John Kerry Part 5: The Burden of Proof

And we think of outdoor pollution as damaging to our environment, but the fact is, as John Spengler found in his research, indoor pollution can be just as dangerous as outdoor pollution. This means stuff suck as fungi, molds, radon, mildew, ash, lead, and other such pollutants are just as dangerous as outdoor pollutants.

And it stands to reason that hospitals are even more dangerous than normal indoor places. The reason is because the body's defenses have broken down due to illness and injury and that therefore, it is even more susceptible to illness there than in the normal world. Not only is our healthcare system broken enough; our environmental system is broken in hospitals as well. All I can say is, don't get sick.

It is not like there are no solutions out there. The science is already there, as there are entire research institutes out there, like the Center for Green Chemistry, dedicated to making chemicals that are harmless to the environment. Not only that, they also research ways to make chemicals that are biodegradable as well.

And Teresa Kerry also recognizes the work of Terry Collins, whose Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry of Carnegie-Mellon University discovered a process involving TAML Activators. Not only does this process break down chemicals that are some of the worst pollutants in this country, it has important national security applications as well, as it would break down biological warfare and chemical warfare agents as well.

Then, Teresa recognizes Dr. Devra Davis, who wrote the book When Smoke Ran Like Water, about her efforts to combat pollution. She discovered that children who eat organic foods have 6 times fewer pesticides. Therefore, organic food may be more expensive, but it would also be worth it, as studies show, according to Kerry, that babies exposes to toxicity levels that are safe for adults according to the EPA can suffer permanent brain damage.

In addition to foods, bath toys can be pollutants as well. They frequently have PVC, which can loosen and soak into the skin of children. And this exposure to pollutants even happens before birth; studies show that fetuses have been exposed to as many as 200 chemical pollutants, including air pollutants.

So, this all goes back to what I said at the beginning, and this is a key point for Kerry as well -- why should the burden of proof be on me, the consumer, to decide whether a toy is safe enough for my kid to play with? It should rather be for the company making the toys in question, to prove that their products are safe for children before a problem even happens.

Now, this may be a diversion from the topic, but it needs to be addressed, as I know that this next part will be controversial. This book was written before the latest firestorm of controversy over Don Imus' latest racist remarks on the radio, for which he was recently suspended. But Teresa Kerry then goes on to discuss the work of Don and (mostly) Deirdre Imus and their work in linking environment and childhood cancers.

For instance:

--They run a ranch for kids with cancer where they are taught how to be cowboys.
--They found that hospitals were major sources of indoor pollition thanks to toxic cleaning products.
--Founded the Deirdre Imus Center for Pedagogic Oncology, which specializes in research linking cancer and the environment.
--The center invented the cleaning products Greening the Cleaning, a line of products that clean your house without polluting.
--She persuaded Gov. George Piataki to require all state agencies to use non-toxic cleaning products in cleaning their offices.
--She successfully lobbied to get New York schools to clean their schools using non-toxic substances; New Jersey and Connecticut followed suit.

So, what are we supposed to think of this, given all these good things that they have done for the environment? We give credit where credit is due. But the problem is that Don Imus has repeatedly made these kinds of racist remarks on radio and TV. He has repeatedly promised to clean up his act, only to not do it.

It seems to me like MSNBC is laboring under a false choice here -- if they were to fire him, many lives would be disrupted because they would have that fewer resources to pour into their projects. I suggest that they are laboring under this dilemma when they decided to slap him on the wrist instead of fire him.

But the fact of the matter is that doing good works like this do not excuse one from making the kind of vile racist jokes that Imus has repeatedly made. The fact of the matter is that he refuses to admit that he has a problem, the first step in stopping any kind of repeated destructive behavior.

The NM ranch, the Imus Center, and Greening the Cleaning are more than just the Imuses. They stand or fall based on the people that they hire to run the places and market the products. If these are worthwhile causes, then they will long outlive any shortcomings that Don Imus has. This is a free country -- he is free to take his racist garbage to Sirius or EIB or FOX. He is protected by the First Amendment as much as anyone else. The problem is that a supposedly mainstream news organization is legitimizing him as a mainstream news source when the fact of the matter is that he carries the water for the GOP and falls in with their plans of mainstreaming hate. And no amount of good works can overcome that.

And the fact of the matter is that Don Imus' actions are hurting their causes. I say this because of the fact of negative branding. When people think of Imus, they will think of Don the Racist, not of any of the good things that he and his wife do. Many of the same people who would send their kids to the ranch or who would otherwise buy Greening the Cleaning would be turned off by Don's racism.

Teresa Kerry returns to the quote of Rachel Carson and her quote saying that we need to be able to be informed about the chemicals that we use. She wrote in Silent Spring that it was a frightful risk for us to be using chemicals blindly without knowing what the consequences of them are. Some of the consequences have been mentioned above -- toys with plastics that can enter kids' bodies, foods full of pesticides, etc.

This is just like Iraq -- we entered that war with no appreciation of the frightful risks that we were taking. And yet most of us trusted that Bush was doing the right thing -- about 75% supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq when it first started.

For people who vote for security, I submit that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for security. That is because Democrats are proactive when it comes to anything from fighting terrorism to protecting the environment. Republicans are reactive. George Bush told the person who warned him about the impending 911 attacks that he "covered his ass now." And Bush was reactive when he allowed many coal plants to actually increase their emissions, reversing Clinton administration policy. And Bush was reactive when he froze up after learning of the 911 attacks.

On the other hand, John Kerry fought Osama Bin Laden before he ever appeared on people's radar screens. He brought down the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, a bank which was financing Bin Laden, well before anybody ever knew who he was. He did so against the advice of people within his own party. He delayed the rise of Bin Laden by several years by his actions.

There is a very clear relationship between the two -- successfully fighting terrorism means being proactive and stopping it before it even starts. And environmentalism is not merely a matter of saving the whales -- it is a matter of protecting this world from destruction through global warming and the cumulative toxic buildup of chemicals in our bodies and in the air that we breathe.

We live under a system of voluntary standards when it comes to toxic chemicals. But the fact of the matter is that there are some things in which the common good requires that voluntary standards are not good enough. Voluntary standards for discouraging rampant speculation did not work back in the days of the Great Depression. Voluntary standards did not work in regulating against monopolies. So, why should voluntary standards be any different when it comes to chemicals?

The kind of proactive leadership that FDR exercised when he put this country on a war footing before Japan struck Pearl Harbor won the Second World War for us. The kind of proactive leadership that he showed when he regulated the economy so that it was stable and so that it would not enter into cycles of boom and bust has created the longest-ever period of economic stability for this country. And the more we learn about how our future as a human race depends on how we address the ongoing environmental problems, the more we need a leader who will exercise that kind of proactive leadership that FDR had.

Chemicals that are in common plastic items around the house like BPA have been shown in animals to have four times as many precancerous cells as others. And Atrazine is a chemical that has shown to be a reproductive toxin that causes cancer. Yet, after Bush's EPA met 40 times in secret with industry reps that were contributors to Bush's campaign, they decided that it was safe. This was Bush's reward to them for their campaign contributions to the Bush/Cheney campaign.

This is a classic example of the Pay to Play political machine that Newt Gingrich created as part of the 1994 revolution -- if you do not contribute, then we do not get you any money or help whatsoever. This corruption of the political process by the Republicans means that decisions about what is safe and what is not is not decided by scientific reasons, but by political reasons -- who contributed the most to the Bush/Cheney campaign.

And then there was the CHEERS experiment, in which the EPA was going to pay low-income families $975 in order to be exposed to toxic pollutants. That project was killed after protests from Senators Kerry and Boxer, among others. This barbaric experiment was in the same league as the CIA mind control experiments and the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments which both involved involuntary participation by people.

The fact that the Bush administration was willing to revive such notorious experiments shows how far they are willing to go in order to control people. Like the anti-abortion crowd, these people don't just want to control your actions; they want to control your mind and body as well. They want to control what chemicals go into your body, whether or not you can have sex or not, whether or not you can end your pregnancy or not, and things of that nature. They also try to control people's minds, given that they issue constant phony terror alerts -- coincidentally any time Bush's popularity numbers dropped.

The major question to be asked here is, with all these proven technologies that can make our lives safer, why doesn't Big Industry adopt these technologies? The answer is that the only logical reason that abusive corporations refuse to adopt these clean technologies is because of power -- they want to be able to control people's bodies.