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M1A2 Abrams tanks in Nowa Deba, Poland, on April 12 2023. (Artur Widak / NurPhoto / Getty Images)
Military sectors are ramping up efforts to “green” warfare. To support the rebranding of the military as a “driver of climate action,” arms industries from Europe to North America are demanding recognition as ESG-friendly sustainable investment options. That is: environmentally and socially responsible businesses. Arms industries bring security, we are told. And security is a precondition for “any sustainability.”
What hides in this statement? What is lost as we allow military actors to monopolize the meaning of a sustainable future? Unless we want to see the real definitions of both security and sustainable practices silenced — those needed to actually address climate and social crises — military investments must remain “sin stocks.”
We live in a time of compounding environmental and social crises, from climate change to armed conflict to systemic human rights violations. As a result, financial investments in arms — the means of death and destruction exacerbating such crises — have acquired an increasingly bad aftertaste for investors with a concern for environmental and social sustainability. At present, this trend is facing a dangerous U-turn as weapons lobbies are putting minds, money, and manpower to co-opting sustainability in theory and practice.
This is made painfully clear by the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe, who define military security as intrinsic to sustainability. “Security is the precondition for any sustainability,” they write. Through “helping to ensure security,” the argument then goes, the European arms industry “de facto makes a vital contribution to a more sustainable world.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given this narrative wings. One month into the war, Swedish bank SEB backtracked on its celebrated blanket ban against weapons investments to include parts of the arms industry in their brand-new sustainable investment policy. Similarly, in March 2022, Citibank noted that “We believe defence is likely to be increasingly seen as a necessity that facilitates ESG as an enterprise, as well as maintaining peace, stability and other social goods” — foreboding the growing acceptance of military sectors’ “ESG credentials.” The signal rings clear: with the return of total war to Europe, investing in arms and dual-use systems is our only hope to protect democracy and so achieve sustainability.
What we are witnessing is a concerted effort across European and North American state, finance, and military sectors to cement the link between the arms industry and sustainability, through naturalizing military security as intrinsically linked to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Particularly Goal 16: “Peace, justice and strong institutions.” So far so good — that is, in a world where militarized forms of security are so normalized that we accept the arms industry’s usage of the terms at face value. Few stop to ask, what kind of security is invoked here? Unless we ask this, we will fail to apprehend what kind of sustainability military industries can guarantee.
What security arms producers stand as gatekeepers to is well captured by the industry’s propensity for secrecy and corruption or its habit of profiting from war crimes and social unrest. Dictatorships pay as well as democracies, and importing states are all the same to Euro-American arms suppliers, especially if they are engaged in active conflicts. Well, as long as the buyer regime is militarily involved in countries of less strategic and symbolic value to the “West” — like Saudi Arabia in Yemen or Israel in Palestine. As for Russia in Ukraine, this logic was easily flipped on its head with profitable consequences for Euro-American arms dealers. Russia’s war against the “free world” has instead instigated “a new era for the defense industry” — the era in which Euro-American arms can be classified as socially responsible goods as they “defend” that world.
The coupling of military security with sustainability is buttressed by another myth that sustains the industry: that arms exports are guarantors of peace. What peace, one might ask? The peace associated with eight years of humanitarian disaster in Yemen, generated by a war armed by Euro-American companies? The peace associated with political repression and police violence among the world’s worst human rights abusing states, propped up by Euro-American surveillance and population control equipment? The peace associated with the exacerbation of armed conflict from the uncontrollable proliferation of Euro-American arms across war-torn regions throughout MENA and the Sahel? Arms seldom stay where they were intended to go.
The military sector is wired toward maintaining control — read: securing an unjust status quo — and reacting to symptoms rather than addressing root causes behind conflict. This predisposes the sector’s understanding of sustainability as one that serves the interests of those with power and resources to the detriment of those without.
Yet, in today’s society, the military’s voice is institutionally prioritized. It carries a veneer of rationality and objectivity that only the military can muster, in a world where militarism has become so commonplace that we do not react to subways featuring adverts for fighter jets while prohibiting those that raise voices for peace. A world where schoolkids go without lunch or nurses are denied adequate pay rises after carrying a whole nation through a pandemic, while the military sector receives billions in budget bumps on a yearly basis.
Will wasting more money on arms make us safer in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis? Will the production and export of these arms pave the way for practices that protect the environment? Any claim to sustainability made by military actors is destined to be reactive and superficial, not preventative and profound.
Like with all arms industry politics, the paradoxes are ripe. While military contractors are touting their sustainability horn, they are also lobbying their governments to be exempted from novel EU legislation mandating companies to respect human rights and the environment. As some of the EU’s largest arms exporting governments support this exemption plea, the European arms industry is given the go-ahead to prioritize profit over people and planet. This is telling of how serious the industry really is about stepping in as the guarantors of a sustainable future, beyond their conscientious hyperbole.
In 2022, we saw the highest total of world military expenditure ever. On top of this, NATO nations, from Germany to Poland to the UK to the United States, now embark on recent historical military spending sprees — as if military spending was not already disproportionate to the real-world needs of both people and planet, representing an utter misplacement of vital resources. The stakes are high for military contractors to get their sustainable label in time to harvest this spending. Yet, the stakes are much higher for the populations bearing the brunt as the arms industry flourishes.
As more is lost to the militarization of environmental and social crises, less is spent on addressing root causes and preventing further environmental and social breakdown. Far more sustainable would be to prioritize diplomacy and development over “defense” and invest in the practices that stop wars from erupting — from climate solutions to peacebuilding to global health and beyond — rather than the industries that depend on the perpetuation of war to line shareholders’ pockets.
Challenging the militarization of sustainability by foregrounding people-centered nonmilitary security frameworks and just social and environmental transition experiences and solutions, is our only hope.
“I just feel like sadly the Democratic party has been hijacked by loud voices of far-left socialists and I don’t think they represent many of the people with liberal views.”
By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner
Human rights activist, former Miss Universe contestant and Iraq native Sarah Idan has filed with the Federal Election Commission and is officially running to represent California’s 30th District in the US House of Representatives.
The Los Angeles resident and founder of the non-profit bipartisan organization Humanity Forward will be running as a Democrat for a position in Congress currently held by Representative Adam Schiff, who is vacating the seat to run for the Senate in 2024. If she wins, she will be the first Iraqi female immigrant and secular Muslim Zionist in history to be elected to Congress, she told The Algemeiner.
“I don’t think there’s a better candidate to represent minority groups than me being an immigrant, Muslim woman and coming from Iraq, a country directly affected by US [foreign] policies,” the 33-year-old explained. “My voice is definitely the voice of the minority and in Congress, I feel like we need an Iraqi voice.”
Idan was born in 1990 in Baghdad and is the second youngest of five kids. When she was 18, she volunteered with the US Army in Iraq as a translator. She moved to America two years later and became a US citizen in 2015. Her late father, who died in 2021 from COVID-19, was a military engineer for Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party but left the party when he saw Hussein orchestrate violent attacks.
Idan is also the founder and CEO of Humanity Forward, which is “committed to building bridges among Muslims and Jews in order to surpass borders and promote reconciliation, tolerance, mutual understanding, and peace,” according to its website. She hosts a podcast called the Sarai Talk Show and received the Ambassador for Peace Award by UN Watch in 2019.
Idan represented Iraq in the Miss Universe pageant in 2017. She received death threats and was forced to leave her home country after posing with Miss Israel Adar Gandelsman during the competition. Her citizenship from Iraq was also revoked because of the incident and her family was forced to flee the country in the aftermath of the scandal. Her family now lives in another Arab country that have formal relations with Israel. Idan has continued to push for solidarity with Israel as well as defend the country and promote the normalization of relations with the Jewish state.
The issues that are the core of Idan’s election campaign include tackling the crime rates in Los Angeles, poverty, homelessness, inflation, strengthening relations with Israel, and building more opportunities for Israel and California to support each others economic growth. She told The Algemeiner that in the MENA region, Israel is “one of the only true allies to actually support the United States and share the same ideology.”
Idan has criticized in the past Democrats such as Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib and other members of the Congressional “Squad” for making remarks critical of Jews and Israel. The former beauty queen told The Algemeiner they are one of the main reasons why she is running for Congress.
“I just feel like sadly the Democratic party has been hijacked by loud voices of far-left socialists and I don’t think they represent many of the people with liberal views,” she said. “They have taken it to an extreme. It’s not only about social issues. Even when it comes to foreign policy and their involvement with basically enemies of the US and trying to always attack our allies in the Middle East [like Israel].”
“Even the woman rights movement in Iran,” she adding, talking about how Omar defamed Iranian journalist and human rights activist Masih Alinejad as “Islamophobic” — even though she was born a Muslim in Iran — and shared an article on Twitter in 2020 that questioned the latter’s credentials as she continues to advocate for women’s rights in Iran. Omar’s husband also accused Alinejad on Twitter of not liking Muslims.
“This is why I feel like we need a voice like mine because we need a secular Muslim,” Idan explained. “I want to be the voice of reason and I hate how ‘The Squad,’ whenever anyone questions them, [like] when they attack Israel, they always [claim] ‘I’m being targeted because I’m a Muslim, a woman of color.’ I just feel like we need someone like me who can literally say, ‘No, this is not why. I’m an Arab, Muslim, immigrant woman of color and I do not share your ideology or agenda.’”
Idan also believes that she can bring to Congress something that many others can’t, which is first-hand experience of what it’s like to live in the Middle East. She explained that some members of the “The Squad” like Omar — whose family fled Somalia as refugees — left their home countries when they were very young and as refugees “so they don’t have a clue about the geo-politics and problems in the Middle East.”
“As an activist who is involved and comes from the Middle East, I would represent a more realistic picture of what’s going on rather than people who came here when they were refugees at a very young age and never dealt with what I went through and am still going through until today, me and my family,” Idan added. “I have all this passion and I really want to be involved because I am directly affected by all these decisions, by what Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and AOC [New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] are pushing. My family is in danger. I’m in danger. I’m not welcome in Iraq and I’ll probably get killed the minute I land there. We need secular Muslims [in Congress] and Muslims who believe in freedom and want to be a non-radical voice.”
California’s 30th Congressional district election will be held on Nov. 5, 2024.
The post Beauty queen who lost Iraqi citizenship for taking selfie with Miss Israel makes congressional run for Democrats appeared first on World Israel News.
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“Not many people could have imagined how a violent change of government would turn her into Israel’s greatest enemy, but luckily for us – E. had already prepared.”
By World Israel News Staff
The creation of the IDF Military Intelligence unit monitoring Iran was due to the foresight of one anonymous Iranian immigrant to Israel who for 15 years gathered information that would prove indispensable to Israel once the Shah was overthrown in 1979, according to a new report on the IDF website published this week.
E. was 12 years old when he was attacked in Tehran for being Jewish. To this day, he still has a deep scar on his nose after being attacked by Muslim thugs. “This scar is the reason I decided to immigrate to Israel,” the IDF report cited E as saying.
He immigrated to Israel, enlisted in Unit 8200 and developed a fascination for the country he had fled years ago. He gathered information, documents and secret codes – which were kept in his desk drawer for years. Today, E’s identity is not even known by 8200.
When the 1979 Islamic revolution broke out, E.’s gut feelings turned out to be correct, and changed the rules of the game, leading to the establishment of the military intelligence unit against Israel’s greatest enemy.
During the time E. collected the intel, Iran was still considered a progressive country, a “friend” of Israel – with which it even maintained various intelligence cooperation.
“Not many people could have imagined how a violent change of government would turn her into the greatest enemy of the State of Israel, but luckily for us – E. had already prepared,” the IDF report said.
According to the article, E said: “Many times, I ask myself ‘why?” Why did I feel like this country would become a threat? Maybe it’s because of the beatings I suffered and the hatred I experienced. I knew the Iranian people – I had to keep my Jewishness a secret. I knew that as soon as the Shah left, something would change – there was always latent antisemitism.”
In his elite intelligence unit, then called Patrol 8200, E, who was also fluent in Arabic, was tasked with monitoring communication from Arab countries. But he found himself listening in on Farsi broadcasts.
“I took out a notebook and started documenting,” he said, “even though Israel is on good terms with Iran, and even though it’s not my field – as a side occupation I decided to try to understand who is coming into contact and characterize them. I identified senior Iranian forces… and I said to myself: ‘One day this will surely help in some way.”
Over the course of 15 years, E’s “hobby” would see him fill thousands of binders. He also created a military Farsi-Hebrew dictionary based on what he had learned. It was the basis for the digital Persian dictionary that exists today in Unit 8200.”
E’s intelligence gathering meant that he was the first person to realize that the Shah had fled the country and that a revolution had begun.
His hobby quickly became his fulltime job, leading to the establishment of the unit. He recruited Iranian immigrants, putting them through intensive training.
“The department was made up of top-level radio operators – talented and acutely sharp people who as early as that time understood the Iranian threat with full clarity. Stars were born there. The people who started there, became the leaders of the intelligence division and the security establishment today,” he said.
The post An Iranian Jew who was beaten up as a child is behind the establishment of the IDF’s secret anti-Iran unit – report appeared first on World Israel News.
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras gives a speech in Athens, Greece, on May 31, 2023. (George Panagakis / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images)
The Left suffered a historic defeat in national elections held in Greece two weeks ago. Syriza, in opposition since the Right came to power in 2019, was crushed at the polls, losing to New Democracy by a full twenty points.
All preelection polls had suggested a narrow victory for New Democracy, but the results were far more punishing, with Syriza managing to win just 20 percent of the total vote. The conservative party hasn’t managed to form a government yet, however, due to an electoral reform introduced by Syriza in 2016, forcing an almost-absolute majority for any party, or the formation of coalitions. A second election will take place on June 25, which should allow New Democracy to form a government.
New Democracy’s first term in office was known for corruption, cruelty, and the implementation of a slew of neoliberal policies across the board. Rights for workers, renters, migrants, and the environment have all suffered since 2019, as inequality has continued to rise.
Prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis ran on a stability ticket and cited the economy’s “recovery” as a main achievement during his first term. Indeed, regaining its investment grade rating, which it is expected to do later this year, became a “national goal.” Though the economy has officially rebounded, inequality continues to rise. Moreover, inflation has meant that though the economy grew by 5.9 percent in 2022 (mainly due to the return of tourism and an injection from the European recovery fund), Greek workers saw their purchasing power nonetheless decrease by 7 percent.
A second term for New Democracy promises more privatizations, particularly in the areas of water, heath, and education. Meanwhile, Greece’s tax system targets the poor — in what is effectively a flat-rate tax system — and gives the rich a free pass. Among EU countries, the capital gains tax remains low — like Hungary’s, it sits at just 15 percent — and dividends tax is even lower — 5 percent. On the other hand, indirect taxes, targeting mainly consumption and the working class, contribute more than 60 percent of the overall revenues of the state.
Law and order has been a key pillar of Mitsotakis’s first term in office. This has meant the increased criminalization of refugees, in flagrant defiance of international law, and the continued pushback of migrants at sea and on land, according to several independent reports. Complaints of police corruption have soared since New Democracy have come to power, and reports of a spyware scandal involving the cabinet itself have caused outrage at home and abroad.
Under Mitsotakis, the judiciary has been devalued, and the administration’s own violation of the rule of law has gone unpunished. It has forced even traditional supporters of New Democracy to wonder whether Greece is now being transformed into a rogue state.
The chronic underfunding of public infrastructure and services has been a defining feature of New Democracy’s rule, leading to the tragic rail accident between Athens and Thessaloniki in March, killing fifty-seven people. Since then, more avoidable deaths have occurred thanks to insufficient safety standards, most recently near the port of Piraeus.
Despite this record, New Democracy received support from the media, banks, and business. This has allowed the party to convey a sense of normality to the outside world, even as life inside the country for working people continues to worsen.
New Democracy’s victory is one half of the story. The other half is Syriza’s defeat. Once the representative of the anti-austerity movement and the electoral vehicle of Greek resistance to the Troika, Syriza is now in crisis. This isn’t new. At the 2019 European elections, the party scored just above 23 percent of the vote, though at the national election later that year, it managed a result of 31.5 percent of the vote.
After a decade of austerity imposed by the Troika — and supported by Greek conservatives — Syriza has opted for a strategy of “pragmatism,” which has meant attempting to enlarge the party’s structures to form a progressive alliance that can include the middle classes — who are the constituency that handed New Democracy victory in 2019. But Syriza has failed to transform itself into a real mass party, and its initiative has backfired. Both PASOK (the centrist social liberal party) and the KKE (Marxist-Leninist) seized on the opportunity to gain more ground for their own parties.
Minor parties like Yanis Varoufakis’s MeRA 25 party shirked the opportunity for unity; the divides were then exploited by New Democracy, which managed to paint a false image of Syriza as responsible for the closure of the banks in 2015.
Inside Syriza itself, the tone was often more melancholic than inspiring. Calls to raise wages above the poverty levels, reduce consumer prices, and protect a decent standard of living within a welfare state failed to convince the majority of voters.
Syriza’s defeat is not only a setback for Greece, however. It is also a warning for the rest of Europe, where far-right populist parties are multiplying and taking power.
Mitsotakis’s victory is not only a victory for neoliberalism but also for right-wing populism. His economic policies are likely to deepen inequalities, and his disrespect for the rule of law may further reduce the popular support for democratic legitimacy, against the imposition of arbitrary authority.
In this context, the Left must come up with a new analysis and a new strategy. It cannot afford division or sectarianism. Syriza is running a new campaign, prioritizing justice and prosperity for all, while renewing party structures and presenting more women, younger candidates, and more representatives from marginalized communities.
Although it’s unclear what the Greek political landscape will look like on June 26, it is certain that unity and defense of the lower classes must orient the Left. If not, in four years from now, it will be in an even weaker position, less capable of fighting back at the next election.
Former vice president Mike Pence speaks to supporters as he formally announces his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president on June 7, 2023, in Ankeny, Iowa. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
In the halcyon days of 2016, when something like the conventional and pundit-sanctioned laws of politics still seemed to apply, the official gatekeepers of American conservatism mounted a multipronged strategy designed to neutralize Donald Trump. In a trial run of the tactic that would so badly fail Hillary Clinton that November, some fixated on his indecency and inexperience.
“Both parties have been infested by candidates who have treated the presidency as an entry-level position,” bleated a January editorial in the National Review. “The burdens and intricacies of leadership are special; experience in other fields is not transferable.” Elsewhere, the same tract attempted to situate Trump as an unreliable tribune of conservatism, darkly intoning that his past comments on abortion, gun control, health care policy, and “punitive taxes on the wealthy” suggested “he and Bernie Sanders . . . shared more than funky outer-borough accents.”
In light of what happened next, these lines of attack now feel quaint. Having strong-armed his way past a cadre of donor-vetted suits like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Jeb Bush en route to the presidency, Trump quickly made his bizarre demagogic style the lingua franca of the American right. For reasons of ideology, opportunism, or some combination of both, many erstwhile opponents obligingly hopped aboard the Trump train, leaving the handful who maintained a critical posture firmly on the margins of Republican politics. Appeals to decency, honor, and Trump’s unreliable conservative bona fides fell on deaf ears.
With all of this in mind, it was somewhat surreal to witness the respective campaign launches of former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (incidentally a minor character in the Republican crackup of 2016) and former vice president Mike Pence this week. Where Ron DeSantis has hitherto done his best to triangulate on the question of Donald Trump, both Pence and Christie are evidently planning to run more directly against him.
“Different times call for different leadership,” declared Pence in a three-minute launch video yesterday that also channeled the typical grievances of the evangelical right. “Today our party and our country need a leader that will appeal, as Lincoln said, to ‘the better angels of our nature.’” Though Pence did not mention Trump by name or allude to the events of January 6, 2021, the mere fact of his candidacy makes having to do both inevitable — and there’s no reason to think the Republican primary electorate will be receptive.
If Pence’s launch resembled a Republican version of Bidenism with an evangelical twist, Christie’s was more like a garbled transmission beamed across time from a distant galaxy where the name “Dick Cheney” still commands respect. Unlike Pence, Christie seized the occasion on Tuesday to aim his tired tough-guy routine squarely at Trump.
Opening with a roughly twenty-minute spiel that mentioned the Greeks, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Abraham Lincoln, the former governor made a series of cliched appeals to “character” and compared Trump to “Lord Voldemort.” “Governing is about compromise. . . . When did ‘compromise’ become such a dirty word?” asked Christie, who apparently suffers from a rare form of amnesia in which the events of 2016 have been entirely erased.
Barring some completely unexpected turn of events, both these men are going to lose. Their respective campaigns’ animating premise — that the same messaging and tactics that have failed to dethrone Trump in the past will suddenly work on the thousandth try — is absurd on its face.
Christie quite literally sold his soul to Trump in 2016, becoming one of his most prominent establishment endorsers upon leaving the race, while Pence served as his vice president. Much as it’s already done with Ron DeSantis, the Trump campaign will be able to pull from a vast arsenal of clips and sound bites showing Christie and Pence praising the man they now deem unsuitable to lead the Republican Party.
Why would anyone buy it? And what in God’s name makes either of these men believe the same playbook that failed to stop Trump in 2016 will somehow be effective seven years later?
One possible explanation, certainly applicable to numerous primary candidates in 2020, is that neither is actually trying to win. For many a presidential also-ran, a plush media gig, a book deal, or a perch in an administration can make even a quixotic campaign an attractive prospect. This, however, seems unlikely. Pence and Christie are already known quantities, and it’s clear neither is auditioning for another job in the administration. Some of the motivation might be personal: after dropping out in 2016, Christie repeatedly kissed the ring to no avail, while Pence became the target of MAGA ire for not falling into line on January 6. In the latter case, a former vice president would normally be a de facto front-runner for the top job, and Pence may be under the impression that the same will apply in 2024.
The most plausible explanation, though, is that the machinery of traditional Republican politics has yet to fully accommodate itself to the realities of the post-2016 world. After Trump’s defeat in 2020, many institutional conservatives apparently concluded the fever dream would pass and that something like normalcy would soon reassert itself. The electoral anticlimax of last November’s midterms, albeit momentarily, again made this idea almost believable. Never having dropped below any of his rivals to begin with, Trump’s poll numbers have since gone up and entrenched him as the race’s clear front-runner.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that Trumpism is less a passing fancy than a structural shift in the politics of the Right. More than any other figure in modern history, Trump has fused his personality and affectations with the grievances and prejudices of his party’s base. Unable to process this reality, more traditional Republican politicians are intent on clinging to the idea that the Trumpian albatross can still be cast off through conventional means. Over the next several months, that premise will be tested. And if 2016’s debates are any indication, the likes of Pence and Christie will live to regret having believed it.
An Israeli anti-reform protester tried to physically attack Economy Minister Nir Barkat in his hotel in Boston, a statement from his office said.
Barkat, who was in the city to meet with the local Jewish leaders, was accosted in the hallways of the hotel by protesters shouting, “Shame.”
A video shows on of them pushing past Barkat’s security guard and heading for Barkat. Another security intervened and pushed him to the floor.
“A short time ago, someone tried to physically attack Minister Nir Barkat during a protest held during his official visit to Boston,” Barkat’s office said in a statement. “Minister Barkat’s security guards pushed him away and prevented him from harming the minister who was not injured. The Boston police arrested the attacker – an Israeli citizen.”
After the incident, Minister Barkat said: “It’s a matter of time before political assassination will occur in Israel. Under the auspices of the protest, there are those who have spilled the blood of elected officials. We are on a slippery and dangerous slope. I thank the security guards of the Personal Security Unit who repelled the attacker and prevented me from being harmed.”
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3M headquarters in Maplewood, Minnesota. (Michael Siluk / Education Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The manufacturers of “forever chemicals” used in products like nonstick pans and waterproof clothing knew about the dangers their materials posed more than forty years before the general public, according to previously secret industry documents. By following the same playbook as Big Tobacco, including suppression of their own research, the companies successfully stymied regulation for decades while the cancer-causing chemicals became ubiquitous in the water, air, and soil.
Major manufacturers are already spending billions to settle lawsuits and millions fighting federal regulations, including landmark environmental rules proposed this spring. The revealing industry documents, analyzed in a new study from researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), could bolster efforts to hold the companies accountable for widespread contamination from chemicals that take hundreds of years to break down. The manufacturer 3M is reportedly preparing to pay $10 billion to settle claims that it polluted thousands of public water systems, but the cost of cleaning up the chemicals in drinking water nationwide will likely top $400 billion.
Introduced into a variety of consumer goods beginning in the 1950s, per- and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, or PFAS, are linked to decreased fertility, developmental delays, and several types of cancer.
While the human health risks became widely known during the last decade, manufacturers have known since at least 1970 that the compounds were “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested,” according to the industry documents obtained through litigation and reviewed by public health researchers at UCSF.
State officials and consumer groups are urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finalize the first-ever enforceable standards for PFAS in drinking water, after decades of deferring to industry groups. Two major manufacturers, 3M and DuPont, reported spending a combined total of more than $3.8 million lobbying on chemical issues including PFAS regulation last year.
Meanwhile, dozens of states are currently considering legislation banning their use in everyday products. Exposure to PFAS is so widespread that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the chemicals are present in the blood of 97 percent of Americans.
A growing wave of litigation, including lawsuits brought by the attorneys general of New Mexico and Washington last week, centers on allegations that DuPont, 3M, and other manufacturers “knew or should have known” about the potential harms caused by their products.
The newly available documents reviewed by UCSF researchers establish that not only did manufacturers know about these risks, they took steps to cover them up.
During the 1970s, a DuPont-funded laboratory carried out a series of studies to test the effects of exposure to the chemical coating Teflon. The laboratory had already established that Teflon dispersions could be highly toxic when inhaled, according to a 1970 DuPont memo. Subsequent tests found that rats exposed at low levels developed enlarged livers; dogs injected with higher ones died within two days.
But instead of reporting these findings to federal regulators, as required by law, the company adopted a communications strategy equating the toxicity of the chemicals to common table salt.
By 1980, employee surveys by DuPont and 3M found that pregnant workers exposed to the chemicals were giving birth to babies with abnormalities in their eyes and tear ducts. While assuring workers that they had discovered “no evidence of birth defects,” the company quietly removed female employees from high-exposure areas.
In the subsequent decades, as evidence of adverse effects mounted, the companies pressured regulators to help them mitigate the fallout. After a panel of outside experts submitted recommendations to the EPA in 2006 that called PFAS a “likely human carcinogen” and urged adoption of stricter regulations, DuPont’s vice president wrote to company executives with a plan to control the narrative.
“The only voice that can cut through the negative stories is the voice of the EPA,” reads a February 2006 email. The email went on to list proposed talking points for the agency, including that consumer products using Teflon were safe for continued use.
The EPA appears to have obliged, telling consumers in March 2006 that they did not need to stop using their nonstick products.
This March, the EPA proposed groundbreaking regulations setting limits on PFAS compounds in drinking water, though those limits are still higher than what many public health advocates say is safe to drink.
3M and the Chemours Company, which spun off from DuPont in 2015, both submitted comments opposing the rules, which are expected to be finalized next year.
The UCSF study’s authors compare the chemical companies’ tactics to Big Tobacco’s decades-long campaign to bury unfavorable research and sew misinformation in public health discourse.
“Like Big Tobacco, the major chemical manufacturers have a vested financial interest in suppressing scientific evidence of the harms of their products while maintaining the public perception that their products are safe,” according to the study. “The U.S.’s failure to shift the burden of proof to the industry with respect to chemical policy means that we may always be chasing the devil they knew, rather than defending public health from the outset.”
You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.