Dempseys123

Compact
America Isn’t Ready for War with China
Malcom Kyeyune
https://compactmag.com/article/america-isn-t-ready-for-war-with-chinaThe Vineyard of the Saker
Nancy braves the Chinese dragon and wins?Project Syndicate (you may have to register for a free limited account if you care to read this)
Russia’s Looming Defeat in Ukraine (by and economist that knows nothing about economics, let alone war-fighting or war as a policy-instrument.)Internationalist 360º
‘Tools of Russia’: FBI Raid on Black Political Party Seen As Part of ‘Black Scare/Red Scare’ in United States

Part 2 to our Max Keiser interview.

Photo by Gije Cho from Pexels

The post The Danger of Foreign Denominated Debt first appeared on Michael Hudson.

Links for you. Science:

A global metagenomic map of urban microbiomes and antimicrobial resistance
The Farmer Trying to Save Italy’s Ancient Olive Trees
The 1,000-Year Secret That Made Betta Fish Beautiful
What scientists know about new, fast-spreading coronavirus variants
The complete sequence of a human genome

Other:

How the AP wronged Emily Wilder
An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer
Democrats are falling for Republicans’ fake negotiations again. The GOP will never support a significant infrastructure package (“They can either figure out internally (and quickly) what they want to do and pass that on a party-line vote, or they can do nothing and effectively collaborate with the Republican plot to topple Biden and set up one-party rule.”)
Shuttered hospitals, soaring Covid-19 deaths: Rural Black communities lose a lifeline in the century’s worst health crisis
China Is Building Two Secret Nuclear Reactors. Scientists Are Worried.
Memo to Biden’s DOJ: Time to open the books on the Trump-Russia scandal
Emily Wilder’s firing is a story of bad faith, not bad tweets. Newsrooms must do better.
Charles Cassell, architect and early advocate of D.C. statehood, dies at 96
Senator Professor Warren Took Jamie Dimon to the Woodshed
I Thought Not Speaking Chinese Made Me a Bad Asian American. It Doesn’t. (similar process happened with Jews and Yiddish)
Why conservatives really fear critical race theory
Mapquest’s DC Map Is Riddled With Strange Anachronisms, and We Are Losing Our Minds (though Carrollsburg was in use in the 1970s, and Swampdoodle is just a variant of Swampoodle)
In defense of the two-state solution. Some are declaring the two-state paradigm for Israel and Palestine totally doomed. But it’s not — and it’s still worth fighting for.
A Recruiter Dishes on Why Restaurants Really Can’t Find Enough Staff
Investigating Oversight: Why congressional hearings are bad, and how they can be made great again
Woman Protests COVID-19 Vaccine By Speeding Car Through Vaccination Site
Joe Manchin Should Check in With 2011 Joe Manchin. The second guy backed filibuster reform. So should the first guy.
Did John Adams Out Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
The Party of White Grievance Has Never Cared About Democracy
Then She Asked Me About Benghazi. I went to Harpers Ferry seeking escape, and discovered how far our shared reality has fractured.
Four Black men developed a Montgomery County suburb to provide a better life for some in their community. They received something very different in return.

A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The specific provision struck down was part of the law's $29 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant program for small, privately owned restaurants struggling to meet payroll and rent due to the COVID crisis. The law, which was passed almost entirely by a party-line vote in March, grants priority status to restaurants that have 51% ownership or more composed of specific racial and ethnic groups as well as women. By effectively relegating struggling businesses owned by white males or ethnicities and nationalities excluded from a priority designation “to the back of the line,” the COVID relief program, ruled the court by a 2-1 decision, ran afoul of core constitutional guarantees.

The ruling is not only constitutionally significant in its own right but also vividly reflective of broader societal debates over how race and gender categories ought to be treated when set next to class. The parties to this case as well as the judges involved in the ruling themselves highlight the pervasive conflicts created by race and gender preferences.

Subscribe now

The lawsuit was brought by Jake’s Bar and Grill, a restaurant jointly owned by Antonio Vitolo, who is white, and his wife, who is Hispanic. If Vitolo's wife owned more than 50% of the restaurant, then Jake’s Bar and Grill would be eligible to receive priority treatment for a grant, since her ethnicity qualifies as “socially and economically disadvantaged” under the law. But because she only owns 50% — her white husband owns the other half — the restaurant's application cannot be considered until the Small Business Administration (SBA) first processes all applications from restaurants entitled to priority status based on race and gender, as well as veteran status.

The Vitolos’ restaurant, said the court, “has struggled during the pandemic—it closed on weekdays and offered to-go orders on weekends. It lost workers and a considerable amount in sales.” For that reason, they filed their application for a grant under the COVID relief bill on the first day the SBA accepted applications, which was May 1. But under the law, their application could not be considered until the 21-day period reserved for priority businesses elapsed. If all of the allocated grant money were exhausted during that designated 21-day period — as the Vitolos feared — then Jake’s Bar and Grill and other non-minority-owned struggling businesses would receive no relief.

The Vitolos filed a lawsuit against the SBA administrator asking that the race-and-gender-based scheme be enjoined and that, instead, their application be processed without regard to their race. Though the district court judge rejected the request on a variety of procedural and substantive grounds, the three-judge appellate panel yesterday ruled in their favor.

The court ordered the government to cease “using these unconstitutional criteria when processing Antonio Vitolo’s application.” The majority expressed the crux of its ruling simply: “This case is about whether the government can allocate limited coronavirus relief funds based on the race and sex of the applicants. We hold that it cannot."

The appellate judge who wrote the majority opinion is Amul Thapar. He made history when, in 2008, he became the first-ever South Asian judge appointed to the U.S. federal bench after being selected by then-President George W. Bush. The son of immigrants from India, whose father owns a heating and air-conditioning supply business in Toledo, Ohio, Thapar was elevated to the Sixth Circuit in 2017 after first being considered by President Trump for the Supreme Court vacancy ultimately filled by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Thapar's ruling contains multiple indirect references to his own ethnicity and race. Among the components of the racial preference scheme that clearly offended his constitutional sensibilities was the seemingly arbitrary classification calculus — what he called a "scattershot approach” — used to determine which groups do and do not qualify as “socially and economically disadvantaged” under SBA regulations. As Judge Thapar put it:

[I]ndividuals who trace their ancestry to Pakistan and India qualify for special treatment. But those from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq do not. Those from China, Japan, and Hong Kong all qualify. But those from Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco do not.

The racial divisions and ethnic categories imposed on the citizenry for determining which restaurants are eligible for COVID relief are, in his view, as irrational as they are discriminatory. One hypothetical invoked by Judge Thapar illustrated the precise racial discrimination which, in his view, the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection guarantee was created to avoid:

Imagine two childhood friends—one Indian, one Afghan. Both own restaurants, and both have suffered devastating losses during the pandemic. If both apply to the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, the Indian applicant will presumptively receive priority consideration over his Afghan friend. Why? Because of his ethnic heritage. It is indeed “a sordid business” to divide “us up by race.” League of United Latin Am. Citizens v. Perry, 548 U.S. 399, 511 (2006) (opinion of Roberts, C.J.). And the government’s attempt to do so here violates the Constitution.

Thapar was referencing the fact that under SBA regulations, a person is deemed “socially and economically disadvantaged” if they are “black, Hispanic, or Native American.” They are deemed presumptively disadvantaged as “Asian Pacific Americans” only “if they have origins from Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (Republic of Palau), Republic of the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Samoa, Macao, Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati, Tuvalu, or Nauru.” Meanwhile, for a person to qualify as “Subcontinent Asian Americans,” they “must have origins from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, the Maldives Islands, or Nepal."

If a person is in one or more of those groups, they are deemed presumptively disadvantaged — and thus entitled to priority grant allocation — unless “someone comes forward” with “credible evidence to the contrary.” But if someone is not in one of those groups — not just if they are white or male but also from any of the countries excluded from the preferred designations — then they can qualify only if they “prove they have experienced racial or ethnic discrimination or cultural bias by a preponderance of the evidence,” a process filled with lengthy delay and red tape.

If they fail to demonstrate this to the satisfaction of the SBA, then they must wait, and perhaps never receive relief. As Judge Thapar put it, “the schedule of racial preferences detailed in the government’s regulation—preferences for Pakistanis but not Afghans; Japanese but not Iraqis; Hispanics but not Middle Easterners—is not supported by any record evidence at all." The law, in his words, is designed for “presumptively sending men from non-favored racial groups (including whites, some Asians, and most Middle Easterners) to the back of the line.”

Thapar, who was joined in the decision by Reagan-appointed Judge Alan Norris, recognized that racial and gender preferences are sometimes constitutionally permissible under Supreme Court jurisprudence, but only if “the government has a compelling interest” in giving some racial and ethnic groups preferential treatment, and only if the preferences are "narrowly tailored,” whereby “the government must show ‘serious, good faith consideration of workable race-neutral alternatives.’”

The court ruled the preference scheme in the COVID relief law constitutionally insufficient for multiple reasons. Among them was the lack of a specific nexus between the discrimination suffered by the favored groups and prior government action. Equally significant, said the court, was the existence of numerous race-neutral alternatives to the problems identified by the government that they are trying to fix: namely, that minority-and-female owned businesses have had greater difficulty obtaining credit or prior COVID relief funds. “The government could,” said the court, “grant priority consideration to all business owners who were unable to obtain needed capital or credit during the pandemic,” rather than only those who are from preferred racial groups. Or the state “could simply grant priority consideration to all small business owners who have not yet received coronavirus relief funds” (emphasis added).

But instead of a targeted effort to assist all American small-restaurant owners who have suffered equally from the pandemic, the law arbitrarily grants priority to some based on racial or gender identity that has no necessary relationship to economic suffering. The law, for instance, favors white women over Middle Eastern men. And it grants priority to ethnic groups that are among the highest earners in the U.S. — including Indian-Americans and specific groups of Asian-Americans — over lower-earning groups including white men and Middle Easterners.

The court explained this irrational approach in the context of striking down the law's gender preference:

The priority system is designed to fast-track applicants hardest hit by the pandemic. Yet under the Act, all women-owned restaurants are prioritized—even if they are not “economically disadvantaged.” Pub. L. No. 117-2, § 5003(c)(3)(A). So whether a given restaurant did better or worse than a male-owned restaurant next door is of no matter—as long as the restaurant is at least 51% women owned and otherwise meets the statutory criteria, it receives priority status. Because the government made no effort to tailor its priority system, we cannot find that the sex-based distinction is “substantially related” to the objective of helping restaurants disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

In sum, divvying up Americans by race and gender and determining who, on that basis, is entitled to benefits and who is not, is something that is constitutionally permissible only in the narrowest and most extreme circumstances. In the view of the court, the race and gender preferences embedded in the COVID relief bill for small-restaurant owners did not come anywhere near that requisite justification. “As today’s case shows once again,” concluded the court, quoting a prior Supreme Court ruling, the ‘way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’”

The dissenting judge, Bernice Donald, is an African-American woman who was first appointed to the federal bench in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, then elevated to the Sixth Circuit in 2011 by President Barack Obama. Her dissenting opinion thoroughly captures the broader political arguments in favor of providing race-and-gender-based preferences.

“It took nearly 200 years for the Supreme Court to firmly establish that our Constitution permits the government to use race-based classifications to remediate past discrimination,” she wrote, but “only seven days for the majority to undermine that longstanding and enduring principle.” Echoing the argument made by those who advocated for such legislative preferences in the first place, Judge Donald insisted that the purportedly race-blind majority opinion ignores systemic realities about how the United States functions and the damages it imposes on specific groups of people:

The majority’s conclusion that Plaintiffs are entitled to injunctive relief requires us to make several assumptions. The majority’s reasoning suggests we live in a world in which centuries of intentional discrimination and oppression of racial minorities have been eradicated. The majority’s reasoning suggests we live in a world in which the COVID-19 pandemic did not exacerbate the disparities enabled by those centuries of discrimination. The majority’s reasoning suggests that we live in a world in which Congress passed the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (“RRF”) not to aid the nation’s economic recovery, but to arbitrarily provide special treatment to racial minorities and women.

She also argued that the evidence is overwhelming that the racial and gender preferences in the law correspond to those most discriminated against by COVID struggles. Citing the legislative process and the judicial hearing, she said “experts offered evidence showing that minority-owned businesses were more vulnerable to economic distress than businesses owned by white entrepreneurs—they were more likely to operate in retail, accommodation, food services, and personal care services industries, which were hardest hit by government shut-down orders and a decrease in foot traffic.” Beyond that, she said, minority-owned businesses were more likely to be in areas with higher rates of COVID-19 infections.”

Judge Donald seemed to concede that no scheme of racial or gender preferences will perfectly match the realities of the population. Some people who do not suffer as much will receive race-based benefits, while others who suffer more will be denied them. But such schemes, in her view, are nonetheless constitutionally justified given the "broad-based emergency legislation designed to fight business fallout that is uniquely and directly tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Given the one-time emergency nature of this grant, she said, "we must avoid hurried judicial decision-making under such circumstances,” and should grant extra deference to the legislature regarding its assessments of how best to help a struggling population.

Judge Donald's core argument is that racial and gender preferences, even if imperfectly targeted, are justified to cure widespread racial and gender inequalities. “Entrepreneurs of color have had specific difficulty in accessing business capital,” she said, while “banks require more documentation from minority applicants but approve loans less often or for lower amounts” and “minority entrepreneurs had lower familial and household incomes, decreasing access to private capital.”

But what of the solutions proposed by the majority, which would target people based on need rather than race and gender? Judge Donald conceded that “in normal times, there may be some force to the majority’s position,” but given the need to “act fast,” some imperfections are inevitable. The Congress, she said, is far better positioned than the Court to assess what is best for the nation during an emergency.”

The undercurrents and conflicts driving this case are highly illustrative of broader cultural debates. Indeed, the case captures the core question driving much politics in the U.S. and the West: is it remedial, or bigoted, to continue to divide people based on race and gender and determine their official rights, benefits and preferences based on their membership in demographic groups rather than the realities of their individual lives?

Specific states, such as Oregon, have explicitly set aside millions of dollars in COVID relief funds available only to black residents. Such race-based benefits across the nation have prompted similar litigation and have resulted in many of these funds being frozen pending their outcome (a Mexican-American resident of Oregon who sued the state over the state's black-only relief fund had her case rejected).

This latest appellate ruling — at least when it comes to COVID relief for small-restaurant owners in the Sixth Circuit (parts of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee) — resolves that question in favor of individual treatment and against group-based preferences. But that specific decision is likely to be appealed to the full court and perhaps the Supreme Court and, either way, this specific race and gender debate will continue to rage.

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

The $1.9 trillion fiscal stimulus should be large because the need is large.

Special To the Vanguard

In letters delivered today, a broad coalition of current and former prosecutors, anti-sex trafficking and anti-domestic violence groups, child advocates and mental health groups is urging President Trump to stop the execution of Lisa Montgomery, a woman with severe mental illness who suffered relentless physical, emotional, and sexual abuse including being trafficked by her own mother.

The federal government plans to execute Mrs. Montgomery on December 8 unless the President or a court intervenes.

“Lisa’s experiences as a victim of horrific sexual violence, physical abuse, and being trafficked as a child do not excuse her crime,” write a group of 41 current and former prosecutors. “But her history provides us with an important explanation that would influence any sentencing recommendation we made as prosecutors.”

The prosecutors stress that Lisa’s history “is not an ‘abuse excuse’ as the jury was told at her trial,” and that evidence of a defendant’s childhood trauma is “critically relevant to determining the appropriate punishment for a serious crime.”

In a separate letter, two former prosecutors who prosecuted similar cases involving attacks on pregnant women agree: “These crimes are inevitably the product of serious mental illness. Women who commit such crimes also are likely to have been victimized themselves. These are important factors that make death sentences inappropriate.”

The prosecutors’ call for clemency is joined by hundreds of organizations that advocate for women, children, and people with mental illness.

A group of 800 organizations and individuals working to combat violence against women stress that Lisa was “consistently failed by people and systems that should have helped her,” and that she “became severely mentally ill by the time she committed her crime.” In 2004, in the grip of a psychotic break, Lisa killed a pregnant woman and took her baby.

They also note that current law provides much stronger protections to victims of trafficking. “Had any of these laws been in effect when Lisa was a child or young adult suffering human trafficking, our legal systems would have offered more meaningful intervention.”

A group of 40 child advocates whose work is devoted to protecting abused, victimized, and abandoned children highlight the tragedy of how “no one stepped in to save Lisa. Lisa was repeatedly abused and exploited by the very adults she turned to for protection – first her own mother and stepfather, then her partners.”

They point to the “many missed opportunities to intervene and stop Lisa’s suffering,” which might well have prevented the crime from ever happening. Lisa’s older sister also suffered horrific abuse in the home but was removed by social services; Lisa was left behind, and though people in power learned of the abuse they did nothing to stop it. “We know from our work with abused children that being unable to escape a cycle of abuse exacts a terrible mental toll,” these child advocates write. “This was sadly true for Lisa. Her crime reflects the desperation, shame, and hopelessness that many victims of extreme child abuse feel.”

Three of the nation’s leading advocacy organizations for people with serious mental illness and their families also call for clemency based on Lisa’s mental illness and neurological disorders. “We believe that Mrs. Montgomery, who acted in the grip of a psychotic episode, should not be subject to the death penalty due to her brain damage and severe mental illness.”

They describe the combined impact on Lisa’s functioning of organic brain damage resulting from her mother’s heavy alcohol use during pregnancy, a genetic predisposition to serious mental illness inherited from both parents, and the psychological effects of extreme and pervasive trauma. “Multiple experts have concluded that Mrs. Montgomery’s crime was the product of her mental illness and brain injuries,” they write. And “even today, her grip on reality is fragile, maintained only with a complex regimen of psychotropic medications that she never received before being incarcerated.”

These mental health advocates also recognize that “the stress of being given an execution date, removed from the institution where she has lived for many years, and transferred to a men’s prison for execution will trigger her psychosis and cause her mental health to deteriorate dramatically.”

A letter has also been submitted by a coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons attesting to the devastating psychological impact of prolonged incarceration. Their experience reinforces concerns that Mrs. Montgomery’s mental health will continue to deteriorate as her execution approaches.

Such concerns are, in fact, being borne out, and a new lawsuit argues that the conditions under which the Bureau of Prisons is housing Lisa in advance of her execution are aggravating her mental illness. For example, the BOP has her under 24-hour observation, allowing male guards to watch her use the toilet. The prison also took away her access to underwear, allowing her to have panties again only if she “behaved” by not crying or otherwise exhibiting distress. For a victim of multiple rapes like Lisa, these conditions are especially damaging.

Letter from Former Prosecutors:

November 11, 2020

Dear President Trump:

Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to be executed on December 8, 2020. As current and former state and federal prosecutors, we respectfully request that you grant clemency to Lisa and commute her sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Although Lisa committed terrible crimes, her lifetime of extreme suffering and abuse weighs heavily in favor of clemency. You alone have the power to grant her mercy and spare her life, and we urge you to do so.

Lisa’s experiences as a victim of horrific sexual violence, physical abuse, and being trafficked as a child do not excuse her crime. But her history provides us with an important explanation that would influence any sentencing recommendation we made as prosecutors. Our experience prosecuting human traffickers and those who commit sex crimes against children has given us a unique understanding of the profound physical and psychological harm that victims like Lisa suffer. In this case, mental health professionals have concluded that the sexual violence and cruelty she suffered was directly related to the crime she committed. They have also diagnosed Lisa with organic brain damage and serious mental illness that requires her to be heavily medicated at all times.

A history of being victimized is not an “abuse excuse” as the jury was told at her trial. We view this kind of evidence as critically relevant to determining the appropriate punishment for a serious crime.

We are keenly aware of the difficult decision you must make. You have the challenge of balancing  victims’ and defendants’ rights, respecting the will of the people expressed through a jury verdict, ensuring that the public will be safe from future harm, and promoting just punishment. In Lisa’s case, however, we believe that all of these goals align in favor of clemency and a sentence of life without parole.

Lisa has taken full responsibility for her actions and expressed profound remorse for her crime. We are persuaded that in light of all these factors, granting Lisa clemency will not only serve the interests of justice

---

To sign up for our new newsletter – Everyday Injustice – https://tinyurl.com/yyultcf9

Support our work – to become a sustaining at $5 – $10- $25 per month hit the link:

The post Supporters Call on Trump to Commute Death Sentence of Lisa Montgomery appeared first on Davis Vanguard.

 New Sacramento Bee Reporter Accepts and Uses Decep...: Sac Bee Reporter accepts and uses deceptive data on “  Pesonalized  Learning” schools response to Covid.  Welcome to Sacramento.  In t...

The post Historic, Interesting, and Dangerous Times appeared first on LA Progressive.

A Philadelphia police union’s recent attack on Players Coalition co-founder Malcolm Jenkins matches rhetorical tactics that officers’ groups are using in the face of outspoken support for criminal justice reforms.

By Aaron Morrison

When Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins wrote an opinion piece urging the city’s recently re-elected mayor to pick a new police commissioner who isn’t “in lockstep with the union,” the police union’s response was strikingly—and revealingly—personal. 

In a scathing letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer, which published Jenkins’s Nov. 18 commentary, Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police president John McNesby called him “washed up,” said his critiques amounted to a “racist attack,” and ended by asking: “What is the Inquirer’s next plan, a survey of drug dealers?”

Jenkins, who is Black, is a two-time Super Bowl champion and co-founder of the social justice and racial equity group the Players Coalition. He also leads the Eagles in tackles and hasn’t missed a snap in two seasons.

This kind of response is nothing new for the FOP, which regularly lashes out at Black public figures and police reform advocates, from Colin Kaepernick and Beyoncé to Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. And the union’s rhetoric suggests an acute insecurity as momentum for reform grows. 

“Unfortunately, these attacks on athletes are emblematic of a deep defensiveness in American police culture, and an indication of their commitment to a kind of ‘thin blue line’ politics that views any questioning of police authority as an attack on civilization,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at New York’s Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing.”

Vitale said the union believes that any questioning of its power “will not only diminish their material well-being as public employees, but will also unlock a Pandora’s box of unregulated individualism that will express itself as rampant crime and disorder.”

Nationally, the FOP represents 330,000 members across 2,200 lodges. Local unions often make political endorsements of elected officials, as the South Bend, Indiana, FOP did in 2011 with then mayoral candidate and now Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg. But most candidates in the Democratic field have released criminal justice reform plans than include proposals to strengthen police accountability for misconduct. In 2016, the national FOP endorsed President Trump, who has championed federal prison and sentencing reforms, but has also advocated for nationwide expansion of stop-and-frisk policing. The tactic led to disproportionate stops and arrests of Black and Latinx people in Trump’s hometown of New York City.

Chris Harris, an activist with the Texas-based criminal justice reform advocacy group Just Liberty, said other recent prominent examples of reform backlash “reveal how staunchly most police unions oppose any reforms that might reduce incarceration or police violence, and subsequently chip away at the bipartisan backing they’ve long enjoyed.”

“While police unions are not a monolith, many have a penchant for fearmongering, disinformation and barely disguised racism,” Harris said.

The national FOP did not respond to a request for comment about whether it condones racially targeted rhetoric from local union chapters.

The FOP has also directed its ire at law enforcement officials. Mosby, who charged six officers involved in the fatal arrest of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, was depicted that year on the cover of the New York City police union magazine as “The Wolf That Lurks.” During an April protest over Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett alleged hate crime case, an unidentified retired Chicago police officer and member of the Chicago FOP suggested that Laquan McDonald, the Black teen murdered in 2016 by former city officer Jason Van Dyke, should have been shot more than the 16 times that authorities say he was shot. And in Dallas, a statewide police unions association, which includes FOP lodges, called for Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot’s removal in April, after he announced plans to stop prosecuting certain low-level offenses, such as criminal trespass and theft of necessities.

The FOP’s attacks on pro-reform voices, including Black athletes, “reflect not only their ideological and rhetorical harmony with President Trump and Attorney General [William] Barr, but also a recognition that many of them have little chance of regaining widespread Democratic Party support,” Harris said.

Jenkins has used his platform to advocate for broad changes to the criminal legal system—including bail and probation reform in Philadelphia, improved state expungement laws, and an end to mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. McNesby, who was first elected president of Philadelphia FOP in 2007, has been as outspoken against Jenkins and police reform movements such as Black Lives Matter as he has against the elected city prosecutor, Larry Krasner, who he called anti-law enforcement.

Jenkins did not respond to a request for comment Monday. In an interview last week in the Eagles locker room, he dismissed McNesby’s rhetoric and the news coverage it received as “a distraction from the actual issues and topics at hand.”

Article originally appeared in the Appeal.

---

Enter the maximum amount you want to pay each month

$USD

Sign up for

The post There’s A Pattern Of Police Unions Attacking People Who Call For Criminal Justice Reform, Especially When They Are Black appeared first on Davis Vanguard.

‘Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.’ 
Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records

The US gospel blues musician and evangelist ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space. Here on Earth, his music influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Howlin’ Wolf. And just beyond the reaches of our solar system, his recording of his song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) is one of 27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft's famed ‘Golden Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression. This instalment from the US animator Drew Christie’s series Drawn & Recorded combines biography and mythology to recount how Johnson’s music made the unlikely journey from the streets of rural Texas to the stars.

By Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

So, what’s behind the sharp increase that is expected in the oldest work-age demographic?

This summer, the City is hosting a series of 10 community workshops as part of the Sacramento 2040 General Plan Update. The Sacramento 2040 General Plan Update will help establish a shared vision for Sacramento’s growth over the next 20 years. “These workshops are meant to gain perspective on the issues and opportunities community members […]

The post Loving America appeared first on LA Progressive.

I saw a few comments this week that caught my attention.  They give me a chance to catch my breath a bit and respond here.

One wrote: “Instead of these repetitive articles which ultimately don’t accomplish much (and frankly, encourage repetitive comments), why don’t you give it a break until/unless an actual proposal arises?  Maybe write about something else, for a change?”

They followed up: “And frankly, how about a little less advocacy (regardless of subject matter)?”

Another: “The Vanguard is ‘less diverse’ due to the loss of a lot of the old posters.”

My belief remains: We actually write on a wide variety of topics – but some topics generate conversation on the Vanguard, some topics generate no conversation on the Vanguard but a ton of conversation on Facebook, and some topics generate no conversation but a lot of reads.

If you only view things through one set of metrics, you miss a lot of the big picture.

But we need to take a step back.

The question I think people need to ask is what are we trying to do – why did I create the Vanguard on July 30, 2006?  The remarkable thing is that, while in many ways the original Vanguard would be unrecognizable, the goals are remarkably similar.

Here are the goals as I formulated them this week:

1. Report on problems in the local political system
2. Report on underreported stories
3. Go into places that other media/reporters are not going
4. Expose injustice in the criminal justice system
5. Advance a community-based conversation on critical issues

The biggest complaints I hear are: The Vanguard is biased, the Vanguard is not journalism but advocacy, and the Vanguard is repetitive.

I would be curious to know if the articles that are straight news – i.e. not commentary or opinion – actually are biased.  I don’t think they are.  But I would be interested in that feedback.

Commentaries are supposed to be biased.  I have opinions like everyone else.  And they are strongly held.  We have always tried to balance that by printing pretty much anyone else’s guest commentary.  There are times we have sought out guest pieces.  There are times when issues come up and they get submitted.

I don’t agree on advocacy.  Commentary takes a position. I have views on politics and local government.  But they are my views.  If I were truly being an advocate, I would go beyond writing an opinion piece three or four times a week.  I believe over the last three years, for instance, I spoke during public comment five times, twice because they were going to close down a program at my kid’s school and I spoke as a parent, once because Don Sherman and I donated a photo to the city.

I don’t endorse candidates, contribute money to campaigns, or work on campaigns.  If I were really being an advocate, I would do those things because those are tried and true methods to effect change.

So what am I doing with sometimes a long series of commentaries on given subjects?  Part of the goal of the Vanguard is to foster community dialogue on issues of importance.  Over the years, we have had long series of commentaries and debates on things like criminal justice reform, race, immigration, policing, the budget, housing, economic development, school issues, and more.

Over time, what I have done is write a commentary, watch or sometimes (less so these days due to time) participate in discussions, do additional research and take ideas that were developed or things learned in the debate, incorporate and throw out some more thoughts for discussion.

As proposals come forward, conditions change, ideas come out, we add to them and over time we have a discourse.  I see that as a core function of the Vanguard – community engagement.

Now unfortunately, because we have changed our posting rules over time, some of the subjects that generated good discussions are no longer doing so – like criminal justice reform and policing, for example.  That’s unfortunate.

One of the reasons we shifted away from anonymous commenters was a general feeling that people over time have stopped commenting due to their presence.  What seems to have happened, however, is a shift.

I must admit, I found it ironic that the individual making the comment on Monday evening of last week that we are too repetitive, basically stayed in that article and generated over 200 comments last week.

In the meantime, we covered a lot of new topics that did not generate many comments on the Vanguard.

But this week was a good illustration of the multiple purposes of the Vanguard.

There were a few articles that drew a lot of comments:

Last week’s Monday Morning Thoughts (an opinion column) generated 206 comments.

Friday’s Commentary on housing’s impact on the economy drew 87 comments.

Saturday’s My View (an opinion column) generated 49 comments

Sunday’s Commentary generated 37 comments.

Four articles – all commentaries – generated nearly 400 comments.

But the world of news and commenting is changing.  The best illustration of that is: “300 Come to Davis to Demand Garamendi Help Close the Camps.”

Last year this article would generate at least 100 comments.  This year: zero.

Failure right?

When you see articles not generating comments, start looking at another metric – “shares.”  The article from Wednesday drew a whopping 484 shares on Facebook.  That is someone taking the article and sharing it with their community on Facebook.

The post on Facebook, and I had two other shares with photos from the event in total, drew over 500 likes and over 500 comments from Facebook users.  Left and right, people from Davis and out of Davis, people that have never commented on the Vanguard, were engaged.

The way people interact is changing – more and more it happens not on independent websites but rather within social media.

By Facebook’s metrics, the article reached thousands of people.  The article also generated thousands of reads on the Vanguard itself.  But no one commented on the Vanguard itself.

It marks a change, but in the end, as long as people are reading, does it matter where they comment?

My final point – as always, the Vanguard is a work in progress.  We’re making a lot of changes and, by the end of this year, things will probably look a lot different.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

---

Enter the maximum amount you want to pay each month

$USD

Sign up for

The post Monday Morning Thoughts: Wait A Second, Didn’t I Just Read That? appeared first on Davis Vanguard.

Derrick Hathaway served multiple tours in Kosovo, contributing to a NATO peacekeeping mission aimed at preventing ethnic cleansing. While Hathaway envisioned his Marine mission as a humanitarian one, he soon became ashamed of his work. In the course of mapping safe routes for NATO forces, Hathaway’s platoon would perform no-knock home raids to search for weapons or contraband, leading to tense confrontations with frightened families.

“It was martial law,” Hathaway said. “That left a nasty taste in my mouth. All we were doing was feeding a new form of hate.”

Still, Hathaway followed orders and earned a number of awards for his military service, including the Good Conduct Medal, which is given to recognize “good behavior and faithful service.” But after half a decade in uniform, Hathaway was given a bad conduct discharge in February 2005. He got the boot after failing a Department of Defense drug test administered shortly after a rowdy weekend in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Among other things, this denied him access to mental health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.

For years, veterans advocates and policymakers have worked to open the VA to the half-million so-called bad paper veterans like Hathaway. Last year, Congress directed the VA to offer more mental health care benefits to this neglected population. For Hathaway, however, it was too little and too late.

“The military threw me to the wolves,” Hathaway told The Intercept. “I couldn’t get counseling. I was abandoned by them.” Desperate for help, Hathaway visited his local VA hospital in Phoenix and would occasionally receive care on humanitarian grounds.

It was September 9, 2015, at around 10:30 a.m. when Hathaway, then 34, entered the hospital looking somewhat disheveled. The temperature outside had already hit 93 degrees Fahrenheit and would continue to climb. He was wearing a whimsical green T-shirt emblazoned with the Tootsie Pop slogan, “How many licks does it take?”

A hospital staffer quickly recognized Hathaway from a previous visit, deemed him a trespasser, and alerted the Veterans Affairs Police of his presence. According to a police report, three officers quickly showed up and tried to arrest Hathaway, who resisted. In the scuffle, Hathaway allegedly kicked officers and bit one’s right thumb.

Once handcuffed, Hathaway was forced into a wheelchair and hauled to a cramped holding cell in the hospital. First, two officers grabbed him by the shirt, rammed his face and body into the back wall of the cell, then threw him to the ground, according to a lawsuit Hathaway filed later. Grainy video surveillance appears to corroborate this account, and it shows that three officers proceeded to pile on top of him. Hathaway alleged that in this pile-on, Sgt. Joshua Fister strangled him. (Though the video footage itself appears inconclusive on this point, police photos taken after the incident show red marks around Hathaway’s neck). Hathaway was ultimately left sprawled out on the floor, bruised and bleeding from a 2-inch gash on his head. At some point during the melee, one of the officers stepped in a puddle of Hathaway’s blood, which he tracked into an exterior hallway.

The hospital visit resulted in five criminal charges against Hathaway, including felony aggravated assault of a police officer. The assault charge stuck, and he served 16 months in prison, which upended his life and recovery.

After he got out of prison, the husky former Marine filed his suit against the VA, alleging that its officers used excessive force. Late last year, the VA settled with Hathaway for $25,000, according to his lawyer, Charles Piccuta. (A spokesperson for the Phoenix VA noted that the settlement “included no admission of liability or fault on the VA’s part.”)

Fister, the cop who allegedly choked Hathaway, has also faced a previous allegation of excessive force: A former VA police officer in Phoenix said that two months before Hathaway’s arrest he witnessed Fister choke a different veteran patient who, just prior to the incident, was expressing suicidal intent but “wasn’t being disruptive” or violent in any way.

“His eyeballs were popping out of his head; he was turning another color,” said the officer, an Army veteran who remains in law enforcement and requested anonymity to avoid adverse professional consequences.

The officer said he reported the incident to his deputy chief and the hospital director. Correspondence reviewed by The Intercept shows that he also informed the FBI. While the VA Office of Inspector General launched an inquiry, the whistleblowing officer said he was never interviewed. (When asked for comment, the VA OIG provided a statement saying that it does not comment on “investigations it may or may not have completed involving an individual.”) After news of the officer’s complaints leaked into the lower ranks of the department, other cops harassed the whistleblower, threatened him, and keyed his car.

“It comes down to the thin blue line: Officers don’t want to tell on other officers,” said the whistleblower, who left the department in December 2016.

Piccuta told The Intercept that all five officers accused of causing Hathaway’s injuries, including Fister, remain on the VA police force. In response to a detailed list of questions, a spokesperson at the Phoenix VA provided a statement emphasizing Hathaway’s behavior and subsequent assault conviction. The spokesperson did not make Fister available for comment, and messages left at voice mailboxes and email addresses associated with his name were not returned.

Shocking reports of police violence against elderly patients at VA facilities have emerged in recent years.

The allegations against Fister do not appear to be exceptional. Shocking reports of excessive violence against veteran patients, many of them elderly, have emerged in recent years. They include then-71-year-old Vietnam veteran Jose Olivia, who in 2016 was tackled to the ground and arrested by VA police in El Paso after setting off a metal detector. The attack, captured on a surveillance camera, resulted in shoulder and throat injuries that required surgery. The same year, Marine veteran Danny Ralph and his service dog were both slammed to the ground by VA police in Spokane, Washington. Police charged Ralph, then 60, with disorderly conduct, contending that he refused to keep his dog outside the facility despite repeated requests.

Violent incidents like these can have fatal consequences. In 2014, the VA paid out a $500,000 settlement to the family of Jonathan Montano, a veteran who died following a physical altercation with police at the VA hospital in Loma Linda, California. Police ruptured Montano’s carotid artery, which resulted in blood clotting and a stroke. Last May, a 66-year-old veteran named Dale Farhner died following a physical struggle with VA police in Kansas City, Missouri. Police detained Farhner because he was apparently driving the wrong way down one of the hospital’s driveways, according to the Kansas City Star. One year later, the VA still has not released any information on Farhner’s death despite requests from the Star, Missouri’s U.S. Senate delegation, and Farhner’s family.

Protecting Those Who Served

Today, nearly 4,200 Veterans Affairs police officers are stationed at 139 VA medical centers across the country. These cops are tasked with keeping order on VA grounds and overseeing a patient population that includes many highly trained ex-military members with psychological trauma. The force’s motto is “Protecting Those Who Served.” Yet for Hathaway and scores of other veterans, that maxim hasn’t matched the reality on the ground.

After reviewing internal police reports, legal documents, and local news reports spanning the past 10 years, The Intercept has identified dozens of credible allegations that VA cops in every corner of the United States have neglected standard police procedures, violated patients’ constitutional rights, or broken the law. In the course of their duties, they have beaten veterans, bungled sensitive investigations, falsified arrest reports, conducted improper searches, and ignored basic procedures, like reading citizens their Miranda rights.

It’s impossible at present to determine the prevalence of misconduct among VA police and how that might compare to other law enforcement agencies — largely because of the department’s own failures. According to a sweeping December report from the VA’s Office of Inspector General, the VA “did not have adequate and coordinated governance over its police program to ensure effective management and oversight for its approximately 4,000-strong police officer workforce.” The OIG found that forces at roughly three out of every four facilities were not receiving timely inspections. Further, the sparse data collected on police activities was not tracked or assessed in any systematic or rigorous way.

In other words, even if it’s unclear how prevalent misconduct is among VA police, it does seem apparent that the department’s lack of oversight structures stacks the deck against accountability and in favor of impunity.

While the VA police force was formally classified as a federal law enforcement body in 1991, its officers were not issued firearms for nearly a decade. But the VA soon provided its cops with the tools of modern American policing, partnering with the Pentagon as part of its highly controversial 1033 program, which provides military-grade equipment to police departments across the county. Between 2005 and 2014, VA police departments acquired millions of dollars’ worth of body armor, chemical agents, night vision equipment, and other weapons and tactical gear.

VA police in every corner of the U.S. have neglected standard procedures, violated patients’ constitutional rights, or broken the law.

Despite this windfall, VA police face critical staffing shortages and are often unable to uphold their basic mission of ensuring security on hospital grounds. (As of late last year, 40 percent of all VA police departments had an officer vacancy rate above 20 percent.) In the past year, the OIG has identified a half-dozen facilities where police failure to carry out required safety procedures “resulted in a lack of assurance of a safe environment for patients and staff.” In one typical example from an inspection of a VA hospital in Marion, Illinois, investigators found that police weren’t remedying problems with the hospital’s panic alarm system. They also had not addressed longstanding security deficiencies at the hospital’s pharmacy, which put it “at risk for potential loss or theft of medications.”

The officers themselves appear to receive as little scrutiny as the security issues they’re supposed to monitor: Oversight of the cops is sparse, decentralized, and split between local hospital leaders and a dysfunctional, Washington-based body called the Office of Security and Law Enforcement. The December OIG report identified significant internal confusion regarding OS&LE, with VA officials believing it to be the agency’s police watchdog despite the fact that the office lacks authority to hold departments “accountable for adhering to police program policies.”

One of the office’s main responsibilities is inspecting departments. Yet the OIG found that beginning in 2014, OS&LE had just six full-time staffers tasked with inspections and oversight of VA police. By 2017, three of these employees had been diverted to other roles. (Since the OIG released its report, the department has provided OS&LE with 10 additional staffers.) Because of staffing constraints, OS&LE did not provide timely inspections for 74 percent of VA medical facilities.

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a department spokesperson said that the VA police force is currently undergoing reforms based on the OIG’s findings. Specifically, the department has hired a senior security officer and 18 regional security managers to identify challenges, review inspection reports, and promote hiring and retention. The department will also soon pilot new software designed to continuously assess the state of physical security at department hospitals and recommend improvements. The spokesperson added that inspection times have improved, in large part because OS&LE has hired additional staffers.

The OIG’s 2018 report was the latest in a string of embarrassing inquiries dating back to the late 1980s. Some of the most shocking findings came in a 2011 Government Accountability Office report that found that many of the nearly 300 sexual assault allegations reported to the VA police since January 2007 were not passed on to the OIG — in violation of departmental regulations — or to VA leadership.

Last winter’s report was spurred, in part, by a wave of police complaints pouring into congressional offices. Earlier this year, Congress directed the Government Accountability Office to further investigate the VA police, and two weeks ago, lawmakers on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs grilled VA officials on police misconduct in their districts.

“It’s hard for me to sit here and answer questions after hearing the stories that you’re talking about,” Renee Oshinski, an acting deputy under secretary at the VA, told lawmakers. “We have to go back and question whether or not the things that we are doing are being effective.”

Corruption in the Capital

In April 2017, shortly after Tony Hebert became the Washington D.C. VA’s new acting police chief, he held a meeting with his officers in a conference room near the hospital’s dental clinic. Many hoped that he would conduct a much-needed cleaning of their dirty department: Two years earlier, two dozen current and former cops had taken the extraordinary step of suing their then-chief Jerry Brown on the grounds that he had secretly installed surveillance equipment, including in changing rooms used by men and women, and snooped on staffers. According to the complaint, Brown “conspired” to spy on staff with the VA Medical Center’s then-director, Brian Hawkins, whose tenure at the hospital was scarred by a damning OIG report that found hospital leaders were upholding a “culture of complacency” that led to serious lapses in the quality of care. (An attorney representing Brown and Hawkins did not respond to requests for comment.)

The reform-minded officers’ optimism was short-lived. In his introductory remarks, Hebert made clear that if anyone on the force interfered with his leadership, he would “roll the fuck over us,” according to a complaint later submitted by Officer Jeremy Balzan to the Department of Justice. According to an administrative complaint submitted by Capt. Luis Rodriguez, during multiple meetings, Hebert slammed his badge on a table and yelled, “I am the fucking chief of police! I have a gold badge; you have silver badges. You will do what I say, or I will fucking fire your asses!”

One of Hebert’s first acts as police chief was hiring a man he later described as his “best friend,” according to Rodriguez’s complaint. Alfred Coburn was hired as one of three new captains at the time, but job postings appear to indicate that only two of those positions were publicly listed. If Hebert hired Coburn for an unlisted position, as Balzan suggested in a formal grievance, it could mean that he violated federal hiring rules. (In an interview with The Intercept, Hebert categorically denied this and all other allegations against him.)

VA police in Washington, D.C., allege that they were repeatedly ordered to falsify training records, dispatch journals, and police reports.

But crony hiring is just one of the many allegations of misconduct that have since dogged Hebert. Balzan, Rodriguez, and two other VA cops who requested anonymity for fear of adverse professional consequences told The Intercept that Hebert repeatedly ordered officers to falsify training records, dispatch journals, and police reports, often in order to make charges less severe and to suggest that criminal activity had been curtailed on his watch. Specific incidents are documented in Balzan’s complaint, which alleges that Coburn also ordered changes to a police report in one instance and falsified reports himself in others.

The OS&LE later documented a plethora of bookkeeping irregularities in the D.C. department, from late and illegible firearms and ammunition records to training sheets that were filled out before said training had occurred. It also found that the department’s investigative reports frequently left out key details and suggested the police work was often not thorough enough to “determine whether a crime has been committed.” At least one report cited a witness statement that was never produced. Two reports of sexual assault made against D.C. staffers were not appropriately investigated by VA police. In one of those instances, the survivor was never even interviewed.

Balzan claims that one day while he was monitoring closed-circuit surveillance footage in October 2017, he witnessed Coburn visiting the department on his day off with a woman the DOJ complaint identified as his girlfriend. After parking illegally on the emergency room ramp, he entered the hospital, had an employee print an incident report from weeks prior, and filed a revised report. In addition to restructuring narrative details, Coburn also added felony charges against the subject of the report, who had stated his desire to file a complaint against Coburn, according to the statement Balzan submitted to the DOJ.

Ironically enough, Balzan and another VA police officer said they witnessed closed-circuit footage of Coburn using excessive force on a government employee over a parking violation just one month after his own unorthodox parking job. The individual allegedly parked at the VA while going to pick up his mother at a nearby clinic. After Coburn and another officer approached the individual, he fled and was eventually taken down by the officers. The department’s subsequent use of force review faulted Coburn’s actions as “in violation of the subject’s Fourth Amendment rights.”  (In the review, Coburn claimed that the subject tripped.)

Finding little recourse to address misconduct internally, Balzan organized nine cops and administrative staffers to sign onto his DOJ complaint. His efforts came on the heels of an August 2017 OS&LE inspection that found the D.C. department was “not operating in a satisfactory manner.”

Under fire and with the specter of accountability on the horizon, Hebert made good on his inaugural promise to punish the police who had gone against him, according to the four officers who spoke to The Intercept. Balzan said he filed his first grievance after Hebert removed him from his detective position and put him on dispatch duty on the grounds that he had failed a firearms test — despite the fact that other cops who performed at a similar level were given additional training and testing and allowed to stay in their positions. Balzan said his pay was reduced by at least $5,000 as a result of the reassignment. He continued to file complaints and said he received threats from Hebert, as well as an anonymous email that stated, “Resign while you can before you get fired.”

Rodriguez, meanwhile, shared concerns with a union official that Hebert was targeting whistleblowing cops in order to remove or demote them, and he wrote a statement for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in support of Balzan. In December 2017, Rodriguez received a letter from the hospital director proposing his termination on the vague grounds of “failure to meet conditions of employment.”

“There’s no way we can do our jobs when they keep us underneath their thumbs,” Rodriguez said. “It feels like VA leaders are untouchable.”

Coburn and Hebert, meanwhile, remained essentially unscathed. Last summer, they moved to new positions at a VA police department in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. While Coburn is still on the force, Hebert recently left the VA. According to LinkedIn, Hebert had a short stint at a private security company that does business with the VA and is now the Virginia director of security solutions for another private firm, Bri-Bet Group, according to its website.

A spokesperson for the D.C. VA said that a new permanent police chief and hospital director are putting the facility “on a new path” and remediating the problems identified by the OS&LE. The spokesperson declined to address specific allegations against Hebert and Coburn without their consent. In a brief phone call, Coburn declined to speak about his VA work. “You can print whatever the hell you want,” he told The Intercept. “I don’t really care what happens.”

In an interview, Hebert said he was a “very successful chief” who earned outstanding performance evaluations, though he declined to provide them to The Intercept. He said he was targeted for being a white chief in a mostly black department.

Death by a Thousand Cuts

The retaliation alleged in D.C. is not uncommon. Last summer, the GAO found that VA whistleblowers are 10 times more likely to be disciplined than their peers. Two months before the report, the Daily Caller published a story highlighting the plight of four VA police whistleblowers. These cops and others who spoke with The Intercept say their actions spurred specious counterinvestigations, relegation to desk duty, unfair annual evaluations, and other retaliatory actions that jeopardized their jobs or made promotions impossible. Three cops from different departments told The Intercept that administrators illegally accessed their medical files in attempts to uncover dirt and write blackmail.

At the VA hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, Air Force veteran and VA Officer Mary Baker told The Intercept that she brought forth allegations that cops on the force were routinely making blatantly racist remarks and having casual conversations about rape. While her allegations were largely affirmed following an internal investigation — which found that “Police Service Leadership supported a culture of allowing inappropriate behavior (public simulated sex acts, racial slurs, etc.)” — Baker said the findings were disregarded, and the offending officers even continued to receive promotions. As one of two women on the force, Baker said her qualifications are consistently questioned, and she continues to face sexist behavior.

“It sickens me to see these people in leadership roles,” Baker told The Intercept. “Meanwhile, I feel like I’m a contestant on ‘Survivor’ or ‘Big Brother'; people are trying to get a reaction or a response out of me. They want to point the finger at me, make me look unstable, unfit, emotional. They have put so much pressure on me.”

In a statement provided to The Intercept, a VA spokesperson in Saginaw said, “The allegations were investigated, processes were followed, and appropriate action has been taken.” She confirmed that three of the five cops who Baker claimed engaged in inappropriate behavior remain VA officers.

Officer Tim Petoskey, who spoke with both the Daily Caller and The Intercept, alleged that police leaders at the Seattle VA engaged in gross mismanagement, rampant discrimination, and illegal searches of veteran patients. Petoskey’s specific allegations, which were later corroborated in a 2015 internal investigation, included instances of cops referring to black VA employees with the “N-word” or describing them as “fucking monkeys.” Cops were found to have engaged in a litany of additional misconduct, from sloppy budgeting and unfair hiring practices to misplacing hundreds of police reports.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Petoskey told The Intercept. “My pay is messed up. My work orders for equipment get lost. I’ve been passed up for promotions. More troubling, our major forms of redress … are taking VA’s cartoonish excuses for this retaliatory behavior as valid.”

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a department spokesperson said the hospital “thoroughly investigated” the allegations and “fixed all of the identified issues.”

“As a result of that investigation, four officers — none of whom still work for VA — left the VA Puget Sound police before any discipline could be administered,” the spokesperson said.

Qualified to Serve?

The VA police force has long struggled to recruit and retain clean, qualified cops. In 1988, the VA’s inspector general found that 57 percent of department officers surveyed were unqualified, unsuited, or both, including 21 police officers who did not disclose prior criminal convictions on their applications for VA employment. In 1989, the VA created the OS&LE in part to address this shortcoming.

Today, prospective VA police are required to submit to a criminal history check, a drug test, and a medical examination. But because the department is desperate to fill its many vacancies, it seems to many on the force that some qualifications are requirements in name only. In September 2017, the department issued a policy advisory that allows police to be given interim credentials before a background investigation by the Office of Personnel Management is completed. (In response to questions about officer vacancy rates and retention, a VA spokesperson told The Intercept that the department has added a net total of 402 officers since 2014.)

At least one officer with serious professional blemishes has risen quite high in the force: the D.C. VA’s deputy chief, Roger Lindsay, who, according to court documents, was indicted by a grand jury in 2004 on charges of intimidating and threatening witnesses to extract statements for a murder investigation while working as a municipal police officer in Brazil, Indiana. (The charge was dismissed on appeal due to the statute of limitations.) Lindsay also purchased a fake MBA degree and submitted it as part of an application to be a police chief at a department in Florida. The OS&LE’s report on D.C. police noted that when Lindsay was under consideration for a job, the VA did not exhaustively examine his previous five years in law enforcement, per departmental requirements. (A spokesperson for the D.C. VA said the hospital is “conducting a top-to-bottom review of Lindsay’s hiring,” which was made under Hebert’s direction; through the spokesperson, Lindsay declined to be interviewed.)

The department’s centralized training academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, is its primary attempt to professionalize its police. Yet the standardized training for VA cops today lasts just 400 hours, which falls significantly below training requirements for many local cops, which vary by jurisdiction. Massachusetts, for example, requires 900 hours of training to become an officer. And despite the unique challenges that VA officers face in dealing with veteran patients, the curriculum focuses little on how to police in this environment.

The academy dedicates only two hours total to “veteran-centered policing,” one hour to “crisis intervention,” and one hour to “post-traumatic stress disorder.” Despite a recent series of shocking suicides on hospital grounds, would-be VA cops are given just one three-hour lecture on “suicide awareness and prevention,” according to the 2019 training curriculum, which was obtained by The Intercept in a public records request.

“When I came out of the academy, I was stupider than when I went in.”

The training is held in uniformly low esteem by the officers who spoke to The Intercept. Charles Harrington, a VA police officer out of Bay Pines, Florida, said a lot of his colleagues “do not have the appropriate legal foundation” to serve, while Officer Ghassan Ghannoum of the West Los Angeles VA bluntly said, “When I came out of the academy, I was stupider than when I went in.”

In response to The Intercept’s inquiries, a spokesperson for the VA pointed to the academy’s accreditation by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Accreditation Board and claimed that it has a “reputation for excellence” among other federal law enforcement agencies that hold trainings there.

Inadequate training may account for the lackluster execution of much day-to-day police work. One troubling finding highlighted in the OIG’s winter report was that officers at the Chicago VA were not consistently advising suspects of their constitutional rights during arrest.

VA police officers across the country have been found to repeatedly issue federal charges with scant evidence for minor violations, a practice that can cause legal headaches and significant bills. The VA police force in Pittsburgh, for instance, has charged hospital employees with disorderly conduct, receiving stolen property, tampering with evidence, and invasion of privacy — charges that were later withdrawn or dismissed in Allegheny County District Court. In 2017, Tampa Bay’s NPR station WUSF found that VA police were taking veteran patients to federal court over small infractions, from parking tickets to spitting.

A VA police detective in Seattle acknowledged to OIG investigators that shoddy police work led to legitimate cases being dropped. Lawyers said that police routinely wrote poor reports that misstated statutes and didn’t properly justify probable cause for actions. One staffer inside the local U.S. Attorney’s Office simply described the Seattle department as a “hot mess.”

The Big, Powerful Men

In October 2017, Navy veteran Juan Victoria, a nurse at the VA hospital in Fayetteville, Arkansas, was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after expressing his intention to report improper behavior by a VA police officer.

Victoria said an officer named Jeff Eye came into the hospital’s triage room, told a patient that his car was parked illegally, and demanded that he move it immediately. Victoria, who was the nursing supervisor that night, told Eye that his actions had violated various laws and regulations, including the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which guarantees patients uninterrupted access to emergency care.

“I was advocating for the patient and the VA,” Victoria told The Intercept. “If the patient had left the triage room before being evaluated by a physician and experienced a serious medical event, we would have had no justification for why the patient was taken out of the ER. We would have been held liable.”

Victoria said his words angered Eye, and a scuffle ensued. In a statement Victoria drafted and sent to VA administrators hours later, he said Eye and another VA cop “took hold of my arms and forcefully took me to the ground, hitting the left side of my forehead and my right knee while also damaging my glasses and phone. … One of the officers put what felt like his knee on my back and neck.” Victoria was arrested, placed in a holding cell, and charged. According to local union officials, his arrest was the second violent incident between VA cops and nursing staff in two months and a violation of the police’s code of conduct.

A spokesperson at the facility provided the following statement on behalf of the VA: “The incident at the center of this inquiry involved an employee who improperly intervened in a police matter and refused to comply with a police officer’s instructions despite repeated warnings. The Veterans Health Care System of the Ozarks investigated this incident thoroughly and found that the officer’s use of force was appropriate.” Attempts to reach Eye by phone and email were unsuccessful.

Nevertheless, after Victoria’s congressperson, Republican Steve Womack, intervened with an inquiry on his constituent’s behalf, all of Victoria’s charges were quickly dropped.

“Every time I see that cop now, he smiles at me,” Victoria told The Intercept. “In his mind he thinks he’s taught me a lesson — not to mess with the big, powerful men: the cops.”

The post Veterans Affairs Police Are Supposed to “Protect Those Who Served.” They Have a Shocking Record of Brutality and Impunity. appeared first on The Intercept.

The post Torpedo Citizens United to Save the Green New Deal: A 1910 Law Shows How appeared first on LA Progressive.

Grainy 8mm and 16mm film now tends to evoke nostalgia but, in the decades before digital cameras, home movies were the only immediate way to visually document the present. The US filmmaker Martha Gregory makes wonderful use of her family's trove of home movies, shot by her grandfather Charles from the 1950s to the 1970s, to craft her short documentary Three Red Sweaters and ask what happens to memories when we document our lives. Charles's amateur filmmaking was mostly for his own enjoyment – and occasionally a means of social avoidance – but his sharp eye yielded lovely images of daily life, family vacations and children growing up. This archive of a life of comfort and means in the San Francisco area is set to present-day conversations with Gregory's mother and grandfather, in which she ponders whether 'photographs and film help us remember the past or remove us from it'. 

By Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

H.R. 2, the Farm Bill, threatens to deny food to 2 million people. Please take action to protect SNAP and those who rely on it.

Take Action NOW:
Call Your Representative!: On Tuesday, May 8th, we all need to call our members of Congress and tell them to “Vote NO on H.R. 2, the Farm Bill!” (Seriously, this means you and everyone you can reach about this.) Please make use of (CHN Member) Feeding America’s toll free number: 1-888-398-8702. You will be connected to your Representative’s office by putting in your zip code. It is imperative that we let Congress know that we want them to “Vote NO on H.R. 2” because its rigid work rules will reduce or eliminate SNAP for millions. It will deny food to children, veterans, women, and people needing treatment and/or with disabilities. Please share this number with your networks and ask them to encourage people to call. The number is live now and people can start calling now but please make sure you call on Tuesday, May 8th!

Share on Social Media:
Be sure to join (CHN Members) Center For American Progress, CBPP, FRAC and others for a digital day of action on Tuesday, May 8th to get word out that Congress needs to “Vote NO on H.R. 2!“ Make sure to use#HandsOffSNAP. The action will go all day but we’re especially encouraging everyone to tweet/post during the 1:00pm ET hour to maximize reach.

In or near DC?:
Click here for information about two rallies taking place on Tuesday, May 8 on Capitol Hill.

Learn More:
This fight to keep SNAP strong and free of arbitrary work rules really intended to deny assistance is the same fight playing out across other vital low-income programs. Defeating H.R. 2’s SNAP cuts will strengthen our hand when it comes to similar fights over housing assistance, Medicaid, and other social programs. Learn more here, on our Protecting Basic Needs campaign/resource page. We’re also compiling a list of other actions you can take; check back, as this list is a work in progress!

The post Take action to protect SNAP appeared first on Coalition on Human Needs.

Maggie Wynne’s career as a foot-soldier in the anti-abortion movement began in Congress, where throughout much of the 1990s she was a staffer for the so-called Pro-Life Caucus. When George W. Bush took the White House, she moved to the Department of Health and Human Services to work in the office that connected Congress and the agency.

A few years later, in 2005, she became a special assistant within HHS. But as the administration neared its end, Wynne pulled off a bureaucratic move known as “burrowing,” in which an appointed official becomes a career government employee, with all the job protections that entails.

So when Barack Obama’s HHS team arrived, Wynne was there waiting for them at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, continuing to wage her bureaucratic battles on behalf of the unborn. Career staff are famously difficult to fire, but they can be marginalized so that they can’t stall an agenda. In 2011, HHS got her out of the agency temporarily by “detailing” her to the staff of the House Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., the most zealous right-to-lifer in the House and co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus. The reassignment was part of an effort to keep her away from the bidding process for federal funding for anti-trafficking work, as Wynne was known to favor the U.S. bishops who fought a new Obama-era requirement to offer victims access to abortion services. 

She managed to involve herself in the process regardless, and, in 2015, Wynne’s department was reorganized to strip most of her authority; she was left directing a relatively small trafficking office, helping to determine whether foreign-born victims qualified for public services. Less than a year later, with the punditry convinced Hillary Clinton would become the next president, Wynne finally called it quits. For the next several months, she went to work for the Knights of Columbus and was the pilgrimage director at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.

But then Donald Trump won.

Wynne quickly came back to public service, becoming an early and influential member of the HHS transition team. A woman who’d just recently been a low-level functionary within the agency now had influence over staffing it at the highest levels, and, until the new director arrived, she was effectively running ORR. She got herself named Counselor for Human Services Policy, one of the most powerful positions within the department.

The lurch toward the evangelical, right-to-life movement has elevated what were once sleepy bureaucratic backwaters into prominent culture war battlefields.

“The Counselor is the point person for the secretary and the agency on all major policy and program decisions,” explained Jeff Hild, who served under Obama as chief of staff for HHS’s Administration for Children & Families. “It’s a crucial position, and pretty under-the-radar as it’s not public-facing. But the people who have held that job are some of the most experienced and respected in the field of human services. During the Obama administration, the Counselors had decades of experience prior to taking on the role, including as senior staff in Congress and leaders at prominent think tanks.”

Wynne is none of that. But she does have one critical qualification: She is zealously opposed to abortion — and a slew of her allies in the movement soon poured into the building.

Wynne, in many ways, is the story of the Trump administration: a fringe operative who fought her battles far from the center of power, suddenly washed into a position of extraordinary authority. Across the administration, officials like her have been leaving their marks, but in the Health and Human Services Department, the lurch toward the evangelical, right-to-life movement has elevated what were once sleepy bureaucratic backwaters into prominent culture war battlefields.

Trump’s Health and Human Services Department has been quietly stocked with a host of anti-choice and anti-LGBT ideologues. There’s Charmaine Yoest, the former president of Americans United for Life, who now serves in a top communications post, and Valerie Huber, an abstinence education champion who works as chief of staff for the Office of Assistant Secretary. There’s Teresa Manning, a former National Right to Life Committee lobbyist who is overseeing federal family planning services, and Tom Price, who led the Department up until October and boasted about as anti-choice a record as a legislator could.

And then there’s Scott Lloyd, another objectively unqualified appointee leading the Office of Refugee Resettlement. He formerly worked as an attorney for Knights of Columbus, a leading anti-abortion group, and once argued that “contraceptives are the cause of abortion.” Wynne, who spent seven years toiling in ORR, overlapped with Lloyd at Knights of Columbus before coming back to join Trump’s transition team.

It was the Office of Refugee Resettlement that made international news by attempting to block a 17-year-old immigrant in its custody from getting an abortion. In late October, after being barred for a month by Lloyd, the unaccompanied minor — known in court filings as Jane Doe — was finally able to end her unwanted pregnancy. She was detained in a privately run shelter funded by ORR – which had implemented a new policy forbidding shelters from “facilitating” abortions. Except Jane Doe wasn’t relying on the shelter to pay for the procedure, or even to transport her there. She just needed permission to leave temporarily.

In court filings, the administration wrote that it has “strong and constitutionally legitimate interests in promoting childbirth, in refusing to facilitate abortion, and in not providing incentives for pregnant minors to illegal cross the border to obtain elective abortions while in federal custody.” As Jane Doe waited for her abortion, government agencies forced her to obtain counseling from a Christian-affiliated crisis pregnancy center and to look at an ultrasound.

The American Civil Liberties Union ultimately prevailed in court for Jane Doe, but the underlying ORR policy remains in place, and in mid-December the ACLU filed suit on behalf of two more undocumented minors – Jane Roe and Jane Poe. A federal judge ruled in their favor last week. In court filings several days later, Lloyd argued that ORR shouldn’t let even a minor impregnated through rape end her unwanted pregnancy because perhaps she’d experience “additional trauma” as a result.

Brigitte Amiri, an ACLU attorney representing the minors, told The Intercept that ORR started to interfere with abortion access in March by working aggressively to dissuade teenagers, giving them unwanted religious counseling, and even contacting their parents against their express wishes. “When all that fails, as it did with Jane Doe, then they just say you can’t get an abortion,” she said.

 “They just flout the law and the Constitution. They’re utterly, utterly brazen.” — Brigitte Amiri, ACLU

These problems, Amiri emphasized, didn’t all start with Trump. “Under Obama, millions of dollars flowed to shelters that had objections to abortion, and if the minor asked for one, they could say well you can’t stay here but we’ll contact the federal government and they’ll transfer you somewhere else,” Amiri said. “It was totally stigmatizing, it delayed access to abortion, and it made the procedure more risky. I had meetings with ORR’s directors – Eskinder Negash in the early years and Bob Carey towards the end – and I said you need to overhaul these policies. But they would not budge, so we sued them.”

This is, in many ways, the defining contrast between the last administration and the current one. The Obama administration, sometimes to its credit, other times to its great discredit, tried to walk a fraught middle ground. In the case of HHS, it meant partnering with faith-based groups in ways that sometimes made accessing reproductive health care more difficult for youth and victims. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has abandoned all pretense of compromise.

“They just flout the law and the Constitution,” said Amiri. “They’re utterly, utterly brazen.”

Under the Obama administration, former ORR director Robert Carey said, the office had a deliberate process for crafting policy that involved convening stakeholders, drafting revisions, and providing opportunities for feedback. That process had been inherited from the Bush administration, and every administration before it, since the advent of the modern bureaucracy. Under Trump, new ORR policies — including the rule banning grantees from “facilitating” abortion — have been issued through hastily drafted emails and memos.

The new rules are issued with such speed that nobody, apparently, even reviews them for grammar. According to court filings, on March 30, two days after becoming ORR director, Lloyd emailed his team announcing that ORR-funded shelters “should not be supporting abortion services pre or post-release. Only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling.” Another email dated March 4 and sent by then ORR-Acting Director Kenneth Tota said that if unaccompanied minors “may be involved in an abortion” then ORR-funded shelters were “prohibited from taking any action that facilitates an abortion without direction and approval from the Director of ORR.”

When she first learned the federal government was prohibiting Jane Doe from leaving her shelter to access an abortion, Amiri, the ACLU lawyer, thought, “No way, they can’t do that.” But then, she told The Intercept, “I realized, oh, they can do it, and they will do it, until a court stops them.”

Aside from appointments, many advocates have raised concerns with specific actions HHS has taken over the past year – actions signaling that vulnerable populations, including undocumented immigrants, victims of trafficking, and LGBTQ individuals – may be subject to further discrimination. Indeed, “vulnerable” is one of the Centers for Disease Control’s newly banned words.

When the HHS published its draft strategic plan for FY2018-2022 this past fall, it removed all mentions of LGBTQ individuals and ethnic minorities that had appeared in the Obama-era version. The Trump draft plan also rewrote the federal government’s definition of life, emphasizing that life begins “at conception.”

Then, in early October, the Trump administration issued new rules rolling back the Obama-era mandate that employers include birth control coverage in their health insurance plans. (A judge issued a nationwide injunction against this in mid-December, and second judge issued a preliminary injunction last week.)

The Trump administration also announced in October it would be soliciting public comment on ways to potentially reduce HHS regulations governing faith-based groups – a bright red flag for those worried about discrimination.“Agency regulations already contain religious exemptions that are too expansive,” wrote the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination in a letter sent to HHS dated November 24.

In response to its solicitation, HHS received nearly 11,000 comments. But it has only made 80 of them public, those that largely reflect support for anti-abortion policies and disapproval for rules requiring groups to serve transgender individuals. “HHS should not solicit comments for rule-making from thousands of child welfare experts, health experts, and everyday Americans and then hide those comments from public view,” said Julie Kruse, a federal policy advocate at Family Equality Council.

In 2015, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and other faith-based groups protested ORR for its new rule designed to prevent, detect, and respond to unaccompanied children who suffered sexual abuse. Rather than worry if the level of protection offered to minors was adequate, the groups charged that ORR had fallen short of “protecting existing and prospective grantees, contractors, subgrantees and subcontractors with religious or moral objections.” Specifically, they protested requirements to offer victims access to emergency contraception and abortion, even through referrals.

Put differently, two years ago, some faith-based groups called on the federal government to exempt them from providing victims with comprehensive reproductive services. Today, the government itself is led by officials like Wynne and Lloyd who forbid grantees from providing youth with comprehensive reproductive services, even when those grantees have no religious or moral objection to doing so.

As the Supreme Court currently reviews a case that could make it easier for states, businesses, and organizations to discriminate based on religious or moral objections, the stakes for LGBTQ individuals are particularly high.

Earlier this year when HHS released its annual national survey on older adults, it announced it would no longer be asking questions about gender identity — effectively preventing transgender adults from identifying as a subgroup on the questionnaire.

“We know the history of HIV and AIDS, we know what happens when the government is not willing to name a group of people who are most affected by a public health issue,” said Harper Jean Tobin, the director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “For years we have been trying to document and address the serious health disparities transgender people face, and we can’t do that when the government refuses to name them as a population.”

“It’s really important to us that HHS send a signal to the states that federally funded agencies need to serve all youth.”– Julie Kruse, Family Equality Council

On December 15, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops published an open letter rejecting the legitimacy of transgender identities. “We come together to join our voices on a more fundamental precept of our shared existence, namely, that human beings are male or female and that the socio-cultural reality of gender cannot be separated from one’s sex as male or female,” the letter reads.

Not to be outdone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is under the authority of HHS, made global news itself that day with reports that it had developed a new list of verboten words. Along with “vulnerable,” words such as “evidence-based,” “transgender” and “fetus” no longer exist, as far as the agency is concerned.

What the department does or does not do influences others across the country. “It’s really important to us that HHS send a signal to the states that federally funded agencies need to serve all youth,” said Kruse of the Family Equality Council. According to the group’s data, 19 percent of foster youth over the age of 12 identify as LGBTQ, and same-sex couples foster at four times the rate and adopt at six times the rate of opposite-sex couples. Despite 111,000 foster children waiting to be adopted annually, and an opioid epidemic that has exploded that population, seven states have passed bills that allow adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ youth and prospective parents. Three of those bills passed in 2017.

“We’re very concerned about placement of LGBTQ youth into non-affirming homes or into faith-based group homes where they might be subjected to conversion therapy,” said Kruse.

And it’s not just youth. HHS currently requires all medical facilities receiving Medicaid and Medicare to honor the visitation preferences of their patients, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity. HHS may soon decide to allow federally-funded hospitals and health clinics to turn away LGBT patients or their loved ones. “State and local housing agencies that administer programs, like housing vouchers or loans to assist with purchasing a home, could [also] refuse to offer those services to LGBT older adults and older same-sex couples,” warned a new report from the Movement Advancement Project.

A Manhattan playboy, who campaigned as friendly to the LGBTQ community and has dubbed himself “very pro-choice,” is now leading the most extreme anti-choice, transphobic, and anti-gay administration in modern history. The movement’s prayers have been answered.

Correction: December 29, 2017, 11:30 a.m.
A previous version of this article misquoted the letter sent from the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination to HHS. The letter said that agency regulations contain religious exemptions that are too expansive, not expensive.

Top photo:Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is sworn-in during a House Judiciary Committee hearing concerning the oversight of the U.S. refugee admissions program, on Capitol Hill, October 26, 2017 in Washington, DC.

The post How a Gay Friendly and “Very Pro-Choice” Trump Created the Most Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBT Administration in Generations appeared first on The Intercept.

A short drive south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australia’s Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, code-named “RAINFALL.” The remote base, in the heart of the country’s barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.

Hundreds of Australian and American employees come and go every day from Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, as the base is formally known. The official “cover story,” as outlined in a secret U.S. intelligence document, is to “support the national security of both the U.S. and Australia. The [facility] contributes to verifying arms control and disarmament agreements and monitoring military developments.” But, at best, that is an economical version of the truth. Pine Gap has a far broader mission — and more powerful capabilities — than the Australian or American governments have ever publicly acknowledged.

An investigation, published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in collaboration with The Intercept, punctures the wall of secrecy surrounding Pine Gap, revealing for the first time a wide range of details about its function. The base is an important ground station from which U.S. spy satellites are controlled and communications are monitored across several continents, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Together with the NSA’s Menwith Hill base in England, Pine Gap has in recent years been used as a command post for two missions. The first, named M7600, involved at least two spy satellites and was said in a secret 2005 document to provide “continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass and Africa.” This initiative was later upgraded as part of a second mission, named M8300, which involved “a four satellite constellation” and covered the former Soviet Union, China, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and territories in the Atlantic Ocean.

The satellites are described as being “geosynchronous,” which means they are likely positioned high in orbit at more than 20,000 miles above the earth’s surface. They are equipped with powerful surveillance technology used to monitor wireless communications on the ground, such as those sent and received by cellphones, radios, and satellite uplinks. They gather “strategic and tactical military, scientific, political, and economic communications signals,” according to the documents, and also keep tabs on missile or weapons tests in targeted countries, sweep up intelligence from foreign military data systems, and provide surveillance support to U.S. forces.

Outside Pine Gap, there are some 38 radar dishes pointing skyward, many of them concealed underneath golfball-like shells. The facility itself is isolated, located beyond a security checkpoint on a road marked with “prohibited area” signs, about a 10-minute drive from Alice Springs, which has a population of about 25,000 people. There is a large cohort of U.S. spy agency personnel stationed at the site, including employees of the NSA, CIA, and National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that manages the spy satellites. Intelligence employees are joined by compatriots from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Pine Gap “plays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations,” according to a top-secret NSA report dated from April 2013. One of its key functions is to gather geolocational intelligence, which can be used to help pinpoint airstrikes. The Australian base has a special section known as the “geopit” for this function; it is equipped with “a number of tools available for performing geolocations, providing a broad range of geolocation capabilities … in conjunction with other overhead, tactical, fixed site systems,” notes an August 2012 NSA “site profile” of the facility.

Richard Tanter, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has studied Pine Gap for years. He has co-authored, with Bill Robinson and the late Desmond Ball, several detailed reports about the base’s activities for California-based security think tank Nautilus Institute. He reviewed the documents obtained by The Intercept and said that they showed there had been a “huge transformation” in Pine Gap’s function in recent history.

The documents “provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa,” Tanter said. “It shows us that Pine Gap knows the geolocations — it derives the phone numbers, it often derives the content of any communications, it provides the ability for the American military to identify and place in real-time the location of targets of interest.”

The documents “provide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world.”

The base, which was built in the late 1960s, was once focused only on monitoring missile tests and other military-related activities in countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and India. But it is now doing “a great deal more,” said Tanter. It has shifted from “a national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence — actionable, time-sensitive intelligence — for American operations in [the] battlefield.”

In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Pine Gap played a key role in controversial U.S. drone strikes. Over the past decade, drone attacks have killed a number of top Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Taliban militants. But the strikes — often taking place outside of declared war zones, in places such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan — have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and in some cases are considered by human rights advocates to constitute potential war crimes and violations of international law.

The U.S. and its allies regularly use surveillance of communications as a tactic to track down and identify suspected militants. The NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a cellphone’s SIM card, rather than the content of the calls — an imprecise method that can lead to the wrong people being killed, as The Intercept has previously revealed. “It’s really like we’re targeting a cellphone,” a former drone operator told us in 2014. “We’re not going after people — we’re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”

Concerns about such tactics are amplified in the era of President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration earlier this year, Trump has dramatically increased drone strikes and special operations raids, while simultaneously loosening battlefield rules and seeking to scrap constraints intended to prevent civilian deaths in such attacks. According to analysis from the group Airwars, which monitors U.S. airstrikes, civilian casualties in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State are on track to double under Trump’s administration.

David Rosenberg, a 23-year veteran of the NSA who worked inside Pine Gap as a team leader for more than a decade, acknowledged that the base was used to “geolocate particular electronic transmissions.” He told The Intercept and ABC that the base helps to “provide limitation of civilian casualties by providing accurate intelligence,” and insisted that “the governments of Australia and the United States would of course want to minimize all civilian casualties.”

But that reassurance is unlikely to satisfy critics.

Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, said the Australian government needs to provide “accountability and transparency” on its role in U.S. drone operations. “The legal problem that’s created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict … and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap,” Howie said. “The first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.”

For more than 100 years, Australia has been a close U.S. ally; the country has supported the American military in every major war since the early 1900s. This relationship was formalized in 1951, when Australia and the U.S. signed the ANZUS Treaty, a mutual defense agreement. Australia is also a member of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance, alongside the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. The country’s electronic eavesdropping agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, maintains extremely close ties with its American counterparts at the NSA. The agencies have a “mutually beneficial partnership,” according to one top-secret NSA document. While the NSA shares its “technology, cryptanalytic capabilities, and resources for state-of-the-art collection, processing and analytic efforts,” the Australians provide access to Pine Gap; they also hand over “terrorism-related communications collected inside Australia,” plus intelligence on some neighboring countries in their region, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

“The first thing we need from the government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside Pine Gap.”

The relationship’s foundations are strong, but some cracks may be beginning to appear. This was highlighted in late January when, after just two weeks in the Oval Office, Trump had a contentious first conversation with Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Trump berated his Australian counterpart over the terms of a refugee deal and abruptly ended the call, describing it as “ridiculous” and “unpleasant.”

Meanwhile, Trump has adopted a more confrontational tone with China — Australia’s top trading partner — and he has threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” over its repeated missile tests. The situation has created a degree of uncertainty for Australia, and some in the country are pondering whether it is time to re-evaluate its traditional alliances.

“There are changing moods in the United States,” said John McCarthy, one of Australia’s most distinguished and experienced diplomats, who formerly served as the country’s ambassador to the U.S. “So, we then need to think, should we try and develop closer security relationships with other countries in Asia? Should we seek to improve our overall structural relationship with China?

“We’re entering into a very, very fluid situation in Asia,” McCarthy added. “I don’t know what the outcomes are going to be. But … we have to be very, very nimble in terms of trying to create new structures, create new relationships, to be able to look at new circumstances from a very independent security perspective, if we are to do the right thing by the Australian people over the next generation or so.”

Because of Australia’s proximity to the Korean peninsula, the North Korea issue is a particularly sensitive one. The city of Darwin in the Northern Territory is about 3,600 miles from Pyongyang, within range of an intercontinental ballistic missile strike. As such, the implications are severe for Australia: It could be dragged into a devastating conflict if the U.S. were to become embroiled in war with Kim Jong-un’s rogue state. And despite its isolated position in the outback, Pine Gap would likely be at the forefront of the action.

“Pine Gap literally hardwires us into the activities of the American military and in some cases, that means we will cop the consequences, like it or not,” said Tanter, the University of Melbourne professor. “Pine Gap will be contributing hugely in real-time to those operations, as well as in preparation for them. So whether or not the Australian government thinks that an attack on North Korea is either justified, or a wise and sensible move, we will be part of that,” Tanter added. “We’ll be culpable in the terms of the consequences.”

The NSA and the Australian government’s Department of Defence declined to comment.

———

This story was prepared in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s investigative radio program “Background Briefing” and ABC News. Peter Cronau contributed reporting.

Documents published with this article:

• Pine Gap site profile
• NSA’s intelligence relationship with Australia
• Pine Gap classification guide
• NRO SIGINT guide for Pine Gap
• M7600 & M8300 SIGINT guide

Top photo: Australian Defence Facilities Pine Gap on Feb. 19, 2016.

The post The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia appeared first on The Intercept.

By James Kwak

“This is a Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders party. Our party has moved right, their party has moved really left.”

That’s Paul Ryan on the Democratic Party. In Vox, Matt Yglesias points out that Ryan is being disingenuous, but only  “in part.” Yglesias goes on to say this:

“In a fundamental way, Ryan is correct — in 2016, the center of gravity in the Democratic Party is much closer to Bernie Sanders than it was in 2006 or 1996.”

Except, that just isn’t true.

You can look at this question in a couple of ways. You can look at the actual accomplishments and priorities of actual Democratic politicians over the past decade. You would see the adoption of Romneycare, the relatively moderate Dodd-Frank Act, the extension of most of the Bush tax cuts, a decline in domestic discretionary spending, the failure to do anything about the criminal justice system, the failure to very much about climate change, and now the push to ratify the TPP. I don’t see a party shifting to the left.

But, you might say, that’s because Obama has been blocked by the GOP at every turn. So let’s look at the data:

Those are the ideological positions of the two parties’ Congressional delegations since 1995, from the absolutely indispensable Vital Statistics on Congress project, led by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. (The years on the X-axis are the years of Congresses.) And, of course, they confirm what everyone knows: The Republicans have been getting more extreme, while the Democrats have stayed roughly the same. Even in the House, which should be more sensitive to ideological shifts, the Democrats remain the party of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton—none of whom is to the left of, well, anyone significant in recent party history.

Why does Yglesias, who is usually very sharp, make this mistake? His evidence is a campaign brochure created by Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel for the 2006 elections, which is relatively moderate; he then asserts, “Whatever you make of Hillary Clinton’s current policy agenda, there’s no denying that it’s far more left-wing across the board even as the status quo in many of these areas has shifted to the left.”

But that’s mistaking tactics for substance. In 2006, the Democrats were running against George W. Bush, a man widely seen at the time as a corrupt, incompetent warmonger; they only had to be as inoffensive as possible in order to win the elections. By contrast, Hillary Clinton is just emerging from what was, in some ways, a pretty standard primary campaign in which the establishment centrist tacked left to siphon votes away from the left-wing challenger. Furthermore, Democrats have controlled the White House for the past eight years, and although Barack Obama is personally popular, Americans in general feel insecure about their economic prospects and unhappy about the political system. Clinton has to run on something different, because few people think Obama’s centrist economic policies have worked. (Whether they have worked is an entirely different question.)

Or maybe Yglesias means to focus on tactics rather than substance. His concluding point is that his 2006 version of the Democratic Party was better at winning elections than the ideological version he sees today:

“Positioning themselves as a kind of big tent catchall alternative to [the post-Reagan, ideologically rigid Republicans] worked very well for Democrats across the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. Their ongoing reinvention as a more ideological party has coincided — not entirely coincidentally — with a period of weakness in down-ballot races, especially in midterm elections where turnout by young people is pathetically low.”

But again, I think this is just wrong. The Democrats won in 2006 because Bush was unpopular and they won in 2008 because the world was collapsing. They have not reinvented themselves in a more ideological form—see the chart above—and they have done poorly beginning in 2010 because of the rise of the Tea Party and ideologically extreme big money, particularly on the state level. Generic Democrats remain more popular than generic Republicans. Democrats get fewer House seats than their popular vote totals would warrant because of state-level gerrymandering; and that gerrymandering exists because right-wing Republicans, backed by extremist billionaires, have taken over state legislatures. If Republicans had managed to nominate anyone remotely plausible as president, they would be on the verge of a complete sweep in November (legislative, executive, and, thanks to playing hardball with Merrick Garland, judicial). In short, the real story of the Democratic Party is that it has more or less stayed the same, but it has been overwhelmed by ideological rigidity backed by lots and lots of money.

Unfortunately, Yglesias’s advice to Democrats is to continue pitching that big tent, chasing moderates, and backing away from any positions that would actually excite young people or attract ideologically minded donors. The irony is that we have a blueprint for political success staring us in the face: become more ideologically rigid, shift the Overton window as far as you can (dragging the other side with you), prevent your opponents from accomplishing anything, gradually take over all the branches of government, and use those branches to consolidate your power.

Democrats may not be able to completely follow that blueprint, because our positions tend to be less attractive to billionaires (which is why electoral reform is, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters). But the big tent strategy only works when the Republicans shoot themselves in the foot (see Bush, George W.), and even then it just gives us a filibuster-prone majority that changes little in the long term and only lasts for two years (see the 1993 and 2009 Congresses). We need more ideology, not less. Because what we’re doing isn’t working.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via RT: Julian Assange says Wikileaks will have "a very big year" as it will publish enough new information about Hillary Clinton to indict her. In an ITV interview about the Democratic presidential candidate, Assange said, "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication." As it stands, about 32,000 emails from Clinton's private server have been leaked by Wikileaks. Assange has yet to comment on how many new emails will be released or when they will be published. While he thinks there will be enough to indict Clinton, he doesn't think it will happen under Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He does think "the FBI can push for concessions from the new Clinton government in exchange for its lack of indictment." Specifically, Assange revealed the leaked emails show that she overrode the Pentagon's reluctance to overthrow sovereign Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and that "they predicted the post-war outcome would be what it is, which is ISIS taking over the country." Clinton's email controversy came to light in 2013 after a hacker named Guccifer breached her personal server.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A wave of knife attacks on Israelis continued on Tuesday, as a Palestinian man, suspected of killing an American tourist and stabbing at least nine others, was shot and killed by police officers near the port of Jaffa.

A Dutch journalist, Olaf Koens, happened to be near the scene of the attack and documented the immediate aftermath.

Plassen bloed langs de boulevard pic.twitter.com/NLoW1u1csw

— Olaf Koens (@obk) March 8, 2016

While most local news reports focused on the fate of the victims — including the 28-year-old American who was killed, Taylor Force, a U.S. Army veteran who was studying business at Vanderbilt University — and the fact that the stabbing spree took place just over a mile away from a visiting Vice President Joe Biden, part of the stabbing rampage, and the efforts by the police to subdue the suspect, were captured on video that circulated widely on social networks.

Tragic attack in Jaffa today, taking the life of an American. There is no justification for such acts of terror.

— Vice President Biden (@VP) March 8, 2016

That video, which was recorded in dim light and downloaded from WhatsApp by journalists, is murky at key moments, but it prompted a heated argument online about whether or not it showed the extrajudicial killing of a suspect who was already wounded and lying on the ground.

The first of two clips of the incident, recorded by someone driving past the attack, shows the suspect, identified as Bashar Masalha, a 22-year-old laborer from the West Bank, running along a boulevard, lashing out at drivers stuck in traffic.

That video ends with the suspect being chased down by officers and what sound like 10 distinct gunshots being fired.

A second clip, either filmed by the same witness moments later or another bystander with a similar phone, begins with the suspected attacker lying on the ground, apparently subdued, as two officers train their guns on him.

In the background, as the Israeli journalist Dimi Reider notes, an enraged spectator can be heard urging one of the officers to shoot the suspect in the head.

@MairavZ @RobertMackey Note the smug (as opposed to, say, panicking) voice behind the camera urging cop to "give him one in the head, bro"

— Dimi Reider (@dimireider) March 8, 2016

Near the end of the clip, a shot rings out and another voice can be heard reproaching the officer for firing at the suspect.

To some viewers, like the Palestinian journalist and blogger Jalal Abukhater, that portion of the video is proof that the suspect was executed.

Video of injured Palestinian (immobile, on the ground) being executed in the head by Israeli police officers – Jaffa https://t.co/NVZdzUyfyA

— Jalal (@JalalAK_jojo) March 8, 2016

Enough with the charade of "justice system" within Israel "proper". In Tel Aviv, extra-judicial execution is normal if you're Palestinian.

— Jalal (@JalalAK_jojo) March 8, 2016

While the man’s head did appear to move slightly in the video before the final gunshot, and then not after it, in the absence of an autopsy, it is hard to say if the suspect died from that shot, or the earlier barrage.

The killing of the American tourist and the suspect, and three other Palestinians who died during separate knife and gun attacks on Tuesday, brings the total number of fatalities from the outbreak of violence in the region since October to more than 200. Of those, 28 have been Israeli victims of attacks, two have been Americans, and 119 have been suspected Palestinian attackers. Dozens more Palestinians have been shot and killed at protests.

As the Jerusalem Post reporter Ben Hartman noted on Twitter, not one Israeli police officer has been charged with the use of excessive force for killing any of those Palestinian suspects.

Yes, since this terror wave started, zero for use of excessive force @usabach @RobertMackey @dimireider @MairavZ

— Ben Hartman (@Benhartman) March 8, 2016

The only recent prosecution of that type was of four men, including a soldier and prison guard, who brutally beat and kicked an Eritrean bystander they mistook for a Palestinian attacker following a shooting attack at a bus station in October. The Eritrean migrant, Habtom Zerhom, was crawling away from the gunman along with other bystanders, when a security guard assumed he was an attacker and shot him. As he lay dying, the man was jeered and beaten by a crowd of Israelis, including a uniformed solider who kicked him and a civilian who dropped a bench on his body.

#????
????? ????? ????? ??? ????? ????????? ??????? ???? ??????.pic.twitter.com/1fecTvzOfs

— ???????? (@m7madqubbaj) October 18, 2015

While some Israelis are horrified by such incidents of mob violence, and have raised alarms about a breakdown in the rule of law and a lack of accountability for the police, the country’s government has justified the response by comparing it to a state of war.

After Tuesday’s attacks, Israel’s intelligence minister, Yisrael Katz, told Israeli television, “We are in the midst of a war against ISIS-style Muslim extremist terror.”

“We are in an emergency situation,” he added. “There are murderers here who are motivated by hatred and we cannot allow Jews to continue to get harmed.”

What that might mean for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, or residents of the West Bank who have lived under Israeli military occupation for 49 years, he did not say.

The post Was a Palestinian Suspected of Killing an American in Israel Executed by the Police? appeared first on The Intercept.

A survey of select cities across the U.S. showed that roughly a quarter of individuals and families who needed emergency food and shelter were turned away because of a lack of available resources. The Hunger and Homelessness Survey from the United States Conference of Mayors, released in late December, presented the results of the survey that covered 22 cities for the period from September 2014 to August 2015. The survey found that, because not enough beds were available, emergency shelters in 76% of the survey cities had to turn away homeless families with children. Shelters in 61% of the cities had to turn away unaccompanied individuals.

Other findings from the report include:

• 66% of the survey cities reported an increase in the number of requests for emergency food assistance. Among those requesting assistance, 42% were employed and 23% were elderly.

• Food pantries and emergency kitchens in more than half of the cities reported turning away people because of a lack of resources. In 57% of the cities, the number of times a person or family could visit a food pantry each month had to be cut back.

• 58% of the survey cities reported an increase in the total number of homeless people.

• 65% of the cities expect requests for emergency food assistance to increase next year, yet 59% of the cities expect that resources will remain the same. Officials in half of the cities expect the number of homeless families to increase next year, while only 1 in 5 cities expects to see more resources.

• Low wages, poverty, a lack of affordable housing, and unemployment were all identified as the leading causes of hunger and homelessness.

• City officials called for more jobs with higher wages, including a living wage, more assisted housing, more affordable housing, and an increase in SNAP/food stamps benefits as important actions to take to reduce hunger and homelessness.

The map below, courtesy of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, provides a snapshot of the increases or decreases in total homelessness, family homelessness, and individual homelessness in some of the cities that reported data for the study.

 

The mayors of the 22 participating cities, which include Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Washington, DC, San Antonio and others, serve on the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. In the telephone press conference announcing the report, the Task Force’s co-chair and Santa Barbara Mayor Helene Schneider said, “Until our economy improves for all Americans, programs to combat poverty, hunger, and homelessness will become critical essentials for more and more people. We clearly need a broader policy response from Congress and our federal elected officials to address these issues.”

The Food Research and Action Center’s Legal Director Ellen Vollinger addressed actions that need to be taken, adding

“Addressing hunger and homelessness requires a comprehensive approach, which includes improving jobs, wages, income and strengthening programs like SNAP and child nutrition programs, which serve as the first line of defense against hunger. There are no excuses for leaving hungry and homeless Americans behind.”

We couldn’t agree more.

The post Fact of the Week: Roughly 25 Percent of Demand for Emergency Food Assistance and Shelter Went Unmet in U.S. Cities appeared first on Coalition on Human Needs.

I absolutely do not want this political economy designing brain implants Corrente. Notice how the Financial Times has been cheerily talking about the brain as the next frontier?

Dino impact ‘also destroyed bees’ BBC

So You Know, This Is How to Incubate Baby Cephalopods in a Bottle Atlantic (furzy mouse)

Spray-On Clothing Could Deliver a Suit in a Can Scientific American (Robert M)

Climate report shows security threat Bangkok Post (furzy mouse)

How the Recent H7N9 Bird Flu Outbreak is Affecting Diners’ Peking Roast Duck Appetite Visit Beijing. Lambert: “English-speaking Chinese propagandists impersonate blogging expat Americans in Peking! Hilarity ensues!”

China turning into ‘giant North Korea’, say panda pundits Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph. Yowza. AEP does say he’s just the messenger and has presented accounts that contradict this view.

Abe Says Japan Ready to Counter China’s Power Wall Street Journal

NASA: ‘We Will Have A Mass Shooting On The Moon By 2055’ Onion

Serco chief executive stands down BBC

Unemployment drops as Spain’s economy begins to beat recessionRaw Story Carol B: “Oh, joy, great news from Spain! Can you believe this shit?” Yanis Varoufakis had a great line, something to the effect that the patient who is starving has his vital signs flatten right before death.

How the Sunni-Shia schism is dividing the world Independent (furzy mouse)

Angry Over Syrian War, Saudis Fault U.S. Policy New York Times

Big Brother is Watching You Watch:

U.S. Tells Suspect It Used NSA Surveillance in Criminal Case Wall Street Journal

Victory for tech giants on EU data laws Financial Times

Want to know who’s spying on you online? There’s an app for that ZDNet

UK spy agency feared ‘a damaging public debate’ Guardian

Obamacare Launch

White House Expects Health-Law Website to Be Fixed by End of November Wall Street Journal

Wait for it… RiverDaughter (Carol B)

Tea Party Confederate Secessionists are Finally Crawling out of Closet Daily Kos

Ted Cruz Is an Amateur Bloomberg

The Powerful Pornography of the Gun Fetish TruthOut (furzy mouse)

Pollster Trend Flickr (furzy mouse)

Both sides agree: No major budget deal foreseen Associated Press. Ah, but that’s because Obama has put chained CPI (which cuts Social Security over time) in his proposal. So there is a Grand Bargain in the making, but on a stealth basis, so the grannies won’t take to the street

Prisoners of Profit Huffington Post (Carol B)

Valley Grove Home Destroyed Wheeling News-Register (Barbara B)

Housing Regulator Announces $5.1 Billion Settlement With J.P. Morgan Wall Street Journal

Citigroup Selling Mortgage Servicing Rights as Banks Retreat Bloomberg

New Empirical Paper on Home Mortgage Foreclosure and Bankruptcy Melissa Jacoby, Credit Slips

Executive At Center Of Bank Of America Mortgage Fraud Case Now Working For JPMorgan Chase DSWright, Firedoglake (Carol B)

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Legalizes Corporate Rights Prevailing Over Human Rights TruthOut

Selling to each other impossible as worldwide trade diminishes Futures

Let Them Eat MOOCs Gianpiero Petriglieri, Harvard Business Review

5 ways sexual assault is really about entitlement Salon

The Politics of Sociopathic Narcissism CounterPunch (Carol B)

Primary Accumulation: The Creation of a class of people who will work for wages Monthly Review (Paul Tioxon). Marx is fashionable!

Can Marx save capitalism? Financial Times

Antidote du jour (furzy mouse):

Genetically modified alfalfa confirmed in Washington test sample OregonLive (furzy mouse)

Promising vaccine candidate could lead to a definitive cure for HIV Gizmag

No One Has to Tweet American Prospect. Actually say the reverse. I hate Twitter, even though I use it a bit. Newspeak. The last thing our culture needs is more rapid reaction, lower content media.

The REAL Fukushima Danger George Washington

A Campaign in Germany With Influence Beyond New York Times

Clifford Chance trainee lawyer faces sack after describing his work as ‘f***ing people over for money’ Independent (Chuck L). FYI, Clifford Chance is top drawer, like Davis Polk here.

Mexico hit by severe dual storms BBC

Syria:

Plan to rid Syria of stockpile poses new challenges Washington Post

Syrian Chemical Weapons Agreement Faces Major Obstacles Bloomberg

U.S., Russia agree on Syria weapons, Obama says force still option Reuters

Syria weapons deal averts US military move for now Associated Press

Putin eyes Obama’s Iran file Asia Times. Important.

US Negotiating Position in Lavrov-Kerry Deal Depends on Expansive Commander-in-Chief Claims Marcy Wheeler

Big Brother is Watching You Watch:

Fisa judge: Snowden’s NSA disclosures triggered important spying debate Guardian

Reporter talks about what it was like working with Snowden ars technica (Chuck L)

Report: Medical Examiner Shiping Bao Claims George Zimmerman Shot Trayvon Martin In The Back NewsOne. From what I can tell, this story is still languishing in alternative media.

Mississippi sitting on $872 million of Katrina funds Daily Kos (furzy mouse)

AFL-CIO to partner with the Sierra Club, other “progressive” groups? Corrente

Oakland, reeling from gun violence, aims for unprecedented solution Los Angeles Times

Heartless: Nevada Dumps 1,500 Mental Patients Via One-Way Greyhound Ticket to California Alternet (furzy mouse)

John Sculley Just Gave His Most Detailed Account Ever Of How Steve Jobs Got Fired From Apple Forbes

Factory Rebirth Fizzles in U.S. as Work Shipped Overseas Bloomberg. I was really hopeful about reshoring…

Immigrants lacking papers work legally — as their own bosses Los Angeles Times

Trade and innovation in services VoxEU

The Post-Lecture Classroom: How Will Students Fare? Atlantic (furzy mouse). Lambert: “Ugh. A Dean does a study funded by a technology company. This has the stench of corruption.”

After a Financial Flood, Pipes Are Still Broken Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times

SEC denies rejecting settlement over money fund that ‘broke the buck’ Reuters

Wall St. Exploits Ethanol Credits, and Prices Spike New York Times

This National Journal Cover On Larry Summers Is Not Subtle Clusterstock

Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image AddictingInfo (Carol B)

Antidote du jour. Furzy mouse writes that this horse, Akhal-Teke from Turkmenistan, is has been declared to be the world’s most beautiful horse, but I have no idea how that was determined.

Honoring Dr. King’s Call for a Job Guarantee Program

By Fadhel Kaboub

Fifty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Yes, jobs!

For the civil rights leaders, the fight for justice was not limited to providing equal voting rights for all Americans and abstaining from discriminatory practices against African Americans. A federally funded Job Guarantee program was a central theme articulated by Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin (the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and one of this year’s recipients (posthumously) of the Presidential Medal of Freedom).

Mathew Forstater’s work has frequently reminded economists and policymakers of our failure to address structural unemployment and to ensure a useful and productive employment opportunity for anyone who is ready, willing, and able to work.

In a 1965 interview, Dr. King said “we must develop a federal program of public works, retraining, and jobs for all—so that none, white or black, will have cause to feel threatened. At the present time, thousands of jobs a week are disappearing in the wake of automation and other production efficiency techniques.”

In 1968, he also said “We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work… It would mean creating certain public-service jobs.”

Rustin was very clear in 1968 when he wrote: “The government becomes the employer of first and last resort for the hardcore poor…Neither individuals nor the private sector of the economy has, or can take, responsibility for full employment in American society. This is the responsibility of all segments of the society and thus, finally, of the government.”

The details of this Job Guarantee plan have been worked out nearly five decades ago by the A. Philip Randolph Institute in the “Freedom Budget” of 1966. Needless to say, this plan has enjoyed wide support from NEP economists working in the Minsky tradition.

Unfortunately, mainstream economists have been successful in spreading their deficit phobia in Washington and have kept the U.S. from implementing one of the most socially and economically transformative policies since the New Deal program. The so-called “sound finance” advocates (deficit hawks and deficit doves) fail to understand the meaning of financial sovereignty, recognize the difference between currency issuer and currency users, and accept the logical implications of the sectoral balance analysis.

Five years after the Great Recession, the U.S. Congress has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on market-friendly, supply side, incentive-driven policies that have failed to put a dent on unemployment, and the Fed has poured more than $29 trillion dollars to bailout Wall Street. Yet, an effective Job Guarantee program has been ignored for five decades for the same old excuses (it is too expensive, wasteful, inefficient, inflationary, etc.), which have been fully refuted by the NEP community.

In this recent paper, I put together a cost estimation for a Job Guarantee (JG) program that would employ 23.4 million underemployed individuals (those who are officially unemployed, the margin­ally attached to the labor force, and the involuntary part-time workers).

I proposed a three-tier JG wage structure such that skilled workers earn $21/hour, semi-skilled workers earn $18/hour, and unskilled workers earn $15/hour. Additionally, JG workers would receive an annual benefits package of $10,000.

For the sake of argument, I assumed that the 23.4 million people in the JG program are working 40 hours/week even though not all JG work­ers will opt for full-time employment.

Adding another $50 billion to account for program material costs, and assuming that the unemployment pool is evenly divided between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers, I find that the net annual cost of the program is only $593.8 billion or 3.93 percent of GDP.

That is less than $600 billion a year to end unemployment, reduce unemployment-related social costs (mental health, suicide, family breakdown, crime, incarceration, etc.), and bring tangible hope to economically disadvantaged communities.

Now, is there anybody in Washington today who has the courage to truly honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph; not with medals, flags, postal stamps, and endless speeches, but with real action, a Job Guarantee program?

Those of us advocating for social justice as workers, teachers, journalists, lawyers, engineers, and citizens from all walks of life must continue building this social movement to guarantee productive employment for all.

 

Dr. Fadhel Kaboub is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Denison University (OH) and a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute (NY) and the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (MO). His research focuses on job creation programs, monetary theory and policy, and the political economy of the Middle East. For more on his work, visit www.kaboub.com

Honoring Dr. King’s Call for a Job Guarantee Program

I’ve long wanted a font based on my own hand. The easiest, cheapest and quickest way is MyScriptFont. To get my personal script, I wrote out an alphabet on their printed-out template (block letters only, no cursive), scanned the sheet and uploaded it, and then installed the scaleable font they handed back. It’s free. Takes only minutes.

Once I had my handprinting font, I figured I could quickly make other homemade fonts. It’s a quick cheap way to make any kind of unique hand-drawn font you want.

-- KK

MyScriptFont
Free, donations accepted

Sample Excerpts:

Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality

By Michael Hoexter

The recent re-entry of the Obama Administration into public discussions and advocacy for climate change action has been a mixed blessing for the climate action movement.  On the one hand, President Obama possesses the (U.S.) bully pulpit as President and thus can broadcast messages, which can be heard around the country and the world.  Furthermore he leads the executive branch of the US federal government, where his Administration can enforce existing regulations, negotiate international business and political relationships, and set climate and energy targets for the functioning of the federal government’s internal operations.  Indications that the US President personally is concerned about climate and assigns it a medium or high priority would, one would assume, make more likely real policy and executive actions, not just speeches.  Against the background of relative US government inaction on climate change over the past two and a half decades, the decision to bring the climate issue out of the shadows in the beginning of his last term in office and his June 25^th speech would under most circumstances be viewed as a net “win” for climate action and the climate movement, no matter what the exact content of his policy prescriptions.

On the other hand, Obama has had a now long history of attracting the electoral or moral support of, and then frustrating or working against, reform and progressive movements.  In numerous policy arenas including climate, after exciting “hope” that change was imminent, Obama has supported corporate friendly actions by government often against the public interest.  In numerous speeches, Obama has reinforced in a seemingly self-defeating manner, the deficit hawk creed that the US government is running out of money.  His signature reform, the Affordable Care Act, attempts to extend health coverage by institutionalizing the roles of large profit-minded corporations within the already excessively expensive and profit-oriented American healthcare system.  Despite a few critical remarks directed at Wall Street, the Obama Administration has been a steadfast friend to the bloated FIRE sector of the economy, favoring mere cosmetic reforms of the banking and financial system, the industry that blew up the world economy in 2007-2008.  He has as well reinforced the covert war-fighting and surveillance capacities of the US government, belying his image in some (deluded) quarters as a “liberal” or someone who would be expected to care about civil liberties.

Obama’s climate speech on the 25^th and the policy prescriptions accompanying it stoked in equal measure, the first idea that Obama is an ultra-timid liberal/progressive genuinely concerned about his legacy or, alternatively, that Obama is just playing another game with those who actually care about the content of policy as it impacts real people, the real economy and the environment.

Supporting the “timid progressive” thesis, Obama talked on June 25^th, seemingly with sincerity, of the generational and moral imperative associated with climate change.  He displayed a more than adequate intellectual understanding of the history of the greenhouse effect and the discovery of climate change. He said that he refused “to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing”.  In a message echoed for the several months leading up to the speech by the successor to Obama’s campaign vehicle Organization for Action, Obama made fun of climate change deniers in Congress (“we don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society”) seemingly pointing the finger once again at them as the chief roadblock to climate action.  In a surprise within the speech, Obama addressed the Keystone pipeline issuing saying that it would be approved only if it did not “significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution.”  At one point towards the end of the speech he, in “movement” call-and-response fashion, called upon people to “invest, divest”, seemingly giving Presidential approval to 350.org’s fossil fuel divestment program.  The general tone of the speech was then in marked contrast to the usual disregard with which Obama has treated those to his “left” in his previous four and a half years in office.

However there was also adequate support for the hypothesis that Obama’s speech was the next, cunning strategic play to co-opt climate action rhetoric and policy for the oil and gas industry.  Obama is well aware of a mounting consensus ranging from “centrists” to the left end of the spectrum that the Keystone XL pipeline would be a monumental step against a sound climate policy.  The growing movements against various unconventional fossil fuel sources and extraction technologies cannot have escaped his notice, even if he sees them as a hindrance to his or his patrons’ plans.  Still, Obama’s announced policy prescriptions on energy and climate seem to rely almost exclusively on a transition from coal to natural gas, as the primary (source) energy upon which the modern economy would be based.  Much of the natural gas that Obama’s energy plan/rhetoric depends upon would be natural gas from hydraulic fracturing or fracking, with its attendant local environmental damage and fugitive methane leakage.

Natural gas system leakage of greater than 2.8%, which is a matter of course in the extraction and distribution of natural gas, will more than negate any positive climate impacts of transitioning from coal to natural gas; the marginal benefit of switching from coal to natural gas only would occur if greater than 97-98% of the fuel extracted from the ground is transformed into carbon dioxide upon combustion.  The reason for this result is that uncombusted methane is a 72 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide within the first 20 years of its release into the atmosphere.  The calculation of supposed reductions in emissions and net social benefit that would come from switching from coal to natural gas would then have to ignore methane leakage as well as wholesale damages to communities and eco-systems from fracking. These non greenhouse damages include overuse of the local fresh water supply for the purposes of fracking and damage to the water table from inevitable leakage of methane and fracking waste fluids.

In these beliefs about natural gas as a “bridge” fuel, Obama has unfortunately been backed by a segment of the environmental and policy community that believes or wants desperately to believe that fracked natural gas is cleaner and otherwise preferable to coal.  Obama may be just acting the role of the natural gas industry lobbyist or may believe, along with this credulous and/or corrupted sector of the environmental and policy community, that there must be fossil fuel “bridge” to the radically different energy and transport system we will need which would generate net zero carbon emissions.

Carbon Gradualism, Born of Neoclassical Economics

The discovery of anthropogenic global warming as a well-supported scientific theory and ongoing process occurred in the 1980’s within the climate science community but it was only in the 1990’s that a significant segment of the international policy community came to realize that action was required in stopping or slowing global warming and addressing its impacts.  Many of the world’s leaders or high level bureaucrats in environmental ministries at around the time of the UN’s Earth Summit in 1992 concluded that some policy with regard to carbon emissions would be necessary for human civilization to be sustainable over the longer term.  Furthermore the issue of only a small fraction of humanity, located for the most part in developed nations, that was using up the carbon buffering capacity of the atmosphere and oceans in pursuit of its own benefit, became a central dynamic of the international politics of climate change.

The 1990’s were also a time when the neoliberal worldview, based on a blend of neoclassical and Austrian economics, became fully consolidated as the dominant understanding of human society among political elites.  With the collapse of Soviet Communism and the embrace of state-led capitalist development by the People’s Republic of China, as well as the growing dominance of finance in the developed capitalist world, the “market” became both the ideal and the assumed encompassing reality of society, the combination of an aspirational goal and a natural fact.  Within neoliberal ideology, people were thought to naturally and exclusively “truck and barter” with each other to maximize their individual “utility” and respond in their behavior only to price differentials or their equivalent as a guide to this supposedly all-encompassing drive towards utility maximization.  The problem with Communism, it was thought, was that these natural commercial impulses were suppressed by government.  Furthermore, financial markets were believed, conveniently, to be the expression of the same sort of natural commercial impulse, efficiently allocating financial resources according to the real requirements of the economy, and whose outsized profits were a reflection of the value they delivered.  The nominally “left” parties, such as the Labour and Democratic Parties, in the developed world became convinced of the market’s power or inevitability and became as well political exponents of financialization of the economy and objects of political patronage by the FIRE industry. 

In reflection of the dominant trends in economics and economic policy of that era, the central policy instrument which the international community arrived at to combat climate change was an offspring of the neoliberal worldview, itself based on the assumptions of Austrian and neoclassical economics.  The Kyoto protocol which became the consensus instrument within the UN to slow warming is anchored in a carbon pricing system that is administered and regulated via permit trading market, a so-called cap and trade system.  The idea was that governments would set a quantity cap on the amount of carbon emissions and then sell the permits to emit up to that amount of carbon into a market.  In addition, less developed countries could sell offsets to the higher emitting countries, enabling the most “cost-effective” emissions cuts to happen first, often via the purchase of these offsets from less developed countries.

The only mainstream idea that has been discussed as an alternative to cap and trade, a carbon taxation system, shares with cap and trade a similar fundamental model of the economy and how to wring out or replace carbon emitting activities within the economy.  Both a carbon tax and cap and trade take the task of social transformation as one that is a step-wise evolutionary transformation of the energy and transport systems, via progressively throttling demand for fossil fuels via increased pricing while, it is implied, increasing demand for non-fossil, non-emitting or low-emitting alternatives.  While in the cap and trade the price is a secondary outcome of both the quantity allotments by government and then the trading market for permits and offsets, the idea behind cap and trade is that high emitters will be disadvantaged in the marketplace by having to pass on the increased costs of permits or higher carbon taxation on to buyers or from diminished output to avoid emitting over the cap.

The engine of transformation and energy innovation is in both cases the consumption and entrepreneurial activities of market participants spurred on by increases and decreases in demand brought on by the carbon price.  Public sector or private sector “entrepreneurs” will supposedly over time will invent solutions that reduce carbon emissions, as the price of carbon goes up and/or the quantity of permitted emissions goes down.  The idea is that successive generations of technology will be invented that gradually approach the zero-carbon bound or dip into carbon negativity, all inspired by calculations of monetary gain and loss by entrepreneurs and private sector actors in the market.  The carbon pricing systems both share a view of governments as “herders” of the market and driving market participants (the “herd”) towards lower carbon activities and away from higher carbon activities.

While a carbon price is an inevitability in a carbon constrained world, the belief among policymakers and pundits that the carbon price itself is the engine of change is an outgrowth of erroneous assumptions about political and social reality more generally as well as the economic realities of technological systems, energy innovation and early deployment of energy–using technologies.  The notion that markets and entrepreneurial activity will deliver a transformation of the energy and transport system is an idea that lives only in the fact-free world of neoclassical economic theory or unrealistic and/or dishonest policy advocacy derived from that theory.

Natural Gas as a Carbon Gradualist Fantasy

The carbon gradualist ideal contained within the idea of carbon pricing as the leading edge of energy transformation is not simply born out of too-studious acceptance of neoclassical economics’ worldview but also out of the fantasy of an non-disruptive, non-wrenching transition from a fossil fuel run economy to one that is run entirely on renewable energy and perhaps some as yet undiscovered nuclear energy.  Politicians and political actors are not eager to join the fight against the fossil fuel industry as well as confronting our societies’ fossil fuel and “cheap” energy addiction overall.   The notion that there must exist a gradual transition away from fossil fuels is preferable to a sharp turning away from them because of the consequence that political leaders would have to stage a bitter fight with fossil fuel interests, and would need to fight to assume, in most cases, complete regulatory control over the fossil fuel industry.

It is in this context that the notion of there being a fossil “bridge fuel” and anointing natural gas this status holds a powerful sway in the minds of policy makers.  With (fracked) natural gas and for that matter any number of other unconventional fossil fuel products, a bone can be thrown to the oil and gas industry to keep them at bay, and or to receive patronage from the industry to promote and defend them.   The threat of radically scaling down their operations by regulatory or other means, is deferred or taken off the table.

Also this allows in the area of electrical generation for there to be a temporary maintenance of the industry’s structure as it currently stands.  So-called “thermal” power plants that burn a fossil fuel can be reconfigured from coal or oil to burn natural gas, thereby maintaining the basic infrastructure of the grid intact.  That natural gas, however does not appear out of nowhere, and the source of it is increasingly from hydraulic fracturing of shale formations, so called “fracking”.    Within the vaporous world of neoclassical economics, far from considerations of the contours of the real, physical world, the tendency of economists to “assume a can opener” is evident in not taking into account the systems of interacting parts that make real economies function.  That economists and therefore policymakers would imagine a quick and easy substitution of one input for another is therefore unsurprising but fantasy-based.

While the damages to the land, the politics and welfare of regions and the nation by fracking is being publicized by the journalist/filmmaker Josh Fox and documented by a number of academic researchers, an almost equally appalling spectacle is the shocking credulousness and blindness of government and industry elites in buying the natural gas hype in the first place.  Even if the worst abuses of fracking can be technically remedied, which is unlikely,  not choosing the available zero-carbon emitting alternative, renewable energy generators, incurs enormous opportunity costs, including the inestimable economic value of a livable climate.  One recoils at first from realizing how misled we have been on this front, especially if we include those environmental organizations that have pushed for natural gas conversion.  President Obama, though he in both a rather bizarre and also predictable manner turned his big climate speech with its calls to intergenerational morality into an advertisement for natural gas and fracking, is in tune with a good portion of Washington conventional wisdom in this regard.

To be clear, the construct of “carbon gradualism” is not identical to natural gas advocacy nor is it identical to carbon pricing: one can have carbon pricing without carbon gradualist justification.  Alternatively one can have natural gas advocacy (most often the case) without a carbon gradualist policy orientation.   Carbon gradualism is an implied policy orientation, an embedded assumption in climate policy.  The notion of “carbon gradualism” helps explain the fixity and enthusiasm with which both of these politically popular supposed “solutions” are held aloft as near panaceas for energy and climate challenges.  Because of the political functions as well as the economic justifications for gradualism, we would expect to see politicians and advocates of gradualism having a hard time absorbing information that de-idealizes natural gas and fracking.  The notion of a sharp turn away, a transformation, an “Energiewende” is anathema to the ways they think and or handle themselves politically.  It also works against, in many cases, their own personal economic interests because of the wealth and power of the fossil fuel lobby.

Why Carbon Gradualism is Unrealistic

While carbon gradualist policy measures were conceived over twenty years ago as a non-disruptive solution to global warming (though an effective carbon price would still be somewhat disruptive to the long-term business plans of the fossil fuel industry) the physical climate landscape has literally changed.  Carbon gradualism’s selling point, besides its harmony with neoclassical economic models of how the economy works, was that supposedly it reflected political and economic realism to be a gradualist rather than working immediately to effect an entire energy and transport system-change.  The realism of gradualist approaches turns out to be not a very substantial assumption at all for the following reasons.

1. Time is Short; Shortening the Approach is the Only Choice

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now above 400 parts per million, 12.5% more than the 350 parts per million that was thought to be the upper boundary of carbon dioxide to maintain the Holocene climate, favorable to human civilization.  Carbon emissions on a worldwide basis continue to rise and we are seeing, probably due to already “baked-in” emissions an increase in global temperatures to levels not seen for 3 million years or more.  As predicted by climate scientists decades ago, we are now experiencing freakish weather in many locations around the world with either long, intense droughts or with excessive precipitation leading to record flooding.   We therefore don’t have much time to take a leisurely route to a near-zero or zero-net-carbon society.  We do not have the leisure to experiment and arrive at climate solutions by approximation or by lengthy trial-and-error, as the more the climate is stoked with heat-trapping gases, the more chaotic and disruptive the world will become for human endeavors.

2. Foundations of a Zero Carbon Transport and Energy System are Buildable Now

The shift then to a zero or near-zero carbon transport and energy generation infrastructure is now necessary, rather than building first an intermediate infrastructure that simply emits somewhat less carbon.   For land-based energy and transport needs we have almost all the technological tools we need to go to a zero-carbon emissions system:

1. Zero carbon emissions electricity generators: renewable energy generators like wind, solar, and hydropower (with management of dam reservoir methane).
2. High-voltage DC power lines that allow low-loss long-distance electricity transmission (to balance renewable energy flows with power demand)
3. grid-tied electric trains, trucks, and buses
4. battery electric vehicles that can travel 200-300 miles on a charge
5. battery switching technology that can allow battery electric vehicles unlimited mileage with 90 second refueling.
6. Building or retrofitting buildings to the Passivhaus standard reduces building energy use by anywhere from 55 to 80% in climates with high space conditioning demand.
7. Replacement in many construction applications of steel and concrete with engineered wood products, enables with sustainable forestry, structures to become carbon negative.

3. Building a Merely “Lower” Carbon-Emitting Infrastructure and Policy Regime Locks in the Carbon-Emitting Status Quo

The building of long-lived buildings and power plants in anticipation of a “somewhat-carbon constrained” world installs stakeholders in the carbon-emitting status quo in positions of power and apparent “virtue”.   It also builds long-lived objects that require or at least stimulate demand for fossil fuel inputs.  A carbon pricing scheme that targets “cost-effectiveness” in the short-term will encourage investments in half-measures, like for instance a somewhat more efficient way to use fossil fuels (one example are on-site co-generation facilities that use natural gas).  Installing a combined-cycle natural gas power plant contrasts well with a coal fired power plant but not with a renewable energy-based supergrid (multiple generators producing the required power output).   The cap and trade idea installs the private financial industry in its current bloated form as the pivotal stakeholder in determining how climate change policy is conducted.

4. For a Rapid Transition, Planning and Implementation Today for a Zero-Carbon Infrastructure is Required 

Certain aspects of infrastructure, including urban and land use planning need to be anticipated by policymakers and leaders, rather than policymakers or builders waiting for or calculating the effects of a price signal, which those leaders or their predecessors had anyway designed with a certain set of intentions embedded therein.  Planning can take into account anticipation of needs beyond calculation of risk reward; it draws upon human functions that are generally depreciated by market processes.  Building infrastructure often means disregarding price (often it is not wise to choose the lowest bidder) and focusing on the availability and future of real resources like people and things.  There is here as well a creative component which rightly or wrongly people nowadays are loathe to entrust to government: the exact planning and execution of such a building project could not be decided by plebiscite, though with online voting, alternative choices could probably be vetted and commented upon by the public.    The alternative to transparent government planning is oligarchic planning where government and powerful stakeholders collude to create an outcome favorable for the few.  Carbon gradualism pushes off the day to plan and implement a zero-carbon infrastructure, incentivizing market participants and policymakers to only plan for the medium-term investment horizon and not the longer-term goal.

The Only Realistic Alternative:  Rapid, Planned Transition to a Zero-Carbon Energy System with Price Drivers

As above, for a number of reasons, the only practical path is to build as quickly as possible an infrastructure the use of which does not depend upon carbon-inputs for operation, an endeavor that we can plan and execute starting today in many critical economic sectors. A plan such as this requires statements of intention that are in some way or another ratified by the population that express a commitment to create a sustainable society that doesn’t depend upon fossil inputs. Without this statement of intention, followed by credible actions by government and also by individuals and businesses, a plan cannot be reasonably be put in place and acted upon.  Such statements of intention are particularly important in nations such as the US or Canada, where there is a strong fossil fuel industry, fossil fuel lobby, and large fossil fuel reserves.  There must be an expressed public intention “not” to extract and use fossil fuels and an expressed public intention “to” only use non-carbon emitting energy transformation process within the economy.  This contrast sharply with the notion that the only realistic political stance vis-à-vis the fossil fuel industry, or any industrial lobby for that matter, is to adjust regulations slightly, levy a tax or engage them in a pollution permit trading system.  A forthright intention to “stop” wholesale fossil fuel extraction and use must be in the mix in order to communicate the moral and existential imperative.

The institution of a “gradualist” carbon pricing system is not a substitute for publicly endorsed statements of intention and a plan, as well as the financial operations of a currency-issuing government that can make such a plan credible.  The carbon gradualist fantasy is that somehow the operations of and gyrations within a carbon pricing system would substitute for political and social statements of intention and planning based on those intentions.  What carbon gradualism edits out is the role and operations of government both in the economy and within a polity where ethical values that go beyond the purely economic have weight and consequence.  Within a political and physical framework of these intentions and plans, a carbon pricing system can then play a role in driving market behavior towards the intended zero-carbon outcome.  However, the notion of a “headless” (and heartless) market that somehow cobbles together the zero-carbon energy system by price setting alone, is a fantasy.

The wartime style mobilization required to credibly build such a zero-carbon energy system, rather than being a “pie in the sky” dream, is the only realistic alternative left for our societies and our governments to start on the path to solving multiple co-occurring social and economic problems.  I will address the specifics of relevant policy, politics and economics in future installments.

Politically Fashionable Carbon Gradualism vs. Reality