Author Archives: BobbieWhinham

For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

by BobbieWhinham Posted on June 20, 2016

Four protesters were killed last year in protests over the huge Las Bambas mine in Apurimac, Peru. Photo courtesy of Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros en el Perú.

For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

By on Jun 20, 2016 9:41 amShare

As we continue to mine the Earth for its resources, global corporate interests are fighting to get to the dwindling supply. And as the stakes rise, so has the death toll of our planet’s defenders.

Last year was the most dangerous year yet for environmental activists, the watchdog group Global Witness reported on Monday. An average of three environmentalists per week were murdered for resisting resource extraction and pollution by major agribusiness, mining, and logging interests — with 185 activists total murdered around the globe. (The murder rate was 59 percent lower in 2014.)

Of the 185 dead, many were assassinated; others were tortured, or publicly executed.

A number of Latin American countries were the most deadly for environmental defenders.

Global Witness uncovered that governments have increasingly criminalized activists for organizing or protesting, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. “Across the world, collusion between state and corporate interests shield many of those responsible for the killings,” Global Witness reports.

The winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize is among the countless indigenous activists recently murdered. After having led her community to resist hydroelectric dams in Honduras, Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in March of this year. Her success made her a target: Once she forced the largest dam company in the world to abandon a major project on the Gualcarque River.

The report is all the more sobering given that the vast majority of incidents go unreported.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Original article: 

For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

by BobbieWhinham Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the Halbig case that struck down subsidies on federal Obamacare exchanges earlier today, one of the key issues was deference to agency interpretation of the law. Longstanding precedent holds that courts should generally defer to agency interpretations as long as they’re plausible. They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be the best possible interpretations. They merely have to make sense.

The DC circuit court decided that there really wasn’t any serious ambiguity in the law, and therefore no deference was due to the IRS’s interpretation that state and federal exchanges were meant to be treated the same. The dissent was scathing about this, since the record pretty clearly showed tons of ambiguity. So if and when this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, what’s going to happen? A lawyer buddy of mine is pessimistic:

Sadly, I think the Supreme Court will eagerly uphold the challenge because it gets to an issue that conservatives have generally despised: deference to administrative agencies’ interpretation of statutes.

It’s long been a fundamental principle in administrative law that an agency’s interpretation of a federal statute that they are charged with enforcing is entitled to judicial deference, unless such deference is unreasonable. Conservatives would prefer that courts not defer to the government because #biggovernment. Thus, they want to weaken the deference standard and Halbig gives them basically a two-fer. Or a three-fer since the agency interpreting the statute is the IRS: Take out Obamacare, knock back the deference standard, and punch the IRS. This invariably will help advance the conservatives’ legal goals because with a lower deference standard, their eccentric theories (such as on tax issues) have a better chance of surviving.

In normal times, the deference standard would likely be left intact because weakening it raises serious issues with government enforcement across all agencies, and courts are loath to send the country into a tailspin. But those days are apparently long past. Truly frightening times.

So what’s next? In breaking news, the Fourth Circuit court has just upheld the federal subsidies in Obamacare, ruling squarely on deference grounds—and disagreeing completely with the DC circuit opinion, which held that the legislative language in Obamacare was clear and plain. In fact, said the Fourth Circuit, the statute is ambiguous, and therefore the court owes deference to the IRS interpretation. This is good news for Obamacare, especially if today’s DC circuit decision by a three-judge panel is overturned by the full court, thus giving the government two appellate court wins. If that happens, it’s even possible that the Supreme Court would decline to hear an appeal and simply leave the lower court opinions in place.

But I’d say an eventual Supreme Court date still seems likely. There’s no telling if my friend’s read of the politico-legal climate among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is correct, but I thought it was worth sharing.

See original article here: 

The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case