Originally published July 27 2012
Health Ranger interviews health freedom attorney Jonathan Emord about Rawesome raids
by NaturalNews
(NaturalNews) This is the transcript of an interview with health freedom attorney Jonathan Emord. See the original video on TV.NaturalNews.com
Health Ranger: Welcome, everyone. This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger with NaturalNews talking about food freedom today, and we have a very special guest: a health freedom attorney. The most well-known health freedom attorney. A man who has defeated the FDA in court many times, at least eight times. We'll ask him for more details on that. His name is Jonathan Emord, and he is a constitutionalist, a defender of food freedom and free choice for farmers and consumers, and joins us today by phone. Jonathan, thanks for joining me today.
Jonathan Emord: You're welcome, good to be with you, Mike.
Health Ranger: It was, is that accurate to call you a constitutionalist?
Jonathan Emord: Oh, very much so. I believe in the founding father's constitution and the doctrines that they espoused that would ensure liberty as the most important thing to protect for government.
Health Ranger: And what is happening with our liberties today, and especially in the context of these FDA and Department of Agriculture raids on raw milk producers and distribution centers?
Jonathan Emord: It's the tragic but logical consequence of the transformation of our government from a republic to a bureaucratic oligarchy, which has occurred over the last 80 years. And the FDA is all powerful. You have a commissioner of the FDA who rules as if she were a an absolute monarch and she gets to choose what she does with the resources of the agency, and she's largely unaccountable to the courts, the Congress, and the American people. So it's totalitarianism, but it is the characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state. You can be accused and tried and punished all without ever having a true and independent searching review of the charges brought against you. These raids are occurring across the United States, as you reported. They are outrageous, they're horrific, and they are causing great injury to people and to those that rely on the companies that are providing the goods and services, all without any necessity of proving that the products are in fact causing injury. Instead, it's just on the supposition that raw food is inherently unsafe, which of course, is true of all foods, not a characteristic of raw food. All food is inherently unsafe in the sense that it can be a medium for the growth of bacteria of one kind or another. It all depends on how the food is handled. Safety in food is dependent on how food is handled. Raw sushi is the rage all over the United States, and yet they don't go raiding raw sushi establishments. Steak tartar is consumed on Capitol Hill with great regularity, yet they don't go bust the chops of members of Congress. The reason is, although those substances are at a higher risk of contamination with bacteria or salmonella, or e-coli, or listeria, they are not the ones subject to prejudice. The government has chosen to go after raw milk, principally, but dairy generally, and even other raw foods because the organic market poses a direct threat to the large food producers, and it has been their lobbying that has succeeded in causing FDA in 2009 to promulgate a regulation prohibiting the interstate trafficking in raw diary, and also to encourage FDA to work with local departments of agriculture and the states' attorneys to prosecute producers of these things all across the United States.
Health Ranger: Well let me get back to something you just said. You mentioned the FDA created a regulation that criminalizes the interstate transportation of raw milk. Now a lot of people aren't aware of that, that if you have raw milk in a couple of jugs labeled for consumption and you take it across state lines, you can then be arrested and charged with federal crimes, correct?
Jonathan Emord: Well, it's not a criminal offense, it's a civil one, but the effect -
Health Ranger: I see.
Jonathan Emord:- is pretty much the same. You can have all your products seized, they can be destroyed, and you can be prosecuted criminally under state law in certain instances. And that's what's happening with Rawesome in California. But in 1987, I mis-spoke, I said 2009, it's actually 1987 that FDA enacted the regulations. 21CFR Section 1240.61, and it says in pertinent part, 'no person shall cause to be delivered into interstate commerce or shall sell, otherwise distribute, or hold for sale or other distribution after shipment and interstate commerce, any milk or milk product unless pasteurized.'
Health Ranger: Wow. And yet, we have all across the food supply, we have all of these admissions that many other items are routinely contaminated. For example, store-bought chicken. Two-thirds of the chickens are routinely contaminated with salmonella. We have the case of the USDA, this just came out a few days ago, the USDA sampled turkey, ground turkey production at Cargill food production factories, and routinely found it to be contaminated with salmonella. And it said nothing. Waited for a fatality before demanding a recall, so here we have the government actually knowing about dangerous food, standing by and waiting for people to die.
Jonathan Emord: Well all the food that these regulators consume is to a greater or lesser degree at risk of contamination. That's the nature of food. Food is a growth medium for bacteria. There's no way around it. And bacteria's present in every food. It's present in higher or lesser degree. Bacteria will grow to reaching raging levels of contamination such that it will cause injury to a person when it's improperly handled. If you pasteurize milk, you flash-pasteurize it, 15 minutes you raise the temperature of it then you drop the temperature, but then immediately after it's pasteurized the level of bacteria in it is low. As soon as it's moved and placed in an environment where it's possible for bacteria to grow again, it will. And so pasteurized milk is susceptible to contamination, which occurs every year with great regularity, resulting in 3,000 to 5,000 instances of sickness because of the contamination with listeria or e-coli or salmonella. And of those people, 40 or 50 will die every year. Does that mean that we should outlaw milk? I mean, maybe we should outlaw all milk, all dairy. We should prevent people from eating raw meat, we should prevent them from having turkey, chicken, any meat. Meat's a real good medium for the growth of bacteria. Maybe we should prevent people from having, oh, we gotta throw out vegetables as well, Mike, because vegetables also become contaminated, and fruits do, quite frequently fruits do. Oh, fruit juice, we can't have fruit juice. In short, if we're gonna have a zero risk food environment, we may eat nothing. Now it's not true that properly handled unpasteurized milk is unsafe as compared to pasteurized milk. It's the case that everything depends in the end on proper handling of the animals and of the milk once it's extracted from the animal. And that's true whether the substance is pasteurized or not. Sure, pasteurization does result in a reduction of risk in some degree. You might even be able to quantify that reduction as compared to raw milk. But the difference disappears entirely as soon as you start moving it. As soon as you start moving it. For example, you buy some milk, you put it in your car, you drive home. Let's say you live 35 minutes away from home. And it's in your trunk and its 100 degrees outside like it is right now. And you're traveling along with it in your trunk and oh my goodness, there's a traffic jam. And you're in that traffic jam for another 30 minutes. Then you get home, you put it on the shelf, you put it out, and you take all your other groceries out. And then you pour yourself a glass of milk and then you put it in the refrigerator. Well you've just increased the bacteria load in the milk, unbeknownst to you, by leaving it in your trunk in 100 degree weather and traveling for an hour.
Health Ranger: Yeah.
Jonathan Emord: I mean, this is just really ridiculous. There is, it is appropriate for the state to go after people when they are selling contaminated products and it's causing injury. The only way we find that out is when injury is caused. And that's unfortunate, but it's really the only possible way unless you're going to have an absolute police state with no freedom and have the government doing it. But even then, the government would be corrupt and the milk would be contaminated, and you know, there's no solution to this problem other than knowing who's selling you the product and investigating them and determining whether they're doing it reasonably and so they build a reputation of quality and safety. That is true of everything, though. That's true not only, it's everything we buy.
Health Ranger: Right, right. The FDA, though, is presenting this idea, a sort of false black and white paradigm here, that everything pasteurized is safe, everything unpasteurized is dangerous. And they even, I remember seeing the FDA, a press spokesperson quoted in the New York Times, saying that raw milk is pathogenic and can cause children to become paraplegics. I mean this is the kind of thing the New York Times is printing.
Jonathan Emord: Well, we would've had, we would've been snuffed out as a people early on in human development if that were true. I mean it's certainly been the case that until the 20th century, milk was not pasteurized. And yet, almost everyone drank milk, and my goodness, the population of the world continued to grow. Sure, some people were injured. Some horrifically so. But that's also true of peanut butter. People have died from having a spoonful of peanut butter, unbeknownst to them they were allergic to peanut butter, or it had a mold growing on it that caused aflatoxin and shock and death. People die of raw fish. They become infested with parasites from fish from raw fish. And you know, it's the story of food that the next bite you take may be your last. It's unfortunate. You should be careful. You should be careful how you handle food, how you cook it, and what you eat. These are important messages for us from the time we're youngsters, forward. But we don't need a nanny state to deprive us of freedom of choice in order to exercise sound judgment. That's our responsibility, it's not the state's. And when the state steps in and deprives consumers of wholesome food on the unproven and unprovable supposition that raw milk is always a ticket to death, well they're lying. And they're depriving us of our freedom. How, I mean my goodness, over a million people in the United States at least, three percent of the milk-consuming population of this country, drinks raw milk. My wife grew up on a farm, and it had dairy on the farm, and she drank raw milk with regularity. She's as strong as an ox and could break my back if she wanted to. But I mean, she's very, very healthy. And these people that I represent in the farm food freedom coalition who have been victimized by the Rawesome raid and by the actions in Michigan and Minnesota and in Pennsylvania against Dan Allgyer, an Amish farmer, you know these people are, look healthy to me. They're not falling over dead and there are thousands of them, they drink every day raw milk. They drink, and they consume raw cheese. I mean, this is a part of the American fabric. This is our history of our country. People who were careful and meticulous in the care of their food and making sure it was from clean animals and that it was properly refrigerated, they didn't die. Even before refrigeration, people would consume milk quickly after it was harvested from the cow. They didn't die. There's some instances of sickness, but it's really most likely related to handling. There's some allegation that TB was transferred from cows to people, but there's never been any sound scientific proof of such a transference, and it's more likely that people with TB handled the milk improperly and in an industrialized setting. But that's not the case, I mean these farmers who are selling raw milk by and large, I mean the overwhelming majority of them, are so conscious of the need to be careful, so conscious of the need to make sure that their animals are healthy and clean that, you know, you and I would substitute ourselves for their cows any day if they would give us the same care. And these are, I mean, the Amish culture, Mennonite culture, Mexican culture. In Mexico, it's queso fresco. They routinely use raw milk. Around the world, raw milk is a staple, raw goat milk and raw milk from cows is common all throughout Africa and the rest of the world. Sure there are some people getting sick, but it's really not appreciably different than the instance of illness associated with pasteurized milk being improperly handled.
Health Ranger: Well it seems like pasteurization has often been used as a cover for unsanitary practices inside the conventional dairy industry because they figure, oh, it's all gonna get killed anyway, so now we really don't have to keep our operations very clean.
Jonathan Emord: Well that's a good point. The long history of industrialized agricultural production, particularly of dairy, is really an unseemly mess. I mean the real source of the contamination problems that occurred in the 1800's and then in the 1900's, early 1900's with milk and dairy, arose from simultaneously with the growth of these massive industrialized chicken and farm operations where you'd have excrement all over and the animals sitting in, standing in their own excrement, where you'd have, the animals would be unclean and then they would become diseased and they would still keep milking them anyway, despite the fact that they were diseased, and even in modern agricultural practices, I mean they're pumping antibiotics into the animals and the animals are not given grass feed and they're not free roaming animals, and a lot of that constriction, I mean it's moving in the other direction as more and more people demand organic products, but, and free range-type products, but it's still very much the norm for animals to be warehoused and to be kept in confined spaces, and to be close to other animals to a degree and for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. And they don't have fresh, clean air and water to drink, and they can't roam. So this fundamentally alters the health and the state of the animal. I mean, the animals are depressed, the animals are transmitting diseases to one another, the animals are not properly cleaned. The animals are, even in clean environments, are still more apt to have disease, and then they're pumping them with antibiotics to off-set that, and then the antibiotics are leaching into the milk. So you're getting, the end product is less healthy, has fewer vitamins and minerals in it than the raw product, but you still wouldn't want to drink the raw product from animals kept in that environment.
Health Ranger: I wanted to ask you about the demeanor of government in conducting these raids because it seems if they simply showed up and asked to take a few samples to run a few tests, that would be less egregious it seems, than what they are doing, which is surprise, armed, SWAT-style raids. The massive destruction of food and private food property. Pouring milk down the drain, for example, stealing the melons and mangoes and raw honey and meats, the arrest and imprisonment of people there. Charging them with felony conspiracy crimes. It seems as if government now is going so far overboard that they've lost all credibility in the minds of anyone who's paying attention. What do you think?
Jonathan Emord: I couldn't agree with you more. We have a police state, just as applied to specific sectors of the market, and, but it's very clear. The amount of brutality used here, the, as you point out, the utter devastation not only to the particular principals who own these things and operate these things, but also to all their customers. And the humiliation, the PR campaign they use to say that, to paint the people as black as possible, as selling unlawful food products that are inherently unsafe, and that they're there to save the public by smashing this enterprise and punishing these people by charging them with all of these offenses. It's enormous overkill, even if you were to accept that their position on the law was sound, propriety, normal sense of decency, respect for the rights of people, including innocent victims, it's not illegal in any state in the union or under federal law to consume these products. It may be illegal under these misguided laws to sell them or put them in interstate commerce, but it's not illegal to consume them. And yet, in several instances they've actually gone to people's homes and intimidated them into giving them milk out of their refrigerators. This whole approach which is characteristic of a government that views itself as having limitless power, the very antithesis of the government that was created by our founding fathers, this notion that the FDA with impunity can go after anyone it wants based on some supposition that they're acting unlawfully, and then use full force, going even into people's homes. I mean, it's not just the businesses. They're ransacking their homes and they're going through their property. In the Rawesome case, they took some $9,000, in addition to another source of cash, that has not popped up on evidentiary rolls as having been taken. People know that $9,000 was taken. And they're never held to account for these abuses in ordinary courts. Most of the time, they get away with all of this nonsense. And you know, if you could envision this, I can give you another example. I had a client that had imported ephedrine, ephedra, excuse me, ephedra into the United States-
Health Ranger: Yeah, a Chinese medicine herb.
Jonathan Emord: -before it was illegal. Before FDA declared it illegal. As you know, I won the case at the District Court level, that held it unlawful under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act for the FDA to ban it. That was later reversed. But at the time I had won that case, and the decision was the law of the land. FDA nevertheless went after my client, they stopped the importation of his product at customs. I was trying to inquire what authority they were using to stop it when it was not illegal. Because the law held it unlawful. And they show up with jackbooted thugs at this guy's house, ransack his house in the middle of the night, throw him down on the ground, guy stands over him and another guy gets right next to his ear and he says, 'if you dare do this ever again,' and he said 'what?' 'Bring that junk into this country. You dare do this ever again, it's gonna be much worse for you and your family, do you understand?'
Health Ranger: Wow. So we have, these are criminal thugs operating with government badges and impunity, I mean this is a lawless government.
Jonathan Emord: Right, well, it's the Food and Drug Administration. I had a client that manufactured over-the-counter cough and cold remedies, a big company. And they had a meticulous chain of control of their product from the point of manufacture to the point of sale, with their own trucks, their own padlocked vehicles, their own security detail, their own processes. Even putting the cough and cold remedies in locked units that were at the retail outlets that could only be opened after certain things were done and they recorded all the information the government wished to acquire. A magnificent system of controls to protect against methamphetamine conversion of cough and cold remedies. Well, because the DEA, associate director of the DEA, Michele Leonhart had entered into a policy position that protected the two major pharmaceutical manufacturers of cough and cold remedies, Sudafed and Primatene Mist, and considered all other forms of competition to them to be defined as out of the traditional market and therefore inherently subject to diversion, even though in fact pharmacies have routinely been raided by marauders trying to get common cold remedies, Primatene Mist and Sudafed, to be converted in meth labs and so on at the time, she created this arbitrary discrimination. And she protected the makers of Sudafed and Primatene Mist without going after them in a single instance even though local authorities found them to be victimized by crime and to be contributing to the diversion, and she declared the non-traditional market, which was anyone marketing other than them, was inherently at risk. And then she prosecuted to revoking the registrations of some 50 companies, destroying them all, causing unemployment. Widespread unemployment in the process, without proving, except in exceptional circumstances, any contributing to this diversion. In the case of my client, they revoked its registration and in the process of doing the investigation they violated law and constitutional law. They went in to my client and they told the CEO of my client that if he didn't produce some 70,000 pieces of paper on various reports within one hour, he would be arrested. And they didn't have a weapon, but they said that they would arrest the person and they would take him away. So you had better get us all that information within an hour. He said, well, I need a day because I have to change a computer program, we have to do these various things. We'll give you all the information, but I need 24 hours. If you don't get it to us in one hour, you're going to be arrested.
Health Ranger: That's incredible.
Jonathan Emord: So he goes over and he contacts us and he says, am I gonna be arrested? I said no, you're not going to be arrested. They don't have any authority to arrest you. They don't have any regulatory authority. These are agents of the DEA who do not have authority to make an arrest and there's no basis to arrest you. You're complying. It just takes you that long. Then they disparaged them, and they went on and on and on and on with it. So then we had, I said look, this is nonsense. Let's videotape this. So I had him set up a video camera. And it's non-obtrusive, it's in the corner. And it would videotape them, and persons there, it would videotape them as they're going through, doing various things, but to keep a record of their abuses. And they see the video camera, and a guy comes over and he grabs it and he throws it down on the ground, smashes it, kicks it outside the door and says you will not videotape us.
Health Ranger: Wow.
Jonathan Emord: They have a first amendment right to that videotape, an absolute right to have a record of what goes on during an investigation.
Health Ranger: Yeah, it's their own business.
Jonathan Emord: I had a client in Texas, and he called me up and said oh, there's an FDA, there's a Texas Department of Health agent here who's been deputized by the FDA and they're investigating my company. And I said okay. He said boy, they're very aggressive. I said well, let's make sure we have a videotape of the whole thing. And he said, okay. So he comes in and he says I'm gonna videotape you here with this, but I'm not gonna interfere with anything you're doing. I'm just gonna record what you're doing. You will not videotape me. He said, no, no, I have a right to do that. He put me on the speakerphone, I said, yeah, he has a right to do that. And while I'm listening on the speakerphone, I hear this commotion, and a table sounds like it's turning over and I hear someone fall, and the client gets up and he says, he just pushed me over a table. And I said, what? He said yeah, he just pushed me over a table. I said, okay, you're outta here buddy. You, the FDA agent, get out of this office. Get outta here. You may not proceed with this. You're violating the regulations. You're exceeding the scope of your authority. You only can conduct an investigation at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner. Pushing my client over a table is unreasonable. I'll talk to your supervisor and the district director about whatever issues you have, but you sir, are not going to perform any investigation. So he leaves and I then file a report and explain the whole thing, and they fortunately removed him from the investigation. But the whole point is that these abuses take place because people think they have no limits to the power that is given them.
Health Ranger: Right.
Jonathan Emord: And they're not sending any messages that you are limited in what you may do clearly enough so that it's not happening. Because it is happening with regularity. And when they go about just ransacking people's homes and their businesses, when they use civil forfeiture laws. I mean, the civil forfeiture laws are the most outrageous violation of civil liberties that you can imagine. You've got, you're accused of wrong-doing, but you haven't and a trial and there's been no determination, yet they seize all of your assets and transfer them to the United States treasury electronically from your bank account. And you may not recover them without suing to get them. What is that?
Health Ranger: Incredible. But it's also, isn't there an element here of escalating the violence to the point where, you know, the FDA brings the guns, they hire, in the case of Rawesome Foods, they hired an LAPD task force, which is available for hire like mercenaries. The FDA and the Department of Agriculture just hires that team, they come in with the riot gear, the Kevlar vests, the face masks, the helmets, the rifles and pistols, isn't it just a matter of time Jonathan before somebody exercises their second amendment right to protect their life, their liberty, their property, and just starts shooting back?
Jonathan Emord: Well, that's what happens and that is in fact happening. People particularly in custody situations where, you know, let's say that you or I happen to have one of our children in the, are you married yet, Mike?
Health Ranger: I am, yes indeed.
Jonathan Emord: Ok. So you have children, perhaps. And you take your child, or will. You take your child to the hospital because the child is sick and it's an emergency and it's late at night and you can't get into your favorite practitioner. So you're in the emergency room and the child reports dizziness and nausea and the child has been vomiting and the child is then put into the hospital. And you start saying things like, let's say you're a vegetarian, and by the way I'm gonna now merge this into a real circumstance. So I have a client who has a child who ends up in the hospital because of dizzy spells, was hospitalized, and is in the hospital and the dietician for the hospital comes in and says I think you have failure to thrive, that's why you're dizzy, because I've looked at your diet and you are a vegetarian and your parents are from India, and they are vegetarians. That is very bad, you should have meat in your diet, and I'm going to have you eat meat right now and put together a nice little dish for you and the hospital kitchen has lovely beef here, nicely cooked, a little stew for you, and open your lovely mouth and I'm going to shove this down your throat. The child says I'm a vegetarian, I can't do that, my mom and father do not want me to eat meat, it's against my religion, and furthermore I have no interest in eating the meat and I'm not going to eat the meat. I'm elaborating beyond what an 11-year-old child would say. The message is the same. And the dietician says, oh, absolutely not, you must have the meat. You're going to have the meat or else you're going to suffer the same dizzy spells. You need to eat the meat. The child says, I want to talk to my parents. The parents come in, they say no, our child's a vegetarian, we will not eat meat, we think that cows are sacred, we do not want that cow carved and placed upon a plate, we don't want that plate in front of our child. Get it out of here. The dietician says, uh-uh, I'm reporting you to the family services department. Family services department gets in touch with local authorities. Child and family welfare in the local state and they come in and say ma'am. We will take custody of your child if you don't let the dietician feed the child meat. And they say, what do you mean custody. Yes. The child is not leaving the hospital, the child will eat the meat, and you're interfering with the ability of the government to exercise health and safety to protect your child from you. And the government has determined that the child has to eat meat. So then they hire me, and I look into it, and I send to the hospital Doctor James Carter from Emory University, who is an expert in nutrition, particularly interested in child nutrition, and he comes in and he interviews the child. He says, how are you feeling, fine, and can you please explain to me how it came to be that you suffered from these dizzy spells, do you know? What happened? What did you do before you became dizzy? Well, I like to spin. What do you mean you like to spin? Well, I stand up and I go round and round and round and round and then I get dizzy and then I fall down and sometimes I fall down and I go to sleep and I wake up. I see, and when did your parents see you the night that this happened? Well, I was out on the floor and they picked me up and they took me to the hospital because I told them that I would have these dizzy spells and I would fall down. Did you tell them that you spin? No, I just told them that I have dizzy spells and fell down. But it always occurs after you spin? Yes, when I spin a lot sometimes. I spin sometimes then I sit down, I get up and then I spin again and spin again and spin again and I fall down. Okay, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with the child. The lab results or anything don't show anything wrong with the child. The child is slightly underweight, but the mother was always underweight when she was young, and the grandmother was underweight when she was young, but they're perfectly healthy. So then I tell the hospital, I say look, your dietician is practicing medicine without a license. She diagnosed failure to thrive and you allowed that to happen and then you took action predicated upon it, bringing in the welfare people. I will cause the hospital's license to practice medicine, not practice medicine, but be authorized to function as a hospital in the state to be challenged and I will also go after the dietician for practicing medicine beyond her license, and I will go after the supervising physician for negligence and for condoning the practice of medicine by an unlicensed practitioner. These things I will do immediately unless you discharge this patient and I have a report establishing that the child suffers not failure to thrive, but has been spinning and that's why she got dizzy and that's why she fell, and I have a report on her nutritional status that shows that she receives adequate levels of protein from the beans and other legumes that she eats voraciously every day but seems not to gain weight because her mother and her grandmother had low weights at that age, as well. So what do you want to do, sir? You have 24 hours to make up your mind. I'll give you that, that's liberal because otherwise I'd file it right now. And he said okay, we'll take a look at it and then he called me back a couple hours later and he said, sorry about that, she's gone. We won't do anything. But this happens all over the place.
Health Ranger: How do you even, being the person you are now, so well-known, I mean your videos are famous online, you gave a speech about the Amish raw milk raid in front of the Capitol in Washington on the lawn there. You have several books, you have "The Rise of Tyranny," you have "Global Censorship of Health Information," you are extremely well known and getting more known. You must get just dozens of calls every week from people who need your help. How do you deal with that?
Jonathan Emord: Well, it's not possible for us to represent all the people who would like us to represent them or even ones we would like to represent. So we have to be somewhat selective. And we're a business enterprise, so we can't do these things for free. We do give out an enormous amount of free service to particular groups and associations that we think are advancing the interests of liberty and creating an environment that is helpful and in specific cases of hardship where it will not cost us an enormous amount to do the work, we do it. But otherwise, you know, we would just go out of business and we would be asking, calling you for help, Mike.
Health Ranger: Right.
Jonathan Emord: So it is hard to have to turn down people, and we try not to. We direct people though, that we do turn down, to others who might be able to help them, and we try to make sure that we help. But we're, our mission is to in the end to restore the republic and to transform this country from a bureaucratic oligarchy into a republic. And in doing that, when I write for NewsWithViews.com or I write columns for various publications, or here on the radio, I try very hard to alert the public to the abuses that are taking place so they know just because it hasn't yet happened to you, the frequency of these things is becoming greater and in a very real sense, we are losing the precious liberties that are our birth right because of a rapacious government. A government that is so out of control and so aggressive that it is a direct and ultimately mortal threat to liberty in this country. We have got to restore the republic. We have got to restore the doctrines that defined limits to government power, and you know all of this underlies the debt crisis. I mean-
Health Ranger: Right.
Jonathan Emord: -the whole thing, it is, and we have this enormous crisis of leadership in this country, not only in our area of health but also in all areas, and particularly, you know the greatest threat to the survival of the United States is the budget crisis. And we will, we are about ready to slip into a depression. This may well happen in the next year or two. And we are going to see the longest depression in American history, and we're looking at a budget debt of $14.5 trillion that is going to rise to at least $25 trillion in just eight years. This year's deficit, $1.27 trillion, is going to occur again and again every year into the future at present levels of spending. Just from the entitlement programs, Medicare, Social Security alone, within the next two decades the entire budget, all discretionary spending, plus more, far more, tens of trillions more, will have to go just to fund what they say, Medicare and Social Security as we know it. It's not an issue of whether these systems will change, they will change. These entitlements will change because they're unaffordable.
Health Ranger: Well, it's all unsustainable and when you say they will change, I say they will fail. I mean, these things are going bankrupt.
Jonathan Emord: They are. And it is possible, with the right leadership, to not only balance the budget, but to have a budget surplus and to do something to save the economy. To reverse the trend, cause employment to come back and increase the economy, which would be to eliminate the personal income tax. I mean if we eliminated the personal income tax, $1.1 trillion taken as revenue would remain in the hands of the American people. It would create the greatest economic boom in the history of the country. But in order to get there, we need to cut spending and we need to eliminate such things as the Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, Department of Education, Department of Commerce, Department of Energy, take down manned fighters and bombers and largely replace them with unmanned aerial systems and emphasize unmanned ground systems and reform the Department of Defense- doing all that we could save $380 billion. If we were to end U.S. involvement in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, repeal Obamacare, the stimulus bill, the jobs bill, the bailout bills, limit Social Security and Medicare to those who need, on a needs basis and eliminate the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, eliminate the Federal Jobs initiatives, repeal Medicare part D, reduce and dismantle Homeland Security and restore FBI and CIA and local law enforcement to policing, that would save $2.39 trillion. Add that to the $380 billion, and if you eliminate a bunch of agencies that we don't have to have- NASA, $18.7 billion, Food and Drug Administration by privatizing, by putting into the universities a system for drug review, $2.51 billion, Drug Enforcement Administration, $2.4 billion. Eliminate the Small Business Administration, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Federal Communications Commission, by privatizing ownership of licenses, National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities and various programs by the EPA, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission, get rid of all those, that's $8.3 billion a year. The total savings will be $2.78 trillion. We'd have a budget surplus of $1.5 trillion. We could eliminate the personal income tax, that's $1.1 trillion. We still have a surplus of $400 billion that we could spend, dedicate to bringing down the national debt.
Health Ranger: I have to challenge you here on one thing, from the folks on the left have always believed that for example education wouldn't happen in America without the Department of Education. That arts would not take place without the National Endowment of Arts. That, all of these departments that you mentioned, many people on the left believe that those represent the founding, the foundation reasons why these things exist and they, for example, they think that the food safety must be done by the government, that it couldn't possibly be done at the local level. What would you say to those people?
Jonathan Emord: Well, I would say to those people that before the welfare state, even in the modern era, the greatest achievements in art, in science, in health, in education, have all come out of private initiative. And, you know, all of the miraculous things that have transformed the world have been the product of private initiative. You can spend $100 trillion through NASA and succeed in launching people into the outer reaches of the universe, all through government spending. And from those programs, you will derive a pittance of productive, usable matter. You get a lot of excitement. You get a big machine that launches into space, produces all this bright light. But in the end, what do you get? You get a big debt. And what do you get from a private sector? Well, through careful, meticulous, market observance, following people's needs and trying to satisfy them, working diligently to find some way to induce you to spend your money because you will buy what is in your own best interest, someone like a Bill Gates comes along and transforms the entire universe, and you know, sorry Al Gore, contributes enormously to the creation of this internet. And causes us to be saved, and causes people with disabilities to be able to enjoy life in a way that they never could before and make the marketplace ramp up and achieve and be more efficient by tens of thousands of times. And enable people to get to a scene and to feed people and achieve distribution and market products and to have avoidance of waste and pollution and on and on and on and on and on. The catalog is enormous in the savings and the benefits to society are gargantuan. Compare that one thing with what the entire history of government regulation has achieved and you have to say it is far superior. And if you take into account all of the negatives that came from the government regulation, then the ledger is so overwhelmingly in favor of achievement through private enterprise. It is the startling realization for many people who share the view that government is a panacea, or can be, that every initiative undertaken by the government on a large scale has collapsed. No planning, no government planning project has ever succeeded in the history of the world. So you have the great society programs that were supposed to eliminate poverty. Well the savior of the world, Jesus Christ, told us that the poor will always be with us and they still are, despite the fact that the government has spent hundreds of trillions of dollars in the aggregate on trying to combat poverty over the years. It is still there, and it is raging. But the market by comparison has succeeded in achieving near full employment, something that is remarkable. And yet the credit is always given to the negligent president at the time.
Health Ranger: Of course.
Jonathan Emord: My name's Bill Clinton and we balanced the budget and unemployment levels were at a low. Is that because of Bill Clinton? No, that's because of Bill Gates, another Bill. And it's others in the marketplace that created the engines of productivity. Government is by nature a parasite. Parasites live off of the labors of something else. Government does not ever create anything of economic value in the marketplace. It ends up sucking the life's blood out of the marketplace. If it is an extremely efficient parasite, it kills its host and it dies. If it is an inefficient parasite, which government has historically been, it variously causes a sense, a degree of anemia in the patient, and it hopes that that anemia will not cause it to malfunction. Well, it's caused this giant market to become so anemic that now it's falling on its face. And the voracious appetite of this parasite is so great now that really, it will destroy its host. And the irony, you know, the extremely outrageous thing is that not President Obama, not the Republican leadership in the house, including John Boehner, and not the Democratic leadership in the Senate, including Harry Reid, not a single one of these people who has an opportunity unparalleled in American history, to establish themselves as the saviors of the Republic, here we have a mortal threat to the existence of the Republic, and they could stand up and they could articulate a plan like I just did, explaining the cuts to be made and explaining how we're going to save the nation from economic destruction, and it is essential and there is no way out of it. It must go this way-
Health Ranger: They'd be called terrorists.
Jonathan Emord: Yeah, and instead what they do is the President won't give a plan. Boehner won't give a plan. Harry Reid certainly won't give a plan, and you end up with nothing. There's no leadership, a huge gap in leadership, and what they're hoping is that gee, if I can just get past my term here, in the case of the president, without a collapse of the American economy, I've done it. And if I can just obfuscate and make the issue look confused enough and blame other people, I won't have to exercise leadership. I think they're in for a rude awakening. I think the American people are going to boot Obama because he has had the prime, he's had the wonderful opportunity to show that he is a leader and to direct the nation out of economic ruin. In fact, it's a necessity. But he hasn't risen to the occasion. He's crawled away from it, which is so embarrassing, but it's true, and it is this type of thing that is the greatest threat to the survival of our country.
Health Ranger: Absolutely, Jonathan, you know we are so far over time here. We gotta wrap this up. I can never talk to you and keep it on schedule because you have so many interesting stories. But I have one more question for you, and I want to give out your web address here. It's Emord.com, that's e-m-o-r-d.com, and also folks you can check out Jonathan's books on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, many other places, and of course video interviews with Emord on NaturalNews.tv. We have several. But, about this issue of people believing in big government as their savior. I'm sensing a major shift on this issue. Before the Rawesome food raids, when I would ask people in California, the vegans, sort of the progressive crowd, many of them really believed that government was going to save them. They would support the Food Modernization Safety Act, they would support the idea of the FDA having more power to have stronger regulatory authority over farms and organic producers. And they believed, yeah, the government's gonna keep our food safe, the government's going to save us. Now, after this one raid, without even soliciting these opinions, I'm hearing from the very same people, again, liberals, progressives, hippie community people, I'm hearing from those people, the government is out to get us. We have to limit government. I mean, this is from the left, Jonathan.
Jonathan Emord: Well, you know, the left has long been, has long embraced the notion that civil liberties must be defended. It's a principal characteristic of a person who is a liberal, as it is even for a libertarian, that the most important thing are rights. Now, unfortunately they think that social programs, they have a misguided conception in this regard, that confiscatory policies of the government, redistribution of wealth and income does not affect rights, even though of course it violates economic liberty rights. But so, they have a truncated view of rights, but nevertheless on the question of whether just people should be incarcerated, they would clearly be opposed to it. On the conservative side you have this fiscal responsibility notion, but then you have these excesses where someone wants to use government policies to regulate the conduct of your private life to a certain extent. And all of these things are excesses of government beyond what the Founding Fathers envisioned, but the point is that this government is so big that it's bad enough for everybody. The only person that it's not bad enough for, apparently, is the President of the United States, the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate. But for everybody who's a victim of what has been done by these people, and I should say also the heads of the bureaucratic agencies, for everybody else who doesn't sit and reign but who is instead a subject and victimized, this is ugly stuff. And so I think what's happening is it's hitting too close to home. They're suddenly realizing that they didn't get the government that each of them individually wanted, which if you get them in a room they'll disagree with one another about. If they want big government, they want big government to do one thing or another, but they don't all agree on what it should do. The reason is that they start with an erroneous supposition. But anyway, this is proving to them that big government is sometimes too much government, alas, we have to pare it back. And so I think that even on the far left they're coming to a realization that the socialist heaven just isn't attainable. They start looking in the direction of China and finding out that a capitalist economy is embraced by a Communist country, and voila, suddenly people become free even if you don't want them to be. It is the history of mankind that heads inexorably in the direction of individual liberty, and those who stand in the way are only temporary barriers. Sooner or later, we go back in that direction. It's the natural tendency of us to favor our freedom and to oppose instances where others would presume, as if our parents, to dictate how we are to conduct our lives when we're adults. We don't like that, and we don't like arrogant people who think they know better than we do what's in our own self-interest. So I think that everybody's coming to the realization that the party is over, that the big spending spree has got to come to an end, that grandiose visions of government creating a solution to every problem were just that: grandiose visions that could never come to realization and that much as you may hate free enterprise and private enterprise, it's the only thing that's feeding you. So, unless you don't want to eat and you're willing to starve yourself to death for a principle of socialism or whatever, you had better thank your neighborhood business for keeping your kids employed, and for enabling you to have a job when jobs become so precious, as they are now. I think reality is finally setting in. And as it does, these turkeys who will not be courageous enough to explain what must be done to save this country are going to lose in the political arena in favor of those who are willing to make the tough choices and do what's necessary. That's not the president, who is incapable of articulating a clear vision, and it's not the Republican leadership of the House or the Democratic leadership of the Senate. These people have to be replaced with ones who are willing to do now what is necessary to save our country, and I think patriotic people, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, will come to that conclusion by 2012. I'm hopeful, and I have to hope. It is the only way out.
Health Ranger: Well Jonathan, I've really enjoyed chatting with you today. I want to thank you for your time and also ask you, are you getting enough sleep, because you are on Coast to Coast AM I think, a couple of nights ago, and you're on the East Coast, so that makes it a very late night for you there.
Jonathan Emord: I love George Noory and think that show's great. I think he does wonders about bringing truth to light and it's a pleasure, so, and I am sleep deprived, but so are a lot of people in this country these days who are working very hard, and I appreciate the fact that so many are just sticking to it despite a rather dismal picture that comes out of Washington over our economy.
Health Ranger: Well thank you for what you do, for standing up, for having the courage, and by the way, the incredible vocabulary to articulate the argument for liberty. It's really great to know you, and thanks for joining me today, Jonathan.
Jonathan Emord: Thanks so much, Mike. You're the best.
Health Ranger: All right, take care.
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