Chemical Illness Epidemic in Gulf States

Recently Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer overseeing the $20 billion Gulf Coast Claims Facility to “make it right” for people harmed by the British Petroleum oil blowout disaster, told a Louisiana House and Senate committee that he had not seen any claims, or any scientific evidence, linking BP’s oil and dispersant release to chemical illnesses. Feinberg also stated that chemical illnesses take years to show up — conveniently well after his tenure with the compensation fund.

Instead of tossing the media a juicy bone, Feinberg tossed a red herring. He is wrong at worst, or intentionally misleading at best, on all points.

The GCCF process makes it difficult for people to be compensated for medical claims or even raise illness claims, while making it easy to release claims and rights to future medical care and benefits for chemical illnesses or other medically-proven illness related to the BP blowout and disaster response.

In fact the GCCF process is so blatantly egregious in terms of protecting corporate liability at the expense of human rights and health that a bill was introduced in the Louisiana state legislature, specifically targeting the BP oil disaster, to declare such “contractual releases are invalid as against public policy” and the release of claims to future medical care and related benefits null and void. In Louisiana. BP lobbyists are reportedly out in force, trying to gut the legislation.

Further, the pro-industry bias in the GCCF process turned thousands of people away. Over 130,000-plus claimants have filed lawsuits, now consolidated in Louisiana federal court under Judge Carl Barbier. According to one of the law firms involved, many of these claimants have indicated concerns about health and desire medical monitoring.

via Lots of Inconvenient Truths — Chemical Illness Epidemic in the Wake of the BP Blowout | Common Dreams.

Feinberg’s downplay of chemical illnesses and other medical issues stemming from the BP oil disaster — with full knowledge of the parallel court proceedings — shows that he and his boss, BP, have no intention of “making it right” for people in the Gulf.

“Not recognizing that there is a problem — that’s the problem,” said Joey Yerkes, a former Florida cast net fisherman who became sick from chemical exposure while doing cleanup work during summer 2010. He filed a medical illness claim for compensation through the GCCF in early 2011 despite the obstacles. He had to file all his paperwork for medical claims twice because the GCCF employees could not find his initial paperwork. Joey undertook a rigorous treatment under medical care to detoxify his body — but he exhausted his finances before completing treatment. Now he is forced to wait for the BP-controlled GCCF to pay, while his health steadily deteriorates. It’s all he can do, he says, “just to chase my 2-year-old daughter around the park when we play.”

Unlike Joey Yerkes, Monette Wynne has not filed medical claims through the GCCF. Her entire family — herself, husband, 4-year-old twins, and 6-year-old child — all tested positive for oil in their blood after spending last summer in their seaside home in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. Wynne was so upset about her sick family that she and her husband drove to Atlanta, Georgia, and presented the family’s test results to seven toxicologists with the federal agency, Center for Disease Control.

“We were told the levels of oil were of no concern,” Wynne said. The federal scientists told them their levels of oil in blood were typical of urban dwellers who breathe traffic exhaust. Wynne didn’t believe it — her family’s blood work shows they have more oil in their blood than most people, and her family is all sick with symptoms like those of Joey Yerkes — symptoms that became widespread in Gulf communities during summer 2010; symptoms that are not going away. Wynne is considering borrowing money to treat her family. She and her husband had exhausted their savings to buy their dream home, a home that is now for sale.

Unfortunately for Joey Yerkes and the Wynne family — and the legions of other Gulf residents and visitors with similar medical issues from summer 2010, British Petroleum is the “responsible party” for its disaster, but BP is actually responsible, by law, to its shareholders, not the injured people in the Gulf. This inherent conflict of interest means Feinberg is nothing more than a well-paid sock puppet for BP. He can be expected to act to minimize liability and financial damages for the “responsible party” by covering up the chemical illness epidemic in the Gulf.

Further, the federal laws and regulations designed to protect public health, worker safety, and the environment from oil and chemical poisoning are so riddled with exemptions that they cannot deliver their promise of protection — as people near oil drilling and hydrologic fracturing (“fracking”) operations have discovered. Social documentaries such as Gaslands and Split Estate exposed chemical illnesses and symptoms similar to the Gulf injuries and independent studies documented groundwater contamination, but the federal government still denies there is a problem.

Similarly, the federal government is also in denial about the horrific-and-federally-sanctioned poisoning of the Gulf people and wildlife, despite prior and post knowledge of the extent of contamination and the health impacts of oil and chemicals used to drill or disperse oil.

As Joey pointed out, denial of the problem is the problem. At the root of the issue of oil and chemical poisoning in the Gulf and elsewhere in America lies the problem of corporate constitutional rights — transnational corporations claiming human rights. The challenge for all Americans is to reclaim our democracy and end corporate rule.

Following Police Shooting, Miami Beach Makes Bad Situation Worse

Earlier this week, we wrote about the racialized controversy surrounding Miami Beach’s annual Memorial Day Urban Beach Week Festival. The anxiety came to a head on Monday when police opened fire on Raymond Herisse, a 22-year-old black man, killing him; four bystanders and three officers were injured in the process.

At the time, reports that unseen individuals in the car had been firing back at police were unconfirmed, and police said they found no gun in the car. The Miami Herald reports that on Wednesday, after leaving the car in the street all Monday morning, police finally found a gun:

Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos Noriega, concerned about the publicity surrounding the shooting, late Wednesday called the gun’s discovery “great news.” The gun was found about 7 p.m. when investigators were processing the car, he said.

“Everything is panning out the way we believe it happened,” he said. “It’s a very important development.”

It took police several days to find the weapon because it was out of sight, Noriega said. Investigators first had focused on processing the crime scenes and on talking to witnesses, he said.

Noriega said he could not say whether the gun had been fired.

“We were told he was seen with a firearm and, sure enough, there was a firearm in the car,” Noriega said. “We were told he discharged his firearm. Now, we need to confirm that with ballistics.”

Over at the Awl, Choire Sicha collects the array of reports of Miami Beach police seizing news cameras and smashing cell phones, arresting onlookers, and shooting at a black man who turned out to be a fire department captain on vacation. Miami Beach’s police department has also come under fire by civil rights groups for declaring the filming of police to be illegal.

Herisse has since been identified as a suspect in a November gas station robbery. Meanwhile, Herb Sosa, the Miami-area Latino gay rights advocate and conservative darling who previously referred to the wealthy black festivalgoers as an “unruly & dangerous mob,” is leading community rallies and Facebook movements to end Urban Beach week.

Disqus

via Following Police Shooting, Miami Beach Makes Bad Situation Worse – COLORLINES.

Narces Benoit filmed the Miami Beach confrontation, was arrested, but hid the memory card. 

Early on Memorial Day, Narces Benoit, 35, witnessed something in Miami Beach that no one should have to see: a fatal shooting by police. He then was arrested for recording the incident.

He had been driving when he saw the police involved in an altercation, and pulled out his cellphone to record the event. Then the shooting took place, and he says an officer noticed what he was doing.

Benoit told a reporter, “When he noticed me recording, one of the officers jumped in the truck, put a pistol to my head. My phone was smashed—he stepped on it, handcuffed me.”

Benoit’s recording of the shooting survived because he took out the memory card and hid it before the cellphone was destroyed.

A Miami Beach Police Department detective, Juan Sanchez, would not comment on how police officers performed that night in handling eyewitnesses. The matter is under review and may become the focus of an internal police investigation or a civil lawsuit, berhaps by Benoit for his treatment by the officers.

Ericka Davis, Benoit’s girlfriend, was with him when the police responded to his filming. “They handled us like we were criminals,” she said. “The officer came over to the driver’s side, on my left, and just put the gun to my head.”

oxfam study says world is entering an era of “permanent food crisis.”

Research to be published on Wednesday forecasts international prices of staples such as maize could rise by as much as 180% by 2030, with half of that rise due to the impacts of climate change.

After decades of steady decline in the number of hungry people around the world, the numbers are rapidly increasing as demand outpaces food production. The average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990 and is set to decline to a fraction of 1% in the next decade.

A devastating combination of factors – climate change, depleting natural resources, a global scramble for land and water, the rush to turn food into biofuels, a growing global population, and changing diets – have created the conditions for an increase in deep poverty.

“We are sleepwalking towards an age of avoidable crisis,” Oxfam’s chief executive, Barbara Stocking, said. “One in seven people on the planet go hungry every day despite the fact that the world is capable of feeding everyone. The food system must be overhauled.”

Oxfam called on the prime minister, David Cameron, and other G20 leaders to agree new rules to govern food markets. It wants greater regulation of commodities markets to contain volatility in prices.

It said global food reserves must be urgently increased and western governments must end biofuels policies that divert food to fuel for cars.

It also attacked excessive corporate concentration in the food sector, particularly in grain trading and in seed and agrochemicals.

The Oxfam report followed warnings from the UN last week that food prices are likely to hit new highs in the next few weeks, triggering unrest in developing countries. The average global price of cereals jumped by 71% to a new record in the year to April last month.

World entering era of permanent food crisis, with prices to double over next 20 years 

Wikileaks, the internet and a world of awakened, angry people

from alternet:

Amnesty International recently drew a link between the protests in the Arab world and the release by WikiLeaks of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic documents. In fact, the United Nations recently declared Internet access a basic human right in a report that cites WikiLeaks and the Arab Spring as driving factors.

5 WikiLeaks Hits of 2011 That Are Turning the World on Its Head — And That the Media Are Ignoring 

1) In January of this year, the north African country of Tunisia captured the world’s attention, as a relentless and inspiring democratic uprising managed to overthrow the autocratic President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in just a matter of weeks. Protests were initially sparked by food price inflation and staggering unemployment, as demonstrated by the self-immolation of a disillusioned young man named Mohamed Bouazizi.

But we should never underestimate the power of information when it comes to stirring things up. The role of the WikiLeaks Embassy cables, which revealed the US government’s view of the president and his ruling circle as deeply corrupt, cannot be overlooked.

Of course, Tunisians were well aware of their government’s corruption long before Cablegate. However, the Tunisian government felt threatened enough by the leaks to block access to the Lebanese news Web site Al-Akhbar after it published U.S. cables depicting Ben Ali and his government in an unflattering light. They went on to block not just WikiLeaks, but any news source publishing or referencing leaked cables that originated or referenced Tunisia. Their repressive reaction to the leaks pushed protesters over the brink, as it epitomized the country’s utter lack of freedom of expression.

And if there’s anything the hacktivists at Anonymous hate, it’s censorship, which is why they retaliated by shutting down key Web sites of the Tunisian government, an effort they dubbed “OpTunisia.”

The Tunisians were the first people in the Arab world to take to the streets and oust a leader for a generation. There is no denying that WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst in that effort, supplying more fuel to a fire that eventually toppled a regime. This helped inspire the revolt in Egypt and beyond, as uprisings against brutally repressive regimes extended to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Libya. As the protests spread, WikiLeaks cleverly released key cables revealing government abuse and corruption in those nations, which intensified the protesters’ demand for democracy.

2) The ‘worst of the worst’ included children, the elderly, the mentally ill, and journalists. In April of this year, WikiLeaks released the Guantanamo Files, which included classified documents on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. These files paint a stunning picture of an oppressive detention system riddled with incoherence and cruelty at every stage.

They shed new light on the persecution of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, who was caged at the camp for more than six years and then abruptly released without ever being charged. His crime was working for Al Jazeera. It was also revealed that almost 100 of the inmates sent to Guantanamo were listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses. Many went on hunger strikes or attempted suicide. Officials in charge also found it appropriate to detain children and old men, including an 89-year-old Afghan villager suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim.

Authorities heavily used unreliable evidence obtained from a small number of detainees under torture to justify due-process free detentions. They continued to maintain this testimony was reliable even after admitting that the prisoners who provided it had been mistreated. Despite President Obama’s promise to close it, the shameful, legal black hole that is Guantanamo is still open for business: 172 detainees remain imprisoned at Guantanamo, about 50 of whom are being subjected to indefinite detention.

3) US allies are among the leading funders of international terrorism. Following the secret raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, WikiLeaks released the Pakistan Papers, a batch of previously top secret State Department cables specifically dealing with the US relationship with Pakistan. The cables were published in Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely-read English-language newspaper.

The documents expose the complicity of senior Pakistani officials in US drone strikes that have maimed and killed hundreds of innocent civilians, including children. A cable from late 2009 reveals Pakistani officials actively encouraging the bombing missions.

Despite longstanding denials, the documents disclose that the US has been conducting special ops inside Pakistan and taking part in joint operations with the Pakistanis since 2009.

The most disturbing, though not surprising, reports show that the Saudis, our supposed allies, are among the leading funders of international terrorism. It appears Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been financing jihadist groups in Pakistan for years. A cable written in 2008 by Bryan Hunt of the U.S. consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, reads: “financial support estimated at nearly 100 million USD annually was making its way to Deobandi and Ahl-i-Hadith clerics in south Punjab from organisations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ostensibly with the direct support of those governments.”

Hunt outlines the process of recruitment for militancy, describing how “families with multiple children” and “severe financial difficulties” were exploited for recruitment purposes. The cable details the recruitment of children, who are given age-specific indoctrination and would eventually be trained according to the madrassah teachers’ assessment of their inclination “to engage in violence and acceptance of jihadi culture” versus their value as promoters of Deobandi or Ahl-i-Hadith sects or recruiters.

Recruits “chosen for jihad” would then be taken to “more sophisticated indoctrination camps, after which “youths were generally sent on to more established training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and then on to jihad either in FATA, NWFP, or as suicide bombers in settled areas.”

Therefore, the US government, well aware for years of Saudi Arabia’s disgusting exploitation of children, has remained a steadfast ally of the world’s biggest financier of terrorism.

4) World leaders are practically lighting a fire under the Arctic. As Secretary of State Hilary Clinton met with the Arctic Council last month to discuss oil exploration, WikiLeaks, with impeccable timing, published a new trove of cables highlighting a race to carve up the Arctic for resource exploitation. Nations battling to poison the arctic with oil drilling include Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, which all have competing claims to the Arctic.

The leaks illustrate a frightening reality, where world leaders are greedily awaiting the opportunity to exploit the oil and natural gas that lie beneath the melting Arctic ice, even arming themselves for possible resource wars. A least that’s what the Russian Ambassador Dmitry Rogozin hinted in a 2010 cable that reads, “The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources. Russia Should not be defeated in this fight.”

A 2009 cable suggests US paranoia about Russia: “Behind Russia’s policy are two potential benefits accruing from global warming, the prospect for an [even seasonally] ice-free shipping route from Europe to Asia, and the estimated oil and gas wealth hidden beneath the Arctic sea floor.” Russian Navy head Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky is quoted in a 2008 cable as saying, “While in the Arctic there is peace and stability, however, one cannot exclude that in the future there will be a redistribution of power, up to armed intervention.”

Clearly, banking on the melting of the polar ice caps has taken priority over halting or even reversing the catastrophic effects of climate change. The Arctic contains as much as one quarter of the world’s gas and oil reserves, once hidden under huge masses of ice and inaccessible through frozen seas. However, ice is melting faster than predicted, presenting profitable business opportunities which are leading the Arctic countries to lose sight of longer-term climate issues. Greenpeace oil campaigner Ben Ayliffe underscores the danger of this mentality:

“These latest Wikileaks revelations expose something profoundly concerning. Instead of seeing the melting of the Arctic ice cap as a spur to action on climate change, the leaders of the Arctic nations are instead investing in military hardware to fight for the oil beneath it. They’re preparing to fight to extract the very fossil fuels that caused the melting in the first place. It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.”

5) Washington would let them starve to protect US corporate interests. The Nation has teamed up with the Haitian weekly newspaper Haiti Liberté, to analyze some 2,000 Haiti-related diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks. The cables will be featured in a series of Nation articles posted each Wednesday for several weeks. The first in the series, “PetroCaribe Files,” reveals, among other things, how the United State, with pressure from Exxon and Chevron, tried to interfere with an oil agreement between Haiti and Venezuela that would save Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, $100 million per year or 10 percent of the country’s budget.

The second piece, set to publish this week, “Let Them Live on $3/Day,” reveals Washington’s willingness to keep Haitian sweatshop wages at near slave labor levels to save American corporations a few bucks. US clothing makers with factories in Haiti, such as Hanes and Levi Strauss, were infuriated after the Haitian government raised the minimum wage from a puny slave wage of 24 cents an hour, to a slightly less puny slave wage of 61 cents an hour.

In a clear symbol of who it serves, the US State Department stepped in to exert pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies. But, according to the Nation’s expose, that was still too much: “Still the US Embassy wasn’t pleased. A deputy chief of mission, David E. Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum “did not take economic reality into account” but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to “the unemployed and underpaid masses.”

To understand the barbarity of this behavior, consider that a Haitian family of three (two kids) needed $12.50 a day in 2008 to make ends meet.

More to come?

These revelations are not the only leaks of 2011, just those I have chosen to highlight. WikiLeaks continues to leaks cables all over the globe. Although they have received little attention in the US press, leaks in countries like Peru, Ireland, Malaysia, and El Salvador are generating headlines, controversy and debate. Perhaps what we have seen from WikiLeaks is just the tip of the iceberg.

Fukushima cover-up continues, opposition leader fears Japan will become uninhabitable.

Recent reports confirming that Reactors 1, 2, and 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility completely melted just hours after the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the area on March 11 have been trumped by even worse news that those same reactors have all likely “melted through,” a situation that according to Japan’s Daily Yomiuri DY is “the worst possibility in a nuclear accident.”

And senior political official Ichiro Ozawa suggested in an interview with The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that the Fukushima situation could make the entire country of Japan “unlivable.”

A nuclear core meltdown involves nuclear fuel exceeding its melting point to the point where it damages the core, leaks out, and threatens to potentially release high levels of radiation into the environment. However, a nuclear melt-through is an even worse scenario, as nuclear fuel literally melts through the bottom of damaged reactor pressure vessels into out containment vessels — and possibly even melts through those outer vessels directly into ground, air, and water.

The report suggesting that melt-throughs have already occurred, which is set to be submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is the “first official recognition” of this dire situation, according to DY. It also confirms early suspicions that such a scenario had been underway all along, as later reports confirmed that the epic disaster at the reactors had produced holes in come of the plant’s core containment vessels, and that radioactive water, and possibly even fuel, were leaking into the lower vessels.

IAEA has already stated that the Fukushima disaster is at least as bad as the Chernobyl disaster (http://www.theatlanticwire.com/glob…), but this new information now suggests that it is probably even worse. At this time, it is unknown whether the fuel that has accumulated in the outer containment vessels has seeped outside, where it has the potential to contaminate groundwater supplies and wreak widespread environmental damage.

In an interview conducted prior to the release of the new report, Ichiro Ozawa told the WSJ that areas around Fukushima were already becoming completely “uninhabitable.” He also suggested that as it currently stands, much of the rest of the country, including Tokyo, could suffer the same fate if nothing is done to properly and effectively contain the situation.

Worse than meltdown, government report says devastating ‘melt-through’ has occurred at Fukushima; Official suggests Japan could become ‘uninhabitable’

from Natural News – Worse than meltdown, government report says devastating ‘melt-through’ has occurred at Fukushima; Official suggests Japan could become ‘uninhabitable’