Residents of Flint, Michigan drank poisoned water for over a year.

In mid-2014, Republican governor of Michigan Rick Snyder, Flint’s city manager appointed by Snyder, and other state officials decided to change Flint’s primary water supply source. Flint River would replace Lake Huron, and save the state millions.

Michigan, like other states — especially those controlled by Republican administrations — has accrued large deficits while shifting the tax burden from large corporations and the wealthy onto low- and middle-income earners.

Snyder, for example, “dug himself into a $454.4 million deficit,” giving “away billions of dollars in tax credits to major corporations…all while squeezing more from the average citizen – some $900 million more, while corporations paid $1.7 billion less in 2014.”

The Flint River was, according to CNN, a

…notorious tributary that runs through town known to locals for its filth.

“We thought it was a joke,” said Rhonda Kelso, a long-time Flint resident. “People my age and older thought ‘They’re not going to do that.'”

Flint native and filmmaker Michael Moore called it “a body of ‘water’ where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factories have been dumped for over a hundred years.” Sewage was reported leaking into the river in 2011.

A 2011 city-funded study determined the river would need anti-corrosive treatments before it was safe to drink. Such a treatment was a requirement by federal law. Virginia Tech researchers believe the water could have been made safe to drink for $100 a day.

The Flint River was nearly 20 times more corrosive than Lake Huron, due to high salt levels and pollution, but Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality failed to treat the water. As one leaked DEQ email from April 2015 put it, “Flint is currently not practicing any corrosion control treatment at the water plant.”

Evidence suggests the DEQ “rigged water test results” to make it appear safer than prior research had indicated, and refused to follow federal procedures mandating the collection of water samples in homes at high risk of lead poisoning.

Residents filed a class-action lawsuit, and the U.S. Attorney General’s Office and the EPA are investigating.

The corrosion ate away at Flint’s iron water mains, turning drinking water brown and foul. It further eroded lead pipes that deliver water to homes, poisoning drinking water with lead as well, invisible to the naked eye.

Flint residents, most of whom are black, paid the price. They report experiencing “skin lesions, hair loss, high levels of lead in the blood, vision loss, memory loss, depression and anxiety” (CNN). “The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River” (Washington Post).

The Post notes:

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

Residents bought bottled water en masse. They also rocked the city with protests.

Governor Snyder was informed of the health concerns in February 2015. He ignored them. Administration officials, in private memos, said the issue would “fade in the rearview” after a new water system was completed in 2016, while at at the same time acknowledging this would be “a public health concern with chronic, long-term exposure” and that there existed “public panic.” They assured themselves that safe water acts did “not regulate aesthetic values of water,” so the smell, taste, and look of Flint’s drinking water could be dismissed, while at the same time they discussed how the corrosion of iron pipes was to blame.

Some of his officials were worried, however. Snyder’s own chief of staff wrote in July 2015 to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, “These folks are scared and worried about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us.” The director of that department, Mark Miller, wrote to his colleagues on July 22, “Sounds like the issue is old lead service lines.”

The EPA had picked up on the concerns long before. “State officials seemingly failed to heed repeated warnings from the Environmental Protection Agency as far back as February about potential problems with Flint’s water system” (The Detroit News). Emails show “the EPA and the state engaged in a secret conflict over whether or not corrosion control was necessary in Flint, despite it being a federal requirement.”

The EPA, while clearly fighting to get Michigan to abide by federal rules, also faces criticism for staying silent for months and being too slow to act.

Instead of moving quickly to verify the concerns or take preventative measures, federal officials opted to prod the DEQ to act, EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman told The Detroit News… Hedman said she sought a legal opinion on whether the EPA could force action, but it wasn’t completed until November [2015].

When an internal EPA memo highlighting the concerns was leaked in June 2015, the EPA promised to “verify and assess the extent of lead contamination issues,” while the spokesman for DEQ told a reporter “anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax” and the DEQ attacked the author of the memo and his findings.

(The state likewise attacked the doctor that discovered high levels of lead poisoning in infants and children, saying her work was wrong and that she was causing hysteria; later the state admitted she was right.)

For failing to make public the EPA’s knowledge right away, and for withholding findings from Flint officials because reports were unfinished, Hedman resigned this month.

The issue was still being blown off months later. On August 31, a Michigan state official declared in a private email, “[The] city has bigger issues on their agenda right now.”

Flint finally switched back to its former water supply in October 2015 (a spokesman for the governor claimed Snyder “did not become aware of the severity of the problem with lead until October 1” and moved to fix this “aggressively the next day”), and the DEQ admitted it had made a mistake, saying, “Our actions reflected inexperience.” The director resigned in December.

Snyder declared a state of emergency this month, and the Michigan National Guard arrived in Flint to distribute bottled water. Michael Moore, and others, are petitioning for the imprisonment of Snyder and others involved.

As tens of thousands of children face irreversible brain damage, behavior issues, and organ problems, the Flint crisis, an entirely man-made disaster, demonstrates how strict federal regulations and harsh punishments are sometimes hugely important, not just for private corporations but also state governments — and sometimes don’t come fast enough.

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The conservative magazine Forbes reported last week that “one in three American families have no savings at all…56.3% of people have less than $1,000 in their checking and saving accounts combined.” Further,

…just 37% of Americans have enough savings to pay for a $500 or $1,000 emergency. The other 63% would have to resort to measures like cutting back spending in other areas (23%), charging to a credit card (15%) or borrowing funds from friends and family (15%) in order to meet the cost of the unexpected event.

Why is this? Forbes explains, “Americans are terrible savers.”

Yes, clearly the only explanation can be innate foolishness, bad choices, the irresponsibility of the poor. This follows conservative ideology neatly: the poor are seen as people with “special flaws” that those better off are “immune to,” as one homeless man, Lars Eighner, observed.

Research a bit deeper and one finds larger problems in American society that may offer a more accurate and complete explanation.

In 2013, Socialist Appeal reported very similar statistics (“40% of Americans have less than $500 in savings. 28% have a grand total $0.00 set aside in the bank for emergencies”) but felt it sensible to include that an estimated “77% of Americans say they are living ‘from paycheck to paycheck.’”

Well there’s an interesting bit of information. Might low incomes, living paycheck to paycheck, help explain empty bank accounts?

Why doesn’t Forbes mention, as CBS News noted, that 48% of Americans now live in poverty or at low income?

That’s over 145 million people, and should come as no surprise, considering in 2013 50% of all jobs in the U.S. paid $34,000 annually or less, according to the Economic Policy Institute. 40% of U.S. workers make under $15 an hour.

Though it varies slightly by state, $34,000 is about $24,000 after taxes, or about $1,980 in take-home pay a month. The cost of living also varies by state (the burden on the poor is much greater on the coasts), but the median cost of just a single-bedroom apartment in the U.S. eliminates about half that take-home pay.

And as Forbes itself reported in early 2015, rent costs are rising rapidly, about twice as fast as wages since 2000. It noted the median cost of rent in cities like Charlotte ($1,235), Denver ($1,827), Los Angeles ($2,460), New York ($2,331).     

The Center for Economic and Policy Research determined in 2012 that only 24.6% of American jobs are “good jobs,” defined as employment that pays at least $18.50 an hour, plus options for health care and retirement planning.

$18.50 hourly is about $38,000 a year (roughly $27,000 after taxes, $2,250 monthly). With exploding health care, education, housing, and other costs, it’s clear the majority of workers, those in “bad” jobs, fight an uphill battle:

20.2 million Americans spend more than half of their income on housing, a 46% rise since 2001. Electricity bills have risen faster than inflation for 5 years running, and water bills have tripled over the last 12 years… According to Bloomberg, since 1978, tuition and fees for college have risen by more than 1,000%, medical expenses by 601%, and food prices by 244%.

At the same time, since 1980, worker wages either stagnated or fell; the bottom 50% of Americans now own just 2.5% of the nation’s wealth.

Even those with a college education struggle to find good jobs: in 2014, a massive 46% of employed college graduates under 27 were working in a job that did not require a college degree, and about 15% had part-time work but wanted full-time work.

The testimonials of ordinary Americans explain the challenge of surviving in such an environment. A woman in Kansas City, Missouri making low wages, Kahtea Bobo, lived “in a rat-infested, slumlord house in the inner city” and once “passed a bad check to a store. Her choice was to pass a bad check or not feed her family.”

Those are the kind of choices too many citizens must make. That is how precariously over half the nation lives, surviving paycheck to paycheck.

Conservatives insist it is all about personal choices: just don’t be a “terrible saver” and all will be fine. This is easy to say, but ignores the all-important context of economic realities.

There are different types of choices available to different people, dependent on socioeconomic status. One choice is that of people who are not too terribly poor—choosing between buying a new car or saving for retirement, emergencies, or college.

But the other is the choice of the very poor—between paying the rent and paying the water bill, between paying for gas and paying for groceries. Impoverished and low-income Americans often don’t have the choice to save: they have to spend everything they make right away on increasingly expensive groceries, electricity, water, gas, and rent.

All this is not to say that Americans, including those in poverty or low-income, never make “unwise” choices (non-essential expenses) like “eating out at restaurants, “buying coffee from a coffee shop rather than home brewing,” or buying a new television or phone. But to focus solely on how the poor are “terrible savers,” without any explanation of American economic conditions, only vilifies and stereotypes millions of our neighbors.

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On January 13, 2016, the Iranian government released 10 U.S. sailors, less than 24 hours after two U.S. patrol boats were detained for trespassing in Iranian waters.

According to The New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry credited the swift transfer to the daily communication between the U.S. and Iranian administrations, a warming of relations that both encouraged and resulted from the recent signing of an historic nuclear deal.

Kerry has formed a relationship with Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and the two spoke on the phone to diffuse the situation. Kerry told the press, “We can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago.” Indeed, similar situations have not gone as smoothly during “three decades of hostility and stony silence,” as the Times put it.

Hamidreza Taraghi, a conservative analyst in Iran, praised the U.S. sailors for cooperating, accepting their fault, and apologizing for unintentionally entering Iranian waters. The U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain confirmed the sailors were not harmed in any way.

This is only the most recent sign that the Iranian government is not, despite what far-right warmongering American politicians insist, comprised of unreasonable madmen.

U.S. military experts view Iran’s pursuit of the bomb as highly logical, yet believe there is little chance Iran would use it

Iran is likely pursuing a nuclear bomb not for deployment, but rather for deterrence.

There is a reason the deputy director of the Near East and South Asia Office of State Department intelligence, Wayne White, said the likelihood of Iran actually nuking Israel if it could was a “1 percent possibility” (see Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects). There is also a reason the Department of Defense said Iran’s “willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrence strategy.” 

After all, such an action would wipe out 1.5 million Muslims living in Israel, plus some of Islam’s holiest sites, such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem–where the Muhammad supposedly ascended into Heaven. The attack would trigger an Israeli-U.S. nuclear counterattack that would utterly destroy Iran, all of its people and its holy sites in Tehran, Isfahan, and elsewhere.

Muslim extremists blow themselves and others up in busy marketplaces, but these men and women are rarely extraordinarily rich leaders of nations, with power over millions. Many Americans were sure the U.S.S.R. would bomb them too, but they were wrong. The M.A.D. concept (Mutually Assured Destruction) works.

One expert on Iran from the CIA Middle East division, a conservative, wrote in 2000 that:

Tehran certainly wants nuclear weapons; and its reasoning is not illogical. Iran was gassed into surrender in the first Persian Gulf War; Pakistan, Iran’s ever more radicalized Sunni neighbor to the southeast, has nuclear weapons; Saddam Hussein, with his Scuds and his weapons-of-mass destruction ambitions, is next door; Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most ardent and reviled religious rival, has long-range missiles; Russia, historically one of Iran’s most feared neighbors, is once again trying to reassert it dominion in the neighboring Caucasus; and Israel could, of course, blow the Islamic republic to bits.        

He points out that in the lead-up to the Second Gulf War, the Iranian mullahs believed that if Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons, the U.S. would not have bombed and invaded Iraq (see Chomsky).

Iran knows that if it had the bomb, it would be protected against U.S. invasion or airstrikes–or anyone else’s military interference. The bomb is the ultimate deterrence. North Korea is a good example of this, and Western intelligence and military experts acknowledge it: America does not mess with North Korea because they have the bomb.

If U.S. did not have nuclear weapons, but two of our most hated enemies did, we would find it very sensible to try to build the bomb. Israel and the U.S., historically nemeses of Iran, both are nuclear powers, and the U.S. is the only nation that has actually used a nuclear bomb. Iranian motives are surely understandable.

Jews, while facing discrimination, largely live in peace in Iran

If Iran wanted to wipe the Jews off the map, you would think they’d start at home.

Iran has the third-largest Jewish community in the Middle East besides Israel and Turkey, some 9,000-20,000 people, which has not been “wiped off the map.” A Jewish reporter writing for the Jewish Forward visited Iran in August 2015 and found that:

These Jews — along with Christians and Zoroastrians — are tolerated and protected under Iranian law, but subject to a number of discriminatory laws and practices that limit their opportunities for work in senior government posts and in other ways. But they do not limit their opportunities in business.

The Jews, who felt free to complain to me openly about these areas of discrimination, as they do to the government, are basically well-protected second-class citizens — a broadly prosperous, largely middle-class community whose members have no hesitation about walking down the streets of Tehran wearing yarmulkes.

The new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, has even wished the Jews a happy new year (Rosh Hashana) on Twitter, as has Zarif. As CBS notes,

Since Rouhani took office, his government agreed to allow Jewish schools to be closed on Saturdays to mark Shabbat, the day of rest. Rouhani also allocated the equivalent of $400,000 to a Jewish charity hospital in Tehran and invited the country’s only Jewish lawmaker to accompany him to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 2013.

Unfortunately, Iran does not yet recognize the nation of Israel, and supports Hamas, Hezbollah, and other extremist groups, in the same way the United States supports terror groups in the Middle East, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yet even in times of war, Iran has acted sensibly: calling for a cease-fire in the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in mid-1996, for instance, or offering to accept the Beirut Declaration of the Arab League, which would normalize Arab-Israeli relations, if the U.S. lifted sanctions.

The Iranian people are even more sensible. “Israel Loves Iran” was a social media movement launched by an Israeli graphic designer in 2014 that expanded into a public advertising campaign. “Iran Loves Israel” launched in 2015. Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in this movement to encourage peace.  

Iranian hatred toward the U.S. is the logical result of U.S. foreign policy

What stands out in many American minds is Iranians in the streets burning American flags and chanting “Death to America,” because that is the only glimpse of Iranians the mass media provide.

Why do (some) Iranians do this?

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani suggests the chant is aimed at a long history of deadly U.S. policies toward Iran, like support for the brutal Shah and support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, not at the American people. U.S. support for Israel is another obvious point of anger, again reasonable to any American who dislikes allies of Al Qaeda or other official enemies.

Consider the history of U.S. intervention in Iran and other Middle Eastern nations. The U.S. has installed military bases in virtually all of Iran’s neighboring nations, with missile systems trained on Iran. The U.S. keeps warships in the Gulf, and its maneuvers are practice for engagement with Iran–all too obvious to observers.

We supported Israel, Pakistan, and India in their development of nuclear weapons, and sell many conventional weapons to Iran’s enemies as well. In 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s government and helped install a brutal dictator, the Shah–who ruled with an iron fist until the Iranian people overthrew him.

And again, U.S. invasions into the Middle East strike fear into national leaders (moderate and extremist alike), encouraging them to pursue bigger and better military technology in case of war. On top of all this, Americans have politicians who say they want to wipe Iran off the map–exactly what violent Iranian hardliners threaten to do to Israel!

Studying history can help Americans understand why Iranians aren’t burning the flags of other democratic or predominantly Christian nations.

The Iranian and American people actually agree on most issues

The opinions of ordinary Iranians might be surprising.

See this poll from 2007. Americans and Iranians actually agree on many issues, like our mutual willingness to find common ground, distaste for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, opposition to civilian deaths (although it seems Iranians are even more ethical than Americans in this case!), the acceptance that geopolitical control over oil has much to do with U.S. intervention, the willingness to use diplomacy, trade, sports, and tourism to improve relations, support for treaties that ban nukes, the common fear of enemies developing nukes first, support for the U.N. as a positive force for peace, and the desire for true democracy.

This is the Iranian people speaking, and we should be encouraged by what we hear.

This is why diplomacy is so important, why negotiation and communication and deals are critical, even if the U.S. doesn’t get everything it wants. The people largely want peace. War must be avoided at all costs, for a war simply plays into extremist hands (we should give the democratic movement in Iran the chance to succeed; lifting U.N. and U.S. sanctions that hurt the common people can help in this effort).

General David Petraeus (head of U.S. Central Command in the Middle East) said in 2010 that a preemptive “military strike on Iran could have the unintended consequence of stirring nationalist sentiment to the benefit of Tehran’s hard-line government.” The U.S. State Department confirmed recently that Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s peaceful nuclear reactor did not end an Iraqi nuclear weapons project–it launched it (see Chomsky).

An attack on Iran would only breed anti-American hatred and increase calls for the development of the bomb.

Foreign policy intellectual Noam Chomsky says that would be “a significant blow to the democratic movement in Iran” (the Green Movement staged the largest protests in Iran in decades to demand the removal of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president, much-hated in Iran and the U.S. alike). It would be a “human disaster,” a slaughter of countless innocent people, and of course Iran would retaliate, whether immediately or decades later–leading to the deaths of innocent Americans. Violent foreign policy will breed revenge (“blowback” the CIA calls it), like with Al Qaeda and ISIS.

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The U.S. has controlled Guantanamo Bay since 1903, following a U.S. invasion of Cuba. It was 14 years ago today that the first inmates arrived at Guantanamo Bay prison. The U.S. government would soon be accused of abolishing basic human rights, as defined by the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, U.N. decrees, and other accords.

After 9/11, the Bush administration quietly established that a noncitizen could be tried by secret military tribunals, with no right to choose a lawyer or see the evidence against him, and later, that American citizens could be held indefinitely without charge, without a lawyer, without a trial, if the government suspected they were an “enemy” (see Foner, Give Me Liberty). Under Obama, foreigners and American citizens could be imprisoned or assassinated anywhere on Earth without evidence or trial.

In 2003, Guantanamo Bay held nearly 700 men, age thirteen to ninety-eight, most given to the U.S. military for cash by “Afghan warlord militias and both Afghan and Pakistani bounty hunters,” but only 8 percent turned out to be Al-Qaeda. “Six hundred have been released, six convicted, and, according to the government, nine have died, most from suicide” (see Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States).

A 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report found that at least 119 people, some innocent, were tortured during the Bush years in secret prisons, including Guantanamo—and failed to provide information leading to any high-level terrorists. The report

…described in disturbing detail the mistreatment meted out by untrained CIA officers, some with histories of violence. The abuse included detainees being interrogated for days on end, hooded and dragged naked across floors while being beaten, threatened with death, deprived of sleep for up to a week, and subjected without medical reason to “rectal rehydration” and to “rectal feeding” with a puree of humus, raisins, nuts and pasta with sauce.

Other techniques include mock executions, exposure to extreme cold or heat, and psychological warfare, all ongoing under Obama’s administration. A U.S. soldier described how a fellow female soldier reached into her pants and wiped fake menstrual blood on a Muslim prisoner, asking, “Does that please your God? Does that please Allah?” The reporting soldier said:

I think the harm we are doing there far outweighs the good, and I believe it’s inconsistent with American values. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that it’s the moral antithesis of what we want to stand for as a country.

One Guantanamo inmate spoke of being hung naked from a wooden beam for three days, having his genitals touched, and being isolated and deprived of sleep through loud music and bright lights for long periods. Other prisoners describe beatings, broken bones, broken teeth, heads struck against the floor, without medical treatment afterward.

Obama’s Justice Department consistently works to coverup images of torture, according to American lawyerstrying to represent prisoners.

Similarly, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, suspects were beaten, electrocuted, attacked by dogs, and made to lie naked on other prisoners.

As at Guantanamo, other prisoners were nearly drowned (“waterboarded”), many were kept in coffin-sized boxes for days, some were told their mothers would be raped and killed, and at least two prisoners died—one from beatings, the other from hypothermia. High-level military officials have warned that such methods do not yield accurate information, and inspire individuals to join terror networks and participate in suicide bombings (see Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects).

Al Qaeda and other extremist groups use the imprisonment and torture of innocent people at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere to ferment anti-American hatred and recruit new members.

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