Category: Veterans – Patriotism

Toxic Humans Are Now in Control of Our Environmental Protection.

VOX

Scott Pruitt is slowly strangling the EPA

The unprecedented regulatory slowdown and rollbacks at the Environmental Protection Agency.

By Umair Irfan      January 29, 2018

Javier Zarracina/Vox

The mandate of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and enforce environmental regulations.

Yet since he was confirmed last February, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has worked to stall or roll back this core function of his agency, efforts he’s now celebrating with posters:

Eric Lipton @EricLiptonNYT: EPA has put these posters up at agency buildings. Celebrating regulatory rollbacks.

He’s also taken some highly unusual, even paranoid, precautions, armoring himself with a 24/7 security detail, building a $25,000 secret phone booth in his office, spending $9,000 to sweep his office for surveillance bugs, and hiding his schedule from the public. When one employee turned one of the celebratory posters around, Pruitt assigned a worker to look through security camera records to see who did it, Newsweek reported.

Pruitt’s posters are a list of the regulatory rollbacks he’s delivered to his allies in coal, oil, gas, and chemicals industries. These gifts include the reversal of a ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental problems in children.

Some of the biggest changes Pruitt has made at the EPA have come by not doing anything at all. He’s steering the EPA’s work at an agonizingly slow pace, delaying and slowing the implementation of laws and running interference for many of the sectors EPA is supposed to regulate.

With more staff and funding cuts looming, even fewer toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards will be measured, and the statues that protect against them won’t be enforced.

“People will get sick and die,” Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, told Vox. “It’s that simple.” Some 230,000 Americans already die each year due to hazardous chemical exposures. “You stop enforcing those regulations and that number will go way up,” she said.

Chaos at the White House and on Capitol Hill has provided Pruitt cover to quietly position himself, his critics argue, as the greatest threat to the EPA in its entire existence. But some lawmakers and the courts are starting to catch onto him. Since the EPA’s inception, it’s been the judiciary that’s again and again beaten back attempts to undermine the agency from the inside. This year is again shaping up to be momentous.

States are now suing to block Pruitt’s regulatory changes, and federal judges are starting to force him to speed up. Pruitt will have to choose between knock-down, drag-out legal fights to deliver for his allies in industry or fold and grudgingly enforce environmental rules. Whatever he decides, Congress, courts, industry, and activists will be watching.

There’s a massive, unprecedented slowdown going on across the EPA

Pruitt can’t simply repeal all the rules he doesn’t like, so he’s had to embrace a different strategy: stall.

Much of EPA’s work is governed by statute, so dismantling most environmental regulations requires an arduous rule-making process that requires public comments, as well as new rules to comply with the law. The whole endeavor is inevitably beset by lawsuits at every step.

“In order to roll back rules, you have to not just have a different policy inclination,” said former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who worked under President Barack Obama. “If you have a final rule, you actually have to find a flaw with the rule, you have to justify it.”

By stalling, Pruitt can effectively shift policy by doing nothing. If he leaves regulations in limbo or delays their implementation, industries get relief from environmental rules while the EPA retains plausible deniability. The result is a drastic slowdown in the pace of work at an agency that faces a constant churn of new rules, regulations, enforcement actions, and lawsuits that affect the health, safety, and livelihoods of millions of Americans.

Here are some of the environmental rules, actions, and proposals that have become mired in the morass:

  • The EPA announced it was seeking a two-year delay in implementing the 2015 Clean Water Rule, which defines the waterways that are regulated by the agency under the Clean Water Act.
  • In May, the EPA dialed backtracking the health impacts of more than a dozen hazardous chemicals at the behest of a Trump appointee at the agency, Nancy Beck.
  • The agency has said nothing about counties that failed to meet new ozone standards by an October 2017 deadline and now face fines.
  • Environmental law enforcement has declined. By September, the Trump administration launched 30 percent fewer cases and collected about 60 percent fewer fines than in the same period under President Obama.
  • The EPA punted on regulations on dangerous solvents like methylene chloride, a paint stripper, that were already on track to be banned, instead moving the process to “long term action.”
  • The EPA asked for a six-year schedule to review 17-year-old regulations on lead paint.
  • The implementation date of new safety procedures at chemical plants to prevent explosions and spills was pushed back to 2019.
  • Pruitt issued a directive to end “Sue & Settle,” a legal strategy that fast-tracks settlements for litigation filed against the EPA to force the agency to do its job. The agency will spend more time in courts fighting cases that it’s likely to lose.
  • The agency’s enforcement division now has to get approval from headquarters before investigating potential violations of environmental regulations, slowing down efforts to catch violators of laws like the Clean Water Act.

“The problem at EPA right now is there is a chilling effect on enforcement,” Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told E&E News.

Even programs Pruitt ostensibly liked are suffering under his leadership, like the cleanup of highly contaminated Superfund sites. In an interview with CBS, Pruitt said he’s aiming to take 27 to 30 sites fully or partially off the list this year. He’s also threatened to cut agency funds for pursuing polluters to make them pay for cleaning up these locations.

Pruitt has taken credit for removing seven Superfund sites from the list, but that work started years before he got to the agency and was completed before he took office, as Timothy Cama reported for The Hill.

The Superfund cleanup program is now run by Albert Kelly, an Oklahoma banker who was banned for life from the industry after receiving a $125,000 federal fine and has no experience in environmental remediation. The Intercept reported that Pruitt received loans from Kelly’s bank.

This is not to say that Pruitt isn’t deregulating the old-fashioned way as well. Under his leadership, the EPA already has tried to roll back at least 19 environmental regulations, from undoing proposed greenhouse gas regulations to relaxing standards for ozone pollution. (The EPA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Just last week, the EPA announced it was going to allow some toxic chemical polluters to be held to a lower standard under the Clean Air Act, allowing them to increase emissions of substances like mercury, lead, and dioxin. The White House’s infrastructure plan would block the EPA from evaluating and rejecting projects based on their Environmental Impact Statements, the Washington Post reported.

“He is much more organized, much more focused than the other Cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies,” Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University, told the New York Times. “Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding.”

Losing the environmental protections established by the EPA could harm millions of Americans

The EPA is essentially an environmental public health agency. Its regulations directly affect millions of Americans as it diagnoses ailments in the air, water, and soil, to name a few, and prescribes solutions.

It has had a pretty great track record.

The Clean Air Act, for example, reduced conventional air pollutants by 70 percent since 1970. Substances like ozone, carbon monoxide, and lead have dangerous consequences for human health like heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory arrests.

According to one estimate, the legislation prevents 184,000 premature deaths each year and has saved $22 trillion in health care costs over a period of 20 years.

But enforcing these rules bears a cost as well, and critics say that continuing to make many of these regulations more stringent is regulatory malpractice since these rules are reaching diminishing returns, costing businesses and individuals more and more to comply with them. This is the main rationale for the White House’s aim to cut back on “job-killing”regulations.

Staff cuts and unfilled positions may be part of Pruitt’s strategy

It’s hard to tell whether the lingering vacancies at the EPA are a deliberate effort by Pruitt to avoid the congressional scrutiny that comes with every new appointee, or a consequence of the dysfunction inside the agency and the White House.

EPA has only filled five out of 14 positions that require Senate approval a year after Trump took office. Throughout the federal government, of the 624 positions that require congressional confirmation, only 242 slots have been filled, and 244 jobs don’t have any nominee at all.

Trump has suggested that many of these vacancies may never be filled.

“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be —because you don’t need them,” he told Forbes in November. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”

The remaining EPA officials are now further constrained since the Federal Vacancies Reform Act deadline expired last November. The law prevents interim workers from performing many of their duties 300 days after inauguration.

“On Day 301, whenever that day might occur for a particular office, the office would be designated vacant, for purposes of the Vacancies Act, and only the head of the agency would be able to perform the functions and duties of that vacant office,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

That means every decision that would normally fall to a lower ranking official has to be kicked up to the top office. For an agency like EPA, that means actions on monitoring the environment, pursuing polluters, and filing lawsuits end up bottlenecked at the desk of Pruitt, who has shown little appetite for fulfilling the agency’s mandates to begin with.

More than 700 employees have left the agency since it began to try to buy out more than 1,200 workers began last year. And more staff cuts are likely still in store, though they may not be as severe as the 20 percent workforce cut requested in the White House’s initial budget.

Even Pruitt’s allies are perturbed by the EPA’s slow walking

Pruitt’s tenure leading the EPA has enraged environmental activists, but some of his deregulation allies are unhappy with the pace of work and staffing vacancies at the agency too.

Myron Ebell, who leads the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and led Pruitt’s transition team at the EPA, warned that not having enough staff in place means that the agency will miss statutory deadlines on regulations, leaving it open to further lawsuits that will sap time and money that could otherwise go toward permanently shrinking the scope of the agency.

“I started complaining, ‘Where are the nominees?’ in March,” Ebell said. “I think over time, this is going to catch up with them. They’re going to have failures and obstacles if they don’t have people in play.”

Another factor, according to Ebell, is that many of the career civil servants at the EPA are not on board with Pruitt, offering less-than-enthusiastic support for the Back to Basics agenda.

“The acting general counsel at EPA is a very competent lawyer and he’s a very nice guy but he’s not going to help Scott Pruitt implement his agenda,” Ebell said. “He’s going to slow walk that.”

This is dimming the prospects for rolling back many of the big prizes for anti-regulation Republicans like Pruitt, like undoing the 2009 endangerment finding for carbon dioxide, EPA’s legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases. These repeals stand to be long, messy fights that cut across law and science.

Many of these regulations took years to put together and will require years to take apart, endeavors that would likely not resolve until well into President Trump’s second term.

“It’s very clear to me that there’s no real intent to redo these things because there’s not a schedule to do these things, and it takes years for a process to revise these rules,” said former administrator McCarthy.

Instead, it seems the EPA is working to prevent the existing greenhouse gas regulations from going into effect as it scrambles to come up with a replacement rule for greenhouse gases by 2019.

Pruitt’s allies’ concern is that without getting these rollbacks enshrined in law, many of EPA’s environmental regulations could snap back into place under a future administration.

While the executive branch is slowing down environmental regulations, it’s speeding up judicial nominations. Many of these new judges are expected to rule on Pruitt’s agenda.

Pruitt, for his part, may be padding his resume for a run for office. He has demurred when asked about his political ambitions, but Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin hits her term limit in 2018, and Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe plans to retire in 2020. He shot down swirling rumors that he may even be angling for the post of US attorney general should Jeff Sessions step down.

The courts are losing their patience with the agency and are now forcing Pruitt’s hand

Federal agencies like the EPA have broad license to interpret law. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts defer to agencies to interpret statutes on issues that Congress hasn’t addressed head-on.

Pruitt described his approach as paring back EPA’s regulations down to the bare minimum authorized by Congress.

“We aren’t deregulating,” he told the National Review. “We’re regulating in accordance with the law.”

However, federal courts don’t agree and are no longer deferring to the new administration. Courts have already blocked the EPA’s efforts to suspend rules on methane emissions and denied the EPA’s request to spend years researching lead paint, instead giving the agency 90 days to come up with a new regulation.

“I think you’re going to see courts get more involved in the work of the agency,” said former EPA general counsel Avi Garbow, who served under President Obama. “That judicial patience cannot be counted on forever.”

Others are taking a page from Pruitt’s old playbook. Already eight states are suing EPA for failing to expand ozone regulations. The EPA has set a target date of April 30 for designating areas of the country that are not meeting the new, stricter ozone standard.

In January 17 interview with CBS, Pruitt said that ozone is something “we most definitely have to regulate.” Michael Honeycutt, the new chair of EPA’s Science Advisory Board, said cutting ozone regulations would have a “negative health benefit.”

Meanwhile, other states are suing the department for not controlling air pollution moving across state lines. Some of the scientists who were ousted from the EPA’s advisory boards are now suing the agency, arguing that their removal violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Public lawsuits are also going forward to try to force the agency’s hand to fight climate change.

There are also some regulations Pruitt supports. He wants to remove lead from all drinking water in the United States in 10 years and has started taking comments on revising rules for water pipes. He also wants to control leaks of methane, the primary component in natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas.

All the while, lawmakers are also growing increasingly suspicious about Pruitt’s activities and are launching investigations. Michael Dourson, a former chemical industry consultant who was nominated to lead the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, withdrew his name from consideration after facing stiff opposition from Congress.

Senate Democrats are preparing to grill Pruitt when he testifies this week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. They are already putting together their agenda for the EPA administrator should they clinch control of the chamber this fall.

This means that in the coming year, the EPA will have to speed up its work as a regulator or face stiff legal consequences. “I do not think the agency is capable of replicating in 2018 the same degree of affirmative regulatory output that we saw in 2017,” Garbow said.

The laws that govern the EPA require action, and whether those demands come from Congress, the courts, or constituents, the agency needs to produce results that stand up to legal challenges from all sides on a deadline, Garbow said.

The goal is not just to give the regulatory certainty that industries crave, but to protect American lives. Pruitt may soon find out that doing nothing, or even very little, is not an option.

Got a tip or idea for stories about the EPA we should pursue? Contact Umair at umair@vox.com, or on Keybase at umairfan.

NEXT UP IN ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Trump: ‘Ice Caps Were Going to Be Gone, But Now They’re Setting Records’

EcoWatch

Trump: ‘Ice Caps Were Going to Be Gone, But Now They’re Setting Records’

Lorraine Chow      January 29, 2018

President Trump,  notorious for his views on climate change, again said something about the topic that’s the opposite of what’s actually happening.

“The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records,” POTUS told host Piers Morgan during an interview on UK television network ITV broadcast Sunday.

Well, the polar ice caps are indeed setting records—for melting. Here’s a GIF showing the extent of the frightening sea ice loss in the Arctic from 1979-2016.

And here’s a graph that NASA released last year showing how sea ice extent has sunk to record lows at both poles.

These line graphs plot monthly deviations and overall trends in polar sea ice from 1979 to 2017 as measured by satellites. The top line shows the Arctic; the middle shows Antarctica; and the third shows the global, combined total. The graphs depict how much the sea ice concentration moved above or below the long-term average. (They do not plot total sea ice concentration.) Arctic and global sea ice totals have moved consistently downward over 38 years. Antarctic trends are more muddled, but they do not offset the great losses in the Arctic.Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

After the ITV interview, ten different climate scientists contacted by the Associated Press said Trump was wrong about climate change.

“Clearly President Trump is relying on alternative facts to inform his views on climate change. Ice on the ocean and on land are both disappearing rapidly, and we know why: increasing greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels that trap more heat and melt the ice,” Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis explained.

Trump’s comment was similar to one he tweeted in 2014: “the POLAR ICE CAPS are at an all time high, the POLAR BEAR population has never been stronger. Where the hell is global warming?”

Trump is a well known climate change denier who infamously said that global warming is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese. Since taking office, he and his administration have rolled back critical environmental protections and pushed for fossil fuels.

When ITV host Morgan asked Trump if he thinks climate change is even happening, the president replied, “There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. Right? That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.”

Of course, 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El Niño. The global ocean was the hottest on record, too.

Trump’s remark was consistent with the one he tweeted last month during a cold snap in the East Coast, when he confused temperature with climate. “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!”

Morgan did not follow up by telling the president that his statements were scientifically untrue.

However, Trump did tell Morgan that he believes in “clean air. I believe in crystal-clear, beautiful water. I believe in just having good cleanliness in all.”

Also in the interview, Trump suggested he’s open to keeping the U.S. in the Paris climate agreement—even though he’s said before that landmark pact of keeping global average temperatures from rising 2°C “was a bad deal for the U.S.”

The reason being? He likes French President Emmanuel Macron, who has centered environmental action as a key presidential policy.

“The Paris accord, for us, would have been a disaster,” Trump said. “Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in. I like, as you know, I like Emmanuel.”

“I would love to, but it’s got to be a good deal for the United States,” he added.

2017, wasn’t just one of the hottest years in modern history, it was also extremely costly. According to a recent report from the National Centers for Environmental Information, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “the U.S. experienced 16 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion, with total costs of approximately $306 billion—a new U.S. annual record.”

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Disaster Strikes Area of Oklahoma Rocked By Natural Gas Well Explosion Less Than a Year Ago

Resilience

Disaster Strikes Area of Oklahoma Rocked By Natural Gas Well Explosion Less Than a Year Ago

By Mike Hand, orig. pub. in Climate Progress   January 24, 2018

Five workers are presumed dead after a natural gas rig exploded in Oklahoma Monday, causing a massive fire that left a derrick crumpled on the ground. The deadly blast comes less than a year after a natural gas well explosion in the same area of the state injured one worker.

Red Mountain Energy LLC, a four-year-old company based in Oklahoma City, was operating the well site. Houston-based company Patterson-UTI Energy Inc. owns the rig. Sixteen workers escaped the site in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, without major injuries; one required treatment at a local hospital. The five workers presumed dead are Josh Ray, of Fort Worth, Texas; Cody Risk, of Wellington, Colorado; and Matt Smith, Parker Waldridge and Roger Cunningham, all of Oklahoma. Ray, Smith and Risk were Patterson-UTI employees.

The explosion and fire on Monday occurred as a crew was drilling a new well. The well had not been completed and no natural gas was being produced, Pittsburg County Office of Emergency Management Executive Director Kevin Enloe said at a press conference Monday. Several tanks surrounded the derrick, all of which caught fire after the explosion. A remote switch that controlled a blowout preventer at the bottom of the well was inoperable, Enloe said.

Red Mountain Energy and Patterson-UTI reportedly are working with local authorities and the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate the accident. OSHA had not responded to a request for more information about its investigation at the time this article was published.

Patterson-UTI Energy has a history of worker deaths. OSHA fined the drilling company more than $900,000 over a 10-year period ending in 2012 for repeated safety violations. A 2008 Senate committee report described the company as an example of the federal government’s “complete failure to check reckless and outrageous conduct” in the workplace. Given its poor safety record, a workplace safety blog, Confined Space, called Patterson-UTI an OSHA “frequent flyer.”

Patterson-UTI has about 25 drilling rigs active in Oklahoma, second only to Texas, where it has nearly 60 rigs in operation, the Houston Chronicle reported Tuesday. The newspaper described Monday’s incident as one of the deadliest in the upstream oil and gas sector in recent years. In one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, 11 platform workers were killed when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

In the February 2017 incident in Pittsburg County, a worker at a Trinity Operating LLC natural gas production site suffered third-degree burns on his legs. The explosion occurred on one well head, which led to fires on three wells. The wells were already producing natural gas for Trinity Operating, which is not affiliated with Red Mountain Energy or Patterson-UTI.

Fatalities in the upstream oil and gas industry began rising sharply in 2011 in tandem with the fracking boom, peaking at 141 deaths nationwide in 2014. The sector has one of the highest rates of severe injuries in the country, according to an E&E News analysis released last year. Severe injuries are defined as those causing hospitalization or loss of a body part. The most common injury is amputation, most frequently fingers and fingertips. Next was fractures, mostly legs. E&E News used OSHA data for its analysis.

Residents are also at risk from natural gas explosions. Incidents involving natural gas pipelines, including distribution lines, cause an average of 17 fatalities and $133 million in property damage annually.

The number of workplace safety inspectors at OSHA has fallen by several dozen under the Trump administration. House Republicans have proposed cuts to OSHA’s enforcement budget by $13.5 million, or 6.5 percent below the FY 2017 budget. Under the 2018 spending proposal, the overall OSHA budget would be cut by 4 percent.

The Trump administration’s rollback of workplace safety enforcement is taking place at the same time that the rate of deaths per 100,000 workers is slowly increasing, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 4,500 workers in the United States die on the job each year.

Where You Live In America Determines When You Die

Forbes

Where You Live In America Determines When You Die

Peter Ubel, Contributor.                                                                                         Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Where you live shouldn’t determine how long you live.

Shutterstock

Debates over income inequality divide liberals and conservatives. In the last few decades, income inequality has soared in the U.S. In the 1950s, the top 1% of Americans brought home about a tenth of the country’s income. By 2012, those 1% ers accounted for almost a quarter.

Only a minority of Republicans are troubled by these statistics, versus three-quarters of Democrats. We are a nation divided—in wealth and in politics. But perhaps another kind of American inequality can bridge this partisan divide—a life expectancy gap.

Consider the facts. The average life expectancy in the U.S. is almost 80 years. But that average obscures enormous differences based on where people live. In some U.S. counties, life expectancy is close to 90. But in others, people are lucky to live to 65. Here is a map showing life expectancy in different parts of the U.S.:

Life Expectancy at Birth by County, 2014

It doesn’t bode well for a lengthy retirement in the rural southeast.

Worse yet, inequality in life expectancy is growing. In 1980, just before income inequality accelerated, life expectancy differed by about 8% across different parts of the country; the gap has risen to almost 11% since then (graph A):

JAMA Intern Med

Absolute and Relative Inequality Among Counties in Life Expectancy and Age-Specific Mortality Risks, 1980–2014

Democrats are troubled by these inequalities, equality of health being a priority for many liberals. But Republicans should be troubled, too; the right to life is cherished by many conservatives, so the opportunity to live a long and healthy life should matter to them.

Both liberals and conservatives strive for an America that gives people equality of opportunity. They should come together to acknowledge the unacceptability of these enormous differences in life expectancy. It won’t be easy to find solutions we can all agree upon, but our search for such solutions will be easier if we come together across the political spectrum and agree that our country has a problem.

Trump’s EPA and Nerve Gas Pesticide

NOW THIS Video

Thanks to trump’s administration to reverse all the EPA protections for our food chains, soon you will be able to buy poison to feed your family from your local grocery stores or Walmart. Well let’s make sure trump is fed this pesticide foods!! Although he eats from McDonald’s because he’s afraid of being poisoned.

Trump's EPA and Nerve Gas Pesticide

Trump's EPA is allowing a nerve gas pesticide to be sprayed on your food

Posted by NowThis Politics on Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Trump’s idiotic policies are moving us backwards!

Occupy Democrats‘s post to the group: Stephanie Miller Fans.

https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/photos/a.347907068635687.81180.346937065399354/1903587259734319/?type=3

Image may contain: 2 people, people smiling, text
Occupy Democrats

January 25, 2018

Ugh. Trump’s idiotic policies are moving us backwards!

Read more: https://ind.pn/2FdZFTs
Image by Occupy Democrats, LIKE our page for more!

Under-reported Good News Stories

Rare Media

January 25, 2018

These stories were under-reported but definitely deserve your attention! (via INSH)

GET THE LATEST TOP NEWS ==> on.rare.us/news

INSH: 20 Under-Reported Good News Stories That Deserve Your Attention

These stories were under-reported but definitely deserve your attention! (via INSH) GET THE LATEST TOP NEWS ==> on.rare.us/news

Posted by Rare Media on Thursday, January 25, 2018

The Mueller Bombshell Proves Republicans Are Running Out of Time

Esquire

The Mueller Bombshell Proves Republicans Are Running Out of Time

History will not be kind to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and others who stand by idly.

By Charles P. Pierce     January 26, 2018

Getty Images

It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild and menacing.

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902.

So, if I read the state of play correctly, special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the president* and the president*’s administration* for obstruction of justice, and Mueller has been running this investigation for seven months knowing that the president* came within an ace of firing him last June for the purposes of, ah, obstructing justice. He’s had this information in his back pocket every time a member of the administration* came before him under oath. I’ve never been a criminal defendant charged with obstruction of justice, but this seems to me to be a bad situation for an obstructor of justice to be in.

The major scoop in The New York Times that has shaken up the world can be read in a number of different ways that all lead to the same conclusion. Right from jump, the president* has been scared right down to his silk boxers of what Mueller would discover regarding his campaign’s connections to Russian ratfcking and regarding his business connections to freshly laundered Russian cash. This conclusion does not change even if you think that White House counsel Don McGahn leaked this story to make himself the hero or to cover his own ass. This conclusion does not change even if you think the ratlines off the listing hulk of this administration are thick with fleeing rodents. This whole thing remains a product of the president*’s guilty mind.

Trump speaks to reporters at Davos.

                     Getty Images

(And the story did shake up the world. The president* went before a gathering in Davos on Friday and began raving about “fake news” and the perfidy of the American media. He got booed. Many cats were called. No shoes were thrown, but George W. Bush set a pretty high bar there.)

The story does explain the curious frenzy over the last week: the president*’s saying that he’s “looking forward” to a chat with Mueller, and that he might even deign to have the chat under oath; the apparent rush to present the Congress with a half-baked “compromise plan” on immigration that has no chance of passing the House of Representatives; and the fact that the president* took every member of his inner circle except his wife to Switzerland. I suspect those folks heard the baying of the hound even before Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman did. More ominous is the possibility that McGahn—or whomever—leaked this story because the president* is thinking about firing Mueller now, or in the near future, and whoever the leaker was understands very well what a monumental calamity that would be for all concerned.

You would think that we would see the wheels turning now. You would think that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would find some slivers of patriotism between the cushions of their sofas and step up to fulfill the constitutional obligations of their respective offices. There is a genuine crisis on their doorsteps right now, and, next week, the president* is supposed to give his State of the Union address, and god alone knows what he’s going to say. They have not moved. They have given no indication that they will move. History will brand them as cowards and as traitors to the country’s best ideals. History’s not going to be kind to a lot of people who are living through these insane times.

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In 2017, 82% of New Wealth Went to the Top 1%—While the Poor Got Nothing

In These Times

In 2017, 82% of New Wealth Went to the Top 1%—While the Poor Got Nothing

Jon Queally     January 22, 2018

New report finds skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich is coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society. (Maslowski Marcin / Shutterstock.com)  

This originally appeared on Common Dreams.

Call it the ‘Year of the Billionaire.’

In 2017, a new billionaire was created every two days and while 82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.

That troubling information is included in Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality—titled Reward Work, Not Wealth—released Monday. In addition to the above, the report details how skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society means that just 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion poorest people on the planet.

“The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system,” Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director of Oxfam International. “The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors.”

Among the report’s key findings:

  • Billionaire wealth has risenby an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 percent. The number of billionaires rose at an unprecedented rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017.
  • It takes just four days for a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her lifetime. In the US, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in a year.
  • It would cost $2.2 billion a year to increase the wages of all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is about a third of the amount paid out to wealthy shareholders by the top 5 companies in the garment sector in 2016.
  • Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few.Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich, nine out of ten, are men.

The report comes just as the world’s economic and political elite are set to open the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland. And why the global elite argue the summit’s focus is addressing the world’s most pressing problems, Oxfam found that the amount of new wealth which went to the world’s top one percent in 2017 was roughly $762 billion—a figure large enough, the group points out, to end extreme global poverty seven times over.

What the report ultimately exposes, Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB chief executive, told the Guardian, is a “system that is failing the millions of hardworking people on poverty wages who make our clothes and grow our food.”

“For work to be a genuine route out of poverty we need to ensure that ordinary workers receive a living wage and can insist on decent conditions, and that women are not discriminated against,” he added. “If that means less for the already wealthy then that is a price that we—and they—should be willing to pay.”

Not just cataloging and lamenting the metrics of inequality, the new report also puts forth a number of policy solutions that should be embraced by people and governments worldwide to reduce levels of inequality and lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. They include:

  • Limit returns to shareholders and top executives, and ensure all workers receive a minimum ‘living’ wage that would enable them to have a decent quality of life. For example, in Nigeria, the legal minimum wage would need to be tripled to ensure decent living standards.
  • Eliminate the gender pay gap and protect the rights of women workers. At current rates of change, it will take 217 years to close the gap in pay and employment opportunities between women and men.
  • Ensure the wealthy pay their fair share of tax through higher taxes and a crackdown on tax avoidance, and increase spending on public services such as healthcare and education. Oxfam estimates a global tax of 1.5 percent on billionaires’ wealth could pay for every child to go to school.

Though Oxfam has been calculating global inequality on an annual basis for more than a decade, the anti-poverty group notes that this year’s report used new data from Credit Suisse and a separate kind of model. Specifically, Oxfam noted, the fact that the world’s 42 richest billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest bottom half “cannot be compared to figures from previous years – including the 2016/17 statistic that eight men owned the same wealth as half the world – because it is based on an updated and expanded data set published by Credit Suisse in November 2017.  When Oxfam recalculated last year’s figures using the latest data we found that 61 people owned the same wealth as half the world in 2016 – and not eight.”

Jon Queally is senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

Lake Michigan has become dramatically clearer in last 20 years — but at a steep cost

Chicago Tribune

Lake Michigan has become dramatically clearer in last 20 years — but at a steep cost

Over the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation. Here’s a look at how invasive mussels have changed the lake’s landscape. (Jemal R. Brinson / Chicago Tribune)

Tony Briscoe Chicago Tribune       January 26, 2018

Decades ago, Lake Michigan teemed with nutrients and green algae, casting a brownish-green hue that resembled the mouth of an inland river rather than a vast, open-water lake.

Back then, the lake’s swampy complexion was less than inviting to swimmers and kayakers, but it supported a robust fishing industry as several commercial companies trawled for perch, and sport fishermen cast their lines for trout. But in the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation.

In analyzing satellite images between 1998 and 2012, researchers at the Michigan Tech Research Institute were surprised to find that lakes Michigan and Huron are now clearer than Lake Superior. In a study published late last year, the researchers say limiting the amount of agricultural and sewage runoff in the lake has had an immense impact. However, the emergence of invasive mussels, which number in the trillions and have the ability to filter the entire volume of Lake Michigan in four to six days, has had an even greater effect.

“When you look at the scientific terms, we are approaching some oceanic values,” said Michael Sayers, a research engineer at Michigan Tech and co-author of the study. “We have some ways to go, but we are getting a lot closer to Lake Tahoe. A lot of times, you’ll hear from people that the water is so blue it compares to something in tropical areas.”

While appealing, the clarity comes at a significant cost to wildlife. In filtering the lake, the mussels have decimated the phytoplankton, a single-celled, green algae that serves as the base of the food chain. For much of the past decade, prey fish, like alewives, have remained at historic lows, prompting state managers to scale back the annual stocks of prized predators, such as king salmon.

The startling evolution has called into question the future of Great Lakes marine life and the region’s $7 billion fishing industry.

“Clearer is not necessarily better,” said Robert Shuchman, co-director of the Michigan Tech Research Institute. “Clearer water means less phytoplankton in the water column, and they’re the basic building block in the food web. The idea is, the little fish eat algae, and the bigger fish eat the little fish.

“There are some folks out there now that think Lake Michigan and Huron could become ecological deserts from a fishing standpoint. The food web could totally collapse because you don’t have the various organisms you need to sustain it.”

For ages, the phytoplankton fed the zooplankton, which were eaten by small, foraging fish. As the fast-filtering mussels reduce the plankton populations, there isn’t enough food to support the diet of many foraging fish. In addition, there’s not enough plankton or nutrients clouding the water to hide these small prey fish from predator fish.

“It’s a game of hide-and-seek in a brightly lit environment,” said Henry Vanderploeg, a research ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A different approach to fishing

After years of working aboard a relative’s charter boat, Rick Bentley was leaving the fishing industry in the early ’90s to pursue a career in finance when the mussels began arriving.

“A lot of people were sounding massive alarms about how the mussels could change everything,” recalled Bentley, 46.

Their fears turned out to be prophetic. As the water cleared up, the fish cleared out. Since the introduction of the mussels, there’s been a sharp decline in nearly all fish species in Lake Michigan, including king salmon, scientists say.

Zebra musselsIn this May 3, 2007 photo, Inland Seas Education Association instructor Conrad Heins holds a cluster of zebra mussels that were taken from Lake Michigan off Suttons Bay, Mich. (John L. Russell / AP)

At the height of king salmon fishing in the mid- to late-80s, around 10 million pounds of the fish were harvested from the lake each year, according to research by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and agencies from four states. In recent years, fishermen are managing to nab only about 3 million pounds.

Despite the drop, Bentley, who had fond memories of fishing’s heyday, returned to the lake in 2007 with his own charter company, Windy City Salmon. The passion from his fishing days brought him back, but to survive, Bentley said, fishermen have to alter their age-old techniques.

“As a captain, fisherman and a businessman who wants to put out a good product, I know the lake is adapting, and we need to adapt with it,” Bentley said. “When I came back 10 years ago, many of the captains I knew were winding down their careers, ready to hang it up. Some adapted. Some of them stayed in their old ways, and their catches tended to suffer.”

King salmon are low-light-feeding fish, so with sunlight reaching into lower depths, it’s become increasingly difficult to catch them during midday hours, Bentley said. He’s found fishing at dawn and sundown provides the best chance to catch salmon.

The clearer waters have made flashers and dodgers, devices that reflect light and attract fish, more effective tools, Bentley said. Still, remaining undetected is a challenge.

“Generally, fish are more likely to keep their distance because they can see the boat and gear now,” he said.

A history of change

Over the years, the Great Lakes have endured numerous encounters with invasive species. The mussels may be the worst Lake Michigan has seen since the sea lamprey, an eel-like parasitic fish that slithered into the Upper Great Lakes in the 1940s through the Erie and Welland canals, according to David “Bo” Bunnell, a research fishery biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center. Sea lampreys latched onto large fish and drained their blood, leading to a collapse in populations of native predators like lake trout.

“They pretty much devastated native lake trout, lake whitefish and other native species that were already suffering from overfishing,” Bunnell said. “That was the one-two death punch.”

Without predators, the population of alewives, another nonnative species that came through the canals around the same time, went unchecked. Though they were abundant, the saltwater fish, already weakened from living in freshwater, befouled local beaches in spring die-offs after being exposed to higher temperature fluctuations when they came close to shore to spawn.

In the 1960s, coastal managers introduced two species of Pacific salmon to contain the alewives and boost fishing: coho and king. The king salmon brought the alewives under control and quickly became a favorite of sport fishermen.

“They get the biggest, they’re a very strong fish and they offer a helluva fight. They’re a 20-pound class fish, so they take 8 or 9 yards off the reel, and it might take 15 to 20 minutes to bring them in,” Bentley said.

The arrival of zebra and quagga mussels led to the collapse of alewives and king salmon in Lake Huron in the early 2000s. Scientists say the crash in alewives stemmed from less food availability and more predation by the king salmon, which was stocked bythe Michigan Department of Natural Resources and naturally reproducing. The king salmon diet is almost exclusively made up of alewives.

The Lake Huron king salmon, emaciated as their favorite prey became harder to find, migrated to Lake Michigan in search of alewives.

Nearly two decades later, the same progression is underway in Lake Michigan.

“There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘When there is crystal-clear water, there is no fish,’ ” said Yu-Chun Kao, a postdoctoral scientist at Michigan State University.

For a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, Kao examined Lake Huron’s king salmon collapse, concluding the fishery that once existed likely won’t ever return to its glory days because of the alewife shortage.

Last year, Kao ran hundreds of computer simulations to consider changes in mussels, nutrients and fish stocking in Lake Michigan. His study suggested Lake Michigan might be better suited for lake trout and steelhead, given the two species of trout can switch from eating alewives to bottom-dwelling round goby, an invasive prey fish that eats cladophora and tiny quagga mussels.

The king salmon, he found, is the most susceptible to changes driven by the mussels, meaning its numbers will likely continue to decline as the mussels continue to spread. But there’s still a chance Lake Michigan could support a substantial salmon population if stocking is reduced to alleviate pressure on the struggling alewife population.

Lake Superior may have relinquished its title of clearest of the Great Lakes, but it also doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities to some invasive species as the other lakes. It has staved off the mussel migration because it’s colder and there’s less calcium in its water, a mineral the mussels need to make their shells.

Stocking the Great Lakes

Since 1984, the state of Illinois has raised fish to stock Lake Michigan at Jake Wolf Memorial Hatchery in Topeka, Ill., where the staff oversees eggs until they grow into fingerlings. Built atop a massive aquifer, the facility draws water into its network of concrete raceways and plastic-lined ponds, where it has up to 15 species of cold-, cool- and warm-water fish.

Each year, the hatchery staff, which works with state biologists, rears millions of fish in hopes of supporting a stable ecosystem and decent season for anglers. The upheaval in the food chain has made it all the more challenging.

Fish hatcheryRainbow trout in a “raceway” at the Jake Wolf Memorial Fish Hatchery located in Topeka, Ill. on July 18, 2017. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

“It’s a daunting task,” hatchery manager Steve Krueger said. “Without stocking, I think the fishery in Lake Michigan would continue to falter.”

Stocking has also become more calculated in recent years — for Illinois and the three other states, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan, that border the lake.

In 2006, all of the alewives in Lake Michigan weighed nearly 10,000 metric tons, roughly the weight of the Eiffel Tower, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates. By 2016, the entire prey fish population in Lake Michigan, including alewives and a half-dozen other species, weighed about 11,000 metric tons.

In response to the lack of alewives, fishery managers around Lake Michigan have called for reducing the number of king salmon at least twice in the past decade. In 2013, they slashed the number by 50 percent, releasing 1.8 million into the lake, down from 3.3 million the previous year. Last year, managers proposed making even deeper cuts, stocking only 690,000 king salmon, a 62 percent reduction from 2016.

People walk along the Lakefront Trail near North Avenue Beach in Chicago on Saturday, July 29, 2017.People walk along the Lakefront Trail near North Avenue Beach in Chicago on Saturday, July 29, 2017. (Alexandra Wimley/Chicago Tribune) (Alexandra Wimley / Chicago Tribune)

New threats loom

In addition to filtering the water, mussels have also altered the landscape of the lake bed.

The voracious eaters are polluting the lake bottom with feces. As sunlight reaches greater depths, it converts nutrients from the mussels’ excrement into a nuisance algae known as cladophora.

During storms, wave action rips up the carpet-esque algae and washes it ashore, where it is known for its potent stench and propensity to kill birds.

The growth in cladophora raises alarms, because it could help establish Lake Michigan’s next potential invasive species: Asian carp. The species has invaded the Mississippi River system and has been reported just 9 miles from Lake Michigan.

Asian carp rely on plankton, which they may not find if it reaches the lake, but researchers say the fish also feed on cladophora. Researchers say there may no longer be enough food for the Asian carp in open waters, but there is likely enough floating algae and cladophora near shore to sustain them.

A sliver of hope

Scientists say the invasive mussels may have reached their limits. With less plankton, the concentration of mussels in Lake Michigan dropped 40 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to a yet-to-be published report by Buffalo State University’s Great Lakes Center. But the total weight of mussels in the lake has risen, suggesting the surviving mussels are growing larger, said Alexander Karatayev, the center’s director. It’s unclear what this might mean in the future.

“However, it is extremely important to keep monitoring the (quagga mussel) population to understand if this decline is a long-term trend and if the population eventually will stabilize or will fluctuate substantially,” Karatayev said.

For now, better fisheries management has helped Lake Michigan see a return of lake trout.

The sport has changed for fishermen like Bentley, but he said there’s always been something biting on the end of his line.

Last year was the best in several years, he said. Though king salmon catches remained low, many of the fish from yesteryear, like lake trout, seem to be returning.

“We’ve seen Lake Michigan go through a lot of changes, but it all seems to work out and it always ends up being OK,” Bentley said. “Last two years, I’ve been encouraged by the comeback. I don’t think we’ll ever see the heyday of king salmon, but I think they’ll always be available.”

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