Tag: Health

Dirty Energy Trifecta

September 8, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

The Obama Administration's Environmental Vision: Green Lighting Arctic Drilling, A Pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands, and Delaying Carbon Emissions Regulations

The Obama Administration has recently made three moves that undermine the possibility of a green future by supporting dirty energy projects and deregulation.

1.  ARCTIC DRILLING:

Though Congress has passed no new oil drilling safeguards following the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dept. of the Interior last month gave Shell the green light to start their plans to drill in the Arctic, despite how dangerous it is.

2.TAR SANDS and the KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE:

The State Department is fixing to approve Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport oil from the Alberta Tar Sands across the U.S to Texas Refineries.

James Hansen, NASA scientist and the first person to warn Congress of the dangers of climate change, lists the negative impact from tar sand development:

The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities.

But worse still is that exploitation of the tar sand’s dirty produce would “make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”  Hansen concludes that if the oil from tar sands is burned together with conventional oil and gas and coal, “it is essentially game over” for our species.

Other scientists also agree that the pipeline sucks.

But nothing to worry about, agrees the company who wants to build the pipeline — what could go wrong? Meanwhile the State Department is following the Corporate Script, asserting without meaningful investigation that there will be “no significant” environmental impact.

Lots of protesters getting arrested in front of the White House, meanwhile. For more, see here.

3. EMISSIONS STANDARDS:

On September 2, Obama announced his decision to delay the implementation of emissions regulations that would have, according to the National Resources Defense Council, “saved up to 4,300 lives and avoid as many as 2,200 heart attacks every year.” This, in order to reduce “regulatory burdens” on the richest corporations in the history of humankind.

This decision means that the Obama administration will accept the Bush Era standards, which Lisa Jackson, the current EPA manager, wrote were “not legally defensible.”

The American Lung Association is pissed, and so is this asthmatic (former?) Obama supporter.


Winners

August 1, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Congressional Leaders and the U.S. President have worked out the framework of a deal to lower the Federal deficit by slashing certain kinds of spending while doing nothing to increase revenue by taxing corporations or the rich.

Economist Paul Krugman calls the deal a “disaster” which “amounts to an abject surrender on the part of the president” to “raw extortion”, and wonders why Obama didn’t utilize any of the tools he had at his disposal to avoid this “catastrophe”.

The Young Turks Cenk Uygur, recently ushered from the insider’s club for his insufficiently partisan critical stance, remembers how President Clinton was able to avoid a debt ceiling challenge from Gingrich republicans in his day. Why didn’t Obama use this or any of the other available methods to avoid a similar challenge now?

Constitutional Lawyer cum Journalist G. Greenwald isn’t buying the myth of Obama’s weakness, and points to the president’s own pronouncements and actions to argue that brutal cuts to Social Security and Medicare is precisely what the corporatist Obama want.

The whole debt ceiling debate has been a political show — a display of tooth and nail fighting between parties that agree on fundamentals:

Ballooning war spending? Significant cuts are off the table.

Taxing corporations the rich? Don’t hold your breath.

In a DN interview, Economist Richard Wolf puts the debt agreement disaster in historical perspective:

In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.

So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.

Even worse this not-so-sleight-of-hand robbery comes at a time when globalizing corporations are achieving liberty from any merely national interests — expanding overseas and laying off domestic labor.

The Associated Press reports that “strong second-quarter earnings from McDonald’s, General Electric and Caterpillar on Friday are just the latest proof that booming profits have allowed Corporate America to leave the Great Recession far behind.”

Again Richard Wolf traces the historical trajectory:

You know, 30, 40 years ago, we spoke about corporations moving production jobs out of the United States. Ten or 15 years ago, we began to talk about outsourcing, moving white-collar jobs out. The most recent addition to that is the decision of corporations, as they look around the world, to say, you know, the growth of our market, the growth of demand, it’s in Asia, it’s in Latin America, it’s in parts of—it’s not here. The American people are exhausted. Their wages are going nowhere. We have high unemployment. And the fact is, no one is going to lend them much more money because they’re tapped out. So they’re not a growing market. So you see American corporations literally focused, for production and for consumption, elsewhere. That means they’re going to take care of themselves in the world.

Prison Hunger Strike

July 17, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Pelican Bay SHU, a stripped and cuffed inmate, and the wide open space of the exercise yard.

Pelican Bay  “Security Housing Unit” inmates have been on hunger strike since July 1, in protest of the nightmarish conditions of their captivity.

They are kept in total isolation, under constant florescent lighting, in a 8′X10′ cell 22 1/2 hours a day.  If they are lucky they get an hour in a slightly larger concrete yard (pictured above right, from images taken from this photo essay).

Some of the hunger striking inmates have been held in the SHU for decades.

As Jeff Kaye stresses at FDL, one of the core demands of the hunger strikers is an end to the “debriefing” process, whereby prisoners are held in the SHU until they snitch or make up evidence against another inmate — an act which can put the prisoner and his family in danger.

The only other way out is to die or to complete your sentence in the SHU — what prisoners call “snitch, parole or die’.

The San Francisco Bay View has been all over this story, documenting the solidarity demonstrations in various cities and updates on negotiations between the prisoners and the Dept. of Corrections. Particularly interesting are the journal entries from hunger striking prisoners themselves — here is Richard Johnson on the “psychology of prisoners” as well as the challenges of “aging in prison”.

The Economist adds that inmates in “at least 11 of California’s 33 prisons” have joined the hunger strike in solidarity, and puts the current California prisons crisis in the broader context of the last several decades of “tough on crime” legislation:

The tale of how California’s prison system deteriorated to this point spans decades. In 1977 Jerry Brown, governor then as now, signed a law introducing determinate sentencing, limiting the discretion of judges and parole boards. Politicians and voters then added hundreds of new laws, all claiming to be “tough on crime” by punishing ever more offences with prison, and making prison terms ever longer.

Most famous of these was the 1994 ballot measure called “three strikes and you’re out”. Sponsored by the prison-guards union, it requires criminals convicted a second time to get double the usual sentence, while those with a third “strike” must get 25 years to life. Other states copied California, but California’s version is still the harshest, allowing even a non-violent or trivial third strike to result in a life term. In another six ballot measures between 1978 and 2000, voters also reintroduced and expanded the death penalty.

Here is a brief video update from TheRealNews.com and FSRN:

(I used to file audio reports with FSRN, btw.  Here is one from 2004 about the 10th anniversary of the “three strikes” law.)

Extreme Energy: Oil, Coal and Nukes.

June 26, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

Power industries have resorted to extreme measures in order to produce energy for an insatiable civilization, exploiting increasingly remote crevices of the planet in the pursuit of corporate profit  — without regard to heavy environmental costs.

Below are three examples: oil from tar sands, coal from mountaintop removal, and nukes from a demonstrably unsafe and under-regulated industry.

1. Oil Extraction from Canadian Tar Sands

Tom Radford’s documentary film about oil extraction from Alberta’s Tar Sands tells the story of Canada’s sorry environmental trajectory, its obstructionism to a global climate deal, the pollution of the Athabasca River and the devastating effects on the humans and other organisms in the area.

A choice sequence from the documentary:

Narrator: In Kyoto, Canada promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6%. Now, 20 years later, the tar sands are booming and the emissions are up 26%.

Bill McKibben: If you set out to devise a method to harm the planet, you couldn’t come up with a better one than what Canada is doing at the tar sands. You’ve got to bring in energy to heat this stuff up enough to get it out.  Once you spent all that energy in getting it out, then you refine it into gasoline and burn it again. If any significant portion of that tar sands continues to get exploited and burnt, then we’ll simply have too much carbon in the atmosphere

Tim Flannery: For every barrel of oil that you get from the tar sands, you release three times the as much carbon that you get form a conventional oil well in Texas or Saudi Arabia. So there is a big carbon liability… if the world followed followed Canada down that route… we would cook the earth.

2. Coal from Mountain Top Removal

Recent development from Mother Jones, on the devastating health effects of mountaintop removal mining:

A new study linking Appalachian mountaintop removal mining to birth defects offers compelling new evidence of the practice’s impact on human health..

Researchers at Washington State University and WVU pored over nearly 2 million central Appalachia birth records from 1996 to 2003. Their findings are disturbing: Kids born near mountaintop mining operations suffered higher rates of a bevy of birth defects, including central nervous system, musculoskeletal, urogenital and circulatory and respiratory problems.

I’ve posted on mountaintop removal before, and described how it saves the coal industry labor costs by simply blowing up mountains to get to the coal deposits inside.

In the process, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council,

Mining companies are clear cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests. They’re filling local rivers and streams with blasted debris, polluting drinking water with toxic waste and sacrificing the safety and sanctity of countless communities.

“The Last Mountain“, a critically acclaimed new documentary about mountaintop removal is playing in theaters this month. Here is a promotional trailer:

BTW, if you want to find your own electric connection to mountaintop removal, here is a useful tool.

3. Disasters and Lax Safety Regulation in the Nuclear Energy Industry

Although the Fukushima disaster has largely disappeared from U.S. “news” media that prefer to giggle at pictures of pee-pees, al-Jazeera is probably right to assert that it is “much worse than you think“.

The article quotes a longtime high level nuke industry exec Arnold Gundersen who claims that “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”

The disaster has led global support for nuclear power to subside, but in the U.S. the AP has reported on how “federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them.”

Meanwhile, these doctors are suggesting a connection between Fukushima and a 35% spike in infant mortality in the U.S. pacific northwest.

Liberating the Streets

April 13, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

This weekend, in the second CicLAvia, 7.5 miles of Los Angeles streets were liberated from the relentless hegemony of the internal combustion engine.

If Los Angeles has a future, it looks like this:

But one thing occurred to me in that terrible moment when the yellow Department of Transportation convoy came to reassert automobile supremacy at 3PM. Against my own anarchistic sensibilities, I must admit that (at least in this instance) it took the full power of the municipal government (Mayor, Police, Dept. of Transportation, etc.) just as much to liberate the streets as it did to shut them down again.

We almost lost [your city here].

March 16, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

In October 1966, there was a partial meltdown of the Fermi I Breeder Reactor in Michigan. Gil Scott Heron wrote a song about it.

As the news from Japan becomes more dire, what else is there to do but turn to a bluesman:

Read about this and four other times “we almost nuked ourselves by accident.”  A fuller list of “civilian nuclear accidents” worldwide is here.

Illegal Plants (But not for long?)

November 1, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

I never thought that I would see the day when Peter Tosh’s anthem would become a reality, but it looks like it might happen if enough people go to the polls tomorrow.

If anybody knows of any compelling reasons why marijauna should not be legalized, please let me know – I can’t find any.

By increasing the legality of this particular plant, CA Prop 19 would eliminate a disproportionately applied (i.e. racist) law that puts people in cages for the possession of a plant that grows from the earth. (Last year, CA police made 60,000 marijuana possession arrests, mostly of “young men of color”, even though “white” people use it more. )

Other benefits: It will increases tax revenue for a cash strapped state, and (possibly, hopefully) reduce the violence of the drug wars in Mexico, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.

But if all of this isn’t enough, just listen to Snoop:

No surprise, but Peter Tosh’s son Dave is also down. He makes his plea here.

CA Prop 23 (2010)

October 20, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Prop 23, initially and primarily funded by two Texas oil corporations (Valero and Tesoro), would suspend the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) until unemployment drops to 5.5% for four quarters.

If it passes, Prop 23 will require that the State of California abandon the implementation of comprehensive greenhouse-gas-reduction program, and drop the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Proponents argue that the measure will help preserve jobs, and that preserving jobs should take precedence over addressing the climate crisis. Opponents say that overturning AB32 will result in more air pollution, undermine the burgeoning clean clean energy sector, and reduce incentives to find alternatives to oil.  Also, there is mistrust of the motives of the measure’s sponsors, who happen to be among California’s worst polluters.

Here is an argument against Prop 23 in action-movie format, written and directed by respected acquaintance M. Cooke:

Totally Non-Nazi Penis Scraping

October 12, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the late 1940s, just as Nazi doctors who had experimented on human subjects were being condemned to death by U.S. military tribunals at Nuremberg, U.S. doctors were themselves experimenting on human subjects not only in Tuskegee, but also, we now find out, in Guatemala.

By now, every school child has heard (or should have heard) about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the U.S. “Public Health Service” withheld penicillin from syphilitic African-American men for the sake of a scientific study, with deadly results, even decades after penicillin became the standard treatment.

Now it comes to light that some of the same doctors were actually actively infecting Guatemalans with the disease.

According to the Susan Reverby, the medical historian who broke the story, the doctors chose Guatemala for their dark enterprise because prostitution was legal there, so in order to spread the disease they could simply hire syphilitic prostitutes to sleep with unsuspecting men in insane asylums.  But since this didn’t spread the disease quickly enough, they decided to scrape the inmates’ penises to facilitate the spread of the disease.  Reverby explains:

Syphilis is not an easy—there’s a reason it’s a sexually transmitted disease. You can’t just draw blood from someone who has syphilis and give it to somebody else. You actually have to create an inoculum. The disease—the bacteria that causes the disease can die when it’s in the air, which is why it has to pass through liquids and body fluids, primarily. And that’s why it’s sexually transmitted. So they created an inoculum using the ground-up testes of rabbits that already had the disease, and then they abraded or scraped the arms of people in the prison and in an insane asylum and in an army barracks. They used their arms. They used their cheeks. They also looked for men, frankly—I mean, this is the really, to me, absolutely unbelievable part that makes it look like a B-movie—they found men who had long foreskins. They took their penises. They moved the foreskin back. They abraded the head of the penis. They made the inoculum and put it on a little cotton—what’s called a pledget, or piece of cotton gauze. They held the penis for an hour and a half or two hours and hoped that they could transfer the infection this way.

These two “doctors” both conducted syphilis experiments on human subjects, and are themselves the subjects of a PBS Nova documentary called “The Deadly Deception“.  Dr. John Heller, on the right, who headed the Tuskegee study at the US Public Health Service in the ’40s, promoted penicillin as a treatment for syphilis at the same time as he “continued the policy of denying treatment to the [black] men in Macon County” even in the face of “undisputed evidence that men were dying, no penicillin was offered.”

Dr. John Colter, on the right, was involved in both the Tuskegee and Guatemalan experiments.  Even decades after the experiments ended, he defended the decision not to withhold treatment from people suffering from the disease:

It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.

The power of self-exceptionalism is such that these doctors not only failed to recognize the subjects of their experiments as fellow human beings — they were black and brown and poor, after all — but they couldn’t even perceive themselves in the mirror of the Nazi doctors condemned to death at Nuremberg.  Historian Jim Jones relates this story about Heller:

I asked him specifically about Nuremberg and whether that gave him any pause. And he said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him if—whether he ever drew any associations between what they were doing and what the Nazis had done, and he said, “Certainly not.” And then he looked at me with a kind of wounded innocence and said, “They were Nazis.”

Smelling the Trees

October 10, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

If Los Angeles has a future, it will include much more of this:

CicLAvia was the shit! Biking around the city without fearing for your life? No exhaust in your face and you can actually smell the trees!

I often imagine a car-free L.A., and this is the closest I’ve come to actually seeing it. It’s beautiful.

So great, that I am creating a new post category called “Solutions”.