Dave Zirin has this to say about Rahm Emanuel’s priorities…which apparently gravitate towards sports and away from educating Chicago’s kids.
Why are you building yet another sports arena, Rahm???
Category Archives: poor
Why Detroit Matters
I’m bopping around the web this morning reading up on Detroit….I just can’t get the dumping of petroleum coke out of my mind.
Whatever happens to Detroit happens to all of us….
Here’s a piece up on a refinery fire…by Marathon…where the residents were not even told what was going on. It is just unconscionable that these folks were not told what was going on and that some were evacuated but others across the street were not.
This piece spouts the pro-corporate view that anything that supports the environment is bad for business. Tell me, what good is business if so many are sick or even dead because of toxic overload? Who will be left to buy your product?
From the article:
The document claims city planners fail to take into consideration that Metro Detroit’s poor and minority neighborhoods are already deluged with excessive pollution and contaminated industrial, commercial, and hazardous waste sites.
~~~~~~~~
Claims of “environmental injustice” (and environmental racism) are little more than catch phrases used by green activists to draw attention to the purportedly disproportionate negative effects of pollution in poor and minority communities. The accusation is that federal, state, and local governments have conspired to permit more pollution in impoverished black communities than in affluent ones.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He goes on to say that there are the same health problems in more affluent neighborhoods. He thinks the problem is their lifestyle rather than the toxic environment. I think that’s too simplistic as it doesn’t take in the whole picture. It is known that mercury damages a person’s DNA. So…if the parents of affluent African Americans were poor and lived in these more toxic areas, being exposed to lead and mercury and arsenic, their DNA will be affected and pass that on to their children. It gets worse with each generation. Also, toxins do not stay in a particular geographical area, although it will be more concentrated in that area, it will drift, and also cause health issues (on a lesser scale) to those in affluent neighborhoods.
As far as environmental racism…it is a well known occurrence. Probably should be better categorized as environmental “poor-ism” because it’s done towards the poor. I say this with the thought in mind that it does not follow blacks whom have moved into more affluent neighborhoods. Perhaps one can say that it is because whites also share that neighborhood. Well….I guess you could say that, BUT then whites also share the poor neighborhoods with blacks….which leads me to conclude that it is against the poor rather than exclusively against blacks.
The last line about the gov’t allowing the poor to bear the brunt of toxins ignores the above~~you don’t see the petroleum coke being dumped on the Koch’s front lawn, do you? When that happens, you can tell me that gov’t officials have not discriminated against the poor.
I notice that the author was once a commissioner….so I am left to wonder whether he, in his official capacity, willfully went along with poisoning the poor and is now trying to justify it?
On to the financial woes of Detroit, I found some interesting articles.
This one details the bad news. Note that they’re going after unions. HUGE RED FLAG that Disaster Capitalism and ALEC are in the midst. (related to this is a strike by fast food workers to form unions.)
This article on Slate paints a different picture of the stuff going on behind the scenes. Note the link to the NY Times’ article on Dan Gilbert trying to make a fortune rebuilding the city…
The article talks about the cityscape with abandoned houses, empty spaces after demolition of houses, and the population dwindling from 2 million down to 700,000. When reading that Gilbert’s solution is to bring business in, to spur people walking the streets (shoppers)…and it strikes me that there is so much opportunity here….but it feels like trying to fix the problem with the same old, same old…
With all the demolished houses…what about the urban farmer? I know that would be difficult if the ground were polluted, as Detroit seems to be the dumping ground, but if the soil were not toxic, why not encourage that? It would help those in the inner cities to feed themselves as well as sell produce to earn income.
Why not encourage planting of trees to help the air quality? As I blogged before, we need to include nature into our plans and stop ignoring the impact we have on nature and the colossal impact nature has on us.
It also ignores the devastating impact that Big Box stores have had on our local economies. Walmart moves in….independent small businesses die…and entire downtowns are destroyed…not only do the businesses die, but our feeling of connectedness dies with them…
Detroit buried in petroleum coke
(migraine…pardon my faux pas)
They ought to take this three-story, one-block long pile of coke and dump it on the Koch’s front lawn. And for every shipment afterward, dumped on every Tea Party supporter’s front lawn who denies the pollution coming from oil and its byproducts.
More here on the residents’ concerns. Same stonewalling over health concerns for residents living around this poison. They say they’re sending in samples to find out if it’s hazardous. Here’s the Material Data Safety Sheet (MSDS) on Petroleum Coke. It’s pretty evident from this that it IS a serious health concern. One of the warnings is not to breathe the dust. Wonder how many residents breathe in particulate every single freaking day?
From the sheet:
Inhalation of excessive dust concentrations may be irritating to the upper respiratorysystem. Repeated chronic inhalation exposure may cause impaired lung function.There is no evidence that such exposures cause pneumoconiosis, carcinogenicity,or other chronic health effects.
~~~~~~~~
I would question the last sentence–anything that can cause impaired lung function is causing inflammation…inflammation kills cells over a period of time.
Note that is is a combustible dust….just laying around….which the MSDS specifically states this is not proper storage–it states it should be in containers. (Not that I personally believe containers are any better. The stuff is toxic, toxic,toxic, creating problems of disposal…in somebody’s neighborhood.)
Anybody wanna bet this is located in a poor neighborhood in Detroit?
So…now BP wants to start operations for processing this filthy sludge in Whiting, Indiana, which is near Gary and Hammond and Chicago….right on Lake Michigan. Um-hmmm…Anybody wanna guess if the toxic environment is a factor in Gary Indiana being the murder capital of the United States. Note the article stating this area is one of the worst in air quality in the U.S.
And here we have the latest in *cough* BP cares….about our profits over your health and safety…
More here.
A video of yet another explosion in Whiting, Indiana:
Indiana has a sad history of putting business over its environment. Just look at the lack of trees compared to, say, Ohio. You can actually tell the air quality difference once you leave Indiana and venture into Ohio. Nevermind the beauty of all the trees, but the air is breathable. Anyway, Indiana’s own Dept. of Environmental Management *cough* has told manufacturers several years ago that once they were given a good report, they could slack off, er I mean, they could continue their good environmental practices until the IDEM inspected them three years later.
The Indiana Dunes, which we used to go to nearly every summer, have been polluted by the lack of concern of the environment. Lake Michigan was once reasonably clean. I took my kids up there after many years and was depressed to see the condition of the water. It was no longer clear and had that polluted look to it. I saw nuclear cooling towers off to my left. At least, I thought they were nuclear cooling towers…turns out they were from another power plant–the one thing Indiana has going for it is that we don’t have nuclear power plants here. I don’t hold my breath that they won’t eventually appear, especially with Mike Pence and the ALEC team now in charge here. Besides, there are nuclear plants in Illinois and Ohio bordering our state, so…yeah…we’re still susceptible to nuclear radiation or the China Syndrome. All it would take is one of the reactors melting down and we’re done.
And then there’s the curious case of radiation in Delaware, Indiana that is mentioned in this blog.
Warrior princesses
They put into words what a celiac goes through with the *cough* medical profession….clueless doctors who charge $$ to tell you that it’s all in your head.
I like the one who told the patient she couldn’t feel pain in the gut…say what??
I’d like to see the Wisconsin Tea Party legislators tangle with these gals. Pass the popcorn. (Ooh, wait, what was I thinking??…Um, pass the gluten free snack. 🙂 Still not used to the idea of not having some things…<sigh> )
With politicians like these….
Did Walworth really ask if they were growing cultures that would become human beings? OMG….these are the people deciding educational standards? ::holds head from spinning::
Even more alarming (if anything could be more alarming) is this passage from Louisiana Voice:
Where others within the Department of Education (DOE) have alluded privately to data suppression and manipulation of school performance scores that artificially inflated graduation rates, Bassett, a band director who said he was “highly qualified” to teach math, publicly charged White, BESE and DOE of misrepresenting test scores and then covering up the lie by removing the data from the Louisiana Believes website. “This is data suppression,” Bassett said.
He said he was asked by his principal last October to look into his school’s score so that it could be improved in the future. “My subsequent research revealed deceit, distortion, manipulation of scores and data suppression,” he said.
~~~~~~~~
Further down, it goes into specifics about VAM and how the data was missing or manipulated. Good God, these people have no conscience nor credibility…
Unfortunately, Louisiana is not alone.
Tossed aside
The suicide rate has skyrocketed for one particular age group: the over 50 crowd….the Boomers…
Susie Madrak has a post up on it here.
From the comments, which are really sobering:
dogjudge • 3 hours ago
~~~~~~~~~~
The comments are heartbreaking. And very telling. There’s a lot of pain out there….and not a lot of hope that things will get better.
Are you listening, members of Congress? President Obama?
….probably can’t hear over the loud voices of lobbyists and campaign donors….
Obama and Education
Diane Ravitch has a link up to the discussion on the Washington Post. You can’t let President Obama off the hook, as is discussed–he picked Arne Duncan and actually praised No Child Left a Mind while slobbering over Bush at the dedication to the *cough* library.
No one who cares about public education and children can endorse No Child Left a Mind. Only someone with a narrow view and narrow mind can believe it is a success. Those with $$ in their eyes, that is….
Some good news
The poster that I blogged about here is apparently okay, as s/he is posting again. Perhaps didn’t see the post asking if s/he was okay. Some good news for a change…and yes, we have lost people to suicide in this group…I posted about one a while ago, but it has been lost. <sigh> She was mercury toxic, without a job, money, or health insurance, and living out of a car. She took her life in her despair.
Meanwhile….corporations get welfare while they ponder cutting Medicare, Social Security, and food stamps….
More on Rogoff and Reinhart
Firedoglake has this up on the *cough* research of Rogoff and Reinhart.
From one of the commenters, letsgetitdone at 16:
I think, finally, that the RR study is an example of the corruption of social science in modern times. I believe that one can show that the study was not just guilty of calculation errors and errors of omission, but that these must be seen as part of a pattern of systematic bias that permeated their whole process of inquiry beginning with their selection of the problem, moving through every decision point in implementing the study, and ending with their evaluation of their evidence and their writing of the result. They made no attempt to do a scientific study maximizing fair comparison of alternative theories having policy relevance, but instead prepared what was essentially a legal brief supporting austerity policies and the Pete Peterson line. The social costs of what they did are strewn all over the globe. See this recent post at DailyKos.
~~~~~~~~
I agree that if R and R purposely left out data (and the concensus is that they did), then what they did was fraudulent and a deliberate attempt to persuade public opinion towards austerity.
This should be *sounding the bells* as to how very, very important our public education system is….from kindergarten through four year colleges….the public needs to be able to understand this stuff in the most basic terms. And the financial gurus purposely make it difficult to understand for the Jane/John Does of the U.S., to give themselves the upper hand. Like I said about the university I attended, they made math more difficult than it had to be –the only conclusion one can come to is that they were doing it on purpose to “weed out” people. This, in turn, means fewer graduates with Math degrees to compete in the job market, enabling them to be paid more $$. It also means that financial gurus can bullshit people and no one will be the wiser. When the Wall St. meltdown happened, there were econ people who could not figure the mess out…how are Jane/John Doe supposed to?
With the Liberal Arts degree, I have a basic understanding of statistics from a political science class. We were taught to look for the reasons behind conclusions of research. Who funded it? What other work have these researchers done (looking at other work for biases)? Who benefits from it (will a corporation use the data as an asset or use the data to knock down a competitor)? If it was a poll, we were taught that anything more than 2% plus or minus of the margin of error was a flawed study–the questions asked were biased in some way or not thorough enough.
That is why one should always question absolutes in science or absolute truth that anyone espouses. If more people were less intimidated and asked “why” and to say “I don’t understand” to someone trying to buffalo them, the financial gurus and others like them would not be able to get away with the stuff that they do. Thank God for people like Herndon and the others who seek the truth and are not afraid to speak out.
I followed the link that letsgetitdone had in the comment to dailykos, which in turn had the link to the cepr.net website.
This quote from the cepr website says it all:
This is a big deal because politicians around the world have used this finding from R&R to justify austerity measures that have slowed growth and raised unemployment. In the United States many politicians have pointed to R&R’s work as justification for deficit reduction even though the economy is far below full employment by any reasonable measure. In Europe, R&R’s work and its derivatives have been used to justify austerity policies that have pushed the unemployment rate over 10 percent for the euro zone as a whole and above 20 percent in Greece and Spain. In other words, this is a mistake that has had enormous consequences.~~~~~~~~~~
Minor quibble—as everyone is leaning to, this was not a “mistake”…but a deliberate attempt to misconstrue data to suit their political ideology, and that of Pete Peterson.
Hunger in America
…speaking of hunger:
http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm
..an issue for the poor whom are also Celiacs, would be made ill by bread and other commonly donated food. Things get more difficult for the poor and sick when the efforts of those trying to help aren’t helping–and would instead make them sick—I’m sure many would seem ungrateful to those trying to help when they would refuse food.
Eagle 
You must be logged in to post a comment.