Julia Scott

Besides, total spending on social programs amounts to only a fraction of what Bush’s tax cuts piled onto the federal deficit, according to calculations by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit group concerned with low-income individuals and families. “In 2005,” declares the center, “the cost of tax cuts enacted over the past four years will be over three times the cost of all domestic program increases enacted over this period.”

While Bush continues to skim off the top of the Social Security trust fund to pay for various initiatives and reduce the debt (while warning of its imminent bankruptcy), he has requested an additional $19.2 billion for the Pentagon, for a total of $419 billion — and that excludes the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Compare those numbers to the money being cut for essential social services and it’s obvious where this administration’s priorities lie: The total budget for the Food Stamp Program alone could fit into the defense budget 13 times. Here are some details about proposed cuts to other programs millions of Americans rely on.

CUT: $57 million from the Food Stamp Program
Bush’s food stamp cuts will take food out of the mouths of 300,000 families. These are all working families — so much for the lazy mother myth — who do not receive cash assistance from TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), a funding source for individual state programs, such as welfare, child care, domestic violence counseling, and transportation. “That’s 300,000 very poor people who don’t have enough money for food,” says Stacy Dean, director of Food Stamp Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

To qualify for food stamps, a person has to have an income of 130 percent below the poverty line — $2,043 a month or, for a family of four, $24,000 a year. Currently, about 20 percent of food stamps are awarded to elderly or disabled people and 80 percent to children of families who can’t afford to put food on the table. It’s the hundreds of thousands of families whose monthly incomes may exceed $2,043 that will bear the burden of the food stamp cuts. And they are precisely “the wrong group of people to be targeting,” says Dean, “particularly in a budget that gives millions of dollars in tax cuts.”

CUT: $200 million from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program
Right now, 5 million families — mostly low-income families with elderly and disabled members — benefit from the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which supplements their heating bills in cold weather. These new cuts are bound to make their winters very cold indeed.

Established in 1982, the program has been under the knife since 2001 — the 2005 level of funding was lower than any of the previous five years — and the 2006 budget calls for an 8.4 percent reduction to $2 billion. Fuel money is doled out according to climate, so this cut will disproportionately affect northern states. Many poor people can’t afford to properly insulate their homes, and, to make matters worse, the prices of heating oil, propane and natural gas are all increasing — a trend not likely to reverse anytime soon. What’s more, according to a fairly recent energy study, next to not paying their rent, people’s inability to pay their utility bills is the main cause of homelessness.

“While we worry about the allocation of billions of dollars here in Congress,” Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords said in a statement, “some people must decide between buying food and heating their homes.”

CUT: $361 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund
The Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund is the country’s largest source of federal funding to upgrade sewage systems. It has distributed nearly $50 billion to states since 1988 to repair old sewer plants and keep raw sewage out of rivers and lakes. Bush wants to cut $361 million from the program this year, leaving states with $730 million. That’s in addition to the $250 million slashed from the fund last year because of the budget crisis.

“The administration’s solution to making our water pure is to provide less money to municipalities and allow them to dump more,” says Wesley Warren, deputy director for advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He adds that every canceled or delayed cleanup project adds gallons of untreated sewage to our waterways.

This cut also comes on the heels of reports that the EPA has been considering “sewage blending,” whereby treatment plants mix raw sewage together with fully treated wastewater during storms and declare it potable. This practice — a veritable fount of waterborne diseases, according to environmentalists — is necessitated by the dire need for sewage upgrades in low-income areas throughout the nation.

CUT: Community Development Block Grant programs
In the past, the Department of Housing and Urban Development dished out Community Development Block Grant programs to cities to help low-income residents. Cities could then cash in the grants — a key part of their efforts to keep folks off the streets — on affordable housing, redevelopment and social services like job training and day care. The new Bush budget boots the community grant program out of HUD and puts it under the aegis of the Department of Commerce. Not a good thing. Last year, HUD backed the program with $4.7 billion; Commerce, now, will give it $3.7 billion. The outcome for cities, says Bart Peterson, Indianapolis mayor, and a vice president for the National League of Cities, is “dramatic reductions.” When it comes to many community improvements, he says, “there really isn’t another source of funding other than raising local taxes. So you either go without, or you raise local taxes. My guess is that most cities will go without.”

CUT: Upward Bound, Talent Search and GEAR UP
College preparatory programs Upward Bound, Talent Search and Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) provide funding to schools and organizations that help low- and moderate-income students get into college. Each program has particular requirements: Upward Bound programs offer math, lab science, composition, literature and foreign language instruction, whereas Talent Search emphasizes counseling, mentoring and bringing dropouts back to school. The Clinton-administration initiative GEAR UP requires applicants to partner with institutes of higher education and follow a group of students from middle school through high school graduation.

The Bush budget would scrap these programs entirely. Given the high number of students served — the American Council on Education estimates that together Upward Bound, Talent Search and GEAR UP provided services to 700,000 students in 2004 — schools and supporting organizations would have to scramble to keep their college prep programs afloat. ACE assistant director for Ggovernment relations Chris Simmons says: “If these types of programs disappear, there’s going to be a hole to fill. Institutions will have to make up the gap with their own funds, or they’re going to have to turn to private resources. These programs really reach into non-English-speaking communities, where college is not part of the life that [students] or their families have experienced  institutions are going to have to try to make up the difference to reach those students.”

If institutions can’t make up the difference, it’s the low-income students who will get left behind.

CUT: $48 million from the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program
In his State of the Union speeches, President Bush loves to imagine a shiny future where people drive hydrogen cars, watch TV by wind power and take baths in water heated by the sun. Renewable energy is always good for 15 seconds of bipartisan applause. But after this budget cut, we defy you to find one Congress member (or TV viewer) who believes the president will actually make good on his Tom Swiftian fantasies.

Carol Werner, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, points out the gap between the president’s words and deeds, and says that the new budget “provides significant cuts in renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean air and climate change.” Adds the Sustainable Energy Coalition, an advocacy group: “With this request, the administration is continuing its policy of slowly bleeding the budgets for most of its core renewable energy and energy efficiency programs  a policy that ignores the consumer job creation, national security and rural economic development benefits of sustainable energy technologies.”

CUT: The stateside Land and Water Conservation Fund
This $91 million slash in the Department of Interior budget literally eliminates federal matching funds for building and maintaining public playgrounds, soccer fields, bike trails and walking paths. Once again, it’s folks without expendable incomes, those who can’t pack up the Jeep Grand Cherokee to travel to our nation’s charismatic national parks, who lose out. These cuts to “close-to-home” recreation areas, says Rindy O’Brien of the advocacy group Americans for Our Heritage and Recreation, unfairly hit people in poor states like North Dakota and Mississippi, where, say, new baseball diamonds or public swimming pools have a much harder time getting built without federal matching funds. “The Bush administration has always been good in making sure there’s money for conservation that benefits private land owners,” says O’Brien. “But when it comes to new public places to fish or hunt, well, there’s no place to go.” And with Americans’ waistlines getting wider every moment, you’d think the feds would want to grant people more places to walk or swim in their own backyards. “Not so with this administration,” says O’Brien.

Additional research by Page Rockwell.

Brandi discovered the watermelon farmer had irrigated his plants with imidacloprid, the world’s best-selling insecticide created by Bayer CropScience Inc., one of the world’s leading producers of pesticides and genetically modified vegetable seeds, with annual sales of $8.6 billion. Blended with water and applied to the soil, imidacloprid creates a moist mixture the bees likely drank from on a hot day.

Stories like Brandi’s have become so common that the National Honeybee Advisory Board, which represents the two biggest beekeeper associations in the U.S., recently asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban the product. “We believe imidacloprid kills bees — specifically, that it causes bee colonies to collapse,” says Clint Walker, co-chairman of the board.

Beekeepers have singled out imidacloprid and its chemical cousin clothianidin, also produced by Bayer CropScience, as a cause of bee die-offs around the world for over a decade. More recently, the same products have been blamed by American beekeepers, who claim the product is a cause of colony collapse disorder, which has cost many commercial U.S. beekeepers at least a third of their bees since 2006, and threatens the reliability of the world’s food supply.

Scientists have started to turn their attention to both products, which are receiving new scrutiny in the U.S., due to a disclosure in December 2007 by Bayer CropScience itself. Bayer scientists found imidacloprid in the nectar and pollen of flowering trees and shrubs at concentrations high enough to kill a honeybee in minutes. The disclosure recently set in motion product reviews by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation and the EPA. The tests are scheduled to wrap up in 2014, though environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, are petitioning the EPA to speed up the work.

For over a decade, Bayer CropScience has been forced to defend the family of insecticides against calls for a ban by beekeepers and environmentalists. French beekeepers succeeded in having imidacloprid banned for use on several crops after a third of the country’s bees died following its use in 1999 — although the French bee population never quite rebounded, as Bayer is quick to point out. Germany banned the use of clothianidin and seven other insecticides in 2008 after tests implicated them in killing up to 60 percent of honeybees in southwest Germany.

Imidacloprid and clothianidin are chloronicotinoids, a synthetic compound that combines nicotine, a powerful toxin, with chlorine to attack an insect’s nervous system. The chemical is applied to the seed of a plant, added to soil, or sprayed on a crop and spreads to every corner of the plant’s tissue, killing the pests that feed on it.

Pennsylvania beekeeper John Macdonald has been keeping bees for over 30 years and recently became convinced that imidacloprid is linked to colony collapse disorder. It’s the only explanation he can find for why his bees, whose hives border farmland that uses the pesticide, started dropping dead a few years ago.

“There’s the pernicious toxic effect — it does everything nicotine does to our nervous system,” says Macdonald. “There’s the pathological effect, the interference with basic functions. They get lost, they get disoriented. They fall to the ground. They get paralyzed and their wings stick out. I can’t think of anything in the environment that’s changed other than farming, and virtually every farmer is using treated seeds now.”

Bayer CropScience spokesman Jack Boyne says his company’s pesticides are not to blame. “We do a lot of research on our products and we feel like we have a very good body of evidence to suggest that pesticides, including insecticides, are not the cause of colony collapse disorder,” he says. “Pesticides have been around for a lot of years now and honeybee collapse has only been a factor for the last few years.” (Imidacloprid has been approved for use in the U.S. since 1994 and clothianidin has been used since 2003.)

Scientists continue to investigate the causes of colony collapse disorder. Leading theories suggest a combination of factors that include parasitic mites, disease, malnutrition and environmental contaminants like pesticides, insecticides and fungicides. The current EPA review will provide further insight into the role of pesticides, as it will uncover whether honeybees sickened by exposure to imidacloprid spread it around by bringing contaminated nectar and pollen back to the hive.

EPA critics suggest that the agency allowed economic considerations to take precedence over the well-being of honeybees when it approved imidacloprid for sale in the U.S. 15 years ago. “I think the EPA and USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] have been covering up for Bayer, and now they’re scrambling to do something about it,” says Neil Carman, a plant biologist who advises the Sierra Club on pesticides and other issues. “This review should have been done 10 years ago. It’s been found to be more persistent in the environment than was reported by Bayer.”

Imidacloprid was approved with knowledge that the product, marketed as Gaucho, Confidor, Admire and others, was lethal to honeybees under certain circumstances. Today the EPA’s own literature calls it “very highly toxic” to honeybees and other beneficial insects. Its workaround was to slap a label on the product, warning farmers not to spray it on a plant when bees were foraging in the neighborhood.

In its 2007 studies, Bayer applied standard doses of imidacloprid to test trees, including apple, lime and dogwood. Its scientists found imidacloprid in nectar at concentrations of up to 4,000 parts per billion, a dose high enough to kill several bees at once. (Honeybees can withstand a dose of up to 185 ppb, the standard amount it would take to kill 50 percent of a test population.) What caught the attention of California agricultural officials was that the test trees contained the same amount of deadly imidacloprid as the citrus and almond groves regularly sprayed by farmers, and pollinated by bees. (California’s almond industry has increased its use of imidacloprid by a factor of 300 in the past five years.) Agricultural officials were also surprised to learn that the imidacloprid can persist in the leaves and blossoms of a plant for more than a year.

The Bayer results don’t surprise University of California at Davis professor Eric Mussen, a well-known entomologist and one of the country’s leading experts on colony collapse disorder. Mussen has seen a variety of unpublished studies with similar results, including one at U.C. Riverside that found imidacloprid in the nectar of a eucalyptus tree bloom at concentrations of 550 ppb a full year after it was applied.

“From some of the data on the trees, it appears as though there are situations where honeybees can get into truly toxic doses of the material,” says Mussen, who avoids spraying imidacloprid on his own demonstration fields at U.C. Davis. “This the first time that we’ve had something you put in a tree that could stay there for a long time.”

But Mussen isn’t convinced imidacloprid is a primary cause of the honeybee die-off. He explains that some bees settle on fields of sunflowers and canola treated with the chemical and then “fly right through to next year.” So imidacloprid is not the only story. “Could it be part of the story?” he asks. “I’m sure. I think any of the pesticides the bees bring back to the beehive is hurting the bees.”

Mussen adds that ongoing research into chronic exposure to insecticides will be crucial. It’s likely, he says, that exposure to even low doses acts like a one-two punch: It can weaken the bees until a parasite or pathogen moves in to finish them off.

As the EPA begins its pesticide studies this year, skeptics wonder whether the agency can conduct an unbiased review. Back in 2003, they point out, the EPA reported that clothianidin was “highly toxic to honeybees on an acute contact basis,” and suggested that chronic exposure could lead to effects on the larvae and reproductive effects on the queen. Although the EPA asked Bayer for further studies of its effects on honeybees, it nevertheless authorized the chemical for market.

“If the EPA had sufficient concern about harm to bees that they would insist on other studies, it seemed unwise to approve it anyway and ask for research after the fact,” says Aaron Colangelo, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The EPA’s job is to make a decision about whether a chemical is safe or not.”

Colangelo envisions a similar scenario in coming years. The EPA has announced it will review clothianidin and other chemicals in the same family, but not until 2012. In the meantime, there’s nothing stopping the agency from approving the insecticides for use on new crops based on existing policies. In the end, Colangelo has little confidence the federal agency will bring a hammer down on the agribusiness giant. The EPA, he explains, often keeps its test results confidential for proprietary reasons at a company’s request. As a consequence, it’s unclear where gaps or discrepancies occur until a company makes a disclosure similar to Bayer’s.

“They’re not making decisions about whether the pesticide can be put on the market based on impacts to bees, no matter how much evidence of harm there is,” Colangelo says. “The EPA will just approve it anyway and put a warning label on the product.”

Halting the sale of pesticides, though, would be no mean task. Over 120 countries use imidacloprid under the Bayer label on more than 140 crop varieties, as well as on termites, flea collars and home garden landscaping. And the product’s patent expired a few years ago, paving the way for it to be sold as a generic insecticide by dozens of smaller corporations. In California alone, imidacloprid is the central ingredient in 247 separate products sold by 50 different companies.

In a statement, the EPA says that before banning a pesticide, it “must find that an ‘imminent hazard’ exists. The federal courts have ruled that to make this finding, EPA must conclude, among other things, that there is a substantial likelihood that imminent, serious harm will be experienced from use of the pesticide.” The EPA did not clarify what is meant by “imminent hazard” and why the death of honeybees does not qualify.

As Mussen points out, though, a few million dead honeybees may be the cost of doing business. “If they didn’t register products that were toxic to honeybees, there wouldn’t be a lot of products on the market that were available for pest control.”

All the more reason to start taking the world’s most ubiquitous insecticide off the market and invent a safer one, argues Walker, of the National Honeybee Advisory Board. “It’s on every golf course, it’s on every lawn. It’s not just an agricultural product. There’s really not one part of our lives it’s not touching.”

That September, a neurophysiologist diagnosed Devon with Asperger’s syndrome, a mental disorder related to autism, which affects children’s social and communication development. But when Clark researched Asperger’s on the Internet, she was shocked to learn something she hadn’t heard in the physician’s office. Some studies had found a correlation between Asperger’s, autism and vaccinations containing the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

Recalling Devon’s childhood vaccines and flu shots, Clark says, “It was as if my world just fell out from under me. There was page after page on the potential connection between mercury in vaccines and autism in children.” Clark is a retired nurse and her husband, Alan, is a physician. “I had vaccinated hundreds of children and so had Alan,” she says. “I thought, My God, not only did I hold my child down for his vaccines, what if I played some part in doing this to someone else’s child? It was almost too horrible for me to believe.”

Determined to help her son and affected children, Clark became an activist in the battle against thimerosal. “I can’t change the fact that this happened to my child, but I can certainly try to move heaven and earth to see that it doesn’t happen to another child,” she says. “If mercury is the problem, and there are alternatives to putting it into vaccines, there just needs to be a law against it.”

Clark frequently travels to Washington to lobby legislators for a ban on vaccines containing mercury. She meets with state senators to help prepare anti-thimerosal legislation and works with other parents to enact bans across the country. Her campaign has brought her head-to-head with big-name legislators like Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Clark describes herself as a lifelong Republican, but after 2002, when the GOP added the Eli Lilly provision to the homeland security bill to protect the company from lawsuits regarding thimerosal cases (it was repealed), she couldn’t bring herself to vote for George W. Bush in November.

Clark spoke to Salon on a cellphone in her car. She, Alan and Devon were driving down the Ohio Turnpike to meet a state representative in New York.

What have your interactions with Washington lawmakers been like?

In Washington, we are placed with interns who are so young they can’t fathom what we’re talking about. They don’t have kids. You can predict what’s going to happen: They nod, take copious notes, and tell you, “Senator so-and-so cares very much about this issue.”

Although we met with Senator Rick Santorum briefly, his staff was condescending and patronizing, and made statements that were simply untrue, like there was no scientific evidence that linked mercury in vaccines to autism. And without telling us, they invited Senator Bill Frist’s people into the meeting. They were observing the interaction very closely. Senators Frist and Santorum are co-sponsors of a new bill that, under the guise of protecting America in the war against terror, would go so far as to say that states cannot regulate vaccines or warn people of their potential dangers. It would shield vaccine makers from lawsuits.

Why do you think Senators Frist and Santorum inserted the vaccine provision into the Senate bill, officially called Protecting America in the War on Terror Act of 2005?

The pharmaceutical industry has a hold over many in Congress because of its extensive campaign contributions and lobbying. That explains why we’re meeting a lot of roadblocks in Washington. Their influence on the Federal Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health is very strong. It’s a David and Goliath fight — there’s no way I can walk into Washington and have the access that many of these pharmaceutical lobbyists have. I can’t write a check that large.

A lot of the people in key decision-making positions have conflicts of interest, and connections to the pharmaceutical companies. But I don’t believe every person in government is corrupt. I don’t believe there’s been some sort of conspiracy at work. I think there are some high-ranking officials at the FDA, CDC and in Congress who probably, for the sake of protecting the immunization program, made some very bad decisions. It’s made me angry, but I’m determined to keep taking the evidence around until I find that person in a position of power who says, “This has to be corrected.”

How do you stay motivated when you’re stonewalled by legislators?

When they were studying Martin Luther King Jr. in school a few months ago, Devon’s class did an art project called “I have a dream.” Alan and I were walking down the hall at school one day and saw the project on the wall. The children had written, “I want to be a soldier” or “I want to be an actress” — all the dreams children have. Then we came to the last drawing and it was Devon’s. Do you want to guess what my son’s dream is? His dream is to end mercury poisoning. That is not a dream that a 10-year-old should have. I sent it to several lawmakers and I wrote, “I don’t have the ability to make my son’s dream come true, but you do.”

Do you have doubts that you can convince lawmakers to ban mercury in vaccines?

Well, are there times when I feel like screaming at them? Of course, especially when they’re being obtuse. I shouldn’t have to go to Washington and beg people not to put poison in a lifesaving vaccine. It’s such a no-brainer to me. But I have seen the political process work. I may be naive, but I still believe we have the best system in the world. It has its flaws, but if we are determined enough and angry enough, those lawmakers are one election away from not having any influence.

Over 80 percent of respondents said the U.S. should use its military assets to bolster African Union troops on the ground in Darfur, should impose tough sanctions on the leaders who control the Janjaweed, and establish a no-fly zone over Darfur (air bombings on Darfuri villages continue unabated, according to reports). 80 percent also believed the war against civilians constitutes genocide.

Only 38 percent of respondents supported deployment of U.S. troops in Darfur — though that’s a number the ICG considered surprisingly high given a strained U.S. military and the intractable situation in Iraq. And ninety-one percent of people polled disagreed with the Bush administration’s policy of non-cooperation with the International Criminal Court, which works to bring genocidaires to justice.

John Norris, chief of staff of the Crisis Group in Washington, said the survey proved that the Bush administration had underestimated Americans’ willingness to support concrete actions to stop the killing.

“This level of support comes at a time when the Bush administration has never used its bully pulpit to issue much of a real call to action on Darfur,” said Norris, in a phone conference with reporters on Wednesday. “This is one of those issue areas where [they've] said there’s little public support, but when you open [it] up, you see that’s not the case.”

President Bush denounced the attacks on Thursday. “The idea of people expressing themselves in opposition to the government, then getting beaten, is not our view of how a democracy ought to work,” he said. But the administration squandered a chance to make its case for real democratic reform during a recent visit to Egypt by Laura Bush, who strongly endorsed Mubarak. The First Lady said Mubarak had taken “a bold step,” with this week’s referendum, but emphasized that “each step is a small step, [and] you can’t be quick.”

President Bush and many of his supporters have suggested that the U.S. war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, culminating in the country’s first elections this January, set off a wave of democratic reform in the Middle East. But Egypt and Saudi Arabia haven’t exactly proven model examples — and the administration continues to act as if it can have it both ways. At a recent meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at Bush’s Texas ranch, the president wooed the Saudi leader to get some help on soaring oil prices, but didn’t bother even to bring up the country’s continuing human rights abuses.

For all the rhetoric from the religious right about “outrage” over the filibuster compromise, the poll revealed that opinions about the nuclear option divided along party lines, with Republicans against the filibuster 48 to 39 percent, and Democrats supporting its use by 70 to 23 percent. Independent voters, meanwhile, backed the use of the filibuster by a margin of 54 to 39 percent.

“While the filibuster fight ended in a truce, most American voters were backing the Democrats on this one,” said Maurice Carroll, Director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in a statement. “If this fight were really about Roe v. Wade, Quinnipiac University polls have shown a consistent 2 -1 support for this historic ruling, with more support from men.”

The poll saves its worst news for the president, with 50 percent of Americans disapproving of Bush’s job performance. This confirms other recent polls that found the president’s job approval at an all-time low.