Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Obama and the Betrayal of America sovereignty

By Howard Bridges

This article was triggered by an email received questioning Obama's Missouri visit and any real commitment he has to those people, to local economies, to rural communities, and to this country.

obama and missouri farm

It set off reflections on what this government has been doing to undermine the lives of ordinary people over many years and what Obama has been arranging under his own administration, including a bill, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, that would remove the most basic of all constitutional and human rights.

The US has been going through tremendous changes:

$ with Reagan when he attacked worker's unions and began deregulating industries;

$ with GW Bush when he put a Monsanto lawyer on the Supreme Court) and GMOs were treated normal organisms and patent law was then extended to nature;

$ with Bill Clinton when he put NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and HACCP into place, outsourcing US industry and centralizing the US food supply into corporate hands;

$ with GHW Bush when he undid constitutional laws to arrange spying on and extreme control over citizens, put in pandemic plans to include martial law, international control by the WHO and UN, forced vaccination but immunity for pharmaceutical industry vaccines; and

$ with Obama as he has left in place and greatly extended Bush's dismantling of constitutional rights, has allowed bankers and Wall Street full rein to hollow out the economy, has declared two false national emergencies (one around 9/11, one around a fake pandemic), empowering the military and corporations, has bowed to the nuclear industry, the pharmaceutical/medical industry, the insurance industry, the oil industry, the war industry, the chemical industry, the biotech industry, and is now set to end net neutrality.

Breaking promises.

Except for his consistent pro-nuclear stance, each of Obama's obeisances to international corporations and to those undoing laws protecting sovereignty of the country and its sovereign people, directly betrayed his own campaign commitments. Obama acquired favor from a public who believed, based on his words, that he would work to deliver peace, environmentalism, constitutional protection, a sustainable future for this country and the world and did the opposite. Promising good for this country, he has caused or passively allowed extremely harmful things to move forward.

In this, he has proven to be an extraordinarily deceptive president.

Globalization.

All the actions of the presidents listed above can be summed simply - they were each putting into place their piece of a giant puzzle which, with all pieces in place, set up full globalization, by destroying local economies.

They were working in the financial interests of multinational corporations and bankers by undoing rights and the sovereignty of the American people and this country, breaking down all structures, laws, and communities, in order to reshape a system for global control and a global economy.

What people are experiencing with Obama is that the movement from a national economy with sovereign constitutional rights and borders, toward an international global economy with open borders and international corporate "law," has sped up exponentially. And he seems to be trying to drop some last major pieces in to complete the puzzle.

Betrayals.

So far, in doing what he has in that direction, Obama has betrayed the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, his own pledges to restore constitutional rights and undo Bush's orders, the single payer/public option healthcare movement, the anti-global warming movement, the justice/human rights movement, and his commitment to maintain internet freedom.

But the betrayal of those who carry everyone's dreams for a sustainable future comes now.

Obama is on the verge of committing the most significant betrayal in the history of the country - ending US sovereignty over its own food supply, and thus its true sovereignty as a nation, through Senate bill S 510.

Control over the US.

The bill would establish control by multinationals, leaving this country entirely dependent on them. Unlike with NAFTA, which stole jobs and sent them overseas (as part of corporate globalizing of industries), making the US dependent on fewer, and cheaply paid corporate jobs, S 510 initiates US dependency on multinational corporations for existence itself. Such food control is a means of taking over countries without armies.

A long series of international corporate grabs and constitutional deconstructions are rapidly being accomplished under Obama. S 510, however, is the most significant. It is not a "food safety" bill (it will actually make food less safe).

S 510 is the "full corporate control of the US food supply" bill.

Though he is speaking of India, Pushpa Bhargava, a senior scientist there, describes a situation identical to that now faced by the US.

"And whosoever controls Indian agriculture, de facto controls India. The unpleasant fact is that the above clan, comprising a miniscule proportion of Indians, believes it stands to gain enormously by such a sell out."

A President with uncertain loyalties.

In considering that his actions do not serve the sovereign interests of the US but those of international elites and corporations, it is of note that Obama now holds a position on the UN Security Council. This appears to be unconstitutional, as the President of the United States is not allowed to hold any other office in order to ensure his undivided allegiance.


Obama's actions serve the global interests of Monsanto and the chemical-biotech-pharmaceutical-food industry, all now integral to agribusiness. Those industries are in an aggressive drive to take control the world food supply and corporatize agriculture. It is a literal war, international in scope, and waged against the people of the world. S 510 sets them up to run the US, removing people's constitutional and even human rights to freely grow, share, sell, transport, store, produce, and eat food.

Obama's silence on a deadly bill.

obama in a tin shed

As Obama visits rural towns, he is telling them nothing about the food globalization bill he supports which will crush their communities. Surely he would mention the bill if there were anything good in it for farmers and farming communities.

He is silent about it. But he acts as their friend, saying he is in favor of alternative energy which he claims will bring them jobs. He visits mom and pop coffee shops where he is treated kindly, but not telling them, either, about the bill that could destroy their store and their livelihood and harm their little town.

This visit to an honest local community distracts from his globalization bill and paints a false PR impression that he cares about local economies. But he is selling industrial jobs.
Alternative or not, those jobs will be corporate, and they will not provide the independence rural people have always sought by running their own farms and having their own businesses. That sovereignty over their own lives has been all but wrecked by long standing government policies that have favored banks (including international ones) and monopolizing agribusiness, and many a

Out in the midwest, Obama says he wants to help rural economies but back in DC, Obama promotes a bill that would drive the few farmers American has left off their farms, crush any kind of local food production and independent local economies based on both, and could take their land. The bill harmonizes with EU laws doing just that and the EU commission is quite clear about what they think of small farmers and their own interest to acquiring the farmland.

Obama helps Monsanto's labeling game.

Obama is also working to help Monsanto and biotech companies gain control over all food in the world by using his government to push at the upcoming Codex meeting to ban all labeling of GMOs throughout the world.

He first bypassed Congressional approval and appointed Michael Taylor (Monsanto VP) as Food Czar at the FDA over all US food. Taylor had previously written a white paper for Monsanto, originating an Orwellian twisting of normal language to create a legal strategy whereby Monsanto could sue honest farmers who had truthfully labeled their milk rBGH-free, for dishonesty. Using precisely the same tortured legal methods, Taylor on behalf of the Obama administration, is now going to demand from Codex (a corporate agency) that no food anywhere in the world be labeled as GMO or not-GMO because to do so would be "False, Misleading or Deceptive."

No one wants things to be false, misleading or deceptive. Honest labels are not "False, Misleading or Deceptive."

But this corporate game-with-labels is. It is an effort to control all sources of plant and animal life (and genetically engineered human DNA would be included) which is dependent on preventing people from knowing what corporations are doing to life, and what people are being exposed to, in food and with drugs and vaccines.

In India, the draconian biotech bill there would shut down knowledge of GMOs in food or drug/vaccines by imposing prison sentences and heavy fines for anyone questions them. From Bhargava again,

*Section 63 says, "Whoever, without any evidence or scientific record misleads the public about the safety of the organisms (GMOs) and (their) products, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months but which may extend to one year and with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees or with both". And who will decide whether there is "evidence or scientific record"?


Obama and deception.

No one wants things to be "false, misleading or deceptive." Deceptiveness is important to recognize.

And Obama's words have been. And the food bill in the Senate is.

How many American know about it? How many know what Obama is set to do to this country, right now, by means of it?

To real people in Missouri, being face to face and exchanging a hand shake matter. With their handshakes, they are saying they are desperate to rebuild their local communities and to get their country back on its feet.

obama in missouri cafe

But with S 510, Obama is planning to knock the stuffing out of their local communities and their lives.

The bill would put the whole country under the control of Monsanto and other multinationals.

To a President working on behalf of corporations bent on globalization, the honest faces of those "real people" have no meaning. But their faces and businesses can be used for corporate media photo ops to sell a multinational corporate agenda that will harm the very people and businesses pictured.

Those photographs show earnest, decent people and American sovereignty being betrayed.

(The irony is that many of these nice people may favor the tea party, whose central tenet is opposition to globalization.)