Cheaper meds or herbal/natural remedies. The FDA hates homeopathy with a passion. That might give their cronies in Congress impetus to shove SOPA (or something like it) through.

Homeopathy? Do you mean placebos?

Don't be rediculous, you can't ban the import of water and sugar.


Touché.

More like herbal remedies, natural cures, alternative medicine, that jazz. Might as well be placebos.

You can if Monsanto creates a GMO version of sugar, that while being openly farmed breeds with all the world's unmodified sugar crops; and then the company claims intellectual property rights of all sugar therefore & says that any unlicensed sugar sales should be considered contraband & destroyed [after all, that's the way it already works with corn].

Exactly. Several farmers have been afflicted by Monsanto's flesh-eating zombie bastard lawyers.

Farmer A grows corn the old-fashioned way: he grows corn, gets seeds from that corn for the next year's harvest, uses them to grow more corn. Farmer B buys genetically-modified seed from Monsanto. The Monsanto corn has had marker genes inserted into their corn seeds that serve no other purpose than to say "Property of Monsanto". While Farmer B grows his crops, bees and other insects cross pollinate his Monsanto corn seeds with Farmer A's natural-grown corn. Problem: now Farmer A's corn has Monsanto's marker genes in it.

Enter Monsanto's legal team. Farmer A is sued into non-existence for essentially "pirating corn". Monsanto's proof? Their marker genes in Farmer A's corn. Farmer A's proof? Just his testimony. Monsanto wins the case.

Such cases have already happened. (Monsanto's business practices are so vile that even the UN has considered going after them in the ICC.)

If Monsanto considers some website selling a similar product to be a threat, they can drum up evidence and use SOPA's legislative loopholes to screw that website's owner in court, in addition to getting their website blocked and/or shut down.

There's got to be a way of getting some form of counter-suit lodged there. Something ridiculous like terrorism charges.

Also if they tried that shit here they'd be laughed out of court. Our sugar is made from beet rather than cane and also we hate this kind of shit.

[EDIT]I have it!

Aggravated sexual assault and murder. If a corporation is a person then they can receive the death sentence for raping the crops and killing the parent DNA.

Are you kidding? This company is so rich & powerful in our country that they're untouchable. This is the same company that developed Agent Orange and used to have VP Bush do photoshoots with the press while talking about how great it will be if we get "dereg" for things like the EPA & FDA [probably because such a thing was what allowed big business to thrust the GMOs threw our regulatory bodies with since debunked Monsanto run studies that were made to hide how bad this stuff really is for human consumption]. There's a reason why some of the countries in Africa that accept international food aid won't accept yellow maze from the US.

We wish corporate "personhood" worked that way...

Considering how many countries Monsanto sells their GMOs in; there is no way you're not eating these cancer-causing products without knowing it. Europe takes a strong stance on this subject but only insofar as their European-grown goods are concerned. The stuff being imported from the 3rd world? There's a big "unknown" element to the provenance of those foodstuffs and no quick & easy way to separate GMO & natural foodstuffs in any proposed inspection. Anything originating in India, S.E. Asia, Africa, or the Americas is questionable.

This is a win-win situation if they can keep pulling it off: they get to eventually "own" the rights to all the affordable food on the market, and if any of their own employees eventually succumbs to the potential after-effects of the disease, they can just cash in on their dead-peasant policies and rack in even more. Sure, there's always heirloom seeds if someone wanted to make sure all their foodstuffs were GMO-free but this is not a cost effective solution for the masses [who are already eating sub-par food to begin with because they can't afford anything else; hence the disproportionate instance of obesity in the poorest two SECs!].

Anything from Africa might as well be moved from "questionable" to "certainly Monsanto". Monsanto got its hooks into the UN aid for Africa programs early on. Don't even get me started about their so-called "terminator seeds".

By questionable I simply mean you don't know what you're getting [GMO or not GMO]. We know the yellow maze supply of North & Central America has all been tainted with GMO cross pollination however that doesn't mean all yellow maze in the US is GMO. Some is, some isn't, and there's no easy way to tell the difference between the two.

Shadowrun is predicting the future!

But really, there's not a huge amount of imported foodstuffs here. We massively overproduce due to EU subsidies and anything that isn't imported junk food is made here, barring some fruits etc. I wouldn't write it off entirely, but here compared to the USA is very different in terms of food controls.

Just in: The bill's author just stated the DNS filter part of SOPA should be taken out to allow the Judiciary committee to investigate the option for future use.

The bill still sucks for a plethora of other reasons, and it sounds like they are hoping to sneak the DNS blocking feature in once the subject has lost all the public's attention.

Totally off-topic, but Monsanto-news that doesn't make my toes cringe:

Solo farmer fights Monsanto...and wins

Rather than sit down and take it when Monsanto comes after them for Patent Infringement, these farmers are turning the tables on GMOs and suing Monsanto, Bayer and other GMO companies for crop contamination, and they are winning and forcing these companies to pay to have their crops decontaminated.