Norm, thank you for the link. Hundreds of your readers have stopped in.

Consuming to survive. A college education isn't enough anymore to make a decent living. It's all like a strange pledge of allegiance. How long will it take for folk to realize that "politics" isn't our (America's) problem. Go corporatism.
(Norm, for whatever reason typekey not working for me tonight.) -tgs-

Hmm. Sign-in is busted.

I was actually all into that article until I followed the corporatewatch.org link and saw that it's an apparent horrible violation of everything sacred to support GM food. Gee whiz, given that there's never been a single proven case of any harm done by GM food, and GM food could be feeding starving people all over the world right now if not for misinformed Greenpeace hippie scare tactics, I don't know how much I agree with that.

Why don't you ask Norman Borlog about how awful GM food is? The guy has only saved billions and billions of lives.

I'm more hung up on the chocolate slavery and the Perrier aquifer depletion than I am on whether or not a corporation attaches intellectual property rights to a seed variety. Although that sucks too and the word isn't in on what a transducing phage virus might do to the planet's food supply in the context of GM seeds. Think AIDS for plants...

“Gee whiz, given that there's never been a single proven case of any harm done by GM food, and GM food could be feeding starving people all over the world right now if not for misinformed Greenpeace hippie scare tactics...”

You may be right. Not a case of “harm” from stuff like GM food. But... that should not be the point. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should (quote from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park). Corporations should have no “rights”. Corporations should not serve the stock market. Corporations should not do whatever they want. GM food is wrong because we have more than enough production capacity for food.

The point I’m trying to make is that corporations, just like people, are out of control. I’m not advocating politics or ideology to control corporations – or people. Doing the right thing doesn’t require a law.

Laden 2cents. –tgs-

The term cheap labour and slavery is not mutually replaceable.

Slaves in most cases aren't paid for their labour beyond food and board.

Labour can be cheap artificially i.e. someone forcing kids to accept ludicrious wages.

Or it is cheap because of context i.e. US$1 per hour maybe beans to people in US but in countries that have a much lower standard of living, it makes kids feel rich.

Anyway, we need something more reliable that the Big Mac index to measure affluence in different countries i.e. the price of Big Macs differ greatly worldwide due to different levels of affluence in different countries.

It was originally meant to be cyber trivia but became a well known indicator.

"GM food is wrong because we have more than enough production capacity for food."

There are two problems with this statement.

The first is that the only reason we have a surplus of crop anywhere in the world right now is due to GM. Without people like Borlog traveling around the world and introducing hybridized and modified versions of staples, many areas would be suffering a serious food shortage.

The second is that there are still many areas suffering that food shortage because of the idiocy of Greenpeace and similar organizations, insisting that there is something wrong with GM food (and calling it 'Frankenfood') and influencing policy.

Nobody wants tumors or a third arm out of their forehead. If there were valid reason to believe that there were something wrong with GM food, I'd be right there with everybody else holding a picket sign.

But there isn't. All the fairy tales hippies come up with about merging fish with tomatoes and making Frankenstein monster food is just self-serving BS. And I simply cannot stand the impossible smugness of some greasy-haired hippie eating a $7 natural lettuce and feta cheese sandwich, and telling me that people in the 3rd world are better off starving than eating GM food.

Unless you spend all day gardening, everything you eat has been influenced by the hand of man. Your corn and weat are hybridized. The food is harvested by machines and pest-controlled with pesticides. The hand of man has been primarily responsible for the bounty we have today. Not sharing that bounty is just selfish.