“It’s food! Really.”

There’s a lot of money to be made if you own both the lock and the key that opens it. Chemicals are Monsanto’s game, so if I told you that they owned both the poison and the antidote you might call it pragmatism. But Monsanto’s real coup was licensing its genetically-modified seeds to the world’s farmers based primarily on the promise that Monsanto’s GM seeds produce higher yields. Cleverly, Monsanto has engineered these seeds to be resistant to their “broad-spectrum” herbicide called Roundup, which is the second half of the bargain.

This alone puts Monsanto in a profitable position, but there’s even more money to be made. Being that farmers can’t own Monsanto’s patented seeds, they must instead license a new batch after each harvest. This turns the ancient practice of seed-saving into a crime, and in response Monsanto has dispatched undercover crop police to root out (ahem) the criminal farmers, and try them for violation of intellectual property rights, patent infringement, and seed piracy.

Still, you can see why farmers would be tempted by Monsanto’s siren song. If you don’t believe that biotechnology has real environmental and health benefits, just ask Monsanto — they have an army of scientists ready with the findings. But the plants that grow from Monsanto’s seed stock don’t keep to themselves. Just as Monsanto’s representatives have infiltrated the upper echelons of our government, Monsanto’s plants produce their own seeds and pollens, and it’s not long before surrounding crops are bombarded by foreign DNA, leading to contamination of the natural surrounding ecosystem, bizarre mutations, and new vulnerability to disease. (This doesn’t just apply to Monsanto, of course. In 2002 a corn engineered by Prodigene to produce pharmaceutical medicines contaminated corn and soybean fields in Iowa and Nebraska.)

Still, farmers remain upbeat about the promise of Monsanto’s products.

[Monsanto’s] seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

(via washingtonpost.com)

The dinosaurs might have said the same thing about that meteor.

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New “fast-pass” traffic lanes between California and Mexico promise to speed processing of the 55,000 vehicles that enter the U.S., provided they’re willing to be tagged with background check information encoded into their SENTRI PortPass, which features Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI) transponder technology.

This sprint toward fascism is met by the popular press without criticism. On the “morning news” this week (which is easily the happiest TV news there is) they were hyping the new $99.95 “Clear Card” which allows travelers to jump to the head of the security line in participating airports. It doesn’t actually get you through security, it just pops you to the top. And all you have to do is submit your bio stats, along with a retinal scan, and this data is encoded into the card for easy scanning!

The angle they played up was the convenience. The angle they didn’t play up was that this data was stored by a government contractor: “Clear® is a subsidiary of Verified Identity Pass, Inc.” A contractor, mind you — which means that they take your data for profit. A corporation storing your data. That’s… um… I think they have a word for that.

It’s not even the clear card itself, but the press’ attitude toward these things that really got me. Where’s the outcry? (Well, it’s online, but that’s not surprising.) This is how the fascists win: by making it “convenient” to give up your freedoms, and by framing “privacy” as difficult or, even worse, as suspicious.

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Seiko Epson’s complaint, filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), calls for a general exclusion order banning the import or sale of less expensive third party cartridges in the U.S.

Epson is able to sell cheap printers because its business model is such that profits can be gained from the sale of replacement ink cartridges. However, Epson is not so interested in fair competition, from outward appearances. And who can blame them? After posting a 56 percent drop in quarterly profits last month, and with more losses forecasted, the company can barely afford to play on an even field.

Meanwhile, the question for consumers becomes: would you buy a toaster that accepted only one brand of bread?

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