This U.S. Department of Agriculture may be as slavish a servant of big agricultural corporations as we have ever seen, but it still has lawfully-mandated duties, and luckily these include taking public comments on their proposed changes to the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service's new genetically-modified crop approval process. And their proposal -- surprise, surprise! -- stinks pretty awful, in that it seems to have been formulated by folks who don't understand that corporations don't create GMO crops to increase yields or promote healthier food, but to withstand ever-higher doses of their own proprietary pesticides. The APHIS proposal doesn't consider a lot of the ill effects of GMO crops, including increased weed resistance to ever-expanding use of pesticides, and GMO seed propensity to drift into fields that don't grow GMO crops. Food and Water Watch helps you tell the USDA to put health-related issues front and center when considering whether to approve GMO crops.
Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced S. 2390, the FBI Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, and the full Senate will soon consider it. S. 2390 would prevent the FBI from retaliating against whistleblowers, and would give whistleblowers the right to have their case reviewed by an Inspector General, the Attorney General, or a federal court. If you're aware of the Obama Administration's "war on whistleblowers" -- a war that has not only claimed good Americans blowing the whistle on medical device problems, CIA torture, and warrantless wiretapping, but also many good FBI officers -- then you probably see that FBI whistleblowers need more protection. And the Senate, at least, also seems to see this need -- S. 2390 has 11 sponsors, including lead sponsor Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and 10 other Senators evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Hence the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Senator to help government workers who want to expose corruption and wrongdoing by supporting S. 2390.
Finally, the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (or HHS) have been working on restaurant menu labeling guidelines since 2010 -- which would, among other things, include information about calories, fat, sodium, and sugar -- but they still haven't finished the job, so Moms Rising helps you tell the FDA and HHS to enact the most vigorous restaurant menu food labeling guidelines possible. This isn't some outrageous Big Gummint mandate, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of big food corporations (including Starbucks and Panera) have voluntarily started such labeling, and that some states and municipalities have enacted their own mandates. I suppose the more resourceful troublemakers among us will complain that people aren't literate enough about these things generally so-what's-the-point, but naturally the more scientific studies tell us that folks actually do make better choices with better information. Giving folks stuff to read promotes literacy, who'da thunk it? And, of course, we don't abide folks trying to convince us to let the perfect murder the good.
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