Tech | June 30, 2011 | 29 comments

Monsanto under investigation by the SEC

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JanforGore
The world's largest seed company, Monsanto, announced Wednesday that its quarterly profits surged nearly 80 percent.

But the news was clouded somewhat by another announcement that the biotechnology giant was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for offering incentives to distributors who sell its herbicides.

The company's herbicide division, which includes the flagship product, Roundup, has struggled in recent years, losing ground to cheaper, generic alternatives from China. In 2009 and 2010, Monsanto began offering incentives to customers to use Roundup in an attempt to shore up the brand.

On Wednesday, Monsanto executives said the SEC had launched a probe into the incentive programs and that the agency has subpoenaed documents.

The company also announced that farmers responded positively to new corn and soybean products this spring, helping push up profits for the third quarter nearly 80 percent to $680 million. Sales of the company's corn, soybean and cotton traits rose 12 percent in the quarter, to $2.6 billion.

Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/article_a4b71892-a25b-11e0-959d-001a4bcf6...
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29 comments // Monsanto under investigation by the SEC

  • AsiaSuperLoop
    • +1
      AsiaSuperLoop  
    • It's the SEC, not the FDA. The investigation apparently has nothing to do with food. GMO's are high tech products that the US must export to balance all the imports of plastic bric a brac and thin substrate we call cellophane we need to wrap our feet and our food, production of which has been offshored to the developing world.

      Americans, for the most part, don't see environmental abuse. We live on an island that we call the information economy, which is a utopian New Atlantis never never land. America, outside of places like Detroit and Camden, is a vast eco Park, but one sitting atop artificial legs; and those legs stand on ground in China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just look down at your plastic shoes, and you'll get my drift.

      So, we sell plastic food to fund the plastic that we walk on, so that we can feel like we live in an eco paradise, in which we sit around philosophizing about carbon cap and trade, all the while complaining about how China is belching carbon into the atmosphere...to make our shoes and a few iPhones. But mostly...shoes. Some tupperware, too. And some tires, a few tv's, the flip up trash can, a broom, the light bulbs, the wiring in the house, the roof tiles, the dry wall.....many, so many stuff and the whatnots, all of which we absolutely cannot not not do without. Not.

    • 11 months ago
  • Incredulous
  • richardparks
  • hoosierdaddy
  • Parkite
  • wakittenz
    • 0
      wakittenz  
    • Image
    • I, Will, will do my part. 

      Brang noo noos..July one of this year!! Comment period at EPA for chlorpyrifos review...Please help.

      Come on yall. We have to alert the public to rub the toxicology 'scientistoids' noses in the real science about the fake regulatory paradigms extant in EPA and USDA and all state DOAs. We know the industrial, largely multinational corporate growers are obtaining an extra yearly $5,000,000,000 in profits from feeding CHLORPYRIFOS to us and our children in small amounts.

      The chemical suppliers are only profiting to the tune of $1,000,000,000 per year. These are the kinds of corporate losers now allowed to buy our government via the 'citizens united' for corporate dominance supreme court decision. They already bought the 'toxicologistoids' that wander form corporation to regulatory agency so freely and profitably. It makes me ashamed of the real scientific community for allowing this to happen...whatever happened to scientific ethics in toxicology? Even their 'professional' society has secret membership and funding, just ask them (SOT.org) why. Not true of my Physics societies, why for those SOTs????  Hiding the overwhelming preponderance of corporate scientistoids, toxicoligistoids, and superpac money, I wager.

      It falls to us. Real people that pay the real price for these horrible poisons allowed on our foods and in my face under false, I believe intentionally misguided regulatory statutes and enforcements. Leaving enforcement to state DOA (Depts. of Agriculture) eliminates ANY real enforcement of what little protections we are afforded. Wholly owned subsidiaries of local and multinational agribusiness.

      How poorly this terrible poison (personal experience) is regulated; I was 'lucky' enough to be sprayed in my own yard with equal amounts of both chlorpyrifos and cypermethrin.   5#/ acre at least on my skin, eyes, lungs, gardens, property, vehicles, dogs (my sweet twin labs died horribly of neuropathies) and possessions doused with each active ingredient, plus whatever else happens to be in Lorsban 4e and fury 1.5ec remaining obfuscated and secret to me and my doctors; what a man-made, unnecessary nightmare... I see the evil, I felt the evil.Definitely evil.

      The state DOA refused to take samples of the bulk inventory of what was sprayed by the aerial crop dusting pesticide application company and only tested for chlorpyrifos, not the cypermethrin nor the oxidized chlorpyrifos-oxon. We did our own tests which confirmed chlorpyrifos contamination (we did not do cypermethrin) inside the house as well and made the same mistake... it turns out the oxon form comes out of a GCMS column at a significantly different dwell times in the columns...and of course more of the parent chlorpyrifos is converted to the oxon within the  sampling and detection devices (GCMS columns operate at elevated temperatures).

      I am working on a new (patent pending) paradigm for analyzing vapor concentrations (organophosphates, oxon forms, pyrethroids (all), and carbamates; as well as metals and other organics and inorganics) which is instant and portable to give immediate readings at the point of sample at PPB levels.

      Not easy, however. I will try to use the patent bully pulpit to 'encourage' instant upload of gps location to my server and analyzed chemical hits to produce, over time, a hot spot map far more viable and data dense than the USGS excellent product here: http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/pnsp/usage/maps/show_map.php?year=02&map=m6009&n... wherein which I believe the scattering of red along the southern east coast is largely state mandated new structural applications. That red is lurking under the homes of American families!

      Take a deep breath...there, you very likely took in an unknown, currently unknowable but positive amount of both chlorpyrifos and the far more toxic and unregulated oxidized form (which it all becomes in or ex vivo, chlorpyrifos oxon on exposure to air oxygen or mammalian livers for processing into the other one thousand times stronger REAL poison, the oxon which is not regulated!). Luckily for us, the scientistoids tells us this unknown amount is safe, although we will never know anything about dose or individual response... never say never.

      True of malathion too, and maloxon, air oxidized to more toxic oxon form. Leave your organophosphates out in the air long enough and spray that, ignoring the dead neighbors and farm workers, of course, and the regulating authority will not even be able to know anything was sprayed, ever!!

      EPA and the toxicology community have given regulation over to the industrial 'scientististoids' that revolve through the regulatory/industrial door. Little ethics, but lots of money... a little dizzy from the revolving door maybe?

      Enforcement has been given to bought out state agencies who answer only to the corporate growers.

      Please let the EPA know of your opinions and especially any personal stories of disaster you know of. I know of many now.

      Good luck in YOUR "PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS"; kind of a superficial 'guarantee' of our constitution. Mine was sure abrogated by the pesticide industry and regulators on 9/4/1999. It turns out the happiness of positive benefit for the corporations trumped all my private property rights and security in my personal effects rights as well as many other rights we all surreptitiously have taken from us by fake regulatory actions and ignorant, lied to applicators and growers.

      People who live near industrial growing operations (or over a treated concrete slab) are possibly the most damaged...irony of the first kind. Profit and death. Great synergism?

      I still wonder about the million+ of east coast houses built on concrete slabs with the required 200 gallons of chlorpyrifos 'sealed' in underneath by legal fiat to slowly destroy the lives of those people. If my theories and data of 'conservative radicalization' inducement by low level chlorpyrifos exposure reveals any insights (see U-shape curve toxicology), then the east coast southern radicalization (paranoia, fears of all kinds, anger, delusions of grandeur, violent outbursts, hypnotic effects, sleep disruption, etc.), will remain for many years. Only southern states actually incorporated chlorpyrifos requirements into their building codes (and I think NC)!

      Please, please, please do anything you can. Write your congressfolk, local and national. Complain to the EPA about fake regulations. They ignore any possibility that anyone could ever be exposed to any kind of a mixture of two or more regulated poisons...effectively, ALL EXPOSURES ARE MIXTURES OF REGULATED POISONS!!!

      They ignore toxic effects of secret (to us, not the 'regulators') adjuvants, surfactants, and common, predictable spontaneous contaminant chemical derivatives as long as they convert after leaving the spray nozzles. It so happens that chlorpyrifos converts even in the storage containers especially when hot or opened to atmosphere, making the late summer evaluations by 'regulators' even more meaningless since they do not care about the 1000x more toxic oxon.... unbelievable to any REAL scientistist. Clearly there is an ethics chasm toxicologoid scientistoids as organisms have lept.

      PLEASE HELP ANY ETHICAL REGULATORS LEFT TO WORK FOR TRUTH, JUSTICE AND THE AMERICAN WAY!!! We must counter the flood of bought and paid 'toxicologoid' opinions they will see. Try to 'just stick to the facts, folks' as much as you can. Emotion can help tho, I hear. You may be able to tell, I have some of that left.

      I wish you all good lives and unencumbered pursuit of happiness.  

      Will will.

      Sincerely,

      Will

      http://epa.gov/oppfead1/cb/csb_page/updates/2011/chlorpyrifos.html   was released July 1, 2011 for comments...also

      http://www.epa.gov/oppsrrd1/registration_review/chlorpyrifos/  to see.

        red is bad!!!!

    • 11 months ago
  • wynnmeg61
    • -1
      wynnmeg61  
    • Given that the SEC is wholey owned by Wallstreet just like our supposed representatives.............this is nothing but a red herring. They are just trying to make us believe they actually do what they were formed to do.

    • 11 months ago
  • Angeliron
  • letsliveinpeace
  • ecoalex
    • 0
      ecoalex  
    • The SEC is outsourcing it's authority to ...you guessed it...the corporations themselves.Corporate responsibility,how ell it has worked...NOT:(

    • 11 months ago
  • Gravity_Man
    • +1
      Gravity_Man  
    • Well, poisoning all food on Earth does have advantages as a CATTLE PROD to make reluctant humans travel to other planets to raise our foods there.

      Fixed that!

    • 11 months ago
  • hombre76
    • +2
      hombre76  
    • great so China is selling cheap genetics....if there is one group of people i trust less than Monsanto its fucking China........

    • 11 months ago
  • AsiaSuperLoop
    • 0
      AsiaSuperLoop  
    • hombre76:

      Hombre, what did China ever do to you? Che Guevera was a Maoist. Don't buy into all the mainstream media claptrap about the Chinese Yellow Peril. China isn't colonizing New Jersey. They have colonized Tibet, which is a terrible thing. But for the most part, China is making great strides to join the globalised economy, mostly making shoes for us as the ticket for entry. And once at the table, you might find the points of view expressed from the "developing world" quite interesting and surprising, things like how democracy isn't entirely an Anglo American idea, and how technology can be less rather than more disruptive. There is evil in China, perhaps. But it is the evil that one sees in the mirror. The evil that results from competition with those that care nothing about you and would see you exterminated sooner than saying hello.

    • 11 months ago
  • Incredulous
    • +2
      Incredulous  
    • AsiaSuperLoop:

      eloquent, appreciated every word of what you said, but I have to admit, when I read the "China isn't colonizing New Jersey" I laughed out loud. I mean, seriously, New Jersey got colonized a long time ago....by "the family."

    • 11 months ago
  • AsiaSuperLoop
    • +1
      AsiaSuperLoop  
    • Incredulous:

      I haven't been in New Jersey recently. I guess I could be wrong. Or maybe it's the Koreans. Maybe they're the ones colonizing New Jersey and pissing everybody off.

      No one has a monopoly on evil intent. It's pretty general and common. It's so easy that we can all do it.

      And race and ethnicity, I think, are going to become much less important in the future, not because we all love one another so much, but because natural challenges are going to push us into a corner. In that corner, we will pick sides, the few people we think we can trust and, most vitally, can survive the challenge. In picking those "friends" we will need to widen the pool in order to acquire the skills and hybridized genetic material that best ensure successful future iteration. A eugenics of hypothalmic love. The oldest parts of the old brain have no tribe.

    • 11 months ago
  • Incredulous
    • 0
      Incredulous  
    • Image
    • AsiaSuperLoop:

      "The oldest parts of the old brain have no tribe."

      I hope not...I honestly hope not, and ironically, something that has always led me to believe that is not true is the process of cell division. I always looked at it and saw longing...as if the two new cells were trying desperately to hold on to each other. It almost distills the very essence of life itself, you have to separate to create new life, but there is that something you witness when cells divide, something almost intangible that has always looked like longing to me....and isn't longing what draws together as well?

      just a different perspective I guess

    • 11 months ago
  • kvb1
  • rgrisham
  • kvb1
  • JanforGore
  • nikonwilly
    • +1
      nikonwilly  
    • rgrisham:

      Unfortunately I wouldn't get too excited....these bastards have a puppet in every agency...the only way we're going to demolish this juggernaut is through mass boycott...or if things get really crazy and we _ _ _ _ _ the _ _ _ _ _ _ _ out of them...:)

    • 11 months ago
  • Schnookums
    • +4
      Schnookums  
    • They will fine them for what seems like an obscene amount of money to the average person, but from Monsanto's perspective is just a slap on the wrist. The SEC is not capable of controlling Monsanto in any meaningful way at this point......nor would they really want to if they could.

    • 11 months ago
  • JanforGore
  • August_K
  • JanforGore
  • JanforGore
  • dalistuff
  • JanforGore
  • dalistuff
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