There are USDA "listening sessions" on the Child Nutrition Act this summer.  Sound boring?  It's about as basic to your freedom as things get.

The USDA, through the Child Nutrition Act has been giving American children rBGH-milk.  That is, milk from cows injected with genetically engineer hormones.  rBGH is the first genetically engineered product ever approved by the FDA.  It is a Monsanto product and was approved while Monsanto ran the FDA and while scientists there tried to tell Congress that Monsanto was fiddling the numbers, and they were fired.

Genetic engineering is neither a minor alteration of DNA or adequately tested.  http://online.sfsu.edu/...

Also Request Oversight Hearing to Investigate NAIS Activities

For liberals who have a familiar list of issues they consider politically urgent, it's time to look at farming issues in that light.

Farming issues reveal a worldwide movement by multinationals to control all food, animals, water, land.  NAIS is a totalitarian plan to oversee every farm animal in the country under the guise of food safety (though it contributes nothing to that safety and skirts the need to investigate and clean up the corporate feedlots, animal factories and slaughterhouses), with a data bank of global tracking information on small farmer and ranchers's to be run by and stored with corporations, and intolerable costs borne by farmers and ranchers, along with loss of all privacy and independence, and including penalties that are massive and destructive.

The sustainable agriculture movement, the independence of our farming and ranching communities, and our democracy itself are at stake with NAIS, which is, incidentally being pushed by Monsanto (and the big meat packers).  

Where does one even begin?  

Before it's possible to understand the scope of this, I'm going to take a moment and give background.

Do you know who Monsanto is? They are a chemical corporation which made Agent Orange and after that, PCBs, with which they drowned the town of Anniston, Alabama for decades, even after knowing for sure that PCBs were highly carcinogenic.  They make organophosphates, including glyphosate (Round-up) - which are highly neuro-toxic.

With this background in illness and killing, Monsanto then began "doing" your food.  It genetically engineers food.

But before you say "Oh, that's good because genetic engineering is making food better, adding vitamins, growing bigger crops, ..." I have bad news for you.  Please go to http://www.responsibletechnology.org and listen to Jeffrey Smith's lecture on how genetic engineering works and what it does to organs.  

Ooooh, did they have you all worried about tomatoes and salmonella?  Have you been all upset the FDA couldn't track down the culprits?  Were you assiduously following the tomato trail, wondering where it would lead?  And did you find that suddenly, it was jalapenos all along?  Geez, It's like tracking Osama and next thing you know, we're in Iraq after WMDs, and no one can find either.

Actually, it's very much like that.  Fear, fear, fear.  Upsetting the public, so everyone will be eager for a push for ... war.  So, when it comes to tomatoes - scratch that, jalapenos - the public is scared again, and the government suggests more FDA power to track better those enemy germs and more regulations, it just like more troops and extensions of FISA.  

WMDs.  Oh my gosh.  Rev up the military.  

Salmonella.  Oh dear, oh dear.  Rev up the FDA.  

Only ... didn't we get set up about WMDs, if I remember correctly?

Activists in Canada have wrung some changes from the government in regard to Bill C51 ithttp://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/07/19/natural-health-advocates-defeat-gove rnment-power-grab.aspx?source=nl

but the bill is so draconian that it stands as a warning to all of us of what corporate/government agencies will do to destroy alternative movements that are growing, whether in health or in food, and the means that they are using.

http://articles.mercola.com/...

I will keep this simple.  

Farming here and around the world is in terrible trouble.  

Kissinger said control food, you control populations.

Corporations are taking control of everything to do with food.  

In India, in the last 10 years since Monsanto and our big Ag corporations went in there, thanks to Clinton, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, 166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide and 8 million have left (or been pushed off of) the land.  

Suicides occurred in the Midwest among our farmers as well.  Where there was once a rich farming life and real communities, it is corporate there now.  

Real farming, real families, real community life, are a memory.  

The pain of those farmers cling to the land.  http://www.pbs.org/...

Be sure to watch http://www.aswesow.com/

Dear friends,

I write you as a burdened Cassandra, someone who has begun to see too much of what is going on, and needing to warn good people to be careful, to make plans to protect yourselves.  i have believed as you do in the wholeness of things and in the inherent goodness of people, and from that in the growth of millions of small efforts to improving our world that would coalesce bit by bit into a better and healthier and lasting world.

Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) is pushing to get a provision into the Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2008 that would give the FDA the power to issue mandatory recalls of contaminated food.  Oh, dear.  We need to not give any more power to that agency to do squat.

Let's take a moment for a little background.  The FDA is essentially run by Big Pharma, including Monsanto, and not for our benefit.
http://www.localforage.com/...
http://articles.mercola.com/...

What do we know?

We know that oil is a limited resource.  

We know that demand for it is climbing because of China and India.  

We know that we went into Iraq for oil and that supplies there have been threatened by fighting.

We know that Bush is an oil man.

We know that Exxon is now making the largest profits in the history of the world - billions.

We know that because there is the so-called oil "crisis," some Congress people want a windfall profits tax.

We know that because there is the so-called oil "crisis," Exxon and the other oil companies are pushing for  a tax BREAK so they will have some "incentive" to explore for oil.

We know that because of the so-called oil "crisis," the president and Exxon and others are pushing to lift bans  on drilling in ANWAR and off the coast of the US.

We know that because of the so-called oil "crisis," both the coal and nuclear industries, each known for large environmental threats, are suddenly saying "We're BAAAACK."

I am very sorry that Teddy Kennedy has been diagnosed with brain cancer and wish him the best.

That said, why are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy the only treatments being considered?

The treatment of cancer has started to move toward treatments that are less damaging.  Lung cancer is now being treated with heat, without surgery.

From: "vidarbha today" <vidarbhatoday@gmail.com>
Date: May 12, 2008 3:08:16 PM EDT
Subject: Debt woes drive thousands of Indian farmers to suicide-SAM DOLNICK-The Associated Press reports

Monday, May 12, 2008

By SAM DOLNICK
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 11, 2008; 12:48 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

KOCHI, India -- On the last night of his life, the farmer walked into his dusty fields, choked down pesticide and waited to die.

He owed more than $1,000 to banks and moneylenders and he had told his wife that if the cotton harvest was bad this year, he would kill himself.

Pandurang Chindu Surpam left the near-barren fields he worked with his sons to share a last meal with his family. Hours later, he died. He was 45.

Using intellectual property laws (as Monsanto did to take control of seeds worldwide), someone is pushing a law to say that "orphaned" artists' work is okay to use by others.

I don't see a lot of artists out there asking for this bill or any big flood of poor orphaned art work which can't find it proper owner.  But there are new digital registry companies which will benefit because unless artists pay to get their work registered digitally, it is open to total use by anyone claiming they couldn't locate the artist.

http://capwiz.com/...

Farming is the heart of every country.  Corporate agriculture - INDUSTRIAL agriculture - is destroying it worldwide.  

Notice that after the vaunted "Green Revolution" and the much ballyhooed "biotech" solutions to food problems:

  the earth is swimming in 6-10 more pesticides than before GMOs,
  fishing stocks are failing because of run-off into oceans,
  prices on commodities are sky-rocketing,
  people are not seeing the great promised yields that were allegedly proposed to solve hunger,

but in fact:

Trying still to get attention to rBGH milk, this petition is going around:

http://action.foodandwaterwatch.org/...

For those who don't know about it, rBGH is a genetically engineered bovine hormone approved during the Clinton administration when Clinton appointed Monsanto-connected-employees to run the FDA and they then approved Monsanto's own product over scientific objections about increased cancer risk.  Despite those links to cancer, the Clinton administration did not withdraw the hormone or warn the public or label the milk.

To learn how Monsanto pushed its genetically engineered hormone on the American public:  http://video.google.com/...

To learn more about Monsanto, you can see Vanity Fair's green issue this month:  http://www.vanityfair.com/... features/2008/05/monsanto200805

On Friday - April 25, 2008, in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Mark Nolt, a Wenger Mennonite (Horse and Buggy Mennonite) dairyman, threatened for months with arrest for selling raw milk without a permit was removed from his property by state troopers.  

Jonas Stoltzfus, a friend, fellow farmer, and Church of the Brethen, was asked by Mr. Nolt to speak for him, and said of the raid yesterday - "Six state troopers and Bill Chirdon of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture trespassed onto his property, and stole $20-25,000 of his product and equipment."  

Mr. Stoltzfus explained that Mr. Nolt did not have a permit because "he chose to turn his permit back in because it did not cover all the products he was selling.  He felt he was being dishonest selling stuff that was not covered by the permit.  He is a man of great integrity."  

Hillary Clinton got away with an amazing feat in Pennsylvania.  In a dairy state, one in which there are two looming bans on milk - one to ban labeling of milk associated with a 7 times increased risk of breast cancer in order to promote it without anyone knowing about it, and one to ban good plain raw milk - her own disturbing connection to milk remained a secret.  In a state where dairy farmers (and other farmers) are living in literal fear of Monsanto, the fact that Monsanto has been running her campaign (even with Penn in the shadows now), remained a secret.

A major study out of Kansas has now dispelled the myth (lie? charade?  PR scam?  boondoggle?)  that Monsanto has been using for years to promote its GMO crops - that GM crops produce greater yields.  It then slathers that manure ... no, manure is too real and valuable to work as an analogy ... that synthetic crap, with an even more synthetic concern for the world's poor and starving.  And thus evil disguised as goodness, worms its way in where it should never have gotten.

The missing back story to the Pennsylvania primary is milk.

Dairy farmers are critical to Pennsylvania and the state is fighting two milk bans - on labeling of milk, and on raw milk - but no one is talking about Hillary Clinton and her experience with milk.  Or the risk the unlabeled milk poses to women and girls.  Or what it means for a politician - particularly a woman - to be working closely with a corporation which not only created that risk but is going state to state to keep people in the dark about even "where" its product is.

Few people know: