Off The Grid News Better Ideas For Off The Grid Living
If you thought of one thing that the government was doing or attempting to do, what would you consider the most serious threat to your well-being? You could point to health care and say that government usurpation of your right to choose insurance companies and doctors is the most egregious abuse of government authority, but at this time, I would have to say S510 is the main thing that is pushing our country down the slippery slope of tyranny with as great or more dire consequences than health care reform.
You can survive your doctors or lack of them. S510 hits us where we’re most vulnerable—the ability to feed and provide for ourselves.
As of Wednesday, the Senate voted cloture on S510 and they now have 60 days to vote on it. Titled the “Food Safety Modernization Act”, this bill is a blank check that allows some sort of nebulous “Administrator” in the FDA to determine food safety, food production, and within a year, put together some kind of list of regulations (whatever he wants them to be) and make the rest of us toe the line in compliance. Well everyone wants food safety, right?
What many people don’t realize is that the FDA has a list it calls “sources of seed contamination”. To better protect us from ourselves, the FDA has now defined “seed” as a “food”, so now our seeds can be controlled through “food safety”.
Legislators like to use words like “contaminate” to instill fear in the public. Using that technique is valuable. Scare the public and it’s easy to get “food safety standards” set. Add in thirty-nine progressives who hop on the wagon, and presto! We are then saved from ourselves!
They’re either lemmings who are just following the party line and don’t understand, or they do understand the consequences and eagerly embrace the arm of government that seeks even greater control through the use of code words like “food safety” when food safety is not even the issue to begin with.
The big agriculture giants want to make you dependent on them for any seed, even if it’s heirloom seed. They know that they need the regulatory heft of Big Brother in order to accomplish this. First they need to eliminate seed cleaning equipment. They get the FDA to set minimum “food safety” standards for seed cleaning so that any farmer would need at least a million dollars in structure and equipment to meet the new requirements.
And that’s per line of seed.
Let’s not worry about the fact that there are no instances of anyone ever having gotten sick from seed cleaning equipment. No, we must satisfy the government regulatory beast that knows no logic and insists on being voraciously gratified in its quest for “food” safety standards, no matter what the economic or civil liberty fallout happens to be.
We are after all, too stupid to tend to ourselves. (I actually think this argument is an excellent nail in the coffin of evolutionary theory… how in the world could we have evolved this far and this long without the beneficial arm of government? By their reasoning, we should never have been able to make it out of the primordial soup.)
Farmers, gardeners, seed exchanges, heirloom seed companies, and seed banks have all been working to protect heirloom seeds, those self-propagating seeds that are rapidly disappearing specifically because of genetic engineering. But now the effort to take over the whole shebang by defining seeds as food is criminal and excessive government overreach. All the affordable means for harvesting, sorting and storing suddenly become too dirty for these “food safety” regulations.
And then the government has you.
Set the standard for “food safety” and certification high enough that no one can afford it and punish anyone who tries to save seed in ways that have worked fine for thousands of years, and just like that, you have criminalized seed banking.
The penalties are tremendous, with a million dollar a day fine and/or ten years in prison. The goal is to make monopoly over seeds absolute. The USDA will be in control of small gardeners, there will be an end to seed exchanges, organic seed companies, and an end to the freedom to pursue happiness in America as we see fit, reducing us to a sole dependence on corporations for our very means of survival.
Between the bankers, the corporations, and the thieving politicians, I’m beginning to wonder if we have a chance in hell of retaining this great experiment in freedom and liberty.
Other articles in this issue:
- Will a Food Bubble Be the Next Phase of Financial Chaos?
- An Introduction to Ham Radios
- Surviving vs. Serving: A Biblical View of Preparing
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