Of all the sneaky tactics practiced in Washington D.C., this recent action by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is one of the most insidious: While no one was looking, he injected amendment language into the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) that would expand the powers of the FTC (not the FDA, but the FTC) to terrorize nutritional supplement companies by greatly expanding the power of the FTC to make its own laws that target dietary supplement companies. This is a little-known secret about the FTC and the nutritional supplements business: The FTC routinely targets nutritional supplement companies that are merely telling the truth about their products. Some companies are threatened by merely linking to published scientific studies about their products.
For example, here's an important article that describes how to FDA criminally extorts money out of supplement companies: www.naturalnews.com/024567_h...
The FTC does much the same thing. They target a particular company that's having success in the natural products marketplace, then they accuse that company of "inferring" that their products have some health benefit. From there, the FTC demands that the company engage in paying a massive fine to the FTC, which the FTC calls "consumer redress" even though none of the money actually goes to the consumers.
If you try to fight the FTC, they haul you into their own special "FTC courts" which are not public courts where you have the benefit of a jury, but rather they are courts where the judges are actually FTC employees and you have no rights. You are essentially guilty until proven innocent, and virtually no one has been found innocent by the FTC.
If the King says you're guilty, then you're guilty The FTC also forces you to sign a "consent decree" which involves you admitting to committing crimes that you have actually never committed. These crimes include the "criminal misrepresentation of a product" by, for example, explaining that walnuts help support healthy cholesterol levels or that cherries ease symptoms of inflammation.
Using these methods, the FTC has extorted tens of millions of dollars out of nutritional supplement companies. More importantly, it has terrorized the industry and put several companies out of business, denying the American public access to products that could improve their health and prevent disease.
Waxman wants the FTC to have even more power over your vitamins Now Congressman Henry Waxman wants to give the FTC even more powers by allowing the FTC to write its own laws without Congressional approval. This would allow a rogue agency to simply invent any new law it wants, such as requiring nutritional supplement companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars "proving" the efficacy of a vitamin before they can sell it.
This will allow the FTC to utterly circumvent DSHEA -- the law passed in 1994 that provides basic protections to vitamin and supplement manufacturers. This will result in an FTC war on vitamins and supplements that would no doubt see this rogue agency attempting to destroy the entire industry and imprison the founders and executives of all the top supplement manufacturers.
This is how bad things have become in America today: The criminal CEOs of drug companies are allowed to commit felony crimes, engage in routine price fixing fraud and fix their research with fraudulent clinical trials, yet the FTC and FDA do nothing. But when an honest nutritional supplement company says something like, "Walnuts are good for your heart," they get threatened with imprisonment or have their entire life savings stolen away from them by the FTC through a series of "fines."
Your help is urgently needed to halt this madness Join NaturalNews.com and the Alliance for Natural Health to protest this deceptive action by Henry Waxman -- a lifelong opponent of natural medicine who is trying to covertly inject this expansion of FTC powers into the Finance Reform Bill.
Click here to sign the online petition now.
This petition is being organized by the Alliance for Natural Health (www.anh-usa.org), a health freedom organization we strongly support here at NaturalNews. Read their announcement and call to action on this bill right here: www.anh-usa.org/congressman-...
Your help is urgently needed. I don't send out a lot of "urgent call to action" articles and emails, but this is one that definitely demands our collective attention. Please call, fax or email your representatives in Washington and strongly voice your opposition to any expansion of powers of the FTC over dietary supplements. The FTC is already a loose cannon. We don't want to now hand it nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire industry.
Protect your health freedoms or you will lose them! The U.S. Congress is literally just one vote away from granting the FTC dangerous new powers to destroy the natural products industry. A vote could take place as early as this weekend.
Attorney Jonathan Emord had this to say about this issue:
"The provision removing the ban on FTC rulemaking without Congressional preapproval contained in H.R. 4173 invites the very same irresponsible over-regulation of the commercial marketplace that led Congress to enact the ban in the 1980s. FTC has no shortage of power to regulate deceptive advertising; this bill gives it far more discretionary power than it needs, inviting greater abuse and mischief from an agency that suffers virtually no check on its discretion."
Tatarewicz: Vitamin supplement makers should fund an independent, Web-based agency which would process results from a vitamin efficacy questionnaire which customers would be invited to fill out after taking a supplement. This would make the trade self-policing and eliminate the need for interference by the friends of big pharma.