If you read his 10 lessons it makes what we do here at Coffee Party USA even more prescient. It is interesting that everything we are all about, everything we fight for is evident in what failed in California. As Jonathan would say, we learn from our failures and we keep moving on. It is about using the networks, social networks and otherwise where we will need to make a difference in getting middle class centric issues resolved. We won’t get help from corporate media or any corporate run organization.
Read his piece below from the Huffington Post. He will be on Politics Done Right w/Egberto Willies today. So call into the show and talk to him about where we go from here, not only on Prop 37 but other issues that have material impact on the middle class
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Ten Grassroots Lessons From Monsanto’s Swift-Boating of the Prop37/Label GMO Campaign
by Jonathan Greenberg Posted: 11/11/2012 3:00 pm
Investigative journalist, author, and new media executiveThe populist campaign to label genetically modified food has been successfully swift-boated by Monsanto and the largest pesticide and junk food companies on earth. Our consumer movement made the costly mistake of arming itself with peace signs and love beads for what turned out to be a gunfight with a ruthless, assault rifle-equipped enemy.
What can we do about it? We can learn from our mistakes for the next necessary round in our struggle for food safety and environmentally responsible agriculture. Ronnie Cummins, the fiery head of the Organic Consumer’s Association (the top fund collector for California’s Prop 37 to label GMO’s), made it clear that when it comes to GMO labeling, citizens are not giving up. "Dirty money and dirty tactics may have won this skirmish," Cummins said, "but they will not win the war."
The big problem that we, the American People, now have is that big money has come to dictate political speech in America. Like a cancer spreading across our nation’s body politic, the mega-corporate financing of deceptive TV ad campaigns has become the predominant manner in which a majority of voters are "educated." Or, more frequently, mis-educated.
In 2004, multi-millionaires supporting George Bush’s re-election created "Swift Boat Vets for Truth." They spent many millions advancing expertly-crafted, lying TV ads stating that presidential candidate John Kerry, a Purple Heart-winning combat officer who had volunteered to fight in Vietnam, betrayed his country. These well-financed lies shifted the national campaign "narrative" to Kerry’s justification of his wartime record, away from the clear facts that President Bush lied to the American people to get them into an unpopular war in Iraq. And away from irrefutable evidence that his politically powerful father pulled strings so that he could evade military service during the Vietnam War.
Eight years later, more than $45.6 million was spent using Swift Boat tactics to defeat Prop 37. Multi-billion dollar corporations financed a relentless barrage of deceptive, fear-mongering ads, all of them bankrolled by tax-deductible contributions from the world’s largest pesticide and junk food companies. The top three funders alone, Monsanto (who brought us, and declared safe, Agent Orange and DDT), Du Pont, and Dow Chemical (of Bhopal fame), spent almost double the $8.7 million that the advocates of Prop 37 raised.
The Swift Boat style ads uprooted the Label GMO narrative from consumers "Right to Know," to the No on 37 Campaign’s carefully-crafted, fear-inducing slogans of a "Deceptive Labeling Scheme," and "Shakedown Lawsuits," and ‘Higher Grocery Bills." With Monsanto-financed junk science, "experts," data, and a million dollars a day of TV ads, No on 37’s propaganda successfully "re-educated" millions of Californians.