Contributor & author: Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
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Preview:
- One may ask how to draw a red line between chemical agents that poison and burn and chemical agents that explode? The latter, called “conventional” weapons, kill by tearing people apart or setting fires. Is this a more humane death?
- Then there are the methods used by Assad’s enemies: burning children alive, running over them with a truck, crucifying them, or beheading them. And there are the true weapons of mass destruction: biological agents (which have a doubling time instead of a half life) and nuclear weapons.
- Chemical Weaponry is not the Demon that must be slain at any cost. It is one of a legion of horrors called War.
April 18th, 2017
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Syrian President Bashar al Assad is being read out of the human race, and the Trump Administration seems to have done a 180-degree turn on the necessity for “regime change” in Syria because Assad used horrible, horrible! weapons against civilians, including helpless little babies.
A journalist might ordinarily assert the word “allegedly” before the charges—if for no other reason that while no one thinks Assad is good, some might think he is not that stupid. But he has already been tried and convicted, by the media and the government. That’s the infallible tribunal that sequentially declared that Iraq had chemical weapons, then didn’t (might they have shipped them to Syria?), and that the Syrian regime had disposed of theirs, but now had used them to kill their own babies.
Chemical weapons seem to be in a class by themselves: the ultimately gruesome way to die. Their use crosses the final Red Line to a heinous crime against humanity, and is a violation of international law. Of course, we don’t always do much about it.
Chemical warfare (CW) was used in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). In the mobile nuclear-chemical-biological (NBC) shelter displayed by Physicians for Civil Defense in the 1990s, there are some graphic photographs of the horrendous injuries inflicted on Iranian soldiers with mustard gas. We kept them covered up when children were touring the display. Mustard burns any body tissue, causing blindness, blistering, and lung damage. We heard that steel shelters like the one we were displaying were being buried in the desert during the Gulf War (1990-1991)—and that the Swiss sir-filtration systems like the one in the display were being sold out. (All Swiss homes are supposed to have such a system in their required shelters.)
While called a weapon of mass destruction, CW is not very good for inflicting widespread mass casualties. It is dispersed by the wind, broken down by sunlight, and deteriorates with time. But is unquestionably very deadly and could be deployed through the ventilation systems of buildings or subway systems. Twenty years ago, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult poisoned the Tokyo subway with the nerve gas sarin, injuring thousands and killing a dozen.
Nerve agents poison the body’s system for transmitting neural impulses. They cause uncontrollable nerve discharges that lead to drooling, vomiting, and diarrhea. Paralysis of respiratory muscles can cause death by asphyxiation. Survivors may have long-term neurological damage.
Hundreds of tons of CW agents have been stockpiled. The U.S. agreed to destroy its CW agents—a difficult, costly, and dangerous undertaking—by international treaty.
Press secretary Sean Spicer committed the probably unforgiveable blunder of suggesting that Assad was worse than Hitler because even Hitler refrained from using poison gas in World War II—forgetting the matter of the Holocaust. What probably deterred Hitler from using CW on the battlefield was not some vestige of humanity but the threat of retaliation in kind. Himself the survivor of a gas attack by the Allies (the Good Guys) in World War I, he knew very well that Britain had CW capability.
Are CW agents more of an affront to humanity than other weapons of war? In a way, they are like the neutron bomb, widely condemned for killing people while leaving the infrastructure relatively intact. Sam Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb, conceived of it, however, as a relatively humane weapon, because of his experience in Korea, where he saw starving, homeless orphans digging through rubble in search of something to eat.
One may ask how to draw a red line between chemical agents that poison and burn and chemical agents that explode? The latter, called “conventional” weapons, kill by tearing people apart or setting fires. Is this a more humane death?
Then there are the methods used by Assad’s enemies: burning children alive, running over them with a truck, crucifying them, or beheading them. And there are the true weapons of mass destruction: biological agents (which have a doubling time instead of a half life) and nuclear weapons.
CW is not the Demon that must be slain at any cost. It is one of a legion of horrors called War. Symptoms of war include dehumanizing the enemy, and mobilizing troops. Sean Hannity is asking for contributions to buy helmets for our under-equipped soldiers.
Some babies have died horribly. How many will die, ostensibly to avenge them?
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Jane M. Orient, M.D.obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Since 1988, she has been chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Society. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fourth editions of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine. More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Apr 18, 2017 @ 18:50:47
Evolution of Pollution the truth about toxic chemicals and the Terrorist CEO’s that murder us with their poisons culminating in a 20 year FederalLawsuit that proved it. We need not wait for global warming.
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:25:34
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
Wal-Mart
Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation in the world. It owns 5,100 stores worldwide and employs 1.3 million workers in the United States and 400,000 abroad, as well as millions more in the factories of its suppliers.
Many people have heard of the way that Wal-Mart steamrolls its way into every possible town, destroying local supermarkets and countless small businesses. We have also heard about Wal-Mart’s long track record of worker abuse, from forced overtime to sex discrimination to illegal child labor to relentless union busting. Wal-Mart also notoriously fails to provide health insurance to over half of its employees, who are then left to rely on themselves or taxpayers, who provide for a portion of their healthcare needs through government Medicaid.
Less well known is the fact that Wal-Mart maintains its low price level by allowing substandard labor conditions at the overseas factories producing most of its goods. The company continually demands lower prices from its suppliers, who, in turn, make more outrageous and abusive demands on their workers in order to meet Wal-Mart’s requirements.
In September 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of Wal-Mart supplier sweatshop workers in China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nicaragua and Swaziland. The workers were denied minimum wages, forced to work overtime without compensation, and were denied legally mandated health care. Other worker rights violations that have been found in foreign factories that produce goods for Wal-Mart include locked bathrooms, starvation wages, pregnancy tests, denial of access to health care, and workers being fired and blacklisted if they try to defend their rights.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:24:10
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
Chevron
The petrochemical company Chevron is guilty of some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in the world. From 1964 to 1992, Texaco (which transferred operations to Chevron after being bought out in 2001) unleashed a toxic “Rainforest Chernobyl” in Ecuador by leaving over 600 unlined oil pits in pristine northern Amazon rainforest and dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic production water into rivers used for bathing water. Llocal communities have suffered severe health effects, including cancer, skin lesions, birth defects, and spontaneous abortions.
Chevron is also responsible for the violent repression of peaceful opposition to oil extraction. In Nigeria, Chevron has hired private military personnel to open fire on peaceful protestors who oppose oil extraction in the Niger Delta.
Additionally Chevron is responsible for widespread health problems in Richmond, California, where one of Chevron’s largest refineries is located. Processing 350,000 barrels of oil a day, the Richmond refinery produces oil flares and toxic waste in the Richmond area. As a result, local residents suffer from high rates of lupus, skin rashes, rheumatic fever, liver problems, kidney problems, tumors, cancer, asthma, and eye problems.
The Unocal Corporation, which recently became a subsidiary of Chevron, is an oil and gas company based in California with operations around the world. In December 2004, the company settled a lawsuit filed by 15 Burmese villagers, in which the villagers alleged Unocal’s complicity in a range of human rights violations in Burma, including rape, summary execution, torture, forced labor and forced migration.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:23:04
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola Company is perhaps the most widely recognized corporate symbol on the planet. The company also leads in the abuse of workers’ rights, assassinations, water privatization, and worker discrimination. Between 1989 and 2002, eight union leaders from Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia were killed after protesting the company’s labor practices. Hundreds of other Coca-Cola workers who have joined or considered joining the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL have been kidnapped, tortured, and detained by paramilitaries who are hired to intimidate workers to prevent them from unionizing.
In India, Coca-Cola destroys local agriculture by privatizing the country’s water resources. In Plachimada, Kerala, Coca-Cola extracted 1.5 million liters of deep well water, which they bottled and sold under the names Dasani and BonAqua. The groundwater was severely depleted, affecting thousands of communities with water shortages and destroying agricultural activity. As a result, the remaining water became contaminated with high chloride and bacteria levels, leading to scabs, eye problems, and stomach aches in the local population.
Coca-Cola is also one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:21:05
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
DynCorp
Private security contractors have become the fastest-growing sector of the global economy during the last decade–a $100-billion-a-year, nearly unregulated industry. DynCorp, one of the providers of these mercenary services, demonstrates the industry’s power and potential to abuse human rights. While guarding Afghan statesmen and African oil fields, training Iraqi police forces, eradicating Colombian coca plants, and protecting business interests in hurricane-devastated New Orleans, these hired guns bolster the security of governments and organizations at the expense of many people’s human rights.
DynCorp’s fumigation of coca crops along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border led Ecuadorian peasants to sue DynCorp in 2001. Plaintiffs argued that DynCorp knew–or should have known–that the herbicides were highly toxic.
In 2001, a mechanic with DynCorp blew the whistle on DynCorp employees in Bosnia for rape and trading girls as young as 12 into sex slavery. According to a lawsuit filed by the mechanic, “employees and supervisors were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, [and] forged passports.” DynCorp fired the whistleblower and transferred the employees accused of sex trading out of the country, eventually firing some. None were prosecuted.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:18:33
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
Lockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest military contractor. Providing satellites, planes, missiles and other lethal high-tech items to the Pentagon keeps the profits rolling in. Since 2000, the year Bush was elected, the company’s stock value has tripled.
As the Center for Corporate Policy (www.corporatepolicy.org) notes, it is no coincidence that Lockheed VP Bruce Jackson–who helped draft the Republican foreign policy platform in 2000–is a key player at the Project for a New American Century, the intellectual incubator of the Iraq war.
Lockheed Martin is not the only defense contractor that goes behind the scenes to influence public policy, but it is one of the worst. Stephen J. Hadley, who now has Condoleeza Rice’s old job as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, was formerly a partner in a DC law firm representing Lockheed Martin. He is only one of the beneficiaries of the so-called revolving door between the military industries and the “civilian” national security apparatus. These war profiteers have a profound and illegitimate influence on our country’s international policy decisions.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:14:45
The 14 Worst Corporate Evildoers
By A Global Exchange Report / AlterNet
Dow Chemical
Dow Chemical has been destroying lives and poisoning the planet for decades. The company is best known for the ravages and health disaster for millions of Vietnamese and U.S. Veterans caused by its lethal Vietnam War defoliant, Agent Orange. Dow also developed and perfected Napalm, a brutal chemical weapon that burned many innocents to death in Vietnam and other wars. In 1988, Dow provided pesticides to Saddam Hussein despite warnings that they could be used to produce chemical weapons.
In 2001, Dow inherited the toxic legacy of the worst peacetime chemical disaster in history when it acquired Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and its outstanding liabilities in Bhopal, India. On Dec. 3, 1984, a chemical leak from a UCC pesticide plant in Bhopal gassed thousands of people to death and left more than 150,000 disabled or dying. Dow still refuses to address its liabilities in Bhopal.
Dow Chemical’s impact is felt globally from its Midland, Michigan headquarters to New Plymouth, New Zealand. In Midland, Dow has been producing chlorinated chemicals and burning and burying its waste including chemicals that make up Agent Orange. In New Plymouth, 500,000 gallons of Agent Orange were produced and thousands of tons of dioxin-laced waste was dumped in agricultural fields.
http://www.alternet.org/story/29337/the_14_worst_corporate_evildoers
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Apr 18, 2017 @ 15:08:04
From THE ATLANTIC/2011
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
The Tyranny of Defense Inc. (excerpts)
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Largely overlooked by most commentators was a second theme that Eisenhower had woven into his text. The essence of this theme was simplicity itself: spending on arms and armies is inherently undesirable. Even when seemingly necessary, it constitutes a misappropriation of scarce resources. By diverting social capital from productive to destructive purposes, war and the preparation for war deplete, rather than enhance, a nation’s strength.
“Every gun that is made,” Eisenhower told his listeners, “every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Any nation that pours its treasure into the purchase of armaments is spending more than mere money. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia, dubbed this perspective “military metaphysics,” which he characterized as “the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.” Those embracing this mind-set no longer considered genuine, lasting peace to be plausible. Rather, peace was at best a transitory condition, “a prelude to war or an interlude between wars.”
Having defined the problem, Eisenhower then advanced a striking solution: ultimate responsibility for democracy’s defense, he insisted, necessarily rested with the people themselves. Rather than according Washington deference, American citizens needed to exercise strict oversight.
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/308342/
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