The world is rich. The problem is the rich control the world.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme 444, retired

We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor.  In the third world, water is as precious as gold.  Sewage and water sources run parallel in the streets due to the lack of modern infrastructure systems.

More often than not, the experts in the universities and think tanks of the 1% drag the age-old Malthusian explanation out of the closet.  There is simply an overpopulation problem. It is the poor that are to blame, if only they’d have fewer children.

But as I have pointed out in previous blogs, it is not too many people that are the problem.  It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the capital needed to provide it.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes.org 17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago.  But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized.  The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve. This is the absurdity of capitalism that Marx wrote about, that we starve amid plenty. He wrote in 1848:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.”  says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths.  They are in actuality, market induced deaths. Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:

“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (2006 UN Human Development Report P. 2)

The cost of bringing people safe water is negligible when compared to the concentration of wealth.  “The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).” says the World Bank.  The world’s richest, Business Week claims, have a collective net worth of $2.8 trillion.  Either way you measure it, there is plenty of money in the world. These characters spend half their time hiding this wealth to protect it, form ex-wives, estranged children and the rest of us. But how do they get it?

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is squabbling with his wife over a $9 billion nest egg

Dmitry Rybolovlev

and who has his cash stashed all over the world, made most of his money (including $500 million in art, $36 million in Jewelry and an $80 million yacht) “…from the sale of two potash fertilizer companies for a combined $8 billion…” Business Week adds.

But how did he come to own these huge operations; and in such a short period?  It’s quite simple really and one of the reasons Gorbachev was so popular with the B movie actor and US president Ronald Reagan and the global 1%. Gorbachev was a former leading Stalinist bureaucrat.  He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the period when one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history began to draw its last breath and collapse under its own bureaucratic weight.

Gorbachev and his old buddies including many former KGB thugs like Putin who reached the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel, wasn’t about to go down with the sinking ship. What happened in a nutshell, and why we see so many prominent Russian millionaires and billionaires is that the old KGB and moribund party men appropriated the collective and collectivized  wealth of the Soviet and Russian people.  The US capitalist class welcomed the plunder and their former KGB credentials were a thing of the past as long as capitalism could flourish.  That’s where Rybolovlev and other Russians like him got their wealth.

No doubt readers are getting a bit bored with it but there is a need to hammer it home to counter the propaganda of the world’s bourgeois that there is not enough money to feed, clothe, house and provide humanity with a decent and productive life. I am talking about the claim by the Tax Justice Network that wealthy individuals, (we’re not talking corporations here) stashed as much as$32 trillion in offshore accounts in 2010 in order to avoid taxes.  This amounts to the combined GDP of the U S and Japan. “Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets..”  BW claims.  This exists as more than 9 million people die worldwide each year because of hunger and malnutrition; 5 million of them are children.

This situation is not something that cannot change.  It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of  “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple; the Russian billionaires for example attained their rapid billionaire status simply through the transfer of the collective wealth of society to individuals including the means for generating that wealth.  We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective.

Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization.  True freedom.

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Monsanto corp.: A Bad Seed

 Reprinted from The Asian Age for our reader's interest.

Seeds of suicide

By editor

Created 27 Mar 2013 - 00:00

Vandana Shiva 

Monsanto’s talk of ‘technology’ tries to hide its real objectives of control over seed where genetic engineering is a means to control seed

“Monsanto is an agricultural company.
We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more.”
“Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing control over cotton seed supply — 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto.
Control over seed is the first link in the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers.

Monsanto’s concentrated control over the seed sector in India as well as across the world is very worrying. This is what connects farmers’ suicides in India to Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser in Canada, to Monsanto vs Bowman in the US, and to farmers in Brazil suing Monsanto for $2.2 billion for unfair collection of royalty.

Through patents on seed, Monsanto has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s renewal from farmers, the original breeders.

Patents on seed are illegitimate because putting a toxic gene into a plant cell is not “creating” or “inventing” a plant. These are seeds of deception — the deception that Monsanto is the creator of seeds and life; the deception that while Monsanto sues farmers and traps them in debt, it pretends to be working for farmers’ welfare, and the deception that GMOs feed the world. GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.

The entry of Monsanto in the Indian seed sector was made possible with a 1988 Seed Policy imposed by the World Bank, requiring the Government of India to deregulate the seed sector. Five things changed with Monsanto’s entry:
First, Indian companies were locked into joint-ventures and licensing arrangements, and concentration over the seed sector increased.
Second, seed which had been the farmers’ common resource became the “intellectual property” of Monsanto, for which it started collecting royalties, thus raising the costs of seed.
Third, open pollinated cotton seeds were displaced by hybrids, including GMO hybrids. A renewable resource became a non-renewable, patented commodity.
Fourth, cotton which had earlier been grown as a mixture with food crops now had to be grown as a monoculture, with higher vulnerability to pests, disease, drought and crop failure.
Fifth, Monsanto started to subvert India’s regulatory processes and, in fact, started to use public resources to push its non-renewable hybrids and GMOs through so-called public-private partnerships (PPP).

In 1995, Monsanto introduced its Bt technology in India through a joint-venture with the Indian company Mahyco. In 1997-98, Monsanto started open field trials of its GMO Bt cotton illegally and announced that it would be selling the seeds commercially the following year. India has rules for regulating GMOs since 1989, under the Environment Protection Act. It is mandatory to get approval from the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee under the ministry of environment for GMO trials. The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology sued Monsanto in the Supreme Court of India and Monsanto could not start the commercial sales of its Bt cotton seeds until 2002.
And, after the damning report of India’s parliamentary committee on Bt crops in August 2012, the panel of technical experts appointed by the Supreme Court recommended a 10-year moratorium on field trials of all GM food and termination of all ongoing trials of transgenic crops.
But it had changed Indian agriculture already.

Monsanto’s seed monopolies, the destruction of alternatives, the collection of superprofits in the form of royalties, and the increasing vulnerability of monocultures has created a context for debt, suicides and agrarian distress which is driving the farmers’ suicide epidemic in India. This systemic control has been intensified with Bt cotton. That is why most suicides are in the cotton belt.
An internal advisory by the agricultural ministry of India in January 2012 had this to say to the cotton-growing states in India — “Cotton farmers are in a deep crisis since shifting to Bt cotton. The spate of farmer suicides in 2011-12 has been particularly severe among Bt cotton farmers.”

The highest acreage of Bt cotton is in Maharashtra and this is also where the highest farmer suicides are. Suicides increased after Bt cotton was introduced — Monsanto’s royalty extraction, and the high costs of seed and chemicals have created a debt trap. According to Government of India data, nearly 75 per cent rural debt is due to purchase inputs. As Monsanto’s profits grow, farmers’ debt grows. It is in this systemic sense that Monsanto’s seeds are seeds of suicide.

The ultimate seeds of suicide is Monsanto’s patented technology to create sterile seeds. (Called “Terminator technology” by the media, sterile seed technology is a type of Gene Use Restriction Technology, GRUT, in which seed produced by a crop will not grow — crops will not produce viable offspring seeds or will produce viable seeds with specific genes switched off.) The Convention on Biological Diversity has banned its use, otherwise Monsanto would be collecting even higher profits from seed.

Monsanto’s talk of “technology” tries to hide its real objectives of ownership and control over seed where genetic engineering is just a means to control seed and the food system through patents and intellectual property rights.

A Monsanto representative admitted that they were “the patient’s diagnostician, and physician all in one” in writing the patents on life-forms, from micro-organisms to plants, in the TRIPS’ agreement of WTO. Stopping farmers from saving seeds and exercising their seed sovereignty was the main objective. Monsanto is now extending its patents to conventionally bred seed, as in the case of broccoli and capsicum, or the low gluten wheat it had pirated from India which we challenged as a biopiracy case in the European Patent office.

That is why we have started Fibres of Freedom in the heart of Monsanto’s Bt cotton/suicide belt in Vidharba. We have created community seed banks with indigenous seeds and helped farmers go organic. No GMO seeds, no debt, no suicides.
The writer is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust

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Pepsico wants Eastern Europeans to eat healthy snacks

by Richard Mellor

Socialists argue that production is not set in to motion by the owners of the means by which we produce things (the bourgeoisie or big capitalists) in order to produce products that human beings need.  This is incidental.  The owners of capital invest in production, invest in the Labor process, in order to make profit no matter what the finished product. When we read their serious journals this becomes very clear.

This is what made me think about this.

Coca Cola’s competitor, Pepsico, bought a giant Russian yogurt manufacturer a couple years ago for $4.2 billion.  All the established western multinationals have been expanding in Asia since the collapse of Stalinism and China’s gradual journey down the road to a market economy. Pepsico wants to bring “Western Style snacking in all its gluttonous glory to Eastern Europeans” writes Bloomberg Business Week.

Pepsico’s CEO, Indra Nooyi, is somewhat of a scrapper in the world of bourgeois culture.  Last year she went on a rampage cutting costs by laying off more than 8000 workers and taking steps that allowed Pepsico to “Regain market share from Coca-Cola” according to BW. This allowed Pepsico to increase profits by 17% in the last quarter of 2012. Another move that helped profits was increasing sales on soft drinks an important and necessary part of a healthy human diet; after all, Pepsico produces food and drink for human consumption.

So Pepsico wants to wean the Eastern Europeans off their terrible habit of making their own food. The company doesn’t want to repeat Campbell Soup’s failed attempt to get Russians to stop making their own traditional soups and buy Campbell’s packaged broths. “Changing behavior is expensive, you can direct it but it’s an evolution”, says one coupon clipper whose job it is to convince people they need to buy certain products they wouldn’t ordinarily buy. Some people just don’t know what’s good for them.

These damn Russians are a bit of a problem though.  Why can’t they be more like Americans?  We are used to being bombarded every day by ads telling us what we should and shouldn’t buy and what we need to be handsome, pretty, liked, and fat. Not to mention how meaningless and empty our lives will be if we ignore this advice.  We know better, we consume $34 billion worth of snacks each year but Eastern Europeans are, “…only now warming up to packaged snacks and on-the-go munching.”

“On the go munching” says it all. It gets worse though. Look at this example of their poor judgment and poor diet.  Instead of some Frito Lays or a healthy General Mills Nature Valley granola bar that their daughter brings home to put in the fridge alongside the Hershey’s Syrup and Heinz Ketchup, the parents of this young woman  “eat what they grew up with: compote juice with fresh apples, cabbage soup made from scratch, or a breakfast of buckwheat porridge.” Now no one is saying they don’t need improvements in their diet that a higher standard of living could bring, but hormone laden meat, sugared drinks and salty crackers aren’t the alternative. But:

“Fresh apples” ha, ha, ha, LOL LOl LOl!

So Pepsico and other multinationals need to get people off this insane idea of making their own food and on to packaged goods and drinkable yogurts and juices that BW refers to as, “value added beverages.”

When I was in Macedonia a few years ago visiting an old friend I ate as I did when I was there 35 years before.  Only then, he was living in a small mountain village where there was one room in the village with a TV in it that people went to watch and they grew most of their own food.  We ate yogurt from cows and fresh veggies.  This time I found him in Gostivar near the Albanian border.  They had more modern conveniences including a big television and a fridge.  As before I ate great food though by our standards they were relatively poor. It was November and we always ate pickled vegetables with our meal. I really liked these treats they pickled themselves.

I remember commenting on them and how delicious they were. “We have a fridge now,” he said, “But we like the flavor at this time of year and we want to preserve the tradition.”
“Preserve the tradition!”  Ha, ha, ha. LOL,LOL, LOL. You can’t make profit preserving traditions. What’s wrong with these people?

Hold on a minute. If Pepsico was interested in people’s health, if it functions to produce food and beverages, a human need for sure, why would it lay off workers and produce unhealthy foods spending millions of dollars convincing people they were healthy and that they should buy them?

Marx wrote “A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.”

He was making some sense. I’m not sure Pepsico is actually in the business of making food, I mean proper food, but of enriching the investors who own the company.

This situation cannot change as long as such a crucial human need is in private hands and profit driven.  It also cannot change as long as the capital necessary for production is in private hands.  Public ownership of food production and the finance industry under workers and consumers control and management is the only way this can be permanently changed. Much of our food can be produced locally. There is nothing wrong in changing habits, including the collective habits of masses of people. It depends on what forces are changing them and for what purposes. Their reason for snacks and packaged foods lie in their need to have people at work and under their control in the production of profit than in our homes and communities in possession of our own time, governing our own lives and deciding what we will eat and how we shall produce it.

*One of the major reasons we have the war against public services (and jobs) is that workers have forced them through collective struggle to provide them and capitalists also support funding public services when they facilitate private profit. (freeways for example). But the problem with increased public services is that it occupies space in society that could be occupied by private capital; it closes a door of opportunity for profit making.

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Capitalism cannot solve the global crisis, it is the cause of it.

by Richard Mellor

We have had a number of commentaries on this blog about global poverty and the consumption of the world’s resources.  This also connects in to the issue of overpopulation as there are those who place overpopulation as the dominant feature in the crisis of global capitalism and as the cause of environmental destruction; lets call them neo-Malthusians for want of a better word.  It is too many people that are at the root of the crisis and not enough food to go around.

If you search this blog or the internet enough you will quickly discredit this argument and discover that it is the way food is produced and allocated that is the issue not too many hungry mouths.  The US throws away and wastes enough food to feed a few countries not that it would be of the quality most people would want to eat in ordinary circumstances.

The data site, Global issues gives some relevant data regarding consumption.

Globally, the 20% of the world’s people in the highest-income countries account for 86% of total private consumption expenditures — the poorest 20% a minuscule 1.3%. More specifically, the richest fifth:

• Consume 45% of all meat and fish, the poorest fifth 5%
• Consume 58% of total energy, the poorest fifth less than 4%
• Have 74% of all telephone lines, the poorest fifth 1.5%
• Consume 84% of all paper, the poorest fifth 1.1%
• Own 87% of the world’s vehicle fleet, the poorest fifth less than 1%

 "Runaway growth in consumption in the past 50 years is putting strains on the environment never before seen." their report says. The other aspect of this is important.  There is much talk about raising living standards and bringing democracy and vibrant market capitalism to the underdeveloped world.  But if other countries adopted the consumerism, the useless products, the 2500 sq. foot houses for two people. The cars, waste, garbage produced by a country like the US the environment could not support it, life as we know it would cease on this floating sphere.  Life would not cease, but life for us would. We must not underestimate this. 

We blogged some time ago about poor women in India who agreed to be sterilized for a cell phone.  Some deal.  But the overpopulation argument always seeks a solution among the poorest among us. The poor have too many children and are consuming the world’s food, there’s just not enough land to go around.  But these statistics show that this is not the case. 

In 1995, Americans spent $8 billion on cosmetics.  The Europeans spent $50 billion on cigarettes and $105 billion on Alcohol. The two continents spent $17 billion on pet foods.  Meanwhile, the State of Human Development resource published by the UN declared in 1998 that the cost of basic social services in “all” developing countries would be (in billions):

Basic education for all	6
Water and sanitation for all	9
Reproductive health for all women	12
Basic health and nutrition	13

So the entire “underdeveloped” world can receive these basic social services for all at a cost that is less than half of the wealth possessed by three American coupon clippers, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune. Does this make any sense?  Is this what people can honestly call civilization?

I think there’s something amiss.

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Capitalism and food production: Flogging a dead horse

This graphic does not come with the original article

by Michael Roberts

The scandal that started in the UK is now sweeping Europe – it’s that ready-made meals in British supermarkets labelled as beef have turned out to contain anything up to 100% horse meat.  So consumers are paying for more expensive beef and being fed horse, with the added health risk that this horse meat could contain dangerous veterinary drugs harmful to humans.  The extent of the fraud is yet to be determined, but it shows once again that when profit rules, health and honesty disappear.

The Great Recession has increased contaminated meat risks,  as cost-cutting has driven British consumers to low-cost ready meals while checks made on meat provenance have been cut back.  As Dr Louise Manning, senior lecturer in food production management at the Royal Agricultural College, put it ” Since the recession in 2008 there has been a drive for affordable food”, resulting in bigger supply chains. “The challenge is that as the supply chain becomes bigger and bigger then consumers have to rely on trust,” she said.  Yet budgets for trading standards and environmental health, meanwhile, have been cut by 32% in real terms per person since 2009, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the independent economic research body. And since the BSE crisis in the 1990s, the meat inspection workforce under the Food Standards Agency has more than halved to 800.   “Food fraud is a fact,” Manning says, arguing that the bigger the supply chain, the greater the uncertainty for consumers.  “We have a truly global supply chain,” she said. “With chicken products most of the meat comes from Thailand. If you buy ready meals the meat could come from Asia or Brazil.”

Since 2003, Britain has eaten more ‘ready meals’ than the rest of Europe put together, and over half of all the savoury snacks and crisps eaten on the continent as a whole. The average amount spent on food ingredients for a primary school meal in 2003 was 35 pence: a quarter of the sum allocated to feeding a guard dog in the British army. In 2005, a staggering 40% of all people admitted into hospital were found to be suffering from malnutrition, as officially defined.

Most disturbing of all are the statistics for obesity.  Thanks in major part to the gradual abandonment of homemade meals  and the adoption of serial snacks and convenience food, Britain is lumbering towards a fat epidemic. Around two-thirds of adult males, and more than half of adult females, are now either overweight (fat) or obese (extremely fat). Obesity has grown by 300% over the last 20 years. More than a fifth of Britain’s adult population is obese – and that’s just the grown ups.  Nearly one third of British children aged 2-15 are either overweight or obese.  Obesity is rising twice as fast among children as adults. Nowadays, nearly 16% of children aged 6-15 are now officially obese – three times as many as a decade ago – and this puts them at risk. In 2002, cases of maturity-onset diabetes in obese British children were reported for the first time. Fatty deposits – one of the first signs of heart disease – have also been identified in the arteries of teenagers.  I don’t need to remind readers that the story is much the same, if not worse, in the US.

Since the beginning of modern industrial capitalism with the commoditisation of food, food fraud and adulteration has been endemic.  In a gruesome passage in chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx wrote of the ‘incredible adulteration of bread’ in Victorian London, and used a report of a Royal Commission of Inquiry to reveal that the London worker, ‘had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead cockroaches, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients’.

It was the same story in America. Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, was stunned and appalled by what American capitalists would do for the sake of profit.  Taking a page from the British, American manufacturers, distributors and vendors of food began tampering with their products en masse — bulking out supplies with cheap filler, using dangerous additives to mask spoilage or to give foodstuffs a more appealing color.  A committee of would-be reformers who met in Boston in 1859 launched one of the first studies of American food purity and their findings make for less-than-appetizing reading: candy was found to contain arsenic and dyed with copper chloride; conniving brewers mixed extracts of “nux vomica,” a tree that yields strychnine, to simulate the bitter taste of hops. Pickles contained copper sulphate, and custard powders yielded traces of lead. Sugar was blended with plaster of Paris, as was flour. Milk had been watered down, then bulked up with chalk and sheep’s brains. Hundred-pound bags of coffee labeled “Fine Old Java” turned out to consist of three-fifths dried peas, one-fifth chicory, and only one-fifth coffee. Though there was the occasional clumsy attempt at domestic reform by midcentury — most famously in response to the practice of selling “swill milk” taken from diseased cows force-fed a diet of toxic refuse produced by liquor distilleries — little changed.

With the development of an international food trade, the scandals spread.  One of the first international scandals involved “oleo-margarine,” a butter substitute originally made from an alchemical process involving beef fat, cattle stomach, and for good measure, finely diced cow, hog, and ewe udders.  This “greasy counterfeit,” as one critic called it, was shipped to Europe as genuine butter, leading to a precipitous decline in butter exports by the mid-1880s. The same decade saw a similar, though less unsettling problem as British authorities discovered that lard imported from the United States was often adulterated with cottonseed oil.  Even worse was the meatpacking industry, whose practices prompted a trade war with several European nations. In 1879, when Germany accused the United States of exporting pork contaminated with trichinae worms and cholera. That led several countries to boycott American pork.  Similar scares over beef infected with a lung disease intensified these trade battles.

The 20th-century malfeasance of the industry is well known: “deviled ham” made of beef fat, tripe, and veal byproducts; sausages made from tubercular pork; and, as Upton Sinclair explained in his horrifying book, The Jungle,  about the Chicago meat packing industry, lard containing traces of the occasional human victim of workplace accidents.

Flogging dead horses is the least of the scandals in the history of the global capitalist food industry.

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California Prop 37 election fraud?

For our readers' interest from  From Food Democracy Now Please feel free to "share" on Facebook or Twitter and visit the website to sign a letter.

Right now the votes for Prop 37 to label genetically engineered foods are still being counted. On Tuesday morning, Dec 4th, Prop 37 hit 6,004,628 votes on the California Secretary of State’s website, but this tally was quickly reversed within an hour of being publicized by Food Democracy Now!

Since November 6th, the vote count in California has been updated daily until December 4th, when the vote count hit 6 million for the first time. When contacted, the Secretary of State's office stated there would be no further updates to the vote totals until Dec 14th when state law requires the election results to be certified. County elected officials only have until COB Dec 7th to submit final results so we need your help now!

At the same time, Food Democracy Now! has learned that a team of independent statisticians have detected “statistical anomalies” in the largest precincts of 9 counties, including Orange, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda and San Diego counties.

We find this news troubling and think it’s important that the Secretary of State’s office know that we are watching these developments closely and expect honest and fair election results.

Join us in standing up for open and transparent elections, it’s important that all votes be counted and any possible malfeasance is properly investigated by California election officials. Count all the ballots, be open and transparent, because we have the Right to Know!

Click here to download proof that Prop 37 has earned 6 million votes, share on Facebook and with your friends to demand openness and transparency in elections.


For those who want the background, here are the links:
1. "Proposition 37: Genetically Engineered Foods Labeling", California Secretary of State, December 3, 2012, 4:58 p.m.

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/725?t=16&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

2. “Election fraud in California Prop 37? vote count hits 6 million, then CA Secretary of States site loses 18,000 votes? pic.twitter.com/hlk4VM7i” @food_democracy,  December 4, 2012
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/727?t=19&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

3. “Documented Deceptions of No on 37 Campaign”, California Right to Know Campaign, November 2, 2012

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/728?t=21&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

4. "Rigged Elections", Op-Ed News, Michael Collins, October 22, 2012
http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/731?t=23&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

5. “How to Rig an Election”, Victoria Collier, Harper’s Magazine, November 5, 2012

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/729?t=25&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

6. “None Dare Call it Stolen”, Mark Crispin Miller, Harper’s Magazine, August 2005

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/go/730?t=27&akid=685.163659.SGEb-s

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Prop 37 recount: $55 million spent by corporations to defeat it

This blog urged voters to support prop 37 which aimed at labeling food. As we pointed out, millions was spent calling for a no vote  by food corporations like Monsanto, General Mills and Con-Agra to name a few. This should have convinced most thinking voters to vote yes but the scare tactics convinced many people to oppose it.  They warned of massive increases in costs and how it will destroy the "little guy" and that the proposition was flawed etc.  It may not have been perfect by any means, but these tactics are also used to convince workers not to fight for higher wages becasue they will simply increase prices and past the cost on to us. They may and they may not. What they can do depends on how organized we are, how strong and committed we are. They will get way with what they can if we let them.

We have been asked to make readers aware of the following and share it for your interest.

Please request via phone or online that all votes are counted for PROP 37 GMO labelling by:

1)  please sign the petition to Debra Bowen, California Secretary of State which says:

"We petition Debra Bowen, Secretary of State of California, to require ALL votes cast in the November 6 election be counted immediately. We specifically demand that ALL ballots in the following counties be counted and recorded: Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, and Santa Clara. We demand that the results of this complete ballot counting be made public immediately."

The petition can be found here:  http://signon.org/sign/prop-37-count-all-the?source=s.icn.em.cp&r_by=6040778

2)  Whether you live in California or not...please call this number and demand a recount.  Main Number: (916) 657-2166!... all you need to do is call the Secretary of State and ask for the absentee ballots to be counted in regards to prop 37. There is something like 2 million votes that are uncounted.

Many of the trendy, so-called organic businesses opposed prop 37 (see image) but they include.

  LaraBar
  Ben & Jerry's
  Kashi
  Cascadia Farms
  Back to Nature
  Muir Glen
  Odwalla
  Goya
  Horizon Milk

They sell their expensive trendy wares to those who can afford to shop at Whole Foods and other trendy places but when it comes to business, profits and the supremacy of capital comes first. They spent a total of $55 million it seems. The best democracy money can buy.

This image can be found here:
http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/drana/Pub/Prop37Traitors.jpg

Also check out this:
Did Prop 37 really lose?

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