Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features New Orleans singer and songwriter Larry Williams. Enjoy!

"I see, therefore, the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work. And with the disappearance of its rentier aspect much else in it besides will suffer a sea-change. It will be, moreover, a great advantage of the order of events which I am advocating, that the euthanasia of the rentier, of the functionless investor, will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution."

-- John Maynard Keynes

News and Opinion

Worth a full read:

Our 'Rentier Capitalism' Is One More Nail in Earth's Coffin

After four-plus decades of neoliberalism, we now live under the rule of a rentier capitalism, in which the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent owns as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. ... Four basic underpinnings of the more broadly shared prosperity in the post-World War II years have been undone inside the “advanced” nations, helping to create such shocking inequality and poverty in the U.S.

First, rising productivity used to be matched by rising wages. However, beginning in the 1980s, U.S. wages stagnated while productivity continued to soar. Second, rising employment used to generate corresponding wage hikes. This is no longer the case. Today, when employment rises, wages stay stagnant or fall because the new jobs pay worse than the old jobs. The long Obama-Trump “recovery” is biased toward—one might even say contingent upon—the expansion of low-paid jobs, as has been most job growth in the long neoliberal era.

Third, rising employment used to produce more tax revenue for the public sector. Again, this isn’t true today, because so many new jobs pay too little and governments have raised the threshold for paying income tax. Fourth, rising company profits used to lead to higher average pay. That, too, has gone away. As the British economist Guy Standing noted in his indispensable 2016 book, “The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay”: “Profits are more concentrated in [largely high-tech] firms that don’t employ many workers. Employment has grown mainly in low-tech sectors, weakening the link between profits, employment, and wages.” ...

Across the “rich” nations, Standing found, a new “global class structure” has been “superimposed on preceding class structures.” It consists of six core constituent elements defined largely by their ability or inability to garner income from the ownership of property and from the political power and policy influence that flow from that possession: “a tiny plutocracy (perhaps 0.001 percent) atop a bigger elite, a ‘salariat’ (in relatively secure salaried jobs), ‘proficians’ (freelance professionals), a core working class, a precariat, and a ‘lumpen-precariat’ at the bottom.” The top three groups, Standing determined, “gain most (or an increasing part) of their income from capital and rental income” while the bottom three “gain nothing in rent” and “increasingly … pay rent in some form to the classes above them” (emphasis added). ...

Especially disturbing is Standing’s discussion of how advanced- and developing-nation governments have been induced to escalate “the plunder of the commons”—the “giving away” (policy-mediated plutocratic taking) of what was once publicly owned and commonly shared to private owners, who garner rental income streams from natural and social resources formerly owned by whole societies on behalf of all, regardless of wealth and other invidious distinctions. Examples of this ongoing enclosure and dispossession include “the confiscation and usurpation of native land, for mining”; the selling off of formerly public oil reserves to multinational corporations at “fire-sale prices”; the handing over of national parks and other public lands to fracking firms; the relentless governmental privatization and commodification of water, city streets, town squares, community and public gardens (and garden allotments), public transport, public housing, social services, health care, the arts, public libraries, museums, concert halls, the educational system and even fresh air and the criminal justice system.

It has nothing to do with the mythical “free market” capitalism that neoliberal politicians claim to uphold. It’s about the rich using the state to make themselves richer and to thereby—since wealth is power and pull—deepen their grip on politics and policy. ... And these are not even neoliberal capitalism’s worst sins. The “plunder of the commons” has put humanity on the path to ecological self-extinction as we march to the plainly fatal mark of 500 carbon parts per atmospheric million by 2050, if not sooner. As a young opponent of the planet-cooking Dakota Access pipeline screamed in futility through the glass walls separating environmental activists from the Iowa Utilities Board in the late summer of 2016, “We’ve got nothing to lose but a livable planet.”

A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism

As Long As Assange Is Silenced, Claims Against Him Are Illegitimate

As attempts to evict Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London get more and more aggressive, we are seeing a proportionate increase in the establishment smear campaign against him and against WikiLeaks. This is not a coincidence. The planned campaign to remove Assange from political asylum and the greatly escalated smear campaign to destroy public support for Assange are both occurring at the same time that Assange has been cut off from the world without internet, phone calls or visitors, completely unable to defend himself from the smear campaign. This, also, is not a coincidence. ...

Among the latest components of this campaign has been a viral dump of Twitter DMs being promoted as a hot news item by outlets like Motherboard, The Hill, Forbes and Think Progress and across #Resistance Twitter. The fact that the juicy bits from those DMs had already been published months ago by The Intercept, and the fact that the smears and spin we’re seeing reruns of today were long ago ripped to shreds in journalist Suzie Dawson’s epic essay “Being Julian Assange” after the Intercept publication, has not dampened the orgiastic frenzy with which this non-story is being bandied about by establishment loyalists and defenders of power as evidence of Assange’s nefariousness.

This is entirely illegitimate. It is not legitimate to make claims about someone who has been deliberately deprived of the ability to defend himself. It is not legitimate to spin a narrative about someone whose ability to participate in that narrative has been deliberately cut off. You don’t get to silence a man and then legitimately take over the public narrative about him. That is not a valid thing to do. But that of course is the idea. By cutting Assange off from internet access, phone calls and visitors, he has been deprived of the ability to give his side of the story in another interview with Fox News, for example, or in tweets to his millions of followers, thus making his side of the story mainstream knowledge. Every voice has been shoved off the stage but that of the political and media establishment which just so happens to be owned and operated by the same powerful oligarchs who want Assange silenced and prosecuted for challenging their rule. This is not a coincidence.

It''s not just Russia meddling in other countries using social media...

Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer. Rex Tillerson’s Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job.

Thirteen hours before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned from the presidential Twitter feed that he was being fired, he did something that President Donald Trump had been unwilling to do. Following a phone call with his British counterpart, Tillerson condemned a deadly nerve agent attack in the U.K., saying that he had “full confidence in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible.” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had called the attack “reckless, indiscriminate, and irresponsible,” but stopped short of blaming Russia, leading numerous media outlets to speculate that Tillerson was fired for criticizing Russia.

But in the months that followed his departure, press reports strongly suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their blockade of Qatar. One report in the New York Times even suggested that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson would be forced out three months before he was fired in March.

The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

In the days and weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed down their land, sea, and air borders with the country, Tillerson made a series of phone calls urging Saudi officials not to take military action against the country. The flurry of calls in June 2017 has been reported, but State Department and press accounts at the time described them as part of a broad-strokes effort to resolve tensions in the Gulf, not as an attempt by Tillerson to avert a Saudi-led military operation. In the calls, Tillerson, who dealt extensively with the Qatari government as the CEO of Exxon Mobil, urged Saudi King Salman, then-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir not to attack Qatar or otherwise escalate hostilities, the sources told The Intercept. Tillerson also encouraged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to call his counterparts in Saudi Arabia to explain the dangers of such an invasion. Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar’s capital city, is the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command and home to some 10,000 American troops. ...

Tillerson’s attempts to de-escalate the conflict in the Gulf diverged from the signals sent by the White House. Trump offered a full-throated public endorsement of the blockade, tweeting that “perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism.” As Tillerson called on the Gulf countries to lift their embargo, Trump told reporters that “the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” ... None of the current or former officials interviewed by The Intercept had direct insight into why Trump decided to fire Tillerson. But one source told The Intercept that the timing — a week before the Saudi crown prince arrived for a much-publicized visit to Washington — was significant.

Memphis police accused of using fake accounts to surveil black activists

Memphis activist and protester Keedran Franklin already knew the city’s police had an eye out for him. At local demonstrations, he’s frequently the first person to be arrested. Sometimes officers sit outside his office in unmarked cars waiting for him to leave, Franklin and his attorney Scott Kramer claim. In public, officers who Franklin has never met come up to him and address him by name, Kramer said, “just to let [Franklin] know that they [the officers] all know who he is.”

But after all that, Franklin was still surprised to see just how deep it went.

A trove of documents released by the city of Memphis late last week appear to show that its police department has been systematically using fake social media profiles to surveil local Black Lives Matter activists, and that it kept dossiers and detailed power point presentations on dozens of Memphis-area activists along with lists of their known associates.

No name is more prevalent in the documents than that of 32-year old Franklin, who has become a veteran organizer with the Memphis Coalition of Concerned Citizens and Black Lives Matter causes over the past few years. It’s “saddening” and “a little scary at times,” he told the Guardian, while finding a touch of humor in it too. “Doing all that for this ol’ poor black guy from south Memphis,” Franklin laughed.

The surveillance project was operated through the Memphis police department’s office of homeland security, which officials said was “originally designed to deal with threats to the MPD or Memphis in general”. But in a deposition for a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union over the information gathering, officials said it had “retooled” around 2016 due to the groundswell of policing-related protests and began to focus on “local individuals or groups that were staging protests”.

Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal. ... The planned move represents a dramatic shift in Google’s policy on China and will mark the first time in almost a decade that the internet giant has operated its search engine in the country.

Google’s search service cannot currently be accessed by most internet users in China because it is blocked by the country’s so-called Great Firewall. The app Google is building for China will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping’s Communist Party regime deems unfavorable. ...

Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny. ...

Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based researcher with human rights group Amnesty International, told The Intercept that Google’s decision to comply with the censorship would be “a big disaster for the information age.”

“This has very serious implications not just for China, but for all of us, for freedom of information and internet freedom,” said Poon. “It will set a terrible precedent for many other companies who are still trying to do business in China while maintaining the principles of not succumbing to China’s censorship. The biggest search engine in the world obeying the censorship in China is a victory for the Chinese government – it sends a signal that nobody will bother to challenge the censorship any more.”

Amnesty International Says 'Chilling Attack' on Staffer Using Israeli-Made Spyware May Be Part of 'Much Broader Surveillance Campaign'

An investigation published Wednesday by the London-based Amnesty International revealed that one of the group's staffers was "targeted by a sophisticated surveillance campaign, in what the organization suspects was a deliberate attempt to spy on its staff by a government hostile to its work," using a tool developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group.

In early June—while Amnesty was campaigning for the release of six women's rights activists jailed in Saudi Arabia—a staff member received an anonymous message in Arabic on the smartphone application WhatsApp from someone who claimed their brother was detained in Saudi Arabia and requested that the group "cover" a protest in front of the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C.

Through its investigation, Amnesty discovered that if the staffer had clicked a link included in the message, they would have unknowingly installed NSO Group's "extraordinarily invasive" Pegasus program on their smartphone. As Joshua Franco, Amnesty International's head of technology and human rights, explained, "a smartphone infected with Pegasus is essentially controlled by the attacker—it can relay phone calls, photos, messages, and more directly to the operator."

"NSO Group is known to only sell its spyware to governments. We therefore believe that this was a deliberate attempt to infiltrate Amnesty International by a government hostile to our human rights work," Franco said. "This chilling attack on Amnesty International highlights the grave risk posed to activists around the world by this kind of surveillance technology."

Canada's richest 87 families have same wealth as 12 million people

Canada’s richest 87 families have roughly the same amount of wealth as that held by 12 million of their compatriots, or about a third of the country’s population, according to a new report.

The report, published on Tuesday by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, found that in 2016 the net worth of the richest was 4,448 times that of the average Canadian. The collective net worth of the country’s richest families is just shy of what is owned by everyone in the east coast provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, the report found.

“Canada’s dynastic families have got it all – more wealth, more inheritance, and are as lightly taxed as they were the last time we looked in 2014,” the author of the report, economist David Macdonald, said in a statement. Based on wealth rankings compiled by Canadian Business magazine and data from Statistics Canada, the report found that Canada’s most affluent families are worth $3bn on average, while the median net worth in Canada sits at just over $295,000.

Inheritance figured prominently in their wealth. In 1999, 46 of the 87 families were nouveau riche, a number that had dropped to 39 by 2016, suggesting that a slim majority of those on the list today were born into wealth. Nine of the 20 wealthiest families also included a top-paid CEO among their ranks. “In other words, not only do these families control vast wealth, but their members are disproportionately likely to be among the highest-paid people in Canada,” said Macdonald.

Obama Says Inequality Led to Rise of the Right, but Takes No Responsibility for It (2/2)

Reporting on Medicare for All Makes Media Forget How Math Works

“Medicare for All,” a federally funded universal healthcare plan championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vermont–Ind.), has quickly become a key issue for progressive voters evaluating Democratic Party candidates for the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential race. The plan would provide coverage for the 40 million currently uninsured in the United States, a gap that is estimated to cause tens of thousands of deaths annually. Despite this, Medicare for All has received no shortage of negative coverage in the media, all revolving around the same question: Just how are we going to pay for it?

A study on the cost of Medicare for All was recently conducted by Charles Blahous for the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Blahous’ study projected that Sanders’ Medicare for All system, assuming it was enacted in 2022, would cost the federal government a whopping $32.6 trillion in excess spending over the course of 10 years. The startling price tag provoked widespread coverage in news outlets, especially conservative ones. A number of major media outlets also re-published a story by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press (7/30/18) that focused on the study.

However, these scary headlines missed an important point in Blahous’ study: In terms of total (federal, state and private) spending on healthcare, Sanders’ Medicare for All plan is actually projected to cost $2.1 trillion less than projections of spending under the current US healthcare system. ... But if Sanders’ plan actually amounts to net savings on overall healthcare spending, why do the Mercatus Center and all of the publications that cite it make such a fuss over the seemingly giant and scary multi-trillion dollar price tag of Medicare For All even when it’s fiscally sound? The answer is of course, the big conservative boogeyman: taxes. ... In the AP article, Emory professor and former Clinton administration adviser Kenneth Thorpe notes pointedly, “There are going to be a lot of people who’ll pay more in taxes than they save on premiums.” Those people will certainly be at the top end of the income scale.

The media chorus complaining about how much a program like Medicare for All adds to the federal debt fades to a whimper, however, when it comes to enacting trillion-dollar tax cuts for the rich, providing billions in corporate welfare, or fighting endless and fruitless overseas wars with America’s $700 billion–a–year military budget.

Immigration officials agree family separation was a failure, but they don’t know how to fix it

Immigration officials dodged a number of questions during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday focused on the family separation crisis at the border, but they all seemed to agree on one thing: The Trump Administration policy that resulted in the crisis was flawed.

One of the most telling moments of the three and a half hour hearing came when the five witnesses — representing the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Justice, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol — were asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) whether any thought the policy of separating children from their parents at the border had been a success. All remained silent. ...

But while all of the officials acknowledged there were issues with the family separation policy, and challenges in reuniting families, none could offer a specific explanation for what went wrong in the process of implementing the policy, or any clear solutions to fix the problem going forward.

Trump pushes Jeff Sessions to end Mueller's Russia investigation 'right now'

Donald Trump appeared to order his attorney general Jeff Sessions to pull the plug “right now” on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump campaign ties to Russia with a tweet on Wednesday morning.

Trump frequently rages on Twitter about the Mueller investigation, which the president calls a “witch hunt”. Trump reportedly ordered Mueller fired in 2017 but backed down in the face of internal White House resistance. Trump has said that he regretted appointing Sessions because Sessions recused himself from matters relating to the Mueller inquiry.

..This is a terrible situation and Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2018

The phrase “17 angry Democrats” is Trump’s shorthand for a conspiracy theory imputing political bias to the special counsel’s team. Mueller is a Republican, his direct superior is a Republican, and his teams includes members who have made political donations in the past to both Democrats and Republicans.

Trump’s lashing out Wednesday morning appeared to be prompted by the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, which began on Tuesday and which is being prosecuted by Mueller’s team. “These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion – a Hoax!” Trump tweeted in reference to the Manafort trial. Trump is correct that the 18 charges of bank fraud and tax evasion that Manafort currently faces in federal court in Virginia do not directly relate to alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

Any Generic Democrat Will Do! Poll Shows Unnamed Dem Beats Joe Biden in Beating Trump

A new poll out Wednesday reveals that a generic Democratic candidate has a better chance than former Vice President Joe Biden of beating President Donald Trump.

The new Morning Consult/Politico poll (pdf) shows that if the 2020 election were held today, 44 percent of voters would choose Biden, while 37 percent would pick Trump, giving the former vice president a 7-point edge.

If the choice were between re-electing Trump and a nameless Democratic candidate, however, 48 percent said they'd back the Democratic candidate and just 35 percent would pick Trump, a 13-point difference. ...

Biden, who's stressed he's "not Bernie Sanders," has said he'd announce by January whether or not he'll be running.

Surrounded by fire, California politicians question links to climate change

At a public meeting not far from the California town of Redding last year, the US congressman Doug LaMalfa said that he “didn’t buy” human-made climate change. “I think there’s a lot of bad science behind what people are calling global warming,” he said on another occasion.

In recent days, the outskirts of Redding have been ravaged by the Carr wildfire, and scientists have directly connected the blaze, which has claimed six lives and dozens of properties, to climate change. Yet LaMalfa sounds unswayed. ...

Like LaMalfa, the citizens of Redding are far more skeptical about climate change than the average American is. In 2016, a team from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 35% of Redding residents believed that global warming would harm them personally, five percentage points lower than the national average, and 12 points less than the average Californian. ...

Like other Republicans the Guardian spoke with, LaMalfa, who is profoundly concerned for his constituents affected by the disaster, linked it less to anthropogenic conditions in the atmosphere than to forest-management policies by federal and state authorities, and specifically to efforts to limit logging. These, he claimed, had led to “fuel loads that have been left in the forest for 30 to 40 years”.

“Climates always change, so the question is what do we do about the conditions” that now exist, he said.

Experts agree that forests are abnormally dense, a factor they link to the suppression of wildfires, which might otherwise have thinned out the trees. But they say it is unequivocal that climate change is leading to a longer fire season and drier vegetation.

Fires rage on in Northern California fuelled by strong winds

Andrew Wheeler, New E.P.A. Chief, Details His Energy Lobbying Past

The acting chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, has come under scrutiny for his years spent as a powerful energy lobbyist. He has represented an electric utility, a uranium producer, and, most significantly, a coal magnate who paid Mr. Wheeler’s former lobbying firm more than $2.7 million over eight years. Mr. Wheeler is now in a position to act upon issues he once raised on behalf of his clients. And he is expected to be grilled on his relationships in the Senate on Wednesday, when he makes a regular appearance before the Committee on Environment and Public Works. It will be his first testimony in Congress since assuming leadership of the agency in July, when Scott Pruitt resigned as E.P.A. administrator.

In an interview, Mr. Wheeler provided fresh details about his lobbying activities, including specifics not included in his government-required disclosure forms, which have been criticized for their lack of detail. Mr. Wheeler also said that, well before Mr. Pruitt’s ethics scandals hit the E.P.A., he had begun stepping away from lobbying activities related to the E.P.A., on the chance he might serve at the agency.

His recent activity as a coal lobbyist, he said, was pushing to kill a rule before the Interior Department that would have restricted coal companies from dumping waste into streams. He also advocated for the Miners Protection Act, he said, a bill that would have used funds earmarked to clean up abandoned mines to bolster mine workers’ health care and pension plans.

Mr. Wheeler acknowledged working with Robert Murray, the head of Murray Energy, a coal company, to fight former President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, the Clean Power Plan. But he distanced himself from a series of memos that Mr. Murray earlier had presented to top Trump administration officials — including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Mr. Pruitt — involving direct E.P.A. issues like eliminating a major regulation on smog and reversing a scientific finding that global warming harms human health. ...

Mr. Wheeler faces at least one formal complaint, by the nonpartisan government watchdog group Public Citizen, alleging that he “appears to be working on the same specific issue areas he had lobbied on within the last two years.” That is a potential violation of President Trump’s ethics rules limiting the influence of former lobbyists on the government, the group asserts. Mr. Wheeler’s critics point in particular to his lobbying disclosure filings, which describe his lobbying activities only in general terms that they say fail to adequately reveal what he actually worked on the past eight years.

More than a half-million Utah acres will be auctioned off by feds for oil and gas development

The Trump administration’s vision of American “energy dominance” is taking shape across the West, and, for Utah, that means a return to oil and gas leasing in places valued for wildlife habitat, recreation and artifacts — along with new limits on public participation in decision making in the name of “streamlining” the approval process. Later this year, the Bureau of Land Management’s Utah office intends to embark on two of its largest lease offerings in years, putting out more than a half-million acres for auction despite an existing inventory of more than 1 million acres of undeveloped leases.

Some of the nearly 334 parcels to be sold online in September and December feature areas cherished by hunters and anglers, such as the Book Cliffs and the headwaters of the Price River, as well as priority sage grouse habitat, archaeologically rich lands in San Juan County, areas with troubled air quality, and wild country that has seen little or no drilling in the past.

Either sale, if approved as proposed, would be larger than the one eco-activist Tim DeChristopher disrupted with phony bids a decade ago to protest leasing lands around national parks in the waning days of President George W. Bush’s tenure. That offering, which was largely pulled back by the Obama administration, exposed flaws in the BLM’s leasing process, leading to reforms that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has now pushed aside as unnecessary hindrances to energy development on public land. ...

Many parcels to be auctioned were drawn from a huge backlog of lands that industry had “nominated” for leasing but were tabled by the Obama administration’s Interior Department while it was developing “master leasing” plans for several Utah landscapes, where hydrocarbon deposits overlapped with public lands that held strong wildlife, archaeological and recreational values. ... The Government Accountability Office reports, however, that Utah’s inventory of federal oil and gas leases that remain undeveloped totals more than a third of the 3 million acres under lease. According to the June report, 731 leases remained under suspension as of 2016, suggesting industry is sitting on more oil and gas leases that it knows what to do with.

Also of Interest

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

Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Here's why

A Family Faces an Impossible Choice: Reunite Child With Her Detained Mother or Undocumented Father?

VIPS to Trump: Intelligence on Iran Fails the Smell Test

Shock and Awe Celebrates Reporters Who Got It Right

Bill Black: Mankiw Whiffs on “Learning the Right Lessons from the Financial Crisis”

'Spectacular' ancient public library discovered in Germany

A Little Night Music

Larry Williams - Jelly Belly Nellie

Larry Williams - Little Schoolgirl

Larry Williams - Rockin' Pneumonia

Larry Williams - Baby, Baby

Larry Williams - Took A Trip

Larry Williams - I Can`t Stop Lovin` You

Larry Williams - My Baby's Got Soul

Larry Williams - Oh Baby

Larry Williams - Steal A Little Kiss

Larry Williams - Dizzy Miss Lizzy