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U.S. Submits Formal Notice Of Withdrawal From Paris Climate Pact

August 8, 2017 Valerie Volcovici, www.reuters.com , ,
By Valerie Volcovici for Reuters - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department has officially informed the United Nations it will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in a document issued on Friday, but left the door open to re-engaging if the terms improved for the United States. The State Department said in a press release the United States would continue to participate in United Nations climate change meetings during the withdrawal process, which is expected to take at least three years. "The United States supports a balanced approach to climate policy that lowers emissions while promoting economic growth and ensuring energy security," the department said in the release. President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris deal in June, saying the accord would have cost America trillions of dollars, killed jobs, and hindered the oil, gas, coal and manufacturing industries. But he also, at the time, said he would be open to renegotiating the deal, which was agreed by nearly 200 nations over the course of years - drawing ridicule from world and business leaders who said that would be impossible. During a visit last month to Paris to meet French President Emmanuel Macron, the two discussed the deal and Trump told reporters "Something could happen with respect to the Paris accords, let's see what happens."

Mueller Impanels Trump Grand Jury And Issues Subpoenas

August 4, 2017 Elizabeth Preza and David Ferguson, www.rawstory.com www.rawstory.com , , ,
By Elizabeth Preza and David Ferguson for Raw Story - Special counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal reports the grand jury convened in recent weeks and will likely continue for several months, according to two sources familiar with the probe. The move signals Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign has intensified. “This is yet a further sign that there is a long-term, large-scale series of prosecutions being contemplated and being pursued by the special counsel,” Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, explained to the Wall Street Journal. “If there was already a grand jury in Alexandria looking at Flynn, there would be no need to reinvent the wheel for the same guy. This suggests that the investigation is bigger and wider than Flynn, perhaps substantially so.” Mueller was appointed in May by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to oversee the investigation after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from all matters involving Russia. Trump has repeatedly derided Sessions over his recusal, suggesting he would not have appointed him as attorney general had he known ahead of time.

As Sessions Promises Drug War Escalation, Listen To Drug War Prisoners

August 4, 2017 Doran Larson, www.theconversation.com , , , ,
By Doran Larson for The Conversation - Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced a return to a pre-Obama policy of seeking maximum penalties for all drug crimes, including low-level, nonviolent offenses. Criticism from politicians, criminologists, lawyers and others was swift and unambiguous. Based on a discredited belief in a zero-sum relationship between crime and incarceration rates, the thinking behind this policy was called “one-dimensional,” “archaic,” “misguided” and “dumb.” America’s unprecedented attempt to jail its way out of crime long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. Drug trafficking in particular sees a replacement effect: Removing one drug seller simply makes room for another (often accompanied by a violent reshuffling of territories). Excessive incarceration can also damage communities and can actually make an individual more, not less, likely to reoffend. I have been facilitating a writing workshop inside Attica Correctional Facility since 2006. For the past eight years, I have solicited, collected, helped publish and digitally disseminated the first-person writing of incarcerated Americans. Those on the receiving end of the attorney general’s misguided policy will naturally feel his words more deeply than others. The writers among them will be burdened with responsibility to make those feelings known.

Top Official Resigns From Trump EPA With Scathing Letter

August 3, 2017 Ryan Grenoble, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
By Ryan Grenoble for The Huffington Post - In her 40 years working in environmental protection, Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland has confronted all manner of environmental threats. But even she has her limits. Faced with the stark new environmental policies ushered in by President Donald Trump and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, Southerland resigned from the agency Monday, where’d she’d been working as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water. Southerland explained her decision in a farewell letter published Tuesday by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a non-profit group for federal resource professionals. “Today the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth,” she wrote. “The truth is there is NO war on coal, there is NO economic crisis caused by environmental protection, and climate change IS caused by man’s activities.” Southerland joins several other dissenting federal environmental officials who have publicly chastised the Trump administration’s environmental approach, which has been defined thus far largely by reducing federal oversight and overturning landmark Obama-era EPA rulings.

Drug Prosecutions Drop To Historic Lows Under Trump

August 1, 2017 Staff, www.trac.syr.edu ,
By Staff of Trac Reports - Despite widespread concern about an epidemic of opioid abuse, and announcements by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others of stepped of efforts by his department and the Trump administration to address it, federal criminal prosecutions for drug offenses have dropped to historic lows. "This epidemic of opioid abuse is a crisis," Sessions said in remarks at an opioid summit in May. "It's ravaging our communities, bringing crime and violence to our streets and destroying the lives of so many Americans." While acknowledging prevention is ultimately the key, Sessions said that "criminal enforcement is crucial[1]." The latest data from the Justice Department, current through June 2017, show that fewer drug offenders were federally prosecuted over the past 12 months than at any time during the last quarter century. According to the case-by-case records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, during the first five months of the Trump administration (February - June 2017), there were only 8,814 drug offenders federally prosecuted. This represents a drop of 9.0 percent as compared with the 9,687 federal criminal cases prosecuted during February - June 2016.

Trump Appoints Abusive Gitmo General As Chief Of Staff

August 1, 2017 Staff, www.ccrjustice.org , ,
By Staff of CCRJusitce - General Kelly’s aggressive oversight of the illegal military prison at Guantánamo Bay disqualifies him to head the Department of Homeland Security. Presiding over a population of detainees not charged or convicted of crimes, over whom he had maximum custodial control, Kelly treated them with brutality. His response to the detainees’ peaceful hunger strike in 2013 was punitive force-feeding, solitary confinement, and rubber bullets. Furthermore, he sabotaged efforts by the Obama administration to resettle detainees, consistently undermining the will of his commander in chief. His temperament and actions make him unfit to lead an agency that currently holds tens of thousands of immigrants, including many fleeing violence and many in long-term indefinite detention. Kelly’s recent vow to end “political correctness” in U.S. national security policy is a thinly veiled endorsement of policies and practices that are illegal and immoral, including torture and racial and religious profiling. His statement is a clear warning sign, and the Senate must reject his nomination to preserve and protect the rule of law.

Amtrak’s $630m Trump Budget Cut Could Derail Service In 220 US Cities

August 1, 2017 Tom Dart, www.theguardian.com , ,
By Tom Dart for The Guardian - The routes have names that evoke glorious Americana and the frontier spirit: the Empire Builder, the Silver Meteor, the Sunset Limited, the Texas Eagle, the Coast Starlight and the California Zephyr. But a president who ran on a nostalgic promise to “make America great again” appears to have little interest in reviving once mighty railroads that stood as symbols of American capitalist ambition in the era of the robber barons. While he has touted a $1tn investment plan for America’s infrastructure – which so far shows few signs of materialising – the president’s proposed budget included $630m in cuts for Amtrak that would devastate long-distance services. An advocacy group, the National Association of Railroad Passengers (Narp), warned the budget “wipes out funding for long-distance train service in over 220 cities and towns and in 23 states that will lose train service completely”. Almost all those states are in the middle of the country and voted for Trump. Most of the stations said to be at risk are in rural areas.

‘How Can You Work … For A President That Undermines Your Work?’

July 31, 2017 Mattathias Schwartz, www.propublica.org , ,
By Mattathias Schwartz for Pro Publica - Last week, Dan Coats, the former senator from Indiana and current head of the U.S. intelligence community, was interviewed by NBC’s Lester Holt in front of a live audience at the Aspen Security Forum, a gathering where diplomats, journalists and top U.S. officials mingle with business executives in between livestreamed panel discussions on world affairs. (The hourlong discussion was posted on YouTube.) ProPublica has obtained internal talking points, apparently written by one of Coats’ aides, anticipating questions that Holt was likely to ask. They offer a window into the euphemisms and evasions necessary to handle a pressing issue for Coats: how to lead the intelligence community at a time when the president has insulted it on Twitter and denigrated its work while questions about Russian influence consume ever more time and attention in Washington. Sixteen of the 26 questions addressed by the talking points concerned internal White House politics, the Russia investigation, or the president himself. One question put the challenges facing Coats this way: “How can you work as DNI for a president that undermines your work?”

#OutragedAndUnafraid: Undocumented Youth Confront Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda

July 27, 2017 Jake Johnson, www.commondreams.org , ,
By Jake Johnson for Common Dreams - "For the last 20 years, Republicans and Democrats have failed to deliver on promise after promise to the immigrant community. We will not put our trust in them. We are putting our faith in our people." As the Trump administration continues to take aim at sanctuary cities and carry out a "draconian" immigration agenda that has led to a large spike in detentions, undocumented youth immigrants and activists took to the streets of Austin, Texas, on Wednesday to both demand that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) be kept in place and to "pledge their renewed commitment to winning permanent protection, dignity, and respect for all eleven million undocumented immigrants." In a statement, Cosecha organizers said that Wednesday's actions were meant to call attention to the fact that Texas "leads the country in mass deportations and recently passed SB4, the most anti-immigrant statewide law."Wednesday marks the first time undocumented youth have carried out a day of civil disobedience of this magnitude since President Donald Trump took office, according to Movimiento Cosecha, the group that organized the effort.

Trump Administration Makes Key Decision That Threatens Water Supply Of Millions

July 25, 2017 Reynard Loki, www.alternet.org ,
By Reynard Loki for AlterNet - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly issuing a proposed rule to undo the Clean Water Rule that was enacted in May 2015, under President Obama’s last term. The rule protects the water supply for more than 117 million Americans. Also known as the Waters of the United States (WOTUS), the Clean Water Rule puts limits on pollution in the wetlands, rivers and streams that feed the nation's larger waterways. Those limits are essential for protecting the safety of the drinking water on which millions of American rely. The rule also safeguards those waters for swimming, fishing and other activities. In addition, the rule helps to maintain the biological integrity of those smaller waterways, in turn protecting wildlife by keeping aquatic ecosystems healthy. When the rule was issued, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers resolved decades of legal debate among politicians, environmentalists and public health advocates, saying that smaller waterways across the nations—tens of millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of streams—actually qualify for legal protection under the Clean Water Act, the primary federal law that protects communities and ecosystems from water pollution.

The Torture-Friendly Trump Administration

July 22, 2017 Medea Benjamin, www.otherwords.org ,
By Medea Benjamin for Other Words - Only stupid people say torture works — and one of them is sitting in the White House. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Donald Trump is pro-torture. He said on the campaign trail he’d approve waterboarding “in a heartbeat,” plus “a hell of a lot worse.” He added: “Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.” There are certainly a lot of stupid people then, because everyone from interrogators to researchers have repeatedly concluded that torture doesn’t work. People will say whatever you want them to say to make the pain stop, making torture not only inhumane but also bad for intelligence. A 2009 Senate Armed Services Committee review concluded that torture “damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.” That’s why the Senate voted in 2015 to turn the presidential ban on torture into official law. To his credit, Trump did water down his original support for torture, allowing Defense Secretary James Mattis — who opposes torture — to override him. But if the Trump administration is now opposed to torture, why are they nominating the architects of America’s torture fiasco to key posts?

Trumpcare Is Dead. ‘Single Payer Is The Only Real Answer’

July 21, 2017 Zaid Jilani, www.theintercept.com , , ,
By Zaid Jilani for The Intercept - THANKS TO A PAIR of defections from more GOP senators late yesterday, the Republican plan to repeal and replace or simply repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead — for now. But the health care status quo is far from popular, with 57 percent of Americans telling Gallup pollsters in March that they “personally worry” a “great deal” about health care costs. Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well. One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry. Fine, now 91, wrote to The Intercept recently to explain that Medicare was never intended to cover only the elderly population, and that expanding it to everyone was a goal that its architects long campaigned for. “Three years after the enactment of Medicare, in Dec. 1968, a Committee of 100 leading Americans was formed to campaign for single payer National Heath Insurance.

Outraged By FERC “Abuses,” Communities Demand Senators Block Trump Nominees

July 21, 2017 Anne Meador, www.dcmediagroup.us ,
By Anne Meador for DC Media Group - Opponents to the GOP healthcare plan weren’t the only ones paying visits to U.S. Senators on Capitol Hill today. Fracking and gas pipelines are also proving to be contentious issues leading up to a key vote on confirmations to a federal agency. Communities facing the construction of interstate gas pipelines, compressor stations and storage facilities have been raising a ruckus for several years now about the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The agency has been at a virtual standstill since February when Chairman Norman Bay resigned, leaving too few commissioners to approve major projects. Opponents would like to keep it that way. Environmentalists from organizations including Delaware Riverkeeper Network and Echo Action NH and representatives of communities impacted by gas infrastructure dropped off letters and held meetings with Senators, demanding that they block confirmations of Commissioners to FERC until the agency is reformed. “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is abusing its authority and the law in alarming ways,” says the letter delivered to lawmakers today. “After three decades of FERC’s unaccountable and irresponsible approach to energy development, the trust of the American people has been strained beyond the breaking point.”

Secret Industry Teams Rolling Back Regulations For Trump Admin

July 13, 2017 Robert Faturechi and Danielle Ivory, www.propublica.org ,
By Robert Faturechi for ProPublica and Danielle Ivory for The New York Times - We’ve found many appointees with potential conflicts of interest, including two who might personally profit if particular regulations are undone. This story was co-published with The New York Times. President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations. But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts. Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Renewable Energy Is Becoming So Cheap US Will Meet Paris Commitments

July 11, 2017 Zoë Schlanger, www.qz.com , , , ,
By Zoë Schlanger for Quartz - Research analysts at Morgan Stanley believe that renewable energy like solar and wind power are hurtling towards a level of ubiquity where not even politics can hinder them. Renewable energy is simply becoming the cheapest option, fast. Basic economics, the analysts say, suggest that the US will exceed its commitments in the Paris agreement regardless of whether or not president Donald Trump withdraws, as he’s stated he will. “We project that by 2020, renewables will be the cheapest form of new-power generation across the globe,” with the exception of a few countries in Southeast Asia, the Morgan Stanley analysts said in a report published Thursday. “By our forecasts, in most cases favorable renewables economics rather than government policy will be the primary driver of changes to utilities’ carbon emissions levels,” they wrote. “For example, notwithstanding president Trump’s stated intention to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, we expect the US to exceed the Paris commitment of a 26-28% reduction in its 2005-level carbon emissions by 2020.” Globally, the price of solar panels has fallen 50% between 2016 and 2017, they write. And in countries with favorable wind conditions, the costs associated with wind power “can be as low as one-half to one-third that of coal- or natural gas-fired power plants.”
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