United States

How quickly the sins of the past are forgotten.

Roughly 10 years ago, a Mexican immigrant working as a strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California, making $14,000 per year, was lent every single penny he needed to purchase a $720,000 home.  And, as crazy as that sounds to most of us, stories such as that were all too common leading up to the 2008 housing crash as everyone, and their brothers, became expert real estate investors buying and flipping multiple houses every month...which worked really well, until it didn't.

Submitted by Farron Cousins via DeSmogBlog.com,

On January 16, 2016, President Obama declared a federal emergency for the city of Flint, Michigan, over the contamination of the city’s drinking water.

One year later, not only is the city still struggling to provide clean sources of water to the Michigan city’s population, but the plight of residents in Flint has opened up the conversation about a water crisis in the United States that very few people even knew existed.

In new video footage circulating around various social media sites, ISIS supporters have been openly boasting about a weaponized drone program which the terrorist organization has been using to target Iraqi forces in Mosul.  While the video appears to be, in part, CGI-enhanced propaganda, other portions reveal actual IED attacks on armored vehicles and human targets.

Below are highlights from the video:

Via ConvergEx's Nicholas Colas,

Counterfactual analysis is a useful way to consider the world we actually inhabit.  To that end, today we ask “What if Hillary Clinton had won the Presidency on November 8th?”

 

As reported yesterday, Mexico is not at all looking forward to starting the process of renegotiating NAFTA with Donald Trump, explicitly warning the US that "there are very clear red lines that must be drawn from the start." What these lines are will be explained by Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Foreign Affairs Secretary Luis Videgaray who are both meeting with US officials in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday, setting the stage with next week's visit from Mexico President Enrique Pena Nieto.