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July 2, 2016

Senator Bernie Sanders Asking Help on Opposing GMO Labeling Bill, Vote Coming up very soon

By Stephen Fox

This is urgent if you care about limiting efforts to not limit GMO labeling, a vital consumer protection issue. Write your 2 Senators as soon as you have read this....

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March Against Monsanto Lethbridge
March Against Monsanto Lethbridge
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I'm writing to ask you to oppose the Roberts-Stabenow compromise language on the GMO labeling bill. This legislation would overrule Vermont's GMO labeling law, and prevent states from passing similar laws.

This legislation would create a confusing, misleading and unenforceable national standard for labeling GMOs. Instead of a uniform labeling standard like Vermont's law, the language allows text, symbols, or an electronic code to be used. This is intentionally confusing to consumers, and the information may be entirely inaccessible if the consumer does not have access to the internet.

Perhaps most shockingly, this bill imposes no penalties whatsoever for violating the labeling requirement, making the law essentially meaningless. Thus, this is a weak bill, full of loopholes, without any requirement to comply.

The overwhelming majority of Americans favor GMO labeling. People have a right to know what is in the food they eat. The Senate shouldn't stop states from passing laws that let that happen. Please oppose the Roberts-Stabenow GMO labeling bill.

>>>>

From Stephen Fox, who posted this article:

My additional comment, which went along with this letter to my two New Mexico US Senators, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich:

You know this is the wrong thing to do at this time, and I am counting on you, as usual, to do the right thing, and vote against this monstrous usurpation of consumer protection. This is a watershed bill, Senator, and if it passes, it opens up the gates to the further complete take-over by massive corporate interests like Monsanto.

>>>>

More from Bernie Sanders on this subject:

The corporate interests are at it again. Monsanto, agribusiness and the bio-tech industry have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to overturn legislation passed by Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Alaska that calls for the labeling of GMO food. In fact, they are moving aggressively now because Vermont's strong law goes into effect today.

This legislation is important because people have a right to know what is in the food they and their children eat. The more information we have, the better consumers we become. This is not a radical idea. It is why over 60 countries around the world have passed GMO labeling laws.

Unfortunately, the major agribusiness and bio-tech companies disagree. They do not believe people have a right to know what's in the food they eat. That is why they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and campaign contributions to overturn the GMO right-to-know legislation that states have already passed and that many other states are on the verge of passing.

A bill in the Senate would overrule Vermont's law, and prevent states from passing similar laws. This bill, introduced by Senators Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) will be coming up for a vote on Wednesday or Thursday of next week. It must be defeated.

Can you write to your senators today and ask them to oppose the GMO bill? You can click here and we'll direct you to write your senators immediately.

Write to
your senators

Their goal is to deny states the right to go forward in this area and to pass legislation that is useless and with no value to consumers. And, if we don't stop them, they may just succeed.

On Thursday evening, with no hearings and no debate, a corporate-backed bill was introduced on to the floor by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

This legislation would create a confusing, misleading and unenforceable national standard for labeling GMOs. Instead of a uniform labeling standard like Vermont's law, the language allows text, symbols, or an electronic code to be used. This is intentionally confusing to consumers, and the information may be entirely inaccessible if the consumer does not have access to the internet.

Perhaps most shockingly, this bill imposes no penalties whatsoever for violating the labeling requirement, making the law essentially meaningless. Thus, this is a weak bill, full of loopholes, without any requirement to comply.

The issue of labeling our food isn't controversial. The overwhelming majority of Americans favor GMO labeling. People have a right to know what is in the food they eat. The Senate shouldn't stop states from passing laws that let that happen.

Congress must stand up to the demands of Monsanto and other multi-national food industry corporations and reject this outrageous, weak, and confusing bill. I will continue to do my best to defeat it, and take the necessary action to protect Vermont's GMO labeling efforts. But I need you with me in order to ensure its defeat.








Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:



Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev



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