In response to the Cornucopia Institute’s attempted smear campaign against me and the concept of organic field testing, many are wondering what happened to Cornucopia’s threat of a lawsuit.
On Tuesday, March 15, 2011, at 9:28 AM, Will Fantle threatened me with legal action. He’s the co-director of the pro-bureaucracy Cornucopia Institute and he was quite upset that I had revealed a couple of his organization’s funding sources: George Soros, a billionaire dedicated to the downfall of the United States of America, and George Siemon, the CEO of Organic Valley Family of Farms Brand, a company that the head of Cornucopia (Kastel) used to work for.
Knowing who’s behind fake grassroots organizations like Cornucopia goes a long way to explaining why the leaders of the multi-billion-dollar organic-import industry remain dead-set opposed to organic field testing. Family-scale, domestic organic farmers are screaming for relief from useless paperwork, exorbitant certification fees and from competition against phony certified-organic foods from China. But with millions of dollars at stake on a monthly basis, Fantle obviously knows which side his bread is buttered on.
In Fantle’s own words,
We will contact our attorneys later today and ask them to pursue a defamation case against you. If in fact you are selling any books we hope the court will compel you to turn over some of your assets to our public charity which you have inappropriately injured.
If you wisely exercise the option to remediate some of the damage you have done we would recommend you submitting a draft of your apology. If you distribute something inadequate we will still hold the option of filing a lawsuit against you.
It's been four months and there is still no lawsuit. Either the legal team at Cornucopia is bogged down in internal bureaucracy or they know darn-well they don’t have a case. They can wait another four months if they want but an apology is NOT forthcoming from me.
I have invited Cornucopia to make public its financial records, but they refuse to do so. This leaves domestic organic farmers to wonder, Does Cornucopia even care about me? Let’s face it, Cornucopia doesn’t stand for family-scale organic farmers; they stand for those who make millions by importing organic foods that are only organic on paper.
In every email I have received from Cornucopia they have assured me that they support my stand on the need for organic field testing. But if you search their site you’ll see this simply is not true. The term “field testing” does not show up on any pages of Cornucopia’s site in the context of the certification of organic farms. Click here and see for yourself. Of course, now that I have once again exposed them they’ll probably add something to their site about field testing as a way to prevent fraud and gross negligence. But as you’ll see by the screen shots taken on July 20th, 2011, they have no actual interest in this type of field testing whatsoever. None. Their benefactors simply will not stand for it.
If they really knew they were right and I was wrong, wouldn’t they make good on their promise and launch that lawsuit? It turns out they were just trying to gag me with the threat of a lawsuit. Nice try guys.
And they claim I’m the one with a vested interest.
