Vermont's GMO labeling law goes into effect on July 1, so, naturally, Congress wants to stop it. And they know most Americans support labeling genetically-modified organisms in food, so your Congressfolk won't say they'd just prefer to ignore the people's will and do the bidding of their Big Ag and big food donors instead. Hence my state's allegedly-conservative junior Senator wrote back to me last month, "I do not believe that a customer should be prohibited from knowing whether or not their food was bioengineered. I am, however, concerned about a 'patchwork' approach where food labeling requirements and definitions vary by state. A patchwork approach could lead to scenarios where a food is considered bioengineered in one state but not in another. Moreover, this could confuse customers and could hurt smaller food businesses that lack regulatory expertise but want to sell their products in multiple states." That answer's got it all -- it takes small businesses hostage, it says labeling will "confuse" you, it lays the ten-dollar word "bioengineering" on you, and it derides local control as a "patchwork" approach. And here you thought "local control" was an actual conservative value or something! So Consumers Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject efforts to overrule state efforts to label GMOs.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (or CFPB) to rein in the notorious abuses of payday lenders, then both CREDO and Stop Payday Lenders still help you do that. You know the drill by now: payday lenders target Americans in financial trouble with high-interest loans that can easily roll over into the next paycheck, and the next paycheck, and so on and so on ad nauseam, until you're trapped in a triple-digit loan you can't get out of. I have no use for people who respond then don't get in financial trouble, as if banksters and their ilk don't destroy jobs as often as they can, as if we should always blame victims and never blame predators. But we should also attend very closely one simple matter that the payday loan industry and their hacks would prefer we ignore: that more debt makes people less free -- less free to raise families, less free to improve oneself, less free to pursue leisure activities, and less free to make a difference in the world, which last item is our true birthright as Americans. So when we pursue "free" markets über alles -- when we let banksters and their like block our government's regulation of their activities on our behalf, so they can put more people and corporations in deeper debt to them -- then we make America less free, because "free" markets über alles only means freedom for that market's biggest actors.
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