Here’s another try at clarifying first principles, something I think still has not been done except on a purely individual basis, and rarely even there.
I take it as empirically proven, and as common sense in the first place, that a fundamentally criminal system cannot be reformed. If it’s a car, you can’t make it act like a boat or a plane. We’ve seen the results of driving this car into a lake, or off a cliff, over and over and over. To insist we keep on trying, the way liberals insist, with things like the Food Control Act or GMO “co-existence” (any version) or Obama’s health insurance poll tax, can no longer be called ignorance or naivete. It’s intentional misdirection on behalf of evil.
So by now I take it for granted that “reformism” is impractical, inexpedient, and wicked. Again, it was common sense from the start (how can you get anything but psychopathic behavior from a thing, a “corporation”, which has been formally enshrined as a mercenary psychopath in principle, from the start? it’s not a plane, it’s a car), and has been proven by the evidence record beyond any shadow of a doubt, let alone a reasonable doubt.
Then why do liberals still exist in the West in such large numbers? Because they lie when they claim to oppose the evils of empire and corporate domination. Just as much as their conservative twin, they support organized crime because they’re still getting some of the crumbs, and because they enjoy the pathetic vicarious sadism of feeling like they have a piece of the power and violence, although they really have no power at all. The only difference between liberals and conservatives is one of temperament – a conservative is more conscious, more “honest”, about supporting organized crime, a liberal is more of a hypocrite, has more of a lingering fake “conscience” he needs to assuage by mouthing anti-criminal platitudes. But he supports the exact same array of criminal policies the conservative does.
This has always been true, although the seamless continuity from the criminal Bush regime to the identically criminal Obama regime has been the most extreme manifestation yet. It looks like Obama’s real significance has been to encourage more and more liberals to dump even the fake vestige of conscience, the “compliment vice pays to virtue”, as La Rouchefoucauld called hypocrisy, and openly avow their support for aggressive war, the police state, and a corporatist command economy. This wipes out the last meager shred of difference between liberals and conservatives. I think we can call the case closed, and from here on use those terms merely to denote the tribal supporters of the identical Democrat and Republican parties.
In that case, what can a decent human being, advocate of democracy, enemy of the toxification of our food and environment, do? One thing she cannot do is still be a “liberal”, still be a ”reformist”. These are evil in their essence, and will continue to try to suck nascent idealism into the corporate maw. I hope there won’t be many who decide in that case to give up and seek some private garden to tend. That’s a kind of desertion, and it won’t work - no matter how much you try to keep your head down and mind your own business, the enemy will still be coming for you eventually. That’s what totalitarianism does, and why it’s called by that name.
I think the only course open is to recognize the need for the abolition of empire, of corporatism, of globalization, of all top-down, supply-based organization; to abolish these, and replace them with purely bottom-up, demand-based organization. (Perhaps this distinction shall be more acceptable to those who still consider “hierarchy” as such to be too vague a term. Although I’d say that by definition hierarchy usurps power upward, concentrates it, and then imposes it in a top-down, supply-based way.)
To need this, to want it, to will it, and to fight for it, first by propagating the ideas of this fight, getting them into the public consciousness by whatever means possible; and by organizing a movement which intends to accomplish these goals, and which can sustain itself during the times of trial while the system is still strong.
In that case, here’s a few hypothetical questions people can ask themselves, to help clarify this first principle.
1. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you could press a button and abolish all supply-based modes of organization, the corporate form, centralized government, and all things which are leeches upon these. Let’s say pressing the button would somehow accomplish this painlessly, except for whatever “pain” would then be involved in communities having to live within their natural means and not by stealing from others. Would you press that button? It seems that most Western ”liberals” would not, because that would mean they could no longer live off the fruits of imperial crime. Many of their kinds of “jobs” would cease to exist, since all the phony “work” of maintaining corporatism would no longer exist. Only the real economy would still exist.
2. What if pressing the button would guarantee humanity’s victory, but it would also guarantee that the criminals would force lots of unpleasantness along the way. Would you still press it? This question is meant to distinguish between those who really want to abolish organized crime, which of course will use any means to try to preserve itself, and those who are really just radical-chic liberals who talk the radical talk but would run home to momma the moment things actually got rough.
3. What if there was no guarantee at all, other than that humanity will try to free itself from empire and create real democracy. Would you join that fight? This question is meant to get people to think about their endurance, their morale, their discipline and belly for a long fight.
I think time is running out for mere ad hoc contemplation. If the people are going to organize real anti-corporate movements in the West, now is the time to start doing it. That would mean agreeing on the basic principles, the basic will to renounce Western empire, deciding on a list of operational goals and necessary tasks toward those goals, and then getting to work on those tasks in a systematic, disciplined way.
I’ve made the strategic decision to focus, for however long the doldrum lasts, on the Community Food movement, “inducing” broader anti-corporate and Food Sovereignty ideas from that, rather than going into every situation calling for the immediate and full Food Sovereignty revolution. This movement has to be built, has to confederate, and has to directly fight the growing government/liberal attempt to repress it through the escalating “Food Safety” assault. (“Food Safety”, as I’ve written many times for years now, has the same character and serves the same purpose as the ”War on Terror”. Indeed the two are increasingly intermingled, as in the way the Food Control Act provides for massive shifting over power over the food supply to DHS. More clear evidence for how the military-industrial complex is increasingly a Monsanto adjunct, just like the FDA and USDA already are. We see how liberal fascists are on board with the whole program.)
So the basic activity:
1. Build the Community Food movement, as a viable economic sector and a political/community manifestation.
2. Counterattack industrial ag and the “Food Safety” assault. I think the fights against food corporatism in general and GMOs in particular are not just true and necessary, but are good political wedges, ideological sweet spots. Everyone except the most dedicated liberals fears and loathes these things, even if they passively accept them because they currently see no alternative. Our job is to present the alternative.
3. Elaborate Food Sovereignty philosophy, but not as part of the primary publicity campaign (which must focus on community food, food relocalization). This part is for within the movement.
4. In the course of these build the movement framework so that when the terminal crash is triggered the movement will be ready to aggressively propagate a philosophical solution and course of action, and be ready organizationally to receive the disintegrating masses.
I want to create an Internet forum dedicated to this project. In the meantime I’ll do the best I can with this solo blog, but it’s not the right vehicle, and I can’t do all the jobs myself. (Especially since I’m going to try to become a “professional” farmer in 2013.)
As a result, the risks of developing a health intervention that would benefit the whole population are carried disproportionately by some of society’s most poor and vulnerable. This is a situation few would judge to be fair or ethical. However it is hard to increase volunteer payment without creating financial incentives. “Danger money” is frowned upon as an inducement that inevitably clouds an individual’s appreciation of risk, limiting the likelihood that consent is informed.
For some reason this doesn’t seem to be applied by our esteemed ethicists to dangerous and disgusting “jobs” in general. The same philosopher who wrings her hands over payments for vaccine trial participation or organ donation pretends not to recognize the economic coercion which drives people to become migrant farm workers, coal miners, or Apple factory workers (they need safety nets in the factories for the number of workers driven to attempt suicide by jumping). For some reason (straight out of Law-and-Economics, no doubt) the whole nexus of economic coercion, economic and physical threats, and forced “contracts” which prevails everywhere with corporatism is normative, but only in the relation of the profiteering medical system and the research subjects it needs is there supposed to be an ethical component. Of course this ethic must act as a damper on any monetary payments. It’s funny how things always work out that way. Why aren’t “financial incentives” bad for doctors, hospitals, insurance corporations, Big Drug with its patents, but only for individual 99%ers? We see again the basic fraudulence of all pro-corporate thought.
It’s hard to imagine how one can honestly embark upon the train of thought expressed above at all, and not quickly be forced to condemn corporate capitalism completely.
For example, I agree, the system of medical profiteering and proprietary drugs is not fair or ethical. So the AMA must want to abolish that, no?
Nope – participation in their for-profit research trials should be mandatory, according to the AMA’s Virtual Mentor. The piece has the appropriate tone from the outset, its first sentence quoting rentier extraordinaire and current GMO flack #1 Bill Gates*. That indicates the mindset and priorities of the authors.
Here we see a characteristic gambit of corporate propaganda. The individual from the 99% has some kind of citizen obligation to volunteer for the alleged common good. If he doesn’t meet this alleged civic obligation, the government should force him. But strangely, there’s no corresponding top-down citizenship obligation on the part of the 1%.
No one has ever explained why profiteering should be allowed to exist in the health care system at all. The authors of this AMA piece certainly don’t explain why it should continue to exist amid such an outbreak of civic concern. Surely if we’re at the point where the individual must be compelled to submit his body, we’re far past the point where the corporatist must surrender his profits?
But no, as always, such a “social contract” point of view is a wild goose chase. As always, it’s a scam. As always it’s one standard for the 99%, and a completely different one for the 1%. Just as “violence” always occurs only from the bottom up, never from the top down, so obligations toward “the greater good of society” exist only from the bottom up (but perhaps to be coerced by top-down force), never from the top down. Profit For Me, Self-Sacrifice For You. Egoism For Me, Altruism For You. Capitalism For Me, Anarchism For You.
Just like with the Wall Street bailout, Obama’s health racket mandate, the Permanent War, the Pentagon’s weapons racket welfare program, the police state, just like with massive corporate welfare in every sector, pandemic privatization, the austerity onslaught, terrorism and war, just like everywhere else, so here too the working citizen must sacrifice, not for the common good, but for the good of a handful of gangsters. Indeed, this sacrifice is a slow suicide, as these gangsters do nothing but prey upon us.
The fact is that the 99% is in a zero-sum death struggle with the 1%. To call for any policy whatsoever which involves the continued prerogatives of the 1%, its continued existence, and any further sacrifice from the 99 on behalf of anything but fighting the system and rebuilding our own communities, is to be an enemy of humanity.
In this case, we know that the system’s “health care” is being intentionally priced beyond our reach. It’s to benefit only our oppressors. Obama’s poll tax, and Mengele-style coerced experimentation like that advocated here, are typical forms of how the people are to serve as a resource mine for something which will never benefit anyone but our enemies. We should contribute nothing further to this predatory system. If we can’t afford the “health insurance” this system forces us to get, then let’s reject the system completely. If we have no choice but to look to ourselves for our medicine, let’s start doing so according to our own plan.
Or, if that’s still too extreme a thought, then how about these kinds of reforms? Let’s institute Single Payer. Let’s abolish Big Drug and its IP regime. Let’s purge rent-seeking from our corrupted universities and educational finance, so that becoming a doctor isn’t tantamount to debt indenture. As things are, vaccines are often peddled and even mandated for non-medical, pro-profit reasons. Remove such crime from the system, and we’ll see where we are. Let’s have a real government jobs program, union-friendly legislation, a much higher minimum wage. Then we’ll see if we still have a research volunteer problem.
I don’t actually call for us to fight for such reforms, because I know reforming kleptocracy is impossible. But I wanted to give some examples of how modest, rational structural reforms could achieve the beneficial goal this piece claims to want to achieve, and far more than that, instead of going in for further coercion within the system of organized crime. But the AMA, like all advocates of organized crime, tends only its own garden, considers corporate crime to be natural and normative, and merely wants its own little share of the loot and taste of the domination prerogative. That’s what this proposal is all about.
As I’ve said before, this should be one of our core slogans and demands upon ourselves and our future:
Total Austerity for the Criminals, Not One Cent More From the People.
This will always put us at the opposite extreme from all system cadres.
*The piece makes much of “informed consent”. So the authors must call for a total moratorium on GMOs, since there was never sufficient safety testing done on any GE product. On the contrary, the unregulated commercialization of GMOs is the human feeding experiment, a massive one, with zero in the way of informed consent protocols. Humanity as a whole comprises the uninformed, uncompensated guinea pigs. Indeed, the US government opposes even GM labeling. So the AMA must be anti-GMO, at least as currently commercialized, no? No.
H-480.958
Genetically Modified Crops and Foods
Retain by modification of (3) to read as follows:
(3) Our AMA believes that as of December 2009, there is no scientific justification for special labeling of genetically modified foods, as a class, and that voluntary labeling is without value unless it is accompanied by focused consumer education.
(I do agree with the part about focused education, which may be an issue with some labeling initiatives. But I mean it in the opposite of the direction meant by these FDA lackeys. They mean that labeled food should have to carry the FDA’s ideological lies about the “safety” of GMOs. I mean that labeling, the initiatives and any labeling that’s actually done, needs to take place within the context of a criticism of industrial and corporate agriculture as such, including the fact that agroecology is superior in every way, now and even more in the post-fossil fuel future.)
We see the basic fraud of this corporate cadre, all its pretensions to caring about the public health, social justice, and basic human decency. I wrote this post to highlight how all professional cadres are completely merged with the basic corporate assault on humanity. Even “doctors” with their vaunted Hippocratic Oath spew the same hypocritical double-standard lies about the economy (the kind of lie that assumes corporate profits, property, and sociopathic seeking of these, as normative, but which considers giving non-rich individuals “financial incentives” is ethically problematic) and about human health itself. Thus, in direct and criminal contravention of their oath, they take up the government’s ideological declaration, not based on any clinical evidence whatsoever, and in defiance of all the evidence that exists, that GMOs are “safe”. They even overthrow their own alleged principle of “informed consent” in order to justify this massive human feeding experiment, and indeed to deny it’s taking place at all. We see what fundamental frauds they are.
With respect to the interstate sale and distribution of raw milk, the FDA has never taken, nor does it intend to take, enforcement action against an individual who purchased and transported raw milk across state lines solely for his or her own personal consumption.
On the big scale, it calls itself a “science-based public health agency”. Yet all its actions are directly in aggressive support of corporate interests. These actions and declarations are usually directly contradictory to one another. Thus here it claims raw milk isn’t sufficiently supported by science. Yet by that measure GMOs should never have been approved in the first place, and at the very least there should be mandatory labeling of all “foods” containing them. Indeed, by now evidence of GMOs’ menace to health is piling up. But where it comes to GMOs the FDA’s position is full steam ahead, with no claim ever having to be substantiated, no precautionary regulation ever having to be applied, no contrary evidence ever considered for a moment.
Meanwhile, there’s no doubt whatsoever about the science of CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations, AKA factory farms). These are literally unregulated bioweapons factories. No such concentration of animals could ever exist long without being wiped out by an epidemic. All such confined animals are permanently sick. They’re kept on a constant, heavy maintenance regime of antibiotics. By design the system is a biological arms race, as ever more powerful antibiotics desperately try to stay one step ahead of ever more resistant microbes. It’s a fact that each and every CAFO is a clear and present danger to the public health. A factory farm will one day be the source for a lethal pandemic among humans. This is not a possibility but an inevitability.
But the science-based public health agency is uninterested in this. On the contrary, it does all it can to defend and promote the CAFO interest. The day this mass pandemic comes, FDA officials will among those guilty of literal mass murder. They must be held accountable as such.
So that should put into perspective the FDA’s oh-so-touching solicitude for the public health where it comes to the big bad raw milk monster.
So there’s one small gain, with a long hard fight ahead.
Which leads to some not-so-good news.
To succeed, a movement has to have a clear view of who’s the enemy, for starters. In the case of food the enemy, of course, is Big Ag. It has tremendous power and is very aggressive in getting the also very powerful government to act as its thug. Yet according to this piece, Joel Salatin in his new book wants to divert the focus of the movement away from the real enemy and toward a phony peripheral target, “overzealous consumer advocates”.
Of course such myopic advocates do exist, but they’re powerless in themselves and gain a phony nimbus of power only where their advocacy advances corporate interests. In that case, they receive corporate money, they’re featured in the corporate media, and the corporate interest tries to hide behind this phony public face. Such “consumer groups”, some of them perhaps dupes and useful idiots, are really corporate front groups. That’s the source of the phony “Food Safety” pseudo-movement. Meanwhile, these front groups seek to defend and intensify all the worst corporate practices – factory farming, GMOs, the whole pesticide/herbicide regime, and so much more – which are very things making us sick.
Salatin must know all that perfectly well, as I’m sure Gumpert, Mark McAfee, and others do. Yet here they are propagating this pro-corporate lie, and the rest of the comment thread was eating it up. I didn’t see a single anti-corporate voice raised in dissent.
I don’t know what Salatin’s real agenda is, but at any rate here he is sticking up for Big Ag, representing them as innocent bystanders whose power just “accidentally” keeps increasing. Big Ag stands by passively, while these ferocious advocates run around terrorizing the poor little government into doing things which just inertially happen to benefit the corporate food rackets. They also force the poor innocent little corporate media into covering them. This is a typical line of corporate propaganda we’ve already seen in every sector – bank regulations cause financial crashes, environmental regulations cause oil spills, and on and on. Here it is indeed the regulations which are the problem, but their real source isn’t a food safety/consumer advocacy movement which on its own has no more power than, for example, the single payer movement. “Food Safety” regulation, as in the recent Food Control bill, is engineered by the likes of Monsanto and Cargill, often directly written by their lobbyists, and then laundered through these “consumer” front groups. This gives the corporate media the best angle to present what’s nothing but corporate propaganda.
Anyone who knows anything about how the system works knows that no activist movement can accomplish anything whatsoever with the government or media other than through direct action from the bottom up. Unless, that is, the “advocacy” happens to coincide with the corporate interest. Then the media’s red carpet is rolled out, the doors of government access are thrown open, and the “advocate” himself becomes a system fixture. But that’s all he is – an ornament, a piece of tinsel.
The movement can never win so long as forces within want to act as agents of misdirection. There’s only one enemy: the corporate-state nexus. There’s only one direction to attack: straight up.
Yesterday I described the pending food bill in some detail, discussing its many dubious and sinister features. I established that it cannot accomplish the food safety goals it claims to seek and can’t even be intended to accomplish such goals. Its intent must lie elsewhere.
If there’s a constitutional right to privacy, to be let alone, implicit in the Constitution, enshrined by the SCOTUS, interpreted in so many ways, then there’s certainly a right to food freedom. That right is simply so obvious that the framers thought it absurd to write it down. Even the so-called Anti-Federalists (i.e. the real federalists), who had to fight for a Bill of Rights and were able to force its inclusion, didn’t think to mention food. Although they have been proven all too correct about the need for a Bill of Rights (and we should consider them the real citizen activists among the framers, not the “Federalists” like Madison and Hamilton who scoffed at the idea), even they never had it cross their minds that they should need to explicitly write in “food”. It appears they should have. No matter – the 9th and 10th amendments, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th, sure cover it. As well as the Commerce Clause, although the brief will cite the wrongful Wickard decision against Commerce Clause federalism. The brief argues both the standard bureaucratic authoritarianism as well as a sweeping repudiation of the very concept of the constitution as the rightful sovereignty of the people. The FDA rejects constitutionalism even according to the diminished principles of “representative democracy”.
When I first read about Farm-to-Consumer’s lawsuit and saw these headings in the article:
a. There is No Right to Consume or Feed Children Any Particular Food
b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health
c. There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract
I thought they were interpretative summaries. But nope – they’re verbatim from the brief’s outline.
When reading claims by the FDA, and wherever we see it claiming powers and even obligations the way it does in this brief, we should keep in mind that it has consistently refused to exercise such powers where it comes to large producers. So right there they’ve proven they’re lying when they claim to have “obligations”. It proves they’re using their alleged powers selectively and maliciously against small producers only. It gives the lie to every claim of reasonability, proportionality, that actions are “warranted”, and so on. Every claim in the brief is a lie on its face since all depend upon the FDA’s protestations of being a good government citizen, exercising power in good faith on behalf of the citizenry and carefully within the bounds delineated by the many decisions it cites. It also claims that the suit is speculative and, implicitly, paranoid. But all that was said in April, and if there were any doubt then, the aggressive, wanton enforcement actions over the summer against Rawesome, Morningland, and other raw milk participants has rendered it all moot. The entire FDA argument falls to pieces, and all that’s left is the naked assertion of brute power, and the vile anti-American ideology the brief expresses.
In the introduction they play innocent, disclaim aggressive intentions and blandly assert (p.4) that the plaintiffs are claiming a “new” right. But the right is of course as old as humanity; the only thing new is the need to fight for it against a corrupt and oppressive US government. The FDA makes imperial executive claims about the courts lacking jurisdiction. Starting on p.5 there’s much noise about “communicable disease”, fighting which is supposed to be the basis of FDA authority. But I’m not aware of which communicable disease (by which people using the English language tend to mean something spread by casual contact, not by voluntarily ingesting a substance) is supposed to be spread by raw milk. Then I have to remember the standard Humpty Dumpty attitude of bureaucracy – “When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, no more, no less…The question is who is to be master.”
On page 6 the brief arrogates a theoretical right to ban intrastate commerce. (The food bill would explicitly confer this as a discretionary power.) The FDA reiterates (p. 8-9) its bureaucratic definition of milk as “pasteurized”, and the corollary criminalization of “misbranded” raw milk as a status offense, accomplished by arbitrary fiat. (On p .7 we find the lie about the FDA’s bogus ”obligation” to persecute raw milk.)
Starting on p. 10 we come to textbook Kafka. By now it’s routine for the government to respond to every challenge first by simply denying the citizen’s right to a day in court. Thus the FDA claims the plaintiffs ”lack standing”, and that their claims aren’t “ripe”:
Plaintiffs cannot make the requisite showing of injury in fact. They claim that
they are presently suffering an injury because FDA’s regulations deprive them of their
constitutional rights, but as explained in Section IV.C below, plaintiffs’ constitutional
claims fail as a matter of law.
(p. 10)
Notice how the alleged lack of standing is based on the alleged lack of a constitutional right, which is of course what’s in question here. This is the logical fallacy of “begging the question”.
Plaintiffs have not made such a showing. They do not point to a single
enforcement action the government has brought against others similarly situated (i.e.,
individuals buying unpasteurized milk for personal consumption or retailers of
unpasteurized milk purportedly not engaging in interstate commerce), nor do they
allege that FDA has in any way signaled an intention to enforce the challenged
regulations against plaintiffs.
(p. 11)
There’s also, on p. 11, a messy argument involving FDA “warning letters”, which also evidently mean exactly what the FDA wants them to mean, depending upon the context. Outside of court, they’re to mean enforcement is imminent. Inside court, as in this brief, they suddenly mean nothing. The warning letter is sufficient for an enforcement action to be considered ”imminent”, except where it’s not. That’s quite a Catch-22 they’ve got going there. How vile is it when what’s supposed to be “our” government sets up such paradoxes against us? Right there is proof of a government’s illegitimacy.
As I mentioned earlier, this entire line of argument is rendered moot and void by the government’s actions in the Rawesome raid and elsewhere. Even by the FDA’s own bogus arguments, the claims are now as ripe as autumn apples.
On p. 13-14 the FDA refuses to give an answer as to what it thinks the law is, and asks the court to refuse to make them answer. This is another arrogated prerogative of autocratic bureaucracy, this fraudulent power to write the law as it goes along, leaving the real state of the law always vague and uncertain in the eyes of the benighted, awed peasantry. It’s the essence of administrative tyranny, as Arendt discussed in great detail in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Here’s the FDA’s nightmare scenario – accountability:
In contrast, FDA has a strong institutional interest in having this Court withhold
review. If any person who could construe an FDA regulation in a manner that was
unconstitutional or in excess of the agency’s statutory authority could bring suit against
FDA, then FDA—and the courts—would be required to devote a substantial proportion
of their resources to litigate—and decide—those hypothetical cases. Dedicating scarce
judicial and agency resources to theoretical disputes would necessarily leave the courts
with less time to resolve actual cases and leave FDA to devote less time to protecting
the public health.
(p.15)
Sounds good to me. I don’t think you’d be dragged into court so many times if you actually did your job as public servants instead of assaulting the people on behalf of anti-sovereign corporations.
Starting on p.16 they claim to be above enjoinment prior to enforcement. Only once enforcement is underway can it be challenged. As with previous arguments, this has been mooted by this summer’s enforcement actions. Enforcement is now at full sail. How much of this brief hasn’t the government already retracted with its actions? It would be easier to list the parts that even could still be logically argued.
There’s more weaselly assertions of sham ”authority” and unaccountability. I’ll just single out (p. 20-21) the “honesty and fair dealing” scam. Compare this sleazy marketing with the FDA’s hostility toward both forms of truth-in-labeling: They refuse to order GMO labels, and they wish to censor GMO-Free labels. So here again, since it’s proven that the FDA is not a ”fair and honest” dealer, their alleged authority is invalid according to their own argument.
Undaunted, on p. 21 the bureaucrats beg for “deference”. Speaking with common sense, I’d say by now the record is clear that the FDA’s actions and intent are entitled to nothing but suspicion.
Starting on p. 24 we get to the core of the tyrannical ideology, the assault in principle on due process and the integrity of the constitution.
a. There is No Absolute Right to Consume or Feed Children Any
Particular Food.
(p.25)
This is phrased tendentiously. The FDA itself cites a court decision prohibiting “unwarranted” restrictions. So they concede that there is an absolute right to any particular food unless there’s a legitimate warrant to abridge that right. Contrary to the contention of their bureaucrat ideology, the burden is on them to claim such a warrant, not upon the American people to prove it invalid.
Going beyond this, are the bureaucrats who wrote this so immersed in the autocratic administrative mindset that they really can’t see the truth, that the right to food freedom is so obvious, no one in 1788 who wanted to be taken as sane would’ve suggested it be written into the Constitution? Even the idea that freedom of the press or to due process had to be written down was subject to controversy. That freedom to choose one’s food had to be written down was simply beyond anyone’s ken. Until our own “enlightened” times.
Here’s my favorite passage in the whole thing:
But there is no “deeply rooted” historical tradition of unfettered access to
food of all kinds. To the contrary, society’s long
history of food regulation stretches back to the dietary laws of biblical times. See Peter
Barton Hutt & Peter Barton Hutt II, A History of Gov’t Regulation of Adulteration &
Misbranding of Food, 39 Food, Drug & Cosmetic Law J. 2, 3 (1984) (citing Leviticus 11,
17 and 19, and Deuteronomy 14).
(p. 26)
They cite the Lord issuing food taboos as precedent for their own comparable authority. They claim to be on the same level as God.
At least they’re admitting their prohibitions have no scientific basis. Indeed, this implicitly admits these aren’t real “food safety” regulations, but authoritarian taboos, in this case used to enforce political and economic power instead of religious. It also highlights how the only ”tradition of fetters” is that of political and religious tyranny, the exact thing from which our true forefathers achieved independence.
b. There is No Generalized Right to Bodily and Physical Health.
Plaintiffs’ assertion of a “fundamental right to their own bodily and physical
health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for
themselves and their families” is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a
fundamental right to obtain any food they wish. In addition, courts have consistently
refused to extrapolate a generalized right to “bodily and physical health” from the
Supreme Court’s narrow substantive due process precedents regarding abortion,
intimate relations, and the refusal of lifesaving medical treatment. See Glucksberg, 521
U.S. at 721 (warning that the fact “[t]hat many of the rights and liberties protected by the
Due Process Clause sound in personal autonomy does not warrant the sweeping
conclusion that any and all important, intimate, and personal decisions are so
protected”); see also Cowan v. United States, 5 F. Supp. 2d 1235, 1242 (N.D. Okla.
1998) (rejecting a claim that the plaintiff had the fundamental “right to take whatever
treatment he wishes due to his terminal condition regardless of whether the FDA
approves the treatment”). Finally, even if such a right did exist, it would not render
FDA’s regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and
distribution of unpasteurized milk promotes “bodily and physical health.”
(p. 26-7)
This again is obviously false. The proposition that one could have freedom of speech where one’s health makes that possible, but have no right to seek the underlying health, is philosophically bizarre and logically invalid. As everywhere else in life, if a contingency isn’t stipulated, then if you will the end, you must will the means. Good health is the necessary condition for a healthful state for all citizen and human rights. (I speak of the citizenry and humanity as a whole, not necessarily each and every individual; but for the species to flourish, each individual must have the freedom to seek.) So it follows that we have the underlying right to pursue health. It’s implicit in the pursuit of happiness, which also isn’t explicated in the written Constitution, but lies at the core of the sovereign people’s constitution.
And to descend again to the nuts and bolts, the bureaucratic assertion that unpasteurized milk is harmful is not only asserted without evidence, but the evidence proves that the FDA’s (and USDA’s) refusal to sufficiently regulate big producers like Wright Eggs is an infinitely more dangerous threat. Here the FDA is a rogue acting against this “bodily and physical health.”
c. There is No Fundamental Right to Freedom of Contract.
(p. 27)
It’s ironic that they cite Lochner as a discredited un-precedent, when these actions (and bills) are just Lochner by other means. The point of society eventually rejecting Lochner was to reject predatory “contracts”. That’s no precedent for the government assailing true contracts between equals. The pivotal difference is whether or not something is a predatory contract of adhesion. It was true of Lochner “contracts”, but it’s false when applied to the raw milk co-ops.
And now we get to the big finale:
5. FDA’s Regulations Rationally Advance the Agency’s Public Health
Mission.
Because the interests asserted by plaintiffs are not fundamental rights, FDA’s
regulations are not subject to strict scrutiny. Instead, plaintiffs have the burden of
showing that the regulations do not bear a rational relationship to legitimate
governmental interests.
(p. 27-8)
This is completely upside down! It’s not we the people who have to prove the government is wrong, but the government, in theory our “public servant”, which has to prove it is correct in any given case. But that inversion of truth and lie, morality and immorality, is all too typical of today’s kleptocratic government.
The finish up by repeating their lies about the “risk” of raw milk and the ”rationality” of the government restrictions. But we know the only danger is to corporate Big Dairy, and the only pseudo-rationality here is that of power and greed.
All this lays bare the FDA and government’s sweeping mindset regarding power and prerogative and contemptuous attitude toward the people. And then this summer’s raw milk persecution proves their aggressive intent, and reveals their preferred tactics.
Farm-to-Consumer describes how the flunkeys of corporate dairy have admitted the real provenance of these enforcement actions.
Recently in Massachusetts, for example, the state’s Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) has been targeting raw milk buying clubs that purchase raw milk from rural dairy farms and have it delivered to urban drop-off points where many of the customers live. Raw milk sales are legal in Massachusetts as long as they are done at the farm, and the state has long tolerated buying clubs, which are convenient for customers and technically perfectly legal.
But this situation now seems to have changed. MDAR recently sent cease-and-desist letters to four buying clubs even though there is no Massachusetts law that prohibits their existence. When club members challenged the legitimacy of the warnings, MDAR decided to propose a new regulation to specifically outlaw buying clubs.
Scott Soares, a Massachusetts legislator who is friends with the MDAR commissioner, held a preliminary meeting in advance of the May 10th proposal hearing to discuss the matter with interested parties. Fifteen educated and passionate consumers and farmers of raw milk showed up to challenge Soares, who ended up revealing to them that “large dairy producers” had contacted him to push for raw milk restrictions.
To make matters worse, it was revealed that Soares failed to follow proper protocol by not opening a docket to keep a record of all interactions relating to the proposal. So not only did Soares reveal that he’s basically bowing to political pressure from Big Dairy by supporting the restrictions, but he’s also violating proper legislative procedure in the process.
So what we have here is a classic case of a large and powerful industry pushing government regulators to outlaw competing products so that it can monopolize the market. It’s the same thing that Big Pharma does in getting the FDA to destroy nutritional supplement companies. But now it’s happening with raw milk, too.
What’s next? Will all farmer’s markets be outlawed because the veggies haven’t all been irradiated or pasteurized?
As usual, it’s all about the money, and as you follow the money trail all the way up to the federal level, you find the same thing happening everywhere: At the FDA, USDA, FTC and so on. U.S. government regulators have become monopoly market enforcers for Big Business, and they won’t let anything get in their way… not even personal health freedoms or just basic access to food.
I’m sensing a Gandhi moment coming on here. Somebody is going to have a powerful public demonstration against tyranny by drinking raw milk in the same way that Gandhi led his followers to harvesting salt. People have a natural-born right to real food, and the FDA is violating human rights by attacking producers of raw milk.
Lawlessness, corruption, monopoly. Motive, intent, opportunity, and crime. We put all this together, the openly proclaimed ideology of the government, its aggressive lawlessness in its enforcement actions, and the language and substance of the pending food bill, and we can conclude that the intent is totalitarian. The purpose of the food bill is to render this FDA, the holder of this ideology, more empowered to pursue the kind of action we saw in this summer’s raw milk raids. But since the bill is focused not on dairy but on produce, we must conclude that raw milk is just the template for persecution, while the real frontier for repressive action is against fruits and vegetables themselves.
This is a fight for political freedom and economic self-determination. Our enemies want to destroy freedom for the sake of power, and even more for the sake of economic domination. We’re trying to find ways to first survive at all, and then to redeem our economic freedom and prosperity and our political democracy. We’re trying to do this through the ways of relocalization, decentralization, sustainability. But this is a mortal threat to the corporate power and an insult to the central government power. The violence of their reaction proves the righteousness and efficacy of our action. They will try to prevent our resurrection by force. We must not let them. Their way has been proven a complete and hideous failure. Theirs is history’s worst record of practical destruction, moral turpitude, and spiritual devastation. We fight for the real achievement and fulfillment of the human promise. We fight against those who wish to quench this promise forever.
Our major action must be outside the system. We’re already doing this, as we seek to relocalize our food production, our economies, and our polities. But at the moment we can perhaps also do some targeted good within the system. Citizen pressure already helped improve the Senate version of the food bill, so we should continue keeping up this pressure. Farm-to-Consumer has a petition page where the people can demand passage of a bill ending all interstate restrictions on raw milk.
Finally, we should ponder how truly effective pressure groups like the NRA work. Surely if people can be so motivated to support and punish based on a politician’s support for or attack on gun rights, we could muster the same fervor where it comes to our own food.
But in the end any dealings within the system are stopgaps. There’s only one way to recover our food freedom, just as there’s only one way to recover all our freedoms. That’s not to look to leaders, and definitely not to look to politicians, but to look to ourselves. We must live these freedoms, every day, relentlessly, with assurance and confidence, cooperating and striving to make them real. Only that will in the end crush the resistance of corporate and government elites, who are really puny little things, however big a fist they momentarily seem to wield. In the long run the size of that fist is proportional to our willingness to fear and submit, and inversely proportional to our resolution and our unquenchable will to live, as undyingly expressed every day through our living action.
