A Discomfitting Truth: The Ahistorical Ilan Pappe

Pappe's Discomfort

by Gilad Atzmon

Ilan Pappe is an important voice. One of those courageous historians, brave enough to open the Pandora box of 1948. Back in the 1990s Pappe, amongst a few other Israeli post-Zionists, reminded Israelis of their original sin - the orchestrated, racially-driven ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of Palestine - the Nakba.

But like many historians, Pappe, though familiar with the facts of history, seems either unable to grasp or reluctant to address the ideological and cultural meaning of those facts.

In his recent article, When Israeli Denial of Palestinian Existence Becomes Genocidal, Pappe attempts to explain the ongoing Israeli dismissal of the Palestinian plight. Like Shlomo Sand, Pappe points out that Israeli President Shimon Peres’ take on history is a “fabricated narrative.”

So far so good, but Pappe then misses the point. For some reason, he believes that Peres’ denial of the Palestinian’s suffering is a result of a ‘cognitive dissonance.’ i.e. a discomfort experienced when two or more conflicting ideas, values or beliefs are held at the same time.

But what are those conflicting ideas or values upheld by Israelis and their President which cause them so much ‘discomfort’? Pappe does not tell us. Nor does he explain how Peres has sustained such ‘discomfort’ for more than six decades. Now, I agree that Peres, Netanyahu and many Israelis often exhibit clear psychotic symptoms, but one thing I cannot detect in Peres’ utterances or behavior is any ‘discomfort’.

I obviously believe that Pappe is wrong here – expulsion, ethnic cleansing as well as the ongoing abuse of human rights in Palestine, are actually consistent with Jewish nationalist supremacist culture and also with a strict interpretation of Jewish Biblical heritage.

Pappe writes, “The perpetrators of the 1948 ethnic cleansing were the Zionist settlers who came to Palestine, like Polish-born Shimon Peres, before the Second World War. They denied the existence of the native people they encountered, who lived there for hundreds of years, if not more.” 

Here Pappe is correct, but then he continues: 

“The Zionists did not possess the power at the time to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced: their conviction that the land was people-less despite the presence of so many native people there.” 

But Pappe fails to point at any symptom of such a dissonance. Could it be that the Director of the Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter is just ignorant?

Certainly not, Pappe is far from being ignorant. Pappe knows the history of Zionism and Israel better than most people. He knows that ‘Zionist settlers’ like ‘Polish-born Shimon Peres’ were ideologically and culturally driven. But then why would a professor of history attempt to turn a blind eye to the ‘ideology’ and the ‘culture’ of those early Zionists?

The early Zionists, were neither blind nor were they stupid. They saw the Arabs in the land of Palestine – in the fields, in the villages and in the towns – but, being driven by a racial, supremacist and expansionist philosophy, they probably regarded the Arab as sub-human and so easily dismissed their rights, their culture, their heritage and indeed, their humanity. [1]

But, even though a cultural and ideological analysis resolves the proposed alleged ‘dissonance’ and illuminates the historical complexity, Ilan Pappe avoids elaborating on those issues. I have a good reason to believe that the truth is just too offensive for Pappe’s audience to digest. So instead, Pappe continues with his psychological model: 

“They (the Zionist) almost solved the dissonance when they expelled as many Palestinians as they could in 1948 — and were left with only a small minority of Palestinians within the Jewish state.”

Yet again, it could be helpful if Pappe provided the necessary ‘historical’ evidence that would prove that the Nakba, was indeed an attempt to ‘resolve an internal Zionist collective cognitive dissonance’. I assume that Pappe knows very well that it is actually that lack of such a "cognitive dissonance" that drives a few Israeli individuals such as Uri Avnery, Gideon Levy and Pappe himself towards universalism, humanism and pro-Palestinian activism.

I guess that Pappe’s new cognitive analytical model is telling us very little about Zionism, Israel or Shimon Peres but it actually tells us a lot about Pappe and the grave state of the Palestinian solidarity intellectual discourse. The discomfort he talks about is in fact his own: the clash between known and accepted facts and logical conclusions and the task he has accepted of squaring the circle, of wrapping up a racist, supremacist project in psychobabble wrapping and presenting it as nothing less than a pandemic of ‘cognitive dissonance.’

For some reason many of us insist on producing ‘inoffensive’ chronicles of Israeli barbarism and Jewish nationalism that attempt to mask and deflect from rather than pointing to the obvious cultural and ideological kernel of the problem.

Yet, the question that bothers me is how is it possible that a leading academic exhibits such a problematic understanding of a conflict after studying it for three decades.

The answer is pretty embarrassing. Pappe is actually a serious scholar and a gracious human being. However, in the current intellectual climate, Pappe, like many others cannot freely explore the truth of Zionism and the Jewish State. The shocking truth is that Pappe was much more provocative and intellectually intriguing while teaching in Haifa University than now when he directs the institute of Palestinian Studies at Exeter University. It is a fair assumption that telling the truth about the culture that drives the Jewish State would cost Pappe his UK academic career and obviously the support within the Jewish so-called ‘left’, let alone the Soros funded Palestinian collaborators.

So instead of searching for the truth, Pappe and others end up searching for some ‘inoffensive’ models – anything to sustain the image of ‘solidarity.’

I do not have any doubt that Pappe knows by now that Israelis are far from being tormented by the Palestinian plight. They are not exactly regretting the Nakba either, they certainly do not sob over their past racist assault on the people of the land of Palestine. And as Israeli polls reveal time after time, most Israelis would support a second Nakba as much as they supported the criminal carpet bombardment of civilian population at the time of operation Cast Lead. Pappe knows very well that Israeli racist policies and collective attitudes are culturally and ideologically, rather than politically driven. Israel is the Jewish State and its politics is dictated by a new Hebraic interpretation of Jewish culture and Judaic heritage.

Pappe is a humanist and I want to believe that in the small hours, he himself feels some discomfort. Deep down, Pappe must know the truth. He knows what drives Zionism and Israeli militarism. He knows it all but, for obvious reasons, he must keep silent and wraps the conflict up with faulty terminology and ‘inoffensive’ cognitive models.

Instead of engaging in an open discourse and digging into the truth of the conflict, we see our leading scholars actively engaged in concealment of the truth. This is actually a tragedy, for the Palestinian Solidarity discourse is now an intellectual desert. We have murdered and buried our most inspirational thinkers [2] and poets. We replaced them with rigid slogans and banal Herem [3] culture.

Interestingly enough, by the time Pappe finished writing his paper, he himself was no longer so convinced by his own model. He writes, 

“It is bewildering to learn that the early Zionists denied the existence of Palestinians in 1882 when they arrived; it is even more shocking to find out that they deny their existence — beyond sporadic ghettoized communities — in 2013.”

The meaning of this is clear: we are dealing here with a total and categorical dismissal of otherness. This is not a symptom of ‘cognitive dissonance’ but rather a historical continuum of a psychopathological condition that is inherent to the politics of the chosen. It is the direct outcome of Judeocentric supremacy - the very domain Pappe and others prefer not to tackle.

At the end of his paper, Pappe claims that Peres is a ‘madman’ who ignores “millions and millions of people, many of them under his military or apartheid rule while he actively and ruthlessly disallows the return of the rest to their homeland.” But if Peres is a ‘madman’, he is unlikely to be riddled with discomfort. If Peres is mad he is not in a state of ‘dissonance’, struggling to integrate conflicting ideas. On the contrary, Peres is, in his awfulness, entirely at peace with himself.

As far as I am concerned, Shimon Peres is not mad at all. He is evil, coherent and consistent. He is the president of the Jewish State and it’s high time that Ilan Pappe openly faced up to this - and to what it means.

[1] Interestingly enough, it was actually the notorious right-winger Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky who was amongst the first to deal with the necessity to address the complexity of dealing with the indigenous population within the context of the Zionist dream. It was the rabid ultra-nationalist Jabotinsky, rather than the Zionist ‘left’ who regarded the Arabs as proud, highly cultural people that must be confronted militarily. In that regard, I would recommend reading Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall.

[2] Just in the last year we have seen the BDS campaigning against Prof Norman Finkelstein, Greta Berlin, MP George Galloway and many others.

[3] Hebrew word for Excommunication and Boycott

The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics
and Jewish Left's spin particular Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

American War Crimes Past and Those to Come

US Presidents Must Be Prosecuted for War Crimes

by David Swanson - War is a Crime

"Our intelligence community does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin."

I do assess with varying degrees of horror (some of the varying degrees rather high even) that a lot of people are going to die. And how dare they die from chemical weapons when they should be dying from hellfire missiles and cluster bombs and napalm and depleted uranium and white phosphorous. We have a responsibility to protect these people from dying of the wrong type of weapon and in too small numbers.

I'm in Dallas protesting the rehabilitation of our last criminal president because of the precedents he set for our current criminal president. So, precedents are on my mind. One precedent for an illegal humanitarian NATO war on Syria is, of course, the illegal humanitarian war on Libya two years ago. And the pair of precedents (Libya and Syria) will put the target of the neocon/neoliberal cooperative war project squarely on Iran.

Syria will suffer, of course. There will be no more an example of a humanitarian war that actually benefited humanity after Syria than before. The precedent will not be one of having accomplished something, but of having gotten away with something.

For some truly illuminating background on what was done to Libya, and some relevant discussion of what awaits Syria (if we don't prevent it), I recommend Francis Boyle's new book, Destroying Libya and World Order.

Boyle served as a lawyer for the government of Libya repeatedly, over a period of decades, more than once successfully preventing a military assault by the United States and the United Kingdom. Boyle details the aggression toward Libya of the Reagan administration: the lies and false accusations, the sanctions, the provocations, the assassination attempts, the infiltration, the blatant disregard for international law.

Boyle's history brings us up to and through the 2011 assault, and traces its precedents to a very similar war over a decade earlier in Bosnia. Boyle finds the unconstitutional and illegal assault on Libya a clear impeachable offense for President Obama. And why would we think otherwise? Only because we let Clinton and Bush get away with everything they got away with. It would seem unfair now to impeach Obama for a crime his predecessors committed as well.

But past, as well as current, presidents can be impeached, censured, prosecuted, and/or publicly shamed. Five of them came to Dallas today; there shouldn't be any trouble finding them. And the criminal attack on Libya can be treated as the crime it was. The excuse of protection was used to quite openly pursue the overthrow of a nation's government, bombing large numbers of civilians in the process, while arming brutal thugs and creating predictable blowback in neighboring nations as well.

In contrast, in Bahrain, nonviolent pro-democracy activists are left to their own devices as a U.S.-backed dictatorship jails, tortures, and murders them.

In Syria, the United States has worked against peace and for violence. That violence is not a justification for further and heightened violence. And every member of an intelligence "community" that announces that Syria might possibly have used a chemical weapon should be doing community service for the people of Fallujah and Basra and Baghdad, not prodding the world's only stupor power into another genocide.

David Swanson is an American activist, blogger and author. He served for a year as media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association. In May 2005, Swanson helped make the Downing Street memo known in the United States and discussed in Congress. He co-founded After Downing Street and led an ongoing campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Swanson continues to work closely with the peace movement and often leads campaigns to end the Iraq War and punish those involved in launching that war. His Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. More articles by David Swanson

 

British Intelligence? UK Military Deems Wind Towers National Security Threat

UK Ministry of Defense Deems Wind Towers a National Security Threat

by John C.K. Daly - Oilprice.com

Twenty-plus years on, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 threatened massive Western defense budgets, bereft of a major enemy like the “Evil Empire.”

Western militaries conveniently found a new global enemy a decade later following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and since then, they have struggled in the light of invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to adapt their strategies to cope with the new threat, making defending the “homeland” the highest priority.

While the U.S. created the “Department of Homeland Security,” Washington’s less prosperous European allies have been forced to seek solutions to indigenous defense largely by themselves beyond NATO.

Except that the NATO charter Chapter 5 stipulates that an attack upon a member state will be met by the entire coalition.

European democracies have scrambled to define both national and European Union security issues, particularly since the global economic downturn, which began in 2008, forcing hard choices amongst European defense ministries.

Furthermore, many European nations now have significant post-colonial immigration populations, ramping up security concerns, from both indigenous citizens and ongoing concerns of foreign aggression. Defending the United Kingdom’s territorial, maritime and aerial space is the primary mission of Britain’s Ministry of Defense.

A laudable objective, but, in a time of declining MOD revenues amid energy imports, perhaps, a wind farm too far?

Needless to say, security encompasses protecting the country access to energy, so anything that reduces the kingdom’s dependency on foreign energy imports must be a good thing, correct?

Apparently not.

The latest threat to Britain?

Wind power, apparently.

The MOD has come out against two proposed 115 foot wind power towers in Cornwall, which they assert are so big they could look like planes on monitoring equipment.

The MOD assert that the wind towers green energy devices could confuse computer systems designed to protect the UK and identify the turbines as a threat, triggering the MOD to send in fighter aircraft to investigate, and while the RAF was preoccupied, allowing real enemies to sneak into British airspace, and accordingly, are against their construction.

The unpatriotic British citizens attempting to undermine British aerial defense are Richard and Ian Lobb, who want to install the 50 kilowatt towers on their adjacent farms in St Ewe, Cornwall. The ever vigilant MOD which warned the installation would cause "unacceptable interference" to an air traffic control radar 30 miles away in Wembury, Devon.

According to the MOD, "Wind turbines have been shown to have detrimental effects on the performance of MoD ATC radars. These effects include the desensitisation of radar in the vicinity of the turbines, and the creation of 'false' aircraft returns which air traffic controllers must treat as real. The desensitisation of radar could result in aircraft not being detected by the radar and therefore not presented to air traffic controllers. The creation of 'false' aircraft display on the radar leads to increased workload for both controllers and aircrews and may have a significant operational impact. Furthermore, real aircraft returns can be obscured by the turbine's radar returns, making the tracking of conflicting, unknown aircraft much more difficult."

Related article: U.S. Congress Breaths Life into Wind Energy

A tad of history and geography here.

Radar installations along the English Channel were crucial in Britain winning the crucial Battle of Britain in 1940 against Hitler’s Luftwaffe, so Britain’s RAF is hardly unfamiliar with the principles of radar, more than seventy years later.

Secondly, how does a stationary object generate a hostile radar signature, unlike an incoming aircraft moving at hundreds of miles per hour?

Thirdly, virtually all of the RAF’s interception missions during the Cold War and after were against Soviet, and now Russian military aircraft approaching from the northeast, across the North Sea.

Cornwall, in Britain’s extreme southwest, is geographically rather distant from this area.

So, who’s to send the threats?

France?

Spain?

Argentina?

The people of Cornwall deserve their green energy, and the MOD officials should be chastised for their ramping up of a non-existent problem.

The Armada was over four centuries ago, World War Two over 70 years ago – the people of Cornwall deserve electricity from renewable energy sources, as it hardly seems to be a threat to national security beyond those MOD boffins who have apparently spent too much time at the pub over lunch hour.

Related article: Has Belgium Cracked the Problem of Storing Wind Power Electricity?

Guinea Pig Nation: How American Citizens Became Subjects

You Are a Guinea Pig: How Americans Became Exposed to Biohazards in the Greatest Uncontrolled Experiment Ever Launched

by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz - TomDispatch

 A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name -- and no antidote.

The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

Today, we are all unwitting subjects in the largest set of drug trials ever. Without our knowledge or consent, we are testing thousands of suspected toxic chemicals and compounds, as well as new substances whose safety is largely unproven and whose effects on human beings are all but unknown. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) itself has begun monitoring our bodies for 151 potentially dangerous chemicals, detailing the variety of pollutants we store in our bones, muscle, blood, and fat. None of the companies introducing these new chemicals has even bothered to tell us we’re part of their experiment. None of them has asked us to sign consent forms or explained that they have little idea what the long-term side effects of the chemicals they’ve put in our environment -- and so our bodies -- could be. Nor do they have any clue as to what the synergistic effects of combining so many novel chemicals inside a human body in unknown quantities might produce.

Tomgram: Rosner and Markowitz, Your Body Is a Corporate Test Tube 

Just over three years ago, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig leased by BP killed 11 people, injured 17, and -- according to government estimates -- polluted the Gulf of Mexico with 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude. It turns out, however, that the casualty toll didn’t end with those 28 workers. The real number may reach into the thousands.

Last year, BP pled guilty to 14 felonies stemming from the disaster, including misleading Congress about the amount of oil that gushed into the gulf. But that wasn’t the only way BP attempted to cover up the extent of the spill. The main method was using 1.84 million gallons of a substance known as Corexit that acts to “attach itself to leaked oil, break it into droplets, and disperse them into the vast reaches of the gulf, thereby keeping the oil from reaching Gulf Coast shorelines.”

Writing for Newsweek and with the support of the Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund, Mark Hertsgaard recently laid bare how Corexit was utilized and the dire effects it apparently had on the men and women who worked to “clean” the gulf in the wake of BP’s historically unprecedented spill. People like Jamie Griffin. A BP representative reportedly assured Griffin that the smelly sludge cleanup workers were tracking into the "floating hotel" where she was a cook would be “as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid” -- so she scrubbed and scrubbed to clean it up. “Within days,” Hertsgaard writes, “the 32-year-old single mother was coughing up blood and suffering constant headaches.” She soon “fell ill with a cluster of excruciating, bizarre, grotesque ailments... unstoppable muscle spasms were twisting her hands into immovable claws... she began losing her short-term memory... The right side, but only the right side, of her body ‘started acting crazy. It felt like the nerves were coming out of my skin. It was so painful. My right leg swelled -- my ankle would get as wide as my calf -- and my skin got incredibly itchy.’”

Hundreds, perhaps, thousands of other workers were exposed to the same chemicals, including those who were coated in a mist of Corexit, since almost 60% of it was sprayed out of airplanes. Hertsgaard reveals that not only “did BP fail to inform workers of the potential hazards of Corexit and to provide them with safety training and protective gear, according to interviews with dozens of cleanup workers, the company also allegedly threatened to fire workers who complained about the lack of respirators and protective clothing.”

So, add Corexit to the list of toxic substances brought to us by industries that promised better and include BP in a long catalog of companies which, over the last century, have tried to hush-up the truth about the types of chemical assaults for which the Department of Homeland Security issues no fact sheets. It’s a story as old as industrial America and one that public health historians David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz know all too well. For years, they have earned the ire of the lead and petrochemical industries for historical exposés that demonstrate how American companies regularly sacrificed workers' health and children’s lives for the sake of big profits.

In their latest historical tour de force, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, Markowitz and Rosner chronicle the battles that have taken place over lead poisoning for the last half-century, with special emphasis on a study in which researchers from Johns Hopkins University conducted what the Maryland Court of Appeals deemed unethical research on African-American children. Knowing that some of the children in their study could be exposed to lead from old paint in the apartments they were moved into and so at greater risk for learning disorders and behavioral problems, they went ahead anyway. If it sounds to you like some dark corollary to the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which hundreds of black men with syphilis were denied treatment with penicillin so that U.S. government researchers could study the course of the disease, you’re not alone in thinking it. The Maryland Appeals Court thought so, too. But while the Tuskegee study began in the 1930s, when protocols for protecting people from medical experimentation were lax, the Johns Hopkins research started in the 1990s, when regulations supposedly provided ample protection from harm at the hands of public health professionals. The story of how and why this came to pass is riveting and revelatory. (The co-authors will soon be discussing it with Bill Moyers on “Moyers & Company.”)

Today, Markowitz and Rosner -- the first guest author ever to pen a TomDispatch piece back in December 2002 -- lead a toxic tour, not through Superfund sites and nuclear no-go zones, but average American homes. And no wonder, we live our lives immersed in a chemical soup never before encountered in human history. We’re the lab rats in a make-it-up-as-they-go-along nationwide corporate experiment, which is also a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Nick Turse

You Are a Guinea Pig: How Americans Became Exposed to Biohazards in the Greatest Uncontrolled Experiment Ever Launched

by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz

 

How Industrial Toxins Entered the American Home

The story of how Americans became unwitting test subjects began more than a century ago. The key figure was Alice Hamilton, the “mother” of American occupational medicine, who began documenting the way workers in lead paint pigment factories, battery plants, and lead mines were suffering terrible palsies, tremors, convulsions, and deaths after being exposed to lead dust that floated in the air, coating their workbenches and clothes.

Soon thereafter, children exposed to lead paint and lead dust in their homes were also identified as victims of this deadly neurotoxin. Many went into convulsions and comas after crawling on floors where lead dust from paint had settled, or from touching lead-painted toys, or teething on lead-painted cribs, windowsills, furniture, and woodwork.

Instead of leveling with the public, the lead industry through its trade group, the Lead Industries Association, began a six-decade-long campaign to cover-up its product’s dire effects. It challenged doctors who reported lead-poisoned children to health departments, distracted the public through advertisements that claimed lead was “safe” to use, and fought regulation of the industry by local government, all in the service of profiting from putting a poison in paint, gasoline, plumbing fixtures, and even toys, baseballs, and fishing gear.

As Joe Camel would be for tobacco, so the little Dutch Boy of the National Lead Company became an iconic marketing tool for Dutch Boy Lead Paint, priming Americans to invite a dangerous product into their children’s playrooms, nurseries, and lives. The company also launched a huge advertising campaign that linked lead to health, rather than danger. It even produced coloring books for children, encouraging them to paint their rooms and furniture using lead-based paint.

Only after thousands of children were poisoned and, in the 1960s, activist groups like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers began to use lead poisoning as a symbol of racial and class oppression did public health professionals and the federal government begin to rein in companies like the Sherwin-Williams paint company and the Ethyl Corporation, which produced tetraethyl lead, the lead-additive in gasoline. In 1971, Congress passed the Lead Paint Poisoning Prevention Act that limited lead in paint used for public housing. In 1978, the Consumer Products Safety Commission finally banned lead in all paints sold for consumer use. During the 1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules that led to the elimination of leaded gasoline by 1995 (though it still remains in aviation fuel).

The CDC estimates that in at least 4 million households in the U.S. today children are still exposed to dangerous amounts of lead from old paint that produces dust every time a nail is driven into a wall to hang a picture, a new electric socket is installed, or a family renovates its kitchen. It estimates that more than 500,000 children ages one to five have “elevated” levels of lead in their blood. (No level is considered safe for children.) Studies have linked lost IQ points, attention deficit disorders, behavioral problems, dyslexia, and even possibly high incarceration rates to tiny amounts of lead in children’s bodies.

Unfortunately, when it came to the creation of America’s chemical soup, the lead industry was hardly alone. Asbestos is another classic example of an industrial toxin that found its way into people’s homes and bodies. For decades, insulation workers, brake mechanics, construction workers, and a host of others in hundreds of trades fell victim to the disabling and deadly lung diseases of asbestosis or to lung cancer and the fatal cancer called mesothelioma when they breathed in dust produced during the installation of boilers, the insulation of pipes, the fixing of cars that used asbestos brake linings, or the spraying of asbestos on girders. Once again, the industry knew its product’s dangers early and worked assiduously to cover them up.

Despite growing medical knowledge about its effects (and increasing industry attempts to downplay or suppress that knowledge), asbestos was soon introduced to the American home and incorporated into products ranging from insulation for boilers and piping in basements to floor tiles and joint compounds. It was used to make sheetrock walls, roof shingles, ironing boards, oven gloves, and hot plates. Soon an occupational hazard was transformed into a threat to all consumers.

Today, however, these devastating industrial-turned-domestic toxins, which destroyed the health and sometimes took the lives of hundreds of thousands, seem almost quaint when compared to the brew of potential or actual toxins we’re regularly ingesting in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.

Of special concern are a variety of chlorinated hydrocarbons, including DDT and other pesticides that were once spread freely nationwide, and despite being banned decades ago, have accumulated in the bones, brains, and fatty tissue of virtually all of us. Their close chemical carcinogenic cousins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were found in innumerable household and consumer products -- like carbonless copy paper, adhesives, paints, and electrical equipment – from the 1950s through the 1970s. We’re still paying the price for that industrial binge today, as these odorless, tasteless compounds have become permanent pollutants in the natural environment and, as a result, in all of us.

The Largest Uncontrolled Experiment in History

While old houses with lead paint and asbestos shingles pose risks, potentially more frightening chemicals are lurking in new construction going on in the latest mini-housing boom across America. Our homes are now increasingly made out of lightweight fibers and reinforced synthetic materials whose effects on human health have never been adequately studied individually, let alone in the combinations we’re all subjected to today.

Formaldehyde, a colorless chemical used in mortuaries as a preservative, can also be found as a fungicide, germicide, and disinfectant in, for example, plywood, particle board, hardwood paneling, and the “medium density fiberboard” commonly used for the fronts of drawers and cabinets or the tops of furniture. As the material ages, it evaporates into the home as a known cancer-producing vapor, which slowly accumulates in our bodies. The National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health suggests that homeowners “purchasing pressed-wood products, including building material, cabinetry, and furniture... should ask about the formaldehyde content of these products.”

What’s inside your new walls might be even more dangerous. While the flame retardants commonly used in sofas, chairs, carpets, love seats, curtains, baby products, and even TVs, sounded like a good idea when widely introduced in the 1970s, they turn out to pose hidden dangers that we’re only now beginning to grasp. Researchers have, for instance, linked one of the most common flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, to a wide variety of potentially undesirable health effects including thyroid disruption, memory and learning problems, delayed mental and physical development, lower IQ, and the early onset of puberty.

Other flame retardants like Tris (1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate have been linked to cancer. As the CDC has documented in an ongoing study of the accumulation of hazardous materials in our bodies, flame retardants can now be found in the blood of “nearly all” of us.

Nor are these particular chemicals anomalies. Lurking in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, for instance, are window cleaners and spot removers that contain known or suspected cancer-causing agents. The same can be said of cosmetics in your makeup case or of your plastic water bottle or microwavable food containers. Most recently, Bisphenol A (BPA), the synthetic chemical used in a variety of plastic consumer products, including some baby bottles, epoxy cements, the lining of tuna fish cans, and even credit card receipts, has been singled out as another everyday toxin increasingly found inside all of us.

Recent studies indicate that its effects are as varied as they are distressing. As Sarah Vogel of the Environmental Defense Fund has written, “New research on very-low-dose exposure to BPA suggests an association with adverse health effects, including breast and prostate cancer, obesity, neurobehavioral problems, and reproductive abnormalities.”

Teflon, or perfluorooctanoic acid, the heat-resistant, non-stick coating that has been sold to us as indispensable for pots and pans, is yet another in the list of substances that may be poisoning us, almost unnoticed. In addition to allowing fried eggs to slide right onto our plates, Teflon is in all of us, according to the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency, and “likely to be carcinogenic in humans.”

These synthetic materials are just a few of the thousands now firmly embedded in our lives and our bodies. Most have been deployed in our world and put in our air, water, homes, and fields without being studied at all for potential health risks, nor has much attention been given to how they interact in the environments in which we live, let alone our bodies. The groups that produce these miracle substances -- like the petrochemical, plastics, and rubber industries, including major companies like Exxon, Dow, and Monsanto -- argue that, until we can definitively prove the chemical products slowly leaching into our bodies are dangerous, we have no “right,” and they have no obligation, to remove them from our homes and workplaces. The idea that they should prove their products safe before exposing the entire population to them seems to be a foreign concept.

In the 1920s, the oil industry made the same argument about lead as an additive in gasoline, even though it was already known that it was a dangerous toxin for workers. Spokesman for companies like General Motors insisted that it was a “gift of God,” irreplaceable and essential for industrial progress and modern living, just as the lead industry argued for decades that lead was “essential” to produce good paint that would protect our homes.

Like the oil, lead, and tobacco industries of the twentieth century, the chemical industry, through the American Chemistry Council and public relations firms like Hill & Knowlton, is fighting tooth and nail to stop regulation and inhibit legislation that would force it to test chemicals before putting them in the environment. In the meantime, Americans remain the human guinea pigs in advanced trials of hundreds if not thousands of commonly used, largely untested chemicals. There can be no doubt that this is the largest uncontrolled experiment in history.

To begin to bring it under control would undoubtedly involve major grassroots efforts to push back against the offending corporations, courageous politicians, billions of dollars, and top-flight researchers. But before any serious steps are likely to be taken, before we even name this epidemic, we need to wake up to its existence.

A toxic dump used to be a superfund site or a nuclear waste disposal site. Increasingly, however, we -- each and every one of us -- are toxic dumps and for us there’s no superfund around, no disposal plan in sight. In the meantime, we’re walking, talking biohazards and we don’t even know it.

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz are co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, (University of California Press/Milbank, 2013). Rosner is a professor of history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz

A 21st Century Australian Genocide Silently Unfolds

Australia's Boom is Anything But For Its Aboriginal People: Black Australians are stereotyped as violent, yet the violence routinely meted out to them by authority is of ­little interest

by John Pilger

The story of the first Australians is still poverty and humiliation, while their land yields the world's biggest resources boom.

Eleven miles by ferry from Perth is Western Australia's "premier tourist destination". This is Rottnest Island, whose scabrous wild beauty and isolation evoked, for me, Robben Island in South Africa. Empires are never short of devil's islands; what makes Rottnest different – indeed, what makes Australia different – is silence and denial on an epic scale.

"Five awesome reasons to visit!" the brochure says. These range from "family fun" to "historical Rottnest". The island is described as "a guiding light, a defender of the peace". In eight pages of prescribed family fun, there is just one word of truth – prison.

More than any other colonial society, Australia consigns its dirtiest secrets, past and present, to wilful ignorance or indifference. When I was at school in Sydney, standard texts all but dismissed the most enduring human entity on earth, the indigenous first Australians. "It was quite useless to treat them fairly," the historian Stephen Roberts wrote, "since they were completely amoral and incapable of sincere and prolonged gratitude." His acclaimed colleague Russel Ward was succinct: "We are civilised today and they are not."

That Australia has since changed is not disputed. To measure this change, a visit to Western Australia is essential. The vast state – our richest – is home to the world's biggest resources boom: iron ore, gold, nickel, oil, petroleum, gas. Profits are in the multiple billions. When the former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd tried to impose a modest tax, he was overthrown by his own party following a A$22m (£14.6m) propaganda campaign by the mining companies, whose mates in the media uphold the world's first Murdocracy. "Assisted by Rio Tinto" reads the last line of an unctuous newspaper article on the boom's benefits to black Australians.

At airports passengers are greeted by banners with pictures of smiling Aboriginal faces in hard hats, promoting the plunderers of their land. "This is our story," says the slogan. It isn't.

Barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited Aboriginal communities, whose poverty is an enduring shock. In Roebourne, in the mineral-rich Pilbara, 80% of the children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media, which can cause partial deafness. Or they go blind from preventable trachoma. Or they die from Dickensian infections. That is their story.

The Nyoongar people have lived around what is now Perth for many thousands of years. Incredibly, they survive. Noel Nannup, a Nyoongar elder, and Marianne McKay, a Nyoongar activist, accompanied me to Rottnest. Nannup's protective presence was important to McKay. Unlike the jolly tourists heading for "Rotto", they spent days "preparing for the pain". "All our families remember what was done," said Noel Nannup.

What was done was the starving, torture, humiliation and murder of the first Australians. Wrenched from their communities in an act of genocide that divided and emasculated the indigenous nations, shackled men and boys as young as eight endured the perilous nine-hour journey in an open longboat. Terrified prisoners were jammed into a windowless "holding cell", like an oversized kennel. Today, a historical plaque refers to it as "the Boathouse". The suppression is breathtaking.

In the prison known as the Quod as many as 167 Aboriginal prisoners were locked in 28 tiny cells. This lasted well into the 20th century. The prison is now called Rottnest Lodge. It has a spa, and there are double bunks for children: family fun. I booked a room. Noel Nannup stood in the centre of the room and described its echoes of terrible suffering. The window looked out on to where a gallows had stood, where tourists now sunbathed. None had a clue.

A "country club" overlooks a mass grave. One psychopath who ran the Quod was Henry Vincent. He liked to whip prisoners and murdered two of them, an inquiry was told. Today, Vincent is venerated as a "pioneer", and tourists are encouraged to follow the "Vincent Way heritage trail". In the Governor's Bar, the annual Henry Vincent golf trophy is displayed. No one there had a clue.

Rotto is not the past. On 28 March Richard Harding, formerly inspector of custodial services, declared Western Australia a "state of imprisonment". During the boom Aboriginal incarceration has more than doubled. Interned in rat-infested cells, almost 60% of the state's young prisoners are Aboriginal – out of 2.5% of the population. They include children. A former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me the state was now "racking and stacking" black Australians. Their rate of incarceration is five times that of black people in apartheid South Africa.

Black Australians are stereotyped as violent, yet the violence routinely meted out to them by authority is of little interest. An elder known as Mr Ward was arrested for driving under the influence on a bush road. In searing heat, he was driven more than 300 miles in the iron pod of a prison van run by the British security company GSL. Inside, the temperature reached 50C. Mr Ward cooked to death, his stomach burned raw where he had collapsed on the van's scorching floor. The coroner called it a "disgrace", but no one was prosecuted [ see footnote]. No one ever is.

Eco-tourism is also booming. The Kimberley region is popular with Europeans. Last year, 40 Aboriginal youngsters killed themselves there, a 100-fold increase. When I first reported on indigenous Australia a generation ago, black suicide was rare. Today, the despair is so profound that the second cause of Aboriginal death is suicide. It is booming.

John Pilger's film on Australia, Utopia, is released in the autumn

*This article was amended on 29 April 2013 to clarify that Western Australia's director of public prosecutions did rule out criminal charges on the grounds that there was not "sufficient evidence". However, WorkSafe, the body that oversees health and safety in WA, brought charges in Kalgoorlie magistrates court, under the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1984. Graham Powell and Nina Stokoe, G4S guards, were fined A$9,000 and A$11,000 respectively by the court; Western Australia's Department of Corrective Services was fined A$285,000 and G4S was fined A$285,000 by Kalgoorlie magistrates court.

Retailers Reject Reformed Worker Safety Standards in Wake of Bangladesh Disaster

Hundreds Die in Bangladesh Factory Collapse As Retailers Reject Better Safety Standards

by TRNN

Western retailers refuse to fund independent safety inspections after 300 die in Bangladesh factory collapse and 5 months after 112 die in factory fire.

Israeli Gaza Bombing Escalates

Army Bombards Southern Gaza

by IMEMC and Agencies

Sunday at dawn, April 28, 2013, the Israeli Air Force bombarded two areas west of Khan Younis, and west of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip; damage was reported but no injuries.

Media sources in Gaza reported that the army fired at least three missiles into an area believed to be a training center for a resistance group west of Khan Younis, and a land west of Rafah.

The sources added that several Israeli war jets were seen and heard flying over different parts of the coastal region throughout the night and during early dawn hours.

The attacks came shortly after the army claimed that a homemade shell was fired from Gaza into Nativot Israeli settlement, close to the border with Gaza, leading to no casualties or damage.

The Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad, reported that its training center, located west of Khan Younis, was targeted by Israeli missiles leading to excessive damage but no casualties.

A second air strike followed the first this time targeting a vacant area west of Rafah, also leading to no casualties.

WMD Ghosts Resurrected for Syria Escalation

Chemical Weapons Charade in Syria

by Sharmine Narwani -  Sandbox

Let us be clear. The United States can verify absolutely nothing about the use of chemical weapons (CWs) in Syria. Any suggestion to the contrary is entirely false.

Don’t take it from me – here is what US officials have to say about the subject:

A mere 24 hours after Washington heavyweights from the White House, Pentagon, and State Department brushed aside Israeli allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the White House changed their minds. They now believe “with varying degrees of confidence” that CWs have been used “on a small scale” inside Syria.

For the uninitiated, “varying degrees of confidence” can mean anything from “no confidence whatsoever” to “the Israelis told us” – which, translated, also means “no confidence whatsoever.”

Too cavalier? I don’t think so. The White House introduced another important caveat in its detailed briefing on Thursday:

“This assessment is based in part on physiological samples. Our standard of evidence must build on these intelligence assessments as we seek to establish credible and corroborated facts. For example the chain of custody is not clear so we cannot confirm how the exposure occurred and under what conditions.”

“The chain of custody is not clear.” That is the single most important phrase in this whole exercise. It is the only phrase that journalists need consider – everything else is conjecture of WMDs-in-Iraq proportions.

I asked a State Department spokesperson the following: “Does it mean you don't know who has had access to the sample before it reached you? Or that the sample has not been contaminated along the way?”

He responded: “It could mean both.”

Chuck Hagel expands on that jaw-dropping admission: “We cannot confirm the origin of these weapons.” Although he goes on to conclude anyway: “but we do believe that any use of chemical weapons in Syria would very likely have originated with the Assad regime.”

Four-year-olds shouldn’t have confidence in the US intelligence community at this point. Yet we are supposed to believe that the Syrian government must be behind a chemical weapons attack because Hagel says so.

Let’s consider the facts. The Syrian government has clearly stated it would not use chemical weapons during the crisis “regardless of the developments” unless “Syria faces external aggression.”

The US and other western states have warned for more than a year now that as the government of Bashar al-Assad begins to "topple," the likelihood of using CWs as a desperate last measure will increase.

The White House reiterated this point yesterday: “Given our concern that as the situation deteriorated and the regime became more desperate, they may use some of their significant stockpiles of chemical weapons.”

Assad’s government is clearly not on its last leg. If anything, the Syrian army has made tremendous gains in the past few weeks by thwarting rebel plans to storm Damascus, pushing them out of key surrounding suburbs, and cutting off their supply lines in different parts of the country.

This recent reversal of fortunes tends to validate the observations of those who have met with Assad and say the president remains confident that he can repel rebel forces whenever and wherever he chooses to do so.

Which frankly removes a major “motive” from any calculation by the Syrian government to use chemical weapons against civilians.

The constant reference to CWs in this conflict is suspect – there is no conceivable military advantage to be gained from the use of these munitions. Writing for Foreign Policy in December, Charles Blair says using CWs against rebels makes no tactical or strategic sense:

“The regime would risk losing Russian and Chinese support, legitimizing foreign military intervention, and, ultimately, hastening its own end. As one Syrian official said, ‘We would not commit suicide.’”

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the government has calibrated its military responses throughout this conflict to avoid scenarios that would create a pretext for foreign military intervention on “humanitarian grounds.”

Just as there is evidence aplenty that rebel forces will go to great lengths to create a pretext for foreign intervention that would help them oust Assad.

On March 19, a suspected chemical weapons attack near Aleppo prompted the Syrian government to ask the United Nations to launch an investigation. Witnesses reported the “smell of chlorine in the air,” which led to speculation that this could have been a rebel-led attack given that opposition militias had seized Syria’s only chlorine gas bottling plant, east of Aleppo, that August.

The use of chlorine gas-based explosives by insurgents was seen not so long ago in Iraq, where attacks against both authorities and civilians are traceable to 2006. US military spokespeople, at the time, claimed that insurgent tactics had become deadlier, seeking to draw maximum attention and impose widespread suffering.

The Iraq connection and insurgent tactics there are important to the Syrian conflict because of the influx of jihadist rebels flooding over the Iraqi border, bringing with them experience and know-how from fighting the US occupation. That border also allegedly hosts training camps for groups in both countries allied with al-Qaeda – a development that has come to light since a recent announcement linking al-Nusra Front to al-Qaeda’s central group.

The White House’s allegations on Thursday specified a sarin gas connection to at least one other suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria. Even if this were true, a clear-cut connection linking the use of a CW explosive to the Syrian government is not at all inevitable. In 2004, an IED roadside bomb – a common insurgent tactic – containing the nerve agent was detonated in Iraq. There are no guarantees whatsoever that chemical munitions have not found their way into the hands of rogue elements – or in fact that they are not producing them in small quantities themselves.

At this point, almost everything being discussed in relation to chemical weapons inside Syria is conjecture – and to be honest – highly suspect.

The Times of London (which is behind a paywall so I cannot link to it) just published a detailed and timely “investigation” of an alleged CW attack in Aleppo, claiming: “the Syrian regime prefers to gas its opponents in this small-scale way, testing the elasticity of President Obama’s ‘red line.’”

The article then goes on to describe the harrowing account of what appears to be a sarin gas attack from a victim, witnesses, and medical staff. But experts are now questioning these accounts, saying that the evidence is “far from conclusive.”

In reference to the video of the alleged CW attack referenced by The Times, Jean Pascal Zanders, a senior researcher at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, tells McClatchy News that there are red flags in the footage.

“Why only one person?” he said, referring to the video showing one patient it said was a victim. “Why do I find the hospital setting, again, unlike what I would expect in a case of chemical exposure? Why is the guy ‘foaming’ in the hospital, considering the rapid action of sarin.” Zanders explained that without an antidote, death is possible within one minute after exposure to sarin.”

The Times article then gets even stranger. To quote:

“In the chaos of Syria’s civil war, no hospital in the rebel-held areas has the facilities to test which gas was used. Yet medical sources in northern Syria have told The Times that in the immediate aftermath of the attack a team from “an American medical agency” arrived at the hospital in Afrin. They took hair samples from the casualties for testing at ‘an American laboratory.’

It is likely that these samples formed part of the evidence cited by the US Defence Secretary yesterday.”

Really? A CW attack takes place in the middle of the night in Aleppo, and in its “immediate aftermath” an “American medical agency” arrives to collect samples for testing?

There's more...

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Free Syrian Army Chief of Staff General Salim Idriss says that Israel is knowledgeable about the Syrian government’s use of CWs, because the Mossad has agents in the country: “Israel has this information because there are many, many members of security services who are now very active in Syria.”

Idriss is, of course, referencing the statements by Israel this week that kicked off all the recent speculation on Syrian CWs:

Israeli army intelligence analyst Brig. Gen. Itai Brun has been quoted far and wide on this issue, mainly referencing the April Aleppo incident highlighted by The Times and debunked by experts.

It is likely that all the speculation in the past few days revolves around an incident that is looking more and more like the “false flag” operations anti-rebel Syrians have been warning about this past year. Given where the “evidence” is coming from, and the alleged presence of a western of American “medical agency” present on the ground, it is quite remarkable that Washington went full-press on this.

It is almost as bad as the account in 2011 of a middle-aged, Iranian-American, ex-car dealer who, by virtue of some familial relationship with a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, decided to collude with a Mexican drug cartel to plot the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington at a popular DC eatery.

Having just passed the ten year anniversary of an Iraqi invasion and occupation based entirely on false and falsified data on Weapons of Mass Destruction, western media needs not to be asking about “red lines” as much as for iron-clad evidence.


Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.

CBC Host Stumping for Israel

"Say No!' Morgan and Jian 

by Steve Greyson

 

 

 

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Daniel Kovalik, Jessica Ernst, Janine Bandcroft Apr. 29, 2013

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook - Pacific Free Press

 

Mass worker mobilization, police riots, and a raging fire in the rubble of a collapsed factory marked Workers' Memorial Day in Bangladesh yesterday. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports the arrest of executives from three garment makers, along with the owner of the former Rana Plaza in Savar, Bangladesh following public outcry and demonstration.

So far, more than three hundred and sixty are confirmed dead, with many more missing. Rescue operations were halted due to the fire within the rubble of the large Rana manufacturing complex that literally fell apart last Wednesday, and authorities now say they are switching from manual searches to machine assisted recovery operations.

Listen. Hear.

The usual culprits are cited as causing the disaster: shoddy building materials, unskilled labour, sub-standard building codes, and rampant corruption at all levels of the Savar Municipal Corp., the licensor. But what's really behind the death and carnage in Savar, and so many other places, and who bears ultimate responsibility?

Daniel Kovalik is Senior Associate General Counsel for the USW, or United Steel Workers union, and teaches international human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and a long-time peace and justice activist. Dan has focused on the movements for peace and justice in Colombia and Central America, where he serves as an attorney for Colombian plaintiffs in cases alleging corporate human rights violations. He's also co-recipient of a Project Censored Award for chronicling the murder of trade unionists in Colombia.

Dan Kovalik in the first half.

And; in 1998, oil patch consultant, Jessica Ernst moved out to Rosebud, Wheatland County in Alberta's heartland. She bought a little house on a tidy bit of land serviced by fresh wells sunk into the Rosebud aquifer. It was an idyllic spot, until EnCana arrived to carry out experiments on a new way to get money out of the ground. The new process was called "hydraulic fracturing," and anyone who hasn't heard of it by now, and the dangers it poses to water, wildlife, and people must be living with their head in a hole in the ground.

Those dangers have been exposed in the States, most famously in the documentary film, Gaslands, and dramatized in Matt Damon's recently released feature film, 'Promised Land.' But despite the growing clamour against the practice, or perhaps because of it, fracking is progressing full tilt with ever more wells across ever-broadening jurisdictions.

When Jessica Ernst's water went bad, she knew why and who was to blame. Ernst filed suit against EnCana, and the company's enablers in the government of Alberta charged with regulating the industry and protecting the environment. But filing a suit is one thing, fighting it quite another.

Jessica Ernst and when David meets the whole Goliath clan in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with some of what's good to do in and around Victoria in the coming week. But first, Dan Kovalik and Labour's global fight from Bogota to Bangladesh.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Fracking's Friends in High Places

Hydraulic Fracturing ["Fracking"] Worldwide: Answers Not Forthcoming, Questions Not Allowed

by Robin Mathews - The Straight Goods

They merge. They interpenetrate. The thread of one weaves into the fabric of the others. “Fracking” operations rush past law, past regulation, past health and environmental concerns. Supporters of ‘quick cash’, gas ‘futures’ pass corporate-written law to silence land-owners, elected councils, voters ... you and me.

Narrowly - “fracking” legislation and regulatory behaviour push aside, silence anyone questioning a dangerous procedure. Broadly – they strip away the Rule of Law, disenfranchise populations, ‘despotize’ governments.

In Alberta, Stephen Harper, Alison Redford, Encana Corporation, the newly appointed Alberta Regulator Gerard Protti (enforcing newly written law), and – so far – The Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Chief Justice Neil Wittmann all merge … interpenetrate to hold off remedial action - to create toxic law, toxic wealth, toxic environment.

People waken worldwide and begin to battle corporations, “regulators”, police forces, legislatures, courts - the dominators determined to engage in “unconventional drilling” (hydraulic fracturing, ‘fracking’). Conflict on the subject continues. France (2011) Bulgaria (2012), and Tunisia have banned hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’). It continues in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, the U.S.A., and more.

Hydraulic Fracturing is the intensive assault on shale, and coal beds, through multiple well bores (often invading water tables) to release marketable gas. “Fracking” uses giant amounts of sand, water, toxic chemical-mixes near the surface or miles down to fracture strata - ‘fracking’ - for marketable gas.

Said to be ‘old hat’ (sixty years old), present hydraulic fracturing to release marketable natural gas has new aspects and possesses multiple knowns and unknowns. Hyper-industrialization of agrarian sites: outcomes unknown. Increased earthquake activity: recorded. Unforeseen “leak gas” explosions: recorded. Increased cancer incidence close to oil and gas wells: measured. Ground water sources polluted: common, but extent and health effects unknown. Water Tables lowered: unpredictable but occurring. “Migration”/leaks of gases over time: unpredictable but certain and increasingly frequent. Toxic effects on water, soil, animal life, human health: certain, unregulated, largely unresearched, information repressed.

The commonly named ‘radioactive threat’ is only now starting to be researched. A. Rich, E.C. Crosby, University of Texas [New Solutions, Vol. 23 (1), 117-135, 2013] reveal (in layman’s language) that a cocktail of radioactive agents are set free especially by ‘unconventional’ (‘fracking’) gas operations. Radioactive agents are found in depositories [sludge storage, waste pits, storage pools] - AND in the land no longer used for those purposes.

“Out of Control: Nova Scotia’s Experience with Fracking for Shale Gas”, Report Summary, April 2013” reports that from the few test wells undertaken radioactive materials were found to be present “only several years after drilling and disposal of some of the waste….” (p. 4)

Jessica Ernst (Rosebud, Alberta) reports that sludge from fracking operations is spread on agricultural lands in Alberta.

In Alberta, (using Joyce Nelson’s words);

 “the government has introduced draconian legislation (Bill 2) that would strip landowners and others of their right to object to any energy project that would adversely and directly affect them.” (Watershed Sentinel, Jan-Feb, 2013) 

The determined action envisioned in Bill 2 is doubtless a response to Jessica Ernst’s $33 million lawsuit against Encana Corporation and Alberta’s regulator. And so - one may conclude - is the switching of judges on her case. And so is, one may conclude, (what I would call) the concerted delay engaged in by Chief Justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, Neil Wittmann. He is the highly dubious present judge on the Jessica Ernst case.

Something is seriously wrong in Canada. And globally. Evidence is mounting of real, multiple dangers in hydraulic fracturing. Legislatures should be restraining, researching, proving, regulating ... preventing ... at high speed. But legislatures, joining with corporations, courts, security forces are – often - deregulating, erasing evidence, punishing protesters, repressing criticism.

The whole operation world-wide is so dangerous, so untested, so irresponsible, so despotic, that reasons have to be available for largely unresearched, unregulated hydraulic fracturing in the face of its perils.

And reasons are available.

First. Think of Wiebo Ludwig (1941-2012) of Trickle Creek farm, Peace River, Alberta, fighting “Sour Gas” fracking. Sour gas “a potent neurotoxin, has left a legacy of death and destruction….” (Andrew Nikiforuk). Think of the attacks on Sour Gas operations around Trickle Creek. Think of the millions of dollars spent to investigate the attacks on Sour Gas fracking around Trickle Creek.

Think of the threats and attacks in B.C. near Chetwyn against Encana Corporation operations and the millions of dollars spent to investigate.

Think of the RCMP/Encana Corporation, alleged to have created a “false flag” and blowing up an Encana well site to spur on distress – no charges laid. Then think of the millions of dollars spent to investigate, charge, jail, and reinvestigate Wiebo Ludwig. One example of many;

“RCMP conducted a four-day [fruitless] search of Trickle Creek (2010) involving over a hundred RCMP officers.” (Wikipedia)

Think of Wiebo Ludwig (but do not speak of him). Think of him driven to desperation by Sour Gas fracking. (But do not speak of him.) Think of his repeated (unanswered) pleas to Alberta government for regulation, for research, inquiry, and investigation of hydraulic fracturing. (But do not speak of him - or risk being accused of sympathizing with lawlessness, terrorist activity.)

Who will speak of the terrorism of Alison Redford, Stephen Harper, Encana Corporation, Gerard Protti and the Alberta Regulators, legislators of Alberta, and – so far – of Neil Wittmann, Chief Justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench in openly, or tacitly, or passively accepting and/or furthering what many believe is a ruthless attack on the health, the well-being, the security, the privacy, the property, and the reasonable tranquility of honest, law-abiding, innocent Albertans?

Alberta may be seen as a poster-location for the kinds of violation named above. But – in various ways – such invasions are happening widely on the planet. And there is a reason.

LSE professor Lord (Nicholas) Stern and thinktank Carbon Tracker state in a recent Report noted by Damian Carrington in The Guardian (Apr. 19, 2013) that instead of;

“reducing efforts to develop fossil fuels, the top 200 companies spent $674bn…in 2012 to find and exploit more….” That is about the sum named in a 2006 report that would “pay for a transition to a clean and sustainable economy”.

Stock markets “are betting on countries’ inaction on climate change”, the Report says. Stock markets are creating a Carbon Bubble not unlike the massive mortgage/derivatives/fake credit scandal of 2008. “If all goes well” – I say - countries will insist on internationally agreed Climate Change targets, and the “Carbon Bubble” will burst because of over-valuation of oil, coal, and gas reserves held by fossil fuel companies. If all does not go well – Climate Change will ramp up beyond control.

It may be fair to say the same kinds of ‘investors’ are engaged in the present Carbon Bubble as were engaged in the 2008 blow-up … criminally irresponsible people willing to cause any kinds of destruction in their drive for wealth. The whole fossil fuels Bubble is being driven by greed … by big, irresponsible money.

To meet only present agreed Climate Change targets, it is estimated that at least two-thirds of present so-called fossil fuel ‘reserves’ will have to remain unexploited. But … instead of diminishing the push presently going on for hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’), it will probably intensify the push. As long as the pollutions created by hydraulic fracturing, by the huge environmental disruptions involved in its activities, and by the waste dumps it creates – as long as they aren’t registered by the present ‘Climate Change/global warming’ regulation machineries, the obviously destructive and dirty activity will be called “clean”.

(But science knows the methane gas leaking and leaking into the environment (almost unmeasured and unrecorded) from oil and gas operations is a potent climate changer! Methane is said to be 25 times more potent in relation to Climate Change than carbon dioxide. Who will bell the leaking methane cat?)

Redneck and Redford governments in Ottawa and Alberta (and elsewhere in the world) will attempt to criminalize any who resist “unconventional gas drilling” (‘fracking’). They will provide aid and comfort to corporations like Encana Corporation, and they will work to undermine courts seeking just adjudication of disputes about injury done from hydraulic fracturing. They will do what they can to push for Liquid Natural Gas pipelines – hoping that a Climate Change clampdown on conventional extractions will raise prices on Hydraulically Fractured Gas.

Here is huge field for environmentalists, many of whom are already engaged in the gigantic task of revealing that – however it may (or may not) register on Climate Change measuring devices - the pollution from unconventional gas drilling (hydraulic fracturing, ‘fracking’) is a very, very Dirty Wildcat. Out of (seemingly) nowhere, in the last twenty years at most, one of the dirtiest “mining” operations in history has come into play and into visibility.

The more governments – like the Redneck government in Ottawa and the Redford government in Alberta – are absorbed into private corporate operations and dictated to by those corporations, the more they will resist just demands by citizens and populations for regulation.

The fight is worth it. The outcome certain. People all over the globe will not, ultimately, permit huge corporations and huge governments to desecrate the planet.

“The bigger they are”, remember, “the harder they fall.”

David, Meet Goliaths: Ernst v. Everyone

Alberta Fracking: Jessica Ernst Versus The Corporate/Government Enemy (A Case For History)

by Robin Mathews - The Straight Goods

Take off the gloves. Take off the rose-tinted glasses. This is (as they say) for real. Alberta is after Jessica Ernst. And Alberta knows how to do it, has known for a long time. Alberta (you might say) means business (pun intended).

Almost no one in the ordinary population of Alberta (and fewer in the rest of Canada) understands the importance of the Jessica Ernst “fracking case” against Encana Corporation and the Alberta regulators (and against the Stephen Harper government as an active silent partner of the two others).

To win against someone fighting for the community, fighting for their own good and the good of others, Alberta knows there are steps to take. Alberta knows them all. There are six steps. The last one is the most important, the least visible … the most painful.

Step One: manoeuvre judges until the right one is in place. Alberta and Stephen Harper just did that. They manoeuvred Justice Barbara Veldhuis off the Jessica Ernst case against Encana Corporation and Alberta regulators. They manoeuvred Neil Wittmann, Chief Justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s bench, onto the case. Step One achieved.

They’ve known how to do that part of it for a long time. In the 1960s case for false arrest and malicious prosecution against then mayor of Edmonton William Hawrelak, the City Solicitor, and the Edmonton Chief of Police they did it. We had a sure case. We (the inexperienced plaintiffs) were moved from judge to judge to judge (being, as they say, ‘remanded’, for as many reasons as there were judges) until the last one.

Nice lawyers told us “he’s been waiting to get you”, waiting till enough remands put him on our case. Then? Well … then … I was convinced the case was carefully, embarrassingly rehearsed. Almost every witness for the Defence, I was certain, carefully perjured himself with the able assistance of the presiding judge … and our careless and inattentive lawyer. Rehearsed perjury. Almost everyone helping. Smooth as silk. We lost the case.

In the Kelly Marie Richard recent dental malpractice case in Calgary I believe judges were set up and changed whenever it was necessary to defeat Ms. Richard. She tells the story. Go to
http://www.therichardtriggcase.com/summary.htm

The BC Rail Scandal trial is the poster case for judge-changing. After almost three years on the case, immersed in its complexities, Justice Elizabeth Bennett was lifted out by Stephen Harper in 2010 and replaced with Justice Anne MacKenzie – and the whole trial lurched out of shape, as - I am sure - it was intended to do. Gordon Campbell, long-time premier of B.C. and alleged king-pin in the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR, was moved seamlessly by a Stephen Harper appointment to the position of Canadian High Commissioner in London, where he remains.

Step One: manoeuvre the judges to get the right one(s) in place. Step Two: manufacture, obstruct, or erase evidence as required. Step Three: Delay.

Even four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote (in Hamlet) about “the law’s delay, the insolence of office”. Alberta learned fast … about delay. Delay – as Jessica Ernst will no doubt tell you – is about bankrupting the claimant, dragging her, him, or them through expensive, unnecessary, time-consuming, stressful, unpredicted and unpredictable, destabilizing … delay. [Like the removal of Barbara Veldhuis and the waiting…and waiting…and waiting for prima donna Neil Wittmann …. ] Delay is about getting the person or persons fighting for self and community so worn down and bankrupted they quit. Simple.

When the stakes are high, when the claimant won’t quit - that’s not all. Few in Alberta, fewer in the rest of Canada, know just how high the stakes are in the case Jessica Ernst is taking against Encana Corporation and the Alberta Regulators. (And against the Stephen Harper government as an active silent partner of the two others.)

When the stakes are high enough, then the corrupt alliance – the Corporation/Government/Court enemy will do … anything. Watch them.

Step Four: change the regulator, re-name government bodies, appoint brazenly odious agents to head up regulation, write new legislation to stop the next Jessica Ernst. In short, do real and public relations things to block, confuse, and mask the issue. In response to the appointment of Gerald Protti to head Alberta’s new Energy Regulator, Mike Hudema of Greenpeace Canada was dumbfounded. Amazed. Wrongly. The appointment of Protti is – I believe - intended: both a threat and a promise of jackboot response to resistance.

Five: Threaten. The RCMP has already carefully questioned Jessica Ernst but has questioned none of the defendants.

Sometimes the threats get worse. In the 1960s Edmonton case against the mayor and others, ‘they’ threatened my life and the lives of our children. On the phone. Real people. Several times. A pleasant experience everyone should have. In Kelly Marie Richard’s recent Calgary malpractice case, Defence (with RCMP help) tried to get Ms. Richard (sharp, intelligent, capable) named mentally incompetent to act in court, threatened to force her into (quack?) psychological examination. That was only one of the threats used against her.

Step Six is the least visible, and the most important. It’s very simple. Destroy the person or persons taking the case.

Wouldn’t it be easier, you say, to take Jessica Ernst into a corner and say: “Get off our backs. Leave us alone. We’ll give you a lot of money – not $33 million, but a lot of money. Sign a note of confidentiality, keeping the agreement secret. End the bad publicity for us – and live happily ever after.” Jessica Ernst has already said she won’t go that secret route. Ever.

Encana Corporation and the Alberta regulators won’t go that route either. You may be sure. That would be to lose. They have to win, they think ... no matter how they use lawyers and judges and RCMP to violate and trample the Canadian judicial system. I believe, they think they have to do everything they can to destroy Jessica Ernst. They believe they dare not lose.

After years of Kelly Marie Richard’s tenacious struggle wouldn’t it have been easier for the insurance company to take her aside and say “we’ll give you a lot of money, out of court, with a secrecy agreement? Just go away.” They wouldn’t do it. In their heads, I believe, they couldn’t do it. In their heads they didn’t dare lose – no matter how they had to use lawyers and judges and RCMP to violate and trample the Canadian judicial system.

Her case was based upon scientifically evidenced orthodontic malpractice. She couldn’t lose her case. And so it never really started. But it’s over. Completed, you might say, though it never was permitted to begin as a normal trial in court.

All the five steps were taken against Kelly Marie Richard and her sons in a long Case Management court battle in which (then) Associate Chief Justice of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Neil Wittmann was in charge of assigning judges, of manipulating (Kelly Marie Richard alleges) Case Management, and being deaf to pleas of improper behaviour. Richard’s absolutely clear, scientifically foolproof evidence of dental malpractice was never permitted to be presented in a fair trial!

Think about that. Kelly Marie Richard’s foolproof, scientific evidence was not permitted to be presented in fair trial in a case that ran six or seven years! That must be a record. Even for Neil Wittmann. Her “summary” [referenced here] only covers four years of Case Management, but her court torture went on … and on.

ING was the insurer for dental malpractice. CGI was the contracted corporation to supply court/legal services. McLeod Dixon was the law firm engaged against her.

In any honest court I am certain Kelly Marie Richard’s case could not receive a judgement in the insurance company’s favour. Period. And so she had to be destroyed. Kelly Marie Richard and her two sons ended up penniless, ruined, and in need of important, expensive care for the damage done by their orthodontic “treatment”. Their incontrovertible evidence was never seen by a trial judge or a jury.

Step Six: destroy the claimant. A fair, real trial taking place, won openly and publicly for the claimant is the same as an out-of-court settlement with a confidential, secret agreement. BOTH are a signal to other injured parties to act. Both show that genuinely wronged ordinary people facing huge corporations can get justice from Canadian courts. That idea had to be killed. I believe the present odious alliance of Alberta government, corporations, and the higher court (with Stephen Harper’s assistance) intend to kill - if they can – the possibility of justice in the Jessica Ernst case.

During the Kelly Marie Richard case she received a message from an expert telling her that if she won, her victory would be impetus for other, genuinely injured parties to undertake cases. And so she had to be destroyed. If she was carefully and completely destroyed financially, socially, and in every other way possible, the message to others would be “DON’T TRY. No matter how badly you have been injured and no matter how badly the public has been injured, DON”T TRY. Look what we did to Kelly Marie Richard and her sons. We’ll do it to you, too. SO DON”T TRY.”

Think of Jessica Ernst. Think of the increasing number of recorded injuries done to water quality, to water table levels, to agricultural operations, to property and to persons by hydraulic fracking in Alberta alone, as well as elsewhere in Canada, in Australia and other countries around the world. Think how Jessica Ernst’s victory will echo and echo around Alberta, around the rest of Canada, and around the world.

Think how quickly it will turn the corporation/government alliance to reform, to repair, to pass proper legislation, to set up genuine and meaningful oversight of operations … and more. Think of the number of payouts Encana Corporation, the Alberta regulators - and their counterparts around the world – will have to pay out to genuinely injured people. Just think….

You may be sure that is what Alison Redford, Stephen Harper, Encana Corporation*, the Alberta regulators, Neil Wittmann, and Gerald Protti, for instance, are thinking about every day. That is why I believe their intention is to destroy Jessica Ernst. Five of the six steps to stop people like her have already been set in motion. The sixth step is: Destroy Her.

Canadians must say – with growing and aggressive determination - “Jessica Ernst must win”. Canadians must be absolutely determined that Jessica Ernst will win – that the Corporate/Alberta government/higher court/Stephen Harper corrupt alliance will not be able to destroy her but will be forced to serve justice and Canadian democracy.

Jessica Ernst HAS to win her case – for herself, for Canadians, for Canada, for the Rule of Law, for democracy in Canada, for the world. Canadians can make sure Jessica Ernst has a full and fair trial. They must insert themselves into the conflict in whatever ways are necessary to assure she gets justice … to assure we all get justice in the matter. Something that will stop Step Six is an angry and informed public ... and the public exposure of every dirty trick undertaken by the corrupt alliance.

*Encana Corporation Annual Shareholders Meeting, Tuesday, April 23, 2:00 p.m., Hotel Arts, Spectrum Ballroom, 119 – 12 Avenue Southwest, Calgary, Alberta.

Be there.

Happy Workers’ Memorial Day

Workers’ Memorial Day April 28th