"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" — Mario Savio, December 2, 1964
Although Mario Savio's speech was about political activism and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement it could have very well been about Senate Bill 510, the so-called Food Safety Modernization Act.
This bill, which is now coming to a vote the evening of Monday, November 29, 2010, is the most "odious" food tyranny bill to have ever been crafted in the history of our nation. S 510 is to food freedom what the Patriot Act is to the Bill of Rights.
If passed, it will criminalize entire ranks of organic gardeners and small farmers while giving rise to a new wave of tyrants — the food safety Gestapo who will rule over the production of food and the saving of seeds in the same way the TSA now rules over your security at the airport.
The intentions behind S 510 are well-meaning, of course: Lawmakers want to do something about e.coli and salmonella contamination of fresh produce. No US Senator wants to face their constituents without being able to claim they "voted for safer food."
They all have good intentions. But of course that's exactly what the road to hell is paved with. The Patriot Act was passed with good intentions, too, in a desperate hour when fearful Americans were grasping at solutions — anything that could calm their fears even if it meant giving up their freedoms in the process. And now we are paying the price for that: Obscene TSA pat-downs at the airport, naked body scanners taking photos of your children's bodies, anti-terrorism laws being used to prosecute animal rights activists, and other such transgressions that were unimaginable in 2001 when it was first passed.
What will the next decade bring us if S.510 becomes law?
If passed into law, S.510 will become the Patriot Act of the food industry, turning raw milk producers into felons and small organic farmers into "seed smugglers." It will all but ensure the demise of small, local farmers and thereby hand a government-protected monopoly to the large industrial farmers who use GMOs, chemical pesticides and cruel, inhumane practices throughout their factory animal farms.
It will destroy small dairy farmers and devastate family food producers. And while it's doing all this, it will also give the FDA — the most dangerous federal agency in the history of our nation — he power to regulate what you grow, what you harvest, what seeds you save and what paperwork you must file in order to comply with Big Brother's food schemes. It will give the FDA the right to conduct surprise inspections of your greenhouse, to seize your plants and to arrest you as a common criminal merely for milking a cow and offering that fresh milk for sale to a neighbor.
This is food tyranny, and this is what we must stop. S. 510 is the machine upon which we must now throw ourselves — upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and we've got to make it stop.
You can help. Here's how:
As soon as you read this, contact your US Senator before 5pm today. I urge you to pick up the phone and CALL your U.S. Senator's offices and voice your opposition to Senate Bill 510.
If you do not know your Senator's phone number you can simply call the the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Senator's office: 202-224-3121.
Let them know what's at stake and urge them to take action Monday, November 29th, before 5pm Eastern.
Senators Paid Off To Support S.510?
View a list of U.S Senators and the Bribes (I mean campaign contributions) that these Senators received from Special Interest Groups to either support or oppose S.510 – The FDA Food Safety and Modernization Act.
Here’s a list of the Special Interest Groups that support S.510 and how much they bribed (I mean donated) to Senators:
Restaurants & drinking establishments $3,217,767Addendum I - Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Food and kindred products manufacturing $1,753,503
Milk & dairy producers $1,717,687
Food stores $1,473,532
Beverages (non-alcoholic) $744,551
Vegetables, fruits and tree nut $709,238
American Veterinarian Medical Association $551,750
Beverage bottling & distribution $289,725
Food wholesalers $284,900
Food & Beverage Products and Services $281,137
Fishing $277,984
Chambers of commerce $219,234
Manufacturing $207,740
Food catering & food services $171,835
Confectionery processors & manufacturers $96,438
Consumer groups $6,100
Farm bureaus $0
Slammed by a barrage of phone calls and emails today that the mainstream media isn't even reporting, the U.S. Senate today has decided to postpone their vote on S.510 — The Food Safety Modernization Act — until Tuesday morning.
Internet reports that S.510 has already passed are incorrect. The final bill has not yet been voted on (only a motion to move forward was voted on).
The Tester Amendment has been passed (see below for more details) which would exclude the smaller farm operations from the more onerous provisions of the bill.
Still up for debate are two amendments to the bill from Sen. Tom Coburn, who is seeking to scale down the bill and make it smaller and less expensive. A second proposed amendment would end Congressional "earmarks" — a tool of financial corruption that lawmakers use to hand out government money to the corporations and special interest groups that got them elected in the first place.
I watched a live C-SPAN video tonight of a pathetic-sounding Senator from Hawaii arguing that earmarks should stay in place because it gives Congress more power (seriously).
The vote on the amendment that would repeal the 1099 IRS reporting requirement for small businesses failed, leaving America's small business owners frantically looking for ways to move their businesses offshore before this outrageous new paperwork requirement kicks in by early 2011.
It was virtually all Democrats, by the way, who voted to keep this outrageous 1099 law in place.
It's almost as if the Democratic Senators can't wait to drive U.S. small business owners out of the country and destroy the U.S. economy in the process.
Working with the natural health community, ANH-USA succeeded in winning inclusion of the Tester amendment with its protection of small farmers. ANH-USA and other organizations fought tirelessly to protect the bourgeoning local healthy food movement from unwarranted federal regulation, and from the processed food companies that are increasingly nervous about the new competition.
Thirty processed food organizations like the American Frozen Food Institute and the Corn Refiners Association sent a letter to the Senate arguing that a local produce stand should face the same regulatory hurdles as their industrial-scale processed food operations.
Mainstream Media Lies About S.510
There's no question that Senators' offices today were hit with a barrage of phone calls and emails from people voicing their opposition to the bill. Not surprisingly, mainstream newspapers published articles strongly supporting S.510 — they've never seen a Big Brother expansion of power they didn't like!
We've also recently been reminded that mainstream media publishers will simply lie to their readers on important issues regarding freedom.
For example, recent MSM reports about the TSA and the "National Opt Out Day" conveniently and deliberately leave out the fact that the TSA turned off their naked body scanner machines for the day, and that's why no one had the opportunity to protest.
Funny how the big newspapers never bother to mention this all-important fact when covering the story. They just claim the protests were a failure because no one protested.
Sadly, it looks like S.510 is likely to pass, and that means Americans should get ready to endure yet another Gestapo agency (the FDA) running rampant over their food and seeds. As if there weren't government agents taking away our rights already, now the FDA is going to be able to show up at farms and, at gunpoint, demand, "Show us your papers!"
NaturalNews plans to publish the names of all the U.S. Senators who voted for this tyranny, and they will join our "Hall of Shame" of legislators who our founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson would have considered treasonous in their shameful betrayal of the rights of individual citizens and small farmers.
Why we need to delineate the right to grow food in the next Bill of Rights
This also reminds me to point out that after the U.S. collapses from total financial and moral bankruptcy — which seems to be getting closer by the day — e must all remember that in the next society, we need to add "The Right to Grow, Harvest and Exchange Our Own Food" into the next Bill of Rights. Because that's exactly what's being stripped away from the American people with the passage of S.510.
Remember, too, that the FDA already took away your right to learn the truth about nutritional supplements and natural remedies. It has sought to destroy the natural products industry. Now it's poised to take away your access to raw milk while burdening food producers with outrageous new paperwork requirements — ll while ignoring the real causes of the food contaminations, which are actually caused by factory animal farms.
The people who are in support of this bill — including several big-name food authors who should frankly know better — re selling out to the agricultural giants and aligning themselves with the dark powers in government who seek to destroy food freedom.
"Food is no less a weapon than tanks, guns, and planes." –Franklin D. Roosevelt
And now the U.S. Senate is making sure that food controls can be used against the American people in exactly the same way the Patriot Act is now being used to crush our civil liberties.
Addendum II - December 9, 2010
The U.S. government wants to know where your greenhouse is. Under Senate Bill 510 — hich is now back in the hands of the U.S. Senate after the House hid an amendment in an appropriations bill and passed it last night — American food producers would be required to register their facilities with the U.S. government. The feds, it seems, want a database of food growers so they know who to target for surprise inspections (show me your papers!).
As stated in the bill itself:
SEC. 102. REGISTRATION OF FOOD FACILITIES. 18 (a) UPDATING OF FOOD CATEGORY REGULATIONS; BIENNIAL REGISTRATION RENEWAL. Section 415(a) (2120 U.S.C. 350d(a))
Kangaroo Courts For Violators
Once an FDA inspection occurs, if the government believes the food grower is producing anything that might pose a risk to the public (and note carefully that "belief" is the only thing required, not actual scientific evidence of harm), that food grower is then "suspended" from producing food.
After that, they get dragged into a kangaroo FDA court where a panel of FDA officials then decides their fate. This takes place with no due process, no attorney, no Constitutional protections and no rights whatsoever. This is, in every sense, a "King's court" where the King can simply decide that you're guilty and put you out of business.
Here's the language in the S.510 legislation:
It means the Secretary (a bureaucrat) gets to decide who can grow food and who can't. This is the FDA's kangaroo court, much like the FTC's kangaroo court that's currently being used to destroy companies offering nutritional supplements and natural cancer cures.
Remember, too, the bill abandoned actual science and now relies entirely on the FDA's "belief" to determine which foods to recall:
SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
So essentially what we have here is a food tyranny bill that would hand a group of un-elected bureaucrats who answer to no one the power to control virtually the entire U.S. food supply. This is an agency, by the way, that is already responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans.
This is an agency that has participated in armed raids against natural product companies.
To all those who say "S. 510 is no big deal, the FDA won't abuse its power, this is just about safety" — I say you have no grasp of the history of tyranny. The FDA has virtually never taken action to protect the People. Its actions have consistently been shaped to maximize the profits of the powerful corporations even at the expense of human lives.
Just read the history of Vioxx if you need a refresher on that point.
That the U.S. Congress would now seek to hand over control of our food supply to this dangerous, rogue government agency is an obscene betrayal of the American people. This is precisely why we must stand up and fight S.510 once again to defeat it in the Senate where it is now schedule for yet another vote. (Like a bad case of herpes, this bill just won't die, it seems)
Sign the petition here.
Once again, CALL your representatives in the House and the Senate. You can reach the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your representatives by name.
By the way, just for the record, I am appalled at the lack of action on this item by some so-called "health freedom" organizations which appear to be doing absolutely nothing to rally opposition to this bill. A few groups are fighting hard to oppose it (NaturalNews, ANH-USA.com, Natural Solutions Foundation, etc.) but there are several which appear to be sitting on the sidelines, doing nothing. I'm not sure why. This is precisely the kind of issue that should have the entire health freedom community up in arms to protect our food freedoms.
Robert Scott Bell gets it, by the way. So do the Vitamin Lawyer (Ralph Fucetola) and health freedom attorneys like James Turner and Jonathan Emord. All the freedom-oriented people seem to understand how crucial this is to maintain our food freedoms and keep the FDA out of our farms as much as possible. If you think the FDA is bad now, just wait until they are granted yet more powers (and funding) to unleash an army of thousands of new agents who sweep across America, raiding small family farms (no, they're not all exempted from this bill) and imprisoning raw milk producers.
The FDA is about to become the SS of food fascism. This is not an exaggeration.
Who would have thought, five years ago, that the TSA would be reaching down your pants and feeling your genitals? Just imagine now what the FDA will do with similar powers over your food and farms. Crudely put, the TSA may be feeling your junk, but the FDA will have us all by the balls.
Take action now to protect your food freedoms (or you will forever lose them).
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Addendum II - December 9, 2010
As stated in the bill itself:
SEC. 102. REGISTRATION OF FOOD FACILITIES. 18 (a) UPDATING OF FOOD CATEGORY REGULATIONS; BIENNIAL REGISTRATION RENEWAL. Section 415(a) (2120 U.S.C. 350d(a))
"The registration shall contain an assurance that the Secretary will be permitted to inspect such facility at the times and in the manner permitted by this Act."What this language shows is that the point of registration is so that government agents can conduct surprise inspections of food facilities. At least 4,000 new FDA agents will need to be hired if this bill becomes law, greatly expanding the FDA's agent presence in much the same way the TSA expanded over the last few years.
Kangaroo Courts For Violators
After that, they get dragged into a kangaroo FDA court where a panel of FDA officials then decides their fate. This takes place with no due process, no attorney, no Constitutional protections and no rights whatsoever. This is, in every sense, a "King's court" where the King can simply decide that you're guilty and put you out of business.
Here's the language in the S.510 legislation:
"(2) HEARING ON SUSPENSION. — The Secretary shall provide the registrant subject to an order under paragraph (1) with an opportunity for an informal hearing, to be held as soon as possible but not later than 2 business days after the issuance of the order or such other time period, as agreed upon by the Secretary and the registrant, on the actions required for reinstatement of registration and why the registration that is subject to suspension should be reinstated. The Secretary shall reinstate a registration if the Secretary determines, based on evidence presented, that adequate grounds do not exist to continue the suspension of the registration."Did you read this carefully?
It means the Secretary (a bureaucrat) gets to decide who can grow food and who can't. This is the FDA's kangaroo court, much like the FTC's kangaroo court that's currently being used to destroy companies offering nutritional supplements and natural cancer cures.
Remember, too, the bill abandoned actual science and now relies entirely on the FDA's "belief" to determine which foods to recall:
SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. — Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended byFDA Tyranny On the Rise
(1) striking ''credible evidence or information indicating'' and inserting ''reason to believe''
This is an agency that has participated in armed raids against natural product companies.
To all those who say "S. 510 is no big deal, the FDA won't abuse its power, this is just about safety" — I say you have no grasp of the history of tyranny. The FDA has virtually never taken action to protect the People. Its actions have consistently been shaped to maximize the profits of the powerful corporations even at the expense of human lives.
Just read the history of Vioxx if you need a refresher on that point.
That the U.S. Congress would now seek to hand over control of our food supply to this dangerous, rogue government agency is an obscene betrayal of the American people. This is precisely why we must stand up and fight S.510 once again to defeat it in the Senate where it is now schedule for yet another vote. (Like a bad case of herpes, this bill just won't die, it seems)
Sign the petition here.
Once again, CALL your representatives in the House and the Senate. You can reach the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your representatives by name.
By the way, just for the record, I am appalled at the lack of action on this item by some so-called "health freedom" organizations which appear to be doing absolutely nothing to rally opposition to this bill. A few groups are fighting hard to oppose it (NaturalNews, ANH-USA.com, Natural Solutions Foundation, etc.) but there are several which appear to be sitting on the sidelines, doing nothing. I'm not sure why. This is precisely the kind of issue that should have the entire health freedom community up in arms to protect our food freedoms.
Robert Scott Bell gets it, by the way. So do the Vitamin Lawyer (Ralph Fucetola) and health freedom attorneys like James Turner and Jonathan Emord. All the freedom-oriented people seem to understand how crucial this is to maintain our food freedoms and keep the FDA out of our farms as much as possible. If you think the FDA is bad now, just wait until they are granted yet more powers (and funding) to unleash an army of thousands of new agents who sweep across America, raiding small family farms (no, they're not all exempted from this bill) and imprisoning raw milk producers.
The FDA is about to become the SS of food fascism. This is not an exaggeration.
Who would have thought, five years ago, that the TSA would be reaching down your pants and feeling your genitals? Just imagine now what the FDA will do with similar powers over your food and farms. Crudely put, the TSA may be feeling your junk, but the FDA will have us all by the balls.
Take action now to protect your food freedoms (or you will forever lose them).
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Citizens for Health
Original Article - NaturalNews.com - The Health Ranger Addendum II - Original Article - NaturalNews.com - The Health Ranger
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