When The Act of Reporting a Crime is It's Self Deemed a Crime -- The Corpse of Franz Kafka is Spinning Madly in His Grave . . .

Jeebus....

Your wonderful, conservative, patriotic, American business community doing what they do best - working behind closed doors to shield their wrongdoing from public view - only this time they are taking it an alarming step further:

S1337 would make it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, to simply photograph or videotape abusive, unsanitary or otherwise unethical activity on a farm. Even employees and journalists who take photos or video to document misconduct on farms could face criminal prosecution if passed, whether it’s mistreatment of animals, food safety concerns, worker safety violations, sexual harassment, financial embezzlement or environmental crimes.

http://www.idahopress.com/members/ag-gag-bill-would-enable-animal-cruelty-to-go-unchecked/article_13aa3c72-9451-11e3-af4c-001a4bcf887a.html


Basically what they are attempting to do with this law is to imprison people for reporting unethical and even criminal behavior by their corporate farms and employees - even if that behavior put's other people's lives at risk or involves financial impropriety.  Allow the Gadfly to repeat that for you dear readers - these wonderful business owners want to put people in prison who would dare to reveal their own unethical and criminal behavior to the public or law enforcement authorities.

Now that you have collected your jaws off of the ground -- if all of this sounds just like some surreal Kafkaesque story that you would typically hear of occurring in Communist China or the old Soviet Union or a myriad of regulation-free, third world oligarchies -- you sure got that right folks.

But this is the message that The Gadfly has been trying for these past few years to get across to you dear readers.  The kind of people who would propose this kind of legislation are the exact same people who comprise the core of the modern-day conservative and Tea Party movement and this most definitely is the vision for the kind of future America that they and their plutocratic business overlords have in store for the people of this country.

If we don't stand up and stop them, people have no cause to complain when the ugliness of the right's dystopian, nightmarish world ultimately becomes a dark reality that will obliterate any hopes of our descendants ever knowing, much less experiencing, the true meaning of these words:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Take it for what it's worth.



----TFG