Scandal of the Week: NIKE Runs Mountaintop Removal Football Ad

by Jeff Biggers

Maybe it's the toxic waste dump. Maybe the pesticides, or the diesel fumes, or the arsenic. How a small-town mystery could change the way we look at pollution.

by Jacques Leslie

THE FIRST BABY'S NAME was America. She was born in September 2007, with Down syndrome, two heart murmurs, and part of her upper lip missing. She couldn't suck from a nipple, so her mother, Magdalena Romero, would stay up through the night to feed her with a special tube. America showed pleasure in music and delighted in being held by her four siblings. Magdalena thinks they felt a special tenderness for her because of her vulnerability.

Hospital officials told Magdalena that the baby wouldn't live a year, but she didn't want to believe it. Then, one morning when America was nearly five months old, her lips turned purple. Concluding that paramedics would consider a rescue futile, Magdalena drove the baby to the hospital herself and insisted that all efforts be made to save her. For a few days, America survived, tethered to machines. Then she died in her mother's arms.

A few flowers struggle to grow in the tiny patch of soil in front of the Romeros' house in Kettleman City, California, a farmworker community halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Outside, the powder blue trim is peeling; inside, the house looks sparse, unfinished, except for an alcove off the living room that has become a memorial to America. On the wall hangs a carefully embroidered cloth with her name and birth date in red script and her tiny hand- and footprints rendered in pink; rosary beads are draped over the frame. Nearby, three photos of America sit atop a VCR—they're typical baby pictures, filled with pink and lace, that startle because of America's missing lip. Magdalena stands in front of the shrine; her lips form a slight smile, but her eyes look uncertain. "You feel all the time, every hour, that something is missing," she says. Magdalena, now 33, dared to have another child, whom she also named America. The toddler is healthy, but Alondra, her six-year-old sister, keeps asking, "Is this baby going to die too?"

There are between 30 and 64 births each year in Kettleman City. In 15 of the 22 years since California's public health department began tracking birth defects, all babies in the town were healthy, and in five other years, only one birth defect occurred. But in the last two years and 10 months, residents say, at least 11 babies have been born with serious birth defects. Three eventually died; another was stillborn. Most have cleft lips or palates, and some have other, graver maladies. "When my child was born," Magdalena says, "I thought she was the only one with a deformity. But when it began happening to other babies, I realized there was something abnormal in my community."

 KETTLEMAN CITY—a dot on the map so insignificant that it is technically not even a town but a "census-designated place"—rose out of the scrublands of the western San Joaquin Valley in the late 1920s, following the discovery of oil in the nearby Kettleman Hills. The second-longest street in town, all half a mile of it, is named General Petroleum Avenue, and the third-longest is Standard Oil Avenue. Those names are as close to wealth as the town gets. Nearly half its 1,500 residents live below the poverty line, according to the 2000 census. A couple of miles south on Highway 41, at the junction with Interstate 5, sits an agglomeration of motels, gas stations, an In-N-Out Burger, and a Starbucks, but the town itself has no pharmacy, high school, or movie theater. It also lacks sidewalks, a supermarket, and a clean drinking-water supply (though the 444-mile California Aqueduct, which conveys water from the Sierras to dozens of Southern California cities, runs just past its border). Most Kettleman families travel 32 miles to Hanford, the county seat, to shop for food and bottled water.

It's not a surprise that Eric Cantor continues to publicly boast his plans to erase all the landmark accomplishments Congress has worked so hard to achieve over the past 2 years.  In an interview with Fox News commentator and fellow neo-con Laura Ingraham, Cantor promised to take steps to repeal health care legislation once he "becomes House majority leader."  How presumptuous of him.  It seems that his only plan for America is to categorically undo everything House Democrats have accomplished with no plans to actually move America forward.

In addition to clumsily defending his plans for healthcare reform, Cantor also waffled when pressed to respond to Ingraham’s questions on his opposition to earmarks.  It’s no surprise that Cantor is opposed to securing earmarks for the 7th District.  He has consistently neglected his constituents to the point that even conservatives are becoming displeased.

by David Wood

U.S. troops returning home from war may be greeted with pay caps and increased health insurance premiums, and could even lose their jobs -- if Congress no longer wants to keep on the payroll all the soldiers and Marines once needed to fight both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Among other benefits at risk, troops and their families could lose their local military exchanges and commissaries, the large Wal-Mart-type stores where military families enjoy convenient and cut-rate shopping right on base.

Previous generations of troops have come home to brass bands and parades. This time, thanks to the rising federal budget deficit of $1.6 trillion and a sagging economy, their welcome may be a little more sobering. The defense spending spree that began nine years ago with the 9/11 terrorist attacks may, according to defense officials and outside analysts, finally be over.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, saying he is "mindful of the difficult economic and fiscal situation facing our nation,'' has demanded that the military services cut $100 billion of "overhead'' over the next five years, in part to stave off even deeper cuts by Congress.

Normally, Congress is deeply reluctant to reduce troop pay and benefits, triply so in an election year. And yet the demand to cut deficit spending, heard from economists and Main Street alike, has become deafening. And with President Barack Obama declaring the end of the "combat phase'' of the Iraq war, the pressure to restrain defense spending may become irresistible.

by David Corn

The other day, I was wondering which of the 37 Senate races underway at the moment is the most important. The one in Nevada? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could be booted out of the top Senate position by former Republican state assemblywoman Sharron Angle, a Tea Party darling who has called for phasing out Social Security, who has scolded out-of-work workers seeking unemployment benefits as "spoiled," and who is doing all she can to avoid taking questions from mainstream reporters. Or is it the Illinois race? This contest features two weak and flailing candidates; Republican Rep. Mark Kirk has been caught fibbing repeatedly about his military service and employment past, and the bank owned by the family of Democrat Alexi Giannoulias failed and was seized by the U.S. government. Still, this is Barack Obama's old Senate seat, and whatever happens to it will carry much symbolic value.

Or the most significant Senate race could be any that produces an unforeseen GOP win that brings the party the 10th Senate pick-up it needs to seize control of the upper chamber.

But then I came across a short news item about Rand Paul, the libertarian ophthalmologist and Tea Party activist who won the GOP Senate nomination in Kentucky. He's had a rough ride since his primary election victory. He said he did not fully support the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He accused Obama of being "anti-American" for applying pressure on BP. Like Angle, after making a series of controversial (read: stupid) comments, he began ducking the media. But the latest Paul news is utterly dumbfounding -- and a profound cause of concern.

by Mike Elk

A lot of attention recently has been focused on one of President Obama's top advisors on Social Security - Former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) after he described Social Security as being "a milk cow with 310 million tits". Perhaps attention should be focused instead on a much more sinister one of President Obama's personal appointments to serve on his deficit commission.

Meet Honeywell CEO David Cote - the most dangerous man in America. David Cote is so dangerous that he's willing to risk nuclear fallout in order to demand that uranium workers agree to cutting their retiree health care and pension plans.

Honeywell runs the only conversion facility in the world that can distill pure uranium in Metropolis, Illinois. On June 28th, Honeywell locked out its union workers during contract negotiations because the union, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-669, refused to accept the company proposal to eliminate retiree health care and pension plans for new hires and increase workers' out of pocket health care to $8,500 a year. Good health care coverage for retirees is especially important to uranium workers who suffer rates of cancer ten times higher than the general public due to their daily interaction with radioactive material; thus the workers refused to give in to demands to cut their retiree health care coverage entirely.

In a major concession, however, the Uranium workers' union refused to go on strike in the interests of keeping the plant safe and agreed to continue working under an extension of their current contract. Honeywell, which is already making record profits, decided they could make even more if they played hardball with their workers and risked a nuclear disaster.

by Michael Winship