Farm Wars
Sunday, July 5, 2009

HR 2749 is a strange bill in many ways.  While the other “food safety” bills have been around since winter, allowing for much public discussion on the internet, HR 2749 has only suddenly appeared.  It is a mutant conglomeration of the worst of the other bills, with the addition of one very original part – martial law.

When it was a draft, it was Waxman’s bill.  But once given a number, it became Dingel’s who already had a “food safety” bill, HR 759.  So Waxman got none and Dingel got two.  (Was this because Waxman, being Jewish, was a hideous choice to introduce a bill with Codex in it – designed by the Nazi pharmaceutical companies that funded Hitler, provided the gas for the gas chambers, experimented on prisoners with vaccines – and is expected to kill millions?)

* HR 2749 would give FDA the power to order a quarantine of a geographic area, including “prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area.”

[This - "that has been used to transport or hold such food" - would mean all cars that have ever brought groceries home or any pickup someone has eaten take-out in, so this means ALL TRANSPORTATION can be shut down under this.  This is using food as a cover for martial law.]

Under this provision, farmers markets and local food sources could be shut down, even if they are not the source of the contamination.  The agency can halt all movement of all food in a geographic area.

[This is also a means of total control over the population under the cover of food, and at any time.] See this DailyKos entry.

The bill is unusual, too, because slow as it was to appear. The little bugger of bill has made up for it since.  It got a number on June 10, went to committee on June 17, passed instantly, and is headed for a vote on the floor of the House.

The first Patriot Act was passed using fear of terrorism. This Patriot Act is more coy, hiding under a cloak of “food safety” and but also using fear – fear of food contamination.  Evidently, Americans are supposed to be so frightened by the slightest possibility of a terrorist or of E-coli, they would trade away all their precious, hard fought freedoms for the promise of safety.  Or at least, that is what the trade-off has become.  “Terrorism” and “contamination” are great bugaboos used to open doors to an end to the US Constitution.  That is exactly what we are left with after those who wrote HR 2749 are done.

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Who did write these bills?  It seems Monsanto had not only a hand, but a “defining” influence. http://farmwars.info/?p=594

This redefining of reality is what seems to be underlying all the loss of freedom.  Normal and free are disappearing into the maw of corporate definitions of reality. See this Yup Farming piece.

So, we begin with contaminated food from filthy corporate processors and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  And what do we end up with after that reality is ground up by corporate legal hands?  Changes in the definition of risk so that natural things are treated as dangerous and toxic things are untouched, such that:

• Healthy, normal farms are taken over by government as though they were run by criminals and contaminated corporate slaughterhouses are untouched;
• The necessary freedom of individuals to live and grow food and be left alone are somehow suddenly destroyed, though they were never the source of any food contamination issue; and such that
• The profit and control and power of corporations which were absolutely the source of the increasingly terrible food, is somehow suddenly vastly increased.

Thanks to corporate control over reality, our wanting to clean up corporate processors and feedlots and CAFOS and end up with farmers’ markets and local farms and organic food has become the industrialization and potential destruction of every healthy part of the food system and the triumph of the most contaminated and toxic part.  And in the non-bargain, we lost all freedoms and they took all control.  And “all” is not a hyperbole here, for one need only look at another provision of HR 2749 to feel how insane, how distant from all we ever wanted.

* HR 2749 would empower FDA to regulate how crops are raised and harvested.  It puts the federal government right on the farm, dictating to our farmers.

[What is missing in pointing out this astounding control, is that it opens the door to CODEX and WTO "good farming practices" will include the elimination of organic farming by eliminating manure, mandating GMO animal feed, imposing animal drugs, and ordering applications of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Farmers, thus, will be locked not only into the industrialization of once normal and organic farms but into the forced purchase of industry's products.  They will be slaves on the land, doing the work they are ordered to do - against their own best wisdom - and paying out to industry against their will.  There will be no way to be frugal, to grow one's own grain to feed the animals, to raise healthy animals without GMO grains or drugs, to work with nature at all.  Grassfed cattle and poultry and hogs will be finished.  So, it needs to be made clear where control will take us.  And weren't these the "rumors on the internet" that were dismissed but are clearly the case?]  See this DailyKos entry.

When we wanted not to get E-coli in processed meat, did we intend to put our farmers into corporate servitude?  Did we plan to have our own lives straight-jacketed by a million new controls over our own gardens, our own desire to grow food, our own plans to start small businesses, our own dreams to have a small piece of land and farm ourselves?  Who has the audacity to take our needs and grotesquely bastardize them in these ways, while giving the destruction and totalitarian control the sham name of “food safety”?

We wanted good food.  We never wanted to trap our farmers into an industrial prison on their own land, afraid moment to moment of not fulfilling some monstrous set of instructions that never end – rules the farmers loathe, rules that have not only nothing to do with real farming but which are antithetical to it.  Why have we ended up with HR 2749, an intense corporate nightmare around the most central and necessary aspects of a free country and of free human beings – farming and food?

American farming needs to be relieved of the burdens it has been under, not finished off by its corporate competition.  It needs freedom to flourish again.  Obviously – and Congress people who would think to vote for such absurdities, take note – the imposition of surveillance, monitoring, warrantless entry, taking of all records, licensing, fees, Codex and NAIS, in addition to massive penalties and prison terms (all without judicial review over even appropriateness and validity), are not how one thanks American farmers for holding together the only working part of our food system.  See Literal Enslavement by Linn Cohen-Cole.

HR 2749 is the most vicious and insane bill one could imagine.  Who treats our farmers in this way?  Who believes that such police measures can provide for the rebirth of farming and the return of healthy food?  Who wrote this bill that trashes the freedom of all our lives?  HR 2749 was not what we ordered and it should be sent back the bowels of hell it came from.

HR 2749 is both insane and cruel.  And the deceptiveness of hiding a Patriot Act in it and the brutal rush to slip it through Congress are ANTI-democratic.

Go here to tell Congress, “No.” http://www.ftcldf.org/petitions/pnum993.php

Full story here.

HARRISBURG - Invasion of privacy is an issue that really gets under State Rep. Babette Josephs’ skin.

That’s why the Philadelphia Democrat introduced a bill, passed unanimously last week by the House, that would ban the forced implantation of computer chips in humans.

Conjuring Orwellian images, Josephs worries the identification devices - the size of a grain of rice - could lead to a real-life Big Brother nightmare.

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“I’m doing, I think, what the legislature does too little of,” she said. “This is a problem on the horizon, and I want to address it before it becomes a societal disgrace.”

Though the technology hasn’t debuted in Pennsylvania, VeriChip, a company in Florida, received federal Food and Drug Administration clearance in 2004 to market the implanted microchips, which were tested on 200 Alzheimer’s patients.

Injected into the triceps, the chips have unique 16-digit codes and GPS capabilities that allow nursing homes to find wandering patients.

Full story here.

Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone has provoked outrage by reportedly praising Adolf Hitler’s ability “to get things done”.

In an outspoken newspaper interview, the 78-year-old billionaire expressed a preference for “strong leaders” like former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Max Mosley, the outgoing head of Formula One’s governing body.

He added: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done.

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“In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it . . . so either way he wasn’t a dictator.”

Mr Ecclestone said democracy “hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries, including this one”.

Full story here.

LAST SUMMER, the National Rifle Association ran adverts claiming that Barack Obama would “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns” if elected. The campaign didn’t do much for John McCain, but in every other respect it has been wildly successful: NRA membership is up 30% and gun control has disappeared from the administration’s list of priorities.

Americans have gone on an extraordinary gun-buying spree. The best available measure of over-the-counter sales is the number of requests for background checks filed with the FBI. From November to February, there were 5.5 million, up almost a third, year on year. Although May’s figures were the weakest since the boom began, gun shops were still selling 15% more weapons than in 2008.

Richard Feldman, a former regional director of the NRA, says the organisation thrives when the right to bear arms is under threat. When there is no such danger, it has to be invented. “You could almost sense the NRA fundraisers licking their chops because for the first time in eight years they had an identifiable bogeyman,” he says. “When people are fearful about losing something that’s the time you can separate them most easily from their money.”

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The fact is, President Obama is nowhere near being “the most anti-gun president in American history”. He wants to close a loophole allowing sales without background checks at gun shows, tighter registration of handguns and a national law against carrying concealed weapons. But on whether the second amendment guarantees the individual right to pack a pistol, he supports the conservative position laid down by the Supreme Court last June, which is that a federal handgun ban would be unconstitutional.

The gun lobby expects him to show his true colours soon. “Gun owners are politically savvy people and they realise that the new administration poses risks to their second amendment rights,” says NRA spokeswoman Vicky Cieplak.

Erich Pratt, the communications director of Gun Owners of America, agrees: “The fear is that once he’s done with the economy, he’ll set his sights on other parts of his agenda.”

Full story here.

Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli warplanes flying over the kingdom in any raid on Iran’s nuclear sites, The Sunday Times said in a report denied by Israel.

Citing diplomatic sources, it said the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service had assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Saudi Arabia has tacitly agreed to the use of its airspace.

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Netanyahu’s office denied the report, however, calling it “fundamentally wrong and baseless”.

The Sunday Times said Mossad director Meir Dagan had held secret talks with Saudi officials to discuss the possibility.

Full story here.

North Korea on Sunday hailed the prowess of its military after it test-fired a salvo of seven ballistic missiles in a show of strength that earned international criticism and talk of further isolation.

In a commentary, the ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun praised Pyongyang’s “army-first policy” which gave North Korea the capacity to hit enemies with what it called a “merciless” strike.

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“Our defence industry… laid a firm foundation to produce any kind of (weapons) needed for modern warfare freely,” the newspaper said.

The missiles, which the North are banned from firing under United Nations resolutions, were launched into the Sea of Japan (East Sea) Saturday in an act of defiance apparently timed for the US Independence Day holiday.

Full story here.

Former US lawmaker Cynthia McKinney, who is in an Israeli jail for trying to take humanitarian aid to Gaza, says the White House has done nothing to secure her release.

Speaking to Press TV from inside the Israeli jail, she said US taxpayers paid for Israel’s 22-day war on the Gaza Strip.

“Operation Cast Lead was made possible by the US taxpayers’ gift to the Israeli war machine in the form of F16s, helicopters gunship, white phosphorous, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and anything that kills,” she told Press TV from inside the Israeli jail on Saturday.

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McKinney has been in Israeli custody since Tuesday when she and 20 other humanitarian activists were arrested by the Israeli Navy while trying to take humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip.

She also criticized US President Barack Obama and his special envoy for their policies in the region, saying she was seeking to do what “neither President Obama nor his special envoy has done and that is to visit Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead.”

McKinney along with her group refused to sign a document admitting they violated Israel’s blockade soon after they were taken to custody.

Full story here.

Leif Svalgaard has been saying for sometime now that Solar Cycle 24 seems to be getting underway. Seeing sunspot group 1024 today, I’m tending to agree.

Click for larger image

The magnetic polarity (seen on the SOHO magnetogram)  of the spot group combined with the middle latitude indicates it is a cycle 24 spot.

From Spaceweather.com

The most active sunspot of the year so far is emerging in the sun’s southern hemisphere: movie. Sunspot 1024 has at least a dozen individual dark cores and it is crackling with B-class solar flares. This morning, amateur astronomer David Tyler caught one of the flares in action from his backyard solar observatory in England:

The magnetic polarity of sunspot 1024 identifies it as a member of new Solar Cycle 24. Its rapid emergence on July 3rd and 4th continues the recent (few-month) trend of intensifying new-cycle activity. This sunspot is the best offering yet from the young solar cycle.

I agree. This one looks like a “normal” sunspot. The question now is: how long will it last? Many promising cycle 24 sunspots have fizzed just as quickly as they arrived. Cycle 24 has not yet shown any indications of spot stamina.

In other news, the SOHO satellite has developed a problem with its pointing motor for the high gain antenna.

This is a serious concern, and data outages are already happening due to limited pointing ability.  There is a backup spacecraft for SOHO in the pipeline, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, set for a November 2009 launch date. It has recently been shipped to Cape Canaveral. Lets hope the didn’t use the US postal service or DHL.

In other solar satellite news…

Goodbye Ulysses (July 3, 2009)

Hi-res TIF image (4.6M)

Upon receipt of the last command from Earth, the transmitter on Ulysses switched off on June 30, 2009, bringing one of the most successful and longest missions in spaceflight and solar study history to an end. After 18.6 years in space and defying several earlier expectations of its demise, the joint ESA/NASA solar orbiter Ulysses achieved ‘end of mission’. The craft is nearly out of hydrazine fuel for its stabilizing thrusters, and there’s not enough money to continue the mission for another year. A final communication pass with a ground station enabled the final command to be issued to switch the satellite’s radio communications into ‘monitor only’ mode. No further contact with Ulysses is planned.

Ulysses is the first spacecraft to survey the environment in space over the poles of the Sun in the four dimensions of space and time. Among many other ground-breaking results, the hugely successful mission showed that the Sun’s magnetic field is carried into the solar system in a more complicated manner than previously believed. Particles expelled by the Sun from low latitudes can climb up to high latitudes and vice versa, even unexpectedly finding their way down to planets. Regions of the Sun not previously considered as possible sources of hazardous particles for astronauts and satellites must now be carefully monitored. “Ulysses has taught us far more than we ever expected about the Sun and the way it interacts with the space surrounding it,” said Richard Marsden, ESA’s Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager.

So farewell, and congratulations on a job exceedingly well done.

The New York Stock Exchange quietly announced last week that it would end its practice of requiring companies to report all their program trading — a move that helps shield large investment banks, particularly Goldman Sachs, from public scrutiny.

The new rule means the public will no longer be able to tell if large investment banks are manipulating the stock market for their own gain, says Matt Taibbi, the journalist whose Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs’ role in asset bubbles over the past century has rocked the financial world.

According to previous NYSE rules, any company that carried out program trading — essentially, large computer-automated trades worth more than $1 million — had to report the trades to the NYSE, which then made the information publicly available.

But, under new regulations (PDF) published last week, that requirement has been removed.

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“The NYSE announced that it will no longer be releasing its weekly program trading data,” Taibbi wrote in a blog posting. “This is quiet obviously a move designed to make it even more impossible to track what’s going on in the NYSE and shield, in particular, Goldman Sachs.”

Taibbi argues that the move is designed to protect investment banks from bloggers who are exposing the companies’ stock market manipulations. Goldman Sachs is singled out because the investment bank’s share of principal NYSE trading has gone from 27 percent at the end of 2008 to fully 50 percent of trades in recent months.

Blogs such as Zero Hedge have been using NYSE data to argue that Goldman Sachs now has an almost unfettered ability to control stock prices.

Responding last week to news of the NYSE’s rule change, Zero Hedge argued:

The NYSE has taken action to make sure that nobody will henceforth be able to keep track of the complete dominance that Goldman Sachs exerts over the New York Stock Exchange. This basically ends our weekly Program Trading updates disclosed every Thursday indicating that Goldman has singlehandedly captured all of NYSE’s program trading.

Taibbi’s article on Goldman Sachs’ long history of involvement in asset bubbles and crashes can be found here.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wants to engage President Obama in “negotiations” before international media, a semi-official Iranian news outlet reported on Saturday.

Speaking at a meeting of medical school deans, Ahmadinejad said Iran “will soon pursue a new round of diplomatic activity” amid a new position of strength for the Iranian government, the Iranian Student News Agency quotes him as saying.

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“I will go to the United Nations and will invite Obama to negotiations,” Ahmadinejad said, adding that such talks would be “in front of the international media, not a sit-down behind closed doors in order to talk about matters.”

The Obama administration has sought dialogue with Iran but also criticized the government for its handling of unrest after disputed presidential elections.

Full story here.