by Thorius

by Thorius

The Carbon Lords' subjects at TVA, together with the usual PR ghouls, began their usual Big Lie campaign to cover up the danger from the TVA's catastrophic storage and discharge of toxic coal ash waste before the ash was even dry. Predictably, the Carbon Lords' eager servants at EPA fell in line. On December 24, 2008, the EPA gave the TVA a belated Christmas present -- a banquet of toxic lies for public consumption.

Current environmental data from surface water sampling indicates that several heavy metals are present in the surface water slightly above drinking water standards in the area of the spill, but not in the area of the Kingston water supply intake. Drinking water standards are designed to be conservative, and results to date are below concentrations EPA knows to be harmful to humans.

Guess we weren't supposed to notice the EPA was reasurring us about the "safety" of water they collected upstream from the toxic catastrophe. Knowing that fact, and knowing the EPA not only chose to continue exposing all Americans to lead on our roads but also lied to the entire planet about the toxic dust from the Twin Towers, why should anyone trust anything the Bushie EPA says about the deadly coal ash poisons the TVA stored and spilled in Tennessee?

The TVA's incompetence and gross negligence dumped such huge quantities of lead and other heavy metals (all of them chemical elements, which can never be destroyed) that centuries from now, the area under the spill and the far wider area the spilled coal ash blows or drains over will still be contaminated with heavy metals. This toxic burden falls atop the huge toxic waste burden the notoriously corrupt TVA and the even more notoriously incompetent Oak Ridge nuke labs have dumped on the land, water, and creatures of Tennessee for over fifty years.

Industry, together with their frequent co-conspirators in the Federal government, have been lying to Americans about lead for decades. Starting in the 1920's the Ethyl Corp lied for decades about the "safety" of leaded gas...even after company docs knew lead was neurotoxic (and fatal) to workers there. Back in 1986, when the EPA still occasionally took on industry instead of abetting industrial crimes, America rose above the lies and banned leaded gas. Two decades after we got lead out of gas, we're still distributing it along the nation's roadways. How is this possible? Easy...if you're a megacorp. The Bushie EPA chose to keep allowing lead on our roads, in the form of lead weights used to balance wheels. You see, the EPA can't get around to banning them. Why? Effective regualtion on our behalf directly threatens the Villagers' Prime Directive: the Federal goverment exists to serve elites. While the elites profit, our brain cells die. Amazingly enough, lead's still neurotoxic, apparently capable of damaging complete brains and developing brains at any measurable concentration.

Along with lead, thallium's one of the heavy metals found in coal and among the toxic wastes Oak Ridge released on their way to making the surrounding communities a National Sacrifice Zone. When the Bushie EPA played PR games and tried to tell us their initial water samples were fairly safe -- by using the familiar dodge of testing upstream from the toxic release site -- they couldn't even give that water a clean bill of health. Why? The upstream water contained the deadly element thallium at levels three times over permissible concentrations. As Soviet assassins and rodent exterminators know well, thallium is extremely toxic at very low concentrations; even if we believe the EPA's bland assurances that water filtration plants eliminate heavy metals, folks who've been eating fish from those waters have been chronically exposed to this cumulative poison.

If the US had effective and assertive public health services, there'd be much more awareness and community-based epidemiological studies covering all of our National Sacrifice Zones, including Oak Ridge, Cancer Alley along the lower Mississippi, Hanford along the Columbia River, and huge swaths of the Corn Belt in which multiple herbicides and pesticides have effectively contaminated virtually all drinking water for hundreds of miles. If.

In the America we live in, the EPA "found" this near-inevitable toxic waste from coal combustion when they just happened to sample water near a coal burning power plant. They chose to sample upstream from where the TVA's Kingston Power plant allowed more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash waste to spill over the landscape, only to demonstate that thallium poisioned the water before it ever flowed though the wastes.

Why hadn't the EPA systematically monitored those waters -- and all waters near coal-fired power plants -- before the Kingston disaster? Well, in the US our wise leaders spent almost thirty years ripping the lungs out of public health by simply ripping out funding for Federal, State, and local public health offices. Oh: and Reagan / Poppy / Clinton-Gore / Bush the Torturer all collaborated with the serial poisoners by selecting industry saboteurs for key positions at FDA, USDA, NMFS, and the like. For both corporatist parties, taking money from collective assassins is far more important than epidemic (and rising) levels of brain disease, infertility, and cancer.

Of course, all too many public health docs long ago went other to the other side, assuring themselves long and lucrative careers as industrial servants and PR flacks. Yesterday's example was the evil git -- or useful idiot -- who works as chief medical "officer" at one of CA's despicable prisons and pretends arsenic levels far above even the EPA's lax acceptable levels is not toxic.

Drinking water from two wells at Kern Valley State Prison contained arsenic, a known cause of cancer, in amounts far higher than a federal safety standard soon to take effect.

[snip]

This year, the EPA has ordered 11 California water systems to reduce excessive arsenic levels. One was the city of Delano, which serves the North Kern State Prison, a few miles from Kern Valley prison. On Dec. 12, the state health department ordered Kern Valley State Prison to come up with a plan by February to comply with the arsenic law.

The prison's chief medical officer, Dr. Sherry Lopez, said there was no immediate danger from the its water, based on an e-mail she received in April from a poison-control specialist who said arsenic is "much more a regulatory problem than a public health problem."

I don't know where Dr. Lopez got her M.D., but in my med school we learned arsenic is a serious cumulative systemic poison, not "a regulatory problem". For Dr. Lopez' edification, as well as to promote her captive charges' safety, I'd send her a copy of Arsenic And Old Lace, but given the lacunae in her basic knowledge I'd hate to waste the dead trees on someone whose reading comprehension appears to put Agatha Christie beyond her grasp.

Of course, today and every day many NYC residents (and many more to come) remind everyone they meet of the most notorious act of public health corruption in modern American history.

How do they remind us? With their breathing -- or more precisely, their progressively failing breathing. You see, the day the towers fell Occupational and Environmental Medicine specialists on the planet's largest e-list devoted to the topic already knew the dust coating lower Manhattan was incredibly toxic and would inflict disabling, catastrophic illness on many who breathed it. That basic information is well known to public health docs, many of whom were privy to the discussion.

Yet when EPA chief Whitman and Rudy the Worm lied to the entire planet and falsely claimed Lower Manhattan was safe for entry, the local public health docs appeared to be almost completely silent on the issue. They kept their very well-paying jobs: locals lost their lungs. Some locals lost their lives.

Nice work, colleagues.

Something to remember when the EPA along with Federal, Tennessee, and local public health docs keep spinning uh flacking uh assuring us the TVA's toxic waste catastrophe won't really have any lasting harmful effects. If any among them had an active and ongoing testing program that had already detected the thallium found upstream from the spill -- and made that info public with the goal of eliminating the risk -- well, they've shown they possess competence and integrity. As for their negligent colleagues: why would anyone trust "public health" doctors and officials who were too fucking stupid, too fucking lazy, or too fucking corrupt to find rat poison in public waters to do the rest of their fucking jobs?

And after the EPA's systemic post-September 11 propaganda campaign deceived hundreds of thousands of people into risking permanent injury from the toxic Twin Towers dust coating lower Manhattan, why would anyone ever believe those lying bastards again? After the Bush Regime, can any of us ever believe EPA stands for more than "Equally Polluting America"?

As rage against the elites mounts, I look forward to seeing serial corporate poisoners and their collaborators in academia, the judiciary, and government in the dock for crimes against humanity. If that seems unlikely now, recall that Henry Kissinger once seemed immune from his crimes in Chile, and John Yoo once thought he could travel freely.

The earth isn't dying -- she's being killed. As are we, our parents, children, loved ones, and pets. And those who are killing her and us have names and addresses. And they poison us -- or collaborate with the poisoners -- for profit.

Book 'em, citizens.