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robertreich · 5 years

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Trump’s “Deep State” is Trump’s Corrupt State

Trump has been ramping up his “Deep State” rhetoric again. He’s back to blaming a cabal of bureaucrats, FBI and CIA agents, Democrats, and “enemies of the people” in the mainstream media, for conspiring to remove him from office in order to allow the denizens of foreign shi*tholes to overrun America.

But with each passing day it’s becoming clearer that the real threat to America isn’t Trump’s Deep State. It’s Trump’s Corrupt State.

Not since Warren G. Harding’s sordid administration have as many grifters, crooks and cronies occupied high positions in Washington.

Trump has installed a Star Wars Cantina of former lobbyists and con artists, including several whose exploits have already forced them to resign, such as Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Tom Price, and Michael Flynn. Many others remain.

When he was in Congress, the current White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from payday lenders, then proposed loosening regulations on them. Trump appointed Mulvaney acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, of all things.

When he was Trump’s special adviser on regulatory reform, Wall Street billionaire Carl Icahn sought to gut EPA’s rule on ethanol credits which was harming his oil refinery investments.

Last week it was reported that a real estate company partly owned by Trump son-in-law and foreign policy advisor, Jared Kushner, has raked in $90 million from foreign investors since Kushner entered the White House, through a secret tax haven run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands. Kushner’s stake is some $50 million.

All this takes conflict-of-interest to a new level of shamelessness.

What are Republicans doing about it? Participating in it.

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who also happens to be the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has approved $78 million in grants for her husband's home state of Kentucky, including a highway-improvement project that had been twice rejected in the past. Chao has even appointed a special liaison to coordinate grants with McConnell's office.

Oh, did I say, McConnell is up for reelection next year?

News that a Cabinet secretary is streamlining federal funding for her husband's pet projects would be a giant scandal under normal circumstances. But in the age of Trump, ethics are out the window.

Congressman Greg Pence, who just happens to be the brother of Vice President Mike Pence, has spent more than $7,600 of his campaign funds on lodging at the Trump International Hotel in Washington since he was elected in November, although federal election law forbids politicians from using campaigns dollars to cover housing costs.

The Corrupt State starts with Trump himself, giving new meaning to the old adage about a fish rotting from the head down.

When foreign governments aren’t currying favor with Trump by staying at his Washington hotel, they’re using state-owned companies to finance projects that will line Trump’s pocket, like China’s $500 million entertainment complex in Indonesia that includes a Trump-branded hotel.

Trump claims the Deep State allows foreigners to take advantage of America. The reality is Trump’s Corrupt State allows Vladimir Putin and his goon squad to continue undermining American democracy.

“I’d take it” if Russia again offered campaign help, Trump crowed last week, adding that he wouldn’t necessarily tell the FBI about it. Just days before, Trump acknowledged “Russia helping me get elected” the first time.

Despite evidence that Russia is back hacking and trolling its way toward the 2020 election, Republican defenders of Trump’s Corrupt State won’t lift a finger.

Mitch McConnell refuses to consider any legislation on election security. He and Senate Republicans even killed a bill requiring campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance to the FBI and federal authorities.

The charitable interpretation is McConnell and his ilk don’t want to offend Trump by doing anything that might appear to question the legitimacy of his 2016 win.

The less charitable view is Republicans oppose more secure elections because they’d be less likely to win them.

Trump and his Republican enablers are playing magicians who distract us by shouting “look here!” at the paranoid fantasy of a Deep State, while creating a Corrupt State under our noses.

But it’s not a party trick. It’s the dirtiest trick of our time, enabled by the most corrupt party in living memory.

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sixtyfivehundredmiles · 4 years

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Report: As EPA pulls back under Trump, serious pollution rises on Great Lakes

President Donald Trump's administration has scaled back enforcement of environmental regulations in the Great Lakes region — and it's having a noticeable, negative impact, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own data. So states a new report from the Chicago-based nonprofit Environmental Law and Policy Center.

In this Sept. 20, 2017 photo, a catfish appears on the shoreline in the algae-filled waters of Lake Erie at the end of 113th Street in the Point Place section of North Toledo, Ohio. Annual algae blooms on the Great Lake are primarily fueled by nutrient runoff pollution from farm fields. (Photo: Andy Morrison, AP)

The data comes from multiple EPA databases and websites. It's all there for the public to access, but usually in complex charts heavy with bureaucratic, regulatory language, said ELPC executive director Howard Learner.

"You can take the individual data points, and they don't tell you a lot," he said. "But when you put them together, you then see what the overall picture looks like. And it's disturbing."

The ELPC is a leading advocate in the Midwest for improving environmental quality and protecting natural resources. Though Learner has stated, "Protecting the Great Lakes is bipartisan and nonpartisan," the group have been sharp critics of Trump's environmental policies and priorities since he took office in 2017.

The ELPC report looked at activity in EPA's Region 5, which covers Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Among its findings:

Fewer regulatory cases are being initiated and concluded by the EPA against polluters. Between fiscal years 2012 to 2015, there were an average of 320 cases initiated per year, but that has dropped to an average of 230 cases per year for fiscal years 2016 through 2019, a more than 28% decline.

Compliance with environmental regulations in the Great Lakes region is declining. In fiscal year 2019, there were 62% more facilities in "significant noncompliance" with the Clean Water Act, compared with the average number of facilities for fiscal years 2012 to 2017.

More water pollution; less looking for it

The EPA's own data shows that particularly since 2017, EPA's Region 5, overseeing the Great Lakes and surrounding states, is initiating fewer cases with polluters. Meanwhile the number of major facilities in "significant noncompliance" with the federal Clean Water Act has sharply risen.

That significant noncompliance data excludes Michigan cases, because of a data communication problem between the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy's data reporting system and the EPA's Enforcement Compliance History Online (ECHO) database, said ELPC staff attorney Jeffrey Hammons, a co-author of the report. The data-sharing problem has since been resolved by the two agencies, but it made some past years' data from Michigan potentially unreliable, he said.

Data from the other five Great Lakes states provides strong evidence of declining Clean Water Act compliance in the region, however, that probably rings true in Michigan as well, Hammons said.

"The only way Michigan's data could change the regional trend is if they had a bunch of noncompliance four years ago and then it sharply went down. But that’s probably not the case," he said.

Penalties against polluters have dropped. In Region 5 in fiscal year 2016, the EPA assessed $1.91 million in penalties against violators of the federal Clean Water Act and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), a program worked through state environmental regulators to monitor point sources of pollution such as factories. The EPA assessed $1.1 million in penalties for such violations the following year. But by fiscal year 2019, the penalty amount in Region 5 had dropped to $429,774.

Compliance costs — the costs firms incur to reduce or prevent pollution to comply with a regulation — have plummeted. In fiscal year 2012, such costs totaled more than $920 million. They had dropped by nearly 73%, to $251 million, by fiscal year 2019.

The cost, penalty for polluting declines

EPA data shows that in the agency's Region 5, overseeing the Great Lakes and surrounding states, polluters are paying much less in costs of compliance with environmental regulations, and penalties for violations, under the Trump Administration.

EPA Region 5, in an emailed statement to the Free Press, said it hadn't been provided with a copy of ELPC's report, so it couldn't comment on its data or the methodology the nonprofit used to arrive at its conclusions.

"EPA Region 5 maintains a robust compliance assurance and enforcement program," the agency stated. "EPA's enforcement program is concerned with outcomes, not outputs. We don't set quotas for enforcement cases."

The agency cited progress in reductions of significant noncompliance with pollution discharge requirements from the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 to the first quarter of this fiscal year. It also cited data reporting issues with "certain states" that the agency did not specify, as "a key reason for recent increases in reported rates of significant noncompliance in Region 5."

Hammons, however, said ELPC did a data quality control check on other Region 5 states, "and they were not having the same problem" as Michigan with that data.

In his 2016 campaign, Trump frequently pledged to scale back environmental regulations toughened during President Barack Obama's tenure, and to take an approach more accommodating to business and industry.

That's come to fruition in EPA's Region 5. The ELPC report notes February 2020 staffing at the regional office at 940 people, a more than 8% reduction from two years earlier. Actual spending by the EPA nationwide on enforcement and compliance monitoring has dropped more than 18% from fiscal year 2011 levels.

The ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic further led the Trump administration late last month to waive enforcement on a range of legally mandated public health and environmental protections, saying industries could have trouble complying with them amid COVID-19. The Trump administration on Thursday scaled back an Obama-era rule that compelled reductions in emissions of mercury and other human health hazards, a move designed to limit future regulation of air pollutants from coal and oil-fired power plants.

EPA chief Andrew Wheeler said the rollback was reversing what he depicted as regulatory overreach by the Obama administration. “We have put in place an honest accounting method that balances” the cost to utilities with public safety, he said.

That's the wrong approach in a public health crisis, Learner said.

"The public expects, amid a pandemic, the president to step up with actions to help solve the problem, instead of making bad environmental problems worse," he said.

Great Lakes enforcement less prioritized

The Trump Administration has spent less on enforcement and compliance of environmental regulations through its budgeting for the Environmental Protection Agency.

ELPC's report provides an example of a polluting company in the Great Lakes region, Reserve Environmental Services Inc. of Ashtabula, Ohio, east of Cleveland and less than two-and-a-half miles from the shores of Lake Erie. The waste management company handles both hazardous and non-hazardous waste, discharging into Whitman Creek, which crosses the facility's property and flows directly into Lake Erie.

More than 5,000 people live within a 3-mile radius of the facility, 37% of them identified as low-income, the report found. Since Jan. 1, 2017, Reserve has reported exceeding its effluent limits nearly 200 times for potentially health-harming pollutants such as mercury, nickel, ammonia and fecal coliform. Many of the violations have been ongoing for a year or more.

"EPA has not undertaken any formal enforcement actions against Reserve," the ELPC report states. "The lack of enforcement means the potential public health harms from these potential violations are still unknown and unaddressed. The serial nature of Reserve's violations, combined with the lack of any EPA enforcement, provides a real-world example of how reduced enforcement puts the environment at risk."

As the EPA has pulled back on regulation, it has called on states to increasingly regulate their own environmental concerns. But the ELPC report shows Great Lakes states are scaling back environmental regulation, too. Michigan is one of only two states in the region, along with Minnesota, to increase its environmental regulatory budget from 2008 to 2018, up 6%. Regulatory spending is down 12% to 36% in the other five states in that time frame. But Michigan EGLE staffing levels are down 22% from 2008 levels, similar to declines in other Great Lakes states.

The ELPC called on the Trump administration and Congress to increase funding and staffing for enforcement and compliance at EPA, particularly in Region 5, and for the agency to ensure that it is effectively spending and deploying the full amount of funds appropriated to it by Congress.

Without a strong expectation of environmental law enforcement, facilities are more likely to violate the law and avoid accountability, Hammons said.

"Prevention is less expensive than remediation," he said. "Residents should not fear going for a swim in Great Lakes beaches, drinking safe, clean water from their taps, or eating local fish because nearby industrial facilities are not being appropriately held responsible for their pollution."

(source: Detroit Free Press) Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press Published 6:00 a.m. ET April 20, 2020

#great lakes #news #environment

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scottbcrowley2 · 6 years

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Sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel - Fri, 06 Apr 2018 PST

EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s concern with personal safety came at a steep cost to taxpayers as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away ... Sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel - Fri, 06 Apr 2018 PST

#Spokesman.com: Latest stories #Sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel - Fri #06 Ap

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investmart007 · 6 years

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WASHINGTON | AP sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/KuzLBG

WASHINGTON | AP sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel

WASHINGTON |April 6, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s concern with his safety came at a steep cost to taxpayers as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away from investigating environmental crimes.

Altogether, the agency spent millions of dollars for a 20-member full-time detail that is more than three times the size of his predecessor’s part-time security contingent.

New details in Pruitt’s expansive spending for security and travel emerged from agency sources and documents reviewed by The Associated Press. They come as the embattled EPA leader fends off allegations of profligate spending and ethical missteps that have imperiled his job.

An EPA official with direct knowledge of Pruitt’s security spending says Perrotta oversaw a rapid expansion of the EPA chief’s security detail to accommodate guarding him day and night, even on family vacations and when Pruitt was home in Oklahoma. The EPA official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Perrotta also signed off on new procedures that let Pruitt fly first-class on commercial airliners, with the security chief typically sitting next to him with other security staff farther back in the plane. Pruitt’s premium status gave him and his security chief access to VIP airport lounges.

The EPA official said there are legitimate concerns about Pruitt’s safety, given public opposition to his rollbacks of anti-pollution measures.

But Pruitt’s ambitious domestic and international travel led to rapidly escalating costs, with the security detail racking up so much overtime that many hit annual salary caps of about $160,000. The demands of providing 24-hour coverage even meant taking some investigators away from field work, such as when Pruitt traveled to California for a family vacation.

The EPA official said total security costs approached $3 million when pay is added to travel expenses.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said late Friday that Pruitt has faced an “unprecedented” amount of death threats against him and his family.

“Americans should all agree that members of the President’s cabinet should be kept safe from these violent threats,” Wilcox said.

A nationwide search of state and federal court records by AP found no case where anyone has been arrested or charged with threatening Pruitt. EPA’s press office did not respond Friday to provide details of any specific threats or arrests.

Pruitt has said his use of first-class airfare was initiated following unpleasant interactions with other travelers. In one incident, someone yelled a profanity as he walked through the airport.

The EPA administrator has come under intense scrutiny for ethics issues and outsized spending. Among the concerns: massive raises for two of closest aides and his rental of a Capitol Hill condo tied to a lobbyist who represents fossil fuel clients.

At least three congressional Republicans and a chorus of Democrats have called for Pruitt’s ouster. But President Donald Trump is so far standing by him.

A review of Pruitt’s ethical conduct by White House officials is underway, adding to probes by congressional oversight committees and EPA’s inspector general.

Pruitt, 49, was closely aligned with the oil and gas industry as Oklahoma’s state attorney general before being tapped by Trump. Trump has praised Pruitt’s relentless efforts to scrap, delay or rewrite Obama-era environmental regulations. He also has championed budget cuts and staff reductions at the agency so deep that even Republican budget hawks in Congress refused to implement them.

EPA’s press office has refused to disclose the cost of Pruitt’s security or the size of his protective detail, saying doing so could imperil his personal safety.

But other sources within EPA and documents released through public information requests help provide a window into the ballooning costs.

In his first three months in office, before pricey overseas trips to Italy and Morocco, the price tag for Pruitt’s security detail hit more than $832,000, according to EPA documents released through a public information request.

Nearly three dozen EPA security and law enforcement agents were assigned to Pruitt, according to a summary of six weeks of weekly schedules obtained by Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Those schedules show multiple EPA security agents accompanied Pruitt on a family vacation to California that featured a day at Disneyland and a New Year’s Day football game where his home state Oklahoma Sooners were playing in the Rose Bowl. Multiple agents also accompanied Pruitt to a baseball game at the University of Kentucky and at his house outside Tulsa, during which no official EPA events were scheduled.

On weekend trips home for Sooners football games, when taxpayers weren’t paying for his ticket, the EPA official said Pruitt flew coach. He sometimes used a companion pass obtained with frequent flyer miles accumulated by Ken Wagner, a former law partner whom Pruitt hired as a senior adviser at EPA at a salary of more than $172,000. Taxpayers still covered the airfare for the administrator’s security detail.

Pruitt’s predecessor, Gina McCarthy, had a security detail that numbered about a half dozen, less than a third the size of Pruitt’s. She flew coach and was not accompanied by security during her off hours, like on weekend trips home to Boston.

Pruitt was accompanied by nine aides and a security detail during a trip to Italy in June that cost more than $120,000. He visited the U.S. Embassy in Rome and took a private tour of the Vatican before briefly attending a meeting of G-7 environmental ministers in Bologna.

Private Italian security guards hired by Perrotta helped arrange an expansive motorcade for Pruitt and his entourage, according to the EPA official with direct knowledge of the trip. The source described the Italian additions as personal friends of Perrotta, who joined Pruitt and his EPA staff for an hours-long dinner at an upscale restaurant.

Perrotta’s biography, on the website of his company, Sequoia Security Group, says that during his earlier stint with the Secret Service he worked with the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian finance police.

The EPA spent nearly $9,000 last year on increased counter-surveillance precautions for Pruitt, including hiring a private contractor to sweep his office for hidden listening devices and installing sophisticated biometric locks for the doors. The payment for the bug sweep went to a vice president at Perrotta’s security company.

The EPA official who spoke to AP said Perrotta also arranged the installation of a $43,000 soundproof phone booth for Pruitt’s office.

At least five EPA officials were placed on leave, reassigned or demoted after pushing back against spending requests such as a $100,000-a-month private jet membership, a bulletproof vehicle and $70,000 for furniture such as a bulletproof desk for the armed security officer always stationed inside the administrator’s office suite.

Those purchases were not approved. But Pruitt got an ornate refurbished desk comparable in grandeur to the one in the Oval Office.

Among the officials who faced consequences for resisting such spending was EPA Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Kevin Chmielewski, a former Trump campaign staffer who was placed on unpaid administrative leave this year.

The prior head of Pruitt’s security detail, Eric Weese, was demoted last year after he refused Pruitt’s demand to use the lights and sirens on his government-owned SUV to get him through Washington traffic to the airport and dinner reservations.

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By MICHAEL BIESECKER, By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

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#EPA chief spent millions #security and travel #Washington

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feelingbluepolitics · 6 years

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This article is posted to make an important point, since this writer is one of the many people to jump into saying that both Pelosi and trump are behaving childishly, and bemoaning that we could use more mature leaders in the midst of this damaging government shutdown.

This article is useful to make the point that we need more discerning journalists. The same goes for any other political commentators proposing the "both sides" version.

Yes, this shutdown is devastating for many, and potentially economically dangerous for all. While trump holds out for funding for his wall to distract from other issues and to pander to the 30 or so percent of the country for whom he is president, Pelosi stands for the 60 or so percent of the country who find trump's ignorant-fear-and-hate wall both stupidly ineffective and abhorent. trump started this, and so far, won't give in. Pelosi has a moral imperative to not give in, and to resist marring our country so foully.

Pelosi understands people are suffering, and she has been trying to end this painful shutdown. She tried to prevent it, when she attempted to head trump off from boxing himself in on live television. She had the Democratic House pass the previous Rupublicon funding bills that trump thwarted. And, by postponing trump's State of the Union address until the shutdown is over -- hopefully very soon, Pelosi was using skillfull negotiation tactics that pulled some of trump's own vain skin into his game, since he couldn't care less about the impacted federal workers that he's been disparaging from the start.

There is no question that the wall is trump's wall. His SOTU television appearance certainly would be trump personally grandstanding. But then somehow, people refer to Pelosi's canceled trip to Afghanistan's war zone as "her" trip, not just in terms of her taking the trip, but as if trump scored retaliation by taking a treat away from her, personally, too. Certainly she is bound to be disappointed, because, on behalf of the American people, she planned to take on the responsibility, with this secret, confidential trip, of boosting the morale of troops getting yanked around by trump, and fact-finding in person the status in this war zone. This wrecked trip was not a vanity perk, or a personal goody of hers, that trump swiped from Pelosi and threw on the ground.

Both sides are not the same. It is blindly stupid or Republicon partisan to assert that they are. It was not childish of Pelosi to push ruthlessly to end the shutdown. It was not childish of Pelosi to plan a confidential trip to assess a war zone. It was not childish of Pelosi to intend to thank our troops personally.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/01/17/trump-cancels-pelosis-use-of-military-aircraft/

"In March 2018, Pelosi lead [sic] a similar congressional delegation to Jordan, Israel and Afghanistan with 11 other House lawmakers. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan and then-House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry arranged a similar trip to visit troops in Afghanistan in October. [trump has not gone.]

"[trump’s] move drew immediate rebuke from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who said lawmakers should not be blocked from visiting troops serving in combat zones overseas."

Of course, Lindsay then leaped back toward trump and pretended "both sides" were being "sophomoric."

That is not true of Pelosi. But trump certainly behaved like a petty, horrible brat.

And furthermore, in an administration that has so far featured...:

- Tom Price

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/09/29/tom-prices-travels-5-things-know-scandal-cost-hhs-chief-his-job/717946001/

- Scott Pruitt

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/07/epa-chief-scott-pruitt-spent-millions-on-security-and-travel.html

- Brock Long (FEMA, criminal referral)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/brock-long-investigation-government-vehicles.html

-Betsy DeVos (one of 10 yachts, this one worth $40 million)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/26/betsy-devos-yacht-vandalism-protest

- Ryan Zinke

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/climate/interior-ryan-zinke-violated-travel.html

- trump's children

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/07/18/trump-sons-trips-secret-service-cost/796259002/

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-florida-trips-prices-costs-first-family-vacation-capitalism-584551

- and trump himself

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/20/trumps-travel-costs-during-his-first-year-exceed-13-million-dollars.html

"The total cost of [t]rump's travel expenses — including trips to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and Bedminster, N.J. golf club — has now surpassed $13.5 million, according to a report by Judical Watch.

"Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the conservative watchdog group accessed documents from the U.S. Department of the Air Force. Those data show that [trump's] non-official travel to rallies and vacations have cost $3.2 million alone since June of 2017."

...trump may want to reconsider a prerogative of ever making snide and obnoxious comments about standard, suitable, responsible, and appropriate travel arrangements.

But, Mr. Chris Cillizza and others, who was that, again, who's behaved like an immature child in this dire shutdown battle? It is certainly your prerogative to pick your "both sides" bullshit better.

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presssorg · 6 years

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Trump rollbacks for fossil fuel industries carry steep cost

Trump rollbacks for fossil fuel industries carry steep cost BILLINGS, Mont. — As the Trump administration rolls back environmental and safety rules for the energy sector, government projections show billions of dollars in savings reaped by companies will come at a steep cost: more premature deaths and illnesses from air pollution, a jump in climate-warming emissions and more severe derailments of trains carrying explosive fuels. The Associated Press analyzed 11 major rules targeted for repeal or relaxation under Trump, using the administration’s own estimates to tally how its actions would boost businesses and harm society. The AP identified up to $11.6 billion in potential future savings for companies that extract, burn and transport fossil fuels. Industry windfalls of billions of dollars more could come from a freeze in vehicle efficiency standards that will yield an estimated 79 billion-gallon (300 million-litre) increase in fuel consumption. On the opposite side of the government’s ledger, buried in thousands of pages of analyses, are the “social costs” of rolling back the regulations. Among them: — Up to 1,400 additional premature deaths annually due to the pending repeal of a rule to cut coal plant pollution. — An increase in greenhouse gas emissions by about 1 billion tons (907 million metric tons) from vehicles produced over the next decade — a figure equivalent to annual emissions of almost 200 million vehicles.

— Increased risk of water contamination from a drilling technique known as “fracking.” — Fewer safety checks to prevent offshore oil spills. For the Trump administration and its supporters, the rule changes examined by AP mark a much-needed pivot away from heavy regulations that threatened to hold back the Republican president’s goal of increasing U.S. energy production. But the AP’s findings also underscore the administration’s willingness to put company profits ahead of safety considerations and pollution effects. SIDING WITH INDUSTRY The AP found the administration has sought to bolster the changes by emphasizing, and sometimes exaggerating, economic gains while minimizing negative impacts. For example, when calculating future damages from greenhouse gas emissions from coal plants, the Trump administration looked only at U.S. effects, instead of globally. That drastically reduced the benefits of emission restrictions and allowed the administration to conclude the Obama-era rule was no longer justified, given costs to the coal industry. In another instance, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to stop considering secondary benefits of controlling mercury emissions — namely reductions in other pollutants projected to prevent up to 11,000 premature deaths. Last month, the AP revealed that the administration understated the advantages of installing better brakes on trains carrying crude oil and ethanol. Transportation Department officials acknowledged they miscalculated potential benefits by up to $117 million because they failed to include some projected future derailments. In explaining its actions, the Trump administration said in some cases that the previous administration understated the price tag on new industry restrictions. In others, it said President Barack Obama’s administration had been overly expansive in how it defined benefits to society. Michael Greenstone, a University of Chicago professor who served as chief economist for Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the Trump administration was downplaying the health and environmental impacts of its actions. “When you start fudging the numbers, it’s not that the costs just evaporate into thin air. We will pay,” Greenstone said. “They are reducing the costs for industries where pollution is a byproduct.” The rules being targeted were largely crafted under Obama in response to climate change, the disastrous 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, massive releases from coal ash dumps and fuel train explosions. ADMNISTRATION: NEGLIGIBLE RISKS Trump’s administration has stressed that savings for companies were greater than any increased perils to safety or the environment. “We fully recognize every significant policy decision has a consequence and that those consequences can differ,” acting U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told the AP. “I think when you look at the track record, holistically, what you see is our deregulatory efforts are still pretty protective.” The AP’s tally of savings was derived from government projections required under a 1993 executive order. Five of the rule changes are still pending. On rules for toxic coal ash, offshore safety and refinery pollution, the administration said companies would save hundreds of millions of dollars with little or no added risk — an assertion former federal officials and environmental groups have disputed. The potential industry savings were projected largely over the next decade. Sectors of the coal industry see lifting costly rules as a matter of survival because demand has plummeted as utilities switch to cleaner-burning fuels. For the oil and gas industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue, the economic impact of the Obama-era rules was comparatively small. But they were vigorously opposed as restrictions on business. “We need to make sure we’re putting together rules that are flexible enough to apply the latest, greatest technologies,” said Erik Milito, vice-president for the American Petroleum institute. He said the group focused on whether rules make sense, rather than cost savings. Critics say the impact on public health and the environment will be even worse than projected. “I don’t think it’s well understood what the death toll of these policies will be for the American people,” said Paul Billings, of the American Lung Association. OBAMA CLIMATE AGENDA ASSAILED Two sweeping changes under Trump — the rollback of the Clean Power Plan that threatened to close many coal power plants and a reversal of plans to increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards — were centerpieces of Obama’s climate change actions. Killing the power plan would save companies up to $6.4 billion, the EPA concluded. The trade-off is almost 61 million tons (55 million metric tons) annually of additional carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. The administration calculated that those emissions carry a maximum of $3.2 billion in “social costs,” such as flood damage and higher air conditioning costs. Since company savings outweighed pollution costs, the administration said scrapping the power plan was justified. That conclusion was possible largely because the EPA limited social costs to effects in the U.S., instead of globally as under Obama. EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones said the analysis complied with a 2003 directive under President George W. Bush that said such reviews should focus on costs and benefits to people in the U.S. Joe Goffman, a former EPA official who helped create the clean power plan and now at Harvard Law School, said the omission of international impacts “doesn’t track with reality” given that climate change is a worldwide problem. The Trump administration also limited pollution cost considerations in its proposal last month on mercury emitted by coal plants. When the mercury rule was finalized in 2012, the EPA projected up to $90 billion in benefits, including avoidance of up to 11,000 premature deaths from other power plant pollutants. Now, the EPA says those benefits could not be considered because they are not directly tied to mercury reductions. The only benefits that should be counted, the agency said, were improvements to IQ scores as a result of less mercury exposure, valued at up to $6 million annually. The National Mining Association had urged the change. Spokesman Conor Bernstein said Obama’s EPA misused the concept of secondary pollution benefits to justify its actions. The rollback’s impact is unclear since utilities already have spent an estimated $18 billion on new pollution controls. FUEL STANDARDS AND DRILLING SAFETY Some experts outside government take issue with the rationale for relaxing the fuel economy rule. The Trump administration says reducing standards would save as many as 1,000 lives annually and spare consumers and car companies hundreds of billions of dollars on vehicles with higher gas mileage. To reach that conclusion, officials lowered estimates of how many vehicles people would buy. But economists including from the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research say that assumption was fundamentally flawed, since looser standards would make cars cheaper and therefore increase demand. The economists said the government used misleading findings to wipe out at least $112 billion in potential societal benefits while falsely claiming its change would save numerous lives. “Every change they made was made in the direction to make the standards look more expensive and the rollback to look cheaper and better,” said Jeff Alson, who worked 40 years at an EPA lab in Michigan. Several rules reworked under Trump tie directly to worker and public safety. The administration rescinded requirements for improved fuel train brakes after determining the costs to industry would be higher than previously calculated. It acknowledged more spills from derailments would likely occur. After AP’s story about the agency’s $117 million benefits understatement, spokesman Bobby Fraser said the decision to rescind the Obama rule would stand because the costs were still greater. Two safety rules for offshore oil and gas drilling were adopted following the Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 people and spilled 134 million gallons (507 million litres) of oil. The Interior Department now says less rigid inspection and equipment requirements would save drilling companies hundreds of millions of dollars with “negligible” safety and environmental risks. Lynn Scarlett, acting Interior Secretary under George W. Bush, said the changes ignore a government commission’s findings on the Gulf spill. “You’re removing a tool that was developed intentionally to help reduce the risks,” Scarlett said. “The failure to have those protections raises the risk, such that actions can result in accidents like Deepwater Horizon.” —— Follow Matthew Brown at https://twitter.com/matthewbrownap Published at Sun, 27 Jan 2019 16:56:34 +0000 Read the full article

#airpollution #cleanpower #climatechange #coal #emissions #fossilfuels #pollution

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xtruss · 3 years

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Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan 🇦🇫 Mark the End of the American 🇺🇸 Era?

It’s a dishonorable end that weakens U.S. standing in the world, perhaps irrevocably.

— By Robin Wright | August 15, 2021 | The New Yorker

The humiliating U.S. retreat from Afghanistan is now part of an unnerving American pattern. Photograph from EPA-EFE / Shutterstock

History will surely note this absurdly ill-timed tweet. On Monday, August 9th, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul posed a question to its four hundred thousand followers: “This #PeaceMonday, we want to hear from you. What do you wish to tell the negotiating parties in Doha about your hopes for a political settlement? #PeaceForAfghanistan.” The message reflected the delusion of American policy. With the Taliban sweeping across the country, storming one provincial capital after another, the prospect that diplomacy would work a year after U.S.-backed talks in Qatar began—and quickly stalled—was illusory. By Thursday, the Afghan government controlled only three major cities. President Joe Biden, the leader of the world’s most powerful nation, announced that he was dispatching three thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan to pull hundreds of its diplomats and staff out of that Embassy. And, by Sunday, it was all over—before dusk. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, his government collapsed, and the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces simply melted away as the Taliban moved into the capital. American diplomats—having evacuated the fortress-like U.S. Embassy—were forced to shelter in place at the airport as they waited to be evacuated. America’s two-decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan has ended. For Americans, Afghanistan looks a little, maybe a lot, like a trillion-dollar throwaway. Meanwhile, Afghans are left in free fall.

It’s not just an epic defeat for the United States. The fall of Kabul may serve as a bookend for the era of U.S. global power. In the nineteen-forties, the United States launched the Great Rescue to help liberate Western Europe from the powerful Nazi war machine. It then used its vast land, sea, and air power to defeat the formidable Japanese empire in East Asia. Eighty years later, the U.S. is engaged in what historians may someday call a Great Retreat from a ragtag militia that has no air power or significant armor and artillery, in one of the poorest countries in the world.

It’s now part of an unnerving American pattern, dating back to the nineteen-seventies. On Sunday, social-media posts of side-by-side photos evoked painful memories. One captured a desperate crowd climbing up a ladder to the rooftop of a building near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to get on one of the last helicopters out in 1975, during the Ford Administration. The other showed a Chinook helicopter hovering over the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Sunday. “This is manifestly not Saigon,” the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, tried to argue on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” It didn’t wash. And there are other episodes. In 1984, the Reagan Administration withdrew the U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Beirut after a suicide bomber from a nascent cell of what became Hezbollah killed more than two hundred and forty military personnel—the largest loss for the Marines in a single incident since the Second World War. In 2011, the United States pulled out of Iraq, opening the way for the emergence of isis. The repeated miscalculations challenge basic Washington policy-making as well as U.S. military strategy and intelligence capabilities. Why wasn’t this looming calamity—or any of the earlier ones—anticipated? Or the exits better planned? Or the country not left in the hands of a former enemy? It is a dishonorable end.

Whatever the historic truth decades from now, the U.S. will be widely perceived by the world today as having lost what George W. Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—despite having mobilized nato for its first deployment outside Europe or North America, a hundred and thirty-six countries to provide various types of military assistance, and twenty-three countries to host U.S. forces deployed in offensive operations. America’s vast tools and tactics proved ill-equipped to counter the will and endurance of the Taliban and their Pakistani backers. In the long term, its missiles and warplanes were unable to vanquish a movement of sixty thousand core fighters in a country about as big as Texas.

There are many repercussions that will endure long after the U.S. withdrawal. First, jihadism has won a key battle against democracy. The West believed that its armor and steel, backed by a generous infusion of aid, could defeat a hard-line ideology with a strong local following. The Taliban are likely, once again, to install Sharia as law of the land. Afghanistan will again, almost certainly, become a haven for like-minded militants, be they members of Al Qaeda or others in search of a haven or a sponsor. It’s a gloomy prospect as Americans prepare to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks next month. Since 2001, Al Qaeda, isis, and other jihadi extremists have seeded franchises on all six inhabited continents. Last month, the United States sanctioned an isis branch as far afield as Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southern Africa where almost sixty per cent of the population is Christian.

Second, both Afghanistan and Iraq have proved that the United States can neither build nations nor create armies out of scratch, especially in countries that have a limited middle class and low education rates, over a decade or two. It takes generations. Not enough people have the knowledge or experience to navigate whole new ways of life, whatever they want in principle. Ethnic and sectarian divisions thwart attempts to overhaul political, social, and economic life all at the same time. The United States spent eighty-three billion dollars training and arming an Afghan force of some three hundred thousand—more than four times the size of the Taliban’s militia. “This army and this police force have been very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day,” Mark Milley told reporters back in 2013. He is now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet, by March, when I was last in Kabul, the Taliban controlled half of the country. Between May and mid-August, it took the other half—most just during the past week. Last month, Biden said that he trusted “the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped and more competent in terms of conducting war.” In the end, the Taliban basically walked into Kabul—and the Presidential palace—on Sunday.

Third, America’s standing abroad is profoundly weakened, symbolized by the U.S. Embassy’s lowering the Stars and Stripes for the final time on Sunday. Smoke was seen rising from the grounds of the Embassy—which cost almost eight hundred million dollars to expand just five years ago—as matériel was burned in the rush to exit. Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives. It’s hard to see how the United States salvages its reputation or position anytime soon.

America’s Great Retreat is at least as humiliating as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal in 1989, an event that contributed to the end of its empire and Communist rule. The United States was in Afghanistan twice as long and spent far more. The Soviet Union is estimated to have spent about fifty billion dollars during the first seven of its ten years occupying the mountainous country. Yes, the United States fostered the birth of a rich civil society, the education of girls, and an independent media. It facilitated democratic elections more than once and witnessed the transfer of power. Thirty-seven per cent of Afghan girls are now able to read, according to Human Rights Watch. The tolo channel hosted eighteen seasons of “Afghan Star,” a singing competition much like “American Idol.” Zahra Elham, a twentysomething member of Afghanistan’s Hazara minority, became the first woman to win, in 2019. But untold numbers of the Afghans encouraged by the United States are desperately searching for ways out of the country as the Taliban move in. Women have pulled out their blue burqas again. And the enduring imagery of the Americans flying out on their helicopters will be no different than Soviet troops marching across the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to the then Soviet Union on February 15, 1989. Both of the big powers withdrew as losers, with their tails between their legs, leaving behind chaos.

For the United States, the costs do not end with its withdrawal from either Afghanistan or Iraq. It could cost another two trillion dollars just to pay for the health care and disability of veterans from those wars. And those costs may not peak until 2048. America’s longest war will be a lot longer than anyone anticipated two decades ago—or even as it ends. In all, forty-seven thousand civilians have died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. More than twenty-four hundred were U.S. military personnel, and almost four thousand were U.S. contractors.

I first went to Afghanistan in 1999, during the original Taliban rule. I drove through the breathtaking Khyber Pass from Pakistan, past the fortified estates of the drug lords along the border, on the rutted, axle-destroying roads to Kabul. The images of the Taliban’s repressive rule—little kids working on the streets of Afghan towns to support widowed mothers not allowed in public, checkpoints festooned with confiscated audio and video tapes—are indelible. I went back with Secretary of State Colin Powell on his first trip after the fall of the Taliban. There was hope then of something different, even as the prospect of it often seemed elusive, and the idea sullied by the country’s corrupt new rulers. I’ve been back several times since, including in March with General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, Jr., the head of Central Command, who is now overseeing the final U.S. military operations. On Sunday, as America erased its presence in Afghanistan in a race to get out, I wondered: Was it all for naught? What other consequences will America face from its failed campaign in Afghanistan decades from now? We barely know the answers.

— Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

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dendroica · 6 years

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Shortly after arriving in Washington, Pruitt demoted the career staff member heading his security detail and replaced him with EPA Senior Special Agent Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, a former Secret Service agent who operates a private security company. An EPA official with direct knowledge of Pruitt’s security spending says Perrotta oversaw a rapid expansion of the EPA chief’s security detail to accommodate guarding him day and night, even on family vacations and when Pruitt was home in Oklahoma. The EPA official spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Perrotta also signed off on new procedures that let Pruitt fly first-class on commercial airliners, with the security chief typically sitting next to him with other security staff farther back in the plane. Pruitt’s premium status gave him and his security chief access to VIP airport lounges. The EPA official said there are legitimate concerns about Pruitt’s safety, given public opposition to his rollbacks of anti-pollution measures. But Pruitt’s ambitious domestic and international travel led to rapidly escalating costs, with the security detail racking up so much overtime that many hit annual salary caps of about $160,000. The demands of providing 24-hour coverage even meant taking some investigators away from field work, such as when Pruitt traveled to California for a family vacation. The EPA official said total security costs approached $3 million when pay is added to travel expenses.

AP sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel

#Scott Pruitt #EPA #corruption #air travel #politics

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Bitcoin Rebounds After a Big Tumble: Live Updates Here’s what you need to know: Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, which bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin last quarter.Credit…Michele Tantussi/Reuters Over the weekend, the price of Bitcoin briefly fell to around $31,000, more than 50 percent down from its high last month. It has recovered somewhat and is currently trading at around $37,000. “About $20 billion of long positions were liquidated last week,” Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of the crypto derivatives exchange FTX, told the DealBook newsletter. “In terms of price movements: the biggest part of it is liquidations,” he said, suggesting the worst is over. But he also noted news from China late Friday of a crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading. This added to other news of official scrutiny that has spooked crypto investors in recent days, from Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. Companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheets may be getting nervous. For accounting purposes, cryptocurrency is valued at its purchase price in company accounts. If it goes up in value, this isn’t reflected in a company’s accounts but if it falls, the value is impaired and puts a dent in quarterly profits. Three big corporate investors in Bitcoin are Tesla, MicroStrategy and Square. Here’s where they stand: Tesla: The electric vehicle company bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin last quarter, at an average price of about $34,700 per coin, not far from its current price. Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has signaled that the company isn’t selling, but it probably isn’t buying, either. MicroStrategy: The business intelligence software company has spent about $2.2 billion on Bitcoin, at an average price of $24,450. The company bought more last week and is still sitting on big gains. Square: The payments company, led by the Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, bought two batches of Bitcoin for its treasury — $50 million in October at a price of about $10,600 per coin and $170 million in February at a price of around $51,000. It took a $20 million impairment on its holdings last quarter. It doesn’t plan to buy any more, its finance chief said this month. Wizz Air, a discount carrier based in Hungary, said on Monday it had rerouted a flight from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Tallinn in Estonia to avoid flying in Belarus airspace.Credit…Andrew Boyers/Reuters Some airlines in Eastern Europe began diverting their planes to avoid Belarus airspace on Monday, a day after that country’s leader sent a fighter jet to force down a Ryanair flight, allowing authorities to seize an opposition journalist on board. The shocking move has unleashed a storm of criticism against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the Belarus president who has clung to power despite huge protests last year. The European Union is considering penalties against the country. At least two airlines said that they were diverting flights away from Belarus airspace as a precaution, but most carriers seem to be waiting to be told what to do by the European authorities. In an interview on Monday with an Irish radio broadcaster, Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, condemned the actions of the Belarus authorities, who ordered the plane, flying from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, to land in the Belarus capital of Minsk and then arrested a dissident journalist on board, Roman Protasevich, and his companion. “This was a case of state-sponsored hijacking, state-sponsored piracy,” Mr. O’Leary told interviewers on Newstalk. Mr. O’Leary, however, said he was waiting for instructions from European Union authorities in Brussels about whether to steer other flights away from Belarus. “We, like all the European airlines, are looking for guidance today from the European authorities and from NATO,” he said. He added that it would be an easy matter for his flights to avoid Belarus. “We don’t fly over Belarus much,” he said. “It would be a very minor adjustment to fly over” Poland instead, he added. Ryanair, a discount airline based in Ireland, describes itself as Europe’s largest airline group. Other airlines are already making changes. AirBaltic, the Latvian national airline, said that its flights would avoid entering Belarus airspace “until the situation becomes clearer or a decision is issued by the authorities.” The rerouted flights include ones from Riga, the airline’s home base, to Odessa in Ukraine and Tbilisi in Georgia. Another airline that flies in the area, Wizz Air, said that it would alter the path of a flight from Kyiv in Ukraine to Tallinn in Estonia so as to skirt Belarus. “We are continuously monitoring and evaluating the situation,” a spokesman for Wizz Air, which is based in Hungary, said. Robert Iger, the former Disney chief executive, reportedly called the head of Time Warner in 2016 about a possible merger.Credit…Etienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock After its $100 billion deal to buy Time Warner, and spending millions more to fight a Justice Department lawsuit that delayed the deal, AT&T wants a do-over. This reversal culminated in the announcement last week that it would spin off WarnerMedia, as the former Time Warner is now known, to merge with the reality-TV giant Discovery. In the three short years since AT&T closed the deal to buy Time Warner, AT&T radically upended the business by cutting staff, angering the talent and firing executives and becoming something of a Hollywood villain. Some of WarnerMedia’s most successful executives, including Richard Plepler of HBO, left or were pushed out. The company cut more than 2,000 jobs. It could have been different if a phone call in 2016 had come just a few weeks earlier, according to the DealBook newsletter. In October that year, shortly before Time Warner and AT&T first announced their deal, Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company at the time, placed a call to Jeffrey Bewkes, the head of Time Warner, according to two people familiar with those details. The Disney leader asked Mr. Bewkes if he’d be interested in a possible merger. It was too late, Mr. Bewkes said: There was already something in the works. Mr. Iger wished him well and hung up the phone. Later, Mr. Iger called another media chief in the hopes of forging a deal. It was Rupert Murdoch. Workers handling rebar at a construction site in Singapore. Prices for rebar and other commodities fell after China said it would crack down on what it described as excessively high prices.Credit…Wallace Woon/EPA, via Shutterstock U.S. stocks were expected to rise on Monday with the S&P 500 set to open 0.3 percent higher when trading begins. Last week, the U.S. benchmark stock index dropped 0.4 percent as swings in cryptocurrency prices and concerns about rising inflation unsettled markets. The Stoxx Europe 600 was little changed. The FTSE 100 in Britain rose 0.4 percent and the CAC in France rose 0.1 percent. The DAX in Germany is closed because of a holiday. Belarus government bonds, denominated in dollars, dropped on Monday after the Belarusian government sent a fighter jet to intercept a Ryanair plane traveling through the country’s airspace on Sunday and seized a prominent opposition journalist on board. European officials are considering further penalties against Belarus. The yield on 10-year debt rose more than half a percentage point to 7.77 percent, the biggest one-day increase in the yield since August when tens of thousands of people protested the election of longtime president Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, in what was been dismissed as a sham vote. Commodity prices Metal prices, including iron ore and steel rebar, fell as Chinese officials continued to intervene in what the government sees as excessively high commodity prices. The National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on Monday that there would be “zero tolerance” for illegal activities such monopolistic behavior or hoarding after major metal producers were called to a meeting with several Chinese government departments. Prices of agricultural products including soybeans and corn also fell. Fresnillo, the mining company, was the worst performing company in the FTSE 100 on Monday morning, with its shares falling 2.9 percent. Oil prices rose. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude benchmark, rose 1.7 percent to $64.65 a barrel. Company news Cineworld shares rose 3.6 percent in London after the movie theater chain said it had a “strong opening weekend” in Britain thanks to the success of “Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway.” In the United States, 97 percent of the company’s movie theaters are now open, Cineworld said, which operates Regal Cinemas, the second-largest chain in the country after AMC. Shares in Virgin Galactic soared 28 percent in premarket trading after Richard Branson’s space plane completed a test flight on Saturday to the edge of space. The company also has more than 600 customers who paid up to $250,000 each for seats on its earliest flights. Beyond Meat shares rose 4 percent in premarket trading. The largest supermarket chain in Britain, Tesco, said on Monday it was introducing a range of frozen ready meals with Beyond Meat. Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator and Republican presidential candidate, has been dropped from his role as a CNN political commentator amid controversy over recent remarks in which he seemed to erase the role of Native Americans in U.S. history. Mr. Santorum’s departure from CNN came after comments he made about Native Americans at a Young America’s Foundation event last month. “We birthed a nation from nothing — I mean, there was nothing here,” Mr. Santorum said. Daimler, the world’s largest maker of heavy trucks, whose Freightliners are a familiar sight on American interstates, said last week that it would convert to zero-emission vehicles within 15 years at the latest, providing another example of how the shift to electric power is reshaping vehicle manufacturing with significant implications for the climate, economic growth and jobs. Dexter George asked white customers who came to his shop after the death of George Floyd to support Black businesses more consistently.Credit…Ben Sklar for The New York Times While Black business ownership rates nationwide dropped by 41 percent from February 2020 to April 2020 — the largest decline for any racial group — Dexter George watched as 1,200 patrons donated $69,211 to support his 30-year-old enterprise, Source of Knowledge, a bookstore on Broad Street in Newark. Personal checks and civic grants further steadied the store’s finances. Unable to secure loans, he used some of the money to reinvest in his 2,700 square feet of retail space. “At the end of the day, you only fit in a box,” Mr. George, who was born in Tobago, said of putting the money back into the store. “Can’t take it with you.” Mr. George, 56, has kept his business operating partly by practicing caution during the pandemic, Kevin Armstrong reports for The New York Times. “There’s a lot of people we aren’t seeing again,” he said. “This virus is going around in a circle until it gets everybody.” Mr. George counted 30 customers killed by the coronavirus. Almost 1,000 people have died in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, because of Covid-19 and the vaccination rate remains below 30 percent. Throughout the pandemic, Mr. George considered not only safety concerns, but also the costs of closures and curfews. He weighed reduced foot traffic against his mortgage of $6,500 per month for the two-story building that houses his bookstore. On his commute, he noted roller gates that remained down and “For Lease” signs going up. But Mr. George was not done building. Early in the epidemic, he created a GoFundMe page to alert customers to his status: “Covid almost killed us!” It was the contributions that revived him. Source link Orbem News #Big #Bitcoin #Live #Rebounds #tumble #Updates

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stillwithhernothim · 6 years

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Um..... WHAT!?! “Millions”!?! On security!?! “Altogether, the agency spent millions of dollars for a 20-member full-time security detail that is three times the size of his predecessor’s part-time security contingent.” How does #DontheCon, or better yet, his followers think this is #DrainingtheSwamp???! Via @nbcnews “President Donald Trump on Friday defended Pruitt. "Do you believe that the Fake News Media is pushing hard on a story that I am going to replace A.G. Jeff Sessions with EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, who is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege?" Trump wrote in a Friday morning tweet. "Do people really believe this stuff?" he added. "So much of the media is dishonest and corrupt!" #pruittmustgo #scottpruitt #corruptpruitt #corruption #cabinetofhorrors

#corruption #cabinetofhorrors #donthecon #scottpruitt #pruittmustgo #drainingtheswamp #corruptpruitt

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investmart007 · 6 years

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WASHINGTON | AP sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel

New Post has been published on https://goo.gl/UtYezS

WASHINGTON | AP sources: EPA chief spent millions on security and travel

WASHINGTON|April 6, 2018 (AP)(STL.News) Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s concern with his safety came at a steep cost to taxpayers as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away from investigating environmental crimes.