by Deborah Stockton

Kinzers, PA – At 9:40 a.m. Thursday, February 4, only a few miles from the scene of the Nickel Mines Amish massacre of 2006, another drama against the Amish began as agents of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came onto the property of Amish farmer Dan Allgyer, without permission, claiming to be conducting an investigation.

Agents Joshua Schafer and Deborah Haney, from the Delaware FDA office, drove past Allgyer’s “No Trespassing” signs and up his driveway almost to his barn, where Allgyer happened to be outside.  Allgyer approached the car, the agents got out and Allgyer asked them why they were there.  They produced a piece of paper, asked Allgyer if he was Dan Allgyer, which Allgyer confirmed, asked him his middle initial and phone number, entered the information on the paper, told Allgyer they were there to do an inspection and started reading the paper to him, saying it gave them jurisdiction to be there.

The agents – Schafer did most of the talking – said they had a right to be there because “you produce food for human consumption.”  Dan asked why they believed that and they said, “Well, you have cows.  You cannot be consuming all the milk you produce.” They further stated, “If you get a milk truck in to move all this milk you sell milk to the public, therefore we have jurisdiction.”

Dan said, “This is a private farm, I do not sell anything to the public.”

As they continued to harass him about doing an inspection, Allgyer said, “You can sit in your car.  I will call my lawyer.”

The agents remained standing.

Allgyer called his attorney who advised him to have the agents call him.  When Allgyer told them to call his attorney Schafer replied, “You are the owner and you have to speak for yourself.”

They pressed him to talk and Schafer asked, “Are you refusing us an investigation?  Allgyer replied, “That’s not what I’m saying.”

They kept repeating, “Are you refusing an investigation?”

Allgyer kept saying, “Call this guy” – meaning his attorney.

Allgyer said they must have asked him six times.

One of them said, “Even if you do not say so, you are still refusing an investigation.”

Eventually Schafer said, “If you refuse an investigation will you answer some questions?”

Allgyer said, “I’d rather not.”

When the agents continued to push him Dan said, “Is that a question?

Sheepishly, they said. ‘Yes.”

Allgyer said, “What did I say about questions?’

They replied, “Well we’re going to write this up as a refusal to have an investigation and give it to our higher officials.”

Dan felt they were threatening him at this point.

After that, they got in their car, drove out the driveway and parked on the neighbor’s property watching Allgyer.

A visitor, Ivan, who had been on the farm, though not part of the conversation, left in his truck soon after, and the FDA agents proceeded to follow him in their car, even when he stopped at a convenience store to use the facilities.  After forty or fifty miles, Ivan called 911 and told the police he was being followed.

The state police – in two cruisers – pulled the agents over.  Ivan pulled over as well.

Ivan said the police told him that the agents explained they were FDA agents and they had the right to follow him because they were conducting an investigation on the farm he left.  They thought he had product and they wanted samples of the product.

Ivan responded by opening the back of the truck and revealing it was empty.  The agents photographed the inside of the empty truck and gave Ivan a paper, claiming they had a right to inspect his truck.  He told them they were harassing him.  The state trooper said they had a right to follow and pull him over but they were in an unmarked car so Ivan would not have had to pull over.

As with Allgyer, the agents asked Ivan some information which they wrote on the paper they produced, then handed it to him.

Ivan asked them, “Why are you writing up a paper on me when you have no cause?”

They said, “We have a cause, because you left the farm.”

They claimed he had a load off the farm and they wanted samples.

Ivan said, “I didn’t know who you were.”

An agent replied, “You saw us at the farm.”

Ivan said. “That doesn’t make any difference, I didn’t know who you were.”

Ivan pointed out that he was at the farm but did not hear what they said.  He was twenty feet or more away from them and was not involved in their conversation.

Ivan said the police told him they would record that the agents had been following him.

A spokeswoman for the FDA (reached at the phone number on the paper the FDA agents gave to Allgyer) said the FDA has no comment at this time because it is an ongoing investigation.

Dan Allgyer will meet with his county sheriff in the near future to apprise him of this incident.

We will update this story as needed.

by Aaron Turpen

(NaturalNews) In the United States, one of our favorite slogans comes from our national anthem: “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” Most Americans don’t seem to realize that this statement is no longer relevant to our nation and its people. We have become the land of the diseased and the home of the wholly owned subsidiary.

Through control of the government, gained by usurping the People, large corporations have used the power of the regulatory to control who can and who cannot compete and profit in their markets. Big Agriculture and their industrialized minions have completely taken over the United States Department of Agriculture, the Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration and awarded themselves billions in subsidies for their efforts.

Every year, these corporate giants of agriculture reap rewards in the form of government (taxpayer) largesse, which they use to artificially lower food prices and edge out the little man who might compete. When a new trend, such as organic foods, emerges as a consumer preference in the marketplace, they move quickly to gain control of what is and isn’t allowed to be labeled, working the rules to their favor, and to profit even more.

Pharmaceuticals play a similar game, controlling the FDA – the very agency meant to regulate them – and thus pushing any alternatives out of the market. Despite whatever a Doctor or health expert might say about a product, if it’s not approved by the FDA (and thus Big Pharma), it’s not allowed to say anything relating to its benefits beyond the overly-general.

Through these tactics, both the Big Ag and Big Pharma cartels have managed to not only gain near-total control of the food and drug markets in the United States, but they’ve managed to generally give their competition (the alternatives) a bad name in the process by wreaking total ruination on the terms that used to mean “good” and “healthy.”

No longer is “organic” anything more than a marketing buzz word with little or no meaning. “Alternative medicine” now virtually means “quackery” to most people.

Big Pharma Owns Medicine
In his documentary film Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Disease and Pushing Drugs, Ronit Ridberg¹ manages to outline how the pharmaceutical companies have accomplished their iron fisted control of the American health care industry.

In this film, you see how total control of the industry, whose goal is supposedly to put patient care and your health needs above all else, is primarily controlled, instead, by pharmaceutical profits. What’s more, the pharmaceutical companies promote propaganda that’s so effective that Goebbels himself would be impressed – from virtually unheard-of diseases made mainstream (ala “Restless Leg Syndrome”) to diseases whose definitions are so vague that they could include nearly anyone (the “disorders”).

By controlling patent law and what can and can’t be labeled as a “medicine,” the pharmaceutical giants own the market. Then you look at who “regulates” them and you see the rest of the picture. The FDA is made up of two basic arms: scientific and managerial. The management arm ultimately makes the decisions and thus national policies on the drugs allowed to be sold on the market. Time and time again, management routinely ignores the science and sides with the pharmaceutical company.

The Vioxx scandal was a glaring example of this in action. Even after Merck, the makers of Vioxx, pulled it from shelves as being dangerously deadly, the FDA stood behind the drug anyway, even claiming before Congress that it was “safe.”^{2, 3}

Big Agra Rules Your Dinner Plate
The giant agricultural conglomerates and their regulatory arms (the USDA and the FDA) are no better off. Currently, in the U.S., genetically modified seed crops make up 91% of our soybean crops and 68% of corn.⁴ That’s just two crops. They’re working on sugar beets, wheat, and others now as well.

That is just one facet of the game. Working the other end of the stick, the big agricultural conglomerates have managed to reap up to $9 billion per year in corn subsidies.⁵ Then comes the corn as fuel subsidies, or corn ethanol payoffs from our tax dollars. This amounts to another $1.3 billion (in 2007) on top of the other subsidies the agricultural giants already receive.⁶

These subsidies don’t go to the happy family farm with a couple of milk cows out to pasture, a few crops on a hundred acres, and mom and pop working together with their teenaged son to grow healthy food. The tens and even hundred of billions in total farm bill subsidies the government throws around every year largely go to the single-crop, big agricultural conglomerates rather than to Farmer Dan and his family.

Those farmers who use traditional methods (aka “organic” or “sustainable” methods) versus the new, industrialized way of using synthetic fertilizers cannot sell their produce as “organic” or with “organic” on the label without submitting to heavy regulatory requirements and filings with the FDA.⁷ Yep, it’s illegal to use a word to describe your product without government approval.

These are just a few of the means by which Big Agra controls your food. You are fed corn syrup from genetically modified corn, sugar from over-processed cane and beets (which could also be GMO), and worse. Your milk, meat, and even your table salt are all controlled and manipulated to profit them and potentially kill you. One needs only to read a few days’ worth of headlines here at Natural News to see these concepts in action.

The Final Control
New legislation makes it basically illegal to sell naturally-sourced supplements as anything more than their scientific name and to force small, artisan and local farms and food producers out of business by adding odious requirements to their overhead and costs. These bills are brought before either of the houses of Congress every year – usually more than once per session.

Often, regulatory changes at the FDA and USDA will just slightly alter one thing or another, always to the detriment of small business and natural production.

It’s time Americans stopped being the victims and once again become the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Fight back against these infringements on your health. They’re working on taking over your well-being at the most fundamental of levels with food and medicine and on controlling what those things are and what you can have access to.

We need to take control back now, before it’s too late.

Footnotes:
1 – Big Bucks, Big Pharma low-res version (full length, about 45 minutes) available online: http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/comm…

2 – Despite Warmings, Drug Giant Took Long Path to Vioxx Recall, New York Times, November 14, 2004: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/b…

3 – Reputation of the FDA in shambles after Vioxx scandal, NaturalNews, November 6, 2004: http://www.naturalnews.com/002157_t…

4 – Racing Toward a Roundup-Ready Food Future, The Huffington Post, July 17, 2009: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy…

5 – Corn Subsidies by Year, the Environmental Working Group: http://farm.ewg.org/farm/progdetail…

6 – Are Corn Ethanol Farm Subsidies Too Complex to Understand?, gas2.0, October 24, 2008: http://gas2.org/2008/10/24/are-corn…

7 – USDA-FDA Organic Foods Label: http://usda-fda.com/Articles/Organi…

by Aaron Turpen of Aaron’s EnvironMental Corner

House Resolution 2749 (read it here) is a bill which would give the power to a Food and Drug Administrationofficial to decide what can and can’t be done in farming.  It allows for perpetrators of a basically unnamed offense to be prosecuted and receive up to ten years in prison and be assessed $100,000 fines.  Per offense.

That’s really the gist of the bill, though I’ve obviously been scant on real details.

A great writeup by Ethan Huff of Natural News on HR 2749 explains in much more detail how the bill works.  The Bill is called the “Food Safety Enhancement Act” and seeks to “reform the food supply” so that viruses and pathogens such as Swine Flu and Mad Cow Diseaseare better able to be controlled.

In reality, the bill is a huge nod to factory farms and GMO seed makers and a giant set of chains for small farms and local, artisan producers.

After you’ve learned about what the bill entails and how it will do nothing but put small, local (and healthy) producers out of business in favor of factory farms, you can help fight this bill’s passage:

A petition can be electronically signed to go to your representatives in Washington atPeaceTeam.net.

You can also sign a petition against HR 2749 and in support of HR 778 (to legalize raw milk products) at Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund at ftcdf.org.