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[bob ford <bobford79 AT yahoo.com>]

That article Lynda first posted, and then Lynn found some information is 
starting to hit the other sites

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  Swat Team conducts food raid in rural Ohio


December 4, 2008

 
"Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply 
intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement 
has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement. The 
1980s and 1990s have seen marked changes in the number of state and local 
paramilitary units, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical 
armament." --Cato Institute (more below)

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national 
security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national 
security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." 
--Barack Obama, "Obama's Civilian National Security Force"

"At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid 
can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food 
is power....." --Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food 
Program, "The UN Plan for Food and Land"
 

On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the 
private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto 
the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, 
infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was 
aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some 
point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop” 
team that tried to befriend the family. The Stowers family has run a very 
large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse on the western 
side of the greater Cleveland area for many years.
There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them 
identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly 
suspicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family’s 
possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of 
every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on 
the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were 
not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their 
rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the 
family’s personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, 
and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact 
records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational 
explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional 
rights.

Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail 
establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for 
a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter 
of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the 
nation’s private food supply.

This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents 
who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The 
present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new 
interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled 
substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously 
unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security 
measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, 
hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario. 
Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat 
unregulated and unmonitored food. 

One blogger familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:

“Interestingly, I believe they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an 
undercover ODA official came to their little store and claimed to have a sick 
father wanting to join the co-op. Both the owner and her daughter-in-law had 
a horrible feeling about the man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op 
and notified him by certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be 
part of it. They refused and gave him names of other businesses and health 
food stores closer to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there 
yesterday as part of the raid.”

The same blog also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been 
chastised by the courts in several previous instances for its aggression, 
including trying to entrap an Amish man in a raw milk “sale,” which backfired 
when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal interpretation of 
“give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn 
not thou away” (Matthew 5:42) 

The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in 
an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by a 
county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College’s student 
food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating 
organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined 
the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk 
from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying 
clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently 
contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by 
state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter 
requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter 
was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate 
the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team
 showed up! 

Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American 
landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic 
food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) food 
coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who freely 
associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that they could 
order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was part of these 
coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 pounds of 
peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey! 

These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their 
ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk 
quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local agrarian 
economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases of produce, 
eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number of different 
local, regional and national distributors, many of them family-based 
businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food cooperatives 
have become large enough to set up mini-storefront operations where members 
can drop in and purchase items leftover from case lot sales. Manna Storehouse 
had established itself in such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway 
attached to their home. It was a folksy place with old wooden floors where 
coop members stopped by to chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.

The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the country. 
Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food, not 
unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the extras to neighbors and church 
members. There is a sense of foreboding that this state crackdown on a 
longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation could adversely impact the 
peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the Amish, but homeschoolers and 
those families living off the land on rural acreages. It raises the 
disturbing possibility that it could become a crime to raise your own food, 
buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher your own chickens for 
family and friends – bustling activities that routinely take place in 
backwater America. 

The freedom to purchase food directly form the source is increasingly under 
attack. For those who have food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who 
are on special medical diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will 
Americans retain the right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by 
pesticides, herbicides, allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs, 
radiation, etc.? The melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly 
inferior and suspect quality of modern processed institutional foods. One 
blog, commenting on the bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse situation, 
observed that:

“No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it is safe to 
eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation. 
These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully equipped 
[sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer 
Legal Defense Fund was created just for this purpose. The USDA just released 
their plans to put a law into action that will put all small farmers out of 
business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will only be allowed in 
commercial farms, even the organic ones.” December 3, 2008 7:09 PM

Note: "The police paramilitary units also conduct training exercises with 
active duty Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. State and local police departments 
are increasingly accepting the military as a model for their behavior and 
outlook.... The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is simply not 
appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police officers confront not an 
'enemy' but individuals who are protected by the Bill of Rights. Confusing 
the police function with the military function can lead to dangerous and 
unintended consequences...." (Diane Cecilia Weber, Cato Institute, "Warrior 
Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in Police Departments")
 

 
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