by Chris Hedges
(from TruthDig)

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.

Tagged agribusiness, big pharma, chris hedges, conventional medicine, corporate control, corporations, modern medicine, politics, rise up or die

by Gabriela Segura, M.D.

I’m sick and tired of the anti-smoking culture that has taken over the entire world. I have had enough of hearing “don’t smoke, it’s bad for you!!” The ignorance that betrays such remarks is utterly abysmal, especially coming from people who should know better. So for all those who have asked me why do I actually smoke, I’m going to explain my reasons in this article.

I have found anti-smoking activists to be intolerant, judgmental Authoritarian Follower types. They believe and parrot emotionally charged catchphrases taken straight from government anti-smoking propaganda. Doctors and non-smokers alike are guilty of this. They feel righteous when providing such ‘advice’ yet fail to take notice of how ill they themselves look, and forget that, in many cases, their own health issues went downhill when they stopped smoking. Thanks to some pretty convoluted thinking, if they are some day diagnosed with a serious disease, they will later blame their ‘smoking years’, while overlooking the real culprits of today’s modern diseases: junk diets high in carbohydrates and the industrial-scale toxicity that has choked our environment.

Yes, the changes in our diet, particularly since the introduction of mechanised agriculture, the Industrial Revolution and arrival in the ‘enlightened’ Modern Age, have systemically destroyed our health. The mismatch between our ancient physiology – which thrived with little or no edible plant food – and our current diet, is at the root of many so-called diseases of civilization: coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, etc. But I’m not here to talk about that. You can read more about it here. My aim here is to defend the rights of people who choose to smoke. It may surprise you to know that, while the percentage of the population that smokes has declined in recent years (due to government propaganda), the incidence of heart disease has not declined. The reason, shock! horror! is that smoking is not the real problem to begin with!

Almost all smokers I know feel guilty about smoking and are planning to quit one utopian day when life gets ‘less stressful’. The way things are going, good luck with that one! I arrived in Europe when there was still a smoking culture and it wasn’t seen as the profound ‘evil’ it is today. The European smoking bans were introduced during my time here and, coincidentally enough, the general state of society has deteriorated badly during the same time. Could that deterioration have something to do with the replacement of nicotine – a chemical that enhances learning and memory – with Big Pharma tranquilizer drugs and dissociative technology?

From my vantage point in the medical profession, everybody and their friend is taking some kind of calming pill that numbs their feelings and further alienates them from reality. It is beyond me how a person who eats food that is completely mismatched to their physiology, and takes drugs to cover up the damaging effects of that food, can claim to be an authority on any health-related matter. I have found that, typically, those who look more diseased are those who feel more self-righteously entitled to use smoking as a scapegoat for all the world’s health problems.

I remember when people used to smoke on airplanes, trains and in restaurants. It was really not that long ago! How have things changed so rapidly? I have colleagues who tell me that they used to smoke in their offices while attending patients. It seems to me that things were definitely better back then, when we were still able to think!

Tobacco has nicotine in it, which is related to acetylcholine, and this fact is very important indeed, as we are going to learn.

Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter responsible for learning and memory. It is also calming, relaxing and is also a major factor regulating the immune system. Acetylcholine also acts as a major brake on inflammation in the body and inflammation is linked to every known disease. For example, inflammation of the brain is linked to every known mood, behavior and attention disorder and every neuro-degenerative disease.

Receptors for acetylcholine, also known as cholinergic receptors, fall into two categories based on the chemicals that mimic or antagonize the actions of acetylcholine on its many target cell types. In classical studies, nicotine, isolated from tobacco, was one of the chemicals used to distinguish receptors for acetylcholine. That is why there are nicotinic receptors for acetylcholine.

People who smoke often experience cognitive impairment when they stop smoking. This worsening is due to the fact that nicotine acts as an agonist (that is, it mimics) receptors of acetylcholine which are important for learning, memory and cognitive functions. Daily infusions of nicotine actually increase the number of acetylcholine receptors.

As in a kind of ‘blessing from above’, local and systemic inflammation is calmed down by the brain through what is called the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, which is a mechanism consisting of the vagus nerve and its neurotransmitter acetylcholine, a process dependent on a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor¹. Nicotine, the prototypical nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist, counteracts inflammatory cytokine production and has demonstrated protective effects in blood poisoning².

Nicotine has also been used to prevent kidney failure and improve kidney function. Nicotinic receptors in the brain are associated with neuronal plasticity and cell survival, which is why tobacco has been linked with better thinking and concentration. Nicotine has been used to treat ulcerative colitis, a disease characterized by inflammation of the large intestine³. It is clear from available medical literature that the benefits are far-ranging when it comes to this natural compound – nicotine – that acts as an anti-inflammatory and facilitates the creation of new brain cells!

Doctors and anti-smokers are, in my opinion, completely deluded on this topic. They say things like “smoking is bad because it has thousands of chemicals including arsenic and cadmium.” For God’s sake, there are far more toxic levels of arsenic in the chicken they eat! Factory poultry farms produce enormous amounts of concentrated waste, and poultry processing byproducts, which are later fed to pigs, cows and fish, are loaded with arsenic⁴. Dangerous concentrations of arsenic in the water supply is a global threat because it induces both genetic and epigenetic changes related to lung cancer and other diseases⁵.

Yes, tobacco has its pollutants, but they are found in the water we drink, the air we breathe, in baby food, you name it, in even higher concentrations. A conservative estimate is that over 80,000 new chemicals have been introduced into society since the 1800s, only a few hundred of which have been tested for safety; this doesn’t even take into consideration nanotechnology and GMOs, which are already pervasive in the food chain. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about 2.5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are released annually by large industrial facilities. And the authorities are worried about a plant that produces the learning and memory-enhancing, natural chemical nicotine? It really is laughable. You see what mainstream education indoctrination does to your brain? You breathe thousands of chemicals every time you inhale air, whether you like it or not, and whether or not you are sitting next to a smoker.

Outdoor air contains some of the nastiest cocktails of pollutants. Most people tend to think of air pollution as having effects on the lungs, but exposure to road traffic and air pollution may also trigger heart attacks⁶. But people are right: air pollution does cause lung cancer. A much-anticipated government study of more than 12,000 miners has found that exposure to diesel engine exhaust significantly increases the risk of lung cancer. For NON-smokers, the risk was seven times higher. The authors of the study say “we also observed an interaction between smoking and 15-year lagged cumulative REC [marker for estimation of diesel exhaust exposure] such that the effect of each of these exposures was attenuated in the presence of high levels of the other.⁷” What does that mean? It means that research suggests that people who smoke are less vulnerable to the toxic effects of inhalation of diesel fumes than people who don’t smoke.

You have no idea how many times we have found again and again the protective properties of tobacco smoking. When it comes to hard-core petrochemical industry pollution, smoking really is a blessing from above. Take for instance this report by Riki Ott from Sound Truth & Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill:

Workers in jobs with high oil exposure to oil fumes, mists, and aerosols have a greater prevalence of self-reported symptoms of respiratory problems, neurological problems, and chemical sensitivities than unexposed workers. Among workers with high oil exposure, nonsmokers reported a greater prevalence of symptoms of chronic bronchitis than smokers. Symptoms of chronic airway disease included sleep apnea, pneumonia, other lung conditions, chronic sinus and/or ear problems, asthma, persistent hoarseness. […]. [Annie O’Neill, a graduate student at Yale Medical School’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, conducted an internship with ACAT and AFER, the two nonprofit organizations investigating the health effects of the EVOS cleanup. She conducted independent research on Exxon’s cleanup and an investigation of self-reported chronic health problems among EVOS cleanup workers for her master’s thesis.]

Want to know more about the real enemy? As Laura Knight-Jadczyk wrote soon after the Fukushima fallout:

Well, thinking about that and the fears about nuclear fallout from a power-plant melt-down made me ask the question: why didn’t anybody get excited about all the nuclear bomb tests that were being done all over the planet since WWII? I mean, just take a look at this time-lapse map of every nuclear explosion since 1945 and ask yourself if that is not one heck of a lot of radioactive fallout to be dumping on our planet – sometimes right in our back yard – and nobody was saying a thing about it? […]

In short, while I think that what is happening as a result of the Japan nuclear reactor disaster is a lot worse that the authorities are saying, I don’t think that is any reason to get hysterical right now. The time for hysteria was long ago. You are already poisoned and don’t know it.

The timeline she is referring to is the “1945-1998” video by Isao Hashimoto. It documents 2,053 nuclear explosions conducted in various places around the world, and it doesn’t even cover the tests made by North Korea. It is based on a report made by Nils-Olov and Ragnhild Ferm⁸.

So much for the anti-smoking campaign where we have been led to believe that smoking is practically the sole cause of all humanity’s health problems. Before the fascist anti-smoking legislation, people in Spain, Italy and France were happily puffing away, and as a result, were enjoying much longer life expectancy than the U.S. with its fewer smokers. Incidentally, more nuclear bombs have been detonated in the U.S. than in any other country.

Professor Chris Brusby, Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, explains that we are probably only looking at the tip of a very nasty radioactive iceberg. In a meeting which took place in Stockholm 2009, he said:

“The global death yield of the nuclear age to 1992 has been horrifying. According to objective calculations by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (using weapons fallout radiation exposure) there have been (up to 2003) 61 million cancer deaths; 1,600,000 infant deaths; 1,880,000 fetal deaths. There has been a loss of life quality of 10% (in terms of illnesses and ageing effects). The blame for this can be squarely placed at the door of those scientists and administrators (WHO, UNSCEAR, ICRP) who developed and supported the scientific risk models. This is a war crime far greater in magnitude than any that has occurred in recorded human history.”

So there you have it.

Yes, you’re reading this right; as a doctor, I don’t discourage patients from smoking in this increasingly stressful world. I do encourage them to choose organic tobacco and papers, or to go back to the old traditional ways of smoking pipes or cigars. The smartest people on Earth smoke and it is a veritable sign of the times that smoking is so highly discouraged in this modern, zombie culture.

Gabriela Segura is a heart surgeon from the University of Milan who was born into a multiethnic family in Central America. Her ongoing adventure with the medical science, alternative healing and the true nature of our world has taken her to live in Costa Rica, Spain, Canada, Uzbekistan, France and Italy. Her favorite hobbies are SOTT.net, researching and spending time with nature. Her writings can be found at The Health Matrix.

Further reading

For more information on the benefits of tobacco smoking, please read:

Pestilence, the Great Plague and the Tobacco Cure
Comets, plagues, tobacco and the origin of life on earth

Notes:

1. Pavlov V.A. Tracey, K.J. The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. 2005: 19, 493 – 49.
2. Van Westerloo D.J. The vagal immune reflex: a blessing from above. Wien Med Wochenschr 2010, 160/5 – 6: 112 – 117.
3. Rosas-Ballina M., Tracey K.J. Cholinergic control of inflammation. Journal of Internal Medicine 2009: 265; 663-679.
4. Nachman KE, Raber G et al. Arsenic species in poultry feather meal. Sci Total Environ. 2012 Feb 15;417-418:183-8.
5. Martinez VD, Vucic EA. Arsenic biotransformation as a cancer promoting factor by inducing DNA damage and disruption of repair mechanisms. Mol Biol Int. 2011;2011:718974.
6. Mills NL, Miller MR, Lucking AJ. Combustion-derived nanoparticulate induces the adverse vascular effects of diesel exhaust inhalation. Eur Heart J. 2011 Nov;32(21):2660-71.
7. Silverman DT, Samanic CM, Lubin JH, et al. The Diesel Exhaust in Miners study: a nested case-control study of lung cancer and diesel exhaust. J Natl Cancer Inst. 2012 Jun 6;104(11):855-68.
8. Nils-Olov Bergkvist and Ragnhild Ferm. Nuclear Explosions 1945-1998. Swedish Defence Research Establishment (FOA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2000. Available at iaaea.org

Tagged anti-smoking, anti-smoking propaganda, authoritarian followers, nicotine aceylcholine, nicotine kidney failure, nicotine kidney function, nicotine learning, nicotine memory, politics, smoking, smoking bans, smoking pollution protection, smoking protects against pollution, smoking stress, tobacco

by Heidi Stevenson

On top of the recent horsemeat scandal, we now have human DNA found in meat produced by Agribusiness. Lest we forget, the horsemeat scandal started in exactly the same way. First, it was announced that traces of horsemeat DNA had been found in some beef products. Then, we heard about how it was actually more than DNA, but significant percentages. Finally, we learned that some “beef” products had no beef at all—they were 100% horsemeat!

Of course, we were informed that there was no need to worry about it. Government agencies assured us that it was perfectly safe.

Now, though, we’re learning that human DNA is being found in South African Agribusiness foods. Naturally, no one should worry … but it shouldn’t be surprising, because, after all, humans do cut meat up and … well, sometimes they injure themselves. That does, though, beg the question: Why aren’t the factory lines stopped and the contamination from human blood—and even body parts—from such accidents removed?

And that, of course, is the rub. It won’t happen because time is money, and so is that human DNA contaminated meat. Surely you don’t expect anything to stand in the way of Agribusiness profits, do you?

There’s a very important lesson to be learned from all this. Real food—organic food—is not produced by Agribusiness. Real food cannot be produced by “economies of scale”, which is the mantra of Big Business.

Economies of Scale

Economy of scale is the idea that prices can be cut if products are produced in larger and larger quantities. There’s truth to that, but the biggest benefactor is corporations, which are focused on profits over and above everything else. Lest anyone question that statement, it must be noted that a corporation’s first duty—by law!—is to the investors. Corporations are required to place profits over any other concerns. Everything else is treated as a means to profit, not as holding any inherent value.

The reason we’re seeing so many mass outbreaks of food poisoning and contamination is the food industry itself. The prevention efforts are utterly misguided. They focus on control and sterility—not just sensible cleanliness.

Foods are routinely being sterilized now. This does nothing to prevent the problem and destroys much of the nutritional value, while also harming the food’s quality, even to the point of creating toxins, which are then eaten by people.

Controls are being put into place, such as tagging every single animal and recording every detail of their movement. These extra requirements are driving the small farmer—the real farmer—out of business. That, of course, leaves ever more of the food business in the hands of Agribusiness. And that leads to ever more “economies of scale”, with ever more pressure on the producers and workers to produce more and faster.

That pressure results in accidents leading to human flesh in meat and ever-more reason for unscrupulous operators to cut corners, which is the reason behind the horsemeat scandal. It also results in under-payment and mistreatment of workers, further degrading society.

Food as a Commodity

Treating food as nothing but a commodity destroys it. Shortcuts will continue to be used to avoid the inherent problems of mass production. Methods are put in place to disguise the harm. The fact that most so-called fresh vegetables in supermarkets—including ones defined as “organic”—are anything but fresh is ignored:

• They’ve often traveled thousands of miles.
• They’ve spent who-knows-how-much time just sitting in gas storage, which makes them look like they’re still fresh, but does absolutely nothing to stop the deterioration of nutrients, resulting in “foods” that still have calories, but are becoming devoid of nutritional value.
• They’re disguised to look fresh and lovely. They’re waxed and dyed.
• They’re being irradiated to give an appearance of freshness—but that process also destroys nutrients.
• They’re grown on depleted soils, resulting in far lower nutrient levels.
• They’re sprayed with pesticides—and don’t think that foods labeled organic are necessarily free of them. Rules and regulations often allow the use of pesticides on organic crops in some circumstances.

Beyond those problems, you can never know if fruits and vegetables have been contaminated by the effluent from modern CAFOs—concentrated animal feed operations. These examples of institutionalized cruelty result in turning healthy meats into the equivalent of poisons:

• CAFO animals are fed unnatural diets to fatten them up. This results in animals being in constant pain as their systems struggle to digest what’s unnatural to them. It does not result in normal healthy meat.
• They are highly stressed living in horrific concentrations, with little room to move and no natural interaction with their species—so you eat their stress hormones.
• They often live in their own filth. You can imagine the implications of that on their health and yours.
• They’re given drugs, including both antibiotics and ractopamine, to cause both rapid and massive growth. Ractopamine is a poison, and it puts animals in pain—which shouldn’t be surprising if you experienced growth pain as an adolescent.
• These problems result in very sick animals prone to disease. Therefore, they are massively and routinely given antibiotics to mask their ill health.
• Some of these methods are used in so-called “organic” and “free range” animals. The truth is that most so-called free range animals raised in CAFOs never go outside. The term organic does not mean free range, and in some instances doesn’t even mean antibiotic-free.

All of the focus on controls and sterilization completely misses the point. We literally are what we eat. As long as food is treated as a commodity, then we have degraded the basic substance of our bodies and minds.

Organic Food

Organic food—real organic food, not the faux stuff produced by Agribusiness and passed by the USDA—is not mass produced. It’s not produced on large-scale farms. It’s not produced by corporations.

Genuine organic food is produced in small quantities. It’s produced on farms that rotate their crops. It’s produced by natural means—and yes, sometimes that results in crop failures, though the oft-concealed reality is that the same thing happens to Agribusiness crops, though on a much larger scale. Organic crops come from seeds with a wide range of variations; there were once nearly-countless varieties of virtually every food, including meats. Organic food is not doctored to be prettier so you’ll buy it. Animals raised for organic meat are not routinely treated with antibiotics or other drugs, fed unnatural foods, or forced to live in misery. Organic meat, unlike the stuff that’s sold in supermarkets, including most of what’s labeled as organic or free range, is healthy.

The term organic has been compromised. What you find labeled as organic food in supermarkets has usually been gas stored and subjected to a range of mass production techniques. What we must come to appreciate is that organic food is not cheap food. If we go along with large-scale operations that sell stuff as organic, but allows corner-cutting, then we are adding to our own misery. The term organic, as defined by governments—and many other agencies—has been compromised. The USDA allows carageenan, a chemical that causes harmful gastrointestinal effects, to be added to foods with the organic label. In England, pharmaceutical drugs can be, and often are used in animals raised for food—and the number of allowable vaccinations is unlimited.

Obviously, the only way you can be sure of your food supply is by knowing the source. Those pretty, feel-good images on so-called organic foods found in supermarkets are nothing but marketing. They don’t present the reality. If you want real organic food, you must take responsibility for it yourself. You can’t buy it at a discount rate. It isn’t available from marketers saying that they bring “economies of scale” to the business. Economies of scale are the heart and soul of Agribusiness, but they’re anathema to organics.

At some point, people need to understand that using the tools of Agribusiness in organic foods is dishonest. Ultimately, if price becomes the sole issue on which people purchase organic food, then it will go the way of conventionally-grown food stuff. Indeed, that process has already started.

Tagged agribusiness, agribusiness economies of scale, conventional food, economies of scale, food as commodity, mass-produced organic, organic, organic antibiotics, organic food, organic gas storage, organic meat, organic vegetables