By Your Consumer Curmudgeon

Not surprisingly, the news this week was that while retailers were tailspinning towards a fiery crash all around us, one, and one alone is thriving: Wal-Mart. You could see this coming, of course, even decades ago, by visiting virtually any small town or city in America, where local so-called “Mom and Pop” businesses were being driven into bankruptcy by this single, relentless, voracious corporate giant with no scruples, no conscience and no sense of boundaries (because after all, while they have insisted on the same constitutional “rights” as individuals and won their case in conservative courts, they have also avoided the human sense of responsibility that individuals are supposed to have).

I have lived in communities that have succeeded in fending them off, usually at great expense and travail, but those are now few and far between. And Wal-Mart is now better positioned than ever to become America’s retail monopoly, offering Third World goods and paying Third World wages. I wonder if it was Sam Walton’s dream, all along, to be the last billionaire standing, while the rest of the world, or at least the rest of America, were his peasant supplicants, unable to afford, at his wages, to shop anywhere else, ever again.

It seems we are almost there, now. But it doesn’t end there. Walton’s troops only dominate and control retail sales. Manufacturing is also almost gone, of course. And with that distribution, and then, service industries.

What will be left will be agriculture, just like in feudal times. With one glaring exception: as in retailing, there will be one player dominating, if they have their way, not just the American agrarian landscape, but the entire world. How? By patenting seeds: the basis of life itself. This was patently (sorry) illegal, until in a 5-4 decision in 1980 the Supreme Court decided to let Monsanto and a few other companies play God.

Monsanto Corporation, over the past twenty five years, in addition to imposing GM (genetically modified) seeds on the marketplace, has positioned themselves to be able to not only force farmers to buy seeds every year from them and them only, but vigorously prosecute any who dare to remain natural (i.e. grow and save their own seeds). They have gone so far as to invade farmers’ fields with armies of thugs, searching for any signs of GM presence, even if it wasn’t planted there (i.e. blew in from a neighboring farm). Then they had, until recently, the gall to sue farmers for “using” their seeds, and forcing them to continue using them thereafter. Forever.

Since that decision in 1980, Monsanto has registered no fewer than 674 patents in biotechnology. They have turned our factory farms into real factory farms, and are determined to turn us all into robots by forcing us to eat their artificially created produce. So they not only are seeking to replace God’s produce with their own, they are forcing farmers to buy it, and us to consume it (because there will be, if they have their way, nothing left to choose from otherwise). But Monsanto isn’t stopping there. Since recent court decisions have forced them to stop using their “seed police” to intimidate farmers who didn’t buy seeds, but had had their crops cross-contaminated anyway, they have now developed what they cheerfully call “terminator technology.” This means that the seeds “self destruct” after producing one crop. They become like mules, unable to reproduce, forcing farmers to buy fresh ones the next year, and every year forever, by making it pointless to save seeds because they are sterile. And of course Monsanto, the true overlord, will decide on the price.

There are two things we consumers can do to combat this pervasive evil, which is what it is: buy strictly organic (although they are trying to cross-contaminate their way into controlling that industry as well) and stop buying processed foods of any kind because virtually all of them are, or soon will contain these GM products.

Bon appétit.