Dealing with Monsanto’s Evil Means Eliminating Corruption in Government
Here’s an article called Monsanto Isn’t Feeding the World—It’s Killing Our Children, which, rightfully, has sparked a great deal of outrage on Facebook and elsewhere. An old friend writes: So many different kinds of people and groups protest this! Can’t we get together and TAKE THEM OUT? Any ideas? How best to organize their collapse?
This, obviously, is a good question, but it raises a larger issue: the world is run by large corporations, and, while some more malevolent than others, all of them benefit from our corrupt Congress. As long as the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision “Citizens United” is in place, which enables corporations to spend as much as they like influencing our elections, there is little hope for justice and reform in the food industry, or anywhere else for that matter. Whether you’re a proponent of safe and nutritional food, affordable health care, environmental stewardship, or any other public good you can name, your efforts will be thwarted as long as Congress really doesn’t care a whit about what you want.
From an earlier post here called “The American People Want Clean Energy, But….”
Over the years here at 2GreenEnergy, we’ve repeatedly made the point that the will of the American people is almost always frustrated by special interests. In fact, we in the U.S. suffer under a political machine that systematically ignores the will of the people, as suggested here: a few facts that came from a recent presentation that Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig gave to a large and earnest audience.
- According to surveys of thousands of Americans, we almost unanimously agree on two things: a) money has too much influence on politics, and b) there is nothing that can be done to change this.
- 4 million Americans (a little under 2%) made cash donations to a politician in the last election, but the top 100 gave more than the bottom 4.75 million.
- A study from Princeton University shows an almost 100% correlation between Congressional votes and the interests of these Top 100.
- The same study shows that the decisions that Congress makes on the variety of issues are completely independent of the will of the people. Whether 20%, 40%, 60%, or 80% of the electorate supports a certain subject, this has no statistical bearing whatsoever on how the Senate and the House will vote on the matter.
Now, let’s ask ourselves this: How does that translate into energy policy under the Trump Administration?
A Pew Research survey published Monday found that 65 percent of Americans “give priority to developing alternative energy sources, compared with 27 percent who would emphasize expanded production of fossil fuel sources.” This, to say the least, seems a bit out of step with the new regime’s obsession with oil, gas, and even coal.
If we thought our government was indifferent to the will of the people before the 2016 election, just watch what happens when ExxonMobil and the State Department become one, and both the Department of Energy and the EPA are eviscerated (or eliminated entirely).
While this post is about money in politics many also know Monsanto as the center of an ongoing controversy about GMO or genetically modified organisms. The biggest concern seems to be the potential for modified genes to escape into the natural environment. On a recent trip, I had a chance to look at this surprising article in the Harvard Magazine subtitled “…peculiar genetics of a parasitic plant” You can find it here online: http://harvardmagazine.com/2017/03/colossal-blossom
“But until Davis’s discovery, gene transfers between higher organisms such as plants were considered extremely unusual, and researchers could only speculate about the conditions in which they took place. The unprecedented nature of the transfer Davis uncovered could shed light on questions such as the likelihood that genetic modifications in crops might escape into the environment, and, in medicine, on basic understanding of the evolution, transmission, and maintenance of virulence in human pathogens.”
This article acts as a warning call to tell us that GMO may not be as benign to our natural environment as we assume and that at the very least additional safeguards are warranted.
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Regarding money in politics I have been watching with interest the ongoing political career of Bernie Sanders who made this a key point of his campaign. Someday the occupy wall-street movement may be seen as the roots of this concern. Now there are a number of organizations that seem to be inspired by the same goal to get money out of politics:
https://represent.us/
http://www.democracymatters.org
http://www.wolf-pac.com/ (an unfortunate name that is close to the name of some unrelated sites.)