The Bush Administration's Ongoing Assault on Blue-State California: Spraying Us to Exterminate the Light Brown Apple Moth

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Paulina Borsook

The spirit of Clausewitz ("war is a continuation of politics with other means") has been ever-present since the Bush Administration declared war against blue state-California in 2007.

How has this war been faring, the one where the combined powers of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and the CDFA (California Department of Food and Agriculture) intend to engage in the fury of aerial bombardment and the terror of ground assault on people, economy, and environment of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas? A war which may extend to the entire state?

This is the extermination campaign against the LBAM (Light Brown Apple Moth), a total war the USDA says it will carry on regardless the will of the people, scientific testimony, state rulings, or anything else having anything to do with rational courses of action. All this against a bug that poses a threat only in the realm of ideas and not in the realm of actual harms. Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it, like a few other wars (in Iraq; on some drugs) carried out by the Bush Administration?

Yet, even within the USDA, documents released through the April 2008 court hearing in Santa Cruz (where Superior Court Judge Paul Burdick ruled that the LBAM has caused neither emergency nor harm to California agriculture, so CDFA can no longer try to get around the need for an environmental impact report [EIR] on its LBAM eradication program) there is evidence that the LBAM is a moth of gentle breeding and modest aspirations, and an eradication program for it would be unseemly.

Specifically, the USDA itself described the LBAM as a "transient pest" and also said "the Suterra formulation is being applied in a way that we believe may seriously compromise its effectiveness, which may have been problematic to start with" [Suterra being the manufacturer of Checkmate, the party mix of pheromone+plastic particles small enough to lodge in the deep lung+mutagens, carcinogens, aquatic toxins, skin lung+eye irritants+possible endocrine disruptor sprayed over the Monterey Bay irritants+Areain 2007.]

So why is the full force and majesty of the U.S. government behind this pre-emptive attack on a presumed (agricultural) terrorist? Just why is the USDA spending its money on a program which isn't necessary, isn't effective, and isn't safe --- when the agency is slashing the budget for useful projects such as research into the wheat rust fungus that's threatening to turn into a scary food-scarcity-causing pandemic?