The 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) set a standard of "drinkable, swimmable, fishable" for our waters. "All waters will support healthy aquatic biological communities," reads a federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) document signed by environmental agencies across the Midwest. Yet swimming in Lake Michigan can no longer be taken for granted, and there are indications the lake is degrading. Recent reports note the absence of crucial links in the lake's aquatic chain, such as diporeia, a shrimp-like organism native to the Great Lakes. An important food source for many fish, diporeia feed on algae from the water column; however, as zebra mussels filter algae out of the lakewater, diporeia populations have dropped drastically.

The disappearance of such vital components of the lake's ecosystem affect swimmers' safety as well.

Asked to rate Lake Michigan using the EPA's scale of 1 (natural state) to 6 (degraded), David Pfeifer, Water Quality Standards coordinator for Region 5 (Midwest) said "3 to 4." In other words, a key official thinks our lake is barely swimmable.

Shoreside, the water is icky, almost all the time. Rotting cladophora algae is evidence of a freshwater ecosystem out of whack. The zebra mussel, an exotic species that removes solids from the water column, has clarified the water, allowing sunlight to reach depths that had not previously seen light. Combined with nutrients found in pollution, this creates an environment where algae thrive. Huge algae forests now bloom across the lake floor, eventually dying and washing up on shores. Stinky, slimy vegetative decay becomes fodder for algae wars between children.

EPA's Holly Wirick encourages swimmers to use common sense. She suggests waiting a day or two after it rains and swimming on sunny days when light is likely to kill off microbial pollution. But if we take Wirick's advice, adding in upward trends in beach closings--which set new records in 2000 and 2001 around the Great Lakes--we find our already brief swimming season reduced to nothing. Thirty feet from shore, pollution levels drop significantly, according to researchers. For most, however, driving to cleaner faraway beaches or taking a boat seems to miss the point: enjoying a natural resource in their own backyard.

Our "Repellant Reservoir"

Sewage overflows--known as "point" sources--are most noxious to kids because of microbes found in human waste. But equally troubling is "non-point" (no fixed source) pollution, which includes runoff from impermeable surfaces such as parking lots, toxins (like mercury) absorbed through the air, boat discharges, discharges not tracked by management agencies (e.g., many trailer parks), and toxins like MTBE, methyl tertiary-butyl ether, a gasoline additive that leaches into water systems from underground storage tanks. The exact ratio of point to non-point is unknown. According to Lynn Broaddus of Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers, "[water pollution] is both things, but we should not be lulled into thinking that it's just non-point. It's somewhere in the 30-to-70 [point to non-point] range." All of Wisconsin's 15,000-plus lakes are currently subject to a mercury poisoning advisory.

Are children better off swimming now than in 1972? This is difficult to assess because there has not been consistent research over the past 32 years. Currently, the most widely accepted assessment of safety in a swimming area tests for "indicator organisms" such as E. coli. The DNR's beach-testing regimen has forgone fecal coliform testing for more reliable E. coli tests, but E. coli is a naturally occurring organism that doesn't sicken. It's actually parasites such as giardia, salmonella and cryptosporidium that hurt. Beach testing is an evolving science.

Some officials say the increase in beach closings is due to more comprehensive testing. The number of beach testing sites in Wisconsin has increased from 6 to 173 since 2000, when the beach monitoring project was approved. "I talk to people on the coast that say the water's a lot better than it used to be," says Ben Vail, head of Wisconsin DNR's testing program. "There's competing perspectives on that. I would echo what a Lake Michigan Federation report came out with [in May]: The more you look for E. coli, the more you're going to find. We're looking harder than we used to. So if we find more E. coli now, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's more than there used to be, just that now we're finding what we're looking for." One could just as easily argue that the nationwide rush to test beaches in recent years indicates the problem may be more widespread than we realize.

Lake Michigan pollution has been evident for decades. In 1966, officials provided scathing testimony to a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on Great Lakes water pollution. "The waters of the Milwaukee beaches will not uniformly comply with proposed guidelines at any time in the foreseeable future," testified Commissioner of Public Health E.R. Krumbiegel. Wisconsin Representative Lynn Stalbaum described "a repellant reservoir of chemicals, silt and organic wastes, spiced [with] decomposing alewives and decaying algae... an unsavory broth [that] has already routed fish and fowl."

Paul Biedrzycki, disease control and prevention manager at the Milwaukee Health Department, is the new Krumbiegel, responsible for protecting Milwaukeeans' health. "The early [beach-testing] programs didn't focus as much on water quality as making sure the beach was well-groomed," he says. Until recently, Biedrzycki explains, non-point pollution wasn't even on the radar.

The Dilution "Solution"

Almost four decades later, Lake Michigan has traded dead alewives for zebra mussels and algae blooms, and sewage is being dumped with regularity. "Milwaukee and the communities leading into Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District's (MMSD) system are in violation of the CWA," says Jodi Habush Sinykin, an environmental lawyer on a commission recently appointed by new Mayor Tom Barrett to audit the MMSD. "And it really makes sense for us to look at this in the planning phase and identify what the sources are. Before litigation."

"I'm very concerned with water security issues, drinking-water security," Biedrzycki says. "The EPA and CDC [Center for Disease Control] are very interested in lessons we've learned from the [1993] crypto outbreak," he explains. "In some ways, the same scenario now exists with water quality in terms of swimming, in terms of assessing risk at the swimming hole." The 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak, which sickened 300,000, occurred when both drinking water plants were in "total regulatory compliance," Biedrzycki says.

With all our managing, sickness and death occurred even though no rules were broken. Is this different from May, when MMSD released more than 4.6 billion gallons of sewage into Lake Michigan but broke no DNR rules? The "Combined Sewage Overflow" (untreated sewage and rainwater) event included a "Sanitary Sewage Overflow" (raw sewage) of 0.5 billion gallons, which the CWA holds to be illegal in nearly all cases. "Milwaukee is the biggest polluter [of Lake Michigan] right now, and no one can dispute the biological evidence," Habush Sinykin says.

"By no standard is releasing 4.6 billion gallons [of effluent] protective of public health," Biedrzycki says. "I don't care if it's meeting regulations. Even though I can't quantify it, I can guarantee you that people get sick."

Regulatory agencies set standards for water quality based upon a wide variety of uses. By issuing permits that allow pollution to enter the system, agencies such as DNR, EPA and MMSD promote the idea that less bad is good. But less bad is bad. "At some point the resource is finite," Habush Sinykin suggests, "and to keep counting on the assimilation of the lake, if everybody keeps polluting the way we are, the approach of dilution as the solution is not going to cut it indefinitely."

In Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart argue persuasively that in addressing poor environmental quality, regulation is a symptom, not a solution. The book offers suggestions for shifting to a more sustainable "cradle to cradle" paradigm from the current "cradle to grave" management system--one that in our case, uses the lake as a dump. Biedrzycki, for one, seems to agree that we need to go beyond regulation: "This myopic focus on regulatory compliance is shortsighted. Much [beach testing] is based on technical and economic standards as opposed to public health."

Managers at DNR, EPA and MMSD, however, seem satisfied with the status quo. "There's been a lot done, and that's up and down the coast, and we've done a pretty good job with that," says DNR's Sharon Gayan. DNR regional water specialist Charles Krohn speaks of "a complete renaissance" on Lake Michigan.

Regulatory Chaos

Who is responsible for protecting children who swim? There are so many regulators, it's nearly impossible to determine the chain of command. EPA's Pfeifer says "the state determines water quality standards." DNR's Vail says, "The DNR plays a role that I might characterize as a middleman. Congress passed the Beach Act, the EPA sends us the money, but local governments have jurisdiction over their beaches. It's not just a top-down thing with DNR dictating. It's more of a collaboration."

"We're running against a clock that's ticking faster than we can run," said Kevin Shafer, MMSD executive director, at a conference entitled "Milwaukee's Urban Environment: Cultivating the Ecological City." Shafer encouraged citizens to buy rain barrels to reduce system flow--a good idea--but refused to take responsibility for a litany of technical problems at MMSD. Shafer emphasized that "non-point pollution is what's really important" and said the public's perception of the MMSD is "warped."

MMSD Board of Commissioners Chair Dennis Grzezinski seems quiet and thoughtful, but turns apoplectic at the mention of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's reporting. In painting a picture of a "city in which nothing works," Grzezinski says, the paper is "pouring gasoline on a fire that has gone out ... it hasn't exploded because the fire went out. But they're trying. There have been at least eight times over the last two years where things were printed that are absolutely false."

MMSD managers Grzezinski and Shafer accept no responsibility for beach closings. They are correct in reminding Milwaukeeans that waste doesn't magically materialize at Jones Island--the public can do better. But it's not just the media on their case. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley recently blasted MMSD; a 2002 press release from U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and other congresspeople demanding action from the EPA noted that MMSD has released "approximately 13 billion gallons of untreated wastewater into Lake Michigan" since the early 1990s, including a 1-billion-gallon SSO.

The MMSD has operated under a public-private partnership with United Water since 1994. One high-level MMSD employee who chose to remain anonymous questions connecting sewage disposal with money-making. "It doesn't make sense to privatize something that is a completely public function. The profit motive isn't consistent with sewage treatment." Friends of Milwaukee's River's Broaddus also points to a dysfunctional relationship when she alleges that MMSD and United Water are falsifying discharge data. "[Their estimates for 1994-2001] specifically misled the public because they didn't include the SSOs, and it was almost as if they didn't want to include the SSOs because those are the illegal ones," she says. "One certainly wonders. Every time it happens I call, write them, and Dennis [Grzezinski] goes, 'Oh, I know, I know.' It's just bullshit."

Grzezinski may offer mea culpas in private, but he takes a different tone in public. "We're among the first to deal seriously with the problem," he says. "There are at best a handful of communities that have done anything close to what we have done to attempt to control the problem." Grzezinski sees the problem as the volume of water, rain and sewage coming to the MMSD from its 30 member communities--30% more than agreed to in the early 1990s, when the MMSD's multi-billion dollar Deep Tunnel project was supposed to solve the overflow problem.

The Seagull Hypothesis

Just as sprawl and exponentially expanding impervious surfaces around southeast Wisconsin lead to skyrocketing MMSD water volumes, lots near beaches such as South Shore Park in Milwaukee collect fecal matter from birds and animals, then flow into the lake. Ongoing research efforts to "source" pollutants make sense in developing strategies to prevent closed beaches, but the data is being misused.

Data by Sandra McLellan's Great Lakes Water Institute lab indicates that seagulls may be responsible for a significant percentage of E. coli found along Lake Michigan beaches (seagull scat is high in E. coli). According to McLellan, determining the source of beach pathogens is difficult. Her lab is in the process of switching from genetic mapping to antibiotic resistance (a condition that develops in people using some medications) to determine whether microbes are of human or bird origin. McLellan has secured a National Institute of Health grant that will help screen for pathogens. Everyone agrees human waste is toxic for swimmers; the goal of McLellan's research is to assess whether or not the seagull pollution is "really a significant health risk," she says.

Often focusing attention on the seagull question, agencies such as the MMSD and DNR deflect attention away from Milwaukee's unsustainable polluting habit--not to mention their own failings. "I am not saying that CSOs make no contribution to beach closings," Grzezinski says. "I'm saying that there are studies that have been done ... and each of them has pointed to bird poop as the most serious threat." Communities from Lake County, Ill., to northern Wisconsin are currently looking at "seagull abatement measures" such as propane cannons and noisemakers. Some Wisconsin communities, according to DNR's Krohn, have begun "seagull eradication" efforts.

As a response to Lake Michigan's deteriorating ecosystems and increases in beach closings, this focus on seagulls is a distraction, an ill-advised attempt to control chaos. Once again, we forget the child's gaze. Try telling a child he can't swim, that pollution is the seagulls' fault. Milwaukeeans would be better off facing some hard truths and focusing on what we can do about our own polluting habits.

Beth Fetterley is director of education at Milwaukee's Urban Ecology Center.
Thacher Schmid is a freelance writer.

With a four-day security budget of $76 million and 10,000 police officers facing protesters, the stage is set for anarchy. And that's just what some activists will be resorting to during the Republican National Convention later this month--only they'll be trading black masks for radically democratic, tech-savvy protest tools. Transcending beloved old-school methods, this new wave of activists will use decentralized and distributed technologies to level the playing field with law enforcement.

"There's been an incredible technological buildup on the side of the police, and on the other side people are still holding cardboard placards and making puppets," says artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko. "In the arms race of direct action, there's been incredible changes in the strategies, the training, and the equipment the police use in treating this political process." But the projects she and others embrace are only anarchistic in a strategic sense. While anarchy suggests a political philosophy loaded with baggage, the term's Greek origins have little to do with chaos or violence: arkhos (ruler) plus the prefix an (the absence of).

Coordinated Goal

This leaderlessness--"uncoordinated action toward a coordinated goal," as Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it in his book The Anarchist in the Library--is what links these new-school approaches:

For instance, Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), will use a special transmitter to break into radio frequencies reserved for corporate stations, giving bursts of information so brief that the FCC can't lock onto their transmission location. During the World Economic Forum demonstrations, BIT called attention to the Bush administration's bogus claims about the safety of the air after 9/11. Each time New York's airborne pollution surpassed the "safe" level, a warning bleep interrupted broadcasts of the local NPR affiliate.

Bikes, Backpacks Against Bush

Joshua Kinberg will hit the streets on an "Internet-enabled tactical media 'weapon' for non-violent creative resistance." Outfitted with a laptop, webcam, GPS device, and cell phone, his tech-laden bike will receive text messages sent by visitors to www.BikesAgainstBush.com. At the push of a button, he'll select messages to print on the pavement using a robotic chalk-spraying device; each anti-Bush screed will be time-stamped and GPS-mapped on the Web site. The bike's maneuverability effectively makes all of New York a free-speech zone.

Meanwhile, Media collective neuroTransmitter will be toting com_muni_ports throughout the convention. These low-power, backpack-mounted radio transmitters will provide localized, on-the-fly media broadcasts, bearing witness, live, to events you won't hear about on local Clear Channel stations.

Yury Gitman will be pedaling his MagicBike during the convention. Offering free Internet connectivity wherever it goes, it will wire the U.K.-based collective OpenSorcery so members can play a military simulator online and on the streets of New York using high-power projectors.

Operations in Urban Terrain (OUT), a first-person-shooter game, aims to critique the militarization of civilian life following 9/11--a condition the group describes as "a government ... at war with its own citizens, with soldiers in the midst of the fabric of ordinary life"--by literally broadcasting the game's violence on city walls.

Counting the Crowd

When the demonstration ends, police will inevitably lowball crowd sizes, while activists will present overly optimistic numbers. The Bureau of Inverse Technology will calculate verifiable figures, thanks to a wireless video camera tethered to a helium balloon high above the action. An inline skater will maneuver the balloon throughout the entire crowd while the high-resolution camera beams visual data to laptops on the ground. The result: a composite image that will be analyzed by software similar to the kind used for counting microscopic cells in labs. "If Bush can dismiss this as a 'focus group' with the wave of his hand, how do you answer that? You have to have a higher standard of evidence, you have to have more compelling images," says Jeremijenko. "And we end up with a family aero-portrait--a self-documentation of our action on the streets."

Secure and decent-paying jobs? Environmental protections? Pro-consumer regulation? Real democracy where corporate interests are not the exclusive preoccupation of government?

Get rid of those hopelessly quaint and outdated expectations, chump. Don't you see they inhibit maximum corporate flexibility and profit?

After all, according to the teachings of corporate globalization's Grand Ayatollah, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, globalization has people around the world tightly wrapped in a "golden straitjacket." "You had better adjust" to globalization, Friedman warns, or severe consequences follow.

But accept the "straitjacket" of corporate dominance, and prosperity will follow. A key player in tightening the straitjackets has been the World Bank, a multilateral lending institution that insists that governments follow policies of privatization and free-market fundamentalism as the price for receiving Bank loans.

But a Wisconsin coalition of grassroots forces recently escaped, Houdini-like, from their straitjackets and managed to strike a blow against the World Bank. The State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) recently decided not to renew its remaining $15 million in World Bank bonds, thus eliminating the last of an investment in World Bank bonds that once totaled $36 million.

The SWIB, the nation's ninth-largest pension fund with $63.8 billion in assets, manages the retirement funds for 520,000 public workers and retirees. The World Bank has been the target of widespread resentment in Wisconsin and internationally over its rigid policies that force poor nations to privatize vital public services, say critics.

"The World Bank has actively promoted policies aimed at holding down wages in the poor nations in order to lure family-sustaining manufacturing jobs from Wisconsin and other states," said Steve Watrous, coordinator of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign. The Fair Trade Campaign, formed in 1993 to fight against the North American Free Trade Agreement, led the statewide effort against World Bank bonds.

Local Targets

For its part, the Investment Board attributed its latest decision solely to the low rate of return on World Bank bonds. But Watrous dismissed the Investment Board's explanation of the decision as entirely predictable. "We never expected them to admit that public pressure had any part in the decision. They hardly want to invite more public challenges to the impact of their investment decisions on working people here and abroad."

Pressure for dropping the World Bank bonds came from a wide spectrum of municipal governments, labor, and religious organizations in Wisconsin. In early 2002, the Milwaukee Common Council passed a resolution in calling for the state to stop investment in World Bank bonds until the Bank reformed its policies demanding privatization of public services and low-wage export strategies. Milwaukee thus became the first "Middle America" city outside progressive hothouses like Boulder, San Francisco and Oakland to join the World Bank boycott effort.

Following the Milwaukee victory, the next target was the nearby factory town of Racine, wracked by plant shutdowns and relocations. A campaign waged by the Racine Dominican order of nuns culminated in a 20-0 vote last fall by the conservative-dominated County Board calling for the state to boycott World Bank bonds. The emotion propelling the Racine effort was summed up by Ron Thomas, secretary of the Racine County AFL-CIO Council and a narrowly defeated mayoral candidate: "There is a beast out there called the global economy, and it has devoured thousands of jobs here, and hundreds of thousands across the nation since NAFTA."

The demand for the state workers' retirement plan to drop World Bank bonds was backed strongly by AFSCME Council 40, representing municipal workers, and the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers. They viewed the World Bank's pro-privatization direction as undermining the interests of the public sector in Wisconsin.

"We are delighted that the Investment Board will no longer be using state workers' money against their interests and those of workers and farmers in the poor nations," declared David Newby, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, another endorser of the World Bank campaign. "The policies of the World Bank promote the export of good family-supporting jobs from Wisconsin to sweatshops in poor, low-wage countries from Mexico to Guatemala to Malaysia. The conditions of their loans to developing countries require the privatization of public services and the adoption of policies that could devastate their environment. Their policies foster a lose/lose form of globalization for both developing and developed countries."

Short Term vs. Long Term

For labor, the World Bank is viewed as the promoter of a model of globalization that fosters a race to the bottom on wages, environmental protections, and democratic rights. Wisconsin has lost a minimum of 19,000 jobs due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, which exemplifies the form of investor-rights-based globalization that the World Bank imposes. Milwaukee, for example, has lost thousands of jobs at one-time inner-city mainstays such as Tower Automotive, Master Lock and Johnson Controls, which now share the distinction of employing more workers in Mexico than in their hometown of Milwaukee.

With bonds providing the World Bank with 80% of its revenues used in harshly conditioned loans to poor nations, a boycott of the Bank's bonds has become a central aim of forces challenging corporate globalization.

"The World Bank claims to be offering a helping hand to poor nations, but it actually strong-arms Third World nations on behalf of transnational corporations," says Frances Bartelt of the Wisconsin Fair Trade Campaign, a broad coalition of labor, religious, and environmental groups seeking to promote globalization shaped around human needs rather than maximum corporate profits. Bartelt led the effort to encourage non-governmental organizations and local governments to urge the Investment Board to divest itself of World Bank bonds.

"The World Bank has tried to cultivate the image of Mother Teresa, but it has functioned on a global scale like a Tony Soprano-style loan shark," Bartelt says.

"The World Bank's strategy is a formula for disaster for poor nations being kept poor by the Bank's onerous conditions for financial assistance, and also devastating for cities like Milwaukee having its industrial base plundered," she says.

Bartelt calls the Wisconsin Investment Board's decision a "major step forward in pressuring the World Bank against its socially destructive faith in free-market fundamentalism." She notes that TIAA-CREF, the world's largest pension company with assets of some $300 billion, had divested all of its World Bank holdings in 2002-03. TIAA-CREF also cited low returns. Prior to the advent of a national boycott effort led by the Center for Economic Justice, California's massive CALPERS retirement plan had also decided not to renew its World Bank bonds.

"The Wisconsin Investment Board's decision to dump the World Bank bonds is extremely significant, because it reinforces both investors' increasing doubts about the Bank's financial returns and more importantly, the growing movement against the Bank's policies," says Bartelt. "The concern of some investors over the low rate of return reflects the results of the World Bank's own perverse policies. By prioritizing short-term debt repayment over the most urgent needs for health care, clean water and basic education, the World Bank has crippled the real development potential of many poor nations."

"The movement against World Bank bonds reflects the increasing public understanding about the Bank's role and the need for a different model of economic globalization based on human needs and human rights, not maximum profits and investor rights alone."

Often, the only apparent way out of financial ruin for heavily indebted Third World nations results in a scenario straight out of "The Sopranos."

Like the Mob offering to take over a piece of a business whose hapless owner falls behind on exorbitant loan payments, the World Bank has often held out the "structural adjustment" option. Under structural adjustment, the Bank dictates the redesign of national economies so that they conform to the World Bank-Monetary Fund model of deregulated capitalism.

Essentially, there are three key elements to the World Bank formula:

1) Nations must pay back their debts to the bankers as rapidly as possible. Poor countries are obligated to cover even the debts of wealthy individuals and corporations if they wish to gain the World Bank's good graces.

2) In concrete terms, this means cutting back on already-paltry government spending on education, health care and sanitation, while privatizing as many government programs as possible. This also means imposing fees on vital educational and health services, which leads to increased levels of illiteracy and disease.

3) Government priorities are refocused on subsidies to export-creating transnational corporations. These corporations are viewed as the new job-providing saviors of these nations. In essence, Third World countries that have adopted such structural adjustment policies have learned that structural adjustment is much like gaining John Gotti as their partner.

To cite just one example, the World Bank and the IMF pressured Bolivia's third-largest city, Cochabamba, to sell its water services to the U.S.-based Bechtel Corp., known for its expertise in landing cost-plus contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. This Bolivian experiment in water privatization--designed to prove the inherent superiority of private-sector development--instead produced skyrocketing water rates and triggered massive public protests that were put down with bloody repression. Eventually, Bechtel was booted out.

The World Bank's fostering of export-led development has also produced a strategy of extending loans to such notably non-needy corporate giants as Coca-Cola, Domino Pizza, Exxon-Mobil, Wal-Mart and the Marriott hotel chain. Even where building schools and providing safe water would seem to be clear-cut priorities, the Bank has handed out loans for four-and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, family-supporting wage levels, such as those created by social spending, are viewed by the World Bank as an impediment to development rather than a fundamental goal of its work. In Mexico, for instance, the World Bank argued for the weakening of labor protections--astonishingly, calling for changes in the Mexican Constitution safeguarding workers' economic rights--in a May 21, 2001 report. Mexico's wages had already fallen 27% between 1991 and 1998, but the Bank has been pushing to further dilute worker's bargaining power.