The death toll for government abandonment of people in West Virginia
isn't nearly as high as that in Katrina, partly because pollutants and
carcinogens kill and cripple slowly, but the principle is the same. Like
New Orleans residents left to get out of town the best way they could,
West Virginians were left to their own devices to do what their
government was supposed to do for them – to figure out where, when,
whether and how badly corporations were poisoning them. Nobody in
government on any level lifted a finger to protect those people till
hundreds of households simultaneously complained to local officials that
their tap water stank of hydrocarbons. When government officials
finally swung into action, they still held back full accounts of which
chemicals they detected, in an apparent effort to safeguard the rights
of “customers” as EPA likes to call the corporations it supposedly
regulates.
The problem is that Democrats run West Virginia from top to bottom.
Like Katrina, the evil forces on display in West Virginia implicate the
core system of capitalism itself, not just the table manners of one out
of the two capitalist parties. That makes the mass poisoning of West
Virginia barely newsworthy, whether the carrier is Fox News, or CNN or
MSNBC. All the news and cable networks, just like both the capitalist
parties have to drink from that trough.
-- Bruce A. Dixon, "MSNBC_ Cherry Picking News & Issue to Make Toxic Democrats Look Good" (Black Agenda Report).