RSN: Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman | Who Will Protect Georgia's Vote Count? Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News Excerpt: "The whole world is watching Georgia's US Senate runoff elections. Set to finish January 5, they'll decide who controls the balance of power in the pivotal next US Congress."
With them comes a “hidden” down-ballot Georgia Public Service Commission race that hovers over America’s last two big nuke reactors … and that could upend the whole Senatorial outcome.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into the state. Every nanosecond of radio/TV time has been bought and overpaid for.
The preliminary battles have raged over voter registration and turnout, precinct closures, misinformation about where people can vote, intimidation of citizens waiting in line during early voting, rejection of “flawed” ballots, and much more.
But they all pale before one issue: will there be a fair and accurate vote count?
The answer depends on whether grassroots citizen groups can muster the expertise, the staff, and the clout to make sure ballots are correctly marked, properly scanned, and accurately counted — and then rightly recounted.
It’s a decisive undertaking.
Ballots mailed to voters are mostly sent back through the postal service or put in drop boxes. They can also be returned in person to election boards, which may be the safest option of all.
They’re then screened. Signatures are checked, markings are verified. Partisan advocates can observe the process and are often hot to disqualify. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office is now claiming a tiny percentage of the cast ballots are being thrown out.
Georgia does have a “curing” process, where voters whose ballots are rejected can be called or otherwise notified. That correction process can be uneven.
Once the ballots are approved, they’re scanned directly into an electronic reader. The ballots themselves are preserved.
The images made during the scanning process and then electronically read can easily be saved on hard drives. There’s no logical reason to erase these images, which make recounts much easier to do. But many counties do it anyway.
Voters who personally bring their ballots into a voting center (as opposed to an election board) usually must surrender them, then vote using a touchscreen marking device.
Ironically, Trump is loudly alleging fraud on Dominion machines bought (for more than $100 million) by Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State. The purchase was bitterly opposed by voting rights advocates. (A Dominion representative had a close personal relationship with Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who denies that had anything to do with the purchase.)
Rather than providing the voter with a cheap pen, these hugely expensive touchscreen devices create a paper ballot with a bar code. The ballots are then scanned and counted. The tallies are sent from the counties to central tabulators for a statewide vote count.
In a vulnerable pivot point, the data can be downloaded onto thumb drives and personally driven by a local election official to be compiled and counted. Internet transmission from the counties to the state’s central tabulator is also an option. Hand-tallied totals could also be printed on paper and driven in, but it’s rarely done that way.
In any event, tapes of the results from the precinct scanners are legally required to be posted on the door of each precinct, for visible monitoring by the public.
Both Georgia Senate runoffs are virtually certain to be recounted.
Likewise the Public Service Commission race, on which billions of rate case dollars depend. Though it’s gotten virtually no media attention, this race features Georgia’s first African-American PSC candidate, Daniel Blackman. His focus on grassroots campaigning, huge cost overruns at the state’s two new nuclear reactors, and the critical issue of broadband in rural areas may increase turnout and affect the Senatorial outcome.
Overall, the whole system reeks of vulnerability. Bitter disputes now rage over alleged stripping of the voter rolls, massive shutdown of voting centers in African-American neighborhoods, the question of how many legitimate voters actually get their ballots in the mail, and more.
The process of challenging and curing ballots is intensely contested. The incoming paper ballots require secure tracking technology and incorruptible chains of custody.
The bitterly disputed ballot marking devices produce a paper record that voters can inspect – but they rarely do. The human eye cannot confirm that the printed bar code accurately reflects the voter’s intent. Voters can’t read bar codes.
Computerized scanning devices are hackable. So are vote counts transmitted by internet, as well as thumb drives hand-carried to the central tabulators. If the images are erased from the scanner’s memory cache, the recount process can be compromised.
These vulnerabilities can be cured. Preserving the electronic ballot images, for example, would render the inevitable recounts far easier and more accurate.
But only a powerful, highly qualified, well-coordinated team of election protectionists can make all this happen.
There are key symptoms to watch for. “Glitches” in the registration records and in the ballot marking devices lead to long lines, most frequently at college campuses and in areas with large percentages of non-white voters.
Precincts may report outcomes (as should be visible on the tapes posted on their doors) that vary wildly from local exit polls. In fact, this has been the case in many of this year’s US Senate races, including the ones won by Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham.
In Ohio 2004, the late-night vote count stopped for 100 minutes as John Kerry was 4.2% ahead. When the delay ended, George W. Bush mysteriously led by 2.5%, then won the presidency.
In Greene County that year, thousands of warehoused ballots sat open and unguarded. Despite a federal court order, 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties destroyed their voting records, preventing an accurate recount of that bitterly contested election.
All that and more could happen in Georgia within the next week. Grassroots groups such as the Atlanta NAACP, Citizens for Good Governance, Scrutineers.org, Audit USA, TrustVote and others are well-versed in various key pieces of the electoral process.
But without a massive, deeply committed task force of well-coordinated election protection activists, Georgia’s vote count could be up for grabs … no matter what its citizens actually want.
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-convene the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org. Their many books reside at www.freepress.org, along with Bob’s Fitrakis Files. Harvey’s People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
President-elect Biden Remarks on Coronavirus Pandemic
President-elect Biden delivered remarks in Wilmington, Delaware, on the coronavirus pandemic. He discussed five key areas that he said all Americans should be made aware of: that things will get worse before they get better, the vaccine distribution plan was falling behind, the vaccine would be made available to all Americans, the Defense Production Act would be used to accelerate vaccine production, and his incoming administration would institute a 100-day mask mandate where possible.
In recent months the $100 dollar donation has been hard to come by. A $100 donation really helps to augment the smaller donations. It’s quick and easy to match the effort of donors who can’t afford $100 but are still helping with what they can.
In the 2014 science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow, based on a Japanese young adult novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, overcoming a time loop finally allows an alien invasion to be defeated in 2020.
It is the only good thing I can think of about 2020, and it didn’t happen.
1. The unprecedented Great Australian Bush Fires spilled into January, 2020. Over 100 raging fires burned 25 million acres, an area the size of South Korea, killing or displacing 3 billion animals. There are fears that it may drive the koala bear to extinction. There isn’t any doubt that the human-caused climate emergency contributed mightily to the outbreak of the fires. The really bad news is that there will be more of them, and not just in Australia. The US West also saw massive wildfires, with millions of acres burning in California.
2. The miserable war in Yemen ground on in 2020. Both houses of Congress demanded that the US withdraw from backing the belligerents, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Trump vetoed the measure. Two million face a crisis of hunger, and half of the 28 million people are food insecure. Deaths from the coronavirus could hit 213,000, on top of everything else. Maybe the Biden administration will manage to bring pressure to bear to end this fruitless struggle.
3. The Atlantic hurricane season broke records and for names we had to go into the Greek alphabet. Pensacola, Fl., saw the highest water levels of any city since New Orleans in 2005 and Katrina. There were 30 named storms and 6 major hurricanes (111 mph or more). Some 18 of the past 26 years have seen above average hurricane seasons, and this is the fifth consecutive year with such massive, lashing storms being far beyond the twentieth century norm. There were also heavy cyclones in the Pacific, and huge monsoon flooding in the Yangtze river valley in China.
4. The Amazon rainforest continues to burn down, another effect of global heating caused by humans driving gasoline cars and burning coal and gas for heating and electricity. The far right Bolsonaro government is also actively encouraging the clearing of the forest for agriculture and cattle ranching. The BBC reported deforestation surging to a 12-year high. A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020. Brazilian scientists have discovered that some non-rainforest forests (deciduous etc.) in Minas Gerais state have become net emitters of carbon dioxide instead of being carbon sinks. This ultimately could happen to the Amazon rainforest. This development would be an enormous catastrophe for each of us. The Amazon rainforest absorbs 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. That is five percent of all annual CO2 emissions around the world.
5. Mark A. Thiessen at WaPo/ the Neoconservative American Enterprise Institue detailed what he thought were the worst 10 things the odious Trump did this year. They include a couple of things I’d agree about, including his discouraging of mask-wearing during the pandemic. Only half of Americans say they typically wear masks when they go out, and we’re heading toward half a million dead as a result. Taiwan and Hong Kong have near universal levels of mask wearing, and they have had very few deaths. He pardoned war criminals. But Theissen is upset that Trump is drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (Thiessen used to work for George W. Bush, who put them there). Let’s leave off his inside-the-beltway list and think more broadly about America. Trump used Federal forces to clear legitimate protests from LaFayette Park and wanted to deploy the army widely. He sent in Federal forces to arrest 200 protesters in Portland Oregon. He blamed the protests against systemic racism on “Antifa,” which is not an organization and anyway is an anti-fascist tendency that only fascists would be afraid of. He continued to tear babies from their mothers’ arms at the border. He rolled back 100 environmental regulations, endangering us all.
6. The novel coronavirus was bad, but other countries dealt with it relatively well. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Iceland, Singapore, Vietnam all put it in the rear view mirror by late summer, even without a vaccine. The US had one of the worst responses, as Trump tried to avoid doing anything on a national scale and kept hoping it would just fade away “like a miracle.” States had to keep going into lockdown, keeping millions unemployed. A winter wave hit, leaving 0 capacity in many ICUs. The US has been suffering deaths on the scale of 9/11 every day. There is hope on the horizon. Joe Biden will swing into action, putting Federal resources into the effort, and we may be able to reach herd immunity by late August, which will cause cases to spiral on down to almost nothing.
We aren’t out of the woods, but 2021 gives us light at the end of the tunnel. It has been so dark so long.
RSN: Marc Ash | Attacking Joe Biden the Man Marc Ash, Reader Supported News Ash writes: "Progressives are looking at the fledging Biden administration's nominations and appointments with a fair degree of consternation, and the opposition is predictably gaining momentum. There is a question, however, about the best way to litigate the concerns."
Attacking Joe Biden in an even remotely ad hominem way is likely to be counterproductive. Joe Biden’s far more responsible approach to dealing with the ongoing coronavirus catastrophe is likely to be well received by the American people and, on the whole, have a badly needed calming effect.
The same can be said for getting the economy back on track. Yes, it’s the corporate economy and its captive dependents, but that’s rent, food, healthcare, and other vital services for a big swath of the country, and getting those services restored does end up being essential.
Biden doesn’t have all the answers, and stopping the virus in a condensed timeframe will be a tall order, but his honest, straightforward manner is likely to be more effective and comforting than anything the country has seen since the virus was first identified – or since Donald Trump took office, in a broader sense.
The corporate press is defining Biden’s nominees and appointees generally as “centrists.” That’s obviously inaccurate and misleading. They are not centrist, they are at least corporate-friendly if not actively corporatist.
The label “centrist” is a favorite rhetorical gimmick of the corporate-sponsored media. Defining policies that are profitable to Fortune 500 business interests as “centrist” suggests that the average, moderate, or sensible American supports those policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Average Americans are disaffected, disenfranchised, and disenchanted in the extreme with the state of affairs in governance on the whole, and they think elected officials should do what they said they were going to do when they were campaigning. That’s the true center of American political thinking. Keeping it real.
Taking the most positive perspective on the soon to be activated Biden presidency, Biden does have ample opportunity to oversee significant Progressive policy initiatives during his term in office. There are even indications that he at least believes he will. Time will tell.
But a full-frontal acerbic assault on Biden the man probably will not help. With the pandemic and its attendant economic impacts threatening the lives and livelihoods of most Americans, Biden would be likely to brush that off fairly easily.
Progressives have powerful ideas and badly needed energy on policy. It’s time to make the case. Progressives must have enough confidence in Progressive programs to wade in and win the policy debates.
If Progressives can do that, there’s a chance Biden will act. Time for some of that “good trouble.”
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
A screen displays Chinese president Xi Jinping (top left), European Council president Charles Michel (top right), European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (bottom right), French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel during an EU-China leaders' meeting video conference Wednesday. (photo: Johanna Geron/AP)
Europe and China Approve Landmark Investment Treaty, Snubbing US Rob Schmitz, NPR Schmitz writes: "China's president and European leaders met Wednesday to mark their agreement on an investment deal between the European Union and China despite a request for talks on the issue by the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden."
Chinese President Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron joined EU leaders Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel in a video conference to conclude negotiations over the deal, which removes a number of barriers to European companies' investment in China.
After Wednesday's video meeting, von der Leyen tweeted: "The EU has the largest single market in the world. We are open for business but we are attached to reciprocity, level playing field & values. Today, the EU & China concluded in principle negotiations on an investment agreement."
Negotiations had repeatedly stalled since they began in 2013. But after Biden won the U.S. presidential election, Chinese negotiators went into overdrive, offering various concessions on market access for European companies to help push the deal through before the end of the year. Among other things, the investment agreement promises that China will no longer force European companies to transfer their technology to local joint-venture partner companies.
The deal is a diplomatic victory for Beijing and a domestic one for Xi. In Washington, it will be seen as a snub to the incoming Biden administration, which last week urged the EU to wait.
"Before President Biden has even taken the oath of office, the well has been a bit poisoned in transatlantic relations," said Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, a think tank in Brussels.
The deal has also been criticized by politicians in Europe because of concerns over forced labor and other human rights abuses in China, and for preempting any discussions with the Biden administration on a joint approach to Beijing.
Fallon told NPR that the push on the European side to sign the treaty was led by Merkel, who, in her final year as Germany's chancellor, wants to seal her legacy with a historic EU-China treaty, and whose country is Europe's largest trading partner with China.
"After four years of the Trump administration, which characterized the EU as 'worse than China,' there is a growing anti-American sentiment" among EU leadership, Fallon said, "meaning 'we don't want to do what the U.S. says.' "
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted that the agreement "demonstrates China's determination and confidence to advance toward a higher level of opening up."
The deal will undergo months of debate and discussion in the European Parliament before it can go into effect, which likely will not be until 2022.
Reality Winner received the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media, prosecutors said. (photo: Michael Holahan/The New York Times)
In the last year of her harsh sentence, the NSA whistleblower’s bid for clemency is gaining backers.
n the days before Christmas, National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner’s family got together to decorate their homes and celebrate the birth of her sister’s new baby. For Winner, the young Air Force veteran, the holiday brought a different sort of gathering: Her federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, had yet another Covid-19 outbreak, prompting her unit to go into lockdown.
The restrictions meant that there were no religious services for the incarcerated women to attend. Likewise, Winner would miss out on much of her holiday mail. Letters from her supporters are the closest thing to a gift that Winner gets her hands on — her friend and advocate Wendy Meer Collins said they mean “everything” to her — but many letters were being rejected by her prison for what her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said appeared to be objections as capricious as being typed rather than handwritten.
Leading up to the holiday season, Winner had even lost her phone privileges for a month after hugging a fellow incarcerated person on a day she was battling severe anxiety, a move that violated the prison’s unauthorized contact policy, according to her mother. Though the privileges were restored on Christmas Day, Winner spent much of the holiday season losing touch with the outside world.
The communication breakdowns marked a tough end of year for Winner. She lost a series of legal cases for compassionate release amid the coronavirus pandemic and seemed increasingly unlikely to be granted clemency by President Donald Trump. After all, the document she allegedly released to the public — for which she received the longest-ever Espionage Act sentence for a leak to the media — was about Russian interference in U.S. elections, a Trump bête noire. (The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept, whose parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner’s legal fund through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.)
Things could look up in the Biden administration — her allies were beginning a push for early release under the new government, with some signs of hope — but Winner was, for the moment, dealing with the vagaries of incarceration and missing the things she loved most.
The Winner family usually spends a whole day together in the kitchen to bake Christmas cookies, but during lockdown, she had to rely on meals delivered to her unit. The meals often weren’t plant-based, her mother said, defying Winner to choose between sustenance and keeping a diet she maintains for ethical and health reasons, stemming from an eating disorder that developed during her time working in the drone program.
As Winner endured especially poignant daily hardships, along with the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned across America’s vast carceral state, Trump issued a flurry of pardons to his wealthy cronies and politically connected defendants. Some of the beneficiaries included former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud; the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Charles Kushner, who served prison time for tax evasion and attempting to blackmail his own brother-in-law, a federal witness; and former Blackwater contractors imprisoned for massacring Iraqi civilians.
Collins, who leads a social media campaign to raise awareness of the whistleblower’s harsh sentence, said the pardons highlight the injustices reserved for the powerless: “These people were out to harm. Reality Winner was out to help.”
With a year of confinement left in her record-breaking sentence for whistleblowing and a series of recent defeats in the justice system, Winner’s supporters are reinvigorating her campaign for a pardon or clemency. And, in a recent boost, several influential parties have joined their ranks.
Seeking to get Winner into home confinement in the early weeks of the pandemic — something that would not only have brought peace of mind to her and her family but that also was in line with pandemic policy guidance to prisons from then-Attorney General William Barr — her defense team looked to the courts. When a federal judge declined to hear her bid for compassionate release in April, he ominously said that her prison, officially a medical facility, would be “presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of Covid-19 in its inmates.” Just four days after that statement, the prison recorded the first death of an incarcerated person from the disease.
Winner’s compassionate release appeal languished as the virus surged in her prison, claiming six incarcerated people’s lives and infecting hundreds of women, including Winner, by July. A three-judge appeals panel that included two Trump appointees heard her case, brought pro bono by attorney Baruch Weiss, and, earlier this month, upheld the lower court’s decision. But they equivocated on whether the nonviolent offender who had already served the lion’s share of her sentence really needed to spend the rest of the pandemic behind bars.
“[T]here will be occasions in which we affirm the district court even though we would have gone the other way had it been our call,” Judge Beverly Martin wrote, citing an applicable past ruling.
Alison Grinter, Winner’s Dallas-based attorney, saw some redemption in that hand-wringing statement. “I think that nobody’s really eager to say, ‘Here’s a woman that belongs in prison,’” Grinter said. “That’s cool, I guess, but not a lot of comfort to a woman who’s in prison.”
FMC Carswell, the facility where Winner is held, and the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to written questions from The Intercept about Winner’s food, access to religious services, mail delivery, and the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine in her prison. However, some people in federal detention reportedly began receiving the vaccine in late December, and Winner’s mother says some people at her facility are among the first vaccinations.
Even as courts have spurned her requests, a diverse array of political actors called on the incoming Biden administration to turn its pardon power on an Air Force veteran who been given the most severe punishment by the federal justice system for whistleblowing to the media, an act that the government acknowledges was done with the intent to send it to journalists, and therefore warn the American public, rather than for personal gain.
In December, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian, became the first sitting member of Congress to call for Winner to receive clemency, calling her punishment “unjust” because of the “the abusive application of the Espionage Act,” the World War I-era legislation used to prosecute her and similar defendants, even though they share information not with foreign adversaries but with the U.S. public.
Shortly after that, Republican J. William Leonard, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and former director of the Information Security Oversight Office — the “secrecy czar” responsible for overseeing classification procedures during the George W. Bush presidency — said that Winner should be Joe Biden’s first pardon when he takes office. In a Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that the public interest of Winner’s actions “far outweigh[s] any claims of damage” by the government.
“At a time when this sacred process of our democracy is being attacked by party partisans, the ability of local, state and federal government officials to attest to the security of our election process has a profound impact upon the well-being of our nation and its democratic institutions,” Leonard wrote. “Many of these same officials first became aware of the vulnerability of our elections only after Winner’s leak to the media.”
At least one incoming member of Biden’s Cabinet has expressed support for Winner. His nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, wrote about Winner on Twitter in 2018, asking: “Has everyone just forgotten this woman is languishing in jail?”
Marianne Williamson, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently calls for Winner’s release on social media. And, in an unexpected twist, former Trump confidant-turned-informant Michael Cohen has also become a supporter, telling Business Insider it would be part of his atonement for his former support of the president.
A military advocacy group, Military Families Speak Out, has also joined the fray, planning a letter-writing campaign around the inauguration to get her name on the president’s radar.
“We believe Reality did what she believed was right and acted in defense of her country, which is what our troops are trained to do,” Pat Alviso, Military Families Speak Out’s national coordinator, said in a statement. “Her continued imprisonment sends a message to all military families, and that is: When your loved one comes home, our government is not going to protect them or give them the slightest consideration they deserve.”
Collins, the advocate leading Winner’s social media campaign, thinks the time is right for a broad coalition to back Winner’s bid for clemency or a pardon, since even national security hawks can say that, after three-and-a-half years behind bars, the veteran has served enough time.
Looking ahead to the inauguration, Collins said, “Two weeks before, we’re going to hit it as hard as we’ve ever hit it.”
Grinter, the attorney, is optimistic that the administration will listen to her campaigners. “I believe that a pardon for Reality, or at the very least commutation for Reality, will be something that we’ll see before the spring.”
Even as she looks to the 46th president, Winner’s mother is still using all of the tools in her kit to also target the current one.
“I continue to come to write to the White House every single day, asking for her release,” Winner-Davis said. “Even though people tell me that Trump is not going to do this, I can’t stop asking. This is my daughter’s life.”
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
McConnell Obstructs $2,000 Stimulus Checks With Poison Pills Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine Kilgore writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has now made it clear he's not going to allow a clean vote on $2,000 stimulus checks, confirming earlier indications that he wasn't going to be stampeded into excessive generosity by growing bipartisan sentiment or orders from the White House."
Instead, in a gambit designed to repel Democrats and perhaps convince the president not to smite him, McConnell will only contemplate a vote on the bigger checks if it’s bundled with Trump’s demands for “election fraud” investigations and the repeal of legal protections for social-media platforms,according tothe WashingtonPost:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that a proposal from Democrats to approve $2,000 stimulus checks has “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate,” effectively killing one of President Trump’s top priorities in the final days of his presidency.
McConnell said Republicans would not be “bullied” into passing the bill quickly despite intensifying pressure from Democrats and Trump, citing a belief that the proposal would greatly inflate the U.S. debt and benefit some families who are not in need of financial assistance.
In doing so, McConnell pledged he would not sever theone-time checksfrom a broader package that the leader said he would try to advance — one that includes an effort to study the 2020 presidential election for fraud and terminate legal protections for tech giants. Democrats vehemently oppose both additions, believing they are deliberate poison pills meant to scuttle any hope of a deal.
The social-media-platform issue (widely referred to as the“repeal of Section 230”for the U.S. code provision containing the liability protections Trump wants to eliminate as vengeance for alleged “censorship” of disinformation from him and his allies) is central to McConnell’s true legislative priority as this Congress winds down: a Senateoverride of Trump’s vetoof the 2020 defense bill. Trump cited in his veto the absence of Section 230 repeal in the defense bill and the inclusion of language mandating the removal of Confederate names from military facilities, so McConnell may again be trying to pour water on the presidential volcano just before Trump leaves office.
It’s telling that McConnell made his move to kill the $2,000 checks after allowing Georgia’s embattled Republican senators toendorseTrump’s demands for them, theoretically neutering Democratic attacks on Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for refusing to come to the aid of needy constituents. At the same time McConnell’s claim that bigger checks would be poorly targeted and would boost deficits and debt represented a big shout-out to the fiscal hawks in his conference who would have preferred no stimulus checks at all. McConnell may figure that Trump is too absorbed with his mad plans for achallenge to Biden’s election on January 6when the new Congress will certify Electoral College votes to pay much attention to other issues.
Yes, Democrats and even a few Republicans may protest this typically devious maneuver; Bernie Sanderscontinues to threatendilatory tactics on the Senate floor on remaining business unless there’s a clean vote on the $2,000 checks. But while Democrats can disrupt holiday plans, in the end McConnell is the master of the Senate, which is perhapsthe best argument Democrats can make for toppling his reignwhen Georgians vote on January 5.
Mexican drug cartels have been paying more money to more US agents than ever before in order to move drugs and people across the border, according to documents and sources who spoke to Insider.
But none of that has had the desired effect: Traffickers have paid millions of dollars to US border agents to keep drugs and people flowing throughout Trump's time in office.
"We pay as much as $10,000 to a migra [Border Patrol officer] only to look the other way while we are using a tunnel to smuggle drugs and to tell us of new trends on surveillance," said a Mexican woman in charge of smuggling operations for a drug cartel in El Paso, Texas.
As Trump tightened surveillance on the border, their costs went up.
"We used to pay no more than $5,000 to a single agent a month or every two months, but now we are paying twice that every month for a migra to give some information," the woman told Insider.
The cartel operative, who asked not to be identified to avoid retribution, said cartels not only have ties to the Border Patrol but to CBP officers at the international bridges as well.
"Some of them provide us with the shift role so we know who is gonna be working where on that week and plan our shipment. That way we know if one of the agents working [with us] is gonna be on a shift and exactly on which lane number," she said.
In addition to bribes with money, cartels use young girls, according to a Mexican diplomatic source, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
"They are bribing CBP officers on ports of entry with girls. The girls start hanging out with them and they convince the officers to let illegal cargo through," the source said.
The cartel operative in El Paso confirmed that was a method to entice border agents.
Border agents "love alcohol and women," she said. "We started inviting some of the agents to party across the border, in a house we have in Juarez [in Mexico], and we set him up. At the beginning the officer working for us started because we were threatening him with showing his pictures with an underage girl to his wife, but later he learned to love money."
Stricter controls at the border are directly responsible for an uptick in corruption cases, most of them related to organized crime, according to David Jancsics, a professor at San Diego State University and author of the 2020 report "Corruption on the US-Mexico border."
"Tighter border security may further increase the level of this type of bribery. A trust-based strategic conspiracy between the corrupt partners is already the dominant form of border corruption in the United States," Jancsics said.
Jancsics' report estimates that workers with the Department of Homeland Security accepted $15 million of bribes over a 10-year period.
"By the logic I would say with Trump the corruption must be worse than before, but it's very difficult to say. We only know of people arrested, which are small numbers — the tip of the iceberg," said Jancsics.
There were 286 total arrests during fiscal year 2018 — 268 CBP employees arrested twice, one employee arrested four times, and one employee arrested five times.
The charges include drug smuggling, bribery, theft, and sharing classified government data, records show.
"As an Agency charged with law enforcement activities, CBP regards any violation of law by its employees as being inconsistent with and contrary to its law enforcement mission," the CBP report states.
During 2020, at least a dozen CBP employees were arrested on suspicion of working directly with criminal organizations at the border, according to media releases.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent in San Diego, said corruption is part of Border Patrol culture.
"To my knowledge, no other agency is as bad as the Border Patrol in terms of corruption. Since Trump took office he has empowered corrupt agents. They feel Trump is one of them and they can do whatever they want," Budd said.
Budd worked with former border agent Raul Villarreal, who was arrested in Tijuana in October 2008 and convicted four years later of running a human-smuggling ring that brought hundreds of immigrants across the US-Mexico border illegally.
"It still is very common for Border Patrol supervisors to smuggle drugs or people using their own official vehicles. There are agents that have cartel connections before even entering BP," Budd said.
Budd, now a whistleblower about Border Patrol corruption, thinks management is responsible for corruption and abuse inside the agencies.
"I've been advocating in Washington for the Border Patrol and CBP [to] be managed by an external agency. That would be the only way out," Budd told Insider.
A park ranger asks Darrell House to identify himself before tasing him at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, N.M., on Dec. 27, 2020. (photo: Darrell House/Instagram)
VIDEO: Native American Walks "Off Trail" Park Ranger Tases Him Wilson Wong, Rima Abdelkader and Ali Gostanian, NBC News Excerpt: "A park ranger was seen on video using a stun gun on a Native American man who was walking his dog with his sister at a national monument in New Mexico on Sunday."
A park ranger stunned Darrell House, who is Oneida and Navajo, after he stepped off a trail while on a walk at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque.
The man, Darrell House, who is Oneida and Navajo, said he went for a stroll with his sister and his dog Sunday afternoon at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, where, he said, he often prays and meditates in honor of the land and his ancestors.
House said he stepped off the trail to maintain social distancing from an approaching group of hikers when a park ranger ran behind him and warned him to stay on the path.
The National Park Service released on Tuesday a 10-minute long recording from the officer’s body camera. It appeared to show the park ranger, who has not yet been publicly identified, asking House for his identification multiple times. House initially refused to provide ID before giving a false identity and date of birth, the video shows.
The officer can be seen warning the man that he would be detained if he did not ID himself.
"I didn't see a reason to give my identification. I don't need to tell people why I'm coming there to pray and give things in honor to the land. I don't need permission or consent," House said. "And I don't think he liked that very much."
Tensions escalated, with the ranger seen in another video his sister recorded repeatedly stunning House to the ground while he cries for help.
In the video, House's sister can be heard pleading for the ranger to stop.
"I don't have anything," House says between screams. "I apologize for going off the trail."
The ranger, who has not been publicly identified, directs House to sit on the ground as he appears to drag the dog by the leash toward House's sister.
"You're being detained because you refused to identify yourself," the ranger says. "If you resist, I will Tase you."
Another officer can be seen handcuffing House before the video cuts out.
NBC News does not know what happened before or after what's shown in House’s sister video and the National Park Services’ video, and the identities of the rangers in the video have not been confirmed.
The National Park Service said on Tuesday the agency is investigating.
“Prior to the officer using his electronic control device, or taser, the officer attempted to resolve the interaction with an educational contact and simple warning,” the agency said in a statement. “During this initial interaction, both individuals provided fake names and dates of birth to the officer.”
A spokesperson for the National Park Service previously told NBC News in an email on Monday that all park officers complete extensive law enforcement training and are required to undergo special training to carry stun guns.
The National Park Service said House was ticketed for three citations: “being in a closed area off trail, providing false identity information, and failing to comply with a lawful order.” House’s sister was also cited for providing false information and being off trail, according to the agency.
House, who had grown up on a reservation, said he has never run into an issue or encountered a ranger on the hiking trail, where he will often perform his rituals, like offering tobacco and stirring sage.
"We don't have a set time, we don't have set places, we don't have buildings, and we don't have things built to worship," House said. "Nature is what we've been worshipping ... and protecting it has always been our job."
"I am Native, you know. I have rights to this land. I have rights off the trail," he said.
Vanessa Keegan, her boyfriend and 3-year-old son live a block from where rail cars will carry liquefied natural gas to an export facility on the Delaware River. (photo: Emma Lee/WHYY)
Opposition has come from Hollywood stars, state attorneys general and local residents who worry about the danger this poses. But plans are moving ahead for a New Jersey project that calls for one of the longest such transport routes in the country: 200 miles through densely populated areas of the East Coast.
The gas from Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale would first be sent by pipeline to a new liquefaction plant in the rural northeast part of the state. Refrigeration units would chill it to negative-260 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it becomes liquid and easier to ship. The part of the plan that scares a lot of people is the next step — transporting the gas by truck or rail down the busy I-95 corridor to a planned export terminal along the Delaware River in Gloucester County, New Jersey.
"That terrifies me," says Vanessa Keegan, who lives nearby with her family, including her three-year-old son Theo. She points to where rail cars full of highly flammable liquefied natural gas — or LNG — would roll about a block and a half away from her house. "That train track that you could skip on down to in about a minute and a half."
A daycare center sits right next to the gate of the planned export terminal.
Pipelines are the more common way to move gas long distances, but battles over them have delayed or even scrapped some projects. Trucks are also allowed to transport LNG. But using rail cars in densely populated areas had been limited until the new rule took effect in August.
Even before that, Delaware River Partners, a subsidiary of New Fortress Energy, which has ties to President Trump, secured a special federal permit to move the LNG by rail. It allows two 100-car trains to transport the gas each day.
In this rust-belt region of New Jersey the project does have support, including from building trade unions and powerful state lawmakers. State Assemblyman John Burzichelli says his grandfather worked at a shuttered DuPont dynamite plant that will house the planned LNG export terminal.
"That site will create jobs as it once did, contribute to the tax base as it once did, and be an important economic driver for people to make a living and feed their families," says Burzichelli.
He says safety issues should be addressed, but that rail cars carry much more hazardous materials through the region every day. "The history of moving this stuff is pretty sound," he says.
The new rule does require rail cars to be built with a thicker outer tank than is mandated for other hazardous cryogenic liquids like ethylene and ethane. (Although it's unclear if that applies to projects like this one, greenlighted earlier through a special permit.)
Ray Mentzer, a chemical engineer at Purdue University, spent his career working on LNG projects for Exxon Mobil. He says the specially designed containers that transport hydrocarbons have a good safety record. But he says transporting the gas through densely populated areas increases the risk if there's a leak.
"It's not flammable until it's vaporized, but it's going to be vaporized pretty darn quickly and then it's going to seek an ignition source," he says. "Believe me, it will find an ignition source pretty darn readily."
The developers of the New Jersey export project — New Fortress Energy and Delaware River Partners — did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and would not confirm details of their plans.
Rail companies lobbied for the rule and downplay the potential for accidents.
Earlier this year, Ian Jefferies, CEO of the Association of American Railroads, told NPR "the track record speaks for itself: 99.99% of all hazmat moved by rail reaches its destination without any incident whatsoever." He also said industry uses "risk-based routing analysis to ensure that railroads are using the lowest risk routes."
Fifteen state Attorneys General, including those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, have challenged the move saying it put people's lives at risk.
"We're going to court because our families expect our government to put their safety first, not put them in harm's way," said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a statement. Becerra is now president-elect Joe Biden's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary.
Despite joining that suit, New Jersey recently signed off on construction of a dock for the LNG export project, although N.J. Governor Phil Murphy says the state "will explore all avenues within its authority to prevent the use of this dock for LNG transport."
The Delaware Riverkeeper Network has challenged a number of state and federal permits for the project, saying a thorough Environmental Impact Statement was never done.
"The Biden Administration could step in and set a policy that this project, and all other LNG export projects, require comprehensive environmental review," says the network's deputy director Tracy Carluccio.
Standing on her porch along the route to the planned export terminal, Vanessa Keegan worries that transporting LNG by rail is untested. "If an accident happens," she says, "we don't get to show up the next day and say, 'Look, I told you so.'"
She also thinks fossil fuel projects like this should be abandoned in favor of renewables like wind or solar.
In fact, if the export facility gets built, none of the gas traveling through the area will go to power New Jersey homes. The state is planning a large offshore wind farm to help reach its goal of using all clean energy by 2050.
n the days before Christmas, National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner’s family got together to decorate their homes and celebrate the birth of her sister’s new baby. For Winner, the young Air Force veteran, the holiday brought a different sort of gathering: Her federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, had yet another Covid-19 outbreak, prompting her unit to go into lockdown.
