Food Safety bill S.510 is alive and well. After suffering a near fatal blow last week in the Senate, it has re-emerged as an amendment to House appropriations bill HR 3082 passed last night, appropriately under the cover of darkness. It is now back in the hands of the Senate for a final vote.
If the Senate passes this bill, powers will be handed to the FDA that have the strong potential to morph it into an American Gestapo. The Gestapo, you will remember, was the feared Secret Police force that wreaked terror on the people of Nazi Germany. What most people do not know is that the Gestapo’s power came from a law passed in 1936 – not a dictatorial edict from Hitler – that allowed it to operate without judicial oversight.
Frighteningly, S.510 would hand similar power to the FDA. The amendment’s language requires the creation of a database of food producers who would be subject to surprise inspections from FDA officials. If the FDA suspects, not proves with scientific evidence, but only believes that a targeted food producer is jeopardizing public health in some way, that food producer is suspended from producing food!
Here’s where the Gestapo part comes in …
With no due process in a court of law (that’s correct – you can forget about your Constitutional rights), suspended food producers would be “evaluated” (aka “railroaded”) by a panel of FDA thugs who have the power to decide whether or not you are out of business or can resume operations.
Small family farms are not exempted from this bill!
Think this scenario is a far stretch? Well, consider the armed raid on a private health food store full of unarmed, law abiding citizens in California this past summer. No one was breaking the law in this raid. It was a witch hunt in every sense of the word.
I’m sure the people of Nazi Germany had no idea that the Gestapo law passed in 1936 would result in people being dragged away in the middle of the night to concentration camps either. They thought the law would be a good thing and help restore order to their society just as supporters of S.510 like Michael Pollan naively believe that this bill will help make our food supply safer and protect the health of consumers.
It is never wise to give any governmental body at any time for any reason the power to operate outside courts of law or to conduct raids/incarcerate citizens without solid evidence and due process of law.
History teaches this simple lesson over and over and over.
If this stealth amendment is passed as part of an under the radar appropriations bill, Americans just may get their first taste of tyranny in the form of the FDA, aka American Gestapo. With 4,000 new FDA agents slated for hire should this bill pass and eager to cut their chops, it’s hard not to envision such a terrifying scenario.
Please contact your Senators right away (call 202-224-3121 to ask for them by name) and express your desire to have this spending bill that contains S.510 as a stealth amendment defeated once and for all.
The future of locally grown food by small family farms may very well depend on it.
Sarah, TheHealthyHomeEconomist.com
Wow, it amazes me how little history some people know about their own country. The people babbling on about how they want the FDA to have more power are crazy. Have they read up on the history of the FDA? They burn books on natural health just to protect Big Pharma profits. Seriously, look up about them during the early 19th century.
I want my food to be safe, but I don’t want to be stuck eating nothing but pure garbage which is 90% of the food in the grocery stores. Do people know what their doing to their health? The consequences we’ll face in a few years for giving up real food freedom are going to be astronomical. Heck, they already are with 2 trillion dollars a year being wasted on disease management brought on by eating junk.
The world is going down the drain. We live in the dark ages, despite what most people think.
Looks like someone needs not only a butter infusion but a good history lesson and an actual reading of the bill as well as the cases against the farms being shut down. A history of the FDA would also be appropriate.
The FDA has always had the power to prevent the drug and food related illnesses and deaths. They have CHOSEN not to. The target of their efforts are not those who are not in compliance, but those who don’t have the bankroll to defend themselves.
The fact is, the more centralized our food system the less safe our food supply is. The Food “Safety” bill will only make our food more centralized, less healthy and far more deadly.
Nice! You obviously need a serious butter infusion! LOL.
These farms that are being shut down haven’t done anything wrong and there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Don’t you get it? Obviously not.
Haven’t you ever taken debate, by the way? When you stoop to personal insults, you have lost the argument.
If the small farmer isnt in compliance and is creating unsafe conditions that put public health at risk then they SHOULD be put out of business. According to your inane logic, because a farm is small they should be allowed to operate with impunity. We are to compromise public health to protect a small farmer wants to sell produce tainted with e-coli or lysteria? Given the rash of food borne illnesses every year, which result from “small” and large farms alike, excuse me if I am not “outraged.” But all of this is neither here nor there as S.510 doesnt apply to small farms doing less than $500,000 in business a year anyway so I am really confused on what your talking about.
Back to my original point… Anyone who would compare the FDA to Nazi death squads is an all together rotten person who has no respect for themselves or for a race of people who faced extermination. You can try and deflect this and argue that you were merely to trying to draw a parallel between the two agencies all you want. But the fact of the matter is that no parallel can be drawn. The FDA protects health and human safety. The gestapo murdered millions of people. Until you apologize for the insensitive filth that you have written you will always be a bad person.
YouRcRazy, Where’s your outrage for the small farms being put out of business without due process by the FDA? Are you so stuck in the past that you can’t see the emerging holocaust against small farms in this country? True, the FDA isn’t using gas chambers, but it is “killing” farmers just the same by taking away their livelihood and bankrupting them.
Are you seriously comparing the FDA, an administration of the United States of America who’s sole function is to preserve the safety of the nations food and drugs, to the Gestapo… an organization from Nazi Germany who’s function was to terrorize and round up Jews for extermination. You should be ashamed of yourself for drawing such a comparison. Have you no shame? Well, in a way I guess I just answered my own question. Anyone who would marginalize the holocaust in this way obviously does not.
HI Barbara, that letter is way old news. I don’t what Senator Durbin’s office is doing sending that out! There is no exemption for small farms in H.R. 3082 which is the spending bill that now has this horrible food safety bill attached to it. You might want to give his office a call.
Sarah, I wrote to my senator regarding this bill and here is his response;
Dear Ms. Chandler:
Thank you for contacting me regarding efforts to improve our nation’s food safety system. I appreciate hearing from you.
Each year, 76 million Americans become sick as a result of food-borne illnesses. An estimated 325,000 of these Americans are hospitalized and another 5,000 die because of the food they ate. This is unacceptable. We must do more to ensure the safety of food in the United States.
With these concerns in mind, I introduced the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), which passed the Senate with bipartisan support on November 30, 2010. This bill would give the FDA a mandate to increase its inspections of all food facilities, including annual inspections of high-risk facilities. It would require food facilities to have plans in place to identify hazards and incorporate measures to prevent outbreaks. The bill also would require all testing and sampling for regulatory purposes to be done by labs accredited by the FDA and would require those results to be sent to the agency. It would enable the FDA to more efficiently respond to outbreaks by giving the agency new authorities to order recalls, shut down tainted facilities, and access records. This bill would also create a national strategy to protect our food supply from terrorist threats and would ensure imported foods meet our food safety standards.
Critics of the bill have expressed concern over how this bill would affect farmers, especially those with smaller farms that market directly to consumers. Throughout the bill, special considerations and exemptions are made for farms and small businesses. The bill also incorporates language from the amendment to protect small farmers offered by Senator Jon Tester of Montana.
The bill would exclude farms and restaurants from the new record-keeping, registration, hazard-analysis, and increased inspection requirements. Though the bill would require farms to comply with produce standards, it directs that these standards provide flexibility to farms depending on the type of business they undertake. Small farms are exempt from the produce safety standards if the individual farm markets its produce directly to consumers, has less than $500,000 in annual sales, and sells its produce within the same state or within 275 miles.
S. 510 now awaits a vote by the House.
Thank you again for contacting me. Please feel free to keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator
RJD/lmm
And that whole $500,000 annual sales limit is just crazy. The local farmers markets in MN limit the farm to making $5,000 a year in sales at the markets which for many farmers is the way they get the majority of income. Those are GROSS numbers too–they do not include fuel to get to the market or the feed mill or in the tractor, all of which are deductions. They don’t discount for the purchase of animals, maintaining the animals, building expences, buying seed, etc. OH and labor! Most farmers my size cannot afford to hire help but we don’t give ourselves a paycheck either.
When the pencil is put to paper and the figures at the end of the year come in, the actual profit is much less than the gross profit. And that is on years when profit was actually made.
I have to have a profitable farm since I do not have an outside job or income of any sort. The American dream is always to be bigger and better, grow, grow, grow but with financial limitations like this it will shut doors and force us to compete with bigger corporate or factory farms. Not that I am going to bring in anywhere close to $500,000 unless I win the lottery!
Tracy
I think the bill parallels Stalins starving of the Ukraine much more than Nazi Germany. Stalin was able to kill off 7,000,000 people in only one year by simply taking their food. His soldiers/police gathered the food, shot or locked up people trying to get the food, and also prevented other people from helping the starving. This happened in 1932-1933, not even 100 years ago and before the Holocaust started in 1938-1945. And the Holocaust “only” killed 6,000,000 over 7 years. Neither should ever happen again but history does tend to repeat itself.
If the bill gets passed and if the “police” can lock up food I think we will see some terrible things happening in this country that so far we have been able to avoid. Perhaps it is a lot of if’s involved but I do tend to believe the government does not always have our best interest in mind.
Tracy