More homes heat with wood, raising pollution risks

USA TODAY


More homes heat with wood, raising pollution risks

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

Mostly to save money, Matthew Walton switched a few years ago from heating his home with natural gas to wood, becoming a modern-day Paul Bunyan.

"The access to cheap wood made a difference," says Walton, a carpenter who lives on heavily forested land in Keene, N.H., where he chops his own fallen or dead trees.

"It saves us a bundle," he says, adding his wood stove can manage all winter with just two cords because he added insulation and good windows to his tidy, 1,300-square-foot home.

As energy prices rise, and winter approaches, more Americans are turning to wood to heat their homes, some hurrying to cash in on tax credits for efficient stoves that expire next month.

This upswing is prompting federal officials, concerned about the health and environmental impact of burning wood, to update 23-year-old certification criteria for stoves and set the first requirements for outdoor wood boilers, which heat water that's piped into homes.

"We are not in the business of telling people how to heat their homes," says Alison Davis of the Environmental Protection Agency, which plans to propose the new rules next year. But if they want to burn wood, Davis urges them to buy an EPA-certified stove and operate it properly so no smoke gets inside the house.

She says boilers are "significantly more polluting" than wood or pellet stoves because they have short stacks and use 10 times as much wood. Even so, she says those meeting the EPA's 2007 voluntary standards are 90% cleaner than older ones. "The technology has improved for wood stoves," Davis says, as has the research on the dangers of wood burning.

Wood heating's upswing

The number of U.S. households heating with wood rose 34% nationwide from 1.8 million in 2000 to 2.4 million in 2010 — faster than any other heating fuel, according to Census data.

"We're seeing a rise mainly in states with high oil and gas prices," most notably in Michigan and Connecticut, says John Ackerly of the Alliance for Green Heat, a nonprofit group that promotes wood stoves.

"It's a combination of rising energy prices and the economic downturn," he says, adding low- and middle-income households are much more likely than others to use wood for primary heating. In rural areas, he says many cut their own wood and in the suburbs, they get it free when trees fall.

He expects wood will become more popular this winter, citing the projected rise in household heating costs. Compared to last winter, heating will cost 3% more with natural gas and 8% more with oil this year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Retailers are gearing up. U.S. shipments of pellet stoves, considered the most efficient way to burn wood, jumped 59% in the second quarter of this year, compared to the same time last year, and pellet fireplace inserts rose 72%, according to Leslie Wheeler of the the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, an industry group.

"We're expecting those numbers to continue to increase," Wheeler says, because of high fuel prices. She says the tax credits expiring this year — up to $300 for EPA-certified stoves — are not as generous as in 2009 and 2010 when they covered 30% of the cost, up to $1,500. She says many cost $3,000 to $4,000 with installation.

Wood's dirty downside

The problem is that most Americans burn wood in old, dirty devices. Traditional fireplaces are so inefficient they don't heat a room unless they've been retrofitted with a wood or pellet insert.

Of the 10 million wood stoves being used in the U.S., 70% to 80% are not EPA-certified and emit 70% more pollution than those that are, says Lisa Rector of the nonprofit NESCAUM (Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management.) She says most of the 500,000 outdoor wood boilers don't meet EPA's voluntary standards.

Several Northeast and Western states have "burn bans" and other rules to limit wood burning, particularly when air quality is bad.

"People don't realize burning wood is a source of pollution, indoors and outdoors, especially when you're using an older stove," says Janice Nolan of the American Lung Association. She says it can emit tiny particulate matter — soot and ash — that gets lodged in the lungs and toxic substances such as benzene, carbon monoxide and methane.

Walton says he bought an EPA-certified stove that does not emit smoke inside his home. He sees a health benefit in chopping wood and an aesthetic one in burning it, adding: "The stove has a certain ambience."

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"We are not in the business of telling people how to heat their homes," says Alison Davis of the Environmental Protection Agency, which plans to propose the new rules next year. But if they want to burn wood, Davis urges them to buy an EPA-certified stove and operate it properly so no smoke gets inside the house.

EPA’s tips on burning wood wisely

EPA’s tips for smoke-free wood burning:

•Use an EPA-certified or qualified wood stove and have it correctly installed.

•Burn only dry, well-seasoned wood that’s been split properly.

•Store wood outdoors, stacked neatly off the ground with the top covered.

•Start fires with newspaper and dry kindling (never with gasoline, kerosene, charcoal starter, or a propane torch) or have a professional install a natural gas or propane log lighter.

•Burn hot fires. Regularly remove ashes from your stove into a metal container with a cover and store outdoors.

•Never burn household garbage, cardboard, driftwood, plywood, particleboard, moldy wood, wood with glue, or wood that’s been coated, painted or pressure-treated. These items could release toxic chemicals when burned.

•Keep all flammable household items (drapes, furniture, newspapers, and books) far from the stove and keep the stove’s doors closed unless loading or stoking the fire.

•Install and maintain a smoke alarm and a carbon monoxide detector. Also, keep a fire extinguisher handy.

•Remember to check your local air quality forecast before you burn. Some areas have restrictions.

By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY

Key Facts on Keystone XL

Key Facts on Keystone XL

Energy Security: Tar Sand will not Reduce Dependence on Foreign Oil

Keystone XL will not lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil, but transport Canadian oil to American refineries for export to overseas markets.

• Keystone XL is an export pipeline. According to presentations to investors, Gulf Coast refiners plan to refine the cheap Canadian crude supplied by the pipeline into diesel and other products for export to Europe and Latin America. Proceeds from these exports are earned tax-free. Much of the fuel refined from the pipeline’s heavy crude oil will never reach U.S. drivers’ tanks.
• Reducing demand for oil is the best way to improve our energy security. U.S. demand for oil has been declining since 2007. New fuel-efficiency standards mean that this trend will continue once the economy gets back on track. In fact, the Energy Deptartment report on KeystoneXL found that decreasing demand through fuel efficiency is the only way to reduce mid-east oil imports with or without the pipeline.

More info:

• “Exporting Energy Security: Keystone XL Exposed”, Oil Change International

Gas prices: Keystone XL will increase gas prices for Americans—Especially Farmers

• By draining Midwestern refineries of cheap Canadian crude into export-oriented refineries in the Gulf Coast, Keystone XL will increase the cost of gas for Americans.
• TransCanada’s 2008 Permit Application states “Existing markets for Canadian heavy crude, principally PADD II [U.S. Midwest], are currently oversupplied, resulting in price discounting for Canadian heavy crude oil. Access to the USGC [U.S. Gulf Coast] via the Keystone XL Pipeline is expected to strengthen Canadian crude oil pricing in [the Midwest] by removing this oversupply. This is expected to increase the price of heavy crude to the equivalent cost of imported crude. The resultant increase in the price of heavy crude is estimated to provide an increase in annual revenue to the Canadian producing industry in 2013 of US $2 billion to US $3.9 billion.”
• Independent analysis of these figures found this would increase per-gallon prices by 20 cents/gallon in the Midwest.
• According to an independent analysis U.S. farmers, who spent $12.4 billion on fuel in 2009 could see expenses rise to $15 billion or higher in 2012 or 2013 if the pipeline goes through. At least $500 million of the added expense would come from the Canadian market manipulation.

More information:

• “Tar Sands Oil Means High Gas Prices” Corporate Ethics International
• “Pipeline Profiteering” National Wildlife Federation

Jobs: TransCanada’s jobs projections are vastly inflated.

• In 2008, TransCanada’s Presidential Permit application for Keystone XL to the State Department indicated “a peak workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel” to build the pipeline.
• Jobs estimates above those listed in its application draw from a 2011 report commissioned by TransCanada that estimates 20,000 “person-years” of employment based on a non-public forecast model using undisclosed inputs provided by TransCanada.
• According to TransCanada’s own data, just 11% of the construction jobs on the Keystone I pipeline in South Dakota were filled by South Dakotans–most of them for temporary, low-paying manual labor.
• Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) both oppose the pipeline. Their August 2011 statement: “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil. There is no shortage of water and sewage pipelines that need to be fixed or replaced, bridges and tunnels that are in need of emergency repair, transportation infrastructure that needs to be renewed and developed. Many jobs could also be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid, maintaining and expanding public transportation—jobs that can help us reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency.”

More Information:

• “Transcanada’s Exaggerated Jobs Claims for KeystoneXL” National Wildlife Federation

Safety: A rupture in the Keystone XL pipeline could cause a BP style oil spill in America’s heartland, over the source of fresh drinking water for 2 million people. NASA’s top climate scientist says that fully developing the tar sands in Canada would mean “essentially game over” for the climate.

• The U.S. Pipeline Safety Administration has not yet conducted an in depth analysis of the safety of diluted bitumen (raw tar sands) pipeline, despite unique safety concerns posed by its more corrosive properties.
• TransCanada predicted that the Keystone I pipeline would see one spill in 7 years. In fact, there have been 12 spills in 1 year. The company was ordered to dig up 10 sections of pipe after government-ordered tests indicated that defective steel may have been used. KeystoneXL will use steel from the same Indian manufacturer.
• Keystone XL will cross through America’s agricultural heartland, the Missouri and Niobrara Rivers, the Ogallala aquifer, sage grouse habitat, walleye fisheries and more.
• The agency was not adequately accounting for threats to wildlife, increased pollution in distressed communities where the crude may be refined, or increases in carbon emissions that would exacerbate climate change, and a variety of other issues.

More Information

• “Tar Sands Pipeline Safety Risks”, National Wildlife Federation, NRDC, Others.
• “On Shore Oil Disasters”, National Wildlife Federation
• “Analysis of Frequency, Magnitude and Consequence of Worst-Case Spills From the Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline” John Stansbury, Ph.D., P.E.
• “Pipeline “Safety Conditions” are Smoke and Mirrors”, NRDC

Climate Change: Keystone XL is the fuse to North America’s biggest carbon bomb.

• In a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a group of retired four-star generals and admirals concluded that climate change, if not addressed, will be the greatest threat to national security.
• The State Department Environmental Impact Statement fails to adequately analyze lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by the pipeline. Extraction and refinement of oil sands are more GHG-intensive compared to conventional oil. The EIS estimates that the additional annual GHG emissions from the proposed pipeline could range from an additional “12-23 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent… (roughly the equivalent of annual emissions from 2 to 4 coal-fired power plants)” over conventional crude oil from the Middle East. [8] The EPA believes that the methodology used by the State Department is inaccurate and could underestimate GHG emissions by as much as 20 percent.[9] Given that the expected lifetime of the Keystone XL pipeline is fifty years, the EPA notes that the project could yield an extra 1.15 billion tons of GHGs using the quantitative estimates in the EIS.[10]

Keystone XL Pipeline: The Details.

Keystone XL Pipeline

The Canadian oil and gas company TransCanada hopes to begin building a new oil pipeline that would trek close to 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to Texas. If constructed, the pipeline, known as the Keystone XL, will carry one of the world’s dirtiest fuels: tar sands oil. Along its route from Alberta to Texas, this pipeline could devastate ecosystems and pollute water sources, and would jeopardize public health.

Giant oil corporations invested in Canada's tar sands are counting on the Keystone XL pipeline to make the expansion of oil extraction operations profitable: The pipeline would double imports of dirty tar sands oil into the United States.

Before TransCanada can begin construction, however, the company needs a presidential permit from the Obama administration.

Your voice is needed to tell the Obama administration to say “no” to the Keystone XL pipeline and the highly polluting tar sands oil that would come with it.

Dirty tar sands oil

Pollution from tar sands oil greatly eclipses that of conventional oil. During tar sands oil production alone, levels of carbon dioxide emissions are three times higher than those of conventional oil, due to more energy-intensive extraction and refining processes. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry 900,000 barrels of dirty tar sands oil into the United States daily, doubling our country's reliance on it and resulting in climate-damaging emissions equal to adding more than six million new cars to U.S. roads.

Water waste

During the tar sands oil extraction process, vast amounts of water are needed to separate the extracted product, bitumen, from sand, silt, and clay. It takes three barrels of water to extract each single barrel of oil. At this rate, tar sands operations use roughly 400 million gallons of water a day. Ninety percent of this polluted water is dumped into large human-made pools, known as tailing ponds, after it’s used. These ponds are home to toxic sludge, full of harmful substances like cyanide and ammonia, which has worked its way into neighboring clean water supplies.

Indigenous populations

Northern Alberta, the region where tar sands oil is extracted, is home to many indigenous populations. Important parts of their cultural traditions and livelihood are coming under attack because of tar sands operations. Communities living downstream from tailing ponds have seen spikes in rates of rare cancers, renal failure, lupus, and hyperthyroidism. In the lakeside village of Fort Chipewyan, for example, 100 of the town’s 1,200 residents have died from cancer.

These problems will only get worse, unless tar sands production is halted. Unfortunately, an area the size of Florida is already set for extraction. Investing in a new pipeline would increase the rate of production, while decreasing the quality of life for indigenous populations.

Pipeline spills

TransCanada already attempted to cut corners by seeking a safety waiver to build the pipeline with thinner-than-normal steel and to pump oil at higher-than-normal pressures. Thanks to the pressure exerted by Friends of the Earth and allies, the company withdrew its safety waiver application in August 2010.

The threat of spills remains. In summer 2010, a million gallons of tar sands oil poured into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan from a pipeline run by another Canadian company, Enbridge. The spill exposed residents to toxic chemicals, coated wildlife and has caused long-term damage to the local economy and ecosystem.

Heightening concerns, TransCanada's Keystone I pipeline has spilled a dozen times in less than a year of operation, prompting a corrective action order from the Department of Transportation. Experts warn that the more acidic and corrosive consistency of the type of tar sands oil being piped into the U.S. makes spills more likely, and have joined the EPA in calling on the State Department to conduct a thorough study of these risks.

The Keystone XL pipeline would traverse six U.S. states and cross major rivers, including the Missouri River, Yellowstone, and Red Rivers, as well as key sources of drinking and agricultural water, such as the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies two million Americans.

Refining tar sands oil

After traveling through the Keystone XL pipeline, tar sands oil would be brought to facilities in Texas to be further refined. Refining tar sands oil is dirtier than refining conventional oil, and results in higher emissions of toxic sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. These emissions cause smog and acid rain and contribute to respiratory diseases like asthma. Communities near the refineries where the Keystone XL pipeline would terminate, many of them low-income and communities of color, already live with dangerously high levels of air pollution. The Keystone XL pipeline would further exacerbate the heavy burden of pollution and environmental injustices these communities confront.

Stopping the pipeline

Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest fuels on the Earth. Investing in tar sands oil now will delay investments in clean and safe alternatives to oil, such as better fuel economy requirements, plug-in electric cars fueled by solar power, and smart growth and public transportation infrastructure that give Americans choices other than cars.

Soon, President Obama will decide the fate of this pipeline. Tell President Obama to say “no” to dirty tar sands oil.

Take action now

Tell President Obama to halt construction of the Keystone XL

Social media

Join our Facebook Page

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Resources

Fact sheets:

• Keystone XL: Pipeline for Dirty Tar Sands Oil [pdf]
• Evidence of State Department bias in Keystone XL review [pdf]

Report -- Dirty Business: How TransCanada Pipelines bullies farmers, manipulates oil markets, threatens fresh water and skimps on safety in the United States

Interviews -- Telling their stories: The Fight to Stop the Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline

Uncovering oil lobbyist influence -- Read about the intensifying scandal regarding the State Department's Keystone XL review

Infographic -- Keystone XL pipeline corruption investigation

Nationwide organizing -- Learn more about the Tar Sands Action's nationwide organizing

Press releases and related media

Read our Keystone XL controversy news round up from October 14, 2011

Read our Keystone XL controversy news round up from October 5, 2011

Read our round up of Keystone XL controversy news following the release of "smoking gun" State Department documents, our lawsuit against the State Department and the expansion of our FOIA request, October 3, 2011 - October 6, 2011

"For Obama, Peer Pressure from Nobel Laureates," New York Times, September 19, 2011

"Poll finds solid opposition to pipeline," World-Herald News Service, September 19, 2011

"State Department Keystone XL pipeline impacts analysis slammed as inadequate," Friends of the Earth, August 26, 2011.

"Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers," New York Times editorial, August 21, 2011.

"Dozens arrested outside White House in Keystone pipeline protests," The Canadian Press, August 20, 2011.

"Pipeline from Canada may already have U.S. backing," Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2011.

"Study warns of leak risks of Canada-U.S. oil pipe," Reuters, July 11, 2011.

"Without Keystone XL, oil sands face choke point," The Globe and Mail, June 8, 2011.

"EPA lining up with Keystone XL critics," Lincoln Journal Star, June 7, 2011.

"Perilous pipeline: Will Hillary Clinton give the OK to a massive tar-sands pipeline?" Grist, June 3, 2011.

"Keystone Oil Pipeline: Regulators Block Restart Of Keystone Oil Pipeline, Cite Leaks," Huffington Post, June 3, 2011.

"New Report Reveals ‘Dirty Business’ Practices of TransCanada Pipelines," Friends of the Earth, April 28, 2011

"State Department Releases Supplemental Environmental Analysis on Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline," Friends of the Earth, April 15, 2011

A Woman with a Plan: The Real Story of Margaret Sanger

Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 12:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Was Planned Parenthood’s founder racist?

Cain is hardly the first abortion foe to smear Margaret Sanger with such accusations. Here's the real story

By Ellen Chesler, New Deal 2.0

(Credit: Wikipedia/AP)

Topics:New Deal 2.0, Birth Control, Herman Cain, Abortion

This piece originally appeared on New Deal 2.0.

Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger is back in the news this week thanks to GOP presidential candidate and abortion rights opponent Herman Cain, who claimed on national television that Planned Parenthood, the visionary global movement she founded nearly a century ago, is really about one thing only: “preventing black babies from being born.” Cain’s outrageous and false accusation is actually an all too familiar canard — a willful repetition of scurrilous claims that have circulated for years despite detailed refutation by scholars who have examined the evidence and unveiled the distortions and misrepresentations on which they are based (for a recent example, see this rebuttal from The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler).

It’s an old tactic. Even in her own day, Sanger endured deliberate character assassination by opponents who believed they would gain more traction by impugning her character and her motives than by debating the merits of her ideas. But when a presidential candidate from a major U.S. political party is saying such things, a thoughtful response is necessary.

So what is Sanger’s story?

Born Margaret Louisa Higgins in 1879, the middle child of a large Irish Catholic family, Sanger grew into a follower of labor organizers, free thinkers and bohemians. Married to William Sanger, an itinerant architect and painter, she helped support three young children by working as a visiting nurse on New York’s Lower East Side. Following the death of a patient from a then all-too-common illegal abortion, she vowed to abandon palliative work and instead overturn obscenity laws that prevented legal access to safe contraception.

Sanger’s fundamental heresy was in claiming every woman’s right to experience her sexuality freely and bear only the number of children she desires. Following a first generation of educated women who had proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfillment outside the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition to the resolution of a broad range of personal and professional frustrations.

The hardest challenge in introducing Sanger to modern audiences, who take this idea for granted, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it seemed in her own time. As a result of largely private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches and various contraptions sold under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, birth rates had already begun to decline. But contraception remained a clandestine and delicate subject, legally banned under obscenity statutes, and women were still largely denied identities or rights independent of their relationships with men, including the right to vote.

By inventing the term “birth control,” Sanger brought the practice — and by implication, women’s entitlement to sexual pleasure — out into the open and gave them essential currency. She went to jail in 1917 for opening a clinic to distribute primitive diaphragms to immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, and appeal of her conviction led to a medical exception that licensed doctors to prescribe contraception for reasons of health. Under these constraints she built a network of independent local women’s health centers that eventually came together under the banner of Planned Parenthood. She also lobbied for the repeal of federal obscenity statutes that prevented the legal transport of contraception by physicians across state lines, which were struck down in federal court in 1936.

Sanger sought and won scientific validation for various contraceptive methods, including the birth control pill, whose development she supported and found the money to fund. In so doing, she helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased reproduction and secured the endorsement of contraception by physicians and social scientists. From this singular accomplishment, which some still consider heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.

Sanger always remained a wildly polarizing figure, which clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to jettison “birth control” and adopt the more socially resonant term “family planning.” This move was particularly inventive but in no way cynical, especially when the Great Depression brought attention to collective needs and the New Deal created a blueprint for bold public endeavors.

Some have falsely charged that Sanger defined family planning as a right of the privileged but a duty or obligation of the poor. To the contrary, she showed considerable foresight in lobbying to include universal voluntary family planning programs among public investments in social security. Had the New Deal incorporated basic public health and access to contraception, as most European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over welfare and health care policy in the U.S. might well have been avoided.

Having long enjoyed the friendship and support of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Sanger also had ample reason to believe the New Dealers would fully legalize and endorse contraception as a necessary first step to her long-term goal of transferring responsibility and accountability for voluntary clinics to the public health sector. What she failed to anticipate was the force of opposition family planning continued to generate from a coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants, that held Roosevelt Democrats captive much as today’s evangelicals have captured the GOP.

The U.S. government would not overcome cultural and religious objections to public support of family planning through its domestic anti-poverty and international development programs until the late 1960s, after the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in Griswold v. Connecticut. At this time, Planned Parenthood clinics became major government contractors, since there were few alternative primary health care centers serving the poor. Today, one in four American women funds her contraception through government programs, many of them still run by Planned Parenthood — a number likely to rise under the Affordable Care Act.

Sanger’s eagerness to mainstream her movement explains her engagement with eugenics, a then widely popular intellectual movement that addressed the manner in which human intelligence and opportunity is determined by biological as well as environmental factors. Hard as it is to believe, eugenics was considered far more respectable than birth control. Like many well-intentioned reformers of this era, Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that humanity’s evolution within the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement if only we apply the right tools. University presidents, physicians, scientists and public officials all embraced eugenics, in part because it held the promise that merit would replace fate — or birthright and social status — as the standard for mobility in a democratic society.

But eugenics also has some damning and today unfathomable legacies, such as a series of state laws upheld in 1927 by an eight-to-one progressive majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Their landmark decision in Buck v. Bell authorized the compulsory sterilization of a poor young white woman with an illegitimate child on grounds of feeble mindedness that were never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin of the ACLU and W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP, both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.

For Sanger, eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary use of birth control, which many still opposed on the grounds that the middle class should be encouraged to have more babies. She countered by disdaining what she called a “cradle competition” of class, race, or ethnicity. She publicly opposed immigration restrictions and framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources like birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or character.

As a nurse, Sanger also understood the adverse impacts of poor nutrition, drugs, and alcohol on fetal development and encouraged government support of maternal and infant health. She argued for broad social safety nets and proudly marshaled clinical data to demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and least educated populations, eagerly embraced and used birth control successfully when it is was provided.

At the same time, Sanger did on many occasions engage in shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families of low intelligence and defective heredity — language with no intended racial or ethnic content. She always argued that all women are better off with fewer children, but unfortunate language about “creating a race of thoroughbreds” and other such phrases have in recent years been lifted out of context and used to sully her reputation. Moreover, in endorsing Buck v. Bell and on several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to poor women who agreed to limit their childbearing (many of whom enjoyed no other health care coverage), Sanger quite clearly failed to consider fundamental human rights questions raised by such practices. Living in an era indifferent to the obligation to respect and protect individuals whose behaviors do not always conform to prevailing mores, she did not always fulfill it.

The challenge as Sanger’s biographer has been to reconcile apparent contradictions in her beliefs. She actually held unusually advanced views on race relations for her day and on many occasions condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation between blacks and whites. Though most birth control facilities conformed to the segregation mores of the day, she opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s. Later, she facilitated birth control and maternal health programs for rural black women in the South, when local white health officials there denied them access to any New Deal-funded services.

Sanger worked on this last project with the behind-the-scenes support of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council for Negro Women and then a Roosevelt administration official. Their progressive views on race were well known, if controversial, but their support for birth control was silenced by Franklin’s political handlers — at least until he was safely ensconced in the White House for a third term, when the government rushed to provide condoms to World War II soldiers.

Sanger’s so-called Negro Project has been a source of controversy first raised by black nationalists and some feminist scholars in the 1970s and later by anti-abortion foes. Respecting the importance of self-determination among users of contraception, she recruited prominent black leaders to endorse the goal, especially ministers who held sway over the faithful. In that context, she wrote an unfortunate sentence in a private letter about needing to clarify the ideals and goals of the birth control movement because “we do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” The sentence may have been thoughtlessly composed, but it is perfectly clear that she was not endorsing genocide.

America’s intensely complicated politics of race and gender has long ensnarled Sanger and all others who have sought to discipline reproduction. As many scholars of the subject in recent years have observed, much of the controversy proceeds from the plain fact that reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time. In claiming women’s fundamental right to control their own bodies, Sanger remained mindful of the dense fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised.

In most instances the policies Sanger advocated were intended to observe the necessary obligation of social policy to balance individual rights of self-expression with the sometimes contrary desire to promulgate and enforce common mores and laws. She may have failed to get the balance quite right, but there is nothing in the record to poison her reputation or discredit her noble cause. Quite the contrary.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. may have put it best in 1966, when he accepted Planned Parenthood’s prestigious Margaret Sanger Award and spoke eloquently of the “kinship” between the civil rights and family planning movements. Here is what he said, since it bears repeating:

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister… She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning.

Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of "Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America." More Ellen Chesler

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

Occupy Earth: Nature Is the 99%, Too

Someone Got Rich and Someone Got Sick

by Chip Ward

What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?

Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.photo: 350.org

In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.

Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.

And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.

The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.

Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By “externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar “superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.

Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.

The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.

First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.

Poll after poll shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.

The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must sacrifice environmental quality for pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?

The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO² the planet can absorb and remain habitable.

Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.

At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms, monster wildfires, epic droughts, Biblical floods, an avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.

Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.

An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.

Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.

When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are dying, fisheries are going, extinction is on steroids.

Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.

After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?

Copyright 2011 Chip Ward

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He co-founded and led Families Against Incinerator Risk and HEAL Utah. He described his political adventures in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah. His essays can be found by clicking here.

100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima

examiner.com

Leuren Moret: 100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima

Alfred Lambremont Webre

Seattle Exopolitics Examiner

October 22, 2011

By Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD. MEd

In an exclusive ExopoliticsTV interview released Oct. 22, 2011 independent scientist Leuren Moret, MA, PhD ABT has revealed that approximately 100,000 excess deaths will occur in North America 2011 that are directly attributable to the effects of deadly radiation from the March 11, 2011 tectonic-nuclear false flag earthquake and tsunami event at Fukushima, Japan.

Ms. Moret's relevation of 100,000 excess deaths in 2011 in North America from Fukushima radiation is based on official excess death data for 2011 published by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), set out at the end of this article.

According to Ms. Moret, the governments of the USA, Canada, Japan and other governments are in knowing complicity in a cover-up of this documented radiation genocide and crimes against humanity by a now-identified international war crimes racketeering organization.

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Based on Ms. Moret’s and other’s research, [See list of links at end of this article], forensic evidence now confirms that the March 11, 2011 Fukushima tectonic-radiation event was triggered by the HAARP-Chemtrails weapons system.

In the case of the Fukushima event, the HAARP Facility at Tromso, Norway may have been the HAARP of more that 17 HAARP facilities worldwide controlled by an international war crimes racketeering organization overseeing HAARP used to trigger the March 11, 2011 Fukushima event. The over-all purpose of this false flag global radiation event was as part of a global depopulation plan to reduce the human population by 90% or more by some reports.

Watch ExopoliticsTV interview with independent scientist Leuren Moret

Readers can watch the ExopoliticsTV interview with independent scientist Leuren Moret embedded in the article above or at the URL below:

WATCH INTERVIEW:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mudMjxSaZA

“100,000 North American excess deaths is an underestimate”

Leuren Moret states, “100,000 excess deaths in North America in 2011 from Fukushima is an underestimate because that does not include deaths of infants and preborns attributable to Fukushima radiation.”

Ms. Moret continues, “The 100,000 excess deaths is 2011 from Fukushima radiation is just for the USA alone. That figure does not include excess deaths from Fukushima radiation in Canada and in Mexico. Now bigger numbers of excess deaths due to Fukushima radiation are coming out for Toronto, Canada than here in the USA.”

Ms. Moret states, “The death rate for infant mortality has increased by 50% in the North West United States since March 11, 2011, as of June 18, 2011. The death rate for infant mortality has to be higher since June 18 because the radiation levels and excess deaths are increasing every week. We will have a horrific update in December 2011, because the increase in birth defects is going to be very apparent in December 2011, - 9 months after Fukushima.”

Fukushima: Environmental radiation levels in USA and Japan and increases in death rates

In her ExopoliticsTV interview, independent scientist Leuren Moret assesses excess deaths for the USA, update for March 13 – September 3, 2011, citing “Beta Radiation In the United States Following the Fukushima Disaster”

Ms. Moret states, “A report on beta levels in the US has established the background levels from 2010, in order to assess and monitor the increases in environmental accumulated Fukushima radiation throughout 129 US cities using EPA data since March 11, 2011. For each time period the beta level increased by many times the 2010 level for the same time period:

“March 15-31 5.09X background (2010)
April 1-30 2.01X background
May 1-23 1.15X background”

Ms. Moret continues, “The March multiplier effects were the highest reported through May, also very high in some cities, with significant increases in all cities tested:

“Tucson AZ Radiation is 18.20X times higher than 2010
Eureka CA Radiation is 53.05X times higher than 2010
San Diego CA Radiation is 11.42X times higher than 2010
Honolulu HI Radiation is 23.98X times higher than 2010
Hilo HI Radiation is 12.49X times higher than 2010
Salt Lake City UT Radiation is 16.77X times higher than 2010”

Ms. Moret notes, “The top beta increases in 15 cities were Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tucson, San Diego, Honolulu, Riverside, Orlando, Hilo, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Omaha, Sacramento, Jacksonville FL, Idaho Falls. March 15-31 rainfall was 8” in Eureka CA, 3.80” in LA, 4.10” in Sacramento, 4.72” in San Francisco, 4.02” in Orlando FL, 6.53” in Hilo, 3.38” in Portland, and 3.58” in Olympia WA. There were also differences in the amount of dry deposition (AZ, UT, CA, HI, FL) in some states compared to wet deposition (CA, HI, FL, WA, OR).”

Seafood and radiation

In her ExopoliticsTV interview, Ms. Moret notes that, “According to CNN Radioactive beef has leaked into the consumer market over in Japan. I can only see this spreading to other Countries through the oceans. If you remember just recently the US Gov. said that it is going to stop monitoring the fish for radiation. So much for the Seafood lovers.”

Radiation and infant mortality rates

In her interview Ms. Moret states, “This data regarding excess deaths does not include infant mortality. However, as reported in late June by Dr. Janette Sherman, infant mortality rates in west coast cities from Washington to California, increased 35% between March 11 and June 18, and in the Pacific Northwest where there is higher rainfall, infant mortality increased 45% in Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Spokane. The increase in excess deaths in the general population would be expected to be lower than for infant mortality, because infants are the most susceptible to radiation exposure even at very low levels.”

Radiation and excess death rates

References:

US Regions with Significant Increases in Mortality Since 3/13/11 (CDC)
http:/freepdfhosting.com/2b6c39b50b.pdf

CDC weekly update: http://wonder.cdc.gov/mmwr/mmwr_reps.asp

Total excess US deaths 03/13/11-09/03/11: 34,129
Weekly increase range – 2.7% to 9.1% (7/9/11-9/3/11)
Pacific Region: WA, OR, CA, AK, HI
Weekly increase: +3.6%, 3.4%3.6%, 3.6%, 3.6%, 3.3%, 3.5% = 6,716 excess deaths
West South Central: OK, AR, LA, and TX
Weekly increase – +5.2%, 5.9%, 7.0%, 7.0% 6.6%, 6.9%, 4.9%= 8,730 excess deaths

Total US Excess Deaths 03/13/11-09/03/11 = 34,129 excess deaths 25 weeks
Peak excess death rate period April 23-May 21 (May 7 peak 34% increase)

March 11, 2011 – Sept 3 34,000 in 25 wks.

Jan 1, 2012 excess deaths including infant - 100,000 excess deaths.

Radiation and maternal death rates

Maternal Deaths – “Maternal Deaths: Why the Rise?”
http://www.medicalobserver.com.au/news/maternal-deaths-why-the-rise

Australia – 8.4 deaths per 100,000
Herzegovina/Bosnia/Macedonia/Croatia – 10 or fewer per 100,000
Calif. 2005 maternal mortality 11 per 100,000
California 1996-2006 maternal mortality tripled from 5.6 to 16.9 per 100,000
Causes: morbid obesity, ageing mothers, hypertension, diabetes, hemorrhaging from caesarian sections (especially in obese mothers)
AU: obesity in pregnant women has increased from 30/yr. in 2008 from 1-2 in 2003
AU/US: C-sections highest in world – 2007 had 30.9% births were C-section
AU: Gestational diabetes increased 20% 2001-2006
Conjoined twins – increasing in monsoon rainout of DU areas (human/animal)
Sex ratios at birth – boys/100 girls changing in radiation contaminated areas
UN and WHO hiding this statistic more than any others

Fukushima - References

33. Leuren Moret: Japan, U.S., Canadian governments complicit in radiation cover-up

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-japan-u-s-canadian-governments-complicit-radiation-cover-up

32. YOU TUBE: Leuren Moret: Japan, U.S., Canadian governments complicit in radiation cover-up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb49kkkkYps

31. YOUTUBE - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://youtu.be/Z91frvrhris

30. RADIATION UPDATE - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-nuclear-genocide-of-babies-children-japan-u-s-canada-grows

29. VIDEO - Leuren Moret: Nuclear genocide of babies & children in Japan, U.S., Canada grows

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-nuclear-genocide-of-babies-and-children-japan-us-canada-grows-video

28. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret - Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, U.S., Canada - Part 2 of 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV7Tm7Tjh9I

27. RADIATION UPDATE - Leuren Moret: Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, US, Canada

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-radiation-food-contamination-grows-japan-us-canada

26. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima radiation food contamination grows in Japan, U.S., Canada

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-radiation-food-contamination-grows-japan-u-s-canada-part-2-of-3-video

25. Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-mega-tsunami-total-melt-through-radiation-levels-and-illnesses

24. VIDEO: Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-mega-tsunami-total-melt-through-radiation-levels-and-illnesses-video

23. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret: Mega-tsunami, total melt-through, radiation levels and illnesses

http://youtu.be/6L3BHnI1A_Y

22.Leuren Moret: Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-haarp-nuclear-attack-by-cia-doe-bp-for-london-banks

21. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-haarp-nuclear-attack-by-cia-doe-bp-for-london-banks-video

20. YOU TUBE - Leuren Moret: Fukushima HAARP nuclear attack by CIA, DOE, BP for London banks

http://youtu.be/htsWup50i3E

19. Leuren Moret: Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world partners

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-monitored-by-world-partners

18. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world HAARP partners

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-fukushima-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-monitored-by-world-haarp-partners-video

17. YOU TUBE: Leuren Moret - Fukushima tectonic nuclear warfare monitored by world HAARP partners

http://youtu.be/Z95xcFW8lPU

16. Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-radiation-war-intensifies-with-haarp-tornadoes-usa

15. VIDEO: Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-radiation-war-intensifies-with-haarp-tornadoes-usa-video

14. YOUTUBE: Scientist Leuren Moret: Radiation war intensifies with HAARP tornadoes in USA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgRlYt5DjJY

13. Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/coverup-california-northwest-b-c-canada-under-radiation-as-high-as-japan

12. VIDEO: Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-coverup-california-northwest-usa-bc-canada-under-radiation-threat-as-high-as-japan-video

11. YOUTUBE: Coverup! California, Northwest, B.C. Canada under radiation as high as Japan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zL3M3kvgI0

10. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret - Scientists declare northern one-third of Japan uninhabitable and should be evacuated

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_kTC8GqlwQ

9. Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-u-s-canada-mexico-hawaii-targeted-nuclear-war-from-japan

8. VIDEO: Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-japan-nuclear-war-targets-us-canada-mexico-and-hawaii-video

7. YOUTUBE: Scientist: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Hawaii targeted in nuclear war from Japan

Leuren Moret - Japan nuclear war targets US Canada Mexico and Hawaii.m4v

6. Scientist: Japan earthquake, nuke “accident” are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-japan-earthquake-nuke-accident-are-tectonic-nuclear-warfare

5. VIDEO: Scientist Leuren Moret - Japan earthquake and nuclear "accident" are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/scientist-leuren-moret-japan-earthquake-and-nuclear-accident-are-tectonic-nuclear-warfare-video

4. YOUTUBE: Scientist Leuren Moret - Japan earthquake and nuclear "accident" are tectonic nuclear warfare

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WxmeOqYtB0

3. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Coverup! California, Northwest USA, B.C. Canada under radiation threat as high as Japan

http://vimeo.com/22003021

2. VIDEO: Leuren Moret - Scientists declare northern 1/3 of Japan uninhabitable and should be evacuated - BREAKING NEWS

http://vimeo.com/22003275

1. U.S. SPACE SHUTTLE & HAARP/CHEMTRAILS:

A. BREAKING NEWS - Leuren Moret: US Space shuttle covert mission was chemtrails in space for HAARP

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-us-space-shuttle-covert-mission-was-chemtrails-space-for-haarp

B. YOUTUBE: Leuren Moret: US Space shuttle covert mission was chemtrails in space for HAARP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH0vJR8nLKw

_____________________
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Copyright Alfred Lambremont Webre JD, MEd, All right reserved

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FIJI Water and Parent Company Still Rolling in the Dirty Water

FIJI Water and Parent Company Still Rolling in the Water

by Kai Olson-Sawyer | 08.29.2011 |

FIJI Water and Paramount Farms - both owned by parent company, Roll Global - are familiar with scandal and legal troubles, much of it involving water. Digital image by Weiling Fu.

So far, 2011 has been a tough year for scandal-prone California agribusiness giant and holding company, Roll International, which might be part of the reason for the company’s recent yet minor name change to Roll Global. (Of course, I’m kidding. It’s for tax purposes, right?) After all the bad press last year about how Roll International Global – the parent company of luxury bottled water brand FIJI Water, among other well-known businesses – established itself as a community-draining water-taker extraordinaire, it’s not unexpected that the corporation might want to distance itself from…itself. Belief in corporate personhood aside , it’s actually the Beverly Hills-based, billionaire socialite couple, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who are probably dismayed.

2011 tasted sour from the start for the Resnick’s equally loved and derided FIJI Water brand thanks to the publicized scuffle over a new Fiji government-imposed 8 cents per liter tax. A negligible-looking cost from the outside, this royalty is a huge increase compared to the teensy 1/3 cent per liter tax that had previously been levied. In November 2010, a row over the tax erupted between the government and FIJI Water. The company shut down bottling operations in dramatic protest, only to accede and get back to bottling a couple days later.

Despite FIJI Water’s indignation about any form of taxation, there are signs that the new tax revenue might benefit the citizens of Fiji, of whom slightly less than half have access to clean water. To reduce the problem of clean water access and to comply with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, the Fiji Water Authority has committed to providing 60 percent of its inhabitants with clean drinking water by 2014. Here’s hoping the ruling military government puts the tax revenue towards improved drinking water quality and access, a moral imperative and a fundamental for building any healthy, stable and prosperous society.

More recently, Roll Global experienced another dent to their image, this time here in the States, in an all-too-familiar form: a lawsuit. The problems flow from the company’s immense 125,000-acre Paramount Farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley which, according to their website, is the “world’s largest grower and processor of almonds and pistachios.” In this case, Paramount Farms, along with other politically powerful farmers in the area, began withdrawing so much groundwater from the two water banks they control that it drastically dropped water levels for residents of a small, local utility. The Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District is now suing the water banks’ authority, Kern County Water Agency, because of a revoked Memo of Understanding that gave certain rights to the utility.

One of the banks – the Kern Water Bank – was established under particularly sketchy circumstances and is no stranger to lawsuits ever since the Resnicks – through Paramount Farms – began buying up area land and water rights “Chinatown-style” in the 1980s-90s. After Roll claimed these water rights with the land purchases, they and other wealthy landowners created the water bank using public funds, giving them unlimited withdrawals and the ability to resell water for big profits, neglecting nearby residents without clean water access in the process.

Most galling to Roll Global must be the coverage by The New York Times of the pending Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District lawsuit. While there was already media scrutiny about the secretive circumstances surrounding the transition of the Kern Water Bank to Paramount Farms ownership, the buzz has stayed mainly within the borders of California where, one might imagine, Roll Global hopes it will remain.

As an agribusiness and water bottler, water is the lifeblood of the corporate giant. The Resnicks rightfully own their businesses and can operate as they see fit. Besides going after cheap water no matter the means, Roll Global is like other companies, especially in the food and beverage industry, that promote their greenness and health-consciousness, even though their products may not be all that green or healthy. Their Foundation and community-building projects do provide some genuine support to worthwhile causes, but the entirety of their programs in combination with their marketing and PR campaigns don’t wipe away all that they’ve wrought.

The pursuit of water is the hidden pea in Roll Global’s corporate shell game. The company uses its multiple businesses and subsidiaries to evade corporate accountability while actually engaging in business practices that both undermine its stated values and obfuscate the many negative effects of these decisions. By making the connections between the unseemly behavior exhibited by the Resnicks, Roll Global, FIJI Water, Paramount Farms and Kern County Water Agency, we get a fuller picture of what is going on behind the scenes and, in the end, are given the opportunity to make consumer choices consistent with our principles.