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A friend of mine tells a story about the political demise in the 1950s of an entrenched Oklahoma state representative, whom we'll call Elmer Goodenuff.
Rep. Goodenuff, who chaired the ag committee, had been in office so long that he'd grown tight with the capitol crowd, but he had lost touch with the folks back in his rural district. Thus, when some supermarket lobbyists asked him to sponsor a bill requiring that all egg producers be regulated by the state and have to pay an egg-grading fee, he saw no problem with the measure. It was for the public's health, the lobbyists told him. His constituents, however, did have a problem with it. In those days, many small farmers made their spending money by selling eggs fresh out of their chicken yards -- yet here was ol' Elmer hitting them with a bureaucratic rigmarole and a fee that would make their little egg stands more trouble than they were worth. It turns out that the supermarket lobbyists' real agenda had been to get rid of all these bothersome mom-and-pop competitors.
Suddenly, the chairman found himself facing political opposition -- a young lawyer from the home district had filed to run against him. Shortly afterward, the two candidates came together for a debate at the county fair. The lawyer spoke first, limiting his talk to only three sentences: "Hidy folks, I'm so-and-so, and I'll make you a good state representative. If you give me the chance, I'll fight for you ... not for the special interests. Now I yield the balance of my time to Mr. Goodenuff, so he can explain his egg bill to you." Still clueless, Elmer did try to explain it, but his explanation was hardly good enough -- the more he talked, the more votes he lost. His egg bill retired him.
Chicken trackers
I expect that many of today's state legislators and Congress critters -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- are going to experience their own Goodenuff comeuppance if they continue to go along with special interests pushing a new regulatory program that is presently roiling rural America into a full-tilt revolt. This is yet another of those sneaky programs blindly authorized under the screaming banner of "homeland security." It has received practically no mass-media coverage, but I'm sure you'll be excited to learn that the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) sets up a whole new surveillance program to defend you and yours from a rather odd national security threat: terrorist chickens. And terrorist cows, horses, pigs, sheep, llamas ... and so on. Advanced under the benign guise of protecting public health from outbreaks of animal-borne diseases, this program is intended to tag and track every farm animal in America from birth to death.
It is, to say the least, intrusive. NAIS would compel all owners of such animals to register their premises and personal information in a federal database, to buy microchip devices and attach them to every single one of their animals (each of which gets its very own 15-digit federal ID number), to log and report each and every "event" in the life of each animal, to pay fees for the privilege of having their location and animals registered, and to sit still for fines of up to $1,000 a day for any noncompliance.
This is Animal Farm meets the Marx Brothers!
It would be one thing if this were meant for the massive factory farms run by agribusiness conglomerates, which account for the vast number of disease outbreaks. After all, they have corporate staffs, computer networks, and existing systems of inventory tracking. But no -- rather than focus on the big boys that cause the big harm, NAIS targets hundreds of thousands of small farms, homesteaders, organic producers, hobbyists ... and maybe even you.
Me, you shriek?! Yes. If you keep a pony for your kids or board a couple of riding horses, if you've got a few chickens in your backyard, if you've got a potbellied pig or a pet goose, if your youngsters are raising a half-dozen ducks as part of a 4-H club project, if you maintain a buffalo or a goat just for the fun of it -- indeed, if you have any farm animals, NAIS wants you in its computerized grasp.
Every farm, home, horse stable, or other domicile of these animals would have to have its address and precise GPS coordinates filed into the system's central computer, along with the name, phone number, and other personal data of the owner/ renter of the premises. Owners of the animals would have to tag every one of them (luckily, fish ponds are not included!) with an approved tracking mechanism -- most likely by implanting radio-frequency ID chips into them.
Then comes the burden of logging and reporting the "events" in each animal's life. These not only include sales and deaths, but also any movement of the animals off the registered premises, including taking them to a vet, going to a horse show, presenting them for judging at the county fair, trucking them to another farm and participating in a roundup or sporting event.
This is far more onerous than the burden put on owners of guns and autos, the only two items of personal property presently subject to general systems of permanent registration. Gun owners, for example, can take their guns off their premises (to go hunting, attend a gun show, or just carry them around) without filing a report with the government. But NAIS would deny this freedom to chicken owners! The authorities are declaring hens to be more dangerous than a Belgian FN Five-SeveN handgun, and every time Hen No. 8406390528 strays from her assigned GPS locale, NAIS autocrats would require her owner to report within 24 hours the location, duration and purpose of her departure -- or be subject to a stiff fine.
See more stories tagged with: agriculture, corruption, government waste, nais, usda, livestock, farmers
From "The Hightower Lowdown," edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer, September 2007. Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back.
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