We Are All Fascists Now

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” – Benito Mussolini

Ron Paul’s latest article at LewRockwell.com gets even more specific in it’s definition:

Socialism is a system where the government directly owns and manages businesses. Corporatism is a system where businesses are nominally in private hands, but are in fact controlled by the government. In a corporatist state, government officials often act in collusion with their favored business interests to design polices that give those interests a monopoly position, to the detriment of both competitors and consumers.

Paul’s article goes into detail about how Conservatives and opponents to ObamaCare are actually doing their cause harm by calling ObamaCare “socialist” or opposing Obama’s agenda on the grounds that it is based on “socialism.”

When he is a called a socialist, the President and his defenders can easily deflect that charge by pointing out that the historical meaning of socialism is government ownership of industry; under the President’s policies, industry remains in nominally private hands.

The key word here is nominally, which is why Paul is advocating that Obama’s agenda be correctly called Corporatist.

This also promotes the understanding that though the current system may not be pure socialism, neither is it free-market since government controls the private sector through taxes, regulations, and subsidies, and has done so for decades.

While Paul discusses this in the context of how the ObamaCare is essentially a corporatist act granting a Government enforced cartel to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries…there is another bill pending before congress that has just as far reaching consequences as health care.

The Fascists are going after our food supply.

Just who are these fascists? The nominally private corporations like Cargill, ConAgra, Kraft, Monsanto et al. And who are their Government partners in this fascist takeover attempt? The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Services (FSIS).

Why yes…the same folks that brought us the wondrous food pyramid, are now ostensibly going to protect us all from contaminated meat.

The bill is
H.R. 2749: Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009.

A website dedicated to saving small, family farms in the face of the agribusiness corporate fascists, called Farm Wars, discusses the implications of this bill in an article entitled History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job:

Vested interest groups have orchestrated a legislative lullaby to hush the public’s growing unease with the safety of its food supply. Their enablers in the mainstream corporate controlled media amplify a chorus of government officials and non-governmental organizations admonishing that the public must be confident that the food it buys is safe. But having confidence our food is safe is not the same as having food that is safe and wholesome to eat.

The American public has a great and unmet need to understand the true impacts (that is, the predictable consequences) of the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, before the Senates passes its version of this dangerous bill. The US Congress has a long, tragic history of passing legislation that promotes the industrialization of our food supply, effectively implementing the wishes — both stated and unstated — of agribusiness, and it’s about to do it again.

Using the pretext of food safety, those behind the Food Safety Enhancement Act seek to institute changes the American public would not condone if it understood what is at stake. The country is being duped into believing that the pseudo-scientific measures prescribed by the bill will prevent new outbreaks of food-borne illnesses when in reality FSEA will usher in a number of undesirable outcomes, none of which do a thing to improve food safety. On the contrary, these measures will permit large processors to become an essentially unregulated segment of the industry by privatizing the inspection process, and — at the same time — the new regulations will constitute a cost-prohibitive barrier for small players to remain in business, making them easy targets for indiscriminant enforcement and greater market consolidation.

The cost-prohibitive barrier is precisely the objective!

Another site also involved in the same fight, offered more details on some of the bill’s provisions.

From FairFoodFight.org:

Expanding an existing program, the FSIS wants to shore up food safety requirements by fully implementing and enforcing its 14 year old HACCP program. What is HACCP? From Wikipedia:

“HACCP is used in the food industry to identify potential food safety hazards, so that key actions, known as Critical Control Points (CCPs) can be taken to reduce or eliminate the risk of the hazards being realized.”

This is a good idea, right? A HACCP plan describes the places in a meat processing plant or a butcher shop where food could be contaminated, and it describes what daily and hourly routine steps are taken to prevent that from happening. Cleanings, pathogen tests, pH tests, temperatures, water activity, and other food safety practices are documented by workers and managers to insure that the HACCP plan is being followed. Poultry, eggs, seafood, and juice all require HACCP programs. (Most other FDA products do not.)

HACCP went into effect over a decade ago, but one aspect that was never fully realized was “Verification,” that is, proving that a business is following its own HACCP plan, and that’s part of what these new FSIS regulations address. The new approach to Verification seeks to “verify” that meat processors are testing for pathogens (among other food safety practices) and documenting those tests in order to prove that their HACCP plan is working.

THE PROBLEM

Local butchers and small meat operations are going to get steamrolled by these requirements.

As just one example, small meat processors will need to collect microbial data for at least one product from each HACCP category that they process (beef, pork, chicken, lamb, etc), under the new Validation program. These products can be grouped (chicken breasts, chicken thighs, chicken sausage), but the similarities and differences in species, process, product public health risk, and food safety hazards might require further testing. If your butcher’s meats vary even slightly (various sausages can be significantly different in how they’re made from one recipe to another), they may be required to “verify” all their products in each and every category.

This is exasperating and frightening to many meat shops and small- to medium-sized processors. Even small operations offer a wide variety of foods, after all (think about all the cuts and various types of meat you see in your local butcher shop or at a farmers market). But these tests are expensive, so the more cuts and varieties of meats that an operation offers, the more it will cost that butcher to keep selling those various cuts. The obvious solution won’t be to invest more money for further testing, but to raise prices, reduce the variety of their product mix, and offer only what sells very well.

Or close up shop.

Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner!

That is precisely the point of this type of legislation! This is how competitors are regularly driven out of business by special interest groups enlisting the Government bureaucracy to grant them a market cartel.

Joel Salatin, owner of PolyFace Farms, also wrote about the way in which government regulation favors the giant, industrial agriculture corporations versus the small operation farmer, in an article entitled Everything I Want to Do is Illegal:

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

ON-FARM PROCESSING

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

Sure is hard trying to compete with the factory farming corporations here in the land of the fee and the home of the debt-slave, eh?

Our whole culture suffers from an industrial food system that has made every part disconnected from the rest. Smelly and dirty farms are supposed to be in one place, away from people, who snuggle smugly in their cul-de-sacs and have not a clue about the out-of-sight-out-of-mind atrocities being committed to their dinner before it arrives in microwaveable, four-color-labeled, plastic packaging. Industrial abattoirs need to be located in a not-in-my-backyard place to sequester noxious odors and sights. Finally, the retail store must be located in a commercial district surrounded by lots of pavement, handicapped access, public toilets and whatever else must be required to get food to people.

The notion that animals can be raised, processed, packaged, and sold in a model that offends neither our eyes nor noses cannot even register on the average bureaucrat’s radar screen — or, more importantly, on the radar of the average consumer advocacy organization. Besides, all these single-use megalithic structures are good for the gross domestic product. Anything else is illegal.

Never forget the way enforcement works too.

Big Ag corporations who violate the food safety codes that result in recalls, outbreaks of listeria or e. coli, that make consumers sick and even die?

They simply pay large fines to the Government.

Just another cost for doing business…the same fines that literally bankrupt smaller farms.

We the sheeple are caught in a fascist pincer. We get sick and malnourished from our fascist food supply, and we must than seek treatment from our soon to be enacted fascist health care system.

DUCE!

Tagged as: big food, fascism, Ron Paul, USDA