What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

Banging head on desk: "Campus Rape Policies Get a New Look as the Accused Get DeVos’s Ear"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — The letters have come in to her office by the hundreds, heartfelt missives from college students, mostly men, who had been accused of rape or sexual assault. Some had lost scholarships. Some had been expelled. A mother stumbled upon her son trying to take his own life, recalled Candice E. Jackson, the top civil rights official at the Department of Education.

“Listening to her talk about walking in and finding him in the middle of trying to kill himself because his life and his future were gone, and he was forever branded a rapist — that’s haunting,” said Ms. Jackson, describing a meeting with the mother of a young man who had been accused of sexual assault three months after his first sexual encounter.

The young man, who maintained he was innocent, had hoped to become a doctor.

In recent years, on campus after campus, from the University of Virginia to Columbia University, from Duke to Stanford, higher education has been roiled by high-profile cases of sexual assault accusations. Now Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is stepping into that maelstrom. On Thursday, she will meet in private with women who say they were assaulted, accused students and their families, advocates for both sides and higher education officials, the first step in a contentious effort to re-examine policies of President Barack Obama, who made expansive use of his powers to investigate the way universities and colleges handle sexual violence.

How university and college administrations have dealt with campus sexual misconduct charges has become one of the most volatile issues in higher education, with many women saying higher education leaders have not taken their trauma seriously. But the Obama administration’s response sparked a backlash, not just from the accused and their families but from well-regarded law school professors who say new rules went too far.

In an interview previewing her plans, Ms. Jackson, who heads the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and organized Thursday’s sessions, made clear that she believes investigations under the 1972 law known as Title IX have gone deeply awry. A sexual assault survivor herself, she said she sees “a red flag that something’s not quite right” — and that the rights of accused students have too often been ignored.

Hundreds of cases are still pending, some for years, she said, because investigators were “specifically told to keep looking until you find the violation” on college campuses even after they found none — a charge her critics strongly deny.

As of Monday, the office had 496 open sexual assault cases, and the average length of a case is 703 days, according to the department. The longest pending higher education cases, against the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Arizona State University, have been open for more than five years. The office is required to complete 80 percent of its investigations within 180 days.

Investigative processes have not been “fairly balanced between the accusing victim and the accused student,” Ms. Jackson argued, and students have been branded rapists “when the facts just don’t back that up.” In most investigations, she said, there’s “not even an accusation that these accused students overrode the will of a young woman.”

“Rather, the accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” Ms. Jackson said.

Such comments infuriate advocates for victims and women, who have spent the last six years waging a concerted campaign to educate college administrators, and the public, on students’ rights under the law, and how to combat what some have called “rape culture” on campus. A 2015 survey commissioned by the Association of American Universities found that more than one in four women at a large group of leading universities said they had been sexually assaulted by force or when they were incapacitated while in college.

“We took for granted the fact that the White House and the Department of Education supported accepting and advancing these rights, and we can’t take that for granted anymore,” said Michele Dauber, a professor at Stanford University Law School. “There is going to be a fight.”

Women’s groups are girding for battle, and are outraged that some men’s rights groups — including advocates they regard as misogynists — are being included in Thursday’s sessions.

Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, which is suing the Department of Education to obtain records related to Title IX, said she was “worried that the department will turn into apologists for the sort of violence that happens on campus,” and that the Trump administration would “allow myths about rape to be perpetuated” — including, she said, “the whole idea that rape is just a drunken encounter gone wrong.”

Under pressure from the Obama administration, many universities overhauled their procedures for investigating sexual assault. But college administrators have been chafing against the strictures imposed by the Education Department, said Daniel Swinton, a top official with the Association of Title IX Administrators.

Appointed by Ms. DeVos in April, Ms. Jackson represented sexual assault victims as a private lawyer before joining the Education Department. She is best known for her involvement in attacks against Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign, when she elevated women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment, while denouncing women who accused Mr. Trump of such behavior.

One question before her is whether to rescind a so-called Dear Colleague letter, issued by the Obama administration in April 2011, that put colleges and universities on notice that the federal government was going to be aggressive on sexual misconduct. The 19-page guidance warned schools they could lose millions in federal funding if they did not comply.

Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s civil rights office from August 2013 through December 2016, called Ms. Jackson’s claims that investigators were told to fish for violations “patently, demonstrably untrue.” For the department to distinguish between violent and nonviolent assaults in investigations, she added, “portrays a profound misunderstanding of Title IX.”

Ms. Lhamon said investigations under her tenure turned up “jaw-dropping degrees of noncompliance” with sexual assault law.

The most controversial part of the 2011 guidance mandated that college officials use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, which makes it easier to find students responsible than a “clear and convincing” evidence standard that some schools had been using. Advocates for the accused are pushing for Ms. Jackson to revoke the guidance and adopt the “clear and convincing” standard.

One of those advocates is C. D. Mock, whose son, Corey, was accused of rape while a student at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, in the spring of 2014.

The accusation led to a convoluted process of administrative hearings, Mr. Mock said, in which his son was at first found “not responsible,” then expelled from school, and then readmitted by a judge after the family sued, but kicked off the school’s wrestling team. Corey Mock graduated but was forced to abandon his dream of becoming a college wrestling coach, his father said.

“The young men who have been accused have gone through an absolutely horrendous experience,” his father said in an interview. “They have had their entire world turned upside down.”

A spokesman for the university declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

The April 2011 guidance was only the first step in the Obama administration’s efforts to hold universities accountable for the way they investigate sexual assault. In 2014, the Education Department published a list of schools that faced civil rights investigations related to sexual violence reports, which included some of the nation’s elite Ivy League schools.

Advocates saw the guidance, and the list, as powerful tools to raise awareness and persuade universities to take sexual assault complaints seriously.

But Ms. Jackson said that college campus representatives have presented it to her as a “list of shame” that even identifies universities where sexual misconduct has not yet been found to have occurred. The department is still deciding whether it will continue publishing the list.

Facing what they view as retrenchment by the federal government, some advocates for victims are turning to the courts. Among them is Debra Katz, who represents a feminist group at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.

The group filed a Title IX complaint with the civil rights office in 2015, after administration officials refused to investigate threatening messages sent over the now-defunct messaging app Yik Yak. Ms. Katz recently withdrew the complaint and sued the university instead.

“It became very clear that this case was going to die on the vine,” she said.

Meanwhile, groups like Know Your IX, which teaches students their rights under the federal law, have been promoting a hashtag on Twitter, #DearBetsy, and asking people to post their personal stories about sexual assault on Twitter. Jessica Torres, a 27-year-old Democratic strategist, tweeted to Ms. DeVos that she had been raped as a student at Williams College.

“My concern is we’re going back to the years when women and queer students were absolutely terrified of coming forward,” Ms. Torres said in an interview.

Ms. Jackson said she planned to draw from her experiences in courtrooms across the country.

“We have a justice system where nobody demands that the system itself be weighted in favor of a plaintiff,” she said. “In principle, there is no reason to depart from setting up a Title IX discipline process on campus that is anything other than fairly balanced and doesn’t prejudge and weight the system in favor of a finding. We don’t do that in our court system, our criminal justice system, and I see no reason why we would want to do it in a campus system either.”

Sigh.

[candygirl200413]

It disgusts me how they always need to play "we need to listen to both sides". Like there are many times where one side can be absolutely correct and the other isn't. My heart aches for those and I feel for them so much I was groped by a teacher in elementary school. I'm praying Mueller is doing the best through job cause people like her are going to ruin so much for so many people.

 

[fraurosena]

WTF is it going to take for somebody, anybody, to stand up to this blatant disregard of the Courts and Justice System? By the head of the very same no less?

Has the entire Repugliklan party already sold their collective souls to the Russians? Because that is what this is certainly implying if they don't act now and choose to ignore this.

[Childless]

2 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

WTF is it going to take for somebody, anybody, to stand up to this blatant disregard of the Courts and Justice System? By the head of the very same no less?

Has the entire Repugliklan party already sold their collective souls to the Russians? Because that is what this is certainly implying if they don't act now and choose to ignore this.

Yes, they have.

[GreyhoundFan]

46 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Has the entire Repugliklan party already sold their collective souls to the Russians? Because that is what this is certainly implying if they don't act now and choose to ignore this.

I'm not convinced they had souls. However, if we go with the premise that they did, then, yes, they sold their souls to the highest bidder.

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I'm not convinced they had souls. However, if we go with the premise that they did, then, yes, they sold their souls to the highest bidder.

Just when you think it couldn't possibly get any worse, it does:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Key Democrat calls for ouster of DeVos’s civil rights chief in light of ‘egregious’ remarks about sexual assault"

Spoiler

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate education committee, is calling for the ouster of the Education Department’s civil rights chief, saying she is unfit for the job.

Candice Jackson, the acting head of the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, triggered fierce criticism last week when she told the New York Times that “90 percent” of campus sexual-assault complaints “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

In days since, Jackson apologized publicly, disclosing that as a survivor of rape herself, she believes “all sexual harassment and sexual assault must be taken seriously.” She also apologized privately to assault survivors in a meeting to discuss the department’s role in enforcing Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at federally funded schools.

Murray said Monday that apologizing for such “callous, insensitive and egregious comments” is not enough. Jackson’s words “crossed a serious line and highlighted her clear biases in this area in a way that, to me and many women and men across the country, should disqualify her from service in the position of top Department of Education protector of students’ right to be safe at school,” the senator said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If nominated for the permanent job at the helm of the Office for Civil Rights, Jackson would need Senate confirmation. Murray’s position suggests she would face opposition.

Murray led Democrats’ unanimous opposition to DeVos’s confirmation as education secretary and has been a relentless critic since then. She has repeatedly questioned DeVos’s commitment to enforcing civil rights laws in the nation’s schools and colleges, pointing to the agency’s decisions to rescind guidance protecting transgender students and narrow some civil rights investigations.

DeVos is also a strong supporter of voucher programs, many of which allow private schools to discriminate against voucher recipients who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender or have LGBT parents. In testimony before Congress, she has declined to say whether she would block such private schools from receiving federal funds.

Murray was among 34 senators who sent DeVos a letter in June outlining their concerns about her team’s approach to civil rights enforcement. The senators also asked DeVos nine questions about the department’s civil rights division, including lists of open cases involving two of the agency’s most controversial issues — transgender students and sexual-assault allegations — and any memos discussing policy changes.

They asked for a response by July 11, and DeVos sent a letter that day defending her commitment to the agency’s civil rights work as “unwavering.”

She did not answer the senators’ questions, but she did acknowledge changes in the agency’s civil rights office under her watch. Under President Barack Obama, DeVos wrote, the office had sought to “punish and embarrass” institutions, collecting reams of data from schools and colleges in search of violations at the expense of resolving individuals’ complaints quickly and fairly.

The civil rights office is no longer “automatically” treating individual complaints as evidence of systemic problems, DeVos wrote.

“The Department today is returning [the Office of Civil Rights] to its role as a neutral, impartial investigative agency,” she wrote.

Murray responded three days later, reiterating the request for answers to the nine questions DeVos had ignored.

I'm glad to see that at least some lawmakers aren't settling for Betsy's crap.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, is hurtling toward his first fiasco"

Spoiler

Shortly before he was sworn in as treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin spoke with his predecessor to get some advice.

Pay attention to the debt problems in Puerto Rico, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Mnuchin, and remember that China’s currency issues are more complex than the incoming president, Donald Trump, had suggested during the campaign, according to two people briefed on the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.

And in pointed remarks, Lew told Mnuchin to take the debt ceiling seriously — or face a potential financial crisis.

Months later, Mnuchin is hurtling toward his first fiasco, unable to get Congress, let alone his colleagues in the Trump administration, on board with a strategy to raise the federal limit on governmental borrowing.

His struggles are casting doubt on whether the political neophyte, who made his name on Wall Street, has the stature in Washington to press through a vote on a measure that former treasury secretaries of both parties have said is critical to preserving the nation’s reputation for financial stability.

Unlike other issues facing the Trump administration — such as passing a health-care bill and overhauling the tax code — raising the debt limit comes with a hard deadline of late September, according to Mnuchin. Failure to do so could lead the U.S. government to miss paying its obligations, causing what analysts would consider a historic, market-rattling default on U.S. government debt.

“We’re going to get the debt ceiling right,” Mnuchin said in an interview Monday. “I don’t think there is any question that the debt ceiling will be raised. I don’t think there is anybody who intends to put the government’s ability to pay its bills at risk.”

Sensing there could be resistance on Capitol Hill to raising the debt ceiling quickly, he reviewed past debt-ceiling fights. He also holds a weekly meeting with advisers about the government’s cash balance and debt issues.

One former Treasury official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive agency deliberations, said officials are now “brushing up on options in the ‘crazy drawer.’ ”

In past administrations, Treasury officials have designed plans to prioritize payments to government bondholders so that if the government runs short on cash it could, in at least a technical sense, avoid defaulting on U.S. debt.

Such a scenario would be very difficult to manage because some bills would either be delayed or not paid — but it could be necessary to prevent an actual default. Still, prioritizing payments this way could lead to a spike in interest rates and a stock market crash, analysts have said.

The coming months promise to test Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood producer who joined the administration as a Trump loyalist, with no experience in government but plenty of experience by the president’s side, serving as campaign finance chairman.

Trump attended Mnuchin’s wedding in June, and on the wall beside Mnuchin’s desk is a news clipping announcing his appointment, signed by Trump along with — in black Sharpie — “I’m very proud of you.”

Beyond the tax code and the debt limit, Mnuchin’s portfolio includes blocking terrorist financing, easing regulations and conveying Trump’s nationalist economic policy at home and abroad.

Mnuchin earlier this summer told lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling in a clean vote that includes no other budget changes before they leave town.

“My preference is to get it clean,” he said Monday. “My preference is to get it done, and my preference is to get it done sooner rather than later.”

But Mnuchin’s push on the debt ceiling was undermined from the start within the White House by Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mulvaney is a former Republican congressman and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus who was brought into the White House, in part, to help influence how conservatives would vote on key issues.

Mulvaney publicly questioned Mnuchin’s call for a clean vote, saying that he would prefer spending cuts or other budget changes as part of any proposal to increase the debt ceiling. Some White House and Treasury officials were incensed to see Mulvaney break ranks, said several people involved in internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Treasury officials complained to the West Wing that Mnuchin’s credibility was being undermined, and Trump told a gathering of Senate Republicans that they should work with Mnuchin, and no one else, on the debt ceiling.

But Mulvaney had sufficiently muddied the administration’s message. And even though Trump told lawmakers that Mnuchin was his point person on the debt limit, the White House still has not publicly come out in favor of a no-strings-attached vote. Top administration officials have now conveyed to Congress that they will support combining an increase in the debt ceiling with other budget changes, as long as Congress works it out soon.

Asked about his relationship with Mulvaney, Mnuchin said, “Mick and I have a very good relationship. I think the press made that out to be more than it is.”

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) pressed Mulvaney during a hearing June 21 to explain the conflicting signals from Mnuchin and Mulvaney.

“These two are working against each other,” Quigley said. “It sends mixed messages.”

He added, “It’s also a dangerous message that you don’t have to fulfill your obligations.”

Mulvaney has tried to downplay the rifts but has suggested that his approach was more politically astute.

“It would be foolish of us to come up with a policy devoid of having talked to the Hill,” Mulvaney said to reporters in June.

Lawmakers and congressional aides who have met with Mnuchin describe an earnestness that they viewed as refreshing but also easily outmaneuvered by experienced political hands.

“He’s certainly in the minority in the administration,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. “The problem is, yes, you could get a clean debt-ceiling, but it would be 180 Democrats in the House with 40 or 50 Republicans, and that’s not a good way to start.”

Meadows said that he recently attended a meeting of eight of the most conservative Senate and House lawmakers about how to handle the debt ceiling and that not once did they consider the idea of backing Mnuchin’s proposal for a clean debt-ceiling increase.

Mnuchin has struggled to give the public an accurate read of how long the Treasury could pay bills before Congress has to act, alternating — sometimes within a matter of minutes — on whether the true deadline is the beginning or end of September.

A Treasury official later clarified that it had sufficient funds to pay all of the government’s bills through September. The Congressional Budget Office, meanwhile, has projected that Treasury should be able to pay all of its bills through early to mid-October.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently said that he would hold the Senate open for two weeks in August to take care of unfinished business — namely the health-care bill. It’s unclear whether they’ll tackle the debt limit or whether the House, where the odds of raising the debt limit are even more remote, will remain open.

One of Mnuchin’s challenges is that he still lacks the Washington alliances many Treasury chiefs enjoy.

He has stayed in close contact with friends and former colleagues from the world of finance, such as Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman and Brian Brooks, who was his vice chairman at OneWest Bank, which Mnuchin ran after acquiring IndyMac’s assets during the financial crisis in 2008. He has also reached out to former treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and recently met with other former secretaries, including Lawrence H. Summers and Robert Rubin. And he has discussed the debt ceiling and other issues with Glenn Hubbard, a top Bush administration economic adviser, who came away impressed.

“He has an unassuming manner, but he should not be underestimated,” Hubbard said.

But although Brooks has been nominated as deputy treasury secretary, that role and many other senior Treasury posts remain unfilled. And many Washington conservatives who have spent years backstopping Republican cabinet members know little of Mnuchin’s goals or tactics.

“The guy is literally a name to me and a cipher beyond that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a longtime Washington GOP economic adviser and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Although Mnuchin may be struggling to learn the ways of Washington, he does have an important patron: Trump.

In a way, they share the same pedigree. Both were born into wealth (Mnuchin drove a Porsche in college) and generated even more during their careers.

Trump’s background was in real estate and Mnuchin’s was in banking, but both had a hankering for entertainment and celebrity that drew them close. Even while on Trump’s campaign, Mnuchin remained an active Hollywood producer.

During the campaign, the two traveled together extensively, and Mnuchin surprised a number of Trump’s other aides when he took a front-and-center policy role during the transition into the White House, helping design tax and infrastructure programs that were to be the centerpiece of Trump’s presidency.

People who have met with him at Treasury describe him as polite and curious, with an unabashed affection for Trump that can cloud his message.

During a speech early in his term, Mnuchin said that Trump had “superhuman” health. At a news conference in Canada, Mnuchin criticized former FBI director James B. Comey for leaking details of conversations with Trump. Typically, Treasury chiefs avoid getting dragged into news-of-the-day politics at all costs. And Mnuchin recently said the president “handled it brilliantly” when meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

To be sure, Mnuchin appears to be enjoying the trappings of being a cabinet secretary. He meets weekly with Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen, often for breakfast or lunch, to discuss a variety of financial market issues.

His wife, actress Louise Linton, has accompanied him to at least two congressional hearings, an unusual occurrence.

Whereas Lew seemed to eschew all the security and publicity — he once stood alone at night in Union Station waiting for his wife to get off a train — Mnuchin travels differently. He was recently seen leaving a Washington custom tailor shop in the middle of a workday with a group of Secret Service agents. His wife gave an interview to Town & Country magazine detailing all the types of diamonds and pearls she would wear at their June wedding.

Mnuchin has made clear that a tax overhaul is a focus of the president, tied to a broader goal of growing the economy at a rate of 3 percent a year, compared with 1.6 percent last year.

Economists say that is unlikely in any sustainable way — and roundly agree that, if the debt limit isn’t increased, the economy will begin contracting, not expanding.

But on the signed news clipping in Mnuchin’s office, Trump made clear that even growing the economy at a moderately faster pace would not be sufficient. Right after he wrote how proud he was of Mnuchin, he added, “5% GDP.”

It's amazing how dysfunctional this administration is, every single day.

[GreyhoundFan]

The confederate Keebler elf is at it again: "Jeff Sessions supports states’ rights. Except when he doesn’t."

Spoiler

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that he wants to see more civil asset forfeiture, the process by which police can confiscate property they suspect is tied to drug crimes. In most cases, some or all of the proceeds from the property seizures then go back to the police agency or prosecutors’ office that initiated the forfeiture. In civil asset forfeiture, the property owner doesn’t need to be convicted of a crime. The police can seize cash, cars, houses, jewelry and other property based only on loose connections to alleged criminal activity — usually drug crimes. In fact, in a large majority of these cases, the owner is never even charged. It’s then up them to go to court to prove their innocence.

Civil asset forfeiture is extremely unpopular. It’s unpopular with Republicans and Democrats. It unites groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Heritage Foundation. A Cato Institute-YouGov poll taken in December found 84 percent of respondents were opposed to the practice. You’d be hard pressed to find any public policy issue on which a larger share of the public agrees. Mounting opposition to civil asset forfeiture — and the extremely unfair and unjust way it works in practice — has caused legislatures across the country to implement reforms. At least 13 states now require a criminal conviction before police can seize and keep property.

And Sessions wants to undo all of that. Sessions’s speech Monday seemed to focus on what are known as adoptive forfeitures. To understand why that’s important, we need to back up a bit. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen some momentum for forfeiture reform. The worst excesses of civil asset forfeiture were passed during the drug war hysteria of the 1980s: first at the federal level, then by state legislatures across the country. As stories of forfeiture abuse by police and prosecutors began to make headlines, Congress was moved to pass some reforms, led by the late congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.).

But the reforms were fairly modest. Many states went further. For example, some states prevented police departments and/or prosecutors’ offices from keeping the proceeds from civil forfeitures, instead earmarking them for schools, or diverting them into the general fund. Others allowed police or prosecutors to keep a smaller share, required police to show more evidence of criminality before allowing a forfeiture, or afforded more rights to property owners. The federal government responded with the adoption program. Under this policy, a local police department or prosecutor need only call the local branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration, or other federal law enforcement agency and ask them to join the case. Even minimal federal participation makes the investigation federal, which means the forfeiture policy will now be governed by federal law. The federal agency will then return a large percentage of the federal proceeds back to the local police agency.

The adoption policy is an end-around the state legislatures. It’s one thing if an investigation involves significant participation between federal and state or local law enforcement, and that investigation produces forfeiture proceeds to be divvied up. Such investigations comprise a broader class of forfeitures that are known as “equitable sharing” cases. They’re still problematic, especially if it’s a civil forfeiture that doesn’t require the state to produce any actual criminal charges. But adoption cases are much more pernicious. The sole purpose of the adoption policy is to give police agencies a way to ignore state law. It was devised to let local cases become federal cases with little to no involvement from actual federal law enforcement officials.

This is why the Obama administration tried to phase out the program. As I pointed out at the time, then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to phase out the adoption policy would affect only about 5 to 6 percent of federal civil forfeiture cases. But it would end the policy in states where the legislature (and, presumably, the people) had tried to pass laws protecting people from unjust forfeitures. That’s important. For all the criticisms from police groups and conservatives that the Obama administration didn’t respect “states’ rights” (I prefer the term “federalism”), this was a policy that did exactly that.

And now Sessions wants to end it. Just to be clear about what this would do: Sessions wants to force federal forfeiture law onto states whose legislatures have explicitly rejected it. And he wants to do this to expand a policy that even conservative groups feel is unfair and unjust, that studies have shown is biased by class and race, and that 80 to 85 percent of Americans oppose.

Sessions claims to be a federalist — an advocate for “states’ rights” and local control. But he makes exceptions. What’s interesting is when he makes exceptions and when he doesn’t. For example, Sessions thinks the Voting Rights Act — which aims to preserve the voting rights of minorities — is intrusive federal meddling. He thinks that Justice Department’s investigations into police abuses — which frequently include allegations of racial bias, and tend to be disproportionately directed at minorities — are also intrusive federal meddling. He thinks that requiring states to recognize same sex marriage — a protection for a minority group — is intrusive federal meddling. He feels the same way about adding sexual orientation to the list of categories protected by federal hate crimes laws, and about requiring states to protect transgender students — again, these are all protections for a specific minority group.

So where does Sessions make exceptions to “states’ rights”? For starters, he thinks sanctuary cities should be punished for not enforcing federal immigration law, despite the wishes of the people who live in those cities, and despite protests from law enforcement that doing so would make those cities more dangerous. The people likely to be hassled by Sessions’s favored policy here are, of course, also minorities, whether they’re citizens, legal residents or undocumented. He has expressed his desire to impose federal law on the states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Though Sessions hasn’t yet openly targeted those states, that’s likely more for practical reasons than ideological ones. He is on record expressing support for enforcing federal drug laws in those states and reportedly has sought support from members of Congress to target medical marijuana distributors in states where the drug is legal. Marijuana prohibition, like all drug prohibition, also disproportionately targets minority groups. And now, Sessions wants to reinstate the adoption program, which would essentially impose federal civil forfeiture law on states that have explicitly acted to make forfeiture more difficult. Forfeiture too disproportionately affects minority groups. 

Of course, there are reasons to support or oppose any one of these policies that have nothing to do with race or bigotry. But it’s uncanny how neatly Sessions’s support for or opposition to federalism seems to align in opposition to protection for minority groups. When a federal government policy offers more protection for a marginalized group, Sessions sings the praises of local control. When it’s the state or local government policy that affords them more protection, Sessions wants to impose federal law.

Perhaps it’s all just coincidence. But there’s really only one principle that remains consistent through Sessions’s various positions on these issues. And it isn’t federalism.

 

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The confederate Keebler elf is at it again: "Jeff Sessions supports states’ rights. Except when he doesn’t."

  Hide contents

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that he wants to see more civil asset forfeiture, the process by which police can confiscate property they suspect is tied to drug crimes. In most cases, some or all of the proceeds from the property seizures then go back to the police agency or prosecutors’ office that initiated the forfeiture. In civil asset forfeiture, the property owner doesn’t need to be convicted of a crime. The police can seize cash, cars, houses, jewelry and other property based only on loose connections to alleged criminal activity — usually drug crimes. In fact, in a large majority of these cases, the owner is never even charged. It’s then up them to go to court to prove their innocence.

Civil asset forfeiture is extremely unpopular. It’s unpopular with Republicans and Democrats. It unites groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Heritage Foundation. A Cato Institute-YouGov poll taken in December found 84 percent of respondents were opposed to the practice. You’d be hard pressed to find any public policy issue on which a larger share of the public agrees. Mounting opposition to civil asset forfeiture — and the extremely unfair and unjust way it works in practice — has caused legislatures across the country to implement reforms. At least 13 states now require a criminal conviction before police can seize and keep property.

And Sessions wants to undo all of that. Sessions’s speech Monday seemed to focus on what are known as adoptive forfeitures. To understand why that’s important, we need to back up a bit. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen some momentum for forfeiture reform. The worst excesses of civil asset forfeiture were passed during the drug war hysteria of the 1980s: first at the federal level, then by state legislatures across the country. As stories of forfeiture abuse by police and prosecutors began to make headlines, Congress was moved to pass some reforms, led by the late congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.).

But the reforms were fairly modest. Many states went further. For example, some states prevented police departments and/or prosecutors’ offices from keeping the proceeds from civil forfeitures, instead earmarking them for schools, or diverting them into the general fund. Others allowed police or prosecutors to keep a smaller share, required police to show more evidence of criminality before allowing a forfeiture, or afforded more rights to property owners. The federal government responded with the adoption program. Under this policy, a local police department or prosecutor need only call the local branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration, or other federal law enforcement agency and ask them to join the case. Even minimal federal participation makes the investigation federal, which means the forfeiture policy will now be governed by federal law. The federal agency will then return a large percentage of the federal proceeds back to the local police agency.

The adoption policy is an end-around the state legislatures. It’s one thing if an investigation involves significant participation between federal and state or local law enforcement, and that investigation produces forfeiture proceeds to be divvied up. Such investigations comprise a broader class of forfeitures that are known as “equitable sharing” cases. They’re still problematic, especially if it’s a civil forfeiture that doesn’t require the state to produce any actual criminal charges. But adoption cases are much more pernicious. The sole purpose of the adoption policy is to give police agencies a way to ignore state law. It was devised to let local cases become federal cases with little to no involvement from actual federal law enforcement officials.

This is why the Obama administration tried to phase out the program. As I pointed out at the time, then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to phase out the adoption policy would affect only about 5 to 6 percent of federal civil forfeiture cases. But it would end the policy in states where the legislature (and, presumably, the people) had tried to pass laws protecting people from unjust forfeitures. That’s important. For all the criticisms from police groups and conservatives that the Obama administration didn’t respect “states’ rights” (I prefer the term “federalism”), this was a policy that did exactly that.

And now Sessions wants to end it. Just to be clear about what this would do: Sessions wants to force federal forfeiture law onto states whose legislatures have explicitly rejected it. And he wants to do this to expand a policy that even conservative groups feel is unfair and unjust, that studies have shown is biased by class and race, and that 80 to 85 percent of Americans oppose.

Sessions claims to be a federalist — an advocate for “states’ rights” and local control. But he makes exceptions. What’s interesting is when he makes exceptions and when he doesn’t. For example, Sessions thinks the Voting Rights Act — which aims to preserve the voting rights of minorities — is intrusive federal meddling. He thinks that Justice Department’s investigations into police abuses — which frequently include allegations of racial bias, and tend to be disproportionately directed at minorities — are also intrusive federal meddling. He thinks that requiring states to recognize same sex marriage — a protection for a minority group — is intrusive federal meddling. He feels the same way about adding sexual orientation to the list of categories protected by federal hate crimes laws, and about requiring states to protect transgender students — again, these are all protections for a specific minority group.

So where does Sessions make exceptions to “states’ rights”? For starters, he thinks sanctuary cities should be punished for not enforcing federal immigration law, despite the wishes of the people who live in those cities, and despite protests from law enforcement that doing so would make those cities more dangerous. The people likely to be hassled by Sessions’s favored policy here are, of course, also minorities, whether they’re citizens, legal residents or undocumented. He has expressed his desire to impose federal law on the states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Though Sessions hasn’t yet openly targeted those states, that’s likely more for practical reasons than ideological ones. He is on record expressing support for enforcing federal drug laws in those states and reportedly has sought support from members of Congress to target medical marijuana distributors in states where the drug is legal. Marijuana prohibition, like all drug prohibition, also disproportionately targets minority groups. And now, Sessions wants to reinstate the adoption program, which would essentially impose federal civil forfeiture law on states that have explicitly acted to make forfeiture more difficult. Forfeiture too disproportionately affects minority groups. 

Of course, there are reasons to support or oppose any one of these policies that have nothing to do with race or bigotry. But it’s uncanny how neatly Sessions’s support for or opposition to federalism seems to align in opposition to protection for minority groups. When a federal government policy offers more protection for a marginalized group, Sessions sings the praises of local control. When it’s the state or local government policy that affords them more protection, Sessions wants to impose federal law.

Perhaps it’s all just coincidence. But there’s really only one principle that remains consistent through Sessions’s various positions on these issues. And it isn’t federalism.

 

Sessions's economics for the entitled. Seize people's property-who cares if it's really legal-then sell it for cheap to your friends. Those who have barely enough lose what they have and those who have the extra cash get nice things for cheap. Just wait until he and Trump get going on eminent domain! 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Why wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg allowed to meet with Glacier’s climate expert?"

Spoiler

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg visited Glacier National Park last weekend and saw firsthand how climate change is shrinking the glaciers in Montana’s northern Rockies.

But the area’s top climate scientist was not permitted to share his expertise on global warming’s role in the retreating ice sheets with Zuckerberg, one of the most prominent business leaders to denounce President Trump’s June withdrawal from the Paris climate accord.

Three days before the tech leader’s July 15 visit to Glacier, research ecologist Daniel Fagre said he was told that his scheduled tour with Zuckerberg of Logan Pass on the Continental Divide was off.

“I literally was told I would no longer be participating,” Fagre, who works for the U.S. Geological Survey, said in an interview Tuesday from his office inside the park. He said he asked the public-affairs officer who notified him why the briefing was being canceled.

“I’ve gotten nothing back,” he said. “We’ve definitely been left in the dark.”

Zuckerberg did meet with park rangers — and wrote a post on Facebook registering his alarm at the shrinking glaciers at the park — although it is unclear whether they discussed climate change.

...

But with the park a ground zero of sorts for the unmistakable signs that warming and melting of glaciers is speeding up, the decision to keep a visitor — and a celebrity at that — from meeting with a scientist-in-residence, first reported by Mic, struck some observers as a deliberate effort by the Trump administration to minimize climate issues.

“Sure, the administration has a particular view. Fine,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a fisheries scientist with the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists. “But that doesn’t mean you suppress scientific information and evidence and expertise the Park Service has developed over literally decades. The park rangers are great, but this is a high-level scientist who really studies this stuff.”

...

The decision by Interior Department officials comes as the Trump administration moves to erase much of President Barack Obama’s environmental record, reducing the role of climate science in much of the federal government, from regulations on U.S. carbon emissions to fossil-fuel production on federal lands to pledging to bring back the coal industry.

Trump and several of his Cabinet secretaries have questioned the scientific consensus that global temperatures are warming due to human activity.

Fagre, a research ecologist who has published widely on his work monitoring the melting of the park’s remaining glaciers, seemed to be an obvious choice when Zuckerberg’s advance team asked park officials to organize a tour.

“Dan’s highly respected,” said Michael Jamison, who manages glacier programs for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Foundation. “He’s a straight-up, this-is-how-it-is scientist.”

Derick Mains, a Facebook spokesman, said, “Mark’s visit was set up by Glacier National Park and they determined who would participate.”

The decline of the ice at Glacier and around the world is frequently cited as evidence of a climate undergoing rapid change, and researchers have confirmed that more than 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are retreating, with some quickly disappearing. At high altitudes where most glaciers are found, temperatures are rising faster than in the valleys below, with signs pointing to even greater melting in the decades ahead.

Heather Swift, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Geological Survey and the National Park Service, gave a different account, denying in a statement that a scheduled meeting with Zuckerberg was canceled.

“As with any celebrity appearance that might attract national attention, Mr. Zuckerberg’s visit to Glacier National Park was highlighted to the national offices,” Swift said, adding: “After reviewing the event proposal which was sent to the National Park Service, the NPS and Interior made a number of park officials available for the celebrity tour. He was given first-class treatment by the park rangers and had the opportunity to interact with a number of park officials and Gracie the ‘bark ranger’ during his visit which came at the height of the busy season.”

She suggested that a tour may not have been the best use of Fagre’s time.

“Allocating government funds, personnel, and resources responsibly is the definition of good government and something we are dedicated to advancing at the Department,” Swift said.

But Fagre said park officials reached out to him when they knew that Zuckerman, on a high-profile tour of states he has not been to, said he wanted to learn more about the retreating glaciers. Fagre settled on Logan Pass, elevation 6,646 feet and a popular launching point for backpackers and hikers, calling it a “very scenic alpine area for taking a little walk.”

“We were just going to be answering questions” Fagre said. “There was no preset agenda.” Glacier is one of only a handful of national parks with scientists on staff who are dedicated to studying climate change.

Fagre, who also studies global warming’s effect on aquatic resources and huckleberry crops that are essential to grizzly bears before they go into winter hibernation, said he frequently lectures on climate change in the local area and to park visitors and speaks with media.

“I’d say I was just puzzled by this more than anything else,” he said.

Same shit, different day in this administration.

[GreyhoundFan]

I so agree with Dana Millbank: "Callista Gingrich’s nomination to the Vatican stinks to high heaven"

Spoiler

Let us consider the qualifications of President Trump’s nominee to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Holy See: one Callista Gingrich of Virginia.

She is a former clerk on the House Agriculture Committee.

She is the author of children’s books about an elephant named Ellis.

She sings in the choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

She plays French horn in City of Fairfax Band.

And, she testified Tuesday, she has “looked at some of” Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change.

But really, Gingrich was receiving a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because of one qualification: She is married to Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and a major backer of President Trump.

And now, for his support of Trump, he is getting the ultimate patronage: the chance to live in Rome on the taxpayer’s dime while his wife, the president of Gingrich Productions, enjoys a plum posting. Newt, who converted to Catholicism several years ago, set his wife up nicely for the job by co-hosting two videos with her about Pope John Paul II, produced with a Gingrich political ally.

But if it is good news for the Gingriches, it is an(other) insult to Francis from Trump, who has sparred with the pope over immigration and climate change. Newt carried on a six-year extramarital affair with Callista in the 1990s when she, 23 years his junior, was a House staffer and he, as speaker, led the impeachment of Bill Clinton over his extramarital affair with an intern. National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters called it “astonishing that a party that celebrates family values at every turn has a president who is on his third wife and who has bragged about his extramarital affairs and who is appointing an ambassador to the Vatican who had a six-year affair with her future husband while he was still married to his second wife.”

The nomination of Callista is also Trump’s beatification of Newt, who has done as much as anyone to coarsen American politics — and to pave the way for Trump — with his name-calling, demonizing and brinkmanship.

All presidents reward supporters with patronage. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson will be our man in London. On Gingrich’s panel Tuesday was George Glass, a big Trump donor, tapped to be ambassador to Portugal though he doesn’t speak Portuguese.

But the choice of Callista Gingrich is another category of cronyism for an administration populated by friends and relations rather than appointees of merit. This has fueled the Russia scandal, stalled the agenda in Congress and made the administration seem singularly incompetent — yet Republicans in Congress have been unwilling to say that this is unacceptable.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) introduced Gingrich on Tuesday by noting that she was valedictorian of her high school class.

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who succeeded Newt in the House before moving to the Senate, declared that “one of her great, great persuasive talents is to not only convince Newt to marry her, but convert him to Catholicism.”

Gingrich testified that she has “the full support of my husband, Newt,” who didn’t attend the hearing. Gingrich, an uncomfortable smile fixed on her face, provided, in lieu of actual answers to questions, strung-together snippets of clichés.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) asked about refugee policy, on which Francis and Trump disagree. Gingrich responded with a bromide about “a deep commitment in this country to work to forward peace and stability.”

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) asked how she would work with the Vatican to counter extremism. Gingrich responded with a word salad about looking “forward to working on those issues of our shared policy opportunities.”

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) asked about the pope’s climate change encyclical. She responded with boilerplate about how “President Trump wants to maintain that we have clean air and clean water.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) asked if she had even read the encyclical.

“I have looked at some of it,” the witness replied.

“Are there pieces of it that particularly resonate for you?”

“Well,” Gingrich replied generically, “I think we’re all called to be stewards of the land.”

Staffers on both sides of the committee were now grinning at the pained responses.

“What other two or three things do you see are key to your particular responsibility should you hold this post?” Merkley inquired.

Gingrich came up with only one: fighting human trafficking.

Johnson, attempting to rehabilitate the witness, urged her to talk about her “study” of John Paul II and what she learned about U.S. and Vatican leadership. Gingrich retreated again to platitude: “It’s so important that we reach out to places like the Holy See to forward good in this world,” she said.

That was enough for Johnson, who pronounced her “perfectly suited for this position.”

Perfectly situated, at least.

Sigh, just sigh.

[ColeJo]

Interior Secretary Zinke formally asked Trump to save the Craters of the Moon National Monument in my homestate of Idaho. One of the few positive things that occurred in this administration so far. However, I feel that none of the national monuments or national parks should be touched at all. The natural and cultural landmarks are essential to our identity as a country.

[GreyhoundFan]

"I’m a scientist. I’m blowing the whistle on the Trump administration."

Spoiler

Joel Clement was director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the U.S. Interior Department until last week. He is now a senior adviser at the department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue.

I am not a member of the deep state. I am not big government.

I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.

Nearly seven years ago, I came to work for the Interior Department, where, among other things, I’ve helped endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. But on June 15, I was one of about 50 senior department employees who received letters informing us of involuntary reassignments. Citing a need to “improve talent development, mission delivery and collaboration,” the letter informed me that I was reassigned to an unrelated job in the accounting office that collects royalty checks from fossil fuel companies.

I am not an accountant — but you don’t have to be one to see that the administration’s excuse for a reassignment such as mine doesn’t add up. A few days after my reassignment, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before Congress that the department would use reassignments as part of its effort to eliminate employees; the only reasonable inference from that testimony is that he expects people to quit in response to undesirable transfers. Some of my colleagues are being relocated across the country, at taxpayer expense, to serve in equally ill-fitting jobs.

I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities. During the months preceding my reassignment, I raised the issue with White House officials, senior Interior officials and the international community, most recently at a U.N. conference in June. It is clear to me that the administration was so uncomfortable with this work, and my disclosures, that I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government.

On Wednesday, I filed two forms — a complaint and a disclosure of information — with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. I filed the disclosure because eliminating my role coordinating federal engagement and leaving my former position empty exacerbate the already significant threat to the health and the safety of certain Alaska Native communities. I filed the complaint because the Trump administration clearly retaliated against me for raising awareness of this danger. Our country values the safety of our citizens, and federal employees who disclose threats to health and safety are protected from reprisal by the Whistleblower Protection Act and Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

Removing a civil servant from his area of expertise and putting him in a job where he’s not needed and his experience is not relevant is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars. Much more distressing, though, is what this charade means for American livelihoods. The Alaska Native villages of Kivalina, Shishmaref and Shaktoolik are perilously close to melting into the Arctic Ocean. In a region that is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, the land upon which citizens’ homes and schools stand is newly vulnerable to storms, floods and waves. As permafrost melts and protective sea ice recedes, these Alaska Native villages are one superstorm from being washed away, displacing hundreds of Americans and potentially costing lives. The members of these communities could soon become refugees in their own country.

Alaska’s elected officials know climate change presents a real risk to these communities. Gov. Bill Walker (I) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) have been sounding the alarm and scrambling for resources to help these villages. But to stave off a life-threatening situation, Alaska needs the help of a fully engaged federal government. Washington cannot turn its back.

While I have given small amounts to Democratic candidates in the past, I have no problem whatsoever working for a Republican administration. I believe that every president, regardless of party, has the right and responsibility to implement his policies. But that is not what is happening here. Putting citizens in harm’s way isn’t the president’s right. Silencing civil servants, stifling science, squandering taxpayer money and spurning communities in the face of imminent danger have never made America great.

Now that I have filed with the Office of Special Counsel, it is my hope that it will do a thorough investigation into the Interior Department’s actions. Our country protects those who seek to inform others about dangers to American lives. The threat to these Alaska Native communities is not theoretical. This is not a policy debate. Retaliation against me for those disclosures is unlawful.

Let’s be honest: The Trump administration didn’t think my years of science and policy experience were better suited to accounts receivable. It sidelined me in the hope that I would be quiet or quit. Born and raised in Maine, I was taught to work hard and speak truth to power. Trump and Zinke might kick me out of my office, but they can’t keep me from speaking out. They might refuse to respond to the reality of climate change, but their abuse of power cannot go unanswered.

Bravo on him for stepping up publicly.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tillerson stays close to Trump, but the State Department seems to be benched"

Spoiler

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s close relationship with President Trump was on display during Trump’s formal sit-down with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin earlier this month in Germany. He was the only other U.S. official present, apart from a translator, for the most anticipated diplomatic meeting of the new administration, held as Trump and Putin were attending the Group of 20 summit.

The picture was one of a trusted envoy at the center of the action. Back in Washington, however, the State Department that Tillerson leads is adrift.

Trump is his administration’s loudest and most-watched voice on foreign policy and has consolidated decision-making among a small group of trusted aides and family members at the White House.

Tillerson meets with the president most days the two are in Washington and takes calls from him at all hours on his mobile phone. But diplomacy, or at least the kind the State Department traditionally conducts, has seemed a low priority for a president who is openly skeptical of international entanglements.

There were early signs that the State Department would be benched.

Trump put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who had no foreign policy background, in charge of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. And he disregarded the advice of Tillerson and the State Department when he decided to leave the Paris climate accord.

Diplomats breathed a sigh of relief when Trump did not quickly lift punitive sanctions on Russia that many of the State Department’s senior leaders had worked for years to impose, and when he backed off his harshest criticism of China as a currency manipulator. Similarly, Trump has signaled that he will not immediately abandon the State Department-negotiated Iran nuclear deal.

But in each case, current and former department employees said, the State Department’s voice was muted or regarded with a measure of suspicion. Several credited the addition of similar recommendations from the Pentagon for changing Trump’s mind.

The nation’s oldest Cabinet department has a hollowed-out feel these days. Six months into Trump’s presidency, most of the top jobs remain unfilled, and lower-level hiring is largely on hold.

“There’s a lot of stuff where it’s not clear there’s anybody at the helm,” said Ronald Neumann, a former ambassador who is president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “There’s a sense of incoherence in the way they fire people without replacements, shuttle people into the job and then have to shuttle somebody else into that job.”

Tillerson wants to restructure the department to reduce its size and get rid of overlapping areas of responsibility. Congressional critics, including numerous Republicans, told Tillerson last month that streamlining may be a good idea but that empty desks and large budget cuts are not.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) opened a hearing on the State Department budget by praising Tillerson’s straight-talking style, while warning him that he has a lot to learn. Graham took Tillerson on a rhetorical tour of trouble spots, including Syria, North Korea, Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, among others.

The U.S. secretary of state has to confront all of them, the veteran senator told Tillerson.

“You’re the man,” Graham said. “You’re going to do all that and cut the budget by 29 percent?”

Tillerson has made clear that he thinks the department’s structure and functions need reforming for the 21st century. He has told diplomats that he has seen the benefits of periodic management overhauls.

But his timeline for change — extending to late 2018, or halfway through the presidential term — is languorous by the standards of Washington political cycles.

A senior adviser, R.C. Hammond, said Tillerson, a mechanical engineer by training, has approached the job methodically. First he huddled with Trump and the national security team, a job set back by the sudden resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Then he proceeded in charted phases. First he laid the groundwork for the most pressing problem, trying to coax China into turning its back on North Korea over its nuclear program.

“In the first six months, we set up an entire new direction with our policy toward North Korea,” he said. “It’s not because the administration changed. It’s because of world events.”

Now, Tillerson is trying to improve relations with Moscow despite growing questions over its attempts to disrupt the U.S. election, and he is wading into the crises in Syria and the Persian Gulf.

Hammond dismissed the narrative that Tillerson is isolated from the staff. He said he has met frequently with desk officers and advisers on hot spots that he is training his attention on. And he is known for insisting that his schedule block out dedicated hours for reading briefing papers.

“People mistake the value of face time versus reading time,” Hammond said. “This is a guy who gets excited reading instructions from Ikea. He’s a mechanical engineer who reads and analyzes. He spends a lot of time with the guys who work on China and the Middle East. The information he needs to do the job is dictated by what the president is looking for.”

In the next six months, Hammond said, Tillerson will speak frequently on the immorality of human trafficking, the wisdom of nuclear nonproliferation, and cooperation with Mexico to combat the drug cartels.

“This was the plan all along,” Hammond said of Tillerson’s pace. “He’s not adjusting because of criticism. He’s staying on the railroad track he laid out for himself, and continues chugging along.”

Tillerson has begun to project his own role more aggressively. That became publicly noticeable when he introduced the annual human trafficking report last month. Six weeks earlier, he had skipped the rollout of the annual human rights report entirely, a sharp departure from previous secretaries of state who used it to underscore the centrality of human rights to U.S. foreign policy.

But when the human trafficking report came around, Tillerson was front and center in the opulent Benjamin Franklin room, with several prominent members of Congress in attendance. Talking off the cuff as the cameras rolled, he struck themes similar to those of his immediate predecessor, John F. Kerry, saying that “the consequences of our failure to act in this area has so many other negative impacts around the world: It breeds corruption; it undermines rule of law; it erodes the core values that underpin a civil society.”

He was willing to infuriate Beijing with the report, which downgraded China to a ranking reserved for the world’s worst offenders. He spoke scornfully and at length of China using North Korean guest workers whose pay goes directly to Pyongyang despite its nuclear weapons program.

At the G-20 summit in Hamburg, the man who in March described himself as “not a big media press access person” stood comfortably in front of a room of reporters, answering their questions and even making light of first lady Melania Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to break up the meeting with Putin when it ran long.

After months of watching silently while the White House grabbed the big items in the foreign policy portfolio, Tillerson — and the State Department — are edging to the forefront of several foreign initiatives.

He has appointed a special representative to push U.S. views and help shape negotiations over the war in Ukraine, where an agreement mediated by the French and Germans has languished for years.

In the Syrian war, the State Department was involved in weeks of negotiations to get an agreement for a cease-fire in the southwest, and Tillerson hopes the cooperation he has sought with Russia will lead to a further cessation of hostilities elsewhere in the country.

And Tillerson spent several days in July flying around the Persian Gulf trying to help end a trade and diplomatic embargo placed on Qatar by its neighbors. At the end of that trip, Tillerson told reporters that he hoped he had nudged the squabbling parties closer, and he suggested that he is more comfortable with that part of the job than he is navigating political Washington.

“It is a lot different than being CEO of Exxon, because I was the ultimate decision-maker. That always makes life easier,” Tillerson said.

Neumann said it is perhaps too easy to criticize Tillerson and the new administration for sidelining the State Department. Tension between the department and the White House National Security Council is nothing new, he noted, nor is a tug-of-war over influence in policy decisions.

The larger question looming over the department, Neumann said, is how diplomacy figures in an administration that still feels ad hoc and that is continually buffeted by Trump’s own behavior.

“It’s one thing having policies under debate. It’s another to have policies that have to be reversed because the president is undercutting his own Cabinet secretaries,” Neumann said.

This is one of the problems of having all these CEOs in charge. They don't understand government.

[GreyhoundFan]

"In the push to deliver on campaign promises, Interior’s energy drive looms large"

Spoiler

With control over more than 500 million acres of public land and hundreds of millions of acres offshore, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is moving rapidly to promote American production of coal, oil and gas — a critical piece of President Trump’s vision for “making America great again.”

In the past few weeks alone, Zinke has lowered the price companies must pay the government for offshore drilling; acted to accelerate approval for onshore drilling permits; approved exploratory drilling in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea; and scheduled lease sales on Western lands the Obama administration had deemed off limits.

And Zinke’s moves have immediate impact. While Trump’s ambitious plans to overhaul the tax code and renegotiate international trade pacts remain far off, and his campaign to roll back environmental regulations will take months to produce results for industry, Zinke is taking concrete action to deliver on one of Trump’s most important campaign promises.

As a candidate, Trump pledged that within his first 100 days he would “lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.” While federal rules prevent him from wiping out these curbs overnight, Trump has taken what he describes as “historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations.”

At this task, Trump remarked during an event at Interior in late April, Zinke “is doing an incredible job.”

Elizabeth Gore, chair of the government relations practice at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, said Trump’s clear vision on the subject has allowed Zinke to move ahead more quickly than some other appointees.

“They had very defined policy objectives from the get go — as opposed to some areas where we’re still struggling to get meat on the bones, beyond the bullet points,” Gore said.

Since taking office, Trump has issued two major executive orders on energy development, ordering the reversal of several of President Barack Obama’s signature climate rules, as well as limits Obama imposed on drilling in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Interior officials have moved rapidly to implement those orders, citing them in multiple federal notices seeking big shifts in policy.

On July 6, for example, as he outlined a new secretarial order aimed at speeding the oil and gas permitting process within the department’s Bureau of Land Management, Zinke said: “This is just good government, and will further support the president’s goal of American energy dominance.”

The department has repeatedly upended Obama-era rules that sought to extract higher royalty payments from the energy industry or set new limits on where and how companies can develop publicly owned resources.

The same day Zinke moved to expedite permits, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it would lower the rate companies must pay the government for shallow-water offshore drilling projects from a planned 18.75 percent to 12.5 percent. Months earlier, Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue suspended a new accounting system that would have compelled coal firms and other companies to pay millions of dollars in additional royalties on minerals on federal land.

Critics say these moves will imperil fragile habitats and the species that depend on them, while also depriving taxpayers of the returns they deserve on public resources. The moves could also slow the development of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, critics say.

In an interview, acting BLM director Michael Nedd said his agency strives to balance the need for energy with the need to safeguard the environment.

“One could argue — I don’t know, but one could argue — that under the previous administration that scale could have been tipped too far on the environmental side and energy wasn’t developed,” Nedd said. “So right now, what we’re looking at is, how can we have that balance?”

Nedd said the administration is allowing firms to develop all forms of energy, including renewables, “and then let the market choose.”

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a consortium of independent energy producers, met with Zinke in April to discuss federal energy policy. She and five top oil and gas officials from the group made the case to Zinke and his deputies that less restrictive federal rules would free their industry to create more high-paying jobs.

“We can help put working-class people back to work, the main constituency of President Trump, back to work,” Sgamma said, adding that the new “mind-set” at Interior “is very helpful.”

Environmentalists and some state officials are protesting the moves. Last month, the attorneys general for California and New Mexico filed suit in federal court challenging Interior’s about-face on royalty payments for federal minerals, saying it “nullifies much-needed, common-sense regulations that were formulated through a time-intensive rulemaking process.”

California and New Mexico also filed suit July 5 charging that the department’s decision to delay implementation of a rule limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations on federal land deprives them of millions of dollars in payments needed to support education.

Kate Kelly, who served as a senior adviser to former interior secretary Sally Jewell and now directs the public lands program at the liberal Center for American Progress, said in an email that Zinke’s “singular focus” on energy development “is starting to shift how the department operates,” particularly regarding the collection of royalties.

One area of clear friction is Obama’s identification of priority habitat for the dwindling numbers of greater sage grouse in 11 Western states. The plan took years to develop and received the approval of both Republican and Democratic governors.

Under Zinke, BLM has already scheduled lease sales in at least two areas in Wyoming and Utah identified as priority habitat for the birds. The agency is also moving ahead with a lease sale near Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, though the National Park Service had in the past objected the project.

“Leasing these lands, most of which do not even have high potential for development according to the BLM’s own analyses, has a lot of risk and not a lot of benefit — except, presumably, to show that more leasing can be considered anywhere at any time,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel at the Wilderness Society.

Recent developments in the energy market have made the federal government a less central player over the past decade, in part because of new oil and gas finds and easier leasing practices on private lands. The federal share of crude oil production dropped from nearly 36 percent in fiscal year 2010 to 21 percent in FY 2015, according to the Congressional Research Service, while its share of natural gas production dropped from nearly 33 percent in FY 2006 to just 16 percent in FY 2015.

Federal lands remain more central to coal production, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the coal that’s burned in American power plants each year. Zinke lifted a year-long moratorium the department had imposed on federal coal leasing, but it is unclear how many buyers there will be: Several companies privately informed department officials last year that they had sufficient supplies for the near term.

Given the continuing retirement of coal-fired power plants, fresh interest in federal coal leases may reflect “a new period of speculation” rather than a rise in demand, said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance for the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis, in an email.

And Mike Cantrell, co-chairman of the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, noted that public equity offerings in the shale oil industry dropped dramatically this year. Opening up more federal areas to drilling could depress current prices even further.

Still, Erik Milito, who directs the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream and industry operations, said Interior is establishing the kind of “stable regulatory regime” that allows firms to make long-term plans.

“It will take some time,” he said, “but the signals are very positive.”

More screwing of the American people and the environment.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"In the push to deliver on campaign promises, Interior’s energy drive looms large"

  Hide contents

With control over more than 500 million acres of public land and hundreds of millions of acres offshore, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is moving rapidly to promote American production of coal, oil and gas — a critical piece of President Trump’s vision for “making America great again.”

In the past few weeks alone, Zinke has lowered the price companies must pay the government for offshore drilling; acted to accelerate approval for onshore drilling permits; approved exploratory drilling in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea; and scheduled lease sales on Western lands the Obama administration had deemed off limits.

And Zinke’s moves have immediate impact. While Trump’s ambitious plans to overhaul the tax code and renegotiate international trade pacts remain far off, and his campaign to roll back environmental regulations will take months to produce results for industry, Zinke is taking concrete action to deliver on one of Trump’s most important campaign promises.

As a candidate, Trump pledged that within his first 100 days he would “lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.” While federal rules prevent him from wiping out these curbs overnight, Trump has taken what he describes as “historic steps to lift the restrictions on American energy, to reverse government intrusion, and to cancel job-killing regulations.”

At this task, Trump remarked during an event at Interior in late April, Zinke “is doing an incredible job.”

Elizabeth Gore, chair of the government relations practice at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, said Trump’s clear vision on the subject has allowed Zinke to move ahead more quickly than some other appointees.

“They had very defined policy objectives from the get go — as opposed to some areas where we’re still struggling to get meat on the bones, beyond the bullet points,” Gore said.

Since taking office, Trump has issued two major executive orders on energy development, ordering the reversal of several of President Barack Obama’s signature climate rules, as well as limits Obama imposed on drilling in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Interior officials have moved rapidly to implement those orders, citing them in multiple federal notices seeking big shifts in policy.

On July 6, for example, as he outlined a new secretarial order aimed at speeding the oil and gas permitting process within the department’s Bureau of Land Management, Zinke said: “This is just good government, and will further support the president’s goal of American energy dominance.”

The department has repeatedly upended Obama-era rules that sought to extract higher royalty payments from the energy industry or set new limits on where and how companies can develop publicly owned resources.

The same day Zinke moved to expedite permits, Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management announced it would lower the rate companies must pay the government for shallow-water offshore drilling projects from a planned 18.75 percent to 12.5 percent. Months earlier, Interior’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue suspended a new accounting system that would have compelled coal firms and other companies to pay millions of dollars in additional royalties on minerals on federal land.

Critics say these moves will imperil fragile habitats and the species that depend on them, while also depriving taxpayers of the returns they deserve on public resources. The moves could also slow the development of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, critics say.

In an interview, acting BLM director Michael Nedd said his agency strives to balance the need for energy with the need to safeguard the environment.

“One could argue — I don’t know, but one could argue — that under the previous administration that scale could have been tipped too far on the environmental side and energy wasn’t developed,” Nedd said. “So right now, what we’re looking at is, how can we have that balance?”

Nedd said the administration is allowing firms to develop all forms of energy, including renewables, “and then let the market choose.”

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, a consortium of independent energy producers, met with Zinke in April to discuss federal energy policy. She and five top oil and gas officials from the group made the case to Zinke and his deputies that less restrictive federal rules would free their industry to create more high-paying jobs.

“We can help put working-class people back to work, the main constituency of President Trump, back to work,” Sgamma said, adding that the new “mind-set” at Interior “is very helpful.”

Environmentalists and some state officials are protesting the moves. Last month, the attorneys general for California and New Mexico filed suit in federal court challenging Interior’s about-face on royalty payments for federal minerals, saying it “nullifies much-needed, common-sense regulations that were formulated through a time-intensive rulemaking process.”

California and New Mexico also filed suit July 5 charging that the department’s decision to delay implementation of a rule limiting methane emissions from oil and gas operations on federal land deprives them of millions of dollars in payments needed to support education.

Kate Kelly, who served as a senior adviser to former interior secretary Sally Jewell and now directs the public lands program at the liberal Center for American Progress, said in an email that Zinke’s “singular focus” on energy development “is starting to shift how the department operates,” particularly regarding the collection of royalties.

One area of clear friction is Obama’s identification of priority habitat for the dwindling numbers of greater sage grouse in 11 Western states. The plan took years to develop and received the approval of both Republican and Democratic governors.

Under Zinke, BLM has already scheduled lease sales in at least two areas in Wyoming and Utah identified as priority habitat for the birds. The agency is also moving ahead with a lease sale near Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, though the National Park Service had in the past objected the project.

“Leasing these lands, most of which do not even have high potential for development according to the BLM’s own analyses, has a lot of risk and not a lot of benefit — except, presumably, to show that more leasing can be considered anywhere at any time,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel at the Wilderness Society.

Recent developments in the energy market have made the federal government a less central player over the past decade, in part because of new oil and gas finds and easier leasing practices on private lands. The federal share of crude oil production dropped from nearly 36 percent in fiscal year 2010 to 21 percent in FY 2015, according to the Congressional Research Service, while its share of natural gas production dropped from nearly 33 percent in FY 2006 to just 16 percent in FY 2015.

Federal lands remain more central to coal production, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the coal that’s burned in American power plants each year. Zinke lifted a year-long moratorium the department had imposed on federal coal leasing, but it is unclear how many buyers there will be: Several companies privately informed department officials last year that they had sufficient supplies for the near term.

Given the continuing retirement of coal-fired power plants, fresh interest in federal coal leases may reflect “a new period of speculation” rather than a rise in demand, said Tom Sanzillo, director of finance for the Institute for Energy Economics & Financial Analysis, in an email.

And Mike Cantrell, co-chairman of the Oklahoma Energy Producers Alliance, noted that public equity offerings in the shale oil industry dropped dramatically this year. Opening up more federal areas to drilling could depress current prices even further.

Still, Erik Milito, who directs the American Petroleum Institute’s upstream and industry operations, said Interior is establishing the kind of “stable regulatory regime” that allows firms to make long-term plans.

“It will take some time,” he said, “but the signals are very positive.”

More screwing of the American people and the environment.

This has already hit home here in my very Red state. Off-shore drilling, uh-oh! I'd say 75% of the residents here are not happy about drilling off our coast. While probably 70% of the residents live at least 100 miles from the ocean, lots of those people either vacation on the coast or own very expensive beach houses that they use for vacation and to make money. Not to mention the seafood business.

Republicans love Zinke. Until he shows up in their backyard.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Will proposed cuts undermine Trump’s vision of ‘energy dominance’?"

Spoiler

On May 22, a day before the release of the Trump budget, senior Energy Department officials completed a presentation about a proposed 69 percent cut in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The first slide featured sunny photos of an electric car charger,a wind turbine, a transmission stanchion, and a house with solar panels and an American flag.

The second-to-last slide was not so upbeat. The proposal would mean a 30 percent reduction in staff. “Achieves cost savings by aligning workforce to smaller EERE program,” the slide said blandly.

The next day, about 100 federal employees filed into the wood-paneled auditorium at the Energy Department headquarters to hear about the proposed changes.

“The thing that felt strange was the cavalier nature in which they spoke of, you know, basically devastating cuts to the office,” said an EERE official who listened to a live feed and who agreed to describe the event on the condition of anonymity.

The $1.6 billion of proposed cuts to the Energy Department’s $29.7 billion budget exemplify the Trump administration’s devaluing of the government’s role in promoting scientific research, which has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since World War II.

In its place, President Trump has promoted a vision of American “energy dominance,” which he outlined in the same room one month later. Heavily focused on digging up fossil fuels and selling them to the world, Trump’s vision did not include renewables or research. “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody, and nobody knew it until five years ago. And I want to use it. And I don’t want that taken away by the Paris Accord,” the global agreement to fight climate change, Trump told reporters accompanying him on his trip to Paris this month.

The spending cuts would fall heavily on the department’s science and energy areas, which include grant and loan programs as well as funds that flow to many of the department’s 17 national laboratories.

The laboratories originally focused on technologies such as radar, computers and the atomic bomb. Today, they safeguard the U.S. nuclear arsenal but also research fundamental physics, applied materials and technologies designed to improve energy efficiency and slow climate change.

The budget would also eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a relatively small, but politically popular program, that takes risks to foster innovation.

The proposed cuts have set up a collision between Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and Congress, where many Republicans remain loyal to the department’s science and research programs and where Democrats remain loyal to “clean” energy projects.

From the administration’s point of view, the cuts would allow the department to carry out its “core functions” — the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear stockpile and cleanup of contaminated weapons sites that take up more than half the department’s budget.

But OMB Director Mick Mulvaney faces congressional opponents — Republicans and Democrats — who are championing the energy research programs because their states benefit and because of the value of federal research money.

The Energy Department sends funds to 17 national laboratories, universities and companies around the country; its support is widespread and bipartisan.

“Our new president talks about making America great, and I think a central part of making America great is to use the secret weapons of our research universities and national laboratories,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water, said at a June 20 Bipartisan Policy Center event.

Alexander could be one of the administration’s biggest obstacles in Congress. His state is home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Established in 1943, the lab has projects on computing, nuclear energy, energy efficiency in buildings, advanced manufacturing, electric grid security and something called neutron scattering, which could have applications for medicine, energy and technology.

The labs mean jobs. Oak Ridge employs 4,750 people. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado employs 2,200 peoplestudying everything from algae to batteries.

“The lab is good for Colorado and good for our country’s energy future,” Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.) said in a statement. “NREL’s work ensures the United States remains a leader in developing cutting-edge energy technologies and grid resiliency, both of which are vital components to an all-of-the-above energy strategy. Congress controls the power of the purse, and I will continue to advocate for NREL.”

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has played an ambiguous role.

As governor of Texas, the glad-handing Perry wrote letters urging then-energy secretaries to steer federal largesse to projects in his state, according to departmental correspondence records. He sought money for carbon capture and sequestration, testing wind turbines, organic fuels, loan guarantees for nuclear plants and state energy grants.

Then in 2012, he campaigned for president vowing to abolish the entire Energy Department, famously forgetting its name during one debate.

In his new role as secretary, he called the national laboratories “science and engineering treasures” and the “crown jewel of this country.” On July 3, he tweeted “This Lab is Your Lab” to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s famous ballad.

But the secretary is seen as lacking influence over the agency’s direction. Besides Perry, there have been nominations for only four out of 21 top Senate-confirmed leadership slots at the agency;none has been confirmed.

“There is a complete void of leadership,” said an upper-level official at the department who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself from retaliation. “It’s painful.”

The department did not reply to requests for comment or an interview with Perry.

Perry’s own view of climate change, which is in line with other Trump officials, has also stirred up a department built on science.

In a June CNBC interview, he played down human contributions to global warming and said that climate science was not settled. Later that day, an Energy Department official filed a protest through the agency’s seldom-used “differing professional opinion” process.

The secretary’s comment “exposes Mr. Perry’s deep disrespect for publicly funded work done at DOE, conclusions generally reached via the scientific method,and the risk that severe weather and sea level rise pose to highly valuable and sensitive public facilities and assets stewarded by the Department,” the official wrote. “What would happen if Secretary Perry chooses not to believe that water flows downhill at hydropower facilities, or that nuclear waste at DOE facilities is not harmful to people, including employees?”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity pending a resolution of the complaint, has not received a reply.

The Trump administration has also diminished its focus on climate by moving to close the agency’s Climate and Technology Office within its international affairs division, according to two Energy Department employees. The office focuses on scientific engagement with other nations and global talks to promote clean energy.

In a Trumpian vision of government, some departmental programs would be killed altogether. The administration wants to close the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, charged with providing strategic guidance to the department.

The proposed cuts would also abolish ARPA-E, a $300 million-a-year program created by bipartisan 2007 legislation, which funds research on superconducting wires for wind generators, smart window coatings, technology to make natural gas vehicles more economic and practical and other projects.

“The whole ARPA-E program is exactly right,” said Chad Holliday, a former chief executive at DuPont and now chairman of Shell.

One fear is that other countries will foster their own technologies or purchase U.S. start-ups. “These programs will help the United States maintain its brainpower advantage to remain competitive at a time when other countries are investing heavily in research,” Alexander said.

Chinese companies and universities are already circling U.S. firms that do not get enough funding from the Energy Department, according to Alexander Girau, chief executive and founder of Advano.

The company, which is working on silicon-based materials that might dramatically improve battery performance, failed to get a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Energy Department — despite partnerships with Argonne National Laboratory and Tulane University and a recommendation from House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

Girau said he might need to sell a stakein the company, and Chinese-owned Long Power Systems is interested.

“China is making a gigantic push,” Girau said. “If we don’t have these opportunities, we have to go where the money is.”

Oh good, let's sell to the Chinese. <end sarcasm>

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Will proposed cuts undermine Trump’s vision of ‘energy dominance’?"

  Hide contents

On May 22, a day before the release of the Trump budget, senior Energy Department officials completed a presentation about a proposed 69 percent cut in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. The first slide featured sunny photos of an electric car charger,a wind turbine, a transmission stanchion, and a house with solar panels and an American flag.

The second-to-last slide was not so upbeat. The proposal would mean a 30 percent reduction in staff. “Achieves cost savings by aligning workforce to smaller EERE program,” the slide said blandly.

The next day, about 100 federal employees filed into the wood-paneled auditorium at the Energy Department headquarters to hear about the proposed changes.

“The thing that felt strange was the cavalier nature in which they spoke of, you know, basically devastating cuts to the office,” said an EERE official who listened to a live feed and who agreed to describe the event on the condition of anonymity.

The $1.6 billion of proposed cuts to the Energy Department’s $29.7 billion budget exemplify the Trump administration’s devaluing of the government’s role in promoting scientific research, which has been a cornerstone of U.S. policy since World War II.

In its place, President Trump has promoted a vision of American “energy dominance,” which he outlined in the same room one month later. Heavily focused on digging up fossil fuels and selling them to the world, Trump’s vision did not include renewables or research. “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody, and nobody knew it until five years ago. And I want to use it. And I don’t want that taken away by the Paris Accord,” the global agreement to fight climate change, Trump told reporters accompanying him on his trip to Paris this month.

The spending cuts would fall heavily on the department’s science and energy areas, which include grant and loan programs as well as funds that flow to many of the department’s 17 national laboratories.

The laboratories originally focused on technologies such as radar, computers and the atomic bomb. Today, they safeguard the U.S. nuclear arsenal but also research fundamental physics, applied materials and technologies designed to improve energy efficiency and slow climate change.

The budget would also eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a relatively small, but politically popular program, that takes risks to foster innovation.

The proposed cuts have set up a collision between Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and Congress, where many Republicans remain loyal to the department’s science and research programs and where Democrats remain loyal to “clean” energy projects.

From the administration’s point of view, the cuts would allow the department to carry out its “core functions” — the maintenance of the nation’s nuclear stockpile and cleanup of contaminated weapons sites that take up more than half the department’s budget.

But OMB Director Mick Mulvaney faces congressional opponents — Republicans and Democrats — who are championing the energy research programs because their states benefit and because of the value of federal research money.

The Energy Department sends funds to 17 national laboratories, universities and companies around the country; its support is widespread and bipartisan.

“Our new president talks about making America great, and I think a central part of making America great is to use the secret weapons of our research universities and national laboratories,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water, said at a June 20 Bipartisan Policy Center event.

Alexander could be one of the administration’s biggest obstacles in Congress. His state is home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Established in 1943, the lab has projects on computing, nuclear energy, energy efficiency in buildings, advanced manufacturing, electric grid security and something called neutron scattering, which could have applications for medicine, energy and technology.

The labs mean jobs. Oak Ridge employs 4,750 people. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado employs 2,200 peoplestudying everything from algae to batteries.

“The lab is good for Colorado and good for our country’s energy future,” Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Col.) said in a statement. “NREL’s work ensures the United States remains a leader in developing cutting-edge energy technologies and grid resiliency, both of which are vital components to an all-of-the-above energy strategy. Congress controls the power of the purse, and I will continue to advocate for NREL.”

Energy Secretary Rick Perry has played an ambiguous role.

As governor of Texas, the glad-handing Perry wrote letters urging then-energy secretaries to steer federal largesse to projects in his state, according to departmental correspondence records. He sought money for carbon capture and sequestration, testing wind turbines, organic fuels, loan guarantees for nuclear plants and state energy grants.

Then in 2012, he campaigned for president vowing to abolish the entire Energy Department, famously forgetting its name during one debate.

In his new role as secretary, he called the national laboratories “science and engineering treasures” and the “crown jewel of this country.” On July 3, he tweeted “This Lab is Your Lab” to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s famous ballad.

But the secretary is seen as lacking influence over the agency’s direction. Besides Perry, there have been nominations for only four out of 21 top Senate-confirmed leadership slots at the agency;none has been confirmed.

“There is a complete void of leadership,” said an upper-level official at the department who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect himself from retaliation. “It’s painful.”

The department did not reply to requests for comment or an interview with Perry.

Perry’s own view of climate change, which is in line with other Trump officials, has also stirred up a department built on science.

In a June CNBC interview, he played down human contributions to global warming and said that climate science was not settled. Later that day, an Energy Department official filed a protest through the agency’s seldom-used “differing professional opinion” process.

The secretary’s comment “exposes Mr. Perry’s deep disrespect for publicly funded work done at DOE, conclusions generally reached via the scientific method,and the risk that severe weather and sea level rise pose to highly valuable and sensitive public facilities and assets stewarded by the Department,” the official wrote. “What would happen if Secretary Perry chooses not to believe that water flows downhill at hydropower facilities, or that nuclear waste at DOE facilities is not harmful to people, including employees?”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity pending a resolution of the complaint, has not received a reply.

The Trump administration has also diminished its focus on climate by moving to close the agency’s Climate and Technology Office within its international affairs division, according to two Energy Department employees. The office focuses on scientific engagement with other nations and global talks to promote clean energy.

In a Trumpian vision of government, some departmental programs would be killed altogether. The administration wants to close the Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis, charged with providing strategic guidance to the department.

The proposed cuts would also abolish ARPA-E, a $300 million-a-year program created by bipartisan 2007 legislation, which funds research on superconducting wires for wind generators, smart window coatings, technology to make natural gas vehicles more economic and practical and other projects.

“The whole ARPA-E program is exactly right,” said Chad Holliday, a former chief executive at DuPont and now chairman of Shell.

One fear is that other countries will foster their own technologies or purchase U.S. start-ups. “These programs will help the United States maintain its brainpower advantage to remain competitive at a time when other countries are investing heavily in research,” Alexander said.

Chinese companies and universities are already circling U.S. firms that do not get enough funding from the Energy Department, according to Alexander Girau, chief executive and founder of Advano.

The company, which is working on silicon-based materials that might dramatically improve battery performance, failed to get a $1 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Energy Department — despite partnerships with Argonne National Laboratory and Tulane University and a recommendation from House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

Girau said he might need to sell a stakein the company, and Chinese-owned Long Power Systems is interested.

“China is making a gigantic push,” Girau said. “If we don’t have these opportunities, we have to go where the money is.”

Oh good, let's sell to the Chinese. <end sarcasm>

At this point it's a toss-up. Will we become a territory of China or of Russia?

[GreyhoundFan]

31 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

At this point it's a toss-up. Will we become a territory of China or of Russia?

You know, I read this YA series of books (The Selection series by Kiera Cass), a bit cheesy, but a fun read. It's set in a distant future where America has been annexed by China because we couldn't pay our debts. We became the ASC (American State of China) and only broke away when joining forces with Canada, Mexico, and Central America to fight off an invasion by Russia. There is then a coup by a corrupt businessman who sells of his daughter to a prince in Scandinavia, declares himself king, and renames all of North and Central America after himself. Hmm, sound plausible with Agent Orange in the White House? BTW, that is just background for the books, which focus on a competition to become the current prince's wife -- sort of "The Bachelor" meets "Survivor".

[GreyhoundFan]

Posting in this thread as it relates to Tillerson: "U.S. says ExxonMobil violated Russia sanctions while Tillerson was CEO"

Spoiler

The Treasury Department on Thursday said it was fining ExxonMobil $2 million for violating sanctions against Russia by entering into banned business agreements while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson led the company.

Treasury said the improper business dealings came in May 2014, shortly after the U.S. government had sanctioned numerous Russian business executives and companies as part of its response to Russia’s support for violent separatists in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.

Treasury officials said one of the Russian executives who was under sanctions at the time was Igor Sechin, 57, president of Rosneft OAO, an energy company partially owned by the Russian government. Rosneft is one of the world’s largest oil companies, and Sechin is a former senior adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. When Treasury sanctioned Sechin in 2014, it wrote that he “has shown utter loyalty to Vladimir Putin — a key component to his current standing.”

ExxonMobil entered into a business arrangement with him two weeks after the Treasury Department said U.S. companies could no longer do business with him.

In assessing the $2 million fine, Treasury said of the ExxonMobil that “the presidents of its U.S. subsidiaries dealt in services of an individual whose property and interests in property were blocked” by the U.S. government, referring to Sechin.

ExxonMobil, in a statement, called the Treasury Department’s fine “fundamentally unfair” and said that it was following “clear guidance from the White House and Treasury Department” at the time.

It added that Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which imposes sanctions, was “trying to retroactively enforce a new interpretation of an executive order that is inconsistent with the explicit and unambiguous guidance from the White House and Treasury issued before the relevant conduct and still publicly available today.”

But the Treasury Department said “ExxonMobil demonstrated reckless disregard for” the sanctions. It also said the company’s “senior-most executives knew of Sechin's status” and that the company “caused significant harm to the Ukraine-related sanctions” by engaging in the business agreement with Sechin. It doesn’t say whether Tillerson played any role in the business deal or had any involvement, however.

The State Department referred questions to the Treasury Department and ExxonMobil. A Treasury spokesman said it did not confer with Tillerson as part of its deliberations. A representative at Rosneft did not respond to a request for comment.

Treasury had instituted the sanctions against Sechin on April 28, 2014, when it said “transactions by U.S. persons or within the United States involving the individuals and entities designated today are generally prohibited.”

Treasury alleges ExxonMobil signed the documents with Sechin two weeks later.

A few weeks after that, speaking at a corporate event in Dallas, Tillerson told reporters that the sanctions had not had any impact on ExxonMobil's relationship with Rosneft.

"There has been no impact on any of our business activities in Russia to this point, nor has there been any discernible impact on the relationship" with Rosneft, Tillerson said at the time, according to the Associated Press. "The organizations continue to work business as usual."

ExxonMobil didn’t deny that it entered into the business agreement with Sechin, but it says that guidance from the Obama administration at the time allowed such an arrangement. In 2014, the Obama administration did not sanction Rosneft, the energy company, but it did sanction Sechin, who led the company.

President Trump selected Tillerson to serve as his first secretary of state, even though the two appeared to have little history together. Tillerson faced scrutiny from lawmakers in both parties because of his close ties to Putin and past business dealings in Russia, but he was confirmed for the cabinet position by a 56-to-43 vote. In 2013, Tillerson won an award from the Russian government called the “Order of Friendship” after signing deals with Rosneft that began a drilling program in the Arctic’s Kara Sea.

Adam Smith, a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and former Treasury Department, said Thursday's fine appeared to be one of the first ever handed out by the U.S. government as part of the Ukraine-related sanctions. He said there has long been confusion from companies about whether they could enter into business dealings with people who were under sanctions if the business agreement pertained to a company - such as Rosneft - and not someone's personal financial holdings.

ExxonMobil on Thursday said there were several instances during the Obama administration when U.S. officials said the sanctions were against Sechin in his individual capacity and not against the company. Smith said the Treasury Department was clarifying in its new fine against ExxonMobil that this is not the case.

"They are putting a marker down that says that which you thought was the case was not the case," Smith said.

ExxonMobil earned $7.8 billion last year, and the $2 million fine represents less than 1 percent of that income.

More shady dealings.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Teachers union leader bashes Betsy DeVos — and DeVos strikes back"

Spoiler

There’s no more pretending to play nice between Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

In April, the two visited a traditional public school in Ohio together in what was a short-lived experiment in “getting to know you,” and they were supposed to visit a charter school together, too. But on Thursday, Weingarten gave a blistering speech at her union’s convention in Washington, calling DeVos an “ideologue who wants to destabilize and privatize the public schools that millions of Americans value and rely upon.”

A few hours later, DeVos went after the teachers unions — and the AFT, in particular — in a speech she gave in Denver to the American Legislative Executive Council, a powerful conservative organization of lobbyists and state legislators.

DeVos accused the unions of being  “defenders of the status quo” who care only about “school systems” and not about individual children. She mentioned — and had displayed — an AFT tweet criticizing her for saying that public money should be invested in individual students and arguing instead that “we should invest in a system of great public schools for all kids.”

DeVos said: “I couldn’t believe it when I read it, but you have to admire their candor. They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”

President Trump and DeVos have made clear that their chief educational priority is to expand school choice, including privately run charter schools, voucher and similar programs that use public money to pay for private and religious school education. They both have criticized the traditional public school system, America’s most important civic institution, which educates the vast majority of the country’s schoolchildren.

Weingarten said in her speech that defenders of America’s public education system are in a “David versus Goliath battle, and in this battle, we are all David.” While the unions contribute a good deal of money to candidates and causes they support, she was setting up union members as the “Davids” against ultra-wealthy philanthropists, including DeVos, a Michigan billionaire, who have been financially supporting efforts to expand school choice and privatize the public education system.

Weingarten said that the term “choice” was, decades ago, “used to cloak overt racism by segregationist politicians like Harry Byrd, who launched the massive opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.” She said:

After the Brown decision, many school districts, especially in the South, resisted integration. In Virginia, white officials in Prince Edward County closed every public school in the district rather than have white and black children go to school together. They opened private schools where only white parents could choose to send their children. And they did it using public money.

Weingarten acknowledged that some public schools do not live up to the promise of providing a good education to every child:

We get that public schools are not perfect and that every one doesn’t always work for every one of its students. We know that schools in America have always been unequal, often based on race and class.

But I’ve never heard a parent say, “That school doesn’t work for my kid. So I want to engage in an ideologically driven market-based experiment that commodifies education and has been proven to be ineffective.”

No, most of the time parents want a neighborhood public school that works for their child. They want their child to feel safe. They want their school to have adequate resources and small enough class sizes. They want their school to have music, art and science. They want their child to soar in challenging classes and get support when they struggle. They want their child to fill the dinner table conversation with stories about what they did in school that day.

Earlier this month, the president of the country’s largest labor union, Lily Eskelsen García of the National Education Association, told delegates at her organization’s annual gathering that they would not work with the Trump administration because the president and DeVos could not be trusted to do what is in the best interests of children. She also labeled DeVos “the queen of for-profit privatization of public education.”

The two major teachers unions, which together represent several million people, have been quick to oppose the Trump administration. It took a lot longer for them to take issue with the Obama administration’s education reform policies, but both eventually did, calling for the ouster of Arne Duncan, who was education secretary for seven years under President Barack Obama.

Here’s Weingarten’s speech Thursday as prepared for delivery and provided by the AFT:

 Introduction — My Day with Betsy

 Welcome to TEACH!

I know many of you have just arrived in Washington (and you can understand why we call it the swamp), but let me start by taking you on a trip, to a town in Ohio called Van Wert.

Like many rural areas in America, Van Wert has grown increasingly Republican. And in the November 2016 election, it went overwhelmingly Republican.

Does that mean that the people of Van Wert agree with everything Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are trying to do, like end public schools as we know them in favor of vouchers and privatization and making education a commodity?

Not in the least.

The people of Van Wert are proud of their public schools. They’ve invested in pre-K and project-based learning. They have a nationally recognized robotics team and a community school program that helps at-risk kids graduate. Ninety-six percent of students in the district graduate from high school. This community understands that Title I is not simply a budget line but a lifeline.

Why I am telling you about this town? Because these are the schools I wanted Betsy DeVos to see — public schools in the heart of the heart of America.

Unfortunately, just like climate change deniers deny the facts, Betsy DeVos is a public school denier, denying the good in our public schools and their foundational place in our democracy. Her record back in Michigan, and now in Washington, makes it clear that she is the most anti-public education secretary of education ever.

Betsy DeVos called public schools a “dead end.” Our public schools aren’t a dead end. They’re places of endless opportunity.

They’re where 90 percent of America’s parents send their children. And while Secretary DeVos may have thought Van Wert would be a good photo op, my goal, like any educator, was to teach her something.

And we did: Great things are happening in our public schools. And with the right support, they can do even better. That’s what she saw in Van Wert, and that’s what’s happening in public schools across the country. Betsy DeVos cannot claim ignorance of what’s happening in public schools — only indifference.

But how can you be indifferent when you hear from someone like Claudia?

I remember Claudia’s history class — the great discussions and the lively debates. But I also remember some grousing that I was pushing the class too hard. (Claudia, I didn’t push you nearly as hard as you pushed yourself.) And I could not be more proud that my former student is a member of AFT Local 243 in Madison, Wis.

Everyone in this hall has their Claudias. It’s why we do what we do. And it’s why we are going to hold Betsy DeVos accountable for her indifference, and for her attacks on our profession and on public education.

But her attacks are not the only challenges we face. She’s not the only ideologue who wants to destabilize and privatize the public schools that millions of Americans value and rely upon.

Let me be blunt: We are in a David versus Goliath battle. And in this battle, we are all David.

How Did We Get Here?

So how did we get here?

It didn’t just happen last Election Day or Inauguration Day.

The moment we’re in is the result of an intentional, decades-long campaign to protect the economic and political power of the few against the rights of the many. It has taken the form of division — expressing itself as racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia and homophobia. And its intentions are often disguised. For example, take the word “choice.”

You hear it all the time these days. School “choice.” Betsy DeVos uses it in practically every sentence. You could show her, as I did, an award-winning robotics program, and she’d say “What about choice?” which she actually said. You could probably say “Good morning, Betsy,” and she’d say, “That’s my choice.” She must love restaurant buffets.

But let me be really serious. Decades ago, the term “choice” was used to cloak overt racism by segregationist politicians like Harry Byrd, who launched the massive opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.

After the Brown decision, many school districts, especially in the South, resisted integration. In Virginia, white officials in Prince Edward County closed every public school in the district rather than have white and black children go to school together. They opened private schools where only white parents could choose to send their children. And they did it using public money.

By 1963, African American students had been locked out of Prince Edward County public schools for five years. AFT members sent funds and school supplies. And some traveled from New York and Philadelphia to set up schools for African American students in church basements and public parks, so these students could have an education.

And what about the schools Betsy DeVos appallingly called “pioneers of school choice” — historically black colleges and universities? HBCUs actually arose from the discriminatory practices that denied black students access to higher education. HBCUs are vital institutions, but that doesn’t change the truth of their origins: They were born of a shameful lack of educational choices for African American students.

Make no mistake: The “real pioneers” of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration. But neither facts nor history seems to matter to this administration.

In March, DeVos gave a speech here in Washington. She justified “choice” by saying: “I’m simply in favor of giving parents more and better options to find an environment that will set their child up for success.”

Who could disagree with that? It’s not ideological to want a school that works for your kid. It’s human. But her preferred choices — vouchers, tuition tax credits, and private, for-profit charter schools — don’t work.

And, after decades of experiments with voucher programs, the research is clear: They fail most of the children they purportedly are intended to benefit.

The Department of Education’s own analysis of the D.C. voucher program found it has a negative effect on student achievement. The Louisiana voucher program has led to large declines in kids’ reading and math scores. Students in Ohio’s voucher program did worse than children in its traditional public schools. And I could go on and on about for-profit and online charters, as well.

And, while parents are promised greater choice, when a family uses a voucher for a child to attend a private school, in reality it is the school — not the family — that makes the choice.

That’s because private schools can — and many do — discriminate, because they don’t follow federal civil rights laws. Vouchers increase racial and economic segregation. And they lack the accountability that public schools have. Many voucher programs, like the one here in Washington, D.C., don’t even reveal how much public funding they receive or how students are performing. DeVos defends this lack of transparency, saying the important thing is not quality or accountability, but — what? Choice.

These choices do not increase student achievement. They do not reduce inequity or segregation. They drain funds from and destabilize our public schools. And they move us further away from the choice every child in America deserves — a well-supported, effective public school near their home.

But Trump and DeVos are not backing off their support for vouchers, for-profit charters and other privatization schemes. They have proposed a $250 million “down payment” they want to follow with billions of public dollars for vouchers and tuition tax credits. And you know how they plan to pay for it? By cutting federal education spending that goes directly to educate children in public schools by $9 billion.

Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation. We are in the same fight, against the same forces that are keeping the same children from getting the public education they need and deserve. And what better way to pave the path to privatize education than to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their shortcomings, and let the market handle the rest. All in the name of choice.

That’s how a democracy comes apart.

On the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I was in Topkea, Kansas, the home of the plaintiffs in the Brown case. I was there to support the fight against Gov. Sam Brownback’s draconian disinvestment from public education.

The big idea behind the governor’s “real-live experiment” with trickle-down economics was that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, and slashing public services, would somehow lead to an economic boom.

There was no boom — only devastating cuts to public schools and other services, and a bust for the state’s economy. This spring the Kansas Supreme Court found that the people who’d suffered the most were black, Hispanic and poor students.

We fought this vile experiment. And last month even the Republican-controlled Kansas state Legislature forced Gov. Brownback to increase public education funding by nearly $500 million.

We took a stand in Prince Edward County. And we took a stand in Kansas. Both fights were long and hard. We didn’t give up, and we didn’t do it alone, with one tweet, one speech or one demonstration.

How Do We Move Forward? Five Values (Five Smooth Stones)

Yes, it’s exhausting. We have to fight harder and harder just to keep from losing ground. But I haven’t lost heart or faith, because, although we face formidable adversaries, we are David to their Goliath.

When leaders controlling the federal government are hell-bent on taking away health care from 32 million people in order to give a tax cut to the ultra-wealthy, we are David to their Goliath. When officials far from the classroom care a whole lot about testing and test scores, but don’t give a damn about what our students really need, we are David to their Goliath. When hedge funders, billionaires and anti-labor ideologues band together in an axis of inequality, further rigging our political and economic system against working folks, we are David to their Goliath. When a presidential administration takes actions that make immigrant students afraid to dream, that favor fraudulent for-profit colleges over students seeking an education, that put an entire religion in its crosshairs, we are David to their Goliath. When governors in state after state go after labor rights and voting rights, and they find an ally in the newest Supreme Court justice who will hear the Janus case, we must be David to their Goliath.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Valley of Elah, where the standoff between David and Goliath took place. And if you remember Sunday school, you’ll recall: That wasn’t a fair fight, either. Goliath was big; David was a little guy. Goliath had an army. And David? David had a sling — with five smooth stones. But David had a plan. Goliath no doubt assumed his greater strength was enough, but we all know how that ended up.

I like the fact that, in our sling, we also have five smooth stones. Five values that we are translating into action. What are they?

• First, Americans deserve good jobs that pay a decent wage, and provide a voice at work and a secure retirement.
• Second, they deserve health care so people are not one illness away from bankruptcy.
• Third, they need public schools that are safe and welcoming and prepare young people for life and citizenship, career and college. And speaking of college, it must be affordable.
• Fourth, none of this happens without a strong and vibrant democracy, including a free press, an independent judiciary, a thriving labor movement, and the protection — not suppression — of the right to vote.
• And fifth, there is no democracy without safeguarding the civil rights of all. That means fighting bigotry and discrimination — like the attacks on immigrants, Muslims and transgender kids, and the rising tide of anti-Semitism and racism.

I am on the road more often than not, or at least it feels that way. And I get to talk with a lot of people. Here’s what I’ve seen and heard: No matter where people are from, or their political persuasion, there is a common set of aspirations — for themselves and their families. When we connect on values — these values, these five stones — we win. We help make people’s lives better, and we repair the common ground that has been jackhammered apart.

Four Pillars

 Well, David had his five stones, but he only needed one. And while I could talk at length about each of these five core values, I want to focus on one: powerful, purposeful public education.
Great things are happening in public schools in every community in America, and we need to lift them up. Poetry slams. Socratic seminars. Science fairs. Speech therapy. Students checkmating their chess coach. A once-struggling student reading on grade level.

Any one of you could talk about things going on in your classroom and your school that you’re proud of — and I hope you will! In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers (my home local) started what they call #PublicSchoolProud — you saw it in the video. This campaign is now taking hold in Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas. It’s one of the ways school employees, parents and communities are showing that there is so much to be proud of in our public schools.

We get that public schools are not perfect and that every one doesn’t always work for every one of its students. We know that schools in America have always been unequal, often based on race and class.

But I’ve never heard a parent say, “That school doesn’t work for my kid. So I want to engage in an ideologically driven market-based experiment that commodifies education and has been proven to be ineffective.”

No, most of the time parents want a neighborhood public school that works for their child. They want their child to feel safe. They want their school to have adequate resources and small enough class sizes. They want their school to have music, art and science. They want their child to soar in challenging classes and get support when they struggle. They want their child to fill the dinner table conversation with stories about what they did in school that day.

Our public schools are filled with dedicated professionals who are doing their level best — despite never having enough funding, despite the relentless attacks, despite misguided policies gussied up as “reforms” and despite the challenges children bring from home.

And with some key investments and the right strategies, we’ll not just have the will, we’ll have the way.

So as far as I’m concerned, the only choice is: Do we as a nation strengthen and improve our public schools, or don’t we?

• We know what works to accomplish this: investment in and focus on four pillars of powerful, purposeful public education: Children’s well-being;
• Powerful learning;
• Educators’ capacity; and,
• Collaboration

Children’s well-being means meeting children where they are — emotionally, socially, physically and academically; making sure they feel safe and valued. Since half of the kids in public schools are poor, that also requires confronting the reality of poverty. One way is to coordinate the services kids need in community schools. The AFT Innovation Fund is helping our affiliates open and expand community schools.

What about powerful learning? Public schools are asked to develop students academically and personally. That doesn’t happen by testing and test prep. It happens when learning engages students and encourages them to investigate, strategize and collaborate. It’s why we fight fiercely for art and music and project-based learning like the computer animation career-tech program the AFT Innovation Fund is supporting in Miami.

And what about developing our capacity as educators? How many times in your career have you been thrown the keys and told to just do it? No one would tolerate that for pilots or doctors or our armed forces. But educators? Please …

We continue to fight against the infantilization of teachers and the “teachers should be seen and not heard” sentiment of people who make decisions affecting teaching and learning, but who haven’t spent 10 minutes in a classroom. That’s the purpose of the AFT Teacher Leaders Program, which now counts 800 participants. Thousands of members have participated in AFT professional development. And hundreds of thousands more have developed their skills through Share My Lesson and the professional development offered by our state and local affiliates.

The glue that holds all this together is collaboration: school employees, parents and community partners working together. When schools struggle, the response too often is top-down takeovers and firing staff. Those approaches are “disruptive”all right — another term public school deniers love — but they are not effective.

Just look at McDowell County, W.Va., the eighth-poorest county in the United States, where coal used to be king. The state took over the school district for a decade. Nothing changed. But now, after an AFT-led partnership that utilizes these four pillars, graduation rates are up by double digits. Most importantly, we are helping change children’s lives.

These four pillars won’t be built on hopes and wishes, they’ll be built on learning effective strategies — which you’re doing here at TEACH — and on investment.

Investment is crucial. But Trump and DeVos, and many states, are actually going in the opposite direction. They tell the lie that public schools are failing, and they try to make huge budget cuts to make the lie real.

The Trump-DeVos budget zeros out resources for reducing class size and for teacher professional development, and strips all funding for community schools, and after-school and summer programs. So offerings like the summer learning program at D.C.’s Brightwood Education Campus, which I visited this week, would be gone, along with its Springboard program, a summer literacy course for students in kindergarten to second grade. This program not only prevents summer learning loss, but in the five weeks of classes, has increased students’ literacy levels by 3½ months. In essence, the Trump-DeVos budget takes a meat cleaver to public education.

And it’s not just the education cuts. While Trumpcare might be on hold right now, the battle is far from over. Its $880 billion cut from Medicaid was inhumane. And it would mean, for the almost 80 percent of school districts that rely on these funds, the loss of school nurses and health screenings, wheelchairs and feeding tubes, for our most vulnerable kids.

And for what? A tax cut for the wealthiest Americans?

These cuts rob children of opportunity. That’s why we fight them, with actions like the lobbying and rallying many of you did yesterday. And people are with us. The AFT recently commissioned a poll. Three-quarters of the people we talked to oppose the deep cuts to education that Trump and DeVos are proposing. And just as many oppose taking away funding from public schools to increase funding for private school vouchers and charter schools.

RESIST — AND RECLAIM

While people have always supported public education, what makes this moment different is that now, millions of Americans are hungry to fight for something better. But with the daily outrages and the relentless assaults on our values and our democracy, it can be hard to know where to begin.

Well, it begins with elections. They have consequences — big-time. Voting really matters. But what can we do between elections? That’s where one of the books I’ve become obsessed with helps. It’s by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder. It’s called “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” And you got a copy in your conference bag.

Snyder’s 20 lessons are told through the lens of history. They sharpen our understanding of what is going on around us. And these lessons are important because most of today’s students were born after Nazi genocide, after apartheid, after the Berlin Wall fell, and after de jure segregation in the United States had been outlawed. They could have, as Snyder writes, the “sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.” Tragically, that’s just not true.

Snyder writes, “History does not repeat, but it does instruct. … History can familiarize, and it can warn.” He reminds us that we can’t take our institutions for granted. That dictators throughout history have built power by kneecapping trade unions and co-opting or undercutting public education.

Believe in truth. Listen for dangerous words. Contribute to good causes. Be a patriot. Defend institutions, such as unions. There is something that each of us can do to defend democracy and fight tyranny.

And if the next generation is to take up the fight, who better to teach them than America’s educators? So I am asking you: Let’s take our responsibility to resist injustice full on. And let’s take our responsibility to reclaim the future full on. Classroom by classroom. Community by community.

And we are not alone. Take a look. This is a photo of the inauguration last January.

...

And this is from the Women’s March just one day after — and so is this, and this, and this. No, we are not alone.

...

Yes, those millions — yes, millions — of people who have protested since Election Day are, as the kids say, woke. They are energized — energized to fight against bigotry and hate, to fight for an economy that works for everyone and an America that leads the world.

Why do we teach our students about Dr. King’s letter from Birmingham jail? Or Cesar Chavez’s organizing of immigrant workers, or Mahatma Gandhi’s fasts, or Malala’s ordeal? Because we know that nothing is more inspiring than when people whom the powerful want to keep down, rise up.

And we, too, will rise.

To rise takes more than a moment, or even a hundred moments. It takes a movement. And you are part of that movement. So:

• If you are a local union president, please rise!
• If you’ve been part of the AFT Teacher Leaders program, rise up!
• If you have participated in an AFT professional development course, rise up!
• If you have downloaded or uploaded a resource on Share My Lesson, rise up!
• If you have bought school supplies for your students, or food for a hungry kid, please rise!
• If you’ve spent a sleepless night worrying about a student, please rise!
• If you have lobbied for a cause you believe in, rise up!
• If you are #PublicSchoolProud, rise up!
• If you know that the union can help empower you to make our communities and our world a better place, please rise!

By resisting, and reclaiming the promise of public education for all of our students, we will preserve our democracy. We will protect our most vulnerable. We will strengthen our communities. We will take on Goliath. And we will win.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

More on our buddy Betsy. You couldn't make this up: "Betsy DeVos claims philosophy of Margaret ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher as her own"

Spoiler

Yes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went there — and a few other places, too.

Speaking at an annual conference of a powerful conservative organization, she invoked the words of Margaret Thatcher, the late prime minister of Great Britain, who instituted tough conservative policies that supporters say helped save the British economy and foes say hurt the poor and destroyed heavy industries and communities.  Thatcher became known as the “Iron Lady” for her tough policies, both domestic and foreign, and is a hero to conservatives here and abroad. (You can see DeVos’s entire speech below.)

DeVos, appearing at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), framed her keynote speech around Thatcher’s philosophy of society, saying that it was hers as well. DeVos said:

What, exactly, is education if not an investment in students?

I was reminded of something another secretary of education once said. Her name was Margaret.  No, not Spellings — Thatcher.  Lady Thatcher regretted that too many seem to blame all their problems on “society.” But, “who is society,” she asked. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” — families, she said — “and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

 The Iron Lady was right then and she’s still right today.

(Margaret Thatcher was secretary of education and science under British Prime Minister Edward Heath before taking control of the Conservative Party herself.)

And that is as clear a distillation of DeVos’s philosophy of government as she has given since becoming education secretary in February after Mike Pence became the first vice president in American history to have to break a tie for the Senate to confirm a Cabinet member. To DeVos, public institutions are impediments to individuals who want freedom to access opportunities, and the traditional public education system, which has been the most important civic institution in America since its creation, is a failure that can’t be fixed.

DeVos was in friendly territory when she spoke in Denver at the annual conference of ALEC,  a powerful  organization of corporate lobbyists and conservative state legislators who craft “model legislation” on issues important to them and then help shepherd through legislatures. ALEC calls itself “the largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism,” while it has been called a “stealth business lobbyist” by the New York Times and “a corporate bill mill” by the watchdog nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy.

At Thursday’s speech, DeVos luxuriated in a mutual admiration society. She praised ALEC, and Debbie Lesko, a member of the Arizona Senate and ALEC, told DeVos before conducting a Q & A with her onstage that they just loved what she said.

While being careful to say that “providing more educational options isn’t against public schools,” she repeated hailed alternatives to traditional school systems and bashed people who support them as people who care only about “systems” and not individual students, and are only interested in sustaining the “status quo.” (That’s an accusation, incidentally, that was used frequently by President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who accused his opponents of wanting to do the same thing, and it may be time for DeVos’s speechwriters to come up with a new insult.)

Having declared in 2015 that “government really sucks,” DeVos savaged the federal government in her ALEC speech:

If you need another reason to believe the federal government shouldn’t be involved in education, look no further than Obamacare. The federal government couldn’t build a website that worked, but progressives think it should run a national health care system?

We need health care reform that rewards innovation and puts patients at the center, just like we need changes in education that put students at the center, empowers educators and spurs creativity.

The same principle applies to fixing our nation’s broken tax code: we need to reduce the financial burden on hard-working individuals and job providers to unleash the economic potential that has been held captive for too long. Without reform, the next generation of entrepreneurs will swim upstream against the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate and a system that punishes risk-taking rather than encourages it.

She said President Trump was determined to return power “back in the hands of people” and she praised his executive order asking her department to review any regulation that “might obstruct parents, teachers, communities and states from best-serving their students.”

And then she said this about what is going on in the nation’s capital:

It’s a sad state of affairs in Washington when common sense requires an executive order.

Over and over, she hailed school choice — which is a euphemism for alternatives to traditional public schools — saying at one point:

Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them! 

Does that mean she thinks parents who want to strengthen the public schools and not promote choice are not good parents?

DeVos praised the state legislators in the audience for playing “the long game,” using a “patient approach” to push school choice in one state after another. Indeed, DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been working and using some of their fortune to promote school choice for decades. She said, in another slight to her critics:

And for those of you here today, who have been on the front lines, you understand the struggle at the very core of this debate: There are those who defend a system that by every account is failing too many kids … and there are those who know justice demands we give every parent the right to an equal opportunity to access the quality education that best fits their child’s unique, individual needs.

That, of course, doesn’t always sit well with defenders of the status quo.  But despite the teachers unions’ not-so-veiled threats and millions of dollars, can anybody name a single legislator who has lost a seat for voting to support parents and students?

Here’s the speech as prepared for delivery and provided by the Department of Education:

...

She is beyond belief.

[candygirl200413]

*screams into a pillow*

[GrumpyGran]

17 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You know, I read this YA series of books (The Selection series by Kiera Cass), a bit cheesy, but a fun read. It's set in a distant future where America has been annexed by China because we couldn't pay our debts. We became the ASC (American State of China) and only broke away when joining forces with Canada, Mexico, and Central America to fight off an invasion by Russia. There is then a coup by a corrupt businessman who sells of his daughter to a prince in Scandinavia, declares himself king, and renames all of North and Central America after himself. Hmm, sound plausible with Agent Orange in the White House? BTW, that is just background for the books, which focus on a competition to become the current prince's wife -- sort of "The Bachelor" meets "Survivor".

Okay, this just scared the shit out of me. Too close to where we are. @fraurosena, I don't suppose you can intervene and have your country invade us before this happens? We promise we'll be good.

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More on our buddy Betsy. You couldn't make this up: "Betsy DeVos claims philosophy of Margaret ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher as her own"

  Reveal hidden contents

Yes, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos went there — and a few other places, too.

Speaking at an annual conference of a powerful conservative organization, she invoked the words of Margaret Thatcher, the late prime minister of Great Britain, who instituted tough conservative policies that supporters say helped save the British economy and foes say hurt the poor and destroyed heavy industries and communities.  Thatcher became known as the “Iron Lady” for her tough policies, both domestic and foreign, and is a hero to conservatives here and abroad. (You can see DeVos’s entire speech below.)

DeVos, appearing at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), framed her keynote speech around Thatcher’s philosophy of society, saying that it was hers as well. DeVos said:

What, exactly, is education if not an investment in students?

I was reminded of something another secretary of education once said. Her name was Margaret.  No, not Spellings — Thatcher.  Lady Thatcher regretted that too many seem to blame all their problems on “society.” But, “who is society,” she asked. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families” — families, she said — “and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

 The Iron Lady was right then and she’s still right today.

(Margaret Thatcher was secretary of education and science under British Prime Minister Edward Heath before taking control of the Conservative Party herself.)

And that is as clear a distillation of DeVos’s philosophy of government as she has given since becoming education secretary in February after Mike Pence became the first vice president in American history to have to break a tie for the Senate to confirm a Cabinet member. To DeVos, public institutions are impediments to individuals who want freedom to access opportunities, and the traditional public education system, which has been the most important civic institution in America since its creation, is a failure that can’t be fixed.

DeVos was in friendly territory when she spoke in Denver at the annual conference of ALEC,  a powerful  organization of corporate lobbyists and conservative state legislators who craft “model legislation” on issues important to them and then help shepherd through legislatures. ALEC calls itself “the largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism,” while it has been called a “stealth business lobbyist” by the New York Times and “a corporate bill mill” by the watchdog nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy.

At Thursday’s speech, DeVos luxuriated in a mutual admiration society. She praised ALEC, and Debbie Lesko, a member of the Arizona Senate and ALEC, told DeVos before conducting a Q & A with her onstage that they just loved what she said.

While being careful to say that “providing more educational options isn’t against public schools,” she repeated hailed alternatives to traditional school systems and bashed people who support them as people who care only about “systems” and not individual students, and are only interested in sustaining the “status quo.” (That’s an accusation, incidentally, that was used frequently by President Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan, who accused his opponents of wanting to do the same thing, and it may be time for DeVos’s speechwriters to come up with a new insult.)

Having declared in 2015 that “government really sucks,” DeVos savaged the federal government in her ALEC speech:

If you need another reason to believe the federal government shouldn’t be involved in education, look no further than Obamacare. The federal government couldn’t build a website that worked, but progressives think it should run a national health care system?

We need health care reform that rewards innovation and puts patients at the center, just like we need changes in education that put students at the center, empowers educators and spurs creativity.

The same principle applies to fixing our nation’s broken tax code: we need to reduce the financial burden on hard-working individuals and job providers to unleash the economic potential that has been held captive for too long. Without reform, the next generation of entrepreneurs will swim upstream against the developed world’s highest corporate tax rate and a system that punishes risk-taking rather than encourages it.

She said President Trump was determined to return power “back in the hands of people” and she praised his executive order asking her department to review any regulation that “might obstruct parents, teachers, communities and states from best-serving their students.”

And then she said this about what is going on in the nation’s capital:

It’s a sad state of affairs in Washington when common sense requires an executive order.

Over and over, she hailed school choice — which is a euphemism for alternatives to traditional public schools — saying at one point:

Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them! 

Does that mean she thinks parents who want to strengthen the public schools and not promote choice are not good parents?

DeVos praised the state legislators in the audience for playing “the long game,” using a “patient approach” to push school choice in one state after another. Indeed, DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been working and using some of their fortune to promote school choice for decades. She said, in another slight to her critics:

And for those of you here today, who have been on the front lines, you understand the struggle at the very core of this debate: There are those who defend a system that by every account is failing too many kids … and there are those who know justice demands we give every parent the right to an equal opportunity to access the quality education that best fits their child’s unique, individual needs.

That, of course, doesn’t always sit well with defenders of the status quo.  But despite the teachers unions’ not-so-veiled threats and millions of dollars, can anybody name a single legislator who has lost a seat for voting to support parents and students?

Here’s the speech as prepared for delivery and provided by the Department of Education:

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She is beyond belief.

No surprise here. Not surprised even at her arrogance. She is what she is. And I'm furious because apparently K12 and Connect are now a thing in my state. Un-educate the masses and it makes it easier to brainwash them.