The Hightower Report

FDA Gives In to Food Torturers

Why do food manufactures hate food?

I'm not talking about farmers, food artisans, or local food enterprises – but about the corporate giants of agribusiness that insist on torturing nature's delicious, nutritional edibles for their own fun and profit. They take food into their labs to alter its genes; they turn grass-eating animals into cannibals; they douse fruits and veggies with toxic chemicals; they juice up milk cows with artificial sex hormones; they contaminate meat with deadly bacteria – and, now, in the name of "food safety," they want to zap our dinner with high doses of radiation.

In August, George W.'s industry-cozy U.S. Food and Drug Administration stiffed consumer advocates and common sense by authorizing the irradiation of spinach and lettuce. Never mind that hitting food with extra-powerful X-rays causes the loss of flavor, texture, and nutrition, while also making the product more expensive – this is a weapon that Big Agbiz wants in its arsenal, so the Bushites delivered. Only a handful of irradiation units exist, meaning the food products have to be shipped hundreds of miles to be treated, thus wasting energy and further driving up costs.

What we have here is technology run amok. Rather than simply cleaning up the industrial processes that contaminate our food, the corporate powers are demanding a quick, high tech fix from government, consumers be damned. The next step for the contaminators is to get the FDA to eliminate the "irradiated" label that's presently required on zapped food products. The industry is asking for something more benign, like "purified."

If they're going to torture our food, at least they should have to tell us about it, labeling it honestly so we can decide whether we want to buy it. To get informed and involved, call the watchdog group Food & Water Watch: 202/683-2500.

Protecting the Integrity of Our Votes

The medical profession has a useful rule: First, do no harm. Congress has no such rule.

Thus, wanting to look like they're "doing something," it's common for Congress critters to approach a problem by introducing a bill that does more harm than good. Such is the case with a bipartisan bill in the senate to "fix" the problem of unreliable, fraud-prone electronic voting machines.

These computerized systems are infamous for miscounting and manipulating our votes. The worst feature is that the machines provide no verifiable paper record of how each voter casts his or her ballot, instead asking us to have faith that the computer is tallying everything accurately and honestly. Voters all across the country have learned the hard way that "faith-based" voting is not to be trusted, and they've forced many districts to scrap the faulty machines in favor of systems that give us paper records.

Voters also are pushing for a national law to restore ballot integrity. Unfortunately, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and Bob Bennett, a Republican, have responded with a "reform" bill that is as fraudulent as the machines themselves. Instead of requiring a paper record of every vote, their bill bows to the manufacturers of electronic systems, allowing one computer to verify the honesty of another, with no human eyes permitted to see the actual votes. The Feinstein-Bennett bill does harm to America's electoral system, for it poses as reform without delivering it, essentially giving federal sanction to the inherent fraud of paperless electronic voting machines.

Come on, senators, this is not that hard of a problem to fix – if you'll just go at it straight. To restore integrity to our vote count, require paper ballots (or at least a paper record) for every vote cast. That's it. For help, go to www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org.

For more information on Jim Hightower's work – and to subscribe to his award-winning monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown – visit www.jimhightower.com. You can hear his radio commentaries on KOOP Radio, 91.7FM, weekdays at 10:58am and 12:58pm.