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General News    H3'ed 3/14/09

A solemn walk through HR 875

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"include, with respect to animals raised for food, minimum standards related to the animal's health, feed, and environment which bear on the safety of food for human consumption;"

"set good practice standards to protect the public and animal health and promote food safety"

"...facility owned or operated by a person located in any State that processes food or a  facility that holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients."

Notice it does not say a person SELLING food.  It says a person holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients. The bill specifically states it covers commerce within states, but again there is no exclusion for food raised for home use. The fact you are growing veggies for your and friends and not selling them does not exclude you.

"in any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction SHALL BE PRESUMED TO EXIST."

Under Ag Sec. Veneman, in September, 1995, the USDA's Food Safety & Inspection Service presented a 600-page document, Farm-To-Table, intended to control every step in the food chain from production to home preparation. 

This is a real life example of what has already occurred and what may be in store:

Today a state Ag inspector and two county officials show up and scare the bee-jesus out of me. First they accuse me of selling products and milk, then explain that even "giving milk products away" is illegal in California. Now everything is pasteurized, but it is illegal to share milk products in any form! They explained it was even ILLEGAL to give it to my own children if they did not live under my roof! I can't even take a lasagna dish to my grown sons home without risk of being fined, arrested and or jailed! This is OUTRAGEOUS!!!!"  Donna, Aug 12, 2008.  (See more stories on Feds raiding farms and co-ops.) 

Conclusion

The related package of "food safety" bills is totalitarian.  There are no two ways about it.  

They allow government warrantless intrusion into and extreme, detailed, surveilled control over every aspect of farmers' land and home, straight-jacketing them into a bureaucratic nightmare which precludes their even functioning as farmers.  And yet for real food safety and for food security, it is exactly farmers we need.  

We need the real food they produce and the farmland they spare and protect from industrialization and the heritage animals and seeds they raise and their knowledge about nature and animals, and we need the way of life they represent.  Free.  How interesting that to have real and clean and wholesome food, it requires that farmers have freedom.  

These bills which claim to be about "food safety" but are proven in the EU already to be about the destruction of farmers, are so frighteningly broad, they allow the government to take over our lives, too.  They allow the government to use rules written by multinational corporations within the WTO, to control whether we can garden or how, whether we chip our pets, even what happens inside our homes in our kitchens.  

These controls are all for mandating things that make money for corporations just as we are all trying to get off the corporate grid of power, fuel, food, ...  Now it is easy to appreciate people' resistance to mandated vaccines (and they keep adding more kinds).  

There is point at which we must say stop.  Our lives are our own, our property is our own, our decisions on what to eat and how to heal ourselves are our own.  We must protect our own freedom and now it is apparent how intimately tied it is those who have been providing for us forever - our farmers.

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Met libertarian and conservative farmers and learned an incredible amount about farming and nature and science, as well as about government violations against them and against us all. The other side of the fence is nothing like what we've been (more...)
 
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