For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page, Millions Against Monsanto page, and our Politics and Democracy page.

The recent carnage to the American people’s way of life began more than 30 years ago when the Reagan administration crafted deliberate policies that stopped enforcement of antitrust laws at the Department of Justice, encouraged an orgy of corporate mergers and launched a three decade assault on common sense government oversight. Since that time, politicians of both parties have embraced the radical notion of “free” markets that decoupled risk from accountability.

Occupy Wall Street was born out of a legitimate frustration with the collusion between Big Business and elected officials of the U.S. government. And nowhere is that collusion so great as in food and agricultural production where four firms control 84 percent of beef packing, 66 percent of pork production and one company, Monsanto, controls patents on more than 93 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn grown in the U.S.

Ironically, on the day that Occupy Wall Street launched, I was in San Francisco at a conference appropriately named “Justice Begins with Seeds” to discuss the problems of excessive corporate control over our food supply. The incredible growth in the use of genetically modified (GMO) seeds and the excessive corporate influence of biotech seed companies have in Washington was high on the agenda. Much like the ubiquitous credit default swaps of the mortgage crisis, which became toxic assets for the global economy, this new technology of GMO seeds is less than two decades old, but already appears in an estimated 75 to 80 percent of processed food that Americans eat everyday.