Lead-en with Problems

We all know of the problems that Flint is facing with its contaminated water supply. The filthy water makes for “great” (sick) TV and the interviews with the parents of children make heart wrenching/breaking stories.

Less glamorous is another problem with lead that is lurking in the houses that many of the poor and minorities live in. A problem so fine that you would need a microscope to see the culprit. But it's there. It's not as glamorous, but it's just as deadly.

These are older houses that were painted with lead paint. The paint chips, falls off and children pick it up and eat it. Or, as WKBW-TV reports, it's on window sills and is ground to a fine powder when people open and close their windows. Everyone breathes in that dust.

Or out in a field that children play in that used to be a former industrial site that had a hand in lead processing. The children score a goal playing soccer. Who knew they were scoring with potential lead poisoning. And the lot is owned by the city of Buffalo.

If this existed in suburban houses, it would have been properly addressed as soon at it was discovered. No questions asked. It's in a lower class, impoverished neighborhood or in a former industrial zone. Nobody really cares, or it affects so few people that TV can't make it into a great story.

Never mind that we will be paying for this with higher health costs, educational costs, and costs to the criminal justice system. How many inmates are just a little brain damaged from lead?

Mother Jones (on-line magazine) had an article that projected the costs of the cleanup in Flint would exceed $60 million. If the capitalist appointed city manager would have listened to the engineers, this problem would have never happened. Now there's the after-effects cost.

The lines will scale back up according to the article. They suggest that the $60 million be used for lead abatement in homes. Get the lead out of where people spend a great deal of their time.

No matter what, we need the lead out.

We need it out of the water.

We need it out of the houses.

We also need the capitalists and their policies that led to this crisis out of office.

Given the damage that they have done, they need to be put in jail.

Flint Probably Has Bigger Problems Than Lead Pipes

City doesn't tell neighbors about lead dangers

Flint crisis revives lead concern in WNY

Lead on in Michigan

Pronounce the word “lead” however you choose to.

While I usually try to focus on WNY and the issues that directly affect us here, the crisis in Michigan (Flint with water and Detroit with schools) is relevant to Buffalo. In a way, Michigan has served as a “laboratory” for neo-liberal (fancy way of saying unrestrained capitalism/capitalist) policies.

First things first: I want to make a note of something that I see/hear all too often about this crisis. I hear people saying “government” quite a bit. They are using the crisis in Michigan to slam the government. The government is the problem, the big evil, the bad guy in this situation, etc.

Key point: They are missing an adjective. That adjective is “Republican.” Governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, has been in charge of this situation.

The Flint water crisis was created under his watch. The man he appointed to handle Flint's water services was ordered to save money and he did. At the cost of the lives of the citizens of Flint. All the evidence that I have read/seen/heard points to the fact that he knew the river was in rough shape. It will cost the taxpayers more now to fix up the situation and pay for the health crisis than the money it supposedly saved.

Flint is a city in worse condition than Buffalo. It suffered greatly, as did all Michigan, when the auto industry closed up shop and exported all the jobs out of the country or to union-free states. (No thank you President Bill Clinton for that mess called NAFTA. We got the shaft-a on that one.) It has no other major industry to fall back upon and is (hopelessly) trying to recreate itself with something other than tourism and sports. Ask anyone and neither of those are stable ways to build an economy.

The education crisis began under a Democrat or a Republican. It depends upon when you want to place the start. The departure of the automotive industry began under President Clinton. However the assault on public education began under President Ronald Reagan. No matter – both political parties are two sides of the same capitalist coin.

BTW: According to the Washington Spectator – The same man who was in charge of the failing Detroit City Schools is the man who was put in charge of the Flint water system. I will find the article and link it to this one.

The education crisis is one that has been building over the years. Cuts to education budgets because of the decline of Michigan's manufacturing based economy and government cuts to education budgets overall have hit the city very hard and left it in a continual case of crisis. Rats, mice, and cockroaches in classrooms are going to make learning hard on even the brightest students. Add to that the problems of poverty and you have a real disaster on your hands.

The teachers having a “sick out” to protest the sad and sorry state of the Detroit schools is a tragedy of the greatest scale. Independent media can say more and better than I can about the whole situation. It is just that terrible.

So why bring this up?

That is the road that Buffalo is not far from. Buffalo and much of WNY takes its water from the Great Lakes, whose levels are in decline according to some sources. And communities in drought areas want to pipe water from the lakes to their area in order to address the drought that they are in. The drought is nothing more than a symptom of the global warming from the climate change crisis that we are in. If the lakes go down too far, where will people get their water from?

And Buffalo's schools are just a shade over what Detroit is in. Look at the receivership situation (~25 schools) and the strong-handed dictator in Superintendent Kriner Cash and Commissioner Elia in Albany.

Detroit and Flint have high minority populations, similar to Buffalo's. We need to pay attention to what happens there in order to prevent it from happening here.

New Orleans and now Flint & Detroit have been capitalism's laboratories for experimentation on education and government.

We need to stop those experiments from ever getting here.

And reverse the damage that was done over there.

Update: January 24, 2016

I listened to this week's CounterSpin and it shed some real interesting light on the whole Flint situation.

More importantly:  Chris Savage talked briefly about how Flint is under an Emergency Manager - Much like Buffalo and Erie County were under a control board (and in some ways still are). 

The key points to me about the Emergency Manager/ Control Board were:

1.  They are undemocratic - They are appointed by the state and are not accountable to the people in any way.
2. They can only cut.  They have no real way to raise revenues.

That shed a whole different perspective on the Emergency Manager situation to me.

It is a podcast (recording) and is well worth the 30 minutes it took to listen.  You can stream it live or download it and listen to it whenever.