Re: Food for thought

**"Duane Campbell" d*@chilitech.net**

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tom Alexander" <tom@growingedge.com>

> You obviously believe that the revolving door of people who used to
> work for Monsanto and other corporations and who now work in those
> regulatory agencies (and vice versa)

I was in KMart yesterday. Clerks used to wear name tags in the upper left 
quadrant of their smocks, but they now had them hanging on lanyards. I 
mentioned to to the cashier that they were hard to read that way, and she 
said, "Yeah, someone in headquarters got a bright idea." I commented that 
they should make those guys actually go out to a store from time to time.

I feel the same way about government officials. As Robert Townsend says, 
they need to get out occasionally and sell the shoes. Are there problems 
with this? Yes. But not as many as there would be with the alternatives. You 
could, for instance, insist that regulators have no experience in the area 
they are regulating. Or you could require that all must be life-long 
government employees; that idea doesn't thrill me. Or you could limit them 
to the universities, where views run the gamut from left to far left. (My 
daughter is finishing up her PhD in a field that puts her in with the 
ecology types. At lunch one day they were bashing America, and she, while 
admitting there were problems, asked if they could name a better country. 
There was unanimity around the table: Yes, Cuba.)

I managed to get through the '60a without catching the residual hatred of 
corporations. Yes, they do things that are wrong. But without large 
corporations we would all still be living within ten miles of the place we 
were born on 40 cares with a mule. A cotton clad organic coop could not 
build a Buick or put computers in the majority of American homes at a price 
an average American can afford.

D 

_______________________________________________
gardenwriters mailing list
gardenwriters@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/gardenwriters

GWL has searchable archives at:
http://www.hort.net/lists/gardenwriters

Send photos for GWL to gwlphotos@hort.net to be posted
at: http://www.hort.net/lists/gwlphotos

Post gardening questions/threads to
&quot;Gardenwriters on Gardening&quot; &lt;gwl-g@lists.ibiblio.org&gt;

For GWL website and Wiki, go to
http://www.ibiblio.org/gardenwriters