The New and Improved Exide Tragedy – non-market tested wireless infrastructure
L. A. Ortega
March 15, 2022
Decades ago a company named Exide began polluting its surrounding community, mostly low income Latino families, with lead poisoning. Damages to generations of families, animals, and environment went on and on. I mean, so what – right – just a bunch of brown poor kids, nothing to worry about. What are they going to do? They should just be happy they live here – is the impression local elected municipal, state and federal representatives exuded due to their decades-long lack of meaningful action to address the issue. Last year the Governor of California proposed a half billion dollars to make it right. But how do you make right tens of thousands of families, for generations, who have been constantly and consistently harmed by this poison? Lead. The answer, you don’t. No matter how much money you throw at it.
Now L.A. County is at it again with a proposal to beam wireless – harmful – nonregulated RF waves into the environment for more than 365,000 households, plants, animals, bees and flowers to consume – to their detriment. In August of 2021 the 9th District Court of Appeals concluded that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) had not followed the law in setting safety standards for wireless technologies. With no market safety tests, but for one done in 1996 for one adult male, there is absolutely no evidence RF waves to the degree prescribed in L.A. County’s proposal will be safe for children. None. Add to that a slew of scientific studies – in the thousands – showing there is definite biological harm to all living things – particularly small children – from RF waves transmitted by wireless technologies.
I mean our L.A. County Supervisors either know, or should know. Either way they have an ethical responsibility to cause no harm to the public. At the moment they do not appear to be taking that responsibility into consideration – shades of Exide – ALL OVER AGAIN.
This of course is not to say our families don’t deserve high-speed broadband access. Of course they do. They needed it a decade or so ago when the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) were making all kinds of promises to fiber-up all of our neighborhoods, replacing copper with fiber. Instead the extreme deference we gave to phone companies, e.g. trust, was violated and consumers were once again burned. The pandemic with all the bad it brought, allowed for the curtain to be drawn back on the failures of ISP’s in delivering on their promises of connecting everyone everywhere. Now we are left with inferior telecommunication infrastructure solutions, that are dangerous, and in most cases 10,000 times slower than a fiber optic connection.
Of course none of this matters, or so it would appear, to our elected representatives – whose captured regulatory agencies are telling them all is good…moneyed inaction, serving as the backdrop to what 1,000’s of scientist are saying is sure to cause harm to all living things. There is a better way and that way is fiber. There are no short-cuts in doing the right thing the right way. Wireless has proven itself to be a mere band-aid (ever talk to any of the families receiving the wifi devices schools handed-out during the pandemic?) and should not be mistaken as a permanent solution for urban America, nuestras familias.
More to come.
L.A. Ortega
March 15, 2020