Consumers Fund on GMO's & Monsanto's Fear

"The other thing Monsanto doesn’t want you to know. We all know that Monsanto doesn’t want you to know which foods contain genetically modified ingredients (almost 80 percent of all processed foods), and which don’t. We also know that Monsanto doesn’t want us to know how genetically modified organisms (GMOs) affect our health, which is why the company refuses to allow independent testing of its GMOs (under pretense of protecting its patented technologies). And clearly, Monsanto doesn’t want you to know that labeling GMOs won’t increase food costs (it hasn’t in all the other countries where GMO labeling is mandatory by law). Or that it won’t provoke an avalanche of lawsuits against food retailers (that wouldn’t be the case under any of the proposed state GMO labeling laws). But here’s something else Monsanto doesn’t want you to know: that if we win even one state labeling law, we will deal a near-fatal blow to the biotech industry’s multi-billion dollar foundation of lies, greed and destruction. In November, voters in Washington State will decide on I-522, a citizens’ ballot initiative to label GMOs. The OCA has pledged $500,000 to the I-522 campaign. If we raise half of that - $250,000 – by April 1, a generous donor will match those funds so we can fulfill our pledge. So far, we’ve raised about $127,000. That means we have to raise $123,000 between now and Monday of next week. Can you help us reach our goal by April 1 with a donation today? You can donate online with a credit card or Paypal. Or you can mail a check. Or phone in your donation. You’ve been down this road with us before. You fought with us, you raised money with us, to pass a similar initiative, Proposition 37, in California last year. When we lost by a mere 3 percentage points (48.5% to 51.5%), you mourned the loss with us. But you also celebrated the fact that we’d mobilized more than 6 million voters in California, that we’d made “GMO” a household name, and that we’d turned the issue of GMOs in our food into a mainstream public health issue. A lot has happened since Nov. 7, 2012. Thanks to consumers like you who hammered the food companies that poured millions into defeating Prop 37, those companies have split from the biotech industry and are likely to sit out the battle over I-522. Thanks to your overwhelming support for Prop 37, more than 30 other states are working together on model language for statewide GMO labeling laws. And thanks to your criticism of Whole Foods for its failure to lend any meaningful support to Prop 37, the nation’s largest organic food retailer recently announced that it will voluntarily label GMOs in its stores in the U.S. and Canada. But we still need a win. We still need a state labeling law. And I-522 is our next best opportunity. Just as with California, a GMO labeling law in Washington State will force food companies to label nationally. And while a federal labeling law would likely be written by lobbyists to favor Big Food and Big Biotech, I-522 has been written with consumers’ best interests as top priority. The money you contributed to Prop 37 created huge forward momentum for the GMO labeling movement. It had an impact that still reverberates today. If we stop fighting now, we throw away our investment. Your investment. It’s not often that someone comes along and offers a $250,000 matching gift. Please help us take advantage of this generous gift and, more importantly, show Monsanto and the biotech industry that we are strong. We are determined. We will not give up this fight. Between today and April 1, your donation will be worth twice as much, as long as we reach our goal of $250,000. Every cent we raise will go directly to support the I-522 campaign. Please help us keep this fight alive with your donation today. You are the GMO labeling movement. And we are grateful for your passion, your energy, your commitment and your generosity. In solidarity, Ronnie Cummins National Director, Organic Consumers Association and Organic Consumers Fund P.S. Prop 37 would never have had the impact it had, without your support. Our $1.5 million donation to the campaign came from individual donations, from people like you. If you still believe in this fight, please donate today. Help us show Monsanto that we intend to win the GMO labeling battle!" From an e-mail I received asking us to post this.

Prop 37 Lies & Fraud

 OBAMA just signed H.R. 993 into law...Do we stand a chance against such legislation and politicians?

According to the dirty politics occurring in California, we need someone with about $80,000 to throw away to come to California and count Fresno County's ballots for Proposition 37.   Here's why...

 

According to Jon Rappoport..."There WAS a recount on the Prop 37 vote, and it was stopped cold

by Jon Rappoport

March 17, 2013

The relentless Brad Friedman of TheBradBlog ran this story down and broke it. There was, indeed, a recount of the Prop 37 vote.

Prop 37, the ballot measure that would have mandated labeling of all GMO food sold in California, went down to defeat last November, under suspicious circumstances.

So a small group, headed by Tom Courbat, former senior budget analyst for LA County, decided to challenge the vote.

In California, any voter can do that, if they’re willing to pay for it. And they have to pay for the recount county by county. They pick the counties they want to start with, they contact the county registrars, and they’re told what the price is. It’s different in each county.

So the group picked Orange and Sierra Counties. They paid the fee. The votes were recounted, and there was no appreciable change in the numbers.

The group decided Fresno County should be next. That’s when trouble came and whole thing blew up. The county clerk in Fresno, in charge of all voting processes, is Brandi Orth.

As The Brad Blog reveals, Orth came up with a staggering price for a vote recount. Here are a few of the details:

Orth stated there would be an up-front fee, due before the recount even started, of $18,000.

The cost per DAY of doing the recount? $4,000. This included five vote counters who would each be paid $46 an hour—to sit and count. Then there would be a three-person executive staff, each of whom would be paid an astonishing $92 an hour.

Note: In Orange County, the Prop 37 recount didn’t cost $4,000 a day. The fee? Only $600 a day!

But here is the best part. As Tom Courbat, the leader of the Prop 37 recount group, spoke with Fresno County Clerk, Brandi Orth, he suddenly learned he was being charged for the phone conversation—and also for Orth’s staff “getting ready” for a recount!

Understand this. No recount had begun. Courbat hadn’t given the green light for a recount. But, he was informed, he was already $4000 in the hole.

Courbat estimated a vote recount in Fresno County was going to cost his group $78,000 by the end of three weeks worth of work. They didn’t have the money.

The Fresno County recount was toast. And with it went any chance (even if one assumes a recount would be honest) that Prop 37 could be fairly reviewed in California.

At this point, I ran down a few facts about Fresno County. It’s the number-one county in the US for agricultural production; in 2007, $5.3 billion. Major employers? Kraft Foods, Del Monte Foods, Foster Farms, Zacky Farms, Sun-Maid. A local outfit, David Sunflower Seeds, is owned by the giant ConAgra.

Beginning to form a picture? Fresno is Big Agriculture, and the last time I looked, Big Ag isn’t rushing to support GMO labeling. They love Monsanto, crime boss of the GMO world.

Brandi Orth, who blocked the recount, was installed as Fresno county clerk a mere 10 months before Prop 37 went up before California voters. This happened, as The Brad Blog points out, because the previous county clerk, Victor Salazar, suddenly announced his retirement with three years left on his contract.

Who picked Orth as the new county clerk? The five members of the Fresno board of supervisors. I noticed that two of them, Phil Larson and Debbie Poochigian, were members of the Fresno County Farm Bureau.

That’s quite interesting, because in the run-up to the November Prop 37 vote, the Farm Bureau was one of the organizations that signed on to a large NO on 37 print ad.

---

Let’s recap. The recount on the Prop 37 vote is stopped cold in Fresno County (a major center of Big Ag), because the county clerk, Brandi Orth put up absurd, incredible, and arbitrary obstacles. Orth was selected for her job, in the first place, by a board of supervisors on which, at the very least, two of the five members were opponents of Prop 37.

Does the California state government and, in particular, the state attorney general’s office give this foul-smelling situation even a sniff? No.

Does the California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, who is in charge of all voting in the State, budge from her office and investigate, or better yet, go down to Fresno and personally install a fair and equitable and affordable recount of Prop 37? Of course not. She moves right along to other matters.

What does that tell you?

The stink from the blocked vote-recount goes all the way from Fresno up to the capital city of Sacramento and back down again.

Naturally, the major media give this story no play. They remain silent.

As I’ve detailed in other articles (under the ~/category/yeson37/ section of my blog), there are many reasons to reject the truth of the original Prop 37 vote in California, as well as any election in the State. But after these revelations, if you accept California vote-counts as real, you should check your sanity.

Source: The Brad Blog, “Forget About Fresno: How One CA County Clerk Stopped Prop 37′s Oversight ‘Recount’”

Jon Rappoport"