A Change of Bastards

It’s a relief, almost, to take a break from wrestling with seriously bad bastards—that would be the National Rifle Association, and do they know, I wonder, that I’m after them?—to deal with another seriously bad bastard.

That would be a little company called Monsanto—which, by the way, my computer seems to know, it corrected me when I spelled it with an “a”--founded in 1901 and located in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

And you probably know that it’s an “agribusiness” and producing genetically modified seeds—indeed, it was one of the first companies to produce and market a genetically modified seed, a soybean that was created in 1983 and tested in the field in the late 80’s.

What you may not know—I didn’t—was that Monsanto started out as a chemical company, and it produced everything from plastics to DDT, Agent Orange, and PCBs.

At about the time that they discovered how to play with genes, they got rid of most of that part of the business. They are still making, however, an herbicide that they tout as “as safe as table salt.” (Or at least they did, until the New York Attorney General got after them. They settled out of court, agreed to drop the slogan in New York, and paid $250,000—small change for them—and denied wrongdoing.)

Roundup is by far the most commonly used herbicide, and its toxicity was for years thought to be low. Is it? As always, it depended on whom you asked—when I was gardening in a public park, I would avoid the garden for days or until a good rain after the city had used the stuff. Oh, and I was growing flowers, not food.

And there is evidence that the studies—funded by guess who!—may have been either poorly done or frankly fraudulent. But two things are known: the stuff is all over the place and farmers who refuse to use the herbicide are at a great disadvantage.

Now then, having created an herbicide of questionable toxicity, Monsanto cooked up a great scheme—create a seed that is resistant to Roundup! This way, the farmer sows the seed, waits around until the weeds appear, and then douses the hell out of his field with Roundup. So Monsanto wins twice, if not three or four times (depending on how often Farmer Jones sprays his field). 

Monsanto wins—but does the farmer? Do we, eating the farmer’s crop? One source reports that over 90% of the soy and canola harvested come from Roundup Ready (as the seeds are called) seeds. Since a lot of soy is used for livestock, nobody knows how high up the food chain Roundup really has gotten.

And Monsanto is not a company particularly easy to like. It tends to go after the people least likely to be disliked—those good farmers out there in the field. Such as the Canadian farmer, who the company charged had a Roundup Ready canola plant growing in his field.

“Hey,” said the farmer, “I don’t use that stuff. The pollen blew in from my neighbors field…”

And are you wondering—how can a company go after a farmer for having a plant in his field?

Because that’s no plant, that’s intellectual property. Yes, in 1980, the Supreme Court decided that the patent laws applied to manmade living organism. So now, 93% of soybeans are from Roundup Ready seeds. Oh, and guess what? The price of seed has tripled since then.

Nor is Monsanto content just to operate this scheme, it is today arguing before the Supreme Court that a farmer violated the law by first buying seeds from Monsanto and then buying seeds from a local grain elevator to plant a second crop. The farmer argued that he had already bought seed for the season, and that the second crop would be less productive, and less profitable. Monsanto said he had no right to buy Roundup Ready seed from anyone except the company.

Can it get worse?

Of course. If memory serves from reading Michael Pollan, Monsanto is now developing sterile seeds, which will have the farmers really locked in a corner. And what will happen if the genes causing the sterility in the seed are transferred to other seeds—not genetically modified? Oh, and what will happen—as it has happened—when the plants develop resistance to Roundup? Already, farmers are told to use multiple herbicides.

Five minutes ago, I decided I was hungry, and so I am eating a peanut butter sandwich. Since I didn’t grow the peanuts, and since the peanut butter in not organic, I am very likely eating a food made from genetically modified seed. Shouldn’t I know? Shouldn’t Skippy be required to label that?

Wanna guess my answer?

Today, Everybody Goes to Their Rooms

It was a time when if you spoke out, you suffered real consequences. There’s Phil Donahue, for example, once at the pinnacle, and the next day in the pit. The Dixie Chicks, whose remarks in London set off a furor. And now we can add Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado.

I should have said “ex-professor,” since the university fired him on 24 July 2007.

And why did he get the sack?

For very serious reasons, say his detractors: plagiarism and academic falsification. Not so, say his supporters, he came out and said the unspeakable: the September 11^th attacks were an inevitable and natural result of our terrible foreign policy. But he went further, as you can read below in an excerpt from his essay, “Some People Push Back”:

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Ouch—that’s pretty strong. And it’s certainly a good way to start a debate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a debate that it spawned, but a firestorm. The media picked it up in January of 2005, with FOX News in particular playing it up—according to Wikipedia, Fox had twice the coverage than the other networks combined.

Is it true? Also debatable—there was a restaurant at the top of one of the towers, so that means waiters and cooks, groups not often held responsible for contributing to the American global financial empire. There must have been maintenance people, secretaries, messengers. But Churchill makes a point—there was also a CIA office in one of the tower. And even if some innocent people got killed, well, we have a term for that—collateral damage. A term, by the way, that we did not get from the Pashto, Dari, or Iraqi Arabic.

Well, the fight spread to a very good school—Hamilton College, which had invited Churchill to speak. And after a news program “invited” viewers to send email to Hamilton College, the school was flooded with 6000 of them.

Eventually the school canceled the lecture, because, in the words of its president, Joan Stewart, there were “credible threats of violence.”

Two former governors of Colorado called for Churchill’s dismissal, and the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado issued a statement “apologizing” to the American people. The Colorado Legislature issued a proclamation calling Churchill’s remarks “evil and inflammatory.”

Things really got bad when people read this, taken from “Dismantling the Politics of Comfort:”

If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I've never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it's part and parcel of what I'm talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there's potential. That's about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I'm actually a de-evolutionary. I do not want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.

“Treason,” cried the governor of Colorado, and called for his dismissal.

The university did something different—pored over Churchill’s research, and found, according to them, serious faults.

There was the question of the blankets of smallpox victims that, according to Churchill, the US army cunningly distributed to the Indians in 1837 at Fort Clark. You may remember this old tale—it’s sometimes alleged to be the first instance of genocide. And the university confirmed that for six times in ten years, Churchill had, according to Wikipedia, “falsified his sources and fabricated his claims.”

Then there was the question of the remarkable similarity between his work and the work of his ex-wife, Annette Jaimes. But Churchill, unbelievably, came up with the reason—he had written the work and his wife at the time had published it, under her name. And since he had written it, well, couldn’t he use it?

There were other allegations as well. And in the end, the university committee unanimously agreed that Churchill had engaged in “serious research misconduct.”

Right—so what to do about him? Oddly, only one of the five people on the committee voted to dismiss him; two members thought the material insufficiently serious to warrant action; two other members favored temporary suspension.

Hunh?

There’s something screwy here. Have we really come to the point where an academic can be found guilty of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications’” and then not receive sanctions? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_academic_misconduct_investigation)

Well, the university took action, and fired Churchill in July of 2007. Churchill, of course, took the university to court, initially won and then lost on appeal. And today, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

My take? There used to be a time when professors could speak their mind, when they could say the things nobody else could, they could write what others might not. In the best schools they were championed; in the worst they were tolerated. The University of Colorado was completely off base.

Second ending. There used to be a time when professors were rigorous in respecting the work of others, in attributing that work, and in representing it fairly in their own writing. Plagiarism is stealing, and for people who value the life of the mind, it is the ultimate, unthinkable crime. Churchill was completely off base.