=By= Steve Horn

[Photo: Mike Catanzaro. Credit: U.S. National Archives at College Park]

The Washington Post has reported that Mike Catanzaro, a former senior energy staffer for Republican Party House Majority Leader John Boehner with a track record of climate change denial, will lead Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump’s energy transition team.

Catanzaro now works as a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN, where his clients include Noble Energy, Koch Industries, EnCana Oil and Gas, Halliburton, Devon Energy and others. For those clients, he lobbies on issues such as pushing for more drilling on public lands on behalf of EnCana, against emissions regulations for drilling onshore and offshore wells on public lands for Hess Corporation and Devon, and for offshore drilling in Israel on behalf of Noble Energy.

Noble Energy Executive Vice President Chip Rimer, also a member of the Board of Directors for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, recently attended a private meeting between Colorado fracking industry executives and Trump in Denver, Colorado.

Beyond oil and gas issues, Catanzaro also lobbies against President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which calls for regulating carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants. In a May speech, the climate change-denying Trump said he intends to “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan” if elected president.

Catanzaro is not the only Devon connection to the Trump campaign: Larry Nichols, Devon co-founder and Board of Directors Chairman Emeritus, also serves as a Trump energy adviser.

The Post’s story landed the same day DeSmog reported that Kathleen Hartnett-White, the climate change-denying former aide to First Lady Nancy Reagan and chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) under Republican Governor Rick Perry, is under consideration to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) if Trump assumes the White House.

DeSmog has also reported that Trump’s prospective Secretary of Energy, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) baron Harold Hamm — founder and CEO of Continental Resources — stands to gain economically from the building of TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline and Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline.

Catanzaro: Oil-Soaked Road to Team Trump

Catanzaro’s current role in heading up Trump’s energy team is over a decade in the making, with a career track record soaked in oil and gas.

After a brief stint as a writer who studied at the industry-funded right-wing National Journalism Institute, Catanzaro launched his career as a communications director for the U.S. Congress’ climate change denier-in-chief, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe made waves in February 2015 by bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor as his evidence that climate change is a “hoax.”

After his time spent in Inhofe’s office, Catanzaro spent the second term of the George W. Bush Administration working on energy policy issues and then serving as Associate Deputy Administrator of the EPA, while also working on Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. He then passed through the government-industry revolving door, becoming a lobbyist and director of federal relations for coal utility company Pennsylvania Power & Light for a couple years until moving back into government and working for Inhofe again on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee as Deputy Staff Director.

After Inhofe, Catanzaro got a job working as senior energy policy adviser to Rep. Boehner, where he worked for a bit less than two years. During that time he also worked on 2012 Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign, heading up its EPA policy transition team.

“Laugh Test”

Perhaps looking for a pay raise, Catanzaro left the Committee after a couple years on the job and went back to the lobbying world, securing a job at FTI Consulting.

FTI runs the fracking industry-funded front group Energy In Depth, which serves as an attack dog PR voice on behalf of the industry and helps to fend off criticism by citizens, regulators, policymakers and the media.

While employed by FTI, Catanzaro testified in Congress against the Clean Power Plan, co-authored a paper supporting the export of U.S. crude oil and advocated for weakening the Endangered Species Act.

Continuing the trend of never staying anywhere for too long, after a couple years at FTI, Catanzaro has spent the past two years working for the lobbying firm CGCN Group and as a senior fellow for the industry-funded American Council on Capital Formation (ACCF), according to his LinkedIn profile.

In 2015, Catanzaro gave a presentation noting that if a Republican wins the White House, one of the first things he will do in office is overturn incorporating climate change into National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews of proposed federal energy infrastructure projects, something called for recently by the Obama Administration.

“Trump’s anointment of Catanzaro to head his energy transition team, if elected, doesn’t pass the laugh test. As someone who has spent his entire career shilling for the dirty energy industry, it’s hard to imagine anyone more compromised,” Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Action Fund, told DeSmog. “When future generations study how self-serving climate deniers gained public prominence, he will be one of the people named.”

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Ramzy Baroud, PhD
Politics for the People

[Photo: ShimonPeres NobelPeaceLaureate by Latuff2 on DeviantArt]

Former Israeli Prime Minister and President, Shimon Peres, was a very successful brand. He was presented to the world as stately, wise, a relentless advocate of peace, and a sane voice amidst a conflict deemed senseless and unending.

Now that he is dead at 93, international media are rife with touching tributes and heartwarming eulogies of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, one of Israel’s most sagacious ‘founding fathers’, who was also seen as a ‘giant among men’.

These attributes were mostly based on sentiment rather than fact, however, full knowledge of the man’s legacy certainly lingers among many Palestinians, Lebanese and advocates of peace and justice in the Middle East.

The truth is, Peres was never truly a peacemaker – he never labored to achieve fair and just political compromises that would preserve the dignity and rights of the Palestinians, along with securing the future of his people. In fact, he was a maximalist, a man who blatantly shoved his ideas forward in order to achieve his goals, no matter what the method or the price.

Nor was he a leader with a specific qualities that allowed him to excel in particular fields of politics. Instead, he was the embodiment of the archetypical Israeli politician who swapped roles, and rebranded himself as the occasion or role required.

“Over seven decades, Peres served as prime minister (twice) and president, though he never actually won a national election outright,” wrote Ben White in Middle East Monitor. “He was a member of 12 cabinets and had stints as defense, foreign and finance minister.”

He was also characterized as a ‘warrior’ at home, and a peace ‘dove’ in global forums. He came across as kind and stately, and Western media often embraced that erroneous image with little questioning.

But for many people, Shimon Peres was a false prophet. Like Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert and others, he was a ‘peacemaker’ by name only, and only by those whose ideals he fulfilled.

Fearing that his reputation as ‘too soft’ to lead Israel – which is often led by battle-hardened generals – would affect his standing among voters, Peres often meted out severe punishment on the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples. His history was rife with brutal war crimes that went unpunished.

Although he is remembered for his ordering of the bombing of a UN shelter in the Lebanese village of Qana in 1996 – which killed and wounded hundreds of innocent people – the list of war crimes associated with his name is as long as his career. He remained, until the very end a staunch supporter of the Israeli right-wing government’s wars on Gaza and the perpetual siege on that impoverished, forsaken region.

Even as a ‘peacemaker’ he failed terribly. He championed the Oslo Accords as a political treaty that would entrench the Israeli occupation and turn the little that remained of historic Palestine into disjointed Bantustans, as was the case, if not to a worse extent, in apartheid South Africa. Yet he certainly never took responsibility, or expressed any remorse for the resultant plight of the Palestinians.

Nevertheless, the brand of Shimon Peres is an old one. It spans over the course of his long career, starting with him joining underground Zionist militias prior to the establishment of Israel on appropriated Palestinian land. His militant group, the Haganah, was entrusted with the implementation of Plan Dalet, which essentially aimed at the ethnic cleaning of the Palestinian population of its historic homeland.

As one of the ‘disciples of David Ben-Gurion’, the first Prime Minister of Israel, Peres “spent his long political career in the public spotlight,” although “his greatest successes were engineered in the shadows,” according to Yaron Ezrahi, a politics professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as quoted by Jonathan Cook.

One of these ‘successes’ was the nuclear bomb. Although various Middle Eastern countries, most notably Iraq and Iran, are often derided for nuclear weapons they never possessed, Peres was the founding father of weapons of mass destruction in the region.

“Peres, like his mentor, believed an Israeli bomb was the key to guaranteeing Israel’s status – both in Washington DC and among the Arab states – as an unassailable Middle East power,” Cook wrote.

Dodging American protests, Peres enlisted the clandestine support of Britain, France, Norway and other countries to realize his ambition.

Yet throughout his career, Peres never ceased speaking of ‘peace.’ His rhetoric and rehearsed face of ‘sincerity’ suited even his political rivals very well, for the juxtaposition of peace-loving Peres vs, for example, warmongering Ariel Sharon presented Israel as a country with healthy, democratic institutions.

The true mockery though is that the differences between Peres and his rivals, who also included former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, were barely even apparent, and only relevant within Israel’s own political and historical contexts.

For example, Shamir, who led the government between 1983–84 and, again between 1986–1992 was a member of the terrorist Zionist paramilitary group, Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, at the time when Peres was a member of the Haganah. Throughout their militant and political careers, both collaborated on the subject of ethnic cleaning, waged wars, expanded illegal Jewish colonies, and entrenched the military occupation of Palestinian land after 1967.

However, ‘stately’ Peres chose his words carefully, and was indeed a cunning diplomat, while Shamir was a blunt and disagreeable character. As far as practical differences are concerned, however, the end results of their policies were practically identical.

A particularly poignant example of this was the unity government in Israel in 1984 which had a most peculiar leadership arrangement that included both Shamir of the rightwing Likud party and Peres of the Labor party – who was at the time in the early phase of his reinvention as ‘dove.’ (Yitzhak Rabin was appointed to the post of Defense Minister.)

These two individuals who stood at the helm of the Israeli leadership constituted the worst possible combination from the point of view of Palestinians in the occupied territories. While Shamir and Peres served the role of the hard-liner and peace-seeker respectively before the international community, both men and their governments presided over a legacy saturated with violence, illegal annexation of Palestinian land and settlement expansion.

The number of Jewish settlers who moved to the occupied territories between 1984 and1988, rose considerably, contributing to a policy of a slow annexation of Palestinian land and predictably, the ethnic cleansing of more people.

In October 1994, Peres, along with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. While Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist and Arafat died from suspected poisoning, Peres lived to be 93, advocating Israel’s interest at the expense of Palestinians to the very end, justifying Israeli wars, siege and military occupation.

The Israelis and many in mainstream Western media may very well praise Peres as a hero, but for Palestinians, Lebanese and a multitude of others he is another war criminal who escaped any accountability for his countless misdeeds.

Ramzy Baroud, PhD

Has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

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=By= Paul Brown

[Photo: A farmer in China spreads pesticide on her crops. Image: IFPRI via Flickr]

With the impacts of climate change threatening food supply as population grows, China is buying land on other continents to grow more crops.

China is protecting itself against future food supply problems caused by climate change by buying or leasing large tracts of land in Africa and South America, a leading UK climate scientist says.

Professor Peter Wadhams, an expert on the disappearing Arctic ice, says that while countries in North America and Europe are ignoring the threat that changing weather patterns are causing to the world food supply, China is taking “self-protective action”.

He says that changes in the jet stream caused by the melting of the ice in the Arctic are threatening the most productive agricultural areas on the planet.

“The impact of extreme, often violent weather on crops in a world where the population continues to increase rapidly can only be disastrous,” he warns.

“Sooner or later, there will be an unbridgeable gulf between global food needs and our capacity to grow food in an unstable climate. Inevitably, starvation will reduce the world’s population.”

Land resources bought by China and Saudi representatives. Washington Post.

Protect food supply

Professor Wadhams, former head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, says China has already realised this is a threat to its future stability and has been taking over large areas of land in other countries to grow crops to protect its food supply.

The drawback, he says, is that the Chinese are introducing industrial agricultural practices that damage the soil, the water supply and the rivers.

“But China is positioning itself for the struggle to come − the struggle to find enough to eat,” he says. “By controlling land in other countries, they will control those countries’ food supply.”

Professor Wadhams, who is a former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, is the UK’s most experienced sea ice expert.

In his new book, A Farewell to Ice, he describes a number of serious threats to the planet resulting from the loss of Arctic ice. These include much greater sea level rise than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resulting in the flooding of cities and of low-lying deltas where much of the world’s food is grown.

“China is positioning itself for the struggle
to come − the struggle to find enough to eat”

He says China has seen the unrest in parts of the world caused by food price increases in 2011 during the Arab Spring, and has sought to guard against similar problems at home by buying land across the globe.

His warnings are echoed in Brazil, where there are concerns about Chinese plans to build a 3,300-mile (5,000km) railway to get soya, grain and timber to the coast to supply China’s needs.

But fears over land grabs by China are only a small part of the changing world that will be created by the loss of ice in the Arctic discussed by Wadhams in his book.

He attacks the last four British prime ministers − John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron − for talking about climate change and doing little. And he says his fellow scientists on the IPCC are failing in their duty to speak out about the full dangers of climate change.

Professor Wadhams told Climate News Network that colleagues “were too frightened of their jobs or losing their grants to spell out what was really happening”. He said it makes him very angry that they are failing in their duty through timidity.

Based on his own measurements and calculations, he believes that summer ice in the Arctic will disappear before 2020 – which is 30 years before the IPCC estimate. He also believes that sea level rise has been badly underestimated because the loss of ice from Greenland and the Antarctic was not included in the IPCC’s estimates.

“My estimates are based on real measurements of the ice in the Arctic – the IPCC rely on computer simulations. I know which I believe.”

He is also concerned about the large escapes of methane from the Arctic tundra and the shallow seas north of Siberia – again, something that has not been fully taken into account in the IPCC’s calculations on the speed of warming.

Bordering on dishonest

“They know it is happening, but they do not want to frighten the horses [alarm people]. It is bordering on the dishonest,” he says.

Professor Wadhams has concluded that there is now so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that dangerous warming is inevitable unless more drastic action is taken. He says reducing emissions will help, along with planting forests, but it will never be enough.

“What is needed is something that has not been invented yet − a large-scale method of passing air through a machine and taking out the carbon dioxide,” he says.

“In the long run, only by taking carbon out of the air can we hope to get the concentrations down enough to save us from dangerous climate change.

“It is a tall order, but if we spend enough money on research we can find a way. Our future depends on it.”

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=By= Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell

[Photo: Toxic e-waste. Today’s waste dump. Tomorrow’s public housing site. Credit: Free Vancouver.]

In this industrial northwest Indiana city, hundreds of families who live in a gated public housing community with prim lawns and a new elementary school next door are searching for new homes. Their own places have been marked for demolition.

The school, temporarily closed, has been taken over by the Environmental Protection Agency and health officials who offer free blood tests to check residents for lead poisoning. Long after the U.S. lead industry left East Chicago, a toxic legacy remains. Smokestacks at one smelter next door, shuttered 31 years ago, for decades polluted these grounds.

Emissions from the now-defunct U.S. Smelter and Lead Refinery Inc, or USS Lead, left a potent hazard in the soil. By early this year, the EPA detected concentrations of the heavy metal so high in some yards that they could pose a serious health risk to families at the West Calumet Housing Complex. Children are told not to play outdoors.

At the 44-year-old housing complex, all 1,100 residents are being forced to move out. Many are outraged about why the dangerous soils weren’t identified and removed earlier.

One reason: Five years ago, a unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a 19-page report that all but ruled out the possibility of children here getting lead poisoning. (http://bit.ly/2dAYVOt)

That CDC branch – the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR, – conducts public health assessments to examine potential contamination risks and point the way to next steps to be taken by EPA and others.

In its January 2011 report, ATSDR said it reached “4 important conclusions.” Among them: “Breathing the air, drinking tap water or playing in soil in neighborhoods near the USS Lead Site is not expected to harm people’s health.”

ATSDR’s report was built on flawed or incomplete data, a Reuters examination found: The assumption that residents weren’t at risk was wrong, and many of the report’s key findings were unfounded or misleading.

The report said “nearly 100 percent” of children were being tested for blood lead levels in the impacted area. State data reviewed by Reuters show the annual rate of blood lead testing among children in East Chicago ranged from 5 percent to 20 percent over the last 11 years.

In the area, well known for its history of lead contamination, ATSDR reported that “declining blood lead levels in small children appear to confirm that they are no longer exposed to lead from any source.”

Yet from 2005 to 2015, nearly 22 percent of children tested in the Indiana census tract that contains the West Calumet houses showed an elevated blood lead level – 160 such results in all. Children tested in this tract were more than twice as likely to have an elevated reading than in other areas of East Chicago, state data reviewed by Reuters shows.

The CDC’s conclusions help explain why many West Calumet residents didn’t learn until recently that their yards were toxic, according to health experts, city administrators and data compiled by Reuters.

Carla Morgan, East Chicago’s city attorney, believes the report contributed to a false sense of safety. “In 2011, the ATSDR lacked data to make any conclusion about the potential health risks,” she said.

Contacted by reporters, the ATSDR initially said it would respond to detailed questions about its 2011 report. Over a period of weeks it said it was finalizing its responses. A spokeswoman, Susan McBreairty, told Reuters the answers were “complicated.” Reporters also sought comment from the two ATSDR scientists listed as authors of the 2011 report; neither responded.

Ultimately, ATSDR didn’t address the questions.

Instead, it released a broad media statement Thursday saying it is evaluating new EPA data “to determine if a human health hazard has developed since the Agency’s 2011 public health assessment (PHA) of the USS Lead and Smelter site.”

A new analysis will come next year, ATSDR said in the statement, and “will help determine if additional public health activities are warranted.”

BARRIER BETWEEN CHILDREN, SOIL

The report’s findings factored significantly into EPA’s decision not to conduct more urgent soil testing or urge residents to relocate, said EPA Region Five Administrator Robert Kaplan. Believing residents weren’t at imminent risk, EPA focused on a multi-year plan to gradually test for and replace lead-tainted soil.

Once EPA completed its soil-sampling this year, the scope of the danger for children was clear.

“The high levels of lead in many yards in East Chicago would require a barrier to be placed between children and the soil, to protect them,” said Dr. Helen Binns, a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago and professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, who reviewed the testing data with Reuters.

EPA’s sampling found that 50 percent of the West Calumet homes tested had lead in their topsoil exceeding 1,200 parts per million, or three times the federal “hazard” level for residential areas.

That level warrants “time-critical” removal action within six months to protect human health, EPA standards say. In the most polluted yard found, a top layer of soil had 45,000 parts per million of lead.

Patrick MacRoy, a former head of the lead poisoning prevention program in Chicago, expressed shock after reviewing the ATSDR report. He found especially troubling its conclusion that children faced no threat of lead exposure.

“I can’t believe anyone with any degree of training or familiarity with environmental health would ever make (that) statement,” MacRoy said. “I can’t believe that no one reviewing that report internally, or even at EPA or the state, wouldn’t have flagged that as grossly misstating the available evidence.”

“I generally respect ATSDR, but that report is embarrassingly bad,” he said.

In recent months, 10 children under age 7 at West Calumet houses or in nearby areas were confirmed to have elevated lead levels, or around 5 percent of those tested, according to Indiana’s State Department of Health.

Following the notorious lead contamination of the drinking water supply in Flint, Michigan, around 4.9 percent of children tested there had high blood lead levels.

In East Chicago, more monitoring is planned, and the recent results do not mean children are in the clear, experts said.

Blood lead testing is usually indicated for children ages one and two. Ingesting lead-tainted soil, dust or paint chips is most common among infants and toddlers with hand-to-mouth behavior, said Dr. Bruce Lanphear, an expert on neurotoxins at Simon Fraser University.

A child poisoned at age two will often later test within a normal range. But the earlier exposure may have already wrought irreversible damage, including lifelong cognitive impairments.

‘WHAT ARE THEY DIGGING FOR?’

Today, outside the orderly brick houses in the community – due west of Gary, Indiana, and some 23 miles south of Chicago – moving vans are parked, and poster board signs warn residents not to play in the dirt.

Some of the 92 EPA staffers on site go door to door to speak with residents, offering testing and clean-up for lead inside their homes. Contractors have placed mulch over exposed dirt areas.

The forced exodus of tenants comes after East Chicago’s mayor told them this summer that lead and arsenic contamination in the area made it unacceptably risky to live here, especially for the area’s more than 600 children.

“I have lived here for five years and was never told anything about contamination until now,” said Akendra Erving, a mother of five young children who is moving her family to Alabama. “In May or June, I started to see these crews digging in peoples’ yards. ‘What are they digging for?’ I thought.

“Now I know.”

Recently, Erving got more bad news. A test showed that her three-year-old son, King, had a blood lead level of 8 micrograms per deciliter. Her daughter Kelis, 4, tested at 9 micrograms per deciliter. CDC recommends a public health response for children who test at 5 or above.

The lead crisis is the focus of several agencies, including ATSDR. EPA has taken a leading role, with Indiana’s State Department of Health, city officials, state environmental officials and federal and local housing agencies also involved.

Tensions and finger-pointing among the parties has sometimes grown heated. In July, East Chicago’s mayor wrote EPA a scathing letter, accusing the agency of withholding soil testing data that demonstrated grave health risks.

EPA’s Kaplan says the soil data was shared with the city as soon as the EPA could verify it, in May.

Recently, a “peacekeeper” division of the U.S. Justice Department, its Community Relations Service, stepped in to de-escalate conflicts.

ON TOP OF ANACONDA

The West Calumet Housing complex stands near the center of a once humming U.S. industry hub. It was also a dirty one.

In the early 1970s, the houses were erected atop the former Anaconda Lead and International Refining Company. For decades, the plant churned out white lead pigment for use in paint.

In 1978, the United States outlawed the type of paint Anaconda produced for residential use. That and other measures brought a sharp drop in average U.S. blood lead levels in recent decades. No level of lead in the blood is safe for children.

Next door was another smelter, USS Lead. From 1920 through 1985, the facility refined lead or lead products. Its blast furnaces pumped out soot that blanketed the land where the housing complex stands.

Also nearby was a facility, formerly operated by chemicals giant DuPont, that produced lead arsenate from 1928-1949. Its main ingredients were lead and arsenic. The product was banned as an insecticide in 1988.

Much of the waste was stockpiled within the city’s industrial complexes. Sometimes it got spread over nearby marshland or dumped in the Calumet River.

Back in 2009, this corner of East Chicago, a working class city of 29,000, was placed on the federal Superfund’s National Priorities List, or NPL.

Michael Berkoff, an EPA project manager who led a 2012 public hearing in East Chicago to inform residents about clean-up plans, described the NPL as “EPA’s nationwide list of the most contaminated sites in the country.”

Numbering more than 1,300 nationwide, the Superfund sites require clean-up to protect the environment and human health. In many cases, the companies that used to operate them folded years ago.

At the hearing, Berkoff laid out EPA’s long-term goal of removing contaminated soil from West Calumet yards and other polluted zones in East Chicago. “Some of the contamination here is at higher levels than we would consider hazardous waste,” he told the audience, according to a transcript.

Years earlier, the EPA had already cleaned up several area yards where topsoil testing detected lead levels exceeding 1,200 parts per million, ppm.

The next round of remediation EPA proposed would cost tens of millions of dollars and take a few years, Berkoff said. At West Calumet, wherever EPA found yards whose shallow soil exceeded 400 ppm of lead, it would excavate and replace the layer with clean soil.

To fund the effort, EPA and the U.S. Department of Justice pursued what they called potential responsible parties for some of the area’s contamination. In 2014, chemicals company DuPont and ARCO, a unit of oil giant BP, agreed to contribute $26 million to the East Chicago clean-up.

Under a consent decree, the companies acknowledged no wrongdoing.

ARCO said it had taken on certain liabilities after it acquired the Anaconda Company in the late 1970’s, though it never operated the Anaconda lead plant itself.

DuPont said it cooperated with EPA but its responsibilities under the consent decree were assumed by the Chemours Company, a former DuPont business now operating independently, a DuPont spokesman said. Chemours said it will cooperate with the EPA, a spokesman said.

To date, the earth-moving envisaged in the plans EPA’s Berkoff described in 2012 hasn’t happened. Securing funds, soil testing, and issues that crept up with contractors all took time. West Calumet soil replacement would have started this summer, EPA’s Kaplan said. Instead, the city plans to raze the houses.

TROUBLED TRACT

The CDC’s role in ensuring the health of people near Superfund sites is enshrined in federal law. When an area is added to the National Priority List, the ATSDR conducts an independent public health assessment.

ATSDR’s role is advisory, but its reports can lead to strongly worded health bulletins or other actions, including condemnation of properties deemed unfit for human habitation.

EPA commissioned the ATSDR report because “we wanted to know, is it an emergency, time-critical response or something that needs a remedy but isn’t necessarily as urgent?” said Kaplan.

The CDC branch concluded that results from childhood blood tests in the region suggested there was no risk.

Other report statements appeared to support that finding: Virtually all children in the area were being tested for lead poisoning, the report said, seeming to reflect close monitoring. Kids living in the area had blood lead levels “consistent with the national average,” it said.

Properties found to contain unsafe levels of lead in the soil had already been cleaned up by the EPA, the ATSDR said, and local health officials offered assurances there were no reports of health problems linked to lead.

Citing Indiana Department of Health data from the 1990s through 2008, ATSDR said children in East Chicago had experienced a sharp decline in blood lead levels.

Yet the report did not specifically cite the most recent blood testing data from residents at the West Calumet Housing Complex, or the census tract where it is located.

Reuters obtained testing data from the Indiana census tract, labeled 303, from 2005 through 2015. The data compiled by Indiana shows that 21.8 percent of children aged up to 6 tested there had blood lead readings above CDC’s current “elevated” threshold.

Although only a portion of the area’s children were being tested in the period, the 303 tract registered 160 elevated test results among small children. That was more than in any other tract in Lake County, where East Chicago is located, and more than in all but a dozen of Indiana’s 1,507 census tracts.

As recently as 2014, 25 percent of the children tested in the 303 tract had elevated levels.

During that same year, Indiana data shows, around 6.4 percent of kids tested across the state had elevated lead levels. CDC estimates show that, across the United States, the prevalence of children with elevated blood lead levels is around 2.5 percent.

The ATSDR report credited Indiana’s state health department with “excellent work” in ensuring almost universal testing.

State and county data reviewed by Reuters tell a different story. The annual rate of blood lead testing among children aged up to 6 in Indiana hovered around 7 percent in recent years. Although around 20 percent of children in East Chicago were tested each year between 2005 and 2010, the rate plummeted to 5 percent in 2014.

As for the ATSDR report’s claim that it had heard of no concerns from local health officials, City Attorney Morgan said the agency never consulted East Chicago’s health department, which declined comment.

The Indiana State Department of Health told Reuters it “does not support the conclusions of that report,” without elaborating.

UPROOTED TO NEVADA

Shantel Allen is a 28-year-old mother of five who has lived at West Calumet since 2011, the year of ATSDR’s report. Allen is moving her family to southern Nevada next month. The housing voucher the family received won’t cover the high costs of the move, she said.

In July, around the time Allen was told her current home faces the wrecking ball, she received a letter from Indiana’s health department. It said her daughter, Samira, 2, had tested positive for lead poisoning with a level of 33 micrograms per deciliter, nearly seven times the elevated threshold. That result, the letter said, was from a test conducted 17 months earlier, around Samira’s first birthday.

“I wanted to know how she was exposed to lead, when and where?” Allen said. “I wanted to know why I was only informed more than a year later.”

The state health department said privacy law does not allow it to comment on a specific patient’s case. However, it said local health departments have primary responsibility for conveying blood lead test results to family.

Since July, Allen has had all her kids tested. Two had elevated levels, she said.

Then, last month, Allen recalled an information packet she’d received from the EPA, dated from late 2014. She didn’t pay much attention to it back then, because she says she didn’t understand its implications. It said the agency had conducted soil testing in her yard.

Reading back the findings recently, she said EPA had detected lead at 4,510 parts per million in the top layer of her front yard, or more than 10 times the action level. Arsenic was found at nearly 13 times the action level.

It was the yard her older kids had always played in, often tracking in dirt to the apartment, where Samira would crawl around on the floor.

Another former West Calumet resident, Krystle Jackson, said she moved her family out in July after two of her children tested with elevated lead levels. Her son, Kavon, 1, had a level of 7. She relocated to her parents’ home in Cedar Lake, 40 minutes south, which is facing a potential bank foreclosure. Jackson worries she’ll be left homeless.

The timing of Jackson’s move, weeks before hundreds of other West Calumet residents learned the complex will be demolished, made her ineligible for a voucher others are getting to move into public housing.

“The housing authority told me there was nothing they could do for me,” she said.

“I just wanted to get out of the public housing because nobody could tell me why my kids were being exposed to lead.”

Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell authored this Reuters Special Report with editing by Ronnie Greene.

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=By= Jonathan Marshall

[Arms trade infographic from Amnesty International.]

Forget oil. In the Middle East, the profits and jobs reaped from tens of billions of dollars in arms sales are becoming the key drivers of U.S. and British policy. Oil still matters, of course. So do geopolitical interests, including military bases, and powerful political lobbies funded by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states.

But you can’t explain Washington’s deference to Saudi Arabia, despite its criminal war in Yemen and its admitted support for Islamist extremism, without acknowledging the political pull generated by more than $115 billion in U.S. military deals with Saudi Arabia authorized since President Obama took office.

Saudi King Salman bids farewell to President Barack Obama at Erga Palace after a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

As arms sales expert William Hartung observed earlier this year, “U.S. arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia have increased by 96% compared to the Bush years. . . In 2014 alone more than 2,500 Saudi military personnel received training in the United States.”

These deals have generated huge new business opportunities for politically powerful U.S. contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Raytheon. Neither the White House nor Congress will let mere war crimes stand in the way of continued sales that fund thousands of jobs.

The Pentagon approved its latest $1.2 billion deal, including more than 130 Abrams tanks (produced by General Dynamics), in early August, just as Saudi Arabia resumed  airstrikes on the ancient Yemeni capital of Sanaa, killing nine civilians at a potato chip factory.

A spokesperson for Human Rights Watch said at the time, “The Saudi-led coalition’s campaign in Yemen has been devastating for civilians (and) the U.S. should be suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia, not approving more.”

On Sept. 22, 71 members of the U.S. Senate rejected that advice and approved the deal, even as another Saudi-led air strike killed at least 26 civilians and wounded 60 more in a residential neighborhood of the port city of Hodeidah. A few days later the coalition killed another 10 civilians in the provincial capital city of Ibb.

The Guardian reports that “more than one-third of all Saudi-led air raids on Yemen have hit civilian sites” — a figure that strongly suggests such targeting is a matter of policy, not mere bad luck. These attacks are fomenting rising support for Al Qaeda and other extremists in Yemen, subverting Western security interests.

Yet U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who rips Moscow and Damascus for “barbarism” and “laying waste to what is left of an iconic Middle Eastern city,” is strangely silent when the target is Sanaa rather than Aleppo, and the perpetrator is Riyadh rather than Assad.

Great Britain Fuels the Fires

The same is true of the U.K. ambassador to the UN, who accused the Syrian government of a “sick bloodlust against its people,” while his own government blocked a European Union investigation of war crimes in Yemen.

President George W. Bush meeting with then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan at the Bush Ranch in Crawford, Texas. (U.S. government photo)

One reason may be that Great Britain has sold almost $3 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia since it intervened in Yemen’s civil war a year and a half ago. Those sales provide plenty of reason to duck accountability.

A hard-hitting British parliamentary report this month concluded that British weapons — including notoriously indiscriminate cluster munitions — have almost certainly contributed to attacks by the Saudi coalition on targets such as “camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses.”

The report called on the British government to stop ignoring blatant evidence of Saudi war crimes and suspend arms sales pending “an independent, United-Nations-led inquiry” into violations of international law.

“[Her Majesty’s] Government has obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, as well as European and domestic law, to ensure there is no risk that arms it has licensed might be used in contravention of international humanitarian law,” the report declared.

“Saudi Arabia is one of our closest allies. However, the weight of evidence of violations of IHL (international humanitarian law) by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen is now so great that it is very difficult to continue to support Saudi Arabia while maintaining the credibility of our arms licensing regime.”

The BAE Bribery Scandal

The link between British foreign policy and arms sales was conclusively established during a multi-year investigation of suspected bribes and kickbacks by arms giant BAE Systems, related primarily to its $80 billion Al Yamamah (“Dove”) arms deal, initially signed in 1985 by the Thatcher government, to sell fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. In 2010, BAE pleaded guilty to two criminal charges and agreed to pay nearly $450 million in penalties.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush shake hands after a joint White House press conference on Nov. 12, 2004. (White House photo)

In 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered a halt to his government’s investigation of BAE’s alleged corrupt practices, including payments to Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former ambassador to the United States and a close confidant of the Bush family.

Bandar was not charged in the BAE case, and denied doing anything improper, but his suspicious receipt of $17 million in an account at Riggs Bank in Washington D.C. — ostensibly for “home improvement” — triggered the start of a bribery investigation of BAE.

(Riggs Bank had previously been identified as the source of funds sent from Bandar’s wife to two of the 9/11 hijackers. The recently declassified pages of the 9/11 commission report revealed indirect ties between Bandar and a senior Al Qaeda operative — a finding that former Sen. Bob Graham called “one of the most stunning parts of the investigation.”)

In 2008, a federal judge froze Bandar’s U.S. assets after a small Michigan pension fund with holdings in BAE sued its directors for allegedly letting the company pay $2 billion in bribes to Bandar.

According to the London Sunday Times, Bandar was instrumental in stopping an investigation by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office of BAE’s dealings with Saudi Arabia. The prince reportedly went to Prime Minister Blair in 2006 to say, “Get it stopped.” He allegedly warned the fighter plane contract would be terminated and “intelligence and diplomatic relations would be pulled.”

Following a spate of media revelations, Blair defended his decision to shut down the investigation of BAE on national security grounds.

“This investigation, if it had it gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family,” he said. “Quite apart from the fact that we would have lost thousands, thousands of British jobs.” (A U.S. investigation continued, leading to the company’s eventual guilty plea.)

Blair has continued his cozy relations with Riyadh over the years. In 2008, as Special Envoy to the Middle East, he “lavished praise” on Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, touting his many “reforms.” Just two years later, the former prime minister signed a lucrative contract with a company owned by the son of King Abdullah to promote Saudi oil sales in China. (In 2015, The Telegraph estimated Blair’s fortune at £60 million, noting that “his financial affairs can appear as complex and opaque as his global influence is remarkable.”)

Meanwhile, the Conservative government of David Cameron signed a $3 billion electronic warfare equipment sale to Saudi Arabia in 2010 — with provisions to siphon off tens of millions of dollars to the Cayman Islands for the benefit of Saudi officials. The Ministry of Defense insisted that any investigation of whistleblower complaints would “compromise” relations between the two countries.

Plus ça change . . .

Today’s wildly lucrative military market in the Middle East is reminiscent of the arms bazaar of the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia, Iran and other OPEC countries recycled billions of “petrodollars” by purchasing entire armories from the United States and Great Britain (thus setting the stage for the eventual emergence of radical Islamist critics like Osama bin Laden).

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden

The parallels between then and now are sometimes eerie. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter invoked his executive authority to approve the sale of nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of arms to North Yemen without congressional review, following that country’s clashes with South Yemen. That sale turned that small and poor country into the third largest recipient of U.S. arms after Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The administration claimed the sale was essential to restoring Saudi confidence in U.S. foreign policy after the fall of the shah of Iran — just as President Obama today keeps reassuring Riyadh of U.S. support following the nuclear deal with Iran.

A few prescient observers questioned whether shoveling more arms into such Middle East conflicts was really in America’s best interests. Said Rep. Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat and member of the House Armed Services Committee,

“Yemen is an unwise spot on which to stake our prestige. It is yet another case where the United States … will be unable to exert much control over events with sophisticated military gear. And yet the sale of such equipment sucks us into the whirlpool and puts American prestige on the line. Selling such vast quantities of advanced weapons is almost certainly not the best way of dealing with the sort of tribal conflicts that have beset Yemen for years.”

Those words ring as true today as they did 37 years ago. But the name of the game in Washington is money, not taming tribal conflicts. One of the most compelling challenges of our time will be to find a way to take the money out of war so we can refocus our national priorities on peace.

¹ SIPRI – Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has arguably the largest and most comprehensive databases of arms and defense production and expenditures in the world.

Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on international affairs, including The Lebanese Connection: Corruption, Civil War and the International Drug Traffic (Stanford University Press, 2012). Some of his previous articles for Consortiumnews were “Risky Blowback from Russian Sanctions”; “Neocons Want Regime Change in Iran”; “Saudi Cash Wins France’s Favor”; “The Saudis’ Hurt Feelings”; “Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Bluster”; “The US Hand in the Syrian Mess”; and “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War.” ]

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