Health Education Research

Rush on Glory

2011-09-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) was a "Founding Father" and signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was a doctor, teacher, and prolific writer. He founded Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. He was a vocal opponent of slavery and capital punishment. He made many contributions to medical science. He was a devout Christian.

Rush was controversial, too, for some of his views on race, for some of his medical practices, and for his opposition to George Washington as Commander-in-Chief. He was buddies with Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams.

Benjamin Rush was a Surgeon General of the Continental Army and observed, first hand, the effects of war. He has been called "the father of American psychiatry" for his work with the mentally ill.

Rush believed that, in addition to the government's Department of War, there should be a Department of Peace. He believed that to promote peace, free schools should teach arithmetic, reading, writing, and religion - especially Christianity because "...it belongs to this religion exclusively, to teach us not only to cultivate peace with men, but to forgive, nay more- to love our very enemies."

From Benjamin Rush's essay "A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States":

In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign, which is placed over the door of the War Office.

1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A Wooden leg making office.
5. An office for creating public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock Jobbers, and Bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9 An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness.

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrifying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded Soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, livers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any other object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.

Above this group of woeful figures,—let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,

"NATIONAL GLORY."

Railroaded

2011-08-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Boston Tea Party of the American Revolution era can be viewed as an act of vandalism, and not as a purely righteous statement of freedom against British oppression as we are taught in high school history class. In any case, it was a bold and important event in an attempt to establish a democratic government on the North American continent. But it might have been for naught.

The East India Company intended to monopolize North American trade and control all commodities, including tea, thus destroying small business enterprise in the colonies. The East India Company, which did pretty much whatever it wanted to do wherever it was in the world, was a corporation chartered by the British government. The colonists on the North American continent stood in opposition to the threat of monopoly and excessive tariffs of which the East India Company was authorized by the British government.

John Hancock, an original tea partier, was a businessman and one of the wealthiest people in the colonies. When he realized what the East India Corporation was up to, and that it was an egregious threat to his business, he was motivated to masquerade as a Native American and, with a few other colonists, make some midnight revelry tea.

From prior experience with the East India Company, colonists feared and hated it and determined to fight to keep its monopoly from subjecting them to its abuses. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, along with Hancock and other prominent figures of the period, strongly opposed the corporate model. Franklin and Madison attempted to include guidelines in the Constitution that would regulate the charter of corporations. But a majority of representatives insisted that individual states should have this responsibility, as the more local states' governments would have better control. That may have been a good idea but by the mid-19th century many states began granting "general incorporation". And since there was nothing in the Constitution to control this kind of business operation there was no restraining the rush to incorporate. Eventually laws concerning corporations protected them more than regulated them.

The East India Company was chartered in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I who gave the company a monopoly on trade with all of Asia. (This grand and sweeping gesture was possible because England, having just defeated the Spanish Armada, was the power in the world with which to reckon.) Late in the 17th century, King Charles II gave the company the right to acquire territory, to mint its own currency, to develop and maintain its own military, to declare war, and other rights that autonomous, sovereign nations enjoyed. The Company ruled territories larger than the United Kingdom; it ruled India for a hundred years. It traded and smuggled opium and fought two wars over it. Its lobbying power in Parliament was assurance that it received special consideration from the British government. The company itself became the most influential entity in determining British trade policy. It had a lifespan of 250 years. It was integral to the evolution of the Industrial Revolution.

It was with knowledge that the East India Company, and other corporate entities legitimized by the British government, was an economic/political/military extension of the aristocracy in England that the Bill of Rights was conceived and written assuring individual human rights in the colonies. The corporate power of the aristocracy, legitimized by Parliament, which was controlled by the aristocracy, was the enemy.

In his Gangs of America, Ted Nace quotes Thomas Jefferson as having written in 1816,

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

However, as reported previously in this blog, Jefferson was instrumental in mid-wifing the rise and success of one of the most powerful corporations in American history: Dupont. In the early 19th century, he instructed then U.S. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn to buy gunpowder preferentially from Dupont of Delaware as a way of returning the favor of a Dupont patriarch who helped Jefferson and the U.S. obtain the Louisiana Territory.

E. I. duPont built his gunpowder business in Delaware after having fled the chaos of the French Revolution and a brief imprisonment in France. The company was organized in Paris in 1801 and incorporated in the U.S. in 1802. On Jefferson's recommendation, 22,000 lbs. of Dupont gunpowder was used to do battle with pirates and privateers on the Barbary coast. A short while later, Dupont sold 40,000 lbs. to Spain.

During the Crimean War (1853-1856; over 500,000 combatants dead), one that originated in a dispute between Catholics and Orthodox Christians over who controlled "The Holy Land", Dupont had contracts with the militarys of several of the involved countries. Dupont supplied almost half of the gunpowder used by the Union army in the Civil War (1861-1865; over 600,000 combatants dead).

On the North American continent Dupont explosives "Blasted mines for extracting coal and carved the paths for railroads and canals..." according to the Hagley Library website featuring the company. "The early history of Dupont is not simply the history of a single business but a bigger story about 19th century America."

Indeed.

By 1902, Dupont had become the largest manufacturer of explosives in the country. Dupont supplied much of the smokeless powder and explosives used by allied armies during World War I (1914 to 1918; 20,000,000 combatants dead). Long after the end of WWI, the 73rd U.S. Congress convened a hearing on the munitions industry as "merchants of death". Pierre duPont, J.P. Morgan, and hundreds of others were called to testify, but a conspiracy was not uncovered.

There is much to say about Dupont and different ways of interpreting the company's contributions to the world. One version, Behind the Nylon Curtain written by Gerard Colby and published by Prentice-Hall in 1974, didn't make it into mass circulation. Dupont people obtained an advance copy and, distressed by the book's content, put pressure on the publisher to back off from promoting it. Colby sued the publisher and won a settlement, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. The book received rave reviews and was nominated for a National Book Award. Colby has pointed out that it's not the government that's a threat to a free press, it's the big corporations that threaten a free press.

Another Dupont story, this one written by business historian Alfred Chandler, is entitled Pierre duPont and the Making of the Modern Corporation. About it publisher Beard Books says "It is truly one of the finest business histories ever written." The Duponts liked this one.

Chandler "...almost single-handedly invented the study of business history..." according to the April 9, 2009 Economist. He studied large American corporations including Dupont, GM, and Standard Oil. He was an advocate of what he called "the visible hand of management". He championed "the managerial business enterprise." He argued that management had replaced market forces as the factor that determined business success and longevity. He traced the origins of modern management to the American railroads of the 19th century. A 2007 Bloomberg obituary quotes Chandler as having said that "...the major innovation in the American economy between the 1880's and the turn of the century was the creation of the great corporations in American industry", and, "Modern business enterprise was thus the institutional response to the rapid pace of technological innovation and increasing consumer demand in the United States in the second half of the 19th century." He taught at Harvard Business School for many years. His books are must reads in business schools around the country. His ideas are very influential.

Born in Guyencourt, Delaware, not far from the now-historic Dupont gunpowder mill, Chandler's full name is Alfred Dupont Chandler, Jr. Though not claiming to be a Dupont, he was "born into a patrician family" with friends in the Dupont clan. While going through a deceased relatives belongings one day Chandler discovered the papers of his great grandfather, who was an analyst of the most important industry of his day: the railroads. Reading his great grandfather's work inspired Chandler to study and write business history.

Chandler's great grandfather began his railroad career in Maine but worked his way into an office on Wall Street. Before the Civil War he owned and wrote for "The American Railroad Journal" and, after the Civil War, "The Manual of the Railroads of the United States". He "... was one of the first Americans to examine intensively the problems raised by the coming of modern big business," according to the biography written by Chandler. Chandler quotes his great grandfather as having written that "A new aristocracy was rising... advancing mankind far more effectively than those who merely applied their minds to books and abstract ideas."

"At different times he helped to promote and finance railroads in the South and West," according to Chandler's biography.

In addition to his analysis and promotion of the railroad industry in the U.S., Chandler's great grandfather, whose name was Henry Varnum Poor, founded Standard and Poor's, the credit rating agency, which traces its origins to the publication of a book by Poor in 1860.

(Standard and Poor's is a subsidiary of text book publisher McGraw-Hill which traces its roots to 1899 when founder James McGraw purchased "The American Journal of Railway Appliances". Today, however, the company's investors are urging McGraw-Hill to dump its text book division because it costs so much to operate and it makes only half as much as the Standard and Poor's division. The company seems prepared to sell. So much for "Creating a Smarter, Better World". McGraw-Hill also owns J.D. Power and Associates, the marketing research and information firm. It is known for its consumer surveys but most of its revenue comes from corporations that request the surveys.)

The period in American history between the Civil War and World War I was interesting...

While Henry Varnum Poor was praising the "new aristocracy", members of which others called "Robber Barons", the U.S. Supreme Court, loaded with pro-railroad judges, was busy ruling against child labor laws, workplace safety standards, injury compensation regulations, and other laws and precedents that protected employees from their corporation bosses.

According to Howard Zinn in his A People's History of the United States,

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression-a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

After the Civil War railroads were given land and huge, risky monetary investments for their expansion. These investments came from large banks and speculators expecting an early return. But a panic ensued when the banks defaulted and businesses failed; an economic depression followed. Many workers were laid off and, for workers who kept their jobs, wages were cut and working conditions were made more hazardous by companies trying to cut corners.

So American railroad unions called for strikes which eventually spread across the country and into other labor unions, and which had the support of non-union workers. Often the local police or the military were called in to halt the strikes, but this only provoked more intense fighting and gun battles.

In the presidential election of 1876, Samuel Tilden won the popular vote and a plurality of electoral votes but, because he did not win a majority of electoral votes, he was not elected president. Amid the confusion and claims of ballot rigging Congress appointed an "electoral commission" which gave the election to Rutherford B. Hayes.

At the heart of this event was "The Compromise of 1877", a behind-the-scenes, "corrupt bargain" strategy promoted by railroad man Thomas Scott. Included in the "Compromise" was a promise to build Scott's transcontinental railroad through the South, to industrialize the South, and to remove Union soldiers stationed there. Nace reports that Hayes was riding in Scott's private, luxury railroad car when the election was decided. According to one historian, it was Scott himself who made the determination that Hayes would be president. And because Hayes became president, Scott received "millions of acres of public land and huge federal subsidies" to build his railroad.

Noteworthy among the peoples' response in this period was the Railroad Strike of 1877. The federal troops that had been recalled from the South as a condition of "The Compromise" were put to work against labor uprisings in West Virginia. Since Thomas Scott's Pennsylvania Railroad was a target of the strikers, Scott used his connection to Hayes, asking him to send in troops to put down the strike, which Hayes did. Many strikers were killed in the ensuing confrontation. The federal troops probably used Dupont gunpowder.

Thomas Scott's political power was as great as that of any elected official of the period. He was feared and hated, especially in his home state Pennsylvania: He got what he wanted, letting nothing stand in his way in the process. Nace credits Scott with figuring out how to get around states' regulations on corporations. And when other corporations discovered Scott's strategy, the flood gates were opened. In the early 19th century states' laws protected people from corporations. By the end of the century states laws, and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, protected corporations from the people. In less than a hundred years a motive force behind the U.S. Constitution had been turned inside-out and ridden out of town on a rail. Thomas Scott was a driving force in that reversal.

It is nearly impossible to question Abraham Lincoln's wisdom or sincerity:

As a result of the [Civil] war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.

Lincoln made this statement in 1864 after the war had ended and "...the best blood of the power of American youth had been offered on the altar of the Republic..."

During the war, however, Lincoln appointed Thomas Scott to be Assistant Secretary of War. Scott's railroad knowledge and expertise worked well in the war effort for the Union. When Scott returned home he was greeted as a war hero. Now Scott didn't have to fight for what he wanted - it was given graciously by state and national politicians. This power and influence, some historians say, is how Scott was able to put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House after the "election" of 1876.

But Thomas Scott was not considered a "Robber Baron" in the same way that J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie were. Carnegie began his railroad career working for Scott on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and he became Scott's protege'. They had a falling out, though, when Carnegie tried unsuccessfully to pull an investment switcheroo behind Scott's back. Carnegie eventually became involved in the steel industry and sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan.

J.P. Morgan was a banker and, technically, not a railroad man. Basically, he was a salesman getting his start selling stock in various railroads before the Civil War. During the Civil War he purchased 5000 rifles at $3.50 each from an army arsenal and sold them to a general in the field for $22. But the rifles were defective, shooting off the thumbs of the soldiers who fired them. (Dupont gunpowder?) Morgan paid a substitute $300 to perform his military service for him, but other wealthy young men in that time did this, too.

Morgan sold stock in his steel company, United States Steel Corporation, for more than the company was worth. He was able to pay dividends by keeping prices high and wages low, taking government subsidies, and convincing congress to pass tariffs on imported steel - in other words, by monopolizing the market.

The term "Robber Baron" dates to 12th century Europe. It refers to a feudal lord who robbed or demanded unauthorized tolls of travelers and merchants passing through his domain. It was a similar situation to the one that provoked the defiant cry "no taxation without representation!" As it applies in this discussion, a Robber Baron is a businessman or industrialist, especially of the late 19th century, who acquires wealth and power using questionable practices (price manipulation, bribery, union busting, monopoly).

The post-Civil War era has been identified by some historians as the birth time of the "modern industrial economy". Between 1873 and 1893 the U.S. economy grew at a rate faster than any economy at any time in the world's history. That is, unprecedented economic growth in the U.S. occurred between the Panic of 1873 and the Panic of 1893. Seems odd....

The Panic of 1873:
   -huge capital investments in railroads and factories
   -risky loans on inflated real estate
   -bank failures
   -14% unemployment
   -18,000 businesses failed
   -89 railroads bankrupt

The Panic of 1893:
   -railroad bubble bursts
   -500 banks fail
   -run on gold
   -17% unemployment
   -15,000 companies bankrupt

Between 1881 and 1890, within a period of "unprecedented economic growth", there were 9,668 strikes and lock-outs in the U.S. In 1889 22,000 railroad workers had been killed or injured. Apparently, some people were happy and a lot of people were unhappy. It may have been "great", but it wasn't always good.

It was "The Gilded Age". The phrase was borrowed from the title of a book by Mark Twain, in collaboration with another writer, who borrowed the idea from Shakespeare: "...to gild refined gold, to paint the lily is wasteful and ridiculous excess..." Written in 1873 at the onset of this period, Twain's story is a satire of greed and corruption of the governing class. It takes place mostly in Washington D.C.

The Gilded Age in the history of the U.S. is a period of rapid economic and population growth, the establishment of the modern industrial economy, and the emergence of the "American aristocracy".

"Liberty cannot long endure in any country where the tendency in legislation is to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few." Daniel Webster.

(But it was lawyer and constitutional scholar Daniel Webster who convinced the Supreme Court in 1819 concerning the charter contract of Dartmouth College to decide in favor of the private college's charter contract with England and against the state of New Hampshire. This decision, which gave corporations independence from states, resulted in the rise of the American corporation.)

"After the authority over public affairs had been transferred to the men of business, I saw the machinery of business pass from the hands of individuals into the hands of corporations - artificial persons - created in the imagination of lawyers, and given efficacy by the sanction of the courts and of the law." Congressman Richard Franklin Pettigrew, Triumphant Plutocracy, 1922.

"...the lawyers who composed two-thirds of both houses of Congress were but the paid exploiters of the American people, and... both political parties were but the tools in the hands of big business that were used to plunder the American people." Pettigrew.

"We are governed by an elective aristocracy, which in its turn, is largely controlled by an aristocracy of wealth. Behind the legislatures and congresses are the corporations and the trusts..." Frank Parsons, The City for the People, 1899.

"He who born with silver spoon in mouth speak with forked tongue."Spoken by a Native American warrior as he, his family, and his tribe were forced from their ancestral land and moved onto a reservation.

Wild Strawberries

2011-05-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

Recently, news media reported research showing that children whose mothers were exposed to organophosphate pesticides during the pregnancy had lower IQ scores than children whose mothers were not exposed to organophosphates. Doctors and scientists, commenting on the research, expressed various opinions including the seemingly ever-present "...more research is needed to confirm a relationship...."

Since the subjects of the study were from an inner city, researchers speculated that exposure to the pesticides came from the food they ate.

Several studies over the last few years have associated exposure to organophosphates with learning problems and ADHD in children, and Alzheimer's in adults. Alzheimer's disease is more common in industrialized countries. In the U.S., 5.4 million people have Alzheimer's.

Organophosphates (OP's) were developed originally for chemical warfare by Nazi scientists in the 1930's, although they were never used as such. They are highly toxic and hazardous at low levels of exposure. OP's came into common use in agriculture to replace highly toxic DDT, which degrades more slowly than OP's. OP's, however, persist in the water supply. Malathion and diazinon are two of the more recognizable OP's used in residential lawn care, agriculture, and public parks.

Chloropicrin, a pesticide used in commercial strawberry production, is considered "highly toxic" by the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2005 in Salinas, California three hundred people, including paramedics, were poisoned by chloropicrin when a strawberry field was fumigated.

In addition to strawberries, chloropicrin and related pesticides are used on raspberries, tomatoes, potatoes, mushrooms, and other commercial crops.

Chloropicrin was used in World War I as a poison gas.

At the present time, methyl iodide is being considered as a replacement for chloropicrin. Methyl iodide, manufactured by Arista Lifescience, is a highly toxic fumigant. It is carcinogenic and toxic to thyroid and reproductive systems according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (Life science?)

Syngenta's organophosphate atrazine is one of the most commonly used food crop pesticides worldwide. Atrazine has been linked to birth defects, infertility, and cancer. It is one of the most commonly detected pesticides in the water supply in the U.S. Recently, atrazine was found in 94% of 309 water samples tested. It is the pesticide that a California researcher discovered turned male frogs into female frogs. It is used on corn and other crops.

Syngenta, maker of atrazine, is a Swiss agribusiness multinational corporation that was formed in 2000 when Novartis Agribusiness and Zeneca Agrochemicals merged. It is the largest pesticide company in the world, controlling about 1/5th of the global market. Each year in the U.S., 76.5 million pounds of its atrazine is used on corn and other crops, but in its home country, and throughout the European Union, atrazine is banned.

From the website of the Stockholm Convention:

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants is a global treaty to protect human health and the environment from chemicals that remain intact in the environment for long periods, become widely distributed geographically, accumulate in the fatty tissue of humans and wildlife, and have adverse effects to human health or to the environment. Exposure to Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) can lead to serious health effects including certain cancers, birth defects, dysfunctional immune and reproductive systems, greater susceptibility to disease and even diminished intelligence. Given their long range transport, no one government acting alone can protect its citizens or its environment from POPs. In response to this global problem, the Stockholm Convention, which was adopted in 2001 and entered into force in 2004, requires Parties to take measures to eliminate or reduce the release of POPs into the environment. The Convention is administered by the United Nations Environment Programme and is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Treaty was signed in Stockholm, Sweden on May 23, 2001 by 128 parties. As of April 2011 there are 173 parties signed on to the treaty. The United States is one of about a dozen countries in the world that is not a party to the Stockholm Convention Treaty.

Wild Strawberries are the fruit of a perennial plant that grows in many areas of the world. Also, it is the title of a 1950's movie by Swedish film maker Ingemar Bergman. In Swedish, the phrase is used as a metaphor suggesting an overlooked or underrated gem-of-a-place, or a natural and fruitful paradise-lost.

superweeds and the war on drugs

The key ingredient in Monsanto's RoundUp, glyphosphate, is the biggest selling herbicide in the world. It's used on corn, soybeans, and cotton in agriculture, and on golf courses and home gardens. For 30 years it has been called "safe". It is not an organophosphate, but works by disrupting specific plant enzymes needed for growth. The U.S. government sprays glyphosphate on coca fields in Columbia.

In 2010 Monsanto made over $2 billion from sales of its glyphosphate even though its patent expired in 2000. Glyphosphate use in the U.S. doubled between 2001 and 2007. Now scientists and environmentalists are saying that over-use of the stuff since 1974 is causing complex problems in the environment and in human health.

The war-on-weeds has resulted in the emergence of 130 types of herbicide-resistent superweeds in the U.S., more than in any other country. Superweeds are appearing in 40 states; glyphosphate-resistant weeds now infest 11 million acres and threaten crop yields.

Recently, one environmental group called for a global ban on glyphosphate. Some research has shown that glyphosphate causes spontaneous abortion and infertility in livestock and malformations in chick and frog embryos. Other research suggests a link between glyphosphate exposure and cancer in humans.

The EPA is reviewing the issue, examining data put together by a research group - a group formed by Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, and BASF. It expects to have reviewed all relevant material by 2015 when it will make a decision. Meanwhile, glyphosphate goes on....

the birds, the bees, and the birds-and-the-bees

Global herbicide sales total over $14 billion with over $5 billion spent in the U.S. alone.There are 17,000 pesticide products on the market in the U.S. Each year, 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used in the U. S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that everyone has pesticides in the body. After agriculture, the heaviest pesticide use is found in golf courses, schools, and public parks. In 2002, Florida led all states in pesticide use in applying 25 pounds of pesticides per acre to its land.

We continue to be exposed to pesticides that have been banned for decades and are no longer manufactured. For example, DDT and other highly chlorinated organic pesticides such as chlordane and aldrin were cancelled for use as pesticides in the 1970's due to their recognized toxicity to humans and the environment, but they persist in the soil and leach into waterways. Our exposure to these pesticides is through the food chain, especially in the fish we eat.

Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) was a pesticide used on grain seeds such as wheat in the 1940's to about 1980. It is no longer used as a pesticide but it is formed as a by-product in making chemical solvents and other pesticides. HCB crosses the placenta and accumulates in fetal tissue, and it is concentrated in breast milk.

HCB is extremely toxic. In Turkey in the 1950's people who ate wheat sprayed with HCB experienced liver and thyroid disease. Children under the age of 1 year died after exposure to the tainted wheat. Thirty years after initial exposure, HCB levels in breast milk of women in the town in Turkey were over 7 times the average and 150 times what is allowed in cow's milk.

POP's like DDT and HCB bio-magnify, resist breaking-down, and increase in concentration up the food chain. Included in this group with DDT and HCB are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) and toxaphene. POP's are strongly associated with a number of diseases including cancer, endocrine imbalances, neuro-degeneration, and diabetes. The U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs has included Type II diabetes on its list of diseases associated with exposure to Agent Orange, a dioxin containing POP's, used as an exfoliant in the Viet Nam war.

Toxaphene is an insecticide that was used on soybean and cotton crops in the U.S. and is still used on pineapples and bananas grown in some Western countries. Before it was banned, the U.S. was the world's largest user. Toxaphene has a half life in the soil of 10 years. Toxaphene is one of the so-called "dirty dozen" - a list of very toxic chemicals identified by the Stockholm Convention. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB's) and other dioxins also are on the list.

Monsanto knowingly dumped PCB's into rivers and soil contaminating Anniston, Alabama and surrounding areas for 40 years. The company is responsible for over 50 Superfund sites in the U.S. Dow Chemical, from 1930 to 1980, contaminated the Tittabawassee River and flood plain in Michigan with toxic chemicals, including dioxins. Speaking of Michigan, chemical company Velsicol (formerly Michigan Chemical Company) contaminated the Pine River and flood plain near St. Louis, Michigan with DDT and polybrominated biphenyls (PBB's). The company's plant on the Pine river was designated a Superfund site in 1983, but clean-up didn't begin until 1998.

In 1973 Velsicol/Michigan Chemical accidentally sent PBB's to the Michigan Farm Bureau Services instead of the magnesium oxide that it also manufactured as a dietary supplement for food animals. The mix-up wasn't discovered for a year, allowing PBB's to enter the food chain through milk, beef, pork, sheep, chickens, and eggs. Five-hundred Michigan farms had to be quarantined.

PBB's are endocrine disruptors and "probable" carcinogens, and are very similar to PCB's. PBB's were used in making plastics before they were discontinued in 1976. PBB has a half life of about 11 years in the human body.

At the present time, Velsicol, whose manufacturing plant is in Memphis, Tennessee is the only producer of hexachlorocyclopentadiene (HCCPD). In the 1970's, it made 50 million pounds per year. By the latter part of that decade, however, due to regulatory restrictions, production dropped to a mere 15 million pounds per year. HCCPD was used as an intermediary in the production of aldrin, chlordane, heptachlor, mirex, and other very toxic POP's. It also is used in making flame retardants, resins, plastics, dyes, and pharmaceutical drugs. Improper disposal by combustion causes the release of toxic phosgene gas, a WWI chemical warfare agent.

Endosulfan, one of the most toxic persistant organic pesticides still in use in the world, was banned in April 2011 by the Stockholm Convention. It has been used on cashews in India and cotton in Africa, among other crops. It contaminates the Arctic and Antarctic food chains. It is so toxic that desperate farmers in developing countries use it to commit suicide. Velsicol's HCCPD is used in the production of endosulfan.

DuPont invented chloroflurocarbon refrigerants, CFC's, and was the world's leading producer until the chemicals were banned for their activity in depleting the earth's ozone layer. An environmental research group called DuPont the U.S.'s largest producer of air pollution. DuPont also is known for its textiles, which business it sold to Koch Industries in 2004, and Teflon, the brand of DuPont's non-stick cooking surface material.

The DuPont family immigrated to the U.S. in 1800 to escape the French Revolution in their home country. Its original product was gunpowder - the company eventually supplied 4 million barrels to the Union army during the American Civil War. DuPont's connection to the U.S. military initially was through Thomas Jefferson who became friends with a DuPont patriarch who helped Jefferson and the U.S. buy the French-owned Louisiana Territory. To repay the favor, Jefferson convinced the then Secretary of War to buy gunpowder from the DuPont mill in Delaware. The relationship between the military and industry, apparently a nice match, has continued.

Interestingly, Dupont originally made gunpowder and eventually made bullet-resistant vests.

Teflon, polytetrafluoroetheylene, PTFE, breaks down under heat releasing several very toxic gases. According to one environmental group, DuPont had been aware of Teflon's toxic decomposition products for 50 years without saying anything to anybody about it. In 2004, the EPA sued DuPont $16.5 million for covering up studies the company had done for a period of 20 years showing that its products had contaminated drinking water and was responsible for contaminating newborn babies. Dupont was sued by a group of people who lived near the company's Parkersburg, West Virginia plant for contaminating their water supply.

Dozens of incidental reports of the deaths of birds attest to the fatal toxicity of PTFE breakdown products. In fact, a condition called "teflon toxicosis" was identified by a Chicago area veteranarian who said that it was "a leading cause of death among birds". Chicks, ducklings, quail, parakeets, cockatiels, other pet birds, and lab rats die within hours of exposure to PTFE breakdown gases.

Perfluorooctanoic acid, PFOA, C8, is the backbone chemical of many of DuPont's products, as well as a toxic breakdown product of Teflon. PFOA is the most persistent chemical known. It is not found in nature, and never breaks down. Once it's in the body, it doesn't come out for a long time. PFOA raises cholesterol, causes cancer, may cause strokes, compromises immune/reproductive/thyroid systems, and causes infertility and ADHD. Ninety-five percent of Americans have PFOA in their blood. These chemicals are used in food packaging and stain-resistant fabrics and carpets. Scotchguard and Stainmaster are brands that use these chemicals in their preparations.

True to form, DuPont also manufactures in-home water purification systems.

DuPont's genetically engineered soy is in many food products. Solae is the soy-product line created and marketed by DuPont with another company, Bunge, a huge agribusiness multinational with soy and seed-oil processing facilities located around the world.

Speaking of West Virginia, in 2008 a Bayer Chemical plant exploded killing 2 people. Chemicals released into the environment included those used in the production of thiodicarb, a pesticide banned in the European Union. Bayer is the company that makes the pesticide that is alleged to have killed 90 million bees in France over a period of years. In 2008 a group in Germany sued Bayer for marketing pesticides it knew were toxic to honey bees.

things go better with chema-cola

Not a pesticide but definitely a persistent environmental toxin is bisphenol A, BPA. A recent study showed that pregnant women exposed to BPA gave birth to children with a higher risk of respiratory illness. The study was presented at a meeting of the Pediatric Academy Society - not exactly an extremist environmental group - which subsequently called for tighter governmental regulation of such chemicals. Another study found that women with polycystic ovary disease had higher levels of BPA in their blood than women who did not have PCOS. Many studies have shown harmful effects of BPA on thyroid and reproductive systems in both males and females, animal studies and humans.

The official word from FDA's Health and Human Services, however, is that BPA has not been proven to cause harm. Still in January 2010 FDA told parents not to pour hot liquids into plastic baby bottles. This year Coca-Cola had an opportunity to stop lining their soda cans with BPA-containing material but decided to take the official statement of FDA regarding the toxin as a nod to continue to use it. "A little BPA with aspartame in that diet Coke won't hurt anyone."

BPA has been banned in Japan since 1999. In Canada it is recognized as toxic and is banned in some applications. A 1997 research study concerning the low-dose exposure of BPA found changes in the reproductive systems of male mice. In immediate response, a chemical industry "task force" did the research but mysteriously found no ill effects. Researchers at Shell, Dow, General Electric, and Bayer - all producers of BPA - also could not replicate the positive results of the 1997 research. This lack of replication, according to the chemical industry, re-affirmed the "safety" of BPA.

At low doses, BPA is an endocrine disruptor and neurotoxin. Even so, in November 2010 chemical company lobby group, the American Chemical Council, managed to prevent a bi-partisan effort in the U.S. Congress to ban BPA in baby bottles and drinking cups. Somehow the Council twisted some Republican arms and, subsequently, some Republicans decided not to support the bill - a bill whose purpose was to minimize exposure of newborns and infants to a recognized toxin....

The American Chemical Council boasts a very long list of members including Dow, DuPont, Bayer, BASF, Chevron, Exxon, Merck, Eli Lilly, Solutia.... Recall that Solutia is the company created by Monsanto to handle problems caused by its PCB contamination in Alabama and around the country.

BPA is found in plastic toys, polycarbonate bottles, cash register tape, lipstick, and many other consumer goods. Originally, it was used as a fungiside. Every year, 4 billion pounds of BPA is put into products. A compound in soy, genistein, enhances the toxicity of BPA. Feeding your baby soy-based formula in a polycarbonate bottle, therefore, though good for the industry, may not be the best for baby.

weapons of mass extinction

Dow Chemical, with Monsanto, supplied the U.S. military with the herbicide/exfoliant Agent Orange during the Viet Nam war. Dow makes or has made Saran Wrap, styrofoam, Ziploc Bags, the pesticide Lorsban, silicon breast implants, and BPA among many other products. Their biotech branch genetically modifies corn, soy, cotton, wheat, and alfalfa.

In the early 1940's Dow made napalm for the U.S. military which used it in WWII, Korean War, and Viet Nam War. Napalm is an incendiary weapon, like jelled gasoline, that burns at very high temperatures, and was used originally as an exfoliant.

In the 1940's Dow developed a process for extracting magnesium from seawater and attracted the attention of the U.S. military which needed the light weight metal to build aircraft. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. government asked Dow to increase its production of magnesium. Dow built another plant and, with the help of the government, built a small city around the plant to house workers.

When the U.S. government decided to make hydrogen bombs and other nuclear weapons in the 1950's the Atomic Energy Commission appointed Dow to manage the Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility near Denver, Colorado where the stuff would be made. For 25 years, until Dow was replaced by Rockwell, the facility contaminated the air and the ground near the site with radioactive waste and plutonium-contaminated solvents such as carbon tetrachloride and dioxin. By 1969 it had become the most costly environmental "accident" in U.S. history.

In 2008 Dow and Rockwell were ordered to pay $925 million to residents around the Rocky Flats site who claimed that their health problems and property devaluations were a result of negligence on the part of the companies. A Dow representative commenting on the court order said that Dow had done nothing wrong and that it would appeal the decision. The federal government spent $7 billion cleaning-up Rocky Flats, which now is a wildlife refuge.

In 1961 president John F. Kennedy and vice-president Lyndon Johnson participated in a ceremony honoring Dow's brine-mining de-salination operation in Texas. Johnson was from Texas.

Dow's pesticide 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane, DBCP, was used on 40 different crops until it was banned in 1979 by the EPA. Until 1985, though, it was used on pineapples in Hawaii. It was banned because it caused sterility in males exposed to the stuff. But Dow knew as early as 1960 of its toxicity without reporting it and continued to make it even after it was banned.

DBCP is carcinogenic, an endocrine disruptor, and it persists in ground water. In 1989 a farming area in California still showed contamination with DBCP, causing water wells to be closed, though the pesticide had not been used there since 1970.

Dow sold DBCP around the world without warnings about its toxicity or instruction on safe use. In one banana plantation area in Costa Rica about 1/4th of the male workers became sterile from contact with DBCP which they mixed by hand.

In 2008 Dow filed a lawsuit against the Quebec government for the government's ban on Dow's herbicide 2,4-D. In 2006 Quebec banned 2,4-D and other chemicals used for cosmetic purposes on lawns and golf courses. Quebec said that it took this action on behalf of the health and welfare of its people. Dow said that the Quebec government had no scientific basis for the ban.

2,4-D is the most widely used pesticide in the world. It was developed in Britain during WWII to improve yields for grain crops. A plant hormone, it kills certain weeds by causing uncontrolled growth. At least 1500 herbicide products contain 2,4-D as an active ingredient. It is a ubiquitous lawn and garden herbicide. Each year, U.S. consumers use 40 million pounds of 2,4-D. Moreso than adults, children have higher concentrations of it in their bodies. It breaks down in the environment but is tracked into homes and onto carpets where it persists. 2,4-D is considered a neurotoxin.

In 2010 the ban on cosmetic pesticide use, which seems to have started in Quebec and is sweeping across Canada, inspired the state legislature in New Hampshire - not to ban - but to create a committee to study what the effects might be of banning only cosmetic pesticide use. We don't want to be too hasty, now, do we, New Hampshire.

The 2008-2009 report of the President's Cancer Panel (current members of which were appointed by George W. Bush) reported the following, among other things:
- a significant number of cancer deaths in the U.S. each year are caused by environmental pollutants, especially in lower income workers
- 58 chemical substances to which people are exposed are known carcinogens and another 188 are "probable" carcinogens
- only 2% of 80,000 chemicals on the market have been tested for carcinogenicity prior to marketing
- in 2009 about 1.5 million Americans were diagnosed with cancer and 562,000 died
- the impact of environmentally caused cancer has been "grossly underestimated"
- children, more than adults, are vulnerable to environmental toxins
- despite its relationship to several diseases including cancer, BPA is still found in consumer products
- "grievous harm" done by environmental toxins "has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program"
- some cancers in children are on the rise
- research is showing that environmental toxins associated with genetic, immune, and endocrine dysfunction can lead to cancer and other diseases
- the entire U.S. population is exposed daily to "numerous agricultural chemicals" many of which are known or suspected carcinogens or endocrine disruptors
- pesticides approved by the EPA contain about 900 active ingredients, many of which are toxic

And more:

The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health, even though we lack irrefutable proof of harm.

And:

Toxic materials produced for and used by the military have caused widespread air, soil, and water pollution across the United States and beyond our borders....

And:

...low levels of exposure [to environmental toxins] at a specific point in the development of an organism... could have really, really significant changes in ways that the classical idea about genetics would not predict.

And:

Our science looks at substance-by-substance exposure and doesn't take into account the multitude of exposures we experience in daily life.

View the 240-page report at: http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY/pcp/annualReports/index.htm.

Herbert Needleman, the professor and researcher who identified the toxic and harmful effects of lead in children in the early 1970's, was ostracized by a lead industry trade organization and accused of scientific misconduct. Needleman's pioneering work was responsible for lowering blood lead levels in children by 78% from 1976 to 1991.

In 2006 the EPA appointed Deborah Rice to chair a panel of experts to study health risks posed by the flame retardant PBDE. The well-respected researcher submitted her report about a year later, but was fired for her efforts. The American Chemistry Council, aware of how the report would go, wrote a letter to an EPA authority accusing Rice of conflict of interest. The EPA fired Rice and removed her comments from the report without investigating the ACC's charges, but on the ACC's letter alone.

Shortly after First Lady Michelle Obama announced, a couple of years ago, that the White House vegetable garden would be "organic" the Mid America Croplife Association sent the White House a letter saying that it was dissappointed that Ms. Obama had not recognized the important role that conventional agriculture had played in the history of the U.S.

Croplife is an international agricultural biotech industry group who's members include BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, and a few others. Croplife Foundation is a non-profit "research organization" that has received grants from Croplife America, state Departments of Agriculture, and U.S. EPA.

The CDC's Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, 2009, reports the following:
- flame retardant BDE 47 was found in all participant samples;
- BPA is found in nearly all participant samples;
- PFC's, banned in 1979, were found in most participant samples, though levels have decreased by 80% since 1980;
- PFOA's were found in nearly all participant samples.

Commenting on the U.S.military's use of napalm and its horrible effects in Viet Nam, in 1967 writer Robert Crichton said: "The excessive valuation of American life, over any other life, accounts for the weapons and tactics we feel entitled to use...." Now we may modify Crichton's statement to read "The excessive importance of corporate American profits, over any other consideration...."

rhetoric, propaganda, marketing, spin, lies

2011-03-30T12:38:00.000-07:00

"The total life of any culture tends to be 'propaganda'…. It blankets perception and suppresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom." Marshall McLuhan, 1970.

the sound of science

The co-incidental emergence of superbugs in hospitals and superweeds on factory farms is ominous, and each represents a challenge to human health.

The evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria by the overuse of antibiotics in humans and farm animals has been observed for at least 40 years in the West. Warnings by doctors, scientists, and government agencies in Europe were obscured in arguments and denial in the U.S. Congress. And the controversy still exists with each side citing sound science in support of its opinion.

To this day, antibiotics are prescribed by doctors for patients with respiratory symptoms caused by viruses or mold, microorganisms which are not affected by antibiotics; and some farmers continue to give sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to cows, pigs, and chickens to fatten them.

Herbicide-resistant superweeds have evolved in fields sprayed with Monsanto’s Round-Up, a glyphosphate herbicide Monsanto’s genetically modified crops have been “engineered” to resist. According to some biologists, this practice, and in general the farming practice promoted by Monsanto, is the perfect way to create plants that herbicides can’t kill. Yet, in January 2011, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Tom Vilsack, under pressure from government and industry, deregulated without restriction Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa seed. Then, a week or so later, USDA deregulated genetically modified sugar beet.

Prior to deregulation, as a result of legal proceedings against the deregulation, the USDA was ordered to complete an environmental impact statement (EIS). As a part of performing the EIS, USDA held a public comment period during which concerns about deregulating GM alfalfa could be expressed. The USDA’s final 2300 pages-long EIS document contained many statements of significant concern against deregulation, concerns which the USDA itself acknowledged as valid.

Consequently Secretary Vilsack, though a proponent of biotechnology and a “friend” of Monsanto, sought to mitigate concern by proposing restrictions on the deregulation of GM alfalfa. However, the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, complaining that “restrictions” would require oversight and oversight would cost money and more taxes, and so on, pressured Vilsack to deregulate without restrictions. Led by committee chairman Frank Lucas, the House Agriculture Committee challenged Vilsack saying that GM alfalfa repeatedly had been found safe. In a public statement after genetically modified alfalfa’s deregulation, Lucas said, “I am pleased the USDA used sound science in making the decision to deregulate GM alfalfa.”

Monsanto, by the way, was a major contributor to Lucas’ 2010 election; it was listed as a “Top Five Contributor” by opensecrets.org, having given Lucas $11,000 for the 2009-2010 election. On top of that, agribusiness political action committees contributed over $5 million to members of the House Agriculture Committee for the 2010 election cycle. But these figures represent a drop in the bucket, as it were. The practice of special interest groups donating money to support the election of politicians who will carry-out their wishes, of course, is not just commonplace but the way business is done in American politics and governments. Please see opensecrets.org.

Recall that “sound science” was invoked in May 2010 by the President of the Wisconsin Medical Society in support of then Governor Doyle’s rejection of a bill that temporarily would have legalized raw milk sales in the state. He said, in part, “…the governor acted on behalf of sound science…” in refusing to sign the bill.

In the last few years the phrases “sound science” and “junk science” have been used increasingly by industry propagandists to criticize research that supports environmental concerns and that is critical of irresponsible industry practices. Neither term has technical relevance or true critical value, however. They are rhetorical devices and are rarely – if ever – used by scientists.

The term “sound science”, though it seems to have been in the vernacular forever, dates to the 1980’s and the tobacco industry’s attempts to discredit research that revealed the harmful effects of cigaret smoke. A shill for the tobacco industry and proponent of tobacco’s “sound science” was Steven Milloy, Fox News commentator, president of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC, a defunct lobby group), and propagandist for various industry concerns. On its inoperable website this “Coalition” says that it advocates “the use of sound science in public policy decision making.”

In a press release in February 1994, TASSC criticized scientists who warned against the use of Monsanto’s rBGH saying "This is a prime example of a special interest group using its own political agenda to drive policy. It has nothing to do with the valid information that sound science has provided." Again, this comment is from a pro rBGH lobby group criticizing scientists who warned against the unwanted side-effects of using the hormone in milk cows – and a demonstration of the power of rhetoric.

In 1937 the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) began discussing rhetorical devices and techniques that were used in political and commercial promotions. The IPA believed that the increasing amounts of propaganda in media at that time decreased a person’s critical thinking ability. According to Sourcewatch, IPA wanted “to teach people how to think rather than what to think.” Initially successful, the group folded in 1942, however, probably under pressure from the proponents of United States’ propaganda aimed at its war enemies.

Among other things, the IPA developed a list of rhetorical or propaganda techniques with which one could familiarize oneself to aid in identifying and deconstructing the propaganda environment. The original 7 techniques, and a few more recent additions, include: name-calling, smear, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonials, plain folks, card-stacking, bandwagon, fear, double-speak, and junk science.

From the website propagandacritic.com:

With the growth of communication tools like the Internet, the flow of persuasive messages has been dramatically accelerated. For the first time ever, citizens around the world are participating in uncensored conversations about their collective future. This is a wonderful development, but there is a cost.

The information revolution has led to information overload, and people are confronted with hundreds of messages each day. Although few studies have looked at this topic, it seems fair to suggest that many people respond to this pressure by processing messages more quickly and, when possible, by taking mental short-cuts.

Propagandists love short-cuts -- particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic. As history shows, they can be quite successful.

In The Fine Art of Propaganda, the IPA stated that "It is essential in a democratic society that young people and adults learn how to think, learn how to make up their minds. They must learn how to think independently, and they must learn how to think together. They must come to conclusions, but at the same time they must recognize the right of other men to come to opposite conclusions. So far as individuals are concerned, the art of democracy is the art of thinking and discussing independently together."

rhetorical questions and trivium pursuit

Rhetoric, with grammar and logic, comprise the trivium, the foundation of a liberal arts education in Medieval Europe.

Historically the trivium is traced to the Classical Period of Ancient Greece, to Socrates, his disciple Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle. Plato and Socrates insisted that rhetoric should be guided by logic and dialog. Aristotle had a lot to say about it in his Art of Rhetoric including how to use emotion, assumptions, and strategy to improve one’s capacity to persuade.

Plato was a strong proponent of literacy, the acquired ability to read and write, even though his dialog Phaedrus displays Socrates’ criticism of it. But Socrates, as the story goes, capitulated after Plato’s rhetorical argument that literacy would not have the unwanted side effects, of which Socrates warned, if a system like the trivium were used in education.

A basic definition of rhetoric, in keeping with Aristotle, is “how to say what one has to say, elegantly, effectively, persuasively, and based on good logic”. “Rhetoric” may refer to the skill, the study, or the language.

Our word “trivial” (meaning “of little importance or significance; ordinary, commonplace”) comes from the point-of-view of those who moved on to the study of the quadrivium (mathematics, natural science, astronomy, and theology) for which the trivium was the foundation. That is, from the point-of-view of high school, grammar school is trivial. However, as the basis for using humanity’s greatest technology - the one that underlies all communication technologies - the trivium should not be trivialized.

“A point-of-view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” Marshall McLuhan, 1962.

propagate The faith

A strategy of propaganda is to appeal to emotion. This bastard of rhetoric, found most commonly in political, commercial, and religious endeavors, dates to the 16th century and the Catholic Church.

In Medieval Europe (5th to 15th century) education was rooted in the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. As the primary cultural influence at that time, the Catholic Church used the trivium to teach and preserve the art of writing.

In the early 17th century, the Church, in reaction to the Reformation and to take advantage of explorations around the world, installed the “Sacred Congregation of Propaganda” to propagate the faith – de propaganda fide. In this endeavor, the Church established its college in Rome and printed many books and other materials to support and promote its efforts. In that same period Ignatius formed the Jesuit order, which was dedicated to the propagation of the Church and its ideas. Although known for its scholastic system of education, the Jesuits were vilified in that period for casuistry, the selective application of laws on a case-by-case basis, for example, in allowing priests to defrock themselves temporarily so they could go to a brothel.

Casuistry, in its pejorative sense, refers to a specious argument or one that is intended to deceive, but it also is a branch of ethics that studies the relationship of general principles to particular cases.

The “Sacred Congregation of Propaganda” was renamed “Congregation for the Evangelization of People” in 1982 by the Pope. Its purpose and function has remained the same throughout its history, however.

disinfomashin’

Chemical Industry Archives notes that in 2002 a jury in Alabama found Monsanto guilty on all six counts it considered including negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage in the operation of its PCB plant in Anniston. According to a February 2002 Washington Post article “Under Alabama law, the rare claim of ‘outrage’ requires conduct ‘so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society’.” That is a legal definition, not rhetoric.

In roughly the same time period that the outrage was coming to light - and to court - Monsanto agents, disguised as “food safety experts”, infiltrated FDA and USDA and railroaded through FDA’s approval process Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone, threatening scientists in the agency who protested the approval.

Currently Monsanto’s “America’s Farmers” website lists the following “pledges”:

Integrity

Integrity is the foundation for all that we do. Integrity includes honesty, decency, consistency, and courage. Building on those values, we are committed to:

Dialogue

We will listen carefully to diverse points of view and engage in thoughtful dialogue. We will broaden our understanding of issues in order to better address the needs and concerns of society and each other.

Transparency

We will ensure that information is available, accessible, and understandable.

Again from www.chemicalindustryarchives.org:

[As] the company's own documents show, Monsanto went to extraordinary efforts to keep the public in the dark about PCBs, and even manipulated scientific studies by urging scientists to change their conclusions to downplay the risks of PCB exposure. Monsanto's conduct, throughout the entire period that the company made PCBs, was less than commendable. Their attempts today to backpedal on the science and shirk responsibility for the global saturation of PCBs is equally discouraging, as are their repeated attempts to "green" their image with flashy, expensive PR campaigns.

In 2001 an attorney for Monsanto in the Anniston trial is recorded as saying, “The truth is that PCB’s are everywhere...” in an attempt to demonstrate that PCB contamination causes no significant health problems. Paraphrasing his rhetoric, “Look: We’ve all got PCB’s in us and we’re o.k., right? So what’s the big deal?” And he tried to convince the jury that Monsanto didn’t know its PCB’s were toxic.

However, because of its toxicity PCB production was banned in the U.S. in 1979. Its toxicity was recognized in the 1930’s. A report in 1947 in a chemical industry journal described chlorinated biphenyls, the class of chemicals to which PCB’s belong, as “objectionably toxic”. Internal confidential documents from Monsanto brought forward in the Anniston trial revealed that it knew for decades that its PCB’s were dangerous and toxic to humans and wildlife.

Until it was banned, Monsanto was the only North American producer of PCB’s.

PCB toxicity is similar to that of other dioxins, which the Environmental Protection Agency identifies as “likely carcinogenic”. Dioxins were a component of Agent Orange, the herbicide made by Monsanto for the U.S. Defense Department during the Viet Nam war. Currently, Monsanto’s glyphosphate herbicide Round-Up and Monsanto’s Round-Up Ready crops are viewed by some in agriculture as responsible for the latest emergence of superweeds.

off the grass!

Grassroots organizations are local, community-based groups that form spontaneously in support of a political issue or politician. Obviously a metaphor, it implies a relationship with the soil, and that which is naturally rooted in the earth and grounded.

Astroturfing is a propaganda technique that a company uses to give support for a cause without revealing its identity. It is a fake grassroots movement that may use a website, or comments on articles or weblogs, or communicates via conversations in social media networks.

Wikipedia makes this distinction between grassroots and astroturfing:

Faking a grassroots movement is known as astroturfing. Astroturfing, as the name suggests, is named after Astroturf, a brand of artificial grass. Astroturfing means pretending to be a grassroots movement, when in reality the agenda and strategy is controlled by a hidden non-grassroots organization. A show is made of individuals pretending to be voicing their own opinions.

The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments the perfect opportunity to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies. This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public.

Astroturf, a brand of synthetic carpeting made to look like natural grass, is installed in sports stadiums all over the country. It was invented in the 1960’s by chemists at… Monsanto. Honest.

Captain Cosmonaut's Journal

2011-03-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

Captain Cosmonaut's Journal by William Conder

Make Your Own Book

Principles of Health

2011-02-19T20:04:00.001-08:00

Principles of Health by Dr. William Conder

Make Your Own Book

Everything Under the Book

2011-01-10T19:37:00.000-08:00

Five hundred years ago the printing press was the platform upon which the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and modern science came about. As a spur to phonetic alphabet literacy, the Gutenberg press “caused” an explosion of ideas and technology.

Martin Luther’s Reformation was a reaction to what he perceived as Church improprieties and corruption, especially regarding policies that wealthy patrons simply could purchase grace or cleric status. Nicholas Copernicus was so concerned that he might offend the Pope with his observation that the earth was not the center of the solar system that he refused to publish his work until he was on his deathbed. Galileo Galilei was imprisoned by the Pope for his astronomical heresies, even after he recanted them.

The thoughts and observations of Galilei, Copernicus, Newton, and Luther were read and discussed widely because of the printing press. The Bible, and its interpretation, was controlled by the Vatican and its priests until this period. But once the Bible was in print every literate person could read it for him or her self, resulting in a reversal in the authority of knowledge.

Science historians call Galilei the father of modern science. Two books, one of which was Copernicus’, are considered by historians as marking the beginning of the scientific revolution.

Even the physical structure of the printing press was recapitulated in industry in assembly line manufacturing and in specialized functions of workers and jobs. So common as to be environmental, this mechanical template conformed thought and thinking.

A psychological effect of the printing press and print as a dominant medium of communication, according to Marshall McLuhan, is a “dissociation of sensibility”, a kind of "disinterest", which has been the hallmark of science and technology. In his Understanding Media, McLuhan says:

That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change.

The concept that there is a cause that immediately precedes an event that is the cause of the event - an effect of print technology - continues to be the ideal of rigorous scientific research and “media” reportage even though its obsolescence was identified 60 years ago.

Electricity became an important component of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century although it had been the subject of experimentation since 1600 when William Gilbert gave it the name. And, of course, there was Franklin, Faraday, and Maxwell whose research brought it into prominence in “modern” society.

As it turns out, however, electricity sped-up the mechanical media to the extent that there occurred a reversal in social-cultural organization. McLuhan says...

.… the greatest of all reversals occurred with electricity, that ended sequence by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again.

The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of organization.

(McLuhan made these observations in the 1950’s!)

This “clash” is intensely apparent in the Wikileaks phenomenon. Although an “implosion” can be seen in comparing Newtonian mechanics with Einsteinian quantum mechanics, in railroad to internet, in the discovery of DNA, in genome mapping, in stem cell research, in biotechnology and genetic engineering, in micro-, and nano-, we may begin to grasp the difference in effect of these two cultural periods in comparing a dynamite explosion with a fusion-fission reaction equivalent to an explosion of mega-tons of dynamite and its radio-active fallout.

The U.S. Government and State Department are reacting to Wikileaks as if it is believed that freedom is vulnerable and must be protected. But if the pattern of “reversal” holds in this case, we might propose that it is only in accepting vulnerability that one can be free.

Peek-a-book

2010-12-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

All Medicine Is Energy Medicine by William Conder, D.C.

Resist it, it persists

2010-12-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

At a news conference in October 2010, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, citing the "distressingly low" number of new antibiotics in development, proposed providing a "financial incentive" to drug companies to increase their research and development of such substances. She said that this action is important and necessary in view of the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant strains of "superbugs" that have evolved from harmless, as well as infectious, strains of bacteria.

In other words, Dr. Hamburg of the FDA wants to pay, or otherwise financially compensate, the wealthiest (and arguably the most ethically-challenged) companies in the world to invent more antibiotic drugs to kill bacteria that have evolved into drug-resistant "superbugs" due to abuse of the drugs these companies have made already to kill less deadly "bugs". Apparently, when Dr. Hamburg's political appointment expires, she will be looking for a really good-paying job in the pharmaceutical industry.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified antibiotic resistance as "one of the world's most pressing health problems". The World Health Organization says that the main causes of the emergence of the resistant bacteria are the overuse of antibiotics in feed animals for non-therapeutic reasons and indiscriminant prescribing of these drugs by doctors.

So, let's have more antibiotics?

It is common practice on large factory farms to add antibiotics to livestock's feed to promote growth and protect against infection. The prophylactic use is necessary due to changes in the bacterial species in the digestive tract of livestock fed mostly grains instead of grasses, and to control mastitis, udder inflammation.

In June 2010, the FDA issued a recommendation to farmers to abandon the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics. The problem was identified, however, as early as 1969 in the UK by a group whose "Swann Report" stated:

It is clear that there has been a dramatic increase over the years in the numbers of strains of enteric bacteria of animal origin which show resistance to one or more antibiotics. This resistance has resulted from the use of antibiotics for growth promotion and other purposes in farm livestock.

(For more details on this issue please see "Augean Stables" on this blog - unless one has difficulty controlling one's outrage.)

Why did FDA drag its feet for 40 years? A reason may be found in this example: recall that Margaret Miller, Deputy Director of New Animal Drugs at FDA in the early '90's, approved a report from Monsanto attesting to the safety of Monsanto's growth hormone for cows, rBGH. (rBGH, by the way, is known to increase the incidence of mastitis in milk cows.) Later, Miller approved increasing by 100 times the legal limit of antibiotics that could be given to cows. And, by the way, the aforementioned report verifying the safety of rBGH was written by Miller, herself, when she was a researcher at Monsanto, before she worked at FDA.

The following is a summary of legislation that has been proposed in congress every year (with minor additions) since 2003. It hasn't passed yet.

Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2003 - Amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to provide for a phased elimination of the nontherapeutic use in food-producing animals of critical antimicrobial animal drugs. Defines "critical antimicrobial animal drug" and "nontherapeutic use." Requires manufacturers of a critical antimicrobial animal drug or an animal feed for food-producing animals containing such a drug to report annual sales information.

In addition to 55 congressional supporters, a 2003 report by the "Keep Antibiotics Working"" campaign listed over 300 endorsements for "The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2003" including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, dozens of health and consumer groups, animal protection organizations, religious groups, and sustainable farming and agriculture organizations. The American Farm Bureau was conspicuous in its absence from that list.

See the list here http://www.acpm.org/2003051H.pdf

The Department of Health and Human Services' National Institutes of Health's website lists the following about antibiotic resistant micro-organisms:

Quick Facts

•Increasing use of antimicrobials in humans, animals, and agriculture has resulted in many microbes developing resistance to these powerful drugs.
•Many infectious diseases are increasingly difficult to treat because of antimicrobial-resistant organisms, including HIV infection, staphylococcal infection, tuberculosis, influenza, gonorrhea, candida infection, and malaria.
•Between 5 and 10 percent of all hospital patients develop an infection, leading to an increase of about $5 billion in annual U.S. healthcare costs.
•About 90,000 of these patients die each year as a result of their infection, up from 13,300 patient deaths in 1992.
•People infected with antimicrobial-resistant organisms are more likely to have longer hospital stays and may require more complicated treatment.

Ninety thousand hospital patients die each year from superbug infections developed while in the hospital, compared to 13,300 in 1992. Remember, Monsanto researcher Margaret Miller, at FDA, approved increasing the legal limit of antibiotic use in cows by 100 times in the early 1990's.

Robert Cohen, who petitioned FDA to reconsider its approval of rBGH, wrote in May 2000:

The consequences of her [Margaret Miller] action were that new strains of bacteria developed in dairy cows that were immune to existing antibiotics, which no longer worked when they were needed. People drank milk containing increased amounts of antibiotics and new species of bacteria with immunities to those antimicrobials.

On its website, Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology follows-up Cohen's article with this comment:

Leading experts have emphasized that powerful measures are required to reduce the use of antibiotics. There are clear evidence linking antibiotics resistance in salmonella and other bacteria to the use of antibiotics in farm animals. In a situation, feared to cause the resurgence of intractable lethal infectious diseases, an FDA official, Margret Miller, has acted so as to further increase the risk of the emergence of dangerous bacteria all over the USA by allowing a considerable increase of antibiotics use on cows. The only obvious reason for such a decision appears to have been to promote the use of rBGH.

If we connect all the dots....we find that industrialized farming practices....which have persisted for several generations in spite of evidence indicating it's harmfulness to humans and farm animals....(because of short-sighted objectives and intentional ignorance with regard to environmental considerations on the part of proponents of these practices)....have caused the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria....which find their way into food....and wind up in the bodies of people....causing illness and death.

What is referred to here by the phrase "industrialized farming practices" includes: administering recombinant bovine growth hormone to cows to make them produce more milk than their bodies want to; giving feed animals antibiotics to fatten them and to combat infection caused as unwanted side-effects of rBGH; grain feeding instead of grass grazing; fertilizing vegetable crops with manure from cows that harbor antibiotic resistant bacteria having emerged due to their being subjected to abuse of antibiotics.

Presently, controversial Senate Bill 510 is being considered by our lawmakers. The bill would grant FDA considerable power to regulate the production and processing of food. With Monsanto operative, lobbyist, and lawyer Michael Taylor acting as "food safety expert" within FDA at this time, one can imagine in whose favor FDA food safety policy will be placed. Meanwhile, the bill to control use of antibiotics in feed animals, first proposed in 2003 and well-supported throughout the health community, can't get out of committee.

Senate Bill 510, if passed into law, would jeopardize small farms' ability to sell directly to consumers. A paragraph added to the bill in the interest of protecting small farmers from the burden of federal regulations was received with protest from big agriculture lobbyists. Following is an excerpt from their letter to Senators Reid, Harkin, McConnell, and Enzi concerning the amendment proposed by Montana Senator Tester:

...we are writing to express our opposition to latest “compromise” on Senator Tester’s amendment to exempt small farms and business operations from basic federal food safety requirements.

Comments from Senator Tester and supporters are now making it abundantly clear that their cause is not to argue that small farms pose less risk, but to wage an ideological war against the vast majority of American farmers that seeks to feed 300 million Americans. We are appalled at statements by Senator Tester reported today in the Capital Press that “Small producers are not raising a commodity, but are raising food. Industrial agriculture, he said, takes the people out of the equation."

The undersigned produce organizations strongly oppose inclusion of the Tester amendment in S. 510. If this language is included in the bill, we will be forced to oppose final passage of the bill.

The "undersigned" is a list of groups represented by The Produce Marketers Association and United Fresh Produce Association. Regarding the latter, its board of directors lists representatives from Dole, Kroger, McDonalds, Dupont, and Bayer, among others. (Noteworthy in this letter is the use of the phrase "wage an ideological war": where do these small farmers get off bucking the system by wanting to control their own farming methods and by selling directly to consumers?! The nerve!)

To reiterate, the primary causes of the evolution of antibiotic resistant superbug microorganisms, according to researchers and public health officials, are 1) the over-use and abuse of antibiotics for non-therapeutic purposes in food animals, and 2) over-use and abuse of antibiotics, for health problems not affected by antibiotics, in humans. And it is widely acknowledged that the "food contamination problem" is inherent in industrialized food production.

When used appropriately, antibiotics are very important drugs and can save lives. In any case, however, they cause unwanted side-effects in the human body. Still, these side-effects are considered a fair and necessary trade-off for stopping a dangerous bacterial infection.

An analogous situation has emerged in agriculture: "superweeds" resistant to conventional herbicides, especially Monsanto's glyphosphate Roundup, are appearing as another sign that Nature is pushing back.

A December 2008 report in "The Delta Farm Press" exposed the following:

The epicenter of glyphosate-resistant Palmer pigweed is Macon County, Ga. That site is now 70 percent to 80 percent resistant and over 10,000 acres were abandoned in 2007.

Palmer amaranth is suspected to be resistant on 300,000 acres in 20 counties in Georgia; 130,000 acres in nine counties in South Carolina; 200,000 acres in 22 counties in North Carolina.

The same online newsletter posted the following article on November 2010:

Are we running out of herbicides? The answer, I believe, is yes — for three reasons.

The first is the continued development of herbicide-resistant weeds. We have no less than seven glyphosate-resistant weeds in the Mid-South now. They include giant ragweed, common ragweed, johnsongrass, Italian ryegrass, Palmer amaranth and common waterhemp.

Many folks tend to forget that in the early 1990s, we were beginning to have major issues with herbicide resistance with these same weeds. Roundup Ready crops came on in the mid- to late-1990s and bailed us out of that mess.

...out of the frying-pan "mess" into the fire "mess".... The Roundup Ready bail-out was temporary. (The other 2 reasons indicated by the article's author had to do with pressure from environmental groups and diminished development of herbicides from chemical companies.)

And now we need more herbicides?

"Roundup Ready" is Monsanto's name for its genetically engineered crop seeds modified to resist its glyphosphate herbicide, "Roundup". The idea is that if farmers plant Roundup Ready seeds they can spray their fields with the herbicide Roundup and not worry that the herbicide will kill Roundup Ready plants - it kills only the nasty, unwanted weeds.

Monsanto's response to the emergence of superweeds to farmers, as early as 1997, was to recommend more glyphosphate, more Roundup Ready seeds, and avoid crop rotation using traditional crops and methods. Meanwhile it worked internally to maintain its position: by 2001 Monsanto obtained a patent on mixtures of its glyphosphate and other herbicides to target resistant weeds.

From Iowa State University's Department of Agronomy in May 2003, the following summarizes what weed scientists knew, and about which Monsanto lied:

Almost all weed scientists agree that the evolution of resistant biotypes is inevitable with the current use pattern of glyphosate. Increased adoption of rotations relying solely on RR crops will greatly enhance the rate that resistance evolves. Because of this, we feel it is best to develop long-term weed management plans that reduce the selection pressure placed on weeds by any single herbicide, including Roundup.

An October 2010 report published on the website of the Organic Consumers Association says:

Environmental scientists warned even before Monsanto's "herbicide tolerant" GMO crops were approved that they would hasten the evolution of resistant weeds. For these scientists, the issue was obvious: introduction of high doses of a single chemical year after year would result in the exact conditions needed to breed resistance: weeds with resistance genes would be the only weeds that could survive and breed, leading to superweeds that are unaffected even by massive herbicide spraying.

As the industrial model of farming and the industrial model of conventional medical practice fail, the people suffer the fallout. The solution that arises from within these industries is to "just keep doing more of the same". With minds set this way, breakthrough is not likely. And, unfortunately, the "...government by the people, for the people..." has become "...the government by the corporations, for the corporations..."

Intentional ignoring of adequate warning because commerce was the priority, a blind faith in the infallibility of the technology, and silly human error caused the unsinkable Titanic to sink, too.

A definition of insanity, attributed by different sources to the likes of Gandhi or Einstein or Twain or Socrates, goes something like "doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results". A variation of this is the observation that "you can't solve a problem using the same logic that created the problem in the first place".

Obesity is recognized as a predisposing factor in heart disease, type II diabetes, and cancer - the top three health problems in America. Farmers know that feeding antibiotics and grains to livestock fattens them quickly and shortens their lives. Choose your doctor and your food carefully. And, if at all possible, stay out of the hospital.

Raw Milk, reprise

2010-10-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

Food, next to air and water, is our most important connection to "mother nature", that is, the natural environment. Over the last 50 years, however, it has been compromised by industrialization.

A specialized perception of the world and phenomena is a concomitant factor with industrialism. Though we try, we cannot separate an investigation of the health of a human being from the health of the environment in which it lives without deluding and desensitizing ourselves.

Inherent in large-scale industrial food production is the carelessness with which food material is handled and with which consumer trust is manipulated. Even so, tremendous monetary wealth has been generated - and continues to be generated - in this politically powerful industry.

A 1936 document of a report to the 74th U.S. Congress says

...foods... being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat.

A 2004 study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, comparing nutrient levels in garden crops between 1950 and 1999, found significant decline in some nutrients in that time period, 14 years after the 1936 report to congress. Authors of the study hypothesized that the overall decline in nutrients in many of the 43 foods they studied was the result of decades of selecting food crops for high yield. (They noted also that a diet of processed foods was more cautionary than the decline in mineral concentration in food crops.)

According to a recent Food&WaterWatch report the American Farm Bureau Federation, which calls itself "The Voice of Agriculture", is one of the most powerful interest groups in the United States. The report says that its image of being pro-farmer is betrayed by its investments of tens of millions of dollars in Cargill, ConAgra, Dow, Dupont, Tyson, Archer Daniel Midlands, and so on. For the last 5 years Farm Bureau and Monsanto have been the highest spending lobbyists in agribusiness.

This report says that

Bob Stallman, the president of the Farm Bureau, ...has invoked post-slavery reparations in a seemingly mixed metaphor he used to condemn consumers and farmers who oppose the industrial model of agriculture, referring to them as “extremists who want to drag agriculture back to the day of 40 acres and a mule.”

The Farm Bureau is the voice of corporate agribusiness, not agriculture.

Food recalls by government agencies for contamination by E. coli or Salmonella, for example, and the reports that detail the agency's "investigation" of the contamination, seem to indicate that the agency is doing its job, and that once the weak link in the food chain is discovered new regulations will "come down" and food safety will be assured again. The government agency, however, is blind to the fact that it is the industrialization of food production that is the problem - blind because they are staffed with people from industry.

It's not only contamination with harmful micro-organisms that continues to be problematic in food industry. At the grocery store we find adulteration, contamination with chemical toxins, over-refinement of raw materials, and genetic modification of "food" that we don't think twice about consuming even though obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, allergies, asthma, ADHD, early puberty in girls, and other signs of imbalance are high and rising.

The farmer grows the raw materials that eventually become the food we eat, but where does the farmer get the seeds he plants? Most likely Monsanto, Dupont, or Syngenta - the three biggest multinational chemical/biotech/pharmaceutical conglomerates in the world.

In his article "Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996 - 2008", Philip H. Howard says that trends in the commercial seed industry have effects that limit renewable agriculture, reduce seed lines, and cause a decline in seed saving. Since the mid 90's when transgenic crops were commercialized, he says, "the sale of seeds has been dominated by Monsanto, Dupont, and Syngenta." Howard says that control of the seed industry is "increasingly bound to agricultural practices that promote unsustainable topsoil depletion, monocultures, contamination of ecosystems, and high fossil fuel and water consumption."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified dozens of Superfund sites for which Dupont is at least partly responsible. For example, during the period 1981 - 1984 a Dupont factory contaminated tap water with a Teflon-related chemical near Parkersburg, West Virginia, and knew about it for years but never told the community or the local water utility. The community eventually sued Dupont in 2001.

It may never be known how much Monsanto has contaminated the environment and compromised human and animal life as a result of their various creations in the pursuit of "better living through chemistry". One example came to light in Alabama in 2002. A February 2002 article in the Washington Post reported that

An Alabama jury yesterday found that Monsanto Co. engaged in "outrageous" behavior by releasing tons of PCBs into the city of Anniston and covering up its actions for decades, handing 3,500 local residents a huge victory in a landmark environmental lawsuit.

The jury in Gadsden, Ala., a town 20 miles from Anniston, held Monsanto and its corporate successors liable on all six counts it considered: negligence, wantonness, suppression of the truth, nuisance, trespass and outrage. Under Alabama law, the rare claim of outrage typically requires conduct "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society."

And,

Anniston residents did not learn about the pollution until 1996, even though documents show that Monsanto knew about it for decades. In 1966, for example, Monsanto managers discovered that fish dunked in a local creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dropped into boiling water. In 1969, they found a fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB level. But they never told their neighbors, and concluded that "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges."

A court document in the Anniston case reported that Monsanto dumped 5,576,000 pounds of PCB's into the Anniston landfill from 1971 to 1975, years after realizing the impact on human physiology and the environment, without trying to control the contamination.

Before the PCB's hit the fan in Alabama, Monsanto spun-off a company named Solutia to take the heat over its "outrageous" contamination of Anniston, and other sites in Illinois, West Virginia, and Wales (a city there is "among the most contaminated places in Britain.") Yet just 5 years after the verdict in Alabama, Monsanto's stock increased in value by 700% - according to the Dow Jones Industrials. "...birds of a feather..."

Monsanto, makers of DDT (banned in 1972), agent orange, dioxin, the herbicide Roundup, aspartame, Posilac (recombinant bovine growth hormone), PCB's (banned in 1979)..., has been called a retirement home for Clinton administration officials, but it makes financial contributions equally and abundantly to both political parties. Bob Shapiro, a former CEO of Monsanto, was one of the biggest contributors to Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996. Subsequently, he was appointed "special trade advisor to the President." Monsanto lawyer and lobbyist Michael Taylor has been in and out of the FDA and Department of Agriculture several times over the last 25 years. He was responsible, by some accounts, for getting FDA approval for Monsanto's rBGH against the objections and warnings of FDA staff scientists. Taylor is back in the FDA today, an Obama administration appointee, as a "food safety expert".

At least partly, Monsanto's success can be attributed to its ability to infiltrate and influence the federal government and its agencies. The FDA has been called Monsanto's Washington office. At the level of influence where multinational corporations form alliances and monopolize the food supply, government, the two-party system, Democrat-or-Republican, and so on, are irrelevant and obsolete - except as a vehicle, a stepping-stone for the likes of Monsanto. This extreme of industrialism is more dangerous to the people than military squabbles between countries.

Former President Eisenhower was known to have warned against the "military-industrial complex"; Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", written in 1816 before human sensibilities adapted to "the industrial revolution", is interpreted as a metaphor for the monstrous effects of industrialism; the legend of Ned Ludd and the Luddites, possibly the original Monkeywrench Gang, represents the actual "revolution" against the collusion between industrial wealth and the military it supplies. But industry has absorbed and transcended the military: Its model is imperialism in the global food supply economy.

Government agencies designed to look-out for the best interests of the people who elect government officials who design government agencies and appoint agency officials... have been taken over by industry operatives who introduce and enforce regulations designed to promote industry and protect it from extremists such as agrarian farmers and people who want raw milk?.... If this sounds like a circular argument or positive feedback loop that makes you crazy when you try to understand it, that's because it is - crazy.

Monsanto's behavior in general is "so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly intolerable in civilized society" yet it abides and prospers. And our elected officials are trusting it, and others like it, in the production of our food.

In his article "The Agrarian Standard" published in Orion magazine in 2002, Wendell Berry says that, as an agrarian writer, he has

never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.

We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in which we are so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.

Raw Milk is a battle-cry for... raw milk, unadulterated food, restoring our critical relationship to "mother nature", freedom to buy food directly from our farmer, and for health. Raw Milk is a shout against the reckless and greedy food industry, the abuse of our beasts of burden and our significant soil, the government take-over by industry confidence men, the manipulation of science for monetary gain, the control of the truth by the middleman...

Raw Milk is a wake-up call. We must wake-up to our self-responsibilities and confront those who take advantage of us for profit.

milk, machines, monsanto, the middleman, and manipulation

2010-08-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

A 1996 study from the University of Chicago's School of Public Health reported the following:

Levels of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) are substantially elevated and more bioactive in the milk of cows hyperstimulated with the biosynthetic bovine growth hormones rBGH, and are further increased by pasteurization. IGF-1 is absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, as evidenced by marked growth-promoting effects even in short-term tests in mature rats, and absorption is likely to be still higher in infants. Converging lines of evidence incriminate IGF-1 in rBGH milk as a potential risk factor for both breast and gastrointestinal cancers.

The FDA, under the influence of Monsanto's Michael Taylor and against the recommendations of agency scientists, approved Monsanto's rBGH in 1993. rBGH is a hormone injected into a cow to make it give more milk in spite of the limitations of the cow's natural physiology. It increases the cow's susceptibility to mastitis (an udder infection), thus increasing the need for antibiotics. This strategy destroys the quality of her milk and shortens the cow's life.

Recently, animal rights activists won a court battle with the egg industry concerning the living conditions of egg-laying hens. The August 2010 recall of over 500 million eggs due to salmonella contamination underscores the abuse of food-producing animals by the farming "industry" and the danger inherent in industrial farming practices.

Industrial-style consolidation and centralization of milk processors and dairy cooperatives gives milk buyers considerable power over dairy farmers. In many parts of the country, dairy farmers have no choice in who they sell their milk to or for what price - they have no bargaining power. A few powerful so-called cooperatives control huge amounts of the country's milk supply this way.

In 2009 the dairy farmer made 97 cents for a 3 dollar gallon of milk and less than a dollar for every 5 dollar pound of cheddar cheese. The middleman got the rest.

How is the cost of milk determined? According to Food & Water Watch:

The price of cheddar cheese blocks traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) serves as the basis for the government’s formulas for determining the price of milk, no matter what milk is used for or where it is sold. The few dairy industry traders at the CME can effectively exert control over the price paid to farmers by selling or buying cheese. The cheese commodity
futures trade occurs for half an hour a week, is estimated to involve 40 or fewer traders working for half a dozen firms, and covers 80 percent of the cheese marketed in the United States. The very small number of traders representing huge dairy companies can actually influence the price of cheese at the CME — and thus the price paid to farmers for their milk — by holding or selling cheese at strategic moments. The Government Accountability Office
(GAO) determined that cheese prices at the CME were prone to manipulation. In 2008, the DFA [Dairy Farmers of America] and two of its former executives were fined $12 million for attempting to manipulate the price of fluid milk through cheddar cheese purchases at the CME.

Vernon Hershberger, a free adult man and an honest farmer, wants to sell unadulterated milk and other wholesome food to his customers. He wants to avoid being manipulated by milk industry con-men and by mealy-mouthed middlemen, shills of "modern" farming methods; he wants to avoid Monsanto-style perversions of natural animal husbandry. And, as a small-businessman, he's providing a commodity that is in demand. He's doing nothing wrong.

Have you got a friend in the gover'ment? (updated)

2010-08-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

Monsanto does.

http://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/Transparency/Basics/ucm206201.htm

From John Robbins' blog at The Huffington Post, August 2010:

By all accounts, the FDA's 1993 decision to allow the use of rBGH was one of the most controversial in the agency's history. Made amid widespread criticism from scientists, government leaders and farmers, including many researchers and officials inside the FDA, the decision was overseen by Michael R. Taylor, the FDA's Deputy Commissioner of Policy from 1991-1994.

Was Taylor unbiased? Prior to holding that position, he was an attorney at King & Spaulding, Monsanto's law firm, where he presided over the firm's "food and drug law" practice. After the decision was made which gave the green light to rBGH, he left the FDA and resumed working directly for Monsanto, as vice president and chief lobbyist.

How significant was Taylor's role in getting rBGH approved? As of August 15, 2010, his Wikipedia entry said that he "has long been hostile to food safety," and "is widely credited with ushering recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) through the FDA regulatory process and into the milk supply -- unlabeled." (This statement was removed from Wikipedia immediately after I referred to it in a comment following an article I wrote last week for The Huffington Post on the topic. Apparently, if you can get your people in and out of key positions at the FDA, messing with Wikipedia is a piece of cake.)

Congressman Bernie Sanders was specifically referring to Taylor when he said "the FDA allowed corporate influence to run rampant in its approval of BGH." Documentaries including "The World According to Monsanto" and "The Future of Food" present Taylor's pro-Monsanto actions at the FDA as a dramatic example of how corporate influence has exerted massive control over the FDA. Today, Taylor again works for the FDA, now as Deputy Commissioner of Foods.

We have non-elected people in government positions making questionable decisions that affect many but which benefit only a few.

Pasteurized Milk, or, "Hey, Dude, Where's My Cow?"

2010-08-08T10:30:00.000-07:00

In May 2010, saying that he "...must side with the interests of public health and the dairy industry..." Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle vetoed a bill that would have allowed the sale of raw milk under specific conditions for a year and a half. Many observers thought the bill, already passed in the Wisconsin legislature by a wide margin, would be signed by Doyle.

In other words, according to what Doyle himself said, he caved-in to the lobbying of special interests: "... side with interests of public health and the dairy industry..." He probably was not aware of what it was to which he was admitting, which makes the problem even worse.

"Public health" doesn't refer to the health of each individual of "the public", whatever that is. It refers to the officiants of government agencies whose opinions of what should and should not be done is dictated by corporate entities that have a special interest in outcomes.

Even though there is enough support from the people in Wisconsin for the "legalization" of raw milk, even though there is enough support from the group of elected state representatives for the "legalization" of raw milk, even though raw milk is "legal" in other states including Illinois and Minnesota, even though (in recent history) pasteurized milk caused more serious illness than raw milk, Doyle vetoed the bill under the lobbying influence of apparently powerful non-governmental agencies.

Statistically, raw spinach and canteloupe are more dangerous than raw milk. Recently, the Departmment of Agriculture announced another "ground beef" recall due to E. coli 0157:H7 contamination, this time 1,000,000 pounds of the mystery meat. The mid-sized Modesto, California, meat processing company in question says it takes food safety very seriously and, of course, it must. But with so many hands in this kind of operation, contamination is inevitable.

Approving of the governor's veto, the President of the Wisconsin Medical Society issued a statement on May 19, 2010 saying, in part, that "...the governor acted on behalf of sound science and in defense of children who may not understand the hazards of a glass of raw milk..."

It's no secret that people can be controlled with fear.

One would ask, "To what 'sound science' does the Wisconsin Medical society refer?" Is it the "sound science" perpetrated by the American Medical Society, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration? One does not find a convincing reason anywhere in the documentation to outlaw raw milk that is produced for raw consumption. In California, where raw milk is "legal", we do not hear of people dropping dead from its consumption the way we hear of people dropping dead from FDA approved drugs prescribed by doctors. What is found, over and over again, is that the dangers lurking in the food supply, including milk, are caused by the over-processing and adulteration of food materials by an impatiently greedy food industry that has influence in government.

Other groups that lobbyed Doyle included the Wisconsin Dairy Business Association, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association, and the Wisconsin Farm Bureau.

The Wisconsin Farm Bureau said that their opposition to legalizing raw milk has to do with

our overall concern for the State’s $26 billion dairy industry. If a person becomes ill from drinking raw milk, it is not only unpasteurized milk that gets a bad image, but all milk and dairy products. Dairy farmers have invested millions of dollars promoting milk and dairy products. Dairy farmers cannot afford to have an incident adversely affect consumption.

Raw milk dairy farmers can make 3 times as much money selling raw milk to people than they make selling to a processor, and they can do it with smaller herds and healthier cows.

The Wisconsin Dairy Business Association website lists as "sponsors" many farming industry companies including those involved in banking, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and "genetic improvement", and the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association.

This is not to say that there's something wrong with participating in big business and associating with others in big business. But, as in the case of the Wisconsin Dairy Business Association, when their "sponsors" page lists Cargill, Pioneer, Pfizer, Purina, BASF, and many other national and multinational companies, one may assume that their influence probably will not come down in favor of the small, independent farmer who prefers not to have ties to agri-business and biotech.

Small, independent farmers who don't want to play the game, who believe in the importance of thoughtful, even loving, farming practice, who simply want to provide people with wholesome, nutritious food, are being harrassed by government officials, extensions of the food and agriculture industries. This makes government and governmental agencies unrepresentative and untrustworthy in the eyes of people who expect fairness from their representatives.

Food pathogens in milk for which pasteurization was found necessary over 100 years ago account for 0.01% of food-borne illness today. Food pathogens found most commonly today have emerged only in the past 30 years. Between 1990 and 2004, all milk, raw and pasteurized, accounted for less than 1% of all reported food-borne illness.

Antibiotic-resistant Salmonella in pasteurized milk caused 200,000 illnesses and 18 deaths in 1984-1985. After 40 years of controversy, only this year the FDA only recommended that the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals be reduced.

You don't have to drink raw milk if you don't want to. But if you do want to, you can't because that choice is not available. Sushi? Pack of cigarets, bottle of whiskey, .38 special, roulette...? Yes. Raw milk directly from the farmer? No.

We have many strange incongruities in our society that we don't question because our perception has been trained to accept them. On closer inspection, some are funny, some are not.

Pasteurize the FDA

2010-07-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

In the 1990's officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an agency in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), were aware that 20 million prescriptions for antibiotics were being given unnecessarily by doctors to patients for viral infections. Viruses are not affected by antibiotic drugs.

Over the last 40 years, there has been "speculation" in the FDA, and proof in other parts of the world, that giving antibiotics to food-animals such as cows to fatten them, as was and still is common practice on factory farms, has the unwanted side-effect of evolving antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria that eventually find their way into the food supply causing serious disease in humans.

Furthermore, the practice of feeding cows mostly grain instead of grass modifies the environment of the cow's gut causing bacteria normally found there to become resistant to acids. Grain feeding acidifies an area of the cow's digestive tract; bacteria found there under normal conditions change to become more tolerant of the acid environment.

Many people in the U.S. are diagnosed by their doctors with "acid reflux disease" and are prescribed anti-acids, histamine blockers, or proton pump inhibitors. In fact, this so-called "disease", created by drug companys' management of consumer perception, in most people is caused by too little hydrochloric acid (HCl) production in the stomach, the result of a deficiency of chloride in the diet.

When the stomach makes too little HCl, food material is not broken down properly, it does not move into the small intestine as it should, and it begins to putrefy in the stomach, making acids of its own. In this case, the proper physiological response is regurgitation. Since most of us learned as children to over-ride the vomiting reflex, the upward impulse from the stomach that should cause the food material to be expelled results only in irritation of the lower end of the esophagus, "heartburn", and "acid reflux".

Physiologists consider the stomach and its acidic environment to be the immune system's "first line of defense" against pathogenic micro-organisms. A low stomach pH of 1.7 found in healthy people, kills many micro-organisms that might overwhelm the gastro-intestinal tract.

Stomach cells make HCl and secrete it into the lumen of the stomach. A form of histamine contributes to the release of this acid. This acid activates pepsin, a very important proteolytic enzyme.

The raw material used in the stomach's production of the acid is salt, NaCl.

Anti-acids, proton pump inhibitors, and antibiotics are among the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. That is, they are available at the doctor's discretion, by prescription. This is drug abuse without parallel. The extent to which these prescriptions cause health problems and shorten life, should such research be undertaken, would be shocking.

If the cause of reflux disease is attributed to infection by Helicobacter pylorii, a bacterium found normally in 50% of the population without symptoms, the conventional therapeutic approach is a prescription of proton pump inhibitors and anti-biotics. (A recognized cause of H. pylorii overgrowth is hypochlorhydria, inadequate stomach acid.)

Proton pump inhibitors are associated with hip fractures and gastroenteritis caused by the Clostridium difficile bacterium which some researchers believe has become - you guessed it - antibiotic resistant.

In Minnesota in 2008 a woman had become infected with Clostridium difficile and was dying from diarrhea. The antibiotics her doctor was giving her for the infection made her worse. As a kind of last resort, the doctor performed a little-known procedure called a fecal transplant. The doctor took fecal material, containing healthy bacteria, from the woman's husband, dissolved it in salt water, and introduced it into her colon. The woman's diarrhea stopped in one day and the infection disappeared.

In a study performed at a Boston, Massachusettes, hospital and reported in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009, researchers found a 30% increase in hospital-acquired pneumonia associated with acid-suppressive proton-pump inhibitor use. They said that the use of proton-pump inhibitors in the in-patient hospital setting had increased though indications for its use were not present.

The well-known proton pump inhibitor Prilosec, one of the most prescribed drugs in the world, was FDA approved and marketed in the U.S. in the late 1980's by the multi-national pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. When the patent for the Prilosec molecule was about to expire, AstraZeneca modified it very slightly, constructed some highly criticised research, and came up with Nexium. In this way, AstraZeneca was able to contine to charge outrageous prices for the same drug that had become generic and cheaper. The FDA approved this drug, extending AstraZeneca's monoply, even though it, Nexium, was a "trivial variation of a drug already present in the marketplace". Here, as in many areas of "agency oversight", laws and regulations designed to protect the interests of large corporations, trump common sense. In any case, this drug is unnecessary and even harmfull for most people for whom it is prescribed.

AstraZeneca then convinced doctors to prescribe Nexium and insurance companies to pay for it. The environment at AstraZeneca's office in the U.S. may shed some light on their methods of persuasion. Over the past 10 or 15 years, this pharmaceutical giant has had many internal problems including - but not limited to - lawsuits over its drugs, accusations of abuse of power, sexual harrasment lawsuits, fraud, misappropriation of funds, corruption involving the Nobel Prize jury, tax evasion....

If the communists had infiltrated the government as successfully as the pharmaceutical and bio-tech industries have infiltrated the FDA, we would be singing the praises of Marx and Lenin. Vioxx, FDA approved in 1999, has caused thousands of fatal heart attacks. Maggots and leaches have been approved as medical devices by FDA. Many drugs with many harmful and under-reported side-effects have been approved by the FDA. In 2009, nine scientists wrote a letter to then president-elect Obama saying that the FDA was "fundamentally broken" and that honest employees were intimidated by dishonest employees. Prior to this, even Congress expressed concerns that FDA was "too close to industry".

A survey in 2006 by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that 1/5th of FDA scientists said that they "have been asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or their conclusions in an FDA scientific document".

In 1993, the FDA approved Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) against the warning of agency scientists. rBGH has been found to increase insulin-like growth factor in the cow's milk, the effects of which in consumers is questionable at best. All European Union countries, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan have banned rBGH use, mostly because of the ill-effect on the cows.

It's been Monsanto's contention that pasteurizing milk destroys the insulin-like growth factor.

Monsanto's rBGH Posilac is now owned by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company. It is made by the genetically engineered bacterium, E. coli. It is known to substantially increase health problems in cows, requiring increased use of antibiotics.

The FDA's policy statement on food products made from cows treated with rBGH is that these foods are safe and that there is no substantial difference between milk from rBGH treated cows and milk from cows not treated with rBGH.

In 1991, the FDA created a position for Monsanto lawyer/operative Michael Taylor called Deputy Commissioner for Policy. There he crafted the FDA's policy statement on rBGH. In 1993 he worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture as Acting Under Secretary for Food Safety. He left that position and went back to work for Monsanto but came back to the FDA in 2009 in another position created just for him, Advisor to FDA Commissioner in the Obama administration.

Michael Taylor wrote FDA's labelling policy that includes a warning to grocery stores not to label milk as rBGH-free. While he was Deputy Commissioner for Policy, references in drafts of policy statements regarding negative effects of GMO foods were deleted.

Margaret Miller, Deputy Director of New Animal Drugs at FDA in the early 1990's, approved a report from Monsanto attesting to the safety of Monsanto's rBGH. The Monsanto report had been written by - herself, Margaret Miller, while she worked at Monsanto as an rBGH researcher, before she got the job at FDA. Later, because rBGH increased the rate of infection in dairy cows, she approved increasing the "legal limit" of antibiotics that could be given to cows by 100 times.

Miller, Taylor, and Susan Sechen, another Monsanto operative at the FDA, were investigated by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 1994. The GAO found "no conflict of interest". Apparently, the GAO was not at liberty to make a common sense evaluation on this matter.

Lawyer and flexian Michael Taylor is back at the FDA in 2010 in a position created for him. Is anyone paying attention...?

FDA's official statement regarding the consumption of raw milk is as follows:

Raw milk is inherently dangerous and it should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose.

If they're talking about milk from cows given rBGH, over-fed on grains, and abused with antibiotics then this is good advice. Milk from these cows is never tested for harmful micro-organisms, after or before pasteurization.

For those aware of the benefits of wholesome, unadulterrated, farm-direct food, including raw milk from healthy cows, a better warning might be: Due to the fact that it is "fundamentally broken" and because it has been infiltrated and controlled by the over-powerful industries it was intended to police, no one, under any circumstances, for any reason, should believe anything the FDA says.

Health is a personal, individual responsibility. Don't take prescription drugs. Don't eat "fast-food". Go to your local farmer. Get some raw milk.

Irony and Raw Spinach

2010-07-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

In 2005, E. coli 0157:H7 sickened 23 people in Minnesota. The bacteria was traced to bagged spinach grown in Salinas Valley, California, processed by Natural Selections Foods, and sold by Dole. At the time, the president of the International Fresh-cut Produce Association said that with an industry producing hundreds of millions of pounds of fresh-cut lettuce it's impossible to catch 100% of all pathogens.

In September 2006, raw spinach contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7 caused 200 people to become ill; 3 people died. The outbreak was traced to a 50 acre plot leased from a cattle ranch in California to a "farmer" growing organic spinach. Initially, the route by which the spinach was contaminated could not be determined. However, deer and wild pigs, as well as cattle, are known to harbor the E. coli bacterium and are known to inhabit the area in question. Additionally, irrigation wells, contaminated by waterways from the ranch, may have been a factor. The producer's processing and transportation methods were questioned, also.

The outbreak spread across the U.S.; Wisconsin reported 49 cases and 1 death. In October of that year, Wisconsin Governor Doyle requested federal aid to help deal with the outbreak.

Reports eventually showed that this 2006 outbreak of E. coli was linked to bagged fresh spinach sold by Earthbound Farms and processed by Natural Selections Foods of California.

In an interview discussing the contamination, then director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Julie Gerberding, M.D. said, in detached public-relations fashion, that all links from farm to table had to be examined to find the cause. Farm? Links?

But there was no farm - as we usually think of it - involved in this outbreak. It was a field, a leased piece of land, planted with spinach by an anonymous person doing his job for some entity in the "salad foods industry". This is an important distinction to make but it was overlooked or considered irrelevant by Dr. Gerberding.

...links from farm to table...? Yes, maybe in the absent-minded industrialized production of leafy greens and other "food products" for mass distribution, but not at the local, small, independent farm where one goes to pick-up a bunch, and half-a-gallon of raw milk. There are no "links" here in the world of real farmers and real food.

Industrialized farming necessitates the many "links" between farm and table. It is the problem which authorities attempt to resolve, ironically, with more industrialization.

In August 2007 a Salinas Valley company recalled 8,000 cartons of its fresh spinach because of a salmonella scare. A routine test during spinach processing found the salmonella. There were no reports of illness in this case.

Between 1995 and 2006, 19 E. coli outbreaks caused by contaminated salad foods were recorded by the CDC. Of these, 8 were linked to Salinas Valley. Contaminated irrrigation water has been known to be a problem in this major produce growing area.

In 2006, 74% of the fresh market spinach grown in the U.S. was from California.

The Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce's website says that it, Salinas Valley, is the center for Monterey County's $3.8 billion agriculture industry. The county is the #1 vegetable producing region in the country. ($3.8 billion!). The Chamber of Commerce site says local growers and shippers lead the industry in all phases of crop growth including seed technology, planting and irrigation, harvesting and marketing. "Agriculture is the largest driver of Monterey County's economy."

Dole is the world's largest producer and marketer of fruit and vegetables. In 2007 it claimed revenues of $6.9 billion. Over the last couple of years, Dole has been in and out of court over a movie about bananas, alleged environmental contamination in Nicaragua, and questionable lawsuits and lawyers. Dole's headquarters are in Monterey County, California.

Earthbound Farms is the "organic" brand of pre-packaged greens and vegetables sold by Natural Selections, LLC. This company was started in 1984 by a married couple from the famous farming region... Manhattan. Today they operate out of a 25,000 foot production plant in San Bautista, California. They grow their veggies in Salinas Valley half of the year and Yuma, Arizona the other half of the year. Their produce is grown by 150 farmers on 33,000 acres. Earthbound Farms is recognized as a leader in the "organic foods industry". In July 2009, to celebrate its 25th anniversary and "underscore its committment to the environment", Earthbound announced that all of its packaging would be made from 100% post-consumer recycled polyethelene terephthalate (PET).

The food industry depends heavily on plastics for packaging and transportation of their food products. The plastics industry would have us believe that their materials are efficiently recycled and reused, but plastic bottles are rarely recycled into plastic bottles. Instead, usually they're made into plastic furniture which is not recyclable.

Research by a Berkeley environmental group reveals many misconceptions about recycling of plastics. They say that most plastics are made from virgin materials (petroleum, natural gas), that manufacurers use no recycled plastic in their new packaging, and that PET, at least in bottles and jars used in soda and peanut butter, for example, leach acetaldehyde into the food material they contain.

Some food producers are using a plastic made from corn in the packaging of their fresh vegetables and greens. NatureWorks, LLC, a Cargill company, makes resins from corn and other starchy plant material that can be used to make plastics and fiber. It says that these bioplastics cost about the same as petroleum plastics and biodegrade under specific landfill conditions in 1 to 10 years. The NatureWorks website is very careful to point out that its production of bioplastics does not distinguish between GMO and non-GMO corn in its process and, therefore, should not increase the demand for GMO corn.

Right.

Packaging constitutes one-third of waste material in the U.S., including plastics made to protect food. Food packaging is fifty-six percent of the flexible packaging market. Flexible packaging is the 2nd largest packaging segment in the U.S.; it is a $26.4 billion industry. The flexible packaging industry says that flexible packaging "...adds value and marketability to food... ensures food safety and extends shelf life."

In November 2006 in the Northeast 71 people became ill after eating at a Taco Bell restaurant.

Since May 2010 Subway restaurants in Illinois have been linked to a salmonella outbreak of food-borne illness. Main suspects are lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers.

A May 2010 recall of alfalfa sprouts produced by Caldwell Fresh foods was enacted. Trader Joe's and Wal-Mart stores were sellers of these sprouts. Caldwell Fresh Foods lists its address as Maywood, California, a city in Los Angeles County. With the information available, it was not possible to locate their "family owned" farm.

Recalls of meat products occur frequently enough to be commonplace. In June 2010 in California 35,000 pounds of ground beef were recalled due to possible E. coli contamination. In the same month, ConAgra recalled its "Marie Callender" brand frozen chicken meals and Campbell Soups recalled 15,000,000 pounds of "Spaghetti-O's" with meatballs. These food contaminations occur because food processing companies are very large and their food processing has so many steps that nobody can keep track of what's going on. People still get sick from consuming this "food" in spite of the regulations, testing, and packaging which really are designed to protect the food industry.

And this "food" isn't wholesome in the first place, so it's not really food.

In an article in the November 9, 2006 New England Journal of Medicine, Dennis G. Maki, M.D., professor of medicine at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and hospital epidemiologist at UW hospital and clinics, concerning E. coli 0157H:7, wrote:

Enormous changes in food production during the past half-century underlie the emergence of this unique bacterial enteropathogen as an agent of life-threatening foodborne disease in a developed country. During my childhood in 1950s rural Wisconsin, when I ate a hamburger at home, the ground beef had been produced locally from cuts taken from several sides of beef purchased by the neighborhood grocer from a local farmer, who probably raised no more than 25 pasture-fed cows on a 150-acre farm. If I ate a fast-food hamburger, the ground beef came from a regional packing plant, which processed cattle that had been pasture-raised on a Western ranch of several thousand acres. Today, virtually all beef consumed in North America is produced on a vast industrial scale, starting with a herd of tens of thousands of grain-fed cattle, raised in the final months before slaughter in the constrained environment of a feedlot, with the beef cuts from hundreds of cows to several thousand contributing to a single lot of more than 100,000 pounds of ground beef, shipped to many hundreds of supermarkets in multiple states. Since grain-feeding to enhance meat production — as contrasted with traditional pasturing — promotes enteric colonization by acid-resistant Shiga toxin–producing E. coli, up to 2 to 3% of domestic cattle carry E. coli O157 at the time of slaughter, which is nearly universally associated with surface contamination of the carcass. The use of ground beef produced from hundreds or even several thousand animals greatly increases the risk of contamination of the pooled meat product with Shiga toxin–producing E. coli.

Moreover, raising thousands of animals with the use of industrial farming techniques generates staggering quantities of manure potentially contaminated with Shiga toxin–producing E. coli, far more than any farm can use as fertilizer. Huge lagoons of stored liquid manure are the consequence — as are periodic spills of raw manure into nearby streams. During heavy rains, runoff contamination of fields of commercially raised vegetables and orchards, as well as of rivers, lakes, and wells, results in produce-associated or waterborne outbreaks of E. coli infection.

Although most reported infections with Shiga toxin–producing E. coli are linked to undercooked ground beef, nearly 25% of outbreaks stem from contamination of commercial produce that is eaten uncooked — lettuce, spinach, cabbage, sprouts, or tomatoes. Outbreaks have been traced to orchards that market unpasteurized apple cider, made from apples that have dropped from the trees and have become contaminated by E. coli O157 from manure used to fertilize the soil. Enteric colonization (and surface contamination) of domestic cattle has resulted in human disease from contaminated milk products and in outbreaks among children visiting petting zoos. Outbreaks at county fairs appear to have been caused by aerosolization of E. coli in the animal barns. Finally, since the infective dose of acid-resistant E. coli O157 (less than 100 organisms) is much lower than that of most other bacterial enteropathogens, secondary spread through fecal–oral contact further expands the number of Shiga toxin–producing E. coli cases in most outbreaks.

Dr. Maki's professional and and real life observation is that

of the myriad community-acquired emerging infectious diseases of the past 30 years, few can more justifiably be called a "disease of progress" than enterohemorrhagic infection with Shiga toxin–producing E. coli.

Dr. Maki made this point to support food irradiation which he says kills or reduces food pathogens without affecting the food. He points out that food irradiation has been approved by WHO, FDA, CDC, USDA, AMA, and so on.

Or they could make raw spinach illegal.

E. coli 0157:H7 is a strain of Escherichia coli that produces a toxin called "Shiga". It is this toxin that makes people bleed in the gastrointestinal tract. Humans are sensitive to this toxin because they have a "receptor" for it. Cows, pigs, deer, goats, and other animals have the bacteria in their GI tract but do not have the receptor for the toxin and, therefore, are not sensitive to it.

E. coli is commonly found in the lower GI tract of humans. These bacteria make vitamin K and protect the gut against infection by pathogenic bacteria. It is believed that E. coli evolved into E. coli 0157:H7-Shiga-producing with the help of a bacteriophage (or simply "phage") that injected genetic material obtained from the Shigella bacteria into the E. coli bacteria. Shigella makes a toxin that causes dysentery.

Phages are viruses that have a parasitic relationship with bacteria and have the capacity to transport DNA. They can make non-pathogenic bacteria become pathogenic, and they can kill bacteria. Biologists say that phages are the most abundant life-form on the planet. Phages have been known for a hundred years; their anti-bacterial function has been researched extensively in what formerly was called The Soviet Union. Ironically, phage research in the U.S. was side-lined after the development of antibiotics.

Recently, phage therapy is being considered as a way out of the crisis caused by pharmaceutical antibiotics' non-selective killing of bacteria. In 2006 the FDA approved the use of a phage in cheese-making to prevent Listeria contamination. A while later it was approved for use in all food, in general.

Augean Stables

2010-07-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

In June 2010 the FDA issued a "Draft Guidance" titled "The Judicious Use of Medically Important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-producing Animals."

Basically, it recommends that farmers use antibiotics on food-producing animals only when the animal's health requires it. For many yearrs, food-animal producers have used anitbiotics or anitmicrobials to increase the rate of weight gain and to improve feed efficiency.

It issued this recommendation because it had been determined that the "non-judicious" (euphemism for careless and abusive) use of antimicrobials was responsible for selectively evolving virulent antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that found their way into food, and into human bodies.

DUH!!!

The FDA'a report provides some history and background which should be very embarrassing to it, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Agriculture, and Congress.

In 1969, a "Joint Comittee" in the U.K. explored the issue and presented the "Swann Report" to Parliament:

The report stated, “It is clear that there has been a dramatic increase over the years in the numbers of strains of enteric bacteria of animal origin which show resistance to one or more antibiotics. Further, these resistant strains are able to transmit this resistance to other bacteria. This resistance has resulted from the use of antibiotics for growth promotion and other purposes in farm livestock”. The report also noted, “There is ample and incontrovertible evidence to show that man may commonly ingest enteric bacteria of animal origin”.

A 1970 FDA "Task Force" came up with the following:

This task force acknowledged that the understanding at the time it conducted its study was that the use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals, especially in subtherapeutic amounts, was associated with the development of resistant bacteria, and that treated animals might serve as a reservoir of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens that could produce human disease.

So,

[i]n 1977, FDA proposed to withdraw the new animal drug approvals for subtherapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed on the ground that evidence showed that these drugs, when used for such purposes in animal feed, had not been shown to be safe. These two drugs were chosen because of their importance in human medicine.

But,

[t]he proposal was criticized because, at that time, there was not adequate epidemiological evidence (or only just-emerging evidence) to show that drug-resistant bacteria of animal origin were commonly transmitted to humans and caused serious illness. Subsequently, Congress directed FDA to conduct further studies related to the use of antimicrobials in animal feed and to hold in abeyance the implementation of the proposed antimicrobial withdrawal actions pending the outcome of these studies.

It might be interesting to know who in congress, or outside of congress, was responsible for this foot-dragging.

Then in 1980 The National Academy of Sciences, at FDA's request, gave this report

...that a very limited amount of epidemiological research had been completed on either the subtherapeutic or therapeutic use of antimicrobials in animal feed. According to the study report, much of the information available on the subject involved “poorly controlled studies of small numbers of subjects for brief periods”. Based on a consideration of available evidence, the report concluded that existing data could neither prove nor disprove the postulated hazards to human health from subtherapeutic antimicrobial use in animal feed. However, the report cautioned that “The lack of data linking human illness with subtherapeutic levels of antimicrobials must not be equated with proof that the proposed hazards do not exist. The research necessary to establish and measure a definitive risk has not been conducted and, indeed, may not be possible.”

Apparently, they didn't want to offend anyone. Then, FDA asked the Seattle-King County Health Department to perform a study:

In 1984, the Seattle-King County Health Department prepared a report summarizing the results of the study. The 1984 study report found that C. jejuni was a more common cause of enteritis than Salmonella. Also, it concluded that C. jejuni "does appear to flow from chickens to man via consumption of poultry products". The report stated, "isolates from human cases and those from retail poultry had similar antibiotic susceptibility patterns, including prevalence of 29.7% and 32.8%, respectively, for tetracycline resistance, which was found to be plasmid-mediated".

A 1988 Institute of Medicine report, requested by the FDA, concerning Salmonella infections that resulted in death

...was unable to find a substantial body of direct evidence demonstrating that the subtherapeutic use of penicillin or tetracycline in animal feed posed a human health hazard. Nonetheless, the Committee’s 1988 report found a considerable body of indirect evidence implicating both subtherapeutic and therapeutic use of antimicrobials as a potential human health hazard. The Committee also strongly recommended further study of the issue.

Even the World Health Organization could put 2 and 2 together correctly on the issue. In 1997, after studying the matter, it arrived at

the conclusion that all uses of antimicrobials lead to the selection of resistant forms of bacteria. Furthermore, the report stated that “low-level, long-term exposure to antimicrobials may have greater selective potential than short-term, full-dose therapeutic use". The report found that the selection of resistant bacteria has adverse consequences for preventing and treating disease in humans, animals, and plants.

A 1999 Government Accountability Office report recommended that

the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services work together to develop and implement a plan with specific goals, time frames and resources needed for determining the safe use of antibiotics in agriculture.

Also in 1999 the European Commission reported that

actions should be taken promptly to reduce the overall use of antimicrobials. Four primary recommendations were forwarded: (1) antimicrobial drugs should be used prudently; (2) infections should be prevented and resistant organisms contained; (3) research for new modalities of prevention and treatment of infections should be undertaken; and (4) the effects of such interventions should be monitored and evaluated.

A 2000 World Health Organization "Global Principles for the Containment of Antimicrobial Resistance in Animals Intended for Food" report by expert consultation read, in part:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) participated in the June 2000 WHO expert consultation, the purpose of which was to develop global principles for minimizing the negative public health impact associated with the use of antimicrobial agents in food-producing animals while providing for their safe and effective use in veterinary medicine.

The principles were part of a comprehensive WHO global strategy for the containment of antimicrobial resistance and provided a framework of recommendations to reduce the overuse and misuse of antimicrobials in food-producing animals for the protection of human health. The principles strengthened and endorsed earlier WHO recommendations such as the need to terminate the use of antimicrobial growth promoters pending comprehensive human health safety evaluations, the need to ensure that all antimicrobials for animal use are only supplied through authorized outlets (e.g., by veterinary prescription), and the need to establish surveillance systems on antimicrobial drug consumption.

And then

In December 2003, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a workshop to “perform a scientific assessment of the antimicrobial resistance risks arising from non-human usage of antimicrobials and to formulate recommendations and options for future risk management actions to be considered by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) and OIE”.

The expert panel’s findings from the workshop were documented in a report which contained a number of conclusions, including: 1) “there is clear evidence of adverse human health consequences due to resistant organisms resulting from non-human usage of antimicrobials;” 2) “the amount and pattern of non-human usage of antimicrobials impact the occurrence of resistant bacteria in animals and on food commodities and thereby human exposure to these resistant bacteria;” 3) “the foodborne route is the major transmission pathway for resistant bacteria and resistance genes from food animals to humans, but other routes of transmission exist;” and 4) the “consequences of antimicrobial resistance are particularly severe when pathogens are resistant to antimicrobials critically important in humans”.

In the following year this group established some guidelines, saying, among other things, that

...good agricultural practices can reduce the necessity for antimicrobials...

In 2003 the Institute Of Medicine issued a report, "Microbial Threats to Health: Emergence, Detection and Response" that included recommendations

to “more finely target the use of antimicrobials” including expanding efforts to decrease the inappropriate use of antimicrobials in human medicine. In addition, the committee recommended that “FDA ban the use of antimicrobials for growth promotion in animals if those classes of antimicrobials are also used in humans”.

That was fairly explicit.

In 2004 in response to a request from Congress (apparently out to lunch with lobbyists for 35 years), the Government Accountability Office studied the issue again and reported

that antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been transferred from animals to humans. GAO also stated that many of the studies reviewed as part of GAO’s research found that this transference from animals to humans poses significant risks for human health. According to GAO’s findings, studies have shown two types of evidence related to the transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria from animals to humans. First, some studies have provided evidence of associations between changes in antibiotic use in animals and resistance to antibiotics in human bacteria. Second, GAO concluded that studies that have examined the genetic makeup of the bacteria have provided stronger scientific evidence that antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter and Salmonella bacteria are transferred from animals to humans. In those studies, strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria infecting humans were indistinguishable from those found in animals, leading researchers to conclude that the animals were the source of human infection.

Why did it take so long to arrive at the same conclusions at which the UK's Swann Report study arrived in 1969?

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services read the GAO report and issued the following comments:

“The draft report presents or refers to significant and growing evidence demonstrating the human health consequences of drug resistant infections related to antibiotic use in agriculture.” “These [11 additional] studies, along with those cited in the GAO report, all demonstrate a relationship between the use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals, antibiotic resistance in humans, and adverse human health consequences as a result. We believe that there is a preponderance of evidence that the use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals has adverse human consequences.” “There is little evidence to the contrary.”

The FDA finally agrees in 2010 saying that it

...has reviewed the recommendations provided by the various published reports and, based on this review, believes the overall weight of evidence available to date supports the conclusion that using medically important antimicrobial drugs for production purposes is not in the interest of protecting and promoting the public health.

And it proposes the following 2 Principles:

1. The use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals should be limited to those uses that are considered necessary for assuring animal health.

2. The use of medically important antimicrobial drugs in food-producing animals should be limited to those uses that include veterinary oversight or consultation.

It took Heracles one day. After 41 years, the FDA is still working on it.

2010-06-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

Discovered on http://www.mudcat.org/

THE FARMER FEEDS US ALL

(Words and Music by Knowles Shaw, 1834-1878)

You may talk of all the nobles of the earth,
Of the kings who hold the nations in their thrall,
Yet in this we all agree, if we only look and see,
That the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

Then take him by the hand,
All ye people of the land,
Stand by him whatever troubles may befall;
We may say whate'er we can,
Yet the farmer is the man,
Yes, the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

There's the President who occupies the chair
Of the nation in the mighty Congress hall,
And the members, too, are great, who are sent from ev'ry State,
But the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

There are Governors and legislators, too,
Who have pledg'd themselves to heed the peoples' call,
Yet it seems they all agree, and can raise each member's fee,
While the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

There are speculators all about, you know,
Who are sure to help each other roll the ball,
As the people they can fleece, and then take so much apiece,
While the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

Then the preacher who can preach his sermons long,
And the lawyer and the doctor -servants, all;
There's the tailor and the smith, and I tell you 'tis no myth,
That the farmer is the man that feeds them all.

Now the Patrons true, are coming to the fight,
And their armies, too, are not the weak and small,
So, God bless them, while we sing, that the farmer is the King,
For the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

From the rising to the setting of the sun,
Great monopolies are surely doomed to fall,
Then onward in the fight, and we'll battle for the right,
While the farmer is the man that feeds us all.

From The Century of Song, vol. II, comp. Adam Geibal (Philadelphia, 1897). Knowles Shaw was born on October 13, 1834 in Butler County, Ohio, and wrote a number of hymns and Sunday School song books.

Chain Gangs and the Weak Link

2010-06-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

Industrialized, centralized, large-scale food production, processing, and shipping make necessary the regulations and oversight that are designed to prevent food contamination by harmful micro-organisms and toxic materials and avoid food-borne illness as there are many links in the chain of this system.

But small local farmers who do not want to participate in this food industry system should not be forced into participation by industry and government, that is, government influenced by industry. A role of government is to protect the rights of the people.

Another role of government is to control criminal activity.

When Governor Doyle vetoed the Raw Milk Bill in Spring 2010, having been lobbied to do so by dairy associations and medical groups, though he said he was acting to protect the public, he "cowed" to talking-head lobbyists who represented industry. The people lost, and now a small, independent dairy farmer in Loganville, Wisconsin is being harrassed by the enforcers of "Big-Food": state and local "authorities".

"Powerful money-interests and enforcers working together to coerce small independents into protection for which they must pay," describes racketeering. "Participate with us, make your commodity available through us, pay us these taxes and fees, we'll return a little to you, and we'll protect you...."

Both organized crime and global corporations may be defined as transnational groupings of centralized enterprises focused on monetary profit and self-protection.

Industies have colonized the governments, and their regulations have usurped the rights of the people. The industry association of multi-national corporations is a kind of organized crime syndicate operating with little restraint and no oversight. Profits, growth, and self-protection are the motive and priority.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We are safer buying direct from our local, small, independent farmer: no links.

Of Special Interest

2010-06-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

Not thinking about where our food comes from is easy, and this intentional ignoring is facilitated by the "food industry." The marketing of "food products" is a facade, and a distraction designed to befuddle our ability to discern real from empty, delicious from empty, nutritious from vacuous.

The "fast-food industry" is among the best examples of the bait-and-switch tactics of food industry marketing. Yes, everyone deserves a break today and there's a playground for the kids! "Mommy, can I have a Happy Meal?!" The distraction persists beyond the discovery of the mystery beheld when the wrapping comes off: a bun made from wheat flour (and other stuff) milled somewhere from wheat purchased somewhere from someone at the lowest price, grown somewhere (hopefully in the United States), pickle/mustard/ketchup (What is that stuff?!), - and is that lettuce in there? where's that from? - and orange cheese, and beef... is that really all beef? what does "all beef" mean, technically? Beef that comes from all-over-the-place, from all kinds of cattle, from all different cuts?

We worry about the calories.

It's no wonder the "food industry" is so concerned about "food safety." The problems with which it is preoccupied are those inherent to its existence. Having infiltrated the government, "food industry's" regulations have become laws which all farmers must abide regardless of participation - or non-participation. Enforcers of food industry regulations point the finger at the small farmer, drawing attention away from itself.

Meanwhile, small, independent, dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger in Loganville, Wisconsin is being pursued by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection and the local sheriff's department for making available raw milk from his Jersey cows, if you want it.

Having an Amish background, Hershberger and his family conduct their lives in accordance with traditional Christian values. They do not place politics or economics ahead of their calm and humility.

Amish people are honest. Their honesty is intolerable to those of us in the greater spuriousness of Modern American culture. Their honesty requires no legislation or governmental enforcement. Their honesty burns holes in all the marketing, the food safety, the food products, the food perversions, the food industry, the Food and Drug Administration, and all of the good intentions of our public officials.

In times like these we might look for guidance to the principles of people like the Hershbergers instead of harrassing them with self-serving laws dictated by special interest. The freedom to choose should be in the hands of the people.

With so many people watching, do our elected officials want to ruin Hershberger and his family to keep a special interest group or two happy?

Today and everyday the food dictators busy themselves preparing and enforcing their agenda.

You don't have to buy raw milk if you don't want to.

The Fox in Charge of the Hen House

2010-06-18T20:15:00.000-07:00

The Introduction to the 1930's The South and the Agrarian Tradition contains a few prophetic statements - or just clearly stated observations. The industrialists "... would have the government set up an economic super-organization which in turn would become the government."

British Petroleum's (BP) Gulf oil spill, which now is recognized as the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, is a result of conflicts of interest that led to extremes of corruption and abuse in government. The Minerals Management Service (MMS), an agency within the Department of the Interior designed to regulate the oil industry and protect taxpayers' interests, instead permitted the oil industry to regulate itself.

BP's application to dig the Deepwater Horizon well, along with its lengthy "oil spill response plan" for projects in the Gulf of Mexico, was embarrassing if it was not a joke: among other absurdities,they vowed to protect walrus and sea otter habitat. Worse, as per President George W. Bush's policies, BP was exempted from an environmental impact review of their project saying simply that there would be no adverse effect on endangered wildlife as a result of the project.

In 2008 the scandal at MMS illustrated the depth of involvement of the oil industry in influencing government policy, and the recklessness of people working in the public trust and getting paid for it. Department of the Interior's inspector general, who investigated MMS, reported serious conflicts of interest, and sex and drug parties with energy company representatives.

MMS was responsible for inspecting and overseeing the operations of oil and gas companies to insure the safety of workers and the environment. It received most of its revenues from leasing offshore waters and other federal lands to oil and natural gas companies. Its 2008 fiscal year dispersements totalled $23.4 billion. But on top of this, reports say that cozy relationships with industry officials have led to the loss of billions in revenue.

MMS was the second richest source of revenue for the U.S., behind income taxes.

An August 2009 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office was titled "MMS Does Not Provide Reasonable Assurance It Receives its Share of Gas, Resulting in Millions of Foregone Revenue." The report did not address MMS's responsibilities for oil.

The GAO report details MMS's lack of scrutiny of its gas industry accounts. The report said that MMS does not perform audits common in the industry to determine that it actually is receiving what it is owed from gas companies. The GAO report is a beautiful example of how to point out extremes of carelessness and ineptitude without judgement or accusation. It's an interesting and educational read.

An environmental group said that MMS seemed to think its job was to help the oil industry evade environmental laws. Scientists who worked for MMS said that the agency went out of its way to accommodate oil and gas industry and that MMS, Interior officials, and congressmen participated in it.

Obama's Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar has vowed to clean-up the mess at MMS. He has restructured MMS into three separate divisions. However, Salazar is a proponent of offshore oil drilling and once criticised the Bush administration for not doing more. Further, since the BP disaster began on April 20, 2010, 27 new offshore drilling projects have been approved by MMS, all but one having been granted similar exemptions from environmental review as BP.

British Petroleum is taking a lot of heat, and rightfully so, but what about the people who work and have worked at MMS, the Interior Department, and the Presidents of the United States?

In 1982, then President Regan appointed lawyer James Watt, notorious anti-environmentalist and Beach Boys hater, as Secretary of the Interior. Watt created the MMS.

James Watt, a fervent industrialist, had an interesting career in and out of government. In 1995, for example, he was convicted on 25 counts of perjury and obstruction of justice relating to his lobbying of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He got off easy with a plea bargain. Watt always approved of prioritizing oil drilling and coal mining above conservation. It seems as though he set the style at the Interior Department and MMS that was dominant for 25 years.

In 1990, an investigation into the Denver and Dallas offices of MMS revealed that employees, calling themselves "royalty rangers," were caught partying with prostitutes.

The GAO consistently and persistently challenged statistical data from MMS between 2003 and 2008.

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) says that the problem at MMS was the result of a revolving door between Department of the Interior and the oil and gas industry.

Bush and Clinton appointees to MMS left office and went to work for oil and gas as consultants.

A "special assistant" working at MMS from 2000 to 2003 was awarded an MMS contract by a rigged bid after he left MMS. He and a former MMS co-worker eventually were convicted of felony violation of a conflict of interest law. From the September 15, 2008 Department of Justice Document: this special assistant "admitted in plea documents that he created the requirements for the same contract immediately before his retirement from DOI, knowing that he would bid on the contract immediately after his retirement."

Elected officials have said that MMS was an obscure agency created by order of the secretary of DOI, not created by law and, therefore, difficult to oversee. ...the little agency responsible for revenues second only to income taxes... the little agency with a reputation for scandalous behavior... the little agency with a history of poor record keeping... that agency that interfaces the oil and gas industries, industries not known for forthrightness...

BP is responsible for this catastrophe, but so is Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Services, and the administrations of Presidents Regan through and including Obama.

And it's still illegal to go to a small farmer in the Wisconsin boondocks and purchase half-a-gallon of real, raw milk.

A Natural

2010-06-13T10:50:00.001-07:00

Wendell Berry is not a food safety expert, a lawyer, a lobbyist, or a corporation. He's a man, a writer and poet, and a farmer. His philosophy has been described as agrarian.

In an article written in 2002 for Orion Magazine, in which he discusses his The Unsettling of America published 25 years earlier, he says "In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States than we had in 1977."

Berry elaborates, "The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world's agricultural diversity... with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are profitable to corporations. The purpose of this now global economy is to replace "food democracy" with a worldwide "food dictatorship.

"I believe the contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.

"Because industrialism cannot understand living things, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it.

"To the industrial mind, a machine... is an explanation of the world and of life."

Berry's perception of the industrialist's behavior and mind carries over into modern, conventional medical practice where the human body, a natural organism, is treated like a machine whose parts can be manipulated, mined, and chemically treated without regard for side-effects.

Raw Milk

2010-06-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin may be America's Dairyland but you can't buy milk from a farmer there.

Governor Jim Doyle refused to endorse legislation that would have permitted the sale of raw milk to the public. While many observers expected him to agree to it he rejected it in the last hour under the influence of the dairy and cheese industry, the Wisconsin Medical Society, and other groups.

Previously, the Wisconsin State Assembly approved the bill by a vote of 60 to 35.

A few weeks later a local sheriff's department raided the farm of a southwest Wisconsin dairy farmer. Local officials explained that the farmer did not have a retail license. This local farmer sold raw milk, too. In the raid, the officials did their thing, including dumping a blue poison into the farmer's milk so that it could not be sold or consumed. They destroyed gallons and gallons of what many believe is nature's perfect food.

The issue with raw milk, or the reasoning, or the excuse, is that raw milk contains dangerous pathogens that must be destroyed by pasteurization so people don't get sick when they drink it. The FDA says, "Raw milk is inherently dangerous and should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose." This official statement seems to betray a somewhat zealous attitude. Ironically, raw milk advocates are accused of zealotry.

Local officials explain that the issue has to do with licensing. Possibly, the raid on the farmer's raw milk was a coincidence.

Small independent farmers and raw milk advocates say that pasteurization was important to the dairy industry a hundred or so years ago when sanitation could not be controlled and the effects of rapid industrialization changed the way we lived and ate. And it may be important today for the dairy industry's factory farms and manufactured milk products. But for the small farmer who has pride in and cares for his dairy, pasteurization is not just unnecessary it's destructive.

As important as the raw milk issue is to so many people, it represents a much larger problem that we face every day: obtaining wholesome, nutritious, unadulterated food.

Driving the backroads in Wisconsin, one frequently sees a sign indicating what brand of GMO corn or soy is planted there.

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is one in which its genetic material has been altered by introducing DNA from another organism into its DNA to create new genes. This genetic engineering has been going on since the 1980's; many people believe that good things have come from this technology, including insulin and other medicines. But GMO technology and its products didn't get much attention until Monsanto patented its GMO seeds and successfully sued a Canadian farmer into who's field Monsanto's seed was carried by the wind.

For agriculture, some GMO's are promoted as increasing yields and decreasing use of herbicide. This idea may have had its "Golden Age" in the 1950's with what was called, paradoxically, in retrospect, "the Green Revolution."

In the mid-twentieth century agri-scientist Norman Borlaug succeeded in hybridizing a wheat plant that was resistant to a fungus that threatened the world's wheat harvest. For his work, he was awarded a Nobel prize and was credited with preventing mass starvation around the world. Agri-scientists thought that the war on the fungus had been won. It's back, however. It's been discovered in Africa and the Middle East, making its way into the Asian continent. The mold has "evolved," bypassing the bred wheat's genes.

By whatever definition, Monsanto should not be included in anybody's "Green Revolution" though it has created a revolution in farming practice. It is estimated that between 1997 and 2005 the total surface land area cultivated with GMO's increased from 4.2 million acres to 222 million acres. In 2006 in the United States, 89% of planted area of soybeans, 83% of cotton, and 61% of corn was of genetically modified varieties.

Most alarmingly, the Grocery Manufacturers of America estimates that 75% of all processed foods in the U.S. contain a GMO ingredient.

The Goose that Lays the Golden Egg

2010-06-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

Borlaug's Hypothesis proposes that increasing crop yields decreases deforestation. In other words, if we increase agricultural production on the farmland we have now we can reduce the demand for new farmland and thereby reduce deforestation. This "hypothesis" has been criticised for many reasons, however. By the way, Norman Borlaug's grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Norway and settled in Dane, Wisconsin, which is about 45 minutes slow-driving time on backcountry roads from the raw milk dairy farm mentioned above.

But Borlaug's hypothesis did not fall on deaf ears as far as Monsanto was concerned. The bio-tech, agri-chem, Frankencorp. picked-up the ball and ran with it, profitting unimaginably around the world from this idea. Today Monsanto is the world's leading producer of genetically modified seed and of the glyphosphate herbicide Roundup. Monsanto is also known for the recombinant bovine growth hormone that's given to cows to increase milk production.

Engineering genetic material in soybeans, corn, and cotton to maximize yields and reduce losses, one must assume, is the idea behind Monsanto's (and other bio-tech company's) GMO technology. Even Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone is all about increasing milk production. It seems like a good idea but critics say that this approach results in abuse of the land, dairy cows, and the end-consumer. In addition, there is some controversy over whether this farming approach actually does produce yields higher than traditional ways. And there's the issue of environmental contamination from increased use of herbicide and fertilizers which even government officials say is poisoning our water.

Industrialization of farming, in general, was not accepted universally in the beginning of the 20th century. Identified as change in a society that results in a shift in the organization of the economy to manufacturing away from an agrarian or farm-based system, farmers saw the shift as having a net result of a loss of freedom. The small farmer or businessperson was part worker and part capitalist. With industrialization, people have jobs, that is they work for someone else. In fact, slavery was an important feature of Euro-Amerrican industrialization in its early stages. The differrence between jobs and slavery is that, in the case of the former, one receives pay.

Agrarianism espouses the virtues of the rural way of life as compared to urban life. Thomas Jefferson's agrarian philosophy is clear in a letter to another American Revolutionary: "Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds."

What's happening on the raw milk dairy in southcentral Wisconsin represents the conflict between agrarian and industrial values.