Modern American’s seem to have lost sight of essential truths clear to the country’s founders more than 200 years ago.

Today, everybody from mega agribusinesses executives to consumer advocates are lauding the Senate for passing a massive overhaul of the “food-safety” system. The legislation would grant broader inspection power to the F.D.A., allow the government to mandate product recalls, oversee farming and regulate the food production industry to an even greater degree.

“Everyone who eats will benefit,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. “F.D.A. will have new tools to help ensure that we have a safer food supply that causes fewer outbreaks and illnesses.”

Benjamin Franklin would have likely taken a different view.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

In fact, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act represents yet another massive expansion of federal power, much of it unconstitutional. (And before you send me emails justifying this monstrosity based on the commerce clause, please do us both a favor and do a little research on the meaning of commerce as understood by the framers. Click here.)

Sadly, if history provides any insight at all, and it usually does, this act will do nothing to actually protect the American people. It will instead serve as a tool for big corporations to gain a competitive advantage over small, local farms and food producers. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this – why else would big companies support legislation that on its face will exact huge costs in time, money and resources?

And it will also give politicians and bureaucrats yet another lever to maneuver and manipulate for their own purposes.

True to form, power hungry politicians and progressive thinkers have churned up the American public with scare tactics to gin up support for another expansion of government power –  as always, at the expense of liberty.

Proponents say the act will protect Americans from foodborne illnesses. But does the problem justify such a massive, expensive, intrusive cure?

Not really.

According the the Centers For Disease Control, only about 1,500 people per year die from salmonella and other known foodborne pathogens. Another 3,500 people die  from illnesses stemming from unknown foodborne pathogens. Many of those deaths result from improper food handling and cooking after purchase.

Certainly, 5,000 deaths is 5,000 deaths too many. Nobody wants to see fellow Americans die. Nobody wants tainted food on grocery shelves. But protecting citizens from every danger, risk and threat is not the role of the federal government – or any government for that matter.

But nanny state politicians continue taking us for a spin on a never ending carousel. Several thousand deaths under a heavily regulated system creates the panic necessary to enact even more expansive, overreaching regulation.

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To live life invites the risk of death. No law, act or government edict can mitigate that reality. Franklin was right. When we begin looking to others for protection from every eventuality, we necessarily give up our freedom, and in the end enjoy no greater safety.

Alexander Hamilton wrote of the threat to liberty posed by war. His reasoning applies equally to government’s other attempts to “protect” its citizens.

“Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”

Note: the legislation passed 73-25. Click here to see how your Senators voted.

Raw milk battle reveals FDA abandonment of basic human right to choose your food

The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FTCLDF), an organization whose mission includes “defending the rights and broadening the freedoms of family farms and protecting consumer access to raw milk and nutrient dense foods”, recently filed a lawsuit against the FDA for its ban on interstate sales of raw milk. The suit alleges that such a restriction is a direct violation of the United States Constitution. Nevertheless, the suit led to a surprisingly cold response from the FDA about its views on food freedom (and freedoms in general).

In a dismissal notice issued to the Iowa District Court where the suit was filed, the FDA officially made public its views on health and food freedom. These views will shock you, but they reveal the true evil intent of the FDA and why it is truly a rogue federal agency.

The FDA essentially believes that nobody has the right to choose what to eat or drink. You are only “allowed” to eat or drink what the FDA gives you permission to. There is no inherent right or God-given right to consume any foods from nature without the FDA’s consent.

This is no exaggeration. It’s exactly what the FDA said in its own words.

You have no natural right to food

The FTCLDF highlighted a few of the key phrases from the FDA’s response document in a recent email to its supporters. They include the following two statements from the FDA:

“There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.” [p. 26]

“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.” [p.26]

There’s a lot more in the document, which primarily addresses the raw milk issue, but these statements alone clearly reveal how the FDA views the concept of health freedom. Essentially, the FDA does not believe in health freedom at all. It believes that it is the only entity granted the authority to decide for you what you are able to eat and drink.

The State, in other words, may override your food decisions and deny you free access to the foods and beverages you wish to consume. And the State may do this for completely unscientific reasons — even just political reasons — all at their whim.

This has all emerged from the debate over whether raw milk sales should be legal. But the commonsense answer seems obvious: Of course raw milk should be legal! Since when did the government have any right to criminalize a farmer milking his cow and selling the raw, unpasteurized milk to his neighbor at a mutually-agreeable price?

The U.S. government’s secret agenda to eliminate raw milk

Raw milk has been in the spotlight recently as defenders of the food are constantly battling with state and federal authorities over the freedom to buy and sell it. At the national level, the FDA has been on a ruthless crusade to eliminate all sales of raw milk everywhere. Lately, the agency seems to have shifted its tactics from attacking raw milk dairy farmers directly to going after raw milk “buying clubs” and “cow-share” programs, which effectively bypass the draconian laws in many states by establishing private contracts between individuals.

In a cow-share program, you buy a share of the cow’s produced milk, and you pay a cost of the cow’s upkeep. It’s sort of like CSA shares for farm veggies, but with cow’s milk instead of veggies. This arrangement drives the FDA absolutely batty because it bypasses their authority and allows free people to engage in the free sales of raw dairy products produced on small family farms.

But why is the FDA hell-bent on stopping raw milk from being sold in the first place? Think about it: What is it about this particular whole food that has regulators working overtime to make sure you don’t drink it?

It certainly has nothing to do with food safety, as the FDA commonly claims is its reason for opposing it. Raw milk’s track record of safety is phenomenal, and all legitimate studies indicate that it’s actually less prone to harbor harmful bacteria than the pasteurized stuff (which is all dead, modified milk anyway).

According to a Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) report, between 1980 and 2005, there were ten times more illnesses from pasteurized milk than there were from raw milk. And most of the reports that link illness outbreaks with raw milk provide little or no evidence that raw milk was even the culprit.

But apparently the facts don’t really matter to the FDA (is anyone surprised?) because the agency continues to repeat false talking points about how raw milk is inherently dangerous and that drinking it is “like play Russian Roulette with your health”.

Big Dairy behind push to eliminate raw milk

The real reason why the FDA opposes raw milk is because Big Dairy opposes raw milk. Just like Big Pharma, Big Dairy has worked very hard behind the scenes to steer FDA policy in its favor. And according to some recent reports, Big Dairy is one of the primary forces trying to eliminate raw milk because it threatens the commercial milk business.

Recently in Massachusetts, for example, the state’s Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) has been targeting raw milk buying clubs that purchase raw milk from rural dairy farms and have it delivered to urban drop-off points where many of the customers live. Raw milk sales are legal in Massachusetts as long as they are done at the farm, and the state has long tolerated buying clubs, which are convenient for customers and technically perfectly legal.

But this situation now seems to have changed. MDAR recently sent cease-and-desist letters to four buying clubs even though there is no Massachusetts law that prohibits their existence. When club members challenged the legitimacy of the warnings, MDAR decided to propose a new regulation to specifically outlaw buying clubs. (They just can’t stand the fact that people are buying raw milk, can they?)

Get this: Scott Soares, a Massachusetts legislator who is friends with the MDAR commissioner, held a preliminary meeting in advance of the May 10th proposal hearing to discuss the matter with interested parties. Fifteen educated and passionate consumers and farmers of raw milk showed up to challenge Soares, who ended up revealing to them that “large dairy producers” had contacted him to push for raw milk restrictions.

To make matters worse, it was revealed that Soares failed to follow proper protocol by not opening a docket to keep a record of all interactions relating to the proposal. So not only did Soares reveal that he’s basically bowing to political pressure from Big Dairy by supporting the restrictions, but he’s also violating proper legislative procedure in the process.

So what we have here is a classic case of a large and powerful industry pushing government regulators to outlaw competing products so that it can monopolize the market. It’s the same thing that Big Pharma does in getting the FDA to destroy nutritional supplement companies. But now it’s happening with raw milk, too.

What’s next? Will all farmer’s markets be outlawed because the veggies haven’t all been irradiated or pasteurized?

As usual, it’s all about the money, and as you follow the money trail all the way up to the federal level, you find the same thing happening everywhere: At the FDA, USDA, FTC and so on. U.S. government regulators have become monopoly market enforcers for Big Business, and they won’t let anything get in their way… not even personal health freedoms or just basic access to food.

I’m sensing a Ghandi moment coming on here. Somebody is going to have a powerful public demonstration against tyranny by drinking raw milk in the same way that Ghandi led his followers to harvesting salt. People have a natural-born right to real food, and the FDA is violating human rights by attacking producers of raw milk.

Unconstitutional position of the FDA

It’s not really news to the folks in the natural health community that the FDA opposes personal health freedoms, but according to the FTCLDF, the FDA’s recent response to its lawsuit is one of the agency’s boldest statements yet about how it views health freedom in America. It practically turns the FDA into a dictatorial Gestapo-like agency whose mission is to destroy the U.S. Constitution and deprive people of their natural rights.

Not only does the FDA think it has the power to regulate interstate trade; it also thinks it can regulate intrastate trade (which means buying and selling within state borders). In fact, the agency made this very clear on page 6 of its dismissal when it wrote, “It is within HHS’s authority…to institute an intrastate ban [on unpasteurized milk] as well.”

This is the FDA trying to run rampant over States’ rights. The federal government, after all, isn’t satisfied to exercise control over the limited powers granted to it by the U.S. Constitution — it wants to overthrow the tenth Amendment and dictate rules, regulations and laws that the states are being forced to follow.

This is blatantly unconstitutional. The Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government from intruding on the laws of individual states, and is only allowed to wield powers expressly granted to it by the Constitution (powers granted by the People, in other words).

There is no power granted to the federal government to ban the sales of raw milk. I’ve read the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and I never saw it mentioned in there. The very idea, by the way, would have seemed bizarre (and downright stupid) by our nation’s founders, many of whom actually operated farms and drank raw milk themselves.

According to the FTCLDF suit, the FDA is clearly operating outside Constitutional authority by forbidding raw milk from being transported across state lines from states where it is legal to sell it. And for the FDA to arrogantly announce that it has the authority to ban intrastate raw milk sales shows just how tyrannical and oppressive the agency has now become.

The FDA, bluntly stated, has become an enemy of the People. It is taking away the rights that your forefathers helped protect (often with their lives). The FDA is destroying what your fathers and grandfathers fought for in World War II. It is attempting to terrorize the raw milk producers of America and run them out of business through a campaign of threats and intimidation. This is the agency that’s supposed to be working for the People? Give me a break…

Even private contracts aren’t a fundamental right, according to the FDA

But it gets even worse. On page 27 of the dismissal, the FDA also states that Americans do not have a fundamental right to enter into private contractual agreements with one another, either.

Huh? Are you kidding me?

Buying clubs, cooperatives and community supported agriculture programs (CSAs) all rely on private contractual agreements in order to operate. People contract with each other to obtain clean, healthy food from the sources of their choice without government intrusion. But now the FDA is saying that people don’t actually have this right. To enter into such a private contract to purchase food, milk or even water is a violation of federal law, the FDA now claims.

You are just a subject of the King, you see, and you have no rights. You must eat and drink what you are told. You must behave in a way that is allowed by your King. You have no rights, no protections and no freedoms. You are a slave, Neo.

The “substantive due process” clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, however, assures people of this right when it states that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” And being able to make personal food choices without having to obtain permission from Big Brother is definitely included under this clause.

But the FDA — aw, heck, all of Washington for that matter — doesn’t honor the U.S. Constitution in any way, shape or form. The document is little more than a tattered piece of American history according to the Nazi nut jobs running federal agencies today. They are no more likely to respect the Constitution as they are to leap from their desk job chairs and magically transform into flying elephants.

But all hope is not lost… there are things you can do to fight for your freedoms.

The Raw Milk Revolution

According to David Gumpert from The Complete Patient, raw milk is a proxy issue that really addresses food freedom at large. Whatever is decided about raw milk will set a precedent for everything else.

That’s why it’s so important to support raw milk freedom whether you drink milk or not (I don’t drink milk, but I support raw milk freedoms nevertheless). Not only is legalized raw milk beneficial to small, family farmers who are able to maintain livelihoods because of it, it also supports the local food economy. It’s also, by the way, a whole lot healthier than pasteurized milk!

On January 28, 2009, Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) introduced HR 778, a bill that would end all federal restrictions on interstate traffic of raw milk. It’s along the same lines as the current lawsuit which challenges the constitutionality of such restrictions in the first place. You can read the entire bill at the following link:
(http://www.ftcldf.org/docs/HR_778_I…)

The FTCLDF has a petition page where you can contact your Congressmen and urge support for HR 778. You can even ask your Senators to cosponsor it. Please support this effort by signing this online petition.

Even more urgent than this is the need to express your opposition to a “food safety” bill going before the U.S. Senate called the “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act”. Also known as S. 510, this bill, if passed, will drastically increase the FDA’s power over food and make it very difficult to obtain natural, unprocessed foods of any kind. It would give the FDA completely power to irradiate, fumigate, pasteurize or otherwise destroy every item you consume, from fruits and vegetables to dairy products.

Remember how I said that the FDA (wrongly) thinks it has the power to regulate intrastate trade? Well S. 510 would specifically grant the agency this power. The FDA would then have the power to destroy all small, local farming, gardening or dairy operations in your home town, even if your state expressly defends your rights to engage in such activity.

Can you imagine a SWAT team of FDA agents showing up at your door because you grew organic broccoli and sold some at the weekend farmer’s market without fumigating it with poisons first? That’s what’s coming to your home town, everywhere across America.

S. 510 is the final version of H.R. 2749, which was passed last summer by the House of Representatives. There’s still time to stop it, but we need your help. So please sign the petition linked above.

I know sometimes it seems like the politicians aren’t listening, and for the most part that’s true, but a massive outcry against this attempted takeover of food is sure to get their attention and may even force them to back down.

You can read all about both bills at the following link:
(http://www.ftcldf.org/news/news-foo…)

You can also contact your Senators by visiting this link:
(http://www.opencongress.org/people/…)

Reposted from NaturalNews.com

Mike Adams is an award-winning natural health author with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies’ products. He has created over 100 CounterThink cartoons and produced several popular hip-hop songs on socially-conscious topics. He’s also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and pursues hobbies such as Pilates, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known on the ‘net as ‘the Health Ranger,’ Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org

Last week, another bill was passed and signed into law that takes more of our freedoms and violates the Constitution of the United States.

It was, of course, done for the sake of the children, and in the name of the health of the citizenry.  It’s always the case that when your liberty is seized, it is seized for your own good.  Such is the condescension of Washington.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will give sweeping new powers over tobacco to the FDA.  It will require everyone engaged in manufacturing, preparing, compounding, or processing tobacco to register with the FDA and be subjected to FDA inspections, which is yet another violation of the Fourth Amendment.  It violates the First Amendment by allowing the FDA to restrict tobacco advertising in multiple ways, as well as an outright ban on advertising any cigarettes as light, mild or low-tar.

The FDA will have the power of pre-market reviews of all new tobacco products, and will impose new user fees, meaning taxes, on manufacturers and importers of tobacco products.  It will even regulate the amount of nicotine in cigarettes.

My objections to the bill are not an endorsement of tobacco.  As a physician I understand the adverse health effects of this bad habit.  And that is exactly how smoking should be treated – as a bad habit and a personal choice.  The way to combat poor choices is through education and information.

Other than ensuring that tobacco companies do not engage in force or fraud to market their products, the federal government needs to stay out of the health habits of free people.  Regulations for children should be at the state level.

Unfortunately, government is using its already overly intrusive financial and regulatory roles in healthcare to establish a justifiable interest in intervening in your personal lifestyle choices as well.  We all need to anticipate the level of health freedom that will remain once government manages all health care in this country.

Actions in Congress such as this tobacco bill are especially disconcerting after we thought we were beginning to see some progress in drawing down the wrong-headed and failed war on drugs.  A majority of Americans now think marijuana should be legal, taxed and regulated, according to a recent Zogby poll and over 70 percent are in favor of allowing medicinal use of marijuana.

Bills like this take us down exactly the wrong path.  Instead of gaining more freedom with marijuana, we are moving closer to prohibiting tobacco.  Our prisons are already bursting with non-violent drug offenders.  How long will it be before a black market in tobacco fills the prisons with non-violent cigarette smokers?

Hemp and tobacco were staple crops for our founding fathers when our country was new.  It is baffling to see how far removed from real freedom this country has become since then.  Hemp, even for industrial uses, of which there are many, is illegal to grow at all.

Now tobacco will have more layers of bureaucracy and interference piled on top of it.  In this economy it is extremely upsetting to see this additional squeeze put on an entire industry.   One has to wonder how many smaller farmers will be forced out of business because of this bill.

Ron Paul is a republican member of Congress from Texas.

We’d like to think that FDA officials have only our health and safety in mind when they decide on what food or medicines they’ll allow us to buy. But, sadly enough, they’re as politically motivated as any politician in Washington.

Certain industries and corporations are rewarded, while many others are restricted, punished, or prevented from entering the marketplace. There is no such thing as a regulatory agency that is free from politics, which is all the more reason to keep the FDA out of our personal health care decisions.

FDA regulations have often prevented Americans from gaining access to new life-saving drugs. Examples of this include major delays in the marketing of drugs used to treat cancer, blood pressure, heart attacks, cholesterol, and strokes

People have suffered unnecessarily — or even died — with such problems as heart disease, depression, schizophrenia, kidney cancer, and epilepsy, just because FDA officials were afraid of the political consequences they would face if they made even a minor mistake.

What might be considered even worse than the intrusion on personal choice, the FDA, by its very existence, gives people a false sense of security. It cultivates a lazy and complacent population; people assume that a government stamp of approval means that drugs must be safe, and they don’t need to study them at all before consuming them.

But the track record for FDA-approved products hardly inspires confidence. In fact, far more Americans have died using approved pharmaceuticals than others, such as nutritional supplements. Not every product on the market will perform as claimed, and that holds true for the drugs approved by the FDA too.

For many years, the FDA wouldn’t allow aspirin makers to state on their product labels that aspirin thinned blood and could therefore save a person from dying if taken during a heart attack. They threatened them with fines or imprisonment if they published this important information on their products.

Also, natural health solutions are available for many diseases today but are not accepted by the FDA and in many cases prohibited by them. And this is not to mention the fact that under FDA supervision, an estimated one million Americans were never told they were given Hepatitis C-infected blood.

Another good example of the evils of the FDA was the Imclone scandal (yes, it’s the same Imclone that landed Martha Stewart in jail!). At first, the FDA rejected its drug for cancer treatment on the grounds that some of its research and testing procedures weren’t followed to the letter. A year later, after adjusting some procedures and getting their paperwork straightened out, the FDA approved the drug – the exact same drug they rejected previously.

What happened? It turned out that the drug was safe, and was safe right from the beginning, just like Imclone stated. But, did anyone at the FDA ever think of the number of people who may have suffered or died because they weren’t allowed access to this drug which had already undergone extensive testing? This is a drug that works like chemo-therapy, but with much less side effects. During that additional year of delay, countless people could’ve benefited from its use while the FDA was supposedly protecting them.

The problem, then, is clear. If the FDA keeps both bad information and bad drugs off the market, it also keeps both good information and good drugs off the market. The approval process has become so horrendously expensive that new life-saving drugs are either not brought to market or experience lengthy delays.

Because of this extensive process, the FDA is also directly responsible for high drug costs. Pharmaceutical companies often spend in the hundreds of millions of dollars to get a single drug to the market. Why? FDA rules make it that expensive. But, unfortunately, many drugs never get FDA approval, and drug companies naturally have to charge extremely high prices for their approved drugs to make up for these great losses. On top of it, big pharma companies end up spending massive amounts of time and money on lobbying so as to ensure that friendly “regulators” are hired, and that drug patent periods are as long as possible.

Much worse, the FDA does not permit U.S. citizens to reimport drugs that sell for anywhere from 30 to 300 percent less outside this nation’s borders. Such limitations keep prices high, and should be considered nothing short of scandalous. Pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to profit from this government-enforced price fixing, but they do.

Why should you be forced to pay an artificially-inflated price for drugs, when the identical drug is available in Canada, Mexico, or Europe for just a fraction of the cost? To protect people from their own choices, the politicians prevent us from reimporting drugs at huge savings.

The mandate of the FDA is to protect American consumers, but this is based on the assumption that bureaucrats know what’s best for you. It’s based on the assumption that you are an idiot, and that you are unable to research what’s good and bad for you. It’s based on the assumption that you aren’t capable of making responsible choices for yourself. It’s also based on the assumption that all drug-makers and physicians are either unethical or criminal.

The answer is simple even if the solution is not. Get rid of this beast. There’s nothing in the Constitution which authorizes its existence anyway. It’s time to abolish the FDA.

Its current incarnation began just over a century ago, in 1906. Logically, that means that people in this country were able to survive without the FDA for much longer than it’s existed. We, like our ancestors, don’t need a centralized agency giving us rules, guidelines, and orders. We’re able to decide for ourselves what’s best for us. How? By word-of-mouth, doctor recommendations, third-party certifying organizations, by reading, or anything else that the FDA claims to be the sole provider of.

The real issue, though, is much deeper. It’s not just whether the FDA does a good job or not. It’s not just whether the FDA is politically motivated or not. It’s not just whether there’s a better system or not. The real issue is this; who makes the decisions for you – you or the government?

The politicians want us to believe that for every situation there is a government solution. But, in a free society, you get to decide what medical treatments or health supplements are right for you.

In abiding by the Tenth Amendment’s mandate for strictly limited government, all agencies not authorized by the Constitution must be abolished. Eliminating the FDA is not only legally required, it’s morally sound.

Getting rid of the FDA would allow you to make important choices according to your own beliefs and values. For the sickest of people, the opportunity to live in a free society such as this would not only be beneficial and just; it may be a matter of life itself.