If you worked on the ‘
Healthy Kids Healthy Portland‘
campaign promoting fluoridation of Portland’s legendary Bull Run fresh
water, you’re probably not having the best week. You’re probably
thinking, “I don’t understand,
HOW could we have lost by 21 percent with the campaign manager/consultant duo of Evyn Mitchell and
Mark Wiener that crafted platinum chart-toppers like ‘
Charlie Hales for Mayor‘?!”
You’ve probably lost a fair amount of sleep trying to figure out how
in the hell a grassroots campaign with far less experience who struggled
to raise $280K was able to take in three votes for every two of yours
when HKHP raked in an estimated $1 million+ dollars in corporate and
political cash. How could such an insurrection happen? Why didn’t the
lobbyists at
Upstream Public Health and the strategists at
Winning Mark see this coming? How did the people get away with forcing a vote on fluoridation in the
first place? It’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath. This will all make sense soon.
For anyone unfamiliar, the current fight over fluoridation went
public when it was reported that the lobbying and public relations firm
Upstream had been meeting with city hall in closed-door sessions that
were
tellingly left off
the city’s calendar. Red flags were raised and alarms were sounded,
but despite heated public hearings, mayor Sam Adams and the rest of the
city commissioners voted unanimously in favor of adding
fluorisisilic acid to public’s drinking water.
The argument put forth for this un-democratic action was that since
most other US cities dose their water with this chemical, it’s high time
Portland did the same, and we can’t
trust the public to agree
with us. In reality, few other developed nations outside the U.S.
practice fluoridation. Almost all of Europe refrains from fluoridating
its water. Last month, the nation of Israel joined Europe in
yanking mandated fluoride over health and environmental concerns.
In response to city hall’s poor behavior, a coalition of concerned
citizens shifted into high gear to bring about a referendum and let the
people vote. Some 20,000 signatures needed collecting within just 30
days. The newly formed Clean Water Portland (CWP) and it’s volunteers
blew that target away
by turning in over 43,000 signatures a day
before the deadline.
The citizen insurrection underway, Upstream, the NW Health
Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, and several other interested parties
launched ‘Healthy Kids, Healthy Portland’ (HKHP) which purported to be
the authority on what they termed a “dental crisis” currently being
suffered by Portland’s lower income families and communities of color.
Their website listed dozens of “
trusted” organizations consisting of national health industry institutions and several smaller community-based groups.
HKHP wasted no time blitzing the airwaves and Youtubes with saturated
media citing figures showing Oregon has an untreated tooth decay rate
of 40%. Yet they
conveniently ignored that Portland’s rate is half that at 20%. What’s more, when compared to state by state figures, Portland ranked 15th best.
Still, with so many ‘health’ groups asserting their authority on the
matter, it was difficult to counter the narrative that fluoridation was
the
only way to provide dental health to disadvantaged
communities. Yet if the issue was better dental health, why had
fluoride supporters like Kaiser previously fought against more equitable
access to actual universal care? Why had institutions now preaching
‘dental equity’ moved to
close free clinics that used to operate throughout our region?
The more one looked into it, the less this issue appeared to be about health care at all.
When
Columbia Riverkeeps, Food & Water Watch, and the local chapter of the
Sierra Club
issued coordinated press releases opposing fluoridation citing concerns
over adding toxic fluorosilicic acid to our drinking water, HKHP could
no longer assert with any seriousness that citizens questioning their
plan were simply conspiracy theorists.
After it was reported that HKHP
had given away
over $120,000.00 in “grant” money to groups representing ethnic
minorities, it was clear they didn’t hold the amount of sway they’d
hoped for. Shortly after, the
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission’s executive director and the local chapter of the
NAACP both came out against fluoridation.
HKHP had a serious problem on its hands. They now had to face the
fact that communities of color were speaking out against fluoridation.
When the first public polling released in May showed that
fluoridation was supported by only 30% of African Americans and less
than 10% of Latinos, critics wondered if Upstream or HKHP had even
bothered to ask people of color what they wanted at all.
Meanwhile,
Clean Water Portland
was waging a quiet ground game unlike anything seen here in a
generation, according to several longtime PDX activists. Building on
the momentum from the referendum signature gathering, CWP did with
volunteers what it lacked in funds. The few donations they had were
spent on yard signs as soon as possible, so that friends and neighbors
could have a visual reminder of solidarity in the face of large
organizations claiming authority on fluoridation.
CWP chose calm blue tones for it’s apparel and media in smart
contrast to HKHP’s blood red campaign materials. While red has been
proven
to convey a sense of superiority, many people on the Clean Water
campaign remarked that it seemed to denote emergency and panic, hardly
consistent with the kind of happy cartoon tooth images they were also
presenting.
While HKHP made sure you couldn’t use Facebook or Youtube without viewing their
repetitive ads,
CWP was sending out dozens of foot soldiers every day, having face to
face conversations, letting people know that outside the U.S. there
is concern about the safety and ethics of mandating the ingestion of fluoride.
At a debate sponsored by the Multnomah County Democrats, CWP representative Rick North
drove this point home,
“We know fluoride can cause harm. Regardless of the PPM, once
introduced into drinking water, we can no longer control the dose. If
we cannot control the dose, we cannot control the harm.” His
counterparts from HKHP could not refute this fact and appeared more and
more frustrated as the evening wore on.
Still, Healthy Kids reminded the public ad nauseam that they’d
secured endorsements from most newspapers in the city. The Oregonian,
Willamettte Week, and the Portland Mercury used their pages to
relentlessly mock those opposed to fluoridation as being on the fringe,
hippies, stoners, Burners, anti-science, paranoid, selfish, racist, or
just plain stupid.
CWP never took the bait, and neither did their supporters. The
back-and-forth over fluoridation raged online for months, yet early on
it became known within the activist community that HKHP was paying
people to troll forums harassing anyone who didn’t support
fluoridation. It seemed their strategy was to antagonize people into
threatening them in order to paint the opposition as emotionally
unstable. If this was their plan, it failed entirely.
More and more people being insulted by HKHP’s paid internet
commenters got involved off-line. They organized events, they knocked
on doors, they made countless phone calls. Many credited HKHP’s online
media coordinator for being so
hostile and demeaning as to motivate and mobilize far more people to join CWP than would have otherwise.
Despite HKHP having the local print press locked down, Clean Water
Portland was doing positive outreach to local broadcast journalists.
On air reporters seemed far more interested in actually listening to
Portlanders concerned about the negative health and ecological effects
of fluoridation. Far from the caricatures of tin-foil hat conspiracy
theorists that HKHP tried to brand the opposition as being, these faces
appearing on the news spoke intelligently and compassionately. They
looked like normal people, they were mothers and fathers. They talked
about issues of
consent.
They talked about what fluoride can do to people with diabetes. These
citizens were not fear-mongering, they were expressing reasonable doubt
and applying the
precautionary principle.
In the final days of the campaign, polls were showing that fluoridation was
losing favor. More reporters were attending Clean Water events than ever before. Nobody wants to report on a losing team.
Then a bomb fell on HKHP. KATU reported that after two freedom of
information requests, it had obtained information that showed that
fluoridation provides less
than a 1% rate of improvement in tooth decay when averaged across the
country, and that Portland -with no fluoridation whatsoever – faired
far healthier than this average.
What’s more, it was reported that a statewide survey that proved
HKHP’s years-old statistics hid recent improvements in dental health had
been delayed by the
pressuring
of Upstream employees. Even more damning, it appeared that some health
officials had done campaign work while being paid by the state of
Oregon with
taxpayer money.
A string of emails showing evidence to this wrong-doing was turned over
by Clean Water Portland, and is currently being reviewed to determine
whether these officials broke the law while working for the pro-fluoride
campaign.
If you worked for HKHP, hopefully you’re starting to understand what
went wrong. Yet still, days after the dust has begun to settle, there
are those who claim Portland voters were somehow tricked into doubting
health industry officials’
insistence of the safety and benefit
of fluoridation. One HKHP staffer claimed the NAACP had been lied to,
as though the organization was somehow incapable of looking at all the
available information and arriving at their own logical conclusions.
There’s apparently a lot of head-scratching going on among Portland’s wealthy political elite and across the
national
blogosphere. The fact that a vast majority of Portland voters would
reject fluoridation of their drinking water is a narrative that
seems to confound
many east coast writers in particular. Evidently, they can’t conceive
that Portland is a city with a large number of very non-political people
who enjoy gardening and simply don’t want fluoride being sprayed on
their food. Instead of hurling out hippie insults or making lame
Portlandia references, they should look up what
bioregionalism means and learn a bit about the
Free Cascadia movement if they truly want to understand why HKHP got buried.
What they also don’t seem to understand is that this victory was about far more than fluoride. Portland politicians have
ridden the coat tails of Tom McCall and touted a stale green-washed
brand while cuddling with big-money interests like the
Portland Business Alliance
and the City Club. Almost all our current city representatives are in
office due to one man, Mark Wiener. This city once had a proud history
of citizens fighting city hall and winning. That kind of rebellious
spirit has been sorely lacking for far too long.
On Tuesday, May 21st,
Rebel Portland
came back with a vengeance. No longer can corrupted politicians assume
Mark Wiener is an unstoppable wrecking ball in local government. We’ve
proven that throwing more money into politics is no promise of power,
that with enough passion and legwork, grassroots operators can crush
city hall.
Sometimes the good guys do win.
The fight to protect Bull Run fresh water is not over. Already,
there is talk of Oregon state politicians plotting whether to challenge
the will of the people with legislation in Salem
that would nullify Portland’s voters choice on fluoridation.
Let them try. There is now a network of ecologically conscious and
politically networked activists in this city capable of stopping
big-business interests cold.
As the Tribune
pointed out,
there are two city commissioners up for reelection who claimed their
support of fluoridation would not hurt them. Now, they have something
to be afraid of.
We know how to win. See you in the streets.
•••
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