Sharks and the Food Safety Scam

By Ben Michaelson

The sharks are the corporations.  The blood in the water is from small farms.  The sharks are swarming now, seeking an absolute end of farming in the US, a plan of theirs with the USDA since 1972.

They were open about it then, with their intent published by U.S. House of Representatives:  “The Young Executives Plan to Liquidate Farmers: Product of an Official Committee Chaired by the Under Secretary of Agriculture.” Congressional Record. June 21, 1972, p. H5907.

Today, they disguise it under “food safety.”  Get rid of local farms that are producing safe food to have safe food.  Welcome to free trade agreements that aren’t.  Welcome to peace prizes for starting more wars.

The corporations have used the Democrats to push through a billion dollar agency for a health threat that is miniscule.  When will people see through the scam?  The CDC citing 5000 deaths each year from food born illness was the urgent justification for a massive (pharmaceutical and agribusiness-driven) bill, dangerous to farmers and to US sovereignty over its own food (and food supplements).  Now the figure being mentioned is 3000.  It doesn’t even make it onto most list of health threats.  But with the bill now law, the FDA is already using armed FBI attacks against small farms that have safe food and is doing nothing whatever about corporate operations that producing contaminated food in the millions of pounds,

While Occupy Wall Street or Boston or LA or DC groups are protesting nationwide what the corporations are stealing, they have not noticed that they are stealing away farms and food (survival itself), based on a phony fear tactic.  Aspirin and Tylenol are a many times greater threat.  Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) cause more than 16,000 deaths a year but are protected by the FDA.  The multinational corporations even have ads on TV offering free samples and encouraging people to give them away to friends.  Properly prescribed prescription drugs are the greatest killer in the US.  Why is there not a massive new agency with politic state powers to stop the single leading cause of death in the US, outpacing all diseases?  Why is media not pointing out this absurd discrepancy between immense power and expense for something that presents virtually no threat (and could present even less if people ate food directly from clean local farms)?

The FDA is tasked with protecting us from deadly drugs but the agency is funded by Pharma and refuses to pull drugs off the market that are already proven to kill, despite Congressional hearings into the heart attacks and deaths.  Media is silent about the well over 100,000 deaths a year from pharmaceutical industry drugs and its own complicity in taking advertising dollars, promoting the drugs, and promoting the fear needed for selling them.  The media doesn’t report that food safety is being used here and around the world to destroy farmers and food producers, while the FDA goes after food born illness, one of the least significant causes of death in the US.  The media doesn’t report that Obama put a Monsanto executive in as Czar over food safety – the same man who designed the bill on behalf of global corporate interests – and he is literally attacking innocent people doing the most important jobs in the country, producing food.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Monsanto is using SWAT team raids against farmers and food coops for being an impediment to absolute monopoly over all US food, and through food, over control of the US.  For existing.

And the big meat packers, the ostensible target of the new food safety law because of its danger to the public?  Take it from an “E-coli terrorist,” that the wrong folks are being slammed and losing their businesses, leaving the filthy packers with more power than ever.

Where is the agency and 1000s of inspectors for those pharmaceutical industry products?

Agribusiness and the drug companies (there is no difference at this point) have used “risk” to scare the public right into corporate traps where there is real danger, freedom and life and death danger.  To take in the extent of the absurdity of all this, read about sharks and peanuts.  We are not spending tax money on real risks at all but government is using it to clobber whomever the corporations choose, and they are clobbering those who protect our food and our health.

The sharks’ favorite game is disease because they can manufacture it or pump out media scare stories about it whenever they want.  Through it, they make sure that things are risk-less get it in the neck, and move their endless teeth closer to chomping down on everything.