Well, it was an unfortunate turn of phrase, as repeated.
RickJay:
Actually, Rick, I don’t think I have the energy at the moment–in the midst of my final law school paper of the year–to engage more heavily in this particular thread…too many bulldog posters (and I don’t mean that derogatorily). But if you’d like to e-mail me, I’d be very interested in having a discussion on the subject–up to and including having my mind changed.
One thing that’s always baffled me about the anti-globalization protestors. They simultaneously argue that trade between the U.S. and Third World countries is invariably explotatative, and leads to the impoverishment of the Third World… and yet, they all seemed to wave signs calling for an end to sanctions on Iraq and they all demand free trade with Cuba.
Now… if they really believed that trade with the U.S. is bad for the Third World, why would they WANT Cuba or Iraq to trade with the U.S.?
Many thanks to Kimstu, Collounsbury and Sam Stone for their perspectives on this issue. While I am somewhat to the left politically of these last two, I am troubled by the seeming lack of coherence of the anti-globalist’s arguments, and by the emphasis on the negative (street protest) at the expense of the positive (concrete proposal for change).
I don’t necessarily think this is the most important issue, but I’m still wondering if any anti-globalists would care to answer the question I posed earlier: would you be OK with having to pay vastly higher prices for goods and services? I ask because this would seem to be a natural result of anti-globalist policies.
Further to this before I piss off
Perhaps, perhaps not. I suppose the ignorant twits serve a purpose, however confused and bumbling they are, but it is a dangerous game. It would be far more preferable to engage in seriously informed critiques.
While I believe there is a serious case to be made for clarifying WTO practice on environemental issues, and clarifying standards generally, the above statement strikes me as a partial red herring.
On the clarificaiton issue, in re WTO and potentially other trade agreements, some clear statements in regards to acceptable multlateral environmental regulation would be a good thing. At present I understand that WTO institutional staff themselves believe that Montreal protocol and similar instruments pass muster and are approp. however this needs to be explicity stated.
The red herring aspect arises form the problem of manipulation of environmental and saftey standards as disguised protection. Unilateral environmental action has the real potential tobe nothing more than a means to skirt free trade requirements. Japan is notorious for this kind of behaviour.
Further, no sovereign is ever “forced” to participate in an accord. As the US has demonstrated, when one thinks one is not getting the best deal, one can walk away. It’s painful perhaps, but so is remaining outside the system.
This has absolutely nothing at all to do with globalization. Absolutely nothing. Local institutional corruption.
Bother.
Primo, as noted supra in my prior intervention, such ‘pressures’ arise from unsustainable spending. At some point the chickens come home to roost when debt levels rise above what is sustainable. IMF strictures are a whole lot fucking less nasty then being shut out of the market entirely and forced to rely on one’s internal resources. That means either massive cut backs or simpy printing money, and hyper inflation. Compare Turkish performance before IMF versus the hyper inflation of the 1980s. What was worse for the avg. Mehmet, 1000% inflation or IMF strictures? Get your data together before you answer.
I further note that the IMF rarely mandates cutting services to the poor per se, they require reductions and eventual elimination of subsidies in large part, as those are inefficient and frequently the Middle Classes and elites capture more value than the poor – another example of the muddled thinking anti-globos have and the degree to which they buy into the self-serving excuse making coming of of developing country elites.
All in all, while IMF has made mistakes, far larger ones have been made by the domestic governments, who take the occasion of IMF negotiations to blame all the bad on the big bad meanies in the IMF rather than their own corrupt practices.
I’ll finally add that in general (there are specfici instances I would make exception for) laws that promote foreign investor confidence are a good thing for the economy as a whole, and that includes locals. I will concede, as do I think many analysts, that capital controls on short term flows may be a very prudent thing, but otherwise the larger part of practice such as allowing profit repatriation, non-discrimination btw for. and local investors, rules against exrop. etc. are good, unambiguously, for all.
I am unaware of any of the multilaterals such as the IMF requiring foreign investor input directly in crafting new laws. Can say MicroSoft sometimes buy a new law? Sure, that’s life and little to do with globalization per se.
Here I can’t argue, the playing field needs to be leveled, and that means the developed world needs to make major climb downs.
Well, tough. The reality is unlaterally walking away from your debt means not being able to borrow more. Odious debt is nice little phrase, like ‘fair trade’ but of dubious pratical application.
Of course, we already have international mechanisms for debt write offs and write downs in the context of multilateral negoations, so that is good. Certainly this could be made stronger, and now that the neocons have suddenly gotten religious, opportunistically enough, on debt due to Iraq maybe we will see some sensible progress.
Scare word.
Competition.
Maybe.
Becuase they are half-informed and poorly understand the economic framework we have come to call globalization.
Well enough but nota bene he has a serious axe to grind with his former House which severely color his perspective.
Thanks for the responses, Coll.
Incentive for US workers to retrain and move into more competitive industries. Does that hurt individuals, yes it does, it most certainly does. In the short run these things are painful, however we have a clear historical record that in the aggregate over a medium and long term running in decades that in aggregate one is better off with this rather than namby pamby ooh they’re losing their jobs whinging.
“In the aggregate over a medium and longterm running in decades in aggregate,” I think you’re quite right. It’s obvious, though, that individual workers whose jobs have moved away from them are going to be focused on the shorter term. I don’t advocate this as a reason for abandoning globalization, I merely point it out as an example of an important issue that is going to continue to resonate with antiglobs—no matter how much the proglobs continue to scold them for “whinging”—unless more serious measures are taken to help workers recover from job loss.
As such I differ from my North American conservative colleagues insofar as I see very Bismarkian reasons for having social programs.
Me too, not least of which is that, as you say, they help reconcile people to the uncertainties of freer markets, whose efficiencies can benefit them.
*Build up the economy, ensure liberal ideas in re freedom of association and minimal rights – realistic ones—are actually enforced, and let the process take care of itself. *
Sounds good. Can you give an example of a set of the “realistic” minimal rights that you think glob-dev should actually ensure to enforce? It would be easier to convince antiglobs that their expectations are unrealistic if we could present a concrete and coherent alternative that could convincingly be defended as realistic.
Simply complaining these guys have not gotten rich yet ignores internal problems, the reality that getting rich takes time and the reality that alternatives are as general matter, impoverishing.
I agree. However, I have to point out that the expectations of rapid progress are often nurtured and encouraged by the foreign investors themselves—“Let us bring you prosperity by setting up our factories in your country! Liberalize your trade policies and capital markets and you’ll have a chicken in every pot!” You can hardly blame uneducated poor people for feeling resentful when these rosy prospects don’t materialize.
It would be more honest to tell them “Look, you’ve got a lot of internal problems, and you won’t get rich anytime soon off of our development plans—which, let’s face it, are motivated much more by our own pursuit of profit than by any altruistic concern for your development, that’s business—but any alternative path you take is likely to be a lot worse for you in the long run.”
Let me speak to Tunisia, a small scale but successful example to date[…]
Thanks! This is exactly the sort of real-world practical example I was looking for.
On the clarificaiton issue, in re WTO and potentially other trade agreements, some clear statements in regards to acceptable multlateral environmental regulation would be a good thing.
Yup.
[On trade barrier asymmetries] I can’t argue, the playing field needs to be leveled, and that means the developed world needs to make major climb downs.
Yup.
Well enough but nota bene [Stiglitz] has a serious axe to grind with his former House which severely color his perspective.
I know, which is why I linked to a somewhat critical review of it which emphasizes that he only tells one side of the story.
It would be far more preferable to engage in seriously informed critiques.
Well, that’s what I’m trying to do. Thanks for your assistance.
Actually, it sounds as though there is more common ground between serious proglob and antiglob positions than one might suspect just from listening to the mutual accusations of “colonialist pigs” and “ignorant twits” flying around everywhere. As you point out, in order for global economic development policies to work well, there have to be political changes in the developed world and in trade agreements, especially on issues like displaced workers and environmental and trade-barrier asymmetries. On these specific issues, the antiglob movement has the potential to be one of your strongest allies.
There was a great PBS program called Commanding Heights that discussed Globalization.
You can watch the whole program on the PBS Site
As someone quite interested in intellectual property issues both nationally and internationally, I’ve noticed that this has been thrown around quite often. Unfortuantely, when it is thrown around, it’s generally under scare words such as “biopiracy”, which I have seen no citations showing the scale of this. Certainly, prior art needs to be respected.
As for saving seeds, this again is something of a misnomer. It only applies to patented GMOs, and if it is so important for the farmers to save these seeds, why on Earth are they buying plants that they are specifically prohbitied from doing so with? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to use traditional crops, if the practice is so important?
Though I recognize that international IP laws do have some imbalances and need to have a hard look at (cough Shortercopyrightterms cough), these issues tend to be something of a red hearing.
Nb: Wouldn’t it make more sense just to use traditional crops, if the [seed saving] practice is so important?
Absolutely. But that is exactly what international seed producers are hoping to displace by opening up Third World markets to their commercial products. They very much want to sell commercial seeds to traditional farmers, and market them aggressively. And this seems (according to a case study I read about East Timor) to be fairly effective, as farmers are ready to believe that the new, packaged, Western stuff must be better than their same old seeds.
So who cares? Farmers have the choice between traditional seed stocks and new imported commercial varieties and can decide which ones they want to plant, and so the free market is just giving the consumer more choice, right? Right in theory, but the problem seems to be that traditional sowing and seed-swapping practices tend to spread different seeds around among different farmers. If a farmer accidentally ends up with imported patented seed stock in his crop that he didn’t pay for, he could be i) breaking the law and ii) in the case of “terminator” seeds, stuck with a bunch of non-reproducing plants that he can’t get seed from for next year’s crop.
So what and caveat emptor and farmers will just have to be more careful to guard themselves against the downsides of the new technology, right? Sure, but you can see why it pisses many people off to realize that the seed companies are deliberately planning to make it more difficult or more expensive for them to use their traditional farming practices. Monsanto, for one, has been fairly aggressive in filing lawsuits against North American farmers who violate the patent, even where the crop contamination with patented seeds was accidental.
Again, I think it would grate less on many people if the companies were more upfront about the bottom line motivation: “This is about our maximizing our profits, so we’ll use attractive marketing, technological controls, and strict enforcement of property rights to get you to use our seeds without following your traditional farming practices, so you’ll have to buy more seed from us. If you decide that the new patented product is worth the extra expense, then everybody’s happy.”
Instead, of course, they come in with glowing advertisements about how the seeds will have higher crop yields and resist pests and be more nutritious and solve Third World hunger and all that; you’d think they were patenting this stuff out of sheer philanthropy, wouldn’t you? Naturally, many people end up a little bit pissed off when they read the fine print. This is what Our Cecil has described as the “frigging-Monsanto” reaction.
“Biopiracy”, I think, is some people’s loose way of referring to the fact that biotech companies get samples of traditional “public domain” food or medicinal plants from farmers at low cost, and then make them into expensive patented products without sharing any of the profits. I agree that it’s not a legally justifiable description of most biopatents.
But it does reflect the natural bitterness many people feel at the realization that the knowledge and effort accumulated over centuries by a traditional population working with these plants is worth exactly zilch in the commercial biotech market, while the work of the biotech company to patent the product can be worth tens of millions.
I’ve wondered if globalization, as presently constituted, has increased wages,* or has led to a race to the bottom in terms of wages and worker protections, among other things. That’s a serious question. But, I’m not planning on throwing rocks at any bankers or bean counters.
I’d hate to be against jobs in developing nations because in my Western-biased perceptions they aren’t ‘good’ jobs. But, some level of protections must be afforded.
This is one of those really sticky difficult issues that does not lend itself to sloganeering or half-baked rhetoric. Ah! What am I doing here? :eek: 
*Overall, globally, factoring out everything else. That’s not an easy number to come by.
Beagle:
I believe you need a very robust econometric model to tease that out, due to multiple countervailing forces. Wage pressures from globalization are going to be hard to distinguish from wage pressures (+/-) from increasing or decreasing relative supply of labor in specific sectors at specific skills levels or pressures due to technology changes, etc.
Not necessarily unanswerable, but in regards to developing countries I think it may very well be unanswerable bec. franky the data is not good. Enormous segments of the economy operate in the “informal” -i.e. unrecorded sector.
A word on Kimstu’s q. to me on sustainable policies in globalization: In my opinion there is no single global menu of rights that should be imposed. Middle income states can sustain and can benefit from things low income states can not. Rather how I feel, for example, about the shrieking about child labor. In the context of a developing Middle Income state, or at least one with income more than $2000 per capita, I fully support that. But then you read wailing about Africa, where child labor is often in traditional practice and sine qua non for family survival where per capita income is only a few hundred dollars at best. There I think you need a more flexible approach, dist. from ‘industrialized’ and ‘systematized’ abuses and simple family factoring.
Mere example of my hostility to one size fits all solutions. And outrage.
Okay, this connects with my former line of work, and also with my irritation with the sort of mythology that gets pimped around on this subject:
Listen, we (me formerly) try to develop and sell a product with real uses. It’s called progress.
Frankly the dewey eyed romanticism about traditional agri practices irritates the fuck out of me since it is just that, stupid dewey eyed namby pamby romanticism.
The reality is that with population pressures specific to certian areas, more efficient means of production are needed if local producers are to survive and land usage is to be sustainable.
Period.
Preservation of tradition and all that is just fine, but people don’t live in damned museums, do they? No, they live in fucking reality, and while indeed seed saving practices are well and fine, for commercial production they don’t cut the mustard any more.
Commercial agri products win in the market, when they do win, because they have real advantages. Not becuase my former industry is hood winking folks.
No we fucking didn’t. Commercial farmers are where the money is, traditional farmers are too poor and don’t have the return to justify the outlay. Now, there is that middle area of quasi-traditional farmers selling to the commercial market, and they should be a market for new seed products since in order to get better yields, more efficiency, they need new products.
First, there are no fucking terminator seeds on the fucking market, Monsanto killed the program. It fucking pisses me off to read this bullshit.
Second, in the developing world you it ain’t fucking worth suing for mega dollars, let alone piss-ant chump change of a “traditional” producer.
Traditional bullshit. Higher efficiencies necessitate change, that’s called progress. W/o progress you have ever more intensive usage of the same land for progressively lower yeilds, that means impoverishment, potentially long term soil damage and inability to compete.
All this romanticization of “traditional” farming practices is a bunch of namby pamby crap. There are certainly traditional agri practices that are worthy of study in the context of adaptation to local micro-climates and the like, but I am sick of reading hand wringing concern over traditional practices.
Monsanto has been run by lawyerly assholes for a while, but as I noted in a rant some two years ago re a Canadian incident, the North American “innocents” in re contamination have often proven to be far from innocent. Guileless farmers, salt of the earth bullshit. You can search on Monsanto, Canada and me in the Pit as I recall.
For all this, I did and continue to despise Monsanto for the damage done to a promising field in the name of quarter driven profit maximization. Assholes. (I admit that no one in the industry was innocent but maintain that the fuckers there were a main driver)
Bother. Then we’d have the usual suspects shrieking on about the ruining of traditional practices and evils of big corp evils boys and the fucking like.
While I am not a fan of overselling and overdone marketing, I hardly think that anyone who is not a drooling moron thinks we did the work out of sheer philanthropy.
I would have liked to have seen more low cost selections available, but frankly it is pretty fucking expensive to work on this stuff, and it never helped that the scare mongers destroyed test crops and generally upped expenses on application.
Now, I readily grant that we generally as an industry (past tense for me) oversold some aspects and I was not personally pleased with some of the rush to market on the BT stuff, alhtough I genuinely feel that was something that Monsanto touched off and blew the original industry game plan. Generated deserved as well as hysterical opposition.
It’s not even a terriblely accurate one.
No, it is not worth zero on the market. It is worth what it is marketed as. Further the charges of bio-piracy utterly abstract away from the millions of dollars we had to spend to analyze and distill to get to something scientifically, let alone commercially worth while.
It’s pure fuzziheadedness to think that much traditional materials are in and of themselves worth millions. One gets a lot of dross, and frankly our efforts to distill the accurate and the useful from the bullshit and the superstition have and had value. Real value added, and it pisses me off to hear easy and inaccurate charecterizations.
However, at the same time, I fully realize there is a public good problem – no one owns the diffuse knowledge (and anti-knowledge) of traditional agriculture, nor is there any readily identifiable ownership of non-commercial plants. As in many problems like this, you’ve got two routes: (a) government/public efforts to collect and stock and analyze the knowledge and materials (b) assigning property rights for the same to enable private protection. In my opinion much of this broad and diverse array of things that we call ‘traditional agriculture’ (a fuzzy romantic term in the end for much of its usage) are hard if not impossible to equitably assign property rights to.
Rather than demonizing firms like my old Swiss Masters, it’s rather more useful to push for coherent programs to collect and protect information on a public science basis. Nota bene, I say science for there is much irrational bullshit out there on this. Set up properly with equitable licensing procedures and the like, the big players will be happy to play ball and even help fund.
I’ll close in saying I am not up to date on this anymore, as I disengaged a bit back when I decided to change careers.
Sam: “Anti-Globalization is an interesting ‘philosophy’, in that it is largely incoherent.”
Which is precisely why, Sam, just about no influential and well-informed critic of the current globalization status quo endorses such a philosophy. But that is not to say that there are no coherent critiques of the status quo: there are, in fact, many. Indeed, it would be every bit as easy to make the argument that “globalization” is an interesting ‘philosophy’ in that it is largely incoherent. In truth, there is very little of substance to be said in the simple avowal of being “pro” or “anti” globalization. Globalization is a phenomenon of our times and has been for decades. Hence, most people with something informed to say about the matter accept its existence as a matter of course. As far as fleshed-out standpoints go, there is almost certainly as much or more “anti-globalization” rhetoric coming from the right (a la Pat Buchanan) than there is from the left (though it’s certainly true that some labor unions have somewhat different reasons for wanting to turn back the clock as such–although there are more forward-thinking positions within the labor movement as well).
I don’t actually have the time to take detailed part in this debate which is a shame because there’s so much to be said on the matter. OTOH, Kimstu has already laid out most of the most important issues with applomb.
What I would say is that it amuses me to no end how those who want to take on this issue–which is to say, to defend the status quo–will repeatedly do so by mischaracterizing critics in order to present criticism in the least flattering and most “incoherent” light. I wish I had a dollar for every globalization thread in which the point was made that the most serious arguments against “globalization” are actually arguments for globalization in a modified form; that a better way of characterizing such arguments–if a simplistic rubric must be adopted at all–is as arguments for fair trade, but not at all against trade itself. And yet those who ought to be edified by such important provisos seem constitutionally allergic to putting simplistic misapprehensions behind them so as to clear the way for intelligent debate. It leaves me to wonder: is it really that much fun to argue with your own artificially concocted strawman?
Let me add that in the years since the Seattle protests it has become less likely that anyone is going to get a fair or even representative sampling of what kind of serious arguments there are against the status quo from reading protestor’s signs, or hearing media snippets of what youthful protestor A or B has to say on the streets. The protests have become both more dangerous and more demonized by the mainstream press (esp. here in the US) while the message that needs to be put across remains just as complex. Protesting is a blunt instrument: good at raising public awareness under the right circumstances, as I think the Seattle protests did (despite the media bias against them), but highly difficult to manage in terms of coherent message. It’s hard enough to tackle the issue in a SDMB post–much less in a soundbite. So, of course, one will find underinformed people on the streets who aren’t able to articulate the position that inspired them to protest in a four-second interview with a reporter; and of course some also lack deeper understanding entirely. There are, to be sure, people on the streets who are more motivated by a desire to be rebellious and anti-establishment than by any particular set of political, economic, legal or environmental arguments. Is that really so surprising?
Collounsbury, I don’t know exactly what it is you do (does anyone?) but I’m willing to believe that there are many NGOs on the ground advocating for a level of change that wouldn’t be immediately practicable: not from your perspective and not, perhaps, from anyone else’s. But that’s not to say that in any given situation that what is already being done–by the IMF, the WTO, by multinationals, by existing government actors in the West and the third world–already assures us that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
To simply take the position that Sam takes–that regulation geared towards raising wages and safety standards in the third world creates no prosperity–is dogmatic in the extreme. It’s also demonstrably false. Higher wages and safer and more humane labor practices in the third world are ultimately in the interests of the first world–and vice versa–since what the entire global economy needs more of is people, sound of wind and limb, who can afford to partake in what there is to buy. And that’s precisely what is driving the current problem: an excess of productive capacity and a deficiciency of consumers able to absorb this capacity because they haven’t got the money. And they haven’t got it partly because segments of the global labor force are being bid further and further down: jobs that first went from the US to Mexico are now leaving Mexico for China. When you follow the money trail of where those extra profits go–right now–it doesn’t add up to a healthy global economy, because the global economy (particularly the part of it that we in the West rely upon for our prosperity) still consists largely in providing goods and services to people who earn more than a basic subsistence. I haven’t seen any market fundamentalist argument–and I do take Sam to be a market fundamentalist–that addresses this problem. Nor do I know of any historical situation in which an economy was stabilized without workers being able to buy at least some of what was being produced–if not necessarily by themselves than by some other workforce.
In the long run I think there is cause to be optimistic about what globalization can bring about. It’s great for there to be engineers in Malaysia as well as Paris, software programmers in Moscow as well as Silicon Valley, and skilled factory workers in rural China as well as Munich. But to believe that stabilizing these outcomes isn’t going to require codified standards and a broader sharing of the wealth–and to believe that such standards and such wealth-sharing are going to come about without active citizen and labor movements–is to be living in an ahistorical la la land. That’s fine if free markets happens to be your religion. But you’ll have to pardon others for taking a more empirical and historical view of the matter.
I hardly think there is much mischaracterization ** at all** of this “movement” – the claims that there are seem to be a sort of no true Scotsman sort.
The reality is the movement is incoherent and badly misinformed.
E.g. this bullshit about “fair trade” an economically meaningless little phrase bandied about by the economically illiterate.
It hardly seems to me that they are artificially constructed at all.
I further disagree that the Seattle crowd, other than in violence, is not representative of the fuzziminded illiteracy of the vast majority of critiques.
I think I’ve made it pretty clear by now:
I now work for an investment fund doing direct investments in the region. FDI - buying, holding and building a private portfolio. Previously as you know I was responsible for MENA region projects for my Swiss Masters.
Bullshit. Sam is on the money. There is already too much regulation and related rigidities in the developing world.
Collounsbury, I’m very interested in reading your replies, but please consider the reception you are likely to receive. So far the only “usual suspect” “shrieking,” “wailng” and cursing like a sailor in this thread is you. Whether you realize it or not, this not only makes your posts unpleasant to read, it also dumbs them down. If the “assholes” at Monsanto are primarily responsible for the practices that you are “fucking” sick of hearing described, there is surely a way to explain that without getting hysterical. Who do you think you’re talking to anyway?
Ah, my last, I should make clear was directed to your prior post Collounsbury. I didn’t see the one that replied to me. Thanks for quick reply.
“The reality is the movement is incoherent and badly misinformed.”
Well I’m hard pressed to tell who “the movement” is in this sentence. Since several of us have read Stiglitz’s book, could you begin with him? What is incoherent and badly misinformed about his a) his critique and b) his recommendations.
“There is already too much regulation and related rigidities in the developing world.”
Oh, undoubtedly there are all kinds of ineffective protections and counterproductive subsidies in the developing world–(just as there are few in the good old U.S. of A. for that matter). But does that mean that replacing them with laissez-faire provides an answer? And, of course, we aren’t really getting laissez-faire either in the status quo: we’re getting the kind of regulation (e.g., copyright and patent protection) that serves some Western interests, and not the kind (e.g., environmental safety, minimal worker safety, political and labor rights for workers) that serves broader public–as well as broader economic–interests.
In addition, you haven’t said a word about excess productive capacity and the long-term and systemic problem of boosting global purchase power. That’s the economic challenge to be addressed and that regulation will, perforce, play a part in addressing. Of course some regulation is bad. Who doubts it?
P.S.
“Previously as you know I was responsible for MENA region projects for my Swiss Masters.”
No, I didn’t know. Sorry if something I ought to have read in some previous exchange of ours has entirely slipped my mind. I’m not actually sure what this means, but I’m guessing you mean that you managed projects as part of a master’s degree you earned in Switzerland. Is that right?
I did not say Stiglitz was badly informed, I spoke to the movement.
No, My Swiss Masters is my cute way of refering to the wonderful folks who paid me back in the day. They’re now part of Syngenta, although that occured through a restructuring about the time I left.
Coll, your outrage about my attempts to present some antiglob arguments that touch on genuine issues (and please note once again that I have repeatedly said that I personally am not espousing these arguments wholesale) might be more persuasive if you didn’t end up so often agreeing with a bit of what I say:
*No we fucking didn’t [market commercial seeds aggressively]. Commercial farmers are where the money is, traditional farmers are too poor […] Now, there is that middle area of quasi-traditional farmers selling to the commercial market, and they should be a market for new seed products […] *
*Commercial agri products win in the market, when they do win, because they have real advantages. Not becuase my former industry is hood winking folks. […] For all this, I did and continue to despise Monsanto for the damage done to a promising field in the name of quarter driven profit maximization. Assholes. […] *
*Then we’d have the usual suspects shrieking on about the ruining of traditional practices and evils of big corp evils boys and the fucking like. […] Now, I readily grant that we generally as an industry (past tense for me) oversold some aspects and I was not personally pleased with some of the rush to market on the BT stuff […] Generated deserved as well as hysterical opposition. *
I completely agree with you that it’s necessary to sift through these issues and separate out the valid points from the PR (on the proglob as well as the antiglob side of the argument), and I joined this thread in order to try to help do that. But I think your Jekyll-and-Hyde alternations between 1) frothing at the mouth about “mythology”, “irrational bullshit”, “stupid namby pamby dewey eyed romanticism”, etc., and 2) calmly conceding that “there is a public good problem”, “traditional practices well and fine”, “I grant that we as an industry oversold some aspects”, etc., is needlessly violent and confusing.
If you agree that there are some questions here worthy of genuine concern, can’t you analyze them on their merits without frequent fulminating outbursts about their most ill-informed and extremist manifestations? If you don’t agree, can’t you just call us “stupid drooling moron mythologizing economically illiterate dewey eyed romantic namby pamby scare monger irrational demonizing asshole motherfuckers” once, and then go away? Your trying to combine the two approaches is getting in the way of the genuinely valuable information and perspective that you are (most of the time) providing.
And furthermore:
First, there are no fucking terminator seeds on the fucking market, Monsanto killed the program.
Yes, I know—largely because of public disapproval largely inspired by antiglob protests, right?