USDA Signs MOU with Rockefeller’s Council of Foundations to Exploit Rural America

Editorial by Ted Gardner and Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

Posted 8/23/2011

On Friday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that USDA has signed an agreement with the Council on Foundations “to provide new sources of capital, new job opportunities, workforce investment strategies,” and, last on the list but the heart of it: “identification of additional resources.”

The group will work with Obama’s newly created Rural Council, which Vilsack also chairs, to implement UN Agenda 21 – a 300-page, 40-chapter, “soft-law” policy that came out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Brazil in 1992.

Though couched in eco-friendly motives, Agenda 21 will “severely limit water, electricity, and transportation- even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system,” wrote Berit Kjos in 1998. (Patrick Wood believes that today’s smart grids are doing just that, and gives an excellent 40-minute speech here.)

Ironically, the Secretary made the announcement while hosting a White House Rural Forum at the Iowa State Fair, the same day news broke about how the USDA lied to farmers and ranchers about federal drought insurance. Vilsack has refused to pay up during the worse drought in US history.

The Council on Foundations formed in 1949 and was joined by the Rockefellers in 1958. It has since morphed into a think tank drawing from the government and private sector. It is funded mainly by corporations and foundations (including Ford, Lilly, and General Mills) to provide “a wide variety of services primarily for endowed, grantmaking organizations throughout the United States and in foreign countries.”

The Memorandum of Understanding will give corporations – whether dressed up as foundations or just openly themselves as profit-driven businesses – full and unhindered access to all resources in rural America, where oil, gas, uranium, coal, water and other resources are buried under people’s private property or under public lands.

In the name of “sustainable” practices, helping rural America, and creating jobs (another broken Obama promise), Obama enlisted 25 federal agencies for his Rural Council, including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

With this new MOU, the USDA has now openly invited corporations in the name of “philanthropy” to join the Rural Council’s efforts.

Government agencies and now corporate America are openly working together to assert complete control over all of rural America, removing state sovereignty which is central to the Constitution, written in by the framers to protect the nation from tyranny.

Vilsack’s press release promises things that superficially sound positive. But if one looks closely, one can easily read the MOU as a corporate gift. Simply remove the gloss about rural America.

With gloss:

  • Foster greater economic opportunities and partner in creation of new sources of rural opportunities to improve the quality of life for rural Americans
  • Identify resources that can be used to produce new economic opportunities
  • Promote new partnerships in workforce investment strategies and
  • Develop innovative, effective and sustainable methods of collaborating to benefit rural communities.

Without gloss:

  • Foster greater economic opportunities and partner in creation of new sources of opportunities to improvecorporate interests
  • Identify resources that can be exploited for corporate interests
  • Promote new partnerships in investment strategies for corporate interests
  • Develop innovative, effective methods of collaborating to benefit corporate interests.

Neither Obama’s Rural Council nor the Council on Foundations include farmers and ranchers. This is a corporate-federal assault on the country. Combined, they are moving to achieve the long-planned Agenda 21, which the Rockefellers designed, as a means of getting people off the land so that corporate interests can have direct access to resources to use as they wish.