Gone are the days when business was conducted on a handshake,in the spirit of mutual benefit and with strong ethical boundaries.

Greed is exactly the emotion tapped when we are influenced or manipulated to consume more to keep the growth economy moving both at an individual level and a corporate level. As individuals we need to take more responsibility to avoid the lemming syndrome. There is a movement taking shape worldwide against greed partly because of the global financial crisis and partly because we are beginning to see how ridiculous our obsession with material wants.

Congratulations on environmental organisations like FOE who play a role in keeping the corporate sector honest when governments turn a blind eye.

Now we need to bring to account the Haliburtons, Blackwater and the remnants of Standard Oil. Sadly, the government connections mean that this will never happen.
I'd like to see a law against funding mis-information too. Tricky to distinguish from genuine alternate research, but I reckon the Big Tobacco style "science" can be readily detected if investigations are transparent enough and peer reviewed.
Now onto Banks and other financial parasites...30% of GDP to bean counting...we really have better things to do with Billions of dollars. Theft to that degree *is* major crime.

Not sure I understand this observation, Ozandy.

>>Now onto Banks and other financial parasites...30% of GDP to bean counting...we really have better things to do with Billions of dollars. Theft to that degree *is* major crime.<<

30% of GDP is $350 billion. How is that attributable to the "beancounting" industry?

That's a whole lot of very wealthy accountants.

And where exactly does this "theft" take place?

Currently there is concern about the infiltration into Australia by the internationally discredited Monsanto. WA is trialling GM crops at two secret locations.

The recent findings on glyphosate formulations, it appears is of no concern to the ignoramuses strutting our halls of parliament.

In January researchers at the University of Caen in France published their findings on weak solutions of Roundup formulations which caused the total death of human embryo cells within 24 hours:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19105591?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

The following author and whistleblower, William Sanjour is a physicist (now retired) and was a senior bureaucrat with the USEPA for thirty years. Read what he has to say about Monsanto (and a corrupt EPA) in the 90s:

http://pwp.lincs.net/sanjour/monsanto.htm

This excerpt is from a letter signed by over sixty European organisations:

‘A report by the Rural Reflection Group (Grupo de Reflexión Rural, or GRR, from Argentina) documents how spraying glyphosate-based herbicides on RR soy leads to an increase in health problems in the countryside such as cases of cancer at early ages, birth defects, lupus, kidney problems, respiratory ailments and dermatitis, evidenced by the accounts of rural doctors, experts and the residents of dozens of farming towns’

Multi-national corporations implicated in the European GM soy saga include, but are not restricted to BP International and Shell International and alas the WWF, who the authors claim have strong links to industry, including nineteen corporations cited in the National Wildlife Federation's recent survey of the 500 worst industrial polluters. These companies included such recognized environmental offenders as Union Carbide, Exxon, Monsanto, Syngenta, Weyerhaeuser, Du Pont, and Waste Management:

http://www.corporateeurope.org/agrofuels/content/2009/05/open-letter-gm-soy-not-responsible

But it seems our politicians know best and while Monsanto et al are ducking for cover around the planet, our leaders have welcomed these agro-frauds and international criminals into Australia while the Australian community remains asleep at the wheel.

Thanks for the article Cam Walker. I still refer to a book I purchased decades ago, published by the FOE in 1984 - “Pesticides: The New Plague” and boy have the chickens you warned us of, come home to roost!

Hear Hear, we hear in the Forum. It was possible to take Royal Dutch Shell to court in the United States of America because the United States has guaranteed courts. A court is a place where 12 local people exercise the democratic right to exercise the Judicial power of Almighty God, and courts strike fear into the hearts of Corporations.

The biggest Corporation in Australia, is the Australian Government, a huge conglomerate that indulges in wholesale abuse of civil and political rights, through its wholly owned subsidiary the Federal Court of Australia. It is in collusion with the next largest corporations, the State and Territory Governments, who have formed a cartel called COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, to collectively and mercilessly tax and burn the Australian economy.

The wholly owned subsidiaries of the Australian Government , the Federal Court of Australia and High Court, no longer accept that a court, not a Court is a guaranteed part of Australian democracy. They do not accept the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is really enacted as Statute, in this country, as Schedule 2 to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986. The wholesale abuse of Aboriginal Australians, older Australians, young Australians, in fact anyone who is unable through age, tender years or any kind of disability to defend themselves, continues while Father Frank Brennan and Mary Kostakaidis roam the country at Australian Government expense, denying its existence.

The legislation recognizing the Commonwealth and States as corporations liable to be haled into court dates from 1903. Like Monsanto, Royal Dutch Shell, Blackwater and others, the Australian Governments have stacked the political meetings that could once call their abuses to account. In fact they have abolished them in every State and the Commonwealth. About 1000 well paid individuals, Judges and Magistrates of both the Commonwealth and States, collude with each other instead of competing, and the community is the poorer for it. Courts are illegal by reference to the Commonwealth Constitution. Yet all nine Government corporations in Australia have them. How good could government be with courts again