Transcripts For ALJAZ Death By Design 20240713 : comparemela

We want accountability. Anyone a powerful cyclon has started dumping rain on bangladesh and india is eastern coast millions of people are being moved to shelters before the storm hits land later on widens day and in indias west bengal region preparing for the site phone as being complicated by the rapid spread of coronavirus people are being asked to maintain social distancing while staying inside some shelters tavor choudhry has more from dhaka. The government figures says nearly 2200000 people have been put into a shelter that made accommodation for at least 5000000 people now bangladeshs used to cycle on it something a frequency almost every year but the cycle on our super cycle and thats much more to read the last one we had was in 2007 cycle in cedar so the government is very very much taking this as a challenge considering it has to deal with kobe had 19 you know pandemic in the country now we know a lot of people have already been evacuated since yesterday evening the danger is a lot of people also stay in scattered island what is known here as silt outside and island out by the coast many of these people dont have shelter and also the fisherman deep sea fisherman at least we know that about 600 fishing boats are still not come back nearly 40000 people in this silt island dont have shelter those people need to be evacuated before the storm hits which is expected to be sometime late evening today the uns acting envoy to libya has warned that an influx of weapons and mustnt race is threatening to make fighting more intense between the countries warning signs a number of civilian casualties has surged in recent weeks forces loyal to warlord honey for have been continuing their Year Long Campaign to seize tripoli from the u. N. Recognize government the u. N. Humanitarian chief is calling on the Security Council to ensure aid continues to reach millions of people in northwest syria a resolution allowing for deliveries across syrias border with turkey will expire in july mark local says aid has been scaled up in weeks and months because of the staggering levels of need and the coronavirus pandemic. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas says palestine will not be bound by agreements with israel and the us because of israels pandemic sanction of 30 percent of the occupied west bank abbas has called for countries that have rejected the trumpet administrations middle east peace plan to recognize the state of palestine and impose sanctions on israel under trump still israel could begin annex in Palestinian Land and he is july. Taiwans president has delivered her inauguration speech where she called on china to find ways the 2 can coexist in line and hope Independence Party reject beijings proposal of one country 2 systems as a method for unification. Polls have opened in the elections the both a tarion president is stepping down after 15 years in charge United Nations has questioned how free and fair the vote will be given that bundy has refused to allow it to send any observers the elections taking place amid the threat of violence and despite the corona virus pandemic china is taking steps to stop the consumption of Exotic Animal meat the governments now offering to pay wildlife farmers in 2 provinces to stop breeding the animals the move is part of a crackdown on the exotic meat trade after some experts linked to socalled went to market in. To the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and those are the headlines coming up next on aljazeera its death by design could by. Im attached to my phone my computer my tablet. Indeed amazes me how in just 20 years theyve completely changed the way i live and communicate. Our devices are sleek and elegant. We store our lives in a beautiful to cloud. Land. Theres. I started making this film to explore the impact of our digital revolution. And then secrets the industry tried to hide for years began to spill out. That it. Was. Our electronics are made and unmade is dirty and dangerous i love it its a global story of damaged lives environmental destruction and devices that are designed to die. To live as. Elin 11. Inch mess. Industrialization have put a huge pressure on our ecosystem and on the environment. When it comes to i. T. Industry many people think its its grainy or natural its rain or some people think its even think its virtual. But in our investigation we find its not like that. This pollution is having different consequences but i think that the top impact the biggest impact is on this Public Health we have 300000000 who are residents who dont have access to sufficient safe drinking water. Want to see what they almost see the have a shiny new economy but not. The kind that your show does not let them do a check. To the world that they do it its on them. To just its is a hold up you hold womens event and it was shot and then the ultimate. I keep thinking about the moment when i face all those environmental and social damage. River you know which carries all the ways to lake. River and base old ladies suddenly around on their knees in front of me. Im not like. I dont have any sort of government administrative power and dont have much Financial Resources to do with this but i told myself at that moment in front of those ladies i told myself that. At least i need to bring the message out. I need to make sure that all the users of all those gadgets they need to be informed about this. I moved to this area in 1969 to go to law school because i said i wanted to help people who didnt have the means to represent themselves. It was a time when most people not heard of the semiconductor industry. But within a few years people started seeing the the birth of what has become the you know Global Electronics industry. The. Top names were companies Hewlett Packard apple intel advanced micro devices. The virtually the whos who of the Electronics Industry. And of course the granddaddy of them all was i. B. M. When i got a card and i. B. M. That was great that was the company to work for at the time i could go any place where he worked i. B. M. I dont need an id just write a check it was that easy i. B. M. Had that much clout i was the 1st microprocessor buyer for i. B. M. In the early eightys the idea of a personal computer which was was on oxymoron right i mean without personal computer what end it what would you use a for anyway but it got legs and we started the p. C. Business the 1st year they shipped 50000. 00 units. And so we went from a 1000 a week 240008 week and at that point the peace scene was launched. From almost the very beginning you heard electronics and Semiconductor Production was a clean industry they said it was as clean as a hospital but what they werent telling people was that it was really a chemical handling industry and that the magic of making these microcircuits relied on the use of hundreds if not thousands of very toxic chemicals and thats why they have clean rooms thats why they have bunny suits to try to protect the chips it was never designed to protect the workers it was always designed to protect the product itself over i got those a lot of different chemicals they built the disk drives we had to strip them out and then would have to dip im in severe gases and with a sponge and just with armed with severe i dunno what it was is i just knew it stunk really bad and you couldnt get it on your skin because it would burn you like nobodys business what what happened was people started getting sick with very strange kinds of illnesses things that didnt seem to make a lot of sense and didnt seem to hang together but increasingly as this happened more and more there was a small group of people that began to think that maybe this was related to the Chemical Exposure on the job. One put music on yeah right you want to turn on the music from. Thats some good music on today. Right there. Because i mean theres a thing of. The. 1975 i was 18 years old and i started working in the Electronics Field i went to a spectra physics and they just hired me just like. I was making the end of the laser and i would have to mix up this chemical in i used to call it green go. And get the consistency and then put into a spray gun and i would have to heat that up after a glued on together that was just all the way that i did. Yvette you know the material she was using turns out to be probably in the vicinity of 50 percent little excite she didnt know she was exposed to lead in tell her that i got pregnant with mark in 1079 and that was full term my months and were just really happy about it. That he doesnt even know to cross the street and know a car is coming to stop going to the restroom you know i have to go with him in there so i have to system with everything. Number one or you know. If i knew what i know now how to read out a spec or fix at the time it was unnecessary it just. Breaks my heart that i could avoid it. Oh were filing this lawsuit against her employer and its a lawsuit for his son who was born with severe Developmental Disabilities and is a suit concealment of systemic chemical poisoning and case of a vet and for the direct injuries to mark. Marks condition isnt like a cold take antibiotics and youre going to be fine in 5 days this is life. Youre. Just overrides all that and you do what youre going to do to the stereo still do. Im sorry going to go. But. I discovered i. B. M. Had a corporate mentality. Which they kept for 30 years and it kept track of the causes of death of their employees the most dramatic findings were about cancer for the company as a whole this was 33000. 00 deaths that were in this corporate mortality file so included people who had worked all over the u. S. But then when you look at specific plants like the i. B. M. Plant in san jose there was some extraordinary excess costs of deaths one was brain cancer the other was not hodgkinson foma another was melanoma of the skin and in the women Breast Cancer was 3 and 4 fold higher than expected. That was the heart just said it was a lost. In a santa clara courtroom today the 1st trial out of more than 200. 00 similar lawsuits filed against i. B. M. Former i. B. M. Workers jim bore and a lighter hernandez say they developed cancer from exposure to toxic chemicals at i. B. M. San jose facility in the late seventys or early ninetys i mean literally tried to prevent the results of the tally analysis from ever seeing the light of day in fact they went to the judge and said this cant be used in this case a lot of hernandez is not dead shes going to be in the courtroom and not only was it not relevant the judge said it prejudiced the jury if they saw what these excess cause dust were and so he denied the use of it in the court many of the brands will respond to questions by saying no one has ever proved to me that a Single Person has died from exposure to these chemicals either within inside their factories or outside of the factories and of discussion but thats not the way that we approach environmental or Occupational Health in the world we are not flying blind here at all especially on the chemicals at issue here in the Electronics Industry actually and most of the common chemical used in all industrial manufacturing weve been at this work for 40 years. If you look at the pub listening generated by again you would think that we lost everything and thats simply not going. After the trial i. B. M. Matters were resolved for hundreds of people whose claims did not go to trial. What can you tell us about the settlements. Im not going to be able to talk about any of the resolutions of the cases and i wont. Can you give any details at all. Did you have to agree not to reveal the details as part of the settlement all i can say is that the matters were resolved thats what im allowed to say. Here in Silicon Valley Chip Companies and the other Electronics Production Companies Used hundreds if not thousands of toxic chemicals and the most of the chemicals once theyre used in making the components needed to be disposed of as waste the companies ended up storing them in underground storage tanks all over the valley. But what the brilliant people who were designing these systems didnt quite think through all the way was that the solvent swer really good at dissolving things and so when you put them into a tank eventually theyre going to eat their way through the tank. Solvent that the Electronics Industry used in production in Silicon Valley in the seventys and eightys are now on in the groundwater and if you think about putting a drop of ink in a bathtub. That spreads really quickly and its really hard to get that dropping back thats what were dealing with except were dealing with multiples of gallons of the stuff that is in the groundwater. In late 1901 there were over 100 families in one little neighborhood who had Serious Problems and the state Health Department discovered that the families that were drinking the most heavily contaminated water had significantly higher rates of miscarriages and birth defects then did people in other neighborhoods. Well the Chemical Industry will often say if i had not a dime for every time i heard this that even water can kill you those non toxic thing of course it can but only if you stick your face down in the bathtub or fall into a you know fall into a large body of water and so that has the traditional approach to toxicology is that the more stuff youre exposed to the more harm it causes you but what were seeing in particularly around cancer and around hormone disrupting chemicals is that its when youre exposed to it the time of exposure so if youre in 3rd trimester and you get even a perp or 1000000000 or part for truly an exposure it can actually cause significant damage. We formed this Silicon Valley tuxes coalition and we did a summer organizing project getting people to sign petitions asking the e. P. A. Step in with their authority in the Superfund Program yesterday and yesterday yes. And i went to a meeting in washington and presented these thousands of petitions saying we need e. P. A. To come in its time for e. P. A. To exercise your authority and to everybodys great surprise they agreed to do that. So Hewlett Packard became a superfund site until became a superfund Site National Semiconductor Advanced micro devices i. B. M. You name it they were there and they were all superfund sites. The cost of cleanup for i. B. M. As well as all the other companies has been tremendous its an enormously slow and tedious process. If you look right over here also this is a major residential neighborhood just directly across the street from this industrial site. Most of the People Living here today are unaware of this huge toxic plume. And those same chemicals that are still right under where were standing are now beginning to seep back up out of the groundwater through the soil and are actually coming into the offices of these Software Engineers a google. And this is the one that e. P. A. Said might take 300 years to clean up. This is so complicated the devastation is so enormous that were really talking centuries of cleanup not just years or decades. The problem is that it just keeps reoccur. Please when companies started moving away from Silicon Valley to china i think that they were the only too happy to have the government off their back. Their Chinese Government made an offer to multinational corporations that they couldnt refuse. You need a land and you need money and you need government approval and you need lots of people to put it all together well they have all of that in china. Just. Please. Let. Me and one of the primary purposes of outsourcing is to enable Companies Like apple to make what are essentially an reasonable demands on manufacturers that they wouldnt and couldnt make if they actually had to employ the workers directly apple doesnt have to worry about what it means to workers when they insist on a tripling of the pace of i phone production. To go to the glue and sons of those who. Come in the new. Ball. Anyway focused on this is you. Know you. Know you can see as you go by the one you dont we see you know some of the. From a single example last year and. This one gains here its not. Played against. The us military. Will. Cause the. News as we do want. To live it will not. Be out. So we have. To. Test it on the way and. You know we. Knew they would sit and have. To do such a thing how much. Dont let me go boom another you go and see they. Do or so we made our loved ones we did good teaching good to go do this and were telling each other you put in the to know. So if our you saucy you know how you sound sung to god so they. Say you have an estate in sweden this is the sudan did you know that you. Know its easy to do so because of that its. Based on. Its resizing. So good about themselves. You would think im going to be able to. Do more in the yard were changing toward him and. You can see more. Doubting in general. Didnt move from the truth of the injured in the costume. Of the one of the 2 ladies. A. T. M. Sure. He laid out a new solution. Which he told me. Change him. Hanss the right is here to report on the people often ignored but who must be heard how many other channels can you say will take their time and put extensive thought into reporting from under reported areas of course we cover major global offense but our passion lies in making sure that youre hearing the stories from people in places like palestine the young man the sahara legion and so many others who go to the you make the effort we care we stay. The story along the family and f