July 31, 2014
- What’s a GMO? And should you worry about it?
- The FDA: Friend of Monsanto, enemy of you?
- The Fed in action: More words, less clarity
- Few worry about Argentina’s default… but maybe you should
- More reader thoughts on “ethical” investing… the energy factor behind conflict in Ukraine… and more!
There’s no such thing as a wild cow, asserts the celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We’ll back up a bit: Mr. Tyson has seen fit to weigh in on the issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — foods whose DNA has been altered by genetic engineering to produce their own pesticides or withstand megadoses of herbicides.
As you can see, most of America’s corn and soybeans now come from GMO seeds. On this chart, HT means the crop is “herbicide tolerant”; BT means it’s insect resistant.
GMOs have recently come on the radar of our colleague Doug Hill, director of the Laissez Faire Club. His conclusion: “These genetically modified crops may be extremely dangerous to our families. Most Americans today are eating this food because they are unaware of the risks.
They do it because government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, have said these genetically modified crops are safe.”
“But the FDA,” Doug goes on, “has actually never conducted any studies on humans to prove this food is safe,” Indeed, Doug and his research team discovered 44,000 pages of memos from the FDA showing “its own scientists agreed that GMOs could create unpredictable, unsafe, and hard-to-detect allergens, toxins, diseases, and nutritional problems.”
“I’m amazed how much rejection genetically modified foods are receiving from the public,” Tyson tells a French interviewer. “It smacks of the fear factor that exists at every new emergent science…
“What most people don’t know, but they should, is that practically every food you buy in a store — for consumption by humans — is genetically modified food,” Tyson continues. “There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There’s no wild cows.”
Hmmm… Tyson seems to think there’s no difference between modifying plants and animals through traditional breeding… and genetic modification techniques that involve, for instance, inserting genes from different species.
Whatever. We’re more intrigued by why Tyson chose to pipe up now: “Global warming” and evolution are more his beat. But we suspect it might have something to do with an Internet furor that exploded within the last week…
“Monsanto is widely recognized as the most hated and most evil corporation on the planet,” wrote Mike Adams, keeper of the enormously popular NaturalNews site.
That’s standard fare for Mr. Adams, who calls himself the “Health Ranger.” Monsanto holds 90% of GMO market share, so for good reason it’s a big, fat target for GMO critics. But last week Adams brushed up against Godwin’s law — comparing Monsanto to IG Farben, the “chemical conglomerate run by Nazi collaborators” that “used Jewish prisoners as human guinea pigs in horrific medical experiments…
“Just as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals,” he wrote, “so too must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused by GMOs be named for the historical record.”
Then Adams went a step further and suggested, “It is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.”
Later, Adams updated his post to put quotation marks around that statement, attributing it to… well, it’s not really clear.
The more, uhh, measured critics of GMOs were left slack-jawed…
Even if you think the science behind GMOs is sound, there’s another problem: Their mere existence is a gross violation of private property rights.
The wind routinely blows Monsanto’s GMO seeds onto the property of farmers trying to grow non-GMO crops. That’s bad enough, but rather than compensate those farmers for the contamination, Monsanto turns around and sues them for patent infringement. Over the last decade, the company dragged 410 farmers from 27 states into court.
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion… in favor of Monsanto.
Joel Salatin, the organic farmer from Virginia who gained a following through the documentary Food, Inc., makes a splendid analogy: “Can you imagine somebody in a community with a male dog, who let him loose from his leash and he went through the community and bred 10 of his neighbors’ female species, can you imagine all those 10 female species’ owners going to the guy that released his male dog and paying him for genetic material?”
Now evidence is emerging that GMO crops don’t even accomplish what they’re supposed to.
This week, farmers in Brazil said their GMO corn is no longer resistant to pests. They have to buy pesticides they thought they wouldn’t need.
“The caterpillars should die if they eat the corn, but since they didn’t die this year, producers had to spend on average 120 reals ($54) per hectare … at a time that corn prices are terrible,” says Ricardo Tomczyk, president of the Aprosoja farm lobby in Mato Grosso state.
The farmers are seeking compensation from Monsanto and three other GMO seedmakers. We hope they’re not holding their breath…
“I’ve already gone through my own fridge and pantry to protect my wife and four kids,” says the aforementioned Doug Hill — bringing us back to the core issue.
Doug and his team have pored over those 44,000 pages of internal FDA memos. His conclusion: “The list of foods that can potentially be dangerous to your health is much longer than you can probably imagine.”
If your goal is to live a long, healthy and vigorous life, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to check out Doug’s research summary. It really is a case of “what you don’t know can kill you”… so give it a look right now.
Stocks are selling off hard this morning. Well, by recent standards anyway.
Barring a miraculous recovery, it looks as if the S&P 500 will notch its second 1% daily decline since mid-April. At 1,941, the index is down 2.4% from its all-time high one week ago today. The correction our trading desk has been eyeing for lo these many weeks might be underway.
Hot money isn’t flowing into gold; the Midas metal is down about $10, to $1,285. Crude? It’s tumbled below $99. Treasuries? They’re flat. The only beneficiary today appears to be the greenback. The (admittedly flawed) dollar index is up to 81.4 — a level not seen since last September.
Mainstream financial media can’t make up their minds what’s to blame: “Fed rate policy,” says MarketWatch. “Europe deflation fears,” avers CNBC.
The idea an epic rally is simply due for a rest is too radical for them to contemplate. Heh…
Well, what about the Fed? Yesterday, its Open Market Committee opted to cut back its bond purchases another $10 billion per month. As our old friend the tapir shows us, the Fed has trimmed in $10 billion increments at every meeting since last December.
But the rest of the Fed statement — at 840 words, near a record for verbosity — left much to the imagination. Specifically, how soon the fed funds rate might finally start being raised from the near-zero levels where they’ve sat since December 2008.
“Markets love certainty, and right now there is too much uncertainty about the Fed’s trigger points for raising rates,” says Kristina Hooper, a strategist at Allianz Global. “Instead of looking at one number, such as the unemployment rate, the Fed is looking at a mosaic of data points. Investors are unsure what the Fed would consider a tolerable level of higher inflation.”
Fat lot of good the Fed’s “communication policy” and “forward guidance” are doing, eh?
Funny thing is nobody seems much worried about Argentina’s second default in 13 years.
Argentina defaulted on $81 billion in bonds in December 2001, when the infamous corralito was grafted onto Argentine citizens and the peso effectively devalued 75%. In the end, the International Monetary Fund agreed to let the government pay only the interest owed.
But along the way, a handful of hedge fund owners — notably Paul Singer of Elliott Management — bought some of the bonds for pennies on the dollar. Then they dragged the Argentine government into courts all over the world betting someone would order the Argentines to pay in full. That included two courts in the U.S.
The U.S. judges told Singer to take a hike: “How dare you waste valuable taxpayer resources on a bonehead case like this! You took your chances with a deadbeat government and it didn’t work out? Boo freakin’ hoo!”
Just kidding. The judges ruled in the hedgies’ favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned away Argentina’s appeal. Mediators tried up until the last minute to broker a deal, but with no luck.
As of yesterday afternoon, Argentina is once again in default… to the yawns of the elite media. “Absolutely nothing is riding on an Argentina’s default,” sniffs Heidi Moore in The Guardian. “The entire conflict is composed of absurdities.”
Au contraire, tweets our friend Jim Rickards, author of The Death of Money…
And so we watch. No dire consequences yet, but we’re on the case.
“I just had to add my nickel to the conversation about the ‘morality’ of investing in certain companies or industries,” a reader writes.
“While some decisions about what to avoid are straightforward, others are less so. For example, the reader yesterday said ‘fracking’ is bad, and therefore, he doesn’t put his investment money in fracking, even though he presumed he could have made significant profits by doing so. His ‘case’ against fracking is thin at best. He thinks that it wastes ‘good’ water and that someday we’ll find that there is a better and ‘safer’ way to obtain these hydrocarbons.
“The logical extension of this kind of thinking would have avoided all oil/gas recovery, and we would all still be living in the whale oil world. (I’m sure he wouldn’t have invested in whale oil either.) If he was serious and consistent, he would not only avoid investing in these ‘immoral’ things, but he would not use the products that result from these technologies and businesses. I would suggest he try to live in California without using hydrocarbon products if he wants to feel really good about himself. Good luck with that!
“Today’s environmentalists (moralists) are quick to embrace the ‘moral’ imperative of avoiding/stopping what, by most rational measures, would be progress. They seem to need to feel superior to the rest of us by opposing this progress. In my opinion, they are little more than spoiled rich children who can afford to look down their noses at those they consider less moral than they. They need to be held to their own standards and shown to be the hypocrites that they usually are.”
“Regarding your comments yesterday about potential development of the Leviathan gas field: Do any of us think that what is going on in the eastern Ukraine is about anything other than the development (or prevention thereof) of the shale gas in eastern Ukraine??
“Lemme see…
1. Shell and BP did a joint venture with a Ukrainian outfit to develop it (with Jokin’ Joe Biden’s son on the board of said Ukrainian outfit).
2. If that Ukrainian gas field gets developed, it will cut into Russia’s gas sales to Europe and/or lower the price of the gas Russia sells to Europe.
3. Vlad does NOT want (2) to happen, as it would hurt his development of the Russian military and/or his (alleged) popularity in Russia.
“Is it at all hard to connect the above dots?”
The 5: Not at all. At this point, we just hope the new cold war doesn’t turn hot.
Best regards,
Dave Gonigam
The 5 Min. Forecast
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