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We're ReadyHenry David Thoreau is credited with saying, “It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
By that measure, Monsanto and Big Food are lacking in wisdom. And looking plenty desperate.
Think about it. We’re coming up on four years now since the citizens of California planned, and then launched, a ballot initiative to require labels on GMOs sold in their state. The biotech and food industries spent more than $46 million on that one campaign alone, in order to win by a mere thread.
Then they turned around and spent millions more in Washington State in 2013 (where they were so desperate they illegally laundered campaign donations), and millions more the following year in Oregon.
But they couldn’t stop the little state of Vermont. So Biotech and Big Food have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for a federal bill that, to avoid, they claim, a “patchwork” of state laws.
Of course if that was really what they’re concerned about, all they’d have to do is craft a federal law that meets the same standards as Vermont’s law.
Instead, Monsanto's minions in Congress are scrambling to write a bill that would preempt Vermont and establish some bogus voluntary scheme, or a mandatory scheme involving smartphones and QR codes that gives food companies yet another two years to dither around before they’re required to do anything at all.
Because their real motive, as we all know, is to keep the words “produced with genetic engineering” off of food products. And they are desperate to do that before July 1, when Vermont’s law becomes official.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), whose anti-labeling position is well known by now, is said to have proposed “new language”—likely involving some techno-labeling scheme that would leave people without smartphones, or people living in rural communities with poor (or none at all ) internet service, out in the cold (and in the dark).
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack continues to pretend he’s concerned that a few words on a label will “confuse” consumers—but fancy QR codes won’t, and either way, if Congress won’t make “the tough decisions” required to pass a bill that preempts Vermont, “I’m happy to make them,” he told Politico. Whatever that means.
This much is certain. Between today and July 1, we face yet another battle in Washington D.C. to protect Vermont’s GMO labeling law. It’s coming. We're ready.
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