Why the Tester Amendment Does NOT Help Small Food Producers Under S.510

The Tester "Small Farm" Exemption  to S.510 Exposed as a Scam: Part 1

Dark Days for Small Farmers (photo: Life.com)

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Some of our readers and others have requested that we reference specific sections of the Tester Amendment to food safety bill S. 510 to outline why this does not help or exempt small food producers.  The amendment has been sold to the critical public as "exempting" small farms and food producers from the entirety of the heavy-handed regulations of the Food Safety Modernization Act. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

These small producer exemptions are only for "qualified facilities" and only pertain to subsections (a) through (i) and subsection (n) of S.510 -- as outlined on page 5, line 15 in the Tester Amendment:

    (2) EXEMPTION. --A qualified facility--

    (A) shall not be subject to the requirements under subsections (a) through (i) and subsection (n) in an applicable calendar year.

Therefore, even a "very small business" making less than "$500K per year," doing business "within 275 miles" and directly with "end-user customers" is still required to adhere to all of the regulations in the remaining subsections of the bill. That's point number one which I'll return to in Part 2 of this essay.

Tighter food supplies, high prices to persist

Svetlana Kovalyova
Reuters

World food prices are set to remain high in 2011/12 with supplies tightening and demand running strong, the United Nations' food agency economist told Reuters on Wednesday after a new jump in prices.

"The chances of prices to remain high and extremely volatile well into 2011/12 are stronger than ever," FAO's economist Abdolreza Abbassian told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Bailouts Are For Banks: Unemployed People Get Zilch

Peter S. Goodman
Huffington Post

In Washington, the agenda has long since moved on from bailing out megabanks to figuring out how to stop paying for things that regular people need -- luxuries like health care, retirement benefits and unemployment insurance.

In the suburbs of Denver, Anthony Roebuck and his family find themselves confronting an action list that seems cruelly divorced from the proceedings in the nation's capital: They have to figure out how to keep the heat on through the Colorado winter now that his unemployment check has run out.

The latest extension of emergency unemployment benefits expired on Tuesday, as a dysfunctional Congress let the deadline go without striking a deal to keep the money flowing. That put Roebuck -- who drew his last check on Monday -- among the two million or so unemployed Americans facing the imminent loss of their benefits between now and the end of the year.

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RELATED ARTICLE:
CEOs Blame Consumer Class For Joblessness

US Ready to Back Bigger EU Stability Fund: IMF Official

Dees Illustration

Reuters

The United States would be ready to support the extension of the European Financial Stability Facility via an extra commitment of money from the International Monetary Fund, a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.

“There are a lot of people talking about that. I think the European Commission has talked about that,” said the U.S. official, commenting on enlarging the 750 billion euro ($980 billion) EU/IMF European stability fund. “It is up to the Europeans. We will certainly support using the IMF in these circumstances.”

“There are obviously some severe market problems,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “In May, it was Greece. This is Ireland and Portugal. If there is contagion that’s a huge problem for the global economy.”

The remarks foreshadow a visit to Europe this week by a U.S. Treasury envoy who is expected to visit Berlin, Madrid and Paris to hold talks on the ramifications of the debt crisis.

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Citizens of Europe Rage Against the Machine
Eurozone Debt Crisis 2.0: Dollar Sucks Less Than Euro, Again

UPDATE: You Tube Restores Banned Video After Media Storm

Infowars

YouTube issued TheAlexJonesChannel a notice reversing its PREVIOUS DECISION to freeze the account. In the newest contact, YouTube writes that “Upon additional review we have reinstated the material and removed any penalties that had been applied to your account.”

Only two days ago, YouTube responded to our counter-notification challenging the removal of a Wikileaks massacre video posted by literally hundreds of other media outlets by ruling to freeze our account. Now, thanks to outrage from our listeners and articles slamming the unfair ruling, You Tube has taken the rare and nearly unprecedented step of taking a second look, restoring the video and removing all penalties. Credit goes to You Tube for listening to our criticism.

Ironically, though, even this reversal contains its own spin. Below the decision [see full letter below] is a message recommending that we “appeal the strike” in any future incidents we feel are unjust. However, this appeal process, known as a “DMCA counter-notification” is the exact venue we used to challenge the video’s original removal. It was when we DID appeal that You Tube ruled to freeze our account; the removal of the video itself was only a strike that would not have closed or frozen our account. 

UPDATE: Following the news that TheAlexJonesChannel would be frozen after it attempted to challenge the removal of its video posting of the Apache Helicopter video released through Wikileaks, YouTube contacted us AGAIN and reversed its decision, restoring the video following media criticism.

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US Ready to Back Bigger EU Stability Fund: Official

Reuters

The United States would be ready to support the extension of the European Financial Stability Facility via an extra commitment of money from the International Monetary Fund, a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday.

"There are a lot of people talking about that. I think the European Commission has talked about that," said the U.S. official, commenting on enlarging the 750 billion euro ($980 billion) EU/IMF European stability fund. "It is up to the Europeans. We will certainly support using the IMF in these circumstances."

"There are obviously some severe market problems," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "In May, it was Greece. This is Ireland and Portugal. If there is contagion that's a huge problem for the global economy." 

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DARPA'S Secret X-37B Robotic Space Plane Returning to Earth Soon

U.S. Air Force Secret Space Plane

Mike Wall
Space.com

The U.S. military's mysterious X-37B space plane will complete its maiden voyage with a return to Earth as early as Friday (Dec. 3), Air Force officials said today.

Personnel at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California are preparing for the return of the unmanned X-37B space plane, which has been aloft on its classified debut spaceflight since April, officials with the Air Force Space Command said in a statement released today (Nov. 30).

"While the exact landing date and time will depend on technical and weather considerations, it is expected to occur between Friday, December 3, and Monday, December 6," Air Force officials said in the statement. [Video of the X-37B in space]

The X-37B, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle 1, launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket on April 22. Since then, it has been circling the Earth performing a mission that has been shrouded in secrecy. What the reusable spacecraft has actually been doing is classified, as is its mission's cost, Air Force officials have said.

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Wikileaks leaks toxic acid in every direction, except to Israel

Julian Assange's Rock Star Status: REUTERS image

Dr. Tariq Shadid
Aletho News

Let us ponder for a second about the meaning of ‘leaking’. When something is leaking, it is usually understood that some fluid substance that is supposed to be flowing in a certain direction, is escaping from its designed route because of a defect in the structure that was built to guide it. Usually, if you have a leaking pipe in your water system, your main problem is that you are unable to control the flow of it, and water goes into directions where you don’t want it to be going.

However, the definition of ‘Wikileaking’ seems to be following entirely different laws of nature. Indeed, the information is flowing away from the secret pipelines it was originally guided into. However, the strange thing about ‘Wikileaking’ is that Israel, a country widely known for its secret dealings and cunning intelligence service, is managing to keep dry feet in spite of the massive political flooding allegedly caused by Wikileaks’ founding father, Julian Assange.

House May Block Food Safety Bill Over Senate Error

John Stanton
Roll Call

A food safety bill that has burned up precious days of the Senate’s lame-duck session appears headed back to the chamber because Democrats violated a constitutional provision requiring that tax provisions originate in the House.

By pre-empting the House’s tax-writing authority, Senate Democrats appear to have touched off a power struggle with members of their own party in the House. The Senate passed the bill Tuesday, sending it to the House, but House Democrats are expected to use a procedure known as “blue slipping” to block the bill, according to House and Senate GOP aides.

The debacle could prove to be a major embarrassment for Senate Democrats, who sought Tuesday to make the relatively unknown bill a major political issue by sending out numerous news releases trumpeting its passage.

Section 107 of the bill includes a set of fees that are classified as revenue raisers, which are technically taxes under the Constitution. According to a House GOP leadership aide, that section has ruffled the feathers of Ways and Means Committee Democrats, who are expected to use the blue slip process to block completion of the bill.

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Why the Tester Amendment does NOT Help Small Farmers

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Watchdog Probes DHS Spying on Drudge

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by former Congressman Bob Barr seeks to discover whether the Department of Homeland Security has been keeping tabs on the Drudge Report and other prominent media outlets who have spearheaded a nationwide revolt against invasive TSA airport security measures.

The FOIA request, filed by Barr’s Liberty Guard organization (PDF here), demands that the Transportation Security Administration, an agency of the DHS, turn over all information related to “Matt Drudge,” the “Drudge Report,” along with other media personalities and websites that have been at the center of the TSA controversy, including “Alex Jones, “John Tyner” and “prisonplanet.com”.

3.8 Quake Hit 80 Miles Off New York Tuesday

Jonah Green
Huffington Post

The biggest earthquake in 18 years hit the New York area at 10:46 AM Tuesday morning. The US Geological Survey says the epicenter of the 3.8 quake was in the Atlantic Ocean off the shore of New Jersey and New York, far away from anything else to do serious damage. However residents of Long Island reported feeling a low tremor. "It was a short rumble, a really low rumble," Smithtown resident Eric Weaver told the Long Island Press.

Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times felt the effects of the quake:

For me, it was almost a bit of nostalgia. I spent most of my life in the Los Angeles area, and I have been in countless "hey, was that an earthquake or are you bobbing your leg?" tremors like this one, as well as several of the "run to the doorway and hang on for dear life" variety.

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Bernanke: Long-Term Unemployment Has SEVERE 'Social Consequences'

Kristina Cooke
Reuters

NEW YORK -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned on Tuesday that a long period of high unemployment could exact a steep social cost, as he and other Fed officials defended the central bank against criticism of its easy money policy.

Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota said the Fed's controversial bond purchase program was needed given a "troubling" slowdown in U.S. economic growth and too low inflation and employment.

The Fed said earlier this month it would buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds to support a weak economy. Core inflation has averaged well below the Fed's informal target of about 2 percent and the jobless rate remains stubbornly high.

"There are obviously very severe economic and social consequences from this level of unemployment," Bernanke said at Ohio State University. "So getting new jobs, getting unemployment down is of an incredible importance."

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2 million lose jobless benefits as holidays arrive

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DHS Whistleblower: They're Training Local Police to Suspend Rights

Sons of Liberty Riders

What happens during a national emergency?  People know that the President of the United States would be the one to declare the emergency, but under what criteria?  What about our Constitutional Rights during the emergency?

Film maker William Lewis had the chance to sit down with former police officer turned whistle-blower Travis Maddox for an interview contained the newly released film Enemy of the State: Camp FEMA Part 2.  During the interview, Maddox shares what became his concerns about the extensive training given to the local police department by the Department of Homeland Security in case of a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.

Maddox, also a former Missouri Constitution Party candidate for office, says the group in which he participated was "trained" to force people from their homes, disarm them, load them onto buses for transport to secured quarantine areas, "and if that weren't enough, from there it gets pretty scary," says Lewis of the interview.

FBI creating police state: Paul Craig Roberts (VIDEO)

RussiaTV

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Race Is On to 'Fingerprint' Phones, PCs

click on image to enlarge

Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valenentino-Devries
The Wall Street Journal

IRVINE, Calif.—David Norris wants to collect the digital equivalent of fingerprints from every computer, cellphone and TV set-top box in the world.

He's off to a good start. So far, Mr. Norris's start-up company, BlueCava Inc., has identified 200 million devices. By the end of next year, BlueCava says it expects to have cataloged one billion of the world's estimated 10 billion devices.

Advertisers no longer want to just buy ads. They want to buy access to specific people. So, Mr. Norris is building a "credit bureau for devices" in which every computer or cellphone will have a "reputation" based on its user's online behavior, shopping habits and demographics. He plans to sell this information to advertisers willing to pay top dollar for granular data about people's interests and activities.

Who Precisely Is Attacking The World?

Paul Craig Roberts
Prison Planet

The stuck pigs are squealing. To shift the onus from the US State Department, Hillary Clinton paints Wikileaks’ release of the “diplomatic cables” as an “attack on the international community.”  To reveal truth is equivalent in the eyes of the US government to an attack on the world.

It is Wikileaks’ fault that all those US diplomats wrote a quarter of a million undiplomatic messages about America’s allies, a.k.a., puppet states. It is also Wikileaks’ fault that a member of the US government could no longer stomach the cynical ways in which the US government manipulates foreign governments to serve, not their own people, but American interests, and delivered the incriminating evidence to Wikileaks.

2 million lose jobless benefits as holidays arrive

Tom Breen
Associated Press

Extended unemployment benefits for nearly 2 million Americans begin to run out Wednesday, cutting off a steady stream of income and guaranteeing a dismal holiday season for people already struggling with bills they cannot pay.

Unless Congress changes its mind, benefits that had been extended up to 99 weeks will end this month.

That means Christmas is out of the question for Wayne Pittman, 46, of Lawrenceville, Ga., and his wife and 9-year-old son. The carpenter was working up to 80 hours a week at the beginning of the decade, but saw that gradually drop to 15 hours before it dried up completely. His last $297 check will go to necessities, not presents

Social Security cuts are part of deficit plan

Andrew Taylor
Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Divisions remain within President Barack Obama's deficit commission on politically explosive budget cuts and slashes in Social Security benefits, even as the panel's co-chairmen go public with a revised plan to tame the runaway national debt.

The new plan by co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, to be unveiled Wednesday, faces an uphill slog. Resistance is certain, not only because of the idea of raising the Social Security retirement age, but also because of proposed cuts to Medicare, curtailment of tax breaks and a doubling of the federal tax on a gallon of gasoline.

The "Great Game" and the Conquest of Eurasia: Towards a World War III Scenario?

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Global Research 

“The great wars of history — we have had a world-war about every hundred years for the last four centuries — are the outcome, direct or indirect, of the unequal growth of nations, and that unequal growth is not wholly due to the greater genius and energy of some nations as compared with others; in large measure it is the result of the uneven distribution of fertility and strategical opportunity upon the face of our Globe. In other words, there is in nature no such thing as equality of opportunity for the nations. Unless I wholly misread the facts of geography, I would go further, and say that the grouping of lands and seas, and of fertility and natural pathways, is such as to lead itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World Empire. If we are to realise our ideal of a League of Nations which shall prevent war in the future, we must recognize these geographical realities and take steps to counter their influence.”

 -Halford J. Mackinder (Democratic Ideals and Reality, 1919)

On September 17, 2009 there were public breaths of relief from citizens across the globe and the people of Eastern Europe as President Barack H. Obama declared that the U.S. missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic was being put aside. It seemed like the planet was headed towards peace. Conrad Black, in a Canadian editorial, has even gone so far as suggesting creating new spheres of influence in Eurasia with Moscow:

How to Save Taxpayer Money: Bring in The Dogs, Not Naked Body Scanners (VIDEO)

video by iching64

Commentary by Brasscheck TV

This video exposes the blood-boiling waste and corruption that the new airport body-scanning machines represent. So far, at least $160 million in US Taxpayer money has been spent, with potentially billions more to be paid on these systems in the next few years.

Trained bomb sniffing dogs, in combination with the metal detectors *already being used* in airports would produce FAR more accurate readings of REAL threats to airline passengers, without the Gestapo-like humiliation, the illegal invasion of privacy and the toxic exposure to radiation from these devices.

The Iraqi government spent millions of dollars on bomb-detecting machines, which they found to be USELESS -- then *returned to using bomb-sniffing dogs*. The FBI relies almost exclusively on bomb-sniffing dogs because they don't trust anything else.

Why shouldn't paying airline customers have the best security there is - rather than being subjected to the dubious results of these radiation devices made by defense contractors that have scammed the government out of the Taxpayers' hard-earned
money?

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Intel Hub News Network Special Broadcast, Wed., December 1st, 7pm: AIDS Fraud

YouTube -- NotForSale2NWO

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