Don't worry, be Toxic. aka Just trust Bush & the repubs

We 'merikuns don't have to worry about homeland security, secure borders, globalization, wars, poverty, healthcare anymore -- not when our Congress and their corporate greed-partners are in charge. No sirree. We'll die before it ever reaches that point because our own FDA, elected robots and mass food production industry will kill us long before it comes to that.

Warning: This bill could make you sick
By Al Meyerhoff and Carl Pope/LA Times

March 21, 2006

THE HOUSE of Representatives this month passed the National Uniformity for Foods Act, a measure that would kill or cancel significant parts of 200 food-safety laws in 50 states. This ill-advised bill, supported by millions of food-industry dollars, passed without a single hearing. Now it's in the hands of the Senate. If it passes there, among its many victims would be California's requirement that foods containing harmful chemicals display a warning for consumers.

Those warnings are mandated by Proposition 65, enacted, as one court described it, to be "a legislative battering ram" by an overwhelming majority of voters in 1986. In passing the measure, Californians wanted to encourage manufacturers to remove dangerous substances from their products before they reached supermarket shelves.

Proposition 65's requirement that companies either warn consumers or remove harmful chemicals works, and it remains a vital protection.

Consider the controversy over mercury in tuna, swordfish and other types of seafood. The Food and Drug Administration recently announced that seafood contaminated by mercury ? a heavy metal found in our oceans mainly as the result of burning coal ? can be so hazardous that women "who are pregnant or may become pregnant" should avoid consumption. Mercury was present in fish at levels sometimes far exceeding the FDA's "action level."

So what "action" did the FDA take? Instead of seizing mercury-laden fish, as federal laws allow, it issued a press release; the seafood remained on supermarket shelves. Despite the FDA's inaction, Proposition 65 mandated that consumer warnings be placed on contaminated seafood sold in California. That encouraged the creation of the nation's first line of low-mercury fish under the "Safe Harbor" brand. Now it is your choice.

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