Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Vaudeville singer and dancer Bertha "Chippie" Hill. Enjoy!

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

-- H.L. Mencken

News and Opinion

American Mythology and the loss of democracy

Trump Calls For Deportations Without Hearings Or Judges

President Donald Trump escalated the debate over immigration this weekend in calling for the deportation of people who “invade our Country”, without hearings or judges. The call would raise serious questions under both U.S. and international law. It would be a denial of the most basic protections of due process for those with credible claims for asylum. ... The shift of Trump from a civil to a criminal emphasis in enforcement is well within his authority. Moreover, it is true that the Obama Administration also separated families in this fashion, though the numbers were smaller.  Indeed this weekend Obama Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson admitted that they did separate children from their families and that “catch and release” was not an option — a position ostensibly close to the current policy but one that did not produce the same protests from Democratic politicians.  He called for family detention centers to avoid the release of undocumented persons.

However, the refusal of any hearing or judge could raise some serious constitutional and international law concerns.  We are a party to the United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol in dealing with refugees — obligating us to take in those with a well-founded fear of being persecuted in the future “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” There is also the Refugee Act of 1980.  Someone asserting asylum is entitled to a hearing to present their case and not simply a perfunctory dismissal.

[see link for discussion of relevant law. - js]

Americans Have Been Taught That Appeasing Authoritarians is Fighting Them

Over the weekend, a restaurant kicked out a powerful authoritarian. And an outcry arose. “We must be civil and respectful!”, cried America’s intellectuals, politicians, and leaders, never known for their courage, wisdom, or insight. My friends, please. Americans have been taught all the wrong lessons about how to fight authoritarianism — and they still are — and that is why they are losing.

Should we play nice with authoritarians? Fascists? What does both history and research tell us?

Never. Not a bit. Not for a moment. The way to defeat authoritarians isn’t to play nice — it is to the very opposite. To shun, ostracize, shame them. To kick them out of every restaurant and theater and café and bar. Until they are no longer welcome in a civilized society itself. I will come back to that. First, let’s understand why.

They’ll take every inch you give — and keep bellowing for the next mile. Today, we found out that a President wants to deny the little kids in camps due process. That is after a national outcry against putting kids in camps to begin with. But that is what has been happening since the beginning: Americans give an inch — and the authoritarians, somehow, take a mile.

Research into authoritarianism uses words like “continuum” and “chain reaction” and “vicious spiral.” Why is that? For exactly the reason above. The authoritarian’s goal is to intimidate you and frighten you into compliance. He is an abuser and bully — only of a whole society, not a family or classroom. Now, when you give an inch to such a person, they know their strategy of intimidation is working — and they double down. So.

Playing nice with authoritarians, just as with abusers, licenses and legitimizes their worse tendencies, and sets off self-reinforcing downward spirals of hardening intimidation, abuse, transgression, and violence.

When we make authoritarians reviled laughingstocks, shunned outcasts, we are saying that one must stand up for civilized society to be a part of one — not just for corroding and ruining one.

In Defense of Incivility

Trump administration officials are having restaurant troubles. Over the weekend, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempted to dine with her family at a restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, and the owner decided, in consultation with her employees, to refuse to serve them. This follows on the heels of senior policy adviser Stephen Miller being called a fascist in a D.C. Mexican restaurant, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen being chased out of another Mexican restaurant by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) protesters.

A certain class of centrist liberal was upset by this supposed affront to civility. The Washington Post editorial board wrote that current history doesn't justify uncivil behavior, and Sanders "should be allowed to eat dinner in peace." Former Obama adviser David Axelrod tweeted that he was "appalled" at people celebrating Sanders getting kicked out. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf suggests that such incivility increases the likelihood of a Trump re-election. ...

First of all, we should be clear about is going on. Nobody jumped Miller and beat him senseless, or made any violent threats, or even broke anything. The confrontation was all clearly within the nonviolent political tradition of boycott, protest, civil disobedience, and so forth.

If there is any main wellspring of "incivility" (an extremely ill-defined word, but setting that aside), it comes from the monstrously evil actions of the Trump regime.

We're being held to a standard of civility when Donald Trump isn't even being held to a standard of constitutionality.

Asymmetrical Political Warfare. If we play by their rules, we've already lost.

— Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) June 26, 2018

Red Hens as far away as Ireland are getting attacked by Trump supporters

Restaurants across the country sharing the same name are being targeted with death threats, eggings, and fake reservations after the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, refused service to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday night.

“This place is unamerican for kicking Sarah Sander out, libtards snowflakes cannot accept a true patriotic American! MAGA!” wrote one Facebook user on a Red Hen Facebook page, giving the place a one-star review. The trouble is, that Facebook page was for a bar and restaurant in Limerick, Ireland, which has absolutely no connection to the restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. ... Restaurants with similar names in places around the world are now being targeted by Trump supporters. One Red Hen in California even had to shut down their Facebook page because they were getting so many comments and messages. Another in D.C. got death threats.

VICE News was able to reach representatives at seven restaurants called “Red Hen” on Monday, all of whom said they'd received calls or had been criticized on social media for the crime of having the same name. ... The Red Hen in Washington, D.C., appears to have borne a large proportion of the misguided vitriol. Located just blocks away from the Capitol building, they say they’ve gotten tons of calls threatening violence. ...

Several of the Red Hens said that some Trump supporters continued to badger them even after they explained they were not connected to the restaurant in controversy.

'Schumer and Pelosi Have to Go': Democratic Leaders Under Fire for Urging 'Civility' in Face of Trump's Vicious Agenda

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) didn't issue a single word of public criticism of their fellow Democrats for voting to deregulate Wall Street and hand President Donald Trump immense spying powers, but on Monday the Democratic Party heads lectured their colleagues and grassroots activists on the need for "civility" in the face of Trump's vicious attacks on immigrant families, the poor, and the planet.

Drawing swift backlash from activists who led the opposition to Trump's cruel family separation policy by greeting White House officials with protests inside restaurants and outside of their homes, Schumer claimed in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday that directly confronting members of the Trump administration over their hate-filled and destructive policies is "not American"—a clear rebuke to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who called on Americans to publicly shame Cabinet officials.

"Schumer is being more critical of Maxine Waters than he's ever been of ICE," independent journalist Eoin Higgins observed.

"All of the liberal politicians and pundits who shouted 'this is not normal' for a year are now telling us to be civil to the people ripping apart families," Margaret McLaughlin, a member of the Metro D.C. branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), added after Pelosi similarly rebuked Waters' call for direct confrontation. "Y'all are fuckin' hypocrites." ...

Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, observed in a tweet that calls for "civility" have frequently been used by powerful throughout American history to deligitimize dissent against the prevailing status quo. "'Civility' has been (and continues to be) invoked to constrain and limit the form and character of dissent by the powers that be," Glaude noted.

I'm always thrown by people who think bombs and war perfectly rational but disturbing a rich person's evening beyond the pale. "civility" LOL but for whom?

— Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) June 25, 2018

For WaPo, Subsidizing Bus Fare Is a Lot Like Giving the Rich $5 Trillion

According to the Washington Post (6/17/18), Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the frontrunner in Mexico’s July 1 election, “bears more than a passing political resemblance” to US President Donald Trump. ...

The one incredibly shallow sense in which Trump and López Obrador are comparable is that both have taken positions that fall out of the extreme centrist status quo. However, Trump challenges the center from the right and AMLO does so from the left. In conflating Trump and López Obrador, the Post emphasizes the sole superficial trait they share and skates over the manifold, substantive differences between the two. For example, the Post’s editorial concludes:

If Mexicans choose Mr. López Obrador, they will be, like the voters who backed Mr. Trump, blowing up the status quo without a reliable sense of what will replace it. The result is likely to be more trouble on both sides of the border.

It’s true that AMLO could mean “trouble,” but for a rather dissimilar constituency than Trump. López Obrador has vowed to reverse Mexican oil policies that led to a $15 billion energy trade deficit with the US in 2017, and is proposing “a sweeping reorientation of the nation’s energy policy with an emphasis on independence from the United States.” This “could slow oil production in Texas and impede deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by international oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron,” while hampering natural gas sales to Mexico “that are an important source of revenue for American oil and pipeline companies.” Trump, by contrast, has been “trouble” for Yemeni civilians, Puerto Rican hurricane victims, and migrant children, toddlers and babies.

Yet the extreme center refuses to acknowledge even the most elementary distinctions between those who depart from the reigning consensus. ... Everyone angry about the state of the world is the same, however numerous and gargantuan the gaps in the political content of their grievances, or of the social changes they endorse. Nor is it the first time the paper has trafficked in these false equivalencies, having run a piece called “This Is How Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Are the Same Person” (6/8/16), as well as articles (1/27/17, 12/26/17) drawing bogus parallels between Trump and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

Such comparisons function to malign those who advocate reforms to improve the lives of the poor and working class, equating them with a racist warmonger who enriches the extremely wealthy and has bragged about sexually assaulting women. That is almost certainly the point of this bizarre insistence that thesis and antithesis are equivalent.

Young Trump staffers are complaining they can't date in DC because everyone hates them

Young Trump administration staffers are having a hard time dating in Washington — one of the most Democratic cities in the country — according to a new Politico feature. Both current and former staffers say they're often berated by prospective dates online, or simply denied when someone finds out where they work or that they voted for the president.

"You do the small-talk thing, and you have a very good conversation, and then they might say, 'You didn't vote for Trump, right?'" one 31-year-old female administration official told Politico. "As soon as I say, 'Of course I did,' it just devolves into all-caps 'HOW COULD YOU BE SUCH A RACIST AND A BIGOT?' And 'You're going to take away your own birth control.'"

In one recent online exchange, a potential date asked her, "Do you rip babies from their mothers and then send them to Mexico?" Another match on an dating app told her, "Thanks but no thanks. Just Googled you and it said you were a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. Go f--- yourself."

Blame liberal democracy’s flaws for Erdogan’s win, not the voters

How many warnings do liberals need? The victory of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, hands power, virtually for ever, to a ruler of 80 million people on Europe’s southern border. His opponents are jailed, his press is censored, his promised reforms give him unlimited control. He is undeniably popular. There is no point in simply deploring Erdoğan and, by implication, insulting his electorate. Europe now faces two populist (and ostensibly popular) autocrats, Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, across its eastern frontier. They are matched by similar “strong-man” leaders in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Serbia.

These regimes are no longer aberrations. Populism is becoming the norm across a swath of states in eastern Europe, characterised by personal rule, xenophobia and the suppression of parliamentary and media opposition. Churchill’s warning of “an iron curtain descending” returns to haunt the continent, except that this time the curtain is not Soviet communism but populist autocracy. The one sure way to exacerbate this trend is for western Europe simply to hurl abuse at it. As in Donald Trump’s America, people do not like being told they are idiots, racists or deluded Nazis when voting for what they see as their interest and their national identity.

Two years ago, the world values survey was clear as a bell. While older respondents (over the age of 60) were resolute that democracy was “essential” to their lives, this was true of less than half of those under 30. Almost a quarter of American “millennials” now think democracy “a bad way” to run a country. A sixth – 17% – of young Europeans think likewise, double the figure for 1995. In Germany, Spain, Japan and America, a full 40% of people overall would prefer “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliaments or elections”. Faith in democracy among the west’s young people is plummeting.

Warning to US: Erdogan Has Used Same Techniques as Trump to De-Democratize Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, began his legitimate political career at the turn of this century with a push for more political pluralism in a Turkey that had long been dominated by an elite, secular military.

Now that he has won another term, Erdogan’s rise as an authoritarian strong man is a key lesson to America about how Trump could move the US in a similar direction. Trump’s antics on racism and immigration have distracted the American public from the massive numbers of federal judgeships Mitch McConnell is allowing Trump to fill with far right ideologues, after having blocked or run the clock out on Obama appointees. Trump is in a position to shape the officer corps, ensuring that fellow travelers of John Kelly and Jim Mattis take control. Trump is attempting to create public distrust of the print and broadcast media, substituting what is virtually Trump Administration t.v. over at Fox as well as far, far right kooks on the internet like the Breitbart crew and Alex Jones. Trump strongly allied with the Christian religious Right, who are his most reliable constituency. All of these steps were taken by Erdogan, as well, and over time they created an elective dictatorship where civil society is often just banned and there is no free press. ...

The current election is a sham in which state television did not even bother to broadcast news of enormous rallies conducted by Erdogan’s main rival. Just the broadcast media manipulation in favor of Erdogan would be enough to render the election unfair, even if there were not widespread charges of ballot-stuffing.

How Erdogan, over the past 8 years or so, dumped Turkey’s democratic experiment and grabbed up power into his greedy hands should be an object lesson to Americans. It can happen here.

Yanis Varoufakis: Is Capitalism Devouring Democracy?

The Class War the Rich Won And the End Of NeoLiberal Capitalism

One of the problems with capitalism is that its benefits rest largely on having competitive (free) markets. But the first thing capitalists do when they “win” the markets is take their profits and use them to buy government so that they can end free markets (our markets are nowhere near competitive or free). Free markets, to anyone who has won, are a threat.

You can see this in the march of so-called “intellectual property.” There is no such thing in anything close to a state of nature: intellectual property is entirely the product of government. Ideas are free, in nature, and can be used by anyone, and one person using an idea doesn’t mean someone else can’t use them. There is no natural property of ideas. But we have extended intellectual property well beyond the life, even, of creators. Walt Disney is dead, long dead, and Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are still the intellectual property of a company.

Competitive markets require that other people be able to compete. They must be able you use your technology, your ideas, etc… to bring down the price of goods. If you want to keep charging a premium, you have to keep coming up with new ideas. But when key technologies and ideas are locked behind patents and copyrights forever, this isn’t possible. ... All of this putting aside other vast barriers to entry and laws and subsidies which benefit incumbents and which push hard towards monopolization.

Capitalism without free markets doesn’t provide most of the benefits of capitalism, and democracy which has been captured by oligarchy doesn’t provide most of the benefits of democracy. And so both are being discredited, and fascism rises and non-market alternatives become more and more popular. You see it in Corbyn, you see it in the challenge to so-called free trade epitomized by Trump, and you see it in the fact that for most young Americans socialism is no longer a four letter word. The days of our form of capitalism are nearly over. .. It is done, and that it is done is concealed by an overhang of older people in the developed world. What will replace it remains to be seen: there are alternatives on the right and left, and the right wing alternatives are pretty ugly.

Psychologist: Separating Children at the Border Creates Trauma Passed Down Through Generations

“They hate this mission”: Inside the tent camp for migrant children

A senior official at a Texas tent camp that’s now housing more than 300 migrant children said Monday that even his own staffers don’t believe the Trump administration should have separated migrant families at the border. “They hate this mission,” the official said of Tornillo staffers, who are not government employees but hired through the private contractor BCFS, which operates the facility. “Everyone who’s working here would go home today.”

On Monday, more than two weeks after the Trump administration opened up Tornillo’s “camp” for migrant children, officials finally opened its doors to reporters. ...

There are 400 beds and 326 kids.
Hondurans: 117
El Salvador: 40
Guatemala: 162
The rest are Mexican, Nicaraguan and one Romanian.
14 are girls
26 were separated from their parents, 3 have been reunified, so 23 separated kids left at the facility

— Nigel Ashok Duara, Sr. (@nigelduara) June 25, 2018

Housing a kid at Tornillo costs about $700 a night, according to Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Mark Weber. Normally, housing kids within an HHS-operated facility for migrant kids costs approximately $250 per night.

VICE News wasn’t allowed to formally interview the children. However, one boy, asked how he was doing as he passed by a group of reporters, paused before answering. Then he laughed.

“You can’t be serious,” he replied in Spanish.

Spain: First Franco-era "stolen babies" scandal trial begins

Korean Voices Missing From Major Papers’ Opinions on Singapore Summit

In major-paper opinion coverage of the Singapore summit, the people with the most to lose and gain from the summit, the people whose nation was actually being discussed—Koreans—were almost uniformly ignored. Three major US papers—the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal—had only one Korean-authored op-ed out of 41 opinion pieces on the subject of the Korean peace talks.

The Post had 23 total opinion pieces, the Times had 16 and the Journal four. The only op-ed by a Korean was a pro-summit piece on June 12 by Moon Chung-in, an aide to South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Of the 41 editorials or op-eds only four (9 percent), were broadly positive about the Trump/Kim summit, 29 (70 percent) were negative and eight (21 percent) were mixed or ambiguous. The full list, current as of June 19, is here.

As FAIR noted in May (5/7/18), there’s a huge chasm between how recent peace efforts are being received in ostensible US ally South Korea and how they’re being covered in US media. As we noted at the time, polling shows 88 percent of South Koreans in favor of these efforts, while the person spearheading them, President Moon, holds an 86 percent approval rating. But the bulk of US coverage ranged from snide dismissal to outright opposition (FAIR.org, 6/14/18).

Similarly, a poll taken after the Singapore summit found that 66 percent of South Koreans were pleased with the results, and only 11 percent opposed them. This contrasts sharply with the reaction in US newspapers, which has been overwhelmingly negative in tone, and dominated by NatSec-centered horse race takes over who “won.”

Trump threatens Harley-Davidson with a “big tax” for trying to dodge the trade war he started

Donald Trump, who outsourced the bulk of his merchandise to overseas manufacturers, threatened Tuesday to place a “big tax” on Harley-Davidson, and even warned it could be “the beginning of the end” for the iconic motorcycle brand after the company said it was moving some production out of the U.S. to avoid trade tariffs. ...

"Rules for thee but not for me" pic.twitter.com/pOq7cfHXow

— Howard Roark (@shortwave8669) June 26, 2018

According to the president’s latest rant, Harley-Davidson was using the trade war with Europe as an excuse, pointing out that the company had announced it would move its Kansas City manufacturing capacity to Thailand earlier this year. ...

“When I had Harley-Davidson officials over to the White House, I chided them about tariffs in other countries, like India, being too high,” Trump tweeted, before adding a now-familiar threat. “Companies are now coming back to America. Harley must know that they won’t be able to sell back into U.S. without paying a big tax.” The president added that the company “will be taxed like never before!” — despite the fact Harley-Davidson has operated overseas manufacturing operations since 1999.

A Harley-Davidson should never be built in another country-never! Their employees and customers are already very angry at them. If they move, watch, it will be the beginning of the end - they surrendered, they quit! The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2018

Despite a threat to their livelihoods, workers at the Harley-Davidson plant in Wisconsin still don’t blame Trump for their current travails, and doubled-down on the U.S. president by saying they would be willing to vote for him again, according to a Financial Times report.

The U.S. spends $4 billion a year subsidizing ‘Stalinist-style’ domestic sugar production

In the United States, fewer than 4,500 farm businesses produce sugar. Yet they cost taxpayers up to $4 billion a year in subsidies.

The U.S. sugar program is a Stalinist-style supply control initiative that limits imports through quotas and domestic production through what are called marketing allotments. This strategy substantially increases U.S. prices — on average U.S. sugar prices are about twice as high as world prices — ensuring domestic sugar production is artificially higher, crowding out other productive uses of irrigable farmland.

Only the shrinking group of those raising sugar beets and sugar cane benefit from this program, receiving an average of over $700,000 per grower each year, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute.

The program, which dates back to the 1981 farm bill, generates over $1 billion a year in profits for growers, or an average of more than $200,000 per grower, according to the AEI report. One Florida family that plays a dominant rule in cane production is estimated to benefit to the tune of between $150 million and $200 million a year.

#PermitPatty Loses Business Over Harassment Of 8 Year Old

California woman threatens to call police on eight-year-old black girl for selling water

A white California woman who said she was calling police on an eight-year-old black girl selling water has faced international backlash, with critics dubbing her “Permit Patty” and business partners severing ties. Alison Ettel went viral over the weekend after footage spread of her on the phone, saying she was calling the authorities on a girl because she didn’t have a permit to sell water, drawing instant comparisons to the many high-profile cases of white Americans harassing people of color with 911 calls.

The video filmed on Saturday in San Francisco captured Ettel on the phone complaining about “illegally selling water without a permit”, as she tried to hide from the girl’s cousin who was filming her. “This woman don’t want to let a little girl sell some water. She calling the police on an eight-year-old,” the cousin narrated, before turning to Ettel: “You can hide all you want. The whole world gonna see you.”

So my little cousin was selling water and didn't have a permit so this lady decided to call the cops on an 8 year old. #PermitPatty pic.twitter.com/SiL61pnAgl

— Raj (@_ethiopiangold) June 23, 2018

People uncovered Ettel’s identity soon after the publication of the videos, which have been viewed more than 8m times on Instagram and Twitter in just two days. Ettel, the CEO and founder of TreatWell, a company that makes cannabis-based tinctures, began losing business relationships within hours of the release of the footage.

The incident follows two similar controversies in the Bay Area, which despite its liberal reputation has increasingly faced scrutiny and backlash over racism and gentrification. In Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, a white woman was dubbed BBQ Becky and became the subject of viral memes after she called police on a group of black people barbecuing in a popular park. Weeks later, a white man nicknamed Jogger Joe faced widespread outrage when video emerged of him trashing a homeless man’s belongings.

This article ends with a poorly thought-out question. The Democrats are deeply afraid that they might take power and have to find some sort of excuse why they cannot deliver on the stated policy agenda that they have been running on, when clearly their actual policy agenda is virtually identical to the Republicans. There is no reason for voters to give power to Democrats, since they have no intent of changing the policies put in place by Republicans that advantage corporate donors and wealthy people.

Do the Democrats Even Want Power

[L]et’s say Democrats manage to eke out enough seats to retake the House, and perhaps even the Senate. Will they follow the Republicans’ lead by wielding their legislative power to the fullest possible extent? Will they rely on obstruction and delaying tactics to constrain the Trump administration as much as the Constitution allows?

The answer appears to be no. In recent months, some Democratic lawmakers have even suggested that instead of exerting maximal political force, they may try to diminish their own power. ...

Earlier this month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said they would adopt “pay-go” rules if they retake the House this fall. Short for “pay-as-you go,” the rules would require House lawmakers to offset spending increases with other spending cuts or higher taxes. Pay-go is meant to enforce fiscal discipline in Congress, though it mainly works to constrain Democratic-supported social programs.

Indeed, what makes pay-go so bizarre is that Democrats seem only to impose it on themselves when in power. Even Republicans who bill themselves as champions of fiscal restraint simply ignore it to pass their policy priorities: The GOP-led Congress approved a pay-go waiver last year before passing a massive $1.5 trillion tax-cut bill. Abiding by the rule would make it harder for Democrats to push for Medicare for All or other ambitious policies without dealing a severe blow to other vital programs.

Some Democrats have also suggested they would restore procedural mechanisms that would allow Republicans to block judicial nominees. In May 2017, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey said that he would support re-instituting the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees after the Republicans killed the rule to confirm Neil Gorsuch. ...

If Democrats win the House this fall, they’ll have many urgent issues to address—starting with the question of whether to impeach the president. If Democrats win the Senate, they’ll have Trump’s conservative judicial overhaul to contend with. Their voters will expect this of them. But if Democrats aren’t willing to exercise political power to advance their agenda, why should voters give it to them?

'Toxic garbage will be sold here': Outcry as Brazil moves to loosen pesticide laws

A Brazilian Congress commission has approved a controversial bill to lift restrictions on pesticides despite fierce opposition from environmentalists, prosecutors, health and environment ministry bodies, and even United Nations special rapporteurs.

Driven by a powerful agribusiness lobby, the bill now needs to be voted on in both houses of Congress and sanctioned by President Michel Temer before becoming law.

Its proponents say it will free up bureaucracy and modernise dated legislation. But the bill has generated fierce opposition in Brazil, one of the world’s biggest food producers and biggest consumers of pesticides, even those banned in other countries.

Opponents dubbed it the “poison package” and said it would lead to the indiscriminate use of dangerous pesticides, while 250,000 signed an online petition against it.

“The law will make us more permissive than we already are,” said Larissa Bombardi, a professor of geography and pesticides specialist at the University of São Paulo. “The economic interest will prevail over human and environmental health.”

Is Flint Michigan’s Water Quality Really Restored?

California Cities Wanted Big Oil to Pay Up for Climate Damage But Federal Judge Just Said 'No'

While delivering a partial victory for science by affirming the undeniable role that fossil fuels have played in the global climate crisis, a federal judge on Monday tossed out a pair of lawsuits filed by the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, California that sought to make five oil and gas companies pay for their contributions to global warming-induced sea level rise, which has left oceanfront communities fighting increased flooding, coastal erosion, and property damage.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup—who was lauded earlier this year for hosting a historic "climate tutorial" in court for this case—wrote in his 16-page decision:

This order fully accepts the vast scientific consensus that the combustion of fossil fuels has materially increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which in turn has increased the median temperature of the planet and accelerated sea level rise. But questions of how to appropriately balance these worldwide negatives against the worldwide positives of the energy itself, and of how to allocate the pluses and minueses among the nations of the world, demand the expertise of our environmental agencies, our diplomats, our Executive, and at least the Senate. Nuisance suits in various United States judicial districts regarding conduct worldwide are far less likely to solve the problem and, indeed, could interfere with reaching a worldwide consensus.

Because the cities accused these five major fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Royal Dutch Shell—of creating a "public nuisance" that warranted compensation, this particular case wasn't about solving the global climate crisis, explained Richard Wiles of the Center for Climate Integrity, "but simply whether oil and gas producers should help San Francisco and Oakland pay for the costs of adapting to it." "By kicking the case to a do-nothing Congress and a climate denying White House, the court essentially ruled that taxpayers alone should pay the massive costs of adapting to climate change," Wiles said.

"This is obviously not the ruling we wanted, but this doesn't mean the case is over," John Coté, a spokesman for the San Francisco city attorney, said. "We're reviewing the order and will decide on our next steps shortly." Oakland City Attorney Barbara Parker told E&E News the lawyers are "considering all options, including an appeal." Although Alsup sided with the fossil fuel companies, Coté added: "We're pleased that the court recognized that the science of global warming is no longer in dispute. Our litigation forced a public court proceeding on climate science, and now these companies can no longer deny it is real and valid. Our belief remains that these companies are liable for the harm they've caused."

While dismissing the suits, Alsup wrote: "The issue is not over science. All parties agree that fossil fuels have led to global warming and ocean rise and will continue to do so, and that eventually the navigable waters of the United States will intrude upon Oakland and California. The issue is a legal one." Though the five companies named in the suit are among the world's largest producers, the judge pointed out that "anyone who supplied fossil fuels with knowledge of the problem would be liable."

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Some of the Pictures of Border Kids That Haunt Me Most Are From 2014. Here's Why

'Guilty of Kidnapping 2,500 Children': Protesters Hand Out 'Missing' and 'Wanted' Posters at Stephen Miller's DC Home

Defending the EU Rather Than One’s Own Country

Italy Threatens to Throw Spanner in European Alternative to Russian Gas

A Little Night Music

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Baby Won't You Please Come Home

Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/Tampa Red - Weary Money Blues

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Do Dirty Blues

Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/Louis Armstrong - Pratt City Blues

Chippie Hill - Charleston Blues

Bertha "Chippie" Hill, Louis Armstrong & Richard M. Jones - Kid Man Blues

Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/Wild Bill Davison - Don't Leave Me Daddy

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Some Cold Rainy Day

Chippie Hill - Mistreatin' Mr. Dupree

Bertha "Chippie" Hill - Sport Model Mama