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Court kills Hawaii GMO Pesticide Ban Timely Insights on Laws, Issues and New Developements
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GMO collageThe Ninth Circuit Court on Nov. 18, 2016 ruled that citizens of a given county have no inalienable right to reject so-called herbicides and toxic, genetically modified crops. The court’s ruling also kept the door open for continued secret crop spraying experiments by Monsanto and other chemical companies on the island of Maui.

Related: Glyphosate Cancer Link

Exposed local residents are the unwilling subjects of at least some of those secret experiments. The court’s ruling will help keep them in the dark about what is being sprayed on them, and for what purpose. (Imagining these pesticides are not being sprayed on us all is to imagine a no-peeing section in a swimming pool.)

Realat: Monsanto moving to Crush Maui

The court rejected regulations in three Hawaii counties which had voted to keep Monsanto’s cancerous glyphosate from being sprayed at Monsanto’s leisure on the Hawaiian island paradise. The court agreed with Monsanto and other pesticide companies and industry groups that Hawaii’s local rules are preempted by state and federal laws.  Controlled by Monsanto and other chemical company money, those who run Hawaii’s state government welcome Monsanto with open arms.

Right to Self Determination Rejected

The appeals court – which made five rulings in separate appeals over the regulations in Kauai County, Maui County and Hawaii County – found federal and state regulatory schemes that regulate harmful plants and pesticides don’t allow counties to make their own rules. Forget about the right to self determination, forget the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The rights of individuals to keep their food, lands, themselves, their pets and livestock from being poisoned was denied on this court’s watch.

Court kills Hawaii GMO Pesticide Regulations
Millions against MonsantoIn the case, Alika Atay et al. v. County of Maui et al., the Ninth Circuit closed the door on an appeal from citizens groups, despite the fact that a Maui ordinance had banned genetically modified crops and the use of Monsanto’s toxic glyphosate.

The judges ignored arguments made by the Shaka Movement and other groups that they had banned Monsanto and GMOs. The judges ruled that such a ban was preempted by the U.S. Plant Protection Act, to the extent that it banned crops already regulated by the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service as “plant pests.” Judges, unlike people, are able to bend the law anyway they prefer. These judges also apparently ignored the fact that Monsanto made a secret arrangement with a prior judge in the case to keep secret its arguments as to why the company should be able to force its poisons onto people who voted against being exposed to them.

The Maui citizens’ groups had argued that the local law wasn’t preempted because it meant to prevent harms associated with transgenic contamination and pesticides. These are not “plant pest harms” under the PPA.

The judges found that what matters under the PPA’s preemption clause is whether a local law seeks to control, wipe out or prevent the dissemination of plants regulated by APHIS.

The judges wrote: “The fact that APHIS regulates such plants for reasons other than second-order concerns that motivated the local law, such as concern with transgenic contamination, is irrelevant as far as the express preemption clause is concerned.”

Rape of Hawaii Continues

Agent-Orange-Spraying-on-your-produceIf you can’t follow that logistical legalese it is with good reason; this is Sophist reasoning at its finest. These laws were put in place to be bent by such judges to remove people’s rights of self determination. The whole history of the islands is a horrendous nightmare of rape and central control used to wipe out or at least neutralize  indigenous peoples.

Law 360 reports that, “For genetically engineered crops that had been deregulated by the APHIS, the panel held Hawaii’s comprehensive state statutory scheme for the regulation of potentially harmful plants preempted any further regulation by the county.”

Similar reasoning carried over to Hawaii County’s ban, the appeals court wrote in a memoradum opinion in Hawaii Papaya Industry Assn. et al v. County of Hawaii. that court also rejected that county’s ban on Monsanto and GMOs.

In Syngenta Seeds Inc. et al. v. County of Kauai et al., the appeals court issued another memorandum opinion shutting down provisions in Kauai’s Ordinance 960 that regulated GMO crops, using the same reasoning as Atay.

Kauai’s Ordinance 960 had also imposed regulations on commercial farm operations that utilized restricted-use pesticides. The Ninth Circuit, in a separate published opinion in the case, also wiped out that argument, finding the state’s pesticide laws also preempted self determination.

monsanto-signThe judges wrote: “In sum, we find that the Hawaii Pesticides Law comprehensively regulates pesticides and creates a clear inference of legislative intent to preempt local regulations of pesticides.”

Chemical companies sue Maui County

A coalition of chemical companies — which included Syngenta Seeds Inc., Syngenta Hawaii LLC, Pioneer Hi–Bred International Inc., Dow AgroSciences and BASF Plant Science LP — had sued Maui county in 2014 over the ordinance.

U.S. District Judge J. Barry M. Kurren agreed with their claim that the county had no authority to enact the ordinance because pesticide use was already covered by Hawaii state law.

The appeals court agreed. It said in its ruling last week that a local law is preempted under Hawaii law if it covers the same subject matter covered within a “comprehensive state statutory scheme” that shows an intent to be “exclusive and uniform” throughout the state.

The panel also upheld the lower court’s decision not to ask the Hawaii Supreme Court to offer its opinion on the issue of “implied preemption,” finding the state’s test “rather well-defined.”

Attorney Paul Achitoff of Earthjustice represented the Center for Food Safety and other environmental groups who intervened in the Syngenta case. He said the court interpreted Hawaiian law wrong and that the county rules should have been allowed to stand.

Mr. Achitoff said that despite striking down the specific ordinances because of Hawaii’s laws, the Ninth Circuit was generally supportive of the ability of states to pass their own regulations on genetically engineered crops and pesticides.

“It makes it clear that Hawaii’s Legislature, if it chooses, can solve these problems,” he said. “So we’ll continue working in that direction.”

A Fight for us All

God bless you, Mr. Achitoff, and the poisoned peoples of Maui. You are fighting for all of us born with the God-given right to refuse to be poisoned in an ongoing experiment that violates rules established at Nuremburg. We never consented to becoming subjects in Monsanto’s experiment in mass poisoning.

Related

  • Monsanto, Hands off Maui!
  • Roundup Cancer Lawsuit
  • What is Monsanto Hiding in Secret Documents?
  • Law360: 9th-circ-buries-3-hawaii-counties-gmo-pesticide-regs
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