i was thinking that Codex could use it's own thread. michael posted the vid off this page on another thread.
http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/index.phphere's a blog piece that's interesting..
http://heartmind.us/index.php?action=post;board=1.0Guest Blog from Ralph Fucetola, JD. Please read and share widely.
April 28th, 2007
Today, Saturday, April 28, 2007, the Working Group on the Proposed Draft Amendment for the Labeling of Prepackaged Food will meet in the Ottawa Congress Center, Ottawa, Canada. On Sunday, April 29, the Working Group for the Production, Processing, Labeling and Marketing of Organically Produced Foods will meet. Both meetings are a single day long each year. Both sort out thorny issues n dry as dust terms. But that dust, like the rest of Codex, contains the seeds of the future health of the planet within it. Each Working Group meets for a one day meeting held each year before the start of the Codex Committee on Food Labeling which is hosted by Canada in Ottawa annually.
After the meeting tomorrow I will fill you in on what takes place. What is going on at Codex is vitally important to your health and your planet. BUt what is going on at Codex is also going on at home, too.
Ralph Fucetola, a regulatory lawyer, has written a beautiful guest blog which follows. Please read it and pass it along to everyone in your circle of influence. It is a really important piece. By the way, Big Pharma?s agenda knows neither national borders nor compassion for the vulnerable. Senator Kennedy?s new bill shows neither sense nor respect for your rights. The FDA Guidance shows neither respect for your health nor your health freedom.
We, the people, are neither amused nor hoodwinked and are once again standing and roaring that we control our freedoms, we, not merchants and not politicians, and certainly not bureaucrats or doctors.
Here is Ralph?s Guest Blog:
A Natural Solutions Foundation Guest Editorial
Don?t be Duped: Multiple Assaults Need Multiple Responses
Our Health Freedom is threatened again. It?s been going on for centuries, this struggle between healers and bureaucrats. Even back in the age of Henry the 8th the surgeons of London got a law passed effectively outlawing their herbalist competitors by granting themselves a monopoly, and, a couple years later, after many herbalists were brought before the courts, the King had to intervene, obtaining Parliamentary approval for what is now known in the Common Law as The Herbalists Charter, to protect traditional methods of healing and allow their practice ?without suit, vexation, trouble, penalty or loss??1 As recently as the start of the Twentieth Century, one state Supreme Court noted, ??The state has not restricted the cure of the body to the practice of medicine and surgery ? allopathy, as it is termed? that would be to limit progress by establishing allopathy as the state system of healing, and forbidding all others. This would be as foreign to ours system as a state church for the cure of souls? To restrict all healing to that one kind ? to allopathy, excluding homeopathy, osteopathy, and all other treatments ? might be a protection to doctors in surgery and medicine; but that is not the object of the act, and might make it unconstitutional, because creating a monopoly.? 2
Just such a monopoly was created. For convenience, we can call it the Big Pharma Cartel. It has money and powerful friends in government ? who often play bureaucratic ?musical chairs? among agencies, big companies and universities. They use that power to harass, jail and even kill their competitors. We honor the memory of doctors Wilhelm Reich and Dinshah Darius, among other victims of this witch hunt (as we honor the memories of those earlier victims of witch hunts who were often Wise Women and Healers.).
In America, after decades of sporadic and arbitrary attacks on health food stores, holistic doctors and alternative practitioners, a powerful groundswell of public opinion surged in the early 1990s. People demonstrated at FDA offices around the country, converged on Washington, flooded Congress with letters and faxes. Those were heady days, when the political establishment first took note of what has come to be called the Health Freedom Movement. The result was congressional passage, without any negative votes, of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA). That law was supposed to protect the right of nutrient purveyors to make truthful and not misleading claims about the nutritional benefits of their products for the normal structure and function of the body.
This did not, however, stop the attempts of cartel and its friends in power. Numerous times since then efforts have been mounted in the media, through cartel-financed schools and journals, and in the government, to discredit all dietary supplements and all Complementary and Alternative Modalities (CAM). The usual process includes fake science, smear and innuendo. In recent years, add to that, very sophisticated attacks on web sites offering products or information about nutrition and CAM.
The battle is being fought in each state, where now discredited ?quackbusters? attacked doctors wanting to practice advanced CAM techniques; in the federal government where important therapies that can benefit many people, such as the responsible use of silver in health 3, are under attack; and on the international level where ?harmonization? means reducing our Freedom to some bland bureaucratic ?minimum daily requirement.? On the international level Codex Alimentarius, the World Food Code, is the chief bureaucratic mechanism to undermine organic standards, prevent people from knowing what foods are genetically modified ? and which are not ? and otherwise make the Big Pharma Cartel agenda international policy. Regional bureaucracies, such as the EU, NAFTA and the ominous North American Union play an important role in imposing the harm of harmonization. 4
Recently, even the Journal of the AMA, JAMA, included a highly suspect ?meta-analysis? of carefully chosen ?studies? to claim that taking vitamins could be bad for your health! This article was strongly criticized by Life Extension Foundation5 and others in the field, but the mass media covered only the fake science, not the response. Literally tens of thousands of good scientific studies prove the value of supplementation. It has been suggested that those who trust the AMA and FDA should certainly not take any vitamins, especially the mega doses many of us have used for decades. Then in a few years, we?ll see who is still around to continue the argument!
Yes, at each turn, the attacks of the cartelists and bureaucrats have been met with stiff public resistance. The attempt to water down organic standards gave rise to a tidal wave of protest. The original FDA ?structure and function? regulation in 1999 was successfully opposed and the final rule was rather more friendly to nutritional products. The public outcry in each of these cases was similar to what is happening now with the FDA?s surreptitiously promulgated CAM draft Guidance (?issued? on December 26th; no public notice until February 26th; initially only a short comment period). The grassroots of the Health Freedom Movement caught fire when the people learned that FDA?s bureaucrats, under the guise of ?just restating the law? were actually setting the basis for handing over our supplements and alternatives to the Big Pharma Cartel. 6
But the song continues, and big government representative Ted Kennedy, has just introduced S 1082, a bill that may gut our Health Freedom. Curiously, we had heard this bill was dead before submission and would not be submitted. As soon as the current public outcry reached a very high level, along comes the senator, with a bill intended to divert attention from the other anti-supplement bills, Codex, the NAU and the anti-CAM guidance.
It is time to Kill the Kennedy Bill in Committee! While we won?t be diverted from our vigilance of the FDA anti-CAM maneuver, it is important to react to these other assaults on Health Freedom. We would like to see this bill killed in committee. Better to knock it out in congressional committee than allow it to waste our time. While comments directed at the FDA over its anti-CAM draft guidance was the proper response, as required by the Federal Register notice, this back-door effort by the senior senator from Massachusetts should be met with a flood of messages to the chairman and the members of the oversight committee that must approve the bill before it goes before the entire Senate. That will be our strategy in the coming weeks.
All of these multiple assaults are, of course, connected. They are connected in philosophy, proponents and beneficiaries. Their proponents refuse to allow us the freedom to make our own choices, deeming that their political power gives them the authority to decide for us. We have had enough of such ?deciders?. They have given us a medical system that kills hundreds of thousands each year. We reject the philosophy that ?the leader is always right;? that we should just shut up and take all the prescriptions Big Pharma sells. We know that the cartel that benefits from all these rules and regulations has plenty of money and jobs to bribe politicians and bureaucrats. None of that matters when the people are alerted and vigilant! We assert our ?Right to heal and be healed.? 6 We will not be duped by false leaders, naysayers and nitpickers. We are ?mad as hell and won?t take it anymore!? The time has come to assert that fundamental right. We need, in both law and fact, for this basic human right to be respected. We need an end to the power of the cartel and its bureaucratic allies. And all this will come to pass using the tools of modern communication, which will prove, I believe, in the end, more powerful than cartels and politicians. It does, however, depend on you. You need to support organizations like the Natural Solutions Foundation,
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org, which shows continuing leadership and, in fact, broke the FDA Guidance story. Like everyone else which unmasks the face of the Big Pharma Objective they are currently being smeared and defamed through disinformation and innuendo. Don?t be duped by disinformation any more than you are by bad science. It?s up to you to see through to the core of truth and to make your voice heard.
Ralph Fucetola JD
www.vitaminlawyer.com