Another Way to Kill Small U.S. Farmers: Seize Their Bank Accounts on Phony Charges
May 15 2012
by Dr. Mercola
small Greek vineyard
In its latest move against small farmers who dare to operate outside the umbrella of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) and Monsanto-dominated crops, the U.S. government has seized $70,000 from a small dairy farmer in Maryland. The feds did this under the “Bank Secrecy Act,” which requires that paperwork be filled out for any cash deposit in excess of $10,000.
The raid on the farmer was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals; the agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it’s interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers
Another small family farm in rural Michigan—and possibly others—may be shut down by a new state law that designates certain breeds of hogs as “feral,” and labels them a threat to neighboring hog breeders and croplands.
Your ability, your right, to purchase and consume pure, unadulterated food grown by small independent farms continues to be threated if you live in the United States; support your local small farmers as much as possible whenever you buy your food.
The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000.
Government Seizes $70,000 On What Grounds?
The dairy farmer’s “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers’ markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They’d reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime.
The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. As reported by Food Freedom News:
Dr. Wilson comments:
We’ve been living too long under the shadow of Big Agriculture and the Industrial Food Complex. The “cheap” food produced by these government-supported entities is literally killing us. When we are at our home in Greece we can still easily buy real food from local producers. When we return to the Unites States the first thing we notice is that just about everyone looks ill and is obese. Why is this so? It’s because our government supports our toxic diet. They make us sick so Big Pharma can produce more medications to keep the walking dead moving.
Yesterday “The Weight of the Nation” hit the airways, the government sponsored program to battle the obesity epidemic. Unfortunately their approach is doomed to fail because it doesn’t focus on the true cause of obesity—the toxic nature of our food supply. It is now clear that excessive fructose mainly from sucrose (sugar) and HFCS and highly refined carbohydrates mainly from grains are driving many of our health problems including insulin resistance, central obesity and type II diabetes.
What’s even worse is that these food elements eventually adversely affect brain function leading to a disease called Carbohydrate Associated Reversible Brain syndrome or CARB syndrome. CARB syndrome is now the leading cause of a long list of brain conditions including depression, ADHD, PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism, eating disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder II and other disorders. Obese people with brains that don’t work so well—our waiting rooms are now filled with people who fit this description.
The only solution is to move back in time to a place where everyone had access to real, locally grown food. We didn’t need the term “organic” because at that time everything was naturally organic. The government needs to refocus its efforts.
Read the rest of the story here http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/05/15/raw-milk-farmers-on-money-laundering-crimes.aspx