Category Archives: Propaganda

Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol

Free Markets, Healthcare, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Regulation, Science, The State

What follows is a segment of a conversation I had with Karen De Coster, CPA. “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol” is now on RT:

Karen De Coster is an accounting/finance professional and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the corporate state, food politics, and essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings.

ILANA MERCER: Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. As convention has it, Americans should give thanks to Native Americans for having taught them to plant corn. Even if this palliative history—this bit of myth-making—were true, all in all corn is a modern-day curse, is it not? Give us the goods on corn and Thanksgiving. What “primal” recipes made their way onto your Thanksgiving dinner table?

KAREN DE COSTER: Corn is at the top of the government’s list for subsidies. The current farm bill gives billions per year to commodity producers of corn. According to the EWG farm subsidy database, corn subsidies in the US totaled $82 billion from 1995-2011. These subsidies take the financial risk out of the system, thereby allowing for a fabricated sustainability. Hence we have the corn-bred Industrial Food Machine.
Cheap corn is a staple in processed, industrial foods. No matter how unhealthy these products are known to be, they become the preferred choice of food for consumers looking for bargains in order to chop at their family budgets.
Additionally, we have had 30+ years of federal alternative fuel subsidies to support ethanol production. In the early 1980s, the government’s ethanol subsidies made it worthwhile for everyone to risk getting into the corn growing game. They did, and the subsidies drove down the price of corn while the government’s tariffs on sugar drove up prices of that product. These government interventions brought us an economical alternative to the tariff-burdened sugar: high fructose corn syrup. Like soybean oil, HFCS is found in so many processed foods, as well as beverages. Nowadays, you have to go to a Mercado (a Mexican market) to buy coke with cane sugar instead of the usual HFCS.
The pilgrims may have celebrated with corn as a way of showing gratitude for their plentiful harvest, but growing that corn involved risk, capital investment, much labor, and it offered no subsidies.
For a primal Thanksgiving, I have access here to free-range, heritage turkeys; raw butter; locally grown organic sweet potatoes, and fresh-off-the-farm stalks of Brussels sprouts. I make my own mayonnaise from free-range eggs, vinegars, olive oil, and nut oils. It takes 10-15 minutes to make a big batch that stays good long enough to use it all. This gives me a pass on the government’s horrific soybean oil, most of which is made from subsidized, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Furthermore, Monsanto corn will never make it to my Thanksgiving table.

ILANA MERCER: Speaking of the devil, what’s up with the misguided love establishment libertarians have for GMOs and Monsanto?

KAREN DE COSTER: Wrong-headed libertarians worship Monsanto and exalt the Frankenfoods (GMO) industry because they believe these “food” innovations are advancing mankind and therefore represent the ultimate free market. No matter what your views on the science of genetically modified foods, the Big Food-Big Agra complex, as I have mentioned, is a heavily subsidized and government-enabled corporatocracy. …

Read the complete interview, “Frankenfoods, Diet Dictators And Other Folderol,” on RT. Stay tuned for Part II of my conversation with Karen.

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Walk Like An Egyptian

Barack Obama, Constitution, Democracy, Democrats, Government, Liberty, Media, Middle East, Propaganda, Republicans, The State

“This just in: The Secret Service backed by the District of Columbia Police Department is battling thousands of protesters outside President Barack Obama’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ‘palace,’ prompting the socialist ‘leader to leave the building. Officers fired teargas at up to 10,000 demonstrators angered by Obama’s November … decree that expanded his powers. ‘The people want the downfall of the regime,’ the demonstrators chant. ‘Our marches are against tyranny and the constitutional … decree, and we won’t retract our position until our demands are met.'”

The excerpt was from “Walk Like an Egyptian,” the current column. Read more about “the competing realities presented” by an apoplectic press with “a stars-and-stripes bias,” and my hope that Americans act more like Egyptians.

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UPDATED: Spielberg’s ‘Pleasant Fiction’ About Abe

Film, Founding Fathers, History, Hollywood, Propaganda, Racism

Tom DiLorenzo says that “Spielberg’s Lincoln movie is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.” Lincoln didn’t use his political heft to push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He did, however, push for an earlier iteration, the “Corwin Amendment.” It “would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery”:

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his “political skills” to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a “pleasant fiction.” It never happened.
It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln.

MORE.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Writes Myron Pauli:

“I would like to correct one thing. The Congress that passed the Corwin 13th Amendment was not overwhelmingly Republican. There was a small House Republican majority but the (lame duck) Senate was Democratic (and only barely Republican if you count 14 Senators walking out) and a 2/3 majority is needed for an Amendment.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo245.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1858

Nevertheless, Lincoln did almost nothing (and impeded efforts) to stop the impending Civil War during the nearly 10 months from his election to the Battle of First Manassas. A professor of history from LSU (whose name I regrettably forgot) went over all the proposed compromises and Lincoln’s opposition/inaction to preventing war.

Ironically, the Crittenden and Peace Conference Plan compromises would have confined the extension of slavery into Arizona and New Mexico – regions so barren that they did not become states for another 40 years – and not conducive to plantation slavery whatsoever! To keep slavery out of Arizona (!!), over 600,000 people died, a region got impoverished, with more wounded and PTSD and
drug addicted, the income tax imposed, etc.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/peace.asp

Lincoln, of course, blamed the War on the South (or God – 2nd inaugural).”

The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy

Debt, Economy, Morality, Natural Law, Propaganda, Taxation

Here’s an excerpt from “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy,” the current WND column. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down the page to sign-up for it.

“Since the chicken-little metaphor is hackneyed, let us use the alleged lunacy of the lemming as a metaphor for the prattle that rises from the cattle that is America’s intelligentsia, in general, and on the fiscal cliff, in particular. ‘Alleged lunacy’ because the idea that the adorable fury critter plunges periodically to its death, en masse, is a figment of another intellectual powerhouse: the think tank known as the Walt Disney Company.

From the late-night talk show hosts and their guests to the daytime cable news comedians and their hangers-on: All are discussing the country’s impending and ‘horrifying’ collective tumble down the thing called the ‘fiscal cliff.’

As the fiscal-cliff chant goes, the country is headed for an economic precipice due to a bundle of laws that will take effect at the bewitching hour of midnight, Dec. 31, 2012. Only a compromise between our factioned overlords in D.C., who enacted the law in the first place, will avert mass suicide.

Let us unpack this linguistic construct.

At least some of the noisy nomenclature refers to a package of spending cuts, ‘deep, automatic cuts,’ by Barron’s telling, bundled in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

‘The federal budget deficit will be immediately cut in half, shrinking to approximately $641 billion in 2013 from the approximately $1.1 trillion in 2012,’ estimates financier Peter Schiff. I’m inclined to think of this ‘budget sequestration’ Wikipedia describes as ‘broad and shallow’ as nothing more than cuts to designated increases in spending.

However you slice it, why, pray tell, is this a bad thing?” …

Read “The Fiscal Cliff: A Lemming’s Lunacy” on WND. Receive the weekly column in your email. Scroll down to sign-up for it.

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