Friends:

Bill Moyers' recent PBS program on the chemical industry has caused quite a stir.

Richard Grossman, co-director of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy, examined the premise of the Moyers program through the perspective of 30 years of activism and organizing. Grossman raises fundamental questions about Moyers' program, the industry, and democracy in the memo below.

*************** HOW LONG SHALL WE GROVEL?

A Memo For The Record

By Richard Grossman(1)

April 4, 2001

Provoked by the March 26, 2001 Bill Moyers PBS Special "Trade Secrets"(2)

"We have trusted the chemical industry and our government to test the chemicals' effects on health and safety, and to take dangerous ones off the market." - Alternet.org 4/2/01

Why?

Based on what evidence?

The point of the Moyers' program was that chemical corporation officials made investment, technology, sales, and promotion decisions to drench their workers and the world with what they knew were poisons, and they didn't come clean. Commenting on the program, The New York Times Corporation said that nothing good comes without a price.

The remedies suggested in Moyers' program: passing laws that give people the "right to know" what's in all products, and requiring the testing of chemicals before they are mass produced.

So I asked myself: "Did Bill Moyers instruct his staff to discover what was known in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and 1980s -- or earlier -- about chemical corporations and poisoning? To find out what people back then were saying and doing?" I took a look at my bookshelves and files.

Here are excerpts from reports, articles and books going back 40, 50 & 60+ years.

They reveal that knowledge about the mass production, use and dumping of toxic chemicals, and about persistent manipulations, murders, deceptions & usurpations by chemical corporation and government officials, was no secret. These excerpts show that diverse people and civic groups -- along with eloquent scientists and even some elected officials -- had a different vision of how to build a prosperous, productive, healthy & just society.

They show people committed to democracy, human rights and living in harmony with the earth's natural systems.

They show people organizing to stop corporate & government assaults on democracy, human rights, justice and the earth's natural systems.

They show poisoned people demanding not vengeance but acknowledgment as human beings...and then health care, reparations, justice & sanity.

They show poisoned people educating themselves, neighbors, public officials and the nation about science, medicine, business, oppression and self-governance.

In 2001, ANYONE who chooses to look will find massive evidence of chemical corporation murder, pillage & lies extending over a century.

ANYONE who chooses to look will see persistent corporate denial of people's constitutional and human rights, and government complicity.

This country exalts the platitude "all political authority is inherent in the people."

But our great corporations have long been protected by the rule of law... empowered by our own constitution and bill of rights.

Our society has bestowed upon Chemical corporation leaders, as upon top officials of all giant corporations, the highest rewards and honors, and great wealth.

Great corporations have been exalted by legislators and judges, presidents and governors, police and national guards, by local, state and federal governments.

How long shall we authorize chemical corporation officials to kill? How long shall we beg them to tell the truth? To make the earth's air, water and soil, our foods and our jobs, a little less deadly? To please "give us" the right to know?

How long shall we grovel before our elected public servants?

Other species are counting on us to do more than regulate the destruction of the planet.

What do YOU think we the people should do now?

***

* "The United States Department of Agriculture has drafted a bill to revise the Pure Food and Drug Act, with the purpose of protecting the people of America, especially the poor and unsophisticated, against substances proven to be either useless, fantastically expensive, grossly misrepresented, noxious, habit-forming, or deadly. ...This fair and strictly serviceable proposal to prevent mass injury, fraud and murder has been met by a veritable avalanche of abuse, obfuscation and indignation. Three great industries are roaring defiance, threatening to deprive congressmen of their seats, newspapers and magazines of their advertising, the administration of support for its recovery program. The drug and osmetic trades have no more interest in rendering a service to the community than a blind man has in the cinema. The proposed bill threatens sources of income. Vendible values might be lowered. Nothing else matters."(3) -Stuart Chase, 1934

* "The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth." - Rachel Carson, the final paragraph of Silent Spring, 1962(4)

* ”As a biologist, I have reached this conclusion: we have come to a turning point in the human habitation of the earth. The environment is a complex, subtly balanced system, and it is this integrated whole which receives the impact of all the separate insults inflicted by pollutants. Never before in the history of this planet has its thin life-supporting surface been subjected to such diverse, novel, and potent agents. I believe that the cumulative effects of these pollutants, their interactions and amplification, can be fatal to the complex fabric of the biosphere. And because man is, after all, a dependent part of this system, I believe that continued pollution of the earth, if unchecked, will eventually destroy the fitness of this planet as a place for human life. ...If we are to survive, we need to become aware of the damaging effects of technological innovations, determine their economic and social costs, balance these against the expected benefits, make the facts broadly available to the public, and take the action needed to achieve an acceptable balance of benefits and hazards. Obviously, all this should be done before we become massively committed to a new technology. ...The costs of correcting past mistakes and preventing the threatened ones are already staggering, for the technologies which have produced them are now deeply embedded in our economic, social and political structure. ...It is already clear that even our present difficulties demand far-reaching social and political actions. Solution of our pollution problems will drastically affect the economic structure of the automobile industry, the power industry, and agriculture and will require basic changes in urban organization. ...Science can reveal the depths of this crisis, but only social action can resolve it..." - Dr. Barry Commoner, 1963(5)

* "In March of 1945, even before the war was over, the AFL and the CIO worked out an agreement with the US Chamber of Commerce calling for a 'new Charter for Labor and Management' for the postwar period. One of the seven points read: 'The inherent right and responsibility of management to direct the operations of an enterprise shall be recognized and preserved.

So that enterprise may develop and expand and earn a reasonable profit, management must be free as well from unnecessary governmental interference and burdensome restrictions.'"(6)

* "A History of Fraud and Deception: Nothing has more characterized the history of occupational health since the industrial revolution than the imbalance between employers and employees in access to hazard information.

Many examples could be cited...The Union Carbide Corporation and its subcontractors concealed evidence of an epidemic of acute and often fatal silicosis among tunnel workers in West Virginia [in the early 1930s]. The Rohm and Haas Company ignored lung cancer among workers exposed to bischloromethylether (BCME), prevented independent analyses of exposure and medical records, and sought to forestall governmental efforts to evaluate and regulate the substance. The Allied-Signal chemical company was sufficiently concerned about the neurotoxic effects of the pesticide kepone to create a legally separate corporate entity to produce the substance; high exposures among uninformed and unprotected workers caused serious tremors, brain damage, liver enlargement, personality changes and sterility. Employers in mining industries refused to disclose to workers the results of periodic chest X rays but instead used this information to fire workers when their lung disease had progressed to a stage where they might consider filing a compensation claim. Two aspects of workplace deception stand out. Where the toxic substances are new and produced by only a few firms, industry has often denied the hazard existed and sought to prevent independent researchers from gaining access to data necessary to identify risks. Where the toxic substances are well known and widely used, industry has often concealed the extent of workplace exposures and medical evidence on adverse effects in individual workers. These tactics of obfuscation and deceit have been practiced most widely and effectively by the asbestos industry...It is against this backdrop of management deception that the worker right-to-know movement was born in the 1970s."(7)

* "The questions which have been raised recently concerning the hazards of 2,4,5-T and related chemicals...may ultimately be regarded as portending the most horrible tragedy ever known to mankind...In view of the potential disaster that could befall us-or conceivably has insidiously befallen us-absolutely no delay is tolerable in the search for answers." - Senator Philip Hart, April, 1970(8)

* "This book is about a political tactic and its effectiveness...Our specific focus is environmental job blackmail...Employers know that for environmental job blackmail to succeed, they must control the terms of public debate. This is because these threats require two kinds of misrepresentation: first, denial of the full extent and costs of environmental destruction; and second, denial that citizens can invent or implement alternative ways to produce and prosper.” "Employers have a well-developed repertoire of tactics designed to control the definition of issues, ranging from elaborate economic analyses to polished public relations campaigns that isolate advocates of change. Those who resort to job blackmail routinely overestimate the costs of production and investment strategies less harmful to workers, citizens and the earth. They consistently under-estimate the costs of continued pollution and the benefits of protecting public health, preserving natural diversity and sustaining the nation's productive capacity. Moreover, they hammer home the message that theirs is the only viable alternative. The public is told: 'Without nuclear power, you will be left freezing in the dark; if millions of acres of forest are closed to logging, local industries and communities will collapse; if your community refuses a toxic waste dump, industrial production will grind to a halt.' "These assertions invariably fail to withstand careful scrutiny. ...Coalitions of worker and community groups have countered with documentation of present and future environmental damage. And they have advanced sound alternatives that preserve jobs while protecting health and environment. Unfortunately, job blackmail threats derive authority not from facts and logic, but from power. Employers and their allies use their resources and authority to stifle debate, to maintain control, and to deflect demands for economic democracy. They control the jobs and never let us forget that fact...."(9) 1991

* "First, an industry will claim that it can't comply with a proposed standard, because the technology to do so does not exist. Next, the industry will claim that the cost will drive it out of business. Finally, companies announce that they can, but it will cost everybody plenty."(10) 1976

* "As far as we're concerned in the Steelworkers, we don't know of any single facility that had to shut down because of environmental cleanup. Indeed, it's just the converse. ...We experienced it at the Johnstown, PA, plant; we experienced it at the Lackawanna plant of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation; we experienced it at the United States Steel Corporation in Duluth, Minnesota: When they began to say that they were refusing to abate and comply with the laws, that was an early warning sign that they intended to discontinue production activity at those facilities."(11) 1979

* "Corporate energy interests, along with most industrialists and some government agencies, are vigorously urging the rapid expansion of energy production. The energy systems they want are large in scale, technologically complex, and will be costly, wasteful, environmentally destructive and dangerous to energy industry employees and to the public. An increasing number of Americans believe that these systems...are too destructive to the nation's public health-as well as to workplace and natural environments-to be acceptable. These citizens propose instead a large decrease in the nation's waste of energy, plus immediate utilization of proven solar energy technologies and developments of solar technologies almost ready to be utilized. ...Such a solution to the nation's energy problem actually leads to a more stable economy and to more jobs than would the large-scale systems. It does so with less pollution, less disease, less social, disruption, and less interference with community, labor union and individual rights."(12) 1979

* "I recently traveled through 80 communities in 8 southern states, on a commission from the Interreligious Economic Crisis Organizing Network. I met people who physicians and worker-health experts say are experiencing the symptoms of common industrial practices and the products of science and industry: liver, kidney and blood diseases; gastrointestinal diseases; central nervous system damage; anemia; headaches; miscarriages; cancers; infertility; diarrhea; numbness of feet and hands; decreased mental clarity; irritability; depression; depressed bone marrow functioning; leukemias; birth defects; growth retardation; immune system destruction; premature aging; premature deaths; genetic disorders. The list could go on...the people I talked to had endless stores of terrible tales to tell...The South is saturated with poisons, and dominated by poisoners. Industrial producers, government producers, industrial users, government and industrial dumpers, along with government and industrial apologists, intimidaters, rationalizers, and liars, comprise the productive' sector of society. They pour money into advertising and public relations, as they seek to shape public debate with images that obscure, words that deceive. They buy scientists, health officials, newspaper owners, police departments, environmental protection departments, politicians, and even physicians. ...Those who want to see only have to go to these places and look. There is also no shortage of documentation. A handful of local newspapers have been diligent. Reports done by [various government agencies] and numerous citizens groups, confirm the tales of woe. The documents show that millions of acres in the South have been stripmined, clearcut, and otherwise ravaged by great machines. Heavy metals-lead, arsenic, zinc, cadmium, mercury-are strewn about. So are synthetic organic chemicals, made from petroleum. And radioactive fission products. As Rachel Carson once wrote, 'no responsible chemist would think of combining in his lab' the multitude of chemicals that are jumbled together when dumped. In 1985, companies in the USA generated 500 billion pounds of synthetic organics (compared with one billion pounds in 1940). Industry now uses 65,000 different chemicals, adding 1,000 new ones each year. Only a handful have been tested, despite the evidence of chemical inks to the diseases and disorders listed earlier. Over 400,000 firms generate products capable of producing these ill-effects. Some 25,000 companies transport them, by truck, ship and plane. Another 25,000 companies store, dump, or 'do' things to them, which they are arrogant enough to call 'treatment.'...(13) 1988

* In April, 1979, KRON TV in San Francisco ran a documentary film "Politics of Poison." It focused on herbicide spraying in California, dioxin, miscarriages and birth deformities. It quoted Dow Chemical Corporation spokesman Cleve Goring labeling the public campaign against spraying of this poison as "chemical McCarthyism." The film provoked 40,000 letters from viewers, "demanding action," as Regenstein described. SF Examiner columnist Bill Mandel wrote: "The only sensible conclusions one can draw are these: that commercial interests are spraying populated areas with herbicides considered too deadly for use as chemical weapons; that government agencies charted with the protection of the public and the environment are powerless or too cowardly to do anything about this rain of death from the skies; that health officials look everywhere for explanations except at the culprits; and that massive expenditures by the timber and chemical companies paralyze the fact-aimed opposition of scientists and residents of the affected areas."(14)

* In 1972, William Longwood wrote in The Darkening Land: "Each spraying makes more spraying necessary...The farmer desperately turns to new and more powerful poisons. More imbalances result. More poison residues are in the crops for people to eat...Even after all the spraying, losses due to pests are about the same as they were 50 years ago-about 10%....We have destroyed the old, and the new does not work. We set out to poison bugs so we could feed ourselves. We wind up feeding the bugs and poisoning ourselves."(15)

* "Regulation of pesticide use by the Federal Government is critically dependent on the safety testing data submitted by the firms that manufacture and market pesticides."(16) -- Senate Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure, December, 1976

* "We do not know where the millions of tons [of toxic waste] is going. We feel that the things that have turned up like the Love Canal are simply the tip of the iceberg. We do not have the capacity at this time really to find out what is actually happening. In my view, it is simply a wide open situation, like the Wild West was in the 1870s, for toxic disposal. The public is basically unprotected. There just are not any lawmen out there, State or Federal, policing this subject." 17* "Our groundwaters are threatened by ruinous contamination...this will become the environmental horror story of the 1980's...the most grievous error in judgment we as a nation ever have made."18* "Our communities are threatened by environmental problems caused by racism inherent in land use decisions that result n the location of dirty industries, toxic dumps, incinerators, and military bases close to low-income communities of color. In the Southwest, as in many other regions, social and economic impacts include loss of resources such as clean water, land, and air. The human costs are staggering. New Mexico, best described as a colony of the United States, is a case in point...Indigenous land loss, the privatization of rangelands, and the coming of the railroad in the 1880s dramatically changed the SW and left people of color in New Mexico economically disenfranchised. State and local governments have largely functioned at the behest of the federal government and for the benefit of outside industries. Barriers have prevented poor communities from exercising electoral power or economic influence even in this limited political arena....Tremendous amounts of groundwater and surface water have been reserved for military and military-related use, for industry and agribusiness. While poor communities have continually had their rights to groundwater and surface water stolen over the years, that which is still accessible is now being poisoned....Birth defects are increasingly common among children of women working for high-tech manufacturers. ...Pesticides are a constant danger to Chicano and Mexican farm workers in southern NM. With the blessings of the state agriculture department, agribusinesses routinely use organophosphates and other insecticides, which poison farm workers and their families and groundwater supplies of local communities, causing cancer and other diseases among many people. ..These cases are not confined to NM but also can be seen and heard throughout the Southwest and in communities where there are large numbers of Latinos...The McFarland, California, 'childhood cancer cluster' is an area where farm workers and their families live in a federally funded housing tract, built right on top of a highly contaminated site previously used as a pesticide dump...(19) 1994

* In April 1980, the President's Council on Environmental Quality issued a report by economics professor A. Myrick Freeman. It concluded that, "national benefits which have been realized from reductions in air pollution before 1970 lie in the range from roughly $5 billion to $51 billion per year," with the best estimate for 1978 being $21.4 billion. The savings included lowered damage to human health, crops, forests, vegetation, buildings and other property.(20)

* "...In 1928...the Consumers' League of Massachusetts surveyed the extent of female exposure to occupational poisons and tabulated its findings."

Here are excerpts from the League's chart listing "some types of industrial poisoning." Women working in the shoe, leather and rubber industries were subjected to "amyl acetate, butyl acetate, pryoxylen or nitrocellulose, benzol, wood alcohol, naptha rubber cement, carbon disulphide, carbon tetrochloride, sulphur..." A companion chart from 1943 on "women's potential exposures to harmful materials during" WWII lists: "skin irritants -- Benzol, Tetryl, Mercury fulminate, Mica dust, Pyranol, Glass silk, materials used in manufactures of plastics, dyes of various kinds, cutting oils and compounds; systemic poisoning -- lead oxides, Benzol, Radium, Mercury, carbon monoxide; Respiratory diseases: Silica dust; steel dust, mica dust; Acid burns -- Nitric acid; x-ray burns, heat prostration..."(21)

* "At the 1936 United Auto Workers Convention, Dr. I Ruskin reported that there had been 13,000 cases of lead poisoning in auto factories since 1929 -- 4,000 in 1934-35 alone. John W. Anderson, who worked at the Dodge plant in 1932, described the conditions: '[There] was no attempt to ventilate the work areas or to take the pollutants out of the air...It was an accepted fact that thousands of metal finishers in the auto industry suffered from lead poisoning."(22)

* “Among the social costs of production discussed are the individual and social losses caused by industrial accidents, occupational diseases, woman and child labor; social costs are also reflected in the manifold destructive effects of air and water pollution resulting from inadequate methods of combustion and from the disposal of untreated waste products into streams, rivers and lakes by private firms; moreover, important social costs of production tend to be bound up with the competitive exploitation of both self-renewable and exhaustible natural wealth such as wildlife, petroleum and coal reserves, soil fertility, and forest resources. Social losses also arise in connection with technical changes and the manner and rate of introduction of innovations by private enterprise. ...What these losses have in common and what makes them truly social costs is the fact that they do not enter into the cost calculations of private firms. They are shifted to and are paid for in one form or another by individuals other than the entrepreneur or by the community as a whole or by both..."(23) 1950

* A group of Long Island citizens led by the world-famous ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy had sought a court injunction to prevent the 1957 spraying [of DDT-in-fuel-oil by the US Dept of Agriculture and the NY Dept of Agriculture and Markets upon truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes...quarter-acre lots of suburbia...]. Denied a preliminary injunction, the protesting citizens had to suffer the prescribed drenching with DDT, but thereafter persisted in efforts to obtain a permanent injunction. But because the act had already been performed the courts held that the petition for an injunction was 'moot.' The case was carried all the way to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear it. Justice William O. Douglas, strongly dissenting from the decision not to review the case, held that 'the alarms that many experts and responsible officials have raised about the perils of DDT underline the public importance of this case.'"(24)

* "The 1972 President's report on Occupational Safety & Health stated that 'at least 390,000 new cases of disabling occupational disease' develop each year. This figure, apparently derived from a projection of California workers' compensation data, is probably far below the true incidence rate, given the barriers erected against compensating occupational disease...[this report] estimated that 'there may be as many as 100,000 deaths per year from occupation-caused diseases.'...It is certainly plausible that 100,000 deaths are caused annually by job-related diseases if heart disease, lung disease, and cancers of the lung, kidney and bladder are even partially linked to occupational exposure. A federal study, cited by HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, estimated that from 20 - 40% of cancer deaths were caused by on-the-job exposure."(25)

* "...EPA chose to discount all of this evidence, including its own study conducted in 1973, which seriously undermined Velsicol [corporation's] claims that leptophos was safe. Instead, EPA chose to credit and rely upon reports developed for and submitted by Velsicol-all of which concluded that leptophos was safe. And on May 31, 1974, EPA granted tolerances for leptophos in and on tomatoes and lettuce."26

* "...no testing has been conducted under [Toxic Substances Control Act]. Monitoring or regulating existing chemicals that might be hazardous has been unsuccessful, and the agency has no access to chemical manufacturers' health and safety studies or records. Outside of the barebones parameters set down by Congress, TSCA remains a law virtually undeveloped despite five years of attempted implementation."(27) 1982

* "...some of the pesticides...are so long-lasting and so pervasive in the environment that virtually the entire human population of the Nation, and indeed the world, carries some body burden of one or several of them."(28) 1980

* from "Major Industrial Air Polluters for Ten Selected Toxic Chemicals in Los Angeles County(29) chemical company 1989 emissions, (in pounds) benzene: Monsanto 167,000 Chevron 14,895

perchloroethylene: Polycarbon, Inc. 241,367 Northrop Aircraft 196,000

Methylene chloride: Crain Industries 920,000 Douglas Aircraft 630,000 General Motors 450,250

Methyl Chloroform: General Motors 1,612,260 (TCA) Chase Packaging 619,000

* "Since 1987, [the Mothers of East LA] have fought state plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator in Vernon, and one in East LA. Aurora Castillo of MELA explained: 'Because we are a poor and Hispanic community they think we will accept destructive projects if they promise us jobs.'...Juana Gutierrez of MELA added, 'The state wants to place all of society's problems in our community -- a prison, a pipeline, and an incinerator. But if we keep up the pressure, they will have to solve all these problems, not just dump them from one place to another.' "(30)

* "Hooker [Chemical Corporation] admits to burying about 21,800 tons of various chemicals in [Love] Canal, but, this is all they will admit to. The Army denies burying wastes, yet there are residents who testified to seeing Army personal and trucks on the site. ...Every time I went to another house, I learned something new. In one home, I met a graying, heavyset man with a pitted face.

www.poclad.org/

-- Or Have We Always Known? (hazardous@chemicals.com), April 11, 2001

Answers

Like it or not, the USA is a republic founded by rich, slavedriving landowners; it ain't Utopia. This country has always been about the freedom to build wealth, and money is our diety. That's why "In God we Trust" is printed on every piece of our currency.

-- (@ .), April 11, 2001.