Dairy Industry Crushed Innovator Who Bested Price-Control System

[donsu]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/09/AR2006120900925.html


Harvesting Cash The Milk Lobby Strikes Back


In the summer of 2003, shoppers in Southern California began getting a break on the price of milk.

A maverick dairyman named Hein Hettinga started bottling his own milk and selling it for as much as 20 cents a gallon less than the competition, exercising his right to work outside the rigid system that has controlled U.S. milk production for almost 70 years. Soon the effects were rippling through the state, helping to hold down retail prices at supermarkets and warehouse stores.

That was when a coalition of giant milk companies and dairies, along with their congressional allies, decided to crush Hettinga's initiative. For three years, the milk lobby spent millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions and made deals with lawmakers, including incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Last March, Congress passed a law reshaping the Western milk market and essentially ending Hettinga's experiment -- all without a single congressional hearing.

-long snip-

The first challenge to Hettinga came in late 2001, when Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) proposed a measure that would have forced Hettinga to pay in to the pool that Shamrock was governed by.

-snip-

In the House, Devin Nunes, a new Republican member from California's Central Valley, introduced a bill to close what he called the "regulatory loophole" that let Hettinga ship unregulated milk into California. Nunes's district is No. 1 in milk production in the nation. Nunes and Sons dairy, located a few miles north of Tulare, was started by Nunes's grandfather and was still in the family

-long snip-

On the evening of Nov. 2, 2005, lawmakers and several dozen lobbyists squeezed into the conference room of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to seek common ground in the milk dispute. Lewis brought Hettinga and McGrath. Reid came with Anderson's Coon. Shamrock Foods' McClelland was with Kyl.

-snip-

Lewis used the muscle of his 66-member Appropriations Committee, the dispenser of billions of dollars a year in spending. But he faced the nearly unified front of the dairy lobby and its friends. Virginia dairy farmers had helped win the key support of Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the Agriculture Committee, convincing him that if Hettinga were brought into line, the threat "would be less likely to show up back here," said lobbyist Charles Garrison. Nunes was a protege of House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.). And he had recently backed John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) in his successful campaign for majority leader.

-snip-

"I still think this is a great country," Hettinga said. "In Mexico, they would have just shot me."
---------------------


so now you know whose pockets need looking into

and who the public can deem trustworthy

[brook]

1. I heard

the author of The China Study on PBS yesterday. He also said that various interest groups influence the American diet - with disastrous results. He mentioned a correlation between drinking milk and osteoporosis - that milk actually increased one's susceptibility to the disease - something the Dairy Council does not want you to know.

[sweetheart]

2. And 'milk' is not 'Milk(TM)"

"Milk(TM)" with hormones and dairy industry additives is not milk. If you had a cow who fed itself on
the grass in the field nearby, and you milked it straight in to a glass and drank it, it would taste
nothing like "Milk(TM)". Part of our problem is this disparity when they steal the real name for
something and replace it with an industrial chemical.

[donsu]

5. true and what is sold today as 'fresh milk' is really reconstituted milk

milk taste so bad nowadays I've stopped drinking it. even organic milk.

grass fed undoctered cow's milk tastes totally different.

for ceral I use coconut milk. also for some baking.

[sandnsea]

11. And no safety guarantees

about how much yeast, mold and bacteria is in the milk. No knowledge of the shelf life of the milk. A glass of white stuff that can kill you, for all you know. It's your choice to drink raw milk if you want, it's usually available from a local farm in any given area. But everybody shouldn't be forced to take the health risks you want to take.

[sweetheart]

15. This is the no-safety guarantee:

rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) is a genetically engineered, potent variant

of the natural growth hormone produced by cows. Manufactured by Monsanto, it is sold to

dairy farmers under the trade name POSILAC. Injection of this hormone forces cows to

increase their milk production by about 10%.



Monsanto, supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), insists that rBGH milk

is indistinguishable from natural milk, and that it is safe for consumers. This is blatantly false:

* rBGH makes cows sick. Monsanto has been forced to admit to about 20 toxic effects,

including mastitis, on its POSILAC label.

* rBGH milk is contaminated by pus, due to the mastitis commonly induced by rBGH,

and antibiotics used to treat the mastitis.

* rBGH milk is chemically and nutritionally different than natural milk.
* rBGH milk is contaminated with rBGH, traces of which are absorbed through the gut.
* rBGH milk is supercharged with high levels of a natural growth factor (IGF-1), which

is readily absorbed through the gut.

* Excess levels of IGF-1 have been incriminated as a cause of breast, colon, and

prostate cancers.

* IGF-1 blocks natural defense mechanisms against early submicroscopic cancers.
* rBGH factory farms pose a major threat to the viability of small dairy farms.
* rBGH enriches Monsanto, while posing dangers, without any benefits, to consumers,

especially in view of the current national surplus of milk.


http://www.preventcancer.com/publications/WhatsInYourMilkRelease.htm

[LeftyMom]

3. I'm reading his book right now.

He also found that casein (the main protein in dairy) promotes the growth of tumors and dairy consumption is associated with higher cancer rates.

[brook]

9. I'd never heard of him

until yesterday and was quite impressed. Are you finding it credible and helpful?
Guess I need to get the book. I see it's out in paperback now.

[LeftyMom]

18. The book is very impressive.

:thumbsup:

[sandnsea]

4. Dairy programs also set standards

They grade the milk, set safety standards, monitor fat standards, do R&D, etc. It isn't fair when the majority of dairies pay into the system and one doesn't. Hettinga's libertarian approach to business is wrong. There may need to be changes to ag rules due to corporate farming, but eliminating the programs, that have kept our food safe and prevented price collapses like in the Depression, is not the way to go.

http://www.ams.usda.gov/dairy/index.htm

[donsu]

6. yes, but whose standards? why do fat standards have to be monitored?

nt

[sandnsea]

7. Are you kidding?

I guess you've never been on a medically prescribed diet.

Do you know who issued the spinach e coli warnings? A spinach or vegetable program, just like the dairy program, just like the meat programs. It's why our food is as safe as it is. Growers pay into the various federal programs that monitor their product for the consumers' benefit. When one grower or farmer doesn't do that, it's an unfair practice and hurts everybody.

It's amazing to me how easy it is for people to toss over FDR's programs that have served us so well for so long.

[sweetheart]

12. big corporatism is all you're saying

Its not about food safety, that can be achieved on a wholly different scale, like how small
dairy coops work in the rest of the world. What you're defending is the system of big
corporatism and 'experts', whose authority you believe in, and have sold out to by this
religion.

I don't accept the religion that big authorities are better than the individual. Big food
has poisoned people on an unimaginable scale over the same period you endorse. Big experts
have approved the addition to our diets of a chemical coctail and humanity is suffering
from a plethora of disease outbreaks and frequencies that were not the case before...

A 'medically perscribed diet', is where you are under the care of your 'authority', your god.
I don't worship at that church, and i don't accept that an authority knows more about you
than you do, that if you pretend they do, its your business, but you have sold out your
essential right to choose when you invoke 'big authority'.

Without that authority, you might have to know a lot more about diet yourself, maybe obtaining
foods from markets where you trust their standards of hygeine. Maybe without authority,
we are not uneducated idiots, but actually far more capable of determining our lives.

The medical authority does not work for you, it works for big pharma and by invoking all that,
you are an unintended messenger from the boardrooms of abbot labs, monsanto, quaker oats
and cargill inc... big ag does it better than you could, little people... and they use their
buddies in corproate media to brainwash prisoners to defending their guard's authority with
the other prisoners so that the whole sociology of the prison defends the authority of the guards.

..and why not, the whole party system is corporatist, and people believe in that religion,
no mattter what silly book they swear on.

[donsu]

19. I don't want to toss out FDR's programs! the food barons have taken

over management of FDR's programs. that's what I don't like.

[sandnsea]

20. But Hettinga does

By not paying into a regional pool, he's not paying his fair share into the programs that keep milk safe and keep prices at a fair rate. Programs may need to be tweaked to be sure small dairies can enter the market, in fact they DO need to be tweaked, but Hettinga sounds like he thinks 'free market' should mean no regulation at all. Frankly, that's one of the problems with having people who weren't born and educated in this country becoming President. They don't have the common experience of learning about things like the Depression and why some of these programs were created in the first place. Too easy to be bamboozled by libertarian 'anti-socialist' gibberish.

[brook]

8. Considering

the number of ecoli outbreaks recently, I think food 'safety' is just another incompetent, probably underfunded, feel good government sideshow. How much R&D do you have to do to learn that cows give milk?
Oh - yeah. You gotta find out what to pump the cows full of to get more bang for your buck.

Corporate farming is dangerous to your health.

[sandnsea]

10. And why is that?

Because this administraton wants completely unregulated business, exactly like this Hettinga guy wanted. Oh, don't worry, nobody can sell a product if it's not safe. Yeah, you see how that works with the ecoli outbreaks. It doesn't. R&D to find new ways to make milk and dairy products safer? Nah, who the hell needs that. Let an aricle twist reality about corporate farms being against the little guy, and suddenly common sense flies out the window and people are ready to toss over the safety programs that have served us so well for 70 years. Incredible.

[Katzenjammer]

17. Probably not quite that simplistic

For Costco shoppers, it was a good deal, according to an e-mail sent last year to Reid's office by Joel Benoliel, Costco Wholesale Corp.'s senior vice president. The arrangement lowered the average price of milk "by 20 cents a gallon overnight and it stayed that way for three years," Benoliel wrote in the e-mail, made available to The Washington Post. "Milk suppliers in southern California were gouging the public on price (20 cents a gallon higher than N. California) for years and were unresponsive to our call for lower prices. It was a brazen case of price gouging and profiteering by the strongest, largest market suppliers simply because they could."

(emphasis mine)

[Kellyiswise]

13. Good old capitalism. It can't stand alone without government subsidies

and corruption. "subsidies" is the other word for "welfare" when it applies to large masses of wealthy businessmen and corporations.

[mainer]

14. Small dairy farms are failing everywhere

Without milk price supports, all we'd have left would be the giant corporate farms, which survive on mega-volume production and nationwide shipping.

France subsidizes its small local farmers, doesn't it? How else will regional produce be available to us?

[hedgehog]

16. The concept of price supports is good; we may need to tinker with the

application. I for one do not understand why Californian farmers are allowed to raise dairy cattle in the desert using irrigation water supplied by the federal government are then allowed to compete with Midwest and Northeastern farmers raising grass fed herds.I would like to see government programs that make it possible for small local farmers to make a decent living. It can't be healthy for the animals, the land or us to raise 500 cows in the same herd and confine them to a small space.