Prairie Ramblings

By Tracy Sayler
Prairie Grains Editor
tsayler@prairieagcomm.com

www.activistcash.com
Profiling the Lunatic Fringe

One of Colorado’s big snowstorms this winter stranded as many as 340,000 head of cattle. Faced with 15-foot snowdrifts, National Guard units were called in to help ranchers in a frantic bid to save the animals, airlifting bales of hay.  The morning hosts of a Denver radio station called PETA to ask if the group would help feed and rescue the snowbound herds.

PETA sniffed it off – why help those animals? “You’re going to save them, and then in six months they’re going to be killed and end up on someone’s plate. So I don’t know that it’s really the most noble cause,” said a PETA person who took the call.

“It’s symbolic of what PETA stands for,” responded Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, dismissing them as “frauds” and “a bunch of losers.”

Kudos to the governor for calling a spade a spade. Too often the lunatic fringe gets a free pass, spouting off while the legitimacy of their own claims , rationale, and motivations go unchallenged.

That’s why I like www.activistcash.com, a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom, and where I learned about the PETA thing in Colorado.  ActivistCash.com is one of the few sources you can go on the Web for background information on a number of loony groups, and the foundations and celebrities who support them.  The profiles include information on financials and connections with other loonies.

Following are a few excerpts from some of the profiles on ActivistCash.com.  By the way, since this column does not necessarily represent the views of the associations which publish this magazine, offended fringe groupies should send their hate mail to me, or better yet the Center for Consumer Freedom, where this information is derived.

Environmental Working Group – Likes to advertise that it provides “cutting edge research on health and the environment,” but its pseudo -scientific ruses are generally meant to play into the hands of the multi-billion-dollar organic foods industry.  More than half of the press conferences held by EWG between 1993 and 2003 featured a leader of the Organic Trade Association right alongside EWG’s “scientific” analysts. EWG’s scientific reign of error and needless hyperbole includes a wealth of misinformation and seemingly intentional deceit – all of it calculated to tarnish the public image of agricultural pesticides and promote organic foods as “the solution.”

Organic Consumers Association – The Organic Consumers Association seems bent on disparaging any form of agriculture or food supply that isn’t 100% organic.  OCA was founded by anti-technology zealot Jeremy Rifkin and originally bore the name “Pure Food Campaign.”  OCA works alongside the Chefs Collaborative, Center for Food Safety, and Friends of the Earth on the “Keep Nature Natural” campaign, which is designed to disparage genetically improved foods. This campaign gets its operating funds from several organic marketers, including Whole Foods Market and Eden Foods.  OCA has joined with Public Citizen and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in opposing potentially lifesaving food -irradiation technology.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine –  A wolf in sheep’s clothing, PCRM is a fanatical animal rights group that seeks to remove eggs, milk, meat, and seafood from the American diet, and to eliminate the use of animals in scientific research. Despite its operational and financial ties to other animal activist groups and its close relationship with violent zealots, PCRM has successfully duped the media and much of the general public into believing that its pronouncements about the superiority of vegetarian-only diets represent the opinion of the medical community.

“Less than 5 percent of PCRM’s members are physicians,” Newsweek wrote in February 2004.  The American Medical Association (AMA), which actually represents the medical profession, has called PCRM a “fringe organization” that uses “unethical tactics” and is “interested in perverting medical science.”

Often appearing in a lab coat, PCRM president Neal Barnard looks the part of a mainstream health expert. But Barnard was trained as a psychiatrist, not a nutritionist. His nutritional advice boils down to one basic message: don’t eat meat, or anything that comes from animals.  Barnard is PETA’s “medical advisor” and regularly writes for PETA’s publications.

Union of Concerned Scientists – The Union of Concerned Scientists was originally born out of a protest against the war in Vietnam. Whether it’s energy policy or agricultural issues, UCS’s “experts” are routinely given a free pass from newspaper reporters and television producers when they claim that mainstream science endorses their radical agenda. UCS routinely abuses and politicizes science. Its crusade against farm animals receiving antibiotics, presents guesswork as scientifically rigorous analysis, and is calculated to scare the public about risks it admits are groundless.

At UCS, politics drives science – not the other way around. “We undervalue our scientists and agriculturalists if we accept today’s productive, but highly polluting agriculture,” UCS claims. Of course, UCS advocates organic-only agriculture, the widespread adoption of which (at today’s anemic levels of production) would result in mass starvation. So in this instance, some form of technology will surely have to save the day, even for organic farmers. But when it comes to something UCS opposes – like missile defense – they argue that the technology will never work.

Western Organization of Resource Councils – WORC serves as the parent corporation for a collection of seven sub-groups in Wyoming, Oregon, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, and the Dakotas (including the Dakota Resource Council, also profiled online at ActivistCash.com).  WORC fights feedlots in Wyoming. It pushed a ballot initiative in South Dakota that hamstrings hog farmers. Over the border in North Dakota WORC pushes for unnecessary restrictions on genetically improved wheat. The WORC officers are convinced that corporations are bad – unless they’re tax-exempt corporations like WORC and its subsidiaries. WORC is also firmly against “outside influences” in rural agriculture. Judging from the organization’s prevailing rhetoric, outsiders like large-scale farmers, mining companies, and energy corporations are to be excoriated and labeled as profiteering pirates. Of course, out-of-state foundation officers bearing six-figure grants to WORC and its affiliates are perfectly fine – those outside influences are kind and visionary.