And Now For Something Completely Political

Sunny, 80

It's a Saturday morning (for me), the sun is shining, the birds are singing. The garden and wild berry harvest are in full swing. We finally did get the much-needed rain over the last few days, so the lawn needs mowing again. Everything seems to be as it should be.

But there are unseen forces at work behind the scenes and beneath the radar that will surely have very serious long-term implications for every one of us in this country and even on this planet. I remember back in the late 60's and 70's, when I was a kid, the birth of the ecology movement. I remember public service commercials meant to wake citizens up to the shameful practice of throwing garbage out along roadsides or in other inappropriate areas. There was a commercial with a Native American man in full ceremonial dress (I guess so we could tell he was an Indian), with a tear streaming down his cheek at the wanton destruction of his precious Mother Nature. I remember there was a movement amongst the people sporting t-shirts and flying flags with the green 'e' symbol on them, meant to indicate support for a green revolution.

Fast forward 40 years. Yes, we've made some progress in some areas. Our understanding and application of organic agricultural practices has grown considerably. We now have words such as sustainability, free-range and permaculture in our lexicon. But at the same time, dark, evil forces have turned out nation into a Corporacracy. (Corporacracy, btw, is the term I use for a government by the corporations, for the corporations. We certainly are there, folks.) The Corporacracy has been growing like a giant blob monster in a b movie laboratory, feeding itself on the knowledge that people will make decisions based on emotion and not on fact. The monster has learned to become our master by manipulating our emotions via the advertising industry (one of it's most vital corporate tentacles) and the media spin industry. It has quietly and cleverly positioned it's minions inside political and legal processes, and inside government itself. In so doing, it has ensured for itself a smooth road to control of our food, our land, our bodies, and next, even our water.

This monster does have a name and a face. Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, Siemens, Nestle.... it's actually (and tellingly) a rather short list. Taking advantage of loopholes in anti-trust laws and armies of it's own lawyers, these few companies went on a feeding frenzy in the 90's, gobbling up smaller companies that supplied essential goods to local communities and the world. Local packing plants, slaughterhouses, farms, feed stores, grain mills, auction barns, seed companies, chemical plants, food processors and suppliers, grocery stores and pharmacies, all bought up and rapidly shut down in the process of eliminating any possibility of competition (a principle on which our free market was founded, remember?) and diversity. Untold numbers of self-sustaining small towns across rural America have become ghost towns. No more jobs, no more customers, no more stores.

At the same time, the corporate megaliths have been planting their representatives in very key and crucial positions to ensure their own future health and, obviously, profit.

We had hope (yes, we did) with the election of Obama that things would finally be turned back toward justice and policies and decisions that would benefit the public and not the corporations. But despite a very loud and organized plea from citizens and small farmers across our country to appoint as the new Secretary of Agriculture someone who was not in the back pocket of Big Agribiz, someone who would guide us toward a more healthful and sustainable method of growing and harvesting our food, he appointed Iowa's former Governor Vilsack, a guy who is Big Corn, and who believes the Ethanol Myth. And now, this. Appointing a Monsanto Man to head the Food and Drug Administration. In most countries, this would cause civil unrest, but here we are too lulled by the circuses of media that tell us this is a good idea.

Apparently President Obama forgot that the only way we can avert total ecological, economic, and cultural disaster is to break the chains the monster has slipped around us all. It will take representatives in Washington who are actually willing to listen to the people instead of their corporate sponsors, and vote accordingly. Thus far, that has been impossible. The stranglehold this monster has on us is so strong that not only will our elected politicians not stand up against them, but if anyone does, most Americans believe the monsters' media campaigns, and actually fight against their own best interests, attacking any calls for reform and calling them "radical", "nutty", or (gasp!) "liberal".

If we continue at this pace, our entire food supply will be GMO, whether we want it to be or not, our small farms will be taxed and and regulated out of business (this could literally mean no more roadside stands for you all to buy fresh, local veggies, for instance), big business will succeed in literally choking off free water supplies to people and farms , food you buy in the stores will not have to carry labels informing you that they may contain chemicals you wish to avoid, every animal on even the smallest homestead will have to be implanted with a radio frequency chip, our soils, air, water, fish and wildlife will continue to be contaminated with hormones, pcb's and other chemicals with no government watchdogs to control or stop it.

As we were all told that we were standing on an economic precipice last Fall, we understood that we had to allow for drastic action in order to avoid falling over that cliff as a society, which would be a very bad thing. We are at an even higher precipice right now, that of being on the tipping point of the point of no return for our environment and the very means by which we obtain our food, and thus our future health and safety.

If the current economic disaster has been an eye-opener into how inter-connected and centralized our financial system is regarding who the powerful elite are and how much of our economic system they actually control, wait until you figure out who is in charge of our food, fiber, soils, seeds, and drugs.

If we don't wake up NOW and demand the turnabout of past good ol' boy practices and the investigation into facts surrounding these abominable for-profit companies stopping short of absolutely NOTHING to capture and control our food, water, and soil, we are going to experience a crisis far worse than something caused (and solved) by simple, silly money. There is no Central Farm to simply crank out more food or water when worldwide shortages hit. And like the greedy bankers selling off bad loans and investments that they knew would fail, causing our arrival at the monetary and credit cliff, these guys are busily manipulating markets and rules and governments in order to squeeze every penny of profit they can as fast as they can, never mind the crash course we are all headed on.