Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
You wouldn’t stand for Tony’s behaviour, so don’t let corporations get away with it.
ACT NOW: http://act.gp/justice
Read more: http://bit.ly/2Dkgz6e
You wouldn't stand for Tony's behaviour, so don't let corporations get away with it. ACT NOW: http://act.gp/justiceRead more: http://bit.ly/2Dkgz6evia Greenpeace International
Posted by EcoWatch on Thursday, January 18, 2018
Cape Town could be the first city in the world to run out of water http://ti.me/2rbaFin
Cape Town’s water crisis is set to intensify with Day Zero soon approaching.
Cape Town Is Days Away From Running Out of Water
Cape Town could be the first city in the world to run out of water http://ti.me/2rbaFin
Posted by TIME on Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Trevor unpacks chain migration and the diversity lottery, two immigration programs Donald Trump both hates and knows nothing about.
►Full episode: http://on.cc.com/2mRTMoa
Trevor unpacks chain migration and the diversity lottery, two immigration programs Donald Trump both hates and knows nothing about.►Full episode: http://on.cc.com/2mRTMoa
Posted by The Daily Show on Thursday, January 18, 2018
Is it time to replace tipping? #FightFor15
The real history behind tipping is surprisingly racist.
Posted by ATTN: on Saturday, January 13, 2018
Watch: These three young girls have a powerful message for America.
Video by Get Lit – Words Ignite, Give them a LIKE!
Shared by Occupy Democrats, LIKE our page as well
These three young girls have a powerful message for America.
Watch: These three young girls have a powerful message for America.Video by Get Lit – Words Ignite, Give them a LIKE!Shared by Occupy Democrats, LIKE our page as well 🙂
Posted by Occupy Democrats on Sunday, January 10, 2016
U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders — US Senator for Vermont
January 17, 2018
Hey Mr. President, maybe the reason why more Americans emigrated to Norway last year than the other way around is because they have universal health care and a strong social democracy.
Hey Mr. President, maybe the reason why more Americans emigrated to Norway last year than the other way around is because they have universal health care and a strong social democracy.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, January 17, 2018
President Trump addressed the National Rifle Association (NRA) convention on April 28, 2017. He’s the first president to do so in more than 30 years. “The eight-year assault on your second amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end,” Trump said. The White House
By Peter Stone and Greg Gordon January 18, 2018
Washington. The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.
FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.
It’s unclear how long the Torshin inquiry has been ongoing, but the news comes as Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including whether the Kremlin colluded with Trump’s campaign, has been heating up.
All of the sources spoke on condition of anonymity because Mueller’s investigation is confidential and mostly involves classified information.
A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined comment.
Disclosure of the Torshin investigation signals a new dimension in the 18-month-old FBI probe of Russia’s interference. McClatchy reported a year ago that a multi-agency U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s intervention, begun even before the start of the 2016 general election campaign, initially included a focus on whether the Kremlin secretly helped fund efforts to boost Trump, but little has been said about that possibility in recent months.
The extent to which the FBI has evidence of money flowing from Torshin to the NRA, or of the NRA’s participation in the transfer of funds, could not be learned.
However, the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.
Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts.
During the campaign, Trump was an outspoken advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, at one point drawing a hail of criticism by suggesting that, if Clinton were elected, gun rights advocates could stop her from winning confirmation of liberal Supreme Court justices who support gun control laws.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” Trump said at a rally in August 2016. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Torshin, a leading figure in Putin’s party, has been implicated in money laundering by judicial authorities in Spain, as Bloomberg News first revealed in 2016. Spanish investigators alleged in an almost 500-page internal report that Torshin, who was then a senator, capitalized on his government role to assist mobsters laundering funds through Spanish properties and banks, Bloomberg reported
A summary obtained by McClatchy of the still-secret report links Torshin to Russian money laundering and describes him as a godfather in a major Russian criminal organization called Taganskaya.
Investigators for three congressional committees probing Russia’s 2016 operations also have shown interest in Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who has attended several of its annual conventions. At the group’s meeting in Kentucky in May 2016, Torshin spoke to Donald Trump Jr. during a gala event at the group’s national gathering in Kentucky in May 2016, when his father won an earlier-than-usual NRA presidential endorsement.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the investigation.
The NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Torshin could not be reached for comment, and emails to the Russian central bank seeking comment from Torshin and the bank elicited no response.
Mueller’s investigation has been edging closer to Trump’s inner circle. This week, The New York Times reported that Mueller had negotiated an agreement under which Steve Bannon, who was recently ousted from his post as a senior White House adviser, would fully respond to questions about the Trump campaign. Bannon headed the campaign over its final weeks.
Since taking over the investigation last May, Mueller has secured guilty pleas from two former Trump aides, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, both of whom agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; and criminal charges against two other top campaign figures, former campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.
A year ago, three U.S. intelligence agencies signed off on a joint assessment that was the basis for the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and other sanctions against the Kremlin. The intelligence agencies concluded that what began as a sophisticated Russian operation to undermine Americans’ faith in democracy morphed into a drive to help Trump win.
Torshin is among a phalanx of Putin proxies to draw the close attention of U.S. investigators, who also have tracked the activities of several Russian billionaires and pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs that have come in contact with Trump or his surrogates.
Torshin was a senior member of the Russian Senate and in recent years helped set up a Moscow gun rights group called Right to Bear Arms. He not only spoke with Trump Jr. at the NRA convention, but he also tried unsuccessfully to broker a meeting between Putin and the presidential candidate in 2016, according to the Times. He further sought to meet privately with the candidate himself near the 2016 NRA convention.
Torshin’s ties with the NRA have flourished in recent years. In late 2015, he hosted two dinners for a high-level NRA delegation during its week-long visit to Moscow that included meetings with influential Russian government and business figures.
In their internal report, Spanish prosecutors revealed a web of covert financial and money-laundering dealings between Torshin and Alexander Romanov, a Russian who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2016 and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
The prosecutors’ evidence included 33 audio recordings of phone conversations from mid-2012 to mid-2013 between Torshin and Romanov, who allegedly laundered funds to buy a hotel on the ritzy island of Mallorca. Torshin had an 80 percent stake in the venture, the Spanish report said.
In the phone conversations, Romanov referred to Torshin as the “godfather” or “boss.” Torshin has denied any links to organized crime and said his dealings with Romanov were purely “social.”
The Madrid-based newspaper El Pais last year reported that Spanish police were on the verge of arresting Torshin in the summer of 2013, when he had planned to attend a birthday party for Romanov, but a Russian prosecutor tipped the banker to plans to nab him if he set foot in Spain, and Torshin canceled his trip.
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also have taken an interest in Torshin as part of their parallel inquiries into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.
In questioning Donald Trump Jr. at a closed-door hearing in mid-December, investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee asked about his encounter with Torshin at the NRA convention, according to a source familiar with the hearing.
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., said his client and Torshin talked only briefly when they were introduced during a meal.
“It was all gun-related small talk,” Futerfas told McClatchy.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent letters in November to two senior Trump foreign policy aides, J.D. Gordon and Sam Clovis, seeking copies of any communications they had with or related to Torshin; the NRA; veteran conservative operative Paul Erickson; Maria Butina, a Torshin protege who ran the Russian pro-gun group he helped launch, and others linked to Torshin.
Erickson has raised funds for the NRA and is a friend of Butina’s. Shortly before the NRA’s May 2016 convention, he emailed Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn about the possibility of setting up a meeting between Putin and Trump during the campaign, according to the Times.
Erickson’s email to Dearborn bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, Erickson solicited advice from Dearborn and his boss, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a top foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, about the best way to connect Putin and Trump.
Both Dearborn and Butina, who has been enrolled as a graduate student at American University since mid 2016, have been asked to appear before the Judiciary Committee, but so far Erickson has not, sources familiar with the matter said.
Bridges LLC, a company that Erickson and Butina established in February 2016 in Erickson’s home state of South Dakota, also is expected to draw scrutiny. Public records don’t reveal any financial transactions involving Bridges. In a phone interview last year, Erickson said the firm was established in case Butina needed any monetary assistance for her graduate studies — an unusual way to use an LLC.
Erickson said he met Butina and Torshin when he and David Keene, a former NRA president, attended a meeting of Right to Bear Arms a few years ago in Moscow. Erickson described the links between Right to Bear Arms and the NRA as a “moral support operation both ways.”
Torshin’s contacts with the NRA and the Trump campaign last year also came to the attention of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser. When Torshin tried to arrange a personal meeting with Trump near the NRA convention site last May, Kushner scotched the idea, according to emails forwarded to Kushner.
On top of Torshin’s efforts to cozy up to the Trump campaign, the Moscow banker has forged ties with powerful conservatives, including Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian whom some have deemed Putin’s best friend in Washington. In a phone interview in 2016, Rohrabacher recalled meeting Torshin in Moscow a few years earlier and described him as “a mover and shaker.”
Last February when Torshin visited Washington, Rockefeller heir and conservative patron George O’Neill Jr. hosted a fancy four-hour dinner for the banker on Capitol Hill, an event that drew Rohrabacher, Erickson and other big names on the right. Rohrabacher has labeled Torshin as “conservatives’ favorite Russian,” Torshin was in Washington at the time to lead his country’s delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast, where Trump spoke. The banker also was slated to see the presidentat a meet-and-greet event prior to a White House breakfast, but Torshin’s invitation was canceled after the White House learned of his alleged mob connections, Yahoo News reported.
Torshin’s involvement with the NRA may have begun in 2013 when he attended the group’s convention in Houston. Keene, the ex-NRA leader and an avid hunter, was instrumental in building a relationship with the Russian, according to multiple conservative sources.
Keene also helped lead a high-level NRA delegation to Moscow in December 2015 for a week of lavish meals and meetings with Russian business and political leaders. The week’s festivities included a visit to a Russian gun company and a meeting with a senior Kremlin official and wealthy Russians, according to a member of the delegation, Arnold Goldschlager, a California doctor who has been active in NRA programs to raise large donations.
Others on the trip included Joe Gregory, who runs the NRA’s Ring of Freedom program for elite donors who chip in checks of $1 million and upwards, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke and Pete Brownell, a chief executive of a gun company and longtime NRA board member.
In a phone interview, Goldschlager described the trip as a “people-to-people mission,” and said he was impressed with Torshin — who, he noted, hosted both a “welcoming” dinner for the NRA contingent and another one.
“They were killing us with vodka and the best Russian food,” Goldschlager said. “The trip exceeded my expectations by logarithmic levels.”
Peter Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent
Alexander Torshin (far left), Russia’s secretary of state and deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia, attended a cabinet meeting in suburban Moscow on February 11, 2016. Ekaterina Shtukina Sputnik via AP
Deputy Governor Alexander Torshin of the Bank of Russia, shown here at the at the InvestRos international conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Moscow in April, 2016. Vitaliy Belousov Sputnik via AP
Ned Resnikoff January 18, 2018
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in a case that could bring about what city and state worker unions fear most: the imposition of a “right-to-work” legal regime across the entire American public sector.
In the states where they exist, so-called right-to-work rules make it illegal for unions to require “agency fees” (payments that cover the expense of bargaining on behalf of non-union members) from the non-members covered by contracts they negotiate. To unions and their allies, the fees help prevent what they call a classic “free-rider problem,” in which people benefit from a costly system without any incentive to pay into it. Without agency fees, non-union members of unionized shops can still benefit from the higher wages and benefits guaranteed by collective bargaining contracts — but they’re not required to keep those efforts financially afloat.
Eliminating unions’ ability to collect those fees threatens to put a big dent in their financial resources — and ratchets up the incentive for workers to forego union membership. The creation of a nationwide right-to-work regime could deal a massive blow to public sector unionism, the last bastion of relative union power following years of defeats in the private sector.
The petitioner in February’s Supreme Court case, Janus v. AFSCME, contends that compulsory agency fees violate his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association, in part because he is effectively being compelled to support a political organization. The court weighed a similar argument in the 2016 case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association; at the time, it seemed poised to make labor’s right-to-work nightmare a reality. But Justice Antonin Scalia’s death unexpectedly delayed the legal reckoning. With Neil Gorsuch now occupying Scalia’s post, the day seems to have arrived.
Some unions have already begun making plans for how they could survive — and perhaps even grow — in a right-to-work climate.
The first step is more aggressive internal organizing. If workers can no longer be expected to automatically pay for representation, the reasoning goes, then unions need to put more effort into winning them over. Some public sector unions have already begun reaching out to members and attempting to strengthen their investment in the cause.
“At the end of the day, we build stronger unions when members see themselves in the advocacy and the DNA of the union, and when we engage community,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten in prepared remarks for a speech at the October 2017 AFL-CIO convention in St. Louis, Missouri. “And that starts with conversation — listening and engaging. We’re focused on that kind of one-on-one engagement.”
The free-rider problem can also be dealt with by giving non-members fewer opportunities to free-ride. If workers can’t be compelled to subsidize union activities, argues University of California Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, then unions probably can’t be compelled into representing non-dues-payers. If members have exclusive access to union representation during grievance proceedings, that provides an incentive for workers to keep paying their dues.
“There are a few examples of unions in different states — in right-to-work states — that I believe have experimented with not handling individual grievances,” Fisk told ThinkProgress. Whether unions could (or should) also negotiate contracts exclusively on behalf of dues-paying members is a “harder question,” she added.
“It’s not obvious that a union would be better off negotiating only on behalf of its members,” she said. “Because they would be setting up the possibility that the non-members could get paid more than the union members, which would obviously prompt some members to resign their membership.”
But that assumes the presence of a contract. Workers could also organize “members-only” unions, which only represent their members, rather than all the employees in a given shop. Such unions tend to operate without any sort of collective bargaining agreement, meaning they need to find other ways to advance the interests of their workers. Century Foundation fellow Moshe Marvit, who co-authored a 2015 report on members-only unions with Leigh Anne Schriever, said that these pressures can force unions to perform “at their best” if they want to survive.
“One could go to them, almost, for best practices among unions: a lot of communication with the membership, a lot of volunteerism among the membership in terms of being involved with the union,” said Marvit. “Really just engaged and democratic, and it was out of necessity. Because the fact of the matter was they had to keep their dues low; they couldn’t charge a lot because they couldn’t guarantee a whole lot, and they had to use other mechanisms to push for concessions in the workplace.”
But a minority union, even one born out of legal necessity, can be a “hard thing to sustain,” said Marvit.
“If you get 20 or 30 percent of the workers on board and form a members-only union, you may not actually achieve a whole lot,” he said. “Because if the employers just insist that they’re not going to take your concerns seriously or bargain with you, or you don’t have some mechanism to bring grievances or use whatever state laws you can to kind of get your message out there, then you may not be able to get much.”
The members-only strategy might function best for public sector unions negotiating with a relatively sympathetic employer. The same also goes for more traditional, shop-wide unions.
For cities or states that want to keep their employees unionized — whether because of their overall liberal orientation, their desire to keep negotiations with employees over working conditions centralized and standardized, or both — there are a few other ways they could mitigate the effect of right-to-work, said Fisk. She cited the federal government’s policy of offering union representatives paid “release time” to conduct union business during work hours.
“Similarly, local governments could try to come up with ways to facilitate fee collection that don’t run afoul of right-to-work,” said Fisk. “And they might renegotiate a contract to say that grievances will be handled by qualified representatives of the employees own choice. […] You could even create some kind of fund that’s partially funded by employer contributions, partially by union contributions, like a prepaid legal services pension plan that then is available only to members, and that’s the fund used to pay for grievance arbitration.”
In cities and states that are less inclined to accommodate public sector unions, organized labor may need to turn to other sources of power in order to survive. A small but growing number of unions have found what they believe is a successful model for doing just that. Instead of limiting the scope of conflict with their employers, they’re partnering with other activists and community groups to formulate shared platforms that command support among union members and non-members alike. They call this strategy “bargaining for the common good.”
As an example of this model’s strength, advocates frequently point to St. Paul, Minnesota, where in 2013 the local teachers union began “convening regular meetings with parents and community members to formulate a shared vision,” according to The American Prospect’s Rachel Cohen. The union also invited community members to participate directly in bargaining sessions. Despite some initial resistance from the school district, the union and its allies won a series of contract items meant to benefit both educators and students, including an expanded preschool program and more non-teacher support staff, wrote former union president Mary Cathryn Ricker in a 2015 essay for Dissent. Ricker is now the executive vice president of the national American Federation of Teachers.
Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin has argued that bargaining for the common good is a response tailor-made for the worst-case Janus scenario. McCartin told ThinkProgress that the strategy “takes the premise of what the Janus decision is likely to be — which is, I think, some variant of saying that anything a public sector union does is ultimately political — and goes with it.”
“Instead of contesting that, it says that it’s right because public sector unions have to fight for those things that are about preserving the services that they provide, that their members provide,” he said.
This strategy can also further engage and mobilize members who would not otherwise feel compelled to engage in collective action, said McCartin.
“I think for people who want to stay active in their unions they want to feel that that activism is for a greater cause than only defending their rights,” McCartin said. “While that’s an important part of it, defending what they have on the job, linking up with community allies is a way of keeping them tied into the mission of the union on a big scale.”
It also gives unions a chance to directly confront broader issues that have contributed to the decline of American organized labor. Bargaining for the common good, said McCartin, “tries to force to the bargaining table, in some form, the larger financial forces that are really setting the agenda for local government.”
To McCartin and other proponents of bargaining for the common good, the main adversaries of public sector unions aren’t the officials trying to reign in municipal budgets by cutting labor costs; they’re the financial giants, lobbyists, and other corporate interests who have forced such austerity measures by lobbying for tax cuts, persuading local governments to make dubious investments, and encouraging privatization of public goods.
“In many places, the vehicle through which our campaigns work is bargaining for the common good,” said Saqib Bhatti, co-executive director of Chicago-based activist group ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy). “Basically, bringing together community-labor coalitions that are using bargaining as a key moment to push forward demands around Wall Street accountability and racial justice.”
Bhatti believes folding those issues into public sector bargaining is only natural. “The reason why there’s not enough money to pay for public sector workers and why there’s a big attack on pensions and wages is the same reason why there’s not adequate funding for schools in black and brown neighborhoods,” he said.
Veteran labor organizer Stephen Lerner, now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, said he has been surprised by how quickly the bargaining for the common good strategy has spread through the labor movement since 2014, when the Kalmanovitz Initiative —where McCartin is executive director — held a conference on the subject. Part of the appeal, said Lerner, is that it moves past the “almost transactional relationship” between labor and potential allies such as the civil rights movement.
“As the whole labor movement and progressive community have been under assault, people have really embraced the idea that this is now about, ‘We do something for you and then you do something for us later,’” said Lerner. “What we’re doing in bargaining for the common good is saying, ‘We’re doing something together.’”
That collaborative approach, Bhatti argued, is key to surviving in a post-Janusworld.
“It seems paradoxical, but in a moment in which labor is under attack, and in which we have fewer resources, in order to become relevant and stay relevant, we actually have to stand for more, not less,” he said.
Evan Halper, Contact Reporter January 18, 2018
A massive coal ash spill near Knoxville, Tenn., in 2008 forever changed life for Janie Clark’s family and left her husband with crippling health problems. So Clark was astounded late last year when she heard what the Environmental Protection Agency had done.
In September, at the behest of power companies, the agency shelved a requirement that coal plants remove some of the most toxic chemicals from their wastewater. The infamous Kingston power plant that released millions of cubic yards of toxic coal ash into area rivers was among some 50 plants given a reprieve.
After the EPA’s action, the plant’s owners delayed new wastewater treatment technology for at least two years.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Clark said. “It is like a slap in the face. It is like everything that has happened is just being ignored.”
The real-time impact of the most industry-friendly regulatory regime in decades is at times overshadowed by policy battles that are years from resolution. President Trump’s moves to shrink national monuments, return drilling to the waters off the West Coast and allow natural gas companies to release more methane into the air are destined to be tied up in court for the foreseeable future. The contentious Keystone XL pipeline may never get built as volatile oil prices threaten its profitability.
Yet under EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the air and the water are already being affected as the administration tinkers with programs obscure to most Americans, with names like “Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for Steam Electric Power Plants” and “Air Quality Designations for Ozone.”
Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times when he was Oklahoma attorney general, challenging the agency’s restrictions on the fossil fuel industry and authority to protect the nation’s air and water. Now under his leadership, the agency’s enforcement actions against scofflaws have plummeted, agency data indicate.
The numbers emerging from the federal government’s database of enforcement actions against polluters show that from the time Pruitt took the helm early last year through November, the dollar amount of pollution-control equipment and cleanup activity the EPA demanded dropped by more than 85%. Even compared with the dollar amount required during the same period of the George W. Bush administration, there is a dropoff of more than 50%.
“It is one thing to say we have a change of administration and a different level of emphasis and focus,” said Cynthia Giles, who led the EPA’s enforcement office during the Obama administration and has analyzed the recent data. “But this kind of drop is not a change of emphasis. That is abandonment. That is a very, very big deal.”
The EPA strenuously objects to the characterization. The agency says holding polluters accountable remains a priority, that a nine-month snapshot of the data does not tell a complete story and that in many cases the EPA has shifted enforcement of environmental violations to state agencies.
Yet those state agencies often lack the resources and sophistication to handle them.
Even in California, where state leaders defiantly assert that their agencies will hold polluters accountable where the EPA retreats, a case involving large amounts of toxic material at the former Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance highlights how ill-equipped the state can be for enforcement responsibilities.
When EPA inspectors arrived at the refinery in December 2016, they found 265 tons of toxic material had sat illegally at the site, in unsuitable tanks, for 26 years, according to a copy of their report provided to The Times by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project. Such material is supposed to be moved to a hazardous waste facility within a year, according to Kandice Bellamy, a retired EPA inspector in California who was part of the team.
State inspectors had earlier been to the site while the many tons of toxic material sat there, Bellamy said, but apparently had not done anything about it.
State officials refused to comment, saying the refinery remained subject to investigation.
“One of the alarming things with this facility is that not too far in the past there had been an explosion there, and they had to evacuate a sizable chunk of the area,” Bellamy said, referring to an incident in 2015 which the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates accidents at plants, called a “serious near miss” that could have resulted in a “potentially catastrophic release” into surrounding communities.
“And we still found things that were of concern.”
Bellamy said the federal team was dismayed EPA higher-ups did not pursue the long list of potential violations they drew up, many of them serious. Instead, the case was turned back over to the state.
“We had the sense that they [EPA] had decided not to take on any of these challenging type cases because any refinery operator and their attorney could just appeal directly to the administrator in Washington,” Bellamy said. “And their pleas would most likely be seen favorably by this administration.”
An EPA spokeswoman in Southern California declined to discuss the case, writing in an email that “EPA’s policy is not to comment on investigations nor potential investigations.”
In another case, in southwestern Michigan, the Trump administration abandoned a years-long push to require a coal-fired electrical plant operated by DTE Energy to update its pollution controls.
A federal appeals court had twice upheld the EPA’s position. But the administration changed direction and put the company in the clear. That decision relaxed restrictions on harmful emissions that owners of other coal-fired power plants will be subject to when they expand facilities.
Pruitt announced the new policy in a December memo, writing that it is not the EPA’s place to investigate whether plant operators are lowballing the emissions that renovated facilities will generate.
The move is expected to slow the pace at which plants install state of the art pollution controls, just as the EPA decision that so upset Janie Clark in Knoxville is moving utilities to slow down plans to remove some of the most toxic materials from coal plant wastewater.
The EPA delay of the wastewater rule, made after power companies protested it would cost jobs and undermine Trump’s energy agenda, is having ripple effects across the country.
Coal plants that were poised to start installing the new technology as soon as this year are now balking.
“We were working with a good number of utilities who immediately said we are putting this on hold,” said Jamie Peterson, CEO of San Diego-based Frontier Water Systems, a company that installs the treatment technology.
“If this rule had not been changed, there would be a significant amount of work being done right now,” said Peterson. “The market has dropped by 80 or 90%.” Regulatory documents obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center confirm that plants are changing their plans.
As the market for high-tech equipment meant to keep some of the most harmful toxins from migrating into drinking water craters during the Trump administration, the market for the highest-polluting trucks is looking up.
The attorneys general of California and 11 other states call the trucks a “pollution menace” that produce 20 to 40 times the harmful emissions of new trucks their size, but the industry that makes “gliders” — trucks built using a new chassis and an old, refurbished diesel engine — has been given a big gift by the administration.
Federal officials are racing to block a rule taking effect this month that aims to keep gliders off the road. The regulation limits the number of new gliders not meeting emission standards to roughly 1,500 each year, nationwide, and eventually bans them altogether. The EPA is moving to change the rule to allow unlimited gliders.
Pruitt pilloried the cap as an attempt by the Obama administration to “bend the rule of law and expand the reach of the federal government in a way that threatened to put an entire industry of specialized truck manufacturers out of business.”
The California Air Resources Board warns the about-face threatens to completely offset all the clean-air gains it has made through the state’s aggressive regulation of heavy diesel trucks and “have a profoundly harmful impact on public health.”
The trucks would continue to roll onto the roads at the same time California and many other states are scrambling to deal with another blow the EPA delivered to their efforts to clean the air. The agency has delayed for at least six months its deadline for declaring which parts of the country are plagued with smog levels that violate new, stricter limits guided by the Clean Air Act.
The EPA’s delay inhibits state and regional air regulators from taking actions to confront the pollution. In California alone, the ozone standards are projected to save as many as 218 lives and prevent 120,000 missed days of school each year.
The EPA says it will have new rules ready by April, but Janet McCabe, who headed the agency’s clean air efforts during the Obama administration, said even so, the delay has consequences.
“If you are an asthmatic exposed to high levels of air pollution, it can mean a lot of missed school days in that six months,” McCabe said.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump relentlessly congratulates himself for the healthy state of the U.S. economy, with its steady growth, low unemployment, busier factories and confident consumers.
But in the year since Trump’s inauguration, most analysts tend to agree on this: The economy remains essentially the same sturdy one he inherited from Barack Obama.
Growth has picked up, but it’s not yet clear if it can sustain a faster expansion. Hiring and wage growth actually slowed slightly from Obama’s last year in office. Consumers and businesses are much more optimistic, but their spending has yet to move meaningfully higher.
“I don’t see any noticeable break over the past year,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We tend to overstate the degree to which the president has the ability to control the economy.”
The U.S. public appears to have a similar view, according to a Quinnipiac University poll last week. It found that two-thirds of American voters say the economy is “excellent” or “good,” the highest since the poll started asking about the economy in 2001.
Yet 49 percent of respondents credited Obama for the economy’s health, compared with 40 percent who credited Trump.
Trump’s successful push for income and corporate tax cuts and his steps to loosen regulations have helped drive a surging stock market rally fueled by the prospect of higher corporate profits. And most economists are optimistic that growth will continue at a solid pace this year.
“We have created more than 2 million new jobs since the election,” Trump said last week in Nashville, Tennessee. “Economic growth has surged past 3 percent, something that wasn’t supposed to happen for a long time. We’re way ahead of schedule. Unemployment is at a 17-year low.”
Those trends aren’t very different from what came before. Employers added more jobs in Obama’s last year in office — 2.2 million in 2016 — and nearly 3 million in 2014. Economic growth did top 3 percent at an annual rate during the second and third quarters of 2017. But it had surged above 4 percent in the second and third quarters of 2014.
The unemployment rate fell from 4.8 percent when Trump took office to 4.1 percent now. It fell by the same amount or more in 2013, 2014 and 2015.
During the presidential campaign, Trump portrayed the economy as floundering and called the unemployment rate “one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics.” Now he accepts the government’s data at face value.
When the government reports growth for the October-December quarter next week, it may show the economy expanded at a 3 percent or higher annual rate for the third straight quarter. That could lift growth in 2017 to the fastest pace since it reached 2.9 percent in 2015.
Some of that growth may reflect greater spending by consumers or businesses in anticipation of tax cuts. But most economists expect it will take time for Trump’s deregulatory and tax policies to have their full effect.
There’s no question that businesses and consumers are more optimistic. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index jumped to a 17-year high in November before slipping a bit last month.
That hasn’t yet resulted in more Americans opening their wallets, though. Spending growth in the first nine months of 2017 was slightly slower than in the previous year.
Some economists are growing skeptical of consumer sentiment surveys because the responses seem increasingly skewed by political leanings. People in counties that voted for Trump reported a much brighter outlook on the economy after the election than did people in Clinton counties, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
People in Trump-voting counties were much more likely just after the election to say their financial situation had improved in the past year, the New York Fed said, long before any of Trump’s policies were in place. But the change in sentiment didn’t produce changes in consumer spending, the report said.
“It does somewhat undermine the message from the confidence surveys,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.
American companies have stepped up their investments in machinery, software, and office towers this year after sluggish spending in 2015 and 2016. Such spending increased about 6.2 percent at an annual rate in the first nine months of the year.
Still, business investment topped 9 percent in the first three quarters of 2014.
In both cases, rising oil prices played an outsized role in spurring more corporate spending. When oil prices increase, drilling firms tend to buy more steel pipe and other goods that are used in drilling rigs.
Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out that when mining and oil and gas are excluded, investment spending has increased an anemic 3.3 percent this year.
Many economists expect growth to perk up in 2018, with the impact of tax cuts and the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts spurring corporate investment and consumer spending. So far, 15 regulations that were put in place by the Obama administration have been overturned by Congress. The administration has put dozens of others on hold.
“There’s just generally the feeling that there’s more pro-growth policy coming from Washington,” O’Sullivan said.
O’Sullivan forecasts that growth will reach 2.8 percent for all of this year, roughly in line with other projections.
“2017 was largely an Obama economy,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said. “But going forward it will definitely be a Trump economy.”
Other factors besides tax cuts and deregulation are playing a role. For the first time since the most recent major recession ended in 2009, the global economy is enjoying widespread growth. That kind of broad expansion helps boost spending on U.S. exports of factory goods, a boon to manufacturers, and also lifts the stock market because it increases profits for U.S. multinational corporations.
Germany’s economy expanded 2.2 percent in 2017, the fastest in six years. Business sentiment in Japan is at the highest level in 11 years. China is still growing at nearly a 7 percent annual rate.
Manufacturing executives appear highly optimistic and welcome the attention Trump has lavished on their industry. Factories added 196,000 jobs last year after shedding workers in 2016. Still, manufacturing added 208,000 in 2014 and 207,000 in 2011.
And most of the jobs that have been added this year were outside the Midwestern “Rust Belt” states that swung for Trump in the election. Instead, some of the states with the biggest gains are in the South, Southwest and Northwest.
Factory jobs grew 4 percent in South Carolina from January through November, the largest gain nationwide, followed by South Dakota with 3.9 percent. Iowa, Rhode Island and Texas were next, followed by Wisconsin, which enjoyed a 3.2 percent gain. Florida, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Arkansas closed out the top 10.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s manufacturing employment was flat last year, while factory jobs rose just 0.5 percent in Ohio. Pennsylvania lost manufacturing jobs.
Fiat Chrysler said last week that it is moving production of some pickup trucks from Mexico to a factory in Warren, Michigan, near Detroit, which will be expanded. The move will employ 2,500 people. And Toyota and Mazda said they will build a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, that will add 4,000 jobs.
At the same time, 215 more workers were laid off last week at the Carrier Corp. factory in Indianapolis where Trump touted a deal early in his presidency that prevented the plant’s closure.
“There are still jobs headed overseas, no question about it,” Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said. “You can’t tweet jobs back into existence.”
