Aside from being the Senate’s most prolific stock trader, making a staggering 2,596 trades during his term, a deep dive into his trading indicates he has been making suspiciously well-timed trades long before the pandemic — often in industries that he oversees as a senator. Among them:
— Perdue bought and sold FireEye stock — a federal contractor that provides malware detection and threat-intelligence services — 61 times, beginning in 2016. Nearly half of those trades were made when he sat on the cybersecurity panel, and during that time FireEye secured a $30 million subcontract with the Army Cyber Command, which happens to be located in Perdue’s home state of Georgia. Perdue reported $15,000 in capital gains from FireEye trades in 2018.
— Perdue began buying stock in BWX Technologies, a company that supplies nuclear components for Navy submarines, about a month before he took over as chairman of the seapower subcommittee. As chairman, he added a multibillion-dollar nuclear submarine to the nation’s defenses — exactly the type that BWX Technologies provides components for. He earned as much as $50,000 in capital gains when he sold the company’s stock.
— Perdue began buying stock in Regions Financial, a mid-size regional lender in Alabama, in May 2017. Four months later, Perdue co-sponsored a Senate bill proposing to loosen regulations governing banks like Regions, and a version of his bill was signed into law by Trump in May 2018. Between Perdue’s first purchase of Regions stock and the time Trump signed his bill into law, the bank’s shares increased by 35 percent. Regions’ CEO has contributed to Perdue’s re-election campaign.
Those are just the highlights of his suspicious stock trades. One thing is clear: David Perdue is in the Senate to enrich himself at the expense of everyone else — not to serve the people of Georgia. Meanwhile, Jon Ossoff has dedicated his career to fighting and exposing corruption. Let’s elect him and Raphael Warnock to the Senate, and send Perdue and his fellow self-dealer Kelly Loeffler packing.
A woman looks at signs at a store closed due to COVID-19. (photo: Nam Y. Huh/AP)
More Than Half of Emergency Small-Business Funds Went to Larger Businesses, New Data Shows Jonathan O'Connell, Andrew Van Dam, Aaron Gregg and Alyssa Fowers, The Washington Post Excerpt: "More than half of the money from the Treasury Department's coronavirus emergency fund for small businesses went to just 5 percent of the recipients, according to data on more than 5 million loans that was released by the government Tuesday evening in response to a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit." READ MORE
Crystal Mason, ACLU File Appeal of Texas 5 Year Illegal Voting Sentence Black Christian News Excerpt: "A Fort Worth woman jailed for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election while on supervised release for a federal conviction is asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn her conviction on illegal voting charges, according to legal documents filed Monday." READ MORE
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest. (photo: Charles Reed/AP)
The sanctions fall most heavily on the poorest people in society, causing death through food and medicine shortages. (photo: AP
Venezuela Loses 99 Percent of Its Income Due to US Sanctions teleSUR Excerpt: "Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro held a meeting with journalists on Thursday at the Miraflores Palace, where he denounced that the U.S. arbitrary sanctions have caused a loss of 99 percent in the country's income." READ MORE
A sea turtle. (photo: Lee Gillinwater/Pew Charitable Trusts
Countries Fall Short of UN Pledge to Protect 10% of the Ocean by 2020 Chris Arsenault, Mongabay Arsenault writes: "Covering a swath of ocean larger than Peru around coral reefs, golden beaches and rocky atolls in north Hawai'i, Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument is one of the world's largest marine protected areas - and the biggest in North America."
This UNESCO World Heritage Site is home to endangered Hawaiian monk seals (Monachus schauinslandi), two dozen species of whales and dolphins, and green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), among thousands of other creatures.
Even as countries fall well short of meeting a U.N. goal to protect 10% of the world’s oceans by the end of this year, marine protected areas (MPAs) like Papahānaumokuākea show what effective conservation can look like, said Aulani Wilhelm, who worked to build and manage the MPA as an official with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“The stability of the ocean drives the stability of all living systems on the planet,” Wilhelm, now a senior official with the NGO Conservation International, based in Hawaiʻi, told Mongabay. “It’s about making enough of the ocean function as close to its natural state as possible to lend resiliency to the ocean — and planet. That’s why MPAs are a critical point of the conversations countries need to be having about the future.”
Created in 2006 and then expanded in 2016, Papahānaumokuākea prohibits large-scale extractive activities within its waters, such as industrial fishing and deep-sea mining. Some recreational fishing is allowed, along with Indigenous Hawaiian cultural practices and scientific research.
These protections should allow coral reefs to regenerate and increase the amount and diversity of fish and birds in the MPA and surrounding waters, while still allowing some local people to make a living from small-scale fishing or ecotourism, conservationists said.
As the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the need to better manage humans’ relationships with the natural world, and climate change accelerates ocean habitat loss, the urgency to build new and more effective MPAs has never been higher, said Liz Karan, who directs a project to promote establishing MPAs in international waters for the U.S.-based Pew Charitable Trusts.
“It’s actually in a country’s best interest to invest in conservation efforts to ensure long-term sustainability, food security and livelihoods,” Karan said.
The target
In 2010, the international community pledged to protect 10% of the oceans by the end of 2020, under the auspices of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The convention now has 196 parties; notably the U.S. is not among them.
About 7.6% of the oceans, an area the size of North America, is now covered by MPAs, according to the U.N.’s Protected Planet database.
Other research paints a more conservative picture. The Marine Protection Atlas, an initiative of the Seattle-based nonprofit Marine Conservation Institute, puts the figure at just 6.4%, counting only MPAs that have been legally designated and not just proposed or pledged.
It also points out that not all MPAs are created equal: Fully or highly protected parks that permit little or no fishing and other human impacts cover just 2.6% of the world’s oceans, and lightly or minimally protected parks cover 3.2%. These less-protected MPAs sometimes allow disruptive activities like mining, hydrocarbon extraction and industrial fishing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the atlas notes that stronger protections tend to yield greater conservation benefits.
Getting out of the gate strong makes a huge difference on a lot of levels is our fundraising drives.
Tis the season of giving. Might also be the season of remembering the consistency, passion and determination with which the RSN Team peruses its mission.
Hoping for a quick start to a great funding drive.
The only way to parse “suspension” of the constitution is its temporary overthrow. Moreover, they are calling for the use of force (“martial law”) toward that aim. They are also using diction such as the threat of civil war. Since nobody but them is talking about civil war, I take it they are envisioning firing off the AR-15s they have stockpiled.
Should they go to jail?
Other people did, for much less. Jessie DeLauder explains that in 1952 seven Seattle citizens were abruptly arrested by the FBI and charged not only with being members of the Communist Party but of therefore seeking to overthrow the constitution of the United States. They were charged under the 1940 Smith Act, passed in the shadow of WW II, which threatened with condign punishment those who
“knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.”
Among the seven, DeLauder says, “Karley Larsen had, for seventeen consecutive years, held the position of the first vice-president of the International Woodworkers Union of Western Washington.” She was arrested at a union meeting in Oregon. Paul Bowen, an African-American veteran, trade unionist and civil rights activist, was arrested just outside Seattle.
As the seven went blue in the face asserting to the judge, they did not in fact advocate the violent overthrow of the US constitution, just because they belonged to the Communist Party.
They were nevertheless convicted, fined and sentenced to five years in jail for throught crimes. One committed suicide. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the convictions.
Given this success, The FBI went on an arrest spree, bringing cases all over the country. Only in 1957 did the Supreme Court finally return to its senses and rule that you can’t be imprisoned for your thoughts, only for your actions.
The Smith Act is still on the books, and I don’t think anyone who believes in human rights would ever want to see it deployed again. It should be repealed. Who knows, our present Supreme Court may be as conservative as the one who upheld the conviction of prisoners of conscience.
But, I’m just saying that there is a double standard in the United States. The far right literally gets away with murder, and no one is talking about locking up the Trump crazies for demanding the overthrow of the US constitution. If they called themselves socialists or if they weren’t white, though, they might well have started being investigated by now.
The House Just Voted to Decriminalize Weed Cameron Joseph, VICE Joseph writes: "In a historic first, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to end the federal ban on cannabis. Senate Republicans are unlikely to take it up." READ MORE
Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, speaks in front of the Capitol building. (photo: Deborah Barfield Berry)
LA Times Sues for Records on Abuse Claims at ICE Centers Andrea Castillo and Jie Jenny Zou, Los Angeles Times Excerpt: "The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, seeking the release of records detailing allegations of widespread sexual abuse and harassment at immigration detention centers." READ MORE
Hospital staff look on as the United States Navy Blue Angels pass over Medical City Dallas on May 06, 2020, in Dallas, Texas. (photo: Tom Pennington/Getty)
CNN investigation has exposed the Nigerian Army’s role in a deadly attack on protesters in the capital city of Lagos in October, when soldiers opened fire on protesters gathered at Lekki toll gate, a key roadway and protest site. At least 12 people were killed in the massacre, which the Army initially denied, and capped weeks of demonstrations against the notorious Nigerian police unit known as the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, or SARS. Senior CNN international correspondent Nima Elbagir says the massacre “had a chilling effect” on the protest movement and enraged many Nigerians. “We kept hearing from these families who were still looking for their loved ones how hurtful it had been for them to hear the Nigerian government deny that they had anything to do with this huge and grievous loss,” says Elbagir.
People protest the Enbridge Energy Line 3 oil pipeline project in St Paul, Minnesota. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty)
A Huge Oil Pipeline Is Coming to Minnesota - and With It the Risk of COVID Emily Holden, Guardian UK Holden writes: "As Covid-19 cases surge in Minnesota, an oil company is bringing in thousands of out-of-state workers to finish building a pipeline from Canada that will stretch hundreds of miles across the state."
Advocates and Native tribes, who have fought the proposal for years, have renewed complaints amid a coronavirus surge
Environmental advocates and Native American tribes have fought Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 proposal for years, and now medical professionals are joining in to plead with the governor to halt construction amid the pandemic.
Enbridge secured its final permits from the state this week, and workers are already arriving, although lawsuits are ongoing.
In Aitkin county where construction is starting, a senior nurse at the Riverwood healthcare center said the staff is already struggling.
“Our nurses, we’re very stressed out. It’s taking more staff to take care of Covid patients, and we’re seeing a lot of our families and friends and our relatives that we’re caring for,” said the nurse, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her position. “We know within the next couple of weeks, it’s going to get bad again.”
Riverwood is a “critical access” hospital, a designation for rural hospitals meant to improve healthcare access to small communities. It has 25 beds and four intensive care beds. The hospital has been trying to transfer the sickest patients to bigger facilities, but those hospitals are increasingly at capacity.
Nearly 200 Minnesota health professionals are petitioning the governor’s office for an emergency stay of construction, arguing an influx of workers will increase community spread of Covid-19.
“Minnesota is currently facing a massive surge in Covid-19 cases. Our hospital capacity is limited and the resilience of our workforce is being challenged,” their petition reads. “A major outbreak in a rural area with limited healthcare capacity such as Aitkin county … will have ripple effects across our entire state healthcare infrastructure.”
Kristina Krohn, a hospitalist at the University of Minnesota medical school in Minneapolis who signed the petition, has worked as the triage doctor answering calls from small-town medical providers who need to transfer very sick patients. The arrival of workers in rural Minnesota makes her nervous for her 70-year-old parents, she said.
“If they get sick, I want a hospital bed available for them,” said Krohn, who spoke to the Guardian in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the university. “When we are encouraging people to not travel for Thanksgiving or Christmas, then I think we need to also not encourage large groups of people to travel for work that doesn’t have to be done right now.”
Following renewed complaints this week, Enbridge has updated its Covid-19 preparedness plan. In addition to regular testing, temperature checks, and masking and distancing requirements, the company is encouraging workers to avoid public spaces whenever possible. The company will increase to 4,000 employees – some local and some not – over four to six weeks, it said. Any sick contractors will be transported to hospitals close to their permanent residences if they need advanced care.
In a statement to the Guardian, Enbridge said safety was its top priority. Laalitha Surapaneni, a Minneapolis physician with the group Health Professionals for a Health Climate, countered that the updated plan was not sufficient and “shifts the burden of reducing Covid spread to individual workers”.
The Enbridge pipeline is meant to replace an original line was built in the 1960s and is corroding, risking an oil spill. Enbridge has argued the project will create 6,500 direct and indirect local jobs over two years.
Shanai Matteson, a climate change advocate who lives next to one of the two sites where the pipeline will cross the Mississippi River, in Aitkin county, said she has seen trucks with mostly out-of-state license plates.
“It seems insane to me that we would do this, especially looking at oil prices and the demand. It’s going down,” Matteson said. “So why are we putting our precious environment at risk and our public health at risk when it’s for something not even needed?”
The state’s department of commerce is also challenging the line, saying Enbridge has not proved there is demand for the oil the pipeline would carry.
State energy regulators will on Friday consider a separate request to halt the project while court battles are ongoing, from the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. White Earth is also considering federal lawsuits over treaty rights.
Last month, a majority of members of an environmental justice advisory committee for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency resigned in protest after the agency approved a key water quality permit for the pipeline.
People of color have disproportionately suffered during the pandemic. Native Americans in particular are four times more likely than white Americans to be hospitalized with Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There is not a more egregious decision you could have made in the state of Minnesota right now. This pipeline is fucking rammed down throats of the native people,” said Winona LaDuke, an activist with Honor the Earth who lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota.
“Who’s going to be liable for the outbreak that kills, you know, 500 people? Who pays for that? Enbridge pays for that? Who’s going to take responsibility for that one?”
The Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries will remain closed for public on-site visits and circulation during the week of December 7, 2020.
Given today's announcement by the Trial Court, it is possible that we may not re-open until January 8, 2021. For further updates, please visit our website.
Message from the Trial Court on Court Operations Through January 8, 2021
In light of the major increase in COVID-19 infections in Massachusetts and experience with court staff testing and courthouse closures, the Trial Court will extend the reduction of in-person court operations begun on November 27 through January 8, 2021. Courthouses will remain open during this time, and Trial Court staff will be maximizing remote work and leveraging the technologies in place to conduct operations remotely.
The reduction of in person hearings has the potential to significantly limit presymptomatic individuals from entering courthouses, and reduces the potential of those individuals infecting others.
Trial Court leaders have concluded that this plan is the best approach to balancing the need to provide access to courts and protecting the health and safety of court staff and court users.
To the extent possible, matters already scheduled during this time will be held as virtual proceedings. Parties, attorneys and court users with questions about matters scheduled during this time should contact the appropriate clerk’s, register’s, or recorder’s office.
Getting out of the gate strong makes a huge difference on a lot of levels is our fundraising drives.
Tis the season of giving. Might also be the season of remembering the consistency, passion and determination with which the RSN Team peruses its mission.
Hoping for a quick start to a great funding drive.
FOCUS: Chants of "Suspend the Constitution" Grow Louder Caitlin Dickson, Yahoo News Dickson writes: "Even as prominent Republicans began to grudgingly acknowledge that Joe Biden will be the next president, a noisy grassroots movement devoted to keeping Donald Trump in office seemed to be edging closer to advocating seizing power in what would amount to a coup d'état."
The day after a group run by a local Ohio tea party leader took out a full-page ad in the WashingtonTimes calling on Trump to declare martial law and have the military oversee a redo of the presidential election using only paper ballots — a call echoed in a tweet by Gen. Michael Flynn — a raucous “Stop the Steal” rally in suburban Atlanta urged Trump supporters to descend on the statehouse on Thursday and demand the resignations of Georgia’s governor and secretary of state. In a press release announcing the ad published Tuesday by We the People Convention, the group’s president, Tom Zawistowski, said, “We wanted to express our concerns to the President, to the legislators, courts and Congress that We the People will NOT cede our exclusive Constitutional right to elect our Representatives to judges, lawyers, courts, Governors, Secretary’s of State, Congress, corrupt election officials and local politicians, the corrupt media — or Leftist threats of violence!”
“I will see you tomorrow at the state Capitol,” attorney and Trump ally L. Lin Wood told the crowd who had gathered to hear him and former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell speak in Alpharetta, Ga., on Wednesday. “Stay mad as hell! We’re not going to take it anymore!”
Though billed as a press conference, the event had the energy of a Trump rally, with tightly packed throngs of the president’s supporters — sporting significantly more MAGA hats than masks — waving flags and breaking into chants of “USA!” and “Lock him up!”
That slogan was directed at Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who was endorsed by Trump in 2018 and has been a strong supporter of the president, but has refused to intervene in the tabulating of results from his state’s election. The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, also a target of derision by Wood and Powell, has maintained that the state’s election was honest and fair.
But Wood — a personal-injury and libel lawyer who has never held elected office — exhorted the crowd that it may be “time to look beyond Republicans and Democrats.” He is not representing Trump or his campaign in court, and Powell, who had been part of the campaign’s legal team, no longer is. Wood insisted he isn’t trying to profit from his efforts for Trump, but an inadvertent clue to his plans might have slipped out when he solicited contributions to his “foundation,” a far-right organization that is helping to defendKyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of killing two demonstrators at a protest in Kenosha, Wis., in August.
“You don’t have to vote for me,” Wood said, before correcting himself: “You don’t have to give me any money.”
The ad published by We the People Convention in Tuesday’s Washington Times highlights some of the extreme executive measures used by Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Civil War and suggests that Trump must take similarly drastic actions, arguing that “today, the current threat to the United States by the international and domestic socialist/communist left is much more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has faced in its history — including the civil war.”
Later on, the letter returns to the divide over the election results and cites recent reports of record gun sales in the U.S., stating that, “without a fair vote, we fear, with good reason, the threat of a shooting civil war is imminent.”
Though Wood and Powell also both promoted the call for martial law on their social media feeds, neither of them mentioned it directly at Wednesday’s rally. Still, they took the opportunity to regurgitate a host of unfounded conspiracy theories about the election and issued several less-than-subtle calls to action against a variety of figures they believe to be standing in the way of Trump’s second term, from state officials like Kemp and Raffensperger to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General William Barr, who one day earlier become the latest (and most senior) administration official todispute Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. George Soros and the Chinese government also came in for some ritual nativist abuse.
“It’s 1776 in America again, and you’re not gonna take our freedom. We’re gonna fight for our liberty,” Wood declared.
Around the same time, the White House releaseda 46-minute videoof what Trump called “maybe the most important speech I’ve ever made,” in which he rehashed all his unproven or disproven theories about election fraud. He did not, however, echo the call for martial law. He has said he will leave office on Jan. 20 if he is the loser after all the “legal” votes have been counted.
More than anything, Wednesday’s event called attention to the chasm between the Americans, including a growing number of Republican officials who’ve accepted that Biden won the Nov. 3 presidential election, and those who, following Trump, cling to an alternate version of reality.
Though not mentioned explicitly, the QAnon conspiracy theory also was part of the context.
Wood, whose Twitter bio includes the QAnon mantra “#WWG1WGA,” or “Where we go one, we go all,” espoused the kind of rhetoric often used by proponents of the pro-Trump conspiracy movement.
“This is the battle between good and evil,” he said.
Throughout the rally, Wood made several references to Flynn, a retired general who served Trump briefly as national security adviser and whose own embrace of Q-related content has made him something of a hero among QAnon followers.
At one point, he even seemed to tease the crowd by suggesting that Flynn might be about to take the stage (though he never appeared to do so), and later elicited cheers and applause by floating the idea of “Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn in 2024.” Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the overlapping investigations of Russian influence on the 2016 election, but he was pardoned in November by Trump.
“We’re going to fight like Flynn and make America great again,” Wood proclaimed, a thought that was echoed by another speaker, Georgia State Rep. Vernon Jones, a Black Democrat who endorsed Trump for reelection. “Georgia has a history of going into battle,” said Jones, perhaps inadvertently reminding the audience that its military history includes participation in the Civil War.
Powell, who first emerged on the far-right scene as part of Flynn’s legal defense team, has alsoused her platform to promote QAnon-related content. In the wake of the election, she hasbecome a QAnon saviorin her own right, as one of the more public faces behind the quixotic legal battle to undo the results of the presidential election.
Though Wood said, “We’re not here for violence,” even likening the movement to Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of civil disobedience, asGeorgia election officialshave already reportedly been the targets of violent threats from Trump supporters.At a press conference on Tuesday, Gabriel Sterling, the state’s voting system implementation manager and a Republican, admonished the president for refusing to concede the election, arguing that the continued promotion of false voter fraud claims would likely ultimately lead to violence.
“Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed,” said Sterling. “This has to stop.”
