S 510 Fake Food Safety bill passed by Senate in late-night sneak attack on small farmers and food freedom

Monday, December 20, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Food Safety, small farmers, health news

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(NaturalNews) The infamous S.510 "food food safety bill" was passed by the US Senate last night in a sneaky, last minute voice vote. All Senators voted for it, Republicans and Democrats alike. Not a single U.S. Senator -- not even Coburn -- objected to its passage.

With this vote, the US Senate now sends the bill back to the House of Representatives where it is due for a final vote as HR 2751 that would then send the bill to the White House for a presidential signature. This House vote could take place as early as tomorrow (Tuesday).

A betrayal of food freedom

This last-minute sneak vote of unanimous consent is widely considered a betrayal of food freedom by the few Republicans who had opposed this bill. TheHill.com posted their report on this unexpected turn of events late last night (http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/food-sa...) and has since been overrun by comments from steaming mad members of the public who feel utterly betrayed by their Senators.

The Natural Solutions Foundation posted a blog entitled, "Betrayed by the GOP" which blasts Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike for approving this bureaucratic monster that will grow the size and power of the FDA (http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=7824).

The Farm-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund also posted an urgent action alert (http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/aa/aa-20dec201...) urging people to call their representatives in Washington and oppose HR 2751.

Take action now to block this bill in the House

The U.S. House of Representatives meets Tuesday, which means we have 24 hours (or less) to fight back with an avalanche of phone calls to stop this bad, freedom-destroying bill from becoming law. The new bill name is HR 2751 (notice how they keep changing this around to confuse us?).

Join the millions of people who actively oppose this bill by calling your representatives in Washington and urging them to oppose passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act. If you don't already know the phone number of your representatives in the House, the capitol switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. Call that and they will connect you to your members of Congress.

Sign the NaturalNews petition to halt HR 2751 at:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/7025/p/d...

And sign the petition from the Natural Solutions Foundation at: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/d...

The betrayal

It's important to understand the depth of betrayal that has just been committed by the GOP members of the US Senate. Democratic members of the Senate, of course, have always voted for S.510 because it's a bill that expands the power of government and will unleash an army of FDA inspectors who roam the countryside harassing farmers and small growers. The expansion of government power over the People has almost always been unanimously supported by Democratic Senators.

But Republicans have been reluctant to see such a sudden expansion of FDA power and personnel. Some GOP members have opposed this bill because they see it as too overreaching, too powerful and too threatening to the food freedoms upon which this country was founded. So they tried to oppose the bill in order to keep the FDA out of our farms, gardens and greenhouses. And for a long time, Sen. Tom Coburn effectively blocked this bill from becoming law.

But Senator Harry Reid -- the King of Corruption in the Senate, in my opinion -- kept pushing this bill, backed by Big Agribiz corporate supporters who can't wait to see small farms buried under the burden of compliance that would be unleashed under the bill. And no, all small farms are NOT exempt from this bill. In the world of agriculture, a small family farm growing food on as little as twenty acres can easily exceed $1 million a year in revenues (without much profit, because there isn't much profit in most crops) and thereby be subjected to FDA tyranny under S.510.

S.510 is the Patriot Act of farming. And the reason it got so much support from the large corporations is because it will effectively destroy many small, local organic farms by suffocating them under a new regulatory burden -- even when they're not the problem to begin with! Food safety is only a problem because of the factory animal operations that comingle with large, corporate food operations, thereby contaminating fresh produce with animal-grown bacteria. E.coli, for example, cannot multiply in plants! It can only grow in the intestines of animals.

Passed in the darkness of night

It is especially noteworthy to observe that the US Senate passed this bill in the dark of night, during a late Sunday night session when they hoped nobody was watching. This is an action they simply could not take in broad daylight during a normal business day when people might be paying attention. So they pulled a "quarterback sneak" and thrust this bill forward in a late-night session where nobody -- and I mean nobody -- had the courage to take a stand and vote against it.

This whole scheme has been fabricated from the start, by the way. The food safety scare stories were intentionally exaggerated to make it seem as if we were all about to die from eating fresh spinach. The food recalls were hyped up by the mainstream media in a huge way, without any honest reporting on the fact that you are statistically ten thousand times more likely to be killed by an FDA-approved drug than from eating fresh produce.

Then the legislators got involved. And there's no problem they don't arrogantly think they can't solve by expanding the power and reach of the federal government. So they got to work figuring out how to take the most dangerous and dishonest agency in the history of America (https://www.naturalnews.com/030461_Senate_Bil...) and give it more power!

This is sort of like handing an arsonist a can of gasoline and a flamethrower. Gee, what do you think the FDA is going to do with all this power? They're going to run rampant with it, of course. Give the TSA power and they reach down your pants and sexually molest your children. Give the FDA power and they'll use it to crush small, local organic farms in order to protect the profits of big business because the FDA has always sought to protect the profits of big business.

How to crush small, local organic farms

So for all you Americans who love to eat local food, or if you buy food from a local CSA or farmer's market, you can kiss your local food goodbye in the near future. Once the FDA revs up its army of jackbooted thugs to start crushing small organic farmers, you are going to see a massive increase in the price of local food because supplies will begin to dwindle as small farmers are forced out of business by the Food Safety and Modernization Act.

This is, of course, exactly what the FDA and Big Agribiz wants -- a wipeout of the competition from small, local farmers. They want to dominate the food industry in the same way that Monsanto has dominated the seed industry. And that means crushing the small, independent food producers and family farm operations.

So once again, our U.S. Senators have betrayed the very freedoms they swore to protect. It appears that when our forefathers wrote the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, they neglected to add one provision that they never could have imagined would be necessary: The right to food freedom and the right to grow your own food on your own land, then sell that food to members of your local community without being harassed by federal government agents who come knocking on your greenhouse door and demand, "show me your papers."

Be sure to sign the petition from the Natural Solutions Foundation at: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/d...

Also sign the NaturalNews petition to halt HR 2751 at:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/7025/p/d...

Take action now to protect your food freedoms (or we'll lose them).

What's wrong with the Food Safety Modernization Act?

These talking points have been provided courtesy of the Farm-To-Consumer Legal Defense Fund:

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act is fundamentally flawed and is not in the best interest of small farmers, especially those who produce raw milk. The Act is a major threat to the local food movement.

1. FDA does not respect individuals' rights to obtain healthy, quality foods of their choice. The agency has stated, as a matter of public record (http://www.ftcldf.org/litigation-FDA-status....) that:

"There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food."

"Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families' is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish."

FDA has even participated in armed raids on small-scale co-ops and membership organizations. This agency should not be given any additional power.

2. FDA has adequate powers under existing law to ensure food safety and effectively deal with foodborne illness outbreaks. FDA has power to inspect, power to detain product and can readily obtain court orders to seize adulterated or misbranded food products or enjoin them from being sold. The problem isn't that FDA needs more power; it's that FDA does not effectively use the power it currently has. The agency has power to inspect imported food yet inspects only 1% of food coming into this country from outside our borders.

3. S.510 does nothing to address many significant food safety problems in this country, such as those resulting from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and various contaminants (e.g., BPA, pesticides, herbicides, etc.).

4. FDA has used its existing power to benefit the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries at the expense of public health (e.g., allowing the overuse of antibiotics in confined animal feeding operations and refusing to require labeling for genetically-modified foods). This bill does not address the fundamental problems at this agency in order to truly protect public health.

5. S.510 will expand FDA's involvement in regulating food in intra-state commerce, further interfering with local communities. State and local governments are more than capable of handling any problems related to food in intrastate commerce. All the major outbreaks of foodborne illness involve either imported food or food in inter-state commerce.

6. S.510 will hurt our ability as a nation to be self-sufficient in food production because it has more lenient inspection requirements for foreign than domestic producers creating an unfair advantage for food imports. Giving an advantage to foreign producers will only increase the amount of food imported into this country that does not meet our domestic standards. S.510 does not address food security -- the ability of a country to produce enough food to meet its own needs.