Hightower Lowdown
"The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it's conformity." -- Jim Hightower
In This Issue
The real crisis in our democracy
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Battling biopiracy
When the poor steal from the rich, it's called crime. When the rich steal from the poor, it's called business.
Monsanto, W.R. Grace, and other global giants are presently engaged in an egregious theft from millions of poor people in India and South America. Citizens there have dubbed it "biopiracy," but these modern-day corporate pirates are too cowardly to confront their victims directly with swords drawn, as the pirates of old did. Instead, they hide behind a batallion of patent lawyers who do their stealing for them.
What they're doing is obtaining patents on indigenous plants that provide food, crops, medicine, and income (among other things) for the people in these impoverished regions.
Basmati rice, the Neem tree, mustard, and the castor plant are among the living things that various corporations now claim "belong" to them, even though the companies did nothing to develop these plants except file the patents.
RiceTec Inc., for example, has grabbed 17 patents on Basmati rice, a variety that was bred over centuries by poor farmers in India. With a patent, RiceTec can claim that farmers who previously were free to plant Basmati rice from saved seeds must now pay the corporation a royalty.
Farmers are uniting to challenge these patents and fight such crass corporate thievery through the Global Campaign Against Biopiracy. To learn more, contact Dr. Vandana Shiva by e-mail: vshiva@vsnl.com.