On Monday, I heard testimony from State Auditor Brian Colon about last minute Martinez settlements & it was shocking. Plus a report on produced water & what’s up with Iowa???

Friday, Feb. 7, 6 -7pm at Collected Works, 202 Galisteo St. Jeffrey Haas discusses his updated edition of The Assassination of Fred Hampton. An excerpt is provided below.

On December 4, 1969, attorney Jeff Haas was in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancée. She described how the police pulled her from her bedroom as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one officer say, “He’s still alive.” She then heard two shots. A second officer said, “He’s good and dead now.” She looked at Jeff and asked, “What can you do?”

Excerpt from The Assassination of Fred Hampton, by Jeffery Haas

The Assassination of Fred Hampton is Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued Hampton’s assassins, ultimately prevailing over unlimited government resources and an FBI conspiracy. Find out what Jeff did and the implications of the assassination of Fred Hampton to our current social-political situation. It is unbelievable just how brazenly the FBI carefully planned Hampton’s execution.

And the Winner in Iowa Is?!?!?!

As of 6:30am Tuesday morning the clear winner was…..no one, but the clear loser was the Iowa Democratic Party which offered little to no explanation of why results were so delayed and no real projection when they would be released except to say: “sometime Tuesday.”

That didn’t stop Bernie, who with a gleam in his eye, declared that when the results were released his supporters would be very pleased. Two hours later, Buttigieg even more brazenly announced that Iowa had “shocked the nation” sending a clear message about his campaign. And oddly, both could be right.

Should Sanders win narrowly over Buttigieg, that would be a clear win for both candidates. Candidates with field operations can gather totals for each precinct by having precinct operatives observe, record, and report to the campaign headquarters. So it’s likely that Bernie and Buttigieg had a reasonably good projection for their boasts. On the reverse side of the coin, it appears possible that Biden may have received a stunning rebuke.

And we will certainly know: “Sometime Tuesday.”

Stunning Roundhouse Disclosure

You may have read about the last minute, secret settlements made at the end of Governor Martinez’s administration, but hearing State Auditor Brian Colon lay it out in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday had both Republican and Democrat Senators’ jaws on the floor. Senator Wirth stated: “This simply doesn’t pass the smell test.” A bit later in the hearing, Senator Cervantes, the Judiciary chair, said that “this doesn’t even pass the dead skunk in the road smell test.”

What was the issue? Scores of checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars were dispensed to settle claims where the claimant provided zero information substantiating the claim. As Colon put it: “Literally, we had cases where one lawyer wrote to the State Risk Management making a claim, and a check for $200,000 was sent without any process.” He went on to state that in some cases no attorney from the State was even involved.

So, someone makes a claim against the state, their attorney writes to Risk Management, makes the claim, and then without any evidence presented or any effort to explore if there was any validity to the claim, a check is processed. That isn’t a claim process, it is an ATM, and Colon described how in the last months of the Martinez administration over $5 million of such claims were processed from that ATM. And now the kicker, the settlement agreements included non-disclosure provisions that precluded making public the details of the settlements, in some cases indefinitely.

Senator Wirth wondered aloud if the state is investigating whether criminal charges are warranted. Stay tuned. I have spoken with Secretary Colon and plan to have him on the Retake radio show soon.

“Produced” Rain Drenches Carlsbad Family

The NM Political Report published an astonishing article about how in the middle night a produced water pipe exploded and rained produced water on the home of Penny Aucoin and her husband Carl George. The shower fell for a full an hour before WPX Energy was able to shut down their broken pipe. In the meantime, produced water drenched her farm animals, her home, and Penny and Carl as they madly sought to get their animals to shelter. From the NM Political Report:

It was going all over our yard and all over my animals,” Aucoin said, referring to her chickens and goat. “They were spooked, so they were all running everywhere. And I’m trying to shove them all into this little tiny chicken coop, to try to get them out from under it.”

WPX stated that they were spraying the property with Micro-blaze, a proprietary bacteria-based product developed by Verde Environmental that uses microbes to breakdown and remove hydrocarbons. Their quote is that it has been “pretty effective” in the past. They also characterized the situation as an “inconvenience” for the family. Some inconvenience. At a Roundhouse rally last week, Penny Aucoin spoke emotionally about her inconvenience. She is suffering from a range of health issues since being showered in produced water, including bloody gums, lesions all over her body, and feeling very weakened and ill.

It’s maddening,” Aucoin said later in an email. “They offered me buckets to feed my chickens in and a new chicken coop for them to feel more comfortable in after their ordeal. I’m just furious that they think that is enough to make my animals safe.”

The report extended beyond this single leak as it went on to present how methane flares also impact the George-Aucoin property.

“We live next to all these oil rigs and stuff, but we live out in the country. We used to have flares right across from us, but they took those down about a month ago, so now it’s dark again. For a while it was like having daylight all the time,” Aucoin said. “About a year ago, my husband counted that there were 27 flares within a mile of my home.”

We have constant headaches, my son gets nosebleeds. It’s like having really, really, really, intense allergies that never quit,” she said. “My daughter is on meds for allergies and asthma. I’ve had to take breathing treatments. It’s horrible.”

And all of this before their produced water shower.

Click here to review the full NM Political Report article.

In solidarity,

Paul & Roxanne

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