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
Thank you so much for sharing this- it is indeed, frightening. I wish more people would pay attention to what is going on and realize they are being tricked! I am not a happy camper with our government right now, expecially with all that is going on with the TSA as well. The American people are slowly but surely letting their freedoms (what our country was founded on!) be taken away without much of a fight.
Hi Melinda, the original bill did have an exclusion for small farms .. this stealth amendment has no such provision.
I’m confused! I thought I was supposed to support this bill because for the first time the FDA would be able to mandate food recalls, an important power they don’t now have. Currently they can only request that manufacturers of tainted foods, like the eggs that poisoned so many last summer, stop producing and distributing their products. I also thought this bill was supposed to have an exclusion for small family farms too.
Melinda, Under current law, the FDA can easily mandate food recalls, by going to court. The courts will give them a court order mandating the recall, if the FDA has evidence to support it. If there is a need, and if the FDA has the evidence, the order can be granted within 24 hours. The point is that the FDA should be subject to court review, to protect all of us against unjust actions. The FDA used this power recently, to shut down a small dairy in Washington state.
S510 allows the FDA to act whenever it want to, without evidence, without court review. Do you think the government should have the power to seize and destroy businesses and property, without evidence, without judicial review? That was the procedure in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, not the United States.
Their appears to be an exclusion for small family farms, but it is not automatic. It must be applied for. There is no exclusion for anybody until it is applied for, with very burdensome paperwork, and granted, almost certainly by the FDA.. The government agency must be satisfied that the farms practices and food meet its safety standards before the exemption is granted, which leaves it up to whim of the FDA. It is a virtual certainty that the FDA will not give an exemption to anyone who makes raw dairy products, as the FDA considers all raw dairy to be unsafe, no matter what.
Unfortunately, the media does a terrible job of describing what the bill really does.
I also have written my senators. I only heard back from one, same response as Heather got. They don’t care what I think. It’s the “we know better” attitude that drives me crazy. Remember, these are the same people who passed the healthcare bill they DON’T have to participate in because they have their own.
That is a good question, Heather. Perhaps Stanley who commented above and who is an attorney can answer this. This bill is quite simply, terrifying.
Heather, Sarah, the law could be challenged as unconstitutional in the Federal courts, and could go up to the Supreme Court. The problem is that several of the justices there are connected with large industrial corporations. In fact, Clarence Thomas used to be an attorney for Monsanto. The courts have showed a frightening tendency to support laws that extend the power of the Federal government, and take our freedom away.
While S510 is, in my opinion, clearly unconstitutional, there is no guarantee that the courts will follow the constitution. They have ruled many times that the rights we have can be limited by “a compelling state interest”. The tyrants would argue that “food safety”
is a such “a compelling state interest”.
The state always uses fear and the argument that they are protecting us, then takes our freedom away. Hitler used the same kind of arguments.
But there is hope. At the beginning, S510 and its house counterpart had huge bipartisan support. Yesterday, every republican and some democrats voted against the inclusion of S510 in the spending bill. It passed by only one vote.. The actual spending bill passed by only 6 votes. Our voices are being heard, and if the republicans and any freedom loving democrats in the senate hold firm, it can be stopped. We must give them all the encouragement and support we can, because this bill truly is terrifying.
There is hope with the new congress, which should be less sympathetic to that kind of tyrannical government, and is much less likely to pass it.
I have called, written and e-mailed both my senators about this. One ignores me, the other gives me the equivalent of a pat on the head and an “I know what’s best for you.” He’s never addressed ANY of the points I’ve brought up. While I hope that this will be rejected, I do wonder if there is a means for this to find it’s way to the Supreme Court as it is CLEARLY unconstitutional. Is there ANY avenue to fight a law that prevents judicial oversite?
Amen!
I have been watching this bill and am incredibly concerned about it.
Americans don’t realize that our freedom won’t be taken away all at once- rather it will be silently chipped away at until we wake up one day and it’s gone.
The parallels with Nazi Germany are accurate and chilling.
I didn’t realize Michael Pollan was a supporter of this… How disappointing…
Allowing any governmental agency to operate without judicial oversight destroys our freedom, violates the constitution, and makes America into a police state. Allowing the FDA, which is dedicated to protecting the profits of Big Ag and Big Pharma, to have such unlimited power is even worse.
The FDA already persecutes small farmers and drives them out of business, while never doing anything to stop big facilities and food imports to taint our food, For example, the FDA allowed the huge facility responsible for tainting huge numbers of eggs to reopen. If S510 passes, the FDA will, without doubt, use its vast new powers to end raw milk and raw cheese. Then it is likely that it will use its new power to decide every detail of how crops are grown to force the use of GMOs,
pesticides, raw sewage full of dangerous pollutants, chemicals, and irradiation on all who raise or sell food.
Here is an example of how the FDA uses its power.
A medical clinic that treats badly damaged knees and joints takes stem cells from their patients, grows them in a lab, then injects the cells into the joint of the person they were taken from. The patient does not need anti rejection drugs, because the body recognizes its own stem cells. In 95 % of the cases, the patients joint regenerates completely, and they are healed. No side effects. No need for artificial knees or hips, no surgery, no need for drugs, no profits for Big Pharma.
So what does the FDA do? The FDA is trying to shut this clinic down, claiming that a person’s own stem cells are a “drug”!. A drug that must go through the FDA approval process!
Fortunately the clinic is able to fight the FDA in court. Farmers will be destroyed before they can even get to court if S510 passes.
Call your senators, please, ask them to vote against the stealth passage of S510, and fight for our freedom/
The FDA was also trying a few years ago to do something about how oranges and other citrus containing vitamin C were marketed. Vit C is a drug ya know!
Andrea, good point. Thanks for commenting. SNOPES is for DOPES!
Great points, Sarah! Thanks for posting this. I am sick and tired of people (green people) saying that this bill is “no big deal.” I have even been told that, since Snopes says it’s no threat to garden growers and such, we have nothing to worry about. Like Snopes is the beat all end all on every matter! Wake up people. Do your research and read the actual bill!!!!