In the 50s the auto industry and smog, in the 60s tobacco and cancer, 70s Nestle’s and baby formula, 70s until now fossil fuels and climate change: We are fine, science is wrong, trust us. And now IT and 5-G tell us that NASA, FCC and Oceanic/atmospheric scientists are also wrong. Our 5-G is fine and won’t destroy your capacity to forecast weather. What could go wrong here? Lots.

Sen. John Pinto Dies at 94.  Sen. Pinto was the longest sitting member of the Roundhouse having become a Senator in 1977. A code talker during WW II, when he lost some of his hearing, he had long sought funding to create a Code Talker museum. And this year, Senators across the aisle contributed from their own discretionary public works funding to complete funding for the project. Good timing. For an excellent tribute to the Senator, click here.

Retake on KSFR with Speaker Brian Egolf. Today at 8:30am on KSFR 101.1 FM with an extended 15-20 minutes on the podcast available Sunday or Monday at KSFR.org, click on programs menu, scroll to podcasts, hunt down Retake Our Democracy and all our shows are there.

The 2019 Roundhouse Legislative Session: What Was Done, What Wasn’t and Why. Saturday, May 25 from 1:30-3:30pm at the Southwest Environmental Center, 275 Downtown Mall, Las Cruces. Retake Our Democracy is on a road to Truth or Consequences, Silver City and Las Cruces. At each stop a Community Meeting has been organized and hosted by local Retake volunteers. Today, co-founders Roxanne Barber and Paul Gibson will share what Retake learned from the legislative session, how good bills died, how specific committees served as ‘graveyards’ for bills that leadership did not want advanced, and who are the legislators most responsible for the demise of many, many good bills, particularly energy bills.

The Community Meeting will also serve as a “listening session” so that Retake can hear from locals about how the Alert Network worked for them, how it can be improved, and hear about local political, legislative, and social justice priorities. These visits are just the beginning of an ongoing effort to visit communities distant from Santa Fe, to learn the local issues, meet the local advocates, and to better hone Retake’s efforts to local political conditions. Finally, together we will discuss next steps related to the next 2020 Legislative Session and the June 2020 primaries and how we can best work together to advance the priorities of CD2 advocates. If you live in or near Las Cruces, please join us. If you know folks in Las Cruces, please share this with them. Many thanks to Don Kurtz for organizing the Las Cruces meeting!

For Decades Industry Lobbyists Have Produced
Fake Science to Allow Their Profits:  Now Another Chapter from the IT Industry 

An old Who song is resonating in my head:  “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”  But actually we’ve been fooled so often, I am not sure the song will hold true now either. At the end of the post is a YouTube video of an old Who performance of Won’t Get Fooled Again. Flashback time for music. More importantly flashback time for history:

• In the 50s the auto industry told us the smog in LA was an anomaly caused by the unique configuration of the mountains abutted to the sea. Smog had nothing to do with auto emissions. It wasn’t until 1974 that legislation was passed to force them to install catalytic converters. Meanwhile millions choked on toxic fumes.
• In the 60s the tobacco industry told us that medical researchers were wrong and millions died.
• In the 70s Nestle continued to market baby formula to third-world countries despite reports that the cost of formula was so high families were diluting the formula 2-3 times and slowly starving their babies. Nestle continued to market the formula as a way to become just like modern Americans, shaming them for breast feeding, and 1 million babies died every year.
• In the 70s and continuing to this day the fossil fuel industry, now aided by Fox, Trump and a slew of other politicos, continue to challenge established science and continue to “drill baby drill,” and now untold millions are climate refugees and all of humanity is in peril.

And there are oh so many other corporate offenses, from pharma and thalidomide, clothing and fire-retardant baby clothing, auto industry and the exploding Pinto, soft drinks and sweeteners, Roundup, and GMOs, and with time I could fill this page with one exploitation after another. In each instance, industry lobbyists paid for their own studies, hired their own talking head scientists and deluged the media with their reassurances.

In each instance, science-based remedies were dismissed as alarmist, job-costing, economy-sapping, liberal whining, nonsense. Except in each instance science was correct, liberals were correct for believing science, and  lobbyists, their corporations and the CEOs made millions, even billions, and mankind suffered. Ironically, liberals also suffered because now the liberal ‘brand” is viewed as some kind of marginalized bubble that exists in Berkeley, Madison, and Santa Fe. Not to overplay a recurring Retake theme, but all of this is pure capitalism, and you can try to regulate it, but the power brokers have their hands on all the levers and they have sufficient money to manipulate the media and pay off our politicians so that the corporate barons can make their profits while we suffer the consequences.

Here we go again. The Washington Post reported on a study conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the FCC that indicated that the 5-G network, while increasing transmission speeds by 100 times, could well set back weather event forecasts 40 years.

Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration testified before Congress and told them that 5G interference could set back weather forecasts 40 years. To give you an idea of what this could mean, this quote from the Post:

But, testifying before the House Science Committee on May 16, Jacobs told members of Congress that the interference could result in a 30 percent reduction in forecast accuracy. “If you look back in time to see when our forecast skill was roughly 30 percent less than it was today, it’s somewhere around 1980,″ he said.  With this reduced forecast skill, the European model would not have predicted 2012′s Superstorm Sandy hitting the Northeast coast several days in advance, Jacobs said. Instead, the model would have steered the storm out to sea. Lead time to prepare for the storm would have been cut short.

Do you remember Sandy and its devastating impact on the Northeast coast? Now imagine, if there had been no warning. It may have then killed millions, but those of us who were not impacted in other parts of the country could have at least uploaded video of their demise 100 times faster. Woo-hoo! 

Once again, we are finding capitalism at its worst. Every possible human advance becomes monetized, privatized and repackaged for our consumption after obscene levels of profit are injected into the cost of production.

And if we aren’t really feeling a need for something they want to sell us, they find a way to make us want it. Families in third world countries had lived for centuries content to rely on breastfeeding until Nestle’s barraged them with images of “advanced” and “sophisticated” life in the American middle class where women didn’t have to feed their babies with breast milk. Much better to buy our packaged product, dilute it and kill your baby. At least our shareholders are happy.

And if there is some significant risk involved in consuming their product, they lie about it and get scientists to back them up. They profit; we suffer.  And the really sick thing is that once science settles the matter, we continue to suffer, but the CEOs responsible for each tragedy continue to live in their privilege, fly their private jets, play golf, and move on. None have gone to jail or even been threatened with it. Yet, a black teenager can go to jail for being caught with marijuana, a hungry mother can be jailed for stealing $20 of groceries to feed her hungry child, and a homeless person can be jailed for sleeping in the park. 21st Century America.

And so now the merry-go-round is about to take us on another spin. Scientists from NASA, NOAA, and FCC tell us that 5-G interference will destroy our capacity to predict weather. But CTIA, the IT industry lobbyist association, is worried that scientist interference might disrupt their profit model and so, from the Post: CTIA unleashed a scathing rebuttal of the Jacobs’ assertion.  “It’s an absurd claim with no science behind it,” wrote Brad Gillen, CTIA’s executive vice president, in a blog post.  Gillen maintained that the NOAA claim relies on the study of a microwave sensor “that never went into use.” There are three things wrong with CTIA’s rebuttal: 

1. CTIA is an industry lobbyist with a financial stake in advancing 5-G;
2. Their claim of no “science behind it” rings pretty false as I am pretty certain NOAA, NASA and the FCC had employed actual scientists to do their study and those scientists do NOT have a financial stake in advancing 5-G; and
3. CTIA’s claims about the microwave sensor are entirely false, as while the precise sensor used was replaced the new sensor employs the same technology prone to the same interference. However, their injection of the microwave sensor language is their way of saying: ‘we understand this stuff; it is really technical;  the average person (that would be anyone not profiting from 5-G) couldn’t understand and so should just trust us.  Oh, there is one other thing wrong with CTIA’s rebuttal: we’ve heard it from similar assurances from the auto industry, Nestle, tobacco, fossil fuels and countless other industries. 

The capitalist merry-go-round is ready to take us for another profitable spin. Will we get fooled again?  To read the full Washington Post article, click here.  I received a link from an ABQ supporter this morning about an even more dangerous consequence of a 5-G network. Look for more on 5-G next week.

Home tonight. Yay.

In solidarity,

Paul & Roxanne

Categories: Climate Change, Agriculture, Land Use and Wildlife, Economic Justice, Community & Economic Development

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