Welcome to the New Feudalism

If you have any doubt that the very rich have decided to do away with the relevance of the middle class, you need look no farther than the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 and the current S510 bill in Congress.

The former effectively made it illegal for any individual or small-scale manufacturer to produce anything for sale for use by children, through demanding such absurd testing that no small producer can possibly afford to meet the requirements - and ANY breach allows the producer to be hauled into civil court and slapped with a million dollar fine. It applies to anything sold for use by children, including books, and it makes no exception for used, hand-made, or unique items. It has been used already to shut down thrift stores - places that sell NOTHING new! - in my own state. I have ceased to offer to produce anything in my own shop that is not in adult sizes, and many others in my position have done likewise. Do you really think that having only suppliers of the size of Wal-Mart will make your children safer?

It gets worse...

S510, which has not yet passed but shows signs of getting to the President's desk too soon, effectively makes it illegal (through grossly impractical or factually impossible paperwork requirements) for local small farmers to sell anything direct to the consumer, or sell it at all in most cases; it will also severely degrade the quality of produce available to restaurants, many of which rely on nearby small farms to obtain supplies of the quality of vegetables that you just can't get any other way. It takes the current privilege-of-monetary-power of hyper-abusive giants like Monsanto, to run roughshod over the production end, and enshrines those unconscionable practices as rights under the law; in some cases, it enlists the government itself in visiting those abuses upon the farmers. And it denies access to the market to any who dare try to simply continue the old, traditional ways of food production that have served humanity well for millennia.

Many links are out there about this; here's just one: http://hartkeisonline.com/food-politics/s510-may-mean-10-years-in-prison-for-farmers/

If this passes, it can be fairly said that we no longer have a government of, by or for the people; it will have passed to a tyrannic rule of the corporations and moneyed few, and will remain so unless WE get off our collective asses and vote in some people who have the integrity and unpurchasability to restore the government's true role as the protector of the RIGHTS of the people. This is NOT the goal of the Tea Party, whose dupes of the rich are simply seeking to dismantle the only remaining mechanism that might have a chance of being reformed to serve us again - the government itself. This is NOT the goal of the Republican Party, which is funded by those same corporations and moneyed few. This is also, sadly, NOT the goal of the current Democratic administration, which has utterly failed to meet any of the reasonable expectations that came from its win in 2008. But I see no party other than the Democrats which might be possible to direct toward this end; the Tea Party makes a joke of itself at every turn, and the Republicans...are Republicans, dedicated to precisely the opposite goal from what is needed.

Postscript: The Tester Amendment to S510 exempts only the smallest farms - those with a gross revenue of under $500,000 per year, who are no threat to Big Farma - from the documentation requirements of the bill and from some of the USDA-backed meddling in their operational practices which results from it. This does not really change the impact of the bill very much; although the kind of semi-pro small-scale farmer who sells direct to the public at a small-scale farmer's market in the town square would probably be exempt, the kind of farmer that's running an operation large enough to reliably supply a dozen restaurants with fresh vegetables, eggs and other products would almost certainly fall under the regs - and probably succumb. It's fair to say that the *average* family farmer is still directly under threat from this bill, and it is certain that the bill does more to erode the overall long-term safety of the food stream than to bolster it; the idea that forcing agriculture to be done only via the methods used by the largest industrial farms (where quality control is nothing more than a very bad joke, and the only thing that matters is the appearance and quantity of product that goes out the gate) is what needs to be struck down, and that basically means that this bill needs to be soundly defeated. Just look at who's really supporting S510; the same Big Farma outfits that essentially created it. This is a case of the fox demanding that only foxes be allowed to guard a henhouse, folks. It's NOT good for any of us. If you think letting the huge agribusinesses run the show is a good idea, think back to the last time you bought one of those huge, perfect-looking peaches in late summer...and it turned out to be lovely on the outside, and tasteless (and often half-rotten) on the inside. That's the kind of food that comes from following USDA "Best Practices", and NO farmer should be forced to follow them!