Tester Amendment to food ‘safety’ bill puts lipstick on a pig

By Rady Ananda
Food Freedom

The voice of controlled opposition wants Americans to believe that the Tester Amendment to S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, elevates the bill to something we should adopt. The Tester Amendment puts a bandaid on a head wound. It does not stop the most lethal agency in American history from seizing control of the food supply from farm to fork.

Even though Big Ag now opposes S 510, we should continue to oppose the bill, as it amounts to federal assault on food freedom. Agribusiness giants have always opposed the exemption provided in the Tester Amendment. Now that it’s included in the current form of S.510, they’re only making clear that they oppose giving any wiggle room to competition. But from their sudden opposition to S 510, because it now includes an amendment they have always opposed, the public is being lulled into a false sense of confidence in S 510.

The Tester Amendment amounts to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, and it still needs to be slaughtered.

The Tester Amendment does not go far enough. As the dollar crashes, how much is $500,000 a year going to be worth? That’s the lower revenue limit on food producers affected by the amendment; and it only exempts them from having to submit a food safety plan. This exemption does not exclude them from everything else in the bill. Small producers will still be wiped out by the hyper-regulation proposed in S 510, as will non-exempt medium-sized producers. History is repeating itself: small and medium-sized meat packers were destroyed by Bill Clinton’s HACCP – the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan adopted under the guise of food safety. Meat did not get any safer; all that happened was that fewer meat packers exist today.

Michael Vail, chief editor of Blacklisted News, wrote about weaponizing food. “Speaking of food as a weapon, consider the genetic experimentation on our food supply. Recently many biotech start up groups had been putting Cholera vaccines in rice and using Africans as lab rats. Who wants to eat a T-bone steak when the cow is cloned or genetically modified to give you your yearly vaccinations?”

Mike Adams has catalogued FDA behavior in support of his theme that this is the last agency the American public needs “protecting” its food supply. “The FDA is responsible for far more deaths of Americans than all the terrorist events in the history of the world — combined.” He cites several FDA-approved drugs that have caused tens of thousands of deaths. One drug alone — Vioxx — has killed more people than Americans killed in Vietnam. He shows how the FDA has criminalized nutrition information from natural sources — to protect Big Pharma profits. He goes further:

“The FDA is the single most deadly agency that has ever existed in the history of the United States.”

He states:

“Over the last 20 years the FDA has killed more Americans than the total number who died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and even the Civil War — combined!“

The FDA also approves (by not regulating) nano-sized particles into food. A “nano” particle is one-billionth of a meter in size. That tiny size allows it to cross the blood-brain barrier thus posing a significant health risk. Without testing for health consequences and thus proving its loyalty to food safety, the FDA turns a blind eye and allows these adulterants in the food supply.

Consider the title of S 510: “Food Safety Modernization Act.” By modernize, the FDA intends to force everyone to adulterate the entire US food supply with drugs (like antibiotics), chemicals (like chlorine), genes from other organisms, and whatever new profit-making adulterant that corporations create. Food producers will be forced to use pesticides, which we then ingest to our detriment. Forced irradiation and pasteurization will be the “safe” standard under which all producers must comply.

S 510’s traceability requirements suggest foods can be injected with nano-tracers and other technologies to follow food back to its source. Even if that dystopic scenario isn’t immediately implemented, the paperwork for food tracing will wipe out medium sized producers and distributors. Imagine having to turn over your private food club client list to your competitors (represented by the FDA). How easy will it be for acts of sabotage from multi-billion dollar corporations to wipe out your small business?

Natural, normal food will be criminalized by S 510, and we know this because of all the current food raids on natural producers and distributors, while allowing giants like Wright County Egg to sell contaminated food for decades. This war on normal food is ongoing– even before giving the FDA an additional $1.6 billion and complete control over all food.

Despite the voice of controlled opposition trying to convince the American public that the Tester Amendment will solve all the problems with S 510, many food freedom agtivists recognize this is a red herring. One letter to the editor was titled, “Pry my turnip from my cold, dead hand.” The highly-touted exemption diverts attention away from the many, serious problems with S 510, like:

► It does not address the real causes of food safety issues stemming from the centralized, industrialized food supply chain;

► It ensures that international trade agreements have supremacy over local laws;

► It destroys States’ rights to define a culturally-appropriate legal platform under which food is produced and distributed;

► It transfers authority over food regulation enforcement from the FDA to the Department of Homeland Security, which brought us the liberty-killing, child-molesting TSA, which disastrously handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which has genocidally turned its eyes away from the ongoing BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico;

► It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production – it eliminated small and medium-sized meat packers; and

► It significantly increases FDA’s power, an agency which has stated on public record that the American people have no “fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health” and “do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.”

Would you trust your diamonds to someone who believes you don’t have a right to them? Clearly, the FDA, and S 510 in particular, is part and parcel of the totalitarian police state being implemented under the plan known as Full Spectrum Dominance.

Finally, we cannot ignore that Monsanto is behind the food “safety” legislation being foisted on us. We cannot ignore that the US Secretary of Agriculture was once dubbed “Biotech Governor of the Year.” We cannot ignore that President Obama has appointed a GMO and pesticide pusher as the US Agricultural Trade Representative. We cannot ignore that he nominated Monsanto-defender Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court, who sits there now with former Monsanto attorney, Clarence Thomas.

In Seeds of Destruction, F. William Engdahl issues a warning: “In the mid-1970’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions stated, ‘Control the food and you control the people.'”

The same cast of characters now seeks such control under the guise of food “safety”. Make no mistake, the FDA and legislation like S 510 is about food control — not food safety. If it were about safety, we’d be seeing legislation that banned concentrated animal feeding operations, that banned indiscriminate use of antibiotics, that banned pesticides and BPA. We don’t, because the FDA is not about food safety any more; it is a federal agency wholly captured by Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Chemicals.

It is massively deceptive for corporate media and food groups to now suggest S. 510 should be supported because Agri-Biz opposes the Tester Amendment. Instead, hold firm our course and reject S. 510 in its entirety.

The Senate is expected to vote on it in the next several days. Drop in at The Atlantic and post a comment telling Marion Nestle why we reject S 510 – even with the Tester Amendment. More importantly, tell your Senators.