And residents of Maui County in Hawaii, frequently referred to as 'GMO Ground Zero,' claimed a victory Tuesday evening when a measure to ban the planting of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) passed despite the fact that agribusiness giants Monsanto and Dow, which for decades have run enormous growing and testing operations on the island, spent nearly $8 million dollars to defeat the ban. [A GMO ban also passed in Humboldt County, California on Tuesday though many of my friends say that's in large part due the fact that GMOs have yet to be developed that compete with Humbolt's main crop.]
As Victor Hugo said, "An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." Both the 'right to know' what's in the foods we feed to ourselves and our families and the right to grow a few pot plants in the backyard are ideas whose time have come. That those basic rights are so staunchly opposed by the War and Wealth Party - the rulers of the empire - shows that, like a levy, any breach, any breath of freedom, threatens a runaway by the entire river.
Also appearing at the Kabuki Theater yesterday was the mid-term elections. The headlines around the globe were, like the 188-2 vote in the UN last week, nearly unanimous 'The Republican wing of the War and Wealth Party [WWP] won control of the US Senate from the Democratic wing. Or, as Ron Paul wrote this morning, "The 2-party US political system in reality a monopoly".
Political analyst Eric Draitser gave a perfect example this morning in ‘Republicans and Democrats – two branches of the one party’ where he says, "The fact of the matter is that the two predominant parties in the US are really one party; they are merely two branches of the big business corporate party. This, I think, we can see quite clearly with a very recent example that was in the news just last week regarding the Food Bill and the supposed triumph by the democrats in the Food Bill, which they rejoiced over for the simple fact that they only cut nine billion dollars out of the Food Stamps budget while the Republicans wanted to cut 20 or more billion dollars out of the same budget. So as more and more Americans go to bed hungry and are homeless, and other various problems, you see that the two parties in fact work together to compromise against the interests of the American people."
A old friend commented recently that a few decades ago capitalism defeated communism, more recently capitalism has defeated democracy. My answer, it takes two to tango. Without the gullible to buy their flim flam, without those who in defending their spilled crumbs act as a barricade that protects the elites from their just meeting with Madame Guillotine, the empire's little old men behind their curtain would be exposed for the frauds they are.
The capitalists power grew quickly in America when, as Howard Zinn says in 'A People's History' at the end of chapter 3, "Along with the very rich and the very poor there developed a white middle class of small planters, independent farmers, city artisans, who, given small rewards for joining forces with merchants and planters, would be a solid buffer between black slaves, frontier Indians and very poor whites."
The middle class is still used as a buffer, still deludes itself into believing that the crumbs dropped for them by the deceivers differentiates them from the working classes thus compelling the idiots to act, live and vote not in their own best interests, but those of rich . They'd only be idiots except that now The War and Wealth Party folks are poisoning the biosphere that supports us all and the bill for the middle class's self-interest is un-payable.
The two headed War and Wealth Party ain't invincible, everything changes...someday.
