The mafia knows the technique well. It asks a business owner for “protection” money. He balks. “Why should I pay you for something I don’t need?” The mafia types send a bruiser over after hours to “work the guy over.” After being beaten up, the merchant is suddenly relieved to discover that he still has the opportunity to pay the protection money.
Ironically, Wisconsin’s Division of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection has the word “protection” in its name, and it plays the protection game with the state’s dairy farmers much like the mafia plays with merchants in areas it controls.
I’ve gradually come to understand DATCP’s approach over the last few months, but at the Acres conference just concluded, I learned about it first-hand, from a number of dairy farmers agonizing over how to handle the matter of selling raw milk.
Here’s the game. Wisconsin is a huge dairy state, just behind California. Unlike California, Wisconsin’s milk tends to come from many smaller dairy farms, rather than a few large feed-lot operations.
Because milk prices for conventional milk are below the cost of production, lots of Wisconsin dairy farmers—likely more than 100—are selling raw milk quietly, under the radar. And because the market is growing so rapidly, these farmers have little difficulty selling significant amounts simply via word of mouth. Many of these have Grade A dairy licenses, which entitles them to sell conventional milk as well.
DATCP is aggressively seeking those people out. It’s sent warning letters to dozens (the equivalent of the initial visit from the mafia, seeking protection money), and then one at a time, it’s been suspending their licenses for selling raw milk, or watching as their licenses are voided because a processor won’t take the milk. Working them over, in the mafia terminology.
Without a market for their conventional milk, which even though it’s a money-losing operation is less of a money-losing operation than having no market at all, DATCP offers to give them their license back, if they promise not to sell raw milk. What a deal. You can go back to losing money slowly rather than quickly (by being out of business).
The mafia metaphor runs even deeper. Just as mafia tactics and enforcement vary according to who’s “boss,” so is it at DATCP. Before this year, DATCP had a more lenient food safety boss, so there were fewer protection deals. Now, it has a tough boss, who wants to show the locals who’s in charge. A recent article in the Wisconsin State Journal describes how the state has varied its approach over the years from permissive to less permissive to the current authoritarian.
And here’s how Scott Trautman, one of DATCP’s enforcement victims, puts it:
“The Food Safety thugs have an incredible amount of power – and unlimited resources to terrorize us — and through Big Dairy — lots of ability to tell lies and half truths.
“To understand what an attack by DATCP Food Safety is like: If I was accused of some public crime, and I was poor (like us family farms are, they absolutely know that), it is just and fair that the state would provide an attorney to defend us if we couldn’t afford it, to arrive at justice. Yet, when DATCP attacks — we are on our own — knowing it takes one smart lawyer to argue with the evil likes of Cheryl Daniels, Food Safety Legal — they know they can wear the most vulnerable of Wisconsin, our dairy farms, down.”
Can new legislation that would permit raw milk sales reign in the DATCP thugs? It will be tough, first, to get the legislation passed and, then, even if it’s law, to get DATCP to respect the law. Remember, to mafia types, laws are mere inconveniences, temporary obstacles to carry out your real agenda.
***
There’s another of those curious illness outbreak situations in Washington State: a state-issued press release reporting three mild illnesses attributed to raw milk at a family dairy. And the family dairy wondering why it’s being clobbered in public. The Dungeness Valley Creamery says on its web site that the state’s release “does mention that there are 100,000 illnesses of the E.coli O157:H7 strain every year in the U.S. It seems we only hear about the illnesses linked to raw milk.” Yes, that press release got picked up by many of the sites run by personal injury lawyers.
***
I was interviewed Sunday for a New York show, “Cutting the Curd”, about The Raw Milk Revolution, and a recording is available. And I wrote a guest commentary on Bob Hayles’ blog about the grwoing evidence of consumer resistance to crackdowns on raw milk.
Thank goodness for The Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund. Maybe it will start to level the playing field a bit. When the Mafia comes calling the fund is there to show some "muscle" in the farmers favor.
Consumers have to stand up and support the farmers both with their voice, body and their wallets. Every real food consumer should join the FTCLDF as their membership dollars will help to build the fund to fight these mafia style tactics.
Lisa
"Remember, to the mafia types, laws are mere inconveniences, temporary obstacles to carry out your agenda." Mafia types = the regulators? How did they become so powerful that they even interpert enforce or ignore laws? When where the regulators created, for what purpose, by whom were they created and what are the results being reaped?
Jonathan Emord Esq. explains it all in this vodeo link Health and Freedom Expo
http://www
The history he reveals is nearly impossible to believe and I wish it were not so.
Really, "we" are the government and even if they ran things while our parents and grandparents were not looking it is a simple matter to take back what is ours…in this case, just keep eating and challange the system three times a day.
Eating local has become one of the most radical acts one can perform..by buying local food, taking it home and sitting down and eating with your family you have just challanged 3 of the major industries in america..health care, corporate food interests, the government whom depends on the money the former provide, and made a nod to the environmental movement as well..not bad for sitting down on the job, and tastes pretty good too…
Tim Wightman
"during an investigation at the dairy, WSDA found the same bacteria that caused one of the illnesses."
This is false and misleading and is intended to injure the reputation of the dairy.To put it more directly, it is a crime.
The tests that they use to identify the strain of ecoli are based on assumptions that haven’t been proven to be true.
Genetic engineers and epidemiologists both study bacteria. Genetic engineers start with a known strain of a bacterium and through a series of steps they generate many different strains of that bacterium.Because they know that they started with a colony that was from one particular strain they can use tests that compare a sampling of DNA of one bacterium to another.If the tests show different patterns they know that they have gotten the original strain to mutate into a different strain.This is call genetic divergence.The tests they use assume that all of the bacteria started out with identical DNA.Along come epidemiologists.They take these same tests and use them to "match" two bacterium of unknown origin to trace the bacterium back and find it’s source.The tests aren’t valid if we don’t know that all of the DNA not sampled in these two bacteria are identical.Of course it is always easy to prove anything if you make the assumption that what you are trying to prove is true.
How do genetic engineers get bacterial strains to diverge into many different strains?They take advantage of natural laws that bacteria follow.When bacteria are subject to stress they have the ability to mutate very rapidly.The stress very often will kill 90% of the organisms but the ones that survive to reproduce will have acquired the ability to survive the new environment.When epidemiologists take a sample of milk or a cow pie,they make the assumption that bacteria mutate at a constant rate as they are observed to do when they are grown under laboratory conditions.If they are looking for ecoli 0157:H7 they will put the sample on a culture plate with an antibiotic that 0157:H7 is known to be resistant to along with the nutrients that most favor the rapid growth of 0157:H7.If 0157:H7 grows on the plate they will say that it was originally in the sample when it was placed on the plate.Is this necessarily true.NO! A common commensal ecoli will mutate in these same circumstances very rapidly into many strains and those that the conditions favor will survive to reproduce.When they select the conditions of the test they are selecting for the bacterium that they are testing for just as a genetic engineer would create the strain of bacteria that he wanted.Even more interesting is that colonies of bacteria appear to have the ability to remember which strains worked best when they were last facing this same environment.They will change more quickly and in greater numbers to the strain that is most likely to survive.
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:y60oXp-rN6wJ:star.tau.ac.il/~eshel/papers/Interface.pdf+bacterial+self-engineering&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
"8. BACTERIAL COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND
LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE"
"We have illustrated these remarkable capabilities by
exposing the bacteria to non-lethal levels of antibiotics.
Recent findings even indicate that the bacteria purpo-
sefully modify their colonial organization in the
presence of antibiotics in ways which optimize bacterial
survival, and that the bacteria have a special collective
memory which enables them to keep track of how they
handled their previous encounters with antibiotic
learning from experience (Ben Jacob et al. 2004; Ben
Jacob & Shapira 2005). This statement requires
additional clarification. In the examples presented
here, we showed that in second encountered with the
same antibiotic stress the emerged colonial patterns
expand faster."
About a week ago, when the blog conversation centered on natural rights, cp made this comment:
While youre all pondering your constitutional rights theres been another E.coli 0157:H7 raw milk outbreak in the state of Washington.
The sarcasm in that remark, as well as its hyperbolical insinuation ("outbreak"?) and jump-the-gun timing, is typical of those who are assured that certain paradigms, policies, rules, and regulations must be forced onto others less enlightened. The comment, though snide, seems to me a fair and succinct representation of the attitude government has taken in Wisconsin, and generally in regard to raw milk in the past several years, and more importantly, in stacking the agribusiness deck in favor of corporate interests. The list is long and ugly: corn subsidies, labeling rules, GMO promotion, dairy price controls, favoring processors over farmers and commodities over food, turning a blind eye to the effects on humans and the environment of pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, and antibiotics, allowing mega-rich agribusinesses to purchase success in the courts by outspending little guys and thus forcing them into settlements or outright ruin… am I forgetting anything?
What does this have to do with my friend’s cancer? Everything. His world, like that of most every American, was (is), because of all those outrageous, unfair, arrogant, and baldly fatuous actions of agribusiness and government, is a quicksand quagmire of toxins, immune suppressors, and God only knows what biological and psychological threats. It ought to surprise no one that this has occurred as we spent billions chasing a cancer cure based on the same flawed paradigm that created the problem.
Of course, when a few committed souls decide they want out, they are met with a self-righteous, relentless, strong-arm tactical force, bought with their own money.
It is something to do with the environment.
If more stand up and speak out, more eyes will be opened and more voices will be heard.
Dave M. I am sorry for you loss.
Mark M. Congrats on your new grand-baby.
Tim…great words…loved your post.
We must all measure our success and progress by simply looking back a few years. We have come one hell of a long way.
There is one heck of a lot of raw milk being consumed and one heck of a lot of diarymen joining our ranks. We are making great progress.
I look forward to Wisconsin on the 21st. It promises to be one great couple of days. There will be video documentary people there and lots of national profile leadership present….
The backward mafiosos…..better watch out. We are about to make them famous and expose their corruption, their FDA allegences and Big Dairy alliances.
There is a time to fight back….the 21st is one of those times.
Mark McAfee
Some are trying to make a difference, one small step at a time. An up hill battle.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121238407
Contributing to the childhood obesity problem is not part of the solution. There has been a decline in consumption of milk since the 1960s and it is ok for big dairy to target kids in their ads? This is no different than the ads for chemical/sugar induced cereal and saying it is healthy-again kids are targeted. And this is legal? Where is the outrage?
"served cold and not in those paper cartons that can sometimes smell bad." I’ve not had a paper carton that smelled bad….the milk has smelled bad-not the carton.