NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/5837

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    "[..] at the University of Southern California recently, scientists
    performed autopsies on 100 youths, aged 15 to 25, who had died by
    violence, accident, or other non-disease cause. They found an
    astonishing 80% had "notable lung abnormalities" and 27% [...]

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[From LaborNet]

         WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT L.A.'S LETHAL AIR
               by Peter Montague, PhD.

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Reprinted from RACHEL'S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #262, December 4, 1991,
providing news and resources to the Movement for Environmental Justice
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        The air in Los Angeles is as bad as it gets anywhere in the
U.S.  For example, at the Univer-sity of Southern California recently,
scientists performed autopsies on 100 youths, aged 15 to 25, who had
died by violence, accident, or other non-disease cause. They found an
astonishing 80% had "notable lung abnormalities" and 27% had "severe
lesions of the lung." Dr. Russell Sherwin, the principal investigator
of the study, said the youths were "running out of lung". He
commented, "The danger I'm seeing is above and beyond what we've seen
with smoking or even respiratory viruses...It's much more severe, much
more prevalent".

        No doubt about it, bad air is killing large numbers of people
in Los Angeles. For many thousands more, L.A.'s bad air means as
people get older they can look forward to emphysema, chronic
discomfort, chest colds and other persistent ailments, restricted
movement, debilitating pain, and finally a prolonged and unpleasant
death.

        But L.A.'s bad air has a bright side, as well: it has provoked
the formation of a far-reaching Campaign for Clean Air that seems to
offer innovative ways to attack environmental destruction and
injustice everywhere. It is an exciting development. People who have
been asking, "How will the grassroots environmental movement develop
next?" will want to learn more about the organization behind the
Campaign. It is called the Labor/Community Watchdog. Despite the name,
which might seem to imply a passive role overseeing government as it
fails again and again to deal with L.A.'s bad air, this Watchdog has
an agressive and expansive vision, and maybe a real bite.

        The Watchdog has outlined its vision in an unusually well-
written, thoughtful and attractive 80-page manifesto called L.A.'s
Lethal Air: New Strategies for Policy, Organizing, and Action.

        The book begins with a description of L.A.'s deadly air, moves
to a discussion of who's affected most (children, pregnant women, sick
people, and people of color; in sum, a majority of L.A.'s population),
identifies the main sources of the problem (carrying names like
DuPont, Chevron, Unocal, and General Motors), then lays out a strategy
for creating solutions. But not band-aid solutions of the kind
environmental groups have tried for the past 20 years with little
success. The Watchdog's strategies are rooted in the sitdown strikes
of the '30s that sparked the growth of industrial unionism, the bus
boycotts and direct-action campaigns of the '60s that forced passage
of civil rights laws, and the United Farm Workers boycotts of Gallo,
grapes and lettuce that forced passage of the Agricultural Labor
Relations Act of 1975.

        The Watchdog says, "We agree that individuals must take
responsibility for making environmentally sound choices. But, for the
most part, it is large corporations that manufacture the consumer
products we purchase and that determine our choices through
advertising, market share, pricing and other forms of power in the
marketplace.

        "...It is misleading for us to talk about making
environmentally sound 'choices' based on our individual consumption
when it is corporate America that must change its products in order
for us to have any real options.

        "When products are environmentally destructive we have to
combine the personal choice to stop using them with the collective
action of demanding they be taken off the shelf".

        "If we have any hope of constructing a society that is based
on industrial democracy and environmental safety, we need a strategy
that targets corporate production," the Watchdog says.

        Then this from Frederick Douglass: "If there is no struggle,
there is no progress. Those who profess freedom, yet deprecate
aggitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground,
who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean
without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never did and it never will". (Frederick
Douglass, August 4, 1857.)

        "We tend to fight corporate polluters on terrain most
favorable to workers and communities -- not primarily in the courts,
the legislatures, or the regulatory agencies, but in the workplace,
the communities, the media, the marketplace, and the streets", says
the Watchdog's manifesto.

        And it is evident that they mean it. As you page through
L.A.'s Lethal Air and read the captions beneath the attractive photos,
you will see that the Watchdog already has built an impressive
coalition of labor and community groups, has tested some of its
strategies and tactics, has won some victories, and has thought hard
about where to strike next. The plan is bluntly put:

        "...Environmental groups don't have to show they can
'communicate' with big business by sitting on corporate boards of
directors or taking grants from corporate polluters. In fact such
tactics compromise their credibility and leverage.

        "We welcome face-to-face negotiations with executives of
polluting companies, based on concrete environmental demands.  But for
those conversations to generate any changes in corporate policy we
will have to: 1) organize a powerful constituency-based movement; 2)
set the terms of the debate so that concepts of public health, worker
and community rights, corporate responsibility, and restricted
profitability create the parameters for the discussion", the Watchdog
says.

        L.A.'s Lethal Air goes on to say, "We need a model of
community action that forces companies to stop producing toxins right
on the spot, even if that means temporarily shutting down production.

        One Watchdog goal: "To initiate a highly-visible test-case
campaign to confront a major corporate polluter, and to win major
changes in production technologies and processes that will, in turn,
improve the health and safety of workers and communities in L.A.

        "But before we initiate such a campaign we need to identify a
company that (a) produces or uses a highly toxic product that is
acknowledged to create a clear and present public health danger; (b)
has substantial economic ties to L.A. and thus could be hurt by a
boycott of its products; and (c) engages in production for which far
safer and less polluting alternatives are available -- even, or
especially if, transforming the production technology would involve
significant corporate expense. It is precisely the conflict between
community health and 'corporate expense' that we want to raise in the
public arena".

        When management caves in and commits the necessary investments
to make production processes safer, "...That precedent, if we are
strong enough to succeed, could begin to change market practices by
other companies in the field", says the Watchdog.

        "Factory and office workers, high school and college students,
women, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans,
white working people, farmworkers working with pesticides in the
field, and the inner-city residents facing air polution, waste
incineration, and groundwater contamination must become the leaders of
the new environmentalism. Therefore the Watchdog is going into work
places, churches and communities to develop new leaders and a new
grassroots movement.

        This short review doesn't do justice to the vision laid out in
L.A.'s Lethal Air. Suffice it to say that the Watchdog's strategists
are working on tough issues such as the flight of capital overseas,
the dumping of toxics in the Third World, the need for environmentally
benign economic development using L.A.'s own abandoned rustbelt
factories, affordable public transportation, changes in the tax
structure, and international campaigns to ban particularly dangerous
chemicals. These are not people who think small, yet they are rooted
in local confrontation over local problems. We expect to hear much
>from them and about them as the decade unfolds.


        Get: Eric Mann, L.A.'s Lethal Air: New Strategies for Policy,
Organizing, and Action for $15.00 plus $2.00 shipping and handling;
California residents add $1.25 tax) from: Labor/Community Strategy
Center, 14540 Haynes Street, Suite 200, Van Nuys, CA 91411; phone
[phone]; FAX: [phone].