MA AND PA KETTLE MEET THE EPA



Beck’s ineptly made but vital point:

Gentle readers, villainy is afoot in our Obamanation, and this, we fully realize, is news that will shock nobody—well, except for that 68 year old guy we heard talking with Glenn Beck the other day who thinks Barack is “a great president, doing a fine job,” and who couldn’t so much as manage a guess as to what “socialism” meant, except he decided, “it isn’t American—we don’t have that here!”—he might be a bit shocked if he reads this—but the odds of him being a WOOF reader are—well—remote. And we digress already. Is that a record? But we did want to say something else about Glenn Beck, namely that he was talking to a friendly politician the other day on his show about the alarming growth of Google as a monopolizer of power within the new national socialist construct of Omerica. Beck, of course, makes a good point. Google’s corporate advances since we caught them building those mystery barges last Halloween (click here if you want the info), are ruthless, rapacious, and geared to maximize control and knowledge of the American family home and any communications incoming or outgoing.

Now we have Google’s recent 3.2 billion-dollar acquisition of the Nest Corporation (the smart meter people who want to know what’s going on in your home, beginning with your temperature settings) and overnight expansion into controlling almost every aspect of the Internet— but you probably noticed that too, right? So you would probably think this was going to be all about the subversive threat posed by Google, unless you read WOOF a lot, in which case you know it’s probably just the opening thought and we’re really going to switch shortly to talking about agricultural—really—but first our point about Beck.: He was talking to Mike Lee, (of whom WOOF predictably and thoroughly approves), and elicited Lee’s promise to help constrain the proliferation of Google as a speedily metastasizing corporate malignancy. And WOOF was pleased to hear Senator Lee express agreement. Pleased indeed. But it was impossible for fair-minded individuals (as we all are in the WOOF cave, except for maybe one or two oddballs), to hear Glenn beck urging Senator Lee to reign in a dangerously bloated corporate entity without bethinking ourselves of the many criticisms Beck has aimed at Teddy Roosevelt for acting on similar impulses.

Friedman’s well made and even better point:

Shortly, a caller dialed in, who professed to be a libertarian and who took Beck to task for the seeming hypocrisy of his position against Google. This was a magnificent opportunity for Beck to make a brilliant point, but he forgot his Milton Friedman. Had he recalled it at that moment, he would have quoted Friedman to the effect that almost all monopolies become monopolies because of governmental privilege. “Sources of monopoly are government intervention,” Friedman taught (click here for confirmation )—yet Beck lost his poise and handled the caller clumsily –and then churlishly, browbeating him a bit for his perceptions whilst clumsily attempting to distinguish between monopolies he wished to sustain (the good ones that weren’t in cahoots with big government) and the bad ones, like Google, that he wished to see defunded by Mike Lee and the other white hats in Congress. WOOF’s point, like Friedman’s point, is that no distinction need be drawn—and just as an aside, the beatdown the caller received need not have occurred, because the caller would have been better served by an education than by the snarly, mean-spirited treatment his polite inquiry earned him. This must not be construed as an anti-Beck rant, by the way, because WOOF does not indulge in anti-Glenn-Beck rants—WOOF, in fact, thoroughly admires Glenn Beck, but his maladroit handling of that particular caller reminded us that monopoly is a poorly understood evil that is, as Dr. Friedman strove to make clear, almost invariably a ramification of unrestrained government.

And Google is a simple case to make—remember, for instance, when the company got caught collecting and storing private user information plus passwords and private emails from a vast array of Wi-Fi networks? (For whom do you suppose?) And the FTC was really going to give ‘em what for, remember? Except they shelved the entire investigation citing “promises from the company” as sufficient cause to drop the case. And this is only the tip of the proverbial ice berg, Woofketeers…and no, this screed isn’t actually about Google, and it isn’t actually about Brother Beck . It’s actually about agriculture, we swear.

But first, digress with us a bit more—you’ll see why it’s important! You know how you sometimes foolishly say something about budget cutting at a party and some ultra-predictable college professor who turns out to be an adjunct film teacher at the local community college chuckles and says, “Ooooh, sure—every one wants to trim the budget, but would you mind telling me just where you’d start when there isn’t a dime to spare anywhere?” (These shrewd eristics also come armed nowadays with a complete roster of horrors and deprivations allegedly visited upon us by sequestration.) They will unblinkingly insist that even a nickel’s delay in the rate of budgetary increase will spell doom for all kids on dialysis while suicide prevention lines shut down coast to coast, and Korean War vets all have to forgo any hope of subsidized dental or podiatric care. Perhaps, like us, you are already accustomed to leaving such pundits gasping incredulously by suggesting a few cuts they never seem to think of. Eliminating the Department of Education, the Consumer Protection Agency, OSHA, the FCC, the Department of Education, the Postal Service, and almost all foreign aid, just for starters. These cuts would constitute a good beginning—and will almost always, in and of themselves, leave your opponents sputtering, but nothing makes them quite as apoplectic as when you add, “Oh yeah, and the Department of Energy– there’s a savings of 31 billion a year—let’s get rid of that, too!” And If you want to make them really crazy, just add, “Heck, that’d buy 20 B-2 bombers!) True, we of WOOF get kicked out of a lot of faculty parties….but anyway:

Do you ever pay attention to what the Department of Energy gets up to? We know you have a lot on your mind out there—but you probably remember, if you think about it, that like a lot of our allegedly indispensable governmental departments, The Department of Energy is pretty new on the scene. It goes back to when Jimmy carter, formerly our nation’s worst president, noted that OPEC was putting a squeeze on oil supplies in 1973 and decided in true liberal fashion that a department of the government with a cabinet position should be established to ensure the continued flow of oil and gasoline to Americans. The result, predictably, was gas rationing, oil shortages, and a nationwide energy crisis, mainly brought about by central planners attempting to micromanage a huge portion of the economy (about which they knew nothing whatsoever), and the means of distributing its products.

The Democrat War on Eagles

There was the memorable (although, come to think of it, swiftly forgotten) incident involving Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary who took time out of her lavishly extravagant international gallivanting at tax payers’ expense to allow the Red Chinese to ransack Los Alamos for it nuclear secrets. O’Leary was caught, but quickly cleared of wrong doing by fellow cabinet appointee Janet Reno—remember Janet “Fireball” Reno–the hero of Waco and the savior of Elian Gonzales? But anyhow—the Department shows up occasionally and annoyingly in the alternative media for this or that bothersome irregularity—and might have played a role in the ongoing war against eagles except that the hot potato got passed to the Department of the Interior. Please begin to notice the amount of seemingly illogical shuffleboard that goes on in these instances—it will come up again.

An already embattled Department of Energy breathed a sigh of relief as Obama’s Secretary of the Interior announced last December she will allow companies to kill or injure eagles without fear of prosecution for up to three decades…in the sacred name of green energy, naturally. Gosh, green energy is a curious priority, isn’t it? It enabled Our Beloved Helmsman to spend 3.5 trillion in stimulus dollars to effectuate an economic recovery that never happened, partly because so many of those dollars went into green energy hustles that subsequently filed for bankruptcy—or simply faded into the verdant woodlands. It enabled him to shelve GM’s promising hydrogen car research and redirect it entirely to the phlegmatic “Volt.” It kills our national birds off in unprecedented numbers, (go green!) but gets a free pass from the government, and, as Beck was by way of pointing out, demands the installation of spyware throughout the home by Google and its acquired host of minion enterprises. (Yes, that’s green too- you are handing over control of your thermostat and air conditioner to ward off global warming, remember?) And think of the wreckage it levies against the nation’s economy.

The Department of Transportation meanwhile is steadfastly promoting mass transit which must also be green, of course, meaning costly and impractical, and government managed, meaning unreliable, thus impeding the American citizen’s freedom to drive himself about at will, by which heedless and renegade activity he may in the past have contributed to the melting of the polar caps…thus hastening the submergence of New York, Long Island, and most of and New Jersey. The thoughtlessness—the sheer thoughtlessness…and when did we drag the Department of Transportation into this ragout? Well just now—because we are about to make the point that focusing on cabinet-and-departmental-level malfeasances as isolated instances of dysfunction is like trying to keep one’s eye on the face-down queen of hearts while a card huckster shuffles her around and between a pair of additional face-down cards. The hustler’s magicianship always triumphs through the powers of misdirection and distraction.

Three-Card Monte at cabinet level…and beyond!

Remember when the Department of Energy’s czar, Secretary Steven Chu, announced that one of his goals was to bring American gas prices as high as those in Europe? This stimulated a momentary outrage before we as a nation returned our thoughts to the caprices of Miley Cyrus and the Biebs. So when it came time to let Americans know that if they want to make green energy they’re going to have to frappe a few eagles, the official pronouncement came not from the Department of Energy, but rather from the Department of the Interior—surely this places the chore in less controversial hands and serves to further neutralize any waftage of taint associated with crazy ex-energy czar and Obama-green radical fanatic Steven Chu, right? And who was he, again?

No, it tosses the issue to one Sally Jewell, ideological keeper of the flame over at DOI, about whom more momentarily. Note that it tosses the issue in the same fashion that a lateral pass is tossed in football–to confuse the opposition through misdirection. Now we see that Sally has the ball—but she’s not that Chu nutcake—surely she’s okay?

But, no, Ms. Jewell is not a daisy; not a daisy at all. Ms. Jewell is just the newest addition to Mr. Obama’s second-term team of dedicated ideologues. It is in fact Ms. Jewell’s (relatively unknown) history on the environmental fringe, and her radically Luddite policy prescriptions, that prove her to be one more standard Obama shill in the cabinet version of Three-card Monte. How on earth congress approves such malignant flower-power leftovers to positions of authority continues to boggle rational minds, and also ours here at WOOF. The president knew he could trust Ms. Jewell to do for the federal government exactly what she’d done at an activist level: Lock down developmentally promising acreage, target industries, kill traditional jobs, and promote green jobs that will never exist because her green industry initiatives consistently flop.

So what we here endeavor to make manifest to the discerning reader is the increasing symbiosis and interchangeability of the cabinet functions—a kind of melding of the various tasks they represent into the larger context of dialectical materialism—the onward march of international socialism. In this cause, individual departmental interests slowly morph into a kind of Marxian singularity. And since Marx unashamedly stole a good portion of his ideas from Hegel (who can’t really be blamed for their misappropriation) the Marxian dialectic ends each new historic dispensation with a newly concentrated, more intensely focused synthesis which is more purely, more openly Marxist than earlier versions. In his book, Marxism, the brilliant Tom Sowell wrote, “What Marxian philosophy derived from Hegel was that the way to understand the world was not to see it as a collection of things, but as an evolving process.”

Interior desecraters…

This helps explain how Obama’s cabinet posts and “czardoms” function with the smooth, unified, ideological precision of a finely tuned socialist juggernaut. The goal is plain enough, although most Americans refuse to consider it: The destruction of America’s super power status and economic primacy by whatever means necessary. The function of the Obama cabinet is entirely dedicated to this purpose, overlapping smoothly in many areas while maintaining the appearance of variously interested cohorts. Why, for instance, can’t the department of energy chop up eagles as proficiently as it hands out millions to manufacturers of defective solar batteries? Because the responsibility has been laterally passed to Department of Interior radical, Sally Jewell. The criticism is thus spread out, and the tendency to focus criticism on any one department is depressed. Think of the cabinet departments under Obama as a pie chart on a crank, and when one turns the crank the chart revolves faster and faster, until it becomes one big unified circle, its colors blending into Marxist Red. Got the image? Good, now add medicine and the IRS and things get really scary.

Here’s a toughy: What is the Environmental Protection Agency doing this week to keep us green and promote environmental safety? Are they shutting down coal burning factories and power plants? Making certain we can’t avail ourselves of cheap nuclear power while driving up the price of carbon fuels to unaffordable heights? Possibly shutting down a Marine artillery range because a rare snail darter has been spotted frolicking in a pond thereabouts? Isn’t that pretty much what we expect from your EPA?

Well, there’s that of course, gentle readers, but also so much more! After all, besides all that we’ve naturally come to expect from our EPA, how many of us would suspect that they are also an important instrument in assaulting American agriculture? Yes, there’s more deviltry afoot from the new, Marxian Uni-Cabinet, (subsector EPA), and you just wait until President Obama finds out about this (provided anyone asks him about it) because he’ll definitely exclaim to the throngs of lobotomized reporters that this sort of thing just isn’t supposed to be going on, that it isn’t what our country is supposed to be all about, and that he’s going to personally look into it! And all the reporters will write that down and print it and say it to each other on television despite the fact that only the possessor of a freakishly nanoid brain could avoid concluding that the president himself ordered and oversaw the mischief.

“…a betrayal of trust.”

It was the Environmental Protection Agency that suddenly got up one morning last week and decided the time had come to leak a whole bunch of information, a la Snowden, or Asange—except that the material leaked by EPA contained no bombshell revelations about government secrets. Rather than that, the agency simply released a torrent of information on no fewer than 100,000 private citizens who happen to be agriculture industry workers, including their home address and phone numbers, GPS coordinates and even personal medical histories. The agency later acknowledged that none of this information should ever have been made public, and even went through the comic charade of asking the recipients…and this is our favorite part– to give it back.

America’s farming community is up in arms over the casual info dump. Mace Thorton, a spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation, put it succinctly, saying, “If someone is setting out to create mischief at these locations, basically the government gave them a road map,” Mace expatiated, “It is very clearly an unjustified intrusion into citizens’ private lives by the government. And it is a betrayal of trust.” After a bit more thought on the subject, Mace Thornton announced that the American Farm Bureau Federation will participate in a joint lawsuit against the EPA.

The EPA responded with the implausible (to put it charitably) announcement that it had “collected all the erroneous disclosures,” thus somehow putting the genie back in the bottle. As an apparent good faith gesture, the EPA proceeded to send out batches of fresh disclosures, but this time with sensitive information redacted. Comes now Caroline Behringer to explain on behalf of the EPA that the redacted versions were actually an exchange for the former (illegal) disclosures. According to Behringer, the “EPA redacted that information and asked the FOIA requesters to return the [previous] information.” And amazo, folks: “All requestors have returned the original data.” Now that deserves an award for far-fetchedness, along with Behringer’s solemn acknowledgment that, indeed, “ … EPA determined that some personal information that could have been protected under FOIA was inadvertently released.” Or to be more exact, the names of farmers, ranchers, and in many instances their employees as well as their places of work and residence in over 29 states were released. These data were “inadvertently” released to the Natural Resource Defense Council, The Pew Charitable Trust, and Earth Justice. We must take it on faith that none of the members of any of these radical organizations kept any copies of the original documents—that each and every one of them was returned unread, as it were, in exchange for the redacted versions.

Off the pigs?

The American Farm Bureau filed suit jointly with the National Pork Producers Council, who have good reason to consider the pork crop in jeopardy as a result of the EPA “leaks.” AFBF President Bob Stallman said in a statement:“We are sticking up for the tens of thousands of farmers and ranchers whose personal information would end up in the public domain,” Of course, the problem with that is—it already has.

Stallman noted the majority of farmers and ranchers live with their families on the farms they work personally. “We support transparency and frequently advocate for increased government transparency,” he told reporters,“but publicly sharing spreadsheet upon spreadsheet of tens of thousands of peoples’ names, addresses and other personal information is not transparency in the workings of government – it is an invasion of the personal privacy of citizens.” Gosh, President Stallman, you got that exactly right–especially considering that, according recent FBI reports, domestic eco-terrorists “…are believed to engage in significant intelligence gathering against potential targets, including the review of industry/trade publications and other open-source information, photographic/video surveillance of potential targets, obtaining proprietary or confidential information about intended victim companies through theft or from sympathetic insiders, and posting details about potential targets on the Internet for other extremists to use as they see fit.” Translated from FBI-ese that means it’s a particularly bad idea to give away info about potential terror targets on the Internet.

A shot in the dark…

Who in his right mind takes offense at farmers, or seeks to do them harm? Well, the problem, of course, is that a lot of people aren’t in their right minds. It is not offered much coverage in the Liberal Establishment Media, but family farms, ranches, and cattle processing facilities have been frequent targets of militant domestic groups Two years ago, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) claimed credit for a fire that caused $2 million in damage to a farm in California’s San JoaquinValley. The group issued a statement afterward ending with the words, “until next time.” It will not astonish our readers to learn that no arrests have been made. Following a 2003 bombing, an email to the FBI from the suspected perpetrators stated, “You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom….Or maybe it will be a shot in the dark.” We have come a long way, it seems, from what Edith Efron used to call the “save the fishies” movement.

Since the early ‘90s many animal rights organizations and radicalized groups of environmentalists have carried out hundreds of terrorist actions against America’s farming and ranching communities. It is conservatively estimated that damage from arson, vandalism and animal-release escapades already amounts to upwards of $100 million. Despite claims that no one has been injured in such actions, the fact is that enviro-terrorists often employ pipe bombs, mailed packages booby-trapped with razor blades, and physical assaults on scientists involved in agricultural research. And while ALF remains the best known cohort of farm and ranch blasters, they have a lot of company. Other threats and acts of violence have emanated from ELF (the Earth Liberation Front), who first won media attention with their New Year’s Eve destruction (by arson) of the University of Michigan’s Agriculture Hall – a symbolic gesture that caused $1 million in damage and destroyed offices involved in a project to enhance crop development in third-world countries. There are competing groups with names like Earth First, SHAC (Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty), and, of course, PETA. And these groups are powerfully financed by a variety of sources including PETA and the French conglomerate Groupe Danone which channels funds into the pockets of enviro-activists through their American holding, Stonyfield Organic. Considering all of this (and this is just a smattering of the examples to be had), why would the EPA visit potential violence and destructiveness on one-hundred thousand ranchers, farmers and their employees in 29 states?

Because in the ObamaNation the small farmers must be swept from the scene just as certainly as the kulaks were erradicated by Joseph Stalin. (Kulaks were a class of successful, independent farmers who resisted handing over their private farmlands to the Soviet collective. About 30,000 kulaks were shot on the spot while an additional 2 million were starved to death or sent to Siberia. We guess no matter how bad American farmers have it, somebody else had it worse!)

Meet John Beale…

John Beale is now a news item—at least on FOX, and in more muffled tones on CNN and MSNBC. It is now widely known that this former EPA officer managed to con taxpayers out of a cool million by pretending to be a CIA agent—but of more interest (actually) are Beale’s admissions to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee before which he testified to some fairly devious plotting and scheming while at EPA involving himself and his boss, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who was at that time in charge of the Office of Air and Radiation. According to Beale, while he was with the EPA he was part of a major effort to “modify the DNA of the capitalist system.” Beale told the committee that capitalism “…is not a God-given system that was created once and never changes. It changes all the time.” He testified that he and Gina McCarthy were part of an agency effort to essentially hinder free enterprise through the application of what he called “green economics.”

Daniel Kish, a senior vice president at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Research, who may well be the most naïve man in America, characterized Beale’s testimony as a“Smoking gun,” adding, “For years, we have been saying the real agenda behind this administration’s energy and environmental policies is just what President Obama has said it is: to fundamentally transform America. In his testimony under oath, Beale, perhaps unwittingly, has laid bare the administration’s end goal. The President’s policies are not about carbon, they are not about coal, they are not even about energy and the environment. … These policies are not about energy, but power.”

Well, there’s a news flash! But what Mr. Kish seems to be overlooking in his excited condition is that no American with an IQ greater than his hat size and an ounce of insight doesn’t already know this…and a smoking gun? Well, Mr. Kish, a smoking gun is useless if nobody notices it, and the Liberal Establishment Media aren’t going to give this story any feet. Within days there will be fewer Americans aware of who John Beale is than can tell you about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, or Rosengate. But that’s not important now, gentle readers—what’s important is that we know—and we can easily interpret the EPA’s illegal endangerment of thousands upon thousands of agricultural workers as another adventure in “green economics.” But it was more than that—it was another step toward tightening the government’s grip on the big three: Energy, Medicine, and Food…and, gentle readers, this isn’t so much green economics as red economics!

The coming agri-monopoly

This is where we’re supposed to begin ranting about Monsanto, right? Well, almost. We at WOOF keep a jeweler’s eye on Monsanto, to besure; and right now they are in the catbird’s seat with the Obama Administration—but this is simply because they are playing the game best. It is too early to call the shots in the efforts to create a uni-farm conglomerate that will find common purpose with Big Government– any corporation that wishes to enter the competition to monopolize the farming industry and play on the administration’s team is in the running. This is survival-of-the-fittest corporatism based on the German model created by Hjalmar Schacht for Adolf Hitler.

Back when Obama’s Agricultural Secretary Dudley Butler was rampaging around, hollering about the meat industry and how he was going to bust up the monopolies it was spawning, and all the crunchy-lib and eviro-nutty websites were oozing praise for Obama’s magnificent fight against food-industry giganticism, WOOF was, even then, laughing up its figurative sleeve. Dudley, like his more famous namesake, was probably too busy trying to accomplish good deeds to realize he was a pawn in the game—a walking cover story for what the Obamans were actually up to—and when Dudley quit in frustration because (somehow or other) every one of his noble salients got blunted in the federal system, he probably did some serious head scratching. Justice was so convincing in its excoriations of Big Agra that it took Christine Varney (an assistant attorney general) and Philip Weisner, crusading justice department attorney, a while longer to catch on and drop out in frustration.

The oldest trick….

As Sharon Kelly, an environmental lawyer and by no means a right-wing conspiracy theorist wrote in a recent article, “Not only have efforts [to halt the establishment of food-industry monopolies]…fallen short, but in some cases, the programs the federal government does fund seem to accelerate this trend [WOOF’s italics].” How did this come about while left-of-center websites unanimously raved about President Obama’s dedicated efforts to halt the advance of monopolies in the farming, dairy, beef and pork industries? Why are the results of all this presidential dedication to monopoly busting accelerating the trend toward monopoly, as noted by Ms. Kelly? In fact, why did the US Department of Justice ultimately announce, come 2012, it had closed its investigation into possible anticompetitive practices in the seed industry? And doesn’t this seem like déjà-vu when we recall the FTC suddenly shelving the Google probe citing “promises from the company” as sufficient unto the day?

This is the oldest trick in Dear Leader’s playbook—it began with “how to wreck the economy while speechifying about saving it,” and,” “how to blow up the middle east while having news reporters rave about ‘Arab Spring,’” It ran straight through to making common cause with agri-monopolists while speechifying about breaking them up. The death of investigative journalism means that everyone prints the bull (Obamian, not Papal) and nobody notices reality.

According to a study released by the Center for Rural Affairs only about 5 percent of the nearly $500 million spent by the US Department of Agriculture on research and grant programs went to projects benefiting small producers. Indeed, as the Washington Times recently noted, the agricultural industry is currently dominated by five major players. Four large corporations control 84% of beef packing and 66% of pork production, and one company (yes, Monsanto) controls more than 93% of soybeans and 80% of corn grown in the United States. As Jeff Siegel remarked in WealthDaily, “I don’t care which side of the aisle you call home — there is a very real and very dangerous connection between the Obama administration and Monsanto.” WOOF would merely amend this to say, “…between Obama and whoever looks like they will monopolize and synthesize!” This government’s intent has always been to monopolize America’s resources, either through direct ownership, or Third Reich-style corporatism.

The Great Uniter

Now, if you have survived these many paragraphs, you understand why we began this screed by rehearsing Milton Friedman’s observation that the “sources of monopoly are government intervention.” What’s increasingly apparent is that Obama’s legacy will be chiefly one of calculated “dialectical” advances toward the goal of centralized power achieved by synthesis. Under Obama’s leadership, mass communications are becoming one, the news media have become one (with a few obvious exceptions about which liberals complain ad nauseam), medical services are becoming one (and will soon be single-payer, you’ll see!), the various cabinet posts have become one, Democrats and RINOs on the Hill have become one, and our domestic sources of energy are en route to becoming one. And soon our domestic sources of food will be streamlined into one or two corporate cut-outs and irretrievably interwoven with government. In this context, however ironically, by the time President Obama’s second term expires (if indeed it expires at all), he may well have earned the title “the Great Uniter” …and for the most purposefully divisive president in American history, that’s quite an achievement!

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WOOF WISHES TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THIS ARTICLE’S SPLASH PICTURE (The “enhanced” Grant Wood painting) was borrowed from the website BEETHOVEN’S CAFE XV–and we aren’t really sure who they are or what they do–even after trying to figure it out–but we hope they don’t mind us using the pic, and if they do we know we’ll hear about it! (And replace it with something equally sophisticated!) –The Management