Author Archives: DominicScanlan

New NAFTA deal omits climate change, and hands oil and gas yet another win

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump’s deal to tweak the trade agreement among the United States, Mexico, and Canada won early praise for changes meant to raise wages and improve safety regulations on cross-border trucking.

But on Monday, environmental groups panned the accord to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing it includes “corporate giveaways” for fossil fuel giants, excludes binding agreements on lead pollution, and contains no mention of human-caused global warming.

Neither “climate” nor “warming” are among the words in the 31 pages of the new deal’s environment chapter.

NAFTA was long criticized for encouraging companies to shift polluting operations to Mexico, the poorest country with the laxest environmental rules in the trilateral trade agreement. Particular complaints focused on the investor-state dispute settlement process, a system in which companies have been historically afforded broad corporate rights that override local environmental regulations.

The new deal limits those rights, with one major exception: U.S. oil and gas companies. Under the rules, firms that have, or may at some point obtain, government contracts to drill or build infrastructure like pipelines and refineries in Mexico ― such as ExxonMobil Corp. ― can challenge new environmental safeguards Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador has vowed to erect.

“It’s like saying, ‘From here on, we’re going to protect the henhouse by keeping all animals away, except for foxes, they’re cool,’” Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s living economy program, said in a phone interview.

That’s not the only giveaway for the oil and gas industry. The updated deal, which requires congressional approval, preserves a provision that requires the U.S. government to automatically approve all gas exports to Mexico, despite another rule mandating regulators consider the public interest.

“We urge Congress to approve” the revised deal, said Mike Sommers, chief of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby. “Retaining a trade agreement for North America will help ensure the U.S. energy revolution continues into the future.”

The deal, rebranded the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, tosses aside a standard set of seven multilateral environmental agreements that undergirded the last four U.S. trade deals. USCMA includes enforcement language taken from just one of the environmental accords, weakens the language from another two, and makes zero mention of the other four.

“Trump’s trade agreement with Mexico and Canada is a corporate giveaway intended to sharply limit the powers of government to protect people and the planet,” said Doug Norlen, director of economic policy at the nonpartisan Friends of the Earth. “This agreement is an attack on our ability to hold Big Oil and Gas accountable for the damage they cause to our communities.”

USCMA also includes a section on good regulatory practices that Beachy said “would be better named deregulation.”

The rules essentially give corporations an extra opportunity to challenge proposed regulations before they’re finalized, and ask for existing regulations to be repealed.

“We expect that, after Trump is out of office, we’re going to have to work hard to re-regulate,” he said. “Even after Trump leaves office, Trump’s NAFTA (revision) could extend his polluting legacy for years.”

See the original post:

New NAFTA deal omits climate change, and hands oil and gas yet another win

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New NAFTA deal omits climate change, and hands oil and gas yet another win

US Justice Department Blasts Baltimore PD for Rampant Racism

Mother Jones

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

Two weeks after a Baltimore prosecutor dropped charges against the remaining officers awaiting trial in the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the US Department of Justice on Wednesday released a scathing 163-page report on its investigation into the policies and practices of the Baltimore Police Department.

The DOJ interviewed hundreds of Baltimore residents, as well as officers and other police officials. It also reviewed training materials, data on pedestrian and vehicle stops, data on arrests between 2010 and 2015, and use-of-force reports going back more than five years. It found that Baltimore officers routinely engaged in unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests—overwhelmingly involving African Americans—and that the department’s policies encourage officers to have “unnecessary, adversarial interactions with community members.” The report calls on the department to address “racism” within its ranks. The investigation’s key findings include:

Baltimore police officers disproportionately targeted black residents for stops, searches, and arrests. Baltimore police recorded 300,000 pedestrians stops from January 2010 to June 2015. Eighty-five percent of those stopped were black, though blacks comprise 63 percent of Baltimore’s total population. Even though officers found contraband 50 percent more often on white pedestrians and twice as often during vehicle stops of white residents, blacks pedestrians were 37 percent more likely to be stopped than white ones, and black drivers were 23 percent more likely to be stopped than white drivers. Blacks had a higher rate of arrest than any other group.
Baltimore cops conducted nearly half of their stops in two predominantly black areas. Fourty-four percent of all stops were made in two of the city’s police districts—both predominantly black. These areas contain just 11 percent of the city’s total population. More than 400 people were stopped more than 10 times in a five-and-a-half-year period—95 percent of whom were black. Seven people—all of them black—were stopped more than 30 times. One African American man in his mid-50s was stopped 30 times, yet none of the stops resulted in citations or criminal charges. And less than four percent of all stops made by Baltimore officers resulted in a citation or criminal charges.
Baltimore officers arrest black residents for “highly discretionary offenses” at disproportionate rates. Black people accounted for 91 percent of all those charged solely with trespassing or failure to obey; 89 percent of people charged for making false statements to an officer; and 84 person of those charged with disorderly conduct. Blacks were also five times as likely to be arrested for drug charges as white people despite comparable rates of drug use. Officers often arrest people who are standing in front of private businesses or public housing projects, the report notes, unless they are able to satisfactorily “justify” their presence there. Moreover, from 2010-2015, BPD supervisors and local prosecutors rejected charges that cops made against black people at significantly higher rates than they did charges made against people of other races, “indicating that officers’ standard for making arrests differed for African Americans,” the report said. Baltimore supervisors and prosecutors dismissed 11,000 charges during that time period.

The DOJ also found that Baltimore cops are inadequately trained, supervised, and disciplined. In one incident reviewed, a BPD shift supervisor instructed officers to arrest “all the black hoodies” in a neighborhood. The DOJ found 60 incidents where a black complainant alleged an officer had used a racial slur, but which was then classified as a lesser offense by Baltimore police supervisors. The DOJ also determined that Baltimore cops regularly failed to appropriately secure arrestees when transporting them in police vehicles, and that the department needs to update its vehicle equipment to ensure passengers’ safety. (Freddie Gray died after his spinal chord was partially severed when he was place in the back of a police vehicle and handcuffed and shackled at the legs, but without a seatbelt.)

At a press conference Wednesday morning, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlins-Blake announced that the police department would implement 26 policies toward reform, and that the department was actively looking to build “constructive citizen inclusion” into the department’s process for reviewing police misconduct. Department transport vehicles have also been outfitted with new safety equipment, including cameras, she said, and the department started a new body camera program. Rawlins-Blake added that all Baltimore police officers would have body cameras within two years.

More: 

US Justice Department Blasts Baltimore PD for Rampant Racism

Posted in Citizen, FF, GE, Jason, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US Justice Department Blasts Baltimore PD for Rampant Racism