Amid concerns that Koch Industries could buy several major U.S. newspapers from Tribune Company, industrial billionaire David Koch was forced to step down as trustee of WNET, New York City’s largest public TV station, after the New Yorker revealed how WNET gave Koch inappropriate influence over its programming. Mr. Koch was floating a seven-figure donation over WNET’s leadership as the station aired a movie that portrayed him as a particularly greedy Manhattan resident.
Sure enough, WNET didn’t wind up receiving David Koch’s hefty donation.

Last Thursday, David Koch submitted his resignation at a WNET Board of Trustees meeting, and Brad Johnson at Forecast the Facts* reports that Koch’s name was scrubbed from WNET’s website several days prior to the resignation. Koch Industries’ public relations website, KochFacts, released a preemptive response to the New Yorker article (which it has now urgently elaborated on), attempting to stifleNew Yorker reporter Jane Mayer and the details of her newest piece. David Koch’s resignation as a WNET Trustee, coupled with telling quotes from WNET president Neal Shapiro and other sources, makes it clear that Koch had too much influence at the decreasingly-public TV station in New York.

The article is a fascinating culmination of two portions of the ongoing legacy of the Koch brothers: their desire to influence media, which is playing out with their company’s bid for the Tribune Company’s eight national daily newspapers, and their attempts to intimidate journalists and silence reporting they consider unfavorable.
Jane Mayer’s epic 2010 profile of the secretive billionaire brothers has left Charles and David Koch firmly positioned in the center stage of politics, and they have cursed her since. In repeated and increasingly desperate attempts to discredit Mayer and ease the impact of her reporting on Koch Industries’ terrible reputation, the company posted her face on the Koch “Facts” website and wrote letters urging the American Society of Magazine Editors to stop considering Mayer’s 2010 article for an award.
The Koch brothers’ attacks on Ms. Mayer provide more examples of how they use their connections to manipulate media (including in Mayer’s new article, which caught Koch spokesperson Melissa Cohlmia in a complete lie).
Following her 2010 expose, Koch Industries was caught trying to fabricate a scandal to take Mayer down. Using the Daily Caller, founded by Koch’s billionaire political ally Foster Friessand run by Tucker Carlson, a senior fellow at the Koch-founded, Koch-funded and Koch-governed Cato Institute, the Kochs tried to get a story placed into the New York Post accusing Mayer of plagiarism. The Post dismissed the idea–and that’s saying something, given the lack of integrity at Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, not to mention FOX News, the collapsed News of the World and other outlets the media mogul owns. (NOTE: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has also expressed interest in Tribune Company’s L.A. Times.)
Greenpeace remains concerned about how the Kochs have already used their media ties to promote denial of climate change science. Beyond the pressing issue of global warming, the implications of media manipulation from Koch Industries spans across issues from education to public employee unions to immigration to healthcare reform.
This is why Greenpeace is working with a growing coalition of unions, media transparency advocates, environmentalists, good government watchdogs and other organizations to oppose Tribune Company’s potential sale of its newspapers to Koch Industries, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and any other politically-charged business interest whose history indicates they would manipulate reporting at Tribune’s papers for political and financial gain.
*Disclosure: Forecast the Facts is one of the groups Greenpeace is working with to oppose Koch Industries’ bid for Tribune Company.

http://www.nationofchange.org/media-manipulators-david-koch-resigns-wnet-trustee-amid-new-yorker-article-1369405651

(This story is the first installment of Truthout’s Fracking Road Trip series on the wide-reaching impacts of the fracking industry.) 

The bluffs rise up gently from the rolling hills and farmlands of Wisconsin’s Chippewa County. For years, the bluffs stood silent as small farming communities grew around them. The bluffs are too steep to farm and most of the trees in the area grow on the tops of bluffs and around their rolling slopes and steep faces. It’s unusually cold for April and trees stand as silhouettes against a layer of snow.

This scene is quickly interrupted at the intersection of two county roads in the small township of Cooks Valley. A large bluff behind a farm has disappeared. The bluff has been blasted, churned up and turned into giant piles of sand. The sand will soon be trucked off to a processing plant, loaded back into trucks or perhaps onto a waiting train and then shipped to oil and gas fields in other states.

The sand will be mixed with water and chemicals and forced deep underground to break up rock and release precious fossils fuels. This isn’t the kind of sand you find at the beach; it’s silica, or “frack sand,” a carcinogenic dust and a key ingredient in the hydraulic fracking process which has facilitated a nationwide natural gas boom and, according to opponents, an ongoing environmental crisis. Silica particles are uniquely shaped and prop open fractures in the underground rock to free the oil or gas.

Cooks Valley may be far from the oil and gas fields, but like the rural neighborhoods in states where fracking rigs and gas pipelines have replaced pastures, the frack industry’s demand for natural resources has pitted neighbor against neighbor and turned this once tight-knit community upside down.

In the Shadow of the Mine

Jane Sonnentag is a busy woman. Several children bounce around her humble kitchen as she holds her youngest child and laughs as she recalls her father advising her not to marry a farmer. She did not take his advice, and now Sonnentag and her husband Louis are raising seven children on their 160-acre farm nestled between the rising bluffs of Cooks Valley. Sonnentag has lived in the area all her life and her family has farmed there for generations. Her farm, she says, is a “little piece of heaven.” But Sonnentag’s farm is not as heavenly as it used to be.

Since 2011, when a massive, out-of-state energy firm won a permit to set up shop in their neighborhood, the Sonnentags have lived in the shadow of a 234-acre frac-sand mine located on the bluffs behind their farm and home. Sonnentag explains that as many as 400 trucks, laden with silica sand or wastewater from a sand-processing plant, may roll past their home in a day. “I’ve got 400 trucks and seven kids and a yard this size … it’s not fun, you know, being by a stop sign, really,” says Sonnentag. “It’s like David verses Goliath, except I don’t have a slingshot.”

For generations, mom-and-pop–sized mines in Wisconsin have supplied silica for a variety of purposes, ranging from water filtration to road paving. But in recent years, the industry has grown exponentially as the fracking boom in other states such as North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania has increased the demand for silica across the country. Big mining and energy companies have swooped into rural communities like the Sonnentag’s to expand existing mines and break ground on massive new ones, turning Wisconsin’s western bluffs into giant piles of sand and its rural towns into centers of sand shipment and processing. There are now 70 active mines operating in Wisconsin, along with dozens of processing facilities. Three mines, each more than 100 acres in size, are currently operating within miles of Sonnentag’s home in Cooks Valley, a small township of less than 1,000 people.

EOG Resources, a massive energy firm and former Enron subsidary (known at the time as Enron Oil and Gas), operates the mine near the Sonnentags’ home. The company’s local office told Truthout to contact its Houston office for comments on the mine and its impacts on nearby farms, but a representative there failed to respond to several inquiries.

When EOG Resources was blasting apart the bluffs, Sonnentag says, the shock would shake her house. Once a blast knocked her to the floor. At times, dust from the mining operations would invade their farm. EOG Resources would dispatch a couple of water trucks every hour to wet down the dust and keep it out of the air, but the effort was “like taking a thimble to a dust bowl.” With dust blowing in the wind and hundreds of trucks passing their house everyday, the Sonnentags became increasingly concerned about their health. “There were not a lot of days we could go outside, because we have two kids who have asthma,” Sonnentag says.

Silica dust is a known carcinogen and has been linked to lung disease and cancer among workers, and the federal government has set limits on silica exposure for the workplace – but has not set limits on public exposure. The frack sand industry in Wisconsin routinely assures the public that airborne silica poses no proven dangers to the public, but without any federal or state regulation of exposure, the industry’s assurances do little to ease Sonnentag’s mind. What if silica is the next asbestos, she wonders? Her family never signed up to be “test dummies.” And what about the water?

Pointing toward the mine, Sonnentag says that EOG Resources is currently trucking wastewater from its sand-processing plant, where the sand is treated with water and chemicals, and dumping it back into the mine. “I always thought my kids would want to live here long after we’re gone, but now I don’t know. There might not be any air to breath and water to drink.”

Regulators Stretched Thin
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) regulates sand mines as “nonmetallic mines,” a class that includes the small gravel pits and limestone mines that have long operated throughout the state. Tom Woletz, the DNR point person on frack sand, tells Truthout that DNR has regulated sand mines in this way for years, but now the frack-sand rush has brought much larger mines to the state. “The fugitive dust, that is a potential problem, and that’s what people are concerned about,” Woletz says.
DNR requires mine operators to monitor silica dust emissions and report them to the state, but DNR officials rarely visit the mines in person. Federal funding requires the agency’s limited staff to focus on major sources of air pollution such as large metallic mines.

“Some of these mines are never going to see a DNR air inspector at all unless there is a complaint,” says Woletz. “We could use more people on the ground to make sure that these people are doing the appropriate things.” A state budget proposal could add two more compliance officers to the DNR staff, and Woletz says DNR could always use more people. But much of the responsibility to keep silica out of the air in rural neighborhoods falls on the industry, he says, and DNR can’t always be there to hold its hand. “There’s some really good [operators] out there, and there’s some that have a ways to go,” he says.

In 2012 alone, the DNR issued violations to at least 15 frack-sand operators in the state, according to state records.

Under state rules, a mine located near a child care center or a neighborhood operates under the same pollution standards as a mine located in the middle of a forest, according to Woletz. In many cases, it’s up to the county or local government to regulate trucking, mine locations and land use. With some residents supporting local measures to protect their homes and farms and other residents eager to cash in on the sand rush, local controversies over sand mine regulation have created brutal divisions in communities that would otherwise be models of Midwestern neighborliness.

“There are family members up in Chippewa County that may never talk to each other again, ever,” Woletz admits.

That’s a familiar story to Sonnentag, who was involved in a local push to regulate the sand mines in Cooks Valley under a local ordinance that was opposed by local landowners, including her neighbors. “Sand has dictated everything in this town … pitted neighbor against neighbor,” she says. The best man at her wedding will no longer talk to her. He wanted to start a mine on his land, Sonnentag says, and saw her family and other supporters of the ordinance as standing in his way.

“It’s unfortunate, because he’s no closer to getting that mine started than I am to becoming a vegetarian,” Sonnentag says with a grin.

A Fractured Community
Sleet is turning the snow to ice outside of Sonnentag’s house, but her kitchen, busy with young children arranging pots and pans on the floor, is warm and cozy. Sonnentag chats with Victoria Trinko, who lives a few miles up the road on a small farm located across the street from a frack sand mine. The two women are discussing the local politics surrounding the ordinance they fought for years to put in place in order to regulate the sand mine operations.

“It’s really split our community apart,” Trinko says.

Earlier that morning, Trinko had returned to her home after volunteering at a Sunday pancake breakfast. She says the turnout was good considering the cold weather and a bit of friendly competition from another pancake breakfast at a local church. She takes a seat in her living room, where she has agreed to be interviewed by Truthout. A picture of her daughter, who is now studying abroad, hangs above the mantle. The conversation quickly turns to sand.

Trinko is the Cooks Valley Board clerk and kept notes on the battle over the ordinance, which was first drawn up and passed in 2008 after residents learned that sand mines might open in the neighborhood. The ordinance addressed noise from blasting, hours of operation, silica dust control and the number of trucks allowed to rumble down the roads.

Landowners who wanted to lease their properties to mining companies or open their own mines quickly hired a lawyer and sued the town to defeat the ordinance. It amounted to a “zoning ordinance” and was not properly filed with the county, they argued, and a local judge agreed.

“So we appealed,” Trinko says, “and that made them all angry.”
What followed was three years of litigation and showdowns in the local town hall. At one point, the town board was accused of embezzlement; at another, the pro-mining landowners tried to take over the board and dismiss Cooks Valley’s village powers, which, under state law, grant the township the authority to pass ordinances.

“It’s gotten really, really nasty,” Trinko says.

Neighbors have sued neighbors, and Trinko herself was sued (along with two board supervisors) over open records laws. Meanwhile, the town board continued to appeal the challenge to the mining ordinance, which eventually landed at the Wisconsin Supreme Court. As clerk, Trinko had been keeping notes throughout the whole fiasco, and eventually, she had to hand them over to the highest court in the state.

“I was very proud of myself, I guess, or satisfied, that my paperwork held up in the [Wisconsin] Supreme Court,” Trinko says with a smile.

In 2012, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed an appeals court decision and ruled in favor of the Town of Cooks Valley, and the township was finally allowed to begin enforcing the regulations it originally passed in 2008. As the battle over the ordinance wove its way through the courts, however, three mines were established in Cooks Valley, including those near the Trinko and Sonnentag farms. To date, the township has only completed the permitting process for one mine under the ordinance. A draft permit prepared by the township for the EOG Resources mine includes mandatory air monitoring and a $112,500 fee to be paid to the Sonnentag family, so they can build a new house, across the street and farther away from the mine’s trucking route.

For Trinko, the matter of sand mining continues to be a big part of daily life. As town clerk, she receives permit notices and posts them in public places such as the local bar. But there are more personal issues as well. In 2011, after the mines began digging into the bluffs, Trinko said she could “chew on dust” when working outside her house. Soon she would have a sore throat, but not the cold that usually accompanies it. She says the symptoms disappear when she travels to visit relatives in other states.

Trinko now believes she has developed asthma from living near the sand mines. She saw a breathing specialist who told her that the breathing problems were related to her living environment, but the specialist refuses to go on the record with reporters due to the ongoing controversy.

Trinko says her daughter is worried the air pollution may be shortening her life, but she wants to stay on her farm. It has been in her family since her father bought it in 1936. Trinko points out the window to a bluff rising beyond the next pasture.
“That bluff … that’s where my dad grew up,” Trinko says. Frack-sand mining and processing continues nearby, and another facility in the area is under development. “It would be very sad to see all the trees disappear. Plus, I am breathing this stuff.”
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/16095-the-mines-that-fracking-built

How much evidence do we need that Gov. Scott Walker’s pro-corporate, anti-government rhetoric adds up to a whole lot of freebies for his cronies and absolutely nothing in terms of actually creating jobs? Not only is Wisconsin 44th in the nation for job creation, we are dead last in the Midwest.

Meanwhile, on May 1, the Legislative Audit Bureau released its scathing audit of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). We already knew Walker’s job-creation agency was grossly mismanaged. The WEDC was slapped by the feds last fall for losing track of millions of taxpayer dollars and failing to track its own loans to businesses, which likewise conveniently forgot to keep up their payments.

Now we learn that the job creators at the WEDC handed out money to companies that didn’t create jobs. On four occasions, the agency gave out “incentives” to companies for the jobs they had created long before they got the awards.

You can’t say the WEDC staff didn’t have fun, though. The Audit Bureau reports that they used taxpayer dollars to buy Badgers tickets and iTunes gift cards and to pay for foreign trips for staff and their family members.

As state Sen. Julie Lassa, who sits on the WEDC board, points out, it’s all part of the way the agency was set up. “WEDC management is shielded from oversight and accountability,” Lassa wrote in an op-ed on the subject for the Tomah Journal.

As board member and Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca put it in a hearing on the audit: “I’ve never served on a board that couldn’t hold the CEO accountable. They’re free to ignore anything the board says. Under the structure we created, they only have to listen to the chairman.”

That chairman, Scott Walker, bold reformer that he is, has asked for a $14 million increase for the WEDC in his budget.

During a committee hearing on the audit last week, Madison Rep. Melissa Sargent was incredulous about the request for more funds. “You’re asking for more money?” she demanded of WEDC executive director Reed Hall. “Are you proud of the direction your agency has brought us?”

Hall not only said he was proud, he suggested that the people who screwed up the facts were the superwonks at the audit bureau, not the party animals at WEDC.

That was too much for several committee members, including Barca. “Excuse my French, but what the hell does that mean?” he said. “I mean, it’s just ridiculous, quite frankly.”

Before the Legislature pours even more tax dollars down the WEDC rat hole, it may ask for some improvements in reporting (WEDC failed to monitor spending for the entire 2011-2012 fiscal year, the audit found), as well as more ethics rules for WEDC staff.

Ironically, Lassa points out, these are some of the same measures the Republicans in the Legislature refused to impose when the Democrats asked at the agency’s inception in 2011.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that an unaccountable quasi-private corporation staffed by business cronies who were there to hand out free cash was not the best way to run things. But good governance in our state has been lost in the fog of rhetoric about how privatizing everything and making Wisconsin “open for business” will magically lead us to prosperity.

Walker got rid of the state’s Commerce Department and replaced it with the WEDC as part of his much-repeated plan to create 250,000 new jobs. And how, you might ask, is that plan working out?

Unless you are one of the lucky WEDC employees or business buddies who got a handout or a loan the state forgot to make you pay back, Walker’s economic policies are not looking great. Pretty soon he will have to answer to the public.

The latest WEDC revelations help explain Wisconsin’s poor performance – Isthmus | The Daily Page.

President Obama has an eerie and alarming ability to detach himself from his own dubious actions.

This character trait was on full display in his speech on Thursday at the National Defense University.

When he talked about the need to shut down Guantanamo, he said: “Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?”

Wise words, but hollow ones.

Hollow, because he could have closed Guantanamo on day one in his first term, as he promised.

Hollow, because even today he could be releasing those prisoners himself, rather than overseeing their force-feeding.

As the great constitutional scholar David Cole notes in the New York Review of Books, “Current law permits the executive branch to waive some of the requirements when the transfer ‘is in the national security interests of the United States.’ Moreover, eighty-six detainees have been ‘cleared for release’ but remain in detention. Fifty-six of them are Yemeni citizens, and it was President Obama, not Congress, who placed their release on hold.”

Similarly, Obama tried to detach himself from his own Justice Department’s grabbing of the phone records of more than 100 AP reporters and the claim by the Justice Department that Fox News’s James Rosen was a “co-conspirator” in violating the Espionage Act of 1917.

“I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds governments accountable,” Obama said.

Then fire Eric Holder, for God’s sake.

But Obama really doesn’t want to do that. Nor does he want to step back from the harsh assault on whistleblowers that he’s had Holder wage, again using the Espionage Act. Obama admitted in his speech that he believes it is necessary “to enforce consequences for those who break the law and breach their commitment to protect classified information.”

Most slippery was Obama on the subject of killing U.S. citizens.

“For the record,” he said, “I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen—with a drone, or a shotgun—without due process.”

But then he justified the assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, without acknowledging that Al-Awlaki received no due process.

Even more shabbily, he neglected to even mention by name the three other American citizens his administration has rubbed out.

Samir Khan, a young editor of a magazine allegedly affiliated with Al Qaeda, was killed by the same drone that struck down Al-Awlaki

A few weeks after they got al-Awlaki and Khan, they bumped off Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki. Obama’s former press secretary, said Abdulrahman should have had “a far more responsible father.”

And now it comes out that they also bumped off Jude Kenan Mohammed, a 23-year-old American citizen who had been radicalized and who had gone to Pakistan.

The Obama Administration doesn’t want to admit that they intentionally killed any U.S. citizen other than Anwar Al-Awlaki because by their own standards, they’re only supposed to kill Al Qaeda members who pose an “imminent” threat.

Now I don’t care how much exercise President Obama wants to get by backpedaling on this issue, the facts remain that he has acted like Tony Soprano in the Oval Office.

And he cannot whisk the corpses of Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Jude Kenan Mohammed under the Oval Office rug.

By the way, these three never received due process, either. So by Obama’s own standard, his Administration violated the Constitution by killing them.

Obama did say some things that were a relief to hear.

It was good of him to say, “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

It was good of him to say that we are not fighting “a boundless ‘global war on terror’ ” but “specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”

It was good of him to say that “we have faced down dangers far greater than Al Qaeda.”

It was good of him to say that he wants to “ultimately repeal” the Authorization for Use of Military Force of September 2001.

It was good of him to say that he is “haunted” by the civilian deaths of non-American citizens who fell victim to our drones, that he understands some of the civil liberties issues that are at stake here at home, and that he is wary of vesting permanent wartime powers in the hands of the President.

All these things are good, as far as they go.

But they don’t go very far.

Not when his policies remain essentially unchanged.

In Drone Speech, Obama Gets Slippery on Killing U.S. Citizens | The Progressive.

The tornado that hit Moore, Okla., on Monday (May 23) killed an estimated two dozen people and caused devastating property damage. Residents had advance warning of the storm, thanks to weather forecasts. But with forced budget cuts in effect, forecasters may not be adequately prepared for future natural disasters.

In March, $85 billion in across-the-board spending cuts, known as the sequester, took effect. The cuts slashed 8.2 percent from the 2013 operating budgets of most federal agencies. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suffered a 7 percent reduction in its fiscal year 2013 budget as a result of sequestration. Thinned-out staffs and under-maintained equipment could hinder the agency’s ability to give timely and accurate weather forecasts, experts say.

“It really highlights the game of chicken we’re playing with the nation’s safety,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society. [Image Gallery: Moore, Okla., Tornado Damage]

Furloughs and cutbacks

Like many government agencies, NOAA is considering implementing agencywide furloughs, or mandatory leave days. The agency has proposed up to four furlough days per employee through Sept. 30, 2013.

“NOAA and the National Weather Service are facing furloughs particularly as we’re entering the hurricane and dry weather seasons,” Shepherd said. National Weather Service (NWS) offices are already short-staffed, and now there’s a hiring freeze, Shepherd said. (Hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and ends on Nov. 30.)

Deputy Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank wrote in a Feb. 8 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee that if the sequester went through, up to 2,600 NOAA employees would be furloughed (by as much as 6.5 days), about 2,700 positions would remain unfilled and there would be about 1,400 fewer contractors.

Sequestration will limit hurricane reconnaissance flights by NOAA aircraft, and the maintenance and operations of the national radar network and weather-monitoring systems, the Capital Weather Gang reported. These could result in longer service outages, such as telecommunications outages, or restrict forecasters’ access to weather data.

“We have to see weather forces the same way as we see National Security,” Shepherd said. “Weather affects lives and property and our economy.”

Under the tightened budget, travel restrictions are preventing weather scientists from attending scientific conferences where they can stay current on the latest forecasting science and interact with the emergency responder community. Dialogue between forecasters and emergency responders is critical, Shepherd said.

Aging equipment

The budget cuts will also make it harder to maintain weather forecasting equipment. Many of the country’s weather satellites are aging and due for replacement. Yesterday (May 23), the GOES-13 satellite (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite), which covers much of eastern North America and the western Atlantic, stopped working. The GOES-14 backup satellite was activated, but if that fails, there is no replacement. NOAA is currently investigating the reason for the failure.

The sequester could delay the production and deployment of two new weather satellites, the GOES-R series, by two to three years, Blank wrote in her letter to Congress. The first two GOES-R satellites are scheduled to launch in 2015 and 2017.

The geosynchronous satellites could go the way of NOAA’s polar-orbiting satellites, whose development is well over-budget and behind schedule.

Failure to replace old satellites could lead to a “satellite gap.” In February, the Government Accountability Office featured a satellite gap in its list of the top 30 challenges facing the federal government.

A gathering storm

The impact of budget cuts on the country’s forecasting systems takes on added urgency in times of severe weather like the Moore tornado.

The NWS’s Norman, Okla., office issued a warning about the tornado 16 minutes before it formed — three minutes more than the average tornado warning time. Forecasters knew several days before the tornado hit that the weather would be bad that day because they had been monitoring the approaching weather system on satellite and radar.

If these services suffer because of reduced personnel or maintenance, the impacts could be dire — not just for predicting tornados, but for hurricanes and other severe weather events as well. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy brought home the seriousness of extreme weather, and NOAA is forecasting an active hurricane season in 2013.

“The sequester impacts are happening now,” Shepherd said. “Unfortunately, it often takes tragedy to wake people up to these dangers.”

http://news.yahoo.com/storm-clouds-ahead-budget-cuts-threaten-severe-weather-210549283.html

The streets are so much darker now, since money for streetlights is rarely available to municipal governments. The national parks began closing down years ago. Some are already being subdivided and sold to the highest bidder. Reports on bridges crumbling or even collapsing are commonplace. The air in city after city hangs brown and heavy (and rates of childhood asthma and other lung diseases have shot up), because funding that would allow the enforcement of clean air standards by the Environmental Protection Agency is a distant memory. Public education has been cut to the bone, making good schools a luxury and, according to the Department of Education, two of every five students won’t graduate from high school.

It’s 2023 — and this is America 10 years after the first across-the-board federal budget cuts known as sequestration went into effect.  They went on for a decade, making no exception for effective programs vital to America’s economic health that were already underfunded, like job training and infrastructure repairs. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Traveling back in time to 2013 — at the moment the sequester cuts began — no one knew what their impact would be, although nearly everyone across the political spectrum agreed that it would be bad. As it happened, the first signs of the unraveling which would, a decade later, leave the United States a third-world country, could be detected surprisingly quickly, only three months after the cuts began. In that brief time, a few government agencies, like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), after an uproar over flight delays, requested — and won — special relief.  Naturally, the Department of Defense, with a mere $568 billion to burn in its 2013 budget, also joined this elite list. On the other hand, critical spending for education, environmental protection, and scientific research was not spared, and in many communities the effect was felt remarkably soon.

Robust public investment had been a key to U.S. prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post-World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.

Austerity Fever

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, a set of manufactured arguments for “austerity,” which had been gaining traction for decades, captured the national imagination. In 2011-2012, a Congress that seemed capable of doing little else passed trillions of dollars of what was then called “deficit reduction.” Sequestration was a strange and special case of this particular disease.  These across-the-board cuts, instituted in August 2011 and set to kick in on January 2, 2013, were meant to be a storm cloud hanging over Congress. Sequestration was never intended to take effect, but only to force lawmakers to listen to reason — to craft a less terrible plan to reduce deficits by a wholly arbitrary $1.2 trillion over 10 years. As is now common knowledge, they didn’t come to their senses and sequestration did go into effect. Then, although Congress could have cancelled the cuts at any moment, the country never turned back.

It wasn’t that cutting federal spending at those levels would necessarily have been devastating in 2013, though in an already weakened economy any cutbacks would have hurt. Rather, sequestration proved particularly corrosive from the start because all types of public spending — from grants for renewable energy research and disadvantaged public schools to HIV testing — were to be gutted equally, as if all of it were just fat to be trimmed. Even monitoring systems for possible natural disasters like river flooding or animminent volcanic eruption began to be shut down.  Over time the cuts would be vast: $85 billion in the first year and $110 billion in each year after that, for more than $1 trillion in cuts over a decade on top of other reductions already in place.

Once lawmakers wrote sequestration into law they had more than a year to wise up. Yet they did nothing to draft an alternate plan and didn’t even start pointing out the havoc-to-come until just weeks before the deadline. Then they gave themselves a couple more months — until March 1, 2013 — to work out a deal, which they didn’t.  All this is, of course, ancient history, but even a decade later, the record of folly is worth reviewing.

If you remember, they tweeted while Rome burned. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for instance, sent out dozens of tweets to say Democrats were responsible: “The president proposed sequester, had 18 mo. to prioritize cuts, and did nothing,” he typically wrote, while he no less typically did nothing. For his part, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tweeted back: “It’s not too late to avert the damaging #sequester cuts, for which an overwhelming majority of Republicans voted.” And that became the pattern for a decade of American political gridlock, still not broken today.

Destruction Begins

March 1st came and went, so the budgetary axe began to fall.

At first, it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, the cuts weren’t quite as across the board as expected. The meat industry, for example, protested because health inspector furloughs would slow its production lines, so Congress patched the problem and spared those inspectors. But meat production aside, there was a sense that the cuts might not be so bad after all.

They were to be doled out based on a formula for meeting the arbitrary target of $85 billion in reductions in 2013, and no one knew precisely what would happen to any given program. In April, more than a month after the cuts had begun, the White House issued the president’s budget proposal for the following year, an annual milestone that typically included detailed information about federal spending in the current year. But across thousands of pages of documents and tables, the new budget ignored sequestration, and so reported meaningless 2013 numbers, because even the White House couldn’t say exactly what impact these cuts would have on programs and public investment across the country.

As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first ripples of impact began to spread quickly indeed. Losing some government funding, cancer clinics in New Mexico and Connecticut turned away patients. In Kentucky, Oregon, and Montana, shelters for victims of domestic violence cut services. In New York, Maryland, and Alabama, public defenders were furloughed, limiting access to justice for low-income people. In Illinois and Minnesota, public school teachers were laid off. In Florida, Michigan, and Mississippi, Head Start shortened the school year, while in Kansas and Indiana, some low-income children simply lost access to the program entirely. In Alaska, a substance abuse clinic shut down. Across the country, Meals on Wheels cut four million meals for seniors in need.

Only when the FAA imposed furloughs on its air traffic controllers did public irritation threaten to boil over. Long lines and airport delays ensued, and people were angry. And not just any people — people who had access to members of Congress.  In a Washington that has gridlocked the most routine business, lawmakers moved at a breakneck pace, taking just five days to pass special legislation to solve the problem. To avoid furloughs and shorten waits for airline passengers, they allowed the FAA to spend funds that had been intended for long-term airport repairs and improvements.

Flights would leave on time — at least until runways cracked and crumbled.  (You undoubtedly remember the scandal of 2019 at Cincinnati International Airport, when a bright young candidate for Senate met her demise in a tragic landing mishap.)

And then, of course, the Pentagon asked for an exemption, too. We’re talking about the military behemoth of planet Earth, which in 2013 accounted for 40% of military spending globally, its outlays exceeding the next 10 largest militaries combined.  It, too wanted a special exemption for some of its share of the cutbacks.

Meat inspectors, the FAA, and the Department of Defense enjoyed special treatment, but the rest of the nation was, as the history books recount, not so lucky. Children from middle-class and low-income families saw ever fewer resources at school, closing doors of opportunity. The young, old, and infirm found themselves with dwindling access to basic resources such as health care or even a hot dinner. Federal grants to the states dried up, and there was less money in state budgets for local priorities, from police officers to lowly streetlights.

And remember that, just as the sequestration cuts began, carbon concentration in the atmosphere breached 400 parts per million.  (Climate scientists had long been warning that the level should be kept below 350 for human security.) Unfortunately, as with the groundbreaking research that led to the Internet, it takes money to do big things, and the long-term effects of cutting environmental protection, general research, and basic infrastructure meant that the U.S. government would do little to stem the extreme weather that has, in 2023, become such a part of our world and our lives.

Looking back from a country now eternally in crisis, it’s clear that a Rubicon was crossed back in 2013. There was then still a chance to reject across-the-board budget cuts that would undermine a nation built on sound public investment and shared prosperity. At that crossroads, some fought against austerity. Losing that battle, others argued for a smarter approach: close tax loopholes to raise new revenue, or reduce waste in health care, or place a tax on carbon, or cut excessive spending at the Pentagon. But too few Americans — with too little influence — spoke up, and Washington didn’t listen.  The rest of the story, as you well know, is history.

Tomgram: Mattea Kramer and Jo Comerford, Congress Tweeted While America Burned | TomDispatch.

Apple in the hot seat.  Lawmakers say the company dodged billions in taxes on overseas profits.  We’ll look at the world of offshore tax escapes.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who for the past forty-seven years has served as a weekend scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America, angrily resigned from that position yesterday, effective immediately.

Justice Scalia quit his post in a terse resignation letter that read, in part:

“Some of the happiest memories of my adult life have been as a scoutmaster. Huddling under blankets around the campfire, and so forth. But now, all of that has been ruined. Ruined.”

Shortly after sending the letter, Justice Scalia destroyed his scoutmaster uniform in the blazing fireplace of his Supreme Court office.

Later, he went across the hall to share his decision with his close confidant on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, telling him, “There’s nowhere I feel safe anymore, Clarence. The military? The N.B.A.? Nowhere. I guess the only place I still feel safe is the Supreme Court. This is still a safe place, isn’t it?”

Justice Thomas said nothing in reply.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/17585-focus-scalia-resigns-post-as-scoutmaster

— Theodore Roosevelt

(See “Mines and Bitter Communities”, below.)

— John Muir 

A groundbreaking research project has mapped the US government’s global kidnap and secret detention programme, shedding unprecedented light on one of the most controversial secret operations of recent years.

The interactive online project – by two British universities and a legal charity – has uncovered new details of the way in which the so-called extraordinary rendition programme operated for years in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to avoid detection in the face of growing public concern.

The Rendition Project website is intended to serve as a research tool that not only collates all the publicly available data about the programme, but can continue to be updated as further information comes to light.

Data already collated shows the full extent of the UK’s logistical support for the programme: aircraft associated with rendition operations landed at British airports more than 1,600 times.

Although no detainees are known to have been aboard the aircraft while they were landing in the UK, the CIA was able to refuel during operations that involved some of the most notorious renditions of the post-September 11 years, including one in which two men were kidnapped in Sweden and flown to Egypt, where they suffered years of torture, and others that involved detainees being flown to and from a secret prison in Romania.

The database also tracks rendition flights into and out of Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Islands, and suggests that flight crews enjoyed rest-and-recreation stopovers on the Turks and Caicos Islands. Both are British overseas territories.

The Rendition Project is the result of three years of work, funded by the UK taxpayer through the Economic and Social Research Council, by Ruth Blakeley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer at Kingston University, working with Crofton Black, an investigator with the legal charity Reprieve.

“By bringing together a vast collection of documents and data, the Rendition Project publishes the most detailed picture to date of the scale, operation and evolution of the global system of rendition and secret detention in the so-called war on terror,” said Blakeley.

Raphael said: “The database makes a major contribution to efforts to track CIA rendition flights, and provides the clearest picture so far of what was going on. It also serves as an important tool for investigators, journalists and lawyers to delve into in more detail.”

Black added: “The Rendition Project lays bare the inner workings of the logistics network underlying the US government’s secret prison programme. It’s the most accurate and comprehensive resource so far published.”

The data includes details on 11,006 flights by aeroplanes linked to the CIA’s rendition programme since 2002. Of those, 1,556 flights are classed as confirmed or suspected rendition flights, or flagged as “suspicious”, depending on the strength of the supporting evidence surrounding each.

The researchers have also confirmed 20 “dummy” flights within the data: flight paths logged with air traffic controllers, but never taken. Instead, the planes took a different route to different airports along the way, to pick up or drop off a detainee. About a dozen more flight paths are marked as possible dummy flights.

The website also weaves together first-hand testimony of detainees of their mistreatment within the secret prisons; the layout and conditions of the facilities; the movements of detainees across the globe; and documents that detail outsourcing to corporations that offered logistical support, from flights to catering and hotel reservations. In some cases, it is unclear whether the airline companies would have been aware of the purpose of the flights.

The project also brings to light new information on the methods used to avoid detection of rendition flights, particularly as journalists became aware of the programme. The project highlights “tarmac transfers” – occasions on which two planes involved in rendition met on remote airfields. The researchers believe these occasions were used to transfer detainees from one plane to another, making their rendition route far more difficult to track.

Among the prisoners who appear to have been switched from one aircraft to another in this way is Abu Faraj al-Libi, who is currently being held at the Guantánamo detention camp in Cuba. After being captured in Pakistan in May 2005, he appears to have been flown to Afghanistan, where he was switched to another aircraft and taken to Bucharest.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/17556-us-global-kidnapping-illustrated

Why does the government give the big banks a better deal than it gives students?

It’s [a] question so perfect that people can’t stop talking about it.

The first standalone bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would not only prevent student loan rates from doubling, it would cut them down to the same rate the Fed charges banks to borrow money overnight for the next 12 months. And the idea has taken off like wildfire, with more than 400,000 people signing on to support the legislation.

Many – including Campaign for America’s Robert Borsage, who calls it “a subsidy in America’s future” – are praising Warren’s temporary proposal as a perfect short-term bailout for graduates who are suffering disproportionately in our slow recovery.

But “serious” policy minds aren’t pleased, and are trying to trigger a backlash against Warren’s proposal.

“Sen. Warren’s proposal should be quickly dismissed as a cheap political gimmick,” writes the Brookings Institution’s Matthew M. Chingos and Beth Akers. [And mind you, Brookings is a supposedly liberal think tank. -- Editor]

“With that mix of populist rhetoric and subterfuge, Senator Warren stands to whip up a mob of angry students (and pundits) who will demand that the government drop the interest rate on student loans to 0.75 percent,” Yahoo! Finance’s Jason Delisle. “Good luck reasoning with a mob.”

Getting a mob interested in student loan debt is exactly what Warren intended to do – and it’s working.

With more than one trillion dollars in student loan debt, the economy is increasingly stifled by the burden on young people coming to age in the midst of the Great Recession.  Immediate and decisive action is necessary.

“According to the Federal Reserve Board of New York, the share of student loan balances 90 or more days delinquent surged to 11.7 percent in the last two quarters—three percentage points higher than the same time last year—elevating student loans, for the first time, to the ignominious distinction of having a worse repayment rate than credit cards,” writes The Century Foundation’s Benjamin Landy.

And now New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a longer-term fix in mind that could help students at the expense of private lenders, according to the Huffington Post:

Debtors with high interest rates on their federal student loans would refinance into cheaper loans under proposed legislation to be unveiled this week, in a move that would lower borrowers’ burdens and potentially hurt private lenders and investors.

The plan sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would force the U.S. Secretary of Education to automatically refinance most government loans carrying interest rates above 4 percent into fixed, 4-percent loans. Roughly 9 of 10 federally backed loans would be affected, saving nearly 37 million borrowers billions of dollars in annual interest payments.

“At a time when corporations, homeowners and even local governments are refinancing at historically low interest rates and saving millions of dollars, students and families who take out loans to pay for college are getting left behind,” Gillibrand said. “Ensuring that our graduates are not saddled with unmanageable debt by keeping interest rates low is just common sense.”

The Center for American Progress estimates that Gillibrand’s bill would save borrowers about $14.5 billion off their student loan payments, boosting U.S. economic activity by $21.7 billion.

And thanks to Warren’s incredibly popular proposal, a simple financing bill seems moderate and entirely sensible.

The new senior senator from Massachusetts has effectively shifted the debate from whether we should help students to how much should we help them.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/340-187/17554-elizabeth-warren-inspires-serious-debate-about-student-loan-debt

• Sign the MoveOn petition in support of Sen. Warren’s effort to bring justice and some common sense to student loans: http://pac.petitions.moveon.org/thanks.html?petition_id=42513&test_group=no_share_chain&from_source=none&id=-1890101-klIJMM

At the same time, populist politicians, grassroots activists, and numbers-based wonks are lining up behind a new idea: expanding Social Security benefits.

The vast majority of Americans think Social Security benefits should be increased, and the wealthy should pay more in taxes to do it. Now, people in power are starting to agree.

Red and purple state senators like Mark Begich (D-AK) and Tom Harkin (D-IA) have introduced bills that would expand Social Security benefits by as much as $800 per recipient, per year. They accomplish this by changing the way benefits are calculated and by finally making millionaires and billionaires pay the same rate of Social Security taxes the rest of us pay.

What’s more, respected analysts like Ezra Klein and the New America Foundation have directly confronted the long-time consensus in Washington, D.C., by making the case for expanding Social Security benefits.

More than 100,000 people have already signed a petition from Social Security Works endorsing Sen. Harkin’s bill.

This is all just the beginning. The tide has turned, and now we are on offense.

Please click here to sign the petition from Daily Kos and Social Security Works calling on Congress to expand Social Security benefits.

Keep fighting,

The crowd inside the state North Carolina Legislative Building has grown larger each Monday as has the number of demonstrators arrested by General Assembly police.

The Rev. William Barber, the head of the state NAACP and chief architect of the weekly Moral Monday demonstrations in the capital city, watched from behind the police line on Monday evening as demonstrators united in message to the GOP-led General Assembly waited to be walked out by the approaching officers.

The chanting, songs and political speeches that had rumbled through the second-floor rotunda were muted by the repeated zip, zip, zip of General Assembly police pulling out plastic ties to bind the wrists of the protesters.

Rep. John Blust, a Republican from Guilford County, peeked in on the demonstration and had words for the organizers within earshot.

“People have the right to voice their opinions, but they don’t have the right to force them on others,” Blust said before walking away.

After Blust had gone down an office corridor that law enforcement officers said was off limits to the public, Barber responded to a small group nearby watching the arrests.

“The reality is you shouldn’t be arrested for praying in the General Assembly,” Barber said noting the many clergy in the crowd. He described the growing demonstrations as “a movement” that had national implications.

The demonstrators offered wide-ranging and sweeping complaints – from the decision to overturn the Racial Justice Act to the changes, to the public education systems that direct more public money to private schools, to the refusal to expand the federal Medicaid program and more.

“If you change the South, you change the nation,” Barber said.

Since April 29, nearly 160 people have been arrested while protesting at the Legislative Building. The first Moral Monday demonstration brought 17 arrests, the next brought 30, then 49. This week, General Assembly police took nearly 60 protesters to the Wake County Detention Center, where they will be jailed briefly and given a date to appear in court. The official number of arrests Monday was not available at press time.

The first wave of protesters are scheduled to appear in Wake County court on June 24, but lawyers representing some of them plan to challenge the authority of the General Assembly police to charge the demonstrators with trespassing, disorderly conduct and failure to disperse during a peaceful demonstration.

The courts will be asked to weigh whether the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights to assemble peaceably and petition their lawmakers were violated by a General Assembly police force citing building rules not encoded in state statute as their basis for arrest.

Jeff Weaver, chief of the General Assembly law enforcement agency, said his aim is public safety. He gives the demonstrators a brief time inside the building to voice their concerns, then calls out that they have five minutes to disperse or risk arrest.

Sara Loeppert, a Raleigh resident, watched from a third-floor balcony as officers walked the arrested demonstrators toward an elevator below. She, like many in the crowd, had come not only to voice her opposition to the new direction the Republicans are taking the state, but to support those who were arrested.

“It’s a moral obligation as a Christian to defend people who are poor, to defend people from these callous laws they’ve passed,” Loeppert said. “I think more ministers need to be promoting this from the pulpit.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/17545-is-north-carolina-the-next-wisconsin

MILWAUKEE – Today the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced major new citations against Palermo Villa, Inc.  Members of the Palermo Workers Union expressed alarm over the continued disregard for the safety of workers at the Milwaukee pizza factory, anger at the revelation that Palermo’s covered up years of injuries dating to 2008, and concern for potential dangers to the broader community.  Click here to view the OSHA citations.

The news comes in the immediate aftermath of a reported amputation at the factory on May 7th, involving a 21-year old Burmese man who lost three fingers, in yet another machinery accident at Palermo’s.  

“Dangerous working conditions at Palermo’s drove us to seek union recognition and the ability to address safety issues without fear of reprisal,” said Cesar Hernandez, a Palermo Worker Union member who previously suffered a partial amputation at the factory.

“Union representation would enable workers to establish our own workplace safety committees and address the safety issues that we know are serious, even if Palermo’s is unwilling to do so.”

The new citations issued by OSHA carry fines totaling $38,500.  These include seven “serious” violations and one “Other-than-serious” violation for process safety violations surrounding the ammonia refrigeration system. OSHA defines a “serious” violation as existing “when the workplace hazard could cause an accident or illness that would most likely result in death or serious physical harm”.

Ammonia is a deadly gas that in large quantities can cause mass casualties. It is often used in food production for refrigeration and freezing. Palermo’s refrigeration system was expanded in 2011, according to the citations.

“Palermo’s is located less than a mile from Miller Park,” said Hernandez. “It’s of great concern that the surrounding community could be threatened with potentially catastrophic safety hazards.”

In addition to the numerous citations, the OSHA letter exposed that Palermo’s hid information about injuries that should have been provided. In a cover letter to Giacomo Fallucca that accompanies the OSHA citations, dated May 17, 2013, OSHA criticized the Palermo’s president and CEO for redacting injury details from a federally required injury log for the period between 2008 and 2011.

OSHA called upon Fallucca specifically to “immediately provide the original requester copies of the un-redacted OSHA logs.”

“Everyone who was injured earned the right to at least have what happened to them investigated and analyzed, rather than swept under the rug as though these injuries never happened,” said Steve Sallman, a health and safety specialist with the United Steelworkers.

“Furthermore, the tragic amputation earlier this month may have been prevented if Palermo’s had not suppressed employees’ lawful efforts to address health and safety issues by forming a union.”

OSHA is now the second federal agency to find Palermo’s guilty of violating federal law. The National Labor Relations Board found in November 2012 that Palermo’s threatened and retaliated against workers who sought union recognition and ordered 11 workers reinstated with back-pay, but Palermo’s has yet to comply with this order.

http://sliceofjustice.com/blog/osha-announces-38500-in-new-fines-for-safety-violations-at-palermos-pizza

Elders and chiefs of at least 10 sovereign nations walked out of a meeting with U.S. State Department officials in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Thursday May 16 in which the government was attempting to engage in tribal consultation over the Keystone XL pipeline.

Deeming the meeting “invalid,” leaders of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association – attendees included the Southern Ponca of Oklahoma, Pawnee Nation, Nez Perce Nation, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, Ihanktonwan Dakota Yankton Sioux, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Crow Creek Sioux Tribe – said they would meet only with President Barack Obama to discuss the pipeline.

The Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association is made up of the 16 tribal chairmen, presidents and chairpersons in North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska who have joined to defend treaty rights, according to the group. In January they along with other tribes signed the International Treaty to Protect the Sacred Against the Tar Sands.

Keystone XL would carry up to 800,000 barrels daily of viscous crude known as bitumen from the Alberta oil sands of Canada for 1,700 miles down to the Gulf of Mexico coast in Texas. Obama is slated to make a decision on the $7 billion project sometime this year, perhaps as early as the end of summer.

The chiefs join the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), which two weeks ago released its public comments on the pipeline’s draft environmental assessment report, recommending that the Obama administration reject the pipeline proposal from TransCanada if certain concerns could not be adequately addressed.

The state department received more than a million public comments by the April 22 deadline, which was coincidentally Earth Day, most of them against the project.

The government’s own Environmental Protection Agency has weighed in against the environmental draft report, which was released on March 1. On April 22 the EPA objected to the review, saying more study was needed of greenhouse gas emissions, the potential effect of spills, and the route through ecologically sensitive territory, the Washington Post reported.

They contended that tribes had not been consulted as the report stated they had, and took issue with the report’s assessment that the pipeline would have little to no impact on climate change.

“The standard for consultation with indigenous nations is described as ‘government to government,’ and that standard must not be treated lightly,” said Jennifer Baker, a Denver-based attorney who works with the Great Plains tribes, to Native News Network after the chiefs’ walkout. “The duty to engage with tribes in this manner stems from treaties and the constitution, and it has been expanded upon through court decisions and executive orders.”

Consultation or no, the Native leaders who left the meeting issued a statement objecting on multiple grounds.

“On this historic day of May 16, 2013, ten sovereign Indigenous nations maintain that the proposed TransCanada/Keystone XL pipeline does not serve the national interest and in fact would be detrimental not only to the collected sovereigns but all future generations on planet earth. This morning the following sovereigns informed the Department of State Tribal Consultation effort at the Hilton Garden Inn in Rapid City, SD, that the gathering was not recognized as a valid consultation on a ‘nation to nation’ level,” they said.

The chiefs who walked out were the Southern Ponca, Pawnee Nation, Nez Perce Nation, and members of the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires People), including Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, Ihanktonwan Dakota (Yankton Sioux), Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Standing Rock Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.

“Eventually all remaining tribal representatives and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers left the meeting at the direct urging of the grassroots organization Owe Aku,” the chiefs said in their statement. “Owe Aku, Moccasins on the Ground, and Protect the Sacred are preparing communities to resist the Keystone XL pipeline through Keystone Blockade Training.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/17524-tribal-leaders-walk-out-of-state-departments-keystone-xl-consultation-meeting

On March 14, 2009, 31 weeks into her pregnancy, Nina Buckhalter gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. She named the child Hayley Jade. Two months later, a grand jury in Lamar County, Mississippi, indicted Buckhalter for manslaughter, claiming that the then-29-year-old woman “did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously, kill Hayley Jade Buckhalter, a human being, by culpable negligence.”

The district attorney argued that methamphetamine detected in Buckhalter’s system caused Hayley Jade’s death. The state Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on the case on April 2, is expected to rule soon on whether the prosecution can move forward.

If prosecutors prevail in this case, the state would be setting a “dangerous precedent” that “unintentional pregnancy loss can be treated as a form of homicide,” says Farah Diaz-Tello, a staff attorney with National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a nonprofit legal organization that has joined with Robert McDuff, a Mississippi civil rights lawyer, to defend Buckhalter. If Buckhalter’s case goes forward, NAPW fears it could spur a wave of similar prosecutions in Mississippi and other states.

Mississippi’s manslaughter laws were not intended to apply in cases of stillbirths and miscarriages. Four times between 1998 through 2002, Mississippi lawmakers rejected proposals that would have set specific penalties for damaging a fetus by using illegal drugs during pregnancy. But Mississippi prosecutors say that two other state laws allow them to charge Buckhalter. One defines of manslaughter as the “killing of a human being, by the act, procurement, or culpable negligence of another”; another includes “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from conception until live birth” in the state’s definition of human beings.

The cause of any given miscarriage or stillbirth is difficult to determine, and many experts believe there is no conclusive evidence that exposure to drugs in utero can cause a miscarriage or stillbirth. Because of this, prosecuting Buckhalter opens the door to investigating and prosecuting women for any number of other potential causes of a miscarriage or stillbirth, her lawyers argued in a filing to the state Supreme Court—”smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs, exercising against doctor’s orders, or failing to follow advice regarding conditions such as obesity or hypertension.” Supreme Court Justice Leslie D. King also raised this question in the oral arguments last month: “Doctors say women should avoid herbal tea, things like unpasteurized cheese, lunch meats. Exactly what are the boundaries?”

Laws that criminalize hurting or killing fetuses are pitched as ways to protect pregnant women from abuse but are often used to prosecute those same women, NAPW says. The group has documented more than 400 cases across the country in which these laws have been used to detain or jail pregnant women … Earlier this year, Mississippi’s neighbor to the east, Alabama, set its own precedent for prosecuting pregnant women for drug use. In January, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld convictions against two women—Amanda Kimbrough and Hope Ankrom—for “chemical endangerment” of a child, under a 2006 law that was written to punish people who expose children—not fetuses—to illegal drugs. Kimbrough gave birth prematurely to a baby boy who died shortly thereafter; she was charged after testing positive for meth. Ankrom gave birth to a healthy baby boy, but she was charged after he was found to have marijuana and cocaine in his system.

In Mississippi, Diaz-Tello says, “we’re trying to avoid another ruling like Alabama.” The decision in Buckhalter’s case is expected to influence a second pending case in the state against Rennie Gibbs, a young woman charged with “depraved heart murder” after a experiencing a stillbirth in 2006, at age 16. A medical examiner claimed a small amount of cocaine, found during the autopsy, caused the death. Gibbs’ case is supposed to go before a trial court later this year.

Buckhalter’s lawyers contend that both Buckhalter and Gibbs are collateral damage in the abortion wars in Mississippi, one of the most anti-abortion states in the country. A 2011 state ballot measure there would have granted full rights to fertilized eggs, making all abortions illegal all the time. That measure failed, but abortion foes have pledged to try again in 2015, and lawmakers are working hard to close the state’s last remaining abortion clinic. Charging a woman with manslaughter for using drugs while pregnant is just a backdoor way of establishing legal “personhood” for fetuses, says Diaz-Tello.

But as McDuff pointed out in oral arguments before the Supreme Court last month, even the state’s law defining homicide as including the killing of a child at “every stage of gestation” includes a specific exemption for women seeking a legal abortion. If a woman can legally terminate an unwanted pregnancy, he argued, how can she be jailed for unintentionally ending a wanted one?

Perhaps the most perverse impact of prosecuting Buckhalter, her lawyers say, is that it could lead to more abortions …

Read the Rest: Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages | Mother Jones.

SUGAR LAND, TX—Shortly after reports surfaced today that the Boy Scouts of America had voted to lift its ban on gay youths, local homosexual child Max Lovell, 14, told reporters that he was looking forward to joining the organization and finally being ridiculed for another thing.

“This is great. I get made fun of every day for being gay, but now I’ll be called a dork, too,” said the enthusiastic Lovell, who is routinely taunted for being homosexual but will now endure everything from light ribbing to vicious name-calling based on his affiliation with the outdoor-preparedness youth group. “It’s perfect because I’ve been looking for a second thing to get mocked for, and Boy Scouts seems like a great fit. I think it’ll really open me up to a whole new batch of cutting insults.”

Lovell added that he also “can’t wait” to see what his peers will do when he joins the eighth-grade marching band in the fall.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/gay-kid-excited-to-be-made-fun-of-for-second-thing,32562/