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It’s hard to imagine someone being shot for knocking on a stranger’s door in Finland, Spain or Canada
I live in the country. It’s easy to lose your way. Mailbox numbers flake off. Satellite signals vanish. Our packages have been delivered to the raccoons in the empty house down the road. I can’t count the times we’ve gotten lost en route to a friend’s, taken the wrong turns, stayed on the wrong dirt road until we could turn around. What would have happened if one of those driveways had belonged to Kevin Monahan, who, according to neighbors, had a “short fuse” and was enraged about trespassers?
Once, 15 years ago, a young man driving to work at five in the morning swerved off the road, tore up our lawn, demolished two lilac trees and smashed into a corner of my husband’s studio. We’d been asleep. We ran outside. It never occurred to me that he was a terrorist or a criminal fleeing the cops. It couldn’t have been more obvious: He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and missed the curve. Dazed but apparently unhurt, he lowered his window, handed us his phone, and asked us to call his brother.
The differences between that upsetting but not fatal experience and the recent shootings in Missouri and upstate New York are a measure of what has changed in a decade and a half. It’s hard to pinpoint the reasons why things have taken such a dire turn. The increase in gun violence has put us all on edge. An uptick in impulsive, explosive, trigger-happy rage ramps up the fear and paranoia that has us warily eyeing our fellow passengers and shoppers.
Race may well have determined a white octogenarian’s decision to shoot the Black child who’d come to the wrong address, but we can’t assume that without knowing more about the shooter. Age might have played a part, too. There’s no indication that drugs or alcohol factored in either of these two cases, but these substances can fuel the paranoia that might inspire a driveway or a front-porch shooting – road rage without leaving the house.
Everything we hear, read and observe for ourselves about the deep divisions in our country comes with a more or less veiled threat: the other side is out to get us. While the right confronts the specter of Ruby Ridge, of Randy Weaver’s wife and child killed by FBI agents, the left is haunted by racially motivated murders and random mass homicides. Anyone could start shooting at any moment as we remain locked in a series of struggles: red v blue, white v Black, men v women.
Obviously, we can scale down the violence and death by limiting access to guns, but there will always be guns. So how do we change the belief that it’s a good idea to shoot first and ask questions later? How do we repair this broken chromosome in our nation’s cowboy DNA?
Given that Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos are among my all-time favorite TV series, I hesitate to advocate dialing down the violence in our entertainment. On the other hand, we might want to consider the fact that Yarl’s shooting was headline news. An alternate scenario – Andrew Lester calmly telling Ralph Yarl that he was on Northeast 115 Street, when actually he was looking for Northeast 115 Terrace – would never have been reported.
Violence is news. If it bleeds, it leads. It’s our daily diet, the disease we can watch proliferate in prime time. Do Andrew Lester and Kevin Moynahan watch TV? Have they seen cops shoot multiple bullets into a Black man before one word is exchanged? For some, the lesson of that sort of footage is: it’s something guys do. It happens.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t see those films. We need to know that this strain of violence isn’t going away. But we might consider the downside of prurience, of the numbing effects of sensationalism, of watching the same chaotic body-cam clip night after night. Perhaps we need to consider the balance between normalizing and reporting.
It’s hard to imagine someone being shot for knocking on a stranger’s door in Finland, Spain or Canada. We Americans seem to have a national anger-management problem, which grows even more toxic when it interacts with racism, sexism, jingoism, homophobia, transphobia and a slew of other “reasons” for hatred.
I can’t imagine the magic cure for an epidemic of impulse murder. It’s too huge, too systemic, too ingrained in the fabric and the moment. It’s as if our population needs therapy or guidance. At the least, we need to learn not to kill strangers who may need our help – but rather to ask if they are lost.
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Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, carries a casket through the halls of the state Capitol with Rev. William J. Barber, right, Monday, April 17, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. (photo: George Walker/AP)
After passing troopers and security, Jones was then barred from bringing the casket onto the House floor, briefly passing it off at the doorway to fellow Rep. Justin Pearson, who was also recently reinstated.
Demonstrators led by Bishop William Barber II had marched in Nashville on Monday, demanding that lawmakers pass the gun safety legislation and stop using their authority to trample democracy. They carried several caskets symbolizing those lost to gun violence on Monday.
“The legislators are back, but returning duly elected lawmakers to their seat does not solve the problem,” Barber said, demanding that lawmakers “stop committing policy murder.”
The fatal shooting of six people at a Nashville private school last month kicked off a stream of calls for changes to Tennessee’s gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons, tougher background checks and a “red flag” law. Republican Gov. Bill Lee has urged lawmakers to pass legislation that would keep firearms away from people who could harm themselves or others. So far, the Republican supermajority has refused.
Reps. Jones and Pearson, both Democrats, returned to the GOP-dominated General Assembly last week after being ousted for their role in a pro-gun control demonstration from the House floor. The episode has turned Tennessee into a new front in the battle for the future of American democracy and pressured lawmakers to address gun control in a state known for its lax firearm regulations.
On Monday, when protesters were blocked from bringing caskets into the Capitol, Jones carried an infant-sized casket inside and walked with protesters, including Barber, through the building. When he reached the House chamber, the sergeant-at-arms stopped Jones from bringing it onto the floor. As Jones entered the chamber after the session and tried unsuccessfully to get the attention of Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton, Pearson held the casket at the door. When Sexton left, he stopped for a moment to speak to a few protesters.
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French President Emmanuel Macron. (photo: AFP)
His critics call him a snake. But his interventions on China and Ukraine show that he’s a blundering one
Yet, on Monday, a French parliamentary delegation numbering three Macronista MPs (and a lone Républicain) was off to Taipei, to meet most of President Tsai Ing-wen’s government, and “reaffirm our support to Taiwanese democracy” (tweeted by Constance Le Grip, a former Sarkozy aide, now a pro-Macron MP).
You can’t really call this a damage control operation – the trip had been planned for some time. What it really shows, if proof was still needed, was that French foreign policy, like French domestic affairs, is made up as it goes along, by one Macron, Emmanuel. (The clever Bruno Tertrais of Fondation pour la recherche stratégique, a think-tank, recently and accurately told The Economist “Emmanuel Macron’s chief diplomatic adviser is Emmanuel Macron.”) Which isn’t noticeably working out so well for le Président.
Almost immediately after he was re-elected last year, Macron suffered humiliation after humiliation. First, he lost his majority at the legislative elections that followed his victory. Then started the endless battle for the pensions reform bill, in which, by refusing to talk early with the unions, he managed to get much of the old Yellow Vests crowds out in the streets. Even if the bill was eventually passed without a vote, domestically, he has lost control of his agenda.
He was never a professional politician, and the current situation, in which he faces four years of battling for every measure, bores him. Now, with nothing to lose, he’s trying to build up his reputation as a world statesman: Europe’s negotiator-in-chief. His problem being that the rest of Europe doesn’t acknowledge his self-appointed mandate. You only have to talk with Poles, Balts, Central and Northern Europeans to see that they share an exasperation not unlike in tone to that of many of the French marchers.
It’s hard not to recall the first time Macron felt he could alter the course of world politics: his frenzied attempts at dialogue with Vladimir Putin, whom he had invited to Versailles soon after the 2017 election, and was sure he could prevent from invading Ukraine. What followed were trips to Moscow, telephone calls, mentions of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky galore, all for nothing except rising annoyance in Moscow, especially when the Kremlin discovered that a documentary France 2 camera crew had been filming the French end of those long telephone conversations. (Soon afterwards, Putin pointedly cut off one of their calls: “Have to go, I’m already geared up and I’m about to play ice-hockey”.)
In China, the all-too conciliatory Macron (who, as early as a year ago, agreed to a French-Chinese mutual statement in which “France [understood] the importance and sensitivity of Taiwan-related issues and will abide by the One China principle”) still managed to annoy Xi Jinping. At their official press conference, he ad-libbed his answer to the Chinese president’s scripted remarks, droning on and on for twice as long, enough of a diplomatic gaffe that Xi decided to fidget visibly, looking at his watch.
His partners don’t trust him, his adversaries don’t respect him, his own people grumble (in private): having cancelled the French Diplomatic Corps two years ago, so that any member of the French civil service can aspire to a diplomatic post, M Macron not only disdains advice from his remaining diplomats, but even from his Élysée advisers. (“He listens, but he doesn’t follow”, one said.)
This should worry us: Macron has started to encapsulate the unlovable attributes of a particular fraction of the French realist school of foreign affairs, in which cleverness trumps sincerity and values – but with none of its historic cautiousness or subtlety. Listening to the advice of such policymakers as Hubert Védrine, the former Socialist foreign minister, he despises the Western approach to foreign policy, measured by right and wrong, as over-simplistic. (He may be “a snake” – as Iain Duncan-Smith said of him, amid reports that Macron was working on plans with China to bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table – but he’s a blundering one: the worst of both worlds.)
Having risen to power by modelling himself as an outsider, Macron remains an archetypal product of the French blob, a strange universe where talking about something means you’ve achieved it – and also means nobody hears you speaking. This explains a lot of French gaffes in history, and especially why Macron doesn’t understand that each time he lobs another of his brilliant new notions, his allies and enemies hear him. Like the French public, who stopped listening some time ago, so should the West.
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An Idaho judge issued a civil arrest warrant Tuesday for Ammon Bundy. (photo: Heath Druzin)
Ada County Judge Lynn Norton found probable cause that Bundy committed contempt and set his bail at $10,000, a figure she called “reasonable.”
Bundy wasn’t present in the courtroom, though several of his supporters were.
“I can’t really arraign him since he’s not here,” Norton said.
“I think it’s impossible not to conclude that, absent Mr. Bundy having some consequences for his actions, it will just continue,” said Erik Stidham, an attorney who is representing St. Luke’s.
St. Luke’s last May filed a lawsuit against Bundy, his gubernatorial campaign and other business entities, as well as his friend, Diego Rodriguez, and Rodriguez's organizations.
Protests over the hospitalization of Rodriguez’s infant grandson last year that resulted in the redirection of emergency services and a lockdown of the downtown Boise campus were simply a “grift” to enrich themselves and boost their own publicity, the health system alleged.
It could take several days for Bundy to be arraigned.
Norton considered a few other motions made by St. Luke’s legal team, including a request for a “discovery referee” to help compel Bundy and Rodriguez, his co-defendant, to produce documents and other records that can be used at trial. She said she would rule on the request at a later date.
Norton also ordered that Bundy, Rodriguez, as well as other business entities controlled by one or the other, are required to appear for depositions.
A jury trial in the case is set for July.
St. Luke’s legal team asks Idaho Supreme Court to force Gem County sheriff to serve Bundy legal notices
Tuesday afternoon’s court actions come after Stidham and others from St. Luke’s legal team asked the Idaho Supreme Court to force the Gem County Sheriff’s Office to serve Bundy his legal notices as required by state law.
Bundy pleaded guilty to criminal trespassing charges in January, according to Idaho Reports, resulting in a suspended jail sentence and one year of unsupervised probation.
In a letter written April 12, Gem County Sheriff Donnie Wunder said Bundy, who lives in Emmett, is “…becoming more and more aggressive with his behavior…” when served with these civil notifications.
Because he has ignored the lawsuit and hasn’t shown up in court, St. Luke’s lawyers said they must use processing companies to serve him with these documents.
Bundy, who unsuccessfully ran as an independent candidate for governor last year, told Gem County dispatchers he considers processors as trespassers, according to Wunder’s letter.
The sheriff said Bundy told him during a phone call that he was “at his breaking point.”
“By the tone in his voice, I believe he is,” Wunder wrote. “My concern is with the safety of process servers and my deputies. I do not want to risk harm over a civil issue.”
In a follow-up email with Gem County Prosecutor Erick Thomson on April 14, Thomson confirmed to St. Luke’s that Wunder would not continue to serve these documents without a court order.
State law requires county sheriffs to serve these documents in legal cases. Failure to carry out these deliveries is a violation of St. Luke’s constitutional rights, according to its legal team. Wunder told Boise State Public Radio in an email Tuesday that he cannot comment on ongoing litigation.
CEO says St. Luke’s wants to stand up to ‘bullying, intimidation, disruption …’
Several hundred pages of sworn statements, legal briefs, new arguments and evidence filed in recent months in the case between St. Luke’s and Bundy, Rodriguez and their organizations offer more insight into what happened in mid-March 2022, during a series of protests outside St. Luke’s hospital in downtown Boise over the child protection case.
The court documents also show that Bundy continues to ignore or refuse to cooperate with the legal process. Rodriguez has participated to a limited extent.
Rodriguez last year greeted the lawsuit by posting on his website that he looked forward to it opening a door to him, legally. He could now obtain financial evidence and other information relating to St. Luke’s and share it with the public, he wrote.
Rodriguez took the opportunity to use that open door last month, when he made his own demand that St. Luke’s provide him with the legal evidence to which he is entitled as a defendant.
The evidence he requested includes:
- “security footage from the Ambulance Bay during the dates and times noted where St. Luke’s alleges to have needed to lockdown the hospital because of an alleged imminent danger from protestors.”
- records of his grandson’s medical care, case files, meeting notes and financial records to show how much money St. Luke’s was paid during his grandson’s stay at the hospital.
- data and records related to COVID-19 medical treatment.
- the number of minors who have died at St. Luke’s hospital annually for the last 10 years.
- detailed information about COVID-19 vaccines and St. Luke’s policies regarding the vaccines.
- “details of any and all complaints issued against St. Luke’s hospitals for medical malpractice, medical negligence, or any other lawsuits, complaints, referrals, or likewise demonstrating incompetence, errors, or problems with St. Luke’s doctors, nurses, or staffs.”
Judge Norton on Tuesday issued an order that blocks Rodriguez and other defendants from sharing the information they receive from St. Luke’s.
Rodriguez last month also formally responded to the lawsuit in a court filing that repeated many of the claims St. Luke’s is suing him over.
“Everything I stated and published is either completely true or is something I believe to be completely true,” Rodriguez wrote in his response to the court. “In America, we have the right to Freedom of Speech and no one can compel me to not speak the truth about any subject — particularly when the welfare and safety of my own grandson is involved.”
Rodriguez said he and Bundy have not made any profit from the child protection case.
“How sick and twisted could someone possibly be to even imagine that I was engaging in a ‘grift’ as they call it — that I was trying to gain money and publicity from the kidnapping of my grandson,” he wrote in his court filing. “This level of depravity is rare, and one can only assume that the plaintiffs or their counsel are acting in perfect alignment with the textbook psychological definition of ‘projection,’ which means that they accuse you of doing what they would do. Normal, decent and honest citizens with integrity would never think to use the most horrifying experience in their entire life — the kidnapping of a precious baby, in this case my own grandson — for profit!”
In addition to their attempts to extract information from Bundy, St. Luke’s attorneys traveled to Orlando, Florida, in January to question Rodriguez under oath, as ordered by the court. The lead attorney sent Rodriguez several emails, which are part of the court records. Rodriguez did not show up.
Rodriguez emailed the attorney in February, saying he was "not waiving any rights to challenge the order to sit for a two day meaningless deposition," but that he would "attempt to make myself available" on two days in late March — at a location in Brazil.
St. Luke’s attorneys have since asked the judge to impose sanctions and force the defendants to cover the costs of pursuing them under the law.
"I believe it is important that St. Luke's stands up to the bullying, intimidation, disruption, and self-serving and menacing actions of (Bundy, Rodriguez and their organizations) …” said St. Luke’s Health System CEO Chris Roth, in a sworn statement from November. “Inaction would signal that this type of behavior is acceptable in our community. It is not."
Rodriguez, Bundy and their organizations spearheaded the protests after Rodriguez’s grandson was placed in child protection and hospitalized at St. Luke’s.
Protesters shouted profanities at health care workers who were going to work or leaving work at the hospital, according to statements from St. Luke’s officials, health care workers and a patient’s husband.
St. Luke’s officials and health care providers said hundreds of people protested outside the hospital on March 15. At one point, they said, elected legislators joined the protest.
In a video posted to Facebook by one of the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho, current Republican Sen. Tammy Nichols, R-Middleton; and former Republican Reps. Chad Christensen of Iona, Karey Hanks of St. Anthony, and Ron Nate of Rexburg are shown participating in the protest.
The video also captures one of the protesters boasting that they kept an ambulance from being able to leave the hospital’s ambulance bay. The hospital went on lockdown for about two hours that day. It diverted patients and ambulances to other health care facilities during the lockdown.
People from about 30 states called the hospital as the protests continued, according to a sworn statement by the health system’s vice president of population health.
Those calls flooded the hospital’s switchboard, according to statements from St. Luke’s officials, and included messages such as:
- "I'll f------ kill you"
- "If that baby is not returned to its mother there is going to be hell to pay"
- "Groups are going to be coming . . . we're coming"
- "The governor of this state should be shot"
- "It's disgusting what this hospital is doing to this baby ... sex trafficking ... you are responsible for that"
- "How about you give that baby an enema you baby killers? What is wrong with you morons? You are going to pay for this."
- "If anything happens to your [sic] child your ass is dead"
- "You will be put in jail and executed"
- "I am so f------ pissed off at you people right now, you have no right to be alive."
“What was remarkable to me was that the protesters were willing to put the lives of the medical staff, all the child patients, and their families at risk," one pediatrician said in a sworn statement. "Many of the protesters were openly carrying guns. They were aggressive toward staff members coming and going from the entrance. That fear that we would not be able to protect not only ourselves but the numerous sick, young children both on the general pediatric floor and the pediatric (cancer) unit was intense."
The pediatrician said that, because the infant’s location was not disclosed, the medical staff worried that armed protesters would come into the building and search room by room until they found him.
That may have been one of the group’s plans, according to a sworn statement from the husband of a patient who was in the hospital ICU that day.
The Treasure Valley resident was visiting his wife daily during a two-week stay at St. Luke's in Boise following surgery. He said the number of protesters increased from "just a handful" on March 13, 2022, to "about 400 or more people" two days later, the day the hospital went on lockdown.
"That day, the entrance to the hospital was completely packed with protesters," he wrote in a sworn statement. "They were using megaphones to shout at doctors and people walking in and out — sometimes straight into their ears."
The patient's husband on that day couldn't find parking at the hospital due to the protest and ended up parking near a cemetery a couple blocks away. As he walked to the hospital, he noticed "all of the side streets were full of Bundy's people. I saw a truck parked on one side street that had several men in the back holding AR-15s." Protesters called nurses coming and going from the hospital the "c-word" and the "b-word" as well as "murderer" and "kidnapper," the patient's husband wrote.
He noticed someone in the crowd whom he recognized from "several months prior when I was part of a counter-protest to the Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters in downtown Boise," he wrote.
Identifying the woman as "Sara Ann," the patient's husband said the woman told him that armed militia groups were on their way to the hospital and the crowd planned to take the baby.
"Shocked, I asked her if their plan was to go from room to room looking for the baby," he wrote. "She responded: 'In every war there's casualties and Ammon believes it's a war zone.'"
The patient's husband said he confirmed with Bundy that Bundy supported the protest.
"I was genuinely concerned for my wife's safety should the protesters breach the hospital doors and security," the patient's husband wrote. Because of his concern, he went out to his vehicle to get his handgun, for which he had a concealed carry permit, he wrote.
"Every nurse on my wife's floor was scared. I'm surprised it didn't turn into something really ugly," he wrote. "I can't believe I had to conceal at a hospital, where people go to get healed, not hurt."
Doctors, health care workers feared for their families and patients
Roth said the words and actions of Bundy, Rodriguez and their organizations and followers caused disruptions as the health system stood up its “incident command” for more than two weeks to be ready to respond to armed protests.
"In the 32 years of my career in healthcare, I never imagined that a non-profit hospital could or would be attacked the way (Bundy, Rodriguez and their organizations) have done -- using armed threats, intimidation, doxing, and a campaign of falsehoods to disrupt the hospital's ability to provide medical help to the community it serves," Roth wrote in his statement to the court.
Statements from Roth and several others involved in the case, and statements from their spouses or partners, said the “doxxing” by the protest organizers has affected morale and the mental health of those involved in the case.
Several of the health care workers who were doxxed said in statements that they have anxiety, nightmares, symptoms of post-traumatic stress and repeated checking to make sure doors and windows are locked. They spent hundreds to thousands of dollars on home security systems and changed their daily habits, the statements said.
"I remember when she went to get a tire changed on her car and they asked for her name she was worried about giving it out because you never know who might be a supporter," the husband of a pediatrician wrote in a sworn statement.
Health care providers said they worried not only about the safety of their families, homes and selves; they worried also that parents would be reluctant to take their children to St. Luke’s Boise campus, the location of Idaho’s only children’s hospital.
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Elon Musk arrives at federal court on April 4, 2019 in New York City. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
Wired reporter Dell Cameron was permanently suspended from Twitter Wednesday after reporting on the Matt Walsh Twitter hack
Walsh, who is a longstanding anti-trans, anti-sense pundit, has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter. But on Tuesday night around 8 p.m. ET, his usual posts were replaced by several derogatory callouts of conservatives Walsh has praised in the past, including Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and Ben Shapiro. The alleged hacker also pinned a tweet on the profile reading “My Pronouns Are That/N***a,” and plugged a pro-LGBTQ+ rap.
In an article published Wednesday, Cameron reported on the hack and spoke to the hacker claiming responsibility. According to Cameron’s reporting, the hacker claims he took over Walsh’s account with the help of an “insider” and SIM swapping — a technique where programmers can target accounts that use phone number verification by fooling their cell phone provider. In February, Twitter removed the ability for everyday users to use SMS two-factor verification, which is one of the least secure forms of account protection. (Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was once hacked in the same way in 2019.)
Less than a few hours after reporting on the hack, Cameron’s Twitter account was suspended. Cameron declined to comment to Rolling Stone. But on the journalist’s Mastodon account, he posted that he was permanently suspended for publishing the story. In an email shared with Rolling Stone, Twitter support banned Cameron’s account for violating rules about the distribution of hacked material.
“We don’t permit the use of our services to directly distribute content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in physical harm or danger, or contains trade secrets,” the message said.
Following initial tweets about the hack, Cameron was also targeted by other far-right pundits, who accused him of soliciting stolen information.
The suspension, if related to Cameron’s reporting, would go directly against the platform’s current policies about journalists and hacks, which allows for reporting with “editorial judgment” on hacked material.
“We recognize that source materials obtained through leaks can serve as the basis for important reporting by news agencies meant to hold our institutions and leaders to account,” reads their terms of service. “As such, we defer to their editorial judgment in publishing these materials, and believe our responsibility is to provide additional context that is useful in providing clarity to the conversation that happens on Twitter.”
When reached for comment, Twitter’s press email automatically responded to Rolling Stone‘s request with a poop emoji. The automated response is just another Musk-related change that has been in place since the Tesla tycoon took over the app — a nod to the Twitter overlord’s seemingly desperate desire to leave behind a meme-heavy legacy.
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US Army soldiers sit inside a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (photo: AFP)
This year, the average American paid $1,087 in taxes just for Pentagon contractors alone. Imagine the kind of society we could construct with just a fraction of the resources we devote to war.
Though unable to find common ground elsewhere, Democratic and Republican lawmakers invariably forget their differences whenever the Pentagon is involved. Despite preaching fiscal restraint on social expenditure, the economic conservatives who dominate both parties have never met a military budget they consider too large or demanded that cruise missiles be subject to a work requirement before they vote Yea. As Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute put it back in 2021: “Roll call votes on military spending reveal that there are considerably fewer ‘deficit hawks’ or ‘fiscal conservatives’ in Congress than reported by mainstream media outlets, if any at all.”
The Pentagon’s bloated and ever-expanding budget undermines American democracy, not only because it never receives the same scrutiny as other government spending, but because it ultimately funnels so much money away from essential social and public goods — as a new report released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) makes vividly clear. Published annually on Tax Day in collaboration with the National Priorities Project, the institute’s analysis examines Americans’ incomes taxes in relation to military and security spending to show just how much of the average person’s tax bill is going to the likes of cluster bombs rather than hospitals or schools. Its findings are staggering.
This year, the average American taxpayer paid $1,087 just for Pentagon contractors alone — a sum representing twenty-one days of work for the average person and four times what they contributed to K-12 education ($270). They also paid approximately $74 for the maintenance of nuclear weapons, while just $43 went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An average taxpayer gave $298 to the five largest military contractors, while only $19 went to programs concerned with mental health and substance abuse. Lockheed Martin, incidentally a major air polluter, received $106 from the average person’s income tax contribution, while a mere $6 went to renewable energy.
The institute has long tracked the wider growth of spending related to domestic policing and securitization. Here the numbers are no less striking: $20 per taxpayer for federal prisons and just $11 for anti-homelessness programs; $70 for deportations and border control versus just $19 for refugee assistance, and on and on it goes.
As part of the study, the IPS also offers an interactive tool showing how money currently going to the military might otherwise be spent. These results are also staggering. For just 10 percent of what America spent on militarization in 2021, it could have funded 660,631 registered nurses, 8.8 million units of public housing, or 1.69 million jobs paying $15 per hour with benefits for an entire year. A mere 1 percent could have funded four-year scholarships for nearly 200,000 students, powered 18.7 million homes with wind or 21 million with solar energy, or salaried approximately 81,000 elementary school teachers over the next twelve months.
Faced with numbers like these, it’s hard to not think about the more generous and humane society that might exist if the institutions of America’s government were less captured by the military-industrial complex. The United States currently spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined (the majority of which are allies), and even a 10 percent cut to its military budget would leave it far ahead of all other countries in total military expenditure.
Since the late 1970s, American politics have been dominated by a strand of fiscal conservatism that views taxes as evil and the state as a quasi-illegitimate body that skims from the wealth ordinary citizens earn. There are many problems with this argument, but it’s especially difficult to take seriously given that its proponents always seem to exclude military spending from the equation. Considering how little scrutiny such spending receives, and considering that it continues to increase regardless of who’s in power, ordinary Americans are effectively being forced to subsidize a bloated military bureaucracy to the tune of hundreds of billions every year — all while having zero say in the matter.
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Cities and states that substitute PVC for lead pipes "may well be leaping from the frying pan into the fire." (photo: Angelo Merendino)
Cities and states that substitute PVC for lead pipes "may well be leaping from the frying pan into the fire."
A new report released Tuesday by the advocacy group Beyond Plastics warns that pipes made from polyvinyl chloride, or PVC — a kind of rigid plastic commonly used in construction — can leach hazardous chemicals into drinking water, making them a “regrettable substitution” for lead pipes. The authors urge state and local policymakers to consider non-plastic alternatives like copper and stainless steel.
“Communities that opt to replace their lead service lines with plastic pipes may well be leaping from the frying pan into the fire,” Judith Enck, Beyond Plastic’s president and founder and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, wrote in an introduction to the report.
Co-published with the nonprofits Environmental Health Sciences and the Plastic Pollution Coalition, the report is a response to the bipartisan infrastructure law that the Biden administration enacted in 2021. Of the $1 trillion in federal funding authorized by the law, some $15 billion was directed to state and local efforts to tear out lead water pipes. Lead transferred from these pipes into drinking water can lead to neurological and reproductive damage, seizures, hypertension, and more, as demonstrated by the public health records of Flint, Michigan, the site of the 2014-2016 water crisis. But the EPA offered no guidance on what to replace those pipes with, leaving local governments to determine the answer for themselves.
PVC is often considered an appealing option, thanks to its low cost. But research suggests that a concerning stew of chemicals can make its way from PVC piping into the drinking water it conveys. Among these chemicals are hormone-disrupting organotins and vinyl chloride, the key building block for PVC and a known human carcinogen.
It’s unclear exactly how much of these chemicals gets transferred from PVC pipes into people, but experts say they can be harmful even at very low doses. “PVC is a horror show,” Bruce Blumberg, a professor of development and cell biology at the University of California Irvine, told the authors of the report.
Additional chemicals that have been found leaching from PVC pipes include benzene, styrene, tetrahydrofuran, methylene chloride, and other volatile organic compounds. These compounds, which may be released into drinking water when PVC pipes are exposed to high heat, are variously linked to cancer, immune suppression, or damage to the nervous and reproductive systems.
Meanwhile, Beyond Plastics says existing systems to protect the public from PVC-related contaminants are inadequate — and potentially compromised by industry influence. The EPA doesn’t have legally enforceable drinking water standards for the vast majority of chemicals used commercially by humans, including organotins, and those that it does regulate are usually tested for at water treatment plants, before water travels through the pipes that lead to people’s homes.
To ensure pipes are safe, the EPA relies on NSF, an international nonprofit formerly known as the National Sanitation Foundation. NSF sets its own standards for how much of certain chemicals are allowed to leach from PVC pipes, and charges pipe manufacturers for a certification saying their products meet those standards.
Enck raised concerns about conflicts of interest in the standard-setting process, not only because NSF gets industry funding from those piping certification fees but because industry representatives sit on the NSF committees that propose and vote for water quality and exposure standards. (Public health experts also sit on these committees, but one former member told Beyond Plastics that their voices were “absent or very quiet.”)
“Shouldn’t this be the role of government?” Enck said. “We would not expect a coal plant to certify whether they’re complying with air pollution laws.” She also noted that NSF typically only tests for leaching chemicals on a short-term timeframe, potentially failing to capture what happens as PVC sits in the ground over years and decades.
NSF did not respond to Grist’s request for comment. The EPA said it has supported the development of NSF’s plumbing safety standards and that they require evaluations to ensure chemicals that leach into drinking water are “below levels that may cause potential adverse human health effects.”
Beyond Plastics says more toxicological data is urgently needed to characterize the full chemical consequences of using PVC pipes. But in the meantime, the organization urges policymakers to consider piping made of simpler, less chemical-laden materials, like copper or stainless steel. These pipes cost more than PVC — but they would only increase the total cost of replacing lead pipes by about 5 percent, according to Beyond Plastics.
Plus, there are nonmonetary costs of plastic to consider, including its carbon footprint and the toxic air pollution caused by its production. In February, the Norfolk Southern train derailment in Ohio highlighted yet more risks as it spewed vinyl chloride and other plastics-related chemicals into the air and soil of East Palestine.
“There are very serious impacts,” Enck said. “Plastic is not cheap when you take everything into account.”
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