Poor Mojo's Newswire

. . . The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula. But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time inside showed signs of mental deterioration, from stumbling memory loss to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. In October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them died. The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects. . . . In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed. It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, or crazy, or dead. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.” . . .

I just finished reading Glen Yeadon's fantastic book, The Nazi Hydra In America I've been quoting at such great length for the last couple months. Towards the end is the story of the CIA assassination of Jaime Roldós, Ecuador's first democratically elected president in modern times. . . . Roldos was elected on a populist platform and pissed off the corporations that determine U.S. policies in Latin America by insisting that his countrymen be treated as human beings. He decreed a 40 hour workweek, doubled the minimum wage to $160/month and rallied other countries in the region to a policy embracing human rights, which, predictably, drove American conservatives into a frenzy of bloodlust. Roldos rejected an invitation to Reagan's inauguration (January, 1981) and 4 months later he had a plane crash. The CIA assassinated the President of Panama, Omar Torrijos, a few months later (another plane crash). John Perkins, in his epic 2004 book, Confessions of An Economic Hit Man, explained that the CIA murdered both Torrijos and Roldos, but not just because of a human rights declaration. A CIA asset planted a bomb in a tape recorder in Roldos' plane because he was in the middle of reorganizing the country's oil policies, a big no-no in a very high stakes world where there's no fooling around tolerated. From Yeadon we learned that in Latin America "legally elected governments leaning to the left or announcing reforms that threatened corporate America were branded as communist and soon overthrown by covert support of hard-right rebellions. Invariably the new regime was a brutal right-wing dictatorship that murdered thousands to suppress dissent. The United States soon recognized the new regime and offered support for its military and police, all in the name of combating communism and supporting freedom." . . .