Posted on 11/05/2013 9:02:04 PM PST by djwright
UPDATE, 8:20 p.m.: With 20 counties reporting– including King, Pierce, Spokane and Thurston — the initiative that would label genetically engineered food was trailing 47 percent to 53 percent. More results are coming.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.seattletimes.com ...
Because the whole GMO scare is bogus. It’s more liberal fear and hatred of anything that smacks of progress. Liberals would like to see half the world’s population starve to death so the world could return to some mythical pristine state.
Yes, that is the current wage.
“I voted against it along with all voting members in my family.”
Me too. Hope it fails. The liberals are destroying our state. Washington was the first political body in the history of the world to legalize abortion, then vote for partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized pot and gay marriage.
It is Obama’s dream state. His mother attended a communist church near Seattle.
I think maybe there are enough hippie farmers who sell at farmers markets that might vote against it, j
You make an interesting point.
I want to know what’s in my food. I have a family member with celiac disease. One has to wonder about the rise in disease and the link with food.
“Who is the biggest supporter of factory farming in the USA?”
The for-profit corporations making billions of dollars off it.
“Why would the beginnings of factory farming be in the Communist Manifesto, in black and white? It’s part of the record.”
It’s not. There is no mention of “factory farming” in the manifesto, or any description of a process similar to what we know as factory farming. Futhermore, the communists never made any attempt, that I am aware of, to implement anything similar to what we call “factory farming”. You are just confusing the reference to involving industry and farming with the modern concept that we have today. What the commies were proposing, and what they actually tried to implement, was an entirely different animal.
Contrary to factory farming, the commie experiment actually reduced efficiency, so it is quite a far cry from factory farming.
“One has to wonder about the rise in disease and the link with food.”
I wonder about the rise in food paranoia and the link with left wing propaganda.
You eat what you want and I will rely on my own victory garden.
Both incorrect. If companies are being subsidized to do farming, how can they be making money from it? As high as $30 billion per year on average in direct agricultural subsidy, with three-quarters of it being received by large “agribusness” concerns?
Intensive animal farming is a recent phenomenon; it started around the 1960s. Coincidentally, the agricultural subsidies started increasing and the number of people on farms started decreasing. Capitalist? Think again. Claiming that “factory farming” is not mentioned in the Manifesto—when it clearly is (”combining agriculture with industrial production”)—is an attempt to push reality away. And yes, intensive farming does reduce quality.
“Both incorrect. If companies are being subsidized to do farming, how can they be making money from it?”
Very simple. Say I make an average of $100 million in profits out of my operation. I take a few million, pool it with others in my industry, pay some lobbyists, and get a subsidy for $10 million a year. Now I make an average of $110 million in profits out of my operation.
Even if they made no profit to begin with, their innovations weren’t created because they LOST money for the business owners. What kind of logic is there in that?
“Claiming that “factory farming” is not mentioned in the Manifesto—when it clearly is (”combining agriculture with industrial production”)—is an attempt to push reality away.”
No, it is just the opposite. You are trying to use one phrase and equate it with another where no equivalency exists. If all we had to go on was that one sentence in the Manifesto, such a mistake might be understandable, but that’s not the case. The Manifesto is simply a general statement of principles for public consumption, and those principles were already laid out in depth in more scholarly works like Das Kapital. So, instead of continuing to cite one not so specific reference in the Manifesto, we can look at the deeper explanations of that idea and see that there is no resemblance to factory farming, and look at what the communists actually DID, and see that they never set up a single factory farm.
If you refuse to accept that evidence, then you are just denying logic in pursuit of an idea you’ve become emotionally attached to, and there’s nothing more to be done for you.
In the 1960’s the Soviet Union imported millions of tons of wheat from the U.S.
The Soviets did indeed practice “factory farming” and their farms like their factories were so inefficient that they weren’t able to feed their people and their live stock at the same time and couldn’t even afford to pay for their imports without financing for the surplus wheat they purchased.
By contrast the private ownership and operation of farms in the U.S. has been the most efficient in the world precisely because the U.S. farmer is not a factory worker but a cross between artist and business owner seeking to ever greater efficiency to survive and prosper.
That’s not where US farming is headed. Why all the subsidy, which keeps going up? never mind, why is US farming headed in the same direction as the USSR’s farming?
There’s a spiritual dimension to this also. The USSR was a practitioner of state atheism, don’t forget.
“You don’t seem to grasp the “logic” of leftists. And calling subsidy “profit” is falling for their line.”
It’s all the same on a company’s books, because it all feeds into the same bottom line. There is no separate total for subsidies at the bottom of the page. This is not “leftist logic”, it is basic business accounting. In fact, at a business I do accounting for, they have a building where 90% of the rents are paid by federal subsidy. Where is the subsidy accounted for? Right there at the top of the income statement, where other non-subsidized buildings would have their normal rental income.
To a business, the only difference between subsidies and other sources of income is that subsidies are reliable and predictable, month after month, year after year, while other income varies. That’s one reason why many businesses actively seek subsidies, because they are a cushion against economic cycles.
“And the communists did indeed set up factory farming, in fact.”
Oh, they did, did they? Then you should have no problem finding examples of such and posting them for us.
“Where do you think the USA got the idea?”
The USA doesn’t get any ideas; people get ideas. I’m not sure who first thought of factory farming, but I am certain it was a business owner who realized they could make more money out of a limited amount of capital by innovating their processes, just like capitalists always do.
So you are countenancing subsidy then as “profit” (which leftists do all the time)? never mind continuing to deny the truth about factory farming? There’s no difference between US factory farms and USSR collectives other than the output; and frankly, much of the output of US factory farms is not all that healthy to eat.
You can’t change the truth with rhetoric.
I think you have just backwards...U.S. farming is being copied by the Russians.
A spiritual dimension? One of the blessings of the Kingdom was that each person could sit under their own vine and their own fig tree and no one would ever be able to take it away from them.
Yes, the Kingdom. That hasn’t yet come; we’re still in the era of “the kingdoms of this world”.
Subsidized agribusiness based on the model in the Communist Manifesto can’t be counted as a blessing. Just because the USSR tried it first and failed does not mean the USA’s current model isn’t based on the Manifesto.
“So you are countenancing subsidy then as “profit” (which leftists do all the time)?”
Countenancing? No, I am flat out telling you that, to a business, there is really no difference between a subsidy and any other income, in fact, the subsidies may be preferable for reasons I already outlined. This isn’t a value judgement as to whether subsidies are “good”, from a political perspective, it is just how they are viewed from a financial perspective. If you can’t understand that, I recommend taking a basic accounting for business class.
“There’s no difference between US factory farms and USSR collectives other than the output; and frankly, much of the output of US factory farms is not all that healthy to eat.”
Ah, so you cannot find an example of factory farms in the USSR, and so you are trying to call the collectives factory farms now? No, that is not going to fool anyone, I hope. There are a great many differences between the two concepts, but if you aren’t aware of them, I would be happy to list some for you.
“You can’t change the truth with rhetoric.”
I’m not the one who seized on a few misinterpreted words in the Manifesto and tried to use them to rewrite history.
To a business, there’s no difference between subsidy and income? Never heard that before, unless businesses are suddenly doing some creative accounting.
Any business that accepts subsidy for doing something is not making money and admittedly cannot sustain itself in whatever pattern they are maintaining if they had to under a purely capitalist system. That’s like saying the private railroad companies were (and are, in some cases today) making money on commuter rail when they were being subsidized to run those trains (and prior to Amtrak, long distance passenger trains).
Just because we’ve adopted a communistic method of farming without completely abolishing private business doesn’t make it less communistic or more capitalistic, nor does it mean that the origins are in capitalism. Things may even be fascistic in outlook here, what with the close relation between nominally private business and government here.
The forerunner of factory farms is the sovkhoz. These were state-owned, but they were organized like industries. This pattern is scattered all over the world, not just confined to the USA after the USSR’s examples.
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