While Clinton crisscrosses the state, there are others moving across Pennsylvania carrying a hidden, sordid and enormous back story to her campaign.
Yesterday, a group of people with one reporter in attendance gathered in western Pennsylvania on a 143 acre farm, to listen to two disturbing speeches and to watch two riders and a boy traveling with them by bike, set off on an historic mission. They are carrying news of what is happening to American farming.
In multiple legs, filled in by volunteers, whether on horseback, by truck, by wagon, by buggy, by bike or on foot, "the Ride for Farmers" has now begun crossing Pennsylvania on a trip that will go on for 20 days from the 2nd to the 21st, the day before the primary, to tell the American people about the destruction of their farmers and their food and their alternative health care system.
This writer has tried to let the liberal community, through this blog, know how dire things are for farmers, a community that continues to fall mainly outside of the scope of progressive attention to the benefit of those who making what can only be called a totalitarian move on what is left of family farming in this country through NAIS.
In HOW TO BECOME A SERF IN ONE EASY STEP
Doreen Hannes explains:
All you have to do is register your property with the USDA under the National Animal Identification System. You'll be assigned a seven-character number that stays with the property forever and the USDA "owns" that number according to " A User Guide" which is their latest public document on the program.
The premise id number or PIN will set you solidly in the position of giving up your rights to ownership. How can I say that? Well, words have meaning for a reason. The USDA, in their original documents regarding NAIS, refers to participants as "stakeholders" repeatedly, twenty one times in the Draft Strategic Plan alone. They also use the term "national herd" and tell us that NAIS is necessary to protect the health and marketability of the "national herd". First let's look at the PIN and then at animal identification with official NAIS compliant tags.
The USDA claims to "own" the PIN (page6 A User Guide) and when one is assigned a PIN either through truly volunteering for it or being rolled into it via other disease control programs, it stays with the property forever (Draft Program Standards pg 16-read the whole section on PIN) and the person who owns the property becomes a stakeholder. The definition of stakeholder is as follows:
"The term stakeholder, as traditionally used in the English language in law and notably gambling, is a third party who temporarily holds money or property while its owner is still being determined."
Yep. While it's owner is still being determined. It doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Now let's look at the definition of ownership as a comparison. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:
"Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive possession or control of property, which may be an object, land/real estate, intellectual property or some other kind of property. It is embodied in an ownership right also referred to as title."
http://www.newswithviews.com/...
Look carefully. While the left is opposing the war in Iraq and occupied with the election, through the USDA, without a law changed anywhere or any democratic process involved, Monsanto and the USDA (and some other others of similar if less immense maws) appear to be rewriting ownership of rural property itself, eliminating it through a forced sign-up and global tracking tag of every single farm animal in the country owned by farmers.
Walter Jeffries, a farmer writes:
The government is using the recent meat recalls to justify NAIS. The media is picking up on this and giving false reports to promote the idea that NAIS is good for consumers.
NAIS, the National Animal Identification System, has nothing to do with consumer food safety. The tags are cut off when the animals are slaughtered and tracking ends. NAIS only tracks the movement of live animals on farms and in transit.
The number of farms participating is grossly exaggerated. It is not 27%. That number is derived by the USDA having reduced the number of farms to a minimal 1.4 million for their statistics so that they can make the participation look larger than it is. The reality is that by the USDA’s definition, a NAIS premise is any location where there is ever one of the 29 covered species of livestock including chickens, pigs, horses, etc. The actual number of premises in the United States is between 8 million and 20 million. This makes the USDA’s NAIS participation more like 2%.
Virtually all food born illness originates in the processing plants not on the farm. NAIS does not even protect against mad cow disease, often used as an excuse for NAIS, because that disease is caused by feeding cows to cows - which is illegal.
What NAIS does do is let the factory farms identify 10,000 animals with a single Group ID number while small farmers are required to tag and track every single individual animal. This creates an overwhelming burden of time and money on small farmers while benefiting the factory farm producers. The irony is that virtually all problems, disease and pollution, originate in the factory farms. Big Ag and the tag producers are the ultimate beneficiaries of NAIS. NAIS is about profits and control. Consumers and small farmers lose out big.
If people want safer food then they should buy locally from small farmers in their area. It’s easy and it promotes local food security by maintaining production capacity.
While the liberal community is rightfully and righteously involved in stopping the war in Iraq, large rats have been busy here. Naomi Kline's shock doctrine applies in a way, in the sense that we are reeling from one assault after another from the Bush administration which makes putting forward something like NAIS easier, but the truth is that the left and right are so fractured, that when it comes to such a MASSIVE attack on democracy as NAIS represents, liberals have literally never heard of it, and if they have, most often believe the USDA/Monsanto line that it is good for food safety.
Ah, just a NSA-spying is the cure for terrorism.
There is more afoot.
In Pennsylvania (and Georgia and some other states), farmers can no longer choose what crops to plants (GMO or not-GMO). Citizens in any community cannot vote to exclude GMO-crops from their counties or state. Monsanto pushed through a law in each place setting up a single agricultural committee to make those decisions.
In Pennsylvania, a dairy farmer was arrested for selling raw milk to a neighbor who wanted raw milk. The feds went onto his property and stole (a more accurate word than confiscate) thousands of dollars worth of his equipment and he faces going to prison.
In Pennsylvania, Amish are selling not only their herds to escape NAIS but many have already sold their farms altogether because farming under the corporate controlled USDA has neared impossible now for family farmers of all kinds.
A small example. An organic dairy farmer must not only show that they don't do anything that lies outside of organic standards (which the FDA has been subtly chipping away at since its last attempt under the Clintons to include GMO-food, cloned animals, irradiated food and sewage sludge as fertilizer), but they must create facilities that are unnecessary (building requirements such as cement floors in barns) and absurd (a bathroom for the FDA inspector) and too expensive for many legitimately organic dairy farmers to accomplish. The bar is constantly being raised on those requirements, and the bar is constantly being lowered on the actual standards, wrecking organic farmers and inch by inch bringing corporate dairy practices which are not organic closer to being able to call themselves that.
The labeling issue being pushed by Monsanto is not just not to label all GMO-food (including milk first of all) and all cloned animals, but it is TO label is "grassfed" animals who only "sometimes" eat grass, or as "naturally raised" animals who are cloned and never step outside of a factory environment onto grass and into the sun a single day in their lives.
Farmers and all of us are living in fun house of lies and double lies. Farmers who label their milk as rBGH-free are sued by Monsanto for being ... misleading. For "by implication" suggesting rBGH is bad for milk. And without such "proof," they are threatened for defining their milk truthfully. Meanwhile, the milk, which a 2007 citizens' petition to the FDA links to a 7-fold increased risk of breast cancer, www.sustdev.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2127&Itemid=35
is sold without labels and the FDA, with a Monsanto firm helping, included in a massive overhaul of the FDA, a section to make citizens petitions more difficult to present.
http://www.fdalawblog.net/...
The link is from a Monsanto law firm which makes it more interesting than usual in that one can see the mental and legal gymnastics at work to stop citizens from having a say in their own government and how cleverly that is approached with homilies and reverse discrimination angles, as the citizen doing doing something wrong, and it is this insanity that we are all caught in, while trusted figures actually participate
Teddy Kennedy, for instance, is a large part of the reshaping of the FDA which is going to eliminate vitamin companies. Why? Too dangerous. Need regulating. Need standards so high few will be able to exist. Who will benefit? Not anyone not beginning to realize that alternative medicine is a serious and valuable and less expensive and gentler and ancient in some cases, means of treating illnesses successfully. That entire competition to traditional medicine, to drug companies with Monsanto-run FDA's approving its products (aspartame which is associated with brain tumors, epilepsy, diabetes, Alzheimers .... ) which keeping a natural product (a sweetener like stevia, with 900+ studies to show it had no association whatever with harm) out of reach.
I mention the FDA because liberals don't know about that either though many are moving increasingly in this direction for their families. I mention the FDA because the Clintons appointed Monsanto to it and that is when rBGH began, when no labeling began, when threatening farmers began, when the craziness of including
Against this insanity, family farmers are going under - Monsanto using one of the largest, most ethically-challenged (that is being kind) PR firms in the world to deal with them, their honest means of reaching customers silenced or made illegal, their truth about decent practices falsely mimicked by those with horrendous practices, their animals which are what allow them OR ANY OF US to be fully self-sufficient, are immensely threatened, up against competition so lopsided and slippery that "unfair" and "competition" don't do it it justice.
Given what is happening to farmers, I do not believe it is exaggerated to use this quote:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini
MONSANTO CONNECTIONS IN THIS CAMPAIGN:
OBAMA: His campaign is run by David Plouffe and David Axelrod, part of AKP Message & Media, political consultants. www.akpmedia.com/ourHistory/index.html
(In December of 2007, Obama's campaign took on Moses Mercado. Previously, Mercado worked with Howard Dean at the DNC, for Richard Gephardt for six years, and before that for a Texas congressman. He has one year of experience with Ogilvy, a PR firm, for Monsanto, BBC, BP, Coca-Cola ...) http://www.sourcewatch.org/...
MCCAIN: His campaign is run by his senior advisor, DC Lobbyist Charlie Black. Charlie Black's firm, BKSH, is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, one of the largest PR firms in the world and a major PR firm for Monsanto, Blackwater, Exxon ....
http://rawstory.com/...
CLINTON: Her campaign is run by her long term advisor, now campaign strategist, Mark Penn, who is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller - Burson-Marsteller, one of the largest PR firms in the world and a major PR firm for Monsanto, Blackwater, Exxon ... http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/...
Clinton and McCain's campaigns are BOTH run by men working for Burson-Marsteller, which does major work for Monsanto.
BURSON-MARSTELLER: Burson-Marsteller (B-M), one of the largest PR agencies in the world, is one of the most reviled by those concerned with the environment and progressive issues for doing such things as helping its industry clients escape environmental legislation, or "sprucing up the image of some of the most repressive governments on Earth. B-M brings to bear state of the art techniques in manipulating the mass media, legislators and public opinion." http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/...
Of particular interest for this campaign, given Clinton's history in the White when rBGH was introduced, and that rBGh is still a very hot issue in Pennsylvania today, is that "FDA scientist, Dr Richard Burroughs concluded from analysing test data that Monsanto was manipulating the figures. In 1989 he was sacked after complaining to Congress that his superiors were suppressing his accusations. ... To deal with the expected controversy Monsanto assembled an army of PR companies to aid them of which [BURSON-MARSTELLER] was one." It was caught infiltrating an anti-rBGH group and posing to a writer as a journalist for ABC, attempting to get access to his material. http://www.corporatewatch.org/...
Others may do a search on Nader, McKinney and Ron Paul.
The Ride For Farmers has said that it
encourages media to look carefully at EVERY candidate and hold them all accountable for their Monsanto connections.
While we have been looking elsewhere, intellectual property law (ruled valid by Clarence Thomas, previous Monsanto employee who also arrived on the court to rule that GMOs were no different than normal) has turned farmers into renters of seeds and allowed Monsanto to actually claim to own biology itself. So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that Monsanto and the USDA appear to be making an astounding end run around the most fundamental of constitutional laws - property rights.
What is surprising is how utterly blind the left has been to the suffering of those need-a-gun-to-defend-my-property right wing folks who are terrified of stem cell research, deplore abortion as tampering with life, and who keep screaming alone that they want no more government.
Perhaps, the left needs to take a moment and realize those people are brothers and are going through the most significant change in human agriculture since its beginning, as corporations take control of ownership of food itself (animals next), and are both displacing biodiversity at horrifying clip, but altering and contaminating it as well.
Farmers are the stewards of our earth and they are being crushed - and in India, killing themselves at the rate of one every 30 minutes. And a third of all bee colonies are gone.
Monsanto - industrial agriculture on steroids and genetically engineered and legally wild - is taking control and it's time - RIGHT NOW IN PENNSYLVANIA - that the left and environmental people and food people and the alternative health people - formed an alliance with rightly frightened and rightly angry and rightly "screaming about the constitution" conservatives.
The Ride for Farmers invites everyone to go to www.rideforfarmers.org and call as ask how you can help, because the net is tightening on us all. We have this primary - because of the Clintons horrifying history with Monsanto - to make Monsanto a household word, to make it clear we about to lose farmers and farm land and all control over our food and access to alternative health care, and via this primary to get through to the American people.