What is Ohio Republican Senator Robert Jones Portman to think when the grand ol’ lady of Conservatism calls his legislation mind-boggingly stupid? That being the tool of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee might not be a smart path? That accepting political contributions from some lobbyists might come with negative consequences? That the Constitution of The United States of America is actually an important document not to be played with? I vote for all of the above.

Noah Daponte-Smith, writing in BDS, Hypocrisy, and Our Barren Public Sphere for the National Review, ledes:

Sometimes in the course of our political life, someone proposes something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it’s hard to know exactly what to say about it. Senate Bill 720 is one of those things.

Regular readers of the National Review (or Conservatives in general) probably don’t recognize Daponte-Smith’s name and that’s understandable. He’s an intern. Rob Portman and his fellow sycophants can’t use that as an excuse to dismiss Daponte-Smith’s assessment, however, because his words were vetted by the editorial staff and, ultimately, Editor Rich Lowery. Daponte-Smith writes what he thinks, but Lowery decides whether or not those thoughts are read in his magazine.

Sen. Portman: withdraw your support.

Ralph Nader argues that half of democracy is showing up. I put the number much higher, up around an Allenesque 80 percent. Showing up, in my book, includes doing your homework, understanding how to form a defensible argument; skills that are hard to find on Facebook or Twitter. We are powerless only if we choose to be.

In Detecting What Unravels Our Society—Bottom-up and Top-down, Nader writes:

The unraveling of a society’s institutions, stability and reasonable order does not sound alarms to forewarn the citizenry, apart from economic yardsticks measuring poverty, jobs, wages, health, savings, profits and other matters economic.

However, we do have some signs that we should not allow ourselves to ignore. Maliciousness, profiteering and willful ignorance on the part of our political and corporate rulers undoubtedly contribute to worsening injustice. Let’s consider some ways that we as citizens, far too often, collectively allow this to happen.

1. Democracy is threatened when citizens refuse to participate in power, whether by not voting, not thinking critically about important issues, not showing up for civic activities or allowing emotional false appeals and flattery by candidates and parties to sway them on important issues. Without an informed and motivated citizenry, the society starts to splinter.

2. If people do not do their homework before Election Day and know what to expect of candidates and of themselves, the political TV ads and the Continue Reading »

Spicer’s run was the 6th shortest of 31 White House Press Secretaries. According to the Washington Post:

Spicer’s resignation on Friday means his run as the president’s spokesman was among the briefest ever. Each of the five men who held the position for less time than Spicer had his term truncated by special circumstances.

Roger Tubby (33 days) and Jake Siewert (111 days) were post-election fill-ins under lame-duck presidents — Harry Truman and Bill Clinton, respectively.

Jonathan Daniels (19 days) had just taken over for the iron man of press secretaries, Stephen T. Early (4,403 days), when Franklin Roosevelt died in office. Harry Truman briefly brought back Early on an interim basis before naming his own press secretary, Charles Ross.

So, before this morning I had never heard of Sergei Magnitsky and I confess to scratching my head reading about how the meeting between Donald John Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya (with a supporting cast of only they know how many) on 9 June of last year somehow involved the adoption of babies.

Now, thanks to Matt Taibbi, writing in Russiagate, Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again for Rolling Stone, I understand.

Why am I not surprised that gangsters, thugs and billions of dollars are involved.

People who know me know that I am a rabid supporter of the First Amendment of our Constitution to the extreme that I think we do have a right to shout fire in a crowded theater. There is no more vital right of an American citizen that that of free speech. That is why I am appalled that my senator, Robert Jones Portman, is a cosponsor of S. 720, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act which would would make it a felony for Americans to support the international boycott against Israel, which was launched in protest of that country’s decades-old occupation of Palestine and impose a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison.

That’s a fine of $1 million and 20 years in prison for exercising your constitutional right to free speech.

All Americans, regardless of party must be horrified at this bill.

Glenn Greenwald, writing in U.S. Lawmakers Seek to Criminally Outlaw Support for Boycott Campaign Against Israel for The Intercept, concludes:

This pernicious bill highlights many vital yet typically ignored dynamics in Washington. First, journalists love to lament the lack of bipartisanship in Washington, yet the very mention of the word “Israel” causes most members of both parties to quickly snap into line in a show of unanimity that would make the regime of North Korea blush with envy. Even when virtually the entire world condemns Israeli aggression, or declares settlements illegal, the U.S. Congress—across party and ideological lines—finds virtually complete harmony in uniting against the world consensus and in defense of the Israeli government.

Second, the free speech debate in the U.S. is incredibly selective and warped. Pundits and political officials love to crusade as free speech champions — when doing so involves defending mainstream ideas or attacking marginalized, powerless groups such as minority college students. But when it comes to one of the most systemic, powerful, and dangerous assaults on free speech in the U.S. and the West generally—the growing attempt to literally criminalize speech and activism aimed at the Israeli government’s occupation—these free speech warriors typically fall silent.

hird, AIPAC continues to be one of the most powerful, and pernicious, lobbying forces in the country. In what conceivable sense is it of benefit to Americans to turn them into felons for the crime of engaging in political activism in protest of a foreign nation’s government? And this is hardly the first time they have attempted to do this through their most devoted congressional loyalists; Cardin, for instance, had previously succeeded in inserting into trade bills provisions that would disfavor anyone who supports a boycott of Israel.

Finally, it is hard to put into words the irony of watching many of the most celebrated and beloved congressional leaders of the anti-authoritarian Resistance—Gillibrand, Schiff, Swalwell, and Lieu—sponsor one of the most oppressive and authoritarian bills to appear in Congress in many years. How can one credibly inveigh against “authoritarianism” while sponsoring a bill that dictates to American citizens what political views they are and are not allowed to espouse under threat of criminal prosecution? Whatever labels one might want to apply to the sponsors of this bill, “anti-authoritarianism” should not be among them.

Toadies works for me.

President Donald John Trump just told his base that he couldn’t care less about them and that if he couldn’t win his way, he is taking his bat and ball and stomping home to Mar-A-Logo.

Three corageous Republican senators—Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia and Susan Collins, Maine—are already taking heat for doing what was best for the people of their states, which is, after all, the job they were elected to do.

So, over the past three years I’ve been gradually working myself through Oliver Burkeman’s opus: This Column Will Change Your Life—yes, the title is tongue-in-cheek—because, like Burkeman, I have a lifelong obsession with being better.

For me, the focus began in high school when I stole the book How To Study Better And Get Higher Marks by Eugene Ehrlich. In my feeble defense, I discovered the 1961 book as a freshman and I was the only name on the library card for the next four years, leading me to take the book to college with me after graduation. In the 10 years the book had sat on the shelf, I was the only student who had ever checked the book out.

The only other book associated with productivity that I still revere is Time Power by Charles Hobbs. I actually own two copies of the book—I panicked one year when I couldn’t find my first copy and bought a second—and I make rereading the book part of my annual thinking retreat.

Reading Burkeman’s column from 8 December 2007 this morning reminded me of the plainly obvious lesson that if all you do is read about productivity without actually, you know, being productive, you’re missing the point. Burkeman writes:

Experience has taught me that there’s a significant problem attached to being the kind of person who gets excited by productivity systems—to-do lists, time management techniques, personal organisers, expensive notebooks and the like. Two problems, in fact, if you count the one about being ostracised by friends and widely regarded as not quite right. But, for now, let’s focus on the other one, which is that an obsession with productivity is, of course, anti-productive: a day spent tinkering with your system for getting things done is another day when you didn’t get anything done. Faced with books and websites offering a multiplicity of methods for living life more effectively and happily, the temptation is to borrow bits from each until you’ve built some huge, Byzantine structure with the twin disadvantages of requiring hours of maintenance and being useless.

A solution came to Burkeman, he continues, in a shift on The Web:

So I’m pleased to report the arrival, on the web, of a backlash—not from the smug, non-anally-retentive people who gambol spontaneously through life like lambs, but from within the ranks of the nerds themselves. This is a radically stripped-down approach to productivity, championed above all by the blog Zen Habits, which focuses not on grand systems but on heuristics. A heuristic, loosely defined, is a rule of thumb: a very simple behavioural guideline, easy to remember and implement, which, when repeated over and over, will end up helping you achieve your aims. The idea is to drop all your finickity systems and just live by one or two of these principles.

I followed Leo Babauta’s blog for more than a few months and found much that I liked, but gradually I realized that Burkeman had captured the essence in his post and that Zen Habits had become repetitive—which may be the idea, but, you know, time to move on.

Reading books on productivity is still a secret pleasure for me, but I’ve greatly curtailed this personal habit. These days I still read Time Power once a year, but I’ve gone back, way back, to the first century of the common era, to productivity’s roots reading Marcus Aurelius’ The Meditations and Epictetus’ The Enchiridion.

Sure, many others have put their spin on these two and made their message relevant to succeeding generations, but you can’t go wrong by reading from the beginning.

Key moments, for me, in the discussion include Jeremy Corbyn’s examination of root causes and his 15 February 2003 speech before Parliament and his take on the power of Social Media;

You can also read the transcript of their discussion at The Intercept.

After reading of the cowardly plan by Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. (R-Ky.) to duck-and-cover by repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act without a viable replacement I called and wrote to my Republican senator, Robert Jones Portman, to let him know how I feel.

This was my message:

Good morning,

My name is Jeff Hess and I live in North Royalton Ohio.

I’m calling this morning to encourage Senator Portman to not kick the greatest challenge the senate faces—real healthcare for all Americans—down the road by voting to repeal the affordable healthcare act without a fair and just replacement passed by the congress and signed by the President in place that doesn’t condemn tens of thousands of Ohioans and millions of Americans to lives of suffering and early deaths.

I’m asking that Senator Portman do the job we elected him to do—govern and not pander to the billionaires who care only for their personal wealth; not our great nation.

Thank you.

Voting to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act without a replacement is a move I would expect from the senators from our neighbor to the south, not one I will accept from my own senator.

I also contacted Sen. Sherrod Campbell Brown (D-Ohio) to voice my continued support, to let him know of my message to his colleague and to encourage him to reason with Sen. Portman.

Here’s how Rich Lowery, editor of the Conservative National Review reacted to McConnell’s plan:

With Mike Lee and Jerry Moran declaring their opposition, the latest Senate health-care bill is dead. McConnell now wants to revert to what was his original idea of repeal-only. The problem is that the CBO score will be much worse—a projected 32 million fewer with insurance rather than 22 million—and even repeal-only isn’t true repeal (the repeal-only bill in 2015 left the Obamacare regulations untouched). If Republicans can’t pass what is, in relative terms, a generous version of a repeal bill, it’s hard to see how they are going to get a more stringent version over the hump—they may get Mike Lee and Rand Paul on board, but they will presumably lose from the left of the caucus. McCain is already out with a statement calling for a bi-partisan bill. If the current fight isn’t completely over, it’s certainly closer to the end of the end than the end of the beginning. We may well be witnessing one of the greatest political whiffs of our time

This is what the Grand Old Party has reduced itself to.

Why is it so hard for the Plain Dealer (and TV news and Ideastream) to tell the truth about major league sports and the costs to this community?

Why can’t they take hard looks at the dollar/revenues of the three major league sports teams? It reveals how obscene treating the teams as welfare clients.

Why can’t they tell the public the true costs of supporting these profitable sports businesses? They are not non-profits.

They do have enough space or air time for this information. After all, the sports pages seem to get the largest amount of pages in a continuously reduced news hole.

Is it simply community spirit that limits their coverage?

You’ll remember how crazy the PD and TV went when we temporarily “lost” the Cleveland Browns. If you didn’t here’s a good resume of it.

The thrust of the news media in town affects the entire tone of civic life. That’s why it is so important. It helps decide what is vital and what’s rather meaningless.

So much just slips by notice. Hard to see what’s not there.

Tax breaks for the NFL’s biggest customer—Corporate America—NFL teams sell between $1.5 billion to $2 billion worth of luxury and high-end club seats a year, according to Bill Dorsey, the chairman of the Association of Luxury Suite Directors. A single suite can cost as much as $750,000 a season. Almost all suites and club tickets are bought by corporate clients, (who) write the cost off as a business entertainment expense, reports CNN.

The NFL is the most profitable pro sports league in the U.S., raking in an estimated $1 billion in profits on $10.5 billion in revenue last season, figures likely to increase this year.

Those massive profits are made possible in part by the billions of taxpayer dollars that local governments spend on teams, coupled with tax breaks worth hundreds Continue Reading »

From Steve Holecko at the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus writes:

The Regional Community Issues Forums are much like the Regional Meeting’s we had earlier this year. The agenda is the same for all of the meetings. Choose the date and location that best fits your schedule. Meeting Agenda: 1) CCPC update 2) Indivisible CLE update 3) Fair Drug Price Act Initiative and 4) Fair Congressional Districts Initiative. Speakers representing the Fair Drug Price Act Initiative and the Fair Congressional Districts Initiative will speak on those issues.

WHEN: This evening, Monday, 17 July from 7 to 8:30.
WHERE: Cuyahoga County Public Library Parma Branch, 6996 Powers Blvd.

Cohosted by Indivisible CLE

I’ve nearly finished reading Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics And Winning The World We Need which concludes with what Klein calls The Leap Manifesto. The CCPC and Indivisible CLE are precisely what Klein is referring to in her book’s subtitle.

We have to fight for the world we need.

I hope to see you at the meeting this evening.

[Update at 0546 on 15 July: see my inline note to French’s reference to Jonah Goldberg below and my comment this morning.]

Starting back in November, The Guardian launched Burst Your Bubble, a weekly collection of items produced by conservative journalists and writers on the administration of President Donald John Trump.

Reading these pieces is important for two reasons: first, any informed American needs to know what Conservatives are thinking and second, knowing what Conservatives are thinking is vital if any political dialogue is to be possible. This is an argument I’ve long made here in Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s bastion of progressive values. I spent the first 18 years of my life in rural and small-town Southeastern, Ohio, where where seeing a face that didn’t look like mine was nearly impossible. There were, and are, Progressives there. My paternal grandmother was a suffragette and life-long Democrat, but in the main, Washington county is predominantly an old school conservative place.

Living there gave me perspective. Holding onto that perspective is important to me. That is why—while I confess I slip into irrational shouting at times—I invest the time in reading pieces that make me angry. Not to feed that anger, but to help me understand. If we insist on only hurling pejoratives and invectives then we’re royally fucked.

This morning I’m reading David French’s No, You Don’t ‘Take the Meeting’—bearing the subhead: Even the most innocent explanations for Donald Trump Jr.’s actions are naïve and dangerous—in the grand old lady of Conservatives, William Buckley’s National Review. French ledes:

Judging from conversations online and in person, the emerging Trump-friendly defense of Donald Trump Jr.’s decision to respond enthusiastically to an invitation to meet a “Russian government attorney” to receive “official documents and information” as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump” is two-fold. First, of course you meet with someone who’s proposing to help you win your political race. And second, the meeting itself was allegedly unimportant. The Russian attorney didn’t deliver the goods. What’s the big deal?

Let’s leave aside the obvious fact that no living Republican would be making those arguments if equivalent news emerged about a Democratic president’s team and address the core of the argument. Yes, it is a “big deal” when senior representatives of an American presidential campaign meet with a purported representative of a hostile foreign power for the purpose of cooperating in that foreign power’s effort to influence an American presidential campaign. It’s an even bigger deal when news of that meeting emerges after an avalanche of denials and evasions.

As an initial matter, it’s amazing that anyone on the right or left is taking any talking points from the Trump administration at face value. After months of deception and misdirection, why should anyone believe the Trump administration’s account of the meeting? Why should anyone believe that this is the last shoe to drop or the only shoe to drop demonstrating an effort to collude with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election? And yet conservatives are rallying across the Internet, ignoring all previous false statements, and essentially saying, “Now we know the truth, and the truth is that nothing happened.” This isn’t analysis; it’s wishful thinking.

So, why do the 27 percent of Americans* in the voting pool who cast their votes for Donald Trump in November continue to engage in this wishful thinking? Arrogance, ignorance, cognitive dissonance, self-interest or perhaps they are in possession of vital intelligence that I and French lack? My money is on the former. French continues:

[B]y taking meetings with enemies, expressing a willingness to cooperate with enemies, and concealing those meetings, you grant your enemy leverage over your political fortunes. We do not know the extent of the Trump team’s interactions with the Russians. The Russians, however, do, and they know if the Trump team is lying in its most current round of public statements. If there are further contacts or more or different embarrassing paper trails, then that knowledge can hang like the sword of Damocles over the heads of relevant Trump officials. Can that impact their dealings with Russia? Will it? Perhaps not, but they’re only human, and human beings tend to act in their perceived self-interest.

I don’t want to use an over-worked term like kompromat, but compromising information doesn’t need to truly “turn” someone to have its impact. It can have more subtle and insidious influence, placing boundaries on your own behavior and causing fear that should not exist.

Finally, it’s naïve (at best) and unquestionably dangerous to cooperate with a hostile foreign power when you know that this foreign power is actively seeking to harm American interests. In their hubris, people are tempted to believe that they can use an enemy without being used in return. It’s silly for an American to interact with hostile intelligence professionals and then believe he can use that interaction for his exclusive benefit. In reality, it threatens to turn you into a tool of enemy interests.

The area of concentration for one of my minors at Ohio University was, the then, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I studied with a great professor, Dr. David Williams. Nearly all I know about Russians comes from that class. (A good place to start for those who know little about our adversary should read Hedrick Smith’s The Russians) The Russian government is not a friend of the United States. At best it is a competitor for world power. At worst it is our mortal enemy. The truth is somewhere between, but I’d lean toward the latter over the former.

French offers his own brief, but sound, assessment of the long history between The United States and the USSR/Russian Republic. His conclusion is equally sound:

My colleague Jonah Goldberg has given perhaps the best one-sentence advice for conservatives in these troubling times: “Trust nothing, defend nothing.” [Less than 72 hours after typing those words, Golberg would write in The Benefit of the Doubt Is Gone: Well, I jinxed it.JH] We don’t know the truth. We don’t know the extent of the Trump team’s misdeeds. We do, however, know enough to reject the administration’s spin. Donald Jr.’s meeting was, in fact, a “big deal,” and Americans who aren’t troubled are Americans who need to check whether their tribalism has trumped their good sense.

As much as Trump would like us to believe that he is still the star of a reality show, there is no show here and we are not members of tribes voting each other off the island. We are living in reality, not watching others do so for our entertainment.

*Consider: in November 2016 231,556,622 Americans were eligible to vote. Of those, only 138,884,643 did so. A staggering 92,671,979 sat out the election. That means that the 62,979,636 people who voted for Donald Trump represented only a little more than 27 percent of the voter pool. In no one’s book is that a majority.

RalphNader, in A Clarion Call for our Country’s Pillars to Demand Justice, writes:

It is time for an urgent clarion call.

Given the retrograde pits inhabited by our ruling politicians and the avaricious over-reach of myopic big-business bosses, the self-described pillars of our society must step up to reverse the decline of our country. Here is my advice to each pillar:

1. Step up, lawyers and judges of America. You have no less to lose than our Constitutional observances and equal justice under law. A few years ago, brave Pakistani lawyers marched in the streets in open protest against dictatorial strictures. As you witness affronts to justice such as entrenched secrecy, legal procedures used to obstruct judicial justice, repeal of health and safety protections and the curtailment of civil liberties and access to legal aid, you must become vigorous first responders and exclaim: Stop! A just society must be defended by the courts and the officers of the court—the attorneys.

2. Step up, religious leaders, who see yourselves as custodians of spiritual and compassionate values. Recall your heroic forebears who led non-violent civil disobedience during the repression of civil rights in the Nineteen Sixties – as with the leadership of the late greats Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin. Champion the Golden Rule for those who don’t believe that ‘he who has the gold, rules.’

3. Step up,business people—large and small. Some of you are enlightened and motivated enough to stand tall against the cruel, monetized minds that are harming low-paid workers, cheating consumers, denying insurance to patients, avoiding or evading taxes, swindling investors and undermining communities across the country.

You have good examples from history, including those business Continue Reading »

President Donald John Trump’s official statement on his son’s email chain regarding a 3 June 2016 meeting was:

My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency.

That high-quality son, Donald John Trump Jr., commenting on his release of the email chain wrote:

To everyone, in order to be totally transparent, I am releasing the entire email chain of my emails with Rob Goldstone about the meeting on June 9, 2016.

Exercising the public relations tactic of getting ahead of the story is not transparency, however. I can’t imagine that Donald Jr. would have have taken this extraordinary step if he didn’t know that The New York Times (and other real news organizations) were already in possession of the emails and preparing to release them.

Trump apologists are attempting to use the excuse that Donald Jr. was naive and ignorant of the consequences of such a meeting, but there is no possibility that candidate Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort—who quit that post on 19 August—was not aware that:

A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election.

According to Larry Noble, Senior Director, Ethics, & General Counsel of The Campaign Legal Center:

Noble of the Campaign Legal Center explained by phone that there was no extricating Trump Jr. from the Trump campaign.

“I think there’s no question he was an agent of the campaign,” Noble said. “He was holding himself out as representing the campaign. He was speaking on behalf of the campaign. It would be hard for them to argue he wasn’t acting as an agent of the campaign, that he was acting independently, particularly because he brought in other people from the campaign with him” to the meeting. Random people can say that they’re doing work for a candidate, but random people can’t get the campaign chairman to show up when asked.

Mind you, whether he was an agent of the campaign is irrelevant for the legal issues that are raised by the emails. The Washington Post spoke with experts who believe that emails show Trump Jr. having probably “crossed the line on conspiracy to commit election fraud or conspiracy to obtain information from a foreign adversary.”

That last part alone is illegal, Noble explained.

“Anyone soliciting a foreign contribution is violating the law,” he said — and that includes opposition research, such as what was embraced by Trump Jr. One legal bar is whether someone provides “substantial assistance” to obtaining something of value from a foreign national. “Given the emails,” Noble said, “I think that’s substantial assistance.”

But, yet again, beside the point.

“Had he been running the Trump businesses and not been involved in the campaign. Not been traveling on behalf of the campaign. Not been speaking out for his father,” Noble said, “they might have an argument” that Trump Jr. wasn’t acting on behalf of the campaign. Trump Jr. didn’t need an official campaign title to be part of the campaign — and, besides, Noble said, he had one. Son.

President Richard Milhous Nixon bunkered down in the White House for the 566 days of his second term before resigning on 9 August 1974. President Trump is now on Day 172 of his first (and only?) term.

The clock is ticking…

There is, of course, much, much more: Donald Trump Jr. Is His Own ‘Deepthroat’ and A Russian, an Email and an Idiot: Did Donald Trump Jr. Incriminate Himself?

We are getting close to the 50th anniversary of the election of Carl Stokes as the first black mayor of a major American city. It’s hard to imagine that so much time has passed.

We need the thrust of those days of dissent against the imbalance of today’s Cleveland. The difference we endure between prosperity and despair.

The first time I met Carl Stokes must have been in 1965, my first year at the Plain Dealer. I was a general assignment reporter and had to cover an event where Stokes was appearing. It was, I remember a Sunday and likely the reason I got the assignment. I talked with him before or after his meeting. I don’t remember any content, but 50 years does that to you.

I do remember the impression he left. The first impression of Carl Stokes remains clear 50 years on. Here was a man who didn’t like reporters. Likely didn’t trust them. His manner sent the message.

I can’t tell you what he said. I only remember the cool manner. I talked to him only a few minutes. It was all very perfunctory. The man was going to run for mayor and he should be covered. I guess that was the reason anyone was assigned to him that day.

I’m sure he had his reasons for disliking reporters.

He made it clear many times.

He once said at a press conference, “There is hardly a place in this community where two or more persons join that their disgust in the two newspapers is not expressed. Rich people, poor people, black and white people. There is a serious erosion of Continue Reading »

Yesterday I wrote about the liability line connecting Wilbur Tennant’s cows to Cincinnati attorney Robert Bilott to Parkersburg elementary school gym teacher Joe Kiger and finally to DuPont employee Bernard Reilly that resulted in a 2004 local settlement between DuPont and effected residents in the poison zone.

In the next installment of her series, The Teflon Toxin, for The Intercept, Sharon Lerner explores: How DuPont Slipped Past The EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency, created by President Richard Milhous Nixon in 1970, has a long history in the Mid-Ohio Valley. William Doyle Ruckelhaus, the first administrator of the EPA, selected the Union Carbide plant on the Ohio River south of Marietta—less than a mile from my home and the source of my budding environmentalism—as the first target for the new agency. I have credited the EPA with the responsibility for turning Washington County Republican because of the jobs lost as plants were forced to stop using the Ohio River as their personal toxic waste dump and to clean up the foul smoke pouring from their smokestacks.

Cleaning up the environment is vital, but we should always remember that real people with real families must also be cared for when corporations chose to move rather than see their profits reduced by regulations and lawsuits.

In the case of the Teflon Toxin, perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA or C8, E. I. du Pont de Nemours hoped to keep concerns under the regulatory and public radar by a combination of misdirection and obfuscation. Lerner writes:

Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle—culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September [2015, JH]—a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.

This story is based on many of those documents, which until they were entered into evidence for these trials had been hidden away in DuPont’s files. Among them are write-ups of experiments on rats, dogs, and rabbits showing that C8 was associated with a wide range of health problems that sometimes killed the lab animals. Many thousands of pages of expert testimony and depositions have been prepared by attorneys for the plaintiffs. And through the process of legal discovery they have uncovered hundreds of internal communications revealing that DuPont employees for many years suspected that C8 was harmful and yet continued to use it, putting the company’s workers and the people who lived near its plants at risk.

All in the name of any corporation’s gold standard: increasing shareholder value.

The best evidence of how C8 affects humans has also come out through the legal battle over the chemical, though in a more public form. As part of a 2005 settlement over contamination around the [Parkersburg,] West Virginia plant where [Ken] Wamsley worked, lawyers for both DuPont and the plaintiffs approved a team of three scientists, who were charged with determining if and how the chemical affects people.

In 2011 and 2012, after seven years of research, the science panel found that C8 was “more likely than not” linked to ulcerative colitis—Wamsley’s condition—as well as to high cholesterol; pregnancy-induced hypertension; thyroid disease; testicular cancer; and kidney cancer. The scientists’ findings, published in more than three dozen peer-reviewed articles, were striking, because the chemical’s effects were so widespread throughout the body and because even very low exposure levels were associated with health effects.

We know, too, from internal DuPont documents that emerged through the lawsuit, that Wamsley’s fears of being lied to are well-founded. DuPont scientists had closely studied the chemical for decades and through their own research knew about some of the dangers it posed. Yet rather than inform workers, people living near the plant, the general public, or government agencies responsible for regulating chemicals, DuPont repeatedly kept its knowledge secret.

Those final six words should be chilling to anyone working for, near or even tangentially associated with DuPont or any of the dozens of chemical companies promising some variation of DuPont’s 1935 slogan: better living through chemistry.

The conscious decision to keep internal studies secret begins in 1978. Echoing the words of Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker ( (Lerner describes the budding coverup this way:

In 1978, Bruce Karh, DuPont’s corporate medical director, was outspoken about the company’s duty “to discover and reveal the unvarnished facts about health hazards,” as he wrote in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine at the time. When deposed in 2004, Karrh emphasized that DuPont’s internal health and safety rules often went further than the government’s and that the company’s policy was to comply with either laws or the company’s internal health and safety standards, “whichever was the more strict.” In his 1978 article, Karrh also insisted that a company “should be candid, and lay all the facts on the table. This is the only responsible and ethical way to go.”

Yet DuPont only laid out some of its facts. In 1978, for instance, DuPont alerted workers to the results of a study done by 3M showing that its employees were accumulating C8 in their blood. Later that year, Karrh and his colleagues began reviewing employee medical records and measuring the level of C8 in the blood of the company’s own workers in Parkersburg, as well as at another DuPont plant in Deepwater, New Jersey, where the company had been using C8 and related chemicals since the 1950s. They found that exposed workers at the New Jersey plant had increased rates of endocrine disorders. Another notable pattern was that, like dogs and rats, people employed at the DuPont plants more frequently had abnormal liver function tests after C8 exposure.

DuPont elected not to disclose its findings to regulators. The reasoning, according to Karrh, was that the abnormal test results weren’t proven to be adverse health effects related to C8. When asked about the decision in deposition, Karrh said that “at that point in time, we saw no substantial risk, so therefore we saw no obligation to report.”

Not long after the decision was made not to alert the EPA, in 1981, another study of DuPont workers by a staff epidemiologist declared that liver test data collected in Parkersburg lacked “conclusive evidence of an occupationally related health problem among workers exposed to C-8.” Yet the research might have reasonably led to more testing. An assistant medical director named Vann Brewster suggested that an early draft of the study be edited to state that DuPont should conduct further liver test monitoring. Years later, a proposal for a follow-up study was rejected.

Memos in 1980 (the year I returned to the Mid-Ohio Valley and while my father still worked at the plant next door to DuPont’s Washington Bottom plant) clearly show to me the underlying problem with all chemical manufacturing. in a memo, C.E. Steiner, a DuPont employee according to Lerner, wrote that there was no conclusive evidence that workers were begin harmed by exposure to C8. That is backwards. One of the survival lessons I leaned when I was a Boy Scout that there is a very cautious way to approach eating unknown plants. This several-stop process carefully increased exposure to the plant so that there was ample opportunity for adverse reaction or first symptoms of poisoning before ingesting what could be a fatal meal.

The assumption was always that an unknown plant was poisonous until proven safe. Never the other way around as Steiner and others in the chemical industry want to conduct business. We ought to be treating all chemicals the way we do drugs. In 2017, in a world where Donald John Trump is our planet’s most powerful leader, those regulations—like the Toxic Substances Control Act—are likely to be removed in the name of profit. The TSCA was meant to protect workers and others, but relied upon the honesty of those manufacturing and using the substances in question.

DuPont proved that such an attitude was naive. Lerner continues:

[The TSCA] requires companies that work with chemicals to report to the Environmental Protection Agency any evidence they find that shows or even suggests that they are harmful. In keeping with this requirement, 3M submitted its rat study to the EPA, and later DuPont scientists wound up discussing the study with the federal agency, saying they believed it was flawed. DuPont scientists neglected to inform the EPA about what they had found in tracking their own workers.

To make matters far worse, DuPont also neglected to inform the the EPA about the threat to non-workers, living miles from the plant.

More tomorrow in Part V of How Poisoned Is My Valley…

Previously: TEFLON ISN’T THE PROBLEM… and WHAT I’M READING: HOW POISONED IS MY VALLEY…