Obama Leads War On Small Farmers

WASHINGTON - The Senate passed a sweeping overhaul of the nation's food-safety system Tuesday after tainted eggs, peanut butter and spinach sickened thousands of people in the past few years and led major food makers to join consumer advocates in demanding stronger government oversight.

***Notice that consumers do not demand this, only “consumer advocates.”  Keep your eyes on the “eggs” issue.***

The legislation, which passed 73-25, would greatly strengthen the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an agency that in recent decades focused more on policing medical products than ensuring the safety of food. The bill is intended to keep unsafe foods from reaching markets and restaurants, a change from the current practice that mainly involves cracking down after outbreaks occur.

***Everything is unsafe if it is not handled properly, nothing is dangerous if it is cooked properly. It gets down to relationships, and the cook. ***

Despite unusual bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and a strong push from the Obama administration, the bill could still die because there might not be enough time for the usual haggling between the Senate and the House, which passed its own version last year. Top House Democrats said on Tuesday that they were considering simply passing the Senate version to speed approval but that no decision had been made.

***It’ll pass, govt will grow.***

Both versions of the bill would grant the FDA new powers to recall tainted foods, increase inspections, demand accountability from food companies and oversee farming. 

***There you go, “oversee farming.”  Small farms, the ones left, will not survive the oversight.***

But neither would consolidate overlapping functions at the Agriculture Department and nearly a dozen other federal agencies that oversee various aspects of food safety.

***Of course not, since government only grows, no matter how chaotic.***

Eggs not covered

The action came after contaminated eggs, peanuts and produce sickened hundreds of people this year and more than 550 million eggs suspected of salmonella contamination were recalled. However, the measure does doesn't cover meat, poultry and eggs because the Agriculture Department regulates them.

***So the reason for the new law is one item not covered.  Big business, the ones responsible for the mass outbreaks, will get a pass.  The onerous rules will be applied only to small farmers.***

The measure requires the FDA to inspect "high-risk" producers only once every three years; the FDA will write the definition of high-risk producers. The bill also exempts small farms from the new requirements.

***See here is the government media advancing the lie...  there is a provision to exempt small farmers in the bill currently.  This provision mutes the objection of small farmers, since it exempts them they are not fighting this bill.  Just before it passes, this exemption will be stripped out.  Farmers will awake one morning to find the FDA poisoning their food inventory under this law.***

Even so, backers of the legislation said it represented a major overhaul and were quick to point out that it received bipartisan support. According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, foodborne illnesses sicken 76 million Americans every year; 325,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 -- about 14 a day -- die.

***Yes, the elderly and others who die due to poor immune systems, for which food poisoning is merely a contributing factor.  They’d die anyway, soon enough.  The is solves a problem that does not exist.***

"This is a historic moment," said Erik Olson, deputy director of the Pew Health Group, an advocacy organization. "For the first time in over 70 years, the Senate has approved an overhaul of FDA's food safety law that will help ensure that the food we put on our kitchen tables will be safer."

***This is what happens when billionaires go into “charity” or do not give all their money away before they die.  Pew said if he were president he would “Tell the truth and trust the people.”   Now the Pew Charities lie and distrust the people.   Food safety is up to the cook, not the fda, and nothing any law can do to overturn that fct of life.***

An uncertain science

The legislation greatly increases the number of inspections the FDA must conduct of food processing plants, with an emphasis on foods that are considered most high risk -- although figuring out which ones those are is an uncertain science. Until recently, peanut butter would not have made the list.

***Hmmm... if the fda could not figure out what to do with the billions they had, how come we are giving them more billions now?***

"This legislation means that parents who tell their kids to eat their spinach can be assured that it won't make them sick," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who, as chairman of the Senate health committee, shepherded the legislation through months of negotiations.

***Big agricultures’ man in Washington.***

Health advocates are hoping the legislation will rekindle the progress -- now stalled -- that the nation once enjoyed in reducing the tens of millions of food-contamination illnesses and thousands of deaths estimated to occur each year. 

***Wait a minute, the last several huge increases in FDA budget were supposed to promote food safety.  You mean none of it worked?  And we will try some more?  And there is evidence that the FDA itself tampers with food for political ends, such as when the FDA went directly to two grapes injected with cyanide in an importation..  Not enough to give a baby more than a stomach ache, but enough to destroy a year of Chilean exports. But this is nothing new: when the Patriot Act was set to end, the underwear bomber is ushered onto a Detroit-bound flight.  When the ATF budget ws set to be slashed, they raided Waco.  It is how government works. It goes on, because no one is ever prosecuted.***

In the case of toxic salmonella, infections may be creeping up, according to government figures.Part of the problem is the growing industrialization and globalization of the nation's food supply. 

***So it is not small, local farmers.***

Nearly one-fifth of it, including as much as three-quarters of its seafood, are imported, but the FDA inspects less than one pound in a million of imported foods. 

*** Let’s see, in 2009 the FDA budget was $2.4 billion, and we had spinach salmonella outbreak and the swine flu hoax, so in 2010, we gave them  $3.3 billion, and we had 550,000 tainted eggs, and still more swine flu hoax.  So 2011, we’ll give them $4.03 billion.  I tremble at what disease we’ll have in 2011. But note that number “one in a million...”

Let’s run some numbers:

2009 FDA had “about”(they don’t know) 8800 employees and a budget of 2.4 billion.  This means each FDA employee costs the taxpayers about $272,727 a year. Extrapolating from these facts, let’s say in 2010, they had 12,100 employees, given a budget of $3.3 billion. That is about a 50% increase, so now they should be able to inspect 1.5 pounds in a million. With their 2011 budget of over $4 billion, they nearly double their 2009 capabilities, so they can inspect almost 2 pounds per million, with 14,666 employees.

Let’s get serious:  If we believe inspections matter, we want at least 10% inspection right?  That would be 100,000 pounds per million. So we can reckon with a 2011 budget of $4 billion, and 14,666 employees, to get from 2 pounds to 100,000 pounds per million, we need to bump this up 50,000 times.  OK.. so to get where we inspect 10% of the imports (and note this is only the imports, let alone domestic inspection), or in other words let 90% of our imported food slide by uninspected, we need a FDA budget of 200 Trillion dollars (with a T) and 733 million inspectors, that is twice the population of USA today.  Better open those borders, and hire illegal aliens, if we want to get serious about food safety.

Of course, every cook inspects every meal, so we need no FDA whatsoever.  The FDA is just the TSA groping dead animals.  Why do we pretend the FDA can enhance food safety when they cannot, why do pretend cooks cannot when they do?

***

The bill gives the agency more control over food imports, including increased inspection of foreign processing plants and the ability to set standards for how fruits and vegetables are grown abroad.

Staunch opposition to the bill by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., forced months of delay. 

***Yippee!  Instead of holding importers responsible for what they import, let’s send government workers to tour the world approving factories overseas, at taxpayers expense.***

Coburn offered his own version of the legislation. It eliminated many of the bill's requirements because he said that more government rules would be deleterious and that the free market was working.

***At the last minute, after he has shaken down enough lobbyists, he’ll go along with whatever.  Count on it.***

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