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Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

WTF?

I’ve seen this happen in the movies. Sometimes there aren’t any good movies, and something has to win (1996: The English Patient). Sometimes the best movie can’t win because it is politically charged with the wrong message (2005: Brokeback Mountain). Often fluff will beat meat to a pulp (1994: Forest Gump over Pulp Fiction). Sometimes the best movie ever ever made by anyone anytime doesn’t win and I just don’t get it (1993: The Fugitive).

But then we have to remember – they are just movies and the award is just given out to help the movie business promote itself. A good movie is a good movie no matter the awards it receives. Right Harrison?

Michael Moore had the best line regarding Obama’s award, taken from the movie Saving Private Ryan. “Earn it.”

The Nobel prize, perhaps a penance for the man who gave us TNT, is often controversial. It carries with it quite a bit of money, and for scientists slaving over a microscope, that’s really important. For struggling writers, it’s a wonderful recognition of achievement in an immensely crowded field.

But for a president who took office based on loads of corporate cash and a slick advertising campaign? One who hasn’t done anything for world peace except make one of our imperial adventures more costly and deadly? Obama’s ad campaign was apparently so good it even worked on the Nobel Committee. (Obama won the coveted Advertising Age “Marketer of the Year ” award, beating out Apple, Nike, Zappos, Coors and John McCain. I’m not kidding.)

Henry Kissinger won the award in 1973. Well, half of it. The other half went to Le Duc Tho, Kissinger’s counterpart in peace talks. Remember that it was Kissinger who sabotaged the Paris Peace talks in 1968 to prolong the Vietnam War and allow Richard Nixon to win the White House. Remember that Kissinger and company (including the Reverend Billy Graham no less), seriously considered bombing the dikes in North Vietnam, and act that would have killed two million innocent people.

That’s some serious mayhem. The Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger (and Nixon’s personal spiritual adviser, The Reverend Graham) considered it appropriate.

And lord only knows what awaits the Afghans and Pakistanis as Obama guides the immense bull of an American military ship of state through their china shop. (I suspect Obama is merely a passenger on that ship, kept far way from the wheel.) His ratcheting up of tensions with Iran is being done like a stage play. Maybe the Nobel prize is for best actor?

It is important to remember, as Obama bows in humility to accept his prize that most often the Best Picture Award goes to artistic endeavors of no real import. Think of Rocky and Annie Hall and Titanic and (yikes!) The Sound of Music. And put Obama’s award on the mantle alongside these artistic masterpieces – a whole lot of talent and a very entertaining movie, and no substance beyond that.

At this point, Obama has earned exactly nothing. We hope for change.

We saw Food, Inc. the other night. We left not wanting food of any kind. But that was no surprise. People had warned us that the movie would sap our appetites.

The movie was not widely seen – we lived in Bozeman when it came out, and it never graced the local theater. We saw it here in Boulder on the local campus as part of an International Film Festival.

Anyway, what can we say about slaughtering cows and pigs and chickens? It has to be done, and done on a massive scale to feed 330 million people. It’s not pretty.

What can be said about NAFTA? The union members who once worked the packing plants have been supplanted by low-wage workers? That is including millions of Mexican corn growers driven out of business by cheap subsidized American corn? Thanks, Bill Clinton. We’d be better off had you stuck to cigars and other preoccupations.

What can be said about high fructose corn syrup? It’s subsidized, it’s cheap, and is at the center of our obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic. (Most people in movie, other than Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, were notably overweight).

Food, Inc. is about all of that, for sure. It is about a wide range of subjects, including the inhumane treatment of animals. Growers keep them confined, not even allowing chickens to enjoy a ray of sunshine during their 49 day life. Cattle are fed corn when their evolutionary path made them grass eaters. Harmful bacteria grow in the bellies of corn-fed cows – a diet of grass for a few days before slaughter would kill 80% of this bacteria, according to Pollan.

But that’s not cost-efficient. Instead, meat producers load the corn mash with antibiotics. The bacteria have grown tougher, and disaster in the food supply chain looms. E. coli outbreaks are common in this century, and Pollan thinks that worse, much worse is yet to come.

I left the movie depressed, feeling helpless. It wasn’t about the cows who can’t graze or chickens who never get to move around or even see light or pigs who never get to root or enjoy being pigs. It wasn’t about loss of good-paying union jobs or wild immigration.

It was about oppression – concentrated corporate power that cannot be dislodged. Just a few corporations now control most of our food supply – ConAgra, Monsanto, Cargill, and IBP. They behave as all people behave when given monopoly power – they clamp down, squeeze, push, take everything the can. They have armies of lawyers fighting for them at every turn, and their executives swarm in and out of government, usually ending up regulating themselves.

That is the nature of “public service” in America. It’s all about self interest.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once an attorney who worked for Monsanto. Later he wrote the majority opinion in the Pioneer Hi-Bred International v. J.E.M Ag Supply case, which upheld lower court decisions allowing large agricultural companies to patent seed strains. The film intimates that Thomas was rewarding a former employer, but that’s not likely. It is simply part of the mindset of right wingers that government should not involve itself in the affairs of commerce … that things usually work out for the best.

Here’s how it worked out for Monsanto and soybeans: Monsanto patented a strain of seed that is “Roundup ready” – that is, that it is not affected by Roundup, Monsanto’s pesticide. At the time of the patent, Monsanto seeds comprised about 2% of the U.S. domestic market. It is now over 90%.

Monsanto does not force farmers to buy its seed, and makes it available through many other companies (but profits from every Roundup Ready seed sold). Here’s the catch – because it was allowed to patent the seed, Monsanto requires that anyone who uses that seed buy new supplies from Monsanto every year. This, in effect, outlaws the common practice of “seed cleaning”, whereby farmers set aside a portion of each year’s crop for planting the following year.

This requirement has set in motion onerous enforcement mechanisms, and Monsanto has a team of undercover spies roaming the country to make sure that farmers are not reusing seed. The result is a regime of oppression, farmers spying on each other, costly lawsuits, and in the end, castration and submission to power. Monsanto now owns the soybean crop.

Monsanto, of course, treats this all as normal, and defends its activities as legal, which of course, they are. But when corporations have the power to make their own laws, operating within the law is quite easy. Farmers, on the other hand, have no choice but comply or be put out of business.

Monsanto defends itself here.

The film makes one claim that the company did not address, however. It’s “GMO” (“genetically modified organisms”) seeds spread naturally – it is impossible for farmers who do not use them to keep them out of their fields. Monsanto has sued farmers whose fields have been involuntarily infected with their product, forcing them to stop seed cleaning, and forcing them under the regime.

No surprises here, and I do not have anything against Monsanto. It is merely behaving as power behaves, which is why we used to regulate power. The problem in part is the legal concept that allows patenting of of essential elements of our food supply, like soybeans. It’s an aberration, a departure from normal practice in American history.

Most agricultural research was once done at our land grant colleges, and scientific advances that came about were made freely available to everyone. Research was a public domain, and we all benefited. It was a free society.

Land grant colleges still do publicly funded research, and still leave all their advances in the public domain. But more and more corporations are funding university research and patenting the results for private use. Corporate oppression has invaded the colleges.

The real bottom line is something far afield from the mistreatment of animals, secrecy and oppression. It is the lack of enforcement of our antitrust laws. Monsanto has too much power. Too much of our food supply is in the hands of too few companies. Farmers have become serfs on their own land, and patent law, as it stands, acts against the public interest by allowing monopolistic practices to flourish.

And that’s why I walked away from the movie depressed – there is so much concentrated power now in the corporate sector, so much corporate control of government, that it is unlikely anything will be done until we have some catastrophe to reawaken the public. The beast will not soon be put back in its cage.

In the meantime, eat organic food, avoid high fructose corn syrup. Avoid fast food. Avoid monopolies and oligopolies. (That’s humor – by definition, we cannot avoid them.)

And by all means shop at Whole Foods or Wild Oats, two organic food outlets. They are in healthy competition with one another, forcing prices down.

Oh, wait. Hold on. Whole Foods bought out Wild Oats. The merger was approved by the FTC. Never mind.

Shop farmers markets – while they are there. Soon they will too be outlawed.

Democrats
Sweet and docile
Meek and fearful of brawls
Beware the day
They find their balls!

A prime minister steps down in response to public outrage over an inept response to a natural disaster? Some other planet, surely.

Prime Minister of Taiwan Quits Over Typhoon Response

BEIJING — The prime minister of Taiwan resigned Monday after widespread criticism of the government’s response to a deadly typhoon and said that his successor would replace the entire cabinet this week.

The announcement at a news conference by the prime minister, Liu Chao-shiuan, came as a surprise, even though the government had come under intense pressure for what many Taiwanese called its inept handling of the response to Typhoon Morakot, which left at least 700 people dead or missing ….

I always looked up to Mike Vick and I always will, because I still think he is one of the best quarterbacks. I love Mike Vick. Everyone kills people, murders people, steals from you, steals from me. I just feel that some people need to give him a chance. Ohio State Quarterback Terrelle Pryor

These, according to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, are real (compiled by Jeannie Sellers):

Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
Drunk gets nine months in violin case
Is there a ring of debris around Uranus?
Stud tires out
Panda mating fails; veterinarian takes over
British left waffles on Falkland Islands
Reagan wins on budget, but more lies ahead
Shot off woman’s leg helps Nicklaus to 66
Plane too close to ground, crash probe told
Miners refuse to work after death
Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
Killer sentenced to die for second time in ten years
Never withhold herpes infection from loved one
War dims hope for peace
Red tape holds up new bridge
Typhoon rips through cemetery, hundreds dead
Man struck by lightning faces battery charge
Astronaut takes blame for gas in spacecraft
Kids make nutritious snacks
British union finds dwarfs in short supply
Lansing residents can drop off trees
Air head fired
Prosecutor releases probe into undersheriff
Hospitals sued by seven foot doctors
Include your children when baking cookies

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Please Cut The Crap is doing due diligence in the health care debate, and is worth a read. Lotta stuff there.

Milt Shook, the guy who does the work behind the site, spends a lot of time deconstructing right wing lies about health care. But as I suggest in the post down below, the point of the lies is their immediate impact – agitprop. By the time they are deconstructed, the liars are on to newer and better lies.

Overmatched, we are.