BEAT's Blog

This past fall, the Occupy Wall Street group made a lot of headlines pointing out that one percent of this country’s population controls a very disproportionate share of the wealth.  Tied in to this is the fact that recent federal court rulings have taken almost all restraints off corporations who want to make contributions to politicians.  Of course, when business leaders pay out money in the form of contributions, they expect something in return, and they get it.  Corporate taxes have been plummeting, corporate profits have been soaring, and politicians have become much more responsive to their contributors than to their constituents.  The result of all this is that politicians respond to corporate directives rather than to public needs.  In effect, our democracy has been seriously damaged.

As I said in a recent blog:

In the most recent CNN opinion poll (April 2011), when adults were asked “Would you favor legislation that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from spending any money to enforce regulations on greenhouse gases and other environmental issues, or do you think the federal government should continue to provide funding to the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce those regulations,” 71% favored continuing funding.  28% were against funding.  Less than a year ago, in a Pew Research poll, adults were asked, “Right now, which ONE of the following do you think should be the more important priority for U.S. energy policy: keeping energy prices low or protecting the environment?”  56% favored protecting the environment.  37% favored keeping prices down.  Less than a year ago an ABC News/Washington Post poll asked, “Do you think the federal government should or should not regulate the release of greenhouse gases from sources like power plants, cars and factories in an effort to reduce global warming?”  Democrats favored regulation 81% to 16%.  Republicans favored regulation  55% to 39%.  Independents favored regulation 69% to 27%. It’s no wonder that the approval rating of Congress is at an all-time low.

Read more…

GE has announced that it is transferring its 115-year-old X-Ray manufacturing operations from Wisconsin to China.  It has also announced that it will invest two billion dollars in China, open 6 new research centers there, and train 65 new Chinese engineers.  This is the same mega-corporation that last year payed exactly no U.S. corporate income taxes at all despite profits of 14.2 billion dollars, and that now, after a series of job cuts in the U.S., employs more people overseas than in the U.S.   To add insult to injury, GE received a 1.1 billion dollar tax credit from the U.S. government as part of the financial industry bailout.

To put this amount of money in perspective, keep in mind that the cleanup of PCBs that GE has been fighting for decades will probably cost only hundreds of millions of dollars.  And yet, GE says that it will sue if the EPA makes them do any cleanup at all.  Apparently building China’s economy is more important than cleaning up toxic PCBs from the communities that previously supplied GE’s labor force.

Here’s a quote from Jeff Immelt.

“When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China.  You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator ourselves.”

But don’t worry.  Our government is on top of the situation.  President Obama recently appointed a new job czar to help figure out why our country is losing so many jobs and to help develop a strategy for getting those jobs back.  Who did he appoint to this position?  GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt.   So will the President be able to convince Immelt that maybe he should pay more attention to his home country, and maybe he should consider cleaning PCBs from the Housatonic River?  On the contrary.  We now have word that Jeff Immelt has convinced President Obama to put pressure on EPA to back off from a Housatonic River cleanup.

PCBs cause cancer.  They are known carcinogens in animals, and suspected carcinogens in humans.  We can’t do studies on humans the way we can on animals, so scientists may never be able to say with scientific certainty that PCBs cause cancer in humans.  In GE’s mind, and in the minds of its defenders, this means “no worries, mate” – at least for CEOs who don’t live in the Berkshires.

Cancer is a serious issue.  So are the other problems caused by PCBs – reproductive disorders, behavioral disorders, neurological disorders, etc.   The people of Berkshire County have to get angry.  They have to find their voice and demand a cleanup of the river.  It has become quite clear that we won’t be getting any help from the Obama-Immelt administration or from any other elected officials.

As I’m writing this, my country is dangerously close to defaulting on its debts for the first time in its history.  Standard and Poor says that if this happens, it will lower the country’s credit rating from AAA to D.  We’re in hard economic times and we have to make some tough decisions.  Legislators have decided that one program we can afford to cut is the Environmental Protection Agency. They say EPA’s regulations are costing money and slowing the economy.  The fact that these regulations save lives and protect our health doesn’t often come up in their arguments. If we really do need to cut a federal program, I have a better one to target – General Electric. Read more…

In yesterday’s blog I warned of the dangers of corporate influence in government. This issue is strongly affecting environmental issues. If you doubt this, ask yourself why it is that we have to fight so hard to get GE to clean PCBs from the Housatonic River. If you or I dumped a million pounds of a pollutant in a river, would we be in any trouble? Would there be consequences? Recently the Supreme Court of the United States, in Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission, decided that we didn’t have quite enough corporate influence in government. Here’s MSNBC’s Rachel Madow putting this decision in perspective.

In 2007, the Union of Concerned Scientists published an article called Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air: How Exxon Mobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics To Manufacture Uncertainty On Climate Science. In this article, the scientists point to strategies used by tobacco companies in an attempt to convince people that the science linking tobacco use with cancer and other diseases was inconclusive. The authors make a strong case that oil companies have adopted these strategies to create doubt in the public’s mind about climate-change science. I would like to suggest that GE has now adopted these strategies in fighting any attempt to make that corporation clean their PCBs from the Housatonic River. Read more…

The recent and on-going battle with GE over how best to clean their toxic PCBs from our river is very frustrating for environmental groups such as ours. It’s difficult to get a message out when you’re out-spent by a corporation as large as GE. Their slick propaganda video which contained very few truths and more than a few lies was widely distributed. Their $300,000 payment to local economic groups who portrayed themselves as environmentalists in order to get their benefactor off the hook was a subversion and perversion of what should have been an open and productive discussion. The political pressure wielded by GE is second to none in the corporate world.

At BEAT, we recognize that to overpower this corporate beast and others who are causing equal and greater environmental harm we have to strike at the heart of the problem. As an introduction to the problem to which I’m alluding, please watch this video. I’ll be presenting my views on this topic and on some closely related topics, and some examples of how this issue plays out locally in this blog soon. Thanks for your time.
Bruce

The Consent Decree – everyone knows what it is, and nobody has anything good to say about it.  This is the legal agreement made in 2000 by which the cleanup of PCBs in and around the Housatonic River is conducted.  The participants in the agreement were:  the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), General Electric (GE), the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the State of Connecticut, the City of Pittsfield, and the Pittsfield Economic Development Authority (PEDA).

From time to time, the parties involved in the cleanup wish to modify this decree.  The Consent Decree has in fact been reopened at least ten times – usually when GE is inconvenienced by one or more of its provisions.  EPA refuses to open it for environmental groups, because they fear that high-powered GE lawyers will take advantage of the opportunity to make more of their own own changes.  Does this make any sense?  Isn’t it more likely that GE will use any opening in the usually locked-down decree to their own advantage when they are the ones planning the opening?

Even when the decree has been opened, environmental groups have little input.  Take the case of the opening of the decree just last September.  This was a reopening of the decree to allow GE to modify the remediation plan for Silver Lake.  BEAT and other environmental organizations thought this might be a good opportunity to make some of our own adjustments to how the cleanup of Silver Lake should proceed.   Our concerns fell on deaf ears.  Only GE’s concerns were addressed.  This makes it difficult to take seriously EPA’s rationale for refusing the requests of environmental organizations.  The rule seems to be that only GE can reopen the decree, even though the decree itself places no such restriction on the process.  EPA won’t act for fear of GE’s lawyers, and now, for political reasons, this situation may get worse. Read more…

Lately I’ve been trying to understand the motivation of those people in our community who are arguing against a cleanup of the Housatonic River and are arguing instead that GE has the correct perspective in saying that the river should be left to heal itself. I understand GE’s motivation. Any cleanup will cost them money. They are bound as a corporation to protect the interest of their shareholders, which means they must protect their bottom line even if it means leaving their poisons in our river. But what about those in our own community who don’t want the PCBs removed from the river and who have been spending quite a bit of money to add their voices to GE’s PR campaign? Read more…

Last week I posted my fourth blog in a series critiquing GE’s video, The Fate of The River – a video in which GE presents its views on the cleanup of PCBs from the Housatonic River.  This week I would like to comment on the next section of that video in which GE tells us that vernal pools along the river are thriving but would be destroyed by any remediation of the river.  A copy of the transcript (created by BEAT) is available here.

Let’s pick up the narrative where I left it last week. Read more…

Last week I posted my third blog in a series critiquing GE’s video, The Fate of The River – a video in which GE presents its views on the cleanup of PCBs from the Housatonic River.  This week I would like to comment on the next section of that video in which GE describes SED 3/FP 3.  Most of the video is devoted to describing this approach which was invented, named, and presented by GE.  You might think that this is GE’s favorite approach since they spend so much time on it, but it’s not.  This is the approach GE will use in trying to scare us into choosing one of its favorite low-cost options.  A copy of the transcript (created by BEAT) is available here.

Let’s pick up the narrative where I left it last week. Read more…