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CNN is postponing a scheduled Senate debate in Florida next week after Gov. Rick Scott (R) backed out of the event, citing the devastation wrought on the state by Hurricane Michael.
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Scott was set to face off against Sen. Bill NelsonClarence (Bill) William NelsonNASA, SpaceX and the private-public partnership that caused the flight of the Crew Dragon Lobbying world The most expensive congressional races of the last decade MORE (D-Fla.) on Tuesday in a debate hosted by the news network.
But in an email on Thursday, Scott’s campaign manager said that the governor had asked CNN to delay the event for two weeks, while he dealt with the aftermath of the storm.
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“Due to the catastrophic destruction caused by Hurricane Michael, Governor Scott will be solely focused on response and recovery efforts,” Jackie Schutz Zeckman wrote.
“Ensuring Florida’s Panhandle and Big Bend communities can rebuild and return to their homes and jobs is top priority.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for CNN said that the network had come to an agreement with both campaigns to push the debate to a later date while the state began the recovery process.
“Due to the devastating effects of Hurricane Michael in Florida, CNN, in agreement with both campaigns, is postponing the Florida Senate debate between Sen. Bill Nelson and Gov. Rick Scott,” the spokesperson said. “A date and time for the rescheduled debate will be announced soon.
Dan McLaughlin, a spokesperson for Nelson, said in an email that the senator was focused on ensuring that residents affected by the hurricane received federal assistance.
“Sen. Bill Nelson is in Florida’s Panhandle today and is working with federal authorities to get the maximum amount of resources into the state as soon as possible to help those who have been hardest hit by Hurricane Michael,” he said in an email. “Now is not the time to discuss politics.”
Hurricane Michael made landfall near Panama City Beach on the coast of Florida’s panhandle on Wednesday, making it the first Category 4 storm to strike the region in more than a century.
Authorities said that at least six people have been killed in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina as a result of the storm.
The hurricane came less than a month before voters are due to cast their ballots in Florida’s closely watched Senate and gubernatorial races.
Scott, who is term limited and cannot seek reelection as governor, is seeking to oust Nelson, a three-term Democrat and longtime presence in Florida politics.
The Senate race is among the closest in the country, with recent polls showing Nelson and Scott locked in a virtual dead heat. The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, currently puts the race in the “toss-up” column.
–Updated at 5:15 p.m.
After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg refused to testify at a joint hearing with lawmakers from seven nations over his company’s invasive privacy practices, the U.K. Parliament on Saturday legally seized thousands of secret and “potentially explosive” Facebook documents in what was described as an extraordinary move to uncover information about the company’s role in the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal.
“This week Facebook is going to learn the hard way that it is not above the law.”
—Christopher Wylie, whistleblower
According to the Guardian, the documents were initially obtained during a legal discovery process by the now-defunct U.S. software company Six4Three, which is currently suing Facebook.
Conservative MP Damian Collins, the Guardian reports, then “invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism” that compelled Six4Three’s founder—who was on a business trip in London—to hand over the documents, which reportedly “contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.”
“This week Facebook is going to learn the hard way that it is not above the law. In ignoring the inquiries of seven national parliaments, Mark Zuckerberg brought this escalation upon himself, as there was no other way to get this critical information,” wrote Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who was previously the director of research at Cambridge Analytica.
“The irony is… Mark Zuckerberg must be pretty pissed that his data was seized without him knowing,” Wylie added.
The U.K. Parliament’s seizure of documents Facebook has long worked to keep hidden from the public view comes as the social media behemoth is embroiled in yet another scandal, this time over its use of a right-wing public relations firm to spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about its critics.
“Facebook will learn that all are subject to the rule of law,” Labour MP Ian Lucas wrote on Twitter. “Yes, even them.”
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Sixty percent of U.S. waterways will be at risk for pollution from corporate giants, critics say, following the Trump administration’s announcement Tuesday that it will roll back an Obama-era water rule meant to protect Americans’ drinking water and all the waterways that flow into it.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the Obama administration’s 2015 Waters of the U.S. rule (WOTUS) rule would be redefined and no longer protect many of the nation’s streams and wetlands.
“This is an early Christmas gift to polluters and a lump of coal for everyone else,” said Bob Irvin, president of the national advocacy group American Rivers. “Too many people are living with unsafe drinking water. Low-income communities, indigenous peoples, and communities of color are hit hardest by pollution and river degradation.”
Under the Trump administration’s proposal, which Common Dreams reported as imminent last week, streams that flow only after rainfall or snowfall will no longer be protected from pollution by developers, agricultural companies, and the fossil fuel industry. Wetlands that are not connected to larger waterways will also not be protected, with developers potentially able to pave over those water bodies.
“The Trump administration will stop at nothing to reward polluting industries and endanger our most treasured resources.” —Jon Devine, NRDC
EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler suggested that WOTUS had created unfair roadblocks for industries, farmers, and ranchers who wanted to build and work near the nation’s waterways and were kept from doing so because of the potential for water pollution.
But green groups slammed the EPA for once again putting the interests of businesses ahead of the families which rely on the rule that keeps at least 60 percent of the nation’s drinking water sources safe from pollution while also protecting wildlife and ecosystems which thrive in wetlands across the country.
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“The Trump administration will stop at nothing to reward polluting industries and endanger our most treasured resources,” Jon Devine, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) federal water program, said in a statement. “Given the problems facing our lakes, streams and wetlands from the beaches of Florida to the drinking water of Toledo, now is the time to strengthen protections for our waterways, not weaken them.”
Ken Kopocis, the top water official at the EPA under President Barack Obama, told the Los Angeles Times that the regulatory rollback will create potential for the pollution of larger bodies of water, even though they are technically still covered under WOTUS and the Clean Water Act.
“You can’t protect the larger bodies of water unless you protect the smaller ones that flow into them,” said Kopocis. “You end up with a situation where you can pollute or destroy smaller streams and bodies, and it will eventually impact the larger ones.”
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, called the revised WOTUS rule a “steamroller” to environmental oversight that American families rely on.
“Piece by piece, molecule by molecule, Trump is handing over our country to corporate polluters and other industrial interests at the expense of our future,” said Hauter.
“The proposed rule will take us back five decades in our effort to clean up our waterways,” argued Theresa Pierno of the National Parks Conservancy Association (NPCA). “We must ensure clean water protections extend to all streams, wetlands, lakes and rivers that contribute to the health of larger water bodies downstream, and our communities, parks, and wildlife that depend on them.”
“We will fight to ensure the highest level of protections for our nation’s waters—for our health, our communities and our parks,” Pierno added.
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After Congress passed the $867 billion Farm Bill last week without the House’s “cruel” and “shameful” provisions to tighten work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—often called food stamps—the Trump administration is pushing to impose such restrictions through changes at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“This regulation blatantly ignores the bipartisan farm bill that the president is signing today and disregards over 20 years of history giving states flexibility to request waivers based on local job conditions.”
—Sen. Debbie Stabenow
While critics including Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter charged that the final Farm Bill “fails to fix critical problems in our food system,” she and many others expressed relief that it “does not include many of the horrible provisions from the House bill that would have gutted the safety net provided by SNAP.”
The USDA’s new proposed rule is supposedly a trade-off for President Donald Trump’s support of the Farm Bill, which he is expected to sign as early as Thursday. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue reportedly said on a press call that “the president has directed me to propose regulatory reforms to ensure those who are able to work do so in exchange for their benefits.”
Under current SNAP policy, although able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) can only receive three months of food benefits within three years if they don’t work at least 20 hours per week, states with high rates of unemployment can waive those restrictions and grant extensions to 15 percent of the ABAWD population. Unused exemptions can be saved for later.
That will all change if Trump has his way. As the Associated Press outlined:
Noting that by the administration’s own calculations, “the rule could jeopardize food assistance for some 755,000 Americans struggling to find stable work,” Rebecca Vallas, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress (CAP), delivered a scathing takedown of the proposal on Twitter.
“The Trump [administration] is dressing up their cruel cuts in the language of work, claiming their mass starvation plan is about the ‘dignity of work.’ Well, I’ve got news for them. Making struggling workers hungrier won’t help them find work any faster.”
—Rebecca Vallas, CAP
“As we know, Trump doesn’t give up when he can’t get his cruel agenda through Congress,” she said. “The Trump [administration] is dressing up their cruel cuts in the language of work, claiming their mass starvation plan is about the ‘dignity of work.’ Well, I’ve got news for them. Making struggling workers hungrier won’t help them find work any faster.”
“In fact, taking basics like food away from people unable to meet strict work reporting requirements is *directly* counterproductive to the goal of work,” Vallas added. “Research shows that when workers have access to those basics, they’re better able to work and have higher earnings.”
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“If Trump actually gave any f*cks about the ‘dignity of work,'” she concluded, “instead of taking food out of the mouths of struggling workers, he’d be raising the poverty-level minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25/hour for nearly a decade.”
News of the USDA proposal also outraged the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate agriculture committee.
“Congress writes laws, and the administration is required to write rules based on the law,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), told the Washington Post. “Administrative changes should not be driven by ideology. I do not support unilateral and unjustified changes that would take food away from families.”
“This regulation blatantly ignores the bipartisan Farm Bill that the president is signing today and disregards over 20 years of history giving states flexibility to request waivers based on local job conditions,” she added to the AP. “I expect the rule will face significant opposition and legal challenges.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) turned to Twitter to weigh in, and accused Trump of “attacking the poor.” The senator added, “We should be expanding programs like food stamps that lift people out of poverty, not making them even harder to access.”
This post has been updated with comment from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
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As news broke Thursday morning that Deutsche Bank’s German headquarters had been raided in Frankfurt over, numerous observers were quick to note the bank’s deep ties to U.S. President Donald Trump.
The bank’s offices were reportedly raided in connection with the Panama Papers money laundering investigation. Two employees and several “unidentified people in positions of authority” are suspected of failing to report the laundering of more than $350 million which were kept by the bank in accounts located in the British Virgin Islands.
According to NPR, more than 900 Deutsche Bank clients were able to keep their money on the islands in 2016.
In addition to its ongoing legal troubles, having been fined $600 million just last year for laundering $10 billion in Russian currency, Deutsche Bank has been known in recent years as “the one financial institution that stuck with Donald Trump when virtually all other banks wouldn’t touch him,” as John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus, wrote in Common Dreams in July.
As Trump’s former top aide Steve Bannon said in early 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s campaign will largely deal with the president’s finances with the bank.
The probe, he said “goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. They’re going to go right through that.”
The bank continued to extend credit to Trump after he failed to pay back $330 million on a loan. Deutsche Bank also counts other members of the Trump family, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, among its clients. The bank opened its own investigation into Trump shortly after he entered office to determine whether its loans to the president had any links to Moscow.
Mueller last year subpoenaed the bank as part of his investigation into Trump’s campaign, ignoring the president’s “red line” that his finances should be off limits to the probe. The subpoena reportedly led to private calls from Trump to shut down the special counsel’s investigation.
“The information that could bring down Trump—and that presumably Robert Mueller is trying to obtain—may be somewhere in the Deutsche Bank files,” wrote Feffer earlier this year. “The relevant documents would link the bank’s two most questionable financial activities—lending to Trump and washing Russian money.”
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After The Intercept reported over the weekend that a bipartisan group of senators is pushing, as its first legislative priority, a bill that would hand states more power to punish boycotts of Israel—even as the prolonged and deeply harmful government shutdown continues into its third week—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Sunday condemned the legislation itself and urged Democrats to block any bills that are not related to reopening the government.
“It’s absurd that the first bill during the shutdown is legislation which punishes Americans who exercise their constitutional right to engage in political activity. Democrats must block consideration of any bills that don’t reopen the government,” Sanders wrote on Twitter. “Let’s get our priorities right.”
Sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the legislation would give states and localities more legal authority to punish companies that participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Kathleen Ruane, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU, condemned the measure as an attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights that must be voted down.
“The legislation, like the unconstitutional state anti-boycott laws it condones, sends a message to Americans that they will be penalized if they dare to disagree with their government.”
—Kathleen Ruane, ACLU
“In the midst of a partial government shutdown, Democratic and Republican senators have decided that one of their first orders of business… should be to sneak through a bill that would weaken Americans’ First Amendment protections,” Ruane declared.
“The bill, Combatting BDS Act, encourages states to adopt the very same anti-boycott laws that two federal courts blocked on First Amendment grounds,” she continued. “The legislation, like the unconstitutional state anti-boycott laws it condones, sends a message to Americans that they will be penalized if they dare to disagree with their government. We therefore urge senators to vote no on the Combatting BDS Act.”
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According to The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim and Glenn Greenwald, “26 states now have enacted some version of a law to punish or otherwise sanction entities which participate in or support the boycott of Israel, while similar laws are pending in at least 13 additional states. Rubio’s bill is designed to strengthen the legal basis to defend those Israel-protecting laws from constitutional challenge.”
“Punishment aimed at companies which choose to boycott Israel can also sweep up individual American citizens in its punitive net, because individual contractors often work for state or local governments under the auspices of a sole proprietorship or some other business entity,” Grim and Greenwald noted. “That was the case with Texas elementary school speech pathologist Bahia Amawi, who lost her job working with autistic and speech-impaired children in Austin because she refused to promise not to boycott goods produced in Israel and/or illegal Israeli settlements.”
In the last Congress, Rubio’s bill was co-sponsored by six received the backing of at least six Democrats who are still in the Senate: Bob Menendez (N.J.); Joe Manchin (W.Va.); Ben Cardin (Md.); Ron Wyden (Ore.); Gary Peters (Mich.); and Debbie Stabenow (Mich.).
As The Intercept reported, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) “plans to support the Rubio bill, rather than whip votes against it.” If all seven Democrats back Rubio’s bill, it will have enough votes to pass the Senate.
Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, expressed outrage at Rubio’s legislation, and Schumer’s support for it, on Twitter.
“It’s horrifying that Sen. Schumer and the Democratic leadership’s first Senate bill (‘S. 1’) allows state and local governments to boycott U.S. companies which boycott Israel,” Shahid wrote. “How is this the first priority?”
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Less than 24 hours after Senate Democrats successfully voted down a motion to proceed to legislation that would give states and localities more power to punish pro-Palestinian boycotts of Israel, rights groups raised alarm and urged Americans to call their senators immediately on Wednesday as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) moved to bring the bill up for yet another procedural vote.
“McConnell apparently has no more important business to take care of in the Senate than trying to force a vote twice in 24 hours to strip away our First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights.”
—Josh Ruebner, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights
“When was the last time the Senate voted twice in less than 24 hours to consider the same bill?” Josh Ruebner, policy director a the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, asked on Twitter. “They’re doing it right now on S.1, a bill to authorize $38 billion in weapons for Israel and encourage states to deny contracts to people who support boycotts for Palestinian rights.”
“McConnell apparently has no more important business to take care of in the Senate than trying to force a vote twice in 24 hours to strip away our First Amendment right to boycott for Palestinian rights,” Ruebner added, alluding to the fact that the Republican leader is refusing to allow a vote on legislation to reopen the government.
In response to McConnell’s rapid attempt to re-vote on a motion that failed Tuesday night, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) issued an urgent call for people to contact their representatives and pressure them to oppose the measure again.
“Republicans have already reintroduced S.1 for another cloture vote!” JVP noted after applauding Tuesday’s vote as a “major victory” for free expression.
JVP went on to provide a links to find senators’ contact information and see how they voted Tuesday night, along with a sample call script.
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While the second vote on the motion was initially expected by Wednesday night, the Senate announced that the vote has been moved to 1:45 pm ET on Thursday.
Sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), S.1 is a package of foreign-policy legislation that includes a measure to give states and localities more legal authority to punish companies and individuals who participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The ACLU, Palestinian rights groups, and progressive lawmakers have denounced the bill as a flagrant attack on the First Amendment.
“The bill, Combatting BDS Act, encourages states to adopt the very same anti-boycott laws that two federal courts blocked on First Amendment grounds,” Kathleen Ruane, senior legislative counsel at the ACLU, said in a statement. “The legislation, like the unconstitutional state anti-boycott laws it condones, sends a message to Americans that they will be penalized if they dare to disagree with their government.”
The motion to end debate and proceed to a final vote on the legislation—which needed 60 votes to pass—failed Tuesday night by a margin of 56-44, with four Senate Democrats voting with Republicans in favor of the motion. Those Democrats were: Bob Menendez (N.J.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), and Doug Jones (Ala.).
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Tens of thousands of public school teachers and support staff with the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest district in the country—continued the city’s first strike in three decades on Thursday.
The United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) kicked off the long-promised strike on Monday over unmet demands for higher payer; smaller class sizes; more special education staff, bilingual education instructors, nurses, counselors, and librarians; and stricter regulation of the city’s many charter schools.
UTLA charges that district superintendent Austin Beutner—a pro-charter school former business executive with no education background—is unqualified for the job. The district has 640,000 students, and while about 500,000 are enrolled in public schools, Los Angeles has more charter schools than anywhere else in the United States.
As negotiations resumed at City Hall on Thursday, with Los Angeles’ Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti mediating between the district and union representatives, strike supporters and participants shared updates from the streets with the hashtags #LAUSDStrike, #UTLAStrong, #WeAreLA, and #RedForEd.
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Even though California is the world’s fifth-largest economy, public schools across the state have struggled for decades to adequately serve students, particularly in communities of color and regions with low incomes.
The strike—which has cast a spotlight on rifts within the Democratic Party in the solidly blue state—has garnered support from multiple Democrats in Congress, including Reps. Ted Lieu (Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (Minn.).
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in an email sent to his supporters on Thursday, expressed solidarity with the teachers, tying the protests to the broader issue of “a rigged economy” that gives major tax breaks to billionaires and corporations rather than investing in educating children.
“What we accept as normal today with regard to education, I want your grandchildren to tell you that you were crazy to accept,” Sanders wrote. Calling for free, full-day, high-quality childcare for every child, starting at age three, and tuition-free public college, he concluded that “what we really need in this country is a revolution in public education.”
The ongoing strike in Los Angeles follows various #RedForED walkouts and rallies that public school teachers and unions organized last year across Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
And the push to improve L.A. schools has inspired even more teachers to protest. According to Payday Report, on Jan. 28, “thousands of teachers marching under the banner of Virginia Educators United are planning to call off from school for only one day in order to march on the state legislature.”
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World leaders have shown little leadership in moving to ban autonomous weapons that would require no human involvement when selecting and killing targets, but a new survey shows that the global population overwhelmingly opposes the development of such “killer robots.”
Commissioned by the Campaign to Ban Killer Robots, a new poll released Tuesday by Ipsos MORI asked between 500 and 1,000 people in each of the 26 countries it surveyed whether they approved of autonomous weapons, and found that three in five respondents were vehemently against the proposal.
“This poll shows that the states blocking a ban on killer robots are totally out of step with public opinion. Governments should be protecting people from the myriad risks that killer robots pose.” —Rasha Abdul Rahim, Amnesty Tech
The survey showed that public opposition has grown considerably since January 2017, when just 56 percent of respondents to a similar poll opposed the development of killer robots.
In the new poll, people in countries around the world objected to autonomous killing machines due to concerns that they would be “unaccountable” for their actions, while two-thirds of respondents also said they opposed the development of weapons which they believe would “cross a moral line.”
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But as noted by Amnesty International, which has joined with the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots to push for an international ban on autonomous weapons, world leaders are not listening.
“This poll shows that the states blocking a ban on killer robots are totally out of step with public opinion. Governments should be protecting people from the myriad risks that killer robots pose,” said Rasha Abdul Rahim, acting deputy director of Amnesty Tech.
Instead, Abdul Rahim added, “governments should take note of this poll and urgently begin negotiating a new treaty to prohibit these horrifying weapons.”
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Twenty-eight countries, including Costa Rica, Palestine, and Pakistan, support a ban on killer robots; Brazil, Chile, and Austria have formally proposed a legally-binding agreement to prohibit their use. The document would require “meaningful human control over critical functions in lethal autonomous weapon systems.”
But such agreements have been thwarted by global powers including the U.S., Russia, and South Korea, which all indicated at the annual Convention on Conventional Weapons last year that they would not support the proposed treaty.
In doing so, Amnesty International noted, world leaders are undermining “the right to life and other human rights,” as well as defying the wishes of the populations they represent.
Fifty-two percent of Americans who were surveyed opposed the development of killer robots, along with 59 percent of Russians and nearly three-quarters of South Koreans.
“We still have time to halt the development and proliferation of fully autonomous weapons, but we won’t have that luxury for long,” Abdul Rahim said.
Only a full ban on such machines “can help ensure respect for international law and address ethical and security concerns regarding delegating the power to make life-and-death decisions to machines,” she added.
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Food safety advocates are expressing sharp disappointment with the final federal GMO labeling rule, released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
While industry-friendly Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue asserted in a press statement that the new standard for foods produced using genetic engineering (GE or GMO) would boost “the transparency of our nation’s food system” and ensure “clear information and labeling consistency for consumers about the ingredients in their food,” groups like the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)—and even food giants like Nestlé—say it does nothing of the sort.
“It is obvious that this rule is intended to hide, not disclose, information about genetically modified foods,” said IATP senior attorney Sharon Treat.
Among the concerns being raised is that the rule, published Friday in the Federal Register and with implementation set to begin in 2020, refers not to the widely recognized phrase “genetically-modified food” but rather “bioengineered (BE) food.”
“USDA’s prohibition of the well-established terms, GE and GMO, on food labels will confuse and mislead consumers,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director at the Center for Food Safety.
To make the disclosure, food producers have four options: text, a friendly-looking symbol, an electronic or digital link, or a text message. According to Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter, the symbol suggests “to consumers the product is natural and sustainable, when genetically engineered foods are anything but.”
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The option for the use of electronic codes, meanwhile, discriminates against those without access to a smartphone, tablet, or reliable internet access, and while the companies would also need to provide a telephone number for a consumer to call, that is onerous, the groups say.
Moreover, says the NonGMO Project, many products that deserve a label won’t have to get one:
In light of such loopholes, Dana Perls, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth U.S., summed up the new rules as “a disaster.”
“No one should be surprised that the most anti-consumer, anti-transparency administration in modern times is denying Americans basic information about what’s in their food and how it’s grown,” argued Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
“At a time when consumers are asking more and more questions about the use of genetic engineering,” Faber continued, “today’s rule will further undermine the technology by sowing greater confusion among Americans who simply want the right to know if their food is genetically modified—the same right held by consumers in 64 other countries.”
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