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General News    H2'ed 12/18/08

Vilsack is not just totally pro-biotech, he is committedly anti-democracy

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Linn Cohen-Cole
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Obama is planning an organic garden at the White House but it is clearly only for a false show given his choice of Tom Vilsack to run the USA. 

Vilsack, according to The Organic Consumer's Association, was named Governor of the Year by Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), the biggest pro-genetic engineering lobby in existence.  Why?  Not for nothing.  Because he'd championed local transgenic R&D corporations like Trans Ova, which clones cows. Vilsack was also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership. Vilsack speaks for biotech.  He is Monsanto's boy.
haphazardgourmet.blogspot.com/2008/11/tom-vilsack-emerges-as-frontrunner-for.html  

OCA names six reasons Vilsack was a terrible choice:

* Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack's support of genetically engineered pharmaceutical crops, especially pharmaceutical corn: 
http://www.gene.ch/genet/2002/Oct/msg00057.html 
http://www.organicconsumers.org/gefood/drugsincorn102302.cfm

* The biggest biotechnology industry group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, named Vilsack Governor of the Year. He was also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership. 
http://www.bio.org/news/pressreleases/newsitem.asp?id=200...

* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.

* Vilsack was the origin of the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, which many people here in Iowa fought because it took away local government's possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds- where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers, banning pharma corn locally, etc. Representative Sandy Greiner, the Republican sponsor of the bill, bragged on the House Floor that Vilsack put her up to it right after his state of the state address.

* Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto. Sustainable ag advocated across the country were spreading the word of Vilsack's history as he was attempting to appeal to voters in his presidential bid. An activist from the west coast even made this youtube animation about Vilsack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmoc4Qgcm4s 
The airplane in this animation is a referral to the controversy that Vilsack often traveled in Monsanto's jet.

*Vilsack is an ardent support of corn and soy based biofuels, which use as much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate, while driving up world food prices and literally starving the poor.

Biotechnology appears to have inserted two special genes into the DNA of genetic engineering - strong anti-democracy genes and thuggish monopoly genes.   Somehow, biotechnology which is supposed to such a scientific gift and such a productive marvel, isn't able to function and be accepted based on its much vaunted specialness but is highly reliant on subverting democracy and clubbing its way in, to get its seeds "established."
 

Notice that Vilsack is not only Monsanto's boy in his speaking FOR biotech but Monsanto's boy in character as well in how he has been the planner of laws that would undo rights of citizens to control their own communities.  These are Monsanto laws.


"Vilsack lobbied hard to get seed pre-emption bills into state legislative bodies, beginning in 2005. These bills seek to control the use of seeds on the state level, and thus deny local communities (and small farmers, and even backyard farmers) the power to establish their own regulations for protection from genetically engineered seeds. If seed pre-emption bills become law, citizens will not be able to regulate where genetically engineered crops are grown, the creation of GE buffer zones, or the banning of pharmaceutical crops, among other things. The use of seeds becomes entirely regulated by government, and opens the door to human and plant exposure to every adverse effect of genetically engineered crops. --And simultaneously ruins biodiversity, because once transgenic seeds prevail, there's no going back. Seed pre-emption bills have been introduced in sixteen states, and the battle is ongoing. But Vilsack has been one of the chief architects of looming biodiversity disaster, and there's no reason to believe he'd halt his love affair with genetic engineering and Big Ag just because he's working for Obama."
haphazardgourmet.blogspot.com/2008/11/tom-vilsack-emerges-as-frontrunner-for.html
 
 
 
  
The seed preemption map?  Is your state already without democratic rights?
 
click here
 
Obama has picked not only someone who is ENTIRELY and ACTIVELY and AWARD-WINNINGLY OPPOSED to organic farming but someone who is fundamentally undemocratic in the service of destroying organic farming and establishing an economic anti-trust monopoly.
So, Obama, it seems only right that YOUR garden should be filled with ONLY genetically engineered crops, including all the pesticides that go along and the industrial chemical crops and the drug crops your biotech masters are seeking.  Why should you eat well when the rest of us can't and the person you chose for the USDA is making sure there laws in place to ensure that?
Eat what we have to, Obama.  You served it up to us.  
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Met libertarian and conservative farmers and learned an incredible amount about farming and nature and science, as well as about government violations against them and against us all. The other side of the fence is nothing like what we've been (more...)
 
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