WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's Journal
"I'm From West Virginia and I've Got Something to Say About the Chemical Spill"
(snip)
...But something about this confluence, the way I had to bring potable water to my family from two hours north, the strange look of the landscape wreathed in rain and mist, the stench of a chemical that was housed directly upstream from the water company -- something about all of that made me absolutely buoyant in my rage. This was not the rational anger one encounters in response to a specific wrong, nor even the righteous anger that comes from an articulate reaction to years of systematic mistreatment. This was blind animal rage, and it filled my body to the limits of my skin.
And this is what I thought:
To hell with you.
To hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a place filled with workers who'd never had a decent shot at employment or education, and then treating the people you found here like just another material resource -- suitable for exploiting and using up, and discarding when they'd outlived their usefulness. To hell with you for rigging the game so that those wages were paid in currency that was worthless everywhere but at the company store, so that all you did was let the workers hold it for a while, before they went into debt they couldn't get out of.
To hell with you all for continuing, as coal became chemical, to exploit the lax, poorly-enforced safety regulations here, so that you could do your business in the cheapest manner possible by shortcutting the health and quality of life not only of your workers, but of everybody who lives here. To hell with every operator who ever referred to West Virginians as "our neighbors."
To hell with every single screwjob elected official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren't followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power. To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.
The rest: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-waggoner/west-virginia-chemical-spill_b_4598140.html
The Easy Problem With Government
An environmental enforcement boat patrols in front of the chemical spill at Freedom Industries
in Charleston, West Virginia. (Photo: Foo Conner / Flickr)
The Easy Problem With Government
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Tuesday 14 January 2014
So I enjoyed watching the Chris Christie Show last week. High entertainment, that, especially the part where he spent two hours saying he didn't know anything about that bridge, hadn't heard, had no idea, couldn't say, because eleventy thousand people work under him, and he can't be watching them all. That was great stuff, the way he exuded a real sense of executive command a year after describing President Obama as a man "walking around in a dark room looking for the light switch of leadership for the past four years," because irony is always awesome.
Chris Christie is a public servant, and a card carrying member (and former presidential frontrunner) of a party that goes out of its way to disparage, attack, diminish and deride public service and government at every opportunity. In Christie's case, and in the cases of so many others at the upper echelons of government employment, it seems as if these people are determined to establish how bad government is by being bad at government. Government is terrible!...I'm terrible!...See? I told you!
All this anti-government rhetoric, of course, is in service of the sainted private sector, the "job creators," the captains of industry. It was Reagan who said government is the problem, a maxim that has become holy writ not only among those on the Right, but among too many Democrats, as well as among all sorts of idiots in the "news" media whose grasping desperation for "balance" leads them on a daily basis to accept and broadcast demonstrably disproven and discredited arguments. Because "balance," and stuff.
Let's take a look at the track record of private industry over the last 200 hours.
The giant retailer Target let it be known that it wasn't 40 million customers who had their financial data stolen, it was 70 million...and then it was 110 million...and it was also PIN numbers and email addresses that got snatched, too. If the federal government had allowed so profound a theft of financial information to take place, the good people at Fox News would be handing out the pitchforks and torches. After a third of the country was placed in peril of having their money stolen, thanks to the failure of private industry? Silence.
In West Virginia, some 300,000 people have been deprived of water to drink, bathe in, or prepare food with for days upon days now. Hospitals and retirement homes have had no water to work with, restaurants and other small businesses have been closed, because the water is so dirty you cannot even boil it to make it clean. Why? Because thousands of gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol were dumped into the Elk River by the magnificently-misnamed Freedom Industries, a private company that deals with coal.
But damn those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington, right? Except it's the public servants in Washington who are running down the crooks who stole all that information from Target. It's the public servants who are cleaning up the mess made by Freedom Industries, and who are trucking in thousands of gallons of clean water to make sure the West Virginia residents affected by this get through it.
And there's this, too: the site of the spill in West Virginia has not undergone a government inspection since 1991, because government is the problem, so they de-regulated everything. And when it does go wrong, as it always does (ask West, Texas), it's the taxpayer who pays for the clean-up that is performed by the public servants.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21218-william-rivers-pitt-the-easy-problem-with-government
Wedding Vows: Mr. Duckett and Dr. Jones, Because Love Is All
Together 46 years, through Dr. Jones' deployment to Vietnam, shared fatherhood with an adopted child, and then grandfatherhood, and everything else that comes with a lifetime spent together.
A little back story: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/these-grandfathers-getting-married-might-just-make-you-well?sf21524348=1
He sat down.
On February 1, 1960, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair Jr. sat down at the lunch counter in the Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Big deal?
Big deal, because they were Black, and it was a "Whites Only" counter.
Those four college freshmen stayed until the store closed, but returned the next day, and the day after, and the day after. They were joined by more protesters, whose numbers built to at least 1,000 by the fifth day. Within weeks, sit-ins were launched in more than 50 cities in nine states. The Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro was desegregated within six months.
Their sit-in led to the formation in Raleigh of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which became the cutting edge of the student direct-action civil rights movement. The demonstrations between 1960 and 1965 helped bring about the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
"The best feeling of my life," Franklin McCain said in a 2010 interview, was ‘‘sitting on that dumb stool. I felt so relieved. I felt so at peace and so self-accepted at that very moment. Nothing has ever happened to me since then that topped that good feeling of being clean and fully accepted and feeling proud of me.”
Franklin McCain passed on Thursday. He was 73.
So let me get this straight...
A West Virginia coal processing plant dumped poison into a river, and now 300,000 people have to avoid tapwater if they want to keep from vomiting relentlessly. Target let everyone know that they lost the financial information for 70 million people over Thanksgiving, which is a little bit less than a quarter of the entire population.
Quite a banner day for the Barons of Big Business. Clearly, the push to privatize everything while slashing regulation everywhere will lead us to paradise on Earth.
Please excuse me while I drink poison and watch my bank account get looted.
Homegrown
(Image: Marijuana gavel via Shutterstock)
Homegrown
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Tuesday 07 January 2014
Homegrown's
All right with me
Homegrown
Is the way it should be
Homegrown
Is a good thing
Plant that bell
And let it ring...
- Neil Young
It was late September in 1993, and my friends and I were at a campground to enjoy a weekend away from the world. It was unusually cold as I shrugged my way out of the tent, and after answering an insistent call of nature just inside a line of trees to the east of our campsite, I set about the work of getting the fire going again. One by one, my friends emerged from their own tents in various stages of disrepair - the previous night had been a doozy, and more than a few of my crew looked and felt as if they had been devoured and shat out by wolves - to warm themselves by the flames.
Once the coffee was going and the blood was flowing, a joint the size of New Jersey began making the rounds, as was tradition, a soothing balm for the tragically hung-over among us. After a fashion, I happened to notice a man two campsites over giving our little campfire circle a long, hard stare. One didn't have to be stoned to be paranoid about smoking marijuana twenty years ago, and my first thought was, "Cop." I quietly told my friends to cool it, cool it, something's off with that guy, and everyone immediately began doing the I-Ain't-Doing-Nothin' Shuffle.
When the man started walking towards me, I began to do an inventory in my head of the cash I had on hand, the cash my friends had, in the event I wound up needing bail money. He presented himself before me, put out his hand, and introduced himself.
I hope I'm not intruding, he said. Not at all, I told him with trepidation flying around my head like I was Tippi Hedren. I offered him some coffee while my friends milled around the campsite pretending they weren't baked and had important stuff to do, casting furtive glances my way as they waited for the hammer to fall.
Listen, he said, I noticed you guys were smoking a joint.
Uh-huh, I replied.
I don't know anyone who smokes weed, he said.
Uh-huh, I replied.
My father has cancer, he said. It's bad. He can't eat because of his treatments, and that's as bad as the cancer. His doctor pulled me aside last week and mentioned marijuana as something that could help him.
Uh-huh, I replied.
You don't know me, he said, but I was wondering if you could give me some, so I can see if it helps him. I don't know anyone else I can ask.
I was still. This is either a set-up, I thought, or this guy is for real. As a NORML supporter, I knew full well that what he was asking for could help his father, but the very last thing I needed was a drug arrest on my record. I took a moment with his eyes, and decided to make a leap of faith...
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21058-william-rivers-pitt-homegrown
The Year of the Gun
(Image: Bullet pile via Shutterstock)
The Year of the Gun
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed
Wednesday 01 January 2014
The year of the gun began in Tulsa, where four women were found bound and shot to death in their apartment. Twelve days later, a fifteen-year-old boy in New Mexico used an AR-15 to slaughter his father, mother, brother and two sisters; his brother was nine years old, and his sisters were five years old and two years old respectively. Less than a month later, a man shot and killed four people in a rural New York barber shop.
A little over a month later, two men and two women were lined up and shot in a basement in Akron. Four days later, a man in Washington State shot and killed his girlfriend and three neighbors before the police shot him down. Two days later, a man shot and killed five members of the mother of his daughter's family before also being killed by police. Four days later, a Kansas man shot his roommate to death, shot his best friend to death, and then shot his best friend's girlfriend and her 18-month-old daughter to death.
On the weekend of Mother's day, a man shot and killed two couples before burning their homes, and then shot and killed a newspaper deliveryman. A little more than a month later, a man in Hawaii shot and killed the couple that managed his apartment building, shot and killed four neighbors, took hostages, and was eventually himself gunned down by police. Two weeks later, a Dallas man shot dead his wife, his girlfriend and two of his children. A week after that, a man in Oklahoma City shot his mother, sister, niece and baby nephew to death. A month later, a man walked onto the Navy Yard in Washington DC with a sawed-off shotgun and killed twelve people. Four days later, a woman in Texas shot and killed her husband, her three sons, and then herself.
A month later, a man in Phoenix shot and killed four people and then himself with a shotgun. Two days later, a Texas man shot and killed five people. The next day, a South Carolina man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend, two of her children, her parents, and then himself. A month later, four people were shot and killed in Topeka. Two days after that, an Arkansas man shot and killed his daughter's boyfriend, his four-month-old grandson, his granddaughter, and then himself. On the same day, a Tennessee man shot and killed his wife, his son, his daughter, and then himself. Five days later, a Connecticut man shot and killed his ex-girlfriend, two other people, and then himself.
This is, bear in mind, an incomplete accounting.
Then there were the school shootings. In 2010, by comparison, there were nine school shootings in America that killed seven people. In 2011, there were eleven school shootings that killed nine people. In 2012, there were fourteen school shootings - including the massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary and Oikos University - that killed 43 people. In 2013, there were twenty-three school shootings that killed nineteen people.
Nine, then eleven, then fourteen, then twenty-three. If the trend holds, we can look forward to maybe thirty or forty school shootings in 2014.
Then there was the two-year-old North Carolina girl who shot herself to death with a gun someone left lying around, the three-year-old Arizona boy who shot himself to death with a gun someone left lying around, the five-year-old Texas boy who was shot in the head by an eight-year-old boy with a gun someone left lying around, the two-year-old Texas boy who shot himself in the head with a gun someone left lying around, the South Dakota woman who was shot while trying to take a gun away from her two-year-old son, the four-year-old Michigan boy who shot himself to death with a gun someone left lying around, the 11-year-old Virginia boy who shot himself in the mouth with a gun someone left lying around, and all the other 7,500 children who were admitted to hospitals with gunshot wounds this year, 500 of whom died.
But there's nothing we can do about it, because there's nothing we can do about it, because there's nothing we can do about it, because there's nothing we can do about it, because there's nothing we can do about it, because freedom, or something.
The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20949-the-year-of-the-gun
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
