One of the things that is especially striking to me about the comments on my previous post concerning the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) is how many things people find wrong with the program.
They object to the excessive control of our lives it implies, to the infringement on minorities’ religious rights, to the feds’ sneakiness, to the arrogance of the bureaucrats, to the Biblical violation, to the dangers to our food supply it suggests, to creating a crisis that doesn’t exist, and to the possibility of property deeds being compromised. And I haven’t even covered everything.
I think the situation that has bothered me the most is the one in Colorado, which unfortunately didn’t make it into The Nation article I co-authored, because of space considerations. There, state officials have used premises registration as a condition for children to enter their animals into 4-H and Future Farmers of America events at the Colorado State Fair. There was huge opposition earlier this year, and the parents seemed to have pushed officials to back off, but according to Mary Zanoni, that was a mirage, like so many “victories” involving NAIS. And now Illinois is taking Colorado’s lead, she says.
The officials in effect encourage children to push their parents into signing up for NAIS, as in, “Please Dad, just sign up so I can enter Bessie in the milking competition. What’s the big deal?” What parent wants to deny enthusiastic kids a chance to compete and be involved in a major community event?
It’s one thing for cereal companies to manipulate kids to get their parents to buy Frosted Flakes, but another for governments to push kids to get their parents to obey government edicts. Dictatorships encourage the children to keep tabs on their parents, to make sure they’re not doing anything subversive…and to turn them in if they are.
I think what everyone is saying is that, no matter what part of NAIS they object to, it is just plain un-American. It goes against our values, our traditions, and our constitution. I know it makes me very sad about my country.
NAIS goes hand in hand with REAL ID. Get the animals first, people and property next. We won’t need the computers from the Matrix……………we are letting a few corporations controlled by fewer individuals take over and control our lives.
If you do NOTHING else this new year; CALL, FAX, EMAIL your state and federal representatives and tell them to take the USDA to task over NAIS. I do one of those each week in rotation on the federal level. This year, I am going to do the state legislature as well. If you join me, we WILL make a difference!
I have been an animal advocate for 30 years working to end pet overpopulation, humane treatment for farm animals, the exploitation of animals for gratuitous entertainment an other venues of animal abuse and cruelty.
When I recently stumbled upon the NAIS program on a forum dedicated to ending the transportation of horses to Mexico for slaughter where it was referenced matter of factly causing me to take note,I delved further into the matter and became absolutely stunned.
The notion that my neighbor down the street who has a pony and mini goat on her property would be swept up into this massive beaucratic surveillance monitoring system was jaw-dropping, that local independent farmers in my region would be forced out of business where I buy my meat, eggs and dairy products and would no longer be a "choice" for me and my family.
I started crossposting this information to as many animal welfare forums I could think of, people thought I had embarked on a paranoia conspiracy theory until they started reading and understanding what was being proposed and how cattle-people, horse-people, organic farmers, homesteaders were all uniting to fight this. I even contacted Farm Animal Sanctuaries & Rescue organizations.
no one had HEARD OF THIS!(which is exactly how the gov’t planned it…subversive & coersive).
every single American will be affected and impacted by this whether you own livestock or not.
we need to organize and unite against this and bombard our elected officials.
The last I read it was scraped from the 2008 Farm Bill, however when a new administration takes office in 2009 it will be back rearing its ugly head, we need to be ready.
The official line on NAIS is that it is to protect "the national herd" (which doesn’t exist) and, again, the consumer. To be able to head off a huge outbreak of some kind of animal disease – well, you can see what good it has done in England, where it is already implemented. Millions of animals slaughtered because of foot-and-mouth, and, most recently, many more slaughtered not because of anything any farmer did but because a government sponsored lab didn’t observe basic safety precautions. Weird, isn’t it, the ear tags didn’t help – who could have guessed?
So the "reasons" behind NAIS, which are purely a smokescreen, again are total hypocrisy but they sound good. Who doesn’t want to protect the public?
But Former Ag secretary Johannes was dumb enough to be honest when he talked about it, publicly, several times, saying repeatedly during the most recent BSE scare that shut off international exports of American meat that his NUMBER ONE PRIORITY was to re-establish exports of American beef (i.e., to get back to lining the pockets of the big meatpacking companies, because they are the ones who profit from it, not the farmer). But he couldn’t do that until the US agreed to establish a national id system in line with the ones currently working so poorly around the world in places like the EU.
And, number two, in establishing that ID system, to make the producers bear the cost of it rather than the processors (ie the little guy instead of the big guy).
Pure and total moneygrubbing hypocrisy.
I agree vote Ron Paul ’08
Ron Paul is scheduled to appear on:
Glenn Beck tonight(Dec 18) 7:00 pm EST
Meet The Press Sunday(Dec 23) NBC with Tim Russert
I finally finished reading Philip Zimbardos The Lucifer Effect-Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo, a social psychologist, who conducted the Stanford Prison Experment in 1971, presents compelling data showing how and why-social settings, institutional systems and group dynamics transform decent folks into monsters. Zimbardo testified in the Abu Ghraib trials. I only mention Zimbardos book, because of issues in dealing with decent people who enforce oppressive regulations without analysis and consideration of the immediate and long term impact, often based on accepted, but fallacious scientific justifications. (Needing NAIS because avian flu will kill Vermont residents? ) The more entrenched and institutionalized vested business interests become, the more difficult becomes to deal with issues in a rational manner, and the more committed regulatory advocates become. Zimbardos analysis places the impact on individuals of corporate and government malfeasance into a different perspective. He argues that social systems contaminate individuals, thus why it is important to continually challenge the establishment of self-perpetuating , oppressive vested interests and the bombardment of misinformation.(Tyranny) I have had some discussions, that became surprizingly heated, with well learned and intended colleagues who think that those opposed to NAIS are a threat to the health and safety of their children.
My next comment has to deal with Monsanto, or Monsatan-as my neighbors prefer to say. Some of you may be aware that the four key patents, regarding GM seeds, used by Monsanto in legal actions against farmers have been rejected upon review by the USPTO. ( http://www.pubpat.org/monsantovfarmers.htm ; http://www.pubpat.org/monsantovfarmers.htm) Monsanto has not yet, to my knowledge, filed a response to the PTOs office action, nor are the rejections final office actions (yet). There are several farmers in our area who are up against the Monstanto enforcement machine. If the patents are rejected, Monsanto will need to rely on fundamental contract law to enforce specific use of their seeds. Hopefully more farmers will question whether they need Monsanto and raise awareness as to the real cost of GM crops and agribusiness domination.
Last comment: the recent issue of the CDCs Emerging Infectious Diseases
contains the feral swine study regarding E.coli O157:H7 contamination near California spinach fields. http://www.cdc.gov/eid/content/13/12/1908.htm . One section of their conclusion reads:
"Wildlife may be sentinels for E. coli O157 in the produce production environment, or they may be vectors involved in the contamination of plants directly by fecal deposition or indirectly by fecal contamination of surface waterways or soil. Notably, baby spinach is harvested with a lawn mowerlike machine that could pick up fecal deposits in the field and thereby contaminate large volumes of product during processing."
……………………….
And we know that "large volumes" of potentially contaminated product are distributed nationally from one small area of one field in a state far away…
"I have had some discussions, that became surprizingly heated, with well learned and intended colleagues who think that those opposed to NAIS are a threat to the health and safety of their children."
tell your esteemed colleagues to read below and
learn the REAL THREAT to the health and safety of their children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
excerpt:
"The first story is about MRSA, the very scary antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria that is now killing more Americans each year than AIDS 100,000 infections leading to 19,000 deaths in 2005, according to estimates in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For years now, drug-resistant staph infections have been a problem in hospitals, where the heavy use of antibiotics can create resistant strains of bacteria. Its Evolution 101: the drugs kill off all but the tiny handful of microbes that, by dint of a chance mutation, possess genes allowing them to withstand the onslaught; these hardy survivors then get to work building a drug-resistant superrace. The methicillin-resistant staph that first emerged in hospitals as early as the 1960s posed a threat mostly to elderly patients. But a new and even more virulent strain called community-acquired MRSA is now killing young and otherwise healthy people who have not set foot in a hospital. No one is yet sure how or where this strain evolved, but it is sufficiently different from the hospital-bred strains to have some researchers looking elsewhere for its origin, to another environment where the heavy use of antibiotics is selecting for the evolution of a lethal new microbe: the concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO."
Spreading MRSA? As in many things, it is usually many different factors that lead to the end product. I can correlate one aspect with the spread of MRSA as with the E-Coli contamination of spinach last year. (The spinach may have been contaminated by animal dung from the fields, then processed in a way to where the contamination was allowed to grow in the bags.) The machines cant tell what they cut, perhaps using people to bring in the crops is safer? (another debate there).
How is MRSA spread in the hospital? A healthcare provider is supposed to wash their hands when they come into the room and when they leave. If you were in the hospital did you notice this being done? Watch how the housekeeper cleans the roomit is poorly done, the whole room is NOT cleaned between patients, the bed-rails arent even wiped down, the night stands are only wiped on the top, the over bed table is also only wiped on the top, the inside drawers are not wiped out, the same rag is used on the beds as is used in the bathrooms (so I guess it is just as well that the drawers arent wiped out?). The mops only swish the dirt around on the floors, unless the facility has carpets (whoever the idiot was that came up with carpets in hospitals only contributed to the spread of contamination) You cannot sterilize the carpets and they are only given a sloppy vacuuming. (I shudder when I see babies and kids crawling around on the floors). You touch things/people, you breath in the germs and breath out the germs, those are the main ways that any bacteria is spread. Hand washing is the best defense.
I think a lot of the contaminations of our foods is because of carelessness, or out right cutting corners, and the factory farming environments. Am I worried about Bird-flu? Not at all. I would think that most small farmers, dairy,produce,meat don’t want their animals sick/diseased or on quarentined, so they would take good care of what is thiers. It isn’t the small farmers that I am leary of, it is the factory farms and thier unhealthy products they push on consumers.
The USDA has a decades long policy of encouraging and working towards the abandonment of small farms and packers in favor of large operations. It has long been the goal of certain corporations to completely control the US, and even global, food supply.
These actions are also in keeping with big government/socialism/facism. The state looks at itself as God, and tries to control every aspect of our lives. After the revolution, the USSR embarked on a long term effort to morph the populous from self-sufficient farmers into city dwellers dependent on state run farms. The same thing has happened here, only on a longer time scale because they weren’t able to use genocide to accomplish it.
Talk about a sad bottom line, USDA issued both their Traceability Business Plan and the new User’s Guide in the last two days. They have made it perfectly clear. NAIS is meant to be mandatory. They can say it is voluntary 42 times, but when you put all the information together mandatory it is. Interestingly enough, there are two places where they use the word "sacrifice" when talking about killing cattle for so-called disease control. Of all the words they could have used my question is why did they pick sacrifice? It’s just a weird choice of words.
To fast track your way to the two new documents and the amended language for Section 10305 of the Livestock Title of the Farm Bill, you can easily find it on my blog. http://henwhisperer.blogspot.com
Merry Christmas Everyone!