The Hightower Report

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Bringing Pollution Right to Your Table

Not only is pollution nasty and deadly, but it's also a spoiled-brat kind of substance that just won't stay put. You dump it over here and -- oops! -- it pops up over there, or way out that way ... or maybe even in that bag of organic baby lettuces you just bought.

Indeed, organic baby lettuce is one of the surprising places that the Environmental Working Group recently found perchlorate, having run scientific tests on 22 types of lettuce being sold in California supermarkets. Perchlorate is not something you want to find in your salad or on your BLT. It's a rocket-fuel ingredient. It's known to cause brain damage and other health problems, especially in children, even when exposed only to trace amounts.

The tests found way more than traces, however -- one-fifth of the lettuces tested contained at least five times the amount of perchlorate that's considered safe.

How did perchlorate end up in our lettuce? It came from a former rocket-fuel factory located down at the tip of Nevada. The toxic chemical leached from the factory into the nearby Colorado River, which then carried it miles away through farmlands in Arizona and California -- where 70% of our country's winter lettuce is grown. The farmers draw their irrigation water from the contaminated Colorado, and the lettuce sucks up both the water and perchlorate. Then the lettuce is harvested and shipped hundreds of miles to supermarkets, where you buy it and take it into your home to serve to family -- unaware that it comes predressed with toxic rocket fuel.

Pollution is like that -- it just keeps going ... ultimately into us. You'd think the powers that be would learn this lesson. Yet these geniuses are saying it's perfectly safe to dump high-level nuclear waste in Nevada, claiming that it's too far away to hurt us.

To learn more about perchlorate and lettuce, call the Working Group: 202/667-6982.

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The Goobers Are in Charge

Time for another Gooberhead Award -- given periodically to those in the news who've got their tongues going 100 miles per hour ... but forgot to put their brains in gear.

This week I have twin goobers for you -- and both are from the Capital of Gooberishness, the Texas Legislature. Like most states, Texas faces a dire budget deficit, falling nearly $10 billion short of the revenues needed just to cover existing spending, which already is inadequate to cover such essential public services as schools and children's health.

Yet, the right-wing Republican leaders of the Texas Legislature decreed at the start that there would not even be discussion about increasing the state's revenues to cover people's needs -- rather, funding for those needs had to be cut. So, for example, the house has now whacked the budget of C.H.I.P. (the Children's Health Insurance Program), so some 200,000 poor children will be kicked out of it.

Up pops Goober No. 1, Rep. Leo Berman, who blithely said, "We're going to lose a lot of kids from C.H.I.P., but perhaps now their parents will go back to many of their private health-insurance plans." When it was pointed out that many can't afford to get private insurance, Leo grandly waved his hand and said, "There are always churches and clinics to help those who fall through the cracks."

Then came Goober No. 2, Rep. Ray Allen, who cried crocodile tears for those kids and families being cut, saying, "I wish I had a magic wand. But I'm not a magician. I can't print money."

We're not looking for printers or magic acts, Ray -- we're looking for legislators with the guts and brains to do right, to meet the needs of the state's people. While they were so cavalierly whacking kids, the sick, the elderly, and the poor -- they voted for a $300 million slush fund to provide giveaways to corporations, and they set aside $10 million to study the genetic makeup of the cow.

Somebody should study the moral makeup of these goobers.