Wednesday, February 05, 2020
Study Finds West Virginia Counties Among ‘Worst in Nation’ For Drinking Water Violations
https://www.wvpublic.org/post/study-finds-west-virginia-counties-among-worst-nation-drinking-water-violations#stream/0
A new study released Tuesday by three environmental groups found more than half of West Virginia counties rank among the worst in the nation for violations of a federal law that protects the quality of drinking water in the U.S.
The report, “Watered Down Justice,” ranked 36 of the state’s 55 counties among the top third worst-offending U.S. counties.
The analysis found millions of people across the country, including 912,650 people in West Virginia, consumed water from drinking systems that were out of compliance with the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), at various points between June 1, 2016, and May 31, 2019.
According to data from the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of three organizations behind the study, 378 water systems violated the SDWA at least once in those three years. That's out of a reported 448 West Virginian systems total, serving more than 1.5 million people.
Small, often rural, community water systems were among the top offenders, along with systems responsibly for serving communities of color and low socioeconomic conditions.
In West Virginia, where much of the state’s residents live rurally, many people depend on small community water systems.
Systems nationwide serving less than 3,300 people accounted for more than 80 percent of all SDWA violations, according to the study. Even smaller systems, serving less than 500 people, were reportedly responsible for more than 60 percent of all SDWA violations, and for 50 percent of health-based violations.
At a press conference at the Capitol in Charleston Tuesday afternoon, a series of speakers, including two state lawmakers and representatives from environmental groups, said the study not only found West Virginia counties violated the SDWA often, but also spent a lot of time not complying with the law in general. According to the report, 42 West Virginia counties are among the top third in the nation for counties who spend the most time out of compliance.
What Is The SDWA?
Three environmental groups -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, Coming Clean, and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance -- analyzed health-based violations of the SDWA between June 1, 2016, and May 31, 2019.
The SDWA was established in 1974. This act requires the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate drinking water sources and to protect residents from both naturally-occurring and man-made contaminants.
The EPA sets legal limits on more than 90 contaminants in drinking water, including chemical contaminants, lead and copper. These contaminants can lead to a large swath of health problems affecting a variety of ages, including cancer and impaired brain development.
When it comes to public water systems, the EPA regulates those that provide water to at least 15 service connections, or at least 25 people for at least 60 days a year.
Quality Of Life ‘Inseparable’ From Quality Of Water
Drinking water faces many threats, including those from chemicals and the improper disposal of human and animal waste.
In 2014, a chemical spill near Charleston left more than 300,000 West Virginians without drinking water for a week after a storage tank at Freedom Industries leaked more than 10,000 gallons of toxic materials into the Elk River. In 2000, dangerous levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or C8, were discovered in water systems, coming from chemical company DuPont’s plant near Parkersburg. Earlier this year, officials discovered chemical water contaminants in Wetzel County.
“We all know West Virginia is no stranger to our water contamination,” said Pam Nixon, President of People Concerned About Chemical Safety.
Since the 2014 incident, Nixon said she has noticed signs and reactions to the “water crisis” everywhere, including grocery stores.
“People in West Virginia realize that our water is contaminated,” she said. “We’ve noticed from 2014 to now, how the section for bottled water has expanded. And when you look, there are, unfortunately, some people who really can’t afford to buy water, they don’t feel comfortable drinking it, so they’re buying bottled water. You can see it in the carts.”
Rick Martin, president of the Charleston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said the spill in 2014 was an “unforgettable experience,” and “difficult to forgive, particularly in low-income communities and our communities of color.”
According to the report, findings showed a relationship between sociodemographic characteristics at the county level, like race and income, and those counties’ drinking water violations.
“Quality of life and quality of water go hand in hand,” Martin said. “They’re inseparable.”
Martin said there will be a push next year to reintroduce House Bill 2153 and Senate Bill 573, both of which failed in 2019. These bills would create a minority health advisory team to assist local communities in developing plans to address local public health crises, like water contamination.
Democratic West Virginia Dels. Mike Pushkin and Evan Hansen also spoke at the press conference.
Pushkin, who lives on the west side of Charleston, referred to his area as “ground zero” for the 2014 spill. He said the report came as “no surprise to those of us who have lived here for a long time.”
“Charleston still has not fully recovered,” Pushkin said. “This part of the state still hasn’t fully recovered from that industrial disaster that took place in January 2014.”
He described the “amount of people who moved out of the area, some of the businesses that closed up and still haven’t come back.”
“Since then ... I have seen the Legislature roll back the Aboveground Storage Tank Act that was passed as a reaction to that chemical spill. … I have seen the weakening of water quality standards every year,” he said.
Pushkin said he rejects the narrative that deregulation is needed to attract and retain businesses to West Virginia.
“This narrative that we’re being fed is a lie,” he added. “We saw businesses that shut down because of the chemical spill in 2014.”
According to the report, there were 170,959 violations of the SDWA in 24,133 community water systems across the U.S.
Almost 40 percent of the U.S. population, according to the report, consumed water from drinking systems that violated the SDWA.
Researchers found 437 counties, mostly in the southwest part of the country, spent the longest average lengths of time, out of compliance, per drinking system.
This story was updated on Wednesday, Sept. 25, to include additional data on violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act in West Virginia.
Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
Currently...
"On December 7 1943, there were 56,082 people in Auschwitz; on December 7 2019, there were 69,550 children (not counting adults) in detained in border camps."
https://www.truthorfiction.com/december-7-1943-56082-people-in-auschwitz-december-7-2019-69550-children-in-border-camps/
https://www.truthorfiction.com/december-7-1943-56082-people-in-auschwitz-december-7-2019-69550-children-in-border-camps/
Monday, February 03, 2020
"Cracker"
But it turns out cracker's roots go back even further than the 17th century. All the way back to the age of Shakespeare, at least.
"The meaning of the word has changed a lot over the last four centuries," said Dana Ste. Claire, a Florida historian and anthropologist who studies, er, crackers. (He literally wrote the book on them.)
Ste. Claire pointed me to King John, published sometime in the 1590s. One character refers to another as a craker — a common insult for an obnoxious bloviator.
What craker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?
"It's a beautiful quote, but it was a character trait that was used to describe a group of Celtic immigrants — Scots-Irish people who came to the Americas who were running from political circumstances in the old world," Ste. Claire said. Those Scots-Irish folks started settling the Carolinas, and later moved deeper South and into Florida and Georgia.
But the disparaging term followed these immigrants, who were thought by local officials to be unruly and ill-mannered.
"In official documents, the governor of Florida said, 'We don't know what to do with these crackers — we tell them to settle this area and they don't; we tell them not to settle this area and they do," Ste. Claire said. "They lived off the land. They were rogues."
By the early 1800s, those immigrants to the South started to refer to themselves that way as a badge of honor and a term of endearment. (I'm pretty sure this process of reappropriating a disparaging term sounds familiar to a lot of y'all.)
The crackers had their distinctive time-intensive cuisine — swamp cabbage, hoppin' john, corn pone — and favored architectural styles meant to make cooking in the brutal Southern summers more bearable. There were baseball teams called the Crackers. According to Ste. Claire, we've even had a cracker president.
"Jimmy Carter is a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "He's an Oglethorpe, from Celtic-English cracker stock. I don't know if he knows, but I think Jimmy Carter would proudly call himself one. "
It was in the late 1800s when writers from the North started referring to the hayseed faction of Southern homesteaders as crackers. "[Those writers] decided that they were called that because of the cracking of the whip when they drove slaves," Ste. Claire said. But he said that few crackers would have owned slaves; they were generally too poor. (That of course, doesn't mean they weren't participants in the South's slave economy in other ways.)
Ste. Claire said that by the 1940s, the term began to take on yet another meaning in American inner cities in particular: as an epithet for bigoted white folks. But he wasn't sure how it happened. (I'm hazarding a guess here, but this would have been during the height of the Great Migration, as millions of black people from the South were moving to the North and West and fleeing Southern racism. They might have carried cracker with them as a shorthand for whites back in the Jim Crow South.)
In the 1990s, some officials in Highlands County, Fla., decided to name a new school the Cracker Trail Elementary school. Their hope was to honor the area's history; the school sat near the Florida Cracker Trail. But many in the county weren't having it.
"African-Americans protested because they thought it was racist and whites protested because they thought it was racist," Ste. Claire said. (The school kept the name.)
For many Southern whites, though, cracker has remained uncomplicated, a source of cultural pride. "There are people who will claim that there's a diff between Georgia cracker and a Florida cracker, but that's really just a difference of football teams," Ste. Claire said.
But Ste. Claire said that cracker is a way of life.
And as much as Ste. Claire studies and celebrates cracker culture — he and several friends run a traveling event called The Great Southern Cracker Roadshow — he technically doesn't count as one.
"Just because you lived in the South doesn't mean you're a cracker," Ste. Claire said. "To really call yourself a cracker you have to live the cracker way — you have to start your kitchen at 4 in the morning," he said.
Just like all those touristy, overpriced soul food joints, Ste. Claire said that you can find fancified cracker cuisine for sale at restaurants all over the South. "You can spend $40 on cracker food," he said. "I call that the revenge of the crackers. I'm sure a lot of crackers are rolling over in their graves at that."
Sunday, February 02, 2020
Wobblies' Free Speech Under Attack. We're Fighting Back.
https://www.acluwv.org/en/news/wobblies-free-speech-under-attack-were-fighting-back
In October 2019, Sam Krzys, a member of law enforcement who works as a school resource officer in Weirton, posted a photo of himself proudly standing by a hooded figure h
In October 2019, Sam Krzys, a member of law enforcement who works as a school resource officer in Weirton, posted a photo of himself proudly standing by a hooded figure h
2/2/20 - Therefore...
conceived and directed by
DIMITRIS PAPAIOANNOU
music
K. BHTA
set design
LILI PEZANOU
art direction – costume design
ANGELOS MENDIS
lighting design
ALEKOS YIANNAROS
painting design
MARIA ILIA
video
ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI, MATT JOHNSON
assistant director – artistic production co-ordinator
TINA PAPANIKOLAOU
performed by
SAVVAS BALTZIS, CHRISTOS DELIDIMOS, NIKOS DRAGONAS, ALTIN HUTA, NIKOS KALOGERAKIS, TASSOS KARACHALIOS, KONSTANTINOS KARVOUNIARIS, YORGOS KOPSIDAS, YORGOS KOTSIFAKIS, EURIPIDES LASKARIDIS, YORGHOS MATSKARIS, MARIOS METTIS, YIANNIS NIKOLAIDIS, CHRISTOS PAPADOPOULOS, FEVOS PAPADOPOULOS, TASSOS PAPAIOANNOU, ARIS SERVETALIS, DIOGENIS SKALTSAS, DROSSOS SKOTIS, PAVLOS STATHAKIS, MANOLIS THEODORAKIS, SIMON TSAKIRIS, KONSTANTINOS YIANNAKOPOULOS and EVANGELOS ZARKADAS
theatrical stage production by
ELLINIKI THEAMATON
___________________
dvd credits
directed + produced by
ATHINA TSANGARI
edited by
MATT JOHNSON
director of photography
SIMON SAKERTZIS
camera operators
MANOS GASTERATOS, MARIA HATZAKOU, CHRISTOS KARAMANIS, COSTAS KEFALAS, ZOE MANDA, SIMON SAKERTZIS, ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI, VIKA TSOURAS, NIKOS ZOIOPOULOS
sound recording
KOSTAS MICHOPOULOS
steadicam
YORGOS PETRAKIS
assistant steadicam
PETROS KOLIAVASSILIS and THEODOROS KENTROS
sound design – foley – mix
PANOS TZELEKIS
sound editing assistant
OTHONAS MENDIS
dvd design – colour correction – authoring
MATT JOHNSON
subtitles
KYRIACOS KARSERAS, MATHESON BAYLEY
a HOAOS FILM production (2007)
Ⓟ + © Legend Recordings S.A. - Modern Times S.A. 2007
dimitrispapaioannou.com
fb.com/papaioannou.page
twitter.com/papaioannou_d
vimeo.com/papaioannou
kbhta.gr
haosfilm.com
Saturday, February 01, 2020
Currently...
"53 men and women, sworn to protect and defend America and her ideals, failed to do that, today.
53 men and women did what no army or government has been able to do for over 250 years. They took the fundamental principle that America is built upon, that no person is above the law, and they destroyed it. They destroyed it in service of the most corrupt and plainly criminal person to ever hold the office of president.
Over the coming weeks and months, more evidence of Trump's lawbreaking and criminality will continue to pile up, and the full extent of their cover-up will be known. They know this, and they don't care.
May these men and women be remembered by history for the partisan cowards they are. When America and all of her people needed them the most, they failed, and they failed in service of a criminal, who is now emboldened to become the autocrat he has always dreamed of becoming. They know this, and they don't care.
America as I have known it for my entire life was killed today, stabbed in the back 53 times, betrayed by the very people who were entrusted with defending her.
May those people never have a single moment of peace for the rest of their lives. May they be shouted at and shamed and driven from public life into the dark corners of the world, like the rats they are."
-Wil Wheaton
Oath of Office
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
https://www.senate.gov/a…/traditions-symbols/oath-taking.htm
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
https://www.senate.gov/a…/traditions-symbols/oath-taking.htm
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