Friday 23 September 2016

THE RADIUM GIRLS Kate Moore


THE RADIUM GIRLS

KATE MOORE

Simon & Schuster, 2016, 465 pages


Review by Phil Shannon


Those smirking denigrators of the ‘nanny-state’ who gripe about ‘occupational health and safety gone mad’ would do well to read Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls about a time when a nasty industrial poison, unregulated by business-friendly governments, destroyed countless American women’s lives.

 

Discovered in 1898, radium’s spectacular luminescence made it a popular craze.  It could, said its promoters, not only make you glow in the dark, but cure cancer (it did destroy tumorous cells) and all manner of human ailments.  US business entrepreneurs cashed in, at their head the watch dial industry whose profits increased by the bucketload from government contracts for night-time illumination of military instrumentation during the first World War.

 

Because of their nimble fingers, teenage and young women (and girls, some as young as eleven) were employed by the thousands for the intricate work of painting tiny dials.  They embraced their new jobs.  Paid on a piece-work basis, the more dials (and thus more radioactive radium) they handled, the better their earnings.  The most efficient and profitable (and dangerous) way to apply the radium-paint was ‘lip-pointing’, where moistened lips were used to bring paint-brush bristles to a fine taper.

 

The continual, close oral contact with bone-loving radium meant that the jaw was the first to go from radiation-induced necrosis (bone decay), after having lost all the teeth, followed by other crumbling bones, severe anaemia from destruction of red blood cell production in bone marrow, and cancer of the bone.

 

The radium-painters had been assured that radium was safe, despite management being aware of its dangers and, in fact, introducing some safety standards for their technical and scientific laboratory workers.  As the radium-painters fell sick and died, however, they continued to be lied to, and about.  Their health problems were blamed on ‘improper diets’, syphilis from sexual promiscuity, pre-existing health conditions, and workers’ compensation fraud.

 

Management’s allies included pro-business government bureaucracies, state legislatures, company doctors, and radium researchers, most of whom either worked for radium companies or for prestigious university departments which were funded by industry.

 

The radium-painters could only rely on a few conscience-troubled defectors from the above ranks, some lawyers (who acted from a mix of sympathy and the commercial lure of their standard 30-40% cut of successful compo claims), and the Consumers League which campaigned for better working conditions for women.  Trade unions (especially the conservative, male-dominated American Federation of Labor) are absent from the book - the radium-painters were too often deferential towards authority figures in business suits and lab coats.

 

Out-of-court settlements in front of business-linked judges cut the companies’ compensation losses whilst exempting them from any precedent-setting legal guilt.  It took two decades before a jury court vindicated the women as victims of industrial poisoning by radiation.

 

The real turning point for the radium industry, however, wasn’t so much the women workers but a wealthy male industrialist who died from drinking Radithor (a radium-infused tonic water) to treat an injury (‘The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off’, was the newspaper headline).  Radium medicines were banned, then laws introduced for all workers for safety standards for radium and other radioactive substances.

 

Radium’s legacy (it has a half-life of 1,600 years) still endures, however.  The contaminated factory and waste land-fill sites remain a radioactive source for above average community cancer rates, whilst costing taxpayers millions of dollars for government clean-ups.

 

The intimate human drama of the radium-painters monopolises most of Moore’s attention (she is a theatre director, not a historian) but the narrative reveals an early, grim chapter in the real cost of all subsequent variations (weapons, reactors, mining, waste dumps) on the disastrous nuclear theme.

THE PANAMA PAPERS Obermayer & Obermaier


THE PANAMA PAPERS: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

BASTIAN OBERMAYER and FREDERIK OBERMAIER

Oneworld, 2016, 366 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

‘Only the little people pay tax’ was the gloating boast of the American billionaire property tycoons, Harry and Leona Helmsley.  Like this happy couple, write the Munich-based investigative journalists, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier in The Panama Papers, wealthy tax cheats have a particular liking for off-shore tax havens.

 

Their book recounts the release in April 2016 of the greatest ever leak of confidential data (2.6 terabytes, 11 million documents) - the entire internal database of Mossack Fonseca (MF), a major Panamanian law firm which specialises in providing shell companies in notorious tax bolt-hole countries to enable the secretive rich to dodge paying tax on the income generated from their wealth.

 

Shell companies are dummy, paper entities which are impenetrable to government financial and criminal investigators through hiding the identities of the real owners of financial and property assets behind anodyne company names fronted by pro-forma ‘nominee directors’.  MF’s go-to glorified company director was a lowly-paid MF employee who was, on paper, in charge of over 25,000 shell companies but whose job was to robotically sign any bit of paper required to keep MF’s famously shy clients out of the tax headlights.

 

Like its founder, a wartime SS officer turned CIA informant to save his Nazi hide, MF is not fussy about the company it keeps.  MF knowingly helps, or prefers not to know about, those amongst its tax-averse clients such as gun-runners, drug dealers, Mafiosi, people-traffickers, child prostitution racketeers and other out-and-out criminals whom MF demurely refers to as its more ‘ethically challenged’ customers.

 

MF’s more ‘respectable’ clients include the Lesser Rich (real estate agents, dentists, etc.) and the Greater Rich such as the embezzling dictators, despots and heads of state; government ministers and their close circle; film directors and movie stars; chess grand masters and Formula 1 racing-car drivers; top-end football club owners, managers and star players like FC Barcelona striker, Lionel Messi; and bucketloads of other billionaires.

 

The tax haven rort is technically legal, note the authors, though the distinction between lawful tax minimisation and illegal tax evasion is easily lost on poor working saps who can not opt out of the tax game because they lack the will (believing, as they do, in such antiquarian notions as tax fairness), the opportunity (because they are compulsorily taxed at source each payday) and the means (adequate capital to be able to afford their own lawyer-accountant enablers or the fees charged by shell company providers like MF).

 

As the MF leak source (known as ‘John Doe’, for safety’s sake) said, ‘what is legally allowed is [itself] scandalous’.  What is legally allowed could easily be disallowed, he adds, were it not for the fact that ‘tax evasion can not possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes’ like the ‘high net worth’ individuals that MF caters to or the multinational corporations serviced by other shell company providers.

 

Thus, Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg’s former Prime Minister and now President of the European Commission) defends his country’s tax haven status.  Thus, the UK is compromised as a tax enforcer by hosting a tax haven in the British Virgin Islands, as is the US by accommodating tax haven rat-holes in Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware and Florida.  The wealthy have little to fear from governments of and for the wealthy.

 

The ‘half century of political failure to address the metastasizing tax havens spotting Earth’s surface’, lamented by Mr. Doe, looks set to continue if left up to rhetoric-rich but action-poor politicians.  Any push must come from the 99%, amongst whose ranks will be those remaining journalists of integrity, motivated by an outraged sense of financial justice.

 

The Panama Papers was the result of a global collaboration involving four hundred journalists from eighty countries.  Whilst the Western journalists’ greatest fear was of being ignored, other journalists faced  the opposite problem of being noticed only too well by trigger-happy criminals and autocrats.  All the journalists rose to the challenge, however, to lift a corner on the lid of the great tax haven swindle.