Poison Policies and Funny Money*

*( Funny money designates money that has little or no value.)

(Revised re-run from June 1, 2013)

Demonstrations against the Monsanto corporation could be witnessed in cities throughout the world last Saturday. If you are not familiar with Monsanto perhaps it’s enough to know that the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has solid evidence that Monsanto’s pesticides are killing off the world’s bees.

Monsanto symbolizes evil corporations. All the evil corps have one policy in common: disregard for laws. They’ve discovered that the cost of criminality and buying politicians is highly profitable. They need not concern themselves with laws, rules and regulations. Should they get caught, the price of the fines represents mere funny money. They can droll over their profits while people spit blood and bees die.

Wal-Mart, for example, was recently fined $82 million dollars for dumping huge quantities of poisons into the water supply and the earth at several locations in the USA. (Notice the ”several” locations. It’s not a question of an isolated mistake.) $82 million represents less than one half of one percent of Wal-Mart’s net profits for one year. To put that in perspective, destroying the health and lives of people, animals and the environment cost Wal-Mart the equivalent of what a traffic ticket costs me.

Syngenta, another evil corp, contaminated the drinking water for millions of Americans in over 2000 places. They were ”heavily” fined. (The equivalent of a slap on the hand.)

The list of evil corps that have a ”fuck-the-laws” policy is much longer than the list of corps that don’t. Note that no board member is ever charged with criminal activity or goes to jail. The big corps are too big to fail and their owners too rich to jail. BTW, corps are basically evil organizations as defined by their corporate constitution demanding profit above all other considerations, be it people, the environment or life itself.

I’m principally opposed to the death penalty, but if we could vote on hanging a of couple corporate directors to save thousands of lives and millions of bees, I would reconsider my principle.

“Reasoning with greed is as effective as reasoning with gravity.”
Dartwill Aquila