Not what the American people ordered – HR 2749, martial law and the enslavement of their farmers

food-policeHR 2749 is a strange bill in many ways.  While the other “food safety” bills have been around since winter, allowing for much public discussion on the internet, HR 2749 has only suddenly appeared.  It is a mutant conglomeration of the worst of the other bills, with the addition of one very original part – martial law.

When it was a draft, it was Waxman’s bill.  But once given a number, it became Dingel’s who already had a “food safety” bill, HR 759.  So Waxman got none and Dingel got two.  (Was this because Waxman, being Jewish, was a hideous choice to introduce a bill with Codex in it – designed by the Nazi pharmaceutical companies that funded Hitler, provided the gas for the gas chambers, experimented on prisoners with vaccines – and is expected to kill millions?)

* HR 2749 would give FDA the power to order a quarantine of a geographic area, including “prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area.” 

[This - "that has been used to transport or hold such food" - would mean all cars that have ever brought groceries home or any pickup someone has eaten take-out in, so this means ALL TRANSPORTATION can be shut down under this.  This is using food as a cover for martial law.]

Under this provision, farmers markets and local food sources could be shut down, even if they are not the source of the contamination.  The agency can halt all movement of all food in a geographic area.

[This is also a means of total control over the population under the cover of food, and at any time.] See this DailyKos entry.

The bill is unusual, too, because slow as it was to appear. The little bugger of bill has made up for it since.  It got a number on June 10, went to committee on June 17, passed instantly, and is headed for a vote on the floor of the House.

The first Patriot Act was passed using fear of terrorism. This Patriot Act is more coy, hiding under a cloak of “food safety” and but also using fear – fear of food contamination.  Evidently, Americans are supposed to be so frightened by the slightest possibility of a terrorist or of E-coli, they would trade away all their precious, hard fought freedoms for the promise of safety.  Or at least, that is what the trade-off has become.  “Terrorism” and “contamination” are great bugaboos used to open doors to an end to the US Constitution.  That is exactly what we are left with after those who wrote HR 2749 are done.

Who did write these bills?  It seems Monsanto had not only a hand, but a “defining” influence. http://farmwars.info/?p=594

This redefining of reality is what seems to be underlying all the loss of freedom.  Normal and free are disappearing into the maw of corporate definitions of reality. See this Yup Farming piece.

So, we begin with contaminated food from filthy corporate processors and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).  And what do we end up with after that reality is ground up by corporate legal hands?  Changes in the definition of risk so that natural things are treated as dangerous and toxic things are untouched, such that:
Healthy, normal farms are taken over by government as though they were run by criminals and contaminated corporate slaughterhouses are untouched;
The necessary freedom of individuals to live and grow food and be left alone are somehow suddenly destroyed, though they were never the source of any food contamination issue; and such that
The profit and control and power of corporations which were absolutely the source of the increasingly terrible food, is somehow suddenly vastly increased.

Thanks to corporate control over reality, our wanting to clean up corporate processors and feedlots and CAFOS and end up with farmers’ markets and local farms and organic food has become the industrialization and potential destruction of every healthy part of the food system and the triumph of the most contaminated and toxic part.  And in the non-bargain, we lost all freedoms and they took all control.  And “all” is not a hyperbole here, for one need only look at another provision of HR 2749 to feel how insane, how distant from all we ever wanted.

* HR 2749 would empower FDA to regulate how crops are raised and harvested.  It puts the federal government right on the farm, dictating to our farmers.

[What is missing in pointing out this astounding control, is that it opens the door to CODEX and WTO "good farming practices" will include the elimination of organic farming by eliminating manure, mandating GMO animal feed, imposing animal drugs, and ordering applications of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Farmers, thus, will be locked not only into the industrialization of once normal and organic farms but into the forced purchase of industry's products.  They will be slaves on the land, doing the work they are ordered to do - against their own best wisdom - and paying out to industry against their will.  There will be no way to be frugal, to grow one's own grain to feed the animals, to raise healthy animals without GMO grains or drugs, to work with nature at all.  Grassfed cattle and poultry and hogs will be finished.  So, it needs to be made clear where control will take us.  And weren't these the "rumors on the internet" that were dismissed but are clearly the case?]  See this DailyKos entry.

When we wanted not to get E-coli in processed meat, did we intend to put our farmers into corporate servitude?  Did we plan to have our own lives straight-jacketed by a million new controls over our own gardens, our own desire to grow food, our own plans to start small businesses, our own dreams to have a small piece of land and farm ourselves?  Who has the audacity to take our needs and grotesquely bastardize them in these ways, while giving the destruction and totalitarian control the sham name of “food safety”?

We wanted good food.  We never wanted to trap our farmers into an industrial prison on their own land, afraid moment to moment of not fulfilling some monstrous set of instructions that never end – rules the farmers loathe, rules that have not only nothing to do with real farming but which are antithetical to it.  Why have we ended up with HR 2749, an intense corporate nightmare around the most central and necessary aspects of a free country and of free human beings – farming and food?

American farming needs to be relieved of the burdens it has been under, not finished off by its corporate competition.  It needs freedom to flourish again.  Obviously – and Congress people who would think to vote for such absurdities, take note – the imposition of surveillance, monitoring, warrantless entry, taking of all records, licensing, fees, Codex and NAIS, in addition to massive penalties and prison terms (all without judicial review over even appropriateness and validity), are not how one thanks American farmers for holding together the only working part of our food system.  See Literal Enslavement by Linn Cohen-Cole.

HR 2749 is the most vicious and insane bill one could imagine.  Who treats our farmers in this way?  Who believes that such police measures can provide for the rebirth of farming and the return of healthy food?  Who wrote this bill that trashes the freedom of all our lives?  HR 2749 was not what we ordered and it should be sent back the bowels of hell it came from.

HR 2749 is both insane and cruel.  And the deceptiveness of hiding a Patriot Act in it and the brutal rush to slip it through Congress are ANTI-democratic.

Go here to tell Congress, “No.” http://www.ftcldf.org/petitions/pnum993.php

http://farmwars.info/?p=1145




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Comments

21 Responses to “Strange Martial Law via Food Control: HR 2749”

  1. Linda Hudson on July 10th, 2009 12:53 pm

    This is outragous!!Stop this unfair bill NOW!!!Vote NO on HR 2749 !!!!

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  2. Auntie-Nanuuq on July 10th, 2009 6:42 pm

    This will now appear on my blog…..Thank-you for the heads up. It is important to have the option of eating healthy, fresh organic foods!

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  3. Donna Kalter on July 10th, 2009 8:10 pm

    HR 2749 is both insane and cruel. And the deceptiveness of hiding a Patriot Act in it and the brutal rush to slip it through Congress are ANTI-democratic.

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  4. Brooks Blanchard on July 10th, 2009 8:40 pm

    Dear Congress person PLEASE look at all the negetive anti human ramifications that come with the passing of this bill
    (hr2749) and thoroughly stop it from passing in the house or anywhere else. It is horrible and we’ll all be better off without it. thank you

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  5. chris on July 10th, 2009 8:41 pm

    Two words: Mengele system!!!

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  6. robert b cruickshank on July 11th, 2009 9:15 am

    Your comments on the intent of this law seem to reach an overblown conclusion. When I read this provision that you cite(* HR 2749 would give FDA the power to order a quarantine of a geographic area, including “prohibiting or restricting the movement of food or of any vehicle being used or that has been used to transport or hold such food within the geographic area.”), it sounds to me more like an effort to be able to contain and quarantine areas of outbreaks of pathologies/pestilences than to take over what farmers do.
    You are totally correct that government agencies like the FDA, controlled by big corporations corporations, are trying to change the the definition of reality: chickens and rabbits are no longer defined as “animals”, so the ruthless food-processing corporations can’t be prosecuted under animal cruelty laws for their barbaric treatment of these living beings.
    The military/industrial complex, abetted by their bought politicians (which are most politicians), is trying to take over and eliminate our freedom more and more. I just believe you are missing the mark and seeing demons where there may not be any. Check your level of paranoia!
    Best Regards,
    Rob

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    Linda Brokopp Reply:

    Wake up and smell the coffee. You are just another brainwashed idiot that reaks of
    ignorance and blindness. The Government
    loves stupid people like you so that you can be controlled to the nth degree and be grateful for it simultaneously.

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  7. barbara wright on July 12th, 2009 10:01 am

    This is unbelieveable

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  8. barbara wright on July 12th, 2009 10:01 am

    This is unbelieveable

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  9. Bob from Maine on July 12th, 2009 10:33 pm

    Whoever wrote this bill should be locked up eather in jail or a funny farm. Bob from Maine

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  10. Jan Geren on July 12th, 2009 11:29 pm

    Leave our food alone. Haven’t you already taken most of our freedoms that American has promised. It is no one’s business how I get my food. Stay out of our business.

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  11. Barbara Williams on July 12th, 2009 11:47 pm

    I have learned that the way laws, contracts, are written they can have double meaning! What do I mean? Well, if the law is poorly written, vague, it’s open to interpretation and there lies the problem. I have not had ample time to look into this Bill. But to be on the safe side I believe that it should be tabled for now and feedback, from the public, allowed. American’s have lost so many freedoms these last years they’ve, we’ve, become gun shy. Informed American citizens have “Questions” they are demanding answers to! “We” would not be in this quandry if “We” had not grown weary and
    uncomfortable with the “BAD” decisions many law makers are, and have been making.

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  12. Jamie on July 13th, 2009 11:02 am

    Time to grow our own food!

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  13. William Cole on July 13th, 2009 12:51 pm

    Please stop HR 2749. Too much control, too little oversight, not a law for a free country

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  14. Jason S on July 13th, 2009 1:42 pm

    It’s time to talk to your local politician and get some protests going so they know we’re serious.

    America, how of the free? Doesn’t seem that way.

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  15. Mosby on July 13th, 2009 5:29 pm

    As much as I hate increased gov’t meddling in just about everything, this bill smells like a response to a possible outbreak of UB99 wheat rust getting into N. America.

    Google it, it’s a bad one. I don’t much like hybrids (GMs) but this is one time I hope they can make it happen because this stuff is resistant to all the fungicides, persistent as hell and takes out 80% + of a wheat crop.

    You want to see some real mayhem? Wipe out the wheat harvest.

    If it somehow gets here (on a pair of sneakers for example), the only way to slow it down would be a geographical quarantine that would keep the grain trucks from spreading it to the elevators, which then set it to be picked up by the trains and then the shipping terminals and then it’s loose across N. and S. Am. (never mind the contaminated grain itself, we’re talking about just means of transportation)

    The minute you spot it, you’d better be locking that area down fast…real fast cause once it’s loose it’s game over. (and then pray the wind doesn’t pick it up)

    That’s what I think is going on here.

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  16. David Spero on July 13th, 2009 9:04 pm

    This bill is overkill and oversteps all reasonable bounds. Martial law provisions should not be in a bill such as this and needs to be “ripped out.” Small farmers should be carefully protected in a bill of this nature. Are they? In a bill such as this, GMO foods should be unconditionally banned.

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  17. Nae Nae on July 14th, 2009 9:01 pm

    Ever see the movie Solent Green, maybe this is what we are going to head to with this type of government interference

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  18. Erika Perez on July 15th, 2009 9:06 pm

    Oppose HR 2749 and support FREEDOM! Everyone who wants to grow their own food should be able to do it. This is a FREE country. What are you congressmen trying to do? To remove all of our liberties, even to the point of telling us what we can eat or not?? This smells like communism… We want freedom. It is YOUR responsibility to protect this right!

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  19. chris on July 20th, 2009 9:54 am

    Mengele system HR2749, period.

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  20. Kelly Dalton on July 22nd, 2009 11:48 am

    I can’t believe this. We need to wake up, now!!!!

    [Reply]

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