The Manhandlers

Mmm good

That used to be a soup by Campbell’s, now they can just name some type of faux grade military weapon in which to market to men so they can go on a killing rampage.And with that it is advertising and marketing that brought us to the current state of guns in America.

Below is an article from yesterday’s New York Times about how guns have been advertised and marketed if not branded to attract buyers to certain kinds of weapons of choice, that play upon two factors: Sexuality and Gender Identity and of course FEAR.

I have said repeatedly Americans are terrified of anything or any body that somehow threatens their identity, beliefs and of course their personal safety. It has been used repeatedly as a moral panic and no greater and more recent example of that is Covid. The way they turned a disease into a political weapon is why we have the divisive natue surrounding everything from masks to vaccines and how we view Dr. Fauci. Seriously the histronics in those early days about Fauci, Trump and Cuomo were mind blowing. If you did not somehow reject, adore and admire one of them during Covid, the tribe will pounce. I feared more of my own, Liberals, than any Conservative. I actually could have rational discussions with Conservative folks about the disease, it being AIRBORNE akin to a Pox or Measles like virus and that masks do work in certain circumstances for certain time periods, dependent on the type/kind each were wearing and that yes a vaccine of this kind has great potential and no it is not “new” as it has been kicking around for a while for other diseases and then I left it at that. No argument, no real push or shove just let the info lay there. The “other” is NOT my problem and I can avoid and do my best to work around said issues or problematic people if I so choose. Damn that word again. But what I find with both Liberals and Conservatives is a real reading comprehension problem. If you cannot concisely get your point in akin to a text or social media post you have lost then and then guns are a blazing. With liberals that is their Trump Derangement Syndrome that puts you in line with him and his crazies and then they dismiss you as the “other.” Liberals are the most judgemental unforgiving bores I have ever encountered. And again I am very liberal. I just don’t vest in the tribal mentality that seems to be largely an affiliation of millennials. It explains the social media implosions and cancel culture bullshit as they are coddled beyond belief. I doubt one could get this far in the blog at this point they would be so, “my feelers are hurt.”

With that you need to toughen up if you are ever going to make it out of your home/work pod. Gun Safety, Gun legislation is by far more important that who said something not nice to someone else by someone they did not know about someone they don’t know, will never meet and have nothing to do with.

As or IF you read the article I have highlighted what I think are essential passages that discuss the rise in gun sales. And this will piss off the young millennial woman, it is WOMEN who are purchasing guns at a faster rate than men. They are afraid! BOO! And the other is that most don’t have one fucking clue on how to use, operate or maintain a gun. Shocking, I know, not really.

Gun Sellers’ Message to Americans: Man Up

The number of firearms in the U.S. is outpacing the country’s population, as an emboldened gun industry and its allies target buyers with rhetoric of fear, machismo and defiance.

A man raffled off a golden AK-47 at the N.R.A. convention last month in Houston.Credit…Mark Abramson for The New York Times

By Mike McIntire, Glenn Thrush and Eric Lipton

June 18, 2022

Last November, hours after a jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse of two shooting deaths during antiracism protests in 2020, a Florida gun dealer created an image of him brandishing an assault rifle, with the slogan: “BE A MAN AMONG MEN.”

Mr. Rittenhouse was not yet a man when he killed two people and wounded another in Kenosha, Wis. — he was 17 — but he aspired to be like one. And the firearms industry, backed by years of research and focus groups, knows that other Americans do, too.

Gun companies have spent the last two decades scrutinizing their market and refocusing their message away from hunting toward selling handguns for personal safety, as well as military-style weapons attractive to mostly young men. The sales pitch — rooted in self-defense, machismo and an overarching sense of fear — has been remarkably successful.

Firearm sales have skyrocketed, with background checks rising from 8.5 million in 2000 to 38.9 million last year. The number of guns is outpacing the population. Women, spurred by appeals that play on fears of crime and being caught unprepared, are the fastest-growing segment of buyers.

An examination by The New York Times of firearms marketing research, along with legal and lobbying efforts by gun rights groups, finds that behind the shift in gun culture is an array of interests that share a commercial and political imperative: more guns and freer access to them. Working together, gun makers, advocates and elected officials have convinced a large swath of Americans that they should have a firearm, and eased the legal path for them to do so.

Some of the research is publicly known, but by searching court filings and online archives, The Times gained new insight into how gun companies exploit the anxiety and desires of Americans. Using Madison Avenue methods, the firearms industry has sliced and diced consumer attributes to find pressure points — self-esteem, lack of trust in others, fear of losing control — useful in selling more guns.

In a paradigm-setting 2012 ad in Maxim magazine, Bushmaster — which manufactured the rifle used in the racist massacre in Buffalo in May — declared, “Consider your man card reissued.”

At the National Rifle Association convention in Houston last month, a Missouri-based gun maker, Black Rain Ordnance, featured a line of “BRO” semiautomatics punning on the company’s acronym: AR-15-style guns with names like BRO-Tyrant and BRO-Predator. Dozens of other vendors had similar messages.

The recurrence of mass shootings has provided reliable opportunities for the industry and its allies. Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a decade ago, gun sales have almost always risen sharply in the aftermath of major shootings, as buyers snap up firearms they worry will disappear from stores.

“Drawing attention to the concern that firearm sales could be further restricted will have a great impact on anxious buyers,” a firearms industry study from 2017 advised.

At the same time, guns rights groups have pushed an aggressive legislative and court agenda. For instance, it soon will be legal to carry a hidden firearm without a permit in half the United States.

In states where pro-gun forces do not have the backing of elected officials, they have taken up the fight in other ways. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on a New York case challenging a century-old law that allows local officials great discretion over who can carry a handgun, which is widely expected to turn into another gun rights victory.

Gun makers and their supporters argue they are only responding to a public need. A rush to buy firearms often coincides with concerns about personal safety or events that could spur legal limits on gun ownership, said Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry trade group.

“I don’t think that’s a marketing trick,” he said. “I think, more than anything, it’s consumer demand that’s driving the appetite for these firearms.”

Whatever the source of Americans’ sense of unease, the result is a country flooded with firearms and no end in sight.

“Fear,” said Darrell Miller, co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, “is an incredibly powerful motivator.”

Anxiety Sells

Marketing firearms for personal protection is nothing new. For the better part of the last century, certain gunmakers emphasized self-defense: One of the industry’s most influential campaigns was a 1996 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal that showed a Beretta handgun on a kitchen table, with the words “Homeowner’s Insurance.”

Still, hunting accounted for a majority of advertisements in Guns magazine from the 1960s to the late 1990s, according to a survey by Palgrave Communications, an online academic journal. The study found that “the core emphasis” shifted in the 2000s to “armed self-defense,” and that the percentage of hunting-related ads had dropped to about 10 percent by 2019.

This transition was accompanied by a surge in popularity of the Glock semiautomatic handgun and AR-15-type rifle, first widely used by law enforcement and in the military, in its fully automatic version. That provided a built-in market among veterans and former police officers, but also kicked off an effort to woo millions of men who liked to buy gear that made them feel like soldiers and the police.

In 2009, a marketing firm hired by Remington to push its Bushmaster AR-15s settled on an ad campaign targeting civilians who “aspired” to be part of law enforcement. The first draft of the new pitch, later obtained by lawyers representing parents of children killed at Sandy Hook, exhorted buyers to use their new rifles to “Clear the Crack House,” “Ice the Perp” and “Save the Hostage.”

The company toned down the language but embraced the idea of trafficking in fears of urban crime and mass shootings, the documents showed.

Josh Sugarmann, founder of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group that tracks firearms advertising and marketing, said the firearms industry became adept at exploiting disquieting developments to spur sales.

“If you look back, it hasn’t just revolved around mass shootings. They tailored their marketing to Katrina, Y2K, 9/11, pretty much everything,” he said. “Their goal is basically to induce a Pavlovian response: ‘If there’s a crisis, you must go get a gun.’”

Industry data shows that in 1990, an estimated 74,000 military-style rifles were manufactured for domestic sale in the U.S. That figure began to climb after expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004 and reached 2.3 million in 2013, the year after Sandy Hook, when AR-style guns accounted for about a quarter of all sales revenue, according to the Firearms Retailer Survey, an annual report by the industry trade association.

Along with the rise in gun sales has been an intensifying effort by the industry to understand — and influence — the American consumer. In 2016, the trade association commissioned its first “consumer segmentation” study that developed profiles of potential gun buyers with labels like “Unarmed Aaron” and “Weaponless Wendy,” who presumably could succumb to the right sales pitch.

The newest study, produced last year, is closely held and not circulated outside the industry, but a copy was obtained by The Times. It found that typical gun owners were white men in their 40s earning about $75,000 a year with a preference for handguns. “Less than half consider themselves to be very knowledgeable about firearms,” the study found, though they felt the need to have one.

A common theme in consumer sentiment is anxiety. The 2021 study contained two new categories of buyers: “Prepared for the Worst” and “Urban Defender.” Urban Defenders worry about crime, “do not trust others around them” and are most susceptible to the argument that tighter laws could threaten their ability to purchase a gun.

Gun owners “Prepared for the Worst” tend to have the lowest incomes and are the least likely to have a full-time job. They cite “building confidence” and “empowering themselves” as reasons to learn shooting skills.

To reach these fearful consumers, the trade association offered suggestions in another of its reports. One example depicts an image of a woman in a desolate urban setting, calmly pulling a handgun from her shoulder bag as a hoodie-wearing man approaches from behind with a knife. *note the hoodie, not at all racist, right?**

That marketing approach may work for Weaponless Wendy, the report advised, but such “cheesy images” should be avoided when targeting Unarmed Aaron.

“It is important for the individual protecting himself or his family to appear to be a confident person while not seeming eager, delighted, or excited to be in such a scenario,” the report said.

Beth Alcazar, a former teacher from Alabama turned firearms instructor, has translated these sentiments into practice. More than a third of her clients are women, she said, adding that fear of crime is a major motivator for first-time gun buyers.

“It comes from not wanting to be a victim and from knowing there’s evil in the world,” said Ms. Alcazar, who has published a book for women on using handguns for self-defense.

Comrades in Arms

The aggressive messaging around fear has also helped define a newer crop of gun rights groups that increasingly overshadow the more deep-pocketed, but troubled, N.R.A. These groups, supported by the industry, have adopted a raw, in-your-face advocacy of near limitless freedom to own and carry firearms. Gun Owners of America, which lists more than 30 gun-related companies as “partners,” proudly calls itself the “only no compromise gun lobby in Washington.”

Their tone has grown more extreme along with the public discourse around guns in general. The Firearms Policy Coalition, which has launched numerous court challenges to gun laws around the country, used to sell T-shirts and bumper stickers with anodyne pro-gun mottos such as “Shall Not Be Infringed.”

But today, its online store has gear emblazoned with barbs like – “Abolish the ATF” and “Go and Print It,” a reference to using 3-D printers at home to make untraceable ghost guns. On social media, the coalition whips up members with warnings of an “impending GUNPOCALYPSE” wrought by weak or corrupt Washington politicians.

The image of Mr. Rittenhouse was put on Facebook by Big Daddy Unlimited, a firearms retailer in Gainesville, Fla., whose owners have said they started selling guns after the Sandy Hook massacre raised fears of new restrictions. “Be a Man Among Men” was a recruiting slogan used by the colonialist army of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and has gained popularity among white nationalist groups in recent years, although it is also used outside of that context.

Tony McKnight, chief executive of Big Daddy Unlimited, said in a statement to The Times that the meme was created by a former employee who did not understand the historical significance of the phrase. “The post in question was meant to recognize justice for Kyle Rittenhouse, whose life came in danger while defending the community,” Mr. McKnight said.

Along with using heightened rhetoric, major gun rights groups have been working to roll back state-level restrictions. Their financial partners include companies such as Daniel Defense, the Georgia-based maker of the military-style rifle used in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in May, as well as major retailers like Brownells of Iowa, which last summer ran a promotion donating a portion of its sales to the Firearms Policy Coalition.

“Your purchases help defend our gun rights,” Pete Brownell, the company chairman, said as he announced the incentive.

A major target of gun rights expansion has been laws limiting the carrying of concealed weapons in public. More than 20 states over the past decade have moved to eliminate or loosen requirements to have a permit.

“Owning a gun that is locked up in your home is not going to help you when you are targeted in a crime,” said Michael Csencsits, an organizer with Gun Owners of America, which has pushed for the repeal of concealed-carry laws. “People buy guns because they want to carry them.”

In pressing the two-pronged campaign to sell more guns and weaken restrictions, the industry and activists have been informed by marketing research that shows an increasingly diverse pool of customers. Timothy Schmidt, president of the United States Concealed Carry Association, said the new generation of gun buyers encompasses city dwellers, suburbanites and those in rural areas.

“It’s not just the angry white male anymore,” he said “You’re seeing rising gun ownership among Blacks, among women. It’s really a different thing.”

JoAnna Anderson would seem to fit that demographic. A Black real estate agent in North Carolina, Ms. Anderson appears in a promotional video for SilencerCo, an online seller of devices that muffle the sound of a gunshot; its slogan is, “Suppress the Fear.”

In an interview with The Times, she said she carried a gun while on the job because she feared running into disgruntled residents of homes being vacated. Her first purchase was a 9-millimeter Ruger pistol, though she now has a collection of seven guns, including a military-style rifle.

“We cannot expect the government to protect us,” Ms. Anderson said, “because they haven’t.”

Nick Suplina, a senior vice president at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, said gun rights advocates tended to ignore data showing that firearms in homes often wound up hurting their owners instead of someone threatening them.

“While selling you this notion that a gun may provide security for yourself and your family, which is very appealing, they don’t tell you that owning a gun makes it two times more likely that somebody in the house will die of gun homicide or three times the likelihood they die by gun suicide,” he said.

Ascendant Gun Rights

After the mass shootings at Sandy Hook in 2012 and in Parkland, Fla., six years later, more than 30 states tightened gun laws, a successful effort pushed by well-funded groups such as Everytown, backed by Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City.

But the scorecard overall remains tilted toward gun rights, as states repeal concealed carry restrictions. Those victories have come amid the Republican Party’s embrace of Second Amendment absolutism and guns as central to its identity, a fervor that gun control proponents have not been able to match, said Mr. Miller of the Duke firearms law center.

“Gun rights advocates are reaping the benefits of a history of asymmetric intensity and political mobilization,” he said.

Energizing gun owners with a sense of alarm over the potential loss of rights has long been a reliable strategy of the firearms industry and its allies. Political candidates from both parties seeking the N.R.A.’s blessing traditionally would try to be seen hunting ducks or plinking at targets to reassure supporters that their gun rights would be safe.

But in the 2010s, with the rise of the Tea Party and increasingly strident opposition to President Barack Obama, Republican political messaging around guns took on a harder edge.

Christina Jeffrey, running for Congress in South Carolina, ran an ad in which she brandished an AK-47 assault rifle while asserting that gun rights were necessary “to ensure that our limited government stays limited.” In a Missouri governor’s race, Eric Greitens blasted away with a mounted machine gun while pledging to “fight Obama’s Democrat machine and their corrupt attacks.”

Such imagery has since become stock-in-trade. When Brian Kemp ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, one tongue-in-cheek ad showed him in a room full of firearms, leveling a shotgun near a young man interested in dating his daughter. It generated criticism, including from Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, who tweeted, “This recurring and uniquely American ‘joke’ is tiresome.”

Mr. Kemp responded dismissively with his own tweet: “I’m conservative, folks. Get over it!”

Groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition have filed dozens of court challenges to gun limits, and conservative judges, some appointed by former President Donald J. Trump, have delivered legal victories, including overturning a California law last month that placed an age minimum of 21 on purchases of semiautomatic rifles.

Mr. Suplina, of Everytown, disputed the idea that this was an era of gun rights expansion, citing a recent modest gun compromise in Washington and some state-level victories, including laws banning or limiting ghost guns in Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New York and Rhode Island. At least four states — Delaware, New York, Rhode Island and Washington — have put new limits on high-capacity magazines that can hold a large amount of ammunition.

“The fight is really intense,” Mr. Suplina said. “But for the first time in any recent period, the gun safety movement is showing up, meeting them on the battlefield, as it were, and that includes state houses and also Congress.”

Still, gun supporters are feeling generally optimistic.

“We are just at the start of expanding gun rights,” said Mr. Csencsits of Gun Owners of America.

But lest its members become too complacent, Gun Owners of America has on its website a very different message about the state of things: Be afraid.

“A handgun ban coming to America?” blared a recent headline on the site. The post goes on to ask for a donation to stop “what could be the single biggest attack on our God-given rights.” *uh no that was the founding fathers in the 1700s not God***

Death Us Do Part

Once again a week was full of Police Violence, Gun Violence, Medical Malpractice and all that falls into the larger picture of how our society runs.  And it was a week of funerals and memorials and recollections of lives lived.  It was a long but busy week.  And I returned to work to see that while some things change some things never do.

The never ending debate over medical care continues as ways to reduce costs and raise efficiency and in turn find insurance coverage for the great unwashed.  We have gone through Medical Concierge services (do they still exist), threats to end supplements on the ACA that has enabled many to attain coverage, while simultaneously shutting out those who do not qualify and pay exorbitant coverage costs from either high deductibles, high premiums or a combo thereof.  It takes only one medical bill to send one to the hospital.   And this is just one of many stories about the same. And as we enter the renewal ACA phase in a couple of months this issue will not be abated.  Then we have the never ending Medicare/Medicaid feud about coverage and expansion of benefits.  Or just the bizarre laws and rules that have enabled hospitals to fund themselves will doing little or nothing to reduce costs and serve patients.  You know like the President who does little to serve the country but plenty to serve his interests.

We have Police shooting innocent people and again the story buried was an actress who ironically was in ER the series that brought us the great furrowed brow acting of George Clooney shot and killed in her own home during a “wellness check.”  And here in Nashville a suicidal man was shot and killed by the police in his own home. Having been subject to one of those myself I did not touch anything in my home stood in pajamas and was scared shitless out my mind as two cops diagnosed me as depressed and having anxiety.  Ya think?    Death be not welcome on this mat.

Then another story of a Police seizure of property without due course or charges filed.  Civil Assets Forfeiture is the biggest boondoggle and boon to local Police forces across the country. That and the act that enables them to attain military grade equipment at low prices with no training, need or even how to maintain and upkeep everything from tanks to grenade launchers. Sure what.ever.

I have written extensively on the subjects of Judicial Reform, the problems with the Medical Industrial Complex and the issues surrounding the ACA/Obamacare before and after Trump and over these past years I have seen little to no movement on any of the subjects.  Some promise and some rhetoric directed to them but in reality the system in entrenched in the status quo.  Perhaps a new broom will sweep  it clean and maybe the women running for office around the country will bring that with them when they enter their halls of justice and disorder.  Women are good at multitasking and house cleaning and working is something we are very familiar.

And speaking of great women the four days of funeral processions and services dedicated to the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was topped not by its seven hour ceremony but her amazing fashion choices that were from head to toe.  Even at the end Ms. Franklin shined and her music that was the soundtrack to all of our lives will live on our radios as we drive down the highway in our Pink Cadillacs.  Death as in life always glamorous and always in style.

Which brings me to John McCain.  I might have been in hiding with Trump on this one. I have never liked the man from his politics to his personal life he was never one I identified with regardless of the moniker “Maverick.”  His daughter has to be the most humorless dullard ever to comment on a TV Screen and frankly I am already burned out on his procession and canonization of this man who brought us Sarah Palin, only bucked the party to my knowledge that infamous ACA thumbs down vote that came on the heels of his diagnosis of brain cancer where he knew the end was near. Then we have his own sordid personal life where he ironically left his first wife when she was disfigured from an car accident.  Thankfully Cindy kept up her youthful looks there and  I guess Cindy thought hey we are rarely together and he has his work wife, Lindsey Graham, to keep him warm those long nights in Washington doing nothing but talking to media so in death they do finally part.

I respect that he served his country and spent many years in a prison camp to come home and continue to serve but then at what point do you say I have done enough bullshit and go and actually go do something. .   Maverick my ass and this profile in the Rolling Stone from 2008 has another tone that was no present in the endless eulogies repeated for days on end.    The only job that in America you can do literally until you die is serve in Congress, so much for swamp draining.

 I have spent the better part of the last few months discussing the problems in the “it” city that surround crime, violence and education and those three are conjoined in a way that few discuss here as most of it is by faces of color and many who are barely out of their teens.   Since this was reported in June, there have been dozens of more fatality or near fatalities thanks to gun violence here.   Before I left for vacation there was a shooting rampage that terrorized East Nashville for days.  Every day is another shooting, a home invasion, a car jacking and assorted other stories of violence and crime that is rarely discussed as a major problem in a city that relies largely on tourism.  And to blame just faces of color would mean that two cities that I just visited, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, would have greater crime as they are similar in composition and demographics when it comes to income and race.  Well no.  Irony that Chicago a much larger metro area which is constantly decried as a city wracked with violence gets the media attention while Nashville is ignored.  Why is that?

The schools and the endless problems in the schools here has become a daily update much like the crime reports.   I again have been to schools that last year were under a different outsourcing agency last year due to the problems getting subs so it was interesting to return.  One I was given a bag of popcorn and thanked which shocked me and the afternoon was fine considering what I used to experience when I went there; however, I want to point out it was a SPED class and that I witnessed much oddness in the hall by the mainstreamed class and a Teacher verbally berate a student to the point of excess where in another school in an outlying district led this Teacher to be placed on leave. Go figure as here in Nashville rape, sexual abuse and other incidents rarely are reported.  Shocking, I know.  Not really.

The other school I went to had been in the news last year due to excessive violence and once again it was as horrid as I recalled and this was two hours for an Art Teacher.  It was bizarre when the SPED Teacher pushed in late into the class with her McDonald’s lunch which she ate while reprimanding and talking to the students. My favorite was correcting the grammar.  Try not eating in front of kids or speaking with your mouth full first before reprimanding others.  The bragging that she had moved to an outlying county to a place with a pool and bought an expensive car, a Lexus, to commute was also unnecessary and well again oddly in place for this school. Again all of the above situations were with Teachers who were black and with students who were also black.  It has been repeated over and over again throughout my visits to the schools in Nashville and what led me to examine my own views about race and poverty.  It was this school when I first arrived that I witnessed the most distressing behaviors, fights and where a Teacher was found with a gun in his backpack.  I found out that the reason for this was he was afraid as Parents had been threatening him so he carried it in his car and forgot to take it out to leave in his car that day.  He left the backpack in the Library where it was found and then reported.  Where he is and what happened to that is one of many stories I have heard since relocating here.  Including a Teacher who slammed a door on a child’s hand, Teachers who are having sexual encounters with students and of course the endless sordid tales that have made it to the media regarding varying Administrators and their sexual misconduct.  Little to no gets reported to the Police or the State.  Shocking, no not really.  Again this is a district headed by an African American man, with largely African American staff and a student population that is the same.  Poverty is the only distinction between the front of the house and the back of the house.  So yes race is a factor it is just what role in this equation has yet to be explained or understood by me a white woman of means. And when anyone white questions the decisions made the race card is tossed and then then hand folds.  Only one reporter,  Phil Williams of Channel 5 has made it his business to investigate the district from hiding lead in the water to the endless other controversy’s from budget to sexual misconduct. Again there is no “union” here to protect workers and tenure is not that big of an issue when it comes to termination so really what is the issue here?

Aside from race I do see the role of the secular community from both church to education and its influence.  I feel leads to much of what I see and hear. It should not be shocking given the Catholic Church which has both Pedophile Priests and abusive Nuns in their flock.  Religion is power and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  And other than Congress it is the only occupation you can serve until death. Talk about tenure!

So tomorrow is labor day of which is to honor those in labor.  Irony that again much has been done to destroy the power of organized labor and yet the phrase “hard work” dominates the lexicon next to In God We Trust as the American concept of meritocracy is tied to those two beliefs – work for the almighty dollar.    I have to laugh as that latter phrase is to be visible in all schools in Tennessee by law.  I have yet to see it but I try to just keep my head down, answer the questions asked and no more, try to ignore the children to the point where unless I am observed or their behavior is so egregious I need to intervene I am pushing through this year with the idea that my end date is nearer than I think.  As for my relationship with Nashville is not until death we do part.

So as labor day soldiers on who are those in labor?  Well we have Police for if was not for their unions we might have some way to communicate and establish expectations for what defines police work.   There are Teachers Unions that are struggling to resolve the problem in Education that means funding and overcoming the endless demands on time that cannot be fixed by a 6 hour school day. The Medical field that refuses to change despite the reality that America is not great when it comes to care and outcome and their primary care obligation seems to be profits and wages for Doctors. And lastly our communities that are wracked with violence and poverty that warehousing them in public housing projects or prisons are failing to both protect and serve anyone.  Welcome to Nashville, home of the honky tonks, low wages and high violence.  Leave your gun in the car and your wallet in your pocket.   The land of bridal showers and promises that until death us do part. 

 

Smoke Meets Fire

In the downtime while everyone is pretending to care about the shooting on the baseball field and burying the hatchet in whomevers’ head is closest to the nearest camera, there was a massive fire in London at Grenfell Towers, a public housing unit that burned so rapidly that fire crews had to use dogs and  drones to search for victims as it is that hazardous of an environment.  The issues surrounding this building was with regards to the improvements that may have actually contributed to it being literally a tinder box – including the cladding used, the lack of fire sprinklers, doors blocked and other fire safety protections that may have enabled more to survive.

The similarities to the Ghost Warehouse in Oakland last year which led this last week to two of the building managers being charged with ‘involuntary manslaughter’  for their role in contributing to the deaths cannot be overlooked.   And true this was not housing by design but many alternative or optional housing for the  poor or displaced in cities are often alternative as housing costs in many cities – Nashville included – have become to expensive.  And as we have come to learn it is a contradiction to build affordable housing due to costs – from construction to maintenance – that has led many of these units to become so dilapidated  to the point that many basic building and safety codes are overlooked.  In other words – third rate people get third rate shit.

**I use the word third as it is what we used to decry about “third world” countries but we have just the same qualities and standards only masked in plastic and we call it fiberglass.**

Nowhere is that clearer than the water crisis in Flint.  This week led to many of the public officials to be charged with their role of covering up or failing to act upon their knowledge that the drinking water was killing people.

5 Charged With Involuntary Manslaughter in Flint Water Crisis

By SCOTT ATKINSON and MONICA DAVEY
THE NEW YORK TIMESJUNE 14, 2017

FLINT, Mich. — By the time Robert Skidmore, an 85-year-old former auto industry worker, died in late 2015, officials had seen signs for months that Flint was wrestling with outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease, prosecutors say. Yet despite a wave of such cases in 2014 and 2015, no public warning was issued until early 2016.

By then, it was too late for Mr. Skidmore and 11 others: a failing so egregious, prosecutors say, that it amounted to involuntary manslaughter.

Five officials in Michigan, including the head of the state’s health department, were charged on Wednesday. It is the closest investigators have come to directly blaming officials for the deaths and illnesses that occurred when a water contamination crisis enveloped this city.

The tainted water has been tied to lead poisoning in children and prompted officials to begin a costly, yearslong process of replacing pipes all over the city. Even now, officials recommend that only filtered tap water be consumed, and many residents say they can trust only bottled water, given false assurances they once received from state and local officials.

The latest charges reached farther than before into Michigan’s state government, affecting two cabinet-level officials in the administration of Gov. Rick Snyder and leaving open the possibility that the investigation would go higher still.

Nick Lyon, the director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and misconduct in office, felonies that could lead to as much as 20 years in prison. Dr. Eden V. Wells, the chief medical executive for the department, was charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a peace officer, and could face up to seven years if convicted. They are among 15 current and former state and local officials facing criminal charges as a 17-month investigation into Flint’s tainted water supply continues.

Before Wednesday, the criminal charges had focused mainly on the lead contamination and, in counts like misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty, on ways that state and city workers had failed to do their jobs.

“The Flint water crisis was and is a failure of leadership,” said an investigative report issued on Wednesday by Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general. “A cause of the breakdown in state governmental management was a fixation, a preoccupation, with data, finances and costs, instead of placing the health, safety and welfare of citizens first.”

Besides, the report found, a solution for Flint’s essential water problem was maddeningly simple, and cheap: The addition of common anti-corrosion chemicals could have cost the financially struggling city only $200 a day.

But officials failed to take that step when they switched the city’s water supply in early 2014, the investigators said, partly to save money. Residents began complaining of puzzling colors, putrid odors and an array of rashes and illnesses, which eventually included Legionnaires’ disease.

In charging Mr. Lyon, and four others who already faced other charges in the water case, with involuntary manslaughter, Mr. Schuette said they had failed to properly alert the public about increases in Legionnaires’ cases, allowing the problem to continue and withholding crucial information from residents, who might have avoided the water had they known.

An examination of government emails from 2014, 2015 and 2016 revealed that officials were aware of the pattern of Legionnaires’ cases, but that they failed to act swiftly on the revelations and tended to become mired in jurisdictional battles over protocol and responsibility.

Mr. Lyon knew of the Legionnaires’ outbreak by late January 2015, court documents claim, but did not notify the public for another year. At one point, the documents allege, he said that “he can’t save everyone” and that “everyone has to die of something.”

The charging documents pointed in particular to the death of Mr. Skidmore, the former autoworker, on Dec. 13, 2015. Mr. Schuette said that Mr. Skidmore had been tending to his ailing wife in mid-2015 when he grew ill, apparently from the water.

According to the charges, Mr. Lyon’s “acts and failure to act resulted in the death of at least one person,” Mr. Skidmore. The documents asserted that Mr. Lyon “willfully disregarded the deadly nature” of the Legionnaires’ outbreak and “exhibited gross negligence when he failed to alert the public about the deadly outbreak and by taking steps to suppress information illustrating obvious and apparent harms that were likely to result in serious injury.”

Defense lawyers for Mr. Lyon called the claims baseless and said they were confident in their client’s case. One challenge for prosecutors may be proving a direct link between Flint’s corroding water pipes and Legionnaires’ disease, legal experts said. Some scientists have suggested that the corrosion may have allowed Legionella bacteria to thrive in the water supply during warm summer months.

“The true facts simply do not support the prosecution’s claims,” the defense lawyers, Chip Chamberlain and Larry Willey, said in a statement. “This case appears to be a misguided theory looking for facts that do not exist.”

Governor Snyder, too, issued a statement of support for Mr. Lyon and Dr. Wells, and appeared to criticize the legal process, noting that other state employees had been charged more than a year ago but had yet to be tried in court.

“That is not justice for Flint, nor for those who have been charged,” Mr. Snyder said. “Director Lyon and Dr. Wells have been and continue to be instrumental in Flint’s recovery. They have my full faith and confidence, and will remain on duty at D.H.H.S.”

Mr. Schuette, a Republican, is widely seen as a possible candidate for governor in 2018. He declined to say whether the investigation might lead to charges against Mr. Snyder, though he emphasized that it was continuing and that the investigative report issued on Wednesday was an “interim” look at the Flint case. He said investigators had tried unsuccessfully to interview Mr. Snyder, who is barred by term limits from running for re-election, but he would not elaborate.

“We only file criminal charges when evidence of probable cause to commit a crime has been established, and we are not filing charges at this time,” Mr. Schuette said.

Mr. Snyder’s lawyer said that the governor has always been willing to be interviewed — but under oath, like other witnesses, to avoid any appearance of special treatment.

“We have repeatedly told the Office of Special Counsel that when they provide an investigative subpoena the governor will provide additional testimony under oath,” the lawyer, Brian Lennon, said in a written statement.

Mr. Skidmore, whose death is at the center of the five counts of involuntary manslaughter issued on Wednesday, was found to have Legionnaires’ disease in June 2015, after he went to a hospital with pneumonialike symptoms.

“It’s a very tragic story,” Mr. Schuette said, adding later, “The family had to bury their mother and their father.”

Mr. Skidmore’s wife of more than six decades died only weeks after he became ill, and Mr. Skidmore continued to fight his symptoms on top of grief, his family said.

“Grandma died. Six months later, after bouncing between the hospital, home care and back, he passed away,” said Megan Skidmore Cuttitta, his granddaughter. “Each time he went to the hospital, he’d get better, but each time he came home, he got worse.”

We are moving back in time. We have an Administration determined to remove any and all regulations, laws or guidelines that govern, mandate or encourage States and local entities from following well established science or data that has demonstrated danger with regards to safety towards the health and welfare of the citizenry. While meanwhile professing to “make America great again” leaving that concept and definition of great to the beholder.

I am sure many thought America was great in 1872 with Slavery. In 1911 with the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire killed hundreds. With the Flu Pandemic of 1918 that killed more than those who died in World War I. Or the crisis around Asbestos that was once thought magical yet later found to be deadly and leading to 50 country’s banning the product (irony not in the US). Or we can discuss the addiction to Nicotine which was largely due to the Tobacco Industry or the Great Depression that led to the Glass-Steagall Act. I could go on and on with numerous laws and acts that were done in the name of protecting Americans from being harmed and in turn contributed to making America “great” but in today’s America they are apparently not so great.

The current Administration of crackpots, liars and frauds are determined to eliminate even the most rudimentary of laws including vaccines that have truly saved millions of lives but no let’s have a go at seeing how that works out. Oh wait we have a pretty good idea.

Then we have larger safety regulations with regards to OSHA and worker’s safety which too has already proven that lives are disposable but one cannot overlook the fact that many of those on building sites are often undocumented workers and in turn the lack of communication and knowledge of rules and guidelines have enabled many to skirt those laws meant to ensure safety. And the same goes with regards to our food production and in turn contributed to other outbreaks of disease and illness for the population at large.

So what defines “greatness?”  I have no idea but I start with wellness, health, the opportunity to work and make an living wage.  To both live and work in a community and participate in its wellness – meaning clean air, clean water, mass transit, safe streets, libraries, community services and businesses that serve a multitude of people and reasonable guidelines and policies in which to do so. Which does mean reviewing laws and policies that man in fact inhibit those or need to be changed to accommodate new information and technology. 

Funny when a Politician wants to show how “tough they are” on a matter of import – usually crime but it can be other safety issues such as helmets to protect young brains – they are all about standing in front of cameras and writing legislation to do so. And they do so regardless that many laws or policies are already on the books.  There are often redundant criminal and civil laws that simply double down the confusion and adherence to policy by the layman but the Lawyers make out and not in a fun way.

We are a country of laws and some of them are just plain outdated/stupid/redundant and some are vital, vested in knowledge, science and that messy thing called “FACTS.”   As my Mother used to say where there is smoke there is likely fire and that is good place to start when making a decision that is about safety and well being.    Shame we have a Government who fails to see that when starting a baseball game around a prayer circle.  Did any of them pray for gun control? I doubt it.  Two strikes and we know what the third brings.  **remember what I said about the word third?**

Days of Our Lives

The decline of the middle class has finally been confirmed.  Glad you made it, however quite late to the party, but  you made it.    The recently released Pew report finally confirmed what those of us who were once working class new for quite some time, we fall into the working poor.

As for the poor poor, an ever increasingly larger cohort as that includes many seniors and immigrants who are the outliers when it comes to noting their poverty.   As the safety nets of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Food Stamps, as well as some housing benefits, are actually counted as income.  Remember when income meant monies actually earned? And to some they actually believe that if they had less to none of those, those enrolled in said programs  would have more of the latter versus the former which somehow is a preventive to actually seeking and earning income.  Sure, okay I  can see that getting Granny to work is the key and those lazy raping immigrants or people who want to raise children and cannot afford child care are slackers that need a swift kick in the ass thanks to all that free shit they get!

The reality is that America is not just divided by the politics that represent them, they are divided by the poverty that marks them.

I wrote in Destiny by Birth that whom you are born to economically determines one’s life opportunities, which may explain the Bush family.  But in reality that has been a long line in genetic predetermination, from the DuPont’s to the Rockerfellers to the Dursts, the Astors, to the new lineages of Gates, Jobs and the Clintons.  They are the new wealth that came out of access and opportunity.   The Zuckerberg baby is another but one needs to recall that Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, not Pomona Community College and came from a well to do family already, so the doors were only half a push vs a shove.

Meritocracy like the Middle Class is an outlier.  And yet the dreams and aspirations of those with children still share a common bond – for them to do well.  But the reality of the intrinsic comes against the extrinsic factors that push against that same balloon trying to rise.

Class Differences in Child-Rearing Are on the Rise

by Claire Cain Miller
The New York Time
DEC. 17, 2015

The lives of children from rich and poor American families look more different than they have in decades.

Well-off families are ruled by calendars, with children enrolled in ballet, soccer and after-school programs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey There are usually two parents, who spend a lot of time reading to children and worrying about their anxiety levels and hectic schedules.

In poor families, however, children tend to spend their time at home or with extended family, the survey found. They are more likely to grow up in neighborhoods that their parents say aren’t great for raising children, and their parents worry about them getting shot, beaten up or in trouble with the law.

The class differences in child rearing are growing, researchers say — a symptom of widening inequality with far-reaching consequences. Different upbringings set children on different paths and can deepen socioeconomic divisions, especially because education is strongly linked to earnings. Children grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum, but not necessarily others.

“Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-term social, emotional and cognitive development,” said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. “And because those influence educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow.”

The cycle continues: Poorer parents have less time and fewer resources to invest in their children, which can leave children less prepared for school and work, which leads to lower earnings.

American parents want similar things for their children, the Pew report and past research have found: for them to be healthy and happy, honest and ethical, caring and compassionate. There is no best parenting style or philosophy, researchers say, and across income groups, 92 percent of parents say they are doing a good job at raising their children.

Yet they are doing it quite differently.

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book “Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.” They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions.

Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. They are taught to be compliant and deferential to adults.

There are benefits to both approaches. Working-class children are happier, more independent, whine less and are closer with family members, Ms. Lareau found. Higher-income children are more likely to declare boredom and expect their parents to solve their problems.

Yet later on, the more affluent children end up in college and en route to the middle class, while working-class children tend to struggle. Children from higher-income families are likely to have the skills to navigate bureaucracies and succeed in schools and workplaces, Ms. Lareau said.

“Do all parents want the most success for their children? Absolutely,” she said. “Do some strategies give children more advantages than others in institutions? Probably they do. Will parents be damaging children if they have one fewer organized activity? No, I really doubt it.”

Social scientists say the differences arise in part because low-income parents have less money to spend on music class or preschool, and less flexible schedules to take children to museums or attend school events.

Extracurricular activities epitomize the differences in child rearing in the Pew survey, which was of a nationally representative sample of 1,807 parents. Of families earning more than $75,000 a year, 84 percent say their children have participated in organized sports over the past year, 64 percent have done volunteer work and 62 percent have taken lessons in music, dance or art. Of families earning less than $30,000, 59 percent of children have done sports, 37 percent have volunteered and 41 percent have taken arts classes.

Especially in affluent families, children start young. Nearly half of high-earning, college-graduate parents enrolled their children in arts classes before they were 5, compared with one-fifth of low-income, less-educated parents.

Nonetheless, 20 percent of well-off parents say their children’s schedules are too hectic, compared with 8 percent of poorer parents.

Another example is reading aloud, which studies have shown gives children bigger vocabularies and better reading comprehension in school. Seventy-one percent of parents with a college degree say they do it every day, compared with 33 percent of those with a high school diploma or less, Pew found. White parents are more likely than others to read to their children daily, as are married parents.

Most affluent parents enroll their children in preschool or day care, while low-income parents are more likely to depend on family members.

Discipline techniques vary by education level: 8 percent of those with a postgraduate degree say they often spank their children, compared with 22 percent of those with a high school degree or less.

The survey also probed attitudes and anxieties. Interestingly, parents’ attitudes toward education do not seem to reflect their own educational background as much as a belief in the importance of education for upward mobility.

Most American parents say they are not concerned about their children’s grades as long as they work hard. But 50 percent of poor parents say it is extremely important to them that their children earn a college degree, compared with 39 percent of wealthier parents.

Less-educated parents, and poorer and black and Latino parents are more likely to believe that there is no such thing as too much involvement in a child’s education. Parents who are white, wealthy or college-educated say too much involvement can be bad.

Parental anxieties reflect their circumstances. High-earning parents are much more likely to say they live in a good neighborhood for raising children. While bullying is parents’ greatest concern over all, nearly half of low-income parents worry their child will get shot, compared with one-fifth of high-income parents. They are more worried about their children being depressed or anxious.

In the Pew survey, middle-class families earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year fell right between working-class and high-earning parents on issues like the quality of their neighborhood for raising children, participation in extracurricular activities and involvement in their children’s education.

Children were not always raised so differently. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is 30 percent to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than those born 25 years earlier, according to Mr. Reardon’s research.

People used to live near people of different income levels; neighborhoods are now more segregated by income. More than a quarter of children live in single-parent households — a historic high, according to Pew – and these children are three times as likely to live in poverty as those who live with married parents. Meanwhile, growing income inequality has coincided with the increasing importance of a college degree for earning a middle-class wage.

Yet there are recent signs that the gap could be starting to shrink. In the past decade, even as income inequality has grown, some of the socioeconomic differences in parenting, like reading to children and going to libraries, have narrowed, Mr. Reardon and others have found.

Public policies aimed at young children have helped, he said, including public preschool programs and reading initiatives. Addressing disparities in the earliest years, it seems, could reduce inequality in the next generation.

                    _____________________________________________________

This week Flint, Michigan has a state of emergency over the state of its drinking water.  It’s lead levels are at dangerous levels for public health.  The former home of Michael Moore the documentarian who 20 years ago noted the reality of their declining city as the automotive industry began to change its production lines and move jobs out of state and the country.

How ironic that the Executive in charge of the Ford Foundation wrote an editorial in the New York Times this week asking philanthropists and foundations to examine their giving practices. To that I say charity begins at home and we have a big house that needs restoration.

Below is the story of Freddie Gray and his community.  We often think of it as a matter of choice and that again the whole idea of “working harder” will resolve the problems that are stacked higher than any wall Donald Trump could possibly build.

I often think if I was born 20 years later I would end up in similar circumstances.  My parents were immigrants or children of them.  They were uneducated and they were working class, my father a longshoreman, my mother a retail clerk.  So when I am forced to sit through endless hours on white privilege surrounded by some who are immigrants, people of color and work in education I want to know who those people are and then I look to the district and their fake rainbow of executives and administrators who rarely set foot in the schools that mark this district and go “really?”

I want to point out that while we were never forcibly desegregated we finally faced the reality of the way the schools elected to do so in the Supreme Court ruling of 2007, 30 years after the crazed busing riots of the 70s.

The case Seattle Schools and Louisville KY schools at that point used race as a “tie breaker” when it came to enrollment.  At that point Seattle only had two races – white and black – in which to determine and validate enrollment data. Any other color was virtually ignored in a district filled with large portion of Samoan Americans and Native ones as well (and yes all the colors and ethnicities in between, I get it Seattle liberal scolds I get it more than you know).  What is my favorite is that when I tell people it was in conjunction with Louisville, Kentucky, the horrific stares of shock is hilarious as the people here in Seattle see themselves as in align with much more sophisticated provinces.  My ill educated former neighbor all Seattle school born and raised is an example when he trashed the South, I informed him that Seattle is not really much better according to the Supreme Court and since that our funding issues are akin to Louisiana and Oklahoma and their respective Supreme Court rulings on funding, so fuck you Seattle arrogant assholes.  We have always been the reverse Oreo, with vanilla wafers on the outside, milk chocolate inside. *note: milk not dark.

So today we have “International” Schools not the same as International Baccalaureate schools, STEM, E STEM and of course the AP schools and alternative or ALE’s as they are called as a way to integrate said schools.  But I spent a good hour last year talking to a Senior at a high school who was the last of the kids affected by this change.  The next two years that followed that decision was a year that led to schools being closed (my personal favorite the African American Academy by a Superintendent who was African American and later fired by the “racially” diverse board for incompetence)  the end of busing and the push for “neighborhood” schools.  And this young man’s memory of this was quite clear,  as one year he went to a middle school with black kids and then he didn’t.  His high school has a mixed group of kids but they are there for its arts program and of course sports.  This school is in every way an archetype of a school of another era – a regular school filled to the rim with kids who live in the hood and this hood is white and middle class.  And that school’s last scandal of rape and assault was that same year and has been literally free of scandal since, while the same style of school (heavy sports and AP courses) located in the “integrated”  district cannot say the same.

And that is what the school population reflects today. I travel the district and it shows in the classes, the curriculum, the test scores and the overall dynamic of a school.  As I pointed out last week a largely whiter school has few minorities and the reality is that these kids have challenges that allow them to stand out in more ways than one.  So if you think that they will perform academically or behaviorially the same, then you need to get your white privleged ass in there to see for yourself.   It explains why the two boys at the center of the masturbation video are both minority students of two respective racial groups.  And no it is not racist to point that out, it is a matter of fact and it is not to say their race is the reason but it is the simple fact that we have little to know about either boys families but we do know that being different is enough of a reason and we have little to know about what that feels like during a time in adolescent that feeling different is enough of a challenge.

Just throwing kids together is not enough to elminate racisim nor prevent income inequity, it again as I wrote a fact that begins at birth and can determine one’s track “professionally” by age 4.   And that is what you are until 18, a professional student,  who receives for free an opportunity to learn and go on with whatever professional pursuits you are enabled to with the degree you receive. But the catch is that that paper is worth about the same cost of printing ink and paper.  The reality for some the paper is just the hurdle to jump over; those with families, income and opportunity have little respect for that paper it is on to the next to them and for some it may be the only paper they or their family will ever receive.

So below I share the article about Freddie Gray and his life and in turn death.  It was as if it was predetermined.

And so goes the Days of Our Lives………

Why you should know what happened in Freddie Gray’s life — long before his death

By Janell Ross
The Washington Post
December 19 2015

The general statistical profile of the West Baltimore community where Freddie Grey grew up is something most people think they know, even if the details are not committed to memory.

Here is the truth: The abbreviated and not at all easy life of Freddie Gray was, to some extent, shaped by Gray’s choices. He was an American and an adult with at least some of the attendant free will that people assume comes with either status.

But it is also a life altered and quite likely distorted by the net effects of where and how the wealthy country into which he was born and its voters have decided to distribute its resources. Freddie Gray was an American failed more often by his country than served by it. And yet again this week, after a mistrial was declared in the first of six cases against police officers in whose custody Gray died, only the details of his death have become the subject of any real and sustained public discussion.

In this, an already heated presidential election cycle, there is much more about the life of Freddie Gray that is worthy of examination — real political issues. You see, Baltimore might be the biggest city in one of the nation’s wealthiest states. But for the people in many of its neighborhoods, those resources are most readily used in ways that a growing body of economists, sociologists and mental health experts now argue do far more harm than good.

Consider the following, which is culled from federal data, a deep dive into Gray’s path through the criminal justice system written by Buzz Feed’s Nicolas Medina Mora, the Baltimore Sun’s extensive reporting — including this helpful timeline — and multiple reports from The Washington Post.

In the area where Gray lived, data-finding efforts often group a trio of communities as one — Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park. Here, the unemployment rate averaged a stunning 51.8 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a Justice Policy Institute report published in February. More than 30 percent of those who are fortunate enough to have jobs must travel 45 minutes or more to get to them. The median household income hovers just over $24,000 a year, and in 2012, there were roughly 19 deaths for every 1,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24.

A full 25 percent of children ages 10 to 17 have spent time in a juvenile facility. That’s a quarter of Sandtown-Winchester/Harlem Park children. That figure is also roughly equal to the share of kids in these communities who are likely to graduate from high school. And more than 7 percent of these same children have levels of lead in their blood — impulse-control and academic-ability-damaging lead — that meet or exceed the state standard for poisoning. Average life expectancy is 68.8 years. And the immediate area where Gray lived does not have a single grocery store or even a fast food restaurant.

Freddie Gray’s West Baltimore was and is the kind of community that those who have other options try to avoid, and those who must live there have to cope with the full knowledge that the odds are truly stacked against them and their children. And should they manage to move elsewhere, some of the same challenges would follow.

The homicide rate in the whole of Baltimore is the nation’s fifth-worst, behind only Detroit, New Orleans, Newark and St. Louis. As recently as 2013, 9.9 — yes, nearly 10 percent — of children born in Baltimore arrived too soon (before 37 weeks gestation), putting them at increased risk of a wide range of long-term health and social problems beginning with low birth weight, early death and academic difficulties. (The figures are even worse for black children in Baltimore and across the country, for reasons that researchers suspect have a lot to do with stress and the overall health of black women.)

 And even that 9.9 percent overall preterm birth rate in Baltimore represents a a marked improvement. In 2009, a full 16 percent of the city’s children were born premature, according to an Annie E. Casey Foundation analysis of federal data.

State prison costs in Baltimore alone approach $300 million each year. 

 When a pair of Harvard researchers examined what, if any, impact the actual place where a person lives, receives their education, etc., has on their long-term economic prospects, they ranked Baltimore at the bottom of their list. A 26-year-old man who spent his entire childhood in Baltimore earns about 28 percent less each year than he would if he had grown up in 100 other major cities, the study found.

In summation, Baltimore — and particularly Gray’s West Baltimore — is not an easy place for a poor and black child to grow up and get an education or a job.

Perhaps most telling of all, though, is this. Almost every disadvantage, challenge and public spending decision described in the paragraphs above had a direct and real effect on Gray’s short life. Arguably, they also had something to do with his death and the heated political debate about policing and Black Lives Matter in which the country is now engaged.

In 1989, Gray was born two months premature, one half of a boy-girl set of twins. Almost two decades later, Gray’s mother told lawyers collecting her testimony in a lead exposure civil lawsuit that, at the time her children were born, she could not read, had never attended high school and had begun using heroin in her early 20s (suggesting that she might have used drugs during her pregnancy). Gray and his sister spent the first few months of life in the hospital, so fragile and ill that one of the goals that doctors set for Gray before he could go home sounds almost elemental to infant life as suck, swallow or breathe: Gray had to gain five pounds.

That minimal milestone reached, Gray went home to a succession of West Baltimore apartments, most of them public housing, where both conditions and eligibility have an almost direct connection to public budgets and the politics of the moment. And in the public housing units where Gray lived, lead-infused paint was peeling from the walls and the windowsills with such intensity that before his 2nd birthday, Gray tested positive for concentrations of lead in his blood more than seven times the level that child health experts now believe can cause severe and permanent brain damage.

 If the magnitude of that misses you, consider what a lead expert told The Washington Post’s Terrence McCoy this year after learning about Gray’s childhood lead levels.“Jesus,” Dan Levy, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the effects of lead poisoning on youths, gasped when told of Gray’s levels. 

“The fact that Mr. Gray had these high levels of lead in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information.”Levy added, “And the real tragedy of lead is that the damage it does is irreparable.”

Then consider this: Lead paint exposure is a widespread national problem, concentrated most heavily in the nation’s low-income communities. And government efforts to remove lead paint from public and privately owned housing remains woefully below levels that most child and environmental health experts think truly necessary to eliminate the issue. In fact, the nation’s lead paint abatement programs are among those that experienced a budget cut due to sequestration and subsequent federal cost reduction efforts.

And that happened even though some public health experts believe that concerted national efforts to reduce widespread lead exposure — such as removing lead from gasoline — might be at least partially responsible for the precipitous drop in the nation’s crime rate over the past two decades.

Two decades ago, when Gray was entering a West Baltimore public school where many other children were, like him, born premature and then exposed to damaging levels of lead, it wasn’t long before Gray began to struggle. He and his sisters were diagnosed with attention deficit disorders and impulse control problems. School officials moved Gray into special education classrooms.

By the time he reached high school, Gray attended a West Baltimore institution where he had the opportunity to play football but never graduated. Still, had he been in better academic standing, his learning options still would have remained remarkably limited.

Today, Gray’s high school is what researchers at the University of California Los Angles have described as an “apartheid school,” where in 2011 — the most recent comprehensive federal data available — less than 1 percent of the student body is white and 98.7 percent black. Nearly half of the school’s teachers were absent from work more than 10 days during that same school year, nearly 20 percent were inexperienced and teaching for the first time, and just more than 79 percent of students came from families poor enough to receive free and reduced-price meals.

It’s a situation that, at the very least, suggests that significant resources might be needed to provide students with a solid education or prepare them for college. But during Gray’s tenure, the school did not offer even one Advanced Placement course (AP course are generally considered a college prep curriculum).

This has since changed, but much else has not.

By the time Gray reached his 18th birthday, he had been suspended several times from school and had a few run-ins with police outside of it. Then, as BuzzFeed reported, his first adult arrest for a non-violent drug crime actually occurred in almost the same spot as his final one.

Police officers who patrol West Baltimore deliver the arrest, chase and conviction stats that eventually form the basis of those tough-on-crime speeches that politicians (until quite recently, at least) clamored to make. And officers in this area had contact with Gray so often that, the Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post have reported, many officers knew Gray by name.

The arrests were followed by stints in jail that prompted Gray’s family and friends to do business repeatedly with bail bondsmen, enter into bail installment plans, payday loans and legal settlement buy-outs which made the network’s already uncertain financial situation even more difficult. And prosecutors, aware that charges will never stick, leave defendants unable to make bail in jail as a form of punishment. This too is a widespread problem — one that Justice Department officials have said is costing Americans their jobs and homes, and might be contributing to a cycle of crime. None of these practices are illegal, of course.

More often than not, in Gray’s cases, prosecutors later dropped those charges. You see, in a community where public funds are directed mostly toward a certain type of policing and making arrests, a large portion of those cases can’t stand up in court or produce the kind of evidence needed — especially when it comes to Baltimore juries that are increasingly unwilling to convict.

But Gray’s arrests generated enough of a record and a handful of convictions to make it difficult for him to find a paying job. During one of Gray’s longest stints in jail — two years — he picked up masonry skills. Later, he told friends that he wanted to put them to use. But a number of construction companies and building trades’ apprenticeship programs will not consider applicants with certain criminal convictions.

And it seems that Gray’s dependence on what are known around Baltimore as “lead checks” (civil lawsuit settlement payments) was something he’d come to accept as an essential part of his life. With the settlement funds, Gray — who an off-and-on girlfriend and several neighbors have described as fun-loving and known to sing off-key in public simply to make people laugh — could at least buy a constant supply of new clothes, something he liked.

In the years that followed, Gray was changed with a series of mostly minor crimes — an arrest in a nightclub parking lot, for instance, where Gray and two friends were found in a van smoking marijuana. A court eventually found Gray not guilty. In March, Gray was charged with his first violent crime, for  allegedly assaulting a family friend. Those charges were pending, along with a felony charge for possession of two oxycodone pills, when he died.

On the day of Gray’s last arrest on April 12, Gray ran from police. The officers who chased him down found no drugs on Gray, but said that his flight and his presence in a known open-air drug market gave them “probable cause” to make an arrest. Later, the officers found that Gray did have a knife.

But prosecutors have described Gray’s arrest as unlawful. The officers deny hitting or manhandling Gray in any way that might have caused his injuries — although cellphone video of Gray being put into a police van show that Gray’s body appears oddly limp. Prosecutors have argued that the injuries to Gray’s spinal cord which ultimately proved fatal happened inside the police transport van.

This is how Freddie Gray lived and died. And there is plenty about it that is very political and very much worthy of a bigger debate than we’re having.

The WPA

The Works Progress Administration was (as summarized by Indiana University)

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a relief measure established in 1935 by executive order as the Works Progress Administration, and was redesigned in 1939 when it was transferred to the Federal Works Agency. Headed by Harry L. Hopkins and supplied with an initial congressional appropriation of $4,880,000,000, it offered work to the unemployed on an unprecedented scale by spending money on a wide variety of programs, including highways and building construction, slum clearance, reforestation, and rural rehabilitation. So gigantic an undertaking was inevitably attended by confusion, waste, and political favoritism, yet the ‘pump-priming’ effect stimulated private business during the depression years and inaugurated reforms that states had been unable to subsidize.

Particularly novel were the special programs. The Federal Writers’ Project (more information available from Indiana State University’s library) prepared state and regional guide books, organized archives, indexed newspapers, and conducted useful sociological and historical investigations. The Federal Arts Project gave unemployed artists the opportunity to decorate hundreds of post offices, schools, and other public buildings with murals, canvases, and sculptures; musicians organized symphony orchestras and community singing.   The Federal Theatre Project experimented with untried modes, and scores of stock companies toured the country with repertories of old and new plays, thus bringing drama to communities where it had been known only through the radio.

By March, 1936, the WPA rolls had reached a total of more than 3,400,000 persons; after initial cuts in June 1939, it averaged 2,300,000 monthly; and by June 30, 1943, when it was officially terminated, the WPA had employed more than 8,500,000 different persons on 1,410,000 individual projects, and had spent about $11 billion. During its 8-year history, the WPA built 651,087 miles of highways, roads, and streets; and constructed, repaired, or improved 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, 8,192 parks, and 853 airport landing fields.

So not only it build infrastructure it created many state records, and contributed to the cultural education and entertainment in America.

Today we can’t get even a federal funding bill that will fund our desperately needed upgrades to improve our roads, bridges and public buildings.

When Harvard complains you would think we would be in arms, but then again Harvard gave us Grover Norquist who wants to drown the baby in the bathwater or whatever metaphor/analogy/euphemism/expression  to “shrink” Government.

Today’s New York Times had this article about the human cost of Infrastructure damage and how desperately we need it.

Forbes also did an article this year discussing the desperate need for upgrades and improvements to our aging public works. 

How public transportation contributes to further income inequity and in turn growing the economy (let us avoid the climate change argument at this point)

Popular Mechanics listed their top 10 list of desperately needed repairs.

And while we tout Homeland Security the reality is that we have done little to secure any major electrical grid from being hacked.

Add to this the dangerous gas lines and their lack of modernization  that could bring systemic destruction to a major city in the same way a natural disaster like Katrina or Sandy.

There’s aviation. A shortage of airports runways and gates along outmoded air traffic control systems have made U.S. air travel the most congested in the world. And you thought your commute was bad?

Clean water in Flint is a problem but perhaps understanding that is has much larger effects on the eco system.  Know any sports fishermen?  But this has been a problem in many towns across America.

Is this problem new? 

Engineers See Dangers in Aging Infrastructure

AllenBrisson-Smith for The New York Times The entire span of the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis.

By JOHN HOLUSHA and KENNETH CHANG

The New York Times 

Published: August 2, 2007 

A steam pipe explodes near Grand Central Terminal, a levee fails and floods New Orleans, a bridge collapses in Minneapolis.

These disasters are an indication that this country is not investing enough in keeping its vital infrastructure in good repair, engineering experts warn.

“Governments do not want to pay for maintenance because it is not sexy,” said John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer and an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

He said the bulk of the nation’s highway system was built in the 1950s and 1960s and is ageing. Referring to the collapse in Minneapolis, he said “This type of event could become more common.”

“We have a major infrastructure problem in this country,” said Maureen L. McAvey, an executive vice president with the Urban Land Institute, which recently published a report on global infrastructure issues. “The civil engineers have estimated that we have a $1.7 trillion shortfall in this country alone”

But other factors come into play, as in 1982, when a bridge inspector looked at the Mianus River Bridge in Greenwich, Conn., and did not see the metal fatigue in a pin that would break nine months later, collapsing three lanes of Interstate 95 and killing three people.

In 1987, a New York Thruway bridge near Amsterdam, N.Y., also had a clean bill of health, but inspectors had never gone underwater into the Schoharie Creek to look at the bridge’s footings, where flood waters had scoured the concrete base. When the footings slipped, the bridge fell. Ten died.

“The American Society of Civil Engineers issues annual rankings of the state of the nation’s infrastructure and most of the grades are C and D,” said Michael J. O’Rourke, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

But he said it was likely the renovations the Minneapolis bridge was undergoing, rather than general decrepitude was the cause of the collapse. “It is more common for a bridge to have problems during renovations than before or after,” he said. “Two or three things have to happen simultaneously for that to happen.”

Kumares Sinha, a civil engineering professor at Purdue University, also thinks the renovation may be the key to the collapse. “You have a lot of contractors working there, and somebody probably cut something critical,” he said.

But he said the heavily used bridge was difficult to inspect and the constant pounding of traffic could have caused fatigue in the steel supports.

Nevertheless, the Federal Highway Administration issued a report last year that rated 13.1 percent of highway bridges as “structurally deficient.” It said these bridges have “deteriorated conditions of significant bridge elements and reduced load carrying capacity.”

In addition, the agency reported that an additional 13.6 percent of bridges were “functionally obsolete,” meaning they do not beat current design standards.

Transportation officials know many of the nation’s 600,000 bridges are in need of repair or replacement. About one in eight has been deemed “structurally deficient,” a term that typically means a component of the bridge’s structure has been rated poor or worse, but does not necessarily warn of imminent collapse.

Most deficient bridges, which included the span of Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, remain open to traffic.

Finding money to maintain infrastructure has become increasingly difficult as public officials keep pledges not to raise taxes., said Robert Dunphy, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “We have an impending crisis with infrastructure, but it is easy to ignore until you have a catastrophe.”

With public money for infrastructure likely to remain short, some authorities have been seeking to attract private capital by leasing toll roads, for example, said Chris Lawton, a partner in Ernst & Young, the accounting and consulting firm that collaborated with the land institute in the infrastructure report.

Highways have been leased in Chicago and Indiana, but proposals in other areas, including New Jersey, have produced uproars. “There is a lot of public skepticism about private investment in infrastructure,” Mr. Lawton said.

States improved their inspection procedures after the Mianus and thruway bridge collapses, and federal statistics show a steady decline in the percentage of deficient bridges, from 18.7 percent in 1994 to 13.1 percent in 2004.

Still, a study by the Federal Highway Administration found that visual inspections, the     primary method used by bridge inspectors, only rarely detect cracks from metal fatigue.

In the study, completed in 2001, 49 bridge inspectors from across the country examined test bridges in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Only 4 percent correctly identified a fatigue crack.

Worse, many inspectors identified nonexistent problems, suggesting that bridges sometimes undergo unnecessary repairs while some serious conditions are not detected.
Inspectors now sometimes employ tools like ultrasound, but those add time and cost to their work.

 The U.S., which used to have the finest infrastructure in the world, is now ranked 16th according to the World Economic Forum, behind Iceland, Spain, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates.

And to many of the most powerful economic and political lobbies in the country9 the real power brokers) they believe the inaction of Congress to adequately fund infrastructure products threaten the country’s economic future. Big corporations like Caterpillar and GE say it’s hurting their ability to compete abroad. And both have had serious reductions in stocks of late, particularly Caterpillar as China too slows down in their building mania.

To quote Ray LaHood, former Transportation Secretary, with regards to Congress: They don’t want to raise the taxes. They don’t really have a vision of America the way that other Congresses have had a vision of America.

I rarely hear any candidate addressing the issues of infrastructure nor education nor criminal justice in any meaningful way.  Oddly as many are being released from prisons this would be one way to find them jobs, allow them to build two things – a work resume and our roads.  The issues of not having jobs for a shrinking population of men who are able bodied this too would resolve some of those issues, even perhaps lending itself to resolving some of the chronic homelessness in America. A sort of widespread Habitat for Humanity where they build where they live.. and yes that is a joke as they do live adjacent to freeway underpasses and highways so hey why not repair them while there!

But in all seriousness this is a matter of national security and global business ready. When ports, airports, or cities are shut down we are shut down.   What one saw in New Orleans during Katrina was a failure to have a well established exit plan. The same in many other cities when disaster strikes.  Hacking is one issue as we also can see that cyber security should be added to the list.  And I see in our schools after yesterday, true evacuation plans and building designs that while even in rebuilt and modern schools an lack of coordination and communication to enable adequate security.

So until that bridge falls on you you refuse the rights of others to live and work and travel safely our roads and cities?  Wow that is self absorption to new heights. Well at least Donald Trump does want to build a wall. That is something.

Step on a Crack

Earlier this week I read the below article about the infrastructure of Los Angeles. But this could be any major city in America.  We have had a series of major problems and devastation that has lead to dangerous conditions and unsafe ones as we go to work, go to school, ride our public transport or just live in our homes as nature seems to also take its course or maybe its revenge. Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned and mother nature might be a tad pissed about how we treat her.

Towns and municipalities are stretched to the limit, since much federal funding is matching or in fact extorted or bribed by issuing tickets for Drunk Driving or other strange caveats usually associated with booze or drugs  that are used by the National Highway and Safety Commission to determine monies given to roads. Ironic that those are the primary funding issues over general safety and use but there are many other issues that are linked to grants each with their own bizarre qualifications and expectations and in turn they get delayed,as in the case of the high speed train in California,  it becomes an issue for voters and it all starts over again.  Or others that are like the bridge to nowhere only exist with endless monies and no oversight, such as the Ohio River Project. 

There is a need and a sense of urgency with each crisis comes a new myriad of problems. This discussion in the New York Times from March addresses this. And this week they expose that the King Bloomberg plan of restoring homes post Sandy was a disaster in and of itself and the new Mayor with his agenda has let the dunes slip away as well.  While also touting building affordable housing in the countries least affordable city.  Pick or choose you can’t have it all.

Then we have the issue of fuel taxes (note the date) which have not been raised in decades which also plays a significant role in funding our aging roads and highways.  And undoubtedly the American Petroleum Society would have a role in that issue.  God help us getting out of cars and needing less of their product.

Coming to a town near you – a bridge collapse, a highway buckling, a cracked and damaged sidewalk, a public school rotting.  Better get the cops writing more tickets it is a great way to balance the budget on the backs of the poors.

Infrastructure Cracks as Los Angeles Defers Repairs

 by ADAM NAGOURNEY
SEPT. 1, 2014

LOS ANGELES — The scene was apocalyptic: a torrent of water from a ruptured pipe valve bursting through Sunset Boulevard, hurling chunks of asphalt 40 feet into the air as it closed down the celebrated thoroughfare and inundated the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. By the time emergency crews patched the pipe, 20 million gallons of water had cascaded across the college grounds.

the midst of a historic drought, no less, was hardly an isolated episode for Los Angeles. Instead, it was the latest sign of what officials here described as a continuing breakdown of the public works skeleton of the second-largest city in the nation: its roads, sidewalks and water system.

With each day, it seems, another accident illustrates the cost of deferred maintenance on public works, while offering a frustrating reminder to this cash-strained municipality of the daunting task it faces in dealing with the estimated $8.1 billion it would take to do the necessary repairs. The city’s total annual

“It’s part of a pattern of failing to provide for the future,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at U.C.L.A. “Our roads used to be better than the East Coast; now they are worse. I grew up here. Things are dramatically different now than they used to be.”
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There are constant reminders of the day-to-day burdens that the dilapidating infrastructure poses here.

The city is battling a class-action lawsuit from advocates for disabled people because of broken sidewalks that are almost impossible to navigate in a wheelchair, and challenging for all pedestrians trying simply to make it home. The average car owner here spends $832 a year for repairs related to the bad roads, the highest in the nation, according to a study by TRIP, a nonprofit transportation research group based in Washington. Families here routinely spring for expensive strollers to handle treacherous sidewalks.

City officials estimate that it would cost at least $3.6 billion to fix the worst roads, $1.5 billion to repair the sidewalks and $3 billion to replace aging water pipes.

“From a ratepayer’s point of view, it can appear overwhelming,” said H. David Nahai, an environmental lawyer and the former head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “We need increases for the streets and the sidewalks. We need increases for the water structure. Pretty much right now we are in a time of transition. That can be frightening.”

The problem is exacerbated by cutbacks in federal spending on public works. “The sense is that more and more, we are going to be doing things alone,” said the mayor, Eric Garcetti.

Close to 40 percent of the region’s 6,500 miles of roads and highways are graded D or F, meaning they are in such bad shape that for now city officials are concentrating maintenance efforts on roads that are in better shape, and thus less costly to fix. More than 4,000 of the 10,750 miles of sidewalks are in severe disrepair, according to Los Angeles city officials.

More than 10 percent of the 7,200 miles of water pipes were built 90 years ago. The average age of a city pipe is 58, compared with an optimal life span of 100 years. While that may not sound so bad, at the current level of funding it would take the Department of Water and Power 315 years to replace them.

Marcie L. Edwards, the general manager of the department, said that the pipes were not in as dire shape as those in some other cities, and that the department had spent more on replacing pipes. Even with more money, she said, there are limits on how fast her department can move.

“Our system is by no means falling apart,” Ms. Edwards said. “We live in a very densely populated environment. These are big jobs that are incredibly impactful on neighborhoods and congested streets.”

Still, the water main break was unsettling because, unlike the war-zone-like patches of streets and sidewalks that have been cast asunder by tree roots in some neighborhoods here, this was a hidden problem until it was revealed in a geyser to motorists waiting at a traffic light. As such, it has become a symbol of the larger problem.

“People don’t think about the fact that there are pipes under the ground that are 100 years old until one blows,” said Mike Eveloff, a leader of Fix the City, a civic group pushing for repairs. “You don’t hear a politician say, ‘I’m going to make your pipes work.
< And here, as in other cities, the demand for public works comes as the costs of municipal pension plans are shooting up — a confluence that has alarmed business leaders. “Once those payments are made, there’s not much money left, if any, to invest in infrastructure,” said Gary L. Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce

The challenge also coincides with a push by city leaders to move Los Angeles away from its historic reliance on cars, with heavy investment in its expanding mass-transit system and bicycle lanes. In an interview, Mayor Garcetti said that any public works campaign would have to factor in that change.

“We have to build a city that people can be happy to walk in and drive in, but we also have to account for the transit revolution that’s coming,” he said. “If we spend billions and billions on car-only infrastructure — ignoring pedestrian, bicycle and transit users — we may look back 10 years from now and say, ‘Whoops, maybe we should have tied all those things together.

California is also known for being averse to taxes. Earlier this year, city officials debated asking voters to approve a plan to add half a cent to the 9-cent city sales tax. That would raise enough for the $3.6 billion in road reconstruction but just $640 million of the $1.5 billion needed for sidewalk repairs.

City Council leaders and Mr. Garcetti decided against putting anything before voters, probably until November 2016, to give the city more time to come up with a plan that has a chance of winning.

“I think people quite frankly are paying enough taxes right now,” said Mitchell Englander, a Republican councilman and leader of the repair effort. “We’ve got to do things differently. They don’t trust politicians.”

“A lot of people are going to say they feel overtaxed,” Mr. James said. “I’m not saying we’re not. But it means going to the voters, as I am prepared to do on behalf of Mayor Garcetti, to make the economic argument that $26 a year, which is what you would spend on a half-cent sales tax increase, is a lot better than $830 a year to fix your car.”

Funds to replace water pipes would come, presumably, if the Department of Water and Power gained approval from the City Council to increase water rates. Because of the drought, the typical city resident’s monthly bill for water has risen to $60, from $34.85 in the fall of 2011, reflecting the higher cost the department had to pay to purchase water.<

“The longer we wait, the more expensive it’s all going to be.” said Mr. Nahai, the former head of the Department of Water and Power.

We All Do Drugs

Shocking I know! (I may have to patent this as my trademark) But you are what you eat.

But it is in your food and water and unless you live on Bainbridge Island, Washington where they have the fewest children vaccinated in the United States you are just like the animals you eat, drugged.

Thankfully but of course with more loopholes than Swiss cheese, sadly American produced swiss cheese which makes it less delicious and in turn healthy although maybe not as even they found a way to circumvent the rules. But for now the FDA is trying to restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock. Chickens well you can’t have it all.

The article clearly discusses the pros and of course cons but as one likes to remind oneself that if the industry who actually is behind the laws, and not behind as support, but behind as in actually write them are currently supporting them we might have a chance of not getting a side of antibiotics with our bacon.

F.D.A. Restricts Antibiotics Use for Livestock

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: December 11, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance.

This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. The waning effectiveness of antibiotics — wonder drugs of the 20th century — has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections.

“This is the first significant step in dealing with this important public health concern in 20 years,” said David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner who has been critical of the agency’s track record on antibiotics. “No one should underestimate how big a lift this has been in changing widespread and long entrenched industry practices.”

The change, which is to take effect over the next three years, will effectively make it illegal for farmers and ranchers to use antibiotics to make animals grow bigger. The producers had found that feeding low doses of antibiotics to animals throughout their lives led them to grow plumper and larger. Scientists still debate why. Food producers will also have to get a prescription from a veterinarian to use the drugs to prevent disease in their animals.

Federal officials said the new policy would improve health in the United States by tightening the use of classes of antibiotics that save human lives, including penicillin, azithromycin and tetracycline. Food producers said they would abide by the new rules, but some public health advocates voiced concerns that loopholes could render the new policy toothless.

Health officials have warned since the 1970s that overuse of antibiotics in animals was leading to the development of infections resistant to treatment in humans. For years, modest efforts by federal officials to reduce the use of antibiotics in animals were thwarted by the powerful food industry and its substantial lobbying power in Congress. Pressure for federal action has mounted as the effectiveness of drugs important for human health has declined, and deaths from bugs resistant to antibiotics have soared.

Under the new policy, the agency is asking drug makers to change the labels that detail how a drug can be used so they would bar farmers from using the medicines to promote growth.

The changes, originally proposed in 2012, are voluntary for drug companies. But F.D.A. officials said they believed that the companies would comply, based on discussions during the public comment period. The two drug makers that represent a majority of such antibiotic products — Zoetis and Elanco — have already stated their intent to participate, F.D.A. officials said. Companies will have three months to tell the agency whether they will change the labels, and three years to carry out the new rules.

Additionally, the agency is requiring that licensed veterinarians supervise the use of antibiotics, effectively requiring farmers and ranchers to obtain prescriptions to use the drugs for their animals.

“It’s a big shift from the current situation, in which animal producers can go to a local feed store and buy these medicines over the counter and there is no oversight at all,” said Michael Taylor, the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine.

Some consumer health advocates were skeptical that the new rules would reduce the amount of antibiotics consumed by animals. They say that a loophole will allow animal producers to keep using the same low doses of antibiotics by contending they are needed to keep animals from getting sick, and evading the new ban on use for growth promotion.

More meaningful, said Dr. Keeve Nachman, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, would be to ban the use of antibiotics for the prevention of disease, a step the F.D.A. so far has not taken. That would limit antibiotic uses to treatment of a specific sickness diagnosed by a veterinarian, a much narrower category, he said.

Another skeptic, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a Democrat from New York, said that when the European Union tried to stop companies from using antibiotics to make farm animals bigger, companies continued to use antibiotics for disease prevention. She said antibiotic use only declined in countries like the Netherlands that instituted limits on total use and fines for noncompliance.

But another longtime critic of the F.D.A. on antibiotics, Dr. Stuart B. Levy, a professor of microbiology at Tufts University and the president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, praised the new rules. He was among the first to identify the problem in the 1970s. “I’m kind of happy,” he said. “For all of us who’ve been struggling with this issue, this is the biggest step that’s been taken in the last 30 years.”

Mr. Taylor, the agency official, said the F.D.A. had detailed what veterinarians needed to consider when they prescribed such drugs. For example, use has to be for animals at risk for developing a specific disease, with no reasonable alternatives to prevent it.

“It’s far from being a just-trust-them system,” he said. “Given the history of the issue, it’s not surprising that there are people who are skeptical.”

He added that some food producers had already curbed antibiotic use.

A spokeswoman for Zoetis, a major drug producer that said it would abide by the new rules, said the new policy was not expected to have a big effect on the revenues of the company because many of its drug products were also approved for therapeutic uses. (Dr. Nachman said that was an indication that overall use might not decline under the new rules.)

The Animal Health Institute, an association of pharmaceutical companies that make drugs for animals, said that it supported the policy and “will continue to work with the F.D.A. on its implementation.”

The National Pork Producers Council was less enthusiastic, saying, “We expect that hog farmers, and the federally inspected feed mills they purchase feed from, will follow the law.”

“It is part of our ethical responsibility to utilize antibiotics responsibly and part of our commitment to public health and animal health,” the council said in a statement.

The National Chicken Council said in a statement that its producers already worked closely with veterinarians, and that much of the antibiotics used in raising chickens were not used in human medicine.

Lead Rules

When the EPA ruled on Lead Paint and in turn turned the industry of paint removal into a hazardous waste one, it was only a matter of time before the lawsuits began.

I just finished an amazing and yes complex book called Lead Wars, The Politics of Science and the Fate of Americans Children.  I do think anyone in the industry of Construction and Environment read it immediately.

The EPA has a brochure out that includes the affects of Lead on the body including:

Lead Gets into the Body in Many Ways

Adults and children can get lead into their bodies if they:

• Breathe in lead dust (especially during activities such as renovations, repairs, or painting that disturb painted surfaces).
• Swallow lead dust that has settled on food, food preparation surfaces, and other places.
• Eat paint chips or soil that contains lead.
• Lead is especially dangerous to children under the age of 6.
• At this age, children’s brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to the damaging effects of lead.
• Children’s growing bodies absorb more lead.
• Babies and young children often put their hands
• and other objects in their mouths. These objects can have lead dust on them.
• Women of childbearing age should know that lead is dangerous to a developing fetus
•  Women with a high lead level in their system before or during pregnancy risk exposing the fetus to lead through the placenta during fetal development.

Health Effects of Lead

Lead affects the body in many ways. It is important to know that even exposure to low levels of lead can severely harm children.

In children, exposure to lead can cause:

• Nervous system and kidney damage
• Learning disabilities, attention deficit
• disorder, and decreased intelligence
• Speech, language, and behavior problems
• Poor muscle coordination
• Decreased muscle and bone growth
• Hearing damage

While low-lead exposure is most common, exposure to high amounts of lead can have devastating effects on children, including seizures, unconsciousness, and, in some cases, death.

Although children are especially susceptible to lead exposure, lead can be dangerous for adults, too.
In adults, exposure to lead can cause:

• Harm to a developing fetus
•  Increased chance of high blood pressure during pregnancy • Fertility problems (in men and women)
• High blood pressure
• Digestive problems
• Nerve disorders
• Memory and concentration problems
• Muscle and joint pain

The issues surrounding lead should not be placed in the same category as say “global warming” as there is no question about the safety and ultimate danger of exposure to lead. I am aware that the science cretins have issue with all things science to the point of where safety and health of their children is acceptable as many many schools in this country still possess lead paint so there you go Ed reform!

There is currently a Lead Paint trial in California right now towards the manufacturer’s of Lead Paint.  I have been waiting to write about this issue until after the verdict but it seems to be taking longer than I expected. 

And the debate among those in the field is as heated as a lead based fire.  I find it interesting that technicians have no interest in their own health, their workers or well the customers they serve. It all resonates down to costs. Sad really that we have to put our health and safety on the line for the almighty dollar.  Now I see why OSHA has no hope in ever really establishing regulations and enforcement.  

This issue I think it predominately is the focus is on the fact that it affects the Poors, the group who live in lower income and often public housing that has not the resources available to remediate the problem. And the fact that the public schools still have this paint should be an issue even if you have no children attending them as you may have friends and family who work within them. But hey that is another great way to break up those Teacher’s unions!

The articles about the trial are here.  I think reading them all is worth the energy. The book is highly technical but the author’s were on Bill Moyers and Company and they make a case that not a trial in any way. 

Got Lead? Well you may without even realizing it.  This is politics of toxic disinformation.