Very Unsettling ... Indeed Disturbing!

I ran across this article tonight while browsing my Yahoo news modules ... somehow the headline of Sludge Tested as Lead Poisoning Fix just caught my eye so I had to read it out of curiosity ... I do encourage you to read the entire article, but the skinny on it is that basically a government program in Maryland has been duping lower income (mostly African American) families into being guinea pigs in an experiment to use industrial and sewage sludge as a sort of 'neutralizer' of lead. Just take a look at the first couple of paragraphs here:

Scientists using federal grants spread fertilizer made from human and industrial wastes on yards in poor, black neighborhoods to test whether it might protect children from lead poisoning in the soil. Families were assured the sludge was safe and were never told about any harmful ingredients.

Nine low-income families in Baltimore row houses agreed to let researchers till the sewage sludge into their yards and plant new grass. In exchange, they were given food coupons as well as the free lawns as part of a study published in 2005 and funded by the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Yes, it gets worse ... just read on. And it's not unique to Baltimore, as these almost Mengelian experiments were also conducted in other low-income predominantly black areas such as E. St. Louis, IL. All, apparently, carried out without the clear informed consent of the families who agreed to put themselves and their children at potential risk, just for a "new lawn" and some food coupons. Despicable.

And lest you think I jumped too quickly to make the Mengele comparison, it appears that the Maryland Court of Appeals already went there well before I even read this article:

The Maryland Court of Appeals likened the study to Nazi medical research on concentration camp prisoners, the U.S. government's 40-year Tuskegee study that denied treatment for syphilis to black men in order to study the illness and Japan's use of "plague bombs" in World War II to infect and study entire villages.

That's the Alphonso Jackson HUD administration in action for you. Fortunately that particular scumball has finally been forced out and his last day at the government teat is this Friday. But as with most of the scandals that have emerged over the past seven and a half years (!) it's going to be a long time cleaning up after these thugs.

I think a lot of those people who were so quick to condemn the Rev Jeremiah Wright's comments from the pulpit as the ravings of an angry black man need to do some serious back-pedaling now. With revelations like this, it's increasingly hard to dismiss our government's more nefarious projects, carried out ostensibly in our names. Shameful, shameful, shameful ...