"Industrial agriculture's monopolistic approach to farming has all but destroyed America's family farms and rural communities; the reliance on toxic chemicals and degenerative farming practices makes it one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas pollution. Sanders' Green New Deal holds the fossil fuel industry legally accountable for its pollution and climate-destructive and declares moratorium on factory farming."

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[In my non-objective personal world and with my focus on consumer protection issues, this is a huge and significant endorsement. It goes right to the core of what needs to be fixed in the United States, in my book, starting with the FDA and getting rid of the corporate stranglehold that corrupts normal regulatory processes. Ronnie Cummins has been a stalwart champion of the organic way of life, staying healthy, and protecting those less fortunate from the ravages of junk food, with an enviable long career with many successes. This endorsement goes straight to the heart of why I have worked for 4 years to help Bernie Sanders win.]

The Board of Directors for CRL representing about 2 million U.S. consumers and thousands of farmers and ranchers, today announced its endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Ronnie Cummins, president of the board, issued the following statement:

"Sen. Sanders, the first of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders to back the Green New Deal, has outlined a $16.3-trillion plan that includes $841 billion to transform the U.S. industrial agriculture system into an organic regenerative food and farming system that supports independent family farmers, guarantees access to healthy, locally produced food for all, cleans up our waterways, restores soil health and biodiversity and promotes climate stability.

"Industrial agriculture's monopolistic approach to food and farming has all but destroyed America's family farms and rural communities. And the industry's reliance on toxic chemicals and degenerative farming practices makes it one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas pollution. Sanders' Green New Deal, in addition to holding the fossil fuel industry legally and financially accountable for its pollution and climate-destructive behavior, also takes on Big Ag by, among other things, enforcing anti-trust laws and declaring a moratorium on factory farms.

"Sanders' Green New Deal is the only plan in the industrialized world that sets a goal high enough to actually reverse global warming and eliminate economic injustice, environmental destruction, deteriorating public health and global conflict, while also offering the first realistic assessment and timeline for what needs to be done in the limited time frame left to avoid climate catastrophe."

In September 2019, CRL, along with Regeneration International, Organic Consumers Association, the Sunrise Movement and other organizations, launched the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal. The coalition represents about 20,000 independent farmers, ranchers and members of food and farming organizations committed to overhauling U.S. agriculture policies in order to advance organic regenerative agriculture and land-management practices.

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