Political Voice Archive

Have Corporations Hijacked Academic Research?

by Jill Richardson, via AlterNet.org

Corporate influence of academic researchHere’s what happens when corporations begin to control education.

"When I approached professors to discuss research projects addressing organic agriculture in farmer's markets, the first one told me that 'no one cares about people selling food in parking lots on the other side of the train tracks,’” said a PhD student at a large land-grant university who did not wish to be identified. “My academic adviser told me my best bet was to write a grant for Monsanto or the Department of Homeland Security to fund my research on why farmer's markets were stocked with 'black market vegetables' that 'are a bioterrorism threat waiting to happen.' It was communicated to me on more than one occasion throughout my education that I should just study something Monsanto would fund rather than ideas to which I was deeply committed. I ended up studying what I wanted, but received no financial support, and paid for my education out of pocket."

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A New Documentary Calls Out Drinking Water’s Impending Demise

by Tara Lohan, via AlaterNet.org

Water level in Lake Mead. Photographer: Brandy RolinThe first voice you hear in the new documentary Last Call at the Oasis is Erin Brockovich's—the famed water justice advocate whom Julia Roberts portrayed on the big screen.

"Water is everything. The single most necessary element for any of us to sustain and live and thrive is water," says Brockovich as her voice plays over clips of water abundance—gushing rivers and streams. "I grew up in the midwest and I have a father who actually worked for industry ... he promised me in my lifetime that we would see water become more valuable than oil because there will be so little of it. I think that time is here."

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Is the Chesapeake Bay Environment Henpecked by the Chicken Industry?

by Tom Laskaway, via Grist.org

Chesapeake Bay dead zoneThe Gulf of Mexico dead zone seems to get all the attention. Yes, this low-oxygen area that forms every year in the waters surrounding the Mississippi Delta is the largest dead zone—currently around the size of Massachusetts—but it’s not the only one in U.S. waters.

The Chesapeake Bay has a dead zone, too. In fact, it covered a third of the Chesapeake last year and continues to grow. And last month, the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science gave the Bay a D+ in its annual “health report card.”

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How Big Food Lobbying Is Defeating Anti-Obesity Efforts

 Guest post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit

Junk food marketing to children. Photo via SMHThis week, the nation’s top public health experts gathered at a much-trumpeted obesity conference hosted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Weight of the Nation. (A quick glance at the agenda reveals nothing that would even begin to challenge the food industry.)

Released at this bland event was an equally uninspired report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM, an advisory arm of Congress) called, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. The irony of the report’s title gets lost among the 478 pages that aim to solve “this complex, stubborn problem” with “a comprehensive set of solutions.”

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Vermont Legislature Votes to Ban Fracking

via Environmental News Service

Fracking operation in North Dakota (Photo by Robert Johnson) MONTPELIER, Vermont, May 8, 2012 (ENS) — Vermont is about to become the first U.S. state to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas.

The Vermont House of Representatives voted 103-36 Friday [May 4, 2012] to approve a conference committee report calling for the ban. The report reconciles differences with a bill banning the practice passed by the state Senate last week.

The measure now goes to the desk of Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, who is expected to sign it into law.

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Technology Breakthrough Offers Improved GMO Testing

by Cookson Beecher, via Food Safety News

GMO TestingDoes this food contain genetically modified organisms?

That's what many consumers, including overseas trading partners, want to know about the food they're buying.

A prime example of that is the recent initiative in California, dubbed the "Right to Know" campaign, which calls for food manufacturers in the Golden State to identify genetically engineered ingredients on the labels of food products sold in that state.

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Are There Drugs in Your Chicken Dinner?

by Richard Schiffman, via The Huffington Post

Banned drugs are being found in factory-farmed chickensIn 2005, the antibiotic fluoroquinolone was banned by the FDA for use in poultry production. The reason for the ban was an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant campylobacter bacteria in the meat of chickens and turkeys -- "superbugs," which can lead to a lethal form of meningitis that our current antibiotics are no longer effective against.

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill tens of thousands of people every year, more than die of AIDS, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. This problem is on the rise because antibiotics are recklessly overused, especially in the commercial livestock industry, where 80% of all antibiotics manufactured in the U.S. end up.

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Making Childhood Obesity Our Business

by David Katz, MD, via The Huffington Post

"Food" marketed to kidsThere was an expression, once commonly used, to describe a situation in which it was easy to exploit people: "like taking candy from a baby." As with all such similes, the illustration itself was meant to be the extreme, self-evident case. Stealing a baby's candy is something so outrageously objectionable that all decent people must oppose it. It would concern anyone, and everyone. It would be everybody's business.

We don't hear that expression much any more for fairly obvious reasons. There is, if anything, far too much "candy"—and variations on the theme of candy, such as soda, sugary cereals, and so on—to go around; and too much of it in particular heads right into the mouths of our babes. The new-age problem is selling far too much candy to babies (well, children, really). That, too, is objectionable!

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Indie Retailer Causes Kashi to Announce Move to Non-GMO

by Caren Baginski, via NewHope 360

Where's My KashiAfter a whirlwind of a week for Kellogg-owned Kashi Company, the natural cereal and granola giant has announced its intent to ditch GMOs in two existing product lines by 2014. And by 2015, all new Kashi foods will contain 70 percent organic ingredients and also be Non-GMO Project Verified. While the company was already moving toward non-GMO, what prompted this sudden announcement?

Perhaps it was consumer outrage to an anti-GMO viral photo circulated on Facebook created a PR nightmare for Kashi—one that the company tried to curb with a video response that didn't satisfy consumers. On April 30, 2012, the brand offered a more satisfying response to its customers, and one that's surely capturing the attention of natural retailers as they evaluate their role in effecting healthy change in the market.

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California GMO Labeling Initiative Headed for November Ballot

GMO labeling campaignSAN FRANCISCO, May 2, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ — In victory rallies across state today, supporters celebrated as the California Right to Know campaign filed 971,126 signaturesfor the state's first-ever ballot initiative to require labeling of genetically engineered foods. The huge signature haul, gathered in a 10-week period, is nearly double the 555,236 signatures the campaign needs to qualify for the November ballot.

If passed this November, Californians will join citizens of over 40 countries including all of Europe, Japan and even China who have the right to know whether they are eating genetically engineered food.   

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Joel Salatin: Life Lessons from a Farmer

Joel Salatin: Life Lessons from a Farmer

by Bruce Boyers

Joel Salatin—farmer, author, featured speaker, and the subject of several documentaries—has spent his life learning from nature how a food system is supposed to function, and putting it into practice at his Polyface Farm. Then, raising his eyes up from his tractor, he has wondered how average citizens, having no connection to the sources of their food and possessing no food security whatsoever, could possibly think they could go on this way.

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Argentine Mother Causes Landmark Changes in Pesticide Rules

Sofia Gatica (center) and members of her group blockading airial sprayingSofia Gatica of Argentina is the 2012 winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize for South America.

Argentina is the world’s third largest exporter of soybeans. Every year, the industry spreads over 50 million gallons of agro-toxins—namely glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s widely-used herbicide Roundup, and endosulfan—through aerial spraying over farmland.

While Monsanto claims there is no risk to humans, a 2008 scientific study found that even at low concentrations, glyphosate causes the death of human embryonic, placental and umbilical cells. Endosulfan is a highly toxic pesticide that has been banned in 80 countries because of its threats to human health and the environment. In May 2011, it was added to the UN list of persistent organic pollutants to be eliminated worldwide.

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Why GMO Foods Should be Labeled

Guest post by Dr. Opiyo Oloya

Wonder where the GMOs are in your groceries?

Dr. Opiyo Oloya is a teacher, writer and broadcaster, living in Toronto, Canada. He was born in Pamin-Yai, west of Gulu town in northern Uganda. Twitter: @OpiyoOloya

Now, I may not be smart enough to understand the argument, but why hide from the consumers how the food product you are peddling is really made, refusing to name precisely what is in it? So far, as I understand it, that is the logic of US-based agriculture giant Monsanto which has threatened to sue the State of Vermont for crafting a law that would require all foods to be clearly labelled.

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Farmer Joel Salatin Takes on the New York Times

by Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

Joe SalatinThe recent editorial by James McWilliams titled "The Myth of Sustainable Meat" contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book Folks, This Ain't Normal.

Let's go point by point. First, that grass grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical.

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The United Nations Embraces the Economics of Happiness

by Laura Musikanski, via Yes! Magazine

Denmark and other Scandinavian countries frequently top lists of the world's happiest countries. Photo by Eddie CodelImagine you open the paper tomorrow, and the headlines are not about the “sluggish economy,” but our nation’s quality of life. You turn to the business section, and find not just information about a certain company’s profitability, but also about its impact on community health and employee well-being.

Imagine, in short, a world where the metric that guides our decisions is not money, but happiness.

That is the future that 650 political, academic, and civic leaders from around the world came together to promote on April 2, 2012. Encouraged by the government of Bhutan, the United Nations held a High Level Meeting for Well being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.

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Fighting Fossil Fuel’s Government Finance Freebies

by Bill McKibben, via Yes! Magazine

The worship of big oil. Photo by John CurleyAlong with “fivedollaragallongas,” the energy watchword for the next few months is: “subsidies.” Last week, for instance, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez proposed ending some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry with a “Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act.” It was, in truth, nothing to write home about—a curiously skimpy bill that only targeted oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas, and you won’t be surprised to learn that even then it didn’t pass.

Still, President Obama is now calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz—even at those stops where he’s also promising to “drill everywhere.” And later this month Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a much more comprehensive bill that tackles all fossil fuels and their purveyors (and has no chance whatsoever of passing this Congress).

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The Push for California’s GMO Labeling Proposition

The recent FDA petition drive from JustLabelIt.org found that over 90 percent of American's favor labeling of GMOs. As you will hear in the video below, the BioTech giants are going to go into dis-information overdrive attempting counter this sentiment. (But the same survey also found that people aren't inclined to "swallow" the BioTech party line!)

The next GMO labeling battle ground is in California. The California Committee for the Right to Know is pushing hard to make a deadline of April 22, 2012 to gather 800,000 physical signatures to qualify a landmark initiative for the 2012 California Ballot. If it gets on the ballot and passes in November, this initiative would make GMO labeling a fact in the most populous state in the US.

Because this is a California Ballot Initiative, the campaign needs in-person, physical signatures. These signatures cannot be gathered online.

Visit LabelGMOs.org and find where you can go to sign the petition and find out what you can do to help. It's time to show BioTech that the citizen's pen is mightier than the corporate dollar

YouTube Preview Image

 

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Oxford University Press—Cheerleading for Monsanto?

by Frances Moore Lappé, via AlterNet.org

Oxford University Press logoEighteen months ago I read a book that changed my life. Yeah, yeah, I know... sounds corny. But it's not what you think. This book changed my life not because of what it said but because of what it didn't say.

On a nothing-special summer afternoon in 2010, I sat in the Cambridge Public Library preparing a speech on something I'd been studying for decades. I plugged "world hunger" into the library's computer. Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know popped up.

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Is BPA the FDA’s Latest Gift to the Chemical Industry?

Guest post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit

BPA can leach out of plastics into foods and liquidsIn a long-awaited decision, last week the Food and Drug Administration disappointed health advocates once again by allowing Bisphenol A or BPA, a known endocrine disruptor, to remain approved as a chemical additive in food containers such as plastic bottles and metal cans.

While the agency says it’s still studying the matter, a number of groups say the science is clear enough. Indeed, in the four years since the filing of a legal petition asking for a ban (a court order was needed to force FDA to respond), evidence of potential harm from BPA exposure has only increased. Of particular concern are young children, as the chemical often lines infant formula containers and baby bottles.

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Who Influences the USDA on GMO Approvals?

by Michael Blanding, via Working Knowledge

USDA LogoMany corporations have gotten good at pulling the levers of government to tilt the odds in their favor, weakening regulations or securing perks, justified or not, to further their business interests. Economists use the term "regulatory capture" to describe the phenomenon whereby regulatory agencies serving the public instead end up advancing the interests of the companies they regulate. The main way companies accomplish this, economists theorize, is through lobbying and campaign contributions that convince legislators to pass laws in their favor.

Once those laws are passed, however, it's less clear how companies sway the regulatory agencies that enforce them, which are more isolated from the direct effects of money or persuasion.

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California Fracking—Ungregulated For the Past 60 Years?

by Scott Thill, via AlterNet.org

A natural gas drill stands at a hydraulic fracturing site on January 18, 2012 in South Montrose, Pennsylvania. | Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThanks to the smoking gun of Josh Fox's sobering documentary Gasland, hydraulic fracturing has finally entered our renewable news cycle. Yet despite poisoning groundwater, freeing methane and literally creating earthquakes back east, fracking has a visibility problem in California.

The situation became less clear after a recent investigative report from DC-based nonprofit Environmental Working Group explained that California has experienced 60 unregulated years of widespread fracking, whose technical methods and geographical locations in the seismically active state exist outside of the public purview. It got darker after Governor Jerry Brown's administration wiped the state government's Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) Web site of fracking fact-sheets and documents. Good luck finding anything about fracking on the governor's official site either.

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US Senator Joins “Don’t Be Fooled by GMOs” Event

by Leslie Yager, via New Cannan Patch

US Senator Richard Blumenthal joined the "Don't be Fooled by GMOs" panel discussion on April 1st in Westport. Regarding Connecticut's pending GMO food labeling legislation, Blumenthal said, "This is an issue where the recurring quality is the consumer's right to know." Background, State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg (left) and Glen Colello panel moderator and owner of Catch a Healthy Habit Café in Fairfield. Credit Leslie Yager While some people are still asking 'What's a GMO?' others are urging politicians to support a bill that would make Connecticut the first state to require that Genetically Modified Organisms be listed on fool labels. 

The prevailing point of view among hundreds who trekked through the rain to the ballroom at the Westport Inn on Sunday for an event billed "Don't be Fooled by GMOs," was that citizens have the right to know what is in their food.

Surprise panelist US Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Greenwich) joined state representatives Kim Fawcett, Tony Hwang, Jonathan Steinberg, Dick Roy, and Brenda Kupchick, who all spoke in favor of the GMO labeling bill, HB 5117.

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Stopping Climate Change Is MUCH Cheaper than Purported

by James West, via Grist.org

Pocket change—the actual cost of fixing the climateYou’ve heard it before: Politicians say they’d love to take action against climate change, but they’re reeling from sticker shock. A new report from the U.K.’s leading climate change watchdog refutes this oft-cited argument that climate action will herald economic Armageddon.

The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) report, with the hairy-sounding title “Statutory Advice on Inclusion of International Aviation and Shipping,” says that in 2050, the U.K.’s emissions reductions across the whole economy will cost 1 to 2 percent of the total GDP. This updates, in greater detail, the range predicted half a decade ago by the watershed Stern Review.

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The Implications Beyond Pink Slime

by David Katz, MD, via The Huffington Post

Pink slimeAs those who know me best will attest, I am far from crude. If anything, I tend to err the other way—with an excess of Monkish fastidiousness. It is in deference to that inclination, and on the chance you may share it, that I warn you in advance of a departure this conversation requires. I am about to use the word "snot" in a less-than-pleasant context.

I was having dinner in an airport restaurant last week, around the time nutrition news was slathered in pink slime. Two young businessmen were sharing a meal and spirited conversation at a nearby table. I was not listening in, and don't know what their conversation was about. But I couldn't help but notice, out of the corner of an eye, that one of them was repeatedly dipping a fork into a small plastic container of salad dressing, before spearing some portion of his salad.

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Pink Slime Maker Goes on the Defensive

Guest post by Michele Simon, Appetite for Profit

Beef Products Inc's defense for Pink Slime: t-shirtsIn a surreal press conference on March 29th, 2012, Beef Products Inc took its best shot at making up for its silence during weeks of public lashing over what has been dubbed “pink slime,” an additive in ground beef made through a high-tech process that BPI invented. (See my previous posts here and here.) The event came in the wake of major grocery chains announcing they would stop selling beef containing the filler.

But while I was expecting a slick corporate PR presentation, instead all we got was a pathetic display of politicians out of touch. One by one, the governors of the three states that are home to BPI plants spoke of the media’s “smear campaign” and (predictably) the potential job losses in their respective states.

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