Genetically modified crops' results raise concern

Carolyn Lochhead

Thursday May 24, 2012

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Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

A harvester works through a field of genetically modified corn near Santa Rosa. Approval of a new corn may lead to heavy use of a 1940s-era herbicide.

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Washington -- 

Biotechnology's promise to feed the world did not anticipate "Trojan corn," "super weeds" and the disappearance of monarch butterflies.

But in the Midwest and South - blanketed by more than 170 million acres of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton - an experiment begun in 1996 with approval of the first commercial genetically modified organisms is producing questionable results.

Those results include vast increases in herbicide use that have created impervious weeds now infesting millions of acres 

of cropland, while decimating other plants, such as milkweeds that sustain the monarch butterflies. Food manufacturers are worried that a new corn made for ethanol could damage an array of packaged food on supermarket shelves.

Some farm groups have joined environmentalists in an attempt to slow down approvals of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, as a newly engineered corn, resistant to another potent herbicide, stands on the brink of approval.

Vote on labels

In November, Californians are likely to vote on a ballot initiative to require labeling of genetically engineered foods, which backers of the measure say would give consumers a voice over the technology that they lack now.

The initiative is part of a nationwide drive to thwart the Obama administration's expected clearance of a new genetically modified corn that could flood the nation's cornfields with 2,4-D, a 1940s-era herbicide used mainly on lawns and golf courses to kill broadleaf weeds.

More than a million people have signed a petition to the Food and Drug Administration to require labeling of genetically engineered food. That is "more than twice the number who have ever commented on any food petition in the history of the FDA," said Gary Hirshberg, chairman of organic yogurt maker Stonyfield and a leader of the "Just Label It" campaign.

The stakes on labeling such foods are huge. The crops are so widespread that an estimated 70 percent of U.S. processed foods contain engineered genes. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved more than 80 genetically engineered crops while denying none.

Mushy corn feared

Organic farmers have long fought the spread of such crops, fearing pollen contamination of their fields. Environmentalists have warned of long-term health and environmental effects.

Now, even biotech supporters fear collateral damage. Vegetable growers warn of plant-killing fogs that they say will accompany the new genetically modified corn. Snack and cereal makers fear that a new corn engineered for ethanol may escape its fields and turn their corn chips and breakfast cereals to mush.

Midwest fruit and vegetable growers this month petitioned the Department of Agriculture to block approval of the 2,4-D-tolerant corn, called Enlist and made by Dow AgroSciences. Similar crops, including a soybean engineered by Monsanto to tolerate dicamba, a similar herbicide, wait in the regulatory pipeline.

Current forms of the herbicides are prone to vaporization and can travel miles from their target, falling back to Earth with rain or fog. Vegetable growers predict the new corn will unleash rampant use of 2,4-D and dicamba, potentially damaging every broadleaf plant in their path other than those engineered to tolerate them.

"Suddenly we are looking at a very dangerous system, because more dangerous herbicides in America are going to be far more extensively used," said John Bode, executive director of the Save Our Crops Coalition, a group working to protect nontargeted plants from herbicides. It has asked the USDA to conduct a full environmental impact analysis.

Preliminary OK

The USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which has chief regulatory authority over genetically engineered crops, has given a preliminary recommendation that the new corn be fully commercialized without restriction.

Michael Gregoire, who heads the agency, said any genetically modified crop that does not meet the definition of a "plant pest," which attacks other plants, falls outside the agency's authority.

"Once we determine that a genetically engineered plant is not a plant pest based on a risk assessment, our jurisdiction and our authority to continue to regulate that ends," Gregoire said.

The Environmental Protection Agency has found that 2,4-D poses "a reasonable certainty of no harm," but will evaluate the effects of using it with genetically modified crops later in the growing season after plants have leafed out and temperatures are higher.

If approved, the new corn could be planted as early as next spring. Charles Benbrook - a former head of the agriculture board of the National Academy of Sciences who is chief scientist of the Organic Center, a Colorado group that researches the environmental benefits of organic farming - projects a 1,435 percent increase in the amount of 2,4-D applied, or 283 million pounds, within seven years.

Hardier weeds evolve

Corn and soybean farmers are clamoring for the new genetically engineered crops because those now in use have spawned an infestation of "super weeds" now covering at least 13 million acres in 26 states. The crops are engineered to tolerate glyphosate, commonly known by its Monsanto trademark Roundup. They greatly simplified weed control by allowing farmers to apply the herbicide to their fields yet leave their corn and soybeans unharmed.

The crops led to a 400-million-pound net increase in herbicide applications throughout corn, soybean and cotton growing regions, according to Benbrook.

The resulting overexposure to glyphosate encouraged the evolution of hardier weeds that can tolerate it. Dave Mortensen, a weed ecologist at Pennsylvania State University, said the number of "super weed" species grew from one in 1996, when genetically modified crops were introduced, to 22 today.

Scientists warn that the next generation of genetically modified crops will likewise encourage overuse of 2,4-D and dicamba, creating still hardier weeds that can tolerate virtually every herbicide on the market.

"It's like pouring gasoline on a fire," Benbrook said.

"We're talking about a lot of pesticide," Mortensen said. "Whether it moves as a vapor or physical drift or surface water runoff or comes down in rainwater, the more of something you use, the greater the likelihood you will see it appearing in places where you did not apply it."

Mortensen worries that 2,4-D and dicamba will damage not just fruit and vegetable crops, but also wild plants on field edges that harbor pollinators. In the Midwest, where there is little plant diversity, "those field edges become critically important reservoirs for hosting beneficial insects," Mortensen said.

Butterflies in decline

55 Interesting Facts About The U.S. Economy In 2012

FEBRUARY 23, 2012

How is the U.S. economy doing in 2012?  Unfortunately, it is not doing nearly as well as the mainstream media would have you believe.  Yes, things have stabilized for the moment but this bubble of false hope will not last for long.  The long-term trends that are ripping our economy and our financial system to shreds continue unabated.  When you step back and look at the broader picture, it is hard to deny that we are in really bad shape and that things are rapidly getting worse.  Later on in this article you will find a list of interesting facts that show the true state of the U.S. economy.  Hopefully many of you will find this list to be a useful tool that you can share with your family and friends.  Each day the foundations of our economy crumble a little bit more, and we need to wake up as many Americans as we can to what is really going on while there is still time.  We have accumulated way too much debt, we consume far more wealth than we produce, millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, our big cities are decaying, family budgets are being squeezed more than ever, poverty is rampant and we have raised several generations of Americans that expect the government to fix all of their problems.  The U.S. economy is at a crossroads, and the decisions that the American people make in 2012 are going to be incredibly important.

The statistics listed below are presented without much commentary.  They pretty much speak for themselves.

After reading this list, it will be hard for anyone to argue that we are on the right track.

The following are 55 interesting facts about the U.S. economy in 2012….

#1 As you read this, there are more than 6 million mortgages in the United States that are overdue.

#2 In January, U.S. home prices were the lowest that they have been in more than a decade.

#3 In Florida right now, some drivers are paying nearly 6 dollars for a gallon of gas.

#4 On average, you could buy about 10 gallons of gas for an hour of work back in the mid-90s.  Today, the average hour of work will get you less than 6 gallons of gas.

#5 Sadly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year.

#6 According to Gallup, the unemployment rate was at 8.3% in mid-January but rose to 9.0% in mid-February.

#7 The percentage of working age Americans that have jobs is not increasing.  The employment to population ratio has stayed very steady (hovering between 58% and 59%) since the beginning of 2010.

#8 If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States into one nation, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the entire world.

#9 When Barack Obama first took office, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in the United States was approximately 2.6 million.  Today, that number is sitting at 5.6 million.

#10 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is hovering close to an all-time record high.

#11 According to Reuters, approximately 23.7 million American workers are either unemployed or underemployed right now.

#12 There are about 88 million working age Americans that are not employed and that are not looking for employment.  That is an all-time record high.

#13 According to CareerBuilder, only 23 percent of American companies plan to hire more employees in 2012.

#14 Back in the year 2000, about 20 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.  Today, about 5 percent of all jobs in America are manufacturing jobs.

#15 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#16 Amazingly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001.

#17 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.

#18 During the Obama administration, worker health insurance costs have risen by 23 percent.

#19 An all-time record 49.9 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all at this point, and the percentage of Americans covered by employer-based health plans has fallen for 11 years in a row.

#20 According to the New York Times, approximately 100 million Americans are either living in poverty or in “the fretful zone just above it”.

#21 In the United States today, corporate profits are at an all-time high.  The percentage of Americans that are living in “extreme poverty” is also at an all-time high according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

#22 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#23 The poorest 50 percent of all Americans now collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#24 The number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent since 2007.

#25 According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

#26 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 46 million.

#27 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages.  According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.

#28 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.  Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

#29 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#30 After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago.

#31 According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark at some point in 2012.  If you went out right now and starting spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#32 Today, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.

#33 Incredibly, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#34 The average interest rate on a credit card that is carrying a balance is now up to 13.10 percent.

#35 Of the U.S. households that do have credit card debt, the average amount of credit card debt is an astounding $15,799.

#36 Overall, Americans are carrying a grand total of $798 billion in credit card debt.  If you were alive when Jesus was born and you spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent $798 billion by now.

#37 It may be hard to believe, but the truth is that consumer debt in America has increased by a whopping 1700% since 1971.

#38 At this point, about 70 percent of all auto purchases in the United States involve an auto loan.

#39 In the United States today, 45 percent of all auto loans are made to subprime borrowers.

#40 Mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP has more than tripled since 1955.

#41 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.

#42 To get the same purchasing power that you got out of $20.00 back in 1970 you would have to have more than $116 today.

#43 When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was going for about $850.  Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1700 an ounce.

#44 The number of Americans that are not paying federal incomes taxes is at an all-time high.

#45 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits.  Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#46 The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

#47 During 2012, the U.S. government must roll over nearly 3 trillion dollars of old debt.

#48 The U.S. debt to GDP ratio has now reached 101 percent.

#49 At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,419,800,222,325.15.

#50 The U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

#51 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

#52 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#53 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.

#54 Right now, the U.S. national debt is increasing by about 150 million dollars every single hour.

#55 Spending by the federal government accounted for about 2 percent of GDP back in 1800.  It accounted for 23.8 percent in 2011, and according to former U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker, it will account for 36.8 percent of GDP by 2040.

Bad news, eh?

But it isn’t just our economy that is decaying.

We are witnessing a tremendous amount of social decay as well.  As I wrote about the other day, America is rapidly decomposing right in front of our eyes.

When the water level of a river drops far enough, it will reveal rocks that have been hidden from view for a very long time.  Well, a similar thing is happening in America right now.  For decades, our debt-fueled prosperity has masked a lot of the social decay that has been going on.

But now that our prosperity is evaporating, a lot of frightening stuff is being revealed.

Unfortunately, another major financial crisis is rapidly approaching and economic conditions in the United States are going to get a lot worse.

So what is our country going to look like when that happens?

That is a very good question.

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Obama's Virtual Economy

It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.

• By DANIEL HENNINGER

If you were a president who for three years presided over an economy with more than 13 million unemployed, a growth rate gasping around 2%, an historic credit downgrade and underwater home mortgages drifting like icebergs toward the American Titanic, what would you do?

You'd do what Barack Obama's done: Reboot.

Related Video

Welcome to the Sim City Economy. You really can make it up.

Listen to the Podcast

With his recently announced campaign platform—An Economy Built to Last—President Obama has essentially constructed a virtual economy. Instead of the economy we all live in, he's making one up and inviting us to pretend we are living in it. Welcome to the Sim City Economy.

Sim City, one of the most popular products ever in the imaginary world of video games, lets players bring to life towns of their own devising in great detail. It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.

In his State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama described what will be a major claim of his re-election campaign—that he renewed the American dream by bailing out General Motors. About the defensibility of this policy we can argue. But as is his wont, Mr. Obama erected a generalized theory of social betterment atop this one event. "What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries." Mr. Obama announced. "It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh."

It can?

What's interesting about this claim is that the corridor between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, much of it economically moribund for years, is experiencing a rebirth thanks to real economic forces, not a president who types in the name of another beleaguered city and hits Ctrl-Shift-Enter to solve its problems.

Most of this revival is taking place around the godforsaken city of Youngstown, Ohio, and the formerly dying steel towns west of Pittsburgh, an area better known today as the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Field. Last summer, a French steel company, Vallourec & Mannesmann Holdings Inc., began construction on a new $650 million plant to make steel tubes for the hydraulic fracking industry. About 400 workers are building it. Nothing Barack Obama has done in three years—not the $800 billion stimulus or anything in his four, $3 trillion-plus budgets—is remotely related to the better times in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But other than grudging acknowledgment of the private entrepreneurs' natural-gas success, don't expect to hear the carbon-based word "fracking" much in the president's stump speech when he paints in the numbers of the American economy as he imagines it. That pitch will run more toward the ideas in the Presidential Memorandum released this Tuesday, directing the Department of Agriculture to put in motion a program called "Promoting a Bioeconomy."

Enlarge Image

Chad Crowe

The Obama Bioeconomy will come to life after the Ag Department "increases the purchase of biobased products" under a program that originated in the 2002 farm bill. After mandating a 50% increase in products designated as biobased, "items like paints, soaps and detergents . . . are developed from farm grown plants, rather than chemicals or petroleum bases." This, the president says, "will drive innovation and economic growth and create jobs at marginal cost to the American public."

You can't make this up. On the other hand, that's the point: You can make this up, and then sell it, or try to sell it, as An Economy Built to Last.

The announcement Tuesday of the impending Bioeconomy was of course overwhelmed that day by the president's White House speech celebrating Congress's one-year extension of his payroll tax cut. This was the biggest economic policy event in Washington the past two months. The president himself announced the payoff for the American people: "It means $40 extra in their paycheck." Sounds real, but barely.

Moments later, he drew attention to an initiative "we passed" that will "create jobs by expanding wireless broadband and ensuring that first responders have access to the latest lifesaving technologies." When Newt makes claims like this, he's nuts; with Barack Obama, it's a vision.

A cynic might argue that none of these pretend ideas for reviving a $15 trillion economy in the second term matters much because the lasting damage was done in the first term, with ObamaCare's redo of the health sector—16% of the economy—and Dodd-Frank, which even the bureaucrats asked to write things like the Volcker Rule admit they can't figure out.

A cynic might say further that much of what Mr. Obama is outputting from his laptop for the next four years are pop-gun ideas or phantom tax policy. The Buffett Rule will never become a real law. On Wednesday Mr. Obama proposed an array of corporate tax changes—some up, some down—but as the reporting noted repeatedly, with virtually "no specifics." Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The scheme to revive manufacturing—taxes overseas that are reprogrammed into domestic hires—would challenge even Sim City's programmers.

Cynical resignation and a president living in a videogame economy aren't what the U.S. needs at this turn in history. The biggest burden on this week's two Republican front-runners, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, will be to describe—in detail—what really happened to the U.S. economy the past three years. Against that reality, Mr. Obama will repeat until November that he wants an economy "where everyone plays by the same set of rules." If he's writing them, it may not compute.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

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Obama fails to deliver on deficit promise

FEBRUARY 23, 2012

Now that President Obama has gotten the platitudes out of the way, let’s see the real budget — one that combines necessary fiscal discipline with selected spending that will move the United States forward.

The spending end of his budget shows vision on the latter. His $3.8 trillion proposal also claims to reduce the deficit in the short run, assuming it is based on numbers that even come close to reality — a broad assumption; this is politics — and also cut it as a percentage of the gross domestic product within five years. But the national debt would continue to grow to $19.2 trillion by 2022. That’s the wrong direction.

The budget aims to increase spending for education, job creation and infrastructure improvements, all of which are connected on some level. He is right that we cannot “cut our way to growth” and that we must not allow our roads, bridges and institutions to deteriorate. But …

Obama promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, a promise this budget does not keep. It does cut the deficit to $901 billion next year and to $612 billion by 2017 (down from this year’s projected $1.3 trillion). His budget aims to do that in part by raising taxes, especially on people with the highest incomes.

In a column published below, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls it a nonstarter — even Senate Democrats, who sit in the majority in that chamber, are balking. Republicans, pushing back against anything that could be construed as a tax increase, have effectively declared the plan dead on arrival.

Critics have a point that Obama’s budget recommendation is more than likely a campaign platform than a spending proposal with a realistic chance of getting through Congress. The Republican budget effort, led by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, may have more than a hint of election-season flavor, too, and neither is likely to stand much chance of passage as written.

The budget fight promises to be contentious, pitting Republicans’ stated mission to slash government spending — the consequences of which would fall hardest on the lower and middle classes — against Democratic pressure and widespread public support for measures to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Neither side has shown willingness to consider the reality that reducing the debt will take a combination of spending cuts and new revenue, including possible tax increases or expiration of President George W. Bush’s tax cut for the wealthy.

And there has been little if any movement toward meaningful debt-reduction talks since the issue came to a head last year over Obama’s proposal to increase the debt ceiling. A similar confrontation looms just around the corner.

The Bowles-Simpson commission provided a road map for cutting the debt, even if almost every American might have found something unpalatable in it. But this was a serious attempt to address a problem that, uncorrected, will pose a real risk to our economic and, possibly, national security. We may not be Greece, but we got a wake-up call when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating last year.

In an election year, when Republicans’ No. 1 goal is to make Obama a one-term president and his goal is to win another four years in the White House, it’s hard to imagine that any progress is possible.

In a small step in the right direction, it does appear that House and Senate negotiators have reached a compromise on extending the payroll tax. It would be good to see that cooperation extend into other areas where the two sides share some common ground.

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Obama gives Oil-Rich Islands to Russia! Bush, 

Clinton and Obama all responsible

By Joe Miller

The Obama administration, despite the nation’s economic woes, effectively killed the job-producing Keystone Pipeline last month. The Arab Spring is turning the oil production of Libya and other Arab nations over to the Muslim Brotherhood. Iraq is distancing itself from the U.S. And everyone recognizes that Iran, whose crude supplies are critical to the European economy, will do anything it can to frustrate America’s strategic interests. In the face of all of this, Obama insists on cutting back U.S. oil potential with outrageous restrictions.

Part of Obama’s apparent war against U.S. energy independence includes a foreign-aid program that directly threatens my state’s sovereign territory. Obama’s State Department is giving away seven strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands to the Russians. Yes, to the Putin regime in the Kremlin.

The seven endangered islands in the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea include one the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The Russians are also to get the tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabeds surrounding the islands. The Department of Interior estimates billions of barrels of oil are at stake.

The State Department has undertaken the giveaway in the guise of a maritime boundary agreement between Alaska and Siberia. Astoundingly, our federal government itself drew the line to put these seven Alaskan islands on the Russian side. But as an executive agreement, it could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by President Obama or Secretary Clinton.

The agreement was negotiated in total secrecy. The state of Alaska was not allowed to participate in the negotiations, nor was the public given any opportunity for comment. This is despite the fact the Alaska Legislature has passed resolutions of opposition – but the State Department doesn’t seem to care.

The imperiled Arctic Ocean islands include Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette and Henrietta. Wrangel became American in 1881 with the landing of the U.S. Revenue Marine ship Thomas Corwin. The landing party included the famed naturalist John Muir. It is 3,000 square miles in size.

Northwest of Wrangel are the DeLong Islands, named for George Washington DeLong, the captain of USS Jeannette. Also in 1881, he discovered and claimed these three islands for the United States. He named them for the voyage co-sponsor, New York City newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. The ship’s crew received a hero’s welcome back in Washington, and Congress awarded them gold medals.

In the Bering Sea at the far west end of the Aleutian chain are Copper Island, Sea Lion Rock and Sea Otter Rock. They were ceded to the U.S. in Seward’s 1867 treaty with Russia.

Now is the time for the Obama administration to stand up for U.S. and Alaskan rights and invaluable resources. The State Department’s maritime agreement is a loser – it gives us nothing in return for giving up Alaska’s sovereign territory and invaluable resources. We won the Cold War and should start acting like it.

The Obama administration must stop the giveaway immediately.

Author’s addendum, Feb. 17, 2012: This is not a new issue. In fact the Bush and Clinton administrations are directly at fault for the same inaction. A maritime agreement negotiated by the U.S. State Department set the Russian boundary on the other side of the disputed islands, but no treaty has ratified this action. Consequently, it is within the president’s power to stop this giveaway. The Alaska delegation’s failure to put pressure on the administration is inexplicable. State Department Watch, an organization that assisted with this article, has confronted each administration and is currently confronting the Obama administration — and has been met by silence. I’m hoping this piece will help reinvigorate efforts to stop this handover.

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Joe Miller was the 2010 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Alaska. He is a West Point graduate and decorated combat veteran from the first Gulf War. A former judge, Joe graduated from Yale Law School and was later awarded an advanced economics degree from the University of Alaska. He is presently chairman of Restoring Liberty Alaska PAC and Restoring Liberty Action Committee. Follow Joe at Facebook and Twitter.

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