Tommy Thompson Declares Candidacy

Tommy Thompson today made official his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination.

Who is Tommy Thompson? The Washington Post offers this:

Thompson billed himself as a "reliable conservative, one who puts principles into practice." The former four-term governor of Wisconsin and ex-secretary of Health and Human Services in President Bush's administration pledged to apply his experience to help "get America and our party back on track."

But so wait. Who is Tommy Thompson?

Well, up to about three weeks ago, he was the chair of the VeriChip Corporation--a company he took HUGE, HUGE sums of money from during his stint as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

So I guess the better question is what is VeriChip and what is Tommy Thompson's relation to it?

In a nutshell, VeriChip is a company that evolved from those RFID chips they implanted into dogs so their owners could find them when they got lost. They extended this to its logical conclusion--let's put them in people! Obviously. Their tagline is "RFID for people!" You know, as if there is nothing wrong with this. Alright.

So this will be literally the first and only presidential candidate in American history to have a piece of corporate spyware embedded in his body.

Anyway the point is that this man has a lot of invested interest in the implantable microchip. He has it in his own body. He has 150,000 shares in the company. As a rational human being (and seeing as though his platform is health care reform), do you wonder what will happen in regards to these stupid little chips? Does it take a considerably strong imagination to conceive of mandatory injections--for the sake of, oh, I don't know, health record information? Sounds innocuous, right?

But think about it. You have HIV. You have cancer. Your employer gets hold of one of these RFID readers and knows your entire medical history.

But what if we put in criminal records in the chip? Educational records? Political party? A lot of shit can be stored on an RFID chip.

Grumble, grumble, of course, but I find Thompson's private investments to be considerably troubling given the amount of political influence a president would hold over the American people. It's worth thinking about.