Category: Veterans – Patriotism

Trump is Peddling Arms as If There Were No Tomorrow.

Mint Press News

The Art of the Arms Deal: Trump is Peddling Arms as If There Were No Tomorrow.

Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway, partnering with the likes of Lockheed Martin to sell weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes that often fuel instability, war, and terrorism.

By William D. Hartung           April 2, 2018

President Donald Trump shows a chart highlighting arms sales to Saudi Arabia during a meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, in Washington. (AP/Evan Vucci)

It’s one of those stories of the century that somehow never gets treated that way. For an astounding 25 of the past 26 years, the United States has been the leading arms dealer on the planet, at some moments in near monopolistic fashion. Its major weapons-producers, including Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, regularly pour the latest in high-tech arms and munitions into the most explosive areas of the planet with ample assistance from the Pentagon. In recent years, the bulk of those arms have gone to the Greater Middle East. Donald Trump is only the latest American president to preside over a global arms sales bonanza. With remarkable enthusiasm, he’s appointed himself America’s number one weapons salesman and he couldn’t be prouder of the job he’s doing.

Earlier this month, for instance, on the very day Congress was debating whether to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, Trump engaged in one of his favorite presidential activities: bragging about the economic benefits of the American arms sales he’s been promoting. He was joined in his moment of braggadocio by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the chief architect of that war. That grim conflict has killed thousands of civilians through indiscriminate air strikes, while putting millions at risk of death from famine, cholera, and other “natural” disasters caused at least in part by a Saudi-led blockade of that country’s ports.

That Washington-enabled humanitarian crisis provided the backdrop for the Senate’s consideration of a bill co-sponsored by Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, and Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. It was aimed at ending U.S. mid-air refueling of Saudi war planes and Washington’s additional assistance for the Saudi war effort (at least until the war is explicitly authorized by Congress). The bill generated a vigorous debate. In the end, on an issue that wouldn’t have even come to the floor two years ago, an unprecedented 44 senators voted to halt this country’s support for the Saudi war effort. The bill nonetheless went down to defeat and the suffering in Yemen continues.

Debate about the merits of that brutal war was, however, the last thing on the mind of a president who views his bear-hug embrace of the Saudi regime as a straightforward business proposition. He’s so enthusiastic about selling arms to Riyadh that he even brought his very own prop to the White House meeting with bin Salman: a U.S. map highlighting which of the 50 states would benefit most from pending weapons sales to the prince’s country.

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Michigan, Ohio, and Florida, the three crucial swing states in the 2016 presidential election, were specially highlighted. His latest stunt only underscored a simple fact of his presidency: Trump’s arms sales are meant to promote pork-barrel politics, while pumping up the profits of U.S. weapons manufacturers. As for human rights or human lives, who cares?

To be fair, Donald Trump is hardly the first American president to make it his business to aggressively promote weapons exports. Though seldom a highlighted part of his presidency, Barack Obama proved to be a weapons salesman par excellence. He made more arms offers in his two terms in office than any U.S. president since World War II, including an astounding $115 billion in weapons deals with Saudi Arabia. For the tiny group of us who follow such things, that map of Trump’s only underscored a familiar reality.

On it, in addition to the map linking U.S. jobs and arms transfers to the Saudis, were little boxes that highlighted four specific weapons sales worth tens of billions of dollars. Three of those that included the THAAD missile defense system, C-130 transport planes, P-8 anti-submarine warfare planes, and Bradley armored vehicles were, in fact, completed during the Obama years. So much for Donald Trump’s claim to be a deal maker the likes of which we’ve never seen before. You might, in fact, say that the truest arms race these days is between American presidents, not the United States and other countries. Not only has the U.S. been the world’s top arms exporting nation throughout this century, but last year it sold one and a half times as much weaponry as its closest rival, Russia.

Embracing Lockheed Martin

President Donald Trump looks over to Lockheed Martin Chairwoman, President and CEO Marillyn Hewson, right, before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Feb. 24, 2017.(AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

It’s worth noting that three of those four Saudi deals involved weapons made by Lockheed Martin. Admittedly, Trump’s relationship with Lockheed got off to a rocky start in December 2016 when he tweeted his displeasure over the cost of that company’s F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken by the Pentagon. Since then, however, relations between the nation’s largest defense contractor and America’s most self-involved president have warmed considerably.

Before Trump’s May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia, his son-in-law, Jared Kusher, new best buddy to Mohammed bin Salman, was put in charge of cobbling together a smoke-and-mirrors, wildly exaggerated $100 billion-plus arms package that Trump could announce in Riyadh. What Kushner needed was a list of sales or potential sales that his father-in-law could boast about (even if many of the deals had been made by Obama). So he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask if she could cut the price of a THAAD anti-missile system that the administration wanted to include in the package. She agreed and the $15 billion THAAD deal — still a huge price tag and the most lucrative sale to the Saudis made by the Trump administration — went forward. To sweeten the pot for the Saudi royals, the Pentagon even waived a $3.5 billion fee normally required by law and designed to reimburse the Treasury for the cost to American taxpayers of developing such a major weapons system. General Joseph Rixey, until recently the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which granted that waiver, has since gone directly through Washington’s revolving door and been hired by — you guessed it — Lockheed Martin.

In addition, former Lockheed Martin executive John Rood is now the Trump administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy, where one of his responsibilities will be to weigh in on… don’t be shocked!… major arms deals. In his confirmation hearings, Rood refused to say that he would recuse himself from transactions involving his former employer, for which he was denounced by Senators John McCain and Elizabeth Warren. As Warrenasserted in a speech opposing Rood’s appointment,

“No taxpayer should have to wonder whether the top policy-makers at the Pentagon are pushing defense products and foreign military sales for reasons other than the protection of the United States of America… No American should have to wonder whether the Defense Department is acting to protect the national interests of our nation or the financial interests of the five giant defense contractors.”

Still, most senators were unfazed and Rood’s nomination sailed through that body by a vote of 81 to 7. He is now positioned to help smooth the way for any Lockheed Martin deal that might meet with a discouraging word from the Pentagon or State Department officials charged with vetting foreign arms sales.

Arming the Planet

Benjamin Netanyahu reaches to an American-made F-35 fighter jet at an unveiling ceremony in Nevatim Air Force base, Southern Israel. (AP/Ariel Schalit)

Though Saudi Arabia may be the largest recipient of U.S. arms on the planet, it’s anything but Washington’s only customer. According to the Pentagon’s annual tally of major agreements under the Foreign Military Sales program, the most significant channel for U.S. arms exports, Washington entered into formal agreements to sell weaponry to 130 nations in 2016 (the most recent year for which full data is available). According to a recent report from the Cato Institute, between 2002 and 2016 the United States delivered weaponry to 167 countries — more than 85% of the nations on the planet. The Cato report also notes that, between 1981 and 2010, Washington supplied some form of weaponry to 59% of all nations engaged in high-level conflicts.

In short, Donald Trump has headed down a well-traveled arms superhighway. Every president since Richard Nixon has taken that same road and, in 2010, the Obama administration managed to rack up a record $102 billion in foreign arms offers. In a recent report I wrote for the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, I documented more than $82 billion in arms offers by the Trump administration in 2017 alone, which actually represented a slight increase from the $76 billion in offers made during President Obama’s final year. It was, however, far lower than that 2010 figure, $60 billion of which came from Saudi deals for F-15 combat aircraft, Apache attack helicopters, transport aircraft, and armored vehicles, as well as guns and ammunition.

There have nonetheless been some differences in the approaches of the two administrations in the area of human rights. Under pressure from human rights groups, the Obama administration did, in the end, suspend sales of aircraft to Bahrain and Nigeria, both of whose militaries were significant human rights violators, and also a $1 billion-plus deal for precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia. That Saudi suspension represented the first concrete action by the Obama administration to express displeasure with Riyadh’s indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. Conducted largely with U.S. and British supplied aircraft, bombs, and missiles, it has included strikes against hospitals, marketplaces, water treatment facilities, and even a funeral. In keeping with his focus on jobs to the exclusion of humanitarian concerns, Trump reversed all three of the Obama suspensions shortly after taking office.

Fueling Terrorism and Instability

A well-equipped Syrian rebel using a US-made BGM-71 TOW against the Syrian Arab Army. (YouTube Screenshot)

In fact, selling weapons to dictatorships and repressive regimes often fuels instability, war, and terrorism, as the American war on terror has vividly demonstrated for the last nearly 17 years. U.S.-supplied arms also have a nasty habit of ending up in the hands of America’s adversaries. At the height of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, for instance, that country’s armed forces lost track of hundreds of thousands of rifles, many of which made their way into the hands of forces resisting the U.S. occupation.

In a similar fashion, when Islamic State militants swept into Iraq in 2014, the Iraqi security forces abandoned billions of dollars worth of American equipment, from small arms to military trucks and armored vehicles. ISIS promptly put them to use against U.S. advisers and the Iraqi security forces as well as tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The Taliban, too, has gotten its hands on substantial quantities of U.S. weaponry, either on the battlefield or by buying them at cut-rate, black market prices from corrupt members of the Afghan security forces.

In northern Syria, two U.S.-armed groups are now fighting each other. Turkish forces are facing off against Syrian Kurdish militias that have been among the most effective anti-ISIS fighters and there is even an ongoing risk that U.S. and Turkish forces, NATO allies, may find themselves in direct combat with each other. Far from giving Washington influence over key allies or improving their combat effectiveness, U.S. arms and training often simply spur further conflict and chaos to the detriment of the security of the United States, not to speak of the peace of the world.

In the grim and devolving conflict in Yemen, for instance, all sides possess at least some U.S. weaponry. Saudi Arabia is, of course, the top U.S. arms client and its forces are a catalogue of American weaponry, from planes and anti-tank missiles to cluster bombs, but hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid were also provided to the forces of Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh during his 30 years of rule before he was driven from power in 2012. Later, however, he joined forces with the Houthi rebels against the Saudi-led intervention, taking large parts of the Yemeni armed forces — and their U.S.-supplied weapons — with him. (He would himself be assassinated by Houthi forces late last year after a falling out.)

Trump’s Plan: Make It Easier on Arms Makers

Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson participates in a signing ceremony between President Donald Trump and Saudi King Salam, May 20, 2017, in Riyadh. (AP/Evan Vucci)

The Trump administration is poised to release a new policy directive on global arms transfers. A report by Politico, based on interviews with sources at the State Department and a National Security Council (NSC) official, suggests that it will seek to further streamline the process of approving arms sales, in part by increasing the already extensive role of U.S. government personnel in promoting such exports. It will also remove what a National Security Council statement has described as “unreasonable constraints on the ability of our companies to compete.” In keeping with that priority, according to the NSC official, “the administration is intent on ensuring that U.S. industry has every advantage in the global marketplace.”

In January, a Reuters article confirmed this approach, reporting that the forthcoming directive would emphasize arms-sales promotion by U.S. diplomats and other overseas personnel. As one administration official told Reuters, “We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attaches, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters.”

The Trump administration is also expected to move forward with a plan, stalled as the Obama years ended, to ease controls on the export of U.S. firearms. Gun exports now licensed and scrutinized by the State Department would instead be put under the far-less-stringent jurisdiction of the Commerce Department. Some firearms could then be exported to allies without even a license, reducing the government’s ability to prevent them from reaching criminal networks or the security forces of potential adversaries. 

In September 2017, Democratic senators Ben Cardin, Dianne Feinstein, and Patrick Leahy sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raising concerns about such a change. As they wrote, “Combat firearms and ammunition are uniquely lethal; they are easily spread and easily modified, and are the primary means of injury, death and destruction in civil and military conflicts throughout the world. As such they should be subjected to more — not less — rigorous export controls and oversight.”

If Trump’s vision of an all-arms-sales-all-the-time foreign policy is realized, he may scale the weapons-dealing heights reached by the Obama administration. As Washington’s arms-dealer-in-chief, he might indeed succeed in selling American weaponry as if there were no tomorrow. Given the known human costs of unbridled arms trafficking, however, such a presidency would also ensure that whatever tomorrow finally arrived would prove far worse than today, unless of course you happen to be a major U.S. arms maker.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of “Trends in Major U.S. Arms Sales in 2017: A Comparison of the Obama and Trump Administrations,” Security Assistance Monitor, March 2018.

Follow TomDispatch, where this article first appeared on Twitter and join them on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

The Newest Weapons Against Unions Are Employees

Bloomberg

The Newest Weapons Against Unions Are Employees

U-Haul workers sent a flood of letters seeking to reverse an Obama-era rule. Most used very similar language, in part because the company wrote it for them.

By Josh Eidelson and Hassan Kanu         April 2, 2018

Photographer: Stephen Hilger/Bloomberg

Thomas Neill wrote the government a letter Jan. 23 asking that it reverse an Obama-era rule that could make it easier for unions to win workplace elections. “Repeal the current rules; reinstate the prior rules; revise the election process in a way that brings them up to date in a sensible, fair manner,” he wrote. So did Brian Picanco, Paul Smedberg, Zane Rowland and Jim Smith.

On the same day. Using exactly the same words.

The men, along with dozens of other people working for U-Haul, the self-storage company, seem to have taken an outsized role in the debate over whether the Trump administration should revisit the rule. They’ve been doing this by flooding the National Labor Relations Board with very similar comments. While at least one employee said workers got together on their own, labor experts contend that the campaign has all the hallmarks of a company-influenced effort. U-Haul agreed, saying that while it didn’t compel workers to take part, it did provide the language for them to use.

Over the past few months, the NLRB received at least 100 similarly worded submissions urging it to throw out the policy that shortens the time between when some employees decide to unionize and when a vote is held. More than 60—roughly one out of every 25 comments submitted so far—used names matching people who work at the self-storage and rental giant, according to a review of LinkedIn pages and recent company announcements. More than a dozen additional comments appear to come from people who worked for the company in the past.

The U-Haul staffers ranged from a clerk for one of its local marketing units to a vice president for government relations, Joseph Cook. (Cook and the five men above didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Another submission was by Sam Shoen, who shares the surname of Joe Shoen, chairman of U-Haul’s parent, Reno, Nevada-based Amerco. The company said two people named Sam Shoen have been associated with U-Haul, one a former official and son of the founder, who said the submission wasn’t his. The other Sam Shoen is a manager who currently oversees one of the company’s storage components and couldn’t be reached for comment. Also among the commenters was Assistant General Counsel Michelle Walters, whose LinkedIn biography says her work for U-Haul includes “union avoidance/positive labor relations.” Walters couldn’t be reached for comment, but company spokesman Sebastien Reyes said in a March 30 response to a request for comment that she drafted the language used by U-Haul employees in their letters to the NLRB .

“We encouraged them to submit comments, and we circulated sample language,” Reyes wrote. “Individuals decided whether to submit a sample comment, write their comment or elect not to submit comments at all.” He confirmed that the people identified by Bloomberg in a review of correspondence sent to the NLRB were in fact U-Haul “team members.”

Photographer: Lars Hagber/Alamy

Founded in 1945, U-Haul claims thousands of locations across the U.S. and Canada. In February, Joe Shoen announced bonuses of more than $23.6 million for almost 29,000 employees, telling them it was thanks to the Republican tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump.

The company has a history of disdain toward organized labor. An alert for U-Haul managers posted on the company’s human resources website (and since removed) emphasized the need to “harden our workplace against possible organizing” and mount a preemptive anti-union campaign that “begins now and lasts every single day.” The document, referring to an earlier legislative proposal, urged managers to participate in company “union avoidance” classes and instructed that the “preservation of our system members’ right to work in a union-free environment is management’s responsibility.” Staff, if treated well, “will keep the union bums out,” it said. (Reyes, the company spokesman, confirmed the document was an internal memorandum representing the company’s stance on organized labor, but added that it was taken down because it was mistakenly made public.)

After employees at two repair facilities voted 2-to-1 to unionize in 2003, the U-Haul Co. of Nevada shut down one of them, terminated 49 employees and allegedly refused to collectively bargain, arguing that the union election had been tainted by misconduct. A federal appeals court ruled against the company in 2007, and in 2008 the company agreed to pay $2.1 million to employees who the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers alleged had been illegally terminated for supporting the union. The company didn’t admit any wrongdoing as part of the agreement.

But the workers declined to return to work there, and the IAM abandoned its efforts to secure a union contract, according to David Rosenfeld, an attorney for the union. “They were extremely vicious,” he said of the company. Of the employees, he added: “Nobody’s tried since then to organize them, as far as I know.” Reyes denied the 2003 firings were related to the union vote, declining further comment on the case or its aftermath.

“Companies are increasingly using their workers to change elections and public policy.”

The recent U-Haul employee comments to the NLRB come in response to a December invitation by the Republican-majority labor board. It seeks input on whether to amend or rescind the 2014 rule change by the Obama administration. The provisions included shortening the time between when workers petition for a vote on unionization and when the vote happens, leaving less time for companies to urge workers to stay union-free. The comments from people associated with U-Haul each urged more stringent rules, including a minimum “campaign period” of at least 40 days before a union vote. On March 14, the NLRB announced that it was pushing back the deadline for submitting comments, which had already been extended, to April 18.

The volume and similarity of comments raise questions as to whether there was a coordinated effort, said Paul Secunda, who directs the labor and employment law program at Marquette University. “These U-Haul employee comments to the NLRB smack of employee mobilization by the company itself,” he said, though encouraging employees to comment on proposed rulemaking is perfectly legal.

That companies urge employees to take part in campaigns for or against government regulations isn’t novel, but the tactic has enjoyed a renaissance of late. Employers and the business lobby have recently urged workers to fight various corporate taxes and support the recent tax legislation. Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist at Columbia University who just wrote a book on the topic, recounted how a lobbyist bragged of helping a financial company get 100,000 letters opposing the fiduciary rule—the now-endangered conflict-of-interest regulation for financial advisers. Hertel-Fernandez said a telecommunications company interested in shaping a different debate established an internet portal for workers, providing letter templates they could tweak before sending.

“Companies are increasingly using their workers to change elections and public policy. This has become a key part of companies’ political arsenals,” Hertel-Fernandez said in an interview. “Workers who are most fearful of losing their jobs, or of retaliation from their employers, are most likely to respond to political requests made of them by their employers.”

When AT&T Inc. was fighting proposed net neutrality rules in 2009, its senior vice president for external and legislative affairs reportedly sent employees talking points to use in emails to the Federal Communications Commission, encouraging them to send messages from their personal email accounts. AT&T declined to comment.

There have been other alleged efforts to game the public comment system, both in and out of government, that have gone beyond coordinating employee letters. In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had identified comments submitted to five agencies that were posted under the names of people who hadn’t consented. Some of those comments were sent to the Labor Department, professing opposition to the fiduciary rule. Last month, environmental groups cried foul over a Trump administration memo summarizing public comments on its reassessment of an Obama-era sage grouse conservation plan, which advocates say omitted almost 100,000 comments.

A scandal EPA chief Scott Pruitt may not be able to survive

MSNBC

Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog

A scandal EPA chief Scott Pruitt may not be able to survive

By Steve Benen     April 2, 2018

FILE PHOTO: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt speaks during a meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump on infrastructure at the White House in Washington,…Kevin Lamarque

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s latest scandal came up during a roundtable discussion on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday, and it led to an interesting exchange between George Stephanopoulos and former Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.).

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does he have to go?

CHRISTIE: Listen, I don’t know how you survive this one. And if he has to go, it’s because he never should have been there in the first place.

The former Republican governor, who was briefly tapped to lead Donald Trump’s transition team before being replaced the week after the election, had a series of related concerns, which seemed to be part of an effort to avoid blame for the president’s mess.

But at the heart of the message was an important observation: common sense suggests the EPA chief’s scandal will cost him his career. The traditional political rules sometimes don’t apply in the Trump era, but in this instance, I think Christie’s correct.

As we discussed on Friday, the first sign of trouble came when Pruitt took a first-class trip to Morocco late last year – it cost $40,000 and you paid for it – in order to have the EPA chief pitch “the potential benefit of liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports on Morocco’s economy.”

Why the head of the EPA would make economic energy recommendations to foreign countries was unclear. The answer, however, soon after seemed to come into focus.

The only LNG export plant in the country hired a lobbyist, and Scott Pruitt lived in a Capitol Hill condo – for $50 a night, far below market value – in the Capitol Hill home owned by the lobbyist’s wife.

And in case the story weren’t quite alarming enough, ABC News also reported on Friday afternoon, “The Environmental Protection Agency paid a Capitol Hill condo association $2,460 after Administrator Scott Pruitt’s security detail broke down the door, believing he was unconscious and unresponsive and needed rescue, ABC News has confirmed.”

Apparently, Pruitt was napping at the time.

The same report added the EPA chief’s adult daughter also lived there during her time as a White House intern last year.

Pruitt was already one of the most controversial members of the president’s cabinet, but this mess is almost certainly the most serious scandal of his tenure. Or as Chris Christie put it, “I don’t know how you survive this one.”

Postscript: The energy lobbyist in question is J. Steven Hart. If his name sounds at all familiar, it’s because Hart is also assisting the NRA in its controversy surrounding foreign assistance it’s accused of receiving.

Comments:

Lebowsky Dude: Scott Pruitt in the EPA is a scandal, republicans absolutely violated their pledges to this country by confirming him, and every single day this cretin remains in the government is a bad day…

Lebowsky Dude: To put this into context, its a scandal that many members of congress were found to be sleeping in their offices because of the high cost of housing in Washington DC… To have this loser getting a special deal from a lobbyist is actually criminal if you ask me…
jazzbeau

Pruitt was napping… Evidently destroying the environment is tiring work. Another interesting attempt at lessening the the scope of this graft is Pruitt saying he only used one bedroom (as most people do), sounds like only wanting to pay for the seat you occupied on a chartered jet.

Republicans rigged our democracy. Here’s how Democrats can fight back

The Guardian

Republicans rigged our democracy. Here’s how Democrats can fight back

David Faris    March 31, 2018

Republicans have been using the constitution’s flaws to wage a one-sided war against their political opponents. It’s time for Democrats to respond

Can the Democrats lead a democratic revival? Illustration: Rob Dobi

Donald Trump wasn’t elected because Democrats lost a policy fight in 2016. What Democrats did was lose a procedural fight that has been going on since the early 1990’s, when Republicans began waging a relentless, brutal, and completely one-sided war, systematically using their lawmaking power to disadvantage their adversaries in elections and political mobilization.

Gerrymandering, the Citizens United atrocity that declared money is speech, blocking US Supreme Court nominations and obstructing legislation are some of the Republican party’s tactics. Depraved, racist voter ID laws that obviously target people who are likely to vote Democratic, and the cruel way that many states prevent current or former felons from voting, are others.

Standing in the way of reforms to our nonsensical, undemocratic electoral college system for electing the president helps the Republicans too, as does ensuring the United States remains the only country in the entire world that holds its critical national elections on a regular working Tuesday as if we literally couldn’t care less who is able take off work to cast a ballot.

Indeed, one has to grudgingly respect the single-mindedness with which the Republican party has pursued its advantage, even as we condemn the damage it has wreaked on our democracy.

Democrats, now that they are in the minority for the foreseeable future, must pay homage to their Republican overlords and use what little power they have to slow down legislation, turn the public against the Republican Congress, and then retake total power in 2018 and 2020. Then, what they must do with that power is to fundamentally alter key aspects of our political system that we take for granted but that are not, contrary to popular belief, outlined in the US constitution.

Ingenious for its time, if deeply morally deficient, the constitution saddles the country with a series of difficult political problems. Some are explicit design flaws, such as the way that every state in the United States, whether it has 38 million or 600,000 residents, gets two and only two US senators, or how the entire 435-member House of Representatives is put up for re-election every two years, the shortest election calendar in the entire world. Others are crimes of omission, like the document’s relative silence about voting rights.

But the biggest problem is that it is underspecified. It doesn’t adequately describe the powers granted to the supreme court it created, or explain what a militia is in the second amendment, or outline what happens if the Senate decides it simply can’t be bothered to carry out its constitutional obligations by approving appointments made by the president. It contains no information about how elections should be funded. And the thing is well nigh impossible to amend.

Beginning with the Gingrich radicals who took over the House in 1994, the modern Republican party has been willing to exploit the constitution’s design flaws and the constitutional order’s reliance on informal understandings between political actors to sabotage the functioning of Congress, destroy the Obama presidency, and seize vastly more power than the American people would otherwise have granted it.

When they retake power, Democrats should use those same flaws to revive not the party, but our democracy.

First, they should grant statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico – long-suffering territories whose citizens are utterly deprived of voting rights and representation in federal elections. This can help rectify the Democrats’ structural imbalance in the US Senate. Breaking the deep-blue state of California into seven states can finish the job, by finally creating about as many blue-leaning as red-leaning states and delivering lasting power (or at least parity) to Senate Democrats and their allies.

The theft of Merrick Garlands seat by Republicans and the deepening intensity of congressional battles over federal judicial appointments should lead the next Democratic administration to pack the supreme court, by adding liberal justices until progressives finally have their first majority in a long generation, as well as creating hundreds of new judgeships in the federal judiciary.

The constitution does not stipulate the number of justices either on the supreme court or the lower courts, and Democrats should use the threat of court-packing to press for a constitutional amendment to end lifetime tenure in the federal judiciary as well as enacting other reforms that would finally remove destructive, ugly battles over the courts from our political landscape.

Progressives should also get behind a change in how we elect our representatives to the House, enacting proportional representation reforms that would not only eliminate the grotesque chicanery of gerrymandering but also make it possible for smaller parties to finally win a seat at the governing table. And they should double the size of the House to bring the constituent-to-legislator ratio more in line with what the founders envisioned.

Finally, any serious progressive governing coalition must immediately address our litany of voting problems, from the disenfranchisement of felons to the racist voter-ID laws implemented by cynical Republicans across the country, by passing a comprehensive new voting rights act.

Step one in bringing this vision to fruition is to stop bringing pistols to the nuclear war. Democrats must be prepared to mimic their tormentors by intentionally destroying the Trump administration and then unleashing this dizzying array of electoral and institutional reforms when they recapture total power.

Only by changing the rules that are currently rigged against them, while clinging to a set of minimal behavioral standards, will Democrats ever hold power long enough to truly transform American politics in a lasting progressive direction.

Doing so will require party leaders to pursue policy changes that will be ridiculed by their opponents as outrageous affronts to democratic decency and received by their own voters with puzzlement or even shock. They need to do it anyway. The shock will wear off.

Most of these structural reforms would require only a law to be passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress and then signed by a Democratic president. If instituted as a bloc, they will improve access to the ballot; increase participation in our elections; decrease destructive tensions over the supreme court; mitigate the fundamental flaws of the Senate; bring members of the House closer to their constituents and open the world of national politics to many more citizens.

At the end of this process, Americans will despise their own politics a bit less, and feel more connected to the system. The purpose of this partisanship is nothing short of dragging the United States kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

From It’s Time To Fight Dirty. Used with permission of Melville House. Copyright © 2018 by David Faris

David Faris is the program director of Political Science at Roosevelt University

Why are the poor blamed and shamed for their deaths?

The Guardian

Death and Dying

Why are the poor blamed and shamed for their deaths?

When someone dies, she often suffers a brutal moral autopsy, says Barbara Ehrenreich. Did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat?

Barbara Ehrenreich       March 31, 2018

Barbara Ehrenreich: ‘Friends berate me for my heavy use of butter.’ Photograph: Stephen Voss for the Guardian

I watched in dismay as most of my educated, middle-class friends began, at the onset of middle age, to obsess about their health and likely longevity. Even those who were at one point determined to change the world refocused on changing their bodies. They undertook exercise or yoga regimens; they filled their calendars with medical tests and exams; they boasted about their “good” and “bad” cholesterol counts, their heart rates and blood pressure.

Mostly they understood the task of ageing to be self-denial, especially in the realm of diet, where one medical fad, one study or another, condemned fat and meat, carbs, gluten, dairy or all animal-derived products. In the health-conscious mindset that has prevailed among the world’s affluent people for about four decades now, health is indistinguishable from virtue, tasty foods are “sinfully delicious”, while healthful foods may taste good enough to be advertised as “guilt-free”. Those seeking to compensate for a lapse undertake punitive measures such as hours-long cardio sessions, fasts, purges or diets composed of different juices carefully sequenced throughout the day.

Of course I want to be healthy, too; I just don’t want to make the pursuit of health into a major life project. I eat well, meaning I choose foods that taste good and will stave off hunger for as long as possible, such as protein, fiber and fats. But I refuse to over think the potential hazards of blue cheese on my salad or pepperoni on my pizza. I also exercise – not because it will make me live longer but because it feels good when I do. As for medical care, I will seek help for an urgent problem, but I am no longer interested in undergoing tests to uncover problems that remain undetectable to me. When friends berate me for my laxity, my heavy use of butter or habit of puffing (but not inhaling) on cigarettes, I gently remind them that I am, in most cases, older than they are.

So it was with a measure of schadenfreude that I began to record the cases of individuals whose healthy lifestyles failed to produce lasting health. It turns out that many of the people who got caught up in the health “craze” of the last few decades – people who exercised, watched what they ate, abstained from smoking and heavy drinking – have nevertheless died. Lucille Roberts, owner of a chain of women’s gyms, died incongruously from lung cancer at the age of 59, although she was a “self-described exercise nut” who, the New York Times reported, “wouldn’t touch a French fry, much less smoke a cigarette”. Jerry Rubin, who devoted his later years to trying every supposedly health-promoting diet fad, therapy and meditation system he could find, jaywalked into Wilshire Boulevard at the age of 56 and died of his injuries two weeks later.

Some of these deaths were genuinely shocking. Jim Fixx, author of the bestselling The Complete Book Of Running, believed he could outwit the cardiac problems that had carried his father off to an early death by running at least 10 miles a day and restricting himself to a diet of pasta, salads and fruit. But he was found dead on the side of a Vermont road in 1984, aged only 52.

Even more disturbing was the untimely demise of John H Knowles, director of the Rockefeller Foundation and promulgator of the “doctrine of personal responsibility” for one’s health. Most illnesses are self-inflicted, he argued – the result of “gluttony, alcoholic intemperance, reckless driving, sexual frenzy, smoking” and other bad choices. The “idea of a ‘right’ to health,” he wrote, “should be replaced by the idea of an individual moral obligation to preserve one’s own health.” But he died of pancreatic cancer at 52, prompting one physician commentator to observe, “Clearly we can’t all be held responsible for our health.”

Still, we persist in subjecting anyone who dies at a seemingly untimely age to a kind of bio-moral autopsy: did she smoke? Drink excessively? Eat too much fat and not enough fiber? Can she, in other words, be blamed for her own death? When David Bowie and Alan Rickman both died in early 2016 of what major US newspapers described only as “cancer”, some readers complained that it is the responsibility of obituaries to reveal what kind of cancer. Ostensibly, this information would help promote “awareness” of the particular cancers involved, as Betty Ford’s openness about her breast cancer diagnosis helped to de-stigmatize that disease. It would also, of course, prompt judgments about the victim’s “lifestyle”. Would Bowie have died – at the quite respectable age of 69 – if he hadn’t been a smoker?

With sufficient ingenuity – or malicious intent – almost any death can be blamed on some mistake of the deceased.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ 2011 death from pancreatic cancer continues to spark debate. He was a food faddist, eating only raw vegan foods, especially fruit, and refusing to deviate from that plan even when doctors recommended a high protein and fat diet to help compensate for his failing pancreas. His office refrigerator was filled with Odwalla juices; he antagonized non-vegan associates by attempting to proselytize among them, as biographer Walter Isaacson has reported: at a meal with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus software, Jobs was horrified to see Kapor slathering butter on his bread, and asked, “Have you ever heard of serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your personality.”

Defenders of veganism argue that his cancer could be attributed to his occasional forays into protein-eating (a meal of eel sushi has been reported) or to exposure to toxic metals as a young man tinkering with computers. But a case could be made that it was the fruitarian diet that killed him: metabolically, a diet of fruit is equivalent to a diet of candy, only with fructose instead of glucose, with the effect that the pancreas is strained to constantly produce more insulin. As for the personality issues – the almost manic-depressive mood swings – they could be traced to frequent bouts of hypoglycemia. Incidentally, 67-year-old Mitch Kapor is alive and well at the time of this writing.

Similarly, with sufficient ingenuity – or malicious intent – almost any death can be blamed on some mistake of the deceased. Surely Fixx had failed to “listen to his body” when he first felt chest pains and tightness while running, and maybe, if he had been less self-absorbed, Rubin would have looked both ways before crossing the street. Maybe it’s just the way the human mind works, but when bad things happen or someone dies, we seek an explanation, preferably one that features a conscious agent – a deity or spirit, an evil-doer or envious acquaintance, even the victim. We don’t read detective novels to find out that the universe is meaningless, but that, with sufficient information, it all makes sense. We can, or think we can, understand the causes of disease in cellular and chemical terms, so we should be able to avoid it by following the rules laid down by medical science: avoiding tobacco, exercising, undergoing routine medical screening and eating only foods currently considered healthy. Anyone who fails to do so is inviting an early death. Or, to put it another way, every death can now be understood as suicide.

Liberal commentators countered that this view represented a kind of “victim-blaming”. In her books Illness As Metaphor and Aids And Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag argued against the oppressive moralizing of disease, which was increasingly portrayed as an individual problem. The lesson, she said, was, “Watch your appetites. Take care of yourself. Don’t let yourself go.” Even breast cancer, she noted, which has no clear lifestyle correlates, could be blamed on a “cancer personality”, sometimes defined in terms of repressed anger which, presumably, one could have sought therapy to cure. Little was said, even by the major breast cancer advocacy groups, about possible environmental carcinogens or carcinogenic medical regimes such as hormone replacement therapy.

While the affluent struggled dutifully to conform to the latest prescriptions for healthy living – adding whole grains and gym time to their daily plans – the less affluent remained mired in the old comfortable, unhealthy ways of the past – smoking cigarettes and eating foods they found tasty and affordable. There are some obvious reasons why the poor and the working class resisted the health craze: gym memberships can be expensive; “health foods” usually cost more than “junk food”. But as the classes diverged, the new stereotype of the lower classes as willfully unhealthy quickly fused with their old stereotype as semi-literate louts. I confront this in my work as an advocate for a higher minimum wage. Affluent audiences may cluck sympathetically over the miserably low wages offered to blue-collar workers, but they often want to know “why these people don’t take better care of themselves”. Why do they smoke or eat fast food? Concern for the poor usually comes tinged with pity. And contempt.

Photograph: Stephen Voss for the Guardian

In the 00’s, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver took it on himself to reform the eating habits of the masses, starting with school lunches. Pizza and burgers were replaced with menu items one might expect to find in a restaurant – fresh greens, for example, and roast chicken. But the experiment was a failure. In the US and UK, schoolchildren dumped out their healthy new lunches or stamped them underfoot. Mothers passed burgers to their children through school fences. Administrators complained that the new meals were vastly over-budget; nutritionists noted that they were cruelly deficient in calories. In Oliver’s defense, it should be observed that ordinary “junk food” is chemically engineered to provide an addictive combination of salt, sugar and fat. But it probably matters, too, that he didn’t study local eating habits in sufficient depth before challenging them, nor seems to have given enough thought to creatively modifying them. In West Virginia, he alienated parents by bringing a local mother to tears when he publicly announced the food she gave her four children was “killing” them.

There may well be unfortunate consequences from eating the wrong foods. But what are the “wrong” foods? In the 80’s and 90’s, the educated classes turned against fat in all forms, advocating the low-fat and protein diet that, journalist Gary Taubes argues, paved the way for an “epidemic of obesity” as health-seekers switched from cheese cubes to low-fat desserts. The evidence linking dietary fat to poor health had always been shaky, but class prejudice prevailed: fatty and greasy foods were for the poor and unenlightened; their betters stuck to bone-dry biscotti and fat-free milk. Other nutrients went in and out of style as medical opinion shifted: it turns out high dietary cholesterol, as in oysters, is not a problem after all, and doctors have stopped pushing calcium on women over 40. Increasingly, the main villains appear to be sugar and refined carbohydrates, as in hamburger buns. Eat a pile of fries washed down with a sugary drink and you will probably be hungry again in a couple of hours, when the sugar rush subsides. If the only cure for that is more of the same, your blood sugar levels may permanently rise – what we call diabetes.

Special opprobrium is attached to fast food, thought to be the food of the ignorant. Film-maker Morgan Spurlock spent a month eating nothing but McDonald’s to create his famous Super Size Me, documenting his 11 kg (24 lb) weight gain and soaring blood cholesterol. I have also spent many weeks eating fast food because it’s cheap and filling but, in my case, to no perceptible ill effects. It should be pointed out, though, that I ate selectively, skipping the fries and sugary drinks to double down on the protein. When, at a later point, a notable food writer called to interview me on the subject of fast food, I started by mentioning my favorites (Wendy’s and Popeye’s), but it turned out they were all indistinguishable to him. He wanted a comment on the general category, which was like asking me what I thought about restaurants.

I grew up in the 1940s and 50s, when cigarettes served not only as a comfort for the lonely but a powerful social glue.

If food choices defined the class gap, smoking provided a firewall between the classes. To be a smoker in almost any modern, industrialized country is to be a pariah and, most likely, a sneak. I grew up in another world, in the 1940’s and 50’s, when cigarettes served not only as a comfort for the lonely but a powerful social glue. People offered each other cigarettes, and lights, indoors and out, in bars, restaurants, workplaces and living rooms, to the point where tobacco smoke became, for better or worse, the scent of home. My parents smoked; one of my grandfathers could roll a cigarette with one hand; my aunt, who was eventually to die of lung cancer, taught me how to smoke when I was a teenager. And the government seemed to approve. It wasn’t till 1975 that the armed forces stopped including cigarettes along with food rations.

As more affluent people gave up the habit, the war on smoking – which was always presented as an entirely benevolent effort – began to look like a war against the working class. When the break rooms offered by employers banned smoking, workers were forced outdoors, leaning against walls to shelter their cigarettes from the wind. When working-class bars went non-smoking, their clienteles dispersed to drink and smoke in private, leaving few indoor sites for gatherings and conversations. Escalating cigarette taxes hurt the poor and the working class hardest. The way out is to buy single cigarettes on the streets, but strangely enough the sale of these “loosies” is largely illegal. In 2014 a Staten Island man, Eric Garner, was killed in a chokehold by city police for precisely this crime.

Why do people smoke? I once worked in a restaurant in the era when smoking was still permitted in break rooms, and many workers left their cigarettes burning in the common ashtray so they could catch a puff whenever they had a chance to, without bothering to relight. Everything else they did was done for the boss or the customers; smoking was the only thing they did for themselves. In one of the few studies of why people smoke, a British sociologist found smoking among working-class women was associated with greater responsibilities for the care of family members – again suggesting a kind of defiant self-nurturance.

When the notion of “stress” was crafted in the mid-20th century, the emphasis was on the health of executives, whose anxieties presumably outweighed those of the manual laborer who had no major decisions to make. It turns out, however, that stress – measured by blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol – increases as you move down the socioeconomic scale, with the most stress inflicted on those who have the least control over their work. In the restaurant industry, stress is concentrated among the people responding to the minute-by-minute demands of customers, not those who sit in offices discussing future menus. Add to these workplace stresses the challenges imposed by poverty and you get a combination that is highly resistant to, for example, anti-smoking propaganda – as Linda Tirado reported about her life as a low-wage worker with two jobs and two children: “I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.”

Nothing has happened to ease the pressures on low-wage workers. On the contrary, if the old paradigm of a blue-collar job was 40 hours a week, an annual two-week vacation and benefits such as a pension and health insurance, the new expectation is that one will work on demand, as needed, without benefits or guarantees. Some surveys now find a majority of US retail staff working without regular schedules – on call for when an employer wants them to come and unable to predict how much they will earn. With the rise in “just in time” scheduling, it becomes impossible to plan ahead: will you have enough money to pay the rent? Who will take care of the children? The consequences of employee “flexibility” can be just as damaging as a program of random electric shocks applied to caged laboratory animals.

Sometime in the early to mid-00’s, demographers noticed an unexpected rise in the death rates of poor white Americans. This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. It was especially not supposed to happen to whites who, in relation to people of color, have long had the advantage of higher earnings, better access to healthcare, safer neighborhoods and freedom from the daily insults and harms inflicted on the darker skinned. But the gap between the life expectancy of blacks and whites has been narrowing. The first response of some researchers – themselves likely to be well above the poverty level – was to blame the victims: didn’t the poor have worse health habits? Didn’t they smoke?

The class gap in mortality will not be closed by tweaking individual tastes.

In late 2015, the British economist Angus Deaton won the Nobel prize for work he had done with Anne Case, showing that the mortality gap between wealthy white men and poor ones was widening at a rate of one year a year, and slightly less for women. Smoking could account for only one fifth to one third of the excess working-class deaths. The rest were apparently attributable to alcoholism, opioid addiction and actual suicide – as opposed to metaphorically “killing” oneself through unwise lifestyle choices.

Why the excess mortality among poor white Americans? In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working-class people of any color. I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back – and a strong union – could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. By 2015, those jobs were long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas such as retail, landscaping and delivery truck driving. This means those in the bottom 20% of the white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender reassurance is shrinking.

There are some practical reasons why whites are likely to be more efficient than blacks at killing themselves. For one thing, they are more likely to be gun owners, and white men favour gunshot as a means of suicide. For another, doctors, undoubtedly acting on stereotypes of non-whites as drug addicts, are more likely to prescribe powerful opioid painkillers to whites. Pain is endemic among the blue-collar working class, from waitresses to construction workers, and few people make it past 50 without palpable damage to their knees, back or shoulders. As opioids became more expensive and closely regulated, users often made the switch to heroin which, being illegal, can vary widely in strength, leading to accidental overdoses.

Affluent reformers are perpetually frustrated by the unhealthy habits of the poor, but it is hard to see how problems arising from poverty – and damaging work conditions – could be cured by imposing the doctrine of “personal responsibility”. I have no objections to efforts encouraging people to stop smoking or add more vegetables to their diets. But the class gap in mortality will not be closed by tweaking individual tastes. This is an effort that requires concerted action on a vast scale: a welfare state to alleviate poverty; environmental clean-up of, for example, lead in drinking water; access to medical care including mental health services; occupational health reform to reduce disabilities inflicted by work.

The wealthier classes will also benefit from these measures, but what they need right now is a little humility. We will all die – whether we slake our thirst with kombucha or Coca-Cola, whether we run five miles a day or remain confined to our trailer homes, whether we dine on quinoa or KFC. This is the human condition. It’s time we began facing it together.

This is an edited extract from Natural Causes, by Barbara Ehrenreich, published by Granta on 12 April at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

Oklahoma Teachers Prepare For Walkout As Red State Revolt Spreads

HuffPost

Oklahoma Teachers Prepare For Walkout As Red State Revolt Spreads

Dave Jamieson, HuffPost           March 30, 2018

Teachers in Oklahoma still plan to walk off the job next week after state legislators passed an education funding bill that fell apart within hours.

Initially it seemed the legislation, signed Thursday by Gov. Mary Fallin (R), would quell the statewide walkout that educators had set for April 2 to demand more money for schools. But not even a day after the state Senate approved the first tax increase package in years, legislators in the state House voted to undo one of its main provisions, a tax on hotel and motel stays.

After applauding legislators for approving the funding bill, the state’s leading teachers union, the Oklahoma Education Association, renewed its call late Thursday for teachers around the state to stay out of school and descend on the Capitol in Oklahoma City on Monday.

“Yesterday, the Legislature passed a historic education funding increase,” the union said Thursday in a Facebook post. “Today, they started dismantling it by cutting millions out of the plan. Now they’re gone for the weekend. Oklahoma: we’ll see you at 9 a.m. April 2 at the Capitol.”

Oklahoma is one of a wave of red states now facing a teacher revolt after years of anemic funding for education.

Over the past decade, Oklahoma carried out a series of tax cuts that, combined with falling energy prices, have left the oil- and gas-rich state with little money to steer toward teachers or textbooks. It’s more or less the same story that played out in West Virginia, where tax cuts forced educators to forego raises while their health care costs increased. Teachers there walked off the job for nine days in February and March, prompting the state legislature to fund pay increases for public employees.

The historic and successful strike in West Virginia has inspired a burgeoning uprising among austerity-weary teachers around the country. In addition to Oklahoma, Arizona could soon face a strike by teachers, who are demanding the state boost pay by 20 percent and return to pre-recession funding levels for education. (Meanwhile, teachers in Kentucky shut down public schools in 25 counties on Friday to protest proposed cuts to the state pension plan.)

Teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona are all among the lowest-paid in the country, with schools facing growing teacher shortages. Republicans control the statehouse and governor’s office in all three states.

“After ten long years in a lot of these conservative states, the chicken is finally coming home to roost,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the 3-million member union with which the Oklahoma Education Association is affiliated. “They’ve given tax breaks to big corporations, defunded public schools, and said, ‘What could go wrong?’”

After Oklahoma legislators passed the tax hike, it seemed the walkout could turn instead into a one-day rally on Monday. Now nobody knows for sure what next week will bring. The mixed actions by Oklahoma’s legislature could lead to a situation where some school districts close only for Monday or not at all, while others engage in a work stoppage for days. Many Oklahoma teachers on Facebook have called for keeping schools shut down until all their demands are met.

We have buildings that are falling apart and textbooks that need to be taped together. Beth Wallis, assistant band director

To a certain degree, their walkout will require the cooperation of their largely sympathetic superintendents, who decide whether schools are formally open or closed. If schools are open and teachers refuse to return to work, the state could consider it an illegal strike. Several districts announced Friday that their schools would not be open on Monday.

Beth Wallis, an assistant band director who teaches in a Tulsa suburb, said teachers in her district voted unanimously to stay off the job beyond Monday. Although the legislation passed this week includes average pay raises of $6,100, Wallis said the lack of state funding guaranteed in the bill could leave local districts on the hook to pay for them. She also said securing teacher pay raises is secondary to increasing general school funding.

“The school funding in the bill is laughably small,” Wallis said. “It’s not enough to buy every kid in my district a single textbook. We have buildings that are falling apart and textbooks that need to be taped together.”

Like most states, Oklahoma cut school funding in the wake of the Great Recession. But it also pursued tax cuts during the economic recovery that followed, dropping income taxes and reducing the gross production tax on oil and gas companies. With little money to devote to schools, Oklahoma has led the nation over the past decade in cuts to its education formula funding, which is the main well of state money for individual districts.

“They sort of maximized the damage that the recession did to their schools and other public services, and as the economy improved, they kept cutting taxes,” Michael Leachman, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, recently told HuffPost. “You’re just digging your hole even deeper.”

With less funding, many cash-strapped schools have gone to four-day weeks, while certifying a growing number of emergency teachers to fill vacant jobs. Such teachers don’t meet the state’s normal minimum requirements to teach in public school. The union says the state will have to increase salaries and school funding significantly if it wants to stop losing teachers to Arkansas and other nearby states that pay better.

Reversing course will not be easy. Approving tax hikes in Oklahoma is extraordinarily difficult, requiring a three-fourths supermajority in both chambers. Legislators were barely able to approve the tax package that has already foundered. Legislators had only hours to digest that bill before it was passed, and many apparently did not have time to read it. One state representative argued that the bill had a $75 million hole in it before taking the repeal of the hotel and motel tax into account.

“The more the bill has gotten to sit,” Wallis said, “the more people have gotten to read it and find problems with it.”

Oklahoma teacher has 5 jobs because he doesn’t earn enough teaching to support his family

CNN
March 30, 2018

He’s a high school algebra teacher in Oklahoma. And a bus driver. And a Little League umpire. And he drives for Uber and Lyft. All because he says his teaching salary isn’t enough to support his family.

The many jobs of Oklahoma's teachers

He’s a high school algebra teacher in Oklahoma. And a bus driver. And a Little League umpire. And he drives for Uber and Lyft. All because he says his teaching salary isn’t enough to support his family.

Posted by CNN on Friday, March 30, 2018

Pruitt’s EPA security broke down door to lobbyist condo

ABC – Good Morning America

EXCLUSIVE: Pruitt’s EPA security broke down door to lobbyist condo

Matthew Mosk, John Santucci, Stephenie Ebbs, GMA,  March 30, 2018

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s protective detail broke down the door at the Capitol Hill condo where he was living, believing he was unconscious and unresponsive and needed rescue, in a bizarre incident last year that the EPA has for months refused to discuss, according to sources and police radio traffic obtained by ABC News.

The incident occurred in the late afternoon on March 29, 2017 at the Capitol Hill address Pruitt was renting, which was co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist. A Capitol Police officer called 911 at the behest of Pruitt’s security detail, which had tried unsuccessfully to reach him by phone, and by banging on the building’s front door, according to police recordings obtained by ABC News.

“They say he’s unconscious at this time,” the 911 operator is told, according to the recordings. “I don’t know about the breathing portion.”

Responding fire units from a Capitol Hill station house mobilized. “Engine three, Medic two respond to unconscious person,” the radio transmission said.

The protective detail then broke down the building’s glass-paneled front door and ascended two flights to Pruitt’s $50-a-night bedroom, where two sources tell ABC News he was found groggy, rising from a nap. It is unclear what led to the panic that caused the response. Pruitt declined medical attention, and a police report was never filed.

The EPA eventually agreed to reimburse the condo owner for the damage to the door, a source familiar with the arrangement told ABC News. EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox did not respond to requests for information on the incident or the reimbursement payments.

The previously unreported incident occurred while Pruitt was living at Capitol Hill condo co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist. Vicki Hart and her husband, lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, both confirmed the events, but neither would say how much the damage to the door cost to repair.

The EPA has since reimbursed Pruitt’s former landlord, Vicki Hart, for the cost of the door.

ABC News first reported Thursday that Pruitt had lived in the condo in 2017, during his first six months in Washington. The condo is in a prime location – less than a block from the U.S. Capitol complex – and other apartments in the building complex have rented for as much as $5,000-a-month, according to a source familiar with a neighboring lease.

The EPA allowed Bloomberg News to review copies of canceled checks that Pruitt paid to the condo owner. The news outlet reported that the checks show varying amounts paid on sporadic dates — not a traditional monthly “rent payment” of the same amount each month, according to Bloomberg. In all, Pruitt paid $6,100 over six months to the limited liability corporation for the Capitol Hill condo co-owned by Vicki Hart, whose husband J. Steven Hart is chairman of a top D.C. lobbying firm and who is registered to lobby for several major environmental and energy concerns.

Two sources told ABC News that Pruitt’s daughter also used the apartment in 2017 during her tenure as a White House summer intern.

“The rental agreement was with Scott Pruitt,” Vicki Hart told ABC News. “If other people were using the bedroom or the living quarters, I was never told, and I never gave him permission to do that.”

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment or clarification on the living arrangement with Pruitt’s daughter. McKenna Pruitt, now a law student, could not be reached by phone or email.

Wilcox released a statement from EPA Senior Counsel for Ethics Justina Fugh Friday, saying she did not “conclude that this is a prohibited gift at all. It was a routine business transaction and permissible even if from a personal friend.” Wilcox did not say when Fugh reviewed the matter or what led her to look into it.

Bryson Morgan, who is in private practice and served as Investigative Counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Congressional Ethics, said he thought it raised red flags.

“I think it certainly creates a perception problem, especially if Mr. Hart was seeking to influence the agency,” Morgan said.

Gift rules prohibit executive branch employees from accepting items of value, Morgan said in an interview prior to the EPA’s release of the details. In addition to traditional gifts, those rules apply to favorable terms on a lease.

EXCLUSIVE: EPA chief Pruitt joined by family in condo tied to lobbyist ‘power couple’

Pruitt arranged condo deal through energy lobbyist, source says

Democrats want details of Pruitt’s DC condo tied to lobbyist ‘power couple’

“It’s not just if he is paying market rent,” Morgan said. “A short-term lease is expensive. Is he given the ability to end it any day? Is this an arrangement any other person could get on the open market? My assumption would be this situation does not involve the hallmarks of a specific fair market transaction,” he said in an interview conducted before the checks were revealed.

The new disclosure comes as Democrats in Congress are demanding that Pruitt disclose to them more details about his 2017 use of the Capitol Hill home. U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, called on Pruitt to resign over his failure to disclose the rental deal tied to an energy lobbyist.

“As he has done over and over again, he showed contempt for transparency, ethical guidelines, and the public interest,” Beyer said. “Pruitt must resign. If he refuses to do so he should be fired immediately.”

Hart is the chairman of lobbying firm Williams and Jensen that lobbies on EPA policies like the Clean Air Act, according to its website. The firm also lobbied on issues related to the export of liquefied natural gas and represented Cheniere Energy Inc., which owned the only active Liquid Natural Gas export plant in the United States at the time.

Pruitt traveled to Morocco last December and the EPA said in a press release that liquid natural gas exports were a topic of discussion during that trip.

Last year, Cheniere Energy Inc. reported paying Hart’s firm $80,000.

Hart’s firm specifically lobbied on “issues related to the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG), approval of LNG exports and export facilities.” The firm also lists on its website that it lobbies on other EPA policies like the Clean Air Act.

Hart was registered with several companies to lobby on energy issues, but he told ABC News on Friday that he never contacted the EPA for clients.

“I made no lobby contacts at the EPA in 2017 or 2018,” Hart said.

The EPA did not respond to ABC News’ questions about whether Hart’s lobbying firm had any involvement in arranging meetings during Pruitt’s trip to Morocco.

Cheniere Energy spokeswoman Rachel Carmichel told ABC News the company ended its relationship with Hart’s firm in December 2017. The spokeswoman went on to say Cheniere was unaware of the relationship between Pruitt and the lobbyist and had not used Hart’s firm to have conversations with the EPA.

Another lobbying client of Hart’s, the railroad Norfolk Southern, spent $160,000 last year on lobbying Congress on “issues affecting coal usage, oil production, and transportation, including EPA regulation.”

Norfolk Southern also declined to comment when reached by ABC News.

Craig Holman, an ethics specialist at Public Citizen, a non-partisan watchdog group, wrote to the EPA Inspector General Thursday to request an investigation into the rental arrangement. If the rental arrangement was anything other than a market rate deal, he wrote, “it would at least constitute a violation of the federal statutes and executive branch rules prohibiting gifts to covered officials from prohibited sources.”

“Since Administrator Pruitt is already involved in allegations of accepting gifts of travel, the question arises whether a sense of entitlement may have led him to violate the gift rules on this rental arrangement as well,” Holman wrote.

The head of the nonprofit watchdog group the Environmental Integrity Project and former EPA Director of Civil Enforcement Eric Shaffer called on the EPA’s inspector general and Congress to look into the issue.

“Does this explain why Pruitt flew to Morocco to pitch natural gas exports, which isn’t really an EPA concern?” Schaeffer wrote in a statement.

The EPA inspector general’s office is aware of the report, according to spokesman Jeff Lagda.

The agency’s inspector general is already looking into the cost of Pruitt’s travel and whether the agency followed all proper procedures.

An Oregon Dairyman Reclaims the Pasture

Civil Eats

An Oregon Dairyman Reclaims the Pasture

Fourth-generation farmer Jon Bansen translates complex grazing production systems into common-sense farm wisdom.

By Kathleen Bauer, Business, Farming    March 30, 2018.

 

In the U.S., the dairy industry is a tough business for organic and conventional producers alike, with plunging prices and changing consumer demand leading to a spate of farm shutdowns and even farmer suicides. And in Oregon, where dairy is big business—accounting for 10 percent of the state’s agriculture income in 2016—the story is much the same.

But Jon Bansen, who has farmed since 1991 at Double J Jerseys, an organic dairy farm in Monmouth, Oregon, has throughout his career bucked conventional wisdom and demonstrated the promise of his practices. Now he’s convincing others to follow suit.

Bansen and his wife Juli bought their farm in 1991 and named it Double J Jerseys, then earned organic certification in 2000. In 2017, he switched to full-time grass feed for his herd of 200 cows and 150 young female cows, called heifers. He convinced his brother Bob, who owns a dairy in Yamhill, to convert to organic. His brother Pete followed suit soon after. (“He’s a slow learner, that’s all I can say,” Bansen joked.)
He’s someone who prefers to lead by example, which has earned him the respect of a broad range of the region’s farmers and ranchers, as well as its agricultural agencies and nonprofits.

“Jon is an articulate spokesperson for organic dairy in Oregon and beyond,” said Chris Schreiner, executive director of Oregon Tilth, an organic certifying organization. “His passion for organic dairy and pasture-based systems is contagious, and he does a great job of translating complex grazing production systems into common-sense farmer wisdom. His personal experience … is a compelling case for other dairy farmers to consider.”

George Siemon, one of the founders of Organic Valley, the dairy co-operative for which Bansen produces 100 percent grass-fed milk under Organic Valley’s “Grassmilk” brand, believes the switch to 100 percent grass is a direction that Bansen has been moving in all along.

“He’s just refined and refined and refined his organic methods,” said Siemon, admitting that Bansen is one of his favorite farmers. “He’s transformed his whole farm. It’s a great case when the marketplace is rewarding him for getting better and better at what he does and what he likes to do.”

Deep Roots in Dairy Farming

Dairy farming is baked into Bansen’s DNA, with roots tracing all the way back to his great-grandfather, who emigrated from Denmark in the mid-1800s, settling in a community of Danes in Northern California. He hired out his milking skills to other farmers until he saved enough to buy his own small farm near the bucolic coastal town of Ferndale in Humboldt County.

Bansen was about 10 years old when his father and their family left the home farm to strike out on their own in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. They bought land in the tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Yamhill, about an hour southwest of Portland.

A typical farm kid, Bansen and his seven siblings were all expected to help with the chores. “You fed calves before you went to school, and you came home and dinked around the house eating for awhile until you heard Dad’s voice beller at you that it was time to get back to work,” Bansen recalled. “I was a little envious of kids that lived in town and got to ride their bikes on pavement. That sounded pretty sexy to me.”

After studying biology in college in Nebraska and getting married soon after graduating, Bansen and his wife worked on his dad’s Yamhill farm for five years and then began talking about getting a place of their own. They found property not far away outside the sleepy town of Monmouth. It had the nutritionally rich, green pastures Bansen knew were ideal for dairy cows, fed by the coastal mists that drift over the Coast Range from the nearby Pacific Ocean.

One day, a few years after they’d started Double J Jerseys, a man knocked on their door. He said he was from a small organic dairy co-op in Wisconsin that was looking to expand nationally. He wondered if Double J would be interested in transitioning to organic production, mentioning that the co-op could guarantee a stable price for their milk.

It turned out that the stranger was Siemon, a self-described “long-haired hippie” who’d heard about Bansen through word of mouth. “He was reasonably skeptical,” recalls Siemon. “He wanted to make sure it was a valid market before he committed, because it’s such a big commitment to go all the way with organic dairy.”

For his part, Bansen worried that there wasn’t an established agricultural infrastructure to support the transition, not to mention the maintenance of an organic farm. “I was worried about finding enough organic grain,” he said.

On the other hand, however, the young couple needed the money an organic certification might bring. “We had $30,000 to our name and we were more than half a million dollars in debt” from borrowing to start the farm, Bansen said.

Jon Bansen and his family.After much research and soul-searching, they decided to accept Siemon’s offer and started the transition process. It helped that his cousin Dan had transitioned one of his farms to organic not long before and that generations of his family before him had run pasture-based dairies.

“My grandfather, he was an organic dairy farmer, he just didn’t know what it was called,” Bansen said. “There were no antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides. You fed your cows in the fields.”

The Organic Learning Curve

During the Bansens’ first organic years, they had to figure out ways to eliminate antibiotics, hormones, and pesticides—all of which Bansen views as “crutches” to deal with management issues.

To prevent coccidiosis, a condition baby cows develop when they don’t receive enough milk and are forced to live in overcrowded conditions, for example, Bansen fed his calves plenty of milk and made sure they had enough space.

To prevent cows from contracting mastitis, an infection of the mammary system, he changed the farm’s milking methods.

Another learning curve had to do with figuring out the balance of grain to forage (i.e., edible plants). Originally Bansen fed each of his cows 20 pounds of grain per day, but after switching to organic sources of grain, he was able to reduce that to four or five pounds a day. This switch cut down grain and transportation costs dramatically.

He also had to learn to manage the plants in the fields in order to produce the healthiest grazing material possible. Since the transition to organic, Double J has grown to nearly 600 acres, a combination of pastures for the milking cows, fields for growing the grass and forage he stores for winter, when it’s too cold and wet to keep the animals outdoors.

“It’s not a machine; it’s a constant dance between what you’re planting and growing and the weather patterns and how the cows are reacting to it,” said Bansen. “There’s science involved in it, but it’s more of an art form.”

Transition from Grain to Grass

Bansen’s decision to take his cows off grain completely has meant doing something very different than what the other farmers around him do—even some of those in his own co-op.

His participation in Organic Valley’s grassmilk program is just a progression of what he calls “the organic thing.” He gets paid a little more for his milk, but it’s not the road to riches, in part because his cows don’t produce as much milk as when their feed was supplemented with grain, and he’s had to add more land in order to grow enough to feed them.

Bansen’s motivated by the desire to produce the most nutrient-dense milk possible, and he believes that 100 percent grass-fed milk is where the market is going.

Two of Jon Bansen's cows.Scientific research seems to bear out his hypothesis. A study titled “Greener Pastures: How grass-fed beef and milk contribute to healthy eating,” published in 2006 by the Union of Concerned Scientists Food and Environment Program, found statistically significant differences in fat content between pasture-raised and conventional products. Specifically, milk from pasture-raised cattle tends to have higher levels of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA)—an omega-3 fatty acid—as well as consistently higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), another fatty acid that in animal studies has shown many positive effects on heart disease, cancer, and the immune system.

As our agriculture has moved away from pasture, the balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids has shifted—leading most of us to consume much more omega-6. Severalstudies have linked that shift to increases in everything from heart disease to cancer to autoimmune diseases.

Bansen’s own test results showed the levels of omega-3 to omega-6 in the milk his cows produce are close to 1:1, far less than the 7:1 ratio found in conventional milk. And that’s on winter forage. He can’t wait to see what the results are once the cows are on pasture this season.

Speaking His Mind

While he’s generally affable, Bansen isn’t shy about disagreeing with the other farmers in the co-op. “When the going gets tough and somebody needs to speak up with some truthfulness, Jon’s never been afraid to speak his mind, and you need that in a co-op,” said Siemon.

In addition to speaking before young farmers in Organic Valley’s “Generation Organic” (or Gen-O) program aimed at farmers under the age of 35, as well as participating in regional farm organizations, Bansen has written articles on grazing and forage for publications like Graze magazine. In an essay in its latest issue, he highlighted the problems he sees in the current organic milk market.

Bansen worries that the integrity of the organic milk market is in jeopardy because of national producers like Aurora Organic Dairy, essentially organically certified factory farms, are flooding the market with milk and reducing prices for smaller operations.

An even bigger problem, from his perspective, is that not enough organic farmers embrace what he terms “the organic lifestyle.” “I’m sick of farmers bitching about the price of milk and going down to Walmart to buy groceries and taking their kids out to McDonald’s,” he said bluntly. “You have no right to bitch about what’s going on in your marketplace if you’re not supporting that same marketplace.”

When Bansen shipped his first milk to Organic Valley in 2000, there were 200 dairies in the co-op. With that number around 2,000 today, he feels it’s more critical than ever that all are pulling in the same direction.

“There’s nothing worse than a farmer who’s on the organic truck saying, ‘I just do it for the money. It’s really no different from other milk,’” he said.

It’s spring in Oregon, probably Bansen’s favorite season, and he’s itching to let his cows out to graze as soon as his pastures have enough forage. When Bansen was growing up, his father used to hold the cows in the barn until milking was done, them release them into the pasture all at once when the season began, which Bansen described as “friggin’ mayhem.”

Preferring a calmer approach with his own cows, he milks six of them at a time and then opens the gate to release them in small groups.

“We’ve kind of taken some of that crazy stuff out of the deal, but it’s still a brilliant day. It’s better than Christmas.”

All photos © David Nevala for Organic Valley.

Some of Jon Bansen's cows.

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