The courage needed to fight the multinationals involves standing up to germs.
We have to be able to face down our fear of disease - a fear that multinational corporations are intentionally ramping up in everyone, as a means of destroying small farmers, substituting GE-animals and GE-crops, selling their drugs and vaccines, establishing laws that give them greater and greater control over all food and health resources.
I have been writing for sometime that liberals are easily jerked around, their fear of bacteria and disease used to get them to push for more USDA and FDA regulations. Those regulations are already being used to attack our small farmers and there are many more on the books that lie in wait with even greater destructive force. But urban liberals who have such a blind faith in "science," they who are so suspicious of political machinations, are missing the politics and control behind science. And though they care about underprivileged and abused people of all kind, are completely dissociated from the suffering of farmers who are affected, oddly enough, by a Liberal desire for 100% certainty they won't get sick when they eat a sandwich.
What do we each give away for safety?
The Right has sold American civil liberties down the river in an attempt at "safety from terrorists" - not minding the CENTRALIZATION of spying agencies set up with huge data banks to spy on lefties/commies/pinkos/Muslim/terrorists who threaten this country with their lack of obedience to authority/patriotism.
The Left has sold American civil liberties down the river in an attempt at "food safety" - not minding that a CENTRALIZED "food safety" Department is being planned which will have huge data banks for spying on the right/rednecks/racists/farmers who threaten this country with their lack of scientific/hygienic practices.
We know what the Patriot Act did to this country. We needed to challenge the whole "terrorism is causing everything" myth to begin to see what was really going on - the fake WMD scare, the oil contracts, the Halliburton and Blackwater contracts, the undoing of civil liberties to destroy political dissent. Some on the right, such as Ron Paul, have stood up to their fear of terrorism, letting go of a blind faith in the authority of the president and military.
The point is to see the rest of the plans to take control. Those plans are happening in the American countryside. And to begin deconstructing them, it is time for the Left to give up its fear of diseases and its blind faith in the "authority of science."
Both authorities are manipulated and controlled by corporations. Both fears are as well. But right now, the Left, which has done such a powerful job of exposing the lies about the war and the dangers of the Patriot Act, is caught way behind in seeing the lie of "food safety" - which sounds so mundane and harmless but is the Nazi- trick of using hygiene, once again, to take control.
Courage to rethink bacteria? To rethink science? Can so much hinge on that?
A more recent and advanced science is now seeing bacteria as amazing, not threatening, and exposure to it, even bad bacteria, as critical for strong immune systems.
The findings, reported in the journal Nature, support the so-called "hygiene hypothesis" – the theory that a lack of exposure to parasites, bacteria and viruses in the developed world may lead to increased risk of diseases like allergies, asthma, and other disorders of the immune system.
The results also suggest that exposure to some forms of bacteria might actually help prevent onset of Type I diabetes, an autoimmune disease in which the patient's immune system launches an attack on cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.
The root causes of autoimmune disease have been the subject of intensive investigation by scientists around the world.
In the past decade, it has become evident that the environment plays a role in the development of some overly robust immune system responses. For instance, people in less-developed parts of the world have a low rate of allergy, but when they move to developed countries the rate increases dramatically. Scientists have also noted the same phenomenon in their labs.
http://www.bio-medicine.org/...
Not so oddly, farmers know this instinctively already. Farmers know a lot of science that doesn't come from books but from being grounded in life itself they have ended up being way ahead of the fragmented "modern science" that, for instance, still promotes pasteurization, which is badly outmoded.
http://www.westonaprice.org/...
It was, of course, "modern science" which grossly devalued breast feeding, and instead promoted bottle feeding and corporate baby formulas. Industry made a lot of money on that "modern" science. The objections from mothers were treated as "anti-science" and ignorant, and disregarded. It took a great deal of time and much more advanced science to prove what mothers have known for thousands of years, that breast feeding is miraculous on many levels. And breast milk, in all its dangerous naturalness, full of bacteria, is not pasteurized. (Please don't tell the USDA.)
http://westonaprice.org/...
Farmers know a great deal about the relation between normal farming and our immune systems that I had never heard as an educated liberal. They certainly know things which don't jive with the USDA's pushing the idea that indoor poultry facilities are cleaner and thus "safer" than a small farmer letting his chickens run loose outside in the "dirt." One farmer told me that one of the problems with factory raised chickens (and there are so many problems ...) is that they don't get out in the dirt and so they don't get exposure to a range of bacteria and so then can't build up their immune systems. He said the eggs of those factory hens are worthless in terms of passing on any immunity to people.
We have been told a whalloping lot of nonsense about cleanliness and bacteria, and by corporations that benefit with each fear they can create.
Here is the US, when Bill Clinton got into office, leaving behind Arkansas rivers contaminated by waste from Tyson poultry factories and boosted to the presidency by large donations from Tyson, his USDA immediately and significantly lowered contamination standards for poultry in the US, easing Tyson's poultry-factory expansion.
http://www.financialsense.com/ editorials/engdahl/2006/0828.html).
His USDA head, Espy, a close friend, was indicted for bribes, money laundering, and much more. Tyson was the largest corporate offender. http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.ne...
Meanwhile, in Asia, when there were outbreaks of Bird Flu, the small farmers there were blamed - them and their 5- 10 chickens running around outside in the dirt. But it turns out the Bird Flu is related to contaminated waste from transnational poultry factories which gets spread out on fields there. Do they clean up the waste because of the risk of Bird Flu? Noooooo. Come on.
Instead, the small farmers' stocks are eradicated by the health departments and the poultry corporations move to substitute genetically engineering birds. That is, they substitute "privatized" birds so the small farmers then don't own the birds, they are merely renting them and now work for the corporations.
Bird Flu, something intelligent liberals would feel justified in fearing. A terrible disease seems a time to listen to scientists and doctors and take precautions. But alerts about diseases should make liberals as suspicious as they are of alerts about terrorism or assertions about WMDs.
"Donald Rumsfeld and other major stock holders of Gilead Sciences or Roche Inc., the marketers of the much-hyped Tamiflu (see previous articles, 'Is Tamiflu another Pentagon Hoax? ;'Bird Flu: A Corporate Bonanza for the Biotech Industry') are reaping nice gains, as sales of the medication are booming thanks to promotion by the Bush and Blair governments.
Agribusiness companies stand to reap huge gains in the event that scientists at Cambridge University and elsewhere are able to replace the entire world chicken population with genetically-engineered chicks allegedly resistant to H5N1 virus.
Little-noticed beneficiaries of the current Avian Flu scare, however, are the giant agribusiness chicken producers based in the United States, who claim 'their' chickens are safe. Their sales are booming and all indications are that Avian Flu, paradoxically, has come like a Godsend to their corporate balance sheets. Are they also responsible for breeding unsanitary conditions and exporting the product worldwide causing disease, illness and even deaths?"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/...
The poultry industry used the crisis they themselves had created through their filthy, cost-saving, profit-gouging methods, to push out small independent farmers and turn them in mere laborers for the poultry. http://www.ens-newswire.com/...
Herds of cattle were wiped out in the UK over Mad Cow. But the corporations disgusting practices caused Mad Cow while small farmers' heritage breeds of cattle were lost forever, being slaughtered when there was evidence that animals were not sick.
http://www.mad-cow.org/...
And here in the US, to get the heat off and to prove it was "on the job," the USDA went after a small sheep farmer in Vermont to make a show of its (fake) diligence - not increasing inspections at or going after the squalid conditions of corporate factory farms, or giant corporate feedlots, and massive corporate slaughterhouses.
... [Th]e Faillace's had documentation to show that their sheep came from scrapie-free flocks. Linda and Larry, scientists both, studied BSE and scrapie disease extensively while working at the University of Nottingham in England. They were able to present concrete evidence that it was impossible for their sheep to have BSE. But Linda Detweiler of the USDA - now working for McDonald's and Wendy's - and the agency she ran refused to budge. The Faillace sheep were slaughtered to prevent the spread of BSE in America .
Larry and Linda Faillace dreamed of having a small dairy sheep farm where their children could work along side them and create a family business. They discovered a niche with high-yield dairy sheep from Europe. They carefully researched and untangled all the regulations regarding the importation of sheep and soon had a thriving entrepreneurial business. Then, one day, the needs of big business and government corruption colluded to bring their operation to a screeching halt.
The USDA created a straw man to protect the beef industry‹that straw man was a family.
Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association wrote a review.
What we are confronted with in Mad Sheep is a government conspiracy. A politically inspired ritual of fabricated charges, manipulated science, and doctored evidence. A modern witch-hunt to sacrifice the innocent in order to protect the massive profits and scandalous practices of the guilty. A diabolically orchestrated, media-scripted search and destroy operation in the Vermont countryside, designed not just to murder some innocent sheep and thereby exorcize mounting consumer fears about food safety and mad cow disease, but also to turn us all into sheep, to fan the flames of fear and ignorance, and to foster our continued dependence on an abusive Big Brother government that has promised to protect us from the contemporary terrors that lurk, well, nearly everywhere.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/...
Fear is being manipulated while nothing real is being done, and buying into that fear,liberals become increasing interested in more and more government regulations, not looking deeper into who is running the smoke and mirrors show and who is being destroyed by - the real farmers we dream of bringing us real and healthy food.
"Slaughtering healthy animals on suspicion -- this has been a horrific week for livestock worldwide. In Vermont, the suspicion was thathealth of beef exports might be adversely affected if the US did not hunt down perceptions of risk from European live imports. The sheep seizure is an alarming precedent for abuse of government power: no convincing evidence was ever put forward that the sheep had any form of TSE, much less BSE; the seizure is taking place despite an appeals court agreeing to finally give the sheep their day in court. The USDA can be ashamed of itself for this cold-blooded, hypocritical seizure -- which may signal abandonment of science-driven TSE policy for the United States. Do the mistakes of Britain really need to be repeated here?
Livestock producers large and small, cattle and sheep, have a very special stewardship relationship with their animals. Farm animals are not viewed as faceless production units in some overarching global economic trade agenda, and rightly so. Massive culls in Europe have been extremely wrenching experiences for affected farmers, experiences that compensation does not even begin to address. So it behooves us to be careful -- whether it is foot-and-mouth, the over 30 month grass fed cow, or healthy sheep -- to make the decision for the sometimes necessary cull only when there is a solid scientific basis for them. This scientific standard has not been met in Vermont."
http://www.mad-cow.org/...
Meanwhile, the FDA and Homeland Security, at the behest of Agribusiness giants like Monsanto, have inserted draconian regulations for "our safety" that will provide "surge capacity" for the destruction and seizure of farmers' crops and animals in case of ... "bioterrorism." And they will use NAIS as their centralized corporate data bank for surveilling all farmers with even a single animal and 24 hours a day, to be able to get hold of those stocks.
Though those animals make up only a teeny portion of the American food system, and are isolated in many ways from it so would be the last place any terrorist with half a brain would bother with, I suspect that those will be the animals seized and slaughtered, like the Fallances' sheep were. The USDA, the FDA and Homeland Security would have both done something to protect us from "bioterrorism" and would have eradicated the independent, local, organic competition, allowing for the insertion of genetically engineered animals.
Any real threat to the American food system, from disease or "bioterrorism," of course, lies with the corporate industrial side of farming - where the "efficiency of scale" and the reduction of animals to mere products, has resulted in cramming of millions of corporate chickens, millions of corporate hogs, millions of corporate cattle, together, eating from the same feed, drinking the same water, susceptible to contamination at a single source and yet the meat from those animals is shipped across across the country to make up most of our food. The infection or disease or attack on the corporate side that would affect the country is massive ways could happen easily. And those animals already live in degraded, disease-inducing conditions, with costs being cut at every point in terms of their feed and health.
Meanwhile, farmers raising animals sold within a local market have little chance of hurting more than a few people, assuming that the farmer himself doesn't see that something is wrong when his own family eats the meat or milk or crops he produces. The levels of protection are many and the extent of exposure very small and the track back to the farmer simple. But those are the farmers being threatened and who the FDA, Homeland Security and the USDA will likely destroy.
While it is alarming to think the government might go after small farmers and destroy them on a scare based on lies Agribusiness and the Pharmaceutical industry has already been known to use as way to ramp up fear and then mop up control and profits, we can at least be reassured ... that corporations will not have their animals wiped out or equipment seized or destroyed.
To the degree that the Left is so fearful of diseases, it hasn't been able to see and care about the destruction of real people - our farmers, farmers in Asia, farmers in India, farmers in Central and South America, farmers in Europe - for jumping on cue at diseases alerts and for demanding MORE regulations to ensure its 100%-guaranteed-"food safety" sandwich.
Racial "hygiene" was how the Nazis pushed their agenda. Hygiene is being used by totalitarians again. They may not be wearing uniforms and they may not have guns but they use SWAT teams and police to destroy people's lives and to gain greater and greater control over the most essential resources in a country - food and healing natural substances and water. Kissinger would approve - control food and you control populations. Who would think that it could be done through fear of bacteria?
To get a good picture of how science is being manipulated by government in a way that it terrible for real farmers and for your health, look at what the FDA did to the cherries growers when they found out their cherries were potentially 10 times stronger than aspirin or ibuprofen in controlling pain. http://www.lef.org/...
And as the backdrop of the FDA protecting you from even knowledge of cherries and threatening cherry growers with prison for merely putting links to peer-reviewed studies on their websites, this is the corporate alternative that the FDA leaves in place with no threats:
"Each year, use of NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) accounts for an estimated 7,600 deaths and 76,000 hospitalizations in the United States." (NSAIDs include aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen, diclofenac, ketoprofen, and tiaprofenic acid.)"
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/...
This is the same FDA that is currently pushing regulations that will disallow the shipping across state lines of any natural supplement about which there has EVER been a study showing its effectiveness.
You read that right.
"If the FDA determines that Section 301 applies to dietary supplements, ... [i]t would create a 'Catch 22' situation in which supplement producers who undertake scientific research on new supplements will find that their very research will lead to a ban on the proposed supplement. This is totally senseless. This is too senseless even for the FDA," said Gretchen DuBeau, AAHF Executive Director.
Dr Robert Verkerk, executive and scientific director of the ANH emphasized:
"Unlike Section 201 of the FDCA, the proposed new Section 301 of the FDA Amendments Act doesn't just limit the ban to supplements that have been subject to drug applications, it applies a ban to some of the best researched and most useful supplements and ingredients on the market today. This is clearly nonsensical and if enforced, would represent one of the most severe restrictions seen in any country at any time."
"There will be no shortage of big corporations that will exploit this situation to their benefit unless the scope of Section 301 is both clarified and narrowed",commented Gretchen DuBeau, "one such company is already trying to use it to ban the natural zero-caloric sweetener stevia, given that stevia has been subject to scientific research and has been a thorn in the side of the sugar and artificial sweetener giants for years."
http://www.healthfreedom.org.
And to get really down and dirty, liberals who have their identities bound up in being educated and modern and "scientific," need to look at what "science" is being "done" in truly life and death situations (where the big money is). The NCI just did a study on vitamin E and selenium as a treatment for prostate cancer, something that the alternative health people consider valuable. Seems good of the NCI to be looking seriously at alternative treatments. The NCI started the study but then halted it out of concern for patients, because the vitamin E and selenium were not effective. But what they didn't say is that the study used a coal tar-based synthetic vitamin E. Using that, the NCI did a very "professional scientific" debunking of the use of natural substances to cure cancers, all the while knowing in advance that they had used a synthetic vitamin E that had NO anti-oxidant value whatever.
They used tar.
They then reported to doctors the vitamin E is worthless. Or perhaps they thought the synthetic was just as good as the real thing, not knowing anything about antioxidants. Which view of the scientists involved in this fraudulent study is worse? Take your pick.
http://www.naturalnews.com/...
The attacks on vitamin C and Linus Pauling were equally egregious, but with vitamin C, recommended by Pauling as a major and painless chemotherapy, one enters a territory of unfathomable immorality when one considers the lives that have been lost and the pain that was suffered, and that both are continuing, all based on corporately-biased (and purchased) lying science.
http://www.prnewswire.com/...
http://www.startribune.com/...
The fear of disease and the risk-aversion of the liberals has left them vulnerable to these astounding manipulations by corporations, and there is one coming at all of us that most liberals have never even heard of and yet farmers have known about it and feared it for years -Codex Alimentarius.
http://www.healthfreedom.org/
Which brings me finally to the FDA just approving stevia.
Hurrah. Maybe.
Just to give a little background to this news.
We have had decades of Aspartame while stevia was kept out of the country. How Aspartame got approved is very connected to Donald Rumsfeld.
http://www.wnho.net/...
And then the Clintons appointed Monsanto employees to run the FDA and they approved Aspartame (by then owned by Monsanto) for use as a sugar substitute, despite strong evidence of brain damage and other diseases and over medical objections.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/...
At the same time, the Clinton's Monsanto FDA also kept the synthetic Aspartame's competition, all-natural stevia, out of US, though more than 900 studies indicated NO problems WHATSOEVER.
http://www.stevia.net/...
Aspartame (Nutrasweet), is still legal despite heroic consumer fights up which must go up against Monsanto power, and though Aspartame is even more strongly associated now with diabetes, MS, many cancers, epilepsy, and more ....
"http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/"
The FDA has now destroyed incriminating records on Aspartame,
http://www.healthtruthrevealed.com/...
and meanwhile Hawaii has been embroiled in a consumer battle to stop Aspartame for some time.
http://www.phxnews.com/...
This country has experienced an epidemic of diabetes which is up 90% in just 10 years and spending on it has doubled in only six.
http://www.healthfreedom.net/...
In addition to its having owned Aspartame, Monsanto's genetically engineering Bt-corn is also associated with diabetes. http://www.organicconsumers.org/... and high fructose corn syrup, made from the Bt-corn that Monsanto owns, is strongly linked to causing diabetes. http://www.sciencedaily.com/...
Isn't that what you call a trifecta?
Well, let's go for quafecta. A Monsanto person heads the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. http://www.jdrf.org/...
So, while Aspartame which causes diabetes was being sold to people trying to avoid it by avoiding sugar, and to diabetics who are made worse by it, and while the corn in this country has been genetically engineered and and that is linked to diabetes and we are exposed to it in so much processed food, and while high fructose corn syrup, now also linked to diabetes, is used in more processed foods, and we got sicker and sicker, it turns out the stevia is actually helpful to diabetics.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/...
Now the FDA has finally approved Stevia. The question for me is why/ Has it been or will it be genetically engineered so the corporations which blocked it originally in favor Aspartame, will "own" stevia. Given what the FDA just did about melamine, I find it hard to think the FDA approved stevia out of any interest whatever in our health.
What is the corporate advantage, for surely without there being a large one, the FDA would not have done this.
Here is the news on Stevia and the details:
http://www.naturalnews.com/...