GMO, Monsanto, organic dreadlocked nonsense?

The important thing everyone should be looking at Monsanto for is not genetics in food (That shit isgreatfor mankind--go go spider silk goat!)...But because companies like Monsanto, Record Labels and even EA are the first legal "battles" that will dictate how the war is fought during our generation. These companies are redefining what it means to "own" something....and essentially, a lot of your basic rights come down to ownership--what you're allowed to own, dictates your power, which is why the most disenfranchised among us typically own nothing (They rent). This is why entire wars were fought--once you get past the bullshit of "freedom" and all that feel good rabble rabble, it usually came down to "what I own, and what I'm willing to share".

In the modern western world, we decided were willing to share with governments we deemed legitimate through the will of the people (The amount depends on the people). We were NOT willing to share with Lords who gained legitimacy through birth or because they could unfairly disenfranchise us with said legitimacy or through financial power (IE work without pay or too little to ever own your own stuff--this included robber baron practices). Even to this day, we are still struggling with "fair" compensation, which allows people to move up--and that's getting worse on it's own (Without this new legal fiasco brewing), every year it's a fight to stop workers from sinking back into serfdom...and now you have this. These companies are essentially new feudal lords which will uselegallegitimacy (Not JUST financial, like say Wal-Mart does to fuck it's workers over) to prevent people from owning what they actually manage to buy.

I mean, I hate to sound overly dramatic--it really does sound like Lumie territory...but property ownership is such a huge pillar of our way of life, that ANY change to it is absolutely massive and these companies have been slipping it in for years now, with small court battles and quiet lobbying. At least Communism/Socialism, theoretically, still found ultimate ownership in "the people" (I know, in principle it didn't quite work)--but these are private entities, who WANT to control products you've legally purchased.

So the question becomes, as production and manufacturing become cheaper and cheaper, and easier for smaller and smaller capital controllers to start--what happens? What happens when 3d printers can perfectly copy shirt designs and anyone can own one for 200$? This IS the legacy of our generation (This and net neutrality). This is our civil rights, it's our end to facism--this is what we will be remembered for when our grand kids groan about visiting us in nursing homes. It's some serious shit, and I wish more people paid attention to it. As is now, most people I talk to think the constantly growing reach of copyright/patent companies is fine--they don't see the absolutely catastrophic effects it's having within places like Silicon Valley, I mean, entire companies now do nothing but own patents and sue people who actually make shit, looking to be a middle man and scoop up some profits. They don't realize how much money that's sapping from the economy, how it's stifling "growth" and advancement. How far will things like that go? That's what we have to decide, and we really need people paying attention to lobbying and court efforts surrounding this issue.

Tuco_sl said:

I don't know why I should care.

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You should care because you still (Maybe not you, but a lot of people) still pay something like a 400% mark up for an Iphone, or clones of Iphones. A lot of the high prices you see in everyday products are now happening because companies hold patents--not because they make the product better or more desirable. Things did not used to be like this, the patent system in this country has quickly gotten out of control and it's preventing the normal working of capitalism. If a product makes an obscene profit margin, it should allow room for a competitor to make the same product, far cheaper. This is a core tenant of how our system works (It's one of the protections for the "little guy" to start his own company and the consumer to get cheap stuff.). We have patents to allow people to recoup that investment, but companies and business are finding work arounds and more obscure, smaller patents (Often on the same thing) that push their control on the overall product up to a term well beyond the envisioned recuperation period.

This cycle is what's starting to starve silicon valley--literally the only new industry the U.S. has produced in the last 40 years will die if it continues. And these companies spend immense amounts of money to get their cases in court and get senators listening because they want the same kind of deal that record labels have enjoyed the past 40 years--IE taking 70% of an items profits,for all time, for doing nothing but paying someone else a small fraction to develop it.

hodj_sl said:

Yes well they spent 150 million dollars to identify a gene and its function, to develop a process of isolating it and inserting it effectively into the nucleus of another species in the correct location, and they should have some sort of return on that investment. Just because you bought round up ready crops doesn't give you a right to mass produce them and then resell them at a lower price without any renumeration to the crop developer.

The problem is the patent system, not Monsanto trying to protect their intellectual property and investment.

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Monsanto, and other companies have been pouring tons of money to alter that system. Which is what I said we have topay attention to(Never talked about what was fair for Monsanto to get)...So, not sure what I said that was different from what you said. But yes, companies deserve to recoup investment and make a profit. They do not deserve to be able to lock down their idea for decades because they can lobby more effectively than the private citizen.

Edit: And you guys should note--I never said we need to fight, or destroy monsanto or anything. I said we need to pay careful attention to how these laws are changing. Because these companies don't want fair, they want to give themselves an advantage. I stopped short of saying what action we should take--I think it will be okay as long as everyone pushes their own input into the system. But right now, that's not the case, laws and precedence are being changed everyday with only the smallest blurbs in the news and not a care in the world from everyone else--despite this being an absolutely massive issue.

Dbl post.

Big Phoenix_sl said:

Its in a businesses nature whether its a mom and pop corner store of Apple to make a profit, how they go about doing the vast majority of the time is what is allowed by whatever body governs said business. What you are talking about is a complete failure of the patent office. I mean really, what do you expect to happen when businesses are granted patents for such idiotic ideas like a shape or movement of fingers?

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Which is why I said the problem is with how big companies are lobbying the government to subvert patent laws.....Again, I'm not saying we should pay attention to Monsanto for the product they make. I'm saying we should pay attention to how patents are handled in this country and how companies like this are changing that.

hodj_sl said:

Most of Monsanto's lobbying is towards getting new products approved, not in trying to affect patent laws in one way or another.

They do spend a lot on lobbying, but its to get shit like their latest round up ready sugar beet approved, not to get patent laws changed to favor them. Patent laws haven't changed much since the mid 90s when they were altered to reflect WTO agreements. The problem with patents in GMO industry is that there should be expiration dates on numbers of successive generations of crops, rather than just a flat 20 years, and cross pollination needs exemptions. The fact is that no one, politician or otherwise, are pushing to get patent laws in regards to genetic modification of organisms changed in a common sense way not because of Monsanto's lobbying, but because all of the agriculture industry is balls deep in the ass of the Federal Government and has been since its founding. Why does corn syrup cost less than imported real sugar in the US? Subsidies to agriculture. Same shit, different story. The government loves to coddle agriculture in general, always has.

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From how I understand the issue--and this isn't my area, so I might be wrong. But these "new" strains are often just small derivations on old ones, that tend to lock down older crops under their control for longer and longer periods. From what I've seen with tech companies, this is the process they go with. I know Monsanto pushes a great deal of money through Washington and that's just open channels--the amount of backchannel greasing that goes on from companies reliant on these industries, like the big food corps, is absolutely insane.

Edit: And "patent laws changed" doesn't mean hard changes--it means recognition of different types of "information" or content that was not within the purview of the original laws (Because it didn't exist), being expanded to include various products owned by these companies--and often times these new "precedences" are chaotic, sloppy and create a pretty strong legal web for the companies to prevent competition...So they don't lobby for the letter of the law to be changed, they lobby to get the Senators to ignore the ever expanding ad-hoc changes the patent office has to make to deal with these new industries.

hodj_sl said:

Not disagreeing with you on that, but the fact is that its all that money and all that government involvement that makes us one of the world's largest food exporters even though only about 2% of our population are actively involved in the food economy.

Its been going on that way for an incredibly long period of time.

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Yeah, but the problem is, the individual farmer gets crushed and from an economics perspective it becomes an increasingly hostile environment for competitors with less capital to spar legally with these guys. This, like in many industries now, is what is driving market irregularities which is what drives a lot of the high social inequality we have. If small business can't exploit the weaknesses of big business, then you have situations where both the end consumer and the laborer/small capital controller lose out--this really hurts social mobility in a capitalistic society.

When you really dig deep in the financial world, you see it's things like this are the root causes for break downs in markets. Most Friedman market businessman (Neo-Liberals) will, on one hand, say the lack of government produces lower prices, but simultaneously exploit the government to prevent competition.

Kaita_sl said:

How much do you think a bag of soybeans would cost if seed company's did not protect their R&D investment by preventing Bin run planting? Nobody is forcing farmers to purchase seed from these companies. If they do not want to follow the tech agreements they should not purchase the seed.

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I think a lot of the problem is that farms that op out of the Monsanto soybeans are getting some anyway through pollination from neighboring farms and are somehow expected to stop that. Also Monsanto is suing the shit out of anyone and everyone not using their seed. I got this from some hippie documentary so maybe they were interviewing farmers who tried to steal the seed and then told some sob story about how Monsanto is bullying them, I don't know.

It is a little weird though to buy a seed, plant it, and at the end of the harvest you somehow don't own the seed that remains. If they can genetically modify the seed to somehow be infertile, that's fine. But to say the farmer who buys seed and plants it doesn't have complete ownership of whatever comes out of it, that doesn't jive with my sense of property rights. It's just like Apple selling you an iPhone and saying you can't jailbreak it. The courts basically said "you bought it, so it's your property and you can do whatever you want." I think the same should apply to seed

Dabamf_sl said:

I think a lot of the problem is that farms that op out of the Monsanto soybeans are getting some anyway through pollination from neighboring farms and are somehow expected to stop that. Also Monsanto is suing the shit out of anyone and everyone not using their seed. I got this from some hippie documentary so maybe they were interviewing farmers who tried to steal the seed and then told some sob story about how Monsanto is bullying them, I don't know.

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From what I recall about that case, the farmer used RoundUp on his land while claiming cross-pollination. Basically, Monsanto's crops are modified so they are resistant to this herbicide. So if it were just a matter of cross-pollination, he'd presumably have continued farming as he did before - without RoundUp.

hodj_sl said:

The individual farmer is a myth, dude. 2% of the nation is involved in farming. Mass monoagriculture has been the norm for 40 plus years, if not longer. Most of the nation stopped farming a long long long time ago, and that's a good thing. The less people we have laboring to produce food, the more people we have engaged in the intellectual economy. That's why so many people left the farms, went to college, and got jobs in the cities and suburbs in the great migration from the rural to the urban setting post World War 2.

Social inequality doesn't even come into the picture, single family farmers have always been some of the poorest people in every society, the only ones poorer were the hunters and gatherers who were shoved into marginal territory with the advance of agriculturalists monopolizing as much arable land as possible. Pastoralist nomads tended to be wealthier than single plot family farmers, and we shouldn't be building our society on the idea that a single family farm should be market viable in this economy, because you're talking about less than 1/10th of 1% of the 2% of the nation directly involved in farming, we shouldn't be hampering the actual food producers over some ideological silliness over keeping the single family farm market viable in an age of mass production. We should want farming totally automated, to be quite frank.

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Individual from an economics perspective does not mean family farm. It means farms which compete with each other, rather than cooperating in a larger conglomerate. Part of the reason you get this competition is the ability for smaller companies to expend capital to carve out profits in markets where lower price points become possible.

And social inequality is at the absolute core of this issue--the inability for small capital to move into a market creates social inequality--just because farms are a base material, and so were the first to really succumb to the effects of capital collection (As you said, 40 years ago) doesn't mean it's the most efficient way for the market to be handled. Not going to write more, because I was unclear in what I meant as individual--but there is no silly ideological desire to see capital competing--that's pragmatism attempting to prevent market irregularities by removing an unfair advantage the government brings. (This all goes back to a lot of issues, but yes, a lot of the problems we see today stem from this same issue growing into other markets.)