STOP Corprat fascists from taking over our food supply - STOP NAIS!

[Triana]

Please note: We told you about this issue last week and many of you
responded. But we still need your comments with the USDA by the end
of the day, Monday, March 16, to stop the incredibly destructive
corporate scheme described below. Congress is already trying to stack
the deck so only lobbyists have a meaningful voice in this debate. We
can stop them if you speak out now.

_ _ _ _ _

Radio Chip Animal Identification Would Do ALL Harm To Our Real Food
Safety, And No Good

It would be too easy to blame the recent peanut panic on one criminal
corporation owner, who KNOWINGLY shipped Salmonella contaminated
product. But before that it was millions of pounds of ground beef,
and before that tomatoes all over the country, and on and on. And
when you ask where is all this horrible filth coming from, with a
over a million cases of Salmonella in the U.S. alone every year, the
answer is self-evident. It's the huge factory farms that overflow
with seas of untreated animal waste, that then spill into our food
supply, including through our agricultural plant crop fields.

We have a lot of work to do to clean up this giant mess, but the
first thing we have to do is STOP a lunatic boondoggle being pushed
by these same corporate interests, to force radio computer chip
implanting of literally every farm animal in the country, EXCEPT on
their own factory farms. It is absolutely nothing but a further
attempt to drive small family farms out of business, who in fact are
our safest source of reliably clean food now.

The proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) would force
even the smallest healthy farms to buy expensive new computer
tracking equipment, and potentially would subject them to
gestapo-like tactics by the USDA if they are in even slight technical
non-compliance. And all this just to fatten the pockets of the RFID
chip manufacturers, and to make it LOOK like something is being done
to make our food safer.

The special one click action page below will send your personal
message to all your members Congress and also directly to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture who is trying to rush this thing through
without adequate scrutiny.

Stop NAIS Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

This action is especially urgent because the U.S. House Agriculture
Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry is holding a hearing on
NAIS implementation on March 11, and many farm activists fear the
plan is to push it out for a full vote in Congress faster than a
greased pig, before we the people have a meaningful chance to speak
out.

You may not have a House member on that particular subcommittee, but
you can pressure your own House member to tell they colleagues on it
that there is massive constituent pressure against NAIS. For the
especially mobilized on the action page above there is a link to the
phone numbers for those on the subcommittee, because they are in fact
your representative as an American citizen if they sit on it.

Below are some more extensive truth points you can select from in
drafting your comments or on the phone, again linked to from the
action page above.

NAIS was designed by NIAA (the National Institute of Animal
Agriculture), a corporate consortium consisting of Monsanto,
industrial meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson, and surveillance
companies such Viatrace, AgInfoLink, and Digital Angel. The NAIS
scheme fits agribusiness, biotech, and surveillance companies to a T:

1) They are already computerized, and they engineered a corporate
loophole: If an entity owns a vertically integrated, birth-to-death
factory system with thousands of animals (as the Cargills and Tysons
do), it does not have to tag and track each one but instead a herd is
given a single lot number.

2). NAIS will only be burdensome and costly (fees, tags, computer
equipment, time) to small farmers which helps push them out of
business, thus leaving more market to giant agribusiness.

3) Agribusiness wants to reassure export customers that the US meat
industry is finally cleaning up its widespread contamination. NAIS
would give that appearance ... without incurring the cost of a real
cleanup.

4) NAIS will allow total control over the competition: Owners of even
a single chicken would be required to register private information,
the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of their 'premise'
and if any animal leaves its 'premise', the owner will be required to
obtain an ID number for it and have the animal microchipped. All
information, including 24 hour GPS surveillance would be fed into a
vast corporate data bank, allowing for ease of false slaughter to
hide true problems or to substitute biotech's genetically engineered
animals.

5) NAIS may allow plundering of farmers through required DNA samples:
DNA samples would be invaluable to Monsanto and biotech corporations
genetically engineering animals. Farmers who raise heritage breeds
would have no say in how their distinct DNA would be used and to the
sole profit of biotech companies.

6) The advantage for the surveillance companies is obvious:
Compulsory tagging of 6 million sheep, 7 million horses, 63 million
hogs, 97 million cows, 260 million turkeys, 300 million laying hens,
9 billion chickens, and untold numbers of bison, alpaca, quail, and
other animals -- and new animals being born, means a massive
self-perpetuating market.

Please take action now to stop this insanity. Our health and our
lives depend on it.

Stop NAIS Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

The health claims for NAIS are a sham though fear of disease is used
to advance it. NAIS does not touch the contaminated source of E.coli,
salmonella, listeria, mad cow, and common meat-borne diseases - the
inherently unhealthy practices (mass crowding, growth stimulants,
feeding regimens, rushed assembly lines, poor sanitation, etc.) of
industrial-scale meat operations. Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" all over
again. NAIS will do nothing to stop these practices. Moreover,
tracking ends at the time of slaughter, yet it's from slaughter
onward that most spoilage occurs. But NAIS does not trace any
contamination after slaughter.

The self-serving Agribusiness NAIS plan distracts from their
contaminatory practices, while targeting hundreds of thousands of
small farms, homesteaders, organic producers, hobbyists ... and maybe
even you. NAIS's purpose is to advance corporate monopoly over all
food in the US. And with it, they have laid the ground work.
Kissinger said if you control food, you can control people. This
immense corporate plan to control of our food supply and eliminate
our independent farmers is, at it heart, the most severe threat
possible to our democracy itself.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed
to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

[pleah]

1. K&R Already signed.

:hi:

[snappyturtle]

2. K&R Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Done. nt

[barbtries]

3. did it

thanks for posting

[TheWraith]

4. Excuse me, but most of this is bullshit.

Tagging and registration is not necessary for animals which don't leave their home areas or mix with animals from other groups, where disease could potentially spread. Whether you think it's a good thing or not, this is intended to keep track of all the animals moving through large industrial farms.

Plus, you're babbling out scare words that mean nothing. "Allowing for ease of false slaughter to hide true problems or to substitute biotech's genetically engineered animals"?

Also, there's no such thing as "24 hour GPS surveilance." Do you know how GPS and RFID tags actually work?

[BrklynLiberal]

5. Perhaps if they would stop including cow carcasses in cow feed,

they would not have to worry so much about tagging food animals.

[mzmolly]

8. Well now,

here is a common sense solution. They'll be no more of that Madaam! :sarcasm:

[Cronus Protagonist]

6. Color me skeptical

These RFID tags cost a couple of pennies each. A reader costs a couple of hundred at the most. Not a single farm will go under with this small expense.

However, disallowing RFID tracking means when there is an outbreak of say, CJD, we won't be able to track the meat back to the source. That sounds like a bad thing to me. I want to be able to track the meat right back to the farmer, and so does anyone with any sense in this day and age.

This urgent alert, painted with the hyperbolic "most severe threat to our democracy" (yeah, right - breathless much?) sounds like the same crap the tobacco companies pulled when they wanted to ensure labels were not placed on their poisonous product.

And I can't find a credible source for this missive, so like I said, color me skeptical.

[truedelphi]

7. I cannot vouch one way or another re: the RFID tags

But the Corporate Ag interests have already destroyed some private small farms by new regulation that says no e-coli can be found in any area near a crop.

The rule enforcers look the other way when it comes to large agriculture. (Can we say "Payoffs, Boys and girls?") But small farmers, who do allow for marshes on their property etc are finding that because a duck pooped in a field adjoining the crops, they are forced to plow under their entire crop!

[MadHound]

11. Umm, you can already track the meat right back to the farmer

What NAIS does is simply add more expense, time and labor to the process.

[mzmolly]

9. "Let them eat

grass..."

:kick:

[ColbertWatcher]

10. "gestapo-like tactics by the USDA" ? What?

Every federal agency under the GOP was incompetent and didn't do their jobs.

The FDA and the USDA were gutted by spending cuts and staffed with industry hacks, who were party ideologues.

That's the reason why we had so many problems with our food supply--not because of the systems that were ignored.

[Two Americas]

12. thank you

Another fear mongering campaign.

It serves the right wing to approach this as an anti-government anti-regulation issue. Extreme right wingers and libertarians are behind these campaigns.

You accurately described exactly what the cause of the problems is.

I say this even though I have direct experience on the farm with "gestapo-like tactics" from federal paramilitary teams - from ICE and from a politicized and corrupted FDA.


...

[ColbertWatcher]

13. You're welcome.

I can't tell you how many times I've read stories about how small farmers/ranchers fought the Bush GOP FDA to do their freakin' jobs, so they could sell their products.

It's going to take a long time to hear about all the different ways the GOP fucked this country.