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]]>Even if it’s true that Roundup is safe if used to company specifications, as Monsanto claims, when is it ever so used? Given the gross power imbalances in the agribusiness industry, nobody’s going to hold giant plantation farmers to account for cutting corners when it comes to their workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals. Back in the 80s, I witnessed the large-scale use of Roundup to “eradicate weeds” on the lawn outside Old Main at the University of Arkansas. In fact it also eradicated the grass and killed some of the oak trees as well. And even as the physical plant workers themselves applied the Roundup in getups that looked like space suits, groups of students clad in shorts and tank tops casually strolled through the clouds of toxic chemicals.
I would also add that it’s disingenuous to give Roundup a pass based entirely on its danger or non-danger to consumers. The effects of Roundup — and the system of large-scale monoculture plantation farming it’s a part of — on farm workers and the ecosystem are also important.
No doubt libertarians will object to labelling requirements at all, including active ingredients. But libertarians also tend to favor a vigorous civil law of torts — or should so favor, if they’re not hypocrites — as a substitute for the regulatory state. And part of tort law is the ability to subpoena evidence relevant to an alleged harm. In a libertarian legal order (stipulating for the moment the unlikely possibility that anything resembling corporate agribusiness could ever have arisen in a free market in the first place), given the prevalence of cancer like non-Hodgkin lymphoma among agricultural workers exposed to Roundup, there would long ago have been lawsuits in which Monsanto was compelled to disclose the full list of ingredients in Roundup. And in any case “trade secrets” guaranteed by law, or enforced by any means other than the actual secrecy of the company itself and non-binding on third parties, would not exist at all.
So the existence of legally protected trade secrets is a weapon against the health and welfare of the public, depriving them of any knowledge of the nature of toxic chemicals they may be exposed to.
This is nothing new. We’ve already seen it in regard to the cocktail of ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which is also kept secret from the potentially affected public by “intellectual property.”
And, in addition to the deaths caused by “intellectual property” itself, the state doesn’t mind, when necessary, inflicting large-scale death in its enforcement of “intellectual property” — as indicated by leaked diplomatic letters from the Colombian embassy (“Leaks Show Senate Aide Threatened Colombia Over Cheap Cancer Drug,” The Intercept, May 14). Colombia has been taking steps towards approving a cheaper generic form of the patented cancer drug imatinib, which costs $15,000 for a year’s supply. An aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch — an intimate friend of the pharmaceutical industry and an ultra-hawk on all “intellectual property” issues — expressed “concern” to Colombian diplomats that if Novartis’s “intellectual property” rights were violated the drug industry might “become very vocal and interfere with other interests that Colombia could have in the United States.” In particular, “this case could jeopardize the approval of the financing of the new initiative ‘Peace Colombia.’” Peace Colombia is an attempt at a negotiated peace settlement between the government and guerrillas, and includes funding for the cleanup of land mines.
So basically Pharma’s Congressional hitmen are willing not only to cause death by denying affordable life-saving medicine. They’re also willing to obstruct (“Nice peace plan you got there…”) an end to a civil war that has killed thousands, and the deactivation of land mines in a country with the second-highest rate of land mine casualties in the world.
“Intellectual property” isn’t just theft. It’s terrorism.
Photo by Artist in doing nothing. 
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Reposted from our friends at The Extraenviromentalist.
Today’s textbook notions of business were developed during an unprecedented global economic expansion – a cultural condition that faces diminishing returns in today’s world. Can we build enterprises for a post-growth future that thrive among challenges of the next century? By reversing the process that privatizes profits, would unsustainable trends and drivers of inequality be subverted? Can a modern media and journalism industry flourish within a not-for-profit framework?
In Extraenvironmentalist #89 we first speak with Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute about their organization’s upcoming book, How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050. Donnie explains ways that organizing business activities under the framework of not-for-profit enterprises can make meaningful change in the face of a seemingly intractable situation wrought by immense private wealth accumulation and slowing global growth.
In the second half of the show, we talk to Chris Nelder, host of the Energy Transition Show – the first regular podcast on the forthcoming XE Audio Network! We ask Chris about the ongoing contraction in US shale oil production during 2015 and the deteriorating financial condition of the industry in the face of a global deflationary undertow. The conversation is Episode #0 of the Energy Transition Show, which launches with Episode #1 beginning September 23.
//Segments on Soundcloud
Bonus Segment
// Links and News Items
The Energy Transition Show – launching September 23rd
As We Lay Dying –
Stephen Jenkinson On How We Deny Our Mortality
// Books
How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050 by Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hilton
// Music (in order of appearance)
Lazy Knuckles – Polyglot via Soundcloud
Eric Clapton – Change the World (Mac DeMarco Cover) via IndieShuffle
Freddie Frank – This Old Rig (1961)
Cavaliers of Fun – Wiki via Tracasseur
Tube & Berger – Disarray Feat. J.U.D.G.E
// Production Credits and Notes
Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel
Episode #89 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:
Stephanie in North Carolina
Wally in North Carolina
Stephen from Australia
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When the state no longer enforces its own legal standards on human rights or ecological protection, often in deference to corporate partners, the logical response is to establish a commons-based alternative – a people’s tribunal. That’s what is now planned in the case of fracking and its implications for human rights.
The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has scheduled a session in March 2017 to “consider whether sufficient evidence exists to indict certain named States on charges of failing adequately to respect the human rights of citizens as a result of permitting, and failing to adopt a precautionary approach to, hydraulic fracturing and other techniques of unconventional oil and gas extraction within their jurisdictions.” The Tribunal is an internationally recognized public opinion tribunal functioning independently of state authorities and operating out of Rome. The Tribunal will hold a week of hearings in both the US and UK.
Governments take great pains to prevent their most sacrosanct policies from being questioned in courts of law. Consider how the US Government short-circuited any significant court rulings about the NSA’s extensive secret surveillance of citizens, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. It took Edward Snowden’s revelations to force judicial review.
We’ve been here before, of course. The lawless Vietnam War was a prime example. As a corrective to the state crimes committed in that instance, philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre organized the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 to hear evidence about violations of the citizen’s basic human rights. In that tradition, today’s PPT will assess the human rights implications of fracking.
The PPT obviously does not have the coercive powers of the state, nor any state-based legal authority. The world’s governments are free to ignore the judgments of the PPT, as they very well might. But as Russell said in opening up the War Crimes Tribunal, “We are not judges. We are witnesses. Our task is to make mankind bear witness to these terrible crimes and to unite humanity on the side of justice in Vietnam.” So the PPT convenes itself, independently of states, politics and vested interests, and invokes the broad, recognized standards of international human rights law. In this case, it will gather evidence about the actual or likely human rights consequences of fracking in various countries.
The PPT explains its process in this way:
PPT Sessions are virtually identical to courtroom proceedings in which a complainant or class of complainants brings an action against a government or private party and asks that they be judged against legal standards. The Peoples’ Tribunal, comprised of eleven members, including five to seven jurists of high standing in international human rights law as well as expert in the field, along with internationally well known representative of civil society, hears testimony from victims, witnesses and experts in various fields, hears arguments from prosecuting and defense attorneys, deliberates and in time issues judgments and recommends remedies.
“The importance and strength of decisions by the PPT rest on the moral weight of the causes and arguments to which they give credibility, as well as the integrity and capability to judge of the Tribunal members.” The goal of PPT Sessions is “recovering the authority of the Peoples when the States and the International Bodies failed to protect the right of the Peoples.”
Complaints heard by the Tribunal are submitted by the victims or by groups or individuals representing them. The PPT calls together all parties concerned and offers defendants the opportunity to make their own arguments heard. The panel of judges is selected for each case by combining members who belong to a permanent list and individuals who are recognized for their competence and integrity.
Since 1979, the PPT has held about forty sessions on various topics, including the behavior of agrochemical companies and the Canadian mining industry in Latin America. The outcomes of the PPT sessions allow for witnesses to be publicly heard and for a public record to be established. The proceedings also have an obvious public education dimension.
This latest session of the PPT is being jointly organized by the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (UK), the Environment and Human Rights Advisory (USA) and the Human Rights Consortium (UK). The Tribunal will consider a number of specific issues, such as the impacts of fracking on physical and mental health, on hydrology and seismic activity, and on social life. It will also look at the effects of the entire fuels infrastructure on people’s human rights, and the climate impacts of fracking.
Like any commons, the PPT does not go of itself; it relies upon people’s active participation and help. People are invited to submit witness statements, donate to help fund the proceedings (travel, lodging, office services); conduct mini-tribunals in their countries; and to endorse the Tribunal.
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The following article, written by Emanuel Pastreich (director of The Asia Institute) in association with John Feffer, and originally published at the Foreign Policy in Focus website, highlights the magnitude of the risks derived from infrastructure oversight and the United States’ suicidal denialism in the face of real, as opposed to hyped-up, dangers.
“The greatest dangers for the United States do not lurk in terrorist cells. They come from thousands of nuclear weapons, toxic chemical dumps, radioactive waste storage facilities, complex pipelines and refineries, offshore oil rigs, and many other potentially dangerous but scarcely regulated facilities.”
The U.S. security complex is up in arms about cyberhackers and foreign terrorists targeting America’s vulnerable infrastructure. Think tank reports have highlighted the chinks in homeland security represented by unsecured ports, dams, and power plants. We’ve been bombarded by stories about outdated software that is subject to hacking and the vulnerability of our communities to bioterrorism. Reports such as the Heritage Foundation’s “Microbes and Mass Casualties: Defending America Against Bioterrorism” describe a United States that could be brought to its knees by its adversaries unless significant investments are made in “hardening” these targets.
But the greatest dangers for the United States do not lurk in terrorist cells in the mountains surrounding Kandahar that are planning on assaults on American targets. Rather, our vulnerabilities are homegrown. The United States plays host to thousands of nuclear weapons, toxic chemical dumps, radioactive waste storage facilities, complex pipelines and refineries, offshore oil rigs, and many other potentially dangerous facilities that require constant maintenance and highly trained and motivated experts to keep them running safely.
The United States currently lacks safety protocols and effective inspection regimes for the dangerous materials it has amassed over the last 60 years. We don’t have enough inspectors and regulators to engage in the work of assessing the safety and security of ports, bridges, pipelines, power plants, and railways. The rapid decline in the financial, educational, and institutional infrastructure of the United States represents the greatest threat to the safety of Americans today.
And it’s getting worse. The current round of cutbacks in federal spending for low-visibility budgets for maintainence and inspection, combined with draconian cuts in public education, makes it even more difficult to find properly trained people and pay them the necessary wages to maintain infrastructure. As Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution points out, the 2015 budget fresh off the press includes a chart indicating that non-defense discretionary spending—including critical investments in infrastructure, education, and innovation—will continue to drop severely, from 3.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013 to just 2.2 percent in 2024. This decision has been made even though the average rate for the last 40 years has been 3.8 percent and the United States will require massive infrastructure upgrades over the next 50 years.
The recent cheating scandal involving employees of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is emblematic of the problem. Nuclear officers charged with protecting and maintaining the thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons simply copied the answers for tests about how to employ the complex machinery related to nuclear missiles. The scandal is only the latest in a long series of accidents, mishaps, and miscommunications that have nearly caused nuclear explosions and tremendous loss of life. As Eric Schlosser has detailed in his new book Command and Control, we have avoided inflicting a Hiroshima-sized attack on ourselves only through sheer dumb luck.
Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued its Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, which painted a grim picture of America’s infrastructure. The average grade for infrastructure—covering transportation, drinking water, energy, bridges, dams, and other critical infrastructure—was a D+. The failure to invest in infrastructure over the last 15 years, the report argues, bodes ill for the future and will guarantee further disasters. As political campaigns against “bureaucrats” render the federal government incapable of recruiting and motivating qualified people, these disasters appear almost unavoidable. The weakest link from the point of view of national security are the military and energy sectors.
Bad Chemistry
The problems begin with our weapons. Despite promises from 20 years ago that the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency would destroy chemical weapons stockpiles, we have finished only 50 percent of the job (whereas Russia has completed some 70 percent) according to Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The process of maintaining and removing dangerous weapons is tedious, labor-intensive, and inevitably involves community approval and the rawest forms of politics. The task suffers from an unhealthy combination of secrecy and apathy: the military wants to keep their weapons secret while the general population treats the matter with a striking lack of interest. Although many chemical weapons are stored relatively safely—binary substances are stored separately and are dangerous only when combined—many other chemicals related to fueling and other activities are hazardous. Because they are out of sight and out of mind, they are poorly managed.
Military waste is but a small part of the problem. The United States is peppered with all-but-forgotten chemical waste dumps, aging nuclear power plants, nuclear materials, oil rigs, oil pipelines, and mines (active and abandoned) that require an enormous investment in personnel and facilities to maintain safely.
Nuclear Headaches
The United States boasts the largest complex of storage facilities in the world related to civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons programs. This network contains a dozen Fukushimas in the making. The U.S. nuclear energy system has generated more than 65,000 tons of spent fuel, much of which is stored in highly insecure locations. ”Even though they contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, U.S. spent nuclear fuel pools are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to merely protect them against the elements,” writes IPS nuclear expert Robert Alvarez. “Some [of the structures] are made from materials commonly used to house big-box stores and car dealerships.” An accident involving any one of these storage facilities could produce damage 60 times greater than the Chernobyl disaster.
The Energy Department, without much regard for public safety, plans to unceremoniously dump in a landfill a ton of radioactive material produced in its nuclear weapons program. Such an approach has precedents. The West Lake municipal landfill in Bridgeton, Missouri harbors highly radioactive material from the weapons program of the 1940s and 1950s. That unsecured material could transform into a major public health risk due to fire or flooding. More recently, investigation of the Hanford nuclear waste complex in Washington State revealed that “significant construction flaws” exist in six of the 28 radioactive waste storage tanks. One of them has been leaking since 2012. The site dates back to the plutonium experiments of the 1950s, and those flawed storage tanks contain around 5 million gallons of radioactive material.
The Obama administration has pledged to reduce its nuclear weapons arsenal and envisions a nuclear-weapons-free future. But at the same it is pouring money into “nuclear modernization” through the development of a new generation of weapons and consequentially even more radioactive waste. Moreover, the administration continues to include nuclear energy as part of its carbon reduction plans, directing federal subsidies to the construction of two new nuclear plants in Georgia.
Despite the enthusiasm for nuclear weapons and power, the administration has turned a blind eye to the disposal of all the nuclear waste that both the military and the civilian side have generated.
Situation Normal: All Fracked Up
The coal industry continues to slice the peaks off mountains and replace them with vast expanses of barren land that cannot support life. That process fills rivers and lakes with toxic sludge, and regulation is all but nonexistent. From the 1990s on, coal companies have torn up West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee using new technologies that have already destroyed a patch of land larger than the state of Delaware. The run-off from these mining operations has buried 1,000 miles of streams.
The recent contamination of the Elk River in West Virginia with the dangerous chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol used in coal mining left over 300,000 people without safe drinking water. Although the storage of the chemicals was the responsibility of the now bankrupt Freedom Industries, the responsibility for the accident does not stop there. In fact, federal officials never inspected the site, and neither Freedom Industries nor local government officials drew up an emergency response plan.
A few weeks later a pipe failure in Eden, North Carolina dumped 39,000 tons of arsenic-laced coal ash into the nearby Dan River, causing a similar crisis. The situation is growing more serious as state budgets for inspection and regulation are being slashed. Training and preparation for hazardous material disasters is underfunded, and the personnel are unprepared to do their job.
Coal and oil workers are dying in greater numbers as a result of a chronic inattention to safety concerns. So bad is the situation that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has only 95 inspectors to oversee safety rules for all Texas work sites, and few of them have training or experience in the energy sector.
If you like coal mining, you’re going to love fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, which is latest weapon in the war on the environment. Fracking is a process for extracting natural gas and petroleum from subterranean rock formations by pushing water, sand, and a variety of toxic chemicals deep into the ground to fracture the rock and release the trapped oil or gas. The process leaves beneath the surface large amounts of toxic chemicals that have already been shown to contaminate drinking water. The chemicals are so toxic that the water cannot be cleaned in a treatment plant.
Fracking is gobbling up large swathes of the United States because sites are quickly exhausted and the driller must constantly move on, leaving behind toxic chemicals to seep into the water supply. The long-term consequences of leaving extremely toxic substances like benzoyl or formic acid underground for decades are unknown. Without extensive regulation, maintenance, and planning for future disasters, the fracking boom is a ticking bomb for U.S. security.
The peril is not just on land. The increasingly desperate search for energy is making extreme measures—like deep-water drilling for oil—profitable for energy companies. The Deep Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 resulted in 11 deaths, affected 16,000 miles of coastline, and will cost upwards of $40 billion. That accident didn’t stop the U.S. government from granting Shell a permit to drill in the deep waters of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off the Alaskan coast, an effort that has already racked up its share of accidents.
Coming Up: Le Deluge
The unending demand for budget cuts is taking a toll on the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for a large number of important regulatory activities, experienced cuts of more than 6 percent in both its budget and workforce: from a nearly $8.5-million budget in 2012 down to $7.9 million in 2013, and from 17,106 employees in 2012 down to 15,913 employees in 2013. This is happening at a time when environmental issues are growing more critical.
Cuts in budgets for maintenance, inspection, and regulation will all but guarantee further disasters and tens of billions of dollars in damages. The poor state of American infrastructure would be a problem in any case, but the challenge of climate change has thrown a monkey wrench in all predictions. The New York Panel on Climate Change concluded that rising sea levels will turn what was previously a once-in-100-years flood into something that happens once every 35 to 55 years by 2050 and once every 15 to 30 years by 2080. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 caused more than $108 billion in damages while Hurricane Sandy in 2012 cost more than $50 billion, according to the National Hurricane Center. Climate change combined with poor maintenance is a recipe for massive disaster. Although the costs of the next disaster will certainly exceed the 9/11 attacks in terms of damage, tragically we are cutting back on infrastructure investment at a time we should be increasing it dramatically.
Unfortunately, the constituencies concerned with such safety inspections do not hire the most expensive lobbyists and rarely show up in the press. Inspectors and experts cannot, and should not, be expected to defend themselves in Washington, D.C. The media-obsessed political culture that rules Washington today makes commitment to low-key support for maintenance and long-term safety the kiss of death for congressmen engaged in an unending struggle to raise funds for reelection.
The strategic foolhardiness of cutting back on low-profile programs has become politically smart. But a few more major industrial or infrastructural disasters in the United States will be enough to bring the country to its knees. The American superpower will topple from self-inflicted wounds without a political rival like China or Russia even having to say “boo!”
Emanuel Pastreich directs the Asia Institute in Seoul, South Korea. John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus.
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TheNation.com.
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