Govt raids on private food suppliers/farms increasing

[Large Sarge]

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/08/05/raids-are-increasing-on-farms-and-private-foodsupply-clubs.aspx




Government raids of producers, distributors, and even consumers of nutritionally dense foods appear to be happening more frequently.
Sometimes they are meant to counter raw dairy production, other times to challenge private food organizations over whether they should be licensed as food retailers.

Grist offers the following advice for preparing for and dealing with a raid:

Be wary of strangers who want to join your private buying group or herdshare: Before they seek out a search warrant, regulators invariably nose around and infiltrate private buying groups or raw milk herdshares to gain information on "probable cause." They'll often make up sad stories as to why they should be allowed to join. Gary Cox of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund recalls how an undercover agent from the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets infiltrated Meadowsweet Dairy LLC, a private organization of 120 Ithaca consumers who bought shares to gain access to raw dairy products, in 2007: "He was insistent. 'I live so far away, and I only come here so very infrequently, so can't I at least have some (milk) today, PLEEEEEEEASE, because otherwise I won't be able to get any for a long time.' Barb Smith felt sorry for him and relented. We know what the consequence was of her kindness." The consequence was an open-ended search warrant that agents used several times in late 2007 and early 2008 to confiscate product, leading up to a legal challenge to the LLC that is currently under appeal following rulings in New York state courts against Meadowsweet.

Have a video camera at the ready: Since search warrants are usually specific as to what can be searched and/or seized, a video recording of events inhibits abuses by regulators and other law enforcement personnel. Regulators and law enforcement officials definitely don't appreciate being videotaped, and sometimes will simply disconnect videos or order targeted individuals to put the videos away. According to Aajonus Vonderpanitz, in the June raid of his Rawesome Foods outlet, "They unplugged our surveillance camera to hide their actions. They threateningly refused video capture of their raid when members commenced filming."

Have a plan of action: Much like planning how your family might escape a fire, decide in advance who will handle the video camera, who will collect business cards or take down the names of all agents, and who will interact with the regulators. The regulators and police count on the element of surprise to sow confusion, and keep the targets from responding intelligently.

Read the search warrant fine print: Sometimes there are limitations on the search warrants that targets can exploit. Vernon Hershberger, the Wisconsin dairy farmer, was able to slow the regulators down because he knew the search warrant in his case likely wouldn't allow forcible entry, so when agents returned a second time, after he cut the seals on his fridges, he locked his farm store doors and they were forced to leave. They eventually returned with an amended warrant that specifically allowed them to take his computer.

Keep computer backups: In nearly all such raids, the authorities confiscate computers so they can document transactions and customer interactions. If you don't have a backup of what's on your disk, you can literally be put out of business. Moreover, it's advisable to monitor what information you keep on the computer in the farmhouse or in your food club. There's something to be said for backing up every few days onto another computer kept off-site.
more @ the link

[Phoenix]

Protecting one's wholesome food is the equivalent to protecting the lives of oneself and one's family. Because it is!

If you'd shoot to kill someone raping your wife, you better shoot to kill someone raping your food.

[Ponce]

Steal my food and they are in trouble, mess around with my tp and they are dead........."Give me tp or give me death" hahahahahahah.

[Phoenix]

If you'd shoot to kill someone raping your wife, you better shoot to kill someone raping your food.


I don't know Phoenix, it's a tough call. Nuking first responders has its upside, but we both know it doesn't change anything. Agribusiness will keep humping the legs of politicians. The same carpetbaggers will craft more legislation in their favor. The police will continue to be the organ of their enforcement. Raids and confiscations will continue. It's job security for the age to be finks.





If we won't defend to the death our ability to have wholesome nourishment, then perhaps we should just turn in our guns and ammunition immediately, and ask for biometric IDs. After all, if protecting our women, our children, and our food aren't important enough to risk death, then we really are just cattle.

[Saul Mine]

I read the bible once and it says this stuff is going to get a lot worse. It's not wise to resist the judgments of God. It's also unwise to resist a cop by force of arms. You might be dead right, but you'll be just as dead as if you had been wrong.

Re the cameras: If there is a law against recording, it only applies to private exchanges. Anything a cop says or does on duty is public. Courts have always ruled so. Be sure you have more cameras than the cops know how to find, and also some wireless microphones. Then if they take recorders by force you can also charge them with destroying evidence.

[Joe King]

If you'd shoot to kill someone raping your wife, you better shoot to kill someone raping your food.


I don't know Phoenix, it's a tough call. Nuking first responders has its upside, but we both know it doesn't change anything. Agribusiness will keep humping the legs of politicians. The same carpetbaggers will craft more legislation in their favor. The police will continue to be the organ of their enforcement. Raids and confiscations will continue. It's job security for the age to be finks.





If we won't defend to the death our ability to have wholesome nourishment, then perhaps we should just turn in our guns and ammunition immediately, and ask for biometric IDs. After all, if protecting our women, our children, and our food aren't important enough to risk death, then we really are just cattle.

Doesn't this stuff make anyone wonder how when why the selling of food was made illegal? Thereby requiring a license?

If we don't understand how we got here, how will we ever know what steps need to be taken to get back to where we should be?
The alternative is to standing around griping about it as they take your milk away from you.

Knowledge is power.

[Phoenix]

I read the bible once and it says this stuff is going to get a lot worse. It's not wise to resist the judgments of God. It's also unwise to resist a cop by force of arms. You might be dead right, but you'll be just as dead as if you had been wrong.


"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst; the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956

[cedarchopper]

They (corpfood/gov) are intent on controlling food and are attacking from every direction...the NAIS animal tracking program (micro-chipping of every animal with GPS coordinates) is re-grouping, not ending as they first claimed. Farmers and ranchers became outwardly hostile to the government because of this program...but they are up against a multi-pronged attack, including control of seeds, monopolization and corporatizing of slaughter house operations (from 1000's to a handful), rules and regulations, and financial manipulation of commodities.

They will drive most small operations out of business, that will be how they finish it off. Corn and soybean farming is a good example of how it will all play out.

But, like everything, if there is a will, there is a way.

[wvojak]

I understand licensing/inspections for companies that are processing food and selling it on the open market to anyone who wants it.

But a private co-op should be able to grow/produce/process food any way they wish, without license, since the food will never be offered beyond the private group of members, who understand all the associated risks.

[Serpo]

S510 - Illegal To Grow, Share,
Trade, Sell Homegrown Food
SB S510 Will Allow Government
To Put You In Jail ....
By Steve Green
8-6-10
http://www.rense.com/general91/dehe.htm

S510 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-510 )

"If accepted [S 510] would preclude the public's right to grow, own, trade, transport, share, feed and eat each and every food that nature makes. It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one's choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God." It is similar to what India faced with imposition of the salt tax during British rule, only S 510 extends control over all food in the US, violating the fundamental human right to food." ~ Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower.

Monsanto says it has no interest in the bill and would not benefit from it, but Monsanto's Michael Taylor who gave us rBGH and unregulated genetically modified (GM) organisms, appears to have designed it and is waiting as an appointed Food Czar to the FDA (a position unapproved by Congress) to administer the agency it would create without judicial review if it passes.

S 510 would give Monsanto unlimited power over all US seed, food supplements, food AND FARMING.

History

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton introduced HACCP (Hazardous Analysis Critical Control Points) purportedly to deal with contamination in the meat industry. Clinton's HACCP delighted the offending corporate (World Trade Organization "WTO") meat packers since it allowed them to inspect themselves, eliminated thousands of local food processors (with no history of contamination), and centralized meat into their control. Monsanto promoted HACCP.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton, urged a powerful centralized food safety agency as part of her campaign for president. Her advisor was Mark Penn, CEO of Burson Marsteller*, a giant PR firm representing Monsanto. Clinton lost, but Clinton friends such as Rosa DeLauro, whose husband's firm lists Monsanto as a progressive client and globalization as an area of expertise, introduced early versions of S 510.

S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.

1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.

2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says:

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into "the United States." Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, "entry of food into the US" covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and "entering into" it by virtue of being produced.

4. It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food. It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements. Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.

5. It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds ÂÂ* How to criminalize them, for more details.

6. It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease. Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents. Animal diseases can be falsely declared. S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.

7. It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production ÂÂ* put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety.

8. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer. The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.

9. It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs. This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil- based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe. The five items listed the Five Pillars of Food Safety are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.

10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control. The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied. It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review.

For further information, watch these videos

Food Laws ÂÂ* Forcing people to globalize?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PwqUQ_HIlg&feature=related Corporate Rule? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXoJHG-er7A&feature=related Reclaiming Economies?

[Phoenix]

SB S510 Will Allow Government To Put You In Jail ....


Only cattle walk into cages.

Aim for the head.

[Joe King]

SB S510 Will Allow Government To Put You In Jail ....


Only cattle walk into cages.

Aim for the head.


My, but hasn't your attitude changed.

You're not actually advocating violence, are you?


I mean, wasn't it you who posted the following statement and link?





I'm not scared


I'm not scared, either. But I am also not SUICIDAL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Kahl


So which is it? :conf:

Is your milk really that good? :conf:

Do you honestly feel that the statement in your sig does not also apply to this milk situation? :conf:

I mean, they don't go in with guns drawn because they're absolutely not going to use them. ::) lol

[Phoenix]

You're not actually advocating violence, are you?


Who do you work for?