The short version: Hi Q’s permits are still pending approval from the Ohio Department of Agriculture and we have until February 22nd to email the ODA and speak out against this. Your voice can make a HUGE difference in the lives of SIX MILLION chickens, not to mention the community that would be left to deal with this horrific facility.

Dead/mangled/diseased chickens are normal occurrences on factory farms like the one Hi-Q wants to build.

If you’re not familiar with battery cages, check out this Virtual Battery Cage for a few minutes to get a glimpse of the hellish lives battery-caged factory-farmed chickens endure.

Another link worth checking out is Your Daily Vegan’s in-depth post on this issue, including a break-down of what exactly Hi-Q’s factory farm will bring to Ohio (hint: LOTS and LOTS of chicken poop, disease, and contaminated water.)

Here’s the full update from Mercy for Animals:

Please take a moment to contact Jim Zehringer, Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, who also serves as the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board Chairman, to ask him to deny the permits Hi-Q Egg Products needs to build a 15 layer-house egg-production facility in York Township, north of Marysville, Ohio that would confine six million hens.

In mid December 2010, dozens of MFA supporters crowded the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s conference room in protest over the proposed permits during a multi-day hearing. The hearing officer is now expected to hand his findings to Zehringer on February 22nd. Chairman Zehringer will ultimately make the final decision on this case.

The millions of hens who could be confined at the proposed Hi-Q Egg Farm would be forced to live crammed together inside battery cages – small, barren wire cages stacked in rows inside filthy windowless sheds. Battery cages are typically the size of a file drawer and confine five to seven hens, giving each bird only 67 square inches of floor space – an area smaller than a notebook-sized piece of paper. Sickness and disease run rampant on factory farms when animals are forced to live in dirty and unsanitary conditions.

In addition to cruelly confining six million hens, Hi-Q Egg Farm would reportedly produce at least 74,000 tons of chicken manure and 23 million gallons of manure-contaminated egg-wash water each year, creating an environmental and public food safety risk.

Hi-Q has been attempting to build its farm for years and has met much resistance from the residents of Ohio. We must continue to speak for the millions of hens that would suffer as a result of this new factory farm, but time is of the essence!

What You Can Do

Please take a moment today to contact Director Zehringer at:
administration@agri.ohio.gov

You can also e-mail your comments to the Board at:
livestockstandardsboard@agri.ohio.gov or send a letter to: Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board, 8995 East Main Street, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068.

Politely ask Jim Zehringer and the Ohio Department of Agriculture not to permit Hi-Q Egg Products to build their enormous egg factory farm in our great state. Please send your letter before February 22nd and include in your correspondence your full name and the city in which you live.

Sample Letter:

Dear Director Zehringer,

As a constituent and resident of Ohio, I ask that you deny permits to Hi-Q Egg Products to keep a new battery-cage factory egg farm out of Ohio. This proposed Hi-Q Egg farm would harm the public and violate the values and ideals of Ohioans. Not only are factory farms repositories for unconscionable animal cruelty and neglect, they threaten human health, the environment and local economies. Further, sickness and disease run rampant on factory farms when animals are forced to live in dirty and unsanitary conditions.

Hi-Q is bad for animals, the environment, neighboring communities and the state of Ohio. Please don’t allow this egg factory farm to be built.

Sincerely,

Your Name
Your City, State

We need your help to give a voice to the voiceless – one email today may help save six million hens. Tell Zehringer that animal abuse has no place in Ohio!

Thank you for helping farmed animals in Ohio.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE take a couple minutes and speak out against Hi-Q.

After you’re done, spread the word— post this information on Facebook, Twitter, email your friends and family, anything you can think of.

We’re talking about SIX MILLION CHICKENS. The amount of pollution, suffering, and death that would result is unimaginable.

We simply CANNOT let this happen.

All Americans who are concerned over the fiscal irresponsibility of Congress and the inflationary effects of its trillion dollar deficits, trillion dollar bailouts, and trillion dollar stimulus package, MUST contact their representative immediately in opposition to H.R. 1, the economic stimulus package.

“There is a lot of stimulus and growth in this bill – that is, of government.  Nothing in this bill stimulates the freedom and prosperity of the American people.  Politician-directed spending is never as successful as market-driven investment.  Instead of passing this bill, Congress should get out of the way by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reining in the reckless monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.”

- Congressman Ron Paul

Rep. Ron Paul issued a statement yesterday regarding this bill which makes it clear what type of bill it is and some of the reasons why we must oppose it. Here are some highlights:

• “In reality, this bill is just an escalation of a government-created economic mess. As before, a sense of urgency and impending doom is being used to extract mountains of money from Congress with minimal debate….. We are again being promised that its passage will help employment, help homeowners, help the environment, etc.  These promises are worthless.  This time around especially, Congress should know better than to pass anything of this magnitude without first reading the fine print.”
• “At least $4 billion is allocated to expanding the police state and the war on drugs … and the COPS program, both of which are corrupt and largely ineffective programs.”
• “To help Big Brother keep a better eye on us and our children, $20 billion would go towards health information technology, which would create a national system of electronic medical records without adequate privacy protection.”
• “$79 billion bails out states that haphazardly expanded their budgets during the bubble years, but refuse to retrench and cut back, as their taxpayers have had to, during recession years.”
• “Of course the bill is rife with central planning projects.”
• “This bill delivers an additional debt burden of $6,700 to every American man, woman and child.”
• “There is a lot of stimulus and growth in this bill – that is, of government.  Nothing in this bill stimulates the freedom and prosperity of the American people.  Politician-directed spending is never as successful as market-driven investment.  Instead of passing this bill, Congress should get out of the way by cutting taxes, cutting spending, and reining in the reckless monetary policy of the Federal Reserve.”

The bottom line is that Americans need to help preserve their freedom and prosperity by opposing this nearly trillion dollar economic stimulus package.

Speak out against this, contact your Representative immediately!

On December 3rd, the Ohio House of Representatives introduced HJR 8, a resolution calling for a Constitutional Convention, provided for by Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

This is one of only two legal methods for amending the Supreme Law of the Land. This nation is only a few states away from having application of the requisite 34 states needed to convene a Constitutional Convention.

It is worth noting that many states which have called for a Constitutional Convention in the past have since withdrawn their requests (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire, and others) after realizing the danger of such an event.

If a Constitutional Convention is called, our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be up for grabs and open to any and all changes.

It is clear that this con-con call is being quickly pushed through the lame-duck legislature before most Ohio citizens learn about it. The legislation was referred to the House Judiciary Committee and they are voting this Wednesday to determine whether to send it to the house for a full vote — only a week after its introduction!

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED ASAP!

1. Get educated on the facts of a Constitutional Convention by watching Beware Article V (4 parts) which was created by state legislators to educate other legislators. Stay updated and join the discussion at The Ohio Freedom Alliance Forum.
2. Contact the Legislature. Send an email to your Rep as well as all of the members of the Judiciary Committee all at once using the Ohio Freedom Alliance SLAM tool. Or telephone your Representative and 11 Committee Members.
3. Join us at the Committee Meeting on Wednesday morning at 9:30am at the statehouse in Columbus to give testimony or just to show your support for the legislation’s withdraw. A large attendance will bring this issue into the spotlight and prevent a hasty, uninformed vote. Details here.

SUMMARY OF THE DANGER:
A Constitutional Convention has no limitations!

Once Congress calls for a Constitutional Convention Article V grants that assembled convention the exclusive power to propose amendments regardless of the original reason for its call. By its very definition a Constitutional Convention is a sovereign body and therefore cannot be limited.

Recall that the first Constitutional Convention was held simply for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation under Article XIII, which indicated that the consent of all State legislatures is required for amendment. Instead, delegates – having met in total secrecy for several months – emerged with a new fundamental government design, which stipulated that only nine of the thirteen states would have to ratify for the new government to go into effect.

Everything in the current Constitution could be tossed, and replaced with whatever the delegates decide. A new convention could even decide not to bother having the states ratify what it produces. A constitutional convention has no limitations. With today’s hostile and divided political climate, can we trust that our rights would be secure?

For questions, please contact:
Teri M. Owens
libertyinlaw@gmail.com
740-816-0933

Beware Article V

Part I, 10 min.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8_pdJ1dPo

Part II, 10 min.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flHJrcdfbBg

Part III, 11 min.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly1Lh3bqtYM

Part IV, 8 min.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5jKAlgvCgg

Please use the “ShareThis” button below to email this alert to your friends and family, as well as vote it up on Digg and Reddit!

—–

UPDATE #2: The Cleveland Plain Dealer has finally decided to give this story some attention, even quoting this blog at one point. Unfortunately, they dismiss all reports of the SWAT team, deciding it’s just some crazies on the internet spreading rumors. Yes of course, believe the police, they’re always innocent and well-intentioned! Don’t do anything silly like wait for the family’s statement to come out…

Reason magazine has also picked up the story, also mentioning my humble little blog:

“The folks over at Peace Chicken (yes, that’s a real site, complete with chicken death doomsday clock) are seriously peeved.”

—–

UPDATE #1: Here’s a good update on this story, including the fact that the husband of the family wasn’t present for the raid because he was in IRAQ. And here is a letter from the family themselves, which includes ways you can help.

[Thanks to LewRockwell.com, Intel Daily, OpEdNews, and NowPublic for carrying this story.]

Below is an OUTRAGEOUS story of a Cleveland-area rural co-op that was raided by a SWAT team earlier this week for a supposed Ohio Dept. of Agriculture violation.

It reeks of police state, lack of Constitutional Rights, and excessive use of force. Unfortunately, this is not a new occurrence, it happens all the time, you just don’t hear about it in the news (big surprise.)

The immediate question that comes to mind — why was the SWAT team used to enforce an alleged Ohio Dept. of Agriculture rule violation? According to the Lorain County Sheriff’s SWAT page, they are intended to be used for these reasons:

• Hostage Situations: the holding of any person(s) against their will by an armed or potentially armed suspect.
• Barricade Situation: the stand-off created by an armed or potentially armed suspect in any location, whether fortified or not, who is refusing to comply with law enforcement demands for surrender.
• Sniper Situations: the firing upon citizens and/or law enforcement officers by an armed suspect, whether stationary or mobile.
• High-Risk Apprehension: the arrest or apprehension of armed or potentially armed suspects where the likelihood of armed resistance is high.
• High-Risk Warrant Service: the service of search or arrest warrants where the warrant service matrix or policy recommends or requires the use of SWAT.
• Personal Protection: the security of special persons, such as VIP’s, witnesses, or suspects, based on threat or potential threat to the well being of those persons.
• Special Assignments: any assignment, approved by the SWAT Operations Commander, based on a high level of threat and/or need.

Was the private selling of organic food by the Manna Storehouse REALLY one of those instances??

We must stand up for our fellow citizens and refuse to allow a transition from Buckeye State to Police State. After the story you’ll find a list of Cleveland news sources. PLEASE contact them and demand they investigate this story. I strongly believe people would be appropriately outraged if they only knew what was going on.

On Monday, December 1st, 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 supicious-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 from 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 it 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 be fully equipped 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.”

Source: http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/08/swat-team.htm
Also reported by The Morning Journal

Please use the ShareThis link below to email this to your friends and family!

This is a HEADS UP to everyone who cares about their future –
in 4 days patriots will meet in 38 cities across the country to End the Federal Reserve and we need YOU there!

WHY //

The Federal Reserve is an unconstitutional institution (see U.S. Constitution, Section 8, Clause 5) that drains the wealth of the American people through the inflationary process.

Despite silence on the true cause of our financial mess, every day it becomes more and more apparent that the #1 issue in our country is the economy and the falling dollar. Who is to blame for this? Who is printing all the money that drives down the value of our dollar? Who controls the interest rates upon which the fate of our banks, credit cards, loans, mortgages, and lives depend? These are very important questions to ask yourself.

One needn’t be an economist to understand: the Federal Reserve is neither federal, nor do they have any reserves. Our dollars are no longer backed by gold or silver. It is a “fiat” currency, and every economy that has used fiat currency in the past has ultimately collapsed. It’s time we demand that Congress END THE FED.

On November 22, 1910 the Federal Reserve Act was conceived at a private meeting of elite bankers. Ninety-eight years after its conception, we will gather to signal the end of its reign!

Patriots from across the country will join together to protest the Federal Reserve system. Activists will demand an END to private banker control over the nation’s money supply and the return to a hard, commodity backed monetary system.

WHERE //

All 38 Federal Reserve locations

WHEN //

This Saturday, November 22nd @ 12pm

DON’T FORGET //

Signs, banners, bullhorns, drums, whatever you need to make a statement.

FIND YOUR LOCAL FED //

http://www.abolishthefederalreserve.com/?p=55#findYourFed

DOWNLOAD FLYERS //

http://www.abolishthefederalreserve.com/?p=174

FOR MORE INFO //

http://www.abolishthefederalreserve.com/?p=55

YES WE CAN abolish the Federal Reserve!

TIP: Use the “ShareThis” button below to email this post to your friends and family, post to Facebook, Myspace, Digg, and more!

They’re exposing their users to only 2 out of 6 candidates which means they’re only giving us 30% of our options! This is not acceptable.

• Where is Chuck Baldwin?
• Where is Ralph Nader?
• Where is Cynthia McKinney?
• Where is Bob Barr?

Here’s the quick and easy way to take action:

• Email them via this contact form. Be sure to point out that they’re including only 2 out of 6 candidates, and they owe it to their members to include ALL candidates on the ballot, including the Constitution Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party, and Independent candidates.
• Pass this on!

We all have issues with Myspace, I know, but the fact remains that millions of voters look at this page and may otherwise have no idea there are 4 other options.

DEMAND that ALL candidates be included!

“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.”

- Carroll Quigley from “Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time”