Tag Archives: afghanistan

The Minimum Wage Took a Beating Last Night

by DanelleTier Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Nobody was in favor of raising the minimum wage last night:

Trump: Taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world….People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.

Carson: My first job working in a laboratory as a lab assistant, and multiple other jobs. But I would not have gotten those jobs if someone had to pay me a large amount of money….I would not raise it. I would not raise it, specifically because I’m interested in making sure that people are able to enter the job market and take advantage of opportunities.

Rubio: If I thought that raising the minimum wage was the best way to help people increase their pay, I would be all for it, but it isn’t. In the 20th century, it’s a disaster. If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine.

So we have a billionaire who says people just have to suck it up and work harder; a neurosurgeon who doesn’t realize he got paid minimum wage for his jobs as a kid; and a senator who thinks it’s still the 20th century. But one thing is for sure: they’re in favor of cutting taxes on the rich and keeping wages low for the poor. Sweet.

Read More: 

The Minimum Wage Took a Beating Last Night

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Minimum Wage Took a Beating Last Night

John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

by LutherDetwiler Posted on November 11, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

How would John Kasich cut spending? Answer: his father was a mail carrier blah blah blah. OK, but did you want to name any specific steps, sir? Why certainly:

We would move the Medicare system from a 7 percent growth down to about a 5 percent growth. And I have a whole series of ways to do that. In Ohio, we reduced Medicaid funding for the poor from 10 percent to 2.5 percent, didn’t cut one benefit or didn’t take anybody off the rolls. Why? Because we’re innovators. I’ve been an innovator my entire career. And I really don’t care what special interests or lobbyists have to say. I have a job to do when I take over a public office. Now, we freeze non-defense discretionary for eight years. We also put an increase in defense spending. Our tax cuts balance out. And at the end of the day, we will get to a balanced budget.

So here is Kasich’s plan: cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut domestic discretionary spending, and increase defense spending. And we already know he wants to cut Social Security. So his plan is to cut every single aspect of domestic spending and increase defense spending. And this guy is the moderate in the field.

View original article: 

John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on John Kasich Wants to Slash Everything Except the Pentagon

Here’s Why "Arming the Opposition" Usually Doesn’t Work

by LarhondPYKO Posted on October 4, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I routinely mock the tiresomely predictable calls from conservative hawks to “arm the opposition.” It never seems to matter who the opposition is. Nor does it matter if we’re already arming them. If we are, then we need to send them even better arms. Does this do any good? Can allied forces always benefit from more American arms and training? That gets tactfully left unsaid.

Today, Phil Carter, who has firsthand experience with this, writes a longer piece explaining just why the theory of indirect military assistance is so wobbly in practice:

The theory briefs well as a way to achieve U.S. goals without great expenditure of U.S. blood and treasure. Unfortunately, decades of experience (including the current messes in Iraq and Syria) suggest that the theory works only in incredibly narrow situations in which states need just a little assistance. In the most unstable places and in the largest conflagrations, where we tend to feel the greatest urge to do something, the strategy crumbles.

It fails first and most basically because it hinges upon an alignment of interests that rarely exists between Washington and its proxies.

….Second, the security-assistance strategy gives too much weight to the efficacy of U.S. war-fighting systems and capabilities….For security assistance to have any chance, it must build on existing institutions, adding something that fits within or atop a partner’s forces….But giving night-vision goggles and F-16 aircraft to a third-rate military like the Iraqi army won’t produce a first-rate force, let alone instill the will to fight.

….The third problem with security assistance is that it risks further destabilizing already unstable situations and actually countering U.S. interests. As in Syria, we may train soldiers who end up fighting for the other side or provide equipment that eventually falls into enemy hands.

There are some things we should have learned over the past couple of decades, and one of them is this: “train-and-equip” missions usually don’t work. Sometimes they do, as in Afghanistan in the 80s. But that’s the rare success. In Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan in the aughts, they failed.

So why do we hear cries to arm our allies during practically every conflict? Because it turns out there aren’t very many good choices in between doing nothing and launching a full-scale ground war. One option is aerial support and bombing. Another option is arming someone else’s troops. So if you know the public won’t support an invasion with US troops, but you still want to show that you’re more hawkish than whoever’s in charge now, your only real alternative is to call for one or the other of these things—or both—regardless of whether they’ll work.

And of course, the louder the better. It might not help the war effort any, but it sure will help your next reelection campaign.

More: 

Here’s Why "Arming the Opposition" Usually Doesn’t Work

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s Why "Arming the Opposition" Usually Doesn’t Work

Cops Raid California Pot Farm, Find Bowe Bergdahl

by WendyCrutcher Posted on July 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the former captive of the Taliban-linked Haqqani network in Afghanistan, was at a remote marijuana farm in Mendocino County when a local dope team raided the property on Tuesday. Sherriff Tom Allman told The Anderson Valley Advertiser, which first reported the story, that Bergdahl “was not involved” in the marijuana operation, and authorities later confirmed to NBC Bay Area that he was not arrested during the raid and is not facing any charges.

Held captive since 2009, Bergdahl was freed in May 2014 in a controversial prisoner swap in return for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. While still on active duty, Bergdahl is currently awaiting a military court martial for allegations of desertion. He was on authorized leave from his post at Texas’ Fort Sam Houston and was visiting old friends at the pot farm when the drug task force showed up. Sherriff Allman told the Advertiser that Bergdahl was “above politeness” and readily produced his military ID for officers at the raid as several people were taken into custody.

As Talking Points Memo highlighted this morning, the outspoken critics of the so-called “prisoner swap” that led to Bergdahl’s release at Fox News unsurprisingly harangued Bergdahl as the news of his association with the raid broke. “Do they give him a drug test when he returns?” asked “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy. “Shouldn’t they give him a drug test when he returns? He’s active duty. Remember, he’s protecting us right now.” And Andrea Tantaros, co-host of “Outnumbered,” had this to say:

According to the Advertiser, military authorities were notified, and once calls were made “all the way up to the Pentagon,” Bergdahl was escorted to Santa Rosa and later to his duty station at the Defense Department’s request.

Continue reading – 

Cops Raid California Pot Farm, Find Bowe Bergdahl

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Cops Raid California Pot Farm, Find Bowe Bergdahl

Hillary Clinton’s Emails Show She’s Basically Julia Louis-Dreyfus in "Veep"

by KieraUKPVduc Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This week, the State Department released a large batch of the emails that Hillary Clinton sent and received (on her personal account via a private server!) when she was secretary of state. The media, naturally, dove into this pool and quickly found the most amusing items among the 3,096 pages. One day, Clinton had heard about a Cabinet meeting on the radio and asked her aides, “Can I go?” Another time, she emailed the protocol chief at State, “Can you contact your protocol friend in China and ask him if I could get photos of the carpets of the rooms I met in w POTUS during the recent trip? I loved the designs.” She once struggled to get a fax machine to work. Her emails showed how she and her lieutenants assiduously worked the press to get positive coverage. They revealed interesting details of her close relationship with author and political operative Sidney Blumenthal. But overall, this trove of emails—the first of several to come—depicts Clinton as an earnest public servant toiling away on important affairs of state (global food security, Afghanistan policy, climate change, and international women’s rights) while often operating in a Veep-like world, as in the HBO comedy in which Julia Louis-Dreyfuss plays a vice president-turned-president who must contend with absurdities and indignities large and small as she handles the gravest of matters.

These emails chronicle several scenes that could appear in the television show. At least, it would be easy to envision President (or Vice President) Selina Meyer in these situations.

* On December 17, 2009, Clinton zapped senior aide Jake Sullivan an email titled “Argentina.” She noted, “The FM foreign minister just told me that Arturo…had insulted their country. He was very upset and said I needed to do damage control. Can you figure out what he’s talking about?” (She might have been referring to Arturo Valenzuela, then the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.) Within two minutes, Sullivan replied, “On it.” And Clinton responded, “He’s standing right inside the door here.” In other words, it’s awkward; hurry. Imagine Meyer stuck like this: The Argentine foreign minister is waiting for me, I told him I had to go to the bathroom, but now I have to tell him something about Arturo.

Continue Reading »

Jump to original – 

Hillary Clinton’s Emails Show She’s Basically Julia Louis-Dreyfus in "Veep"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hillary Clinton’s Emails Show She’s Basically Julia Louis-Dreyfus in "Veep"

How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

by Bernard6504 Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

On April 29, three adults and a child came across some fist-sized canisters on the ground outside of Baqim, a Yemeni town controlled by Houthi rebels. To the 10-year-old boy among them, they “looked like toys.” Out of curiosity, they picked up the cannisters, which then exploded. All four were injured; a nurse told Human Rights Watch that the child was wounded in the stomach, and one of the adults received injuries to his face, torso, thigh, and crotch. Considering the kind of damage that cluster-bomb submunitions can cause, they’re lucky to still be alive.

Fighter jets from the Saudi Arabia-led coalition have been carrying out strikes against Houthi rebels since late March, when Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi fled the country. Now, according to two recent Human Rights Watch investigations, they are also using cluster munitions, some supplied by the United States. The first HRW report was published on the heels of mounting concern over the growing toll of civilian casualties from the air campaign—more than 1,800 people have been killed as of late May; at least 135 of them were children. The second report found evidence that US-supplied cluster munitions deployed near populated areas are harming civilians.

Here’s a look at why American cluster bombs, which have been banned by more than 100 countries, are being used in Yemen.

How cluster bombs work: Cluster bombs can be dropped from aircraft or fired from rockets, mortars, and artillery. When they open in mid-air, as many as several hundred submunitions, or bomblets, spread out over a wide area and explode. While the weapons are designed to target military installations and convoys, anyone nearby can be struck. Bomblets that fail to detonate or self-destruct can become de facto land mines. Bombs like those found in Baquim, explains Megan Burke, director of the Cluster Munition Coalition “remain on the ground until someone or something comes along and triggers that explosion.”

Why they’ve been banned: Cluster munitions were first deployed in 1943, when Soviet forces dropped them on German tanks. Due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, they were banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a 2008 treaty signed by 116 nations. Tens of thousands of civilians—a third of them children—have been maimed or killed after encountering the unexploded ordnances in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kosovo, Iraq, and beyond.

Continue Reading »

Jump to original:

How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

The Tea Party’s Most Hated Presidential Hopeful? Hint: Not Hillary Clinton

by Jerilyn00H Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The tea party hates South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the feeling is mutual. It attacked the Republican lawmaker mercilessly during his Senate reelection campaign in 2014, but Graham held his seat with 55 percent of the vote. “Kicking the crap out of the tea party is the most fun Senator Lindsey Graham has ever had,” wrote Molly Ball for The Atlantic last June after interviewing the South Carolina Republican on the eve of his primary election victory, when he faced six no-name challengers, one of them a tea party pick, in his deep red state’s Republican primary.

On June 1, Graham plans to join the crowded GOP 2016 field, according to his preannouncement on Monday. And his soon-to-be presidential campaign raises the question: How will the Graham/tea pary feud continue?

The animosity between this three-term senator and tea partiers began before his 2014 reelection campaign, triggered in part by Graham’s intermittent attempts to work with Democrats in the Senate. Such moves have enraged staunch conservatives. The Executive Committee of the South Carolina Republican Party compiled a list of 29 offenses that they “strongly disapprove of and hold to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principles of the South Carolina Republican Party.” Right-wing blogs have nicknamed him “Flimsy Lindsey” and “Grahmnesty” because he disagreed with his party on climate change, immigration reform, and a few other hot-button Republican issues.

Climate change triggered the first tea party salvos against Graham. In the fall of 2009, tea partiers in South Carolina and beyond bashed Graham for his support of energy legislation that aimed at reducing carbon emissions. In an editorial titled “Graham’s Dalliance With Cap-And-Trade Crowd a Bad Move,” Michael Costello of the Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune wrote, “If Republicans really want to completely alienate this crowd and give birth to a third party, they should follow the lead of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). He has thrown his lot in with John Kerry (D-Mass) to push one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history, the carbon cap and trade bill.”

Soon after that, as Politico reported, the conflict between Graham and tea partiers “sparked a mutiny back home” in South Carolina. The Charleston County Republican Party, in a written resolution, slammed Graham for stabbing Republicans in the back and undercutting “Republican leadership and party solidarity for his own benefit.” Politico noted that “bubbling” conservative discontent blew up because of the climate change bill but was also fueled by Graham’s support for immigration reform and changes at the US detention facility Guantanamo Bay. Graham, a hawk who often criticizes President Barack Obama’s national security policies, didn’t try to make peace with his conservative critics. Instead, he called detractors of immigration reform “bigots” and refused to disavow or stop his occasional bipartisan efforts.

“I’m making that a tea party goal to get scoundrels like Lindsey Graham out of office,” Greg Deitz, a Charleston Tea Party organizer, told Politico.

In 2010, about 100 tea party activists gathered outside Graham’s office in Greenville, South Carolina, to protest his support for the bipartisan climate bill. “No cap and trade,” they chanted. Two different countywide GOP organizations in South Carolina voted to censure Graham noting that “in the name of bipartisanship—he continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism.”

Tea party activists routinely booed him when he spoke at town hall meetings. At one gathering at the Bluffton Library in June 2010, activists in the audience interrupted Graham with angry questions and accusations when he asked what the biggest problems facing the world were. One audience member, according to the Beaufort Gazette, told Graham to “be conservative and quit reaching across the aisle.”

Graham further upset the tea party by meeting with Obama several times to discuss working together on various issues, such as “closing Guantánamo Bay and bringing terror suspects to justice,” according to Newsweek. Graham was a former military prosecutor who served on the Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, and Joe Biden invited him over to his home for a steak dinner to discuss Afghanistan.

In July, 2010, Graham told the New York Times that the tea party would “die out” because “they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country.”

A few months later, though, Graham tried to mend a few fences. In September, during a private meeting with tea party organizers in North Charleston, he attempted to address tea partiers’ concerns. Later, he praised the movement in interviews, including one with Politico where he said tea party activists “came to Washington talking about reducing spending. Thank God they’re here.” He even tried to get the Senate’s two tea party caucus founders, Rand Paul and Mike Lee, to help him push legislation on Social Security in 2011, which would raise the retirement age to 70 and cut retirement benefits for the wealthy. By August 2011, around the second time he asked for a private meeting with local tea party leaders, Graham bragged to the Associated Press that his new push for fiscally conservative policies had united him with the conservative right.

The détente did not hold. When Graham was up for reelection in 2014, tea partiers were chomping at the bit to defeat him. The only thing they lacked was a candidate who could win in a Republican primary, where Graham needed 50 percent of the vote to avoid a run off.

“There was speculation that he would face severe tea party resistance,” says Robert Wislinski, a political strategist based in South Carolina. “But that never really materialized.” Graham raised $13 million for the primary race, and mobilized a powerful campaign. Five challengers who were seeking their first elected office, and one incumbant state senator, ran against him, but their combined campaign war chest was only about $2 million. The Republican opposition was split, and Graham’s opponents weren’t particularly well known. Nor did the opposition get any help from national tea party activists like Sarah Palin, who remained silent on the race. “The conservative opposition could not unify for the singular purpose of defeating Graham,” wrote the conservative blog RedState in January, and Graham won with 56 percent of the vote.

So Graham beat the tea party and went on to win easily the general election. But will his presidential bid give the tea partiers another chance to cause him political pain?

So far, the tea party has been silent on his campaign. The South Carolina tea party convention did not respond to request for comment, and neither did multiple national tea party organizations.

Either way, Graham’s hawkish rhetoric and lack of national popularity make his chances for election pretty low. If the tea party has their way, those chances might be even lower.

See original article – 

The Tea Party’s Most Hated Presidential Hopeful? Hint: Not Hillary Clinton

Posted in Anchor, bigo, Bragg, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Tea Party’s Most Hated Presidential Hopeful? Hint: Not Hillary Clinton

America’s War on Drugs in Mexico Is Depressingly Similar to the Global War on Terror

by DanaePartain Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

They behead people by the hundreds. They heap headless, handless bodies along roadsides as warnings to those who would resist their power. They have penetrated the local, state, and national governments and control entire sections of the country. They provide employment and services to an impoverished public, which distrusts their actual government with its bitter record of corruption, repression, and torture. They seduce young people from several countries, including the United States, into their murderous activities.

Is this a description of the heinous practices of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria? It could be, but as a matter of fact it’s not. These particular thugs exist a lot closer to home. They are part of the multi-billion-dollar industry known as the drug cartels of Mexico. Like the Islamic State, the cartels’ power has increased as the result of disastrous policies born in the USA.

There are other parallels between IS and groups like Mexico’s Zetas and its Sinaloa cartel. Just as the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya fertilized the field for IS, another US war, the so-called War on Drugs, opened new horizons for the drug cartels. Just as Washington has worked hand-in-hand with and also behind the backs of corrupt rulers in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, so it has done with the Mexican government. Both kinds of war have resulted in blowback—violent consequences felt in our own cities, whether at the finish line of the Boston Marathon or in communities of color across the country.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

America’s War on Drugs in Mexico Is Depressingly Similar to the Global War on Terror

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, organic, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on America’s War on Drugs in Mexico Is Depressingly Similar to the Global War on Terror

7 Reasons America Is Stuck in Never-Ending War

by BobbyeHeinz Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was launched immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when I was still in the military, and almost immediately became known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Pentagon insiders called it “the long war,” an open-ended, perhaps unending, conflict against nations and terror networks mainly of a radical Islamist bent. It saw the revival of counterinsurgency doctrine, buried in the aftermath of defeat in Vietnam, and a reinterpretation of that disaster as well. Over the years, its chief characteristic became ever clearer: a “Groundhog Day” kind of repetition. Just when you thought it was over (Iraq, Afghanistan), just after victory (of a sort) was declared, it began again. Now, as we find ourselves enmeshed in Iraq War 3.0, what better way to memorialize the post-9/11 American way of war than through repetition. Back in July 2010, I wrote an article for TomDispatch on the seven reasons why America can’t stop making war. More than four years later, with the war on terror still ongoing, with the mission eternally unaccomplished, here’s a fresh take on the top seven reasons why never-ending war is the new normal in America. In this sequel, I make only one promise: no declarations of victory (and mark it on your calendars, I’m planning to be back with seven new reasons in 2019).

1. The privatization of war: The US military’s recourse to private contractors has strengthened the profit motive for war-making and prolonged wars as well. Unlike the citizen-soldiers of past eras, the mobilized warrior corporations of America’s new mercenary moment—the Halliburton/KBRs (nearly $40 billion in contracts for the Iraq War alone), the DynCorps ($4.1 billion to train 150,000 Iraqi police), and the Blackwater/Xe/Academis ($1.3 billion in Iraq, along with boatloads of controversy)—have no incentive to demobilize. Like most corporations, their business model is based on profit through growth, and growth is most rapid when wars and preparations for more of them are the favored options in Washington.

“Freedom isn’t free,” as a popular conservative bumper sticker puts it, and neither is war. My father liked the saying, “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and today’s mercenary corporations have been calling for a lot of military marches piping in $138 billion in contracts for Iraq alone, according to the Financial Times. And if you think that the privatization of war must at least reduce government waste, think again: the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated in 2011 that fraud, waste, and abuse accounted for up to $60 billion of the money spent in Iraq alone.

To corral American-style war, the mercenaries must be defanged or deflated. European rulers learned this the hard way during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. At that time, powerful mercenary captains like Albrecht von Wallenstein ran amok. Only Wallenstein’s assassination and the assertion of near absolutist powers by monarchs bent on curbing war before they went bankrupt finally brought the mercenaries to heel, a victory as hard won as it was essential to Europe’s survival and eventual expansion. (Europeans then exported their wars to foreign shores, but that’s another story.)

2. The embrace of the national security state by both major parties: Jimmy Carter was the last president to attempt to exercise any kind of control over the national security state. A former Navy nuclear engineer who had served under the demanding Admiral Hyman Rickover, Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber and fought for a US foreign policy based on human rights. Widely pilloried for talking about nuclear war with his young daughter Amy, Carter was further attacked for being “weak” on defense. His defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 inaugurated 12 years of dominance by Republican presidents that opened the financial floodgates for the Department of Defense. That taught Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council a lesson when it came to the wisdom of wrapping the national security state in a welcoming embrace, which they did, however uncomfortably. This expedient turn to the right by the Democrats in the Clinton years served as a temporary booster shot when it came to charges of being “soft” on defense—until Republicans upped the ante by going “all-in” on military crusades in the aftermath of 9/11.

Continue Reading »

Link:  

7 Reasons America Is Stuck in Never-Ending War

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citadel, Citizen, Cyber, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Oster, Prepara, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 7 Reasons America Is Stuck in Never-Ending War

The Town From “True Blood” Is Filled With Toxic Explosives the EPA Fears Will Blow Up

by SharronWinchest Posted on March 5, 2015

Mother Jones

For the past few years, tiny Doyline, Louisiana, best known as the Southern Gothic setting of HBO’s True Blood, has been perched next to a powder keg. Next month, the Environmental Protection Agency will decide whether to light a match.

In 2012, an explosion at Camp Minden, a former military base just outside of town that had become a hub for munitions contractors, sent a 7,000-foot mushroom cloud into the Louisiana sky. The blast rattled homes as far away as Arkansas and forced Doyline residents to evacuate. “I thought I was in Afghanistan,” one resident told the Associated Press. State police investigators, who raided Camp Minden soon after, discovered that Explo Systems Inc., a munitions recycling company that operated there, was storing 15 million pounds of toxic military explosives on-site—with some of it in in paper sacks, cardboard boxes, or even outside. After the raid, the company, at the direction of state officials, moved the munitions into old bunkers the Louisiana National Guard had made available on the base in order to reduce the risk of an explosion caused by a fire or a lightning strike.

A Louisiana grand jury indicted seven Explo employees on multiple charges, including unlawful storage of explosives and conspiracy. (The case has not yet gone to trial.) Two months later, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms revoked Explo’s explosives licenses. The next week, the company declared bankruptcy, triggering a fight among state and federal regulators over whose job it was to clean up the toxic mess.

Now the race is against the clock. The bunkers are falling apart—pine trees are growing on the roofs of several of them—which means the increasingly unstable materials are now being exposed to moisture. And the EPA has warned that the explosives, which become more unstable over time, are increasingly at risk of an “uncontrolled catastrophic explosion.” So in October, the EPA announced it would do something it had never done before—approved a plan for a large-scale controlled burn of the hazardous military waste.

Continue Reading »

This article is from:

The Town From “True Blood” Is Filled With Toxic Explosives the EPA Fears Will Blow Up

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Town From “True Blood” Is Filled With Toxic Explosives the EPA Fears Will Blow Up