The stinky, disgusting downside of the world’s demand for pork

New York Post

The stinky, disgusting downside of the world’s demand for pork

The Associated Press March 5, 2018

All the waste from the Everette Murphrey Farm is stored in open-air lagoons and sprayed onto fields as fertilizer. AP

WILLARD, NC — Terry “Pap” Adams says he was out in the backyard, tinkering on one of his car projects, when another cloud of noxious pinkish-brown mist drifted overhead. The droplets hit his wife’s black car, leaving blotches with greasy little dots in the center.

“You can feel it on your clothes,” he said as he stood outside his home in rural Willard, about 70 miles southeast of Fayetteville. “You could feel it, like a misting rain. But it wasn’t misting rain. It was that stuff.”

The nose-curling mist was wastewater – pumped from a pond where his neighbor stores the urine and feces from thousands of hogs, and sprayed onto the fields just across a narrow ditch from Adam’s property line.

“When the wind is right, you get it – ain’t nothing you can do about it,” the 60-year-old man said, twisting his mouth in an expression of disgust.

For decades, people like Adams say they have felt powerless against the economic and political influence of the commercial hog farming industry. In early December, a federal judge scheduled the first of what could be dozens of trials in a group of nuisance lawsuits filed against Murphy-Brown LLC, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods – the world’s largest pork processor and hog producer.

The first two test cases are set to be tried in April.

Iowa is by far the nation’s leading hog producer, but recent events in No. 2 North Carolina have triggered concern at the industry’s trade group in Washington, according to lobbying disclosures.

Hog waste flows into the waste pond at Everette Murphrey Farm. AP

After a series of major spills from hog lagoons caused fish kills and contaminated rivers, pork producers here shifted two decades ago to disposing of their swine waste by spraying it across farm fields. But there are no easy solutions to the challenges caused by the massive amounts of animal waste that are byproducts of the world’s demand for pork and other protein. In this corner of rural North Carolina, the response to the problem of hog waste spilling into rivers has spawned a new kind of environmental concern.

Residents’ lawyers plan to present DNA testing evidence at the upcoming trials they say shows that tiny particles of hog feces are settling over their clients’ properties.

A former environmental engineer for the Environmental Protection Agency, Shane Rogers, swabbed the outsides of homes near several hog farms in southeast North Carolina. He said 14 of the 17 homes – including those belonging to two of Adams’ neighbors – tested positive for pig2bac – a genetic marker linked to the presence of hog feces.

When Rogers visited the Rose Hill home of 80-year-old Mary Tatum in November 2016, he was “met at the road in front of her house with exceptionally malodorous air,” he wrote in his report. The hog lagoon is less than 500 feet from the Tatum’s house, separated from the spray field by a narrow buffer of trees.

Mary Tatum’s house, bottom right, in Rose Hill, NC.AP

Swabs tested positive for pig2bac inside Tatum’s home – from a stovetop, a range hood and the top of her refrigerator, where she keeps her bread and her cereal, he testified in a February 2017 deposition.

In a response filed with the court, an expert hired by the pork company said Rogers’ methods were shoddy and violated fundamental pillars of sample-collection reliability. Jennifer Clancy, a microbiologist who has also consulted with the EPA, said the study of pig2bac is far from conclusive, and that Rogers “turns a blind eye to the scientific caveats in testing.”

Meanwhile, the state Department of Environmental Quality is negotiating with three watchdog groups to resolve complaints of environmental racism in the administration of North Carolina’s swine-waste permitting. In a letter to the state agency last January, EPA’s civil rights office said it had “deep concern” that African-American, Latino and American Indian communities have been subjected to discrimination in the location of operations that produce a lot of waste.

Lobbying reports show the National Pork Producers Council has been meeting with EPA officials and Congress recently to discuss federal regulations for reporting air emissions from livestock farms and the environmental justice petition in North Carolina.

The industry has also backed a House bill, co-sponsored by two North Carolina Republicans, that seeks to limit the ability of neighbors to sue hog farmers who are “diligently seeking compliance” with state and federal regulations.

A spokesman for the trade group said its farmers have been interested and concerned about environmental justice. “If neighbors have concerns with odor or manure management, hog farmers in North Carolina or anywhere will work and have worked to address and mitigate them,” said Dave Warner, the council’s communications director.

Virginia-based Smithfield – which was purchased in 2013 by China-based WH Group – disputed that race played any role where it locates its company-owned or contract operations. The company has called the lawsuits a “cash grab” and maintains that the current permitting system works well.

“It protects the environment and the neighbors of farms,” said Joyce Fitzpatrick, Smithfield’s spokeswoman. “More than 80 percent of hog farms are family farms. These farmers care deeply about their communities. They wouldn’t do anything to hurt the places where they and their families live.”

Hog farmer Everette Murphrey. AP

Last spring, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a law to protect hog and other agricultural operations against lawsuits like those pending in federal court. The new law limited a producer’s liability to the lost property value plaintiffs can prove as a result of nuisance, a move critics said was the latest legislative gift to the hog industry at the expense of the poor.

Pork is a $2.3 billion industry in the Tar Heel State, home to roughly 9.3 million hogs. The state’s human population is around 10.2 million.

It is the intersection of those two populations that has generated much of the friction.

In North Carolina, as in all the leading pork-producing states, most hogs are raised in airplane hangar-like barns, some holding hundreds of animals each. The difference is how the waste is stored and disposed.

Among the top hog states, North Carolina and, to a lesser extent, Illinois are alone in allowing the widespread use of open-air waste-storage lagoons and fertilizer spray fields. Here, spraying often uses large sprinkler guns that can aerosolize waste into tiny droplets.

Farmers in Iowa – with more than 20 million head and over $7.5 billion in annual sales – and the other large Midwestern pork states store the manure and urine in deep concrete pits beneath the hog houses. The resulting “slurry” is then pumped or trucked to the fields, where it is injected or disked directly into the soil as fertilizer.

An analysis by the Environmental Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance, two environmental groups, in 2016 estimated that North Carolina’s hog operations generate more than 9.5 billion gallons (35.96 billion liters) of fecal waste a year.

Hog farms here tend to be much smaller than their Midwest counterparts. But they’re clustered in low-lying, flood-prone counties with sandy soils and shallow aquifers.

There are strict rules about not spraying when rain or high winds are forecast, and to stop before the water begins ponding. But the state has just 14 inspectors to make annually required visits to the roughly 2,100 hog operations.

Plaintiff Elsie Herring, who lives about 7 miles (11 km) south of Tatum in the town of Wallace, said she feels like a prisoner in her own home.

“We don’t open our windows or doors,” said Herring, who is black. “We don’t sit out. We don’t cook out. We don’t do anything.”

Her simple frame home is one of several on 15 acres that has been in the family since the 1890s. Her grandfather, Immanuel Stallings, an ex-slave, bought the property from his former mistress.

“My mother had all 15 of us on this land,” said Herring, a community organizer with the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, an environmental group.

Growing up, Herring said there was always farming going on all around. Her family even kept a few hogs.

But, she said: “These mega-farms are something that’s new.”

Terry “Pap” Adams. AP

Dr. James A. Merchant, former dean of the University of Iowa College of Public Health, said people like Herring have a “reasonable basis to be fearful and concerned” for their health. He cited conclusions of scientific studies he said clearly establish public health risks from commercial hog farms. One study, which he co-authored, found that a 2,000-head operation can produce as much waste as a small city.

Smithfield has fought unsuccessfully to have Merchant’s report and testimony blocked.

During its civil rights investigation, initiated under the Obama administration following a 2014 complaint, the EPA said it heard descriptions of health impacts, but also “retaliation, threats, intimidation and harassment by swine facility operators and pork industry representatives.”

Even on a 90-degree day, the smell from two hog houses and a waste lagoon was almost negligible on Everette Murphrey’s 172-acre operation in the town of Farmville. Inside the houses, huge fans kept the temperature a good 10 degrees cooler than outside.

“It’s not bad on the hogs,” Murphrey said as pigs skittered away before him. “It’s not bad on the humans that are working in there.”

Murphrey uses a center pivot system to irrigate crops of hay, feed corn and soybeans. Resembling the skeleton of some metal dinosaur, the machine can be swung into place over different parts of the field as dangling nozzles spray the wastewater downward – minimizing wind drift.

“If the wind’s blowing in the direction of where some houses are, that day we won’t pump,” he said. “I’ve never had a complaint from a neighbor. Never.”

Fitzpatrick, the Smithfield spokesperson, said the company has no qualms about severing ties with scofflaws.

Just before Labor Day, state officials responded to a spill at a Smithfield contract farm near Croatan National Forest, not far from the Bogue Banks. Inspectors found pinkish waste flowing from a hydrant and into a ditch leading to the Trent River.

“The flow was so good, it looked like there could have been a pipe there,” one of the inspectors reported.

An investigation later showed nearly 1 million gallons of wastewater from the lagoon were illegally drained into a nearby wooded area. The state levied a $64,072 fine against Lanier Farms TCB Inc., citing, in part, violations dating back to 2010.

Smithfield said it placed the grower on probation in August. Fitzpatrick said all animals have been removed, and the farm has been empty since December.

Under a 2000 agreement with the state, Smithfield has spent $15 million to research alternatives to lagoons and spray fields. Fitzpatrick told AP that, “No alternative technology has been identified that is both economically feasible and that is as environmentally effective as the current system.”

Despite incentives, only two North Carolina swine operations have adopted the “environmentally superior technologies” that might produce renewable energy, while reducing odors. Using numbers from North Carolina State University, the North Carolina Pork Council has estimated it would cost $5.4 billion over 10 years to retrofit all of the state’s hog farms.

Dwight Strickland, who owns the farm beside Elsie Herring’s property, told AP that all his spraying is done according to state regulations, and that he strives to be a good neighbor.

Some plaintiffs said things have improved since the lawsuit was filed. Herring noticed that Strickland doesn’t use the spray field closest to her property line as often.

If the legal challenges fail, Herring worries things will go right back to the way they were. She says she owes it to her ancestors to keep fighting.

“This is my connection to them,” she said. “This is my birthright. Absolutely sacred.”

Tesla: The world’s largest rooftop solar farm.

EcoWatch

March 5, 2018

The world’s largest rooftop solar farm.

via World Economic Forum

Tesla wants to power its city-sized factory with renewable energy

The world's largest rooftop solar farm.via World Economic Forum

Posted by EcoWatch on Monday, March 5, 2018

State Dept. Was Granted $120 Million to Fight Russian Meddling. It Has Spent $0.

New York Times

State Dept. Was Granted $120 Million to Fight Russian Meddling. It Has Spent $0.

By Gardiner Harris March 4, 2018

Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state, has voiced skepticism that the United States is capable of doing anything to counter Russian meddling. CreditPool photo by Lintao Zhang

WASHINGTON — As Russia’s virtual war against the United States continues unabated with the midterm elections approaching, the State Department has yet to spend any of the $120 million it has been allocated since late 2016 to counter foreign efforts to meddle in elections or sow distrust in democracy.

As a result, not one of the 23 analysts working in the department’s Global Engagement Center — which has been tasked with countering Moscow’s disinformation campaign — speaks Russian, and a department hiring freeze has hindered efforts to recruit the computer experts needed to track the Russian efforts.

The delay is just one symptom of the largely passive response to the Russian interference by President Trump, who has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow and defend democratic institutions. More broadly, the funding lag reflects a deep lack of confidence by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson in his department’s ability to execute its historically wide-ranging mission and spend its money wisely.

Mr. Tillerson has voiced skepticism that the United States is even capable of doing anything to counter the Russian threat.

“If it’s their intention to interfere, they’re going to find ways to do that,” Mr. Tillerson said in an interview last month with Fox News. “And we can take steps we can take, but this is something that once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”

The United States spends billions of dollars on secret cyber capabilities, but these weapons have proved largely ineffective against Russian efforts on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere that simply amplify or distort divisive but genuine voices in the United States and elsewhere.

The role for the Global Engagement Center would be to assess Russian efforts and then set about amplifying a different set of voices to counter them, perhaps creating a network of anti-propaganda projects dispersed around the world, experts said.

“There are now thousands of former Russian journalists who have been exiled or fired who are doing counter-Russian stuff in exile who we could help,” said Richard Stengel, who as the under secretary for public diplomacy in the Obama administration had oversight of the Global Engagement Center.

Concerted campaigns to highlight the roles of Russian troll farms or Russian mercenaries in Ukraine and Syria could have a profound effect, Mr. Stengel said.

At the end of the Obama administration, Congress directed the Pentagon to send $60 million to the State Department so it could coordinate government-wide efforts, including those by the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security, to counter anti-democratic propaganda by Russia and China. This messaging effort is separate from other potential government actions like cyber-attacks.

Mr. Tillerson spent seven months trying to decide whether to spend any of the money. The State Department finally sent a request to the Defense Department on Sept. 18 to transfer the funds, but with just days left in the fiscal year, Pentagon officials decided that the State Department had lost its shot at the money.

With another $60 million available for the next fiscal year, the two departments dickered for another five months over how much the State Department could have.

After The New York Times, following a report on the issue by Politico in August, began asking about the delayed money, the State Department announced on Monday that the Pentagon had agreed to transfer $40 million for the effort, just a third of what was originally intended.

State Department officials say they expect to receive the money in April. Steve Goldstein, the under secretary for public diplomacy, said he would contribute $1 million from his own budget to “kick-start the initiative quickly.”

“This funding is critical to ensuring that we continue an aggressive response to malign influence and disinformation,” Mr. Goldstein said.

On Wednesday, Mark E. Mitchell, a top official in the Defense Department, said much wrangling remained before any of the promised $40 million is transferred to the State Department.

“We’re still a ways off,” Mr. Mitchell said.

The delays have infuriated some members of Congress, which approved the funding transfer with bipartisan support.

“It is well past time that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center gets the resources Congress intended for it to effectively fight Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and other foreign propaganda operations,” Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Wednesday.

Adele Ruppe, the center’s chief of staff, defended the administration’s broader efforts to counter Russian propaganda, pointing out that the State Department had provided $1.3 billion in assistance in 2017 to strengthen European resilience to Russian meddling. But that money was largely obligated during the Obama administration, and the Trump administration has proposed slashing that assistance by more than half for the coming year, to $527 million, and to $491 million for the next year.

While it waits for the funding transfer from the Pentagon, the center, which has a staff of around 60 people, including 23 contract analysts, will continue working on its original mission: countering jihadist and extremist propaganda.

Most of the center’s leaders are working in temporary assignments, a product of Mr. Tillerson’s halt in promotions. The analysts work in a warren of cubicles in the basement of a tired building that once housed the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor to the C.I.A.

The analysts are divided into five teams that largely work in four languages: Arabic, Urdu, French and Somali. The analysts said in interviews that they had notched some significant victories, including a video montage proving that the Islamic State had itself destroyed Al Nuri Grand Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, and a widely seen cartoon in French depicting the miserable life of an Islamic State fighter.

Still, these efforts are a small fraction of what Congress envisioned. A 2015 internal assessment found that the Islamic State had been far more nimble on social media than the United States had been. In May, Congress more than doubled the center’s budget, providing an additional $19 million over its earlier budget of $14 million. But by Jan. 1, the department had spent just $3.6 million of the additional $19 million, Mr. Goldstein said.

James K. Glassman, the under secretary for public diplomacy during the George W. Bush administration, said the center’s uncertain funding and temporary leadership reflected the administration’s lack of interest in countering either jihadist or Russian propaganda.

“They’ve got the vehicle to do this work in the center,” Mr. Glassman said. “What they don’t have is a secretary of state or a president who’s interested in doing this work.”

Mr. Tillerson is focusing his energies instead on drastically shrinking the department, leaving a significant part of its budget unused and hundreds of important decisions unmade.

Last year, the State Department spent just 79 percent of the money that Congress had authorized for the conduct of foreign affairs, the lowest such level in at least 15 years and well down from the 93 percent spent in the final year of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of data from the Office of Management and Budget.

Because of the hiring and promotion freezes that have left large sums unspent, as well as Mr. Tillerson’s refusal to delegate spending decisions, the department had a backlog of more than 1,400 official requests for Mr. Tillerson’s signoff at the end of last year, according to a former senior diplomat who left the department then.

Trash in the Fjords? Norway Turns to Drones

New York Times – Europe

Trash in the Fjords? Norway Turns to Drones

Richard Martyn-Hemphill and Henrik Pryser Libel, March 4, 2018

A promenade in Oslo. The fjord in Norway’s capital is filled with garbage, and the city has approved the use of drones to pinpoint the trouble spots. Credit: James Silverman for The New York Times

OSLO — Norway’s fjords have long inspired the country’s artists and drawn streams of tourists. In winter, their ice-laced surfaces shimmer beside snow-capped mountains: a vision of natural beauty, blissfully untouched.

But lost in the depths of the fjord in Oslo, stretching out from the capital, is a trove that would please any intrepid archaeologist or Nordic noir sleuth: sunken Viking trinkets, bullion from Hitler’s prized warship and, possibly, a few victims of homicide.

Mostly, though, the fjord is filled with garbage, like unwanted cars. And that has alarmed environmentalists.

“Not many years ago, a mayor said if you want to get rid of a car, put it on the ice,” said Solve Stubberud, general secretary of the Norwegian Divers Federation.

Now, the capital is turning to new technology to help pinpoint the litter so that human divers can scour it off the seabed. This past Thursday, board members of Oslo’s Port Authority approved a pioneering trash-removal plan.

“We will test out drones,” said Svein Olav Lunde, the chief technical officer of the Oslo Port Authority, shortly after the meeting, explaining how these unmanned vessels will be used to help clear out underwater “islands of trash.”

Geir Rognlien Elgvin, a board member, says he believes that Oslo’s port will be the first in the world to try this sort of trash pickup. The drones will plunge into the depths of Oslo Fjord this spring. An electric-powered ship with a crane will join the cleanup fleet by next year.

Oslo is turning to drone technology partly because of a dead dolphin — bloodied, beached and ensnared in plastic. Gory images of the carcass, taken in January on a trash-strewn shore of Oslo Fjord, resonated on social media among Norwegians, who tend to see their jagged coastline as a paragon of untouched natural beauty.

Mr. Stubberud said that recent images of beached dolphins and whales have woken up Norway, but that “plastic is the real problem.” Politicians and the public have shown more interest in the cleanup campaign in the past two years, he said.

But it’s mainly driven by environmentalists. Ambitious plans to clean up the city’s industrial waste and sewage have been in the works for decades, along with a proposal for a car-free city center and a ban on using oil to heat buildings that is to go into effect in 2020. Campaigns like these won Oslo the European Green Capital Award for 2019.

By The New York Times

Fjords are indelibly linked to Norway’s identity as a seafaring nation. The long, narrow, deep inlets form at the base of mountains where ocean water flows into valleys formed near the coast. The Oslo Fjord is 62 miles long.

But in the fjord — roughly one-third of Norway’s five million people live on its shores — the problems started with industrialization and increased shipping after the oil boom in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Even as the first drones are set to plumb the fjords, the national government is moving in another direction. Norway is one of the few countries that allow offshore dumping of mining waste, which can destroy vast numbers of fish stocks in fjords with hundreds of thousands of tons of sludge.

Norway has refused to sign an International Union for Conservation of Nature resolution outlawing the practice, putting it in the company of Chile, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Turkey.

“It’s wrong, and I wish that we didn’t do it,” said Lan Marie Nguyen Berg, vice mayor for the environment and transportation in Oslo. Ms. Nguyen Berg says Norway should preserve the fjords “for future generations.”

But the national government has emphasized that the mining projects provide local jobs.

Now, to tackle the household trash in the city’s surrounding seabed, a drone bidding war awaits for the technology to map the trash spots.

“There are whole households of furniture,” Christine Spiten, 27, a drone operator and tech entrepreneur, said recently at Oslo’s Lysaker River, which forms the boundary between the municipalities of Oslo and Baerum.

Ms. Spiten spoke before unraveling a bright yellow cable of rubber and Kevlar that linked a video game controller and touch screen to an underwater drone called Blu Eye. She had showcased the drone to representatives of the port authority and Norway’s shipping industry at the mouth of the river in February. The demonstration uncovered a rusty red bike and showed how drones could save time, money and hassle in cleaning the seabed.

Ms. Spiten and her team in the seaport town of Trondheim, where she lives in a sailboat, engineered the drone’s technology. She said her skills were partly drawn from her training at an oil company. Some board members see Ms. Spiten as the favorite to take home the contract, but she has stiff competition from international drone makers.

After the meeting on Thursday, the litter collection plan settled, Roger Schjerva, the chairman of the port authority, noted even more important items in the fjords that continue to need urgent attention: mines.

The mines date back to the Second World War. There are more than 1,550 of them in Oslo Fjord. Of the 270 that have been located so far, around 100 of those have been detonated, said a spokesman for the Royal Norwegian Navy. When detonated in the fjords, they can damage ships and fish. The mines are also leaking.

So another wave of mine sweeping may come to the fjords. Mr. Schjerva said, “We will prioritize removing remaining mines from World War II.”

Economic Equality Is Key to Solving Climate Change, Report Shows

Bloomberg – Technology

Economic Equality Is Key to Solving Climate Change, Report Shows

By Jeremy Hodges March 5, 2018

Scientific study looks at global warming scenarios to 2100

Reaching climate goals won’t be an easy task, scientist says

Economies need to reduce inequality and promote sustainable development for the world to avert the perils of runaway global warming, according to new research.

The risk of missing emissions targets increased dramatically under economic scenarios that emphasizes high inequality and growth powered by fossil fuels, according to research published Monday by a team of scientists in the peer-reviewed Nature Climate Change journal.

“Climate change is far from the only issue we as a society are concerned about” said Joeri Rogelj, the paper’s lead author and a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis outside of Vienna. “We have to understand how these many goals can be achieved simultaneously. With this study, we show the enormous value of pursuing sustainable development for ambitious climate goals in line with the Paris Agreement,” he said.

The paper bridges two of the most intractable challenges facing policy makers across the globe. Scientists predict higher frequencies of floods, famines and superstorms unless the world keeps temperature rises well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century. At the same time, growing income inequality has been robbing advanced economies of dynamism needed to boost their resilience to change.

The IIASA researchers modeled six different scenarios in order to determine conditions that would limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to the paper.

“Our assessment shows particularly the enormous value of pursuing sustainable development for reaching extreme low climate change targets,” said Keywan Riahi, a coauthor of the paper. “On the other hand, fragmentation and pronounced inequalities will likely come hand-in-hand with low levels of innovation and productivity, and thus may push the 1.5 degrees Celsius target out of reach.”

Greenhouse gas emissions should peak before 2030 after which they’ll “decline rapidly” with a combination of phasing out of industry and energy related CO2 combined with an “upscaling” carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal, according to the report. An estimated 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide was released last year, 2 percent more than 2016, according to researchers in the Global Carbon Project.

“Bioenergy and other renewable energy technologies, such as wind, solar, and hydro, scale up drastically over the coming decades in successful scenarios, making up at least 60 percent of electricity generation by the middle of the century,” according to the researchers. “Traditional coal use falls to less than 20% of its current levels by 2040 and oil is phased out by 2060.”

— With assistance by Eric Roston

Team Trump’s war on science reaches a new level

MSNBC: The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

Team Trump’s war on science reaches a new level

By Steve Benen March 5, 2018

In this March 10, 2016 photo, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma Attorney General, gestures as he speaks during an interview in Oklahoma City, Okla. Photo by Sue Ogrocki/AP

In Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, the new president made a specific vow: “We’ll restore science to its rightful place.” He did exactly that, prioritizing the integrity of scientific inquiry throughout the executive branch. I remember Time magazine publishing a piece that said the Democratic president showed so much enthusiasm for science, he was “almost strident” on the issue.

It’s safe to say no one will ever say this about his successor.

The AP recently reported, for example, “When it comes to filling jobs dealing with complex science, environment and health issues, the Trump administration is nominating people with fewer science academic credentials than their Obama predecessors. And it’s moving slower as well.” The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, meanwhile, is a “ghost town.” The top-ranking science official in the White House is a 31-year-old aide with no relevant background in science.

The New Yorker published a brutal piece last week, noting not only Trump’s disdain for science, but also detailing the extent to which Trump’s budget blueprint represents an “assault on knowledge and reason.”

It’s against this backdrop that Politico reported the other day on Trump’s EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, went so far as to dismiss evolution in an old radio interview.

“There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution, and it deals with the origins of man, which is more from a philosophical standpoint than a scientific standpoint,” he said in one part of the series, in which Pruitt and the program’s hosts discussed issues related to the Constitution.

EPA would not say this week whether any of Pruitt’s positions have changed since 2005. Asked whether the administrator’s skepticism about a major foundation of modern science such as evolution could conflict with the agency’s mandate to make science-based decisions, spokesman Jahan Wilcox told POLITICO that “if you’re insinuating that a Christian should not serve in capacity as EPA administrator, that is offensive and a question that does not warrant any further attention.”

That’s not a constructive response to a reasonable question.

The issue isn’t about whether a Christian can lead the EPA. Rather, what matters in this case is whether someone who struggles to evaluate evidence and scientific information is suitable for this post.

Which is why it’s so discouraging to see the EPA’s spokesperson respond in such a knee-jerk way. As New York’s Jon Chait put it, it matters if “the administrator of the agency charged with assessing environmental threats and protecting against them is a kook who rejects out of hand any scientific theory that implies any revision of any right-wing belief whatsoever, including the right of companies to dump endless amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for free.”

To try to shut this down by suggesting any concerns are necessarily anti-Christian is a mistake.

Emails reveal oil and gas drilling was a key incentive to shrink national monuments

ThinkProgress

Emails reveal oil and gas drilling was a key incentive to shrink national monuments

Ryan Zinke also directed Interior staff to study coal reserves at Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument.

Mark Hand March 2, 2018

The Department of the Interior focused on the potential for oil and gas exploration at the Bears Ears National Monument during its 2017 review of National Monuments. Credit: George Frey/Getty Images

From the start of the Trump administration’s review of national monuments, agency officials were directing staff at the U.S. Department of the Interior to figure out how much coal, oil, and natural gas had been placed off limits by the Bears Ears’ National Monument designation.

Environmental activists and public lands advocates feared Trump was pushing to reduce the size of national monuments to give mineral extractive industries easier access to drill or mine in the protected areas. But they didn’t have any evidence or a smoking gun to prove their theory. Now they do.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, long before Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended a major reduction in the size of the Bears Ears monument in southeastern Utah, the administration was already eyeing the potential for oil and gas exploration at the site.

Last March, an aide to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), asked a senior official at the Department of the Interior to consider reduced boundaries for the Bears Ears monument to remove land from protection that contained oil and natural gas deposits, The New York Times reported Friday.

Hatch’s office sent an email to the Interior Department on March 15, 2017 that included a map depicting a boundary change that would “resolve all known mineral conflicts,” referring to oil and gas sites on the land that the state’s public schools wanted to lease out to increase state funds.

Trump decimates two national monuments in ‘historic action’

More than 100 years ago, the federal government granted so-called trust lands to support state institutions, like public schools, given that nearly 70 percent of the state is federally controlled land. Bears Ears included about 110,000 acres of these trust lands, eliminating the potential for resource sales, Utah officials said.

John Andrews, associate director of the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, which oversees the lands designated for school funding, told The New York Times that the new Bears Ears boundaries approved by Trump reflected his group’s request to exclude its trust lands.

The newspaper obtained emails and other documents about the shrinking of national monuments from the Interior Department after it sued the agency in federal court.

“We’ve long known that Trump and Zinke put polluter profits ahead of our clean air, clean water, public health and coastal economies. This is more proof,” League of Conservation Voters Deputy Legislative Director Alex Taurel said Friday in a statement. “On Zinke’s one year anniversary as secretary, the evidence of just how embedded Trump and Zinke are with the dirty energy of the past could not be clearer.”

The Interior Department had not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress on these emails and documents at the time this article was published.

NRDC Energy Team: And who is surprised by this? Oil was central in decision to shrink #BearsEars monument, emails show https://nyti.ms/2FIUmwA

Oil Was Central in Decision to Shrink Bears Ears Monument, Emails Show

Interior Department emails obtained by The New York Times in a lawsuit indicate that oil exploration was the central factor in the decision to scale back the monument. nytimes.com

Bears Ears wasn’t the only national monument being evaluated for its potential fossil fuel reserves. In one memo, an Interior official asked department staff to prepare a report on each national monument under review in the United States, with an emphasis on the areas of national monuments with “annual production of coal, oil, gas, and renewable energy sources.”

During his review, Zinke also looked closely at the potential coal reserves at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also located in Utah.

Interior Department staff developed a series of estimates on the value of coal that could be mined from a section of Grand Staircase-Escalante. When Trump announced in December that he would be reducing Grand Staircase-Escalante to nearly half its original size, those sections with coal reserves were included in the areas that would no longer be protected, according to the New York Times.

The reductions of the two national monuments located in Utah came after an Interior Department review, initiated in April, which looked at all national monuments created since 1996. Trump, at the time, said that the review would put an end to “egregious abuse of federal power” that has resulted in a “massive federal land grab.”

Grand Staircase-Escalante was designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Bears Ears was designated by President Barack Obama in December of 2016, as one of his final major designations as president. Environmentalists and indigenous groups have fought for years to protect Bears Ears, arguing that the area holds numerous sites of historical, cultural, and ecological significance.

A Former SWAT Operator Says the Cop Who Stood Outside Is Another Victim of the Parkland Massacre

The Nation

A Former SWAT Operator Says the Cop Who Stood Outside Is Another Victim of the Parkland Massacre

“Good guys with guns” are not going to prevent—or even lessen the horror of—mass shootings.

By Joshua Holland February 27, 2018

Students evacuate from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, February 14, 2018. (Mike Stocker / South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

Was Scot Peterson, the sheriff’s deputy who didn’t storm into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the midst of a mass shooting that claimed the lives of 17 teachers and students, a “coward,” as Donald Trump described him?

David Chipman, who, unlike Donald Trump, knows a thing or two about facing off against an armed gunman, says no—that Peterson is, instead, one of “the many victims of Parkland.” Chipman, a 25-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), served on one of its Special Response Teams—the agency’s equivalent of SWAT—and is now a senior policy adviser to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s campaign to curb gun violence. He says, “We rightfully applaud heroes. People who disregard their own personal safety for another. But it is a rare act. We hope that when the chips are down, we will exercise our duty, but you never know until that day comes. I’d like to say I would have rushed into a building with only a handgun to confront an active shooter armed with a military-style assault rifle, knowing I was outgunned, knowing that I would likely die, but I don’t know.”

trump says of Parkland shooting: “I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon.”

By all accounts, Scot Peterson had been a model cop until he became a national disgrace. “His personnel record is filled with commendations,” reported the Sun-Sentinel. “Four years ago, he was named school resource officer of the year. A year ago, a supervisor nominated him for Parkland deputy of the year.” But like most of us, he had never faced a situation like he did on the day that Nikolas Cruz shot 33 of his former classmates, teachers, and coaches with an AR-15.

The criticism Peterson’s received is understandable. He took a risky job. Since the school shooting at Columbine, police officers have been trained to enter a building in such circumstances, even if it might cost them their lives.

But Chipman says that the reality is that, even though they undergo extensive training designed to inoculate them against natural human stress reactions, it’s not uncommon for soldiers to freeze up the first time they experience combat. It’s not a sign of cowardice. In most cases, those same troops perform well—or even heroically—after that first exposure to real-life combat. We can’t expect police officers to behave any differently.

The data show that having access to a firearm almost doubles your risk of becoming a homicide victim, but, according to Pew, two-thirds of gun owners “cite protection as a major reason for owning a gun”—far more than any other reason given.

The gun lobby’s heroic-gunslinger fantasy also animates Donald Trump’s repeated calls for arming school teachers. It’s a distraction from the real issue—mass shootings, on and off campus, accounted for fewer than 4 percent of gun murders last year. Still, I asked Chipman: What’s wrong with the NRA’s idea that “good guys with guns” could stop people like Cruz? How realistic is it to expect a teacher, administrator, or other bystander to intervene in such a situation?

You can listen to our 20-minute interview through the player above, or read the transcript below, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Joshua Holland: We’ve had another mass shooting, and predictably, conservatives are calling for teachers to be armed. Conceding that we can’t post a police officer in every classroom, why shouldn’t we train teachers? Why not send them to the range, make sure that they’re proficient with their weapons, and hope that they can stop the next massacre?

David Chipman: Let me break it down a couple of ways. First, what the president really said is that the presence of guns in the hands of teachers would serve as a deterrent. Deterrence is something I believe in, and in policing, in certain respects, it does work. The problem is that [Nikolas Cruz] suffered from severe mental illness, and as we know, for most mass shooters, it’s basically a suicide attack, so that’s when deterrence falls apart. If you’re willing to die, it’s tough to imagine that a deterrent would work.

So let’s say that it isn’t a deterrent, but perhaps the outcome could be better. I was a trained SWAT team member for ATF. I was actually issued a semiautomatic AR-15 during my duty, so I know what that gun can do, and I know the type of training that I had not only to be proficient at shooting it, but also to be proficient when the chips were down.

I also have some expertise in teaching, because my father is a mathematics professor. Now, my dad and I are very different people. For instance, for his birthday, I gave him a device that caught bugs on the wall of his house so that he could let them go outside. This is a person who’s wired against killing anything, and I think that it’s interesting how people assume that everyone is capable of killing another human being, and the research shows that that’s just not true.

There’s this famous book called On Killing, by David Grossman, who studied how training in the military has evolved over the years. They used to qualify by shooting at round targets, and what they found is that once they got into combat, many of them did not fire their guns, and even when they fired their guns, they would purposely fire over the enemy. So they had to train people to actually shoot at targets that looked more like humans, and that’s why police qualify today on targets that aren’t round but are shaped like people.

So I think that unless you are trained—and you’re trained over and over again, and you practice like you play, which means you’re training in simulated life or death environments—the likelihood of you even firing your gun is small. And then the likelihood that you would actually hit a moving target surrounded by other moving targets—any trained operator knows the fallacy in that. It’s highly unlikely that it would turn out well.

“Yes, most [gun owners] practice, but they’re not practicing with rounds of ammunition zinging past their head.” —David Chipman

Now, there’s a limited number of exceptions. The pro-gun people say this, “Well, what happens if you’re lined up against a wall and people are being slowly executed one at a time, would you want a gun?” Okay, sure, yeah, of course I would, but that’s not a realistic scenario we’re talking about.

JH: There’s a natural stress reaction that law enforcement and the military train hard to overcome. If you’re in a situation with an active shooter, you have adrenaline coursing through your body and that makes it very difficult to respond in an effective, smart manner. Can you talk about that a little bit?

DC: When you’re in a life-or-death encounter, your blood goes to your major organs and you experience tunnel vision. That’s why police and the military train repeatedly under similar conditions. I think that 30, 40 years ago, they would put you under stress by actually physically hurting you. They just exhausted us, because being very tired is similar to stress. We also trained in simulated situations where we were firing live ammo around each other, and there’s a difference in how you respond to a situation when you know you’re firing real bullets. It just changes everything.

I think you also have to understand the element of fear. The fear involved in doing these operations is something that every individual has to deal with on their own terms. Law enforcement doesn’t really provide much support in terms of how to deal with these things. Cops are really good at drinking together and telling stories, but they never really talk about what’s going on emotionally.

I’ve never talked about this before, but for me personally, to get through these operations, I would actually pretend that I was already dead. And in that way, I had the courage to do what I needed to do to safely to protect my team and do the operation. How many other people do that? I don’t know. I can just share my own experience. But I can just tell you that the movies and real life are so different, and it concerns me that we have a president talking about things that are way beyond his scope of qualifications.

JH: What’s the practical effect of coming down with tunnel vision?

DC: You lose your peripheral vision, and you only see what you’re focusing on. And the problem is that you become hyper-focused on that one target and you don’t see innocent victims nearby, or other offenders, or your partners who might be arriving on the scene. It’s a very dangerous thing that you can overcome through breathing and lots of practice. But you need to overcome it because it can put you in a situation where you not only don’t shoot your correct target, but you hit unintended people.

Yes, most [gun owners] practice, but they’re not practicing with rounds of ammunition zinging past their head.

JH: We should acknowledge that, as you said, there are situations in which it is proper for a bystander to intervene if he or she has a weapon, but for the most part, law enforcement counsels people not to do so in an active shooting situation unless they are immediately in front of the shooter and have a very clear shot. And then in that circumstance, you should put your weapon down immediately after firing. Why is that?

DC: Well, for a host of reasons. [Even] members of law enforcement are told not to shoot if they’re off-duty in a situation like that unless it’s a clear and imminent danger. They’re told that it’s better to be a good witness, because there have been so many incidents where off-duty officers are trying to render aid or defuse a situation, and they’re actually killed by law-enforcement [officers who think they’re the shooter].

That’s what happened to John Capano, the ATF agent most recently killed in the line of duty. It was New Year’s Eve [of 2011], he was going to a pharmacy to pick up a prescription for his father, and he walked into the middle of a prescription robbery. He engaged this robber, got into a fight with them, had his weapon drawn, and another off-duty cop shot and killed him.

Some aspects of law enforcement are like being a doctor. You never want to do harm. You don’t want to make the situation worse. And it seems to me that this idea of putting a gun in teachers’ hands is like giving up in this issue. The time that we needed to focus on the shooter in Florida was every moment prior to him exiting his Uber with a military-style assault rifle, and what I mean by that is all of the warning signs, how we regulate guns in America, his mental-health condition and what we could have done to intervene there. Those were the opportunities to be heroes and save the day—not after he began shooting, because we know that once the shots are fired, things move so quickly that even trained people have difficulty reacting fast enough to actually stop the shooting from occurring.

JH: It seems to me that we need a comprehensive approach, like we take for other public-health issues, but the discussion often gets derailed by either/or thinking. When you mention mental health, for example, people think that that means you’re trying to avoid the issue of banning assault weapons or other forms of gun control. What are some of the measures that the Giffords campaign is advocating right now?

DC: I love thinking about it in terms of that kind of culture of safety. I grew up just north of Detroit, so as a child I grew up riding in a car without seat belts, with both my parents smoking Pall Malls, and I think I was sitting over the gas tank. And here we are today, we have mandatory seat belt laws, we have airbags, and we have other sensors that help us drive safe, and it’s actually become cool to buy a safe car. Cars are marketed for their safety, and that has evolved over several decades.

At Giffords, I’m a concealed-carry owner, [Giffords co-founder] Mark Kelly is a combat war veteran—even Gabby [Giffords] has a naval warship filled with guns named after her. We are not anti-gun. We recognize how lethal guns can be in the wrong hands and how accidental shootings and other things can impact families in a bad way. So we want there to be more focus on smart technologies—different technologies that can make guns safer. From “smart guns” to visible signs that a gun is loaded, to just securing guns in your car. One of the biggest problems for law enforcement today is that as more people are carrying guns outside their home, they’re leaving them unsecured in cars and they get stolen and then those guns are used in crime. My boss in Detroit retired from ATF and within two years, he was walking his dog outside in northern Virginia and he was murdered with a gun by someone who had stolen it from a car two blocks away.

These are real things that happen to real people, and I think that people will do the right thing if it becomes the cultural norm. Like don’t drive drunk, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the gun lobby sees safety as a potential mandate, and they just oppose any regulation or mandate whatsoever as a matter of principle, and so that’s what we’re up against. But I think the more we get cops like me and veterans and other gun owners saying, “Hey, look, I like my rights to have a gun, but I know how dangerous it is, and I want to make it safe,” I think we’re making progress.

JH: Another important piece of this is that the gun lobby pays lip-service to the idea of keeping guns out of the wrong hands, but they oppose every single measure to do so. An important component of this is not only closing the so-called gun-show loophole—which is not necessarily just about gun shows, it allows individuals to sell each other weapons without a background check—but also these red-flag laws that empower law enforcement to confiscate guns from people who are identified as a threat, at least on a temporary basis.

There are a number of things we could do that just seem like common sense. For example, there are mental illnesses that will disqualify you from purchasing a firearm, but when you’re given a 72-hour emergency hold during a moment of crisis, and a psychiatrist says you represent a threat to yourself and others, in most states there’s no mechanism for law enforcement to intervene in that circumstance and make sure that you don’t have guns.

So it’s not either/or, it’s yes/and. We need to improve these systems. We need to deal with the culture. And I believe that we should ban military-style weapons with high-capacity magazines that result in greater body counts.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, David. I really appreciate your expertise and wisdom on this topic.

DC: It’s always a pleasure.

Joshua Holland is a contributor to The Nation and a fellow at the Nation Institute. He’s also the host of Politics and Reality Radio.

Orrin Hatch Calls Obamacare Supporters ‘The Stupidest, Dumbass People I’ve Ever Met’

HuffPost

Orrin Hatch Calls Obamacare Supporters ‘The Stupidest, Dumbass People I’ve Ever Met’

David Moye, HuffPost March 2, 2018

Orrin Hatch Calls Obamacare Supporters;The Stupidest, Dumbass People I’ve Ever Met

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is apparently sick of people who support affordable health care.

On Thursday, the Republican politician called supporters of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, “the stupidest, dumbass people I’ve ever met,” according to Salt Lake City station KSTU.

Hatch made the comments during a speech about the recent GOP tax overhaul that repealed the health care law’s individual mandate, according to The Hill.

The insult came after Hatch referred to “that wonderful bill called ‘Obamacare.’”

“Now, if you didn’t catch on, I was being very sarcastic,” he said.

Hatch then called the Affordable Care Act “the stupidest, dumbass bill that I’ve ever seen.”

He added:

“Now, some of you may have loved it. If you do, you are one of the stupidest, dumbass people I’ve ever met. This was one of them — and there are a lot of ’em up on Capitol Hill from time to time.”

Hatch’s comments came the same day the Kaiser Family Foundation released a poll saying the Affordable Care Act was popular with 54 percent of the population.

That’s the highest level of support since the law was enacted in 2010, according to The Hill.

Hatch spokesman Matt Whitlock tried to put a Band-Aid on the senator’s Obamacare insults.

“The comments were obviously made in jest, but what’s not a joke is the harm Obamacare has caused for countless Utahns,” Whitlock told KSTU.

In January, the 83-year-old Hatch announced he would retire from the Senate at the end of 2018. He has served in the office since 1977.

Comments:

Boltarama: “195,000 Utahns signed up for health insurance under Obamacare for 2018 — nearly matching last year’s number, when the enrollment period was twice as long, the Trump administration reported Thursday. About 130,000 people were expected to be covered in 2018 by Intermountain Healthcare SelectHealth, while University of Utah Health Plans signed up 25,000 in the six-week open enrollment period that ended Dec. 15, the insurers told The Salt Lake Tribune.” He’s talking to you folks who voted for him since the beginning of time!!

Colonel: Hatch just insulted over 1/3 of Trump’s base.

Concerned: HATCH + TRUMP= DEPLORABLES

dmacho: TRUMP folks all have STD ” stupid trump disorder ”

Lloyd: Orin Hatch died 10 years ago. He just hasn’t fallen over yet.

Samuel: Says the guy who supports Trump.

trijamma: I agree Obamacare isn’t great. But it’s better than anything Republicans have proposed, which is nothing but trying to tear down an honest attempt to fix health care.

Jason: Yeah, people that want access to affordable healthcare for their families are stupid. Thanks so much Senator.

Gumby: Hillary was crucified for calling racists deplorable, but its okay for Orrin Hatch to call people who want universal healthcare stupid.

Bob P: Let Hatch retire, but for God’s sake don’t let him become an usher taking hold of a collection plate at the Mormon Tabernacle.

If the Supreme Court rules against unions, conservatives won’t like what happens next

Washington Post

Democracy Dies in Darkness

If the Supreme Court rules against unions, conservatives won’t like what happens next

Janus vs. AFSCME could mean the end of no-strike clauses.

By Shaun Richman March 1, 2018

Activists rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 26. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard the case Janus vs. AFSCME, with the fate of the labor movement seemingly in the balance. At stake are agency fees — public sector unions can collect fees for service from employees who don’t join the union that represents them, which the plaintiff argues is an unconstitutional act of compelled speech.

The deep-pocketed backers of Janus aim to bankrupt unions and strip them of whatever power they still have, but if the court rules that an interaction a union has with the government is political speech, they might not be so happy with the results. Many have noted that such an overreaching and inconsistent decision could have unintended consequences by granting a heretofore denied constitutional right to collective bargaining and transforming thousands of workplace disputes into constitutional controversies.

What the Janus backers (and most commentators) miss is that agency fees are not just compensation for the financial costs of representation, but for the political costs of representing all the members in the bargaining unit and maintaining labor peace. As AFSCME’s attorney pointed out in his oral arguments, the agency fee is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in most union contracts. Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and discord on their hands.

American labor laws, and the employers who benefit from them, prefer that if there’s going to be a union, only one should serve as the exclusive representative of all eligible employees in a workplace. That scheme imposes on unions a legal obligation to fairly represent all members of the bargaining unit, and a political imperative to defend the terms of any deal as “the best we could get” (even if it includes concessions on benefits and work rules). It rewards the unions with a guaranteed right to exist and a reliable base of fee-paying membership. But it rewards employers with the far more valuable guarantee of the right to direct the uninterrupted work of the enterprise while union leadership has to tamp down rank-and-file gripes and discord for the length of the contract.

The combination of exclusive union representation, mandatory agency fees, no-strike clauses and “management’s rights” are the foundation of our peculiar labor relations system. No other country structures its labor relations system quite like this. Knock one part out, as the Janus plaintiffs aim to do with agency fees, and the whole system can fall apart. Employers will not like the chaos that this will bring.

Before this system evolved during the New Deal, multiple unions did compete in individual workplaces for dues-paying members and shop floor leadership. They would compete over who made the boldest wage and hour demands and who led the most disruptive job actions, as well as who could forge a more productive relationship with management or just flat-out take a sweetheart deal. But no deal could bring lasting labor peace, as any union cut out of the deal had a political need to disparage its terms and agitate for a fresh round of protests. In the New York City hotel industry, for example, rival anarchist and Communist unions competed with a number of craft unions. Their one-upmanship resulted in half a dozen industry-wide strikes between 1911 and 1934, until the industry voluntarily recognized one merged union council in 1938.

World War II strained this system. As a show of patriotism, unions pledged not to strike to maintain defense production, but were rewarded with federally enforced wage freezes to combat inflation. Workers who were squeezed by rising consumer prices found themselves unable to file a grievance if they were fired for engaging in wildcat strikes; many chose to quit their unions in protest. With their leadership and revenue under threat, union leaders considered abandoning their no-strike pledge.

To maintain production and labor peace, federal arbitrators began granting unions a “maintenance of membership” clause in contracts, which compelled union members to continue to pay dues during the terms of a collective bargaining agreement. That evolved into today’s union shop and agency fee. Public-sector labor laws, which are immediately at issue in Janus vs. AFSCME, are modeled on private-sector labor law and ruled by the same bargaining dynamics.

If the Supreme Court rules against AFSCME in Janus, many unions will abandon exclusive representation altogether. Their primary motivation will be avoiding the “free rider” problem — being required to expend resources on workers who opt out of paying anything for those services. And new unions will form to compete in that abandoned space.

The first unions to compete will probably be conservative. In non-bargaining Southern states that do not recognize formal union representation, organizations already exist that vie with teachers unions by offering minimal services and the promise to refrain from political activity. And right-wing foundations are paying for “organizers” to go door-to-door to convince union-represented workers to stop paying dues where they no longer have to. Would anybody really be surprised if rich and powerful funders encouraged new anti-union “unions” to more closely align members with the GOP agenda?

Those will eventually be followed by new unions that are more left-wing or militant (or at least crankier). They will not be satisfied with the current work rules and compensation and will have little incentive to settle.

Under the current scheme, those kinds of differences of opinion are aired in winner-take-all leadership elections between competing factions. A post-Janus system of voluntary representation would encourage many opposition caucuses to break away and form alternative, minority unions for their members only.

The solicitor general of Illinois — indirectly a party to the Janus case — warned in Monday’s oral arguments “that when unions are deprived of agency fees, they tend to become more militant, more confrontational.” And AFSCME’s counsel warned about the thousands of contracts that would have to be renegotiated in a climate where an agency fee is no longer a trade for a no-strike pledge, raising “an untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country.”

Although Janus vs. AFSCME applies to public-sector unions, this same logic applies to the majority of states that have passed “right to work” laws prohibiting mandatory union fees in the private sector. And the big-money, right-wing plotters who have been pushing Janus are gunning for the blue states, too.

“No-strike” clauses buy employers a period of guaranteed labor peace. They would be basically unenforceable if workers could quit a voluntary association to engage in a wildcat strike, or join an alternative union that eschews signed agreements to have the freedom to engage in sudden unannounced job actions.

Many union organizers, frustrated by the unequal application of constitutional rights in labor relations and hungry for breakthrough strategies to revive the labor movement, will welcome this kind of chaos. Conservatives who just want to deprive unions of financial resources for short-term partisan gain should think twice about this attack — if the court rules their way, they will not like what comes next.