Vin Suprynowicz

We’ve been discussing topics where today’s Internet readers complain the Mainstream Media appear to report only one side — The Government Line. Last week we dealt with 1) the Sept. 11 attacks, and 2) childhood immunizations. Here are more:

3) Inflation is routinely reported as “slight; under control” in terms of consumer prices, when the economist’s actual definition of inflation is an increase in the money supply. Obama and his Federal Reserve Board have tripled the money supply — 300 percent inflation.

In this recession, as people are willing to work for less and able to pay less, prices should be tumbling. It takes a vastly high rate of currency inflation, backed by government interventions which prevent lower wages (the largest of these being “unemployment benefits” which hold unemployed workers off the market for 99 weeks, added to nonsense like “prevailing wage laws”) to nudge prices up — even slightly — at a time when the natural tendency of merchants would be to offer lower wages so they can charge lower prices and win back missing customers.

Ron Paul tried to talk about this kind of thing all winter, on the campaign trail. The Mainstream Press treated him like the crazy uncle in the attic.

The U.S. Congress, over the past century, has handed over its power to mint money and control its value and cost to a consortium of private bankers called the ”Federal Reserve Board,” whose goal is NOT to allow interest rates to float according to the free bids of borrowers and lenders (a “market,”) but rather to enforce uniform rates to achieve policy goals, wielding the coercive force of a government that can shut down banks at will, and then charge their executives with the crime of having “required” the feds to close them down.

Interest rates set by such a coercive consortium can dupe lenders and borrowers alike into thinking “This must be a pretty low-risk proposition: Look at the low interest rate!” Result: The Housing Bubble.

Eventually, all fiat currencies — those not directly convertible into gold or silver — collapse. Old people who have “saved for a rainy day” find their life savings will no longer buy a sandwich with a pickle. See Germany in 1921. Not pretty.

When the Lamestream Media covered a debate in which Ron Paul took part during the recent GOP primary campaign, how much space did your daily newspaper spend, explaining the background of what he was trying to talk about? How thoroughly have they informed us of the extent to which our megabanks — which incredibly were allowed to spare themselves any pain while dictating the supposed economic reforms following the collapse of that Housing Bubble — are still wrapped up in doomed fantasy derivatives like Br’er Rabbit hugging the Tar Baby?

To the informed Internet reader, it sure looks like the nation’s daily newspapers have chosen to parrot the government line on yet another topic, leaving us at the mercy of the bailed-out banksters.

4) The mainstream press loves to do features about the newest touchy-feely nanny state intervention in the world of children — the battle against “bullying.”

But how many reporters point out that the biggest bully in the government school system is … the government?

Of course children — especially adolescent males — are going to act out their anger at being caught up in a system where they are essentially imprisoned for half their waking day under threats of punishment and coercion. Tie a cord to the leg of an adolescent male cat, refuse to let him go explore where he wants, and watch him go nuts. Of COURSE they’ll strike out, in their frustration, at anything that comes within range.

Yet how many newspaper features end by suggesting “The conscript Red Army used to have a big problem with bullying, too. If you don’t like bullying, you might simply ask why they don’t make attendance at the government schools optional — impose no penalty or sanction on any student or his parents if he simply chooses not to attend. Peace would be restored, and the progress of the remaining students who WANT to be there might surprise you”?

None.

Government schools, which are nothing but giant union jobs programs and child holding pens, suck. Around the country and around the world, the best chance for kids to escape poverty is a good education, which increasingly means home-schooling or escaping the government youth camps to a decent private school.

“Something very strange is happening around the country: students are disappearing from America’s public schools,” reported Walter Russell Mead on July 26 at http://tinyurl.com/czgfb72. “The New York Times reports that many of the country’s largest school districts are rapidly losing students as parents lucky enough to have the choice switch their kids to private and charter schools. In the country’s largest school districts, public school enrollment is down by about 10 percent while charter school enrollment is up by more than 60 percent.”

Competition is here. As budgets finally constrict, the wardens of the violence-ridden government youth internment camps only make things worse by laying off teachers — especially those who teach “electives” — to protect their own phony-baloney administrative jobs.

Home schoolers and voucher activists find the information and support they need on the Internet, not in Mainstream newspapers and TV stations, who continue to use the phrase “the schools” (as though there’s only one kind) when they actually mean “the coercion-based government youth camps” — the ones that don’t work, because you can’t really FORCE a child to learn anything but how to hate you, along with the institution, the government, and the society you rode in on.

5) Wonder why you can’t drive out in the desert any more — why the trail or dirt road you used to use is now blocked off, rocks and dead Joshua trees dragged across, signage indicating vast acreages are now a “habitat restoration “ or “habitat study” area?

Do a Web search for the United Nations’ “Agenda 21” and an outfit called Local Governments for Sustainability, founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI.)

Yes, of course disarming us and herding us all into urban enclaves where we can ride little electric trolleys to our assigned work stations is absurd. I used to laugh at the absurd pomposity of these fat, dashiki-clad kleptocrats, too. But that doesn’t mean your local BLM and Forest Service and state “environmental protection” bureaucrats haven’t been thoroughly brainwashed to accept this crap — and now to attempt to put it into effect.

If they hate guns and big trucks so much, when are they going to give up THEIRS?

6) To their credit (though their tone makes it clear they don’t expect their readers to have heard anything about this, previously), Amy Harmon and Andrew Pollack of the New York Times reported on May 24: “For more than a decade, almost all processed foods in the United States — cereals, snack foods, salad dressings — have contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory” — Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs.) “Regulators and many scientists say these pose no danger. But as Americans ask more pointed questions about what they are eating, popular suspicions about the health and environmental effects of biotechnology are fueling a movement to require that food from genetically modified crops be labeled, if not eliminated.”

Labeling bills have been proposed in more than a dozen states over the last year, and an appeal to the Food and Drug Administration last fall to mandate labels nationally drew more than a million signatures. There’s even an iPhone app: ShopNoGMO.

“The most closely watched labeling effort is a proposed ballot initiative in California that cleared a crucial hurdle this month, setting the stage for a probable November vote that could influence not just food packaging but the future of American agriculture. …

“The heightened stakes have added fuel to a long-simmering debate over the merits of genetically engineered crops. …

“Almost all the corn and soybeans grown in the United States now contain DNA derived from bacteria. The foreign gene makes the soybeans resistant to an herbicide used in weed control, and causes the corn to produce its own insecticide,” the Times reports. Even Kashi cereals, which advertise themselves as natural, contain genetically modified soy.

(Ask any beekeeper what eventually happens to beehives whose workers bring home the pollen of corn — maize — plants that “produce their own insecticide.”)

The F.D.A. has said that labeling is generally not necessary because the genetic modification does not materially change the food.

“Farmers, food and biotech companies and scientists say that labels might lead consumers to reject genetically modified food — and the technology that created it — without understanding its environmental and economic benefits,” The Times explains.

Did we get that? Telling consumers the truth on product labels might lead them to make their own decisions about whether they want to buy this stuff.

Oh, the humanity!

Europeans require that such foods be labeled. Is this because they’re superstitious Third World savages? Next our home-grown Frankensteins want to modify salmon, to make them grow faster. Really.

Even better, “Rather than label food with what consumers might regard as a skull and crossbones, the companies say food producers may ultimately switch to ingredients that are not genetically modified, as they did in Europe,” the Times warns.

So the answer is to keep us in ignorance?

I’m not a physician, nor a geneticist. I don’t know if GMOs are safe. What I do know is that — justified or not — many efficacious drugs are kept out of this country for decades while the FDA demands vastly expensive testing, which can take decades.

When was the decades-long human testing to determine if GMOs are safe? The answer is that it’s ongoing right now: The Europeans are the control group; we’re the guinea pigs.

When asked if they wanted genetically engineered foods to be labeled, about 9 in 10 Americans said that they did, according to a 2010 Thomson Reuters-NPR poll.

Yet how much coverage of this dispute have you seen in your hometown newspaper, or on network TV?

In a future column: Electromagnetic Radiation, HIV and AIDS; Fluoride in the water.