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Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features blues songwriter, singer and piano player Jimmy McCracklin. Enjoy!

^{Jimmy McCracklin w/Ry Cooder + Wayne Bennett - The Walk}

“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”

-- André Malraux

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News and Opinion

U.S. Escalates Battle to Keep Guantánamo Force-Feeding Tapes Hidden

The government has refused to meet the deadline for the release of videotapes that show a detainee at Guantánamo being force-fed while on hunger strike.

A federal judge had given the government until Friday, January 22, to release around 11 hours of footage in which a Syrian detainee, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, is forcibly removed from his cell, restrained, and force-fed. Dhiab’s lawyers have called the footage “extremely disturbing.”

In a notice filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., lawyers for the Justice Department said that they would appeal the judge’s order to release the tapes. The government has previously said that the videos are properly classified, and that if released, they might “inflame Muslim sensitivities overseas.” ...

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler originally ordered the videos released in October 2014, but the government has pushed back with appeals and delayed with arguments over redactions.

Don’t hide video of force-fed detainee

This nation learned so much from the depravity of Abu Ghraib prison. We learned of the stunning failure of military command. We learned that disclosure of such horrors, though difficult to hear and to see, is at the foundation of Americans’ right to know what it being done on their behalf. ...

The Obama administration is recklessly sweeping those lessons aside in a misguided attempt to keep from public view what has been described as an “eye-watering” video of a Guantánamo detainee being forcibly dragged from his cell and force-fed, while he is waging a peaceful hunger strike to protest his endless detention without a trial.

The administration should stand on the side of the public’s right to know. ...

An appeal would aiding, basically, a government coverup.

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters Launches "Campaign to Close Guantánamo" for Obama's Last Year in Office

Iraqi Kurdistan president: time has come to redraw Middle East boundaries

The president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish north has called on global leaders to acknowledge that the Sykes-Picot pact that led to the boundaries of the modern Middle East has failed, and urged them to broker a new deal paving the way for a Kurdish state.

Massoud Barzani, who has led the troubled country’s Kurds for the past decade, said the international community had started to accept that Iraq and Syria in particular would never again be unified and that “compulsory co-existence” in the region had been proven wrong.

“I think that within themselves, [world leaders] have come to this conclusion that the era of Sykes-Picot is over,” Barzani told the Guardian. “Whether they say it or not, accept it or not, the reality on the ground is that. But as you know, diplomats are conservatives and they give their assessment in the late stages of things. And sometimes they can’t even keep up with developments.”

The political map of northern Iraq has changed drastically in the 18 months since Islamic State overran Iraq’s second city, Mosul. Kurdish forces are now in full control of Kirkuk and Sinjar and have claimed control of thousands more miles of land that had been under control of Iraq’s central government.

Now, four months before the centennial of the Sykes-Picot agreement under which Britain and France carved spheres of influence from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, Barzani said maintaining the status quo would ensure further regional disintegration and destruction.

Imperial hubris on parade:

US Troops Take Over Syria Airbase

The Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are reporting today that US troops have taken over control of the Rmeilan airfield in northeastern Syria’s Hasakeh Province, the first US military base inside Syria.

The SDF reported that the Kurdish YPG, their largest faction, previously controlled the base and handed sole control over it to the US, as a route for the US to bring them weapons and to launch warplanes from. ...

Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren confirmed that there is an operation “ongoing” in the area, but refused to discuss the matter, citing the “special nature” of the US ground troops who are deployed in Syria. Officials previously confirmed a handful of troops were sent to Syria, but never suggested they were going to establish their own bases.

The operation appears legally dicey, at best, as while the base was nominally under the control of the Kurdish YPG, who are closely allied to the US, the Obama Administration has refused all coordination with the Syrian government, and certainly doesn’t have Syrian permission to establish military bases on Syrian soil.

How To Succeed at Failing, Pentagon-Style

Iraq and Afghanistan are separated by more than 1,000 miles and, although they both exist in what is now known as the Greater Middle East, they had little in common – at least until March 2003, when the Bush administration followed up its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by invading Iraq. Since then, they’ve had quite a bit in common, including vast infusions of U.S. funds and the massive levels of corruption that accompany them, as well as the way refugees from both countries have been joining the same flow of the desperate and dispossessed heading for Europe. These days, with the spread of an Islamic State franchise to Afghanistan, even their insurgents are becoming part of the same “brand.” And there’s one other thing they’ve had in common in these years: ghosts.

In both countries, the U.S. military has built, on paper, vast local security forces from scratch to the tune of at least $65 billion in Afghanistan and at least $25 billion in Iraq. Their armies and police forces have, however, both turned out to be remarkably spectral in nature. They are filled with “ghost soldiers” and “ghost policemen” who are being paid salaries but don’t exist. In some cases, they are quite literally already dead and wandering in the world of spirits. Their U.S.-funded salaries are, in turn, being pocketed by commanders and other senior military officials in an operation that couldn’t be more profitable or “successful” – at least until their ranks, sometimes thinned to nonexistence, are attacked by flesh-and-blood enemy forces. In Iraq, in 2014, after significant parts of that country’s American-built army had abandoned its weaponry and fled its posts in the country’s northern cities in the face of modest numbers of Islamic State fighters, the prime minister announced that there were at least 50,000 “ghost” troops in his military. (That figure was widely believed to be an underestimate.)

In Afghanistan more recently, as Taliban attacks have ramped up, similarly undermanned units have found themselves hard-pressed and have retreated, fled, or been defeated. The number of ghosts in the ranks of the Afghan security forces (as in its police) is unknown. Recently, however, the head of the provincial council of Helmand Province, a key area in the Taliban’s southern heartland, estimated that 40% of the Afghan soldiers there might, in fact, be ghosts. Whatever the specific numbers, what’s striking is the Pentagon’s strange skill when it comes to creating, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, spectral security forces of a remarkably similar kind in two such, until recently, disparate countries.

Pentagon Given Broad Authority to Target ISIS in Afghanistan

Amid ever-growing indications that ISIS is establishing itself as a proper faction in southeastern Afghanistan, based around the city of Jalalabad, the Pentagon has reportedly been given broad new authority to launch attacks on ISIS targets in the country. ...

Several Congressional hawks had been agitating for the change for months, accusing the administration of not taking the threat of the ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan seriously. Recently, Pentagon reports have indicated they believe the affiliate is more or less fully functional, and no longer in the embryonic stage it was previously presented as occupying.

Kerry Pressed for MH-17 Evidence

The father of Quinn Schansman, the only American citizen to die in the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine, has asked Secretary of State John Kerry to release the U.S. data that Kerry cited in claiming precise knowledge of where the suspected anti-aircraft missile was fired.

One of the mysteries of the MH-17 case has become why the United States – after asserting that it possessed information implicating ethnic Russian rebels and the Russian government – has failed to make the data public or apparently even share it with Dutch investigators who are leading the inquiry into how the plane was shot down and who was responsible. ...

In a letter to Kerry dated Jan. 5, 2016, Thomas J. Schansman, Quinn’s father, noted Kerry’s remarks at a press conference on Aug. 12, 2014, when the Secretary of State said about the Buk anti-aircraft missile suspected of downing the plane: “We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

Yet, where the missile launch occurred has remained a mystery in the MH-17 investigation. Last October, when the Dutch Safety Board issued its final report on the crash, it could only place the launch site within a 320-square-kilometer area in eastern Ukraine, covering territory then controlled by both Ukrainian and rebel forces. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile).

Meanwhile, Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the Dutch Safety Board’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

In the days immediately after the shoot-down, Kerry and other senior U.S. officials pointed the finger of blame at ethnic Russian rebels who were resisting a military offensive by the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev. The Russian government was faulted for supposedly giving the rebels a powerful Buk anti-aircraft system capable of downing a civilian airliner flying at 33,000 feet.

But – in more than 18 months since the tragedy – the U.S. government has never made public its alleged evidence, while Russia has denied supplying the rebels a Buk system and the rebels have asserted that they did not possess functioning Buk missiles.

Tunisia Protests - "It's not only about jobs, it's about corruption"

Tunisia imposes curfew as unrest grows over lack of jobs

Tunisia has imposed a nationwide overnight curfew after protests and violence against rising unemployment spread across the country.

The curfew, to be imposed from 8pm until 5am, was announced after skirmishes between police and protesters in the early hours of Friday in the impoverished suburbs of Tunis. The capital is braced for mass protests this weekend.

The violence followed a week of unrest across the country, which police said had injured 59 officers and 40 protesters. The protests carry echoes of Tunisia’s Arab spring revolution in December 2010, which saw the downfall of the former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

“We have the freedom, but you cannot eat freedom,” said one unemployed graduate, Saber Gharbi, “There is a big similarity between 2011 and now. The same people are in the street for the same reason.”

IMF's Prescription for Europe: Exploit Refugees with Low Wages

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday released a report urging the European countries accepting a majority of refugees to "temporarily" pay them less than minimum wage.

In its report, the IMF recommended implementing a short-term differentiation between asylum seekers and EU citizens, by way of "temporary and limited derogations of the minimum wage for refugees."

That would entail giving wage subsidies to companies to employ individuals migrating to Europe to escape war, poverty, and state violence from the Middle East and North Africa, or adopting "temporary exceptions to minimum or entry level wages" for those already hired.

"International experience with economic immigrants suggests that migrants have lower employment rates and wages than natives, though these differences diminish over time," the report, The Refugee Surge in Europe: Economic Challenges, states.

According to Jordi Angusto, an economist with the European Progressive Economists Network (Euro-PEN) and Spain's Econonuestra, who spoke with Common Dreams over email, "The IMF is the sancta sanctorum of neoclassical/neoliberal thinking, a theory sustaining that lower salaries increases always the employment."

The outcomes put forth in the report are unrealistic, he said. "Most probably, the first effect should be a workers substitution (more expensive for less expensive ones), thus increasing the xenophobia amongst substituted and at risk of substitution workers; the second effect, an aggregate decrease of salaries as GDP %, increasing profits and global inequality," Angusto said. "From the demand side, lower salaries should mean less demand than supply; a lack of demand that, if compensated by exports, should imply a beggar-thy-neighbour strategy, adding pressure to cut wages in third countries."

Israeli Settlers Seize West Bank Buildings Near Key Religious Site

Though aides to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon insisted that the “purchases” were almost certainly illegal, Israeli military forces were deployed to the West Bank city of Hebron to crack down on Palestinians who protested the settler takeover of buildings near an important religious site. Several Palestinians were hospitalized.

Dozens of settlers showed up in Hebron this afternoon, breaking into a pair of buildings they claimed to have purchased, and have declared “Beit Rachel” and “Beit Leah.” The apartment buildings were vacant, but there was no indication that the settlers had any permit to buy land in a Palestinian city.

The proximity of the apartments of the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as al-Ibrahimi Mosque, adds to the tension, as the site is religiously important to both Muslims and Jews. ... Israel’s far-right government will almost certainly pressure Ya’alon to allow the occupations to continue, with Likud Minister Zeev Elkin cheering the takeovers as “the appropriate answer to murderous Palestinian terrorism.”

Fresh outrage after militia seen rifling through tribal artifacts at Oregon refuge

LaVoy Finicum, one of the leaders of the armed protesters occupying the Malheur national wildlife refuge, posted a video of himself inside a government building looking through cardboard boxes of papers and other items associated with the local tribe – and inviting Paiute leaders to meet with the militia and reclaim their belongings.

“We want to make sure these things are returned to their rightful owner,” said Finicum, who recently helped destroy a US Fish and Wildlife Service fence and remove cameras that he claimed the government was using for surveillance. ...

Days after the occupation began, leaders of the federally recognized Paiute Indian tribe in Burns, the town closest to the refuge, decried the armed occupation, pointing out that the out-of-state militiamen were trying to claim sacred lands that are part of the tribe’s ancestral territory.

The new video, posted on Wednesday night, has only further enraged tribal leaders who recently called on law enforcement officials to protect native cultural resources at the refuge and to criminally prosecute the militiamen. ...

Tribe leaders and federal officials say the refuge stores confidential documents and thousands of historic artifacts, such as baskets, spears, tools and beads. The refuge is also home to Paiute burial grounds, making the militia’s recent decision to pave a road through the refuge particularly alarming.

“I could go to the Bundys where his grandparents are buried,” Kennedy said. “How would they feel if I drove over their grave and went through their heirlooms?”

Fueled by 'Austerity Agenda,' Gov. Plans for State Takeover of Chicago Public Schools

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has been accused of "doubling down and holding Illinois citizens hostage with his austerity agenda" following his backing of Republican plan for a state takeover of the Chicago Public Schools.

With the move, unveiled on Wednesday, Rauner "launched a years-in-the-making all-out assault on the Chicago Teachers Union," the Chicago Tribune reports, while Politico describes the school system as "the latest laboratory for an ambitious Midwestern governor trying push his anti-union agenda." ...

As WTTW reports, the proposal would allow for CPS, which faces a $500 million cash shortage, to declare bankruptcy. It would also allow, the Tribune adds, "the governor's hand-picked State Board of Education chief to replace the mayor's appointed school board until the district's finances were deemed fixed. The state panel would have the power to negotiate a new teachers' contract if none is reached in current talks, or oversee a union contract that could be broken if the district filed for bankruptcy." ...

Among the proposal's critics—who also include embattled Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the CTU—is House Speaker Michael Madigan, who pointed to failures in another city which stripped local control away with the appointment of an emergency manager. "The disaster in Flint, Michigan, is a very timely example of how reckless decisions just to save a buck can have devastating consequences on children and families."

"Republicans' ultimate plans include allowing cities throughout the state to file for bankruptcy protection, which they admitted today would permit cities and school districts to end their contracts with teachers and workers—stripping thousands of their hard-earned retirement security and the middle-class living they have worked years to achieve," Madigan's statement added.

Ben Joravsky argues at the Chicago Reader that the plan is "a blatant attempt to use bankruptcy laws as a pretext to reward friends and punish enemies."

Elizabeth Warren Denounces Travesty of Government "Settlement" With Goldman Sachs

Criticism of US government leniency on Wall Street legal transgressions is now being covered widely - even by trade publications such as the National Mortgage Professional Magazine. On January 18, the trade publication ran an article about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemning the most recent US government settlement with a "too-big-to-fail" financial firm, in this case Goldman Sachs, for illegal abuse of the mortgage market:

Sen. Warren used her Facebook page to denounce the agreement, noting that the settlement sum was “barely a fraction of the billions investors lost” while arguing that Goldman Sachs was not properly penalized for its actions.

“That’s not justice – it’s a white flag of surrender,” she wrote. “It’s time to end this farce. These companies think they’re above the law – and too many government officials go along with them. A first step would be to pass the bipartisan Truth in Settlements Act to shine more light on these backroom deals. A second step would be to get government officials who have the backbone to fight back.”

Warren’s comments were echoed by the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG).

The publication, which is geared toward professionals in the mortgage industry, also tellingly noted, "In announcing the [$5.1 billion] settlement, Goldman Sachs made no admission of guilt or error, and no executive from the New York-based financial giant will face criminal or civil charges." 

UN Fact-Finding Mission to Investigate Racial Discrimination in the United States

Why New Orleans public defenders will not take criminal cases of city's poorest

The New Orleans office that represents poor criminal defendants has started refusing to take on serious cases – murder, rape, manslaughter – due to a lack of funds, and the crisis may soon spread from Louisiana to other states.

A flawed funding scheme, rising caseloads, and – strange as it sounds – safe driving in New Orleans have all conspired to leave the Orleans public defenders office unable to handle big cases. So this month, the office announced that it would turn away many facing serious felony charges, particularly those with potential life sentences.

Criminal defendants who have been deemed indigent have a constitutional right to a lawyer, which should mean that those facing charges can be prosecuted without one.

As a result, the city’s most desperate people – and by definition the poorest – now sit in limbo, waiting in jail an indefinite length of time for their day in court.

The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a federal lawsuit against New Orleans’s chief public defender, Derwyn Bunton, and the state’s lead defender, James Dixon. The ACLU wants the US district court in Baton Rouge to clarify that abandoning indigent defendants is unconstitutional. “It seems clear. It’s in the sixth amendment,” said Brandon Buskey, the ACLU attorney leading the case. “But believe it or not, this circumstance has never been ruled on before.”

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This certainly seems revelatory of Hillary's priorities. I bet Hillary wouldn't do this to Goldman Sachs if she was due to give a speech to the Vampire Squid.

Hillary Clinton angers Iowa fans who waited hours for five-minute speech

Hillary Clinton left her audience cold in Iowa City on Thursday night, after she spoke for less than five minutes to a crowd of more than a thousand people, some of whom had lined up for more than an hour to see her.

After a day marred by a new poll showing Bernie Sanders leading her by eight points in Iowa, Clinton might have been expected to go for broke during a rally at the University of Iowa, which featured a performance by popstar Demi Lovato.

But Clinton did not refer to the Vermont senator, or much else, in her speech. The lack of length and substance of her address appeared to upset some in the crowd.

“It was like a political commercial,” said Allison Steigerwald, a 24-year-old graduate student at the university. “I thought she was saying goodbye to Demi and then she’d start her speech. But it never happened.”

Can Clinton Be Trusted to Regulate the Industry That Made Her Wealthy?

Half the Foreign Policy Experts Signing Clinton’s Anti-Sanders Letter Have Ties to Military Contractors

Hillary Clinton’s campaign released a letter this week in which 10 foreign policy experts criticized her opponent Bernie Sanders’ call for closer engagement with Iran and said Sanders had “not thought through these crucial national security issues that can have profound consequences for our security.”

The missive from the Clinton campaign was covered widely in the press, but what wasn’t disclosed in the coverage is that fully half of the former State Department officials and ambassadors who signed the letter, and who are now backing Clinton, are now enmeshed in the military contracting establishment, which has benefited tremendously from escalating violence around the world, particularly in the Middle East.

[See the article for a list of the suspects signatories and a description of their criminal affiliations employment by military contractors. - js]

Sanders Campaign Strikes Back at 'Mudslinger' for Attack on New Ad

A spokesperson for the Bernie Sanders campaign on Thursday struck back at a political operative who founded a super PAC backing Hillary Clinton and who suggested "black lives don't matter much" to the Vermont senator, saying the former secretary of state "should be ashamed of her association with" him. ...

Brock's comments were in response to Sanders' new, one-minute ad featuring Simon and Garfunkel's 1968 song "America," which you can in the video below:

He told AP that it was a "significant slight to the Democratic base," adding, "From this ad it seems black lives don't matter much to Bernie Sanders."

Sanders campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs responded by slamming Brock as a liar and mudslinger.

"Bernie Sanders, as everyone knows, has one of the strongest civil rights records in Congress," Briggs said in a statement. "He doesn’t need lectures on civil rights and racial issues from David Brock, the head of a Hillary Clinton super PAC. Twenty-five years ago it was Brock—a mud slinging, right-wing extremist—who tried to destroy Anita Hill, a distinguished African-American law professor. He later was forced to apologize for his lies about her.

"Today," Briggs continued, "he is lying about Sen. Sanders. It’s bad enough that Hillary Clinton is raising millions in special-interest money in her super PACS. It is worse that she would hire a mudslinger like David Brock. She should be ashamed of her association with Brock."

Clinton Calls for Small Donor Matching Funds on Citizens United Anniversary

Hillary Clinton declared on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that as president she would “fight to create a robust small-donor matching system.”

Clinton previously endorsed such a system for congressional and presidential candidates as part of her campaign’s platform. While Clinton hasn’t laid out any specifics, almost all House Democrats have co-sponsored the Government by the People Act, which would match political donations up to $150 at a six-to-one ratio with public money. For example, a donation of $100 to a candidate would be matched with $600, so the candidate would actually receive $700 total.

Howard T. Hypocrite, nailed! This information-dense article shows how former populist Howard Dean has been co-opted and dragged down into the greed-pits of Washington, where, yoked together with Newt Gingrich he betrays every value he ever espoused.

Howard Dean Says He’s Not a Lobbyist But He Sure Acts Like One

Last week, we reported that Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and current supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, had attacked Bernie Sanders for supporting a single-payer health plan, claiming that having the government pay for everyone’s health care would “undo people’s health care” and result in “chaos.” In our story, we noted that Dean, once a proponent of single-payer, now works for the lobbying practice of Dentons, a law firm retained to lobby on behalf of a number of pharmaceutical and for-profit health care interests.

In response, Dean tweeted: “I continue to support Single pay or [sic] and I do not Lobby.” ...

Since joining the lobbying industry, Dean has oddly argued on multiple occasions that he does “not lobby.” But he engages in virtually every lobbying activity imaginable, helping corporate interests reach out to lawmakers on legislation, advising them on political strategy, and using his credibility as a former liberal lion to build public support on behalf of his lobby firm clients.

In his new career, he has helped drug companies maintain monopoly power, reversed his old positions on Medicare prices, and worked to undermine a critical component of the Affordable Care Act. Though known for his anti-war rhetoric in 2004, Dean has accepted money from Mojahedin-e Khalq, an extremist group seeking regime change in Iran and has criticized President Obama’s negotiations with Iran.

The fact that Dean is not a registered lobbyist reflects a distinction that is largely meaningless in today’s Washington. Thousands of other professionals in the lobbying business have either never registered or de-registered and lobby registration law has almost never been enforced. Newt Gingrich, who was widely criticized in 2011 for acting as a lobbyist for various clients without registering, was hired last year by Dentons’ lobbying practice, where he works closely with Dean to consult with clients on political strategy. As Legal Times reported, the Dean-Gingrich team is now a selling point for Dentons as the “pair aims to become another Washington-based bipartisan tag team who can act as political soothsayers for whichever corporate clients call upon them.”

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Porter Ranch 'Climate Disaster' Shows Need for National Fracking Ban: Sanders

As the ongoing Porter Ranch disaster shines a spotlight on the dangers of aging natural gas infrastructure around the country, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and environmental experts are now arguing that the leaking well serves as "yet another example of the urgent national need to transition away from fossil fuels." ...

The Porter Ranch gas leak is a climate disaster and yet another example of the urgent national need to transition away from fossil fuels.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 21, 2016

Newly uncovered documents show that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was "commonly used in the Aliso Canyon gas storage wells—including a well less than a half-mile from the leak," wrote Center for Biological Diversity attorney Maya Golden-Krasner in an op-ed for the Sacramento Bee on Thursday. ...

The climate-destroying debacle at Porter Ranch, said Sanders, "is yet another reason why I have called for a ban on all fracking. Porter Ranch is simply one more tragic cautionary tale in our dependence on oil and gas."

He continued: "That is why I have put forth the most far-reaching climate plan of any candidate for the presidency. I opposed Keystone XL from Day One. I am the only candidate for president who has opposed the Bakken Pipeline in Iowa, and the proposed pipelines in New Hampshire and Vermont carrying fracked gas."

As 350.org noted in a statement Thursday, Sanders' fellow Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley have yet to comment on the Porter Ranch crisis or come out with strong positions against fracking.

Flint water crisis: What's in that contaminated water

The city previously bought its water from Detroit (where lead levels are 2.3 ppb) but as of April 2014, it switched its source to the Flint river to cut costs. ... Almost immediately, citizens began to make complaints about the quality of their water. Since then, Virginia Tech and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality have together taken 271 samples.

The average reading was 11 ppb – over two times higher than the EPA guidelines.

The highest reading made by the Virginia Tech researchers observed lead levels of 13,000 ppb – anything above 5,000 ppb is deemed toxic or hazardous waste by the EPA.

In September 2015, doctors from the Hurley Medical Center presented findings of a study about the effects on children younger than 5. The doctors analysed the blood of 840 children who had visited the medical center in 2013 and again in 2015 (i.e. before and after the change in the city’s water supply). They found that lead levels in the children’s blood had risen from 2.1% to 4.0% – a statistically significant rise. When they repeated these tests with children that weren’t from Flint, they didn’t notice the same increase over the same period.

EPA regional director resigns in connection to Flint water crisis

EPA chief Gina McCarthy said on Thursday that Susan Hedman is stepping down effective 1 February. Hedman is administrator of EPA’s region 5, which is based in Chicago and includes Michigan.

McCarthy said she accepted Hedman’s resignation to ensure the regional office remains solely focused on the restoration of Flint’s drinking water.

McCarthy also issued an emergency order requiring Michigan and the city of Flint to take immediate steps after determining that the response by the local governments has been “inadequate to protect human health”.

Meanwhile, Michigan officials say they still aren’t certain whether there’s a link between a drinking water crisis in Flint and an increase in local cases of Legionnaires’ disease.

The EPA's lack of integrity has cost the lead-poisoned children of Flint dearly

Had Isis poisoned a US water supply it would be decried as an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction. Why not hold US officials to the same standard? ...

The Detroit News reports a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency’s midwest office knew about the toxic water. Instead of sounding the alarm, EPA official Susan Hedman “quietly fought” with Michigan’s department of environmental quality (DEQ) for about six months.

The article reveals that “EPA water expert, Miguel Del Toral, identified potential contamination problems with Flint’s drinking water last February and confirmed the suspicions in April. He authored an internal memo about the problem in June, according to documents obtained by Virginia Tech”. The ACLU has accused Hedman, who resigned on Thursday night in connection to the crisis, of downplaying the significance of the Del Toral investigation.

Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech researcher whose work exposed the lead contamination in Flint, told The Detroit News: “There was no sense of urgency at any of the relevant agencies, with the obvious exception of Miguel Del Toral (an EPA water expert) and he was silenced and discredited”. ...

EPA Region 5 administrator Hedman, invoking “the buck stops over there,” refused to accept responsibility for EPA’s role in the Flint poisoning, saying her “agency did not alert the public to the potential dangers, it followed proper protocol by repeatedly prompting Michigan’s DEQ to implement corrosion controls”. ...

Barack Obama said from Michigan on Wednesday that he would be beside himself if he were a parent and learned that his children had been poisoned. Indeed. But why hasn’t he called for the resignation of EPA administrator McCarthy and recommended her and Hedman to the attorney general for criminal prosecution?

Speaking of people needing criminal prosecution...

As the Flint water crisis grows, we must demand more emails from Rick Snyder

Governor Rick Snyder, following through on a promise made on Tuesday, has released emails from 2014 and 2015. That, however, is not nearly enough. If he truly does desire to be transparent – in a state where the governor (and legislature) are exempt from the state’s Freedom of Information Act law that other officials and state employees are subject to – he must release all of the emails.

The public needs to know what his office’s role, if any, was in the decision to use the dangerously corrosive Flint river in 2014 as the sole water supply for a city of 100,000 people, a majority of whom are African American, and many of whom are desperately poor.

Every time the administration is asked about that role, Snyder’s people keep trying to sidestep it. The question is, why?

In a videotaped interview with the ACLU of Michigan on 15 September, Howard Croft, who has since resigned from his job as Flint’s director of public works, asserted that the decision to use the river came directly from the governor’s office.

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Also of Interest

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

Some Experts, Like Krugman, Supported Single Payer Until Bernie Sanders Put It in His Platform

The 0.1%’s Marie Antoinette Moment

No more holding hands

Neocons Flack for Unsavory Saudis

NSA Chief Stakes Out Pro-Encryption Position, in Contrast to FBI

Why I protest – five activists on the new age of dissent

Greece Falls Prey to ECB Diktats and Blackmail

Bolivia's second-largest lake dries up and may be gone forever, lost to climate change

The Real Disaster(s) in Flint’s Water Crisis

Flint And Fallujah

Clinton Now Red-Baiting Sanders

Hillary Clinton and the Northern Strategy

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A Little Night Music

Jimmy McCracklin - Arkansas

Jimmy McCracklin - Just Got To Know

Jimmy McCracklin - Rockin' All Day

Jimmy McCracklin - Think

Jimmy McCracklin - I Cried

Jimmy McCracklin- Steppin' Up In Class

Jimmy McCracklin - Pretty Little Sweet Thing

Jimmy McCracklin - Georgia Slop

Jimmy McCracklin - Lets Do It

Jimmy McCracklin - The Wobble

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