Senate Delays S 510 Food Safety Bill Vote
Until Tuesday
by Mike Adams
the Health Ranger
Monday, November 29, 2010
from
NaturalNews Website
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.
On the S 510 bill itself, our hope now rests with Senator Tom
Coburn's amendments as well as the possibility that more
Senators will reconsider their positions on this bill and come
out tomorrow to oppose it.
Other
improvements put in place with the help of health freedom allies
The
Alliance for Natural Health has
been working hard with many health freedom allies, including
NaturalNews, to reduce the tyranny of the bill.
From their announcement today:
These are some of the changes
that ANH-USA and allies have [achieved with] the Food Safety
bill:
Excluded excessive punishment
Last week we learned that S. 510 would not include the
obscene ten-year jail sentences for food and supplement
manufacturers who violate complicated FDA rules.
That draconian language was
specifically designed to target supplement manufacturers
while leaving pharmaceutical drug and medical device
companies untouched.
Resisted international
harmonization of food and health supplement policy
Together we worked to modify language that would have
committed the US to harmonization of international food and
supplement rules similar to those in Europe, where attempts
are being made to regulate away natural health.
Excluded small farmers from
burdensome regulation
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 vote 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 - we 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 - all 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 - are
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," said 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.
Top Ten Lies About Senate Bill 510
by Mike Adams
the Health Ranger
December 01, 2010
from
NaturalNews Website
|
We are working hard
to fight for freedom and educate the public about why we
need to resist these "Big Government solutions" that
trample over our Constitutional rights to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness (which, in my mind,
includes buying fresh produce at the farmer's market). |
The Food Safety Modernization Act looks like it's headed
to become law.
It's being hailed as a
"breakthrough" achievement in food safety, and it would hand
vast new powers and funding to the FDA so that it can clean up
the food supply and protect all Americans from food-borne
pathogens.
There's just one problem with all this: It's all a big lie.
Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about
S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and
the
mainstream media:
Lie #1
Most deaths from food poisoning are
caused by fresh produce
Here's a whopper the
mainstream media won't dare report: Out of the 1,809 people
who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC
estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer's
contamination of fresh produce.
By far the majority of food
poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed
foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of
pathogens.
For example, one of the largest food-borne killers
according to the CDC is
Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat
feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen
right in their own homes. Salmonella poisoning accounts for
553 deaths a year.
As a reference for relative
risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents
in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher
chance of killing you
than eating fresh produce.
In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from
things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and
spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely
nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since
those foods are considered "sterilized" at the time of sale.
Lie #2
Under S.510, the FDA would only recall
products it knows to be contaminated
Not true. S.510 merely
requires the FDA to have "reason to believe" a food is
contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will
be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any
scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has "reason to
believe" the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.
In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a
food product. It merely needs an opinion.
Is this "reason to believe" section really true? Yep, and
here's how it was amended:
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 by (1) striking ''credible
evidence or information indicating'' and inserting
''reason to believe''.
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:s510rs.txt.pdf)
In other words, in negotiating
this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the
FDA needed "credible evidence" in order to recall a product
and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing
"reason to believe."
It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the
FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison
people based entirely on what the agency "has reason to
believe."
Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if
not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping
whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food,
no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to
prevent disease of any kind. They don't even believe limes
can prevent scurvy, and you'd have to nutritionally
illiterate to believe that.
The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing
phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants,
therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless
for human biology.
This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge
of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane
government agency that has completely lost touch with
reality while abandoning nutritional science.
Lie #3
They didn't tell you that nearly 70% of
grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella
every day
Yep, it's true: Amid all
the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to
notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at
grocery stores every single day are widely
contaminated with salmonella.
Yet S 510 does absolutely
nothing to address this. It's not even mentioned in the
bill.
In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up
cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens
across America. So the so-called "food poisoning" that's
often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the
contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on
their kitchen cutting boards.
Lie #4
S.510 will exclude and protect small
farmers
The Tester Amendment,
which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who
sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the
more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in
the bill.
But this dollar amount is not
indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar
continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve
counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more
"quantitative easing," anyone?), food prices will continue
to skyrocket - and this will shift even small family farms
into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.
In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could
easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right
now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their
profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on
that might be only $50,000 or even less.
Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small,
successful farms that are doing well and would like to
expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their
operations.
To avoid the tyranny of S 510,
small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding
the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.
Lie #5
The FDA needs more power to enforce food
safety
The FDA already has the
power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a
product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already
has the power to confiscate "misbranded" products, too, and
it could easily use this power to halt the sale of
contaminated food items.
But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on
the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by
hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently
worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the
FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding,
too!
And you can bet it will find
creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the
health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.
Lie #6
Fresh produce is contaminated because of
a lack of paperwork
There is no evidence that
requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their
food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the
existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output
(huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water
supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with
fresh produce.
The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where
you've got to reform the factory animal operations that now
dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does
absolutely nothing to address this.
Factory animal farms aren't even
addressed in the bill!
Lie #7
The American people are dying in droves
from unsafe fresh food
The truth is that
Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic
chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce.
Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and
artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people
than bacterial contaminations.
The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals --
anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed
by FDA-approved drugs, most
of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly
fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA
doesn't seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful
co-conspirator in the
scientific fraud carried out by Big
Pharma in the name of "medicine."
To think that the FDA - the very same agency responsible for
the Big Pharma death machine - is now going to "save us" by
controlling food safety is highly irrational.
Lie #8
The FDA just wants to make food "safer"
Actually, the FDA wants
to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are
vocal opponents of live food.
They think that the only safe
food is sterilized food, which is why they've supported the
fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have
been pushed over the last few years.
California almond growers, for example, must now either
chemically fumigate or
pasteurize their almonds
before selling them. This has destroyed the incomes of U.S.
almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw
almonds from Spain and other countries.
Lie #9
Food smuggling is a huge problem in
America
One of the main sections
of S.510 addresses "food smuggling." Yep -- people smuggling
food across the country. If you've never heard of this
problem that's because it's not actually a problem.
Not yet anyway.
But there's a reason why they put this into the bill:
Because they're probably planning on criminalizing fresh
produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli
with the "intent to distribute."
Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend
farmer's market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if
they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the "food
smuggling" provisions of S.510.
Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to
trade carrots for cash.
Lie #10
S.510 will make America's food supply the
safest in the world
Actually, even with S.510
in place, America's food supply is among the most chemically
contaminated in the world, second only to China.
You can find mercury in the
seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the
"natural" potato chips, and artificial petrochemical
coloring agents in children's foods.
Eating the "Standard American Diet" is probably the single
most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It's
the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Every nation in the world that begins to consume the
American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative
disease within one generation.
This is the "safe food" that the
U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.
Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD.
And the FDA says it wants to keep
everybody 'safe'...
