As a historic vote with profound implications for the future of our food system nears, the question becomes whether a campaign with limitless resources and a disdain for the truth can defeat an overwhelmingly popular idea supported by a grassroots army, and over 3000 public interest organizations: the right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed our families.

Poll after poll showed 90% of Americans (and Californians) favored labeling foods that have been genetically engineered (GMOs) and nearly a million signatures were gathered by California volunteers in just 10 weeks – easily qualifying Prop 37 for the ballot. And as of the first week of October, the Yes on 37 campaign enjoyed a 2 to 1 lead in the polls.

This broad statewide (and national) support – across party lines – made perfect sense. Prop 37 posits a simple question: Do we have the right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed our children, or is that a decision better left to the pesticide and junk food companies bankrolling the opposition campaign?

Prop 37 isn’t a referendum on genetically modified foods. It’s not a ban, or a warning, it’s a label.



The debate over the efficacy of genetically engineered foods should and will continue. In the meantime, Californians have a right to know, and for good reason.

A growing body of research links GMO foods to potential health risks, increased pesticide use, biodiversity loss, the emergence of super bugs  and  “super weeds” and the unintentional contamination of conventional crops.  

Prop 37 simply adds a line of ink to a label — as is currently required for 3,000 other ingredients — so consumers know which products have been altered in a laboratory. 61 other countries have provided their citizens with this right, and choice, it’s time we do the same.  

Corporate Backlash Against Our Right to Know

In response to this growing outcry for food transparency a who’s who of the world’s most notorious corporate bad actors, with long histories of deceiving the public, polluting the environment, and endangering public health, converged on California to convince us we don’t deserve this basic, human right. A right that nearly half the world’s population already enjoys.

The No on 37 campaigns two largest contributors are pesticide giants Monsanto ($8.1 million) and Dupont ($5.4 million) – who for decades assured us Agent Orange, DDT, and Tobacco were safe. At the same time, Monsanto has actively advocated for labeling in Europe

So how do companies like these go about persuading us that we don’t deserve the right to know what they’re doing to our food?

The Only Recourse: An Unprecedented Campaign of Deception



The campaign against the right to know has relied on three essential components: unlimited resources, a willingness to repeatedly lie, and a willingness to double and triple down on those lies-even when they are debunked by independent fact checkers.

Seriously, when was the last time giant, out-of-state pesticide and junk food companies spent $45 million to improve your health, protect the environment or save you money?

Spoiler Alert-they never have.    

The No On 37 campaign knows that the less you know about your food, the more money they are likely to make.  Their goal is literally that simple, even though their campaign of deception is far more elaborate.

They’ve set up phony AstroTurf groups, misrepresented spokespeople and embellished their credentials, and misrepresented leading science, government, professional and academic organizations-including (but not limited to) the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics,US Food and Drug Administrationand World Health Organization. They’ve bankrolled demonstrably phony “economic studies,” made repeated false statements in advertisements, deceived voters with mailers sent by obvious front groups, and repeated one falsehood after another—hoping somehow that no one would ever notice.

Well, someone just did. We filed a complaint to the Department of Justice about the potentially fraudulent use of the FDA seal in No on 37 campaign propaganda, and the DOJ has referred the matter to FDA to look into.



The No on 37 Campaign and the “Post Truth Era”



After four weeks of million dollar a day advertising by out of state pesticide and junk food corporations, No on 37 shrunk a 40 point deficit into a lead.  Not because they were right on the facts-because they don’t care about the facts.  

No on 37’s red herring arguments around common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus “big bureaucracy claims”, and “cost increase hysteria”, has been painstakingly documented.

Ultimately, we believe that “No on 37’s” financially motivated corporate “sting operation” constitutes a profound disdain for the democratic process and the citizens of this state.

Why Spend $45 Million To Prevent A Simple Label?



Just follow the money: If we know what’s in our food, and what’s being done to our food, many of us will seek alternatives, and that would reduce the profit margins of companies like Monsanto and DuPont.

Their fears are well founded: since Europe instituted labeling 15 years ago, only 7 percent of its food now contains genetically engineered ingredients – compared to approximately 70% in the United States. Imagine what that would mean to these corporations if a similar shift in purchasing habits took place in California?

Multi-billion dollar pesticide and junk food companies believe there is no greater threat than an informed consumer – and with transparency comes accountability.

Prop 37 threatens their monopoly of our food system – which prevents small farmers, the organics industry, and truly natural food producers from competing on an equal playing field.

Whose Side Are You On?



On Tuesday more than a label is on the ballot. Democracy itself is. Will voters allow out of state, multinational pesticide and junk food corporations tell us what we can and can’t know about the food we eat, and what they’re doing to that food? Are we going to allow television ads based on one demonstrable lie after another convince us that information is somehow a radical concept that we don’t deserve?

This right to know movement began with a farmer, a grandmother, and former midwife, organizing women across the state two years ago toward a 2012 ballot drive.  

Prop. 37 is about one and only one thing– our right to know what’s in our food, and make an informed choice about what we eat and feed our children.  

We can’t allow our democracy to be hijacked by unscrupulous corporate interests willing to say and spend anything to protect their profits at the expense of real people, and our rights as free citizens.

We must ask every voter that will take the time to listen a few simple questions:

• Who do you trust with the health of your family: Pesticide and junk food companies and the $45 million they’ve spent lying to you, or Prop 37 supporters like the California Nurses Association, the Breast Cancer Action Fund, the California Council of Churches, and the American Public Health Association?

• Who do you trust when it comes to protecting our natural environment and food supply: Monsanto and DuPont, or Prop 37 supporters like the Sierra Club, California League of Conservation Voters, and the Natural Resources Defense Council?

• And finally, who do you trust to make decisions about what you know about the food you eat, pesticide and junk food companies or Prop 37 supporters like the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, and Public Citizen?

Prop 37 is not just about our health and our environment, and the future of our food supply. It’s also about the health of our democracy, and whether something so simple, so popular, and so “people driven” can be stomped out by giant out of state corporations polluting our state with $45 million of lies to protect their profits, at our expense.

Say yes to democracy. Say yes to your right to know. Vote Yes on Prop 37. And please tell everyone you know to do the same.

Check out our website, or help us get our television ad run a few more times by Contributing here, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

In a heated political battle over a topic that matters to everyone – our food system – is it possible for a grassroots movement for transparency to survive a $40 million hailstorm of lies from the world’s largest pesticide companies?

Just over one week to go until California decides whether to join 61 other countries in requiring labeling for genetically engineered foods, and the pesticide and junk food corporations are in overdrive trying to convince voters that a simple label will cause the sky to fall.

Opponents of Proposition 37, the California Right to Know genetically engineered food labeling act, are pulling every dirty trick in the book – from inventing a false title for their top science spokesman (who happens to be an anti-science radical), to misrepresenting the entire profession of nutritionists, to making up newspaper endorsements and even fabricating quotes from the U.S. government.

The opposition ads, which are saturating California airwaves at the rate of about $1 million dollars a day, have been called “mostly untrue” and “misleading”  by newspaper fact checkers.

Yet they are having an effect. After months of 67% support in the polls, support dropped to the mid 40s after just three weeks of deceptive television advertising. The most recent poll by Los Angeles Times shows Prop 37 still ahead, though barely – 44% to 42% — as we head into the final stretch.

This is actually good news. Despite their full-court press of deception, the opposition has been unable to pull ahead. The recent infusion of $5 million from the junk food companies to the No on 37 Campaign, and a new $1.5 million donation by Monsanto, make one thing clear: They’re worried.

They know the people’s movement can win this.

Rallying to the cause for the people’s right to know are celebrities like Bill Maher and Danny DeVito, famous chefs led by Alice Waters, faith and religious leaders, the CEOs of leading food companies and more than 3,000 endorsing organizations.  

Prop 37 has one of the most successful web ad campaigns ever, amazing videos arrive daily from supporters around the world (check out these kids), filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia just announced she  is offering free viewings of her movie The Future of Food from now until the election, and renowned environmental activist Vendana Shiva is heading to California.

And with just over a week left, the Yes on 37 Campaign is finally on the airwaves with a TV ad that goes straight to the heart of the matter.

Ending How We Began: A Message for Everyone Who Cares About Our Food

On Friday, after three dark weeks of unanswered opposition ads, the Yes on 37 Campaign announced a seven-figure television ad buy to promote its message to California voters.  

But how is it possible to answer a blizzard of lies with just one 30-second television spot? In what is bound to be a controversial decision, the Yes on 37 Campaign is going with a simple, values-based, positive message.

“Because food is love. Food is life. Food is family. We all have the right to know what’s in our food,”   says the female narrator in the new “Food is Love” Yes on 37 ad now running in major broadcast markets across the Golden State – see the Food is Love ad here

In polling and focus-group tests, the positive ad outperformed more critical approaches by orders of magnitude, a fact that surprised some campaign veterans. The results could be an indication that voters are fed up with negative political ads.  

More importantly, the Food is Love ad reflects the true roots of the GMO labeling movement in California. Prop 37 was the inspiration of Pamm Larry, a grandmother, former midwife and farmer from Chico, California, who began organizing women across the state two years ago toward a 2012 ballot drive.  

The hugely successful effort – which gathered almost a million signatures in just 10 weeks — was largely due to the volunteer army that Pamm helped organize – many of them moms who just want to know what’s in their food.  As Yes Magazine reported, Prop 37 is a story about Soccer Moms facing off against Monsanto.

It’s all very simple. Food is a sacred part of our lives. We absolutely have the right to know if our food comes from nature, or if it was engineered in a lab by companies like Monsanto and Dow to contain foreign genes that have never before existed in the food supply.

So we are finishing this campaign with the same positive message that we began it with:  We have a right to know what’s in the food we eat and feed our families. No one has the right to make that choice for us.

Especially not the pesticide and junk food corporations: Since when have these notorious anti-consumer special interests ever spent $40 million because they want to save us money?

We invite you to join us in aiming our slingshot at Goliath. As Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times, now is the moment when we find out if we have a food movement in this country.  

The $36 million No on 37 campaign, bankrolled by $20 million from the world’s six largest pesticide companies, has been caught in yet another lie, this time possibly criminal.

These companies and their allies in the junk food industry know that their profit margins may suffer if consumers have a choice whether to purchase genetically engineered foods or not.  And that’s why opponents are spending nearly a million dollars per day trying to make Prop 37 complicated. But really it’s simple – we have the right to know what’s in our food.

To date, the No on 37 campaign has been able to repeat one lie after another with near impunity. But has this pattern of deceit finally caught up to it?

Yesterday, the Yes on 37 campaign sent letters to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a criminal investigation of the No on 37 campaign for possible fraudulent misuse of the official seal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  

The No on 37 campaign affixed the FDA’s seal to one of the campaign’s mailers. Section 506 of the U.S. Criminal Code states: “Whoever…knowingly uses, affixes, or impresses any such fraudulently made, forged, counterfeited, mutilated, or altered seal or facsimile thereof to or upon any certificate, instrument, commission, document, or paper of any description…shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.”

The letter also provides evidence that the No on 37 campaign falsely attributed a direct quote to the FDA in the campaign mailer. Alongside the FDA seal, the mailer includes this text in quotes. “The US Food and Drug Administration says a labeling policy like Prop 37 would be ‘inherently misleading.” The quote is entirely fabricated. The FDA did not make this statement and does not take a position on Prop 37.

In addition, the three identified authors of the “Rebuttal to Argument in Favor of Proposition 37” include a Dr. Henry I. Miller, who is identified solely as “Founding Director, Office of Biotechnology of the Food & Drug Administration.” Dr. Miller in fact, does not currently work for the FDA in any capacity – as millions of California voters have been erroneously led to believe.

This is not the first blatant act of deception that the No on 37 campaign has been caught perpetrating on the citizens of California – particularly relating to their “top scientist” Dr. Henry Miller.

Consider Miller’s growing “rap sheet”:

• On Oct. 4 the No on 37 campaign was forced to pull its first ad off the air and re-shoot it after they were caught misrepresenting Miller as a doctor at Stanford University  when he is actually a researcher at the Hoover Institute on Stanford’s campus, as the Los Angeles Times reported.

• Last week, the campaign was reprimanded by Stanford again for misrepresenting the university in a mailer that went out to millions of voters. And this week, the campaign was caught sending out yet another deceptive mailer involving the University.

In addition to allowing his university affiliation to be repeatedly overblown, Miller has a sordid history of parroting the talking points of some of the world’s most notorious corporate bad actors: he’s a founding member of a now defunct tobacco front group that tried to discredit the links between cigarettes and cancer, he’s repeatedly called for the reintroduction of DDT – known to cause premature birth, fronted for an oil industry funded climate change denial group for Exxon, claimed that people exposed to radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster “may have benefited from it”, and attacked the US Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs safety while urging it to outsource more of its functions to private industries.

This is the man the No on 37 campaign has portrayed to voters as an arbiter of good science and promoted as an expert worthy of our trust. In reality, Miller is nothing more than a corporate shill that will say whatever his paymasters ask him to, be it Exxon, Phillip Morris, Monsanto, or DuPont.

Does the No on 37 campaign stand behind Miller’s fringe views on tobacco, climate change, nuclear radiation and DDT?

But this pattern of deceit doesn’t end with Miller:

• On Oct. 5, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the nation’s largest professional association for nutritionists and dieticians, accused the No on 37 campaign of misrepresenting its position and misleading voters in the official California Voter’s Guide that went to 11 million voters.

• And the anti-Proposition 37 ads that are now blanketing the state have been described as misleading by the San Jose Mercury News, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle.

Perhaps these latest revelations will prompt the mainstream press to begin focusing their attention on the No on 37 campaign’s pattern of deceptions – including a potentially criminal act – rather than on easily discredited pesticide industry Prop 37 “red herrings” like common sense exemptions, phony lawsuit scares, bogus “big bureaucracy claims”, and “cost increase hysteria”.

So who should we trust?

Who should we trust when it comes to our right to know what’s in the food we eat: Monsanto, DuPont, and Henry Miller or the millions of California consumers and leading consumer, health, women’s, faith-based, labor and other groups; 61 countries that already require GMO labeling; and a growing stack of peer-reviewed research linking genetically engineered foods to health and environmental problems?

Who has our best interests at heart, the pesticide and junk food industry, or Prop 37 supporters like Consumers Union, California Nurses Association, California Democratic Party, California Labor Federation, United Farm Workers, American Public Health Association, Consumers Union, Sierra Club, Whole Foods Market, California Council of Churches, Organic Consumers Association, Center for Food Safety, Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen, and Food Democracy Now!?

To defeat their $1 million a day of discredited falsehoods blanketing California’s airwaves we need your help to fuel our grassroots effort and Contribute here, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Apparently $34.4 million in pesticide and junk food money can’t buy the opponents of Proposition 37 their own set of facts.

Case in point: A new L.A. Times poll shows Prop 37 winning by more than a 2-to-1 margin among registered California voters. And, according to the recent Pepperdine poll, the opposition’s support actually dropped four points over the past two weeks.

So while their treasure trove of special interest money can pay for an endless supply of tired, discredited talking points, it can’t seem to convince consumers we don’t deserve to know what’s in the food we eat.

It’s not hard to understand why. The companies bankrolling the opposition campaign – including pesticide giants Monsanto ($7.2 million) and Dupont ($4.9 million) – will say and spend anything to prevent the kind of transparency that labeling of genetically modified foods (GMO’s) would provide. And without transparency there can be no accountability.  

Here ARE a few facts: A growing body of research links GMO foods to potential health risks, increased pesticide use, the emergence of super bugs and super weeds, biodiversity loss, and the unintentional contamination of conventional crops.

What Prop 37 will do is add a line of ink to a label — as is currently required for 3,000 other ingredients — so consumers know which products have been altered in a laboratory.  That’s why the vast majority of Californians support this common-sense measure, and it’s why 50 other countries already require that GMOs be labeled.

But that’s not all: This summer, Monsanto began selling its first GMO sweet corn product at Walmart. The sweet corn is engineered to withstand the herbicide Roundup and also contains an insecticide (Bt toxin) within the cells of the corn.

Are your children eating Monsanto’s latest concoction? You won’t know because we don’t require labeling. In response to Walmart’s decision to undermine the will of its customers , the Yes on 37 campaign released a new ad highlighting the fact that California children are eating unlabeled GMO sweet corn without their parents knowing it.

And now, the recently published (in the highly regarded journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology), first long-term, peer-reviewed animal study involving GMO corn found massive tumors, organ failure and premature death in rats. The findings have prompted the French government to call for an investigation into GMOs, and Russia to suspend imports of GMO corn.

The study was roundly criticized by Monsanto’s band of scientists, who were out in force trying to discredit the study design – but what they failed to mention is that Monsanto’s own studies that supposedly indicate “safety” are based on the same study design: similar size study, same rats.  The only real differences is that the French study was free of industry influence and pressure, was more comprehensive and stringent, and was long-term rather than short.

The most shocking thing of all about the French study is that it is the first long-term feeding study on genetically engineered corn that has been on the American market for more than 15 years. So where’s the science? The reason we have been denied such critical information is that biotech companies like Monsanto have controlled and suppressed research.

We need, and deserve, more independent research in this area. In the meantime, we have a right to know and to decide for ourselves whether we want to eat Monsanto’s corn. Prop 37 will give us that right.

Help our David campaign take on their Goliath, by fueling our grassroots effort and Contribute here, or by following us on Facebook and Twitter.  

     

   On November 19th, 52 UC Davis students were arrested after peacefully protesting the new 32% fee increases established by the UC Regents. As a second year undergraduate, I was hopeful that students were beginning to see the bigger picture: California is broken.

   Students, so far, have been forcing most of the blame on the UC Regents. While it is true that the 20 Regents who voted for the increase certainly deserve a heaving portion of the blame for borrowing tens of millions (from a non-CA bank, NY Merrill Trust) while forcing students into a cycle of debt in order to protect UC’s eerily superb bond rating, the only way for students to move towards enacting change is to recognize that UC’s woes are symptomatic of the larger disease that has infected the entire state.

   The UC student, to widen the umbrella for a movement that might have the capability of rallying support for reform, should understand that he or she risks turning people off by angling attacks towards the Regents and the Regents only. It is important to recognize that while it is a travesty that UC is becoming an unaffordable option for many California families, it is nearsighted to think that UC fees are anything more than a slice of the pie that is California’s broken political system. The state workers that have been furloughed, the elderly Californians that are losing their access to Medicare, the thousands of previously middle-class Californians that have had their homes foreclosed, and the over 12% of California that is unemployed might tell students that UC is not the only government program that is underfunded, mismanaged, and increasingly unavailable to the people who need it.

   

 To the single mother making $30,000 a year or the undocumented immigrant working in poor labor conditions for a less-than-legal salary, the plight of the students might seem distant and unimportant. The reality of the situation is that students are making valid points, but they are doing so in a way that turns off the millions of Californians that should be turned on by the students’ overarching message of reforming California.

   When the student recognizes that the immediate and long term problems caused by UC’s fee increases are tied together with the struggles of working families, immigrants, the elderly, homeowners, borrowers, the unemployed, water drinkers, and dozens of other California communities and interest groups, then, perhaps, we will see forward progress.

   The first point that needs to be made by students (that might catch on) is that the programs that made our state great in the 50s and 60s cannot continue to exist without proper funding.

   The message should be loud and clear: raising revenue does not mean higher taxes for everybody, it means looking at who and what gets taxed in this state, and what kind of people are hurt when programs lose funding. Here are three problems that have been generally accepted among the progressive community to be at the heart of the problem:

   Lack of an oil-severance tax in California. Who wins? Big Oil. Who loses? The People. AB 656 (Torrico) would use a 9.9% tax on Gross Product to generate up to $1 billion annually for programs like UC, CSU and CCC.

   2/3rds majority required to pass anything that raises revenue. Who wins? The CaGOP and Big Business. Who loses? Again, The People. Republicans who are indebted to special interest groups that represent Big Business are able to crush the programs that help make the California Dream a reality for many working Californians. AB 656 is expected to be an easy kill for the Republican minority, even though California is the only state in the union that does not have an oil severance tax (including Sarah’s AK and GWB’s TX).

   Proposition 13. Who wins? Big Business. Who Loses? The People. The remains of the Jarvis Taxpayer Revolution act as the most regressive and harmful tax policy in the state. With the veil of providing economic safety for elderly residents without a fixed income, the anti-tax era cursed California’s future with budget shortfalls and program cuts. It is apparent, now, that Californians can’t have our cake and eat it, too.

   So, students should be asking the question: Why is it that Chevron, Monsanto, and Walmart are allowed to raise revenue while the State of California isn’t? Why is it that CEOs are getting pay raises while the People are getting both pay cuts and program cuts?

   The students are right: the State of California has left them for dead, but they are not alone. Almost every Californian uses some sort of state-sponsored program, whether that be a UC, a public elementary school, a library, or the DMV. If you’re one of those people, and if you haven’t gotten a pay raise, then you should be ticked off, too.