Why Would the FDA Make an Academic Article About Potential Benefits of Raw Milk Go Away?; Profile on Food Rights Advocacy

Miguel-

Here's a question for you.

How do you expect an informal economy in raw milk to thrive when we have so few dairy farmers left?

I would suggest that the real problem here is corporate control of land. We need to break up the factory farms. Yes... this means abolishing private property in land. Land should be communally owned.

“Unfortunately we have been letting the informal economy be converted to the formal economy for too long.”

That, in a sentence, is the crux of the problem. In America, as in other highly technological, highly industrialized countries, the tentacles of the formal economy--media, education, and political control--have more reach than ever in history. (The aristocracies, guilds, and popes of old were putzes in comparison to the globalized, business/government socioeconomic controllers of today.) We have reached the point where few can imagine any other living than working for steady wages, than a job greasing machinery with effects far too big to understand. Central controls have never been so formidable. Even now as the formal economy collapses into a void of debt and disease, as the true value of everything gradually gets obliterated by the manipulations of third-party payments, taxes, rules and regulations, as we become ever less confident of decisions not made by experts, the indoctrinated clamor for even more controls, even more political solutions. It seems we have reached a generational tipping point, where the simple actions of livelihood--of providing products or services to another human being, face-to-face--have become foreign, unworthy, valueless.

Here's a passage from Robert Neuwirth's book, “Shadow Cities” in which he discusses the now billion or more people living in what he calls “squatter cities”:

“This was Southland, a small shanty community on the western side of Nairobi, Kenya. But it could have been anywhere in the city, because more than half the city of Nairobi lives like this: 1.5 million people stuffed into mud or metal huts with no services, no toilets, no [legal] rights.
...The sun slammed down on the thin steel roof and we perspired as we ate. After we finished, Armstrong straightened his tie, put on a wool sports jacket and we headed out into the glare. Outside, a mound of garbage formed the border between Southland and the adjacent legal neighborhood of Langata.

It was perhaps 8 feet tall, 40 feet long and 10 feet wide. And it was set in a wider, watery ooze. As we passed, two boys were climbing the Mount Kenya of trash. They couldn't have been more than five or six-years-old. They were barefoot and, with each step, their toes sank into the muck, sending hundreds of flies scattering from the rancid pile.

I thought they might be playing King of the Hill. But I was wrong. Once atop the pile, one of the boys lowered his shorts, squatted and defecated. The flies buzzed hungrily around his legs. When 20 families, 100 people or so, share a single latrine, a boy pooping on a garbage pile is perhaps no big thing.

But it stood in jarring contrast to something Armstrong had said as we were eating: that he treasured the quality of life in his neighborhood. For Armstrong, Southland wasn't constrained by its material conditions. Instead, the human spirit radiated out from the metal walls and garbage heaps to offer something no legal neighborhood could: freedom.

This place is very addictive, he had said. It's a simple life, but nobody is restricting you. Nobody is controlling what you do. Once you have stayed here, you cannot go back. He meant back beyond that mountain of trash, back in the legal city of legal buildings with legal leases and legal rights. Once you have stayed here, he said, you can stay for the rest of your life.”

Robert Neuwirth was recently asked this question by an apparently very indoctrinated interviewer: “How can you think about them [as cities if] they don't have organization, they don't have governance, they don't have services. You have to have some sort of order. How do you respond to people who say - that they just reject the premise that this is a city?”

Neuwirth's answer: “When you go there, you discover that they're not disordered. We're not talking about places that are completely lawless. They form their own organizations. Every squatter community has residents' associations. Every neighborhood has its informal associations of who leads it. In fact, many of the communities were built by a kind of cooperative or mutuality, where 10 families would get together and build 10 homes. So this is not something that comes without structure. That's the first point. The second point is that we make the mistake of thinking that these communities are outright deprived. One of the huge surprises I had when I went to Kibera and first came into the community, this is the, basically, largest mud hut settlement in sub-Saharan Africa, is how much commerce there is there. The main drags are just loaded with stores, all run by the squatters themselves. There's bars, there's, you know, health clinics, there's grocery stores, there's places where you can buy just, you know, the average necessities, drug stores. So this is a tremendously thriving economy, even though each store may be worth very little. In aggregate, it's a huge amount of commerce. And people are negotiating what their rights are, let's say. So can you have a bar there? And can you have a grocery store here? And is it OK for a cigarette shop to be located here? Or a church to be located there? So they're sort of proto-zoning, if you will. So the communities are basically organizing themselves and that says to me that they are communities and they are creating structures that we can work with and that are adaptable to working in partnership with the city.”

"...rebuild ... from the ground up... That has to mean taking back the land."

Returning to the land is the theme of my first post in this forum, FDA arms buildup. And how do we do this? Groups like the American Indian Movement have physically picked up arms, "Wounded Knee", to reclaim their lands. I don't believe they succeeded in gaining sovereignty over one square inch, although they may feel what they did was helpful to the cause. Around the world people have fought to the death to try to defend their homelands from the global establishment... I mentioned in a post the Saami people's attempts to recover their homelands in northern Europe. There may actually be Nations in the Amazon, such as the Achuar people, who are successfully holding off big oil and other arms of the global terrorists as we speak, look into it...

I find Dave Milano's quotes re Shadow Cities quite interesting. I myself lived in Rio de Janeiro for two years, 4 1/2 million people lived in the favelas there, as squatters. I rarely ventured in there, at times it looked like a nightmare, other times I saw laughing people, once a goat walked past me (raw milk could be happening in these ghettos), I'm really no expert on that scene, one thing you see all the time in the third world is severely deformed people. Obviously mainly due to severe mineral vitamin deficiencies. A lot of the people there can only afford white rice. Weston Price's pictures and claims make more and more sense as I think about this, ie if you improved that white rice diet slightly, added some wonder bread, some pastuerized milk, ... brought it up to the standard american diet, what would you have? You'd have people that are deformed but not as noticably. Crooked teeth, near sighted, one arm longer than the other, "allergies", ... How many health problems are really due to mineral vitamin deficiency?

I've spent most all of my life in the US, and 8 years ago a simple plan came to me that people can use to return to the Earth, in this part of the global prison at least. It's not complete sovereignty, but it's a huge improvement. I combined ideas I got from Seminoles that still live communally in the Everglades, with other ideas such as the legal structures used by condo associations today. Basically, for a fraction of the cost of what people are paying today for housing, food, car, taxes, childcare, utilities... you could have your own land, cabin, energy, garden orchard grazing areas, forest, community kitchen, community clubhouse, your own dairy, no need for a car, economies of group cooking, baking, cheesemaking, a small herd... this would be in the country, but you could have a presense in town too, so you could work part time in town if needed, and avail yourself of city resources. The magic number I used was about 25 people, who each buy 5 acres, so you'd have about a half mile by half mile piece of land, most of it preserved, giving you that amazing substance called wood, freely, when trees die and fallen branches, for cooking and heating and building... If you need to leave you can sell your share, like someone selling his condo, where he had the use of group areas as well as his individual area. These legal structures work, I am just taking it to a new level. Some or all of the group could form their own business, farming, dairy, cheesemaking would be naturals, as you're already doing that for yourselves... This type of community could multiply, I like bicycles, but you could go farther out and use say an old school bus, look into wood burning cars, ... and run it to town and back twice a week on wood from dead trees...

Call your group whatever you want, an employee owned business, a partnership, corporation, workers of the neighborhood uniting, ... or use the old name, your family or clan...Do the math, a life of ease, all your basic needs met, self sufficient, clean, with time to do the other things that give life meaning: feasting, chasing women, art, dance, drama, meditation, seeking, music, praying, massage, herbal knowledge ... be a renaissance man.

I've tried this twice, no one was listening. There are small intentional communities, but the ones I've seen look like mini versions of the global prison. Mine would be fundamentally different, an Oasis. Reading and talking only get you so far in life. Sometimes you have to put it in gear. I hope someday people decide to make the change.