First of a four part series on the ongoing attack on the American Food Supply including a time line.
“In an effort to escape the continuous, racking abdominal cramping, Alex curled up into a fetal position and begged me to hold him. I stroked his face, attempting to calm him, to soothe him. I watched in horror his life hemorrhaging away in the hospital bathroom; bowl after bowl of blood and mucus gushed from his little body. Later, I helped change blood-soaked diapers that he had to wear after he could no longer stand or walk. Alex’s screams were followed by silence as the evil toxins attacked his brain causing him to lose neurological control. His eyes crossed and he suffered tremors and delusions. He no longer knew who I was.”
Nancy Donley, mother of Alex and President of Safe Tables Our Priority
The agonizing death of this little boy and many others WAS DELIBERATE. It was ‘JUST POLITICS.’ An orchestrated death, along with others, used to play up the need for legislation that moved control of the US food supply FROM AMERICAN’S INDEPENDENT FARMERS TO THE AG CARTEL OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION.
Shielding the Giant USDA’s “Don’t Look, Don’t Know” Policy tells the tale of how the USDA ALLOWED ConAgra to Poison Americans with Tainted Meat to create a crisis to get their blasted Food Safety Modernization Act through Congress. For over a decade Congresswoman Rosa Delauro (D – CT) tried to get the food safety bill through congress with no luck. So they set-up a MAJOR food poisoning event the E. coli Outbreak at the 2004 North Carolina State Fair and the MSM blasted it all over the news. I give the insider details HERE . (Slight editing to make it more readable.)
…..I know Jason Wilke of Crossroads Farm Petting Zoo, the designated fall guy for the State Fair E. coli Outbreak in North Carolina (2004). It is curious that two weeks before there was NO outbreak at the Lee County fair where he was for a week and there was no outbreak the week after at another large venue. (I personally verified with the fair committee chairs.) However during the week he stayed home prepping for the state fair, an animal rights activist who was a USDA vet, stuck a thermometer up the butt of each of his animals thanks to that one line change in the Animal Welfare Act. She also told him she wanted to close him down. These actions and words were relayed to me via phone by Jason BEFORE the fair. (He wanted to vent and moan) … CDC did over 400 tests on Jason’s animals and the only vector route was through fresh feces. Skin/fur or mouth contact did not have viable organisms. Also it was the first case where this nasty strain of e coli showed up in sheep and goats. It was confined to concentrated feed lot operations prior to that. Operations that would be inspected by a USDA vet. The four year campaign by Animal Rights Activists in North Carolina to cause a bad accident/incident at pony rides or petting farms ended abruptly the week of the fair and has not resurfaced…. HMMMmmm.
Gail Combs
I did not mention in that comment that PETA targeted me, trying to arrange animal related injuries to children 4 times in the 6 months prior to the fair. The last attempt was less than a week before the fair. I have had no incidences since then. Also Feces SINK through the shavings so a child would literally have to go digging through the shavings for the fresh feces to eat. On the other hand State Fairs use casual labor (How many were PETA?) The food vendors would likely buy hamburger from the refrigerated trailers parked on the state grounds. The vendors equipment and area would be steam cleaned long before the inspectors would go looking for someone to pin the blame on. Therefore there would be zero chance of connecting the food vendors to the outbreak.
…What bothers me the most is that there is enough “leakage” to see the clear coordination. Like the “4 walling” of food related illnesses right up until the farm regulation bill was past. Now? Nothing. Well I’m sorry, but we did not overnight go to zero food poisoning or bacterial contamination. It just reeks of either deliberate contamination to create a panic or a deliberate propaganda effort coordinated from (somewhere) central.
It bothers me to think that the governments of the world are largely in the Railroading Business, but it is looking ever more that way. Clear lines of control, influence, action “for effect”, coordinated efforts agenda driven. I’d like to think we had a free association of people and a marketplace of ideas, evolving to the best ends. The evidence argues otherwise. The UN is clearly (and states so) acting as a central coordinating and influencing body. The intent to reduce the Nation State autonomy is also quite clear. (That the Big Players have publicly stated that intent makes it easier to see…
E.M. Smith (ChiefIO)
EM was certainly correct. Prior to that final incident in 2004 John Munsell tried to alert politicians and others. In a e-mail to me he even said he had a reporter stay with him for three days, write an article for a well know NY magazine, have it approved by the editor only to have the CEO kill the article at the last minute.
Meatpacking Maverick: John Munsell’s against-the-odds struggle for improved food safety — Mother Jones Magazine, December 2003 Issue
“Before the tainted beef arrived — USDA-approved and vacuum-sealed – Munsell had no reason to doubt the integrity of the food-safety system. But that changed after the meat he ground for hamburger tested positive for E. coli 0157:H7. Instead of tracking the contaminated meat back to its source, the USDA launched an investigation of Munsell’s own operation. Never mind that the local federal inspector had seen the beef go straight from the package into a clean grinder — a USDA spokesman called that testimony “hearsay.” By February 2002, three more tests of meat Munsell was grinding straight from the package came back positive. This time, as he would later testify in a government hearing, he had paperwork documenting that the beef came from a single source: ConAgra:
Michael Scherer, Mother Jones Magazine
Munsell fired off an angry email to the district USDA manager, warning of a potential public-health emergency, and adding that if no one tracked down the rest of the bad meat, “both of us should share a cell in Alcatraz.” The agency moved immediately and aggressively — not to recall meat from Greeley, but to shut down Munsell’s grinding operation, a punishment that lasted four months. Despite Munsell’s continued whistleblowing — to Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), national cattle associations, and his fellow meat processors — the USDA failed to address the alleged contamination at ConAgra’s Greely Plant. Then, in July 2002, Munsell’s worst fears came true. E. coli-tainted burger from Greeley killed an Ohio woman and sickened at least 35 others. ConAgra then recalled 19 million pounds of beef, one of the largest recalls in history.”
John Munsell even contacted a lawyer, Bill Marler, a products liability attorney. One E. coli O157:H7 Outbreak I Think I could have prevented
But again nothing was done. The switch from the ‘safest food in the world’ to feces laced hamburger can be traced to the switch from hands on USDA food inspection to HACCP, a new system where inspectors no longer inspect FOOD, they inspect PAPERWORK. John Munsell does a great job of explaining the change in:
HACCP’S Disconnect From Public Health Concerns (PLEASE READ)
An amusing short article on the harassment John had to put up with from the USDA: Five Minutes With John Munsell & A Trip To The Woodshed With The USDA
Unfortunately there are just too of many “incidents” that have been handled in such a way that transnational corporations are not “inconvenienced”. Stanley Painter, Chairman of the National Food Inspection Unions, stated in his testimony at the congressional hearing on the Hallmark Dower Cows:
“..when we see violations of FSIS regulations,.. we are instructed not to write non-compliance reports… Sometimes even if we write non-compliance reports, some of the larger companies use their political muscle to get those overturned….Some of my members have been intimidated by agency management in the past when they came forward and tried to enforce agency regulations and policies. I will give you a personal example: [SRM removal regulations concern brain and spine removal to prevent BSE] …
In December 2004, I began to receive reports that the new SRM regulations were not being uniformly enforced. I wrote a letter to the Assistant FSIS Administrator for Field Operations at the time conveying to him what I had heard…I was paid a visit at my home in Alabama by an FSIS official dispatched from the Atlanta regional office to convince me to drop the issue. I told him that I would not.
Then, the agency summoned me to come here to Washington, DC where agency officials subjected me to several hours of interrogation including wanting me to identify which of my members were blowing the whistle on the SRM removal violations. I refused to do so….I was then placed on disciplinary investigation status. The agency even contacted the USDA Office of Inspector General to explore criminal charges being filed against me…
Both my union AFGE and the consumer group Public Citizen filed separate Freedom of Information Act requests in December 2004 for any non-compliance records in the FSIS data base…. It was not until August 2005 that over 1000 non-compliance reports – weighing some 16 pounds — were turned over to both AFGE and Public Citizen that proved that what my members were telling me was correct – that some beef slaughter facilities were not complying with the SRM removal regulations… on the same day those records were released, I received written notification from the agency that they were dropping their disciplinary investigation – eight months after their “investigation” began.
Stanley Painter
When the act failed to pass under the sponsorship of Democrat Rosa Delauno, the Act was then CO-SPONSORED by Senator Burr (R – NC) I go through some of the ramifications of that law HERE. The KEY is the Ag Cartel controlled World trade Organization would determine the rules US farmers would have to live by.
SEC. 404. 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.
Sir Julian Rose talks of the ramifications fo the OIE & FAO recommendations worldwide in The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside
….Spend hours out of your working day filling in endless forms, filing maps and measuring every last inch of your fields, tracks and farmsteads; applying for ‘passports’ for your cattle and ear tags for your sheep and pigs; re-siting the slurry pit and putting stainless steel and washable tiles on the dairy walls; becoming versed in HASAP hygiene and sanitary rules and applying them where any food processing was to take place; and living under the threat of convictions and fines should one put a finger out of place or be late in supplying some official details…
Sir Julian Rose
Do not forget that Bush signed a treaty to HARMONIZE US laws with that of the EU.
“In a sweeping move that has garnered surprisingly little attention this week the United States and the European Union have signed up to a new transatlantic economic partnership that will see regulatory standards “harmonized” and will lay the basis for a merging of the US and EU into one single market, a huge step on the path to a new globalized world order.” The BBC reported from the Summit in Washington on Monday….
http://stopspp.com/stopspp/?p=122 (Defunct URL)
And the FDA in 2003 even had up on their website: International Harmonization
The harmonization of laws, regulations and standards between and among trading partners requires intense, complex, time-consuming negotiations by CFSAN officials. Harmonization must simultaneously facilitate international trade and promote mutual understanding, while protecting national interests and establish a basis to resolve food issues on sound scientific evidence in an objective atmosphere. Failure to reach a consistent, harmonized set of laws, regulations and standards within the freetrade agreements and the World Trade Organization Agreements can result in considerable economic repercussions.
FDA
The international Ag Cartel was the driving force behind the Agreement on Agriculture, HACCP and the doubling of Food Borne illnesses. I did the graphs for a presentation before congress showing the five years before HACCP and the five years after. The USDA responded just as the DOD is now. ‘OH the first five years didn’t capture ALL the food borne illness. We switched to a different system where the reports (MANDATORY BY LAW) can be emailed instead of Faxed or sent by mail.’
This doubling of food borne illness, well hyped by the media, was used to justify the new law, the Food Safety Modernization Act, REGULATING farming (not the corporate processing plants.) These new regulations are meant to be used to kill off US independent farmers.
Again the USDA and the FDA LIED. They stated there had been no up date to our food safety system AFTER they had already implemented HACCP allowing the Ag cartel to inspect themselves.
In September, 1995, USDA’s Food Safety & Inspection Service presented a 600-page document Farm-To-Table – control of every step in the food chain from production to home preparation.
Reshaping USDA’s Meat & Poultry Inspection Program . . . An AAMP Perspective & Analysis Of The Agency’s Top-To-Bottom Review And How It Affects You And Your Business by Steve Krut, American Association of Meat Processors
For plants with more than one process (meaning more than one HACCP program), verification activities would be scheduled to ensure that all HACCP plans are covered at least once a month. Compliance over time would mean less frequent verification.
Some key steps:
Verification – Inspector checks to see that the plant is doing what is in its process control or HACCP plan. This may last several hours or perhaps one day.
Validation – FSIS evaluates the plant’s HACCP plan to be certain it is appropriate and works for the product and process covered. A target frequency for validation audit would be at least once every two years for every HACCP plan. This is likely to involve an FSIS out-of-plant technical person or team and take several days to a week, but will occur on site…
Steve Krut, American Association of Meat Processors
The Grain Trader Dan Amstutz, Who wrote the Draft of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture was VP of Cargill (grain) and then moved to Goldman Sachs (How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis- with it’s entry into the commodities market) He originally worked in the department of Ag under Reagan but his draft Agreement on Ag and Draft farm bill was passed under Clinton.
Background from 1945: History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job
The author Nicole Johnson takes us through how a Milner Round Table, the Committee for Economic Development (CED), intentionally changed the US agriculture system from a decentralized system to the vertically integrated system favored by the Ag cartel.
The human cost of CED’s plans were exacting and enormous.
CED’s plans resulted in widespread social upheaval throughout rural America, ripping apart the fabric of its society destroying its local economies. They also resulted in a massive migration to larger cities. The loss of a farm also means the loss of identity, and many farmers’ lives ended in suicide.CED members were influential in business, government, and agricultural colleges, and their outlook shaped both governmental policies and what farmers were taught. Farmers found themselves encouraged to give up on a farming system that employed minimal outsourced inputs and capital and get “efficient” by adopting instead a system that required they go into debt in order to purchase ever more costly inputs, like fossil-fuel based fertilizers, chemicals, seeds, feed grain, and machinery. The local, decentralized food distribution networks that were previously in place became subject to corporate buyouts, vertical integration and consolidation, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer outlets to sell their goods.
With this consolidation of grain handlers, railways, food processing, meat packing, brewing and beverage makers, cereal makers, food retailers and restaurants, more and more of the food dollar went to processors and retailers, which gained increased market power. Farmers, meanwhile, were and continue to be squeezed on both ends: by input suppliers putting upward pressure on selling prices and by output buyers exerting downward pressure on their buying prices.
This analysis is confirmed by the Keystone Center, an establishment think tank with representatives on its board from Monsanto, DuPont, Shell, Coca-Cola, Dow, General Electric and the Rockefeller Foundation, to name a few. The organization’s 2001 report “The Keystone National Policy Dialogue on Trends in Agriculture” observes that “Agricultural policy in many respects supported the concentration of farming into larger and fewer units. Some would say agricultural policy is biased toward bigness.”
Home Gardens ARE covered in case you are wondering..
“..FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY- The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation…”
There is NO exemption for instate commerce, for hobby farms, for you backyard garden.
“ The Administrator, in order to protect the public health, shall establish a national traceability system that enables the Administrator to retrieve the history, use, and location of an article of food through all stages of its production, processing, and distribution.
set good practice standards to protect the public and animal health and promote food safety;
conduct monitoring and surveillance of animals, plants, products, or the environment, as appropriate
require each food production facility to have a written food safety plan that describes the likely hazards and preventive controls implemented to address those hazards;
include, with respect to growing, harvesting, sorting, and storage operations, minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water”
Notice it does not say a person SELLING food, it says a person holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients. This is very scary given Ag Sec. Venman’s ” September, 1995, USDA’s Food Safety & Inspection Service presented a 600-page document Farm-To-Table – control of every step in the food chain from production to home preparation. “
Also included is this.
“in any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction SHALL BE PRESUMED TO EXIST.”
The fact you are growing veggies for you and friends does not exclude you!
SEE: Overlawyered — H.R. 875, Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 by WALTER OLSON and Trojan Horse Law: The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 by Hans Bader
….Lori Robertson of FactCheck.org, who is not a lawyer (she has a B.A. in advertising), claims the bill doesn’t apply to “that tomato plant in your backyard.” As a lawyer, I am skeptical of this claim (I co-represented the prevailing defendant in the last successful constitutional challenge to federal regulation under the interstate commerce clause…
….Ignorance about the law’s broad reach (and how it will be construed by the courts) has thwarted opposition to the bill, which will likely pass Congress. For example, a newspaper claims the bill “doesn’t regulate home gardens.” The newspaper probably assumed that was true because the bill, like most federal laws, only purports to reach activities that affect “interstate commerce.” To an uninformed layperson or journalist, that “sounds as if it might not reach local and mom-and-pop operators at all.” (The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, has sought to forestall opposition to her bill by falsely claiming that that “the Constitution’s commerce clause prevents the federal government from regulating commerce that doesn’t cross state lines.”)
But lawyers familiar with our capricious legal system know better. The Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) that even home gardens (in that case, a farmer’s growing wheat for his own consumption) are subject to federal laws that regulate interstate commerce. Economists and scholars have criticized this decision, but it continues to be cited and followed in Supreme Court rulings, such as those applying federal anti-drug laws to consumption of even home-grown medical marijuana. Indeed, many court decisions allow Congress to define as “interstate commerce” even non-commercial conduct that doesn’t cross state lines — something directly at odds with Rep. DeLauro’s claims.
Hans Bader
