Karen Hanretty, Communications Director, California Republican Party
According to the developers, venture capitalists, bio-tech companies, and great private bio-research universities who conceived and are financing the campaign to pass California's Proposition 71, if the people of California would only borrow $3 billion dollars and give it to them, they, for their part, would provide Californians with jobs, cheaper health care, piles of tax revenue and, above all, cures for terrible diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and others.
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In order to give weight and credibility to their claims, the "Yes on 71" team hired the Analysis Group, Inc., a Menlo Park, California, consulting company with a wide variety of corporate clients, including such public-spirited corporations well-known for always putting the general welfare ahead of making a buck, as Pfizer, Merck & Company, GlaxoSmithKline, and Abbott Laboratories, to do a "study" about their claims.
To no one's surprise, the Analysis Group, Inc., report after thoroughly looking into the matter, concluded in 96 pages that passing Proposition 71 would provide Californians with jobs, cheaper health care, piles of tax revenue and, above all, cures for terrible diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and others.
As reported on September 19th by the New York Times:
"The committee promoting the plan released a study last week that said the measure would pay for itself in lower health care costs and higher income and sales tax revenues. The study, financed by the initiative's proponents, also predicted that the research would generate $537 million to $1.1 billion in royalties to the state over the next 35 years."
In its own press release on the "study," the Yes on 71/California Stem Cell Research & Cures Initiative campaign totally begs the question by promoting its "findings" under the headline "New Economic Study Demonstrates Proposition 71 Benefits to State Economy". How exactly does a report paid for by investors in Proposition 71 "demonstrate" anything, let alone benefits to the state economy?
The press release goes on to announce that "Investment in Stem Cell Research Could Yield More Than $12 Billion in Returns Through Tax Revenues, Royalty Revenues, and Health Care Cost Savings." Well, it COULD cure cancer, reverse the aging process, and reveal the secret of immortality. Wait, that IS what Proposition 71 investors are implicitly saying it will do, aren't they?
The same "I-paid-for-this-microphone" mentality can be found in an article on the newsdesk.org web site, which reports:
"Laurence Baker, a Stanford University associate professor of health research and policy, studied the economic implications of the initiative at the request of the groups that put it on the ballot.
"He said the measure, even with the state facing interest payments from the $3 billion in bonds, makes financial sense."
When this reporter asked Analysis Group, Inc., for an interview with Bruce Deal, chief consultant on the study, he wasn't available. When this reporter asked Analysis Group, Inc., how much the "Yes on 71" team had paid it to do the "study," he was referred to the chief spokesperson for the "Yes on 71" team. Repeated calls to that spokesperson have gone unreturned. A request to Stanford University Medical Center for an interview with report author Dr. Laurence Baker received a rather puzzling response: "Unfortunately, Dr. Baker is away and unavailable to talk."
Then, today, while interviewing Karen Hanretty, spokesperson for the California Republican Party, on the subject of Proposition 71, which is opposed by her party, Ms. Hanretty spoke to the same point implicit in the campaign's refusal to discuss the legitimacy of the "study" they themselves had paid for, when she said:
"The research that came out on that was paid for by the "Yes on 71" campaign, so already I'm going to discount a political proposal that has been put out as empirical data; there's no empirical data to back up those claims. They're misleading the public. They're raising hopes and expectations and to do so is terribly cruel to many families out there with children who have diabetes and aging parents who have Alzheimer's who desperately want cures and I think that these people should be called to task for raising such unrealistic expectations."
Listen to Karen Hanretty say this herself by clicking here.
Listen to her remarks today on Proposition 71 in their entirety by clicking here.
When Judge Jim Gray, the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in California, hired Rasmussen Reports to poll Californians about his candidacy, as part of his effort to qualify under the rules established by the League of Women Voters of California for participation in what has, so far, been the only televised debate between the already-more-visible Democratic and Republican candidates for that office, Xandra Kayden, the LWV's chief consultant on this debate, dismissed the results of that poll, calling it a "push poll" that was intrinsically illegitimate, having been paid for by the very party who stood to gain from it.
Now that the "Yes on 71" team has commissioned and is widely touting the results of what can only be called a "push study," perhaps the League of Women Voters of California will use their visibility and credibility to repudiate this attempt by the "Yes on 71" side to buy "facts" that so perfectly fit their own campaign needs.
Some possibly overwrought (but possibly instructive) comparisons of the War in Iraq and Proposition 71 .
President Bush led the U.S. into war in Iraq with lies, manipulations, half-truths, and lies. Everyone is paying for that deception, and for going along with that deception, now.
The super-wealthy and super-powerful investors behind Proposition 71 are cloaking their rapacious desire for even more wealth and more power in the sorrowful guise of suffering humanity, in the form of diabetics, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients, and many other innocent victims of disease for whom everyone feels sympathy, just as the suffering Kurds, the raped and tortured prisoners, and the gassed children of Iraq were held up by George W. Bush as justification for his own particular brand of "spreading democracy."
We can now see, even if the President doesn't, or pretends not to, the terrible fix we've gotten into by yielding to the siren song of a privileged elite bent on consolidating and expanding its control by lying to the people about the facts and the likely consequences of going along with their hare-brained schemes, such as trying to save a country by destroying it or sucking all the creative and financial oxygen out of the bio-medical research community by putting it under the control of "embryonic stem cell czars" who will dictate the future course of research, in place of the existing mechanisms that are based on an often-creative combination of scientific and technical curiosity and private capital risk taking.
That combination is what created the old "Silicon Valley." It's deeply ironic that many of the beneficiaries of that system have now decided that central control and public, debt-driven funding (the "scientific Stalinism" model) is a better way to move forward, at least, apparently, if its under their control and is paid for by California taxpayers, most of whom stand to gain very little by their own forced investment in this future and few of whom are likely to benefit in any real way from whatever scientific and bio-medical breakthroughs emerge from the "Institute for Regenerative Medicine" that Proposition 71 will set up.
The very latest poll, for example, shows (or purports to show) majority support for Proposition 71. But read this excerpt from the Los Angeles Times very carefully, and keep in mind what was said a few paragraphs back about "push polling":
"A survey by the Los Angeles Times showed that while most voters had not yet formed an opinion on the ballot measure known as Proposition 71, a majority expressed support once they were read the proposal itself." (italics added)
"The survey showed 54 percent of likely voters in California said they were inclined to vote for the stem cell proposal, compared with 32 percent who said they would vote against it."
Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe these entrepreneurial investors/patient advocates mean it. Maybe they are deep-down sincere in wanting to push the boundaries of medical and biological science into areas that will offer them and their family members, and everyone else, treatments and magic-bullet cures for their diseases.
If altruism, and not greed, is what's motivating the sponsors of Proposition 71, then let them lobby the California legislature to appropriate the money they think they need for the necessary research. Above all, let them stipulate that in return for providing public money for advanced biomedical research in the area of embryonic stem cells, ALL the medical benefits and ALL the financial benefits will accrue and go to THE PEOPLE of CALIFORNIA who will be providing the wherewithal to do the research in the first place.
As I argue in "Socializing the Risk while Privatizing the Health Benefits and Profits, as California's Proposition 71 does, is Unethical," it's wrong and counter-intuitive to make 30 million Californians take a risk that could yield them nothing, while arranging things (as Proposition 71 does) so that a small fraction of the state's population stands to benefit (without risk) from the interest on the $3 billion in bonds, the contracts for construction and research, ownership of the intellectual property rights (patents) to be generated by the research, and, no doubt, priority in receiving whatever powerful treatments and/or cures are generated by this project.
But wait. Here's news hot off the wire showing how valuable embryonic stem cells might be, in a account dated today from Massachusetts reporting that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) (which calls itself "the leading biotechnology company in the emerging field of regenerative medicine") "has created the first generation of human retinal cells in the laboratory from human embryonic stem cells."
First, if true, this is great, offering potential treatments and possibly cures for those suffering from "macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, and other retinal degenerative diseases."
The researchers at ACT seem to have made this breakthrough without $3 billion in borrowed money and without amending the Massachusetts constitution to enshrine the right to do embryonic stem cell research on the public dime.
But does this mean California is in danger of falling behind Massachusetts, of being on the wrong end of the "embryonic stem cell" gap?
Well, maybe, but if so, then it ought to mean that scientists and venture capitalists in California, buoyed by this good news from the East, should re-double their investigatory and private fund-raising efforts, and together their collaborative ones, and get going before all those retinitis pigmentosa patients start calling (or investing in) ACT.
If the venture capital money aggregated and the methods developed and used on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park were good enough to create the microprocessor revolution, then these tools ought to be enough to creation a revolution in bio-medical therapeutics. In fact, they already are. It should be beneath the dignity of the titans of capitalism who work there to come to the financially-strapped people of California now, (designer) begging bowl outstretched, asking for a $3/6 billion handout.
If a sense of their own dignity won't stop them, then it's up the rest of us, calculating our own individual and collective self-interest, to do it for them.
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