Cancel 2016.2
The Almighty
Yurt.... when you decide to read the thread, you will see I already answered it.
Greenpeace needs to be dissolved
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- Start date
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
You didn't answer my question.
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The Almighty
thanks
Bfgrn
New member
You CAN'T even read about red state conservative farmers in North Dakota who are fighting on the side of Greenpeace. You just LOVE to lick the ass of corporations especially when a corrupt government agency is in bed with them...
Bfgrn
New member
You keep trying to reach a new low...
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The Almighty
ok... a bit off topic, but thanks for sharing
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The Almighty
to each their own, to each their own
Bfgrn
New member
You are really embarrassing yourself...
Oh, I almost forgot how to reply to your level of intelligence...
I know you are, but what am I?
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The Almighty
Sorry.... but they are eco terrorists.... you will just have to deal with that.
Bfgrn
New member
OK Freak...it is clear that you have surrendered and are resorting to childish attempts at diversion...
YOU are derailing your own thread...LOL
The strong parallel with my schooling you on the Boston Tea Party and the colonist's rebellion against the biggest transnational corporation and supporting community based economies is STARTLING!
Excerpt from: Breadbasket of Democracy
In 2004, George Bush carried North Dakota with 63 percent of the vote. It seems like the last place that one might go looking for a revolt against the powers that be.
Nor does a man like Todd Leake seem like the type of person to participate in any such uprising. “Extreme traditionalist” might be closer to the mark. Lean and soft-spoken, Leake has spent the past twenty-eight years farming the homestead established by his great-grandfather, a Canadian immigrant who arrived here over 120 years ago. “I guess you’d describe me as an umpteenth-generation wheat farmer,” he says, “because as far back as we can tell, on both sides of the family, it’s been farmers. And as far back as we can tell, it’s also been wheat.”
On a crisp, windy November day, Leake reflects on the events that turned him into a thorn in the side of the agribusiness establishment, especially the Monsanto Company. He gestures toward two symbols. The first, just visible through his kitchen window, is the outline of the North Dakota Mill, the only grain-handling facility owned jointly by the citizenry of any state. “Sort of the epitome of farmers cooperating,” he notes.
The other symbol offers a less inspiring vision, one of farmer fragmentation and disempowerment. It is a simple refrigerator magnet inscribed with the words, “MONSANTO CUSTOMER SUPPORT 800-332-3111.”
“They call it customer support,” says Leake. “It’s actually a snitch line, where you report that your neighbor is brown-bagging. Or where somebody reports you, and a week or two later you find a couple of big guys in black Monsanto leather jackets standing in your driveway.”
Brownbagging is an old term in rural America. It refers to replanting seed from your own harvest, rather than buying new seed. Lately the term has come to possess a second meaning, that of a crime, a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty allowing private companies to obtain patents for lifeforms, and the Court’s 2001 decision in J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer affirming that the saving of seed constituted a patent violation.
When Todd Leake first became aware of genetic engineering in the mid-1990s, the prospects sounded enticing, including heady promises that new biotech crops capable of producing industrial chemicals and even pharmaceuticals would expand agricultural markets and thereby raise farm incomes. “But when they finally came out with actual product,” he said, “it was all about selling more Roundup.”
Roundup, Monsanto’s leading product, is the trade name of an herbicide based on the chemical glyphosate. By using genetic engineering to create glyphosate resistance in common crops, Monsanto made it feasible for farmers to apply Roundup directly to fields at any time in the growing season, killing weeds without killing crops.
By 2000, Monsanto had successfully introduced “Roundup Ready” corn, alfalfa, canola, soybeans, and cotton in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the company began field-testing and pursuing USDA permits for Roundup Ready spring wheat. Wheat is the world’s most widely cultivated food, and Monsanto wanted to introduce it as the crown jewel of genetically modified (GM) crops. North Dakota, which accounts for 47 percent of the U.S. acreage for spring wheat, was vital to the company’s plans.
But Leake wondered whether the new seed would end up actually hurting farmers. One worrisome possibility was that “Frankenfood”-averse European or Japanese markets would reject GM wheat, causing the price to collapse. Something similar had happened in the late 1990s, when the Japanese had begun rejecting soybean shipments containing transgenic material.
Another concern was Monsanto’s record of suing scores of farmers whose crop was found to contain patented genetic material, even miniscule amounts that had arrived via spillage, wind-blown seed, or pollen drift. He found himself sympathizing with Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who had been sued by Monsanto in 1998 for violating the company’s patent on Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser had never bought Monsanto’s seed. He had only planted seed saved from his own fields. Apparently, his fields had been contaminated through seed blown from passing trucks, but it didn’t matter: brown-bagging had turned him into a common thief.
When Leake talks about wheat, his tone shifts subtly, becoming almost reverential. “Wheat’s an amazing plant,” he notes. “It’s a combination of three Middle Eastern grasses, and that gives it a huge genome. In many languages, the word for ‘wheat’ is the same as the word for ‘life.’ There’s a ten-thousand-year connection between wheat and human beings, each generation saving seed. Now it’s in our hands.”
In January 2000, Leake began urging various organizations in North Dakota to oppose the introduction of genetically modified wheat. One of the groups he approached was the Dakota Resource Council, a network of local groups that originally formed in the late 1970s to deal with strip mines and power plants. (For full disclosure, I should note that I spent several years working for the council in the early days, first as a field organizer and later as staff director, until I left in 1982.)
Leake’s concern about GM wheat fit naturally within the DRC’s scope, but questions remained: what tactics should be adopted, and what objectives should be pursued? A reasonable political strategy might start from the assumption that GM wheat would inevitably come to be a presence in fields, freight cars, and grain elevators; hence, those concerned about negative effects would try to shore up protective regulations so that GM wheat would not contaminate non-GM wheat.
But Leake and the DRC opted to seek a different solution: an outright ban on GM wheat in North Dakota until all outstanding concerns were addressed.
YOU are derailing your own thread...LOL
The strong parallel with my schooling you on the Boston Tea Party and the colonist's rebellion against the biggest transnational corporation and supporting community based economies is STARTLING!
Excerpt from: Breadbasket of Democracy
In 2004, George Bush carried North Dakota with 63 percent of the vote. It seems like the last place that one might go looking for a revolt against the powers that be.
Nor does a man like Todd Leake seem like the type of person to participate in any such uprising. “Extreme traditionalist” might be closer to the mark. Lean and soft-spoken, Leake has spent the past twenty-eight years farming the homestead established by his great-grandfather, a Canadian immigrant who arrived here over 120 years ago. “I guess you’d describe me as an umpteenth-generation wheat farmer,” he says, “because as far back as we can tell, on both sides of the family, it’s been farmers. And as far back as we can tell, it’s also been wheat.”
On a crisp, windy November day, Leake reflects on the events that turned him into a thorn in the side of the agribusiness establishment, especially the Monsanto Company. He gestures toward two symbols. The first, just visible through his kitchen window, is the outline of the North Dakota Mill, the only grain-handling facility owned jointly by the citizenry of any state. “Sort of the epitome of farmers cooperating,” he notes.
The other symbol offers a less inspiring vision, one of farmer fragmentation and disempowerment. It is a simple refrigerator magnet inscribed with the words, “MONSANTO CUSTOMER SUPPORT 800-332-3111.”
“They call it customer support,” says Leake. “It’s actually a snitch line, where you report that your neighbor is brown-bagging. Or where somebody reports you, and a week or two later you find a couple of big guys in black Monsanto leather jackets standing in your driveway.”
Brownbagging is an old term in rural America. It refers to replanting seed from your own harvest, rather than buying new seed. Lately the term has come to possess a second meaning, that of a crime, a consequence of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty allowing private companies to obtain patents for lifeforms, and the Court’s 2001 decision in J.E.M. Ag Supply v. Pioneer affirming that the saving of seed constituted a patent violation.
When Todd Leake first became aware of genetic engineering in the mid-1990s, the prospects sounded enticing, including heady promises that new biotech crops capable of producing industrial chemicals and even pharmaceuticals would expand agricultural markets and thereby raise farm incomes. “But when they finally came out with actual product,” he said, “it was all about selling more Roundup.”
Roundup, Monsanto’s leading product, is the trade name of an herbicide based on the chemical glyphosate. By using genetic engineering to create glyphosate resistance in common crops, Monsanto made it feasible for farmers to apply Roundup directly to fields at any time in the growing season, killing weeds without killing crops.
By 2000, Monsanto had successfully introduced “Roundup Ready” corn, alfalfa, canola, soybeans, and cotton in the United States and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the company began field-testing and pursuing USDA permits for Roundup Ready spring wheat. Wheat is the world’s most widely cultivated food, and Monsanto wanted to introduce it as the crown jewel of genetically modified (GM) crops. North Dakota, which accounts for 47 percent of the U.S. acreage for spring wheat, was vital to the company’s plans.
But Leake wondered whether the new seed would end up actually hurting farmers. One worrisome possibility was that “Frankenfood”-averse European or Japanese markets would reject GM wheat, causing the price to collapse. Something similar had happened in the late 1990s, when the Japanese had begun rejecting soybean shipments containing transgenic material.
Another concern was Monsanto’s record of suing scores of farmers whose crop was found to contain patented genetic material, even miniscule amounts that had arrived via spillage, wind-blown seed, or pollen drift. He found himself sympathizing with Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who had been sued by Monsanto in 1998 for violating the company’s patent on Roundup Ready canola. Schmeiser had never bought Monsanto’s seed. He had only planted seed saved from his own fields. Apparently, his fields had been contaminated through seed blown from passing trucks, but it didn’t matter: brown-bagging had turned him into a common thief.
When Leake talks about wheat, his tone shifts subtly, becoming almost reverential. “Wheat’s an amazing plant,” he notes. “It’s a combination of three Middle Eastern grasses, and that gives it a huge genome. In many languages, the word for ‘wheat’ is the same as the word for ‘life.’ There’s a ten-thousand-year connection between wheat and human beings, each generation saving seed. Now it’s in our hands.”
In January 2000, Leake began urging various organizations in North Dakota to oppose the introduction of genetically modified wheat. One of the groups he approached was the Dakota Resource Council, a network of local groups that originally formed in the late 1970s to deal with strip mines and power plants. (For full disclosure, I should note that I spent several years working for the council in the early days, first as a field organizer and later as staff director, until I left in 1982.)
Leake’s concern about GM wheat fit naturally within the DRC’s scope, but questions remained: what tactics should be adopted, and what objectives should be pursued? A reasonable political strategy might start from the assumption that GM wheat would inevitably come to be a presence in fields, freight cars, and grain elevators; hence, those concerned about negative effects would try to shore up protective regulations so that GM wheat would not contaminate non-GM wheat.
But Leake and the DRC opted to seek a different solution: an outright ban on GM wheat in North Dakota until all outstanding concerns were addressed.
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where? i read your only response as.....depends which side is doing the calling
not an answer, given you are so strongly calling greenpeace terrorists....why are you afraid to take a stance on the boston tea partiers? if you gave a specific answer, kindly cite, i didn't see it.
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The Almighty
Do us all a favor you fucking idiot.... Start another thread if you wish to discuss your 1982 article on Monsanto. THIS THREAD IS ABOUT THE ILLEGAL ACTIONS OF GREENPEACE YOU IGNORANT POS.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
The only think he said was "One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter."
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The Almighty
Great, another fucking retard to deal with. This thread is ON GREENPEACE.
But quickly since you are obviously too fucking dense to get it on your own. In my opinion, the Boston Tea Party members were patriots. In my opinion, they were likely viewed by the British as terrorists. Hence my comment, one mans freedom fighter is another's terrorist. Hopefully this concludes your idiocy.
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wow...who pee'd in your cheerios? getting your opinion on the boston tea party helps me gauge your opinion in this thread. your opinion is clearly intellectually dishonest. while the axiom usally is true, the situation here presents you as a huge hypocrite as there was no war over the protests. you got it wrong, you can't have it both ways here. if greenpeace are terrorists, then so are the boston tea partiers....
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exactly, IOW...he never answered the question until i prodded him enough...his answer is the very definition of intellectual dishonesty
Cancel 2016.2
The Almighty
This is why I didn't want to get into the Boston tea party you fucking moron. You are incapable of understanding the relationships involved. You pretend they are the same. They are not.
But I shall endeavor to educate your ignorant ass anyway.
England was trying to FORCE the people to buy tea from the British East India Company. Australia's government was doing RESEARCH into whether or not GM Wheat would be safe. One is a repressive government the other a benefactor. the members of the Boston Tea Party were standing in the face of that oppression. What exactly did Greenpeace stand for? What was their goal? What did they base their decision on? As I stated, one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter. I told you which side I stand on for both issues. I acknowledged that there is an opposition to both of my positions. So do tell us Yurt... where is the hypocrisy you accuse me of? Do tell us you actually have an intelligent comment and that this is not another one of your pathetic attempts to play semantics. Please tell us you are not wasting our time yet again.
Now.... as for your rambling.... how does a lack of war over the protests make me a hypocrite? Do explain that for us moron.
Bfgrn
New member
More extremely relevant excerpts from: Breadbasket of Democracy
What is Greenpeace and North Dakota farmers fighting for? The SAME thing the colonists who threw the biggest transnational corporation's tea overboard were fighting for...
AMERICA’S PRIMARY decision-making system, known as representative democracy, is two centuries old. Structured according to the terms and judicial interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, it nominally governs decisions on all elements of public life, from elections and schools to privacy and environmental regulations. But whatever its strengths, the Constitution leaves a fundamental issue open to interpretation: who controls important economic decisions, and how will they be made?
This ambiguity allowed the rise of America’s other major form of decision making, corporate capitalism, which emerged between the Civil War and the First World War. That system is not democratic, nor does anyone claim it to be. It has given the managers of a few hundred large corporations the power to make many of the big decisions that will shape the future—what energy technologies should be invested in, what medical research should be turned into pharmaceutical products, how aggressively timber or mineral resources should be extracted, how workplaces should be organized, whether hundreds of independent radio stations should be consolidated, and so forth.
According to the generally accepted rationale, corporate managers respond to markets, and markets in turn respond more or less to public preferences as expressed through buying decisions. At times one even hears markets described as a sort of democracy, with customers voting via their dollars. But because for-profit corporations are legally mandated to maximize shareholder return, their managers tend to shut out considerations vital to the larger society. In the revealing language of neo-classical economics, social effects of a product are labeled “externalities,” or marginal considerations rather than central ones.
In any case, as the conventional wisdom goes, what’s the alternative? Surely a market system, whatever its imperfections, is preferable to an economy rigidly controlled by monolithic bureaucracies: that is, state socialism. And here the conversation typically ends.
Today, we rarely hear such simple questions as, “What is an economy for?” or “Should we trust our future to corporations?” But these were exactly the sort of questions that farmers in North Dakota decided to ask during the debate over GM wheat. As one farmer, Steve Pollestad, expressed it, North Dakotans had a choice. They could put the future of wheat “in the hands of people who are accountable to the citizens of North Dakota. Or, we could let Monsanto decide. And maybe we also could get Enron to run our utilities and Arthur Anderson to keep the books.”
It’s no coincidence that such sentiments grow out of the fields of North Dakota. Beneath the state’s conservative surface are surprising currents of history, some quite radically divergent from the American mainstream. North Dakota’s economy cannot be described as corporate, but neither can it be described as socialist. Perhaps the best way to describe it is with a term that doesn’t appear too often in economics textbooks: democratic.
For residents from Amidon to Walhalla, civic participation means not just serving on political bodies such as the county commission or the school board, but also taking part in running economic institutions such as the local electric co-op or grain elevator. Farmers see nothing extraordinary in buying gas from a co-operative gas station, buying electricity from a rural electric co-operative, borrowing college money from the publicly owned Bank of North Dakota, and selling their milk to a producer co-operative. The theme of noncorporate economics pervades the state, extending even to agricultural processing co-operatives handling everything from noodles to tilapia. Indeed, as a matter of state law, corporate-owned farms are banned in the state.
North Dakota’s unique economic arrangement grew out of a strain of radical populism that swept the state from 1915 to 1920. The revolt ignited in 1915 when a North Dakota state legislator named Treadwell Twichell told an assembled group of farmers seeking relief from the state, “Go home and slop the hogs.” One of those farmers, A.C. Townley, couldn’t go home to his hogs; he had already lost his farm in bankruptcy court. Instead, Townley and his friend Fred Wood sat down in Wood’s farmhouse kitchen and drafted an audacious political platform. In essence, their call to arms urged farmers simply to bypass the corporate agricultural system altogether by creating their own grain terminals, flour mills, insurers, and even banks.
Townley was a charismatic speaker. Farmers flocked to his fledgling organization, the Non-Partisan League. To the delight of crowds, Townley shouted, “If you put a banker, a lawyer, and an industrialist in a barrel and roll it down a hill, you’ll always have a son of a bitch on top.”
What is Greenpeace and North Dakota farmers fighting for? The SAME thing the colonists who threw the biggest transnational corporation's tea overboard were fighting for...
AMERICA’S PRIMARY decision-making system, known as representative democracy, is two centuries old. Structured according to the terms and judicial interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, it nominally governs decisions on all elements of public life, from elections and schools to privacy and environmental regulations. But whatever its strengths, the Constitution leaves a fundamental issue open to interpretation: who controls important economic decisions, and how will they be made?
This ambiguity allowed the rise of America’s other major form of decision making, corporate capitalism, which emerged between the Civil War and the First World War. That system is not democratic, nor does anyone claim it to be. It has given the managers of a few hundred large corporations the power to make many of the big decisions that will shape the future—what energy technologies should be invested in, what medical research should be turned into pharmaceutical products, how aggressively timber or mineral resources should be extracted, how workplaces should be organized, whether hundreds of independent radio stations should be consolidated, and so forth.
According to the generally accepted rationale, corporate managers respond to markets, and markets in turn respond more or less to public preferences as expressed through buying decisions. At times one even hears markets described as a sort of democracy, with customers voting via their dollars. But because for-profit corporations are legally mandated to maximize shareholder return, their managers tend to shut out considerations vital to the larger society. In the revealing language of neo-classical economics, social effects of a product are labeled “externalities,” or marginal considerations rather than central ones.
In any case, as the conventional wisdom goes, what’s the alternative? Surely a market system, whatever its imperfections, is preferable to an economy rigidly controlled by monolithic bureaucracies: that is, state socialism. And here the conversation typically ends.
Today, we rarely hear such simple questions as, “What is an economy for?” or “Should we trust our future to corporations?” But these were exactly the sort of questions that farmers in North Dakota decided to ask during the debate over GM wheat. As one farmer, Steve Pollestad, expressed it, North Dakotans had a choice. They could put the future of wheat “in the hands of people who are accountable to the citizens of North Dakota. Or, we could let Monsanto decide. And maybe we also could get Enron to run our utilities and Arthur Anderson to keep the books.”
It’s no coincidence that such sentiments grow out of the fields of North Dakota. Beneath the state’s conservative surface are surprising currents of history, some quite radically divergent from the American mainstream. North Dakota’s economy cannot be described as corporate, but neither can it be described as socialist. Perhaps the best way to describe it is with a term that doesn’t appear too often in economics textbooks: democratic.
For residents from Amidon to Walhalla, civic participation means not just serving on political bodies such as the county commission or the school board, but also taking part in running economic institutions such as the local electric co-op or grain elevator. Farmers see nothing extraordinary in buying gas from a co-operative gas station, buying electricity from a rural electric co-operative, borrowing college money from the publicly owned Bank of North Dakota, and selling their milk to a producer co-operative. The theme of noncorporate economics pervades the state, extending even to agricultural processing co-operatives handling everything from noodles to tilapia. Indeed, as a matter of state law, corporate-owned farms are banned in the state.
North Dakota’s unique economic arrangement grew out of a strain of radical populism that swept the state from 1915 to 1920. The revolt ignited in 1915 when a North Dakota state legislator named Treadwell Twichell told an assembled group of farmers seeking relief from the state, “Go home and slop the hogs.” One of those farmers, A.C. Townley, couldn’t go home to his hogs; he had already lost his farm in bankruptcy court. Instead, Townley and his friend Fred Wood sat down in Wood’s farmhouse kitchen and drafted an audacious political platform. In essence, their call to arms urged farmers simply to bypass the corporate agricultural system altogether by creating their own grain terminals, flour mills, insurers, and even banks.
Townley was a charismatic speaker. Farmers flocked to his fledgling organization, the Non-Partisan League. To the delight of crowds, Townley shouted, “If you put a banker, a lawyer, and an industrialist in a barrel and roll it down a hill, you’ll always have a son of a bitch on top.”