Food Insecurity on 9/11

Well, here we are, eight years to the day since the dawn of our Brave New World. I remember like it was yesterday - how the patriotic response was to go out and buy an SUV, buy new furniture, fill up your gas tank as often as possible, spend money. Didn't matter if you had the money or not, just spend. The credit explosion led to the credit collapse and now here we are in an "economic crisis." You'd think we'd have learned about thrift and responsibility.

But no. According to Fox, frugal Americans are now the enemy, directly responsible for our slow recovery. It's still our patriotic duty to spend money we don't have and become ever more dependent on the corporate system. Meanwhile Congress is working hard to render us even more dependent on a larger, industrialized agricultural system with the tragically misnamed Food Safety Enhancement Act. (Read more here.) Even though the USDA has agreed that centralized, long-distance industral production is one of the greatest threats to food safety, this bill (which has already passed the House and is before the Senate as I type), would further centralize production and drive small farms out of business.

Worse yet, it doesn't differentiate between commercial and home production, so this "Administrator" to be determined would have the right to enter your own home kitchen or garden with no judicial oversight and hold you to the same standards as industrial food exporters. If that's not unconstitutional I don't know what is, but Con-Agra and Monsanto can afford to keep it away from the Supreme Court for long enough to drive small independent farmers out of business.

It should go without saying that any "Food Safety Enhancement Act" supported by Con-Agra and Monsanto is not going to be about food safety at all.

We know already that the proper response to economic crisis is to tighten our belts, and the proper response to a food safety crisis such as the current one is to take responsibility for our own food production. But Corporate America is working hard to make money by convincing us all that black is white. It began the full-force push eight years ago today and now it's poisoning not only our food, but our Constitutional rights and our way of life.

Contact your Senators today and tell them to vote against HR2749. Our lives depend on it.