Tag Archives: association
Inside the $7 Million Fight to Tax Soda in San Francisco
Mother Jones
After a high-profile battle in New York, the front line in the War on Soda has moved to Northern California: next month, voters in San Francisco and Berkeley will consider whether to levy major taxes on sugary beverages.
Measure D and Proposition E sound like ordinary, small-time municipal ballot items, but in the past few months, they’ve become subjects of national attention. For Big Soda, defeating the tax in the liberal, health-conscious Bay Area would be their ultimate triumph—and kill hopes for similar taxes in other places. The American Beverage Association—lobbying arm for Pepsi and Coca-Cola—has poured Super Big Gulp–sized streams of cash into these contests: they’ve spent $7.7 million thus far fighting San Francisco’s Proposition E alone. It’s already the second most expensive ballot measure campaign in the city, and could easily break the record.
Proposition E was proposed by San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener and it’d place a two-cent per ounce tax on sugary beverages. (Berkeley’s Measure D proposes a one-cent tax.) It’s specific about what constitutes a taxable sugary beverage: soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and juices will be subject to the tax, while milk, syrups, and alcohol will be exempt. Distributors of the drinks are meant to cover the hikes, but they’re likely to pass that cost onto retailers, so consumers will end up paying the price. So, if you’re buying a 21-ounce Coke in the city, you can expect to pay 42 cents more. If Prop E passes, San Francisco would become the first city in the country to tax soda.
Supporters say all those Cokes will generate over $30 million in revenue per year, which would be used to fund nutrition, fitness, and other public health programs in public schools and elsewhere. Beyond that, it’s projected to reduce consumption of sugary drinks by 30 percent, according to San Francisco city economist Ted Egan. All in all, Prop E seems to have addressed some of the issues that made past soda taxes hard to swallow: In nearby Richmond, a measure was sunk because it didn’t specify what drinks could be taxed, and in El Monte, Calif., their bill didn’t specify how revenue would be allocated.
Though it’s arguably one of the best-crafted soda taxes to be put to vote, the Prop E campaign has been competitive, to put it lightly. Thus far, it’s been rife with deception and nasty attacks on both sides. Buoyed by its multi-million-dollar warchest, the No on E camp has blanketed the city with ads that evoke typical anti-nanny-state rallying cries. Big Soda has funded a group called Californians for Beverage Choice, which has put up signs and sent spokesmen on TV to argue that “consumers should be able to make the choice for themselves without taxes or regulation trying to influence their behavior.”
The No on E campaign also focuses on the high cost of living in San Francisco, calling the soda tax a “regressive tax” that would disproportionately hurt low-income people. The soda lobby has been leaning on another front group, the appealingly-named Coalition for an Affordable City, to make that case. It’s put up billboards across the city featuring local shopkeepers who oppose the measure, and sponsored TV ads like this one:
The San Francisco Bay Guardian investigated, however, and found that many of the 700-plus retailers who are listed as opponents of Prop E actually favor it. The Guardian claims that the beverage lobby allegedly dispatched canvassers to get local shopkeepers to oppose the tax, without mentioning exactly what it was, or that their businesses would be included on a public list. The Guardian also alleged that the groups endorsing a no vote—they appear during the ad—were paid off in exchange. “The Young Democrats, who endorsed No on the Sugary Beverage Tax, got a whopping $20,000 for their troubles,” it said.
The Yes on E coalition, led by a group called Choose Health San Francisco, has also accused the measure’s opponents of being deliberately dishonest. In a formal complaint to the San Francisco Ethics Commission, Choose Health said the No on E committee didn’t disclose how much money it has received, and has failed to add a disclaimer that the American Beverage Association has been funding their campaign. Michelle Parker, a PTA member and supporter of E, called the soda lobby’s tactics “personally offensive.” The opposition has denied wrongdoing, and spokesman Roger Salazar countered by accusing E’s supporters of “going around, harassing our supporters and bullying them.”
For some, it might be enough to look at the millions that Big Soda has (and will) spend, and conclude that Proposition E is doomed. While it’s true the lobby has a lot of money—and some of the best consultants in the business—the measure’s supporters are hardly a ragtag bunch. Backers have raised nearly $300,000—including $50,000 from billionaire donors Lisa and John Pritzker—which is enough to mount a competitive campaign. And the political consultancy firm Erwin & Muir—which boasts a 90% success rate, according to Politico—is working for the yes camp, pro bono.*
Proposition E will need to be approved by at least two-thirds of voters to become law. Polling has found support hovering around 50%, but it could receive a bump after the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed the measure last weekend. Things could easily get nastier as Election Day nears.
Even if it fails, many are betting that its cross-bay counterpart, Measure D, will succeed in Berkeley. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote that “If a soda tax can’t pass in the most progressive city in America, it can’t pass anywhere. Big Soda knows that, which is why it’s determined to kill it here.”
The measure’s passage might not spark a nationwide movement—the ABA’s Salazar was quick to say Berkeley is “not a precedent-setter”—but it’s dangerous enough that his bosses have spent over $2 million to stop the tax there. And it’s dangerous enough to have merited national attention. If both Prop E and Measure D fail, the idea of the soda tax may go flat for years. But if one of them passes, it could very well be coming to a ballot box near you.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the name of the political consultancy firm.
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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children
Mother Jones
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It’s self-evident that embryos, fetuses, and babies are vulnerable. We have strict laws protecting children because they cannot fend for themselves. And yet, too often, we ignore the impact that environmental disasters have on the very earliest stages of life. In her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein examines the effect that our reliance on fossil fuels has on the most helpless members of the animal kingdom—as well as on our own children.
“In species after species, climate change is creating pressures that are depriving life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines,” Klein writes. “Instead, the spark of life is being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”
Take the case of the leatherback sea turtles. These ancient creatures have been around for 150 million years, making them the longest-surviving marine animals on earth. As Klein points out, they’ve survived the “asteroid attacks” that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. But now they are threatened by a combination of poaching, fishing and climate change. One recent study found that as temperatures rise over the next century, “egg and hatchling survival will rapidly decline” for sea turtle populations in the Eastern Pacific.
The leatherback turtles have “survived so much,” says Klein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to survive even incremental climate change, because what’s happening already is that when the eggs are buried in the sand, even if the sand is just marginally hotter than it used to be, that the eggs are not hatching; they’re cooking in the sand.” What’s more, turtles don’t have sex chromosomes—they turn into males or females based on the ambient temperature of the sand in which they are born. Hotter sand means more female turtles hatch. And the danger is that warming could eventually result in a significant imbalance between males and females, ultimately decimating the species.
While writing the book, Klein was going through her own fertility crisis, so she says she was particularly attuned to the fragility of new life and the impacts that stressors can have on reproduction. And she began to notice a common theme in the after-effects of environmental catastrophes. In the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill, for example, she toured the Louisiana marshes. With Jonathan Henderson, an organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network, guiding the way, Klein and a few others set out to investigate whether the oil from the Deepwater Horizon had permeated the bayous. It was the fish jumping in dirty water and the coating of reddish brown oil that impressed Klein and her companions.
But what most concerned Henderson, recalls Klein, was the nearly invisible cost of the disaster: the tiny zooplankton and juveniles that grow into the shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that are the bedrock of the Gulf fisheries. “What he was preoccupied with was the fact that this was spawning seasoning,” says Klein. “And that even though we couldn’t see it, there was just a huge amount of proto-life surrounding us, and this was spring in the Gulf and everything was spawning.”
Drifting in the marshlands, Klein writes that she “had the distinct feeling that we were suspended not in water but in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.”
These effects, she argues, may be felt years later, when those juveniles should be reaching maturity. “Looking into it in the context of the Gulf, we’ve heard a lot of really concerning stories directly from fishermen saying that they’re not seeing baby fish out there,” says Klein. “Or they’re seeing female crabs without eggs.” In her book, she recounts a 2012 interview with a Florida fisherman named Donny Waters who had noticed the absence of small fish in his catches. This hadn’t yet cut into his income, since small fish are thrown back. But Waters was worried that the impact would be felt in the years to come—specifically, in 2016 or 2017 when those fish that were in the larval stage during the spill would have grown up.
This wouldn’t be the first time that an oil spill had a delayed effect on the fishing industry. “The greatest and most lasting impacts on the fish in Alaska had to do with this delayed disaster,” says Klein, referring to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. “It wasn’t until three or four years after the spill that the herring fishery collapsed.” Twenty-five years later, it still hasn’t recovered.
What’s more, scientists say the spill might also help explain the deaths of an unusual number of young bottlenose dolphins in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In a paper published in PlosONE in 2012, Ruth Carmichael and her colleagues examined whether the spill contributed to a “perfect storm” of events that killed 186 dolphins—46 percent of whom were perinatal calves (that is, babies)—in the first four months of 2011.
An unusually high number of young bottlenose dolphins died in the Gulf of Mexico between January and April 2011. Graham Worthy/University of Central Florida
“When we put the pieces together,” explained Carmichael in a 2012 press release, “it appears that the dolphins were likely weakened by depleted food resources, bacteria, or other factors as a result of the 2010 cold winter or oil spill, which made them susceptible to assault by the high volumes of cold freshwater from heavy snowmelt coming from land in 2011 and resulted in distinct patterns in when and where they washed ashore.”
By April 2014, 235 stranded baby bottlenose dolphins had been found, “a staggering figure, since scientists estimate that the number of cetacean corpses found on or near shore represents only 2 percent of the ‘true death toll,'” Klein writes.
Of course, this research isn’t conclusive. A BP spokesperson notes that dolphins in the Gulf began dying off before the oil spill and that unusual mortality events “occur with some regularity.” For its part, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration states that the “direct or indirect effects” of the spill are being “investigated as potential causes or contributing factors for some of the strandings” but that “no definitive cause has yet been identified.”
Dolphin strandings by age group for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and western Florida. Reprinted with permission from Carmichael et al., PlosONE, 2012.
Further up the food chain, Klein is also concerned about the potential impact of environmental pollution on human fertility. During the same trip that took her through the marshlands of Louisiana, she also visited Mossville, the historic African-American town notorious as a case study in environmental racism.
“This was a town formed by freed slaves, and after being established, it was surrounded by 14 massive petrochemical factories, and the land and water was just poisoned, and most of the people have already left,” says Klein.
While worries about cancers and other illnesses in Mossville have been covered fairly extensively in the media, the issue of fertility problems is less well known. “When I spoke to women who had lived in Mossville, what I heard about was just an epidemic of infertility and that just so many women had hysterectomies,” Klein says. These stories are anecdotal, but Klein hopes more research will be done. “This is often just an understudied part of science,” she says.
Klein also points to emerging research that links the fracking boom with various reproductive problems. In a Bloomberg View column earlier this year, Mark Whitehouse reported on data presented at the annual American Economic Association meeting from a yet-to-be published study of Pennsylvania birth records that apparently found a correlation between proximity to shale gas sites and low birth weight in babies. Babies born within a 2.5-kilometer radius of gas drilling sites were almost twice as likely to have a low birth weight (increasing from 5.6 percent to 9 percent of births) or a low APGAR score, the first evaluation of a baby’s health after birth. And a study published this year examining birth outcomes and proximity to natural gas development reported that mothers who lived within 10 miles of the highest number of fracking sites (125 wells within a 10-mile radius) were 30 percent more likely to have babies with congenital heart defects and twice as likely to have babies with neurological problems compared to mothers whose homes were at least 10 miles away from any fracking site.
Then there’s the threat that climate change itself poses to children. Last year, UNICEF warned that “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives” and that by 2050, climate change could result in an additional 25 million children suffering from malnourishment.
“For all the talk about the right to life and the rights of the unborn,” writes Klein, “our culture pays precious little attention to the particular vulnerabilities of children, let alone developing life.”
Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.
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Naomi Klein: Fossil Fuels Threaten Our Ability to Have Healthy Children
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What’s the Matter With Sam Brownback?
Mother Jones
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Illustration by Roberto Parada
One Wednesday afternoon in mid-August, Govs. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey stopped for a photo op—and $54 worth of pork ribs and sausages—at Oklahoma Joe’s, a gas station barbecue joint on the outer fringe of Kansas City. Along with hickory smoke and diesel fumes, there was a mild aroma of desperation in the air. Brownback’s approval ratings hovered in the mid-30s, and one recent poll had his Democratic opponent, state House Minority Leader Paul Davis, beating him by 10 points. Now Christie, the chair of the Republican Governors Association, had parachuted in to lend some star power as Brownback made a fundraising swing through the wealthy suburbs outside of Kansas City. A day earlier, the RGA had announced a $600,000 ad buy in support of Brownback. “We believe in Sam,” Christie assured the scrum of reporters who’d accompanied the governors to Oklahoma Joe’s.
That the RGA had been forced to mobilize reinforcements in Kansas spoke to just how imperiled Brownback had become. After representing Kansas for nearly two decades in Congress, he had won the governorship in 2010 by a 30-point margin. Once in office, Brownback wasted no time implementing a radical agenda that blended his trademark social conservatism with the libertarian-tinged economic agenda favored by one of his most famous constituents, Charles Koch, whose family company is headquartered in Wichita and employs more than 3,500 people in the state. Other GOP governors elected in the tea party wave, such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, garnered more ink for their brash policy maneuvers, but in many ways Brownback had presided over the most sweeping transformation.
Early in his tenure, he said he wanted to turn Kansas into a “real, live experiment” for right-wing policies. In some cases relying on proposals promoted by the Kansas Policy Institute—a conservative think tank that belongs to the Koch-backed State Policy Network and is chaired by a former top aide to Charles Koch—Brownback led the charge to privatize Medicaid, curb the power of teachers’ unions, and cull thousands from the welfare rolls.
But his boldest move was a massive income tax cut. Brownback flew in Reagan tax cut guru Arthur Laffer to help sell the plan to lawmakers, with the state paying the father of supply-side economics $75,000 for three days of work. Brownback and his legislative allies ultimately wiped out the top rate of 6.45 percent, slashed the middle rate from 6.25 to 4.9 percent, and dropped the bottom tier from 3.5 to 3 percent. A subsequent bill set in motion future cuts, with the top rate declining to 3.9 percent by 2018 and falling incrementally from there. Brownback’s tax plan also absolved nearly 200,000 small business owners of their state income tax burdens. Among the “small” businesses that qualified were more than 20 Koch Industries LLCs. “Without question they’re the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cuts,” says University of Kansas political scientist Burdett Loomis.
Laffer told me that “what Sam Brownback has done is and will be extraordinarily beneficial for the state of Kansas,” but many Kansans beg to differ. Brownback had said that his tax cut plan would provide “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” Instead, the state has gone into cardiac arrest. “The revenue projections were just horrendous once the tax cuts were put into place,” Loomis says. The state’s $700 million budget surplus is projected to dwindle into a $238 million deficit. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s downgraded the state’s bond rating earlier this year as a result. “The state’s on a crisis course,” says H. Edward Flentje, a professor emeritus of political science at Wichita State University who served alongside Brownback in the cabinet of Kansas Gov. Mike Hayden in the 1980s. “He has literally put us in a ditch.”
Conservatives once celebrated Brownback’s grand tax experiment as a prototype worthy of replication in other states and lauded Brownback himself as a model conservative reformer (“phenomenal,” Grover Norquist has said). “My focus,” Brownback said in one 2013 interview, “is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.'” By this fall it was hard to imagine anyone touting the Brownback model, especially with the Kansas governor at risk of going down in defeat—in the Koch brothers’ backyard, no less—and dragging the entire state ticket down with him. The Wall Street Journal recently dubbed Brownback’s approach “more of a warning than a beacon.”
Not long after taking office in 2011, Brownback called a meeting with members of the state Senate’s Republican caucus, whose tone was historically set by a core group of moderates. After a friendly introduction over tea and cookies on the veranda of the Capitol, the governor made clear that he would brook no dissent. “He said, ‘I’ll be glad to campaign for you coming up, but I want all of my guns pointed in the same direction,’ meaning there’s no room for difference of opinion,” recalls former GOP state Sen. Jean Schodorf, who was present that day. “From there on it was chilling.”
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In Wake of Arizona Uzi Killing, NRA Tweets About Kids Having Fun With Guns
Mother Jones
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There’s no shortage of grim gun news in the United States, including numerous killings involving children, but there was something particularly disturbing about an incident on Monday in which a 9-year-old girl accidentally shot her instructor to death with an Uzi. The tragedy unfolded at an Arizona gun range catering to tourists called Bullets and Burgers. How on earth was such a child allowed to fire such a powerful weapon on fully automatic, by a person who knows enough about firearms to have served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan? See video of the incident below via the New York Times; the clip doesn’t show the actual moment of tragedy, but it’s plenty chilling nonetheless.
Reactions to the news, as you might expect, have ranged from somber to mystified to angry. But with the story making the rounds on social media, only those latter two applied to a tweet posted on Wednesday afternoon by NRA Women, which is part of the National Rifle Association’s Women’s Programs and is sponsored by gun manufacturing giant Smith & Wesson. “7 Ways Children Can Have Fun at the Shooting Range” the tweet announced, linking to a recent story that details how kids can get bored with target practice if not properly entertained. NRA Women posted the tweet at 1:51 p.m. Pacific on Wednesday; by about 3 p.m. it had been removed, but not before I and others took a screen shot of it:
The list of options in the article included firing at animal, zombie, and even exploding targets, but surely there was a better time to promote them. Historically the NRA is known for its disciplined and effective messaging. But more recently, as it has branched out to cater to children and women and minorities, America’s top gun lobbying group seems to be misfiring, again and again.
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In Wake of Arizona Uzi Killing, NRA Tweets About Kids Having Fun With Guns
Can This Democrat Win on a No More “Trayvon Martin Tragedies” Platform?
Mother Jones
Wilcox for Congress
Could the 2012 killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin prove a deciding factor in an Arizona Democratic congressional primary? Former Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox certainly hopes so. Seeking to gain an edge over her rival, ex-state Rep. Ruben Gallego, in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s primary, Wilcox’s campaign has invoked Martin’s shooting and her opponent’s past support for a controversial Stand Your Ground law.
“America doesn’t need more Trayvon Martin tragedies,” read a mailer distributed by Wilcox’s campaign earlier this month that blasted Gallego for voting “for an NRA-backed ‘Stand Your Ground’ law that made it easier to shoot someone and claim self-defense.” The mailer went on to cite Gallego’s B+ rating from the National Rifle Association, while asking voters to remember “tragedies like Newtown, CT” and “the theater in Aurora, CO.” (Those shootings did not involve Stand Your Ground.)
Wilcox, who was shot in the hip in 1997 by an angry constituent, has kept gun control front and center during the campaign, although not always successfully. She brought up Gallego’s vote at a recent debate; in June, her husband, Earl, confronted Gallego at a gun control rally, alleging that he was a “traitor to the cause.” Gallego, a former NRA member, has said he brought a handgun to work at the state capitol after receiving threats, but supports a ban on assault rifles and the county buyback program Wilcox helped to start.
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Can This Democrat Win on a No More “Trayvon Martin Tragedies” Platform?
Posted in Abrams, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta
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5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast
Mother Jones
Welcome to the worst breakfast-related crisis since Lord of the Rings: There might be an impending Nutella shortage. And there’s a good chance the culprit is climate change.
The price of hazelnuts, a main ingredient in the delicious chocolate spread, is up 60 percent after unseasonable ice storms devastated hazel tree farms in Turkey’s Black Sea coastal region this year. And colder winters and heavier precipitation are exactly what the EU’s Centre for Climate Adaptation says the Black Sea coast should expect as climate change advances. Though Nutella’s manufacturer hasn’t raised its prices yet, it’s facing increasing strain as palm oil and cocoa get more expensive, too.
It would be bad enough if Nutella were the only food that melting ice caps and changing weather patterns are threatening to rob from the breakfast table. But no—the list of climate change’s culinary casualties goes on. Here are some other ways it’s making the most important meal of the day a little less satisfying:
- Rising cereal prices. Kix might be kid-tested and mother-approved, but have fun buying them in 2030, when their cost could be as much as 24 percent higher due to drought-stricken grain crops, according to an Oxfam International report. (And that doesn’t even account for inflation.) Lovers of Frosted Flakes and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes should also start stockpiling now—Oxfam predicts their respective prices will rise by 20 and 30 percent by 2030.
- A global bacon shortage. The aporkalypse is nigh. Even if you’re on a no-carb diet, shrinking grain supplies are bad news. Pricier corn and soybeans equals pricier pig feed, and pricier pig feed equals smaller pig herds. In 2012, Britain’s National Pig Association announced that a pork and bacon shortage “is now unavoidable.”
- Bland-but-costly coffee. There’s an epic drought in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee exporter. As a result, one commodities trading firm says caffeine addicts will consume 5 million more bags of beans than coffee growers can produce in the 2014-2015 season, and the price of coffee futures has already doubled to $2 a pound. To make matters worse, beans grown at higher temperatures don’t develop the blend of aromatic compounds that give coffee its distinctive flavor.
- Waffle woes. The nation had to collectively leggo its Eggos in November 2009, when record flooding in Atlanta stopped waffle production at the local Kellogg plant. Sure, this has happened once so far, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “projected sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and associated storm surge may lead to further erosion, flooding, and property damage in the Southeast.”
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Posted in Anchor, Aroma, Brita, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta
Tagged agency, association, blue marble, brita, climate-change, flakes, food and ag, kellogg, king, nation, turkey
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"Ex-Gay" Conversion Therapy Group Rebrands, Stresses "Rights of Clients"
Mother Jones
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As the “ex-gay therapy” movement suffers major legal and legislative blows, one of its leading proponents has undergone a major rebranding effort.
On Wednesday, in a bizarre, décolletage-heavy, news-style video, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)—the professional organization for conversion therapists—reestablished itself as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI). In what it calls a “major expansion of our mission,” ATCSI claims it will continue “preserving the right of individuals to obtain the services of a therapist who honors their values, advocating for integrity and objectivity in social science research, and ensuring that competent licensed, professional assistance is available for persons who experience unwanted homosexual (same-sex) attractions.”
NARTH’s makeover, along with a similar rebranding effort by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), comes in response to growing national opposition to conversion therapy. ATCSI’s new website says the group has become “increasingly involved in legal and professional efforts to defend the rights of clients to pursue change-oriented psychological care as well as the rights of licensed mental health professionals.”
Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), another ex-gay therapy organization run by former NARTH Board Member (and convicted fraudster) Arthur Abba Goldberg, is currently being sued for a different kind of fraud—accepting money but failing to deliver on the conversion promised.
Meanwhile, California and New Jersey‘s bans on ex-gay therapy for minors have held up in court. Michigan may be next to pass a similar bill. Many conversion therapy groups have shut down in recent years, including Love in Action, Evergreen International, Love Won Out, and Exodus International; The latter’s president issued an apologetic open letter to the LGBT community last summer. In July, nine remorseful former leaders in the ex-gay therapy movement penned a joint letter condemning ex-gay therapy as an “ineffective and harmful” practice that “reinforces internalized homophobia, anxiety, guilt, and depression.”
Conversion therapy, which is discredited by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, and the American Counseling Association, has been shown to increase risks of suicide, depression, drug abuse, and HIV/STDs. Its damaging effects have led to the creation of “ex-ex-gay” survivor groups.
Despite this growing tide of opposition, ex-gay therapy is not a thing of the past. Proposed youth bans similar to California’s and New Jersey’s have failed to pass in Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Washington, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Hawaii and Rhode Island. The Republican Party of Texas even endorses the practice in its draft 2014 platform.
In a press release regarding NARTH’s makeover, LGBT activist nonprofit Truth Wins Out (TWO) warns “not to be fooled” by the “cynical branding effort,” calling the group’s literature “anti-gay hate speech wrapped in medical language.” TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen calls ATCSI “the same old swine peddling junk science to desperate and vulnerable people.”
TWO’s press release also points out some of NARTH’s stranger recommendations: The group has encouraged clients to increase their manliness by drinking Gatorade and calling their friends “dude.”
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"Ex-Gay" Conversion Therapy Group Rebrands, Stresses "Rights of Clients"
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The Case Against Chlorinated Tap Water
Mother Jones
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The chlorination of municipal tap water is considered one of the 20th century’s best public health ideas. The American Water Works Association credits the practice with increasing life expectancy by 50 percent over the past century by virtually eliminating water-borne diseases such as typhoid fever and cholera. But chlorine in drinking water can cause health risks of its own. And while some of the of those risks, such as reactions with organic compounds that can yield toxic byproducts, are relatively well understood and managed, at least one has been largely overlooked: The effect of chlorinated drinking water on the beneficial bacteria in our guts.
The notion that our bodies’ 100 trillion bacteria act as a crucial internal ecosystem, a sort of sixth human organ, has only recently gained currency among mainstream scientists. Researchers now believe a lack of beneficial bacteria in the gut can trigger certain autoimmune diseases, among them diabetes, asthma, and even neurological conditions such as autism. Those conditions have spread in step with Western society’s war on germs, which has scorched our good bacteria along with the bad, throwing our bodies’ microbiomes off balance in the same way that a slashed and burned rainforest becomes susceptible to invasive weeds.
Jeff Leach is a leading microbiome researcher and founder of the American Gut Project, which aims to sequence the microbiomes of tens of thousands of Americans. Leach suspects that several factors may impede bacterial diversity in Americans, among them the profligate use of antibiotics, over-consumption of processed foods, and, at least to some extent, consumption of chlorine in tap water. “It’s something I’ve discussed with a number of other microbiologists,” he replied when I asked about the possibility. “In short, nobody has done the research, but we are certain that there is an impact.”
Based on studies of chlorine’s effects on human cells, the Environmental Protection Agency sets the safe level in drinking water at no more than four parts per million. Even that dilute level can wipe out lots other life forms, however, as anyone knows who has filled a goldfish bowl from the tap.
There’s no debate that chlorinating our water kills off a wide array of malignant bacteria—just try drinking the tap water in countries that don’t fully disinfect it. Much less is known, however, about chlorine’s effect on good bacteria that help preserve healthy digestive systems. We simply don’t know enough about the microbial ecosystem in the human gut to identify every type of bacteria that’s important, much less how well those bacteria survive when we guzzle mildly chlorinated tap water.
Still, some tangential research suggests cause for concern. A 1987 Toxicology study found that consumption of water with even fairly low levels of monochloramine, a commonly used disinfectant that persists in drinking water longer than chlorine, disrupted the immune systems of rats—a finding that’s notable given the strong link between the human immune system and gut microbes.
Chlorine in tap water is also known to kill microbes in soil—watch out, home gardeners!—though it doesn’t penetrate deep into the ground, and microbial populations typically bounce back quickly after watering.
Though the risks of chlorine in tap water might justify purchasing a low-cost home water filter that can remove it, it’s definitely premature to back off of requirements to chlorinate or otherwise disinfect municipal drinking water, as some Wisconsin state legislators proposed a few years ago.
“Chlorination has done tremendous good, so the default is to continue as is,” Martin Blaser, the director of the Human Microbiome Project, told me, “but whether or not there are subtler effects needs to be studied.”
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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.
Mother Jones
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From all of the commotion around the new federal school lunch standards, you’d think they were really Draconian. Republican legislators have railed against them. Districts have threatened to opt out. The School Nutrition Association (SNA), the industry group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food employees, has officially opposed some of them—and doubled its lobbying in the months leading up to July 1, when some of the new rules took effect.
Here’s who doesn’t mind the new standards: kids. For a study just published in the peer-reviewed journal Childhood Obesity, researchers asked administrators and food service staff at 537 public elementary schools how their students were liking the meals that conformed to the new standards. Half of those surveyed said that the students “complained about the meals at first,” but 70 percent said that the students now like the new lunches. Rural districts were the least enthusiastic about the new meals—there, some respondents reported that purchasing was down and that students were eating less of their meals. But respondents from schools with a high percentage of poor students—those with at least two-thirds eligible for free or reduced-price meals—were especially positive about the new standards: They found that “more students were buying lunch and that students were eating more of the meal than in the previous year.”
“Kids who really need good nutrition most at school are getting it,” says Lindsey Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author and a research scientist at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “That’s really good news.”
SNA’s response? To issue a statement declaring that “these reported perceptions about school meals do not reflect reality.” The group cites USDA data that participation in school meals has declined by 1.4 million since the new rules went into effect in 2012. But Turner, the Childhood Obesity study’s lead author, notes that this is only about a 3 percent drop. She also points to a Government Accountability Office study that found that most of the drop-off was among students who pay full price for lunch.
What makes SNA’s stance on the new rules even stranger is that they actually are not all that strict. For example: Foods served must be whole grain rich, but as I learned from my trip to SNA’s annual conference last week, that includes whole-grain Pop Tarts, Cheetos, and Rice Krispies Treats. Students are required to take a half cup of a fruit or vegetable—but Italian ice—in flavors like Hip Hoppin’ Jelly Bean—are fair game.
Not all members of SNA consider the task of tempting kids with healthy foods onerous. As I reported last week, Jessica Shelly, food director of Cincinnati’s diverse public schools, has shown that all it takes is a little creativity.
HT The Lunch Tray.
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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.
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