Raw Milk Lobbying

[2007]

[Aajonus]

I guess people got my email this morning that I wrote last night about Ron Paul, all the lobby that five of us did.

We'll just have to put up with some of the talking. Anyway, five of us were in Washington, DC. I went May 28th and stayed to August 1st. We lobbied Congress five days a week, had meetings with senators and representatives, 2 to 7 a day.

That was very rare that there were 7 a day. We had meetings with them, convinced them that the raw milk was a safe and good thing. Out of 537, we only saw 76, would've taken probably a year to see all of. However, we did have a plan to go to each office with a report that I had printed, just the printing alone was $15,000 and the rental of the unit was 10,000, the house.

Very expensive to live in DC in a nice neighborhood. The Cohen family out of Colorado funded the whole thin, so that was very good. So, when we went to Ron Paul's office, his chief assistant, Norman Singleton said, "You want a bill? We'll write a bill for you".

Yeah. I said, "Sure, let me see how many co-sponsors we can get before you write it". So, we had about 70 representatives and senators who agreed to sign on as co-sponsors, if they would get somebody else to write the bill. Well, Ron Paul was way out there, so I was afraid for him to write the bill, even though he is an MD, he's a doctor, so it'd be perfect to have an MD write it.

However, the stature that he's accumulated in the past few months is incredible. So, we've been writing the bill for the past for about 6, 7 weeks. We were tossing the bill back and forth, rewriting it to make it as simple as possible like a one paragraph or less, three sentences is what we were trying to whittle it down to and did the final right of it, and he submitted the bill to Congress on November 5th. And just last Thursday, Dennis Kuk and Peter Welch signed on as co-sponsors. So, in the email that I sent this morning, or last during the middle of the night, I asked people who are pretty savvy about the milk, who understand it can call all these 70 representatives and get them to sign on as co-sponsors, the ones that promised that they would, if they go out somebody to submit a bill. So, we need people who can get on the phone in this next week and call everybody. I will be calling some, I've got this other California law that passed, which is going to wipe us out of milk in California. So, I need people who can call in the next two weeks to get as many to sign on as possible.

The federal law allows raw milk to go interstate. Right now it's outlawed, and the FDA is using that as a reason to say raw milk is bad, but if this law is delivered to Congress by an MD, they're gonna have a hard time using that defense anymore.

So, I'm also planning to do a class action suit with them starting somewhere around April, but this class action we're going to against the California legislature is a law that was just signed in by the governor on I think it was October 10th, something like that. October 8th, somewhere around there. The governor signed it in that will make the regulations for raw milk for the coliform count so strict that the milk will pass no more than 50% of the time, and that way it'll put the raw dairy producers out of business because they won't be able to afford to stay in business.

Same thing that happened to [unclear]. That's what they did with [unclear] here when the Los Angeles county, the medical milk commission did that very same thing.

So, I took it to the legislature, showed them all of the documentation on raw milk that was a good thing, and Vicky Union who was the head of the health department at the time issued a 5 page letter to the board of supervisors stating that it killed children, like one girl, she had really drowned in a lake, it had nothing to do with salmonella.

So, I showed that every statement that he put in the letter was false, he was fired a week later. They have to because they set them up for a suit and I was getting ready to file a suit on them. So, with him having created all this false information, it was blatant that they were prejudice in creating a situation of fraud to defraud the public of the raw milk.

So, of course the bill passed, 4 out of 5. So, it was close to unanimous, so we got the mill. So, now we're facing the same thing, the state did it, passed that law. So, I have to go on with a class action suit.

I just got an attorney who's going to help, he's not licensed in California, but he's a constitutional attorney out of east, out of Washington state, he's the head professor for constitutional law. So, he's agreed to do it for half price, 350 an hour, instead of 700 an hour. So, we need your donations. I have enough to probably get us all the way through to the court steps with donations already, but if it goes to court, then of course we're gonna need the extra money. Another 30,000 to get us through the court. Don't want to do it pro bono, because that means if there is money that we get, it's all gonna go to the attorneys and we'll see $5 a piece, something like that. And I don't think attorneys deserve it, that kind of money just to go in pro bono.

That's like 100% interest on their money. Not right. Of course it is a high risk gamble, but everything's a risk when you're investing, whether it's a savings account or whatever, so need your donations to help out there. Also, I'll be getting another large donation, $25,000 from the Cohen family this February to give $5,000 the right to choose healthy food.

That's why we had to wait two years to receive $75,000 before we could go to Washington DC to do that, and that whole episode cost about $40,000 to be in Washington to be in two months. That was pretty good. Most lobbyists charge $100,000 a month.

[Kathy]

Oh you to pay them?

[Aajonus]

No, we did it ourselves, but all the expenses, which was for 5 of us and all the food, especially for little piggy Nathan, where is he? The amount of food that guy eats.

He's skinny now. Now he doesn't have all the food we get, but all of us ate well. And, Nathan did a lot of work there, he made our food for us. He wasn't there the whole time, he came about a month later, about four weeks after we were there. So, he prepared our food for us, even went shopping and did a lot of computer work too.

So, we all worked very hard and very long hours, so we've worked very hard to make raw milk available. And then for them to pull this thing in California state legislature, they slip a one page bill that nobody noticed into the farm bill regulating raw milk and it didn't belong in there. They snuck it in. So, of course, Schwarzenegger grew up on raw milk, he trained with raw milk. So, I'm sure he wouldn't have signed it if he had seen it. But he's the only one that can issue a letter to the health department and say, back off, you cannot enforce this law and he can do that.

He can't resend the law I found out from the constitutional attorney, he can't resend it. If he was going to resend it, he had to do it within 30 days. He'd already signed it before anybody found out about it. It's too late. Yeah. He had 30 days to resend it, he didn't do it.

[Kathy]

Why is that?

[Aajonus]

He wouldn't have signed that. He would've had it rejected from the bill, from the farm bill, cause he's for raw milk, unless he's in the hands of big corporations like Enron, cuz he's in the Enron's lap. And the Bush family, he's heavily in with the Bush family. So, he may have, I doubt that he knew about it. I doubt that he would've let that fly.

So, I've got an attorney in San Francisco who looks like he will be doing the submitting of the law and briefs and the injunction in the lawsuit itself. I got Martin, Charlie Sheen, and Emilio Estevez as they will go and do a press release when we file the suit, they will be part of the lawsuit to get us some publicity, cuz all you have to do is make enough noise, and the health department doesn't want to be seen as a bad guy and the government doesn't want to be seen as that big of a bad guy.

So, that's why I'm getting them, I'm also trying to get Leonardo DiCaprio. Now Martin Sheen and Leonardo worked on The Departed film that was done, released last year and won all those awards.

So, Martin's gonna call Leonardo and Leonardo was raised on raw milk because he was a patient with Paul Fleiss who was a pediatrician.

Looks like everything's going very well, but I don't know if we're gonna be able to get ahold of Leonardo, cause he's probably one of the busiest actors there is.

Raised on that raw milk, he's one of the brightest minds we have.

[Attendee]

He did that 11th hour documentary also about planetary survival

[Aajonus]

He's a very conscious young man.

[Fred]

Another thing on the legal thing. Is ODP and Claravale working with you on this?

[Aajonus]

No, I don't want them working with me. I want separate suits.

I think even Sally Fallon's attorney doing one and then mark has his own attorney. So, we're gonna go at the state of California with three lawsuits. It's always better cuz the judge can't get by with throwing out three. They may get away with throwing out one of the cases, but no judge is gonna get by throwing out all three cases.

Even if they throw out mine, we're in federal court overnight. because it's a federal issue, it's a constitutional issue. It's even in the California constitution.