OCCUPY WALL STREET

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/don-ca...b_1035295.html

The Food Movement Must Fight a "Secret Farm Bill"

"The farm subsidy lobby and a handful of their powerful Congressional allies are working overtime to skirt normal democratic processes, write a farm bill behind closed doors and slip it into law through the congressional Super Committee. But their plan to write a secret farm bill is finally showing up on the political radar.

The San Francisco Chronicle's intrepid Carolyn Lochhead put it this way on the paper's politics blog yesterday:

Leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture Committees are attempting a breathtaking end-run around the democratic process. They are hatching their own farm bill in private and plan by Nov. 1 take it to the new deficit Super Committee to be enacted whole, without votes in their own committees or in Congress.

Lochhead went on to predict that a secret farm bill, written by politicians from subsidy-heavy states, is certain to short-change California's diverse agriculture yet again. Add to the list of likely losers: conservation interests, local and organic food advocates, defenders of down-and-out Americans who depend on food stamps and just about anyone else who'd like the farm bill to do more than bankroll industrial-scale commodity farming -- GMOs, pesticides and all."

This is only part of the article.