Our friends at the Ecological Options Network and California Alliance to Stop the Spray have created a wonderful, informative Public Service Announcement video which they have the opportunity to have shown in movie theaters. This will reach an audience of 2 million people.

They are asking for donations to make this possible.

Click here to read about this powerful project

Hats off to CBS for this must-watch interview of Dennis Knepp and Jeff Haferman explaining the State’s egregious miscalculation of the deadly PM10 in Checkmate aerial spray.

Watch the video I’ve linked to and you will not only hear Knepp and Haferman explain the shoddy ’science’ CDFA is guilty of in regards to their wrong calculations of the deadly PM10 in LBAM aerial spray, but you will also see CBS providing a simple, graphic demonstration of why CDFA’s calculation was dead wrong. Knepp and Haferman have discovered that the amount of PM10 in the spray is not the 1.2% percent touted by the state, but rather that fully half of the particles in the spray are size PM10 or less! As you know, the American Lung Association uses the designation PM10 to classify tiny particles of 10 microns in size or less. This size of particles are inhaled into the deep human lung and cause chronic disease and death.

It has been my honor to be in communication with Dr. Dennis Knepp, and I want to take this moment to thank both him and Jeff Haferman for shouldering the burden of proof that our government has refused to take on and for proving, in my opinion, exactly why hundreds of families were sickened with respiratory illnesses in 2007, and why the aerial spraying must NEVER be allowed to resume in California. Thank you, Dennis and Jeff. You are heroes.

A Word from Mike Lynberg
Mike Lynberg, another of our heroes and the man responsible for championing the cause of all of the wrongfully sickened families of the Central Coast, has sent the following letter in regards to the release of the findings of Knepp and Haferman. Mike has been writing to OEHHA - the agency guilty of dismissing the hundreds of reports of illness when they were charged with the sacred duty of investigating the terrible sickness caused by the spray in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties. Here is Mike’s most recent letter to OEHHA’s agents:

Joan, Mary-Ann and Mark:

The independent scientists interviewed in this CBS-5 report are doing the work your teams were responsible for doing, but totally failed to do. Please share this message with those responsible for your cursory, unscientific and highly biased “Illness Report.”

Scientists Question Safety Of Apple Moth Pesticide
CBS 5 - San Francisco, CA,USA, May 7 2008

http://cbs5.com/pets/apple.moth.spraying.2.718614.html

You can view the most current, May 7 video story by clicking the thumbnail image on the far left; however, the other CBS 5 reports contain important information for you, too – again, things that should have been considered by the people on your teams.

As the USDA’s and CDFA’s reckless, poorly researched and managed eradication campaign moves to an area of more than 7 million people, I would hope that you are deeply concerned about the harm that could be caused by it. If not, there is something very, very wrong.

I would also hope that you are remorseful for the harm already inflicted on thousands of California citizens. Your lack of care and diligence has resulted in grave injury to many innocent people, including children. And we’re not sure what the long-term effects might be; neither, I might add, are you, since you never studied them.

The report below is further evidence that the spraying of pesticides on highly populated cities has been a grand experiment on the health of California citizens without their informed consent. I’m not sure how you can live with that!

As I’ve said before, all three of you owe an apology to the 200,000 citizens who have been impacted by your lack of diligence and respect for human health and safety. Moreover, you need to tell the Governor that aerial spraying should not resume before you go back and do a more thorough epidemiological study – in-the-field with interviews and a survey of all the people impacted, rather than a statistical analysis from the comfort of your offices in Sacramento.

As Dr. Larry Rose MD said in his alert to Marin County doctors, the fact that you “have not implemented or funded a well designed epidemiology study to determine scope and seriousness of the health impact on exposed residents in these two counties is far beyond irresponsible; criminal negligence would be a more appropriate label for the lack of public health follow-up.”

I’ve attached Dr. Rose’s alert as well as testimony by Dr. Elisa Song, a pediatrician who testified before members of the CA State Assembly a couple of weeks ago. She remarked, “OEHHA did not contact any of those people who reported illnesses or their physicians, and discarded many of the complaints as incomplete rather than following up and investigating them. This report was not a scientific study of the complaints and does not reassure us in the medical community about the safety of the spray.”

Nor does your work reassure the public, especially as new studies come out like the one reported last night on CBS 5.

Please remember why you got into your professions in the first place, and start doing what you can to protect the health of children, expecting mothers, the elderly and others.

Sincerely,

Mike Lynberg

Author of “Report on 643 Illnesses” and advocate for those who got sick – including my family and friends

VeganReader thanks Mike Lynberg for his persistence in reminding OEHHA that they have violated the trust of the American People, have wronged the people of Santa Cruz and are guilty of both professional and ethical misconduct. Like Mike, I don’t know how these agents are living with themselves, knowing the harm they have caused to the innocent.

Sonoma City Council members voted 4-1 Wednesday to pass a resolution opposing aerial spraying to eradicate the light brown apple moth.

Read the Press Democrat Story Here.

I will make the actual resolution available here when I can find a copy of it.

In the meantime, deepest thanks to Councilman Ken Brown for introducing the resolution and to the members who voted for it.

I am concerned that the Press Democrat report indicates that the council is asking the state to use least-toxic methods. Unfortunately, CDFA’s idea of least-toxic is blanket aerial spraying of carcinogenic pesticides and deadly PM10 over 7 million people! I need to see the resolution for myself to get a clear idea of what was resolved. I’ll update this post soon.

Update:
Here is a Sonoma Index Tribute article regarding the city council meeting. From the article:

Sonoma architect Bill Willers told the council its most important responsibility is “the health and welfare” of the community. “It’s absurd,” he said, “to put ourselves under this aerial assault.”

Mayor Joanne Sanders emotionally recalled her childhood experience in the South Bay when her neighborhood was sprayed with malathion, a pesticide used to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly. “My parents told me the malathion was coming and it marked my whole life…It wouldn’t matter to me if this room was full of people from the government saying this was safe. I guess I don’t trust the government.”

Update:
Extract from letter to the editor from Sonoma Mayor Pro-tem, Ken Brown:

As a Sonoma County resident and parent, I am concerned that the state may conduct aerial spraying for the light brown apple moth, which has been found in Sonoma Valley.

In Santa Cruz and Monterey counties last year, there were more than 600 health-related complaints attributed to the spraying when it happened there.

In almost all circumstances there would be a complete environmental impact report to determine the effects of this spraying. All we are asking is that the full process of an EIR study be included before any spraying occurs.

Sometimes, life is poetic in its demonstrations of simple lessons.

Every summer and winter, our home is visited by ants. They come in two varieties, for which we have common names.

1) Sugar ants - these are the larger, common ants you likely know best.
2) Oil ants - these are the tiny, tiny ants that may be less common where you live.

Here I was, today, thinking about the LBAM spray poisoning and how it will devastate our health and environment, and while my thoughts were thus occupied, a fair-sized swarm of oil ants came in my kitchen screen window above my sink. This is an experience we’ve gotten used to over the years, and my husband and I got right to work.

The oil ants need to be gotten out of the house for 2 reasons:

1) They would be injured and killed in the kitchen, falling into water, onto hot burners, etc. The house is not a proper environment for them - they belong outside.
2) Oil ants do bite people. Their bites are rather painful.

Why not reach for a can of Raid?
It’s true, like so many Americans, we could reach for a can of insecticide and blast away the oil ants, but in so doing, we would not only be killing innocent little critters who, after all, are just trying to go about their day, but we would also be poisoning our own home and ourselves. The fumes of the Raid would also drift out to our neighbors, possibly sickening them. The poisoned ants might stagger back outside and be eaten by birds or my neighbor’s kitty cat, thus poisoning further innocent bystanders.

Raid is the dangerous choice. It is also the lazy choice when, with a little work, it is possible to send the ants about their business without a drop of poison.

Today, we began by carefully sliding a piece of printer paper under the ants to pick them up and transport them outside. This works well with Sugar Ants, but I was having trouble with the miniscule oil ants so we switched tools. I got a remnant of porous linen from my fabric scrap box and very gently swished up the ants with it, taking care to be as soft in my movements as possible so as not to damage the ants’ tiny, fragile antennae and legs, which are so important to them. Once outside, they can go rejoin their colony again and start making other plans for finding a summer home.

In twenty minutes of relays from the sink to the kitchen door, my husband and I had transported the swarm outside. It is my observation that when ants stop returning to their home base, the ants at home realize something is wrong and pause in sending new ants. So, once you’ve got the ants outside, you can take step two.

With a clean sponge, carefully wipe down all of the areas where the ants were walking with vinegar and non-toxic liquid soap. We like Avalon Organics peppermint. We have observed that this appears to remove the ants’ scent trails and discourages them from thinking they’ve claimed the kitchen as belonging to them.

Lastly, locate the point of entry for the ants and make a barrier around it with non-toxic liquid soap. No new ants will be able to cross over it if you carefully surround the entry area. Thus, your little problem is solved.

If you’ve got the larger Sugar Ants, the solution is often even easier. If you can pound on the counter and wall where they are walking and speak in a low, loud voice, telling them to go away, they turn and run back to their entry point 9 times out of 10. They do not like that awesome, massive voice warning them and they don’t like the vibrations. You can also blow gently on them. They don’t seem to like the smell of human breath or the gust of wind.

If this doesn’t work, you can use the printer paper or soft cloth technique. Always follow up by washing away the scent trail and creating the barrier around the entry point.

What It Takes
What it takes is time. It took us about 25 minutes from start to finish to deal with this visitation of oil ants. Apart from the soap, which we already have on-hand as a household staple, this solution costs nothing. But the real savings is so much more far-reaching than that. We aren’t poisoning nature’s important creatures, we aren’t poisoning our neighbors and we aren’t poisoning ourselves. In today’s toxic world, you can’t overstate the value of that.

Insecticides and pesticides have been created and marketed to the laziness of people. The proposition made is that you can either put in a few minutes of your time or your can poison yourself. Amazingly, Americans so often choose poisoning themselves because they are obsessed with ’saving time’, or, sadly, because they don’t realize what their non-toxic options are for dealing with small inconveniences in daily life.

We Are Like The Ants
Agribusiness and CDFA are the epitome of the lazy approach to living in this world. Rather than working hard to create a good, and vibrant Earth with healthy ecosystems where good farming practices and diversity keep all populations in a correct balance, farmers have been marketed the lazy, ‘time-saving’ poison approach. Thousands of years of indigenous agriculture say that poly-culture (growing lots of kinds of plants together in the same place) keeps soils healthy and foods nutritious. But farmers have been sold the non-sustainable approach of growing vast acreages of a single crop (monoculture) and covering the land in poisons because the other organisms get so out of balance in so artificial a setting.

Rather than teaching farmers to grow abundant food with organic polyculture, CDFA intends to blanket 7 million human beings, all lands, all wildlife with carcinogenic, deadly poisons because of the presence of a single kind of bug. It would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on your house because you found a ladybug in your bathroom. It might be a quick way to get rid of the lady bug, but then, you’d end up with no place to live.

And that’s what Agribusiness and profit-driven, shamefully lazy entities like California Department of Food and Agriculture are doing. Blowing up the house because of a ladybug.

We are like the ants that visited my kitchen today. Innocent, hardworking beings, just trying to go about our business, meaning no harm to anyone. My respect for nature and myself made the scene in my home play out so that no toxins were inflicted on anyone, and the one chance to live life was honored for all beings. But CDFA claims that California is their house, and they refuse to deal with us respectfully. Their fingers are on the triggers of the vast pesticide bottles and they have no compunction about poisoning us all. Because they are allowed to neglect the wisdom and necessity of sustainable polyculture that makes NO insect a major threat when the environment is so diverse. Because they are after the instant answer and the easy money. Because they are so lazy.

Gandhi said you must be the change you want to see in the world. I want to see people finally reach the consciousness that a little ant’s life is as much to him as my life is to me. In vain, have countless people tried to win this recognition of our own value, our own hopes, dreams, lives, from CDFA so that they will realize the evil of poisoning us. I believe in doing unto others as we would be done by.

So, there is no Raid in my cabinet. There is no devilish Round-Up in my tool shed. And I can’t stop working until I am secure in the knowledge that there will be no deadly Checkmate in my body.

As a vegan, a birder, and a woman who holds our animal friends in sincere reverence, animal testing is abhorrent to me. It’s an unforgivable evil that tortures innocent creatures and dehumanizes the torturer, inflicting him with a woeful, desensitized outlook on pain and suffering. Much like slavery, it turns the master into a monster.

Unlike some whom I’ve heard expressing a strong wish that animal testing be conducted to prove that LBAM spray is toxic, I would like to think we’ve developed far enough as an intelligent species to know that poison is poisonous. No mumbo-jumbo testing needed to prove what would be obvious to a 3 year old.

Yet, CDFA has already conducted extensive animal testing by flying poison-laden airplanes over the Central Coast of California in 2007.

And what did the tests show?

That LBAM spray kills birds, cats, dogs, rabbits and bees.

It’s the silent spring Rachel Carson warned of in the USDA’s infamous DDT era. LBAM spray is the new DDT, and Roy Upton has carefully prepared the following report demonstrating that the toxicity ‘testing’ of LBAM spray in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties caused disease and death in the ‘test animals’.

Read the chilling, red flag report regarding LBAM spray’s deadly effects on wildlife and pets

What: Sonoma City Council Meeting to discuss adopting resolution against CDFA’s aerial spraying of California.

Where and When: May 7th at 177 1st St.West at 6:00 pm

Here is the meeting agenda

Please, attend the meeting. If you cannot attend, please email the City Clerk, Gay Rainbarger at: gayr@sonomacity.org

My letter to City Clerk Rainbarger regarding the deadly threat posed to California’s people by CDFA’s aerial spray:
——

Dear Clerk Rainbarger,

Over the past several moths, I have been in direct contact with scientists, doctors and media regarding the aerial spraying of the state of California for the light brown apple moth. I am running the most active blog on the web covering this issue, and because of this, have also been in constant contact with countless individuals whose families were gravely sickened by the aerial spraying of the Central Coast in the fall of 2007. I request that this letter be given to Sonoma City Council in their endeavor to adopt a resolution against the aerial spraying of our county and our state.

These are science-based facts, established by independent UC scientists, doctors, researchers, media and statisticians.

1) The CDFA has just been convicted by the superior court of violating CEQA. They broke the law by creating a false ‘emergency’ which enabled them to bypass every law and tenet in place to protect the safety of human health and environment. The CDFA must be regarded as lawbreakers, not trustworthy, honest or law abiding citizens.

2) CDFA has been forced to admit that the light brown apple moth (LBAM) has caused zero damage to agriculture or the natural environment in California. Their fear-mongering threats of a ‘moth of mass destruction’ are based on decades-old reports from New Zealand. As was discovered by Dr. Daniel Harder on his investigative visit to New Zealand, the use there of horrific organophosphates had devastated local bird, bat and beneficial insect populations. Once New Zealand stopped using organophosphates, the birds, bats and other beneficials returned and the LBAM has not been considered a problem since then. California can count on birds, bats and other natural predators to keep LBAM in check, and it is likely that it is the presence of these natural predators here that enabled LBAM to go undetected for decades. CDFA is not correct in saying the moth just showed up last year. UC scientists have calculated that it has likely been here for as many as 50 years.

3) When CDFA states that LBAM will cause millions of dollars in damage to agriculture, they are again using the unscientific and fear-mongering tactics for which they received a Superior Court conviction of violating CEQA. Any damages referred to are not to crops. They are financial damages caused by quarantines and trade embargoes because of the incorrect classification of LBAM as a Class A pest. Modern science has shown that LBAM is not a class A pest and needs to be declassified, thus lifting the trade issues and CDFAs option to received millions in emergency funding from the federal government for their so-called eradication program. Remember, LBAM will not harm our food supply, native or ornamental plants beyond minor, cosmetic damage to leaves. All CDFA’s misleading quotes of agricultural damage actually refer to financial penalties due to incorrect classification of the moth. This is about money, not about our food supply.

4) California Certified Organic Farmers and Whole Foods, after careful consideration, have come out against the aerial spray program. The USDA has promised organic farmers that they can still call their products organic even after being sprayed with toxic pesticides. CCOF, Whole Foods and Organic consumers are smarter than that. Organic means not sprayed with pesticides. CDFA’s plan to blanket California with untested compounds of pesticides, synthetic pheromones and PM10 pollution will put an end to organic farming in California.

5) CDFA consistently refers to Checkmate, the product they are spraying, as a ‘pheromone product’. Checkmate is classified by the EPA as a pesticide. Independent doctors and scientists have stepped forward to explain that the 11 ingredients in checkmate are mutagenic, endocrine disruptors and carcinogenic. A xenochemical in the spray causes breast cancer. The microscopic plastic encapsulation of the pesticide spray is designated as PM10 by the American Lung Association. PM10 is matter that is small enough to be inhaled into the deep lungs of humans from which it cannot be expelled and causes disease and death.

CDFA has repeatedly called Checkmate the safest and most environmentally friendly product they have ever used. Unfortunately, their other products include DDT and Malathion, which also caused death and environmental devastation. Saying something is ’safer’ than DDT is not reassuring, and has no scientific basis, as CDFA sprayed Monterey and Santa Cruz counties without conducting a single long term test of the synergistic effects of long-term, chronic exposure to the pesticide compound. In the words of U.C. scientist Jim Carey, “this is an experiment.”

6) CDFAs illegal 2007 aerial spraying of the Central Coast resulted in human beings experienced adverse health reactions including first-time asthma attacks, violent vomiting and diarrhea, heart arrhythmia and tachycardia, interrupted menstrual cycles for up to three months, recommencement of menstruation in menopausal women over the age of 65, severe sinus and eye irritations.

The infant son of Major Tim Wilcox went into respiratory arrest and nearly died. The family ended up hiding the baby in a military fort in an attempt to protect him from further spraying and the baby is now being kept breathing by means of corticosteroids. Six Central Coast schools were polled following the spraying and the results showed that attendance was halved in the three days following the spray.

The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment was entrusted with the duty of investigating the health damages that had been suffered by Central Coast families. Rather than doing their job, OEHHA failed to contact even one victim or primary care physician in the area, threw out 90% of the reports of pesticide poisoning and announced that they couldn’t find a connection between the illnesses and the pesticide. Media forced OEHHA to confess that they also couldn’t say the poisoning had not caused the illnesses. In addition to the unforgivable harm done to children, men and women on the Central Coast, the local watershed was horrifically fouled with a yellow foam and over 650 sea birds, including the federally-protected Endangered Brown Pelican, washed up dead on the beaches. Local beekeepers reported confusion and deaths in honey bee colonies and residents reported the disappearance of wild birds from their gardens for several weeks following the aerial spray.

7) CDFA has just placed a large portion of the Sonoma Valley under quarantine because of the incorrect classification of the light brown apple moth, which needs to be declassified. They are imposing unfair penalties on growers based on antiquated reports. Worse than this, they have announced that they intend to festoon the area with some 250 toxic twist ties per acre. The twist ties contain known irritants and the warning labels specifically state that the ingredients must not come into contact with eyes, skin or clothing and must not be introduced into water sources. Children, wild birds and wildlife will be playing in and around the trees and bushes where they twist ties are placed. Should your child or pet come into contact with the ties, you are directed to contact your doctor and Poison Control because the substance the twist ties are soaked in is poisonous.

Unfortunately, some 30% of the ingredients on the twist ties are ’secret’. So, your doctor or vet will have no idea what your child or pet was poisoned with. Wildlife will be damaged and vulnerable to predation due to chemical damage to skin and eyes. Additionally, each time it rains, the chemicals will be washed onto the ground and into the ground water and numerous creeks in the Sonoma Valley, in violation of the strict warnings on the product label. The chemicals will be in our water and on our ground. We will track these on our shoes into the house where small children will be playing on the floors. But again, 30% the toxic ingredients are being kept secret, so neither you nor your doctor will understand what the poisons are to which your children have ingested or gotten in their eyes or on their skin. CDFA’s entire program, from aerial spray, to twist ties, to permethrin-coated telephone polls is toxic to humans and is completely unnecessary as, again, the LBAM is considered a forgettable bug everywhere else it lives in the world.

8 ) Following CDFA’s superior court conviction of violating CEQA, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that the aerial spraying would be stalled while a so-called 6-pack of toxicology tests was conducted. These tests will revolve around short-term reactions only. They will not test for the long-term health damages that will be caused by chronic exposure to pesticides. CDFA will spray 5 nights a month, nine months a year for up to 10 or more years over residential areas. A couple of weeks of short-term testing in no way address the type of chronic pesticide exposure Californians will be subjected to. The tests are totally insufficient, and also suspect as they are being authored by the very agencies which are benefiting financially from the spraying.

It is vital to understand that severe political corruption is at the heart of this as has been exposed by major media. Gov. Schwarzegger has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions both from CDFA, and from the spray manufacturer, Stewart Resnick. Governor Schwarzenegger was quoted this week as saying he was confident that he and CDFA could get the Superior Court ruling overturned in order to recommence aerial spraying. Governor Schwarzenegger has begun to refer to himself and CDFA as ‘we’. Rather than being one with the people of California, he has made it quite clear that he considers himself one with CDFA.

7) Aerial spraying of an untested, synergistic pesticide compound over residential areas constitutes a human experiment without consent. Following World War II the civilized nations of the world adopted the Nuremberg Code which declares that no human being will be subjected to experimentation without informed consent. CDFA intends to expose some 7 million Californians to their carcinogenic pesticide compound without consent and in so doing will be guilty of violating the globally-upheld Nuremberg Code 7 million times.

Additionally, our U.S. and California Constitutions guarantee our right to obtain safety. We cannot obtain safety when our air, water, food, land and bodies are being forcefully invaded by carcinogens and deadly PM10. A group of human rights organizations have just published a study citing the 30 US and State laws and acts which CDFA is violating with their enforced aerial spraying. Your constitutional rights protect you from human experimentation without consent.

You will find public documentation of all of the above facts at the following websites:
lbamspray.com
cassonline.org
stopthespray.org
veganreader.com

I urge the City Council of Sonoma to adopt a strong resolution against all aspects of CDFA’s unconstitutional assault on the health and environment of our community. Not one toxic twist tie, not one drop of carcinogenic poison is needed to deal with this moth. Nothing needs to be done. As the Superior Court ruled, there is no emergency. And, the bottom line is, our Constitution protects us from human experimentation without consent.

Thank you.

From the SF Bay Guardian:

There’s a simple way to solve this: Congress can de-list the Light Brown Apple Moth.
Pelosi has the ability as speaker to push this to the top of the agenda and get a bill passed quickly. Mayor Gavin Newsom and the supervisors should call on her to do that — now.

The SF Bay Guardian printed, in error, that Sam Farr had introduced a bill demanding the declassification of the Light Brown Apple Moth. They later corrected the story, stating that Farr had merely questioned the classification, not written a bill. I just got off the phone with Rep. Pelosi’s office and they’ve heard all about this.

Let’s make this bill happen in reality.

Contact Sam Farr. Ask him to introduce a bill demanding the reclassification of LBAM.
Call him at: Santa Cruz Office
701 Ocean Street
Room 318
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
831-429-1976

Contact Mayor Gavin Newsom. Plead with him to urge Rep. Pelosi to make this reclassification priority #1.
Call him at:
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
Telephone: (415) 554-6141

Contact Rep. Nancy Pelosi. Urge her to make the reclassification of the light brown apple moth her top priority, as the health and lives of millions of Californians hang in the balance:
Call her at:
District Office - 450 Golden Gate Ave. - 14th Floor
- San Francisco, CA 94102 -
(415) 556-4862

We have literally only days left to get this moth correctly re-classified, lift the terrorizing threat of permanent or fatal damage from the hearts of citizens and lift quarantines from our valued organic farmers. The reclassification of the moth, if enacted with urgency, will accomplish this.

Please, call these people today. Thank you!

This is an in-depth, thorough, factual, must-read report created by the California Alliance to Stop the Spray regarding the economic damages posed by LBAM spray, the history of human experimentation without consent in the US, and the actionable solutions to stopping the aerial spraying of California.

Read The Report

Our hats are off to CASS for the time and expertise that went into creating this powerful and vital report.

East Bay Pesticide Alert / Don’t Spray California, Co-sponsored by the Social Justice Committee of Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, Present:
True Accounts of the
LBAM Spraying
and other short films

Followed by discussion about all aspects of the LBAM eradication program and possible actions to take to stop it

Sunday, May 11, 7pm
BFUU, 1924 Cedar Street (at Bonita), in Berkeley

(SCENT FREE, PLEASE)

The U.S. and California Departments of Agriculture want us to believe that the tiny, exotic Light Brown Apple Moth is a threat to our food supply and ecology, even though it’s done no actual damage to crops nor forests, and there’s no evidence that it will. We are told the pesticides they’re using are safe and environmentally friendly, but hundreds of people have been injured already, and pets, and hundred of birds have died. Come listen to their stories, and participate in a brainstorm about what to do when this poisonous pesticide program comes to your town.

IT’S NOT SAFE – IT’S NOT EFFECTIVE – IT’S NOT NECESSARY!

250 TWIST TIES PER ACRE / 3,000 UTILITY POLES & TREES PER SQUARE MILE / 693.8 SQUARE MILES BY PLANES / HOSING DOWN NEIGHBORHOODS

For more information: (510) 895-2312 or beneficialbug@netzero.net

www.DontSprayCalifornia.org

We’ve talked about political corruption. We’ve talked about lies. We’ve talked about Schwarzenegger accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from pesticide manufacturer Stewart Resnick and CDFA Ag. Secretary A.G. Kawamura.

Nonetheless, I was completely blown away by the following quote taken from the Scotts Valley Press Banner:

Schwarzenegger said CheckMate will undergo tests of its potential for eye, inhalation, respiratory and other irritants, known as the “six-pack” toxicology test.

Reminded that the six-pack test isn’t a complete EIR, Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Rachel Cameron said the governor was “confident we will prevail” in the appeal of Burdick’s ruling.

We will prevail? We?

It’s my understanding that a superior court ruling was made against CDFA and that CDFA was going to appeal it. Where does Schwarzenegger fit into this? When did he become one with CDFA? When did they hire him?

I simply couldn’t believe my eyes reading this quote which incontrovertibly convicts Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of tremendous impropriety in the following ways:

1) It proves him to be allied with CDFA rather than the people of California whom he serves.

2) In attesting his confidence that ‘we will prevail’ he reveals that his agenda is to spray the people of California, before any of his six-pack toxicology tests give ‘results’ regarding spray safety. His agenda is supposed to be protecting the people of California - not prevailing over superior court rulings or working for CDFA.

3) Having exposed himself as a man with improper allegiances which are counter-productive to his duties as a public servant, Gov. Schwarzenegger has shown himself to be incapable of the scientific impartiality that would make him an appropriate facilitator or judge of the safety testing of pesticides which will affect the health of millions of citizens.

What is, perhaps, most baffling about this man’s behavior is the open way in which he reveals his inappropriate allegiances and attitudes. As he says, “Any of those kinds of real big, powerful special interests, if you take money from them, you owe them something.”

Apparently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger owes Stewart Resnick so much, he is willing to poison 7 million Californians to make things even-Steven. Apparently, he owes CDFA so much, he’s joined their ranks and become one with them, to the tune of hoping ‘we’ can overturn a court ruling that has demanded that CDFA obey the law and conduct an EIR to protect public health. He’s hoping ‘we’ can break the law.

Watch this man destroy his own political career by taking Big Ag and law-breakers as his partners and guides, winning the mistrust and hatred of millions of voters in the process. His legacy as Governor, his name in history, is going to be one of unprecedented shame.