Monopoly & censorship in your food and environment! (Here’s something that might be worth discussing at Occupy Wall Street)

Most of my career as an environmental consultant has been involved in helping commercial and industrial clients comply with the various regulations in a way that allowed them to still be profitable. About 15 years ago we were working on a nationwide study for a trade association. In our research for that study, we came upon a process that was used during WWI that could possibly benefit many of our clients. We performed some laboratory studies and confirmed that this procedure would indeed be beneficial to our clients and reduce the potential for certain pollutants leaching from a waste material. We published the results of our investigation in a report distributed nationwide (which places the procedure in the public domain). After our report was public, a large corporation filed for a patent for this process. The U. S. Patent Office granted the patent in spite of the fact that the process had been placed in the public domain and was, in fact, merely a different application of a process used during WWI.

We contacted a patent attorney and learned that it would cost us between $250,000 and $500,000 to contest the patent. Our intention was to put this process in the public domain so that people could use it without paying our company, or anyone else, any license fee. We obviously could not afford to contest the patent and so many of our clients are paying an outrageous license fee every year for a process a high school chemistry student could assemble in his back yard. This is similar in principle to what Monsanto has done with the genetically altered soybean seeds. Monsanto now controls over 90% of the soybean seed market. These seeds are patented and it is illegal for the farmers who grow the crops to collect and clean the seed for next year’s crop. We should pause and consider this a moment. Farmers purchase seed with their money; plant the seed on their land; work the fields with their equipment using fuel they have purchased; and, at the end of the season they harvest their crop but are forbidden to use a part of the harvest (seeds) to continue the process next year. What a travesty our government and its legal system have created. Shame on us for allowing this to happen.

The thing in the movie that sent me over the edge was the realization that more than a few states have enacted laws forbidding people to publically criticize the food suppliers. In the movie a mother who lost her toddler son to E Coli won’t mention the names of the fast food outlets where her son ate because she has been threatened with lawsuits that would bankrupt the family. In the state of Colorado it is a felony (with prison time attached) to criticize the beef or pork producers for their animal management practices. Is this not unbelievable? Yes, maybe it is time for another revolution if we are going to save what is left of the American way of life. The government corruption that has lead to this situation transcends parties.

Read the whole post at: Reluc Tant.

COMMENT:

I know the writer and can vouch for his integrity and honesty. I don’t always agree with him, however (nor does he agree with everything in Food, Inc, the movie he is writing about). He goes on to talk about electing “trust-busters” but I don’t see how that could ever work. People who directly profit from lobbying are always going to have more resources to do so then the rest of the plundered and exploited population. The entire concept of “intellectual property” (the only kind of private property the modern state seems to respect) needs to be declared a fiction and a rationalization for robbery and serfdom. The entire situation is Feudal, with lives being destroyed to protect “the king’s deer.”

I’m pretty much an unapologetic abolitionist on the entire arrangement. Even though I’d love to make money as an author.

But notice how corporations now work. There are companies that work honorably. The author works for one that came up with a way to benefit everyone. But those companies are in a system designed to make them the losers and pirates the winners. Corporations are the antithesis of freedom and a market economy. They are the Iron Curtain. And the system is government coercion with Corporations as the Feudal barons.

God grant us an end to these horrors and mercifully release our planet to the freedom of trade and respect for real property rather than tyranny in the name of fake property.

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