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This evening's music features Delta bluesman Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes. Enjoy!

"A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power."

-- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

News and Opinion

Obama appears to have decided that "reforms" made for the sake of optics after Ferguson have gone quite far enough and now it's time to get back to building the fascist police state hammer and tongs. Incentives for police abuse of people without the legal means to fight back are the first order of business:

The feds have resumed a controversial program that lets cops take stuff and keep it

The Justice Department has announced that it is resuming a controversial practice that allows local police departments to funnel a large portion of assets seized from citizens into their own coffers under federal law.

The "Equitable Sharing Program" gives police the option of prosecuting some asset forfeiture cases under federal instead of state law, particularly in instances where local law enforcement officers have a relationship with federal authorities as part of a joint task force. Federal forfeiture policies are more permissive than many state policies, allowing police to keep up to 80 percent of assets they seize.

The Justice Department had suspended payments under this program in December, due to budget cuts included in last year's spending bill. ...

Asset forfeiture is a contentious practice that lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted of wrongdoing — and in many cases, never charged. Studies have found that use of the practice has exploded in recent years, prompting concern that, in some cases, police are motivated more by profit and less by justice. ...

Asset forfeiture is fast growing -- in 2014, for instance, federal authorities seized more than $5 billion in assets. That's more than the value of assets lost in every single burglary that year.

Here's an interesting look at how, historically, the American media has promoted fascism.

Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis

The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed.

When the Nazi party seized power in Germany in 1933, one of its first objectives was to bring into line not just the national press, but international media too. The Guardian was banned within a year, and by 1935 even bigger British-American agencies such as Keystone and Wide World Photos were forced to close their bureaus after coming under attack for employing Jewish journalists.

Associated Press, which has described itself as the “marine corps of journalism” (“always the first in and the last out”) was the only western news agency able to stay open in Hitler’s Germany, continuing to operate until the US entered the war in 1941. It thus found itself in the presumably profitable situation of being the prime channel for news reports and pictures out of the totalitarian state. ...

The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”.

This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. AP has removed Roth’s pictures from its website since Scharnberg published her findings, though thumbnails remain viewable due to “software issues”.

Obama undermined press freedom. Now he wants a strong media to stop Trump?

The president can’t lecture the press to be more aggressive. He has made an enemy of investigative journalists and whistleblowers

Obama spoke Monday night at the Toner Prize ceremony, which honors excellence in political reporting. When he first ran for president in 2008, Obama said, candidates couldn’t just get away with saying whatever they wanted, regardless of truth. The current election cycle, he said, indicates that this is no longer the case. ...

Obama’s own track record shows that if anyone isn’t being held accountable for the promises he’s made, it’s Obama himself – at least when it comes to the deep-diving investigative journalism he professes to want more of.

On his first day on the job, way back in January 2009, Obama issued a memorandum declaring that his administration was “committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government … and establish a system of transparency”. This was one of his campaign promises. ... The Obama administration set a new record in the percentage of Foia requests answered with either redacted files or nothing at all: 77%. That’s up 12 points from the first year of Obama’s presidency. ...

This is an administration that has used the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers at least seven times. By contrast, before Obama’s presidency, the act, in place since the first world war, was used to prosecute government officials who leaked to the media just three times. ...

This is an administration that has been happy to present the press with the story it wants the public to know, but then throws every possible roadblock in front of journalists looking for the story that the public deserves to know.

Growing International Movement Seeks to Place Arms Embargo on Saudi Arabia

A lawsuit filed last week in Canada is seeking to halt a major $15 billion sale of light-armored vehicles to the government of Saudi Arabia, part of a growing international movement to stop arms sales to the Saudi government over its alleged war crimes in Yemen.

The suit, filed by University of Montreal constitutional law professor Daniel Turp, argues the vehicle sales to Saudi Arabia violate a number of Canadian laws, including regulations on the export of military equipment, which prohibit arms sales to countries where human rights are “subject to serious and repeated violations” and there is a reasonable risk exported equipment “will be used against the civilian population.” Saudi Arabia, which has a deplorable human rights record at home, has inflicted considerable civilian casualties in Yemen as part of its yearlong bombing campaign in support of the contested government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. ...

But despite growing pressure, major arms-producing countries generally appear unfazed. In the past several months, U.S. weapons manufacturers have inked weapons deals with Saudi Arabia for billions of dollars, ensuring a steady stream of munitions for the war in Yemen. “Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a war inside Yemen for over a year, and we’re selling them weapons with knowledge they will be used in Yemen, where ample evidence has shown they are using them to commit war crimes,” said Raed Jarrar, government relations manager with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker political advocacy group with a mandate to promote peace.

Jarrar said the U.S. has legal grounds to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia under the Arms Export Control Act, presidential policy directives, and international treaties, all of which circumscribe arms sales based on human rights violations.

Saudi War in Yemen Starving Huge Numbers of Children

A new UNICEF report estimates some 320,000 children are facing severe, life-threatening malnutrition, and that some 82% of the Yemeni population is reliant on humanitarian aid at this point. Before the war, Yemen imported some 90% of its food from abroad.

Though the UN eventually started scaling up humanitarian shipments to Yemen after the war began, the Saudis have ensured that those shipments are predominantly to Saudi-held territory, with the Shi’ite regions getting little support

The Future Is in Missiles Not Talks, Says Iran's Supreme Leader

Iran's top leader on Wednesday said missiles were key to the Islamic Republic's future, offering support to the hardline Revolutionary Guards that have drawn criticism from the West for testing ballistic missiles.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supported last year's nuclear deal with world powers but has since called for Iran to avoid further rapprochement with the United States and its allies, and maintain its economic and military strength. ...

"If the Islamic Republic seeks negotiations but has no defensive power, it would have to back down against threats from any weak country." ...

Khamenei's comments may have been directed at former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the de facto leader of a more moderate political alliance, who last week tweeted "the future is in dialogue, not missiles".

An interesting article about the strategic moves by Putin in Syria, checking American ambitions and outmaneuvering Kerry's neocons. It's worth a full read if you're following the situation there.

Cutting Off Syrian Rebels’ Weapons

... The agreement between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Kerry [...] was more far-reaching than what has been made public and the ceasefire has proven to be far more effective than anyone had expected. It is now clear that the reason is that Putin was able to convert his new-found leverage into the one U.S. diplomatic concession that is necessary to any possibility of ending the war.

According to a report last week by Elijah J Magnier, who writes on regional politics and diplomacy for Al Rai, Kuwait’s leading daily newspaper, “high officials present in Syria” – which his report makes clear were Iranian – said the United States had pledged as part of the ceasefire deal to “enforce on its regional Middle Eastern allies the cessation of the flow of weapons” into Syria.

In response to an e-mail query from this writer, Magnier said he had learned from his sources that no weapons have crossed the border into Syria from either Turkey or Jordan since the ceasefire went into effect. This crucial element of the U.S.-Russian understanding, about which the Obama administration has maintained a discrete silence, evidently left the leadership of Nusra Front and its allies with little choice but to go along with the ceasefire for an indeterminate period.

The entire armed opposition has thus apparently been shut down in Syria on the insistence of the United States because it was a requirement for the Russians to halt the offensive against them.

That far-reaching U.S. concession explains why Putin surprised the entire world by announcing on March 14 that he was withdrawing the bulk of the Russian aircraft participating in the offensive. Contrary to the speculation of many pundits about his motive in doing so, Putin was actually enhancing his leverage over both the military situation and the political negotiations still to come.

Inside Old Palmyra: Exclusive access to ancient relics after ISIS flees

Archaeologists Are Figuring Out How Badly the Islamic State Damaged Palmyra

Following the ancient city of Palmyra's recapture by the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, archaeologists and antiquities experts have begun to remotely determine the extent of damage inflicted by nearly a year of Islamic State control.

Despite widescale looting and several high-profile demolitions, much of the city's Roman-era structures appear to still be intact. The United Nations said on Tuesday that it plans to send a mission to the World Heritage site as soon as possible.

Last May, IS militants drove government forces from Palmyra's ruins and the modern city, also known as Tadmor, that lies beside them. Confirming the fears of local officials and UNESCO, the UN's cultural agency, the group proceeded to release images and videos of fighters blowing up several structures, including the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel — the city's largest and best known building — and the temple of Baalshamin. Much of the oasis settlement's architecture dates to the first two centuries AD, when Palmyra was a crossroads amid the far reaches of the Roman Empire.

In August, UN satellite photos confirmed that the Temple of Bel had been reduced to rubble, though its surrounding walls appeared to remain standing. In October, IS destroyed a triumphal arch that had been constructed by the Romans to commemorate victory in battle against the Persians. Though the temples were religious structures and theoretically un-Islamic in the eyes of IS, the arch was not.

Iraq’s Offensive Near Mosul Collapsing in the Face of Mass Desertions

Less than a week ago, Iraqi officials were touting a new military offensive against some villages near Mosul as a major sign of progress in the war against ISIS, and their success in taking three villages was proof of ISIS being “in retreat.”

Today that offensive is stalled outright, on the brink of collapse, as low morale has many Iraqi troops leaving their positions, and Kurdish officials who were involved in the fighting saying the army “have no will to fight.” ...

US officials are downplaying the concerns, insisting that the Iraqi troops are performing up to expectations. Locals are complaining that the troops showed up, looted their villages, and then just left, insisting they are no better than ISIS.

Thousands Protest as Japanese Government Ushers in New Age of Militarism

Thousands of anti-war protesters rallied outside the parliament building in Tokyo on Tuesday, railing against the Japanese government's new so-called security law which marks a historic departure from the country's decades-long pacifism. 

The controversial "war legislation," a package of bills that passed parliament in September and took effect on Tuesday, reinterprets Article 9 of the country's Constitution, which renounced war as a means to settle international disputes following World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushed for the revisions which "expand the activities of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) overseas, even in situations when Japan is not under direct attack," The Asahi Shimbun reports. "The laws call for the SDF to provide greater support to the militaries of the United States and other nations anywhere in the world."

Tens of thousands of people protested against the measure last fall and on Tuesday an estimated 37,000 demonstrated against Japan's expanded militarism. According to The Mainichi, demonstrations were held in 35 cities across Japan.

Days of Revolt: Junk Economics and the Future

Top Privacy Watchdog Suddenly Resigns

The Chief of the independent government agency tasked with evaluating the risk that federal counterterrorism programs present to Americans’ constitutional rights is stepping down unexpectedly.

David Medine, who was confirmed as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board shortly before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the massive scale of the U.S. government’s spying operations, has been tugging on the reins of expanding government surveillance power since. ...

The board’s review of the NSA’s surveillance program under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act left unanswered many central questions, including: How much American data is swept up in a program ostensibly intended to capture only foreign communications?

And the board is only now working on a report on the most massive body of spying: NSA surveillance conducted under the Reagan-era Executive Order 12333. Medine’s departure “will not affect the 12333 report,” writes PCLOB spokesperson Jen Burita in an email to The Intercept. “The board is still going to release it this year.”

Study: Government Surveillance Has People Scared to Express Views Online

A new study from Wayne State University’s Elizabeth Stoycheff provides strong evidence that the growing perception of government surveillance of Internet communication is having a serious deleterious impact on the willingness of individuals to express “controversial” views online.

The study found that subjects primed before questioning with information giving them the impression the government is watching what they say are much less likely to disclose political views, and are reluctant to reveal any non-mainstream opinions they hold.

How the FBI's Shadowy iPhone Hack is Putting Privacy (and Lives) at Risk

Privacy advocates are warning that if the FBI does not let Apple know how it hacked into the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, not only would the government be going against its own policy on such matters, it will be putting people's "lives at risk."

On Monday, the FBI backed down from its controversial legal battle to force Apple to develop a backdoor entry into the locked device of Syed Rizwan Farook—instead, breaking into the phone on its own, with the help of Israeli firm Cellebrite.

Apple, along with numerous privacy and rights advocates, argued that the creation of such a tool would open a "Pandora's box," rendering all user-set security features moot. ...

Fight for the Future, a digital and privacy rights group which helped lead opposition to the FBI case, issued a statement Wednesday arguing that if U.S. officials "really care about public safety, they must disclose the vulnerability they used to Apple to prevent criminals, hackers, and terrorists from exploiting the same security flaw and using it to do harm."

Family of Mexican Man "Tortured & Killed" by U.S. Border Agents Seeks Justice at Int'l Tribunal

Man says California officers who beat him tried to bribe a homeless witness

Two northern California sheriff’s deputies seen beating a suspect on surveillance video last year offered the man’s belongings to homeless witnesses so they would not speak out about what they saw, the man’s attorney alleged.

Lawyer Michael Haddad said Alameda County deputies approached a homeless man in a San Francisco alley after the November beating of Stanislav Petrov and gave him Petrov’s large gold chain with a medallion, cash and cigarettes, the Oakland Tribune reported on Monday.

Sgt JD Nelson, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told reporters that the agency was investigating.

“They are no better than the criminals they arrested, if these allegations are true,” Nelson said about the deputies.

They have been on paid administrative leave since the San Francisco public defender’s office released video showing the deputies repeatedly hitting a man with their batons as he screamed. He had broken bones in both hands and severe bruising to the head and body, his attorney said.

The idea that Bernie Sanders has been too negative to debate Hillary Clinton is ridiculous

Asked about the possibility of a New York debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders before the Empire State primary on April 19, Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said this on CNN Monday:

Senator Sanders doesn't get to decide when we debate, particularly when he's running a negative campaign. Let's see if he goes back to the kind of tone he said he was going to set early on. If he does that, then we'll talk about debates.

Er, okay. Negativity is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. But, it's very hard for me to see the campaign that Sanders has run fits the into the "negative" category. ...

This campaign has been one of the least contentious I have ever covered and stands in marked contrast to the mudfest on the Republican side. Clinton has every right to refuse further debates but citing Sanders's negativity to explain it away doesn't fly.

2008 Hillary: "You should be willing to debate anytime, anywhere."

The Disappearance of Hillary Clinton's Healthcare Platform

In an extraordinary magic trick, performed on a national scale, Hillary Clinton's healthcare platform has been disappeared. While policy analysts, news anchors, and columnists have been engaged in an intense debate over Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, Clinton’s incremental alternative has escaped almost all scrutiny - even among those who say they prefer it.

Combining the election-season writings of our most prolific, liberal-leaning columnists at the New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox, Mother Jones, Politico, The American Prospect, etc. you’ll find dozens of articles critiquing Sanders's single-payer plan. None have mentioned a single Clinton healthcare proposal as a point of comparison - merely that she supports a philosphy of incremental reform.

Take Paul Krugman, a high-profile advocate of Clinton's approach to healthcare reform. Krugman has published two op-eds in the New York Times and five additional blog posts arguing that "[progressives] should seek incremental change on health care... and focus their main efforts on other issues - that is... Bernie Sanders is wrong about this and Hillary Clinton is right." In all seven pieces, Krugman focuses exclusively on Sanders's single-payer proposal and fails to mention even a single Clinton policy.

What would happen if the media lifted the curtain on Clinton's healthcare platform and introduced any level of scrutiny to her proposed improvements on the Affordable Care Act? They would find two categories of Clinton proposals: some that are so vague they're difficult to evaluate, and other more concrete plans that follow in the footsteps of one of Congress's most practiced healthcare incrementalists: Senator Bernie Sanders.

For example, one of Clinton's clearest incremental proposals is to repeal the Affordable Care Act's poorly named "cadillac tax" on health plans with high premiums. She announced this proposal on September 29, drawing the ire of White House spokespeople. The move, however, followed in the footsteps of a Senate bill to repeal the Cadillac tax introduced by Bernie Sanders and seven Democratic Senators just a few days previously on September 24. Clinton's position was correctly seen by reporters as necessary if she didn't want to lose labor union support to Sanders.

Many of Clinton's well-defined healthcare proposals are rolled into a package of prescription drug reforms, which she released on September 22, 2015. They bear a striking resemblance to the Sanders prescription drug plan announced on September 1, filed as legislation on September 10. ...

This is the double standard at work in almost all national coverage of Clinton and Sanders on healthcare reform: Clinton has been taken at her word that her incremental plans will be politically feasible, succeed in improving affordability and access to care, and are not shared by her opponent.

MSNBC Guest Argues It’s a ‘Higher Bar’ to Prosecute Clinton Because She’s Running for President

During a panel discussion Monday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about a pair of new reports in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post concerning the ongoing FBI investigation into the Clinton private e-mail server, National Journal political reporter Ron Fournier argued that there should be a higher bar to bring charges against Hillary Clinton because she is running for president. ...

“Politically, there are severe questions about her judgment that voters really have to look into. Legally, …there is a higher bar you have to get over before you prosecute somebody who is running for president. That is just a fact,” Fournier said.

“In what statute is that?” Scarborough asked rhetorically.

As the rest of panel broke out in an awkward laugh, Sam Stein, a Huffington Post political writer, jumped in and sort of stuttered his way along in defense of Fournier.

“Well, this is the thing … it is not codified … but we all recognize … and this is sort of the frustration with Clinton critics which is that had she been some sort of underling at the State Department, certainly there would’ve been a different standard applied to her,” Stein said. ...

It is concerning that even those who are tasked, in theory, with holding our elected leaders accountable are arguing that Clinton should get a pass, or at the very least that the legal bar should be higher to prosecute her, simply because she chose to run for president.

This Obama Endorsement Is a Sign Pro-Corporate Democrats Are Getting Nervous

President Obama on Monday endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, his handpicked Democratic National Committee chair, in her congressional race. What’s stunning about that is that Obama felt the need to endorse a six-term congresswoman running in a heavily Democratic district at all.

Tim Canova, a law professor and Federal Reserve expert, jumped into the Democratic primary in January, challenging Wasserman Schultz from the left. At that time, my Intercept colleague Glenn Greenwald interviewed Canova, revealing multiple contrasts between his opposition to bank bailouts, corporate-written free trade agreements, and the Patriot Act and Wasserman Schultz’s support of those policies.

Populist primaries of entrenched incumbents don’t usually get the attention of the White House, because success for the challenger is so remote. Obama very rarely involves himself in House primaries. That he felt the need to endorse Wasserman Schultz suggests that Canova’s message is gaining traction in her district.

The endorsement comes fully five months before the primary — and days before the end-of-the-quarter deadline for Federal Election Commission reporting. While Wasserman Schultz has never needed help soliciting campaign contributions from wealthy donors, the presidential endorsement has the appearance of a vote of confidence to ensure the continued flow of money.

The Rebellion Will Not Go Away

The Sanders- and Trump-led (for now) political rebellion is not going to go away. There are only two questions going forward:

• Will it remain a political rebellion, one that expresses itself through the electoral process, or will it abandon the electoral process as useless after 2016? 

• Will it be led by humanitarian populism from the left, or authoritarian populism from the right?

Why is this rebellion permanent, at least until conditions improve? Because life in the U.S. is getting worse in a way that can be felt by a critical mass of people, by enough people to disrupt the Establishment machine with their anger. And because that worsening is seen to be permanent. ...

If you look at the Trump side, it's easy to see why. Are wages rising with profits? No, and Trump supporters have had enough. ... Trump supporters, the core of them, are dying of drugs and despair, and they're not going to go quietly into that dark night. The Trump phenomenon is proof of that.

On the Sanders side, the rebellion is even clearer. Sanders has energized a great many voters across the Democratic-independent spectrum with his call for a "political revolution." But it's among the young, the future of America, that the message is especially resonant. For the first time in a long time, the current generation of youth in America sees itself as sinking below the achievements of their parents. ...

The squeeze is on, and unless the rich who run the game for their benefit alone decide to stand down and let the rest of us catch our breath and a break, there will be no letting up on the reaction. What we're watching is just the beginning. Unless the rich and their Establishment enablers stand down, it won't be the end but a start, and just a start.

Green Party Senate Candidate Removed From Debate Stage

Hmmm... could there be a rationale here for Bernie?

Donald Trump withdraws pledge to support Republican nominee

Donald Trump has backtracked on his much ballyhooed pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee as he deals with swirling controversy after his campaign manager was charged with assaulting a reporter.

In a television town hall in Milwaukee with CNN on Tuesday night, Trump insisted he had been “treated very unfairly” by the Republican National Committee and the establishment and revoked the commitment he signed in September. Although the Republican frontrunner previously hinted that he might do so, saying the RNC was “in default”, he had never explicitly revoked his commitment until Tuesday.

Top scientists back federal plan to protect Alaska predators

A group of scientists has backed a federal plan to restrict the trapping and gunning down of bears and wolves in Alaska’s wildlife refuges, in the face of bitter opposition from the state government.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has proposed an overhaul of hunting regulations for Alaska’s 16 national wildlife refuges, which span nearly 77m acres of wilderness in the state.

The new rules would effectively ban “non-subsistence” slaughter of predators within the refuges without a sound scientific reason. Practices to be outlawed include the killing of bear cubs or their mothers, the controversial practice of bear baiting and the targeting of wolves and coyotes during the spring and summer denning season.

Anyone hoping to take a plane or helicopter to shoot a bear will also be unable to do so. These changes have been backed by a group of 31 leading scientists who said the current hunting laws hurt some of the “most iconic yet persecuted species in North America: grizzly bears, black bears and wolves”.

In a letter sent for the USFWS’s public comment process, the biologists and ecologists from across the US point out that research shows that killing the predators of moose and caribou does very little to boost their numbers.

'Wake-Up Call' Study Finds Link Between Fracking and Toxic Water

A study published Tuesday has found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, had a "clear impact" on the groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming, raising new concerns over the drilling method. ...

Residents of Pavillion, an oil and gas boom town, first began complaining of tainted water in the 1990s after fossil fuel companies began conducting more than 180 drilling operations in the state's Wind River Basin. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft study in 2011 which found that oil and gas activities may have contaminated the town's water supply, but the agency shut down its preliminary research in 2013 after criticism from the industry and the state's fossil fuel regulators.

After the EPA handed over its investigation to Wyoming, state regulators said they had no plans to continue the research, even as the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry advised Pavillion residents not to bathe in, cook with, or drink water from their taps.

Stanford's study picks up where the EPA left off—and goes a step beyond, researchers said. ...

The study, based on publicly available records and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), tracks the occurrence of dangerous fracking chemicals in underground wells as well as their impact on the allegedly potable drinking water that supplies the residents of Pavillion. The impact reaches far beyond the small town of 231 people, the researchers said.

"When you look at everything as a whole, it seems implausible that all this is due to natural conditions," Dominic DiGiulio, lead author of the Stanford University study, told InsideClimate News. "When you look at the compounds, it's a virtual fingerprint of chemicals used in the field."

"Geologic and groundwater conditions at Pavillion are not unique in the Rocky Mountain region," he said. "This suggests there may be widespread impact to underground sources of drinking water as a result of unconventional oil and gas extraction."

The EPA has an Air Quality Index Forecast webpage that might interest you after you read the following article excerpt.

This Hidden Price of Air Pollution Is Costing the US Billions of Dollars

Air pollution contributes to 16,000 premature births in the United States each year, costing $4.33 billion annually, a new study has found.

Most of the cost, $3.57 billion, is in lost productivity related to the physical and mental disabilities that arise from being born prematurely, Dr. Leonardo Trasande, an associate professor at New York University's Langone Medical Center, and colleagues reported in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. The rest is spent on extended hospital stays associated with premature birth.

Trasande's study is the first of its kind to measure the economic implications of air pollution on preterm birth in the United States. After starting with preterm birth data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pollution data from the Environmental Protection Agency, Trasande and his colleagues drew from various previous studies to estimate the number of preterm births caused by air pollution in each US county. ...

"Air poll causes inflammation, and inflammation in the placenta contributes to a lack of integrity of the blood vessels there and can also send hormone signals that can trigger early delivery," Trasande said. ...

Air pollution kills 5.5 million people worldwide each year, causing heart disease, lung cancer and other diseases "on the same level" as smoking and poor diet, according to the Global Burden of Diseases report published last month.

Also of Interest

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

The Bernie Sanders Moment: Brought to you by the generation that has no future

Is This Class Warfare?

President Obama Cracked an Amazing Joke About Debbie Wasserman Schultz

Ezra Klein and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good Tax Calculator

GAO Has Been Telling Congress that Financial Regulation Is in Disarray for 20 Years

The Pentagon’s Budget Time Bomb

US Seeks Maximum—If Paltry—Sentence for 'Cold-Blooded' Coal CEO

I Do Not Care to Finish Reading This Mediocre Kissinger Biography By Niall Ferguson

A Little Night Music

Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Love Like I Wanna

Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Louise , Louise Blues

Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Rocking Daddy

Roosevelt Barnes - Ain't Goin' To Worry, About Tomorrow

Roosevelt Booba Barnes - Baby, Scratch My Back

Roosevelt Booba Barnes - I'm going back home" & "Bluebird

Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes & The Playboys How Long This Must Go On