Category Archives: State Crime

Gates Foundation’s Seed Agenda in Africa ‘Another Form of Colonialism,’ Warns Protesters

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‘This neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization poses a serious threat to food sovereignty and the ability of food producers and consumers to define their own food systems and policies,’ says campaigners

By Lauren McCauley

Source: CommonDreams.org

Food sovereignty activists are shining a light on a closed-door meeting between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which are meeting in London on Monday with representatives of the biotechnology industry to discuss how to privatize the seed and agricultural markets of Africa.

Early Monday, protesters picketed outside the Gates Foundation’s London offices holding signs that called on the foundation to “free the seeds.” Some demonstrators handed out packets of open-pollinated seeds, which served as symbol of the “alternative to the corporate model promoted by USAID and BMGF.” Others smashed a piñata, which they said represented the “commercial control of seed systems;” thousands of the seeds which filled the pinata spilled across the office steps. A similar protest is expected later Monday in Seattle, Washington, where BMGF is headquartered.

The meeting was convened to discuss a report put forth by Monitor-Deloitte, which was commissioned by BMGF and USAID to develop models for the commercialization of seed production in Africa, especially “early generation seed,” and to identify ways in which the African governmental sectors could facilitate private involvement in African seed systems. The study was conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zambia on maize, rice, sorghum, cowpea, common beans, cassava and sweet potato.

However, food sovereignty activists are sounding the alarm over the secret meeting. Heidi Chow, food sovereignty campaigner with Global Justice Now, which organized Monday’s protest, warned that the agenda being promoted by these stakeholders will only increase corporate control over seeds.

“This is not ‘aid’ – it’s another form of colonialism,” said Chow. “We need to ensure that the control of seeds and other agricultural resources stay firmly in the hands of small farmers who feed the majority of the population in Africa, rather than allowing big agribusiness to dominate even more aspects of the food system.”

In a blog post, Chow further explained:

For generations, small farmers have been able to save and swap seeds. This vital practice enables farmers to keep a wide range of seeds which helps maintain biodiversity and helps them to adapt to climate change and protect from plant disease. However, this system of seed saving is under threat by corporations who want to take more control over seeds. Big seed companies are keen to grow their market share of commercial seeds in Africa and alongside philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation and aid donors, they are discussing new ways to increase their market penetration of commercial seeds and displacing farmers own seed systems.

Corporate-produced hybrid seeds often produce higher yields when first planted, but the second generation seeds will produce low yields and unpredictable crop traits, making them unsuitable for saving and storing. This means that instead of saving seeds from their own crops, farmers who use hybrid seeds become completely dependent on the seed companies that sell them.

Further, many of the seeds produced by these biotechnology giants are sold alongside chemical fertilizer and pesticides, manufactured by the very same companies, the use of which often leads to widespread environmental destruction and other health problems.

As others noted, while the meeting attendees included representatives from the World Bank and Syngenta, the world’s third biggest seed and biotechnology company, no farmers or farming organizations were represented at the talks.

“Seeds are vital for our food system and our small farmers have always been able to save and swap seeds freely,” Ali-Masmadi Jehu-Appiah, chair of Food Sovereignty Ghana, said in a press statement. “Now our seed systems are increasingly under threat by corporations who are looking to take more control over seeds in their pursuit of profit. This meeting will push this corporate agenda to hand more control away from our small farmers and into the hands of big seed companies.”

Reporting on the Monitor-Deloitte study, Ian Fitzpatrick, a food sovereignty researcher for Global Justice Now, said that documents circulated ahead of the meeting revealed a neo-liberal agenda “laid bare.”

Fitzpatrick writes:

The report recommends that in countries where demand for patented seeds is weaker (i.e. where farmers are using their own seed saving networks), public-private partnerships should be developed so that private companies are protected from ‘investment risk’. It also recommends that that NGOs and aid donors should encourage governments to introduce intellectual property rights for seed breeders and help to persuade farmers to buy commercial, patented seeds rather than relying on their own traditional varieties.

Finally, in line with the broader neoliberal agenda of agribusiness companies across the world, the report suggests that governments should remove regulations (like export restrictions) so that the seed sector is opened up to the global market.

“This neoliberal agenda of deregulation and privatization, currently promoted in almost every sphere of human activity—from food production to health and education—poses a serious threat to food sovereignty and the ability of food producers and consumers to define their own food systems and policies,” Fitzpatrick adds.

AGRA Watch, a program of the grassroots group Community Alliance for Global Justice, notes that the BMGF-USAID commercial seed agenda further “extends U.S. foreign policy into Africa on behalf of corporate interests.”

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington added: “This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years—working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”

The Real Story Behind the Republicans’ Iran Letter

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By Gareth Porter

Source: Middle East Eye

The “open letter” from Senator Tom Cotton and 46 other Republican Senators to the leadership of Iran, which even Republicans themselves admit was aimed at encouraging Iranian opponents of the nuclear negotiations to argue that the United States cannot be counted on to keep the bargain, has created a new political firestorm. It has been harshly denounced by Democratic loyalists as “stunning” and “appalling”, and critics have accused the signers of the letter of being “treasonous” for allegedly violating a law forbidding citizens from negotiating with a foreign power.

But the response to the letter has primarily distracted public attention from the real issue it raises: how the big funders of the Likud Party in Israel control Congressional actions on Iran.

The infamous letter is a ham-handed effort by Republican supporters of the Netanyahu government to blow up the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran. The idea was to encourage Iranians to conclude that the United States would not actually carry out its obligations under the agreement – i.e. the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Cotton and his colleagues were inviting inevitable comparison with the 1968 conspiracy by Richard Nixon, through rightwing campaign official Anna Chenault, to encourage the Vietnamese government of President Nguyen Van Thieu to boycott peace talks in Paris.

But while Nixon was plotting secretly to get Thieu to hold out for better terms under a Nixon administration, the 47 Republican Senators were making their effort to sabotage the Iran nuclear talks in full public scrutiny. And the interest served by the letter was not that of a possible future president but of the Israeli government.

The Cotton letter makes arguments that are patently false. The letter suggested that any agreement that lacked approval of Congress “is a mere executive agreement”, as though such agreements are somehow of only marginal importance in US diplomatic history. In fact, the agreements on withdrawal of US forces from both the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq were not treaties but executive agreements.

Equally fatuous is the letter’s assertion that “future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time”. Congress can nullify the agreement by passing legislation that contradicts it but can’t renegotiate it. And the claim that the next president could “revoke the agreement with the stroke of a pen”, ignores the fact that the Iran nuclear agreement, if signed, will become binding international law through a United Nations Security Council resolution, as Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has pointed out.

The letter has provoked the charge of “treason” against the signers and a demand for charges against them for negotiating with a foreign government in violation of the Logan Act. In a little over 24 hours, more than 200,000 people had signed a petition on the White House website calling such charges to be filed.

But although that route may seem satisfying at first thought, it is problematic for both legal and political reasons. The Logan Act was passed in 1799, and has never been used successfully to convict anyone, mainly because it was written more than a century before US courts created legal standards for the protection of first amendment speech rights. And it is unclear whether the Logan Act was even meant to apply to members of Congress anyway.

AIPAC marching orders

The more serious problem with focusing on the Logan Act, however, is that what Cotton and his Republican colleagues were doing was not negotiating with a foreign government but trying to influence the outcome of negotiations in the interest of a foreign government. The premise of the Senate Republican reflected in the letter – that Iran must not be allowed to have any enrichment capacity whatever – did not appear spontaneously. The views that Cotton and the other Republicans have espoused on Iran were the product of assiduous lobbying by Israeli agents of influence using the inducement of promises of election funding and the threat of support for the members’ opponents in future elections.

Those members of Congress don’t arrive at their positions on issues related to Iran through discussion and debate among themselves. They are given their marching orders by AIPAC lobbyists, and time after time, they sign the letters and vote for legislation or resolution that they are given, as former AIPAC lobbyist MJ Rosenberg has recalled. This Israeli exercise of control over Congress on Iran and issues of concern to Israel resembles the Soviet direction of its satellite regimes and loyal Communist parties more than any democratic process, but with campaign contributions replacing the inducements that kept its bloc allies in line.

Cotton’s loyalty to Israel

Rosenberg has reasoned that AIPAC must have drafted the letter and handed it to Senator Cotton. “Nothing happens on Capitol Hill related to Israel,” he tweets, “unless and until Howard Kohr (AIPAC chief) wants it to happen. Nothing.” AIPAC apparently supported the letter, but there may be more to the story. Senator Cotton just happens to be a protégé of neoconservative political kingpin Bill Kristol, whose Emergency Committee on Israel gave him nearly a million dollars late in his 2014 Senate campaign and guaranteed that Cotton would have the support of the four biggest funders of major anti-Iran organisations.

Cotton proved his absolute fealty to Likudist policy on Iran by sponsoring an amendment to the Nuclear Iran Prevention Act of 2013 that would have punished violators of the sanctions against Iran with prison sentences of up to 20 years and extended the punishment to “a spouse and any relative, to the third degree” of the sanctions violator. In presenting the amendment in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Cotton provided the useful clarification that it would have included “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids”.

That amendment, which he apparently believed would best reflect his adoption of the Israeli view of how to cut Iran down to size, was unsuccessful, but it established his reliability in the eyes of the Republican Likudist kingmakers. Now Kristol is grooming him to be the vice-presidential nominee in 2016.

So the real story behind the letter from Cotton and his Republican colleagues is how the enforcers of Likudist policy on Iran used an ambitious young Republican politician to try to provoke a breakdown in the Iran nuclear negotiations. The issue it raises is a far more serious issue than the Logan Act, but thus far major news organisations have steered clear of that story.

– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

 

The ISIS Truth We Hide From

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Isis fighters, pictured on a militant website verified by AP.

By Bob Hennelly

Source: WhoWhatWhy

Identifying Terrorist Enemy No. 1—the Islamic State militants—is easy now, after a spate of horrific videos of beheadings and burnings.

But what’s hard for Western governments and the mainstream media is figuring out the popularity of this terror group among young western Muslims. Why do these people choose to leave the relative comforts of home and take up arms with IS militants? It’s as if these young people are from another planet.

Even after President Obama’s three-day White House Summit on Violent Extremism, few establishment “experts” and commentators seem ready to consider one possible answer: that it is the extreme militarism of the U.S. and its allies that helped spawn IS, and al Qaeda before that.

On the PBS NewsHour segment covering the White house confab, panelists were asked “why people are drawn to the kind of extremism we are seeing today?” The assembled pundits identified “local grievances” like “access to education and job opportunities” and faulted recruiting for “extreme ideology through books and social media.”

Yet there was no mention of U.S. drone strikes, prisoner rendition, torture, and the thousands of dead and wounded Muslim civilians. All of those factors have been exploited by ISIS and other violent groups to make their case that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam.

After several decades of self-proclaimed “nation building” and “exporting democracy” in the Middle East and its environs, the results are all too clear. There are shattered nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed states in Yemen, Libya and Syria, and more than a dozen African nations that the U.S. State Department concedes are under constant threat of attack by well-armed and organized terrorists.

Is it possible that what the U.S. has actually been doing in these hot spots is “terrorism building” and “exporting chaos”? Is this the awful truth the United States cannot bring itself to admit?

Massaging History

It would seem so, since instead of changing course, the U.S. is in the process of doubling down on its mistakes. How else to explain that the new GOP presidential hopeful, Jeb Bush, nonchalantly told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that “mistakes were made” in Iraq. He then proceeded to lay out his own plan for becoming the new global sheriff in town.

Here’s a jaw-dropping statement from that speech:

There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everybody embraced about weapons of mass destruction was not—turns out not to be accurate.

Watching his brother’s back, Jeb wove out of thin air a phony consensus that “everybody” signed on for the rationale for the Iraq war. That’s despite a vote in Congress in which 23 U.S. Senators and 133 House members opposed it.

You see, if “everybody” was wrong, then nobody was right. It should come as no surprise that Jeb’s team of policy wise men includes many Bush II veterans, among them the unrepentant Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

His Own Man, With an Old Plan

As much as Jeb Bush insists he is his own man, the audience in Chicago could hear echoes of his brother George’s cowboy-like approach. When Jeb was asked about how he would handle IS, he said he would develop a “global strategy” that would “tighten the noose” so he and the posse could “take them out.”

During Bush’s remarks, he took aim at the Obama administration for being too quick to disengage from the world and Iraq. He blamed Obama for creating a power vacuum that set the stage for the rise of IS and Iranian influence.

Yet an examination of President Obama’s new National Security Strategy, his proposed military budget and his request for his own War Powers re-authorization all indicate an administration that is prosecuting a global war on terror with unfettered latitude as to where and whom it targets.

Could it be that this “global war on terror,” whether it be the Bush 1.0 or Obama 2.0 version, may actually be what is proliferating the very thing it was aimed to eradicate?

One policy expert who dares to look deeper is Graham Fuller, a career CIA agent and analyst who was vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. Fuller says it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that set the stage for IS. By creating an endemically corrupt central government in Baghdad, notes Fuller, the American occupation provided a focal point to unite disparate opposition groups. As for the high-profile effort to train a new Iraqi army, that “security” force collapsed the moment its U.S. handlers left. (In an odd twist to an already bizarre security meta-narrative, Fuller’s former son-in-law is the uncle of accused Boston Marathon Bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.)

***

In linking Washington’s Middle Eastern policies to the rise of terrorist groups in the region, MIT professor Noam Chomsky takes it even further back. He says the roots start with the U.S. support of Iraq in its brutal war with Iran in the 1980s, and include the draconian economic sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In Chomsky’s view, these sanctions punished Iraqi civilians while reinforcing Saddam’s dictatorial control.

In his 2006 book Devil’s Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, longtime Nation correspondent Robert Dreyfuss documents how the U.S., as early as the 1950s, backed the Muslim Brotherhood in exchange for help fighting communism.

Peace’s Deadliest Year

One way to justify failed policies is to pretend that they have worked as advertised. Nowhere was this disconnect between rhetoric and reality more on display than in President Obama’s updating this month of his National Security Strategy.

In presenting this new security game-plan, the president exhibited excessive confidence in declaring that the United States was heading “home” and “moving beyond” ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his mini-version of Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ statement, he asserted that “the threat of catastrophic attacks” against the U.S. had “diminished.”

But even as the president describes a winding-down of combat operations, anything but peace is taking hold in those places.

The sectarian violence has resulted in record numbers of civilian deaths and injuries. The UN reported last month that more than 12,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2014, the deadliest year for noncombatants since 2008. In Afghanistan, the UN Assistance Mission counted close to 3,200 civilians killed and more than 6,400 wounded, the deadliest year since America’s longest war started.

Providing a sharp contrast to the president’s own assertion that peace is almost at hand, he has sent troops back into Iraq. And just a few days ago, his new Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said the U.S. might end up sticking around in Afghanistan after all.

What the Administration and a cheerleading media refuse to acknowledge is that the two U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, aimed at ending terrorist threats in the region, have done the exact opposite. They not only caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties but hardened the resolve of yet another generation to seek revenge against their perceived Western oppressors.

Bottom Line

While details of how the president plans to use his refreshed war powers are still vague, the price tag is not.

In the name of defending the country and fighting terrorism, the president’s proposed 2016 budget calls for adding $38 billion in regular defense spending and another $58 billion for so-called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” These expanded outlays would come on top of the more than half a trillion dollars the U.S. is already spending on the military.

Even under the sequester restrictions, says one specialist, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

“If you can’t protect the nation with $500 billion dollars,” then something is amiss, according to Veronique deRugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. She notes that even under the sequester restrictions, U.S. military spending was already quite robust and shamefully under-scrutinized.

The failures are especially pronounced, says deRugy, when one takes into account that in the years since 9/11, Washington’s extra expenditures, labeled “emergency” war funding, have topped Pentagon budgets by tens of billions annually.

And so under presidents from both parties, who were supposedly ‘conservative’  and ‘liberal’,  the “emergency” continues to spread.

5 Things Busy People Can Do to Fight the Rising Control System

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By Bernie Suarez

Source: Truth and Art TV

Want to implement small-scale, realistic tasks in your own life to strike back at the control system? Have you been seeing the daily headlines, the lies, the deceit and the global enslavement agenda in full swing and feeling that you aren’t doing enough to fight back because of your busy schedule? Feeling helpless and overwhelmed by the idea that a small group of psychopaths at the very top would push for a global order that involves their full enjoyment of life while you and the rest of humanity live as miserable slaves forever? Don’t have time to be a full-time activist, be involved in marches, or downright challenge the court system? Wondering what small things you can do to fight back as you deal with the hustle and bustle of your own life working to pay bills, obtain an education, or raising children?

Here are five subtle actions you can incorporate into your busy schedule to start pushing back and start making a difference. If you think any of these simple steps is too difficult then give yourself time to adapt. Work on weaning yourself off of your usual habits and slowly changing the hard-to-break habits keeping you from maximally fighting back while continuing your busy life.

1- Turn off your TV and shut off mindless entertainment

This is for some people a difficult thing to do so for those people it may be more realistic to wean down how much entertainment and TV you absorb. A key to this commitment is realizing that TV watching is a medical-physiological issue. Realize that when you watch TV there is a real physical reaction going on in your brain and that addiction to TV and entertainment (like gambling and alcohol) is one problem among many others associated with TV watching.

When someone is an addict they are taught that overcoming denial is a big part of the recovery process and you can’t recover if you deny that you have a problem to begin with. Likewise being addicted to TV and entertainment must not be underestimated as just another incidental habit. It is a real addiction and TV flicker rates have a lot to do with it. I recall for year I watched TV and during that time of my life whenever I was in a room without TV it felt very uncomfortable. I couldn’t understand why it felt so uncomfortable but I knew it was. I now realize that was because there is a physiological addiction involved in TV watching.

As you can imagine, successfully committing to watching less or no TV while living a busy life will free up a lot of time which can then be used for doing creative things, improving relationships, starting a group, picking up a book, doing research, and a lot of other pro-active things you thought you didn’t have time for.

2- Optimize your online privacy

Another subtle thing you can do to strike back at the control system while managing a busy schedule is to learn a few things about online privacy. Start cleaning up your computer and unplugging some of the links put in place for private corporations and even government to potentially spy on you. Learn about what an IP address is. Realize that an IP address can be used to track where you are. Go to your browser and type in the address ‘myipaddress.com’ and this website will read back to you your own IP address.

Become familiar with this concept then become familiar with the concept of ‘Proxy Servers’ and Tor browsers. Do some basic research on the issue and decide for yourself if you want to occasionally (or always) go online using a privacy optimized server. This may not be for everyone but at least be familiar with what it is in case you want or feel you need to use one some day. A proxy server or Tor browser will allow you to browse online without your IP address being traced or tracked.

Also, here’s something you should be doing every day. Depending on which browser you are using, become familiar on how to delete cookies from you computer. Cookies are like tiny robot programs installed on your computer by sites you visit. These robots are installed without your permission and are used to track you. For many browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome) it will be under ‘privacy’ options and/or ‘clear browsing data’. Then look for a link or option for deleting cookies. As I said, know that these cookies are installed on your private computer every single time you go a website. Get in the habit of clearing these cookies unless you want every site you visit to also know what other sites you are visiting. By using cookies many corporations are able to monitor your shopping habits and many other things about you. They rely on the fact that you don’t know how to clear your cookies or perhaps are too lazy to delete them every time you go online. Why not become familiar with cookies and what they do? Still not sure? Just do an online search for “how to clear cookies” then specify the browser you are using.

The point is to start doing little things that will make surveillance more difficult and to educate yourself about some small things that add up and can make a difference later on.

3- Use technology strategically

This topic in some ways is a continuation of the online privacy. Start doing small things to make the police surveillance state a bit more difficult for them to carry out. Be smart about how you use your smart phone. If possible, consider reverting back to a not-so-smart phone. If your phone company allows you to use an older phone it’s something you MAY want to consider.

Remember the time when we all bought small cameras to take pictures and we purchased video cameras to make videos? Why can’t we go back to using individual electronics again? Why do we need to use our phones for everything we do? Why have we become conditioned to living our entire lives using our phones? Have you considered this may have been planned to help enslave humanity? Studies now show smart phones are proven to have a negative impact on human relationships making people more selfish, more easily distracted and more stressed out among other things.

Furthermore, have you read the ‘Terms and Conditions‘ of the license agreements you agree to every time you download a cell phone (or any) app? Do you realize that for many of these redundant and often useless apps you sign away your privacy? Read the agreements very carefully, that is exactly what you are doing almost every time you download a cell phone app. Is this lifestyle really necessary? No it isn’t, and it’s one of the small things you can do to fight back. Take back your privacy and commit to a smart life instead of a smart phone.

Also, you can stop taking “selfies” and broadcasting your image all over your own cell phone. Realize the control system has mastered the facial recognition technology and these self produced images only help the opposition keep track of your facial features and what you look like recently, information that can be added to whatever information the system may already have about you. Remember every bit of content you pack your smart phone with can be legally stolen from your phone and given to anyone including law enforcement or even a fusion center that may have created a file for you without you knowing. Since the revelations of Edward Snowden we all know how NSA is violating the privacy of average Americans and although these measures may not entirely prevent NSA from doing what it does, at least you are doing something to fight back and you are making it more difficult for them to get your information. Imagine if everyone does their part to resist in some way how much harder it becomes for NSA.

Other things you can do is periodically change your contact information like your phone number(s), emails, and addresses. There is no law that says you can’t have multiple emails, addresses and phone numbers if for no other reason than to make yourself harder to track. Be creative instead of being predictable. It’s not about being paranoid it’s about smartly preparing for the worse case scenario, being a tiny bit smarter than the next person, being creative, and being vigilant about the world we now factually live in. Not all of these measures are for everyone but again, these are subtle things some of us can do while living a busy hectic life.

4- Be mindful where you spend your money

This is an issue that everyone can and should do something about. Each of us makes decisions every day about where we spend our money and who we give our money to. If you know a corporation is a part of the problem stop giving them your money. Is a decision like this not practical to implement immediately? Then decrease how much money you spend with that store. Here are a few other suggestions:

Buy only what you need. Resist mindless advertisements that try to get you to spend money on things you don’t need. Realize that like TV, shopping is another subtle addiction that you may need to break. Break away from the habit of going shopping as a form of entertainment and instead practice saving and smartly investing your money.

So where should you spend your money? Support alternative media with donations and online purchases. Support organizations and stores that share your values. Identify those entities that support the freedom and liberty we all wish to see come to fruition and then support those platforms. Invest in your own health and survival. Instead of spending money on things you don’t need buy things that empower you and your ability to survive free from government. Do your part to buy smartly, and if everyone does this we can greatly contribute to a shift in paradigm even as we live our busy lives.

5- Don’t give government a reason to arrest or fine you

Finally, regardless of what you do, know that government (City, State and Federal) needs your money badly and they pay a lot of people to look for reasons to take your money (or your freedom which is worth money to them) away from you. We’ve all seen the big city parking police scouring neighborhoods looking for any car parked in front of a meter that is one minute over the limit. We’ve seen throughout the U.S. how police often set up hidden speed traps so they can pull you over for a speeding ticket. Realize that police are rewarded for giving out tickets and the cities have quotas for tickets. The control system NEEDS your money or your freedom to fund its very own control over you. This is why they set up traffic light cameras, create stringent rules and DUI checkpoints throughout the city in hopes of catching violators. Realize this and stay focused every day being careful to not give the control system an excuse to transfer any of your hard earned money into their pockets. Do what you can to not be arrested, not get a ticket and not be harassed for money by the control system.

If none of this works, if you end up with tickets or arrested, or if you simply want to become a more effective change agent while living a busy life then educate yourself about the legal system and how it is rigged against you. Take time on your off days to learn some of the basics of how the system tricks each and every one of us from the time of birth into consenting to be ruled, robbed and controlled. Again, some may feel they don’t have time to learn about the legal system but, like learning about online privacy, learning how to legally take control of your own life is a priceless piece of knowledge to obtain in your spare time.

So there it is. All of these things can be done by someone caught up in a busy hectic lifestyle. All of us have spare time, some of us have more spare time than others. Ultimately, you choose your road and what kind of life you want to live. These ideas are for those you really care and really want to make a difference but realize that time is precious. Go ahead, start making your list and put some of things into action. Don’t worry about not being able to do all of this, just start somewhere. This is a guideline not a set of rules. Peace and love.

Against All Bosses: Government AND Corporate

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By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

I keep resolving not to comment on any more of Alternet‘s by-the-numbers anti-libertarian puff pieces, but a recent one from David Masciotra (“You’re Not the Boss of Me: Why Libertarianism is a Childish Sham,” February 26) is in its own category of wretchedness.

Masciotra’s commentary includes two seemingly contradictory lines of argument. In the first, he dismisses anti-authoritarianism, as such, as the ethos of a spoiled toddler:

the protest of children who scream through tears, “You’re not the boss of me.” The rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent. It is infantile naïveté.

He associates this infantile rejection of all authority with selfishness and anti-sociality. In fact it “does not even rise to the most elementary level of politics,” which Aristotle defined as “the things concerning the polis,” or the community. Confucius associated politics with an ethics of “communal service with a moral system based on empathy.” This, in contrast to libertarianism, which “eliminates empathy, and denies the collective,” and opposes “any concept of the common good” or organizing communities “in the interest of solidarity.”

And of course because this is an Alternet attack on libertarianism, he can’t get through it without mentioning Ayn Rand — “the rebel queen of their icy kingdom.” Oddly enough, he didn’t manage to drag in the Koch brothers.

Just in passing, it’s a bit odd that none of Alternet‘s stable of center-left critics of libertarianism seem to have any idea that the movement might have ideological roots older than last Tuesday. American libertarianism as an organized political movement — the movement that later gave birth to the Libertarian Party — has its origins more or less in the radicals who dropped out of Young Americans for Freedom in 1968. But radical free market thought didn’t start with them, or with Ayn Rand, or even with Ludwig von Mises. It goes back to the classical liberalism of two hundred and more years ago.

And classical liberalism was a very diverse and varied movement, including some quite left-leaning strands, who considered themselves socialists as well as free market libertarians. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that the origins of classical liberalism, socialism and anarchism are so closely intertwined in the culture of the Enlightenment, and overlapped so heavily in their formative period of the 1820s through 1840s.

Two of my strongest ideological influences were the free market libertarians Thomas Hodgskin in England and Benjamin Tucker in the U.S., both of whom were socialists and saw the state’s primary role as intervening in the market on behalf of landlords and capitalists to enforce rents on the artificial scarcity of land and capital. And left-wing strands (like the thought of Henry George) persisted in American classical liberalism afterwards, and have continued to exist even in the modern libertarian movement.

Although contemporary American libertarianism is generally right-leaning and much of it is corporate-influenced, it still contains leftward-oriented strands — many of them quite anti-corporate, or (like me) even anti-capitalist. At his most left-friendly phase in the late ’60s, for example, prominent libertarian Murray Rothbard collaborated with New Left scholars like Ronald Radosh and the Studies on the Left group. During this period Rothbard described the main function of “our corporate state” as subsidizing the operating costs of big business and the accumulation of capital.

After all this, though, Masciotra dismisses libertarians as not being rebellious enough. Their rebellion disguises “their subservience to — for all their protests against the ‘political elite’ — the real elite.”

Who then are the libertarians rebelling against? The most powerful sector of the society is corporate America, and it profits and benefits most from the deregulatory and anti-tax measures libertarians champion. That sector of society also happens to own the federal government. Through large campaign donations and aggressive lobbying — the very corruption that libertarians help enable by defending Citizens United and opposing campaign finance reform — they have institutionalized bribery, transforming the legislative process into an auction. Libertarians proclaim an anti-government position, but they are only opposing the last measures of protection that remain in place to prevent the government from full mutation into an aristocracy.

Masciotra might be surprised to know I actually agree with most of this, and I’m a libertarian. My understanding of government as something that serves the interest of propertied classes, protects big business from competition, and funnels rents on artificial scarcity and artificial property upward from the producing classes to the plutocracy is one of the reasons I became a libertarian and an anarchist.

And one of the primary targets of my writing has been the right-leaning sort of libertarian who ignores the extent to which Corporate America owns the federal government. These people pass over the primary function of government — intervening in the market to facilitate rent extraction by the propertied ruling classes — and focus entirely on eliminating the secondary functions like partially restricting abuses of those ruling classes’ power and stabilizing the worst side-effects of corporate power.

My hatred of bosses is at the root of my identification, not only as a libertarian — but as a Leftist. My instinctive affinity for the “you’re not the boss of me” sentiment, which Masciotra dismisses contemptuously, is the reason I so strongly support labor struggle and radical unions like the I.W.W.

I believe that institutional hierarchies of all kinds are bad — corporate, government, university, etc. — because they suppress the free flow of information and feedback that those in authority don’t want to hear. They create conflicts of interest in which those at the top appropriate the gains from contributions to productivity from those below, and shift costs and blame downward — basically kind of stuff anyone who’s worked under a boss, or reads Dilbert, knows instinctively.

And my belief in free markets doesn’t mean that I lionize “rugged individualism,” or believe that the cash nexus should dominate most aspects of social life. It just means I don’t think the state should interfere with voluntary exchange where it exists. In fact I strongly support a solidaritarian society build on the kinds of self-organized working class institutions for mutual aid that Pyotr Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson described in their writing. I’m strongly influenced by Elinor Ostrom’s views on the governance of common pool resources. And I think that most economic activity in a free society would take place through forms of voluntary interaction other than money exchange — the social and gift economy and commons-based peer production, among them.

If Masciotra took a break from constructing his libertarian strawmen for a minute and checked out the diverse array of real people within our movement, he might find he actually has stuff in common with some of us.

 

The Lies End Now: “Most Transparent Administration Ever” Is No More: White House To Delete Its FOIA Regulations

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By Tyler Durden

Source: Zero Hedge

Back on October 28, 2009, then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the following:

… understanding what this President has done is institute the very toughest ethics and transparency rules of any administration in history…  I think the President has returned to a stance of transparency and ethics that hasn’t been matched by any other White House.

… the President believes strongly in transparency… that transparency in that way in the best policy

… understand that what the President campaigned on – toughening our ethics rules, making more transparent our transparency policy – was something that he was passionate about and is proud of the progress that we’ve made in ensuring that.

And here is the president himself: “We have put in place the toughest ethics and transparency laws of any administration in history.”

Lies, lies, and nothing but lies. The lies end now.

As reported moments ago, the White House is voiding a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA  (incidentally the same act that discovered none of Hillary Clinton’s “personal” government-business emails since they were not even stored on government property!) which as USA Today explains, makes “official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.”

And just like that the lie of Obama’s transparency is over, and it couldn’t come at a worse time for the democratic party, just as its top contender for the 2016 presidential race is struggling to emerge from a cover-up scandal which reeks of intentional hiding of classified documentation from the public (or worse). Going forward it will no longer be Hillary Clinton who will be mocked and ridiculed for her total impunity when it comes to public accountability and transparency, but the “most untransparent” president as well.

The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails.

Actually, Obama really couldn’t have picked worse timing because not only does it come hot on the heels of clintonemail.com, but the announcement also is taking place on National Freedom of Information Day and during a national debate over the preservation of Obama administration records. It’s also Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency. Almost as if the president of the US is openly mocking the public, making it clear he is accountable to no one (except of course for a few mega corporations: see: The Best “Democracy” Money Can Buy: For Every Dollar Spent Influencing US Politics, Corporations Get $760 Back)

“The irony of this being Sunshine Week is not lost on me,” said Anne Weismann of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.

“It is completely out of step with the president’s supposed commitment to transparency,” she said. “That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example, how the White House is dealing with e-mail.”

But who wants to know that? Can’t the peasants just pay attention to the rigged all time high in the Apple Sachs Non-industrial Average and just leave the troubled leader of the free world alone?

The irony here is that with this act, Obama is now becoming even less transparent than the loathed by the left Bush dynasty:

Unlike other offices within the White House, which were always exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the Office of Administration responded to FOIA requests for 30 years. Until the Obama administration, watchdog groups on the left and the right used records from the office to shed light on how the White House works.

 

“This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act any more,” said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.

 

That happened late in the Bush administration, when CREW sued over e-mails deleted by the White House — as many as 22 million of them, by one accounting. The White House at first began to comply with that request, but then reversed course.

 

“The government made an argument in an effort to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the lawsuit in order to stop the archiving of White House e-mails,” said Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has used similar requests to shed light on foreign policy decisions.

As USA Today further explains, the rule change means that there will no longer be a formal process for the public to request that the White House voluntarily disclose records as part of what’s known as a “discretionary disclosure.” Records released by the Office of Administration voluntarily include White House visitor logs and the recipe for beer brewed at the White House.

“You have a president who comes in and says, I’m committed to transparency and agencies should make discretionary disclosures whenever possible, but he’s not applying that to his own White House,” Weismann said.

Why wait until now? The White House did not explain why it waited nearly six years to formally acknowledge the court ruling in its regulations.

Because accountability, that’s why. No really: “In the notice to be published Tuesday, the White House said it was not allowing a 30-day public comment period, and so the rule will be final.”

Well, at least Obama has a sense of humor as he brings the country ever closer to the police state so well forecast by George Orwell: “It’s a little tone deaf to do this on Sunshine Week, even if it’s an administrative housecleaning,” said Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government initiative for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.”

And the punchline: the notice that will be published in Tuesday’s Federal Register, and in which the White House says it’s removing regulations on how the Office of Administration complies with Freedom of Information Act Requests based on “well-settled legal interpretations” is hosted on a cloud server run… by Amazon.

Colluders in Crude: The Oily Politics of How the Obama Administration Sided with BP Over the American People

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By Stuart H. Smith

Source: WhoWhatWhy

The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 21, 2010,  was the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry. The resulting devastation to human health and the environment continues to this day. A new Florida State University study, published on Jan. 20 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, reports that up to 10 million gallons of crude oil “missing” from the spill settled at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, imperiling wildlife and marine ecosystems.

Stuart H. Smith, an environmental plaintiff attorney who served as lead counsel on more than 100 oil pollution cases and has won major litigation against oil giants Chevron and ExxonMobil, came to represent thousands of claimants against BP. He saw from the inside how BP and the American government really responded to the crisis. This article is adapted from his book, Crude Justice: How I Fought Big Oil and Won, and What You Should Know about the New Environmental Attack on America (BenBella Books, 2015). 

…

I am a first-hand witness to the Obama administration’s complicity in putting the interests of a foreign company above and beyond the health and safety of American workers.

The tragedy began on April 21, 2010, with the explosion and fire on British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast. It killed 11 workers and caused a leak that would ultimately spew nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

Denying Workers Protective Gear

BP hired workers to clean up the spill, but no one was publicly addressing what the prolonged exposure to oil—which is laden with carcinogens such as benzene—might do to them. There was little talk about the threat of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the air along the Gulf Coast, even for workers traveling to the edge of the spill in boats and removing oil from the beaches. Cleanup crews were attaching oil-catching booms to their shrimp boats and driving their boats directly through the oil slicks to corral and collect the oil spilling from BP’s broken well—and largely tackling their jobs without serious protective gear, because BP had not supplied it.

“BP knew that providing protective equipment would be an admission that the oil exposure was dangerous and sought to avoid that at all costs,” says Marylee Orr, the founder and longtime executive director of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), a leading environmental group in the state.

It wasn’t long before the fishermen began reporting headaches, vomiting, nausea, dizziness, and chest pains.

In early June, two key Democratic members of Congress—Minnesota Representative James Oberstar, then-chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and New York Representative Jerrold Nadler, a senior committee member—sent a letter to the EPA and the Department of Labor demanding that Gulf workers be provided with “proper protective equipment, including respirators.”

Incredibly, the Obama administration said “no.”

David Michaels, assistant secretary in the Labor Department, who oversaw the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, told the Wall Street Journal that their tests showed “minimal” risk from exposure to airborne toxins—despite the fact that EPA’s air monitors along the Gulf Coast were picking up substantial airborne VOC readings from the spill, and despite scores of alarming medical reports from cleanup workers.

Protecting BP Stockholders

Around the same time, President Barack Obama was on the phone to the British prime minister. David Cameron was in a tizzy because so many English pensioners had their retirement money tied up in BP stock.

“The president made clear that he had no interest in undermining BP’s value,” Cameron’s office announced after the phone call.

Indeed, on June 16, 2010—one month before the leaking well had been capped and the full extent of the damage could be investigated—the White House announced an unprecedented deal with BP in which the oil company would finance a relief fund of up to $20 billion.

This escrow fund was good politics—$20 billion sounded impressive to the average voter—but would prove to be music to the ears of BP’s board. Historically, such escrow funds had been effective means for companies to limit their liability. They were tools for persuading vulnerable people in desperate need to sign away their legal rights to recover full compensation for the damages they’d suffered.

Sure enough, just before Christmas 2010, Kenneth Feinberg, who’d been appointed to oversee the fund, made a blatant attempt to boost the number of cases the fund could say were “settled” by offering the spill’s victims one-time bonus payments of $5,000 for individuals and $25,000 for businesses, contingent upon his settlement terms.

In fact, the $20 billion fund had set a preliminary target for damage claims that would turn out to be tens of billions of dollars less than the actual damages. Moreover, the agreement allowed BP to secure the fund using future productions from its leases in the Gulf of Mexico as collateral, exempting all of BP’s holdings elsewhere.  This locked the federal government into a partnership with BP, forcing it to continue to allow its offshore drilling in the Gulf to pay back the claims.

Hiding the Oil, Spreading the Toxins

In the early days of the spill, BP began unleashing gallons of a toxic chemical called Corexit.  Corexit was able to get rid of the thick black oily plumes on the water’s surface that had been visible for miles across the Gulf and were becoming such a public relations disaster on the nightly TV news.

But Corexit wasn’t solving the oil problem, only the PR problem.  Corexit was merely hiding the oil and spreading toxins over a larger area. This created even greater risks for the cleanup workers—risks they had not been trained to deal with.

Weeks after the spill, LEAN’s Marylee Orr pressed for admission to the main command centers, to which her NGO was supposed to have access. Eventually she and other Gulf environmental activists got a private meeting with a top federal official—EPA administrator and Louisiana native Lisa Jackson. They argued that the feds needed to force BP to stop spraying Corexit in the Gulf and produced evidence that Corexit was merely masking the oil and dispersing toxins over a bigger area.

(Hugh Kaufman, longtime EPA employee and whistleblower, said government officials were well aware of the hazards of Corexit, telling an interviewer that “in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now.  The average death age is around 50.”)

At first it seemed like Jackson was listening to their plea. A short time later, in late May, the EPA and the Coast Guard issued a joint order to BP telling the company to “eliminate” surface spraying of Corexit—unless the firm got a waiver from the Coast Guard because of exceptional circumstances.

You can guess how that all played out. BP asked for and routinely got a waiver from the Coast Guard to spray Corexit—day after day, including nine days in a row immediately after Lisa Jackson’s “order,” and ultimately 74 times over 54 days. An estimated million gallons of the toxic dispersant were deployed in the Gulf after the government’s supposed command to eliminate much of its use.

Later, independent laboratory tests performed for me confirmed what the experts had feared about the Corexit spraying: dispersing the oil actually meant taking the toxic elements of the oil from the surface, where they were highly concentrated but weren’t harming marine life below, and spreading them deep into Gulf waters.  Our lab tests showed toxic pollution of water at levels 35 times higher than before the oil was dispersed.

Claiming “Gulf Seafood Is Safe”

Early on, the federal government’s public relations initiative was in full gear. On June 14—54 days into the crisis of the oil spill—President Obama came down to the Florida Panhandle and decreed that he was launching “a comprehensive, coordinated, and multiagency initiative” to make sure the catch from the Gulf waters was safe to eat.  “Now,” he said into the bank of cameras, “I had some of that seafood for lunch, and it was delicious….So let me be clear. Seafood from the Gulf today is safe to eat.  But we need to make sure that it stays that way.”

In essence, Obama was telling Americans to eat first and ask questions later.  But how could the president assure the public that seafood was safe to eat when, as he acknowledged, in-depth testing hadn’t yet even been carried out?”

At the Pentagon, a massive order for shrimp, crab cakes, and pre-packaged jambalaya was placed and sold at base commissaries around the world.  The executive chef at the White House bought and served more than 2,000 pounds of shrimp and other Gulf goodies at an array of holiday parties for Barack and Michelle Obama and their guests, commenting: “We at the White House are so happy to play our part in reminding Americans that Gulf seafood is not only safe but delicious.”

Around the Gulf, news accounts quoted fishermen who were reeling in red snapper with sores and lesions—some the size of a 50 cent piece—the likes of which they had never seen before.  Crab fishermen were reporting that their hauls had dropped by 70% and that the few crabs they did pull up suffered similar lesions and disease.  It made sense. Red snapper were bottom feeders—eating the shrimp and crabs that live on the sea floor—and independent scientists had already shown that oil from the leaking BP rig was coating the bottom of the Gulf.

Practicing Faulty and Deceptive Testing

In late 2010, the government stated that it had tested more than 10,000 seafood samples from the Gulf and found no evidence of problems. But the vast majority of those tests were what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called “sensory testing,” and what you and I might call a smell test. This test was hardly adequate for finding traces of hydrocarbons that are odorless, yet highly toxic.

Moreover, in conducting the smell tests, specimens that were clearly oiled in the spill or possibly diseased were tossed aside, skewing the lab results. When the seafood that would have produced the worst numbers was transferred to trash buckets, the polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbon numbers looked a lot better.

In addition, according to the government testing structure, the “safe” consumption level for a grown man is four shrimp a week.  Who the hell living on the Gulf of Mexico eats only four shrimp per week?

Conducting his own test analysis, Paul Orr, Marylee’s son and the unofficial river keeper for the lower Mississippi, gathered samples of shrimp, crab, and finfish from 20 different locations in the Gulf off the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines. His results showed high levels of total petroleum hydrocarbons, including in seafood from areas that had been declared safe for fishing. Testing by other independent environmentalists showed high levels of cadmium, a long-lasting carcinogen.

Alleging “Swimming Is Safe”

The seafood shilling was just the beginning.

The government also issued reports that beaches were safe for swimming. President Obama dramatized this, allowing a photo of him swimming with his daughter—in an unimpacted bay, of course—along the Florida Panhandle coast.

The passage of time did not diminish the assault on the beaches.  Tropical Storm Lee washed tar balls and patches of asphalt-like gunk up and down the Gulf in 2011, as did Hurricane Isaac in the summer of 2012.  In 2013, more than three years after the BP catastrophe, a blob of oil from the Macondo field that was roughly half the size of a football field came ashore in Grand Terre Island off the coast of Louisiana.

Attempting to Bar Independent Testing

The U.S. government seemed to have two agendas—both of them bad.  One was siding with large commercial fishing operations in the Gulf, whose livelihood depended on public confidence in the safety of their catch, and not with the broader U.S. public of seafood consumers.  The other was to get the PR nightmare of BP out of the headlines.

Almost immediately after the spill, the FAA implemented a temporary flight restriction across the entire eastern Gulf of Mexico that continued for months.  They refused to let the media get anywhere close to the offshore slicks. The Coast Guard turned the entire zone over to private security goons hired by BP who would not let anyone near the spill to photograph and take samples. BP’s guards blocked many of the roads leading to oil-gunked beaches. Never before had America ceded its sovereign police power to a corporation, and a foreign one at that.

Key governmental agencies involved in the Gulf Coast recovery seemed to be working harder to prevent independent scientists from doing their own testing than they were in conducting their own rigorous studies.

As a Big Oil litigator, I knew that the fastest way to lose an environmental law case was to rely on industry or government data, which rarely painted the full picture. It was critical to perform your own testing using your own experts.  I’d never had an environmental case where the government was on the side of the victim.

***

To prove toxic exposure and resulting damages in the BP disaster, I hired Dr. William Sawyer, a top Florida-based research toxicologist with 30 years of experience, and Worcester Polytechnic civil engineer Marco Kaltofen, considered one of the top engineers in the field, who described himself as “specializing in when things go really bad.”

Marco and William decided that the best approach to overcoming the restricted access was simply to look and act like they belonged.  “We dressed the way the BP guys dressed,” Marco told me later.   “We had the story, we had the business cards and lab notebook and all the equipment.  And you just go out there and you mix it up.”

Soon the BP cleanup contractors were giving Marco and his coworker access to their refreshment tent.

“I got a Louisiana oysterman’s license,” Marco said. “I would get out to these sites and they would say, ‘I’m sorry—you can’t be collecting specimens out here.’  I’d say, ‘I got a Louisiana scientific collection permit,’ and I would get BP escorts when I produced this document.  It looked really official—it said I could collect oysters around this area….It had dates, stamps….”

From that, Marco collected a treasure trove of shellfish and marine life, as well as water, sand, and spilled oil.

Marco and William’s initial data showed alarming levels of toxic hydrocarbons, first in the Gulf water columns, and then in seafood. Even before they issued a formal report, they posted some of their raw data on the Internet.

That’s when they started receiving phone calls from staffers on the president’s commission investigating the oil spill.

“There was a grave concern as to why we were finding contamination,” William recalled, “and then the questions were geared toward whether we had sampling permits.”

Instead of expressing concern about the danger that might be posed to American consumers from eating oil-contaminated seafood, federal investigators were questioning whether Marco and William had permits to collect the samples.

It was only after a TV news crew investigated the calls and a New Orleans-area congressman called for a full-blown investigation that the Oil Spill Commission pulled a 180-degree turn.  One staffer even tried to explain that the calls to Marco and his associate had gone out because the commission had been impressed with their work.

Much later, our team learned about some of the intense pressure that was taking place behind the scenes.  At the same time that we were pressing for a more open investigation of environmental impact, in-fighting was ensuing between other independent scientists, who were finding equally troubling data, and government officials, who were finding ways to cover up the discoveries. The Reuters news agency learned that wildlife biologists who’d been hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document an “unusual marine event”—the dramatic rise in dolphin deaths—were told they couldn’t make their findings known because it was part of a law enforcement probe into the BP spill.

Denying Evidence

Mounting evidence revealed that oil-spill cleanup workers and other Gulf residents were suffering respiratory illnesses, skin rashes, and other more serious maladies.  But federal authorities insisted that the rise in such ailments was merely a coincidence. Donald Boesch, a member of Obama’s Oil Spill Commission, summed up their response: “We were charged with being evidence-driven, and the fact is, we’ve asked for and sought out evidence that the oil spill is the proximate cause of these health problems, and we just haven’t found it.”

But all Boesch had to do was walk into any of the doctors’ crowded waiting rooms and health clinics scattered across the Gulf region.

Dr. Michael Robichaux of Mathews, Louisiana, on the Gulf Coast, was among those examining the ailing cleanup workers and other coastal residents. At first the doctor was dubious that the ailments were linked to the workers’ and residents’ exposure to BP’s oil and Corexit. But after he began treating them, he converted and became an evangelist for their cause.  Of the 113 patients he treated who had been exposed to toxic pollution, he wrote that about 100 of them had severe chronic health effects, to the point that many were unable to work. “It appears that the interests of a large, foreign corporation have superseded the needs of thousands of Americans who reside along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico,” Dr. Robichaux told U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.

Settlement Deals

In May 2012, BP announced that it had reached a settlement deal—estimated at the time to be worth $7.8 billion—with a circle of well-connected tort lawyers called the Plaintiffs Steering Committee on behalf of the Gulf Coast residents and small businesses.  Joining a handful of other lawyers, I appeared before Judge Barbier that September to object to the proposed deal.  How, we asked, could a proper price be fixed on the damage caused by BP when new oil kept coming ashore, as had happened when Hurricane Isaac hit the Gulf Coast just days before the courtroom arguments?  We also argued that the deal was woefully inadequate, both for those who had been made ill and for many coastal businesses.

We didn’t win that skirmish, but other penalties for the British oil giant are finally adding up. In early 2015, a federal judge was nearing a final ruling on civil penalties against BP under the federal Clean Water Act, which could reach some $13.7 billion.

To date, my firm has successfully handled claims against BP for about three quarters of our thousands of clients.  Hundreds of them remain, fighting for their fair share.

The extreme efforts of a Big Oil giant to avoid liability for its actions have been sadly familiar to me.  But the actions of the U.S. government to side with a huge multinational corporation against the health and safety of American workers are unconscionable.

Adapted from CRUDE JUSTICE:  How I Fought Big Oil and Won, And What You Should Know About the New Environmental Attack on America by Stuart H. Smith (BenBella Books, 2015).