Drug Goes From $13.50 A Tablet To $750, Overnight

By ANDREW POLLACK

Martin Shkreli is the founder and chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, which raised the price of the drug Daraprim to $750 a tablet from $13.50. Credit Paul Taggart/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection.

The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former hedge fund manager. Turing immediately raised the price to $750 a tablet from $13.50, bringing the annual cost of treatment for some patients to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“What is it that they are doing differently that has led to this dramatic increase?” said Dr. Judith Aberg, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

She said the price increase could force hospitals to use “alternative therapies that may not have the same efficacy.”

Turing’s price increase is not an isolated example. While most of the attention on pharmaceutical prices has been on new drugs for diseases like cancer, hepatitis C and high cholesterol, there is also growing concern about huge price increases on older drugs, some of them generic, that have long been mainstays of treatment.

Although some price increases have been caused by shortages, others have resulted from a business strategy of buying old neglected drugs and turning them into high-priced “specialty drugs.”

Cycloserine, a drug used to treat dangerous multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, was just increased in price to $10,800 for 30 pills from $500 after its acquisition by Rodelis Therapeutics. Scott Spencer, general manager of Rodelis, said the company needed to invest to make sure the supply of the drug remained reliable. He said the company provided the drug free to certain needy patients.

In August, two members of Congress investigating generic drug price increases wrote to Valeant Pharmaceuticals after that company acquired two heart drugs, Isuprel and Nitropress, from Marathon Pharmaceuticals and promptly raised their prices by 525 percent and 212 percent respectively. 

Marathon had acquired the drugs from another company in 2013 and had quintupled their prices, according to the lawmakers, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, and Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland.

Doxycycline, an antibiotic, went from $20 a bottle in October 2013 to $1,849 by April 2014, according to the two lawmakers.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association sent a joint letter to Turing earlier this month calling the price increase for Daraprim “unjustifiable for the medically vulnerable patient population” and “unsustainable for the health care system.” An organization representing the directors of state AIDS programs has also been looking into the price increase, according to doctors and patient advocates.

Daraprim, known generically as pyrimethamine, is used mainly to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasite infection that can cause serious or even life-threatening problems for babies born to women who become infected during pregnancy, and also for people with compromised immune systems, like AIDS patients and certain cancer patients.

Martin Shkreli, the founder and chief executive of Turing, said that the drug is so rarely used that the impact on the health system would be minuscule and that Turing would use the money it earns to develop better treatments for toxoplasmosis, with fewer side effects.

“This isn’t the greedy drug company trying to gouge patients, it is us trying to stay in business,” Mr. Shkreli said. He said that many patients use the drug for far less than a year and that the price was now more in line with those of other drugs for rare diseases.

“This is still one of the smallest pharmaceutical products in the world,” he said. “It really doesn’t make sense to get any criticism for this.”

This is not the first time the 32 year old Mr. Shkreli, who has a reputation for both brilliance and brashness, has been the center of controversy. He started MSMB Capital, a hedge fund company, in his 20's and drew attention for urging the Food and Drug Administration not to approve certain drugs made by companies whose stock he was shorting.

In 2011, Mr. Shkreli started Retrophin, which also acquired old neglected drugs and sharply raised their prices. Retrophin’s board fired Mr. Shkreli a year ago. Last month, it filed a complaint in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accusing him of using Retrophin as a personal piggy bank to pay back angry investors in his hedge fund.

Mr. Shkreli has denied the accusations. He has filed for arbitration against his old company, which he says owes him at least $25 million in severance. “They are sort of concocting this wild and crazy and unlikely story to swindle me out of the money,” he said.

Daraprim, which is also used to treat malaria, was approved by the F.D.A. in 1953 and has long been made by GlaxoSmithKline. Glaxo sold United States marketing rights to CorePharma in 2010. Last year, Impax Laboratories agreed to buy Core and affiliated companies for $700 million. In August, Impax sold Daraprim to Turing for $55 million, a deal announced the same day Turing said it had raised $90 million from Mr. Shkreli and other investors in its first round of financing.

Daraprim cost only about $1 a tablet several years ago, but the drug’s price rose sharply after CorePharma acquired it. According to IMS Health, which tracks prescriptions, sales of the drug jumped to $6.3 million in 2011 from $667,000 in 2010, even as prescriptions held steady at about 12,700. In 2014, after further price increases, sales were $9.9 million, as the number of prescriptions shrank to 8,821. The figures do not include inpatient use in hospitals.

Turing’s price increase could bring sales to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year if use remains constant. Medicaid and certain hospitals will be able to get the drug inexpensively under federal rules for discounts and rebates. But private insurers, Medicare and hospitalized patients would have to pay an amount closer to the list price.

Some doctors questioned Turing’s claim that there was a need for better drugs, saying the side effects, while potentially serious, could be managed.

“I certainly don’t think this is one of those diseases where we have been clamoring for better therapies,” said Dr. Wendy Armstrong, professor of infectious diseases at Emory University in Atlanta.

With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.

The switch from drugstores to controlled distribution was made in June by Impax, not by Turing. Still, controlled distribution was a strategy Mr. Shkreli talked about at his previous company as a way to thwart generics.

Some hospitals say they now have trouble getting the drug. “We’ve not had access to the drug for a few months,” said Dr. Armstrong, who also works at Grady Memorial Hospital, a huge public treatment center in Atlanta that serves many low-income patients.

But Dr. Rima McLeod, medical director of the toxoplasmosis center at the University of Chicago, said that Turing had been good about delivering drugs quickly to patients, sometimes without charge.

“They have jumped every time I’ve called,” she said. The situation, she added, “seems workable” despite the price increase.

Daraprim is the standard first treatment for toxoplasmosis, in combination with an antibiotic called sulfadiazine. There are alternative treatments, but there is less data supporting their efficacy.

Dr. Aberg of Mount Sinai said some hospitals will now find Daraprim too expensive to keep in stock, possibly resulting in treatment delays. She said that Mount Sinai was continuing to use the drug, but each use now required a special review.

“This seems to be all profit-driven for somebody,” Dr. Aberg said, “and I just think it’s a very dangerous process.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2015, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Once a Neglected Treatment, Now an Expensive Specialty Drug.

Nate Silver Reveals His ‘Editorial Bias’ About Racism

By Tommy Christopher

For weeks, the mainstream media has contorted itself like a pretzel in a yoga class in order to avoid identifying racism as the key factor in Donald Trump‘s success, alternately attributing it to angst at Washington DC (even though 12 of the original 17 candidates are not Washington legislators) and ignoring direct evidence of it while they’re discussing that evidence. Finally, their golden boy has admitted why that is.

Nate Silver is the closest thing there is to a mainstream media avatar for “objectivity,” a polling whiz kid who is supposed to be an unflinching believer in data. On Friday night, Silver appeared on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes to discuss the racist (possibly planted) Donald Trump supporter who asserted President Obama’s alleged Muslimhood and lack of American citizenship during a town hall meeting, and whom Trump failed to correct.

That incident naturally led to discussion of recent polls indicating that an overwhelming majority of Republicans (as much as 86%) wouldn’t have corrected that guy, either. Right off the bat, Silver revealed, point blank, that he automatically resists ascribing things to racism, and then demonstrated that he’s also willing to make stuff up in order to do that:

Silver: “This may be my editorial bias. I tend to prefer explanations for the vote that don’t, as a default, invoke race and Islamophobia and whatnot… ”

“…PPP, not my favorite pollster, but 2/3 of Trump supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim. That’s 54% of voters overall in the GOP primary electorate.”
Hayes: “You said PPP is a democratic-leaning firm, and I think they do poll sometimes, like, troll polls. But we’ve got other polling, CNN polling that shows 43% of Republicans…”

Silver: “It depends on how you ask the question. right? Some pollsters say ‘What do you really think deep down,’ so they ask in different ways.”

Here are two guys who sit suspensefully for years hoping they get to play the word “empirical” in a game of Scrabble, yet they each choose to ignore facts that lead them to an uncomfortable conclusion, and even make up a fake polling question to do it. They also neglected to mention that Silver’s non-favorite pollster was also the most accurate pollster during the 2012 election, and even according to Silver himself produced results that tended to favor Mitt Romney.
I confronted Hayes and Silver about this on Twitter Friday night, and only Hayes responded:

@tommyxtopher @FiveThirtyEight @ppppolls never asserted that. In fact my point was that the data in other polls backs it up.

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 19, 2015

There’s no mystery to how PPP asked the question, because they printed it in their survey, and when Chuck Todd made the very same assertion that Silver did (and to which Hayes audibly agreed), I asked the pollster about it, just to be sure.  While Hayes is correct that he did point to the CNN poll, discrediting the PPP poll has the effect of taking the Muslim assertion from a majority Republican view to a significant minority opinion, thus allowing the media, Silver, and Hayes to still consider that maybe this is all anger at Washington, and not what it plainly is: the crystallization of white male resentment.

But the poll questions actually are there for us to look at. PPP asked “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim, or are you not sure?” which gave Republicans, at worst, a 50/50 shot at guessing correctly, or saying they weren’t sure, like Scott Walker. CNN, on the other hand, gave voters seven choices, and did not offer them “not sure” as an option. They also didn’t ask voters what religion they “think” Obama belongs to, they asked “Do you happen to know what religion Barack Obama is? Is he Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, something else, or not religious?”

Therefore, you could easily interpret these polls to mean that while 28% of Republicans are willing to concede that President Obama professes to be a Christian, only 14% of them actually believe that. I’m not even saying you should discount the CNN poll, I’m saying you shouldn’t discount either of them, and certainly not by making something up or following a preconceived bias.

So why do it? I don’t know Nate Silver, but Chris Hayes is an extremely intelligent guy who suffers from Acute Chronic Good Faith Syndrome. Like Hayes, I have a lot of very good friends who are also prominent conservatives. He and I first met at a CPAC afterparty hosted by Michelle Malkin, and we both know a lot of conservatives who aren’t just nice, but are some of the most decent and wonderful people in the world. I understand how hard it would be to look a good friend in the eye, someone like Ed Morrissey or Matt Lewis or Ben Domenech, and say “Most of your party is racist.”

Unfortunately, that’s the fact, Jack, and it’s not crazy liberal Tommy Christopher saying that. These polls demonstrate, empirically, that the birther/secret Muslim view is held by a majority of Republicans, and tolerated by almost all of them, and several prominent Republicans have said that those views are racist, and science says it, too. I love my conservative friends, and it pains me that this is not a deal-breaker for them.

Having a bias against attributing things to racism is one thing if you’re a political commentator looking to engage with the other side, but for a renowned pollster like Nate Silver, it’s like a doctor announcing he’s got a diagnostic bias against attributing things to cancer. I don’t necessarily want a doctor who sees cancer everywhere, but I’m not going to the one who’s looking to ignore it.

But such a bias is also a luxury (or even a privilege, you might say) that only certain people can afford, like people who have benefited from it their entire lives. At the very least, racism will never harm Nate Silver, so he can afford not to see it in order to make his own world seem like a better place.

When you’re the Muslim kid building a clock, or the black guy without a front license plate, you want someone to be staring extra-hard at those x-rays. Ignoring or resisting the existence of racism isn’t being nice, it’s being an accomplice.

Glenn Beck Concocts Conspiracy Theory For Conspiracy Theorists

By Karoli



I'd love to see Glenny's chalkboard for his latest conspiracy theory. Be forewarned, it concerns Donald Trump punking the Tea Party. No, really.

As Beck sees it, his listening audience contains more Tea Party members than that of any other right-wing radio host and yet Trump consistently fares poorly when Beck's network takes its monthly presidential poll. If his audience doesn't support Trump and his audience contains lots of Tea Party members, then Trump's support cannot be coming from the Tea Party, Beck reasons. Of course, actual scientific polls show Trump leading among Tea Party supporters.

"The Tea Party is eating its own," Beck said. "If I'm a guy who is a Republican establishment guy or I'm a liberal, I want to destroy the Tea Party. But if I'm a businessman, I want to destroy it as well. The reason why the GOP isn't suffering with their goals on campaign funds is because big business just wants business to go on. They know how to play the game. Look, Donald Trump as said, 'I give to everybody." He knows how to play the game. He doesn't know how to play the game with a libertarian, small government guy who says, 'There's no game for you to play here, Donald, and we stand by the Constitution.' So you can't buy that person or bully that person out of their house any more."

"It makes sense that he doesn't want the Tea Party," Beck continued. "So what's as good as getting the presidency of the United States? Discrediting and destroying a movement that stands for true principles. Small government and maximum freedom, stand for those who want to disrupt the system that makes everybody rich."

"I think is is really important that you stand up," he warned, "and you separate yourself as a tea partier and say, 'That is not us, that is not us.'"

But Glenn. It is absolutely you, and those who follow you. From the day you declared that President Obama hated white people, you set the bar, and your followers are simply rising to the challenge.

Poker players targeted by card watching malware

The malware spies on the cards being dealt to online poker players

Online poker players are being targeted by a computer virus that spies on their virtual cards.

The software shares the cards with the virus's creators who then join the same game and try to fleece the victim.

The sneaky malware has been found lurking in software designed to help poker fans play better, said the security firm that found it.

The software also targets other useful information on a victim's computer such as log in names and passwords.

Card counter

The malware targets players of the Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker sites, said Robert Lipovsky, a security researcher at Eset, in a blogpost.

When it infects a machine, the software monitors the PC's activity and springs to life when a victim has logged in to either one of the two poker sites. It then starts taking screenshots of their activity and the cards they are dealt. Screenshots are then sent to the attacker.

The images show the hand the player has been dealt as well as their player ID. This, said Eset, allows the attacker to search the sites for that player and join their game. Using information about a victim's hand gives the attacker a significant advantage.

"We are unsure whether the perpetrator plays the games manually or in some automated way," wrote Mr Lipovsky.

Eset found the Windows malware lurking in some well-known file-sharing applications, PC utilities as well as several widely used poker calculators and player databases.

Eset said the spyware had been active for several months and most victims were in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia and the Ukraine.

Why America's Deadly Love Affair With Bottled Water Has To Stop

Last year, Americans drank more than 10 billion gallons of bottled water. Wildlife and the environment paid.

By Tara Lohan

This spring, as California withered in its fourth year of drought and mandatory water restrictions were enacted for the first time in the state’s history, a news story broke revealing that Nestlé Waters North America was tapping springs in the San Bernardino National Forest in southern California using a permit that expired 27 years ago.

And when the company’s CEO Tim Brown was asked on a radio program if Nestlé would stop bottling water in the Golden State, he replied, “Absolutely not. In fact, if I could increase it, I would.”

That’s because bottled water is big business, even in a country where most people have clean, safe tap water readily and cheaply available. (Although it should be noted that Starbucks agreed to stop sourcing and manufacturing their Ethos brand water in California after being drought-shamed.)

Profits made by the industry are much to the chagrin of nonprofits like Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a corporate watchdog, and Food and Water Watch (FWW), a consumer advocacy group, both of which have waged campaigns against the bottled water industry for years. But representatives from both organizations say they’ve won key fights against the industry in the last 10 years and have helped shift people’s consciousness on the issue.

A Battle of Numbers

In 2014 bottled water companies spent more than $84 million on advertising to compete with each other and to convince consumers that bottled water is healthier than soda and safer than tap. And it seems to be paying off: Americans have an increasing love of bottled water, particularly those half-liter-sized single-use bottles that are ubiquitous at every check-out stand and in every vending machine. According to Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), a data and consulting firm, in the last 14 years consumption of bottled water in the U.S. has risen steadily, with the only exception being a quick dip during the 2008-2009 recession.

In 2000, Americans each drank an average of 23 gallons of bottled water. By 2014, that number hit 34 gallons a person. That translates to 10.7 billion gallons for the U.S. market and sales of $13 billion last year. At the same time, consumption of soda is falling, and by 2017, bottled water sales may surpass that of soda for the first time.

But there is also indication that more eco-conscious consumers are carrying reusable bottles to refill with tap. A Harris poll in 2010 found that 23 percent of respondents switched from bottled water to tap (the number was slightly higher during 2009 recession). Reusable bottles are now chic and available in myriad designs and styles. And a Wall Street Journal story tracked recent acquisitions in the reusable bottle industry that indicate big growth as well, although probably not enough to make a dent in the earnings of bottling giants like Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi.

Why the Fight Over Bottled Water

“The single most important factor in the growth of bottled water is heightened consumer demand for healthier refreshment,” says BMC’s managing director of research Gary A. Hemphill. “Convenience of the packaging and aggressive pricing have been contributing factors.”

That convenience, though, comes with an environmental cost. The Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization, found that it took the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil to make all the plastic water bottles that thirsty Americans drank in 2006 — enough to keep a million cars chugging along the roads for a year. And this is only the energy to make the bottles, not the energy it takes to get them to the store, keep them cold or ship the empties off to recycling plants or landfills.

Of the billions of plastic water bottles sold each year, the majority don’t end up being recycled. Those single-serving bottles, also known as PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles because of the kind of resin they’re made with, are recycled at a rate of about 31 percent in the U.S. The other 69 percent end up in landfills or as litter.

And while recycling them is definitely a better option than throwing them away, it comes with a cost, too. Stiv Wilson, director of campaigns at the Story of Stuff Project, says that most PET bottles that are recycled end up, not as new plastic bottles, but as textiles, such as clothing. And when you wash synthetic clothing, micro-plastics end up going down the drain and back into waterways. These tiny plastic fragments are dangerous for wildlife, especially in oceans.

“If you start out with a bad material to begin with, recycling it is going to be an equally bad material,” says Wilson. “You’re changing its shape but its environmental implications are the same.” PET bottles are part of a growing epidemic of plastic waste that’s projected to get worse. A recent study found that by 2050, 99 percent of seabirds will be ingesting plastic.

Ingesting plastic trash is deadly for seabirds, like this unfortunate albatross. (image: USFWS)

“We notice in all the data that the amount of plastic in the environment is growing exponentially,” says Wilson. “We are exporting it to places that can’t deal with it, we’re burning it with dioxins going into the air. The whole chain of custody is bad for the environment, for animals and the humans that deal with it. The more you produce, the worse it gets. The problem grows.”

Even on land, plastic water bottles are a problem — and in some of our most beautiful natural areas, as a recent controversy over bottled water in National Parks has shown. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), more than 20 national parks have banned the sale of plastic water bottles, reporting that plastic bottles average almost one third of the solid waste that parks must pay (with taxpayer money) to have removed.

After Zion National Park in Utah banned the sale of plastic water bottles, the park saw sales of reusable bottles jump 78 percent and kept it 60,000 bottles (or 5,000 pounds of plastic) a year out of the waste stream. The park also made a concerted effort to provide bottle refilling stations across the park so there would be ample opportunity to refill reusable bottles.

There might be more parks with bans but 200 water bottlers backed by the International Bottled Water Association have fought back to oppose measures by parks to cut down on the sale of disposable plastic water bottles. The group was not too happy when National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis wrote that parks “must be a visible exemplar of sustainability,” and said in 2011 that the more than 400 hundreds entities in the National Park Service could ban the sale of plastic bottles if they meet strict requirements for making drinking water available to visitors.

Water bottle filling stations at Grand Canyon National Park provide free spring water from the park's approved water supply located at Roaring Springs. (image: Michael Quinn/National Park Service/Flickr CC)

Park officials contend that trashcans are overflowing with bottles in some parks. The bottling industry counters that people are more apt to choose sugary drinks, like soda, if they don’t have access to bottled water. The bottled water industry alliance used its Washington muscle to add a rider to an appropriations bill in July that would have stopped parks from restricting bottled water sales. The bill didn’t pass for other reasons, but it’s likely not the last time the rider will surface in legislation.

Changing Tide

Bottlers may be making big money, but activists have also notched their own share of wins. “When we first started, really no one was out there challenging the misleading marketing that the bottled water industry was giving the public,” said John Stewart, deputy campaign director at CAI, which first began campaigning against bottled water in 2004. “You had no information available to consumers about the sources of bottling and you had communities whose water supplies were being threatened by companies like Nestlé with total impunity.”

If you buy the marketing, then it would appear that most bottled water comes from pristine mountain springs beside snow-capped peaks. But in reality, about half of all bottled water, including Pepsi’s Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani, come from municipal sources that are then purified or treated in some way. Activists fought to have companies label the source of its water and they succeeded with two of the top three — Pepsi and Nestlé. “We also garnered national media stories that put a spotlight on the fact that bottling corporations were taking our tap water and selling it back to us at thousands of times the price,” said Stewart. “People finally began to see they were getting duped.”

When companies aren’t bottling from municipal sources, the water is mostly spring water tapped from wilderness areas, like Nestlé bottling in the San Bernardino National Forest, or rural communities. Some communities concerned about industrial withdrawals of groundwater have fought back against spring water bottlers — the biggest being Nestlé, which owns dozens of regional brands like Arrowhead, Calistoga, Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Poland Spring. Coalitions have helped back communities in victories in Maine, Michigan and California (among other areas) in fights against Nestlé.

One the biggest was in McCloud, California, which sits in the shadow of snowy Mount Shasta, and actually looks like the label on so many bottles. Residents of McCloud fought for six years against Nestlé’s plan for a water bottling facility that first intended to draw 200 million gallons of water a year from a local spring. Nestlé finally scrapped its plans and left town, but ended up heading 200 miles down the road to the city of Sacramento, where it got a sweetheart deal on the city’s municipal water supply.

CAI and FWW have also worked with college students. Close to a hundred have taken some action, says Stewart. “Not all the schools have been able to ban the sale of bottled water on campus but we’ve come up with other strategies like passing resolutions that student government funds can’t be used to purchase bottled water or increasing the availability of tap water on campus or helping to get water fountains retrofitted so you can refill your reusable bottle,” says Emily Wurth, FWW’s water program director.

In just six months, Lake Mead National Recreation Area visitors have kept more than 13,600 water bottles out of landfills by using a new hydration station. (image: National Park Service)

Changes have also come at the municipal level. In 2007, San Francisco led the charge by prohibiting the city from spending money on bottled water for its offices. At the 2010 Conference of Mayors, 72 percent of mayors said they have considered “eliminating or reducing bottled water purchases within city facilities” and nine mayors had already adopted a ban proposal. In 2015, San Francisco passed a law (to be phased in over four years) that will ban the sale of bottled water on city property.

These victories, say activists, are part of a much bigger fight — larger than the bottled water industry itself. “We are shifting to fight the wholesale privatization of water a little more,” says Stewart. He says supporters who have joined coalitions to fight bottled water “deeply understand the problematic nature of water for profit and the co-modification of water” that transcends from bottled water to private control of municipal power and sewer systems.

Currently the vast majority (90 percent) of water systems in the U.S. are publicly run, but cash-strapped cities and towns are also targets of multinational water companies, says Stewart. The situation is made more dire by massive shortfalls in federal funding that used to help support municipal water and now is usually cut during federal budget crunches.

“Cities are so desperate that they don’t think about long-term implications of job cuts, rate hikes, loss of control over the quality of the water and any kind of accountability when it comes to how the system is managed,” says Stewart. “We need to turn all eyes to our public water systems and aging infrastructure and our public services in general that are threatened by privatization.”

Trump duped or worse in fundraiser speech to fake veterans group

Rachel Maddow reviews the background of the man behind Veterans for a Strong America, the beneficiary of a Donald Trump fundraiser speech on the USS Iowa, which does not appear to have any membership outside of chairman Joel Arends, and which today had its non-profit status revoked by the IRS.

Plutocrat Pete And Tea Party Tim In 'The Breakup'

The 5 Times America Elected Donald Trump

By Josh Harkinson

If you can't believe that Donald Trump is still the GOP front-runner, then consider this: America has elected the likes of The Donald before. There are, deep in our history, plenty of men who brazenly exploited nativist sentiments to win the White House or strengthen their grip on the office. Here are five US presidents who, if they lived today, might, in Trump's words, "make America great again."

John Adams

Adams was no Trump. America's "big deal" 18th century legal scholar and Founding Father would have been worth, in today's dollars, only $19 million. And he never even mastered the comb-over. But when it comes to making BOLD political moves while socking it to our enemies abroad, the second president puts Trump to shame. Determined to quash the immigrant vote, which mainly benefited Jeffersonian Republicans, Adams and his Federalist allies in Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. The bills lengthened the period of residency required for citizenship from 5 to 14 years and authorized the president to deport foreigners considered dangerous. One bill, the Alien Enemies Act, would later serve as the legal basis for detaining Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Theodore Roosevelt

Nativists weren't always the kind of people who attended tea party rallies and watched Fox News. In the early 1900s, some of the strongest opposition to immigration came from the labor unions that helped usher Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. In his first Congressional address, Roosevelt called for requiring immigrants to meet a "certain standard of economic fitness" and pass a literacy test—a measure that would effectively exclude many Southern and Eastern Europeans. After meeting stiff congressional resistance, Roosevelt brokered a compromise that established an immigrant head tax of $4 and created the Dillingham Commission, an investigative panel stacked with nativist legislators. Its reports accused Southern and Eastern European immigrants of displacing native workers, living in crowded and unclean housing, and performing poorly in school. Unlike Trump, however, Roosevelt never signed a GOP loyalty pledge. Instead, he left the Republican Party in 1912 and formed his own.

Woodrow Wilson

Woodrow Wilson never had the guts to accuse immigrants of being rapists, but he did call them low energy. His History of the American People, published in 1901, complained that most immigrants to the United States no longer came from "the sturdy stocks of the North of Europe," but rather from places like southern Italy, Hungary, and Poland, where "there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence." But when those comments became an issue during his 1912 presidential race, Wilson backpedaled and earnestly courted immigrant groups—or the European ones, anyway. Like most other national candidates at the time, he remained staunchly opposed to immigration from Japan and China. "We cannot make a homogenous population out of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race," he said. "Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson."

Warren Harding

Before "Make America Great Again," there was "America First!"—the slogan that in 1920 swept Harding and his fellow Republicans to power on a platform of curtailing a tide of immigrants from politically unstable parts of Europe. Harding signed the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, effectively cutting in half the number of immigrants admitted into the United States. The act also favored immigrant groups from Northern European countries while steeply limiting immigration from other parts of the world. "I don't know much about Americanism," Harding later said, "but it's a damn good word with which to carry an election."

Herbert Hoover

Hoover proved that rich guys with no experience in elected office can become president and that America can be for Americans. At the dawn of the Great Depression, he issued an executive order calling for the "strict enforcement" of a clause of the Immigration Act that barred the admission of immigrants who were "likely to become a public charge." Turning away virtually all working-class immigrants, his administration slashed legal immigration from 242,000 people in 1931 to 36,000 the following year. And Hoover stepped up raids on the homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants, causing more than 121,000 people, most of them from Mexico, to leave the United States. Hoover touted his record on immigration during the 1932 election, but it ultimately wasn't enough to keep him from getting thrown out of office by a bunch of LOSERS who had been FIRED.

Chipotle Says It Dropped GMO's. Now A Court Will Decide If That’s Bullshit.

Turns out, proving that your food is GMO-free is pretty difficult.

—By Tim McDonnell

su-lin/Flickr

What should have been an easy public-relations win for Chipotle is turning into a major headache—but one that could have interesting repercussions in the public debate about genetically modified organisms.

Back in April, the fast-casual burrito chain announced that it would stop serving food prepared with genetically engineered ingredients. At the time it didn't seem like a huge change, since only a few ingredients—notably the soybean oil used for frying—contained GMO's. (More than 90 percent of the soy grown in the United States is genetically engineered.) But as critics in the media were quick to point out, there was an obvious hole in Chipotle's messaging: The pigs, chickens, and cows that produce the restaurant's meat and dairy offerings are raised on feed made with GMO corn. (In fact, 70-90 percent of all GMO crops are used to feed livestock.) And don't forget the soda fountain, serving up GMO corn syrup by the cup.

 

This is the first lawsuit to challenge the veracity of an anti-GMO marketing campaign.

Last week, Chipotle got officially called out, when a California woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for allegedly misleading consumers about its much-publicized campaign to cut genetically modified organisms from its menu.

"As Chipotle told consumers it was G-M-Over it, the opposite was true," the complaint reads. "In fact, Chipotle's menu has never been at any time free of GMO's."

Chipotle has never denied that its soda, meat, and dairy contain, or are produced with, GMOs. A spokesman, Chris Arnold, said the suit "has no merit and we plan to contest it." Still, the case raises an unprecedented set of questions about how food companies market products at a time when fewer than 40 percent of Americans think GMOs are safe to eat (they are) and a majority of them think foods made with GMO's should be labeled.

The California statute applied in the lawsuit deals with false advertising: Allegedly, the "Defendant knowingly misrepresented the character, ingredients, uses, and benefits of the ingredients in its Food Products." The suit then provides a cornucopia of Chipotle marketing materials, such as the image to the left, which implies that that taco has no GMOs in it—even though, if it contains meat, cheese, or sour cream, then GMOs were almost certainly used at some stage of the process. The suit goes on to detail how Chipotle stands to gain financially from this anti-GMO messaging. The upshot is that, according to the complaint, Chipotle knew its stuff was made from GMOs, lied about it, and duped unsuspecting, GMO-averse customers like Colleen Gallagher (the plaintiff) into eating there. (Gallagher is being represented by Kaplan Fox, a law firm that specializes in consumer protection suits. The firm didn't respond to a request for comment.)

It will be up to the court to decide whether Gallagher's claims have any merit. But there's a big stumbling block right at the beginning: There's no agreed-upon legal standard for what qualifies a food as being "non-GMO," and thus no obvious legal test for whether Chipotle's ad campaign is legit. In fact, several food lawyers I spoke to said this is the first suit to legally challenge the veracity of that specific claim, which means it could set a precedent (in California, at least) for how other companies deal with the issue in the future. That sets it apart from deceptive marketing suits related to use of the word "organic," for example, for which there is a lengthy legal standard enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. (Organic food, by the way, is not allowed to contain GMO's.)

"There are many definitions of what constitutes non-GMO that are marketing-based definitions," said Greg Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "But nothing like [the federal standard for organic labeling] exists for GMOs at the moment."

In the context of this lawsuit, that lack of clarity may work to Chipotle's advantage, said Laurie Beyranevand, a food and ag law professor at Vermont Law School. Without specific guidelines to adhere to, Chipotle could basically be free to make "non-GMO" mean whatever the company wants it to mean (more on that in a minute). The question before the court is about the gap, such as it exists, between Chipotle's understanding of that term and its customers' understanding of it, when it comes to the meat, dairy, and soda at the heart of the suit.

Beyranevand said the soda could be a weak point for Chipotle. Even though the company's website is clear that its soda is made with GMO corn syrup, customers could still be misled by the advertising into thinking it isn't.

 

Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it's no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.

Meat and dairy are a different story, and there's a bit of existing law that makes Chipotle's rhetoric seem more defensible. In Vermont, the only state to have passed mandatory GMO labeling laws, meat and dairy products are exempted. And that makes some sense: Even if a chicken has been stuffed full of genetically modified corn its whole life, it's no more a GMO than I would be if I ate the same corn.

"Chipotle is just sort of riding on the coattails of that state legislation," Beyranevand said. In other words, Chipotle could have pretty good grounds to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't confuse its advertising with the notion that livestock aren't fed GMO's.

Of course, not everyone agrees with Vermont's approach. That includes the Non-GMO Project, an independent nonprofit that has endorsed nearly 30,000 food products as being non-GMO over the past five years. The group won't give its stamp of approval to meat products that have been fed GMOs. According to Arnold, Chipotle "would love to source meat and dairy from animals that are raised without GMO feed, [but] that simply isn't possible today."

Let's zoom out to the broader issue: Why isn't there a standard definition for what makes a food product count as "non-GMO"?

The closest thing is a bit of draft language the Food and Drug Administration published in 2001 that was meant as a nonbinding blueprint for companies that want to voluntarily label their foods as non-GMO. Turns out, that simple-sounding phrase is loaded with pitfalls. As "GMO" has gone from a specialized term used by biochemists to describe seeds, to broadly used slang for the products of commercial agriculture, its meaning has gotten pretty garbled. That makes it hard to come up with a legal definition that is both scientifically accurate and makes sense to consumers, and it leaves companies like Chipotle with considerable linguistic latitude.

First of all, there's the "O" in GMO. A burrito, no matter what's in it, isn't really an "organism," the FDA points out: "It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire 'organisms' is 'organism-free.'" Then there's the "GM": Essentially all food crops are genetically modified from their original version, either through conventional breeding or through biotechnology. Even if most consumers use "GMO" as a synonym for biotech, the FDA says, it may not be truly accurate to call an intensively bred corn variety "not genetically modified."

Finally, there's the "non": It might not actually be possible to say with certainty that a product contains zero traces of genetically engineered ingredients, given the factory conditions under which items such as soy oil are produced. Moreover, chemists have found that vegetables get so mangled when they're turned into oil that it's incredibly difficult to extract any recognizable DNA from the end product that could be used to test for genetic modification. So it would be hard, if not impossible, for an agency like the FDA to snag your tacos and deliver a verdict on whether they are really GMO-free.

 

"It would likely be misleading to suggest that a food that ordinarily would not contain entire 'organisms' is 'organism-free.'"

The point is that Chipotle likely isn't bound to any particular definition of the non-GMO label, and that we just have to take their word that the ingredients they say are non-GMO are, in fact, non-GMO. Lawmakers are attempting to clear up some of this ambiguity: House Republicans, led by Mike Pompeo (Kan.), succeeded in July in passing a bill that would block states from passing mandatory GMO labeling laws similar to Vermont's. The bill is now stalled in the Senate, but it contains a provision that would require the USDA to come up with a voluntary certification for companies like Chipotle that want to flaunt their GMO-less-ness.

Until then, another solution would is to seek non-GMO certification from the Non-GMO Project, though the group would likely reject Chipotle's meat products. In any case, Arnold said, neither Chipotle nor its suppliers are certified through the project, and they don't intend to pursue that option.
"We are dealing with relatively niche suppliers for many of the ingredients we use," Arnold said. "By adhering to a single certification standard, we can really cut into available supply of ingredients that are, in some cases, already in short supply."

With all this in mind, here's a final caveat: When Chipotle has its day in court, how we actually define what is or isn't a GMO product might not matter too much, explained Emily Leib, deputy director of Harvard's Center for Health Law. That's because the California laws in question here are as much about what customers think a term means, as what it actually does mean.

"The court will ask, 'Is there a definition [of non-GMO] or not?" Leib said. "They'll say, 'No,' and then they'll ask, 'Is this misleading?' How does this use compare to what people think it means?"
That's what makes this case interesting, since the truth is that most of the burrito-eating public knows very little about GMOs. Does that make it illegal for Chipotle to leverage peoples' ambiguous (and mostly unfounded) fears to sell more barbacoa? We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, probably don't eat too much Chipotle, anyway.

Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Associate Producer

Tim McDonnell is Climate Desk's associate producer. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email at tmcdonnell [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS |

Huckabee Goons Block Ted Cruz From Entering Kim Davis Event

Republican presidential candidates have been flocking to Kim Davis’s side to show how devout they are, but some are find it literally difficult to get by her side. Ted Cruz recently tried to get near her, but was blocked by an aide of GOP rival Mike Huckabee. Ana Kasparian (The Point), and John Iadarola (Think Tank), hosts of the The Young Turks, break it down. 

"The rally Tuesday had been scheduled before it was known whether Ms. Davis would be released. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, also a Republican presidential contender, made an appearance, but it was Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor, who grabbed the political spotlight. When Senator Cruz exited the jail a throng of journalists beckoned him toward their microphones, but an aide to Mr. Huckabee blocked the path of Mr. Cruz, who appeared incredulous.”*

Republican Lawrence Wilkerson on Dick Cheney: 'This is a man who's lost his mind'

Chris Hayes included a Fox News clip where Chris Wallace reminded a willful history revising Dick Cheney that during the Bush/Cheney administration Iran went from 0 to 5,000 centrifuges. Wallace suggested that Cheney left a mess for the Obama administration.

Republican Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State General Colin Powell, was introduced. (Colin Powell endorsed the Iran Nuclear agreement this weekend.) Chris Hayes asked Wilkerson about Cheney's apocalyptic warning about the Iran deal. Lawrence Wilkerson did not mince words.

"I have been searching for a single word that would describe Dick Cheney," Wilkerson said. "And I am afraid the only one that I can think of is 'insanity'. It's a deliberate, it's a methodical, it's a lucid, often lucid insanity. But it is insanity nonetheless. He can't recognize reality. He can't recognize the truth. The good thing Chris, for this country is that Independents, Republicans, and Democrats wish he would just go away now. He has almost no influence. You saw the influence he has virtually by numbers. Those at the AEI today that listened to his speech, that's about it."

Dick Cheney's speech at AEI was interrupted by a Code Pink protester.

Lawrence Wilkerson pointed out that Dick Cheney was once a brilliant strategist. He said Cheney changed after nine eleven. "All of a sudden he's turned into this person who cannot recognize reality," Wilkerson said. "I can't explain it. Maybe its physiological. Maybe it's biological. Maybe 9/11 did something to him. ... He is simply devoid of reason and he doesn't recognize reality anymore."

Wilkerson went on to make the point that Dick Cheney was using the same fear-mongering technique used by Joseph McCarty. At the end Wilkerson makes the Defense Industrial Complex / Dick Cheney association.

"Cheney is a millionaire now," Wilkerson said. "So maybe I am assuming his insanity and maybe I am wrong. Maybe he sees this as a way, as a route to success and it turned out to be profitable. His personal finances now are quite well established. He is a multi-millionaire. This is a man who in 1998, Chris, said most forcefully as CEO of Halliburton, that sanctions were not working, that they wouldn't work unless they were comprehensive and international. And he wanted to do deals with Iran. And so he was bashing sanctions up one wall and down the other. This is a man who's lost his mind."

Any more questions about Dick Cheney or his motives?

The Glox Market

Republicans Fear Trump Is Giving Party A Racist Image

By Taegan Goddard

“Republicans are growing increasingly concerned that Donald Trump’s inflammatory language is damaging the party, fearing that his remarks are hardening the tone of other candidates on racial issues in ways that could repel the voters they need to take back the White House,” the New York Times reports.

“Some party leaders worry that the favorable response Mr. Trump has received from the Republican electorate is luring other candidates to adopt or echo his remarks. It is a pattern, they say, that could tarnish the party’s image among minority voters.”

Man Is Arrested For Drinking Soda In Public

By Matt Agorist

New York, NY — Shawn Thomas films the police. He does so because it’s his right and he’s also great at fending off and exposing their rampant corruption.

Many of those who choose to film the police are polite and cordial, even when they are disrespected.

However, Thomas is not afraid to answer back to police who attempt to violate his rights, and he does so with an eloquent knack for profanity.

If you visit Thomas’ YouTube Channel, you will see that he is no stranger to these interactions.

Officer Kevin McAlister, badge number 17304, was the latest tyrant to violate this man for doing nothing wrong.

As Thomas was minding his own business, he was approached by McAlister for drinking a non-alcoholic malta soft drink. As he proceeded to violate this man’s rights, McAlister wrongfully claimed that Thomas had a Sam Adams beer.

Thomas stood his ground and refused to bow down and be harassed, illegally. Even if he would have had a beer, the response from police in this instance is utterly ridiculous. Five officers were called to the scene because a man had a soft drink in paper bag.

 

Thomas was forcefully handcuffed, and his cellphone, wallet, and ID were confiscated. Illegally.

After assaulting him and depriving Thomas of his freedom, the officers realized that they had no justification for the stop and they were forced to let him go.

In the land of the free, this is what protecting and serving has become.

How The Egg Lobby Paid Food Blogs And Targeted Chef To Crush A Vegan Startup

Internal emails reveal coordinated attack by American Egg Board to quash the rise of Hampton Creek’s egg alternative in possible breach of federal regulations

By Sam Thielman

A government-controlled industry group targeted popular food bloggers, major publications and a celebrity chef as part of its sweeping effort to combat a perceived threat from an egg-replacement startup backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, the Guardian can reveal.

The lobbyists’ media counterattack, in possible violation of US department of agriculture rules, was coordinated by a marketing arm of the egg industry called the American Egg Board (AEB). It arose after AEB chief executive Joanne Ivy identified the fledgling technology startup Hampton Creek as a “crisis and major threat to the future” of the $5.5 billion-a-year egg market.

A detailed review of emails, sent from inside the AEB and obtained by the Guardian, shows that the lobbyist’s anti-Hampton Creek campaign sought to:

• Pay food bloggers as much as $2,500 a post to write online recipes and stories about the virtue of eggs that repeated the egg lobby group’s “key messages”
• Confront Andrew Zimmern, who had featured Hampton Creek on his popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods and praised the company in a blog post characterized by top egg board executives as a “love letter”
• Target publications including Forbes and Buzzfeed that had written broadly positive articles about a Silicon Valley darling
• Unsuccessfully tried to recruit both the animal rights and autism activist Temple Grandin and the bestselling author and blogger Ree Drummond to publicly support the egg industry
• Buy Google advertisements to show AEB-sponsored content when people searched for Hampton Creek or its founder Josh Tetrick

The scale of the campaign – dubbed “Beyond Eggs” after Hampton Creek’s original company name – shows the lengths to which a federally-appointed, industry-funded marketing group will go to squash a relatively small Silicon Valley startup, from enlisting a high-powered public relations firm to buying off unwitting bloggers.

One leading public health attorney, asked to review the internal communications, said the egg marketing group was in breach of a US department of agriculture (USDA) regulation that specifically prohibited “any advertising (including press releases) deemed disparaging to another commodity”.

Tetrick called for the USDA to clamp down on the food lobby, as thousands of petitioners called on the White House to to investigate the USDA itself for “deceptive endorsements”.

“This is a product that has been around for a very long time,” the Hampton Creek founder said. “They are not used to competition and they don’t know how to deal with it.”

In statements, AEB’s Ivy and a USDA official denied any wrongdoing. An agriculture department official said that it “does not condone any efforts to limit competing products in commerce”.

The AEB contracted Edelman, the world’s largest public relations company, to coordinate the attack. One passage within the email tranche suggests that AEB amended its contract with Edelman to include a section called “Beyond EggsConsumer Research”.

“Conduct qualitative/quantitative consumer research to pinpoint and prioritize areas of focus. For example, research will, ideally, provide actionable intelligence on what attacks are gaining traction with consumers and which are not so as to help industry calibrate level of communications response (if any) to ensure a consistent response strategy moving forward,” the passage reads.

“Ads considered disparaging are those that depict other commodities in a negative or unpleasant light via either video, photography or statements,” said attorney Michele Simon, of the law firm Foscolo and Handel, after reviewing the AEB emails. “The entire contract [amendment] with Edelman violates this rule.”

Some of the web’s biggest food blogs were unwittingly paid from the “Beyond Eggs” budget to write supportively about eggs as AEB executives privately expressed mounting frustration about Hampton Creek, whose high-profile backers include the Facebook backer Peter Thiel, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla and other Silicon Valley luminaries.

When one Edelman executive, Jamie Singer, advised that the board wait on “an eventual and organic balancing of the media narrative”, Kevin Burkum, AEB’s senior vice-president of marketing, shot back: “Help us understand why the recommended course of action seems to always be sit back and do nothing?”

More recently, Hampton Creek has in fact faced its own PR woes with allegations of suspect science and hazardous work environments. And last month the US Food and Drug Administration warned the California startup that the name of its flagship product, Just Mayo, was misleading and and should be renamed, insisting an egg-less product should not be described as mayonnaise.

The emails reveal how AEB executives had grown increasingly frustrated about coverage of Hampton Creek, hailing the company as providing a high-tech and sustainable alternative to factory-farmed eggs.

In an email an AEB executive noted a blogpost by Zimmern – an influential TV celebrity – that complimented Hampton Creek and described caged-chicken egg production as “the poster child for everything farming and food systems shouldn’t be”.

The AEB executive complained Zimmern’s post was “a new love letter” to Hampton Creek and suggested sending the TV chef a study underwritten by the AEB to contradict his take. A long exchange discussed whether or not to respond to Zimmern’s offer to host a bake-off between Beyond Eggs and hen eggs.

On behalf of the egg group, Edelman contacted high-profile food blogger and Food Network star Drummond, author of several top-selling cookbooks. Drummond did not agree to work on the campaign, the emails indicate. The group also sought out Grandin, another famous figure whose endorsement would have been valuable. Grandin, too, appears to have declined.

In 2013, Google bought ads against Hampton Creek’s name and other search terms including Tetrick’s name and his chief product, Just Mayo, so that links to egg board-sponsored talking points about industrial farming would pop up alongside links to Hampton Creek. The AEB emailed about how to deal with Buzzfeed’s Rachel Sanders, who reported on the ads, and others who followed up on the campaign, in the emails.

The AEB retained at least five bloggers and contacted many more during the period covered by the emails. The bloggers disclosed the egg group’s advertising on their sites. The two bloggers who responded to the Guardian for this article said they were completely unaware that the sponsorships were part of a concerted effort against Hampton Foods.

Hemi Weingarten, author of the popular food blog Fooducate and an occasional columnist for the Huffington Post, published a post marked as sponsored by the AEB entitled “10 Reasons to Love Eggs” that including this sentence: “At just $0.15 each, eggs are the least expensive source of high-quality protein per serving.” This language is consistent with one of the American Egg Board’s most regularly used talking points.

Weingarten said he knew nothing of the campaign against Hampton Creek and pointed out that his blog had published positive coverage of the company. “As part of our ad sales activities we reach out to healthy brands and commodity boards to spend their ad dollars to reach our audience,” Weingarten told the Guardian.

Lori Lange, of the popular blog Recipe Girl, is listed by Edelman as receiving a fee of $2,500 for a bagel quiche recipe. Lange disclosed the post was sponsored. The Guardian emailed Lange for comment; she did not respond but did remove an AEB infographic that read in part: “Today’s hens are producing more eggs and living longer due to better health, nutrition and living space.”

Blogger Gaby Dalkin was paid $2,000 to include the AEB’s “Incredible Eggs” talking points in a recipe for breakfast burritos, and Susan Whetzel of Doughmesstic included the language in her in her Italian Egg Frittata recipe, according to the emails. Both disclosed the posts were sponsored.

Whetzel said she, too, was unaware that the blog post was considered part of a campaign against Hampton Creek by the AEB, and that she had adhered to the Federal Trade Commission’s advertising guidelines by including a disclosure notice. “It’s obvious it’s a sponsored post,” she wrote in an email to the Guardian.

Dalkin did not respond but an email bounce back said she was out of the country.

The cache of 600 pages of AEB emails, first reported last week, was obtained by Ryan Shapiro, a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington DC-based Foia specialist attorney Jeffrey Light.

The messages show Ivy, who is set to leave the AEB at year’s end after being named the industry’s 2015 Egg Person of the Year, received many messages from egg producers and processors who make up the board’s constituent members, are required by law to supply its budget and were evidently unnerved over the rise of Hampton Creek.

Ivy expressed a desire to push back at the positive media coverage the company would start to receive, from the pages of Forbes magazine to Buzzfeed and beyond.

“We know that shell egg producers are [...] feeling threatened by the introduction of this product,” she wrote in a September 2013 email.

In a statement to the Guardian, Ivy said the AEB’s efforts to “balance existing media efforts” were “common” practice and “part of a larger business strategy”.

“While egg replacers have been around for many years, we recognize that the interest in this category has increased recently,” she said. “In response, we bolstered our efforts to increase the demand for eggs and egg products through research, education and promotional activities.

“These activities, which are common within the consumer products industry, include continuing to work with industry thought-leaders, conducting a paid social media strategy to balance existing media efforts and liaising with partner organizations.”

However it is the process of targeting a perceived rival that could prove most controversial for the AEB, a statutory body paid for by industry but partly appointed by the US agriculture secretary.

Paid-for or “sponsored” blog posts are not uncommon, but the notion that a quasi-governmental body funded a campaign to undercut a Silicon Valley food startup could raise eyebrows.

Tetrick, the Hampton Creek founder, called for a congressional inquiry on Thursday, saying that the agriculture department should be held responsible for the AEB’s actions.

“They have gone way beyond what they are allowed to do,” Tetrick said of the egg lobbying group.
He said the scale of the egg lobby’s retaliation against his company’s rise was “hard to wrap your head around”.

“They play the same game over and over again,” he told the Guardian on Friday. “They say they are doing it to promote eggs, but it’s got nothing to do with competition.”