Wolf Sucks
Had a ridiculous fluff piece on this morning with Ann Veneman, Agriculture Secretary, about “good nutrition” for our school kids and all the love of the government school breakfast and lunch programs. Not once did Wolf ask, “Why did the USDA under the Bush administration almost immediately reverse food safety rules enacted by the Clinton administration testing for E.Coli and other dangerous food-borne illness in the meat supply fed at our schools, which I may add, kills 5,000 American children each year?”
Let’s take a closer look at Veneman:
Common Dreams:
Veneman has served as a key member of the Reagan and Bush administration farm teams, as director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture during the gubernatorial administration of agribusiness favorite Pete Wilson, as an agribusiness lawyer and as a member of the national steering committee of Farmers and Ranchers for Bush. In those positions she has rarely missed an opportunity to promote a free-trade regimen that advances the interests of international food production and processing conglomerates, to encourage policies that lead to the displacement of family farms with huge factory farms, to open public lands for mineral extraction and timbering, to support genetic modification of food and to defend biotech experimentation with agriculture. Indeed, Veneman is a biotech absolutist who served on the board of Calgene, the corporation that launched the first genetically engineered food in 1994. Veneman told a forum last year, “We simply will not be able to feed the world without biotechnology.”
[snip]
In addition, she was actively involved in negotiating the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. So determined is Veneman to advance the free-trade agenda that Bush transition team aides briefly considered her as a candidate for the position of U.S. trade representative before handing the keys to the Department of Agriculture, with its 100,000-member staff and $100 billion budget, to the woman who has already proven her willingness to sacrifice the interests of American farmers on the altar of trade liberalization. Even as family farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota were marching in the streets of Seattle to protest WTO interference with agricultural supports and food safety standards, Veneman was in Seattle to tell the WTO to move more aggressively to remove so-called “technical barriers to trade.”
Ann Veneman served on the board of directors for Calgene Inc. In 1994, Calgene became the first company to bring genetically-engineered food, the Flavr Savr tomato, to supermarket shelves. Calgene was bought out by Monsanto, the nation
comments