I have been trying for some time here to alert the left to what is happening to farming.
Department of Agriculture raids have been occurring in Pennsylvania against horse and buggy Mennonite dairy farmers regularly and for some time. It's getting almost no attention though the farming communities there have been terrorized by the government for doing what they have done for centuries. They came here to live in peace and freedom.
Meanwhile, farmers and ranchers have been desperate to stop NAIS - the National Animal Identification System - which the USDA said would be voluntary but the Bush administration in a last minute gift to our disappearing farmers, just made it mandatory by ordering vets to sign people on who bring animals for vaccinations even if they refuse to do so themselves. Those who refuse are given a special number indicating they didn't "volunteer."
And along with NAIS come "premises" ID which looks to be a way of tricking farmers and ranchers into signing away their land as collateral for the bailout. US farmland for US debt to the World Bank.
http://brianallmerradionetwork.wordp...
It has been almost impossible to let the urban community understand the truly totalitarian threats occurring RIGHT NOW against our farmers.
Now this ... and perhaps it will hit home enough for those who care about their CSAs and want real organic food, not industrial food with an "organic" label applied by corporate agriculture which first got the USDA to eliminate its competition - real farmers producing real food.
"...SWAT police, armed for riot control weapons, packing automatic rifles and armored for a terrorist response stormed a family food cooperative in Ohio.
Agents from the State of Ohio Department of Agriculture with the S.W.A.T. team did not give any explanation to the family other than a warrant, did not provide them a phone call, did not charge the family with anything as they burst into their private home. But what they did do was make a big mess, taking over ten thousand dollars of merchandise with them, reported the IVN Bureau Chief...."
http://homesteadingthebackforty.blog...
Here's the most thorough thing I've found so far and it has numbers to
call, too. Every CSA member in the country needs to get on the phone.
SWAT Raids Co-Op in Rural Ohio by peacechicken <http://www.nowpublic.com/peacechicken>
December 5, 2008 at 10:38 am Originally published on
PeaceChicken.com<http://www.peacechicken.com/2008/12/05/action-item-swat-raids-co-op-in-rural-ohio>
Below is an OUTRAGEOUS story of a Cleveland-area rural co-op that was raided by a SWAT team earlier this week for a supposed Ohio Dept. of Agriculture violation.
It reeks of police state, lack of Constitutional Rights, and excessive use of force. Unfortunately, this is not a new occurrence, it happens all the time, you just don't hear about it in the news (big surprise.)
The immediate question that comes to mind --- why was the SWAT team used to enforce an alleged Ohio Dept. of Agriculture rule violation? According to the Lorain County Sheriff's SWAT
page
<http://www.loraincountysheriff.com/swat.htm>,
they are intended to be used for these reasons:
Hostage Situations: the holding of any person(s) against their will
by an armed or potentially armed suspect.
Barricade Situation: the stand-off created by an armed or potentially
armed suspect in any location, whether fortified or not, who is refusing to comply with law enforcement demands for surrender.
Sniper Situations: the firing upon citizens and/or law enforcement
officers by an armed suspect, whether stationary or mobile.
High-Risk Apprehension: the arrest or apprehension of armed or
potentially armed suspects where the likelihood of armed resistance is high.
High-Risk Warrant Service: the service of search or arrest warrants
where the warrant service matrix or policy recommends or requires the use of SWAT.
Personal Protection: the security of special persons, such as VIP's,
witnesses, or suspects, based on threat or potential threat to the well
being of those persons.
Special Assignments: any assignment, approved by the SWAT Operations Commander, based on a high level of threat and/or need.
Was the private selling of organic food by the Manna Storehouse REALLY one of those instances??
We must stand up for our fellow citizens and refuse to allow a transition from Buckeye State to Police State.* After the story you'll find a list of Cleveland news sources. PLEASE contact them and demand they investigate this story. I strongly believe people would be appropriately outraged if they only knew what was going on.
On Monday, December 1st, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM.
The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the "bad cop" SWAT team was relieved by another team, a "good cop" team that tried to befriend the family. The Stowers family has run a very large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse
<http://www.mannastorehouse.com>
on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many years.
There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly
supicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family's
possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family's personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights.
Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation's private food supply.
This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario.
Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat unregulated and unmonitored food.
One blogger familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:
"Interestingly, I believe they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join the co-op. Both the owner and her
daughter-in-law had a horrible feeling about the man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the raid."
The same blog also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been chastised by the courts in several previous instances for its aggression, including trying to entrap an Amish man in a raw milk "sale," which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal
interpretation of "give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would
borrow of thee turn not thou away" (Matthew 5:42)
The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in
an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College's student food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed
up!
Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) food coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who freely associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that they could order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was part of these coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 pounds of peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey!
These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local agrarian economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases of produce, eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number of different local, regional and national distributors, many of them family-based businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food cooperatives have become large enough to set up mini-storefront operations where members can drop in and purchase items leftover from case lot sales.
Manna Storehouse had established itself in such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway attached to their home. It was a folksy place with old wooden floors where coop members stopped by to chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.
The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the country. Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food, not unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the extras to neighbors and church members. There is a sense of foreboding that this state crackdown on a longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation could adversely impact the peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the Amish, but homeschoolers and those families living off the land on rural acreages. It raises the disturbing possibility that it could become a crime to raise your own food, buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher your own chickens for family and friends, bustling activities that routinely take place in backwater America.
The freedom to purchase food directly form the source is increasingly under attack. For those who have food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who are on special medical diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will Americans retain the right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by pesticides, herbicides, allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs, radiation, etc.?
The melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly inferior and suspect quality of modern processed institutional foods. One blog, commenting on the bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse
situation, observed that:
"No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it it safe to eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation. These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully eqiped [sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund <http://www.ftcldf.org> was created just for this purpose. The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that will put all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will only be allowed in commercial farms, even the organic ones."
Source: http://www.crossroad.to/...
We Must TAKE ACTION!
Please take a minute to alert these Cleveland news outlets and ask that
they report on this disgusting abuse of power and infringement of
Constitutional Rights:
Cleveland Plain Dealer
call: 216-999-4800
email: sgoldberg@plaind.com,dasimmons@plaind.com, emcintyre@plaind.com,
dkannberg@plaind.com
NewsNet5 (ABC)*
email: 5tips@newsnet5.com
MyFox Cleveland
contact form:
http://www.myfoxcleveland.com/...
19 Action News (CBS)
call: 216-367-7300
email: 19tips@woio.com
WKYC (NBC)
call: 216-344-3333
email: tomberes@wkyc.com,deldonahoo@wkyc.com, maureenkyle@wkyc.com,
ericmansfield@wkyc.com,tommeyer@wkyc.com,jennifermurphy@wkyc.com,
lynnolszowy@wkyc.com, mikeomara@wkyc.com,monicarobins@wkyc.com,
dickruss@wkyc.com,billsafos@wkyc.com,csullivan@wkyc.gannett.com,
davesummers@wkyc.com,paulthomas@wkyc.com, kwendel@wkyc.com
Don't forget to contact the Ohio Dept. of Agriculture, who was behind the
raid:
Ohio Department of Agriculture
call: 614-728-6201
email: administration@agri.ohio.gov,enforcement@agri.ohio.gov
From http://www.nowpublic.com/...
We need a petition to Obama to commit to putting someone at the head of the USDA who has a history of working well with small farmers and who will be maximally PROTECTIVE of the very few farmers we have left, as well as of all of their local outlets.
Meanwhile, Monsanto is picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest, our last hope for sustainable agriculture. More on this later but it should be noted that the USDA and Monsanto are both moving in tandem and aggressively to destroy our rural communities and to make sustainable agriculture just a naive dream.
Amnesty International is now asking for human rights events across the country in the first 100 days after Obama's inauguration in order to roll back all the constitutional violations that were put in place under the excuse of the war on terror. NAIS is the rural counterpart to NSA-spying only MUCH worse because not only is our chance at a normal and sustainable and non-global warming alternative to industrial agriculture at stake but our human rights to grow food we wish and to choose that food for ourselves without police state actions on behalf of multinational corporations taking over all food and making sure there is no alternative whatsoever - particularly not a better one.
We need to sign on to Amnesty's program
http://www.amnestyusa.org/...
and have human rights events across the country now - on behalf of our farmers and ranchers, on behalf of our Mennonite and Amish brothers and sisters, and on behalf of our own right to the food we wish to eat. NAIS, the attack on real milk dairy farmers, Monsanto's eliminating seed cleaners across the Midwest and putting laws into place to criminalize saving seeds, the use of Homeland Security to allow for raids on farmers land without warrants to seize all crops and animals and dispose of them immediately, etc, etc, etc. These changes in law, by the way, are promoted by Monsanto, to whatever degree it can actually be distinguished from those in the FDA and USDA.
Those who are members of Amnesty need to reach them immediately and ask for their FULL participation is protecting American farmers from attacks by their own government, most especially our Amish and Mennonite who are most helpless to defend themselves from either SWAT teams or totalitarian laws using "food security" and the threat of diseases just as NSA has used "homeland security" and the threat of terrorists attacks.
International Secretariat
The International Secretariat is responsible for the majority of the organization's research and leads our campaigning work, based in London, UK.
Telephone: +44-20-74135500
Fax number: +44-20-79561157
Address:
1 Easton Street
London
WC1X 0DW, UK
http://www.amnesty.org/...
Amnesty USA
Make clear to their that their human rights concern in the US ignore a totalitarian crisis happening across the country to all of us to deny us food.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/...
Amnesty's list
U.S. Human Rights
TASER Abuse
Katrina Survivors
Individuals at Risk: Criminal Justice
Individuals at Risk: Conscientious Objectors
Racial Profiling
Child Life Without Parole
Tracked in America
does not begin to cover the PROFOUND human rights to SURVIVAL being aggressively violated right now by our government in their corrupted alliance with agribusiness and food and drug corporations.
Ohio residents, please call the Ohio ACLU until you get an answer and get your friends and neighbors to do so as well:
ACLU of Ohio Foundation
4506 Chester Ave.
Cleveland, OH 44103-3621
Attn: Intake Department
Phone: (216) 472-2200 (recording)