THE NEW “CHINA SYNDROME”
That ol’ “yellow peril” is so... 9/10
In U.S. television news media and the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, widespread concerns sparked by some seriously harmful cough medicines and tainted dogfood are turning into a full-blown campaign of demonisation of China over allegedly sub-standard quality-assurance practices in its food-and-drug manufacturing sector.
Of course, in the most recent cases involving toxic cough medicine, nowhere is Big Pharma indicted even by implication for establishing globalised marketing of pharmaceuticals. This is the marketing system that maintains continuous movement of unlimited quantities of pharmaceuticals from some source of supply to (and-or through) anyone possessing means of payment (or possessing the ability to sustain some extension of credit between the time a product leaves the supplier until it reaches the customer). It is modelled on the marketing mechanism developed for oil.
Uniquely in the world at the moment, in China’s economy, both production and consumption expand without mutual interdependence, or any other form of regulation of production by consumption or vice-versa. Vast quantities of goods can be produced in China without reference to whether these commodities find any market in China. Why? Because they can be priced for sale outside the country well below what any potential competitor relying on equivalent or better technology would charge, and still earn a huge profit, especially on the volumes involved. In this manner, point-destinations in the world market may become temporarily saturated with surpluses of underpriced yet unsold goods, even though, at the same time, the world market as a whole signals no evident point or likelihood of becoming saturated overall.
This is the kind of “free trade” that has become the main prop and support of the U.S. economy’s seemingly endless series of “soft landings” — as distinct from hard outright crashes or even technical recessions [i.e., two or more successive quarters of zero or negative “growth”] — as it continues its so-called “post-industrial transformation towards the Information Age”. In reality, this “transformation” is a process of de-industrialisation. It has given rise to a services-dominated economy of low-wage, low-skilled labour across the U.S. and Canada, in which heavy industry and secondary manufacturing have all but disappeared, while the higher-paying technical and managerial functions based on them have been largely outsourced to lower-wage economies overseas.
The absurdity of the report below, epitomised by its blaming everything on some overambitious tailor in a Chinese village in the Yangtze delta, is matched only by the depth of the ignorance on display regarding these underlying trends of the global economy tahgt have been responsible for creating one opportunity after another of more or less this same type.
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From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER
The New York Times, Sun 6 May 2007, Page A1
IN CHINA At least 18 people, most of them in Guangdong Province, died in a month last year after they ingested contaminated medicine.
The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.
Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.
It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.
Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.
Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.
Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.
Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.
Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”
The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.
An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.
Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States “to be especially vigilant” in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was “no reason to believe” that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was “exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated.”
China is already being accused by United States authorities of exporting wheat gluten containing an industrial chemical, melamine, that ended up in pet food and livestock feed. The F.D.A. recently banned imports of Chinese-made wheat gluten after it was linked to pet deaths in the United States.
Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India.
In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish, who investigated the Bangladesh epidemic and helped write a 1995 article about it for BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”
“It’s vastly underreported,” Dr. Bennish said of diethylene glycol poisoning. Doctors might not suspect toxic medicine, particularly in poor countries with limited resources and a generally unhealthy population, he said, adding, “Most people who die don’t come to a medical facility.”
The makers of counterfeit glycerin, which superficially looks and acts like the real thing but generally costs considerably less, are rarely identified, much less prosecuted, given the difficulty of tracing shipments across borders. “This is really a global problem, and it needs to be handled in a global way,” said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s top representative in Beijing.
Seventy years ago, medicine laced with diethylene glycol killed more than 100 people in the United States, leading to the passage of the toughest drug regulations of that era and the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration.
The F.D.A. has tried to help in poisoning cases around the world, but there is only so much it can do.
When at least 88 children died in Haiti a decade ago, F.D.A. investigators traced the poison to the Manchurian city of Dalian, but their attempts to visit the suspected manufacturer were repeatedly blocked by Chinese officials, according to internal State Department records. Permission was granted more than a year later, but by then the plant had moved and its records had been destroyed.
“Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” the American Embassy in Beijing wrote in a confidential cable. “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”
In fact, The Times found records showing that the same Chinese company implicated in the Haiti poisoning also shipped about 50 tons of counterfeit glycerin to the United States in 1995. Some of it was later resold to another American customer, Avatar Corporation, before the deception was discovered.
“Thank God we caught it when we did,” said Phil Ternes, chief operating officer of Avatar, a Chicago-area supplier of bulk pharmaceuticals and nonmedicinal products. The F.D.A. said it was unaware of the shipment.
In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said.
But when Chinese officials investigated the role of Chinese companies in the Panama deaths, they found that no laws had been broken, according to an official of the nation’s drug enforcement agency. China’s drug regulation is “a black hole,” said one trader who has done business through CNSC Fortune Way, the Beijing-based broker that investigators say was a crucial conduit for the Panama poison.
In this environment, Wang Guiping, a tailor with a ninth-grade education and access to a chemistry book, found it easy to enter the pharmaceutical supply business as a middleman. He quickly discovered what others had before him: that counterfeiting was a simple way to increase profits.
And then people in China began to die.
Cheating the System
Mr. Wang spent years as a tailor in the manufacturing towns of the Yangtze Delta, in eastern China. But he did not want to remain a common craftsman, villagers say. He set his sights on trading chemicals, a business rooted in the many small chemical plants that have sprouted in the region.
“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mr. Wang’s older brother, Wang Guoping, said in an interview. “He didn’t understand chemicals.”
But he did understand how to cheat the system.
Wang Guiping, 41, realized he could earn extra money by substituting cheaper, industrial-grade syrup — not approved for human consumption — for pharmaceutical grade syrup. To trick pharmaceutical buyers, he forged his licenses and laboratory analysis reports, records show.
Mr. Wang later told investigators that he figured no harm would come from the substitution, because he initially tested a small quantity. He did it with the expertise of a former tailor.
He swallowed some of it. When nothing happened, he shipped it.
One company that used the syrup beginning in early 2005 was Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical, about 1,000 miles away in Heilongjiang Province in the northeast. A buyer for the factory had seen a posting for Mr. Wang’s syrup on an industry Web site.
After a while, Mr. Wang set out to find an even cheaper substitute syrup so he could increase his profit even more, according to a Chinese investigator. In a chemical book he found what he was looking for: another odorless syrup — diethylene glycol. At the time, it sold for 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a ton, or about $725 to $845, while pharmaceutical-grade syrup cost 15,000 yuan, or about $1,815, according to the investigator.
Mr. Wang did not taste-test this second batch of syrup before shipping it to Qiqihar Pharmaceutical, the government investigator said, adding, “He knew it was dangerous, but he didn’t know that it could kill.”
The manufacturer used the toxic syrup in five drug products: ampules of Amillarisin A for gall bladder problems; a special enema fluid for children; an injection for blood vessel diseases; an intravenous pain reliever; and an arthritis treatment.
In April 2006, one of southern China’s finest hospitals, in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, began administering Amillarisin A. Within a month or so, at least 18 people had died after taking the medicine, though some had already been quite sick.
Zhou Jianhong, 33, said his father took his first dose of Amillarisin A on April 19. A week later he was in critical condition. “If you are going to die, you want to die at home,” Mr. Zhou said. “So we checked him out of the hospital.” He died the next day.
“Everybody wants to invest in the pharmaceutical industry and it is growing, but the regulators can’t keep up,” Mr. Zhou said. “We need a system to assure our safety.”
The final death count is unclear, since some people who took the medicine may have died in less populated areas.
In a small town in Sichuan Province, a man named Zhou Lianghui said the authorities would not acknowledge that his wife had died from taking tainted Amillarisin A. But Mr. Zhou, 38, said he matched the identification number on the batch of medicine his wife received with a warning circular distributed by drug officials.
“You probably cannot understand a small town if you are in Beijing,” Zhou Lianghui said in a telephone interview. “The sky is high, and the emperor is far away. There are a lot of problems here that the law cannot speak to.”
The failure of the government to stop poison from contaminating the drug supply caused one of the bigger domestic scandals of the year. Last May, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, ordered an investigation of the deaths, declaring, “The pharmaceutical market is in disorder.”
At about the same time, 9,000 miles away in Panama, the long rainy season had begun. Anticipating colds and coughs, the government health program began manufacturing cough and antihistamine syrup. The cough medicine was sugarless so that even diabetics could use it.
The medicine was mixed with a pale yellow, almost translucent syrup that had arrived in 46 barrels from Barcelona on the container ship Tobias Maersk. Shipping records showed the contents to be 99.5 percent pure glycerin.
It would be months and many deaths later before that certification was discovered to be pure fiction.
A Mysterious Illness
Early last September, doctors at Panama City’s big public hospital began to notice patients exhibiting unusual symptoms.
They initially appeared to have Guillain-Barré syndrome, a relatively rare neurological disorder that first shows up as a weakness or tingling sensation in the legs. That weakness often intensifies, spreading upward to the arms and chest, sometimes causing total paralysis and an inability to breathe.
The new patients had paralysis, but it did not spread upward. They also quickly lost their ability to urinate, a condition not associated with Guillain-Barré. Even more unusual was the number of cases. In a full year, doctors might see eight cases of Guillain-Barré, yet they saw that many in just two weeks.
Doctors sought help from an infectious disease specialist, Néstor Sosa, an intense, driven doctor who competes in triathlons and high-level chess.
Dr. Sosa’s medical specialty had a long, rich history in Panama, once known as one of the world’s unhealthiest places. In one year in the late 1800s, a lethal mix of yellow fever and malaria killed nearly 1 in every 10 residents of Panama City. Only after the United States managed to overcome those mosquito-borne diseases was it able to build the Panama Canal without the devastation that undermined an earlier attempt by the French.
The suspected Guillain-Barré cases worried Dr. Sosa. “It was something really extraordinary, something that was obviously reaching epidemic dimensions in our hospital,” he said.
With the death rate from the mystery illness near 50 percent, Dr. Sosa alerted the hospital management, which asked him to set up and run a task force to handle the situation. The assignment, a daunting around-the-clock dash to catch a killer, was one he eagerly embraced.
Several years earlier, Dr. Sosa had watched as other doctors identified the cause of another epidemic, later identified as hantavirus, a pathogen spread by infected rodents.
“I took care of patients but I somehow felt I did not do enough,” he said. The next time, he vowed, would be different.
Dr. Sosa set up a 24-hour “war room” in the hospital, where doctors could compare notes and theories as they scoured medical records for clues.
As a precaution, the patients with the mystery illness were segregated and placed in a large empty room awaiting renovation. Health care workers wore masks, heightening fears in the hospital and the community.
“That spread a lot of panic,” said Dr. Jorge Motta, a cardiologist who runs the Gorgas Memorial Institute, a widely respected medical research center in Panama. “That is always a terrifying thought, that you will be the epicenter of a new infectious disease, and especially a new infectious disease that kills with a high rate of death, like this.”
Meanwhile, patients kept coming, and hospital personnel could barely keep up.
“I ended up giving C.P.R.,” Dr. Sosa said. “I haven’t given C.P.R. since I was a resident, but there were so many crises going on.”
Frightened hospital patients had to watch others around them die for reasons no one understood, fearing that they might be next.
As reports of strange Guillain-Barré symptoms started coming in from other parts of the country, doctors realized they were not just dealing with a localized outbreak.
Pascuala Pérez de González, 67, sought treatment for a cold at a clinic in Coclé Province, about a three-hour drive from Panama City. In late September she was treated and sent home. Within days, she could no longer eat; she stopped urinating and went into convulsions.
A decision was made to take her to the public hospital in Panama City, but on the way she stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. She arrived at the hospital in a deep coma and later died.
Medical records contained clues but also plenty of false leads. Early victims tended to be males older than 60 and diabetic with high blood pressure. About half had been given Lisinopril, a blood pressure medicine distributed by the public health system.
But many who did not receive Lisinopril still got sick. On the chance that those patients might have forgotten that they had taken the drug, doctors pulled Lisinopril from pharmacy shelves — only to return it after tests found nothing wrong.
Investigators would later discover that Lisinopril did play an important, if indirect role in the epidemic, but not in the way they had imagined.
A Major Clue
One patient of particular interest to Dr. Sosa came into the hospital with a heart attack, but no Guillain-Barré-type symptoms. While undergoing treatment, the patient received several drugs, including Lisinopril. After a while, he began to exhibit the same neurological distress that was the hallmark of the mystery illness.
“This patient is a major clue,” Dr. Sosa recalled saying. “This is not something environmental, this is not a folk medicine that’s been taken by the patients at home. This patient developed the disease in the hospital, in front of us.”
Soon after, another patient told Dr. Sosa that he, too, developed symptoms after taking Lisinopril, but because the medicine made him cough, he also took cough syrup — the same syrup, it turned out, that had been given to the heart patient.
“I said this has got to be it,” Dr. Sosa recalled. “We need to investigate this cough syrup.”
The cough medicine had not initially aroused much suspicion because many victims did not remember taking it. “Twenty-five percent of those people affected denied that they had taken cough syrup, because it’s a nonevent in their lives,” Dr. Motta said.
Investigators from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who were in Panama helping out, quickly put the bottles on a government jet and flew them to the United States for testing. The next day, Oct. 11, as Panamanian health officials were attending a news conference, a Blackberry in the room went off.
The tests, the C.D.C. was reporting, had turned up diethylene glycol in the cough syrup.
The mystery had been solved. The barrels labeled glycerin turned out to contain poison.
Dr. Sosa’s exhilaration at learning the cause did not last long. “It’s our medication that is killing these people,” he said he thought. “It’s not a virus, it’s not something that they got outside, but it was something we actually manufactured.”
A nationwide campaign was quickly begun to stop people from using the cough syrup. Neighborhoods were searched, but thousands of bottles either had been discarded or could not be found.
As the search wound down, two major tasks remained: count the dead and assign blame. Neither has been easy.
A precise accounting is all but impossible because, medical authorities say, victims were buried before the cause was known, and poor patients might not have seen doctors.
Another problem is that finding traces of diethylene glycol in decomposing bodies is difficult at best, medical experts say. Nonetheless, an Argentine pathologist who has studied diethylene glycol poisonings helped develop a test for the poison in exhumed bodies. Seven of the first nine bodies tested showed traces of the poison, Panamanian authorities said.
With the rainy season returning, though, the exhumations are about to end. Dr. José Vicente Pachar, director of Panama’s Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, said that as a scientist he would like a final count of the dead. But he added, “I should accept the reality that in the case of Panama we are not going to know the exact number.”
Local prosecutors have made some arrests and are investigating others connected to the case, including officials of the import company and the government agency that mixed and distributed the cold medicine. “Our responsibilities are to establish or discover the truth,” said Dimas Guevara, the homicide investigator guiding the inquiry.
But prosecutors have yet to charge anyone with actually making the counterfeit glycerin. And if the Panama investigation unfolds as other inquiries have, it is highly unlikely that they ever will.
A Suspect Factory
Panamanians wanting to see where their toxic nightmare began could look up the Web site of the company in Hengxiang, China, that investigators in four countries have identified as having made the syrup — the Taixing Glycerine Factory. There, under the words “About Us,” they would see a picture of a modern white building nearly a dozen stories tall, adorned by three arches at the entrance. The factory, the Web site boasts, “can strictly obey the contract and keep its word.”
But like the factory’s syrup, all is not as it seems.
There are no tall buildings in Hengxiang, a country town with one main road. The factory is not certified to sell any medical ingredients, Chinese officials say. And it looks nothing like the picture on the Internet. In reality, its chemicals are mixed in a plain, one-story brick building.
The factory is in a walled compound, surrounded by small shops and farms. In the spring, nearby fields of rape paint the countryside yellow. Near the front gate, a sign over the road warns, “Beware of counterfeits.” But it was posted by a nearby noodle machine factory that appears to be worried about competition.
The Taixing Glycerine Factory bought its diethylene glycol from the same manufacturer as Mr. Wang, the former tailor, the government investigator said. From this spot in China’s chemical country, the 46 barrels of toxic syrup began their journey, passing from company to company, port to port and country to country, apparently without anyone testing their contents.
Traders should be thoroughly familiar with their suppliers, United States health officials say. “One simply does not assume that what is labeled is indeed what it is,” said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, deputy commissioner for international and special programs for the Food and Drug Administration.
In the Panama case, names of suppliers were removed from shipping documents as they passed from one entity to the next, according to records and investigators. That is a practice some traders use to prevent customers from bypassing them on future purchases, but it also hides the provenance of the product.
The first distributor was the Beijing trading company, CNSC Fortune Way, a unit of a state-owned business that began by supplying goods and services to Chinese personnel and business officials overseas.
As China’s market reach expanded, Fortune Way focused its business on pharmaceutical ingredients, and in 2003, it brokered the sale of the suspect syrup made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The manufacturer’s certificate of analysis showed the batch to be 99.5 percent pure.
Whether the Taixing Glycerine Factory actually performed the test has not been publicly disclosed.
Original certificates of analysis should be passed on to each new buyer, said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council. In this case, that was not done.
Fortune Way translated the certificate into English, putting its name — not the Taixing Glycerine Factory’s — at the top of the document, before shipping the barrels to a second trading company, this one in Barcelona.
Li Can, managing director at Fortune Way, said he did not remember the transaction and could not comment, adding, “There is a high volume of trade.”
Upon receiving the barrels in September 2003, the Spanish company, Rasfer International, did not test the contents, either. It copied the chemical analysis provided by Fortune Way, then put its logo on it. Ascensión Criado, Rasfer’s manager, said in an e-mail response to written questions that when Fortune Way shipped the syrup, it did not say who made it.
Several weeks later, Rasfer shipped the drums to a Panamanian broker, the Medicom Business Group. “Medicom never asked us for the name of the manufacturer,” Ms. Criado said.
A lawyer for Medicom, Valentín Jaén, said his client was a victim, too. “They were tricked by somebody,” Mr. Jaén said. “They operated in good faith.”
In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup.
During that time, the company never tested the product. And the Panamanian government, which bought the 46 barrels and used them to make cold medicine, also failed to detect the poison, officials said.
The toxic pipeline ultimately emptied into the bloodstream of people like Ernesto Osorio, a former high school teacher in Panama City. He spent two months in the hospital after ingesting poison cough syrup last September.
Just before Christmas, after a kidney dialysis treatment, Mr. Osorio stood outside the city’s big public hospital in a tear-splattered shirt, describing what his life had become.
“I’m not an eighth of what I used to be,” Mr. Osorio said, his partly paralyzed face hanging like a slab of meat. “I have trouble walking. Look at my face, look at my tears.” The tears, he said apologetically, were not from emotion, but from nerve damage.
And yet, Mr. Osorio knows he is one of the lucky victims.
“They didn’t know how to keep the killer out of the medicine,” he said simply.
While the suffering in Panama was great, the potential profit — at least for the Spanish trading company, Rasfer — was surprisingly small. For the 46 barrels of glycerin, Rasfer paid Fortune Way $9,900, then sold them to Medicom for $11,322, according to records.
Chinese authorities have not disclosed how much Fortune Way and the Taixing Glycerine Factory made on their end, or how much they knew about what was in the barrels.
“The fault has to be traced back to areas of production,” said Dr. Motta, the cardiologist in Panama who helped uncover the source of the epidemic. “This was my plea — please, this thing is happening to us, make sure whoever did this down the line is not doing it to Peru or Sierra Leone or some other place.”
A Counterfeiter’s Confession
The power to prosecute the counterfeiters is now in the hands of the Chinese.
Last spring, the government moved quickly against Mr. Wang, the former tailor who poisoned Chinese residents.
The authorities caught up with him at a roadblock in Taizhou, a city just north of Taixing, in chemical country. He was weak and sick, and he had not eaten in two days. Inside his white sedan was a bankbook and cash. He had fled without his wife and teenage son.
Chinese patients were dead, a political scandal was brewing and the authorities wanted answers. Mr. Wang was taken to a hospital. Then, in long sessions with investigators, he gave them what they wanted, explaining his scheme, how he tested industrial syrup by drinking it, how he decided to use diethylene glycol and how he conned pharmaceutical companies into buying his syrup, according to a government official who was present for his interrogation.
“He made a fortune, but none of it went to his family,” said Wang Xiaodong, a former village official who knows Mr. Wang and his siblings. “He liked to gamble.”
Mr. Wang remains in custody as the authorities decide whether he should be put to death. The Qiqihar drug plant that made the poisonous medicine has been closed, and five employees are now being prosecuted for causing “a serious accident.”
In contrast to the Wang Guiping investigation, Chinese authorities have been tentative in acknowledging China’s link to the Panama tragedy, which involved a state-owned trading company. No one in China has been charged with committing the fraud that ended up killing so many in Panama.
Sun Jing, the pharmaceutical program officer for the World Health Organization in Beijing, said the health agency sent a fax “to remind the Chinese government that China should not be selling poisonous products overseas.” Ms. Sun said the agency did not receive an official reply.
Last fall, at the request of the United States — Panama has no diplomatic relations with China — the State Food and Drug Administration of China investigated the Taixing Glycerine Factory and Fortune Way.
The agency tested one batch of glycerin from the factory, and found no glycerin, only diethylene glycol and two other substances, a drug official said.
Since then, the Chinese drug administration has concluded that it has no jurisdiction in the case because the factory is not certified to make medicine.
The agency reached a similar conclusion about Fortune Way, saying that as an exporter it was not engaged in the pharmaceutical business.
“We did not find any evidence that either of these companies had broken the law,” said Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the drug administration. “So a criminal investigation was never opened.”
A drug official said the investigation was subsequently handed off to an agency that tests and certifies commercial products — the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.
But the agency acted surprised to learn that it was now in charge. “What investigation?” asked Wang Jian, director of its Taixing branch. “I’m not aware of any investigation involving a glycerin factory.”
Besides, Huang Tong, an investigator in that office, said, “We rarely get involved in products that are sold for export.”
Wan Qigang, the legal representative for the Taixing Glycerine Factory, said in an interview late last year that the authorities had not questioned him about the Panama poisoning, and that his company made only industrial-grade glycerin.
“I can tell you for certain that we have no connection with Panama or Spain,” Mr. Wan said.
But in recent months, the Glycerine Factory has advertised 99.5 percent pure glycerin on the Internet.
Mr. Wan recently declined to answer any more questions. “If you come here as a guest, I will welcome you,” Mr. Wan said. “But if you come again wanting to talk about this matter, I will make a telephone call.”
A local government official said Mr. Wan was told not to grant interviews.
A five-minute walk away, another manufacturer, the Taixing White Oil Factory, also advertises medical glycerin on the Internet, yet it, too, has no authorization to make it. The company’s Web site says its products “have been exported to America, Australia and Italy.”
Ding Xiang, who represents the White Oil Factory, denied that his company made pharmaceutical-grade glycerin, but he said chemical trading companies in Beijing often called, asking for it.
“They want us to mark the barrels glycerin,” Mr. Ding said in late December. “I tell them we cannot do that.”
Mr. Ding said he stopped answering calls from Beijing. “If this stuff is taken overseas and improperly used. ...” He did not complete the thought.
In chemical country, product names are not always what they seem.
“The only two factories in Taixing that make glycerin don’t even make glycerin,” said Jiang Peng, who oversees inspections and investigations in the Taixing branch of the State Food and Drug Administration. “It is a different product.”
All in a Name
One lingering mystery involves the name of the product made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The factory had called its syrup “TD” glycerin. The letters TD were in virtually all the shipping documents. What did TD mean?
Spanish medical authorities concluded that it stood for a manufacturing process. Chinese inspectors thought it was the manufacturer’s secret formula.
But Yuan Kailin, a former salesman for the factory , said he knew what the TD meant because a friend and former manager of the factory, Ding Yuming, had once told him. TD stood for the Chinese word “tidai” (pronounced tee-die), said Mr. Yuan, who left his job in 1998 and still lives about a mile from the factory.
In Chinese, tidai means substitute. A clue that might have revealed the poison, the counterfeit product, was hiding in plain sight.
It was in the product name.
Renwick McLean and Brent McDonald contributed reporting.
06 May 2007
30 April 2007
IS KEEPING WATER SAFE TO DRINK REALLY A MATTER OF ROCKET SCIENCE? IS SECURING SAFE CONCENTRATION LIMITS ON A TOXIC PRESENCE JUST GIVING US ALL “TIME OFF FOR GOOD BEHAVIOUR”?
A COMMENT
The appended article discloses some hair-raising new findings concerning the persistence of perchlorate compounds — like those found in rocket fuel — in the water supply of a major American city.
The only permissible levels for these synthetic toxins in the environment is 0, not 2 or 5 or 6 ppb (this is still 2000 or 5000 or 6000 pp-trillion...).
Once we are below the levels that cause immediate visible-tangible damage, the point to remember about concentration is the moral of the story of the frog that will stay in boiling water and die if it has been previously conditioned to accept warm and ever-increasingly warm water... If humans become conditioned to surviving low but increasing concentrations of toxic chemicals, we face the frog’s fate. What is getting conditioned by this process is our acceptance, not our ability to tolerate. At some point the level will kill, but by that point all our warning systems will long since have been turned off.
In this connection, it is worth noting that Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth readily cites the story of the frog and its moral when it comes to our tolerance of the Greenhouse Effect. However, he does not repeat this when it comes to toxic chemical concentrations. What is the difference? Nobody “owns” the CO-2 , making it hard to find someone to sue. Toxic synthetic chemicals, on the other hand, come from someone’s factory or process. They thus hardly enjoy the luxury of similar immunity from legal liability.
Something else about that frog story: applied to human beings, all theories of “learned behaviour” based on “conditioned stimulus, conditioned response” or “CS, CR” — like that of the frog in water being warmed steadily to boiling point — actually promote, if not endorse, overcoming conscience and “moral squeamishness” by means of “behaviour modification” techniques. The behaviourists’ claim is true. They have indeed developed a theory to account for, as well as practices that implement, certain measurable kinds of “learning” in which vague and largely unquantifiable notions that would link cognition and-or cognitive ability either to personal development or to the development of consciousness may be dispensed with. However, what is labelled “learning” here is utterly aphenomenal and thus false. What is actually taking place or being reinforced is not “learning” in the sense of knowledge. It is the control, initiation and-or extinction of behaviour by way of external stimuli applied without regard to the autonomy of the human person.
The entire approach of testing for the imaginary line that divides a tolerably safe from an intolerably unsafe level of toxic concentration seems to be a “learning” exercise of the behavioural type, rather than one in which meaningful knowledge of actual use to human beings is either gathered or applied.
~~~~
Executive Summary:
New study from CDC and Boston University shows babies getting unsafe dose of perchlorate, underscores need for federal action
http://www.ewg.org/issues/perchlorate/20070329/analysis.php
An Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of recently published data from scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Boston University (BU) shows that infants are being exposed to dangerous levels of the rocket fuel component perchlorate. The CDC/BU study, which examined breast milk from 49 Boston area women, found that the average infant in this study is being exposed to more than double the dose of perchlorate that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe; highly exposed babies are ingesting up to 10 times this amount. [1,2]
Boston area infants are exposed to unsafe levels of perchlorate in breast milk At the 95th percentile perchlorate dose level in women with lower iodide intake, CDC found a 20% drop in thyroid hormone levels
Calculations based on 4kg infant and average daily infant intake of 0.78 liters breast milk. Sources: 1, 3.
If this weren’t troubling enough, in September of 2006, the CDC published a study showing significant changes in thyroid hormone levels in women who were exposed to far less perchlorate than babies drinking breast milk in this study, and less than the EPA “safe” dose. [3] Since it is also well known that infants are at much greater risk for thyroid hormone disruption than adults, taken together, the findings of these two studies show that the perchlorate levels found in the breast milk of ordinary American women could be threatening the normal development of their exposed infants. [4]
Perchlorate, the explosive ingredient in solid rocket fuel, has leaked from military bases and defense and aerospace contractors’ plants in at least 22 states, contaminating drinking water for millions of Americans. The chemical has also been found to contaminate dairy milk, produce, and many other foods and plants. [5-12] In a related 2006 study, the CDC found perchlorate in the urine of every one of 2,820 people tested, suggesting that food is a key route of exposure in addition to drinking water. [13] Boston’s tap water is not known to be contaminated with perchlorate; the 49 women in this study were likely exposed through food. [14]
Infants are at greater risk for thyroid disruption by perchlorate than adults for several reasons. Perchlorate acts by inhibiting the thyroid gland’s ability to take up the nutrient iodide, a key building block for thyroid hormone. Unlike adults, infants have minimal stores of thyroid hormones and must rely instead on their own daily production (breast milk does not contain significant quantities of thyroid hormone). Therefore, while adults may be able to use hormone stores to make up for temporary shortages related to chemical insults, infants can only do this to a very small degree. [4]
While thyroid hormones regulate metabolism in adults and long-term deficiencies can lead to chronic health problems, the consequences for thyroid disruption in infants are much more serious. Normal thyroid hormone levels are critical for normal brain and organ development, and recent research has shown that infants can suffer permanent neurological deficits from even short-term thyroid hormone insufficiency. [15,16,17]
On average, babies drinking breast milk in the Boston study would be exposed to 19 times more perchlorate than the September, 2006 CDC study found would depress thyroid hormone levels by 20 percent in adult women with lower iodide intake (thirty-six percent of women in the U.S. have urinary iodide levels in this “lower” range). [3]
To make matters worse, the Boston study found that 47 percent of the babies tested were not getting adequate levels of iodine from breast milk. Since the effects of perchlorate are compounded by insufficient iodide consumption, these babies are at even greater risk for thyroid hormone disruption. [1]
Notably, the Boston study also found that even moms who ingested extra iodine by using iodized salt or taking multivitamins containing iodine didn’t always have sufficient iodine in their breast milk. [1] This finding is important because it underscores the need for the government to act to reduce perchlorate contamination of food and drinking water, rather than just simply pointing to iodized salt and multivitamins as quick fixes to the perchlorate problem.
Earlier research confirmedÑhealth protections still lacking
The CDC/BU study confirms earlier research that found high levels of perchlorate in breast milk. [18,19] One study, for example, found perchlorate in every one of 36 samples of breast milk from nursing mothers in 18 states at levels as high as 92 parts per billion (ppb). [18] The Boston study found even higher levels of perchlorate among its 49 women, with a maximum concentration of a startling 411 ppb. The median perchlorate level in CDC/BU study was 9 ppb. [1]
The Boston study also measured perchlorate concentrations in the mother’s urine, finding a median level of 3.0 ppb. More important than the actual values, however, is the fact that these concentrations are remarkably similar to the levels of perchlorate that the CDC found in its much larger study of perchlorate exposure that tested the urine of more than 2,800 individuals. [13] In that study, the median urinary perchlorate concentration was 3.6 ppb. Since the perchlorate exposures in the two studies are so closely aligned, one can assume that the high levels found in the Boston women’s breast milk are, unfortunately, probably typical of the general U.S. population.
CDC’s large study of urinary perchlorate levels also raises concerns about fetal exposures. CDC found that in the 36 percent of U.S. women with low iodine intake, almost any amount of perchlorate exposure was linked to a significant change in levels of thyroid hormones. [3] For about 1 in 10 of these women, exposure to perchlorate in drinking water at 5 ppb would result in subclinical hypothyroidism; this is a condition that requires treatment if these women become pregnant because it may negatively impact the brain development of their fetus if left untreated. [20] EWG estimates that there are more than 2.2 million women who fall into this latter category. [21]
Conclusion
Taken together, the weight of the evidence from these studies strongly support the conclusion that perchlorate is a major public health threat that needs to be addressed. Yet, there are still no federal safety standards for perchlorate in drinking water or food. Under pressure from the Pentagon and the defense industry, EPA has delayed setting a drinking water standard for perchlorate. California is in the final stages of adopting a perchlorate drinking water standard of 6 ppb, recommended by state scientists before release of the September, 2006 CDC study. The proposed standard in New Jersey is 5 ppb. Last July, Massachusetts adopted 2 ppb as the nation’s first legally enforceable drinking water standard.
Senators Boxer, Feinstein, and Lautenberg and Representative Solis from California have introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate and House of Representative that seeks to improve perchlorate monitoring and regulation to better protect public health.
Recommendations
Breast milk is by far the healthiest food for infants. However, the perchlorate levels found in breast milk in this CDC/BU study are alarming. The doses of pechlorate that infants are getting from ingesting this food are far higher than doses that have been shown to cause significant disruptions of thyroid hormone levels in many adult women. We also know that infants are more vulnerable than adults to the health effects of perchlorate exposure.
The level of perchlorate found in breast milk in this study suggests a serious threat to the normal development and health of potentially all American infants.
To protect public health:
EPA must adopt a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate in drinking water based on the most recent science, including the 2006 CDC study and the Boston study described above. The 2006 CDC study showed convincingly, with statistically valid data from a large human population, that perchlorate levels well below the EPA’s “safe” dose cause significant thyroid hormone depression in adult women of childbearing age.
With the CDC study showing that even less than 1 ppb perchlorate in water may pose health risks to women, fully protective drinking water standards must be set as low as possibleÑat no more than 1 ppbÑand revised downward as detection and cleanup technology improves. The Food and Drug Administration must also adopt an action level for perchlorate in food that is designed to protect the fetus, infants and children from the adverse effects of these exposures.
References:
[1] Pearce EN, Leung AM, Blount BC, Bazrafshan HR, He X, Pino S, Valentin-Blasini L, Braverman LE. 2007. Breast milk iodine and perchlorate concentrations in lactating Boston area women. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism epub Feb 2007.
[2] Ginsberg G, Rice D. The NAS perchlorate review: questions remain about the perchlorate RfD. Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Sep;113(9):1117-9. Erratum in: Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Nov;113(11):A732.
[3] Blount BC, Pirkle JL, Osterloh JD, Valentin-Blasini L, Caldwell LK. 2006a. Urinary perchlorate and thyroid hormone levels in adolescent and adult men and women living in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives 114:1865-1871.
[4] Ginsberg GL, Hattis DB, Zoeller RT, Rice DC. 2007. Evaluation of the U.S. EPA/OSWER preliminary remediation goal for perchlorate in groundwater: focus on exposure to nursing infants. Environmental Health Perspectives 115: 361-69.
[5] California Department of Food and Agriculture. 2004. Data cited in: Sharp, R. 2004. Rocket fuel contamination in California milk. Environmental Working Group. Available at
[6] Danelski D., Beeman D. 2003. Special Report: Growing concerns: While scientists debate the risks, a study finds the rocket-fuel chemical in inland lettuce. The Press-Enterprise. April 27, 2003
[7] Environmental Working Group. 2003. Suspect Salads: Toxic rocket fuel found in samples of winter lettuce. Available at
[8] Environmental Working Group. 2004. Rocket fuel contamination in California milk. Available at
[9] Food and Drug Administration. 2004. Exploratory Data on Perchlorate in Food. Available at
[10] Kirk AB, Smith EE, Tian K, Anderson TA, Dasgupta PK. 2003. Perchlorate in milk. Environ Sci Technol. 37(21):4979-81.
[11] Kirk AB, Martinelango PK, Tian K, Dutta A, Smith EE, Dasgupta PK. 2005. Perchlorate and Iodide in Dairy and Breast Milk. Environ Sci Technol. 39(7):2011.
[12] Sanchez CA, Crump KS, Krieger RI, Khandaker NR, Gibbs JP. 2005. Perchlorate and nitrate in leafy vegetables of North America. Environ Sci Technol. 39(24):9391-7.
[13] Blount BC, Valentin-Blasini L, Osterlow JD, Mauldin JP, Pirkle JL. 2006. Perchlorate exposure of the U.S. population, 2001-2002. J Exp Sci Environ Epidem, Online 18 October 2006.
[14] Environmental Protection Agency. 2005. Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule data. Updated January 2005. Available at
[15] Zoeller, T. 2006. Collision of Basic and Applied Approaches to Risk Assessment of Thyroid Toxicants in forthcoming volume. Living in a chemical world: framing the future in light of the past. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006: 168-190.
[16] Haddow JE, Palomake GE, Allan, WC, Williams JR, Knight GJ, and Gagnon J, et al. Maternal thyroid deficiency during pregnancy and subsequent neuropsychological development of the child. New England Journal of Medicine 1999: 341: 549-555
[17] Pop VJ, Kuijpens J., van Baar, AL, Verkert, G. et al. 1999. Low maternal free thyroxine concentrations during early pregnancy are associated with impaired psychomotor development in infancy. Clinical Endocrinology 50: 149.
[18] Kirk AB, Martinelango PK, Tian K, Dutta A, Smith EE, Dasgupta PK. 2005. Perchlorate and iodide in dairy and breast milk. Environmental Science and Technology 39: 2011-2017.
[19] Kirk AB, Dyke JV, Martin CF, Dasgupta K. 2007. Temporal patterns in perchlorate, thiocyanate, and iodide excretion in human milk. Environmental Health Perspectives 115: 182-186.
[20] Cooper, D. 2004. Sub-clinical thyroid disease: consensus or conundrum. Clinical Endocrinology 60: 410-412.
[21] Environmental Working Group. 2006. Thyroid Threat: Under Proposed Rocket Fuel Standards, Many Women Would Need Treatment To Protect Baby. Available at www.ewg.org.
A COMMENT
The appended article discloses some hair-raising new findings concerning the persistence of perchlorate compounds — like those found in rocket fuel — in the water supply of a major American city.
The only permissible levels for these synthetic toxins in the environment is 0, not 2 or 5 or 6 ppb (this is still 2000 or 5000 or 6000 pp-trillion...).
Once we are below the levels that cause immediate visible-tangible damage, the point to remember about concentration is the moral of the story of the frog that will stay in boiling water and die if it has been previously conditioned to accept warm and ever-increasingly warm water... If humans become conditioned to surviving low but increasing concentrations of toxic chemicals, we face the frog’s fate. What is getting conditioned by this process is our acceptance, not our ability to tolerate. At some point the level will kill, but by that point all our warning systems will long since have been turned off.
In this connection, it is worth noting that Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth readily cites the story of the frog and its moral when it comes to our tolerance of the Greenhouse Effect. However, he does not repeat this when it comes to toxic chemical concentrations. What is the difference? Nobody “owns” the CO-2 , making it hard to find someone to sue. Toxic synthetic chemicals, on the other hand, come from someone’s factory or process. They thus hardly enjoy the luxury of similar immunity from legal liability.
Something else about that frog story: applied to human beings, all theories of “learned behaviour” based on “conditioned stimulus, conditioned response” or “CS, CR” — like that of the frog in water being warmed steadily to boiling point — actually promote, if not endorse, overcoming conscience and “moral squeamishness” by means of “behaviour modification” techniques. The behaviourists’ claim is true. They have indeed developed a theory to account for, as well as practices that implement, certain measurable kinds of “learning” in which vague and largely unquantifiable notions that would link cognition and-or cognitive ability either to personal development or to the development of consciousness may be dispensed with. However, what is labelled “learning” here is utterly aphenomenal and thus false. What is actually taking place or being reinforced is not “learning” in the sense of knowledge. It is the control, initiation and-or extinction of behaviour by way of external stimuli applied without regard to the autonomy of the human person.
The entire approach of testing for the imaginary line that divides a tolerably safe from an intolerably unsafe level of toxic concentration seems to be a “learning” exercise of the behavioural type, rather than one in which meaningful knowledge of actual use to human beings is either gathered or applied.
~~~~
Executive Summary:
New study from CDC and Boston University shows babies getting unsafe dose of perchlorate, underscores need for federal action
http://www.ewg.org/issues/perchlorate/20070329/analysis.php
An Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of recently published data from scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Boston University (BU) shows that infants are being exposed to dangerous levels of the rocket fuel component perchlorate. The CDC/BU study, which examined breast milk from 49 Boston area women, found that the average infant in this study is being exposed to more than double the dose of perchlorate that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe; highly exposed babies are ingesting up to 10 times this amount. [1,2]
Boston area infants are exposed to unsafe levels of perchlorate in breast milk At the 95th percentile perchlorate dose level in women with lower iodide intake, CDC found a 20% drop in thyroid hormone levels
Calculations based on 4kg infant and average daily infant intake of 0.78 liters breast milk. Sources: 1, 3.
If this weren’t troubling enough, in September of 2006, the CDC published a study showing significant changes in thyroid hormone levels in women who were exposed to far less perchlorate than babies drinking breast milk in this study, and less than the EPA “safe” dose. [3] Since it is also well known that infants are at much greater risk for thyroid hormone disruption than adults, taken together, the findings of these two studies show that the perchlorate levels found in the breast milk of ordinary American women could be threatening the normal development of their exposed infants. [4]
Perchlorate, the explosive ingredient in solid rocket fuel, has leaked from military bases and defense and aerospace contractors’ plants in at least 22 states, contaminating drinking water for millions of Americans. The chemical has also been found to contaminate dairy milk, produce, and many other foods and plants. [5-12] In a related 2006 study, the CDC found perchlorate in the urine of every one of 2,820 people tested, suggesting that food is a key route of exposure in addition to drinking water. [13] Boston’s tap water is not known to be contaminated with perchlorate; the 49 women in this study were likely exposed through food. [14]
Infants are at greater risk for thyroid disruption by perchlorate than adults for several reasons. Perchlorate acts by inhibiting the thyroid gland’s ability to take up the nutrient iodide, a key building block for thyroid hormone. Unlike adults, infants have minimal stores of thyroid hormones and must rely instead on their own daily production (breast milk does not contain significant quantities of thyroid hormone). Therefore, while adults may be able to use hormone stores to make up for temporary shortages related to chemical insults, infants can only do this to a very small degree. [4]
While thyroid hormones regulate metabolism in adults and long-term deficiencies can lead to chronic health problems, the consequences for thyroid disruption in infants are much more serious. Normal thyroid hormone levels are critical for normal brain and organ development, and recent research has shown that infants can suffer permanent neurological deficits from even short-term thyroid hormone insufficiency. [15,16,17]
On average, babies drinking breast milk in the Boston study would be exposed to 19 times more perchlorate than the September, 2006 CDC study found would depress thyroid hormone levels by 20 percent in adult women with lower iodide intake (thirty-six percent of women in the U.S. have urinary iodide levels in this “lower” range). [3]
To make matters worse, the Boston study found that 47 percent of the babies tested were not getting adequate levels of iodine from breast milk. Since the effects of perchlorate are compounded by insufficient iodide consumption, these babies are at even greater risk for thyroid hormone disruption. [1]
Notably, the Boston study also found that even moms who ingested extra iodine by using iodized salt or taking multivitamins containing iodine didn’t always have sufficient iodine in their breast milk. [1] This finding is important because it underscores the need for the government to act to reduce perchlorate contamination of food and drinking water, rather than just simply pointing to iodized salt and multivitamins as quick fixes to the perchlorate problem.
Earlier research confirmedÑhealth protections still lacking
The CDC/BU study confirms earlier research that found high levels of perchlorate in breast milk. [18,19] One study, for example, found perchlorate in every one of 36 samples of breast milk from nursing mothers in 18 states at levels as high as 92 parts per billion (ppb). [18] The Boston study found even higher levels of perchlorate among its 49 women, with a maximum concentration of a startling 411 ppb. The median perchlorate level in CDC/BU study was 9 ppb. [1]
The Boston study also measured perchlorate concentrations in the mother’s urine, finding a median level of 3.0 ppb. More important than the actual values, however, is the fact that these concentrations are remarkably similar to the levels of perchlorate that the CDC found in its much larger study of perchlorate exposure that tested the urine of more than 2,800 individuals. [13] In that study, the median urinary perchlorate concentration was 3.6 ppb. Since the perchlorate exposures in the two studies are so closely aligned, one can assume that the high levels found in the Boston women’s breast milk are, unfortunately, probably typical of the general U.S. population.
CDC’s large study of urinary perchlorate levels also raises concerns about fetal exposures. CDC found that in the 36 percent of U.S. women with low iodine intake, almost any amount of perchlorate exposure was linked to a significant change in levels of thyroid hormones. [3] For about 1 in 10 of these women, exposure to perchlorate in drinking water at 5 ppb would result in subclinical hypothyroidism; this is a condition that requires treatment if these women become pregnant because it may negatively impact the brain development of their fetus if left untreated. [20] EWG estimates that there are more than 2.2 million women who fall into this latter category. [21]
Conclusion
Taken together, the weight of the evidence from these studies strongly support the conclusion that perchlorate is a major public health threat that needs to be addressed. Yet, there are still no federal safety standards for perchlorate in drinking water or food. Under pressure from the Pentagon and the defense industry, EPA has delayed setting a drinking water standard for perchlorate. California is in the final stages of adopting a perchlorate drinking water standard of 6 ppb, recommended by state scientists before release of the September, 2006 CDC study. The proposed standard in New Jersey is 5 ppb. Last July, Massachusetts adopted 2 ppb as the nation’s first legally enforceable drinking water standard.
Senators Boxer, Feinstein, and Lautenberg and Representative Solis from California have introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate and House of Representative that seeks to improve perchlorate monitoring and regulation to better protect public health.
Recommendations
Breast milk is by far the healthiest food for infants. However, the perchlorate levels found in breast milk in this CDC/BU study are alarming. The doses of pechlorate that infants are getting from ingesting this food are far higher than doses that have been shown to cause significant disruptions of thyroid hormone levels in many adult women. We also know that infants are more vulnerable than adults to the health effects of perchlorate exposure.
The level of perchlorate found in breast milk in this study suggests a serious threat to the normal development and health of potentially all American infants.
To protect public health:
EPA must adopt a maximum contaminant level for perchlorate in drinking water based on the most recent science, including the 2006 CDC study and the Boston study described above. The 2006 CDC study showed convincingly, with statistically valid data from a large human population, that perchlorate levels well below the EPA’s “safe” dose cause significant thyroid hormone depression in adult women of childbearing age.
With the CDC study showing that even less than 1 ppb perchlorate in water may pose health risks to women, fully protective drinking water standards must be set as low as possibleÑat no more than 1 ppbÑand revised downward as detection and cleanup technology improves. The Food and Drug Administration must also adopt an action level for perchlorate in food that is designed to protect the fetus, infants and children from the adverse effects of these exposures.
References:
[1] Pearce EN, Leung AM, Blount BC, Bazrafshan HR, He X, Pino S, Valentin-Blasini L, Braverman LE. 2007. Breast milk iodine and perchlorate concentrations in lactating Boston area women. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism epub Feb 2007.
[2] Ginsberg G, Rice D. The NAS perchlorate review: questions remain about the perchlorate RfD. Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Sep;113(9):1117-9. Erratum in: Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Nov;113(11):A732.
[3] Blount BC, Pirkle JL, Osterloh JD, Valentin-Blasini L, Caldwell LK. 2006a. Urinary perchlorate and thyroid hormone levels in adolescent and adult men and women living in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives 114:1865-1871.
[4] Ginsberg GL, Hattis DB, Zoeller RT, Rice DC. 2007. Evaluation of the U.S. EPA/OSWER preliminary remediation goal for perchlorate in groundwater: focus on exposure to nursing infants. Environmental Health Perspectives 115: 361-69.
[5] California Department of Food and Agriculture. 2004. Data cited in: Sharp, R. 2004. Rocket fuel contamination in California milk. Environmental Working Group. Available at
[6] Danelski D., Beeman D. 2003. Special Report: Growing concerns: While scientists debate the risks, a study finds the rocket-fuel chemical in inland lettuce. The Press-Enterprise. April 27, 2003
[7] Environmental Working Group. 2003. Suspect Salads: Toxic rocket fuel found in samples of winter lettuce. Available at
[8] Environmental Working Group. 2004. Rocket fuel contamination in California milk. Available at
[9] Food and Drug Administration. 2004. Exploratory Data on Perchlorate in Food. Available at
[10] Kirk AB, Smith EE, Tian K, Anderson TA, Dasgupta PK. 2003. Perchlorate in milk. Environ Sci Technol. 37(21):4979-81.
[11] Kirk AB, Martinelango PK, Tian K, Dutta A, Smith EE, Dasgupta PK. 2005. Perchlorate and Iodide in Dairy and Breast Milk. Environ Sci Technol. 39(7):2011.
[12] Sanchez CA, Crump KS, Krieger RI, Khandaker NR, Gibbs JP. 2005. Perchlorate and nitrate in leafy vegetables of North America. Environ Sci Technol. 39(24):9391-7.
[13] Blount BC, Valentin-Blasini L, Osterlow JD, Mauldin JP, Pirkle JL. 2006. Perchlorate exposure of the U.S. population, 2001-2002. J Exp Sci Environ Epidem, Online 18 October 2006.
[14] Environmental Protection Agency. 2005. Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule data. Updated January 2005. Available at
[15] Zoeller, T. 2006. Collision of Basic and Applied Approaches to Risk Assessment of Thyroid Toxicants in forthcoming volume. Living in a chemical world: framing the future in light of the past. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2006: 168-190.
[16] Haddow JE, Palomake GE, Allan, WC, Williams JR, Knight GJ, and Gagnon J, et al. Maternal thyroid deficiency during pregnancy and subsequent neuropsychological development of the child. New England Journal of Medicine 1999: 341: 549-555
[17] Pop VJ, Kuijpens J., van Baar, AL, Verkert, G. et al. 1999. Low maternal free thyroxine concentrations during early pregnancy are associated with impaired psychomotor development in infancy. Clinical Endocrinology 50: 149.
[18] Kirk AB, Martinelango PK, Tian K, Dutta A, Smith EE, Dasgupta PK. 2005. Perchlorate and iodide in dairy and breast milk. Environmental Science and Technology 39: 2011-2017.
[19] Kirk AB, Dyke JV, Martin CF, Dasgupta K. 2007. Temporal patterns in perchlorate, thiocyanate, and iodide excretion in human milk. Environmental Health Perspectives 115: 182-186.
[20] Cooper, D. 2004. Sub-clinical thyroid disease: consensus or conundrum. Clinical Endocrinology 60: 410-412.
[21] Environmental Working Group. 2006. Thyroid Threat: Under Proposed Rocket Fuel Standards, Many Women Would Need Treatment To Protect Baby. Available at www.ewg.org.
10 April 2007
What is conscience?
Science of Conscience: that one may be very difficult to render comprehensible by anyone who is focused on tangible. Anyone focused on tangible repeatedly follows the line of looking first for an acceptable, approved existing definition, having nothing to do with his own life-experience, of what he "ought" to be seeing/perceiving BEFORE he will commit to "learning" anything. A simple example of ‘focused on tangible’ is this: Say, there is a course on how to bake bread in a bakery. Because the person registered for this course aspires to work in a certain bakery that uses, say white bread ingredients, with chemical additives (e.g. sugar, hydrogenated oil, and others, for taste and preservation), baked in an electrical oven, he has vested interest in finding out how this bakery operates and how his ‘knowledge’ will fit into job prospect with the bakery. However, if he is focused on tangible, his eyes will roll during any discussion of what makes a good bread, why whole wheat bread is better than white bread, the dangers of adding chemical additives, not to mention the long-term impact of electrical heating. In fact, such a person may not even last first few days, thinking this course is driving him crazy. He came here to ‘learn’ how to make bread in a bakery and he is being ‘lectured’ on nutritional values. He would be saying, “I need my job with the bakery, the heaven can wait. Just give me the ingredient of white bread, which setting the knob of the oven should be at and where is the timer button, …I didn’t pay all this money to ‘increase my virtue so I throw up next time I even eat white bread. This not a course on human health, man! If I needed such a course, I would go to medical doctor, not a Master Chef!” This down to earth example serves as a basis for first condition to increasing knowledge, you cannot be focused on tangibles and you cannot rush to find a number so you can just get back to your lazy lifestyle of robotic thinking. Other examples of this can be derived from: 1) Dessert making course; 2) Water engineering; 3) Food processing; 4) Pop-drink manufacturing; 5) Tobacco engineering; 6) Pharmaceutical Sciences; 7) Genetic engineering; 8) Fluid flow; 9) Materials and Manufacturing; 10) Building design and architecture. With a focus on tangible, every decision a person will make will be exactly opposite to what the decision should have been made based on true knowledge. Conscience is the driver of true knowledge.
Conscience is what an individual discovers by going with his own natural, unmediated reaction to events and surroundings, not assisted by or dependent upon any definition in some book somewhere. Even prophet Muhammad, the man believed to be the only person who acted on conscience all the time, did not get order from divine revelations on his daily decisions. He constantly took decisions based on conscience and some of them were later discovered to be incorrect. One such example is cited in Chapter 80 of the Qur’an. This chapter begins with
عَبَسَ وَتَوَلَّىٰٓ (١) أَن جَآءَهُ ٱلۡأَعۡمَىٰ (٢) وَمَا يُدۡرِيكَ لَعَلَّهُ يَزَّكَّىٰٓ (٣)
أَوۡ يَذَّكَّرُ فَتَنفَعَهُ ٱلذِّكۡرَىٰٓ (٤)
(1) He frowned and turned away (2) Because the blind man came unto him. (3) What could inform thee but that he might grow (in grace) (4) Or take heed and so the reminder might avail him?
Obviously, the prophet himself is being chastised for ignoring a blind man whom he ignored in favor of elites with whom he was busy discussing none other than ‘conscience’. This one shows, there is no escaping making decisions yourself. You cannot rely on other’s diktat and more importantly you cannot avoid responsibility of making decisions. You can never say, “This and that expert said, therefore I did it…My boss ordered me to do so…I wasn’t quite thinking at that time…” Not acting on conscience has no excuse. There is no such thing as pathological psychopath. Not even the Pharaohs would fall under this category.
Humans are born into society, into collectivities — family, followed by larger, different collectives — and this is where the sense of what's right and wrong becomes modulated. This cannot be taught. In fact, teaching anything, let alone ‘conscience’ is an absurd idea. You cannot teach anything to anyone. Thinking about one's actions and their consequences further strengthens and defines conscience. It is a fact of living in this world that many things emerge to challenge the individual who would let their conscience be their guide. For anyone familiar with Islam and the Qu’ran, one could say: this is where jihad (literal meaning being sustained struggle, as in continuously climbing uphill or swimming against the current) must enter the picture. Conscience is the origin of jihad. In fact, if there is no jihad, there is no act of conscience. In general, it is the same for everyone: anyone who has been normally socialized knows exactly when they have acted in violation of conscience. How the individual acts upon that realization — aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet says.
Again: the issue becomes an individual choice. We do not mean by this the individuality of the choice, which is a thoroughly American idea, but rather the pathway by which the individual's actions become linked to their thought-process, and whether the long-term is in command or something else. Such choices cannot possibly be guided by, say, some 'objective', allegedly true-for-all-circumstances-cases type of checklist of 'Good' versus 'Bad'. That’s why people focused on tangible are constantly looking for a list of ‘dos and don’ts’. They have no hope of acting on conscience. The individual, on the other hand, can have their own checklist, and, if it is based on long-term, and not short-term self-interest, such a checklist may even be valid at least in principle for other individuals who do not operate according to short-term self-interest. What there cannot be is any absolute checklist that works equally for those whose interest is based on short-term serving of self and those whose interest is actually long-term. THAT's a defining feature of the "science" of conscience. Thus, for example, Khan and Islam (2007)’s recent book on sustainability is part of science of conscience because its starting premise is that inherent sustainability, obviously based on the long term, is the only sustainability that matters. Same goes for Economics of Intangibles (Zatzman and Islam, 2007). None of this forecloses usingany or all the mathematics and other findings of science to date. Rather, it imposes the requirement that the first-assumption of one's chosen line or area of research is checked carefully before proceeding further with selecting the relevant or applicable mathematics and other modeling tools and deciding how far these are applied, etc.
So, what is the single most important criterion for judging if an action has been based on conscience? Have you considered long-term implications of the action. Long-term here means infinity. In fact, one can argue, it is the only one that an individual has absolute control over. He cannot have any control over his short term or anyone else’s short-term and long-term, without violating natural laws. Violation of natural laws is aphenomenal.
Anti-Conscience/Ignorance
Conscience/knowledge
Percentage of actions based on long-term
This figure shows true knowledge requires actions, including thinking, based on long-term. Without considering one’s long-term (which is the only one, one has the power to control), all judgments will be implosive, because they contradict nature. You cannot win a fight against Nature. (FIGURE NOT SHOWN)
Aknowledgements
Substantial contributions by Gary Zatzman in organizing the thought and writing the first draft is gratefully acknowledged.
References
Khan, M.I. and Islam, M.R., 2007, Handbook of Sustainable Petroleum Engineering Operations, Gulf Publishing Co., Houston, USA, 458 pp.
Zatzman, G.M. and Islam, M.R., 2007, Economics of Intangibles, Nova Science Publishers, New York, USA, 393 pp.
Science of Conscience: that one may be very difficult to render comprehensible by anyone who is focused on tangible. Anyone focused on tangible repeatedly follows the line of looking first for an acceptable, approved existing definition, having nothing to do with his own life-experience, of what he "ought" to be seeing/perceiving BEFORE he will commit to "learning" anything. A simple example of ‘focused on tangible’ is this: Say, there is a course on how to bake bread in a bakery. Because the person registered for this course aspires to work in a certain bakery that uses, say white bread ingredients, with chemical additives (e.g. sugar, hydrogenated oil, and others, for taste and preservation), baked in an electrical oven, he has vested interest in finding out how this bakery operates and how his ‘knowledge’ will fit into job prospect with the bakery. However, if he is focused on tangible, his eyes will roll during any discussion of what makes a good bread, why whole wheat bread is better than white bread, the dangers of adding chemical additives, not to mention the long-term impact of electrical heating. In fact, such a person may not even last first few days, thinking this course is driving him crazy. He came here to ‘learn’ how to make bread in a bakery and he is being ‘lectured’ on nutritional values. He would be saying, “I need my job with the bakery, the heaven can wait. Just give me the ingredient of white bread, which setting the knob of the oven should be at and where is the timer button, …I didn’t pay all this money to ‘increase my virtue so I throw up next time I even eat white bread. This not a course on human health, man! If I needed such a course, I would go to medical doctor, not a Master Chef!” This down to earth example serves as a basis for first condition to increasing knowledge, you cannot be focused on tangibles and you cannot rush to find a number so you can just get back to your lazy lifestyle of robotic thinking. Other examples of this can be derived from: 1) Dessert making course; 2) Water engineering; 3) Food processing; 4) Pop-drink manufacturing; 5) Tobacco engineering; 6) Pharmaceutical Sciences; 7) Genetic engineering; 8) Fluid flow; 9) Materials and Manufacturing; 10) Building design and architecture. With a focus on tangible, every decision a person will make will be exactly opposite to what the decision should have been made based on true knowledge. Conscience is the driver of true knowledge.
Conscience is what an individual discovers by going with his own natural, unmediated reaction to events and surroundings, not assisted by or dependent upon any definition in some book somewhere. Even prophet Muhammad, the man believed to be the only person who acted on conscience all the time, did not get order from divine revelations on his daily decisions. He constantly took decisions based on conscience and some of them were later discovered to be incorrect. One such example is cited in Chapter 80 of the Qur’an. This chapter begins with
عَبَسَ وَتَوَلَّىٰٓ (١) أَن جَآءَهُ ٱلۡأَعۡمَىٰ (٢) وَمَا يُدۡرِيكَ لَعَلَّهُ يَزَّكَّىٰٓ (٣)
أَوۡ يَذَّكَّرُ فَتَنفَعَهُ ٱلذِّكۡرَىٰٓ (٤)
(1) He frowned and turned away (2) Because the blind man came unto him. (3) What could inform thee but that he might grow (in grace) (4) Or take heed and so the reminder might avail him?
Obviously, the prophet himself is being chastised for ignoring a blind man whom he ignored in favor of elites with whom he was busy discussing none other than ‘conscience’. This one shows, there is no escaping making decisions yourself. You cannot rely on other’s diktat and more importantly you cannot avoid responsibility of making decisions. You can never say, “This and that expert said, therefore I did it…My boss ordered me to do so…I wasn’t quite thinking at that time…” Not acting on conscience has no excuse. There is no such thing as pathological psychopath. Not even the Pharaohs would fall under this category.
Humans are born into society, into collectivities — family, followed by larger, different collectives — and this is where the sense of what's right and wrong becomes modulated. This cannot be taught. In fact, teaching anything, let alone ‘conscience’ is an absurd idea. You cannot teach anything to anyone. Thinking about one's actions and their consequences further strengthens and defines conscience. It is a fact of living in this world that many things emerge to challenge the individual who would let their conscience be their guide. For anyone familiar with Islam and the Qu’ran, one could say: this is where jihad (literal meaning being sustained struggle, as in continuously climbing uphill or swimming against the current) must enter the picture. Conscience is the origin of jihad. In fact, if there is no jihad, there is no act of conscience. In general, it is the same for everyone: anyone who has been normally socialized knows exactly when they have acted in violation of conscience. How the individual acts upon that realization — aye, there's the rub, as Hamlet says.
Again: the issue becomes an individual choice. We do not mean by this the individuality of the choice, which is a thoroughly American idea, but rather the pathway by which the individual's actions become linked to their thought-process, and whether the long-term is in command or something else. Such choices cannot possibly be guided by, say, some 'objective', allegedly true-for-all-circumstances-cases type of checklist of 'Good' versus 'Bad'. That’s why people focused on tangible are constantly looking for a list of ‘dos and don’ts’. They have no hope of acting on conscience. The individual, on the other hand, can have their own checklist, and, if it is based on long-term, and not short-term self-interest, such a checklist may even be valid at least in principle for other individuals who do not operate according to short-term self-interest. What there cannot be is any absolute checklist that works equally for those whose interest is based on short-term serving of self and those whose interest is actually long-term. THAT's a defining feature of the "science" of conscience. Thus, for example, Khan and Islam (2007)’s recent book on sustainability is part of science of conscience because its starting premise is that inherent sustainability, obviously based on the long term, is the only sustainability that matters. Same goes for Economics of Intangibles (Zatzman and Islam, 2007). None of this forecloses usingany or all the mathematics and other findings of science to date. Rather, it imposes the requirement that the first-assumption of one's chosen line or area of research is checked carefully before proceeding further with selecting the relevant or applicable mathematics and other modeling tools and deciding how far these are applied, etc.
So, what is the single most important criterion for judging if an action has been based on conscience? Have you considered long-term implications of the action. Long-term here means infinity. In fact, one can argue, it is the only one that an individual has absolute control over. He cannot have any control over his short term or anyone else’s short-term and long-term, without violating natural laws. Violation of natural laws is aphenomenal.
Anti-Conscience/Ignorance
Conscience/knowledge
Percentage of actions based on long-term
This figure shows true knowledge requires actions, including thinking, based on long-term. Without considering one’s long-term (which is the only one, one has the power to control), all judgments will be implosive, because they contradict nature. You cannot win a fight against Nature. (FIGURE NOT SHOWN)
Aknowledgements
Substantial contributions by Gary Zatzman in organizing the thought and writing the first draft is gratefully acknowledged.
References
Khan, M.I. and Islam, M.R., 2007, Handbook of Sustainable Petroleum Engineering Operations, Gulf Publishing Co., Houston, USA, 458 pp.
Zatzman, G.M. and Islam, M.R., 2007, Economics of Intangibles, Nova Science Publishers, New York, USA, 393 pp.
08 April 2007
Why real and artificial products behave differently?
أَفَمَن يَخۡلُقُ كَمَن لَّا يَخۡلُقُۗ أَفَلَا تَذَڪَّرُونَ (١٧)
Is the One who creates the same as the one who creates not (16.17, Al-Qur’an)
هَـٰذَا خَلۡقُ ٱللَّهِ فَأَرُونِى مَاذَا خَلَقَ ٱلَّذِينَ مِن دُونِهِۦۚ بَلِ ٱلظَّـٰلِمُونَ فِى ضَلَـٰلٍ۬ مُّبِينٍ۬ (١١)
This the creation of Allah. Now, show me that which those beside him have created. Nay, the wrongdoers are in manifest error. (31.11, Al-Qur’an)
The above two verses lays out the fundamental tenet of creation. Man cannot be a creator and if he attempts to create something, the following will be the fate.
Every action has two components to it: (1) origin; (2) pathway. The origin of any action is the intention. So, if a human being considers making something, it is automatically a false intention, as he cannot create anything. He has no power over his own short-term, let alone on others. The immediate fate of this false intention is that the entire process is based on a false or aphenomenal foundation or stems from aphenomenal root. As a consequence, one doesn’t even have to consider Point (2), i.e., the pathway of the action, the entire process is aphenomenal. Say, we want to make sugar so we can replace honey with sugar. Honey is the only complete food (including water) known to mankind. The moment we want to replace honey with sugar, we know that the process is inherently corrupt and you are set to fight against nature, a fight you cannot win. So, what happens to sugar when it actually comes to existence? It serves the opposite purpose of the one perpetrated by the false intention. So, what is the intention of the Creator behind creating sugar. After all, man cannot create anything, so why did the Creator allow the creation of such a product. If you can answer this, you can also answer why the Creator allowed Pharaohs to rule for many years, why He also allowed G W Bush to be ‘elected’ ‘leader of the free world’, twice. Sugar may have been allowed to be in existence but don’t blame the Creator for allowing human beings to make such a mess (closed word to ‘fassad’ as in Chapter 89.12 of the Qur’an:
فَأَكۡثَرُواْ فِيہَا ٱلۡفَسَادَ (١٢ ).
Human beings were created as vicegerent to the Creator. Would you say, the Creator failed in His original intention? The ones who follow the aphenomenal model are no vicegerent of the Truth. Our logic of true and false does not apply to the Creator as He is also the Creator of our logic and He is like none of the creation, as stated in Chapter 112, verse 4 of the Qur’an (see below):
وَلَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُ ۥ ڪُفُوًا أَحَدُۢ (٤) (there is none comparable unto Him)
At the end, all creations, including human beings, behave according to the intention of the Creator. The Qur’an states what was the intention behind creating human beings with conscience (vicegerent of the Creator) and what was the intention behind other objects than humans (it is to benefit men). It is not explicitly stated the intention behind creating humans who fail to act upon conscience and at the same time the products and processes that these humans attempt to create based on the aphenomenal model. Our logic states, they do not follow the false intention of humans. The Creator’s intention is never false, so this logic wouldn’t apply to Him (in Arabic, ‘Him’, ‘He’ also applies to neutral gender – another reason true logic cannot be done in English).
أَفَمَن يَخۡلُقُ كَمَن لَّا يَخۡلُقُۗ أَفَلَا تَذَڪَّرُونَ (١٧)
Is the One who creates the same as the one who creates not (16.17, Al-Qur’an)
هَـٰذَا خَلۡقُ ٱللَّهِ فَأَرُونِى مَاذَا خَلَقَ ٱلَّذِينَ مِن دُونِهِۦۚ بَلِ ٱلظَّـٰلِمُونَ فِى ضَلَـٰلٍ۬ مُّبِينٍ۬ (١١)
This the creation of Allah. Now, show me that which those beside him have created. Nay, the wrongdoers are in manifest error. (31.11, Al-Qur’an)
The above two verses lays out the fundamental tenet of creation. Man cannot be a creator and if he attempts to create something, the following will be the fate.
Every action has two components to it: (1) origin; (2) pathway. The origin of any action is the intention. So, if a human being considers making something, it is automatically a false intention, as he cannot create anything. He has no power over his own short-term, let alone on others. The immediate fate of this false intention is that the entire process is based on a false or aphenomenal foundation or stems from aphenomenal root. As a consequence, one doesn’t even have to consider Point (2), i.e., the pathway of the action, the entire process is aphenomenal. Say, we want to make sugar so we can replace honey with sugar. Honey is the only complete food (including water) known to mankind. The moment we want to replace honey with sugar, we know that the process is inherently corrupt and you are set to fight against nature, a fight you cannot win. So, what happens to sugar when it actually comes to existence? It serves the opposite purpose of the one perpetrated by the false intention. So, what is the intention of the Creator behind creating sugar. After all, man cannot create anything, so why did the Creator allow the creation of such a product. If you can answer this, you can also answer why the Creator allowed Pharaohs to rule for many years, why He also allowed G W Bush to be ‘elected’ ‘leader of the free world’, twice. Sugar may have been allowed to be in existence but don’t blame the Creator for allowing human beings to make such a mess (closed word to ‘fassad’ as in Chapter 89.12 of the Qur’an:
فَأَكۡثَرُواْ فِيہَا ٱلۡفَسَادَ (١٢ ).
Human beings were created as vicegerent to the Creator. Would you say, the Creator failed in His original intention? The ones who follow the aphenomenal model are no vicegerent of the Truth. Our logic of true and false does not apply to the Creator as He is also the Creator of our logic and He is like none of the creation, as stated in Chapter 112, verse 4 of the Qur’an (see below):
وَلَمۡ يَكُن لَّهُ ۥ ڪُفُوًا أَحَدُۢ (٤) (there is none comparable unto Him)
At the end, all creations, including human beings, behave according to the intention of the Creator. The Qur’an states what was the intention behind creating human beings with conscience (vicegerent of the Creator) and what was the intention behind other objects than humans (it is to benefit men). It is not explicitly stated the intention behind creating humans who fail to act upon conscience and at the same time the products and processes that these humans attempt to create based on the aphenomenal model. Our logic states, they do not follow the false intention of humans. The Creator’s intention is never false, so this logic wouldn’t apply to Him (in Arabic, ‘Him’, ‘He’ also applies to neutral gender – another reason true logic cannot be done in English).
26 February 2007
THE CLUB OF ROME: INCUBATOR FOR THE "SCIENCE" OF THE APHENOMENAL MODEL
As the following excerpt from an obituary from today's editions of The New York Times discloses, the Club of Rome and its work mark the starting-point of the scientific research problematic in which the modern aphenomenal model has been incubated. By ‘modern’, we refer to the version of the model based on theories developed from the field of systems and operations research. These theories conceal or downplay the roles of human planning and intervention in the contemporary technological disaster. Their modus operandi consists in ascribing outcomes not to class interests and intentions — including their human authors — but rather instead to the automaticity of systems and their operation. This approach shifted the focus away from the contradictions engendered by centuries of foreign domination and the local rebellions and resistance that this fuelled. Instead, the focus became one of fine-tuning the automaticity of such systems with more comprehensive planning. In practice, disguised by gobbledygook about “better feeedback loops”, the content of this comprehensiveness included continuing ever-greater intrusion by North American and European governments, and their tools inside and outside governments of developing countries, to keep public right co-opted by monopoly right in these countries, making peoples and governments in the developing world kowtow to the whims of North American and European corporate molochs.
Starting in 1960, the Rostow brothers (Eugene Rostow in the CIA, Walt Whitman Rostow as the author of The Stages of Economic Growth) unfolded their theories and practices for “modernising” developing countries in a manner that would integrate them more closely, and subjugate them, within a U.S.-dominated imperium (later dubbed the Pax Americana). This was applied with special vigour in central and South America and the Latin Caribbean. With the sole exception of Cuba, by the mid-1960s there was no government in Latin America whose armed forces and police were not compromised and embroiled in programs of the CIA and the US armed forces to train and equip death squads. The theories and practices engendered by this line of political economy were what informed, and provided the warp and woof of, the Club of Rome's entire outlook and approach. Among other aims, this was intended to further the same aims of foreign colonial domination in general without openly reasserting the discredited open racism of Eurocentric outlook in particular.
With the installation of the Kennedy administration, imperial “help”, i.e., foreign intervention and domination developed largely under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was mandated for modernising developing countries. With its modelling of overpopulation as a condition endemic to economies that fail to achieve critical mass and take off, etc., the Club of Rome produced many “scientific” justifications ascribing the economic difficulties of developing countries to their unfittedness to handle properly the “complexity of modern systems and their requirements” — a logic resonating with toxic British imperialist noises spawned in the 19th century about ”races that are best-fitted for ‘self-government’ ”. No blame for these countries’ failure to thrive was ever attached to any of the destructive consequences of centuries-long colonial intervention and dictate and the massive violence unleashed by colonial masters to prop up local ruling tools against rebellion from below.
The Club of Rome ensured that their own actual consciousness would never be asserted openly — that “we” your overlords, possessing the powerful magic of systems analysis, are white and know what’s what, and what’s best, whereas “you” our lowly subjects are lesser breeds without the law in need of continual whiffs of grapeshot combined with the occasional good extermination. It focused instead on effecting some cosmetic surgery on the ugly and hated visage of European colonialism, enough to ensure the return of this imperialist agenda — newly decked out as “fresh American thinking” — to the commanding centre of world affairs.
=======
Hasan Ozbekhan, 86, Economist Who Helped Found Global Group, Dies
By JEREMY PEARCE
The New York Times, Mon 26 February 2007, Page B6
{EXCERPTS]
Hasan Ozbekhan, a Turkish-born economist and management expert who helped found the Club of Rome, a group of thinkers who came together to examine unwieldy global problems like food shortages and overpopulation, died on Feb. 12 in Philadelphia. He was 86.
...
In the early 1970s, Mr. Ozbekhan (pronounced UHZ-beh-kahn), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and applied the field-of-systems theory to global problems, helped inspire the group of planners, diplomats, scientists and academics who came together as the Club of Rome. He wrote a paper, “The Predicament of Mankind,” that became an influential core document of the group, addressing issues of energy, overpopulation, depletion of resources and environmental degradation.
Alexander N. Christakis, a former colleague in the Club of Rome, said Mr. Ozbekhan’s writings constituted “a forward-looking document” and argued that global problems were “strongly interconnected and that any attempts to deal with them independently would simply not work.”
Mr. Ozbekhan, who was the club’s director of research and a member of its executive committee, later resigned, but the organization continues and now operates from Hamburg.
In 1975, while working as a consultant for the French government, Mr. Ozbekhan published a report about long-range planning in Paris. The report reviewed land use, cultural issues and the city’s economy and tried to provide the French with an avenue toward developing the city “within the context of a globalizing world.” In 1977, he gave a lecture on the future of Paris before the Royal Society in London.
Hasan Ziya Ozbekhan was born in Istanbul. He earned an undergraduate degree from the London School of Economics. He became an American citizen in the 1950s.
From 1963 to 1969, Mr. Ozbekhan was principal scientist and director of planning at the System Development Corporation, a military research group and software development company in Santa Monica, Calif.
In 1970, he was named a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also taught statistics, operations research and social systems sciences. He retired in 1992.
...
As the following excerpt from an obituary from today's editions of The New York Times discloses, the Club of Rome and its work mark the starting-point of the scientific research problematic in which the modern aphenomenal model has been incubated. By ‘modern’, we refer to the version of the model based on theories developed from the field of systems and operations research. These theories conceal or downplay the roles of human planning and intervention in the contemporary technological disaster. Their modus operandi consists in ascribing outcomes not to class interests and intentions — including their human authors — but rather instead to the automaticity of systems and their operation. This approach shifted the focus away from the contradictions engendered by centuries of foreign domination and the local rebellions and resistance that this fuelled. Instead, the focus became one of fine-tuning the automaticity of such systems with more comprehensive planning. In practice, disguised by gobbledygook about “better feeedback loops”, the content of this comprehensiveness included continuing ever-greater intrusion by North American and European governments, and their tools inside and outside governments of developing countries, to keep public right co-opted by monopoly right in these countries, making peoples and governments in the developing world kowtow to the whims of North American and European corporate molochs.
Starting in 1960, the Rostow brothers (Eugene Rostow in the CIA, Walt Whitman Rostow as the author of The Stages of Economic Growth) unfolded their theories and practices for “modernising” developing countries in a manner that would integrate them more closely, and subjugate them, within a U.S.-dominated imperium (later dubbed the Pax Americana). This was applied with special vigour in central and South America and the Latin Caribbean. With the sole exception of Cuba, by the mid-1960s there was no government in Latin America whose armed forces and police were not compromised and embroiled in programs of the CIA and the US armed forces to train and equip death squads. The theories and practices engendered by this line of political economy were what informed, and provided the warp and woof of, the Club of Rome's entire outlook and approach. Among other aims, this was intended to further the same aims of foreign colonial domination in general without openly reasserting the discredited open racism of Eurocentric outlook in particular.
With the installation of the Kennedy administration, imperial “help”, i.e., foreign intervention and domination developed largely under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was mandated for modernising developing countries. With its modelling of overpopulation as a condition endemic to economies that fail to achieve critical mass and take off, etc., the Club of Rome produced many “scientific” justifications ascribing the economic difficulties of developing countries to their unfittedness to handle properly the “complexity of modern systems and their requirements” — a logic resonating with toxic British imperialist noises spawned in the 19th century about ”races that are best-fitted for ‘self-government’ ”. No blame for these countries’ failure to thrive was ever attached to any of the destructive consequences of centuries-long colonial intervention and dictate and the massive violence unleashed by colonial masters to prop up local ruling tools against rebellion from below.
The Club of Rome ensured that their own actual consciousness would never be asserted openly — that “we” your overlords, possessing the powerful magic of systems analysis, are white and know what’s what, and what’s best, whereas “you” our lowly subjects are lesser breeds without the law in need of continual whiffs of grapeshot combined with the occasional good extermination. It focused instead on effecting some cosmetic surgery on the ugly and hated visage of European colonialism, enough to ensure the return of this imperialist agenda — newly decked out as “fresh American thinking” — to the commanding centre of world affairs.
=======
Hasan Ozbekhan, 86, Economist Who Helped Found Global Group, Dies
By JEREMY PEARCE
The New York Times, Mon 26 February 2007, Page B6
{EXCERPTS]
Hasan Ozbekhan, a Turkish-born economist and management expert who helped found the Club of Rome, a group of thinkers who came together to examine unwieldy global problems like food shortages and overpopulation, died on Feb. 12 in Philadelphia. He was 86.
...
In the early 1970s, Mr. Ozbekhan (pronounced UHZ-beh-kahn), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and applied the field-of-systems theory to global problems, helped inspire the group of planners, diplomats, scientists and academics who came together as the Club of Rome. He wrote a paper, “The Predicament of Mankind,” that became an influential core document of the group, addressing issues of energy, overpopulation, depletion of resources and environmental degradation.
Alexander N. Christakis, a former colleague in the Club of Rome, said Mr. Ozbekhan’s writings constituted “a forward-looking document” and argued that global problems were “strongly interconnected and that any attempts to deal with them independently would simply not work.”
Mr. Ozbekhan, who was the club’s director of research and a member of its executive committee, later resigned, but the organization continues and now operates from Hamburg.
In 1975, while working as a consultant for the French government, Mr. Ozbekhan published a report about long-range planning in Paris. The report reviewed land use, cultural issues and the city’s economy and tried to provide the French with an avenue toward developing the city “within the context of a globalizing world.” In 1977, he gave a lecture on the future of Paris before the Royal Society in London.
Hasan Ziya Ozbekhan was born in Istanbul. He earned an undergraduate degree from the London School of Economics. He became an American citizen in the 1950s.
From 1963 to 1969, Mr. Ozbekhan was principal scientist and director of planning at the System Development Corporation, a military research group and software development company in Santa Monica, Calif.
In 1970, he was named a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also taught statistics, operations research and social systems sciences. He retired in 1992.
...
08 February 2007
YOU DON'T NEED TO BE EINSTEIN TO GRASP THE APHENOMENAL MODEL UNDERLYING THE PROFITABLE BUSINESS OF SMOKING-CESSATION MEDICATIONS
The graphic that comes with Kevin Helliker's front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled NICOTINE FIX- Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry; Government Guidelines Don't Push Cold Turkey; Advisers' Company Ties[1] compares the success rates in quitting smoking of those who quit cold-turkey versus those who relied on medications. It shows, first, that almost as many ex-smokers who quit "cold turkey" as ex-smokers who relied on anti-smoking medications are still off cigarettes 3 months after quitting. Additionally, more "cold turkey" ex-smokers are still off after 9 months than users of anti-smoking medications. These two facts form a profound and powerful indictment of the entire smoking-cessation sector of Big Pharma.
The aphenomenality of smoking-cessation pharmaceuticals lies in the assumption that smoking is a habit requiring external intervention to break. This is the assumption that becomes the premise for product development and marketing.
Smoking as a mass habit is widely blamed on becoming addicted to nicotine. A more complete statement of the case is more something like the following:
From the mid-1950s, after the Khrushchev group replaced the Stalin and his circle, the U.S. ruling circles were consumed with intensifying all forms of competition --- military and otherwise --- with the Soviet Union. The aim was to force the latter into a crisis that would bring it crashing down. The U.S. ruling circles had numerous and extensive ambitions beyond U.S. territory which they wanted to pursue without hindrance. The main hindrance these ambitions faced on the home front, among U.S. citizens, was the existing level of participation of the American public in political affairs. This was much higher than the authorities liked. Maximum consumerism was thus developed to serve both the anti-Soviet and the pro-U.S. imperial aims. Middle-class standards of high consumption were encouraged with the aim of wiping out and eventually displacing mass participation in the political process at any level within the United States, and to reinforce propaganda representations of the Soviet bloc as uniformly dingy, stodgy, unmodern, without household appliances, etc.
Meeting these standards, however, imposed ever-increasing levels of personal anxiety on individuals trying to handle the accompanying stresses at the place of work, at home and in social intercourse. One index of this increased general level of societal and individual stress could be seen in the rapid rise in sales of drugs to handle mood and appetite -- tranquilisers, vitamins etc. Noting this trend, Big Tobacco consciously set out to transform the cigarette into a nicotine delivery system, ensuring profits from generation to generation.
Einstein pointed out that the thinking that got one into a problem was not going to get one out. Sure enough, as the evidence served up by the Wall Street Journal exposé confirms, the thinking that the medical science bought and paid for by one massive concentration of capital resources to hook people on nicotine delivered in cancer-causing cigarettes could be redeployed by some other concentration of capital resources to "help" people "stop" smoking profitably has not gotten the society out of the problem of massive concentrations of capital usurping the public's right to good health in the first place.
~~~~
Note
1.Wall Street Journal subscribers only may access this article online.
The graphic that comes with Kevin Helliker's front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal entitled NICOTINE FIX- Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry; Government Guidelines Don't Push Cold Turkey; Advisers' Company Ties[1] compares the success rates in quitting smoking of those who quit cold-turkey versus those who relied on medications. It shows, first, that almost as many ex-smokers who quit "cold turkey" as ex-smokers who relied on anti-smoking medications are still off cigarettes 3 months after quitting. Additionally, more "cold turkey" ex-smokers are still off after 9 months than users of anti-smoking medications. These two facts form a profound and powerful indictment of the entire smoking-cessation sector of Big Pharma.
The aphenomenality of smoking-cessation pharmaceuticals lies in the assumption that smoking is a habit requiring external intervention to break. This is the assumption that becomes the premise for product development and marketing.
Smoking as a mass habit is widely blamed on becoming addicted to nicotine. A more complete statement of the case is more something like the following:
From the mid-1950s, after the Khrushchev group replaced the Stalin and his circle, the U.S. ruling circles were consumed with intensifying all forms of competition --- military and otherwise --- with the Soviet Union. The aim was to force the latter into a crisis that would bring it crashing down. The U.S. ruling circles had numerous and extensive ambitions beyond U.S. territory which they wanted to pursue without hindrance. The main hindrance these ambitions faced on the home front, among U.S. citizens, was the existing level of participation of the American public in political affairs. This was much higher than the authorities liked. Maximum consumerism was thus developed to serve both the anti-Soviet and the pro-U.S. imperial aims. Middle-class standards of high consumption were encouraged with the aim of wiping out and eventually displacing mass participation in the political process at any level within the United States, and to reinforce propaganda representations of the Soviet bloc as uniformly dingy, stodgy, unmodern, without household appliances, etc.
Meeting these standards, however, imposed ever-increasing levels of personal anxiety on individuals trying to handle the accompanying stresses at the place of work, at home and in social intercourse. One index of this increased general level of societal and individual stress could be seen in the rapid rise in sales of drugs to handle mood and appetite -- tranquilisers, vitamins etc. Noting this trend, Big Tobacco consciously set out to transform the cigarette into a nicotine delivery system, ensuring profits from generation to generation.
Einstein pointed out that the thinking that got one into a problem was not going to get one out. Sure enough, as the evidence served up by the Wall Street Journal exposé confirms, the thinking that the medical science bought and paid for by one massive concentration of capital resources to hook people on nicotine delivered in cancer-causing cigarettes could be redeployed by some other concentration of capital resources to "help" people "stop" smoking profitably has not gotten the society out of the problem of massive concentrations of capital usurping the public's right to good health in the first place.
~~~~
Note
1.Wall Street Journal subscribers only may access this article online.
06 February 2007
TRANSPARENCY AND THE APHENOMENAL MODEL
The aphenomenal modelling of "transparency" starts from placing maximum transparency at one end of a spectrum, and total opacity at the other end, and then discussing degrees in between these poles. As this approach renders it impossible to assert what transparency itself is, in the first place, then what transparency is in its relationships to its internal components and to the external world, aphenomenality is inherent in it.
There are four kinds of transparency that can be readily distinguished:
1 - no screen between subject & object, and mutual awareness of each other;
2 - subject knows there is a screen but object does not, e.g., one-way glass;
3 - neither the subject nor the object know there is a screen through which other third parties observe them; and
4 - both subject and object know there is a screen and/but they can observe one another.
As far as an external third-party observer is concerned, the first, third and fourth look substantially similar, yet each of these scenarios would obviously look and be experienced entirely differently by the subject and object involved. The first, second and fourth are transparent for the subject and a third-party. In the second case, nothing is transparent for the object, and in the third something is hidden from both the subject and object even though they experience transparency with respect to each other.
Natural transparency - the first case - involves no third party regulating or modulating relations between a subject and an object. Aphenomenality arises in each of the other cases as an outgrowth of such third-party involvement.
The aphenomenal modelling of "transparency" starts from placing maximum transparency at one end of a spectrum, and total opacity at the other end, and then discussing degrees in between these poles. As this approach renders it impossible to assert what transparency itself is, in the first place, then what transparency is in its relationships to its internal components and to the external world, aphenomenality is inherent in it.
There are four kinds of transparency that can be readily distinguished:
1 - no screen between subject & object, and mutual awareness of each other;
2 - subject knows there is a screen but object does not, e.g., one-way glass;
3 - neither the subject nor the object know there is a screen through which other third parties observe them; and
4 - both subject and object know there is a screen and/but they can observe one another.
As far as an external third-party observer is concerned, the first, third and fourth look substantially similar, yet each of these scenarios would obviously look and be experienced entirely differently by the subject and object involved. The first, second and fourth are transparent for the subject and a third-party. In the second case, nothing is transparent for the object, and in the third something is hidden from both the subject and object even though they experience transparency with respect to each other.
Natural transparency - the first case - involves no third party regulating or modulating relations between a subject and an object. Aphenomenality arises in each of the other cases as an outgrowth of such third-party involvement.
04 February 2007
Political Economy of the Aphenomenal Model:
THE HONEY → SUGAR → SACCHARIN®→ASPARTAME® , OR HSS®A®, PRINCIPLE
Introduction
We are compelled to live out our lives in an aphenomenal universe. One of its features is the “Honey → Sugar → Saccharin®→Aspartame®” principle [1].
The central idea captured in the form of this principle concerns the degradation of the natural qualities of goods and services through intensified refining. Used originally without further external processing, materials taken originally from the natural environment (including even the living thoughts of human beings) become degraded step-by-step as a result of adding ever-further stages of external processing. This can carry on potentially indefinitely.
It is the aphenomenal quality of this principle that renders it so useful to the status-quo. This aphenomenality resides in its unquestioned underlying assumption that further refinement (or refining) must in the end improve quality [2].
Here we propose to discuss some aspects of the political economy of this principle.
I. The HSS®A® Principle & Monopoly Right
Greater refining is not a function of the increased application of creative human labouring power by the actual producers. On the contrary, it is a function of the owners and managers of production investing more in fixed capital, to replace creative living labour with more advanced machines. These machines are actually accumulated labouring power congealed in machine form, i.e., dead labour. In effect, dead labour is being employed to replace living labour [3].
The refining displaces natural elements of the original source material. Often the replacements are components in molecular forms that either would not be found in nature either at all, or in that particular physical phase, or in the presence of so-called catalysts comprised from laboratory-created combinations not normally present in, or characteristic to, nature. This displacement marks one of the main yet intangible manifestations of the degradation of quality after upgraded refining [4]. On the one hand, regardless of the relative increase in capital-intensiveness, an absolute increase in “total” labour content, i.e., of living labour plus dead labour, is indeed possible and is effected in practice by these means. At the same time, however, that absolute increase in “labour” content incidental to the additional “refining” effort neither prevents nor arrests the tendency for natural components to decrease relatively or absolutely compared to synthesised components in the end-product. What else is taking place within this transition? Exercising power on behalf of a monopoly, oligopoly or cartel, managers and owners of production are dictating the use-value of the commodities that they produce and market [5]. The ability to dictate how commodities will be used, and what value they have in use, derives from the exercise of monopoly right [6].
The capacity to dictate use-value by “over-engineering” at the point of production marks a major break with the situation that prevailed before that point. With the emergence of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels, there were major efforts undertaken to deploy mass advertising campaigns to invent new social wants which monopolies then fulfilled with products [7]. The purchasing power for consumption available in the markets that grew in this period of the 1950s and 1960s was based in the Third World, and mostly among the previously very impoverished at that. American levels of consumption were not going to become available any time too soon in these areas. The need and ability of the American system to expand on a global scale was also blocked by the presence of the Soviet camp. In the bipolar world of that time, monopolies could secure superprofits “at the margin” by inventing new needs for new products as opportunities arose. However, monopoly right was not in a position to trump public right, and a wide array of product standards were indeed regulated by various government agencies, thus posing a potentially punishing financial risk to monopolies that attempted to bully the markets with products that failed to acquire approval from these bodies [8].
Pre-monopoly capitalism had developed and spread across the world by focusing entirely and exclusively on the generation and capture of the exchange-value of commodities. Commodities were a vector, a delivery-vehicle, for this exchange value, in the same way that the modern cigarette was redefined by the U.S. tobacco giants in the 1950s as a nicotine delivery vehicle, or that the anopheles mosquito is described as a vector for the spread of malaria. Capitalists produced commodities to piggyback on these uses and needs which already existed among the populace in order to generate and capture the exchange-value congealed in these commodities. The uses and needs were labelled “demand”, the piggy-backing operation was labelled “supply” -- and voilà! neo-classical economics was born.
In the global economy of the post-bipolar world, on the other hand, monopoly right asserts its priority over public right. It does this by redefining many of the terms of conditions of the economics-of-scale to develop or apply in determining how far, in each case, to redefine and manipulate use-value. For example, honey is perceptibly “sugar”-y to taste. We want the sugar, but honey is also anti-bacterial, and cannot rot. Therefore, the rate at which customers will have to return for the next supply is much lower and slower than the rate at which customers would have to return to resupply themselves with, say, refined sugar. In other cases – in Bangladesh, for example – the amount of honey available in the market is extended by adding refined sugar. The content of this “economic” logic then takes over and drives what happens to honey and sugar as commodities. While there are natural limits to how far honey as a natural product can actually be commodified, sugar is refined to become addictive so the consumer becomes hooked and the producer’s profit is secured. What never enters into considerations of these economics of scale is the matter of intention. Here lies the heart of darkness in a world dictated by monopoly right [9].
II. Economics of Scale under Monopoly Right
There are two especially crucial premises of the economics-of-scale under monopoly right that lie hidden within the notion of “upgrading by refining”.
The first premise of economics of scale under monopoly right is that unit costs of production can be lowered (and unit profit therefore expanded) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction. If relatively free competition still prevailed, this would not arise even as a passing consideration. In an economy lacking monopolies, oligopolies and-or cartels dictating effective demand by manipulating supply, unit costs of production remain mainly a function of some given level of technology. Once a certain proportion of investment in fixed-capital (equipment and ground-rent for the production facility) becomes the norm generally among the various producers competing for customers in the same market, the unit costs of production cannot fall or be driven arbitrarily below a certain floor level without risking business loss. The unit cost thus becomes downwardly inelastic.
The unit cost of production can become downwardly elastic, i.e., capable of falling readily below any asserted floor price, under two conditions:
1. during moments of technological transformation of the industry, in which producers who are first to lower their unit costs by using more advanced machinery will gain market shares, temporarily, at the expense of competitors; or
2. in conditions where financially stronger producers absorb financially weakened competitors. In neoclassical models which assume competitiveness in the economy, this second circumstance is associated with the temporary cyclical crisis. This is the crisis that breaks out from time to time in periods of extended oversupply or weakening of demand. In reality, contrary to the assumptions of the neoclassical economic models, the impacts of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels have entirely displaced those of free competition and have become normal rather than the exception. Under such conditions, the lowering of unit costs of production (and expansion thereby of unit profit) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction, is no longer an occasional, and exceptional, tactical opportunity. It is a permanent policy option: monopolies, oligopolies and cartels manipulate supply and demand because they can.
The second premise of the economics of scale possibly under monopoly right is that only the desired portion of Q end-product is accounted as having tangible economic, and therefore also intangible social, “value”, while any unwanted consequences – e.g., degradation of, or risks to, public health, damage(s) to the environment, etc. – are discounted and dismissed as “faux frais” [false, incidental costs] of production. Here it becomes possible to glimpse a node around which resistance could begin to form, because popular rejection of this position gives rise to consciousness about the unsustainability of the present order. These methods of continuing indefinitely to refine nature out by substituting ever more elaborate chemical “equivalents” hitherto unknown in the natural environment have started to take their toll. The narrow concerns of the owners and managers of production are seen to be at odds with the needs of society. Irrespective of the private character of their appropriation of the fruits of production, based on concentrating so much power in so few hands, production itself has become far more social. The industrial-scale production of all goods and services as commodities has spread everywhere from the metropolises of Europe and North America to the remotest Asian countryside, deserts of Africa and jungle regions of South America. This economy is not only global in scope, but social in its essential character. Regardless of the readiness of the owners and managers to dismiss and abdicate responsibility for the environmental and human health costs of their unsustainable approach, these costs have become an increasingly urgent concern to societies in general. In this regard, the HSS®A® principle becomes a key and most useful guideline for sorting out what is truly sustainable for the long-term from what is undoubtedly unsustainable.
As monopoly right attempts further to trump public right, the human being already transformed ever further into the merest consumer of products is a being marginalised from most of the possibilities and potentialities of the very fact of his/her existence. This marginalisation is a further important feature of the HSS®A® principle. There are numerous things individuals can do that modulate or otherwise affect the intake of honey and its impacts, but there’s precious little – indeed: nothing – that one can do about Aspartame® except drink it.
~~~~
Notes
1. This principle illuminates much that is obscure about the laws of motion in this universe. It is elaborated explicitly in a Note to be published soon in a forthcoming volume of the Journal of Nature Science and Sustainable Technology (available through Nova Science Publishers).
2. The correct principle was that the increased application to materials and products of creative human labouring power by the actual producers should lead to a general improvement in product quality. The aphenomenal version is a distortion.
3. At the level of financial accounting, this “greater refining” reflects an increase, either relative or absolute, in the expenditure on such components of fixed capital compared to the outlay in wages for the human workforce. This transformation is what conventional economics discourse and financial press reports refer to as “capital intensive” industrial development, which they contrast favourably to “labour intensive” forms that only Third World economies can afford.
4. To our knowledge, the peculiar feature of the political economy of this reality is remarked nowhere to date.
5. This is another peculiarly intangible transformation within the political economy of such “refining” reality that also remains still unremarked anywhere.
6. Monopoly right is often only partially described or encapsulated in such terms as “privatisation” and “outsourcing”. It is essentially a usurpation of public, social rights, and this usurpation within the present stage of global economic development is something that has emerged with a vengeance and ruthlessness since the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and its COMECON and related semi-barter structures within international trade.
7. For example, the popular American writer Vance Packard was already documenting many aspects of this phenomenon in his bestselling book of 1957, The Hidden Persuaders. With the rise of these monopolies, advertising became a big part of mass marketing and the aphenomenal creation of new “needs”. The aim and conditions, however, in which these developments took flight included a certain stagnation or “plateau”-ing in market growth for established necessities like household appliances, cars, etc., took off. Further constraining the extent of this expansion was what happened to the weight of the consumption level -- disposable income -- available in the largest home markets of the capitalist world, in the United States and western Europe, relative to other parts of the world.
8. The works of Vance Packard and other social liberals in fact became rallying cries for more such regulation.
9. As a result of discarding any consideration of intentions, certain questions go unasked. No one asks whether any degree of external processing of what began as a natural sugar source can or will improve its quality as a sweetener. Exactly what that process, or those processes, would be is also unasked. No sugar refiner is worried about how the marketing of his product in excess is contributing to a diabetes epidemic. The advertising that is crucial to marketing this product certainly won’t raise this question. Guided by the “logic” of the economies of scale, and the marketing effort that must accompany it, greater processing is assumed to be and accepted as being ipso facto good, or better. As a consequence of the selectivity inherent in such “logic”, any other possibility within the overall picture – such as the possibility that, as we go from honey to sugar to saccharin to aspartame, we go from something entirely safe for human consumption to something cancerously toxic – does not even enter the frame. Such considerations could prove very threatening to the health of some group’s big business in the short term. All this is especially devastatingly clear when it comes to, say, the economics of crude oil as an energy source. Widely and falsely believed to be toxic before it is touched by a refiner, refined petroleum products are utterly toxic but not to be questioned since they provide the economy’s lifeblood.
Edible natural products in their natural state are already good enough for humans to consume at some safe level and process further internally in ways useful to the organism. We are not likely normally to overconsume any unrefined natural food source. However, the refining that accompanies the transformation of natural food sources into processed-food commodities also introduces components that interfere with the normal ability we would have to push a natural food source aside after some definite point. Additionally, with externally processed “refinements” of some natural source, the chances increase that the form in which the product is eventually consumed must include compounds that are not characteristic in nature anywhere and which the human organism cannot usefully process without excessively stressing the digestive system and-or other parts of the organism.
THE HONEY → SUGAR → SACCHARIN®→ASPARTAME® , OR HSS®A®, PRINCIPLE
Introduction
We are compelled to live out our lives in an aphenomenal universe. One of its features is the “Honey → Sugar → Saccharin®→Aspartame®” principle [1].
The central idea captured in the form of this principle concerns the degradation of the natural qualities of goods and services through intensified refining. Used originally without further external processing, materials taken originally from the natural environment (including even the living thoughts of human beings) become degraded step-by-step as a result of adding ever-further stages of external processing. This can carry on potentially indefinitely.
It is the aphenomenal quality of this principle that renders it so useful to the status-quo. This aphenomenality resides in its unquestioned underlying assumption that further refinement (or refining) must in the end improve quality [2].
Here we propose to discuss some aspects of the political economy of this principle.
I. The HSS®A® Principle & Monopoly Right
Greater refining is not a function of the increased application of creative human labouring power by the actual producers. On the contrary, it is a function of the owners and managers of production investing more in fixed capital, to replace creative living labour with more advanced machines. These machines are actually accumulated labouring power congealed in machine form, i.e., dead labour. In effect, dead labour is being employed to replace living labour [3].
The refining displaces natural elements of the original source material. Often the replacements are components in molecular forms that either would not be found in nature either at all, or in that particular physical phase, or in the presence of so-called catalysts comprised from laboratory-created combinations not normally present in, or characteristic to, nature. This displacement marks one of the main yet intangible manifestations of the degradation of quality after upgraded refining [4]. On the one hand, regardless of the relative increase in capital-intensiveness, an absolute increase in “total” labour content, i.e., of living labour plus dead labour, is indeed possible and is effected in practice by these means. At the same time, however, that absolute increase in “labour” content incidental to the additional “refining” effort neither prevents nor arrests the tendency for natural components to decrease relatively or absolutely compared to synthesised components in the end-product. What else is taking place within this transition? Exercising power on behalf of a monopoly, oligopoly or cartel, managers and owners of production are dictating the use-value of the commodities that they produce and market [5]. The ability to dictate how commodities will be used, and what value they have in use, derives from the exercise of monopoly right [6].
The capacity to dictate use-value by “over-engineering” at the point of production marks a major break with the situation that prevailed before that point. With the emergence of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels, there were major efforts undertaken to deploy mass advertising campaigns to invent new social wants which monopolies then fulfilled with products [7]. The purchasing power for consumption available in the markets that grew in this period of the 1950s and 1960s was based in the Third World, and mostly among the previously very impoverished at that. American levels of consumption were not going to become available any time too soon in these areas. The need and ability of the American system to expand on a global scale was also blocked by the presence of the Soviet camp. In the bipolar world of that time, monopolies could secure superprofits “at the margin” by inventing new needs for new products as opportunities arose. However, monopoly right was not in a position to trump public right, and a wide array of product standards were indeed regulated by various government agencies, thus posing a potentially punishing financial risk to monopolies that attempted to bully the markets with products that failed to acquire approval from these bodies [8].
Pre-monopoly capitalism had developed and spread across the world by focusing entirely and exclusively on the generation and capture of the exchange-value of commodities. Commodities were a vector, a delivery-vehicle, for this exchange value, in the same way that the modern cigarette was redefined by the U.S. tobacco giants in the 1950s as a nicotine delivery vehicle, or that the anopheles mosquito is described as a vector for the spread of malaria. Capitalists produced commodities to piggyback on these uses and needs which already existed among the populace in order to generate and capture the exchange-value congealed in these commodities. The uses and needs were labelled “demand”, the piggy-backing operation was labelled “supply” -- and voilà! neo-classical economics was born.
In the global economy of the post-bipolar world, on the other hand, monopoly right asserts its priority over public right. It does this by redefining many of the terms of conditions of the economics-of-scale to develop or apply in determining how far, in each case, to redefine and manipulate use-value. For example, honey is perceptibly “sugar”-y to taste. We want the sugar, but honey is also anti-bacterial, and cannot rot. Therefore, the rate at which customers will have to return for the next supply is much lower and slower than the rate at which customers would have to return to resupply themselves with, say, refined sugar. In other cases – in Bangladesh, for example – the amount of honey available in the market is extended by adding refined sugar. The content of this “economic” logic then takes over and drives what happens to honey and sugar as commodities. While there are natural limits to how far honey as a natural product can actually be commodified, sugar is refined to become addictive so the consumer becomes hooked and the producer’s profit is secured. What never enters into considerations of these economics of scale is the matter of intention. Here lies the heart of darkness in a world dictated by monopoly right [9].
II. Economics of Scale under Monopoly Right
There are two especially crucial premises of the economics-of-scale under monopoly right that lie hidden within the notion of “upgrading by refining”.
The first premise of economics of scale under monopoly right is that unit costs of production can be lowered (and unit profit therefore expanded) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction. If relatively free competition still prevailed, this would not arise even as a passing consideration. In an economy lacking monopolies, oligopolies and-or cartels dictating effective demand by manipulating supply, unit costs of production remain mainly a function of some given level of technology. Once a certain proportion of investment in fixed-capital (equipment and ground-rent for the production facility) becomes the norm generally among the various producers competing for customers in the same market, the unit costs of production cannot fall or be driven arbitrarily below a certain floor level without risking business loss. The unit cost thus becomes downwardly inelastic.
The unit cost of production can become downwardly elastic, i.e., capable of falling readily below any asserted floor price, under two conditions:
1. during moments of technological transformation of the industry, in which producers who are first to lower their unit costs by using more advanced machinery will gain market shares, temporarily, at the expense of competitors; or
2. in conditions where financially stronger producers absorb financially weakened competitors. In neoclassical models which assume competitiveness in the economy, this second circumstance is associated with the temporary cyclical crisis. This is the crisis that breaks out from time to time in periods of extended oversupply or weakening of demand. In reality, contrary to the assumptions of the neoclassical economic models, the impacts of monopolies, oligopolies and cartels have entirely displaced those of free competition and have become normal rather than the exception. Under such conditions, the lowering of unit costs of production (and expansion thereby of unit profit) by increasing output Q per unit time t , i.e., by driving ∂Q/∂t unconditionally in a positive direction, is no longer an occasional, and exceptional, tactical opportunity. It is a permanent policy option: monopolies, oligopolies and cartels manipulate supply and demand because they can.
The second premise of the economics of scale possibly under monopoly right is that only the desired portion of Q end-product is accounted as having tangible economic, and therefore also intangible social, “value”, while any unwanted consequences – e.g., degradation of, or risks to, public health, damage(s) to the environment, etc. – are discounted and dismissed as “faux frais” [false, incidental costs] of production. Here it becomes possible to glimpse a node around which resistance could begin to form, because popular rejection of this position gives rise to consciousness about the unsustainability of the present order. These methods of continuing indefinitely to refine nature out by substituting ever more elaborate chemical “equivalents” hitherto unknown in the natural environment have started to take their toll. The narrow concerns of the owners and managers of production are seen to be at odds with the needs of society. Irrespective of the private character of their appropriation of the fruits of production, based on concentrating so much power in so few hands, production itself has become far more social. The industrial-scale production of all goods and services as commodities has spread everywhere from the metropolises of Europe and North America to the remotest Asian countryside, deserts of Africa and jungle regions of South America. This economy is not only global in scope, but social in its essential character. Regardless of the readiness of the owners and managers to dismiss and abdicate responsibility for the environmental and human health costs of their unsustainable approach, these costs have become an increasingly urgent concern to societies in general. In this regard, the HSS®A® principle becomes a key and most useful guideline for sorting out what is truly sustainable for the long-term from what is undoubtedly unsustainable.
As monopoly right attempts further to trump public right, the human being already transformed ever further into the merest consumer of products is a being marginalised from most of the possibilities and potentialities of the very fact of his/her existence. This marginalisation is a further important feature of the HSS®A® principle. There are numerous things individuals can do that modulate or otherwise affect the intake of honey and its impacts, but there’s precious little – indeed: nothing – that one can do about Aspartame® except drink it.
~~~~
Notes
1. This principle illuminates much that is obscure about the laws of motion in this universe. It is elaborated explicitly in a Note to be published soon in a forthcoming volume of the Journal of Nature Science and Sustainable Technology (available through Nova Science Publishers).
2. The correct principle was that the increased application to materials and products of creative human labouring power by the actual producers should lead to a general improvement in product quality. The aphenomenal version is a distortion.
3. At the level of financial accounting, this “greater refining” reflects an increase, either relative or absolute, in the expenditure on such components of fixed capital compared to the outlay in wages for the human workforce. This transformation is what conventional economics discourse and financial press reports refer to as “capital intensive” industrial development, which they contrast favourably to “labour intensive” forms that only Third World economies can afford.
4. To our knowledge, the peculiar feature of the political economy of this reality is remarked nowhere to date.
5. This is another peculiarly intangible transformation within the political economy of such “refining” reality that also remains still unremarked anywhere.
6. Monopoly right is often only partially described or encapsulated in such terms as “privatisation” and “outsourcing”. It is essentially a usurpation of public, social rights, and this usurpation within the present stage of global economic development is something that has emerged with a vengeance and ruthlessness since the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and its COMECON and related semi-barter structures within international trade.
7. For example, the popular American writer Vance Packard was already documenting many aspects of this phenomenon in his bestselling book of 1957, The Hidden Persuaders. With the rise of these monopolies, advertising became a big part of mass marketing and the aphenomenal creation of new “needs”. The aim and conditions, however, in which these developments took flight included a certain stagnation or “plateau”-ing in market growth for established necessities like household appliances, cars, etc., took off. Further constraining the extent of this expansion was what happened to the weight of the consumption level -- disposable income -- available in the largest home markets of the capitalist world, in the United States and western Europe, relative to other parts of the world.
8. The works of Vance Packard and other social liberals in fact became rallying cries for more such regulation.
9. As a result of discarding any consideration of intentions, certain questions go unasked. No one asks whether any degree of external processing of what began as a natural sugar source can or will improve its quality as a sweetener. Exactly what that process, or those processes, would be is also unasked. No sugar refiner is worried about how the marketing of his product in excess is contributing to a diabetes epidemic. The advertising that is crucial to marketing this product certainly won’t raise this question. Guided by the “logic” of the economies of scale, and the marketing effort that must accompany it, greater processing is assumed to be and accepted as being ipso facto good, or better. As a consequence of the selectivity inherent in such “logic”, any other possibility within the overall picture – such as the possibility that, as we go from honey to sugar to saccharin to aspartame, we go from something entirely safe for human consumption to something cancerously toxic – does not even enter the frame. Such considerations could prove very threatening to the health of some group’s big business in the short term. All this is especially devastatingly clear when it comes to, say, the economics of crude oil as an energy source. Widely and falsely believed to be toxic before it is touched by a refiner, refined petroleum products are utterly toxic but not to be questioned since they provide the economy’s lifeblood.
Edible natural products in their natural state are already good enough for humans to consume at some safe level and process further internally in ways useful to the organism. We are not likely normally to overconsume any unrefined natural food source. However, the refining that accompanies the transformation of natural food sources into processed-food commodities also introduces components that interfere with the normal ability we would have to push a natural food source aside after some definite point. Additionally, with externally processed “refinements” of some natural source, the chances increase that the form in which the product is eventually consumed must include compounds that are not characteristic in nature anywhere and which the human organism cannot usefully process without excessively stressing the digestive system and-or other parts of the organism.
03 February 2007
That latest IPCC Report:
THE APHENOMENAL MODEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE TRIES TO WRESTLE RATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT TO THE GROUND
Discussing the latest report by the International Panel on Climate Change at the BBC Online website --- one of the busiest in the world -- Dr Vicky Pope, head of the Climate Programme at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, writes: "The only way to predict the day-to-day weather and changes to the climate over longer timescales is to use computer models".
If the underlying assumptions are in error, however, longer timescales may not help. If we "know" -- as educated Europeans did for about 2000 years, from 350 BCE to 1650 CE -- that heavier objects fall to the ground faster than lighter objects, computer models of falling objects over longer timescales would enable us to measure the differences in the precise rate at which objects of different weight reach the earth. Enough data would then have accumulated to enable us to predict various things more accurately. But the predictions would all be hogwash, even if this or that group of them turned out to correspond with physically-measured cases, because... differing weights of objects freely falling towards the earth in fact have no effect whatsoever on the rate at which they fall!
The problem with modelling climate change is that there is as yet no integrating hypothesis about what, if anything, actually changed for the long term in the atmosphere with the coming of the Industrial Revolution; what previous changes were redirected or distorted in their effects; and what new processes appeared that had not appeared before. There is neither baseline data nor an hypothesis supported by extensively collected observations to suggest either what fundamental change or shifts in climate took place if any, and what its dynamics were or still are. In this area, we remain as lost as physicists and students of motion were before Galileo and Newton figured gravity out. Solving equations systems that produce answers consistent with observed data isn't going to get us out of this one... but this needs to be demonstrated with some actual systems of equations, preferably non-linear to begin with, and what happens with their solutions when certain fundamental assumptions are relaxed, esp. if the relaxation is in fact a linearisation.
• Link to the BBC's informed commentary by Dr Pope on the IPCC's 2007 update of their climate-change findings
• Link to the IPCC's 2007 paper
THE APHENOMENAL MODEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE TRIES TO WRESTLE RATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT TO THE GROUND
Discussing the latest report by the International Panel on Climate Change at the BBC Online website --- one of the busiest in the world -- Dr Vicky Pope, head of the Climate Programme at the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, writes: "The only way to predict the day-to-day weather and changes to the climate over longer timescales is to use computer models".
If the underlying assumptions are in error, however, longer timescales may not help. If we "know" -- as educated Europeans did for about 2000 years, from 350 BCE to 1650 CE -- that heavier objects fall to the ground faster than lighter objects, computer models of falling objects over longer timescales would enable us to measure the differences in the precise rate at which objects of different weight reach the earth. Enough data would then have accumulated to enable us to predict various things more accurately. But the predictions would all be hogwash, even if this or that group of them turned out to correspond with physically-measured cases, because... differing weights of objects freely falling towards the earth in fact have no effect whatsoever on the rate at which they fall!
The problem with modelling climate change is that there is as yet no integrating hypothesis about what, if anything, actually changed for the long term in the atmosphere with the coming of the Industrial Revolution; what previous changes were redirected or distorted in their effects; and what new processes appeared that had not appeared before. There is neither baseline data nor an hypothesis supported by extensively collected observations to suggest either what fundamental change or shifts in climate took place if any, and what its dynamics were or still are. In this area, we remain as lost as physicists and students of motion were before Galileo and Newton figured gravity out. Solving equations systems that produce answers consistent with observed data isn't going to get us out of this one... but this needs to be demonstrated with some actual systems of equations, preferably non-linear to begin with, and what happens with their solutions when certain fundamental assumptions are relaxed, esp. if the relaxation is in fact a linearisation.
• Link to the BBC's informed commentary by Dr Pope on the IPCC's 2007 update of their climate-change findings
• Link to the IPCC's 2007 paper
02 February 2007
HOW, AND UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, IS USING MODERN RULES IN OLD CASES "UNFAIR", JUDGE DOHERTY?
The remarks of Justice David Doherty in the Ontario Court of Appeal's review hearing of the Truscott conviction provide an excellent example of the aphenomenal model at work.
According to the description of a session of the review hearing, on Thursday, 1 February 2007, reported in The Globe and Mail, Judge Doherty said:
"If something is done in accordance with the accepted rules of the day, I don't understand how it can turn out to be unfair... Before 1896, an accused couldn't testify at his trial. Does that mean that we declare every trial before 1896 to be unfair?"
Judge Doherty made the remarks after hearing James Lockyer, a lawyer for Mr. Truscott, argue the appeal judge must be prepared to evaluate a vast amount of evidence that wasn't disclosed to Mr. Truscott's defence team at his 1959 trial or at a 1966 review of his case by the Supreme Court of Canada.
What Judge Doherty's remark betrays is the most serious limitation of the entire mindset of Anglo-American criminal justice. According to this mindset, the conduct of the investigation prepared before the summoning of the trial is secondary to the conduct of the trial.The other side of this coin is that the rules of trial procedure and their maintenance by the judge, the prosecution and the defence, are decisive. Any other notion of priority is slighted or dismissed. And why? Because, in practice, the manner in which any particular criminal investigation has been conducted becomes the subject of review only extremely infrequently. This lack of frequency is then itself assumed to prove the lack of a need for such review in general. From this people are expected to infer that full and proper use of trial procedure by all parties -- the prosecution, defence and the judge -- can generally make up for, or even overcome, malice or bias in the investigation. Of course, as lawyers and others in the justice system well know: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Infrequent hauling on the carpet discloses nothing about how necessary it may be to call responsible officials to account.
There is nothing new in the police gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution without the details of the investigation being disclosed, before trial, to an accused and-or his/her defence counsel. For centuries, details of investigative procedure could be withheld even during trial. In the United States, beginning in the 19th century, it was illegal for the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defence before trial. (An exception was maintained for espionage, which has been broadened since 9-11 to include "terrorism" interpreted as a suspicion without the standard of "reasonable and probable grounds" of ordinary criminal jurisprudence.) However, even in ordinary criminal jurisprudence, this was frequently manipulated to mean: "before introduction of the evidence during trial". Thus could surprises still be sprung on an accused after the trial had begun and the defence prepared along definite lines and assumptions about the state of the prosecution's case.
In Anglo-American criminal jurisdictions, the most important feature of criminal investigations is the large discretionary power prosecutors enjoy in their dealings with the investigative arm. Prosecutors could either shut down, or instigate, police pursuit of certain lines of investigation. The use of this power may be reviewable after the success or failure of the appeal of a criminal conviction. The key thing, however, was (and remains to date) that the use of this power could not be examined during or as part of the original trial itself.
This problem of the criminal justice system, and its unique potential to unleash great mischief and supreme injustice in stripping people of their liberty, is discussed far less than the problems of plea-bargaining and plea-bargaining strategies of prosecutors and defence counsels. It remains the key, however, both to why the judge in the Truscott case did so little to protect the accused from prosecutorial misconduct or assist his defence counsel to protect him from it during and at trial, and to why he persisted in obstructing efforts proposed independently and outside of the appeals court to review any aspect of the case including the police investigation.
In Anglo-American systems of criminal jurisprudence, the presumption of innocence of an accused, combined with the strictly-maintained barriers between the prosecution and the defence counsel of an accused, serve to insulate the investigative process from scrutiny. In criminal jurisprudence developed in other jurisdictions, based on the model of France, there is no presumption of the innocence of an accused. As a consequence, no rules have been developed that are based on an adversarial arrangement between the prosecution and the accused. Investigation is the responsibility of an examining magistrate, i.e., a member of the judiciary. Any suspected police misconduct is reviewable by a special administrative body of the judiciary empowered to sanction investigatory misconduct.
In general, on the other hand, as part of the adversarial principle of this system of criminal jurisprudence, the onus is on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Within this arrangement and on this basis, it was long accepted that the prosecutorial arm had no particular duty of care to exercise in relation to the ability of an accused to conduct an adequate defence. In the adversarial system, the judge in the case carried this responsibility. However, the judge also lacked any power to order, conduct or direct the investigation. Thus, while charged with a duty of care for the rights of an accused under a system that assumes innocence until proven guilty, the judge lacked any access to the institutions or individuals bringing the prosecution's case. Such a duty of care can obviously only be exercised formally, with regard only to details of procedure, not to any of the substance of the intentions informing the Crown's choices as to how to proceed.
The discretionary power of the prosecuting arm of the criminal justice system is defended in our own day from two directions. It is said to be either something flowing naturally from the adversarial principle, or something that aids in the maintenance of the most efficient functioning of judicial services. In fact, however, this discretionary power is part and parcel of the Royal Prerogative of the State, based on the notion of the Divine Right of Kings. This prerogative, which asserts that the Sovereign is always right, stands in stark opposition to securing a just result or uncovering and correcting an earlier unjust result. (For centuries, it was high treason punishable by execution even to think let alone whisper that the Sovereign could be wrong.)
The prerogative character inherent in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion has consequences. For example, apart from the penalties attaching to perjury, there is almost no systematic way to uncover any order by the prosecution to the police to deep-six certain incriminating evidence and-or the methods by which, and sources from whom, it was obtained.
How the prosecution assembled its case against Truscott exposes the great dangers inherent in such discretion. It dribbled out into the public prints over the decades following his conviction that police at the time had collected evidence suggesting possible involvement in the victim's murder of a disturbed individual serving in the Canadian armed forces. This man was potentially implicated in other contemporaneous but still unsolved rape-murders. (He died while Truscott was in jail. This strengthened the later argument that a review of the original investigation was moot, since Truscott's appeals were exhausted and a new trial could not be held to prosecute a dead man.) At the time of this particular murder, a case could be assembled and despatched more quickly against a juvenile acquainted with the victim and known to be one of the last people to see her alive. Accordingly, the Crown proceeded against Stephen Truscott. The discretion exercised by the police and the Crown prosecutor in so proceeding still awaits comprehensive investigation and exposure.
Truscott was convicted in 1959 as a 14-year old and sentenced to the gallows. However, his sentence was commuted after Canada abolished the death penalty. He was released after serving two-thirds of a life sentence. The judgment in the case was controversial almost as soon as it was rendered. In the wake of popular reception of a book about the case by journalist Isabel LeBourdais which questioned the entire conduct of the prosecution, the presiding judge in the Truscott case became incensed enough to write the Prime Minister of Canada demanding she be charged with bringing the administration of justice into contempt. This demonstrates how the concern of the presiding judge to protect the reputation of the conduct of all in his court -- including himself-- could operate to reinforce pressures from elsewhere in the system against any kind of judicial review of the original investigation.
The strong premonition of an unjust result in a particular case arises from two circumstances. First, there is the continued assertion of the innocence of the convicted person. Sometimes this may become combined -- as in the Truscott review -- with a reasonable reconstruction of how an unjust result could have been produced despite, and to some extent because, of the fact that both sides in a particular criminal case, tried under the adversarial norms, followed the rules more-or-less. The key to uncovering possible pathways to an unjust result in the Truscott case was to apply retrospectively certain investigative and procedural standards developed since 1959 to those aspects of the case where such standards did not yet apply.
The resistance to such retrospection brings us back finally to the true and deeper significance of Judge Doherty's outburst. Clearly, wherever this exercise may lead in any particular case has validity for that case and possibly certain other cases whose outcome turned on certain procedures not being available to, let alone insisted upon, by the defence. However, from this it does not follow that the judgment rendered in every every trial completed before certain rules of investigative as well as trial procedure changed must fall under a cloud. It does suggest that, if certain cases were re-examined by applying such a retrospective analysis, much light might be thrown on the actual pathways to the final result.
This is exactly the process we have been proposing as the only way to defeat and undo the noxious consequences of the aphenomenal model everywhere -- throughout the physical, natural and biological sciences and their engineering applications, as well as throughout the social sciences. What was assumed to be true at "Knowledge-state(time=yesterday)" of our knowledge can hardly be assumed still to be true in the same way, if at all, after our knowledge has moved on to "Knowledge-state(time=today)".
What could be the source(s) of the pressure against such retrospection, reflected in Justice Doherty's outburst?
One possibility is that material considerations, tied to the short-term self-interest of various individuals and their institutional bodies, are deeply vested in resisting the updating of the fairness and transparency of rules of procedure or the widening of their application outside already defined boundaries. As we have noted in many other examples, this investment in the status-quo appears to be the guarantor of the Aphenomenal Model. Without such a guarantee, the model would collapse of its own self-evidently top-heavy instability, an instability well illustrated by our graphical representation of it as an inverted triangle.
The remarks of Justice David Doherty in the Ontario Court of Appeal's review hearing of the Truscott conviction provide an excellent example of the aphenomenal model at work.
According to the description of a session of the review hearing, on Thursday, 1 February 2007, reported in The Globe and Mail, Judge Doherty said:
"If something is done in accordance with the accepted rules of the day, I don't understand how it can turn out to be unfair... Before 1896, an accused couldn't testify at his trial. Does that mean that we declare every trial before 1896 to be unfair?"
Judge Doherty made the remarks after hearing James Lockyer, a lawyer for Mr. Truscott, argue the appeal judge must be prepared to evaluate a vast amount of evidence that wasn't disclosed to Mr. Truscott's defence team at his 1959 trial or at a 1966 review of his case by the Supreme Court of Canada.
What Judge Doherty's remark betrays is the most serious limitation of the entire mindset of Anglo-American criminal justice. According to this mindset, the conduct of the investigation prepared before the summoning of the trial is secondary to the conduct of the trial.The other side of this coin is that the rules of trial procedure and their maintenance by the judge, the prosecution and the defence, are decisive. Any other notion of priority is slighted or dismissed. And why? Because, in practice, the manner in which any particular criminal investigation has been conducted becomes the subject of review only extremely infrequently. This lack of frequency is then itself assumed to prove the lack of a need for such review in general. From this people are expected to infer that full and proper use of trial procedure by all parties -- the prosecution, defence and the judge -- can generally make up for, or even overcome, malice or bias in the investigation. Of course, as lawyers and others in the justice system well know: "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Infrequent hauling on the carpet discloses nothing about how necessary it may be to call responsible officials to account.
There is nothing new in the police gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution without the details of the investigation being disclosed, before trial, to an accused and-or his/her defence counsel. For centuries, details of investigative procedure could be withheld even during trial. In the United States, beginning in the 19th century, it was illegal for the prosecution to withhold evidence from the defence before trial. (An exception was maintained for espionage, which has been broadened since 9-11 to include "terrorism" interpreted as a suspicion without the standard of "reasonable and probable grounds" of ordinary criminal jurisprudence.) However, even in ordinary criminal jurisprudence, this was frequently manipulated to mean: "before introduction of the evidence during trial". Thus could surprises still be sprung on an accused after the trial had begun and the defence prepared along definite lines and assumptions about the state of the prosecution's case.
In Anglo-American criminal jurisdictions, the most important feature of criminal investigations is the large discretionary power prosecutors enjoy in their dealings with the investigative arm. Prosecutors could either shut down, or instigate, police pursuit of certain lines of investigation. The use of this power may be reviewable after the success or failure of the appeal of a criminal conviction. The key thing, however, was (and remains to date) that the use of this power could not be examined during or as part of the original trial itself.
This problem of the criminal justice system, and its unique potential to unleash great mischief and supreme injustice in stripping people of their liberty, is discussed far less than the problems of plea-bargaining and plea-bargaining strategies of prosecutors and defence counsels. It remains the key, however, both to why the judge in the Truscott case did so little to protect the accused from prosecutorial misconduct or assist his defence counsel to protect him from it during and at trial, and to why he persisted in obstructing efforts proposed independently and outside of the appeals court to review any aspect of the case including the police investigation.
In Anglo-American systems of criminal jurisprudence, the presumption of innocence of an accused, combined with the strictly-maintained barriers between the prosecution and the defence counsel of an accused, serve to insulate the investigative process from scrutiny. In criminal jurisprudence developed in other jurisdictions, based on the model of France, there is no presumption of the innocence of an accused. As a consequence, no rules have been developed that are based on an adversarial arrangement between the prosecution and the accused. Investigation is the responsibility of an examining magistrate, i.e., a member of the judiciary. Any suspected police misconduct is reviewable by a special administrative body of the judiciary empowered to sanction investigatory misconduct.
In general, on the other hand, as part of the adversarial principle of this system of criminal jurisprudence, the onus is on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Within this arrangement and on this basis, it was long accepted that the prosecutorial arm had no particular duty of care to exercise in relation to the ability of an accused to conduct an adequate defence. In the adversarial system, the judge in the case carried this responsibility. However, the judge also lacked any power to order, conduct or direct the investigation. Thus, while charged with a duty of care for the rights of an accused under a system that assumes innocence until proven guilty, the judge lacked any access to the institutions or individuals bringing the prosecution's case. Such a duty of care can obviously only be exercised formally, with regard only to details of procedure, not to any of the substance of the intentions informing the Crown's choices as to how to proceed.
The discretionary power of the prosecuting arm of the criminal justice system is defended in our own day from two directions. It is said to be either something flowing naturally from the adversarial principle, or something that aids in the maintenance of the most efficient functioning of judicial services. In fact, however, this discretionary power is part and parcel of the Royal Prerogative of the State, based on the notion of the Divine Right of Kings. This prerogative, which asserts that the Sovereign is always right, stands in stark opposition to securing a just result or uncovering and correcting an earlier unjust result. (For centuries, it was high treason punishable by execution even to think let alone whisper that the Sovereign could be wrong.)
The prerogative character inherent in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion has consequences. For example, apart from the penalties attaching to perjury, there is almost no systematic way to uncover any order by the prosecution to the police to deep-six certain incriminating evidence and-or the methods by which, and sources from whom, it was obtained.
How the prosecution assembled its case against Truscott exposes the great dangers inherent in such discretion. It dribbled out into the public prints over the decades following his conviction that police at the time had collected evidence suggesting possible involvement in the victim's murder of a disturbed individual serving in the Canadian armed forces. This man was potentially implicated in other contemporaneous but still unsolved rape-murders. (He died while Truscott was in jail. This strengthened the later argument that a review of the original investigation was moot, since Truscott's appeals were exhausted and a new trial could not be held to prosecute a dead man.) At the time of this particular murder, a case could be assembled and despatched more quickly against a juvenile acquainted with the victim and known to be one of the last people to see her alive. Accordingly, the Crown proceeded against Stephen Truscott. The discretion exercised by the police and the Crown prosecutor in so proceeding still awaits comprehensive investigation and exposure.
Truscott was convicted in 1959 as a 14-year old and sentenced to the gallows. However, his sentence was commuted after Canada abolished the death penalty. He was released after serving two-thirds of a life sentence. The judgment in the case was controversial almost as soon as it was rendered. In the wake of popular reception of a book about the case by journalist Isabel LeBourdais which questioned the entire conduct of the prosecution, the presiding judge in the Truscott case became incensed enough to write the Prime Minister of Canada demanding she be charged with bringing the administration of justice into contempt. This demonstrates how the concern of the presiding judge to protect the reputation of the conduct of all in his court -- including himself-- could operate to reinforce pressures from elsewhere in the system against any kind of judicial review of the original investigation.
The strong premonition of an unjust result in a particular case arises from two circumstances. First, there is the continued assertion of the innocence of the convicted person. Sometimes this may become combined -- as in the Truscott review -- with a reasonable reconstruction of how an unjust result could have been produced despite, and to some extent because, of the fact that both sides in a particular criminal case, tried under the adversarial norms, followed the rules more-or-less. The key to uncovering possible pathways to an unjust result in the Truscott case was to apply retrospectively certain investigative and procedural standards developed since 1959 to those aspects of the case where such standards did not yet apply.
The resistance to such retrospection brings us back finally to the true and deeper significance of Judge Doherty's outburst. Clearly, wherever this exercise may lead in any particular case has validity for that case and possibly certain other cases whose outcome turned on certain procedures not being available to, let alone insisted upon, by the defence. However, from this it does not follow that the judgment rendered in every every trial completed before certain rules of investigative as well as trial procedure changed must fall under a cloud. It does suggest that, if certain cases were re-examined by applying such a retrospective analysis, much light might be thrown on the actual pathways to the final result.
This is exactly the process we have been proposing as the only way to defeat and undo the noxious consequences of the aphenomenal model everywhere -- throughout the physical, natural and biological sciences and their engineering applications, as well as throughout the social sciences. What was assumed to be true at "Knowledge-state(time=yesterday)" of our knowledge can hardly be assumed still to be true in the same way, if at all, after our knowledge has moved on to "Knowledge-state(time=today)".
What could be the source(s) of the pressure against such retrospection, reflected in Justice Doherty's outburst?
One possibility is that material considerations, tied to the short-term self-interest of various individuals and their institutional bodies, are deeply vested in resisting the updating of the fairness and transparency of rules of procedure or the widening of their application outside already defined boundaries. As we have noted in many other examples, this investment in the status-quo appears to be the guarantor of the Aphenomenal Model. Without such a guarantee, the model would collapse of its own self-evidently top-heavy instability, an instability well illustrated by our graphical representation of it as an inverted triangle.
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