Crimes Against Humanity Go Unpunished in U.S.
Even George Orwell might have been shocked by the extent of doublespeak in today’s America. ‘Freedom’ Industries?–seriously?? A company that habitually poisons entire populations of Americans, has now poisoned them through their water supply overnight in wholesale lots by the tens/hundreds of thousands is known as FREEDOM Industries?
Adding insult and callous disregard to egregious injury, the company responsible for these crimes against humanity now seeks the protection of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court (chapter 11 filing) to evade responsibility and accountability for its actions. Deeming the anticipated lawsuits an unprofitable business model, FREEDOM Industries wants to walk away from the toxic mess it created and lives it destroyed as though nothing important had happened. Its owners want to go back to business as usual without nicking their wallets or subjecting the company to the kind of scrutiny and accountability ordinary criminals would face. Arguably, over time, this company has killed more Americans than Bin Laden ever dreamed of. Yet, these domestic ‘terrorists’ remain unpunished and unaccountable.
Read “Fateful Harvest”, a book about how industries save money by dumping toxic wastes with heavy metals (cadmium, chromium, lead, arsenic, mercury, dioxin, you name it) into our fertilizers for untutored farmers to spread on their crop lands instead of certified landfills. Coal, generates vast quantities of these poisons and spreads it over vast distances, either through fertilizers or air pollution. Until practically yesterday, the EPA treated CO2 emmissions as though they were benign instead of planet killers. And government agencies conceived to protect us actually act as enablers and facilitators for the very industries they’re supposed to be watching/monitoring and regulating. When government agencies (e.g. NSA) treat its own citizens as the ‘enemy’, they have, themselves, become the enemy of the people. Instead of protecting and preserving our welfare, they sell it to the highest bidder through what they euphemize as the ‘permit process’–as though it were a procedure to protect us rather than a government sponsored barter fair. e.g. ORCAA (Olympic Regional Clean Air Agency) has NEVER met an air pollution project/proposal it didn’t like and has NEVER denied such an air pollution permit application in its entire existence!
Oh!…and sub PM2 particulates?–they don’t even have the available technology to remove these most pernicious of all hazards as a vector for literally injecting this panoply of poison into our and our children’s lungs, then bloodstream.
FREEDOM Industries is one of those the Koch Brothers have a strong financial interest in. It held small oceans of toxic chemicals adjacent to the water supply of approximately 300,000 local residents. Despite the obvious hazard this scenario represented, nobody appears to have been minding the store or overseeing the industry they were charged with regulating–just the opposite. Once again, the poorest and most vulnerable were the first to be victimized by an unbridled unchecked industrial monster.
A detailed synopsis of Freedom Industry’s bankruptcy filed Friday, Jan. 17, after poisoning 100,000 houses and 300,000 people in West Virginia with its mystery chemical, was presented by MSNBC late Friday.
“The company at the center of the West Virginia water crisis appears to be dodging lawsuits and creditors,” says MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
Only eight days after Freedom Industries, a distributor for the Koch brothers, was found to have caused the water crisis, it has filed Chapter 11 Bankrupcy.
Freedom has operated with almost no government oversight and subject to almost no state and local monitoring.
There is, however, much more to this story in the state that has been a model of corporatism for the rest of the nation, as reporter Bob Kincaid told Hayes Friday in the report below.
One thing that remains unmentioned in relation to the West Virginia chemical leak, absent from any advisory or warning, is what toxicologists, such as Dr. Riki Ott, repeatedly told Gulf Coast residents after the 2010 BO Gulf oil catastrophe. That is:
“If you can smell the poison, you are being poisoned.”
The other thing that too many Gulf Coast survivors learned the hard way is, that no amount of poison is “safe.”
Finally, an advisory was issued Friday about children and the water crisis.
Dr. Raheel Khan, president of the West Virginia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has stated that younger children may also be more at risk.
A report published Friday said children should only drink bottled water, but many question if that is enough to protect the young from being poisoned.
West Virginians first learned about the water crisis on January 9, when authorities warned 300,000 people living in nine West Virginia counties to not use tap water or do anything with it except flush their toilets with it.
Over 7,000 gallons of a chemical, known as “Crude MCHM,” had leaked from a Freedom Industry storage tank into the Elk River — the key water supply source for the area.
A strong licorice odor was a signal that a chemical was present. Officials warned they could not say the water was safe.
Last weekend, state health officials said they had guidance from the Centers For Disease Control.
Monday, officials began lifting the water ban in some areas. As that happened, the number of residents having to go to emergency rooms surged.
Water continues injuring and/or making people sick, some with even short exposure, including people in areas where the water ban was lifted and despite their flushing home water systems as officials directed.
Here’s Chris Hayes reporting (below) how the company responsible for this growing disaster has been able thus far to escape accountability and continues attempting to do so.
Sunday, the Charleston Gazette reported one of Freedom Industries’ well-connected executives, Carl Lemley Kennedy II, has two prior felonies. In 2005, he was charged with tax evasion and failure to pay the government Freedom employees’ tax withholdings while he was the company’s accountant from 2000 to 2003. The other felony came in 1987, for selling cocaine.
But the NSNBC story (in the video below) goes much deeper than that.
