HR 2749 - A Stealth Agribusiness Empowering Act

HR 2749: A Stealth Agribusiness Empowering Act - by Stephen Lendman

America is the truest example of what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." Obama is upholding the tradition and then some.

In fact, in less than six months, he's done the impossible. With congressional Democrats, he's compiled a worse record than even his fiercest critics feared, worse than George Bush, straight across the board on both domestic and foreign policies that include:

-- looting the nation's wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;

-- proposing greater Fed empowerment and global monetary control, disguised as financial reform;

-- expanding unbridled militarism through continued foreign wars, occupations, and stepped up aggression on new fronts with the largest defense budget in history - greater than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;

-- its first coup d'etat in Honduras against its democratically elected president, an attempted regime change in Iran, and perhaps others ahead against independent leaders called national security threats while continuing to support the world's most ruthless and corrupt tyrants;

-- presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;

-- continuing the worst of the Bush administration's torture policies and practice of lawlessness;

-- targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;

-- illegally spying on Americans as aggressively as under George Bush;

-- destroying decades of hard won labor rights;

-- eroding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other New Deal and Great Society social gains;

-- trying to control the media more aggressively than Richard Nixon, according to veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas;

-- refusing help for budget-stricken states like California; forcing them to impose austerity by gutting welfare programs, education, health care for the poor, and other vital services at a time they're most needed; to be followed by bailout-rich banks, real estate developers, and other profiteers using "shock doctrine" tactics to buy state and other troubled assets on the cheap;

-- continuing to commodify education, end government responsibility for it, and make it another business profit center;