship it wasn't. Worse, at the level intimated in the article (if true,) that particular factory and its overseers were committing mass murder. One has to wonder about our corporate law structure on that note.
Are fines and clean-up measures a reasonable response?
A number of people have stated that this analogy is incorrect already, but none of them seem to be getting the point through to people, so let me try an analogy to show why these actions are in fact reason to question the GM production from Monsanto.
Let's say that you have a friend who you've known for a fair while and trust. You tell this friend a secret which is really important to you that it is kept secret and they break your trust by telling a whole bunch of people your secret with no reasonable justification for these actions. Needless to say you're pretty annoyed, you yell and scream etc, etc. Then you notice that your friend gets on really well with your girlfriend.
Now, there is no evidence to suggest that your friend is doing anything with your girlfriend and before this friend betrayed your trust you never would have even thought he would steal your girlfriend - but you never would have thought he'd breach your trust either. It's pretty clear in this situation that while you shouldn't jump to conclusions you probably shouldn't put blind faith into your friend who has clearly and blatantly betrayed your trust.
Now lets suppose that you know a corporation who makes weed killer and the weed killer works really well - you've been buying it for a fair while now. Suddenly you discover that in producing this weed killer the company has been dumping all kinds of dangerous chemicals into a river - affecting a significant number of people - with no good reason.
Then you notice that this corporation is producing genetically modified foods (which you regularly eat). Clearly it's not a time to go jumping to conclusions, but it's also not all that wise to continue to put your blind faith in the corporation.
Whether or not there is evidence that the GM foods produced by Monsanto are good, bad or indifferent is irrelevant. When a company shows this much flagrant disregard for the health and saftey of people, it is probably worth taking a closer look at their other areas of operation - not doing so is akin to burying your head in the sand.
After a couple of well publicised incidents in the UK (Hatfield train crash etc.) the subject of "corporate mansluaghter" (manslaughter in the UK is, I think, similar to 2nd degree murder in the states). Obviously not popular with big companies because it could actually mean executives going to jail when their negilgence results in someone getting killed. It doesn't make a lot of sense that if you drive a car dangerously and kill someone, you go down; if you drive a company carelessly and kill someone, you might get a fine of 0.0000001% of your turnover.
One thing I've noticed in the UK, is since the privatisation of our railways, almost all incidents have been blamed on the driver - who is normally dead so can't fight back. This way nobody can sue the company. Hatfield was one of the first ones where they couldn't do that 'cos unless the driver stopped the train, got out, broke the rail himself, got back in, backed up to get some speed and then drove round the corner he couldn't possibly be at fault.
If corporations want the same rights as citizens, they should have the same responsibilities. Mind you, when they do send execs down (fraud or whatever), they get a nice open prison with full access to laptops, cellphones etc. so they can just carry on working. There is no justice.
"Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
Many (many) years ago I took a B-School class (Organizational Behavior) where I read a great article called "On the Folly of Rewarding A While Hoping for B" (still have it, it's by Steve Kerr if you want to read it). It gave numerous examples of skewed reward (or regulatory) systems and their consequences. One example was pollution regulation, where a simple calculation would show that it was to the companies benefit to risk the fine, rather than clean up the problem. Kerr's solution was to change the reward system as follows: The President of XYZ Corporation had to choose between a) spending $11 million dollars for anti-pollution equipment or b) incurring a fifty-fifty chance of going to jail for five years.
[Insert pithy quote here]
In a larger sense, the tragedy of this industry is that the "science" that goes on loses much of its objectivity when research is results and profit driven, and not released for public scrutiny. We as the consuming public and we as educated people are forced to trust a faceless organization with limited liability and a very poor track record for honesty.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
do anything but throw your hands up and say, "No changes!".
Agreed. However, since at this time, there have been few if any unbiased studies of the issues surrounding GM foods, we should be doing nothing (commercially) for now.
Unfortunatly, the commerciaql operations appear to be unwilling to cooperate with any unbiased evaluation (which raises a bit of suspicion at least). Instead, they wish to override our concerns by using such tactics as lobbying to make it illegal to state that a given food does not contain GM ingrediants.
It would also appear that Monsanto is primarily interested in producing exactly the least likely to be safe GM foods.
Those sound good, but the one's that I heard of recently have more to do with increasing shelf life by decreasing the micro-nutrient content.
Did the high-lysine corn ever make it to the market? Did the low-isoflavin soy beans?
The high lysine corn would have improved nutrition. The low isoflavin soy beans would have improved storage (and decreased nutrition).
I heard lots of PR about the high lysine corn. I don't know that it was released. (The one that I heard of was deemed by the FDA to be too dangerous for human consumption. And it ended up in Taco Shells recently.) The low isoflavin soy beans I only heard of in Science News, and appearantly was on it's way into production.
So I am not particularly trusting of the good intentions of the GM food vendors. And guess what: the dangerous (allergy inducing) corn and the low isoflavin soy beans were both from Monsanto.
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I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Please note that this is my personal opinion, but as a libertarian, its heavily set on punishing those responsible for hurting another person or persons.
First of all, you must understand that the majority of environmental damage is caused by government regulations, subsidies, intervention or on land owned by the government and leased to a corporation. A great website that speaks about free-market environmentalism is www.perc.org.
A libertarian knows that Monsanto doesn't care so much BECAUSE they're so heavily in bed with the government -- and our government can subsidize or "free up" environmental rules for any corporation they want to, because we've given them the power to.
In a libertarian society, the federal government would have ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL over environmental regulations -- people would be free to pollute as they please. But here is the restriction in a free society: if you pollute your own land, that land will now be useless for you, and have absolutely no value for you in the future. In a free-market society, government won't own land, so you can't lease it only to treat it badly and move on. Secondly, if you pollute your own land, and the pollution crosses over to someone else's property, airspace, or drinking water, YOU WILL BE LIABLE. Bar none.
Today, the government lets the polluters pollute, and really just keeps the big pro-earth groups happy with thousands upon thousands of regulations that have loopholes for government's greatest supporters. Get government out of this mess: the environment is not what you want to protect, you want to protect private property.
If you're worried that pollution done now might contaminate someone's property 100 years down the road, I can see where a little government intervention on a local level is necessary -- ON A LOCAL LEVEL. Let the city or county government enact rules as to what corporations or individuals can do now. If a corporation wants to, they can always move to a city that lets them do what they want to do (and the people of that city they move to made the decision to live there and accept it).
I know, its not a perfect answer -- BUT ITS FAR FAR BETTER than what we have now.
Read Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the
Economic World.
In a similar vein, though I haven't read it, there is a book called Emergence...
You are hitting on something fundamental - the idea of complex systems, composed of a myriad of simpler, interchangable "units", being "alive", and sometimes "intelligent" (possibly in ways individual human being fail to understand - it is akin to the neuron vs. brain idea, or cell vs. body, or bee vs. hive). The complex system can be anything - groups, societies, corporations - but they all seem to have similar forms of emergent behavior, and some of this behavior can even be considered "intelligent".
What is even more curious, IMO, is that it seems like most of the time, this behavior, when it manifests itself in corporations, tends to degenerate into psychopathism, when they hit a certain number of units (people in the corporation). Individually, the people themselves may not be, probably aren't - in any way evil, or psychopathic - but the sum total of the corporation, when looking at "its" actions, seems to be...
I tend to wonder, if we follow this to an extreme conclusion - whether such entities can become "infected" with a "disease" - a "virus" in some manner - and further, what form would that "virus" or "disease" take...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon