Tag Archives: authority

Who the Hell Is Running Things at the White House?

by JoleenAmaya Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

This is nuts:

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security determined that President Trump’s immigration order didn’t apply to green card holders.
Later on Friday, Steve Bannon overruled them and said it did.
Saturday night, DHS confirmed that the order applied to green card holders.
Today, chief of staff Reince Priebus apparently overruled Bannon and said it didn’t apply to green card holders after all.

Who are Bannon and Priebus speaking for? Neither one of them has the authority on their own to issue these directives. DHS Secretary John Kelly has the authority. Whoever’s running the Department of Justice has the authority. Donald Trump has the authority. When are we going to hear from one of them?

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Who the Hell Is Running Things at the White House?

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Mass Transit Ridership Is Down. How Can We Fix This?

by AndrewLoewentha Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen point us to Wendell Cox, who says that aside from New York City, mass transit ridership in the US is looking grim:

If New York City Subway ridership had remained at its 2005 level, overall transit ridership would have decreased from 9.8 billion in 2005 to 9.6 billion in 2015. The modern record of 10.7 billion rides would never have been approached.

Despite spending billions of dollars on new rail lines in LA, mass transit in Southern California certainly fits this bill:

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region’s largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating….In Orange County, bus ridership plummeted 30% in the last seven years….Southern California certainly isn’t alone. Public transportation use in many U.S. cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C., has slumped in the last few years.

But all is not lost. If you take a longer look at Los Angeles transit, it turns out there are things you can do to increase ridership. It’s complicated, though, so you’ll need to read carefully:

Thirty years ago, Metro handled almost 500 million annual bus boardings in Los Angeles County. In the decade that followed…Metro raised fares and cut bus service hours. Ridership during this period declined from 497 million to 362 million. –ed.

In 1994, an organization that represented bus riders sued Metro in federal court….Metro agreed to stop raising fares for 10 years and relieve overcrowding by adding more than 1 million hours of bus service. Ridership soared. Metro buses and trains recorded about 492 million boardings in 2006, the most since 1985.

But from 2009 to 2011, several years after federal oversight ended and during the Great Recession, the agency raised fares and cut bus service by 900,000 hours. By the end of 2015, ridership had fallen 10% from 2006, with the steepest declines coming in the last two years.

Hmmm. There’s an answer in there somewhere. We just need to tease it out. Here’s an annotated version of the full chart that I excerpted above. Maybe that will help.

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Mass Transit Ridership Is Down. How Can We Fix This?

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

by VictoriaPethebr Posted on June 23, 2015

Mother Jones

Things were looking grim for the Trans-Pacific Partnership—Obama’s controversial trade deal—after House Democrats turned on the president earlier this month and struck down a major provision in the “Fast Track” Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), a bill that would enable the president to complete trade-deal negotiations and present trade accords to Congress for an up-or-down vote with no amendments. But, in a stunning turnaround, the Senate voted 60-37 today to end debate on the fast-track legislation, a clear indication that it will pass and clear the way for Obama’s trade deal to move forward.

Fast-track legislation is nothing new. This type of authority has been granted to every president since Gerald Ford. But what makes it controversial is that it paves the way for negotiations to continue on the secretive and sweeping trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which have been met with heavy criticism from both liberal advocacy groups and Republicans who are concerned with granting the executive more power.

House Democrats nearly derailed the fast-track legislation earlier this month when they helped to vote down a measure, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, that had been appended to the bill. By knocking down the TAA, a program widely supported by Democrats, House Dems gambled that their Senate counterparts would balk at passing the fast-track bill without the assistance program. But on Tuesday they lost that bet, when 13 Senate Democrats joined with their Republican colleagues to end debate on the TAA-less fast-track bill, which is expected to come to a final vote tomorrow. (The assistance program has been attached to another, more popular trade bill that will be voted on later this week.)

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Obama’s Controversial Trade Deal Is Back From the Dead

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Here’s What Boston’s Record-Setting Snowfall Looks Like

by LolitaMcKinley Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the past two weeks, Boston has been hit by three separate snowstorms that have dumped a combined total of more than 70 inches of snow on the city. The storms have shattered Boston’s previous record—set back in 1978—for most snowfall in a 30-day period.

The historic snowfall has virtually paralyzed the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the oldest transit system in the country, forcing the agency to declare a state of emergency. Roof collapses have been reported throughout the area and the city’s public school system has been closed for eight days, as of Tuesday.

The relentless snowfall is showing no signs letting up either, with another storm forecasted for the area this Thursday.

Steven Senne/AP

Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/AP

While city plows have been working round-the-clock to clear the snow—more than 130,000 combine hours according to the Department of Public Works—the city is still struggling with what to do with the excess. On Monday, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh indicated that the snow might be dumped into Boston’s harbor, a move that some experts warned could have environmental consequences.

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Here’s What Boston’s Record-Setting Snowfall Looks Like

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Getting to the Bottom of David Wildstein

by dfdedtcf Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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What exactly was David Wildstein’s job at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey? His official title was Director of Interstate Capital Projects, which isn’t much help since building and managing interstate capital projects is pretty much all the Port Authority does. The position was invented in 2010 after Chris Christie became governor, and it was eliminated after Wildstein resigned following the Bridgegate revelations. It doesn’t appear to have much of an official job description. So what did Wildstein do? Here’s what Shawn Boburg of the Bergen County Record said about him in a 2012 profile:

Wildstein is playing a key behind-the-scenes role in Governor Christie’s effort to get more control over the Port Authority, the bi-state transportation agency that has come under increased scrutiny since raising bridge and tunnel tolls in September….Several executives said Wildstein has played a role in placing some of those recommended by the Christie administration in jobs and that he seems to serve as the administration’s eyes and ears within the byzantine agency.

….Eight current and past Port Authority colleagues agreed to speak about Wildstein, but insisted that their identities remain undisclosed because they feared retribution. They described Wildstein, one of 50 recommended for jobs by the Christie administration, as intimidating, hardworking, intelligent, private and fiercely loyal to the governor.

Some bristle that a senior executive post is occupied by someone with more experience with campaigns than with transportation issues. “He became the watcher of the entire agency,” one person said. “What he was watching for was strict adherence to the Christie agenda.”

Hmmm. Via Bob Somerby, here is what WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein said on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night:

This wasn’t a nothing job. This was a really important position where he was in charge of doling out billions of dollars for capital projects, much of that in New Jersey.

And what we know now is that David Wildstein was taking money and putting them into projects that solved other problems for Chris Christie, lots and lots of money….There was a project lifting up the Bayonne Bridge….There was also billions of dollars that went into the Pulaski skyway….Now, this seems like a mundane project, but the key thing about it is that it meant that Chris Christie didn’t have to spend New Jersey funds. So it solved a big budget headache.

….Now, as you mentioned, the top of the segment, I learned and some other reporters learned this week, that this position had been eliminated. Which sort of goes to, was it key? Was it important? Or was it something that was created so that David Wildstein could carry out Chris Christie’s will at this authority? Which is, let’s not forget, a bi-state authority, New York and New Jersey. It runs the airports. It runs the bridges and tunnels between New York and New Jersey. That’s its function.

The Christie take on this is that the Port Authority was a mess and badly needed better oversight, which Wildstein provided. Everyone else’s take is that Christie wanted more personal control over which projects were and weren’t approved, and Wildstein was his inside guy, the enforcer who made sure that Christie loyalists were installed in key positions and Christie priorities were taken care of.

And I guess that job is no longer necessary. That’s either because Wildstein did a bang-up job and the Port Authority no longer needs extra oversight, or because Bridgegate made it politically impossible to keep a Christie enforcer on the Port Authority payroll. I guess you can make up your own mind about which seems more likely.

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Getting to the Bottom of David Wildstein

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No, There Was Never a Legitimate Traffic Study About the Fort Lee Lane Closures

by N0bodyh56 Posted on January 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby has been doing yeoman’s work on the Fort Lee lane closures, pointing out that some liberal pundits have gotten a little too far over their skis on the scandal. I’d say that’s fair. However, he also takes issue with the allegation that the “traffic study” offered up as the reason for the closings was merely a pretense made up after the fact. Technically, he’s right: there’s plenty of evidence that bridge authorities talked about the study before the lanes were closed. But that doesn’t mean the study wasn’t a pretense, only that it was a pretense made up prior to the closures. There’s a ton of evidence suggesting that this supposed study was never anything more than a tissue-thin charade:

Most traffic studies don’t involve actually doing anything to traffic: “Traffic engineers will assess the existing flow by counting cars….Then they’ll take standard calculations for what the proposed change would introduce, and plug them into formulas provided by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. It’s a pretty automated procedure, with little impact on traffic.”
If traffic is affected, it’s usually for a single day, not multiple days.
Yes, data was being collected while the lanes were shut down. However, as Somerby points out, it was tolls data. This is collected every day automatically. Nothing special was done during the Fort Lee lane closures.
No serious planning document has been produced. When the general manager of the bridge was asked if “traffic experts or engineers” had been consulted about the plan, he replied, “We had talked about gathering data….” That was it. This is hardly the hallmark of a genuine study.
Several managers at the Port Authority were flummoxed about what this study was all about. They asked why it was being done, and apparently received no credible answers.
A few weeks before lane shutdowns, one of Chris Christie’s senior aides, Bridget Anne Kelly, gleefully emailed David Wildstein, a top Christie executive at the Port Authority, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” This is obviously damning. In the first place, it doesn’t seem likely that a Christie aide would have any role to play in a legitimate traffic study. And if she did, she certainly wouldn’t take a tone like that.

Put all this together, and it’s hardly likely that the traffic study was ever genuine. The folks involved obviously knew that they needed a public story, and so they made one up. I agree that everyone should get their tenses right on this, but at this point I think it’s going too far to remain agnostic about whether the Fort Lee lane closures were ever part of a legitimate traffic study. If they were, we’d know it by now.

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No, There Was Never a Legitimate Traffic Study About the Fort Lee Lane Closures

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Five years after Tennessee coal-slurry disaster, EPA has produced no new rules

by Jim Bow Posted on December 26, 2013

Five years after Tennessee coal-slurry disaster, EPA has produced no new rules

By

Appalachian Voices

Five years ago, in the dead of night, a torrent of more than a million gallons of slurry broke free from its holding place at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Tennessee. The toxic stew of coal fly ash, which is produced when coal is burned, polluted waterways and 300 acres of land. The disaster triggered anger from residents and promises from the EPA to introduce new rules to prevent such accidents.

The anger is still there. But the government promises appear to have been broken. The Louisville Courier-Journal brings us a depressing update on government inaction in the wake of the catastrophe:

Witnesses still recall with horror the sights, sounds and smells of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s power plant disaster here five years ago, when a mountain of toxic coal ash broke loose in the middle of a frozen night to bury hundreds of acres and devastate a community.

“It was not a spill,” said Roane County resident Steve Scarborough. “It was a geologic event. People that lived right there looked out their windows and saw a forest moving by.”

Miraculously, nobody was injured when 5.4 million cubic yards of piled, sodden ash broke loose on Dec. 22, 2008. But the slide, which destroyed three homes, damaged dozens of others, and poured into two tributaries of the Tennessee River, has required a $1 billion cleanup, with $200 million more to go. …

But, so far, the EPA has failed to enact a single regulation — even as the agency has documented an increasing number of ash sites that have polluted the environment.

In 2000, the EPA had counted 50 sites where groundwater or surface water had been contaminated by coal ash. The most current number of these so-called “damage cases” is now more than 130. …

The search for solutions is particularly crucial in Kentucky and Indiana, which are among the nation’s leaders in producing coal-burning waste such as bottom ash, fly ash and scrubber sludge.

If you’re unlucky enough to live near a fly-ash-hoarding power plant, we suggest you cross your fingers and hope for the best. Nobody wants their neighborhood coated in coal ash, let alone something called “scrubber sludge.”


Source
EPA fails to deliver coal ash rules 5 years after catastrophic spill, The Courier-Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Five years after Tennessee coal-slurry disaster, EPA has produced no new rules

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Bobby Jindal to axe officials who took on Big Oil

by Ha Zega Posted on September 16, 2013

Bobby Jindal to axe officials who took on Big Oil

By

Gage Skidmore

Lawsuits against Big Oil make Bobby Jindal feel emotions.

We told you last month that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) doesn’t want Big Oil to be forced to spend billions of dollars to repair the marshes that once protected his state from floods.

Now comes news of the extreme steps Jindal is willing to take to ensure that the gas and oil industry, which has paid more than $1 million into his election campaigns, is protected from a lawsuit filed in July by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East.

The flood authority is suing BP, ExxonMobil, and other oil companies in a bid to force them to spend billions restoring shorelines that they tore up while exploring and drilling for gas and oil and building pipelines. Those shorelines had been home to marshes and other coastal ecosystems that naturally buffered the New Orleans area from rising seas and storm surges.

The flood-control officials would like those marshes back, pretty please. But Jindal thinks their lawsuit is an outrageous attack on a wholesome industry that shouldn’t be held accountable for its own actions. He’s moving to kill the lawsuit by reshaping the authority’s 11-person board, axing members who support it. From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Garret Graves, chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, said Friday that Jindal “will not” reappoint Tim Doody, president of the levee authority, and Vice President John Barry. Both Doody and Barry, whose terms officially expired June 30, have faced attacks from the Jindal administration, which opposes the levee authority’s controversial lawsuit demanding that 97 energy firms repair wetlands damage or pay to repair the damage. …

“Barry and Doody will not be reappointed,” Graves said. “In regard to other members of the board, we plan to continue working with them to better understand the implications of the lawsuit.”

The authority was created after Hurricane Katrina to serve as an independent body that would oversee flood protection in the New Orleans area. By axing these two commissioners, Jindal is not only tampering with the authority’s supposed independence — he is promoting deadly flooding in his own state.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Japan is going nuclear again, Fukushima be damned

by 9ji7g4x Posted on February 28, 2013

Japan is going nuclear again, Fukushima be damned

By Susie Cagle

After the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, Japanese leaders vowed to phase out nuclear power over the next two decades, but new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe isn’t having any of that.

The reactors at Fukushima.

Speaking to Parliament on Thursday, Abe said nuclear plants around the country would restart after meeting stricter safety standards and instituting upgrades, an expensive process that could take months if not years to complete. Japan used to get a third of its energy from 50 nuclear plants. From The New York Times:

On Thursday, Mr. Abe said that Japan had learned the need for tougher safety standards from the Fukushima accident, which forced more than 100,000 people to evacuate. He said the new safety standards will be enforced “without compromise.”

Mr. Abe also said Japan would continue seeking energy alternatives to reduce its dependence on nuclear power, even without going so far as to eliminate it.

In January, the new nuclear agency [the Nuclear Regulation Authority] released a list of its proposed new safety regulations, which include higher walls to protect against tsunamis, additional backup power sources for the cooling systems and construction of specially hardened earthquake-proof command centers. According to a report by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, none of Japan’s 16 undamaged commercial nuclear plants would currently pass those new standards.

The newspaper said making the necessary upgrades to meet the proposed guidelines would cost plant operators about $11 billion, in addition to improvements already made after the Fukushima accident. The agency has said the new guidelines will be finalized and put in place by July 18.

Japan has already restarted two of its nuclear plants in order to meet power demands, but given the new safety rules, it’s unlikely that more will open this year. Financial analysts expect that will keep up record demand for natural gas in the country. Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions might go down a bit with the nuclear refire, but there’s still the whole matter of preventing another Fukushima-level catastrophe.

The Nuclear Regulation Authority has released some of the new safety and evacuation guidelines for the next meltdown, including distribution of iodine tablets to people living near nuclear plants, and more strict rules on when residents must leave their homes. Feeling better yet?

Hey, at least reactors sitting directly on top of earthquake faults won’t be allowed to restart …

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From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

by donseoo Posted on February 26, 2013

From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

By Susie Cagle

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has come a long way, baby. Back in the ’90s, it was mired in $75 million in debt and under investigation by the FBI. Now it’s being honored [PDF] as one of the top transit agencies in the nation.

dan_ol

The Philadelphia Daily News has the story of how SEPTA was turned around over the last two decades, in large part thanks to board chair Pat Deon. After years of operating in the red, Philly’s transit systems added revenue-generating advertisements, balanced its budget, and drove right into the black.

SEPTA’s chief financial officer, Richard Burnfield, said the Deon-era board’s commitment to running SEPTA like a business with balanced budgets has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding that riders enjoy through new Silverliner V regional-rail cars ($330 million), 440 new hybrid buses ($232 million) and beautifully rebuilt subway stations such as Spring Garden and Girard ($30 million).

There were also some notable cultural shifts at the agency.

A big accomplishment during Deon’s tenure has been the cessation of hostilities between the 15-member board’s 13 suburban members and two city members.

Rina Cutler, who was appointed to the board by Mayor Nutter five years ago, said, “It was very clear to me that the city and SEPTA spent a long time poking each other in the eye, and that this relationship was not useful.

“I came from Boston, where people have such a love affair with transit, they wear T-shirts with an MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] route map on them,” Cutler said. “That model didn’t exist here.”

Cutler said she and Deon “have a healthy respect” for one another and “we don’t poke each other in the eyes anymore.”

Deon told the Daily News: “When I first came here, this was just a pitiful operation. For myself and the board, it was like turning around an ocean liner. But we did it.”

Now Deon is pushing for a new smart-card system that would allow poorer transit riders without bank accounts to deposit their checks directly into the system, saving hundreds of dollars in fees and streamlining their rides. The city also plans to phase out subway tokens (!) by 2014.

The problems SEPTA has faced are more or less the same ones facing other regional transit systems that reach across poor urban communities and more affluent suburban ones (give or take an FBI investigation and some bus-related gunfire). If Philly can turn things around, perhaps there’s hope for us all.

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