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FOCUS: Maybe the White House Meant "Take Her Out" and "Your Head Will Be on a Pike" in an Innocent Way? Jeremey Stahl, Slate Stahl writes: "Late on Thursday, and again on Friday afternoon, Rep. Adam Schiff made a powerful argument that President Donald Trump must be convicted of abuse of power and removed from office, before he can use his office to damage the country's democratic institutions again, perhaps beyond repair."
This was, technically, part of the House impeachment managers’ opening remarks, but under the topsy-turvy procedural rules set for Trump’s trial by the Republican Senate majority, it may stand as Schiff’s best chance at making a closing argument as well.
Republican senators have so far appeared unmoved by the case the impeachment managers are making for holding a full trial of the president, with new documents and witnesses, let alone by the case for his conviction. On Friday morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham—who a day earlier had praised Schiff’s presentation—called the case against Trump presented by the House managers on Thursday “mind numbing.” Sen. John Barrasso echoed those remarks, saying: “It seems to me their case is weaker today than it was yesterday. There’s so little brought out kind of every hour and a half they bring out the same thing.”
Axios on Friday, meanwhile, reported that Senate Republicans were pushing the message that the trial had been tainted by Rep. Jerry Nadler’s remarks that Senators who blocked witnesses and evidence would “be complicit in the president’s cover-up.” That call for independence had “backfired on Democrats,” Axios’ sources said; self-styled Republican moderates, whose votes would be essential to calling new witnesses, called it “stunning” or “offensive.”
Similarly, Axios reported that Senate Republicans were taking offense at Schiff’s argument that Trump’s repeated attempts to cheat would not stop, and that such cheating threatened to place the legitimacy of the 2020 general election outcome in doubt. As the majority weighed how seriously they have to take the trial, it was apparently insulting to try to remind them of the stakes.
The thrust of all the complaining was that the House managers, by hurting the Republicans’ feelings, were forfeiting their claim to be able to call witnesses, let alone to win a conviction. It gave Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus something to talk about other than the hours and hours of factual documentation that Trump is a reckless criminal who attempted to extort a foreign power to help him cheat in the next election, and who can only be expected to increase his abuses once the threat of impeachment no longer looms over his head.
Meanwhile, even as the Republicans were expressing their dismay at being bullied by the impeachment managers, CBS News reported late Thursday that a “Trump confidant” had issued a warning to wavering Republican Senators: “Vote against the president, and your head will be on a pike.” Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who had denounced Nadler for suggesting they could be complicit in the president’s coverup, have so far had nothing to say about the president’s camp publicly threatening them if they don’t loyally go along with Trump.
Then, on Friday, ABC News reported it had reviewed a recording of an April 2018 dinner at the Trump International Hotel attended by Rudy Giuliani’s now-indicted associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in which the president could be heard saying of Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, “Get rid of her! Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it.”
Parnas had previous told interviewers that at that dinner he had beseeched Trump to get rid of Yovanovitch—who he saw as an obstacle to using Ukrainian authorities to advance Trump’s private political goals—and the president had offered to do so. The new recording seems to corroborate that account. Parnas and Fruman have been indicted by the Southern District of New York for campaign finance crimes related to their pressure campaign to remove Yovanovitch, who was ultimately “taken out” one year later and who text messages show may have been stalked by goons working on behalf of Parnas (Ukraine has said it is investigating the evidence).
President Trump has said he doesn’t know Parnas and that “I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to him.” The recording reportedly features Parnas telling the president “We gotta get rid of the ambassador” and “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.’” Such a conversation would obviously contradict Trump’s claim that they had never spoken.
How did Republicans react to this news? Vice President Mike Pence said any such recording “will only confirm what people already know: is that the president had concerns, and in his authority the president made a decision.” Graham, meanwhile, responded that “the president can fire any ambassador they want.”
Faced with new proof, past and present, of the president issuing mobster-like threats, the Senate majority remains unmoved. Why bother getting any documents or testimony from Parnas, or from anyone else, if the conclusion will still be the same? Whatever the president may do, or may have already done, the majority will define it as his legitimate use of his powers. To support the charge of abuse of office, the impeachment managers have repeatedly played the video clip of Trump declaring that under Article 2 of the Constitution, he is allowed to do whatever he wants. Where they see the crime, the Republicans see the excuse for it.
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SA Today reports on #Ohio's 2019 voter purges that removed more than 460,000 registrations, noting that:
1. The young were disproportionately purged: Nearly 1 out of 3 purged voters was age 25 to 34.
2. Where a party preference could be determined based on the last partisan primary in which the voter cast a ballot, Democrats outnumbered Republicans almost 2 to 1.
Our experts have been screaming that the big purge attacks young voters — i.e. Democrats. The excuse is that they’ve moved out of Ohio. They haven’t. They are students and renters who moved to a new dorm or down the street.
And as usual with the mainstream media, USA Today have it dead wrong: Federal law prohibits the removal inactive voters from voter rolls. They hunt for “errors“ in the purge list, when the entire freaking operation is stone cold illegal.
In my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, I showed you how they stole Ohio in 2016. If you haven’t seen it yet, shame on you. Because they’re going to steal it again.
Watch impeachment proceedings with the eyes of a good cop.
Impeachment manager Val Demings does. She was an Orlando police officer for a sterling 27 years, rising to chief before retiring and running for Congress.
“I’ve heard a lot about testimony and witnesses and evidence and investigations,” the 62-year-old told The Daily Beast on Friday of her new role, presenting the House’s case in the Senate. “That’s exactly what I did as a cop... I feel like I’m in the same line of work.”
She is reminded in particular of her time as commander of Internal Affairs, a position she accepted even though friends advised against it. Internal Affairs can make you a pariah in the cop world.
“I did because it’s about protecting the integrity of the agency and the profession,” she said. “So here we are in this impeachment inquiry, it’s about integrity. It’s about the law. And nobody is above the law.”
Demings went from the police to politics after she met Michelle Obama and the then first lady asked her a life-changing question.
“When are you going to run for office?”
But Demings did not start out with any animosity toward President Trump.
Whatever the true attendance at Trump's inauguration, it would have been one less if Demings had not gone.
“I wanted to see the peaceful transition of power,” Demings told The Daily Beast. “That’s what makes us the greatest nation on earth.”
Since childhood, Demings has been of the firm belief that it is important to respect the office of the president, however you may feel about the person holding it.
That included Richard Nixon, who was elected seven months after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and five months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
“She’s never been shy or timid and I remember on the school bus she would beat up the boys.”
— Gwen Butler
“She said, ‘He’s still president, you got to respect that,’” her older sister, Gwen Butler, told The Daily Beast. “And boy was I furious.”
Demings was then all of 11 years old.
“She always had that wisdom, that old woman wisdom,” Butler said. “You have to respect the office and somehow pray for the person that’s in there.”
That was in 1968, one year after Demings entered the fifth grade and her first integrated school. The fifth grade was also when she took the first step toward a career in law enforcement by becoming a school safety officer. She wore an orange belt with a shoulder strap and a badge. The other kids looked to her to settle disputes on the school bus as well as ensure they safely crossed the street.
“On the school bus, the kids would get into these quarrels and they would ask her advice,” Butler recalled. “She was like the police on the bus.”
Butler added that Demings seemed not afraid to assert herself physically if some of the boys tried to intimidate her or bully others.
“She’s never been shy or timid and I remember on the school bus she would beat up the boys,” Butler said. “She has the spirit of doing what has to be done... of carrying on what needs to be carried on and you cannot be too close-mouthed.”
Nobody could have been much surprised when Demings became a cop. She remembers starting her first shift with a spirit that has stayed with her through all the years that followed.
“I was ready to go,” she told The Daily Beast. “We believe as new police officers we can save the world... That is what I was determined to do. That was what I was going to do.”
She remained ever ready to answer a call for help.
“I loved the energy,” she said. “I loved the rush. When people are in trouble, they call the police department believing when we get there things will get better.”
She worked patrol and motorcycles and became a detective and rose on through the ranks. She married a fellow cop and had three children. Jerry Demings preceded her as chief, bouncing the first African-American to hold that position before becoming Orange County Sheriff and then mayor of Orange county. She became the first woman chief. And violent crime fell significantly during her tenure.
“She did not play,” Butler told The Daily Beast. “She treated those criminals in Orlando the way she treated those boys on the bus.”
Val Demings reminded her cops how they should always strive to make things better when they answer a call.
“Make sure it’s better, not worse,” she said.
Demings retired in 2011, and was prompted to run for office by Michelle Obama’s question. Demings was defeated in her first bid to represent Florida’s 10th congressional district, but tried again and won in 2016. The mass shooting that left 49 dead at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando that June may have convinced more voters to support an adult version of the kid in the orange vest and badge, a champion of public safety who advocated sensible gun control.
She delivered her first remarks from the House floor on Jan. 9, 2017, hours after Orlando Police lieutenant Debra Clayton and Orlando County Deputy Norm Lewis were killed in the line of duty. Demings had worked with Clayton for years and knew her to be an officer who would take time to read books to children at elementary schools and clean the homes of struggling senior citizens.
That morning, a civilian had approached Clayton outside a WalMart and told her she had just seen a man inside who was wanted for murdering his pregnant girlfriend and the girlfriend’s brother. Clayton was approaching the entrance when the wanted man suddenly emerged and shot her multiple times. The gunman fled and Lewis was killed while giving chase.
That afternoon, the voice that had commanded respect on the school bus and in the streets was heard in the House for the first time.
“As the former Orlando Police Chief, I had the honor of knowing both Sgt. Clayton and Deputy Lewis,” Demings said. “Sergeant Clayton was a fine officer, wife, mother. She was 42 years young, and had just celebrated her first anniversary with her husband. Deputy Lewis was deeply admired by all of his colleagues. He loved helping people, and it showed in his work. He was just 35.”
Demings then said, “Mr. Speaker, I respectfully ask all Members to join me in a moment of silence to honor these heroes during this most difficult time.”
All present of whatever political persuasion stood in respectful silence. The partisan struggles of the House then resumed, Demings as filled with a sense of mission as she had been on her first time on patrol. She was determined to make things better when it comes to such real life, pressing issues as gun violence and seniors and veterans and housing and health care. She brought to it her old woman wisdom and street cop smarts.
“I've seen the effect of good and bad government and the effect of good and bad leadership,” she said.
On Jan. 20, 2017, the newly elected Representative Demings attended the inauguration of the newly elected President Trump, who was assuming the office that she had since childhood insisted we all have to respect.
Demings ran unopposed in 2018. She was in her second term when there arose a situation too much like when she ran Internal Affairs, involving someone who appeared to be violating public trust and ignoring the very laws he had sworn to uphold. And that person was our current president.
“I believe we are in a nation of laws.”
— Val Demings
Deming had started life as the youngest of seven children in a shack that had shutters, but not windows, no indoor plumbing or electricity, with light provided by kerosene lamps and cooking done on a wood burning stove. She started in segregated schools and went on to college and a degree in criminology and she had become chief of police and had gone on to Congress. And now she became one of the seven impeachment managers.
“So here we are in this impeachment inquiry,” she said on Friday.
She remarked on the similarity between her current duties and being a cop. She cited a common guiding principle.
“I believe we are in a nation of laws,” she said.
As an impeachment manager, she has remained focused not on The Donald but on The Law. She spoke on Friday afternoon to a senate-turned-jury, saying Trump’s “campaign of witness intimidation” is “reprehensible,” and it “degrades the presidency and was part of his effort to obstruct the impeachment inquiry.”
“The president issued threats, openly discussed possible retaliation, attacked their character and patriotism and subjected them to mockery and other insults,” she said of the witnesses who testified. “The president’s attacks were broadcast to millions of Americans, including the witnesses, their families, their friends and their co-workers.”
She carefully enunciated each syllable of what she said next.
“As we all know, witness intimidation is a federal crime.”
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (photo: Guardian UK)
CIA Used Prisoner as 'Training Prop' for Torture, Psychologist Testifies Sacha Pfeiffer, NPR Pfeiffer writes: "A man accused of helping finance the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was subjected to 'excessive' abuse at the hands of CIA interrogators who used him as a training tool for employees learning the agency's torture techniques."
That's according to testimony Thursday from a psychologist who helped design the torture program. James Mitchell, who co-owned a company that was paid $80 million by the U.S. government to develop what the CIA called "enhanced interrogation techniques," said the prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi, became an instructional aide for student interrogators.
Al-Baluchi, the 42-year-old nephew of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is facing criminal charges in the terror attacks.
During a May 2003 interrogation at a secret overseas CIA prison in Afghanistan known as a "black site," al-Baluchi was slammed into a wall, doused with water and slapped multiple times in the face and stomach, according to an unclassified CIA document presented in court. He was also put in stress positions — forced to lean at an angle against a wall using only his forehead and also to kneel backwards to an extreme degree — for nearly an hour.
Before his interrogation, al-Baluchi was kept in a "standing sleep deprivation position" for about a day, and afterward he was returned to his cell naked and again placed in a standing sleep deprivation position, where he remained until his next interrogation the following day, the document shows. He was also denied solid food and given a cold-water bath afterward.
According to CIA records, the interrogation provided little new information.
Testifying at the U.S. military court at Guantanamo in a pretrial hearing for al-Baluchi and other Sept. 11 defendants, Mitchell affirmed claims by al-Baluchi's attorneys that CIA employees used the experience to earn certification in the agency's "enhanced interrogation techniques."
The employees were already "qualified" in the techniques but needed more hands-on training to become "certified," according to Alka Pradhan, one of al-Baluchi's defense lawyers. She said six to eight CIA employees took part in al-Baluchi's interrogation session.
One employee "explained his role as a student doing on-the job training." Another said that before al-Baluchi's interrogation, he had felt he was falling behind "because he needed to practice interrogation techniques." Others said they were "trying to learn what they were doing and how to apply coercion." That's according to a classified CIA report, portions of which defense attorneys were permitted by the government to read in open court.
Asked by al-Baluchi's lead attorney, James Connell, if it is customary for people learning interrogation methods to practice on detainees, Mitchell — a former interrogation trainer — replied: "We had them practice on themselves," not on prisoners.
Added Mitchell: "It looks like they used your client as a training prop."
Noting that al-Baluchi's interrogation included "one round of walling," Connell asked Mitchell: "How do you know one round of walling didn't last an hour-and-a-half?"
"I don't," Mitchell replied.
Of the 20 "facial slaps" al-Baluchi was subjected to, Mitchell said: "To me, that seems excessive."
To underscore his point, Mitchell, who personally waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, added that "in my most contentious time with KSM, he was looking at me like he wanted to cut my head off and I slapped him three times and he stopped glaring."
Al-Baluchi is accused of helping finance the Sept. 11 hijackers. Also known as Abd al Aziz Ali, he was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006.
The case is not scheduled to go to trial until January 2021, but pretrial hearings have been happening for years as attorneys debate various legal issues that must be resolved before a trial can begin.
During his testimony this week, Mitchell defiantly defended his role in the CIA's torture program, emphasizing the climate of fear in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks and the concern that another catastrophic event was imminent. Given those circumstances, he said, the government was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent that, even if it resulted in "the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us."
Yet Mitchell also testified that he came to believe the CIA's torture techniques had gone too far and verged on breaking the law. He said some interrogators used his methods in abusive and unauthorized ways, prompting him to try to quit. But he said CIA officials told him he had "lost his spine" and would be at fault if another mass casualty occurred.
"The implication was that if we weren't willing to carry their water, they would send someone else who would do it," Mitchell said, "and they may be harsher than we were."
Mitchell continued working for the CIA, although the agency eventually cut ties with him and canceled his contract in 2009 as public outrage over the torture program mounted.
Mitchell's testimony is expected to continue next week, and his former business partner, Bruce Jessen, will testify after him.
The 1990 law banned documenting animal abuse on factory farms.
For nearly 30 years — since 1990 — a Kansas state law made it illegal to take photographs or record video in a factory farm or slaughterhouse “with the intent to damage an enterprise conducted at the animal facility.”
The law was the earliest example of what are now called “ag-gag” laws, which criminalize undercover investigations, often by animal welfare groups, that reveal abuses on farms. Since Kansas’s law was enacted, half a dozen states have passed such laws — and more have considered it. Legislators have been forthright about their motives: They’re worried that evidence of what goes on on these farms will outrage Americans, so they want to ban it.
So far, the courts aren’t impressed. Last year, the federal court for the southern district of Iowa ruled that Iowa’s ag-gag law was unconstitutional. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Kansas agreed. “The prohibition on taking pictures at an animal facility regulates speech for First Amendment purposes,” the court concluded, dismissing arguments that prohibiting the taking of pictures did not constitute a restriction on speech.
Even worse from a constitutional standpoint, the restriction on speech is not viewpoint-neutral, the court concluded: “The law plainly targets negative views about animal facilities and therefore discriminates based on viewpoint.”
Such restrictions are rarely constitutional — subject to a high standard called “strict scrutiny,” where the government must prove that there is a compelling state interest in suppressing the speech, and that the law is necessary to preserve that interest and narrowly tailored to prohibit as little as possible. This law didn’t meet that bar. (Trespassing is of course still illegal on farms just the same as on any other private property.)
That makes Kansas the fourth state — after Utah, Idaho, and Iowa — to see their ag-gag law struck down. But laws in Alabama, North Carolina, Montana, North Dakota, and Arkansas remain standing, with new ones passed as recently at 2017 — the product of a powerful agriculture industry furious about the animal rights movement.
What ag-gag laws are trying to hide
Undercover investigations in other states give us a hint as to what the investigations now legal in Kansas might uncover.
Iowa’s ag-gag law passed shortly after the results were revealed from an undercover investigation of Sparboe Farms in 2011, by the activist group Mercy for Animals. An investigator, working for Sparboe on a traveling crew that visited eight facilities in three states, got footage of workers burning the beaks off baby chicks, throwing chickens by the neck, and leaving dead chickens to rot in cages they shared with live birds.
This video by the Humane Society of the United States was captured in Iowa in 2010, and depicts abuses at Rose Acre Farms and Rembrandt Enterprises. It would have been illegal to film after 2012, when the state’s ag-gag law was enacted. The investigation found cages with weeks-old decomposed hen carcasses, live hens with severe infections and abscesses, and hens suffering uterine prolapses (a consequence of the strain of laying far too many eggs), including a hen whose internal organs became caught in the floor of the cage.
Importantly, these incidents are not the result of a few maliciously cruel slaughterhouse workers. They occur routinely on factory farms — they’re systemic problems.
“In virtually everyinstance where we’ve exposed a factory farm, they claim there is a mythical ‘humane barn’ where the animals were well treated,” Wayne Hsiung, an investigator with Direct Action Everywhere, told Vox after one such investigation. “The reality is that they must do this because the public does not have a stomach for animal torture.“
Ag-gag laws successfully keep atrocities on farms hidden
Ag-gag laws are rarely actually used to prosecute activists. But they’ve nonetheless succeeded at their mission of squelching dissent. That, the federal judge in Kansas decided, is why the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which sued the state, had standing to sue: “ALDF wishes to conduct an undercover investigation in Kansas but has refrained from doing so out of fear of criminal prosecution under the Act. If the Court finds that the Act is unconstitutional, ALDF will commence an undercover investigation in Kansas.”
ALDF is fairly typical of other animal organizations in its reluctance to defy ag-gag laws.
The organizations that arrange undercover investigations mostly avoid putting themselves at legal risk, Josh Balk, vice president of farm animal protection at the Humane Society, told me last year. “Most organizations will not go into a state to actively break a law,” which means that ag-gag laws have been effective at shielding farms from scrutiny.
One person has been arrested under an ag-gag law so far: Amy Meyer of Utah, who stood in a public thoroughfare filming the treatment of cows in a slaughterhouse visible from the road. Utah’s law shouldn’t have applied to her, as it only prohibited recordings that were made while an investigator was there on “false pretenses.” Charges were quickly dropped once the case attracted national attention. Nonetheless, the whole episode put the lie to the insistence of ag-gag proponents that the laws would only be used to charge people for extreme and outrageous behavior.
Animal advocates have responded with caution. “None of the major animal protection groups have done anything in Iowa in the last seven years,” Harvard’s Chris Green told me last year. The ag-gag laws worked. And when Iowa’s law was overturned, animal activists went back to work in the state. (Iowa has since tried another ban, but that one has been held up in court as well.)
Our nightmarish food system
Ultimately, though, ag-gag laws aren’t the real problem, they’re a symptom of it. The problem is that what goes on on our farms is so horrifying, and so unconscionable to the typical American consumer, that agribusinesses have turned to trying to hide it.
“The situation agribusiness faced was this,” Balk told me. “They tried for many years” to defend the treatment of animals in industrial farming — blaming systemic abuses on individual bad workers, claiming that their practices were good for animals. “They lost every time. They lost ballot measures, they lost their customers — fast-food chains and major grocery stores.”
That’s why there was a sudden surge of interest in banning undercover investigations of factory farms. Ag-gag laws, in other words, came about because agribusiness concluded the horrors of our food system couldn’t stand up to the light of day.
People want affordable meat. They also don’t want animals treated cruelly. Right now, the industry is trying to provide the meat and hide the cruelty. But we can do better. It’s fair to expect a food system that doesn’t have to hide its conduct from its customers — and fair to be very concerned that our current food system considered ag-gag laws a better solution.
Members of the group Moms 4 Housing stand outside the house they were occupying on Magnolia Street in West Oakland, California, December 30, 2019. The house's owner agreed to sell the house to a community trust this week. (photo: Kate Wolffe/KQED/AP)
Palestinian Boy Allegedly Kidnapped by Israeli Settlers, Found Dead teleSUR Excerpt: "An eight-year-old Palestinian boy who went missing in East Jerusalem Friday afternoon was found dead at the bottom of a cistern filled with rainwater after long hours of search efforts Saturday."
The Jerusalem Post cited Israeli police as saying that the youngster “was last seen entering a car.”
n eight-year-old Palestinian boy who went missing in East Jerusalem Friday afternoon was found dead at the bottom of a cistern filled with rainwater after long hours of search efforts Saturday.
Qais Abu Rmaileh was found in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina and was immediately taken to Hadassah hospital, where lifesaving attempts were unsuccessful.
The Jerusalem Post cited Israeli police as saying that the youngster “was last seen entering a car.” The family is now asking that security footage from the area be released.
“If it turns out he was kidnapped by [West Bank] settlers it would set the entire neighborhood on fire,” the boy’s parents said.
Hundreds of Palestinians take part in the funeral of deceased Qais Abu Rmaileh, 8 years old, who was found dead in a ditch filled with rainwater in the occupied Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina yesterday.
The Governor of Jerusalem Adnan Ghaith held the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for his death, stressing that the authorities should have sealed the open water ditches to prevent children's access to them.
While Knesset’s MP Ahmad Tibi, from the Arab Movement for Change party, told Israel’s Ynet news website that “things are worrisome” and he hopes “that all doubts will be proven false.”
However, the accusations of Israeli settlers being involved in the boy’s disappearance and death are not unfounded, as in the past the illegal occupiers have killed and injured Palestinians, including children.
In July 2014, a Palestinian teenager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped and killed after being burned by three Israeli settlers.
Lake Erie turns toxic every summer. Officials aren’t cracking down on the source.
t was sunny and 82 degrees, a perfect August day for a trip to the public beach just outside Toledo. But hardly anyone was here. And no one was swimming. “DANGER,” warned a red sign posted in the sand near the edge of Lake Erie. “Avoid all contact with the water.”
The reason: The water was contaminated with algae-like cyanobacteria, which can produce toxins that sicken people and kill pets. This is the noxious goo that cut off about 500,000 Toledo-area residents from their tap water for three days in 2014 and made at least 110 people ill.
It suddenly seems like harmful algae blooms are everywhere. In some cases, they’re hard to miss, forming a colorful layer of muck on waterways; in others, they lurk below the surface, fortifying themselves before bursting back into view.
Hazardous algae scuttled swimming at Mississippi’s mainland beaches on the Gulf of Mexico for most of the last summer. They killed dozens of dolphins and hurt tourist-dependent businesses in Florida over a 16-month stretch that finally ended in February 2019. Scientists suspect they’re causing clusters of deadly liver disease across the country. In rarecases, they’ve killed people shortly after contact.
Even as toxic algae triggered no-drink orders in at least threemorecommunities in 2018, data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shows just how much worse the problem could get: Nearly 150 public water systems in 33 states have reported spotting algae blooms near their intakes in reservoirs or other water sources since 2017, in many cases multiple times, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, Grist, and The World.
The algae are natural. This slow-motion crisis, however, is largely manmade — and neither the federal government nor states are effectively cracking down on the major contributor.
Harmful blooms like cyanobacteria or the so-called red tide grow out of control when they’re overfed nutrients such as phosphorus. That’s exactly what commercial fertilizer and manure running off farm fields provide. U.S. rules intended to protect people from water pollution have prompted sharp reductions in the nutrients discharged by sewage treatment plants since the 1970s, but loopholes in the Clean Water Act shield agricultural operations from similar federal enforcement.
States have broader leeway to act. But they have largely opted to make recommendations about farming practices and promote voluntary measures that don’t draw opposition from influential agricultural trade groups.
After Toledo’s water crisis, Ohio went further, passing a law that prohibits farms in the western Lake Erie region from applying fertilizer on frozen or rain-saturated soil. But here, too, most fertilizer runoff efforts are voluntary — and exceptions undercut the state’s 2015 ban.
More than a dozen years have passed since Ohio convened a task force to figure out how to tackle its Lake Erie problem. Since 2011, the state has spent more than $3 billion on it, largely to upgrade sewage and drinking water plants. But Ohio’s agriculture nutrient-reduction strategy has yet to show results.
“Everything we’ve done so far, trying to reach these reductions voluntarily, has had no impact,” said Jeff Reutter, a longtime Lake Erie researcher who retired from the Ohio State University in 2017. “The voluntary approach has been — I guess you’d say — a total failure.”
The state could set legally enforceable limits on nutrients in Lake Erie. It hasn’t. Two groups and a local county are suing the EPA, arguing that it has a duty to make Ohio officials act.
The state also could mandate that farmers not use more fertilizer than their crops need. It hasn’t done that, either. It barely tracks the issue. Little information about how much farms fertilize is publicly available beyond some documentation from operations raising large numbers of animals, such as several thousand or more pigs.
Dozens of such sites, producing more than 760 million gallons of phosphorus-rich manure each year that they must do something with, are in the region that drains into western Lake Erie. An analysis by Public Integrity and its partners of Ohio Department of Agriculture permits for those farms found widespread application of manure to land that the farms’ own soil tests show already had more than enough phosphorus for key crops. That increases the odds of nutrients leaving the fields to fuel harmful algae.
More than 40 percent of the acres disclosed by the farms had phosphorus levels that, according to field research by the Ohio State University, is plenty to grow the state’s major crops for at least five years. Harold Watters, an agronomic systems field specialist at the university and a farmer himself, has a one-word fertilizing recommendation for acreage with those phosphorus levels: “Stop.”
But that’s all it is. A recommendation.
The Ohio Department of Agriculture, which has the dual mission of overseeing farm rules and creating economic opportunities for the industry, would not make its director available for an interview. In written answers to questions, the agency called its rules effective and said that limiting phosphorus to the amount crops need would needlessly restrict manure application “in places where risk of [phosphorus] loss is low.”
“There is remarkable progress being made in the efforts to improve water quality in Ohio,” the agency said in its statement. “It is a priority for Governor Mike DeWine, with dedicated funding through the legislature and an unprecedented collaboration between the agricultural, conservation and research communities.”
The state’s newest approach, announced in November, is to pay farmers to use a customized combination of anti-runoff strategies, such as injecting fertilizer into the soil rather than spreading it on top.
“Ohio has supported many programs to help farmers reduce nutrient loss over the years, but the state hasn’t done nearly enough, nor have previous plans focused enough, on reducing phosphorus runoff from agriculture,” DeWine, a Republican, said in a statement about the “H2Ohio” plan. “That changes now.”
H2Ohio doesn’t require any of these farming practices, though. It encourages them by offering subsidies.
Containing the algae problem is only going to get harder, scientists warn. Heavier rain, courtesy of a warming world, means more nutrient runoff. Research from Stanford and Princeton predicts that government agencies will have to double down on control efforts to keep up. And because nutrient pollution causes water bodies to emit more of a potent climate-warming gas — in part, it appears, because of the cyanobacteria themselves — there’s a dangerous vicious cycle at work.
If officials can’t stop it, the consequences will mount in serious and unexpected ways.
“I had to file bankruptcy,” said Steve Klosterman, whose business developing lots and building homes alongside Ohio’s Grand Lake St. Marys unraveled after severe algal blooms destabilized that market, about 90 miles southwest of Toledo. “I had 10 employees, and now I don’t have any. It’s just me. I basically lost everything.”
‘We’re paying’
Up on the projector screen was a photo of a glass full of what looked like pea soup: the cyanobacteria that temporarily cut Toledoans off from their public water. Mike Ferner, giving a presentation in August to retired locals at the West Toledo YMCA, reminded them that this happened five years earlier “and some people” — he meant state officials — “are still looking for solutions.”
He popped up a different photo to illustrate that: A person with their head in the sand.
Ferner, a retired union organizer and former Toledo councilman, runs the all-volunteer Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie. He’s among the Toledo-area activists who think the solution is obvious: Stop approving more animal feeding operations in the region and require more of the ones already there.
Ohio has fewer farms now than it did 30 years ago, when the lake was healthy, but they’re raising more animals. The number has quadrupled at the average hog operation, for instance. Since 2015, the state issued permits for nine new sites with 4,500 cows, 35,950 hogs, and 2.6 million chickens between them in the western Lake Erie region, according to an analysis by Public Integrity and its partners. Other area sites already in operation added more than 700,000 animals, mostly chickens. Officials are considering proposals to build sites for nearly 30,000 additional hogs.
There’s simply too much manure now concentrated in small areas, environmental advocates argue — a problem the EPA noted in a 2012 report about the water-quality consequences of “the industrialization of livestock production in the U.S.”
“These animal-factory owners, they’re doing what every industry has done through history — they’re trying to shift the cost of their production onto somebody else,” Ferner told the retirees. “And that’s what’s happened. We’re paying to clean up their pollution.”
Kevin Elder, a consultant for the Ohio Pork Council and other agriculture commodity groups, said the phosphorus escaping from farms is a collective problem but comes to “a very small amount per acre” of about 2 pounds per year — though that’s an average and can vary a lot.
“I don’t think the manure is any more [to blame] than the commercial fertilizer,” said Elder, who ran livestock environmental permitting for the state before retiring to work with the industry he used to oversee. “I think there’s probably better regulations, hard regulations, on the manure.”
The state requires farmers and brokers handling large amounts of manure to get certified and keep records on site. But actual restrictions are thin. The analysis of permit records by Public Integrity and its partners shows the results: Many farmers reported plans to add manure to acreage that already had phosphorus levels above the threshold that Ohio State University experts say is plenty for years of bountiful crops — 40 parts per million with the so-called Mehlich III soil test, or 30 parts per million if using an older test.
The state sets no phosphorus cap for most farms. For the rest, typically big operations, it’s high: generally 200 parts per million on a Mehlich scale.
“The rules weren’t written to grow crops, the rules were written to get rid of waste,” said Adam Rissien, author of a 2017 report about manure for the Ohio Environmental Council. “When I said, ‘Let’s lower that,’ [state and industry officials] said, ‘That’s not going to work.’”
Elder, the Ohio Pork Council consultant, says farming is simply too varied for many hard-and-fast rules. Crops such as sweet corn and tomatoes, he said, need more phosphorus than feed corn and soybeans.
In Ohio, though, acres in feed corn and soybeans in 2018 outnumbered all other crops combined by more than 5 to 1. For an operation planting the typical Ohio rotation of crops, there’s no need for phosphorus above 40 parts per million, said Watters, the agronomist. The main debate among experts, he said, is whether it’s OK to push it as far as 50 — way below the current cutoff.
The rule that died
When farm rules do get proposed, they can hit a buzz saw of opposition.
The state’s previous governor, Republican John Kasich, found that out the hard way when he signed an executive order in 2018 telling the Ohio Department of Agriculture to consider categorizing eight watersheds that drain into Lake Erie as “in distress” and establishing nutrient-management requirements for farms there. He said in a statement at the time that “it’s clear that more aggressive action is needed.”
Some environmentalists doubted this approach would be stringent enough to move the needle much, but agriculture groups were outraged. Top members of the Legislature told Kasich to drop it. The head of the agriculture agency opposed it, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Kasich fired him. Finally, an agency commission charged with deciding whether to declare the watersheds in distress tabled the measure despite hearing from scientists on the panel that phosphorus levels were not improving and public health required more action.
Adam Sharp, the Ohio Farm Bureau’s executive vice president, summed up the industry’s influence in a 2019 email to members about another Lake Erie battle: “We in agriculture may be small in number but, together with farmers, we are large in force.”
Karl Gebhardt, who ran the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s Lake Erie programs during the Kasich administration, watched the 2018 fight with frustration. Gebhardt is a former Ohio Farm Bureau lobbyist. But if voluntary approaches aren’t getting results, he said, “something else has to change.”
“It’s not fair for the farmers … that are doing the right thing, that are implementing the right programs, to have the knucklehead next to them saying, ‘Nah, I’m not going to do it,’” he said.
Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie sees Ohio’s EPA as exactly that sort of knucklehead. The agency wouldn’t declare the algae-choked western Lake Erie “impaired,” the first step in a Clean Water Act process that ends with an enforceable improvement plan, until the group and the Environmental Law & Policy Center sued. Then the Ohio agency signaled that it had no near-term plans to start the next step, setting phosphorus limits. The groups sued again — and this time, Lucas County, in which Toledo is located, joined in.
The case, which like the previous lawsuit was brought against the U.S. EPA because it oversees states’ handling of Clean Water Act requirements, passed a key test in November when a federal judge declined to dismiss it. Ohio contends it is pursuing other measures to help Lake Erie, U.S. District Judge James G. Carr wrote in his order, but the state did not supply “a credible plan” to fix the problem.
Ohio’s EPA would not make anyone available for an interview. But in a statement, the agency wrote that while the region that drains into western Lake Erie does not have a phosphorus limit, dozens of small watersheds within the area do. Advocates believe a limit for the entire region would be more effective, though they expect they will have to dog regulators for follow-up action.
Deep into his presentation at the West Toledo YMCA last summer, Ferner said Ohio could take a lesson from the nutrient-overloaded Chesapeake Bay. Though the bay’s health is far from perfect, and agriculture nutrients remain a challenge, progress accelerated after the U.S. EPA agreed to impose limits, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation says.
Lake Erie, on the other hand? The week Ferner gave his talk, its algae bloom had ballooned to nearly the size of Houston.
Blame it on the rain
Anthony Stateler zipped up the road in a mud-flecked utility terrain vehicle and turned into one of his family’s fields in McComb, Ohio. There, by a ditch, sat a white container full of specialized equipment. He’d just explained how it measures nutrients in the water leaving the field when it interrupted him, making a soft whirring sound. The pump was pulling a sample.
Stateler and his family raise 7,200 pigs at any given time. They use most of the manure to fertilize the corn, soybeans, and wheat they grow on about 920 acres, and they sell the rest to other farmers. Ask the Ohio Pork Council about nutrient runoff, and officials there will probably suggest you talk to the Statelers because of their relentless efforts to better understand and contain it.
They’re part of an experiment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Ohio Farm Bureau to test cutting-edge conservation practices that could improve Great Lakes water quality. In addition to the monitoring equipment, they’ve got a phosphorus removal pit with material that traps the nutrient. Water-management gates hold back rainwater, giving it a chance to soak into the soil rather than running out their underground drains and, eventually, into Lake Erie, about 45 miles northeast. They inject manure into the ground, too, which helps keep more nutrients in place.
But the Statelers don’t want these or other practices turned into requirements.
“We don’t have the science behind things yet to make it mandatory,” said Anthony’s father, Duane Stateler, who has been farming in the area for five decades. “And to try to mandate it doesn’t make any difference because [farmers don’t] have the money.”
The way Anthony Stateler sees it, the explanation for Lake Erie’s tipping from good to ill health is heavierrain washing farms’ nutrients away, not anything farmers are doing differently.
More rain, courtesy of climate change, does contribute to runoff problems — and financial trouble for farmers. Last year was especially bad: Extreme weather, the Ohio Department of Agriculture said in a suicide prevention campaign, brought at least some farms “the most devastating economic losses they have ever faced.” Drenchers that dump more than 2 inches in a 24-hour period are happening about 50 percent more often in the Great Lakes region these days than in 1960, said Reutter, the Lake Erie researcher.
But the lake’s increasing problems are also a matter of farm-management decisions, scientists and the state’s phosphorus task force report say. For instance: Northwest Ohio farmers use subsurface drains to keep their fields from getting soggy, and they’ve installed large numbers in recent decades, said Laura T. Johnson, director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University. “That just helps drain water even faster,” she said.
Reutter said just two actions, both recommended by the state’s phosphorus task force nearly a decade ago, would help the lake a lot if all farms took them: Insert fertilizer into the ground and stop applying too much. The first involves pricey equipment. The second isn’t a major hurdle for farms using commercial fertilizer, but he said it’s “a real heavy lift for people putting on manure.” The analysis by Public Integrity and its partners shows only a small part of the problem because relatively few farms must send reports to the state or abide by limits, he said, and many are “applying way too much.”
Ohio’s inability to stem the flow of nutrients has costly consequences. To protect its residents from microcystins, cyanobacteria toxins that can sicken people, Toledo has spent $53 million on an under-construction ozone treatment system, $6.2 million for a powdered activated carbon system, and $800,000 a year on the extra carbon and other agents that remove the toxin. The city also pays for a buoy system that measures water quality, which officials rely on to adapt their water treatment as algae conditions change.
And that’s just one place. The city of Oregon, which like Toledo taps Lake Erie for its drinking water, has had to spend extra, too. Across the country, more and more water systems are grappling with the costs of nutrient pollution.
“We no longer have a drinking-water problem in this community,” Toledo’s mayor, Wade Kapszukiewicz, said in his office overlooking the Maumee River, which is full of farm runoff that dumps into the lake. “But that’s only true because of the incredible investment the taxpayers of Northwest Ohio have had to make.”
Toledo also spent $527 million over the last two decades to upgrade its sewage handling and reduce its own nutrient pollution. By Kapszukiewicz’s calculation, locals have paid twice over while the industry that’s sending most of the phosphorus to Lake Erie skates.
“It is a profound injustice that the citizens of Toledo have had to clean up a mess that other people have made,” he said.
Other ripple effects range from a sharp drop in business for western Lake Erie charter boat captains during key summer months to no-swimming warnings, which in 2019 stretched from the end of July through late August at a Lake Erie public beach near Toledo.
Lake Erie waterkeeper Sandy Bihn, whose small organization advocates for the lake, said her family largely stopped swimming in it at the end of the 1990s as algae mounted. Even boating is a problem: The stuff keeps clogging their engine. She praises the state of Ohio for its monitoring and other efforts to keep people safe from the toxins; many other places are playing catch up. But she thinks Ohio is doing an awful job reducing the pollution.
“The system is politicized to the point where they just don’t want to find the sources,” Bihn said.
‘Wherever you are, it’s coming’
Pam Taylor was in the driver’s seat, her former student Brittney Dulbs in the back, as they drove past a water source for Dulbs’ community last August.
“That’s Lake Adrian,” said Taylor, a retired high school teacher who farmed on the side and now volunteers as a concentrated animal feeding operation and water-quality watchdog. “Looks kind of green right now, Brittney.”
“Yeah,” Dulbs murmured.
They both live across the state line in Michigan, but their region’s farms and large animal operations eventually drain into Lake Erie. The algae drinking-water crisis that might have seemed somewhat distant when Toledo was battling it in 2014 hit home a few years later as Dulbs and others in her small city of Adrian complained that their own drinking water tasted earthy and smelled foul.
With Taylor’s help, Dulbs collected samples that tested positive for cyanobacteria, though not its toxins, which can come and go during a bloom.
Now Dulbs was on a field trip Taylor has taken many times before: a manure tour. Taylor paused at a creek she’d tested a few weeks earlier; the lab results, she said, came back with hits for microcystin, along with a separate cyanobacteria toxin and the bacteria E. coli, often found in animal manure and human feces.
Then she continued driving upstream, slowing as she passed one dairy operation after another that produce large amounts of manure, pointing out fallow fields with recent applications. She praised good management practices as she saw them. Those were few and far between.
Nutrient pollution sneaks up on you, Taylor warned. Once you realize you have a problem, it’s hard to undo and — for those whose drinking water relies on polluted sources — stressful to manage. There are no federal requirements for public water systems struggling with cyanobacteria, only EPA guidelines. The agency said it is gathering data to decide whether to regulate the contaminants; a rulemaking effort, if begun, could take years.
“The EPA needs to set some standards,” Taylor said. “You can kind of watch [cyanobacteria] spread all over the United States. It’s coming. Wherever you are, it’s coming to you.”
Earlier that week, Silvia Newell with Wright State University in Dayton took a class of students onto Lake Erie. Newell, whose specialty is aquatic biogeochemistry, researches nitrogen — another nutrient in commercial fertilizer and manure — and its role in harmful algae blooms. It’s a major player in the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. Newell and other scientists are showing that nitrogen helps phosphorus feed freshwater blooms like those in Lake Erie, too.
The early morning light painted the sky a peach-yellow as her class boarded a trawler and cast off from Put-in-Bay, an island vacation spot about 30 miles east of Toledo. Newell, lying on her stomach, head over the edge of the stern, helped the students pull up samples from below the surface. The water looked clean and inviting. No hint of sickly green scum.
But the lake was choppy, its waves potentially pushing cyanobacteria out of sight. They’re wily, too: They can float — or they can disappear down the water column in search of just the right amount of light and food.
Later that day in a lab overlooking the lake, Newell’s students put a few drops of the water they collected on a microscope slide. The blobby microorganisms there were a telltale bright green. A graduate student using a spectrofluorometer to analyze pigments in another sample found highly concentrated levels of cyanobacteria.
They were in that part of the lake after all, hidden from view.
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