the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Mar 28, 2016
In March, school fountains were turned off in Newark, New Jersey. The water was found to be contaminated with lead, which can do permanent harm to children. Lead poisoning has been found to damage the developing brain.
Two years ago the Newark public school system already knew it had a lead problem and proposed that custodians flush the water fountains every day before school opened. It proposed that cafeteria workers run cold water for two minutes every day before preparing food.
It will surprise no one that the “precautions” didn’t get carried out. In fact, exactly the same problem, with exactly the same solution, failed in the Los Angeles public schools in 2008.
The news about Flint has shown that for 25 years, school systems around the country have known that too much lead has leached into their water systems.
Flint, Michigan may be a much more widespread, costly and dangerous situation than in other school systems, but the problem of lead harming children is a longstanding one.
Politicians at the local level, the state level and the federal level ignore faulty infrastructure of all kinds.
This is one consequence when the politicians give out millions, billions and trillions to the banks, the corporations, the well-connected developers, and so forth. These are the priorities of a system destroying itself from the inside out.