Senate Bill S510 Makes it illegal to Grow, Share, Trade or Sell Homegrown Food (petition)

S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010,  may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US.  It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.

“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.”  ~Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower 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.

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.

(petition)

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 advisor 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 underperfect 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 theWorld 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 (evendirect 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 Organisation 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 worsenfood 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, withHomeland 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. It is (similar to C-6 in Canada) the end of Rule of Law in the US.

(petition)

For further information, watch these videos:

Food Laws – Forcing people to globalize
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-P4rL2IWc

State Imposed Violence … to snatch resources of ordinary people
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onw_PkVvpts&feature=related

Steven Seagal 16 years before the BP oil leak disaster.

In the 1994 movie “On Deadly Ground,” Steven Seagal, as Forrest Taft, a specialist dealing with oil drilling-related fires, gives a powerful speech on the power and control oil cartels have. Does big business have to mean ‘profit at all expense?’

Dr Deagle says there is a real danger we could see a tsunamia triggered by an underwater volcana that BP drilled into. He also talks about how this event could result in a mini ice age in europe due to disruption to the flow from the gulf stream. Also, Dr Deagle goes into the dangers of the gases being emitted from the sea floor.

Internet “Kill Switch” Proposed For U.S.
A new US Senate Bill would grant the President far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of, or even shut down, portions of the internet.

The legislation says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines or software firms that the US Government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined.

That “emergency authority” would allow the Federal Government to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people,” Joe Lieberman, the primary sponsor of the measure and the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, told reporters on Thursday. Lieberman is an independent senator from Connecticut who meets with the Democrats. Are we missing something here, or does Mr. Lieberman think his new 3-D widescreen computer monitor actually allows viruses to enter his bloodstream. Oh wait… on second thought… Now seriously, this is getting to be far too much for even those in the dark to accept. Since when did Homeland Security care about the protection of our access to information? Except when it is information about them that they do not want accessed!

Due to there being few limits on the US President’s emergency power, which can be renewed indefinitely, the densely worded 197-page Bill (PDF) will undoubtedly encounter some stringent opposition, or one would hope.

TechAmerica, one of the largest US technology lobby groups, said it was concerned about “unintended consequences that would result from the legislation’s regulatory approach” and “the potential for absolute power”. The Center for Democracy and Technology stated concerns that the Lieberman Bill’s emergency powers “include authority to shut down or limit internet traffic on private systems.” That is okay, I believe the White House is working to have the word private removed from the English language.

A Presidential-controlled kill-switch is not new idea. A draft Senate proposal that CNET obtained in August allowed the White House to “declare a cybersecurity emergency”, and another from Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) would have explicitly given the government the power to “order the disconnection” of certain networks or websites. Curtains you say? We have a wide selection… iron curtains to the right.

On Thursday, both senators lauded Lieberman’s Bill, which is formally titled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, or PCNAA. Rockefeller said “I commend” the drafters of the PCNAA. Collins went one step further, signing up at a co-sponsor and stating publicly that “we cannot afford to wait for a cyber 9/11 before our government realises the importance of protecting our cyber resources”. Government control. Mao could you?

Under PCNAA, the Federal Government’s power to force private companies to comply with emergency decrees would become unusually broad. Any company on a list (yes, yet another list) created by Homeland Security that also “relies on” the internet, the telephone system or any other component of the US “information infrastructure” would be subject to command by a new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC) that would be created inside Homeland Security.

The only obvious limitation on the NCCC’s emergency power is one paragraph in the Lieberman Bill that appears to have grown out of the Bush-era flap over wiretapping without a warrant. That limitation says that the NCCC cannot order broadband providers or other companies to “conduct surveillance” of Americans unless it’s otherwise legally authorised. Phew! That makes me feel much better. Not.

Lieberman said on Thursday that enactment of his Bill needed to be a “top congressional priority”. “For all of its ‘user-friendly’ allure, the internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets,” he said, Gary McKinnon no doubt somewhere in the hollow recesses of his mind. “Our economic security, national security and public safety are now all at risk from new kinds of enemies — cyber-warriors, cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and cyber-criminals.”
A new cybersecurity bureaucracy

Via CNET

Lieberman’s proposal would form a powerful and extensive new Homeland Security bureaucracy around the NCCC, including “no less” than two deputy directors, and liaison officers to the Defense Department, Justice Department, Commerce Department, and the Director of National Intelligence. (How much the NCCC director’s duties would overlap with those of the existing assistant secretary for infrastructure protection is not clear.)

The NCCC also would be granted the power to monitor the “security status” of private sector websites, broadband providers and other internet components. Lieberman’s legislation requires the NCCC to provide “situational awareness of the security status” of the portions of the internet that are inside the United States — and also those portions in other countries that, if disrupted, could cause significant harm.

Selected private companies would be required to participate in “information sharing” with the Feds. They must “certify in writing to the director” of the NCCC whether they have “developed and implemented” federally approved security measures, which could be anything from encryption to physical security mechanisms, or programming techniques that have been “approved by the director”. The NCCC director can “issue an order” in cases of non-compliance.

The prospect of a vast new cybersecurity bureaucracy with power to command the private sector worries some privacy advocates. “This is a plan for an auto-immune reaction,” says Jim Harper, director of information studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “When something goes wrong, the government will attack our infrastructure and make society weaker.”

To sweeten the deal for industry groups, Lieberman has included a tantalising offer absent from earlier drafts: immunity from civil lawsuits. If a software company’s programming error costs customers billions, or a broadband provider intentionally cuts off its customers in response to a federal command, neither would be liable.

If there’s an “incident related to a cyber vulnerability” after the President has declared an emergency and the affected company has followed federal standards, plaintiffs’ lawyers cannot collect damages for economic harm. And if the harm is caused by an emergency order from the Feds, not only does the possibility of damages virtually disappear, but the US Treasury will even pick up the private company’s tab.

Another sweetener: a new White House office would be charged with forcing federal agencies to take cybersecurity more seriously, with the power to jeopardise their budgets if they fail to comply. The likely effect would be to increase government agencies’ demand for security products.

Tom Gann, McAfee’s vice president for government relations, stopped short of criticising the Lieberman Bill, calling it a “very important piece of legislation”.

McAfee is paying attention to “a number of provisions of the Bill that could use work,” Gann said, and “we’ve certainly put some focus on the emergency provisions.”

source

The enemy is at home

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/797.html