09 April 21
Why Do We Have To Fight So Hard For Basic Funding?
So much time, so much effort expended for the few donations we need to provide basic funding to function.
It’s hard to comprehend. Again, we don’t need major funding. We can function very efficiently with modest funding.
What we cannot do is function without funding. That’s when we are forced to press for relief.
Now pressing.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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09 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
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WE NEED A FEW DONATIONS TO GET FRIDAY STARTED — Fridays can be a nightmare. Very important to get moving on funding. Who can step up and get this started? With urgency. Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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Robert Reich | How Corporations Crush the Working Class
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "The most dramatic change in the system over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate giants like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions."
he most dramatic change in the system over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate giants like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions.
The resulting power imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.
Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker earned $35 an hour in today’s dollars and had a major say over working conditions.
Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying far less per hour and routinely exploiting their workers, who have little recourse.
The typical GM worker wasn’t “worth” so much more than today’s Amazon or Walmart worker and didn’t have more valuable insights about working conditions.
The difference is those GM workers had a strong union. They were backed by the collective bargaining power of more than a third of the entire American workforce.
Today, most workers are on their own. Only 6.4% of America’s private-sector workers are unionized, providing little collective pressure on Amazon, Walmart, or other major employers to treat their workers any better.
Fifty years ago, the labor movement had enough political clout to ensure labor laws were enforced and that the government pushed giant firms like GM to sustain the middle class.
Today, organized labor’s political clout is minuscule by comparison.
The biggest political players are giant corporations like Amazon. They’ve used that political muscle to back “right-to-work” laws, whittle down federal labor protections, and keep the National Labor Relations Board understaffed and overburdened, allowing them to get away with egregious union-busting tactics.
They’ve also impelled government to lower their taxes; extorted states to provide them tax breaks as a condition for locating facilities there; bullied cities where they’re headquartered; and wangled trade treaties allowing them to outsource so many jobs that blue-collar workers in America have little choice but to take low-paying, high-stress warehouse and delivery gigs.
Oh, and they’ve neutered antitrust laws, which in an earlier era would have had companies like Amazon in their crosshairs.
This decades-long power shift – the ascent of corporate leviathans and the demise of labor unions – has resulted in a massive upward redistribution of income and wealth. The richest 0.1% of Americans now have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% put together.
The power shift can be reversed – but only with stronger labor laws resulting in more unions, tougher trade deals, and a renewed commitment to antitrust.
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats appear willing. The House has just passed the toughest labor reforms in more than a generation. Biden’s new trade representative, promises trade deals will protect American workers rather than exporters. And Biden is putting trustbusters in critical positions at the Federal Trade Commission and in the White House.
And across the country, labor activism has surged – from the Amazon union effort, to frontline workers walking out and striking to demand better pay, benefits, and safety protections.
I’d like to think America is at a tipping point similar to where it was some 120 years ago, when the ravages and excesses of the Gilded Age precipitated what became known as the Progressive Era. Then, reformers reined in the unfettered greed and inequalities of the day and made the system work for the many rather than the few.
It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re now living in a Second Gilded Age. And today’s progressive activists may be on the verge of ushering us into a Second Progressive Era. They need all the support we can give them.
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Accused sex trafficker Joel Greenberg (left) and Rep. Matt Gaetz. (photo: Seminole County/Getty)
Matt Gaetz Paid Accused Sex Trafficker Joel Greenberg, Who Then Venmo'd Teen
Jose Pagliery and Roger Sollenberger, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "In two late-night Venmo transactions in May 2018, Rep. Matt Gaetz sent his friend, the accused sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, . The next morning, over the course of eight minutes, Greenberg used the same app to send three young women varying sums of money. In total, the transactions amounted to ."
When Joel Greenberg made his Venmo payments to three young women, he described the money as being for “Tuition,” “School,” and “School.”
n two late-night Venmo transactions in May 2018, Rep. Matt Gaetz sent his friend, the accused sex trafficker Joel Greenberg, $900. The next morning, over the course of eight minutes, Greenberg used the same app to send three young women varying sums of money. In total, the transactions amounted to $900.
The memo field for the first of Gaetz’s transactions to Greenberg was titled “Test.” In the second, the Florida GOP congressman wrote “hit up ___.” But instead of a blank, Gaetz wrote a nickname for one of the recipients. (The Daily Beast is not sharing that nickname because the teenager had only turned 18 less than six months before.) When Greenberg then made his Venmo payments to these three young women, he described the money as being for “Tuition,” “School,” and “School.”
The Daily Beast examined these records as a scandal, rooted in a criminal case against Greenberg, engulfs Gaetz.
Greenberg—the former Seminole County tax collector—has now been federally indicted on 33 counts, including sex trafficking crimes involving a 17-year-old. Court documents say Greenberg was “engaged in ‘sugar daddy’ relationships.” And The New York Times says a Justice Department investigation is looking into Gaetz’s involvement in the cash-for-sex ring.
Gaetz and Greenberg are both connected through Venmo to this then-18-year-old woman—who now works in the porn industry, according to a friend of the girl. And on Thursday, Greenberg’s attorney and prosecutors indicated during a court hearing that they expect Greenberg to strike a plea deal, likely meaning he plans to cooperate with investigators.
That could be potentially disastrous for Gaetz, as investigators look into the connections between these two men. And one particularly damning connection is their financial transactions.
This week, during the reporting of this story, Gaetz’s once-public list of Venmo transactions disappeared. Greenberg’s Venmo account is not currently publicly accessible. But The Daily Beast was able to obtain partial records of Greenberg’s past online transactions through a source.
Greenberg and Gaetz are also connected on Venmo to at least one other woman that Greenberg paid with taxpayer funds using a government-issued credit card. Seminole County auditors flagged hundreds of those payments as “questioned or unaccounted for,” and in total found more than $300,000 in suspicious or unjustified expenses. The Daily Beast was able to obtain that credit card data through a public records request.
“No one has any idea what he was doing. Zero,” said Daniel J. O'Keefe, an accountant who conducted a forensic audit for the county. “The arrogance of these guys. They just felt they were above the law. I've never seen it this bad.”
O’Keefe was particularly puzzled by weekend expenses, hotels, unspecified high-dollar “consulting” fees, and cash advances that Greenberg made to himself and others. The Daily Beast has compared Greenberg’s credit card statements and Venmo transactions to Gaetz’s expenses and travel records—compiled through campaign finance reports, Instagram posts, and Venmo—and found that, in some key places, the two timelines and circles of contact overlap.
Gaetz and Greenberg share Venmo connections with at least two women who received payments from Greenberg, and both have professional relationships with each other.
In 2018, Greenberg also paid another woman, a mutual friend of Gaetz's, several thousand dollars using his taxpayer-backed Seminole County-issued Wells Fargo Visa card, according to county financial records obtained by The Daily Beast. Auditors flagged the transactions, saying that, despite having a contract and invoice from the company, they “do not know what it was for.”
Last week, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating Gaetz for allegedly paying for a 17-year-old girl to travel with him across state lines and inducing her to have sex—an act that would violate federal child sex trafficking laws. The investigation reportedly dates back to last summer, when it sprung from the ongoing Greenberg probe. According to the Times, the two men reportedly had sex with and trafficked the same 17-year-old girl.
The three-term Republican has acknowledged the existence of the investigation but denies the allegations. He told The Daily Beast in a late-night March 31 text message that, “The last time I had a sexual relationship with a seventeen year old, I was seventeen.” And in an op-ed in the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner last weekend, Gaetz claimed that he “never, ever paid women for sex.”
Gaetz has not been charged with a crime, and Gaetz’s congressional office declined to comment directly for this story.
Instead, a representative from an outside public relations firm, the Logan Circle Group, responded with this statement from Gaetz: "The rumors, gossip and self-serving misstatements of others will be addressed in due course by my legal team."
Logan Circle's Erin Elmore—a pro-Trump pundit and former contestant on The Apprentice—added that a lawyer would be "closely monitoring your coverage."
Also cc'd on the email was another Logan Circle Group employee: Harlan Hill, who was banned from Fox News after calling now-Vice President Kamala Harris "an insufferable lying bitch."
Greenberg’s defense attorney, Fritz Scheller, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But during a press conference after a hearing for the case, Scheller offered that the Florida congressman would probably not welcome the news that Greenberg was taking a plea deal.
“I'm sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today,” Scheller said.
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The Amazon fulfillment warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. (photo: Rederic J. Brown/Getty)
Alabama Warehouse Workers on Track to Reject Forming Amazon's First US Union
Michael Sainato, Guardian UK
Sainato writes: "Vote counting kicked off on Thursday in a consequential unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, an effort seen as one of the most important labor fights in recent American history."
I’m flagging the Amazon union vote in Bessemer as highly suspicious. The overarching question is, why would any Amazon employee vote against unionizing, period? Let alone at a 2-1 ratio. That totally defies logic. But it would also be nice to know more about how and why Amazon is challenging so many votes. NLRB and Justice Department investigators need to get in the game here. — MA/RSN 
Results have not yet been finalized, but workers so far have voted 1,100-463 against forming a union at the Bessemer facility
ote counting kicked off on Thursday in a consequential unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, an effort seen as one of the most important labor fights in recent American history.
While results have not yet been finalised, it appeared Thursday evening that warehouse workers were on track to reject unionization by a 2-1 margin, with almost half the votes counted. Vote counting will resume Friday morning.
Of the received ballots, workers so far have voted 1,100-463 against forming a union at the warehouse in Bessemer. The election will determine if workers in Bessemer will form the first labor union at an Amazon warehouse in the US.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which is organizing the Bessemer workers, said that 3,215 votes were sent in – about 55% of the nearly 6,000 workers who were eligible to vote. The union said hundreds of those votes were contested, mostly by Amazon. The union would not specify how many votes were being contested.
Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the RWDSU, struck a grim tone Thursday in a statement ahead of the results: “Our system is broken, Amazon took full advantage of that, and we will be calling on the labor board to hold Amazon accountable for its illegal and egregious behavior during the campaign. But make no mistake about it; this still represents an important moment for working people and their voices will be heard.”
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency overseeing the election, is conducting the vote count in Birmingham, Alabama. The NLRB set up multiple cameras so participants and media could watch its agents count the votes.
Many observers expect the huge amount of challenged ballots to lead to a delay in any formal announcement of a result.
“There remain hundreds of challenged ballots mostly by the employer that will need to be addressed after the public count. As the ballot envelopes are opened and the ballots are counted there’s a possibility that more issues could impact the final results,” the RWDSU said.
The unionization drive has sparked huge political interest and a roster of leftwing politicians – and even some Republicans – have spoken out in support of it or visited the state. The US labor movement sees it as a bellwether case for hopes of expanding its power, especially in areas of the economy – such as online retail – that are increasingly dominant.
Ballots in the vote can be challenged based on several factors, such as the eligibility of the voter in regards to job classification or dates of employment. The NLRB will probably hold a later hearing on the validity of the challenged ballots, after unchallenged ballots are tallied, if the number of challenged ballots could affect the outcome of the election.
The union organizing drive in Bessemer grew from a 51-year-old warehouse worker, Darryl Richardson, contacting the RWDSU in June last year with interest in starting to organize a union at the warehouse. A former union member in his previous job in the auto industry, Richardson’s excitement to start the job months earlier quickly dissipated after witnessing co-workers face termination over productivity quotas, and seeing how wages lagged far behind the pay he received in the auto industry.
Richardson and other workers managed to obtain more than 3,000 union authorization cards, enough for the NLRB to determine the union had enough support to conduct an election. The union initially proposed a bargaining unit of 1,500 workers, which was later expanded to about 5,800 workers at the behest of Amazon.
Ballots for the union election were mailed out to eligible workers on 8 February and workers were given until 29 March to mail in completed ballots to the NLRB.
Depending on the outcome of the vote, other legal challenges or objections could further delay the official results. The election counting process has taken as long as it has due to the challenged ballot process and the large size of the eligible bargaining unit.
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Jamelle Brown, a technician at Research Medical Hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, was Employee of the Month and was awarded a $6 gift voucher. (photo: NBC News)
CEOs of Public US Firms Earn 320 Times as Much as Workers. Even Some CEOs Say the Gap Is Too Big.
Gretchen Morgenson, NBC News
Morgenson writes: "Last August, Jamelle Brown, a technician at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, contracted Covid-19 while on the job sanitizing and sterilizing rooms in the facility's emergency department. Luckily, his case wasn't severe, and after having quarantined, he was back at work."
An Employee of the Month at a Missouri hospital got a $6 coupon after surviving Covid. The CEO of the firm that owns the hospital got $30 million.
ast August, Jamelle Brown, a technician at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, contracted Covid-19 while on the job sanitizing and sterilizing rooms in the facility's emergency department. Luckily, his case wasn't severe, and after having quarantined, he was back at work.
Upon his return, Brown was named Employee of the Month in his unit and given a gift voucher for use in the hospital cafeteria. The amount: $6.
"That stung me to the bone," said Brown, who makes $13.77 an hour and has worked for almost four years at the hospital, owned by the corporate giant HCA Healthcare. "It made me sit back and say, 'This place doesn't care for me.'"
Research Medical's owner, HCA Healthcare Inc., is a profitable, publicly traded network of 185 hospitals and 121 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states and England. Even in the year of Covid-19, 2020, the company generated $51.5 billion in revenue and increased its pretax earnings by 3.6 percent. Its shares are up by 14 percent this year, versus 10 percent on the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
That performance helped boost the total compensation HCA's chief executive, Samuel N. Hazen, received last year to $30.4 million, a 13 percent rise from 2019, documents show. Although Hazen's salary was 5.8 percent lower in 2020, the total worth of his compensation package equaled 556 times the compensation received by the median employee at HCA — $54,651.
The figures highlight the growing CEO pay gap, a problem among many public companies according to some investors and workers and even a few CEOs. In 2019, for example, the average pay ratio among 350 large American companies was 320-to-1, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. In 1989, the average was 61-to-1.
Because Brown, the emergency department worker, makes even less than the median, Hazen got roughly 1,000 times Brown's pay. Brown says he lives with his sister because he doesn't earn enough from his job at Research Medical to pay for his own apartment. He said he hasn't had a raise in two years.
NBC News asked Hazen to discuss his leadership of HCA and his pay. He declined through a spokesman, who said the company's compensation philosophy is centered on performance.
"We value our colleagues and the work they do to care for their communities," the spokesman said in a statement, "and we are committed to offering competitive compensation and benefits packages, as well as opportunities for professional development and career advancement."
The Service Employees International Union, of which Brown is a member, and which connected Brown to NBC News, has been negotiating unsuccessfully with HCA to raise its workers' pay to $15 an hour for more than a year. NBC News questioned HCA about Brown and his colleagues' pay in Kansas City on March 31. Later that day, the company agreed to raise its wages to $15 an hour. SEIU employees in other areas didn't get the pay increase.
Spring is when many public companies report how much their CEOs and other top executives earned during the previous year. One of the details investors focus on in the regulatory filings is the so-called CEO pay ratio. The calculation, required by the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2017, compares the compensation a company's CEO received with that of its median worker.
Some companies pay their CEOs far more than the average, of course. In 2019, for example, C. Douglas McMillon, Walmart's chief executive, received a package worth $22 million or 983 times the median worker.
Cynthia Murray, 64, is a Walmart associate in Maryland who has worked for the retailer for 20 years. She makes $15.27 an hour and is a member of United for Respect, a nonprofit that advocates for retail workers.
"My raise this year was 30 cents an hour," Murray said. "Walmart is one of the richest companies in the world. Why shouldn't they take some of that money and give back by raising workers' wages?"
Randy Hargrove, a Walmart spokesman, said in a statement: "Over the past five years we've made incremental investments of more than $5 billion in training, education and higher pay for store and club associates in the U.S. alone. Walmart has represented a ladder of opportunity and we are committed to our associates' long-term success."
Three-quarters of the company's store management teams started as hourly associates, he added, noting that an average Walmart store manager earns more than $180,000 a year.
Moving the goalposts
The pandemic has made life harder for many workers, and some lost their jobs altogether. Those who hung on, especially front-line health care workers like Brown and retail workers like Murray, faced enormous challenges because of Covid-19.
Many health care companies also took hits last year. Hospitals' profits, for example, were hurt when some state governments temporarily banned moneymaking elective procedures to keep beds available for pandemic patients.
The bans dented HCA's results but not its CEO's pay. That's because the compensation committee of the HCA board decided to exclude from its pay computation the financial results from two months when the bans had a severe effect.
By essentially moving the goalposts on the pay calculation, the HCA compensation committee made it easier for Hazen and other top executives to use a new profit measure that excluded months when profits were adversely affected. As a result, HCA executives received more incentive pay than they otherwise would have, the filings show.
Based on the revised metric, Hazen received $3.52 million in part because the company's earnings exceeded the new threshold by 167 percent. Had the goalposts not been moved, the filings show, the company's performance would have cleared the threshold by only 44 percent, resulting in far lower incentive pay.
The compensation committee of HCA's board said in the filing that it excluded the two months of performance because the pre-Covid-19 earnings targets were no longer appropriate in the pandemic, "which was outside of management's control." The committee also said the easier performance measure was proper because the company's top executives were committed to protecting HCA workers during the pandemic. According to the filing, the executives wanted to "keep them safe and keep them employed."
The HCA directors overseeing the pay are Meg Crofton, a former executive at The Walt Disney Co.; Robert J. Dennis, a former executive at Genesco Inc., a specialty retailer; and Charles O. Halliday Jr., chairman of Royal Dutch Shell PLC.
Through the HCA spokesman, all three declined interview requests. The spokesman also declined to answer questions about why HCA moved the pay goalposts. The company's proxy says it also reduced executives' payout opportunities for the months most severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Moving goalposts is a big concern in executive pay, said Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert at ValueEdge Advisors, which helps institutional investors engage with the companies whose shares they own.
"The problem is not that somebody is getting paid a lot of money," Minow said. "The problem is their pay is supposed to have an upside and a downside, and right now, it's basically heads I win, tails you lose."
Susan Fischer, 58, has been a registered nurse at Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, since 2005. HCA purchased the nonprofit facility in 2019, and since then, she said, staffing levels have fallen at the hospital while cleanliness and other conditions have deteriorated.
Last year, nurses at the hospital won union representation, a blow to HCA. "When we started unionizing two years ago, it was definitely about the lack of patient care, nurse-to-patient ratios and decrease of ancillary staff," Fischer said. "Employers used to take care of their people. Now we feel like we're disposable and we're not."
For a different point of view, HCA connected NBC News with Janet Garrett, a registered nurse at HCA Sky Ridge Medical Center in Lone Tree, Colorado. A condition of the interview was that the HCA spokesman had to be present.
Garrett, who said she isn't involved in direct patient care, is director of quality and regulatory at the hospital and said she is proud to work for HCA. "The whole time I worked for this organization, I always felt very supported," she said. "I felt they never made decisions that did not put their staff or patients first."
The HCA spokesman also said in a statement that the company didn't lay off any workers because of the pandemic and that it introduced "a pay program that continued paying colleagues 70 percent of their salary, even when there was no work for them due to government mandates that halted many elective procedures. In 2020, this program helped more than 127,000 members of our HCA Healthcare family support themselves and their families."
2,316 times the median
HCA isn't alone in paying its chief executive vastly more than what rank-and-file workers earn. Acuity Brands, an industrial technology company, paid its CEO, Neil M. Ashe, $21 million last year, or 2,316 times the median employee's pay. An Acuity spokeswoman said the company's pay program "is very well aligned with our shareholders' interests."
Lawrence Culp of General Electric got $73.2 million last year, the lion's share of it in stock awards that vest when performance and service requirements are met. The value of the package put Culp at 1,357 times the median GE worker. A spokeswoman for the GE board said in a statement that the stock award won't pay out until 2024 at the earliest and that it "is tied to producing results and only can be attained if the company delivers substantial value for shareholders and employees."
Starbucks, the ubiquitous coffee shop chain, paid its CEO, Kevin Johnson, $14.7 million last year. That was 1,211 times the pay of its median employee, the company's filings noted. A Starbucks representative said it recently instituted a pay increase that resulted in wages of at least $15-an-hour for over 30 percent of its U.S. retail partners.
And former Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina got $17.5 million last year, 524 times the median worker's pay. A Walgreens representative said the company's pay resulted from "a thoughtful and thorough process to balance the impacts of Covid-19 on our business with the extraordinary efforts of our team members who embraced our collective critical role in the response to the pandemic."
None of the chief executives agreed to speak with NBC News about their pay packages.
One CEO who's bucking the pay trend is Glenn Kelman, head of Redfin Corp., a Seattle-based residential real estate company that uses technology to make buying and selling a home easier.
Kelman said he gave up his salary in 2020 and that in 2019, the most recent year for which figures are available, he got $1.08 million in cash and stock, or 14 times Redfin's median employee pay. Kelman, who has been CEO since 2005, owns 1.5 percent of the company's shares.
Kelman says excessive CEO pay essentially extracts money from workers. "I want to be admired, like anyone, and the way to do that is by doing admirable work," he said. "But I don't want to do that at the expense of all the other people who have made Redfin great. If you believe that it takes a company to make a company, that should also be reflected in your pay philosophy."
Resounding support
Each year, when public companies host their annual meetings, stockholders are asked to vote on their pay practices. Many get resounding support.
Last year, for example, 91 percent of HCA's shareholder votes on executive pay were cast in favor, its filings show. The results of this year's vote on HCA's pay will be disclosed after its shareholder meeting, scheduled for April 28.
Large asset managers like BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard typically vote in favor of CEO pay. Last year, for example, the data analytics firm Insightia said BlackRock voted yes on 95.6 percent of pay votes, Fidelity supported pay in 94.6 percent of its votes, and Vanguard voted for in 94.2 percent.
BlackRock said it is increasing its engagement with companies about pay and that it voted against the re-election of over 690 compensation committee directors responsible for setting executive pay at 350 companies in 29 global markets last year.
Fidelity said it "acts in the best interest of its shareholders and remains focused on maximizing long-term shareholder value."
A Vanguard spokeswoman said in a statement: "Our investment stewardship team evaluates executive compensation proposals case-by-case and looks for pay plans that incentivize long-term outperformance versus peers."
Other investors may be tiring of ever-rising CEO pay. So far this year, shareholders at six large companies have voted against their pay practices, according to Insightia, up from two companies during the same period last year. Such votes aren't binding, but they are a black eye for companies, governance experts said. The six no votes represent 3.6 percent of large public company votes reported so far, Insightia said.
Acuity Brands, whose CEO made 2,316 times the median worker, was among those falling short, with 67.2 percent of votes cast against its compensation. Starbucks and Walgreens both reported majority no votes on pay this year — 52.5 percent of votes cast by shareholders at both companies' annual meetings were thumbs-down. (Vanguard cast a no vote at the Walgreens meeting, its spokeswoman said.)
Individual investors who consider corporate pay practices to be excessive may feel helpless about the rising pay gap. But they shouldn't, Minow said.
"Just about everybody has a 401(k) plan, mutual funds, some kind of pension plan," she said. "Is your pension plan approving all of these pay plans? If so, you can do something about it — you can tell them not to. You can switch your 401(k) to a different outfit."
In the meantime, Minow said, "the best message the CEO can give employees is: 'We are in this together. I do well when you do well.'"
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West Virginia governor Jim Justice in his office in the state Capitol in Charleston in March 2020. (photo: Kenny Kemp/Charleston Gazette-Mail)
Coal Companies Owned by West Virginia's Billionaire Governor Owe Millions in Environmental Fines
Ken Ward Jr., Mountain State Spotlight and ProPublica
Ward writes: "The federal government is seeking to collect nearly .2 million in fines from coal companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice after the firms violated the terms of a major water pollution settlement, according to documents filed Thursday in federal court."
The richest person in West Virginia, who is also the state’s governor, owns coal companies that routinely violate environmental laws. Latest filings say the companies owe over $3 million for not complying with a major water pollution settlement.
he federal government is seeking to collect nearly $3.2 million in fines from coal companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice after the firms violated the terms of a major water pollution settlement, according to documents filed Thursday in federal court.
U.S. Department of Justice attorneys said in their filing that Southern Coal Corp. and two related companies failed to renew required water pollution permits, leading to unauthorized discharges at three mining sites in Tennessee and one in Alabama. Those permits are required so regulators can limit the runoff of everything from mud to toxic metals from coal operations.
The companies’ actions triggered fines under the terms of a 2016 settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency. As part of the deal, the governor’s companies had agreed to resolve more than 23,000 water pollution violations by paying a $900,000 fine, spending millions of dollars on new pollution controls, and covering automatic penalty amounts — known as “stipulated penalties” — for any future violations.
The DOJ’s new court filing indicated Justice’s companies have so far paid nearly $2.9 million in stipulated penalties, but the firms have repeatedly failed to honor the other terms of the settlement, either delivering late or not at all on site improvements and fines, continuing what federal attorneys called a “long history” of environmental violations.
A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment beyond the Thursday court filing.
Representatives for Justice’s companies and the governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The new court filing, in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, comes three months after another one of Justice’s companies reached a separate pollution settlement with environmental groups, which sued over excess discharges of selenium, a mining byproduct that can be toxic to fish, at a strip mine in southern West Virginia.
In that deal, Bluestone Coal Corp. paid a federal fine of $30,000 and contributed $270,000 to a conservation group, settling a case brought by the Sierra Club and other citizen groups. The maximum federal penalty for Bluestone Coal could have been nearly $170 million.
Justice, a billionaire listed by Forbes as the richest person in the state, owns a vast empire of businesses, including coal mines, resort hotels and agricultural interests, many of them regulated by the state agencies that report to him. While Justice’s adult children have day-to-day control over the family’s business operations, the governor has continued to guide the empire.
Last year, an investigation by ProPublica found that, over the last three decades, the governor’s companies have accumulated more than $140 million in judgments and settlements in cases brought by vendors and other businesses and government entities over unpaid bills. (The governor and his representatives say that his companies always eventually pay their bills.) Many of the cases involve Justice’s mining companies.
Last spring, about two dozen of those mining companies reached a deal with the DOJ to pay more than $5 million in delinquent mine safety penalties, some of them dating back more than five years.
The 2016 water pollution settlement at issue in this week’s filing was announced just weeks before that year’s general election, in which Justice, then a Democrat, won the governor’s race. Last year, Justice, now a Republican, was reelected to another four-year term.
On Thursday, the federal government asked U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad to order Justice’s companies to stop the unpermitted discharges and to pay the outstanding fines. Attorneys said they have been seeking compliance since September 2020.
As part of the 2016 settlement, the federal government took the unusual step of requiring Justice’s companies to put up $4.5 million, in the form of a bank line of credit, that the DOJ could access so it could pay to have mine cleanup work done if the governor’s companies failed to complete it. In December 2020, with promised work at mine sites in Tennessee unfinished, the U.S. withdrew $1.5 million from that account.
A lawyer for the companies objected to the amount of the government’s withdrawal and asked that the matter be taken up through a dispute resolution process spelled out in the settlement.
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Cemetery workers wearing protective gear carry the coffin of a person who died from complications related to COVID-19 to a gravesite at the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, April 7, 2021. (photo: Andre Penner/AP)
Brazil Top Court Orders Probe of Bolsonaro's Handling of Pandemic as Covid Cases Spike
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered the Senate on Thursday to investigate the government's handling of the coronavirus crisis and the full court ruled that churches can be barred from reopening during the pandemic, threatening to further strain tensions between President Jair Bolsonaro and the judiciary."
Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered the Senate on Thursday to investigate the government's handling of the coronavirus crisis and the full court ruled that churches can be barred from reopening during the pandemic, threatening to further strain tensions between President Jair Bolsonaro and the judiciary.
The order by Justice Luis Roberto Barroso for a Senate probe came only minutes after the whole court upheld the power of local authorities to prevent churches and other houses of worship from opening.
Bolsonaro has downplayed the threat of the coronavirus while arguing that the economic and emotional impacts of shutdowns would harm more Brazilians than the pandemic. He has at times bristled at the checks and balances from other branches of government, and has repeatedly criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the power of governors and mayors to establish restrictions on economic and personal activity during the pandemic. Last year, he attended protests against the court.
The conservative president, a proud Christian who has the support of some of the country's main evangelical leaders, has opposed locally imposed lockdowns and other restrictions that health experts have said were sorely needed to halt the virus' spread. In recent weeks, Brazil has become the epicenter of the pandemic crisis, accounting for more than one-quarter of the world's deaths from COVID-19.
"The inquiry will call scientists from all over Brazil to testify and show how irresponsible the president's statements were. It will get tougher for him. Public opinion will be heard at the Senate," said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo. "It was unavoidable. The time came for the political system to react."
With the country's death toll rising — among the 345,000 dead are three senators — more than the required 27 senators had already signed a request for a congressional investigation into the administration's handling of the pandemic, but moving forward required approval by the chamber's president, Sen. Rodrigo Pacheco. Pacheco, who won his leadership post in January with Bolsonaro's support, had refrained from triggering the probe.
"It wasn't the moment. That's what I think," Pacheco told reporters in Brasilia after the judge's order. "This inquiry at this moment will be out of bounds. It might crown the national failure in this pandemic."
Pacheco said a probe will inevitably drag forward the 2022 presidential race in which Bolsonaro is expected to seek reelection, giving opposition senators a platform for attacking the leader and potentially accusing him of committing crimes.
The Senate is to look at how the government dealt with the COVID-19 crisis, and could level new criticism at Bolsonaro. If senators decided there was anything criminal in the response, the Senate would have to ask the federal attorney general to open its own investigation.
The ruling on houses of worship doesn't prevent local authorities from allowing churches to reopen, and some have already done so.
But the court acted after Justice Kassio Marques, the court's only member appointed by Bolsonaro, allowed churches across Brazil to reopen Saturday provided they followed health protocols. Many churches opened on Easter Sunday, some without observing social distancing.
Marques was overruled by his colleagues in a 9-2 vote that culminated Thursday.
Justice Gilmar Mendes said during his vote that Brazil has become "an international pariah in matters of health care."
"Brazil, which was once a role model in public health, in immunization campaigns, is today in this highly embarrassing situation," he said.
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A new study found rat poison in the bodies of more than 80 percent of 133 dead bald and golden eagles from across the U.S. (photo: Mark G. Ruder)
Study Finds Rat Poison in Dead Eagles From Across the US
Alex Fox, Smithsonian
Fox writes: "In the United States, the eagle is a powerful national symbol, and even though their populations are now increasing following the ban of DDT, they're afforded protections under three federal laws."
More than 82 percent of 133 eagles tested had so-called anticoagulant rodenticides in their bodies
n the United States, the eagle is a powerful national symbol, and even though their populations are now increasing following the ban of DDT, they’re afforded protections under three federal laws. But a new study suggests that Americans trying to eradicate rodents with poison could be negatively impacting eagles across the country, reports Ian Morse for New Scientist.
The study, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, tested 116 bald eagles and 17 golden eagles collected between 2014 and 2018 for the presence of common rat poisons known as anticoagulant rodenticides. Researchers found rat poison in 82 percent of the eagles they tested.
Though the rat poison was only determined to be the definitive cause of death in four percent of the eagle deaths, the fact that the deadly chemicals were so prevalent is still cause for concern.
“This really suggests that despite the best efforts to use these compounds wisely and minimize the opportunity for the raptor species to be exposed, they’re still somehow getting exposed,” Mark Ruder, a researcher studying wildlife disease at the University of Georgia and the paper’s lead author, tells New Scientist.
Predators such as eagles, bobcats or coyotes tend to be exposed to rat poison by eating rodents that have been consumed the toxins through poisonous bait. Most rat poisons are now what’s known as second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, meaning they kill animals that eat it by preventing the blood from clotting and causing lethal internal bleeding. First-generation rat poisons worked in a similar fashion but were less deadly, reports Molly Taft for Gizmodo. Second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides also tend to persist longer in the body of any creature unlucky enough to eat them.
Since 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency has restricted the sale of second-generation rodenticides to commercial users such as professional pest control workers, but it’s somehow still getting into the eagles’ food.
“It’s the ability to persist in those tissues for a long time that creates the problem,” Ruder tells Gizmodo. “Being efficient predators and scavengers, eagles are more at risk for accumulating this toxin through their system, basically just by being eagles—eating dead stuff or killing things and eating them.”
The precise health impacts of non-lethal exposure to rat poison are currently unclear, Ruder tells New Scientist, but the finding that the issue is so widespread remains “alarming.”
Scott Edwards, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the study, tells Megan Marples of CNN that the paper suggests “we are unnecessarily killing some of our most majestic bird species," and adds that "humans need to understand that when those compounds get into the environment, they cause horrible damage to many species, including our national symbol, the bald eagle.”
Speaking with Gizmodo, Ruder says his study’s findings show that deadly rat poison is still finding its way into the broader environment despite regulation. From here, Rudy tells Gizmodo “we need to keep examining what pathways for exposure are for wildlife and figure out how to lower that risk.”
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