RSN: RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America | More Than 700 Delegates Have Now Signed Pledge Committing to Vote Against Democratic Platform Lacking Medicare for All

30 July 20

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IF RSN HAS EARNED YOUR SUPPORT, WE NEED IT NOW - We don't make the case for public support with a fund-raising appeal or during a donation drive, we make the case for public support in what we do day in and day out. If you believe in what we do we need your support at this time. This project is growing, keep that growth alive. Thank you all sincerely. - Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America | More Than 700 Delegates Have Now Signed Pledge Committing to Vote Against Democratic Platform Lacking Medicare for All

RootsAction and Progressive Democrats of America, Reader Supported News
Excerpt: "Coordinators of a pledge by Democratic National Convention delegates not to vote for the party platform if it lacks a commitment to Medicare for All announced on Tuesday afternoon that more than 700 delegates have signed the pledge."
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A Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Oregon, on July 21. Court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that 14 protesters were charged with 'failing to obey a lawful order' between July 21 and July 24. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

"Defendant Shall Not Attend Protests": In Portland, Getting Out of Jail Requires Relinquishing Constitutional Rights
Dara Lind, ProPublica
Lind writes: "Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as 'failing to obey' an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property - and then tell them they can't protest anymore as a condition for release from jail."
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Dr. Stella Immanuel. (photo: Twitter)

Americans Are Suffering. Trump Offers Them a Doctor Who Warns of Sex With Demons.
David Von Drehle, The Washington Post
Drehle writes: "According to the Mayo Clinic, endometriosis is 'an often painful disorder in which tissue similar to the tissue that normally lines the inside of [the] uterus - the endometrium - grows outside [the] uterus.'"
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Elaine Riddick sits with her son, Tony Riddick, at a hearing before a state panel in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday. (photo: Jim R. Bounds/AP)

North Carolina Eugenics Program Tried to 'Breed Out' Black People Through Forty Years of Sterilization, Report Says

Hayley Fowler, The Charlotte Observer

Fowler writes: "For more than four decades North Carolina's statewide eugenics program forcibly sterilized almost 7,600 people - many of whom were Black."

EXCERPT:
“The United Nations’ official definition of genocide includes ‘imposing measures to prevent births within a (national, ethnically, racial or religious) group,’” Darity said in the release. “North Carolina’s disproportionate use of eugenic sterilization on its Black citizens was an act of genocide.” 

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The president's niece discusses her family's intolerance and questions why any LGBTQ+ person would support her uncle. (image: Advocate)

Mary L. Trump on Growing Up Gay in an 'Anti-Everything' Family
John Casey, Advocate
Casey writes: "Mary L. Trump - and there's a reason that the "L" is in there - has lived a very quiet existence for most of her life, but not behind the scenes."
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Police officers gather at an entry gate of Peshawar's district court following the killing of Tahir Ahmad Naseem. (photo: Muhammad Sajjad/AP)

Man Shot Dead for 'Blasphemy' in Pakistan Courtroom
Asad Hashim, Al Jazeera
Hashim writes: "A man accused of blasphemy for claiming that he was a prophet has been shot dead in a courtroom in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, police officials say, the latest violence associated with Pakistan's strict blasphemy laws."
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Volunteers unload a truck of relief supplies for Houstonians impacted by Hurricane Harvey in September 2017. (photo: Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle/AP)

Hundreds of Toxic Superfund Sites Imperiled by Sea-Level Rise, Study Warns
David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News
Hasemyer writes: "A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concludes that more than 800 hazardous Superfund sites near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are at risk of flooding in the next 20 years, even with low rates of sea level rise."

The Union of Concerned Scientists, faulting Trump for ignoring climate change, says flooding there could wash deadly chemicals into nearby communities.

 new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concludes that more than 800 hazardous Superfund sites near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are at risk of flooding in the next 20 years, even with low rates of sea level rise.  

More than 1,000 of the sites, overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, will be at risk for flooding by 2100 if carbon emissions continue on their current trajectory, triggering high rates of sea level rise, according to the study, which faults the Trump administration for ignoring climate change. 

Superfund sites, the toxic legacy of industry's environmental indifference, are the worst of the worst hazardous waste sites that expose millions of people—many in neighborhoods of color and of lower economic status—to hundreds of deadly chemicals. Flooding can increase the chances that these toxins will contaminate nearby land and water, putting communities at risk of adverse health effects.

The study, "A Toxic Relationship: Extreme Coastal Flooding and Superfund Sites," was written by Jacob Carter, a research scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who began the analysis while working at the EPA. He was forced out of the agency in 2017 when the Trump administration signaled it would no longer prioritize climate change-focused research.

Trump Revoked Obama's Climate Change Directive in 2017

Carter started his review in response to a 2015 directive by President Barack Obama aimed at understanding how climate change was exacerbating flooding risks. The Trump Administration revoked the directive in 2017. Carter said that's when he was essentially shown the door.

"If I'd been able to carry out this work at the EPA, it would have allowed Superfund site project managers to prepare for the potential flooding to come," Carter said. "Instead, the new administration's EPA leadership came in with the clear intention to stop considering climate change, and it became clear to me that my work—which obviously focused on climate change—could easily be terminated. For purely political reasons, the agency sidelined work that was vital to its mission."

Since taking office in 2017, President Trump has attacked longstanding regulations designed to protect water, air, land and public health, in favor of fossil fuel development and dependency.

"Dismantling this research is in keeping with the administration's wholesale rollback of pollution oversight and public health protections," said Adrienne Hollis, a senior climate justice and health scientist at UCS. "Their actions increase the risk that environmental justice communities are facing from climate change and hazardous pollutants."

A study released last year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office also concluded Superfund sites were vulnerable to climate change threats. In that study, researchers looked not only at sea level rise, but hurricanes, inland flooding and wildfire threats, and determined that 60 percent of Superfund sites across the county were threatened. 

The UCS study identified flooding at a Superfund site on the San Jacinto River near Houston as a case in point for the vulnerability of Superfund sites to storms intensified by climate change. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey ripped open the containment caps put over the toxic waste that had been dumped alongside the river by a paper mill in the 1960s. The toxins leaked into the river that runs through residential sections of the city.

"As sea levels continue to rise, multiple types of industrial facilities, and the contaminants they store, could be in the paths of extreme coastal floods—but the flooding of Superfund sites is particularly worrisome," according to the UCS report.

Using modeling, Carter projected sea level rise scenarios out to 2100, based on an expected range of sea level rise of approximately 1 to 6.5 feet. The high sea-level rise scenario puts in jeopardy more than 1,000 Superfund sites within 10 miles of either the East or Gulf Coasts. Florida, New Jersey and New York are especially vulnerable because of the large number of sites situated along their coastlines, according to the study.

The Costs of Superfund Mitigation Are Enormous

No matter the expense or the politics, these sites have to be examined for flooding vulnerabilities, said Bill Muno, a former EPA director of superfund for the Great Lakes Region. 

Yet Muno said he doubts that will happen, because of the enormous cost associated with reinforcing the sites and the current atmosphere of climate denial fostered by the Trump Administration.

"I can see where, for existing disposal sites, there would be a feeling that because sea level rise is more of a prediction ...we'll deal with it when and if the time comes," he said. "This is a bit of denial that doesn't take into account the consequences of what could happen with these sites. There has to be some thinking ahead. I don't see that now."

The report also calculates the devastating human toll associated with flooded Superfund sites. 

Flooding can increase the chances that dangerous chemicals can be released and contaminate nearby land and water, putting communities at risk of adverse health effects. Especially hard hit could be more than 17 million people of color and low-income who live within five miles of a Superfund site facing flooding risk, according to the report.

"Our results suggest that if leaders continue to sideline science when making important decisions concerning future flooding of hazardous facilities, the health of millions of the country's most vulnerable people will be at risk," according to the report. "If sea levels continue to rise at rates expected in high heat-trapping emissions scenarios, we can expect the majority of coastal Superfund sites and the communities of color and low-income communities located near these sites to be at risk of extreme floods."

The report calls to task the president and EPA officials and says they must take immediate action to incorporate climate science into the decision-making process when considering the effects of future floods on Superfund sites.

"The EPA already has resources available to guide remediation project managers and others who manage Superfund sites regarding measures that can be put in place to adapt these facilities to withstand expected climate change effects," the report says. "However, other resources are needed to help stakeholders navigate complex climate change models for their sites as well as risk analysis frameworks."

The UCS report urges the EPA division responsible for Superfund sites to take a variety of actions, including the integration of information on the potential impacts of climate change effects into flood risk assessments, and the development of a policy requiring calculations of predicted flooding increases to ensure that communities are prepared. The report also calls for programs to train non-climate experts on the use of climate modeling and its application for designing protective measures at Superfund sites.

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'Vagina Monologues' Playwright Eve Ensler: 'My Whole Life, I've Been Waiting for an Apology'

11 February 20 Don’t Be an RSN Tourist – Get Involved! We are serious about RSN’s Mission. We take seriously all that RSN does and its impact on the wellbeing of the community. We accomplish nothing as a grassroots organization without public participation and support. Don’t just look at RSN from a safe distance, get involved with the organization’s wellbeing. It’s about you. Marc Ash Founder, Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation! Update My Monthly Donation If you would prefer to send a check: Reader Supported News PO Box 2043 Citrus Hts CA 95611

10 February 20

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YES WE ARE SERIOUS, BELIEVE IT : We are serious a powerful voice social justice, we are serious about fighting for economic justice and we are serious about real meaningful reform. We are also serious about maintaining a stable organization. To do that we need dependable funding. And, yes we are absolutely serious about funding as well. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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'Vagina Monologues' Playwright Eve Ensler: 'My Whole Life, I've Been Waiting for an Apology'

KK Ottesen, The Washington Post
Ottesen writes: "Eve Ensler, 66, is a Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, author and activist whose celebrated play, 'The Vagina Monologues,' has been staged all over the world. Ensler wrote her recent book, 'The Apology,' in the fictional voice of her late father as an account of and apology for the abuse he inflicted on her."
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Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)

Sanders Pulls Further Ahead of Buttigieg in New Hampshire Poll
Jon Keller, CBS Boston
Keller writes: "Bernie Sanders appears to be cementing his hold on first place with 27 percent, while Pete Buttigieg, who had surged into a virtual tie with Sanders as the week ended, in second with 19 percent."
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Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg reportedly raised .8 million last quarter. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty)

More About Pete
Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs
Robinson writes: "Pete Buttigieg, as I have documented at length before, has spent his life doing little more than try to advance himself to higher and higher levels of status and power."

EXCERPT:

Pete Buttigieg, as I have documented at length before, has spent his life doing little more than try to advance himself to higher and higher levels of status and power. When he was at Harvard, he passed by the “social justice warriors” (his term) fighting to get a living wage for the school’s janitors, so that he could go and have pizza with governors and media elites. As a newly minted Rhodes Scholar, with the privilege to do almost anything in the world, he chose to go to McKinsey, a totally amoral consulting firm that advises dictators and drug companies on how to optimize their evil. There, he almost certainly helped craft layoffs and insurance rate hikes at Blue Cross (instead of denying this, he pivots quickly to trashing single-payer healthcare). He worked on McKinsey’s contract with the Department of Defense in Afghanistan, which funneled millions of dollars of taxpayer money to the consulting firm for seemingly doing almost no work. (The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan could not find anything that McKinsey had produced for the $18 million the government gave it except a 50-page report highlighting the economic development opportunities in Afghanistan.) When asked about it, Buttigieg simply says it’s all a secret. 

Buttigieg’s company appears to have stolen millions from the U.S. government (or at least, the Inspector General has no idea where the money went except into McKinsey’s pocket), in addition to their work on helping corporations fire people and pump more opiates into more bodies. Let’s be clear: McKinsey is sociopathic. They have no hesitation about advising murderous autocrats like Mohammed bin Salman (of bombing school buses and dismembering dissidents with bonesaws infamy), and they even disgusted ICE employees by considering plans to optimize immigration detention centers by spending less on feeding detainees. (Then they lied about what they did.) Yet when Buttigieg was first asked about McKinsey, he could see nothing wrong with the firm and refused to accept that he had any moral responsibility whatsoever for the kind of work he chose for himself. He said that McKinsey’s job is simply “answering questions and solving problems,” and they are only “as moral or immoral or amoral as the American private sector itself.” (So very immoral, then.) 

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Sanders has devoted his life to social movements. He has shaped them and been shaped by them. He understands that change comes from the bottom, not the top. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)

Barbara Smith | I Helped Coin the Term 'Identity Politics.' I'm Endorsing Bernie Sanders
Barbara Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "As a black lesbian feminist who has been out since the mid-1970s, I believe that, among all the candidates, Sanders' leadership offers us the best chance to eradicate the unique injustices that marginalized groups in America endure."
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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Federal Plaza on Dearborn Street. (photo: Rich Hein/Sun-Times)

Duncing About Architecture: The Right-Wing Push for "Classical" Federal Buildings
Kate Wagner, The New Republic
Excerpt: "The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for 'classical' federal buildings."

EXCERPTS:

Comparisons have already been made to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Everyone is very mad online, except for Ross Douthat, who loves the idea.

The abrupt aesthetic reversal heralded by this executive order has some obvious underpinnings, beginning with the fact that the reversion to a mandatory classical style reflects the architectural philosophies of white supremacists online, as well as the doings of a developer-president and a right-wing think tank making what is explicitly a political move. But this is also the inevitable result of an architectural faux-populism that has been sown in the conscience of American architecture since postmodernism.

Whether we like to admit it or not, Trump is an architectural president—in his professional life as a (failing) developer, he has had his grubby, tiny hands in myriad buildings across the country. Like all building-peddlers, Trump is subjected to the gaze of architecture critics, who have on occasion praised his work but have most often panned it. Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from nineteenth-century retrofits to late-modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating. His choice of modernism for the style of the Trump Towers in Chicago and New York can simply be explained away by the fact that modern, all-glass buildings are the hegemonic aesthetic signature of corporate capitalism: It is the style of big business.

Simply put, people love good buildings, modern and traditional. More to the point, architecture is imbued with all manner of personal meaning to the people who experience it, regardless of how good it is. After all, the houses most of us grow up in are not architectural masterpieces. However, only a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both.

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Mural portrait of Marielle Franco in Brazil. (photo: Reuters)

Brazilian Police Kill Suspect in Marielle Franco's Murder
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Adriano da Nóbrega, the notorious hitman whose gang of hired killers was allegedly involved in the murder of Brazilian councilor, Marielle Franco, was gunned down by police on Sunday in the northeastern state of Bahia, where the suspect had been hiding from authorities."
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An unfunded superfund site comprised of abandoned gold, lead and copper mines near Lee Mountain, Montana. (photo: Matthew Brown)

Trump Calls for Slashing Funding for Toxic Superfund Cleanup
Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press
Knickmeyer writes: "President Donald Trump called Monday for slashing funding for the Superfund hazardous waste program, even as the backlog of clean-ups has grown around the country for lack of money."

The $113 million in Superfund clean-up cuts are part of Trump’s proposal for a $2.4 billion, or 26%, cut in overall funding for the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s in line with the president’s vow as a candidate to cut all but “little tidbits” of the environmental agency in a push to cut regulations he sees as unnecessarily burdensome to business.

Monday marked the fourth year where Trump has called for cuts nearing one-third of the environmental agency’s budget. Republicans and Democrats in Congress annually have overridden his proposal, keeping funding for the agency’s environmental and public health oversight roughly even.

Other major cuts for the EPA in Trump’s latest proposal include eliminating $66 million in funding for the Energy Star program — a popular program that lets consumers compare the energy efficiency of appliances — and for voluntary climate programs. 

“These programs are not essential to EPA’s core mission and can be implemented by the private sector,” the budget says.

Trump and his EPA administrators have stressed Superfund clean-ups as one of their top environmental priorities.

However, as The Associated Press reported in January, the Trump administration has built up the biggest backlog of unfunded toxic Superfund clean-up projects in at least 15 years, nearly triple the number that were stalled for lack of money in the Obama era, agency figures show. 

The four-decade-old Superfund program is meant to tackle some of the most heavily contaminated sites in the U.S., which threaten the residents, wildlife and habitat around the sites with dangerous industry pollutants.

Trump’s proposal says the cut reflects that his administration is running the Superfund program more efficiently, and “challenges the agency to optimize the use of settlement funds for the cleanup actions” at those Superfund sites where a responsible company has been found to pay for the work.

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