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Fluoride: The Details

ETS!,

From the extensive research that I have done on brittle bones (my 10-year-old daughter has Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis) I keep coming up with the same conclusion: fluoride. Over 70% of North America is fluoridated and the numerous studies done on the risks of fluoride have been overshadowed by the one and only possible benefit. Fewer cavities in teeth.

Fluoride settles in the bones as well as the teeth. It hardens the bones to the point of being brittle. Studies done on hip fractures and osteoporosis in the elderly (Journal of the American Medical Ass'n, July 24 1990) have proven this. It has also been directly linked to bone cancer in young men, (New Jersey Department of Health study, "A Brief Report on the Association of Drinking Water Fluoridation and the Incidence of Osteosarcoma Among Young Males" by Dr. Perry Cohn, PHD., November 8, 1992.)

I could go on about the risks of fluoridation, including decreased IQs in children, motor dysfunction, learning disabilities in humans, Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Vol.17, no.2, 1995; but until we are relaxing in our LazyBoy recliners, watching reruns of Seinfield and a Brita commercial comes on advertising that they have a water filtration system that rids drinking water of the toxin called fluoride, very few will take notice, not to mention believe that something the U.S. Public Health Service has been condoning and dumping in our water supplies for the past 50 years, would be harmful to us. Fluoride is a toxic byproduct of aluminum and fertilizer manufacturing.

An extremely brief history on fluoride and fluoridation, compiled from New York based health writer, Joel Griffiths' article Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy, (complete text at http://www.southshore.com/%7Efisher/Fluoride.htm). Throughout industry's "roaring '20s," the U.S. Public Health Service was under the jurisdiction of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of ALCOA. In 1931, the year Mellon stepped down, a Public Health Service dentist named H. Trendley Dean was dispatched to certain remote towns in the West where drinking water wells contained high concentrations of natural fluoride from deep in the earth's crust. Dean's mission was to determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without obvious damage to their teeth, a matter of considerable concern to ALCOA. Dean found that teeth in these high fluoride towns were discolored and eroded, but he also reported that they appeared to have fewer cavities than average. He cautiously recommended further studies to determine whether a lower level of fluoride in drinking water might reduce cavities without simultaneously damaging bones and teeth, where fluoride settles in humans and other animals.

Back at the Mellon Institute, ALCOA's Pittsburgh industrial research lab, this news was galvanic. ALCOA-sponsored biochemist Gerald J. Cox immediately fluoridated some lab rats in a study and concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and that: "The case should be regarded as proved." In a historic moment in 1939, the first public proposal that the U.S. should fluoridate its water supplies was made not by a doctor, or dentist, but by Cox, an industry scientist working for a company threatened by fluoride damage claims. Cox began touring the country, stumping for fluoridation.

Initially, many doctors, dentists, and scientists were cautious and skeptical, but then came World War II, during which industry's fluoride pollution increased sharply because of stepped-up production and the extensive use of ALCOA aluminum in aircraft manufacture.

Meanwhile, back at ALCOA, Oscar R. Ewing, a long-time ALCOA lawyer who had recently been named the company's chief counsel with fees in the then-astronomical range of $750,000 a year, arrived in Washington. Ewing was presumably well aware of ALCOA's fluoride litigation problem. He had handled the company's negotiations with the government for the building of its wartime plants.

In 1947, Ewing was appointed head of the Federal Security Agency (later HEW), a position that placed him in charge of the Public Health Service (PHS). Under him, a national water fluoridation campaign rapidly materialized, spearheaded by the PHS. The government's official reason for this unscientific haste was "popular demand." And indeed, many had become so wild for fluoridation that the government claimed it wasn't fair to deny them the benefits. By then, in fact, much of the nation was clamoring for fluoridation. This enthusiasm was not really surprising, considering Oscar Ewing's public relations strategist for the water fluoridation campaign was none other than Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays. Bernays, known as "the father of public relations," pioneered the application of his uncle's theories to advertising and government propaganda. The government's fluoridation campaign was one of his most stunning and enduring successes.

Evidence that industrial fluoride has been killing and crippling not only cows but human beings has existed at least since the 1930s. The government has not only dismissed the danger and left industry free to pollute, but it has promoted the intentional addition of fluoride, most of which is recycled industrial waste, to the nation's drinking water.

I have, in my possesion, hundreds of studies that have been done on the risks to human health because of fluoridation, many of them U.S. and Canadian government studies and publications. I will send the URL's to anyone interested. The publications by the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services are available only on request from the government, but I can give you the contact addresses for these publications, on request. Please e-mail me at LoveOwen@aol.com with the subject "Fluoride" or "ETS!."

Sincerely,

--Theresa M. Sents, Renton

Those Durn Furriners

Dear Mr. Parrish,

I've been reading ETS! for a while. I enjoy it, but one area I don't understand is your position on immigration.

I don't see how hundreds of thousands of people crossing our border annually is in our interests, unless we are employers looking for a plentiful supply of cheap, easily-intimidated labor.

I like the idea of very tight restrictions on not only immigrants (from all continents), but also on all forms of U.S. government support for both documented and undocumented workers and their dependents. I also think U.S. citizenship requirements should be tighter.

Please explain why this is virulent xenophobia.

Sincerely,

Margaret Bartley, Bellevue

G.P. replies: It's not necessarily "virulent xenophobia." I used that phrase to describe Pat Buchanan and his eagerness to build enormous, symbolic but useless walls on the Mexican border, encourage vigilante help for the Border Patrol, and both militarize and dramatically expand harassment of brown people, any brown people, in border states. The real place U.S. jobs are lost isn't in the fields or factories here: it's in Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, and all the other countries U.S.-based corporations relocate or subcontract facilities to so as to take advantage of still cheaper, more easily intimidated labor. The issue, then, isn't the job loss; it's that THEY are HERE. That's xenophobia. It's also classist; our country's laws are set up to encourage the wealthy to immigrate to the U.S., and discourage everyone else. (This seems backwards to me, as the rich ones tend to be the sociopaths.)

I don't know what ETS!'s "position" on "immigration" is; my personal belief is that there shouldn't be any immigration, because there shouldn't be any borders. We're now in a situation where corporations often have complete freedom to shift their resources among jurisdictions, depending on where they can get the lowest taxes, most corporate welfare, most pliant labor force, and so on. Borders at this point don't exist for goods or companies--only for humans. That's a direct legal subsidy through which corporations can isolate and manipulate labor forces. We should have the right to move, too. Moving to another country should be no more significant legally than moving to another state.

It's also fair to point out that immigrants, legal or not, aren't "easily intimidated" because they're docile--quite the opposite, it takes guts to move to a whole new society. They're intimidated because we're created a second tier of residents who don't get "benefits" like due process, or the ability to report a crime. One way to make them less easily intimidated is to give them some basic human rights, now being systematically stripped by Buchananite ideologues with the eager support of U.S. employers.

Without getting into too much of an essay, one other point needs making: the U.S. has already abolished borders in the sense that, through global financial institutions like the I.M.F., it mandates policies in dozens of countries that cause the domestic economic dislocations that send many here in the first place. If you want a country's workers to stop coming to the U.S., then the U.S. should pay reparations. For example, Wall Street's Mexican "bailout" and the devaluation of the peso decimated Mexico's middle class--why shouldn't they demand some of the wealth that was taken back to the U.S. by debt servicing and the investor class that we bailed out? Much of this country's affluence is stolen from the rest of the world; like it or not, in the new global economy, economic justice demands that they get some of the wealth back.

If that means millions flock here, driving down living standards until they're in equilibrium with the rest of the world, so be it. More likely, immigration, as it always has been, would be an economic plus; it's the hard-working, motivated folks who want to pick up and move to another country. In other words, it's good for us. And who knows, maybe the U.S. would get a bit more of a sense of responsibility to the rest of the world for its behavior if we lived down the street from more of its victims. Abolish the borders!

And The Food Sucks, Too

According to The Washington Blade (July 17, 1998, pg. 12), Darden Restaurants, the owner of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, and the new Bahama Breeze restaurant chains, wants to be able to fire employees solely because those employees are Gay. Darden Restaurants is going to court to try and get Cook County's (Illinois) human rights ordinance--which prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and other categories, in matters of employment, housing, public accommodations and credit transactions--declared unconstitutional.

Their action comes in response to an order from the Cook County Human Rights Commission that they reinstate a Gay employee who was repeatedly ridiculed and eventually fired because of his sexual orientation. The restaurant is not trying to claim that it didn't discriminate--it is acknowledging that it did discriminate, and that civil rights laws which prevent them from acting on their bigotry are unconstitutional! This is not just a company that supports an anti-Gay "foundation." This is not just a company that discriminates and tries to cover it up (although those examples are bad enough!). This is a company that is actively seeking to overturn important civil rights legislation, which would open the doors for countless other firings, harassment, and other forms of discrimination. Next time you're tempted to eat at Red Lobster or The Olive Garden, imagine your Lesbian daughter / sister / granddaughter / aunt / niece / friend / mother / lover / self being fired solely because she's a lesbian and for no other reason. Or imagine your Gay son / brother / grandson / uncle / nephew / friend / father / lover / self losing his housing or being unable to find a place to live, solely because he's Gay. There are hundreds of other restaurants out there--ones that aren't using your money to take away the civil rights of those you know and love. Patronize them, but not Red Lobster or The Olive Garden.

--Anonymous, forwarded via e-mail by David Yao, Seattle

Yank That Sucker!

ETS!,

I hate political yard signs on public property. I mean when someone has a sign in their yard, it means they're saying "Hey, I support that candidate." However, when one's on public property, it means the campaign couldn't find people to say they support them. I'm the public, and I figure someone else puts a sign up on my property, I have the right to push it over, am I right?

Stephen 'the man' Phillips, via e-mail

Ouija Endorsement!

ETS!,

Why did you endorse Linda McCaslin over Barbara Madsen? Madsen is the first woman in history to get herself elected, not appointed, to the Washington Supreme Court,and over an opponent (Elaine Houghton, later appointed to the Court of Appeals in Tacoma by Mike Lowry) who outspent her 10-1. Plus Chief Justice Barbara Durham, an unmitigated Reaganite,has come out and endorsed Madsen's other opponent, Jim Bates, just another King County judge who thinks Seattle should run the whole state. You need to be talking to more independent radical lawyers around the state and judge races and spending less time on the ouija board.

--Perry Buck, Attorney, Vacouver WA

Then You Apply For Parole (Again)

Dear ETS!,

I was outraged and consternated to read Bill's opinion of hookers (BackTalk, ETS!, Aug. 19). Hell, Bill, some of my best friends are hookers. But in other respects I forgave him with a warm smile as I appreciated his evaluation of Clinton's real sins even tho they would never get an American president impeached. All these things are part of conquering the world, the task that America has so zealously applied itself to for the past few centuries. Murdering lots of folks to satisfy corporate greed will make you president of the world. Only squirting on a dress has some small chance of ousting your slime-ball ass.

Truth be told, I always hope that the very worst human available will be America's president; someone the right-thinking, right wing truly deserves (the left no longer has any say in the matter anyhow). And just look at the wonderful selection: how does President Bush, Jr. grab ya? Or Gingrich, Quayle, or Gore?!? President Perot is almost too much too hope for. I always wished that that "effete intellectual snob" feller, Spiro somebody-or-other, would be their leader--and he would have, too, if he hadn't gone to prison just when his 15 minutes was looming on the horizon. Why couldn't he have been struck down after being president? Where is fair?

Miss Manners sez I'm alienated from the political process. I dunno. As you may have guessed, I'm not an American but rather a member of the fodder-class that right wing America likes to kill and steal from and throw mud balls at, i.e. a poor folk, an Indian, an elder, a prisoner, an un-Christian, and a supporter of Hempfest.

Hey, thanks Geov and all the crew at ETS! for sending me the paper. I love it, as do all my fellow captives! It was a little nightmare getting the pigs and pigettes to let me have it. They still send every issue to their home office pig sty in Huntsville where they keep somebody who can read, but so far I think I have received every issue. I also thank my beloved younger sister Phyllis Donovan for turning me on to your paper. I do worry about one thing: my free sub is only until the year 3000. What do I do when it runs out?

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,