I'm All Over The Map

Judges should be seen and not heard in some cases.

There’s a joke, “What are 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?”, the answer is “A good start.”.

As times go on I’m convinced that one word needs to be changed, so the joke reads:

“What are 500 judges…”

Case in point.  Last week the Supremes, ignoring common sense and consumer concerns, overturned a lower court ruling by a 7 -1 margin, ruling that a nationwide ban on genetically modified alfalfa seeds will be rescinded.

“So?”, you ask.

Consider the following, members of the jury:

• Monsanto, the “winner” in this case, already controls 92% of the soybean production in the US, 85% of corn, and is broadening the reach of their RoundUp Ready® / GMO crops into wheat, cotton, sugar beets, and eventually a wide range of vegetables.
• Monsanto pursues a program of intimidation and aggressive litigation to grow and maintain their dominance in the GMO food arena, and is lobbying to avoid labeling foods as genetically modified.
• Monsanto now owns and/or administers seed through the following brands: Dekalb, Genuity, Asgrow, De Ruiter, Seminis, Vistive, WestBred, YieldGard, American Seeds LLC, Acceleron, Deltapine, and RoundUp Ready®.
• Monsanto’s dominance in the seed business has forced hundreds of businesses to close their doors, stopped the practice of banking seeds for the next growing season (that practice infringes on their “intellectual property”), and has driven the cost of seed to farmers by up 56% since 2006.
• No long term studies on the effects of prolonged consumption of glyphosate by humans have been conducted (American consumers are undoubtedly participating in one by now, whether they want to or not), though some countries are at least cognizant of the risks.¹
• After just over a decade of using RoundUp Ready® seed, we are seeing the emergence of RoundUp Resistant® weeds, prompting the use of increasingly toxic combinations of chemicals to prolong a farming model that is proving to be not only unsustainable, but unhealthy as well.²

So now, with the bang of a gavel and stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court further legitimizes Monsanto’s efforts to control food production from seed to slaughter and guarantees that the amount of glyphosate concentrating in the food chain will continue to escalate once planting of this GMO fodder can commence on commercial scales.

All of which leads me to conclude that while the legal niceties of this situation may have been examined as thoroughly as possible by the esteemed justices, I doubt the moral and clinical implications were, and that therefore the best course of action for SCOTUS would have been to decline to rule in this case.

After all, a judge doth not necessarily a doctor, or research scientist, make.

¹ Before anyone jumps my case, saying there having been studies done, up to three years in length, on glyphosate ingestion, all of those have relied on animal models (which are not necessarily reliable or applicable to humans), and none have addressed the issue wherein a subject given a chemical for study purposes has been exposed to one or more additional chemicals, and that mix has resulted in morbidity or carcinogenicity. Nor is testing being done based on the fact that growers are spraying more than one herbicide at one time, from the same tank, to achieve results RoundUp alone can no longer give at the recommended doses. In other words, the science we need is not being done.
² Here’s a link to a four year old document from Purdue Extension Service detailing the problem as it existed then. [Googledocs version]