Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1253
September 22, 2016
THE DISINTEGRATION OF U.S. INFRASTRUCTURE: Quarter Million Water Main Breaks A Year
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US states and cities face continual budget cutbacks while the federal government blows trillions of dollars on permanent war.
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By the SRSrocco Report,
The United States is sitting on top of a massive amount of aging infrastructure that continues to disintegrate at an alarming rate. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the U.S. suffers from 240,000 water main breaks a year. That’s roughly 700 water main breaks each day.
Some of these water main breaks can be quite large. Here is a picture of water main break that took place on Howard Street in Baltimore.
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Furthermore, according to the the Water Main Break Clock, it costs approximately $3 billion a year just to repair the water main breaks in North America (USA & Canada). In addition, a congressional study estimated that water pipe corrosion in the United States costs $50.7 billion annually. Since 2000, the total U.S. water paper corrosion cost is a staggering $674 billion.
To replace all the water pipes in the…
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Climate Disruption: Latest News on ExxonMobil
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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on September 20, 2016, that they’re opening an investigation into whether Exxon has failed to account for the risk climate change and climate regulations could pose to their business model.
The campaign to hold Exxon accountable for their climate cover-up just took a big step forward.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on September 20, 2016, that they’re opening an investigation into whether Exxon has failed to account for the risk climate change and climate regulations could pose to their business model.
Learn more at 350.org.
Forget GMOs. Pesticides Pose the Real Risk
AP Photo/Phil Sandlin
By Liza Gross
The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal that Americans’ appetite for locally grown, organic food is growing. Consumers want to know where their food comes from and what’s in it. Most polls show that the vast majority of Americans also support mandatory labels for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Nearly half of Americans think scientists have found risks associated with eating GM foods even though they haven’t, according to a recent survey by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. “People don’t know very much about the science, and they don’t know that GMOs have been in the food supply for 20 years,” says William Hallman, who ran the survey. “They just know they don’t like it.”
Last month, after years of contentious debate, President Obama signed legislation requiring the first national GMO labeling standard. (Labeling advocates aren’t happy with the law because it lets companies choose whether to use a simple text label or a smartphone-accessible code to disclose GM ingredients.) But what’s lost in the debates over imaginary risks from GMOs is the real threat posed by the way our food is produced.
U.S. farmers apply more than a billion pounds of pesticides to conventionally grown crops every year. It’s no surprise that chemicals designed to kill living things that farmers consider pests can also harm us. There is mounting evidence that conventional agriculture’s reliance on pesticides places agricultural communities, and especially their children, at risk for serious health problems.
Last month, University of California, Berkeley researchers reported that seven-year-olds scored lower on cognitive tests if their mothers were pregnant when high applications of organophosphates and other pesticides were applied to crops near their homes. On average, these children had lower IQs. They also scored lower on verbal comprehension tests.
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, adds to a growing body of research which indicates that people who live and work in agricultural communities face increased risk for asthma, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, and other chronic conditions related to pesticide exposure. Their children are more likely to have birth defects, cognitive difficulties, childhood cancers, lower IQs, and other developmental problems.
Source: Forget GMOs. Pesticides Pose the Real Risk
September 21, 2016
Join the #NoLameDuckUprising Nov 12-13
Are you in?
Dear Corporate Greed Resisters,
As we speak, the White House is preparing Congress to pass legislation that would ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during the coming Lame Duck session. Just last week, Obama insisted that the ratification of the TPP in Congress will “get done,” as he marketed the anti-democratic agreement in Vietnam.
That is why this November, we are launching the #NoLameDuckUprising!
We need thousands to join us as we make the TPP impossible for Congress to pass.
The #NoLameDuck Uprising begins on Nov. 12-13 with an action camp in Washington, DC. We will use the first days of the Lame Duck session to mobilize thousands of people for actions in DC from Nov. 14-17.We will bring the resistance back home between Nov. 21-23 when folks from every corner of the country will pressure their state’s members of Congress to vote against the TPP.
Register now to join the #NoLameDuckUprising! Nov. 12-13: Action Camp in DC
Nov 14-17: Week of Action in DC
Nov 21-23: Home-grown Resistance
We will discuss more details of the #NoLameDuck Uprising on the TPP Resistance Call this Wednesday, Sept. 21 at 9pm EST/ 6pm PST.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE CALL.
Spread the word about the #NoLameDuck Uprising… the TPP cannot pass.
Please support the resistance in any way you can by sharing this email, spreading the word through social media, joining actions, participating in the TPP Resistance call and making a donation. Click here to donate. All donations of $25 or more will receive a Flush the TPP T shirt. Thank you!
Unite for Global Justice,
FlushtheTPP Team
TPP Occucards
Flush the TPP on the web
Flush the TPP on Facebook
Flush the TPP on Twitter, @FlushTheTPP
Our mailing address is:
402 East Lake Ave. Baltimore MD, 21212Click here to donate.
215 Million Gallons Of Radioactive Water Threaten Drinking Water In Florida
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“It’s hard to trust them when they say ‘Don’t worry,’ when they’ve been keeping it secret for three weeks.”
Officials waited 3 weeks to inform the public
Image credits: flickr, simongotz
Mulberry, Florida is now home to a giant sinkhole that has caused 215 million gallons of radioactive water to leak into the state’s supply of drinking water.
The contamination occurred when a sinkhole appeared at a phosphate fertilizer plant near Tampa, which damaged the stack where waste water was stored. This filtered into the state’s aquifer system, which supplies water to residents, making the water contain phosphogypsum. Phosphogypsum is classified as slightly radioactive and is a byproduct of the creation of fertilizer. This is due to the naturally-occurring uranium and radium in the phosphate ore. [1]
The contaminated water also flows into springs used for activities like snorkeling and swimming. [2]
Mosaic, the fertilizer company responsible for the contamination, has kept this sinkhole leak concealed for the better part of 3 weeks, leaving many residents wary when they…
View original post 213 more words
They Have to Go: President of Philippines Demands US Troops Leave
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The US military has occupied the Philippines since the 1898 Spanish American war.
This could be the start of something big. Possibly the end of America’s imperialism. Go home and fix your country, your people, America.
This is the best indication of the country’s decisive China pivot.
Source: They Have to Go: President of Philippines Demands US Troops Leave
undergroundreporter.org
James Holbrooks
September 14, 2016
UR)Philippines — Following Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s comments Monday that all U.S. troops in the country’s southern region of Mindanao “have to go,” an analyst recently posited the president’s move is an indication of the Philippine citizenry’s desire to move away from the West and toward China.
“A considerable segment of the population in the Philippines does not want to see foreign troops, including U.S. troops, in the Philippines,” Dr. Joseph Chang toldRadio Sputnik.
Chang theorizes much of President Duterte’s decision regarding the removal of U.S. troops in the Philippines is rooted in his status…
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The Squatter Movement in New York City: Seizing Housing
By Frank Morales and Bonnie Faulkner
(This extraordinary 2003 interview from Bonnie Faulkner’s Guns and Butter radio program is currently making the rounds of the Internet. Faulkner’s guest is the radical episcopal priest Frank Morales. The highlights of the interview concern 1) the thriving squatters movements in New York City – which is virtually invisible – even in the so-called “alternative media” and 2) the federal “spatial de-construction” program to suppress inner city activism by deliberately destroying ghetto housing.
Morales has been a major squatting organizer since the late 70s in the South Bronx and the Lower Eastside – two of the areas selected for housing demolition. In 2014, he and other squatters offered a public forum called The ABC’s of Squatting in NYC
As he and fellow activists describe at the forum, some of the buildings he and other squatters occupied and rehabilitated were re-taken by the police and demolished while other became legally recognized cooperatives through the hard work of Morales, other squatters and neighborhood supporters.
Morales and Faulkner’s discuss of the government’s deliberate destruction of inner city housing (which happened all over the country) is more ominous. The “spatial de-construction” policy Morales describes came out of a report Samuel Huntington wrote in 1975 (Crisis in Democracy) for the Trilateral Commission – to address the wave of riots that sweep America’s inner cities in the late sixties. In the report, Huntington describes the US as suffering from an “excess of democracy.” In his view, the best way to remove this excess is to make inner city residents homeless by destroying their housing.
The report also recommends reducing their access to high education, as college education was allegedly found to increase blacks’ inclination to riot.
It strikes me as no coincidence that the War on Drugs and movement to mass incarcerate African Americans began around the same time.
Morales also refers listeners to Chapter 17 of the Kerner Commission Report report, which came out in 1967.
He asserts that squatting is the largest political movement in the world and that 75% of the world’s power access housing via squatting.)
This is Guns and Butter.
There was too much democracy. Therefore, that was the reason for this massive protest, the anti-war movement, etc. Their analysis of the ‘60s had to do all with ‘too much democracy. We have to shrink democracy.’ So the shrinking of democracy, the analogy is planned shrinkage on the housing front. It’s to undercut the ability of people to organize if you take out their house.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Frank Morales. Today’s show: The Squatter Movement: Seizing Housing. Frank Morales is a writer and researcher whose work has been published in Covert Action Quarterly, Global Outlook and Midnight Notes. He is the author of Police State America: U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning. He has written numerous articles including Non-Lethal Warfare, Operation Garden Plot, The War at Home,Operations Other Than War and Military Operations in Urban Terrain. Frank Morales is a New York City Lower East Side activist and squatter. Today we explore his work as a grassroots housing activist and leader of the squatter movement in New York City.
Source: The Squatter Movement in New York City: Seizing Housing
photo credit: User:EPO
September 20, 2016
Potentially harmful chemicals widespread in household dust
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A study of the top 10 toxins found in household dust.
Household dust exposes people to a wide range of toxic chemicals from everyday products, according to a new study. A multi-institutional team conducted a first-of-a-kind meta-analysis, compiling data from dust samples collected throughout the United States to identify the top ten toxic chemicals commonly found in dust.
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Russian MoD Releases Footage of Attacked UN Aid Convoy in Syria’s Aleppo (VIDEO)
From Sputnik News:
The Russian military unveiled on Tuesday video footage of a UN humanitarian aid convoy that came under attack in Syria, which shows a militants’ pickup vehicle carrying a large-caliber mortar as part of the convoy.
The video shows that the UN aid convoy was accompanied by a terrorists’ off-road vehicle with a large-caliber mortar launcher, the Russian Defense Ministry spokesman said.
According to Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov
The examination of the video footage made via drones of the movement of the humanitarian convoy in areas controlled by militants in the province of Aleppo has revealed new details. The video clearly shows how terrorists are redeploying a pickup with a large-caliber mortar on it using the convoy as a cover.
Read more: https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160920/1045521488/aleppo-un-convoy.html
See prior post: About That UN Aid Convoy
About That UN Aid Convoy that was Attacked in Syria and the Video of the FSA “Barrel Bomb” Launcher Driving by the Convoy
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Despite US claims to the contrary, evidence strongly suggests that US-backed moderate terrorists bombed the UN aid convoy. Note that the incident conveniently pushed the US bombing of the Syrian Army out of the headlines. Original post has great illustration of Free Syrian Army mortars the US government is calling “barrel bombs.”
by Scott Creighton
On Monday, in between endless reports about the terrorist distraction attacks in Jersey and New York, CNN, MSNBC, Fox “News” and the other corporate media speckled in a few stories about how Russia and Syria were now the responsible parties for the collapse of the Syrian cease-fire agreement because one of the two of them used airstrikes to attack a UN humanitarian aid convoy after it crossed the conflict line in the Big Orem area of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
Nothing was said all day Monday about the US “accidentally” attacking Syrian troops on Saturday, killing 63 of them, in support of “ISIS”
No. By then, the story was all about how it “must have been” the Syrians or the Russians because it was “definitely” an air attack from war planes and the US says they didn’t have any in the area. Ergo… it “must have…
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