Bush, Our Anti-POPs President?

It is time for a vacation from spending day after day, night after night, frightened by the Bush administration, and by expending money, time and energy opposing virtually everything it sends down the autobahn. Switch to the Other Side. Let's support Bush! There is a way. Who would have thought?

Start slowly. Visualize banners and bumper stickers saying "Support Bush in His Stand Against POPs!" Imagine designs showing the green Earth Flag crossed in solidarity with the Stars 'n' Bars. Consider: we are either with Bush on this, or we are against him. Or think of it this way: We are either with industries that harm our health and kill us, or we are against them. No need to flip a coin to decide.

POPs are Persistent Organic Pollutants -- toxic, cancer-causing industrial substances that have contaminated our environment and brought death, disease and even extinction to the planet. There are many of them but, just over a year ago, more than 120 countries signed the Stockholm Treaty to phase-out the twelve worst of the worst POPs, the "Dirty Dozen". Amazingly, the United States -- this administration -- signed the treaty! Interestingly, the mainstream media did not trumpet this event to show what a concerned, environmentally conscientious administration we have in the land, despite so many indications to the contrary.

The dozen initially targeted POPs are furans, PCBs, hexachlorbenzene, Mirex, heptachlor, DDT, Dieldrin, Chlordane, Toxaphane, Aldrin, Endrin and, last but not least, dioxin. Dioxin, the worst of the worst, is an unwanted by-product of manufacture, processing and burning of chlorine, developed by Dow years ago from common table salt. There is no safe dose. It is bioaccumulative in fatty tissues and has been indicted for being a cause of breast cancer and a host of other pathologies. Dioxin is the central element of such nightmares as Love Canal, Times Beach and Agent Orange. Even the U.S., belatedly and much to the displeasure of the chlorine industries, classified it a Known Human Carcinogen, the worst level. Not making this determination would have been equivalent to, say, claiming that bullets didn't make holes in people.

Others on this POPs list have been banned for use in the U.S. and elsewhere, though some are still made in the U.S. for export. Some, like DDT, are still used overseas legally and illegally. Some of this returns to the U.S. in import crops, including tobacco, in the still-existent "Circle of Poison". Apparently, plans to use DDT-sniffing dogs to prevent this threat to U.S. health security ran into a glitch when the dogs died.

Chlorine is utterly non-essential. Environmentalist Barry Commoner wrote that, except for a very rare medical photographic process, every use of chlorine, for water purification, plastics, fuel refining, bleaching, cleansers, pharmaceuticals, synthetic fabrics, etc., could be replaced with benign alternatives. The only reason chlorine remains cheap, and therefore profitable to industry, is that the powerful chlorine cartel has evaded responsibility, liabilities, criminal prosecution and often even exposure for all the harms it has caused. The public, thanks to a complicit regulatory system, has paid the costs financially and by earth-wide health and environmental damages.

Chlorine is a significant part of most petroleum, petrochemical, pesticide, plastics, pharmaceutical, paper, packaging and other industries. Note that a lot of these industries could use hemp as a benign substitute for chlorine, and eliminate the need for it almost entirely. Fuels, plastics, paper and packaging can be derived from hemp, a plant that needs no pesticides, and a paper source that needs no bleach or forest destruction. Processing and disposal of hemp products would produce no industrial toxins, and certainly no dioxins. The trouble with the sensible direction is that it, like most sensible choices, would cut into pesticide profits for Big Oil and Big Pharmaceuticals. It would spread the wealth to farmers and farm communities. It would make farmlands economically viable for agriculture, thus keeping sprawl, highway development and automobile proliferation at bay. It would also provide a good example of non-toxic agriculture with all the healthy farm workers, downwind neighbors and local wildlife which would make the toxic industries, including waste disposal, look bad, to say the least, by comparison.