Tag Archives: obama

WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

by JuanBoettcher Posted on April 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

Link – 

WATCH: Cliven Bundy’s Anti-Government Beliefs, Animated Fiore Cartoon

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President Obama Denounces Donald Sterling’s Racist Tirade

by GuadaluStarns Posted on April 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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At a press conference with Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, President Obama was asked about the audio recording of racist Donald Sterling’s racist comments.

Here are his remarks, courtesy of CNN:

I don’t think I have to…interperet Sterling’s statements for you. They kind of speak for themselves. When people…When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don’t really have to do anything, you just let them talk. And that’s what happened here. I have confidence that the NBA commissioner Adam Silver, a good man, will address this. Obviously the NBA is a league that is beloved by fans all across the country. It’s got an awful lot of African-American players. It’s steeped in African-American culture. I suspect that the NBA is going to be deeply concerned in resolving this.

I will make just one larger comment about this. You know, we, the United States, continues to wrestle with a legacy of race and slavery and segregation that’s still there, the vestiges of discrimination. We’ve made enormous strides but you’re going to continue to see this percolate up every so often and I think we have to be clear and steady in denouncing it, teaching our children differently, but also remaining hopeful that part of why some statements like this stand out so much is because there has been this shift in how we view our selves.

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President Obama Denounces Donald Sterling’s Racist Tirade

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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

by gorso6 Posted on April 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Aetna is one of America’s biggest health insurers, and it’s currently operating in 17 different Obamacare exchanges. On a call this morning, CEO Mark Bertolini passed along a couple of interesting factlets:

Bertolini said about half of the company’s premium increases, whatever they turn out to be, will be attributable to “on the fly” regulatory changes made by the Obama administration. He cited as an example the administration’s policy of allowing old health plans that were supposed to expire in 2014 to be extended another three years if states and insurers wanted to.

….Aetna has added 230,000 paying customers from ACA exchanges, and it projects to end the year with 450,000 paid customers. It said it can’t yet draw a “meaningful conclusion” about the population’s overall health status.

The first is interesting because it suggests that Aetna’s premium increases won’t be based on fundamentals. That is, they aren’t rising because the customers Aetna signed up were older or sicker than they expected. That’s good news, even if the regulatory shakeouts of Obamacare’s early days are causing a bit of pain.

And the second is interesting because Aetna apparently expects to double its Obamacare customer base by the end of the year. That’s roughly what the CBO projected earlier this year, and this is a bit of evidence suggesting that they got it right.

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Aetna CEO: Obamacare Pretty Much On Track

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Most Independent Voters Aren’t, Really

by MichellKen Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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I write from time to time about the myth of the independent voter, which goes something like this: there aren’t any. Oh, lots of people say they’re independent, but it turns out that most of them lean in one direction or another, and when Election Day rolls around the leaners vote just as reliably as stone partisans. True independents—the ones who switch between parties from election to election—make up only about 10 percent of the electorate.

Still, 10 percent is 10 percent. It’s not quite nothing. But it turns out that it really is. Today, Lynne Vavreck breaks things down a bit further and explains just how these folks vote:

Only a small percentage of voters actually switched sides between 2008 and 2010. Moreover, there were almost as many John McCain voters who voted for a Democratic House candidate in 2010 as there were Obama voters who shifted the other way….On average, across districts, roughly 6 percent of Obama voters switched and just under 6 percent of McCain voters switched.

So, yes, there are some true switchers. But mostly they’re going to cancel each other out. The net result from a huge push for swing voters is likely to be no more than 2 or 3 percentage points. In a few high-stakes states in a presidential election, that might make them worth going after. But in your average congressional election, it’s a waste of time and money. So what does make the difference?

On turnout, the numbers were not evenly balanced for Democrats and Republicans. Only 65 percent of Obama’s 2008 supporters stuck with the party in 2010 and voted for a Democrat in the House. The remaining 28 percent of Mr. Obama’s voters took the midterm election off. By comparison, only 17 percent of McCain’s voters from 2008 sat out the midterms.

….It may seem hard to believe that the 2010 shellacking was more about who turned up than about who changed their minds between 2008 and 2010, but it lines up with a lot of other evidence about voters’ behavior. Most identify with the same political party their entire adult lives, even if they do not formally register with it. They almost always vote for the presidential candidate from that party, and they rarely vote for one party for president and the other one for Congress. And most voters are also much less likely to vote in midterm elections than in presidential contests.

The problem is that going after turnout is every bit as hard as picking up the crumbs of the swing voters. Traditional Democratic constituencies—minorities, low-income voters, and the young—simply don’t turn out for midterm elections at high rates. They never have, despite Herculean party efforts and biannual promises that this time will be different. But it never is. They’ll vote for president, but a big chunk of them just aren’t interested in the broader party.

So what’s the answer? Beats me.

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Most Independent Voters Aren’t, Really

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How We’ve Created a Booming Market for Border Security Technology

by MaudeMiramontes Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.

The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn’t happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying “border security,” they weren’t to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.

Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. “Anything that grows or exists in nature,” Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy told a local Phoenix television station, “we build it.”

Nor would those students get to see the miniature drone—”eyes in the sky” for Border Patrol agents—that fits conveniently into a backpack and can be deployed at will; nor would they be able to check out the “technology that might,” as one local Phoenix reporter warned, “freak you out.” She was talking about facial recognition systems, which in a border scenario would work this way: a person enters a border-crossing gate, where an image of his or her face is instantly checked against a massive facial image database (or the biometric data contained on a passport).”If we need to target on any specific gender or race because we’re trying to find a subject, we can set the parameters and the threshold to find that person,” Kevin Haskins of Cognitec (“the face recognition company”) proudly claimed.

Nor would they be able to observe the strange, two day-long convention hall dance between homeland security, its pockets bursting with their parents’ tax dollars, and private industry intent on creating the most massive apparatus of exclusion and surveillance that has ever existed along US borders.

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How We’ve Created a Booming Market for Border Security Technology

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Meet the Doctor Who Gave $1 Million of His Own Money to Keep His Research on Gun Violence Going

by ShastaSnoddy Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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UC Davis

This story was originally published in ProPublica.

Federal funding for research on gun violence has been restricted for nearly two decades. President Obama urged Congress to allocate $10 million for new research after the Newtown school shooting. But House Republicans say they won’t approve it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget still lists zero dollars for research on gun violence prevention.

One of the researchers who lost funding in the political battle over studying firearms was Dr. Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Wintemute is, by his own count, one of only a dozen researchers across the country who have continued to focus full-time on firearms violence.

To keep his research going, Wintemute has donated his own money, as the science journal Nature noted in a profile of him last year. As of the end of 2013, he has donated about $1.1 million, according to Kathryn Keyes, a fundraiser at UC Davis’ development office. His work has also continued to get funding from some foundations and the state of California.

We contacted Wintemute to talk about his research, the politics of studying firearms, and how much we really know about whether gun control laws work.

At the end of one of our conversations, Wintemute volunteered that he is also a donor to ProPublica, something the editorial staff had not known. (He and his family’s foundation have donated less than $1,500 over four years.)

Here is the condensed version of our conversations, edited for length and clarity.

What research were you doing when the CDC ended your funding?

We were looking at risk factors for criminal activity among people who had legally purchased handguns. A person can have a misdemeanor rap sheet as long as his arm and still be able to purchase firearms legally in most parts of the country.

In California, there is an archive of handgun transfers. You could draw a random sample of people who purchased handguns and see their overall risk of committing crimes later. We found people who had misdemeanor convictions for nonviolent offenses were five times as likely to commit violence in the future than people with no criminal records. People who had multiple prior misdemeanor convictions for violent crimes like simple assault and battery or brandishing a firearm were 15 times as likely to be arrested down the road for crimes like murder and rape and robbery and aggravated assault.

What happened when the CDC cut off your funding?

As I recall, we were in the middle of our project period. We had the expectation that we would be continuing the funds according to the initial award.

When CDC’s funding went away, some private foundations stepped up. But there was a growing sense that little or nothing was going to be done about the problem, at least at the federal level. Why put your money into this one when Congress won’t be doing anything about it?

When did you start donating your own money to keep your research going, and what does the money support?

There came a point when I decided that the work we do is as important as the work of the other nonprofits to which I gave donations. I decided, I’m going to keep the lights on. I told our small staff—three people besides me—I will make that happen personally if need be.

A million dollars is a lot of money. Where does it come from?

Some of it is gifts from stock that was given to me by my father. He’s a businessman. He ran a small company that did well and that’s done well in his retirement. I didn’t earn that. I’ve always seen myself as the steward of that resource.

Some of it is my cash. It boils down to this: I earn an ER doc’s salary. I lead a very simple life. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, I don’t have a television. My rent is $840 a month. It’s easy to save. I don’t drive a fancy car. I don’t go out to eat.

One recent study from Harvard researchers found that there were lower gun death rates in states with more restrictive gun laws. The study got a lot of press. But you’ve been very critical of its conclusions. What’s wrong with this kind of analysis?

Almost all the effects they had seen from mortality in the study had to do with suicide. But the laws were largely intended to prevent homicide.

Number two: Correlation is not causation. Rates of gun deaths are lower where rates of gun ownership are lower. That’s true. We know that. It’s also easier to pass laws like this where the rates of gun ownership are lower. There aren’t that many guns around, there isn’t that large a constituency of gun owners.

States with lots of laws have lower firearm death rates, but the fact that two things occur at the same time does not mean that one of those things caused the other.

So is there any evidence that denying people the right to legally purchase guns has an impact on crime?

In 1991 California began denying people who had been convicted of violent misdemeanors. Our group took advantage of this natural experiment. Everyone in the study tried to buy a handgun from a licensed seller. One group tried to do it under the terms of the new policy, and their purchases were denied. The other group tried it in the two years before the policy, and their purchases were approved.

The people who got their guns were 25 to 30 percent more likely to be arrested for crimes involving firearms or violence. There was no difference in arrests for crimes that did not involve violence. The difference was specific to the types of crimes the law was supposed to affect.

We also looked at denial for felons and found the same effect. Felons who were denied had a lower risk of being arrested for crimes of violence down the road than were people with felony arrests who were able to purchase their guns.

So do we know whether background checks for all purchases—as President Obama has proposed—would actually prevent violence?

There are not hard data on whether universal background checks work better than what we have at the moment. But there’s lots of suggestive evidence.

One piece of that evidence we have comes from the state of Missouri, a new study by Daniel Webster. Missouri had universal background checks and repealed them. In very short order, there was evidence of increasing gun trafficking. The guns that were recovered after use in crime were getting newer. The inference was it was much easier for people to acquire guns for criminal purposes.

You are planning a broad study about whether comprehensive background checks work. What will that research look like?

Six states—Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and New York—have just adopted comprehensive background checks, and they’ve all taken effect already. The provisions of their laws vary, and they started from different places.

The intent of our study is to come as close as possible to determining whether there is a causal relationship between comprehensive background check policies and important measures like crime and mortality.

Do you think there’s any chance the CDC will get new funding to resume gun violence research?

I think hell will freeze over before this Congress gives them money. The good news is that funding from other sources is starting to pick up. The National Institute of Health—it’s the first time in their history that they have issued a formal program announcement, a request for proposals on firearms violence.

The NRA has been critical of your work, and says you’re funded by anti-gun groups.

I won’t take money from advocacy organizations.

So, what groups would be on that list?

The National Rifle Association, The Second Amendment Foundation, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Brady Campaign, Moms Demand Actions, Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Have you ever accepted funding from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg?

I have not.

How do you draw the line between nonprofits whose funding you do accept, and “advocacy organizations”?

I’ve been offered money to do studies where the conclusion was basically determined from the design of the study. It wasn’t really science. The organization that was offering to fund the study was also going to control the interpretation of what the analysis meant. They were going to make the decision of whether or not the study got published. As a scientist, I just can’t enter into such an agreement. We have to let people know what the truth is, even if the truth makes someone uncomfortable.

Has your research ever made gun control advocates uncomfortable?

I did a gun show study. When I started crunching numbers on gun show sales, and looking at the surveys, I came to realize—as interesting as this is, gun shows themselves are not a big part of the problem. I felt obligated to add this into my report.

Before we released the study, I had a conference call with a bunch of organizations that I knew were interested in working to close the gun show loophole, and I told them what we were saying. That was a very uncomfortable conversation. People got very angry. It was going to make it more difficult for them to do what they wanted, which was to close the gun show loophole.

You recently did a large survey of federal firearms dealers. What was the most interesting finding?

We learned that a majority—not a large majority, but a majority—of gun dealers and pawn brokers are in favor of comprehensive background checks.

Do you know why some dealers supported background checks and others didn’t?

There is a sense in the country that retailers who have lots of traced guns i.e. guns that show up at crime scenes are themselves bad guys, and I just don’t believe that is always the case.

Retailers who had higher frequencies of attempted straw purchases, higher frequencies of attempted off-the-books-purchases, were more in favor of comprehensive background checks. They’re in the business. They know that when they say “no” to somebody, that guy is just going to go somewhere else to someone who says, “yes,” and they don’t want it to happen. They said “no,” so they want the system to say, “No.”

One of the policy proposals you’ve been looking at is whether people with a history of alcohol abuse should also be banned from purchasing firearms. Is this ever going to be a realistic policy — that two DUIs could mean that someone could lose their legal right to buy guns?

Yes. Last year, I floated the idea to the California legislature, and the legislature passed it. The governor vetoed it, or we’d have it now. His veto message said there’s not enough evidence. There’s tons of evidence of alcohol as a risk factor of violent activity. I think he meant evidence specific to gun owners. We’ve started one study, and are in the process of another. We’ll come back with the evidence.

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Meet the Doctor Who Gave $1 Million of His Own Money to Keep His Research on Gun Violence Going

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Nope, There Are No Russians in Eastern Ukraine. Why Do You Ask?

by CecilaMcKenzie Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Imagine my surprise:

For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.

Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces….More direct evidence of a Russian hand in eastern Ukraine is contained in a dossier of photographs provided by Ukraine to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a Vienna-based organization now monitoring the situation in Donetsk and other parts of the country. It features pictures taken in eastern Ukraine of unidentified gunmen and an earlier photograph of what looks like the same men appearing in a group shot of a Russian military unit in Russia.

Nope, nobody here but us surprisingly disciplined, well-trained, and Russian-armed guys in masks taking over government buildings. Anybody got a problem with that?

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Nope, There Are No Russians in Eastern Ukraine. Why Do You Ask?

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The US Government Really Isn’t Worried About “Transcendence” Happening in Real Life

by PhyllisRamsden Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

This post contains spoilers, but the movie is bad so I don’t think you’ll care.

Transcendence is an awful movie—two hours of squandered potential. (You can read my colleague Ben Dreyfuss’ review here.) The film stars Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, and Kate Mara. It was executive-produced by Christopher Nolan, and marks the directorial debut of cinematographer Wally Pfister (the guy who made Christopher Nolan movies look like Christopher Nolan movies). The plot goes something like this: Depp plays a renowned artificial-intelligence researcher named Will Caster. He gets assassinated by a terrorist group that fears super-intelligent, sentient machines will one day rule the world. Will’s wife Evelyn (played by Hall) has the bright idea to upload his consciousness to a big computer thing, hoping he’ll live on in cyberspace or something. It works, and this achieves technological singularity (when A.I. becomes greater than the human mind), which Will calls “transcendence.”

Things get really creepy and it starts to look like Johnny Depp The Omniscient Computer really is trying to take over the world. The US government begins to wage a secret war on him/it, and gets into bed with some shady, gun-toting characters in doing so.

Anyway, that may sound like a cool premise, but the movie is really, very boring—but it did get me and my buddy thinking: What would our government do if this happened in real life? Does the government have a contingency plan if (as some believe is possible) sentient machines began outdoing mankind? What if the machines went to war against us? What would Barack Obama do???

Okay, this is stupid. But if America once drew up legit plans to invade Canada, maybe there’s a chance we have a plan for this. I called up the Department of Defense, and was transferred to spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart. I asked him these questions, and if anyone working in cyber warfare had anything to say about this. His response:

I’m gonna be frank with you. There is nobody here who is going to talk about that…There are currently no plans for this. It’s just a completely unrealistic scenario. We have a lot of people working on this team on serious stuff, but this just isn’t a real threat.

“Well,” he concluded, “at least not for now.”

For now.

Obama’s America.

Here’s the trailer for the Johnny Depp movie:

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The US Government Really Isn’t Worried About “Transcendence” Happening in Real Life

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Beloved Author Gabriel García Márquez Was Also a Go-Between for Colombian Guerrillas and the Government

by Tawanna55K Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Gabriel García Márquez passed away on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87. The Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist was celebrated for such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. “The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers—one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Obama said on Thursday.

When a literary figure as towering as García Márquez dies, there are too many fascinating things to write about—his writing, his political history, his wild ride of a life. (Hell, I could see myself writing an entire term paper on his friendly relationship with Colombian pop star Shakira!) I’m not going to attempt anything close to a definitive obituary of a man who gave the world so much through his art. I’ll leave that to others.

But I’d like to highlight one politically significant part of Gabo‘s life: García Márquez wasn’t just an acclaimed writer and passionate supporter of left-wing causes—for a time, he was an intermediary between Colombian leftist guerrillas and the government.

Here’s an excerpt from a 1999 New Yorker profile written by Jon Lee Anderson:

García Márquez who has often referred to himself as “the last optimist in Colombia,” has been closely involved in the peace negotiations. He introduced Colombian president Andrés Pastrana to his old friend Fidel Castro, who could facilitate talks with the guerrillas, and he helped restore good relations between Washington and Bogotá. “I won’t say that it was Gabo who brought all this about,” Bill Richardson, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, said early this summer, “but he was a catalyst.” García Márquez was invited by the Clintons to the White House several times, and friends say he believed that he was going to not only carry off the immediate goal of getting some sort of negotiated settlement between the guerrillas and the government but also finally help bring about an improvement in relations between the United States and Cuba. “The U.S. needs Cuba’s involvement in the Colombian peace talks, because the Cuban government has the best contacts with the guerrillas,” he explained to me. “And Cuba is perfectly situated, only two hours away, so Pastrana can go there overnight and have meetings and come back without anyone knowing anything about it. And the U.S. wants this to happen.” Then he smiled in a way that indicated he knew much more than he was telling me, as usual.

The whole profile, which you can check out here, is definitely worth a read.

I now leave you with this footage of García Márquez visiting Shakira and dancing:

R.I.P.

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Beloved Author Gabriel García Márquez Was Also a Go-Between for Colombian Guerrillas and the Government

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Map: Is There a Risky Chemical Plant Near You?

by BessMEIF Posted on April 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last April 17, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people, injured at least 200, and destroyed dozens of homes, schools, and a nursing home. In the wake of the disaster, we wondered: Can we locate the industrial sites in your community where similar incidents might occur?

The answer to that question, it turns out, is not so simple. Even basic information about sites where hazardous chemicals are kept and what kinds of accidents can be anticipated is tucked away in official documents. Much of that data is not easily accessible due to post-9/11 security measures, making it nearly impossible to get a clear sense of whether you live, work, or go to school near the next potential West, Texas.

Here’s what we do know: Millions of Americans live near a site that could put them in harm’s way if hazardous chemicals leak or catch fire. The Environmental Protection Agency monitors roughly 12,000 facilities that store one or more of 140 toxic or flammable chemicals that are potentially hazardous to nearby communities. In late 2012, a Congressional Research Service report found that more than 2,500 of these sites estimate that their worst-case scenarios could affect between 10,000 and 1 million people; more than 4,400 estimated that their worst-case scenarios could affect between 1,000 and 9,999 people.

The interactive map below, based on data from the EPA’s Risk Management Program, shows at least 9,000 facilities where a “catastrophic chemical release” or what the EPA calls a “worst-case scenario” could harm nearby residents. Hover over any site to see its exact location, the chemicals it stores, and how many accidents it documented in its most recent 5-year reporting period.

According to chemical safety experts, this is the most comprehensive national-level chemical safety data out there. But there’s a lot it doesn’t tell us.

First, don’t let the facilities with no accidents fool you. Before its explosion last year, West Fertilizer’s EPA records showed that it had no mishaps. “A lot of facilities, even though they haven’t had any accidents, it doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of one, and that the damage can’t be similar to what we’ve seen in West, Texas,” explains Sofia Plagakis, a policy analyst with the Center for Effective Government‘s environmental right-to-know program. “It only takes one accident,” says John Deans, a former toxics campaigner at Greenpeace.

And if you click on the West Fertilizer Co. plant in West, Texas, you won’t see any record of ammonium nitrate, the prime suspect in last year’s explosion. (The other suspect was anhydrous ammonia, which the EPA does monitor.) That’s because the chemical is not monitored under the EPA’s Risk Management Program. Basically, the data used to make this map can’t be used to predict the next West, Texas-style accident; it couldn’t even predict the first West, Texas, accident.

More data is out there, however. To find out more about where ammonium nitrate is stored, try the Department of Homeland Security, which monitors facilities that keep the chemical under its Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program. Yet DHS never knew about West Fertilizer, even though the plant told state agencies in 2012 that it stored 540,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, about 1,350 times the amount that triggers the reporting requirement. While West Fertilizer didn’t report to DHS, it did disclose its ammonium nitrate storage to Texas’ emergency planning committee in a federally required report that’s meant to help firefighters, hospitals, and other first responders prepare for an accident. Almost every facility on the map above also stores a chemical whose name has been redacted. That information is only accessible if you visit one of 15 EPA Federal Reading Rooms scattered across the country.

If you’re confused, you’re not alone. Disparate government data sets and patchy oversight have raised more questions about chemical risks than regulators or citizens can answer. In the wake of the West, Texas, tragedy, the Obama administration promised to address these knowledge gaps and issued an executive order, calling for agencies such as DHS and the EPA to improve their info sharing with state agencies and local responders.

Other organizations have tried to determine which chemical plants pose the greatest risks to nearby residents. In 2011, Greenpeace’s Deans and his team set out to find some answers in the EPA data. But publicly accessible risk data doesn’t say exactly how close facilities are located to communities, how many people live in those communities, or what kinds of damage an accident might cause. The West Fertilizer explosion destroyed or irreparably damaged three of the town’s four schools. Had the accident happened during the day, Plagakis asks, “Did the school know how to get the students out of harm’s way?”

Facilities are supposed to report this information to the EPA, but these Offsite Consequence Analyses are not included in the agency’s response to public records requests for risk management data. You can access this information at an EPA Federal Reading Room. But you’re allowed one visit per month and can only bring a pen and paper. Greenpeace dispatched about a dozen researchers to the reading rooms for this project, Deans says.

When it was done, Deans’s team had identified 473 chemical facilities that could put 100,000 people or more at risk. “Of those,” they found, “89 put one million or more people at risk up to 25 miles downwind from a plant.” In all, Greenpeace concluded, one out of every three Americans was at some risk of being affected by a toxic chemical release from a nearby facility.

Chemical Sites That Put 100,000 or More People at Risk

Source: Greenpeace

Still, the West Fertilizer plant, which is in a town of 2,800 people, does not show up on this map. As mounting evidence pointed to ammonium nitrate as the likely culprit in the West Fertilizer explosion, a team of Reuters reporters started looking for other ammonium nitrate facilities across the country to see if they could pinpoint other potentially risky locations. It found hundreds of thousands of homes, hundreds of schools, and 20 hospitals within a mile of sites that store or use the chemical.

Ammonium Nitrate Sites

Source: Reuters

According to news reports, there are roughly 6,000 facilities that store ammonium nitrate at levels that should report to Homeland Security. DHS never returned calls to verify this number, and it does not publicize the ammonium nitrate facilities it tracks under its Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program. Federal law mandates that any facility storing at least 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate disclose it to local emergency planning authorities. To track down these reports, you have to ask your state for it. Some states, like Illinois, make the information easily accessible online. Others, like Arizona, have denied public requests to see the the documents. Reuters requested these Tier II reports from environmental, public safety, and emergency response agencies in all 50 states: 29 states released the information, 10 states did not respond or did not have electronic data, and 11 refused altogether.

“The states that declined often wanted us to request information about a specific site,” says Ryan McNeill, one of the Reuters reporters who worked on mapping the ammonium nitrate facilities. “They claim that’s what the law intended. Our counter was that this is a silly position because it requires a citizen to know about the existence of a site with dangerous chemicals before they can request information. How is the public supposed to know whether a warehouse houses dangerous chemicals?”

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Map: Is There a Risky Chemical Plant Near You?

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