‘Grassroots’ support for Prop. 37 exposed

Posted In:  Chemicals & Environment

Publish Date:  October 24, 2012

With California getting ready to vote on Proposition 37, the fear-mongering ballot initiative that would require the labeling of certain foods made with genetically modified ingredients, a column in Forbes warns that the supposed “grassroots” movement is not what it seems….. [it was not a] “brainchild of small-town grandmother Pamm Larry who ‘woke up one morning’ during the summer of 2011 with the idea for the ballot initiative and transformed it into reality ten months later through the hard work of a ‘decentralized movement of citizens.’” ……In fact, Prop. 37 was engineered by a hard-core professional activists like Ronnie Cummins of the Minnesota based Organic Consumers Association, Jeffrey Smith of the Iowa-based Institute for Responsible Technology and Andrew Kimbrell of the Washington, DC-based Center for Food Safety. It’s also being backed by organic and natural products special interests who spend millions in “unreported marketing activities to disparage farming methods and promulgate fraudulent health claims about the foods we eat – to no other purpose than to increase sales of their own exorbitantly priced offerings,” Byrne and Miller write.  To Read More…..

My Take – I find this pattern repeats far more often than you might think.  In Ohio we had an initiative to make May Multiple Chemicals Sensitivity Syndrome Awareness Month, and supposedly it was being promoted by a term limited senator who was being brow beaten by one resident in his district.  Baloney…this was all a state wide effort by the activists as we later learned.  Fortunately it never was passed by the Ohio Senate due to the diligence of a handful of pesticide applicators who stand against this kind of horsepucky regularly.  In Ohio this really is a case of David and Goliath.  They have the money, they have the media, they have the activist groups, they have the boots on the ground and all that we have are a dedicated few armed with facts, guts and determination.  Reality is the great leveler.  RK