Yes on I-522 empowers us against major corporations
By Michael Rothgeb
We may not get many opportunities in life to actually make a major corporation or group of elite mega-corporations do what’s truly right for the people. We may not get many more real opportunities to retain a right of the people as important as knowing what you and those you love are eating as food. Let’s not volunteer to give a right like that away.
These corporations are here to steal your right to know what you’re eating, and then a sort of force-feeding takes place. Instead, vote yes on Washington state Initiative 522 and empower yourself and feel really good.
Monsanto, Dow Chemical and other companies are so concerned about you giving up your ability and right to know what’s in your food, and more importantly losing your right to tell them what to do, that they will spend vast millions to perpetuate and finance a lie machine to coerce us and make sure we are fooled into giving up.
We can prove to them that in Washington state, we will run ill-will entities like them back into the dark hole they came from. What an opportunity to show that grass roots are stronger than poison money. What an opportunity to remind ourselves who we are, how this country was built, and how it should be built – with the will, consensus and intention of a completely honestly informed public, in honest elections.
Corporations like Monsanto, Pepsi, Coke, World Bank and Dow Chemical already know Washington state has an attitude about corporate bullying worldwide and at home in the Unites States. We have a seriously healthy and vibrantly active organic food social movement that includes millions of conscious people who know what this I-522 vote means to our future and our children’s future. This is a movement that fought hard to come into existence. For decades, organics were only in the minds of the insane, according to the same multi-national corporations that want to stop you from your right to know and stop the yes-on-I-522 movement. The growth of organics has proved them liars again. Why believe them now? These elite corporate entities are very much afraid of that kind of power, and if they can’t find a way to dissolve it or dirty it, they will find a way to milk it for profit if at all possible.
Hopefully we are also an informed public that does not depend on the major corporate-supported media such as CNN, Fox and MSNBC. Corporate-funded and controlled media are not honest. They have their own agendas and distort the truth to suit those agendas, not necessarily for the public good. So as Paul Revere once said, get up, wake up, stand up for your rights. Don’t give up the fight.
Remember how the tobacco corporations lied to the public for years about the harmful effects of cigarettes, knowing full well that they were killing 500,000 people per year, and they had to be forced into labeling? We had to fight for that same right to know what we are consuming or about to consume. Remember how local, state and national governments were deeply invested in tobacco, knowing it was deadly? Deja vu all over again. Now the Food and Drug Administration finally thinks it should regulate tobacco, and then milk more money from a poison. Worldwide labeling or not, tobacco producers are still killing people and causing cancer, heart disease, etc. At least we can read the label and the dire warnings now.
Let’s not allow these same kinds of people to do the same thing to our food supply. Sixty-four countries have banned genetically engineered food after investigations proved it to be unsafe and detrimental to public health. Why wouldn’t we do the same?
Michael Rothgeb is a farmer who lives in Twisp.
