No on 37 campaign accused of deception

Anti-37 campaign of deception
By now, many of you know that the No on Prop. 37 anti-GMO-labeling campaign—funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by pesticide giants Monsanto, DuPont, etc.—was forced to pull one of its television ads for misrepresenting the credentials of its spokesperson, one Henry I. Miller, M.D. The ad, as NaturalNews.com recently reported, “featured an opinion from an individual identified on screen as ‘Dr. Henry I. Miller M.D., Stanford University, founding dir. FDA Office of Technology.’

“As it turns out, Dr. Henry Miller doesn’t work for Stanford University at all,” continued writer Mike Adams. “He’s actually a ‘research fellow’ at [conservative think tank] the Hoover Institution, which just happens to be physically located on the same plot of land as Stanford University.”

“What’s important here is the larger pattern of deception,” offered consumer-rights advocate Zack Kaldveer, the Bay Area-based assistant media director for the Yes on 37 campaign, in a recent phone interview. “These pesticide companies—the six largest pesticide corporations in the world—are bankrolling the No on 37 campaign to the tune of $20 million out of a $36 million war chest [that they have raised so far]. And these are the same corporations that told us Agent Orange and DDT were safe.”

Interestingly, as Kaldveer pointed out in a recent piece he wrote for CommonDreams.org, Miller is “a founding mentor of a now-defunct tobacco front group [The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition] that tried to discredit the links between cigarettes and cancer, he’s repeatedly called for the reintroduction of DDT … 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 U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to ensure proper vetting and testing of new drugs’ safety while outsourcing more of its functions to private industries.”

Ouch!

Miller, who remains the face of the No on 37 campaign, “is promoted as an arbiter of good science and someone that Californians can trust with their health,” Kaldveer told me, “but in reality he is nothing more than a scientific front man for some of the most notorious corporate bad actors.” On Oct. 5, said Kaldveer in his CommonDreams article, “the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics…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.”

The Yes on 37 campaign recently sent letters to the U. S. Department of Justice asking for a criminal investigation for “possible fraudulent misuse” of the official seal of the FDA, after “misrepresent[ing] an FDA quote from 20 years ago and using the FDA logo” in campaign literature “to make it sound like the FDA opposes Prop. 37, which it does not,” Kaldveer said.

“These pesticide companies and their allies in the junk-food biz know their profit margins will suffer [if foods containing GMOs are labeled as such], as they have been in Europe,” said Kaldveer. “That’s why the opponents are spending a million dollars a day, largely on television ads, to make Prop. 37 seem complicated when in reality it’s [asking for] one line of ink on a label as is required for 3,000 other ingredients. …

“Who should you trust … Monsanto, DuPont and corporate shills like Henry Miller, or Prop. 37 supporters like Consumers Union, the California Nurses Association, the Sierra Club, the American Public Health Association, Public Citizen and the Center for Food Safety?”

Go to www.carighttoknow.org to learn more about the Yes on 37 campaign.