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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Ag-Secretary-Announced-To-by-Jill-Hamilton-and-081216-596.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
December 17, 2008
Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack: Too much Monsanto in the Mix?
By Jill Hamilton and Ronnie Cummins, Director Organic Consumers
Too good a friend of Monsanto and BioTech, this may be truly a bad appointment, particularly since Obama was presented with a petition from Organic Consumer Association signed by almost 10,000, asking that Terry Vilsack NOT BE APPOINTED SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE. What do you think? Please post a comment!
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Tue Dec 16, 2008 at 15:46:00 PM PST |
Well, weeks after being counted as "out of the running," Vilsack was announced as our new Secretary of Agriculture. The general reaction I'm hearing is not a very happy one, but also "he's not the worst pick." How's that for a ringing endorsement? Iowans who I've spoken to tell me about their disappointment in Vilsack's vote (as a state senator) to take away local control on hog factory farms in Iowa. During his time as governor "Vilsack oversaw the largest proliferation of hog confinements in the states history." These new hog CAFOs put tens of thousands of independent family hog farmers out of business in the state. The end result of this was a "decimation of rural Iowa" and serious degradation of the state's drinking water. Iowans also remember the rides on Monsanto's corporate jet that Vilsack - the Biotech "Governor of the Year" - enjoyed during his time in office. He repayed Monsanto by working with the Republican floor manager in the House, promising to do everything he could to get a seed bill to pass. This bill took away county power to regulate GMOs within county borders. Says one Iowan: While Tom Vilsack is not the worst pick, he certainly does not have a history of serious reform that was promised by Barack Obama during his campaign for change. For some quick info on him, I recommend reading A Different View of Vilsack and see a statement by Organic Consumers director Ronnie Cummins on Vilsack and an Organic Consumers alert opposing Vilsack for Ag Secretary (below). |
Six Reasons Why Obama Appointing Monsanto's Buddy, Former Iowa Governor Vilsack, for USDA Head Would be a Terrible Idea Web Note, Nov. 20, 2008: Although the Organic Consumers Association is happy that former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack apparently supports a modest reduction in our nation's annual $17-25 billion subsidies (for example the often voiced reform for a $250,000 limit to individual farms per year) to chemical, energy-intensive and genetically engineered crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton, our position is that all "non-green" subsidies should be eliminated. We can no longer afford to use U.S. tax money to subsidize chemical and energy-intensive crops that basically prop up factory farm profits and the junk food industry, make consumers unhealthy, waste valuable non-renewable resources, and destabilize the climate. We need massive subsidies instead to help American farmers and ranchers make the transition to healthy, energy-efficient, carbon-sequestering, organic crops and farm practices--before it's too late. |
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