One of Congress’s Most Damaging (and Racist) Budget Cuts That Flew Under the Radar
The fund for lead-poisoning prevention was almost entirely eliminated. And here’s why this is such a big deal.
February 7, 2012 | AlterNet / By Peter Montague and Maria B. Pellerano …
For Christmas this year, Congress gave the nation’s urban children a gift that will keep on giving — a 94 percent cut in funds for lead-poisoning prevention. Once a child is poisoned by toxic lead, permanent brain damage reduces I.Q., lowers grades in school, and diminishes self-control. This, in turn, can lead to frustration, a sense of failure, impulsiveness, aggression, and, for some, potentially even violence, crime, and prison.
Lead is a soft, grey metal with many practical uses, from bathroom pipes to bullets. Unfortunately, it is highly toxic to humans. Despite eons of knowledge about the toxicity of lead, during most of the 20th century Congress allowed the paint and gasoline industries to lace their products with millions of tons of the stuff, which of course ended up in the environment where much of it still remains available to poison unsuspecting children. Urban neighborhoods are full of lead today, in soil and in paint flaking off old buildings. Low-income families are hardest hit because they tend to live in old buildings poorly maintained.
With a peculiar mix of frugality and cruelty, Congress’s $1 trillion spending bill for 2012 shrank a small ($30 million per year) federal lead-poisoning-prevention program to a minuscule $2 million annual effort, a 94 percent cut. And it’s no surprise to anyone that the children harmed by this grinch move are mostly city kids, which means they’re mostly African-American and Hispanic. The nation’s medical establishment has been reporting excessive lead in urban children (75 percent of them of color) since 1952 – so we have 59 years of studies, all showing the same thing. Therefore, in this rare instance, Congress relied on the best available science and knew exactly what it was doing. It was saddling hundreds of thousands of urban children with persistent cognitive damage and elevated blood pressure for life.
Could it be that many politicians of the past 35 years, both Republican and Democrat, have found it advantageous to keep inner-city kids behind the 8-ball by diminishing their I.Q.s early in life, making them less successful in school, plus making them more impulsive, aggressive, and potentially violent, thus more likely to end up in prison? (Needleman, 2002; Wilkinson, 2003; Montague, 1997; Masters, 1997; Nevin, 2006) From that perspective, exposing urban children to toxic lead could be seen as part of a well-established pattern — a school-to-prison pipeline, aided by a war on drugs that targets people of color and a private prison industry that kicks back money into election campaigns to promote public policies that keep the jails overflowing. Mass incarceration of blacks in particular has created a legal opportunity to once again discriminate against them in jobs, housing, voting, jury duty, public assistance, educational opportunity, small business loans, and more — in sum, the “New Jim Crow.” We this is not the case, but the historical facts speak for themselves.
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