BayerSanto: What the Merger Means For You
If you had told someone a few decades ago that by 2016 the company that brought aspirin to the world and the company that brought Agent Orange to Vietnam were going to team up to control a quarter of the world’s food supply, chances are you would have been labeled a loony.
Unless your name was Robert B. Shapiro. He was CEO of Monsanto from 1995 to 2000, and in 1999 he told Business Week that the company’s goal was to wed “three of the largest industries in the world–agriculture, food and health–that now operate as separate businesses. But there are a set of changes that will lead to their integration.”
With this week’s announcement that Bayer had finally succeeded in its quest to acquire Monsanto, it is hard to deny that Shapiro’s vision has been realized. Too bad for all of us that that vision is a nightmare.
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I remember as a child, back in the 1970’s early 80’s, we’d visit my grandparents almost every weekend, and driving back home every Sunday, usually around dusk, by the time we had arrived home the front grill of the car was splattered with dead bugs, and I mean full splatter. When I’d help wash the car with my dad, I would have to basically scrub the bugs out of the grill by hand and they were even splattered on the radiator…fast forward 20 years or so, no bugs whatsoever!
These companies are killing our ecosystem.
I take solace in that the report goes on to suggest that these increasing prices, combined with the emergence of increasingly-resistant weeds, are leading a growing number of farmers back to non-GMO seeds.
…now we just need to get our bugs back.
That’s right. I forgot about the bugs on the car grill.
Which is just about the same time that chem-trails started appearing in the sky, could be a coincidence but somehow I doubt it.
I’ll reserve judgment until I taste some of that GMO Franken Food. I understand it taste just like chicken. It doesn’t look like were going to have much of a choice ! Shades of the 1973 science fiction movie Soylent Green !
Ha, I remember in first grade the teacher asked, What if she dissolved some sugar in a glass of water, how could you get the sugar back? I raised my hand and answered, Evaporate the water. The teacher said no, I was wrong and said she would tell us the correct answer tomorrow. But the next day she didn’t and she never brought it up again. From at least that point I was a rebel, though I am not sure how much it had to do with my teachers or with my parents’ narcissistic attitude. As for enlightenment about the situation of the world: A few years ago (perhaps 2012 or 2013) I stumbled online into Larken Rose’s e-book about his experiences with the IRS including the kangaroo court trial that sent him to prison for a year for simply asking the IRS to show him the law which required him to file. That was the beginning of my questioning everything and then I also somehow stumbled online into information about 9/11 being an inside job, and it was all uphill from there. I don’t know whether it would have been possible for me to become so enlightened were it not for the Internet.
Oh, yeah, and at the same time I found out about The Franklin Scandal and learned just how corrupt our “leaders” are.
For some years certifying airworthiness multi engine aircraft, it become readily apparent that rather than trust one piece of input/data the larger complex system needed consideration – that started the line of thinking – what are the inputs – what can i trust?
Add in the times when authourity figures make non sensical statements and i was on the path to ferreting out what had validity.
Taking on the medical system as advocate for the ‘ole Mum’ showed a system that ignored any info that questioned ‘the pill for everything’ mindset, then it was a dead cert, that in my stumbling around the internet, i would find James Corbett and leap on board.
Since around 1974 have been a ‘square peg in a round hole’, and quite happy in that role.
For me my “wake up moment” was in 7th grade (age 12 or so) when I deconstructed the Pledge of Allegiance that the teachers made us recite by rote every single morning. I analyzed it sentence by sentence and asked myself what it was really saying and what it really meant. The wake up moment came when I got to the phrase “…and liberty and justice for all.” I distinctly remember thinking, “That’s just not true!” I mentally recited all the other phrases and thought, “Neither is that! Or that! Or that!” I realized I was just not like everyone else seemed to be – that I didn’t believe everything I was taught or that I was told I should believe. From then on out things started looking like a house of cards… And, as you can imagine, I got kicked out of class throughout my primary and secondary education for asking “disruptive” questions.
I was a teenager by the late 60’s. Actually, the 60’s were inviting for growth and new ideas. Great era in many respects.
I well remember trying to talk to my classmates in school about deep ideas and asking questions on what life was all about. I loved some of my literature classes, because many writers would communicate about deeper thoughts.
Anyway, what struck me was that very few of my classmates were interested in deep ideas. It seemed like they only were interested in what I deemed “shallow topics”. I felt different from the herd. And I wasn’t a nerd, but actually quite adventurous.
Adventure
And the adventure started in the 7th Grade when I started keeping a diary.
At first, everyday the entry was the same… “School. Come home. Watch “Leave it to Beaver”. Homework. Bed.”
Then I realized that I needed to create my life.(at least for my diary entry)
The game became “have an interesting entry”.
So one adventure after another, from making gunpowder to pulling harmless pranks to journeys in the country to exploring a cave to meeting all kinds of very interesting people (Hells Angels, Gamblers-Hustlers, different cultures, activists, goat ropers,) to having friends that worked at the town’s Bordello to exploring the military base with impunity and walking in the Vietnamese barracks talking to people…. An incredible quantity of interesting things and adventure.
Life became an adventure.
It still is an adventure.
We write our own book.
Great story I can really relate!
My “wake up moment 
Up until 2007, I was no different to the average American guy. Believed (swallowed) the American / European story hock, line and sinker.
In 2007, I took a trip to Russia, and was shocked not to find the empty shelves, and police checkpoints i was expecting (ie. it made me suspect the authenticity of all the news i was fed through my life). but it was not a deal breaker.
in 2011, I took a trip to China, again expecting to see what i was told China “should be”, and i found the opposite. I found a world comparable to the west, and in many ways, far advance than the west. This shattered my believe system, and from that moment i no longer believed what was said in the Western News.
I started looking for alternative news… I found Russia Today, then Al Mayadeen News, Then Press TV, and I kept looking until I found Corbertt Report and NewsBud…
Since 2011, I have visited many countries, and seen first hand many of the atrocities that USA, and some European countries left behind, which makes the Holocaust nothing in comparison.
I believe that Humanity exists, and it is in 80% of us. However, if we all refer to the Broken Windows Theory, or the Secondary Psychopath, we will understand why the Holocaust or Vietnam or Iraq happened.
I am however looking at what is next…. (not the next news source, but the next step in growing up….)
I suppose my first inkling of not being part of the herd was at a building site where my parents were building a new house back when I was was 4 ½ years old.
The house was a the stage where you could still see all the electrical wiring through the framework and it made me curious about how electricity worked? After questioning the adults about it I realised that not only did they not have any answers but they were not interested and had never even thought to ask the question like I had.
It seems like I have always had a gut feeling that some things were wrong well before I have the knowledge to understand why they were wrong.
For instance, I had always hated going to school. It felt to me that they were teaching things the wrong way. Why would you try and teach kids how to read by forcing them to read the most boring books in the universe and then wonder why there was little progress? Besides, nobody at the school knew how electricity worked either.
Unfortunately I didn’t discover the facts about the Prussian education system until long after I had left school – at the time I had simply though they taught things the way they did because they were stupid.
P.S.
If we threw Hillary in the river, would she sink or float?
Considering the “real” Hillary may not even be alive anymore I guess she would just instantly dissolve into smoke.
An interesting note about the “Just for Fun” Plant Killer video referenced above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY4upseb-aw
After repeatedly reading about experiments with plants, I decided to replicate an experiment.
I had two containers of Alfalfa Seed sprouts. One I labeled “Good”, one “Bad”. This experiment was some 10 years back when a grandson was 17. Daily, I had him take the “Bad” container into the garage and yell at it, cussing, saying “I hate you! You are ugly!”, etc. On the “Good” container, he would take it into the garage and say loving statements. Both plants received the exact same water and light. I photographed the daily series of seed sprouting. By day 10, the “Bad” looked pretty bad, while the “Good” looked good.
The poor kid (grandson), I recruited him for all kinds of experiments. He is at the end of this video water dowsing over a well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EAtuDyUwik
Here he starts a fire in one second on a 2X4 with a giant lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soK4NawBaO8
An experiment with plants I performed in the late 70’s. I hooked one plant up to a very sensitive meter measuring electrical resistance. I tore a leaf off of a neighboring plant. I was amazed that the meter registered.
I often follow organic gardening information, like “The Dirt Doctor” or Malcolm Beck, because I enjoy that type of activity.
There is some interesting data about paramagnetism with volcanic sand and how it affects plants.
David Blume also has some profound things to say about organic gardening (or farming).
On realizing not part of the herd, which is like saying ‘black sheep’ which in family dynamics usually means scapegoat–I think we know this even before age 8 or 10, we just cognitively register it about that time. I remember trying to read the Bible and not understanding it at all and then started reading more classic literature in a family that read popular fiction. This was viewed as pretentious. That was an AHA moment that began the lifelong search for understanding, first quite superficially through travel and studying other cultures, but when curiosity is the driving force of one’s life we eventually end up here, studying power and liberty. Many paths leading to the same destination, it seems to me now.
We so appreciate your work, James!
For me it’s a little ‘up side down’. I come from a familie who are all ‘outside the herd’. Pretty much all ‘einzelgängers’ and very self-willed/critical thinking people who live(d) their lives a very different way as the ‘normal’ way. Squatting, living in busses and selling/repairing the stuff they found on the street. From early on i was raised with a high sense of responsibility and pretty freely(maybe a bit to much).
So later when we already had started living in a house and i came in contact with ‘normal’ living people i found out that i was different(probably around 5-6). Always questioning everything grown ups told me and it got me in a lot of trouble all my (young)life. I was branded antisocial. Growing up and wanting to fit in i started to feel ashamed of the way i was and often wished i was more the same as everybody else(most). Tried to suppress it, no more questioning, no more talking about double standards/hypocrisy but it just didn’t work. I wasn’t going to believe something just because some(body/authority) told me.
So i never felt part of the herd and essentially at one point wanted to be part of it. Now that i’m a little bit older i’m glad that i’m the way i am. Although it sometimes feels as a love/hate relationship. It can be horrible to know how the world really works but i just can’t stop myself from wanting to know the truth(facts).
I’m wishing everybody the strength to be themselves because being different can be very tough.
And these days it has gone to a whole nother level where even(some of)my family don’t want to look at facts and think i’m a ‘conspiracy theorist’. So thanks James for helping me keep believing that it’s not me who is the crazy one.
Interesting question James! I’m curious about all the stories.
My first “I’m a critical thinker moment’ occurred when I was send to Sunday school. I was a 7-year old know-it-all in the bud. My parent had decided it was good for me to become acquainted with religion and had been arguing about to which of three calvinistic sub-dominations they would send me. When I went to my first session I asked the teacher “why do you think that your ideas are better than of the others?” And that let to a follow-up question “do you really believe that you are right and they are wrong?”
Discovering, in my own village, that people had different ideas, but still all thought they were correct was a life-changing insight that told me that my own opinions, that I had thought were correct, were probably incorrect as well. This motivated me to improve my opinions and to discover truth. And that, more than anything else, set me apart from the herd.
Here is an audio narration of the article.
http://mixlr.com/convince-yourself-media/showreel/ccr-bayersanto/
UPDATE:
I have a place to put these things now!
http://convinceyourselfmedia.com/2016/10/12/ccr-006-bayersanto-what-the-merger-means-for-you/
I was a conservative for a long time and thought that was the only “Christian” political party. However, as I saw the current election cycle going the way it was and that no candidates actually reflected my values whatsoever, I was at a loss of who to vote for and whether it mattered at all. But then someone linked one of Corbett Report videos in a news comment feed about the Clinton’s true nature. From there I began to look into many things on your website, but the video that really did it for me was Corbett’s reporting on Bohemian Grove. When I learned what our so called “family values” and “Christian” leaders were doing I was utterly distraught. They were all complete frauds. That’s when I gave up on mainstream politics and began doing more research through your site and others.
Now I am much stronger in my faith and devotion to living as Christ taught, not the way our political puppet “leaders” have told us to do. War is not the answer, and the terrorists are not men with turbans on their head but men with ties around their neck. Now when people get wound up about politics I just shake my head. What matters is how we live as individuals and what actions we take. We can’t leave it up to government to save us from their mistakes.
I think I’ve always been part of the herd, until recently. As a kid, I used to believe everything I was taught and told by adults. I was never a critical question asker.
The fact that I am now aware of what is really happening in the world is all thanks to my boyfriend whom I met 5 years ago. In the beginning we used to have huge fights about politics. If I hadn’t been in love with him, I would long have stopped listening to him or taking him seriously. It’s only through repeated and repeated arguments with him that I slowly came to realize that most of what I believed was wrong.
Walking to work this morning it finally occurred to me or became clear to me (probably thanks to Mr Corbett’s article or other more perspicacious commenters) that with the break-down of the TTIP negotiations (when Europe finally realized that these so-called “free trade zone” talks were just the foot in the door for American Multinationals to legally call the shots for European food policies)
Bayer’s buy-out of Monsanto became urgent.
Now Monsanto is European and no longer needs a TTIP visa to invade European dinner (and breakfast and lunch) plates.
You think Junker owns Bayer stocks???
I guess it was being put face into a corner with a pointy hat, every day, and having the other kids laugh at me back in good ole Belfast when I was a leprechaun.
And that severe double dose of vaccinations back in 1960 or 61 and the long night of a screaming meamy fever that followed it, I had an epiphany shortly after the fever heat left my body…”These bastards are trying to kill me. WTF”…
@nosoapradio
That merger/takeover/purchase happened way back in 1954, with ‘MOBAY’. This latest nonsense is simply a show, and a snake to shed a skin called Monsanto, and become what?
A new predator…seems Monsanto and I G Farben..sorry, Bayer have been genetically modifying themselves as well as us. What will there new name be…
MOBAY
Banonta
Banato
MonBayto
Banyanto…Mobayonto, Santobayo
And a legal injection of money, and your right…to get back into those countries that kicked Monsanto out.
The wolf in a sheep coat. “Bayer makes aspirin, they are not bad people…are they.” too right they are.
Um, in response to Mr Corbett’s “herd” question:
at the risk of sounding preachy and holier-than-thou, which is profoundly irritating, as indeed all of the testimonies on this comments board are engaging, moving, comforting, unusually intelligent, I’d like to meet every one of you in person… even if none of you seem to like seafood lasagna…
All of us and none of us are part of the herd, and we all feel different and misunderstood to some degree…
We’ve all got our pet peeves or our personal crusades as it were…
Met volunteers who go out and feed the gypsies and homeless folks 3 nights a week around the city – all they see are sheeple who don’t give a damn about others…
people whose priority is raising their children to the next rung on the social ladder, occupying all their time and energy,
sick people whose only preoccupation is recovering health…
couples trying to stay together…
people fighting religious intolerance that takes up all their time…
people who’re fighting for woman’s rights or against excision, confronted with the majority who don’t seem give a damn…
folks fighting for Armenians and Armenia… alone against the world,
humanitarian workers trying to figure out why their altruistic passions aren’t working out as they’d hoped
people whose parents, sick or well, require all their attention…
people just trying to survive the fact of confronting another day…
these people can’t be bothered with what they perceive to be extraneous, irrelevant issues that they couldn’t do anything about even if they wanted to…
But I too have spent considerable time wondering why all the thinkers and scholars and researchers in my entourage don’t give a damn about 9/11 for starters and even actively reject all “alternative theories” or questioning on this or other topics…
So if I were to try to isolate one thing perhaps that Corbetteers largely have in common
I’d put my money on our relative, perceived, assumed or desired imperviousness to social ostracization. The attitude that our real friends will tolerate, if not embrace or entertain our ideas and continue to respect and appreciate us and too bad for all the others. Or the others, no worry, it’s just a matter of time depending on your resistance and optimism.
Hence my moniker. The joke goes something like this (you probably know it): an elephant and a zebra are taking a bath. the zebra says to the elephant “please pass the soap” and the elephant says “no soap! radio!”.
The idea is, if you laugh, you’ve probably succumbed to peer pressure. And probably swallow the official 9/11 fairytale.
Most people aren’t inclined to alienate their family and friends by openly embracing what are widely perceived to be uncouth, even socially suicidal ideas.
Even very very smart and caring people.
But perhaps I haven’t gone far enough out on a limb to really understand the question…
or maybe there really is a punchline…?
My “wake up” moment…
I do not remember the exact moment, but there are two fundamental things I do recall that pushed me in the right direction; one part of my personality and one a moment.
I have always (or since very young) hated the American culture. I’m not sure how it started, but I have a healthy loathing for their pettiness and self-importance. Obviously they are not all like this, but that was the image they sold to the world. I grew up in Africa where we were more connected to the reality we lived in. I was also an outcast (son of a teacher, not popular, etc.) so I was used to being alone and thinking more than simply doing what everyone else did.
There was a moment in standard two (grade 4) where our teacher posed a question for us. Sadly I do not recall the question. It was a statement followed by: “Do you agree? If no, why?”
The statement didn’t sound right, but I remember it being a complex idea for a young child and I couldn’t say why I disagreed, but I did. All the boys who were to grow up to become typical jocks kept saying yes and encouraging me to say yes. I said no, but couldn’t say why I said no. I asked them why they said yes and they pointed to the board and the question, saying theyt didn’t have to give a reason if they said yes. This infuriated me. What I wanted to say (but couldn’t at that age) was that you couldn’t just choose the yes option because it was easier. Youu had to give a reason for your choice.
This moment has stuck in my mind for years and aided in guiding my thoughts towards healthy scepticism and questioning.
I think i can relate to what James said in the video. I was a bad learner when i was young and i thought i am just dumb/slow and i became good at cramming but i was never able to remembered things. Later on in my life i started understanding that i could remember things easily if i knew the “WHY” of it and can explain my way through as i answered things.
This realization came very late in my life after i finished my studies and had lots of free time on my hands. You are able to do understand lot of things if you are not constantly doing things just to keep up with the societal schedule.
IMO every human being at heart is curious but I think most people are reluctant to even listen about reality because they are barely surviving as compared to their ambitions (i guess this is what leads to psychopathic tendencies) and have no time to know the “Why” or do deeper research.
To be honest, very young – when I was around 5 and discovered meat came from dead animals, I refused to eat it (still do). My parents were furious and I often went without dinner but I stood firm. I realised no one else around me was vegetarian (I grew up in Argentina) but I didn’t care. I felt it was the right thing to do and have always done what I believed in ever since.
But when did I wake up to the fact that most of what I had been taught was a lie? Probably 911. I saw Building 7 collapse in real time AFTER the BBC journalist had reported it, and my blood ran cold. Then, when America decided to invade Iraq and not Saudi Arabia, I knew they had planned the attack themselves, and ever since, I don’t trust anything what the American government or their allies abroad say or do.
Saudi Arabia didn’t do it. The 28 pages was just a coverup to help forming a storyline if and when Saudi Arabia possibly needed attacking.
I wonder what’s the main reason for the scandal of vaccines with HIV. I believe in Dr Deusberg’s theory that HIV is a scam.
Not that the vaccines can’t make people become HIV positive in the tests.
But there’s something even more stinky in that story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB8g0b-FkW0