21 February 20
“Oligarchy (from Greek (oligarkhía); from (olígos), meaning "few," and (arkho), meaning "to rule or to command") is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, or military control.”
In contrast RSN is something you control through your contributions.
Think about it.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
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21 February 20
Charles Pierce | Julian Assange Saw the Gallows in His Eyes and Tried to Make a Devil's Bargain
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "I have a friend up in Boston named Anthony Cardinale, and he is a lawyer and some of his clients were, as you might call them, good family men."
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Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "I have a friend up in Boston named Anthony Cardinale, and he is a lawyer and some of his clients were, as you might call them, good family men."
READ MORE
American intelligence agencies concluded that Russia, on the orders of President Vladimir V. Putin, interfered in the 2016 presidential election. (photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)
Russia Backs Trump's Re-Election, and He Fears Democrats Will Exploit Its Support
Adam Goldman, Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him."
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Adam Goldman, Julian E. Barnes, Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Fandos, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to try to get President Trump re-elected, five people familiar with the matter said, a disclosure to Congress that angered Mr. Trump, who complained that Democrats would use it against him."
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Kevin Euceda, an asylum-seeker from Honduras, looks into his detention facility's yard. He has been held more than 900 days. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Confidential Therapy Notes Being Used Against Immigrant Children
Hannah Dreier, The Washington Post
Dreier writes: "It was time for another hearing in the ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport a Honduran teenager named Kevin Euceda, who had already been in detention for more than two years."
EXCERPT:
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Hannah Dreier, The Washington Post
Dreier writes: "It was time for another hearing in the ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport a Honduran teenager named Kevin Euceda, who had already been in detention for more than two years."
EXCERPT:
The government required him to see a therapist. He thought his words would be confidential. Now, the traumatized migrant may be deported.
. In a Northern Virginia courtroom, U.S. immigration judge Helaine Perlman peered at a TV screen as a detainee came into blurry view: a slight 19-year-old with deep dimples and a V-shaped scar on his forehead. "Buenos días," Kevin said, hoping this was the day he would find out about his request for asylum, and then tried to follow along as Perlman began to explain the latest twist.
“I had made a decision granting your request — but the government disagreed with it,” she said. “They want me to make a new decision.”
Kevin was watching from a remote detention center. On one side of the judge, he could see his lawyers, ready to argue that he should be freed immediately. Across from them was a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there to argue that Kevin should be deported. And in front of them all, inside a thick folder, was an old report from a shelter for immigrant children that was the reason the long-running matter of Kevin Euceda existed at all: “Youth reports history of physical abuse, neglect, and gang affiliation in country of origin. Unaccompanied child self-disclosed selling drugs. Unaccompanied child reports being part of witnessing torturing and killing, including dismemberment of body parts,” the report said.
The person who had signed it: A therapist at a government shelter for immigrant children who had assured Kevin that their sessions would be confidential. Instead, the words Kevin spoke had traveled from the shelter to one federal agency and then another, followed him through three detention centers, been cited in multiple ICE filings arguing for his detention and deportation, and now, in the fall of 2019, were about to be used against him once more.
This kind of information sharing was part of a Trump administration strategy that is technically legal but which professional therapy associations say is a profound violation of patient confidentiality. To bolster its policy of stepped up enforcement, the administration is requiring that notes taken during mandatory therapy sessions with immigrant children be passed onto ICE, which can then use those reports against minors in court. Intimate confessions, early traumas, half-remembered nightmares — all have been turned into prosecutorial weapons, often without the consent of the therapists involved, and always without the consent of the minors themselves, in hearings where the stakes can be life and death.
One of Kevin’s lawyers leaned into her microphone and asked Perlman to make a ruling as soon as possible. “Kevin has been in detention for 856 days today,” she said.
The ICE attorney said the government would continue to assert that Kevin was a danger to the country, and would rely on its latest legal filing, including references to that first therapist’s report.
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The Justice Department has placed a high national security priority on its probe of the shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, insisting that investigators must get access to data from two locked and encrypted iPhones that belonged to the alleged gunman, a Saudi aviation student. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Trump Administration Targets 'Warrant-Proof' Encrypted Messages
Martin Kaste, NPR
Kaste writes: "The Trump administration has revived the debate over 'end-to-end encryption' - systems so secure that the tech companies themselves aren't able to read the messages, even when police present them with a warrant."
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Martin Kaste, NPR
Kaste writes: "The Trump administration has revived the debate over 'end-to-end encryption' - systems so secure that the tech companies themselves aren't able to read the messages, even when police present them with a warrant."
READ MORE
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo greets Saudi Major General Shablan after visiting the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on Thursday. (photo: Andrew Caballero Reynolds/AP)
Mike Pompeo Cozies Up to Saudi Arabia While US Citizens Are Imprisoned
Alia al-Hathloul, Ali AlAhmed and Areej AlSadhan, NBC News
Excerpt: "Last summer, when the American rapper A$AP was tried in a Swedish court on assault charges, President Donald Trump dispatched his special envoy for hostage affairs to Sweden."
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Alia al-Hathloul, Ali AlAhmed and Areej AlSadhan, NBC News
Excerpt: "Last summer, when the American rapper A$AP was tried in a Swedish court on assault charges, President Donald Trump dispatched his special envoy for hostage affairs to Sweden."
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A monument honoring the dead is seen against the background of the eastern Sierra mountains at the Manzanar internment camp. (photo: Robyn Beck/Getty)
California Will Apologize to Japanese Americans for Internment Camps
Mario Koran, Guardian UK
Koran writes: "California lawmakers on Thursday voted unanimously to formally apologize for the role the state legislature played in the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps during the second world war."
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Mario Koran, Guardian UK
Koran writes: "California lawmakers on Thursday voted unanimously to formally apologize for the role the state legislature played in the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps during the second world war."
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The Rio San Antonio, in the headwaters basin of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, will lose federal protections under a new rule. (photo: Bob Wick/BLM California)
Trump Admin's Clean Water Rollback Will Hit Some States Hard
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "The Santa Fe River starts high in the forests of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows 46 miles to the Rio Grande. Along the way it plays important roles for wildlife, irrigation, recreation and other cultural uses, and provides 40% of the water supply for the city of Santa Fe's 85,000 residents."
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "The Santa Fe River starts high in the forests of New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows 46 miles to the Rio Grande. Along the way it plays important roles for wildlife, irrigation, recreation and other cultural uses, and provides 40% of the water supply for the city of Santa Fe's 85,000 residents."
EXCERPTS:
But the effects of removing this “environmental safety net” won’t be felt equally. States with fewer local protections and resources will suffer the most — as will their people and wildlife.
But some stretches of the river don’t flow year-round, and that means parts of this vitally important water system could lose federal protections under changes to clean-water rules just passed by the Trump administration.
The administration’s new Navigable Waters Protection Rule replaces the Obama-era Waters of the U.S. (or WOTUS) rule that defined which waterways were protected under the Clean Water Act. The Obama administration broadened and clarified which waters were safe, but the new rule takes a much narrower view. Under the changes many waterways lose federal protection. That includes ephemeral streams and rivers that depend on seasonal precipitation — like parts of the Santa Fe — as well as waters that cross state boundaries and wetlands that aren’t adjacent to major water bodies.
This loss of protections means pesticides, mining waste, and other pollutants can be dumped into these streams and unconnected wetlands can be filled for development without running afoul of federal authorities.
“This puts drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution,” Blan Holman, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told The New York Times. “This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ’70s and ’80s that Americans have relied on for their health.”
The rule flies in the face of basic science about river ecology and groundwater, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s own scientists. Even if streams don’t flow all the time or wetlands don’t touch major bodies of water, dumping pollutants into them can still harm the watershed — and by extension drinking water and wildlife.
The Trump administration promised these changes would offer more control to states, but many state officials say they find the new rules problematic, confusing and potentially dangerous.
“One of our biggest concerns with the final rule is that it’s not rooted in sound science,” says Rebecca Roose, water protection division director of the New Mexico Environment Department. “And there was really no attempt by the agency to reconcile the final rule with the scientific basis for the 2015 WOTUS rule and advice from the scientific community.”
While these changes will be felt in every state, they won’t be felt equally.
Some states may not be equipped to deal with what’s coming, says Jen Pelz, an attorney and biologist at the nonprofit group WildEarth Guardians.
Weak Links
To understand these changes, it helps to look to the East Coast, where the 64,000 square-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed touches six states and the District of Columbia. Decades of concerted effort and millions of dollars have helped clean up and protect its network of creeks, streams, rivers and wetlands that flow into the tidal bay.
Experts fear the new rule could undo some of that effort.
The most damage could come from Delaware, West Virginia and the District of Columbia, which lack strong state laws to protect waters. In Delaware alone, 200,000 acres of wetlands could now be susceptible to pollution or drained and filled for development, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation reported.
Wetlands like those in the Chesapeake serve as a critical safeguard for filtering water pollution, according to the EPA. Coastal wetlands can also help prevent floods and storm surges, with are both likely to increase with climate change and sea-level rise.
And this weakening of protections in some states in the region could harm the entire multistate watershed because of the interconnected nature of waterways.
“Wetlands that are not connected on the surface with rivers are vital parts of a river network and significantly influence water quality, the rate of flow and the biological communities in larger rivers,” Ellen Wohl, a professor of geosciences at Colorado State University and an expert in river systems, told The Revelator last year, when the rule change was proposed. Even when there’s no surface connectivity, wetlands “can still be connected below the ground with other portions of the drainage basin,” she explained.
That’s an issue not just in the Chesapeake. Holman expressed concern about how it will affect states across the South. The rollback of protections is likely to affect drinking-water quality — and the states with the least resources to handle more pollution will be hit hardest.
“Who loses when that protection is removed? The people living downstream,” Holman wrote recently in The Guardian. “They will have dirtier drinking water and more flooding. This is especially true in the South, where state environmental agency staff are routinely underfunded, understaffed and overwhelmed by pro-polluting politics and industries.” The Clean Water Act previously leveled the playing field for these communities across the country, but now that’s gone.“Generally, the Clean Water Act will still require federal agencies to follow state water laws,” Kostyrko says. “We have grave concerns about how the federal administration could push boundaries here, though.”
Costly Burden, Bigger Picture
The rule was sold to states as a way to boost their authority and give them more control over how waters within their boundaries are designated.
“All states have their own protections for waters within their borders and many already regulate more broadly than the federal government,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement announcing the rule.
Unfortunately, that’s not true for states like New Mexico.
“The premise that all states are capable of addressing water quality issues in their state is false,” officials from the New Mexico Environment Department wrote in their public comments on the rule last year. “Not all states can implement a robust and successful water quality program without significant federal assistance.”
Roose says they originally estimated that around 96% of New Mexico’s waterways would lose federal protections. Since the final rule has been released, they’re re-evaluating it and believe it may be slightly less, but the vast majority of the state’s waterways would still fall outside the scope of federal jurisdiction under the new rule.
For a state with the second-worst economy in the United States, that poses some big problems.
New Mexico is already more reliant than most states on the federal government’s help implementing Clean Water Act regulations. Under the Act certain programs, like the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, which issues permits to regulate pollution discharges from large sources like mining operations, municipal sewage-treatment plants and big construction operations, can be relegated to states. But New Mexico is one of just three states where the federal government administers and enforces the program.
With the federal government now relinquishing regulatory authority to huge amounts of New Mexico’s waterways, the state will need to find a way to fill those gaping holes to protect water quality — a process that won’t be easy, cheap or fast.
“If we already had a built-in program for permitting discharges to our surface waters, then we might be able to pick up that regulatory permitting slack with existing state and rules, like some other states are planning to do,” says Roose.
She says the state will do all it can to leverage its groundwater program and other regulations as it begins to work with the legislature to find funding and build capacity for a new regulatory program. It’s a process that would take a minimum of three to four years at best, she estimates.
Barring legal challenges that result in an injunction, the rule would be implemented in just a few months.
That means that for years some drinking-water sources will be more at risk, and so will wildlife. In New Mexico this includes imperiled species such as the Gila trout, Chiricahua leopard frog, Jemez salamander, Rio Grande silvery minnow and yellow-billed cuckoo.
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