Last night, the US Senate released its Continuous Resolution spending bill. Attached to the bill was the latest Monsanto rider – a law that would strip federal courts of their authority to halt the sale and planting of an illegal, potentially hazardous GE crop.
Additionally, it has provisions that would harm our farmer’s competitiveness in the form of a GIPSA rider, limiting the Obama administration’s ability to protect farmers and ranchers from complex, anti-competitive market concerns.
Dakota Rural Action member Pat Trask gives us a bit of a history on this kind of legislation:
“All of the compendium of horrible information that brought the US Supreme Court to affirm the lower courts to rule against trans-genetic alfalfa and other trans-genetic perennial biotechnology was circumvented by a special session of Congress in which a heavily Monsanto-sponsored chair of the House Agriculture Committee told the Secretary of Agriculture either you re-legalize trans-genetic alfalfa, or we will circumvent your office by a direct congressional statute to legalize it.
So, this effort to again throw the entire system of checks and balances in our American form of government – We the People – is being distilled down into one branch of government which has already been shown to being vulnerable the briberous-appearing indulgence of Monsanto. It must necessarily not be allowed by the members of Congress to circumvent judicial oversight over issues of science and the law that are increasingly adversarial to the monopolistic aspirations of Monsanto and its allies.”
Call Senators John Thune and Tim Johnson RIGHT NOW to tell them you are not happy about the Monsanto and GIPSA riders, and that they need to amend the Continuing Resolution before it is passed:
Senator John Thune
Phone: (202) 224-2321
Senator Tim Johnson
Phone: (202) 224-5842