A freight train derailment brought environmental catastrophe to a small Ohio town. While the circumstances are somewhat unique, events followed a predictable pattern in a country run by and for the ruling class.
The U.S. is an oligarchy. Stating this fact explains events that may seem mysterious if this simple truth is not spelled out. The ruling class are fully in control and ensure that their needs are met. They disregard the public good and any claims of democracy are easily exposed as a cruel hoax. Americans have no representation in congress or the white house and the corporate media are also part of the oligarchic class. They expose nothing that their partners in crime want to hide. Governmental action and inaction if the wake of a freight train derailment exemplify all of these dynamics.
On February 3, 2023 a 150-car Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio near the Pennsylvania border. Twenty of those cars were carrying chemicals such as vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate. One doesn’t need to be a scientist to figure out that none of these should be in the air or water.
Despite photographic and video evidence of an environmental catastrophe, the accident initially received little media attention. Nothing is covered unless the Biden administration wants it to be and East Palestine didn’t make the cut when there was war propaganda about Ukraine to stir up. In addition, Biden had already made clear that the railroads are in the class of corporate untouchables who are to be placated. They are among those who were promised that “nothing would fundamentally change” and he kept his promise to them by giving the derailment little attention. However he did give these corporations all the attention they demanded.
When railroad unions rejected a contract that didn’t include paid sick leave provisions the Biden administration forbade them to strike. There was a phony show among “progressives” about having made a good deal but they were lying. Barack Obama excluded the railroads from a requirement that federal contractors provide paid sick leave. Biden could have issued an executive order changing that policy. But he had no intention of doing anything that might upset the oligarchs, and the Democratic Party succeeded in presenting a false narrative.
Pete Buttigieg is Secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), and is responsible for overseeing railroad safety. But he has made it clear that he follows his boss’s dictate to change nothing that would upset their oligarchic bosses.
As DOT Secretary, Buttigieg has the ability to regulate corporations such as airlines in regard to their public service. When a series of Southwest airlines snafus left thousands of passengers stranded during the holiday season, Buttigieg made a great show of saying his hands were tied. Of course he is the one person who can direct the airlines or levy large fines. Buttigieg was a no-show when the people needed him to act.
It took Buttigieg three weeks to show up in East Palestine and he only did so after Donald Trump visited. The town residents may have been better off without him. When he arrived he whined about railroad companies, “fighting us every time we try to do a regulation.” It is hard to believe that Buttigieg makes any effort to fight back when corporate chieftains tell him what to do.
The duopoly worked together to cover up their mess. Ohio’s republican governor Mike DeWine and Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan took a page out of Barack Obama’s Flint, Michigan book by dramatically drinking East Palestine water . Fortunately the U.S. still has plenty of lawyers, and one of many lawsuits filed in recent days specifically names the stunt as having made a “mockery of Ohio citizens.”
The back and forth over freight train regulations isn’t complicated. Trump undid regulations that Obama enacted but Biden didn’t undo what Trump had done. But even worse, regulations currently on the books allowed Norfolk Souther to get away with not labeling the train as carrying hazardous materials because it also carried wheat and vegetables. All over the country trains go through residential areas carrying hazardous materials but the law doesn’t require anyone to be informed of the dangers. And yes, the oligarchs like it that way.
The Biden administration is siding with Norfolk Southern in a case before the Supreme Court . A worker claims to have developed cancer as a result of exposure to carcinogens without having had the proper protective equipment. Norfolk Southern wants to restrict plaintiffs from choosing the venue in which they file suits, a practice known as forum shopping. Corporations are the biggest proponents of forum shopping, for themselves, but want to restrict where they can be sued. The Biden administration filed a brief in favor of Norfolk Southern. It doesn’t matter if the presidents are democrats or republicans, at the end of the day they end up doing what the oligarchs want.
Next year in 2024 the people will be subjected to the quadrennial political hoax, i.e., a presidential election. Let’s tell the truth before the theater begins anew. The power doesn’t rest with the presidency. It rests with the people who do the presidential hiring, and they don’t care about railroad workers or any other workers or people who have hazardous chemicals traveling through their communities. Should an accident happen, their hirelings will just drink water for the camera.
If you want a perfect example of how corrupt our system of government has become, just look at the massive cover up that is going on in East Palestine, Ohio right now. Federal, state and local officials are telling the public that everything is just fine when everything is obviously not just fine. On February 3rd, a 50 car Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine. 5 of the cars were carrying vinyl chloride which is an extremely hazardous substance that has been proven to cause several types of cancer. Unfortunately, with the approval of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a decision was made on February 6th to conduct a “controlled burn” of the wreckage. They knew that burning the vinyl chloride would create vast amounts of phosgene gas. By now, most of you already know that phosgene gas was actually used as a chemical weapon in World War I. The cloud of toxic chemicals that was created by the “controlled burn” was so large that it could literally be seen from space, and the long-term health problems that are being caused all over the east coast could stretch on for decades.
But Ohio Governor Mike Dewine doesn’t want to be blamed.
He is telling everyone from East Palestine to go back to their homes, and he insists that the water in the area is “safe to drink”…
Ohio Governor Mike Dewine: "The water is safe to drink. We never thought that the municipal water was contaminated. But out of abundance of caution our Ohio EPA took samples which were analyzed and they in fact came back and were shown to be safe." pic.twitter.com/sGJYZHrG8S
Visited a local creek in East Palestine today. These waterways are still very polluted. It’s time for Norfolk Southern to finish the cleanup. Check this video out: pic.twitter.com/4lsHBmrMJj
The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency has said he would allow his own children to drink and bathe in public water near the site of a train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio, so long as it had been tested and deemed safe by officials.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited the site of the East Palestine derailment on Thursday, seeking to reassure skeptical residents that the water is fit for drinking and the air is safe to breathe.
Nobody wants to see your children do that Michael Regan.
But we would love to see you down a tall, cool glass of tap water from a home right in the middle of East Palestine.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is going to work relentlessly to downplay the severity of this crisis because they know that if they admitted the truth it would make them look bad to the voters.
And there is a presidential election coming up in less than two years.
The White House explained why it turned down Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s request for disaster relief this week in the aftermath of a derailment of a train hauling toxic chemicals.
A Biden administration official told Fox News Digital that it has provided extensive assistance to surrounding communities following the chemical release earlier this month in eastern Ohio. However, the official said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency that usually provides relief to communities hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters, isn’t best equipped to support the state’s current needs.
I was floored when I saw that.
We have just witnessed one of the greatest environmental disasters in the entire history of our country, and the Biden administration is not even willing to grant a request for disaster relief?
Ultimately, this is all about protecting the asses of the politicians and protecting the asses of the executives and shareholders of Norfolk Southern.
To the elite, it really doesn’t matter if the poor people of East Palestine all get cancer and die.
What matters is controlling the narrative, and up to this point the corporate media is doing a wonderful job of helping them do it.
There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another form of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.
It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.
For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.
I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”
Not once.
This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.
Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.
In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.
Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:
Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?
This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.
That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted. The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all. Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.
The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.
Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…
GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train
The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?
Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?
Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.
Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.
There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.
Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.
If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to make sure GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.
I, for one, would certainly like to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as a pesticides).
There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.
The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.
Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science
I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.
The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.
In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.
There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.
Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.
The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?
I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.
What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.
These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci? Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.
And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).
The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible. These laws remained in effect well into the 13th century. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.
It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.
Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.
Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.
The featured documentary, “Harvest of Greed,” investigates a number of the many issues brought about by the merger of Monsanto and Bayer AG. The merger was initially announced in May 2016, when Monsanto accepted Bayer’s $66 billion takeover offer — the largest all-cash buyout on record.1,2,3
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) approved the merger in April this year,4 following the European Union’s (EU) approval in March. As a condition of the DOJ’s approval, Bayer will sell some of its assets to BASF — its German competitor — before the finalization of the merger.
This includes its soybean, cottonseed and glufosinate weed killer businesses, which overlap with Monsanto’s and were antitrust sticking points. Combined, Bayer and Monsanto used to control nearly 60 percent of the American cottonseed market. Monsanto also owns the rights to 80 percent of corn and 90 percent of soybeans grown in the U.S.5 The EU also demanded Bayer eliminate about $7.4 billion-worth of its various firms “to ensure fair competition.”6
Mega-Entity Now Controls Large Portion of Global Seed Supply
This new entity is now the largest seed and pesticide company in the world, controlling more than 25 percent of the global seed and pesticide supply. In all, just three companies now dominate the global seed and pesticide market.7 (In addition to the Bayer-Monsanto merger, the DOJ has also given the Dow-DuPont merger the green light, and the Federal Trade Commission recently approved ChemChina’s acquisition of Syngenta.)
The Bayer-Monsanto merger generated deep concerns right from the start, and anti-competition regulators were urged to investigate the takeover. Bernie Sanders went on record saying the takeover poses “a threat to all Americans” and needed to be blocked.8 He also urged the DOJ to “reopen its investigation of Monsanto’s monopoly over the seed and chemical market.” Farmers have also expressed concern over what the merger might do to prices, as less competition inevitably tends to lead to price hikes.
As just one example, the price of a bag of seed corn has risen from $80 to $300 over the past decade alone — a price hike attributed to the consolidation of seed companies and reduced competition. The merger of Bayer and Monsanto is predicted to make matters worse. Farmers also worry that consolidation will result in lower quality products by reducing incentive for innovation. Organic farmers have their concerns as well. As noted by Food and Power:9
“For Kristina Hubbard, director of advocacy and communications for the Organic Seed Alliance, the merger presents a particular threat to organic farmers. She notes that the National Organic Program’s regulations on organic seeds generally dictate that growers must use organic seeds to grow their crops. But there is an exception granted for non-organic seed when ‘an equivalent organically produced variety is not commercially available.’
Acceptable non-organic seeds are generally owned by the giant seed companies. ‘That exemption is important because currently the supply [of organic seeds] isn’t sufficient to meet the diverse and regional needs of all organic farmers,’ she says. With continued consolidation in the seed industry, she says farmers that rely on those non-organic seed options may find themselves faced with even fewer options as the merged companies cut down on research and development.”
Bayer-Monsanto Merger Unlikely to Benefit Anyone but Its Shareholders
Bayer AG’s CEO, Werner Baumann, has stated that “it is not our plan or our ambition or our intent to prevent farmers from having choice.”10 But the history of Monsanto and Bayer both suggest it would be naïve to believe him. As noted by Mark Connelly, an agriculture analyst at the investment group CLSA Americas, “These companies want to make more money, they want to raise prices. No company in this industry needs these deals in order to innovate.”11
One example of Monsanto’s strong-arm tactics included in the film is that of India, where more than 300,000 farmers have committed suicide due to farm-related debt. When the government attempted to regulate the price of seed — the main cause leading to these debts — Monsanto sued the Indian government.
Between 1997 and 2014, Monsanto also sued 147 farmers for “improperly reusing patented seeds.”12 They never lost a single case, even in cases where organic fields were contaminated or cross-pollinated with unwanted GE seeds.
Billions Against Bayer
In response to the announcement of the merger in 2016, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) launched a boycott against Bayer. The “Billions Against Bayer” campaign is essentially a continuation of the successful “Millions Against Monsanto” campaign. Following the DOJ’s April approval of the merger, OCA renewed its call for consumers around the world to join the boycott. You can follow the campaign and get the latest news updates on Facebook.13 As noted in a September 2016 press release:14
“Two of the world’s most foul corporate criminals will be one. Monsanto will pack up its headquarters and head overseas. The much-maligned Monsanto name will be retired. But a corporate criminal by any other name — or size — is still a corporate criminal.
This merger only heightens the urgency, and strengthens our resolve, to hunt down the corporations that are poisoning everything in sight. We will follow them to the ends of the earth, if need be. We will expose their crimes. We will end the toxic tyranny. We will become the Billions Against Bayer. And we will need your help …”
Even many Bayer employees are leery of the merger. While both companies have checkered pasts, Bayer has managed to escape the brunt of the kind of criticism, if not hatred, leveled at Monsanto over the years.
According to the featured documentary, Bayer claims the merger has widespread support among its staff, yet when Bayer employees were approached under the promise of anonymity, the general consensus was one of dismay at inheriting Monsanto’s tarnished reputation. Such fears are likely to come true sooner rather than later. Activists in Argentina, for example, promise Monsanto’s ill reputation cannot be washed clean but will now transfer over to Bayer.
Glyphosate — A Toxic Legacy
Both Bayer and Monsanto insist that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup and other herbicide formulations, is “a very safe product when used properly.” In the video, Bayer CEO Werner Baumann stresses that more than 3,000 studies support the chemical’s safety. Yet numerous studies have reached the converse conclusion, showing it poses toxic risks to soil, animals and humans.
“The things you hear in the public debate are ultimately based on misinformation about the risks of this product,” Baumann says. “So, we think glyphosate, even if it does belong to our company, is a good product, and its license should be renewed.”
At the end of 2017, the EU did indeed renew its approval of glyphosate for the next five years,15 but the process was not without its critics, such as Martin Häusling, member of the Green Party and the European Parliament, who noted that many of the studies exonerating glyphosate were funded by Monsanto itself, while independent research keeps finding problems.
Indeed, scientists have discovered it not only may be carcinogenic,16 but may also affect your body’s ability to produce fully functioning proteins, inhibit the shikimate pathway (found in gut bacteria) and interfere with the function of cytochrome P450 enzymes (required for activation of vitamin D and the creation of nitric oxide and cholesterol sulfate).
Glyphosate also chelates important minerals, disrupts sulfate synthesis and transport, interferes with the synthesis of aromatic amino acids and methionine, resulting in folate and neurotransmitter shortages, disrupts your microbiome by acting as an antibiotic, impairs methylation pathways, and inhibits pituitary release of thyroid stimulating hormone, which can lead to hypothyroidism.
Recent Government Tests Show Roundup Is More Toxic Than Glyphosate in Isolation
Most recently, toxicology testing17 by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) concluded the Roundup formula is actually far more toxic than glyphosate alone.18 The NTP testing was done by request from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reclassification of glyphosate as a Class 2A probable carcinogen three years ago.19
At the time, the IARC noted concerns about glyphosate formulations possibly having increased toxicity due to synergistic interactions. As it turns out, that’s exactly what the NTP testing found. According to the NTP’s summary of the results, glyphosate formulations “significantly altered” the viability of human cells by disrupting the functionality of cell membranes.
Mike DeVito, acting chief of the NTP Laboratory commented on the results saying, “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it.”
Internal documents from Monsanto, obtained through previous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, reveal Monsanto’s own employees have not been convinced the product is harmless either. For example, in a 2002 email, Monsanto executive William Heydens said, “Glyphosate is OK but the formulated product … does the damage.”20
Monsanto Charged With Crimes Against Humanity
October 16, 2016 (on World Food Day), Monsanto was put on trial for “crimes against nature and humanity” at a tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. The steering committee21 included Vandana Shiva, Corinne Lepage (former environment minister of France), Giles-Eric Séralini (toxicologist researching toxicities of GMOs and glyphosate), and Olivier De Schutter (former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food), among others. The legal opinion on the evidence presented at the tribunal was delivered April 18, 2017. As reported by Corporate Europe Observatory:22“The tribunal concluded that:
Monsanto has violated human rights to food, health, a healthy environment and the freedom indispensable for independent scientific research
‘Ecocide’ should be recognized as a crime in international law
Human rights and environmental laws are undermined by corporate-friendly trade and investment regulation”
When asked if Bayer will continue Monsanto’s underhanded business practices, Baumann said the new entity will be managed “according to our standards,” adding that “Bayer stands for transparency, reliability and a different style of debate.”
Monsanto — A Destroyer of the Natural World
In addition to GE seeds and its flagship product, Roundup, Monsanto has also been a leading producer of Agent Orange, PCBs, DDT, recombinant bovine growth hormone and aspartame — the history of which is summarized in “The Complete History of Monsanto, ‘The World’s Most Evil Corporation,’”23 originally published by Waking Times in 2014.24
Monsanto also made its mark on history by participating in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, thereby becoming a “war horse” ally to the United States government — an alliance that still holds today. As noted in “The Complete History,” article:
“To add insult to world injury, Monsanto and their partners in crime Archer Daniels Midland, Sodexo and Tyson Foods write and sponsor The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009: HR 875.25 This ‘act’ gives the corporate factory farms a virtual monopoly to police and control all foods grown anywhere, including one’s own backyard, and provides harsh penalties and jail sentences for those who do not use chemicals and fertilizers. President Obama … gave his approval.
With this Act, Monsanto claims that only GM [genetically modified] foods are safe and organic or homegrown foods potentially spread disease, therefore must be regulated out of existence for the safety of the world … As further revelations have broken open regarding this evil giant’s true intentions, Monsanto crafted the ridiculous HR 933 Continuing Resolution,26aka Monsanto Protection Act, which Obama robo-signed into law as well.
This law states that no matter how harmful Monsanto’s GMO crops are and no matter how much devastation they wreak upon the country, U.S. federal courts cannot stop them from continuing to plant them anywhere they choose. Yes, Obama signed a provision that makes Monsanto above any laws and makes them more powerful than the government itself.”
Bayer Also Has a Long, Dark, Destructive History of Genocide
Despite having a far “cleaner” public reputation than Monsanto, Bayer is really just more of the same. Founded in Germany in 1863 by Friedrich Bayer and Johann Wescott, it too has a long, sordid history of creating poisons and mass destruction.27 During World War II, Bayer (then I.G. Farben) produced Zyklon B gas, used in the Nazi gas chambers to eradicate 11 million people whose only crime was to be born a Jew.
According to Alliance for Human Research Protection, the company was also “intimately involved with the human experimental atrocities committed by Mengele at Auschwitz.”28 In one case, Bayer purchased 150 healthy female prisoners from the camp commander of Auschwitz for use as test subjects for a new sleep drug. All the test subjects died, and another order for prisoners was placed.
While some of its board members ended up being arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity, others escaped and helped create the Federal Reserve.29 If you think the passing of time might have made this corporate entity kinder, safer and gentler, think again.
In 2003, it was revealed Bayer sold blood-clotting medicine tainted with the HIV virus to Asian, Latin American and Europe in the mid-1980s.30 The drug, Factor VIII concentrate, was worth millions of dollars, and the company continued to sell the tainted drug for a year after the contamination was discovered. In Hong Kong and Taiwan alone, more than 100 hemophiliacs contracted HIV and died after using the medicine.
Bayer’s drug Trasylol — used to control bleeding during surgery — was also eventually found to be responsible for at least 1,000 deaths each month for the 14 years it was on the market.31 In 2006, documents proved Bayer hid evidence showing unfavorable results from the drug in order to continue selling it. Lawsuits have also been filed against Bayer for the untimely death of 190 young women taking their birth control pill Yaz, which raises your risk of blood clots by 300 percent.
Bayer Unlikely to Shift Public Perception of GMOs and Toxic Agriculture
Between 2006 and 2007, Bayer was also responsible for contaminating U.S. rice imports with three unapproved varieties of GE rice under development by Bayer CropScience. Bayer also makes neonicotinoid pesticides, suspected of being responsible for mass die-offs of bees around the world, thereby threatening the global food supply, and made the plastic chemical bisphenol-A, now known to have a dangerous impact on the human endocrine system.
In short, Bayer’s history is just as dark and unethical as Monsanto’s, if not more, and some have rightfully referred to the merger of these two destructive behemoths as a “marriage made in hell.”32 While change is possible, it seems improbable that this new Bayer-Monsanto mega-entity will radically change, and based on their combined histories, the world better get ready for a monumental fight.
Biotech Companies Are Gaining Power by Taking Over the Government
Monsanto and their industry allies will not willingly surrender their stranglehold on the food supply. They must be resisted and rolled back at every turn. There is no doubt in my mind that GMOs and the chemical-intensive agricultural model of which they are part and parcel, pose a serious threat to the environment and our health. Yet, government agencies not only turn a blind eye to the damage they are inflicting on the planet, but actively work to further the interests of the biotech giants.
This is not surprising. It is well-known that there is a revolving door between regulatory agencies and private corporations. This has allowed companies such as Monsanto to manipulate science, defang regulations and even control the free press, all from their commanding position within the halls of government.
Consider for a moment that on paper, the U.S. may have the strictest safety regulations in the world governing new food additives, but has repeatedly allowed GMOs and their accompanying pesticides such as Roundup to circumvent these laws.
In fact, the only legal basis for allowing GE foods to be marketed in the U.S. is the FDA’s tenuous claim that these foods are inherently safe, a claim which is demonstrably false. Documents released as a result of a lawsuit against the FDA reveal that the agency’s own scientists warned their superiors about the detrimental risks of GE foods. But their warnings fell on deaf ears.
Don’t Be Duped by Industry Shills!
In a further effort to deceive the public, Monsanto and its cohorts spoon-feed scientists, academics and journalists a diet of questionable studies that depict them in a positive light. By hiring “third-party experts,” biotech companies are able to take information of dubious validity, and present it as independent and authoritative.
Industry front groups also abound. The Genetic Literacy Project and the American Council for Science and Health are both Monsanto-funded. Even WebMD, a website that is often presented as a trustworthy source of “independent and objective” health information, is heavily reliant on advertising dollars. It is no coincidence that they promote corporate-backed health strategies and products.
There’s No Better Time to Act Than NOW — Here’s What You Can Do
The biotech giants have deep pocketbooks and political influence, and are fighting to maintain their position of dominance. It is only because of educated consumers and groups like the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that their failed GMO experiment is on the ropes. We thank all of the donors who helped OCA achieve their fundraising goal. I made a commitment to triple match all donations to OCA during awareness week. It is with great pleasure to present a check to this fantastic organization for $250,000.
At the end of the day, we must shatter Monsanto’s grip on the agricultural sector. There is no way to recall GMOs once they have been released into the environment. The stakes could not be higher. Will you continue supporting the corrupt, toxic and unsustainable food system that Monsanto and its industry allies are working so hard to protect?
For more and more people, the answer is no. Consumers are rejecting genetically engineered and pesticide laden foods. Another positive trend is that there has been strong growth in the global organic and grass fed sectors. This just proves one thing: We can make a difference if we steadily work toward the same goal.
One of the best things you can do is to buy your foods from a local farmer who runs a small business and uses diverse methods that promote regenerative agriculture. You can also join a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, where you can buy a “share” of the vegetables produced by the farm, so that you get a regular supply of fresh food. I believe that joining a CSA is a powerful investment not only in your own health, but in that of your local community and economy as well.
In addition, you should also adopt preventive strategies that can help reduce the toxic chemical pollution that assaults your body. I recommend visiting these trustworthy sites for non-GMO food resources in your country as well:
Monsanto and its allies want you to think that they control everything, but they are on the wrong side of history. It’s you, the informed and empowered, who hold the future in your hands. Let’s all work together to topple the biotech industry’s house of cards. Remember — it all starts with shopping smart and making the best food purchases for you and your family.
The Trump administration sent instructions to federal agencies Monday proposing a $54 billion increase in spending for the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security, to be offset by $54 billion in cuts for other agencies, mainly those involved in domestic social services and regulation of business.
Trump’s budget outline sets the stage for his first address to Congress on Tuesday. It provides further evidence that the Trump administration will be dedicated to radically rolling back social spending to finance a dramatic escalation of military operations, both in the neo-colonial wars in the Middle East and against the United States’ ‘great power’ rivals: China and Russia.
Federal departments are being told to file budget requests for the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2017 based on the numbers they were given by the Office of Management and Budget. Each agency will be responsible for working out the cuts required to meet proposed reductions, while the Pentagon, CIA and DHS will propose expanded operations with the additional funds they are to be awarded.
There were no details made public about the exact budget ceilings given to each federal department, but White House officials made it clear that foreign aid programs in the State Department and anti-pollution regulation through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would suffer some of the largest cuts.
The total budget of the EPA is only $9 billion, so many other domestic programs are certain to be hard-hit, involving such departments as Education, Labor, Transportation, Agriculture (which includes food stamps), Housing and Urban Development and Health and Human Services.
The biggest federal social programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, are not affected by the budget order, which involves only funding for so-called discretionary programs, those financed through annual congressional appropriations. Entitlement programs, where benefits are paid out automatically to those who establish their eligibility, are covered by a separate budget process.
OMB Director Mick Mulvaney appeared at the White House press briefing Monday afternoon to explain the action taken by the Trump administration. He emphasized that setting what he called the “top-line budget number” for each department was only the start of a protracted process.
The OMB will use the figures from each department and agency to prepare a budget outline to be submitted to Congress on March 16. A full budget will not be ready until sometime in May, Mulvaney said. He also indicated that while spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were not addressed in the action taken Monday, “entitlement reform”—i.e., cuts in these critical programs—would be a subject of discussion with congressional leaders later in the budget process.
Press reports identified the three White House officials who have played the main roles in the initial budgeting: Mulvaney, who was confirmed on February 16 as budget director; National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, the huge investment bank; and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, the former chief executive of the fascistic Breitbart News site, who exercises increasingly broad sway over all White House policy decisions.
While no details have yet been released of what the $54 billion increase in military-police spending will pay for, the scale of the increase, in and of itself, shows the real character of the Trump administration. This is to be a government of war abroad and mass repression at home.
Trump himself touched on this theme in typically rambling and unfocused remarks to a meeting of the National Governors Association Monday. “We never win a war,” he said. “We never win. And we don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. So we either got to win, or don’t fight at all.”
He continued, telling the governors, “My first budget will be submitted to the Congress next month. This budget will be a public safety and national security budget, very much based on those two with plenty of other things, but very strong. And it will include a historic increase in defense spending to rebuild the depleted military of the United States of America at a time we most need it.”
Additional money for the Pentagon is likely to go to a dramatically increased tempo of operations in Iraq and Syria. Defense Secretary James Mattis delivered proposals to the White House Monday for an offensive against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as required by an executive order issued by Trump last month. No details are available yet, but any acceleration of the bombing campaign, let alone the deployment of significant numbers of the US ground troops, would increase the cost of that war by many billions.
The $54 billion increase would also presumably include funds for the construction of Trump’s planned wall on the US-Mexico border, as well as a massive increase in spending on detention facilities for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants to be rounded up under the executive orders already issued by the White House.
The federal budget is operating under the constraints imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, the bipartisan legislation negotiated by the Obama White House, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, and a Democratic-controlled Senate. This set up the so-called sequester process, under which all discretionary spending is subject to a budget freeze, for both domestic and military programs.
Each year, increased spending for programs under the sequester has been worked out on the basis of roughly equal increases for domestic and military programs. Last year, for fiscal year 2016, Congress approved $543 billion for domestic discretionary programs and $607 billion for the military. The Trump White House plan would thus represent a cut of about 10 percent for domestic programs, and an increase of nearly that amount for the military.
Any significant change in the sequester process would require support from congressional Democrats, particularly in the Senate, where the Republican party holds only a narrow 52-48 edge, and any major legislation would require a 60-vote majority to pass.
Several congressional Republican leaders criticized the White House plan as insufficiently skewed to the military. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry of Texas issued a statement criticizing the “low budget number” and adding, “The administration will have to make clear which problems facing our military they are choosing not to fix.”
Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, declared that the Trump plan is “a mere 3 percent above President Obama’s defense budget, which has left our military underfunded, undersized and unready.”
For all the statements by Trump and the Republicans bemoaning the supposedly “depleted” state of the US military, the United States spends more on its armed forces than the next 15 countries in the world combined. The military budget is only inadequate if the mission of the US military is assumed to be the conquest of the entire planet and the subduing of all armed resistance from any quarter—which is actually the perspective of the American ruling elite.
As the race for the White House heats up, WikiLeaks continues to unveil sensitive information showing ties between the Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, foreign governments, and corrupt companies.
In a recent tweet, WikiLeaks reported its unveiling of Clinton’s dubious ties to Lafarge, an American company owned by a French conglomerate that, between 2011 and 2013, paid taxes to the Islamic State (ISIS) in order to protect its cement factory 95 miles northeast of Aleppo, Syria. The arrangements were discovered by the French daily, Le Monde. The story became relevant once again after the Office of the Mayor of Paris recently struck a corporate partnership naming Lafarge as its main supplier.
Lafarge bought the cement plant in Syria in 2007, but in 2011, civil war broke out, forcing Lafarge to make the choice of paying the terrorist organization to continue production. The taxes were allegedly paid to ISIS middlemen and other rebel groups in Syria.
Another investigation carried out by Zaman al-Wasl, an independent news organization based in Syria, adds that Lafarge may have also bought oil from ISIS regularly.
On July 13, 2014, Zaman al-Wasl reported, Mamdooh al-Khalid, who served as the manager and sales manager of Lafarge Syria, “wrote to Bruno Pescheux, General Manager of Lafarge warning him about buying [f]uel from non-governmental company in areas out of the regime’s control.” If Bashar al-Assad’s regime discovered the deal, al-Khalid allegedly warned, the regime would not be pleased.
In a reply to al-Khalid, Pescheux “advised him to mention that Lafarge had done its best to get fuel from the government, and wondered about the previous requests for fuel from Homs refinery” before illegally buying fuel from ISIS in case the regime were to find out about the dealings.
According to The Canary, “Al-Wasl reported that the CEO of Lafarge Cement Syria, Frederic Jolibois, had personally instructed his firm to make payments to Isis.”
But the fact a private Western company has allegedly had dealings with ISIS is not the only worrying factor in this story.
According to an article from 2007 published by the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was the Clinton family’s breadwinner in the early 1990s, when she was “earning more than $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees.” At the time, she served on Lafarge’s board, making about $31,000 a year from the company.
The report added that “[s]hortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant.” As soon as Clinton was elected, however, the administration “reduced that fine to less than $600,000.” Hillary left the board in 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination.
According to an investigative report published in the 1980s by the American Spectator and used as a source by The Canary, Hillary Clinton was already involved with the firm when Lafarge helped to facilitate the CIA’s support for Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program. At the time, Clinton “did legal work for Lafarge … [providing] key services for the covert arms export network that supplied Saddam Hussein.” The Canary added that the investigative report unveiled how “the Justice Department was told to bury the investigation” to “prevent exposure of that secret supply line, and collateral damage to Hillary Clinton.”
As Paris accepts a bid from Lafarge to provide sand for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, an international corporate watchdog known as SumOfUs is now urging Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to “immediately cut Paris’ partnership” with the company.
In a petition with nearly 40,000 SumOfUs member signatures, the group claims the partnership with Paris is “scandalous.” According to the SumOfUs campaign manager, Eoin Dubsky, this deal “should have never happened.”
“By partnering with Lafarge for this summer’s Paris-Plages event, the City of Paris is whitewashing the company’s obscene show of corporate greed that profits off the war and violence created by terrorists,” the SumofUs announcement reads.
ST. JOSEPH, Louisiana – “I’m scared to take a bath,” said Ethel Strum, who lives in St. Joseph, a community of barely 1,000 people in northeast Louisiana.
She turned on the tap in the bathroom sink of her tidy one-story home and the water flowed clear for a second before fading to a milky brown. In her kitchen, a few cases of bottled water, which she uses for everything from brushing her teeth to cooking, are stacked on the table.
“I drive to Newellton to shower. It’s a 20-minute drive but I can do it in 12,” she laughed.
But talking about the town’s water issues makes her visibly upset. Among the many problems are frequent outages, water thick with iron sediment from the aging pipes, and poorly communicated boil-water advisories. “Water should be free until it’s fixed,” she said.
Strum can’t even wash her car with town water because it leaves a rust coating. Despite minimal use, she says she has received high bills and has to buy 20 cases of bottled water every month.
While state officials and the EPA have deemed the water safe to drink, virtually no one risks it. Most here do not even use tap water to cook or brush teeth, and many, especially children, bathe with bottled water. Lots of residents spend several hundred a month on store-bought water.
To add to the mounting frustration, $6 million of state funds allocated to St. Joseph for water line repairs in 2013 are still being withheld because the town’s mayor, Edward Brown, has failed several times to turn in a mandatory financial audit on time. New Governor John Bel Edwards said this week his office was working with the town of St. Joseph and the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to fast track the allocation of at least some of that money to start system repair work. Mayor Brown said he expects to file the overdue audit by the end of February.
“What we’ve experienced here is policy failures that have allowed these communities to fall through the cracks,” said St. Joseph resident Garrett Boyte, drawing a comparison to the disaster in Flint, Michigan.
Boyte, along with colleagues in the Servant Leadership Corps of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, have sought to attract public attention on the issue through a recent social media push and an online petition to the Obama administration for federal assistance to St. Joseph. The effort has just over one-tenth of the 100,000 signatures it needs by Feb. 19 to reach its goal. The group notes, however, that with no evidence of lead contamination, the situation in St. Joseph is considerably less dire than in Flint.
Nevertheless, the town’s water woes illustrate a more slow-moving and commonplace catastrophe: failing infrastructure in small, impoverished communities that cannot afford to replace their systems, leaving residents with limited resources to cope on their own.
Established in 1834, St. Joseph lies squarely in the so-called Black Belt, a term coined by Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century to refer to the swath of dark, fertile soil that spans much of the American south. It has evolved to describe the largely black, poor communities that have been in decline since the mechanization of farming drove out small farmers, with no industry to replace it.
The town is the seat of Tensas Parish — one of the state’s poorest, with 34 percent of residents living in poverty and a median household income of around $27,000 (compared to $45,000 statewide). The least populous parish in the state, over half of its population is African-American. Unemployment in St. Joseph is likely higher than the official parish average of 9 percent, and the town’s poverty is written in its shoddy roads and houses in dire need of repair.
St. Joseph’s decaying water distribution system, installed in the 1930’s, is the main cause of the town’s water problems. “Over time, these old cast iron pipes that convey the water, they deteriorate and start to crack and leak,” said Davis Cole, a Baton Rouge-based civil engineer working on the redesign of St. Joseph’s water system. Leaks cost the town money; according to Mayor Brown, the system loses 50 percent of its water. And with resources already stretched thin, long-term repairs are out of reach. “This is typical of communities probably all over the U.S., especially poor communities,” Cole said.
The water’s rusty tint comes from naturally occurring iron and manganese sediment in the underground well that has built up in the water lines over the years. Every time the system has to be shut down for repairs, and then restarted, sediment is injected into the water flow. The problem started to become obvious over a decade ago, according to residents, but has gotten progressively worse. The water main reportedly broke four times last month alone.
While the state does monthly bacterial tests, the last detailed analysis of St. Joseph’s water was in 2013. It showed 32 times the EPA-recommended level of iron and 9 times that of manganese, according to an analysis by the local Sierra Club. But the EPA considers these contaminants to have merely “aesthetic” affects on the water. They are not regulated by the EPA or the state.
The state’s official approval of the water quality is of little comfort to most residents here. “We don’t know what’s in that water. They say it’s rust but there are so many ‘what if’s’,” said Marie, a grandmother and lifelong resident of St. Joseph who declined to give her real name because of the sensitivities around local politics.
“Who’s more important: the people or the paperwork?” asked Marie, implying that the audit issue was to blame. “Get the water straight and then work on that. It’s not the community’s fault, don’t make it hard on us.”
Iron contamination and aging infrastructure are not uncommon problems in the region. Dr. Jimmy Guidry, state health officer at the Department of Health and Hospitals, confirms that water discoloration caused by iron is a common complaint across the state. “There are probably several hundred water systems that deal with this,” Guidry said, out of approximately 1,360 local water systems in Louisiana.
“As a physician, I’m not going to tell you a lot of iron in your system is not going to affect your health,” Guidry said, when asked about the long-term effects of high iron exposure. “But that’s not something we regulate.” In light of renewed attention on the issue, he said the DHH would be looking again at an iron and manganese water rule that was legislated in 2014.
Of more pressing concern to Guidry was replacing St. Joseph’s decrepit water pipes, which pose a risk of bacterial contamination every time they break. Many Louisianans have been on high alert for water contamination after a brain-eating amoeba was found in four separate water systems last year.
Guidry also noted that frequent leaks in the St. Joseph water main present another threat — they have started to erode the nearby levee. The Mississippi River has swelled to record heights in some areas this winter following heavy rainfall.
“I understand their urgency to [fix the water color]. That will take time,” said Dr. Guidry. “The urgency to get their system back to where they are not at risk of contamination is most important to me.” He said that if they receive approval for two grants totaling around $600,000, the most-needed repairs on the town’s storage tank and water pipes could begin in a matter of weeks.
However, he noted that even with a full revamp of the system, which is planned once an additional $2 million in funding is secured, the brown water of St. Joseph might not disappear. “It may not get rid of it completely, because it doesn’t address the treatment part,” he said. While there are expensive chemicals and filters that can get rid of iron discoloration, “for a poor community, it’s not an easy option to address the iron,” he added.
“If you were born after 2000 in this parish, you were always taught not to drink that water,” said Rosalie Bouobda, who moved to St. Joseph two years ago as a consultant for the Servant Leadership Corps of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana. That group has been meeting with state and local officials about the water issue for the past two years. “Children are taught not to deal with [the water]. It’s a reflex to them…They’ve never known clean water.”
Bouobda, along with Garrett Boyte, who started posting pictures of the muddy water on Twitter, has been instrumental in garnering attention beyond social media. But many lifelong residents of St. Joseph have been reluctant to speak out, either because of a fatalistic sense that nothing will change, or out of deference to local politics in a town where so many people are related to each other.
“They just accept it as a fact of life, their water is dirty and there is nothing they can do about it,” Boyte says of people’s perceptions.
For St. Joseph, dirty water may be as much a fact of life as high unemployment and failing schools.
“It’s like nobody cares. That’s how people in this town feel,” Michael Thomas, Jr., a 25-year old father of two, said. His apartment in a small subsidized housing complex stands across from the overgrown ruins of a long-abandoned Tensas Rosenwald High School, one of many built in the early 20th century with funds from Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, to educate African-Americans in the South.
“We gotta boil the water just to wash the babies,” he said. “If I could afford it, I’d move.” He said he spends as much as $300 every month on bottled water.
Sitting nearby, Kristi McWilliams, 23, and John Jackson, 24, echoed Thomas’ frustration. “I think about moving all the time, but we don’t have the jobs or the money,” said McWilliams.
“There is more they could be doing,” said Jackson of state officials. “They could drop the water bill. Water should be cheaper in the stores.”
Some residents, like Ann South, an elderly woman who recently suffered a stroke and a heart attack, were frustrated by the disparities with other communities. “Around the lake there is no water problem,” she said, referring to the more affluent, largely white area around Lake Bruin nearby. “Who in the world do we have to talk to about helping my people in St. Joseph?”
Others, like Ethel Strum, were more sharply critical of Mayor Brown’s role in the water crisis. “The Mayor – he’s doing nothing!” she said. Valerie and Chip Sloan, a white couple who own a large house by the levee, claims that Mayor Brown has kicked them out of multiple town hall meetings for asking questions about the water, and that he has ignored their Freedom of Information Act requests for data on town finances.
“There are residents who have spoken out and they are retaliated against, either by the community at large or someone from the city,” added Boyte.
For his part, Brown, the town’s first African-American mayor, says his hands are largely tied on the water issue. “The state of Louisiana is testing this water and is saying that it is safe. And for me to overrule, [the Department of] Health and Hospitals or EPA … I don’t have that expertise, and no one in this town does,” he told Al Jazeera.
He says that with a budget of around $1.5 million – including a $500,000 general fund and around $1 million in water and gas sales – he is left with around $50,000 a year. That would leave little cash for infrastructure upgrades.
As for the lapsed financial audits that have delayed water system funding, Brown says that after an audit firm pulled out mid-audit in 2013, the town was forced to file late. With various lawsuits looming over the town since then, he says he has struggled to find an audit firm that will take on his case.
Brown also points to tight oversight from legislative auditors closely monitoring the town, in light of its failure to comply with financial audit rules. He says state law requires him to cut off utility connections after two months of missed payments and that, in the past, he has been issued a citation by auditors for granting extensions to individuals. Now, he turns off about 10-15 utility connections per month, including houses where he knows there are children and elderly people.
“You tell me what the state cares about the people in this town,” said Brown. “Did they care about people in Flint? They care about them now.”
Federal and state officials are warning Flint residents that the lead filters they are using may be inadequate to protect them from the effects of elevated levels of lead in the city’s drinking water.
The warning came Friday after random samples collected from 26 residences since the final week of December came back with lead levels higher than the filters are designed to handle. The highest reading among the 26 homes was 4,000 parts per billion (ppb). The filters are not rated to handle lead levels above 150 ppb. The tests covered 3,900 homes.
After more than two years of lies and cover-up by federal, state and local officials, Flint residents are in a restive mood. Megan Kreger, a member of the local activist group Water You Fighting For, told the WSWS, “I didn’t believe it [about the lead filters] from the beginning. It has only finally hit the press.
“There has been fraud and negligence at all levels. It is a humanitarian disaster. We should not be living without clean water when we are only one hour away from one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world.”
She rejected claims that Flint water is now safe for bathing. “My boyfriend took a shower before the Rachel Maddow town hall [over the weekend] and got the worst rash he has ever gotten. It almost looked like chicken pox.”
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends action be taken when lead levels exceed 15 ppb, though there is no safe level of lead exposure. Mark Durno of the EPA said the affected residents have now been contacted. The state had previously insisted that drinking filtered water was safe.
In the wake of the findings, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder urged all Flint residents to have their water tested as soon as possible. Dr. Eden Well, chief medical executive of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), advised children under six and pregnant women to drink only bottled water.
In an effort at damage control, Snyder sent a letter to state employees Friday, stating “what happened in Flint can never be allowed to happen again anywhere in our state.” The governor has tried to deflect all blame for the crisis to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and lower-ranking officials.
The DEQ said Monday that it has undertaken a five-part strategy to determine whether Flint water is safe to drink. The DEQ said it is working on a plan to make sure that residents with high lead-blood levels get their water tested.
Another issue of concern to Flint residents is that filters only have a limited life span, after which they are no longer effective. This is particularly true if the faucet where the filter is installed is the only source of water in the home.
Further, many Flint homes have older faucets that will not accommodate the water filters provided by the state. Over the weekend some 300 plumber volunteers installed new faucets free of charge in some 1,100 Flint homes, still a fraction of the city’s residences.
Federal officials said they were not sure why recent samples came back showing elevated levels of lead. Despite the findings, the EPA did not call on residents to stop using the lead filters. More testing is being planned.
The report on lead filters comes as state officials on Friday informed residents at more than 250 addresses living in areas of Genesee County outside of Flint that their water may also be tainted.
Dana, an auto parts worker who lives just outside of Flint, said she had just learned that her water may be dangerous to drink. “This is crazy. I live in the county and they just posted a whole bunch of addresses that might be affected. It appears it is impacting more than just the city of Flint. They had us misled. They told us it was fine. I was making coffee with the tap water every morning.
“It is an outrage. It is getting worse and worse. Everyone in the government is to blame. We as citizens do not know what is going on.”
Soon after the switch by the city of Flint in 2014 from its traditional water source, the Detroit water system, to the polluted Flint River, residents began to complain of foul-tasting, discolored water coming out of their taps. Nevertheless, citizens were repeatedly told the water was safe.
It later emerged that the highly corrosive water from the Flint River was leaching lead from the city’s antiquated piping, poisoning the city’s 100,000 residents. Even after the switch back to the Detroit water system in October, lead levels remain dangerously high due to the damage already done to the city’s water pipes.
Ten deaths from the deadly Legionnaires’ virus have also been traced to Flint water.
In another development, the US Department of Agriculture rejected a request by Snyder to extend the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program to Flint residents up to the age of 10. A department spokesperson said federal law limited the program to children under age five. The program provides grants to states for supplemental foods, health referrals and nutrition information to pregnant and postpartum women with infant children.
Health professionals say proper nutrition is important in mitigating the long-term effects of lead poisoning in children. Children are especially vulnerable to lead, since their developing brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to toxins. The city has a child poverty rate of nearly 67 percent, 10 percentage points higher than Detroit.
According to the Michigan DHHS, 130,095 people in Genesee County, where Flint is located, are using food stamp assistance now, compared with 87,847 in 2005.
The report on continued high levels of lead in Flint’s water supply comes as Michigan’s Attorney General Bill Schuette says the state may not provide legal counsel for seven DEQ employees who are the subject of a class action lawsuit by Flint residents. Schuette has asked a federal judge to decide the matter of representation.
The lawsuit alleges the state endangered Flint residents by switching the city’s water source to the Flint River. In addition to the DEQ employees, the lawsuit also names Snyder, the state of Michigan, the city of Flint, two former emergency managers, the former Flint mayor and three city employees.
It has been filed on behalf of 10 plaintiffs, but seeks class action status for all Flint residents. It seeks compensatory and punitive damages, the creation of a medical monitoring fund and the appointment of a monitor to oversee Flint water.
The suit does not name federal officials, however the Obama administration’s EPA is deeply implicated in the cover-up of the lead poisoning danger. As early as April 2015, the highest-level EPA official in Michigan was aware that Flint water was not being treated for corrosion control, but said nothing. This, despite the fact that water professionals understand that such treatment is necessary if highly corrosive water like that from the Flint River is being used for drinking because of the danger of lead leaching from old piping.
Snyder has claimed he did not become aware of problems with Flint’s drinking water until October 1, 2015.
After the Crash 