Why does the US allow a controversial weedkiller banned across the world?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I, for one, was not surprised.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
That’s not really the definition of lobbying though. We should try to avoid hyperboles. Additionally, bribery is not legal and that’s not even remotely the form that the vast majority of lobbying takes today.
Now, everyone tries to hide behind levels of abstraction — “It’s just lobbying!” — but those are just fig leaves and reasonable people should see through them. E.g., “Exxon gave the money to my campaign committee, and I’m not involved with the finance end; my vote in favor of Exxon was just a coincidence.” That’s pure bullshit and everyone knows it.
So yes it’s bribery. Calling it something else is disingenuous.
Let’s say a lobbyist for a nonprofit cancer research group has dinner with a representative and discusses reasons for (lobbies) him to vote for increased cancer research at this dinner. Is this bribery? Because it is lobbying. But under your definition of lobbying and bribing being equivalent terms, they are the same! And to call such an action bribery isn’t really making your case - it’s just nuking the utility of both of the words.
This is a problem with modern political discourse - all rhetoric is flattened. No - lobbying is lobbying. Bribing is bribing.
Your representative has a town hall and afterwards you get a few minutes to speak with him. You argue that the number of stop signs in your neighborhood isn’t enough and causes danger. In other words, you lobby him to pursue increased stop signs in your area. He hears you out, you guys shake hands, and leave.
As you have now engaged in lobbying, have you engaged in bribery? Clearly not. The two words are not synonyms.
Who's footing the bill ?
Lobbying has, for a very long time, been another term for bribery. Even as recently as the COVID crisis. Why do you think Pfizer got all that juicy government money? Go look at open secrets and see who they paid. If you want a real shocker, look at their top donors and then look at their voting record. Look at all the politicians that end up at Pfizer, Exxon, Northrop, Google, etc. Look at all the executives for those companies that, as if by some miracle, end up running MAJOR parts of our government.
You are correct in the literal sense lobbying was supposed to be about the everyman talking to their representative and convincing them to do right by them. However, now, the everyman has no voice. If you don't donate $X millions you won't even the time of day from most congressmen. It's corruption at it's core and an affront to democracy. It's disguised as "lobbying" because Citizens United allowed it to be. That's all.
Frequently, lobbying is used for corruption. The insinuation that nuanced perception can somehow alter this dynamic, is not compelling.
There's tons of nuance here; I'm responding to a person who appears to be insisting that there's absolutely nothing wrong with lobbying when in fact there are lots of problems with the actual practice as observed in the US.
It's fine for normal people to lobby their representative. But if you're a billionaire telling your representative to close the roads near your house because you don't like normal people driving by, and anyway you travel by helicopter, and you donate millions every year to your representative's campaign so they'd better listen to you - then you're using money to increase your influence beyond "one man, one vote" and that's basically bribery.
wait
Didn't you go from lobbying (getting a dinner specifically to discuss and convince):
> Lets say a lobbyist for a nonprofit cancer research group has dinner with a representative and lobbies him to vote for increased cancer research at this dinner. Is this bribery?
to having dinner and talking cancer research en passant:
> having dinner while talking about cancer research
With that being said, these matters are supposed to be debated on a parliament's floor and an elected parliament member should have his stance about cancer research in his program, that's what he sold/promised to people who voted for them.
I agree that conflating these terms leads to less productive conversations.
it very well could be.
I know plenty of people that could be persuaded to do things by the mere chance to meet someone that they adore.
'Dinner' is often just code for "let me introduce you to X business associate", which has definite real-world persuasive power for people that need to make those connections.
It would be unsurprising for an oil-tycoon to try to purchase a plate at a dinner with lots of oil-state-politicians. This isn't for the sake of good company, it's to further business interests.
Ironically enough, I'm pretty sure these companies do a lot of lobbying.
I’ve been involved in lobbying efforts before as an employee of a firm. It’s not bribery. The company pays a lobbying firm to strategize around an issue, put together talking points or a white paper and leverage their network (as registered lobbyists) to argue their point with various politicians. There is no money transfer happening.
The EU has a very healthy lobbying process as well.
Campaign donations are a different matter, but I can donate up to $5000 to any member of Congress as a citizen and likely get time with them. Am I “bribing” when I do that?
I mean lobbyists can break those laws, but you can break any law.
most people would tend to agree that if it required something it was at the very least an exchange, perhaps a bribe.
one could ask why the request for support couldn't be done over the phone; the answer is "because of the dinner." -- well, then, isn't the dinner being exchanged for the support?
what is the value of the dinner? Does the value represent a monetary amount that would throw red flags up regarding the dinner being an exchange of value rather than a living expense? Does this exchange of value represent a bribe?
It's not as cut and dry as "A is lobbying and B is bribing.", that's why most political corruption scandals are generally handled by committees of people that try to go through the events to extract meaning from them.
Do you have an idea to improve on this? Perhaps there could be 100 designated dinners per rep per year and up to four competing voices could be at the table. We could vote for the candidate who has a 100 dinner topics list that we like the best.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/former-congressman-dunc...
https://www.salon.com/2022/05/17/fec-block-action-on-alleged...
Now, perhaps the scheme I just outlined is a bit too obvious, but I certainly don't doubt that far more sophisticated money laundering schemes that leverage the recent supreme court decision are happening now and will happen in the future.
Give it a try. Let me know how it goes.
If you don’t have a campaign donation lined up, you’re not getting in the door.
Edit: Without money, I mean.
Sometimes I sincerely wonder if it is due in part to a lack of autonomy from the national parties. I think there is limited wiggle room to oppose the party line, except in cases where a lot of money is brought in, or a particular issue strongly jeopardizes the party’s control over an area.
I've heard this before and I suspect it's true.
My professor in college actually drafted a pro-entrepreneurship law in the office of his representative who then brought it to the floor for a vote.
No money was exchanged.
Corruption doesn’t always seem to lie in the identification of problems (although it could). The interface with the private sector is where I believe the government often fails to meet ethical standards.
The experts in the telecom industry work for the telecom industry, for instance. If I believe a bill they wrote will cause harm to the public, there is no one within the benefitting industry that will argue on my behalf, except for myself.
Lobbying is talking to politicians to attempt to convince them of something. Lobbyists aren't allowed to give money or gifts to a politician beyond some small limit (exact rules vary by state). For example, in California, a lobbyist can pay up to $10 of the politician's meal and the politician has to pay the rest.
A company can both make political donations and hire lobbyists. But when you see that X company spent $2 million on lobbying, that's not money going to a politician or their campaign. You need to look at the political donations.
It has become a channel for corruption, though. The solution, which may be entirely impossible, is to select better representatives. But requires being a better people in the first place.
Yeah, it's bribery.
At any rate, I think it's good that people collecting signatures are being paid for their time. If there's something actually bad about the petition though, it'd be good to hear about it.
I'm also still not sure why I should think both sides are terrible, given that you haven't stated any reason to think that the petition is terrible.
It seems like the other democratic thing, which is likely more impactful, is that most people don't give a shit about most issues like this. People have much bigger issues in their lives (and on the reps schedule), so there's no real pressure for regulators to changeover this issue vs others. For even more evidence of people not giving a shit, just look at voter turn out.
Edit: why disagree?
Perhaps you misconstrued my perspective. I'm just telling it how it is. There are plenty of issues that we should see action on, yet none is taken. The main reason is that there's only so much bandwidth in the system so things get prioritized. The high priority stuff is high priority because a lot of people give a shit about that thing.
This is not victim blaming. Even if people gave a shit, the system is overburdened and they'd have to deprioritze other stuff. This is simply reality. Not to mention, we'd need proof that all these indifferent people are actually victims.
Many people think the foundations of the U.S. are outdated and ill-informed of modern society. Most of those people are poor students of history. The U.S. founders were not poor students.
Regarding lobbyists and special interests in politics, the founders were not the least bit ignorant. In the end they settled on a clever mechanism to control them. The answer to special interests is special interests.
It might be argued that some special interests have escaped containment. Big oil is too big? But Biden just sent massive funding into solar and batteries and electric vehicles. Big chemical is too big? Trump gutted EPA? What about Big Pharma? Well, any system is going to have pendulums, and none of them will be perfect. But can they self heal? History suggests the current system is pretty good at that even if any given moment seems a bit off-kilter.
I'm not opposed to exploring other options. But to improve requires a recognition of the weanesses and the strengths of alternatives. Don't be too quick to dismiss the strengths of the current alternative.
The alternative is a secret vote. Now only passed/unpassed legislation can be bought. This is a lot more expensive and requires a conspiracy, but it's a lot harder to hold the people in this conspiracy directly accountable since they can always plausibly deny how their vote was cast. I've yet to see another better solution for getting rid of the money to vote pipeline.
The solution is simply to ban lobbying.
Dgmr, I agree that it’s a huge problem but banning lobbying will just be used as a tool to hang some politican they can’t oust any other way.
When spending money is equated with speech, and corporations are given the same free speech rights as people, and you allow anonymous shell corporations... You end up with a corrupted government.
Perhaps there are even certain types of votes that should be visible at the individual level, but I can't think of them right now.
If you ban more direct lobbying there will always be indirect routes to reward desired behavior. As long as buyers can see returns they'll keep investing. We don't have to make it easy for them to see. We don't have to let political machines force party line votes.
Sure, it's legal, but how is it democratic?
Glyphosate gets a bad rap in large part due to similarity to organophosphates (P-O-C), which are usually quite toxic, but it is in fact a phosphonate, with a direct P-C bond. I forget the exact mechanism, but it makes a difference.
Also glyphosate readily hydrolyzes, while paraquat is a "brick" that resists breakdown and is prone to bioaccumulation.
The mechanism of action is identical: methylpyridinium promotes the production of reactive oxygen species which wreak havoc on cellular machinery. In fact MPP is a "quat" and was briefly used as an herbicide. The chloride of MPP+ was sold under the trade name Cyperquat.
> As an herbicide, paraquat acts by inhibiting photosynthesis. In light-exposed plants, it accepts electrons from photosystem I (more specifically ferredoxin, which is presented with electrons from PS I) and transfers them to molecular oxygen. In this manner, destructive reactive oxygen species (ROS) are produced.
> MPP+ exhibits its toxicity mainly by promoting the formation of reactive free radicals in the mitochondria of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra.[9][10] MPP+ can siphon electrons from the mitochondrial electron transport chain at complex I and be reduced, in the process forming radical reactive oxygen species which go on to cause further, generalized cellular damage.
I have limited knowledge about glyphosate, and don’t know much about herbicides in general. Help me (us) understand what makes them nasty.
I'm not specifically a specialist of herbicides (I know much more about biomedical stuff), but my experience during the pandemic has completely put me off trying to educate others. I've become extremely cynical and de-energized: the people who need help don't want it.
Glyphosate at most could maybe increase by 30% the risks of a quite rare cancer for farmers who use it in high dosage (so glyphosate in conservation agriculture is likely to be harmless).
[edit] TFA talk about paraquat anyway :P
If one herbicide is not completely replaced by another (some may try going completely herbicide-free, which has its own very different set of risks), it will certainly be partially replaced by another.
I don't support the "ban glyphosate" movement (for imo it is one of the lesser evils), but I would more easily support a "ban all herbicides" movement... Though I would be somewhat skeptical of the feasibility of going completely herbicide-free.
This is my view as well.
If your skepticism of a herbicide free system stems from the meme that we need industrialized agriculture to feed the world, you can rest assured that small agriculture and local permaculture is more than capable of feeding the world: https://grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small...
>small agriculture and local permaculture … feeding the world
Requires a major restructuring of civilization and economic upheavals involving an enormous number of people returning to food production. It might be a yuppie ideal to go start up a hobby farm but a few rich people having fun is a lot different than changing world economies.
It’s not so hard to do for the Whole Foods and farmers market crowds willing to pay high prices. It’s quite hard to feed the poor by throwing out industrialization and replacing it with lots of labor. This makes food much more expensive.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23...
> It’s quite hard to feed the poor by throwing out industrialization and replacing it with lots of labor. This makes food much more expensive.
This is untrue. Small farms produce the majority of the world's food, despite increasing industrialization. More importantly, small farms are more efficient than big agro.
> In the European Union, 20 countries register a higher rate of production per hectare on small farms than on large farms. In nine EU countries, productivity of small farms is at least twice that of big farms.55 In the seven countries where large farms have higher productivity, it is only slightly higher than that of small farms.56 This tendency is confirmed by numerous studies in other countries and regions, all of them showing higher productivity on small farms.
> Our data indicate, for example, that if all farms in Kenya had the current productivity of the country's small farms, Kenya's agricultural production would double. In Central America and Ukraine, it would almost triple. In Hungary and Tajikistan it would increase by 30%. In Russia, it would be increased by a factor of six.57
> Although big farms generally consume more resources, control the best lands, receive most of the irrigation water and infrastructure, get most of the financial credit and technical assistance, and are the ones for whom most modern inputs are designed, they have lower technical efficiency and therefore lower overall productivity. Much of this has to do with low levels of employment used on big farms in order to maximise return on investment.58
https://grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small...
We don't need economic upheaval, just stop regulatory capture and stop giving handouts to big agro.
You can buy glyphosate from different manufacturers, under different brand names. Roundup is just one of many.
With the concerned person perfectly happy with that explanation.
"Nah, we don't use 1080. This is sodium fluoroacetate." "Oh."
Edit: NZ also permits use of glyphosate. It is starting to be discouraged because of the effects of long-term use on soil ecology, rather than health.
There are no good (non-labor-intensive) alternatives, though. To grow grass we have to use it, pretty much. At least until all-weather autonomous solar-powered weed-grubbing robots arrive.
Show me someone who can come up with a better herbicide, and I will show you a wealthy person.
I admit that there very well could be better options that I don't know about (especially if there are new ones that emerged in the last 10-20 years), but I think it's no exaggeration to say that almost anything else is worse.
Just pick a couple that look interesting from the larger one.
This whole discussion seems extremely hyperbolic…
Other commenters have provided good short lists. Do you want me to repeat them?
* 2,4-D
* Dicamba
* Trifluralin
* Pendimethylin
Go find a herbicide that doesn’t have a list of health concerns and environmental effects… which anybody uses.
However the risk to human health is (in my honest opinion and according to my best professional judgment) very minimal, and the greater risk is environmental. In part for this reason, I would think industrial application to be orders of magnitude more concerning than some old lady applying it in her patch of tomatoes.
2. I do believe there are serious environmental concerns (which unfortunately is not really my expertise-- I rely on my colleagues and on what I see in journals for this judgment).
Given so much suspicion about this substance, homeowners are probably not equipped to handle it safely in a spray bottle with a mile of fine print on it. Professional farmers might be if well informed.
And we cannot farm successfully on scale we need without them.
> They are literally stuff meant to kill other stuff, with varying degrees of specificity and effectiveness.
The effectiveness bit is obvious, but I think the public thinks much less about specificity, especially in cases where there is a component of fear.
The following study states that organic farming on average is 25% less productive than conventional farming. The major difference being the use of plant protection products (herbicides, pesticides, etc.).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/IDAN/2019/6344...
That additional land use could be satisfied if the consumption of meat would be drastically reduced. Currently 33% of cropland are used for feed production. (https://www.fao.org/3/ar591e/ar591e.pdf)
So yes, we could farm successfully without them. But not at the current prices for produce and not with the current meat consumption.
https://www.agdaily.com/technology/the-list-of-pesticides-ap...
But like, how safe are they really? If they're spraying a cocktail that kills dozens of kinds of insects of all sizes, how does that have no effect on humans? Even at small doses it would seem that the effect would still be measurable. Surely whatever biological process that kills all those bugs also does something to people?
I don't let them apply chemicals inside the house, that's where I draw the line. And I'm probably not going to renew the extensive service. If nothing else, it's more chemicals around me that I can live without. But almost every one of my neighbors pays for something similar. How much are we inundating ourselves in this stuff? And what is it doing to the environment and ecosystem? This is one of those things that I feel like we'll look back on with deep regret in a few decades.
Short answer: it's complicated, and there are in fact very targeted pesticides that are far less harmful to humans. In the same breath, we've had so many fuckups of the flavor of "use this wonder chemical! It's safe!" that it's easy to be wary.
Humans, having evolved as omnivores, are actually very good digesters of xenobiotics (foreign chemicals). The true masters of eating poison are rats (which, frankly it's cruel and* not very effective to use poison to kill rats), and they are only about 6x better than us at metabolizing weird chemicals.
Insects have very different biology, so usually they can be orders of magnitude more selective than typical poisons. Most are nerve agents, basically Sarin for bugs. Note: they can still be very hazardous to poor metabolizers, e.g. cats.
There is little in the way of selectivity against arthropods (some are better at insects than arachnids, or vice versa). Anything effective against ants, wasps, or even beetles will likely harm bees.
Personally I use borax/sugar for ants (has to be eaten), and gamma cyhalothrin as a barrier only on the edges of my foundation, avoiding any zones which I think could spread out into the environment. I probably shouldn't even use that stuff really, but my partner insists.
I've sworn off pesticides and herbicides and the effect on my property has been amamzing. It's like a little nature hub. Lots of insects outside, but it hasn't been an issue. We started to have lots of birds show up every day to feast, and there is a noticeable difference in the amoujt of birds that show up compared to all the homes around me.
At first all the pesky weird insects show up, but eventually the birds and bats and other predatory insects balance things out. One group I wasn't to keen on was a wasp nest. I got rid of that one but they moved to the other end of the property and aren't an issue. I don't know... I feel like we humans are too afraid of nature these days. I mean, everyone likes hiking in the national parks and tells themselves they want to preserve nature but don't really seem to interested on the day to day things that can help preserve other species' habitats.
I'm not perfect either. It takes some effort to question norms and behaviour you were taught, so I'm just as guilty as everyone else.
Edit: On mobile. Forgive the typos.
Lol. My neighbor got pest treatment for the first time recently. Guess what happens? The pests move next door. So now we need pest control.
Profits are the only yardstick by which anything in the US is measured. Everything else is secondary.
That's not an accurate representation of the court's opinion. Here's the summary given on wikipedia
>The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional, because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.
Corporations being considered "people" (aka. corporate personhood) has nothing to do with it.
Other countries have limits on campaign contributions, but claiming that they're known as "bribes" is a massive hyperbole.
https://www.appf.europa.eu/appf/en/donations-and-contributio...
Those contain alterations that (I hypothesize) are partially responsible for increased allergies in the US population.
In France, the increased allergies isn't as noticeable in rural area as in cities. If it was caused by chemical we use on plant, the reverse would be true.
It makes sense that there is general coincidence between severe allergies and other immune disorders.
ngl i think this is just a epigenetic shift from people who have been "raised weak" for several generations. i can't prove it completely but there is some research showing that kids with milk allergies end up runty:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4362703/
https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(19)31475-7/ful...
By the way, the two worst offenders i ever met when talking about allergies were around the same age (they should be in their 60s now) and both are Distilben babies. And they were scrawny, but it wasn't by choice, they just couldn't eat most fats. Nothing to do with nurture in their case.
Even if the modification is a simple addition between adjacent start and stop codons, that kind of modification could alter meta encodings that control other aspects of cell regulation, including (potentially) gene expression -- which would cause proteins that are coded for but that normally aren't present to become present in crops. Even one newly expressed protein (that is normally not ever expressed) could trigger immune response.
Normally, parallel evolution of people and crops allows humans enough time to adapt to natural mutations. Note selective breeding doesn't increase the underlying mutation rate - that's the number that I'm concerned we've manipulated beyond acceptable bounds.
none of this really seems to fit with a GMO hypothesis.
(are you a biologist? this stuff is pretty obvious to biologists)
The goal in this case was to improve soybean amino acid content (soybean is a major world crop, with Brazil being one of the top suppliers). Pioneer- one of the major seed companies- created a transgenic (moving a whole gene from one organism to another) soybean with a gene from Brazil nuts. That gene turned out to be the one that produces the protein in Brazil nuts which causes an allergic reaction and the soybeans actually seem to cause a reaction in people who consume them (I'm glossing over a bunch of technical details in the paper).
It's not hard to image, with an existence proof like this, that there are many ways that GM crops could increase the risk to consumers.
Any biologist I've trained with who understands transgenics and immune response would immediately note that this was a fairly obvious potential risk/outcome provided the source gene's properties had been identified first.
2. A study by the CDC estimates that 80% of Americans have glyphosate in their urine. Glyphosate is an antibiotic proven to be disrupting to gut bacteria. Crops are being genetically engineered to allow for more and more glyphosate exposure because the weeds are growing increasingly resistant to it, requiring even more glyphosate - which in turn runs off into our water supply. It's a positive feedback loop as nature abhors monoculture (less diversity = less evolutionary resiliency), and seeks to restore balance and diversity with pests, weeds, viruses, etc. Monocrop agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable
https://www.propublica.org/article/asbestos-poisoning-chemic...
Its 2022. If you have inert ingredients and unpronounceable ingredients in your diet (untested junk science), known harmful chems external from that are just par for the course.
Dead soil from herbicides and pesticides just mean that junk science is "busy as bees" :p
Same reason why toxic oil fracking exists and burn off millions of dollars of natural gas into atmosphere daily.
Same reason why there are allowed toxic zones in populated areas https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
Same reason why highly toxic leaded fuel is still used daily in aviation for decades despite banned everywhere else.
[1] https://search.carrot2.org/#/search/pubmed/Paraquat/folders
You're worried about weedkillers?