Food Fascism in the Land of the Free

The food industry is no longer a free market.  In fact, I’d go as far as saying it’s becoming the most glaring example of corporate-government fascism in America.

Actual monopolies fully control the basic building blocks of the food that makes up the majority of the American diet — and no one seems to care.  Simply put, those who control the corn, wheat, and soybeans control all food, since all livestock and all processed foods are dependent on those food resources.  These monopolies place their cronies in government regulatory agencies like the FDA and USDA to weed out their competition through excessive regulation.  Currently proposed legislation are textbook examples of their methods.

There once was a time when free markets existed for food.  Back when local food ruled the day, if a farmer sold milk that was bad, he would not get return customers unless he adjusted his practices to make a healthier product.  This free market was self-regulating.  In other words, in a truly free market we shouldn’t need the FDA.  However, as mentioned before, we are light years from a free market.

Subsidies rain down on big agribusinesses that grow what the government tells them to grow.  Industry leaders like Cargill, Monsanto, and Tyson essentially turn farmers into indentured sharecroppers.  The food engineers at General Mills and others weave corn, wheat, and soybeans into chemical concoctions that end up in brightly colored packages — some even come with free Chinese-made toys.  The finished product develops from a Genetically Modified base, using multiple poisons to glue it together, demonstrating that the monopolies and their regulatory lapdogs care not for our health.

But what about voting with our pocketbooks, isn’t that a free market? Surely that is what we have been taught.  Yet, all 16 flavors of Cheerios — which give the appearance of free choice — are all made by General Mills from a genetically modified corn base.  This illusion of choice hides the monopolistic nature of food.

Enter Senate bill S. 510 Food Safety Modernization Act, already passed in the House as HR 2749.  Some have demonized the bill as ultimate food fascism where the FDA will micromanage even small farms and co-ops to the point where it will become illegal to grow, share, trade or sell homegrown food.  While others see it as a measured way to control the health and quality of factory farms. One thing is for sure, S.510 gives more power to the corrupt FDA to regulate our food.  And there is renewed interest in the Senate to pass this bill since the recent massive egg and meat recalls due to salmonella and E. coli outbreaks.

This bill does nothing to change the actual practices of factory farming and the way the food for animals is grown and delivered.  It does give the FDA draconian powers to force inspections to be paid for by the farmers themselves.  This can be an effective tool for the big multinational agri-corporations to further squeeze out their competition and gain near complete control of food resources in America.  Furthermore, S.510 essentially hands much of the FDA’s duties over to the liberty-smashing Department of Homeland Security — which is mentioned 41 times in the bill.

All 273 pages of the bill contain legalize that can be difficult to decode, but one of the easiest ways to determine if it is good for average Americans is to view who is supporting the bill, versus who opposes the bill.  Monsanto and other agri-monopolies support the bill with full force.  Indeed, some speculate that they even wrote the bill themselves.

Sadly, this bill is gaining momentum because of the recent food recalls.  One way or another, our corrupt politicians and their corporate overlords will see to it that there is more regulation over our food.  If this bill passes, we can expect more consolidation in agriculture and more police-state raids of private health-food cooperatives.  Worse yet, this bill may just be the primer for the even more egregious bill HR.759 Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act, which fully restricts local food producers and natural health remedies.

Food freedom starts at home with the individual choices that we make.  However, exposing the corrupt regulatory system and educating the powers that be about healthier ways to produce food is also vital to maintaining our food freedom.  It’s time we tell the corporate government to back off our food.

You can read the proposed bill for yourself at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bil…

Policing the Internet

Two cybersecurity bills that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the Internet in the event of a national emergency have now been merged into a single unified piece of legislation that Democrats will try to pass before the end of the year, with the Department of Homeland Security being given a larger role in policing the world wide web.

Under the new draft bill, which is a combination of the two versions originally crafted by Senators Joe Lieberman and Jay Rockefeller, Janet Napolitano’s DHS will be handed broader authority to determine how to handle potential cybersecurity threats.
“DHS will get expanded authorities. I think that’s clear,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert with think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has studied the new bill.
An expanded role for Homeland Security would be somewhat ironic given the fact that the DHS itself recently failed an extensive cyber-security audit conducted by the agency’s own Inspector General.

“The DHS US-CERT office is currently plagued by at least 600 vulnerabilities that could compromise sensitive data, including 202 which have been classified as high-risk,” reported TG Daily.
Homeland Security’s failure to adequately secure its own internal network will lead to questions about why the agency should be given vast new authority to secure America’s cyber assets and the public Internet.
Democrats want to get the bill passed within the next four weeks, although “sticking points” could delay the legislation, according to a Senate aide familiar with the bill. However, lawmakers are determined to put the package up for a vote before the end of the year.

“Senate Majority Harry Reid has put the measure on his list of top-priority bills to get through the Senate this year,” sources told MoneyControl.com.

Lieberman’s version of the original bill includes language that would hand President Obama the power to shut down parts of the world wide web for at least four months with no congressional oversight. The combined version appears to shift that responsibility to DHS, who under the pretext of a national emergency could block all Internet traffic to the U.S. from certain countries, and close down specific hubs and networks, creating an ominous precedent for government regulation and control over the Internet.

Cybersecurity legislation is being promoted as a vital tool to defend the nation’s critical infrastructure against cyber- terrorism. However, the threat from cyber-terrorists to the U.S. power grid or water supply is minimal. The perpetrators of an attack on such infrastructure would have to have direct physical access to the systems that operate these plants to cause any damage. Any perceived threat from the public Internet to these systems is therefore completely contrived and strips bare what many fear is the real agenda behind cybersecurity – to enable the government to regulate free speech on the Internet.

The Obama administration’s release of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a government plan to “secure” (or control) the nation’s public and private sector computer networks, coincided with Democrats attempting to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Fears that cybersecurity legislation could be used to stifle free speech were heightened when Senator Lieberman told CNN’s Candy Crowley that the real motivation behind the bill was to mimic the Communist Chinese system of Internet policing. “Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.

The Communist Chinese government does not disconnect parts of the Internet because of genuine security concerns, it habitually does so only to oppress and silence victims of government abuse and atrocities, and to strangle dissent against the state, a practice many fear is the ultimate intention of cybersecurity in the United States.

This is a long overdue lawsuit. Unbeknownst to many United States citizens, if you leave the country with an electronic device — like a smartphone, cell phone, camera, or more likely, a laptop — your electronics can be seized, searched and contents archived by the Department of Homeland Security with no due process other than a field officer deciding you might be a threat to the nation.

Sure we need to protect the nation and monitor who comes and goes into and out of the country, but with the due process that represents the best of America. In the post-9/11 world, policies like this are slowly turning the United States into a police state that would be unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers.

Civil liberties groups sued the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, alleging that the government should not be able to search, copy or keep the data on electronic devices carried by people crossing the border without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Layers (NACDL) announced on Tuesday that they filed a lawsuit against the policy, arguing that Americans “do not surrender their privacy and free speech rights when they travel abroad.”

DHS policy says that electronic devices such as laptops, cameras and cell phones can be searched as a matter of course, and that the border agents can copy the contents of the devices in order to continue searching them once the traveler has been allowed to enter the U.S. — even if the traveler is not suspected of any wrongdoing. Information obtained by the ACLU indicated that over 6,600 travelers — nearly half of whom are U.S. citizens — had their electronic devices searched at the border between Oct. 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010.