Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
It was 1979 when the great, seminal British hard rock band Motörhead released their third studio album, “Bomber,” which is to this day one of my favorites. Of course, the title track, the anti-heroin warning “Dead Men Tell No Tales,” and the music-business-critique “All the Aces” might be the better-known tracks off that album; but one of my very favorite Motörhead songs of all time is the ninth track on the disk, “Talking Head,” the second verse of which is in the accompanying picture to this article. That Lemmy is describing British television news in the late 1970s and not US cable news in 2016 is a bit astounding to me given how well the words fit.
Of course, in the 21st Century USA we don’t have an overtly-government-run media company acting as the primary source of our information as a citizenry, unlike Lemmy’s late 70s-UK. Instead, we have several corporate owned broadcasters and their online counterparts as well as a literally endless array of “news sites” that aren’t affiliated with larger media companies and tend to be run by people who aren’t familiar with the basics of journalistic integrity. The resulting mass confusion isn’t all that different now than it was when Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy were recording that album.
I was set upon this course of thought by a hilariously hyperbolic article I found in my Facebook newsfeed from one of those aforementioned “news sites,” CounterCurrentNews. Turns out, Obama signed the “Monsanto Protection Act” into law earlier this week, potentially jeopardizing all life on planet earth. Well, to hear CounterCurrentNews tell it, anyway.
What the law actually does is ban judges from issuing orders to halt the harvest of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), namely the foods most humans eat all day. The law is super-evil because it was written by a Republican senator with close ties to Monsanto, the nation’s leading producer of GMO seeds and therefore the hippie left’s biggest boogeyman.
“’…the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] oversaw and approved (or denied) the testing of genetically modified seeds, while the federal courts retained the authority to halt the testing or sale of these plants if it felt that public health was being jeopardized. With HR 933 now a law, however, the court system no longer has the right to step in and protect the consumer,’” James Brumley of Investor Place was quoted in the article as saying.
Senator Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), was also quoted in the hilarious article defending the law, after CounterCurrentNews made sure to point out he worked with Monsanto to craft the bill’s language – because this is the first time any sort of public/private collusion on lawmaking has ever happened in the history of the United States, apparently.
“’What it says is if you plant a crop that is legal to plant when you plant it, you get to harvest it. But it is only a one-year protection in that bill,’” Blunt said in the article.
That detail, the one-year protection, seemingly negates the doom-is-nigh tone of the article’s opening, but, the author wasn’t willing to give it up that easily.
“One year could be all it takes to cause catastrophic damage to the environment by allowing laboratory-produced organisms to be planted into the earth without oversight. Under the Monsanto Protection Act, health concerns that arise in the immediate future involving the planting of GMO crops won’t be able to be heard by a judge. Blunt, a junior senator that has held elected office since the late ‘90s, has good reason to whitewash the very bill he helped craft. The Center for Responsive Politics notes that Sen. Blunt received $64,250 from Monsanto to go towards his campaign committee between 2008 and 2012. The Money Monocle website adds that Blunt has been the largest Republican Party recipient of Monsanto funding as of late,” reads the paragraph immediately following the quote by Blunt.
An astute reader will notice the total lack of attribution for the statement that is presented as fact. That first sentence is among the funniest things I’ve ever read. The idea that one season of planting a GMO crop could cause “catastrophic damage to the environment” has exactly no basis in fact or science at all. The idea that magical “government oversight” could somehow prevent this “catastrophic damage” is the sort of laughable naivetéö only statists are capable of.
Statists, in their nearly theistic adoration of the state, fail to recognize that all the various government “oversight” agencies typically fail to prevent things from happening but instead just issue fines and penalties after the fact. The Environmental Protection Agency has prevented exactly zero chemical spills while it oversees 1,322 Superfund sites that are still undergoing cleanup. The USDA doesn’t stop salmonella contamination at food processing plants, it helps track tainted products back to their source. Only very rarely does a government agency luck into actually doing something useful pro-actively. The idea that a federal judge, with our without the help of USDA, would know whether or not planting GMO seeds in the springtime will cause “catastrophic damage” to the environment by fall is pure madness; but taken as a given by the author of this silly-ass story.
Forty years ago, we had the newspapers and TV news to mislead us; nowadays we have to be mindful of millions of voices competing for our attention so they can fill our heads with their own self-serving lies. As always, they’re still just trying to teach you to be meek, ‘til all you are is weak, ‘til you’re just a talking head.
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