One of the things that is especially troubling about the experience of the Smiths is that it isn’t the exception. Rather, it fits into a broader pattern of government abusiveness and sneakiness on the agriculture/food front.
I make these observations from the perspective of having spent a fair amount of time over the last few weeks investigating the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), in connection with an article I helped write in The Nation. The difficulties being encountered on the raw milk front, I am convinced, are part and parcel of the NAIS battle.
Anyone who seeks to operate outside the agribusiness factory system is a threat to the big plan now being implemented. In investigating NAIS, I was struck by how, time and again, state and federal bureaucrats have refused to take no for an answer.
Huge numbers of farmers and consumers are dead set against this program, yet the bureaucrats refuse to back off. In fact, no matter how vehement the opposition, or how badly they seem to be beaten off, they continue to come back, sometimes in other guises. In Texas, they seemed to be beaten back, and suddenly, NAIS is being implemented via a press release. In liberal Massachusetts, farmer data is being inputted into U.S. Department of Agriculture databases—unless farmers take the initiative to opt out. Just like California sneaks through legislation to attack raw milk producers.
The examples go on and on. This for a program billed by the USDA as “voluntary.” (To sbarackman’s comment on my previous post that, “Under NAIS when you sign up you no longer have full title to your property,” I don’t believe that is currently the case; but that fact that many people believe it to be true indicates how high the fear factor is.)
I take two messages:
–The bureaucrats are running things. Congress hasn’t voted, and in states where reps have voted, they’ve tended to vote against NAIS. Arizona enacted legislation against making it mandatory. In Missouri, voters replaced a senator over NAIS. But it’s still not been debated in the U.S. Congress, nor in most state legislatures. I don’t know if the legislators are abdicating because they don’t want to be identified with taking a stand on this controversial subject, or the bureaucrats have just taken control.
–Most depressing, the never-ending pressure to spread NAIS is just more evidence of how monied interests have taken control, and are consolidating with a vengeance. Their attitude isn’t unlike guerrillas fighting in an insurgency—we will fight as long as necessary to achieve our goals. In the U.S., the fighters are hired hands, lobbyists, whose main goal is financial rather than political, and whose main resource is endless cash rather than fighters.
Money makes these people highly motivated—the big difference from insurgents is that the hired hands are fighting for power and wealth rather than their lives. So they can fight for as long as it takes because they have comfortable weekly paychecks coming in, while the opposition has to fight back on the fly—during free time away from tending the farm, or other job. While the opposition is tending the farm or job, the pro-NAIS forces are scheming to come up with still other ways to accomplish their goals. It’s a depressing way to fight a war.
It’s terrifying as well. The same band of people who are forcing America into NAIS also control countless other areas of our lives. The main hope I see in cases like that of the Smiths and the two California raw milk dairies, together with the many anti-NAIS groups, is that farmers and their supporters are finally learning to organize in meaningful opposition. Will this organizing be strong enough, and in enough time? If it truly is just the start of the opposition struggle, and can build up additional momentum, and has enough patience and money, maybe so. The outcome remains very much in doubt.
Just the thought of that is so revolting.
Has there been a catastrophic animal disease event in America? If there has, I am not aware of it.I must have gone to the wrong schools, I thought this country WAS built by
"independent people" who ran this country? (or a least it used to be) Though I have seen the quiet coup dtat by the corporations. What is that saying about not learning history, it will only repeat itself? Or something like that. The many reasons for the Tea Party in the harbor,(which was today in history) appear to be resurfacing. Just exchange tea/taxation/NAIS with small farms & animals/produce and corporations with England. Wasn’t that a King George back then? . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
"In Canada, Aqua Bounty Farms has patented the first transgenic salmon, which grows to adult dimensions in half the time it takes conventional salmon. Regulators are considering whether to approve the salmon for sale."
Transgenic? Is that another way to say "genetically modified"? If it makes the fish grow twice as fast, what will it do to those who eat it?
How is anyone supposed to tag a chicken? I am against NAIS.
Some say that there is nothing we can do to stop NAIS and have either bailed emotionally or are getting rid of their animals.
In USDA’s year long mantra of "it’s voluntary with a capital V" they have used that time to finish connecting their dots.
Second, a sad but necessary addendum to Walter Jeffries’s comments about Vermont’s rejection of NAIS premises ID in 2006. Unfortunately, in the spring of 2007, the VT agriculture department saw fit to adopt new and very stringent regulations for a scrapie program for sheep and goats. (Scrapie is a very inconsequential and rare disease of sheep — the program is merely one example of how the USDA is expanding its disease programs to encompass really minor diseases, all to exert more control over small farmers.) The VT ag dept adopted the rules because it was being threatened with "noncompliant" status by the USDA. The VT ag dept threatened several larger VT sheep producers, saying that they would no longer be allowed to ship their sheep to their normal slaughterhouse in Massachusetts if the USDA declared VT "noncompliant." In actuality, the federal scrapie rules are not materially different for compliant vs. noncompliant states as to shipping animals to another state for slaughter. But the VT sheep producers nonetheless were scared into submission, and even took steps to prevent the general VT livestock community from knowing about the pending rules. So VT farmers, who fought so hard against NAIS in 2006, effectively were deprived of any chance to oppose the VT scrapie rules.
Oh, and what exactly does the VT (and other states’) recent adoption of stricter, USDA-imposed, scrapie rules have to do with NAIS? As stated by the New York USDA/APHIS Area Veterinarian-in-Charge in Jan. 2007, "the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) . . . is now enforced in sheep and goats as part of the Scrapie Eradication Program."
On side effects of the chips (as per Hastur), they ARE already finding bad side effects in animals. Some dogs are getting cancer due to chips they have. A recent Dutch site, shows the incredible damage chips are doing to horses, including constant pain, unable to turn their head to the side the chip is implanted in, large growths in the neck and in at least one case, death.
I don’t know if we can beat them head on. The federal bureaucracy has too much momentum. It will probably take a blind end run that undermines their power base.
My guess is that Sylvia would agree that we are now suffering from catastrophic levels of many diseases resultant of unnatural, industrialized food production methods. You might say that the underlying disease is actually in our food production system. And agribusiness and compliant government bureaucracies not only keep the whole rotten thing alive, they are making it grow.
Leading us to note another a catastrophic change: The alarming growth in strength and power of government bureaucracies. Agencies and Departments and Bureaus, working on the fringes of the law and wielding powers that police and judges dont have, control more and more our lives, as the Smiths and many others can attest.
The saddest part of the mess is the quiet compliance of most Americans with a system bent on gradually replacing rights with rules. (Those Americans include, not incidentally, the growing armies of agency minions carrying out the dirty jobs of rule-writing and enforcement.) We have fallen for one of the oldest and most pernicious lies of all time: That all this control is necessary and is, really, for our own good. If we dont wake up well soon all die from excessive goodness.
The thing is that none of these bureacracies can function unless they convince us that theres something terrible out there that we need protection from. We are to be terrified of germs, of famine, of our neighbors, of bad outcomes of any sort. By God, now were to be terrified of terror itself.
This country is in desperate need of a bottom-up retooling.
. In the NAIS document those who own livestock are called stakeholder and the land upon which the livestock presides is premises. Contracts use certain words for a reason. Why not call us owners of the animals or private property owners? The lectric law library states that the word premises signifies a formal part of a deed,and is made to designate an estate; to designate is to name or entitle. Therefore a premises has no protection under the United States constitution and has no exclusive rights of the owner tied to it. Stakeholder (the term the USDA is using to identify us) refers to a third party who temporarily holds money or property while its owner is still being determined.
By signing up for NAIS, title to property rights are clouded, basically making the owner little more than a sharecropper. That could give the USDA freedom to bypass the 4th amendment and swoop in at any time without a warrant to depopulate your place.
When Britain had her hoof and mouth outbreak, it resulted in the catastrophe of a mass slaughter in one of the centers of diversity for domestic animals. Why? Becuase, in an effort to market their meat as "added value" their ag system had voluntarily refused to vaccinate. Once there was an outbreak, the sensible thing to do would have been giving up the non-vaccination label, a piece of empty marketing to begin with. Instead, they killed thousands of animals, and if there is another outbreak, they will probably do the same again. The last thing we need is for government beurocrats to know where all the animals are so that they can pull off another piece of idiocy on that scale, or the scale of the bird slaughters that are happening around the bird flu hysteria.
Great Plato quote, by the way.