Bruce King, the former governor of New Mexico, once said with alarm: "We don't want to open a box of Pandoras." When it comes to toxic chemicals, however, the lid of Pandora's box was lifted long ago by petrochemical corporations. They've since released some 70,000 different synthetic compounds that now saturate our land, air, water, food, bodies, and babies.
The industry has reaped enormous profits manufacturing everything from plastics to pesticides, vinyl siding to aerosol sprays, medicines to computer chips, and it constantly pats itself on the back with expensive PR campaigns to tout its bountiful contribution to America's way of life.
Fine. But what the industry doesn't want you to hear about, much less think about, is its contribution to America's (and the globe's) way of death. A plethora of cancers, poisonings, gruesome birth defects, malfunctioning-to- nonfunctioning immune systems, and reproductive disorders—not to mention global warming and other ecological disasters in the making—also are products of the chemical "revolution" of the past 60 years or so.
The industry's knowing complicity in all this was the focus of a powerful two-hour television documentary by Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones, recently broadcast by PBS. Moyers and Jones used internal industry documents to reveal that these corporations have known for decades that their products and manufacturing processes are killers, and that they have engaged in an outright conspiracy to cover up this knowledge, deliberately withholding it from workers they knew were dying, from the workers' doctors, from government regulators, and, of course, from We the People.
But this Lowdown is not about the Trade Secrets story, which tells itself, but about the story behind the story: the unrelenting effort by the chemical industry to trash this documentary, and the industry's ongoing use of evasions and lies to conceal the deadly facts from the public.
This is a story called "How Things Work"—a story that no establishment-media outlet has chosen to mention, even though it's readily available, like a bird's nest on the ground.
The preemptive strike
Two months before the program's broadcast date, the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which is the industry's Washington lobbying and PR front, began huffing and puffing, trying to blow down Moyers' house. It had learned that the documentary was in the works, and it sicced its man Terry Yosie, VP for "strategic communications," on Moyers.
Yosie strategically dispatched a letter on February 6, demanding to be told what would be in the report and arrogantly instructing Moyers that "the Council expects the story to be accurate, balanced, and fair"—three standards that the ACC has never tried to live up to.
Good grief, you can imagine them thinking, doesn't PBS know that ACC members are the top campaign contributors to the congressman who oversees public broadcasting's appropriations? Or that ACC members such as ExxonMobil are major corporate underwriters of PBS programs?
Two days later, Moyers replied to Yosie, noting that the program was "a work in progress for which I haven't even done the narration," and informing him that the final half-hour of the program would consist of a panel discussion of the issues raised. ... [ read more ]
THE 8,000-MEMBER GREATER GRACE TEMPLE in Detroit is the home church of many autoworkers, and its Sunday service on December 7 spoke directly to their troubles. The tone was set by the choir's opening selection, "I'm looking for a Miracle." The Pentecostal pastor kept the spirit moving with a sermon he titled "A Hybrid Hope," after which the congregation joined in a full-throated, hallelujah version of the gospel classic, "We're Gonna Make It." For the men and women who actually do the work in automobile manufacturing (America's quintessential industry), the only hope left for dealing with a catastrophic economic meltdown seems to be prayer. 
