75-year-old soybean farmer sees Monsanto lawsuit reach U.S. Supreme Court

Who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground? A 75-year-old farmer takes the agricultural giant to court to find out

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.

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A Police State

Where are we headed as a country? It appears that no matter which party is in power, the objective is to get more power and control.

 

Recently a Federal Court judge ruled that the clause in the National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA, that allowed the government to hold an American citizen indefinitely without charges was suspended, it was not constitutional. Of course the Administration went to the Federal court of Appeals and had that ruling overturned. Obviously, the executive branch is not very interested in our freedom nor rights as citizens.

 

This particular clause has many journalists very afraid and has affected their journalism. The problem with this clause is the question of who defines what ‘terrorism’ really is. If it suits the powers that be it can be dang near anything they want it to be. So reporters that have a more independent view of the way things happen might end up in jail or worse, Guantanamo Bay!

 

It really doesn’t pay to counter the government line. One very bold example of this craziness was the detention of an ex Marine because he ‘facebooked’ a message that said basically that the 9-11 investigation should be reopened since the governments official explanation didn’t cover building 7. He was detained for a month in a mental institution without charges.

 

I am hoping the citizens will eventually wake up and say with one voice ‘we have had enough’! Unfortunately, the way various interest groups are ‘played’ against one another that is very unlikely!

Are the senate going to take away our constitutional rights in this week’s vote?

In this article from infowars we see yet again how dangerous it can be for us when the charlatans in Washington who are supposed to protect our interests are doing nothing but eroding them.

With the bill expected to be up for a vote within 48 hours, Senator Rand Paul has offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that will kill a provision allowing the militaryto detain individuals, including American citizens, without trial or due process.
The “indefinite detention” sections of the NDAA bill would turn the whole of the United States into a “battlefield” and hand the executive branch the power to have the military arrest U.S. citizens and hold them without trial.
The provision is merely an update to the “parallel legal system” had been in place under the auspices of the war on terror for over a decade, “In which terrorism suspects — U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike — may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system,” as the Washington Post reported in December 2002.
In attempt to kill the indefinite detention provision of the legislation, Senator Rand Paul aims to strike Section 1031 from the bill, which reads as follows.
“Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force…includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons…Detention under the law of war without trial”.
The amendment is seen as having more teeth than a change offered by Colorado Senator Mark Udall which the ACLU has urged voters to support. “There are other similar Amendments too, however none of them completely eliminate the Constitutionally offensive section,” reports the Tennessee Campaign for Liberty website.
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Writing in the Washington Post today, Udall emphasizes the fact that the bill does affect American citizens.
“The provisions would require the military to dedicate a significant number of personnel to capturing and holding terrorism suspects — in some cases indefinitely — even those apprehended on U.S. soil. And they authorize the military to do so regardless of an accused terrorist’s citizenship, even if he or she is an American captured in a U.S. city,” writes Udall.
Republican Congressman Justin Amash also warned that the bill had been “carefully crafted to mislead the public,” in suggesting that the indefinite detention provision didn’t apply to American citizens when it clearly does.
“Note that it does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary,” Amash wrote on his Facebook page.
As we documented yesterday, every single piece of legislation passed in the name of catching terrorists has been used against American citizens on countless occasions.
In an op-ed for the SIlicon Valley Mercury News, S. Floyd Mori, national executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League, warns that the legislation would create the legal framework for internment without trial on a similar scale to how Japanese-Americans were held in concentration camps during World War II.
“Indefinite detentions based on fear-driven and unlawfully substantiated national security grounds, where individuals are neither duly charged nor fairly tried, violate the essence of U.S. law and the most fundamental values upon which this country was built,” he writes.
The National Defense Authorization Act is set for a procedural vote at midday on Wednesday.