Poor, Black and Dumped on

The title of Bob Herbert's latest Times op ed speaks for itself and will come as no surprise to those at the receiving end of BushCo's ongoing war against our most vulnerable, or to those who choose not to ignore it.

Poor, Black and Dumped on
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Most of the carnage — the terrible illnesses and the premature deaths — is hidden.

“The people in those agencies who issue the permits, and then do very little monitoring and very little enforcement in our communities, they don’t go with us to the emergency rooms where the children are suffering from serious asthma attacks. And they certainly don’t go with us to the funeral homes where we bury people who are 40 years old and have died of cancer. They don’t see the terrible damage that this stuff is doing.”

Monique Harden, a lawyer and director of a human rights agency in New Orleans, was talking about a problem that will get no attention at all in the Congressional elections, which are primarily about foolishness and the compulsion to deceive.

The evidence has been before us for decades that black people, other ethnic minorities and some poor whites have been getting sick and enduring horrible deaths from the filth that they breathe, eat, drink and otherwise ingest from the garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other world-class generators of pollution that have been deliberately and relentlessly installed in the neighborhoods where they live, work, worship and go to school....

Read more here (TimesSelect Subscribers) or here (Non-TimesSelect Subscribers.

Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

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