What better way to spread propaganda than to have it paid for with your tax dollars. The Federal Government through your (or Monsanto’s) House of Representatives is currently putting together a spending bill for the new Fiscal Year (September 2016-17) that includes over $3 million for consumer education and outreach to “promote understanding and acceptance of agricultural biotechnology”.
In other words, your tax money would be used to educate you about the benefits of eating GMO foods. This money would be jointly used by the FDA and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. They realize that the majority of Americans (close to 90%) want our foods to have mandatory GMO labeling. However, they also have seen that very heavy spending by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association and their Biotech friends defeated bills that would have required mandatory labeling of GMO’s in Washington, Oregon, and California last year.
The American consumer is now wise to the fact that many of these GMO foods, particularly those derived from Monsanto, were created not only to be resistant to high levels of pesticide application, but do in fact contain pesticides which have been encoded into their DNA.
The timing of this Federal spending bill will likely be too late to stop the inevitable – Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling law takes effect in July. If the Senate led by Pat Roberts (R -Kansas) is unable to pass a bill protecting GMO foods (denying Americans the right to know what is in their foods) before July, then Vermont’s Bill becomes a State law. General Mills and Nestles appear ready to conform to Vermont’s law and are in preparation to relabel their foods in order to sell their foods in Vermont after July.
The picture below has some parallels to the Federal Gov’t’s budget process. This tiny crab, less than one inch long, was found hiding in some soft coral. His skills at hiding do not compare to our House of Representative’s ability to camouflage spending and pork within large appropriations bills. I’d rather be down at 50 feet with a camera looking for crabs rather than have to reread that proposed USDA and FDA budget again.
