USDA Moves to Let Monsanto Perform Its Own Environmental Impact Studies on GMOs
April 24th, 2011Via: Grist:
In early April, the USDA made what I’m reading as a second response to Judge White, this one even more craven. To satisfy the legal system’s pesky demand for environmental impact studies of novel GMO crops, the USDA has settled upon a brilliant solution: let the GMO industry conduct its own environmental impact studies, or pay other researchers to. The USDA announced the program in the Federal Register for April 7, 2011 [PDF].
The biotech/agrichemical industry has applauded the new plan. Karen Batra of the Biotechnology Industry Organization told the Oregon-based ag journal Capital Press that the program will likely speed up the registration process for GMO crops and make the USDA’s approach less vulnerable to legal challenges like the rebuke from Judge White. Capital Press summed up Batra’s assessment of the plan like this: “The pilot program will not only help move crops through the process more quickly, but the added resources will also help the documents hold up in court.”
Research Credit: midnightagain
It’s really hard to find the words to express the level of disgust I feel at this decision. Does anyone who was part of it even begin to feel the responsibility placed upon their shoulders by law of safeguarding the public health?
Saying the system is broken doesn’t begin to address the actual problem. Sometimes I think our idea of what a corporation is needs to be completely overhauled. As it is now, corporations behave like a living entities. They have no natural limitations to their growth but the available food. Their actions so often seem to boil down to the magnified aggregation of the individual hungers of the individuals employed, or invested. And the anonymity of the group, works to help bulwark the amorality of action that seems characteristic of so many corporations.
I don’t see human nature changing. Maybe we need to devise not just more strict regulations on how a corporation can behave, but enforce some sort of more destructive life cycle on them. Maybe no corporations should be allowed to grow past a fixed size. Maybe guaranteed death (break-up into separate companies) past a given size (employees or $$$) should be faced by all companies.
Yeah, it’s probably crazy. And I know any new set of regulations would be just gamed by the same old companies to their advantage, if you could even get such legislation passed. But I’m so @#$@#$ tired of feeling like one more pathetically rebellious number in the spreadsheets of the corporate world, not eating as much of their crap as I’m supposed to, not buying as much of their junk as I was predicted to, ignoring as much as I can of the media garbage that is busy trying to pry-bar its way into my life.
If they could take my life’s allowance of taquitos and cola and 3-car McMansions filled with toxic drywall and mind-numbing TV shows and turn it back into unmolested soil and undrilled petroleum, I would sign up right now.
Zeke
One of my impossible to implement ideas would be to have a maximum total compensation ratio for the top and bottom tiers of employees of corporations. The CEO can only make some multiple of whatever total compensation amount the janitor makes. Total compensation doesn’t just mean salary. It means total compensation. Everything. Stock options, dividends, bonuses, etc. Contractors/temps are not exempt from this.
This would just apply to corporations. Sole proprietors would not have this constraint.
In general, big is bad, so, I thought, how can we deal with super-sized corporate fascism without requiring complex regulations?
This is a simple, structural mechanism that would cause more people to have the resources to become entrepreneurs. More entrepreneurs = more competition = rat poison for corporate fascists.
If sole proprietors are psychopaths, there’s only so much damage that they can do on their own without the absurd responsibility avoidance mechanisms that corporations enjoy. If they decide that they want the protections associated with a corporation, fine, then the maximum total compensation ratio rule kicks in.
I don’t agree with everything on this chart, but I agree with a lot of it:
http://conceptualmath.org/philo/minwage.html
That’s a very interesting read.
The central idea is that any solution to the problems that result from unregulated corporate growth must be systemic – it *must* be inescapable, or at least as close as can be managed.
I can’t imagine legislation enforcing anything this radical being passed in any existing political system in which the current political (economic) powers have established themselves. House rules like this only happen when they’re put into play at the start, or during an, er, ‘governmental discontinuity’.
On an semi-related note.
Sometimes I think that the creeping fascism we see is really only the cumulative expression of the natural wariness each individual feel towards untrusted-but-encountered others, magnified by the artificial sense of ‘connection’ or ‘neighborness’ generated by pervasive media – the world seems smaller, other individuals seem closer, and the correlation between our fates and theirs are much more obvious in a world where the connections are so much more visible – and empowered by the every-growing technological capability for surveillance and control.
Zeke
>>One of my impossible to implement ideas would be to have a maximum total compensation ratio for the top and bottom tiers of employees of corporations.
Here is your impossible: http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6154
An administrative worker, for example, might receive two minimum wages per month, and in December last year the Salaries, Pensions, and Retirement of Senior Officials of Public Power Law was passed, setting the highest wage any public worker can receive, including the country’s president, vice-presidents, and ministers, at 12 minimum wages.
Not widespread, but the concept of multiples is law.