I’m back from a working “vacation” visiting my Mom on the Washington coast. Basically, while Mom is low-maintenance, her house isn’t.
Even after 20 years, the Evergreen People’s Republic still fascinates and amazes me. Between Spokane and Pugetopia, I usually take the back way through the scablands and wheat country, but one thing never changes: No matter how fast or slow I go, friendly Washington drivers always insist on having a tailgate party with me.
It was nice to get home, especially this year. Mom and I barely survived an avalanche … an utter blitz of nonstop political ads for and against Ballot Initiative 522. I-522’s nine pages of gobblygook was supposedly about requiring front-of-package labeling for “genetically-engineered” foods.
Between them, the warring factions blew $30 million on an off-year ballot measure – an outrageous $25 per vote cast.
To anyone following the “Frankenfood” fight, it’s no surprise the nays were led by Monsanto ($5 million), Dow, Bayer, and DuPont, alongside other agribusinesses that fronted their money through a Grocery Manufacturers Association “fund” – all told, $22 million, of which only $550 came from Washington residents.
The Yes faction was fronted by the Washington State Nurses Association, (an AFL-CIO union), along with Greens, foodies, organic/alternative grocers and growers, who combined to toss away about $8 million. While the Yes funders included 10,000 or so real people, about 70 percent of the Yes cash came from outside Washington, including the D.C.-based anti-GMO Center for Food Safety and California firm Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps.
Does that matter? Well, kinda. I-522 certainly broke out along the expected ideological and cultural lines: Right versus left, rural versus urban. Only four counties in all of Washington voted for I-522 – King and three already-flaky others. Outside of Pugetopia, I-522 lost.
Where food is a lifestyle accessory or political statement, I-522 passed. Where actual food production is a community’s lifeblood, voters blew away I-522 by huge margins, up to 82 percent against – enough to defeat the initiative.
But there’s another, more subtle dynamic that played out. I-522 wasn’t Big Evil Corporations versus Nice People Simply Wanting to Inform You. It was fought primarily between competing corporations, businesses battling for market share via the political process. Monsanto did it, but so did Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, to the tune of $2.3 million.
Company owner David Bronner is a Burning Man regular and donor to Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential run. Last year he locked himself in a cage at a hemp protest in front of the White House.
A glowing Mother Jones profile explains that Bronner’s eccentric grandfather Emmanuel created the soaps and founded the company. Then David’s chemist father Jim quit Monsanto (oh, the irony) to save the business. Then, when Jim died, David took over.
Bronner then grew the firm’s sales from $5 million to $64 million in 15 years – very impressive, and all without, as Inc. Magazine put it, a “dime” for advertising. Bronner not only staked out an honest “organic” niche, but successfully litigated “organic-in-label-only” competitors off the shelves.
More importantly, as Mother Jones explains, rather than advertise, Bronner has plowed over $5 million into “a variety of causes” such as “Occupy Monsanto” – which, as Inc. put it, has “the same effect as advertising, anyway.”
How? Consider Bronner’s Magic Soap (featuring 18-in-1 Hemp) label, which reads like it was written on the magic bus, pushing just about every politically and organically correct hot button there is: “100% Cruelty Free/100% Vegan/Not Animal Tested/Certified Fair Trade Ingredients/100% Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic Bottle/Oregon Tilth Certified Organic.” Never mind that hemp is, as Bronner told Inc., “at the nexus of a bunch of hot issues.”
What better way for a corporation to secure the loyalty of its “aware” customers – and market share – than backing their pet causes with cold, hard political cash? Even if that cash is, gasp, corporate?
Yep, and Bronner has plenty – for example, aloe Ivory costs 45 cents a bar at Super 1. Bronner’s castile “Magic Soap” costs four bucks, which in turn is nearly triple that of the competing castile soap. Wow.
Guess we better get that corporate money out of politics, right?