You don’t have to eat cattle who have worn trenbolone ear implants to end up with the growth stimulating androgenic hormone in your body reported the Associated Press in 2008.
Water taken near a Nebraska feedlot had four times the trenbolone levels as other water samples and male fathead minnows nearby had low testosterone levels and small heads.
Nor do you have to see a doctor to imbibe a witch’s brew of prescriptions like pain pills, antibiotics and psychiatric, cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy and heart meds in your drinking water, says the AP. Free of charge.
Other “biosolids” found in drinking water include anti-fungal drugs and the toxic plastic, Bisphenol A, from some bottled waters which people ironically drink to avoid tap water.
While pharma and water treatment professionals routinely deny the existence of prescription drugs in public waterways and drinking water — easy to do when they are not tested for anyway! — Mary Buzby director of environmental technology for pharma giant Merck was a little more candid in 2007.
“There’s no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations that they’re at, could be causing impacts to human health or to aquatic organisms,” she remarked at a conference in 2007, says the AP.
And if we need a second opinion from the antibiotics found in Tucson drinking water, sex hormones in San Francisco drinking water and seizure and anxiety meds in Southern California drinking water, there’s the animals themselves.
Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants near five major US cities had residues of cholesterol, high blood pressure, allergy, bipolar and depression drugs reported Discovery news in 2006.
Male fish in the estrogen-saturated St. Lawrence River around Montreal are developing ovaries, reported Daniel Cyr, at Quebec’s National Institute for Science Research according to the Independent Post in 2008.
And now fish in the same area are showing signs of the antidepressant Prozac in their systems says the University of Montreal.
(And that’s not counting the feminized frogs with both female and male sex organs which are increasingly found in US waterways and even suburban ponds, an ominous “canary-in-the-water” trend that indicates serious ecological damage say scientists.)
When scientists studied hybrid striped bass exposed to Prozac at Clemson University, SC they found the fish maintained a position at the top of the water surface, sometimes with their dorsal fin out of the water unlike the fish not on Prozac who remained at the bottom of the tank. Staying near the top of the water and maintaining “a vertical position in the aquaria” could increase the bass’ susceptibility to predators and decrease their survival reported the researchers. Nor did the bass eat as much as non-Prozac fish.
A similar loss in survival behaviors has been seen in shrimp exposed to Prozac who are five times more likely to swim toward light than away from it, making them also more susceptible to predators reports the Southern Daily Echo News.
”Crustaceans are crucial to the food chain and if shrimps’ natural behaviour is being changed because of antidepressant levels in the sea this could seriously upset the natural balance of the ecosystem,” says Dr Alex Ford, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Marine Sciences.
For years public health officials have told people that just because the bass and other fish in their waterways are contaminated with chlordane, PCBs and methylmercury doesn’t mean the drinking water is unsafe. But the prescription drugs levels in fish are precisely because the drinking water is unsafe.
In the State of the Union speech, Barack Obama did get applause for saying that the US stands with the people of Tunisia. Now, he didn’t mention the two decades of support the US had given the dictatorship.
The President did not have anything to say about Egypt — where thousands of people, inspired by Tunisia, were taking to the streets to protest their own repressive government — another one the US has backed for years. Secretary of State Clinton’s official word is that the Egyptian government was “stable”. Aha. She said it’s “looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests” of its people. And she urged “restraint” as they suppressed protesters.
Today there’s more tear gas and water trucks being used on people in the streets of Cairo, and Twitter’s been blocked. As has become the norm, social media helped Egyptian protesters organize and spread the word: Video was uploaded to the Web from cell-phone cameras; it showed activists blocking trucks with water cannons and fighting off police batons. As of Wednesday morning the Guardian newspaper was reporting four dead. And now the Twitter-world’s aflame with reports that Egypt’s ruling Mubarak family’s arrived in Heathrow. Stable — in another country — I don’t think that’s what Secretary Clinton meant.
While this was playing out President Obama was holding forth on US exceptionalism, and especially its role promoting world democracy..
What happens now? Paul Ryan’s Republican response to the State of the Union noted that the GOP is watching protests abroad quite closely — he referred to Greece and England’s “day of reckoning.” But it may not be theirs only.
As massive protests ripple across the repressed world, US leaders can’t both claim leadership and show none. They certainly can’t claim a pro-democracy role and stand firm — until the very last minute — with dictators. And the same is true for the rest of us. When it comes to what’s wrong here — we can sit back and wait for chips to fall, or get involved in righting a wrong and do something.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on Facebook.
We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the launch of President Obama’s escalated military campaign in Afghanistan, so we here at Brave New Foundation decided we’d mark the occasion with a new Rethink Afghanistan video that will convey the reasons why it’s time to end the war. We put out a call to our supporters to share their photo and the reasons why they think it’s time for the war to end on our “Because It’s Time” wall. Almost 1,000 people responded, and the community created a fantastic collage of images and personal statements to take a strong public stand for peace.
In the coming weeks, we’ll use the best comments left on the site to create a new video that sends a strong message to Washington, D.C. that it’s time to end the war.
This is where you come in. We’ve narrowed submissions to just 20 finalists, and we need you to vote on your favorite entries to help us cut this number down to the top three comments and participants. The winners of this vote will get the chance to star in our latest video declaring to policymakers that it’s time to end the war.
Please take a minute to vote on your top three favorite reasons to end the Afghanistan War, and stay tuned for future updates about the results of the vote!
For more updates on Rethink Afghanistan projects, follow Robert Greenwald on Twitter, click here!
Written by Kelly Castagnaro for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.
This article is part of a series by RH Reality Check in collaboration with EngenderHealth, Guttmacher Institute, the International Women’s Health Coalition, the Fistula Foundation, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the Campaign to End Fistula. All articles in this series can be found at this link.
The series is being published during a time of renewed efforts by advocates and the public health community to increase U.S. international support for efforts to address obstetric fistula, a wholly preventable but debilitating and sometimes deadly condition caused most immediately by prolonged labor and too early or too frequent childbearing, but generally rooted in lack of access to health care and discrimination against women. Fistula affects the lives of individual women, their children and families, and also grossly undermines women’s economic productivity and participation in society. The global public health community has called for comprehensive strategies both to prevent new cases and treat existing cases of fistula. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) will soon introduce legislation intended to support a comprehensive U.S. approach to fistula as part of a broader commitment to reducing maternal mortality and morbidity worldwide.
It has been said that in an unequal world, women are the most unequal among equals. Obstetric fistula—a condition driven by a range of inequities in access to basic health services, nutrition, education and other basic elements— is a living example of this statement.
Obstetric fistula is a tear or hole in the birth canal through to the urinary tract and/or rectum and caused by obstructed labor; left untreated, women become incontinent and may uncontrollably leak urine and feces. With more than two million women living with obstetric fistula and between 50,000 to 100,000 new cases each year, we must do more collectively to prevent and treat this condition.
This requires a focus on the human rights dimensions of public health problems.
Rose’s story of surviving fistula in Uganda. Video courtesy of Engender Health and USAID.
Whether by choice, persuasion or coercion, many girls in the developing world have had sex before their 15th birthdays, often without adequate information or protection from unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. For example, an estimated 60 million women between the ages of 20 and 24 in developing countries were married before 18. The Population Council estimates that this number will increase by 100 million over the next decade if current trends continue.
For girls, sexual initiation is more likely to occur in the context of sexual violence and forced marriage, both of which place them at high risk of pregnancy, and STIs, including HIV. In Ethiopia, for example, nearly 70 percent of young married girls are forced to have sex before they have begun to menstruate. Because their bodies are not fully developed and ready to bear children, these young girls are at high risk for injury and death during pregnancy and childbirth. In fact, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death among girls between the ages of 15 and19 in the developing world.
Originally posted at Eyes on the Ties — tracking powerful elites and groups at the heights of business and government.
Not many people know that General Electric has been a huge beneficiary of recent bank bailouts via its financial subsidiary GE Capital, which would be America’s eighth largest bank measured by total assets. Regulators changed banking rules to guarantee $340 billion in GE Capital debt, and the bank received $16 billion in cheap emergency loans from the Federal Reserve, according to Fed data released in December. All the while GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, was on the board of the NY Fed (along with another former GE executive) and a member of Obama’s economic advisory board. The conflicts of interest are obvious and, as one Fed historian put it to the NY Times, “ugly”.
Immelt and Obama talking business in a GE factory
After $40 million in lobbying last year, more than any other company, the returns on GE’s political investments are still flowing. Immelt was with Obama in India a few months ago when he negotiated a $10 billion export deal benefitting GE, and Obama stood at a GE plant in New York as he named Immelt to lead his new economic advisory council, which looks like it will focus on making America’s laws, taxes, and labor force even more business-friendly.
Interestingly, the deep conflicts surrounding Obama’s promotion of Immelt have provoked the strongest criticism from libertarian think tank FreedomWorks, which has close ties to the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are energy moguls notorious for their financing of dozens of free-market political forces, from free-market think tanks to Tea Party affiliates. Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article about the Koch brothers shows how their influence through political and nonprofit financing is both unequalled and self-interested. The Kochs are fiercely opposed to bank bailouts, economic stimulus, and climate regulation. Immelt has been a high-profile supporter of all of these — perhaps because they’ve profited GE — and GE’s campaign contributions have leaned Democratic in recent years. That’s probably why he’s so close to Obama, and why the Koch brothers and groups like FreedomWorks want him to go away.
FreedomWorks and the NCPPR, another free-market think tank, have launched a campaign to “dethrone” Immelt from GE, calling him the “king of crony capitalism”, and are running ads attacking Immelt’s conflicts of interest as a blatant sign of corruption. “It’s time to break up the unethical romance between government and big business,” said FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe in a statement. “For too long, corporate elites have lobbied to profit from the size and growth of government at the expense of hard-working Americans.”
FreedomWorks has it wrong. It’s not the size and growth of government that ensured minimal financial regulations and generous bailouts for well-connected banks like GE Capital, it’s the size and growth of finance and its influence over government. Relative to expanding financial markets, regulations and regulatory bodies are not growing, they’re shrinking. Still, FreedomWorks can apparently exploit anger about Obama’s dirty dancing with bailed-out corporate elites to rally support for further dismantling of government oversight and regulation.
The beast of corporate power is feeding off its own corruption.
At the center of last year’s Wikileaks controversy (which is still ongoing) was a solider by the name of Bradley Manning.It was speculated that Manning provided Wikileaks the classified information it put out.
There was one more about Manning which you should know. He is gay.
This little fact got many members of the right extremely giddy as they attempted to make Manning the poster child of why Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell shouldn’t be repealed. Many of them, especially the religious right, presented Manning as a “radical angry homosexual” who, when he was not considering sexual reassignment surgery (an untrue claim), was striking at the military for its anti-gay policy:
It turns out that Manning is an extreme homosexual activist, whose fury over the services’ homosexual policy may have led him to publicize highly classified documents about the wars. According to the U.K.’s Telegraph, Manning has an extensive history of campaigning for gay, lesbian, and transgendered causes and sources say he may have even been considering a sex change when he leaked military secrets on the Internet. – Family Research Council
“The key point — which is starting to get some more attention now — is that not only was he openly homosexual, but he bore a grudge against the Army for apparently not letting him be completely open about his perverted sexuality.” – Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy in Media
Even if DADT was Manning’s excuse: This isn’t about DADT – this is about an individual who was unfit for military service. Gays served before Clinton introduced DADT (is that what makes liberals so mad? That they have to address that their own party created this legislation therefor compromising their narrative about being so pro-gay rights?) and gays will still serve, regardless the outcome of the ruling. The emotion in the real world doesn’t match the perspective self-importance and no one cares about your sexual orientation. . . The only thing that matters is whether or not you can be stripped down by your commanders, rebuilt, and operate as part of one cohesive unit is strictly prohibited. The military does one thing and they do it well: fight. – Dana Loesch, Big Journalism.
The out-of-the-mainstream media has collaboratively kept the focus on the sex criminal, Julian Assange, and off the guy who has committed actual treason, the homosexual soldier Bradley Manning, who sold out his country in what may turn out to be fit of gay pique. – American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer
As much as I hate to rain on the parade of homophobic nonsense (oh who am I kidding), news has just come down from MSNBC that the U.S. military has not been able to link Manning with Wikileaks:
U.S. military officials tell NBC News that investigators have been unable to make any direct connection between a jailed army private suspected with leaking secret documents and Julian Assange, founder of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.The officials say that while investigators have determined that Manning had allegedly unlawfully downloaded tens of thousands of documents onto his own computer and passed them to an unauthorized person, there is apparently no evidence he passed the files directly to Assange, or had any direct contact with the controversial WikiLeaks figure.
Granted, I am not defending Manning because speculation is still out there in regards to just what happened.
But that is the point. Everything is pure speculation to this point. No one knows what exactly Manning did or why he did it. The only thing that we knew was that he was a possible suspect.
To spin a theory that simply because Manning was gay he leaked secrets in order to attack the military’s DADT policy is an irresponsible stretch. And to demonize the lgbts, who have served and continue to serve bravely, for Manning’s alleged actions – without even waiting to confirm his guilt - is beyond irresponsible. It’s disgusting.
But it’s business as usual with these folks. And that’s even sadder. Those who bear the standard of decent journalism (Loesch) or the standard of “true Christian values” (Family Research Council, Kincaid, Fischer) should aspire to higher ground rather than to the level of pigs in the mud.
Related posts:
One News Now and Cliff Kincaid demonstrate homophobia, ability to lie
Family Research Council distorts British article in attack on gay soldier
Does President Obama understand that if you continually stand in the center of the road you are going to inevitably get hit?
In lieu of writing a post that would fall down the Barack Obama State of the Union media rabbit hole, I offer the speech that I wish the President had given tonight. The following is a dream…my dream and maybe yours. If President Obama gave a version of the following promo from Glen Ford and the Black Agenda Report it would be both high comedy and tragedy. The collective pundit classes would die of a stroke. And the Tea Party GOP and Democrats would have a moment of bipartisan unity as they grab the torches and run Obama out of town.
Either way, the result would be grand sport and entertainment.
Listen to America: Violent to the Bone or read it at your leisure.
Question: In your personal alternate reality–one where Barack Obama is a man with cojones, heart, and true grit–what do you wish the President had said in the State of the Union address tonight?
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America Violent to the Bone
The gruesome murders in Tucson, have prompted a huge chorus of establishment voices to call for a ratcheting down of political rhetoric, lest the more mentally unbalanced among us become unhinged, as is thought to have been the case with the Arizona shooter. At times like these, it is considered unseemly to put such tragedies into a larger context of American violence – a bit like going to a funeral and mentioning that lots of people died on the same day as the dearly departed – which would be a crude and boorish thing to do. The problem is, many of the mourners in this virtual national funeral procession have already brought their own agendas to the sad occasion. The rich and powerful believe it is their privilege to preach over the bodies, in order to properly spin the victims into the hereafter. And that means that the rest of us must also treat the sad occasion as a political event. And so, I will.
Lots of people do die from the violence that America’s political system engenders, tens of thousands every year here at home, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, around the world. The U.S. is uniquely violent among the rich nations of the planet, and that is because of its fundamental political history and social and economic arrangements. American class and racial structures are not only the fruits of great historical crimes of horrific violence, they also require unending applications of violence in order to sustain the prevailing social and economic order.
Therefore, when those who have grown rich from organized violence, who are the same people who have made America, in Dr. Martin Luther King’s words, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world, today,” start talking about ratcheting down the rhetoric so as not to encourage violence, it is time for us to do the opposite. We must become fixated on violence, hyper-conscious of the violence that is inflicted on our own communities and on peoples and nations around the planet, by the people who benefit from what Dr. King called the triple evils: racism, militarism, and materialism. Put in other terms, that’s white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, and rule of the rich.
Those who profit from the existence of the triple evils are the fountainheads of the great violence that afflicts our nation and world. It is no wonder that the most racist political organizations, like the Tea Party, are also the greatest fomenters of domestic violence. They are political heirs to the slave master, who could not have existed without daily application of the most extreme violence to the slave. The militaristic and imperial American state fosters a mass culture of violence that saturates the society at large, inculcating disrespect for human life in general and absolute contempt for the lives of non-Europeans the world over. And the values of the rich – most especially the Wall Streeters that exercise complete hegemony over the machinery of government and the communications apparatus – are those of the mass killer, because the rich few can only remain in power by being prepared to murder the many who have nothing.
So, by all means, let’s examine violence in – and from – America. And then let’s ratchet up the intensity of struggle against the real culprits who profit from a culture of violence.
The wet blue ball that spins in space has its own belief system. How can we join THAT church? Earthalujah!
We are watching the Earth, sitting here with Jehovah, Christ, the Prophet or the thousand gods of secular humanism. We are watching the Earth’s amazing Wikileaks, sharks swimming across Australian shopping malls, freak storms dropping from the jet streams, water, mud, fire escaping everywhere… We nervously check our holy books – did we say this would happen?
We’ve had a lot of best-selling apocalypses. We sought to survive the end of time by selling it in cine-plexes. “Eternity” has been our obsession, from our position back here in the present tense of life. What is after death? What is before birth? Blackbirds fall on the Missouri streets in articulate patterns. The language emerges from the unknown that we crave and fear.
We sing in large harmonized crowds, “My Lord! My Lord! I’ll pay you the rent if you keep the unknown away from me!” Earth-life listens to our stupid culture. The Fabulous Unknown was always our only audience. And it agreed to give us our private moment with eternity – this thing called Life. What a gift! Then we find a way to be confused by the deal of Life. We pray till we can’t think, we shop, we bomb – we demand to be born again.
The power industries, gas and oil and coal and all the CO-2 emitters – they are sly retro-fitters of eternity. They drill and dam and dynamite so that the Earth-life must burst into flames for us. In imitating the apocalypse, they are causing it to happen when it doesn’t have to. What’s REALLY clever is that they then make billions on forestalling our death for a few minutes, by leaving us in the throes of paralyzing comfort. We lay back on our couch, in the room that floats in the stream of time at 80 degrees. We’re muscle bound with passive exertion, our remote raised like the sword of old, gallantly confronting the pixilated apocalypse. (So much of our entertainment is apocalyptic, but we can’t get out of our chair to do anything about it…)
Meanwhile, Earth-life waits in our window. And then our time is up. The ocean blows across the room. Sharks swim up Main Street and they are not special effects, freak storms full of insects drop from the mountaintops and blackbirds try to eat our fireworks. Our violence against eternity, gathering power for our inadequate present life, sustaining our born-again luxury watching HBO from the bed – collapses inward. The Earth has come for its human beings.
The mudslide, the wall of fire, the thirty-years drought - are moving toward us now, and we will die. We were alive the first time we were born, which is to say this: We are alive now! We have everything; every freak storm imaginable is inside us, at this very moment. This is the form the gift takes. The Earth believes in this generosity. Earthalujah!
Obama will deliver his take on the State of the Union tonight and while Congress has bickered about bipartisan seating, it doesn’t matter where anyone sits because the profiteers who define what’s possible in our politics have already barred any serious solution to what ails us.
We know what the problem is: Jobs. 15 million still unemployed. A National Journal piece last week noted that the Great Recession wiped out what amounts to every U.S. job created in the 21st century. And jobs had already been leaving — for three decades.
That’s a bipartisan problem—remember who passed NAFTA, which first opened the floodgates. As a commentator with the hardly radical Hoover Institute told the Journal — Instead of reinvesting the gains of globalization in improved plants or a higher quality of life work in the US, private companies privatized the profits and hired abroad. Driving down wages for them, and us.
Now as cheap production’s boosting profits again,as Heidi Shierholz reminded GRITtv yesterday, while CEOs are smiling, communities are frozen, cold as ice. And again big business is promoting trade.
Abroad, “That’s where the customers are,” the president said last week, and with a jobs-tsar like Jeffrey Immelt the GE CEO at his side – we’re going to hear a lot more of that.
But trade’s not fixed, it’s fouled us up. The spoils have gone to shareholders, and to spending on jobs abroad – and politics — thank you, Supreme Court.
As a result, government’s done nothing: neither through taxes nor through regulations. The traditional tools for evening the playing field — government regulation, economic planning, taxes—have all been turned toxic.
And while bailouts for banks are just fine – safety nets for the rest of us are trashed as socialism and waste. And in place of a community culture, those same profiteers have sold us a celebration of greed and all things private — while denigrating government and all things public. Think public workers, public spaces, public art.
Obama is just the last in a line of Democratic presidents playing it safe, or making change small enough not to rock any powerful boat. But that’s what we’ve seen for thirty years. And playing safe hasn’t been safe at all — it’s played us into a ditch.
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv and editor of At The Tea Party, out now from OR Books. GRITtv broadcasts weekdays on DISH Network and DIRECTv, on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter and be our friend on As President Obama calls on the nation to “come together as a people, Republicans, Democrats, Independents,” and “find common ground, even as we’re having some very vigorous debates,” the questions begs to be asked if the political leadership in Arizona and West Virginia will join him, or remain in their increasingly isolated bunkers of state’s rights. The view from the mountain state to the Grand Canyon state is looking fairly dim. In fact, some observers wonder if Arizona and West Virginia are spiraling quickly down the slippery slope of a virtual secession from federal laws. In less than a month since the tragic shooting of US Rep. Gabby Giffords left six people dead and 13 injured, Arizona has been on a fast-track to challenge federal authority at all costs. Writing in Forbes, journalist Osha Davidson previewed a new bill that “can be summed up in three words: “Stay outta Arizona.” As Davidson notes, “HB 2077 would require any “federal regulatory agency” to register with the sheriff whenever its representatives enter one of Arizona’s fifteen counties. That would effectively end surprise visits by mine safety inspectors, EPA air quality officials and anyone working for the IRS, said Crandell. The sheriff would also be allowed to charge feds a “reasonable” (but unspecified) fee to register.” Only days before, the state legislature took up a bill that would prohibit “courts from considering international law or legal percepts of other nations or cultures when making judicial decisions.” Last week, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer became the first state leader to “play chicken with the Obama administration,” according to the Washington Post, by passing a bill that requests a federal waiver to comply with certain Medicaid requirements. In essence, Arizona plans to cut Medicaid benefits for 280,000 of the state’s poorest citizens. (This is after Arizona cut funds for deathly ill transplants.) The California-transplanted Brewer is no stranger to challenging federal authority–especially President Obama. Last year, she not only championed the draconian anti-immigration legislation, but signed the “Firearm Freedom Act” that permits certain weapons and ammunition manufactured in Arizona to be sold without following any federal registration or regulations. Now West Virginia wants to get in on the state’s rights show–and go one step further. Casting aside the vision of West Virginia US Senator Robert Byrd, who served the state for half a century and warned its leaders and coal industry officials to “embrace the future,” and who declared before his passing last year that “the monolithic power of industry should never dominate our politics to the detriment of local communities,” the Big Coal-bankrolled politicians in West Virginia are introducing three bills that would exempt guns AND coal mined and sold in the state from federal regulation. The bill’s main sponsor, Delegate Gary Howell (R-Mineral), declared what the “EPA is doing is a soft tyranny.” Howell is hardly alone in his defiance of the EPA’s recent move to veto a reckless and violation-ridden mountaintop removal proposal. Despite overwhelming evidence that mountaintop removal mining–the process of using millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives to blow up mountains and dump the toxic waste into valleys and waterways–has devastated the coalfields economies and taken jobs, destroyed the unions, and poisoned watersheds, Acting West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin recently joined a “call to arms” to defy the Clean Water Act and strip the EPA from any federal authority over strip-mining permits. The Rachel Maddow show recently exposed US Sen. Joe Manchin, who is increasingly turning into the “Theodore Bilbo” of his generation, for his rifle-toting defiance of President Obama and his debut legislation to gut the EPA’s power. Meanwhile, while the President details his plans for economic revival and clean energy jobs, residents and advocates across the Appalachian coalfields are wondering why their own states will be left out of the discussion for a just transition. Facing a similar state’s right revolt in the fall of 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy admonished the Senate Judiciary Committee: “States’ rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states’ rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . . The time is long past – if indeed it ever existed – when we should permit the noble concept of States’ rights to be betrayed and corrupted into a slogan to hide the bald denial of American rights, of civil rights, and of human rights.” The time is long past for radical Arizona and West Virginia politicians to return to rule of law, find some common ground and join the rest of the nation.
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