Protecting Montana's Farmers

We recently wrote about Monsanto, its proprietary seed business and how it was created to increase sales of its flagship pesticide product as well as guarantee a regular revenue stream, and the way it aggressively investigates and threatens anyone it can in order to expand its control over agriculture.

In order to protect Montana farmers and their private property rights from the corporate Leviathan that is Monsanto, Montana Representative Betsy Hands (D-Missoula) introduced HB 445 during the 2009 legislative session. Hands was quoted on the website Montana Capitol Report about her bill, saying, "This [HB 445 seed sampling bill] is about the family farmer versus the big multinational company."

One can read the text of the bill itself here. It's a pretty straightforward process that defines how a company like Monsanto is allowed to collect agricultural samples from farmers' private properties. More importantly, it absolves any farmer from liability if a patented plant turns up on his property through no fault of his own - something that happens all the time now that naturally seeded crops are being increasingly surrounded by proprietary ones.

We would have thought that in an agricultural state like Montana where private property rights are paramount and the protection of these rights is often the source of political activism, this bill would be relatively uncontroversial and receive bipartisan support. Looking at its legislative history, we can see it passed out of committee 13-7 and was sent to the Montana Senate by a House vote of 57-43.

The blog Politics, Peaks, and Valleys wrote about this bill and how Monsanto has its sights trained on Montana wheat, a market worth at least half-a-billion dollars each year. Corporate agribusiness lackeys gave Hands a hard time, but she explained why Montana farmers need the protections her bill provides.

In committee, she took some incredulous questions from the likes of Taylor Brown (R-Huntley), a Jr. version of Conrad Burns without the tobacco, cussing, and racism, but similar ties to the Northern Ag Network and Eastern Ag. Brown and others questioned the necessity for Hands’s Bill, looking to undermine her claims of an existing problem. Hands quickly pointed to examples of Monsanto’s bullying, strategic spookery, and aggressive lawsuit filing–not to mention the billions of dollars they’ve invested in such schemes, in other states. Her point: let’s make a law so this stuff doesn’t become more prevalent here.

The Bill passed the House and is now in the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation.

Where it now languishes, thanks to the hospitality of Monsanto toward this committee's members. We'll cover that next.

Too Big To Fail Is Too Big

Ever since the bailout was justified by claiming that companies such as AIG were "too big to fail", we've been advocating the breakup of any company this could be applied to as well as regulations to prevent this from happening in the first place. When a company is too big for the government to allow it to fail, it's simply too big.

Over at the Daily Koz, Devilstower covers this same theme.

Market fundamentalists may cheer at the idea of government being bossed about by business forces, since they've long held disdain for government and awe of the most ruthless business mogols. They'll defend elevating business above government as "freedom" while ignoring the fact that it's enormously undemocratic. If we get anything out of living through the Great Bushwhack, let's hope it's a new understanding that the market fundamentalists are simply anti-American nuts.

From its beginning, the "American compromise" has represented an understanding that business be regulated by government for the betterment of both the market and the people.

When it comes to "too big to fail," the solution now is the same as it was a century ago: chop them up. That means not waiting until a company has an effective monopoly on the market before applying anti-trust laws. It means applying those laws when a company reaches the size where it deforms the market, bullies its competitors, and when the prospect of its failure is so frightening that we cushion its fall with billions in taxpayer assistance.

Too big to fail is too big. One of the most important lessons of the current economic crisis is that we must have an economic system where individual components can fail elegantly and not be the cause of crashing the entire structure. We seem to implicitly understand and appreciate this when building things like airplanes. It's time we take the same approach with building something far more important - our economy.

Quote of the Day

If you put a banker, a lawyer, and an industrialist in a barrel and roll it down a hill, you’ll always have a son of a bitch on top.
   - A.C. Townley

Bachmann The Seditionist

It's well known by now that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is a right-wing, irresponsible loon who loves stirring the pot on political hate radio. It's also clear that she's woefully (perhaps intentionally) misinformed about the facts of the various subjects at which she directs her addle-minded rants. Unfortunately, her behavior has made her something of a cult hero of those on the far right whose anger and vindictiveness is exceeded only by their ignorance and fondness for violence as the preferred means of addressing problems.

Last week, however, the Congresswoman, as TMP reports, became a seditionist.

This past Wednesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) appeared on Sean Hannity's radio show, and sharply reiterated her calls for revolution in America, warning against the imminent dangers of tyranny under Barack Obama.

Providing a link to an audio of this portion of the Manatee's program, TMP goes on to quote Bachmann.

At this point the American people - it's like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution -- where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch. It won't be our children and grandchildren that are in debt. It is we who are in debt, we who will be bankrupting this country, inside of ten years, if we don't get a grip. And we can't let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.

Let's set aside for the time being the fact that it's been Bachmann and the rest of her party that until two months ago ran the country for the past eight years and whose fiscal policies not only doubled the national debt but also created the economic meltdown Barack Obama gets the privilege of dealing with. What a member of Congress, sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, is calling for is the overthrow of the government.

As First Amendment absolutists, we believe the Congresswoman has the right to say whatever she wants, including speech that encourages rebellion against the government in power. We don't, however, believe she should engage in this speech and still sit in the Congress of the United States. If she wants to lead a revolution, that's fine, but she needs to resign her seat first.

Moreover, we would remind the Congresswoman that the 1940 Smith Act is still on the books, and this act makes what she's doing illegal. We understand that Republicans are used to considering themselves above the law, and we would agree with those who have constitutionality issues with this law. But we also know without a doubt that if a Democratic member of Congress had suggested that the way to deal with the Bush/Cheney dictatorship was to heed Jefferson's call to water the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, Michelle Bachmann would be the head cheerleader for his arrest and imprisonment.

Finally, we want to ask the people of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District how they could possibly elect someone like this. We understand that some people would rather live in Russia than vote for a Democrat, but are there no Republicans left in this neck of the woods that are both sane and will serve? Perhaps they should point their browsers to this site and then reconsider how they feel about who's representing them to the rest of the nation.

The Borg That Is Monsanto

If you're a farmer in Montana, Monsanto has you on its radar. They are the agricultural Borg, and you will be assimilated.

Monsanto, the same company that gave Vietnam Agent Orange and America a collection of Superfund sites, is now focused on replacing the nation's food supply with products grown from its genetically modified seeds. Because the SCOTUS has decided that artificially altering the genetic structure of a cell is a form of intellectual property that can be patented, farmers using Monsanto seeds have to abide by Monsanto's terms.

Farmers have an incentive to use Monsanto's seed products because the primary genetic modification makes the plants resistant to Monsanto's RoundUp weed killer. This lets farmers simply spray their crops with the pesticide to kill the weeds without killing the crops themselves. The obvious benefit to Monsanto is that it sells more RoundUp - lots more RoundUp. This was the whole point of the genetic modification in the first place - to increase the sale of its chemical pesticide.

Putting aside the question of whether it's a good thing to have crops and land lathered in pesticide, especially given Monsanto's track record in chemicals, two things happen when farmers switch to RoundUp Ready seeds. First, they are required to buy their seed each year from Monsanto instead of saving seed from their crops to use for planting in the future. Thus, perfectly good seed and the entire history of crop-raising gets discarded in order to ensure a regular stream of revenue for one private corporation. Second, Monsanto-seeded crops, because of wind and pollination, inevitably contaminate crops from other seed sources, infecting these crops with Monsanto-created genetics. Thus, even farmers who choose to raise genetic-natural crops - the only kind many European and Asian markets allow - end up with crops containing Monsanto-altered DNA against their explicit wishes.

Monsanto isn't shy about unleashing its investigators on anyone it suspects has a crop containing one of its genes regardless of how it got there, nor are they shy about threatening economic destruction for anyone who resists its highly aggressive tactics. It's Monsanto's intention to dominate American agriculture and force all farmers to use its products and it's more than happy to use its corporate economic clout and political connections to make this happen.

In May 2008, Vanity Fair published an article about Monsanto's ruthlessness in its drive to take over American agriculture. It's but one of a host of similar stories about what this agricultural Borg is up to.

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics – ruthless legal battles against small farmers – is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the “seed police” and use words such as “Gestapo” and “Mafia” to describe their tactics.

Here in Montana, a bill recently passed the House designed to protect farmers who, through no fault of their own, wind up with Monsanto DNA in their crops and to ensure the property rights of farmers Monsanto wants to investigate. It's a pretty straightforward protecting-David-from-Goliath piece of legislation. But then it went to the Montana Senate Agricultural Committee for consideration and Monsanto showed up in Helena. We'll talk about what happened shortly.

Quote of the Day

I keep remembering that after Pandora closed the box, after all the scourges had been loosed, the only thing that did not escape was hope.
   - David Plowden

America's Most Wanted

Good news for those of us still waiting for the Obama administration to prosecute the high-level members of the Bush administration who, rather than protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, shredded it in a bald-faced attempt to turn the Presidency into a dictatorship. As Harper's reports, Spain - the country that forced Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet into house arrest in England - is now investigating the team of lawyers that provided the widely discredited legal justifications that led to indefinite imprisonments without charges or legal representation and widespread abuse and torture at the Guantánamo prison.

One of America’s NATO allies — which supported the Bush Administration’s war on terror by committing its troops to the struggle – has now opened formal criminal inquiries looking into the Bush team’s legacy of torture. The action parallels a criminal probe into allegations of torture involving the American CIA that was opened this week in the United Kingdom.

Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who pioneered the descent into torture at the prison in Guantánamo.

Público identifies the targets as University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

Unfortunately, the wheels of justice turn slowly, but at least they're turning. The sad thing is that, once again, they're not turning in the country that keeps telling the rest of the world that we're a nation of laws, not men. And, once again, it's another nation that has to remind us that what matters is what is done rather than empty platitudes and rhetoric.

Particularly troubling is that, so far, what Obama has done regarding past Bush decisions merely builds on the Bush assertion that the President alone decides what will and will not be done. While it's a good thing that the policy of torture has been overturned and detainees will now be processed instead of hanging in a never-ending limbo, this has happened not because the Obama administration has rejected the Constitutionality and legality of Bush decisions, but because Obama as President has decided to change course. We understand that it's good to be the King, but Obama doesn't get to choose any more than Bush did, regardless of what those choices are.

There's only one course of action that can return our country to a nation of laws rather than men: the immediate and comprehensive prosecution of those who acted illegally and unconstitutionally in asserting that the President of the United States has the unilateral power to order the arrest and torture, without charges or representation, anyone he alone designates. It's a sad commentary on the political spine of our nation's leaders that Spain understands this, but America doesn't.

Of course, we'd gladly entertain an alternative approach. We'd be satisfied with Obama using the power his predecessor asserted without serious opposition to declare Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their cabal enemy combatants and locking them up in the Guantánamo prison indefinitely and without access to counsel. The squeal from the right would be priceless entertainment with the shoe on the other foot and might well be the only way to get fascist apologists to understand why we have a Constitution in the first place.

Who Really Blew Up America's Economy

We keep meaning to get back to the subject of who the major culprits of the housing bubble were. It's a subject that deserves research and consideration because our country needs regulations to keep it from happening again as well as a thorough discussion of how policy decisions contributed to the meltdown. And, not surprisingly, right-wing ideologues continue to intentionally lie about what happened in their typically pathetic attempt to smear anyone who doesn't march in lockstep with their political agenda.

Here's the short version. Unregulated derivative financial products fueled a demand for mortgages, and this demand could only be met by loaning money to people who were poor debt risks. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's policy of keeping interest rates low exacerbated this behavior by making the initial act of borrowing inexpensive, thus encouraging loans that would have future costs that couldn't reasonably be expected to be paid. Responding to fundamental economics, this increase in the demand for mortgages was met with an unregulated supply from private lenders, many of them unscrupulous, predatory quick-buck artists, and this supply drove an increased demand for houses, which drove their prices up.

As long as housing prices kept going up, people could periodically borrow against their additional equity whenever their loan terms readjusted their interest rates. This need to periodically refinance also had the added benefit of generating additional business for mortgage companies, supplying fees that don't get generated when people take out traditional 30-year fixed mortgages. This is why there was an explosion of new mortgage companies anxious to get in the game, and why most of them have now disappeared.

Added to all of this, a variety of dishonest practices sprung up to support this activity. Appraisers started saying houses were worth whatever number a mortgage company needed to make a loan instead of a realistic, conservative estimate. Rating agencies, paid by the companies they were rating, started handing out excessively positive ratings of financial products that were actually garbage. Private lenders took advantage of unsophisticated borrowers who simply wanted what almost everyone does - a house of their own.

Ignorant and/or dishonest right-wing gasbags continue to try to convince people, many of whom are still, quite understandably, trying to put all these pieces together, that this is all the Democrats fault. They think that if they repeat their lies often enough, that this is all the fault of Freddie and Fannie and the CRA of 1977 (yes, even Jimmy Carter gets trotted out for this one), that someday it will become true. They continue to deny that it was the combination of greed, dishonesty, and right-wing ideology that turned the American housing market into just another giant casino where the house could fleece the sheep and privileged financial insiders could turn securities markets into nothing more than a very complicated Ponzi scheme.

From time-to-time, we'll present a variety of articles that discuss what really happened, and show how the right continues to lie about the hijacking of the American economy for the benefit of the few. It is no accident that all of this occurred when Republicans controlled all three branches of government. For now, we'll begin with this article from McClatchy that discusses how it was private sector loans, not those purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that drove the housing bubble and its ultimate, inevitable collapse.

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

Between 2004 and 2006, when subprime lending was exploding, Fannie and Freddie went from holding a high of 48 percent of the subprime loans that were sold into the secondary market to holding about 24 percent, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance, a specialty publication. One reason is that Fannie and Freddie were subject to tougher standards than many of the unregulated players in the private sector who weakened lending standards, most of whom have gone bankrupt or are now in deep trouble.

During those same explosive three years, private investment banks — not Fannie and Freddie — dominated the mortgage loans that were packaged and sold into the secondary mortgage market. In 2005 and 2006, the private sector securitized almost two thirds of all U.S. mortgages, supplanting Fannie and Freddie, according to a number of specialty publications that track this data.

Of course, there's a lot more detail that ties these activities to the unregulated derivatives markets that packaged and resold these subprime mortgages as well as sold insurance (we're talking about you, AIG) just in case these mortgages went belly up without any reserves whatsoever to actually pay owners' claims. What's important to understand at this point is what's above, and why the only way to prevent this from happening again is strong, airtight regulation and enforcement that effectively cages the inevitable greed and dishonesty that arises whenever money starts changing hands. Unregulated private enterprise had its chance, and only fools or privileged insiders would give it another.

Quote of the Day

All over the world people are seeking peace of mind, but there can be no peace of mind without strength of mind.
   - Eric B. Gutkind

Helping The Party Of No Out

Over at 538, Nate Silver has taken the time to contribute to the Republican's alternative 'budget' by expanding on its fifth-grade graphics to let us know how they're going to tackle the serious challenges our nation faces.

Turn Off The Lights

Tonight is Earth Hour 2009. Wherever you are, at 8:30 PM local time you can vote for for the Earth and against global warming by switching off all your lights for one hour. Already in the early time zones, people are turning off their lights and then posting pics and videos of their experiences to the Earth Hour website.

So break out the candles, join in the experience, and then check out how others around the world celebrated this event.

Quote of the Day

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
   - Alfred North Whitehead

The Lie That Is Sarah Palin

How do you know when your party is in complete collapse? When Sarah Palin continues to be treated as a viable national representative. The failure of the Party of No to make it clear that she has no place in its future says quite a bit about what Republicans really value.

Sarah Palin is nothing more than a complete pathological liar with delusions of grandeur. It's painfully clear she can't open her mouth without lying about something. The most recent example is her claim that she wouldn't take all the federal stimulus money for Alaska, but then she would, but then she wouldn't, but then she wanted to consider what the money she was rejecting could buy, so then she would. And just today she once again sniped at McCain campaign operatives, claiming she couldn't find anyone to pray with her before her VP debate. It's a charge that's already been adamantly denied by two evangelical McCain staffers.

Her greatest lie, however, remains the elaborate illusion she continues to sell: that she's the biological mother of Trig Palin. There's an exceptional blog and website called Palin's Deceptions that has dedicated hours upon hours of research time collecting and evaluating any and all evidence regarding this subject. While it's still impossible to conclude with certainty who is Trig's mother, in the fine tradition of Sherlock Holmes, the possibility of Sarah Palin has been eliminated.

This is no minor matter for the person who continues to believe she'll be the standard bearer of the Party of No in 2012. And even if we suspend all intelligence and credulity and simply take Palin at her word (which she has repeatedly proven is a fundamental mistake), the best that can be said about her regarding Trig's birth is that she acted in a wildly irresponsible and selfish manner. After reading through the Palin's Deceptions website, however, even the most partisan supporter will be faced with a stark decision: either blindly drink the Palin Kool-Aid or admit that she's lying.

This could all be easily resolved by Sarah Palin herself, and when one seeks to become President of the United States, it's not unreasonable to expect such resolution to be forthcoming. All Sarah Palin has to do is submit DNA evidence from herself and Trig to an independent third-party for testing and the matter will be put to rest once and for all.

But that's not what Sarah Palin has done. She's repeatedly refused to bring closure to this question, has repeatedly behaved like someone who has something very serious to hide, and has repeatedly made it clear she doesn't want the truth to come out. The question everyone should be asking her is why.

So That Explains It

It's hard to know which is more fake: House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-OH) shoe polish tan and Burger King hair or the Republican 'budget' he waved around at reporters today.

On Tuesday evening, President Obama challenged the Party of No to do something besides whine and produce its own budget if they thought they had a better plan than his. Today, the Party of No issued a 17-page political pamphlet its leaders tried to sell as an alternative budget, but which lacked the very thing every budget, no matter how small and personal, has - actual numbers.

That's right. The Republican's idea of a budget is a set of blathering platitudes without any specifics. In fact, its only proposal that had any numbers at all associated with it was, and this will come as no surprise to anyone, massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

This, however, explains quite a bit about the past eight years under complete Republican domination. Other people's money means nothing to Republicans; they love to spend it and are more than happy to stick future generations with the costs of massive deficits while cutting the taxes of the top 1% of the country. Anything's OK just as long as they themselves don't have to pay.

Moreover, they remain as dishonest today as they always have been when they refused to include the costs of two major wars in their budgets and openly lied to Congress about the expected costs of those wars as well as other programs such as the Medicare prescription drug program.

A budget without numbers. Jesus. Is it any wonder that America is in the mess it's in when these are the people who have been running it? John Boehner needs to go back to buffing his shine and let the adults get to work repairing the widespread damage his Party of No caused and seeks to perpetuate. The Republicans have proven, once again, they have no solutions for our country.

Quote of the Day

Your world is as big as you make it.
   - Georgia Douglas Johnson

The Revolution Was Televised

With apologies to Gil Scott-Heron, the revolution was televised, and the world has watched as the very people whose insatiable thirst for More destroyed the American financial system have executed a leveraged buyout of America itself. In short, thanks to the ability of the U.S. Treasury to print fiat currency at will and the unilateral promise of unborn generations to labor on their behalf, the Masters of the Universe now own a country.

Of course, it hasn't been sold this way. Instead, the pitch has been that it's the other way around; that it's American citizens who are the owners and who will ultimately come out ahead when the oceans of toxic assets are somehow decontaminated and become worth more than anyone remotely wants to currently pay. And anyone who really believes this might as well buy the bridge they're selling, too. It's easily worth more than the rest of the crap combined.

Matt Taibbi, one the finest journalists writing today, covers this revolution in his recent article for Rolling Stone. The entire piece is a must-read, but we'll quote some paragraphs that are especially poignant.

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what's left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

But before you even finish saying that, they're rolling their eyes, because You Don't Get It. These people were never about anything except turning money into money, in order to get more money; valueswise they're on par with crack addicts, or obsessive sexual deviants who burgle homes to steal panties. Yet these are the people in whose hands our entire political future now rests.

Good luck with that, America. And enjoy tax season.

For the few hard-core ideologues that are still in denial about what the actual results of an unregulated, laissez-faire financial system are, here is your object lesson. If you're on the inside still pulling down a ridiculous salary and obscene bonus just because your father had the right friends when it came time to get you a job, we understand that you've always seen the American Taxpayer as the next market to corner. Congrats. Mission accomplished. This one is even better than the privatization-of-Social-Security scam.

But if you're not one of the few whose massive gambling debts are being covered by everyone but the people responsible and you still think government has no place regulating the size and actions of its corporations, then you deserve to be on the bus driving over the cliff because there's no guardrail in place to save it. Just don't be surprised when we look over the edge and say, "We told you so."

And what of the future? To begin with, the guiding principal should be, "If it's too big to fail, it's too big." We need to break up corporations into pieces small enough so that any given collapse doesn't threaten the financial stability of our country. Capitalism is predicated, after all, on the assumption that some businesses will fail just as some trees in the forest die and rot away. But a forest of only two or three monstrous giants makes it impossible to suffer any loss, and must therefore be prevented in the first place.

We need a system that can fail elegantly; what we have now is one that's failed us completely and has rewarded those responsible for making it happen. Since we're now forced to replant the forest, let's finish clearing out all the failed free-market deadwood and do it right this time. We wonder if the MOTU who have taken over will let us have it back.

Room To Grow

A recent annexation/subdivision proposal here in Missoula raised the very important question of what should be done when someone wants to build houses on land that is very well-suited for growing food. It also made it quite clear that there's been next to no substantive planning concerning this issue and that those in a position to ensure a future that includes agrarian land use within the community are ill-prepared and ill-equipped to do so.

Fortunately, the extremely ill-considered decision to approve the Chickasaw subdivision seems to have provided some impetus to address the need for the preservation of agricultural land. The Missoulian recently published a guest editorial addressing this issue. We hope our community representatives took notice and will act.

Over the past 30 years, much of western Montana’s productive fields and pastures have been permanently lost to creeping residential sprawl. That loss is a serious threat to the future food security of our local citizens and the world community as well. As shipping costs escalate, the case for preserving our agricultural land becomes even more compelling.

Economic development and land use planning tools should both conserve and support a matrix of farms and ranches across Missoula County - including hay fields and pastures, small farms near towns, and larger farms and ranches in rural areas. The diversity of these lands is the bedrock for a vibrant food system with a variety of farms, ranches and foods. Effective growth management will discourage leapfrog developments in rural, agrarian communities (our emphasis); encourage density in the urban core; and conserve the most productive lands in the urban fringe, while building houses on less productive soil.

The county and city of Missoula plan for transportation, water, drainage and waste systems - all important functions of a viable community. It’s now time to plan for a food system, which will provide for the long-term food security and agricultural legacy of western Montana. When it is no longer practical to ship food across the world and back, our kids and grandkids will judge our actions today. They will either blame us or thank us, because once farm and ranchland is gone, we won’t get a second chance.

Quote of the Day

We have fewer friends than we imagine, but more than we know.
   - Hugo von Hofmannsthal