Improved Cooling Tower Design Could Save Billions of Gallons of Water Per Year

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that commercial, residential and industrial buildings use approximately 47 billion gallons of water each day. And the EPA found that a typical office building uses more than 25 percent of its water supply for cooling towers.

In most large commercial and industrial buildings, tens of thousands of gallons of water flow through a big apparatus called a cooling tower (about the size of a two-car garage, they’re usually on the roof), where it evaporates out the top.

AT&T, whose facilities used 3.5 billion gallons of water in 2010, calculates that improving operations in the cooling towers at its largest facilities could save millions of gallons of water per year. Adopted on a broad scale, these solutions could save billions of gallons of water annually.

Read full details.

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

By Arundhati Roy

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older brother’s marbles.

On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an “embedded” CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier. “I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty,” Private AJ said. “I wanna take revenge for 9/11.”

To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was “embedded” he did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ
stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end of his chin. “Yeah, well that stuff’s way over my head,” he said.

According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What percentage of America’s armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody’s guess.

It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.

But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more, does it?  Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto itself. It doesn’t need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear instructions: “Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated.” (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people’s bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.

After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the “Allies”/”Coalition of the Willing “(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) – sent in an invading army!

Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don’t think so. It’s more like Operation Let’s Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.

So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the “Allies”. Faced with the richest,best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)

Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the “Allies” are at war, the extent to which the “Allies” and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their ownobjectives.

When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt in history – “Operation Decapitation” – we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation – Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?

After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed – a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! “They’re using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down.”

If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?

When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it’s denounced as “emotive” Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the “Allies”, as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the “Allies” look bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described as the “terrible beauty” of war.

When invading American soldiers (from the army “that’s only here to help”) are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and “exposes the evil at the heart of the regime”. But it is entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US Government
officials don’t deny that they’re being being ill-treated. They deny that they’re “prisoners of war”! They call them “unlawful combatants”, implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what’s the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)

When the “Allies” bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue to advertise themselves as “balanced” when their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists “embedded” with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-“embedded” journalists (such as the BBC’s Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people)
are undermined even before they begin their reportage: “We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities.”

Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as “militia” (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as “quasi-terrorists”. Iraqi defence is “resistance” or worse still, “pockets of resistance”, Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the “Allies”, the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.

And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with very little food. We’re still waiting for the legendary Shia “uprising”, for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the “liberating” army. Where are the hordes? Don’t they know that television productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam’s regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)

After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the “Allies” have brought in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.

As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn’t really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid -a minuscule fraction of what’s actually needed (call it a script prop) – arrived on a British ship, the “Sir Galahad”. Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?

Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad’s a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the bombing began.

We oughtn’t to be surprised though. It’s old tactics. They’ve been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: “Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however – if handled right – might … offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided – which we could offer to do ‘at the conference table’.”

Times haven’t changed very much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It’s called “Winning Hearts and Minds”.

So, here’s the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared “disabled” by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn’t stopped the “Allies” from continuing to use depleted uranium.

And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl – it turns out that she just ain’t what she was cracked up to be. She’s been demoted (although she retains her high salary). Now she’s the world’s janitor. She’s the Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She’s employed to clean other peoples’ shit. She’s used and abused at will.

Despite Blair’s earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those juicy “reconstruction” contracts. But Bush has appealed to the international community not to “politicise” the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN’s oil for food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.

Contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq we’re told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world economy. It’s funny how the interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in “reconstruction” work will make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for “re-construction” are already being negotiated. The news doesn’t hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?

As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters, chanting, “We don’t want your stinking wine.” We’ve heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they’re called now. There’s news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic
outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that should be boycotted.

Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald’s – government agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap – could find themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the “inevitability” of the project of corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.

It’s become clear that the war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It’s about a superpower’s self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case it’s an IMF chequebook. In the
other, cruise missiles.

Finally, there’s the matter of Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)

In the fog of war – one thing’s for sure – if Saddam ‘s regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas?  Would it?

Excuse me while I laugh.

In the fog of war we’re forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or – he simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US government.

So here’s Iraq – rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here’s Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here’s all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here’s all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says “humanitarian aid” we automatically go looking for induced starvation.

“Embedded” I have to admit, is a great find. It’s what it sounds like. And what about “arsenal of tactics?” Nice!

In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody – perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, “All Muslims are terrorists”). Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they’re called.

Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being “anti-American” and “anti-west”, find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.

Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the “American way of life” comes from American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America’s citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they’ve been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that’s as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.

While the “Allies” wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.

Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America’s great cities – Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.

At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It’s odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don’t hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to “rid the world of evil-doers”.)

Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It’s true that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.

Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I’d like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one’s weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush’s tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.

Bring on the spanners.

 

Fair Use

Coastal Basements and Underground Utilities Will Be At Risk as Global Warming Advances

Basements of some coastal area buildings and underground utilities may be at risk of being inundated by rising groundwater by the end of the 21^st century due to projected rates of sea level rise for the area, according to a preliminary study by the U. S. Geological Survey and Yale University.

“An underappreciated aspect of climate change is going to be the rising toll on property owners in the coastal zone from effects such as the one identified in this report: rising ground water that produces water damage in basements that for decades and possibly a century were dry,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “Utility bills will also rise to re-engineer utilities that were not designed to be installed completely above ground, as in the case in more temperate climates farther south.”

More Details. 

Please, Please, Don’t Buy Me Another Tie:

I’m Fed Up with Hole-to-Hole Economics

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

November 22, 2001

A few Christmases ago, I was given a kettle, which now leaks. I could mend it, if only I could tighten the base. But one of the screws has a star-shaped slot with a spike in the middle, which is designed to prevent repairs, as no available tool will fit it. My kettle was for Christmas, not just for life. So I will throw it away, and help to build an earthly paradise by buying a new one.–George Monbiot.

 

The day following Thanksgiving is being promoted again this year by an international organization as “Buy Nothing Day.” The Gazette enthusiastically endorses Buy Nothing Day and urges its readers to participate by not joining the masses who, like Pavlov’s dogs, will respond to the first ringing of the Christmas bells by rushing, obedient and salivating, to the malls with credit cards in hand.

 

A few years ago, in an article called “The Gazette’s Great Water Article,” Gene Franks wrote:

 

Although we “average Americans” may think of ourselves as gentle folks, we are active participants in a cruel and unprecedented pillaging of the world that sustains us. We do not reflect that our unbridled consumerism is no accident. We are programmed to consume by schools, media, and tradition. Even the politicians we elect take on the role of detail men, sales reps for big business, today hawking drugs, tomorrow automobiles or a dam project in India. In the days of bustling economic growth after World War II, an American retailing expert named Victor Lebow proclaimed: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.’”

Lebow, of course, would be very proud of us.

But perhaps we should reflect on whether we are satisfied with the role they are casting us in. Didn’t it make you a little angry to be asked, for the sake of our country, to do nothing more than go out and buy something?

The idea that our obligation is to consume is based in the notion–a bizarre notion when you really pause to take thought–that we can somehow consume our way to happiness. That if we can only consume enough, we will eventually live in a world of plenty. Doublespeak indeed. George Monbiot has summed up this view of world economics nicely. I call his system “hole-to-hole” economics. He writes:

The modern industrial economy works like this: resources are dug from a hole in the ground on one side of the planet, used for a few weeks, then dumped in a hole on the other side of the planet. This is known as the Creation of Value. The Creation of Value improves our quality of life. Improvements in our quality of life make us happier. The more we transfer from hole to hole, the happier we become.

That this hole-to-hole transfer plan isn’t working too well should be apparent from the growing gap between haves and have-nots. Even the elites at the top of the heap who reap the benefits don’t seem very happy. They always seem to need more and more, so they keep spurring us on to ever greater levels of consumption. I once read that one of the Rockefellers, David, I think, if he never slept and devoted 24/7 to spending his money, and if he could spend at the rate of $29,000 per minute, would never be able to spend his wealth. Nevertheless, he was working a fitful 17-hour-day in an effort to amass greater wealth. It’s hard to rest when there are resources to be moved from one hole to another. George Monbiot continues:

Unfortunately, we are not yet transferring enough. According to the Worldwatch Institute, we have used more goods and services since 1950 than in all the rest of human history. But we still don’t seem to be happy. Indeed, over the same period, 25-year-olds in Britain have become ten times more likely to be afflicted by depression. One in four British adults now suffers from a chronic lack of sleep, and one fifth of schoolchildren have psychological problems. Over the past 13 years, mental health insurance claims have risen by 36 per cent. American studies suggest that between 40 and 60 per cent of the population suffers from mental illness in any one year. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2010 depression will become the second commonest disease in the developed world. Unless we start consuming in earnest, we’ll never experience real joy.

Never before have we been given such an overt, unblushing mandate to consume. What can I do for my country? Go shopping. Take a plane trip. Buy a new automobile. Conservation, which we at least talked about in the 1970s, has become a dirty word in the current American political arena. Gluttonous over-consumption is now synonymous with patriotism.

 

Maybe this time of change we are experiencing is the time when the mad spiral of consumerism we’ve been caught in should stop. Surely our generation has more to contribute than the consumption of trinkets.
Please don’t buy me another tie. I have plenty. I also have plenty of cute tee shirts and baseball caps with funny sayings and electronic marvels that do all the things I don’t want to do. And please don’t buy me, or yourself or anyone else, a leaf blower. Show some self respect.

When they ring the golden bells of Christmas, please don’t salivate.

You can learn more about Buy Nothing Day at http://www.buynothingday.co.uk/

You can read Shirley Wilkes Johnson’s article here on the Gazette website.

You can read “The Gazette’s Great Water Article”  here.

See also “The Photos We’ll Never See,” by Paul Vitello. 

The Man Who Cried,

« The Empress is Naked ! »

At the age of 91, Hans Ruesch, author of Slaughter of the Innocent,
the book the pharmaceutical industry tried to suppress,
remains Humanity’s Arch-Warrior against
Vivisection and the resulting False Medicine…

by Guenady

*Footnotes are at the end of the article.

Gazette Note:  Hans Ruesch, Gazette Hero Award recipient, died in 2007 at age 94.  Read the NY Times obituary.

A young American couple passing through Nice, where I live, in the South of France, was having lunch in the city’s only vegan restaurant. The young woman, I saw, had a copy of The Fountainhead balanced on her purse at her feet.

I couldn’t resist a comment. « Do people still read that? »

Her eyes, turned to me, were eloquent.

« Well then, when you’ve finished The Fountainhead, you have to read Atlas Shrugged… And when you’ve finished Atlas Shrugged, and you’re feeling sad because such people don’t exist in real life– then, read up on Hans Ruesch. »
« Hans Ruesch? » Two middle-aged English ladies seated nearby perked up their ears and chirped… « Hans RUESCH? Hans Ruesch? » Their eyes were glowing, too. «Is he still alive? That WONDERFUL man! »

The heroes portrayed by philosopher Ayn Rand in her novels have nothing at all over the flesh-and-blood person, in this instance. Howard Roark, John Galt and Hank Reardon meet their match in Hans Ruesch in terms of intellect, courage, and the kind of iron determination that makes for surviving trial by fire– either as a Martyr, or as a Veteran Crusader… and Ruesch is one of the latter, for he is still very much alive. Someday, somewhere, some smart young writer will pick up on The Hans Ruesch Story, and it will be adapted for the movies. Then, once again, Mr Everyman will have clear proof that even today, even in our jaded, comfort-oriented, conformist world, there still exist some stubborn individuals who think on their own, and who put what they know to be True and Right over everything, whatever it costs them…

For those who do not know, and I was one of them until recently, the early facts are quickly told : Child of a well-to-do Swiss family, Ruesch, whose leonine looks remind one of Franz Liszt, has been a Formula One race car driver and a best-selling author (his best-known titles are Top of the World, Return to Top of the World, and South of the Heart, with two books made into major films, one starring Anthony Quinn and the other Kirk Douglas). His brilliant intellect and abiding interest in all things medical (motivated not least by an early tragedy, the death of his infant brother from a dangerous medical treatment prescribed by a doctor) led him to do medical journalism on the side.*1

Then, at the age of sixty, when most people are contemplating retirement and enjoying the good life with the years that remain to them, Ruesch had a seminal experience that not only sent him into a radically ‘new life’, but that also presaged his extraordinary, groundbreaking book, Slaughter of the Innocent.

He was in Italy, in the mid 1970s, and working on a novel, when someone brought him a kitten that had just been rescued from a vivisection laboratory (although it would shortly thereafter die)…

« I could not, » he says, « comprehend how anyone could think that hurting such a tiny, innocent creature could ever result in any good for Humanity.».

Ruesch began researching vivisection. He finished his novel-in-progress, gave it to his publisher, and announced that he would write no more fiction until vivisection had been abolished. And he has applied himself to that end, exclusively, ever since, in an ongoing campaign which also calls for a return to Humanist Values, particularly in matters of medicine, and for respect for all of Life.

Slaughter of the Innocent was the first book Ruesch put together on medical research and vivisection, and it is generally recognized by those who know it as a masterpiece. It is first and foremost a scholarly study, but written in a free-flowing, clear and accessible style which makes it not only an intellectual tour de force but, on a purely literary level, a joy to read… quite an accomplishment when we consider that English is author’s fourth language (after Italian, German and French), and that the subject is far from attractive– in fact, usually kept under the proverbial rug. Despite this last hurdle, Ruesch’s book is one that can be read by anyone, for it comprises a complete (and fascinating) history of vivisection from ancient times to the present (including an appreciation of the evolution of medical thought which that history reflects), and, as well, it includes an overview and analysis of thousands of reports on animal experiments, published by vivisectors themselves, during the hundred and fifty years or so previous to the book’s writing (that chapter opens with the author’s note that it can be skipped without any loss, at the reader’s choice).

As a result of this last study, already a major service to all those too squeamish to take such a close look at this horrendous subject themselves, Ruesch uncovered a fundamental truth, an astounding observation, in fact, which ought to have altered the whole course of the international anti-vivisection movement and which should have (and surely will still, one day) provide the grounds for the outright legal abolition of vivisection in all civilized countries.

But let us allow Ruesch to speak a few words for himself :

THE SCAPEGOAT CONCEPT *2

The scapegoat concept –the idea of getting rid of one’s sins, vices, diseases, misfortunes and other troubles by transferring them to some guiltless man or animal– has always been widespread in human society. The Babylonians used to behead a ram for this purpose. The ancient Greeks scourged two human scapegoats out of the city every year—a criminal, or deformed, man and woman.

Today the scapegoat transference is usually psychological rather than physical, and consists in blaming other persons or groups for one’s own shortcomings and frustrations.

The scapegoat concept looms importantly in the whole vivisectionist practice. Although usually the choice of a scapegoat is arrived at through an irrational process, the vivisectors have ‘rational’ reasons for their practice: monetary gain or personal satisfaction. But the scapegoat concept has certainly contributed to the tacit acceptance of the vivisectionist practice by large segments of the public.

To obtain ‘scientific confirmation’ of the well-known fact that overcrowding leads to nervousness, hostility and violence, experimenters like to confine great numbers of rats in such cramped quarters that they will eventually attack and kill one another. To get ‘scientific proof’ that motherly warmth and love are important for the child, newborn primates are snatched from their mothers and kept for years in solitary confinement, some of them, furthermore, in total darkness—a punishment generally considered too cruel even for hardened criminals.

To the same category of experiments belong those designed to turn animals into drug addicts. When they get cramps or convulsions after the sudden withdrawal of the drug, soothing medicines can be tried out on them. But then, of course, the researchers still don’t know whether those medicines will have the same effect on man, or whether they are going to poison men—in view of the fact that strychnine, for instance, is a deadly poison for man but not for monkeys.

Although worldwide statistics have conclusively proved that heavy smoking can lead to lung cancer, the researchers—especially those in the employ of the tobacco companies—obstinately claim that ‘there is no scientific proof’ that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer, since it has not yet been possible to produce lung cancer in animals. Actually, if researchers succeed in causing lung cancer in an animal through heavy smoking, it would only prove that smoking can give cancer to that particular species, not to man. We already know that smoking may give lung cancer to man: through statitistcs and clinical observations.

Yet millions of animals, mainly dogs and rabbits immobilized in restraining devices, are subjected to smoking treatments lasting a lifetime for the sake of theories that the experimenters keep calling ‘scientific’ but which, in actual fact, are an insult to real science and to every thinking man and woman.

The American press recently reported experiments on sleep that one Dr. William Dement of Stanford University was making, depriving cats of sleep until they went out of their minds—in order, so he claimed, to understand better the mechanism of human sleep…

The nervous system of animals, especially of cats, has very little in common with ours. A cat normally snoozes 22 hours out of 24, practically anywhere and even standing up. So perhaps does Dr. Dement, but most people don’t. To deprive cats of sleep, without having to keep awake himself, Dr. Dement has hit on a bright idea: He places his experimental cat, electrodes in its head, on a brick surrounded by water. When the cat goes limp with sleepiness its nose slips into the water. Dr. Dement has thus kept hundreds of cats awake for up to 70 days—not hours, but days. Whereafter he reported that the brain waves revealed ‘definite personality changes’, which in ‘scientific’ jargon means ‘madness’…

* * *

In her book, Intelligence and Personality (Pelican, 1970) Dr. Alice Heim, an eminent British psychologist working as a member of the Medical Research Council, denounced other experiments in sleep deprivation, which speak very poorly for the mental balance of the experimenters in her own country as well. Rats were deprived of sleep for 27 consecutive days, by means of placing them in a continuously rotating wheel, two-thirds submerged in water. The rats, when exhausted, fell from the wheel into the water and were unable to remount the wheel. Some found ways of resting by hanging on food trays and, in one case, climbing on top of the cubicle and sleeping while hanging with front teeth hooked in the cloth top. Modifications were introduced to prevent this.

Thus in every field of science innocent animals are made to serve as scapegoats for man’s vices and faults. We smoke, animals don’t: So we force animals to smoke, although for them it’s torture, for us pleasure. We drink alcohol, animals don’t: So we cause liver cirrhoses in animals by funneling alcohol into them. We drug ourselves, animals don’t: So we turn animals into drug addicts. We suffer from insomnia owing to our daily excesses, animals don’t: So we force animals to stay awake until they go crazy. We suffer from stress owing to our unnatural way of living, animals don’t: So we traumatize them in rotating drums to put them in a state of stress. We cause car accidents through incompetence or carelessness, animals don’t: So we fasten animals to vehicles and send them crashing against walls. We contract cancer by consuming the wrong foods and toxic drugs, and through pollution caused exclusively by ourselves: So we inflict cancer upon millions of animals and continue torturing them while we watch them slowly waste away through the cruelest malady mass-produced by man.

* * *

Now we have had a first glimpse of what passes today for Medical Science. Speculating upon the ignorance and suffering of countless people, their constant fear of pain and disease, and with the help of the mass media, this pseudo-science has created the illusion—like the shamans of the primitive tribes who promise rain—that she wields mysterious and unlimited powers on which mankind’s salvation depends. So the peoples of the western hemisphere have prostrated themselves in awe and servility at her feet, imagining her as an almighty goddess of peerless beauty, shining with gold and brocades, to which common mortals may not even raise their eyes, lest they be blinded. But if they dared to do so, they would discover that their empress hasn’t got a stitch on and is gruesome to behold.

Greed, cruelty, anbition, incompetence, vanity, callousness, stupidity, sadism, insanity are the charges that this treatise levels at the entire practice of vivisection. The evidence is in the coming parts. They exaggerate nothing, for the simple reason that in matters of vivisection any exaggeration is not only superfluous, but impossible… »

In the book, Past to Present : Ideas That Changed Our World*3, Stuart Hirschberg of Rutgers University (writing with Terry Hirschberg) has included Ruesch in a list of Humanity’s luminaries, including such figures as Stendhal, Keats, Shaw, Orwell, de Beauvoir, Toynbee, Herodotus, Carlyle, Whitman, Darwin, Heyerdahl, Hoyle, Plato, Darrow, Sartre, Aristotle, Ruskin and Flaubert, to name just a few. Hirschberg reproduces a chapter from Slaughter of the Innocent, and introduces it with these comments :

« Hans Ruesch (b.1913) is a modern-day Renaissance man who not only is a scholar of the history of medicine but has also written best-selling novels… and many short stories that have appeared in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, ESQUIRE and REDBOOK. This Swiss author is best known for his brilliant exposes of the animal experimentation industry… »*4

In a critique of Hirschberg’s book, The Canterbury Animal Respect Network for a Green Environment*5 has written that it « …is targeted at the possibly great thinkers of the future, mainly those in universities, from freshman to postgraduate. That is not to say that great thinkers are only to be found in universities, as you will note from the list of names in this book… In rightly adding [Ruesch]’s name to ‘Ideas That Changed Our World’, the authors have ‘un-suppressed’ him. They have, indeed, quoted some 10 pages from “Slaughter of the Innocent”, his meticulously researched most famous oeuvre for genuine antivivisectionists. The faux AVs also did/still do a hatchet job on [Ruesch], yet the ‘innocent’ in the title are humans and animals, both… »

That Slaughter of the Innocent has been in effect suppressed, and, where suppression was not possible, ignored in stony silence by the drug and medical research industries that it touches, their lobbies, and also the media of mass communication which they largely control through advertising pressure, is an indication of just how powerful Slaughter of the Innocent is, and how determined those it targets are to keep it from being known and read.

The truth Ruesch realized –and revealed to the public– is that vivisection is not only a cruel activity for the animals who are its victims, and not only is it corrosive to the humanity of those who practice it, but worse yet, it is futile in its announced purpose, since the results of experiments on animals cannot, under any cirumstances, whatever the species used, be extrapolated to provide information applicable to Man, due to the profound physiological differences between the species.

Ruesch’s study reveals to laymen that inflicting injuries on animals in order to produce symptoms similar to those found in human disease, can never duplicate those same symptoms when they are produced spontaneously from conditions within a sick human body. And equally, no amount of practicing surgery or other interventions on animals is of any use whatsoever to those who would ultimately treat human beings, also because of the same physiological differences between the species. In fact, Ruesch reveals that many of the most respected and brilliant doctors of past and present times (names so illustrious that even laymen recognize them) have stated that experimenting on animals makes doctors and surgeons unfit to treat and operate on humans, having become prone to errors caused by these physiological differences.

Here is just one succinct quotation, taken from a chapter in Slaughter of the Innocent that assembles a vast quantity of similar quotations :

« The idea, as I understand it, is that fundamental truths are revealed in laboratory experimentation on lower animals and are then applied to the problems of the sick patient. Having been myself trained as a physiologist, I feel in a way competent to assess such a claim. It is plain nonsense. »

Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford*6

This then and more, is what the medical research world and the industry it exists to support, pharmaceutics, do not want the public to know… Simply put, by his study and his analysis of the evidence brought to light, Ruesch revealed to the general public that the practice of vivisection has no basis whatsoever in science. The evidence, accumulating over the centuries, had already, at the time of the writing of Slaughter of the Innocent, made this point clear to researchers, scientists and many doctors (despite their medical training to the contrary), but not to the public who rely for information on the very professions whose financial interests prompt them to hide the truth. Today, Ruesch tells us, continuing to insist on and to propagate the idea that there is value for human health in animal testing, constitutes fraud on the part of those who profit financially by using such tests to market new drugs and treatments, most of which are useless, many of which are ultimately shown to be patently harmful.

Have we not just learned from The British Medical Journal, that the side effects of drug therapies are now officially recognized as the number 4 reason for hospitalizations, and a leading cause of death, in Great Britain ? *7 And an article recently published by a panel of doctors in Nexus Magazine opens by telling us: « …The total number of iatrogenic [ie, doctor-caused] deaths [in the U.S.] is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251… »*8

The public has up to now largely trusted the claims of the medical and pharmaceutical industries over animal testing, and, to preserve that trust, those industries exert pressure to keep Slaughter of the Innocent from being known, officially ignoring it where suppression fails… Their flunkies (according to Ruesch) include many persons strategically placed in animal protection associations who continue, despite the evidence (and almost certainly for a price, or other benefits), to promote the exposed and discredited lie as if it were not exposed and discredited. Ruesch shows us, particularly in his second book Naked Empress, how the errors and consequent human suffering that have resulted from false science based on animal testing have been systematically minimized, hushed up and excused away, in order to protect the process (government subsidies, lucrative jobs, the manufacture of laboratory equipment –ie animal restraining devices, etc) and to keep the profits from the sale of legal drugs/medicines flowing in. How many industries in the world can boast of comparable 350 to 400% profits on their products? What puts the nails in our coffins, human greed being what it is, is that the medical, research and pharmaceutical industries depend on our sickness, not on our health, for their subsidies and grants (taxpayer financed!) and profits…

But again, let us permit Ruesch to speak for himself… He opens Naked Empress with the following paragraphs :

It is not only scandalous but also tragic that the Drug Trust is permitted to flood the market with its products on the grounds that they have been thoroughly tested for effectiveness and safety on animals, and that the Health Authorities, meaning the Government, abet this deception, which is nothing but confirmed fraud. For both sides are well aware that animal tests are fallacious and merely serve as an alibi—an insurance against the day when it is no longer possible to conceal the disastrous side effects of a drug. Then they can say that « all the required tests have been made »–that they have obeyed the Law.

But they don’t say that they themselves have imposed those laws, because the Lawmaker has no choice in all medical questions but to submit to the dictates of the ‘medical experts’. And who are they? Agents of the Chemo-Medical Syndicate, whose links to the Health Authorities are so close that they usually overlap. So they, and no one else, impart binding orders to that mysterious and omnipotent individual, identified anonymously as ‘The Lawmaker’.

It is this outrageous state of affairs that once caused Dr. James D. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research of Lederle Laboratories, to declare:

Another basic problem which we share as a result of the regulations and the things that prompted them is an unscientific preoccupation with animal studies. Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is meaningless—
which means our research may be meaningless.
(Journal of the American Medical Association, March 14, 1964.)

In fact, the so-called ‘medical experts’ that have imposed animal tests as the touchstone of medical research are among the principal participants in the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated, mainly for profit motives, to the detriment of mankind in all history. To bring exhaustive proof of this assertion, with which a growing number of medical people are in full agreement, is the purpose of this exposé… *9

In the well-known case of thalidomide, taking just one example out of the hundreds mentioned and the thousands known (of which more and more examples date from AFTER the publication of Slaughter of the Innocent, alas…), with more than 10,000 deformed children born worldwide as a result of the use of this ‘safely tested on animals’ drug, the pharmaceutical company responsible for this tragedy was totally exonerated of responsibility before the courts, since it had previously carried out all the legally required safety tests (as defined by the industry itself, of course).

Heads we lose, tails they win…

Still (let us remember) you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. The number of medical heritics among doctors is growing worldwide (in ratio to the accumulating empirical evidence against the Empress of Modern Medicine), as are alternative, ‘soft’ methods of treatment, and most of all, emphasis on disease prevention (not financially profitable for the mainstream ‘health’ industries). (Just see, out of curiosity, as a real example of efforts to destroy all but traditional, mainstream thought within the medical profession, the website : http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html.*10)

Naturally, Slaughter of the Innocent seemed destined to be a bombshell when it first appeared in 1978 in the U.S. It had already been published in an Italian version in Italy (titled Imperatrice Nuda, not to be confused with Naked Empress, Ruesch’s later, second book in English, which deals in depth with medical fraud and the eyeopening history of today’s medical establishment). Despite critical acclaim, and having caused general public consternation, including discussions in the Italian Parliament, « …a few weeks after publication, Italian bookstores were advised that the title was out of print (although I had personally seen thousands of copies held back in Rissoli’s [the publisher’s] warehouse). At the time, Rizzoli was financially dependent on Italy’s largest chemical concern, Montedison, which comprised the country’s major pharmaceutical firms. So the publisher’s decision to withdraw the book was understandable… » *11

Ruesch continues, « …I kept receiving reassurances from Cooper [Roger F. Cooper of Bantam Books in New York] that Bantam expected the book to be one of its top sellers in 1978… But when Spring came, there was only silence from Bantam. ..» *12 And silence from the critics, as well, except for an exception or two that managed to slip into the press before unofficial censorship silenced even those few voices.

Censorship? Impossible, you say? In a repeat of the Italian experience, almost all the copies printed by Bantam of Slaughter of the Innocent were boxed and stored, never making it to bookshops. Why?

« A change of ownership had taken place at Bantam during the 18 months between acceptance of the manuscript and publication … …Bertelsmann Corporation, the new majority stockholder … had learned its lesson… » having been forced to withdraw in Germany Weisse Magier, « a shattering exposé of Germany’s pharmaceutical industry… »*13

« So, » says Ruesch, « in our western democracies, no public book-burnings are necessary; there are subtler and more effective ways to stifle information unfavorable to the industrial powers-that-be. »*14

Ruesch managed eventually to retrieve the printed copies of his book, as his contract with Bantam stipulated that he could, but no major book distribution network would touch them. And yet, despite being reduced in its influence due to these obstructions, by word of mouth, by direct mail, by the hard work of certain determined anti-vivisection associations, and thanks also to a very few dedicated and tireless supporters, the book has been sold and Ruesch’s message has passed. Today, Slaughter of the Innocent is in its fifth private printing in English, with more than 150,000 copies sold worldwide, in eight languages.

The suppression of Slaughter of the Innocent happened nearly 30 years ago, in the pre-Internet Age. Yet still today, and despite the clear evidence that iatrogenic diseases are on the increase, the fraud of vivisection continues. The reassuring formula, « This drug has been safely tested on animals », continues to lull unwitting consumers into believing that a new drug can therefore be safely used by human beings, and that it will produce the promised results…

But thanks to Ruesch, the cat is now figuratively out of the bag. In the years since Slaughter of the Innocent came out, Ruesch has gone on in his determined campaign to reveal the truth, publishing Naked Empress,1001 Doctors against Vivisection, as well as numerous Foundation bulletins and pamphlets (many of them available on-line *15), including Vivisection is Scientific Fraud.

Ever true to the vow he made those many years ago, Ruesch continues to write and to translate his writings every day. He would certainly have produced more valuable work, and perhaps even more novels, if he had not been systematically and repeatedly attacked, over the years, with lawsuits designed to harass him, occupy his time, and eat up his money– a classic tactic used by industrial interests to destroy individuals.

Gordon Moran, in his book, Silencing Scientists and Scholars in Other Fields, Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly Communication*16, writes :

«The case of Hans Ruesch may break all records (or come close to breaking all records) in terms of the number of legal actions taken against a scholar and the scholar’s organization… He reported that between 1989 and 1996, more than 70 legal actions were taken against him by persons connected with the medical and pharmaceutical establishment. In one of his recent publications, International Foundation Report, Ruesch (1993) related that, as a result of these legal actions, some publication plans of the Centre d’Information Vivisectionniste International Scientifique (CIVIS) have been held up (and, thus, silenced, at least for a period of time): ‘CIVIS had planned an important publication program which lay within our possibilities three years ago. Uninterrupted legal actions conducted against Hans Ruesch through the Swiss courts… prevented the realization of our program.'(p.16)

« Although he has not been completely silenced, much of Ruesch’s time, energy, and financial resources have been taken up by the legal actions against him. The sheer number of such actions seems to imply that they function as harassment. As a scholar, Ruesch is being silenced to the extent that time, energy, and financial burdens required to fight the legal actions prevent him from writing, publishing, and giving lectures on his scholarly material… »*17

An important point bears correcting here– these legal attacks against Ruesch were never made openly by the medical and pharmaceutical industries (with the single exception of an action brought by Christiaan Barnard, the story of which can be read in the preface to the 1983 edition of Slaughter of the Innocent), but rather by recognized animal rights spokespersons, or certain animal protection societies which claim to be anti-vivisection, while in reality, according to Ruesch, doing damage-control for the industries. For, what is a better way to convince the public that the fraud is not a fraud, than to point to prominent animal rights people and to animal-defense societies which steadfastly support vivisection, even in the face of the evidence Ruesch has accumulated?. Other animal-defense societies remain silent on the substance of Ruesch’s work, even at this late date– out of fear of retribution such as Ruesch has experienced? Or for some surrepticious benefit? Once you have read Naked Empress and know the dirty wheeling/dealing which created the industries that Ruesch’s work has challenged, you are tempted to think that just about anything is not only possible, but probable.

Take, for example, the case of Peter Singer. This internationally recognized academic, author and animal-rights spokesperson, whose biographical information usually includes the claim that his first book, Animal Liberation, is the bible of the animal rights movement, was criticized by Ruesch for being « a big phoney ». Why? Because Singer, in the aforementioned book, does not take a stand against vivisection, but makes the claim, instead, that vivisection has resulted in medical advances for human medicine and is therefore a valid human endeavor.*18 Ruesch, on the other hand, has established that many medical advances attributed to vivisection were not due to it after all, and that, furthermore, not one medical advance has ever been made through vivisection that could not have been made without it, usually also saving time, money, and human suffering, as well as animal suffering… But being called « a big phoney » must certainly be a wounding experience, if we are to judge by Singer’s reaction. For the young professor from Australia, then just at the beginning of his career, came all the way to Italy and engaged the nation’s leading corporate lawyer (normally unavailable to and unaffortable by individuals) to defend him against this ‘attack’. When Ruesch tried to submit, in the course of the trial, circumstancial evidence(*19) which he claimed established a link between the young professor and the Rockefeller Foundation (read the enlightening history of this organization for the promotion of medical research and pharmaceutical sales in Naked Empress), the judge (inexpicably?) balked. Ruesch has always lost these nuisance cases, in which he defends himself without a lawyer (shades of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead).*20 Note, however, that not one of these legal actions has ever attacked the substance of his anti-vivisection stand, nor refuted it.

In fact, whether addressing a vivisectionist (supporter of vivisection) or a vivisector him/herself, the usual response when challenged on factual grounds, is, « I’m afraid I have no time for that… » And thus they perpetuate the mystique of a realm where only the initiated can enter and comprehend, where those initiated must be trusted without question… At least, for a while longer… while some people, and all « laboratory » animals, continue to needlessly fall sick of preventable illnesses, and to suffer and die…

In 1998, 20 years after the appearance of Slaughter of the Innocent, Ruesch wrote *21 :

« …Jobs are more important to governments than the people’s health. That is why as early as infancy the population is made dependent on medicines. The parents help along with this too. Of course, they were themselves brought up in this way. A congress of specialist German doctors for internal medicine in Wiesbaden, Germany confirmed in 1977 that 6% of all illnesses resulting in death and 25% of all organic diseases are caused by medicines. Moreover, 61% of all deformities at birth and 88% of all still-births are caused by drugs…

« Although millions of animals are sacrificed each year in research on cancer and circulation ailments, these illnesses are constantly increasing. Their causes are well known and could be avoided by preventative measures, which are in fact the only approach and do not cause dangerous side-effects. But of course there is no money to be made out of prevention…

« Diabetes is one of those illnesses which are best avoided by preventative measures, namely a suitable diet. The long-term use of animal-derived insulin (a catastrophically harmful approach) leads to blindness, circulatory and other problems and early death, as well as encouraging the insulin-user to neglect the appropriate diet. What is more, long-term insulin use leads to the total atrophy of the already malfunctioning pancreas gland. No wonder that since the introduction of insulin, diabetes has not decreased but increased enormously…

« Penicillin was discovered by pure chance and would probably not have been employed as a medicine, according to statements by its co-discoverers, had it been first tested as intended on guiney-pigs – since penicillin is fatal to guinea-pigs. But at the time there were no guinea-pigs available in their laboratory, so mice were used instead and they weren’t killed by it… …some animals can tolerate 100 times more or less of a given substance than human beings… to this day there is still no universally ‘correct’ dosage of penicillin. Some people are extremely allergic to penicillin and can be severely harmed by it, while it remains ineffective in others. Moreover, more and more doctors are agreed these days that penicillin has caused more harm than good.

« The thoughtless, massive over-prescription of penicillin, using it even as a preventative medicine, has over time led to the development of particularly resistant strains of bacteria which are immune to all penicillin treatments. The same applies to other antibiotics… It is one of the achievements of modern medicine that it has succeeded in creating ever weaker human beings, and ever stronger strains of bacteria. « Antibiotic », by the way, means « hostile to life ». And it is no secret that all these wonder drugs have only worked wonders for the bank balances of their manufacturers…

« …The use of progressive research methods needs to be learned; it requires hard study and at least average intelligence – whereas any idiot can cut up or poison animals and report what he sees. Whether such experiments have any validity for human medical research is of no interest to these gentlemen. Clearly, there is no obstinacy greater than that of academics mired in their set ways. But in addition, over the last few decades a gigantic industry has developed around animal research: manufacturers of restraining devices, cages and torture instruments, as well as animal breeders, all of whom together constitute a most powerful lobby who influence the media and the politicians…

« All the great plagues and epidemics evinced a certain cycle. Inoculations were only introduced when the cycle was already approaching its end. The devastating bubonic plague of the Middle Ages disappeared on its own without medical intervention and long before there was any talk of vaccinations. Puerperal (childbirth) fever which in earlier times snatched away the lives of so many newborn babies and their mothers and for a long time diminished general life expectancy was defeated solely by the hygienic measures introduced by Semmelweis many decades before Pasteur…

« …Massive polio vaccinaton programmes were only introduced when this extremely rare infectious disease was already dying out. Polio declined in all countries that did not vaccinate against it, just as in those which did. These latter, however, witnessed a renewed flaring up of the illness every time after vaccination. Brazil was hit particularly badly, since there had previously been almost no polio at all in that country, until mass vaccination was undertaken…

« …In 1983, for instance – some 30 years after the allegedly so successful action against polio – there were major polio vaccination scandals in the USA, Great Britain and New Zealand. Of particular interest is the fact that the tissue cultures derived from monkey kidneys (upon which Salk and Sabin based their vaccines) proved to be very dangerous, and were so precisely because they were of animal origin. Recognition of this fact led to the production of a new vaccine, which derived not from animals but from human cell cultures… »

To those who say that surely a surgeon needs to practise his manual dexterity by operating on animals, Ruesch replies *21 :

« Allow me a counter question: Would you let yourself be operated on by a vet? Why not? We shall answer you with the words of Lawson Tait, the famous British surgeon, who at the end of the 19th century developed fundamental operative techniques which are still in use today After years of experimenting on animals, Tait gave up this method and started to speak out forcibly in a veritable campaign against vivisection. He wrote, for instance: ‘As a method of research, experimentation on living animals has led all those who have practised it to quite wrong conclusions, and their reports abound with cases where not only animals are uselessly sacrificed but where, because of the errors, humans have been added to the list of sacrifices too.’ A whole host of authoritative surgeons of today and yester-year have expressed similar views…

« Abel Desjardins, the best known French surgeon of his time and professor of surgery at the University of Paris, answered this question unequivocally and logically. In a lecture in Geneva he stated, amongst other things: ‘First one must be an assistant to an experienced surgeon for a long time. Then one takes up simple cases under the supervision of one’s teacher, who can warn about every wrong move or give advice. Gradually one moves on to more difficult cases. This is the true method of training up a surgeon, and I state categorically that there is no other. Any training based upon operations upon dogs cannot but lead to lamentable errors. The surgeon who knows his art cannot learn a thing from such exercises, and the trainee does not learn correct surgical technique from them but becomes a dangerous surgeon.’ …

« …The chemical and arms industries are not subject to the politicians, but rank above them in real power. They also influence the attitudes of the opinion-forming Press, which depends for its survival on advertisements – approximately 80-90% of all ads stem directly or indirectly from big business, which exerts an effective form of censorship, so that our ads (the ads of CIVIS) are simply refused by the great press barons… even though we are trying to point out the deplorable state of affairs that exists in matters of public health…

« Through generous endowments to universities, the chemical industry buys the indebtedness and dependency of relevant university departments, not to mention the doctors, who have become assiduous propagandists for the disasterous but lucrative products of the chemical industry. Intelligent, brave and honest doctors who prescribe cheap, tried-and-tested, safe natural medications are denounced as ‘quacks’ by the chemical pushers who dominate orthodox medicine, and nature-cure physicians are often thrown out of the medical fraternity altogether. By means of generous donations, the financial powers of the chemcial industry have won over the leaders of all the big animal-protection societies and have even bribed the leaders of some anti-vivisection societies, so that they now see their main rôle as hushing up the truth about vivisection’s uselesness and ever-attendant dangers. In other words, their task is to hold anti-vivisectionism in check… [b]y asserting that at least a certain percentage of animal experiments ‘are still essential’ and that one cannot therefore press for total abolition. But through this means, any experiment can be justified, since it is the pseudo-scientists of the chemical and medical industries who claim the right to decide what is and is not ‘essential’. Experience has shown that for them everything is ultimately deemed ‘essential’. That is why we insist on total abolition of all animal experiments, instead of regulation, which already exists and has proven itself utterly inadequate. The vivisectors are only too keen to ‘regulate’ themselves… »

To those who object that he is too concerned with the well-being of animals rather than that of humankind, Ruesch replies *21:

« What would YOU say about an industry that does not hesitate to dump drugs onto the peoples of the Third World – drugs which have long been withdrawn from the manufacturers’ own markets because of their devastating side-effects?… »

« …From all that has been said so far, you will be able to see that we are also concerned for the good of humanity, and actually a lot more than the chemical industry, the media, the doctors and the governments all put together. With such organisations, the ‘good of humanity’ and ‘our children’ are welcome pretexts for boosting their own power and wealth. This question is usually put to us by people who have never done anything for either animals or people. There are adequate statutes in our legislation for the protection of people. But the same legislation has seen to it that not the laboratory animals but solely their torturers and ruthless exploiters are protected. And animal experimenters exploit humanity too… »

The enduring interest of Ruesch’s scholarship, along with the literary quality of his writing, is still further enhanced by the solid ethical and philosophical stance from which he reasons, and nowhere more clearly than in Slaughter of the Innocent. Long after vivisection is abolished, people will go on reading that book, and with it, Naked Empress (which Ruesch himself considers even more important than Slaughter of the Innocent*22), not just to marvel at how such a manifestly absurd idea –vivisection– could ever have dominated society, but also because, at a time when Humanity has gone to what may one day be judged the very Brink of Madness, with the destruction of our environment, our health and our collective sanity well underway, Ruesch gives us a renewed sense of our own human identity –a lifesaving sense of the fundamental common sense and decency of our species, whatever a minority might have done and still be doing– and Ruesch gives us, as well, a sense of direction so that we can turn civilization around and find our way out of the wilderness of greed, cruelty, ambition, incompetence, vanity, callousness, stupidity, sadism, and insanity that dominate human relations today.

Recovering our health by rejecting Modern Medicine, with its culture of (read dependence on) illness, is only the first step in this move BACK to the wisdom of the ancients, which Ruesch also champions in Slaughter of the Innocent. For he also shares with us his broader vision of the Humanist Values we need in order to preserve our species, our planet and all the Life that it harbors… this being the true goal of civilization, not the accumulation of profits whatever the cost. Ruesch gives us the evidence that points us :

* back to a rediscovery of the wisdom of Hippocrates, whose advice (strict hygene, a simple, frugal diet and a pure environment) is still the best means of maintaining the health of our species,
* back to an appreciation of our fellow earth creatures, animals and even insects, as forms of Life that act, each individual, with its own individual intelligence –like us!– and not blindly from instinct as we have been falsely taught.
* back to an appreciation of the Moral Law at work in society, which means that Mankind must pay for its follies (we can vivisect, we can pollute, we can defraud, but there will be a reckoning…)
* back to a Humanism in which the dignity of our species is affirmed through respect for the other creatures of the Earth, respect for their roles in the balance of Nature (over which Man’s attempt to rule has proved so disasterous), and respect for the only home we have, our planet Earth.
Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in so-called democracies, where a measure of freedom still remains to the citizenry, must wake up and assume the responsibility for the rot that has developed in society, while we, and our parents, and our grandparents were occupied, all of us, with our own little lives. If this wake-up does not happen soon, while there is yet the freedom to act and to reclaim control over our institutions and governments (a freedom which may, already, at this time, exist in theory only), the wake-up may come when it is too late, as we are being figuratively (and perhaps even literally) led to slaughter for the greater good of the greatest number, as defined by those who profit from every aspect of our existence, but who have lost their humanity along the way (if you think these words are an exaggeration, read up on Utilitarian Ethics –including calls for the euthanasia of handicapped and retarded children, justifications for bestiality, and even apologies for vivisection and medical experiments on ‘useless’ human beings, like tramps, the mentally retarded, the elderly… –all being propounded by these Utilitarian Ethicists (and prominent among them –a coincidence ?– the aforementioned Peter Singer, today installed at Princeton University as a professor of bioethics).

Reason, and a brilliant clarity in regard to the moral issues involved, defines Slaughter of the Innocent as a masterpiece that not only makes the reader want to weep for the errors of our species, but gives him/her as well the hope and the courage to fight to right the wrongs that have been done by the few, and perpetrated on the many of all species. In Slaughter of the Innocent and Naked Empress, Hans Ruesch has indeed given Humanity what it needs to begin the turnaround that morality demands and that our survival requires.

=======================
*1. All biographical information comes from Hans Ruesch himself, in conversation with Guenady
*2. Slaughter of the Innocent, first published by Bantam Books in 1978; this extract taken from the 1983 reissue by Civitas Publications, pp 32-35
{N.B.: Slaughter of the Innocent, Naked Empress and other anti-vivisection/responsible medicine writings by Hans Ruesch are available from Civitas ( http://www.linkny.com/~civitas ) or from Fondazione Hans Ruesch, Via Motta 51, 6900 Massagno, Switzerland
*3. PAST TO PRESENT: IDEAS THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD, by Stuart Hirschberg (Rutgers University) and Terry Hirschberg, Prentice Hall (USA), 2002, www.prenhall.com/hirschberg
*4. op cit., Chapter 11, page 626, Matters of Ethics, Philosophy and Religion section
*5 The Canterbury Animal Respect Network for a Green Environment, www.carn-age.org.uk
*6 Quote taken from The British Medical Journal, Dec. 26, 1964, pp. 1615-1619, as cited in Slaughter of the Innocent, page 253
*7 The British Medical Journal, July 2004; 329; 15-19; « Adverse Drug Reactions », by Munir Pirmohamed, et al.
*8 « Death by Medicine », in the August-September 2004 issue of Nexus Magazine, and http://www.nutritioninstituteofamerica.org
*9 Naked Empress or the Great Medical Fraud, Civis Publications, 1982, pp 9-10
*10 Quackwatch ( http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html ) is the product of a vice president of the National Council Against Health Fraud (see, if you are curious, their site at http://www.ncahf.org/ )
*11 From the Preface to the 1983 reissue of Slaughter of the Innocent, p.vii
*12 op cit, p. vi
*13 op cit, p. viii-ix
*14 op cit, p. ix
*15 The main articles from Ruesch’s Civis International Reports may be read online at www.novivisection.org.uk.
*16 Silencing Scientists and Scholars in Other Fields, Power, Paradigm Controls, Peer Review, and Scholarly Communication, Gordon Moran, Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998
*17 op cit, p.9
*18 As a matter of related interest, it can be noted that Singer was the object of an article in UNIKEN, the paper made by the staff of the University of NSW, in Sydney, on October 25, 1991, which states in part :

« Consistent with the view of a university as a place where polemic is set aside in favour of rational discourse, the seminar on 9 October by Professor Peter Singer (Professor of Philosophy at Monash University who was visiting UNSW to give a few lectures on ethical topics for the School of Community Medicine) allowed a useful interaction between a significant number of UNSW staff who use animals in their work and the ‘guru’ of the animal liberation movement – especially during question time.

« The scientists were obviously gratified to hear Professor Singer say that the use of pound dogs in research could, with appropriate controls, be ‘an example of the most defensible kind of experimentation because the animal presumably feels nothing, additional to what it would feel’ when put down with a high dose of anaesthetic, something which happens to thousands of abandoned cats and dogs every week in Australia… »

*19 The Campaign against Fraudulent Medical Research in Cabramatta NSW, Australia, issued a press release, at the time, in which they wrote :

Professor Peter Singer, for years touted by animal liberationists as their ‘guru’, is suing prominent figure in the antivivisection movement, Hans Ruesch, after accusation of being a ‘big phony’.

Mr Ruesch made the accusation after a journalist accidentially disclosed in an Italian newspaper that Peter Singer’s animal rights lecture tour of Italy at the time (1989) was being sponsored by THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION. The Rockefeller industrial complex owns over 200 pharmaceutical enterprises – a major user of animal experimentation. Hans Ruesch wrote to Rome’s antivivisection society, Lega Anti-Vivisezione (LAV), pointing out the irony of this acclaimed animal lover’s pilgrimage being financed by the pharmaceutical outfits. The editor turned it into a full page article titled ‘PETER SINGER IS A BIG PHONY’. Consequently, Singer is suing Mr. Ruesch and LAV.

Spokesperson for the Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research, John Leso, explains : ‘In suing Ruesch, who is the world-leader of the abolitionist anti-vivisection movement, Professor Peter Singer has put himself under the spotlight, something he could ill-afford to do.’ Mr Leso further states that ”… If Professor Singer is to sue everyone who claims he is a ‘phony’, then he would be a very busy man.’ »

*20 Note the following statement, dated April 26, 1995, and addressed : TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, which appears in the CIVIS International Foundation Report, Number 19:

Hans Ruesch, the well-known Swiss author who has been living mainly in Italy, has consulted me in regard to the harassment by the Swiss courts to which he is bieng subjected ever since he constituted in Lugano, Switzerland, a FOUNDATION FOR A MEDICINE WITHOUT VIVISECTION. The relentlessness and outcome of those court actions arouse in many informed individuals the suspicion that they are politically inspired.

Mr. Ruesch has been for many years a highly esteemed client of mine, because I am a lawyer specialized in international copyright law and in that capacity I have negotiated for him various contracts for the sale of the movie rights to some of his books. Most of my professional activity is in English, a language I know well also thanks to long sojourns in the USA, as do my sons, who are lawyers too and work with me; and none of us has been able to find in Mr. Ruesch’s CIVIS FOUNDATION REPORT Nr. 13 the phrase that, according to the verdicts of the Swiss courts, has allegedly appeared in it.

It is incomprehensible and disconcerting for me as a man of the law of very long standing (and particularly proud of his profession because I am the son of Italy’s most celebrated jurist, the late Luigi Ferrara), to learn that both the Court of Appeals of Lugano and the Federal Court of Lausanne have passed punitive verdicts against Hans Ruesch for something that has not been proved to exist; verdicts that have then been spread worldwide by his habitual pursuer with the clear purpose of defaming a universally respected name.

Signed : Prof. Massimo Ferrara-Santamaria

* 21 All quotations are taken from the phamphlet CIVIS Answers Questions on Vivisection, 1998, prepared by Dr Tony Page
*22 Hans Ruesch, in conversation with Guenady

N.B.: Guenady is the single pen name used by the active members of The Friends of Guenady association (www.stop-abus-animal.com). The author of this particular article is a graduate, in Journalism, of the University of California at Berkeley, and lives and teaches English in the South of France.

Ladies! Gentlemen!
Let Us Wake Up ! We Have Been Sleeping Too Long !

“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world.
For indeed, that’s all who ever have.”
Margaret Mead

 

Gazette Fair Use Statement

 

Dona Ana County in New Mexico Is Pumping Water for Irrigation at an Unsustainable Rate–May 14, 2012

 

Groundwater pumping has jumped drastically in the past year in the Las Cruces, NM area.  Irrigation is the major water use.  Irrigation usage jumped from 138,000 to 279,000 acre feet between 2010 and 2011. (An acre foot equals 326,000 gallons.)   A state engineer drew the ire of local officials when he warned that the present  usage rate is not sustainable in the long term.

Read the troubling details in the Las Cruces Sun-Times

Shall We Leave It to the Experts

  by Arundhati Roy

Published originally in The Nation
February 12, 2002

  “In the present circumstances, I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

 

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously. As a nation we age by pushing outward from the middle–adding a few centuries on either end of the extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing head of a hammerhead shark with eyes looking in diametrically
 opposite directions.

I don’t mean to put a simplistic value judgment on this peculiar form of “progress” by suggesting that Modern is Good and Traditional is Bad–or vice versa. What’s hard to reconcile oneself to, both personally and politically, is the schizophrenic nature of it. That applies not just to the ancient/modern conundrum but to the utter illogic of what appears to be the current national enterprise. In the lane behind my house, every night I walk past road gangs of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber-optic cables to speed up our digital revolution. In the bitter winter cold, they work by the light of a few candles.

It’s as though the people of India have been rounded up and loaded onto two convoys of trucks (a huge big one and a tiny little one) that have set off resolutely in opposite directions. The tiny convoy is on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world. The other convoy just melts into the darkness and disappears. A cursory survey that tallies the caste, class and religion of who gets to be on which convoy would make a good Lazy Person’s concise Guide to the History of India. For some of us, life in India is like being suspended between two of the trucks, one leg in each convoy, and being neatly dismembered as they move apart, not bodily, but emotionally and intellectually.

Fifty years after independence, India is still struggling with the legacy of colonialism, still flinching from the “cultural insult.” As citizens we’re still caught up in the business of “disproving” the white world’s definition of us. Intellectually and emotionally, we have just begun to grapple with communal and caste politics that threaten to tear our society apart. But meanwhile, something new looms on our horizon. On the face of it, it’s just ordinary, day-to-day business. It lacks the drama, the large-format, epic magnificence of war or genocide or famine. It’s dull in comparison. It makes bad TV. It has to do with boring things like jobs, money, water supply, electricity, irrigation. But it also has to do with a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has few parallels in history. You may have guessed by now that I’m talking about the modern version of globalization.

What is globalization? Who is it for? What is it going to do to a country like India, in which social inequality has been institutionalized in the caste system for centuries? A country in which 700 million people live in rural areas. In which 80 percent of the landholdings are small farms. In which 300 million people are illiterate. Is the corporatization and globalization of agriculture, water supply, electricity and essential commodities going to pull India out of the stagnant morass of poverty, illiteracy and religious bigotry? Is the dismantling and auctioning off of elaborate public sector infrastructure, developed with public money over the past fifty years, really the way forward? Is globalization going to close the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged, between the upper castes and the lower castes, between the educated and the illiterate? Or is it going to give those who already have a centuries-old head start a friendly helping hand?

Is globalization about “eradication of world poverty,” or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote-controlled and digitally operated? These are huge, contentious questions. The answers vary depending on whether they come from the villages and fields of rural India, from the slums and shantytowns of urban India, from the living rooms of the burgeoning middle class or from the boardrooms of the big business houses. Today India produces more milk, more sugar and more food grain than ever before. And yet, in March 2000, just before President Clinton’s visit to India, the Indian government lifted import restrictions on 1,400 commodities, including milk, grain, sugar, cotton, tea, coffee and palm oil. This despite the fact that there was a glut of these products on the market.

As of April 1–April Fool’s Day–2001, according to the terms of its agreement with the World Trade Organization, the Indian government had to drop its quantitative import restrictions. The Indian market is already flooded with cheap imports. Though India is technically free to export its agricultural produce, in practice most of it cannot be exported because it doesn’t meet the First World’s “environmental standards.” (You don’t eat bruised mangoes or bananas with mosquito bites or rice with a few weevils in it, whereas we don’t mind the odd mosquito and the occasional weevil.)

Developed countries like the United States, whose hugely subsidized farm industry engages only 2 to 3 percent of its total population, are using the WTO to pressure countries like India to drop agricultural subsidies in order to make the market “competitive.” Huge, mechanized corporate enterprises working thousands of acres of farmland want to compete with impoverished subsistence farmers who own a couple of acres.

In effect, India’s rural economy, which supports 700 million people, is being garroted. Farmers who produce too much are in distress, farmers who produce too little are in distress and landless agricultural laborers are out of work as big estates and farms lay off their workers. They’re all flocking to the cities in search of employment.

“Trade Not Aid” is the rallying cry of the head men of the new Global Village, headquartered in the shining offices of the WTO. Our British colonizers stepped onto our shores a few centuries ago disguised as traders. We all remember the East India Company. This time around, the colonizer doesn’t even need a token white presence in the colonies. The CEOs and their men don’t need to go to the trouble of tramping through the tropics, risking malaria, diarrhea, sunstroke and an early death. They don’t have to maintain an army or a police force, or worry about insurrections and mutinies. They can have their colonies and an easy conscience. “Creating a good investment climate” is the new euphemism for Third World repression. Besides, the responsibility for implementation rests with the local administration.

Enron in India

The fishbowl of the drive to privatize power, its truly star turn, is the story of Enron, the Houston-based natural gas company. The Enron project was the first private power project in India. The Power Purchase Agreement between Enron and the Congress Party-ruled state government of Maharashtra for a 740-megawatt power plant was signed in 1993. The opposition parties, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena, set up a howl of swadeshi (nationalist) protest and filed legal proceedings against Enron and the state government. They alleged malfeasance and corruption at the highest level. A year later, when state elections were announced, it was the only campaign issue of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance.

In February 1995 this combine won the elections. True to their word, they “scrapped” the project. In a savage, fiery statement, the opposition leader L.K. Advani attacked the phenomenon he called “loot through liberalization.” He more or less directly accused the Congress Party government of having taken a $13 million bribe from Enron. Enron had made no secret of the fact that in order to secure the deal, it paid out millions of dollars to “educate” the politicians and bureaucrats involved in the deal.

Following annulment of the contract, the US government began to pressure the Maharashtra government. US Ambassador Frank Wisner made several statements deploring the cancellation. (Soon after he completed his term as ambassador, he joined Enron as a director.) In November 1995 the BJP-Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra announced a “renegotiation” committee. In May 1996 a minority federal government headed by the BJP was sworn in at New Delhi. It lasted for exactly thirteen days and then resigned before facing a no-confidence vote in Parliament. On its last day in office, even as the motion of no confidence was in progress, the Cabinet met for a hurried “lunch” and reratified the national government’s counterguarantee (which had become void because of the earlier “canceled” contract with Enron). In August 1996 the government of Maharashtra signed a fresh contract with Enron on terms that would astound the most hard-boiled cynic.

The impugned contract had involved annual payments to Enron of $430 million for Phase I of the project (740 megawatts), with Phase II (1,624 megawatts) being optional. The “renegotiated” power purchase agreement makes Phase II of the project mandatory and legally binds the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) to pay Enron the sum of $30 billion! It constitutes the largest contract ever signed in the history of India.

Indian experts who have studied the project have called it the most massive fraud in the country’s history. The project’s gross profits work out to between $12 billion and $14 billion. The official return on equity is more than 30 percent. That’s almost double what Indian law and statutes permit in power projects. In effect, for an 18 percent increase in installed capacity, the MSEB has to set aside 70 percent of its revenue to pay Enron. There is, of course, no record of what mathematical formula was used to “re-educate” the new government. Nor any trace of how much trickled up or down or sideways or to whom.

But there’s more: In one of the most extraordinary decisions in its not entirely pristine history, in May 1997 the Supreme Court of India refused to entertain an appeal against Enron.

Today, everything that critics of the project predicted has come true with an eerie vengeance. The power that the Enron plant produces is twice as expensive as its nearest competitor and seven times as expensive as the cheapest electricity available in Maharashtra. In May 2000 the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Committee (MERC) ruled that temporarily, until as long as was absolutely necessary, no power should be bought from Enron. This was based on a calculation that it would be cheaper to just pay Enron the mandatory fixed charges for the maintenance and administration of the plant that it is contractually obliged to pay than to actually buy any of its exorbitant power. The fixed charges alone work out to around $220 million a year for Phase I of the project. Phase II will be nearly twice the amount.

Two hundred and twenty million dollars a year for the next twenty years. Meanwhile, industrialists in Maharashtra have begun to generate their own power at a much cheaper rate, with private generators. The demand for power from the industrial sector has begun to decline rapidly. The MSEB, strapped for cash, with Enron hanging like an albatross around its neck, will now have no choice but to make private generators illegal. That’s the only way that industrialists can be coerced into buying Enron’s exorbitantly priced electricity.

In January 2001 the Maharashtra government (the Congress Party is back in power with a new chief minister) announced that it did not have the money to pay Enron’s bills. On January 31, only five days after an earthquake in the neighboring state of Gujarat, at a time when the country was still reeling from the disaster, the newspapers announced that Enron had decided to invoke the counterguarantee and that if the government did not come up with the cash, it would have to auction the government properties named as collateral security in the contract.

But Enron had friends in high places. It was one of the biggest corporate contributors to President George W. Bush’s election campaign. US government officials warned India about vitiating the “investment climate” and running the risk of frightening away future investors. In other words: Allow us to rob you blind, or else we’ll go away.

Last June the MSEB announced that it was ending its agreement with the Dabhol Power Corporation, a joint venture of Enron–which has the largest stake–General Electric and Bechtel. DPC ceased operations soon afterward, and is pressuring the government to cover its debts. Royal Dutch/Shell, the Anglo-Dutch petroleum group, TotalFinaElf and Gaz de France are currently bidding to take over Enron, Bechtel and GE’s collective stake in the plant in a “distress sale.”

Globalizing Dissent

Recently, globalization has come in for some criticism. The protests in Seattle and Prague will go down in history. Each time the WTO or the World Economic Forum wants to have a meeting, ministers have to barricade themselves with thousands of heavily armed police. Still, all its admirers, from Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan and A.B. Vajpayee (the Indian Prime Minister) to the cheering brokers in the stalls, continue to say the same lofty things: If we have the right institutions of governance in place–effective courts, good laws, honest politicians, participatory democracy, a transparent administration that respects human rights and gives people a say in decisions that affect their lives–then the globalization project will work for the poor as well. They call this “globalization with a human face.”

The point is, if all this were in place, almost anything would succeed: socialism, capitalism, you name it. Everything works in Paradise, a Communist State as well as a Military Dictatorship. But in an imperfect world, is it globalization that’s going to bring us all this bounty? Is that what’s happening in India now that it’s on the fast track to the free market? Does any one thing on that lofty list apply to life in India today? Are state institutions transparent? Have people had a say–have they even been informed, let alone consulted–about decisions that vitally affect their lives? And are Clinton (or now Bush) and Prime Minister Vajpayee doing everything in their power to see that the “right institutions of governance” are in place? Or are they involved in exactly the opposite enterprise? Do they mean something else altogether when they talk of the “right institutions of governance”?

The fact is that what’s happening in India today is not a “problem,” and the issues that some of us are raising are not “causes.” They are huge political and social upheavals that are convulsing the nation. One is not involved by virtue of being a writer or activist. One is involved because one is a human being.

If you’re one of the lucky people with a berth booked on the small convoy, then Leaving It to the Experts is, or can be, a mutually beneficial proposition for both the expert and yourself. It’s a convenient way of shrugging off your own role in the circuitry. And it creates a huge professional market for all kinds of “expertise.” There’s a whole ugly universe waiting to be explored there. This is not at all to suggest that all consultants are racketeers or that expertise is unnecessary, but you’ve heard the saying: There’s a lot of money in poverty. There are plenty of ethical questions to be asked of those who make a professional living off their expertise in poverty and despair.

For instance, at what point does a scholar stop being a scholar and become a parasite who feeds off despair and dispossession? Does the source of your funding compromise your scholarship? We know, after all, that World Bank studies are among the most quoted studies in the world. Is the World Bank a dispassionate observer of the global situation? Are the studies it funds entirely devoid of self-interest?

Take, for example, the international dam industry. It’s worth $32-$46 billion a year. It’s bursting with experts and consultants. Given the number of studies, reports, books, PhDs, grants, loans, consultancies, environmental impact assessments–it’s odd, wouldn’t you say, that there is no really reliable estimate of how many people have been displaced by big dams in India? That there is no estimate for exactly what the contribution of big dams has been to overall food production in India? That there hasn’t been an official audit, a comprehensive, honest, thoughtful, post-project evaluation, of a single big dam to see whether or not it has achieved what it set out to achieve? Whether or not the costs were justified, or even what the costs actually were?

Cynics say that real life is a choice between the failed revolution and the shabby deal. I don’t know…maybe they’re right. But even they should know that there’s no limit to just how shabby that shabby deal can be. What we need to search for and find, what we need to hone and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I’d say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It’s India’s best export.

Arundhati Roy, a novelist who lives in New Delhi, is the author of Power Politics (from which this article in the February 18, 2002 issue was adapted). A second and expanded edition will be available (February 2002) from South End Press.

 

Gazette’s Fair Use Policy

A Few Things You Should Know about Benzene

by Pure Water Annie

Benzene is a known carcinogen. There is a lot of it around. You’d do best to take in as little as possible.

This piece appeared originally in the Pure Water Occasional for February 2012. Benzene has emerged more recently as a major water contaminant related to wildfires. See Benzene Pollution after California Fire.

Benzene is an organic chemical, one of the aromatic hydrocarbons. It is essentially colorless and has a slightly sweet odor. It is highly flammable. Benzene dissolves easily in water and evaporates quickly at room temperature. It boils at 176 degrees F.

Benzene has been much in the news recently because of its presence in the fracking fluids being injected into the ground by gas well producers, but it can contaminate water via many other sources.

Natural sources of benzene include volcanoes and forest fires. Benzene is also a natural part of crude oil, gasoline and cigarette smoke. Burning PVC also produces benzene. Some industries use benzene to make other chemicals that are used to make plastics, resins, nylon and synthetic fibers. Benzene is also used to make some types of lubricants and pesticides.

Benzene can cause cells not to work correctly, leading to conditions such as anemia. It can damage the immune system by changing blood levels of antibodies and causing the loss of white blood cells.

An ingredient of gasoline, benzene is found in groundwater contaminated by leaking underground fuel storage tanks, or in surface water subject to fuel spills. Gasoline contains a bit less than 1% benzene. Produced from coal or petroleum (usually the latter), benzene ranks among the top 20 chemicals in production volume. Benzene is used to make solvents, detergents, plastics, resins, paint and many other products.

Benzene is a carcinogen in humans. Also, long exposure to high levels in air causes leukemia. People who are exposed over long periods in their workplace are most at risk.

Drinking water or eating food containing high levels of benzene can cause vomiting, dizziness, or even death.

The EPA regulates benzene. The MCL for benzene in water is 0.005 mg/L (5 ppb).

If exposed to air, benzene evaporates to the environment. It can also be broken down by some soil microbes. It may also be degraded in some ground waters. If benzene is released to surface water, most of it should evaporate within a few hours. Though it does not degrade by reacting with water, it may be degraded by microbes. It is not likely to accumulate in aquatic organisms.

Benzene can be removed from water by adsorption with granular activated carbon. It can also be treated by ozonation. Because benzene evaporates easily, open tank aeration is also a valuable treatment method. If benzene is present, it should be treated as a “whole house” or point of entry issue because inhalation is a hazard. The most practical residential treatment is filtration with a good activated carbon filter.

Fracking May Be an Environmental Disaster, but It’s a Goldmine for the Water Treatment Industry

With hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — the use of high pressure water to help extract previously inaccessible shale gas, the U.S., the market for water treatment will grow nine-fold to $9 billion in 2020. This expansion will spur technology innovation and novel thinking about water disposal and reuse, but the field is rapidly growing overcrowded, creating significant risk for new entrants, Lux Research said in a report.

Fracking requires between 4,000 m(3) and over 22,000 m(3) (25,000 bbl to 140,000 bbl) of water per well and produces toxin-laced brine that can be more than six times as salty as the sea. Its growth has energized the water industry, inspiring a bumper crop of new water treatment startups vying to treat the highly challenging flowback water.

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