They'll do exactly as much damage as they can get away with. If there's no regulation standing in their way, or the potential profits outweigh the consequences, of course they'll continue their malfeasance. I don't know why this is surprising to anyone. The nature of any corporation is to act in its own self-interest. I guess Mighty Earth is doing what they can, but it's like raking leaves in the forest, in the middle of a raging wildfire. The only way that anything is going to change is through effective regulation and credible enforcement. Trying to wheedle and cajole Cargill into growing a conscience is a manifest exercise in futility.
If there's no regulation standing in their way, or the potential profits outweigh the consequences, of course they'll continue their malfeasance
Well, yes, but that’s really “if voters and customers are happy” isn’t it? No corporations exist in a vacuum. It’s like Nike making shoes in sweatshops, people moan but buy them anyway. Voters could sort it easily by imposing punitive tariffs on any country that doesn’t comply with US labor and environmental laws.
The Nike sweatshop situation is actually a counterexample to your point. People complained and, at least according to what I read, not only did Nike change but they lobbied for legislation to force their competitors to change as well.
> People complained and, at least according to what I read, not only did Nike change but they lobbied for legislation to force their competitors to change as well.
They realized their sales would drop unless they started spending more on manufacturing costs - which would decrease profit. Solution? Make all your competitors spend more too. That way we all make less profit, instead of me making less and everyone else taking over the market with their higher margins.
I mean, that does seem like the optimal outcome, doesn't it? Not only is Nike not using sweatshop labor, but all their competitors are also not using sweatshop labor. Did you want Nike to stop just because they felt bad, but their competitors could continue to use sweatshop labor? As you point out, that would mean that they would be pushed out of the market and we'd just have a new major corporation using sweatshop labor to be mad at.
It is a pretty good outcome. Your comment made it seem like Nike pushed other manufacturers to get better labor practices out of a desire to do good (perhaps I am reading it wrong), whereas I think what happened was that a purely-profit-driven corporation acting in its best interest ended up doing something good.
Totally distracting aside: I've always felt I wish I could walk around a store with a special set of glasses on so I could apply my own personal voting filters -
Chili - benefits monsanto $0.05 per can, KRAFT Foods $1 per can
etc...
I mean I have a lot of values - I buy small label organics and that does a lot, but sometimes I just want to buy cheetos- I think I would think twice if I knew my enemies were benefitting.
Honestly I thought that was one of the purposes of something like G-Glass.
Anyway - but yeah, these companies exist because even if we know they are bad - we have no way of knowing what we are buying that is making them stay in power.
Money is our voting power - and unlike presidential elections, we generally have no idea what we're voting for.
A wikipedia based on Universal Product Codes has been in the back of my mind for a long time. Scan the UPC and a page pops up. Have the data in the form of an infobox or RDF (dbpedia.org) and the basis is there for an app or glasses that does what you describe. Biggest problem would be how to defend each UPC page from astroturfing by whoever makes money off the product associated with the UPC.
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Edit: It seems like the aforementioned https://www.buycott.com is essentially this? It's always nice to see an idea completed with no work!
Not exactly a special set of glasses, but probably as close as you're going to get right now: https://www.buycott.com/
That said, the idea that you can enact change by making "good consumer choices" is probably one of neo-liberalisms greatest, most insidious triumphs. It subverts democratic ideals to make us feel like we have power, while diverting our energy away from pushing for the kinds of systemic changes necessary for meaningful impact on big problem (e.g. putting the responsibility for reduction of plastic pollution on consumers, rather than on manufacturers via legislation).
Totally distracting aside: I've always felt I wish I could walk around a store with a special set of glasses on so I could apply my own personal voting filters
Oh it's worse than that. Go to your favorite restaurant (or any restaurant really) and ask if they use kosher salt. If they answer in the affirmative, ask which brand they use. Dollars to donuts it's Diamond brand.
It is good salt, and if memory serves the production method is patented. Even if the production were easy to reproduce, aside from boutique stuff, I typically only see Morton's and Diamond in the stores out here. Boycotting Cargill completely is a monumental task.
You know what is GOOD salt.. Costco himalayan pink salt. HOLY crap you will never go back after that. Unfortunately they dropped their tellicherry pepper. I'm still trying to find a replacement for it. But, I'm sure Cargill has its hands on Costco somehow too.
Actually, he was the first. In his speech at the Second Virginia Convention, he spoke the immortal words: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me voting dollars or give me death!"
Part of the idea of free market liberalism is that people don’t care who you are, where you came from and who you vote for as long as your product or service satisfies the consumer. If you start to decide which toilet paper to buy based on if a company’s owners have a certain political view or which fried chicken to eat based on a company owners religion then we may be sacrificing some industrial liberty.
So, this may sound awkward but I'm going to say it anyway: this is what globalization enables. The very fact of sourcing things as elemental as the food you eat, from the other side of the planet (whichever side has the laxest environmental, health, and safety rules), makes this easier. It is easier to live far away from the things your company does, and the people it does them to, if they're on a different continent than you. Moreover, by its very nature globalization enables regulatory arbitrage, so you can live in a country with relatively good EHS rules, and produce in a country with bad or no EHS rules.
There is a tradeoff between producing wealth, and trashing your environment, and I don't judge too harshly the people who want to worry about carcinogens later, once they've got enough to eat that they won't starve to death. But that tradeoff used to happen within each country. When it was poor, the production was low, and as their ability to wreck their environment scaled up, so did their wealth to afford not to.
Only globalization allows companies like this to descend with 1st World money on places with 3rd world EHS rules. Cargill and its ilk exist, because we changed the rules to make it easier for them to do this.
Globalization isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s the rules surrounding trade that perpetuates the problem you outlined.
In some alternate universe we could have free trade laws that enshrined environmental, labor, and other protections into law to benefit all. Instead we have laws that are silent (or with what we almost had under TPP toothless) on protections for anything other than corporations.
Globalization isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s the rules surrounding trade that perpetuates the problem you outlined.
Except I believe the lack of rules, and the specific anti-regulatory pressures of modern neoliberal economic rationalists are one of the underlying axioms of globalization as implemented: Its not a coincidence, it was designed into the DNA.
If tomorrow laws were passed that the entire lifecycle of a product sold in a country must fully respect the laws of that country (e.g. a banana sold in the US would have to be grown, transported, etc. according to US rules and regulations, or in other words as if it was done inside the US) then you could guarantee such abuses done on the other side of the world would at least be illegal and hold the company in the US liable.
But then the banana would probably become a luxury product and people vote with their wallets. Some countries that rely on this would be gutted and lose a lot of the income making their lives even worse. And it still wouldn't change anything that happens at home and is legal regardless of globalization (cut down a forest to make room for cattle? Lobby says yes).
The fact that it happens elsewhere just helps put people's minds at ease. Everybody can now have plausible deniability. But it could happen one town over, if it doesn't affect them directly most will still vote with the wallet. Some can't afford not to.
It's not globalization that does this, it's that people want cheap. And if globalization goes away tomorrow they will just find new ways, someone will always have to pay the price so all the rest don't have to. A poor town? An Indian reservation? Some wildlands? Someone will have to "take one for the team" whether it's at home or on the other side of the world.
My point is simply that globalization doesn’t have to be a bad word.
Trade between Canada and the US left both countries better off. Largely because we have similar standard of living so neither country was being exploited.
If lawmakers did a better job putting in safeguards into trade laws then globalization wouldn’t be a synonym for exploitation.
I do agree with your point that under current political realities nothing is likely to change. I’m simply hopeful that if enough people become aware of this then policy will eventually shift—rather than respond with a knee jerk cancel all trade reaction that we see today.
Agreed. I’ve often thought that the banes of regulatory arbitrage and labour arbitrage could be simultaneously killed by allowing the free movement of people across borders. It’s strange to me that corporations and money can cross borders easier than people.
And it's not a simple issue. Free movement works well for people who are comfortably off, but tends to trash the economies of those left behind. I don't think FoM is a full solution.
The end state is the end of nation states, and especially competitive nation state economies. Not only would this create a multi-trillion dollar peace dividend which could be spent on original R&D and social investment of all kinds, it would also create a massive wealth equalisation, end many of the more obvious and pointless kinds of wealth speculation, and create a global wealth boom, as location became much less important than talent and imagination.
>Moreover, by its very nature globalization enables regulatory arbitrage, so you can live in a country with relatively good EHS rules, and produce in a country with bad or no EHS rules.
It could be solved by making transitive EHS rules. I.e. rules that require the source also applying these rules. This is still some kind of rarity but they do exist. For instance for years it has been very difficult/impossible to import US meat into the EU because of that. (Mostly because of different antibiotics usage AFAIK.) To some degree such rules also exist in other industries. For example it makes little sense to import a cheaply produced car from a non-EU/non-US vendor into the EU (or probably US) because it won't match the safety regulations and would at least have to go through an expensive individual (re-)certification process, and might even need customizations for that. Of course nobody does this and people buy a cheap FIAT or VW instead.
Globalization is really nice I think because it connects countries and people through economy and thus also fostering peace. ;) It could become even much nicer by adapting regulations in the destination markets. Custom tariffs and local subsidies are another way to solve this but those are obviously much less fine-grained (25% on everything :)) and come from a time when there was no globalization. In fact the high EU subsidies on agricultural products still seem to be the reason that impede African countries to export agricultural products into the EU. On the other hand the African market is flooded with subsidised EU produce, making it hard to sell products for small farmers.
Probably markets could be far less distorted if the regulations in the industry nations would be modernized... I'm not in favour of any form of turbo capitalism but free markets cannot really be blamed for this because we don't have them anyways.
Ideal free markets simply cannot exist when the safety of people is our primary goal. I'm not sure if you meant that with the statement "because we don't have them anyways" so I'm pointing this out loud because on every discussion about regulations and free markets this is one argument I still would haven't heard a good counterpoint to.
I don't think free trade between countries is so likely to foster peace. There are many examples, but "gunboat diplomacy" of the U.S. in Japan, and the Opium War in China, are two that come to mind. Even Russia's invasion of Ukraine was in large part because of the prospect of Ukraine joining the EU.
But, to your main point, most 3rd world countries don't have the resources to enforce or abide by 1st World EHS rules. That's understandable; we didn't have them in the 1st world when we were at those income levels, either. Plus, most of the trade between the 1st and 3rd worlds exists primarily in order to get lower costs, and most of those lower costs are due to the lack of EHS rules; if you eliminate the EHS arbitrage, you eliminate most of the trade. Which is fine by me, but just eliminating the trade directly is much more plausible than somehow forcing 3rd world countries to spend their money on 1st world levels of government regulatory apparatus.
Brought to you by the Louis Dreyfus company, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, Bunge, Callebaut, Glencore, Armajaro and so on...
There's a great book "Merchants of Grain" written in the 70s about the secretive foods megabusinesses. It's arguably gotten worse since then. They make oil companies look like public servants.
This piece did inadvertently introduce me to Shorthand, which tells me that "the world's most successful digital storytelling teams" are using it to "create simply beautiful stories using" Shorthand's "beautifully simple" story editor. I can only wonder how much more successful those teams could be if they would beautifully, simply stop.
Maybe Shorthand made it too easy to do all the overlays and timeline things, like when prezi first came out and everyone used a million zoom-in / zoom-outs in presentations.
I've never heard of shorthand before, but it seems fine to me, what's your issue with it? It works fine, and performantly, in desktop Firefox with a moderate amount of adblock/privacy extensions active. It's mostly just text that you can scroll through like any other article. It just has some semi-sticky images and a timeline widget which, to me, only add to the presentation. It's not like they're hijacking the scroll action to ruin normal browser behavior.
If it sucks on mobile, so what? Everything sucks on mobile.
It performs well enough on my connection, because it's pretty good about playing "load as you go." But it's loading a lot of stuff. By the time I scrolled to the end and read through the entire timeline, this "web page" had loaded over 52M of data.
Speaking of scrolling, I had to scroll both down and to the side at various points to accomodate that "clever" timeline thing. I don't think this sort of approach is particularly user-friendly. It's even worse on mobile.
Mobile! As noted, this site doesn't do well on mobile, and it's not doing badly on mobile in a "Well, all sites are bad on mobile, [shrug emoji]" fashion. It's very clear that the site is trying to demonstrate responsive design: it's not "broken because tiny screen," it's "unpleasant experience because poor design choices." Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman is a lovely fellow, but I don't actually need his image in a partially-transparent overlay taking up nearly half the screen of my iPhone XR when I'm reading his forward. The timeline display is even more annoying on the phone, as it starts with a non-modal "swipe to navigate, OK?" demand. If you get past that, scrolling gets janky, until you move past and get another fixed image which only takes up a third of your screen this time. So yay.
Actually, I'd argue scrolling is kind of janky even on the desktop, in no small part because it's doing all this fancy "here's a picture scrolling up with the text! now it's fixed! now it's scrolling!" Is it pretty? I guess. Would it be less pretty if the images were just, you know, images on the side of the text? Not really, and if you just let a web browser scroll a page without this kind of fluffery, it scrolls really well! Scrolling turns out to be a solved problem! Also, does the picture of Former Congressman Henry A. Waxman need to be that big on the desktop? No. No, Mr. Waxman, it does not.
Last but not least: you know how I mentioned the web page was over 52M of data? The PDF with the same data is only a hair over 36M. It doesn't have a cute scrolling timeline in it, but it does have footnotes. Which the Shorthand web version doesn't. The web version has footnote numbers, but they don't go anywhere -- no links, no popovers.. For a report that has 61 footnotes, this is actually a pretty big fail.
So that's my issue with Shorthand. Thanks for asking!
Some good points. 52M is an absurd amount of data for this.
I have to disagree on the scrolling behavior. If you think of the goal as just trying to reproduce static printed content, then sure, scrolling is a "solved problem". But this presentation method is actually a meaningful improvement. Photos for an article are probably the least useful example, but imagine reading a technical article, with diagrams that you want to reference multiple times while scrolling through the text. Or a code tutorial, with code blocks on the right and extensive documentation on the left.
This behavior can probably be achieved with 10 lines of JS and CSS, almost certainly not the case here. But despite the ostensible problems with this implementation, the idea is good, and I'd be happy to see this more often. As long as it's performant, responsive, not full of tracking nonsense, etc.
Does anybody else get a Bernie Sanders type of feeling from this? A throwback to older issues and older battles, not seen since the 90s? It's refreshing to see that someone still cares about the rainforests, but I don't know if it's going to stick. The energy of the environmental movement is now elsewhere; at the cosmic scale, in the fight against climate change; at the scale of smaller, practical changes, it's in things like banning plastic straws.
If you want to know more about the five grain companies read the book Merchants of Grain. All five have very sharp elbows and only one (Bunge) is public so a lot of the wrangling goes on in private. Cargill is the largest of all of them.
Just want to point out that I'm a Midwesterner and the line "drank their polluted water" is neither factual nor representative of me or any of my family or friends. There are a valid points you point out but please exclude hyperbole in your arguments.
Not sure why it’s hyperbole - they never said all Midwesterners drank it, just that there were Midwesterners who drank it. And did you only drink water at home or from a bottle? If not, you can’t be sure you never drank Cargill polluted waters.
The main pollution source in ground water aquifers around here is two fold, salt water contamination or chlorinated solvent leakage. The former is caused by oil wells drilled during ww2 without proper casement and sealing, and the latter is caused by small government corruption. The plumes of each are organic, ironically enough, and can be fixed with simple bacteria and recirculation wells. Long cry from the opening statements in this article.
And what an awfully designed webpage. I’ll never know why Cargill is bad simply because of this utterly incompetent web designer who is making images take up half of the page even when scrolling.
> In contrast to the oil and tobacco industries, for instance, the bad practices documented here are not inherent to the products Cargill sells, and are, in fact, entirely avoidable.
On the contrary, there are strong philosophical arguments that selling meat and eggs, as Cargill does, is 'inherently' immoral.
Here are a couple of links. The basics are that animals, like humans, have moral status and thus we are not justified in unnecessarily bring harm to them through practices like egg farming and cattle farming. Cargill's agriculture practices are a far far far way from the ideal farming scenarios described in the common "Happy Cows" argument. It's pretty clear that even if their meat wasn't poisoning people, their production of it would still be immoral.
Seriously? Worst company in the world? Come on. They’re responding to demand. If Cargill doesn’t buy the palm oil, another importer/distributor will. Sure, educate customers regarding the impacts of their purchases, but “worst company in the world” is just trolling. It’s this kind of partisan over-the-top hyperbole that turns people off and, IMHO, gets dudes like Trump elected.
Voting for a racist that puts babies in concentration camps is a fairly extreme overreaction to someone criticizing the environmental impact of a company to say the least.
The basis for this claim seems to hinge on the facts that Cargill is a) big and b) privately owned, both of which are sins in today's political orthodoxy.
As a Minnesotan, I was wondering how long it would take before someone would notice them and shift their attention from Koch, but it had to happen at some point.
"Throughout its history, Cargill has exhibited a disturbing and repetitive pattern of deception and destruction. As this report details, its practices have ranged from violating trade embargoes and price fixing, to ignoring health codes and creating markets for goods produced with child and forced labor. Under pressure, Cargill has reformed its practices in many areas — which shows that it can change when it wants to. But contrary to its view of itself as a leader, it usually comes in dead last. It has remained a laggard across multiple industries, trailing peers like Louis Dreyfus and Wilmar."
I'm sure one can argue with the piece's conclusions -- Cargill almost certainly will! -- but your summation doesn't seem to be supported by even a cursory reading of the report. The environmental advocacy group that put this report out is not making the case that Cargill needs to have an IPO.
And it completely ignores what the company has done for Minneapolis and the surrounding area. But it’s easy to disregard local knowledge when Internet outrage is the preferred reaction.
No, it really doesn't, things need to balance out - far too long has America been perfectly fine with terrible things on the other side of the globe fueling domestic profits.
Cargill's business practices are supplying economic growth that is dwarfed by the externalities that are being accrued.
It's done bad things for Minneapolis too? Or are you suggesting that we should keep destroying the Amazon so the fine people of MN can have some more Teslas?
Then please inform us what the local benefits are that justify a global history of forced child labor, slavery, dumping toxic waste, poisoning food products, etc, etc?
As a Minnesotan, probably nothing. Jobs? It’s probably the only argument one could make, but I’m not going to make it. It wouldn’t make me sad if Cargill stopped exploiting everyone and everything.