With Congress on Vacation, Let's Survey the Damage So Far

After a busy weekend it's time to assess where we are at the beginning of a new month.

Is Congress on vacation yet?

Some folks bemoan a "do-nothing" Congress; I pray that this becomes one. When Congress is on recess we "only" have to worry about the president and his executive branch commissars, which is plenty.

Before the House left on Friday it managed to pass HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act, an onerous collection of new regulations that will give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration more regulatory power over small farms. Written by and for corporate farming interests, in the wake of scandals involving tainted spinach, Mexican peppers and peanut butter (all, by the way, attributable to Big Ag, not small farmers), it will make it more difficult for America to produce her own food. It passed 283 to 142 after being fought in the Energy & Commerce committee. It now goes to the U.S. Senate.

Here is a brief description of its contents:

This bill proposes greater FDA regulatory powers over the national food supply and food providers, namely granting it the authority to regulate how crops are raised and harvested, to quarantine a geographic area, to make warrantless searches of business records, and to establish a national food tracing system. Concurrently, the bill would impose annual registration fees of $500 on all facilities holding, processing, or manufacturing food and require that such facilities also engaged in the transport or packing of food maintain pedigrees of the origin and previous distribution history of the food.

Note the "warrantless searches of business records" and the "quarantines" of entire geographic areas. Joe Stalin couldn't have written this better. Just another big step on the road to Corporatocracy and Socialism. Of course, it you don't care whether there is adequate food to eat, you may not be interested.

ObamaCare cleared the crucial committees in the House necessary to set up floor debate in September. Meanwhile congresspersons appear to be reluctant to schedule too many town hall meetings with constitutuents after the first round of such sessions took place this weekend. Arlen Specter and Kathleen Sebelius look rather sheepish in THIS VIDEO when riled Pennsylvanians take them to task.

Speaking of video, there is an embarrassing video of The One, first assuring the American Medical Association that he believed in private medical insurance, and then a two-year-old clip of his address before an SEIU forum where he explains that he wants a "single payer system" -- government run, of course -- "by the end of my first term." It continues with a 2003 address in which he admits he is a "proponent of a single-payer health care plan." He admits it may take some time to implement it, but that is his goal.

So the question becomes, Do you believe the Obama of 2003 and 2007, or the one who is trying to eliminate opposition for a massive bill that would include a public option?

Careful, comrade! You are being monitored.

More broken promises may be in the works. Two of the administration's key players told interviewers Sunday that a middle class tax increase is a possibility. Tax Cheat Timmy said that "we will do whatever is necessary" to fund ObamaCare. Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser to Obama, had similar remarks.

So much for that "No New Taxes" pledge for 95 percent of Americans, right?

Harry Reid declares that the U.S. Senate is the most productive since the FDR era -- that's Franklin D. Roosevelt for you young whippersnappers who attend government schools. If by productive you mean spent a record amount of cash we don't have, then I guess he's right.

All in all there is plenty of damage to assess even with Congress on the hustings, raising campaign cash every penny of which, I do believe, they are going to need to contend with the rising anger of Americans.

The Future of Food: A Numbers Game

I read today a blog post from Britain about a farm that is trying to wean itself from oil -- petroleum -- as a sign to other world farmers that it can be done, though not easily.

Which is nice, I suppose. Go for it. Humankind was farming long before Jed's bubbling crude came along.

But what really struck me in the entry was this statement:

A return to manual labour on farms seems unlikely. Most British farmers don't have the physical strength for one simple reason - their average age is 60. And there are only 150,000 left. As an industry, British farming has effectively been left to die.

If this is true, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, the lovers of eating in Great Britain had better hope that we are not at peak oil and that someone comes along to replace those 150,000 farmers. That is a very fragile thread upon which to dangle the food supply of a nation. Any major disruption in shipping (which could come with diminished oil supplies, war, or natural disaster) would leave people scrambling for sharply reduced inventories.

It gets me to thinking about the FFA creed I recited, lo those many years ago, that began, "I believe in the future of farming, with a faith born not of words but of deeds ..." Except that I left the farm as fast as I could right out of high school, as did most of my FFA-trained schoolmates. Words, not deeds. Now I believe that there needs to be a future for farming, and it had better not just be words.

Things may not be quite as dire here in America, but not by much.

Enjoy That Cheeseburger While You Still Can

It may not be much longer before the ad slogan "Beef, It's What's for Dinner!" will be obsolete.

"Beef: What We Used to Eat"

The "Cow Tax" (and the "Pig Tax") are coming. Don't let the reassuring words from Washington bureaucrats cause you to let your guard down. The Enviro-Nazis are chomping at the bit to have their people installed in Washington, D.C., and the "Cow Tax" is a logical extension of their proposed policies largely because your average small to medium farmer has little political clout these days.

The EPA has already suggested a $175 per cow tax "to combat global warming." How this combats global warming - and I don't even believe global warming is a problem - is a mystery other than it will discourage many ranchers from owning cows.

Oh, Dave! you complain. Farmers will just pass the $175 on to the consumer.

In theory you are correct. In reality, it doesn't work that way. Individual farmers are singularly ineffective at controlling the markets they are so dependent on. That's because middle-men (increasingly mega-corporations) control supply and demand, much of that through coordination with the federal government. Small and medium farmers are at the mercy of forces that often do not seem to correlate with the laws of supply and demand. And it's been this way ever since government began inserting itself into the farming business in the early 20th century.

So many farmers and ranchers will decide to raise only the number of animals underneath the cap, which means just enough for themselves and their families. Major beef and pig operations will be able to pass the tax along to the consumers. Bottom line: the rich get richer, the individual farmer gets the short end of the stick, and the consumer gets the shaft.

And the world goes right on warming. Or cooling. Depending on the whim of the Almighty.

Our nation's food supply becomes less diversified and thus less reliable while our economy continues its meltdown and the vast majority of Americans wouldn't know how to raise a green bean if their lives depended upon it. And someday soon lives may well depend upon it.

If the EPA takes the action it has published, it will take Congressional action to exempt cows and pigs from the carbon tax. Under Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid, how likely is that to happen?

God, Government & Small Farmers

One of Reagan's oft-used punch lines was that the scariest phrase an American could hear are the words: "Hello. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Government, he said, was not the solution; government was the problem.

I thought of this today as I read this article on the legal troubles of a family-run food cooperative in Ohio where, they say, a state agent of the agriculture department created an "entrapment" situation that led to a SWAT-team style raid on their farm near LaGrange. The gist of the dispute is that the family has run a food co-operative, which is legal as long as they do not charge money for distribution of their produce, but the state insists that they take out a retail food license. This would not only involve cost but would bring down various regulatory requirements that would put their little cooperative out of business.

The family has friends who are helping, including an outfit called The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.

Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund said the case was government "overreaching" and was designed more to intimidate and "frighten people into believing that they cannot provide food for themselves."

"This is an example where, once again, the government is trying to deny people their inalienable, fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice," said Gary Cox, general counsel for the FTCLDF. "The purpose of our complaint is to correct that wrong."

Apparently this is not the first such raid in the state. If the story reflects an accurate picture of what is taking place, it should concern every American who values individual freedoms. According to one related blog post:

"Agents began rifling through all of the family's possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family's personal stock of food for the coming year."

When did government begin taking such a personal interest in farmers? During the Great Depression, when government powers over agriculture were expanded to a vast extent, much of it on the excuse that it was protecting the health of consumers. But it was also an excuse to limit the production and distribution of various types of animal and vegetable products in order to centrally plan supply and demand. There was nothing too large or too small for the FDR Administration (and administrations to follow) to regulate and oversee.

Over the years the growth of corporate farming has only made it more difficult for the small farmers of America as an incestuous relationship has grown between CorpAg and Government. Billions of subsidies flow to corporations that control seed stocks and purchases of farmers' goods, and in return CorpAg sends millions of dollars of lobbying monies and political contributions back to the state capitals and Washington.

So let us review the concept of constitutional rights: God gives individuals the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. In the Constitution We the People assign some of these rights to the government to administer on our behalf (but not to be used against us). Since government actually has no rights of its own, no "extra" rights created by God given to it exclusively, We cannot lend to government anything we ourselves do not have. Thus, if I cannot tell my neighbor, Bob, where to sell his milk or corn, then it is a damn certain thing that the government has no business telling him how, or even if, he can do it.

This is how out of whack we have allowed our system to devolve.

It was the Almighty who to our proto-parents made a covenant, saying, "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth. ... See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the animals of the land, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the ground, I give all the green plants for food." (Gen. 1: 28-30)

To paraphrase, what God has given, let no man (or group of men) rend asunder. You may not care much about the issue now, but if in the future you are really, really hungry, and you wonder to what part of the globe all the small farmers in wandered off, you may wish that we had done a better job of protecting the God-given rights of American farmers.