Yesterday, I managed to remain unplugged all day, and so when I got home last night and finally checked in, I was shocked to find that my FaceBook and Twitter had blown up with links to all kinds of craziness going down in L.A.
It turns out that Rawesome Foods, a buying club for raw goat’s milk and other raw dairy and produce in Venice Beach, was raided by the FDA, LAPD, CDC, LADH, and a whole alphabet soup can full of armed agents. Three arrests were made; James Stewart, Sharon Palmer and Victoria Bloch. Jenny at Nourished Kitchen has an article on the raid and arrests, as well as the 21 page complaint being made against Rawesome and Healthy Family Farms. There are actually a lot of really great articles and blog posts with a lot of info on the raids from Natural News (here, here, here and here,) to Food Renegade, and of course, AnnMarie Michaels of CHEESESLAVE is keeping us all updated as an eye witness to the unfolding events through FaceBook and Twitter.
Everyone has posted plenty of details about what’s going down, and are encouraging folks to get involved and for L.A. locals to come out for the Rally at 8 AM this morning. Several media outlets are already on top of the story, and my hope is that public awareness and outrage will be raised.
So I won’t dwell on all of that.
Rather, I want to focus on what this all means. Yesterday’s raid is only the latest in a string of increasingly bigger and more aggressive attacks on food freedom and ultimately our civil liberties. This past April in my own state of PA, an Amish farmer, Dan Allgyer was raided after another year-long sting operation for his perfectly legal raw milk operation and the buying club arrangement he had with several out of state residents. Rawesome was raided once before in 2008, and there have been a whole slew of farms, not just raw dairy producers, who have been raided and had property and livestock confiscated and destroyed, some of which are highlighted in the new documentary, FARMAGGEDON:The unseen war on American Farms.
All of this begs the question: WHY? Why is the FDA, an agency charged with the responsibility of food safety, so dead set on targeting small farms which have had NO safety or health violations, while in the meantime, huge conglomerates and CAFO’s are constantly having recalls due to illness and death as a result of their cut corners and the inherent short-comings of producing food on a massive scale?
An easy answer is to say the bottom-line, the all-mighty-dollar, is the biggest reason. The government gets a LOT of money from Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Dairy and all those other BIG food and drug lobbies out there. But really, is that all? Is it just because of kickbacks that CAFO’s get a pass on their toxic poo-lagoons while tiny family farms are being raided by multiple government agencies at gunpoint? Money doesn’t turn the world THAT much.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy nut, when one takes a step back and looks at the bigger picture, what is actually accomplished by this over-reach and tyranny seems so much more insidious. Ultimately, it’s not about money, but power and control. The FDA and all of the other federal state and local agencies involved are really in a battle to demolish our civil liberties, and private property rights. They are not interested in our health and safety; if anything all of the moves they make seem to be targeted towards making us LESS healthy, not more so. Our education system, which seems to be getting progressively worse, is raising up a whole generation of people who not only cannot think for themselves, but who are willing to believe whatever the State tells them.
I don’t believe this is paranoia. It’s been done before. Plato said in his Republic that the best way to create his utopia would be to take the children from the parents and have them raised by the State. Its not a new concept, people. And it has been exploited by many despotic leaders, from Hitler to Lenin to Mao.
The Powers That Be in world government have this as a goal in mind: create a generation of folks who are dumbed down, cowed, and crippled so that they may be most easily controlled. Teach them to willingly hand over their freedom, their property and their lives. “The individual must sacrifice his autonomy for the collective,” is the reasoning. There is a very real agenda out there at work at a global, federal, state and local level, usually disguised as conservation laws.
If you haven’t heard about Agenda 21, the UN’s initiative for the 21st century, I highly encourage you to look it up. Youtube has a ton of videos about what is in the initiative, how it is being implemented, as well as the implications.
I am not one who sees a conspiracy under every rock. But looking back over policies and procedures put into action by the last four presidents, including the current one, is really scary when one begins to see the snowball effect. What is happening now is a direct result of policies put into place over the last 20+ years. And it is no accident.
Sustainability is the buzz word, but what TPTB mean by sustainability and what we, the “little people,” mean by it are two VERY different things. I do not know what the solution is, beyond becoming knowledgeable, and refusing to shut up and sit down when the time comes. But as of right now, the Brave New World we are looking at is a very scary place indeed.
