Opinion

Details

Written by: Elizabeth Larson

Published: 25 May 2008

For anyone who has had a family member in the military, who has heard their stories firsthand, days like this take on a painful significance, especially when remembering those whose stories have been silenced by time, age or injury.

Memorial Day is usually a time to focus on those already departed, but for me it's also a time to honestly consider how we treat all vets, and if we're doing right by them before it's too late.

The millions of veterans who call the United States home have a right to the best health care we can afford them.

It certainly hasn't been the case in recent years that all our vets have been treated to the highest standard of care. The well-known nightmare of Walter Reed Hospital is an example that continues to resonate in many peoples' minds.

A country with a strong military needs a strong medical program for its service members, and that takes funding.

A bill in Congress that has the attention of many local veterans as well as national veterans organizations is HR 2514, the Assured Veterans for Health Care Act of 2008.

The bill is meant to change the way Veterans Administration funding is determined, taking it from discretionary to mandatory, establishing a baseline funding year and providing future funding based on the number of actual veterans who participate in the health care system. In addition, it would figure in rising costs of providing health care.

Congressman Mike Thompson is among the bill's cosponsors.

Unfortunately, the bill – introduced May 24, 2007 – has been stuck in the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Health since just days after its introduction.

In January, Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota introduced S 2639, the Senate's version of the bill. In February, that bill was sent to the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs. Sen. Johnson reported on his Web site that the legislation is supported by the American Legion, the Disabled American Veterans, the Paralyzed Veterans of America and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The Vietnam Veterans of America also are lobbying for the bill. Dr. Thomas J. Berger, chair of the VVA's National PTSD and Substance Abuse Committee, and Rick Weidman, the association's executive director for policy and government affairs, testified last Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, asking them to consider a number of bills, including S 2639.

The men pointed out, “Unfortunately the debates regarding funding of veterans' health care continue to focus on the year-to-year 'band-aids' and quick fixes needed to keep the health care system afloat.”

They said it was time to ensure “a consistent, predictable and responsible level of funding that will give more than lip service to the mandates for health care set forth in law, and by the will of the American people.”

The Veterans Administration's funding is so uncertain and inadequate that it is barring many veterans from eligibility for services, Berger and Weidman reported.

There are many causes vying for attention and money from Congress, but certainly the care of our nation's veterans has to be at the top of the list.

For those of you who would like to help move these bills forward, write to Congressman Bob Filner, the House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Health chair, and ask him to move HR 2514 toward a House vote. Write to the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, 335 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, D.C 20515; fax your letter to 202-225-2034; or call 202-225-9756.

On the Senate side, contact Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs Chair Sen. Daniel Akaka at www.senate.gov/~veterans/public/index.cfm?pageid=1, by writing to 412 Russell Senate Building, Washington D.C. 20510, or by calling Democratic staff at 202-224-9126 or Republican staff at 202-224-2074.

Neither Sens. Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein have signed on as cosponsors of the Senate bill.

Contact Sen. Barbara Boxer at 112 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington D.C. 20510; telephone 202-224-3553; Web site, http://boxer.senate.gov; e-mail, http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm. Her San Francisco office can be reached at 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111, telephone 415-403-0100, fax 202-224-0454.

Contact Sen. Dianne Feinstein at 331 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington D.C. 20510; telephone

202-224-3841, fax 202-228-3954, TTY/TDD 202-224-2501. For her San Francisco office, write One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; telephone 415-393-0707; fax 415-393-0710. Her Web site is http://feinstein.senate.gov, where you also can send her an e-mail at http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactUs.EmailMe.

I think Memorial Day is an entirely appropriate time to ask if we're doing right by our surviving veterans. After all, those who died in combat, or served and passed on later, did their duty to ensure that this country continued to give its citizens the very best it had to offer.

Our honored dead had a right to expect we would take care of their brothers and sisters in arms when they came home, after their service was done. That's what we should strive to do now and always. It's a critical and moral obligation, and a duty of love to those who served.

E-mail Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

{mos_sb_discuss:4}

Details

Published: 22 May 2008

This offhand response toward the end of the interview seems an appropriate representation of the extent of research some politicians, local or otherwise, undertake to make important, public policy decisions ... in the context of a strong antagonism towards anything that does not seem to fit their narrow ideology or interests rather than through actual analysis.

Since we now know that objectivity regarding this topic is lost in at least one corner of the Board of Supervisors chamber, let's restore it here and look at the biotech industry objectively, particularly at some very critical, crucial, undisputable facts.

Simply put, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wasn't allowed to do its job. Documents made public from a lawsuit (has anyone noticed how the public has to sue the government to get any answers to any relevant questions?) show that the overwhelming majority of FDA scientists felt that biotech foods were inherently dangerous and could create poisons or allergens, new diseases, or nutritional problems, particularly in infants and children.

These FDA scientists urged their superiors to require a long-term study. However, the FDA was under orders from the White House to promote the biotechnology industry. They consequently created a new position to bypass the science and the regular FDA channels of research and approval, called the "Deputy Commissioner of Policy," and hired Monsanto's former attorney to this position, Michael Taylor. Yes, you read correctly, an industry insider lawyer made, alone, a "scientific" decision that will affect the American population for the coming centuries.

So Taylor became the lone "decider" at the FDA, under Bush and in the interests of the biotech industry. I wish I was making this up, but it is a sad reality of today's government, that has totally escaped public control and escaped its own morality, if it even had any.

Taylor was in charge of policy when the GMO policy was created. That policy stated that the agency was not aware of any information showing that the foods created from these new experimental methods differed in any meaningful or uniform way from any other. On the basis of that one sentence, the FDA declared, "We require no safety studies whatsoever" ... this regarding a technology that is one of the biggest scientific breakthrough in decades, and radically alters the DNA of our food.

Consequently when Monsanto and others claimed that their foods were safe, the FDA had no further questions, having being reduced to nothing more than an impotent rubber stamp bureaucracy at the service of dominant corporate interests by the Bush administration.

Of course the FDA decision was an outright lie from the top. Not only was the agency aware of the important differences of GM foods, but the overwhelming consensus among its scientists-whose objections were suppressed-was that further studies were necessary before releasing these products to farmers and consumers.

The consistent denials and coverups about the health risks of GM foods are very similar to what went on with the tobacco and particularly the cigarette industry, as researches by the industry are rigged to guarantee conclusions of safety, the GM industry meticulously designing their so called studies to avoid finding problems.

The biotech industry has a genetically engineered counterpart to virtually every fruit, vegetable, grain and bean that is being sold in the United States. More than 172 different species have been field-trialed, with more than 50 000 field trials in the US alone.

Soy, corn, cottonseeds, canola, potatoes, cocoa, Hawaiian papaya, zucchini and yellow squash are currently the major GMO crops. There are many dairy products made from cows injected with rBGH (synthetic growth hormone), and there are genetically modified enzymes and food additives that are usually not listed on the label of processed foods. Many supplements are created from genetically engineered bacteria or microorganisms. The wine industry is looking at GMO grapes.

As GM crops are predictably and unavoidably beginning to contaminate all other forms of agriculture, European standards for organically grown food are being lowered to include trace amounts of GMOs, these amounts expected to rise significantly in the coming years, which is why a biotech industry representative stated cynically that “the cat is already out of the bag,” meaning that they had already altered the global food supply and that resistance was futile precisely because of contamination, while stating at the same time that contamination would not be a problem, yet suing farmers whose fields are contaminated ...

The transfer of genes is a very serious issue, ignored by the FDA and the industry. The only human feeding study ever conducted on GM foods demonstrated that the genes inserted into soybeans transfer into human intestinal bacteria DNA and remain there, integrated on a stable basis, never eliminated. The implications regarding the genes that produce GM pesticides, that could remain in the intestinal flora, or transfer into our own cellular DNA, causing it to produce foreign proteins, could be devastating.

Back in the 1980s, 100 people died and anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 fell sick or were permanently disabled after ingesting a brand of L-tryptophan supplement that was manufactured through a genetically modified bacteria. The FDA however, after pulling all such supplements off the market, withheld information from the public and from Congress about the genetic engineering aspect of the problem.

In Europe, a GM food researcher named Arpad Pusztai discovered that supposedly harmless GM potatoes caused massive damages to rats. He was fired from his job after 35 years and silenced with threats of a lawsuit. In Russia, a leading researcher in the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered that female rats that were fed GM soy had an infant mortality rate that was over 50 percent within the first three weeks, compared to only 10 percent of the offspring with mothers who were fed non-GM soy. This scientist has since been told she could not do any more GM food research.

Most people do not realize that there have not been extensive and independent tests on GM foods. Most people do not even know what GMO means, yet they ingest an unproven, experimental, highly controversial, untested, revolutionary "Frankenstein" food that could have devastating consequences for their health and particularly that of their children ...

The points made by Rob Brown on the GMO issue during his interview are all invalid.

It is easy to demonstrate that those who have an "agenda" are not the people who seek to get a moratorium on all GMOs until further studies are completed by independent scientists, a process which any reasonable person would demand and support, the heavy-handed agenda comes from those who have stealthily forced this technology on the American consumer without such proper and prudent studies, without the labeling of GM products as is required in Europe, and with the help of a corrupted bureaucracy; the only existing agenda here comes from the industry itself and those who support it and its distortion and strangulation of science in the name of immediate profits.

Objective scientific research is not an agenda, it is not political ... to ask that FDA scientists be allowed to do their jobs is not an agenda ... to request that a new product be held until considered safe by the FDA after such required studies is not an agenda.

And no, the power to decide whether to have GMOs in Lake County cannot be given exclusively to farmers or the farm bureau, who are not scientists and have no appropriate science upon which to base their decisions, it must be given to the greater public through he restoration of an honest and independent FDA process of scientific research and approval or rejection of GM products. Short of this and under current corrupt conditions, the American public must educate itself and demand to be heard, and to be respected. Alfalfa is not the only issue in Lake County, other GM crops will eventually be available to replace traditional crops, as in the case of winegrapes, and GE pears will certainly be available at some point.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the Bush administration is attempting to force famine stricken third world countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, to plant genetically engineered crops, as part of a $770 million aid package, just as it has bullied Iraq to also plant GE crops.

These untested and mostly unregulated GE crops are considered controversial all over the world; at least 40 nations have restricted GE farming and GE ingredients in foods by requiring, because of public demand, mandatory labeling. (A majority of the American public has also demanded labeling of GMO products, but in America, giant corporations have more rights and apparently more powerful votes than ordinary citizens, particularly under Republican regime). A number of nations and regions have banned GMOs in agriculture altogether, until further research proves it is safe.

Beyond health and environmental concerns, and contrary to industry propaganda, GE crops do not significantly increase yields, but rather force farmers to stop saving their seeds and instead buy toxic chemicals and highly priced patented seeds from biotech companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, Dupont, Dow's and BASF. Once they do, they no longer have a choice, as their fields are contaminated at the DNA level and will remain so forever.

Is forever a good choice concerning an untested and potentially dangerous technology that could affect our own human DNA in unpredictable ways?

Sources of information:

Books: “Seeds of Deception” and “Genetic Roulette,” both by Jeffrey Smith; “Genetically Engineered Foods,” by Martin Teitel and Kimberley A. Wilson; “Codex Alimentarius: Global Food Imperialism,” by Scott Tips.

The Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit organization created by leaders representing all sectors of the organic and natural products industry in the US and Canada.

Raphael Montoliu live in Lakeport.

{mos_sb_discuss:4}

Details

Written by: Andrea Anderson

Published: 18 May 2008

Though I am a huge supporter of liberty and the right of expression, I have to ask if the owner of those buildings is doing what he wants or is he catering to what “government officials” want? What I saw were not colors picked by an individual but colors picked by committee.

It reminded me of when my parents painted their house blue and then were told by the housing association that it was “too blue” and that they would have to repaint it “slate blue” or pay a hefty fine. It also reminded me of colors I have seen hundreds times before in strip malls and cookie cutter houses everywhere.

This really concerned me and it should concern you. We all really should be asking ourselves, is this the direction our charming little city is going, the way of cookie cutter buildings and strip malls? Where is the originality and charm that makes our city different from all the rest? Have we, as individuals, completely lost it?

I don’t know about the rest of the Lakeportians but I moved here because it was different from anywhere I had seen. This town has a great amount of quaint charm and originality.

In fact, back then – only two years ago – I considered Lakeport to be heading more in the direction of Calistoga rather than the direction of Santa Rosa. Unfortunately, now, I see it headed more in the direction of Santa Rosa and every other little town turned cookie cutter big city.

I believe we are at a point where we need to be asking ourselves, do we want be just another precut Santa Rosa or do we actually want to make our city into something special like Calistoga? Do we want our unique value to be appreciated or do we want our value to be lost to a preselected committee or even to a trend? Do we want to be just another city on the map or do we want to make a place for ourselves on the map?

Consider the quality and value of having a place with quaint charm and individuality, as opposed to the value of being just another city with a strip mall and cookie cutter houses. Consider the value of property of Calistoga, as opposed to the value of property in Santa Rosa. Ask yourself, what direction do you want our city to take?

I see two different paths we could take and I am hoping we choose the one that will do the most to preserve and protect the uniqueness of our city rather than the one that will simply allow for us to be just like every other cookie-cutter, committee-run city.

Andrea Anderson lives in Lakeport.

{mos_sb_discuss:4}