An oversized puppet of the Wendy's mascot, provided by the People's Puppets of Occupy Wall Street, took part in silent street theater to convince the fast food giant to sign onto the Fast Food campaign. (Coalition of Immokalee Workers)

Originally posted at In These Times.

While rain pattered gently on the concrete steps of Manhattan’s Union Square last Saturday, a group of workers were giving the assembled crowd a tour of the sun-scorched fields of Florida’s tomato farms. The performers had turned the urban square into a stage for a street theater performance, depicting backbreaking labor and tussles with industry goons emblazoned with corporate food brand logos.

By dramatizing a farm scene amid the bustle of Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the surrounding neighborhoods, the activists of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers highlighted the connection between farmworkers’ daily struggles and the villain of the drama: Wendy’s restaurants, which are the primary target of the group’s Fair Food campaign for decent labor standards in an industry built on modern-day serfdom.

The Union Square rally-–featuring a brass band adorned with Wendy’s trademark red pigtails and tomato-shaped placards proclaiming “Justice” and “Derechos” for farmworkers–-was part of a nationwide series of Fair Food demonstrations that are helping bridge the conceptual gap between food consumerism and farm labor, a sector replete with poverty wages and brutally exploitative conditions in the fields. The Coalition has been campaigning for months to push Wendy’s and theFlorida supermarket giant Publix to sign a Fair Food agreement like the agreements brands like Chipotle and Trader Joe’s have already signed.

The Fair Food Program mandates about an additional penny in wages for each pound of tomatoes picked by Florida workers. That seemingly trivial amount, when multiplied by the massive scale of tomato agriculture, adds up to a meaningful difference in the lives of thousands of farmworkers who typically lack a living wage and basic labor protections: Since January 2011, the penny-per-pound premium has put some $10 million in their pockets, which could mean a raise of more than 60 percent for some low-wage laborers.

CIW activist Oscar Otzoy told Working In These Times in Spanish that, by spreading the word through rallies across the country, “We take action directly against the corporations that are responsible for the conditions that we’re facing. Because in the market context that exists, it’s these big companies that profit the most from the work that we as farmworkers are doing. And as they continue profiting, we continue facing the conditions that have existed for so long.”

Otzoy, who has been working in the United States for seven years, noted that although immigrant workers are at the center of their campaign, the exploitative conditions have affected all farmworkers–those with and without papers and even U.S. citizens, because the production structure is inherently exploitative. “Our goal with this program is to get to a day when everyone, regardless of their status, is treated with dignity and respect on the job,” he said.

To prevent abuses like wage theft and forced labor, the Fair Food Program sets a broad code of conduct that ensures compliance with labor laws, “including zero tolerance for forced labor and systemic child labor,” a binding commitment to an auditing process for growers, and a system for workers to file complaints against employers. The program also deploys health and safety monitors to help protect workers from the many hazards lurking in hot, pesticide-laden fields.

The agreement is anchored by the 2010 commitment by Florida’s major growers’ association, Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing about 90 percent of the state’s producers. Since then, the Coalition’s program has attracted massive support from consumers, community groups and upscale foodies, and pressured numerous industry purchasers to sign on. The Coalition’s unique, worker-led organizing model fuses consumer education and outreach with grassroots labor mobilization, and in the process reveals interlinked systems of consumption and production. In effect, their movement envisions “food justice” as structural change within a massively consolidated industry.

Wendy’s is seen as the “last holdout” among major fast food chains. However, advocates notethat, ironically, CEO Emil Brolick was something of a fast-food pioneer in 2005, when the company he led then, Taco Bell, became the first corporate buyer to sign the Fair Food Agreement.

According to statistics released by the US Department of Agriculture earlier this month, 31 percent of the managed honeybee colonies died in the winter. Since fruiting is dependent on fertilization, a result of pollination, honeybee decline can impact agriculture. We can directly link honeybees to one out of every three bites of food that we put on our table.

The Plight of the Honeybee
Billions of dollars—and a way of life—ride on saving pollinators.

Western nations rely heavily on managed honeybees—the “moveable force” of bees that ride in trucks from farm to farm—to keep commercial agriculture productive. About a third of our foods (some 100 key crops) rely on these insects, including apples, nuts, all the favorite summer fruits (like blueberries and strawberries), alfalfa (which cows eat), and guar bean (used in all kinds of products). In total, bees contribute more than $15 billion to U.S. crop production, hardly small potatoes.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) explains that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a hive condition where “very low or no adult honey bees present in the hive but with a live queen and no dead honey bee bodies present.” According to interviews of beekeepers in the documentaries, this condition can occur within a matter of a few hours.

The USDA further suggests that possible causes of colony decline could be due to unusually warm winter, bee diet (ie: protein, in particular), or cyclic disease, but also states that scientific connections are lacking for the theories. While the European Commission (EU) has ” has banned the pesticides associated with colony collapse disorder in bees,” the US has not done so yet. Oddly, the report contains this statement:

A comprehensive and sensitive analytical survey was done for the presence of 200 pesticides in bee, comb, and pollen samples from 23 states. No specific pattern of pesticide residues emerged that correlates with honey bee deaths March 2010

To be precise, the study linked in the statement says this:

Conclusions/Significance

The 98 pesticides and metabolites detected in mixtures up to 214 ppm in bee pollen alone represents a remarkably high level for toxicants in the brood and adult food of this primary pollinator. This represents over half of the maximum individual pesticide incidences ever reported for apiaries. While exposure to many of these neurotoxicants elicits acute and sublethal reductions in honey bee fitness, the effects of these materials in combinations and their direct association with CCD or declining bee health remains to be determined.

Will we fund or ignore the “remains to be determined” part? Would it surprise you at all to learn that yesterday, three large agrichemical pesticide companies came forward with plans to fund research for bee decline?

Monsanto, Bayer, Sygenta Fund Bee Research

Bayer and Sygenta “produce neonicotinoids,” and Monsanto uses the pesticides to coat seeds. These pesticides have been banned in Europe, as mentioned above. From wiki: “Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine. The development of this class of insecticides began with work in the 1980s by Shell and the 1990s by Bayer.[1]”

Leo Tolstoy said, “The closer we examine the honeybee, the more we realize the workings of a beehive encompass territories beyond our comprehension.” USDA bee laboratory scientist Dr. Jeffrey Pettis explains in Vanishing of the Bees that CCD is difficult to study because there are no bee corpses to examine when a colony literally vanishes. (video at 15:30). So far, scientists have investigated, and eliminated as possibilities, several microbial and viral suspects. Haunting how accurate Tolstoy’s quote really was. But what is maybe even more haunting is that the beehive workings will be studied with funds that have direct interest in the outcome of the research.

One of the scientists in the documentary reveals other suggestions for honeybee decline, that he has received in his email, including cell phones, the Rapture, Outer Space, and the ‘Russians-have-implanted-genes-and-they-are-beaming-them-from-satellite.’ While the scientist is confident that the persistent cell phone tower rumor is now known nonsense, he does say that the issue of genetically modified crops, while scientists have observed no direct evidence, deserves a bit more attention.

What saddens in the documentary is that we have exploited the honeybee, with factory farming practices such as feeding the bees empty sugar calories, killing the queens and replacing them with younger queens introduced in cages, and artificial insemination, with the likes of a scientist’s backward after-remark, “She looks a little rough, but she’ll come around.” There have been only too few, it seems, efforts at returning the bees to their natural state. When bees disappear, it’s wrong- surely some basic humanity instinct still exists in all of us.

Vanishing of the Bees full documentary:

BBC Documentary titled Who Killed the Honeybee?

Related:

One-Third of U.S. Honeybee Colonies Died Last Winter, Threatening Food Supply

Bees and the European neonicotinoids pesticide ban: Q&A

The US rejects Europe’s banning of these chemicals:

US rejects EU claim of insecticide as prime reason for bee colony collapse
“Government study points to a combination of factors for decline in population, breaking away from singling out pesticides”

Beepocalypse Redux: Honeybees Are Still Dying — and We Still Don’t Know Why

Monsanto stung by drop in bee population

Monsanto, Bayer seek answers to bee losses

“This is a difficult, high stakes battle,” said Peter Jenkins, a lawyer with the Center for Food Safety, which sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in March on behalf of a group of U.S. beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups over what they say is a lack of sound regulation of the pesticides in question.

“They may have a lot of money. But… we’re going to win,” Jenkins said.

Hi, y’all.

It’s been humid and windy by turns today in Austin. Strange to think the breezes that bring pleasant relief to me are, in a way, the same winds which devastated so many.

Tonight’s musical selection is “I Lost Myself” by Lauren Mann and the Fairly Odd Folk, from their album Over Land and Sea.

Would you drink a vaportini?

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What’s on your mind tonight? It’s an open conversation in the comments.

"Oil-Free" Lake Conway

On March 29 ExxonMobil, the most profitable company in the world, spilled at least 210,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from an underground pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas. The pipeline was carrying tar sands oil from Canada, which flooded family residences in Mayflower in thick tarry crude. Exxon’s tar sands crude also ran into Lake Conway, which sits about an eighth of a mile from where Exxon’s pipeline ruptured.

A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.

When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway…The water is all part of one body of water.” Furthermore, Exxon water tests confirmed that levels of Benzene and other contaminants rose throughout the lake, not just in the cove area.

Though Exxon was eventually forced to redact their claim that the cove specifically was  “oil-free,” the oil and gas giant has yet to publicly address the dangerous levels of Benzene and other contaminants their own tests have found in the body of Lake Conway. The Environmental Protection Agency and the American Petroleum Institute don’t agree on everything, but they do agree that the only safe level of Benzene, a cancer causing chemical found in oil, is zero. Benzene is added to tar sands oil to make it less viscous and flow more easily through pipelines.  Local people have reported fish kills, chemical smells, nausea and headaches. Independent water tests have found a host of contaminants present in the lake.

Dead fish in Palarm creek, which Lake Conway drains into. Palarm creek is a tributary of the Arkansas River.

According to Exxon’s data, 126,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from the pipeline spill is still unaccounted for.

Exxon’s spill emanated from the Pegasus Pipeline, which like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, connects the Canadian Tar Sands with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

As we originally reported on DeSmogBlog in November 2011:

At the “Media & Stakeholder Relations: Hydraulic Fracturing Initiative 2011” conference [in Nov. 2011] in Houston, Matt Pitzarella, Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs at Range Resources, revealed in his presentation that Range has hired Army and Marine veterans with combat experience in psychological warfare to influence communities in which Range drills for gas.

As CNBC reported, Range spokesman Matt Pitzarella boasted to the audience:

“[“…looking to other industries, in this case, the Army and the Marines. We have several former PSYOPs folks that work for us at Range because they’re very comfortable in dealing with localized issues and local governments. Really all they do is spend most of their time helping folks develop local ordinances and things like that. But very much having that understanding of PSYOPs in the Army and in the Middle East has applied very helpfully here for us in Pennsylvania.”

[**Listen: MP3**]

At that same conference, Matt Carmichael, External Affairs Manager at Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, suggested three things to attendees during his presentation:

“If you are a PR representative in this industry in this room today, I recommend you do three things. These are three things that I’ve read recently that are pretty interesting.

“(1) Download the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual [audible gasps from the audience], because we are dealing with an insurgency. There’s a lot of good lessons in there, and coming from a military background, I found the insight in that extremely remarkable. (2) With that said, there’s a course provided by Harvard and MIT twice a year, and it’s called ‘Dealing With an Angry Public.’ Take that course. Tied back to the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency [Field] Manual, is that a lot of the officers in our military are attending this course. It gives you the tools, it gives you the media tools on how to deal with a lot of the controversy that we as an industry are dealing with. (3) Thirdly, I have a copy of “Rumsfeld’s Rules.” You’re all familiar with Donald Rumsfeld — that’s kind of my bible, by the way, of how I operate.”

[**Listen: MP3**]

We learned a lot more from this episode about the gas industry’s aggressive intimidation tactics and personnel, so please read the original report and additional coverage for further details.

The use of PSYOPs by active military personnel on U.S. citizens is illegal and a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, as Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone explained in his February 2011 investigative story uncovering the fact that U.S. military generals had used PSYOPs on members of Congress. The Smith-Mundt act “was passed by Congress to prevent the State Department from using Soviet-style propaganda techniques on U.S. citizens.”

To this day, there has been no Congressional investigation of the oil and gas industry’s usage of PSYOPs personnel and tactics on U.S. soil.

U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) says federal aid to his home state after the tornado should be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. We’ll see how well the ideological integrity holds up if offsets aren’t quickly found, but nevertheless, the question of how to fund disaster relief is increasingly urgent. It arose late last year when Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast. And though we cannot know whether man-made climate change was specifically responsible for either of those acts of nature, we do know federal spending to cope with extreme weather events has been rising. Indeed, from 2011 to 2013, the federal government has spent $136 billion on disaster relief.

One area of spending that Americans from Left to Right are willing to cut is incarceration and the War on Drugs. According to a 2012 poll, 82% of Americans believe the country is losing the drug war, and a plurality say we should be spending less money on it. In another survey, voters overwhelmingly contend we should save money by shifting nonviolent offenders from prison to cheaper alternatives involving rehabilitation. Groups such as Right on Crime and Justice Fellowship demonstrate that many conservatives are now rethinking criminal justice policy. And of course, progressive organizations have long been beating that drum.

There is plenty of federal money to be saved. To start, President Obama’s latest budget contains $8.5 billion for prisons and detention. With about half of all federal inmates locked up explicitly for drug offenses (never mind for the collateral consequences of prohibition, including black market violence), that’s a hefty chunk of change being spent by the federal government on drug-related incarceration. Obama’s proposed budget also allocates $25.6 billion to fighting the drug war through law enforcement, interdiction, international operations, and other means. These are substantial federal investments in an approach to criminal justice that most Americans no longer believe in.

Counting state and local appropriations paints an even bleaker picture of our spending priorities. As of 2007 — the last year for which data is available — the United States spends a massive $228 billion annually on cops, courts, and corrections. Much of that money goes toward arresting, prosecuting, and locking up nonviolent offenders. As a result, our country has become the incarceration capital of the world. With less than 5% of the world’s population, we have nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. That gives us the highest rate of incarceration and the highest number of prisoners — besting Russia, China, and all the rest.

Money aside, there is something fundamentally unfair about how our criminal laws are applied. Given that this year is the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we would do well to reflect on the vast racial inequalities that have only gotten worse when it comes to the justice system. Consider that blacks, whites, and Latinos use and sell drugs at about the same rate. Yet people of color are far more likely to be arrested for drugs; once arrested, they’re more likely to be prosecuted; and once prosecuted, they get longer sentences. In all, two thirds of the people incarcerated for a drug offense are black or Latino even though those two groups make up less than a third of the U.S. population.

This trend of mass incarceration has had sweeping consequences. Millions of formerly incarcerated people have vastly diminished economic prospects. Millions of children have a parent behind bars. And people of color have borne the brunt of the unequal application of our nation’s criminal laws.

So as we figure out where to come up with more money for disaster relief, here’s one question we face: Would we rather spend billions on rebuilding lives and communities destroyed by natural disasters, or billions on a criminal justice system that is itself destroying lives and communities?

It’s not like taking money out of the justice system would be inherently bad for public safety. There are numerous cost-effective alternatives to mass incarceration that would free up money for things like disaster relief. Beyond Bars‘ new video, produced in partnership with the liberal evangelical group Sojourners, explores those options:

Policymakers hoping to find meaningful offsets to fund disaster aid or any other initiative will have look at three things: 1) Where there’s a lot of money, 2) where the spending is unjustifiable, and 3) where the politics and public opinion are conducive to allowing cuts, since there are very few areas in which that’s true. Mass incarceration and the drug war meet all three criteria. They just might be the only areas of spending that do.

Sen. Coburn and other politicians who insist on offsets for increases in spending should look anew at America’s approach to criminal justice. It’s perhaps our best option for making such cuts a reality.

Cross-Posted from DeSmogBlog

Gasland Part 2 continues documenting energy industry spin and climate change.

Gasland 2 screened yesterday in Normal, IL and DeSmogBlog was there to gain a sneak peak of the documentary set for a July 8 HBO national premiere.

Josh Fox’s documentary played at the Normal Theater, the second-ever screening since the film officially premiered on April 21 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. 

The movie builds on Fox’s Academy Award-nominated Gasland, further making the case of how the shale industry’s hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) boom is busting up peoples’ livelihoods, contaminating air and water, polluting democracy and serving as a “bridge fuel” only to propel us off the climate disruption cliff. 

A central theme and question of the film is, “Who gets to tell the story?” That is, industry PR pros and bought-off politicians utilizing the “tobacco playbook” and saying “the sky is pink,” or families directly injured by the industry? Fox explains how the industry has gamed the system, ensuring the communities have their voices drowned out. The Gasland films seek to tell some of the victims’ stories. 

Another theme is the bread and butter of following any big industry’s influence: following the money. In depicting the financial clout of Big Oil, Gasland 2 shows that the oil and gas industry has gone to the lengths of deploying warfare tactics – literally – on U.S. citizens to ram through its agenda. 

PSYOPs Use by Gas Industry PR Flacks Featured

Much of the content in Gasland 2 has also been covered on DeSmogBlog over the past few years.

Robert Howarth’s and Anthony Ingraffea’s prominent “Cornell Study” receives some good play in the film. Howarth and Ingraffea demonstrated that from cradle to grave, fracked gas has a more dangerous global warming effect than coal, a death knell to the “natural gas as a bridge fuel” meme. President Obama’s deployment of American Petroleum Institute “jobs” talking points for fracking is in there too.

Former head of the Dept. of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and Republican Gov. of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, also takes a beating in the film. His appearance on “The Colbert Report” is righteously roasted, the same appearance in which he lied to U.S. citizens and declared he was “not a lobbyist” even though he was registered to lobby at that time for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Tailsman Terry the Fracosaurus,” which demonstrates the industy’s willingness to utilize propaganda on young children, receives a similar round of ridicule in Gasland 2. Fox also explains the oil industry’s use of Big Tobacco’s Playbook through interviews with Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt, a major theme of our coverage of both the shale gas industry and the Tea Party. 

Steve Lipsky, who was left in the dust by Range Resouces and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is one of the central characters of the film. The major villain of that tale is former PA Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped derail and censor the EPA’s fracking groundwater contamination study motivated by Lipsky’s water contamination in Weatherford, TX.

While the prospective shale gas export boom is covered in some depth in the film, so too is the concept of the government-industry revolving door, particularly as it pertains to Pennsylvania. The Public Accountability Initiative’s study “Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania” is featured in the film, a study we also covered.

Last but certainly not least, Gasland 2 devotes an entire section to the industry’s admitted use of psychological warfare tactics (PSYOPs) on U.S. citizens, as we first revealed in Nov. 2011.

The Houston PR conference referred to in the film is one I attended and covered in some depth. It was a gathering of industry public relations executives talking among friends about how to best manipulate mainstream media journalists, divide and conquer anti-fracking activists, and intimidate local communities to go along with fracking operations that endanger their health and drinking water.

Gasland 2 presents the audio of Range Resouces Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Matt Pitzarella revealing that Range hires PSYOPs Iraq War veterans to use their skills to pressure local communities. The film also features Anadarko Petroleum External Affairs Manager Matt Carmichael advising gas industry PR pros to read the Army “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” and “Rumsfeld’s Rules,” because “we are dealing with an insurgency.”

Both audio clips were obtained by Earthworks’ Sharon Wilson at the conference and provided to media by Earthworks and DeSmogBlog. CNBC first broke the story on Nov. 8, 2011.

Illinois Fracking Fight Wages On