Good luck finding news coverage of these topics

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 the Sept. 11 attacks and childhood immunizations. Here are more:

- Inflation routinely is reported as "slight; under control" in terms of consumer prices, when an economist's actual definition of inflation is an increase in the money supply. President Obama and his Federal Reserve Board have tripled the money supply (the "MB," or monetary base, if we want to be technical) since 2008.

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 that prevent wages from falling (the largest of these being extended 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 to a larger pool of willing workers so they can charge lower prices to win back missing customers.

Rep. Ron Paul tried to talk about this all winter, on the campaign trail during Republican presidential primaries. The mainstream press treated him like the crazy uncle in the attic.

Congress, over the past century, has handed over its power to mint money and control its 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.

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 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.

How thoroughly have we been informed about 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, or linked to the fate of the Euro union?

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.

- Wonder why you can't drive out in the desert anymore? 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 generic "habitat restoration 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 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 nonsense - and now to attempt to put it into effect.

- To their credit (though their tone makes it clear they don't expect their readers to have ever heard about this topic before), 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 past year, and an appeal to the Food and Drug Administration last fall to mandate labels nationally drew more than 1 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. ...

"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.

The FDA 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!

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 while the FDA demands vastly expensive testing, which can take decades.

When was the decades-long human testing to determine whether GMOs are safe?

When asked if they wanted genetically engineered foods to be labeled, about nine in 10 Americans said 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; bullying in the schools; HIV and AIDS; fluoride in the drinking water.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow" and "Send in the Waco Killers." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.