66. United National Antiwar Conference (UNAC), Major Advance for the Antiwar Movement

By Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action

The July 23-25 national antiwar conference in Albany, N.Y., was an extraordinary advance in the fight against imperialist war and for social justice. To an extent greater than in any other decision-making conference of recent decades, this was a broad, determined, and united political mobilization against all of the ongoing and threatened U.S. wars, interventions, and occupations. And by the same measure, the conference was the most thorough repudiation of the government’s “bail out the banks” antisocial agenda at home.

The United National Antiwar Conference’s (UNAC’s) open and democratic gathering included representatives of virtually every major national antiwar group in the U.S. as well as hundreds of local, state, and regional antiwar organizations. Equally important was the presence and participation of leading representatives and activists from many of the country’s most vital social movements, all of whom aimed to link the fight against U.S. imperialism’s wars to the fight for social justice, democratic rights, and civil liberties.

The conference’s power, scope, program, and unity were a direct response to the world economic crisis, which has directly affected the lives of tens of millions of Americans and driven the nation’s corporate rulers to a series of endless and murderous wars across the globe.

After hours of debate—at times contentious and sharp—the conference unanimously adopted a 24-point Action Plan of antiwar activities culminating in mass demonstrations in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles on April 9, 2011.

The Action Program represents a critical turning point for the U.S. antiwar and other social movements and an important political break from the widely held illusion that the 2008 presidential election would have ushered in “change we can believe in.” It is a harbinger of the powerful movement that will take to the streets in renewed, massive, and repeated mobilizations to demand a fundamental re-ordering of social priorities and an immediate end to all U.S. wars and occupations. 

At least 776 antiwar and social justice activists from across the country, and including small delegations from Canada and Latin America, registered to participate. Scores of others flooded the giant auditorium without registering—putting the total attendance at well over 800. With the assistance of the Albany-based Sanctuary Media, 17,000 more witnessed the conference and many of its 30-plus workshops via video-streaming (http://mediasanctuary.tv/crows/).

The conference was initiated by the National Assembly to End U.S. Wars and Occupations and sponsored by UNAC, a group representing 31 national antiwar and social justice organizations. The conference adhered throughout the proceedings to an open and democratic, “one-person-one-vote” procedure. The central demands that the conference adopted were:

• Immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops, mercenaries, military contractors, and war dollars from Iraq,Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

• Money for jobs, education, health care, pensions, housing, infrastructure, the environment, and human needs in general—not war.

• End U.S. aid to Israel—military, economic, and diplomatic. End U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the blockade of Gaza.

The third set of demands was incorporated into the Action Program by an overwhelming majority vote, following a long and vigorous debate on the relationship between the antiwar movement and the Palestinian freedom struggle. A comprehensive resolution on Palestine, including support for “boycotts, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) against Israel was also approved at the concluding session, this time by a unanimous vote.

Varying strategies presented

Renowned social activist, linguist, and historian Noam Chomsky keynoted the conference via a 30-minute video telecast that reviewed the machinations and disinformation campaigns surrounding U.S. imperial policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chomsky presented grave warnings regarding the dangers of recent U.S. preparations for a war against Iran. Also keynoting the conference was South Carolina AFL-CIO President Donna Dewitt, who sharply focused her remarks on the need to broaden and unify the movement to include the wide range of constituencies required to build an effective struggle against U.S. intervention and for social justice.

Muralist Mike Alewitz made a stirring dedication speech for the cloth mural draped behind the conference stage—a memorial to the four students at Kent State University (in Ohio) killed by National Guard troops on May 4, 1970, and to the two students murdered by police at Jackson State College (in Mississippi) 10 days later. Alewitz was a young participant in the Kent Stateantiwar rally that the National Guard fired upon. It had been called in solidarity with nationwide protests against the invasion ofCambodia ordered by President Nixon a few days earlier.

“These young lives,” Alewitz said, “were snuffed out as an example to others to stop the protests. But Nixon had greatly misjudged the mood of the country. Instead of curbing the protests, he provoked a national student strike. For every one of our martyrs, tens of thousands took their place.”

“That spirit lives,” Alewitz declared. He said that the UNAC mural was dedicated to the latest martyrs, “the nine brave activists of the Freedom Flotilla, who said to the world that we will never turn our backs on the Palestinian people.” And the real memorial, he concluded, “is sitting before me—the living movement.”

Two major Friday and Saturday evening panel discussions, with some 12 speakers each, presented a wide range of strategies and tactics to advance the antiwar movement and to highlight the multitude of issues that the organizers deemed essential to building a broad-based, inclusive, and effective fightback.

Representing the National Assembly, Chris Gauvreau reviewed the essential ingredients of the mass movement that needs to be constructed today. Key to the movement’s success, she concluded, was the construction of a united and democratic political movement that operates independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. (Her speech appears in this issue of Socialist Action.)

The conference was not without serious debates over critical issues, the most intensely contested of which were the amendments submitted to the Draft Action Program by a recently formed Palestine Solidarity Caucus. This group of 15-20 Palestine solidarity activists began its deliberations via a series of national conference calls and finalized its proposals and tactics at a well-attended conference caucus meeting of about 75 participants.

Two major plenary sessions discussed and debated some 45 wide-ranging amendments and resolutions that had been submitted prior to the conference, as well as others offered at the conference itself. The amendments expanded the scope of the initial nine-point Draft Action Plan, originally presented unanimously by the 31 co-sponsoring organizations, to about 24 distinct actions over the course of the coming nine months.

Aug. 28 & Oct. 2 labor mobilizations

These activities will begin with UNAC supporting the Aug. 28 Detroit and Washington, D.C., labor and civil rights groups’ mobilizations “to create jobs and stop moving money out of education and into wars and prisons.” These actions will also commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington. The Aug. 28 actions are also aimed at countering the reactionary, racist, and provocative Tea Party gathering also slated for Aug. 28 in the nation’s capital.

The UNAC conference endorsed and voted to build an antiwar contingent in the Oct. 2 national march for jobs in Washington,D.C., supported by the AFL-CIO and initiated by the NAACP and the SEIU-affiliated Local 1199. The Oct. 2 national mobilization’s inclusion of antiwar themes represents an important opportunity to link labor’s fightback at home with the struggle against the present trillion-dollar corporate war budget aimed at colonial expansion and horrific death and destruction abroad.

A number of conference speakers, including Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report, while expressing support for the Oct. 2 labor mobilization, cautioned that this effort not be turned into a pre-election rally for the Democratic Party. The thunderous applause that greeted Ford’s critique of the policies of the Obama administration was a powerful indication that today’s antiwar and social movements are increasingly looking to independent forms of struggle.

Ford, citing a recent poll, was also critical of the still strong illusions in Obama, especially among Black Americans. Ford talked about the culture of resistance that in past decades made Black people the most dependable antiwar demographic in the U.S. But Obama’s presence, Ford noted, has served as a "narcotic" for the Black population. "Breaking the Obama spell is the must-do task for a renewed movement for social justice and peace," he added. "There is nothing complicated about it. You simply tell the truth. Obama works for Wall Street and the militarists. That is the truth."

Similar concerns were expressed by Albany conference immigration-rights activists who pointed with alarm to the Oct. 2 march organizers’ demand for “comprehensive immigration reform,” a term that has come to be associated with President Obama’s support for the notorious anti-immigrant and punitive bill sponsored by Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

The above concerns are certainly legitimate—and especially so in light of labor’s decades-long history of bureaucratic functioning and subordination to the Democratic Party. But the fact that labor and moderate civil rights leaders feel compelled to organize mass protests in the nation’s capital that challenge the government’s war and social policies is new to American politics and reflects the deep disillusionment of the ranks with the status quo of war, racism, and ever deepening attacks on working people.

The decision of the UNAC to actively participate and build the Aug. 28 and Oct. 2 actions and march alongside civil rights and labor activists far outweighs the fact that march officials will undoubtedly use the occasion to advocate support to Obama and his warmongering Democrats while placing the blame for today’s social crises on “obstructionist Republicans.”

Few mass actions of this sort meet the “test” of “political purity.” Tens of thousands of antiwar fighters carrying placards like “Jobs and Justice, Not War: Bring the Troops Home Now!” and “End All U.S. Aid to Israel!” while marching alongside their fellow workers and discussing the critical issues of the day would far outweigh the expected deferential remarks of a bankrupt labor “leadership” that has stood silent in the face of the greatest capitalist offensive against workers since the Great Depression.

A broad plan of protest action

The 24-point Action Program included endorsement of an Oct. 7 national day of student-led protests against education cutbacks, demanding “Money for Education, Not for Occupation;” a mid-October week of actions to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan; support to the Nov. 15-19 “Remember Fallujah” week to mark the horrific and virtual leveling of this Iraqi city by U.S. troops; and a national effort to initiate various city council, town, and village antiwar meetings and antiwar voter referenda/ballot initiatives as well as lobbying efforts.

The Action Program also included nationally coordinated teach-ins in mid-March 2011 to mark the eighth year of the Iraq War and to prepare for the culminating April 9 bi-coastal mass demonstrations in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. A full-scale national effort was approved to begin immediately to gather broad endorsements for the April 9 bi-coastal mobilizations.

Additional actions approved include a week of local antiwar lobbying in April, national speaking tours, and the mounting of  “rapid, broad and nationally coordinated protests by antiwar and social justice activists” in the event of a U.S. or Israeli attack onIran.

The Action Program also called for support to actions to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and for protests in the event of U.S.-backed military action by Israel against Palestinians, aid activists attempting to end the blockade of Gaza, or attacks on other countries such as Lebanon, Syria, or Iran.

The program called for solidarity with Iraqi trade-union leaders who are under attack by the puppet Iraqi regime. In fact, just days after conference attendees returned home, it was announced that the Iraqi government had raided and closed all offices of the electrical workers' union, underlining the importance of heightened solidarity. 

The program urged support to actions aimed at dismantling the Cold War nuclear, biological, radiological, and chemical weapons and delivery systems. It called for solidarity with GIs, veterans, and military families and support for their campaigns and calls for action. And it called for actions against war profiteers, including oil and energy companies, weapons manufacturers, and engineering firms whose contractors are working to insure U.S. economic control of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s resources.

The Action Program noted the necessity to link the antiwar movement with mass actions demanding urgent social needs such as jobs, health care, housing, education, and immigrant rights.

A Continuations Committee was approved, consisting of one representative of each of the 31 co-sponsoring conference organizations. This committee was empowered to expand its membership with additional forces in agreement with the conference’s adopted program. It is expected that the expansion will result in the broadest unified antiwar effort in decades.

Workshop discussions draw crowds

Two-dozen conference workshops provided critical spaces for movement activists to discuss and debate many of the movement’s most hotly contested subjects. This was the case with a workshop that attracted 120 participants entitled, “The Rise of Right Wing Populism and the Tea Party: Do We Need a Right-Left Coalition?” Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and Kevin Zeese of Voters for Peace argued that the idea had merit in attracting some of the forces who have been inadvertently attracted to right-wing solutions. Chris Gauvreau and Glen Ford rejected such an alliance, arguing that it would only serve to drive away the very forces that are a prerequisite to the antiwar movement’s success.

A workshop entitled “Israel and the Palestinian Struggle: Is a Two-State Solution Possible or Desirable?” drew some 80 participants, most of whom rejected a “two-state solution,” a far cry from previous conferences where mere mention of a Democratic Secular Palestine was considered anathema to any serious discussion. The panelists detailed the historic conditions that led to the formation of the Zionist Israeli state and its constant expansion as well as the dramatic impact of the murderous blockade and siege of Gaza and the Israeli army killings aboard the flotilla boats carrying humanitarian relief to Gaza.

There was also a workshop featuring Palestinian activists speaking on boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and other strategies. It was more than evident from the workshop discussions and the overall UNAC deliberations that this conference marked the sea change in politics that has deeply permeated the consciousness of the broad antiwar movement.

The July 23-25 UNAC conference opened the door wide to a return to the streets of a reinvigorated antiwar movement. Nine months of coordinated actions have been placed on the movement’s agenda. The fulfillment of the conference’s promise depends now on the capacity of the hitherto divided movement to come together to reach and exceed its immediate potential.

Unity in the antiwar movement, not to mention in the radical and socialist left, has never come easy. Divisions remain deep and profound. But mass-action united-front politics and practice have always proved decisive in bringing together the broadest layers on the basis of widely held principles. Today these principles boil down to the key slogans, “Bring the troops home now!” “Money for jobs and all associated human needs, not war,” and “End to all U.S. aid to Israel!”—chief agency of U.S. and world imperialism in the Middle East. The stakes are high. The future of humanity could well depend on the outcome.

 The conference ended with Jerry Gordon, national secretary of both the National Assembly and UNAC, reviewing the accomplishments of the conference and noting the importance of forging a lasting unity in the movement.

Gordon humorously awarded Marilyn Levin of New England United and Joe Lombardo, representing the Albany area peace and justice community, the title of "the conference's Most Valuable Players (MVPs)." Marilyn headed a team that solicited and organized some 128 speakers into various workshops and panel presentations, the effect of which was to provide participants with a well-rounded and broadly representative spectrum of the movement's political views. Lombardo headed an on-site logistics team of some 40 activists who for several months had meticulously planned and organized almost every aspect of the conference's functioning.

Gordon noted the important role of the conference's four co-chairs—Jim Lafferty, executive director, Los Angeles National Lawyers Guild; Michael McPherson, co-chair United for Peace and Justice and past executive director of Veterans for Peace; Kathy Black, national co-convener, US Labor Against the War and leader of the Philadelphia-area Coalition of Labor Union Women; and this writer, national co-coordinator of the National Assembly.

Special mention was also given to the conference's broadly representative presiding committee—Kathy Kelly, Center for Creative Nonviolence; Michael Eisenscher, national coordinator, USLAW; Blanca Misse, UC Berkeley student leader and central organizer of the March 4 statewide anti-budget-cuts strike; Mary Nichols-Rhodes, Ohio state coordinator of Progressive Democrats of America; and Marilyn Levin, co-national coordinator, National Assembly.

Gordon concluded with a statement of his personal appreciation for the collaboration, advice, and meticulous attention to detail of USLAW’s Michael Eisenscher in a wide range of endeavors critical to the conference's functioning.

Following Gordon's remarks, conference participant Adam Shils from Chicago rose for a special point to unanimously affirm the key role of Jerry Gordon in the conference's success. The meeting ended with a standing ovation for Gordon's leadership and tireless efforts and for the unity he had so effectively fostered.

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UNAC promotes solidarity with political prisoners

A special Saturday box-lunch session allowed the Albany antiwar conference time to counter the government’s broadside attacks on civil liberties and to express the antiwar movement’s active solidarity with the Arab and Muslim communities. The victims of the government’s post-9/11 “anti-terrorism” raids, mass incarcerations, and “pre-emptive persecutions” were properly seen as key components of the new antiwar movement.

Leaders of the Project Salaam (Support and Legal Advocacy for Muslims), a national organization formed to defend Arab and Muslim victims of government persecution and a co-sponsor of the conference, were joined by representatives of CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), as well as friends and family members of Arab and Muslim political prisoners who have been incarcerated under false charges. This critical issue was prominently featured throughout the event—from plenary sessions and workshops to the one-mile march that concluded the conference.

Conference participants were joined by local Muslim community activists in a display of solidarity that began at the Crowne Plaza Hotel conference site and proceeded to a brief rally at the New York State Capitol Building. From there the march continued along a route through Black and Muslim communities and concluded at the Masjid-As Salaam (House of Peace) mosque, where two years ago an FBI raid seized two Muslim worshippers without any evidence of wrongdoing. Typical of the times, the government, citing “national security” concerns, found no incriminating evidence and has to this day refused to specify charges against these alleged terrorists.

The mosque’s imam welcomed the demonstrators to a rally, where the daughter of one of the Albany detainees as well as a family member of the similarly detained Fort Dix Five from the Philadelphia area recounted their terrifying experiences at the hands of government witch hunters. Ralph Poynter, husband of imprisoned civil-liberties attorney Lynne Stewart and leader of her defense committee, and Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin also addressed the crowd of some 250 conference and community activists.

The luncheon session at the UNAC conference also featured talks by representatives of the defense committees of innocent political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Lynne Stewart as well as Guantanamo detainee representative and Center for Constitutional Rights attorney, Pardiss Kebriaei. Ralph Poynter read a powerful statement to the conference from Lynne Stewart, whose original 28-month sentence on frame-up charges of “conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism” was a week earlier increased in a vindictive Federal District Court re-sentencing hearing to 10 years in prison.

This writer, speaking as the West Coast coordinator of the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee and as a national co-coordinator of the National Assembly, announced that the National Assembly had decided to retain the imprisoned Stewart on its Administrative Committee despite her 10-year jail sentence. Also featured was a resounding pre-recorded antiwar address to the conference from Mumia Abu-Jamal, on death row in Pennsylvania. Chants of “Free Mumia!” and “Free Lynne Stewart!” rocked the jam-packed rally.

65. Cubans Brace for "Reorganization" of Labor Force

by Marc Frank, Reuters

Cuba is moving up to a million employees, or a fifth of its workers, off bloated public payrolls and into jobs where they actually have to work, according to Communist Party and government sources. The goal is to boost the island's struggling economy by targeting what President Raul Castro has called "unnecessary workers" in a five-year project to reorganize its labour force in tandem with some economic liberalization.

"We hope to eliminate 200,000 jobs per year, as much as 100,000 of them over the coming year in the capital alone," a Communist Party economist said, like others asking that his name not be used. Castro said in a speech to young party supporters in April that payrolls would be cut to help modernize the economy and that there were possibly more than a million excess workers.

All state agencies were ordered in January to review payrolls with an eye to trimming unneeded positions, apparently with dramatic results.

"We have 304,000 employees, of which it is necessary to reorient 79,000," Domestic Trade Minister Jacinto Angular Pardo said in an interview in the latest edition of Bohemia magazine.

"We will do this gradually over five years as part of a reorganization of the company system, distribution networks and forms of administration that rid the state of unnecessary burdens and improve efficiency," he said.

The plan is just getting under way, so there have been few layoffs so far, sources said. They said those being let go are offered other jobs when available.

Hundreds of employees at the SEPSA security service in Havana were recently given the choice of jobs in agriculture, construction or the local version of the FBI, a worker said.

LIMITED OPTIONS

"The plan is that those over retirement age will be let go and the rest offered up to three possible jobs," said a former party leader in eastern Holguin, with similar reports coming from various other provinces. Options are limited because the state employs about 85 percent of the work force of 5 million and claims an unemployment rate of only 2 percent.

Those who do not accept initial job offers will have to look for work at the Labour Ministry, get land through the government's agriculture land-lease program and take up farming, or live off family remittances and illegal activity.

They will get unemployment benefits for just six weeks, but will not be totally out in the cold because all Cubans receive free health care and education, subsidized utilities, a subsidized food ration and automatic adjustment of mortgages to 10 percent of the top breadwinner's income.

Still, said an employee at the state-run telephone company, "everyone is nervous, and in particular those above retirement age."

Because of the job shakeup, the government is likely to accompany the plan with economic reforms that will allow more self-employment and other schemes, most of which are currently prohibited, analysts said.

"This plan probably signals additional policy reforms, because current policies are not generating new jobs," said Phil Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute in Virginia.

"There are lots of options: foreign investment, self-employment, cooperatives, or small- and medium-sized businesses. All would yield more jobs and tax revenue, a lower social welfare burden, and less black market activity," he said.

The government's plan in Havana calls for issuing more licenses for self employment in various trades that were frozen a number of years ago, the party economist said.

He said it also appears probable the state-run retail sector will be liberalized, which could absorb some of the extra workers.

64. Ecuador Wins Compensation for Not Drilling for Oil in Yasuni National Park

From Earth’s Newsdesk and the Rainforest Portal, projects of Ecological Internet (EI)http://www.ecoearth.info/newsdesk
http://www.rainforestportal.org/

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It is reported Ecuador will be compensated for leaving oil reserves in Yasuni National Park untouched. This is a major victory for Ecuador, the rainforest movement, and Ecological Internet – who was the first to campaign internationally on the issue.

Ecuador’s government announced today it has reached a deal with the United Nations Development Program under which donor countries will compensate Quito for leaving oil reserves untouched in a large primary rainforest filled national park. Yasuni National Park – covering some 9,820 km2, or about the size of Massachusetts – is thought to be one of Earth’s most biodiversity rich sites and is also home to several nomadic Indian tribes. Yasuni’s preservation (total protection, not “sustainable management” or “conservation”) would spare Earth some 410 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that contribute to global warming; while keeping biodiversity, ecosystems and cultures fully intact. The official signing is reported to be held on Tuesday.

Ecological Internet’s Earth Action Network [1] was the first to campaign internationally on threats to Yasuni from oil exploration, successfully internationalizing the issue. “This marvelous rainforest and climate victory is very gratifying and exciting,” states Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet President. “Ecological Internet began to campaign in the early 2000s to protect Yasuni National Park from oil development, and continuously since. Like so many of our campaigns, it has just taken off. Our efforts were picked up by ‘The Ecologist’ Magazine, and since then a large local and global movement has been built – including the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, Scientists Concerned for Yasuni, Save America’s Forest and many other participants – who share in this victory.”

In 2007, Ecuador’s then President Rafael Correa launched the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, which sought compensation for agreeing to forgo exploiting the estimated 846 million barrels of crude in the Yasuni National Park. Negotiations had centered on the amount of compensation Ecuador would receive, with Correa insisting his nation get at least 3.5 billion dollars over ten years — about half the value of the estimated reserves in the protected area. When international donors were slow to respond, Ecological Internet launched another campaign which successfully “nudged” donor nations to fund this Yasuni-ITT proposal[2]. As of early this year, about half had been pledged, with Germany (910 million) and Spain (241.8 million) leading the group of donors that included France, Sweden and Switzerland.

Much of the remainder of the Western Amazon — home to some of the most biodiverse and intact primary rainforest ecosystems left on Earth, which are critical for driving regional and global ecosystems and climatic patterns necessary for life – are threatened with decimation by oil rigs and pipelines. Over 180 oil and gas “blocks” – covering some 688,000 km2 (170 million acres) of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil (nearly the size of Texas) – areas zoned for exploration and development. This energy production is concentrated in the Amazon’s largest remaining un-fragmented primary rainforest wildernesses, containing the most species of birds, mammals, and amphibians.     


“Destruction of primary rainforests for oil production and other industrial developments is a global ecological emergency. Regional governments, international donors and global citizens must decide whether every last bit of the Earth’s old forest wildernesses; and intact, large ecosystems which make Earth habitable, will be sacrificed to delay having to transition now to renewable energy sources. In the process, abrupt run-away climate change, mass extinction and social disintegration will be ensured. This deal, if indeed signed as reported on Tuesday, represents a major new model for achieving global ecological sustainability, which must be replicated wherever primary rainforests shroud oil reserves. Further, it sets the precedent that to truly be protected, primary rainforests must be fully preserved in an intact condition, and not ‘sustainably managed’, which is a myth,” explains Dr. Barry.

63. "You can Fool People, But You Cannot Fool the Fish"

Yesterday's Washington Post carried an article about how the Obama administration has formally limited the use of chemical dispersants by BP in its "clean-up" effort but actually rubber stamped BP's repeated request to use the highly toxic chemicals. "Despite the order -- and concerns about the environmental effects of the dispersants -- the Coast Guard granted requests to use them 74 times over 54 days, and to use them on the surface and deep underwater at the well site (see the entire article here).  The use of chemical dispersants more as a public relations gimmick.  The less oil on the surface of the Gulf, the more successful BP's attempt to clean up the mess it created looked. Carys Mitchelmore, a professor at the University of Maryland, told the Washington Post that "By using more dispersants you're just going to be killing more things in the water column."  This validates an earlier commentary I wrote that the BP (and the "Big Oil"), not the government, has been in the driver seat of oil and gas policy.  More generally, the government has been serving the general corporate interests.  

The article below by Campbell Robertson of the New York Times offers a longer view of how the Gulf of Mexico has been the dumping ground for the U.S. military and industry, including the corn and oil and gas industries, for more than half a century. Thus, Washington and the corporate interests it defends have used one of the most intricate ecosystems in the world as their dumping ground regardless of which party or set of politicians were in power. 

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By Campbell Robertson (The New York Times, July 29, 2010)

HOUMA, La. — Loulan Pitre Sr. was born on the Gulf Coast in 1921, the son of an oysterman. Nearly all his life, he worked on the water, abiding by the widely shared faith that the resources of the Gulf of Mexico were limitless.

As a young Marine staff sergeant, back home after fighting in the South Pacific, he stood on barges in the gulf and watched as surplus mines, bombs and ammunition were pushed over the side.

He helped build the gulf’s very first offshore oil drilling platforms in the late 1940s, installing bolts on perilously high perches over the water. He worked on a shrimp boat, and later as the captain of a service boat for drilling platforms.

The gulf has changed, Mr. Pitre said: “I think it’s too far gone to salvage.”

The BP oil spill has sent millions of barrels gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, focusing international attention on America’s third coast and prompting questions about whether it will ever fully recover from the spill.

Now that the oil on the surface appears to be dissipating, the notion of a recovery from the spill, repeated by politicians, strikes some here as short-sighted. The gulf had been suffering for decades before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20.

“There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” said Felicia Coleman, director of Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”

The gulf is one of the most diverse ecosystems in the hemisphere, a stopping point for migratory birds from South America to the Arctic, home to abundant wildlife and natural resources.

But like no other American body of water, the gulf bears the environmental consequences of the country’s economic pursuits and appetites, including oil and corn.

There are around 4,000 offshore oil and gas platforms and tens of thousands of miles of pipeline in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, where 90 percent of the country’s offshore drilling takes place.

At least half a million barrels of oil and drilling fluids had been spilled offshore before the gusher that began after the April 20 explosion, according to government records.

Much more than that has been spilled from pipelines, vessel traffic and wells in state waters — including hundreds of spills in Louisiana alone — records show, some of it since April 20.

Runoff and waste from cornfields, sewage plants, golf courses and oil-stained parking lots drain into the Mississippi River from vast swaths of the United States, and then flow down to the gulf, creating a zone of lifeless water the size of Lake Ontario just off the coast of Louisiana.

The gulf’s floor is littered with bombs, chemical weapons and other ordnance dumped in the middle of last century, even in areas busy with drilling, and miles outside of designated dumping zones, according to experts who work on deepwater hazard surveys.

The likelihood of an accident is low, experts said, but they added that federal hazard mitigation requirements are not strong enough to guarantee the safety of drillers working in the gulf.

Even the coast itself — overdeveloped, strip-mined and battered by storms — is falling apart. The wildlife-rich coastal wetlands of Louisiana, sliced up and drastically engineered for oil and gas exploration, shipping and flood control, have lost an area larger than Delaware since 1930.

“This has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years,” said Aaron Viles, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit group. “What we’re seeing right now with BP’s crude is just a very photogenic representation of that.”

History of Neglect

All along the coast, people speak of a lack of regulatory commitment and investment in scientific research on the gulf by state and federal lawmakers.

They note, for example, that over the last decade, the Environmental Protection Agency’s financing for the Chesapeake Bay Program, a regional and federal partnership, was nearly five times the amount for a similar Gulf of Mexico program, and a Great Lakes program was given more than four times as much.

“The funding had never been equivalent to other great water bodies,” said Lisa Jackson, the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “That’s absolutely true. But it’s also absolutely true that this administration changed that long before the spill.”

While the Gulf of Mexico program financing remains at roughly the same levels, Ms. Jackson pointed to other programs to address gulf health that have been created and received tens of millions of dollars in the last two years.

On July 19, the Obama administration announced the recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, a committee created in 2009 to coordinate governance over the country’s major bodies of water.

The White House also announced the creation of a gulf restoration road map before the spill to address the long-term problems on the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.

The details of some of these federal plans remain vague, and the financing is viewed as just a start, but they have raised hopes of a more effective federal approach to the gulf’s problems — an approach that has long been missing, say scientists, lawyers and environmental advocates here.

Ms. Jackson added that it is not all about money. Some of the key coastal issues, like control of the Mississippi River, present thorny jurisdictional complications between the federal government and the states.

And while billions of dollars would be required to restore the coast — much more than has already been committed — the maintenance of a healthy gulf also demands rigorous enforcement of regulations.

Some of the strongest resistance to tough regulation, as well as the most permissive attitude toward industry and property development, has come from the Gulf States themselves.

While the states formed an alliance in 2004 to address the gulf’s overall health, the group includes some of the poorest states in the country, and they are concerned that tighter rules could chase away jobs.

In a federal ranking of states for annual toxic release, 3 of the top 10 are along the gulf.

This has led to a cycle of lax oversight. Members of several national environmental groups said they had found much of the gulf a hostile fund-raising and political atmosphere — a point echoed by Paul Templet, a former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

“They don’t have any support in state government,” Mr. Templet said of the groups. “They do a cost-benefit analysis, and they decide to spend their money elsewhere.”

A Regional Difference

But without the aggressive watchdog role played by well-financed environmental groups in places like California and the Mid-Atlantic, threats to the gulf have largely gone unmonitored.

Kieran Suckling, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, said he was shocked in the days after the Deepwater Horizon spill to discover the United States Minerals Management Service’s lax oversight of the offshore drilling industry.

“The blatant, extremely public actions of the M.M.S. would not survive for 10 minutes if they were doing this very same thing in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

But his organization, like many others, did not have an office on the gulf.

“The environmental movement was either so far removed from it that it was unaware, or it was aware and afraid to challenge it because of local politics,” Mr. Suckling said. “Or it was unwilling to challenge because it has written off the gulf as America’s dumping ground.”

By the time the environmental movement gained steam, in the 1970s, the Gulf of Mexico had already established a reputation as a place where the country did its dirty work.

Oil and gas companies have been drilling offshore in the central and western gulf for more than 60 years, providing tens of thousands of jobs for states with ailing agrarian economies.

In that time, only the Ixtoc I spill off Mexico in 1979 has come close to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But still, a report from the Ocean Studies Board and other federal scientific advisory groups found that the waters of the northwestern gulf take on more oil on average per year, from spills, natural seeps and land-based sources like coastal refineries and everyday transportation, than any other North American marine waters.

According to data from the Minerals Management Service compiled and analyzed by Toxics Targeting, a firm that documents pollution and contamination, at least 324 spills involving offshore drilling have occurred in the gulf since 1964, releasing more than 550,000 barrels of oil and drilling-related substances. Four of these spills even involved earlier equipment failures and accidents on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Thousands of tons of produced water — a drilling byproduct that includes oil, grease and heavy metals — are dumped into the gulf every year. The discharges are legal and regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But in the early 1990s, Robert Wiygul, an environmental lawyer who works on the Gulf Coast, brought at least a half-dozen lawsuits against companies that were found to be dumping produced water in shallow areas along the coast without any permit at all, citing little to no enforcement by the E.P.A. and little concern from regional politicians.

The E.P.A. later tightened regulations, including an outright ban on dumping produced waters near shore. But Mr. Wiygul described the situation as typical.

“If you’d had high-level politicians saying, ‘Y’all need to do this, this needs to happen,’ you would have seen a different situation there,” he said.

A Double-Edged Sword

Some of the alternatives to oil and gas could present their own problems to the gulf. While many farm groups, along with the Obama administration, are pushing for an expansion of ethanol-based fuels, such an expansion could mean more corn grown in the Midwest. That in turn could mean more nitrogen-rich fertilizer pouring into the gulf from the Mississippi River.

The nitrogen discharged into the Mississippi — 1.5 million tons of it yearly, from fertilizer, as well as urban runoff and sewage plants — creates a feeding frenzy among the phytoplankton when it enters the gulf. When the phytoplankton decompose, oxygen in the water is reduced so significantly that little life can exist.

That man-made area of dead water, called a hypoxic zone, is second in size only to a similar zone in the Baltic Sea. And its source, for the most part, is in states hundreds of miles from the gulf.

“One of the problems with the gulf as an ecosystem is its insults come from so damn far away,” said Oliver Houck, a lawyer at the Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.

The Clean Water Act has been effective at regulating “point source” pollution from specific factories and waste plants. But the act leaves much up to the states when it comes to regulating more diffuse sources of pollution, like runoff. And agricultural runoff is explicitly exempt from regulation under the act.

That does not mean that the states and the E.P.A. are powerless to curtail upstream pollution, said Nancy Rabalais, an expert on gulf hypoxia and executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. They just have been reluctant to do so in the past.

She said some positive steps had been made recently, including a new four-year, $320 million federal initiative dedicated to substantially reducing the nitrogen coming into the gulf by working with agricultural states upriver. But the plan is only a start, she said, and she has not seen the states along the Mississippi, including those in the gulf, push for the financing needed to make a measurable difference.

Mr. Pitre is skeptical that anything will change, given the economic realities. The BP spill aside, much of the damage to the gulf has been gradual and piecemeal. And people still believe that the gulf is big enough to absorb it.

“You can fool people,” Mr. Pitre said. “But you can’t fool the fish.”