William S. Lind’s cultural Marxism conspiracy theory boils down to the claim that in his essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse “called for tolerance for all ideas and viewpoints coming from the left and intolerance of all ideas and viewpoints coming from the right” and that college administrators and professors have put Marcuse’s proposal into practice in the form of “Political Correctness.”

Marcuse did indeed make a statement that seemed to propose exactly that: “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” The problem with taking the proposition literally, however, is that on the very first page of his essay, Marcuse had already dismissed it with the awareness that,”no power, no authority, no government exists which would translate liberating tolerance into practice.” The proposition, he added, was intended “to open the mental space in which this society can be recognized as what it is and does.”

Approximately 6,000 words of dense verbiage intervene between Marcuse’s discounting of the proposition and his restating it in stark, attention-getting terms. The casual reader could be forgiven for having forgotten the initial disclaimer along the way. What is implausible, though, is that college administrators and professors would have collectively adopted the formula as gospel while expressly ignoring the caveats. In fact, in a 1968 postscript to his 1965 essay, Marcuse indicated that his proposition had encountered “virulent denunciations” which he attempted to counter with a restatement of its rationale and acknowledgement that the practice he called liberating tolerance “already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve.”

Marcuse’s postscript apologia is hardly more convincing than his original essay. The problem, in my view, is that Marcuse attempted to illustrate a terminological paradox with a “counter-paradox.” His diagnosis — that “tolerance” in an administrated state rife with propaganda is not all it is cracked up to be — was apt. But he clumsily succumbed to the temptation to offer a prescription. And since he realized that there is no pat solution, he offered a pseudo-cure instead, in the form of a facile “thought experiment.”

It may well be that the crude, simplistic slogan of “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left” would have appealed to student radicals in the 1960s, in which case, Marcuse’s popularity would have been due more to incomprehension than to affirmation. But among his peers, even in the Frankfurt School, there was no such luck. Correspondence between Marcuse and Theodor Adorno from 1969 show Marcuse’s defensiveness in response to Adorno’s tense disapproval of his “undialectical” activist sympathies:

You know me well enough to know that I reject the unmediated translation of theory into praxis just as emphatically as you do. But…

Like you, I believe it is irresponsible to sit at one’s writing desk advocating activities to people who are fully prepared to let their heads be bashed in for the cause. But…

Meanwhile, Max Horkheimer “too has joined the chorus of my attackers” while Habermas was publicly warning against “left fascism.” By the early 1970s, Marcuse’s brief moment of notoriety was rapidly fading.

Marcuse’s paradoxical fable of “liberating tolerance” (and intolerance) was not even the most pernicious part of his “Repressive Tolerance” essay. The same social conditions that make “tolerance” abstract and spurious, Marcuse argued, also “render the critique of such tolerance abstract and academic, and the proposition that the balance between tolerance toward the Right and toward the Left would have to be radically redressed in order to restore the liberating function of tolerance becomes only an unrealistic speculation.” So, there you have it, folks! Herbie has been giving you the jive and now he’s telling you it’s all jive. What, oh what… is to be done?

Indeed, such a redressing seems to be tantamount to the establishment of a “right of resistance” to the point of subversion. There is not, there cannot be any such right for any group or individual against a constitutional government sustained by a majority of the population. But I believe that there is a “natural right” of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.

Andreas Baader invoked this “natural right of resistance” at his 1968 trial for arson, with the outcome that he was sentenced to three years imprisonment for political vandalism that caused no injuries and relatively modest property damage. So much for Marcuse’s objection to sitting “at one’s writing desk advocating activities to people who are fully prepared to let their heads be bashed in for the cause.”

Closely reading Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay gives me a new insight into what Lind is doing with his cultural Marxism hoax. Lind has appropriated Marcuse’s theme of there being a regime of repressive tolerance but has inverted its origin and attributed it to Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance.” Marcuse’s “mental space,” “unrealistic speculation” or petitio principii that “already presupposes the radical goal which it seeks to achieve” is recycled by Lind as the actual persecution endured by conservative students under the imagined regime of “cultural Marxism.”

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run75441: I have been fortunate to run across incredibly intelligent people here and other places who continue to impress me with their command on particular topics. Esmensetoo has an excellent knowledge of healthcare and healthcare insurance and how it has evolved. I was not expecting quite this much. It does cover all of the bases and there is still more to be had. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

In the 1980s when managed care was just coming into being in a substantial way, I worked with every major insurer in my region — Blue Cross, Blue Shield, Group Health (a Kaiser-type care provider that is now, in fact, owned by Kaiser), as a marketing professional. I also worked with several major regional health care providers, including the Sisters of Providence, who were the founders of the first hospitals in our region in the mid-19th Century. In the 80s they were trying, under the new deregulated environment, to create a health insurance vehicle too — that would use their hospital network. Ultimately, they were never able to worked out the details of a plan that both met what they saw as their responsibilities to the community and thought would be financially viable.

By the end of the 80s the late-1970s and later deregulation that led to “managed care” also encouraged insurers, at that time that primarily meant Blue Cross and Blue Shield, that had been founded as non-profits and had operated as such for all of their history, to become for profit (earning those in the executive suites HUGE paydays. It) was also bringing a lot of questionable new for-profit insurers into the health insurance market — many were little more than scams; adopting all the questionable practices we are all later became too familiar with — for instance, finding all kinds of clever ways to deny coverage when premium payers became ill. Also, as “managed care” which was supposed to control the cost of premiums and care that had started inflating in the 70s drove non profit insurance out of the market premiums began to really soar while what and who was covered was becoming more restricted. Small businesses started dropping insurance for workers and large insurers started offering lesser benefits at higher cost.

By the early 90s people were demanding reform, again. (Which, in my opinion, played an important role in Clinton’s election — and then the Democrats failure to pass anything in his first 2 years, along with other things like the bank scandal, contributed to their loss of the congressional majority for the first time in 40 years).

In my state, Washington, demand for reform was a really big issue for almost everyone, certainly including me. In 1992 I went to work for a local Democratic political consulting firm that was running the campaign of a reform candidate for Insurance Commissioner. She ran on setting standards to keep the scammers out of the state, setting up a system of state support for low cost insurance for the employees of small businesses, and developing community clinics that would treat people on a sliding scale. The insurance companies of course pushed back and demanded things that compromised her vision. But she still got most of what she ran on done. We ended up with system that was far from perfect but that did, did keep the scammers out of the market and the community clinics were an important resource. But the state supported small business insurance had too much paperwork and was especially unworkable for people whose work hours varied from quarter to quarter — which is common for low wage workers. And, unfortunately, by the time Obamacare passed, with similar reforms in terms of what insurers were required to provide, we only had one insurer left in the state who was offering Individual Insurance. It was excellent insurance but very expensive.

Thanks to those reforms we were in a good position for an easy transition to the ACA. We had a little technical difficulty right out the gate (embarrassing for state that sees itself as a tech leader) but mostly the transition was painless. The nonsense the Republicans and Trump have been indulging in has created problems though.

This is already too long — so I have no time to back up these three points but here are 4 things that many misunderstand about the history of our health care system that makes it difficult to have intelligent conversation about reform:

1. Our health care system was not created by the “free market.” Americans traditionally saw health care as a community responsibility. Community taxes, in addition to charity, and at times some non-profit insurance-like schemes, were used to help support community hospitals from colonial days on, often these hospitals were associated with religious denominations or orders but not always.

2. The Federal government also was involved in health care AND insurance very early — creating a hospital system for seaman in the late 18th century and requiring those using the system to purchase insurance to help cover the cost of care. In the 19th century that Marine Hospital Service also began to support medical research. The NIH, which has been very important in both funding research and doing research, was created out of the Marine Hospital Service.

3. Health insurance was not created by the “free market’ either. IT IS NOT RISK INSURANCE — and the commercial insurance industry avoided it like the plague for most of our history because they understood that it wa sn’t risk insurance but rather a way of socializing costs — and that it was unlikely to be profitable (while actually insuring care). Health insurance was created by the hospital industry and it was non-profit until “reformers ” de-regulateded it in order to make it easier for insurers to profit by choosing who and what would be covered and what providers would be paid (something, obviously, the AMA objected to).

4. The connection between employment and insurance was not created by FDR. From the very beginning hospitals identified employment groups — people who, like the seaman, and like the loggers in my state that the Sisters of Providence provided with a crude-insurance plan — $1 a month would insure they would have care in the very likely case that they were injure d — while allowing the Sisters to provide care to the poor too. Illness and injury deprived people of their ability to work and earn. So it made sense to ask the employed, especially those in dangerous occupations — to pay something while they were well and earning, so there would be resources available to care for them when they were not.

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…it would be absurd to subscribe to the author the unintended consequences of an author’s statements without considering the circumstances which surround them. It is, however, equally absurd to pretend that the ideological history of a work’s consequences are entirely extrinsic. — Jürgen Habermas

With all its limitations and distortions, democratic tolerance is under all circumstances more humane than an institutionalized intolerance which sacrifices the rights and liberties of the living generations for the sake of future generations. — Herbert Marcuse

As we saw from his March 17 webcast, William Lind was not inclined to consider taking any responsibility whatsoever for the (presumably) unintended consequences of his rhetoric. This is not to say, however, that he isn’t eager to take credit for political influence his ideas may on powerful state actors.

In his March 24 webcast, Lind revealed the “scoop” that his initiative may have inspired President Trump’s executive order to protect conservative speech on university campuses. “We have,” Lind boasted, “what I think is the inside story on one of last week’s news events — mainly the President Trump’s announcement that 35 billion dollars worth of federal funding for higher education is going to be tied to freedom of thought and expression on college and university campuses.” According to Lind, what happened is that, as a board member of a conservative group of Dartmouth University alumni, he wrote a memo — subsequently forwarded to the White House by a well connected board member — that recommended substantially the steps taken by Trump in his executive order.

This, by the way, is a basic rule of politics. If you’re going bottom-up you come in as a supplicant. You’re either ignored or kicked in the teeth. The way you get something to happen politically is to come in top-down. You come on… you come down on the center you’re targeting from a higher political level. Well there’s no higher level obviously than the White House.

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I had thought these types of treatment had gone by the wayside in treatment during the last year of life. According to an Medscape article they have not.

“‘Physicians should carefully consider whether the prescribed drugs are likely to achieve their benefit within the patient’s remaining lifetime,’ the authors concluded. The study included 151,201 patients ages 65 years and older who died in Sweden at a mean age of 81.3 years from 2007 to 2013. ‘The use and cost of preventive drugs during the last 12 months of life were the main study outcomes.’ The drugs of ‘questionable benefit’ assessed in the current study included antidiabetic drugs, antihypertensives, statins, and bisphosphonates medications for the treatment of chronic anemia and vitamin and mineral supplements.’

Receipt of these long term preventative drugs added 20% to the cost of treatment during the final year of life. ‘The median drug cost during the last year of life was $1,482 (interquartile range $700-$2,896).'”

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In an earlier post, My Education In Going to College, I commented:

what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Thornton Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity, offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many schools who would turn down a half a $million donation or so and a student who is willing to pay full price at the same time. Schools are short of funding. I am pretty sure this is going on today with little being said about the donations. Perhaps, others here would disagree with me?

It appears my comment is more correct than wishful thinking as detailed in The Atlantic’s “Elite Colleges Constantly Tell Low-Income Students That They Do Not Belong.”

The Atlantic article explores Anthony Jack’s “The Privileged Poor” and gets into the detail of the prevailing wealth at top-tier schools. For instance, it is no secret, many of the students come from elite origins. For example:

“Led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty a team of researchers found students coming from families in the top 1 percent of household incomes (those who make more than $630,000 a year) are 77 times more likely to be admitted to and attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families who make less than $30,000 a year.” I do not consider this to be a new discovery. Most people go to where they can and to what they can afford. And many end up at for-profits with a hope of achieving some type of equivalency and a chance to succeed.

“The study found that 38 elite colleges have more students who come from families in the top 1 percent than students who come from the bottom 60 percent or families making less than $65,000 a year.” Granted those 1 percenters are not the “real” rich in income as the 1 tenth of 1 percent comprising 115,000 households but, they do have enough money available to influence a school. They do count in the scheme of influencing outcomes.

14% of all the students at the elite colleges such as Stanford, Princeton, or Columbia come from the bottom half of the US income distribution. Before I go on, the author (Jack) details what he identifies as the privileged-poor and the doubly-disadvantaged. Privileged poor students come from low-income backgrounds and more than likely attended wealthy private high schools which gives them familiarity with and an acquired access to the social and cultural capital making people successful at elite universities. In other words, they know the ropes and how to get about. Doubly disadvantaged students arrive at these top institutions from neighborhood public schools many of which are overcrowded and underfunded. These students have excelled, however they are ill-equipped and lack the sociocultural tools necessary to understand the nuances of how these elite colleges operate. The doubly disadvantaged lack the social capital many students the 77-percenters and the privileged poor, the faculty, and the administrators have taken for granted. There are few mentors, councilors, or whatever you want to call them to guide them.

The advantage of the 77-percenters have is in the exposure to better schools, neighborhoods, and economics. For all intents and purposes their parents buy their way into the elite schools through private-school tuition, test prep, donations to colleges, and a myriad of other advantages which opened doors and prepared them to compete. They also rarely experience the same level of skepticism as to whether they have ‘earned’ their place as would those who enter the elite schools as a privileged poor of doubly disadvantaged.

Back to the controversy . . . rather than buy their way into the university with full price tuition and “Thorton Mellon-like” donations, these parents tried a cheaper route to getting their children admitted. Historically, the elite have used wealth to get their kids into top colleges via legal and widely recognized means—legacy, athletic admissions favoring the wealthy, and the use of test preparation to gain an advantage. Some followed the route of Thornton Mellon from “Back To School” and made or offered some nice donations meant to influence the school regardless of whether it paid for a new School of Business building or a revamped sports field.

The parents caught up in the illegal bribery opted instead for a different scheme of conspiracy and bribes. These bribes were cheaper than a building, less costly than paying for years of student preparation, going to sports games and having your child coached, and personally guiding and working with your children. Many were the vacations we took focused around soccer tournaments and many were the meetings we had with teachers and colleges.

Upfront here is the deal; a $million plus full tuition or meet me tonight at such and such place for $500,000 and full tuition. The only difference is how the bribe is made as the thumb is still on the admissions scale of yea or nay.

What is the difference? A bribe is a bribe and while one is illegal, I would say both face a test of morality.

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As I explained in a conversation, what was done most recently by some wonderfully-over-funded people in an effort to get their children into a Tier one school certainly did not have to happen in the manner it did. They could have just approached school authorities and with a “Mellon’s” (Back to School’s – Rodney Dangerfield) audacity and offered to pay full ride and make a sizeable donation to the school. Maybe I am wrong; but, I do not know of many schools who would turn down a half a $million donation or so and a student who is willing to pay full price at the same time. Schools are short of funding. I am pretty sure this is going on today with little being said about the donations. Perhaps, others here would disagree with me?

Unfortunately, I was never so well-funded to initiate a back door funding approach such as what we are reading about today. My field of endeavor being Purchasing, Logistics, Distribution, and other similar disciplines did not command the type of salary to allow me to even hint at $hundreds of thousands or even $tens of thousands. In my field, we did not have the respect and admiration the reported actors had in their fields and accumulate such money. I was also caught in the 10 year economic cycle and one year spent time gaffing up trees and cutting them down. As Rodney would say; “Where does one go to get some respect around here?” It kept my family in one place and it paid the bills.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby tells us what his mother said to him while a sophomore in high school; “If you want to go to college, you’d better get a scholarship.” I never had such a discussion with my parents other than my dad telling me not to do what he did. At 19 I was in the military, got out at 22, and married this pretty woman from NYC who in the beginning made more money as a Paralegal than I did with a college education. It paid the bills until such time as I caught up.

Suddenly I had responsibility for more than just myself. So I picked out a small Lasallian Catholic college, used my VA bennies and the state grant to pay for it, and finished up in three years. Never thought of Northwestern or University of Chicago as neither were in the cards and my parents would not have understood it much less pay for either. As a good Baptist I chose a Jesuit University over a Vincentian University for my Masters. Going to school at night then seemed to drag on forever. It was years later when I found out the high school and colleges I attended were pretty good schools. Each year, I donate a few hundred and get invited to various functions which I do not attend. I do not know anyone at these schools other than the Deans.

As advice to my own children, I suggested they go to where the money was. If they offered you grants and scholarships, they wanted you. If all they could conjure up was a subsidized Stafford loan at $3,000/year for a $30,000/year education, they were telling you something. Thank the school for their time and move on to the next one. In the end, it worked and we were also able to finagle a few more $thousand yearly at some pretty good small colleges for each. They do well for themselves and have paid their school loans.

As I sit here in my Levi jeans and ratty-looking Jesuit University sweat shirt writing this, I find myself agreeing with Jacoby and confirming what I already know; “No one needs to attend an elite university to get a decent education or to make a success of their lives, just as no one needs to wear a Dolce and Gabbana sweater to keep warm or drive a Ferrari Enzo to get from here to there.”

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Brad DeLong got a huge amount of attention by saying it was time for neoliberals such as Brad DeLong to pass the baton to those to their left. Alarmingly, he seems to have written this first on twitter.

Zach Beuchamp rescued it from tawdry twitter to now very respectable blogosphere with an interview.

One interesting aspect is that Brad has very little criticism of 90s era Brad’s policy proposals. Basically, the argument is that Democrats must stick together, because Republicans are purely partisan and no compromise with them is possible. I absolutely agree with Brad on this.

But I also want to look at criticisms of Clinton/Obama center left policy as policy.

Brad tries to come up with 2 examples

I could be confident in 2005 that [recession] stabilization should be the responsibility of the Federal Reserve. That you look at something like laser-eye surgery or rapid technological progress in hearing aids, you can kind of think that keeping a market in the most innovative parts of health care would be a good thing. So something like an insurance-plus-exchange system would be a good thing to have in America as a whole.

It’s much harder to believe in those things now. That’s one part of it. The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years.

Now monetary vs fiscal policy is only considered right vs left because of the prominence and fanaticism of Milton Friedman. Is see no connection between laser eye surgery, hearing aids, and private health insurance. Medicare for all is not a National Health Service (note I am not conceding that a national health service would be bad for medical innovation). Brad did not advocate insurance/plus/exchange system in 1993. He (and Bentson, Summers and Rubin) advocated a payroll tax financed system not the Clinton-Clinton and Magaziner mess. I think he is stretching to get a second example.

I think the first isn’t really left vs right and the second is and always was a bad political calculation. IIRC Obama certainly said that he thought single payer was better policy but politically impossible. That was the general line on the center left wonkosphere. I think the case for insurance-plus-exchange was at most a bad political argument disguised as a bad policy argument.

In another twitter thread (no not the one where he says twitter is a horrible medium for serious discussion) Paul Krugman comments

I want to focus on two of his tweets

Last point: wages. Here’s where research has convinced me and others that wages are much less determined by supply and demand, much more determined by market power, than we used to believe. This implies a much bigger role for “predistribution” policies like minimum wage hikes 10/

Pro-union policies, and more than we used to think. “Let the market do its thing, but spend more on education/training and a bigger EITC” no longer sounds like wisdom 11/

I listed this as the one economist’s mea culpa based on empirical evidence which came to my mind. A lot of center left economists used to oppose minimum wage increases and were convinced by empirical evidence (mostly by Card and Krueger) that this is actually good policy. But I don’t see any problem with the EITC. Rather, economics 101 based arguments against the minimum wage and unions have been undermined by evidence*.

I think Krugman’s problem with “a bigger EITC” is political. It appears on the Federal budget so deficit hawks won’t allow a really huge increase. In contrast, people can think firms pay the minimum wage, so increasing it sounds like a cheap way to help the working poor.

More generally, I don’t see any reason to abandone redistribution (like the EITC). In fact, I think that is both excellent policy and political dynamite. I note that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned promising to raise taxes on the rich and cut taxes on everyone else. Also they won. Other Democrats didn’t promise that and they lost. A more progressive income tax is a relatively market respecting policy long supported by left of center economists. Oh and also Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I don’t think there is any evidence against the Clinton 1993 tax increase combined with EITC increase.

The fact that it is totally obvious that it is good politics (rejected absolutely by the Republican party and supported by most self identified Republicans) doesn’t mean that it is too obvious to stress. It means debating redistribution vs predistribution is a distraction (which one here is not like the others)?

I personally have criticisms of Bill Clinton type neoliberalism after the jump

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What’s New About Fake News?

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In parts of Livingston and Oakland counties, the people have been warned not to eat the fish from the Huron River and Kent, Strawberry, Zukey, Gallagher, Loon, Whitewood, Base Line and Portage lakes as well as Hubbell Pond due to the fish being contaminated with PFAS and similar chemicals coming from industries. In 2016, Michigan started to tell people about the impact of PFAS and how dangerous the PFAS and PFOAs are.

PFAS/PFOA are part of a class of man-made chemicals used in many industrial and consumer products to make the products resist heat, stains, water, and grease. Product Examples include: Teflon® cookware, waterproofing fabric and coating on fast food wrappers.

Former Army reservist Spc. Mark Favors, his relatives, and family have lived around Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base for years drinking and bathing-in base and off-base water for years. The level of PFAS and PFOA on base around Peterson Air Force Base has been established at 79 to 88,400 parts per trillion on-base wells and 79 to 7,910 parts per trillion in public and private drinking wells off base.

It was not until the EPA published its 70 parts per trillion guidelines did the DOD claim it began to understand how harmful exposure could be and voluntarily took action. Spc. Mark Favors does not buy the excuse. The issue has been explored in-depth by the Colorado Springs Gazette, which produced a timeline dating back to the first concerns about the foam used to fight fires in 1962. Fort Carson stopped using the firefighting foam in 1991 stating, “Firefighting operations that use AFFF must be replaced with nonhazardous substitutes.”

In Michigan, it will take a Flint-sized emergency before it begins to take aggressive action with businesses dumping contaminated water in company drainage pipes going to water reclamation plants. Then too, Livingston County is the richest in income in the state and is also 96% white, an advantage the county has over the City of Flint.

Fifty year old Mark Favors can count at least 16 relatives from around the area who have been diagnosed with cancer; 10 have died. Six of those relatives have died since 2012, including his father at age 69 and two cousins, ages 38 and 54.

“In my family alone, we have had five kidney cancer deaths,” Favors said. “And those people only lived in the contaminated area.”

Many of Favors’ relatives lived near Peterson Air Force Base, where scores of both on-base and off-base water sources have tested significantly above the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended exposure of 70 parts per trillion of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFAS) or perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). The compounds were part of the military’s firefighting foam until just last year. The same compounds in the foam have been linked to cancers and also developmental delays for fetuses and infants.

In a recent March 6, 2019 House subcommittee hearing, Mark Favors was among those in attendance as the subcommittee was questioning the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Defense representatives over the decades long use of PFAS, the failure to regulate it’s usage, provide adequate protection from its usage, and monitor the safe disposal to prevent contamination of ground water and the environment. Knowing its dangers, a reasonable person would have found an alternative to its usage as demonstrated by Fort Carson in 1991. Obvious, some elements of the military were not of that mind.

With a large degree of politeness, House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on the environment chairman Rep. Harley Rouda, D-CA commented:

“To put it charitably, it is unclear why DoD feels justified in passing the buck to the EPA, particularly in light of the evidence suggesting DoD’s awareness of the toxicity of the chemicals since the early 1980s.”

If stationed at a military bases (and who has not been for some period of time?), this is a big issue as many of us were using the water supplied to us at places such as Camp Lejeune where we were drinking and showering in water contaminated with chemicals such as benzene. For those who were at Camp Lejeune for at least 30 days, there is now a list of disorders which the VHA will accept as being attributed to exposure to base water. Some of us have disorders on that list and some of us do not. There are many other military sites where former military and civilian personnel have complained of disorders and illness which they believe is attributed to the bases they were stationed during their enlistment or working as civilians.

In Michigan, there is a site where you can get an idea of how bad the issue is in and around your community. All known PFAS sites in Michigan and check your own area (at the bottom you scroll to find your county and township/community).

Many knowledgeable sources believe the 70 parts per trillion is still too high.

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“The Pentagon is planning to tap $1 billion in leftover funds from military pay and pension accounts to help President Donald Trump pay for his long-sought border wall, a top Senate Democrat said Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL ‘It’s coming out of military pay and pensions. $1 billion. That’s the plan.

The funds are available because Army recruitment is down and a voluntary early military retirement program is being underutilized.’

The development comes as Pentagon officials are seeking to minimize the amount of wall money that would come from military construction projects that are so cherished by lawmakers.

‘Imagine the Democrats making that proposal — that for whatever our project is, we’re going to cut military pay and pensions.'”

Gee, did anyone ever think of tossing this into the VHA funding since the VA now has to pay for the Choice program which Trump said he will not fund.

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