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How the GOP Is Thwarting Our Desire for Safe Food

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By having become the political arm of a few oligarchs who control billions of dollars of America’s wealth and are turning capitalism into a money gusher for themselves, the Republican Party is preventing our government from doing its job to protect the environment and manage agriculture so it produces clean, harmless food.

It’s past time for Americans to wake up and find ways to shut off the money spigots for the bigots. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman recently wrote this in The New York Times regarding the GOP’s so-called budget plan:

“The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

“It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

“Think about what these Republican budgets would do. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

“But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.

“Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.
Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.”

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THIS’LL TEACH ‘EM

Dr. Krugman left out one adjective that applies to modern Republicanism: mean-spirited. For example, to teach learning by doing, New Hampshire students drafted a bill to learn the process of how a bill becomes law. They proposed House Bill 373, an act establishing the Red Tail Hawk as the New Hampshire State Raptor. Even though it passed through the Environment and Agriculture committee with a majority vote, some representatives were far from receptive.

“Rep. Warren Groen, a Republican from Rochester, said, “It grasps them with its talons then uses its razor sharp beak to basically tear it apart limb by limb, and I guess the shame about making this a state bird is it would serve as a much better mascot for Planned Parenthood.”

The Republican legislature then killed the bill as the kids watched from the gallery.

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W.H.O. SAYS ROUNDUP LIKELY CAUSES CANCER

The following is from Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association:

Several days ago, an agency of the World Health Organization issued a report concluding that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, likely causes cancer in humans.

If you eat foods that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs), you are consuming glyphosate—because the U.S. EPA not only allows glyphosate residue on your food, the agency actually raised the allowed limits in 2013.

How do you know you’re eating GMO foods? You don’t. Because Monsanto and the EPA, USDA and FDA made certain of that by refusing to require labels on GMO foods. Even though about 80 percent of processed foods in the U.S. contain GMO ingredients.

You may be thinking, is it worth it to keep funding these state GMO labeling campaigns, when Monsanto and Big Food come in with their hundreds of millions of dollars to snuff them out?

The answer is a resounding yes. Here’s why. First, it’s more urgent than ever for your health. The FDA just signed off on the GMO apple and the GMO potato, and will likely sign off on GMO salmon and GMO wheat. This, in addition to new GMO corn and soy varieties the USDA recently approved—crops engineered to withstand massive doses of a toxic combination of both glyphosate and 2,4-D (a form of which was used to make Agent Orange).

More and more studies are being done on the toxic effect of glyphosate on human health. But this most recent study, from the World Health Organization, may be the most incriminating of all. Yet, we have no indication from the U.S. government that it will heed this new warning and take action.

Second, Monsanto’s lobbyists are pushing Congress to pass a law that would kill states’ rights to pass GMO labeling laws. Word is that within weeks, if not sooner, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) will reintroduce what activists have labeled the DARK ACT—Deny Americans the Right to Know. The bill is an attempt to strip states’ of their constitutional right to pass GMO labeling laws.

If we pass GMO labeling laws in Maine, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, in addition to the law already passed in Vermont, we’ll make it much more difficult for the Republican-dominated Congress to take on all four of these states. In what is a clear sign that Pompeo is about to reintroduce his bill, the House Agriculture Committee is holding a full committee hearing on the costs and impacts of GE food labeling, The Gene Giants and Big Food will pack that hearing with their lobbyists.

Third, it is absolutely essential that we not give up this fight—your fight—or we risk sending the wrong message to Monsanto, and state and federal lawmakers. We may have (very narrowly) lost several key state battles, but those battles launched a massive national public education campaign, and helped launch similar initiatives and legislative campaigns in more than 20 states.

Without the support of people like you—concerned consumers, voters, moms and dads, from every generation and every point across the political spectrum—most Americans still wouldn’t know what a GMO is or why it matters, much less that they are being denied this basic information on food packaging—information that consumers in more than 60 countries rightfully have.

Instead, thanks to you, more than 90 percent of Americans are now standing up to demand the right to know.

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HOW MANY POLICE KILLINGS IN AMERICA? NOBODY KNOWS

An article in The Guardian discovers that we have no accounting of the number of people killed by police in this country. The NSA gathers information on all our communications. We keep track of how many men over 20 eat certain foods each day. We track all kinds of things. But police killings? No—that’s too difficult.

The police in this country are out of control. They kill unarmed citizens—especially black citizens–and pay no price. Hell, we don’t even know how often they do it. They are armed up with military weapons. There are bullies and murderers in their ranks. They protect each other behind the code of silence. New revelations of their emails show vicious racism and intolerance. I can vouch for that. The most virulent racism I’ve ever heard came from a couple of Irish cops in New York City. They were friends of my brother-in-law, an Irish-American guy who grew up on West 22nd Street in Manhattan. Their racism astonished and sickened me.

Now I discover that the number of people killed each year by police in America can’t be known—it’s too murky. The cops aren’t reporting. Or they’re reporting wrong. Or the FBI is covering up the numbers. Or there’s no reporting protocol. All while our government surveillance of its citizens compiles enormous amounts of precise data.

Are all cops killers? Of course not. Are some cops killers? For sure. And they routinely get away with it.

Here’s the Guardian story, reported by Tom McCarthy on March 18:

A year ago, in a bureaucratic shift that went unremarked in the somnolent days before Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, the US government admitted a disturbing failure. The top crime-data experts in Washington had determined that they could not properly count how many Americans die each year at the hands of police. So they stopped counting.

The move did not make headlines. Before Brown was killed, a major government effort to count people killed by police could be mothballed without anybody noticing. The program was never fully funded, and no one involved was accustomed to their technical daily work drawing a spotlight.

But it had been a major effort. For the better part of a decade, a specialized team of statisticians within the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)-– number-crunchers working several nesting dolls deep inside the Justice Department — had been collecting data on what they called arrest-related deaths. The ARD tally was more than a count of killings by police. It was meant to be the elusive key to a problem that seemed easy to understand but difficult to define. The program set out to track any death, of anyone, that happened in the presence of a local or state law enforcement officer.

A victim like Michael Brown, shot dead in the process of arrest, would make the count. A victim like Akai Gurley, shot dead in Brooklyn not in the process of arrest, would make the count. A victim like Eric Garner, choked and squeezed to death on Staten Island in the process of arrest, would make the count. A victim like Tamir Rice, shot dead in Cleveland at 12 years old with no arrest attempt made at all, would make the count, along with many other victims.

These people would make the US government’s authoritative count of people killed by police. If the count still existed. Which it does not.

With some states never participating, and major police departments such as the NYPD failing to report for some years, the Bureau of Justice (BJS) statisticians were never satisfied with their data pool. In March of last year, the bureau pulled the plug on the project, leaving the truth about the most high-profile year for police killings in US history to discarded spreadsheets, bad numbers, and acronymed taskforces with little to show.

The US government is a virtuoso counter. So why can’t it count people killed by police?

For some people, the government’s failure to track officer-involved homicides is especially painful because it seems part of the institutional racism visited on African Americans by the US criminal justice system. Of the many examples of racial disparity in criminal justice, the arrest-related deaths data points to extra risk for African Americans. Black people die in disproportionate numbers at the hands of police, they are more prone to “accidents” around police, and their deaths are more likely to manifest as holes in police records.

Finally, the question of how many people are killed by police leads to the door of the only people who really know: the police.

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