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Opinion
The MAHA Commission Won’t Fix Public Health or Our Food System
RFK Jr. sold out on pesticides, but we can course correct if as a society we reprioritize health and start making decisions that benefit people over corporate greed.
Oct 19, 2025
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. started talking about pesticides, a lot of people got their hopes up that someone might finally fix the broken food system. But instead he bowed to corporate oligarchy when he listened to Big Ag rather than recommending that we stop exposing ourselves to toxic pesticides. This toxic food system wasn’t always our reality, and it doesn’t have to be our future.
In the United States, it is the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) job to regulate pesticides. Pesticide manufacturers apply for registration of active ingredients by submitting research (often industry funded) claiming they are safe and effective when used as directed. EPA determines its registration decisions based on a risk assessment and other supporting documents, then a public comment period follows. However, EPA relies on industry-funded research for these decisions, when time and again we have seen the pesticide industry hide evidence that its products cause harm.
Take the herbicide paraquat for instance: Paraquat is a highly toxic pesticide; one teaspoon is enough to kill an adult. There is no antidote for paraquat poisoning. This herbicide is commonly used in the United States as weeds become increasingly resistant to glyphosate (the active ingredient in Bayer’s industrial formulation of Roundup™). Paraquat is banned for use in 72 countries. Exposure to paraquat has been increasingly associated with Parkinson’s disease and other chronic conditions like cancer, but Big Ag has successfully pushed back against calls to ban this pesticide in the US for decades.
But this issue is bigger than one chemical; there are hundreds of pesticides in use in this country, and all of them have the potential to cause harm. Be it weeds, bugs, rodents, or fungi, the purpose of these chemicals is to kill what they come in contact with. Our consolidated food system encourages farmers to prioritize quantity over crop diversity—meaning that the largest farms in this country are monoculture operations (farms growing one crop on massive swaths of land). One problem with monoculture is that the pest pressures are significant. It requires high inputs of agrichemicals; you either need a huge amount of labor to pull weeds and hand-pick pests, or you apply increasing quantities of synthetic pesticides to manage pests. Year over year, as farms use more and more pesticides, weeds and pests develop resistance, requiring more frequent application or resorting to stronger, more toxic formulations. This is a vicious cycle that traps farmers by keeping them on a “pesticide treadmill.”
Agorecology is an economically and ecologically viable alternative to our current food system’s foundation of extraction.
This monoculture, ultra-processed food system that relies heavily on toxic chemicals is also making us sick, with microplastics being found in our brains (plastic usage in agriculture is also a growing concern and a major contributor to microplastics in soil); PFAS contaminating our water (many pesticide formulations contain or are themselves PFAS); and children being exposed to pesticides in their backyards, at parks and schools, and in utero. At the same time, farmers are being squeezed by a system that makes it harder for small and medium-sized farms to make a living, with no protections in place except for the corporate players.
It wasn’t one thing that set us on the path to this reality where our food, water, soil, air, and bodies are contaminated with fossil fuel derived agrichemicals and microplastics; there were decisions and policies that over the course of only a few decades cornered us into this reality. The good news is that we can course correct if as a society we reprioritize health and start making decisions that benefit people over corporate greed.
A food system built on agroecology is one that doesn’t rely on agrichemicals to function and is therefore not captured by corporations. An agroecological food system in America looks like thriving and decentralized community food systems, where the people growing and consuming food have control over what goes into and comes out of their food system; grow food without reliance on agrichemical inputs or patented seeds; work with the environment rather than against it; and prioritize health, safety, and collective well-being.
Agorecology is an economically and ecologically viable alternative to our current food system’s foundation of extraction. It is actively practiced around the world, and it existed in what we now call the United States of America long before pesticides were introduced. Our job today is to shift our extractive mindsets to ones that prioritize health, in line with Indigenous wisdom.
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We Live in an Age of Public Bullying; What Can We Do About It?
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.”
Oct 19, 2025
Professor Emeritus Roddey Reid could have retired from the University of California San Diego to a life of deserved leisure. Instead, he has just published a handbook on "Political Intimidation and Public Bullying," which is increasingly dominating government, business, and civil society.
A guest this week on my radio show and podcast, Professor Reid was followed by Professor of Law Robert Fellmeth from the University of San Diego, a leading critic of unbridled anonymous speech fostered by Silicon Valley companies to boost profits.
Reid argues, Newt Gingrich launched this political onslaught in 1994 when he took over the GOP, led the Republicans to victory and became house speaker. “To be clear,” Reid continues, “political intimidation and public bullying are forms of psychological and physical political violence… meant to injure, humiliate, isolate, coerce, and even destroy opponents and entire communities.” These interviews should spark a civic rebellion.
The political intimidation operates in both open sight—from the belligerent bully-in-chief Donald Trump, and in the shadows with serious anonymous threats to members of Congress, judges, and their families. Combined, this viciousness has meant the difference in razor-thin votes in Congress. For example, the violent-talking, unfit secretary of defense being confirmed by the Senate. Other Trump nominees, who are also staggeringly inexperienced, totally obeisant to Trump’s wrecking of America in daily violation of the Constitution and federal laws, have also squeaked through Senate confirmation votes.
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Reid is systemic and illustrative in his fast-paced book titled Confronting Political Intimidation and Bullying–privately published to make it very up to date through August 2025. In his last chapter, he conveys 13 strategies for citizens to use locally in response.
Cumulatively, this mass “callout” could descend upon Congress and state legislatures for a more systemic regulatory agenda.
Such legislative activity in Sacramento, California is already taking place to deal with the central delivery mode of such bullying—ANONYMITY—according to Professor Fellmeth. A long-time advocate of curbing the dangers of internet anonymity, including to children. Fellmeth urges a decisive ban on most anonymous assaults, leaving open some exceptions for whistleblowers and others with a need to protect their privacy and self-defense. To accomplish this selectivity has to involve regulation of the Silicon Valley profiteers and electric child molesters, led by the duplicitous Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of META. His major declared mission is to drive people from reality and live their lives in his virtual reality. A quick safeguard is to require anonymous speech to be pursued by law enforcement when it embodies physical threats and deliberate psychological torture. Naming and prosecuting the perpetrator will serve as deterrent to other potential anonymous predators.
Moreover, Fellmeth, who has written several articles on AI’s rapidly intensifying damage to youngsters, wants a regulation mandating identifying AI creations as such to forewarn the public. (See Professor Fellmeth’s article: "AI is already harming our children. Are California lawmakers going to do something?" January 30, 2025).
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.” That means those attacked with nicknames need to counter with nicknames, rebutting phony allegations and revealing the brutal impacts of their bullying on innocent people and families in both red and blue states by the vicious and cruel Trumpsters. Otherwise, the “Big Lies” without rebuttals become soliloquies, and therefore believable to millions of people and influence millions of susceptible voters. (See our prescient and useable book Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.)
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
His latest vindictive cuts—some boomeranging against his own desired policies—were outlined in a recent Washington Post feature by lead reporter Hannah Natanson. His latest “firings”—suspended by a federal district judge in California–targeted services for students with disabilities, inspectors who check the defects of federal housing, and employees who help regulate hazardous waste and pollution, according to the Post. Frothing at the mouth, Trump called those fired “people that the Democrats want,” as if conservative Trump voters and their families want to breath and otherwise be exposed to dangerous pollutants. The same flailing dismissals will strike what the Post described “as vulnerable Americans–school children, low-income families, homeless people, and senior citizens.” Trump is steered by the seriously hateful Russell Vought, the White House Budget chief and preparer of the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s fascist dictatorship. It doesn’t matter that these and previous firings, without cause, are illegal in numerous ways. After all, didn’t Trump tell you in July 2019 that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President”?
Here is an illustration of the institutionally insane wielding of the axe by indiscriminate haters that is hurting Trump voters and families alongside their Democratic counterparts. Trump and Vought want to layoff “workers with top secret clearance responsible for monitoring and protecting the United States from biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.” Earlier Trump and Vought drastically cut federal health scientists, safety regulators, and critical benefit dispensers in the tens of thousands.
Another instance of mindlessly cutting federal support for slammed hard-pressed community colleges, the recipient of lavish praise by Trump over the years for their job training curricula.
He is betraying Trump voters, with regular treachery! It is time for the people to say, “Donald Trump, you are fired.” (See my May 2, 2025 column: “YOU’RE FIRED!”–GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP)
You can listen to these interviews on radio stations in central cities or by visiting RalphNaderRadioHour.com.
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Dispatches From the Winter of Our Discontent Against Woodside Energy's Carbon Bomb
It's been a winter in which our elected representatives still give primacy to commercial interests and the economy over the environment and cultural heritage of Western Australia.
Oct 19, 2025
“This year was a year of change, a year when secret fears come into the open, when discontent stops being dormant and changes gradually to anger. It wasn’t only in me… And it wasn’t only in the nation; the whole world stirred with restlessness and uneasiness as discontent moved to anger and anger tried to find an outlet in action, …” (John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961)
1 June
Winter 2025 begins with a still, sunny 23°C day in Perth, Western Australia (WA). It’s a reprieve from disgruntlement, discontent, and alarm about the state of the world, especially the genocide in Gaza and long war in Ukraine and, closer to home, the Australian environment minister’s "carbon bomb."
Four days earlier, and only two weeks after being sworn in as Australia’s new Environment Minister, Murray Watt announced his snap decision in favour of Woodside Energy’s bid to keep burning gas until 2070 at its North West Shelf (NWS) plant on the Burrup Peninsula in WA.
I’m still hoarse from chanting “Dis-rupt Bur-rup Hub!” to the rhythmic beat of Drummers for Climate Action at the dusk snap rally outside Parliament House the night before Watt gives conditional approval to Woodside’s "carbon bomb"—a fossil fuel project that will emit more than 1 billion tonnes of carbon pollution.
At home, it’s been a winter in which we witness the wanton destruction wrought upon WA’s native jarrah forests, endangered black cockatoos, fragile coral reefs, and ancient Indigenous rock art by rapacious mining companies.
Never mind the 500,000+ signatories to Greenpeace Australia’s petition to stop Woodside’s Burrup Hub expansion, the hundreds who called Watt’s office, and the thousands who emailed him to voice their objections in the week before his decision. Elections and environment ministers come and go, but none will stop the Woodside Energy juggernaut—Australia and WA’s second worst fossil fuels polluter, headed by American “Methane Meg” O’Neill, formerly of ExxonMobil.
3 June
Federal Cabinet meets in Perth, for the first time since the government was reelected in a landslide and since the March State election returned a Labor Government. Prime Minister (PM) Anthony Albanese responds to journalists’ questions about the NWS extension by emphasising the Government has a target for net-zero emissions (as if approving one of the top 10 fossil fuel polluting projects in the world will help us reach net zero by 2050). The PM sidesteps a question on community anxiety about the environmental impacts by saying he and the people of Karratha “support jobs and economic activities.” The NWS employs 900 people; 280 live locally in Karratha.
4 June
Conservation Council of WA holds another snap rally to protest Watt’s decision, coinciding with Cabinet’s visit. The invitation stipulates BYO “pots and pans and something to hit them with” (the pots and pans, that is, not the Cabinet ministers).
6 June
Three climate activists are fined $10,000 each for trying to take a “stink bomb” into Woodside’s 2023 AGM.
8 June
Premier Roger Cook defends WA’s rising greenhouse gas emissions since 2005, and the NWS extension, with the dubious claim that gas exports from the NWS help other countries decarbonise; spinning Woodside’s line.
20 June
I walk along the grassy banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan-Swan River between the new Boorloo (Perth) Bridge at the causeway and Matagarup (one-leg or knee deep) Bridge at the Optus Stadium, two kilometres upriver. The Whadjuk Noongar people know this place as Joorolup, from the time when there were jarrah forests here.
The Indigenous names for these new bridges co-exist with the naming rights of on-the-nose corporate giants that predominate our public infrastructure in this mining State. The Optus (Yes!) Stadium precinct includes the Chevron Parkland and BHP Boardwalk and Amphitheatre; Chevron and BHP are ranked, respectively, first and fifth of Australia’s "Dirty Dozen" carbon polluting companies.
29 June
For one week of winter, my husband and I go "down south." We’re 400 kilometres away in Walpole walking on the Bibbulmun Track through the tall Karri and Tingle forest—wilderness preserved by the WA Labor government’s decision 25 years ago to cease logging in old-growth forests.
1 July
Flinders Bay, Augusta: There’s a newborn Southern right whale calf with its mother. The marine biologist on the boat says it is unusual to see a calf so early in the whale migration season and a calf born in these cold waters is unlikely to survive to adulthood. It’s a bittersweet reminder of the fragility of our endangered species.
2 July
Driving home from the southwest to Perth on the Wilma Wadandi highway, we cross the Preston River and see the billowing smokestack of Alcoa’s 40 years old Wagerup Alumina Refinery to the east.
WA’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, Alcoa, like Woodside, has a voracious appetite for expansion. It wants to clear another 7,500 hectares of endemic jarrah-marri forest for bauxite mining—3,500 times the size of the 60,000-seat Optus Stadium.
Alcoa’s expansion would destroy up to 144,500 potential nesting trees for endangered black cockatoos—trees that can take up to 150 years to grow suitable hollows for cockatoos’ breeding, according to Birdlife Australia. Cockatoos’ foraging habitat will be lost for up to 11 years, at a time when starving Carnaby’s cockatoos are already being admitted to Perth Zoo for treatment.
The State’s Environmental Protection Authority received a record 59,000 public submissions on Alcoa’s proposal. So, will WA’s new environment minister halt the destruction of our native forests and endangered cockatoos’ habitat and food sources or will he enable their extinction, accelerated by an American-owned aluminium company?
10 July
A Disrupt Burrup Hub activist is fined for blocking access to Woodside’s NWS gas plant; the judge rejects her “climate emergency” defence.
12 July
News from Paris: Last night UNESCO approved Murujuga for World Heritage listing in recognition of its cultural value. Emissions are already damaging the ancient Indigenous rock engravings at Murujuga, adjacent to the NWS, according to eyewitness and measured evidence by local and eminent archaeologists. Minister Watt says he’s put the onus on Woodside to protect the one million Murujuga engravings, but how?
World Heritage listing should force the Government to protect the rock art to a higher standard, but will it?
12 August
World Heritage listed Ningaloo Reef and other reefs along the WA coastline are casualties of the worst marine heatwave ever recorded. It’s sad to see the extensive coral bleaching, caused by heat stress, and a “raging fever” in the case of Ningaloo which experienced temperatures up to 4°C warmer than usual. The Australian Institute of Marine Science attributes the damage to carbon-emissions induced climate change.
Obviously, World Heritage listing does not protect reefs (or rock art) from fossil fuels. That requires governments to stop recklessly approving new coal and gas developments. Will feverish and bleached corals on a possibly terminally-ill Ningaloo Reef give our governments pause for thought about Woodside’s plan to sink 50 gas wells near Scott Reef off the Kimberley coast?
17 August
Requiem for the Reefs held outside the Maritime Museum in Fremantle, which has an Open Day sponsored by Woodside the Reef-Wrecker! About 100 of us, including 3 of the 4 Greens members who now hold the balance of power in the WA Parliament, gather to mourn the bleaching of our once-colourful reefs. Voices for Climate sing; a violinist plays a lament at the edge of a mock reef; we hold up placards and chant, “Save Ningaloo. Save Scott Reef.”
22 August
In a fitting end to our Woodside winter of discontent, another court case goes Woodside’s way. Doctors for the Environment Australia loses its Federal Court case against the approval of Woodside’s Environment Plan for its Scarborough gas project—a floating platform from which to drill 21 wells 375 kilometres off the coast of the Pilbara with a pipeline to bring the gas onshore. Back in 2021, Woodside wanted to dump a 2,500-tonne mooring from a decommissioned floating oil rig next to Ningaloo.
31 August
Winter ends as it began with a deceptively sunny warm 225°C day in Perth.
A winter in which the world’s woes worsened. Israel continues bombing Gaza, and famine sets in. A winter in which Israel bombed Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. A winter in which America bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, and Iran fired missiles at the US military base in Qatar. A winter in which Russia continues its military invasion of Ukraine and still refuses peace talks. A dark violent winter.
At home, it’s been a winter in which we witness the wanton destruction wrought upon WA’s native jarrah forests, endangered black cockatoos, fragile coral reefs, and ancient Indigenous rock art by rapacious mining companies. A winter in which our elected representatives still give primacy to commercial interests and the economy over the environment and cultural heritage.
12 September
Wildflowers bloom on the banks of the Derbarl Yerrigan, and cygnets bob on its choppy waters on this windy spring day.
Australia’s environment minister confirms approval of Woodside’s NWS extension.
Winter is over, but our discontent lingers and deepens into anger.
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Words Are the First Weapon of War
The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized.
Oct 18, 2025
I sit here at my desk, looking out the window—and see someone walking through the parking lot. This is the most ordinary of moments. I shrug quietly. Life goes on.
My impulse is to stop writing the column here. That’s it. Nothing more to say. Life is totally fine and civilized and I’m here in the middle of it, growing old but giving no thought whatsoever to the darkness that lurks at humanity’s margins. Sure, the news covers that stuff, but what do I care? Things are fine where I live.
But the darkness tugs. I read the news. I know that hell consumes parts of the planet and certain lives have no safety—no value—whatsoever. Here’s a recent New York Times headline, as ordinary as the fact that someone was walking through the parking lot outside my window:
“U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says.”
Well, so what? They were transporting drugs. “The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects...”
To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them.
Minor news, right? But consider the complexity of the context that emerges from these words. The story is critical of President Donald Trump for bombing boats and claiming without evidence that they were transporting drugs meant to be sold to Americans. But there’s a quiet assumption here. By making the point that this was not a war zone, the story quietly leaves the assumption hanging that if it were a war zone—and the boat had been carrying officially declared American enemies—well, that would be a different matter.
War itself is unchallenged and accepted—certainly by the mainstream media (whatever is left of it). And also by the collective American, and perhaps global, norm. And here’s the problem. War is a 50-50 deal: There’s a good side and a bad side. And if you’re on the good side, the war you wage is just. That means you have the moral leeway to kill whomever you want... excuse me, “must.” This includes children.
But “permission to kill” is psychologically—indeed, spiritually—complex. It requires a further step, one that lets us off the hook from our own inner moral sensibility: We’re all humans. We are deeply alike. We are one.
The way around this emotional difficulty is simple: Dehumanize the enemy! It happens virtually automatically, as soon as a particular group is declared the enemy, i.e., “them.” But it requires linguistic assistance: The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Now it’s a weapon. Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized. Language is the initial weapon of war, and is an indispensable tool of those who wage it.
Indeed, dehumanization exists almost as though it’s part of who we are. I believe with all my heart that it is not part of the human DNA, but it sure seems to act like it is. To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them. We can just dismiss them.
Welcome to racism. Welcome to ethnicity. Welcome to borders, both political and religious. Welcome to us vs. them—the hole in the human heart.
In my lifetime, here in the USA—in the wake of World War II—the primary way to dehumanize someone, at home as well as abroad, was to declare them a communist. The term had instant power. Every leftist was a commie. They were taking over Hollywood, not to mention Washington. They were under our beds! Because of the existence of nuclear weapons, America’s powers-that-be wisely avoided going to war with the Soviet Union or China, but we nonetheless had the wherewithal to create the military-industrial complex here at home and engage in proxy wars, killing a few million people and, oh yeah, intensifying our long-term, unacknowledged war on Planet Earth itself.
Another dehumanization term that emerged from those wars was “collateral damage”—a unique form of dehumanization. Those who were collateral damage were not necessarily our enemies, just people in the vicinity of the just war we were waging. They were merely in the way. But the term did its job. It took the humanity away from anyone our bombs unintentionally eliminated and turned them into scrap metal at a junkyard.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, however... uh oh, now what? The communists were done with, but we still needed an enemy! Governing is so much harder without one. Enter the terrorists, our primo enemy of the last couple decades and a word with enormous potency. For instance, anyone who criticizes Israel for killing 70,000 Palestinians (or far, far more than that) is both pro-terrorist and antisemitic. The flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza is a terrorist operation.
And then, closer to home, we have the “illegals”—aliens, wetbacks—who are not just fleeing poverty and crossing the border into the USA, but invading it. Looks like we’ve got another war on our hands, folks.
I’m not worried about the guy I saw walking through the parking lot a little while ago, but what if he looked like an invader? Hey, ICE...
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