Today, farmers have "the right" to farm but the government is attacking their products as "too dirty to sell." The USDA and its state agriculture departments are increasingly making raids against Mennonite and Amish raw milk dairy farmers and others who have been producing and selling their clean and healthy products for hundreds of years without complaint from customers. Click here. The government lab results which are used to close down farms don't match independent labs, and farmers fear the permits demanded of them set them up for attacks against them. Those behind the "food safety" attacks represent filthy food already making our population sick - food derived from disease-creating feed processes, from GMOs, from heavy pesticide use, from hormones, steroids and antibiotics. Just as the racists hid behind literacy as the criteria for democracy, but were at their core illiterate about democracy and anti-democratic, those discriminating against farmers ("farmists"?) hide behind "food safety" as a bar to selling food, but are at their core are "too profit-blinded to produce safe food" as well as profoundly anti-democratic. "Food filthy" is attacking those providing true food safety and the healthiest food in the country. These attacks are certainly criminal and corrupt and in Canada, a farmer is actually suing the government for criminal conspiracy. Click here. But what is important is to see through the criminality and corruption and the bogus use of "food safety" to the discrimination involved in generating a view of farmers as incapable of farming adequately - and by those farming dangerously. Just as with demanding literacy tests (which were also rigged), condemning farmers' food as unsafe it is a device meant to stop farmers from farming. And just as with voting rights, this is discrimination - an absolute denial of the civil rights of one group to the advantage of a more powerful one.
So, American farmers can farm, only their means have been removed and they are being being raided and their products seized and the public is told what they produce is dirty and dangerous. Many farmers refuse to get permits out of fear and out of their belief it is their Constitutional right to contract freely with neighbors without the interference of a corrupt government, one that is not only intentionally discriminatory but has become dangerous in its armed attacks against them. They want testing for pathogens but distrust the government labs now. And in California, "too dirty to sell" comes now in the form of a government law that intentionally sets the bar higher than normal fresh milk can meet. Click here. Farmers recognize the George Wallace/Bull Connor behind the demand for permits, and are standing up for their Constitutional rights against their own government, and using the language of Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement in doing so. Click here.
Monsanto triggers thoughts of the civil rights movement, because its KKK tactics work the same way, as does its infiltration of good ole boy networks within state and national governments. Vilsack pushing of anti-democratic laws that preempt a community's means to control what is planted in its area, his pushing for GMOs, his pushing of NAIS, his supporting CAFOs which wiped out thousands of small farmers in Iowa, should be seen only through the lens of his working for Monsanto or of the government being corrupted through his closeness to Monsanto. Instead, his actions should be seen as massively discriminatory against farmers and against citizens whose constitutional right to life, and to liberty through democratic laws, is being aggressively and endlessly and covertly and powerfully denied.
Pull farming and pesticides and GMOs out of the frame they have been held in. It's almost like pulling them out of the mud. Wash them off and hold them up and look at them again. Realize that you are the little black child now unable to reach a decent life. And in that doorway, towering over you and all of us, is our own government (infiltrated by Monsanto), blocking every one of us from farming, from having a country full of small farmers, from local food, from safe food, from clean unpoisoned land, from healthy bees and birds, from normal seeds and trees and animals, available to everyone, and from our democracy.
Instead, we have a government ramping up to create a disease scare (as bird flu is being used in Asia right now) and use Homeland Security to wipe out normal animals stocks and normal seeds at will, and replace them with genetically engineered and patented ones. "Food safety," "diseases," "bioterrorism" all part of how the Patriot Act and Bush's "war on terror" are justified as weapons against us and our civil rights.
This is not just an agricultural issue. It is a civil rights and a human rights issue - the most profound in human history since it is about the right to (normal) nature and survival itself. The totalitarian and corrupt parties discriminating against us all can only be dealt with once we see this as a single issue and come together in a civil rights movement on behalf of us all.
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