Dioxin Dorms Blog :: SUNY New Paltz

Readers, please note — I’ll be taking a few days off from the Dioxin Dorms blog. However, I’ll be posting links to highlight articles through the rest of the week, so please check in.

AS WE SAW from yesterday’s entry, the dioxin dorms at SUNY New Paltz are part of a much vaster history of the chemical industry that dates back to the early 20th century, and which affects the whole world.

It is unfortuate that today, few people have heard of PCBs or dioxins. PCBs were the manufactured product, created mainly between the 1930s and the late 1970s; dioxins were (and are) the contaminant that comes along — a problem similar to Agent Orange during Vietnam, which also contained dioxin.

Once thought to be more toxic than PCBs, it is now known that certain PCBs are “dioxin-like,” meaning just as toxic. All the chemicals are now classed as dioxin-like compounds.

There has been a systematic campaign to obscure the truth in the news, and the PCB manufacturers have even gone so far as to sue journalists who dare to tell the truth. The issue has so many arms, legs, heads, and tails and has left its droppings from your nearest ocean to the North Pole, that if you start to talk about the extent of the problem you seem like a true conspiracy freak.

This is, however, one of the best-documented conspiracies there is, and it came down to the 16 cents a pound for which Monsanto sold its “Aroclor” PCB fluid to Westinghouse, General Electric and other electrical manufacturers.

Congress might have acted sooner to ban them, but the Electrical Manufacturer’s Association was so effective at lobbying for federal insurance regulations that by the 1970s it was mandatory to have PCBs in every public building. And it might have acted sooner, if not for the fake studies that Monsanto was putting out “proving” how safe the chemicals are.

These are no different in intent and effect than the fake studies done by the State of New York which “prove” that the dioxin dorms are safe; in both cases, they are science for sale, lacking all the integrity you would expect. The state officials who conduct these studies and foist them on an unwitting public are no different than the Monsanto executives who presented fabricated studies to congress in an effort to forestall the federal regulation of PCBs.

And why does it always happen this way? It seems that everyone is in it for the money.

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