Senate delays S 510 food safety bill vote until Tuesday

Monday, November 29, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Food Safety, S 510, health news

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(NaturalNews) 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. (https://www.naturalnews.com/028854_1099_small...)

It was virtually all Democrats, by the way, who voted to keep this outrageous 1099 law in place. (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_c...) 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 (www.ANH-USA.org) 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.