Chris Hedges's Blog, page 530

Trump Dreams About a New Energy Boom

Ten thousand feet up, it’s possible to see the whole North Fork Valley from Dan Stucker’s plane. As the aircraft glides over sloping mesas with snow-dusted mountains, the land below resembles a vintage pioneer landscape.

If President Donald Trump has his way, a new feature could arrive on this vista: oil and gas pumps. His administration is opening vast stretches of public land to energy companies, and among the forests and fields under Stucker’s plane, up to 95 percent of the valley could be available to drillers.

The administration’s new policies would bring sweeping changes to this Rocky Mountain landscape, facilitated by a growing bond between federal officials and the oil and gas industry. Emails and other communications between government employees obtained by E&E News reveal directives and orders by Trump officials to shelve environmental policies to speed energy development.

Under President Donald Trump’s energy policies, up to 95 percent of Colorado’s North Fork Valley could be available to oil and gas drillers. Credit: Morgan Levy for Reveal

In one instance, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke courted oil and gas drillers in private by assuring them that changes to federal land policy would make their companies more profitable.

Documents show that some career employees in the Bureau of Land Management questioned whether drillers were being penalized adequately for major violations of environmental regulations. Interior Department staffers also pushed back on efforts by political appointees to put federal land up for auction before scientific assessments on the potential damage drilling could inflict on wildlife were finished.

At other times, federal officials voiced concern that Trump’s drilling goals were more aggressive than oil industry wishes. One federal official was asked whether it would be possible to rejigger data to make it look like the government would sell more leases because she was worried about how companies’ lack of interest in drilling would look to administration bigwigs, according to an email E&E News obtained.

These policies will set the nation on a future course of reliance on fossil fuels that cause climate change, more air and water pollution in rural areas, and new threats to endangered species. In return, the government charges oil companies as little as $2 per acre to lease the land for drilling.

Once a coal town, Paonia has transformed itself over the past few decades. It’s now known for wineries, boutiques, galleries and organic farms that draw tourists from nearby ski resorts. Perhaps most symbolic of its economic conversion, the town now hosts a major company, Solar Energy International,  that trains solar panel technicians.

But Paonia’s shift away from its fossil fuel roots could be reversed under the Trump administration’s new policies.

Stucker, the pilot, represents the more traditional side of this region. He said his family arrived here on covered wagons in 1893. Dutch people, then Coloradans. That’s how they distinguish things in this valley – you’re either a fifth-generation son of the Western Slope like Stucker, or you’re an organic-farming hippie. Waves of them came in the 1970s.

“I have friends who are liberals and what I love about that is we have wonderful arguments,” said Stucker, a self-described libertarian who favors drilling here. “I do not want us to become Boulder, where you have to get permission to screw a lightbulb in.”

Leasing vast acreage to oil companies

Trump feels the same way.

The president’s plans to expand fossil fuels seem as boundless as the tracts of wilderness below. He wants to open millions of acres across the West, all owned by taxpayers, to private oil and gas companies. Last year alone, his administration put 11.9 million acres on the auction block. It was the most in nine years. In sheer size, that’s twice as big as Vermont.

Pilot Dan Stucker says his family has lived in Colorado’s North Fork Valley since the 1890s. He supports oil drilling on the region’s public lands.Credit: Morgan Levy for Reveal

Colorado’s North Fork Valley is now destined to become part of that statistic. Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management it would offer 7,903 acres in the valley to drillers in December.

The move underscores how the Trump administration has sidelined science to promote energy development. Trump revoked a policy that required the Interior Department, which oversees the BLM, to consider how its actions could contribute to climate change.

Interior Department officials wanted to make the business case for drilling on federal land to oil executives at a March 2017 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute’s board of directors at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. An email from then-Interior Department official Megan Bloomgren – who now works for the oil lobby group – to colleagues clarified the message that Zinke wanted to deliver. The upshot is that Bloomgren wanted to persuade them that drilling on federal land would be easier under Trump than President Barack Obama, in turn increasing companies’ revenues, returns for taxpayers and U.S. energy production.

“He’s saying ‘when you buy a lease from us now it’s a junk bond. We want to move that over so we take on more burden and get return on investment with right market conditions. That way you have a higher probability of success. That way lease value and taxpayer return goes up. I’d like to sell product. We’re looking at how to price royalties and rents right now,’ ” she wrote in a March 22, 2017, email. “What can he say to back up that he wants to ensure federal lands are just as profitable as private land?”

Coordination with industry has at times been overt. In an audio recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with E&E News, Interior Department energy adviser Vincent DeVito detailed his courtship of energy companies at an event by Americans for Prosperity. The conservative group is linked to fossil fuel billionaires David and Charles Koch. Another brother, Bill Koch, owns an energy company that drills in the area and used to own a now-shuttered coal mine in Paonia.

In the recording, DeVito asked energy executives whether they would drill more if the department lowered its fees.

“We met with the investors and were like, ‘Listen, if we do this, will you participate? Because there is no sense in taking the hit for lowering royalty rates unless you guys do this,’ ” he said in the recording. “Money from a low royalty rate is better than no money at all. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. You know, we are prioritizing production, we are prioritizing revenue, which creates jobs, right? So when we lower that royalty rate, and we did the lease sale last week, we got folks to come to the table and invest.”

Some energy experts say the Trump administration is trying to lease lots of federal land that oil companies don’t even want. Of the 11.9 million acres offered by the administration in 2017, 792,823 received bids, considerably less than the 921,240 acres out of 1.9 million under the Obama administration in 2016.  

Onshore oil, gas, coal and other hardrock mining on federal lands generated about $496 million for the U.S. Treasury in fiscal 2017 and $1.4 billion for states. Most of this came through royalties. Critics note that royalty rates and fees for renting federal land haven’t increased in decades. The Government Accountability Office suggested that raising royalty rates couldincrease revenues for taxpayers between $5 million and $38 million.

Royalty rates for onshore production are currently12.5 percent, the lowest allowed by federal law. Energy-rich states such as Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah have higher rates.

“Federal onshore oil and gas revenues have increased 87% in just the first year of the Trump Administration, as well as an overall increase in federal energy revenue around $1 billion,” Interior Department spokesman Alex Hinson said in a statement. “With historic tax cuts and smart regulatory reform, we look forward to continual growth. That means more money for conservation and to rebuild our National Parks.”

The 87 percent increase reflects an additional $167 million generated for the federal government from lease sales last year.

The oil industry and Trump’s supporters say the president is swinging the pendulum back to energy after Obama conserved a record amount of federal land, some of which Trump has undone. They say Obama suppressed energy production through cumbersome permitting and heavy-handed regulation.

But internal emails obtained by the conservation group Rock Mountain Wild and shared with E&E News illustrate a complication with Trump’s policies: Energy companies didn’t want to lease a lot of the federal land, and that was problematic for BLM leadership because Trump and Zinke had instructed the agency to hold quarterly lease sales.

“It doesn’t look like Colorado will have a March 2018 Lease Sale,” Rachel Vaughn, a BLM official in Colorado, wrote to colleagues in Washington, D.C., on March 6, 2017. “We don’t have any new (expressions of interest) for the field offices in that rotation and we don’t have any old deferrals that can be brought forward at this time.”

For an administration that wants to demonstrate that it’s turbocharging the energy economy, the email betrayed a truth the White House hasn’t wanted to admit: By and large, the industry isn’t buying what the White House is selling.

“We’ve been seeing some pushback from the Main Interior, regarding lease sale postponements,” Jennifer Spencer, a mineral leasing specialist for the BLM in Washington, responded on March 8, 2017.

Spencer explained that a Nevada office ran into a similar problem – lack of industry interest – and recommended postponing the lease sale. But the Interior Department wouldn’t approve that. Instead, it forced BLM officials in Nevada to shuffle around leases from another district: The Battle Mountain district was supposed to have one lease sale. Instead, the BLM planned two in separate quarters, spending taxpayer dollars to divvy up the land and hold two distinct auctions to satisfy the demands from Interior headquarters.

Can drilling coexist with wildlife, organic farms? 

Paonia sits in a fertile shadow of the Rockies atop the nation’s second-largest shale gas reserve. It’s a town with a legacy of coal mining. Now it’s full of artists and organic farmers. Cafes line the main drag and mountains hug the valley. The land at its doorstep is under Bureau of Land Management control. That means Trump is the landlord.

The family farm where Dan Stucker, 69, spent summers pitching hay turned 104 his year. He’s lived a storied life, doing everything from “deliver a baby to plan an invasion.” A former State Department employee who spent years in Zimbabwe – he remembers it as Rhodesia – the land where his family’s story began eventually called him home.

So perhaps it’s ironic that Stucker named his plane “Unintended Consequences,” because that’s exactly what people on the other side of this debate are worried about.

Here’s why: Trump doesn’t seem to accept that fossil fuel extraction has costs – to the environment and people’s health. The White House reduced estimates of damage from carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to $1 to $6 per ton. It was $42 under Obama. In the past, Trump has called climate change “bullshit” and a “hoax.” Now, his administration is implementing policies that reflect that view.

That outlook emerges in Trump’s decisions here and across the West. The nation’s vast public lands have always been an engine for energy development. Now it’s in overdrive. One of Trump’s economic cornerstones is “energy dominance.” He wants the nation to produce more energy than it ever has.

To do that, Trump instructed the agency overseeing public lands to kill the “burdens” on oil drilling, gas extraction and coal mining. A 43-pagereport by the Interior Department identified various rules meant to ensure that energy development was done safely and cleanly. Then the White House began axing them.

Those decisions had clear consequences for wildlife, such as the greater sage-grouse, a threatened bird that exists on federal territory oil and gas drillers covet.

“We understand current BLM policy prevents the BLM from utilizing the best available science/data, specifically the most current (sage-grouse) Habitat Management Categories … when applying stipulations in regards to oil and gas parcel leasing,” D. Bradford Hardenbrook, a habitat biologist with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, wrote in a letter to a BLM official obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservation group WildEarth Guardians. “Inadequate impact preventions are the result.”

It’s not unusual for Republican presidents to jettison regulations. What stands out is how Trump is doing it. There’s scant mention of conservation – a GOP hallmark in the past – or safeguarding the environment. The metric for success in the report was simple: Does this get energy out of the ground faster?

Trump’s Interior Department is also taking a lighter touch on enforcing laws it has on the books. A BLM official decided against proceedings to penalize Whiting Petroleum Corp. for spilling 107 barrels of oil in Colorado on March 28, 2017.

Brent Helleckson, a vineyard and winery owner in Paonia, Colo., questions whether the federal Bureau of Land Management properly administers its oil lease program.Credit: Morgan Levy for Reveal

“Seems to me that failing to report a major undesirable event ought to be more than a wrist slap,” Gregory Shoop, then the associate state director for the BLM’s Colorado office,said in an email to Mark Lyon, a supervisory petroleum engineering technician for the BLM in Colorado. “But that’s a problem for another day.” The documents were obtained through WildEarth Guardians’ FOIA request.

Trump’s vision of oil pumps riles many residents in Paonia. It threatens the town’s economic lifeblood, they say. People here want to avoid repeating history by relying on a boom-and-bust resource economy driven by the price of fossil fuels.

Hunters crowd into inns and lodges every fall, lured by elk that graze on nearby hillsides. They’re a major contributor to Paonia’s economy, said Mike Drake, a bow hunter and former Paonia Chamber of Commerce president. Agriculture flourishes here, too. Paonia has Colorado’s highest concentration of organic crops.

Can these hills be speckled with oil rigs and still sustain those virtues?

“I don’t think the federal government has ever set foot out here. They wouldn’t understand it,” said Elizabeth Plummer. Her store, Lizzy’s Market, sells local meats, cheeses and produce from 20 suppliers.

“We the people own this land, and we the people should have a say in who does what with our land,” she said. “And the fact that it could be leased for next to no money and be literally destroyed without anybody having a say in it is literally deplorable. What happened to ‘we the people?’ ”

Bob Reedy owns a gas and service station in Paonia that his dad started 65 years ago – local reporters call it, and the worn couch crammed into the corner, the town’s “conservative think tank.” He doubts the industry’s estimates for jobs growth or economic benefits will come true, but he’s a utilitarian. He guesses oil company employees will spend money in town while they’re working, even if they’re only here a short while.

“I hunt, I fish, I ride horses, I ride ATVs and I use pickups, Jeeps, whatever. I use (the land) as much, and in the past probably more, than 90 percent of the people who use it now,” Reedy said, adding that he thinks it all can coexist with oil drilling. “We’ve got to get energy somewhere. Why not here?”

Climate change is another unintended consequence. The Trump administration revoked a policy that instructed the BLM to consider whether its actions warm the planet. That means an agency that already accounts for 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t have to consider its effect on the atmosphere when auctioning off federal land. That land could be under the control of private oil and gas companies for decades.

Climate change already is hitting this area hard. Residents experience water shortages. The Gunnison River Basin, where Paonia rests, is “a microcosm” of the broader climate and water troubles bedeviling the state, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Higher temperatures mean precipitation is increasingly falling as rain rather than snow. That’s decreased the Rockies’ snowpack, a natural reservoir that feeds the Colorado River system’s summer streams. Now, there’s less to melt. Crops go parched. Riverbeds go dry. Farmers’ pockets go empty.

“Climate change, global warming, degraded water supplies – all the various things that happen when we start developing lands, especially for energy production, is something that isn’t factored into what we get from it in the short run,” said Mark Waltermire, a soft-spoken organic farmer outside Paonia who sells produce across the state.

Is drilling profitable here?

Trump can offer as much land as he wants, but that doesn’t make it profitable to pull oil and gas out of difficult areas. Geology is the problem. Most of the shale plays on which hydraulic fracturing has occurred aren’t on federal land. Trump can’t control that.

That’s especially salient for Paonia, said Brad Burton, a petroleum geologist at Western State Colorado University. The North Fork Valley is “characterized by a thin stratigraphic section that is essentially devoid of petroleum source rocks,” so developing oil and natural gas has “extremely low” prospects.

“We’re giving away leases for pennies on the dollar,” said an Interior Department staffer, speaking on background to be candid. “It’s to the detriment of the American West.”

But energy companies defend the practice. Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a trade group, said shutting out federal oil and gas development would increase reliance on imported fuel, making the U.S. more dependent on other oil-rich nations.

“The land is not locked out from other uses,” she said. “I know that environmentalists love to say that.”

Comparatively few acres attract the minimum price, she said. The government still collects a check either way from rental fees and whatever the company paid for the lease.

“It’s kind of like ‘no harm, no foul’ if somebody buys a lease and then doesn’t use it,” she said.

Today, Paonia, Colo., is full of artists and organic farmers. Cafes line the main drag and mountains hug the valley.Credit: Morgan Levy for Reveal

Energy companies say there’s plenty of interest from industry, but the Obama administration and environmental opponents impeded energy development.

“For eight years, I couldn’t get a permit. Why is that?” said Eric Sanford, operations and land manager with SG Interests, which has federal drilling operations near Paonia. “I think it’s unfortunate that public lands are used as a political tool like they are.”

Worldwide fossil fuel consumption is expected to rise for decades, and U.S. taxpayers benefit by exporting fuel. It’s better to have the land under lease so if there’s a fuel shortage, drilling can start immediately, oil executives say.

The concern among critics is that Trump is handing large stretches of public land to oil and gas companies for a decade or more. That treats the West’s huge landscape as a bank account filled with greenhouse gas emissions that oil companies could withdraw at any time.

“It’s what in the climate policy community they call ‘climate lock-in,’ ” said Michael Saul, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “People are essentially paying money to acquire property rights and federal minerals that in the real world are never going to be burnable under any sort of climate action scenario.”

Brent Helleckson, owner of Stone Cottage Cellars, a vineyard and winery in Paonia, is dressed in overalls and a Stetson. His outfit belies a background in aerospace engineering. He’s realistic about oil and gas companies’ need to stockpile reserves as they deplete what they have. Still, Helleckson questions whether the BLM properly administers its program.

Helleckson surveys the bare branches he’s been pruning. The sun begins its slow crawl down the blue sky, finding a notch behind the snow-capped mountains and green valley.

“Is that the best use of that land for the taxpayer? I doubt it,” he said. ”You’ve taken a public good and converted it to a private asset. We should be very careful about where we do that.”

Paonia has Colorado’s highest concentration of organic crops.Credit: Morgan Levy for Reveal

This report is the result of a collaboration between E&E News and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

Trump’s Remarks About Changing European Culture Draw Ire

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s lament this week that immigration is “changing the culture” of Europe echoed rising anti-immigrant feelings on both sides of the Atlantic, where Europe and the United States are going through a demographic transformation that makes some of the white majority uncomfortable.

Historians and advocates immediately denounced Trump’s comments, saying such talk would encourage white nationalists.

“The way he put this argument about changing our culture … about Europe becoming less nice than it is, in other words, these people are here and they are making the culture crappy and making the place lesser, that’s straight out of the white supremacist/white nationalist playbook,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

Trump, in an interview with the British newspaper The Sun, blamed immigration for a changing culture in Europe: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”

Trump, the grandson of a German immigrant and the son of a Scottish immigrant to the United States, repeated his contention at a news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May:

“I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said. “I think it’s very much hurt other parts of Europe. And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that, but I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture, you are changing a lot of things.”

Beirich called those comments “racist.”

Claire M. Massey, a scholar at the Institute for British and North American Studies at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität in Greifswald, Germany, said Trump’s comments were “awfully painful,” especially for the United Kingdom, where immigration has played a key role in rebuilding the country after World War II. “England and the United Kingdom wouldn’t be what it is today without immigrants,” she said.

Massey said Trump’s comments remind her of the rhetoric coming from neo-Nazis in Germany and Poland. The comments will embolden the far-right in Europe at a time when many European nations are already very diverse.

Lisbon, Portugal, for example, is now home to sizable and visible Brazilian, Cape Verdean, and Angolan populations. The immigrant groups and their Portuguese-born children have helped revitalize areas of the cities once in disrepair and have a presence in everything from professional soccer teams to popular culture.

Portuguese Mozambique-born fado singer Mariza is among the nation’s most beloved performers.

In France, immigrants from the Middle East and Africa have settled throughout Paris and have drawn the ire of the far-right and even some moderates over the city’s changing makeup. Then-French Prime Minister François Fillon decreed in 2011 that women were banned from wearing face veils outside of the home except in mosques or as car passengers. A European court later upheld the ban, saying the intent was to unify the country, but not before an outcry by human rights activists.

Throughout England, from London to Liverpool, immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the former British colonies in the Caribbean have reshaped various neighborhoods, drawing scorn from members of the far-right and some rural residents who blamed the European Union and immigrants for the economic struggles of once-prosperous mining regions.

The United States is also going through a demographic shift. The Census Bureau estimates that the country’s population will have more minorities than whites for the first time in 2043, a change due in part to higher birth rates among Hispanics and a stagnating or declining birth rate among blacks, whites and Asians.

Trump’s public life has been filled with controversial statements about immigrants.

In the first moments of his presidential campaign in June 2015, he called for the construction of a border wall with Mexico and accused the country of sending migrants who were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

He continually used dark imagery to depict immigrants as dangerous invaders. Then, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that December in San Bernardino, California, that was carried out by a U.S.-born Muslim and his Pakistani wife, who was a legal U.S. resident, Trump called for barring all Muslims from entering the country. The Supreme Court eventually upheld his executive order banning travel from several mostly Muslim countries, rejecting challenges that it discriminated against Muslims or exceeded his authority.

In January, Trump questioned why the U.S. would accept more immigrants from Haiti and “shithole countries” in Africa as he rejected a bipartisan immigration deal, according to one participant and people briefed on the conversation.

In recent weeks, Trump bowed to tremendous political pressure and issued an executive order ending his administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents when families cross the border with Mexico illegally.

Paul A. Kramer, a Vanderbilt University historian who specializes in the politics of inequality in the United States, said Trump’s most recent comments were an intentional attempt to ally himself and his base in the United States with the far-right nationalist movements in Europe.

“The rising tide of white nationalism is something that he embraces, that he sees himself as participating in and that he wants to encourage,” Kramer said.

___

Contreras contributed to this report from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Joining Forces to Boost Progressive Agenda in Kansas

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are joining forces next week as they both head to Kansas to give progressive contenders a lift as they run on a similar agenda of bold and progressive policies in that state’s upcoming Democratic primary.

According to the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez will head to Kansas on July 20. They’ll begin in Wichita, where James Thompson, who narrowly lost a special election in 2017, wants another chance to win the 4th Congressional District. They’ll continue with an event in the Kansas City suburbs for Brent Welder, a former Sanders delegate now seeking the Democratic nomination in the 3rd Congressional District.”

Speaking with Weigel in an interview, Sanders explained the importance of bringing the kind of agenda that fueled his 2016 presidential challenge—and also swept Ocasio-Cortez to her historic victory in New York—to places often characterized as “Red State” bastions.

“I’ve believed for years that the Democratic Party has committed political malpractice by writing off half the states in this country,” said Sanders. “They’ve got to fight for every state in this country.”

For their part, both Thompson and Welder expressed excitement over the endorsements from Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and say they believe the kind of agenda they are promoting—which demands Medicare for All, tuition-free college, ambitious climate action, and a laser focus on economic inequality and the dignity of workers—is exactly what people in their districts need and want to be hearing.

“People keep asking, are these the kind of ideas that a candidate can talk about and be successful in Kansas?” Welder, a 37-year-old labor lawyer, told Weigel earlier this week. “What I’ve learned on this campaign is that the only way we can be successful is by talking about these ideas.”

 

Bernie. Alexandria. One amazing rally.

Friday, July 20 @ the Reardon. Doors open at 5pm. Get your free tickets now at https://t.co/GO5BOIWGEC. Get ready for one epic event to support our bold, progressive, winning campaign! https://t.co/jH8bU9a9c9

— Brent Welder (@BrentWelder) July 13, 2018

Why are we beating Republican Congressman Yoder by 7 points? Because we’re fighting for true progressive values.

Join us w/ a small-dollar donation @ https://t.co/6wK2yorK52 or sign up to volunteer https://t.co/yHcx7yKCeK pic.twitter.com/mt3xrBifI0

— Brent Welder (@BrentWelder) July 14, 2018

And despite that President Donald Trump handily won his district in 2016, Thompson said he’s not at all worried about being smeared with the “democratic socialist” label even in a district that has leaned Republican in recent years.

“I’m extremely, extremely excited to have the senator and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in town for an event,” Thompson said. “They can say that, but my opponent here is a corporate socialist who’s been redistributing wealth to people who don’t need it.”

As promised, YUGE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Our next campaign rally is at the Orpheum on July 20th.

We are excited to welcome (drumroll, please) @Ocasio2018 and @BernieSanders to WICHITA, KS! Let’s kick this up a notch and #flipthe4th! Sign up here! https://t.co/NzsXHwkLou #UnitedWeStand pic.twitter.com/w2f9M6Ui6Y

— James Thompson (@JamesThompsonKS) July 13, 2018

As Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief for The Intercept, tweeted on Friday night, “This shows how much [Ocasio-Cortez] is changing the game.”

This shows how much @Ocasio2018 is changing the game. @emilyslist is putting hundreds of thousands in this race for @sharicedavids against @BrentWelder.

A month ago, Bernie would be getting called a misogynist for this this rally. Now it’s part of a movement. https://t.co/wNsp1dsJc8

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 14, 2018

And, in his weekend newsletter sent to subscribers on Saturday, Grim added:

Last week, Emily’s List announced it was putting $400,000 of super PAC money behind its candidate in a Kansas House race, Sharice Davids. On Friday, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, who had previously endorsed Brent Welder, Davids’ opponent, announced they’d be coming to Kansas to hold rallies for Welder and also for James Thompson, another House candidate.

It’ll be fascinating to see whether the infusion of big money into the race is enough to overcome the huge on-the-ground organization that Welder has built. One reason both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez want to come to Kansas is to prove their long-held theory that bold progressive politics doesn’t need to be confined to the coast, and that you can run on things like Medicare for all, and still win, even in Kansas.

Now, Davids isn’t really bad: she’s a former Obama official and Native American woman from the district, and also a mixed-martial arts fighter. Pretty great bio! But she isn’t running on the kind of aggressive platform Welder is, and Ocasio-Cortez did. And she’s relying on big money from a super PAC rather than small dollars and an army of volunteer door knockers. And that’s the main cleavage in the Democratic Party right now. The primary is on August 7, should be interesting.

In the wake of her stunning victory in New York last month, Ocasio-Cortez objected to the idea—as Common Dreams reported at the time—that the platform she ran on in Queens and the Bronx does not or would not have traction in the Midwest or more rural working-class regions.

In his talk with Weigel, Sanders said that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is not an isolated incident but part of a larger shift in which candidates further to the left, running on bold policy agendas, are besting more centrist candidates reluctant to challenge the status quo.

“Alexandria’s victory took place after hundreds of volunteers elected two progressive women in Pittsburgh,” Sanders said. “It worked in Baltimore, where three incumbent state senators were defeated by progressives. That is really something. It’s happened in Chicago, where not only did Chuy Garcia win a primary for Congress, but he brought more progressives into the state legislature. What this is all about is the political revolution.”

Though not a political novice by any means, just a few months ago, Ocasio-Cortez was working in a restaurant. And that is not beside the point. That is much of the point.

It was hard for me to leave my restaurant job. When you work long days in a hard job with thoughtful and funny people, it very much becomes a family.

These photos are from just a few months ago. I love these people a lot. My focus is to make life better for folks like these. pic.twitter.com/q8Ai3aQMCf

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) July 13, 2018

Turns out, every state has restaurants. And every restaurant has people who work there. And of course, it’s not just restaurants.

As Sarah Smith, running for Congress in Washington state’s 9th District, tweeted in response:

I’m still working full time on top of campaigning. I get asked about it a lot and why I do it. The fact is, I don’t have a choice.

Working class people can’t afford politics. It’s a way to keep us away from the table.

It’s hard. But it reminds me who I’m doing this for.

Rot and Rehabilitation in the American Penal System

“The Mars Room”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“The Mars Room”

A book by Rachel Kushner

What does it mean to “get tough on crime”? If the answer is meting out lengthy prison sentences to those rightly convicted of felonies, it’s an entirely reasonable proposition. But if getting tough on crime also entails psychological abuse of such offenders once they’re jailed, as is so often the case in the U.S., then it’s a different story—one not just ethically unacceptable, but utterly lacking in rehabilitative potential. “The Mars Room,” a new novel, tells that story, and is all the more commendable for having the strength of its convictions; author Rachel Kushner refrains from taking the easy way out and presenting the reader with an innocent protagonist. Though diffuse (touching as it does on myriad facets of incarceration, American-style) and more than a little uneven, “The Mars Room” brims with arresting vignettes populated by characters who are morally tainted, yet also victims of a needlessly repressive and dehumanizing penal system.

Kushner, best known for her novels “The Flamethrowers” and “Telex from Cuba,” both of which were finalists for the National Book Award, lives in Los Angeles. Stanville, the state prison in the Central Valley where much of the novel is set, may be fictional, but thanks to the author’s firsthand research, it resembles any number of correctional facilities across California and beyond. Just what goes on at Stanville is about to become daily life for Romy Hall: “The Mars Room” opens with 29-year-old Romy, recently convicted of murder, on a bus transporting prisoners from county jails to the big house. “In our closeness to the scumbly land beyond the meshed window,” she relates of the bus ride, which takes place at night, “I longed for reality to twist itself like a bag and tear a hole from the twisting, rupture the bag and let me out, release me into that no-man’s-land.”

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Mars Room” at Google Books.

Romy shifts back and forth between the debasement she endures at Stanville over the years and a far less compelling account of her upbringing and adulthood in the seedier neighborhoods of San Francisco (Kushner herself lived in the Bay Area for a while). This includes a portrait of her job as a stripper and lap dancer at a particularly unsavory joint called the Mars Room, where she made the fateful acquaintance of Kurt Kennedy, a regular who became besotted with her—and whom she would murder.

Even before the bus reaches its destination, you receive more than an inkling of the treatment its passengers can expect there. When one of them, a morbidly obese woman, loses consciousness for unknown reasons and slowly slides off her seat, an unresponsive “human mound slumped on the floor of the bus,” the correctional officers do not instruct the driver to head to a hospital. At Stanville, the woman is pronounced dead.

“When you see lights even higher than stadium lights, you are at prison,” notes Romy upon arriving at her new home. While she and the others are being processed, a young pregnant woman known as Button goes into labor. Because Romy and fellow prisoner Sammy defy orders that they refrain from helping her, they are shunted off to administrative segregation—a kind of prison within the prison, also known as “ad seg”—once the baby is born and the commotion has ended. Meanwhile, since Button has no relative or friend who might claim the baby within 48 hours, her newborn is not only removed from her care, but becomes a ward of the state. A similar calamity befalls Romy some time later; her mother dies in a car wreck and her 7-year-old son Jackson (who sustains non-life-threatening injuries in the same accident) is left without a guardian.

Of course, at a place like Stanville, cruelty is hardly the exclusive preserve of correctional officers. The women themselves are guilty of horrendous crimes. In a fit of rage and protectiveness, Romy killed the infatuated Kurt Kennedy for stalking her and Jackson—he even followed them when they moved from San Francisco to L.A.—despite the fact that the man was disabled and does not appear to have posed any threat. At Stanville, Romy realizes that some of her fellow inmates have yet to exhaust their capacity for violence. When a transgender woman is transferred there after being raped at a men’s prison, she is set upon by an ad hoc gang. And poor Button, who dotes on a baby rabbit much like she would have done with the child the authorities snatched from her, returns to her cell one day to discover that the most psychopathic of her cellmates has boiled and eaten it. “Button crawled into her bunk with the rabbit’s little shirt that she had sewn,” is how Romy describes the heart-rending scene. “She stayed that way for a day.”

Though other characters sometimes take center stage (Sammy, who helped with Button’s delivery, narrates a chapter, while the ill-fated Kurt Kennedy is the subject of two consecutive ones, both related in the third person), those who linger there are three: Romy, of course; Gordon Hauser, a green and tentative English literature instructor at Stanville; and “Doc,” a corrupt and murderously violent L.A. police officer who got his comeuppance and is now understandably keen on keeping his former job a secret from his cop-hating fellow inmates at a men’s prison. Hauser and Doc are distinct from one another and from Romy (all three, incidentally, are white), as well as moderately engaging in and of themselves. Nevertheless, both these male characters remain underwritten, and seem to have been devised for the purpose of drawing attention to the novel’s secondary themes.

With Doc (who doesn’t make the acquaintance of either Romy or Hauser), the theme is obvious enough: the all-too-common and often years-long impunity of dirty cops. When it comes to Hauser, however, Kushner reveals a more ambitious streak. Lovelorn (he was transferred to Stanville following indications he had grown overly familiar with an inmate at another women’s prison), compassionate (he tries to help Romy locate Jackson), and sensitive to humans’ relationship with nature (his abortive Ph.D. dissertation was on Henry David Thoreau), Hauser moves into a small cabin in the sparsely populated mountains overlooking his new place of employment. The chapters revolving around him are peppered with extracts from a Ted Kaczynski reader, which the curious prison teacher has taken to perusing in his spare time. Do the Unabomber’s tirades against society’s despoliation of nature dovetail with Hauser’s observations regarding the remote location of Stanville? Kushner clearly believes that they do, and seems to imply that the ever-expanding prison industrial complex is disfiguring pristine rural America. The notion is thought-provoking, to be sure, but also makes for an odd combination: coyly oblique and self-consciously radical environmentalist.

For more straightforward (and immediately relevant) social commentary, you’re better off looking to the various daily indignities the women suffer behind bars. And for a trenchant indictment of how the penal system fails to prepare inmates for the day they’re released, consider Romy’s bluntly stated point regarding rehabilitation: “They don’t help you with it. You have to do it yourself.” Of course, if, like Romy, you’re a lifer, successful rehabilitation is probably moot. But what of those prisoners who have a realistic shot at parole?

Here, Kushner boldly assails the widespread and almost sacrosanct assumption that there cannot be enough contrition on the part of prospective parolees. The truth proves more complicated. While it is certainly legitimate to stipulate that a person found guilty of a crime show genuine remorse (including empathy with the victim/s) as a condition for the granting of parole, should such a feeling consume him or her, it could cause severe psychological harm. As Romy notes:

Prison was a place where you had to be strong to get through each day. If you thought about some awful act you’d committed, every day, in graphic detail, enough to prove to a parole board that you had insight, the proverbial insight they wanted, needed, to let you go home, you might lose your mind.

Ironically, such an outcome would prevent you from becoming a functional member of society in the event of your release, thereby defeating the purpose of parole.

As Kushner demonstrates time and again, the rot within America’s carceral realm goes even deeper. For the U.S. penal system, the fact that the law deprives you of your freedom if you commit a crime doesn’t suffice as punishment. In prison, at every conceivable opportunity your offense is used as a cudgel to bludgeon you. “The Mars Room” features instances of this phenomenon astonishing in their malice as well as their illogicality. When a frantic Romy tries to inquire about Jackson’s condition after news of the car accident that injured him and killed his grandmother, a correctional officer (who happens to be a woman) responds with this sneeringly self-righteous remark: “Hall, if you’d wanted to be someone’s mother, you should have thought of that before.”

At Least 132, Including a Candidate, Die in Pakistan Campaign Violence

LAHORE, Pakistan — The deadliest attacks in Pakistan’s troubled election campaign killed at least 132 people, including a candidate, on Friday just before the arrest of disgraced former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif upon his return to the country.

In the southwestern province of Baluchistan, a suicide bomber killed 128 people, including a politician running for a provincial legislature. Four others died in a strike in Pakistan’s northwest, spreading panic in the country.

The attacks came hours before Sharif returned from London along with his daughter Maryam to face a 10-year prison sentence on corruption charges, anti-corruption officials said. Maryam Sharif faces seven years in jail.

He was taken into custody to serve his sentence; however, he is expected to appeal and seek bail. It wasn’t clear when his appeal would be filed but he has until Monday.

In the southern town of Mastung, candidate Siraj Raisani and 127 others died when a suicide bomber blew himself up amid scores of supporters who had gathered at a rally.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement carried on its Aamaq news agency.

The group gave no reason for the bombing that killed Raisani, who was running for the election on the Baluchistan Awami Party ticket.

Raisani is the brother of the former Baluchistan chief minister, Aslam Raisani. Caretaker Home Minister Agha Umar Bungalzai told The Associated Press another 300 people were wounded in Friday’s bombing.

The U.S. State Department in a statement strongly condemned this week’s attacks on political candidates and their supporters in Pakistan.

“These attacks are cowardly attempts to deprive the Pakistani people of their democratic rights,” it said. “We will continue to stand with the people of Pakistan and the broader South Asia region in their fight against terrorism.”

Meanwhile, Sharif arrived in the eastern city of Lahore from London where he was visiting his ailing wife when a Pakistani court convicted him and his daughter of corruption.

Sharif’s son-in-law is currently serving his one-year prison sentence on the same charge, which stems from the purchase of luxury apartments in Britain that the court said were bought with illegally acquired money.

Ahead of his return, police swept through Lahore, arresting scores of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party workers to prevent them from greeting him at the airport.

Barbed wire was strung across some roads leading to the Lahore airport on Friday and barricades were positioned at the roadside ready to close off main boulevards should crowds start to gather.

In a video message Friday reportedly from aboard his aircraft en route to Pakistan, Sharif said he was returning knowing he would be taken directly to prison.

Sharif has been banned from participating in politics, and his brother Shahbaz Sharif now heads his Pakistan Muslim League and is campaigning for re-election on July 25.

In a televised appeal to supporters from London earlier this week, Sharif said he was not afraid of prison and asked people to vote for his party. He also used the opportunity to again criticize Pakistan’s powerful military, which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for most of its 71-year history, saying Pakistan now has a “state above the state.”

During his term in office, Sharif criticized the military’s involvement in civilian affairs and its efforts in fighting extremists.

Pakistani and international rights groups have accused the military of seeking to maintain its influence in Pakistani politics by keeping Sharif out of power. The military denied the accusations saying their assistance in carrying out the elections was requested by Pakistan’s Election Commission. The army will deploy 350,000 security personnel to polling stations throughout the country on election day.

Underscoring the security threat, were Friday’s bombings the first of which killed four people in the northwest near the election rally of a senior politician from an Islamist party.

The explosion targeted candidate Akram Khan Durrani, who escaped unhurt, and wounded 20 people, said local police chief Rashid Khan.

Durrani is running in the July 25 vote against popular former lawmaker Imran Khan. He is a candidate of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, an election alliance of radical religious groups.

The attacks came days after a suicide bomber dispatched by the Pakistani Taliban killed secular politician Haroon Ahmed Bilour and 20 others at his rally in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Former lawmaker Imran Khan, who hopes to become the next prime minister, condemned Friday’s attack against his opponent, Durrani. In a tweet, he said there seems to be a conspiracy to sabotage the July 25 vote. But he said the people of Pakistan will not allow anything to prevent “historic” elections from taking place.

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Sattar reported from Quetta, Pakistan and Associated Press writers Riaz Khan in Peshawar and Munir Ahmed and Kathy Gannon in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Strzok Hoisted With His Own Petard

If FBI agent Peter Strzok were not so glib, it would have been easier to feel some sympathy for him during his tough grilling at the House oversight hearing on Thursday, even though his wounds are self-inflicted. The wounds, of course, ooze from the content of his own text message exchange with his lover and alleged co-conspirator, Lisa Page.

Strzok was a top FBI counterintelligence official and Page an attorney working for then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. The Attorney General fired McCabe in March and DOJ has criminally referred McCabe to federal prosecutors for [allegedly] lying to Justice Department investigators.

On Thursday members of the House Judiciary and Oversight/Government Reform committees questioned Strzok for eight hours on how he led the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized emails and Donald Trump’s campaign’s ties with Russia, if any.

Strzok did his best to be sincerely slick. Even so, he seemed to feel beleaguered — even ambushed — by the questions of Republicans using his own words against him. “Disingenuous” is the word a Republican Congresswoman used to describe his performance. Nonetheless, he won consistent plaudits from the Democrats. He showed zero regret for the predicament he put himself into, except for regret at his royal screw-up in thinking he and Lisa could “talk about Hillary” (see below) on their FBI cellphones and no one would ever know. One wag has suggested that Strzok may have been surreptitiously texting, when he should have been listening to the briefing on “Cellphone Security 101.”

In any case, the chickens have now come home to roost. Most of those chickens, and Strzok’s predicament in general, are demonstrably the result of his own incompetence. Indeed, Strzok seems the very embodiment of the “Peter Principle.” FBI agents down the line — that is, the non-peter-principle people — are painfully aware of this, and resent the discredit that Strzok and his bosses have brought on the Bureau. Many are reportedly lining up to testify against what has been going on at the top.

It is always necessary at this point to note that the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA and even the Department of Justice were operating, as former FBI Director James Comey later put it, in an environment “where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump.” Most of them expected to be able to stay in their key positions and were confident they would receive plaudits — not indictments — for the liberties that they, the most senior U.S. law enforcement officials, took with the law. In other words, once the reality that Mrs. Clinton was seen by virtually everyone to be a shoo-in is taken into account, the mind boggles a lot less.

Peter Principle

In a text sent to Page on April 2, 2016, Strzok assured her that it was safe to use official cellphones. Page: “So look, you say we text on that phone when we talk about Hillary because it can’t be traced.” It goes downhill from there for the star-crossed lovers.

Pity Page, who asked for more time to answer a subpoena to testify to the same joint committee. It is understandable that she would have trusted Strzok on this. After all, he was not only her lover, but also one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence officials.

How could she ever have expected to taste the bitter irony that the above text exchange could be retrieved, find its way to the Department of Justice Inspector General, to Congress, and then to the rest of us, not to mention far more incriminating exchanges.

The ‘Hillary Dispensation’

There were moments of high irony at Thursday’s hearing. For example, under questioning by Darrell Issa (R-CA), Strzok appealed, in essence, for the same kid-gloves treatment that his FBI and DOJ associates afforded Mrs. Clinton during the Strzok-led investigation of her emails.

Issa: Mr. Strozk, you were part of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, that’s correct?

Strzok: Yes.

Issa: And in that investigation, uh, you were part of the decision for her to, uh, and her lawyers, to go through emails that were produced during, uh, you, if you will, during her time as Secretary, go through and determine which ones were Government, and which ones were not, both the classified and unclassified, is that correct?

Strzok: I was not.

Issa: You were not involved at all.

Strzok: That’s correct.

Issa: But you’re aware of it.

Strzok: I … I’m aware of their statements to us about how they did it.

Issa: And do you think it was ok, uh, for Secretary Clinton to determine what could or couldn’t, uh, uh, qualify for her to turn in under the Federal Records Act?

Strzok: I, I can’t speak to that. That was a decision, my understanding between her and her attorneys, and …

Issa: Ok, but you were aware that in her production she failed to deliver some items that’ve now been ruled were classified, is that correct?

Strzok: I’m aware that we recovered information that was not in the material that she turned over. I don’t know if it was her failure, the failure of the attorneys conducting that sort, or simply because she didn’t have it. I, I don’t know the answer to that question.

Issa: So, I bring up something that came up in the previous round. So far, only you have determined what should be turned over from your private emails, that, or your non-government emails and texts, what should be delivered because it was government in nature. You’ve made that decision.

Strzok: That’s right.

Issa: And it’s your position that nobody else in the way of a government entity should be able to look over your shoulder, so to speak, and make that decision.

Strzok: That, that’s right.

Issa: So you think it’s ok for the target — and you are a target — of an investigation to determine what should be delivered rather than, if you will, the government, right?

Strzok: Sir, I am not aware of any investigation of which I am a target, not aware I’m a target of any investigation.

At this point Issa tells Strzok he is indeed a target of investigation by Congress. More importantly, Issa makes the point that the content of the texts exchanged on the FBI phones contained a mixture of official business and personal matters.

So why, asks Issa, should we not ask you to provide similar texts from your personal exchanges, since there is likely to be a similar mixture of official and personal matters in those texts? Issa suggests they likely “would be similar.”

Strzok asks if, by “similar,” Issa means “commenting on Mr. Trump or Hillary Clinton or anything else political in nature.” Strzok then adds, “I don’t specifically recall but it is probably a safe assumption.”

Uh oh.

Strzok: No Good Options

If Strzok was distracted by texting during the standard briefing on “NSA Capabilities:101,” he may have missed the part about NSA collecting and storing everything that goes over the Internet. That would include, of course, his private text messages with Page on private phones.

There is, admittedly, a very slim chance Strzok is unaware of this. But, given his naiveté about how well protected the texts on his FBI cellphone were, that possibility cannot be ruled out. In any case, given the high stakes involved, there seems a chance he might be tempted to follow Mrs. Clinton’s example with her emails and try to delete or destroy texts that provide additional incriminating evidence — or get someone else to do so.

More probably, after Thursday’s hearing, Strzok will see it as too late for him to try to cash in on the “Hillary Exemption.” Strzok, after all, is not Hillary Clinton. In addition, it has probably long since dawned on him that his FBI and DOJ co-conspirators may well decide to “throw him under the bus,” one of those delicate expressions we use in Washington. In this connection, Strzok will have noted that last month McCabe asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to give him immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony on how senior officials at the FBI and Justice Department handled the investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private email server.

If McCabe knows FBI history, he is aware that one of his predecessors as acting director, L. Patrick Gray, famously was left to “twist slowly in the wind” per the instructions of President Richard Nixon’s aide John Ehrlichman, when the Senate Judiciary Committee could not get satisfactory answers from Gray.

Nixon had nominated Gray to lead the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972, but he could never get confirmed by the Senate. Worse still, Gray was forced to resign after less than a year as acting FBI director, after he admitted to having destroyed Watergate-related documents.

Predictable Media Spin

The “mainstream media” remain the main obstacle to understanding what is going on behind the scenes. It would be easier to forgive them, were not a full-blown Constitutional crisis brewing between the Executive and Legislature branches, as the DOJ and FBI continue to resist Congress’s requests for original documents. Former CIA chief John Brennan is also being given space to indulge in pre-emptive rhetoric that he apparently thinks will help when they get to him.

The New York Times reported Friday that “Peter Strzok … was hauled before the House but came out swinging. … The embattled F.B.I. agent who oversaw the opening of the Russia investigation mounted an aggressive defense of himself and the F.B.I. on Thursday, rejecting accusations that he let his private political views bias his official actions and labeling Republicans’ preoccupation with him ‘another victory notch in Putin’s belt.’”

The Potomac Times (aka The Washington Post) ran similarly laudatory coverage of Strzok — “Strzok testifies amid partisan fury: heated hearing sheds little light as agent fumes at accusations of FBI bias” — and laced its coverage with a defamatory article about Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who led the most aggressive Republican questioning of Strzok.

According to the Times, Jordan is “under withering scrutiny as he faces numerous accusations that he knew or should have known about the alleged sexual misconduct of a doctor who worked with the Ohio State wrestling team when Jordan was an assistant coach there between 1986 and 1995.” The Times goes on to quote House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): “Well, many people say that he did know and by his own standard, he should have known.”

And, sadly, do not look to so-called progressive media for more balanced reporting. For example, Democracy Now! Friday morning chose to highlight Strzok’s tortured explanation of what he really meant when he told Page, “We will stop” Trump. Strzok says the “we” he referred to was “the American population [which] would not elect somebody” who behaves like Trump. The context of that text exchange, however, makes it clear who the “we” is — or was.

Finally, for those with the courage to dissect and explain Strzok’s testimony to neighbors still drinking Russia-gate Kool-Aid, please note that Strzok’s name is easier to say, than to spell. It is pronounced “struck” like “dumbstruck,” or — equally applicable in Strzok’s circumstances — “Moonstruck.” Those watching Thursday’s hearing will have noticed that not all members of the House Judiciary and Oversight/Government Reform Committees had gotten the word on how to pronounce what may now become a household word.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. A former U.S. Army officer and CIA analyst, he has closely watched Washington goings-on like this for five decades. Ray co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Trump Weighs Drastic Measure to Lower Gas Prices Ahead of Midterms

Less than four months from the midterm elections, the Democratic Party enjoys an eight-point lead in a generic congressional vote, and Donald Trump’s approval rating hovers around 42 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average. Meanwhile, the average price of unleaded gasoline sits at $2.89 per gallon, up 63 cents from one year ago. Now the Trump administration is considering tapping into the country’s strategic reserve of crude oil to prevent that number from rising any higher before November.

“No decision has been made to release crude from the 660-million-barrel stockpile, known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but options under review range from a 5-million-barrel test sale to a larger release of 30 million barrels, said the people who requested anonymity to discuss non-public deliberations,” reports Bloomberg’s Ari Natter. “An even larger release is possible if it were to be coordinated with other nations.”

As Natter observes, Trump has voiced his frustration with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in characteristic fashion—by railing against the intergovernmental petroleum group on Twitter.

Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018

The OPEC Monopoly must remember that gas prices are up & they are doing little to help. If anything, they are driving prices higher as the United States defends many of their members for very little $’s. This must be a two way street. REDUCE PRICING NOW!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2018

“The oil stockpile, which was created in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo sent prices skyrocketing and forced Americans to ration gasoline, is mainly meant to be used in emergencies,” continues Natter. “But it has been tapped in the past to bring down domestic gasoline prices, such as by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, as well as to fund unrelated domestic legislation.”

Read the full report at Bloomberg.

McCain Calls on Trump to Confront Putin

WASHINGTON — The Latest on the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (all times local):

4:20 p.m.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona says President Donald Trump must be willing to confront Russia’s Vladimir Putin during their summit Monday in Helsinki.

McCain says that if Trump is not prepared to hold Putin accountable, the summit should not take place.

McCain’s statement comes after the Justice Department announced charges Friday against 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking into Democratic accounts during the 2016 presidential election.

McCain says the revelations from the Justice Department add to a body of evidence that confirms a Russian plot to “attack the 2016 election, sow chaos and dissention among the American electorate, and undermine faith in our democracy.”

In response to the indictment, Democrats overwhelmingly called for Trump not to meet with Putin. The press release from McCain’s office adds a rare GOP name to that list.

The Kremlin has denied that the Russian state interfered in the U.S. election.

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3:45 p.m.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry is denouncing the United States’ indictment of 12 alleged military intelligence agents accused of hacking into Democratic accounts in the 2016 US elections.

The ministry says “obviously, the purpose of this is to spoil the atmosphere” before Monday’s summit of President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.

The ministry’s statement blames “influential political forces of the United States, who oppose the normalization of relations between our countries and have been manufacturing blatant slander for two years.”

It says: “It is regrettable that the circulation of false information in Washington has become the norm, and that criminal cases are brought for obvious political reasons.”

The Kremlin has denied that the Russian state interfered in the U.S. election.

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2:15 p.m.

The White House is stressing that the new indictment against 12 Russian military intelligence officers contains no allegations of knowing involvement by anyone on the Trump campaign or that the hacking the Russians are accused of conducting affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Spokeswoman Lindsay Walters adds in her statement that “this is consistent with what we have been saying all along.”

In Friday’s indictment, the Justice Department accuses the Russian officers of hacking into Democratic accounts during the 2016 election campaign and releasing the stolen information in the months before Americans headed to the polls.

The indictment comes as special counsel Robert Mueller investigates potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the presidential election.

It also comes three days before Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin meet in Finland. The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

Rosenstein said the investigation is continuing.

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1:45 p.m.

The Kremlin is reaffirming its denial of meddling in the U.S. election.

President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov reaffirmed that “the Russian state has never interfered and has no intention of interfering in U.S. elections.”

Ushakov spoke Friday, just hours before the U.S. Justice Department announced charges against 12 Russian military intelligence officers accused of hacking into Democratic accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

He said the Kremlin believes there are “no objective reasons” for the current tensions, and that Moscow and Washington must join efforts to tackle global challenges such as international terrorism.

Putin and President Donald Trump are meeting Monday in Helsinki.

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1:40 p.m.

National Intelligence Director Dan Coats says the warning lights about cyber threats to U.S. national security are “blinking red” and the threats are not just around election time.

Coats spoke Friday after the Justice Department indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking into Democratic email accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and releasing stolen information in the months before Americans headed to the polls.

The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

Coats said U.S. officials are detecting cyber threats targeting energy, water and other infrastructure, aviation networks and manufacturing facilities. He says the threats are coming from Russia, Iran, China and North Korea as well as criminal networks and independent hackers.

He was speaking at the Hudson Institute think tank.

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1:35 p.m.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein says the timing of indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the U.S. election only reflects the natural course of the investigation.

Rosenstein announced the charges Friday as President Donald Trump was meeting with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle and just days before the president is scheduled to hold a summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

Rosenstein said: “The timing is a function of the collection of the facts, the evidence, the law and a determination that it was sufficient to present the indictment at this time.”

He said he briefed the president earlier this week on the indictments, but he declined to describe the president’s reaction.

The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

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1:30 p.m.

The top Democrat in the Senate is calling on President Donald Trump to cancel his coming meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the wake of new charges that 12 Russian intelligence officers hacked into Democratic email accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Intelligence agencies have said the interference was aimed at helping Trump’s presidential campaign and harming the election bid of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says the indictments are “further proof of what everyone but the president seems to understand: President Putin is an adversary who interfered in our elections to help President Trump win.”

Schumer says Trump should cancel his meeting with Putin until Russia takes steps to prove it won’t interfere in future elections.

The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

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12:30 p.m.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein says that Russian intelligence agents stole information on 500,000 U.S. voters after hacking a state U.S. election board. The allegation was part of new charges Rosenstein announced against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses during the 2016 presidential election.

The charges are part of the ongoing special counsel probe into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

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12:20 p.m.

The Justice Department has announced charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses during the 2016 presidential election.

The indictments were announced Friday by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as part of the ongoing special counsel probe into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Russians are accused of hacking into the computer networks of the Democratic National Committee and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Before Friday, 20 people and three companies had been charged in the Mueller investigation. That includes four former Trump campaign and White House aides and 13 Russians accused of participating in a hidden but powerful social media campaign to sway American public opinion in the 2016 election.

The Kremlin denies that the Russian state has interfered in the U.S. elections.

12 Russians Accused of Hacking DNC, Clinton Campaign in 2016 Elections

WASHINGTON — Twelve Russian intelligence officers hacked into the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign in the run-up to the 2016 election and released tens of thousands of stolen communications in a brazen effort by a foreign government to meddle in U.S. politics, according to a grand jury indictment announced Friday.

The indictment stands as the clearest Justice Department allegation yet of Russian efforts to interfere, through illegal hacking, in the U.S. presidential election before Americans went to the polls — and the first to implicate the Russian government directly. It had been sought by special counsel Robert Mueller and comes days before President Donald Trump holds a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

U.S. intelligence agencies have said the meddling was aimed at helping the Trump campaign and harming the election bid of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The effort also included bogus Facebook ads and social media postings that prosecutors say were aimed at influencing public opinion and sowing discord on hot-button social issues.

The indictment lays out a sweeping effort starting in March 2016 to break into key Democratic email accounts, such as those belonging to the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Among those targeted was John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman.

The Kremlin denied anew that it tried to sway the election. “The Russian state has never interfered and has no intention of interfering in the U.S. elections,” President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, said Friday.

But the indictment identifies the defendants as officers with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU. It accuses them of covertly monitoring the computers of dozens of Democratic officials and volunteers, implanting malicious computer code known as malware and using spearphishing emails to gain control of the accounts of people associated with the Clinton campaign.

By June 2016, the defendants began planning the release of tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents, the indictment alleges. The messages were released through fictitious personas like DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0.

The charges come as Mueller continues to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to influence the presidential election. The indictment does not allege that Trump campaign associates were involved in the hacking efforts or that any American was knowingly in contact with Russian intelligence officers.

The indictment also does not allege that any vote tallies were altered by hacking.

Still, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said the internet “allows foreign adversaries to attack Americans in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious and there will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide and conquer us.”

Before Friday, 20 people and three companies had been charged in the Mueller investigation. The 20 are four former Trump campaign and White House aides, three of whom have pleaded guilty to different crimes and agreed to cooperate, and 13 Russians accused of participating in a hidden but powerful social media campaign to sway U.S. public opinion in the 2016 election.

If the involvement of the GRU officers in the hacking effort is proved, it would shatter the Kremlin denials of the Russian state’s involvement in the U.S. elections.

The GRU, which answers to the Russian military’s General Staff, is part of the state machine and its involvement would indicate that the orders to interfere in the U.S. election came from the very top.

Hours before the Justice Department announcement, Trump complained anew that the special counsel’s investigation is complicating his efforts to forge a better working relationship with Russia. Trump and Putin are scheduled to hold talks Monday in Finland, a meeting largely sought by Trump.

Trump said at a news conference Friday near London with British Prime Minister Theresa May that he wasn’t going into the meeting with Putin with “high expectations.”

Referring to Mueller’s probe, he said: “We do have a — a political problem where — you know in the United States we have this stupidity going on. Pure stupidity. But it makes it very hard to do something with Russia. Anything you do, it’s always going to be, ‘Oh, Russia, he loves Russia.’ ”

“I love the United States,” Trump continued. “But I love getting along with Russia and China and other countries.”

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Associated Press writers Richard Lardner, Desmond Butler and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Raphael Satter in Paris contributed to this report

Read the full indictment here.

Standing Rock Activists Face Harsh Prison Sentences

Thousands of Native Americans and environmental activists came to North Dakota in 2016 to protest the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, which now runs through the Standing Rock tribe’s reservation. They were fighting both the desecration of Native American land and the environmental impact of oil drilling on that land. Hundreds of activists were arrested for civil disobedience, but the movement was a source of purpose and hope for many of them.

Two years after the protests faded from national headlines, The Guardian reports that many of these activists, also called “water protectors,” are accusing the U.S. government of “an aggressive campaign … to suppress indigenous and environmental movements, using drawn-out criminal cases and lengthy prison sentences.”

Michael “Little Feather” Giron, 45, a member of the Chumash tribe, was among those arrested. His wife, Leoyla Cowboy, told The Guardian that Little Feather had been battling drug addiction prior to participating in the Standing Rock protests, and that the protests gave him purpose, a renewed connection to tribal elders and sobriety.

“He has been taken from us, and it’s a huge void in our lives,” Cowboy said of Little Feather, who has been sentenced to three years in prison. She added, “He is a political prisoner. … We were protecting our land. It’s something we have to do, and we’re going to be met with this violence from these agencies, from the federal government, from the state.”

More than 141 activists were arrested at Standing Rock. Now that many movement leaders, including Red Fawn Fallis, who was charged with attempted murder, are being sentenced, activists have started to speak to the press about the toll these court cases are taking on their lives and those of their families.

As The Guardian notes, under President Trump, prosecutions of water protectors have increased:

The US Department of Justice has pressed forward with six cases against Native Americans. North Dakota prosecutors meanwhile have pursued more than 800 state cases against people at Standing Rock, including 165 still pending, according to the Water Protector Legal Collective, a legal support team.

Some activists, including Little Feather, and Rattler of the Lakota tribe, have agreed to plea deals. Like Little Feather, Rattler was charged with civil disorder and the use of fire to commit a felony. The civil disorder charges stemmed from a standoff with police on Oct. 27, 2016, when water activists set up a roadblock to the proposed pipeline. The Guardian says, “The arson charges related to the fact that ‘several fires were set by unidentified protesters’ to thwart police, as prosecutors wrote in one court filing.”

Rattler maintains that these were exaggerated charges. As he put it, “They needed these convictions to make examples of people.”

Had Little Feather and Rattler not taken plea deals, they would have faced a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison. Rattler’s attorneys expect that he’ll get three years. As reported by KFYR, a Fox affiliate in North Dakota, Fallis was sentenced Wednesday to 57 months in prison. KFYR says she was charged with “one count of civil disorder and one count of possession of a firearm and ammunition by a felon. The sentences will run concurrently.” She’ll then have three years of supervised probation.

Meanwhile, Cowboy has been separated from Little Feather since his arrest in March 2017. While she’s relieved that sentencing is over, there are obstacles to manage when he gets out. In addition to maintaining his sobriety, he’ll have to contend with another challenge that Standing Rock activists have been coping with since the media gaze faded: a feeling that their hard work has stalled, that they’ve been left behind.

As Cowboy said of the rest of America, “They are forgetting that we are still here.”