MEDIA ROOTS- If there is one thing that’s been constant over the course of this planet’s evolution, it’s nature’s resilience. Even if a pesticide is designed to eradicate a weed or insect species native to a particular area, nature will eventually bounce back and become resistant to the poison.

Similar to the heavy use of antibiotics leading to supergerms, a recent epidemic of super weeds have started to take over farmers’ lands that have been spraying crops with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready weedkiller. According to the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts, the built up resistance to these pesticides is “the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen.”

For the first time, Monsanto’s BT corn crops in Iowa are now falling prey to the very bug they’re engineered to resist: the rootworm.

This could be very bad news for Monsanto, a company that has monopolized both the pesticide and genetically modified food industry for more than a decade. Since Monsanto’s Roundup Ready GM seeds are engineered to withstand their Roundup Ready pesticide, American farmers have gotten accustomed to using both products hand in hand. However, if Monsanto’s seeds are deemed useless, what incentive will farmers have to spend the extra money for seeds that no longer kill weeds or bugs?

Monsanto is a monolithic and ruthless corporation that will do anything to meet their bottom line of profit maximization. Hopefully this is the beginning of Monsanto’s disintegration into irrelevancy. For more about Monsanto’s callous domination over the global food market read Media Roots Original – Monsanto’s Global Food Domination.

Abby Martin

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WALL STREET JOURNAL– Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann’s discovery that western corn rootworms in four northeast Iowa fields have evolved to resist the natural pesticide made by Monsanto’s corn plant could encourage some farmers to switch to insect-proof seeds sold by competitors of the St. Louis crop biotechnology giant, and to return to spraying harsher synthetic insecticides on their fields.

“These are isolated cases, and it isn’t clear how widespread the problem will become,” said Dr. Gassmann in an interview. “But it is an early warning that management practices need to change.”

The finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.

Monsanto said its rootworm-resistant corn seed lines are working as it expected “on more than 99% of the acres planted with this technology” and that it is too early to know what the Iowa State University study means for farmers.

Read more about Monsanto Corn Plant Losing Bug Resistance.

© 2011 Wall Street Journal

Photo by Flickr user Hadie

MEDIA ROOTS- Perhaps one of the most abhorrent aspects of US foreign policy in the 21st century is the privatization of the US military and the government’s outsourcing of military jobs to corrupt war contractors.

Despite Obama’s early campaign rhetoric about scaling down the use of contractors, he has increased their presence– they now make up approximately 50% of the total military force in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  

Military contractors are murderous thugs-for-hire who act above the law and hold zero allegiance to any constitutional body. Blackwater’s sordid slew of contemptuous behavior and criminal actions during the Iraq war might have cast a negative light upon them, but it didn’t stop the Obama administration from awarding their criminality with a quarter billion dollar contract to continue working in US war zones.

This unaccountability for criminal acts is not unique to Blackwater. Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is a private security company that employs more US private contractors and holds larger contracts with the US government than any other firm in Iraq.

In 2007, a KBR employee named Jamie Leigh Jones claimed that she was gang raped by multiple KBR workers at a camp in Iraq’s Green Zone. After she reported the rape, she was reportedly locked in a shipping container and threatened with her job if she took further action. Appallingly, KBR has turned the case around and is now suing Jones for making “frivolous claims”, demanding $2 million in damages.

“They have beaten us and now they are attempting to crush us,” her lawyer, Todd Kelly, told the Wall Street Journal. “This is an attempt by KBR to chill other people from bringing claims against them.”

It’s shameful that these corporations have essentially no oversight from the US government– the Crime Victims Office at the Department of Justice was unable to investigate the incident because of a lack of jurisdiction over private contractors in Iraq.

Now it’s Jones’s word against KBR, and it doesn’t look like she has much of a chance to win against the monolithic corporation. Let’s just hope she can walk away without having given them a dime.

Written by Abby Martin

Photo by flickr user wenews

MEDIA ROOTS- Michelle Bachmann’s catapult to fame eerily resembles Sarah Palin’s rise to the top during the 2008 election circus. Both Bachmann and Palin are media made sensations whose extreme antics and shocking ignorance of basic civics have only garnered them more attention. One can’t help but wonder if the popularity of such inept candidates has been in part manufactured by the establishment to provide insurance for another Obama victory.

On a panel discussing Michelle Bachmann’s potential presidential run, Chris Matthews strangely admitted that Bachmann was “created here“– in reference to his MSNBC show Hardball. Was he insinuating that he was partly responsible for Bachmann’s recognition and success?

In 2008, Matthews excoriated Bachmann for her suggestion to catalog and investigate ‘dissenters’ in the House of Representatives, then proceeded to give her a platform to speak at length on his show. Bachmann’s empty rhetoric equating liberalism with anti-Americanism became a viral hit online.

Michelle Bachmann on Hardball with Chris Matthews

Later on Real Time with Bill Maher, Matthews repeats himself, adding gleefully that “Bachmann’s going to win the nomination.” Maybe Matthews is smiling because he is hoping for his Frankenstein-esque creation to fall on her own sword, creating an easy victory for Obama. Tricks or so called ‘dirty’ ones have always been a part of the election cycle. Matthews is an influential partisan talking head, who is experienced enough in the media world to know exactly what he’s doing.

In a recent Media Roots Interview, Cindy Sheehan said that Sarah Palin was picked as Mccain’s VP as “insurance” for an Obama victory. Whether or not that’s true, it’s undeniable that a large amount of Americans voted for Obama in 2008 solely because of how terrifying the prospect of a Mccain/Palin presidency was.

It’s a sad state of democracy when people are fear-mongered into voting against their own interests. As long as the media continues to prop up such extremist GOP candidates, people who identify themselves as liberal, green and libertarian will continue to knee jerkily vote for bought-and-paid for establishment candidates that will proceed the policies that have bankrupted and demoralized this nation.

MEDIA ROOTS- This year marked the tenth anniversary of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, officially making it the longest war in US history. Now that Osama Bin Laden is finally confirmed dead, the federal government’s logic of continuing the occupation remains unclear.

Initially, the Bush administration irrationally insisted that any sovereign nation harboring terrorists was itself complicit in “terror” and therefore open for pre-emptive US military action. This rationale is absurd– just because one criminal might be living inside of a particular country doesn’t make that entire country guilty of the criminal’s crimes.

In 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was quick to tell CNN that US forces had successfully pushed the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the region, and reports reveal that Osama Bin Laden hadn’t even been in Afghanistan since 2001. Additionally, a White House spokesperson recently admitted that there hasn’t been a terrorist threat in the country for the last eight years.

So what has the US been doing in Afghanistan for the last decade?

War has always been about two things: resources and control. Alongside the supposed surprise discovery of Afghanistan’s $1 trillion wealth of untapped minerals, it’s more than coincidental that before the US invasion, the Taliban along with the UN had successfully eradicated the opium crop in the Golden Crescent. Now 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan.

As reported by Global Research:

Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes.

Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium markets were restored. Opium prices spiraled. By early 2002, the opium price (in dollars/kg) was almost 10 times higher than in 2000.

In 2001, under the Taliban opiate production stood at 185 tons, increasing  to 3400 tons in 2002 under the US sponsored puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.

While highlighting Karzai’s patriotic struggle against the Taliban, the media fails to mention that Karzai collaborated with the Taliban. He had also been on the payroll of a major US oil company, UNOCAL. In fact, since the mid-1990s, Hamid Karzai had acted as a consultant and lobbyist for UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban.

In today’s globalized world, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the Afghanistan occupation: big pharmaceutical companies, who collectively lobby over $250 million to Congress annually, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation.

Another fact worth mentioning is that Karzai, a notable player in Afghanistan’s opium trade, has been receiving regular payments from the CIA since the invasion. Even more infuriating, the US government has been paying Taliban insurgents to protect supply routes and to “switch sides” in a poor attempt to neutralize the insurgency and buy loyalty from the fighters. The fundamental logic of funding both sides of the war to “win” is possibly the most incomprehensible concept to grasp. Clearly, this war is meant to be sustained– not won.

Fast forward to ten years later, and the turmoil within the country still looms heavy. Last Thursday, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a deadly attack that killed 27 US soldiers and wounded dozens more. Earlier this month marked the deadliest day for US troops since the war started when a rocket propelled grenade shot down a helicopter and killed 30 US soldiers.

In June of this year, Obama delivered a speech about drawing down in Afghanistan, which corporate media outlets touted as a major step to ending the war (Media Roots cut through the speech rhetoric). Yet, a glaringly under reported factor of the praised “drawdown” is the fact that even if the reductions are carried out as planned, the US will still have far more troops in Afghanistan than at any point during Bush’s administration. Furthermore, the US and Afghanistan are about to sign a strategic pact that will allow thousands of special forces troops to remain in Afghanistan until 2024.

Considering how the US is spending at least $6.7 billion a month in Afghanistan and over 55% of Americans think that the US should immediately withdrawal, this issue should be a constant hot topic in the public dialogue– especially amidst the debate of economic sacrifice. Yet in 2010, the corporate news only allotted a measly 4% of its coverage to the war in Afghanistan.

The unsustainability of America’s endless wars and imperialistic foreign policy is the elephant in the room that not enough people in the public arena seem to want to discuss. Sadly, because Americans are conditioned to not bring up politics and religion with others, many are confined to their own rigid perspective fed by biased corporate media outlets. We must begin to challenge this societal dogma if we ever want to progress our society and evolve our collective human consciousness.

Written by Abby Martin

Photo by flickr user DVIDSHUB