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Parks and Wreck: The Feds Need $11.5 Billion to Fix Our Public Lands

by NinaShuler Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2014, the 300 million visitors to US national parks may have noticed the potholes in the roads, the magnificent vistas obscured by dense brush, dirty visitors’ centers in need of basic repairs, trails that were not maintained, and overgrown campgrounds. Why? Blame Congress, which has routinely purchased new federal lands over the last 20 years while neglecting to fund the maintenance of existing national parks. National parks and historic sites need almost $12 billion in upkeep—or about four times the National Parks Service’s annual budget. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans proposed a budget that would slash spending by $5.5 trillion in 10 years.

So why the backlog? The NPS claims that stingy funding from Congress has forced park employees to make tough decisions about which repairs to perform and which to put off. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and many conservationists place most of the blame on the government, which has bought up new land instead of spending money maintaining the sites it already administers. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to acquire additional federal lands, but none of that funding is applied to the maintenance backlog,” she wrote in a 2013 op-ed in the Hill.

With an annual budget of $3 billion, the NPS is responsible for managing and maintaining 75,780 sites across the country—including such tourist destinations as the Grand Canyon, San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Ellis Island, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone—and many of the nation’s most iconic NPS-administered landmarks are fast falling into disrepair. When the agency released its annual maintenance report on Monday, the NPS noted a staggering $11.49 billion in deferred maintenance costs.

The NPS is urging Congress to fund its 2016 budget requests of $248.2 million for high-priority repairs and $300 million over three years for longer-term projects. And that’s just the start. For roads and transportation projects, NPS is hoping for $150 million in Obama’s proposed transportation bill.

Last year’s defense authorization bill, for instance, created seven new national parks and increased the size of nine others, though it provided no additional funding for the expansion or for maintenance costs. Former National Park Service director James Ridenour has referred to Congress’ penchant for creating new parks without authorizing new funding to care for the old ones as “thinning the blood” of national parks. Even 20 years ago, older national parks were neglected in favor of new projects.

Things have only gotten worse. Congressional funding tends to be directed to new projects that politicians can tout to their districts rather than upkeep of old ones, note Kansas City Star reporters Jeff Taylor and Jake Thompson in an article that delved into the national park funding debacle. Kurt Repanshek of the National Parks Traveler magazine made a similar point in a recent op-ed: “Members of Congress certainly like to point to a unit in their home districts, but if we can’t afford the park system we have today, how can we possibly justify new units?”

Another symptom of the funding problem is that there are too few seasonal employees to get all the work done, says Leesa Brandon, a press officer for the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, North Carolina. “We don’t have the seasonal staff we want to have. Our visitors enjoy driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 495-mile-long linear park…they see ditches, potholes, vistas with overgrown plants, and tell our workers,” she tells me. Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic road that stretches from North Carolina to Virginia and is one of the most-visited national parks, needs nearly half a million dollars to make necessary repairs on roads. According to the Federal Highway Administration, 45 percent of the road is in need of repair.

According to NPS, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, visited by 13 million people every year, needs $232 million in upkeep. The White House itself needs more than $12 million in necessary and preventative repairs, such as the often postponed renovation of the West Wing, fixing the Harry Truman bowling alley, and buying the required 570 gallons of paint to cover the outside of the president’s home.

Nonprofit groups such as the Mesa Verde Foundation of Colorado and the National Park Trust are attempting to raise money to fill NPS’s funding gap and preserve parks all over the country, including the ancient cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the Santa Monica Mountains, the world’s largest urban national park, in Southern California. Many lawmakers and conservationists, including Murkowski, suggest that privatizing parks and outsourcing funding may shift the burden of maintaining the parks away from taxpayers.

Next year, the NPS celebrates its 100th anniversary, and the maintenance backlog is only expected to grow, unless Congress increases its budget or finds another way to fund the parks. The billions in unfunded repairs “show the result of Congress’ chronic underfunding of our national parks,” Craig Obey, a senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, tells Mother Jones in an email. “Failing to provide for the system’s basic maintenance needs has eroded our most treasured natural landscapes and historical sites.”

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Parks and Wreck: The Feds Need $11.5 Billion to Fix Our Public Lands

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

by JoannWreford Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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When most of us think of Mexican food, we visualize tacos, burritos, and chiles rellenos. But we should probably add cucumbers, squash, melons, and berries to the list—more or less the whole supermarket produce aisle, in fact. The United States imports more than a quarter of the fresh fruit and nearly a third of the vegetables we consume. And a huge portion of that foreign-grown bounty—69 percent of vegetables and 37 percent of fruit—comes from our neighbor to the south.

Not surprisingly, as I’ve shown before, labor conditions on Mexico’s large export-oriented farms tend to be dismal: subpar housing, inadequate sanitation, poverty wages, and often, labor arrangements that approach slavery. But this week, workers in Baja California, a major ag-producing state just south of California, are standing up. Here’s the Los Angeles Times: “Thousands of laborers in the San Quintín Valley 200 miles south of San Diego went on strike Tuesday, leaving the fields and greenhouses full of produce that is now on the verge of rotting.”

In addition to the work stoppage, striking workers shut down 55 miles of the Trans-Peninsular Highway, a key thoroughfare for moving goods from Baja California to points north, the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada (in Spanish) reported after the strike started on March 17.

The blockade has been lifted, at least temporarily. But the “road remains hard to traverse as rogue groups stop and, at times, attack truck drivers,” the LA Times reports. And the strike itself continues. The uprising is starting to affect US supply chains. An executive for the organic-produce titan Del Cabo Produce, which grows vegetables south of the San Quintín Valley but needs to traverse it to reach its US customers, told the Times that the clash is “creating a lot of logistical problems…We’re having to cut orders.” And “Costco reported that organic strawberries are in short supply because about 80% of the production this time of year comes from Baja California,” the Times added. The US trade publication Produce News downplayed the strike’s impact, calling it “minor.”

Meanwhile, the strike’s organizers plan to launch a campaign to get US consumers to boycott products grown in the region, mainly tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries, inspired by the successful ’70s-era actions of the California-based United Farm Workers, headed by Cesar Chavez, La Jornada reported Tuesday. And current UFW president Arturo Rodriguez has issued a statement of solidarity with the San Quintín strikers.

Such cross-border organizing is critical, because the people who work on Mexico’s export-focused farms tend to be from the same places as the people who work on the vast California and Florida operations that supply the bulk of our domestically grown produce: the largely indigenous states of southern Mexico. And the final market for the crops they tend and harvest is also the same: US supermarkets and restaurants.

In a stunning four-part series last year, LA Times reporter Richard Marosi documented the harsh conditions that prevail on the Mexican farms that churn out our food. He found:

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.
Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.
Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.
Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences, and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.
Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

As for their counterparts to the north, migrant-reliant US farms tend to treat workers harshly as well, as the excellent 2014 documentary Food Chains demonstrates. The trailer, below, is a good crash course on what it’s like to be at the bottom of the US food system. In honor of National Farm Worker Awareness Week, the producers are making it available for $0.99 on iTunes. And here‘s an interview with the film’s director, Sanjay Rawal, by Mother Jones‘ Maddie Oatman.

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The People Who Pick Your Organic Strawberries Have Had It With Rat-Infested Camps

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The Navajo Nation Will Soon Have the Country’s First-Ever Junk-Food Tax

by AdalbertoCocker Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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A version of this piece was originally published by Civil Eats.

Next month, after three years of legislative tug-of-war, the Navajo Nation will become the first place in the United States to impose a tax on junk food. The Healthy DineÌ&#129; Nation Act of 2014, signed into law by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly last November, mandates a 2 percent sales tax on pastries, chips, soda, desserts, fried foods, sweetened beverages, and other products with “minimal-to-no-nutritional value” sold within the borders of the nation’s largest reservation.

Authored by the Diné Community Advocacy Alliance (DCAA), a grassroots organization of community volunteers, the legislation was modeled on existing taxes on tobacco and alcohol, as well as other fat and sugar tax initiatives outside the United States. The act follows on the heels of a spring 2014 amendment that removed a 5 percent tribal sales tax on fresh fruits and vegetables.

The sales tax will generate an estimated $1 million a year in 110 tribal chapters for wellness projects—greenhouses, food processing and storage facilities, traditional foods cooking classes, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and more.

Those who advocate for a return to a more traditional diet hail the law as a positive change: The Navajo Nation, a 27,000-square-mile area that straddles three states, has a 42 percent unemployment rate. Nearly half of those over the age of 25 live under the federal poverty line. The USDA has identified nearly all of the Navajo Nation as a food desert, meaning heavily processed foods are more available than fresh produce and fruit.

According to a 2014 report from the Diné Policy Institute there are just 10 full-service grocery stores on the entire Navajo reservation, a territory about the size of West Virginia that straddles parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. As a result, many people rely on food stamps to stretch grocery dollars with the inexpensive processed, fried, and sugary foods commonly found in gas stations or convenience stores.

But even having a grocery store nearby doesn’t guarantee access to healthy food. A DCAA survey of one major grocer in the town of Kayenta found approximately 80 percent of the store’s inventory qualified, in the group’s definition, as junk food. Compounding the issue is the continued popularity at family gatherings, flea-markets, and ceremonial gatherings of lard-drenched frybread—whose dubious origins have been traced back to the “Long Walk,” the federal government’s forced removal of Navajos to a military fort in New Mexico 300 miles away from ancestral land in Arizona.

The heavy consumption of soda, fat, and processed foods has taken its toll. According to the Indian Health Service, an estimated 25,000 of the Navajo Nation’s 300,000 members have type-2 diabetes and another 75,000 are pre-diabetic. The tribe has some of the worst health outcomes in the United States, with rampant hypertension and cardiovascular disease. According to data collected between 1999 and 2009 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) overall death rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives were nearly 50 percent greater than those of non-Hispanic whites.

These stark health statistics drove the DCAA to lobby for a consumer tax—despite strong opposition at the start from Shelly and some council delegates. Navajo Nation Council Delegate Jonathan Nez was a co-sponsor of the Healthy Diné Nation Act. He says there was “overwhelming support” for the initiative in his region, a large rural area on the Utah and Arizona border, but he did hear misgivings amongst the general population and some of the other delegates.

“Some people thought: ‘A two-percent sales tax is going to hit my wallet,'” says Nez. The legislation was vetoed three times by Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, because of questions about how the tax would be regulated. He also cited concerns about how the tax would be enacted along with its potential impact on small business owners. Other opponents said the bill would place undue burden on consumers and drive desperately needed revenue off the reservation and into surrounding cities. After multiple revisions, the tax gained support from a majority of the council, with the added concession of a 2020 expiration date.

While this is the first “junk-food tax” in the United States, the movement to slow the consumption of unhealthy foods gained momentum last November after residents of Berkeley, California voted to tax soda and other sweetened beverages. According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, which supports a national sugar-sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax, studies show a correlation between added excise taxes and lower consumption rates. One 2011 study published in Preventive Medicine showed that a penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages nationally could generate nearly $16 billion a year in revenue between 2010 and 2015 while cutting consumption by 24 percent.

It’s still too soon to evaluate the tax’s effect on consumption habits in the Navajo Nation, but Nez says it has already opened a discussion “about how to take better care of yourself, how to return back to the way we used to live, with fresh produce, vegetables, and fruit along with our own traditional unprocessed foods.”

Denisa Livingston, a community health advocate with the DCAA, has been leading grocery store tours in Window Rock, Arizona to educate government officials and community members about how the layout and inventory of local markets affects buying patterns. “I’ve been telling the councils, food can either empower us and make us strong, or it can kill us,” she says. “Healthy food is not just our tradition, it’s our identity. This is the start of a return to food sovereignty.”

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The Navajo Nation Will Soon Have the Country’s First-Ever Junk-Food Tax

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Are Solar-Powered Homes Jacking Up Everyone Else’s Electric Bills?

by MorganZEEZ Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Mr. Biscuit

Solar power is having a major moment. It’s growing faster than any other energy source—in 2014, a new system was installed in the United States every three minutes—while the price of a typical panel has dropped 63 percent since 2010. By 2016, experts predict that solar will be as cheap or cheaper than conventional electricity in most states. But solar companies are warning that the boom could soon end, if utilities and some Republican state lawmakers have their way.

Power companies’ beef with solar boils down to a clever payment system that was largely responsible for bringing about the solar boom in the first place—a practice known as net metering. Most solar homes aren’t actually “off the grid”: They stay connected to transmission lines, using regular power when their panels aren’t operating (like at night). But they also feed electricity into the grid when they produce more than they can use.

Sounds great, right? Not really, say the power companies. They pay solar homeowners for their excess kilowatts—but argue homeowners aren’t paying their fair share for grid maintenance. That has utilities in revolt, and the fight has reached a fever pitch in Northern California, where the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, serves more residential solar homes than any other.

Like many utilities, PG&E charges customers on a multitiered price scheme—the more electricity you use, the more you pay per unit. That can incentivize power hogs to conserve, but it can also mean that a poor family of four in California’s AC-dependent Central Valley can end up paying rates far above the national average (and what it actually costs PG to serve them), while a Google-employed bachelor millionaire gets a bargain. If that tech dude decides to install solar panels, he pays even less—even though he still uses the grid.

To be fair, customers who generate their own electricity also save the utilities money, causing less wear and tear on transmission lines and less power lost along the way. But a study commissioned by California’s Legislature found that in the Golden State at least, these benefits do not fill the hole left by lost revenue. Net metering cost the state’s privately owned utilities $254 million in 2012, a price tag estimated to jump to $1.1 billion per year by 2020 as an estimated 500,000 more homes go solar.

The solar industry shot back with a study of its own, arguing that those costs are minor compared with the roughly $32 billion that California’s major utilities earned in 2013 and that, for PG&E, the problem is not really caused by solar but by the huge gap—about threefold—between the company’s lowest and highest rate tiers. Since solar is attractive to high-tier customers, who stand to save the most money, each one who saves by installing a system is a big blow to the utility’s bottom line. Smooth out the rate tiers, the study suggests, and the problem disappears.

In 2013, California lawmakers told the state’s utilities to do just that. PG&E’s proposed solution, set to be voted on by state regulators in the spring, would reduce the number of price tiers and add a fixed monthly grid maintenance surcharge. The problem is that the fixed charge will erode the cost advantages of going solar, since you can’t avoid it just by using less power from the grid. Sanjay Ranchod, a policy analyst for the solar installer SolarCity, sees the change as a sneaky way for the utilities to kneecap the competition. Imposing a fixed monthly charge, he says, is “one way you can inhibit the growth of distributed solar.”

Similar battles are playing out from Utah to Wisconsin, as utilities fight to roll back net metering, restructure their rate systems, or impose special fees for solar users—and it’s easy to see why power companies are sweating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the gap between the cost of maintaining the US grid and the available funds will grow by $11 billion per year through 2020, since the revenue streams utilities have traditionally relied on to pay for those costs—investments in big power plants they can recover through increased sales—are drying up.

John Farrell, a program director at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, argues that to succeed down the line, utilities will have to act more like grid managers, connecting power from a host of sources (much like data flowing into a server from many places) and investing in technology that helps consumers use power more efficiently. “There’s no outcome 10 or 20 years from now that looks anything like what utilities have been before,” Farrell says. “It’s going to happen anyway, and you just have to choose whether you’re gonna like it or not.”

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Are Solar-Powered Homes Jacking Up Everyone Else’s Electric Bills?

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Robot-Building 6-Year-Old Girls Talking Tech With Obama Is the Best Thing You’ll See All Week

by JacquesBroome Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, President Obama made his annual rounds at the White House Science Fair. The event is a breeding ground for adorable interactions with kid-nerds (See 2012’s marshmallow-shooting air cannon), but his chat yesterday with five cape-wearing Girl Scouts from Oklahoma was especially magical.

The 6-year-olds from Tulsa’s Girl Scout Troup 411 were the youngest inventors selected to present at this year’s fair. Inspired by conversations with a librarian and one of the girls’ grandmas, they built a mechanical Lego contraption that can turn pages, to help patients with mobility issues read books.

The group of first graders and kindergartners explain to Obama that the device is a “prototype” that they came up with in a “brainstorming session.” One of the girls asks Obama if he’s ever had his own brainstorming session.

“I have had a couple brainstorming sessions,” replies an amused Obama. “But I didn’t come up with anything this good!”

Another girls asks what he came up with:

“I mean, I came up with things like, you know, health care. It turned out ok, but it started off with some prototypes,” the president says.

And then they all go in for a group hug. GOLD.

Suzanne Dodson, the coach of the Lego team and the mom of one of the scouts, told Tulsa World that she’s glad the girls are getting such positive attention for their project: “It really is a problem with girls, when they get to middle school, they lose confidence in their own ability to succeed in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)” she said. “Having this experience at young age really gives them a confidence boost.”

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Robot-Building 6-Year-Old Girls Talking Tech With Obama Is the Best Thing You’ll See All Week

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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Everything Changed on 9/11, Starting With Ted Cruz’s Musical Taste

by CorinaBadilla Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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During a segment of CBS’s This Morning show, Senator Ted Cruz attempted to explain how the attacks on September 11 moved him to shun the soulless genre of rock music and pick up country:

You know, music is interesting. I grew up listening to classic rock and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story. My music tastes changed on 9/11. And it’s a very strange—I actually, intellectually, find this very curious, but on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me and I have to say, it—just as a gut level, I had an emotional reaction that says, “These are my people.” And so ever since 2001 I listen to country music, but I’m an odd country music fan because I didn’t listen to it prior to 2001.

September 11, the day the music died for our only declared presidential candidate and now the phoniest dude you’ll run into at a country concert. This is going to be a wildly entertaining road to 2016.

(h/t Slate)

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Everything Changed on 9/11, Starting With Ted Cruz’s Musical Taste

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Why Is BP Funding America’s Most Notorious Climate Change Denier?

by JarrodGwendolen Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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

One of America’s most powerful and outspoken opponents of climate change regulation received election campaign contributions that can be traced back to senior BP staff, including chief executive Bob Dudley.

Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who has tirelessly campaigned against calls for a carbon tax and challenges the overwhelming consensus on climate change, received $10,000 from BP’s Political Action Committee.

Following his re-election, Inhofe became chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee in January, and then a month later was featured in news bulletins throwing a snowball across the Senate floor.

Before tossing it, the senator said: “In case we have forgotten—because we keep hearing that 2014 is the warmest year on record—it is very, very cold outside. Very unseasonal.”

The BP PAC is funded by contributions from senior US executives and company staffers who sent in contributions to the PAC totaling more than $1 million between 2010 and 2014. Over the same period the committee paid out $655,000 to candidates, with more than 40 incumbent senators benefiting.

Yet, BP and Dudley have long called for world leaders to intervene and impose tough regulatory measures on the fossil fuel industry. Publishing its 98-page research paper, Energy Outlook 2035, last month, BP warned: “To abate carbon emissions further will require additional significant steps by policymakers beyond the steps already assumed.”

Dudley has personally given $19,000 since June 2011 to the BP PAC—very close to the $5,000-a-year maximum allowable by law. Although Dudley is a resident of Britain, he is eligible to give via the BP PAC because he is a US national.

While the sums channeled to Inhofe’s campaign represent only a small proportion of the BP PAC’s election spending and the senator’s own campaign funds, they show how unafraid the committee has been to spread its donations to the most controversial candidates. According to the BP PAC website, it financially supports election candidates “whose views and/or voting records reflect the interests of BP employees.”

Records suggest Inhofe’s 2014 campaign was a funding priority for the BP PAC, ranking as one of the top recipients of committee funds when compared with disbursements to other serving senators.

This was despite Inhofe’s senate battle not being a close one. His opponent, Matt Silverstein, who Inhofe beat comfortably in last November’s midterms, had a tiny campaign war chest by comparison.

BP was asked whether it was appropriate for the PAC to make campaign contributions to such a vocal opponent of action on climate change, or for Dudley to be contributing towards such payments.

In a statement BP replied: “Voluntary donations by staff to the BP employees’ political action committee in the US are used to support a variety of candidates across the political spectrum and in many US geographies where we operate.”

“These candidates have one thing in common: They are important advocates for the energy industry in the broadest sense.”

It added: “BP’s position on climate change is well known and is long-established. We believe that climate change is an important long-term issue that justifies global action.”

The company declined to comment on Dudley’s own donations.

PACs exist in the US where companies and trade unions cannot give directly to the campaigns of those running for office. Instead funds are pooled from staff—often senior executives—into a PAC, and disbursed by a committee board, often in a manner sympathetic to the company’s lobby and other interests.

Other US oil industry leaders, including Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, make contributions to their own corporate PACs—money which in many cases can then be traced to Inhofe and other climate-skeptic politicians.

But Tillerson and other peers have not been as outspoken as BP and Dudley in calling for state intervention to tackle climate change, making the BP boss’s links to Inhofe campaign finance more controversial.

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Why Is BP Funding America’s Most Notorious Climate Change Denier?

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Farms that save space for flowers give bees a boost

by FredricCorones Posted on March 24, 2015

green4us

What the Dog Knows – Cat Warren

Cat Warren is a university professor and former journalist with an admittedly odd hobby: She and her German shepherd have spent the last seven years searching for the dead. Solo is a cadaver dog. What started as a way to harness Solo’s unruly energy and enthusiasm soon became a calling that introduced Warren to the […]

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo

This New York Times best-selling guide to decluttering your home from Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes readers step-by-step through her revolutionary KonMari Method for simplifying, organizing, and storing. Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles? Japanese cleaning consultant […]

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White Dwarf Issue 60: 21st March 2015 – White Dwarf

White Dwarf 60 arrives to drown the galaxy in blood! This issue sees the release of Codex: Khorne Daemonkin and we’ve got the lowdown on these most blood-crazed of all the followers of Khorne. And if you’ve been waiting for the fantastic new Bloodthirster to make his Warhammer 40,000 bow, we’ve got everything you need […]

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All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition – Mel Bartholomew

Rapidly increasing in popularity, square foot gardening is the most practical, foolproof way to grow a home garden. That explains why author and gardening innovator Mel Bartholomew has sold more than two million books describing how to become a successful DIY square foot gardener. Now, with the publication of All New Square Foot Gardening, Second […]

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis – Instaread

PLEASE NOTE: This is a  summary and analysis  of the book and NOT the original book.  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo – A 15-minute Summary & Analysis   Inside this Instaread: Summary of entire book, Introduction to the important people in the book, Key Takeaways and Analysis of the Key Takeaways. […]

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The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, […]

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Warhammer 40,000 (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of extinction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man, beset on all sides by ravening aliens, foul traitors and Warp-spawned Daemons, looks once more to its greatest heroes to stave off the encroaching darkness. There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. […]

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Codex: Khorne Daemonkin (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

Screaming praise to their dark and bloody master, the Khorne Daemonkin rampage across the stars claiming skulls and destroying worlds. They are the mortal servants of the Blood God who give their flesh to the inhabitants of the Warp – gore-crazed cultists and brutal Chaos Space Marines who covet daemonic possession so they might bring […]

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One Year to an Organized Life – Regina Leeds

Who would you be if you felt at peace and had more time and money? An organized life enables you to have more freedom, less aggravation, better health, and to get more done. For nearly twenty years, Regina Leeds-named Best Organizer by Los Angeles magazine-has helped even the messiest turn their lives around. Anyone can […]

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Farms that save space for flowers give bees a boost

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Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

by Cherie65Cw Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee thinks questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails as secretary of state “will linger” throughout the 2016 presidential race. “If the law said you had to maintain every email for public inspection, that’s what you got to do,” he recently told ABC News. Huckabee also suggested that the missing emails might shed new light on the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.

Huckabee, who is considering a second run for president himself, is probably right that the issue of secrecy will dog Clinton’s campaign going forward. But he might not be the best man to make that case. As Mother Jones reported in 2011, Huckabee destroyed his administration’s state records before leaving office in 2007.

In February, Mother Jones wrote to the office of Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe seeking access to a variety of records concerning his predecessor’s tenure, including Huckabee’s travel records, calendars, call logs, and emails. Beebe’s chief legal counsel, Tim Gauger, replied in a letter that “former Governor Huckabee did not leave behind any hard-copies of the types of documents you seek. Moreover, at that time, all of the computers used by former Governor Huckabee and his staff had already been removed from the office and, as we understand it, the hard-drives in those computers had already been ‘cleaned’ and physically destroyed.”

He added, “In short, our office does not possess, does not have access to, and is not the custodian of any of the records you seek.”

Huckabee responded at the time by attacking Mother Jones, which he claimed “doesn’t pretend to be a real news outlet, but a highly polarized opinion-driven vehicle for all things to the far left.” He also called the story “factually challenged.” But the Arkansas Department of Information Systems confirmed that the hard drives had been destroyed while he was still in the governor’s mansion. Legal? Sure. But absolutely shady.

Even before he destroyed his hard drives rather than grant the public access to his records, Huckabee took a combative approach to public records requests. When Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley (who has also weighed in on Huckabee’s transparency record) requested documents from Huckabee in 1995, the then-lieutenant governor flipped out. In a press release issued by his campaign, he attacked Brantley as a “disgruntled and embittered wannabe editor” from a “trashy little tabloid”—and went after Brantley’s wife, a Clinton judicial appointee, for good measure. All because the editor filed a request for records every citizen was entitled to.

Dale Bumpers Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas

Hillary Clinton’s missing emails are a legitimate scandal if you care about government transparency. But many of her loudest critics have done little to inspire confidence they’d do anything differently.

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Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mike Huckabee Should Probably Stop Criticizing Hillary Over Her Emails