TRUMP HAD HUMAN, SIGNALS, AND FISA INTELLIGENCE IN AN INSECURE ROOM AT MAR-A-LAGO FOR A YEAR

August 26, 2022/in 2020 Presidential Election, Leak Investigations /by emptywheel

Here’s the affidavit used to search the home and resort of the 45th President of the United States for classified documents he refused to return. My live tweet is here. I’ll do running updates in this thread. Here’s my earlier post on what the affidavit would include which accurately predicated a great deal of what was in here.

THE INVESTIGATION

The affidavit spends three paragraphs describing how, after NARA made a referral on February 9, 2022, the FBI opened an investigation to learn:

• How classified documents were removed from the White House
• Whether the storage facilities at Mar-a-Lago were suitable for storing classified materials
• Whether there were anymore classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere
• Who had removed and retained the documents in unauthorized spaces

In a probable cause paragraph, it explains that there were 15 boxes with classified information at Mar-a-Lago and there was probable cause to believe there were more.

There’s a redacted paragraph that may describe the basis for suspecting obstruction. A later sentence in the probable cause paragraph describes that there likely will be evidence of obstruction at MAL.

The affidavit explains that this is an investigation into (among other things) 18 USC 793e — which I was among the first people to predict. This means that DOJ maintains that Trump was not authorized to have these documents.

STATUTORY AUTHORITIES

As I predicted, there is a series of paragraphs that lay out the statutory authorities implicated. This tells us how sensitive the documents in question are.

It does not list the Atomic Energy Act.

It does have paragraphs defining:

• 18 USC 793(e), the Espionage Act
• EO 13526, the Executive Order governing classified information
• Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret classifications
• Secure Compartmented Information
• Special Intelligence, which is SIGINT
• HCS, which refers to clandestine human spying
•  FISA
• NOFORN, material not permissible to share with foreign governments
• Originator Controlled, meaning whoever created controls it
• Need to know
• 32 CFR Parts 2001 and 2003 which describes the Storage requirements for classified information
• 18 USC 1519, obstruction
• 18 USC 2071, willfully removing information
• 44 USC 2201, the Presidential Records Act
• 44 USC 3301(a), the Federal Records Act

NARA REFERRAL

Two paragraphs describe the NARA referral.

First, it describes the February 9, 2022 message to DOJ describing how Trump had “classified records [that were] unfoldered,” meaning their protective cover sheets were gone, “intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.

Former Watergate prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega described that this sounds like an old white collar crime technique.

There’s also a description, first, of the notice NARA gave to Carolyn Maloney as the Chair of the House Oversight Committee, and Trump’s response. It also included Trump’s statement in response falsely claiming he was raided.

REDACTED PACK-UP DESCRIPTION

There are four paragraphs that appear before the description of Trump’s move out of the White House. Those must include details about what was known of his pack-up.

BOXES CONTAINING DOCUMENTS WERE TRANSPORTED FROM THE WHITE HOUSE TO MAR-A-LAGO

There are eight paragraphs that start with a description of how he moved at least two trucks of stuff to Mar-a-Lago.

It’s unclear what the rest of this section describes (though it may include witness testimony about how things were unpacked). It also seems to quote from correspondence.

PROVISION OF THE FIFTEEN BOXES TO NARA

Nine paragraphs (and one footnote) describe the effort to retrieve the boxes. It describes the effort lasting from May 6, 2021 to “approximately late December 2021,” when NARA was informed there were 12 — not 15 — boxes ready to be retrieved.

That section ends with a redaction, possibly a Trump Text.

THE FIFTEEN BOXES PROVIDED TO NARA CONTAIN CLASSIFIED INFORMATION

What may be just two paragraphs describes what was found in the original 15 boxes: 184 documents bearing classification marks, including:

• 67 Confidential documents
• 92 Secret documents
• 25 Top Secret documents
• Others marked HCS, FISA, ORCON, NOFORN, and SI
• Some documents with Trump’s handwritten notes

TWO REDACTED DOCUMENTS

Paragraphs 49 and 50 are a separate section. They may describe evidence of obstruction.

A DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP’S REFUSAL TO RETURN MATERIALS [REDACTED TITLE]

Paragraphs 51 through 61 describe DOJ’s efforts to get Trump to return the rest. Most are redacted. The unredacted passages include:

• A May 5 letter from Evan Corcoran purporting to lay out “principles” covering the the President’s authority to declassify, asking NARA to share that letter with “any judicial officer who is asked to rule on any motion pertaining to this investigation.”
• A link to the Kash Patel post where he claimed Trump had declassified documents. (I accurately predicted these were related.)
• A description of the June 8 letter from Jay Bratt to Corcoran, informing him that the facilities were not authorized for classified information.

A footnote to the paragraph leading into that section distinguishes NDI from classified information. Clearly, Trump was claiming he had declassified everything, and DOJ was saying that didn’t matter.

SEVEN REDACTED PARAGRAPHS

This may explain the declaration Christina Bobb signed and reason DOJ believed it was false.

THERE IS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT DOCUMENTS CONTAINING CLASSIFIED NDI AND PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS REMAIN AT THE PREMISES

Seven paragraphs in this section are classified.

The eighth explains that the classified documents are likely to be in the STORAGE ROOM, FPOTUS’ residential suite (which is called Pine Hall), and the “45 Office.”

A mostly redacted paragraph describes where this stuff has been stored. After a redaction, it explains that the club is closed for the summer, and explains that rooms that are not currently occupied may be searched.

CONCLUSION

This is summary asking for proof of all three crimes.

SEALING

This is a standard sealing paragraph.

SEARCH PROCEDURES FOR HANDLING POTENTIAL ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGED INFORMATION

Four paragraphs describe that a taint team will conduct the search of Trump’s office. If it finds stuff that is privileged that DOJ wants to search, it provides three further ways to get it:

• An ex-parte determination of whether they are privileged
• Simple deferral of accessing the information
• Cooperation with Trump

This must be the stuff on the SSA receipt.

Update: Corrected something I thought was a heading but which was not.

 

HOW TO BE A HANDMAIDEN TO CORRUPTION, BARR MEMO PRESS COVERAGE EDITION

August 26, 2022/1 Comment/in 2016 Presidential Election, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel

Much of the coverage of the Barr Memo — written over a weekend after a 7-hour review of the Mueller Report to justify a public statement to Congress exonerating the former President — continues to magnify the corruption of Barr’s act, rather than expose it.

The memo makes numerous factual errors (errors that can be easily documented thanks to a public record liberated by Jason Leopold). One Judge — Amy Berman Jackson — issued a ruling saying that the memo doesn’t do what it claimed it did (deliberate about whether Trump could be charged). She even included a timeline to show her work. Three more Circuit Judges agreed with ABJ’s opinion that DOJ misrepresented what they claimed they had done — by saying they were making a prosecutorial decision rather than a public messaging decision — in an attempt to keep the memo under wraps.

You’d think that after four judges had called out DOJ for shenanigans with this memo, anyone remotely interested in performing the function of journalism would explain why those judges found the project so suspect, and the import of that to the actual claims made in the memo. CREW spent years doing the hard work of liberating the memo to make it easy for journalists!

Instead, numerous outlets simply parroted the language of the memo that four judges had ruled to be a messaging project, thereby treating the memo as a valid exercise of legal analysis and not a performance of corruption.

I’d like to pay tribute to some of the outlets that chose to be a handmaiden to corruption rather than journalists.

I should say, while I bitched about it the day of the release, the NYT improved their story by adding the work of Charlie Savage. (early version; later version) It still treats the focus on Don McGahn as real rather than tactical and chooses to primarily quote experts explaining the problems with the memo rather than lay that out directly. But it notes (as I did) that the memo doesn’t explain something that was at the core of Mueller’s obstruction analysis — pardons. It provides actual reporting explaining that Merrick Garland’s DOJ wasn’t hiding the substance of this when they fought to keep it sealed last year, they were making a “narrower legal” argument — presumably trying to preserve the exemption it had been sealed under (the b5A deliberative privilege).

After losing in court on Friday, the Justice Department had the option to appeal the case. But the department’s senior leadership decided to release the document, according to a senior official in federal law enforcement. The leadership never opposed airing its contents, but had contested its release on narrower legal grounds, the person added.

Compare that with some of the stenography that remains untouched.

Eric Tucker, Memo sheds light on decision to clear Trump in Russia probe (AP)

Unsurprisingly, Eric Tucker ignores the opinions from four judges who called out this memo and spends three paragraphs ignoring the evidence that this was a hash job instead describing it as a record of “how two of the department’s senior-most leaders arrived at that conclusion,” something the judicial record says it’s not. He then spends seven paragraphs rehashing part of Steven Engel and Ed O’Callaghan’s argument, never calling out factual errors and ignoring their even more problematic treatment of witness tampering. Only after that does Tucker explain that two courts (he only mentions the Circuit) deemed that it had been improperly withheld, without explaining why. Finally, in the last two paragraphs, he quotes from CREW about the substance of the memo, as if he doesn’t have the competence to assess it himself.

Ryan Lucas, DOJ releases a Mueller-era memo to Barr on the decision not to prosecute Trump (NPR)

Unlike the AP, NPR didn’t claim, in its headline, that this memo actually did represent the decision-making process. But Ryan Lucas dedicated much of his story on the memo — paragraphs three and four, and then nine through eleven — parroting the claimed rationale of the lawyers. It describes the rebukes from the judges this way: “A district court judge and a panel of circuit court judges disagreed and ordered its release.” That leaves him free to pitch the question of Barr’s exoneration of Trump (which he calls “declin[ing] to prosecute Trump”) as a he-said, she-said affair, pitting CREW and 1,000 former prosecutors against Trump and his supporters. Lucas ends the piece by describing the current investigation into whether Trump violated the Espionage Act and obstructed an investigation by refusing to return classified documents an investigation into “storing presidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.”

Robert Legare, Government lawyers advised Barr not to bring obstruction charges against Trump after Mueller report, newly-released memo reveals (CBS)

Of 28 paragraphs in this story, twelve report the claimed analysis of the memo unfiltered, as if it really was a predecisional declination memo, as if it really did analyze the entirety of the report, as if it was factually accurate. It dedicates four paragraphs to more recent efforts of Barr and the others involved to justify their decisions or separate themselves from Trump. Rather than describing the years-long fight featuring judges repeatedly calling out both the project of the memo itself and the means by which it was hidden, Legare described only that it, “was ordered unsealed by an Appeals Court after a FOIA request and subsequent lawsuit were filed seeking its release.” Ultimately, then, this article treats the memo as something the judges say it’s not — a view that would be reinforced by an assessment of the actual claims made against the now-public record of the investigation itself.

Ryan J. Reilly and Dareh Gregorian, DOJ releases unredacted memo to Barr on Trump, obstruction in Mueller probe (NBC)

Reilly interrupted breaking a story about an important January 6 militia arrest the other day to cover this live and did a pretty good job on the air. But in the write-up with Dareh Gregorian, they spend paragraphs three through eight quoting at length from the memo. Along the way, they claim the memo “dismiss[ed] Mueller’s concerns about Trump’s … dangling of pardons to some witnesses,” rather than calling it out for ignoring pardons entirely. While the piece noted that Barr “announced that the Justice Department would not prosecute the case the same day the memo was sent to him” and described ABJ’s ruling that, “Barr’s mind had already been made up before the memo was written,” thereby hinting that the memo was just a messaging project, they don’t consider the import of that sequence for the analysis itself. And rather than identifying the problems of the memo themselves, they describe that, “many people strongly disagreed with the analysis laid out in the memo,” and explicitly identify CREW as ” left-leaning,” treating the actual substance as something inaccessible to them and so just a matter for ongoing political dispute.

Alexander Mallin, DOJ releases memo behind Barr’s decision not to prosecute Trump for obstruction (ABC)

To his credit, in the five paragraphs describing what led to the release of the memo with which Alexander Malin starts his coverage, he describes the judges concluding that, “Barr and other DOJ officials were not candid in their statements about the role the memo played in their decision to not charge Trump.” Which makes it all the more mystifying why he dedicates eleven paragraphs of his story quoting the memo at length, with no fact-checking or push-back, as if it the memo really was real analysis that led to Barr’s decision to make an announcement that he wouldn’t have charged Trump if he could have.

I get it. This memo came out amid a flood of news, especially for those of us on the DOJ beat. I get that people rushed to do quick analyses so they could go back to watching dockets in Florida, Georgia, and DC.

But what happened with this memo — four judges overriding a b5 exemption based on their assessment that DOJ misrepresented the function of the memo — is virtually unprecedented. That, by itself, should lead reporters to scrutinize the memo (or at least the process) for the kind of dishonesty the judges judged it was, rather than treating it as a transparent record of legal analysis that ABJ already showed it’s not. All the more so when, as is the case here, thousands of pages recording the underlying evidence (evidence that the authors of the memo explicitly say they’re not going to cite) are publicly available.

If you’re reporting on a document that DOJ made false claims in an attempt to keep secret, parroting what it says at length, with no discussion of why DOJ made misrepresentations to keep it secret, with no effort on your own to test whether what it says is any more true than what was said to keep it hidden, you’re doing readers a disservice.

Four judges and CREW (plus Leopold, with his earlier Mueller Report FOIA) have given you an easy way to reassess what Bill Barr did to pre-empt the results of the Mueller Report in 2019. To instead simply repeat his past claims or those whom he ordered (and worked with) to justify a pre-ordained result is not journalism.

"Texas miracle died in Uvalde": Mysterious billboards urge people not to move to Texas


AUGUST 26, 2022 / 

CBS NEWS
LOCAL NEWS


A billboard recently put up in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood referencing the recent school massacre in Uvalde, Texas has people wondering who put it up and why, CBS Bay Area's Reed Cowan reports.

Featuring an ominous-looking man in a hoodie and sunglasses, the sign reads, "The Texas miracle died in Uvalde. Don't move to Texas."

CBS Bay Area spotted the billboard as the massacre was making national headlines again. The Uvalde schools police chief was fired this week in the wake of sharp criticism of his department's response to the May shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

A billboard with the messages "The Texas Miracle Died in Uvalde" and "Don't move to Texas" located in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, August 25, 2022.CBS

Sophia Roane is a Texas teacher who recently moved to San Francisco, one of two California cities where the billboard looms large. Another one was reportedly spotted in Los Angeles.

CBS Bay Area saw her taking a picture of the sign to send back to her family in Texas.

"I stopped and took a picture because it's Texas. I'm from Austin. You have to be strong in your messaging. This is so important. These are kids, these are elementary school kids," Roane said.

Across the street, CBS Bay Area chatted with Jamal Abraham, who works at a lube oil and filter shop. Abraham says his customers are curious.

"They're asking who did it, how long has it been up. And I'm curious to know as well," Abraham said. "Don't move to Texas - that's a pretty bold statement."

CBS Bay Area reached out to the sign company whose name is associated with the billboard to see who paid for it and why. The company hadn't replied as of Thursday evening.

Some refugees stay in temporary status for up to 26 years – how they still manage to create homes and communities

THE CONVERSATION

Published: August 26, 2022 

More than 6.5 million Ukrainian war refugees are now scattered across Europe and North America, most with temporary emergency residency allowing them to stay in host countries for one to three years.

But roughly half a year into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war looks unlikely to end soon. Ukrainians may be unable to return to their home country for years to come.

They are not alone in their plight.

Refugees from around the world are living with displacement longer than they did three decades ago. Host countries in North America and Europe that traditionally granted refugees permanent resettlement are increasingly offering temporary status only. At the same time, the displaced population is rising. In 2021, the United Nations estimated more than 89 million people worldwide were forced to flee their homes, up from 43 million in 2012.

Today, the average refugee remains in a state of temporary residence for 10 to 26 years, up from about nine years in 1993.

Our academic research focuses on what refugees and other displaced people do to make homes for themselves even as their lives remain in flux – sometimes for decades on end.

Understanding these practices could help create more pragmatic refugee policies. As migration becomes increasingly more common and more necessary, laws that stand in the way of the universal human need to make a home also prevent societies from learning how to cope with refugee crises.
Practices of survival and sustenance

Between 1990 and 2018 we conducted wide-ranging research with long-term refugees and other displaced people in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and North America. Our work shows that displaced people find creative ways to settle into life despite refugee policies that keep them in limbo.

From Sudanese refugees living in Egypt to Georgians and Sri Lankans displaced within their own countries, we found that most started making homes quickly. They sent their children to school, cooked meals and scrounged furniture.

These daily practices are essential for “holding things together,” our research participants told us, with many of them explaining that they had to keep going because of their children.

Most of the refugees also kept their living space clean, whether it was a room in an abandoned hotel, a tent or a shelter. They have shown us that maintaining and modifying one’s living space is essential for a feeling of autonomy, dignity and respect.

These observations are supported by other research on displaced people. In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina survivors who were residing in FEMA trailers that they were not allowed to personalize showed poor health outcomes and depression after a few years in these conditions.

Those who aren’t refugees can likely relate to these feelings. People try to make home even when they do not feel at home, in ways many people would recognize.

Ukrainians walk toward a refugee shelter set up in an exhibition hall in Dresden, Germany, in March 2022. Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images

While daily practices of survival and sustenance are important, refugees need more to create homes in exile. For one of our studies, co-author Anita Fabos accompanied Sudanese refugees living in exile in Cairo, Egypt, on daily visits to other Sudanese families.

One hot summer afternoon, she went on a 10-hour social tour of the city with a 26-year-old secretary named Khalda after she finished work. They set off on foot to a nearby Sudanese human rights office for a quick visit with Khalda’s activist friends, then took the Metro several stops to board a minibus that took them an hour outside of Cairo to greet a newly arrived Sudanese refugee family over tea and biscuits. Back in her own neighborhood, Khalda paid several more calls to fellow Sudanese.

Khalda’s social rounds were an exhausting daily ritual. But for Sudanese in Egypt, giving and receiving hospitality was a way to rebuild their communal sense of home in a new and insecure place.
What is home?

Our work also reveals that “home” means different things to different people. It can be a house, a familiar ritual, a homeland or social relations – or many things at once.

This multifaceted understanding of home was reflected in a young displaced man co-author Cathrine Brun interviewed in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s. Home, for him, was the place he had been forced to leave nine years earlier. At the same time, he felt at home in the familiar camp where he lived because he knew everyone around him. When the young man left the camp, he sometimes faced abuse by locals who called him a “refugee.” Only then did he feel homeless.

Listening to refugees and displaced people share their home-making strategies showed us that “home” does not refer just to a person’s country of origin.

Instead, refugees develop what we call “constellations of home.” They participate in daily life locally while remaining connected to other home places. They nurture relationships, memories and ideals as additional dimensions of their home constellations.
Policy limbo

For refugee agencies, however – and often news stories about refugees – “home” generally refers only to a specific country.

International policy recognizes only three “durable solutions” to refugee displacement. Ideally, conditions in the country of origin improve enough for refugees can return. Alternatively, host countries allow refugees to naturalize and build new lives. If neither is possible, refugees may be sent permanently to a third country.

Refugee status, in other words, is designed to be temporary; it is resolved internationally, either by being taken in or taken back. But as conflicts persist and host countries increasingly resist offering refugees a permanent new home, more people are becoming “permanently temporary” instead.

Our research argues against rigid policies that treat refugees as homeless until they are absorbed back into the international system. By understanding our constellations of home model, refugee agencies and host countries could move past trying to achieve “durable solutions” that are scarce and have the real-world effect of keeping people in limbo.

Take Egypt’s approach to Sudanese refugees in the early 1990s.

Sudanese in Cairo rented their own apartments, sent their children to local schools and set up self-help organizations largely on their own. They were free to move across the city, visiting one another and creating a homey feeling of life “back in Sudan.”

Because neither Egypt nor the U.N. imposed temporary conditions on their exile, they could recreate livelihoods even while dispersed: Many left to find work in wealthy Arab Gulf countries, sending money to family members still in Cairo and returning to visit.

Egypt was not Sudan. But Sudanese refugees in Cairo managed to create constellations of home while on the move because they had the freedoms and rights necessary to do so.

A refugee policy that incorporates the constellations of home model is more than a self-reliance strategy. It can work only when all dimensions of the constellation – from daily practices of survival to feelings of community membership and the ability to plan for the future – are fulfilled.

As the war in Ukraine rages on, both host societies and refugees themselves would benefit by moving beyond the politics of limbo and toward recognizing that home is more than just a country.

Authors

Anita H. Fábos
Professor of International Development, Community, and Environment, Clark University

Anita H. Fábos receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Research presented in this article was funded by the Social Science Research Council, the Population Council, the Mellon Foundation, and Clark University.

Cathrine Brun
Deputy Director for Research, Centre for Lebanese Studies at Lebanese American University
Cathrine Brun receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Research Council of Norway, The International Development Research Centre (Canada) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. In addition to her affiliation with the Lebanese American University, she is a professor (part-time) at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice, Oxford Brookes University, and a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.
Partners

A cafe in Cairo, Egypt, that is predominantly visited by Sudanese migrants, in August 2017. Oliver Weiken/picture alliance via Getty Images

How Medicare for All Would Affect Union Health Plans

Medicare for All would save IUPAT members $4,868 to $7,866 per year.

3P ORIGINAL REPORT NO.019

BY Matt Bruenig and Jon Walker
August 17th, 2020

Download Full Report


In the political discourse around health care reform, commentators frequently raise concerns about the effect of any given reform on union health plans. In this paper, we use data provided by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) to determine what the net financial impact of implementing Medicare for All or Bidencare would be on their members. In short, we find that Medicare for All would save their members $4,868 to $7,866 per year while Bidencare could save them $676 to $3,253 per year if they take advantage of new individual exchange subsidies.
Union Health Plans

In a normal employer health plan, an individual firm provides insurance to the workers employed by the firm. In a union health plan, also known as a multiemployer plan or a Taft-Hartley plan, a union and various employers establish a separate trust fund that jointly administers an insurance plan. During collective bargaining, the union agrees to forego wages so that the employers can contribute money to the trust fund, which then uses that money to provide health benefits to the union’s workers.



This structure has a few main advantages not found in single-employer plans. First, the larger size of multiemployer plans allows them to be more administratively efficient and allows them to negotiate better rates from third-party insurers. Second, in industries where workers frequently move between firms, such as the construction industry where IUPAT represents workers, the multiemployer nature of the plans means that workers can retain coverage even as they move from job to job. Lastly, unions can use the enticement of a multiemployer plan to assist in organizing workplaces that are not currently unionized.

But these advantages don’t insulate the plans from the general problems of the overall healthcare system. Ever-escalating healthcare prices have consistently increased the per-member costs of the funds, requiring unions to continually forego wage increases in order to free up money for employers to contribute to the funds. Plan members also face the prospect of dropping their insurance or having to pay hefty out-of-pocket premiums if they lose their job, have their hours cut, or change jobs to an employer who does not participate in the multiemployer plan.

Multiemployer plans are also uniquely vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks that cause large amounts of prolonged unemployment, such as the shock coinciding with the coronavirus pandemic. This is because many multiemployer plans base eligibility for benefits on how many hours a member worked in the last quarter or even sometimes in the last calendar year. This lagging eligibility criteria means that, during a mass disemployment event, the funds stop receiving employer contributions even though their members continue to be eligible for benefits based on their prior work record. When this happens, fund reserves are quickly depleted, threatening the solvency of the health plan.
Medicare for All

In order to determine the effect of moving to a Medicare for All system, we used detailed wage and health plan information from three IUPAT locals and compared the status quo arrangement to what would prevail under Medicare for All. The results are summed up in the following graph.


Bidencare

We did the same thing with the Bidencare proposal. Unlike Medicare for All, the Bidencare proposal lacks a number of key details, such as the precise sliding scale that will be used to determine exchange subsidies and what the employer shared-responsibility payment will be. We filled in those gaps with reasonable guesses in order to produce the graph below.



This graph assumes that the union and employers agree to stop providing health insurance so that the workers can buy an individual exchange plan using Biden’s proposed individual exchange subsidies.
Conclusion

Combining the Medicare for All and Bidencare graphs together producesthe following graph.



As a historical matter, it was smart for unions to take advantage of the Taft-Hartley Act to create multiemployer union health plans for their members. One of the things that gets lost in the discussion about healthcare reform is how similar Medicare for All is to these union plans. What unions recognized long ago is that it is much better for workers to create a central healthcare fund that many employers contribute into than to have a bunch of independent plans organized within each company. Medicare for All is just the logical extension of this insight to the whole economy. It is, in a sense, just one big multiemployer fund.

In light of the coronavirus catastrophe and the objective superiority of Medicare for All to existing union health plans—in terms of cost, solvency, and continuity of coverage—we believe that unions like IUPAT should take a stance in favor of Medicare for All for the benefit of their own members and the working class generally.


A think tank for the develop­ment of an econ­omic system that serves the many, not the few.

People's Policy Project is supported by over 1,800 small donors pledging $5–15 per month. This funding source allows us to do our work without being compromised by the corporate money other think tanks rely on. Learn more.Support on Patreon
Support on ActBlue

Biden administration to declare

'forever chemicals' hazardous substances

FILE PHOTO: Signage is seen at the headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, D.C.

Fri, August 26, 2022

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration said on Friday it will propose designating certain "forever chemicals" as hazardous substances under the nation's Superfund program, in a bid to spark cleanup of countless sites that have been found contaminated by the toxic industrial compounds.

The proposal would require companies to report leaks of two of the most widely used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and pay for cleanups, and would also provide public funds for cleanups when the culprits cannot be found.

PFAS chemicals -- widely used to make household products from nonstick cookware to food packaging -- have in recent years been found in dangerous concentrations in drinking water, soils and foods across the country. Because the substances do not break down quickly, they can build up in the body where they have been linked to illnesses ranging from heart problems to low birthweights.

"Communities have suffered far too long from exposure to these forever chemicals," said Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "Under this proposed rule, EPA will both help protect communities from PFAS pollution and seek to hold polluters accountable for their actions."

Environmental groups and some lawmakers praised the proposal as a step toward solving a sprawling national issue.

"With this announcement, the tens of millions of Americans who live near a PFAS-contaminated site can finally rest easier knowing that help is on the way," said U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, a Democrat.

Representatives of U.S. chemicals makers, including the America Chemistry Council, have opposed the proposal to designate PFAS chemicals as hazardous, calling it expensive and ineffective in cleaning up contaminated sites.

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Rami Ayyub; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

EPA to designate ‘forever chemicals’ as hazardous substances
By MATTHEW DALY

yesterday

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan speaks at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro, N.C., April 14, 2022. The EPA is designating some toxic industrial compounds used in cookware, carpets and firefighting foams as hazardous substances under the so-called Superfund law.

 (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency moved Friday to designate two “forever chemicals” used in cookware, carpets and firefighting foams as hazardous substances, a step that would clear the way for quicker cleanup of the toxic compounds, which have been linked to cancer and other health problems.

Designation as a hazardous substance under the so-called Superfund law doesn’t ban the chemicals. But it requires that releases of PFOA and PFOS into soil or water be reported to federal, state or tribal officials if they meet or exceed certain levels. The EPA could then require cleanups to protect public health and recover cleanup costs.

PFOA and PFOS have been voluntarily phased out by U.S. manufacturers but are still in limited use and remain in the environment because they do not degrade over time. The compounds are part of a larger cluster of “forever chemicals” known as PFAS that have been used in consumer products and industry since the 1940s. The term is short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which have been used in nonstick frying pans, water-repellent sports gear, stain-resistant rugs, cosmetics and countless other consumer products.

The chemicals can accumulate and persist in the human body for long periods of time, and evidence from animal and human studies indicates that exposure to PFOA or PFOS may lead to cancer or other health problems.

“Communities have suffered far too long from exposure to these forever chemicals,″ EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Friday. “The action announced today will improve transparency and advance EPA’s aggressive efforts to confront this pollution.”

Under the proposed rule, “EPA will both help protect communities from PFAS pollution and seek to hold polluters accountable for their actions,″ Regan said. The rule is expected to become final next year.

The Superfund law allows the EPA to clean up contaminated sites and forces parties responsible for the contamination to either perform cleanups or reimburse the government for EPA-led cleanup work. When no responsible party can be identified, Superfund gives EPA money and authority to clean up contaminated sites.

The EPA’s action follows a recent report by the National Academies of Science that calls PFAS a serious public health threat in the U.S. and worldwide. It comes after an EPA announcement in June that PFOA and PFOS are more dangerous than previously thought and pose health risks even at levels so low they cannot currently be detected.

The agency issued nonbinding health advisories that set health risk thresholds for PFOA and PFOS to near zero, replacing 2016 guidelines that had set them at 70 parts per trillion. The chemicals are found in products including cardboard packaging, carpets and firefighting foam and increasingly found in drinking water.

The EPA said in a statement that it is focused on holding responsible companies that manufactured and released significant amounts of PFOA and PFOS into the environment and will not target individual landowners or farmers “who may have been inadvertently impacted by the contamination.″ The agency also said it is committed to further outreach and engagement to hear from communities affected by PFAS pollution.

Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the announcement an important step to clean up hundreds of contaminated sites across the country and protect millions of families exposed to the toxic chemicals.

“Listing PFOA and PFOS as hazardous under Superfund law should allow EPA to hold polluters responsible for that contamination,” he said. “Ratepayers and public utilities should not be footing the bill for industry’s decades of wonton use of these dangerous chemicals.”

Attorney Rob Bilott, an anti-PFAS advocate, said the EPA’s proposal “sends a loud and clear message to the entire world that the United States is finally acknowledging and accepting the now overwhelming evidence that these man-made poisons present substantial danger to the public health and the environment.”

Bilott, whose work to uncover the widespread presence of PFAS chemicals in the environment and in human blood was highlighted in the 2019 film “Dark Waters,″ said the EPA must work to ensure that costs of cleaning up the toxins are borne by PFAS manufacturers that caused the contamination — “not the innocent victims of this pollution who didn’t create the toxins and were never warned any of this was ever happening.”

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said she supports strong action to address PFAS contamination in West Virginia and across the country but was concerned about “the unintended consequences that today’s proposal could have.″

If finalized, “property owners, farmers, employers, essential utilities and individuals may be liable for unknowingly having PFAS on their land, even if it was there years or even generations prior to ownership and came from an unknown source,″ Capito said.

She urged the EPA to develop an enforceable drinking water standard to promote the health and safety of all Americans.

The American Chemistry Council, which represents major chemical companies, called the EPA’s proposal “an expensive, ineffective and unworkable means to achieve remediation for these chemicals.″

Listing the chemicals under Superfund could harm local fire departments, water utilities, small businesses, airports and farmers, the group said. “The proposed (Superfund) designation would impose tremendous costs on these parties without defined cleanup standards,″ the council said in a statement.

The EPA said it expects to propose national drinking water regulations for PFOA and PFOS later this year, with a final rule expected in 2023.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Environmental Protection Agency at https://apnews.com/hub/us-environmental-protection-agency.

Virginia site taken off EPA's Superfund list after cleanup

US launches process to set Idaho mercury pollution standards

Federal judge orders Puerto Rico landfill to stop operating

Meeting set to discuss Memphis medical sterilizing plant

Activists face arrest but push on with 'Hong Kong parliament' plan, hatched in Canada

Vancouver journalist Victor Ho says the threat of arrest announced by the Hong Kong Security Bureau on Aug. 3 had not deterred him or fellow organizers


Author of the article:
The Canadian Press
Nono Shen
Publishing date:Aug 26, 2022 • 

Journalist Victor Ho poses for a photograph in Richmond, B.C., 

on Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022. 

PHOTO BY DARRYL DYCK /THE CANADIAN PRESS

Activists who launched a plan in Canada to elect an unofficial “Hong Kong parliament” say they are pushing ahead with the project, despite being put under investigation for subversion by authorities in the Chinese territory.

Vancouver journalist Victor Ho said the threat of arrest announced by the Hong Kong Security Bureau on Aug. 3 had not deterred him or fellow organizers who were working “full gear” to stage the symbolic online election in late 2023 or early 2024.

“Instead, I feel it is ridiculous that a government which never represents its own people now wants to bring me and other activists to justice,” said Ho in an interview conducted in Mandarin.

The parliament plan was launched in Toronto on July 23 by Ho, U.S.-based Hong Kong businessman Elmer Yuen and U.S.-based former Hong Kong legislator Baggio Leung.

It proposes online elections, with voting by Hong Kong residents and members of the Hong Kong diaspora around the world.

Ho said the goal was to establish a parliament that “can truly reflect the will of Hong Kongers.”

Hong Kong’s democratic movement has experienced major setbacks since large-scale protests in 2019, including the mass arrest of pro-democracy figures, the shutdown of media organizations and sweeping changes to the electoral system.

Only “patriots” are eligible for election in Hong Kong under a 2021 law passed by China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress.

Hong Kong’s Security Bureau said it “severely condemns” Ho, Yuen and Leung, and police would “spare no efforts in pursuing the cases in accordance with the law in order to bring the offenders to justice.”

The Security Bureau said in an online statement that people should “dissociate themselves from individuals contravening the Hong Kong National Security Law, and the illegal activities those individuals organized, so as to avoid bearing any unnecessary legal risks.”

It said Ho, Leung and Yuen were being investigated for subversion, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment under the security law.

The Security Bureau said in response to questions that it would not comment on individual cases, despite having named all three men in its online statement. But it said anyone who violated the security law, regardless of their background or where they are located, would be dealt with by the Hong Kong government in accordance with the law.

Leung, who left Hong Kong on 2020, said the threat of arrest had made him more determined to make the parliament plan a reality, providing Hong Kongers around the world with a platform to be heard.

With street protests effectively banned in Hong Kong under pandemic rules, the unofficial parliament would allow Hong Kongers “to discuss, debate or argue with each other even though they might not agree,” said Leung.

Yuen said the prospect of investigation and arrest was “not a big deal” for him although it had shocked some of his family members.

“We know we have to pay a price,” said Yuen, who was visiting Germany to ask representatives from the European Union to endorse the “Hong Kong parliament” plan.

Ho said voting would be open to anyone who had lived in Hong Kong for at least seven years, and was over 16.

“No matter where you are located, inside or outside of Hong Kong, you can participate in the voting process,” said Ho, a former editor-in-chief of Sing Tao Daily, a Chinese-language newspaper published in Canada.

The parliament would be founded on “the principle of universal suffrage and will truly represent the voices and interests of Hong Kongers around the world,” said Ho.

“If you bring democracy back to Hong Kongers, they know how to make the best out of it,” said Ho.

Hong Kongers had demonstrated their “democratic spirit” in official 2019 district elections, said Ho. Pro-democracy candidates won more than 80 per cent of seats, with a record turnout of 71 per cent, in what became the last polls staged in Hong Kong before the revamping of election laws.

Ho said Toronto was chosen to launch the project because of the city’s large number of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers, making it easier to hire staff and volunteers.

Yuen said Toronto was also selected for having a large group of “financially more stable” Hong Kongers.

Ho said he was visited by officers from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service last week in light of the Hong Kong Security Bureau’s remarks.

Although Ho brushed off threats to his safety, Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan and Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson said the situation was “gravely concerning,” in a letter last week to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly.

Bill Chu, a spokesperson for the Chinese-Canadian Concern Group on the Chinese Communist Party’s Human Rights Violations advocacy group, said Hong Kong was trying to exert “extraterritorial power” over Ho, and Canadian authorities should condemn it.

“Who will be the next to be added on the wanted list? It can be you or me since the NSL (National Security Law) lacks clarity and its application becomes so unpredictable now,” said Chu.

Public Safety Canada said there were support mechanisms in place for people facing state-backed harassment and intimidation.

Ho said that being on a “wanted list” meant he would never again visit relatives and friends in Hong Kong, or see the city where he grew up.

But he said he felt no regrets, and Canada was his home.

“Just like I chose to become a reporter when I was young, my goal and belief is to protect and always fight for the public’s interest,” he said.

“I have been staying true to myself from the beginning and my heart has no place for any regret or fear.”

There were more than 208,000 Hong Kong-born people living in Canada according to the 2016 census.

Canadian authorities have meanwhile estimated there are about 300,000 Canadian citizens living in Hong Kong, a figure cited by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland in 2020.

What is behind US clashes with ‘Iran-backed’ fighters in Syria?

Escalation comes after months of calm and amid productive ongoing talks to restore the Iranian nuclear deal.
A US military convoy rides at the countryside of Deir Az Zor in northeastern Syria

 [File: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP]

By Umut Uras
Published On 26 Aug 2022

Three separate days of skirmishes this week between the United States’s military forces and reportedly Iranian-backed militias in Syria have put the spotlight on the US presence in the country, just as indirect negotiations to salvage the Iran nuclear deal enter what appears to be the final stage.

US President Joe Biden said on Thursday that US attacks killed four fighters in eastern Syria, adding that Washington’s action aimed at protecting its forces from attacks by Iran-backed armed groups in the region.

“I directed the August 23 strikes to protect and defend the safety of our personnel … and to deter the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran-backed militia groups from conducting or supporting further attacks on United States personnel and facilities,” Biden said in a statement to the US Congress over his decision to take military action.

Iran has denied the groups involved are backed by Tehran, or that the targets were linked to it and has called for US forces to withdraw from Syria.

Biden said the attacks had shelled a facility used by the groups for logistics and ammunition storage and were a response to raids on the US and its allies in the region.

Three US service members also suffered minor injuries on Wednesday, when armed groups launched rocket attacks at two military bases in northeast Syria, according to US Central Command, adding that US forces killed the four suspected fighters in response.

Jean-Loup Samaan, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute in Singapore, said the recent US raids look like tit-for-tat exchanges rather than a considerable military escalation.

“If we follow the statements from the US government, the logic so far does not seem to be to escalate but to restore some kind of status quo between both sides,” Samaan told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t think the idea was to connect the developments in Syria to the ongoing nuclear talks, in fact, it’s probably the opposite,” the analyst said.

“It also reminds us that the deal at stake won’t solve all the issues on the table, as we saw back in 2015 the deal had no effect on other regional issues,” he added.

The escalation between the two sides might threaten the talks to salvage the nuclear agreement between important world powers, led by the US, and Iran.

Negotiations to restore the agreement have ramped up in recent months, more than four years after former US President Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the deal, which aims to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in return for the lifting of sanctions on the country.

The sides have been exchanging amendments to what is called a “final text” to the deal in the scope of the talks.

US internal politics

Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at the University of Tehran believes that the recent escalation in Iran stems from domestic US politics ahead of upcoming mid-term polls in the country.

“Biden wants to be seen as a strong leader in front of the American political class and people before the upcoming [mid-term] elections, and also because now we are close to a nuclear deal,” Marandi said from Tehran, adding that the forces attacked are present in the country with the approval of the Syrian government to fight the ISIL (ISIS) group (ISIS).

As well as fighting ISIL, the militias fighting in support of the Syrian government played an active role in defeating the Syrian opposition across vast swathes of the country.

Marandi added that “the illegal US attacks” seem to be calculated as the reported damage caused by them was limited, and therefore not affect the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran.

“The American troops are careful not to overly escalate the situation without large damage or cost, which also shows that the move is more about internal politics than regional issues,” Marandi said.

The 2022 US mid-term elections will be held on November 8. The candidates will compete for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate.


SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

 

James Madison v. Originalism

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Aug 26, 2022

ALISON L. LACROIX

Judicial conservatives in the United States frequently cite a caricatured James Madison to justify their "originalist" approach to constitutional interpretation. But the real Madison was a complex thinker who thought his successors should have the power to judge how his words would be interpreted.

CHICAGO – The US Supreme Court’s recent rulings on cases involving guns, abortion, climate change, tribal sovereignty, religion in schools, and individuals’ ability to sue government officials for rights violations have uncorked a torrent of commentary about the ascendance of “originalism” among the six-justice conservative majority. The text of the US Constitution, on this view, means only what its authors intended or what readers at the time it was written would have understood it to mean. “History Triumphs at Supreme Court,” declared one recent headline. “Supreme Court Again Nods to History, Tradition in Religion Case,” asserted another.

As a historian and constitutional law scholar, I am troubled by this framing. It is simply false to suggest that the Court’s conservative majority is doing anything that resembles “history.”

Originalists would have us believe that constitutional interpretation is quite simple. The late justice Antonin Scalia, one of originalism’s most influential exponents, argued that the Constitution “is not living but dead” – and “enduring.” The Constitution “means today not what current society, much less the courts, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”

What, then, is meant by the Second Amendment’s reference to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” or the Fourteenth Amendment’s language about “due process” and “equal protection of the laws”? Originalism insists that there is a single correct answer to such questions, and that the only alternative is to have judges simply making things up as they go. If we don’t want “current society” or “the courts” telling us what they think the Constitution ought to mean, Scalia warned, we must commit to “what it meant when it was adopted.”

The problem, of course, is that determining what the text of the Constitution meant when it was adopted is a complex undertaking. Historians have a word for this process: “research.” It involves a lot of reading and a lot of time, until the researcher has immersed herself in a context that is entirely different from her own. The people living through the drafting of the Constitution (1787), the ratification of the Bill of Rights (1791), or the Reconstruction amendments (1865, 1868, and 1870) saw things differently, and used words differently, from how their own predecessors did – and from how people do today.

History is an empirical discipline. Historians form hypotheses and test them based on the available evidence, not on theory or logic alone. To ascertain what a legal text meant at any point in time, one must examine how people talked about it at that time. In the case of the Constitution, we have ample evidence not only of how the founders talked about the text, but also of how they thought their handiwork and specific legal issues should be talked about.

Consider James Madison. Originalists and the conservative Federalist Society frequently cite a caricatured version of Madison as their ideal founding father. But the real Madison was a complex and contradictory thinker and politician who had concrete ideas about how constitutional interpretation should be undertaken.

In 1830, when Madison was 79 years old and living in retirement on his Virginia plantation, he conducted a remarkable correspondence with Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, who was advising and essentially speaking on behalf of President Andrew Jackson. These letters make clear that the father of the Constitution was no originalist.

Van Buren and Jackson had written to the elderly Madison because they wanted his advice, as the “last of the fathers” still living, on one of the most pressing policy debates of the day: federal funding for public works projects (“internal improvements”) such as roads and canals. Jackson had recently vetoed an appropriations bill that would have funded the federal government’s purchase of stock in a company that was building a road in Maysville, Kentucky. In an effort to justify his decision, Jackson laced it with references to previous presidents’ vetoes of similar legislation, including one by Madison in 1817. As the dutiful go-between, Van Buren sent the Maysville Road Veto Message to Madison.

The father of the Constitution responded to this show of respect from his successors by telling them that they had misunderstood him. Jackson’s veto message, Madison wrote, had “not rightly conceived the intention” Madison had in vetoing the 1817 bill. Madison’s intent on that earlier occasion had been to reject specific aspects of the bill that he considered to be beyond Congress’s power, including ones that Jackson now seemed willing to permit. Madison was able to explain what he had meant in 1817, demonstrating that Jackson’s plain reading of his predecessor’s words was wrong.

But even more important is what the Madison of 1830 thought should happen as a result of his correcting the record: nothing. Madison declined to instruct Jackson, and he rejected Van Buren’s offer to issue a “formal correction.” Instead, Madison explicitly stated that neither his own intention in 1817 nor “the general understanding at the time” of the earlier veto could or should control its meaning in 1830.

Only 13 years had passed, but Madison believed that the meaning of that legal text was now beyond the control of its author. “I am aware that the document must speak for itself, and that intention cannot be substituted for the established rules of interpretation,” he wrote. “Whether the language employed duly conveyed the meaning of which J.M. retains the consciousness” was “a question on which he does not presume to judge for others.”

Madison insisted that meaning was to be determined by a later community of readers, in a later context. The author disavowed the power to “judge for others” how his words would be interpreted. As We the People continue to digest the Court’s recent decisions, let us correct the soon-to-be historical record of our own moment. Instead of headlines trumpeting false victories for “history,” let us be real Madisonians. The last of the founders would tell us to abandon the fruitless, fatuous search for a singular fixed intention and urge us to take up the difficult work of interpretation.

Enjoy unlimited access to the ideas and opinions of the world’s leading thinkers, including long reads, book reviews, topical collections, short-form analysis and predictions, and exclusive interviews; every new issue of the PS Quarterly magazine (print and digital); the complete PS archive; and more. Subscribe now to PS Premium.



ALISON L. LACROIX
Writing for PS since 2022
1 Commentary
Alison L. LaCroix, a former member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, is Professor of Law and an associate member of the History Department at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalism (Yale University Press, 2023).

Fauci compares monkeypox outbreak to HIV epidemic, advises against making the same assumptions

BY JOSEPH CHOI - 08/25/22 

The White House’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci advised against making the same assumptions about the current monkeypox outbreak that were made during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Fauci and H. Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research and special projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday in which they reflected on the similarities between the monkeypox outbreak and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which both men spent much of their careers studying.

The two researchers noted the obvious similarities, namely that most monkeypox cases have so far been detected among men who have sex with men. While the main mode of transmission for monkeypox is believed to be through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, they observed that some early data has suggested sexual transmission may play a role in the spread of the virus.

Public health officials have repeatedly stressed that while many monkeypox cases appear to have been transmitted during sexual encounters, the virus itself is not considered to be a sexually transmitted infection.

“Given how little we know about the epidemiologic characteristics of the current outbreak, it is prudent to heed an observation made during the first year of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: ‘… any assumption that it will remain restricted to a particular segment of our society is truly an assumption without a scientific basis,'” Fauci and Lane wrote

To better understand the virus, the two infectious disease specialists called for further studies and surveys as well as continued surveillance of new cases. According to federal data, over 16,000 U.S. monkeypox cases have been confirmed so far.

In the piece, Lane and Fauci — who is stepping down from his positions in the White House and the NIAID in December — noted there are some characteristics of monkeypox that suggest recent changes that led to the current outbreak, but emphasized that the virus has been known of for decades, with readily available vaccines and treatments.

“Thus, the challenge to the public health and research communities during this time of emergency response is to ensure the efficient and equitable availability and distribution of existing countermeasures to those in need of them while at the same time conducting the rigorous studies needed to define what the clinical efficacy may be, understand any potential safety concerns, and guide proper utilization,” they wrote.