CALLING ALL MOTHERS

by Another Mother

This is the most important email of your life and of your children's lives.

We are all aware that the corporations and bankers have been stealing this country blind. Now they have gone one step further, threatening our children's lives and future existence.

The FDA which was supposed to protect the American public's by controlling the harm done by corporations to food and drugs (and vaccines) has turned that on its head by declaring in court that

• "There is no absolute right to consume or feed children any particular food."
• "There is no 'deeply rooted' historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds."
• "Plaintiffs' assertion of a 'fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health ... is similarly unavailing ..."
• "[Even if such a right did exist, it would not render FDA's regulations unconstitutional because prohibiting the interstate sale and distribution of [insert the name of a food you think is critical to your family's wellbeing] promotes bodily and physical health."
• "There is no fundamental right to freedom of contract."

Imagine the national reaction if the FED, which has been destroying this country, had gone further than robbing the country blind, to say that Americans had no right to mortgages, to their homes, to pensions, to property itself. That is the size of what the FDA has done.

As mothers you already know that the corporations have been exposing your family to not just junk but poisons that are making your children ill - pushing your daughters into puberty at less than 10 years of age, making all your children obese and giving them diabetes (!), causing ADHD, and creating skyrocketing autism rates. Whether its genetically engineered hormones in dairy or genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup in literally everything, or heavy loads of toxic pesticides in grains, fruits, vegetables, or 10 times more vaccines than your own generation and adding more by the day, you know your children are being harmed.

But now the food and vaccines corporations behind the FDA have gone further than the banks. The FDA (or Food and Vaccine Administration) is asserting in court that you have no right whatsoever to choose your family's food, that your children do not have a right to their bodily and physical health and you have no right to buy and sell freely.

They have become a rogue agency, asserting the end of human rights around food and health, and claiming to control all sales.

Who is doing that asserting? The FDA's "food safety" Czar (called so because he wasn't approved by Congress) is Michael Taylor, a Monsanto executive. If you don't know what Monsanto is, watch this movie. They produced deadly things like Agent Orange, PCBs, pesticides, and toxic dumps in huge numbers, before they got involved in food. Now the corn they genetically engineer is associated with organ failure and their genetically engineered soy beans not only caused complete sterility in lab animals but hair to grow in their mouths (look for yourself). They have been charged in court for lying about how toxic their chemical products are, but with food they take another tack and via Taylor, they just keep their genetically engineered food unlabeled. Norman Braksick, the president of Asgrow Seed Co. (owned by Monsanto) said "If you put a label on a genetically engineered food, you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it." So though their GE-corn and GE-soy are in everything, the skull and cross bones warning is missing). And Obama and the FDA are pushing for a worldwide ban on all labeling of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) which would include GE-meat and GMOs in vaccines and drugs.

It is Monsanto's Michael Taylor in his role at the FDA (or FVA) who is attempting to make a legal positions removing your human rights as a mother to protect your family and your children's right to health (that is, to live).

This is the greatest threat to the protective role of mothers ever seen in human history.

Mothers are already angry in NY where "food safety" laws are starting to rain down, eliminating home cooked food in schools and markets, in favor of corporate trash. And the rage will grow as mothers and grandmothers realize this food fascism will impact church bazaars, ethnic fairs, religious holidays, and their ability to transfer culture and history to their children through traditional food.

So, what should mothers do?

First, pass this article to every single mother and grandmother you know, asking them to pass this on, making it the fastest and largest "phone tree" ever. (The threat goes beyond the US - in India, as just one example, Monsanto and biotech corporations are seeking prison for anyone questioning the safety of GMOs in food or vaccines.)

Second, bring the following statement to your physician and/or pediatrician, demanding they sign it or lose your family as patients.

"My patients and all human beings have the human right to choose foods they see as best for their families, the fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, and the human right to informed consent over food and medical care."

Either doctors will join mothers in their rejection of the FDA threat to the right to food and children's lives or the medical community will be exposed for its corrupt connections and their failure to stand up for the most basic of human rights of their own patients, and they will watch their waiting rooms empty. Mothers in the millions are more powerful than any group on earth and will have no trouble finding the true physicians who stand behind mothers' instinctual (God-given, spiritual) obligation to feed their families what they decide is best and to defend their children's God-given right to health (to their very lives).

Third, take any form of boxed or packaged junk food and draw a huge "X" on it. Make it the symbol of mothers' absolute rejection of the FDA and government control over food and health. The dumping of tea at the Boston tea party is become minor compared to the across-America dumping of pop-tarts, cokes, fritos and more.

Go with other mothers to you local legislatures and while you might all have the urge to throw the damn stuff at the building, instead, pile it up neatly in a visible location along with the message that American mothers have had it with corporate food, and demand that "food safety" regulations be ended in your area for local farmers and food producers, so they have full freedom and even support to bring your family farmers markets, CSAs, road side stands, home made food at church bazaars and ethnic fairs. In short, let them know loud and clear that you want non-corporate food and it will be mothers who decide what is safe to consume, not the government. And it will be mothers who stand behind local farmers and local food producers and human rights to grow, sell and choose food. And it will be mothers who guard like ferocious bulldogs their children's absolute right to bodily and physical health and a long and happy future.

So, if any mothers want raw milk, if any want home baked brownies at markets, if any want eggs that did not come on refrigerated trucks (the requirement the government is now using to stop eggs from coming to markets), if any want chicken raised outdoors and not in chicken houses (another government requirement), if any want meat from local farmers butchered locally, so be it. Those choices must be there for some to choose and for others to reject, based on what each mother - and not the government - decides is best for her own family. If mothers want it, then by God, that is what the local legislatures are going to hear and have to support fully or they will be out on their ear.

Tape junk food boxes with "X"'s across them onto cars, on bicycles, onto trucks, onto houses, onto telephone poles - everywhere - as a visible symbol of mothers' revolt against what the corporations have done to our children and now are attempting to do to this country in stealing its rights to food and health, and to contracts between people which are the basis of all local economies and of rebuilding America.

Pile up junk food boxes in front of groceries, letting them know mothers demand full labeling of GMOs, and refuse to allow their children to be sterilized or their organs damaged.

The same applies to forced vaccines. If mothers want vitamins instead of vaccines or one vaccine and not another, so be it. Mothers will not allow the FDA or any government to mandate any health treatments for their children not only because it lies outside the Nuremberg Code (as does unlabeled food people have no choice but to eat) but because the government bases its health "claims" on a policy asserting that their child has no inherent right to health (and thus life.) Through the FDA asserting that people do not have "a fundamental right to their bodily or physical health," they have immediately brought together mothers upset about corporate food with mothers concerned about vaccines being forced on them by corporations. Both groups of mothers have seen basic human rights being lost but now the FDA has made the dangerous assumptions behind such losses blatant. After such a statement, mothers who may have disagreed around details now realize they are together on the fundamentals - that they are the ones to make decisions to protect their children's health. They see clearly that government regulations over food or declarations of emergencies or mandates over health are not founded in concern for their children's health at all but on government's (until now) unstated rejection of everyone's rights to bodily and physical health.

Perhaps mothers might use syringes (without needles) as the symbol of their refusal to accept government mandates and their rejection of the FDA's assertions that their children have no right to their health, and pile those in front of legislatures. They might include boxes upon boxes(also marked with a large "X") of children's drugs all of which were approved by the FDA but have had to be recalled for toxicity. Or boxes of Avandia which have killed more than 80,000 people which the FDA (having rejected people's fundamental right to health) continues to keep on the market.

Fourth, use your imagination as you never have before in getting word out and in stopping Obama's FDA from attempting to remove the most fundamental of all human rights around food and health (as with S 510).

No one on earth has more imagination when it comes to looking after the best interests of their family and children than mothers. And those best interests are now tied inextricably to precious-to-life local farmers and local food producers who must be free to produce and sell whatever food they possibly can.

Mothers need to know about S 510 to stop it.

“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.

This is extreme FDA power over the country and all families.

Mothers' imagination and protective love will be needed to reach out and warn everyone, everywhere.

Fifth, tell Michael Taylor and the FDA where they can get off ... by immediately planting your own organic garden. (And always have at least 3-6 months of food on hand so your family is not entirely dependent on corporate food stores and thus easily jerked around if government declares some "emergency" and closes stores, or creates "food shortages" and drives up prices.)

That garden is your independence from government and from high prices; a cushion in case of lost jobs; valuable work if one is out of a job; the place for your children to learn about real food and nature; and a haven from the industrial world for your family to have fun together. A kitchen garden was something mothers always used to provide and mothers have big reasons to offer them again, and right now. See it as a victory garden, whether a "Victory over Monsanto Garden" or "Victory over the FDA Garden" or a "Victory over Bank Theft Garden" or a "Victory over Childhood Diseases Garden," or in the truest sense, a "Victory of All Mothers Garden." But however you see it, get started putting one in this week. Mothers in the millions putting in their own organic gardens can begin the first stop to transforming this country, and the world, in only a few days. If you have poor soil, have good soil trucked in. If you live in an apartment, put food in pots on your balcony or even indoors. Food can be grown anywhere. Get a plot at a community garden, get your local school to plant a real garden (don't count on the Farm to School program Michelle Obama wants which actually depends on corporate commodities so would deliver unlabeled GE-food laced with the usual pesticides while calling it "farm food."), get your church or temple to plant a large garden. Ask everyone's help and put in gardens everywhere possible. Between you and other mothers, there can very quickly be abundant and safe food for everyone. Neighborhoods will no longer just be buildings and ground but real communities filled with food and healthy children.

And mothers will be doing the most powerful thing possible to look after their family's lives and this country's future.

The FDA threat, also embodied in false "food safety" bills in Congress designed by Monsanto, is greater than the bailout. The corporations have taken our money. Now they want inhuman power over the most essential things there are - our food and health.

They threaten our children.

That is all mothers need to know.

Obama and the Betrayal of America sovereignty

By Howard Bridges

This article was triggered by an email received questioning Obama's Missouri visit and any real commitment he has to those people, to local economies, to rural communities, and to this country.

It set off reflections on what this government has been doing to undermine the lives of ordinary people over many years and what Obama has been arranging under his own administration, including a bill, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, that would remove the most basic of all constitutional and human rights.

The US has been going through tremendous changes:

$ with Reagan when he attacked worker's unions and began deregulating industries;

$ with GW Bush when he put a Monsanto lawyer on the Supreme Court) and GMOs were treated normal organisms and patent law was then extended to nature;

$ with Bill Clinton when he put NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and HACCP into place, outsourcing US industry and centralizing the US food supply into corporate hands;

$ with GHW Bush when he undid constitutional laws to arrange spying on and extreme control over citizens, put in pandemic plans to include martial law, international control by the WHO and UN, forced vaccination but immunity for pharmaceutical industry vaccines; and

$ with Obama as he has left in place and greatly extended Bush's dismantling of constitutional rights, has allowed bankers and Wall Street full rein to hollow out the economy, has declared two false national emergencies (one around 9/11, one around a fake pandemic), empowering the military and corporations, has bowed to the nuclear industry, the pharmaceutical/medical industry, the insurance industry, the oil industry, the war industry, the chemical industry, the biotech industry, and is now set to end net neutrality.

Breaking promises.

Except for his consistent pro-nuclear stance, each of Obama's obeisances to international corporations and to those undoing laws protecting sovereignty of the country and its sovereign people, directly betrayed his own campaign commitments. Obama acquired favor from a public who believed, based on his words, that he would work to deliver peace, environmentalism, constitutional protection, a sustainable future for this country and the world and did the opposite. Promising good for this country, he has caused or passively allowed extremely harmful things to move forward.

In this, he has proven to be an extraordinarily deceptive president.

Globalization.

All the actions of the presidents listed above can be summed simply - they were each putting into place their piece of a giant puzzle which, with all pieces in place, set up full globalization, by destroying local economies.

They were working in the financial interests of multinational corporations and bankers by undoing rights and the sovereignty of the American people and this country, breaking down all structures, laws, and communities, in order to reshape a system for global control and a global economy.

What people are experiencing with Obama is that the movement from a national economy with sovereign constitutional rights and borders, toward an international global economy with open borders and international corporate "law," has sped up exponentially. And he seems to be trying to drop some last major pieces in to complete the puzzle.

Betrayals.

So far, in doing what he has in that direction, Obama has betrayed the anti-war movement, the environmental movement, his own pledges to restore constitutional rights and undo Bush's orders, the single payer/public option healthcare movement, the anti-global warming movement, the justice/human rights movement, and his commitment to maintain internet freedom.

But the betrayal of those who carry everyone's dreams for a sustainable future comes now.

Obama is on the verge of committing the most significant betrayal in the history of the country - ending US sovereignty over its own food supply, and thus its true sovereignty as a nation, through Senate bill S 510.

Control over the US.

The bill would establish control by multinationals, leaving this country entirely dependent on them. Unlike with NAFTA, which stole jobs and sent them overseas (as part of corporate globalizing of industries), making the US dependent on fewer, and cheaply paid corporate jobs, S 510 initiates US dependency on multinational corporations for existence itself. Such food control is a means of taking over countries without armies.

A long series of international corporate grabs and constitutional deconstructions are rapidly being accomplished under Obama. S 510, however, is the most significant. It is not a "food safety" bill (it will actually make food less safe).

S 510 is the "full corporate control of the US food supply" bill.

Though he is speaking of India, Pushpa Bhargava, a senior scientist there, describes a situation identical to that now faced by the US.

"And whosoever controls Indian agriculture, de facto controls India. The unpleasant fact is that the above clan, comprising a miniscule proportion of Indians, believes it stands to gain enormously by such a sell out."

A President with uncertain loyalties.

In considering that his actions do not serve the sovereign interests of the US but those of international elites and corporations, it is of note that Obama now holds a position on the UN Security Council. This appears to be unconstitutional, as the President of the United States is not allowed to hold any other office in order to ensure his undivided allegiance.

Obama's actions serve the global interests of Monsanto and the chemical-biotech-pharmaceutical-food industry, all now integral to agribusiness. Those industries are in an aggressive drive to take control the world food supply and corporatize agriculture. It is a literal war, international in scope, and waged against the people of the world. S 510 sets them up to run the US, removing people's constitutional and even human rights to freely grow, share, sell, transport, store, produce, and eat food.

Obama's silence on a deadly bill.

As Obama visits rural towns, he is telling them nothing about the food globalization bill he supports which will crush their communities. Surely he would mention the bill if there were anything good in it for farmers and farming communities.

He is silent about it. But he acts as their friend, saying he is in favor of alternative energy which he claims will bring them jobs. He visits mom and pop coffee shops where he is treated kindly, but not telling them, either, about the bill that could destroy their store and their livelihood and harm their little town.

This visit to an honest local community distracts from his globalization bill and paints a false PR impression that he cares about local economies. But he is selling industrial jobs.

Alternative or not, those jobs will be corporate, and they will not provide the independence rural people have always sought by running their own farms and having their own businesses. That sovereignty over their own lives has been all but wrecked by long standing government policies that have favored banks (including international ones) and monopolizing agribusiness, and many a

Out in the midwest, Obama says he wants to help rural economies but back in DC, Obama promotes a bill that would drive the few farmers American has left off their farms, crush any kind of local food production and independent local economies based on both, and could take their land. The bill harmonizes with EU laws doing just that and the EU commission is quite clear about what they think of small farmers and their own interest to acquiring the farmland.

Obama helps Monsanto's labeling game.

Obama is also working to help Monsanto and biotech companies gain control over all food in the world by using his government to push at the upcoming Codex meeting to ban all labeling of GMOs throughout the world.

He first bypassed Congressional approval and appointed Michael Taylor (Monsanto VP) as Food Czar at the FDA over all US food. Taylor had previously written a white paper for Monsanto, originating an Orwellian twisting of normal language to create a legal strategy whereby Monsanto could sue honest farmers who had truthfully labeled their milk rBGH-free, for dishonesty. Using precisely the same tortured legal methods, Taylor on behalf of the Obama administration, is now going to demand from Codex (a corporate agency) that no food anywhere in the world be labeled as GMO or not-GMO because to do so would be "False, Misleading or Deceptive."

No one wants things to be false, misleading or deceptive. Honest labels are not "False, Misleading or Deceptive."

But this corporate game-with-labels is. It is an effort to control all sources of plant and animal life (and genetically engineered human DNA would be included) which is dependent on preventing people from knowing what corporations are doing to life, and what people are being exposed to, in food and with drugs and vaccines.

In India, the draconian biotech bill there would shut down knowledge of GMOs in food or drug/vaccines by imposing prison sentences and heavy fines for anyone questions them. From Bhargava again,

*Section 63 says, "Whoever, without any evidence or scientific record misleads the public about the safety of the organisms (GMOs) and (their) products, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months but which may extend to one year and with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees or with both". And who will decide whether there is "evidence or scientific record"?

Obama and deception.

No one wants things to be "false, misleading or deceptive." Deceptiveness is important to recognize.

And Obama's words have been. And the food bill in the Senate is.

How many American know about it? How many know what Obama is set to do to this country, right now, by means of it?

To real people in Missouri, being face to face and exchanging a hand shake matter. With their handshakes, they are saying they are desperate to rebuild their local communities and to get their country back on its feet.

But with S 510, Obama is planning to knock the stuffing out of their local communities and their lives.

The bill would put the whole country under the control of Monsanto and other multinationals.

To a President working on behalf of corporations bent on globalization, the honest faces of those "real people" have no meaning. But their faces and businesses can be used for corporate media photo ops to sell a multinational corporate agenda that will harm the very people and businesses pictured.

Those photographs show earnest, decent people and American sovereignty being betrayed.

(The irony is that many of these nice people may favor the tea party, whose central tenet is opposition to globalization.)

Codex Alimentarius and the take over of language

by Max Guthrie

Nazis (not metaphoric ones) designed Codex Alimentarius. It arrived here on December 31, 2009, right on its corporate schedule.

Codex fulfills the worst of German stereotypes of their applying industrial force and obsessive control to insane ideas about "hygiene." In their last infamous "clean up," Nazis applied industrial "hygiene" to people. They put together an extensive and very detailed plan both for judging those they considered dirty/inferior (including tracking birth lineage) and for dealing with them: arranging trains, arranging concentration camps, arranging gas chambers, arranging lies to get people quietly onto the trains (country internment) and then more lies to get them quietly into the gas chambers (showers after travel), arranging gassing of them, arranging people to climb over the dead bodies and dig out the gold from their teeth, arranging use of the dead's skin for lampshades or soap, arranging crematoria, arranging propaganda to hide their "organization achievements" from the world.

Now these highly organized industrial hygiene obsessives, in conjunction with multinationals in the WTO, have turned their focus on food.

Not a good fit with that glorious stuff people have been intimate with since birth, that stuff which spells comfort and happiness, whose sauce runs down the chin from a luscious barbeque or that makes a creamy raw milk mustache on the upper lip or that babies get all over themselves, grinning in pleasure, or that lovers feed each other in front of the fire. It is the stuff which people believe with good reason, belongs to them by right of existence in the human race, by their simply being in the natural world with it.

American public, meet Nazi Codex.

Having spent decades designing their program, the industries in the WTO are now rolling out their master plan, Codex Alimentarius, intended to disabuse this country of its history and right to play in its food or with its food or during its food or in growing its food or in selling it.

Curiously, though Codex covers every food in the world in detail and though it is quite extensive in pages of text and agencies it's woven into and in international regulations that have been arranged , the corporations which designed it (pharmaceutical, biotech, agribusiness, etc.) haven't announced its arrival. They haven't mentioned it at all. It is hidden in the food safety bills now in the Senate, never called by name or even alluded to, and if asked whether the current bills contain it, Codex is denied.

They appear to have put as much effort into concealing it as into making it.

And media has said nothing about it.

The core of the plan is that for "food" to be considered "food," it will have to pass expensive corporate tests to be certified as such. Those arranging the tests will control food. Those unable to pay for the tests, or unable to pass them, will have no rights to food.

Michael Taylor, the Monsanto VP who wrote a white paper for Monsanto on how to sue dairy farmers for saying honestly that their milk was rBGH-free, twisted what seemed at the time to be all decent use of common language by such trickery, but Codex, within bills that Taylor appears to have contributed, moves into new territory altogether concerning language and even beyond language.

And this is where Wisconsin comes in. The Wisconsin Senate bill has this in it.

"The bill prohibits labeling a product as Wisconsin certified honey or implying that a product is Wisconsin certified honey, unless the product has been determined by testing to meet the standards established by DATCP, DATCP has approved a summary of the testing, and the product was produced in this state."

An expensive bar to a local farmer labeling his own honey, honey.

But the bill is far more than intrusive and unnecessary and even more than a possibly insurmountable financial bar because the bill includes the following stunning sentence:

The bill also prohibits labeling a product as honey or implying that a product is honey, unless the product meets the standards established by DATCP.

So, Wisconsin farmers, even if they don't care about saying they are producing "Wisconsin" honey and would give up voicing simple realty that they are, indeed, producing Wisconsin honey, would, under this bill, not be able to label their honey as honey at all.

What is it, then?

What does Wisconsin's Senate want them to do with it? Not sell it, that's for certain.

Through letting Codex loose on local farmers, Wisconsin Senate's bill is saying that if farmers can't afford an expensive nonsensical test that would buy them a certificate to allow them to speak the words honestly (Wisconsin honey), what farmers make they may not even say aloud.

Does the Senate want even more than that? If not, what do they legally mean by "implying"?

How is "implying" defined? It's not but the Senate is setting farmers up for $1000 fines and huge court costs for "implying" honey is what it actually is. Hard on the farmer to not imply reality.

If someone on a farm sees a jar of syrupy stuff and sees a bee flying around the farmer's head, is the farmer implying the stuff in the jar is honey? Or is the person inferring? Is the only way a farmer can not "imply" something is honey, by disassociating entirely from it?

Does the Senate want that - no farmer being associated with honey at all?

The farmer, notice, can't even say, "This is uncertified honey" or "The state of Wisconsin is not comfortable with this honey." The farmer, in fact, can't even get near honey and anyone else at the same time without potentially being accused of implying it is honey. What the farmer supposed to do, scream "Sit!" at the honey or put the jars in the compost pile or toss the jars around with the kids or wear it on his head, all not to imply the obvious but imply "dog," "garden waste," "ball," or "hat," instead?

Those behind Codex are seeking not only control of all food and to take over normal words related to it, but even to control an amorphous and thus unlimited zone of association with it. Codex provides those behind Codex endless fees associated with food and all the penalties incurred in anyone speaking or "acting wrongly" in relation to food.

Now, having been shat on by Nazis, suddenly good ole American food has fees and penalties, for even daring to speak of it. It's punishment looking for an undefined infraction, doing the judging, and reaping the reward.

The bill doesn't prohibit "implying that a product is honey" to the act of marketing." No, it says only "implying that a product is honey." At all.

Is there ever a time when the poor farmer can relax and even imply this to his wife? In the privacy of their bedroom? To his children as he offers them breakfast? To the bees, as he tends the hive?

Is the point Wisconsin farmers are supposed to stop selling honey as food and leave it to the multinationals?

Will the farmers start selling their bottles of honey as "Wisconsin crap," the Wisconsin's joke on its own farmers?

Or as the Wisconsin Senate's "Eff the Farmer" fluid?

None of it meant for human consumption.

Morality-free.

2009 − 2010 LEGISLATURE

2009 SENATE BILL 419

LRB−3834/1 CTS:cjs:rs

December 3, 2009 − Introduced by Senators VINEHOUT, LEHMAN, MILLER and SCHULTZ, cosponsored by Representatives GARTHWAITE, VRUWINK, BARCA, BALLWEG, BROOKS, CLARK, HILGENBERG, KERKMAN, KNODL, MOLEPSKE JR., A. OTT, PASCH, POPE−ROBERTS, RIPP, ROYS, SCHNEIDER, STEINBRINK, TAUCHEN, TURNER, A. WILLIAMS, YOUNG and ZIGMUNT. Referred to Committee on Agriculture and Higher Education.
1 AN ACT to create 100.187 of the statutes; relating to: requiring the Department
2 of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to establish standards for
3 products sold as honey, prohibiting the labeling as Wisconsin certified honey of
4 a product that has not been determined to meet the standards, prohibiting the
5 labeling as honey of a product that does not meet the standards, and requiring
6 the exercise of rule−making authority.

Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau

This bill requires the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) to promulgate rules that establish standards for products sold as honey and standards for the testing by private laboratories of samples submitted by persons who wish to sell honey produced in this state as Wisconsin certified honey. The standards for honey must be consistent with the standard for honey under the Codex Alimentarius of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

The bill prohibits labeling a product as Wisconsin certified honey or implying that a product is Wisconsin certified honey, unless the product has been determined by testing to meet the standards established by DATCP, DATCP has approved a summary of the testing, and the product was produced in this state. Under the bill, DATCP investigates violations of this prohibition and may bring an action to enjoin violations.

The bill also prohibits labeling a product as honey or implying that a product is honey, unless the product meets the standards established by DATCP. Any person who suffers damages as a result of a violation of this prohibition may bring an action against the violator to recover the amount of the person’s damages or $1,000, whichever is greater, plus reasonable attorney fees.
For further information see the state fiscal estimate, which will be printed as an appendix to this bill.

The people of the state of Wisconsin, represented in senate and assembly, do enact as follows:
SECTION 1. 100.187 of the statutes is created to read:
100.187 Sale of honey and Wisconsin certified honey; rules, prohibitions. (1) The department shall promulgate rules that do all the following:
(a) Establish standards for products sold as honey that are consistent with the standard for honey under the Codex Alimentarius of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, number 12−1981, as revised in 2001.
(b) Establish standards for testing by private laboratories of samples
submitted by persons who intend to sell honey produced in this state as Wisconsin certified honey to determine whether the samples meet the standards established under par. (a).
(2) (a) No person may label a product as Wisconsin certified honey or imply that a product is Wisconsin certified honey unless all of the following apply:
1. The product has been determined to meet the standards established under sub. (1) (a) by a laboratory whose testing procedures meet standards established under sub. (1) (b).
2. A summary of the results of the testing performed under subd. 1. have been submitted to the department and approved by the department.

2009 − 2010 Legislature − 2 −

(b) The department shall investigate violations of this subsection and may bring an action for permanent or temporary injunctive or other relief in any circuit court against a person who violates this subsection.
(3) (a) No person may label a product as honey or imply that a product is honey unless the product meets the standards established under sub. (1) (a).
(b) Any person who suffers damages as a result of a violation of this subsection may bring an action for damages against the violator for the amount of the person’s damages or $1,000, whichever is greater. Notwithstanding s. 814.04 (1), a court shall award to a prevailing plaintiff in an action under this paragraph reasonable attorney fees.

[Max Guthrie is a visual artist with an interest in environmental recovery in the absence of industrialism, and in language predicted by Orwell.]

Food safety in two pictures

Looking at the photos below, can you answer these three questions about food safety?

1. Which place is doing the right things? (Perhaps your child would like to help you decide.)

2. Which place would you like your food to come from? (Perhaps you child would like to pick again.)

3. Which place is set to be regulated out of existence by FDA "food safety" laws? (Perhaps your child should be sent off to play and skip this question.)

CORPORATE ANIMAL FACTORIES?

Cows with rBGH-induced mastitis stand in shit on factory farms.

LOCAL FARMS?

Photo of Amish dairy farm courtesy of Jeff Wignall