I am trying to take a bit of a down day today so I will stay off my usual subject of the chief idiot, his underhanded power grab, and improved American Fascism. I did a story last july highlighting that once again I for one was hoodwinked. I actually thought the farm subsidies were to help needy farmers then I found out the truth! Farm subsidies is our largest Corporate Welfare program with more given to them than we spend on Home Land Defense which by the way is being cut by 50%. Dead Farmers get Billions, Corporations get millions and needy farmers get nothing but for Willie Nelson!A while back I became aware of another corruptive program I never realized before because it was well hidden by corruptive Politicians. I keep seeing more and more related information and because of all the unfolding corruption and problems this is getting no attention and it should!Having gone to an Agricultural High School I am a Farmer by Vocation I worked on and managed many farms. Struggling small farmers was to me normal and just thought that was part of the hard but fun life of today's farmers. That was before I served my country, became an accountant, then turned to writing the truth about Bush and the ever growing corruption.
Thinking that Farm Subsidies were out there to help average farmers, I should have known better but I was really caught off guard when I became aware that Washington spends more on corporate welfare than on homeland security and farm subsidies are America's largest corporate welfare program.Farms have come a long way since subsidies were introduced as a temporary solution to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression. Today farms have one of the lowest failure rates of any industry in the country. But that is because of the millionaire farmers subsidized by Politicians as the small farmer continues to be left to fail and helped only by Willie Nelson and Farm Aid. These rapidly growing food prices have absolutely nothing to do with family farms making obsessive or even decent profits. It is all about speculation, food commodities, and Government subsidized corporate welfare!If farm subsidies were really about alleviating farmer poverty, then lawmakers could guarantee every full-time farmer an income of 185 percent of the federal level ($38,203 for a family of four) for under $5 billion annually — one-fifth the current cost of farm subsidies. Instead, small farmers are largely excluded from farm subsidies. Farm subsidy payments are based on acreage, so by definition, the largest agribusiness's get the largest subsidies.
Consequently, commercial farmers — who report an average income of $200,000 and net worth of nearly $2 million — now collect the majority of farm subsidies. Most farm subsidy dollars go to millionaires.The Environmental Working Groups farm subsidy database reveals that from 1995 to 2005, farm subsidies have been distributed to Fortune 500 companies such as John Hancock Life Insurance ($2,849,799) and Westvaco ($534,210); as well as celebrity hobby farmers like David Rockefeller ($553,782) and Ted Turner ($206,948). Even Members of Congress who vote on farm legislation have received subsidies, such as Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa, $225,041) and Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo., $161,084).Then like all the rest of the underhanded activities going on today it gets worse. I found out the U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report. In a selection of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time.
The report cited a 1,900-acre soybean and corn farm in Illinois that collected $400,000 on behalf of an owner who lived in Florida before his death in 1995. The company did not notify the government of the death but certified each year that the dead shareholder, who owned 40 percent of the company, was "actively engaged" in managing the farm. again the more you hear the worse it gets.In that report we hear from,Surprise! Senator Grassley of all people that these programs are to help- "needy" farmers, that to him is needy Millionaire corporate farmers. Knowing this Billion dollar corporate Welfare system has been going on at least under my radar can anyone really expect the no over sight, corruption champion Bush to veto the $300 billion farm bill expected to come before the U.S. House of Representatives this week? No way! The farm bill, which includes $35 billion in crop subsidies for farmers, also contains production incentives that would benefit some of the world's biggest food companies, including Tyson Foods Inc. and Archer Daniels Midland Co.
We knew the Bill would pass because many Republicans need it and it primarily benefits wealthy Corporations not Needy or small family farmers. Well it passed! The Senate on Friday approved a $286 billion farm bill with an election-year expansion of subsidies for growers and food stamps for the poor. With Food stamp use going up drastically since Bush thank God someone atached that to this Corporate welfare Program. Last July and Decembers story on this the House and the Senate
We knew the Bill would pass because many Republicans need it and it primarily benefits wealthy Corporations not Needy or small family farmers. Well it passed! The Senate on Friday approved a $286 billion farm bill with an election-year expansion of subsidies for growers and food stamps for the poor. With Food stamp use going up drastically since Bush thank God someone atached that to this Corporate welfare Program. Last July and Decembers story on this the House and the Senate
* I must say this is finally a veto I can agree with! I suggest you check out the link and see just how corruptive this Bill and the program is! So much for my down day! last December when I did a story on the Senates passing of the Bill they promised major changes early this spring. Well today I learn a A five-year, nearly $300 billion farm bill emerging on Capitol Hill appears to fall short of President Bush's goal of making big cuts in subsidies to affluent farmers. The question now is whether Mr. Bush will sign it. Under a tentative agreement reached by key members of the House and Senate, the bill would make only modest changes in support for farmers. The measure would end a practice that allows farmers in some cases to collect triple payments from the government. The legislation would only slightly trim so-called direct payments that annually provide commodity producers with income support. I recommend a Veto! Farm Bill Leaves Safety Net Intact for Corporate Welfare
James Joiner
Gardner Ma
15 comments:
Big Agriculture is trying hard to eliminate all forms of competition.
We nearly had a system in place that would require that all chickens be micro-chipped and regular reports filed on where they were.
Each discrete location was to get a code. If you chicken hopped a fence into a neighbor's yard, you had to file a report detailing the reason for transport to and from your neighbors.
This legislation would of course raise the costs to a prohibitive level for small producers. Microchipping each chicken and individually tracking them would add several dollars at least to the cost of the birds. Not counting scanners and computers to ID the birds with. It could easily double the cost of each bird and make them too expensive for small producers to sell at a profit.
Of course, under the proposed rule, large producers like Tyson foods (one of the sponsors) would be exempted from microchipping their birds.
In other countries, the fear of bird flu has been used as an excuse to wipe many thousands of backyard flocks. While the factory farms are exempted from the slaughter, unless bird flu has taken hold and the losses are so high that they can't be hidden.
Ironically, in the third world, very few cases of birds in backyard flocks have been identified. Presumably, the fact that backyard flocks are more genetically diverse, gives them an advantage in fighting off the virus as compared to factory farms where the birds are so inbred, they are effectively clones.
In fact all of the outbreaks of bird flu in poultry have occurred in factory farms. In such an environment the virus is able to quickly evolve to evade the identical immune systems, in the many thousands of mono-genetically bred birds in these facilities.
Out of protest, the microchip idea was eventually implemented as a voluntary program with few participants. For now I think it's been shelved. One of the problems that came up, was funding. Farmers were asking their congressmen to have the government pay for the micro-chipping. The plan was to have one veterinarian in each state oversee all of the backyard flocks and insure compliance and to micro-chip the birds.
When I found out about that part I had to laugh, thinking of one veterinarian in Texas and one in California keeping up with all of those records. I read in a paper a while back that Los Angeles alone has 50,000 chickens roaming in yards. Imagine the paperwork entailed in tracking them as they roam from yard to yard during the day!
Knowing chickens as I do I have to laugh at trying to keep a record of them all. what the hell? We lost 15,000 once to smothering!What do you record every time you kill one to eat? I never thought about that with the bird flu.
I'm naive I guess. They had me convinced in Asia at least that the problem was because of all the small unregulated farms. I'm sick of this crap.
I have to laugh about this volluntary participation. That is friggen worthless. I just found out this morning that Participation by lending companies to help homeowners in danger of foreclosure was volluntary too.
Of course no vollunteers no help. Instead they bail out the banks and give a $7,000 credit to those buying the houses. I am sick and friggen tired of the facade of concern while screwing you. As you know, we're on our own!
The best solution here is to limit subsidies to family-owned farms under a certain size. The left (or rather those on the left whose pockets aren't stuffed with agribusiness cash) sign on to this every five years only because US food aid to poor countries is always tied to the farm bill. That's linkage we need to lose.
tom
I like your cats by the way. As for the subsidies, everyone i knew period has their farm. The small family farms have for the most part gone under.
Willie Nelson is their only help. Subsidies only help the big and wealthy farmers. You probably read the links.
The more I learn about this Medicare, McCain, Bush, MSM, what is really happening here and around the world, the more disgruntled I get!
Yeah, the bird flu story changes when you dig deeper.
The factory farms pushed for the extermination of backyard flocks, for fear that their birds would be wiped out. In many cases, they lost their monocultured birds anyway. After all they couldn't wipe out all of the wild birds, that were the real vector for the flu.
All they needed was to find one sick bird, as justification to take out all of the fowl in a city.
It all sounded really scary didn't? The footage of thousands of birds being killed and cremated.
I worried that would happen in the US. It would be a stupid move to wipe out the genetic diversity in all of the breeds we have, in order to save a few mono-genetic lines with limited immune capacity.
The bird flu crap certainly sounds foul (ha) now that you tell me all this stuff. But seeing that it was Asia i tended to believe. I am sick of the friggen lying. Of of life today is a friggen set up for a hidden agenda and personal gain. It is disgusting! Boy are we screwed!
AND GWB had the gumption to talk about the Farm Bill as if he was astute or even read the document LOL
Jim,. have you followed the case of Percy Schmeiser?
If you haven't and your blood pressure is too low, look him up.
torrence
He is sickening. I am so sick of his crap. he friggen blames everyone but himself for everything he has done here and around the world. I am preparing something on that right now.
As we and the world suffer the consequences of his lack of knowledge and concern you can bet he looks into nothing and could care less about the consequences as he lies and tells people he does. It is sick but some still believe the scum!
Wease
You're funny! I haven't followed Perry Scmeiser but my blood is boiling already. You know though that I will finish what I am doing and look it up. I can just imagine and I am pissed already. I'll get back to you after I research it. Thanks!
Wease What the Hell?
The Implications of the Schmeiser Decision
E. Ann Clark, Plant Agriculture,
University of Guelph, Guelph, ON
(eaclark@uoguelph.ca)
The Crime of Percy Schmeiser
Let us first be clear what Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser was found guilty of.
He was found guilty of a) having Monsanto genetics on his land, and b) not advising Monsanto to come and fetch it.
He was not found guilty of brownbagging - obtaining the seed fraudulently. Indeed, all such allegations were dropped at the actual hearing, due to lack of evidence.
Regardless, in his 29 March 2001 decision ( http://www.fct-cf.gc.ca ;click on decisions), Judge W. Andrew MacKay made it clear that how it got there didn't matter anyway. The guilt was the same. Specifically, "Yet the source of the Roundup resistant canola...is really not significant for the resolution of the issue of infringement..."
It also didn’t matter that Schmeiser did not benefit - at all - from the RR seed. In order to derive any economic benefit from growing RR seed, you’d either have to
< sell it as seed, or
< spray Roundup.
He did neither. He sold the crop as grain - not as seed, and he didn’t spray Roundup. He acknowledges spraying Roundup around his telephone poles - a standard practice - which first alerted him in 1997 to the contamination in his field because some of the plants didn’t die. Then, in typical farmer fashion, he got out his sprayer and made a couple of passes leading away from the road to see how far the contamination reached - total sprayed area was 3 ac out of the hundreds of acres sown in 1997. None of these points are disputed. No one - including Monsanto - argued that Schmeiser actually benefited - or even intended to benefit1 - from growing a crop contaminated with RR plants. But it didn’t matter. He was guilty nonetheless, and fined $15/ac x 1030 ac, plus the value of his crop $105,000, plus $25,000 for punitive and exemplary damages.
He also lost the improved genetics resulting from his lifelong practice of saving his own seed to produce his own tailor-made variety of canola, as the crop was confiscated.
The harm that has been done to Percy and Louise Schmeiser, now in their 70's, is grievous. But of even greater concern is how this incomprehensible decision will affect all western Canadian farmers - regardless of whether they even grow canola, let alone GM canola.
The Problem(s) with Canola
Canola is a relatively primitive crop, and as such, retains many of the characteristics of a wild species. Unlike corn and wheat, which have been domesticated by over 10,000 generations of breeding,
< canola pods mature unevenly, obliging farmers to cut and place the crop in windrows to allow the green seed to dry prior to combining
< the dry pods also shatter upon maturity, dropping a fraction of the mature seed to the ground
< the seed retains dormancy, meaning that particularly under the reduced or no-till conditions favored in the prairies, the seed can remain dormant for 6-10 years, depending on the type of cultivar - Polish or Argentine, and
< the seed can germinate anytime in the season - not just in the spring prior to seeding
Further, because the seed is very small, round, and smooth, it travels readily in the wind. It is not uncommon for windrowed canola to be picked up and blown over adjoining fields. Seed is known to be dispersed by transport trucks in transit - either blown out the top if uncovered or falling off the exterior if not filled tidily. Schmeiser’s contaminated fields are to the east side of a major haul road leading to Bruno, Saskatchewan, and the prevailing wind direction is west to east. The initial samples used by Monsanto to charge Schmeiser were actually taken from the roadside - not the sown fields.
Although canola is primarily a selfing species, outcrossing is in the range of 20-30%, and canola pollen can move long distances, several km at least, primarily via insect pollinators. The required isolation distance for hybrid canola seed is 800 m. Who is it that has to absorb the cost of installing an 800 m buffer between GM and non-GM crops on neighboring farms? Pollen has always moved - it did not start with genetic modification. But this is the first time we’ve called it genetic pollution, because the genes that move are proprietary.2
To put these numbers into perspective, Alberta Agriculture has calculated that even at 0.2% outcrossing (with a neighbor’s RR canola, for example), a crop yielding 25 bu ac-1 with 3% shattering losses would deposit 10,000 outcrossed seeds ac-1 or 4 outcrossed seeds per m2 (http://www.agric.gov.ab.ca/crops/canola/outcrossing.html). And that is just the genetic pollution from a single season. The lengthy dormancy interval of canola allows the soil seed bank of contaminated seed to accumulate with each successive year’s additions.
Land can be contaminated with proprietary seed in other ways. If you intentionally planted RR canola [or any other herbicide tolerant (HT) canola], shattered RR seed would contaminate your soil next year anyway, and the next, and the next. Emergence of ‘volunteer’ canola in subsequent crops is nothing new in western Canada - but what is new is that the volunteer plants bear proprietary genes and are tolerant to one or more common herbicides.
You can also bring RR canola into your land inadvertently, as an unavoidable contaminant in your sown crop. Cross contamination of seed crops with GM seed is now so pervasive that seed companies will no longer guarantee "100% GM-free" even in the seed they sell to farmers, for any field crop that has been subject to genetic modification.
In the aggregate, these arguments explain the widespread occurrence of RR canola growing in places where it was never sown, and even where no canola has been sown, in western Canada.
The impossibility of reproductive isolation - both on-farm and post harvest - is nowhere better illustrated than recent occurrence of contamination within Monsanto’s own RR ‘Quest’ canola. Seed with an unapproved RR gene was found to contaminate bags carrying seed with the approved RR gene, obliging the urgent recall of thousands of bags of seed, some of which was already on-farm and being sown. This is just the latest example of cross contamination within the seed trade itself, of which StarLink contamination in the corn to be sown in 2001 is perhaps the best known example.
How then can farmers be held accountable for something which the seed trade itself cannot do?
Well, they can’t, and even Monsanto knows it. So, Monsanto’s position - which the judge inexplicably accepted - is that all the farmer has to do is call them up and they’ll come out and deal with it. No matter how the proprietary genes got there, the judge held that the farmer is accountable for it, and they are obliged to inform Monsanto about it - or risk the fate of Schmeiser.schmeiser vs Monsanto
Bush? Read the bill?!!? He's still struggling with My pet Goat!
You're funny Tom! He doesn't know how to read nor does he have to. He has people for that.
The elite's government FEARS you!!!!!!
Their fear is manifested in the laws they pass. Here is a law banning what MANY of the Founders wrote is a RIGHT of citizens when a government no longer represents them:
Section 2385. Advocating overthrow of Government
Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or
teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of
overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or
the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession
thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by
force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any
such government; or
Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any
such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates,
sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed
matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity,
desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any
government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts
to do so; or
Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society,
group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the
overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or
violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any
such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes
thereof -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than
twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by
the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five
years next following his conviction.
If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in
this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned
not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for
employment by the United States or any department or agency
thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
As used in this section, the terms ''organizes'' and
''organize'', with respect to any society, group, or assembly of
persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new
units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes,
and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons.
The federal government is allowing MILLIONS of illegals to invade our country. Corporate America is becoming increasingly more powerful and influential. Yet, according to the government of for and by the elites YOU, a citizen, have to accept whatever the government does with NO recourse other than voting...... and there is sufficient proof that shows to me voting is worthless since the entrenched power structure ensures that the emplaced elite class can not be removed.
The Founders specifically wrote of the people's right to abolish a government when it no longer represents them.
Tyranny is upon is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
obbop.wordpress.com/
Obbop
Wow where have you been? Welcome! Yes we are in serious trouble but I will be okay where many will not be as they do not know how to survive!
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