Trumping Sanctions on Iran: A Tale of Two Elections

Notes From Tehran: Trump, the Iranian Elections and the End of Sanctions

by Franklin Lamb - CounterPunch

February 12, 2016

Tehran - The remaining 5 Republican candidates, winnowed in from the original dozen, push to ingratiate themselves among South Carolina’s Republican voters, who like a majority of their countrymen, are angry at Washington ‘pay-to-play’ politicians. The day before that state’s February 27 primary, Iranian voters will have gone to the polls for their own crucial elections.

Iranians will vote in twin elections for the Iranian parliament and to elect a more powerful separate body known as the Assembly of Experts. And yes, The Donald is now a factor in both of those Iranian elections. Before Trump involved himself, the Iranian elections had already proven divisive. Many relatively moderate candidates were rejected by hard-liners during the vetting phase. Several of these blocked candidates support President Hassan Rouhani, a key architect of the Iran nuclear deal that they support.

For his part, Rouhani has been traveling abroad to begin Iran’s process of returning to international global trade. His recent travels are viewed among many in Iran as part of this month’s elections to shore up his support, given that the election is partly a referendum on his record and the nuclear agreement.

Hardliners in Iran and the US have joined the election campaign on the nuclear issue. Trump has referred to all supporters of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreements on Iran’s nuclear program as “stupid.” During recent campaign interviews his approach, which is a mélange of nativism, conservatism, and populism is being closely monitored in Tehran while at home no other current candidate is matching its breadth. The Donald insists that the Obama administration completely botched the negotiation with Iran, whereas being the master dealmaker, he would have negotiated the agreement with Iran and obtained a much better outcome for America.

Trump assures voters that he would have spared America from having to pay to Iran what he wrongly claims are $150 billion. He would have easily done this by telling the Iranians:

“Look guys, we Americans owe $19 trillion in debt. We’re a country that has no money. We can’t give you the $150 billion dollars.” The Iranians, claims Trump, would have said, “But we want it. It’s ours!” And Trump says he would have responded, “We can’t give it! We don’t have it! We don’t have it!” Trump assures audiences that he would have stood his ground and absolutely refused to pay the $150 billion. At that point, the meeting would have broken-up with no agreement. But then, two days later, the Iranians would have folded by calling Trump and saying, “Let’s make a deal.” Iran would then have agreed that America would not be required to pay the $150 billion.

What has many Iranians scratching their heads and asking American visitors: “Who is this is guy?” is partially the fact that Trump seems not even to know that frozen Iranian funds were never part of the US budget and no one has ever seriously claimed that they don’t belong to Iran. The US is obliged under the JCPOA to simply return Iran’s own money that it had seized and was holding in frozen accounts pending the resolution of the sanctions against Iran.

During an interview last week with CNN, Trump, ignorant about the facts of the deal, obviously had no clue that this money always belonged to Iran. Yet this troubling fact does not prevent Trump from lambasting the nuclear deal and pledging to tear it up just as soon as he becomes president. He appears to have no idea what he is talking about in substance and appears to read from AIPAC ‘fact sheets’ which repeat Israel’s PM Netanyahu’s hysterical claims that Iran will be awash with up to $250 billion cash to fund more terrorism.

Of course, neither Trump nor any US President is going to scrap the JCPOA and if one tried, America’s global allies and likely the American public would strongly oppose its attempt. Nor will the Iranians scrape it.

Iranians, unlike candidate Trump, are realistic about what sanctions relief will really mean to Iran, recognizing that $20 billion of their returning money is committed to projects with China where sanction relief funds cannot be spent, and that there are tens of billions of dollars locked up in nonperforming loans to Iran’s energy and banking sectors. Iran has the world’s fourth-largest proved reserves of crude oil, and hopes to quickly increase production, which could lead to tens of billions worth of new oil trade despite a slumping market. But that won’t happen anytime soon.

In the run-up to their elections, many Iranians are increasingly critical of the terms of the deal and Rohani is losing some support for not delivering on promises of JCPOA benefits. This month’s elections will likely be viewed through this prism.

Recent polls of public opinion in Iran show that there has been an approximately ten percent drop in public support for the agreement. A recent poll taken by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies last month shows that still nearly 72 percent of Iranians support last July’s agreement. Last August the figure was 75%. Answering a question on whether the deal was a victory for Iran or a defeat, last August 36.6 percent of Iranians said it was a victory, but as of this month the figure has dropped to 27.4 percent. The current trend in Iranian public opinion has shifted with a rising number, currently 54%, up from 43% six months ago, claiming that the deal is beneficial for both Iran and the international community that agreed to it.

So-called moderate supporters of Iran’s President Rohani may have a major impact on this month’s elections and bring changes to Iran. The Iranian public is sophisticated about what JCPOA is likely to mean for them. Recent polls show that there has been an approximately ten percent drop in public support for the agreement.

Trump’s claims that the Obama administration has given Iran a major financial windfall favoring Islamic extremism are not supported by any serious analysis. The Obama administration and its partners on the nuclear deal point out that Iran will receive over the next few years not $150 billion, but more like $56 billion, $32 billion of which it has already received, leaving $20 billion to repair its oil industry, much needed and popularly demanded infrastructure repairs plus measures to try to quell inflation.

The World Bank also estimates that about $100 billion of Iranian assets were frozen abroad, around half of which Tehran could access to as a result of sanctions relief. A contest for available funds in already well underway in Iran between public expectations for use of the money and hardliners favoring the funds going to various military demands including from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its hardliner allies.

Iranians will be indirectly voting this month on this key issue and students interviewed appear realistic that in the short term their lives will not be much improved as a result of JCPOA, but they overwhelmingly favor a return to ‘normal’ relations with the global community while acknowledging that Iran and the West have conflicting opinions on such issues as human rights, religious governments, aspects of Islam, terrorism and Israel among others and that these differences will likely remain for the foreseeable future.

Some Iranians, especially young people, are also vocal about the fact that while Iran’s 1979 Revolution shook its criminal justice system to the core, the country’s legal framework remains largely inadequate, inefficient and inconsistent with fair trial standards, as claimed recently by Amnesty International.

Changes are coming to Iran and America and this month’s elections will likely point in which direction. This year’s elections in America and Iran may well also have a major effect on which direction both countries move, as well as their impact on the Middle East-West Asia region.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

More articles by:Franklin Lamb

A Cowardly New World: Tyranny of Fear the Currency of Empire

Russia, North Korea, Terrorism...Fear as Currency of Western Tyranny

by Finian Cunningham - RT

Feb. 11, 2016

For those with a weak heart it has been a testing week. Russian nuclear aggression, North Korea’s ballistic missiles, terrorists planning to attack the US and Europe. Please almighty, benevolent Washington – protect us!

History has long shown that fear is the currency of rule by tyrants. Get the people to fear some external enemy and then you can command their submission to any form of control – because it’s for their “protection”.
North Korea sends one across the bow

Organized crime calls it a “protection racket”; colonial powers called it “protectorates”; and modern Western supposed democracies claim it is in the name of “state security”.

In many ways it constitutes a risible ruse that should be easily seen through for the farce that it is. But the otherwise unbelievable farce is given a facade of plausibility, credibility and normality due to the immense conditioning power of the Western news media.

That, by the way, is why alternative new outlets are so vilified by Western powers because they dispel the fiction in a way that exposes the fiction-tellers as the dupes, liars and charlatans that they are.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week pointed out the absurdity of Washington and its NATO allies hyping the “myth of Russia’s threat” to Europe. Particularly insulting to ordinary decent human intelligence is the claim put out by Western countries that “Russia is planning to use nuclear weapons to intimidate Sweden and the Baltic countries.”

As ever, Washington and its NATO allies do not present evidence to support their far-fetched claims. Tendentious assertions are simply turned into “facts” by force of repetition and dissemination, and sheer double think, as illustrated by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg making the bizarre statement that the military alliance is not posing a threat to Russia.

The fear factor in this case works to subdue public criticism in NATO countries of their governments piling up more military firepower around Russia’s borders. This week, the American Pentagon announces plans to increase its military spending in Europe fourfold to $3.4 billion, purportedly to “deter Russia’s threat”. Not only is this expenditure depriving American people of needed public services, such as clean drinking water, it is actually a deeply provocative act of aggression towards Russia.

But the trick tends to work, with apparent public consent, because it is all done in the name of “protecting us” from “evil Russians”.

The same goes for implementing state emergency powers in France this week and the long-established post 9/11 so-called Patriot legislation in the US, giving the authorities license to erode civil liberties.

The US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress this week that the country is facing a major attack this year from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL/ ISIS) terror group. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer described Clapper’s presentation as “a sober assessment”, thus giving it a veneer of substance. But in reality all that the intelligence (sic) chief said was that there were thousands of ISIS cadres in 40 different countries. How this presents a clear and imminent security danger to the US is not evidenced, but no doubt it will serve to maintain, if not extend, federal police powers against their own citizens.

And, of course, CNN or any other Western corporate media outlet would never question or probe the origins of ISIS and other Al Qaeda-linked terror networks as a willful creation of American, British, French, Saudi and Turkish state intelligence.

In the same Congress briefing, the US disinformation chief also gave a grim assessment of North Korea producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Clapper said with apparent gravity that the secretive authoritarian state is “making steps towards developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) which could target the United States.” And, dutifully, the Western news media amplify those words in order to give them credibility and ominousness.

A BBC World news ticker read: “North Korea close to having bomb”. Funnily enough, the very next ticker headline read: “Andy Murray’s wife has a baby”.

So you see, not only are vacuous claims about the alleged threat from North Korea transformed into a seemingly serious fact, the issue is also given a sense of normalcy and banality by mixing it up with news on a tennis player’s family.

Last week, North Korea did indeed launch a ballistic rocket into outer space to put an observation satellite in orbit. Yes, the launch breached UN resolutions banning Kim Jong-Un’s regime from using ballistic power. Pyongyang is no doubt using the satellite story as a cover for testing dual ballistic technology that could be, eventually, used to build an ICBM.

And, yes, North Korea carried out a nuclear test explosion last month – the fourth such explosion since 2006, again in violation of UN resolutions.

But such activity is a distant remove from actually being able to mount a nuclear warhead on to a serviceable ICBM and to be able to fire the weapon thousands of kilometers. Most international ballistic experts do not believe that North Korea is anywhere near that stage of development.

The AFP news agency quoted aerospace engineer John Schilling, who has closely followed the North’s missile program, as saying: “An ICBM warhead, unlike a satellite, needs to come down as well as go up. North Korea has never demonstrated the ability to build a re-entry vehicle that can survive at even half the speed an ICBM would require.”

In short, despite what the US and heaps of Western media coverage would have us believe, North Korea is not a threat to international security. Sure, the secretive state can be said to be in breach of UN resolutions. But a nuclear enemy of the world it is most certainly not.

Meanwhile, Washington possesses more than 1,500 actively deployed nuclear warheads across the globe, ready to launch at the touch of a button. The US is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, killing more than 200,000 people in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Nearly, 40 years after signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty mandating nuclear disarmament, the US is in a process of upgrading its nuclear arsenal at a cost of $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

Behind all the bombast over North Korea’s alleged “threat”, the US is moving ahead with the deployment in South Korea and Japan of its “missile shield” system. Such a move is much more destabilizing to international security than any alleged violation by North Korea, because as China and Russia have consistently argued over many years, such a so-called defense shield tends to give the US a “first strike nuclear capability”. That increases the risk of a nuclear war, making nuclear weapons escalation a relentless tendency rather than disarmament. So who is the rogue state here?

It should be noted too that the US-led NATO alliance is pushing ahead with deploying a similar missile shield system in Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, at the same time that NATO is building up ever-more of a presence.

Where is the accountability of Western governments to their public for such provocative, precarious, police-state policies? If there is no accountability, then that is the definition of tyrannical power.

But how could such tyranny pertain in notional democracies, you may ask? Fear. Fear is the currency of tyranny. And servile news organizations – more accurately perception-management services – condition public acceptance of these fears. Fears that in a more rational perspective would be dismissed as outrageous fabrications.

Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV. 

Solving the Bernie Problem: Democrat Elites and Their Handmaidens Take On the Populist

Can the Establishment Fix Its Bernie Sanders Problem?

by Shamus Cooke - CounterPunch

February 11, 2016 

The Democrats’ fight against Bernie is appearing futile. Like a python choking on an elephant, they’ve miscalculated. The Party elites underestimated their opponent, and with each new attack the snake swallows an extra inch, harming only itself.

Establishment figureheads are taking turns ruining their reputation as they attempt to ruin Bernie’s. The U.S. ruling class as a whole revealed the depth of its crisis in this election: not since the Vietnam War have both wings of the establishment thoroughly discredited themselves.

The Republican wing combusted quickly while the Democrats have chosen a slower, more torturous form of self-harm.

The problem with both parties is their inability to serve the super rich while successfully appealing to voters. As inequality widens, democracy suffers. Focusing on the “billionaire class” has catapulted Bernie’s campaign, but the presidency is not an institution that just anybody is allowed to capture.

How will this all play out? Nobody knows. Polls swing wildly in times of flux, making predictions risky. Here are two questions whose answers will guide the future of the election:

1) Can Bernie win the Democratic nomination?

2) If Bernie wins, what next? Will the establishment try to make a deal with him? And will Bernie take it? Or will he remain true to his rhetoric and be a candidate of the 99%?

Nobody except his cheerleaders believed Bernie could actually win, until recently. His momentum combined with Hillary’s crash has forced many to rethink.

An excellent article by Arun Gupta lays bare the machinery of the Party that could be used to decapitate Bernie’s campaign. Yes, the Democratic Party machine could destroy Bernie’s campaign, but it could come at a cost they might not be willing to pay. Most of the Party’s weapons are blunt instruments that leave too much evidence. And millions of people are watching closely.

The first major Party attack misfired badly when the Democrats tried to sabotage Bernie by restricting access to voter data. Hundreds of thousands of people expressed outrage on social media and by signing petitions.

The blowback stunned the Party, which quickly backtracked. They learned a powerful lesson: By destroying Bernie, they could destroy the Party, completely discrediting themselves in front of millions of people.

They didn’t realize how fast the political ground was shifting beneath their feet. Nobody did, and unless an anti-Bernie cryptonite is found soon, the crisis will deepen. Their own electoral game is rigged, yet out of their control.

The trump card of the Party elites is their control of “superdelegates.” But overplaying your best cards is risky too. Imagine Sanders winning the popular vote by wide margins in state after state, only to have the Party machine give the delegates to Clinton. Acting this undemocratically could trigger a deep crisis and destroy the veneer of democracy.

For now the Democrats have opted for a backup plan. It isn’t working. They launched a coordinated pro-Hillary bandwagon campaign, foolishly thinking that Bernie’s populist message could be drowned by a flood of “respected individuals” offering glowing endorsements of Clinton or making cheap attacks against Bernie.

Hillary’s bloated list of endorsers is a “who’s who” among Party elites; nearly every Democratic senator and House representative has endorsed Hillary, while an array of intellectuals have emitted a stream of drivel from their pens and mouths. But their pro-Hillary hack pieces have only invited rage and insults. Nobody likes an arrogant salesman with a shoddy product.

Gloria Steinem, Paul Krugman, Bernie Frank, Madeleine Albright, and a host of others have proven themselves cheap hit-men for the establishment. But their aim is off. The self-inflicted wounds are exposing the hollow intellectualism of the Party elites. Trying to sound smart is tough while making dumb arguments.

Esteemed liberal economist Paul Krugman proved to everyone how clueless he was about political change in his anti-Bernie article “How Change Happens.” His readers skillfully torched him in the comments section.

Famous feminist Gloria Steinem had to apologize for her sexist comment that young women like Bernie because “boys” do.

And Madeline Albright would apologize too, had she any dignity. In her pro-Hillary rant she said there was a “special place in hell” for women who would vote Bernie. But if hell does exist, Albright certainly has her own very special place reserved, for having argued that it was “worth it” that 500,0000 Iraqi children died as a consequence of the U.S. Clinton-era sanctions levied against Iraq.

These “influential” people have lost their authority, which hinged on a political equilibrium that has drastically changed. They can no longer stuff their beliefs down others’ throats. There is a resounding clash of realities which the elites are smashing their heads against, one after another. Young people care nothing about what these so-called experts say. Nor should they.

The mass discrediting of “respected” individuals represents another side of the establishment’s crisis. The question is being posed: who really has the ear of the people? It turns out that very few elites can exert much influence.

They are too alienated. Historic inequality has shrunken the establishment to 1% of the population. Meanwhile, the ranks of the “middle class” have been reduced, most of those still in the “middle class” are now struggling to get by, and the poor are getting poorer. By breaching this alienation Bernie has exposed the whole rotten system that Hillary hopes to preserve.

The many organizations endorsing Hillary faced similar denunciations from their adherents. Groups like Planned Parenthood, national labor unions, The New York Times, and the League of Conservation Voters proved how unrepresentative they were of their followers and members.

An article by the Intercept noted that “Bernie gets endorsements when members decide; Hillary gets endorsements when leaders decide.” The leaders of these groups miscalculated; they tried to play the old political game without realizing the game had changed. They tried to help Hillary but only harmed themselves.

This dynamic can’t go on much longer. It’s too dangerous; it creates unpredictable political chaos. If Bernie survives the multi-state primary “Super Tuesday” on March 1st, the Party establishment may give up and approach him to make a deal. If they can’t beat Bernie they’ll join him; or more accurately, they’ll officially ask Bernie to join them.

What might an offer look like? Broadly speaking, they would ask Bernie to focus his campaign against the Republicans in certain ways, and if he were to become president they’d ask that he’d adhere to a small list of policy considerations.

But would Bernie take the bait as Obama did? Yes, most likely he would. As argued in a previous article, Bernie supports the unifying priority of the establishment: war and imperialism abroad, which requires less domestic spending at home.

His allegiance to the juggernaut of the U.S. military-industrial complex isn’t a blind spot of his politics; he’s trying to play ball. You’ll notice that Bernie isn’t advocating the slashing of the military budget during the debates, even though the vast majority of people would enthusiastically support such an idea, especially if it meant funding the programs Bernie is promoting.

Another indication that Bernie would be willing to join hands with the 1% is his stated willingness to support Hillary if he loses. If he is so anti-establishment why would he campaign for one of its most notorious figures? As author Diana Johnstone shows in her new book “Queen of Chaos,” Hillary is a quintessential member of the ruling class, representing everything that Bernie claims to be against. His principles are mushier than they appear on TV.

Sanders would surely justify his pro-Hillary campaigning as a “fighting against the right wing,” a common theme of Sanders’ politics over the years. He’s attacks have been limited to Republicans, which is why Obama’s establishment presidency provoked little criticism from Sanders, and never a strong denunciation.

Sanders has already made overtures to the Democratic establishment during his campaign. At a Party conference he pleaded for support, arguing that he is the candidate the Party should unite around since his popularity would increase voter turnout.

There is plenty of other evidence that Bernie could make peace with a Democratic Party agenda, based on the years that he caucused with Democrats in the Senate. It’s true the establishment doesn’t identify with Bernie. They don’t trust him. But Bernie identifies with them.

Many have compared Bernie Sanders with the UK Labor Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But several articles have made the case, correctly, that Corbyn’s politics are far to the left of Bernie’s, who could taper his rhetoric just a bit to fit into the mold of the Democratic Party elites. The Democrats wouldn’t be able to make a deal with a Jeremy Corbyn, who’s been a consistent anti-war politician for decades, but they could possibly do business with Bernie, were they desperate enough.

The emperor can easily change clothes, and feels comfortable in different skin colors or genders. But capitalism will shed its democratic clothing if needed. If Bernie posed a real threat to core economic interests, the establishment would go to greater undemocratic lengths to prevent him from taking office.

And if Bernie somehow manages to become president without agreeing to a deal, his physical safety would be at risk. It may already be at risk. The U.S. ruling class just doesn’t allow anybody to become president. There is too much money and power at stake. The next few months are sure to be fascinating.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

More articles by:Shamus Cooke

Meanwhile...As You Watched the Election Horserace

What Obama Did While You Were Watching Elections

by David Swanson - Let's Try Democracy

 

11 February 2016 

 

Pass the popcorn! Wait till I tweet this! Did you see the look on his face?

Ain't elections exciting? We just can't get enough of them, which could be why we've stretched them out to a couple of years each, even though a small crowd of Super Delegates and a couple of state officials with computer skills could quite conceivably decide the whole thing anyway.

Through the course of this marvelous election thus far I've been trying to get any human being to ask any candidate to provide just the most very basic outline of the sort of budget they would propose if president, or at least some hint at the single item in the budget that takes up more than half of it. 

 

Do they think military spending should go up, go down, or stay right where it is?

Who knows! Aren't elections wonderful?

I'd even settle for the stupid "gotcha" question in which we find out if any of the candidates knows, even roughly, what percentage of the budget military spending is now.

Why is this topic, although seemingly central, scrupulously avoided?
The candidates all, more or less, agree.
None of the candidates brings it up.
Nobody in Congress, not even the "progressive" caucus, brings it up.
Nobody in the corporate media brings it up.
The corporate media outlets see war profiteers as customers who buy ads.
The corporate media outlets see war profiteers in the mirror as parts of their corporate families.

The fact that the military costs money conflicts with the basic premise of U.S. politics which is that one party wants to spend money on socialistic nonsense while the other party wants to stop spending money and build a bigger military.

Those seem like the obvious answers, but here's another. While you're being entertained by the election, President Obama is proposing a bigger military than ever. Not only is U.S. military spending extremely high by historical standards, but looking at the biggest piece of military spending, which is the budget of the Department of so-called Defense, that department's annual "Green Book" makes clear that it has seen higher spending under President Barack Obama than ever before in history.

Check out the new budget proposal from the President who distracted millions of people from horrendous Bush-Cheney actions with his "peace" talk as a candidate eight years ago. He wants to increase the base Do"D" budget, both the discretionary and the mandatory parts. He wants to increase the extra slush fund of unaccountable money for the Do"D" on top of that. This pot used to be named for wars, but wars have gotten so numerous and embarrassing that it's now called "Overseas Contingency Operations."

When it comes to nuclear weapons, Obama wants to increase spending, but when it comes to other miscellaneous extras for the military, he also wants to increase that. Military retirement spending, on the other hand, he'd like to see go up, while the Veterans Administration spending he proposes to raise. Money for fueling ISIS by fighting it, Obama wants raised by 50%. On increasing hostility with Russia through a military buildup on its border, Obama wants a 400% spending boost. In one analysis, military spending would jump from $997.2 billion this year to $1.04 trillion next year under this proposal.

That's a bit awkward, considering the shade it throws on any piddly little project that does make it into election debates and reporting. The smallest fraction of military spending could pay for the major projects that Senator Bernie Sanders will be endlessly attacked for proposing to raise taxes for.

It's also awkward for the whole Republican/Hillary discussion of how to become more militarized, unlike that pacifist in the White House.

And, of course, it's always awkward to point out that events just go on happening in the world rather than pausing out of respect for some inanity just uttered by Marco Rubio.

 

Defensive Defenders Demand "Get the Facts Straight" on Great Bear Deal

85% Means 85% - Get the Facts Straight on the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement

by Valerie Langer, Director of BC Forest Campaigns, ForestEthics Solutions

Feb 5, 2016

The Great Bear Rainforest Agreement strengthens the position of Native People and legally prevents logging on 85% of the massive temperate rainforest.

On February 1, 2016, Coastal First Nations, Nanwakolas Council (First Nations) and the Province of British Columbia announced the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement. ForestEthics and our partners Greenpeace and Sierra Club BC strongly support the plan. For a decade we worked alongside First Nations, the Province and five logging companies to develop a conservation package that would put people and the environment first. And while the scope of conservation is very significant, it is also rather complicated.

For more than a century protecting wildlands has meant setting up parks. But that history includes a darker side, one where Native Peoples are excluded from their homes or territorial lands. The term “conservation refugees” was coined to describe people removed from parks because of the faulty belief that healthy ecology means no human communities. To native people who have inhabited rainforests and other wild areas for milenia, this belief is as dangerous as destruction or industrialization of the forest. Across the globe natural forest is directly correlated with Indigenous people -- where First Nations live on their ancestral lands, forests and other wildlands remain.

For the past 10 years we worked closely with First Nations to develop legal conservation approaches and designations that respect Indigenous rights and the needs of their communities. Different designations, each with its own governing principles were developed, but all share one common trait -- these areas cannot be logged. So it is through this variety of designations that the full 85% of the forested land-base in the Great Bear is legally off limits to logging. And let’s not forget that the remaining 15% will only be logged subject to the the most stringent commercial logging rules in North America.

Some people have said only 38% is legally off limits to logging -- those people are simply wrong. The legal requirement for 85% (3.1 million hectares) can be found in The Legal Order on the Provincial website (Part 1; Section 6; page 10). This sections states:

Great Bear Rainforest Order Part 1:

1. Objectives for Managed Forest and Natural Forest

(1) Identify and maintain in the order area:

(a) an area of Managed Forest of 550,032 hectares that is or will be available for timber harvest; and

(b) a Natural Forest area that continues to grow older over time subject to natural disturbance and non-forest tenure activity, and has an area of 3,108,876 hectares

Here is a cheat sheet on the conservation and advancements for First Nations that are included in the Great Bear Agreement:

First Nations

Strengthened their governance and economic relationships with the province (for forestry and carbon revenues and other community well being measures)
Identified areas they want protected and not protected and jointly developed and approved the out the new logging rules with the province

Protected Areas

8 new protected areas including (295,000ha). Brings total to 38% of the landmass (41% of Great Bear Rainforest forested landbase)

New Legal Designations:

• Managed Forest - new legal designation = 15% of the total forest (550,000 ha) where LOGGING ALLOWED
• Natural Forest - new legal designation = 85% of the total forest (3.1 million ha) is OFF LIMITS TO LOGGING (this includes the protected areas and the conservation targets for every ecosystem type in the Great Bear Rainforest which are now legally required to be maintained under the new Land Use Order)

Improved Forest Management

• Conservation Targets - legal requirement to maintain conservation targets of minimum 70% of each ecosystem type (except for 30,000 ha)
• Restorations Zones - 9 new Restorations Zones (90,000 ha) in the very south (which has been heavily logged) to recuperate old forest to 30% where currently there is less than 10% old growth forest
• Landscape Reserves - requirement to map where conservation targets will be achieved
• Annual Allowable Cut - big reduction (~40% reduction since pre Ecosystem Based Management. of that 19% just achieved Feb 1st)
• GBR Act - The AAC will be entrenched in a new GBR Act that will be legislated in the spring session.
• Close Loopholes - loopholes from prior Land Use Orders have been closed and Land Use Objectives and the associated policy has been improved (bear dens, cultural objectives, Reserve Design requirements, endangered and threatened ecosystem requirements and definition of old forest etc.)
• Accountability - Forestry is going to be done in a new, more cooperative and accountable fashion
• Transparency - There will be greater transparency for the general public about how forestry occurs including an annual report out on how conservation targets were met.

Trophy Hunt

The Trophy bear hunt is still allowed (despite the Premier saying otherwise during a press conference). We strongly support abolishing this barbaric practice.
By Valerie Langer, Director of BC Forest Campaigns, ForestEthics Solutions



By Valerie Langer, Director of BC Forest Campaigns, ForestEthics Solutions

Follow Valerie Langer on Twitter: @ValerieLanger

More by Valerie Langer:


85% of Great Bear Rainforest Off Limits to Logging

Kinder Morgan vs. Everyone in the World

The Homestretch for the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements

Syria Peace Talks: One Hand Stops Clapping in Geneva

Will Geneva talks lead right back to Assad’s 2011 reforms?

by Sharmine Narwani - RT

Feb. 10, 2016

Syrian peace talks have already stalled. The opposition refused to be in the same room as the government delegation, while the latter blamed opposition ‘preconditions’ and the organizers’ inability to produce a ‘list of designated terrorists’.

The UN’s special envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura has now promised talks will reconvene on February 25, but how will he achieve this?

So much has shifted on the global political stage and in the Syrian military theater since this negotiation process first began gaining steam.

In just the past few weeks, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies have recaptured key areas in Latakia, Idlib, Daraa, Homs and Aleppo, and are making their way up to the Turkish border, cutting off supply lines and exits for opposition militants along the way.

While analysts and politicians on both sides of the fence have warned that a ‘military solution’ to the Syrian crisis is not feasible, the SAA’s gains are starting to look very much like one. And with each subsequent victory, the ability for the opposition to raise demands looks to be diminished.

Already, western sponsors of the talks have as much as conceded that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will continue to play a role in any future government - a slap in the face to the foreign-backed Syrian opposition that have demanded his exit.

And the long list of deliverables in peace talks yet to come - transitional governance, ceasefires, constitutional reform, and elections - are broad concepts, vague enough to be shaped to advantage by the dominant military power on the ground.

The shaping of post-conflict political landscapes invariably falls to the victor – not the vanquished. And right now, Geneva looks to be the place where this may happen, under the watch of many of the states that once threw their weight – weapons, money, training, support – behind the Syrian ‘opposition.’

So here’s a question: As the military landscape inside Syria continues to move in the government’s favor, will a final deal look very much different than the 2011 reforms package offered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

Assad’s 2011 reforms

In early 2011, the Syrian government launched a series of potentially far-reaching reforms, some of these unprecedented since the ascendance of the Baath party to power in 1963.

Arriving in Damascus in early January 2012 – my third trip to Syria, and my first since the crisis began – I was surprised to find restrictions on Twitter and Facebook already lifted, and a space for more open political discourse underway.

That January, less than ten months into the crisis, around 5,000 Syrians were dead, checkpoints and security crackdowns abounded, while themes such as “the dictator is killing his own people” and “the protests are peaceful” still dominated western headlines.

Four years later, with the benefit of hindsight, many of these things can be contextualized. The ‘protests’ were not all ‘peaceful’ – and casualties were racking up equally on both sides. We see this armed opposition more clearly now that they are named Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and ISIS. But back in early 2012, these faces were obfuscated – they were all called “peaceful protestors forced to take up arms against a repressive government.”

Nevertheless, in early 2011, the Syrian government began launching its reforms - some say only to placate restive populations; others saw it as an opportunity for Assad to shrug off the anti-reform elements in his government and finish what he intended to start in 2000’s ‘Damascus Spring.’

Either way, the reforms came hard and fast - some big, some small: decrees suspending almost five decades of emergency law that prohibited public gatherings, the establishment of a multi-party political system and terms limits for the presidency, the removal of Article 8 of the constitution that assigned the Baath party as “the leader of state and society,” citizenship approval for tens of thousands of Kurds, the suspension of state security courts, the removal of laws prohibiting the niquab, the release of prisoners, the granting of general amnesty for criminals, the granting of financial autonomy to local authorities, the removal of controversial governors and cabinet members, new media laws that prohibited the arrest of journalists and provided for more freedom of expression, dissolution of the cabinet, reducing the price of diesel, increasing pension funds, allocating housing, investment in infrastructure, opening up direct citizen access to provincial leaders and cabinet members, the establishment of a presidential committee for dialogue with the opposition – and so forth.

But almost immediately, push back came from many quarters, usually accompanied by the ‘Arab Spring’ refrain: “it’s too late.”

But was it?

Western governments complained about reforms not being implemented. But where was the time – and according to whose time-frame? When the Assad government forged ahead with constitutional reforms and called for a nationally-held referendum to gain citizen buy-in, oppositionists sought a boycott and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the referendum “phony” and “a cynical ploy.”

Instead, just two days earlier, at a meeting in Tunis, Clinton threw her significant weight behind the unelected, unrepresentative, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council (SNC): “We do view the Syrian National Council as a leading legitimate representative of Syrians seeking peaceful democratic change.”

And when, in May 2012, Syria held parliamentary elections – the first since the constitution revamp – the US State Department called the polls: “bordering on ludicrous.”

But most insidious of all the catch-phrases and slogans employed to undermine the Syrian state, was the insistence that reforms were “too late” and “Assad must go.” When, in the evolution of a political system, is it too late to try to reform it? When, in the evolution of a political system, do external voices, from foreign capitals, get to weigh in on a head of state more loudly than its own citizens?

According to statements made by two former US policymakers to McClatchy News: “The goal had been to ‘ratchet up’ the Syria response incrementally, starting with U.S. condemnation of the violence and eventually suggesting that Assad had lost legitimacy.”

“The White House and the State Department both – and I include myself in this – were guilty of high-faluting rhetoric without any kind of hard policy tools to make the rhetoric stick,” confessed Robert Ford, former US Ambassador to Syria.

An analysis penned by veteran Middle East correspondent Michael Jansen at the onset of the talks in Geneva last week ponders the point: “The Syrian crisis might have been resolved in 2011 if US president Barack Obama had not declared on August 18th that year that his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad had to 'step aside.'”

Were the additional 250,000 Syrian deaths worth those empty slogans? Or might reforms, in Syrian hands, have been worth a try?

Domestic dissent, Assad and reforms

The story inside Syria, within the dissident community, still varied greatly during my January 2012 trip. But with the exception of one, Fayez Sara, who went on to eventually leave the country and join the SNC, Syrian dissidents with whom I met unanimously opposed sanctions, foreign intervention and the militarization of the conflict.

Did they embrace the reforms offered up in 2011? Mostly not – the majority thought reforms would be “cosmetic” and meaningless without further fundamental changes, much of this halted by the growing political violence. When Assad invited them to participate in his constitutional reform deliberations, did these dissidents step up? No – many refused to engage directly with the government, probably calculating that “Assad would go” and reluctant to shoulder the stigma of association.

But were these reforms not a valuable starting point, at least? Political systems don’t evolve overnight – they require give-and-take and years of uphill struggle.

Aref Dalila, one of the leaders of the ‘Damascus Spring’ who spent eight years in prison, told me: “The regime consulted with me and others between March and May and asked our opinion. I told them there has to be very serious reforms immediately and not just for show, but they preferred to go by other solutions.”

Bassam al-Kadi, who was imprisoned for seven years in the 1990s, managed to find one upside to reforms. Speaking about the abolishment of the state security courts in early 2011, Kadi said:

“Since 1973 until last May, it was actually a court outside of any laws and it was the strong arm of the regime. All trials held after abolishing this court have taken place in civilian courts. Sometimes the intelligence apparatus intervenes but in most cases the judge behaves according to his or her opinion. Hundreds of my friends who were arrested in the past few months, most were released within one or two weeks.”

This reform, by the way, took place a mere few months before Jordan’s constitutional reforms added another security layer - the state military courts - for which it was promptly lauded.

Hassan Abdel Azim, head of the National Coordination Committee (NCC) which included 15 opposition parties, took a different view: “Our point of view is that such reforms can only take place when violence stops against protestors…But since the regime tries to enforce its reforms, the result will only be partial reforms that enhances its image but not lead to real change.”

The NCC went on to have a short-lived alliance with the foreign-based SNC which fell apart over disagreements on “non-Arab foreign intervention.”

Louay Hussein who headed the Tayyar movement and spent seven years in prison when he was 22 (and recently as well), told me that January: “We consider Assad responsible for everything that’s happened but we are not prepared to put the country in trouble…In March, we wanted what the regime is giving now (reforms). But when the system started using live bullets we wanted to change it and change it quickly. But after all this time we have to reconsider our strategy.”

And the list goes on. The views ranged from dissidents who “like Assad, but hate the system” to those who wanted a wholesale change that was arrived at through a consultative process – but definitely not foreign intervention. Eighteen months later when I revisited some of these people, their views had transformed quite dramatically in light of the escalation of political violence. Even the ones who blamed the government for this escalation seemed to put their arms around the state, as nationalists first and foremost.

Had the conflict not taken on this stark foreign-backed dimension and become so heavily militarized, they may have expended their energies on pushing at the limits of reforms already on the table.

How can Geneva transform Syria?

First on the table in Geneva is the establishment of a transitional process that gets the two sides working on common governance. On a parallel track, demilitarization is on the menu - which basically consists of organizing ceasefires throughout Syria. The transitional team will then work on hammering out a new constitution, with elections to be held within 18 months.

That sounds a bit like the process already underway in Syria in 2011 and 2012.

Certainly, the opposition believes it has a stronger hand today than back in 2011, supported as it is by the UN-sponsored Geneva process. But the difficulties will start the moment decisions need to be made about which opposition participates in the transitional body, if they can even manage to convince the Syrian government - now racking up military victories every week - that it needs to relinquish a chunk of its authority to this new entity.

It is the kind of ‘opposition’ that eventually enters the transitional process that will help ultimately determine its outcome. Look for some Riyadh- and Turkish-backed opponents to be tossed by the wayside during this process.

With the introduction of Russian air power and qualitative military hardware last autumn, the Syrian army and its allies have gained critical momentum in the field.

So why would the Syrian state backtrack on that momentum to give up authority in Geneva? Even the expectation of this is illogical.

There is a growing consensus among Syria analysts that the Americans have ceded the Syrian theater to the Russians and Moscow’s allies. Washington has barely registered any meaningful objections to Russian airstrikes over the past months, apart from some sound bites about hitting ‘moderate rebels’ and not focusing enough on ISIS.

Part of the US problem is that, without any clear cut Syria strategy, it has found itself neck-deep in this crisis without any means to extricate itself from the uncomfortable dependencies of thousands of rebel militants, and the demands of increasingly belligerent allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

They Russians offer that opportunity – like they did in 2013 by taking the Syrian chemical weapons program off the table - and it looks like Washington is grabbing it with both hands right now. It is likely that Moscow waited to intervene in the Syrian quagmire only when it was absolutely sure the US needed an exit – any earlier, and the Americans were still playing both sides and all cards.

For Geneva to move forward, the participants are going to have to make some awkward commitments. Firstly, the batch of Islamists-for-hire that currently makes up the opposition will need to be finessed – or torn apart – to include a broad swathe of Syrian ethnic groups, sects, political viewpoints and… women.

Secondly, all parties to the talks need to agree on which militants in the Syrian theater are going to make that “terrorist list.” This was a clear deliverable outlined in Vienna, and it hasn’t been done. This all-important list will make clear which militants are to be part of a future ceasefire, and which ones will be ‘fair game.’

After all, there can be NO ceasefires until we know who is a designated terrorist and who can be a party to ground negotiations.

I suspect, however, that this terrorist list has been neglected for good reason. It has spared western rebel-sponsors the discomfort of having to face the wrath of their militants, while allowing time for the Russians and Syrians to mow these groups into the ground. Hence the stream of recent victories – and the accompanying timid reaction from Washington.

As the balance of power shifts further on the ground, we may see a much-altered ‘Geneva.’ Will it genuinely beget a political process, will the players at the table change, will the ‘political solution’ be entirely manufactured behind the curtains… only to be offered up to an unsuspecting public as a victory wrenched from a ‘bad regime?’

Because, right now, Syria would be fortunate to have those 2011 reforms on that table, the rapt attention of the global community encouraging them forward, weapons at rest. A quarter million Syrians could have been spared, hundreds of towns, cities and villages still intact, millions of displaced families in their own homes.

Perhaps Geneva can bring those reforms back, wrapped in a prettier package this time, so we can clap our hands and declare ourselves satisfied.

Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony's College, Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University. Sharmine has written commentary for a wide array of publications, including Al Akhbar English, the New York Times, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, Salon.com, USA Today, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera English, BRICS Post and others. You can follow her on Twitter at @snarwani 

This Deal Saves Nothing But Industrial Forestry Profits

To Globe And Mail Editor in Chief, re: Great Bear Rainforest Deal

by Steve Lawson, Susanne Hare Tofino, B.C.

February 10, 2016

Mark Hume's article in the Globe and Mail was right on. The GBR deal goes on and on and probably will be renegotiated in the near future as the plan says, every 5 to 10 years or so. Talk and log. Less than half of the GBR is off limits to logging and now that has been reduced by more and chopped up even further.

The really problematic part of the situation is that globally no one wants to support the logging of old growth forests and people don't want to purchase products from these but the enviro people making the deal behind closed doors did it before in Clayoquot Sound, promised the logging companies to help market the old growth forest that they allowed to be cut and got it certified. This has happened again. In return for no objections on the part of these environmental companies, old growth is still being made acceptable on the markets.

2016 and we are still trying to protect the last few vestiges of these important forests and the life they contain. This is over 25 years after the "Clayoquot Compromise" was signed by these same people and the logging has never stopped here in spite of their great self-congratulatory media campaign to the public.

Last year's logging in Clayoquot Sound involved barge loads of massive cedar trees for profit and secondary trees as collateral near Sulphur Pass where many people were arrested to stop this. We have objected and attempted to stop the "scientific logging" here that has caused blowdowns, landslides, siltation of rivers and creeks and clear cuts while most of the public thought Clayoquot was "saved".

These groups are negotiating away other people's livelihoods, fishing, potential tourism, wildlife habitat, medicinals and other values all behind closed doors while disallowing any input that says "NO". They have been hand-picked by government and industry for this and we still question how much they are being paid and where the money comes from.

Vancouver Island and the coast has been and is still being ravaged and no-one is objecting. These are the things the public should know and question.

It is like the Emperor's New Clothes; everyone lauding the agreement while the logging of old growth forests goes on and on...a finite and irreplaceable ecosystem, we are all losing.

Sincerely, Steve and Susanne Lawson, Tofino, B.C.


The great bears aren't really saved
by MARK HUME  - 9 February 2016
British Columbia

Still a Chance for the World’s Forests?

A Last Chance for the World’s Forests?

by Bill Laurance  - CounterPunch

February 10, 2016

An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of ‘core forest’ – remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes – are vanishing even faster.

Core forests are disappearing because a tsunami of new roads, dams, power lines, pipelines and other infrastructure is rapidly slicing into the world’s last wild places, opening them up like a flayed fish to deforestation, fragmentation, poaching and other destructive activities.

Most vulnerable of all are forests in the tropics. These forests sustain the planet’s most biologically rich and environmentally important habitats.

The collapse of the world’s forests isn’t going to stop until we start to say ‘no’ to environmentally destructive projects.

Damn the dams

Those who criticise new infrastructure projects are often accused of opposing direly needed economic development, or – if they hail from industrial nations – of being hypocrites.

But when one begins to look in detail at the proposed projects, an intriguing pattern appears: Many are either poorly justified or will have far greater costs than benefits.

For example, in a recent essay in the journal Science, Amazon expert Philip Fearnside argues that many of the 330-odd hydroelectric dams planned or under construction in the Amazon will be more trouble than they’re worth.

Many of these dams will have huge environmental impacts, argues Fearnside, and will dramatically increase forest loss in remote regions.

This happens both because the Amazon is quite flat, requiring large areas of forest to be flooded, and because dams and their power lines require road networks that open up the forest to other human impacts. For instance, the 12 dams planned for Brazil’s Tapajós River are expected to increase Amazon deforestation by almost 1 million hectares.

Furthermore, Fearnside argues, much of the electricity the Amazon dams produce will be used for smelting aluminium, which provides relatively little local employment.

Fearnside asserts that mega-dams planned for the Congo Basin and Mekong River will also cause big problems, with limited or questionable benefits.

Roads to ruin

The explosive expansion of roads into the world’s last wild places is an even more serious problem. Indeed, Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists, once quipped that “the best thing you could do for the Amazon is to blow up all the roads.”

Current projections suggest that by 2050, we’ll have nearly 25 million kilometres of additional paved roads – enough to encircle the Earth more than 600 times.

I have led three major studies of planned road expansion, for the entire planet and for the Brazilian Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa. All three show that many planned roads would have massive impacts on biodiversity and vital ecosystem services while providing only sparse socioeconomic benefits.

In Africa, for example, our analyses reveal that 33 planned ‘development corridors’ would total over 53,000 kilometers in length while crisscrossing the continent and cutting into many remote, wild areas. Of these, we ranked only six as ‘promising’ whereas the remainder were ‘inadvisable’ or ‘marginal’.

Progress at any price?

There is a very active coalition of pro-growth advocates – including corporate lobbyists, climate-change deniers, and die-hard proponents of ‘economic growth’ – that immediately decry any effort to oppose new developments.

Added to this are those who argue reasonably for economic development to combat poverty and disparity in developing nations. Such advocates often assert that an added bonus of development is greater sustainability, because impoverished people can be highly destructive environmentally. The denuded nation of Haiti is one such example.

Yet the on-the-ground reality is often far more complex. For instance, the heavy exploitation and export of natural resources, such as minerals, fossil fuels or timber, can cause nations to suffer ‘Dutch Disease‘ – an economic syndrome characterised by rising currency values, economic inflation and the weakening of other economic sectors, such as tourism, education and manufacturing.

Dutch Disease tends to increase economic disparity, because the poor are impacted most heavily by rising food and living costs. Further, the national economy becomes more vulnerable to economic shocks from fluctuating natural-resource prices or depletion. The Solomon Islands – which relies heavily on timber exports that are collapsing from overexploitation – is a poster-child for Dutch Disease.

On top of this is the toxic odour of corruption that pervades many big infrastructure projects. One would need an abacus just to keep track of the allegations.

To cite just two recent examples: in Malaysia, an independent investigation has concluded that nearly US$4 billion was misappropriated from a state-owned fund set up to attract international property, infrastructure and energy investments. And in Brazil, the granting of contracts for major Amazon dams has been drowning in allegations of corruption.

In both nations, public coffers needed for education, health and other vital services appear to have been hugely defrauded.

Just say ‘no’

The bottom line is that many big infrastructure projects are being pushed by powerful corporations, individuals or interests that have much to gain themselves, but often at great cost to the environment and developing societies.

Globally, the path we’re currently following isn’t just unsustainable. It’s leading to an astonishingly rapid loss of forests, wildlife and wilderness. From 2000 to 2012, an area of forest two and half times the size of Texas was destroyed, while a tenth of all core forests vanished.

If we’re going to have any wild places left for our children and grandchildren, we simply can’t say ‘yes’ to every proposed development project.

For those that will have serious environmental and social consequences, we need to start saying ‘no’ a lot more often.


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University.

More articles by:Bill Laurance

Flinty Hearts: America's Coast-to-Coast Municipal Toxic Crises

Two, Three... Many Flints: America’s Coast-to-Coast Toxic Crisis

by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz - TomDispatch

February 9, 2016

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. 

To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. 

No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable. As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.” 

Tomgram: Rosner and Markowitz, Welcome to the United States of Flint

Talk about nightmares: the children of a city, thousands of them, may have been poisoned by lead in its drinking water in a process set off by adults intent on saving a little money, who learned of the dangers and then ignored the warnings of scientists, revealed nothing to the public about the risks to their health, insisted on the water’s safety, and in some cases suppressed information about its actual state. As anyone who has picked up a paper or turned on the TV news in recent weeks knows, this is a basic description of the ongoing crisis in Flint, Michigan, in which “austerity” economics dictated that a city switch to extremely corrosive water that often came out of the tap discolored, and sometimes left those who bathed in it with severe rashes. You undoubtedly also know that an anti-corrosive agent which might have prevented most of the corrosion in the city’s water pipes, and so the lead poisoning of untold numbers of its residents, was skipped at a savings of approximately $100 a day. And lest you think that any lessons have been learned, Republicans in Congress, eager (like Michigan Governor Rick Snyder) to save a few bucks at whatever cost to the health of people they could care less about, refuse to fund a fix to the problem. As Reuters reported recently, “Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, said aid to Flint must not add to U.S. budget deficits for 'what is a local and state problem.'"

And while we’re on the topic, the activist group Progress Michigan uncovered a revealing document from Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget. By January 2015, 10 months before the administration of Governor Snyder admitted that Flint’s water was unsafe to drink, the state had already begun trucking water into that city and setting up water coolers next to drinking fountains in state buildings “so that state workers could choose to continue to drink Flint water or a safe alternative.”

In such a grim situation, is there a ray of hope to be found? Let me suggest one in a group of workers who may feel austerity-bound in their own lives but haven’t let that affect their sense of generosity to their fellow human beings. For months, from across Michigan, union plumbers by the hundreds have been driving to Flint and volunteering their time and skills to install filters and faucets that will help get at least some of the lead out of the water flowing into people’s homes. Unfortunately, they can’t replace the corroded pipes in the city’s water system on a volunteer basis.

Today, TomDispatch has called on two of this country’s top experts on the corrosive effects of lead on human health and on the ways in which corporations have profited from the use of lead while covering up its effects. David Rosner -- the first guest author ever to pen a TomDispatch piece back in December 2002 -- and Gerald Markowitz, authors of Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children, survey the situation not just in Flint, but nationally when it comes to ways in which Americans, particularly our children, are being poisoned by lead. Without a doubt, it’s the story from hell. Tom

Two, Three... Many Flints: 

America’s Coast-to-Coast Toxic Crisis

by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz

President Obama would have good reason to worry if his kids lived in Flint. But the city’s children are hardly the only ones threatened by this public health crisis. There’s a lead crisis for children in Baltimore, Maryland, Herculaneum, Missouri, Sebring, Ohio, and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., and that’s just to begin a list. State reports suggest, for instance, that "18 cities in Pennsylvania and 11 in New Jersey may have an even higher share of children with dangerously elevated levels of lead than does Flint." Today, scientists agree that there is no safe level of lead for children and at least half of American children have some of this neurotoxin in their blood. The CDC is especially concerned about the more than 500,000 American children who have substantial amounts of lead in their bodies. Over the past century, an untold number have had their IQs reduced, their school performances limited, their behaviors altered, and their neurological development undermined. From coast to coast, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, children have been and continue to be imperiled by a century of industrial production, commercial gluttony, and abandonment by the local, state, and federal governments that should have protected them. Unlike in Flint, the “crisis” seldom comes to public attention. 

Two, Three... Many Flints

In Flint, the origins of the current crisis lay in the history of auto giant General Motors (GM) and its rise in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the status of the world’s largest corporation. GM’s Buick plant alone once occupied “an area almost a mile and a half long and half a mile wide,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and several Chevrolet and other GM plants literally covered the waterfront of “this automotive city.” Into the Flint River went the toxic wastes of factories large and small, which once supplied batteries, paints, solders, glass, fabrics, oils, lubricating fluids, and a multitude of other materials that made up the modern car. In these plants strung out along the banks of the Flint and Saginaw rivers and their detritus lay the origins of the present public health emergency.

The crisis that attracted President Obama’s attention is certainly horrifying, but the children of Flint have been poisoned in one way or another for at least 80 years. Three generations of those children living around Chevrolet Avenue in the old industrial heart of the city experienced an environment filled with heavy metal toxins that cause neurological conditions in them and cardiovascular problems in adults.

As Michael Moore documented in his film Roger and Me, GM abandoned Flint in a vain attempt to stave off financial disaster. Having sucked its people dry, the company ditched the city, leaving it to deal with a polluted hell without the means to do so. Like other industrial cities that have suffered this kind of abandonment, Flint’s population is majority African American and Latino, and has a disproportionate number of families living below the poverty line. Of its 100,000 residents, 65% are African American and Latino and 42% are mired in poverty.

The president should be worried about Flint’s children and local, state, and federal authorities need to fix the pipes, sewers, and water supply of the city. Technically, this is a feasible, if expensive, proposition. It’s already clear, however, that the political will is just not there even for this one community. Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, has refused to provide Flint’s residents with even a prospective timetable for replacing their pipes and making their water safe. There is, however, a far graver problem that is even less easy to fix: the mix of racism and corporate greed that have put lead and other pollutants into millions of homes in the United States. The scores of endangered kids in Flint are just the tip of a vast, toxic iceberg. Even Baltimore, which first identified its lead poisoning epidemic in the 1930s, still faces a crisis, especially in largely African American communities, when it comes to the lead paint in its older housing stock.

Just this month, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community, and development, Kenneth C. Holt, dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callously suggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child's mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

There is, in fact, a grim broader history of lead poisoning in America. It was probably the most widely dispersed environmental toxin that affected children in this country. In part, this was because, for decades during the middle of the twentieth century, it was marketed as an essential ingredient in industrial society, something without which none of us could get along comfortably. Those toxic pipes in Flint are hardly the only, or even the primary, source of danger to children left over from that era.

In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead was introduced as an additive for gasoline. It was lauded at the time as a "gift of God" by a representative of the Ethyl Corporation, a creation of GM, Standard Oil, and Dupont, the companies that invented, produced, and marketed the stuff. Despite warnings that this industrial toxin might pollute the planet, which it did, almost three-quarters of a century would pass before it was removed from gasoline in the United States. During that time, spewed out of the tailpipes of hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, it tainted the soil that children played in and was tracked onto floors that toddlers touched. Banned from use in the 1980s, it still lurks in the environment today.

Meanwhile, homes across the country were tainted by lead in quite a different way. Lead carbonate, a white powder, was mixed with linseed oil to create the paint that was used in the nation’s homes, hospitals, schools, and other buildings until 1978. Though its power to harm and even kill children who sucked on lead-painted windowsills, toys, cribs, and woodwork had long been known, it was only in that year that the federal government banned its use in household paints.

Hundreds of tons of the lead in paint that covered the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States remains in place almost four decades later, especially in poorer neighborhoods where millions of African American and Latino children currently live. Right now, most middle class white families feel relatively immune from the dangers of lead, although the gentrification of old neighborhoods and the renovation of old homes can still expose their children to dangerous levels of lead dust from the old paint on those walls. However, economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today. As with the water flowing into homes from the pipes of Flint’s water system, so the walls of its apartment complexes, not to mention those in poor neighborhoods of Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and virtually every other older urban center in the country, continue to poison children exposed to lead-polluted dust, chips, soil, and air.

Over the course of the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead and millions more remain in danger of it today. Add to this the risks these same children face from industrial toxins like mercury, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs) and you have an ongoing recipe for a Flint-like disaster but on a national scale.

In truth, the United States has scores of “Flints” awaiting their moments. Think of them as ticking toxic time bombs -- just an austerity scheme or some official’s poor decision away from a public health disaster. Given this, it’s remarkable, even in the wake of Flint, how little attention or publicity such threats receive. Not surprisingly, then, there seems to be virtually no political will to ensure that future generations of children will not suffer the same fate as those in Flint.

The Future of America’s Toxic Past

A series of decisions by state and local officials turned Flint’s chronic post-industrial crisis into a total public health disaster. If clueless, corrupt, or heartless government officials get all the blame for this (and blame they do deserve), the larger point will unfortunately be missed -- that there are many post-industrial Flints, many other hidden tragedies affecting America’s children that await their moments in the news. Treat Flint as an anomaly and you condemn families nationwide to bear the damage to their children alone, abandoned by a society unwilling to invest in cleaning up a century of industrial pollution, or even to acknowledge the injustice involved.

Flint may be years away from a solution to its current crisis, but in a few cities elsewhere in the country there is at least a modicum of hope when it comes to developing ways to begin to address this country’s poisonous past. In California, for example, 10 cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Oakland, have successfully sued and won an initial judgment against three lead pigment manufacturers for $1.15 billion. That money will be invested in removing lead paint from the walls of homes in these cities. If this judgment is upheld on appeal, it would be an unprecedented and pathbreaking victory, since it would force a polluting industry to clean up the mess it created and from which it profited.

There have been other partial victories, too. In Herculaneum, Missouri, for instance, where half the children within a mile of the nation’s largest lead smelter suffered lead poisoning, jurors returned a $320 million verdict against Fluor Corporation, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. That verdict is also on appeal, while the company has moved its smelter to Peru where whole new populations are undoubtedly being poisoned.

President Obama hit the nail on the head with his recent comments on Flint, but he also missed the larger point. There he was just a few dozen miles from that city’s damaged water system when he spoke in Detroit, another symbol of corporate abandonment with its own grim toxic legacy. Thousands of homes in the Motor City, the former capital of the auto industry, are still lead paint disaster areas. Perhaps it’s time to widen the canvas when it comes to the poisoning of America’s children and face the terrible human toll caused by “the American century.”

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, TomDispatch regulars, 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. Rosner is a professor of sociomedical sciences and 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. Both have been awarded a certificate of appreciation by the United States Senate through the office of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has recognized the importance of their work on lead and industrial poisoning.

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Copyright 2016 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz