The Animal: On George Orwell, Frankenfood, Corporate Farms, & The Matrix

from Wikipedia

George Orwell, in his book Animal Farm, wrote about Old Major, the old boar on the Manor Farm, who calls the animals on the farm for a meeting, where he compares the humans to parasites and teaches the animals a revolutionary song, "Beasts of England."

When Major dies three days later, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and turn his dream into a philosophy. The animals revolt and drive the drunken and irresponsible Mr. Jones from the farm, renaming it "Animal Farm."

The Seven Commandments of Animalism are written on the wall of a barn. The most important is the seventh, "All animals are equal." All the animals work, but the workhorse, Boxer, does more than others and adopts the maxim — "I will work harder."

Which brings me to the here and now, and the effects of agrocorportions on food production for folks all over the planet. We are rapidly approaching the era of Frankenfood and if the Agrocorp's have their way we won't even be able to grow our own. There is a movement to re-instate small farms and organic methods
, but large corporations like Monsanto are buying influence in government, in our educational system, and even the corporate media.

So...Lets take a break and watch the effects of tampering with Mother Nature, and what can happen to life forms on our fragile planet if there are no controls on genetic manipulation, chemical farming, and animal factory practices.

Local legal coalitions to protect environment against big agrabusiness

We are rapidly approaching the era of Frankenfood and if the Agrocorp's have their way we won't even be able to grow our own. There is a movement to re-instate small farms and organic methods, but large corporations like Monsanto are buying influence in government, in our educational system, and even the corporate media.

In the farming department, Monsanto is so busy buying up the leading seed companies that the only way you can grow untainted food is to buy or borrow heirloom seed. So entrenched is this devious purveyor of poison and herbacides that, in some cases, it is actually illegal to grow organic food in your own garden.

All is not lost yet though, the folks in Chambersburg PA have formed their own legal coalition called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Here's an article from their web site...

"Small Farm Extermination"

celdf.org

Submitted by:

Thomas Linzey, Esq. 675 Mower Road, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania 17257

Multinational agri-business corporations set out almost forty years ago to exterminate family farmers and take control of food production in the United States. That chilling proposition, which has been asserted by farming communities across the Country over the past decade, gained support last week with the release of a document authored by several agri-business corporations.

The 1962 strategy memorandum, entitled "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture", was drafted by a group of multinational corporations called the "Committee for Economic Development" and it lays out a detailed plan for the decidedly un-American corporate takeover of an American institution - the family farm.

Chapter 6 of the memorandum calls for a two pronged strategy, either "(a) leakproof control of farm production by agri-business corporations" or "(b) a program, such as we are recommending here, to induce excess resources - primarily people - to move rapidly out of agriculture."

One of those "excess resources" - an Illinois hog farmer named Keith Bolin - was one of the farmers who read the paper. In an interview done shortly after Farm Aid, Bolin spoke of the absolute control being exercised over hog prices by agri-business corporations. He explained that "Many factory farms are packer owned and packer controlled. And when the packers are short of hogs and they don't want to bid up for my hogs, they flood the market with their own and drive the price down. They force me to chase the market down. They use their own hogs to drive the price lower." Last year, Bolin lost thirteen months of net worth. Last month, he canceled his health insurance to cut his operating costs. Next year, he sees himself taking a job off the farm.

In blunt testimony before the Senate Ag Committee, he stated that "this is not about efficiency or inefficiency. It's about control of our food supply by a few multinationals who are not loyal to Main Street, or rural America, or the American flag."

More