I don’t even want to think about how many months we and many others put into the battle to stop the introduction of herbicide-resistant wheat.
Here it is back again, this time from the chemical company BASF (not Monsanto).
My letter to the CFIA is appended. I did not restrain myself. I am very angry. It is time that we know who the President of the CFIA is, and direct correspondence directly to him. He should not be anonymous.
On Monday I will be phoning François Guimont, the President of the CFIA, 613 225-2342, to tell him what I think.
Sock it to them. Hard and fast.
/Sandra
====================================
Canadian Food Inspection Agency Accepting Comments on Submission for Approval and Release of Herbicide Tolerant Wheat
November 8, 2005
Biotechnology Notices of Submission Project – Wheat (ALS1b) which has been bred for herbicide tolerance (URL no longer valid)
If you would like to provide comments on this submission, a feedback form is available from the web-site.
=======================
DEADLINE Jan 7, 2006.
======================
“Currently, the CFIA and Health Canada post decision documents on the Internet after a product has been approved. They have not previously posted information about products that are under review, as will be the case in this pilot project.”
================================
FROM:
Sandra Finley (contact info)
TO: François Guimont, President of the CFIA
Your job is in jeopardy. The leadership you provide does not serve to protect the Canadian food supply which is your mandate.
By the thousands, Canadians have told you that we do not want our food supply developed by the criterion that it be resistant to chemicals. Our food supply is to be developed according to the criteria:
– is the seed more nutritious than other varieties (of wheat, in this example)? Does it make a positive contribution to the nutritional value of our food supply?
I am losing my patience. We fought for months and months to put a stop to herbicide-resistant wheat developed jointly by Monsanto and the Government of Canada. Now here it is back again, only this time from BASF. You get paid an exorbitant salary, and are unsuccessful at protecting the Canadian food supply. We work day-in, day-out for what is right, for no salary and the costs come out of our pockets. It’s time you were fired.
You have 4 issues to address:
– GOVERNANCE (In whose interest are these undertakings?)
– HEALTH (Our food supply. Health is dependent upon food supply. What is the criteria for seed selection?)
– ENVIRONMENT (Introduced species do not have enemies. They proliferate and become weeds. Common sense, science and experience ALL reinforce the fact that crops engineered to be resistant to chemicals bring about an increase in the use of chemicals. Farmers now apply a round of glyphosate to kill the plants they don’t want, and then turn around and apply 2-4D to kill the plants that are resistant to the glyphosate. I know. I am from Saskatchewan. We have 10 years of experience with RR canola which is now a weed growing in shelter-belts, gardens and in other unwanted places.
Roundup won’t kill it. You, the CFIA, has no credibility here. In fact, I am antagonistic to you.)
– OWNERSHIP OF LIFE FORMS. The Patent Act was never meant to apply to life forms. It was intended to cover mechanical devices. In at least 4 different places in the Schmeiser decision the Supreme Court of Canada told the Government that the legislation had to be changed. Has that been done?
The earlier “Harvard Mouse” decision also pointed out to the Government that the Patent Act required an update. Has it been done? Have YOU, François Guimont, done anything to insist that the Patent Act be changed? Whose interests do you serve?
Transnational corporate interests more and more determine the food that is grown. They do not develop seed using the selection criteria of nutritional value. And they attempt to appropriate that which belongs to the commons.
You, the CFIA, are party to the attempted appropriation.
The Government almost shut down a whole industry (cattle) when it was suspected that just ONE INDIVIDUAL’s food production might be injurious to the public good (health). What do you do when it is suspected that crops developed with the criterion that they be resistant to chemicals, crops that serve a corporate interest, might not be in the public interest?
The health of the population, and therefore medicare costs, are dependent upon the nutritional value of our food supply.
According to a Globe and Mail report, the nutrition found in fruits, vegetables, and other food crops has declined significantly since the 1950’s. That is YOUR responsibility.
CRITERIA USED:
The licensing process for new varieties of wheat, barley, oats, etc. uses criteria such as disease resistance, yield, and now, resistance to chemical applications.
CRITERIA NOT USED: nutritional value, taste, impact on environment, contribution to the common good.
Plant Breeders do not have Rights. They have RESPONSIBILITIES.
The purpose of the Government and its Legislation is to defend THE COMMONS.
Seeds are an essential part of the commons; they form the basis of our food supply. It is the RESPONSIBILITY of ANYONE who is tampering with the food supply to use the following selection criteria.
Before any seed is released into the environment or licensed for use:
– NUTRITIONAL VALUE (in the case of seed that becomes food): is the nutritional value of the seed superior to that of hallmark original varieties? If the seed (food) does not make a improved positive contribution to the value of the food, therefore to the health of the citizens, it will not be licensed for use. It is well documented that the nutritional value of food has significantly declined over the last 50 years. That does not bode well for public health. There is a connection between our food supply and escalating disease rates (health).
– ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES: will it perform like an “introduced or invader species” such as wild oats, purple loosestrife or zebra mussels? If so, it will not be licensed. Anyone who releases such organisms into the environment must pay the “external costs” of eradication. Do you know how many millions and millions of dollars are spent, year after year, to try and control wild oats (an intorduced species? Do YOU pay for it?)
– TASTE: Food that contributes to the healthfulness of the citizens must be appetizing, or it will be shunned in spite of its nutritive value. SO: What is the taste performance of the proposed seed: it must at least be as tasty as hallmark original varieties.
– COMMON GOOD: WHOSE INTERESTS ARE YOU SERVING? THE RESPONSIBILITY OF GOVERNMENT.
Visionaries implemented a seed development process in Canada which used public money for the common good (e.g. Agriculture Canada Research Stations and scientists). They understood that allowing inferior seed from producers to enter the food production system undermines the value of the crop for citizens collectively.
They understood that:
~ the goals of the individual or corporation (minimize costs, maximize revenues) can be at odds with the interests of the community,
~ use of inferior seed by some individuals promotes use of inferior seed by everyone because those with higher costs will be driven out of production if they don’t adopt the same lowest-cost production. (The common good (health) and the environment are the losers.)
~ the role of Government is to serve and protect the public interest.
Historically, Agriculture Canada did that well, up until the 1980’s when Government POLICY changed.
TODAY, the Government is WRONG in its understanding of its role. A necessary criterion for deciding whether a new seed will be introduced is: whose interests will be served by the introduction? Seeds are part of the commons.
If it cannot be demonstrated that the society at large will benefit from the seed, then it must not be licensed. (The very name of the Act – PLANT BREEDERS’ RIGHTS – states a bad situation, a serious misunderstanding.)
Canada has a long history of exemplary seed development based on community interest. The evidence is that we HAVE floundered by succombing to private, commercial, interest-based seed selection criteria.
From John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The Economics of Innocent Fraud – Truth for our Time”, published in 2004 :
“… As the corporate interest moves to power in what was the public sector, it serves, predictably, the corporate interest. That is its purpose. …One obvious result has been well-justified doubt as to the quality of much present regulatory effort. There is no question but that corporate influence extends to the regulators. … Needed is independent, honest, professionally competent regulation … This last must be recognized and countered. There is no alternative to effective supervision. …”
Tax-payers provide salaries for Government employees to perform work that is in the public interest. ANY Government employee whose work is in collaboration with an industry, ESPECIALLY if the employee’s official work is related to the regulation of that industry, MUST resign their Government position.
I am very angry that I and others must expend so much time and energy to try and force you to do your job.
(2) FOLLOW-UP ON 2006 CANADIAN CENSUS, CONTRACTED OUT TO LOCKHEED-MARTIN
(2a) Copy of Expense Claims from 2nd in command at StatsCan, 2009 and 2010: Lockheed Martin provides the “steerage” for the Census operations
(3) RELATED STORY: CTV NEWS, NOV 23, ANGRY CANADIAN PAYS OFF VISA BILL WITH PENNIES
===============================
(1) COMMENTS
In April-May 2004 we participated in the huge backlash by Canadians against Government plans to contract 2006 census work out to Lockheed-Martin, American “company with a military orientation”.
2006 is fast approaching. The letter below from Ivan P. Fellegi, Chief Statistician of Canada, emphasizes that only 20% of the work will be done by Lockheed-Martin.
Just as it is odious to me when the Government enters into contractural arrangements with companies with a history as corrupt as that of Monsanto, it is repugnant to me when my tax dollars are used to enrich corporations tied to the American war machine.
Aside from the question of “with whom do we do business?” is the question of access to Canadian information held by American companies given to the American Government through their Patriot Act.
The second article (“Angry Canadian … ) is related.
I am wondering whether we are heading into non-compliance with the Census, similar to non-compliance with the gun registry? If so, it need not have been the case: Canadians were loud and clear that out-sourcing of the census is not wanted. Acceptable censuses have been carried out in the past and can be done again without contracting out. They may not be state-of-the-art but there are other over-riding considerations that Canadians insist upon, like morality.
And all of that is related to a written submission I will make to the “Smart Regulations” public consultation process and circulate to you in the next day or two.
Cheers!
Sandra
=======================================
(2) FOLLOW-UP ON 2006 CANADIAN CENSUS CONTRACTED OUT TO LOCKHEED-MARTIN, LETTER FROM CANADA’S CHIEF STATISTICIAN
(INSERT: this is off the internet and not me, Sandra, speaking.)
It’s a generic form response but I’ll share it anyways and you all can tell me what info you derived from it.
Cut and pasted directly from my email box,
Letter from Ivan P. Fellegi, Chief Statistician of Canada:
Statistics Canada would like to clarify and provide additional information concerning the contracting out portion of the 2006 Census with private industry. First of all, I would like to emphasize that only 20% of the work for the 2006 Census will be contracted out while the remaining 80% is being done by Statistics Canada. The distribution, collection, follow-up and storage of questionnaires will be done strictly by Statistics Canada.
Important improvements and significant changes in the way census data are collected and captured are required for the 2006 Census. These changes will move the census from what is now a highly decentralised, manual collection operation, to a more centralised and automated approach while addressing the issues of privacy, security, confidentiality and the provisions of an Internet response option for Canadians. However, these and other improvements require the implementation of a very complex logistics and control system.
Why did we decide to contract out a portion of the software development for the 2006 Census? Simply because, after a painstaking review, we concluded that we lacked the expertise needed. The 2006 Census clearly has to offer the option of Internet filing of census returns, and this has to be integrated with the traditional paper filing option which, of course, must also be offered. Further complicating the logistics is the fact that we will be mailing, for the first time, the census questionnaires to about 65% of all households in Canada. This, together with the need to know at all times who completed and who did not their census forms (in order to initiate timely follow-up of those who did not do so) leads to exceptionally complex logistics.
Traditionally census returns have been key-entered but that option will no longer be available in 2006. As a result, it will be necessary to introduce the scanning of the paper returns into the 2006 Census – and, again, integrate all of that with the Internet-filed returns. The complexity of these highly technical operations was entirely outside our range of past experience. When one considers the fact that the census must go almost flawlessly (because we do not have a second chance), it became abundantly clear that contracting out was the only realistic option. In addition to the technical complexities, we also conducted a very thorough cost benefit analysis of the “buy or make” option, to determine the appropriate approach for undertaking the significant systems development and operational activities required for the 2006 Census. The factors considered included cost, timeliness, integration, risk and the availability of resources/expertise and while not the only factor in our decision, the business case was clearly in favour for the private sector. Incidentally, the same conclusion was reached not only by our US counterpart, but also by the Office of National Statistics in the UK for their census systems development and processing activities.
After a lengthy consultation process with industry, proposals were invited by Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC) through a Request for Proposal (RFP). Critical security and confidentiality requirements were built into the RFP to ensure the protection of census returns. Indeed, these safeguards will be even higher in 2006 than they were in 2001 or in earlier censuses.
Under the North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization Agreement regulations that governed this procurement, non-Canadian based firms were eligible to submit a bid. All of the bidders were Canadian firms, although several were US owned. The evaluation of proposals was very rigorous, with no opportunity for biasing the results either in favour of, or against, any one bidder. In addition, an independent fairness monitor certified that the selection process followed the terms of the RFP and that the process was fair and objective to all bidders. Through this process, PWGSC awarded the contract to Lockheed Martin Canada Inc. to carry out activities in support of the 2006 Census. The firm will be leading a consortium consisting of IBM Canada and Transcontinental Printing Inc. Canada and ADECCO Employment Services Ltd Canada.
Lockheed Martin specifically has a successful track record in developing and implementing solutions in a census context and has access to international expertise based on lessons learned in the United States and United Kingdom censuses. Statistics Canada is capitalizing on this existing experience and investment.
Statistics Canada will maintain full control of all aspects of the census.
Indeed, the data collected from Canadians will, at all times, be under the care and full control of Statistics Canada and everyone working on the census will, as always, be subject to the provisions and penalties of the Statistics Act. Only census agents who are sworn to secrecy under the Statistics Act – and subject to considerable penalties should their oath be violated (including imprisonment of up to six months) – will have access to individual census information. Career employees will at all times be in charge of every aspect of census operations
All contractors will be security screened, and sworn in under the Statistics Act. As such, they will become Statistics Canada employees, subject to all the sanctions of the Act.
Stringent safeguards will be in place to ensure that only information required for the processing operation is accessible by the contractor. The census processing site will be strictly isolated from external networks, so unauthorised transmission of census data would be physically impossible. In addition, all sites will be subject to 24-hour supervision by our career employees. Needless to say, data will never be processed or stored outside the country. Processed data will be stored at Statistics Canada premises.
Statistics Canada has a well-earned reputation for quality statistics, which in turn depends on the trust of Canadians. It would never endanger that reputation by exposing to the slightest risk the confidential data that its respondents provide – let alone exposing it to access by any foreign country. The confidentiality of 2006 Census returns will be as stringently guarded as in the past; in fact, technology allows us to implement even better safeguards. We are ready to expose our plans to any expert scrutiny.
(3) CTV NEWS, NOV 23, ANGRY CANADIAN PAYS OFF VISA BILL WITH PENNIES
(INSERT: The “angry Canadian” is Don Rogers who later put up the website “Count Me Out” to help coordinate information and support for opposition to Lockheed Martin’s involvement in the Canadian census. You will find references to his work in later postings.)
Al Taylor writes: An interesting story … worth checking out where your credit card is processed.
Don Rogers shows off his Visa bill to Canada AM on Wednesday from CTV’s bureau in Ottawa.
CTV.ca News Staff
Updated: Wed. Nov. 23 2005 8:59 AM ET
When Don Rogers found out that his bank had outsourced its credit card processing to a U.S. company — potentially, he believes, putting his personal information at risk — he decided to do something about it.
The 62-year-old retired city councilor from Kingston, Ont., paid his $230 Visa bill with Citizens Bank of Canada in 985 installments — often pennies at a time — in protest.
Rogers was worried that by allowing a U.S. company to review all his purchases, U.S. authorities could gain access to his personal information under the Patriot Act, a controversial piece of legislation that the U.S. hopes will help them crack down on terrorism but that has privacy advocates worried.
“This has huge implications for privacy of Canadians,” Rogers told CTV’s Canada AM Wednesday, “because once your personal data enters the United States, it becomes subject to American law.
“The Patriot Act could kick in and your information could be forcibly turned over to the American government.”
Rogers complained to his bank, but didn’t like the response.
“They were very pleasant at first and sympathetic. But as I refused to let go of the issue, their position hardened somewhat.”
When the bank refused to stop outsourcing their Visa billing processing to a company in Georgia, Rogers decided to fight back.
“I usually pay my credit card statement with one payment each month, transferring it by Internet from my bank account to my Visa account,” he explained.
“And I thought well, hey, what would happen if I transferred one cent?
So I tried it and it went through. So what I did was basically pay off a large part of my Visa in one cent and five-cent, nickel dime payments.”
The result was a payment statement that grew to 35 pages long and a half-inch thick.
“It came with a heck of a thump through the letter slot,” Rogers laughs.
The maneuver created a huge headache for accounting personnel at Citizens Bank and generated a phone call from the bank’s information technology department.
“I told the guy, ‘Well, I’m trying to get your bank president’s attention. He said ‘You have got his attention’.”
Rogers has also gotten the attention of a number of news outlets who have pressing him for interviews – much to his satisfaction.
“It is gratifying that the little guy can fight the big corporations and make an impact.”
Rogers says he still isn’t sure whether his stunt is going to make his bank change its policy. He’s given them until Jan. 1, 2006, to return their payment processing back to Canada.
“The way it was left about a week ago, the last discussion I had with the bank’s vice-president in charge of Visa was that they would be back to me shortly and we declared a temporary truce. So I’m waiting to hear from them.”
Rogers jokes that the moral of the story is: don’t mess with a retiree
— “retired folks are dangerous. We have time on our hands” – but he believes that other Canadians should be asking the kinds of questions he asked.
“Most Canadian credit card holders have no idea whether their personal data regularly goes down to the United States. They should ask their bank. It’s a legitimate question to ask.”
And it you don’t like the answer, try the “Rogers one cent solution”, he recommends.
“I think Canadians have to speak up. There’s Canadian sovereignty involved.”
It’s not the crude: What the U.S. most needs is our water.
We must not let it flow through our hands, says former Alberta premier PETER LOUGHEED
By PETER LOUGHEED
The Globe and Mail, Friday, November 11, 2005
I predict that the United States will be coming after our fresh water aggressively within three to five years. We must prepare, to ensure we aren’t trapped in an ill-advised response. It would be a major mistake for Canada to handle this issue badly. With climate change and growing needs, Canadians will need all the fresh water we can conserve, particularly in the western provinces.
I’ve been involved in this issue for years. In the early 1980s, when I was Alberta premier and worked with the knowledgeable Henry Kroeger, then Alberta’s minister for water management, he convinced me that we should transfer water from Alberta’s more northerly rivers to the dry areas in the southern and eastern parts of our province. When we took the proposal to caucus (we held almost every seat) we were shocked by the aggressively negative reaction.
I learned then that water is an emotional political issue; I was usually able to get support from the caucus — but not when it came to fresh water.
As Alberta premier, I’d travel to Washington each spring to lobby U.S. senators for market access to our surplus oil and natural gas (we finally obtained this access through the free-trade agreement). I became friends with the U.S. senator from Washington state, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who was chairman of the Senate’s energy committee. He visited Alberta and was the first senior elected U.S. official to recognize the potential of the oil sands. One evening “Scoop” asked me what I knew about Section 21 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Next to nothing, I responded. He convinced me that it would be a great positive for Canada to take advantage of Section 21 of GATT and secure a free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States.
I took this idea up at my final first-ministers’ conference in the spring of 1985, and proposed the concept to then prime minister Brian Mulroney. As history records, he quickly adopted the idea. (The Macdonald Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada was coming to the same conclusion). The free-trade agreement was negotiated with President Ronald Reagan.
After I left government, I worked with the Business Council on National Issues (now the Canadian Council of Chief Executives) to help implement the FTA. Remember, Canada was a supplicant in this matter. In the spring of 1987, a number of us were in Washington making the pitch for the FTA to a group of senior senators. At a crunch time, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas asked us whether fresh water should be included in the deal. It was quite a moment: I bent down to tie my shoelace, one colleague dropped his book, another colleague dropped his pencil. The moment passed; another senator changed the subject. Fresh water was not included in the FTA. (Had we been pressured, the Canadian strategy, as I recall, was to reject the inclusion of water, but we would have had to trade something else of major value in exchange.)
Fast forward to today. I spend time in Arizona and observe the dryness, the barren riverbeds and the constant concern about water shortage there and in neighbouring states, including California. I talk to a lot of people about water. My political instincts tell me that some time soon water availability is going to rise to the top of the U.S. domestic agenda and the Senator Bentsen of the day will say: “What about Canada? They have lots of excess water and we have the free-trade agreement. Let’s demand they share their water with us.”
With the population and political shift from the U.S. northeast to Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California, what has not been on the agenda soon will be. My strongly-held view is, we Canadians should be prepared to respond firmly with a forceful “No. We need it for ourselves!”
Why should we not export fresh water?
There are many compelling reasons. Water is essential to our life and its supply is not always certain. Water is essential to our food production, and why increase our dependence on foreign food supplies? Water can be a determinant in job location; let’s bring good jobs to Canadians. Finally, if there is an acceptable way for inter-basin transfers, let’s confine such to Canada.
So, how can Canadians prepare for this thirst for our water?
1. Governments and their departments of environment must put out current, reliable data and encourage the exchange of data across Canada. We must include the entire 49th parallel as well as the Great Lakes, which have their own important water issues.
2. The federal government House Leader should join with other house leaders to hold a special “water debate” in the House of Commons no later than next spring.
3. The provincial governments through their premiers should move the water issue to the forefront and prepare for legislative debates next spring, perhaps on a resolution framed as: “Should we export any of our fresh water to the United States?”
4. The first ministers planning secretariat should plan for a late spring meeting with the water issue specifically at the forefront.
5. Private sector research groups across Canada should pick up on the Canada West Foundation’s January 2005 report Balancing Act: Water Conservation and Economic Growth (the export issue is targeted on page 16).
6. Environmental groups and business associations should form an alliance to pressure political parties to make the water issue a priority.
No doubt there will be a significant segment (I’d guess a minority) who either believe the water issue is overblown or that bulk water sales to the United States should not be discouraged. My sense is that once they are alerted to the probability of a U.S. grab for our fresh water, most Canadians will react as the Alberta government caucus did in the early 1980s when they told their then premier: “Get lost!”
I hope that when the time comes, Canada will be ready. The reality is that fresh water is more valuable than crude oil.
Subject: Battle over water in Saskatchewan; Federal Liberal’s Old Boys Network and Federal Money
Dear Fred Wendel (Provincial Auditor) and Sheila Fraser (Federal Auditor-General),
Battle arising out of Liberal old boys network in Saskatchewan eyeing the money to be made through water “development”.
Items 1 to 15 document the connections of which I am aware.
I suspect that someone should be checking to see where CARDS money is going after it is given to SCCD. (see details below).
Sandra Finley
===========================
Federal money is paying for the promotion of archaic ideas and grandiose schemes for water diversion on the prairies. Red Williams is behind Agrivision Corporation and a good pal of Ralph Goodale. I have attended conferences and a lecture given by Red at the University. He is a retired professor of Agriculture. His “vision” includes the building of 200 dams. (Although he may have reduced the number after being challenged at the University lecture.) Through misleading big screen presentations and “experts” Agrivision is focussing on the construction of the “Hygate Dam” at North Battleford, SK. Read on … it is tax-payers’ money that is funding the nonsense, and with no accountability because of how the money is dished out.
==================================
The myth promoted in Saskatchewan is that our farmers “feed the world’s starving masses.” Hence dams and irrigation are required so they can produce more. When you ask why farmers should irrigate to produce MORE grain, and why the public should subsidize the construction of irrigation infrastructure to produce cheap grain for transnational grain and meat companies (transnational corporations are the only ones making money), you are told that the farmers must “diversify”; the irrigated land will be used to produce “specialty crops”. … When did “the starving masses” start eating “specialty crops”? And with the rising cost of fuel, the transportation of grain across Canada and across the ocean, added to the cost of irrigated specialty crops, means that only the elites of the world will be eating Canadian specialty crops. As a tax-payer I have no desire to feed the elites. /Sandra
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Agrivision conference. Friday Nov 4, North Battleford.
===========================
“Drought-proofing the Economy” conference put on by Agrivision Corp. this week.
Info at (Link no longer valid) http://www.droughtproofing.com/index.html
Link last checked:
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Final URL:http://www.droughtproofing.com/index.html
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This link has been broken for 11 months.
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(Points 12 to 15 have been added to content of original email.)
The Summary seems like wild statements. The substantiating detail follows the SUMMARY.
SUMMARY:
(1) BEWARE OF WHAT YOU ARE WALKING INTO. IT IS OFFENSIVE TO THE CITIZENS OF SASKATCHEWAN THAT AGRIVISION CORPORATION AND ITS INDUSTRY PARTNERS POSE AS THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE AUTHORITY FOR A “50-Year Water Development Plan” for Saskatchewan.
(2) AGRIVISION SUPPLIES OUT-DATED AND MISLEADING INFORMATION AT ITS CONFERENCES.
(3) INFORMATION ON THE WEB SUGGESTS THAT THE “SASKATCHEWAN WATER COUNCIL”
MAY BE LESS THAN A BONA FIDE ORGANIZATION.
(4) AT AGRIVISION’S “DROUGHT-PROOFING” CONFERENCE IN REGINA, Red Williams
(President) said the agenda for the development of water is to “move the economy into institutions”. This is a direct quote from Red. From my experience with herbicide tolerant wheat (Roundup Resistant wheat) “moving the economy into institutions” means moving it beyond democratic control and Government accountability.
My statements are substantiated by the information below which is an amalgamation of input from many people. This email has been circulated to them and others, in different forms.
(1) Regarding the “WATER COUNCIL”, headed up by Wayne Clifton, a “partner” in the Conference:
– I attended a water conference in Saskatoon. Red Williams and Al Scholz (President and CEO of Agrivision respectively) put it on. Wayne Clifton, an engineer and owner of “Clifton and Associates” gave a presentation which high-lighted all the underground water in Saskatchewan that has not been “developed”, and the wonderful opportunity this represents. I asked him and the audience: what are the recharge rates, especially in a time of climate change? What data do they have on cumulative withdrawal rates? Mr. Clifton knew only about the development “opportunities”. He knew nothing about something as basic as recharge rates. To my knowledge the Government of Saskatchewan has little data and no water projections which incorporate climate change, although this deficiency is being addressed.
– I attended a “Drought-Proofing the Economy” conference in Regina put on by Agrivision. Red Williams announced the formation of the Water Council with much fanfare and that his good friend Wayne Clifton would head up the Council. A Google search on the Saskatchewan Water Council turns up:
(a) A fact sheet from Agrivision on “The Saskatchewan Water Council”. SWC’s purpose is to “implement” the “50-Year Development Plan for Water”. (My comment: The gift of water in Saskatchewan belongs to “the Commons”. If anyone is going to implement anything regarding water, it is solely the responsibility and authority of the democratically-elected Government of Saskatchewan.)
(b) WHO is “The Water Council”? This one-page fact sheet web-site for the Water Council says “TO CONSIST OF stakeholders in the development and management …” and, for administration, “The Council WOULD BE served by …”. The wording says to me that the Water Council is an idea (charitably speaking, or a “front” not so charitably speaking) – it’s not a reality.
This email network is quite familiar with organizations that are “in name only” and whose name implies that they have some legitimate non-business interest – the name insinuates that the organization has the community interest at heart. They are fraudulent organizations that are only a name and a web-site – they attempt to appropriate the commons (air, water, seeds) for financial gain and to serve their own interests. You may be familiar with the example during the pesticide debate in Toronto – a web-site and press releases issued by the Toronto Environmental Coalition. There is a legitimate Toronto Environmental Alliance. The Toronto Environmental Coalition is CropLife Canada which is the chemical/biotech industry – a web-site and press releases, nothing more.
(2) Clifton & Assoc provide the water engineering for Florian Possberg’s hog barns (Big Sky Pork Production. Florian sits on the Board of Directors of Agrivision and heads the Business Development function of the ACRE Committee. Red also helps run the ACRE Committee.)
(3) At the Regina Water-spoofing Conference, President Williams talked of the opportunity for “equity interests” that would come with implementation of Agrivision’s Water Development Plan. Of course, water belongs solely to the Commons. There are no opportunities for anyone to own any part of the Commons. And it is the role of Government in an uncorrupted democracy to protect the commons against the appropriators.
(4) I attended a lecture given by Red Williams at the University of Saskatchewan, Dept of Agriculture. He enthusiastically laid out Agrivisions’s plan for building dams and water diversion schemes for irrigation.
I asked him and the audience whether they knew that the projected construction costs, by engineering consultants Golder & Assoc from Calgary, of the proposed Meridian Dam on the South Saskatchewan River, a few years ago, was between $3.5 and $5 BILLION dollars? And that the number of people who would potentially benefit from being able to irrigate was 100 land-owners – ranchers who do not want to be farmers? Red quotes $750 million dollars as the cost of a dam and doesn’t supply the year when the figure was calculated, or what it included.
Students asked questions that further under-mined his presentation. I have no grudge with Red. But he must use non-Jurassic information if he is not to embarass himself.
(5) Graham Parsons is part of the Agrivision team and will be giving a presentation in North Battleford, as he did in Regina.
HIGHLY SELECTIVE AND MISLEADING INFORMATION = PROPAGANDA At the Agrivision “Drought-Proofing the Economy” Conference (Regina) Graham Parsons gave the main presentations about the water resource. (He is an economist.) The credibility of the information supplied by Dr.
Parsons is dependent upon an ignorant audience.
Just one example (question I asked of him): “You have a graph which shows the fluctuation in the water levels of the South Saskatchewan River in the period 1912 to present. The graph shows declining fluctuation which you present as a positive consequence of a large dam on the River. (Agrivision is promoting many dams.)
What is the change in VOLUME of water in the River over the same period?
Response from Presenter Graham Parsons: yes, the fluctuations have declined, etc.
Questioner interrupts: I did not ask about fluctuation, I clearly asked “What is the change in the VOLUME of water?
Response from presenter Graham Parsons: he never did answer the question.
The answer is that over the period 1910 to present, the volume of water has decreased by 80%. The flow level at Saskatoon is 20% of what it was in 1910.
The summer-time glacial feed (irrigation happens in the summer months) will be gone when the last of the glaciers in the Rocky Mountains disappears, projected to be in another 15 years.
Several other questions from others and myself drew attention to the selective nature of the information presented, all of which contributed to a very skewed understanding, provided by an “expert”, as newspaper reports referred to Graham Parsons. It amounts to propaganda. It’s okay for me:
I’ve worked on water issues and know truth from fiction. But an intention to deceive is not okay. Perhaps it is only ignorance. Neither is that okay.
(6) Red Williams (President) said at the Drought-proofing conference in Regina, the agenda is to “MOVE THE ECONOMY INTO INSTITUTIONS” (like AgWest Biotech, a Government-funded front in which citizens have no influence over things like the development of herbicide tolerant crops that lead to the use of yet more chemicals in agriculture).
(7) GOVERNMENT INVOLVEMENT
At the Regina Agrivision Conference, as will be at the North Battleford Conference, personal and specific endorsements and congratulations from Federal Finance Minister Ralph Goodale and Prime Minister Paul Martin were projected on the big screen, with apologies from Ralph that he couldn’t be in attendance. Red Williams is well connected to the Liberals.
Given Paul Martin’s and Ralph Goodale’s big screen performances, there is significant Government support (politically) for Agrivision’s plans for the “development” of the water resource in Saskatchewan. The “development”
agenda is being promoted, not under the auspices of a Provincial Government Department that can be held to account, but through Agrivision Corporation.
Business interests are represented, with access to large amounts of public funding. It is very consistent with the Federal Government’s P3
(Public-Private-Partnerships) agenda (a partnership between Big Business and Big Government that does not serve the public interest. It steals from the commons.).
(8) Agrivision receives money through Government programmes. The Saskatchewan Council for Community Development(SCCD) comes in. The Federal Government has a funding programm called CARDS (the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development Program). The GOVERNMENT does not administer the public money, which is “a $240 million, four-year fund” (extended, more money, as of Oct 14, 2005). … Who does administer the money? “Industry-led adaptation councils” in the provinces. In Saskatchewan, CARDS money is administered by SCCD, the Director of which is Linda Pipke. I met Linda when she sat down at the same table as me, at the Agrivision Conference. She is also on the ACRE Committee.
In the initial stage, Agrivision received in the neighbourhood of $300,000 from CARDS to do the 50-year plan for the development of the water resource in Saskatchewan. I am told that they also received money from PFRA. There could be more.
Oct 14, 2005: (Link no longer valid) http://www.sccd.sk.ca/cards/pdf/CARDSExtended.pdf The funding for CARDS has been extended.
(9) CONFLICTS-OF-INTEREST abound. As we have seen in our work, this is a common characteristic of “moving the economy into institutions” process. The final question I got to ask in Regina (before access to microphone was blocked) was to Clay Serby (Provincial Minister for Rural Re-vitalization and luncheon speaker), about the Govt officials who sit on the Board of Directors of Agrivision Corporation alongside industry people they are supposed to regulate and who have a large vested interest. This was after Clay’s speech, the first half of which was about the necessity to separate the water developers from the regulatory function (rhetoric in light of the facts).
Agrivision’s Board of Directors includes the intensive livestock operators, along with the Government officials. There are large problems with environmental protection around these factory barns. A couple of examples:
Florian Possberg, President
Big Sky Farms
is the “entrepreneur” behind Big Sky Pork Production who receives more Government largesse by far than he has invested. He is a member of the Agrivision Board of Directors.
Neil Ketilson, General Manager
Sask Pork, He is a member of the Agrivision Board of Directors.
(10) Agrivision has a speaker from the Tennessee Valley Authority to speak at the North Battleford Conference. What we learned during the Meridian Dam battle was that the trend in the United States and around the world is to DE-COMMISSION dams, not to build them. 300 dams in the United States had been de-commissioned in one year alone. We are in the process of obtaining updated information on de-commissioning.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is switching to the construction of nuclear reactors to generate electricity. This is understandable when you know that in Idaho in one summer alone, the Government paid the irrigators $73 million to turn off their pumps (which take a lot of electrical power to run). In an era of climate change and water shortage, the City people needed the electricity to run their air-conditioners.
Red Willians and Al Scholz brought a lawyer from the U.S. to speak at the Saskatoon Conference. I presume the reason was to show how valuable water is. The lawyer told us that every River in the U.S. today has litigation over rights to its water. It is such a hot commodity that there is now a national association of lawyers who do nothing but litigation related to water rights. Why in hell anyone would knowingly promote more water out of the South Saskatchewan River when Alberta is about to stop the permitting of any more water withdrawals because the River is over-allocated, is beyond me. Last year and in the preceding years there were many places in the River where a kayaker had to get out and pull the kayak to navigate the River, water levels were so low. Ferries experienced a great deal of difficulty.
What we should learn from the U.S. where the Colorado River no longer reaches its delta (in Mexico) because of water diversion schemes, is that water is a gift to be treasured, not exploited. Litigation tells you that the American allocation system is a failure.
(11) The University of Alberta’s Dr. David Schindler won the 2001 Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. The award is $1 million dollars. Dr. Schindler makes himself available. He presented at a Community Sustainability Conference in Humboldt. If Humboldt can get Dr.
Schindler, why does Agrivision have a problem getting presenters who will provide balanced and current information? It’s record to date isn’t great.
(12) The myth promoted in Saskatchewan is that our farmers “feed the world’s starving masses.” Hence irrigation is required so they can produce more. When you ask why farmers should irrigate to produce MORE grain, and why the public should subsidize the construction of irrigation infrastructure to produce cheap grain for transnational grain and meat companies (transnational corporations are the only ones making money), you are told that the farmers must “diversify”; the irrigated land will be used to produce “specialty crops”. When did “the starving masses” start eating “specialty crops”? And with the rising cost of fuel, the transportation of grain across Canada and across the ocean, added to the cost of irrigated specialty crops, means that only the elites of the world will be eating Canadian specialty crops. As a tax-payer I have no desire to feed the elites.
(13) From the Agrivision Web-site: The following quote by Red Williams leapt out at me (Kerry speaking) : ” It is not whether, but when, Saskatchewan develops the full potential … of the Saskatchewan Nelson
River basins..” Also I noted : “numerous reservoirs” … “industry led
organization with a mandate to establish a clear vision for growth and expansion” … “Water will be the oil of the 21st..”
(14) I (David speaking) have to keep emphasizing to people who want water to be free to everyone that, in their efforts to ensure everyone has water, they are in effect subsidizing the rich. There are much better ways to get water to people who need it than to give it free to everyone.
(15) Re Manitoba. I (Sandra) included this note in the communication to Barry Oswald who will come from Manitoba to give their perspective. “The Colorado River was “diverted” to the point where the delta dried up.
Further grandiose diversion schemes on the North and South Sask River will impact the health of Lake Winnipeg. Some people are aware of it’s present day health, but many people in Sask are not.
People go to Conferences to learn. Down-River communities are vulnerable.
Lake Winnipeg is a serious problem that people in Saskatchewan should know about. You cannot expect help if people are unaware of your situation.”
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You cannot have sustainable communities without protection of the gift of water.
Which means you have to fight corruption. (Some see water as an increasingly valuable resource to be exploited for their own purposes.)
Public money funded the 5-year water development plan for Saskatchewan, and helps fund the Drought-proofing the Economy Conference:
– the report for the Development Plan is not available to the public, except through a payment of $100, and
– discussion around the plans for the gift of water are being held at meetings that exclude the public because of the $50.00 registration fee.
– implementation is to be through a questionable organization (Sask Water
Council) headed by a man (Wayne Clifton) who would be in a clear conflict-of-interest (Clifton & Assoc, Engineering Co.) were that to happen.
The Govt has no business handing over public money, along with the accountability for it, to non-government organizations. (e.g. CARDS to SCCD)
The Government of Saskatchewan is the proper authority. What is the Federal Govt doing, funding Agrivision Corporation in all this?
This is not democracy.
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We cannot have democracy without the participation of citizens.
I am sending the notes because
– of the difficulty for you in writing a speech for a Saskatchewan audience when you don’t know the local situation (you are in Ottawa).
– the information you DO receive is coming through “old boys’ networking”.
There is a great deal of self-interest in that network.
– when we are dealing with “the commons”, the Dept of Environment has ONLY the protection of the commons as its mandate.
The notes can help the Minister deliver a better speech:
– The economy and the environment are very serious issues in Saskatchewan.
A purely “political” speech for loyal Liberal supporters will be a mistake.
Many Saskatchewanians are well-informed. They wish to engage in constructive and real dialogue. The conference “Drought-proofing the Economy” will draw more than current Liberal supporters and those who think they will gain financial and personal advantage by becoming pals with “the boys”.
– Citizens respond to speakers who have investigated the local situation and are able to relate it to the message the speaker brings.
– Most people do not want to have their time wasted. Speakers need to have MEAT in their presentation.
In Craik I pointed out to the audience, the Minister and you, the obstacle between him and the achievement of his goals for the Environment:
– the marriage of corporate interests with the Federal Govt has more power than the Minister’s finely stated intentions.
– we are ferociously battling this infiltration by corporate interests into the Departments of Agriculture and Health, notably in the PMRA (Pest Management Regulatory Agency) and the CFIA (Cdn Food Inspection Agency).
The corporate interests are the chemical and biotechnology companies which are the same as the pharmaceutical companies.
– it is alarming to now see in Environment Canada, under the “Sector Sustainability Tables” (SST’s) the co-chairs of one Committee are Steve Griffiths, a Vice-President at IMPERIAL OIL and Suzanne Hurtubise, Deputy Minister of INDUSTRY CANADA. The “public private partnership” (P3) agenda clearly extends into the Dept of Environment now, too. This is wrong.
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THE PROCESS: “MOVING THE ECONOMY INTO INSTITUTIONS”
Look back on our work. Find the patterns in:
– WATER DEVELOPMENT (Meridian Dam battle, and recently the Agrivision Conference “Drought-proofing the Economy”)
– HEALTH (Romanow Healthcare Review battle to get “Prevention” addressed, and now the “Health Research Foundations” and the proposed changes to the Food and Drug Act.)
– TRANSGENICS & OWNERSHIP OF SEEDS (roundup resistant wheat battle, now proposed changes to the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act).
When you recognize the pattern in one, you see PRECISELY the same process at work in the others. We each need to understand what is going on. It will be our un-doing if we don’t.
The process is one of “MOVING THE ECONOMY INTO INSTITUTIONS”. Which is to move exploitable resources out of the reach of citizens who interfere with the agenda of those who will use the resources to enrich themselves.
The following has a bias of Saskatchewan detail and experience, but the underlying process will be the same in other provinces.
Each is a Manual on how to achieve more corporate domination of basic parts of what is “the commons”, that which belongs to all people and all species.
It includes the allocation of tax money handed over by citizens to Government which is supposed to be for the advancement of the public good – not to serve corporate interests and individual greed, or lust for power.
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PILLARS OF SAND
Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last?, W.W. Norton, 1999
Irrigation has been a powerful tool of human advancement for 6,000 years. In Pillar of Sand, author Sandra Postel examines the challenges to our modern irrigation society – from mounting water scarcity and salinization of soils to rising tensions between countries over shared rivers. She shows how innovative technologies and strategies can improve irrigation’s sustainability and alleviate hunger and environmental stress at the same time.
“Postel gives a lucid and authoritative account of humanity’s dwindling supply of fresh water and what to do about the shortage before it causes dangerous social and economic problems worldwide.” — E. O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize winner and renowned Harvard biologist, in selecting Pillar of Sand as one of his three favorite books of the year for the Washington Post (Dec 2000).
Postel’s Pillar of Sand “has a global focus that…gives her a perspective that is almost breathtaking.” — Molly Ivins, syndicated columnist
To date, Pillar of Sand has been selected for course use at more than 130 colleges and universities.
———————————–
Water scarcity is the single biggest threat to global food production.
Tensions over water have the potential to incite civil unrest, spur migration, further impoverish already poor regions, destabilize governments, and even ignite armed conflicts.
Irrigation is important because some 40 percent of the world’s food now come from the 17 percent of cropland that is irrigated-and we are betting on that share to increase. But, history tells us that irrigation brings serious risks along with its benefits.
Irrigation has been a powerful tool of human advancement for 6,000 years. It remains a cornerstone of agriculture today. Farmers strive to meet the increasing food demands of growing populations. We face the challenge of mounting water scarcity and salinization of soils to rising tensions between countries over shared rivers. The rise and fall of early civilizations can be traced, in many cases, to the failure of irrigated agriculture. Irrigated farmlands are being converted to subdivisions. The water is being converted to municipal uses and the price paid for the right to divert and use the water is ever increasing.
The recent news that 136 miles of the Middle Rio Grande is a protected habitat for the silvery minnow has placed new demands on the finite and overappropriated water of the Middle Rio Grande. This will increase the price of water rights further and faster.
Here are some facts to think about:
1. It takes about 1,000 tons of water to grow one ton of wheat.
2. In the next 25 years, the number of people living in water-stressed areas will increase sixfold to 3 billion.
3. A tenth of the world’s grain supply is propped up by unsustainable water use.
4. As water becomes scarce, competition for it is increasing – between neighboring states and countries, between farms and cities, and between people and their environment.
5. Many major rivers now run dry for most of the year.
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The 2004 “50-Year Development Plan for Water” Committee includes:
Saskatchewan Agrivision Corporation Inc., C.M. (Red) Williams and Al Scholz Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development Program in Saskatchewan, Elvin Haupstein and Jim Schick Clifton & Associates Ltd., Wayne Clifton Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, Guy Lonechild Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, Larry Lenton and Carl Neggers Saskatchewan Agriculture, Food & Rural Revitalization, John Linsley Saskatchewan Association of Rural Water Pipelines, Grattan O’Grady Saskatchewan Irrigation Projects Association, Roger Pederson Saskatchewan Watershed Authority, Wayne Dybvig SaskPower, Rick Patrick SaskWater, Stuart Kramer Tourism Saskatchewan, Roy Anderson and Darryl McCallum University of Saskatchewan, Agricultural & Bioresource Engineering, Gordon Kent Water Resource Consultants Inc., Ray Pentland
SASKATCHEWAN AGRIVISION CORPORATION BOARD OF DIRECTORS (SAC) The SAC Inc. Executive Board includes:
Larry Hayes, Farm Credit Canada, Saskatoon (Alternate: Brent Bender)
Elements of this email required for community sustainability:
water supply
mechanism for getting problems / obstacles on the table and dealt with, “social ingenuity”
manageable healthcare costs
This is part of a submission to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
If I’ve made errors, PLEASE let me know.
I don’t want to give the College ammunition for the charge that I am a lunatic!
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CONTENTS
(1) PREAMBLE
(2) OBSTACLES TO ADDRESSING THE CAUSES OF DISEASE (most of you know this & will skip it)
(3) HUGE PROBLEMS FOR SOCIETY FROM PHARMACEUTICALS:
(a) THE DRUGS ENTER OUR WATER SUPPLY. WE ARE WATER.
(b) MICRO-ORGANISMS EVOLVE TO BECOME RESISTANT. IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG. (TB example)
(c) THE PATHWAY OF A LUNATIC
(4) MUST FIND A DIFFERENT PATH
(5) CREATED MY OWN UN-DOING
(6) A GREEN ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY EMERGES WHEN EXTERNALITIES AND MULTIPLIER EFFECTS ARE ADDRESSED
(7) REFERENCES
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(1) PREAMBLE
In the beginning I didn’t know whether to have confidence in the naturopathic doctor, but I believe that in life you have to be open to trying different ways, IN SOME CASES, and IF the information you have tells you that current ways are not working. It’s called effective problem solving!
– – – – – – – — – – – – – – – – –
(2) OBSTACLES TO ADDRESSING THE CAUSES OF DISEASE
Western (called “allopathic”) medicine has developed good tools for diagnosis and for things like fixing detached retinas, etc. etc . But they are off-base in treating the SYMPTOMS of illness (using drugs) with little of addressing the CAUSES of illness.
It is difficult to get western medicine back on-base because there are very large financial interests in the status quo (in addition to normal human resistance to change):
the drug companies are among the world’s richest companies.
(WRONG.) Medical practitioners make lots of money and don’t have to face the challenge of changing the status quo. I don’t think that’s the problem. The system is not working well; the way it’s designed, medical practitioners are under enormous pressure to churn a burgeoning load of patients through the turn-style. Change requires support, motivation, time to update your information base and to experiment with alternatives. If the workload is stressful, it is draining. If you are drained, you cannot summon the energy required to motivate yourself to deal with change. If you have the energy to deal with family matters, the balancing of other personal necessities for
health, you are doing extremely well. There’s nothing left to energize the change required in the workplace. We know that is the case for doctors, but we don’t do effective problem solving to change it. (We lack “Social Ingenuity”!)
As long as you continue to treat symptoms and not causes, there is a guaranteed and growing flow of money through the growing number of patients.
Ironically, our indicator of economic success, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), tells us we are doing just great! when disease increases (high expenditures on medicare, drugs and healthcare).
A recent article in the Globe & Mail:
– cancer will soon overtake heart as the leading cause of death, confirmation that our “address the symptoms” approach does not deliver the goods.
What we see: under the pharmaceutical or drug approach to healthcare, disease has risen significantly. Under the use of pesticides, the amount of “weeds” has risen. We use more drugs and more chemicals and the problems escalate. ?? Smart?
In this network we fight hard to try and force Governments and disease organizations to deal with CAUSE. Unfortunately there is little money to be
made by vested interests if we accomplish our goal (it is largely lip service that is given to “preventive medicine” as evidenced by the failure around pesticides at the Federal and Provincial levels, including some municipal levels).
Dealing with cause is a huge threat to the profitability of the pharmaceutical companies because they own the chemical companies, and together they are the biotechnology companies. They ALL have a lot to do with the CAUSES of disease. They are corrupt companies that corrupt the Government. But good news! in spite of the vested interests, we are beginning to see the results of our work. It’s coming.
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(3) HUGE PROBLEMS FOR SOCIETY FROM PHARMACEUTICALS:
(3a) THE DRUGS ENTER OUR WATER SUPPLY. WE ARE WATER.
Treating symptoms with drugs is creating huge problems that affect the whole population, other species and the environment: pharmaceuticals, in enormous quantities are entering our water supply.
Saskatoon gets its water from the South Saskatchewan River. Calgary is upstream, along with Medicine Hat and other communities – Outlook, SK for example. The Calgary area, alone has a million people. Many people are on drugs, lots of different ones: birth control pills, hormone replacement drugs, ritalin, anti-depressants, insulin, heart pills, chemotherapy drugs, … the list is long.
Those drugs go through our bodies, some remains in the body, but large quantities exit through urine. Urine goes through the sewer lines, through the water (sewage) treatment plant, and back into the River.
Because research “in the public interest” in North America has been increasingly under funded (due to the influence of the pharmaceutical/chemical/biotech companies not only in Government but also in our universities) we do not have the body of research that is available in Europe – they have decades-long documentation of the pharmaceuticals in the water supply. In Canada there are studies of the lake water near some northern communities that show the ingredients of aspirin in the water. And through one study by the DFO (Dept of Fisheries & Ocean) we know that fish downstream from sewage treatment plants are “feminized” (sterile), which tells you that the pharmaceuticals and chemicals are not all removed by “water treatment”. Water keeps recycling through the rain-evaporation cycle and through our bodies. What went through people two thousand years ago is still cycling through us. What we put into the water is profoundly important.
Drugs are chemicals; they, along with the chemicals enter the water supply (think of what goes down the drain from latex paint, to chemicals that are strong enough to dissolve body hair or tree roots in sewer lines, to run-off from agriculture and lawns.)
We know what is happening to the water supply. If there isn’t enough evidence in North America, there is in Europe. We have to resolve this, not only for the human species but for the sake of other species. We are all totally dependent for life on the gift of water. If we poison it, it has no option but to poison us.
“Different people have different percentages of their bodies made up of water. Babies have the most, being born at about 78%. By one year of age, that amount drops to about 65%. In adult men, about 60% of their bodies are water. However, fat tissue does not have as much water as lean
tissue.
In adult women, fat makes up more of the body than men, so they have about 55% of their bodies made of water. Fat men also have less water (as a percentage) than thin men.”
As David Suzuki says, water IS us, we are water. You can’t separate us out.
We must develop the SOCIAL INGENUITY to remove the obstacles that are blocking effective problem-solving. This is my contribution to that attempt. Put it out on the table. Stop hiding the problem.
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(3b) MICRO-ORGANISMS EVOLVE TO BECOME RESISTANT. IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG.
The second large problem with the drugs is that organisms evolve to become resistant to the current drugs. The development of TB strains that are
resistant to current drug protocol is a rising threat in the world. The drug companies are in a race to be the first one out with a more potent drug that can kill the newly evolved TB micro-organisms now found in Africa, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. The fact that I (not from a “vulnerable” population) have TB is to me, an indication that yes, TB is definitely on the rise, and there is a lot of money to be made in the future in treating TB. But I also know that world-wide there won’t be the money available to buy the drugs to treat Africans, Eastern Europeans and others. Many, but not all North Americans and western Europeans will have access to the drugs.
(The race to find a “cure” for TB and the corruption in the drug companies and Governments is the subject of John Le Carre’s recent book, made into a movie – “The Constant Gardener”. Le Carre is the author of thriller spy and espionage novels, based in a very real world.)
The “treat the symptom” drug approach is of course, quite stupid. It is as obvious as my nose that more and more potent drugs, over time, guarantee the development of yet more virulent organisms. It is the way of Nature. If you think of the TB drugs, just the current ones make some people nauseated and sick. That is natural – the drugs required to kill the TB organisms are potent.
The drug required to kill the evolved MORE VIRULENT TB organism is obviously going to make us sicker than the current drug protocol, because it is MORE POTENT. The organisms will continue to evolve – we are in a deadly spiral.
– – – – – – – — – – – – – – – – – —
(3c) THE PATHWAY OF A LUNATIC
It is lunacy to continue along this pathway. Yet Western medicine does it. Curiosity and creativity would address resistant organisms, pharmaceuticals in the water supply, and the role of the pharmaceutical companies. If the educational system left ingenuity intact, we might by now be onto a new path.
– — — – – – – – – – — – –
(4) MUST FIND A DIFFERENT PATH
SO! the information leads me to think that we must find a different path. We will never find the path if we don’t search for it.
I saw the naturopathic doctor.
His analysis is that the reason I have TB is most likely because I have a fungal infestation in my body that is producing a large load of myco toxins
(a form of toxaemia, I believe). The infestation is not visible of course. I am uncertain about the familiarity of allopathic doctors with the production and role of myco toxins in health. My experience with TB suggests there is an information gap.
The evidence to date says that the naturopathic doctor is right. Four months after taking anti-fungal and supporting treatment and diet, I no longer suffered the symptoms of the TB. And my vitality returned. (There is more to this story, told in later postings.)
IMPORTANT: I am very fortunate. In my case the TB is “encapsulated” and therefore not contagious at this point. I cannot infect other people at this stage. I hope to arrest and reverse the growth of the TB.
– – – – – — – — – – — – – — – — – — –
(5) CREATED MY OWN UN-DOING
When the TB was over-powered it felt so good to have my energy and vitality back, and there is so much that I want to do with my work, that I began to neglect the treatment. The diet says no sugars because yeast is a fungus. From making bread you know that without sugar the yeast
can’t grow. The diet works with the treatment: an anti-fungal kills the yeast, and you cut off the food supply for the fungus (yeast) so there is nothing to feed what doesn’t get killed.
The diet says no alcohol because in similar fashion it feeds the yeast.
Well, when I go to conferences or weddings (not usual, I’ve been at 2 weddings and 3 conferences lately!), I go off the diet. I ate desserts loaded with sugar, drank some wine, and coffee (caffeine). And I don’t get the rest needed to enable my body to have extra resources for fighting the fungus and TB. The weather is such that I can no longer lay out in the healing sun. Coincidentally I ran out of the anti-fungal, etc, treatments and didn’t re-stock immediately. Although I felt energetic, there was obviously still fungus and TB organisms floating around inside because the symptoms of the TB are back again. Damn! It is nothing to mess around with – a million people world-wide die of TB each year and the number is rising if the disease incidence is rising. (If you would argue that my lack of discipline is proof that the drug treatment should be used, I counter with the argument that there are many people who contract TB and are prescribed drug therapy who never complete the 8 month drug protocol which is known to then contribute to the evolution of resistant TB strains because incomplete treatment leaves only the strongest organisms behind. There has to be experimentation with alternatives, and like it or not, I am in a position to provide research information.)
I go back to the TB Control Centre, November 3rd, for x-rays to see where the TB is at. I expect it will show that I have a small amount yet to deal with, significantly down from where it was during my last visit. Then I will see the naturopathic doctor on November 7th. Working with both
allopathic and alternative practitioners will work if I maintain discipline. It is sooo easy to let down your guard, especially when confronted by a chocolate brownie, or the sociability of a glass of wine. Easy and also stupid (I admit!).
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(6) A GREEN ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY EMERGES WHEN EXTERNALITIES AND MULTIPLIER EFFECTS ARE ADDRESSED
My Grandmother-in-law, from Brandon, MB had tuberculosis in the 1940’s. She spent 2 years at the sanatorium in the Qu’Appelle Valley in Saskatchewan and was cured of the disease without the use of drugs. She lived a healthy life into her 80’s. I doubt she was given any anti-fungal treatment. With anti-fungal treatment, I believe it will turn out that in my case, the disease could have been overcome in, say 6 months. (Please see the February 2012 posting on the “cure” of my TB; in the end it involved more than the anti-fungal treatment.)
Drug treatment is a large drain on the economy of Saskatchewan. All the profits are siphoned out of the province by foreign transnational corporations. If you consider “the externalities”,
the cost of resistant organisms
the cost of poisoned water
the cost of long term unknown side effects, AND
the cost of very low multiplier effects (“multiplier effects” of keeping the money here circulating and available in our own communities)
the opportunity costs of lost meaningful jobs
you would conclude that a return to a sanatorium-type cure, employing local care givers, would address the problems effectively. Or you may have some other idea that would move us onto a sound path forward. We need the debate and the experimentation. It could lead to the establishment of model health care facilities that would attract TB patients from around the world, just as my Grandmother-in-law was attracted from Manitoba to Saskatchewan. Opportunity and job creation. You know the demand is rising. We COULD develop a world-class treatment centre, attractive because:
it doesn’t add to the problem of resistant organisms
it demonstrates how it is possible to stop the flow of pharmaceuticals into water supplies.
Very innovative!
I’d be impressed.
It is unfortunate when Medicare promotes allopathic medicine as a sole answer (it is almost unheard of not to take the drug protocol for TB). In spite of the cost of going to alternative therapies, many people find the money to use them. But then many are prevented because they can’t round up the funds. In my case, I view it that my “life” depends on it.
I could take the drug protocol, of course and right away “save” my life (I might be nauseated for 8 or 9 months). But there will have been no long term evaluations to see whether down-the-road I will suffer from other maladies that become manifest only in the long term. If a fungal overgrowth is the root of the problem, and goes unaddressed because only the TB has been treated, it is pretty well guaranteed that I will have recurring health problems.
Also, there is responsibility on my part to force the issue, along with others who are doing the same. I am aware of the consequences for my children and theirs if we do not exercise our social ingenuity to remove the obstacles that prevent us from moving forward, from addressing the issues of pharmaceuticals in the water supply and our knowing contribution to the development of resistant organisms, a deadly game.
– – – – — – – – – – – – – — – – –
(Note: Please see the February 2012 posting regarding “cure” for TB. It involved more than elimination of the myco-toxins.)
– – – – – — – – – — –
(7) REFERENCES
(a) * Some of my information and the diet is from the book, “Complete Candida Yeast Guidebook, Revised 2nd Edition, Everything You Need to Know About Prevention, Treatment & Diet” by Jeanne Marie Martin with Zoltan P. Rona, M.D., (2000).
One problem with the symptoms listed in the book, or maybe MY problem, is that the symptoms experienced by different people are so many and varying that almost anything could be a symptom! And of course, those symptoms could also be the symptoms of many other illnesses. Other than that (which is likely MY problem) I found the book to be very informative.
(I suspect that the symptoms are many because a fungal infestation in different parts of the body would create different symptoms.)
(b) The information on the USDA web-site about myco toxins in our food supply, so far as it is related, is consistent with the information from the book. We have talked about it: THE INCREASE IN FUSARIUM (A FUNGUS) FOUND IN FOOD CROPS TREATED WITH ROUNDUP (GLYPHOSATE) – a concern because it is another vector through which myco-toxins can enter the food supply.
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, October 3, 2005; Page D04
Lockheed Martin Corp. won a $500 million contract last week from the Census Bureau to develop and operate the information processing system for the 2010 Census. The bureau’s goal is to make the next population count more automated than the one in 2000 and to make it simpler for citizens to participate.
The Decennial Response Integration System contract includes developing an option for citizens to answer census questionnaires over the Internet. The contract provides for systems, facilities and staffing to capture and standardize census data from paper forms and the telephone as well as the Internet.
The contract also calls for capturing data coming from handheld computers to be used by census takers; a contract for the handheld devices has yet to be awarded.
“It’s like a big catch net, capturing all the data coming in no matter where it comes from,” said Preston J. Waite, associate director for the 2010 Census. “It will integrate everybody who tries to answer the census form.”
The Census Bureau also has improved its geographic database to better match housing units and street addresses using Global Positioning System coordinates.
The bureau pulled together all of its information processing services, equipment, systems and software under one contract, said Arnold Jackson, assistant director of information technology systems for the 2010 Census. “We’re hoping with one integrator there will be fewer handoffs, lower risk, and solutions can be envisioned by the prime contractor and pushed all the way through the system. We have fewer problems with unintended differences in our data that way.”
Lockheed Martin developed the information processing system used in 2000, but it was one of three contractors handling data gathered from paper forms and over the phone, said Julie Dunlap, Lockheed Martin’s 2010 program director for the contract.
Lockheed Martin’s teammates on the six-year contract include Cardinal Technologies Inc. of Bethesda; Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo, Calif.; Evolver Inc. of Reston; International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y.; Metier Ltd. of Washington; Nortel PEC Solutions of Fairfax; and Pearson Government Solutions Inc. of Arlington.
Mary Mosquera is a staff writer with Government Computer News. For more information on these and other contracts, go tohttp://www.gcn.com.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the guest speaker at the FSIN (Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nation)’s “Only a Matter of Time” Conference, Saskatoon in Octctober. He is one of my heroes. I get to hear him in person!
THE WORK OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance (used to be Riverkeepers Alliance) … I didn’t realize how much of his work we’ve distributed. It began with his attendance in Calgary and Banff to challenge the Government of Alberta on intensive livestock operations (developers who are shut down in the U.S. move to Canada to do their deeds). An Alberta chapter of his Waterkeeper Alliance was launched.
The following postings are excerpts from his written work, pretty amazing given his court work and the number of public appearances he does. The articles are lengthy and excellent!
==================================
THE JUNK SCIENCE OF GEORGE W. BUSH, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr
Publication: The Nation
(Link no longer valid)
article | posted February 19, 2004 (March 8, 2004 issue)
As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church’s most central purpose–the search for existential truths.
Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration–aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals–are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own.
Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration’s corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact “for partisan political ends.”
I’ve had my own experiences with Torquemada’s modern successors, both personal and related to my work as an environmental lawyer and advocate working for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Waterkeeper Alliance.
At the time of the World Trade Center catastrophe on September 11, 2001, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, cater-corner from the World Trade Center and within the official security zone to which access was, afterward, restricted for several months. Upon returning to the office in October my partner, Kevin Madonna, suffered a burning throat, nausea and a headache that was still pounding twenty-four hours after he left the building.
Despite the Environmental Protection Agency’s claims that air quality was safe, Kevin refused to return and we closed the office. Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the EPA’s nine press releases between September and December of 2001 reassuring the public about the wholesome air quality downtown. We have since learned that the government was lying to us. An Inspector General’s report released last August revealed that the EPA’s data did not support those assurances and that its press releases were being drafted or doctored by White House officials intent on reopening Wall Street.
On September 13, just two days after the terror attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was “very low” or entirely absent. On September 18 the agency said the air was “safe to breathe.” In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples collected by the EPA before September 18 showed presence of asbestos above the 1 percent safety benchmark. Among outside studies, one performed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, found particulates at levels never before seen in more than 7,000 similar tests worldwide. A study being performed by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung ailments and 88 percent had ear, nose and throat problems in the months following the attack and that about half still had persistent lung and respiratory illnesses nine months to a year later.
Dan Tishman, whose company was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street, required his crews to wear respirators but recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected–no doubt relying on the government’s assurances. “The frustrating thing is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health,” he says. “When that role is compromised, people can get hurt.”
I also recall the case of Dr. James Zahn, a nationally respected microbiologist with the Agriculture Department’s research service, who accepted my invitation to speak to an April 2002 conference of more than 1,000 family farm advocates and environmental and civic leaders in Clear Lake, Iowa. In a rigorous taxpayer-funded study, Zahn had identified bacteria that can make people sick–and that are resistant to antibiotics–in the air surrounding industrial-style hog farms. His studies proved that billions of these “superbugs” were traveling across property lines daily, endangering the health of neighbors and their herds. I was shocked when Zahn canceled his appearance on the day of the conference under orders from the Agriculture Department in Washington. I later uncovered a fax trail proving the order was prompted by lobbyists from the National Pork Producers Council. Zahn told me that his supervisor at the USDA, under pressure from the hog industry, had ordered him not to publish his study and that he had been forced to cancel more than a dozen public appearances at local planning boards and county health commissions seeking information about health impacts of industry mega-farms. Soon after my conference, Zahn resigned from the government in disgust.
Ignoring Bad News
The Bush Administration’s first instinct when it comes to science has been to suppress, discredit or alter facts it doesn’t like. Probably the best-known case is global warming. Over the past two years the Administration has done this to a dozen major government studies on global warming, as well as to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its own efforts to stall action to control industrial emissions. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government’s National Research Council and National Academy of Sciences, and by scientific teams at the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, and a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.
The Administration has taken special pains to shield Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, which is part of an industry that has contributed $58 million to Republicans since 2000. Halliburton is the leading practitioner of a process used in extracting oil and gas known as hydraulic fracturing, in which benzene is injected into underground formations. EPA scientists studying the process in 2002 found that it could contaminate ground-water supplies in excess of federal drinking water standards. A week after reporting their findings to Congressional staff members, however, they revised the data to indicate that benzene levels would not exceed government standards. In a letter to Representative Henry Waxman, EPA officials said the change was made based on “industry feedback.”
As a favor to utility and coal industries, America’s largest mercury dischargers, the EPA sat for nine months on a report exposing the catastrophic impact on children’s health of mercury, finally releasing it in February 2003. Among the findings of the report: The bloodstream of one in twelve US women is saturated with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ loss and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children.
The list goes on. In October 2001 Interior Secretary Gale Norton, responding to a Senate committee inquiry on the effects of oil drilling on caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, falsely claimed that the caribou would not be affected, because they calve outside the area targeted for drilling. She later explained that she somehow substituted “outside” for “inside.” She also substituted findings from a study financed by an oil company for some of the ones that the Fish and Wildlife Service had prepared for her. In another case, according to the Wall Street Journal, Norton and White House political adviser Karl Rove pressed for changes that would allow diversion of substantial amounts of water from the Klamath River to benefit local supporters and agribusiness contributors. Some 34,000 endangered salmon were killed after National Marine Fisheries scientists altered their findings on the amount of water the salmon required. Environmentalists describe it as the largest fish kill in the history of the West. Mike Kelly, the fisheries biologist on the Klamath who drafted the biological opinion, told me that under the current plan coho salmon are probably headed for extinction. According to Kelly, “The morale is very low among scientists here. We are under pressure to get the right results. This Administration is putting the species at risk for political gain. And not just in the Klamath.”
Roger Kennedy, former director of the National Park Service, told me that the alteration and deletion of scientific information is now standard procedure at Interior. “It’s hard to decide what is more demoralizing about the Administration’s politicization of the scientific process,” he said, “its disdain for professional scientists working for our government or its willingness to deceive the American public.”
Getting the Right Answer
But suppressing or altering science can be a tricky business; the Bush Administration has found it easier at times simply to arrange to get the results it wants. A case in point is the decision in July by the EPA’s regional office overseeing the western Everglades to accept a study financed predominantly by developers, which concludes that wetlands discharge more pollutants than they absorb. There was no peer review or public comment. With its approval, the EPA is giving developers credit for improving water quality by replacing natural wetlands with golf courses and other developments.
The study was financed by the Water Enhancement and Restoration Committee, which was formed primarily by local developers and chaired by Rick Barber, the consultant for a golf course development for which the EPA had denied a permit because it would pollute surrounding waters and destroy wetlands. The study contradicts everything known about wetlands functioning, including a determination by more than twenty-five scientists and managers at the Tampa Bay Estuary Program that, on balance, wetlands do not generate nitrogen pollution. Bruce Boler, a biologist and water-quality specialist working for the EPA office, resigned in protest. Boler says the developers massaged the data to support their theory by evaluating samples collected near roads and bridges, where developments discharge pollutants. “It was like the politics trumped the science,” he told us.
In a similar case, last November the EPA cut a private deal with a pesticide manufacturer to take over federal studies of a pesticide it manufactures. Atrazine is the most heavily utilized weedkiller in America. First approved in 1958, by the 1980s it had been identified as a potential carcinogen associated with high incidences of prostate cancer among workers at manufacturing facilities. Testing by the US Geological Survey regularly finds alarming concentrations of Atrazine in drinking water across the corn belt. Even worse, last year scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that Atrazine at one-thirtieth the government’s “safe” 3 parts per billion level causes grotesque deformities in frogs, including multiple sets of organs. And this year epidemiologists from the University of Missouri found reproductive consequences in humans associated with Atrazine, including male semen counts in farm communities that are 50 percent below normal. Iowa scientists are finding similar results in a current study.
The Bush Administration reacted to the frightening findings not by banning this dangerous chemical, as the European Union has, but by taking the studies away from EPA scientists and, in an unprecedented move, giving the chemical’s manufacturer, Switzerland-based Syngenta, control over federal research. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sherry Ford, a spokesperson for Syngenta, praised without irony the advantages of having the company monitor its own product. “This is one way we can ensure it’s not presenting any risk to the environment.”
In a dramatic expansion of this disturbing strategy, the Bush Administration now plans to systematically turn government science over to private industry by contracting out thousands of science jobs to compliant consultants already in the habit of massaging data to support corporate profits. The National Park Service is preparing a first phase of contracting reviews, involving about 1,800 positions, including biologists, archeologists and environmental specialists. Later phases may entail replacement of 11,000 employees, more than two-thirds of the service’s permanent work force.
At least federal employees enjoy civil service and whistleblower protection intended to allow them to operate professionally and independently. Private contractors don’t enjoy the same level of protection. “You can shop for the right contractor to give you the kind of result you want,” says Frank Buono, a retired Park Service veteran who now serves on the board of a nonprofit whistleblower protection organization.
As a Last Resort, Fire the Messenger
Most federal employees have gone along with the Bush Administration’s wishes, but a few have tried to stand up for sound science. The results are predictable. When a team of government biologists indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers was violating the Endangered Species Act in managing the flow of the Missouri River, the group was quickly replaced by an industry-friendly panel. (In an unexpected–and fortunate–development, the new panel ultimately declined to adopt the White House’s pro-barge-industry position and upheld the decision to manage the river to protect imperiled species.) Similarly, last April the EPA suddenly dismantled an advisory panel that had spent nearly twenty-one months developing rules for stringent regulation of industrial emissions of mercury [see Alterman and Green, page 14].
Or consider the case of Tony Oppegard and Jack Spadaro, members of a team of federal geodesic engineers selected to investigate the collapse of barriers that held back a coal slurry pond in Kentucky containing toxic wastes from mountaintop strip-mining. The 300-million-gallon spill was the largest in American history and, according to the EPA, the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the Eastern United States. Black lava-like toxic sludge containing sixty poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks and poisoned the drinking water in seventeen communities. Unlike in other slurry disasters, no one died, but hundreds of residents were sickened by contact with contaminated water.
The investigation had broad implications for the viability of mountaintop mining, which involves literally lopping off mountaintops to get access to the underlying coal. It is a process beloved by coal barons because it practically dispenses with the need for human labor and thus increases industry profits. Spadaro, the nation’s leading expert on slurry spills, recalls, “We were geotechnical engineers determined to find the truth. We simply wanted to get to the heart of the matter–find out what happened and why, and to prevent it from happening again. But all that was thwarted at the top of the agency by Bush appointees who obstructed professionals trying to do their jobs.”
The Bush Administration appointees all had coal industry pedigrees. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (the wife of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s biggest recipient of industry largesse) appointed Dave Lauriski, a former executive with Energy West Mining, as the new director of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversaw the investigation. His deputy assistant secretary was John Caylor, an Anamax Mining alumnus. His other deputy assistant, John Correll, had worked for both Amax and Peabody Coal.
Oppegard, the leader of the federal team, was fired on the day Bush was inaugurated in 2001. All eight members of the team except Spadaro signed off on a whitewashed investigation report. Spadaro, like the others, was harassed but flat-out refused to sign. In April of 2001 Spadaro resigned from the team and filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Labor Department. Last June 4 he was placed on administrative leave–a prelude to getting fired.
Bush Administration officials accuse Spadaro of “abusing his authority” for allowing a handicapped instructor to have free room and board at a training academy he oversees, an arrangement approved by his superiors. An internal report vindicated Spadaro’s criticisms of the investigation, but the Administration is still going after his job. “I’ve been regulating mining since 1966,” Spadaro told me. “This is the most lawless administration I’ve encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples.”
Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. At their best, scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Over the past two decades industry and conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars to corrupt science. They distort the truth about tobacco, pesticides, ozone depletion, dioxin, acid rain and global warming. In their attempt to undermine the credible basis for public action (by positing that all opinions are politically driven and therefore any one is as true as any other), they also undermine belief in the integrity of the scientific process.
Now Congress and this White House have used federal power for the same purpose. Led by the President, the Republicans have gutted scientific research budgets and politicized science within the federal agencies. The very leaders who so often condemn the trend toward moral relativism are fostering and encouraging the trend toward scientific relativism. The very ideologues who derided Bill Clinton as a liar have now institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture of America’s federal agencies.
The Bush Administration has so violated and corrupted the institutional culture of government agencies charged with scientific research that it could take a generation for them to recover their integrity even if Bush is defeated this fall. Says Princeton University scientist Michael Oppenheimer, “If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge and in a search for the truth, this White House is an absolute disaster.”
Regulatory environment (the political CONTEXT) in which we are operating: address context if you are to understand what will work and what won’t, to bring about correction.
Vet my logic. Tell me where I am in error. Thanks.
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Based on experience and information collected during
– the battle against roundup-resistant (RR) wheat (GMO’s)
– my bout with tuberculosis,
here’s what I’m thinking:
– the application of poisons (Roundup / glyphosate) to living organisms weakens and sets them up for disease.
– which would explain the increase in the incidence of fusarium in crops that have been treated with herbicides.
Fusarium is a fungus.
As per the USDA web-page that discusses the seriousness of fungus and the myco toxins they produce, as well as the book on fungal infestations in the human body, myco toxins from fungus from crops enter humans through the plant food we eat. It also enters animals through feed crops; meat we eat then becomes another vector for it (although steps are taken to keep crops contaminated with things like fusarium out of the human and animal food supply. At one time there was “zero tolerance” for grain with fusarium in it.)
– with the industrialization of agriculture, things done on grand scales by people who are more and more removed from the plants and the animals and from the people eating the food, there will be more fungus entering the industrialized food supply. (more chemicals and yet again more chemicals with the introduction of gmo crops, the research that shows increased incidence of fusarium in gmo crops)
– myco toxins weaken us and set us up for disease. It used to be that if the routine sampling from a truckload of grain arriving at the elevator showed ANY fusarium, the truckload was rejected and the whole crop was destroyed.
– A high myco toxin load in my body made me susceptible to disease. My main question to the naturopath was “why didn’t my immune system take care of the TB bug?” His tests suggested that the real villain was a high level of myco toxins. There is more TB around. When I came into contact with its virulence, I succombed. It could as well have been a different disease. (We looked after the source of the myco toxins; I recovered from the TB.)
… As part of writing this email, I updated developments at the PRRCG (The Prairie Registration Recommending Committee for Grains) whose role we have discussed earlier. The developments at the PRRCG (described below) are extremely worrisome. I am beginning to think the only way to get the corporations out is to change the Government. The PRRCG is now a glaring example of the degree of infiltration and takeover of critical parts of the regulatory system by the corporations. Weakened regulations on fusarium is another.
The CONNECTIONS AND CONTEXT are:
(the herbicide glyphosate (“roundup” is just one of the trade names under which it is marketed) is widely used and is used in even greater quantities after Monsanto’s patent on it expired)
The Government-Monsanto partnership has resulted in the introduction of crops such as Roundup Resistant (RR) Canola.
2. A critical part of the licensing for new crop varieties is the PRRCG, the Prairie Regional Recommending Committee for Grain. The public is not allowed in to its meetings – I attended under a press pass in 2003 or 2004. The CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) had been trying for at least 3 years to rob the plenary session of its power over which seed varieties go forward for registration. Supposedly in the interests of “stream-lining”, they wanted the grain sub-committees to be able to determine which varieties would be registered. Coincidentally, Monsanto and its bought ally, the Canola Growers Assoc (who also intervened in the Supreme Court on the side of Monsanto) have a great deal of influence in, for example, the sub-committee responsible for which varieties of canola will get registered. Today I read with dismay, that the PRRCG “voted … to dissolve the committee, effective April 1, 2005, and shift full powers to its four crop-specific subcommittees, allowing them to become independent recommending committees.” This is all part of legislative changes brought forward by Agriculture Canada that provide “rights” to Plant Breeders (which now includes large chemical-biotech corporations). It is part of the attempt to “own” seeds which are the basis of our food supply.
3. In the battle over the ownership of seeds (against RR Wheat) we learned that there is a great deal of research from different countries and in regard to different crops, but with a common denominator – the application of the herbicide glyphosate. The research shows there is a higher incidence of FUSARIUM in crops treated with glyphosate. Also in the literature, the incidence of fusarium is on the increase and spreading, especially in some locations on the prairies.
4. The introduction of herbicide tolerant crops (resistant to roundup/glphosate) leads to the use of MORE herbicides. That is researched and documented, common sense tells you the same thing, as does the experience of farmers. They now spray a field with glyphosate to kill all but the plants that are resistant to the chemical. RR Canola is now a weed. Farmers must go back and apply 2,4D to kill the plants that withstand the glyphosate/roundup application.
5. Recently I read where Monsanto is working on the development of crops that are resistant to fusarium. (Why not stop spraying them with the chemicals that weaken the plants AND the environment? Strong plants have strong immune systems that do not succumb to disease.)
6. April 1 this year it was confirmed that I have active tuberculosis (which is fortunately “encapsulated” outside the lung and not contagious, so not an immediate threat).
7. Internet information shows that TB is on the rise world-wide. I think it kills a million people world-wide.
8. With the support of the doctor in charge of the Tuberculosis Control Centre, it was arranged that I would work with conventional medicine (the TB Control Centre) AND a naturopathic doctor who came highly recommended.
9. The naturopathic doctor looked for why it was that my immune system hadn’t successfully defended against the TB (many people carry inactive TB with no ill effect). He diagnosed an internal fungal infestation, for which I was treated with anti-fungals to kill the overgrowth of myco-toxin-producing fungus in my body. I also had to keep to a diet that would not potentially introduce more myco toxins, or feed the fungus (sugar, etc.). Think of candida, a yeast (fungal) infection (I happened to have different fungal infection).
10. In learning about fungal infestations and the myco toxins they produce, from a book on the sources and effects of fungal infestations and myco toxins in the human body I came to understand that fusarium in crops isn’t just a problem for farmers, it’s a very real problem for my own health.
11. After 4 months of treatment for a fungal infestation the symptoms of tuberculosis (“the sweats”) are gone and my vitality has returned.
12. An interesting note from Slim: when people die, by law the corpse must be quickly treated or disposed of. The reason? when you die your immune system shuts down. The bad organisms in your body then enjoy a heyday. Inactive organisms come alive and rapidly multiply in the absence of that immune system. I (Sandra speaking now) recall reading a book that put forward the idea that you ARE your immune system. Without it, there is no you!
13. Extension: That’s why disease becomes rampant in the aftermath of the death surrounding hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, mud-slides, etc.
This is chilling. Suitors to corporations, University’s role in control of information.
Two researchers accuse the University of Manitoba of blocking for three years the release of their video exploring the risks of genetically modified crops, while at the same courting funds from biotech companies.
I never dreamt that when we started following the work of Ian Mauro it would come to this.
“University of Manitoba PhD student Ian Mauro is distributing 11,000 questionnaires to rural addresses in high-wheat-growing areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Farmers will be asked whether they would grow Monsanto’s new Roundup Ready Wheat, which is resistant to the company’s popular Roundup weed killer.”
Plant Breeders’ Responsibilities, not “Rights” (Proposed changes to Plant Breeders’ Rights Act raise serious issues of GOVERNANCE (In whose interest?)
HEALTH (Our food supply. Health is dependent upon food supply. What is criteria for seed selection?)
ENVIRONMENT (Introduced species do not have enemies. They proliferate and become weeds.) and
OWNERSHIP OF LIFE FORMS, the right of citizens to save seeds.
UPDATE: (Thanks to Mike)
Mon 12 Sep 2005
Winnipeg Free Press
Video sows seeds of controversy
by Helen Fallding
Two researchers accuse the University of Manitoba of blocking for three years the release of their video exploring the risks of genetically modified crops, while at the same courting funds from biotech companies.
The case is being compared to a University of Toronto scandal over the suppression of drug research concerns.
University of Manitoba environment professor Stéphane McLachlan and his PhD student Ian Mauro completed a feature-length documentary in
2002 with help from independent Winnipeg filmmaker Jim Sanders.
It is based on interviews with Prairie farmers about their experiences — good and bad — with genetically-modified canola.
But the Seeds of Change video has never been screened because the university and the researchers, who share the copyright, have been unable to negotiate an agreement on its release.
“We’ve had people knocking on our door wanting this,” said Mauro, citing interest from Denmark, Australia and the U.S.
The university originally demanded assurances it would not be liable if anyone sued. One insurer demanded a $50,000 deductible for any lawsuits by crop marketer Monsanto, which has a reputation for protecting its interests vigorously through the courts.
The company is featured in the documentary because of its legal battle with Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and its development of genetically-modified wheat.
‘Never seen (the video)’
“Obviously, we’ve never seen (the video), so I’m not sure how these guys could assume that we would sue them,” Monsanto Canada spokeswoman Trish Jordan said.
Now that a private investor has pulled out of the Seeds of Change project and the filmmakers have made it clear they don’t intend to make a profit, the lawsuit issue has apparently been dropped by the university.
“I’ve seen (the video) and I think it’s fair. It’s not a biased kind of thing,” said Alan Simms, who represented the university in early negotiations before going on to head the university’s Smartpark research complex.
Simms said preliminary negotiations with Monsanto Canada over moving its Canadian headquarters to a new $6.5-million building in Smartpark did not begin until after his involvement with the documentary issue ended.
But McLachlan said the university is still demanding control over where and when the video is shown, while at the same time requiring a disclaimer indicating the project has nothing to do with the university. An independent lawyer advised him not to sign the agreement the university proposed.
University spokesman John Danakas would not say what restrictions the university would place on how the video is screened, because those details have not yet been discussed with the researchers. The university wants to make sure the documentary is only used for educational purposes, he said.
Filed grievance
McLachlan has filed a grievance through the faculty association claiming the university is infringing on his academic freedom — and even his responsibility as a public servant — to disseminate his research results as he sees fit.
If he and Mauro wrote a book about their interviews with the farmers, or even published the documentary transcript, the university administration would have no say. But a university copyright bylaw originally written to govern the use of taped lectures says the university has 50 per cent ownership of video and audio recordings by staff.
University of Manitoba ethics professor Arthur Schafer noted that universities are sometimes reluctant to offend corporate donors who compensate for government underfunding.
But Danakas said the lengthy negotiations over the video have more to do with the complexities of new media and the involvement of an outside filmmaker.
Sanders, meanwhile, is tired of waiting for permission to release the increasingly dated video.
In an article in the current issue of Canadian Dimension magazine, the independent filmmaker promised to put the documentary on his website for free download next month.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers has also taken up the case and plans to help McLachlan release the video in Winnipeg this fall — with or without the university’s permission. The professor recently received tenure, which gives him job security he did not have when negotiations with the university began.
CAUT executive director James Turk compared the case to the University of Toronto’s failure to support Dr. Nancy Olivieri when drug company Apotex tried to prevent her from going public with her concerns about one of their drugs. The company was also negotiating with the university over a huge donation.
Turk said stalling by the university amounts to suppression of research-based discussion of a compelling public issue — the very reason universities exist.
Equally vigilant
“We hope this never happens to another researcher.”
He said the association would be equally vigilant if the documentary focused on the benefits of genetically-modified crops.
Mauro said he has spent more time fighting to get the video released than he did interviewing farmers.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which helped fund the documentary, encourages researchers to disseminate their work in a format accessible to the general public and has raised no objection to Seeds of Change.
Seeds of Change: Farmers, Biotechnology and the New Face of Agriculture
Summary: The video documentary explores the impacts genetically modified canola is having on farmers and rural communities in the Canadian Prairies, outlining benefits, but paying special attention to the risks. The voices of farmers have sometimes been missing in the public debate between anti-GM activists and the biotech industry.
Scientists critical of GM crops are interviewed, including activist David Suzuki, University of Guelph professor Anne Clark and Indian activist Vandana Shiva. Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace activist turned advocate for GM crops, also appears in the film.
Monsanto, one of the main marketers of genetically modified crops, declined to participate in the project.
Date: The documentary was completed in 2002, but has not yet been released.
Length: 70 minutes
Budget: Less than $200,000, including grants from the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council.
Created by: University of Manitoba PhD student Ian Mauro, independent Winnipeg filmmaker Jim Sanders and University of Manitoba professor Stéphane McLachlan. Other films by activist filmmaker Sanders include The Real Thing: Coca, Democracy and Rebellion in Bolivia, which screened last year at Cinematheque.
Benefits of genetically-modified crops mentioned in the video: yield increases, profitability, better weed control, reduced tillage and fuel savings.
Risks highlighted: contamination of non-GM seed, GM crops as weeds in other fields, resistance to herbicides, loss of markets in Europe, lawsuits against farmers for patent violations, impact on zero-till agriculture and organic farming. Similar issues were raised in an award-winning Free Press series on genetically-modified wheat in 2002.
Excerpt: “You have the extreme groups on the anti-GMO. You also have big business, which I don’t trust all the time — or ever — telling you something else on the other side. We’re stuck in the middle.”
(Farmer from Starbuck, Manitoba.)
Potential audience: farmers, academic conferences, agriculture policy makers, film festivals and alternative theatres. The potential for international distribution is limited now that independent funder Angband has pulled out following delays in releasing the video.
The article “SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE” (below) in its excellence was making me depressed – so many problems demanding remedy.
My sub-conscious went to work on it while I slept. In the morning “Science under siege” downloaded into my consciousness, not in its isolation, but connected to other happenings in the world. Perception changed: the article actually represents very positive developments. The “COMMENT” below explains.
AND THEN! enter delightful serendipity – “SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTIONS” – received before I could email SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE to you. In one short paragraph “Successful revolutions” says it better than my “comment”.
Thanks to Elaine and Eduard who both submitted “Science under siege” – – not to depress us!
Cheers!
Sandra
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CONTENTS:
(1) COMMENT
(2) SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE, RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #822
(3) SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTIONS, E.F. SCHUMACHER FOUNDATION
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(1) COMMENT
The article SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE tweaks an internal “fretful” chord that I usually silence.
THE FRET: our society is treading on a thin edge when science falls into the hole of disrepute it is digging.
But step back and you will see a pattern that is deliberate in its repetition. It is not that we fight battle after battle, all the same and going nowhere. We are methodically chipping away at the institutions and thinking that do not serve us well. Growing numbers of people participate.
We live in extremely interesting times. Stepping back you see the de-construction and reconstruction work that is happening, you see the potential for the beauty of the forest to emerge.
“Advertising corrodes science” Aug 13, 2004 we circulated information re ANGELL MARCIA, former New England Journal of Medicine editor, now senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School and her book “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It” (Random House, 2004).
Doctors and scientists are lobbying to require that pharmaceutical companies must register all research into their products at the time the research commences. And the results must then be reported. Currently, if there are 4 negative test results and one positive, the pharmaceutical/chemical companies will only report the one positive test (which could be a manipulated test done by a scientist who is on their payroll).
In “Selling Sickness” on the “Nature of Things” (Sept 30 and Oct 3/04) David Suzuki “explores the unhealthy relationships between society, medical science and the pharmaceutical industry as they promote their new miracle cures – selling not just drugs but also the latest diseases that go with them.”
We circulated Globe & Mail articles with related condemnations from the Canadian Medical Association.
The article SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE nicely packages what we know.
SO WHY DO I FRET ABOUT CORRUPTED SCIENCE?
The Dark Ages is a metaphor most commonly used in relation to the European Middle Ages which spanned 900 years; written records all but evaporated in smoke. The monasteries in Ireland are credited with the maintenance of knowledge during this period and later re-introduction back into continental Europe. “Dark Age” is used generally to emphasize the violence or difficulty of a particular period in history. The erosion of science is, to me, skating on thin ice over a pool of ignorance which I equate with dark age chaos and fear.
In our network we seem to be banging up against trees and into dense thickets of hawthorne spikes, whirling under relentless attack from new legislation that is in the interests of transnational corporations, attacks on water, air, food, forests, environment, health and spirit.
We talked about Jane Jacobs’ DARK AGE AHEAD, Jared Diamond’s COLLAPSE, John Ralston Saul’s book THE COLLAPSE OF GLOBALISM, all recent books from long-established, reputable authors. The best place to find hope is to put your head in the sand!
WHY IS DESPAIR NOW REPLACED BY EXHILARATION AND HOPE?
Kidding aside, look to CONTEXT – there you will discover hope. Fit SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE into the larger context. A decade ago it was recognized that the pillar stone churches were losing their influence. Then 50% of marriages end in divorce. Five years ago we felt powerless against entrenched problems. Today we tell the Federal Government: if you won’t do your job in protecting the environment and us from toxic synthetic chemicals, we will take back our power and do it ourselves (70 – – became more than 100 – – communities in Canada and the Province of Quebec passed laws prohibiting the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes). Roundup Resistant wheat was halted. Outraged citizens forced the Feds to provide an entry visa to Ethiopian scientist Dr. Tewolde to attend the Biosafety Protocol meetings in Montreal. The Federal Government is losing ITS power and control.
… what’s the bigger picture? Step-by-step we are taking apart the corrupted foundations of our society that no longer serve us well. “Science” is one of the rotting foundations that requires attention.
… why exhilaration? Because it offers a huge opportunity, of our choosing. Yes, there is the potential to descend into a dark age. But if we stick with it, and if we have a vision of what we want to replace the thoroughly worn out, we can emerge into a much improved place. Care must be taken to preserve that which has served us well. Not everything requires replacement. Already we are recognizing the value of and polishing up our neglected communities. They have not failed us, ever. Together we are strong. We fight the good fight and will prevail.
/Sandra
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(2) SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE, RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH NEWS #822
http://www.rachel.org
July 21, 2005
By Tim Montague
An ill wind is gusting through the halls of science these days: faked research, suppression of unwelcome results, corruption of science advisory panels, university research falling under the influence of corporate sponsors, and many other conflicts of interest.
It’s as if science were under siege.
For at least the last thirty years science has strongly supported the positions taken by environmental and public health advocates. The proponents of ‘business as usual’ have claimed that chemical and nuclear technologies have created only minor problems or no problems whatsoever — but time after time science has shown otherwise. They said global warming was a “chicken little” fantasy. They said the Earth’s ozone shield couldn’t possible be harmed. They argued that asbestos was benign. They said lead in paint and gasoline was entirely safe. They said harm from hormone-disrupting chemicals was imaginary. They said a little radioactivity might actually improve your health. They said human health was constantly and consistently improving — until scientific study revealed increases in birth defects, asthma, diabetes, attention deficits, nervous system disorders, diseases of the reproductive system, immune system disorders, cancer in children, and on and on. In each of these cases science showed that the advocates of ‘business as usual’ were simply wrong.
Science cannot solve all our problems or tell us everything we need to know, but it remains a powerful tool for reaching agreement about the nature of reality (at least for those parts of reality amenable to scientific inquiry). For the past 30 years, science has shown us unmistakably that we are destroying the natural systems (and bodily defences) that we ourselves depend upon, so ‘business as usual’ is a dead end.
Perhaps this is why science itself is now under systematic attack by corporate interests. Whatever the underlying reasons, it seems clear that industry has lined up to discredit science, control the research agenda, take over the apparatus for scholarly publication and otherwise undermine the scientific and democratic pursuit of knowledge in the public interest. Perhaps they see it as their only hope of defending themselves against the overwhelming scientific evidence that — if accepted by the public — would end ‘business as usual’ and set us on a new precautionary path.
The Los Angeles Times reported July 11 that allegations of faked scientific findings increased 50% between 2003 and 2004.[1] But the Times also noted that the federal Office of Research Integrity cannot keep up with the rising tide of scientific fakery because it’s budget is far too small. The office received 274 allegations of scientific fakery in 2004, but was able to complete only 23 investigations.
Corporate suppression of data is now so routine that no one raises an eyebrow. In the wake of an EPA advisory panel classifying the Teflon chemical C8 (ammonium perfluorooctanoate, or PFOA) as a “likely carcinogen,” reporter Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette learned that in 1981 DuPont initiated a study to learn whether exposure to C8 caused birth defects in the children of Teflon factory workers. When the study found an excess of birth defects in the children, the study was abandoned and the results filed away without notifying the federal government. Under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) companies must tell the EPA when they find information “that reasonably supports the conclusion that [a chemical] presents a substantial risk of injury to health.”[2]
Generating Doubt — OSHA Gives Up
It is common practice for industry to wage scientific and public relations war against the regulatory agencies whose job is to protect public health. The Wall Street Journal reports that PR firm executives openly admit to hiring university professors to put their names on ghost-written letters to the editor.[3] The letters are written by hacks paid to put a corporate “spin” on the science, and the experts sign their names to lend credence to the spin (and to earn a fat fee).
Another common practice these days is “seeding the scientific literature” with bogus results, to create doubt and confusion. In recent years, corporations have seeded the literature with false findings related to tobacco, lead, mercury, asbestos, vinyl chloride, chromium, nickel, benzene, beryllium and others. They cook the numbers, publish misleading articles in obscure journals, and then cite their own work to create confusion and doubt.
This strategy has brought the federal government to its knees. The case of beryllium is illuminating. Beryllium is a strong, light metal used in nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Beryllium dust is a potent lung toxicant and carcinogen. In 1999 the Department of Energy (DOE) set beryllium exposure levels for federal workers that are ten times as strict as the general industrial exposure standard set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The OSHA standard was set based on data available in 1949. When OSHA proposed to tighten its safety standard for beryllium exposure, to bring it into line with the new standard set for federal workers, industry was able to create enough doubt and confusion that OSHA backed off and concluded that “more research was needed” before a tighter standard could be justified.
A writer in Scientific American concludes that “OSHA administrators have simply recognized that establishing new standards is so time and labor-intensive, and will inevitably call forth such orchestrated opposition from industry, that it is not worth expending the agency’s limited resources on the effort.”[4] Creating confusion and doubt pays off.
Science in the Private Interest
Chester Douglass — chairman of the Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at Harvard — is being investigated for concluding that there is no relationship between fluoride in drinking water and bone cancer in children. He himself cites research — described as the most rigorous to date — concluding the opposite. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), which funded the research with a $1.3 million dollar grant, and Harvard are investigating. Why would a public health expert skew his results? Does it matter that Dr. Douglass is the editor of The Colgate Oral Health Report, a quarterly newsletter published by Colgate-Palmolive, which makes fluoridated toothpaste?[5] Professor Sheldon Krimsky, author of Science in the Private Interest, warns that science in the public interest will increasingly lose out as the entire system favors a tight collaboration between industry, government and academia.[6]
Academic scientists are under increasing pressure to find commercial applications for their research so that their institution can patent, license and profit from the work. Corporate partnerships and lucrative consulting deals inject big money into the equation. In 1996, Sheldon Krimsky analyzed the biomedical literature and found in 34% of the articles, at least one of the chief authors had a financial interest in the research. None of these financial interests was disclosed in the journals. Krimsky said the 34% figure was probably an underestimate because he couldn’t check stock ownership or corporate consulting fees paid to researchers.[7] No wonder allegations of misconduct by U.S. scientists are at an all time high. [1] A recent survey of several thousand scientists found that 33% had committed at least one of ten serious misbehaviors — like falsifying data or changing conclusions in response to pressure from a funding source. Six percent admitted to failing to present data that contradicted their own previous research.[8]
FDA, NIH Broken
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are now so thoroughly beholden to industry that they are broken, unable to perform their duties to protect the public.
The New York Times reports “the White House and Congress forced a marriage between the agency [FDA] and industry years ago for the rich dowry that industry offered.” Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner of operations at the FDA said that the drug approval process is “pretty much broken down… and has been for some time.”[9] The FDA has become so focused on approving new drugs at the expense of monitoring the ones already on the market that thousands of people have been put in harm’s way by drugs like Vioxx. One FDA analyst estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks — killing somewhere between 26,400 and 55,600 people (assuming 30 to 40 percent of heart attacks were fatal).[4, 10]
An investigation into drug company ties with NIH scientists found that more than half of those investigated had violated existing policies meant to limit conflict of interest. Director of the NIH Elias Zerhouni said, “We discovered cases of employees who consulted with research entities without seeking required approval, consulted in areas that appeared to conflict with their official duties, or consulted in situations where the main benefit was the ability of the employer to invoke the name of NIH as an affiliation.” To his credit, Zerhouni ushered in reforms banning NIH employees from accepting drug company consulting fees or stock. But congress is now pressuring him to relent because NIH employees have objected to the restrictions.[11]
To their credit, many courageous government scientists are now speaking out about the corruption of science and there have been a number of high profile firings and resignations ranging from the Fish and Wildlife Service to NASA where scientists are blowing the whistle on government abuses of solid science.[12]
Some 6,000 scientists including 48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences have signed the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) statement, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making.”
The Bush government is certainly not the first to abuse science, but they have raised the stakes and injected ideology like no previous administration. The result is scientific advisory panels stacked with industry hacks, agencies ignoring credible panel recommendations and concerted efforts to undermine basic environmental and conservation biology science.[12] In the words of the UCS, “The actions by the Bush administration threaten to undermine the morale and compromise the integrity of scientists working for and advising America’s world-class governmental research institutions and agencies… To do so carries serious implications for the health, safety, and environment of all Americans.”[12]
We have merely scratched the surface here. The corruption of the scientific enterprise has proceeded very far. In some areas of scientific endeavor, there are almost no independent researchers left because nearly every scientist in the field is funded by corporations with an axe to grind.
Agricultural biotechnology (genetically engineered food) is one such field of inquiry. The flip side of that coin is that certain avenues of research have been nearly eliminated by the funding sources — for example, researchers say funds to study the health effects of biotech foods are now almost non- existent. [13]
What does this all mean for science and society? The public’s trust in science will most certainly continue to erode. When this happens, even honest science is tarnished and loses its power to protect nature and public health because the public doesn’t believe it. Honest science in the public interest is becoming an endangered species. And America slides further from democracy by and for the people.
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[1] Martha Mendoza, “Allegations of Fake Research Hit New High,” THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, July 11, 2005.
[2] Ken Ward Jr., “DuPont Proposed, Dropped ’81 Study of C8, Birth Defects,” THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE, July 10, 2005.
[3] Michael Schroeder, “Some Professors Take Payments To Express Views,” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, December 10, 2004, pg. B1.
[4] David Michaels, “Doubt Is Their Product, Industry groups are fighting government regulation by fomenting scientific uncertainty,”SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (June 2005) Vol. 29 No. 6, pg. 96, 6p.
[5] Juliet Eilperin, “Fluoride-Cancer Link May Have Been Hidden,” THE WASHINGTON POST, July 14, 2005.
[6] Sheldon Krimsky, SCIENCE IN THE PRIVATE INTEREST; HAS THE LURE OF PROFITS CORRUPTED BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH? (New York, Rowman & Littlefield 2003). ISBN 074251479X.
[7] Sheldon Krimsky and L.S. Rothenberg, “Conflict of Interest Policies in Science and Medical Journals: Editorial Practices and Author Disclosures,” SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING ETHICS (2001) Vol. 7, pgs. 205-218.
[8] Meredith Wadman, “One in Three Scientists Confesses to Having Sinned,” NATURE (June 9, 2005) Vol. 435, pgs.718-719.
[9] Gardiner Harris, “Drug Safety System Is Broken, a Top F.D.A. Official Says,” THE NEW YORK TIMES, June 9, 2005.
[10] The World Health Organization estimates that 39% of all heart attacks globally are fatal. INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT OF CARDIOVASCULAR RISK: report of a WHO meeting, (World Health Organization, Geneva, 9-12 July 2002).
[11] David Willman, “NIH Inquiry Shows Widespread Ethical Lapses, Lawmaker Says,” THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, July 14, 2005.
[12] SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY IN POLICYMAKING; INVESTIGATION INTO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S MISUSE OF SCIENCE (Cambridge, Mass.: Union of Concerned Scientists, February 2004). And SEE SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY IN POLICYMAKING; FURTHER INVESTIGATION (Cambridge, Mass.: Union of Concerned Scientists, July 2004), both available at: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/index.cfm (Link no longer valid)
[13] “Monsanto research causes concern about biotech corn,”Canadian Press June 23, 2005.
Past issues are on the web at http://www.rachel.org in plain-text and PDF formats.
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Permission to reprint Rachel’s is hereby granted to everyone, though we ask that you not change the contents and we ask that you give credit.
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(3) SUCCESSFUL REVOLUTIONS, E.F. SCHUMACHER FOUNDATION
—–Original Message—–
From: E.F. Schumacher Society [mailto:efssociety AT smallisbeautiful.org]
Sent: July 30, 2005
Subject: Successful Revolutions
Those who know me, know of my great love for Russian Literature: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol‹trusted sources of insight into the struggle of human beings learning to conduct themselves responsibly on earth and with each other. Among these giants in Russian literature is Peter Kropotkin, known best for his “Mutual Aid,” describing the Buryat people of Lake Baikal in Siberia and their unique social structure. In times of need, the independent Buryat tribes band together in a spirit of cooperation to resolve problems without resorting to hierarchal command. Kropotkin’s autobiography, “Memoirs of a Revolutionist” first published as a series of essays in the 1898 “Atlantic Monthly“, spills over with relevancy for today.
“Socialist papers have often a tendency to become mere annals of complaint about existing conditions. The oppression of the laborers in the mine, the factory, and the field is related; the misery and sufferings of the workers during strikes are told in vivid pictures; their helplessness in the struggle against employers is insisted upon: and this succession of hopeless efforts, related in the paper, exercise a most depressing influence upon the reader. To counterbalance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon burning words by means of which he tries to inspire his readers with energy and faith. I thought, on the contrary, that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record of those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming of a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, the growing revolt against antiquated institutions. These symptoms should be watched, brought together in their intimate connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitating minds of the greater number the invisible and often unconscious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, when a revival of thought takes place in society. To make one feel sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart all over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustice, with its attempts at working out new forms of life,– this should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper. It is hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.”
from MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONISTby Peter Kropotkin, Grove Press edition
Following is a list of upcoming events conducted or sponsored by the E. F. Schumacher Society. They are gatherings of hope, not despair–announcing the coming of a new era Join us.
