To the Editor of the Daily Journal,

You would think that before your journal would publish garbage, that it would have done some investigative journalism.  Your article (click link to see the original article Gordon is responding to) on quota in the milk industry is another distortion of the truth, and it is the same propaganda that Mr. McCarthy has pushed on the courts.  As my father taught me a a young age, garbage in garbage out, and the rulings we have received from the courts are a testament to the garbage that Mr. McCarthy has filled the courts with.

To start with, in typical McCarthy distortion of truth, the first paragraph contains four distinct  distortions.:

1)  He does not represent California dairy farmers, he represents 1/3 of the states dairy farmers who receive this welfare quota payment.  That quota payment is 1 billion dollars every 6.3 years for the last 40 years.  It is taken from the 933 dairy farmers of all sizes  and handed over to the favored 300 that Mr. McCarthy  represents. Fact.

2)  There isn’t any corporate campaign.  Stop QIP is a loose coalition  of dairy farmers of all sizes. Fact.

3)   Quota is not a part of a complex milk pricing  system.  The USDA specifically said that quota is not involved with the pricing or pooling of milk. Fact.

4)    It does not equalize revenue for Producers it does just the opposite.  95% of the milk is Grade A and we blend all of the classes of milk into a pool and we all get that blended price, but the quota holders get and additional 13 million added to their milk checks every month. 157 million a year and 1 billion dollars every 6.3 years, and that extra revenue is take from our industry  in the form of an assessment that we have to pay.  A far cry from equal.  Fact.

Second paragraph:

1)  McCarthy saved the Favored 300 dairies from having to compete on a level playing field while they ran out of business     over 450 dairies, and mostly small dairy farmers at that.  Watch the video that names his favored 300 and the amount of cows  they represent.  A far cry from small dairies. I am paying $3500 a month and my neighbor is getting an additional $250,000 a month. Fact.

2)   Saved the nation from disrupting the supply of milk. We have a huge oversupply of milk and eliminating quota disrupts nothing, the Favored 300 would start to get the same money all of us get.  Fact.

Third paragraph:

1)   Nobody from Stop Qip that I know of wants to wipe out any dairy farmer, we are trying to prevent our dairies from going out of business.  The proof is in the pudding. We have lost over 500 plus dairies in just the last 7 years.  I take offense at this paragraph,  because I am a small dairy of 354 milking cows,  when McCarthy represents two families of dairymen  that have a combined  45,000  milking cows. Fact.

Fourth paragraph:

1)  McCarthy may consider the 1.7 million cows as his family, but 353 dairymen who signed petitions that Stopqip represents, and 45% of the dairyman do not own quota,  do not consider him family.  We consider him the high priced attorney and law firm who represents big money and definitely our enemy of free enterprise, and democracy. Fact.

Fifth paragraph:

1)   Quota  was issued for free to all of the class 1 shippers and their so called assets are only good if you have the liability side to the equation.  Mr. McCarthy conveniently leaves out that part of the story.  There is not an asset without all of us dairymen on the hook for the payments made.  Getting rid of quota eliminates the inflated asset, for the Favored 300, but it eliminates the the billion dollar liability for the entire 933 dairymen.  Fact. 

Sixth paragraph:

1)    We launched a campaign to have a democratic referendum to determine if the industry wants to continue with this cancer called quota.  By eliminating quota our industry would have a level playing field.  The favored 300 has spent in the millions of dollars (our millions) trying to stop us from having a referendum and Mr. McCarthy has done an excellent job of stopping us at every turn.  The Governor and the Attorney Generals office  has pulled out all f the stops, and to  say that their tactics are legal, would be a stretch, but they are definitely not ethical, but who blames McCarthy  and his law firm, they are making bank on this illegal tax. We would be more then glad to present the facts of this campaign and challenge anybody to a debate on how CDFA and McCarthy and the AG’s office  have consistently not adhered to the law as it is written in the Food and AG code.  Fact.

The rest of the paragraphs:

The hardest part for them was to take a simple system and make it complicated for the courts to understand. They were not there to  protect  the industry , they were there to help a small part of the industry, continue to take their welfare quota checks at the tune of 157 million dollars a year.  You don’t have to do the math to see how crippling this tax is; that just benefits the Favored 300.  If anyone investigated  the facts, you would conclude that only and idiot would believe what Mr. McCarthy is selling to  the courts and people like you.  That is why he gets the big bucks.

California had over 1496 dairies just 7 years ago, and we are down to 933 dairies a reduction of over 1/3 of our industry and we are still losing dairies, and we anticipate in ten years we will be left with 300 quota dairies.   Fact  

Go to stopqipdairytax.com and watch the videos to learn the truth and see the evidence.  

Your article is trash and a injustice to our state dairy industry.

Respectfully submitted,

Craig Gordon

Stop QIP