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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.
Be not surprised by this sort of actions. These people are so bottom line centered, they hired a private investigator in Canada to determine if a farmer was using their GM seed for a crop without their permission (or without paying a fee...something to that effect).
I love the smell of greed in the morning. It reminds me what a miserable bunch of animals humanity really is...
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
...fuckwits. They should be made to move to the town they polluted. With their families.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
I never thought companies like Monsanto existed outside of the paranoid writings of science fiction writers or in surreal alternate reality fantasy stories until I found out about their infamous Monsanto Terminator Seeds?
Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
Monsanto is the Microsoft of the ag world. They are constantly buying up smaller seed and chemical corporations and/or their patents. They have no regard for safety, only their bottom line financial figures. Some of their more scary research and development involves genetically engineered plants (and seed) that reacts to only certain (Monsanto-brand) chemicals and fertilizers.
This is certainly a company to be watching. At least Microsoft only fiddles around with computers and home entertainment gizmos. Monsanto plays god with our food supply at all levels. It's scary and it gets more scary each year.
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.
Why is this relevant? Well, Monsanto is currently one of biggest proponents of GM (genetically modified) foods.
It should be obvious, but it probably needs to be said:
To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else.
If there are any real factual arguments against GM foods, by all means present them. But if this is the best argument, it's a big endorsement of GM foods.
Philip Morris is currently one of the biggest proponents of Macaroni and Cheese; it even markets this product to children! (Kraft is a subsidiary of Philip Morris, a company widely considered to have manipulated nicotine content in cigarettes and marketed addictive cigarettes to children).
Study the safety of genetic modifications, sure, just don't assume that because a corporation has been evil, everything it touches magically turns cold and dark. In other words, just because they concealed what they knew about PCB's, there's no reason to trust Monsato more or less than any other genetically modified crop producer.
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?
OK don't get me wrong here, I think it is totally repugnant that they pump this shit into waterways wherever they can get away with it. In a local sense this is a tragedy of major proportions.
BUT... We have a major multi-national manufacturing corporation polluting the environment and being worried only about public image. This is hardly newsworthy. In a global sense, so what?
In and of itself, that has nothing to do with their genetic engineering division, does it? Sure, it may say something about the overall corporate morality (yeah, I know. oxymoron and all that) of Monsanto, but is it really news?
Unless of course, Monsanto are genetically engineering a whole range of crops that are either resistant to or actively break down PCB's. Their polluting activities take on a whole new, somewhat darker perspective under those circumstances, don't they now?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Write your representatives and demand the institution of a Corporate Death Penalty.
Corporations have made huge strides in gaining "personhood" rights, with none of the responsibilities.
They have evolved to become wholly irresponsible citizens of the nations. This must stop. Either send the corporate structure back two hundred years, withdrawing all the privileges they've gained in that time; or make them take on the responsibilities that all other citizens must accept.
Write your representative. Make a difference.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Slashdot had a link to a story on the Percy Schmeiser case a long time ago. It may also be worth checking out this site on his continuing conflict with Monsanto; whois records indicate it's run by a relative of Percy, and it seems rather thorough.
Monsanto is nasty corporation that fights dirty and wants to control everything it touches. It's Microsoft crossed with tobacco companies. Monsanto was one of the companies that produced the Agent Orange defoliant for the US military during 'Nam, and currently produces Roundup and Roundup Ultra. The latter is being indiscriminately dumped on various locations around Colombia as part of the US War on (Some) Drugs. This doesn't even get into Monsanto's legal and technical games with genetics.
Monsanto is also a candidate for being "first up against the wall" when "the revolution" comes. Whatever that turns out to be, it can only mean good things for life on Earth to evolve and exist outside of manipulation for profit.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I was doing a little light reading a week back and discovered that an absolutely RAGING but hopelessly ignored debate regarding the toxicity of Nutrisweet and the apparently spectactular corruption throughout the food manufacturing/safety industry.
Get this: Aspertame is apparently highly unstable, especially in fluid form, (the reason they put best before dates on Diet Pepsi).
Did you know that when Aspertame breaks down, about 10% of the by-product is Methyl Alcohol!, --which in turn breaks down into Formadyhide, which in turn causes a mess of neurological damage including the dissolving of the optic nerve.
--One of the ways the Monsanto P.R. people deal with this is to quickly point out that there's more Methyl Alcohol in a glass of Tomato juice. --But further research explains that Tomato juice also naturally contains more than enough Ethyl alcohol to neutralize the effects of the wood alcohol, which Nutrisweet does not.
Anyway, there's a TON of information on this and it makes for fascinating reading. Do yourself a favor and spend twenty minutes with Google over this.
-Fantastic Lad
While it could be said that Win XP is useless because it was brought to us be the makers of edlin, it doesnt validate the argument, regardless of your opinions on either.
GM foods can be a good thing (see golden rice), and pollution is a bad thing (see earth), please be carefull not to base any futher flames on the fact that one company is guilty of both.
There is no 'Monsanto'.
I've seen this argument posted a couple times to the thread. I'm going to play pedant boy for a minute here.
Yes, there is a Monsanto. Under U.S. law, Monsanto is a legal entity. It even has legal status as a person. Now, while the actions of Monsanto may be directed and carried out by thousands of individuals, ultimately, those actions are carried out under the 'Monsanto' corporate personhood.
Now, either the corporation takes a huge legal hit due to the corporation's past actions - halt of operations, massive compensation, et al - or the individuals directly responsible for the decisions must stand to account for the actions of Monsanto. A person - which a corporation legally is in American - may do great work in the community, may support a family, but if that person commits voluntary manslaughter, that person is going to have rights revoked and operations halted for a while, and the people who relied on the convict will have to find other ways to get along. Harsh as hell, but if corporations get to be people, they get to be subject to the same punishments as people.
Either way, someone has to take responsibility for this mess, be that someone a person, or the corporation.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
For those who don't know, Neil Stephenson's 2nd novel is Zodiak, about a drug-abusing, hell-raising, hippie chemist who makes life miserable for polluters in Boston harbor. He also finds monstrous amounts of PCBs in the water, and the story goes on from there.:)
/. much more than PCBs. :)
Also, Neil's been mentioned here on
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Not only does Monsanto have no respect for the environment, they are also dishonest:
And it's not like activists haven't been fighting Monsanto. Early as 1967, Dr. Denzel Fergusen reported Monsanto's mercury discharges where killing nearby fish. The same article links to a 404 at Annistonstar (a newspaper for one of the highly affected areas), but a quick search reveals several relevent articles:
At least Monsanto is doing something about their situation. Paul and Joyce Guldin, residents whose backyard includes Choccolocco Creek, received a $999.33 settlement check from Monsanto. Hopefully, many more checks are to come.
What do you think of MusicCity now?
MON is looks like a good day trading stocks this year. Specifically, It seems highly cyclical with a very short cycle. It's still on the decreasing part of the cycle, so you might still manage to short it (or sell it god forbid you own it). If I cared to day trade this I would go look at how GE preformed during it's PCB issues (course GE poluted something lots of people care about).
Anyway, I feal that some limited ammount of polution problems like this are acceptable as "growing pains," *but* the additude of corperate America towards these sorts of problems is truely dispicable. "we did a studdy and surpressed the results" or "we choose not to do a studdy because we knew what the resutls would be" are totally unacceptable behaviors. The natural deduction is that corperations are simply not being held sufficently accountable, but I think this could be incorect. People, not faceless abstractions, are making these decissions. The problem is that the faceless abstraction, and not the people, are being held accountable. Here are two proposals:
1) Make is easyer to throw corperate executives in jail for "statistical manslaughter," i.e. shortening a number of people's lives.
2) Remove the limited liability for shareholders, i.e. corperations would issue a one share "liability dividend" for each share of voting stock; these liability shares could be traded on the open market, but they would caust money to get rid of; those holding the liability shares for the relevent years get tagged for all clean up expences. Alternativly, you could just remember who voted that years and tag those people for the cost of the clean up (people who voted would buy inshurance). Anyway, the point is that share holders would get used to seeing the financial fall out of ignoring their companies enviromental policy.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Just glad to see this on slashdot. I would've submitted it myself if I thought it had any chance of being posted. Some of my favorite tidbits are....
.pdf or something. To put it simply, I trust the corporate media about as much as I trust Mosanto. And when the quotes trail off as if to say "I love.............hitler", I find the word-chasm annoying. I'm sure it's not misrepresentation in this case, but goddamnit, they have the full version and I don't see why they can't put that out......
1. 'The (Mosanto) committee even drew up graphs charting profits vs. liability over time.'
2."It is our desire to comply with the necessary regulations, but to comply with the minimum,"
3. "Please let me know if there is anything I can do . . . so that we may make sure our Aroclor business is not affected by this evil publicity," (hazard warnings)
4. "It only seems a matter of time before the regulatory agencies will be looking down our throats,"
5. '...the memo did not go so far as to propose a cleanup -- "only action preparatory to actual cleanup."'
To raise a little dissent, I have to say that I really despise the way this story is put out, apparently without any copy of the 'confidential' documents. It seems like a routine thing with most stories of this nature. God forbid they put up a
Do yourself a favor and spend twenty minutes with Google over this.
Or you can ignore all the ravings of web lunatics, and read this page which gives some useful information and links about this crapola.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
jeez, and I thought the big difference was that Monsanto's conduct will lead to illness and death.
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
They knew about PCBs since '37 it seems. Just 40 years from now what will we find out they hid about GM foods? Maybe its best to avoid them for that reason. I've supported GM foods. I think that a lot of the mentioned benefits are real. But this makes me see things a little differently.
The free market line is that corporations won't deliberately hurt their consumers because that's how they make their money. This needs rethinking. Maybe it works out economically in some weird way for corporations. The effects are too distant, and so long as no one finds out for 40 years or so the exceptional profits over that time outway any possible criminal charges.
There is also the failure of the EPA to consider in this whole situation. The EPA isn't the oldest institution around, remember it was Nixon who signed off on it. Wouldn't a survey of all water ways have been on the agenda of an organization that is supposed to protect the environment? Why are they just figuring out the PCB levels in this town now?
There are two things to learn from this whole debacle:
I heard some other posters mention a corporate death penalty. Sounds good to me. But just a quick web search didn't turn up much actual investigation into the subject other than people saying "Sounds good to me." Anyone reading this who knows of actual legislation that has been proposed would do well to paste a link.
Would you care to explain how sterile seeds can "spread"?
Under certain conditions the pollen from a "terminator" plant could be used to cross-pollinate other plants as shown in this BBC article
Before this discussion gets biased, we must present equal time for the Libertarian side of the argument:
If the people of Anniston simply stopped buying products from Monsanto, then they could use their "market forces" to stop this kind of activity.
If all we do is ask for "government regulation" then companies will just start producing thier deadly chemicals outside our borders. Then America would lose twice!
So remember, kids: Trust the market, it is perfect.
And don't eat the fish.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I couldn't agree more. Ordinarily I roll my eyes when I see articles about "corporate evil" on Slashdot, but Monsanto is an exception. Unequivocably, without doubt, Monsanto's corporate charter should be revoked, the CEOs should be stripped of all but their posessions but $500 and a suit, their assets should be auctioned and checks cut to any shareholders who are not involved with day-to-day decision making.
They are just pure evil. I already knew about the terminator seeds, and as shocking as the PCB article was when I read it this morning, it didn't surprise me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The burden of proof that GM foods (or any other products, for that matter) are safe in the long term for consumption and the environment rests entirely on the shoulders of their proponents, the people who want to release those organisms into the environment. And biotechnology and ecoology are such new fields that we really can say very little about long term effects.
Personally, I think most GMOs are likely to be non-poisonous and non-invasive. But I think they will be harmful indirectly--by allowing human populations to push further into previously non-arable lands. Ultimately, GMOs don't hold the answer for hunger or human suffering; at some point, we have to limit our growth, and we might as well do it as long as there is still a little bit of earth left.
With a little luck this will hit about 3 years after the baby boomers create a second great depression by retiring.. :)
No, baby boomers retiring should free up jobs, not make them more scarce. Plus, retired baby boomers will probably be busy consuming goods such as motorhomes and other retirement toys, creating new jobs.
Retired baby boomers may cause inflation, since there may be more people (dollars) chasing goods than people producing them (limited goods). But I fail to see how they could create the severe deflation that marks the great depression.
I'll probably burn the little karma I built up, but what the heck.
I think writers of these headlines should try to maintain a certain level of objectivity and integrity when posting it. Let's separate the issues.
1st: Monsanto is a big corporation that does bad things.
2nd: Monsanto is a Biotech company.
The author most likely isn't very fond of the idea of GM food, I quote:
However, this has nothing to do with the fact that Monsanto produces GM seeds. If it were some chemical plant, it would be just as relevant .
Maybe I'm overreacting, it's just that a lot of people bash genetic modification as a "bad thing" perse, which is something I don't agree with.
Meneer de Koekepeer
I have begun to consider corporations a separate evolving lifeform. Corporations have committed many acts inimical to human life. Tobacco companies, Monsanto, Hooker Chemicals - all acted to maximize their selection function (profit). Every superfund site has a similar corporate story. Unfortunately for those of us who have to live on this planet, maximizing health (human, animal or environmental) is not a part of their fitness-selection function.
Employees in cash stressed companies knows that in questions of "cash" vs "morals", cash usually overrules.
Corporations have totally warped the political process in the US since the mid 1970s when they were granted "equal" free-speech right in the political forum. Deep pockets and harassment lawsuits have allowed them to drown out public discourse and common sense.
Our problem is corporate survival has nothing to do with human survival.
In general, all hybrid seeds are "infertile", in that the seeds of the plants grown from them do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid. This is a fact about hybridisation. Of course, if you produce new kinds of seed through genetic modification rather than hybridisation, then the resulting seed will not be a hybrid and will "breed true". By putting the terminator gene into their roundup ready seeds Monstanto were actually restoring the status quo ante rather than unleashing some new horror on the world.
Second, farmers
Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the "sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds.
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments, encouragement of the overuse of pesticides, etc - and this obsession with "Terminator [wooooh!] Genes" obscures it. It implies that if only Monsanto would stop making terminator genes, there would be nothing wrong with the rest of the GM industry.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
The reasoning here:
PREMISE A - Corporations only care about profit and nothing else. After all, without profit they're not going to be around for very long. And they seem capable of doing anything to protect the profitable product lines (see Pinkertons beat up union organizers, PCB cover-up, Microsoft strong-arm tactics, Just Following Orders, etc.)
PREMISE B - We're capable of manufacturing products of incredible potency: carcinogenic chemicals, genetically modified organisms, and someday self-replicating nanotech bots that can reduce North America to chum.
PREMISE C - Corporations tend to be the ones manufacturing these products.
PREMISE D - Some of these products have a negative impact on our quality and length of life, the number of limbs our children are born with, and the aesthetics of the world around us.
CONCLUSION - Perhaps we should be a little worried about the impact free market rules have on the world around us and our own livelihoods. When corporations have the ability to let loose technological advancements purely in the name of profit, the results may be less than desirable.
-- "Sucks to your ass-mar"
As long as agriculture has existed, plants have been genetically modified to produce harvests with particular attributes, including resistance to pests, resistance to harsh climate, or resistance to disease. The process of genetic modification was done by combining the seeds of two or more plants that had the desired traits.
The plants produced by this genetic manipulation weren't called "genetically modified," they were called "hybrids." Still, the end result is the same: the genetic structure of a plant was purposefully changed by humans to produce a new plant that had desired traits.
Ever eaten corn? It's a genetically modified plant. The corn you eat is not "natural." It was made, through trial and error.
How about potatoes? The potato itself is a natural plant (well, tuber.) However, farmers have modified potatoes for 1000s of years to produce different strains that have resistances, or have a higher nutritional value, or keep longer, or have a different taste.
Ever seen a white orchid? Not natural. Genetic modification. Orchids are not white by nature. (Granted, you're not supposed to eat orchids, but I think you get my point.)
So, what's the big to-do about genetically modified foods? It's not a new science, merely a new approach to an ancient art.
However, I will agree that Monsanto is a perfect example of a sleezy coorporation. But I also think that Micheal needs to lay off the scare-tactic propoganda. That, or he should go work for Microsoft as Chief FUD Officer.
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
It's like the Nazi's who said they were just following orders. If your boss asks you to sweep a toxic chemical into the drain and you do it... you're just as guilty.
I think if these criminals get prison terms for the rest of their natural lives I think we might get a few whistle blowers among our friends working on GM foods...
Cynic inside me {
Of course that's about as likely as getting the president that won the election (No I didn't vote for him, but I can tell an election from an appointment.) }
To those who wonder what GM crops have to do with PCB/chemical dumping, they're missing the point. The point is that if a company has a history of putting profits over public safety and have blatant disregard for human life, then how can you trust them when they say GM crops are safe? They may be safe, they may not be, but I for one do not find their opinions credible.
Show Summary:
Surveys of public opinion show that the majority of Americans believe that the government is making sure that they are protected against harmful chemicals. Is their understanding justified? Journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones report on how the chemical revolution of the past 50 years has produced thousands of man-made chemicals that have not been tested for their effect on the public's health and safety. The report is based on documents never before published and interviews with historians, scientists, and physicians who are exploring how chemicals affect the human body.
Here are some quotes from industry documents from transcript of Trade Secrets. I'll let you interpret them yourself:
September 28, 1981. Government Relations Committee. Pebble Beach.
"The Committee believes that the new climate in Washington is more reasoned and responsive. ...The election of the Reagan Administration appears to have produced changes which bode well for our industry."
"President Reagan directed EPA to delay proposing or finalizing regulations until it could be determined that they were cost-effective and necessary."
January 11, 1982. CMA Board of Directors. Grand Ballroom, Arizona Biltmore. "Just ten days ago, TSCA celebrated its fifth birthday. The first five years of TSCA have seen numerous rules proposed by the Agency. To date, we have seen none of these types of rules finalized."
[TSCA: the Toxic Substances Control Act, one law intended to give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate toxic chemicals]
[Fact:To this day - almost 25 years after the Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted - only five types of chemicals, out of thousands, have been banned under the law.]
passetspike!
If you look at the article, there's an email this story link which enables you to send the story off to someone of your choice, along with comments. My choices were: NPR and PBS, both organizations which rely heavily upon corporate donations, notably the Monsanto Corporation. In the comments, I requested that they consider refusing donations from Monsanto, which would have the dual effect of making a public stand for what is right as well as denying Monsanto a hefty tax write-off. Like they need it. I agree with a previous poster who compared them to Microsoft. No doubt a merger is in the works :)
Other good choices for the email link would, of course, be your state and national representatives, particularly if you live in a state which Monsanto has operations in (Like, almost anywhere?)
Fortunately, the Post is a big paper with a good reputation. Stories like this need to see the bright light of day. It is what evildoers fear most.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
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]
Try this Google Search as a starting point. You might switch to Mineral Water (not genetically engineered) after reading some of that stuff.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Mr. SilentStrike,
Please read my comment again. I was not denying that Monsanto is not exactly behaving correctly. I even acknowledged that they are bad. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, so let me rephrase:
Enviromental pollution *by dumping waste* [by Monsanto] has nothing to do with the fact that they are producing genetically modified seeds/crops.
[off topic rant]
Although I'd love to discuss the various degrees of risks that are associated with GM foodstuff, it's off-topic, and I'll resist the temptation.
[/off topic rant]
Meneer de Koekepeer
Actually, if you study a little on Mossad's record of hunting escaped Nazis, you'll see that prosecutionm of the Nazis continued until 40-50 years after the end of the Nazi regime. Google on Klaus Barbie, for example.
The most telling quote is, I believe,
The critics understand unchecked capitalism all too well. If monetary profit is all that matters, then the evidence clearly demonstrates that people suffer. This is yet another datum.
There is absoloutely no guarantee that an unregulated market will lead to an optimal outcome for actual people. On the contrary, some people will suffer greatly.
Frankly, we can't trust an invisible hand.
Do you even realize the multi-million dollar P.R. bullshit you're parroting?
Did you even read the page you linked to? It didn't hold any actual core information, but it did suggest that you read through the available papers before rendering judgement.
Now maybe there has been a mountain of new data made available since you last looked at the question. But from my searches, based on the thousands of documents collected over the last thirty years from every imaginable level of the medical/scientific/governmental community, the conclusion you reached seems to me, frankly, ill-considered to say the least.
It seems to me that you are jumping very, very quickly to pre-set conclusions, your thought processes masquerading under the guise of scientific rationale. Sorry Charlie. You may have read a few clever books, but Real scientists aren't made into fools by the P.R. jockeys.
Honestly. People think that just because the X-Files were stupid that bad things don't actually happen in the world. "I don't believe in Conspiracies." Well genius, do you believe in "Corruption"?
Go look at the fish in Anniston.
Better hurry, because in another year, there'll be some new & dangerous fool just like you, sir, declaring that it never happened because he's been programmed since birth to reject everything but the 'official' story.
Do you even understand the basic principals behind advertising and mass persuasion?
Sheesh.
-Fantastic Lad
There used to be a Monsanto plant in Everett, MA a couple of miles from where My grandmother lived. On hot summer days the smell from the plant would give you migranes. I meal literally the whole neighborhood would get sick from the smell. It had to be even worse closer in! You could see all kinds of different colored smoke wafting up into the air from various vents at the plant. The newspaper looked into it and was basically blown off. Fortunately, the plant closed in the mid 70's, but I still wonder what they were putting out into the air and if anyone suffered permanent damage from it. Based on this story that just may be the case.
I could not believe my eyes when I read this quote, "Robert Kaley said it is unfair to judge the company's behavior from the 1930s through 1970s by modern standards."
Of Coures you judge a company by the past. It's the same as saying sure he killed 100 people in the 1960's and then spent years hiding it. But hey he's a nice guy now so let's forget about it.....
It's just another case of Big Bussiness sticking it to the little guy and not caring what the out come is.
If it isn't broke, tinker with it till it is!
Your comment contains a number of falsehoods which I will be more than happy to address:
,always buy new seed every year, because retained grain is a poor and inefficient way to grow your pants [must control bad jokes...]
1. all hybrid seeds are "infertile"
This happens to a false and incorrect statement. With canola it is difficult to create hybrids that are fertile and increase crop yield. Please note that this does not mean infertile; it just means difficult to reproduce. Cross-fertilized plants are rarely fertile. But that's nowhere close to never fertile.
2. farmers
(By the way, how does your first point of "all hybrid seeds are infertile" tie in with your second point of "new seed comes from new healthy hybrids grown for seed"? If the hybrids are all infertile, why would I grow hybrids for seed)?
While, yes, as a farmer I supplement my existing gene-lineages (both plant and animal) with external lines for hybrid vigor and outside traits every year; I also breed my existing plants and animals for specific traits. If I started off with one line of genes, and attempted to maintain that line forever, yes, I might have problems. But I don't. I select outside strains to enhance certain qualities that I believe my strains are deficient in. However, assuming I made a good starting selection of lineages, I don't need to acquire outside stock. You're talking about a minimal initial genetic selection that doesn't allow for cross-breeding over a number of generations. Sorry, but I'm aware that this could be a problem and either: start off with a reasonable selection of different genetic strains, or supplement my breeding stock every year. But if I start off with a good selection, I don't need to buy new seeds every year.
3. our assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting
Seeds aren't the issue here. Pollen is. For example, corn cross-pollinates. If I've got some sterile corn that swoops across the pasture and cross-pollinates with my good "breeding" corn, I've got a problem. And we haven't had a chance to get to the seed part yet.
And, also, sterility is the final "hereditary property". If I've got a ewe that hasn't bred by the time she's two, I'm going to cull her. And, guess what, all of the genes that I've worked on breeding into her are gone.
By the way, if I plough the "sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed, I've lost time, money and productivity. The things that I grow aren't comparable to "weeds".
Having worked as a hired hand in my youth, and my father working in a grain elevator for >20 years. I can say with complete certainty, farmers do grow their own wheat seed for next year. Normally keep a few truckloads off to the side, pay the elevator to get it cleaned properly (removing as much of the impurities as possible). True, they don't do it for tens of years on end, but saying they do it every year or every other year is very much a false statement.
In todays grain market there is no way that a single family farmer could buy grain every year, he would be out of money in very short time.
True enough, for small values of "farm" and first values of "world". But this isn't what we're talking about. The emotional rhetoric about terminator genes is all in the context of the third world, where the grain is sold much cheaper, because otherwise nobody could afford to buy it. And Monsanto only sells in the third world to large-scale farming businesses of the scale where they do buy new seed every year; this picture of subsistence farmers being drawn into a hellish spiral of terminator seed isn't right.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I haven't heard any good rumors about Monsanto, they have all been bad. There is the rumor that they manufactor Nutrasweet and that product causes tons of illnesses.There is also the lovely terminator seed which is designed to make sure that farmers can't reuse their seed and are forced to buy new seeds from Monsanto every season. This news doesn't suprise me, this corporation really needs to reigned in!
Robert Kaley, Monsanto's whore, mentions 2 things that are really interesting: (environmental affairs director for Solutia who also serves as the PCB expert for the American Chemistry Council)
"Did we do some things we wouldn't do today? Of course. But that's a little piece of a big story," he said. "If you put it all in context, I think we've got nothing to be ashamed of."
Then another gem at the end. . .
"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No. Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today."
Now if this doesn't scare you I'm not sure what will. No remorse, nothing. Sad thing is that opinions like this end up getting to politicians after getting campaign contributions.
Hmm.. also, I wonder who introduced micheal to www.fark.com.. Quite a few stories have been taken off their front page today (i.e. all) Anyways...
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Selling third world farmers infertile seeds so they have to keep buying your seeds with the full knowledge that these sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile is so nefarious, mere words cannot convey the feelings of disgust I feel.
It is more offensive that they use planes to spray herbicide over fields of farmers who refuse to buy their product, just to see if their crop is resistant, and then sueing those farmers whose seed stock was pollenated by their neighbours monsanto patented GM crop.
Patenting genes is infinitely more evil than software patents...
So wait a minute, this company is being blamed for creating delicious, easy-to-eat skinless fish?
Seems kinda unjust to me...
------
Today's Top Deals
Do you all remember the Challenger Disaster? After that, many memos were released detailing how one of the seals would absolutely fail at the temperatures and pressures at which the shuttle was to be launched that day. I have a very strong feeling that this is the same thing. Some engineer was doing his job - reporting the facts. Some one in that plant, in order to not make himself look so bad, buttered it up a little - maybe this stuff isn't so great after all. And so it goes, until we reach where we are today. As far as anti-GM foods go, I say all that is a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap. We are not talking about breeding man-eating vegetables (although it would give vegetarians a run for their money). We are talking about doing the same thing that farmers have been doing for centuries - breeding better crops. Only now, instead of it taking generations of growing and flowering and cross-pollenating, it is being done with genetics. Isn't technology and the advance of it what so many of you support?
once again, i'm surprised that so many of you are surprised! even though i'm sure this one will never make it to the top of my list i'm really in my element now so please pay attention.
.. okay.. great.. now type in 'CNMI abuses' and hit search again. whoa! all of this stuff happening on 'american soil', right under our noses!? yeah..
this is nothing new! monsanto has been up to this kind of no-good for years. the company was founded near the turn of the century to bring saccharin to our country. saccharin, for those of you with your heads stuck perilously far up your asses, is the first artificial sweetener. oh yeah, it's been positively linked with lukemia and numerous other types of cancer and for some reason they still put it in EVERYTING sugar-free.. hmmm?
let's see... monsanto.. monsanto.. what else have they manufactured that causes cancer? how about agent orange? guilty.. it was their product and they've paid hundreds of millions to former employees stricken with rare forms of cancer and other strange diseases. rBGH is theirs too.. you know, the stuff that the uninitiated end up drinking in their milk because it's forcibly injected into our livestock. it's been shown to cause the production of a hormonal by-product called IGF-1 (proven to cause cancer in human cells) as well as udder infections and other disturbances in livestock. for this reason and others rBGH is banned in canada and europe.
this is outrageous! how can they get away with this!?! 1st, they have a legal department that rivals phillip-morris.. they're yet another sue-happy american corporation bent on manipulating information and political agenda for their own financial gain. 2nd, we live in a society where so many people bend to that kind of bullshit that you never get a chance to hear what's really going on (unless it's too late and someone else is serving the lawsuit).
..and monsanto is small potatoes..
if you're upset or interested enough to do some more reasearch on your own try this: go to google.com and type in 'CNMI' (commonwealth of the northern marianas islands)
also, there's a great book called 'If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates' by Jim Hightower.. those of you familiar with his work know that he can get a little far left in his rantings, but the book is packed with information and is a great read. (so great that i could only set it down when i became so disgusted that i was forced to)
i leave you with a quote from a previous rant of mine posted to a different site:
"In this country, literally 90% of the wealth is controlled by the richest
1% of the population. These are the people and organizations that finance
our political campaigns.. the people and organizations that own our
country. The United States frequently dispenses propaganda, domestically
and abroad, to justify 'military action' in wars that are waged to protect
the financial interests of American corporations. We covet our neighbors'
goods enough to kill innocents to prevent increases in our oil prices.
It's painfully obvious to me that the almighty U.S. dollar, which has
ensconced us in the position of the last world 'super-power', has perverted
our political processes and twisted our country into a monstrous entity.
Much of the world has good reason to fear and even hate us.
To say that the 1,400-some people dead of a heinous and cowardly act of
terrorism ought to be dead would be insane. However, I hope people can see
that the attacks on our nation's sanctity were not unprovoked."
-j0nah
If you think this is bad, check out what American comanies do outside America. In 1984 gas leaking from a tank in a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India IMMEDIATELY KILLED 8000 people, with the death toll subsequently rising to 16000 over the last 15 years. 40% of the women pregnant at the time of the disaster spontaneously aborted. Many children were born with severe permanent disabilities. Nearly 1/5 of the population of 500,000 are TODAY suffering from a myriad of exposure-related diseases. Chromosomal abberations have also been found in the exposed population, suggesting congenital malformations in the next generation.
Union Carbide settled with the Indian government for $470 million, 1/10 of what Exxon were fined for their pollution of the Alaskan coastline. The chairman of Union Carbide is indicted for culpable homicide, but has absconded and is known to be living in a beach house in Florida.
Source: Bhopal.org, NOT Union Carbide's own site, which is much slicker and comes top of a Google search on union+carbide+bhopal.
My default expansion for 'PCB' is Printed Circuit Board - especially when I see a story on Slashdot! Just to let everyone know this is about Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls - I think thats two carbon rings with lots of chlorine in there.
Baz
All of what jayed_99 says is true.
However, the original idea with terminator seeds was that they would (I'm not sure how well it works - I gather it doesn't but Monsanto policy seems to be that objective truth is foreign to their religion) produce non-fertilising pollen. So, the seeds that monsanto sells are a hybrid of line A (fertile) and line B (fertile) which produces line C, which they sell, and which doesn't produce fertile pollen OR fertile seeds. In addition to meaning that you can't grow up line C yourself, or make your own lines that include whatever favorable genes where transgenically introduced into line C, this means that line C's pollen can't contaminate non engineered crops nearby, which is a huge problem with other GM foods (pause, looks askance at my Dorito.)
Now, terminator seeds are basically a dead issue because folks like jayed_99 simply refused to buy them.
This means that people are growing up (or being forced to grow up, by cross polination) the GM crops that Monsanto sells without paying for new seeds each time.
So, the next part of Monsanto's evil plan is to make their money selling chemicals (which they also make) instead of the GM crops themselves. Enter roundup ready Corn. You want evil, there's your classic Monsanto evil. The idea is that they can go ahead and give away the GM crops (although they'll continue to charge while they can), because the only thing the GM crops are good for is buying mroe roundup.... from Monsanto.
So, the trend in agro genetic engineering is to do stuff like that. Genetically engineering crops that resist perishability better, or which inherently resist pests, or are more nutritious, may be a losing proposition because the product is a living thing that is not easily controlled. However, genetically engineering pesticide resistance lets you sell more of your pesticide, which is where the big money is, anyway.
Of course, as a medical geneticist, I may have an unfair bias against evil (which seems to be Monsanto's position vis a vis the union of concerned scientists)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
When I was 8 years old I went to a Monsanto PR booth during an ecology festival at the local museum. My first question was "How could you be so concerned for the environment if everything in that area smells like paint?" He didn't seem to have an answer except for "We're obey all federal laws blah blah blah". It was very discouraging. My Chemistry teacher in high school used to work night shift at the plant when he was young and inclass he would tell us stories about guys who would drop deap in the middle of the shift from the fumes.
I dont like Monsanto.
"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No. Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today."
This statement hits the nail on the head and shows why pure Libertarianism would fail in real life. Pure capitalism produces companies that have no regard for the environment.
The level of disregard for human and non-human life displayed by this company is disgusting. I don't care about context, or how this report was taken without regarding the times which Monsato was operating. Basic common sense tells you that if you dip a fish in water and its skin falls off that you should not be dumping that shit directly into the river. A complete disregard for the tens of thousands of people and their children. These people should be tried as criminals because they knowingly allowed the release of obviously harmful chemicals. There are no excuses for this behavior. They knew what they were doing was wrong because they had to cover their own internal memos. What an extreme disgrace. I'll stop ranting now because I could go on for hours.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Don't just blame corporations, several governments have recently been uncovered to have conspired against UN anti-polution conferences and programs.
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Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and France.
Don't believe it?
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
At least there are no PCB's in my foods. PCB's are very very toxic and persistent material (they don't break down). Good old General Electric is going to have to dredge the Hudson river to clean up the PCB mess it made years ago, and hopefully it will cost about 500 million $$ so hopefully it will discorage them and others from this kind of pollution. Seems fines are the only remedy corporations understand which is sad...
The times has a short abstract about the GE cleanup.
The problem is, this planet is all collectively ours. Let's say, for example, *everybody* consents to having their property ruined by another person if they have the privelage to ruin somebody else's property. Under Libertarian philosophy this would be a completely acceptable contract. But to *real people* who have to live on the planet, the earth is more than just individual pieces of property that people have entire sovereignty over to handle according to their whim. The United States is pretty rich...let's just buy a smaller country, sell tickets, and then nuke it! That would be fun! But entirely unacceptable.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My main problem with this is that there are huge, massive problems with Monsanto - a total disregard for safety testing, obsession with secrecy and a tendency to corrupt governments,
It's irresponsible to make that kind of broad accusation without background. Here's some:
Round up ready corn contaminating other crops.
The 60 minutes story about how they covered up the fact that working with PVC monomer melts people's bones. This isn't the best possible link, unfortunately.
Ooh! Here's a whole page dedicated to how wicked monsanto is. You can learn about how Monsanto tried to cover up that fact that DDT was wiping out all the birds in California (yes, the evil corporation is the classic Silent Spring is none other than Monsanto.) They also made agent Orange, which had health effects that they tried to cover up.
Those really interested in the subject of chlorinated organics should read Pandora's Poison. The up-shot is that they are a technolgy which simply isn't safe, and that we should abandon them entirely, especially chlorine based pesticides. The book is highly informative, and also a good introduction for someone who's background is more in, say, computers.
So, the long and the short of it is that this is nothing new. Monsanto has been doing lots of stuff like ever since its inception.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
We've also forgotten that corporations are a specific breed of company with extra rights given to it by the state through a mandated charter. It used to be we actually *thought* about these charters and these rights, watchdogged the corporation and revoked charters when they went astray. Now we hand them out like candy with nary a thought of accountability. If a corporation is doing something obviously wrong (legal or not) we don't have to squabble forever with them...just revoke their charter. That's tough shit (watch me crying for those poor poor put upon corporations) but that should be the cost associated with the extra privelages corporations get.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In general, all hybrid seeds are "infertile", in that the seeds of the plants grown from them do not have the desirable properties of the hybrid. This is a fact about hybridisation. Of course, if you produce new kinds of seed through genetic modification rather than hybridisation, then the resulting seed will not be a hybrid and will "breed true". By putting the terminator gene into their roundup ready seeds Monstanto were actually restoring the status quo ante rather than unleashing some new horror on the world.
Not even close. The terminator seeds work quite differently. They insert a trait that expresses a lethal toxin during the germination process that makes sure that apparently normal seeds will die as they germinate.
They swear that these terminators won't cross with non terminator crops to produce similarly self destructing seeds, but this is the same company that saw no problem with rendering fresh water lethal to fish (within 3.5 minutes) in a populated area and keeping quiet about it.
Put simply, would you trust Jim Jones to mix the KoolAid served to your children?
If PCBs are any more "carcinogenic" than water, everyone near there or downstream should have cancer.
Not a very good supposition..
Cigarettes contain carcinogens - are you saying that everyone near or downwind of smokers will die of cancer?
In the 20th century, almost everyone smoked - doctors frequently "prescribed" cigarettes for symptoms such as stress.. according to your logic, everyone who smoked (and everyone they came in contact with?) should be dead from cancer already.
PCBs are regarded as a "*probable* human carcinogen". Epidemiological studies of this kind of thing are always *choked solid* with confounding factors. The only absolutely clear data come from lab work, using animal models.
PCBs have been confirmed to cause cancer in rodents, but rodents appear to generally be more susceptible to some carcinogens than humans. There are known cases of rodent carcinogens which are *not* regarded as "probable human carcinogens".
The science in these areas is *far* from done. Recent genetic differences found between rodents and primates raise the very real possibility that humans are virtually non-susceptible to some rodent carcinogens. It is my understanding that, for this very reason, gene-splicing is being investigated to produce rodents whose cancer susceptibilities are more like humans.
-- Mike Greaves
...can be found in Toxic Sludge is Good For You, a fine investigation into the Public Relations industry and the evils it protects. Monsanto is covered in great detail.
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
The problems that we have with companies like Monsanto and, to a much lesser extent, Microsoft, are symptoms of a deeper cultural and legal problem.
In the USA (I'm sure this applies to other western countries too; I'll just talk about the one I'm familiar with) publicly traded companies have a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Think about that. They have a legal obligation to ignore any ethical or moral issues in favor of putting dollars in the pockets of their shareholders, primarily people who are already wealthy. It seems obvious to me that this will lead to corporate cultures with ethics that are upside down from anything sensible. If we're obliged to maximize profits at the expense of all else, doesn't it make sense that successful companies will establish corporate cultures in which the dollar is almighty? In which the the health of non-shareholders is of insignificant importance compared to the profits of the company?
In my opinion, publicly held companies and our notion of the corporation as a legal entity equivalent to a person exacerbate the already existing problem of corporate greed a hundred-fold.
Sauget is a small town located just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. It has a pretty sad history, as you may have gathered from the article. One of my favorite (now-defunct) bands, Uncle Tupelo, wrote a song about it entitled "Sauget Wind." Give it a listen if you can find the MP3 anywhere. Lyrics/guitar tablature are here.
I knew that Monsanto was responsible for the demise of Sauget, but I had never heard the full story until today. Very interesting.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
At the very end of the article is the scariest quote, from a Monsanto 'environmental affairs director':
"I'm really pretty proud of what we did," Kaley said. "Was it perfect? No. Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today." [emphasis added]
In theory GM foods would be a great improvement.
In practice...
1) The developers control who will benefit from it. And they don't appear to be interested in benefits to either the farmers or the consumers.
2) If there are several different approaches, then a choice must be made between them based on the expected value returned. If a centralized control exists for the system, then the choices will tend to be made to favor that centralized controller. (see point 1)
3) Monoculture is known to encourage the development and spread of diseases and pests. But it's expensive to develop a GM food strain, and cheaper to develop only a few varieties. So if the entity developing the strains has any control over the process, only a few will be developed. Therefore monoculture will flourish. Therefore diseases and pests will proliferate. And by a curious coincidence the same company that developes the plant strains is also developing chemicals for pest and disease control.
4) Soybeans have certain isoflavins that are suspected to contribute to health. But the beans store longer if these are reduced. So GM strains are being created to reduce these chemicals. But one can't tell by looking at the bean whether or not these chemical are present. So it may be impossible to choose the healthier variety. The benefits traditionally expected by the addition of soy to the diet are thus defeated, but in a manner undetectable not only by the consumer, but also by the food manufacturers (without expensive testing of each batch of beans). So even reasonably conscientious food processors won't know.
5)...
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, I don't claim to know all the details of why this Union Carbide gas tank exploded - but it sounds much more to me like an accident than something willful on the part of the U.C. management/owners.
Quite frankly, here in the U.S. - we regularly have issues with homes exploding from natural gas leaks. It may not kill thousands at a time, but local gas companies have their lines running into most homes in America -- not concentrated in just a few tanks someplace. Most people consider it an acceptable risk because they like the benefits of natural gas (hot water, dry clothes, heat in the winter). What benefits were people getting from the product U.C. was producing in India?
When things go wrong, we're always quick to point fingers at the companies - but we sure do like to buy their products when they benefit us. Double-standards.....
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.
The corporate charter should be revoked. This is 1st degree homocide. Murder. So the death penalty should be applied. Revoke the corporate charter and issue a LARGE!!! fine. But primarily revoke their charter. Declare them to no longer be a corporation. They are clearly not worthy of it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Wrong - you are EVIL. Even though you inherited problems from your predecessor company - you are still responsible, both to your company and the community around you. It is part of what a good citizen, a good HUMAN does. Evil can take many forms - and in this case it is an outright rejection of the old fashioned notions of responsibility and accountability.
Good call... no connections at all really. The dumpin gof roundup isn't an action of montasano, its an action of the US government.
Theres plenty of good reason to say Montasano is evil. I mean, read the article. A researcher puts fish in the lake they are dumping into, and they shed skin, and die within 3 mins! A stream that was known to meet other streams and run through residential areas.
When confronted with this data, they did nothing. In fact, they defend their actions as having been reasonable at the time. Saying its unfair to judge their past actions by modern standards.
Its not so much that they did it so many years ago that bothers me, its that they still defend those actions as reasonable that is truely frightening, and damning.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It was and remains a frightening vision. Those who bleat about MS monopoly practices should remember that desktop software rarely kills or crippl es. There are far more serious battles going on in the world today.
- Derwen
â
http://fsfeurope.org/
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.
It's correct that cross breeding most hybrid plants would result in dramatically reduced yeilds, (with some plants like squash being exceptions) but it's worth noting that there's nothing that makes hybrid breeding more productive than cross breeding. If you can find an actual experiemnt (rather than some pronouncement from an 'authority) which demonstrates the opposite, I'd like to see it. Hybridization is a form of 'copy protection'. End of story.
Incidentally, some plants such as Corn actually exibit the genotype of their seed in the phenotype, meaning that bad pollen can have an effect on your corn.
And remember that not all farmers rely on hybrid plants. Many third world farmers replant seeds. If their plants are polinated with pollen from monsanto's 'terminator' plants, their own seeds will be infertile and they won't find out till after planting time next year.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
On December 3 1984, a large quantity of Methyl Isocyanate (IIRC) was accidentally released from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Over 4,000 people were killed; over 200,000 were injured.
We all know what happened on September 11 2001.
The apologists among you are already preparing your rebuttal, building the argument that the WTC deaths were intentional and the Bhopal deaths were an accident. Union Carbide, an American company (now owned or otherwise absorbed by Dow) manufacturing a dangerous product demanded by American manufacturers or consumers was very much aware of the dangers of Methyl Isocyanate--precisely the reason why the plant was not built in America. I'm sure profit (the modern-day "prophet") figured into it as well. So by consciously building a ticking time bomb in a poor country halfway around the world, Union Carbide made it clear that the lives near its location were worthless--just as Atta and his crew did as they boarded their planes on that fateful morning.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Fast forward a few years to 2000, and Monsanto was merged into Pharmacia and ceased to exist as a seperate company. The new company decided that it wanted to be just a pharmaceutical company, so it spun off a big piece of itself and named the new company Monsanto, because of the "proud heritage" of the original name.
This is obviously not such a good idea in retrospect, as the new company, which has nothing to do with PCBs, is now getting a big black eye in the media. However, if you check the markets, it's Solutia whose stock price has plummeted, which indicates that the big investors, at least, know which is which.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
"Finally, your assertion that "sterile seeds could spread and render entire regions infertile" is interesting. I was not previously aware
that sterility was a hereditary property. In any case, if "sterile" seeds spread, all you would have to do would be to plough the
"sterile" seeds into the ground and plant a different kind of seed. It's done all the time with weeds."
Single sex sterility IS hereditary however. The best known example is the Texas cytoplasm which was allowed the spread of the corn blight in the 60's. This is a warning against monoculture rather than anything else!
However the use of single sex sterility, or in animals skewed sex ratio's has been posited as a means of pest control several times. Although it sounds unlikely these genes can under many circumstances resulting in a population of one, or large of one sex, which obviously results in a reduction of the population size very quickly.
Phil
And this perfectly demonstrates the flaw with your "Libertarian" philosophy, they assume that those hurt by something will have the market power to prevent it, but often those hurt by pollution and other products of the quest for profit aren't even born yet and therefore have no market power.
Don't trust the market, it doesn't care about you!
Ah, I think I have just been the victim of a troll....
OK don't get me wrong here, I think it is totally repugnant that they pump this shit into waterways wherever they can get away with it. In a local sense this is a tragedy of major proportions.
... I think the potential rewards are well worth persuing genetic modifications of foodstuffs in a controlled and responsible manner. I do not think Monsanto meets any of those criteria, and their actions in deliberately poisoning a town to enhance quarterly profits demonstrates, indeed proves absolutely, their unsuitability as even a potential GM manufacturer.
[...]
In and of itself, that has nothing to do with their genetic engineering division, does it?
Genetic engineering (of food and other things) holds great promise. It also holds tremendous dangers, and must be managed very carefully. This means excersizing a high level of caution, and probably a large degree of public oversight with a conservative criterium for licensing and production (i.e. you must prove the safety of your product, not we must prove the danger of your product).
The use of dangerous chemicals and disposal of hazardous waste is another area with almost identical criteria for the need to be careful and mindful of its dangers. Monsanto has demonstrated a criminal disregard for public safety and a complete lack of regard for the ethics and concerns involved in handling toxic chemicals and waste.
They are clearly unqualified in every respect to take on the risks and dangers of GM food, and should be prohibited by law (or court order) from ever doing so.
I am in favor of GM foods
If they wish to begin doing something that doesn't entail danger to human life, like basket weaving, then I'm all in favor of allowing them to continue operations. Otherwise we should very seriously consider shutting them down perminently. In addition, everyone involved in this atrocity, whether or not they were "just following orders," should be doing hard time in a high-security, no-nonsense (and no club-fed) prison. "Just following orders" wasn't an exceptable excuse in Nuremburg, there is no reason it should be an exceptable excuse here.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"This story is an important story..."
you think so? all over america chemical companies continue to illegally dump toxic chemical wastes, including PCB's and very little is done about it, IF this story turns out to be true (and if you actually read the WashPost story, it's just a report at this point, the WashPost isn't exactly the EPA or WHO, is it?), monsanto then joins the long list of chemical companies who have continuously polluted communities across america...and will probably receive little more than a slap on the wrist, just how important is PCB dumping when we let it happen over and over and over again?..i don't know how old you are, but in the last 20 years in SoCal, i remember DOZENS of JUST PCB dumping stories..i expect to see dozens more in the next 20 years
that's actually a problem with our POLITICAL, judicial and enforcement systems, but most American's (like most
"By creating self-destructing vegetables, farmers are lured into being forced to pay for seed year after year after year. Instead of being able to save a small amount of seed for the next year's crop and becoming self sufficient, Monsanto is forcing farmers in these poor countries to come back to them year after year and beg for more seed.
so what's YOUR solution?
monsanto has to make a profit to pay its employees, its suppliers, its stockholders, the employees need money to support themselves and their families, if monsanto doesn't charge for their products their employees will leave and this "corporate legal entity" that everyone keeps talking about will have no one left to do the work, stockholders will dump the stock, the market will walk away from anything monsanto does, and BINGO, no more ag products from monsanto AT any price...
if YOU don't like monsanto's policies, YOU can go out, put together a company to compete with them, and if monsanto does indeed have inflated prices you will have no problem beating monsanto in the market, vastly cheaper prices will always prevail
"They have entrusted Michael with editorial powers and the ability to post stories. If you do not like this fact, then I suggest you should probably take it up with the owners, instead of the readership at large.
DUH! what exactly do you think i'm doing?
Michael has the journalistic ethics of a whore, he's done more to damage
i don't ALWAYS agree with Taco/Hemos/Cliff, but i RESPECT THEM AND THEIR JUDGEMENT...Michael has no connection with either journalistic or even community ethics...he's using
i'm as politically agnostic and independent as you can get, and if
so lacking any other alternative, here's MY feedback to the rest of the
these are the very things that
how long do you think
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Lynching begins to look like the only really fitting response... how can you let people like that live? They are too dangerous to society.
Microsoft is very different- they don't conceal much. All we'll find out is that lots more 'linux isn't ready', 'boy, OSX's interface bites' articles and opinions were fabricated by MS than anybody knew at the time. If they were really doing that much more, OSS coders would be turning up dead or something. We do already know what they do. It's not much of a secret.
From what I have read, the Bhopal UC incident was an accident...which resulted from willful negligence on the part of UC.
Basically, when the accident occurred, regulations weren't being followed - mostly in the safety area. The people manning the plant were undertrained, or trained wrong, and there weren't enough people actually running the plant as was required. As far as safety measures: the big one was a main klaxon or siren that was turned off to avoid disturbing the citizens of the town should there have been a problem.
Thus, when the problem occurred, nobody in the town knew about it - until they woke up choking.
Read about it, and what happened (and failed to happen) - it is truely one of the more sickening examples of corporate greed.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
A better idea: hold the corporate officers criminally responsible and make them do time. If it's a deterrent for a petty thief, it should be a deterrent to an MBA. If it reduces the number of bad guys on the street, it will reduce the number of bad guys in the boardroom.
Sure there were no regulations specifically against discharging PCBs back then, but if they knew it was harmful it was illegal. If they were destroying economically valuable public resources like streams and fish stocks, it's no different from vandalism, arson or wantonly damaging any other kind of property. If they acted in a way which reasonably could be interpreted as endangering nearby residents based on what they knew, then they should be held liable for acting recklessly even if there was no specific regulation prohibiting PCB release and no demonstrated actual harm. There's probably no law against chucking bowling balls out a tenth story window onto a crowded street, but if I did it I would be arrested and thrown in jail, even if nobody actually got hit. If I killed somebody, I would certainly be up for manslaughter.
You don't need a laws to cover every circumstance, you just need to apply the ones you have to everyone equally.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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
This is the same specious argument that comes up with a LOT of new things...
Fact is, we don't know if NORMAL food is safe, either. How many times have, for example, eggs gone from being declared healthy, to unhealthy, to healthy again? Or margarine? (Low in cholesterol! High in Trans-fatty-acids! Made with healthy vegetable oil!...)
the people in charge of determining whether GM food is safe are the same people who want you to eat GM food.Why does the Food and Drug Administration (at least, here in the US) 'want [me] to eat GM food'? The FDA would probably rather have extensive, expensive testing and regulation that would justify them getting bigger budgets and more authority rather than making 'new' foodstuff available simply. Artificially Genetically Modified foods get a lot more scrutiny than random crossbreeds or imports...
there's absolutly no accountability in the industry.If that's so, why did so much food have to be recalled due to fear of 'StarLink(tm)' corn? If there's no accountability, the companies could simply shrug and say "Uh, no, there wasn't any in OUR food"....
Put simply, GM foods are BETTER understood than a new randomly-bred strain of 'naturally GM' food would be. We don't KNOW what varieties of proteins might be getting produced in a new hybrid, but we DO know, with quite a lot of precision, what type of new protein is being produced in 'artificially GM' food. Bt Corn produces a single, rather specific insecticidal protein (the same one that 'Organic' farmers will often spray on their crops) which can be tested for its effects on humans (none whatsoever, unless you count the miniscule amount of additional nutritive protein that it adds to the corn - humans digest the Bt protein.) 'RoundUp Ready' crops don't produce ANYTHING different - they simply have an additional version of a gene which can continue producing its natural protein while the original 'plant' version of the gene is blocked by glyphosphate.
This whole argument is simple fear-mongering. "It MIGHT cause you to grow a third arm! The plants MIGHT become intelligent and take over Washington D.C. [Note, despite the way modern US politicians behave, this has NOT already happened! :-)]! You MIGHT get a horrible plant disease and turn green!...." But probably not.
There ARE a number of legitimate concerns about artificially GM crops, but none of them relate specifically to the fact that they are GM. Problems of monoculture farming, excessive corporate control of farming practices, possible overly-casual use of herbicides, the remote but real possibility that crop plants might cross-pollinate with wild relatives and pass on the gene [the same problem would exist with 'naturally GM' plants or related plants imported from other parts of the world], the possibility that pests might become resistant to pesticides (insecticides, fungicides, etc.) produced at low levels by 'artificially GM' plants, the fact that some GM crops might (for example) be bigger and last longer but be less tasty, and so on, are all legitimate concerns, but not specific to 'artificially GM' organisms.
Perhaps the only solution is to ban most foods and force everyone to live on carefully bred, thoroughly-reviewed-by-the-FDA yeast paste...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The fact is, the reason companies behave this way is because that's just plain how they work. The costs associated with any action are what counts. Moral implications only indirectly affect things, depending on how their public image affects their bottom line.
I recal a Suzuki lecture years ago where he pointed out, and it still makes good sense, that we will never have companies (or people, for that matter) that are truly environmentally responsible until we have environmental costs that truly reflect the damage to the environment. And the problem, of course, is that we barely know anything, in the grand scheme of htings, about the long-term affects of our actions on the environment.
I'm no tree-hugger; I'm not a terribly environmentally friendly person. But I recognize that society will NEVER be that harmonious with the planet until things change drastically, and that's just not likely to happen.
What if Union Carbide had built that gas tank out of a skin twice as thick, or of a metal that did not rust, or otherwise took greater precautions to prevent an accident.
Their bottom line would be affected, because those precautions cost money. They'd either have to take a cut in profits due to this increased expense, or they'd have to take a loss in marketshare when they passed on this cost to the consumer, and consequently had a higher sale price for their products. Either way, somebody made a call somewhere to scale-back the engineering of those gas tanks, or safety procedures (I'm not familliar with the exact cause of the accident).
Such decisions are often made, completely isolated from potential circumstances. I'm guessing it was probably an accountant that made that decision, with little understanding of how it would impact the safety of the plant. You can't really in clear conscience trace blame back to a bean counter. Even if it was possible to follow the trail of blame back. But corporations necessarily are groups of people working in concert. Folks all down the chain of command probably shared some responsibility, but you can't really say that one person decided that having profits was better than not killing people.
On the other hand, what might have prevented an accident like Bhopal would be for the government to have strict safety regulations regarding the procedures in handling these materials, and frequently inspect and enforce those regulations, and fine the fuck out of the company for violations - and what is currently NOT done, impose judicial oversight, so that there is a paper trail pointing back to the decision makers. THEN we can put those people in jail if they refuse to obey the regulations.
Who pays for all these inspectors and regulators? Well, who is profiting from producing products using these hazardous materials? The victims had to bear the risk, while UC profitted. I think that the people who profit directly need to pay for these kinds of things.
However, in the current system, these things are paid for by taxes on individuals and consumers.
As someone else pointed out - profit is privatized, while risk and loss are socialized.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What on earth are you talking about? Now I know you didn't even read your own references!
Go look at the Medline indexing service, (The bottom link on your brief "Urban Myth Page", posted as a kind of 'final word from the world of proper science' on the subject).
--Yes, while they only provide summaries and abstracts of paid subscriber journals & documents, (which take a bit more work and money to find, but are by no means unavailable), Medline, "Pub-Med", an index of available current medical publications, has right this moment, numerous studies available which describe Aspartame as having significant impact upon the neurochemistry of the brain. --Everything from affecting migraine headaches to dramatically raising serotonin levels in rats.
And what's with calling me a Tin-Foil Hatter? For goodness sake, man! THAT is exactly what I'm talking about. Generalization. Labels. Shutting your eyes because of natural generalities which are never going to go away.
Yes. The traffic of human information is littered with emotion and misinformation and it always will be. But there IS reliable data out there; you simply haven't tried to look. Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater is foolhardy. --Yes, we've all been conditioned to ignore the human information traffic because of its inherent flaws, but the solution is NOT to tune into the corporate information feeds without criticism.
Listen carefully:
Information is messy; it's not easy. If you want to learn, then you have to be prepared to do some work, to sort and study and think. To earn knowledge.
Your tag name is 'RealityMaster101' -A brief look at your posting history and self proclaimed charter, seems to indicate that you've set yourself up in such a way that your ego is heavily involved before you even open your mouth around here.
If you REALLY want to find pure truth as you claim, then you are going to have to disentangle your powers of examination from that of your self-image.
-Fantastic Lad
(And before you waste my time with the obvious moronic dig, my signature is designed precisely to make fun of those who take themselves too seriously. All the 'RealityMasters' out there. Get it? Good.)
hang the rich.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So does sugar.
So do carbohydrates. Not to mention that rats != humans.
And what's with calling me a Tin-Foil Hatter?
Read again. I said, "Do you realize the tin-foil hat ravings you're parroting?". You're the one who said we should do Google searches to find information about this subject (which is guaranteed to find you the loonies). I'm the one who advocated going to reputable sources.
but the solution is NOT to tune into the corporate information feeds without criticism.
Where did I advocate that? You seemed to be positively offended by the fact that there was even a link on Snopes to Monsanto's side of the story. I guess any information that doesn't jibe with what you "already know" is automatically lies, right?
A brief look at your posting history and self proclaimed charter, seems to indicate that you've set yourself up in such a way that your ego is heavily involved before you even open your mouth around here.
"The Reality Master is dedicated to viewing the world objectively; without emotionalism, wishful thinking, cynicism or silly prejudices. The pursuit of simple Truth." I submit that that is exactly what I'm doing. I don't emotionally and cynically believe that all corporate information is wrong. I look for factual information in order to draw my conclusions, from which you might want to take a lesson.
my signature is designed precisely to make fun of those who take themselves too seriously.
I find it highly amusing that you think that you are the only one allowed to have fun with nicks.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Put it this way - Aspartame is a tiny bit of protein, made up of the amino acids Phenylalanine and Aspartic Acid. If this produces traces of methanal as a by-product of metabolism, ANY source of protein (including 'organic beans and rice' and other such things) will do the same.
Incidentally, Nutrasweet, IN SUFFICIENTLY LARGE QUANTITIES, may very well affect brain chemistry - The essential amino acid Phenylalanine is a precursor to dopamine-related neurotransmitters. I somehow doubt that the tiny traces of Phenylalanine in normal amounts of Nutrasweet would be noticeable, but you might have a problem if you're eating a kilogram per day of the stuff....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
He's not saying we should trust Monsanto. He's saying we shouldn't throw GM foods out the window just because one company is bad.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
See? Me again. This time I don't get a point. Wow! That's pretty amazing, huh?
Danse
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I wonder how long it will be before Congress patches up that particular oversight. If any of these cases succeed, I'm sure they'll be swimming in cash immediately afterwards, all from big business trying to cover their asses.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Stop trying to throw reason into this argument!