Its a fact - most of the members of the UCS and CSPI are not scientists - they're leftwing front organizations.
Give them money and poof!, you're a scientist:
secure3.convio.net
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That the Union of Concerned Scientists is
a highly partisan operation, well funded by
left-leaning foundations and Hollywood celebrities—
and happy to ignore established
scientific methodologies for its own purposes—
is apparently not newsworthy. The
group has a long history of being just plain
wrong on many scientific issues, and its
current agenda conforms to the extremes of
environmentalist ideology. Moreover, UCS
is neither representative of the scientific community
at large nor is it a gathering of top
scientists. Instead, a cadre of senior staff
whose credentials are steeped more in Washington
policy making than in scientific research
rides herd over a grassroots membership
that comes from all walks of life. You too
can be a Concerned Scientist for a new member
fee of $35!
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Putting Politics before Science
The track record of the Union of Concerned
Scientists is bursting with examples of how it
puts politics ahead of science. The group
was founded in 1969 by a group of Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists
who were concerned about the threat
of nuclear war. Currently, the group claims a
membership base of over 100,000 “citizens
and scientists,” and an annual budget of over
$10 million.
True to its peacenik roots, UCS organized
opposition to President Ronald Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in the 1980s,
fearing that it would push the world to war. But
history showed otherwise. British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher would call Reagan’s
decision to go ahead with SDI the “one vital
factor in the ending of the Cold War.” UCS
continues its anti-nuclear activism today.
The 1980s were not a good decade for the
Union’s predictive powers in other ways. In
1980, UCS claimed that, “It is now abundantly
clear that the world has entered a period of
chronic energy shortages.” As is now abundantly
clear, known energy reserves are higher
than ever. Middle East oil reserves alone are
estimated to have increased from 431 billion
barrels in 1985 to 742 billion in 2005. Of course,
if UCS achieved its stated aim of capping
energy production from fossil fuel sources
and closing down nuclear plants, then the
world most certainly would face a major energy
shortage today.
More recently, UCS has been consistently
wrong in its stated concerns about genetically
modified crops. In 1999, it publicized
reports that corn modified with the natural
pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is harmful
to the monarch butterfly, findings that
were subsequently rejected by the National
Academy of Sciences.
Another NAS report found that increasing
CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards
contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600
additional traffic deaths per year because
manufacturers downsize cars to increase their
fuel economy and comply with the regulation.
Yet the UCS website still maintains, “To
reduce fuel consumption and address global
warming, CAFE standards must increase.”
UCS helped coordinate a campaign to discredit
Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg,
whose 2001 best-selling book, The Skeptical
Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State
of the World, presents compelling statistical
evidence refuting many of the modern environmental
movement’s alarmist claims.
In other matters—abortion, suburban
“sprawl” and the war in Iraq—UCS stakes
out policy positions that are predictably those
of a far-left pressure group.
Funding Sources
The database of campaign contributions
assembled by the Center for Responsive
Politics contains abundant evidence of the
partisan political leanings of UCS officials.
For instance, the UCS chairman, Cornell physicist
Kurt Gottfried, has donated over $10,000
in contributions to Democratic Party organizations
since 1990, mostly to the Democratic
National Committee.
Signatories to a 2004 statement attacking
President Bush over alleged manipulation of
science donated over $300,000 to Democratic
candidates and liberal organizations since
1990—long before the supposed Bush “assault
on science.” In contrast, they donated
only $5,050 to Republicans—the majority of
that to liberal Senator Arlen Specter of
Pennsylvania. The signatories donated
$28,000 to the presidential campaign funds of
John Kerry and John Edwards. Nobel laureates
affiliated with UCS have contributed
$97,000 to Democrats.
All of this undermines the credibility of
Union president Kevin Knobloch who claimed
in the 2003 UCS annual report: “Several key
principles and beliefs will guide my
leadership. Nonpartisanship is one.”
Knobloch, an environmental activist, spent
six years on Capitol Hill, where he worked for
Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) and Representative
Ted Weiss (D-NY).
Alden Meyer, the Union’s director of strategy
and policy, is also a longtime environmental
activist. Prior to joining the UCS staff
in 1989, Meyer worked as executive director
at a series of green groups: League of Conservation
Voters, Americans for the Environment,
and Environmental Action. Meyer’s
academic background isn’t in the natural
sciences. As his biography on the UCS
website notes, he received an undergraduate
degree from Yale in 1975 “concentrating in
political science and economics,” and “He
received a Master of Science degree in human
resource and organization development
from American University in 1990.”
UCS likes to attack free-market groups for
accepting corporate donations, but much of
its own funding comes from foundations
established by conservative businessmen
but subsequently hijacked by left-wing partisans.
....
capitalresearch.org
CSPI Background
1875 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20009
Phone 202-332-9110 | Fax 202-265-4954 | Email cspi@cspinet.org
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is the undisputed leader among America’s “food police.” CSPI was founded in 1971 by current executive director Michael Jacobson, and two of his co-workers at Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law. Since then, CSPI’s joyless eating club has issued hundreds of high-profile—and highly questionable—reports condemning soft drinks, fat substitutes, irradiated meat, biotech food crops, French fries, and just about anything that tastes good.
CSPI fancies itself a “watchdog” group but behaves more like an attack dog, savaging restaurants, disparaging adults’ food choices, and discouraging even moderate alcohol consumption. It famously dubbed fettuccine alfredo a “heart attack on a plate.” Its nutrition nags encourage the public to “just say no” to fried mozzarella as though it were an illegal drug.
With a long history of writing letters to restaurants threatening legal action over purported mislabeling of “low fat” menu items, it surprised no one when CSPI graduated to lawsuit threats over the absence of nutritional labeling. In July of 2003, Jacobson teamed with legal shark John Banzhaf to formally warn six U.S. ice cream retailers that lawsuits may result from their refusal to immediately "list the calorie (and, ideally, saturated fat) content of each item" on menu boards.
CSPI’s self-anointed “experts” also encourage “a whole lot of lawsuits” against fast-food restaurants (the group says it is “looking at tobacco as a model”), mostly because they see legal action as leverage to enact all the restrictions on food they have long supported. These include, but are by no means limited to:
extra taxes on foods with fat, sugar, and sodium (the so-called “Twinkie tax”);
government-mandated “warning” labels on high-fat, high-calorie menu items;
mandatory nutrition information on restaurant menus, menu-boards, meat packages, hamburger wrappers, food commercials, ice cream stores, movie theatres, bakeries, hot dog stands, etc., etc.
requirements that broadcasters give free “equal time” to government-supported advertisements of “healthy” foods;
restrictions on baby food packaging requiring that tapioca be labeled as “chemically modified food starch”;
labels warning parents that soft drinks may be replacing low-fat milk, fruit juice, and other drinks in their children’s diets;
labels warning of contamination from fresh, unpasteurized juices;
a government-sponsored “Must-Not-See-TV Week” campaign; and
stricter regulations on genetically enhanced foods, which are already the most regulated food products in the U.S.
To accomplish these goals, CSPI sends a flurry of petitions and letters to the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, the FTC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and any other government agency that has a role to play in regulating food. Each of these actions is accompanied by a breathless press release that seeks to scare ordinary consumers about the food they eat.
So Many Targets, So Little Time
CSPI complains about so many foods and beverages that it’s hard to think of anything that has escaped their wrath. Even so, the group has a special animus towards a few common foods. CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson considers caffeine such a blight on civilization that he complains about people socializing over coffee. Unsurprisingly, he suggests that Americans patronize a “carrot juice house” instead. CSPI’s in-house food policies are so strict that Jacobson once reportedly intended to get rid of the office coffee machine—until one-third of his 60 employees threatened to quit.
CSPI also has a bias against meat and dairy. Jacobson, himself a vegetarian, wrote in an issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter that proper nutrition “means eating a more plant-based diet … It means getting your fats from plants (vegetable oils and nuts) and fish, not animals (meats, milk cheese, and ice cream).” In keeping with his personal vegetarianism, Jacobson quietly sits on the advisory board of the “Great American Meatout,” an annual event operated by the animal rights zealots at the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM). Alcohol, even when consumed in moderation, is perhaps CSPI’s most hated product. The group’s Healthletter has asserted that “the last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” CSPI wants hefty increases in beer taxes, increased restrictions on adult-beverage marketing, and even poster-sized warning labels placed in restaurants. George Hacker, who leads CSPI’s anti-alcohol effort, has accused winemakers of “hawking America’s costliest and most devastating drug.”
CSPI also opposes wineries’ plans to promote the well-documented health benefits of moderate wine consumption. As the Washington Times observed, “Jacobson argues that people can’t be trusted to make wise and healthful decisions on their own. He says that’s why CSPI is fighting the industry’s bid to include information about the health benefits of wine on the label of bottles.”
The thousands of readily available and relatively inexpensive food offerings we enjoy today are for CSPI something to lament. “People tend to eat most healthily during hard times,” Jacobson has argued. “Heart disease plummeted in Holland and Denmark during the most severe food shortages of World War II. Records of English manors in the 1600s reveal that the peasantry feasted on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day.” And that, to Jacobson is “basically a wonderfully healthy diet.” Yum.
At least you can get your fill of spuds and carrots, right? Wrong. Not only does Jacobson argue that you should avoid most foods you currently enjoy, but he insists that you should limit your consumption to just-above-starvation levels. “With animals,” notes Jacobson, “hundreds of studies show that if you give them 80 to 60 percent of their normal calories, they live much longer.”
CSPI's Motivation
"If children have healthy foods available, they’ll eat healthy foods. If they have unhealthy foods available, they’ll eat those … Animals will do the same thing when put in a cage.”
So says Kelly Brownell, a long-time member of the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s scientific advisory board, who has co-authored numerous articles with CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson. CSPI believes that the American people act like animals who have to be poked and prodded—or scared, taxed, and restricted—into eating a healthy diet. It’s no surprise that CSPI’s public-policy arm selected the motto “Because it takes more than willpower.”
Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that CSPI’s “obsession” with a low-fat diet reflects “a paternalistic idea that the public is not smart enough to distinguish between types of fat.” Food critic Robert Shoffner puts it more directly when he describes CSPI’s approach this way: “People are children and have to be protected by Big Brother or Big Nanny from the awful free-market predators ... That’s what drives these people—a desire for control of other people’s lives.”
In addition to the desire to control people’s lives, CSPI is motivated by at least three distinct goals: making you afraid of your food, taking the pleasure out of eating, and (of course) making money.
CSPI wants to scare you about your food
Whenever an activist-inspired food scare is afoot, CSPI takes to the airwaves, exaggerating the risks and calling for a complete overhaul of America’s food safety systems. When Great Britain was slaughtering its cattle at the height of the mad cow disease scare, CSPI trumpeted the grossly misleading claim that the animals are “better protected from ‘Mad Cow Disease’ than people.”
CSPI’s everyday language about normal foods like sandwiches and milk is also intended to scare you about your food. Here’s Jacob Sullum in Reason magazine describing CSPI’s “bottom line” on many foods:
The low-down on pizza with extra cheese: “Never order an extra-cheese pizza.” Likewise fried mozzarella sticks (“Just say no”), buffalo wings (“Order something else”), crispy orange beef (ditto), beef and cheese nachos (“Order just about anything else”), a gyro (“There’s no way to make this a healthful choice”), a mushroom cheeseburger (“Forget about this one!”), a fried whole onion (“a bomb”), a milk shake (“Skip it”), the Cheesecake Factory’s carrot cake (“the worst dessert on the menu”), and cheese fries with ranch dressing (“worse than anything we’ve ever analyzed”).
Appearing on Good Morning America to promote a report condemning ice cream, Jacobson told viewers never to indulge. “Just know that you’re going to kill yourself,” he said.
Is there anything CSPI would allow us to eat? At least fruits and vegetables, right? “Naturally, you should eat lots of them, because they’re good for you,” Sullum writes in the voice of CSPI. “Just keep in mind that they may be killing you.” CSPI can’t help itself from warning about the risk of cancer from all those pesticides on fruits and vegetables—even though they quietly acknowledge that those risks are probably nonexistent.
Regardless of the facts, CSPI’s message is: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
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CSPI Suggestions
Educating consumers is not enough for the CSPI crowd -- government regulation of everything we eat is what they want. Here are some of their more outrageous ideas:
New excise taxes on fatty food, cars, and television sets to fund government fitness campaigns
A government-sponsored "Must-Not-See-TV Week" campaign
Caffeine warning labels
Calorie labeling on all fast-food packaging
A fast-food advertising ban on any TV program seen by children
FDA requirements to force baby food producers to label tapioca as 'chemically modified food starch'
Doubling excise taxes on beer
Taxpayer-funded nutrition counseling for food-stamp recipients
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“Health claims or the converse, ‘un-healthy’ claims, of course, have to be backed by rational science. However, these are matters that CSPI, despite their grandiose and associative-scientific sounding name, would have difficulty in delivering. Throwing figures and ‘facts’ that would fail to pass muster for a secondary school science project, CSPI recklessly and with gay abandon, continues to launch fresh attacks ...”
— Frank Tate, writing in the online news site Scoop, March 2007
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“We could envision taxes on butter, potato chips, whole milk, cheeses, [and] meat.”
— Jacobson, quoted in the Newark Star-Ledger, April 30, 2002
“CSPI is proud about finding something wrong with practically everything.”
— CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, in Washingtonian magazine, February 1994
“The typical CSPI report takes one or two plausible concerns, blows them way out of proportion, and throws in several dangers that are trivial, unlikely, or highly speculative, all in an effort to scare people into the one course of action CSPI knows to be right.”
— Jacob Sullum, writing in Reason magazine, June 2003
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CSPI's Victims
It would probably be easier to list the products and companies that CSPI has not attacked... but the following is a list of the victims of CSPI's questionable "scientific" studies and political attacks.
Alfalfa sprouts Apple pies Baby food
Bacon Baked potatoes with sour cream Baklava
Beef Beef burritos Beer
Belgian waffles Berries BLT sandwiches
Brie Buffalo wings Butter
Caffe latte Caffe mocha Caffeine
Candy Canned fish Cantaloupes
Cappuccino Cereals Cheese
Cheese fries Cheese manicotti Cheese nachos
Cheese ravioli Cheeseburgers Cheesecake
Chef's salad Chicken enchiladas Chicken fingers
Chicken nuggets Chicken pot pies Chile rellenos
Chimichangas Chinese Restaurants Chocolate cake
Chocolate chips Chocolate mousse Clams
Condiments Cookie dough Cookies
Corned beef Crackers Cream cheese
Cream of broccoli soup Creamed spinach Croissants
Danish Desserts Dips
Donuts Eggplant Parmigiana Eggs
Enchiladas Family restaurants Fat-free cakes
Fat-free cookies Fat-free ice cream Feta cheese
Food coloring French fries French toast
Fried calamari Fried clams Fried fish
Fried mozzarella sticks Fried rice Fried shrimp
Frozen dinners Frozen turkey Fruit cocktails
Fruit drinks Fruit juice Fudge brownie sundaes
Garlic bread General Tso's chicken Granola bars
Greek salads Grilled cheese Gyros
Ham sandwiches Hamburgers Home-canned vegetables
Homemade eggnog Homemade frosting Hot fudge sundaes
Italian restaurants Kung pao chicken Lasagna
Lettuce Lo mein Luncheon meats
Macaroni and cheese Margarine Mayonnaise
Meatloaf Meat-stuffed grape leaves Melons
Mexican restaurants Milk Milk shakes
Movie popcorn Mushrooms Mussels
Olestra Omelets Onion rings
Orange beef Oysters Pancakes
Pastries Pizza Pork chops
Potato chips Prime rib Pudding
Quick service restaurants Rotisserie turkey Saccharin
Salad dressings Salads Salt
Sandwich shops Sandwiches Sausage
Scones Seafood Seafood restaurants
Shellfish Soft drinks Soups
Spaghetti and meatballs Steakhouses Stuffed potato skins
Sweet and sour pork Taco salads Veal Parmigiana
Waffles Wine
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