These Scientists Were Disbanded by the EPA — They Plan to Meet Anyway
Jordan Davidson September 27, 2019
EPA offices in DC. Skyhobo / E+ / Getty Images
A group of 20 scientists charged with reviewing the nation’s air quality standards plans to convene and to issue a report on the country’s air pollution regulations, even though the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disbanded their panel.
In a move that is consistent with the administration’s skepticism towards science and expertise, the EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, part of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, in October 2018, as The Hill reported.
When he disbanded the group, Wheeler claimed that the group — made up of some of the nation’s top scientists assigned to review the impact of soot and other microscopic air pollutants on human health — took too long to perform its task, according to Bloomberg Environment.
Now, in a seemingly unprecedented maneuver, the scientists will meet in Arlington, Virginia Oct. 10-11, one year after they were disbanded, to issue a report on whether or not the current federal particulate matter standard is sufficient, according to Reuters.
The group, which now calls itself the Independent Particulate Matter Review Panel wants to make sure there is a documented record of scientific consensus that reaches the EPA decision-makers.
“I’m proud to say that being disbanded is not an obstacle for our panel,” said Chris Frey of North Carolina State University who chairs the panel to the NC State press office. “If anything, being told that we were unilaterally terminated has redoubled my determination to discharge the public service to which I originally agreed.”
Even though Wheeler is a former coal-industry lobbyist, Frey is hopeful that he will consider the independent panel’s recommendations.
“As a group, this panel has more experts, more breadth, depth and diversity of expertise than the chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee,” Frey said, as E&E News reported.
Like Frey, most of the members of the independent panel come from universities and all are unpaid for serving on the panel.
“This is the first time in the history of EPA where the credibility of the agency’s science review process has been so compromised that an independent panel of experts has recognized the need for and will be conducting a comprehensive review,” said Chris Zarba, who will help lead the effort and once served as director of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, another board that provides scientific advice to the agency, The Hill reported reported.
The Union of Concerned Scientists will host the panel since it was troubled that the EPA is operating without the scientific expertise it needs to ensure a particulate standard based on the best available science.
“Reconvening a disbanded pollutant review panel breaks new ground,” said Gretchen Goldman, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, to The Hill. “Nothing like this has ever been done before. Indeed, nothing like this has ever been necessary. But we live in unprecedented times.”
The EPA, however, disagrees with the idea that it is without scientific expertise or that it writes regulations without considering science.
“EPA is committed to scientific integrity and transparency,” EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said in an emailed statement when asked about the start-up of the independent panel, as Reuters reported. “EPA always welcomes comments from the public and it is not uncommon for special interest groups and coalitions to organize, meet and develop comments for submission to the record. EPA will continue to take into consideration these comments that meet our scientific standards.”
Frey, for his part hopes the EPA will consider the independent panel’s work.
“We will place our written report into the docket for this review cycle, which obligates EPA to look at our findings and advice,” he said to NC State. “We would like for our findings and advice to be considered by EPA staff as they revise the draft Integrated Science Assessment and draft Policy Assessment into final documents, and by the administrator in making a decision regarding whether to retain or revise the existing standards.”
Researchers Assembled over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One.
A cybersecurity exercise highlights both new and unaddressed vulnerabilities riddling US election systems.
Al Vicens September 27, 2019
im Weber/The Commercial AppealZuma Press
A report issued Thursday by some of the country’s leading election security experts found that voting machines used in dozens of state remain vulnerable to hacks and manipulations, warning that that without continued efforts to increase funding, upgrade technology, and adopt of voter-marked paper ballot systems, “we fear that the 2020 presidential elections will realize the worst fears only hinted at during the 2016 elections: insecure, attacked, and ultimately distrusted.”
The 47-page report is the product of researchers who organized a shakedown of voting machines at the annual DefCon conference, one of world’s biggest information security gatherings frequented by hackers, government officials, and industry workers. First incorporated into DefCon in 2017 with the aim of improving voting machine security, this year’s version of the now-annual “Voting Machine Hacking Village” assembled over 100 machines and let hackers loose to find and exploit their vulnerabilities. While election officials have criticized the effort’s utility as a testing ground, deriding it as a “pseudo environment,” some have seen value in letting machines’ flaws become more known and potentially lead to security improvements.
“Once again, Voting Village participants were able to find new ways, or replicate previously published methods, of compromising every one of the devices in the room,” the authors wrote, pointing out that every piece of assembled equipment is certified for use in at least one US jurisdiction. The report’s authors, some of whom have been involved with election machine security research going back more than a decade, noted that in most cases the participants tested voting equipment “they had no prior knowledge of or experience” in a “challenging setting ” with less time and resources than attackers would be assumed to marshal.
The report urges election officials to use machines relying on voter-marked paper ballots and pair those with “statistically rigorous post-election audits” to verify the outcome of elections reflects the will of voters. The authors also warn that supply chain issues “continue to pose significant security risks,” including cases where machines include hardware components of foreign origin, or where election administrators deploy foreign-based software, cloud, or other remote services. The report lands as officials in several states are working to upgrade election equipment, and as lawmakers in Washington, D.C. debate federal election security legislation and funding.
Ultimately, the report notes flaws that have been acknowledged for years.
“As disturbing as this outcome is, we note that it is at this point an unsurprising result,” the authors conclude. “However, it is notable—and especially disappointing—that many of the specific vulnerabilities reported over a decade earlier…are still present in these systems today.”
Russians Used Greed to ‘Capture’ NRA, Senator Alleges in New Report
Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast September 27, 2019
Senator Rips Majority Leader McConnell for Standing Beside Trump and NRA on Guns
Ties between the National Rifle Association and influential Russians were substantial and potentially lucrative enough to render the politically potent gun lobby an “asset” of Russia, according to a Senate Democrat’s year-plus investigation.
More than 4,000 pages of NRA records provided to Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the finance committee, documented deep connections between the beleaguered gun group and Maria Butina, who in December pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a Russian agent without registering with the Justice Department. Wyden’s report, released Friday and undertaken without the cooperation of committee Republicans, indicates that greed motivated some NRA officials to engage in the outreach.
Butina also made clear to NRA officials long before their controversial Butina-facilitated December 2015 trip to Moscow that Alexander Torshin, her patron and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was a man with mysterious pull in the Kremlin. She emailed former NRA president David Keene in January 2015 that Torshin’s appointment to the Russian central bank was “the result of a ‘big game’ in which he has a very important role. All the details we can discuss with you only in person.”
“During the 2016 election, Russian nationals effectively used the promise of lucrative personal business opportunities to capture the NRA and gain access to the American political system,” Wyden said.
Representatives for the NRA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In addition to scrutinizing the December 2015 NRA trip, Wyden found that the NRA hosted former Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak for a three-hour tour of its headquarters in August 2015. Kislyak was a key figure in Russia’s 2016 election interference before former national security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to misrepresenting his conversations with him to the FBI. An NRA calendar entry provided to Wyden suggests that NRA leaders took Kislyak hunting at the Grand National Waterfowl Hunt weeks before the Moscow trip.
Wyden’s report shows the NRA officials, donors, and supporters meeting with Russian officials under U.S. sanctions during the Moscow trip, something previously reported. But it also shows that Butina ensured the NRA would send sufficiently senior leaders, something necessary to enhance Torshin’s prestige, by dangling opportunities for NRA luminaries to enrich themselves. While U.S. sanctions do not make meeting with foreigners under sanction illegal, U.S. nationals can’t conduct business with them.
Returning from Moscow further inclined the NRA to aid its Russian friend Butina, who presented herself as the head of a rare Russian gun-rights foundation. Soon after, the NRA bought Butina and Torshin memberships in a hunters’ advocacy group known as Safari Club International. Later, one of the key NRA figures on the Moscow trip, Pete Brownell, confirmed to Wyden that he personally introduced Butina to Donald Trump Jr. at the NRA’s 2016 annual meeting, though Brownell’s counsel dismissed it as a “chance encounter.” Butina would also write to NRA heavies for formal invitations to their events, something she said would help her get visas to enter the country.
The NRA has attempted to distance itself from the Moscow trip after it became politically controversial. It told Wyden’s office in May that any relationship “certain individuals, including NRA supporters and volunteers” had with Butina and Torshin was entirely distinct from NRA business.
Yet Wyden’s report shows then-NRA president Allan Cors, who backed out of the trip, contemporaneously referring to it in an email to Torshin as a chance to “represent the NRA” to influential Russians. Among those Russians were Butina’s reputed moneyman, Igor Pisarsky, whom Butina presented as Putin’s “campaign manager”; the sanctioned Russian deputy prime minister for the defense industry, Dimitry Rogozin; and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Documentation the NRA provided, the report notes, did not show “action to discourage or prevent its officers from using organization resources to explore business opportunities or to meet with sanctioned individuals and entities” during the trip.
Cors’ absence from the trip was a problem for Butina. Without a senior NRA leader to show off to the influential Russians who had agreed to meetings, Torshin could lose face. “Many powerful figures in the Kremlin are counting on Torshin to prove his American connections—a last minute important member cancellation could affect his political future,” she emailed. In November, Butina turned to Brownell, the NRA’s then-vice president and Cors’ future successor, with an urgent plea for his attendance.
Outside the NRA, Brownell runs a business that sells guns, ammunition, and firearms accessories. A Brownell spokesperson told The Daily Beast in February that Brownell took the trip “understanding that it was an NRA-related event organized with the support of the organization.” His corporate compliance officer later said Brownell could meet with sanctioned Russians insofar as his trip was not business but an NRA “cultural exchange.”
But materials Wyden acquired cast doubt on that. Butina, in emails, told Brownell that while it was an NRA trip, “especially for you and your company I have something more.” She told him that Russian gun manufacturers “are ready to meet you and talk about export and import deals.” Another email, this one from Brownell, records the NRA vice president musing that he was “not interested in attending if [it is] just an NRA trip.” In another email, Brownell called the “strictly diplomatic” trip a chance to “introduce our company to the governing individuals throughout Russia.” Among the people the NRA met with in Russia were representatives of the Kalashnikov Concern, a weapons manufacturer under U.S. sanctions. The report states that later Brownell explored a deal with someone he met on the trip but ultimately canceled because the Russian was unable to follow proper import-export rules.
Brownell recently resigned from the NRA’S board, a move seen as part of the organization’s recent turmoil. In April, its president Oliver North resigned after losing a power struggle to longtime NRA magnate Wayne LaPierre. The group is locked in bitter litigation with its former ad firm, which might be the least of its legal woes, considering investigations into its tax status by attorneys general in New York and the District of Columbia.
A representative for Brownell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brownell was not the only one to whom Butina appealed with an offer unrelated to NRA business. Wyden’s report corroborated a Daily Beast report that Butina told trip attendee Keene, who was also the Washington Times’ opinion editor, that one of the meetings was with a Russian media oligarch who would be able to secure Keene an interview with Putin for the paper.
Butina also dangled to the NRA a meeting with Putin himself, though no such meeting appears to have manifested. An email ahead of the trip from Butina’s since-indicted boyfriend, the GOP consultant Paul Erickson, to Brownell promised “private meetings with the top ministers in Putin’s government and private lunches in oligarch’s dachas.” Butina fronted money for the attendance of another trip attendee, NRA donor Jim Liberatore, for which the NRA reimbursed her with $6,000 from its president’s budget.
The NRA was an open door for Butina and Torshin, whose goal was to use the organization as a lever to move U.S. politics in a direction more agreeable to Russian interests. In addition to welcoming the two to the NRA’s own events, the NRA aided them in attending other conservative-friendly gatherings, including the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, a staple event for politicians of both parties. Butina asked then-presidential candidate Donald Trump a question about U.S.-Russian relations at a campaign stop in Las Vegas, boasted of being a conduit for his campaign’s communications to Russia, and was photographed with prominent GOP politicians like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Wyden stopped a step short of recommending the NRA lose its tax-exempt status, citing insufficient cooperation from the group. “A broader review of NRA’s activities in recent years” from the IRS was needed to determine if the NRA’s Russian connections fit within a “persistent pattern of impermissible conduct,” the report concluded.
“The totality of evidence uncovered during my investigation, as well as the mounting evidence of rampant self-dealing, indicate the NRA may have violated tax laws. This report lays out in significant detail that the NRA lied about the 2015 delegation trip to Moscow,” Wyden said. “This was an official trip undertaken so NRA insiders could get rich—a clear violation of the principle that tax-exempt resources should not be used for personal benefit.”
Trump, Impeachment, and the Democracy That Happens Between Elections
By Masha Gessen September 25, 2019
Donald Trump’s attempt to use congressionally approved military aid for his own benefit, now the subject of an impeachment inquiry, falls in the same category as his other attacks on democracy. Photograph by Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty
There was always going to be a last straw, a single event that would launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. On Tuesday, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, declared that Trump had finally gone too far, by “asking the President of Ukraine to take actions that would benefit him politically.” As a result, she was officially announcing the transition from investigation to an impeachment inquiry. “The President must be held accountable,” she said. “No one is above the law.”
The Rubicon that Pelosi crossed is more rhetorical than procedural. As my colleague John Cassidy has pointed out, the six congressional committees that have been investigating Trump in a de-facto impeachment inquiry will continue their work, incorporating the newly urgent investigation of Trump’s July phone call with the Ukrainian President, Vlodymyr Zelensky, and the whistle-blower report that apparently, at least in part, stemmed from it. But what makes this event different from all the other malfeasances of the Trump Presidency? Trump has been credibly accused of breaking the law many times—nearly two hundred pages of the Mueller report document the President’s attempts to obstruct justice. Now he appears, judging from a newly released summary of the call, to have pressured a foreign leader to dig for dirt on a potential electoral opponent, tied the release of congressionally approved military aid, explicitly or implicitly, to this request, and stopped the acting director of National Intelligence from releasing the resulting whistle-blower report to Congress. Why are these alleged crimes the ones that, in the estimation of Pelosi and her colleagues on the Democratic caucus, warrant impeachment proceedings?
This is less a legal question than a political one. Hours before Pelosi’s announcement, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp argued that the Ukraine revelation changed the mathematics of impeachment because it concerned an “ongoing attempt to hijack American foreign policy in service of the president’s reelection.” Impeachment stemming from the Mueller report would constitute punishment for past misdeeds, while impeachment stemming from the whistle-blower report would serve to prevent further harm. This, Beauchamp argues, would make it harder for Republicans to dismiss the inquiry.
The inquiry gains additional urgency because it concerns the 2020 Presidential election. For the first two and a half years of the Trump Presidency, congressional Democrats and much of the legacy media have concentrated on investigating and relitigating the 2016 election, sometimes at the expense of paying attention to the events of the Presidency itself. Now the focus is shifting to 2020, with Ukraine upstaging Russia and the entire story already upstaging current events (such as, for just one example, Trump’s isolationist, anti-immigrant speech at the United Nations on Tuesday). An election gave us Trump, and, impeachment proceedings notwithstanding, an election has the potential to rid us of him. For the past two and a half years, Trump has aspired to autocracy—attacking institutions, undermining and subverting the separation of powers—but, as long as his Presidency can be ended by an election, he has not consolidated autocratic power.
How Trump Could Get Fired
Evan Osnos on what it would take to cut short Trump’s Presidency.
And yet we habitually overstate the importance of elections. We have a way of talking about elections as though they were synonymous with democracy. They are not: they are merely a very imperfect way of creating the possibility of democracy, which is the government of the governed. Ideally, democracy is what would happen between elections. Trump’s attacks on democracy include his war with the media, his redefinition of American identity in white-male supremacist terms, his isolationism, his use of the Presidency for personal profit, his campaign of packing the federal courts, his verbal attacks on judges, and his treatment of the judiciary as a nuisance on the way to getting things done—a view that he applies to the separation of powers in general. These are just some of his high crimes.
Trump should be impeached. The event that finally got Pelosi to say so is, in fact, a straw: an incident that resembles a succession of other incidents in which Trump has used his office for personal gain and sabotaged the system of checks and balances. His attempt to use two hundred and fifty million dollars of congressionally approved military aid for his own benefit falls in the same category as his and his children’s foreign business deals, brokered on the back of American diplomacy; his use of the Presidency to attract lobbyists, dignitaries, and perhaps entire summits as paying guests to his properties; and his use of taxpayer funds for incessant leisure travel. Trump’s attempt to quash the whistle-blower’s report is similar to his attempt to pressure the F.B.I. director James Comey to stop the investigation of the national-security adviser Michael Flynn, or his attempt to get the White House counsel Don McGahn to lie to the public. This time, Trump succeeded, at least for a while, surely in part because Joseph Maguire is the third person in the course of his Presidency to hold the National Intelligence job, and because, like an ever-growing number of Administration officials, Maguire has the word “acting” in front of his job title. As the impeachment inquiry moves forward, it would behoove congressional Democrats, and all of us, to focus less on Ukraine and the eternal spectre of election contamination by a foreign power and more on Trump’s pattern of abuse of executive power and the destruction it has wrought on American government. This is what will require repair in the time after Trump.
‘We’ve been talking about saving the Amazon for 30 years.’ — Harrison Ford urged UN leaders to listen to young people and let them save the planet from the climate crisis
‘We’ve been talking about saving the Amazon for 30 years.’ — Harrison Ford urged UN leaders to listen to young people and let them save the planet from the climate crisis
The Ukraine ‘Transcript’ Illustrates How Foreign Leaders Handle Trump: Flatter Him and Pay Him
Jack Holmes, Esquire September 25, 2019
What the president and his associates billed as a “transcript” of his call with the president of Ukraine is not actually a full, verbatim transcript of the call, so it’s not really a transcript. There are ellipses throughout—particularly, as some have pointed out, when Trump is making requests of Volodymyr Zelensky—and the indications are that a substantial chunk of the 30 – minute phone call has not been included. Even still, the president just provided documentary evidence of what he’d already admitted to: he pressured the leader of a foreign government to open an investigation into a U.S. citizen, who happens to be a political opponent, thereby inviting foreign interference in our elections. He put his personal political gain over the interests of the United States and violated his oath of office. He should be impeached.
Folks will now turn, with good reason, to demanding the full transcript—if it (still) exists—and calling for Congress to get access to the whistleblower’s complaint. It reportedly documents more of the context surrounding Trump’s dealings with Zelensky and whether the demands for a Biden investigation are tied to the president’s order to hold back hundreds of millions in military aid for Ukraine. That would be the quid pro quo Trump and his toady associates like Lindsey Graham are yelling isn’t in the transcript, which is why Trump released it. (He telegraphed this strategy when he announced the release.) It’s not yet clear there’s no QPQ in the transcript—more on that shortly—and you don’t need it for this to be an impeachable offense. But it’s worth exploring further.
There’s another side to the Ukraine call that demands attention, however. It has to do with how Zelensky approached his interaction with the President of the United States. He started off by very obviously flattering Trump:
ZELENSKY: Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country. We brought in many many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government … You are a great teacher for us and in that.
Trump gushed in response, then went on a rant about all the problems he has with other European leaders and emphasized about how “good” the U.S. has been to Ukraine. Zelensky agrees with everything he says without caveats, and in fact works to boost his claims. He then mentions Ukraine wants to buy more Javelins—anti-tank missiles—from the U.S., and Trump responds immediately by asking for “a favor though because our country has been through a lot.” This smells a bit like the kind of quid pro quo Lindsey Graham told me wasn’t in there, although Trump does not mention Biden specifically until the next exchange. He did, however, repeatedly suggest putting the Ukrainians in contact with Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr for the purposes of said investigation.
But it’s a bit later that we get to the emoluments:
ZELENSKY: I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States. Actually last time I traveled to the United States, I stayed in New York near Central Park and I stayed at the Trump Tower. I will talk to them and I hope to see them again in the future.
And there it is. Having flattered Trump relentlessly and nodded along to whatever he said, Zelensky came in with the tried-and-true finish: I stayed at your property and put money in your pocket. This is the way you do business with the United States of America now. You call up our president, tell him he’s a very good boy who everyone loves, and then hint that there’s money in it for him if you have a productive relationship. It’s very likely that this is now standard procedure for foreign leaders. It certainly is for Saudi Arabia, and it is for corporate types, too: T-Mobile celebrated it’s proposed merger with Sprint, which would need approval from Trump’s administration, by spending a bunch of money at Trump’s hotel in D.C. The CEO stomped around the lobby in his T-Mobile shirt, just to make sure the message was received.
This is not some intricate corruption caper. The president has maintained his business holdings while running the country. This is an obvious conflict of interest, particularly when it comes to foreign actors. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias pointed out, Trump has vetoed five bills since he took office, and four of them were efforts to reduce U.S. support for Saudi Arabia. Is that because he, like many previous presidents, thinks we can’t do anything to jeopardize our alliance with the Saudis? Or is it because they’re putting money in his pocket? This is why the Constitution has an Emoluments Clause, which forbids presidents from accepting sizable gifts from foreign leaders. Trump is accepting gifts every day, in violation of the Constitution, as part of The Great American Heist. The public can never be sure he’s made a decision in their interests as opposed to his own. It’s just another reason he should be removed from office.
Democrats Must Impeach Donald Trump to Defend the Republic. Also, It’s Good Politics.
The president is lawless, and has violated his oath to defend the Constitution. Make Republican senators defend him and what he’s done.
By Jack Holmes, Esquire September 23, 2019
SAUL LOEB/GETTY IMAGES
At the risk of sounding a bit repetitive, Democratic leaders must come to grips with who and what Donald Trump is—and the nature of the Republican Party he leads—before this crew tramples what’s left of the republic. One of our two major political parties is now an authentic authoritarian outfit, where the political playbook at both the state and federal levels consists of using the mechanisms of democracy to strangle the popular will and entrench minority rule. Anything is acceptable if it helps you maintain your grip on power.
Just as important, every party official now marches in lockstep with The Leader, who will do anything he feels will benefit him personally as long as there are no concrete consequences. This is how Trump has behaved his entire life—strong-arming opponents, bending or breaking the law, using mobspeak to hint at the quid pro quo—and gotten away with it, except now he is President of the United States. The authoritarian knows only force, and until Democrats impose consequences for the president’s behavior in the form of legal force, Trump will continue to break the law and destroy institutions of the republic until the landscape of our politics is unrecognizable.
So far, Democrats have completely failed to make Trump believe there will be repercussions if he breaks the law or violates his oath to defend the Constitution. The Mueller Report detailed multiple instances in which the president blatantly attempted to obstruct justice in an investigation into whether he and his associates accepted help from a hostile foreign power in 2016. Democrats chose not to impeach the president, despite the fact that he’d broken the law repeatedly, and so far have failed to even call many of the key witnesses to testify before Congress.
No wonder, then, that Trump reportedly called the Ukrainian president the day after Mueller’s testimonyand hinted, likely in mobspeak, that he would hold up $250 million in military aid until they got to work investigating Trump’s political opponent. There were no consequences for what we learned about Trump’s activities in 2016 and during the subsequent investigation, so why would there be consequences if he got up to the same—or more—in 2020? And in between, he has continued to destroy the separation of powers that forms the essential architecture of our Constitution and relentlessly profited from his office.
Trump has broken the law, assaulted the Constitution’s separation of powers, and profited from his office relentlessly. SAUL LOEB/Getty Images
Democratic leadership, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has thus far held the line that the best way to rid the republic of Trumpism is to defeat Trump at the ballot box in 2020. But this rests on a number of tenuous premises, not least that the elections will be free and fair. Domestically, the Republican Party will work overtime using the time-tested shenanigans: voter purges, voter suppression, closing polling places, old-fashioned ratfucking. And now the president has essentially put up a neon sign for the world’s shadiest operators: do me a favor and ratfuck my opponent, and there could be something in it for you down the line. Bonus points if you put money in my pocket at one of my hotels. He said we were waiting for word from the Saudis on whether the U.S. military should strike Iran, for Christ’s sake.
The simple fact is that the president is lawless and must be made accountable to the law, or his lawlessness will continue to spread and metastasize. Democrats must initiate impeachment proceedings against him on the basis that he has betrayed the republic and violated his oath of office. Along the way, they should call every witness they need and hold those who refuse to testify in contempt. They should literally be held in jail. Those who do testify but make a mockery of proceedings, like Cory Lewandowski did last week, should also be held in contempt.
The president is not going to suddenly see the light and stop doing crimes because they’re the wrong thing to do. He will stop doing crimes if someone stops him from doing crimes. This is what he’s up to more than a year out from the election. What will he do between now and November if he is not held accountable, particularly when he knows that a failure to win reelection could mean a federal indictment?
Democrats must act. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Democratic leaders have also relied on the excuse that impeachment will not succeed in the Senate even if the House initiates proceedings. This is also absurd, particularly if you’re banking on winning the next election. Impeachment hearings function as an airing of the president’s misconduct, putting it on blast for the whole nation to see. Just 19 percent of the public supported impeaching Richard Nixon when the Watergate hearings began. By the time he resigned, it was 57 percent, because people learned the extent of his treachery. Support for Trump’s impeachment already hovers between 35 and 38 percent.
And along the way, it’s not just the president who will come under pressure for what he’s done. Senate Republicans will have to defend their defense of a criminal president, some of them while they’re running for reelection. Does Cory Gardner want to defend the president’s behavior while defending his seat in purple Colorado? Also, if you care about that kind of thing, they’ll have to live out the rest of their lives knowing they, too, betrayed everything they claimed to hold dear to stay in favor with The Base.
Simply put, Democrats must impeach Trump because he has likely committed high crimes and misdemeanors. It is the right thing to do in defense of the republic. But it will also be good election-year politics as they try to sink Trump and take the Senate, without which any Democratic legislative agenda is dead on arrival. The only reason they wouldn’t, at this point, is that they are afraid. Or maybe Pelosi and her leadership team still think they’re playing chess when Trump and his crew upended the board years ago.
Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire.com, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.
Factory Farms Pollute the Environment and Poison Drinking Water
By Daniel Ross February 20, 2019
PeopleImages / E+ / Getty Images
Hurricane Florence, which battered the U.S. East Coast last September, left a trail of ruin and destruction estimated to cost between $17 billion and $22 billion. Some of the damage was all too visible—smashed homes and livelihoods. But other damage was less so, like the long-term environmental impacts in North Carolina from hog waste that spilled out over large open-air lagoons saturated in the rains.
Hog waste can contain potentially dangerous pathogens, pharmaceuticals and chemicals. According to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, as of early October nearly 100 such lagoons were damaged, breached or were very close to being so, the effluent from which can seep into waterways and drinking water supplies.
Rather than an isolated problem, however, the story of North Carolina’s failure to properly manage its hog waste opens a door to what critics say is a much wider national and global issue: the increasingly extensive and varied impacts on our water resources, air and soils from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
“The big problem with this model is the waste management problem that it creates, generating so much waste in such high concentration,” said Will Hendrick, staff attorney with the Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of organizations monitoring U.S. waterways. “We haven’t really improved the technologies for managing this waste beyond what we were using centuries ago.”
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
In recent decades, livestock numbers have soared in the U.S., while the number of actual farms has shrunk—a dynamic fueled in part by the government’s acquiescence to industrial farming mega-mergers. In 2015, for example, just four companies accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s beef packing industry. This has given rise to what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls CAFOs, livestock operations where animals—primarily cows, pigs and chickens—are kept and raised in confined spaces.
The amount of animal feces and urine produced in these facilities is staggering—more than 40 times the waste generated in wastewater treatment plants. Most CAFO waste is spread over farmland as fertilizer. But unlike strictly regulated human waste, the waste generated by CAFOs isn’t held to the same standard and is largely untreated. “The basic legal theory, which is basic legal fiction, is that the waste will be kept on site and applied to adjacent cropland and [will] never enter our water-bodies,” said Hendrick.
What actually happens is that potentially toxic chemicals, drugs and bacteria in untreated animal wastes drain off or leach through the soils, making their way into the nation’s rivers, streams, groundwater and drinking water at alarming rates, directly impacting communities. Iowa’s largest municipal water utility provider, for example, recently sued a number of upstream drainage districts for excessive drinking water nitrate levels caused by farmland runoff. The lawsuit, however, was subsequently dismissed, the judge ruling it a problem for the state legislatures to tackle.
CAFO wastes are regulated to some extent. Under the Clean Water Act, for example, operators must file a nutrient management plan with their state environmental agencies. “Whether spread next to the CAFO or on neighboring fields, that manure spreading is done only after a careful analysis of both the manure itself and the land it’s applied to. There are legal penalties attached to violating those plans,” said Will Rodger, a spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), in an email. The bureau is a powerful lobbying organization that has championed efforts to weaken the Clean Water Act.
Enforcement of these management plans, however, varies from state to state, said Tom Pelton, spokesperson for the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit environmental watchdog. “In reality, there’s not much enforcement, and they’re also difficult to enforce,” he added.
Soil Oversaturated With Animal Manure
The prevalence of veterinary drug use in industrial farming, and the associated health risks when humans are exposed to these drugs, is another factor that critics highlight. Antibiotics, for example, make their way through the waste-streams at these facilities and out into the environment, leading to fears of increased antibiotic resistance in humans, not to mention their damaging impacts on sensitive ecosystems.
There’s also the question of what to do with excess animal waste when the available agricultural land surrounding CAFOs is limited, leading to oversaturation of soils with animal manure. “There are still some states that have not banned applying this waste on frozen ground,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director at Food & Water Watch, a consumer advocacy organization that has called for an end to factory farms. “That’s not about growing crops. That’s about disposal.”
Animal waste doesn’t only impact valuable water resources. Industrial livestock production generates huge quantities of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, all national agricultural processes, including livestock production, accounted for 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2016. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization pins the percentage share from livestock production on overall anthropogenic global greenhouse emissions much higher—at 14.5 percent.
Despite the fact that the EPA has long known about high levels of CAFO-produced air pollution, the agency is seeking to exempt these facilities from having to report toxic air emissions like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide under a federal right-to-know law, though a group of environmental organizations filed a lawsuit last year to halt that proposed rule.
Air quality issues from industrial farming can also be more locally felt. In North Carolina, for example, neighbors of a hog farm operated by Murphy-Brown filed a lawsuit in 2014 against the owners complaining of nuisance noises and odors, worsening their quality of life. Theirs was one of a number of lawsuits against Smithfield Foods, Murphy-Brown’s parent company. The plaintiffs from that particular suit were recently awarded $473.5 million. But the state legislature also passed a law limiting the legal action that residents can now take against neighboring CAFOs.
Agricultural Chemicals
More animals, of course, means that more crops must be grown to feed them, which leads to broader industrial farming impacts, including runoff from agricultural chemicals like those found in fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. What kinds of impacts do these chemicals have? A recent study out of New Zealand finds that certain bacteria develop antibiotic resistance up to 100,000 times faster when exposed to common herbicides like Roundup and Kamba. Agricultural runoff also helps feed harmful algae blooms.
According to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of data from 2014 and 2015, the drinking water in 1,700 individual systems (affecting approximately 7 million people) contained nitrogen at levels higher than 5 parts per million (ppm), an amount the National Cancer Institute says increases the risk of colon, kidney, ovarian and bladder cancers. The EWG also found that nearly 32,000 Americans received drinking water containing nitrogen at levels exceeding the EPA’s threshold of 10 ppm—a limit set more than 55 years ago.
Nor is it cheap for consumers to filter out chemicals like nitrates themselves, explained Anne Weir Schechinger, EWG’s senior economic analyst. As an example, the Iowan utility tackling elevated drinking water nitrate levels is reportedly spending $15 million to expand its filtration technology. “That’s why we want to make sure our audience has more [information] resources so they can protect themselves if the EPA isn’t going to,” Weir Schechinger said, pointing to EWG’s drinking water database.
The American Farm Bureau Federation disputes EWG’s findings, and points to what it regards as “inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity” in drinking water. “We are not impressed with this effort, nor the quality of EWG’s reports across the board,” said Will Rodger in an email. In response, Weir Schechinger explained how for decades, “peer-reviewed studies have shown a clear link between an increased risk of cancer and nitrate levels in tap water that are lower than EPA’s legal limit—and no amount of lobbying from special interest groups will change the science.”
Indeed, the health risks associated with living in close proximity to CAFOs are becoming increasingly clearer. A recent study out of Duke University found that North Carolinians who live near hog farms have higher death rates from a variety of health issues—including anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, tuberculosis and infant mortality—compared to those who live further away from such facilities. And who are the people most affected? CAFOs disproportionately impact low-income rural communities, African Americans, Latino Americans and Native Americans.
What Can Be Done?
The regulatory framework exists—in federal laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act—to force CAFO operators to properly dispose of their waste, said Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health. The problem is, “They [CAFO operators] have a very strong hook in the legislature,” he said, pointing to the political clout that large agricultural organizations wield. That’s why CAFO operators have for so long circumvented more stringent waste disposal laws, according to Wilson.
But Wilson stressed that in the event CAFOs are held to tougher laws in the future, the costs associated with modernizing these facilities should be absorbed by the large conglomerates driving the CAFO industry, rather than the smaller farm operators, many of whom struggle financially. “In the process of compliance, there would have to be some modifications made to make sure the costs are internalized by the corporations,” said Wilson. “We’re not anti-farmers, we’re pro-farmers. We’re not anti-development, we are pro-sustainable development.”
Experts point to other things that CAFO operators can do to minimize their environmental footprint. Greater use of cover crops would promote healthier soils and reduce erosion. Buffer strips and terraces—natural devices that intercept pollutants—help reduce nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. But other proposed changes are more controversial. Methane digesters might sound like a good way of transforming methane emissions into renewable energy, but critics pick holes in such technologies, arguing that they do little to nothing to tackle the sheer volume of animal waste generated. More broadly, critics highlight ethical issues inherent in CAFOs, pointing to instances of animal abuse and cramped living conditions.
At the end of the day, though CAFOs are the “dominant model of agriculture,” said Lovera, “we didn’t vote” for this system. “If I could wave the magic wand, everybody would be using different agricultural techniques, but it’s going to take some steps to get us there.”
EPA offices in DC. Skyhobo / E+ / Getty Images
