This week’s story is a fable, and since this is an age of instant gratification, I’ll give you the moral up front: honesty is always the best policy.
Here’s the story: Once upon a time, a nation at war discovered one of its chemical weapons, Agent Orange, was not just killing trees and non-combatants, but also American soldiers. The top brass in the military and government had to decide between doing right by its veterans or protecting the financial interests of Dow and Monsanto, the companies that made Agent Orange. The government decided to screw the veterans, because after all, the only people who were exposed were the ones who were not able to dodge the draft or hide out in National Guard units, the way future presidents did. One little lie can’t hurt, can it?
Unfortunately, scientists soon learned that dioxin, the poisonous chemical in Agent Orange, was turning up back in the United States. Government officials, in their wisdom, tried to make the problem go away, by purchasing and evacuating the communities of Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri. On one hand, this was an admission by the government that dioxin was a hazardous chemical. On the other hand, those goddamned environmentalists started tracking down the sources of dioxin and the path led right to many corporations that give big campaign contributions to both political parties. There was the plastics industry, the paper industry, the trucking industry, the steel industry, the incineration industry. These discoveries set off quite a commotion in the public relations branches of these corporations. Soon television airwaves were full of attractive spokespeople who said the industry they represent does not produce dioxin, or at least not very much, or that trees cause dioxin or volcanoes cause dioxin or fire causes dioxin. It’s not our fault, they said, it was Prometheus who brought down fire to the earth. The lies kept growing and growing.
The dioxin-producing industries decided that the thing to do was have the government convince people that dioxin was not so bad after all. Parts of Love Canal were opened again and some working class folks with few other chances to own a house were persuaded to move in. In 1991, a group of lobbyists from the paper industry convinced Bill Reilly, who was then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to announce that perhaps dioxin wasn’t so bad after all and that EPA would undertake a two-year reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin.
Now the house of lies began to collapse. Scientists all over the world were beginning to discover that dioxin was actually more poisonous than had been suspected, not less. Besides causing cancer at remarkable rates, dioxin was shown to play havoc with the reproductive systems of both women and men.
The dioxin polluters tried very hard to stack the EPA review panels with scientists from their payrolls, but it’s possible to deny only so much. This dioxin problem looked like it was going to go the way of cigarettes and global warming. The only thing to do was stall, and so the EPA’s two-year reassessment of dioxin has now lasted ten years. However, the longer the reassessment continues, the more damning the evidence becomes. If the document is ever finalized, the dioxin polluters know that all the people who have been getting dumped on for years and years will use the findings to sue the corporations’ butts off.
All around the world, other companies have seen the error of their ways and have found clean ways to fabricate their products without making dioxin. The American companies never did this, because they were caught in their web of lies and to use clean production would be like admitting they knew they were wrong all along. They thought it would be cheaper to just go on poisoning people and manipulating the government with campaign contributions.
That’s the other moral to this story: the only thing more toxic than dioxin may be money in politics.
The Best Policy
This week’s story is a fable, and since this is an age of instant gratification, I’ll give you the moral up front: honesty is always the best policy.
Here’s the story: Once upon a time, a nation at war discovered one of its chemical weapons, Agent Orange, was not just killing trees and non-combatants, but also American soldiers. The top brass in the military and government had to decide between doing right by its veterans or protecting the financial interests of Dow and Monsanto, the companies that made Agent Orange. The government decided to screw the veterans, because after all, the only people who were exposed were the ones who were not able to dodge the draft or hide out in National Guard units, the way future presidents did. One little lie can’t hurt, can it?
Unfortunately, scientists soon learned that dioxin, the poisonous chemical in Agent Orange, was turning up back in the United States. Government officials, in their wisdom, tried to make the problem go away, by purchasing and evacuating the communities of Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri. On one hand, this was an admission by the government that dioxin was a hazardous chemical. On the other hand, those goddamned environmentalists started tracking down the sources of dioxin and the path led right to many corporations that give big campaign contributions to both political parties. There was the plastics industry, the paper industry, the trucking industry, the steel industry, the incineration industry. These discoveries set off quite a commotion in the public relations branches of these corporations. Soon television airwaves were full of attractive spokespeople who said the industry they represent does not produce dioxin, or at least not very much, or that trees cause dioxin or volcanoes cause dioxin or fire causes dioxin. It’s not our fault, they said, it was Prometheus who brought down fire to the earth. The lies kept growing and growing.
The dioxin-producing industries decided that the thing to do was have the government convince people that dioxin was not so bad after all. Parts of Love Canal were opened again and some working class folks with few other chances to own a house were persuaded to move in. In 1991, a group of lobbyists from the paper industry convinced Bill Reilly, who was then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to announce that perhaps dioxin wasn’t so bad after all and that EPA would undertake a two-year reassessment of the toxicity of dioxin.
Now the house of lies began to collapse. Scientists all over the world were beginning to discover that dioxin was actually more poisonous than had been suspected, not less. Besides causing cancer at remarkable rates, dioxin was shown to play havoc with the reproductive systems of both women and men.
The dioxin polluters tried very hard to stack the EPA review panels with scientists from their payrolls, but it’s possible to deny only so much. This dioxin problem looked like it was going to go the way of cigarettes and global warming. The only thing to do was stall, and so the EPA’s two-year reassessment of dioxin has now lasted ten years. However, the longer the reassessment continues, the more damning the evidence becomes. If the document is ever finalized, the dioxin polluters know that all the people who have been getting dumped on for years and years will use the findings to sue the corporations’ butts off.
All around the world, other companies have seen the error of their ways and have found clean ways to fabricate their products without making dioxin. The American companies never did this, because they were caught in their web of lies and to use clean production would be like admitting they knew they were wrong all along. They thought it would be cheaper to just go on poisoning people and manipulating the government with campaign contributions.
That’s the other moral to this story: the only thing more toxic than dioxin may be money in politics.