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Category: water

  • Celebrating World Water Day by Calling for Respect for Our Environment and Indigenous Communities

    photo by Caroline LaPorte, Anishinaabe, Descendant and Associate Judge, Little River Band of Ottawa Indians; Director, Indigenous Safe Housing Center, NIWRC By Cameron Ewing (Legal Intern), Samantha Johnson (Legal Intern), Braelyn Saumure (Student Fellow), and Tamar Ezer (Acting Director), Human…

    This post was originally published on Human Rights at Home Blog.

  • Ecosocialist Bookshelf: Oceans, legal rights, and industrial agriculture

    Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus presents five new books for reds and greens.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Mexican Forces Evict Indigenous Activists Who Took Over Water Bottling Plant

    The Mexican National Guard and other security forces guard the entrance to the plant that had been run by Indigenous people on February 15, 2022, in Puebla, Mexico.

    Around 300 Mexican National Guards and state security forces violently evicted Indigenous environmental activists from their community center in Puebla this week, on the morning of February 15.

    The community center had been a foreign-owned water bottling plant for decades, until Indigenous Nahua people in the area took it over 11 months ago. The incident is being understood by many as a demonstration that the Mexican government puts big business first.

    On Sunday, just two days before the security forces seized the space, which the activists had renamed Altepelmecalli (meaning “House of the People”), the Indigenous organizers had begun plans to request that the space be expropriated from its former owner — Bonafont, a water company owned by the multinational corporation Danone.

    A security official guards the seized installations that had been run by Indigenous people.
    A security official guards the seized installations that had been run by Indigenous people.

    But at 1:20 am, under the cover of darkness, the security forces arrived, blocked the road in front of the factory, entered by force, threatened those inside then removed them, and tore down the protest camp and kitchen and dining area that was set up out the front, according to the activists.

    Twenty Indigenous Nahua communities make up the United People of the Cholulteca Region movement, which had reclaimed the former water bottling plant in order to use it for community projects. They told the press on Tuesday that the military seizure of the area was a breach of Indigenous self-determination, which is enshrined in the Mexican Constitution.

    Danone is a multinational food giant headquartered in Paris. Its annual revenue is around $30 billion per year. Bonafont, one of Danone’s brands, had been illegally and excessively extracting local water in the Indigenous region of Puebla state, in order to bottle it and sell it for a profit. The United People initially closed the Bonafont plant in March 2021, in order to stop the water extraction, then took the plant over and ran it as a community space with various agro-ecological and social projects.

    There are thousands of water-bottling and purification plants in Mexico, and Danone, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the main beneficiaries of the market, with 82 percent of it. Here in Puebla, Nestlé Water and the U.S. company Keurig Dr Pepper also bottle water, with Nestlé helping itself to spring water of nearby volcanoes. The companies pay around 2,600 pesos ($127) per year for each water extraction concession and make 494 times what they spend when they sell bottled water, while locals don’t benefit at all.

    Indigenous activists take over the Bonafont water bottling plant in August 2021.
    Indigenous activists take over the Bonafont water bottling plant in August 2021.

    The Cholulteca region has a high rate of poverty, with most people working as farmers or for factories and industrial plants. Over the last few decades, foreign and local companies have industrialized the area, taking advantage of cheap labor and resources like water. A major Volkswagen plant is around 10 kilometers away and has caused environmental damage with hail cannons. Local farmers say that the technology, which uses sonic blasts to alter weather patterns, have devastated hundreds of hectares of crops.

    Last year, the region made international news when a massive sinkhole opened up down the road from the former Bonafont plant. “Academics worked with us and made it clear that the sinkhole was a result of the plundering of water by these companies,” Bertha, an activist with the United People, told Truthout.

    The sinkhole demonstrated “what [Indigenous] people had been saying for years, that the extraction of water and the pollution of our rivers, air and territory in general, was leading to a really severe situation,” Campeche, another activist with the United People, told Truthout. (Both Bertha and Campeche requested only their first names be used in order to protect them from retaliation.)

    The Politics of Water

    After the events of Tuesday morning, the Puebla state governor claimed the military takeover was the result of a warrant from the federal Judiciary of Mexico, and he called for dialogue between the activists, Bonafont, and the state and federal governments. The United People, however, had invited him, other authorities and the company to dialogue on various occasions, but no one ever showed up, according to activists.

    In a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, United People accused Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of coordinating with state and municipal governments to defend Bonafont and Danone and to “strip the people of their water.”

    United People of the Cholulteca Region hold a press conference in the rain on February 15, 2022, after they were violently evicted from their community center earlier that day.
    United People of the Cholulteca Region hold a press conference in the rain on February 15, 2022, after they were violently evicted from their community center earlier that day.

    Such coordination was evident, they said, in the way the national guard, state and local police forces worked together to evict them from Altepelmecalli.

    “This shows that the state serves private interests and the armed forces only exist to repress organized people,” United People said.

    They pointed to the repression of other movements in Indigenous regions of Istmo de Tehuantepec, Ayotzinapa, Mactumatz, and Nahuatzen this week alone, and the murder of a fellow activist, Francisco Vázquez, a few days ago in Morelos.

    “What this shows is that we are in a global war for water, which is against the people and all of humanity,” United People stated.

    Life as a Cause

    A chicken and sheep in part of the former Bonafont plant, with old Bonafont water bottles used as fencing.
    A chicken and sheep in part of the former Bonafont plant, with old Bonafont water bottles used as fencing.

    When Truthout talked to Bertha just a few days before the military seizure of the space, she said, “We’ve changed a place of destruction into a place of life. We have farm animals here, meetings, cultural events, national forums. We provide health care and workshops, and have productive projects so we can be self-sustaining.”

    The space also had a media center equipped for community television broadcasting, and a women’s rights organizing area. So far, the activists say they don’t know what the security forces have done with all their animals, tools, computers, cameras and library of books.

    “We closed the company … so they couldn’t steal one more drop of water from us…. As Nahua people, we have been building our own way of life for a very long time,” Campeche explained. He said the arrival of foreign companies and other factors had made that difficult, so it was significant when 20 different communities came together to shut Bonafont down.

    “In assemblies, people said that what they needed was a place for health care, education and trade-based workshops, so that’s what we did with the old Bonafont plant,” he said.

    “Our aim was that this space, where there had been plundering of resources and exploitation of workers … be transformed into a collective space where life is built and created … It’s been 11 months and we have faced some challenges, but we have addressed them as a community,” Campeche concluded.

    On Tuesday, Bertha told Truthout, “We’re going to keep going, keep organizing. Maybe not in that physical space, but we’ll keep everything that we achieved alive.”

    At their press conference, the United People declared that they were willing to reclaim what belonged to them, “as we have had to do throughout history.”

    “They think that by seizing Altepelmecalli, they will beat us. But we, the Nahua people of the Cholulteca region, tell them that we won’t give up, we will continue to defend our water and life,” the activists stated.

    They called for local and global protests outside Mexican embassies and Danone buildings, and declared they would wage a “permanent campaign of mobilization, boycott and sabotage against Bonafont” and Danone.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • World’s Rivers Awash in Pharmaceuticals, Historic Study Reveals

    Fishermen catch fish along the Mekong River on the outskirts of Vientiane, Laos, on October 2, 2021.

    Underscoring the value of collaboration, experts from around the world on Monday unveiled what they described as the first “truly global study” of pharmaceutical drugs contaminating rivers, which has “deleterious effects on ecological and human health.”

    The historic analysis, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved 127 authors from 86 institutions. They examined surface water samples from 1,052 sites in 104 countries — including 36 that had never been monitored before — across all continents for 61 different active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs).

    Sample sites ranged from an Indigenous community in Venezuela where modern medicine is not used to highly populated urban areas such as Delhi, London, and New York City. Researchers also gathered samples from regions with political instability, including Baghdad, Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank, and Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé.

    The United States was the “most extensively studied” nation, with samples collected at 81 locations along 29 rivers across Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and Texas. Samples were also taken in every European Union member state except Malta, which the paper explains “was not included due to the country’s lack of rivers.”

    The paper notes that all four contaminants detected on every continent — caffeine, nicotine, acetaminophen or paracetamol, and cotinine — are “considered either lifestyle compounds or over-the-counter APIs.” Another 14 APIs, including various antidepressants and antihistamines, were found on all continents except Antarctica.

    “Concentrations of at least one API at 25.7% of the sampling sites were greater than concentrations considered safe for aquatic organisms, or which are of concern in terms of selection for antimicrobial resistance,” the study states. “Therefore, pharmaceutical pollution poses a global threat to environmental and human health, as well as to delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

    The Guardian’s Damian Carrington reported that “the APIs end up in rivers after being taken by people and livestock and then excreted into the sewer system or directly into the environment, though some may also leak from pharmaceutical factories.”

    Lead author John Wilkinson of the University of York told Carrington that “the World Health Organization and U.N. and other organizations say antimicrobial resistance is the single greatest threat to humanity — it’s a next pandemic.”

    “In 19% of all of the sites we monitored, the concentrations of [antibiotics] exceeded the levels that we’d expect to encourage bacteria to develop resistance,” he said.

    With the exceptions of Iceland and the Yanomami Village in Venezuela, “at least one API was detected in all of our study campaigns,” the paper reveals. The highest concentrations were documented in Lahore, Pakistan; La Paz, Bolivia; and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

    Overall, the most polluted samples came from African and Asian countries, the experts found. The most contaminated samples from Europe, North America, and Oceania were from Madrid, Spain; San Jose, Costa Rica; and Adelaide, Australia, respectively.

    “While the majority of previous studies have monitored active pharmaceutical ingredients in rivers, these studies have often excluded many countries, have measured only a select few pharmaceuticals, and used different analytical methods,” co-author Anna Sobek of Stockholm University said in a statement. “This means that it is difficult to make direct comparisons between studies and, hence, assess the scale of pharmaceutical pollution across the globe.”

    Though she emphasized that the study confirms the issue is global in nature, Sobek noted that “in general, the rivers with the highest level of pharmaceutical pollution were found in low- to medium-income countries where there are no adequate water treatment facilities and where high emissions from the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals are found.”

    “The findings of this study remind us that the medicines we buy in pharmacies can have a big impact on the environment of the countries they are manufactured in,” Sobek said.

    “Since we clearly show that access to sewage treatment facilities significantly improves water quality,” she added, “I hope the study will lead to projects that support and expand sewage treatment where it is needed the most.”

    Wilkinson told Carrington that “we know good sewage connectivity and wastewater treatment is the key to minimizing, though not necessarily eliminating, pharmaceutical concentrations,” but it “is extremely expensive as there’s a lot of infrastructure involved.”

    In a statement, Wilkinson said the research project “is an excellent example of how the global scientific community can come together to tackle large-scale environmental issues.”

    The paper highlights that the authors’ approach “could be applied to other APIs and other classes of pollutants, such as personal care products, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, pesticides, and metals,” as well as “expanded to other environmental media, such as sediments, soils, and biota.”

    “As we move toward 2030, the new paradigm in environmental monitoring must involve a global, inclusive, and interconnected effort,” the study concludes. “Only through global collaboration will we be able to generate the monitoring data required to make informed decisions on mitigation approaches required to reduce the environmental impacts of chemicals.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Court Allows Nestle/Blue Triton To Dodge Justice

    Ever since Nestle applied for the permit to increase pumping at the White Pine Springs well (PW 101)in Evart for its bottling operation in Stanwood in 2016, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation has been contesting this outrageous water grab. We have argued in public forums, educated across the state about the injustices this grab represents to the people and ecosystems of Michigan, and worked with organizations and citizens who submitted thousands of comments opposing the more than 200,000 gallons a day increase. Failure of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) to deny this increase has left two former trout streams badly damaged. We have had a few victories along the way, but without strict enforcement by EGLE, the damage will continue.

    The post Court Allows Nestle/Blue Triton To Dodge Justice appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘The People of Flint Are Still Suffering’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Status Coup News‘ Jordan Chariton about the Flint, Michigan, water crisis for the January 21, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin220121Chariton.mp3

     

    CounterSpin: Flint ‘Really Comes Down to People Not Being Listened To’

    CounterSpin (1/22/21)

    Janine Jackson: In an op-ed for The Hill a year ago, Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee called the 2014 decision to switch the source of Flint, Michigan’s drinking water “one of the greatest environmental injustices in our lifetimes.”

    That may be true, but the environment didn’t do it. The Flint crisis was and is a crisis of democracy. Decision-making had been taken out of the hands of Flint’s elected officials and given to an emergency manager tasked with reining in costs, a process that seems to be used disproportionately in communities of color—taking decisions out of community hands, but leaving them to deal with their fallout.

    The Flint story reflects malfeasance, austerity politics, and punishing indifference to the lives of Black and brown people, as well as the limits of news media’s attention span. Evidence suggests most big media have either swallowed the pollyanna line that the Flint water crisis is over and justice served, or else the nihilist line that Flint was really no worse than lots of other places, so what are you going to do?

    But some journalists have not stopped seeing the ongoing community harms resulting from decisions carried out by real people, with names and addresses, as worthy of pursuit. We’re joined now by Jordan Chariton, investigative reporter and the CEO of independent news network Status Coup News. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jordan Chariton.

    Jordan Chariton: Hey, thanks for having me.

    JJ: The story has some twists and turns and a lot of players, individual and institutional. Folks can listen to previous interviews to get some of the early issues. But I’d like to ask you to bring us up to date. What are the latest developments in efforts to hold officials accountable, for what was not an accident but a crime, and one with real and ongoing effects?

    Status Coup News: Misdemeanor Charge

    Status Coup News (1/15/21)

    JC: Yeah, so, unfortunately, the latest efforts seem to be inadequate, based on my reporting. But the current attorney general of Michigan, Dana Nessel, and her prosecution team, which basically is the second Flint investigation in eight years—there was an original investigation team launched under the previous Michigan attorney general, they investigated from 2016 through 2018, and then when the current attorney general, Nessel, came in, she basically fired that team and restarted the whole investigation.

    That new investigation charged Governor Snyder last year with a misdemeanor for his role in the water crisis. My reporting over the years has indicated there was a whole lot more there than a misdemeanor. And my reporting actually showed that the original Flint water investigators, who were fired by the current attorney general, they were actually building a case against the governor for involuntary manslaughter. So they were going much more aggressively against the governor than the current prosecution team ended up doing; they only charged him with a misdemeanor.

    There’s been some other charges against state and city officials. Nothing has gone to trial yet. Currently former Gov. Rick Snyder and other defendants are trying to get the charges tossed, basically claiming that the prosecution team made errors in how they collected and distributed evidence.

    So right now it’s kind of stuck in delays and, big picture, we’re now headed into year eight in April. No one has been convicted. No one is in jail. The people of Flint are still suffering. Residents are getting sicker and sicker as the years go on. I think that’s something people don’t realize, the effects of heavy metal poisoning, it gets worse as the years go on. So residents I speak with are developing cancers that they had no family history for, liver issues, kidney issues, bone issues, autoimmune issues. And, of course, the children: learning disabilities, behavioral problems, all sorts of things.

    So it’s still very much a crisis and, in my view, the media has totally abandoned this and abdicated their responsibility to cover it and treat it as an ongoing crisis.

    JJ: Yeah, let me just start from there, because it seems to me that the media didn’t just stop covering Flint, they kind of declared it over, you know? They kind of said, it’s fixed. You’ve been working with Detroit Metro Times, with the Intercept, and since the start, it seems like local media have done more and done better and done deeper than big media. But in big national media, it’s almost not like it’s over, it’s like, oh no, no, it worked out, you know? And that couldn’t be more wrong, you’re saying.

    Jordan Chariton of Status Coup News

    Jordan Chariton: “The media…basically regurgitated falsified data that was being said to them by the very state government that presided over the poisoning.”

    JC: Yeah. If I write the book one day, the media will be a big part of it, because honestly, they’re as complicit in the cover-up as the politicians at this point. Actually, if I roll back to 2018, the media at that point was just basically regurgitating the data that then-Governor Snyder and his team were putting out there, data that showed the lead levels were dramatically falling, and that the levels were now “meeting EPA regulations.”

    But I was hearing from residents and sources that they basically manipulated the testing and the data. So I did something radical these days for a journalist, and I went to Flint and I just started knocking on doors. And myself and, at the time, my previous reporting partner, we knocked on nearly 500 doors in the summer and fall of 2018. And what we discovered was that the state of Michigan’s environmental department was literally running residents’ water right before taking lead and copper samples. Like just a few minutes before taking the samples, they were running the water, which is against EPA regulations. So voilà, they were getting low lead levels, because they were basically flushing away potential lead.

    I was actually working on that story for Newsweek, trying to get it in a bigger national outlet with the hope of it getting traction. Newsweek literally killed the story the week it was supposed to be published, claiming we didn’t have enough data, even though we had dozens and dozens of residents on the record that state officials had run their water before testing, or told them to run their water before testing. So we ended up self-publishing it, but even in 2018, it was very clear that the way they were testing was completely wrong, and borderline just cooking the data.

    So when you see stories from Reuters and elsewhere that 3,000 other cities have higher lead levels than Flint, I was screaming, well, we don’t really know what the real lead levels are in Flint, because there was no integrity in the testing. Erin Brockovich, actually, when our story came out, said, this is a crime. It’s falsifying lead and copper samples. That’s a crime and the testing should be tossed out.

    Guardian: Revealed: the Flint water poisoning charges that never came to light

    Guardian (1/17/22)

    So since then, the testing has still been inadequate. They’re not even testing as many homes as they should be in Flint, and they haven’t even changed all of the busted pipes. So how can you say the water is safe if eight years later they haven’t even replaced all the pipes? They haven’t touched the pipes inside their homes, which were already damaged. So this is your classic example of, the media got caught up in the five-year Trump circus. A lot of other stories fell through the cracks, and the media, national and local, just basically regurgitated falsified data that was being said to them by the very state government that presided over the poisoning.

    And to tell you the truth, the current Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and the current Democratic attorney general haven’t really done much better. There’s really been this push to declare it over, to claim that it’s not an issue with the water anymore. The water’s fine. Now it’s just about rebuilding trust.

    Well, I was just in Flint over the summer. I could tell you, I spoke with residents who showed me rashes they are still getting from that water, hair loss, they’re still losing hair when they shower, residents describing their eyes burning in the shower. Anecdotally, I have sat in homes within the last year where the water stinks.

    So it’s very easy for media in New York, DC, on the West Coast to basically regurgitate what they’re fed by the government. But it’s a lot harder, and more expensive by the way, to actually go there with your own eyes, and talk to residents to find out, yeah, this is more of a narrative. This isn’t actually reality, that it’s solved.

    JJ: Let me just say, finally, maybe I know the answer. President Biden said just recently:

    I want you to know I see you, I hear you, we understand, and I’ve seen and we’ve understood the damage done in places like Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi. So we’ve already announced over $7 billion in clean water funding to states so they can fix and upgrade their aging water systems and sewer systems.

    What’s your response to that kind of official declaration vis-à-vis human beings in Flint, Michigan?

    Truthdig: Fraudulence in Flint: How Suspect Science Helped Declare the Water Crisis Over

    Truthdig (5/27/18)

    JC: First of all, it’s a nice slogan to say the infrastructure deal is going to deliver clean water and replace all pipes. The actual money earmarked to replace lead pipes is not enough to replace all lead pipes in the country. So that’s number one.

    Number two, there’s a misnomer that the only issue with water is lead. That’s not the only issue contaminating our water. There’s a lot of other contaminants in our water. And a lot of those contaminants are coming from corporate and industrial pollution. So this was more of a marketing slogan and a messaging thing by Biden and Democrats. Replacing some lead lines is, of course, better than nothing, but that’s not going to completely fix the problem.

    And when you look at Flint, specifically, why is it that Flint, Michigan, majority Black, those residents don’t have Medicare for All for being poisoned by their government? So when you look up to Libby, Montana, those residents, 96% white, they have universal healthcare because of an asbestos disaster that happened over a decade there where a lot of people died. They got universal healthcare in Libby, Montana. Your listeners should look that up.

    People of Flint don’t have universal healthcare. They got a short-term expansion of Medicaid, and that’s pretty much over now. I talked to residents who are nearly going bankrupt because of the bills they have for environmental doctors. Because for heavy metal poisoning, a normal internist is not enough. You really need specific, specialized doctors.

    So the people of Flint, there’s been a lot of woke language, and we hear you and we’re going to do everything for you. But if you talk to the people of Flint, they are still screaming for help.

    And, real quickly, this is also a major problem for local media. I’ve broken at least four pretty significant stories on the Flint water coverup over the last two years. The Flint Journal has not covered any of it. The Detroit Free Press has not covered any of it. The Detroit News has not covered any of it. And I literally have spoken with people from those outlets who have told me point blank, yeah, there’s pressure from the top just to kind of not cover that anymore. So I have no idea why, but this is a national media failure, but it’s also a local media failure, because the local media in Michigan has essentially continued this narrative that the water is fine now, and let’s move on.

    JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jordan Chariton, reporter and CEO at the independent news network Status Coup News. Thank you so much, Jordan Chariton, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    JC: Thank you.

     

    The post ‘The People of Flint Are Still Suffering’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Covid-19 cases confirmed aboard HMAS Adelaide bound for Tonga

    RNZ News

    Twenty-three people onboard an Australian Navy vessel enroute to help with the recovery effort in Tonga have tested positive for covid-19.

    In a statement, the Australian Department of Defence said the positive covid cases, and their close contacts, are being isolated onboard the vessel which has a 40-bed hospital with operating theatres and a critical care ward.

    The Department of Defence is adamant the cases will not stop the Adelaide’s mission with the vessel expected to arrive off the coast of Tonga in the early hours of tomorrow morning.

    It said it was confident it could deliver the much needed supplies on board to local authorities in Tonga without transmitting the virus.

    Tonga is one of the few remaining covid-19 free countries in the world and the government has made it very clear its priority is keeping things that way.

    Air New Zealand to deliver relief supplies
    An Air New Zealand flight is scheduled to take supplies to Tonga tomorrow to help with the recovery from the recent volcanic eruption and tsunami.

    Chief pilot Captain David Morgan said 18 tonnes of cargo — including fresh water, medical supplies, garments, bedding, and urgent machine and automotive parts — will be onboard.

    The flight is scheduled to take off from Auckland at 8am.

    The same plane will then turn around and depart from Tonga at 12.20pm tomorrow, bringing back passengers and cargo to Auckland.

    Tongan diaspora in NZ working overtime to ship supplies home
    The Aotearoa Tonga Relief Committee plans on packing 13 shipping containers by midnight tonight so that they could be shipped to Tonga tomorrow.

    Co-chair Jenny Salesa said more volunteers were needed at the Mount Smart Stadium donation centre as hundreds of drums still needed to be packed.

    She said people had been so generous and more shipping containers were still needed.

    Twenty-five containers are scheduled to be sent to Tonga tomorrow if they are all packed in time.

    The Aotearoa Tonga Relief Committee is coordinating shipping containers at Auckland's Mt Smart Stadium to be filled with donations, including emergency supplies from family in New Zealand to relatives in Tonga.
    The Aotearoa Tonga Relief Committee is coordinating shipping containers at Auckland’s Mount Smart Stadium for relatives in Tonga. Image: Photo: Lydia Lewis/RNZ Pacific

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Jordan Chariton on Flint Water Crisis, Maurice Carney on Lumumba Assassination

     

    Tainted water from Flint, Michigan

    Flint, Michigan

    This week on CounterSpin: Search corporate news media for recent stories on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—in which some of the city’s overwhelmingly Black residents were paying upwards of $300 a month for water they couldn’t drink, based on an infrastructure decision on the water’s source that their elected officials had no say in—and you’ll find a few stories on how yes, lead-leaching pipes endangered people’s health…but there’s been a multi-million dollar settlement, and a presidential commitment to address lead in water, so maybe it’s all over but the shouting.

    CNN hosted a Republican Michigan congressmember who explained that Flint was under an unelected austerity-minded emergency manager because their “city had essentially collapsed. They had no strong functioning government and the state had to step in and there was an error in shifting water sources.” That sounds lamentable, but not really blameworthy. So how do you square that “sorry but let’s move forward” line with the information that investigators looking into the crisis found that the cell phones of key health officials and other players, like then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s press secretary, had been wiped of messages for the key period?

    While corporate media have largely let Flint go, the story isn’t over, nor has justice been served. We’ll hear from a reporter still on the case: Jordan Chariton, from independent news network Status Coup News.

          CounterSpin220121Chariton.mp3

     

    Patrice Lumumba

    Patrice Lumumba

    Also on the show: You don’t need to put your ear to the ground to hear US news media drumbeats for war of some sort with official enemies China and/or Russia. With China, part of what we’re being told to two-minute hate is their involvement on the African continent, where we’re to understand they are nefariously trapping countries in debt—unlike the US involvement in the region, which has been about bringing joy and love and hope.

    Just because a playbook is old doesn’t mean it won’t be used again and again. The vision relies on amnesia and ignorance of what the US has done and is doing in Sub-Saharan Africa—a topic that, if news media wanted to explore it, they had a great chance this past week, with the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why was Lumumba killed? And what’s the living legacy of that undercovered murder? We’ll hear from Maurice Carney,  co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo.

          CounterSpin220121Carney.mp3

    The post Jordan Chariton on Flint Water Crisis, Maurice Carney on Lumumba Assassination appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Safety at Tonga port being checked for arrival of more humanitarian supplies

    RNZ News

    Specialist New Zealand Defence Force staff will be checking Tonga’s shipping lanes are passable and the wharf is safe so desperately needed humanitarian supplies can get through.

    Three deaths have been confirmed after Saturday’s massive volcanic eruption. There are reports of significant injuries, but no details yet.

    UN officials said 84,000 people – more than 80 percent of Tonga’s population — had been impacted by tsunami and the ashfall that followed the eruption.

    New Zealand Defence Force Rear Admiral Jim Gilmour said there were fears for food security, with reports ash was killing crops.

    Ash and sea water have also contaminated water supplies.

    Offshore patrol vessel HMNZS Wellington, which is carrying a helicopter, technical gear, and teams, has arrived in Tongan waters.

    “They commenced clearing the outer part of the Nuku’alofa harbour and they’ll be working in towards the wharf area and terminal area,” Admiral Gilmour told RNZ Morning Report.

    Scoping shipping channels
    It will scope the shipping channels and wharves at the main port to see if they safe enough to use to drop off supplies, in time for HMNZS Aotearoa due today, which is carrying a range of stores including water, long life non-perishable foods, hygiene kits and shelter.

    “Water is among the highest priorities for Tonga, and the Aotearoa can carry 250,000 litres, and produce 70,000 litres per day through a desalination plant,” Admiral Gilmour said.

    “I feel that the most value that she’s going to provide today is bring able to discharge fresh water into water tanks for distribution around Tongatapu.”

    Admiral Gilmour said staff did not need to set foot on Tonga at all, in an effort to avoid spreading covid-19 to the currently coronavirus-free country.

    Sanitised containers will be moved by crane from the ship onto the dock or hauled by personnel in full PPE.

    They will then withdraw and Tongans will pick up the goods.

    Hundreds of people, including the Tongan Armed Forces, cleared ash off the international runway allowing a Defence Force Hercules to land yesterday afternoon.

    Water containers, shelters
    It carried the most urgently needed supplies including water containers, temporary shelters, generators, and communications equipment.

    It was expected to be on the ground for about 90 minutes before returning to New Zealand.

    The Hercules will be decontaminated today with a plan to head out again tomorrow, Gilmour said.

    Admiral Gilmour said ash that was moved off the runway was sitting nearby and in a fine powder form. Some of this was picked up in the wind.

    HMNZS Aotearoa leaves Auckland for Tonga.
    HMNZS Aotearoa is due to arrive in Tonga today with water supplies. Image: RNZ/NZDF

    A Royal Australian Air Force C-17 also landed yesterday.

    A third New Zealand Defence Force vessel, HMNZS Canterbury, is being prepared to be deployed this evening or on Saturday to arrive on Tuesday.

    It is carrying two helicopters which can be used to distribute supplies and survey Tonga’s outer islands.

    Self-sufficient force
    The Defence Force intends to be self-sufficient to not put pressure on Tonga’s food, water and fuel supply.

    It has enough stores to stay at sea for at least 30 days without any external assistance. If it stays that long plans will be made to resupply.

    “We’re very mindful of the sensitivities about covid and its transmission. I’m 100 percent confident that none of our deployed forces have covid, they’ve all been PCR tested, at least double jabbed, some, if not many triple jabbed,” Admiral Gilmour said.

    He said the NZDF respected Tonga’s decision whether or not to allow troops on the ground.

    “If Tonga decides that they would like boots on the ground and our operators will be operating ashore, then will will do that and obviously still maintain a contactless approach delivering any assistance that is required.”

    Australia’s high commissioner to Tonga Rachael Moore has described the loss of property as “catastrophic”.

    Tonga's Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni (right) joined by Australia's High Commissioner to Tonga Rachael Moore (left) to witness the arrival of the first Royal Australian Air Force C-17A Globemaster III aircraft from Australia delivering humanitarian assistance on January 20, 2022.
    Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni (right) joined by Australian High Commissioner to Tonga Rachael Moore to witness the arrival of the first Royal Australian Air Force C-17A Globemaster III aircraft from Australia delivering humanitarian assistance yesterday. Image: RNZ/Australian Defence Force/AFP

    “Along the western beaches there is a moonscape where once beautiful resorts and many, many homes stood,” Moore said.

    Tonga has only just begun to re-establish global contact after five days cut off from the rest of the world.

    Mobile phone company Digicel has confirmed re-establishing communications between Tonga and the rest of the world, but lines have been clogged with heavy traffic, leaving many still unable to get through to loved ones.

    Work to improve the satellite capacity and improve communications at the New Zealand High Commission in Nuku’alofa was being done Thursday evening.

    Food and water woes
    MP for Panmure-Ōtāhuhu and the co-chairperson of the Aotearoa-Tonga Relief Committee Jenny Salesa said Tongans in New Zealand were hearing from their families back home for food and bottled water.

    “We’re also told by some of our relatives that the ash from the volcano is everywhere. A lot of the ash has now hardened like cement on some of the surfaces and cleaning up is a challenging task,” she said.

    “Some of the worry is that it would also affect the crops and the traditional food sources that a lot of our Tongan people back home rely on.”

    The relief committee is asking families from the most effected islands to head to the appeal at Mt Smart Stadium today. People from the rest of Tonga are asked to come from Sunday.

    Each family being allocated a 44-gallon drum to send supplies to Tonga and eight containers have been given to the relief committee.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Anxious Tongans in NZ await volcano news from home: ‘It’s painful, you just feel hopeless’

    By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Langi Fatanitavake’s wife and son live on one of the islands flanking Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano, but his repeated calls home since the violent eruption and tsunami have gone unanswered.

    The South Island seasonal worker last spoke to his family on Ha’apai on Saturday afternoon, shortly before destructive waves crashed into the island nation.

    Fatanitavake is growing increasingly concerned for their safety.

    “Last night and today, nothing. I called, no answer. My feeling is not good about my family,” he said.

    Fatanitavake is also worried about his sister who lives on Atata Island, about 50 km from the volcano that has covered Tonga in a layer of ash.

    “I want to know what happened to my sister,” he said.

    Fatanitavake said the 17 other Tongans he was working with on an Alexandra orchard had not heard from their families either and were anxious to receive a simple message or phone call to say they were safe.

    Repatriation flight postponed
    A repatriation flight scheduled for Thursday for workers who came to New Zealand as part of the Recognised Seasonal Employers (RSE) scheme has been postponed.

    An Auckland church congregation prays for their family in Tonga.
    An Auckland church congregation prays for their family in Tonga. Image: Lydia Lewis/RNZ Pacific

    Tongans in New Zealand have been praying for their Pacific Island families, as they endure an agonising wait for news from relatives cut off from the world.

    Timaru’s Sina Latu last heard from her sister when she broadcast her family’s escape from the tsunami live on Facebook, as ash rained down on the island of ‘Eua.

    “It was very scary, we could see the waves coming in,” she said.

    While Latu believed they were safe, she said the lack of communication was upsetting.

    “It’s painful, you just feel hopeless and very anxious,” she said.

    “I’m so worried, I haven’t really slept well. I just want one phone call, or one message, that will do me, just to say we’re fine, we’re safe.”

    Latu said she was also worried about her 80-year-old father who lives on Tongatapu, but was reassured by no official reports of injuries or deaths so far.

    An RNZAF P-3K Orion left Whenuapai air base, Auckland, to carry out assessment of the area and low-lying islands after the huge undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano eruption.
    An RNZAF P-3K Orion flew from Whenuapai air base, Auckland, today to carry out assessment of the area and low-lying islands after the huge undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption. Image: NZ Defence Force/RNZ Pacific

    Aerial reconnaissance, water supplies
    A New Zealand Defence Force plane flew to Tonga today to assess the damage, but Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said aerial reconnaissance depended on the conditions, including the amount of suspended volcanic ash.

    Another plane took essential supplies like water late today.

    Communication links were still down, because the undersea cable that connects Tonga to the wider world appears to have been damaged.

    Invercargill’s Ofa Boyle is yet to hear from her brother and sister who live near the capital Nuku’alofa.

    She is also worried about the situation on the Ha’apai group of islands.

    “I have some extended family living around that area, in Ha’apai. It’s a big worry,” she said.

    “On the main island, the waves coming inland are not those big giant ones. That gives a bit of relief, but I’m also anxious about what it’s like in other areas like Ha’apai, near where the volcano erupted.”

    Boyle said Tongan families relied heavily on relatives overseas, who would rally around to help them.

    GNS Science said there could be more small-scale eruptions for some weeks, but they would be unlikely to trigger another big tsunami.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • NZ Air Force plane leaves for Tonga to assess volcano eruption damage

    RNZ Pacific

    Power is being restored in Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa, and the country is sending naval boats to outlying islands to assess the damage from the huge Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and tsunami.

    A New Zealand Defence Force plane has left for Tonga to assess the damage from Saturday’s volcanic eruption and tsunami.

    The violent eight-minute eruption of the undersea volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai triggered atmospheric shockwaves and a tsunami which travelled as far afield as Alaska, Japan and South America.

    The flight — which was dependant on whether the ash cloud from Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai had dissipated enough — departed from Whenuapai air base in Auckland.

    Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta said reports overnight said there had been no further ash fall, and that there was no damage to the runway in Tonga.

    “It’s just a matter of clearing the ash from the runway.

    “The flight is scheduled to leave this morning.”

    80 percent of power restored
    Mahuta said 80 percent of power had been restored in Nuku’alofa, on Tongatapu, but internet connections remained disrupted.

    Damage on Tongatapu was able to be better assessed today, and the country was sending its naval capacity to the outer islands, she said.

    The initial need was for water and water storage bladders, as well as food and medical supplies, she said, and Mahuta expected the Tongan government would be be making a more formal request for assistance.

    The New Zealand Defence Force has deployed a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3K2 Orion aircraft to help search for two vessels in Kiribati that failed to return from separate fishing trips last week.
    An RNZAF P-3K Orion carrying out a reconnaissance flight to Tonga today. Image: NZ Defence Force

    The RNZAF P-3K Orion will carry out a reconnaissance flight over the affected area, including low-lying islands that have not been heard from.

    The Defence Force was also preparing options for naval deployments to help with the recovery.

    Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said yesterday the navy was making preparations, and either HMNZS Canterbury or HMNZS Manawanui could be deployed.

    No casualties in Ha’apai
    Labour MP Jenny Salesa, who is Tongan, last night joined a Zoom meeting with Tongan Methodist ministers, including Reverend ‘Ulufonua from Ha’apai.

    ‘Ulufonua told them there had been no casualties on the group’s main island. There was a lot of ash on the ground and quite a number of houses had been damaged.

    “One of the main things that they’re dealing with right now is the damage to the water system and the fact that not all of the people were able to protect some of the tank water that they collect from the rain,” Salesa told RNZ Morning Report.

    “There are 169 islands in all of Tonga, 36 of those are inhabited, and so we don’t have updates from any of those other islands.”

    Red Cross teams in Tonga have supplies in the country to support 1200 households, their international organisation says.

    International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Pacific head of delegation Katie Greenwood said they were able to make very brief contact with the teams in Tonga on Saturday before communication was cut.

    “Red Cross teams were supporting authorities to move people to the small available amount of higher ground around capital Nuku’alofa itself and also they are well trained to be able to support any needs that are arising on the ground,” she told Morning Report.

    Looking for contact with loved ones
    Greenwood said once communications were restored the Red Cross was looking to help connect families registration system where people indicate they are looking for contact with loved ones.

    A P-8 aircraft from Australia’s defence force is also being sent to survey critical infrastructure such as roads, ports and power lines today, if conditions permit. A statement from Australian government ministers said it was co-ordinating critical humanitarian supplies for disaster relief, and was ready to respond to further requests for assistance.

    New Zealand Acting High Commissioner in Tonga Peter Lund said Nuku’alofa resembled a moonscape.

    He said the capital was blanketed in ash, and there was a lot of damage on the waterfront and along the western coast.

    There were no confirmed reports of any deaths or serious injuries, he said.

    The ash cloud reached many kilometres into the air, and the eruption is thought to be the largest since Mt Pinatubo, in the Philippines, exploded in 1991.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Veteran Tahiti politician Flosse accuses France of causing his ‘political death’

    RNZ Pacific

    French Polynesia’s former president Gaston Flosse says he is in mourning because the French state has signed his political death by banning him from political office for five years for abusing public funds.

    Flosse made the statement after France’s highest appeal court upheld a 2020 conviction over a long-running corrupt water supply arrangement in Pirae.

    The ruling means the 90-year-old Flosse will not be able to contest this year’s French National Assembly elections and next year’s territorial election.

    As former and current mayors of the town of Pirae, Flosse and now President Edouard Fritch made the town administration pay for the water use in the upmarket Erima neighbourhood, where Flosse lived.

    Flosse had set up the scheme and Fritch allowed the abusive billing process to be continued until the practice was discovered in an audit in 2011.

    When the two were convicted in Tahiti in 2020, Flosse was declared ineligible to hold office for five years.

    Flosse questioned how the justice system worked, as he was singled out for punishment in a witch hunt while Fritch got away with just a fine.

    Why was Fritch still eligible?
    He said he wondered why Fritch was not made ineligible for two years because for years the scheme was run while Fritch was mayor.

    Flosse’s lawyer said he could not understand the intellectual mechanism used to convict Flosse over the issue.

    Losing the appeal in Paris last week, Flosse, will not be able to run for office until 2027, but he said would not give up and would continue with renewed vigour.

    Only last week, he had announced his candidacy for one of the three French Polynesian seats in the French legislature.

    In 2014, Flosse had been declared ineligible for five years after another corruption conviction and he had hoped to avert a renewed such sanction by taking the matter to Paris.

    He was forced to relinquish the presidency to his deputy Fritch, but the two politicians have since fallen out.

    Fritch has since been re-elected president and mayor of Pirae.

    In French Polynesia, about a quarter of the ruling party’s assembly members have corruption convictions, including the assembly president Gaston Tong Sang.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tahiti’s Flosse banned from public office after latest court defeat

    RNZ Pacific

    France’s highest court has upheld a corruption conviction of French Polynesia’s former president Gaston Flosse, effectively ending his political career.

    It confirmed a 2020 appeal court ruling in Tahiti, which had deprived Flosse of his eligibility to hold public office for five years after finding him and the current president Edouard Fritch guilty of abusing public funds.

    As former and current mayors of the town of Pirae, Flosse and Fritch made the town administration pay for the water supply to the upmarket Erima neighbourhood, where Flosse lived.

    Flosse had set up the scheme and Fritch allowed the abusive billing process to be continued until the practice was discovered in an audit in 2011. In the appeal court in 2020, Flosse had been given a two-year suspended prison sentence.

    However, Fritch was allowed to stay in office, but both have been fined and have been ordered to jointly settle the water bill of US$820,000.

    When the case went to court, Fritch was a defendant and, as the mayor of Pirae, he was also a complainant because in the civil case running alongside, the town sought to be reimbursed.

    In Paris, the court did not accept Flosse’s arguments that the statute of limitations applied, and it rejected a claim that Fritch could not both be a complainant and an accused.

    Losing the appeal in Paris, Flosse, who is 90, will not be able to contest this year’s French National Assembly elections nor next year’s territorial election.

    Only last week, he had announced his candidacy for one of the three French Polynesian seats in the French legislature.

    In 2014, Flosse had been declared ineligible for five years after another corruption conviction and hoped to avert a renewed such sanction by taking the matter to Paris.

    He was forced to relinquish the presidency to his deputy Fritch, but the two politicians have since fallen out.

    Fritch has since been re-elected president and mayor of Pirae.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse

    Tokyo Electric Power Company-TEPCO- has been attempting to decommission three nuclear meltdowns in reactors No. 1 No. 2, and No. 3 for 11 years now. Over time, impossible issues grow and glow, putting one assertion after another into the anti-nuke coffers.

    The problems, issues, enormous danger, and ill timing of deconstruction of a nuclear disaster is always unexpectedly complicated by something new. That’s the nature of nuclear meltdowns, aka: China Syndrome debacles.

    As of today, TEPCO is suffering some very serious setbacks that have “impossible to deal with” written all over the issues.

    Making all matters nuclear even worse, which applies to the current mess at Fukushima’s highly toxic scenario, Gordon Edwards’ following statement becomes more and more embedded in nuclear lore: “It’s impossible to dispose of nuclear waste.” 1

    Disposing of nuclear waste is like “running in place” to complete a marathon. There’s no end in sight.

    As a quickie aside from the horrendous details of the current TEPCO debacle, news from Europe brings forth the issue of nuclear power emboldened as somehow suitable to help the EU transition to “cleaner power,” as described by EU sources. France supports the crazed nuke proposal but Germany is holding its nose. According to German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke: “Nuclear energy could lead to environmental disasters and large amounts of nuclear waste. 2   Duh!

    Minister Lemke nailed it. And, TEPCO is living proof (barely) of the unthinkable becoming thinkable and disastrous for humanity. Of course, meltdowns are never supposed to happen, but they do.

    One meltdown is like thousands of industrial accidents in succession over generations of lifetimes. What a mess to leave for children’s children’s children over several generations. They’ll hate you for this!

    In Fukushima’s case, regarding three nuclear power plants that melted all-the-way (China Syndrome), TEPCO still does not know how to handle the enormously radioactive nuclear fuel debris, or corium, sizzling hot radioactive lumps of melted fuel rods and container material in No. 1, No 2 and No.3, They’re not even 100% sure where all of the corium is and whether it’s getting into underground water resources. What a disaster that would be… what if it is already… Never mind.

    The newest wrinkle at TEPCO involves the continuous flow of water necessary to keep the destroyed reactors’ hot stuff from exposure to air, thus spreading explosively red-hot radioactivity across the countryside. That constant flow of water is an absolute necessity to prevent an explosion of all explosions, likely emptying the streets of Tokyo in a mass of screaming, kicking, and trampling event to “get out of town” ASAP, commonly known as “mass evacuation.”

    The cooling water continuously poured over the creaky dilapidated ruins itself turns radioactive, almost instantaneously, and must be processed via an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove most radioactive materials (???) housed in a 17-meter (56 feet) tall building on the grounds of the disaster zone.

    Here’s the new big danger:  as it processes radioactive contaminated water, it flushes out “slurry” of highly concentrated radioactive material that has to go somewhere. But where to put it?

    How to handle and dispose of the radioactive slurry from the ALPS is almost and, in fact, may be, an impossible quagmire. It’s a big one as the storage containers for the tainted slurry quickly degrade because of the high concentration of radioactive slurry. These storage containers of highly radioactive slurry, in turn, have to be constantly replaced as the radioactivity slurry eats away at the containers’ liners.

    Radioactive slurry is muddy and resembles a shampoo in appearance, and it contains highly radioactive Strontium readings that reach tens of millions of Becquerel’s per cubic centimeter. Whereas, according to the EPA, 148 Becquerel’s per cubic meter, not centimeter, is the safe level for human exposure. Thus, tens of millions per cubic centimeter is “off the charts” dangerous! Instant death, as one cubic meter equals one million cubic centimeters. Ahem!

    Since March 2013, TEPCO has accumulated 3,373 special vessels that hold these highly toxic radioactive slurry concentrations. But, because the integrity of the vessels deteriorates so quickly, the durability of the containers reaches a limit, meaning the vessels will need replacement by mid 2025.

    Making matters ever worse, if that is possible, the NRA has actually accused TEPCO of “underestimating the impact issue of the radioactivity on the containers linings,” claiming TEPCO improperly measured the slurry density when conducting dose evaluations. Whereas, the density level is always highest at the bottom, not the top where TEPCO did the evaluations, thus failing to measure and report the most radioactive of the slurry. Not a small error.

    As of June 2021, NRA’s own assessment of the containers concluded that 31 radioactive super hot containers had already reached the end of operating life. And, another 56 would need replacement within the next 2 years.

    Transferring slurry is a time-consuming highly dangerous horrific job, which exposes yet a second issue of unacceptable risks of radioactive substances released into the air during transfer of slurry. TEPCO expects to open and close the transfers remotely (no surprise there). But, TEPCO, as of January 2, 2022, has not yet revealed acceptable plans for dealing with the necessary transfer of slurry from weakening, almost deteriorated containers, into fresh, new containers. 3

    Meanwhile, additional batches of a massive succession of containers that must be transferred to new containers will be reaching the end of shelf life, shortly.

    Another nightmarish problem has surfaced for TEPCO. Yes, another one. In the aftermath of the 2011 blowup, TEPCO stored radioactive water in underground spaces below two buildings near reactor No.4. Bags of a mineral known as zeolite were placed to absorb cesium. Twenty-six tons (52,000 lbs.) of bags are still immersed with radiation readings of 4 Sieverts per hour, enough to kill half of all workers in the immediate vicinity within one hour. The bags need to be removed.

    TEPCO intends to robotically start removing the highly radioactive bags, starting in 2023, but does not know where the bags should be stored. Where do you store radioactive bags containing enough radioactive power to kill someone within one hour of exposure?

    Additionally (there’s more) the amount of radioactive rubble, soil, and felled trees at the plant site totals 480,000 cubic meters, as of 2021. TEPCO is setting up a special incinerator to dispose of this. Where to dispose of the incinerated waste is unknown. This is one more add-on to the horrors of what to do with radioactive material that stays hot for centuries upon centuries. Where to put it?

    Where to put it? Which is the bane of the nuclear power industry. For example, America’s nuke plants are full of huge open pools of water containing tons of spent nuclear fuel rods. If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material known to humanity. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities.

    According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” 4

    It’s not just Fukushima that rattles the nerves of people who understand the high risk game of nuclear power. America is loaded with nuclear power plants with open pools of water that hold highly radioactive spent fuel rods.

    What to do with it?

    1. Gordon Edwards in The Age of Nuclear Waste From Fukushima to Indian Point.
    2. “EU Plans to Label Gas and Nuclear Energy ‘Green’ Prompts Row”, BBC News, January 2, 2022.
    3. “TEPCO Slow to Respond to Growing Crisis at Fukushima Plant”, The Asahi Shimbun, January 2, 2022.
    4. “Nuclear Fuel Buried 108 Feet from the Sea”, March 19, 2021.
    The post Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Radioactive Contamination Is Seeping Into Drinking Water Around the U.S.

    Child pours water from faucet into glass jar for drinking

    When Jeni Knack moved to Simi Valley, California, in 2018, she had no idea that her family’s new home was within 5 miles of a former nuclear and rocket testing laboratory, perched atop a plateau and rife with contamination. Radioactive cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-239 and tritium, along with a mix of other toxic chemicals and heavy metals, are known to have been released at the industrial site through various spills, leaks, the use of open-air burn pits and a partial nuclear meltdown.

    Once Knack learned about the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and the unusual number of childhood cancer cases in the surrounding community, she couldn’t ignore it. Her family now only drinks water from a 5-gallon (19-liter) jug delivered by Sparkletts water service. In August, she began sending her 6-year-old daughter to kindergarten with two bottles of the water and instructions to not refill them at school, which is connected to the same Golden State Water Company that serves her home.

    A federal report in 2007 acknowledged that two wells sourced by the water company were at risk of contamination from the site. “The EPA has said we’re at risk,” says Knack. And Golden State, she says, has at times used “possibly a very hefty portion of that well water.” To date, radioactivity above the natural level has not been detected in Golden State’s water.

    Concerns Across the Country

    All water contains some level of radiation; the amount and type can vary significantly. Production of nuclear weapons and energy from fissionable material is one potential source. Mining for uranium is another. Radioactive elements can be introduced into water via medical treatments, including radioactive iodine used to treat thyroid disorders. And it can be unearthed during oil and gas drilling, or any industrial activities that involve cracking into bedrock where radioactive elements naturally exist. What’s more, because of their natural presence, these elements can occasionally seep into aquifers even without being provoked.

    The nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG, a partner in this reporting project) estimates that drinking water for more than 170 million Americans in all 50 states “contains radioactive elements at levels that may increase the risk of cancer.” In their analysis of public water system data collected between 2010 and 2015, EWG focused on six radioactive contaminants, including radium, radon and uranium. They found that California has more residents affected by radiation in their drinking water than anywhere else in the U.S. Yet the state is far from alone. About 80% of Texans are served by water utilities reporting detectable levels of radium. And concerns have echoed across the country — from abandoned uranium mines on Navajo Nation lands, to lingering nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project in Missouri, to contaminants leaching from phosphate mines in Florida.

    While ingesting radioactive elements through drinking contaminated water is not the only route of human exposure, it is a major risk pathway, says Daniel Hirsch, a retired University of California, Santa Cruz, professor who has studied the Santa Susana Field Laboratory contamination. “One thing you don’t want to do is to mix radioactivity with water. It’s an easy mechanism to get it inside people,” he says. “When you drink water, you think you excrete it. But the body is made to extract things from what you ingest.”

    Strontium-90, for example, is among elements that mimic calcium. So the body is apt to concentrate the contaminant in bones, raising the risk of leukemia. Pregnant women and young kids are especially vulnerable because greater amounts of radiation are deposited in rapidly growing tissue and bones. “This is why pregnant women are never x-rayed,” says Catherine Thomasson, an independent environmental policy consultant based in Portland, Oregon. Cesium can deposit in the pancreas, heart and other tissues, she notes. There, it may continue to emit radioactivity over time, causing disease and damage.

    Scientists believe that no amount of radiation is safe. At high levels, the radiation produced by radioactive elements can trigger birth defects, impair development and cause cancer in almost any part of the body. And early life exposure means a long period of time for damage to develop.

    Health advocates express concern that the government is not doing enough to protect the public from these and other risks associated with exposure to radioactive contamination in drinking water. The legal limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for several types of radioactive elements in community water systems have not been updated since 1976. Further, many elements are regulated as a group rather than individually, such as radium-226 plus radium-228. And water system operators, if they are required to monitor for radioactive elements, only need to do so infrequently — say, every six or nine years for certain contaminants.

    Meanwhile, private wells generally remain unregulated with regard to the elements, which is particularly concerning because some nuclear power plants are located in rural areas where people depend on private wells. More than one out of every 10 Americans use private wells or tiny water systems that serve fewer than 15 residences.

    The Santa Susana Field Laboratory was rural when it was first put to use about 70 years ago. Today, more than 700,000 people live within 10 miles (16 kilometers). Recent wildfires have exacerbated these residents’ concerns. The 2018 Woolsey fire started on the property and burned 80% of its 2,850 acres (1,153 hectares). Over the following three months, the levels of chemical and radioactive contamination running off the site exceeded state safety standards 57 times.

    Hirsch highlights several potential avenues for drinking water contamination related to nuclear weapons or energy development. Wind can send contamination off site and deposit it into the soil, for example. Gravity can carry contaminants downhill. And rains can carry contamination via streams and rivers to infiltrate groundwater aquifers. While vegetation absorbs radioactive and chemical contaminants from the soil in which it grows, those pollutants are readily released into the environment during a fire.

    While no tests have detected concerning levels of radioactivity in Golden State’s water, advocates and scientists argue that testing for radioactive elements remains inconsistent and incomplete across the country. Federal and state regulations do not require monitoring for all potential radioactive contaminants associated with the known industrial activity on the site. For some of the regulated contaminants, water companies need only test once every several years.

    “This is not an isolated matter,” says Hirsch. “We’re sloppy with radioactive materials.”

    “We Need Stricter Regulations”

    In 2018, around the same time that fires stirred up radioactive elements in and around the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, drinking water concerns arose just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Guy Kruppa, superintendent of the Belle Vernon Municipal Authority, had been noticing major die-offs of the bacteria in his sewage treatment plant. The bugs are critical for breaking down contaminants in the sewage before it is discharged into the Monongahela River. About 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) downstream is a drinking water plant.

    Kruppa and his colleagues eventually linked the low bacteria numbers to leachate they accepted from the Westmoreland landfill. The landfill had begun taking waste from nearby fracking sites — material that included bacteria-killing salts and radioactive elements such as radium.

    The Belle Vernon Municipal Authority subsequently got a court order to force the landfill to stop sending its leachate — the liquid stuff that flows off a landfill after it rains. “We sealed off the pipe,” Kruppa says.

    Today, radiation is no longer discharging from his plant. Yet he remains concerned about where the leachate might now be going and, more broadly, about the weak regulation regarding radioactive waste that could end up in drinking water. The quarterly tests required of his sewage treatment plant, for example, do not include radium. “The old adage is, if you don’t test for it, you’re not going to find it,” adds Kruppa.

    Concerns that radioactive elements from fracking could travel into community drinking water sources have been on the rise for at least a decade. A study led by Duke University researchers and published in 2013 found “potential environmental risks of radium bioaccumulation in localized areas of shale gas wastewater disposal.” Kruppa’s actions in 2018 drove widespread media attention to the issue.

    In late July 2021, the state of Pennsylvania announced it would begin ordering landfills that accept waste from oil or gas drilling sites to test their leachate for certain radioactive materials associated with fracking. The state’s move was a “good step in the right direction,” says Amy Mall, a senior advocate with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which published a report on radioactive waste from oil and gas production in July. “We do need more data. But we don’t think monitoring alone is adequate. We need stricter regulations as well.”

    The EPA drinking water standard for radium-226 plus radium-228, the two most widespread isotopes of radium, is 5 picocuries per liter (0.26 gallon). The California Office of Environmental Hazard Assessment’s public health goal, set in 2006 and the basis of EWG’s study, is far more stringent: 0.05 picocuries per liter for radium-226 and just 0.019 picocuries per liter for radium-228. “There is a legal limit for some of these contaminants, like radium and uranium,” says Sydney Evans, a science analyst with EWG. “But, of course, that’s not necessarily what’s considered safe based on the latest research.”

    “We don’t regulate for the most vulnerable,” says Arjun Makhijani, president of the nonprofit Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. He points to the first trimester in a pregnancy as among the riskiest windows of development.

    The known toxicities of radioactive contaminants, as well as technology available to test for them, have evolved significantly since standards were established in the 1970s. “We have a rule limited by the technology available 40 years ago or more. It’s just a little crazy to me,” says Evans. Hirsch points to a series of reports from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on health risks from ionizing radiation. “They just keep finding that the same unit of exposure produces more cancers than had been presumed,” he says. The most recent version, published in 2006, found the risk of cancer due to radiation exposure for some elements to be about 35% higher per unit dose than the 1990 version.

    The EPA has begun its fourth review of national primary drinking water regulations, in accordance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. The results are anticipated in 2023. While advocates hope for stricter standards, such changes would add to the difficulties many drinking water providers already face in finding the finances and technology necessary to meet those regulations.

    Seeking Solutions

    The aquifer beneath Winona, Minnesota — which supplies drinking water to residents — naturally contains radium, resulting in challenges for the city water department to minimize levels of the radioactive element.

    Recent tests of Winona’s drinking water have found levels of radium above federal standards. In response to results, in April city officials cautioned residents that low-dose exposure over many years can raise the risk of cancer. However, they did not advise people to avoid drinking the water.

    The city is now looking to ramp up their use of a product called TonkaZorb, which has proven effective in removing radium at other drinking water plants, notes Brent Bunke, who served as the city’s water superintendent during the time of the testing. The product’s active ingredient is manganese, which binds to radium. The resulting clumps are easy to sift out by the sand filter. Local coverage aptly likened it to kitty litter. Bunke notes that the city also plans to replace the filter media in their aging sand filters. Of course, all these efforts are not cheap for the city. “It’s the cost of doing business,” says Bunke.

    Winona is far from alone in their battle against ubiquitous radium. And they are unlikely to be the hardest hit. “Communities that are being impacted don’t necessarily have the means to fix it,” says Evans. “And it’s going to be a long-term, ongoing issue.” Over time, municipalities often have to drill deeper into the ground to find adequate water supply — where there tends to be even larger concentrations of radium.

    Some are looking upstream for more equitable solutions. Stanford University researchers, for example, have identified a way to predict when and where uranium is released into groundwater aquifers. Dissolved calcium and alkalinity can boost water’s ability to pick up uranium, they found. Because this tends to happen in the top 6 feet of soil, drinking water managers can make sure that water bypasses that area as it seeps into or is pumped out of the ground.

    The focus of this research has been on California’s Central Valley — an agricultural area rich in uranium. “When you start thinking about rural water systems, or you think about water that’s going to be used in agriculture, then your economic constraints become really, really great,” says Scott Fendorf, a professor of earth systems science at Stanford and coauthor on the study. “You can’t afford to do things like reverse osmosis” — a spendy form of filtration technology.

    In general, radiation can be very difficult to remove from water. Reverse osmosis can be effective for uranium. Activated carbon can cut concentrations of radon and strontium. Yet standard home or water treatment plant filters are not necessarily going to remove all radioactive contaminants. Scientists and advocates underscore the need for further prevention strategies in the form of greater monitoring and stronger regulations. The push continues across the country, as the issue plagues nearly everywhere — an unfortunate truth that Knack now knows.

    Why doesn’t her family simply move? “I’m not saying we won’t. I’m not saying we shouldn’t,” she says. “But I don’t even know where we’d go. It really looks like contaminated sites are not few, but all over the country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Imminent Peril Of Drinking Water Contamination By US Navy Fuel Tanks

    In a strongly worded proposed decision and order, on December 27, 2021, David Day, the Hawai’i State Department of Health Red Hill case Hearing Officer and Deputy Attorney General announced in a 33-page proposed decision and order that the “imminent peril” caused to the drinking water by the U.S. Navy’s leaking jet fuel tanks in the island of O’ahu outweighs the military’s claims that the tanks are key to “national security.”

    On November 28, approximately 19,000 gallons of jet fuel and water leaked from the massive 20 underground fuel storage tanks at Red Hill and contaminated two wells providing  drinking water for over 93,000 persons on the U.S. Navy’s water system. Each of the fuel tanks holds 12.5 million gallons of jet fuel and the tank complex sits only 100 feet above Honolulu’s main aquifer.

    The post Imminent Peril Of Drinking Water Contamination By US Navy Fuel Tanks appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Flushing Of Dangerous Petroleum Contaminated Water From Military Housing

    Hawai’i – On Friday, December 24, I went to Aliamanu Military Reservation at Red Hill housing area which is located above the entryway into the main tunnel that leads into the  U.S. Navy’s deep, massive, leaking 80-year-old Red Hill underground jet fuel storage tanks complex.  These tanks are only 100 feet above the main aquifer of drinking water for 400,000, half the population of the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i.

    A recent leak of at least 19,000 gallons of jet fuel and water leaked from a fire suppressant pipe into two Navy operated wells that supply drinking water to over 93,000 residents in the Pearl Harbor-Hickam Air Force Base area. Built during World War II, the tank complex has 20 huge tanks, each measuring 100 feet in diameter and 250 feet high — the height of a 20-story building, or Aloha Tower, a famous landmark for tourist ships in Honolulu harbor.

    The post Flushing Of Dangerous Petroleum Contaminated Water From Military Housing appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Here’s to our Health: Well, To the Health of the Profiteers!

    “You know what I think?” she says. “That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ’em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction–they’re all just fuel.”

    – Haruki Murakami, After Dark

    I’m thinking about nuclear energy, the waste, the fallout, radioactive new elements. I’m thinking about all those antibiotics, about all those rat-roach-flie-mosquito poisons. I’m thinking about the sprayed-on litany of food enhancers (sic) and the artificial colorings, and the Round-up Ready, for sure. I am thinking about opiod deaths for 18-50 year olds in USA as the number one cause of death for that demographic, at 80 K last year.

    But I am also thinking about immune-compromised folk, the gut diseases, the array of diseases of the liver, kidneys, thyroid, stomach. Really, all of those malnourished and over-nourished and oddly chemicalized humans sucking up sugar sugar sugar. All of the combinations of bad in utero bombardments; i.e., epigentics, and then all the fun once coming out of the birth canal or c-section cut. DNA collected. How many jabs at birth? Then, how many (pre-mRNA maintenance series forever) vaccinations before age 5, 8 10, 12?

    But thyroids, man, they are so compromised (in women especially) because of a variety of reasons that the entire ranch has been sold down the river. Thyroid issues here; chronic pain, brain fog, gut issues, psychological issues.

    Serious-serious chronic illnesses associated with thyroid issues. And, this chart below is cartoonish, but if you look into thyroid diseases and the effects, you will shiver. And this is a common problem, becoming bigger with poisons, background radiation, pregnancy, bad food, bad nutrition, stress, plastics in the air-blood-intestines. Oh, what a world, and, of course, AMA, CDC, NIAID, NIH, WHO, you name the outfit, they are so hobbled by their germ theory crap, all other things really killing people (and planet) are not only a drag on a broken medical system, but on their economy.

    Common symptoms of hypothroidism: depression, brain fog, fatigue, muscle cramps, cold intolerance, weight gain, dry skin

    So, that’s just one arena-terrain of issues, the thyroid. Add up the entire issues flooding our endrocrine systems, then add up the microbiome maladies, add up the weathering of humanity under inflammatory capitalism, and here we are going into 2022.

    Shoot, let’s inset doomsday #999 just to get gargantuan — the glacier down under:

    The Thwaites “Doomsday Glacier” in West Antarctica is spooking scientists. Satellite images shown at a recent meeting December 13th of the American Geophysical Union showed numerous large, diagonal cracks extending across the Thwaites’ floating ice wedge.

    This is new information, and it’s a real shocker if only because it’s happening so quickly, much sooner than expectations. It could collapse. And, it’s big, 80 miles across with up to 4,000 feet depth with a 28-mile-wide cracking ice shelf that extends over the Amundsen Sea.

    Well, Greta and COP26, and the bagpipes of Glasgow. Another fun reality TV show, is the blank mentality of mainstream and left-stream media: how stories about Omicron and about mandated vaccination boosters x 5, and the complete loss of critical thinking when attempting to challenge the narratives/motives around the shifting baselines on steriods; i.e., fully vaxxed was one (1) J & J and two (2) Moderna’s. Now? The schedule of boosters will be determined not by doctors, not by us, not by the public, us, not by the thinkers, but by them, the elites, and those oh-so-perfectly honest and heroic folks working for Big Pharma which by the way foots the bill for most media in the mainscream, and foots the bills of many university research facilities, and foots the bill for NIH, WHO, FDA, etc.

    a vaccine syringe

    This is the Atlantic Magazine, one of the elites’ best source of information. When I say elite, I mean highly college degreed folk, the woke folk, all those beautiful and wannabe beautiful people. Note, when you read these rags, and I include The Nation or even Mother Jones, you get no other perspective outside the mainstream Big Pharma Has All the Answers for SARS-CoV2. DARPA?

    For nearly a year now, the phrase fully vaccinated has carried a cachet that it never did before. Being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 is a ticket for a slate of liberties—a pass to travel without testing and skip post-exposure quarantine, per the CDC, and in many parts of the country, a license to enter restaurants, gyms, and bars. For many employees, full vaccination is now a requirement to work; for many individuals, it’s a must for any socialization at all. (source)

    I could write this entire blog just looking at the Atlantic’s story here, and how cavalier and how snobby and so tragically hip the verbiage is and the folks cited and interviewed so much on the same sheet of music, which is entirely planned. This is how these writers do their journalism — no push back, no alternative views, no outside the paradigm thinking. Here, last point I can make by pasting another paragraph:

    Countries such as Israel have already done it; Anthony Fauci has been gunning for the switch. As he told me this summer, “I bet you any amount of whatever” that three shots, spread out over several months, will ultimately be the “standard regimen for an mRNA vaccine.” Even the CDC told me this week that it “may change [the] definition in the future”—a line it’s never used with me before. For a cautious government agency, that’s kind of a gargantuan leap. A new floor for full vaccination, one that firmly requires what we’re now calling booster shots, is starting to look like a matter of when, not if.

    No other sources of medicine and immunology or virology to be consulted??? These writers are dangerous, but they always have been on all given topics — war, surveillance, finance, everything in the Complex. They have credos and pledges to not drill into capitalism. And that means, that this pig of a human, Tony Fauci, can play “I bet” shit word games about boosters that well, hmm, sort of work. Imagine that, funny Tony. And, what the fuck is happening in Israel? Please, look into that mess of vax madness there. “Israel.” How quickly the vaxxed lose immunity, which they never had.

    Hands up, or else:

    kids covid

    Kids who are exposed to COVID-19 can stay in class as long as they are tested in schools, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a news release on Friday.“Test-to-Stay is another valuable tool in a layered prevention strategy that includes promoting vaccination of eligible students and staff, requiring everyone age 2 and older wear a mask inside schools and facilities, keeping at least 3 feet of distance between students, screening testing, ventilation, handwashing, and staying home when sick,” the news release reads. The Test-to-Stay initiative was put into motion by the CDC to help “minimize absenteeism and learning loss which can occur during traditional quarantine at home.”

    Again, read the story on “Test to Stay,” and you will get no person or journalist pusing back on the policy, on the stupidity of testing, on the masking requirements, on the 3-foot distance lies, man, so-so much wrong with this picture. (Source)

    But again, it’s not the air, stupid. It’s not the water, stupid. It’s not the food, stupid. It’s not the chemicals offgassing and in every product a child first comes in contact with up until the grave, stupid. It’s coronavirus, and, it’s compliant people, labeling and creating the “Dirty You,”which in the old days (not so old) was the Dirty Jew-Japanese-Indian-Irishman-Chinaman-Gypsy-Communist-Catholic-Disabled-et al.

    I am asked about climate change, as the existential set of crises for humanity. How to stop it, how to mitigate it, how to prepare for it?

    Here, from friend, Joe, then my snarky answer —

    Paul– It’s pretty fucking obvious the government doesn’t plan to do anything except to promote more air travel, more military use of hydrocarbons, more roads for increased auto and truck travel, more planet destroying corporate agriculture and the list goes on. Besides that most people are not willing to change their lifestyles one bit. They will continue to support the things that kill the planet as they shroud themselves in selfrighteousness because they recycle and separate their food waste and put it in their compost bins made of plastic. They will pat themselves (and on each other’s) backs as they eat organic cucumbers flown in from Chile for their Super Bowl parties. Sick cognitive dissonanced bastards riding towards Hell on earth.

    +–+

    Joe — And the same tools to say stop companies from forcing low wage workers working in warehouses while tornadoes are about to hit and then once those workers are killed injured and traumatized will be the same needed to reorganize humanity for a world without ice: compassion, moral compass, communitarian guidance, systems thinking, socialism, democracy, resiliency, end of economic classes, justice, integrity, regional & multinational planning, valuing safe/ food/ air/ water/ soil, those plus redistribution of work and economic well being …. some or all of these needed to solve little things (sic) and yet we can’t tackle opioid crisis or housing crisis or industrial torture factory animal crisis.

    A world without ice without those human values above? Road Warrior and The Road and Minority Report and Soylent Green and Bladerunner all mashed up

    Seagulls stand on the Caddebostan shore, in Asian side of Istanbul, Monday, June 7, 2021, partially covered with marine mucilage, a thick, slimy substance made up of compounds released by marine organisms, in Turkey's Marmara Sea. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised Saturday to rescue the Marmara Sea from an outbreak of "sea snot" that is alarming marine biologists and environmentalists.

    Again, the loopy writing of this mainstream and influential rag, The Atlantic. “Climate Change is Going to be Gross: The thick layer of mucilage that covered the Sea of Marmara for weeks was an unsettling glimpse of climate change’s more oozy effects” by Jenna Scatena This Jenna will not interview ecosocialists or those looking at the systems of collapse. Putting one part into the system, and then looking at the system. So, all this dead algae and plankton, off-gassing, mucking up ocean floors and coming to the surface and destroying fish stocks. And yet, no one interviewed looking at how this is just a slice of the destruction pie, and that, yes, bacteria and viruses live in the muck, and, yes, they can get passed on and on and on.

    Under a Green Sky by Peter Ward

    Under a Green Sky : Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us about Our Future

    Paleontologist Peter Ward’s book on mass extinctions and climate change provides a deep-time perspective that is both sobering and necessary. Under a Green Sky puts the present within a geological context while also making the climate crisis feel even more personal and pressing. Before getting that perspective in full, however, readers encounter several fetching narratives of paleontological and other scientific fieldwork across the globe. Captivating as they are, the stories are mostly used to set up later passages that aggressively dismantle an argument Ward clearly loathes: that most past mass extinctions — especially the Permian, some 250 million years ago — were caused by huge meteorite impacts. Ward takes scientists and the media to task for, in his mind, recklessly embracing impacts as the culprit du jour for nearly all prior mass extinctions, when an impact is clearly responsible for just one such die-off: the famous dinosaur-killer 65 million years ago.

    Ward presents a powerful alternative model for explaining these extinctions. In short, an increase in carbon dioxide — from volcanism (in the past) or from humans (in the present) — warms the oceans enough to change circulation patterns. When this happens, sulfur-eating microbes sometimes thrive. These bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide, which, in sufficient quantities and under certain conditions, outgasses into the air, shreds the ozone layer, and poisons other living things. The warming also causes methane ice under the seas to melt and, well, burp, adding to the nasty mix. The end comes not in a bang but a stinky whimper. (Source)

    Quoting: “Where is the “Misanthropocene” right now in relation to past extinction events? The chart below tells the tale. Notice that our current rise in GHG’s is essentially instantaneous in relation to past warmings which took place over thousands of years. As far as scientists can tell, the current warming from industrial civilization is the most rapid in geologic time. Ice core and marine sediment data in the paleoclimatology archive have revealed brief periods of rapid warming and there is no reason to believe modern man is immune to such catastrophic and abrupt climate events. In fact, we know that the Arctic is already warming twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet. Earth sensitivity to climate change is now thought to be possibly double that of previous estimates. An entirely different planet can result from just a slight change in temperature:

    Snap 2015-01-14 at 23.36.48
    We’re about halfway towards the same CO2 levels as the Paleocene Thermal Extinction, but our speed of trajectory surpasses even that of the Permian Extinction:
    wardco2big

    In 2005, Lee R. Kump and fellow scientists published a paper describing what would become known as the Kump hypothesis, implicating hydrogen sulfide (H2S) as the primary culprit in past mass extinctions. According to OSHA, “a level of H2S gas at or above 100 ppm is immediately dangerous to life and health.” Prior to Kump’s study, the working theory had been that some sort of singular, cataclysmic event such as an asteroid strike was to blame for all mass die-offs, but Kump and colleagues proposed that a global warming-induced asphyxiation via hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) was to blame for snuffing out life under the sea, on the land, and in the air. In past mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions and thawing methane hydrates created greenhouse-gas warmings that culminated in the release of poisonous gas from oxygen-depleted oceans. Humans with their fossil fuel-eating machines are unwittingly producing the same conditions today. The Kump hypothesis (elevated CO2 with lowering O2 levels) is now regarded as the most plausible explanation for the majority of mass extinctions in earth’s history.”

    The post Here’s to our Health: Well, To the Health of the Profiteers! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • News on China | No. 77

    In this week’s News on China in 2 minutes: economic changes in China; increased share of the wealth pie garnered by the richest 10%; curbing groundwater exploitation; Chinese entertainment achieving international popularity.

    The post News on China | No. 77 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Migrant caravan and Qatar’s tarnished World Cup: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

    A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Pakistan to Poland

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Bill Gates Should Know Better: How the Israeli Occupation Ravages the Environment in Palestine 

    Those who are not familiar with how Israel, particularly the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, is actively and irreversibly damaging the environment might reach the erroneous conclusion that Tel Aviv is at the forefront of the global fight against climate change. The reality is the exact opposite.

    In his speech at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow, Israel’s right wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pushed the Israeli brand of “innovation and ingenuity” to “promote clean energy and reduce greenhouse gases”.

    Israel uses this particular brand to sell everything, whether to promote itself as the savior of Africa, to help governments intercept fleeing refugees, to push deadly weapons in the global market or, as Bennett has done in Scotland, supposedly save the environment.

    Just before we hastily dismiss Bennett’s rhetoric as empty words, we must remember that some are actually buying into this Israeli propaganda, one of whom is the American billionaire, Bill Gates.

    The day following Bennett’s speech, Gates met with the Israeli Prime Minister on the sidelines of COP26 to discuss the establishment of a “working group” to study potential cooperation “between the State of Israel and the Gates Foundation in the area of climate change innovation,” the Times of Israel newspaper reported.

    According to the newspaper, Gates, who had asserted in his meeting with Bennett that only innovation can solve the problem of climate change, said, “That’s really what Israel is known for”.

    Gates’ obsession with ‘innovation’, however, might have blinded him from addressing other issues that Israel is also ‘known for’ – namely, being the world’s leading human rights violator, whose horrific track record of racial apartheid and violence is known to every member of the United Nations.

    However, there is something else that Gates might also not be aware of – the systematic and purposeful destruction of the Palestinian environment, resulting from the Israeli occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv’s insatiable appetite for military superiority, thus constant ‘innovation’.

    Every act that is carried out to entrench the military occupation consolidates Israel’s colonial control and expanding illegal Jewish settlements directly impacts the Palestinian environment.

    Not a single day passes without a Palestinian tree or an orchard being set ablaze or cut down. ‘Clearing’ the Palestinian environment is, and has always been, the prerequisite of constructing or expanding Jewish settlements. For these colonies to be built, countless trees have to be ‘removed’, along with the Palestinians who have planted them.

    Over the years, millions of Palestinian olive and fruit-bearing trees were uprooted in Israel’s constant hunger for more land. The soil erosion in many parts of occupied Palestine speaks volumes of this horrendous ecocide.

    But it does not end here, of course. For hundreds of illegal Jewish settlements – hosting a population of more than 600,000 settlers – to survive, a heavy price is being exacted from the Palestinian environment on a daily basis. According to the thorough research of Ahmed Abofou, an independent Legal Researcher with Al-Haq rights group, illegal Israeli settlements “generate around 145,000 tons of domestic waste daily.” Abofou reported that “in 2016 alone, around 83 million cubic meters of wastewater were pumped throughout the West Bank.”

    Moreover, Israel has near-total control of Palestinian water resources. It relies on the occupied West Bank’s aquifers to supplant its need for water, while denying Palestinians access to their own water.

    According to Amnesty International, the average Israeli receives 300 liters of water per day, while a Palestinian receives a much smaller share of 73 liters. The problem is accentuated when the water usage of illegal Jewish settlers is taken into account. The average settler consumes as much as 800 liters per day, while entire Palestinian communities could be denied a drop of water for days and weeks, often as a form of collective punishment.

    The issue with the water is not just that of outright theft, denial of access or unequal distribution of water resources. It is also that of the lack of clean and safe drinkable water, an issue that has been highlighted by international human rights groups for many years.

    The result of these unfair policies has forced many Palestinians “to purchase water brought in by trucks” at prices “ranging from 4 to 10 USD per cubic meter,” Amnesty International found, highlighting that, for the poorest Palestinian communities, “water expenses can, at times, make up half of a family’s monthly income.”

    As bad as the situation may sound, the plight of besieged Gaza is much worse than that of the occupied West Bank. The tiny and overcrowded Strip is the perfect example of Israeli cruelty. Two million Palestinians live there, while being denied the most basic human rights, let alone freedom of movement.

    Since the Israeli military blockade on Gaza in 2007, the environment of the coastal region has been in constant deterioration. With little electricity and with bombed-out sewage plants, Palestinians have been forced to dump their unprocessed sewage into the sea. Gaza’s underground water is now polluted to the extent that 97 percent of the available water is now undrinkable, according to United Nations reports.

    This is only the tip of the iceberg. From the destruction of Palestinian wells to the poisoning of trees, to the demolishing of entire ecosystems to make space for Israel’s apartheid wall, to the use of depleted uranium in its various wars against Gaza, Israel has been on an unrelenting mission to ruin Palestine’s environment in all of its manifestations.

    In truth, Mr. Gates, this is what Israel is ‘known for’ to anyone who cares to pay attention. Allowing Bennett to present his country as a potential savior of humanity, while validating Israel with massive investments in ‘innovation’, mischaracterizes – in fact, invalidates – the entire global campaign to truly understand the nature of the problem at hand.

    Those who are hurting the planet have no right to claim the role of being its saviors. Israel, in its current violent state, is the enemy of the environment, and this is what it truly should be ‘known for’.

    The post Bill Gates Should Know Better: How the Israeli Occupation Ravages the Environment in Palestine  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • News: Access to water is a human right. When will the U.S. government agree?

    Martha F. Davis, Access to water is a human right. When will the U.S. government agree?, WBUR (Nov. 3, 2021). Excerpt below: “Water is life, and water policy should be a central concern of nations as they gather for the…

    This post was originally published on Human Rights at Home Blog.

  • Sewage in our waters

    Video transcript

    What a load of sh*t!

    Last week, MPs voted down an amendment to the Environment Bill tabled in the House of Lords. The amendment called for a new duty on water companies to reduce the amount of sewage dumped into our rivers.

    The issue centres on storm overflows in two different parts of the system. Older sewer systems combine surface water and ‘foul’ water from people’s homes. The water is then moved to a water recycling centre to be ‘treated’. This becomes an issue during heavy storms. In the event of a storm, excess water is released into rivers or the sea when the system becomes overwhelmed.

    Over the course of 2020, raw sewage was dumped 400,000 times.

    It’s important to note, that whilst the combined sewage system will sometimes dispose of unclean water into our seas to stop flooding on the streets, voting down a legal obligation for corporations to not pollute our rivers allows them to do as they please with no consequences.

    It’s no surprise that England is ranked last on bathing water quality in Europe. According to the European environment information and observation network, 100% of Cyprus’s bathing water was deemed excellent, compared to us with 17.2%.

    In 1991, the EU created the Urban Waste Water Directive that was designed to protect the water environment from urban waste water that is discharged from cities and the industrial sector.

    Now that the UK has left the EU, there is no floor when it comes to regulation. In-fact, some rules have already been relaxed after The Environment Agency has announced that this will be the case on the regulations around discharging water.

    In the last 10 years, dividends of £13.4bn have been paid out by private water companies. In the last year alone the top nine company directors have received an 8.8% pay increase.

    The CEOs at Severn Trent were the highest paid with £2.4 million in salaries.

    Scottish Water, which is publicly owned, is more equal with the highest paid director earning £366,000.

    Astonishingly, since 1991 English water companies have paid dividends totaling £57bn. As CEO wages have grown, the water and sewage system has been neglected.

    The water industry was privatised by Thatcher in 1989, with the government apparently writing off all the debts. However, analysis by Karol Yearwood shows 10 water companies had accrued a £51bn industry net debt balance as of 2018, which is close to the £57bn given to shareholders… Public debt is private gain.

    In contrast, the publicly owned Scottish Water has invested 35% per household more than English private companies.

    Whilst the borrowed money should have been spent on infrastructure and quality control, once again the shareholders enriched themselves, another classic result of privatisation. The easy solution, of course, is to make the companies pay and renationalise them.

    With the UK playing host to the UN’s global climate summit in Glasgow, it’s high time Westminster got their house in order rather than literally allowing our environment to go to sh*t.

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • If All Refugees Lived in One Place, It Would Be the 17th Most Populous Country in the World

    Jaime de Guzman (Philippines), Metamorphosis II, 1970.

    On 5 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a historic, non-legally binding resolution that ‘recognises the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights’. Such a right should force governments who sit at the table at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow later this month to think about the grievous harm caused by the polluted system that shapes our lives. In 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) pointed out that 92% of the world’s population breathes toxic air quality; in the developing world, 98% of children under five are inflicted with such bad air. Polluted air, mostly from carbon emissions, results in 13 deaths per minute globally.

    Such UN resolutions can have an impact. In 2010, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution for the ‘human right to water and sanitation’. As a result, several countries – such as Mexico, Morocco, Niger, and Slovenia, to name a few – added this right to water into their constitutions. Even if these are somewhat limited regulations – with little incorporation of wastewater management and culturally appropriate means for water delivery – they have nonetheless had an immediate, positive effect with thousands of households now connected to drinking water and sewage lines.

    Kim in Sok (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), Rain Shower at the Bus Stop, 2018.

    A major area of futility in our time is that produced by the roaring sound of hunger that afflicts one in three people on the planet. On the occasion of World Food Day, seven media outlets – ARG Medios, Brasil de Fato, Breakthrough News, Madaar, New Frame, Newsclick, and Peoples Dispatch – jointly produced a booklet called Hunger in the World looking at the state of hunger in countries across the world, how this was influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and what people’s movements have done to respond to this catastrophic reality. The closing essay features a speech given by Abahlali baseMjondolo’s president S’bu Zikode. ‘It is morally wrong and unjust for people to starve in the most productive economy in human history’, Zikode said. ‘There are more than enough resources to feed, house and educate every human being. There are enough resources to abolish poverty. But these resources are not used to meet people’s needs; instead, they are used to control poor countries, communities, and families’.

    In the introduction to Hunger in the World, written by Zoe Alexandra and Prasanth R of Peoples Dispatch and me, we looked at the state of hunger today and how we got there, as well a vision for the future being created by people’s movements in the fissures of the present. Below is a brief extract from our introduction.

    In May 1998, Cuba’s president Fidel Castro attended the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. This is an annual meeting held by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Castro focused his attention on hunger and poverty, which he said were the cause of so much suffering. ‘Nowhere in the world’, he said, ‘in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet’.

    Two years after Castro made this speech, the WHO’s World Health Report accumulated data on hunger-related deaths. It added up to just over nine million deaths per year, six million of them children under the age of five. This meant that 25,000 people were dying of hunger and poverty each day. These numbers far exceeded the number of those killed in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, whose death toll is calculated to be around half a million people. Attention is paid to the genocide – as it should be – but not to the genocide of impoverished people through hunger-related deaths. This is why Castro made his comments at the assembly.

    Elisabeth Voigt (Germany), The Peasant War, c. 1930.

    In 2015, the United Nations adopted a plan to meet certain Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. The second goal is to ‘end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture’. That year, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) began to track a rise in the absolute number of hungry people around the world. Six years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has shattered an already fragile planet, intensifying the existing apartheids of the international capitalist order. The world’s billionaires have increased their wealth tenfold, while the majority of humankind has been forced into a day-to-day, meal-to-meal survival.

    In July 2020, Oxfam released a report called The Hunger Virus, which – using World Food Programme data – found that up to 12,000 people a day ‘could die from hunger linked to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic before the end of the year, perhaps more than will die each day from the disease by that point’. In July 2021, the UN announced that the world is ‘tremendously off track’ to meet its SDGs by 2030, citing that ‘more than 2.3 billion people (or 30% of the global population) lacked year-round access to adequate food’ in 2020, which constitutes severe food insecurity.

    The FAO’s report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021, notes that ‘nearly one in three people in the world (2.37 billion) did not have access to adequate food in 2020 – an increase of almost 320 million people in just one year’. Hunger is intolerable. Food riots are now in evidence, most dramatically in South Africa. ‘They are just killing us with hunger here’, said one Gauteng resident who was motivated to join the July unrest. These protests, as well as the new data released by the UN and International Monetary Fund, have put hunger back on the global agenda.

    Numerous international agencies have released reports with similar findings, showing that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has solidified the trend of growing hunger and food insecurity. Many, however, stop there, leaving us with the feeling that hunger is inevitable, and that it will be the international institutions with their credit, loans, and aid programmes that will solve this dilemma of humanity.

    Teodor Rotrekl (Czechoslovakia), Untitled, 1960s.

    But hunger is not inevitable: it is, as S’bu Zikode reminded us, a decision of capitalism to put profit before people, allowing swaths of the global population to remain hungry while one third of all food produced is wasted, all while liberalised trade and speculation in the production and distribution of food create serious distortions.

    Jerzy Nowosielski (Poland), Lotnisko wielkie (‘Large Airport’), 1966.

    Billions of people struggle to maintain the basic structures of life in a system of profit that denies them the necessary social anchors. Hunger and illiteracy provide evidence of the crushing sadness of our planet. No wonder so many people are on the road, refugees of one kind or another, refugees from hunger and refugees from the rising waters.

    By the UN count alone, there are now nearly 83 million displaced people, who – if they all lived in one place – would make up the 17th most populous country in the world. This number does not include climate refugees – whose plight is not going to be part of the COP26 climate discussions – nor does it include the millions of internally displaced people fleeing conflict and economic convulsions.

    In 1971, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, rattled by the war in Biafra, published a poem called ‘Refugee Mother and Child’ in his 1971 book, Beware, Soul Brother. The beauty of this poem lingers in our wretched world:

    No Madonna and Child could touch
    that picture of a mother’s tenderness
    for a son she soon would have to forget.
    The air was heavy with odours

    of diarrhoea of unwashed children
    with washed-out ribs and dried-up
    bottoms struggling in laboured
    steps behind blown empty bellies. Most

    mothers there had long ceased
    to care but not this one; she held
    a ghost smile between her teeth
    and in her eyes the ghost of a mother’s
    pride as she combed the rust-coloured
    hair left on his skull and then –

    singing in her eyes – began carefully
    to part it… In another life this
    would have been a little daily
    act of no consequence before his
    breakfast and school; now she

    did it like putting flowers
    on a tiny grave.

    The powerful look at the homeless and hungry in the countryside and cities of our planet with revulsion. They would prefer to be shielded from that sight by high walls and armed guards. Basic human feeling – which saturate Achebe’s poem – is suffocated with great effort. But the homeless and the hungry are our fellows, at one time held in the arms of their parents with tenderness, loved in the way we need to learn to love one another.

    The post If All Refugees Lived in One Place, It Would Be the 17th Most Populous Country in the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Puerto Ricans Fight Privatization of Energy and Demand Democratic Ownership

    A person waves a flag reading "Fuera Luma" (Luma out) during a demonstration to mark May Day, or International Workers' Day, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 1, 2021.

    Neoliberalism is not dead — it’s simply mutating. Austerity politics and privatization have been repackaged as public-private partnerships and forced upon communities without their consent. Growing communal resistance to corporate capitalism has emerged in different ways and in different places. One such place is Puerto Rico.

    Puerto Ricans, both on the island and in the diaspora, have been mounting fierce resistance to the privatization of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. Residents have been experiencing widespread power outages, utility price hikes, voltage fluctuations (power surges that damage appliances) and a plethora of ongoing issues since the start of the public-private partnership between Luma Energy — the U.S.-Canadian company that seized control of the island’s power transmission and distribution system — and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) — the island’s public energy corporation, which is in charge of power generation.

    On October 15, demonstrators blocked Puerto Rico Highway 18 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, calling much attention to insistent blackouts and the 15-year contract between Luma Energy and PREPA. Despite reports of flagrant disinformation and other peculiar obstructions, thousands of Puerto Ricans marched down the usually busy highway waving flags, carrying banners — one of which read “¡LUMA se va pa’l carajo!” (“LUMA go to hell”) — and illuminating their path with phone flashlights because, for some odd reason, the light posts lining Puerto Rico Highway 18 were not on. (Latino Rebels reported that they “were working fine before the march.”)

    Six days earlier, protesters staged a demonstration in Aguadilla and held another one in San Juan on October 1. Residents of Puerto Rico protested again on October 18 at the Capitol of Puerto Rico in San Juan where they demanded an end to the U.S. plan to make cuts to social services, public education and pensions. Back in the mainland United States, Puerto Ricans in the diaspora held solidarity protests. Some gathered in New York City at Union Square and demanded the ouster of Luma Energy. Demonstrators everywhere echoed the popular rallying cry “Fuera Luma,” (Luma Out).

    A Doomed Neoliberal Framework

    The Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, colloquially known as “La Junta,” has been the driving force behind the contract between Luma Energy and PREPA. In 2016, the Obama administration signed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) which created the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board and tasked it with restructuring the island’s $72 billion debt. The result? Brutal austerity measures have gutted the public sector and transformed Puerto Rico into a neoliberal fantasyland — imperiling pensions and foreclosing countless schools to make way for charters. Since its takeover, Luma Energy has imposed four electricity rate increases despite not being able to provide adequate service. At one point, the energy corporation attempted to bill consumers 16 percent more for electricity before the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau declined Luma Energy’s request and approved a 3 percent increase instead.

    PREPA itself is shouldering a debt of over $9 billion — hence why the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board forced a public-private partnership onto the people of Puerto Rico. The public corporation, like most publicly owned electric utilities, has relied on a centralized energy system. Many of the power plants in Puerto Rico are located along the southern coast of the island. This means that transmission and distribution lines stretch across long tracts of land to reach mountainous regions and metropolitan areas like San Juan, which is why the transmission and distribution system is vulnerable to hurricanes.

    Ruth Santiago, a lawyer and environmental justice advocate based in Salinas, Puerto Rico, analogized the transmission and distribution system in an interview with Truthout: “If you order something online and have it delivered, do you think you should pay as much for delivery as the value of the contents? That’s what the LUMA contract is all about — it’s about paying for energy delivery.”

    As of October 18, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stands to fund almost $10 billion toward unsustainable energy infrastructure in Puerto Rico. The contract between Luma Energy and PREPA indicates that the two corporations plan on using the FEMA funds to consolidate transmission projects. This move would be detrimental to the people of Puerto Rico who are already suffering the effects of a failing electrical grid.

    In an interview with Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), Columbia University professor Ed Morales — journalist and author of the book Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico — described the situation: “And because of the imposition of the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board, it’s taken away so much of the agency of the government itself on the island, because all of its moves have to be approved by the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board.… Democracy has become kind of a joke on the island, because there’s a delegitimization that happens with the Oversight Board.”

    The median household income in Puerto Rico is $20,500, and 43.5 percent of the island’s population lives in poverty. In recent years, it has been battered by hurricanes and earthquakes. Puerto Ricans remember the devastation after Hurricane Maria, which killed 2,975 people.

    The Fiscal Oversight and Management Board is defunding municipalities and the University of Puerto Rico in the interest of bondholders and Wall Street vulture funds. Unemployment is soaring. Tax incentives are benefiting high-yield individuals, exacerbating inequity, increasing the cost of housing and pushing locals out of Puerto Rico. Funding for Medicaid and Medicare has also dwindled. And the island’s historically public beaches are under constant threat from private interests.

    The Insistence of Austerity Politics

    A larger struggle is being waged in different ways and different places against the iniquitous push toward the privatization of utilities. Resistance has come in the form of immense demonstrations as well as small-scale protests, both of which have highlighted the structural faults of privately owned essential utilities. Privateers have hollowed out the public sector and sold off public goods in order to secure self-serving windfalls. Privatized services are often insufficient and plagued by corporate malfeasance. Under private ownership, essential utilities are beholden to their shareholders and charge more for services that are not necessarily better than those offered by public enterprises.

    Some have raised concerns about this model because public enterprises like PREPA are corporatized and can be just as bureaucratic or managerial as private corporations. Structurally, the corporatized public sector is loosely democratic. However, this does not mean that public enterprises have sufficient community representation. In PREPA’s case, the publicly owned utility has an executive (José Ortiz, whose salary is $250,000, according to The Nation) and mirrors the top-down structure of Luma Energy.

    Public utilities typically offer reliable service at an affordable rate, and public ownership has been used for place-based economic development programs, some of which include low-income housing credits and job creation. When Luma Energy came along, the two corporations merged and became a singular monopoly that is now motivated by profit. In other words, it is no longer serving the public interest; Luma Energy is beholden to its investors, not the people of Puerto Rico.

    Moreover, publicly owned utilities do not always serve the public interest. PREPA, for instance, could be doing more to implement democratic principles that would allow for true democratic public ownership. “PREPA needs to be radically transformed,” Santiago told Truthout. “People who are vested in public service [and the public interest] should have a voice in PREPA governance.”

    Global Resistance

    Globally there has been mounting evidence that the push toward privatization of utilities like water and electricity has been characterized by resource extractivism, corporate profits and systemic racism. Resistance in Puerto Rico is only one example of the struggle against austerity politics and private ownership worldwide. Multinational corporations are threatening the public’s access to essential utilities, and communities are coming together to resist capitalist exploitation.

    The United States’ electric system is mostly owned by “investor-owned utilities” (for-profit electric distributors) which account for the majority of the nation’s transmission and distribution apparatus. Despite this, state-level campaigns in favor of democratic public ownership have occurred in California, Rhode Island and Maine, among other states, regions and locales.

    In Minnesota, Indigenous Water Protectors protesting the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline encountered “corporate counterinsurgency” when the private oil company coordinated with local law enforcement to quell the protests, The Intercept reported. Blockadia activists frequently find themselves at the forefront of conflicts between corporate privateers and communities demanding control of their utilities. On October 11, another front emerged in Washington, D.C. during a week of Indigenous-led civil disobedience dubbed “People vs. Fossil Fuels,” where law enforcement arrested more than 530 climate activists who called on the Biden administration to declare a climate emergency and stop approving fossil fuel projects.

    In the United Kingdom, private sector energy suppliers dominate the utilities industry. These suppliers have been reluctant to invest in renewable energy infrastructure. In fact, they only did so when they received public funding, The Guardian reported.

    Germany and France have made significant strides toward re-municipalization (also called re-nationalization or re-communalization). Germany established public energy corporations called Stadtwerke and France owns the majority of a nuclear electric power generation company called EdF. Both countries receive two-thirds of their electricity from public enterprise.

    In Nigeria, residents of Lagos have been resisting government-led efforts to privatize the city’s water supply. The ongoing struggle has persisted in the face of growing pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to privatize water in Lagos and throughout the African continent.

    On October 13, Our Water, Our Right Africa Coalition demanded that national and municipal governments resist the marketization of water during the “Africa Week of Action Against Water Privatisation.” Anti-privatization activists and Water Protectors from across the continent identified the looming, iniquitous threat posed by water privateers. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund held their annual meetings from October 11 to October 17. Organizers planned the Africa Week of Action during this time frame in an effort to offset the institutions’ support for water privatization schemes across Africa. In doing so, grassroots organizations deepened connections among several countries that have been facing many of the same water supply struggles.

    “Corporate capitalism is economically, ecologically and socially inequitable and unsustainable, and we need to move to a new economic model that’s based on different forms of institutions,” Thomas Hanna, research director at The Democracy Collaborative, told Truthout. He is the author of Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States. His research has focused on democratic models of ownership and governance in the public sector. Hanna explained that the global re-municipalization movement, which includes campaigns in North America and Europe as well, is more fundamentally rooted in Indigenous resistance to austerity politics and privatization in the Global South following the turn of the century. He went on to say that democratic public ownership is structurally obligated to meet people’s needs.

    “The great benefit of public ownership is that it’s an inherently flexible ownership form really can be set up and established for whatever purposes or community or a policy wants,” Hanna said. “You’re just never going to get there with private ownership, [it does not] have the same incentive structure.”

    Energy Democracy

    Johana Bozuwa, former comanager of the Climate and Energy Program at The Democracy Collaborative, wrote that energy democracy “seeks to take on the political and economic change needed to tackle the energy transition holistically.” She believes “a democratic energy approach powered by renewables … would distribute wealth, power, and decision-making equitably.” This approach emphasizes the need for public ownership because publicly owned utilities can be democratized — owned and operated by local residents.

    Bozuwa asserts that broad participation is possible in a democratic and decentralized energy system, arguing that multi-stakeholder groups of workers, grassroots organizers, local officials and members of the community can pave the way toward shared governance that gives all voices a seat at the table. She believes that this model, which seeks to center transparency and equity, would also make avenues for decision-making widely accessible.

    “It’s a balancing act,” Hanna told Truthout. “You have to balance decentralization with the need for higher levels of coordination and planning and control.”

    Grassroots organizations like the environmental justice coalition Queremos Sol (We Want Sun) have voiced their support for a rapid transition to decentralized, renewable energy infrastructure. This transition would involve a widespread democratization of Puerto Rico’s energy system. Decentralizing the electrical grid in Puerto Rico would bypass the structurally flawed transmission and distribution system and eliminate transmission costs. This, in turn, would “provide ratepayers with accessible, reliant and resilient energy,” according to a legal testimony co-authored by Santiago.

    Queremos Sol outlined the viability and advantages of rooftop solar:

    The use of the sun is technologically and economically viable in Puerto Rico. Priority should be given to this “rooftop resource” at the residential, commercial and industrial level, which with distributed and adequate storage, will create no grid-interconnection problems…. Where roof space is not available, large-scale solar facilities can be constructed in suitable areas.

    Suitable areas include parking lots and contaminated lands known as “brownfields,” both of which offer the open space needed for the construction of solar arrays. The Queremos Sol proposal features a number of strategies that would help facilitate decentralization. One of these strategies is providing technical assistance with microgrid development. Microgrids are decentralized groups of energy sources that can operate autonomously from a centralized electrical grid. They tend to be most efficient because of their ability to function in the absence of a transmission system, which is structurally vulnerable to climate-related grid disruption events like hurricanes and earthquakes. Another strategy involves establishing financial and legal structures that support local ownership of solar power. Queremos Sol has also proposed progressive equity initiatives that would provide opportunities for low- and middle-income individuals to establish solar communities.

    In an article about FEMA’s responsibility to “avoid a multi-billion-dollar mistake,” law professors Patrick Parentau and Rachel Stevens wrote that, “investing in solar and wind power and energy efficiency could transform Puerto Rico’s electrical system into a resilient grid,” citing a 2015 study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

    During a House Committee on Natural Resources hearing on October 6, Congress probed the public-private partnership’s failures to provide reliable electricity to residents of Puerto Rico. Two congresswomen pressed Luma Energy CEO Wayne Stensby about the company’s highest salaries to no avail. Stensby has refused to disclose the salaries of employees (more so executives) making more than $200,000 and $500,000 despite repeated calls to do so; Luma Energy executives make $325 per hour, according to Puerto Rico-based journalist Bianca Graulau.

    Santiago told the House Committee on Natural Resources that PREPA could use the allocation from FEMA to acquire rooftop solar, which would provide “life-saving resiliency” to the people of Puerto Rico — something that the current energy system simply cannot offer.

    “Primarily, the LUMA contract right now is the largest obstacle we’re seeing for integration of renewables,” Santiago said at the October 6 hearing. “[Luma Energy wants] to rebuild the old 20th-century transmission system that will be knocked down by the next hurricane, and that’s taxpayer money to the tune of $9.6 billion or more that will be wasted.”

    Moreover, the Queremos Sol proposal aligns with the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda. FEMA funds are “already earmarked for the electric system, but not for specific projects yet,” Santiago told Truthout. “The Biden administration has the opportunity to weigh in on whether the projects … comply with [its] policies.”

    Although re-nationalization seems to be on the rise, transferring privately owned utilities to public hands is a narrow reform compared to what is necessary to usurp the prevailing neoliberal order. There are a multitude of fronts where this pushback is taking place. The people are resisting the privatization, corporatization, liberalization and marketization of essential utilities. They are defending basic human rights, urging governments to act swiftly on climate change and reclaiming democratic control.

    This collection of global voices is reverberating at the highest levels — challenging an economic model that continues to subject the public to maldevelopment, colonization and exploitation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Probing the wounds of a scarred country

    Wounded Country is a provocative record of voices from the frontline of the land and water grab of the past two centuries, writes Tracey Carpenter.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Lead Pipes Leave Benton Harbor, Michigan, With Toxic Water

    Residents of Benton Harbor, Michigan, are calling for immediate action on replacing the city’s lead pipes, which have endangered their drinking water. Since 2018, tap water in the predominantly Black city has contained lead levels up to 60 times the federal limit. Yet government officials have only addressed the toxic contamination as an urgent crisis in recent days. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician who exposed a similar water crisis in the neighboring city of Flint, sees parallels between the two emergencies. “Every day that goes by when there is lead in the water is one day too long for the children of Benton Harbor,” she says. Reverend Edward Pinkney, president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, emphasizes that racism plays a major role in the government’s slow response. He says, “Since it’s Benton Harbor, a Black city, they figure this can continue.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    Officials in Michigan have warned residents in the predominantly Black city of Benton Harbor not to use tap water for drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth, due to lead contamination. Tap water in the city has contained lead levels up to 60 times the federal limit since 2018. Advocates are calling for officials to declare a state of emergency and for the EPA to intervene. Free cases of water are being given out to households, but some distribution sites don’t have enough water to meet the demand. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has now vowed to remove and replace lead pipes in the city within 18 months. Up until recently, Whitmer had been saying the process could take five years.

    The situation in Benton Harbor is being compared to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, that began in 2014 when the city’s unelected emergency manager, appointed by then-Republican Governor Rick Snyder, switched the city’s water supply to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure. The move has been linked to at least 12 deaths, from an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, and widespread lead poisoning in residents, including children, in the majority-Black city of Flint. The water crisis in Benton Harbor comes as Congress is considering a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes $55 billion to replace lead pipes and for other measures to ensure drinking water supplies.

    We’re joined now by two guests. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a Flint-based pediatrician whose 2015 study revealed Flint’s children had high levels of lead in their blood. And in Benton Harbor, Michigan, we’re joined by the Reverend Edward Pinkney, president of the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, executive director of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization.

    Reverend Pinkney, let’s begin with you. Can you lay out the extent of the problem? You had top state officials, like the governor, coming in last Thursday to say they will deal with this. But this is a story, once again, like Flint, that has been going on for years.

    REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: Absolutely. And let me start at the very beginning, how all this came about. How it came about was that one of the Benton Harbor community members of the council took two jugs of water to the mayor of Benton Harbor to let him know that in this one square block everybody’s water was this color. And when they took it, he refused to even look at it. Once he didn’t look at it, Emma Kinnard brought it to me, and I sent it to the University of Michigan biological lab to have it tested. And it came back with over 300 parts per billion of lead. That’s how all of this started.

    We went out and helped the city of Benton Harbor to test the water to make sure they have at least 60 samples. They had never had 60 samples at this time, so we went out and did it for them, which is so, so important because if they don’t have 60 samples, they’ll just be out of compliance with the state. That’s all it means. But if they have 60 samples, they can say that — you know, whether the water is bad or not. So, that was crucial.

    For three years, it was like this. Nobody said nothing. The elected officials, the governor officials, the EPA — nobody said a mum word. But what happened on September the 9th, we filed a petition. That petition was a — what do you call — a state of emergency with the federal government. And after filing that, they started to move, and which was so, so important because if we had not filed that petition, you know, we wouldn’t be talking today, and, yet and still, it would maybe be another three or four years that the residents of Benton Harbor would be drinking that tainted water, which is so, so crucial. The governor would have did exactly nothing without that petition. And also, this is an election year for her, so that is crucial.

    And let me say something about the bottled water that’s being distributed. Thirty thousand cases is being distributed in Benton Harbor, but 25,000 is going to the surrounding areas. They are the ones coming to pick the water up. So, that is a major crisis that we need to talk about also. You can’t say that she’s putting 30,000 cases of water into Benton Harbor, when she’s allowing people from the surrounding areas to come and pick the water up. And I’m very, very, very upset about that. I cannot believe that they didn’t have a better system to make sure that everybody in Benton Harbor get fresh water.

    AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, you were the one who blew open the story of the lead poisoning of the people of Flint. We’re talking again about an overwhelmingly Black city, Flint and Benton Harbor. Can you talk about what you feel the state and the federal government needs to do? And describe the crisis right now in Benton Harbor.

    DR. MONA HANNA–ATTISHA: Yeah. First off, Amy, it’s great to be here with you, and it’s great to be here with Reverend Pinkney.

    REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: Thank you.

    DR. MONA HANNA–ATTISHA: He has done heroic work to elevate this issue.

    So, what the state and the federal government needs to do — and I was one of those folks that signed that petition — is to share, very clearly and transparently, in many different ways, that the water is not safe right now, and to provide alternative water. And right now that’s bottled water. And, you know, maybe it needs to be home delivered. We need to work with the community. We need to work with Reverend Pinkney and the folks on the ground to make sure that people have access to bottled water, because every day that goes by when there is lead in the water is one day too long for the children of Benton Harbor.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, describe what happened in Flint, the years, as you exposed this. This was under a Republican administration, you know, under Governor Snyder. And then talk about what’s happening in Benton Harbor.

    DR. MONA HANNA–ATTISHA: Yeah. So, Flint, as you mentioned earlier, was under this bizarre state of usurped democracy: We were under emergency management. And their goal was austerity, to save money. And that’s how our water source was changed in Flint from the Great Lakes to the Flint River without proper treatment. So, for about a year and a half, the people of Flint, like the people of Benton Harbor, were saying, “Hey, there’s something wrong with my water. Please do something with my water.” Moms would bring jugs of brown water to town hall meetings, and they would be dismissed and denied for a long time, until, finally, we brought the science to the table that kids were in harm’s way. And it took a while. There was a bit of backlash, but the state finally conceded.

    And now in Benton Harbor, we have amazing folks that are also sharing, “Hey, there’s something wrong with our water.” And also, interestingly, Benton Harbor was also one of the cities in Michigan that lost democracy. It was also another city that was under emergency management. And if you remember, in Michigan, at one point, half of our African American population was under emergency management, where there was unelected, unaccountable officials that were running these cities. And, you know, let this be another lesson of the consequences of taking away people’s democracy and taking away their voices. It impacts health.

    So, in Benton Harbor, there wasn’t a water switch. It’s hard to tell when their crisis happened. But for six consecutive sampling periods, which is about three-and-a-half years, the lead in their water has exceeded the EPA action level. And that EPA action level is not even a health-based standard. It’s just a compliance standard. So that’s even an underestimation of the amount of lead that has been in the water and the potential harm that it could be doing.

    AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Edward Pinkney, if you can talk about the two towns? Alex Kotlowitz eloquently wrote about it years ago in a book called The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma. It’s a story of overwhelmingly African American Benton Harbor and the white, wealthier St. Joseph. Talk about the difference.

    REV. EDWARD PINKNEY: There’s a major difference here. When you talk about St. Joseph, Michigan, they have nice, clean water. But at one time, they got their water from the city of Benton Harbor. Let me say this: Racism plays a major part in this. And when I talk about it, can you imagine a white woman with a baby getting on the camera in front of the news media, telling people that they had 889 parts per billion of lead in their water, and it’s killing her baby? They would send out the Army, FEMA, the Pentagon and all these different things.

    But since it’s Benton Harbor, a Black city, that they figure that, you know, that this can continue. If we had not filed that petition — and I thank Dr. Mona for partnering, for joining us with that, because that was tremendous — we wouldn’t even be talking today about this, because this is one thing that they allow. Flint, Michigan, Benton Harbor, in their eyesight, it’s all right.

    But it’s not all right. We have to change and let them know that no city in the United States of America should be suffering from water. Water is life. You cannot live without water. And the racism that exists on this part is outstanding, because nobody really cares. You see, nobody cares about Benton Harbor. Nobody cares about Flint, Michigan. Flint, Michigan, is still having the same problem they had years ago. But we have to make sure that we’re doing what we’re supposed to do to make sure this never, ever, ever happens to another city.

    AMY GOODMAN: Many top state officials were indicted for what happened in Flint. For example, the governor, Rick Snyder, ultimately was indicted. Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, if you can talk about what took place? And explain what lead poisoning does and why children are particularly vulnerable.

    DR. MONA HANNA–ATTISHA: Yeah, I’l start with that. So, you know, when I heard about the possibility of lead in Flint’s water, that’s when my heart stopped, my life changed, because, as a pediatrician, we know what lead does. It’s a irreversible, potent neurotoxin. It especially impacts developing children. It erodes cognition, so actually lowers IQ levels. It impacts behavior and development, causing learning problems, attention problems, focusing problems, causes growth problems and hearing problems. And we now know that kids exposed to lead can present later on in life with things like high blood pressure and kidney disease and gout, and even things like early dementia and Alzheimer’s. Incredible science has taught us that — especially over the last few decades, that there is no safe level of lead — none, zero. Levels we thought were OK, you know, decades ago, we now know are not OK.

    And what we’re supposed to be doing, what the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Health Organization recommend, is this concept of primary prevention. We are supposed to find lead in the environment before children are exposed. Yet for decades, and maybe centuries, we have failed at this. We have lacked the political will to dig up those lead pipes, to fix up the old homes where there’s still lead paint, to clean up the soil where we have remnants of lead in gasoline, and protect our children, and especially our most vulnerable children.

    Lead is a classic form, like Reverend Pinkney mentioned, of environmental racism. And we’ve known that also for decades. It continues to be children who are predominantly poor, but predominantly people of color, who are disproportionately burdened by environmental contamination like lead. Flint kids, just like Detroit kids and Chicago kids and Benton Harbor kids and Philadelphia kids, these are kids that already have higher rates of lead and are also already burdened with so many other toxicities of life that make it hard for them to be healthy and succeed.

    So, if we are serious about being antiracist, if we are serious about eliminating inequities, one of the first things that we should be doing is getting rid of the lead in our environment. And I’m hopeful. I am hopeful that the infrastructure bill will finally get rid of these poisonous — and you can think of them as straws, like our children have been drinking through poison straws across this country. You know, Flint was just the tip of the iceberg. And I’ve probably spent half my time working with other communities, because the story keeps repeating. And I hope this story in Benton Harbor is the last story. And we can actually — we can make it the last story if we finally pass the infrastructure bill.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank Reverend Edward Pinkney for joining us, president of Benton Harbor Community Water Council. And, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, I’d like you to stay on as we move to the issue of COVID.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Captives of Coca-Cola

    Ad for Coca-Cola on wall

    In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.

    The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.

    Health impacts

    Coca-Cola was first marketed in 1886. The name refers to two of the original ingredients – coca leaves, which are the source of cocaine, and kola nuts, which contain caffeine. Both are addictive. Since 1904 the coca leaves used have been not fresh but ‘spent’ – left over after the cocaine extraction process is complete. However, despite claims to the contrary, they still contain traces of cocaine.

    This daily dose of Coca-Cola taken by residents of San Cristobal contains a whole pound of sugar. So it should be no surprise that each year over 3,000 of them die of diabetes. It’s an unpleasant way to die. Typical symptoms are frequent urination, hunger and thirst (despite eating and drinking), fatigue, blurred vision, slow-healing sores, recurrent infections, tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands or feet, sunken eyes, rapid breathing, headache, muscle aches, dehydration, nausea, stomach pain and cramping, vomiting, cerebral edema, and coma.

    Besides diabetes, excessive sugar causes obesity, tooth decay, and fatty liver disease and increases the risk of strokes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers who estimated the burden of disease associated with consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in 2010 found such consumption responsible for 184,000 deaths a year — 133,000 from diabetes, 45,000 from heart disease, 6,500 from cancer.

    These deaths were concentrated in high-income (24%) and especially medium-income (71%) countries. SSBs accounted for the highest proportion of all deaths – 12% — in Mexico, rising to 30% in Mexicans under the age of 45. In 2014 Mexico overtook the United States in per capita SSB consumption. In that year Mexicans drank on average 106 liters of Coca-Cola, Americans 99.5.

    Sugar, moreover, is not the only harmful ingredient in Coca-Cola. There is also caffeine, which raises blood pressure and can cause dehydration as well as urinary and respiratory problems. There is phosphoric acid, which like sugar causes tooth decay, slows down digestion, may produce kidney failure or kidney stones, and impedes the absorption of calcium by the bones, leading to osteoporosis. Finally, the caramel used to color the drink is carcinogenic.

    Why do they drink so much Coca-Cola?

    Observers talk about ‘addiction’ to Coca-Cola, and it does contain three addictive substances – cocaine, caffeine, and sugar. It is also said that Coca-Cola has become an integral part of the local culture in Chiapas. Many indigenous people believe that Coca-Cola can heal the sick. The BBC documentary features a ‘healer’ sacrificing a chicken to ‘Goddess Maria’ together with an offering of Coca-Cola.

    However, framing the problem in terms of addiction or ‘culture’ gives the impression that it might be solved with the aid of therapy and health education. This is not the case. The residents of San Cristobal have no real choice. Even those fully aware of the ham done to their health by imbibing huge quantities of Coca-Cola have no better alternative. After all, they need to drink water and Coca-Cola does at least contain clean water, drawn from a deep unpolluted aquifer.

    Is clean water available from any other source? Consider possible alternatives.

    The town has no wastewater treatment facilities. Untreated sewage goes straight into the waterways. This is the water that comes, now and then, from the faucet, contaminated by E. Coli and other pathogens:

    Symptoms of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) infection vary for each person, but often include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting. Some people may have a fever, which usually is not very high (less than 101˚F/38.5˚C). Most people get better within 5 to 7 days. Some infections are very mild, but others are severe or even life-threatening.

    What about the water trucks that occasionally pass through your neighborhood? I have information specifically about trucked water in San Cristobal, but here is an assessment of trucked water in Mexico City:

    Trucked water is often higher in quality than the city’s notorious tap water, but its quality does vary significantly. Many suppliers simply provide filtered tap water in steel trucks — and others may bring water of such poor quality that it is unsafe to drink.

    The situation in poverty-stricken San Cristobal is presumably worse than in the capital.

    If water from the faucet and trucked water are not safe options, then why not buy not Coca-Cola but bottled water drawn from the aquifer? And/or other drinks known to contain clean water — milk, fruit juice, beer?

    This would indeed be a sensible thing to do.

    But Esquire remarks, without further explanation, that bottled water is ‘hard to find.’ So, perhaps, are other clean-water drinks. Perhaps Coca-Cola is the only clean-water drink that is at all widely available in this town?

    In order to show why this may be so, I must go into the commercial aspect of the production and distribution of Coca-Cola in San Cristobal.

    The commercial aspect

    The Coca-Cola Company is a US-based multinational corporation. It produces not Coca-Cola but a syrup or paste concentrate that has to be diluted with water to make Coca-Cola. it sells the concentrate to bottling companies that make the Coca-Cola, bottle it, and sell it in various regions of the world to which they have bought exclusive rights.1 The bottling company that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in Mexico as well as nine other Latin American countries is FEMSA (a Spanish acronym for Mexican Economic Promotions). FEMSA is a Mexico-based multinational beverage and retail company. It is FEMSA that owns and operates the bottling plant in San Cristobal. It also owns retail chains, including OXXO, Mexico’s largest chain of convenience stores.

    Here again I have no information specific to San Cristobal, but a plausible reason why bottled water is ‘hard to find’ would be FEMSA’s ownership of the town’s retail stores. If one and the same company were to own the retail stores and the Coca-Cola bottling plant, it would hardly allow its stores to display drinks that would compete with Coca-Cola.

    In accordance with an old agreement between FEMSA and the Mexican federal government, the company pays for the water it takes from the aquifer at a very low rate – about 10 cents for every 260 gallons, which comes to $120 per day or $44,000 per year. Even this very modest payment goes to the federal not the local government and cannot be used for local needs. FEMSA offered to build a sewage treatment plant to provide 500 families with clean drinking water, but this token measure was abandoned when the company realized that it would not stop local protests.

    Why would the Mexican government allow this situation to continue? It may be recalled that Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico in 2000—2006, was a former chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company in Mexico. This fact suggests the political clout of the Coca-Cola business in Mexico.

    A clean-water monopoly

    Propagandists for capitalism like to dwell on the wide choice that ‘the market economy’ gives consumers. They forget to mention that this is true only of a competitive market and that most markets are no longer competitive. They are either oligopolistic, with a few big companies that conspire to limit consumer choice, or monopolistic, with a single company in a position to dictate terms to its customers.

    In a place like San Cristobal, a vital human need – clean water – has been turned into a commodity monopolized by a single supplier. This supplier exploits its monopoly position to compel residents to buy clean water from itself and mixed with other substances that destroy their health and doom many of them to an early and miserable death.

    End of the story?

    Climate change has brought a sharp and persistent reduction in rainfall to the Central Highlands of Chiapas State. Both surface and deep water sources are undergoing rapid depletion. If this continues for very long, the region will no longer be able to support a large population and most of the people of San Cristobal will join the swelling stream of environmental refugees. At a certain point, whether due to exhaustion of the aquifer or to the falling number of consumers, the making, bottling, and selling of Coca-Cola will cease to be a commercially viable operation. The managers of the plant will depart, well satisfied with the splendid job they have done for the shareholders of FEMSA.

    And so the story will end. Unless?

    1. A comrade was shown round a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant. When he entered the refrigerated room where the concentrate was stored, the stench was so overwhelming that he had to get out immediately. He felt that otherwise he would collapse.
    The post Captives of Coca-Cola first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Indigenous Coalition Tells Biden Communities Need Clean Water and Climate Action

    The words "Expect Us" are seen painted at the base of a statue of U.S. President Andrew Jackson during a climate march in honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day at in front of the White House on October 11, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    On the heels of President Joe Biden’s proclamation formally marking Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a coalition of Indigenous and environmental leaders on Sunday delivered a blunt message to the White House: “We don’t need performative proclamations, our communities are dying.”

    The Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) — a broad alliance of tribes, Indigenous rights groups, labor organizations, and others — said in a statement that since taking office earlier this year, “Biden has consistently fallen short of protecting the water that sustains all life on Mother Earth and continuously failed to honor our treaties.”

    Specifically, IEN pointed to the president’s refusal to block Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement project, which Indigenous groups have worked tirelessly to stop for years in the face of brutal police repression and arrests. Oil started flowing through the sprawling pipeline — which could have the equivalent climate impact of 50 new coal-fired power plants — earlier this month, and its opponents have vowed to keep up their legal and on-the-ground fights as the Biden administration continues to defend the tar sands project.

    “If President Biden was committed to honoring the treaties and strengthening sovereignty, he would implement a policy of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent by executive authority and act swiftly to mitigate the climate chaos that has engulfed our communities by ending the anti-Indigenous U.S. legacy of fossil fuel extractivism,” IEN said. “We have had enough of your empty words. Our communities need clean water, land returned, divestment from the fossil fuel industry, and healing from residential school traumas.”

    “Proclamations don’t erase the police surveillance of Indigenous peoples standing for our land and water, beatings, and imprisonment for those trying to stop pipelines, fracking, [liquefied natural gas], uranium, and other extractive industries from devastating our ecosystems and our bodies and violating our rights,” the coalition added. “No proclamations needed until there is justice for the original stewards of these lands.”

    IEN’s statement came just ahead of a five-day “People vs. Fossil Fuels” mobilization targeting the Biden White House over its inadequate climate policies.

    While Biden has promised to listen to the science and treat the climate crisis like an “existential threat,” he has continued to pursue drilling initiatives that could ramp up U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and intensify planetary warming.

    This week, according to organizers, thousands of Indigenous people and their allies in the climate movement are expected to descend on the White House and engage in “mass civil disobedience” to demand that Biden “declare a climate emergency and stop all new fossil fuel projects.”

    On Monday morning, IEN activists wrote “Expect Us” on the statue of Andrew Jackson in front of the White House.

    “Our people are older than the idea of the United States of America. We are the original stewards of this land and will continue to fight for the natural and spiritual knowledge of our Mother who sustains our life-ways,” IEN said in a statement Monday. “We are the grandchildren of the strong spirits who have survived your residential schools, your pipelines and mines, your reservations and relocation and your forced assimilation and genocide.”

    “We carry the prayers and intentions of our ancestors and are unafraid,” the group added. “Another world is possible, may all colonizers fall.”

  • Water As A Weapon Of War

    Masafer Yatta, Occupied West Bank – Last weekend, around 600 Israeli, Palestinian and international activists marched across Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank to deliver a water tanker to Palestinian villagers. Their message was clear: Water is a human right, and Israel is depriving Palestine of this basic necessity.

    Amid a sea of rippling Palestinian flags, demonstrators walked alongside a tractor transporting the water tanker from the village of At-Tuwani. The protesters did not reach their intended destination. Instead, they turned back at the village of Mfakara in order to avoid a confrontation with the Israeli Army waiting for them atop a nearby hill.

    “Water is a right for everyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white or Jewish or Arab,” ​​Adam Rabee — an activist with Combatants for Peace (CFP), one of the march’s organizers — told MintPress News.

    The post Water As A Weapon Of War appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.