Fool me once, shame on you.

Fool me twice, shame on me…or rather on the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors who have sent a letter to California’s Secretary of Agriculture, A.G. Kawamura, begging him to hurry up and help them douse the county in poison and pesticides as the latest step in the Light Brown Apple Moth scandal.

Remember A.G. Kawamura? He works for the CDFA who did this to little children in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties in the fall of 2007:

CDFA sprayed California families

Remember how the CDFA wanted to spray all the way up to the SF Bay Area and everywhere in between in 2008:

Lbam spray bay area

Remember how in May 2009, the EPA banned the Checkmate Pesticides CDFA had already sprayed on Central California families and wanted to spray on all Californians everywhere?

Lbam spray checkmate banned

Remember how this banning finally took place after the EPA, the OEHHA, the USDA, the CDFA and Gov. Schwarzenegger repeatedly assured Californians of the total safety of spraying pesticides on men, women and children…all the while suggesting that we go inside our houses while the spraying happened?

Yes, you remember and I remember how Californians were terrorized, abused and lied to by the CDFA and its willing and greedy cohorts in the name of agribusiness being given hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for their utterly unfounded, ludicrous and deadly LBAM ‘eradication’ effort.

But the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors doesn’t remember. The California Certified Organic Farmers association doesn’t remember. The California Native Plant Society doesn’t remember. The California Land Stewardship Institute doesn’t remember. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center doesn’t remember.

In their state of what I can only describe as hysterical amnesia, they have all decided that the CDFA is right. The CDFA is trustworthy. The CDFA is honest and good…and the light brown apple moth is a horrendous threat to all living things. Yes, the CDFA who poured deadly, now-banned pesticides over family homes while infants were rushed off to ERs in 2007 is the group of folks these organizations have decided to turn to as the authors of truth about the light brown apple moth.

As this cowardly, cringing Sonoma Board letter demonstrates, all of those who signed it have decided to jump on the LBAM charade bandwagon, casting aside all science, all ethics, all reason in order to be relieved of the burden of the totally phony quarantines that have been imposed as blackmail upon the region by the CDFA. They have played directly into the hands of A.G. Kawamura and the pesticide manufacturers and have acted without one modicum of backbone.

Rather than protect their own children from the utterly toxic poisons of pesticide twist ties, BTK, spinosad and other pesticides, these organizations have invited CDFA’s ghouls to ride into town, set up the most expensive possible ‘eradication’ program they can dream up and get on with the spraying. No, the LBAM still hasn’t done any damage to anything despite 3 years of being under microscopic scrutiny in the state and despite the fact that it has lived here for 50+ years. No, there are no grounds for panic or hysteria. No need to protect yourself or your plants from this infinitesimal insect. The moth harms nothing…whereas the twist ties and sprays are utterly toxic to all of us. Yet, these organizations are saying, ‘spray our kids and save us from…a bug.’

It’s disgusting. It’s completely disgusting what CDFA has done to the people of California and it’s agonizing to watch the organizations get in line to ask for another whipping, and fast. How any of the people who supported that letter can live with themselves knowing that they are joining league with a government agency that put children in the hospital in Santa Cruz and Monterey in 2007, I simply don’t know.

It isn’t that the Board, the California Certified Organic Farmers association and other groups don’t know better. It’s that they’ve chosen to drown out their consciences in order to get with the program, even if that means pretending to believe in total lies about a totally harmless insect and causing harm to their own families. It has become easier for these people to get with the program than to get real about what agribusiness is doing to California, the US and the world. These people must not be ready to get real and say ‘no’ to the devastation to life being caused by agribusiness around the globe. It’s horrific to have them not ready, and yet sitting on boards and signing their names to documents of ignorance and shame.

The Truth Is
The truth is that the Napa-Sonoma region is already so drowned in carcinogenic pesticides because of the industrial production of alcohol that it’s amazing anything is left alive there. If a couple of light brown apple moths are managing to gasp for breath amidst the nightly pesticide spraying that takes place across Napa, Sonoma, Kenwood, St. Helena, Calistoga and Cloverdale 8 months out of every year, I’m actually amazed. Everyone who lives in the Napa-Sonoma region wonders where the butterflies, the birds and frogs have gone, and because the spraying is done nightly under the cloak of darkness, few residents ever connect the alcohol industry to the loss of the rich biodiversity that was once ours.

It is absolutely no surprise to see all of the alcohol growers eagerly signing their names to anything that will lift the quarantines on their toxic liquor products. These people are in the pesticide business. They’ve got scores of migrant workers riding the spray machines for them night after night. They couldn’t care less about a few more tons of pesticides being added to the unfathomable load they are already dumping in the wasteland they market as ‘The Wine Country’.

But, the funny thing is, the alcohol industry CEOs like to do things under the cover of darkness. It keeps the public from seeing that their migrant workers aren’t even wearing masks and it keeps you from connecting the dots about their toxic business practices and your ruined health, your polluted town and your collapsing local environment.

In this case, however, with this letter, there are the names of their associations in black-and-white for anyone who happens to see that document to read. They are publicly endorsing the use of pesticides where you live, including if they have to bust down your gate to get into your backyard as these interests have been doing to our elders in Ojai, California. This time, what’s happening isn’t after midnight on those silent summer evenings in the alcohol valleys. This time, they are showing their hand and this gives you a chance to learn the truth about the presence of industrial alcohol production in California, the ethics of its proponents and its direct effects on you.

You can already see the utter fools being made of your neighbors by the games agribusiness plays within communities. To see the California Certified Organic Farmers endorsing constitution-crippling pesticide practices pretty much says it all to me. CDFA and the alcohol growers have managed to confuse and manipulate the state in a manner humanitarians would deem diabolical and I have to remind myself to have pity for those people on the various boards who are acting out of that abused mindset. I don’t hate those board members. I am completely pained by what has to be either their ignorance, or their corruption and I am just shaking my head over what is happening here in California.

We’re dead broke, we’re closing all of the state parks that support mental health by offering opportunities for exercise and contact with the natural world, and simultaneously, we’re begging government organizations to fill our towns with mood-altering pesticides that can result in psychosis. To me, the possible outcomes of this twisted combination of dangerous factors is no joking matter. It’s deadly serious.

What do you think?