Month: September 2013

Do we really need SWAT teams for clean water violations?

by digby

What in the hell?

Miners from the Chicken area — a gold mining town of just 17 full-time residents and dozens of seasonal miners off the Taylor Highway, between Tok and the Canadian border — said that during the third week of August they were surprised by groups of four to eight armed officers, who swarmed onto their mining claims with little or no warning.

The officers were armed and wearing body armor. They were part of the Alaska Environmental Crimes Task Force and were there to check for violations of section 404 of the Clean Water Act, according to several miners who were contacted by the group. Section 404 governs water discharges into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans.

The task force’s methods are now being questioned by the miners as well as the Alaska congressional delegation.

“Imagine coming up to your diggings, only to see agents swarming over it like ants, wearing full body armor, with jackets that say POLICE emblazoned on them, and all packing side arms,” said C.R. “Dick” Hammond, a Chicken gold miner who got a visit from the task force.

“How would you have felt?” Hammond asked. “You would be wondering, ‘My God, what have I done now?’”

Well, you can’t blame them.

Yes, clean water violations are serious business. Except, you know, it’s Alaska, not Lake Erie. And they had a method for dealing with these violations in the past that worked out pretty well:

Miners suggest it might have been better all around if officials had just shown up at the door — as they used to do — and said they wanted to check the water.

But get this:

The EPA has refused to publicly explain why it used armed officers as part of what it called a “multi-jurisdictional” investigation of possible Clean Water Act violations in the area.

A conference call was held last week to address the investigation. On the line were members of the Alaska Congressional delegation, their staff, state officers, and the EPA. According to one Senate staffer, the federal agency said it decided to send in the task force armed and wearing body armor because of information it received from the Alaska State Troopers about “rampant drug and human trafficking going on in the area.”

The miners contacted by the task force were working in the area of the Fortymile National Wild and Scenic River. The federal designation, made in 1980 as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protects 32 miles between Chicken and Eagle, Alaska. It is a remote area, close to the Canadian border and the town of Boundary. The nearest city of any real size is Fairbanks, 140 miles to the northwest. It was unknown to everyone in the area that there is a rampant problem with drug and human traffickers.

This also came as news to the Alaska State Troopers, whom the EPA said supplied the information about drugs and human trafficking, and at least one U.S. senator.

“Their explanation — that there are concerns within the area of rampant drug trafficking and human trafficking going on — sounds wholly concocted to me,” said Murkowski, R-Alaska.

“The Alaska State Troopers did not advise the EPA that there was dangerous drug activity. We do not have evidence to suggest that is occurring,” said Trooper spokesperson Megan Peters.

Chicken Alaska as a rampant center of drug and human trafficking is hilarious:

According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 115.4 square miles (299 km2), all of it land.

The only transportation to Chicken is a small local airstrip, as well as Alaska Route 5, the Taylor Highway. The highway is not maintained from mid-October through mid-March.

As of the census of 2000, there were 17 people, 6 households, and 4 families residing in the CDP. The population density was 0.1 people per square mile (0.1/km²). There were 21 housing units at an average density of 0.2 per square mile (0.1/km²). The racial makeup of the CDP was 100.00% White.

It may have doubled or tripled in size since then …

Seriously, this is a case of a federal agency being given a bunch of para-military gear and the boys just having to play GI Joe with it. I’m generally a fan of the EPA and I’m all for keeping Alaska’s water as clean as can be. But this is dangerous and insane behavior. They do not need a military style “environmental crimes task force” in the first place. And if they do then I think they should probably be spending their time dealing with the potential for massive oil spills not small family run gold mines in Chicken Alaska.

Oh and by the way;

Likins said the task force may have found one possible clean water violation at a mine near Boundary, very close to the Canadian border.

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Tragic wastes on top of tragic wastes

by digby

If you want to know why Americans are not exactly keen on starting another war, this surely plays a part in it:

According to today’s numbers it is down a bit more from that graph. It’s at 7.3%, with vast numbers having left the workforce because they can’t find any work. This used to be considered a crisis.  Now, it’s considered a success.

Krugman put this in context in his column today called “Years of tragic waste”

In a few days, we’ll reach the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers — the moment when a recession, which was bad enough, turned into something much scarier. Suddenly, we were looking at the real possibility of economic catastrophe.

And the catastrophe came.

Wait, you say, what catastrophe? Weren’t people warning about a second Great Depression? And that didn’t happen, did it? Yes, they were, and no, it didn’t — although the Greeks, the Spaniards, and others might not agree about that second point. The important thing, however, is to realize that there are degrees of disaster, that you can have an immense failure of economic policy that falls short of producing total collapse. And the failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.

Some of that immensity can be measured in dollars and cents. Reasonable measures of the “output gap” over the past five years — the difference between the value of goods and services America could and should have produced and what it actually produced — run well over $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of pure waste, which we will never get back.

Behind that financial waste lies an even more tragic waste of human potential. Before the financial crisis, 63 percent of adult Americans were employed; that number quickly plunged to less than 59 percent, and there it remains.

How did that happen? It wasn’t a mass outbreak of laziness, and right-wing claims that jobless Americans aren’t trying hard enough to find work because they’re living high on food stamps and unemployment benefits should be treated with the contempt they deserve. A bit of the decline in employment can be attributed to an aging population, but the rest reflects, as I said, an immense failure of economic policy.
[…]
Look, I know that as a political matter an adequate job-creation program was never a real possibility. And it’s not just the politicians who fell short: Many economists, instead of pointing the way toward a solution of the jobs crisis, became part of the problem, fueling exaggerated fears of inflation and debt.

Still, I think it’s important to realize how badly policy failed and continues to fail. Right now, Washington seems divided between Republicans who denounce any kind of government action — who insist that all the policies and programs that mitigated the crisis actually made it worse — and Obama loyalists who insist that they did a great job because the world didn’t totally melt down.

Obviously, the Obama people are less wrong than the Republicans. But, by any objective standard, U.S. economic policy since Lehman has been an astonishing, horrifying failure.

There are only so many “immense policy failures” (and I would certainly define the Iraq debacle as another one) that people can take in a few short years. It’s too much.

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Is it really all about chemical weapons?

by digby

Chris Hayes interviewed John Kerry last night and you should watch it if you missed it. It was really good.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I’m just going to highlight one little exchange:

HAYES: Can you unilaterally declare that you’re not taking responsibility for a civil war when the rebels on the ground are going to see this American intervention as possibly a door opening to further intervention and that is going to affect the way they conduct themselves. 

KERRY: We have made it crystal clear to them. We make it crystal clear now in every statement that we have made, this action has nothing to do with engaging directly in Syria’s civil war on one side or the other. It has to do with enforcing a norm of international behavior that has protected people against chemical weapons. And it is one of the things — chemical, biological, nuclear warfare, we have decided as a world we are going to protect people against those weapons.

Oh, ok:

The Obama administration is considering a plan to use U.S. military trainers to help increase the capabilities of the Syrian rebels, a move that would greatly expand the CIA training now being done in Jordan, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Any training would take place outside Syria, and one possible location would be Jordan. 

The officials, who declined to be identified, said discussions were continuing and came as the Obama administration prods Congress to authorize limited military strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government in retaliation for a deadly Aug. 21 chemical-weapons attack that killed more than 1,400 people. 

The proposal to use the U.S. military to train the rebels would answer the demands of some lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to do more to train and equip the Syrian opposition. President Obama in June decided to provide lethal aid to the rebels, but none of that assistance has arrived.

Also:

President Obama has directed the Pentagon to develop an expanded list of potential targets in Syria in response to intelligence suggesting that the government of President Bashar Assad has been moving troops and equipment used to deploy chemical weapons while Congress debates whether to authorize military action. 

Obama ordered the expansion beyond the 50 or so major sites that were part of the original target list. The strikes would be aimed at the military units that have stored and prepared the chemical weapons and carried out the attacks against Syrian rebels, military officials said.

It occurred to me this morning that despite the resistance of the American people and many in congress, I think virtually everyone accepts this “preserving the international norms” banning chemical weapons rationale (regardless of whether or not they believe it will lead to further escalation.) It’s a testament to the trust people still have in the president that they believe him.

But it must be acknowledged that getting involved in the civil war, for which McCain and the right wing hawks have been lobbying for months, is certainly the neo-con approach (“real men go to Tehran — but Damascus is good too”.) And the realists in both parties have recommended arming the rebels for months. From all reports the president rejected that course and only decided to act as a result of the red line crossing. I have no reason to doubt those motives. But more cynical types might easily wonder if the administration has been looking for an excuse to get more involved and finally found it. At the very least it would appear that there’s some negotiating going on to ensure certain hawkish votes in congress. And that’s a worry.

Update:  Also note that Kerry said he and Hagel were against the Iraq war. They both voted for it. C’mon.

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Secrets and lies

by digby

Dana Milbank brought up an good point the other day when discussing the administration’s unwillingness to share the information that would prove Assad was responsible for the sarin attack:

Officials say the evidence is incontrovertible that Assad used sarin gas against his people. Lawmakers emerging from secret, classified briefings seem to agree. But while members of Congress are coming around to an attack on Syria, the American public remains skeptical. Why? Maybe it’s because the government won’t let them in on the secret.

The public heard about another “slam dunk” case a decade ago and, then as now, Democratic and Republican lawmakers agreed that the secret evidence was compelling. And it turned out to be wrong. Now, administration officials are telling Americans to trust their assurances that the secret evidence is convincing and that their war planning is solid. But they won’t provide details.

Estimates of collateral damage? “Lower than a certain number which I would rather share with you in a classified setting,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey told lawmakers.

Response of the Arab and Muslim countries? “This is something I’d be happier discussing in greater detail with you in the closed session,” Kerry said.

Safeguards to keep military action limited? “We can talk about that in a closed session,” Dempsey said.

How would Russia and other Syrian allies respond to a U.S. strike? “We all agree that that would be best handled in a classified session,” Kerry said.

No, we don’t all agree.

The administration’s case against Assad may well be airtight. Walter Pincus, The Post’s longtime intelligence correspondent, tells me he hasn’t heard the sort of doubts from the intelligence community that he heard during the run-up to the Iraq war. The problem is that the refusal to declassify evidence helps opponents such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin cast doubt on the intelligence.

The administration is hiding behind the protection of “sources and methods,” but is any foe still unaware of the National Security Agency’s satellite and intercept capabilities?

Nobody is unaware that the US Big Brother is all up in everybody’s business and I’m sure that Assad has no illusions that he is immune. The knowledge of this surveillance capability should make the US more willing to openly share this kind of information. The cat is definitely out of the bag.

And I would guess that on some level people feel the illogic of their refusal and wonder why they’re doing it, particularly after the history of US government lying about these things. You can’t blame people for being skeptical. And now that we know the full scope of US capability you really do have to wonder why the government still persists in saying “trust us” instead of just putting out the information that would put all these questions to rest.

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Another sign of the broken asset economy: young adults priced out of the housing market

by David Atkins

The modern economy has many unsustainable trends: rising energy costs, declining wages, rising unemployment, rampant financialization, absurd student loan debts, growing inequality and many others. The housing market is also unsustainable and broken.

Some older homeowners bought in prior to the housing boom and are now “wealthy” because of the highly inflated values of the property they bought cheap; some are underwater in homes they purchased at or near the height of the market. Inventory is low, and what does come on the market–often through the misery of foreclosure–is quickly snapped up in cash by the fortunate few who are wealthy or happened to buy in early. Younger buyers, meanwhile, are increasingly priced out of the market.

Young, first-time buyers are struggling to purchase a home. With low inventories of homes for sale, young first-timers are finding themselves competing against other bidders who are willing to pay cash. Meanwhile, many young buyers are having trouble qualifying for a loan, often due to high student loan debt.

Overall, young buyers have been left out of the housing recovery more than any other age group, according to a new USA Today analysis. The home ownership rate for 25 to 34 year olds has gone from 46.7 percent in 2006 to 29.7 percent in 2011 — a decline of 17 percentage points. As comparison, the 45-54 age group has seen home ownership rates fall 3.8 percent.

National home ownership rates during the same timeframe has fallen 2.7 percentage points — from 67.3 percent to 64.6 percent, USA Today reports.

“There’s been no situation as devastating as this, and it’s probably taken a greater toll on the younger generation,” says Budge Huskey, CEO of residential brokerage Coldwell Banker. “They’ve seen other friends or acquaintances that may have even gone through a foreclosure. There’s a psychological aspect of the impact of the recession that goes beyond the mere finances.”

Keep in mind that policymakers are as we speak attempting to inflate the value of real estate, even as current prices make the traditional American Dream an unrealistic fantasy for most young adults.

The economy is broken, and none of the asset inflaters in government are even aware enough of the basic problems to even attempt a fix.

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“This is the nuclear winter of data security”

by digby

I’ve never known Michael Froomkin to be hyperbolic.  So this is a big deal:

The latest revelations about the NSA’s ability to undermine most encryption used online dwarf anything we have learned previously. What is worse, the NSA has worked to insert weaknesses into products — backdoors.

the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments. 

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”. 

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with “brute force”, and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves. 

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

It’s everything, everything that Cypherpunks ever muttered about over their beer.

This is the secret that likely explains why the Obama and Cemeron administrations were willing to do almost anything to try to get Snowden, the reporters he leaked to, and the anyone who touched their data.

This is the nuclear winter of data security.

Froomkin notes that there is some evidence that this has not only been used for national security. And I still think it’s obvious that there have been or will be commercial applications, if only among the contractors who are “entrusted” to do this work. But what’s at stake is something more fundamental. He quotes Bruce Schneir:

“[b]y subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract.”

Schneier says that in light of these revelations we have to rebuild the internet.

Froomkin asks, “are we up to it?”

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Motives and methods

by digby

Huffington Post:

The [Joint Intelligence Committee] had high confidence in all of its assessments except in relation to the regime’s precise motivation for carrying out an attack of this scale at this time,’ read an unclassified version of a British intelligence report, released last week. A declassified American intelligence summary doesn’t go much further, saying that regime ‘frustration’ with its inability to prevent rebel incursions into Damascus ‘may have contributed’ to the decision.

The lack of clarity on this issue may not ultimately undermine the case against Assad, but it does raise substantial worries about the effectiveness of the strike — and about Assad’s possible response in the aftermath. 

Well, yeah. The fact that nobody can offer up a good reason why the regime would purposefully invite the rest of the world to basically join the other side in its civil war should make you question whether lobbing bombs in response will alter its behavior — or anyone’s behavior. Things that don’t make a lot of sense to begin with aren’t likely to become clearer after you escalate with bombing strikes. After the Iraq fiasco, this lack of a believable motive sets off so many alarm bells that you can’t blame people for just sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “lalalalala.”

And speaking of motives, I just want to comment on David’s post below about telling your congressman to vote against because you think it’s none of our business. He believes that it is a counter productive argument because it will make congress do the opposite since they know that it is immoral to ignore the suffering of 100,000 people. He thinks people should make the pragmatic argument that we shouldn’t intervene because it won’t do any good.

We agree on the pragmatic argument — it won’t do any good and escalating the violence will likely make things worse. (It’s my primary motive for rejecting almost all military action that isn’t in direct self-defense.) But I have to defend the people who believe it’s none of our business. Americans have been shouldering the burden of being the world’s policemen for over half a century now. And that responsibility is always couched in humanitarian terms, even though we consistently find out later that the motives were much more complicated. With some exceptions, the citizens of this country have borne that burden with little complaint, backing our government’s decisions on where to spend blood and treasure over and over again. But this last decade has finally so frayed their trust that people are quite logically questioning whether this is sustainable. They are asking whether or not we can and should continue to play this role in the world.

After all, we have just gone through — are still going through — the most catastrophic economic crisis since the Great Depression. People are still reeling from protracted unemployment and a sense that their futures and their children’s futures will not be what they expected them to be just a short time ago. Americans are tired of crises and they are tired of war and they are tired of having to sign the check for yet another military adventure in a faraway land while everyone else in the world gets to sit it out. And I don’t blame them. This is what comes of empires that starve their people at home in order to spend enormous amounts of money on far flung global responsibilities.

I think it’s very important that congressional representatives understand their constituents’ feelings on this. And if they don’t, they will be punished for it at the ballot box. But I think they know that. In fact, the idea that members of congress truly feel a sense of obligation to the Syrian people that the average American does not, strikes me as unlikely. Members of congress are madly trying to figure out the smart move — and that has little to do with the moral case for war. It hardly ever does.

So,  I think people should just tell their congressional representatives what they really feel. If what they feel is that this is none of our business, that’s what they should say. FWIW, I’ve heard civilians in my own personal life say this more than once over the past week or so. People just do not understand why the US is the only country doing this. It sounds like the same old rhetoric (even down to the “he gassed his own people!”) and they aren’t buying it.  Why would they?

Update: I should add that I agree with David that the US can and should offer a moral alternative. Here’s one: how about we finally  join the ICC and push to have all perpetrators of war crimes atrocities in Syria’s civil war be tried in the Hague?  It won’t stop the bloodshed, but then neither will lobbing bombs.  And since we believe so strongly in international norms, this seems like a good one to add to the mix don’t you think?

Of course we’d have to be willing to deal with our own war crimes (and war criminals) which is why we haven’t done this already.  And which kind of makes a hash out of all of our governement’s humanitarian chest beating, doesn’t it?
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House Democrats at odds with progressive base over the moral obligation in Syria

by David Atkins

Having spoken with a number of sources close to various House Democrats, I think it’s clear that many of them are deeply and genuinely conflicted about taking action on Syria.

One common thread comes out of the conversations, however: there is a moral element to this problem, and a pragmatic element. And those two issues are in conflict with each other.

Congressmembers are getting a lot of letters and phone calls from progressives and Tea Partiers alike saying essentially that Syria is “none of our business.” Those sentiments are actually counterproductive. Congressmembers and staffs are inclined both geopolitically and morally to absolutely reject that argument; in fact, I’d wager that every call and letter they receive to that effect makes a yes vote more likely, if for no other reason than Congressmembers would like to distance themselves from that sort of thinking. The isolationist argument is a bad one, and it does not hold the moral high ground in the face of over 100,000 dead by conventional weapons and over a thousand dead by poison gas.

The pragmatic argument, on the other hand, is much more persuasive. If we want to do “good” in Syria, are missile strikes really the way to go? Will we truly accomplish any our stated objectives through the campaign of limited missile strikes currently under discussion? My own perspective says no, and it is that argument which seems to have significantly more traction among House Democrats as they prepare for a stronger White House push through intelligence briefings.

But it’s important to note that the moral anti-war case so often favored by progressives as the strongest argument, seems to be the weakest one at the moment. The biggest difference between Iraq and Syria is that in Iraq, the United States was starting a war with a stable country. In the case of Syria, the United States would theoretically be seeking to somehow reduce casualties in a civil war. That goal is seen as having a greater moral force, but it’s not at all clear that lobbing missiles into Syria will help accomplish that goal.

In this context, House progressives and their allies might do well to build a positive alternative case for credible action to manage the moral crisis in Syria without resorting to the pragmatic black hole of war footing.

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We just keep jumping off the building even though we can’t really fly

by digby

A video interlude for my friends who don’t like to read:

Alyssa Milano’s sex tape explains Syria. No really, it does:

Alyssa Milano Sex Tape from Alyssa Milano      

Via Jonathan Schwarz, the great George Carlin with the ugly truth:

And here are Stewart and Colbert. (Stewart brings up the same point at the end I’ve been making, which is that the US may be a super-power, but it doesn’t have super-powers. People really need to get over the idea that we do.

Enjoy.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

Colbert translates the administration’s “roll out”: “We don’t know what we want to do, we can’t do much and it doesn’t matter when we do it? Who’s with me?!”

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

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The next front in the war on reproductive freedom

by digby

Don’t miss this informative article by Linda Greenhouse on what’s at stake in the next Supreme Court abortion case. The case is so scientifically bogus it signals once again, in living color, just what a neanderthal culture we’re becoming.

It’s about medication abortion, which has the forced childbirth zealots in a near state of panic:

But if you think about it, it’s evident why opponents of abortion have begun to focus on the early nonsurgical procedure. Medical abortion is the ultimate in women’s reproductive empowerment and personal privacy. All it takes are two pills: mifepristone, sold as Mifeprex, which blocks the hormone progesterone, without which a pregnancy can’t continue, and misoprostol, taken two days later, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the early pregnancy. In many states, women can take the second pill at home.

As abortion clinics are forced to close because of onerous state regulations (54 clinics in 27 states have closed in the last three years, and many women live hundreds of miles from the nearest provider) and as women entering clinics often have to run a gauntlet of protesters seeking to “counsel” them (in its new term, the Supreme Court will hear a First Amendment challenge to a Massachusetts “bubble zone” law that keeps speakers 35 feet away from the entrance to a “reproductive health care facility”), medical abortion offers an end-run around the obstacles that for years have been a core part of opposition strategy.

That’s why, for example, 17 states have recently passed laws or issued regulations barring doctors from using video conferencing — “telemedicine” — to prescribe the abortion pills. Although video conferencing is increasingly popular in other medical settings, abortion is the only context in which states have sought to ban it. For a medical abortion, a nurse examines the woman by ultrasound as the doctor views the results over a video link. Having determined the stage of the pregnancy, the doctor then advises the woman on what to expect from the medication and dispenses the pills by sending a command that opens a drawer in the office. After taking the sequence of pills, the woman returns two weeks later for a follow-up visit.

We can’t have that.  Women must be forced to run the gauntlet of screeching harpies spouting bullshit in order to exercise their rights:

And naturally, the bans on this procedure are being spearheaded by yet another national anti-abortion group:

The law at issue in the Supreme Court case wasn’t drafted in Oklahoma. It was written in Chicago by an influential anti-abortion organization, Americans United for Life, and included as the “Abortion-Inducing Drugs Safety Act” among 30 model laws made available for sponsorship by state legislators. In the name of patient safety, the statute makes it a crime for doctors to deviate from the dosage and other instructions published by the Food and Drug Administration when it approved the medication in 2000.

This concern for off-label use is ridiculous. The off-label instruction is to reduce the dosage recommended by the FDA because after millions of medication abortion around the world and many thousands in the US, doctors now know that it doesn’t take as much of the drug to accomplish the same end. They are actually prescribing a much safer dose. And yet these creeps are making their case based upon the idea that the doctors are rogues who are hurting women’s health. But then these are the same people who claim to be helping women when they force 10 year old rape victims to go through a full term pregnancy and give birth. So, let’s just say they shouldn’t have much standing to hold any opinions on whether or not any medical procedure is either scientifically sound or philosophically moral.

Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent primer on one of the primary new reproductive rights fronts on which women are already fighting different states all over the country and will soon be dealing with on a national level. These people never give up.

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