Chris Hedges's Blog, page 200

10 Ways Andrew Wheeler Has Decimated the EPA in Just 1 Year

On July 8, President Trump hosted a White House event to unabashedly tout his truly abysmal environmental record. The following day, coincidentally, marked the one-year anniversary of Andrew Wheeler at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), first as acting administrator and then as administrator after the Senate confirmed him in late February.

The good news, if there is any, is that Wheeler is an Eagle Scout compared to his ethically challenged predecessor, Scott Pruitt. The bad news is, as predicted, Wheeler has been more effective than Pruitt in rolling back and eliminating EPA safeguards.

My organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, has compiled a list of 80 Trump administration attacks on science since taking office, and Wheeler has been the driving force behind many of them. Below are 10 of the more egregious ways he has undermined the EPA’s time-honored role to protect public health and the environment so far.

Sidelined Scientists

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, has taken a number of steps to systematically reduce the role of scientists in the agency’s policymaking process. Last fall, for example, he eliminated the agency’s Office of the Science Advisor, which counseled the EPA administrator on research supporting health and environmental standards, and placed the head of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection on administrative leave. He also disbanded a 20-member scientific advisory committee on particulate matter, or soot; failed to convene a similar panel on ozone; and packed a seven-member advisory committee on air quality standards with industry-friendly participants.

Proposed to Restrict the Use of Scientific Data

Claiming his intent is to increase “transparency,” Wheeler is promoting a rule Pruitt proposed that would dramatically limit the scientific studies the agency considers when developing health standards. If adopted, the rule would restrict the use of scientific studies in EPA decisions if the underlying data are not public and reproducible, which would disqualify many epidemiological and other health studies the EPA relies on to set science-based public safeguards. Given that EPA health standards often rely on studies that contain private patient information, as well as confidential business information that cannot be revealed, the rule would significantly hamper the agency’s ability to carry out its mission. Wheeler plans to finalize the rule sometime this year.

Gutted the Coal Ash Rule

The first major rule Wheeler signed as acting administrator refuted his claim that he could fulfill President Trump’s directive to “clean up the air, clean up the water, and provide regulatory relief” at the same time. By rolling back the Obama-era coal ash rule, Wheeler provided regulatory relief to his old friend the coal industry by weakening environmental protections established in 2015 to clean up coal ash ponds, which are laced with toxic contaminants that leak into groundwater. The move was a top priority for coal baron Bob Murray, owner of Murray Energy, Wheeler’s most lucrative client when he worked for the Faegre Baker Daniels law firm.

Coal-fired power plants have been dumping this residue from burning coal into giant, unlined pits for decades. According to the EPA, there are more than 1,000 coal ash disposal sites across the country, and a recent analysis by Earthjustice and the Environmental Integrity Project found that 91 percent of the coal plants filing monitoring data required by the 2015 rule are polluting water with unsafe levels of toxic contaminants. Wheeler’s EPA says the new rule—which extends the deadline for closing some leaking ash ponds and allows states to suspend groundwater monitoring and set their own standards—will save utilities as much as $31 million. But the agency ignored the enormous costs of cancer and neurological and cardiovascular diseases linked to coal ash ingredients, which include arsenic, chromium, lead and mercury.

Recommended Unsafe Levels of Drinking Water Contaminants

Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are used in firefighting foam and a variety of nonstick, cleaning, packaging and other household products, have been linked to thyroid disease and kidney, liver, pancreatic and testicular cancer. According to a recent study by the Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University, these chemicals threaten the drinking water supplies of an estimated 19 million Americans. A 2018 Union of Concerned Scientists report, meanwhile, found that PFAS water contamination at 130 military bases across the country exceed the 11-parts-per-trillion safety threshold determined by the Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Nearly two-thirds of the sites had contamination that was more than 100 times higher than the safe level.

In February, Wheeler announced the “first-ever nationwide action plan” to regulate PFAS chemicals in water, saying the agency would develop and set a limit for two of the most prevalent PFAS chemicals, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. During the announcement, he told reporters he believes the agency’s voluntary 70-part-per-trillion health-advisory level for the chemicals is “a safe level for drinking water,” despite the fact that this level is more than six times higher than what the Disease Registry considers safe.

While Wheeler slow-walks the EPA’s response, members of Congress have introduced at least a dozen bills to address PFAS contamination, and the Senate recently passed a defense bill that would require the EPA to set a science-based standard for PFAS in drinking water.

Rolled Back Clean Water Act Protections

Clearing up a decade-long dispute over the scope of the Clean Water Act, the Obama EPA adopted a broad, science-based definition of the law that included protecting intermittent and ephemeral streams and wetlands that do not have surface water connections to other waterways. A 2015 EPA meta-analysis of more than 1,200 peer-reviewed studies concluded that even infrequently flowing small streams and isolated wetlands can affect “the integrity of downstream waters.” Trash them and that pollution could wind up in rivers, lakes, reservoirs and estuaries.

Regardless, Wheeler announced plans during a December telephone press briefing to reverse the Obama EPA definition of waters protected by the Clean Water Act, a thinly disguised gift to land developers and the agriculture industry. When asked what wetlands would no longer be protected, Wheeler replied, “We have not done … a detailed mapping of all the wetlands in the country.” Likewise, EPA Office of Water head David Ross—who represented industry clients against the EPA before joining the Trump administration—told reporters on the call that the agency had no idea how many streams would be dropped from Clean Water Act protection under the proposal.

In fact, Wheeler and Ross were well aware of the damage their new definition would do. At least 18 percent of streams and 51 percent of wetlands across the country would not be covered under their proposed definition, according to an internal 2017 slideshow prepared by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers and obtained by E&E News under the Freedom of Information Act.

Suppressed an Inconvenient Formaldehyde Report

Last August, Wheeler disingenuously told a Senate committee that the EPA was holding up the release of a report on the risk of cancer from formaldehyde to confirm its veracity. “I am sure we will release it,” he said, “but I need to make sure that the science in the report is still accurate.”

In fact, the report—which concluded that formaldehyde can cause leukemia and nose and throat cancer—was completed by EPA scientists a year before Wheeler testified, according to a Senate investigation, and their conclusion was hardly a surprise. Both the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services National Toxicology Program have already classified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen.

The EPA’s review process normally takes 60 to 90 days. The formaldehyde report has been in limbo for at least a year and a half, a blatant giveaway to the American Chemistry Council, the U.S. chemical industry’s premier trade association, which has blocked tighter restrictions on formaldehyde for decades.

Ignored EPA Scientists’ Advice to Ban Asbestos

Instead of heeding the advice of agency scientists and lawyers to follow the example of 55 other countries and ban asbestos completely, the EPA announced in April that it would tighten restrictions on asbestos—not ban it—despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its dangers. Manufacturers will be able to continue to use the substance if they obtain EPA approval.

Asbestos has not been produced in the United States since 2002, but is still imported for use in a wide range of commercial and consumer products, including auto brake components, roofing, vinyl floor tile, fire-resistant clothing, and cement pipes, sheets and shingles. One of the deadliest known carcinogens, asbestos kills nearly 40,000 Americans annually, mainly from lung cancer.

Weakened the Mercury Emissions Rule

In late December, the EPA proposed to significantly weaken a rule restricting mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by recalculating its costs and benefits. The Obama EPA, which issued the rule in 2011, estimated it would cost utilities $7.4 billion to $9.6 billion annually to install pollution controls and lead to $37 billion to $90 billion in health benefits by reducing not only mercury, a potent neurotoxin, but also sulfur dioxide and soot, thus preventing 130,000 asthma attacks, 4,700 heart attacks, and as many as 11,000 premature deaths. The Wheeler EPA ignored the “co-benefits” of limiting sulfur dioxide and soot, and flagrantly lowballed the health benefits of curbing mercury alone at only $4 million to $6 million annually.

Most utilities have already complied with the mercury rule at a fraction of the estimated cost, but health advocates fear that this new, industry-friendly accounting method, which makes it appear that the cost to polluters far outweigh the rule’s benefits, will set a precedent for the EPA to sabotage an array of other public health protections.

Slammed Vehicle Emission Rules Into Reverse

Last August, the EPA and the Transportation Department issued a proposal to freeze vehicle tailpipe pollution and fuel efficiency standards, rolling back a 2012 Obama-era rule requiring automakers to boost passenger vehicle fuel economy to a fleetwide average of 54 miles per gallon by 2025. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Make Cars Great Again” published a few days before the two agencies announced their proposal, Wheeler and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao charged that the Obama-era standards—the first to limit vehicle carbon emissions—are too burdensome for automakers and “raised the cost and decreased the supply of newer, safer vehicles.”

Parroting the Trump administration’s line of reasoning, Wheeler and Chao argued that fuel-efficient cars—which weigh less than gas-guzzlers—are not as safe, a contention that has been widely debunked. In fact, a 2017 study concluded that reducing the average weight of new vehicles could result in fewer traffic fatalities.

In any case, freezing the standards at 2020 levels would be hard on the planet, not to mention Americans’ wallets, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. It would result in an additional 2.2 billion metric tons of global warming emissions by 2040, amounting to 170 million metric tons in 2040 alone—the equivalent of the annual output of 43 average size coal-fired power plants. It also would cost drivers billions of dollars. In 2040 alone, they would have to pay an additional $55 billion to fill their gas tanks. Meanwhile, the design improvements automakers have made so far to meet the standards have already saved drivers more than $86 trillion at the pump since 2012, and off-the-shelf technological fixes, the Union of Concerned Scientists says, would enable automakers to meet the original 2025 target.

Rescinded the Clean Power Plan

Perhaps Wheeler’s most damaging move to date came late last month when he signed a final rule to repeal and replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which would have required coal-fired power plants to dramatically cut their carbon emissions. Yet another gift to the coal industry, Wheeler’s so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule grants states the authority to determine emissions standards but sets no targets, leaving them the option to do absolutely nothing.

Before Wheeler released the final rule, an April study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that his draft version would boost carbon emissions in 18 states and the District of Columbia and increase sulfur dioxide emissions in 19 states. The EPA’s own analysis of the draft rule, meanwhile, found that the proposal could have led to as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030 due to an increase in soot, and as many as 15,000 cases of upper respiratory problems.

Reversing Decades of Bipartisan Protections

If Wheeler truly cared about transparency, he would petition the Trump administration to change the name of his agency to “Every Polluter’s Ally.” In just 12 months, he has killed or weakened dozens of safeguards with the sole intention of bolstering polluting industries’ profit margins even after Congress slashed the corporate tax rate. As a result, millions of Americans will be drinking filthier water and breathing dirtier air, and more will suffer from serious diseases, according to his agency’s own accounting.

Wheeler and his predecessor Pruitt have sullied the bipartisan track record of one of the nation’s agencies entrusted with protecting public health and safety. So it is little wonder that three former EPA administrators who, notably, served under Republican presidents, recently sounded the alarm on Capitol Hill, urging legislators to step up their oversight of the agency and denouncing its attempts to hamstring science.

“There is no doubt in my mind that under the current administration the EPA is retreating from its historic mission to protect our environment and the health of the public from environmental hazards,” former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who served under President George W. Bush, stated in her written testimony for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. “This administration, from the beginning, has made no secret of its intention to essentially dismantle the EPA…. Therefore, I urge this committee, in the strongest possible terms, to exercise Congress’s oversight responsibilities over the actions and direction of the EPA.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Trump’s Reelection Could Spell the End of American Democracy

It’s often said that if Trump is reelected, it’ll be the end of democracy in America. But how could Trump get reelected, and how could democracy get wiped out in the USA?

Turns out, there’s an actual project to rewrite our Constitution, turning America into a corporate-run oligarchy.

They’d end the income tax, eliminate federal regulatory agencies like the EPA, end all labor protections (including laws against child labor), let states ignore anti-discrimination and other federal regulations, and impose term limits so the only “institutional memory” for legislatures will be the corporate lobbyists.

All it needs to succeed—within just a few short years—is for Trump and the GOP to win big in 2020. And the prospects of that happening are going up every day. With a big Trump win will come a rewrite of our Constitution itself, if the billionaires funding it have their way.

But how could he win? With another $2 billion worth of free publicity, just like in 2016.

One example is how Trump’s reelection campaign got a great boost recently when the media, just like in 2016, went all-Trump-all-the-time around his ICE raids, and when he told four congresswomen of color to “go home” to the countries of their ancestors—a racist trope for centuries.

The ICE raids were merely arrests of undocumented people who actually have committed crimes (beyond crossing the border) and currently have legal deportation orders already in place; they’re arrests like the ones Presidents Bush and Obama did daily.

There was nothing unique about them, and year over year, Trump has actually deported fewer people than Obama did.

But Trump tweeted the media into a frenzy, and like obedient hounds, they frantically ran after the bits of hamburger he threw their way.

As Ayanna Pressley noted Monday, the media shouldn’t “take the bait.” Nonetheless, literally every week—virtually every day—since Trump was elected, he’s gotten the media to put his name on the front page of the nation’s newspapers and at the top of the TV news shows.

And in America, as P.T. Barnum (whom Trump has cited as a role model) said, it doesn’t matter if publicity is positive or negative, “As long as they spell my name right.” And they always spell Trump’s name right.

As we saw with the 2015–2016 Republican primary, that Barnum-like daily publicity was all he needed to take down an entire field of competent, professional, and well-financed Republicans. Taking down Democrats may be even easier if he can paint the Democrats with his “open borders” and “Soviet-style socialism” lies (among others).

NBC trained Trump well; they spent millions teaching him how to do a reality show, from cliff-hangers to pitting “heroes” against “goats.” It’s one of the few things he’s actually good at. And instead of his old “Apprentice” weekly show, he’s now producing a daily show from the White House.

But to what end?

It’s looking more and more like the endgame here for Trump—and the right-wing billionaires who support him and the GOP—is not just to get reelected, but to actually rewrite our Constitution and end the American experiment.

The group leading this charge for the billionaires is called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG), which SourceWatch.org says, “is a right-wing political organization … that is campaigning for an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution.”

SourceWatch notes that, “Through its ‘Convention of States’ project, CSG promotes an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution pursuant to Article V, which provides that thirty-four states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose an amendment, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths).”

They add, CSG director Eric O’Keefe “has deep ties to Charles and David Koch and has been a founder and funder of numerous right-wing groups including Wisconsin Club for Growth,” and the CSG, “Through its Convention of States project, is pushing for a constitutional convention in order to severely restrict federal power, for example by redefining the Commerce Clause to prohibit Congress from enacting child labor or anti-discrimination laws, or by adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.”

And they’re actually doing it, complete with annual dress rehearsals in the Washington, D.C., area. As Wikipedia notes:

“In December 2013, nearly 100 legislators from 32 states met at Mount Vernon to talk about how to call a convention of states. … In February 2014, U.S. Senator Tom Coburn announced that after his retirement from Congress, he would focus on promoting the Convention of States to state legislatures.

“In December 2015, Marco Rubio endorsed CSG’s efforts to a call [for] an Article V Convention. In January 2016, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for a Convention of States to restrict the power of the federal government.”

And their rehearsals now include delegates from every state in the union.

Wikipedia notes:

“In September 2016, CSG held a simulated convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution in Williamsburg, Virginia. An assembly of 137 delegates representing every state gathered to conduct a simulated convention. The simulated convention passed amendments relating to six topics, including requiring the states to approve any increase in the national debt, imposing term limits, restricting the scope of the Commerce Clause [to its original meaning], limiting the power of federal regulations, requiring a supermajority to impose federal taxes and repealing the 16th Amendment [end the income tax], and giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order.”

The Convention of States website notes that as of 2019, 15 states have signed on, and enough to hit the critical 38 are lined up, just waiting for right-wing billionaire takeovers of their state legislatures.

And taking over state legislatures in 2020 just became a huge priority for those billionaires because of the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing radical gerrymandering. Expect hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into state legislative and gubernatorial races (thanks to Citizens United), with virtually no opposing funding from the handful of left-wing billionaires.

Progress to rewrite our Constitution was slow but steady when Georgia’s legislature was the first state to join, in March of 2014. States that signed on before Trump’s election included Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.

Since Trump took over the White House, however, they’ve added Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, and, just in the first three months of 2019, Arkansas, Utah, and Mississippi.

As of now, the call for a Convention to rewrite the Constitution has also passed at least one chamber of the legislatures in New Mexico, Mississippi, Iowa, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Hampshire.

And with Trump in power, the Convention of States website notes that just this year (2019) they are working to bring in Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, Illinois and Hawaii.

If Trump is as successful in manipulating the media as he was in 2016, and the GOP can ride his coattails (along with hundreds of millions from right-wing billionaires) to sweep the Democratic-controlled states they’re targeting, they could hit the 38 states needed to replace the Constitution in the first year or two after his reelection (there are 40 states in the lists above).

A probably apocryphal quote often attributed to Arnold Toynbee says, “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”

Similarly, when the last American who remembers how quickly democratic constitutions were replaced in Europe in the 1930s dies, the replacement of democracy in America becomes inevitable.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

Trump Plan to Roll Back Nuclear Inspections Raises Alarm

After months of experts raising alarm over the nuclear power industry pressuring U.S. regulators to roll back safety policies, staffers at the federal agency that monitors reactors sparked concerns Tuesday with official recommendations that include scaling back required inspections to save money.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has spent months reviewing its enforcement policies—and, as part of that process, sought input from industry groups, as Common Dreams detailed in March. In response, the industry representatives requested shifting to more “self-assessments,” limiting public disclosures for “lower-level” problems at plants, and easing the “burden of radiation-protection and emergency-preparedness inspections.”

According to The Associated Press, which first reported on NRC staffers’ suggestions:

The recommendations, made public Tuesday, include reducing the time and scope of some annual inspections at the nation’s 90-plus nuclear power plants. Some other inspections would be cut from every two years to every three years.

Some of the staff’s recommendations would require a vote by the commission, which has a majority of members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, who has urged agencies to reduce regulatory requirements for industries.

The NRC document that outlines the recommendations reportedly acknowledges that staffers disagree about the inspection reductions but claims that cutting back “improves efficiency while still helping to ensure reasonable assurance of adequate protection to the public.”

Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear power expert Edwin Lyman, however, charged that the suggestion to decrease federal oversight of nuclear power plants “completely ignores the cause-and-effect relationship between inspections and good performances.”

Democratic NRC member Jeff Baran also criticized the staff recommendations. He argued that the agency “shouldn’t perform fewer inspections or weaken its safety oversight to save money” and called for a public debate before any changes are made to existing policy.

“It affects every power reactor in the country,” he said. “We should absolutely hear from a broad range of stakeholders before making any far-reaching changes to NRC’s safety oversight program.”

Before the recommendations were released Tuesday, Democrats from the House Appropriations as well as Energy and Commerce committees expressed concerns about potential rollbacks of safety standards in a letter (pdf) to NRC Chairwoman Kristine Svinicki Monday.

Ebola Outbreak in Congo Declared a Global Health Emergency

GENEVA — The deadly Ebola outbreak in Congo is now an international health emergency, the World Health Organization announced on Wednesday after the virus spread this week to a city of two million people .

A WHO expert committee had declined on three previous occasions to advise the United Nations health agency to make the declaration for this outbreak, which other experts say has long met the conditions. More than 1,600 people have died since August in the second deadliest Ebola outbreak in history, which is unfolding in a region described as a war zone.

This week the first Ebola case was confirmed in Goma, a major regional crossroads in northeastern Congo on the Rwandan border with an international airport. Health experts have feared this scenario for months.

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A declaration of a global health emergency often brings greater international attention and aid, along with concerns that nervous governments might overreact with border closures.

While the risk of regional spread remains high the risk outside the region remains low, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said after the announcement in Geneva. “The (international emergency) should not be used to stigmatize or penalize the very people who are most in need of our help,” he said.

This is the fifth such declaration in history. Previous emergencies were declared for the devastating 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa that killed more than 11,000 people, the emergence of Zika in the Americas, the swine flu pandemic and polio eradication.

WHO defines a global emergency as an “extraordinary event” which constitutes a risk to other countries and requires a coordinated international response. Last month this outbreak spilled across the border for the first time when a family brought the virus into Uganda after attending the burial in Congo of an infected relative. Even then, the expert committee advised against a declaration.

Alexandra Phelan, a global health expert at Georgetown University Law Center, said Wednesday’s declaration was long overdue.

“This essentially serves as a call to the international community that they have to step up appropriate financial and technical support,” she said but warned that countries should be wary of imposing travel or trade restrictions.

“Those restrictions would actually restrict the flow of goods and health care workers into affected countries so they are counter-productive,” she said. Future emergency declarations might be perceived as punishment and “might result in other countries not reporting outbreaks in the future, which puts us all at greater risk.”

WHO had been heavily criticized for its sluggish response to the West Africa outbreak, which it repeatedly declined to declare a global emergency until the virus was spreading explosively in three countries and nearly 1,000 people were dead. Internal documents later showed WHO held off partly out of fear a declaration would anger the countries involved and hurt their economies.

The current outbreak is spreading in a turbulent Congo border region where dozens of rebel groups are active and where Ebola had not been experienced before. Efforts to contain the virus have been hurt by mistrust by wary locals that has prompted deadly attacks on health workers. Some infected people have deliberately evaded health authorities.

The pastor who brought Ebola to Goma used several fake names to conceal his identity on his way to the city, Congolese officials said. WHO on Tuesday said the man had died and health workers were scrambling to trace dozens of his contacts, including those who had traveled on the same bus.

There was no immediate reaction to WHO’s emergency declaration from Congo’s health ministry, which had lobbied against it.

“Calling for a (global emergency) to raise funds while ignoring the negative consequences for (Congo) is reckless,” the ministry tweeted following an editorial by Britain’s secretary of state for international development in favor of a declaration. Rory Stewart announced earlier this week that Britain would donate up to another $63 million for the Ebola response and called for other countries, especially Francophone ones, to increase their support.

At a U.N. meeting on Ebola in Geneva on Tuesday, Congo’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga, said the outbreak was “not a humanitarian crisis” and that the risk of Ebola spreading to other cities or regions in Congo remained the same.

“Ebola is not rocket science, it’s very simple,” he said.

WHO has long called the regional Ebola risk “very high.”

Earlier this week, Ugandan health officials said a Congolese fish trader had traveled to Uganda while sick and vomited several times at a local market. The woman returned to Congo last week and died after testing positive for Ebola. Ugandan officials estimate almost 600 people could be targeted for vaccination and follow-up.

Those working in the field say the outbreak is clearly taking a turn for the worse despite advances in this outbreak that include the widespread use of an experimental but effective Ebola vaccine.

Dr. Maurice Kakule was one of the first people to survive the current outbreak after he fell ill while treating a woman last July before the outbreak had even been declared.

“What is clear is that Ebola is an emergency because the epidemic persists despite every possible effort to educate people,” he told the Geneva meeting. “We have sufficiently informed them about the existence of this disease but there are still people who don’t want to believe that it does.”

___

Cheng reported from London. Associated Press writer Krista Larson in Beni, Congo contributed.

Dwight Eisenhower’s Worst Nightmare Has Come True

When, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the “unwarranted influence” wielded by the “military-industrial complex,” he could never have dreamed of an arms-making corporation of the size and political clout of Lockheed Martin. In a good year, it now receives up to $50 billion in government contracts, a sum larger than the operating budget of the State Department. And now it’s about to have company.

Raytheon, already one of the top five U.S. defense contractors, is planning to merge with United Technologies. That company is a major contractor in its own right, producing, among other things, the engine for the F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive Pentagon weapons program ever. The new firm will be second only to Lockheed Martin when it comes to consuming your tax dollars — and it may end up even more powerful politically, thanks to President Trump’s fondness for hiring arms industry executives to run the national security state.

Just as Boeing benefited from its former Senior Vice President Patrick Shanahan’s stint as acting secretary of defense, so Raytheon is likely to cash in on the nomination of its former top lobbyist, Mike Esper, as his successor. Esper’s elevation comes shortly after another former Raytheon lobbyist, Charles Faulkner, left the State Department amid charges that he had improperly influenced decisions to sell Raytheon-produced guided bombs to Saudi Arabia for its brutal air war in Yemen. John Rood, third-in-charge at the Pentagon, has worked for both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, while Ryan McCarthy, Mike Esper’s replacement as secretary of the Army, worked for Lockheed on the F-35, which the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) has determined may never be ready for combat.

And so it goes. There was a time when Donald Trump was enamored of “his” generals — Secretary of Defense James Mattis (a former board member of the weapons-maker General Dynamics), National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. Now, he seems to have a crush on personnel from the industrial side of the military-industrial complex.

As POGO’s research has demonstrated, the infamous “revolving door” that deposits defense executives like Esper in top national security posts swings both ways. The group estimates that, in 2018 alone, 645 senior government officials — mostly from the Pentagon, the uniformed military, and Capitol Hill — went to work as executives, consultants, or board members of one of the top 20 defense contractors.

Fifty years ago, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire identified the problem when he noted that:

“the movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military-industrial complex in operation. It is a real threat to the public interest because it increases the chances of abuse… How hard a bargain will officers involved in procurement planning or specifications drive when they are one or two years away from retirement and have the example to look at of over 2,000 fellow officers doing well on the outside after retirement?”

In other words, that revolving door and the problems that go with it are anything but new. Right now, however, it seems to be spinning faster than ever — and mergers like the Raytheon-United Technologies one are only likely to feed the phenomenon.

The Last Supper

The merger of Raytheon and United Technologies should bring back memories of the merger boom of the 1990s, when Lockheed combined with Martin Marietta to form Lockheed Martin, Northrop and Grumman formed Northrop Grumman, and Boeing absorbed rival military aircraft manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. And it wasn’t just a matter of big firms pairing up either. Lockheed Martin itself was the product of mergers and acquisitions involving nearly two dozen companies — distinctly a tale of big fish chowing down on little fish. The consolidation of the arms industry in those years was strongly encouraged by Clinton administration Secretary of Defense William Perry, who held a dinner with defense executives that was later dubbed “the last supper.” There, he reportedly told the assembled corporate officials that a third of them would be out of business in five years if they didn’t merge with one of their cohorts.

The Clinton administration’s encouragement of defense industry mergers would prove anything but rhetorical. It would, for instance, provide tens of millions of dollars in merger subsidies to pay for the closing of plants, the moving of equipment, and other necessities. It even picked up part of the tab for the golden parachutes given defense executives and corporate board members ousted in those deals.

The most egregious case was surely that of Norman Augustine. The CEO of Martin Marietta, he would actually take over at the helm of the even more powerful newly created Lockheed Martin. In the process, he received $8.2 million in payments, technically for leaving his post as head of Martin Marietta. U.S. taxpayers would cover more than a third of his windfall. Then, a congressman who has only gained stature in recent years, Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT), began to fight back against those merger subsidies. He dubbed them “payoffs for layoffs” because executives got government-funded bailouts, while an estimated 19,000 workers were laid off in the Lockheed Martin merger alone with no particular taxpayer support. Sanders was actually able to shepherd through legislation that clawed back some, but not all, of those merger subsidies.

According to one argument in favor of the merger binge then, by closing half-empty factories, the new firms could charge less overhead and taxpayers would benefit. Well, dream on. This never came near happening, because the newly merged industrial behemoths turned out to have even greater bargaining power over the Pentagon and Congress than the unmerged companies that preceded them.

Draw your own conclusions about what’s likely to happen in this next round of mergers, since cost overruns and lucrative contracts continue apace. Despite this dismal record, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy claims that the new corporate pairing will — you guessed it! — save the taxpayers money. Don’t hold your breath.

Influence on Steroids

While Donald Trump briefly expressed reservations about the Raytheon-United Technologies merger and a few members of Congress struck notes of caution, it has been welcomed eagerly on Wall Street. Among the reasons given: the fact that the two companies generally make different products, so their union shouldn’t reduce competition in any specific sector of defense production. It has also been claimed that the new combo, to be known as Raytheon Technologies, will have more funds available for research and development on the weapons of the future.

But focusing on such concerns misses the big picture. Raytheon Technologies will have more money to make campaign contributions, more money to hire lobbyists, and more production sites that can be used as leverage over members of Congress loathe to oppose spending on weapons produced in their states or districts. The classic example of this phenomenon: the F-35 program, which Lockheed Martin claims produces 125,000 jobs spread over 46 states.

When I took a careful look at the company’s estimates, I found that they were claiming approximately twice as many jobs as that weapons system was actually creating. In fact, more than half of F-35-related employment was in just two states, California and Texas (though many other states did have modest numbers of F-35 jobs). Even if Lockheed Martin’s figures are exaggerated, however, there’s no question that spreading defense jobs around the country gives weapons manufacturers unparalleled influence over key members of Congress, much to their benefit when Pentagon budget time rolls around. In fact, it’s a commonplace for Congress to fund more F-35s, F-18s, and similar weapons systems than the Pentagon even asks for. So much for Congressional oversight.

Theoretically, incoming defense secretary Mike Esper will have to recuse himself from major decisions involving his former company. Among them, whether to continue selling Raytheon-produced precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for their devastating air war in Yemen that has killed remarkable numbers of civilians.

No worries. President Trump himself is the biggest booster in living memory of corporate arms sales and Saudi Arabia is far and away his favorite customer. The Senate recently voted down a package of “emergency” arms sales to the Saudis and the UAE that included thousands of Raytheon Paveway munitions, the weapon of choice in that Yemeni air campaign. A similar vote must now take place in the House, but even if it, too, passes, Congress will need to override a virtually guaranteed Trump veto of the bill.

The Raytheon-United Technologies merger will further implicate the new firm in Yemeni developments because the Pratt and Whitney division of United Technologies makes the engine for Saudi Arabia’s key F-15S combat aircraft, a mainstay of the air war there. Not only will Raytheon Technologies profit from such engine sales, but that company’s technicians are likely to help maintain the Saudi air force, thereby enabling it to fly yet more bombing missions more often.

When pressed, Raytheon officials argue that, in enabling mass slaughter, they are simply following U.S. government policy. This ignores the fact that Raytheon and other weapons contractors spend tens of millions of dollars a year on lobbyists, political contributions, and other forms of influence peddling trying to shape U.S. policies on arms exports and weapons procurement. They are, in other words, anything but passive recipients of edicts handed down from Washington.

As Raytheon chief financial officer Toby O’Brien put it in a call to investors that came after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, “We continue to be aligned with the administration’s policies, and we intend to honor our commitments.” Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson made a similar point, asserting that “most of these agreements that we have are government-to-government purchases, so anything that we do has to follow strictly the regulations of the U.S. government… Beyond that, we’ll just work with the U.S. government as they are continuing their relationship with [the Saudis].”

How Powerful Are the Military-Industrial Combines?

When it comes to lobbying the Pentagon and Congress, size matters. Major firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon can point to the jobs they and their subcontractors provide in dozens of states and scores of Congressional districts to keep members of Congress in line who might otherwise question or even oppose the tens of billions of dollars in government funding the companies receive annually.

Raytheon — its motto: “Customer Success Is Our Mission” — has primary operations in 16 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. That translates into a lot of leverage over key members of Congress and it doesn’t even count states where the company has major subcontractors. The addition of United Technologies will reinforce the new company’s presence in a number of those states, while adding Connecticut, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina (in other words, at least 20 states in all).

Meanwhile, if the merger is approved, the future Raytheon Technologies will be greasing the wheels of its next arms contracts by relying on nearly four dozen former government officials the two separate companies hired as lobbyists, executives, and board members in 2018 alone. Add to that the $6.4 million in campaign contributions and $20 million in lobbying expenses Raytheon clocked during the last two election cycles and the outlines of its growing influence begin to become clearer. Then, add as well the $2.9 million in campaign contributions and $40 million in lobbying expenses racked up by its merger partner United Technologies and you have a lobbying powerhouse rivaled only by Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense conglomerate.

President Eisenhower’s proposed counterweight to the power of the military-industrial complex was to be “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” And there are signs that significant numbers of individuals and organizations are beginning to pay more attention to the machinations of the arms lobby. My own outfit, the Center for International Policy, has launched a Sustainable Defense Task Force composed of former military officers and Pentagon officials, White House and Congressional budget experts, and research staffers from progressive and good-government groups. It has already crafted a plan that would cut $1.2 trillion from the Pentagon budget over the next decade, while improving U.S. security by avoiding unnecessary wars, eliminating waste, and scaling back a Pentagon nuclear-weapons buildup slated to cost $1.5 trillion or more over the next three decades.

The Poor People’s Campaign, backed by research conducted by the National Priorities Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, is calling for a one-year $350 billion cut in Pentagon expenditures. And a new network called “Put People Over the Pentagon” has brought together more than 20 progressive organizations to press presidential candidates to cut $200 billion annually from the Department of Defense’s bloated budget. Participants in the network include Public Citizen, Moveon.org, Indivisible, Win Without War, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, and United We Dream, many of them organizations that had not, in past years, made reducing the Pentagon budget a priority.

Raytheon and its arms industry allies won’t sit still in the face of such proposals, but at least the days of unquestioned and unchallenged corporate greed in the ever-merging (but also ever-expanding) arms industry may be coming to an end. The United States has paid an exorbitantly high price in blood and treasure (as have countries like Afghanistan and Iraq) for letting the military-industrial complex steer the American ship of state through this century so far. It’s long past time for a reckoning.

Sanders Set to Mount Vigorous Defense of ‘Medicare for All’

WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders will vigorously defend his signature “Medicare for All” proposal on Wednesday and hit back at his critics who say his push amounts to both bad politics and bad policy.

The Vermont senator also will pledge to reject campaign donations from health insurance and pharmaceutical industry executives, lobbyists and political action committees and will challenge other Democratic presidential candidates to do the same.

He’ll deliver a speech at George Washington University as the fight over how to best provide health care for Americans becomes an animating focus of the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“You can’t change a corrupt system by taking its money,” Sanders will say, according to prepared remarks.

Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden have been engaged in an increasingly bitter dispute over Medicare for All. Wednesday’s speech could further escalate tensions between the two campaigns, which have pointedly engaged each other in recent days.

During a live-streamed discussion on Tuesday, Sanders dismissed Biden’s criticisms of Medicare for All and said the nation should have “a health care debate on the facts and not on fear-mongering.”

“Medicare is a popular, well established program,” he said. “All that we are doing, despite all that the health care industry is going to expend trying to lie about what we’re doing, what my opponents will talk about, all we’re doing is expanding Medicare. Not so radical really, after all.”

Slipping in some public polling and outraised by some of his 2020 opponents, Sanders has been increasingly willing to go on the offense against Biden on the issue of health care, one that has sharply divided Democrats. Sanders’ campaign says that in the speech he will “confront the Democratic opponents of Medicare for All and directly challenge the insurance and drug industry” and will make the case that Medicare for All “is the only way to fix our broken health care system.”

On Monday, Biden released a proposal to expand the Affordable Care Act, warning that it would be dangerous to eliminate it and replace it with Medicare for All. Biden’s proposal would create a public option that would allow people to sign up for a government-run health system like Medicare if they were unhappy with private insurance.

This week in Iowa, where Biden pitched his plan to voters, he cautioned that a sudden transition of tens of millions of people to Medicare for All was “a little risky.”

“Medicare goes away as you know it. All the Medicare you have is gone. It’s a new Medicare system,” Biden said at a presidential candidate forum held by the AARP. “It may be as good, you may like it as well, it may or may not, but the transition of dropping 300 million people on a totally new plan, I think is a little risky at this point.”

He also raised the prospect that some people could see temporary gaps in coverage, a notion that Sanders has bristled at and called “obviously absurd.”

On Tuesday, Sanders said the plan that Biden has pitched did not go far enough in ensuring that Americans have the coverage they need.

“I have helped write and defended the Affordable Care Act,” Sanders said during an interview with The Washington Post, which was live-streamed. “But you know what? Times change, and we have got to go further.”

Nine years after the Affordable Care Act was passed under the Obama administration, Americans are still more likely to support than oppose the law, 48% to 30%, according to an April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research , though a sizable share doesn’t take either side. Views of a single-payer health care system, in which all Americans would get their insurance from one government plan, are mixed: More Americans favor than oppose single-payer, 42% to 31%, and an additional 25% say they hold neither opinion. The public is even more supportive of a government health insurance plan that can be bought instead of a private insurance plan: 53% express support, compared with just 17% who oppose; 29% are neither in favor nor opposed.

The roaring health care debate also is likely to further draw in the full Democratic field. Several other leading 2020 candidates, including California Sen. Kamala Harris and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, support Medicare for All. However, some other Democratic hopefuls have warned that the party is moving too far left and have supported a more centrist approach.

Among them is Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who has been sharply critical of Medicare for All, instead preferring a public option for health coverage that could be included in the current structure of the Affordable Care Act.

In an interview with The Associated Press as he campaigned in Iowa, Bennet said that Democrats would “never unify around Medicare for All” but that plans like his, which would create a public option but allow people to keep their private health insurance, could bring Democrats together and notch wins in states like Colorado.

“If you’re gonna stand up and commit the Democratic Party to taking away from 180 million people, you’d better be clear on what the nuances are because when you’re running against Donald Trump, it’s going to be too late,” he said. “You may think you can get away with it in the Democratic primary. You will not be able to get away with it running against Donald Trump.”

___

Associated Press writers Elana Schor and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report.

Nuclear Agency Weighs Reducing Inspections to Cut Costs

WASHINGTON—Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff is recommending that the agency cut back on inspections at the country’s nuclear reactors, a cost-cutting move promoted by the nuclear power industry but denounced by opponents as a threat to public safety.

The recommendations, made public Tuesday, include reducing the time and scope of some annual inspections at the nation’s 90-plus nuclear power plants. Some other inspections would be cut from every two years to every three years.

Some of the staff’s recommendations would require a vote by the commission, which has a majority of members appointed or reappointed by President Donald Trump, who has urged agencies to reduce regulatory requirements for industries.

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The nuclear power industry has prodded regulators to cut inspections, saying the nuclear facilities are operating well and that the inspections are a financial burden for power providers. Nuclear power, like coal-fired power, has been struggling in market completion against cheaper natural gas and rising renewable energy.

While Tuesday’s report made clear that there was considerable disagreement among the nuclear agency’s staff on the cuts, it contended the inspection reduction “improves efficiency while still helping to ensure reasonable assurance of adequate protection to the public.”

Commission member Jeff Baran criticized the proposed changes Tuesday, saying reducing oversight of the nuclear power industry “would take us in the wrong direction.”

“NRC shouldn’t perform fewer inspections or weaken its safety oversight to save money,” Baran said.

The release comes a day after Democratic lawmakers faulted the NRC’s deliberations, saying they had failed to adequately inform the public of the changes under consideration.

“Cutting corners on such critical safety measures may eventually lead to a disaster that could be detrimental to the future of the domestic nuclear industry,” Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and other House Democrats said in a letter Monday to NRC Chairwoman Kristine Svinicki.

Asked for comment Tuesday, NRC spokespeople pointed to the staff arguments for the changes in the report. Trimming overall inspections “will improve effectiveness because inspectors again will be focused on issues of greater safety significance,” staffers told commission members in the recommendations.

Edwin Lyman, a nuclear-power expert at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, faulted the reasoning of commission staff that the good performance of much of the nuclear power industry warranted cutting back on agency inspections for problems and potential problems.

“That completely ignores the cause-and-effect relationship between inspections and good performances,” Lyman said.

49ers’ Exum Knocks Police Violence in ‘Officer Kaepernick’ Track

Antone Exum Jr. is all too aware of what he’s up against as a professional athlete looking to be taken seriously as a recording artist. As if that weren’t a tough enough feat to pull off, the San Francisco 49ers safety also mixed politics with music in his latest track. And Exum made the stakes even higher by name-checking a revolutionary figure who rose from the same NFL ranks as he has, one whose mere mention draws any number of reactions—none of them mild.

Exum’s single, “Officer Kaepernick,” dropped on July 12. The title refers, of course, to Colin Kaepernick, the 49ers quarterback whose risky bid three years ago to protest police brutality and racial injustice by “taking a knee” during the national anthem made him an icon and a pariah in the same instant. But the track isn’t so much an out-and-out ode to Kaepernick as it is a first-person take on the issues “Kap” brought up by sinking down, game after game, to one knee until league officials effectively showed him the door.

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by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

 Though they both played (at different times) for the same team, and though they have now both used their public platform to signal-boost a similar message, Exum insists he isn’t looking to follow Kaepernick’s act in one very crucial way: Exum sees himself as an artist and an athlete but not an activist, despite the overtly political—“provocative,” as the promotional material puts it—content he just released, with lyrics like this:

Body after body

Don’t them boys stink

Shotty after shotty

Blow em’ if he blink

“I’m not a civil rights activist—I try not to identify with anything,” Exum told Truthdig in an interview, raising more questions than he settled in making that distinction. “It was a time when I refused to turn a blind eye to what was going on. … I was angry at what I was seeing when I looked outside and at the news and social media.”

Still, it’s getting harder by the moment to tell where any mysterious line between expression and political action may linger, and it isn’t always up to the creator to make that call. As for what happens now that the song is out, Exum doesn’t sound all that concerned, even if any Kaepernick-style static could be headed his way. “To be frank, I don’t care. I just make things, and that’s really where I was at at that time—that song was written like one or two years ago,” he said. “So if anybody wants to do anything about that or try to punish me in any way, then it’ll be what it is … I’m not really worried about any type of backlash.”

So far, he’s been able to count his teammates and coaches among his supporters. The same can’t be said for the gatekeepers in the music business, who see him as a “one-trick pony”—and that trick would be football. “I kind of feel a little bit marginalized right now, because I think people are just seeing me in the light of an athlete,” Exum said. “And I really do understand that history is not in my favor, because a lot of athletes who have tried their hand at music before were either joking, or they were just not serious about the craft, or it was just awful. So that’s not helping my cause at all.”

Though Exum may not claim the label of leader for a broader cause, he wouldn’t mind if listeners heard a specific message in “Officer Kaepernick.” When asked what that takeaway might be, Exum was ready with an answer. “There are people out there that are as enraged and frustrated and upset and hurt as I sound in the song,” he said. “And I think that whatever your role is in some of those injustices that I talked about in the song, let’s move forward to try to ease those peoples’ pain.”

Trade Group Paves the Way for China Sanctions on the U.S.

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration blasted a World Trade Organization decision Tuesday that could let China levy sanctions on the United States.

The 2-1 decision by the WTO’s appellate body was actually a mixed verdict in a case that dates back to 2007 and is unrelated to the tariffs the administration has slapped on $250 billion in Chinese goods. In its final decision, the WTO agreed with the U.S. that China lets state-owned enterprises (SOEs) subsidize Chinese firms by providing components at unfairly low costs.

But it said the U.S. wrongly calculated the tariffs imposed to punish China for the subsidies. If the U.S. doesn’t recalculate them, China can retaliate with its own sanctions.

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The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said the ruling “undermines WTO rules, making them less effective to counteract Chinese SOE subsidies that are harming U.S. workers and businesses and distorting markets worldwide.”

Separately, the U.S.-China are locked in a yearlong standoff over U.S. allegations that China uses predatory tactics — including outright theft of trade secrets — in an aggressive push to challenge American technological dominance.

Not a Single House Republican Is Prepared to Censure Trump

Not a single House Republican on Tuesday voted to proceed to debate on a Democratic resolution condemning President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

The resolution (pdf)—which is on track to pass by Tuesday evening—”strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”

The procedural motion to begin debate passed by a vote of 233-190.

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I Know What It’s Like to Be Told to ‘Go Back’ to My Own Country



by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

BREAKING: The House votes along party lines to condemn Trump’s racist, xenophobic attacks against @AOC, @IlhanMN, @AyannaPressley and @RashidaTlaib.

Shamefully, not one Republican voted yes. pic.twitter.com/NZsy6rUmcC

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) July 16, 2019

While a handful of Republican members of Congress have condemned Trump’s Twitter attacks, which said the freshman Democrats should “go back” to the countries “from which they came,” the vast majority have either stayed silent or defended the president.

During a press conference ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Republican congressional leaders defended Trump’s remarks and said his attacks on the four congresswomen were not racist.

“I believe this is about ideology,” said House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). “This is about socialism versus freedom.”

Heidi Hess, co-director of CREDO Action, said in a statement Tuesday that there is no doubt that the Trump’s comments were racist.

“Donald Trump is a racist—and he’s been a racist since long before entering the Oval Office,” said Hess. “Every single policy forced through by his administration has harmed black, brown, and immigrant communities. House Democrats must stand together with congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, and listen to these new leaders in the party who are fighting for their communities by standing up to Trump’s hate.”

Watch the debate on the resolution: