Monthly Archives: August 2010

Personal Rights and Food Freedom

Food Freedom and Our Personal Rights: Upholding the Constitution

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On Tuesday, August 24th I attended a key Constitutional Rights rally for raw milk on the capitol steps of Madison, Wisconsin led by Sheriff Richard Mack . Mack is a retired sheriff from Graham County, Arizona and ardent champion of the U.S. Constitution and of states and individual rights. In the mid-90’s, Mack successfully challenged the Brady bill, obtaining a United States Supreme Court ruling that prevented the federal government from imposing an unfunded mandate on the States. Today,  Sheriff Mack travels the country lecturing on the importance of constitutional vigilance.  He educates sheriffs about their ultimate authority in their counties–that their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution forbids them from carrying out unconstitutional orders from federal and state agencies such as DATCP in Wisconsin (Dept. of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.)

Sheriff Mack described eloquently the warnings of our founding fathers who fought and died for our freedom. They knew that the correct role of government should be to protect the basic freedoms of its people and not interfere in their private lives, and that when government gets too big,  this basic role could be threatened. He said that Lady Liberty is ailing and that people today cannot be complacent and uninvolved – that this will be a grave error for our people. Many great nations have fallen by this sword.

Now just as a reminder of why our forefathers had the wisdom to write a constitution that upholds the right of every citizen to bear arms, and why Sheriff Mack worked so hard to challenge the Brady bill, I have a little gun history that may interest you.

  • In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
  • China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
  • Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

You get the idea. Every constitutional right you have is there for a reason. Without these rights, the United States of America would not stand for freedom today. Yet, right now we are facing many challenges to these freedoms that cannot be ignored.

Our country is rooted in a rich agricultural heritage. Small family farms graced our land for hundreds of years. In the last two years, all over our nation, we have witnessed unprecedented, unethical governmental farm raids aimed at jeopardizing these small farms. Wisconsin farmer, Vernon Hershberger and his family were present at the rally and had been recent victims of these tactics that make criminals out of innocent, law abiding people.

Mack called on sheriffs and police officers who have sworn by sacred oath, to abide by the constitution–that it is their absolute duty to protect citizens from unlawful harassment. He asked–“How different would the Rosa Parks case have been if police officers had protected her personal rights, which was their constitutional responsibility?”

As our people have suffered from the far-reaching health consequences of a sixty-year experiment with industrial foods, the demand for nutrient-rich foods that heal and support health from sustainable farms is dramatically increasing. However, even as food safety and quality issues regarding mass-produced food are ever more prevalent, the industrial food system and pharmaceutical giants are trying to deal their power card. Fortunately, people are waking up and the word is getting out. The government has no business in our kitchens or dictating to our small farms–these are private affairs.

Americans intuitively understand our claim to clean water and air, and to sustainable food grown with integrity. We know that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty and security of our person. Another example of overreaching government intrusion is seen with proliferating vaccination mandates. In all states, healthy children are required to receive an unprecedented number of vaccines – 70 doses of 16 vaccines, as a requirement for daycare and school admission. This occurs in the complete absence of any public health emergency, where government has not demanded the scientific research to prove their assertions of herd immunity and the “greater good.”   Yet the government is violating our rights, as Americans and human beings, by withholding important privileges, making the choice to vaccinate no real choice at all.  Parents have always possessed the right, supported by the Constitution, to determine what is best for their own children. Will we protect these rights?

Vaccination choice and food freedom share the common foundational touchstones of health, human rights, and bodily integrity. Our communities are bringing networks and resources together to educate supporters on how our work is part and parcel of the same cause.  If we remain segregated and separate, we will be divided and picked off. The inspiration for solutions will come from integration across our groups, in the creation of a broader movement.

Have we forgotten that our country was founded on the rights of private citizens? Have you read our Constitution recently? In June, I traveled to Washington DC to testify against the “new” USDA Dietary Guidelines. During this trip, I visited the Holocaust Museum. Nazi Germany followed on the heels of a cultured, civilized and sophisticated Weimar Republic. The process unfolded slowly, almost imperceptibly. German citizens were decent, hardworking people, struggling to provide for their families, trusting their government to make the right choices for its people. As the words “Never again” ring in our ears, today we ask how it could have happened. What happens when we abandon vigilance, seek greater protections and safety in exchange for our freedom, and trust government to do the right thing?

We cannot afford complacency. The signs are all there. Be actively involved in the protection of our personal and Constitutional rights. Go to a rally, organize a rally, write letters, contact and meet with your governmental representatives–get involved. Do something. But–you have no time–right? What is the consequence of this attitude. Who will do it then?

Kathryne Pirtle

with

Louise Habakus
Life Health Choices
Center for Personal Rights and
PetitionCoalition for Vaccine Safety

Personal Rights and Food Freedom, Sustainable Farming, Health, Soil and Environment

Urgent – SB S510 Will Allow Government to Put You in Jail for Growing, Sharing, Trading and Sharing Homegrown Food

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We cannot assume that someone else will protect our rights. Each person needs to write a letter. SB S510 is perhaps one of the most scandalous bills to ever have been written that could jeopardize your right to choose the foods you want to eat.

Please send the following senators listed below a sample letter below, or write one and send yours.

Kathryne Pirtle

Dear Congress(wo)man,

I am deeply concerned with your sponsorship of Senate Bill 510. That bill represents another hideous attempt to place more power into the hands of centralized government and robs individual citizens and states. The greatest danger to mankind is that this bill allows complete manipulation of America’s food supply and threatens to strip us of our freedoms to grow, sell, and buy food and make doing any of those natural things crimes punishable by imprisonment. It would be a crime to grow food and share it with my friends and neighbors. The act of generating and supporting this bill is in itself criminal to our Constitution to which you are not immune. Not only remove your sponsorship from Bill S510 but defeat it. Thank you.

Sincerely,

(your name)


Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) is the sponsor of this bill.

Co-sponsors are:
Lamar Alexander [R-TN]

Jeff Bingaman [D-NM]

Richard Burr [R-NC]

Roland Burris [D-IL]

Saxby Chambliss [R-GA]

Christopher Dodd [D-CT]

Michael Enzi [R-WY]

Kirsten Gillibrand [D-NY]

Judd Gregg [R-NH]

Thomas Harkin [D-IA]

Orrin Hatch [R-UT]

John Isakson [R-GA]

Edward Kennedy [D-MA]

Amy Klobuchar [D-MN]

Ben Nelson [D-NE]

Tom Udall [D-NM]

David Vitter [R-LA]

Senate Bill S510 Will Make It Illegal to Grow, Share, Trade or Sell Homegrown Food
by Steve Green

S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US.

“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 adviser 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 – 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 – 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 – Forcing people to globalize?
Corporate Rule?
Reclaiming Economies?