March, 28 2017, 01:30pm EDT
NRDC: Flint's Lead Pipes Will Be Replaced Under Settlement in Federal Safe Drinking Water Case
Citizen suit brings funding and timeline for pipe replacement, more water quality testing, transparency, and other resources to help Flint
DETROIT
Residents of Flint, Michigan will finally get their lead pipes replaced as the result of a settlement agreement approved by a federal judge today. The settlement will require the State of Michigan and City of Flint to replace Flint's lead pipes within three years, and will be enforceable by the court. The lawsuit was filed in response to the Flint water crisis, the result of failed government decisions that caused lead to leach out from aging pipes into thousands of homes in Flint.
"This hard-fought victory means safer water for Flint. For the first time, there will be an enforceable commitment to get the lead pipes out of the ground. The people of Flint are owed at least this much," said Dimple Chaudhary, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and lead counsel in the case Concerned Pastors for Social Action v. Khouri.
The agreement requires the State of Michigan to provide nearly $100 million to the City for replacement of Flint's lead service lines. The agreement also requires the State to maintain a door-to-door water filter installation and education program, to extensively monitor Flint's tap water for lead, and to continue to make bottled water available to Flint residents.
"Concerned Pastors brought this lawsuit to heal the damage to the community from both the lead in our water and government indifference, and to take a stand for what is right for the people of Flint. The water issue must be resolved before we can make Flint thrive again, and I believe this resolution offers a path to a healthier, less traumatic future for everyone in Flint," said Pastor Allen Overton, of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action. "I remain hopeful that we have time to restore Flint to a place where dreams are made and hope stays alive," said Overton.
Melissa Mays, a plaintiff in the case and one of the parents who confirmed Flint's water was contaminated with lead through independent testing, said "This is a win for the people of Flint. When the government fails to uphold democracy, and protect our rights to clean water, we have to stand up and fight. The greatest lesson I've learned from Flint's water crisis is that change only happens when you get up and make your voice heard."
"We are thrilled that, after nearly three years of grappling with lead-poisoned water, the residents of Flint can finally look forward to a long-term solution to a catastrophe that has devastated the community," said Michael J. Steinberg, Legal Director of the ACLU of Michigan. "The Flint Water Crisis has its roots in the state's toxic emergency manager law and is a tragic example of what happens when state government displaces democracy to save a few bucks. This ground-breaking settlement marks a huge step toward restoring a long-neglected community to some semblance of normalcy."
The terms of the agreement require:
The State to provide $97 million to the City of Flint for replacement of lead and galvanized steel pipes at no cost to Flint residents; $47 million will come directly from Michigan state funding sources; and $50 million will come from federal and state funding directed to Flint by Congress;
The City to conduct the pipe replacements within three years;
The State to expand and maintain its program for filter installation and education, including by conducting door-to-door visits to residents' homes through December 2018;
The State to fund a pair of extensive tap water monitoring programs, beyond what is legally required under federal law, to test hundreds of homes in Flint. All testing data will be made available to the public, including at https://www.NRDC.org/Flint;
The State to guarantee bottled water availability at distribution centers until at least September 1, 2017 and delivery through the 2-1-1 helpline to homebound residents until at least July 1, 2017;
The State to guarantee funding for seven existing health and medical programs designed to mitigate the effects of lead exposure for Flint residents.
The Court will retain authority to enforce the agreement and to ensure that the State and City meet their deadlines and fulfil their obligations.
Plaintiffs in the case Concerned Pastors for Social Action v. Khouri are Concerned Pastors for Social Action, Flint resident Melissa Mays, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the ACLU of Michigan. The plaintiffs will monitor implementation of the agreement and make available information related to the status of lead pipe removal and water quality reports at https://www.nrdc.org/Flint.
The Flint water crisis began when dangerous amounts of lead leached out of the city's pipes and into the drinking water of Flint's homes and schools following a decision by Flint and Michigan officials to use the Flint River as the City's primary drinking water source without first treating the water to prevent corrosion. There is no safe level of lead exposure. The toxic effects of lead on virtually every system in the body, and particularly on the developing brains of young children, are well documented and irreversible.
The summary of the settlement is available at: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/flint-lead-pipe-replacement-agreement-summary.pdf
Visit www.nrdc.org/Flint for information related to the status of lead pipe removal and water quality reports.
Case Timeline:
On November 16, 2015, the Plaintiffs and other community groups filed a Notice of Intent to sue state and city officials for ongoing violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act amid the city's widespread lead-contamination crisis.
On January 25, 2016, the Plaintiffs filed a complaint that sought to compel the City and state officials to follow federal requirements for testing and treating water to control for lead and the prompt replacement of all lead water pipes at no cost to Flint residents. More at: https://www.nrdc.org/media/2016/160127
On, March 24, 2016, the Plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction, asking the court to direct the delivery of bottled water to people's homes, as many Flint residents cannot obtain water for their daily needs due to transportation or other access issues.
On November 10, 2016, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction and ordered Michigan officials and the City of Flint to immediately ensure that every Flint household has safe drinking water. That means the City and State were required to verify that each home has a properly installed and maintained faucet filter or, if they could not, deliver bottled water to that home. More at: https://www.nrdc.org/media/2016/161110
On December 2, 2016, federal Judge David Lawson denied the State motion to stay the preliminary injunction order. On December 16, 2016, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals paneled similarly denied the State's motion to stay the order.
On December 28, 2016, the District Court appointed a settlement master for the purpose of mediating settlement discussions between Plaintiffs, the State, and the City.
March 28, 2017, Judge Lawson will consider approving a settlement agreement to resolve the case.
MEDIA ALERT:
The following are press opportunities related to the settlement this week:
Tuesday Telebriefing:
Attorneys and plaintiffs in the case will be available during a telebriefing for national media on Tuesday, March 28 at 3:30 eastern. To join the call, dial 1 (866) 939-3921 and use the confirmation number 44649152.
Thursday Community Meeting:
Plaintiffs will host a community meeting to discuss the latest developments in the case on Thursday, March 30, at 6 pm eastern. The Town Hall will be held at the Rev. LW and Ella Owens Educational Center at the New Jerusalem Full Gospel Baptist Church, 1035 E. Carpenter Road in Flint.
NRDC works to safeguard the earth--its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. We combine the power of more than three million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.
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DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," one lawyer said.
May 02, 2024
Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.
"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."
"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.
"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.
Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.
The Interceptrevealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.
OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according toThe Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."
CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."
The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.
After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses," Mitchell added, "he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests."
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Corporate Profiteering Schemes That Drive Inflation Detailed at Senate Hearing
"At every turn, companies are cutting corners on the path to record profits, and American consumers are paying the price," one expert testified.
May 02, 2024
Progressive policy experts took aim at corporate greed and profiteering during a Thursday U.S. Senate hearing on "shrinkflation," the process of reducing the size or quantity of a product while selling it at the same price.
At the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing—entitled "Higher Prices: How Shrinkflation and Technology Can Impact Consumers' Finances"—Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) began by acknowledging that "prices today are far too high, and families are having a harder time finding a fair price, seeing more of their paycheck vanish into thin air."
"All of this is happening while corporate profits hit record highs," the senator continued. "Let's be clear: The fact that prices and corporate profits are going up at the same time is no coincidence. A study by the Kansas City Fed found that corporate profits drove half of the price increases in 2021."
Bilal Baydoun, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, testified that "in America today, a fair price, let alone a sweet deal, is harder and harder to come by. In the age of corporate concentration and high-powered algorithms, pricing is in the midst of a troubling transformation, and the price tag as we know it may become a relic of the past."
"At every turn, companies are cutting corners on the path to record profits, and American consumers are paying the price," he continued. "In a practice known as 'shrinkflation,' companies discreetly reduce the size or volume of common household items—everything from jars of peanut butter to bars of soap—to charge consumers more for less."
"For some essential goods like household paper towels, shrinkflation accounted for roughly 10% of the price increase consumers experienced over the last four years," Baydoun added. "Indeed, big profits increasingly come in smaller packages."
Accountable.US president Caroline Ciccone and other executive members of the group submitted a statement for the record asserting that "the American people are fed up with corporate greed and price gouging."
The statement continues:
Even as inflation has gone down, prices remain too high. Americans understand that corporate greed is a major driver of costs that make it difficult for their families to make ends meet.
Corporate profits have exploded since 2020, and a recent study by our partners at the Groundwork Collaborative found that for much of 2023, corporate profits drove 53% of inflation. Comparatively, over the 40 years before the pandemic, profits drove just 11% of price growth. In the final three months of 2023, corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion, according to Commerce Department data.
"From Big Food to corporate landlords to Big Pharma, CEOs across industries keep raising prices despite bragging of bigger and bigger profits and stock rewards for wealthy investors," said Liz Zelnick, director of Accountable.US' Economic Security & Corporate Power program. "These executives clearly didn't need to raise prices so high, but they did it anyway because they could."
"Yet one by one," she added, "conservative Senate Banking Committee members today gave a free pass to their corporate megadonors and instead disingenuously blamed the Biden administration's actions against junk fees and price gouging that are actually working to lower costs for everyday families. They should get their priorities in check."
Earlier this year, Brown and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) introduced a bill "to crack down on companies shrinking their products and raising their prices."
The Shrinkflation Prevention Act would:
- Direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to promulgate regulations to establish shrinkflation as an unfair or deceptive act or practice, prohibiting manufacturers from engaging in shrinkflation;
- Authorize the FTC to pursue civil actions against corporations who engage in shrinkflation; and
- Authorize state attorneys general to bring civil actions against corporations engaging in shrinkflation.
"We need members of Congress to grow spines and stand up to more of these corporate lobbyists," Brown said during Thursday's hearing. "We need our colleagues to join us in efforts like this, to lower prices and stop these tactics that distort the market, stifle competition, and make it harder for Americans to afford the cost of living."
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Professors, Speakers Cut Ties With Universities Over Police Crackdowns on Protests
"What President Shafik did at Columbia moved the whole world a step closer to universally criminalizing direct action, and direct action is the ONLY thing that is going to help the world halt global heating," said one climate scientist as she canceled a planned speech at the school.
May 02, 2024
Repercussions of American universities' crackdowns on student protesters are becoming increasingly evident this week as faculty members, public speakers, and others who collaborate with higher education institutions announced they would cut ties with schools that have repressed students' constitutional right to protest against Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza.
On Thursday, Dipali Mukhopadhyay, a former Columbia University professor who is still affiliated with the school's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, announced on social media that she had written to Columbia President Minouche Shafik to ask that her "current affiliation with the university be removed."
"I have watched with horror as your administration has responded with breathtaking incompetence and inhumanity to peaceful student protest against genocidal violence ongoing in Gaza," wrote Mukhopadhyay. "As a teacher and a scholar, I can no longer justify my association with this institution so long as you are at the helm."
Mukhopadhyay's letter to the prestigious Ivy League school came two days after the New York Police Department forcibly removed student protesters from Hamilton Hall, which they had occupied to demand that Columbia divest from companies that contract with the Israeli government. The officers entered the building—which the students had renamed Hind's Hall in honor of a six-year-old girl who was killed by Israeli forces in January—with guns drawn, and reportedly used tear gas to disperse demonstrators outside.
On Wednesday, End Climate Silence founder Genevieve Guenther announced she was canceling her scheduled keynote address at Columbia's symposium on climate and language, which she was supposed to give Friday.
Guenther expressed sorrow that she would not move forward with the talk, but said that being associated with Columbia "at this political moment" was equivalent to ignoring the school's "authoritarian response to protest."
"Climate protest is being systematically criminalized in the U.S. and even in Europe and the U.K.," said Guenther. "And these authoritarian, anti-First Amendment tactics are not only deployed by the right. Yes, the right wing is targeting climate protests. But Democrats are deploying the same tactics to prevent direct action in support of the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza."
Guenther added that she was "deeply ashamed to be associated with this university" as a Columbia graduate, and that she "would FEAR to send [her] son to a place that turns the NYPD in full riot gear on students occupying a building that has been occupied many times before and survived just fine."
Also in New York, Deborah Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said this week that she would no longer be speaking at the City University of New York School of Law's (CUNY Law) commencement ceremony due to the school's decision not to allow students to give speeches at the event.
The law school quietly made its decision last September, weeks before Israel began bombarding Gaza in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on October 7, in response to last year's commencement speech by Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who spoke about Israel "murdering" Palestinian civilians. The school publicly disavowed Mohammed's comments under pressure.
As the school community learned of the prohibition on student commencement speakers, eight students filed a lawsuit last week, and on Monday, Archer said she was withdrawing from her speaking engagement.
"I cannot, as a leader of the nation's oldest guardian of free expression, participate in an event in which students believe that their voices are being excluded," said Archer. "I feel compelled to decline the invitation under the circumstances."
Two renowned authors also informed University of Southern California (USC) on Sunday that they will not speak at upcoming events due to the school's deployment of armed officers to arrest 93 student protesters in recent weeks and its decision to keep 2024 valedictorian Asna Tabassum, a Muslim supporter of Palestinian rights, from delivering a commencement address.
"To speak at USC in this moment would betray not only our own values, but USC's too," wrote C Pam Zhang and Safiya Noble. "We cannot overlook the link between recent developments and the ongoing genocide in Palestine."
"Our withdrawal is in no way a condemnation of USC's graduating class, who deserve to be celebrated; nor do we condemn the countless USC faculty, staff, students, and administrators whose views are not represented by university leadership's authoritarian decision-making," the authors added.
Zhang and Noble, who had been scheduled to speak at USC's doctoral and master's degree commencement ceremonies, called on speakers at the graduations of 38 USC satellite campuses "to join us by signing this letter; withdrawing from USC events; and supporting USC students, as well as thousands of students nationwide who deserve respect, not arrest and punishment by their own universities, for courageously speaking truth to power."
Last week, more than 2,100 academics from across the globe signed a statement expressing solidarity with student and faculty protesters and supporting an "academic and cultural boycott" of the school.
Former New Yorker editor Erin Overbey on Wednesday called on "all journalists of conscience" to boycott the Pulitzer Prizes, which are administered by Columbia and are set to be awarded next week. The NYPD threatened student journalists and Columbia School of Journalism Dean Jelani Cobb with arrest during its raid of Hamilton Hall this week.
"Can't wait for the president of Columbia University to tell my industry what's good journalism at the Pulitzers next week," said Matt Pearce, president of the Media Guild of the West. "Try not to trip over any hogtied student journalists while collecting your award."
While the Pulitzer Prize Board on Thursday put out a statement praising "the tireless efforts of student journalists across our nation's college campuses, who are covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk," it faced criticism for using passive voice when noting that the NYPD "was called onto campus" at Columbia.
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