NO PAINTING OVER A NATIONAL BAMBOOZLE

Scott Shuger, Author of IGNORAD, Baltimore and Dutch Boy Lead-Based Paint

By Ivana Driver for CPW News Service

       Scott Shuger, author of IGNORAD: The Military Screw-up Nobody Talks About (January 16, 2002), the blaring critique of U.S. preparedness during 911, had connections to the post-WWII military industrialist complex's bamboozling of the American citizenry through the prolonged use of lead-based paint.  Scott Shuger had grown up with a front row seat to the flow of the National Lead Co.'s Cold War era promotion of lead-based paint as a deterrent to the ignition of civilian structures during a nuclear explosion.  This government-assisted marketing strategy, diametrically opposed to the MAD theory of nuclear annihilation or "mutually assured destruction," had the citizens believing that lead-based paints would retard the burning of wooden houses based on Defense Department experiments that avoided the issue of radiation poisoning and irradiation like that which kills even Anthrax spores.  At the same time nations world-wide were banning lead in paint, then in gasoline, because of its health dangers.

      The Maryland-based Baltimore Paint and Color Works family, the company that acquired National Lead's Dutch Boy Lead-based paint, made since 1907, was acquired by Sherwin Williams in 1980 and was one of the paints recommended for its effectiveness in limiting the ignition of wooden structures during nuclear bomb blasts.  The 1950's U.S. Civil Defense and its preparedness program's training film The House In The Middle touted the ability of white lead-based paint to stand up under the scorching heat of a nuclear fireball.  The National Fix-up, Clean-up and Paint-up programs promoted the nation-wide effort which energized the paint industry based on bad science but very effectively applied mind-science elements of psychology and sociology.  "These modern sciences inform K-Street, Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the halls of the Pentagon," said Peter Pezonus.  "Psychology and sociology took a subtle shift in recent decades from the research, analysis and critique of people like Upton Sinclair and Vance Packard to the wholesale use of applied sociology and psychology as a type of snake oil mystical, magical motivators through subtle individual and mass behavioral control geared toward some singular payoff, generally financial. Take, for example, Columbia University's 'father of applied sociology,' Robert Merton, whose son, Robert Merton of Harvard, won the Nobel Prize for his development of Black Scholes the financial formula for the credit default swaps that tanked the U.S. economy in 2008 and provided a bamboozle as big as Smedley Butler's assertion that 'war is a racket,'" said Pezonus who added...."Alfred Nobel's work is still blowing things up." 
      Pezonus is sure that "when people are given some apparently reliable pseudo-scientific justification for their irrational behavior rationality jumps head-first out the window from the highest floors."

     While the effects of radiation from a nuclear  bomb blast are well known few know that Microsoft's and Bill Gate's Slate.Com’s leading journalist and the first real internet reporter, Scott Shuger, who mysteriously died in a witness-less scuba diving accident (June 15, 2002) in California five months after writing IGNORAD, wrote the critique of the U.S. preparedness for the 911 terrorism scenario.  Shuger, a former military intelligence officer, was from the family that developed reflective road paint made by Baltimore Paint and Color Works which profited from the Eisenhower initiative to duplicate in the U.S.A. the German autobahns in the post-WWII era of U.S. infrastructure expansion.

 

     "With lead-based paint banned in Europe 50 years before its banning in the U.S., this means that Scott was clearly an insider as to the U.S. paint, varnish and lacquer business’ history with the U.S. Civil Defense program and its marriage to the lead mining industry that was featured in the March 8, 2013 article Somewhere Between the Dirty Low Down and the ProperLine," said Peter Pezonus, the article's author.   Pezonus noted that, likewise, the February 16, 2011 article The House In The Middle Should Have Been The House On the Ends by Winsip Custer exposes this little known chapter in faulty-science that had informed the larceny in the nation's war-profiteering legacy.  "Yes," said Custer, "it's a long legacy of larceny."

From: http://www.mde.state.md.us/assets/document/brownfields/SherwinWilliams.pdf:

Site History

Before 1946, the site area was undeveloped and mainly used for agriculture. In 1946, Sophie Shuger et al. purchased the site and constructed the Baltimore Paint and Color Works. The company manufactured paints and paint type coatings. Production of similar products has continued through the years even though the line of products may have expanded or contracted according to market conditions. In 1975, the Baltimore Paint and Chemical Corporation merged into and became Elt, Inc. Elt, Inc. changed its name to Dutch Boy, Inc. in 1977 and this company subsequently sold the land and it’s building to the Sherwin-Williams Company in August 1980.

The Sherwin Williams Company maintains three permits from the Maryland Department of the

Environment (MDE). The company has an Air Management Administrative Construction Permit owing to the use of liquid and powder type compounds, a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System Permit for discharge of cooling water to Gwynns Falls and ultimately to the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River, and an Oil Control Operation Permit owing to the use of oil in boilers.

Environmental Investigations

An extensive history of spills, cleanups and remedial actions and proposals exists for the Sherwin-

Williams Baltimore facility. These incidents have generally related to leaking lines and tanks, tank

overflows, cleaning of tanks, broken hoses, couplings disconnecting during use, dropped and broken containers, rusted containers and damaged seals.

The property came to the attention of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as having possible groundwater contamination when an inspector noted occasional changes in the color of a stream coincident with discharges from the site. As a result of the observations, Sherwin-Williams installed and sampled five monitoring wells in June 1985. Volatile organic compounds, lead and chromium were detected, although lead and chromium were not detected in 1987 samples. Seven additional wells were installed at the site in 1988.

     The NY Times obituary, similarly affirmed Scott's connections to this prominent Baltimore family:

"Born and raised in Baltimore, he held a bachelor's degree from Carleton College and a doctorate in philosophy from Vanderbilt. He was a naval intelligence officer and was on the staff of The Washington Monthly before becoming a freelance writer in Los Angeles.

Survivors include his wife, Debora; a daughter, Dale Shuger of Brooklyn; two sisters, Nancy Shuger of Baltimore and Lisa Shuger Hublitz of McLean, Va.; and his parents, Sewell and Virginia Shuger of Baltimore.”

From Scott Shuger, 50, Pioneer Internet Journalist, (NYT, June 18, 2002, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/nyregion/scott-shuger-50-pioneer-internet-journalist.html on 6/6/2015).
 

   "The fact of the matter is, Mr. Shuger, with Sewell Shuger being the production man a Baltimore Paint,  was in a perfect place historically to understand just how the military industrialist complex does.....and doesn't.....work," said Pezonus who said that the Winsip Custer  article "Deathbed Confession Sheds Light...", also provides important insights into this national embarrassment.

   "Well, when the wars are over the lead purveyors look for someplace else to make a buck...paint....gasoline additives.  National Lead Co.  like the other petro-chemical companies domiciled in Houston has been hand-in-hand in its relationship with the Atomic Energy Commission that had sidelined Oppenheimer via Rice University's Kenneth Pitzer and William Liscum Borden, while finding a cross-town ally in the bamboozle.   If the science was, like global warming, stacking up against lead decades earlier it's not easy to ween industry off of this lucrative revenue stream.  Same with big tobacco that is looking now to replace its lost revenues with the revenue from ZMAPP that fights Ebola....which is likely no better than those vaccines that were waiting in the wings because of the internal conflicts at CDC and BARDA. Tobacco Senator from North Carolina, Richard Burr, has erected legislatively a Manhattan Project-like wall of silence around BARDA and ZMAPP, a principle shared with the silence surrounding the lead additives in paint and gasoline being much the same," said Pezonus who noted that the Huntington Library at San Marino, California had copies of the "The Dutch Boy's Lead Party" children's coloring books in its archives that rivaled tobacco's Joe Camel commercials. 

     "With R.J. Reynold's Gordon Gray, father of Bush legal counsel, C. Boyden Gray, heading the committee that de-frocked Oppenheimer for his refusal to make bigger bombs we can see how ZMAPP slipped right into the new equation for Ebola," said Pezonus.  "National Lead Company became NL Industries and for years had an address at 3000 N. Sam Houston Parkway, Houston, Texas, the current address of Halliburton Industries.  On the current board of NL Industries is Pierce Marshall, son of J. Howard Marshall, the Yale attorney that headed the U.S. government oil procurement program during WWII just like Samuel Prescott Bush had been in charge of small weapons procurement for the government during World War I.  J. Howard Marshall married Anna Nicole Smith from Mexia, Texas," said Pezonus noting that Pierce Marshall had teamed up with one of the Koch brothers to fight for control of Koch Industries after J. Howard had apparently left his fortunes to the buxom former Rick's Cabaret dancer, a decision that Pierce Marshall fought and won.  
     "Just south of Houston is one of the world's largest sulfur domes that was exploited for gun powder and other products by the Frasch Process that was funded by Wall Street financier, Bernard Baruch, son of one of Robert E. Lee's surgeons and promoter of 'hydro-therapy,' Dr. Simon Baruch," said Pezonus.  "That was back when lead pipes carried drinking water to the tap," Pezonus concluded.