Proposed HR 875, Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 - Discussion by Mike Adams
Friday, March 20, 2009 2:53The following article is Mike Adams’ take on the new proposed laws and regulations which could radically change the way food is grown and produced in the US.
Will it spell the end of good, natural, wholesome, health-promoting organic foods? Is Big Food & Beverage set to seize control and monopolize the way Big Pharma has done? To me, this a worrying situation. I hope I am overreacting. Mike, fortunately, knows how to look at the positive spin of things.
HR 875 Could Result in Arrest, Imprisonment of CEOs of Processed Food Companies (if enforced)
by Mike Adams
The health-conscious community is rightly concerned over the pending passage of HR 875, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, which hammers small family farms with a whole new level of tyranny and oppression. The proposed law is chock full of ominous-sounding text that would allow government authorities to fine small farms $1 million a day while arresting and imprisoning their owners for refusing to spray toxic chemicals on their organic produce. (There are many other bizarre elements in this proposed law, too.)
But the law has a few other elements that no one is talking about, such as SEC 401 - Prohibited Acts (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.875:), which reads, “It is prohibited (1) to manufacture, introduce, deliver for introduction, or receive in interstate commerce any food that is adulterated, misbranded, or otherwise unsafe.”
And that sentence, if actually enforced by the new FDA (Food Safety Agency), should immediately outlaw ALL foods containing:
• Aspartame
• MSG
• Partially-hydrogenated oils (an “adulteration”)
• Homogenized milk (an “adulteration”)
• Sodium nitrite
… and many other dangerous ingredients that I’ve written about for years on NaturalNews, and in my book Grocery Warning (http://www.truthpublishing.com/grocerywarning_p/yprint-cat21246.htm)
Five years in prison for diet soda company executives?
Another part of HR 875 that’s quite interesting describes the civil penalties for those responsible for shipping food (or beverage) products that result in “serious illness.”
The law reads:
(1) CIVIL PENALTY-
(A) IN GENERAL- Any person that commits an act that violates the food safety law (including a regulation promulgated or order issued under the food safety law) may be assessed a civil penalty by the Administrator of not more than $1,000,000 for each such act.
(1) OFFENSE RESULTING IN SERIOUS ILLNESS- Notwithstanding section 303(a) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 333(a)), if a violation of any provision of section 301 of such Act (21 U.S.C. 301) with respect to an adulterated or misbranded food results in serious illness, the person committing the violation shall be imprisoned for not more than 5 years, fined in accordance with title 18, United States Code, or both.
Thus, because chemical sweeteners in diet sodas have been well documented to cause conditions that most reasonable people would consider “serious illnesses” (blindness, seizures, brain tumors, etc.), if HR 875 is enforced, it could result in the arrest and imprisonment of the CEOs of Coke and Pepsi.
And that doesn’t even cover all the other food and beverage companies that sell products known to contribute to serious illness. Diabetes is a serious illness, and soda products directly promote it. Heart disease is a serious illness, and margarine products (which are adulterated beyond belief) certainly cause heart disease. Cancer is a serious illness, and bacon, sausage and processed meats contain sodium nitrite that directly promotes cancer.
Given these simple truths, if HR 875 passes, I suggest the members of the natural health community should get together and start calling for the arrest and imprisonment of the CEOs of Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and all sorts of other food mega-corporations that ship products that promote disease and death.
Speaking of death, the penalties get even more aggressive if someone dies from eating harmful food products. As stated in the HR 875 bill text:
(2) OFFENSE RESULTING IN DEATH- Notwithstanding section 303(a) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 333(a)), if a violation of any provision of section 301 of such Act (21 U.S.C. 331) with respect to an adulterated or misbranded food results in death, the person committing the violation shall be imprisoned for not more than 10 years, fined in accordance with title 18, United States Code, or both.
Did you catch that? Under this law, we could conceivably get the CEOs of junk food companies locked away for ten years! To do that, we have to demonstrate that people are being killed by consuming their food products. That’s easy: Just open your eyes and look around: Virtually everybody dying in America today is dying in part or in whole from the consumption of toxic chemicals and adulterated ingredients found in processed foods and pharmaceuticals. If any honest science were actually being conducted on this, it would be remarkably easy to prove.
Shutting down CVS Pharmacies, Walgreens and Junk Food Retailers
That’s not all you’ll find in HR 875. According to the law text, even retailers who receive adulterated foods would be subjected to civil penalties. As the law states: “It is prohibited (1) to manufacture, introduce, deliver for introduction, or receive in interstate commerce any food that is adulterated, misbranded, or otherwise unsafe.”
That means it would be illegal for Walgreens, for example, to stock processed foods made with harmful ingredients. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually been in a Walgreens, but I have. And if you remove everything in that store that’s harmful for your health, there’s virtually nothing left but empty shelf space. That whole retail box is a cesspool of toxic chemicals, if you ask me.
Wouldn’t it be cool to see the CEO of Walgreens arrested and imprisoned for selling products that poison people? And why stop at Walgreens? You could move on to Wal-Mart, CVS Pharmacies, K-Mart and grocery store chains, too. There’s hardly a single grocery store operating in America today that isn’t selling some sort of harmful poison on its shelves. Heck, even Whole Foods sells soups and deli foods made with yeast extract (which contains MSG).
Why HR 875 will never be enforced in this way
So frankly, if you really read HR 875, and if it were really enforced as written, it would spell an end to the mass-poisoning of Americans through processed foods and beverages.
But you know as well as I do that this law will never be enforced as written. Instead of targeting processed junk foods that cause cancer and heart disease, the law will be used to intimidate and prosecute organic farmers and raw milk producers.
As with all laws under a nation of tyranny, this law will be used to oppress freedom and centralize power in the hands of the (agribusiness) few.
Remember this: In a lawless land, laws have no meaning other than to justify acts of tyranny against the People. And the United States of America is now, without question, a lawless land. The FDA follows no law. The FTC follows no law. The Federal Reserve follows no law. Even the President makes up his own laws (executive orders).
In America today, Laws are selectively applied against the enemies of the status quo, which is primarily made up of powerful corporations, corrupt lawmakers and tyrannical federal regulators like the DEA, which has conducted medical marijuana raids against California’s health clinics that were fully complying with state law!
This brings me to an astonishing conclusion: It does not matter how HR 875 is written. The “language” of laws in America today is all but irrelevant. The reality is that Big Agribusiness is taking over the food supply much like Big Pharma has taken over medicine, and anyone who gets in the way of that agenda (small organic family farmers, raw milk products, raw almond growers, etc.) will be destroyed, arrested or put out of business. What words are written on paper are irrelevant.
This is precisely how the American Medical Association and the FDA railroaded natural health practitioners and took over medicine in America. Food is now being hijacked in the same way. In fact, these two conspiracies are related: Food is being targeted for termination precisely because when sold in natural, non-adulterated forms, it is highly medicinal! This is why the new “food security” laws focus on fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation: Because these things destroy the natural medicine found in foods, rendering them medicinally inert.
It’s all so pathetically predictable
HR 875 should be called the Food Destruction Act of 2009. As usual, Big Government exploited a food crisis (the peanut contamination) in order to forward its food tyranny agenda.
I predicted all this on April 14, 2008, in an article called The Food Irradiation Plot: Why the USDA Wants to Sterilize Fresh Produce and Turn Live Foods into Dead Foods (http://www.naturalnews.com/023015.html). In that 2008 article, I wrote:
“Destroying the natural medicine in the food supply sure would be a highly effective way to create more customers for Big Pharma, wouldn’t it? I think it’s all part of the “keep the population sick and diseased” plot being carried out by an evil partnership between drug companies and the U.S. government. We already know that the FDA and USDA work for the corporations, not the People. We already know that they will do practically anything to boost their profits (including conducting medical experiments on infants, drugging schoolchildren, lying to the public, fabricating clinical trials and more). Is it any surprise that they would now attempt a “final solution” on the food supply that kills the food and thereby results in a huge reduction in the population’s intake of the disease-fighting nutrients found in fresh produce?”
In went on to describe the steps that would be taken by the U.S. government in order to create the conditions for a national food safety tyranny organization. These steps include:
1) Conduct poor inspections of fresh produce on purpose, in order to cause a large increase in food-borne illness outbreaks. (We’ve seen this increase happen over the last 12 - 24 months.) This can be easily accomplished by reducing the budget of food inspection offices, or removing inspectors from the payroll altogether (which has already happened).
2) Wait for the outbreaks to happen. When consumers get sick, run national press releases announcing how dangerous the food supply is.
3) Watch the consumer reaction as people and lawmakers demand “something be done!”
4) Once the public is demanding a solution to food-borne illnesses, roll out a national produce irradiation requirement that sterilizes all the food.
This is essentially what has happened now with the FSA (Food Safety Administration), but on a much larger scale.
The bottom line in all this? It’s all so pathetically predictable that I’m surprised most people can’t see through it. The agenda to take over the food supply is being advanced precisely by the allowed creation of a food crisis, which wasn’t even really much of a crisis to begin with. A few people died from eating tainted peanuts. While their deaths are regrettable, their numbers are insignificant compared to the number of people dying every day from pharmaceuticals and processed food.
The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 is a tyrannical answer to an imagined crisis that has been purposely blown out of proportion by Big Government and the mainstream media.
But you know what? If HR 875 actually passes, let’s demand that its written text actually be enforced against all the processed food companies selling dangerous, toxic products to the American public right now.
Source: NaturalNews.com
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Bob S. says:
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
There is obfuscating language in this bill designed to confuse and redirect your attention to thinking by implication rather than specification. This is cleverly illustrated using the words “include(s)”, “exclude(s)” and custom definitions. So let’s take a look at an example.
(a) In General- Any food establishment or foreign food establishment engaged in manufacturing, processing, packing, or holding food for consumption in the United States shall register annually with the Administrator.
Notice that annual registration is limited to a Food Establishment or foreign food establishment. One cannot imply that this extends beyond these two entities as defined in the definitions section and only those that engage in manufacturing, processing, packing or holding food for consumption.
Before I get to what is a Food Establishment or foreign food establishment, let me give you an example of the use of include and typical efforts employed to muddy the waters.
To start with we must recognize that if a word is meant to be understood as having its common meaning, there is no need to define it at all. It is axiomatic that if a word is explicitly defined, it has a restricted meaning. If language such as the term “Fruit” is used and defined as “includes, apples, oranges, and pears”, it can only be understood as restricting the definition to those things listed, or no definition would be required; the word “fruit” would be understood to include apples, oranges and pears, as well as all other fruits. If the word “common” is left out of the definition, then the things used in the definition are what establish the class to which belong, and as the word is being deliberately defined, the common meaning of the word must be excluded.
Under the definitions section:
(13) FOOD ESTABLISHMENT-
(A) IN GENERAL- The term ‘food establishment’ means a slaughterhouse (except those regulated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act or the Poultry Products Inspection Act), factory, warehouse, or facility owned or operated by a person located in any State that processes food or a facility that holds, stores, or transports food or food ingredients.
(B) EXCLUSIONS- For the purposes of registration, the term ‘food establishment’ does not include a food production facility as defined in paragraph (14), restaurant, other retail food establishment, nonprofit food establishment in which food is prepared for or served directly to the consumer, or fishing vessel (other than a fishing vessel engaged in processing, as that term is defined in section 123.3 of title 21, Code of Federal Regulations).
(14) FOOD PRODUCTION FACILITY- The term ‘food production facility’ means any farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, or confined animal-feeding operation.
So a Food Establishment is not a farm, ranch, orchard, vineyard, aquaculture facility, confined animal-feeding operation. This is a custom definition, is specific and no other implications can be drawn as meaning something else. Note that farm, ranch …. since not custom defined, have a common definition without exclusion or inclusion. I do not have cites to their common definition.
In addition to the above, a Food Establishment is not a resturant, retail food establishment, nonprofit food establishment or fishing vessel (as limited in definition to section 123.3 of title 21 of CFR). Again, resturant, retail food establishment …. have a common definition without exclusion or inclusion.
There is a specific class of actions as custom defined by ‘Process’, all of them being Commercial.
(19) PROCESS- The term ‘process’ or ‘processing’ means the commercial slaughter, packing, preparation, or manufacture of food.
Note this means Commercial slaughter, commercial packing, commercial preparation, commercial manufacture of food.
There is another specific class of actions not defined but listed as holds, stores, or transports. Common definitions apply here.
Also, there is a geographical constraint that limits this to any State. What is a State?
(20) STATE- The term ‘State’ means–
(A) a State;
(B) the District of Columbia;
(C) the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico; and
(D) any other territory or possession of the United States.
This is important since we move to the only other entity required to register annually, a foreign food establishment.
(16) FOREIGN FOOD ESTABLISHMENT- The term ‘foreign food establishment’ means any category 1 through 5 food establishment or food production facility located outside the United States that processes or produces food or food ingredients for consumption in the United States.
Look at what has happened here. The Food Establishment custom definition does not apply since the location is specific and “located outside the United States” and does not fall within the confines of a ‘State’. Therefore the exclusions of “(14) Food Production Facility” do not apply.
This makes this particular entity far more reaching than the restrictive entity of a “Food Establishment” located in a ‘State’.
What does all this mean?
If you do not fall under the custom definition of a “Food Establishment” you are not required to register. If you are not required to register then there is no categorization of you as a Category 1 thru 5, you can’t be assigned a registration number, there is no inspection, monitoring, or reporting requirements. This is however not a statement that you are not obligated to practice good health standards.