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This evening's music features Texas blues singer Melvin "Lil' Son" Jackson. Enjoy!

“When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst, Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings."

-- George Orwell

News and Opinion

Worth reading in full:

Why Berkeley’s Battle Against White Supremacy Is Not About Free Speech

It is absolutely crucial to understand what is going on in Berkeley—not only because of how the coverage of protests has been used to shift public opinion on antifascist actions, but also because the sequence of events from Berkeley to Charlottesville dramatically illustrates why this battle is emphatically not about free speech. This is about the ability to shape consensus in a time of rising mass anxiety and political extremism. The “power of framing,” as linguist George Lakoff puts it, is everything. ...

The clashes between the alt-right and antifascist protesters at Berkeley cannot be taken out of the context of the climate of terror that has been brewing since white-nationalist and Nazi flyers began to appear at over 100 college campuses across the country after the election of Donald Trump.

A letter circulated to Berkeley faculty by student activists in the wake of the dramatic shutdown of Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking event on February 1 reveals the extent of the intimidation campaign waged against the campus community and the failure of administrators to address safety concerns. Berkeley students had seen the rise of white-nationalist recruitment on campus and witnessed the tactics employed by Yiannopoulos and his followers surrounding the shutdown of an event at UC Davis—which included violent provocation, stalking, manipulative lies in the press, and a perverse reenactment of the incident when Occupy student protesters were pepper-sprayed by police in 2011. With this in mind, students began writing letters to campus administration, faculty, and media voicing their opposition to the Berkeley event. In retaliation, far-right trolls sent intimidating messages and death threats. Students were doxxed (their personal information hacked and revealed on message boards) and stalked by alt-right activists who followed them on and off campus. Incidents were reported to top campus and UC administrators to no avail.

UC Berkeley graduate student and union steward Beezer de Martelly recounted:

When we began organizing publicly against Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled talk, we started receiving disturbing messages on our public Facebook event page warning us that if he were prevented from speaking, we should expect people to come with guns to shoot demonstrators. After publishing our Official Anti-Milo Digital Toolkit, several of the contributing women and non-binary femmes (myself included) were doxxed on numerous men’s rights and misogynist message boards where members distributed our workplace addresses and emails, shared fantasies of enacting violence towards us, and some of us began receiving threatening emails sometimes with gruesome rape and death threats.

...

The free-speech narrative perpetuated in national media by the alt-right—and by prominent pundits on the center and left—provided cover for these threats. While student efforts to tell their stories were largely ignored by the media (perhaps for fear of appearing to support leftist “censorship”) and Koch-funded Republican lawmakers implemented plans to crack down on student protest and academic freedom, Yiannopoulos and avowed white nationalists were celebrated as heroes of free speech. It cannot be the sole responsibility of communities facing white-supremacist violence to be suitably respectable victims for public consumption. Commentators, politicians, and campus administrators must reject the alt-right’s framing of this as a battle over free speech. Regardless of the far right’s strategies to divide us, we must prioritize the safety of students and amplify the voices of the vulnerable—not promote narratives that serve racist ideologies.

Senate Intel slips sentence into bill that could lead to spying on US citizens

A Senate panel may be stealthily trying to give federal law enforcement a new tool to go after the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks and its U.S. collaborators. A one-sentence “Sense of Congress” clause was tacked onto the end of a massive 11,700-word bill that was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and is likely to come before the full Senate later this month. The clause says that WikiLeaks “resembles a non-state hostile intelligence service” and that the U.S. government “should treat it as such.”

And this language would help investigators secure the authorization needed to surveil those U.S. citizens thought to be associated with WikiLeaks, said Robert L. Deitz, a lawyer who has held senior legal posts at the CIA, the National Security Agency and at the Pentagon’s intelligence offices. Requests to spy on citizens go to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and, at least theoretically, they are difficult to obtain.

“You need to show that someone is an agent of a foreign power,” said Deitz, who teaches at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

US hungry for regime change, nuclear weapons are excuse to attack – Pilger

China and Russia Warn the U.S. Not to Seek North Korean Regime Change

In supporting a watered-down version of North Korea sanctions, China and Russia had a stern warning for the U.S.: Don’t try to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime.

The measures passed on Monday at the United Nations Security Council included reducing imports of refined petroleum products, banning textile exports and strengthening inspections of cargo ships suspected of having illegal materials. U.S. envoy Nikki Haley called them the “strongest measures ever imposed on North Korea” even though they ended up dropping demands for an oil embargo and freeze on Kim’s assets.

More worrisome for China and Russia was Haley’s remark that the U.S. would act alone if Kim’s regime didn’t stop testing missiles and bombs. The UN representatives of both countries on Monday reiterated what they called “the four nos": No regime change, regime collapse, accelerated reunification or military deployment north of the 38th parallel dividing the Korean Peninsula.

“The Chinese side will never allow conflict or war on the peninsula,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement on Tuesday. The comments in the wake of the sanctions signaled that both China and Russia are only willing to go so far in pressuring Kim to abandon his attempts to secure the ability to strike the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. Both nations have called for dialogue, something President Donald Trump has resisted.

Radioactive gas found after North Korea's latest nuclear test

In Seoul, the government said traces of radioactive xenon gas were confirmed to be from a North Korean nuclear test conducted on September 3. Meanwhile, a couple of hundred kilometers north in Pyongyang, the North Korean regime was describing its neighbor as a “puppet” of the U.S. government in an editorial in the state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper.

Turning its attention to Washington, the North’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the latest round of sanctions — passed unanimously by the 15-member UN Security Council Monday — were “completely suffocating its state and people through full-scale economic blockade.” Speaking Tuesday, the North’s ambassador to the UN, Han Tae Song, warned that “forthcoming measures will make the U.S. suffer the greatest pain it ever experienced in its history.”

Despite the rhetoric, U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t seem to think the sanctions were anything to get worked up about. “We think it’s just another very small step, not a big deal,” Trump said, “those sanctions are nothing compared to what ultimately will have to happen.”

Air Force's Monthly Bombing Campaign in Afghanistan Hits 5-Year High

The U.S. Air Force in August released more than 500 weapons in Afghanistan against terrorist organizations such as the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Islamic State, marking the most in a single month since 2012, according to newly released figures.

Aircraft such as F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet and MQ-9 Reaper drone have dropped more than 2,000 bombs this year, already almost doubling the number of weapons released during all of last year, according to Air Forces Central Command's latest airpower summary.

"Will the 9/11 Case Finally Go to Trial?": Andrew Cockburn on New Evidence Linking Saudis to Attacks

Senate Votes 61-36 To Kill Repeal of AUMF

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) had to push heavily and very publicly against the Senate leadership to get even the limited debate that ultimately occurred on his amendment, aiming to revoke the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). The vote did not occur. In the middle of the debate Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) moved to table (kill) the amendment, forcing an immediate vote. The Senate then voted to kill Paul’s amendment, by a vote of 61-36.

The post-9/11 AUMF has been interpreted broadly by US presidents as allowing unlimited war-making powers against anything even loosely described as “terror.” Sen. Paul argued that the AUMF was wrongly been used to authorize seven distinct wars, and that repealing it would force Congress to debate specific authorizations for specific wars as an alternative. ...

While the failure of the amendment doesn’t preclude future efforts at passing new AUMFs to cover America’s many wars, it makes such debate a less pressing matter. Talk of an AUMF for the ISIS wars, put off since the 2014 mid-term elections on various reasons, can be expected to remain just talk, and no real advance on the effort is likely.

Russia’s plot to undermine America has devolved into war over parking

The Kremlin has found a new way to get revenge on the Trump administration, and is taking the spiraling U.S.-Russia diplomatic spat to the streets: Russia wants American diplomats to experience the full horror of finding a parking spot in Moscow.

Russian officials may revoke U.S. diplomatic envoys’ access to reserved parking spaces near the American embassy in Moscow as well as at diplomatic missions in other cities, according to a report in daily newspaper Kommersant on Monday citing unnamed sources. They’re also considering fresh domestic travel restrictions and reducing the number of permissible entry points into the country.

"Pivotal Moment in American History": Sen. Sanders Unveils Medicare-for-All Bill with 15 Co-Sponsors

Bernie Sanders unveils universal healthcare bill: 'We will win this struggle'

Battle lines have been drawn as Bernie Sanders launches his latest attempt to establish a healthcare system that covers all 323 million Americans.

Standing in opposition to Sanders’ plan are what he calls the “most powerful and greedy forces in American society”: the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies, Wall Street and the Republican party. “The opposition to this will be extraordinary,” Sanders said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office, prior to the launch of his universal healthcare bill, known as “Medicare for All”.

“They will spend an enormous amount of money fighting us. They will lie about what is in the program. They will frighten the American people,” he said. Sanders has no illusions about the bill’s fate in a Republican-controlled Congress, where it has little chance of passing. But he says the time has arrived to have a debate he believes is fundamental: is healthcare a right or a privilege in America? ...

Since Sanders launched his presidential campaign in May 2015, public support for universal healthcare has climbed. Where 46% of the public supported such a system in 2008 and 2009, a recent Kaiser poll found 53% now support the idea. But that same survey found that when respondents were told that a universal healthcare plan might give the government “too much control,” or that it might increases taxes, opposition spiked from 43% to 62% and 60% respectively – perhaps a sign of the major political and policy fights that lie ahead. ...

Some advocates of a “single-payer” system have expressed concern that Democrats could fall into the same trap Republicans did with their campaign to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Sanders’ Medicare For All bill, like the Republicans’ repeal and replace effort, is a popular idea but leaves open crucial policy decisions and ideological disagreements. ... Sanders said he was open to other approaches that push the country toward universal healthcare but said he believed that Medicare for All, modeled after the Canadian healthcare system, was the most logical path.

Pharma CEO Worries Americans Will Say “Enough is Enough” and Embrace Bernie Sanders’ Single-Payer Plan

Brent Saunders, the chief executive of Allergan, one of the largest pharmaceutical firms in the world, is concerned that Americans will become fed up and, in an era of increasing political polarization, come to embrace the single-payer health care plan being unveiled Wednesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. The candid thoughts were shared last weekend at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference in Boston, a gathering for investors and major pharmaceutical and biotech firms.

Americans have lost trust in drug companies, Saunders said, noting the industry consistently ranks lower than oil and tobacco companies in public trust surveys. “I think we’ve got to do things to bring that trust back,” the executive added. “Because ultimately, someone’s going to be in the White House. Somebody’s going to be in Congress. Someone’s going to be somewhere and going to have to say, ‘Enough’s enough. Let’s just change the whole system. Let’s go to one payer. Let’s do something.'” ...

Saunders, during his speech to Wells Fargo, touted a statement of principles he released in 2016 calling for a “social contract” with patients, promising not to use predatory pricing and other behaviors that have come to define his industry.

The Obamacare Fight Is Over — Now It’s On To Universal Medicare

In June, as the fight over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act reached its climax, then-White House spokesman Sean Spicer delivered a warning. “It’s not a question of Obamacare versus the AHCA,” he said, referring to the GOP alternative, the since-failed American Health Care Act. The question, Spicer said, was between repealing Obamacare and moving to single payer.

History may prove him right. The battle over the Affordable Care Act is over. The fight for what comes next will begin in earnest on Wednesday with the introduction of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s bill to create a universal Medicare program, the most fleshed-out single-payer proposal ever introduced in Congress. The campaign for the Vermont independent’s bill will start with the backing of at least 15 Democratic cosponsors and 24 progressive and healthcare advocacy groups, numbers that will only grow in the coming days and weeks.

The bill starts by sweetening the pot for seniors who may be wary about welcoming the rest of the country into their warm pool. It eliminates copays and deductions, except for name-brand drugs when generics are available, and adds dental, vision, and hearing aid coverage to Medicare where it didn’t exist before — huge benefits that have long been a goal of public health advocates. At the same time, people aged zero to 18 would be eligible for the coverage in the first year. In year two, the eligibility age would be lowered to 45. The next year, it would drop again to 35. In year four, the age restrictions would be eliminated.

Importantly, Sanders’s bill repeals the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortions, as it relates to funding for universal Medicare. That means that those covered would have full access to the entire suite of reproductive health care services, including abortion coverage. His is the only single-payer legislation currently on the table that moves so strongly in the direction of the reproductive health care choice.

Read a chapter-by-chapter summary here, or the executive summary here.

Red Cross "didn't show up" at Florida shelters during Irma

Miami-Dade's hurricane shelters experienced "chaos" during Irma, and the Miami-Dade schools chief Alberto Carvalho says that's because the Red Cross was missing in action.

The Red Cross is contracted to run 42 shelters in Miami-Dade schools, but in many cases, Red Cross personnel were late to show up, and in others, no one showed up at all.

Red Cross spokeman Robert Baltodano referred reporters to regional communications director Grace Meinhofer, who didn't reply to a query.

The Red Cross hired AT&T exec Gail McGovern to serve as CEO in 2008, and since then the organization has been plagued by mass layoffs, low volunteer morale, secrecy and suspicious accounting, massive executive paychecks, and an emphasis on "branding" exercises at the expense of serving the organization's core mission.

Senate Blocks Rand Paul’s Bill to Give Money to Hurricane Victims Instead of Foreign Dictators

As estimates to fix the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey reach over $100 billion, the U.S. Congress has pushed for a bill that would raise the national debt in order to pay for it. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul suggested a different solution—why not make cuts to foreign aid in order to help Americans in need? ...

Paul noted that with the current budget, American taxpayers are funding a failed foreign policy by sending billions of dollars to countries such as Afghanistan, where President Trump recently promised to continue the longest war in U.S. history. “We spent billions of dollars—I think it’s over $100 billion—building roads in Afghanistan, blowing up roads in Afghanistan, building schools, blowing up schools, and then rebuilding all of them,” Paul said. “Sometimes we blow them up, sometimes someone else blows them up, but we always go back and rebuild them. What about rebuilding our country?”

With around $20 billion in unobligated foreign aid available, Paul pointed out that the United States Agency for International Development is not exactly hurting for money, and some of the programs it is spending taxpayer dollars on are absolutely ridiculous. However, the Senate did not agree, and when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a motion to table Paul’s proposal, it passed 87-10.

While Rand Paul’s amendment was centered around foreign aid, it should also be noted that the United States spends nearly $600 billion on its military every year—far more than any other country in the world—and when the Pentagon has a habit of “losing” at least $10 trillion in recent years, everyone should start questioning why money continues to be wasted in foreign nations, while Americans suffer in the United States.

A Top Bank Regulator Is in His Job Illegally, Watchdog Argues

Most people remember the last day of a temp job. Maybe colleagues take you out to lunch; maybe you send that goodbye email promising to keep in touch. But for Keith Noreika, the temporary head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, his final temp day is just like any other Tuesday. Because he doesn’t plan on leaving. Noreika’s unusual stint running the OCC, a top bank regulatory agency, as a “special government employee” enabled him to sidestep congressional vetting and ethics rules for members of the executive branch. But a watchdog group believes that unique status runs out today, and they want Noreika investigated for illegally overstaying his welcome. ...

Noreika was a corporate lawyer defending Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and others, until being selected to head the second most important bank regulator in the federal government. Instead of taking Noreika through the Senate confirmation process, the Trump administration named him “first deputy comptroller,” a non-confirmable position. When Comptroller Thomas Curry stepped down on May 5, Noreika slid into the top slot. The position was considered temporary until Trump got a permanent replacement for Curry confirmed. ... But there was a catch: Federal ethics laws would create conflict of interest burdens in office, and the Trump ethics pledge would prohibit Noreika from communicating with OCC colleagues for a year after exiting, or from lobbying the agency for five years.

So administration officials found a loophole. If Noreika was made a “special government employee,” a status typically reserved for part-time members of advisory committees — or for Huma Abedin — he would be exempt from ethics statutes or the Trump pledge, enabling him to flow smoothly between the OCC and a law firm partnership without restrictions. The only condition? Special government employees can only work “one hundred and thirty days during any period of three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days,” per law. The end of that 130-day cycle is September 12.

Median wealth of black Americans 'will fall to zero by 2053', warns new report

Growing up in the projects of Baltimore in the 1980s, things like savings accounts, stocks and bonds were completely foreign to Mysia Hamilton. ... Now 48, Hamilton is on the path to a different reality. Working as a medical office manager and earning her college degree, the mother of five manages to squelch away $50 a month by furiously clipping coupons and being “extremely frugal”.

“$50 is definitely not my goal, but it’s all I can do with the money that’s going out,” Hamilton said. And it’s working: a decade after she began working with a financial coach, she is on track to have a positive net worth by March 2018. “I’m so driven to do that. It’s important to me.”

But Hamilton is in the minority, in execution if not intention. A new report calculates that median wealth for black Americans will fall to $0 by 2053, if current trends continue. Latino-Americans, who are also experiencing a sustained downward wealth slide, will hit $0 about two decades later, according to the study by Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies. “By 2020, median black and Latino households stand to lose nearly 18% and 12% of the wealth they held in 2013 respectively, while median white household wealth increases by 3%,” the report states. “At that point – just three years from now – white households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than black households, and 68 times more wealth than Latino households.”

With the US set to become “majority minority” by 2044, researchers say this spells major economic peril for the nation. “If the racial wealth divide continues to accelerate, the economic conditions of black and Latino households will have an increasingly adverse impact on the economy writ large, because the majority of US households will no longer have enough wealth to stake their claim in the middle class.” The authors cite the legacy of discriminatory housing policies, an “upside down” tax system that helps the wealthiest households get wealthier, and the economic effects of mass incarceration as among the root causes for the discrepancy.

In Surprise Vote, House Passes Amendment to Restrict Asset Forfeiture

In a stunning move, the House of Representatives on Tuesday approved an amendment to the Make America Secure and Prosperous Appropriations Act that will roll back Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s expansion of asset forfeiture.

Amendment number 126 was sponsored by a bipartisan group of nine members, led by Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash. He was joined by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna of California; Washington state’s Pramila Jayapal, a rising progressive star; and Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard.

Civil asset forfeiture is a practice by which law enforcement can take assets from a person who is suspected of a crime, even without a charge or conviction. Sessions revived the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allowed state and local police agencies to take assets and then give them to the federal government — which would in turn give a chunk back to the local police. This served as a way for these local agencies to skirt past state laws designed to limit asset forfeiture.

The amendment would roll back Sessions’ elimination of the Obama-era reforms. Amash, the prime mover of the amendment, spoke forcefully in favor of the Obama-era rules on the House floor and the need to bring them back.

The fuckers got away with murdering a black man in cold blood again. Thanks, Beauregard!

DOJ won't bring charges against officers in Gray case

The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday it won't bring federal civil rights charges against six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest and in-custody death of Freddie Gray, a young black man whose death touched off weeks of protests and unrest in the city.

The officers were charged by state prosecutors after Gray's neck was broken in the back of a police van in April 2015. The 25-year-old was handcuffed and shackled, but he was unrestrained by a seat belt.

The Justice Department said in a statement that while Gray's death was "undeniably tragic," federal prosecutors did not find enough evidence to prove the officers willfully violated his civil rights, a high legal threshold.

The decision not to bring federal charges against the officers means none of them will be held criminally responsible for Gray's death. Three officers were acquitted in state court, and Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby later dropped the remaining state cases.

I love the intro to this piece:

Hillary’s Message To Dems: Don’t Give Bernie The Keys

Democrats are living their own version of Groundhog Day. Every day, they wake up and realize they are still in the 2016 presidential primary.

The leaked excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir, “What Happened,” have stirred up another round of relitigation over, well, what happened. Clinton reserves some blame for Vladimir Putin, James Comey and herself. But it’s her fingering of Bernie Sanders that has cheered her loyalists, enraged his, and made every other Democrat consider emulating Bill Murray by taking a bath with a plugged-in toaster.

Chocolate industry drives rainforest disaster in Ivory Coast

The world’s chocolate industry is driving deforestation on a devastating scale in West Africa, the Guardian can reveal. Cocoa traders who sell to Mars, Nestlé, Mondelez and other big brands buy beans grown illegally inside protected areas in the Ivory Coast, where rainforest cover has been reduced by more than 80% since 1960.

Illegal product is mixed in with “clean” beans in the supply chain, meaning that Mars bars, Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Milka bars could all be tainted with “dirty” cocoa. As much as 40% of the world’s cocoa comes from Ivory Coast.

The Guardian travelled across Ivory Coast and documented rainforests cleared for cocoa plantation; villages and farmers occupying supposedly protected national parks; enforcement officials taking kickbacks for turning a blind eye to infractions and trading middlemen who supply the big brands indifferent to the provenance of beans. ...

Up to 70% of the world’s cocoa is produced by 2 million farmers in a belt that stretches from Sierra Leone to Cameroon, but Ivory Coast and Ghana are the giants, the world’s first and second biggest producers. They are also the biggest victims of deforestation. Ivory Coast is losing its forests at a faster rate than any other African country – less than 4% of the country is covered in rainforest. Once, one quarter was.

The ballooning global demand for chocolate means that if nothing is done, by 2030 there will be no forest left, according to the environmental group Mighty Earth which today publishes an investigation into deforestation caused by chocolate. The final, insulting irony is that locals are so poor they could never afford to eat a Mars bar.

Colorado: the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper labored mightily for three months and brought forth a gnat. He had promised the people, after an uncontrolled leak from an oil well had caused two deaths in a fiery explosion of a home in the bedroom community of Firestone, Colorado, that it would never happen again. To fulfill this promise, he asked the oil industry, the people who caused the explosion, to tell him how it happened and how to correct their mistakes. He rigorously guarded against invoking an independent investigation, though many in the crosshairs of the frackers had asked for one.

If most of life is preparation for things that never happen, then Hickenlooper never disappoints. After three months of fronting for the oil industry and defending its good intentions and overall safety record, he gave birth to his gnat. Dubbed a 7-point program, this speck of a plan is so slight in its impact and reach that even the Denver Post demurred. It is basically a repeat of his dithering Blue Ribbon panel of yesteryear, which was also monopolized by industry executives intent on making sure nothing happened. ...

Chief among Hickenlooper’s corrective measures was a call for improving the oil and gas emergency response telephone system by hiring more people to man the 811 phones. How a phone call to Denver to find out where the nearest gas line is located would have helped the people who died at Firestone or the contract oil worker at an Anadarko Facility who died from another explosion a couple of days later while relocating a gas line at the facility is unknown and unexplained. ...

Mostly Hickenlooper, in his 7-point program, sought continued hand-in-glove cooperation with the industry. In this spirit, he declined to require the mapping of all industry oil and gas lines in a publicly accessible database as even the Denver Post advocated. ... Hickenlooper only asked the industry to test the lines at wellheads, where the COGCC has statutory authority. These are basically low-pressure lines that power onsite facilities or flow to separators where the oil, gas, and waste begin to be separated and processed for downstream use or storage. And he only asked that they test lines at old vertical wells like the one next to the house that exploded in Firestone–In total, 19,000 of the state’s 54,000 active wells. He exempted the new industrial-sized fracking sites, those over which people in threatened neighborhoods are most concerned. He also excepted all lines leading off the wellheads, those that carry oil and gas to markets in high-pressure lines. In Colorado the feds claim there are 45,000 miles of such buried line, though the actual mileage is probably much higher since it is unlikely all the collector lines from well heads to storage tanks and compressor stations are in that inventory. Add to this that the state allows abandoned oil and gas lines to remain in the ground. These alone have been estimated to measure thousands of miles, but no one really knows.

Except for the interstate lines, which a small agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation has oversight, this vast inventory is a regulatory no-man’s land. No one is in charge. One should also add the underground storage reservoirs that store natural gas. These are like the Aliso Canyon site in California which was responsible for what is thought to be the largest single leak of methane into the atmosphere in modern times. Nine of these reservoirs exist in Colorado, some near populated areas. In total they store more methane than Aliso. Since the reservoirs are old played out oil and gas deposits, leaks can be expected. At Aliso, tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated for weeks until the leak could be controlled.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Reagan Documents Shed Light on U.S. ‘Meddling’

New York Times stokes anti-Russia campaign to promote Facebook, Twitter censorship

Around the Empire: A Syrian Kurdish Perspective

The Other 9/11: Unremembered and Unatoned

America’s secret role in the Rwandan genocide

The Case Against the Iranian Nuclear Deal Is One Big Lie

Der Spiegel Interview with Edward Snowden

One South Carolina County Shows the Insanity of Giving Military Gear to Cops

Bernie’s Army: 24 Organizations With Millions of Members Vow To Help Pass His Universal Medicare Plan

Republicans are radicalizing Democrats. Just look at healthcare

Are Bosses Dictators?

Wanted: Volunteer shooters to thin Grand Canyon bison herd

On The Road To Extinction, Maybe It's Not All About Us

A Little Night Music

Lil Son Jackson - Johnnie Mae

Lil' Son Jackson - No Money

Lil' Son Jackson - Homeless Blues

Lil' Son Jackson - Freedom Train Blues

Lil Son Jackson - Movin' To The Country

Lil' Son Jackson - No Money No Love

Little Son Jackson -Talking Boogie

Lil' Son Jackson - Confession

Lil Son Jackson - Restless Blues

Lil' Son Jackson - Upstairs Boogie

Lil' Son Jackson - All My Love

Little Son Jackson - Milford Blues

Lil' Son Jackson - Everybody's Blues