Barack "Where's the Change?" Obama delivers the same

By Linn Cohen-Cole

Obama is planning an organic garden at the White House but it is clearly only for a false show given his choice of Tom Vilsack to run the USDA.

Vilsack, according to The Organic Consumer's Association, was named Governor of the Year by Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), the biggest pro-genetic engineering lobby in existence. Why? Not for nothing. Because he'd championed local transgenic R&D corporations like Trans Ova, which clones cows. Vilsack was also the founder and former chair of the Governor's Biotechnology Partnership. Vilsack speaks for biotech. He is Monsanto's boy.

* When Vilsack created the Iowa Values Fund, his first poster child of economic development potential was Trans Ova and their pursuit of cloning dairy cows.

* Vilsack was the origin of the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, which many people in Iowa fought because it took away local government's possibility of ever having a regulation on seeds- where GE would be grown, having GE-free buffers, banning pharma corn locally, etc. Representative Sandy Greiner, the Republican sponsor of the bill, bragged on the House Floor that Vilsack put her up to it right after his state of the state address.

"Vilsack lobbied hard to get seed pre-emption bills into state legislative bodies, beginning in 2005. These bills seek to control the use of seeds on the state level, and thus deny local communities (and small farmers, and even backyard farmers) the power to establish their own regulations for protection from genetically engineered seeds. If seed pre-emption bills become law, citizens will not be able to regulate where genetically engineered crops are grown, the creation of GE buffer zones, or the banning of pharmaceutical crops, among other things. The use of seeds becomes entirely regulated by government, and opens the door to human and plant exposure to every adverse effect of genetically engineered crops. --And simultaneously ruins biodiversity, because once transgenic seeds prevail, there's no going back. Seed pre-emption bills have been introduced in sixteen states, and the battle is ongoing. But Vilsack has been one of the chief architects of looming biodiversity disaster, and there's no reason to believe he'd halt his love affair with genetic engineering and Big Ag just because he's working for Obama."

* Vilsack has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto. Sustainable ag advocated across the country were spreading the word of Vilsack's history as he was attempting to appeal to voters in his presidential bid. An activist from the west coast even made this YouTube animation about Vilsack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmoc4Qgcm4s The airplane in this animation is a referral to the controversy that Vilsack often traveled in Monsanto's jet.

*Vilsack is an ardent support of corn and soy based biofuels, which use as much or more fossil energy to produce them as they generate, while driving up world food prices and literally starving the poor.

Obama has picked not only someone who is ENTIRELY and ACTIVELY and AWARD-WINNINGLY OPPOSED to organic farming but someone who is fundamentally undemocratic in the service of destroying organic farming and establishing an economic anti-trust monopoly.

So, Obama, it seems only right that YOUR garden should be filled with ONLY genetically engineered crops, including all the pesticides that go along and the industrial chemical crops and the drug crops your biotech masters are seeking. Why should you eat well when the rest of us can't and the person you chose for the USDA is making sure there are laws in place to ensure that?

Eat what we have to, Obama. You served it up to us.

Ooops, I forgot you don't care what you eat--why would you care about what we eat?

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny” Thomas Jefferson