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13 April 21
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Matt Taibbi | Noam Chomsky on Biden vs. Trump, His New Book, and Why Manufacturing Consent "Is Much Easier Now"
Matt Taibbi, TK News
Taibbi writes: "Noam Chomsky at 92 is voluble, energetic, and quick."
oam Chomsky has been a central figure on the American left for over five decades. His New York Review Of Books article from 1967, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” was called “the single most important piece of anti-war literature” from the Vietnam period. That helped launch him on a course to being “the most widely-read American voice on foreign policy on the planet,” as the New York Times described three and a half decades later, in 2004.
Chomsky’s academic field is linguistics, where he’s won numerous prizes for work developing theories like universal grammar, but he’s famous mainly as an anti-propagandist. A chief attraction to his work for readers across the spectrum is his relentless, Cassandra-like habit of calling out official untruths, especially American ones, be they about war or domestic politics or the subject he seems lately to care most about, the environment.
Chomsky calls himself a “libertarian socialist,” which he defines as a belief that “enterprises ought to be owned and managed in a democratic fashion by the people who participate in them.” The left has always claimed him as a champion and some on that side of the aisle regularly appeal to him to settle disputes, as something like a Papal authority (humorously, he seems to hate this). I’m not so sure any particular political label fits him, however.
He’s certainly an internationalist — even in the interview below he argues for “citizens' international solidarity.” One of the things that mainstream American pundits have always loathed and resented about Chomsky is his habit of blithely judging America as one would any other country. Ask him about al-Qaeda after 9/11, and he pivots to the “far more extreme terrorism” of American foreign policy in the third world. Ask him about China’s repression of the Uighurs, as Katie Halper and I do here, and he asks, “Is it as bad as Gaza? It's very hard to argue that.”
What grinds critics of Chomsky is that he seems to push the rejection of geographical chauvinism to impossible degrees. Phil Donahue once asked him, seriously, if he liked sports. Chomsky replied he didn’t really get it. What did he care which group of professional athletes won a game? None of them had anything to do with him.
Donahue pressed: come on now, you really don’t get it? Don’t you remember being a kid, rooting for the home team, the smell of the field, the memories? “Why wouldn’t you celebrate that?”
Chomsky offered the following reply:
I did the same thing. I can remember the first baseball game I saw when I was 10 years old, I can tell you what happened at it — fine. But that’s not my point. See, if you want to enjoy a football game, that’s great. You want to enjoy a baseball game, that’s great. Why do you care who wins?
Note the use of “fine” there, a staple of Chomskyian argument! When Donahue later tried to tweak him with a comment about how it was “no wonder you grew up to be such a radical who doesn’t like high school football,” Chomsky doubled down: “Unfortunately, I did like it,” adding, “I’m sorry for that.”
Chomsky’s Spockian insistence that his adult self is immune to such temptations has led some fiercer critics to scoff at his habit of batting away questions about atrocities committed by other countries as a kind of reverse chauvinism, a calculated pose rooted in some unknown pathology, leading to overcorrections back in the direction of America’s bad behavior. Surely he doesn’t really believe the U.S. government is worse than al-Qaeda?
Then you watch “Collateral Murder,” or film of American cluster bombs dropped in the cities of Yemen, or our Air Force dropping thousands of tons of bombs on civilians in North Vietnam — speaking of sports, one such bombing campaign was called Operation Linebacker — and Chomsky becomes harder to argue with. Suddenly we’re glad he’s no flag-waver, because who else is going to point these things out?
This is why I’ve always admired Chomsky a great deal, even if I sometimes disagree with his politics (or his takes on sports for that matter). Unafraid of criticism, few people of his stature in American life are willing to do what he does. He is clearly a man of principle, a character trait that might have gotten him in even more trouble had he come of political age in the Internet era. His defense of the speech rights of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson is still brought up by critics and sticks to his name like flypaper on Twitter.
More evidence that he’s honest broker lay in the fact, as Christopher Hitchens once noted, that over time, “the more Chomsky was vindicated, the less he seemed to command ‘respect’” from mainstream pundits. His fame has grown in inverse relationship to the number of his green room invites. Although American political life has moved toward him, as noted below, he’s still largely an unperson to the networks and the newsrooms of the great dailies like the Times, who’ll never forgive him for being right about everything from the civil rights movement to Vietnam to Iraq. Even his views on Russiagate (“farcical,” he said) identify him as an outside-the-tenter, confirmed in his shameful lack of deference to the manufacturers of consent.
Chomsky has other, little-remarked-upon qualities that mark him as a true egalitarian, like his habit, still, of trying to answer every serious query sent to him. Although not a fan of tweets — “If you thought for two minutes… you wouldn’t have sent it” is his mordant assessment of a lot of Twit lit — he gives nearly every other kind of correspondence generous consideration. He’ll prioritize responding to an obscure blogger over a major daily newspaper if the blogger has the better question.
Chomsky’s stubbornness is clearly his great strength, but it can make interviewing him a challenge. When I approached him before writing Hate Inc., which I initially tried to model after his great book of media criticism, Manufacturing Consent, I tried over and over to get his take on how the press had changed since he and Edward Herman first started looking at the subject forty-odd years ago. What about the role of Facebook, Google, Twitter?
In the age of data mining and push notifications, couldn’t a company like Facebook — which has completely taken over the distribution authority regional newspapers once claimed for themselves — individually shape the news-reading habits of billions of people in ways never imaginable previously? I thought the new algorithm-fueled emphasis on divisive media was a truth-smothering innovation that fit with his famous propaganda model, but Chomsky wasn’t having any of it.
“Take a look at the Facebook phenomenon,” he said. “Where are they getting their news from? They don’t have any reports. They’re just getting it from the New York Times, so it’s the same sources of information.” I tried again in the interview below, but he dunked on me quickly. Some issues are no-fly zones. But there are plenty he loves talking about.
His most recent book, Chomsky for Activists, traces the aforementioned undeniable truth, that the arc of American politics has moved in his direction, thanks in large part to activism. Chomsky wrote The Political Economy of Human Rights and Manufacturing Consent around the same time that Howard Zinn was writing The People’s History of the United States. At the time, all three books (and especially Zinn’s) were almost universally denounced as scandalous anti-American provocations.
Today there’s a debate over whether the Zinn/Chomsky view of American history has become too hegemonic in academia. I’m not sure The 1619 Project isn’t a clever subversion of Chomskyan politics rather than an affirmation of it, but the influence of his mode of thinking in modern American culture is still clear from any angle.
Noam Chomsky at 92 is voluble, energetic, and quick. Except for the werewolf beard, which gets a big yes vote from me, he’s still the same far-ranging, defiant thinker he was twenty or thirty years ago. In a recent interview with Useful Idiots, he offered his thoughts on Joe Biden, Donald Trump, a rising nuclear threat, the media, and other topics.
Protest against the police shooting of Daunte Wright. (photo: Reuters)
Minneapolis: Police and Protesters Clash for Second Night Over Death of Daunte Wright
Oliver Laughland, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Police have clashed with protesters for a second night in the suburbs of Minneapolis after the officer-involved death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright on Sunday."
Law enforcement swarms Brooklyn Center, deploying teargas and flash bangs to disperse hundreds gathered outside police headquarters
olice have clashed with protesters for a second night in the suburbs of Minneapolis after the officer-involved death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright on Sunday.
Multiple law enforcement agencies swarmed the suburb of Brooklyn Center on Monday, deploying teargas, flash bangs and other non-lethal force to disperse hundreds of people who gathered outside the police headquarters.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, issued a 7pm curfew in the wake of Sunday night’s unrest but the large crowd of protesters defied verbal orders by police to go home. Police fired volleys of teargas, smoke and pepper-balls, initially from behind a newly erected fortified fence, before advancing in formation and pushing the remaining protesters back.
Some protesters responded by launching fireworks towards police as drum beats pounded and people chanted Wright’s name.
The confrontations occurred hours after Brooklyn Center police released body camera footage of the shooting, which took place on Sunday evening, showing the unarmed Black man’s death. The police chief, Tim Gannon, described the shooting as “an accidental discharge” after the video appeared to show the officer, later identified as 26-year force veteran Kim Potter, threatening to use her Taser electrical weapon before opening fire.
Wright had been pulled over for an alleged traffic violation and was shot dead after a brief scuffle with officers.
On Monday afternoon both President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris called for accountability over the shooting.
“Prayers are not enough,” Harris said on Twitter. “Daunte Wright should still be with us. While an investigation is underway, our nation needs justice and healing, and Daunte’s family needs to know why their child is dead – they deserve answers.”
Biden called for calm after the footage was released: “We do know that the anger, pain and trauma amidst the Black community is real.” But he added that “does not justify violence and looting”.
Brooklyn Center’s mayor, Mike Elliott, called for the department to fire Potter, labelling the shooting “deeply tragic”.
“We cannot afford to make mistakes that lead to the loss of life of other people,” he said.
On Monday afternoon Elliott, the suburb’s first Black mayor, announced that the city council had voted to give his office “command authority” over the police department to “streamline things and establish chain of command and leadership”.
Late on Monday evening the mayor appeared alongside Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, in front of protesters after police dispersed many of those who broke curfew.
“I’m going to do everything I can in my power to make sure justice is done,” Elliott, dressed in a suit and wearing a protective helmet, told onlookers.
Ellison, whose office is prosecuting four officers involved in the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed in May last year in Minneapolis, told the crowd: “This thing is not going to be swept under the rug, we’re going to deal with it in a real way.”
Brooklyn Center is about 10 miles north of Minneapolis’s city center and is a suburb made up of about 30,000 people, 29% of whom are Black.
The Minneapolis area had already been tense before the Wright shooting, as the former police officer Derek Chauvin was brought to trial over death of Floyd. On Monday the trial entered its third week and saw tearful testimony from his brother Philonise Floyd, who told the court Floyd was “a person that everybody loved around the community”.
Chauvin’s defence is expected to start calling witnesses this week, with the trial due to conclude early next week. The three other officers involved in restraining Floyd are due to go on trial in August.
Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, speaks during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/AP)
'Horrifying' Abuse Scandal Still Haunts Leavenworth VA Center; Moran Floats Reforms
Jonathan Shorman and Bryan Lowry, McClatchy DC
Excerpt: "As the new leader of the Department of Veterans Affairs toured VA hospitals across Kansas last week, he confronted the continuing fallout from a sexual abuse scandal in the state that tarnished the agency."
s the new leader of the Department of Veterans Affairs toured VA hospitals across Kansas last week, he confronted the continuing fallout from a sexual abuse scandal in the state that tarnished the agency.
Court judgments ordering millions in payments are still coming in against the VA four years after the perpetrator went to prison. And Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas will soon introduce legislation aimed at preventing future misconduct.
Mark Wisner, a former physician assistant at the Dwight D. Eisenhower VA Medical Center in Leavenworth, was sentenced to 15 years and seven months in prison for multiple convictions of sexual battery and other sexual offenses after a group of veterans testified that he had molested them during medical exams during his tenure at the facility from 2008 to 2014.
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough toured Kansas on Thursday and Friday, making stops in Wichita, Emporia, Junction City, Topeka and Leavenworth, the location where Wisner’s crimes took place against more than 100 victims.
“Your characterization of the incidences is precisely correct — horrifying. And we have zero tolerance for such,” McDonough told The Star Thursday during his Topeka visit.
The case spurred dozens of lawsuits. Eighty-two veterans settled for a shared sum of $7 million in 2019.
In November, U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree awarded two veterans a combined sum of more than $2 million in separate decisions after they testified they were subjected to unnecessary genital exams by Wisner as patients at the VA.
In January, the same federal judge awarded another veteran $1 million after finding the VA “wholly failed to comply” with its reporting and tracking policy for sexual misconduct allegations.
McDonough, who served as chief of staff for former President Barack Obama, was confirmed as the VA secretary in February, roughly three weeks after Crabtree’s latest ruling.
McDonough said the department has taken steps to prevent similar cases from taking place.
“We have very important safeguards and checks in place,” McDonough said, adding that the VA also has an independent inspector general who can investigate whistleblower complaints.
McDonough is the first member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet to visit Kansas since the new administration took office.
He was accompanied throughout his trip by Moran, the top Republican on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, which has oversight of his department. For his part, Moran doesn’t believe Congress or the department have fully responded to the matter.
“My view is that I’m not yet satisfied that everything that can be done legislatively or administratively has been or is being done,” Moran said.
“And it’s the horrific nature of the crimes that were committed in Kansas that are worthy of more attention and will continue to receive them,” Moran said. “Part of it, as the secretary said, is cultural. We need to make certain whoever works at the VA, really anybody in society who sees this kind of behavior occurring, reports it and then VA leadership responds by removing that person from any kind of contact with patients.”
Moran plans to introduce legislation as early as this week that would increase the credentialing and performance monitoring standards in the VA in hopes of preventing other cases of medical malpractice, sexual abuse and other wrongdoing.
Sarah Feldman, the spokeswoman for Sen. Jon Tester, the Montana Democrat who chairs the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said Tester “looks forward to working with Senator Moran to ensure all veterans seeking care at VA facilities are safe and treated with the respect they deserve.”
The bill’s focus is broader than just the Kansas case.
Moran’s office pointed to wrongful death and malpractice cases around the country. It also pointed to a West Virginia case where an unlicensed nursing assistant at a VA facility was convicted in 2020 of murdering seven patients and attempting to murder an eighth with an unnecessary insulin injection.
Moran’s bill would require the VA to conduct “ongoing, retrospective and comprehensive monitoring of the performance and quality of the health care delivered by each health care professional,” according to a bill summary shared by Moran’s office.
The bill would require substantiated concerns to be reported to state licensing bodies and the National Provider Data Bank, a national database that documents malpractice cases and other adverse information about providers. It would also require some VA employees to hold an active registration with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office, an independent agency that serves as a watchdog for Congress, found that some VA facilities had failed to report information to the provider data bank and had also overlooked disqualifying information about employees available in the database.
“What we’re talking about is an individual comes to work for the VA while credentialed some place else but may have problems reported elsewhere,” Moran said.
Moran’s bill would also prohibit the VA from entering into legal settlements with employees that would require it “to conceal a serious medical error or lapse in clinical practice that constitutes a substantial failure to meet generally accepted standards of clinical practice as to raise reasonable concern for the safety of patients.”
Moran said that during the visit to the Leavenworth facility he asked a newly hired doctor who had moved from another state to tell him about the credentialing process she went through before being hired at the facility.
He said the person told him that she believed she was fully vetted.
“That’s encouraging to me,” Moran said, “but the circumstances we went through, no person and veteran ought to ever experience.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, shown here in a hospital in Denver. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
US Recommends Pausing Use of Johnson and Johnson Vaccine Over Blood Clot Concerns
Scott Neuman, NPR
Neuman writes: "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday they are recommending a 'pause' in the use of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine."
READ MORE
Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock informed the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that allowing patients to receive abortion pills through the mail will not increase risks. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
FDA Lifts Curbs on Dispensing Abortion Pills During Pandemic
Alice Miranda Ollstein and Darius Tahir, POLITICO
Excerpt: "The Biden administration is lifting restrictions on dispensing abortion pills by mail during the Covid-19 pandemic, reversing a Trump administration policy that the Supreme Court backed in January."
READ MORE
Rosemarie Santiago sits at home with her son Jericho, who was born while she was incarcerated in Manila. (photo: Hannah Reyes Morales/WP)
The Philippines' Drug War Is Putting More Pregnant Women Behind Bars. What Happens to Their Children?
Regine Cabato, The Washington Post
Cabato writes: "Rosemarie Santiago was four months pregnant when she walked into prison. She left more than a year later as a mother who had spent just one day with her child."
She was taken to a Manila hospital to give birth to her son Jericho. The next day her siblings claimed him, and she returned behind bars. She would not see him for another nine months.
“When I came back, he was so thin,” said Santiago, who was arrested in 2018 on drug charges. “I kept thinking about what could have happened if I had not been arrested.”
Santiago is among hundreds of young mothers who give birth while in government custody in the Philippines, where the poor can wait up to a decade for a trial. Some women tend to their children in dismal conditions, sometimes handcuffed to their hospital beds. Others, like Santiago, surrender the child to family.
The most prominent recent case is that of activist Reina Mae Nasino, whose baby River died of pneumonia in October. The spectacle of the funeral, with a 23-year-old mother cuffed and unable to wipe her tears, was seen by critics of President Rodrigo Duterte as a jarring portrait of diminishing rights in the country. Duterte’s expanding crackdowns on drugs has sharply increased prison populations and left an estimated 25,000 people dead — drawing criticism from rights activists around the world. Nasino is charged with the possession of illegal weapons, which she denies.
The national Bureau of Jail Management and Penology recorded more than 1,600 pregnant detainees and 485 births in the past two years. Around 80 percent of the women face cases related to drugs, said medical officer Paul Borlongan.
Drug-related charges against women jumped to more than 15,000 from 9,000 in 2015. Many are arrested alongside their partners and families, according to the Commission on Human Rights.
At least one other death of a detained activist’s child was reported this year. Human rights advocates argue that babies have higher chances of survival if they are not separated from their mothers. The World Health Organization recommends at least six months for breastfeeding.
But rules in the jail management bureau manual cap a mother and baby’s time together at one month. Anything more must be approved by a court. Many facilities enforce separation after only a day, citing health concerns for the child.
The treatment of incarcerated mothers is largely “prison-specific, judge-specific, warden-specific,” said Inez Feria, director of NoBox Philippines, an organization advocating for drug policy reform. NoBox has supported calls to release mothers and other vulnerable people to decongest jails.
At the Correctional Institution for Women, mothers can spend up to a year with their children. As the only national prison for women, it can set different rules than the one-month limit for newborns that applies in most other detention facilities.
When The Washington Post visited in February, three young women and their babies shared a space called the “mothers’ ward,” across the hall from the cramped dorms of fellow inmates. The room had five beds — two mothers recently checked out — a shared bathroom, a pantry and a shelf of toys.
Superintendent Virginia Mangawit said a separate facility would still be ideal. They are always in need of bed space. The prison, built for 1,500 inmates, holds more than 3,000.
Santiago, the former detainee, said she was not involved in drugs but pleaded guilty on the advice of authorities to avoid a longer wait for trial. By the time she walked free in 2019, Jericho’s father had left.
Bureau of Jail Management and Penology spokesman Xavier Solda defended the one-month cap for new mothers to be with their babies. “[It] is in the best interest of the child given the atmosphere, the health risks, on the part of the baby,” he said. “Are [critics] really saying that it’s more okay to stay in a jail, given the conditions in our jails, rather than at home with a family?”
But human rights advocates say the Philippines is in violation of the “Bangkok Rules,” guidelines from the United Nations on the treatment of women in detention. Under these requirements, determining the length of a mother and child’s time together must be “made in the best interests of the child.”
The rules also say cuffing mothers even during the transfer to a hospital “[violates] international standards,” and every effort should be made to give pregnant women noncustodial sentences, among other recommendations on the facilities and health services that should be available.
In the Philippines, the Commission on Human Rights reports inconsistency in access to maternal health services. “None of the women mentioned availability of postnatal care or services for those experiencing postpartum depression,” it said. Only 37 out of 84 women’s dormitories have a breastfeeding room.
Raymund Narag, prison reform advocate and assistant professor at Southern Illinois University, said the lack of physical and legal structures forces bureau employees in the Philippines to come up with individual solutions. Jail officers sometimes convert their offices to nursing spaces or pool donations with the help of other detainees. At the national penitentiary, a prison employee adopted an inmate’s child.
“Sometimes those coping mechanisms benefit other people but don’t benefit others,” said Narag, a former detainee himself, spending seven years in jail on murder charges for which he was eventually cleared. “You need new guidelines to deal with the concrete situation, not idealistic ones.”
Experts suggest that these gaps be addressed through a new law, formal guidelines from the country’s Supreme Court and revisions to the jail management manual.
Officials told The Post an interagency memorandum that would streamline rules and probably extend the time allotted for mother and child is under review. The Health Department hopes it will pass within the year. A Philippines Senate bill meant to aid incarcerated parents has been pending at the committee level since last year.
The issue can be personal for bureau employees. Hannah Nario-Lopez, a University of the Philippines assistant professor who conducts research and skills training in jails, says some female guards expressed frustration at online vitriol received after the Nasino case.
“At the end of the day, all women suffer here,” she said. “[Anger at the] cruelty of the state, I think, should [be] directed to the critique of the system, lack of institutional support … rather than personal attacks on the officers.”
In one case last May, jail guard Sallie Tinapay — who was nursing her own 8-month-old at the time — was assigned to watch over a detainee after childbirth. When the inmate could not produce milk, she fed the baby from her own breast.
“It was like she didn’t want to breastfeed,” she recalled. “She was thinking that they would be separated anyway.”
The mother, who authorities did not identify for her privacy, could not secure a court permit that would prolong her hospital stay. Social services picked up the infant, and a relative claimed her later, Tinapay said.
The inmate has been released, jail management said.
“I hoped she would be set free,” Tinapay said, “so she can take good care of her child.”
Decaying barrels of toxic waste captured by an underwater camera. (photo: Dr. David Valentine)
Countless Barrels of DDT Dumped off California Coast
Jeff Berardelli, CBS News
Berardelli writes: "Just 10 miles off the coast of Los Angeles lurks an environmental disaster over 70 years in the making, which few have ever heard about."
ust 10 miles off the coast of Los Angeles lurks an environmental disaster over 70 years in the making, which few have ever heard about. That is, until now, thanks to the research of a University of California marine scientist named David Valentine.
Working with little more than rumors and a hunch, curiosity guided him 3,000 feet below the ocean's surface. A few hours of research time and an autonomous robotic submersible unearthed what had been hidden since the 1940s: countless barrels of toxic waste, laced with DDT, littering the ocean floor in between Long Beach and Catalina Island.
The fact that his underwater camera spotted dozens of decaying barrels immediately in what is otherwise a barren, desert-like sea floor, Valentine says, is evidence that the number of barrels is likely immense. Although the exact number is still unknown, a historical account estimates it may be as many as a half a million.
After 70-plus years of inaction, Valentine's research has finally helped initiate a huge research effort to reveal the extent of the contamination.
But this offshore dump site is only a part of the story of environmental damage from years of DDT discharge along the coast of Southern California — a story which likely won't be closed for decades to come because of its ongoing impact, including a recently discovered alarming and unprecedented rate of cancer in the state's sea lion population, with 1 in every 4 adult sea lions plagued with the disease.
The history of DDT dumping
The chemical DDT was invented in 1939 and used during World War II as a pesticide helping to protect troops from insect-borne diseases like Malaria. After the war, production of the chemical ramped up and it became routinely used in the spraying of crops, and even over crowded beaches, to eliminate pests like mosquitos.
But in the 1960s, DDT was discovered to be toxic. Over time, eating food laced with DDT builds up inside the tissues of animals and even humans, resulting in harmful side effects. The EPA now calls it a "probable human carcinogen." In 1972, when the U.S. government started taking environmental pollution seriously with legislation like the Clean Air Act, DDT was banned in the United States.
The largest DDT manufacturer in the U.S., Montrose Chemical Corporation, was located along the Southern California coast in the city of Torrance. From 1947 through 1982, Montrose manufactured and distributed DDT worldwide. In doing so, a byproduct mix of toxic sludge made up of petrochemicals, DDT and PCBs was produced.
For decades, that hazardous waste was disposed of in two ways. Some of the toxic pollution was dumped into storm drains and the sewer system, which was then pumped out to sea through outflow pipes, 2 miles offshore of the city of Rancho Palos Verdes.
The rest of the waste was disposed of in barrels which were loaded onto barges and floated 10 to 15 miles offshore to waste dumping sites off Catalina Island and then jettisoned into the ocean.
While it may seem hard to believe, at least part of the dumping was legally permitted. Back then, Valentine says, the prevailing thought was the ocean's were so huge that they could never be compromised. The mantra was "dilution is the solution to pollution" — in hindsight a naïve notion.
But while the designated dumping site was very deep — in 3,000 feet of water — Valentine says shortcuts were taken, with barrels being dumped much closer to shore. And, in an effort to get the barrels to sink, there is evidence that many were slashed, allowing poison to leak, as they were dropped into the ocean.
For decades, the existence of these toxic barrels was surmised only by a very small group of scientists and regulators. That's despite a startling report produced in the 1980s by a California Regional Water Quality Control Board scientist named Allan Chartrand, which asserted there may be as many as 500,000 barrels laced with DDT sitting on the ocean floor.
The report was largely ignored. But after nearly 30 years, Valentine dusted it off as he began his quest to see if these barrels existed.
The inshore toxic waste site
Unlike the deep water dumping sites, the shallower toxic site — called the Palos Verdes Shelf — 2 miles off the beaches of Rancho Palos Verdes was well-known and documented. In 1996, this zone was declared a Superfund clean-up site by the EPA, now comprising a 34-square-mile area. Montrose was sued and after a protracted legal battle ending in late 2000 the companies involved, including Montrose, settled for $140 million.
Over the past two decades, most of the money has been used by a program called the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program (MSRP) to try to restore the contaminated sites. Half of the funds were allocated to the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to rehabilitate ecosystems impacted by the poison.
DDT gets into the food chain when it is consumed from the contaminated ocean bottom by tiny marine creatures, which are then eaten by small fish, which are then consumed by larger fish and marine mammals, like sea lions. Over time DDT builds up in the tissues and blubber of marine animals, a process called bioaccumulation. To this day, signs all along the Southern California coast warn fishermen not to eat certain fish. Despite this, you cannot get DDT contamination from swimming in the water.
Scientists say the contamination at this shallower water site is the most likely food chain route which leads to DDT building up in sea lion blubber. That's because there is a much greater amount of marine life living in shallower water. But that does not rule out contamination from the much deeper site as well.
To try to remedy these pollution problems, NOAA has used its share of the funds to manage almost 20 restoration projects off the LA coast, like restoring kelp forest habitat, helping migratory seabirds and restoring 500 acres of critical coastal marsh habitat in Huntington Beach.
The last project of the effort — just completed — was the commissioning of an artificial reef just off the beaches of Rancho Palos Verdes. To accomplish this, NOAA hired a team of scientists from the Southern California Marine Science Institute and Vantuna Research Group at Occidental College to design and deploy the reef.
The reef building effort was led by Jonathan Williams, a marine biologist from Occidental College. The project involved strategically placing more than 70,000 tons of quarry rock on the ocean bottom just off the beach. Williams says that the reef was an immediate success, with thousands of fish flocking to the rocks.
This reef site is much closer to shore than the contamination site, which is 2 miles from land. That's by design. Williams says the idea is to construct new habitat for fish and kelp in uncontaminated areas to build up healthy populations of fish. This helps limit the amount of toxins, like DDT, which enters the food chain.
As predators at the top of the food chain, DDT in fish is also a danger to people. Williams says this is especially true of underserved communities who are mostly likely to subsistence fish, eating what they catch. In this way, NOAA's project addresses environmental justice by attempting to make fish more safe to eat.
Two miles offshore, Williams says that after years of measuring high levels of DDT on the Palos Verdes Shelf, levels have started to drop precipitously, a sign that some of the DDT may finally be starting to break down.
Discovering the barrels
Despite the fact that the toxic barrels were dumped in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, their existence just became common knowledge this past fall when the Los Angeles Times published a feature on Valentine's work. But his discovery dates all the way back to 2011 when he first decided to see if the rumors of the barrels were true. In 2013 he made another short trip to the site. But his research was not published until March of 2019.
In all, his time-limited work yielded visuals of 60 barrels. Besides bringing back video of the leaking barrels, his team was also able to collect samples from the ocean floor. One of them registered a contamination 40 times greater than the highest contamination at the Superfund site, indicating that the toxins down deep are still very concentrated.
Armed with this compelling evidence, Valentine said that he "beat the drum" for years, speaking to various government agencies, trying to get some interest, but to no avail. However, when the LA Times story came out, interest finally followed as public outcry grew.
But before his discovery in 2011, Valentine placed part of the blame for the lack of knowledge about the barrels on the lack of technology to find it. It's only in the past couple of decades that the technology became available to make this deep water research feasible.
Coincidentally, on the very day CBS News went to visit Valentine in Southern California, Scripps Institution of Oceanography began a two-week mission to survey almost 50,000 feet of the deep ocean seafloor.
Employing a large research vessel called the Sally Ride, 31 scientists and crew members, and two high-tech autonomous robots they call Roombas, the team used sophisticated sonar to map the ocean bottom and assess how many barrels there are.
As of our last conversation with Eric Terrill, the team leader, the final number had still not been tallied. But even as early as a week into the research mission, Terrill described detecting tens of thousands of targets and said the number of barrels seemed "overwhelming."
The two-week mission is now complete, but the team is still putting together the pieces. They expect to have a final report published at the end of April.
Sea lions in trouble
Located right near the Golden Gate Bridge, the mission of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California is to rescue marine mammals in distress. Since 1975, the organization says they have rescued 24,000.
In December, the team published a 30-year study on sea lions, finding an alarming statistic: 25% of adult sea lions have cancer.
CBS News interviewed the lead veterinarian Dr. Cara Field. She called the number of sea lions with cancer both "extremely alarming" and "unprecedented in wildlife." Last year the Marine Mammal Center had to euthanize 29 sea lions because of cancer.
In the report, the research team pointed to a combination of herpesvirus and contaminants like DDT and PCBs as the cause of cancer. In all cases of cancer, sea lions had elevated levels of DDT and PCBs in their blubber. The theory goes that the contaminants weaken the body's immune system, making the virus more effective.
Because sea lions travel up and down the California coast yearly, scientists believe they may pick up the contaminants when they are near their breeding site on the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California.
And while it seems logical that the sea lion contamination is coming from polluted sites in shallow water, scientists do not yet know how much of the DDT from barrels in deeper water may be entering the food chain. This, they say, will require more research.
While there are still many unanswered questions, one lesson from this story of DDT contamination is clear: When humans callously pollute the environment it can have consequences for generations to come. One current example is human-caused climate change. The question is, how much of a burden will our children and grandchildren have to bear as result of our choices?
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