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In announcing his pick last week for Secretary of Agriculture, Trump heaped predictable praise on Sonny Perdue, promising that the former governor of Georgia will “deliver big results for all Americans who earn their living off the land."

We predict that Perdue will indeed deliver “big” results—but he’ll deliver them to his friends in Big Food and Big Ag, not to America’s rural farmers, and surely not to America’s consumers.

If it’s true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, well, judge for yourself whose side Perdue is really on. 

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), that multi-billion-dollar lobbying group that represents Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, Coca-Cola, General Mills (you get the picture) rushed to praise Perdue’s nomination. In a statement, GMA’s president said her group “looks forward to working with [Perdue] on issues key to keeping America's food the safest and most affordable food supply in the history of the world.”   

Coming from the GMA, leader of the charge to keep labels off GMO foods, we know that “safest and most affordable food” is code for “industrial chemical GMO food.” 

Today, Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States.

Today, I'm announcing our #ConsumerRevolution and #PoliticalRevolution 2017-2020 platforms.

Today, we witnessed the swearing in of a president who has signaled loud and clear his intent to maximize the profits of giant corporations—like Exxon Mobil, BP, and Monsanto and Bayer (whose merger he's set to approve)—on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. Public and environmental health be damned.

And yesterday we learned, not surprisingly, that the new USDA Secretary of Agriculture will be former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, another millionaire climate-denier and cheerleader for the worst of the worst agribusiness corporations. 

We have our work cut out for us in the coming months and years. 

With that in mind, we have developed two platforms that will guide our work, beginning immediately.

Monsanto (soon to be Bayer) and their minions are poisoning us.

Yet another independent peer-reviewed scientific study has confirmed that Monsanto’s notorious weedkiller, Roundup, sprayed on most major agricultural crops and animal feed, including corn, soy, canola, sugar beets, cotton, wheat, alfalfa, and beans–contaminating the majority of the non-organic foods in U.S. grocery stores, restaurants, and school lunch cafeterias–is toxic, even at the routine parts per billion or trillion level ingested by most Americans everyday.

Roundup is everywhere, in our food, in our cotton clothing, in our urine, in our breast milk, in the rain, in our drinking water, rivers, fish, and wildlife.

The question we should be asking today is not whether we need more proof that the Biotech Bully of St. Louis is deliberately poisoning us for profit, aided and abetted by indentured scientists, media hacks, and politicians; but rather how do we drive Monsanto’s Roundup and Roundup-tainted foods off the market?

If there were an award for “greenwashing,” it would likely go to Ben & Jerry’s, the iconic Vermont-based ice cream brand, now owned by Unilever.

Ben & Jerry’s has done a brilliant job of selling consumers on the idea that the company cares about social justice, the environment, the climate, and its customers—the company even brags about its "Caring Dairy" program and its commitment to using non-GMO ingredients.

But behind that greenwashed façade lies the tale of a company that relies on a #dirtydairy industry that has poisoned Vermont’s waterways, that abuses animals, that is bankrupting farmers and is contributing to global warming by stripping the soil of its ability to draw down and sequester carbon.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Ben & Jerry’s: Stop Defrauding Consumers—It’s Time to Go Organic!

Want to rid the world of toxic chemicals? There’s no better place to start than in your own community. But how does an “ordinary” citizen with no political experience get the ball rolling?

With our friends at Beyond Pesticides, we’ve created an online tool that lets you see which communities in the U.S. have already banned or restricted the use of toxic pesticides and herbicides. You’ll even find the full text for each law—so instead of starting from scratch, you can just replicate or adapt existing laws for your own community.

More than 115 communities in 21 states have passed ordinances to protect their citizens from exposure to toxic chemicals—and in almost all those cases, it was a citizen-led group, not a city lawmaker, who led the charge.

Check out the newly launched Map of Local Pesticide Reform Policies, then sign up to learn how you can get started in your community. The map will be updated regularly. If your city, county or state has passed legislation but you’re not on the map, contact info@beyondpesticides.org.

TAKE ACTION: Put your city on the map! Learn how you can make your community pesticide-free