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11 Things the Republican Party Just Promised to Do to the Environment

by CoyRoyer369530 Posted on July 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1952, a massive fire—fueled by oil and industrial waste—engulfed Ohio’s Cuyahoga River. Was that the inspiration for the platform Republicans just adopted in Cleveland? AP file photo

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

The Republican Party’s 2016 platform, released on Monday at its national convention in Cleveland, has sections called “A New Era in Energy” and “Environmental Progress.” Both titles are inaccurate. Perhaps they’re meant sarcastically?

If you want a guide to what Republicans would do with full control of the federal government, you couldn’t get a better one than this 2,400-word part of the platform. Like the EPA/Department of Interior spending bill House Republicans passed last week, it makes the GOP’s incredibly radical agenda crystal clear: deregulate pollution, halt any action to prevent climate change, and expand fossil fuel use.

Here are the 11 biggest lowlights:

Cancel the Clean Power Plan. This plan—the EPA’s program to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants—is the most important piece of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. The GOP platform dismisses it as part of “the President’s war on coal”: “The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda.” As Grist’s Rebecca Leber noted, this language comes almost verbatim from a pro-coal lobbying group. To call coal “clean” is just a falsehood. In addition to its massive carbon footprint, the burning of coal leads tons of conventional pollution such as smog, soot, and acid rain.

Build the Keystone XL pipeline and more like it. “We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security.” Republicans have long been fixated on how awesome Keystone would be, even though current gasoline prices might make it not worth building. If gas prices spike, though, Keystone approval could have major consequences for the climate as it would help bring more super-dirty tar-sands oil to market. This plank is basically the opposite of the Democratic platform’s call for the next administration to use a “Keystone test” and reject infrastructure projects that will exacerbate climate change.

Kill federal fracking regulations. Because nothing should stand in the way of fossil fuel development.

“Oppose any carbon tax.” Many conservative policy wonks support a carbon tax as the most market-friendly, efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. The Republican Party, though, is determined to quash anyone’s hopes of a bipartisan compromise on climate action.

Expedite export terminals for liquefied natural gas. To liquefy gas, ship it across the ocean, and re-gasify it uses a lot of energy and results in a huge carbon footprint. Republicans want more of this.

Abolish the EPA as we know it. The platform calls for turning the EPA into “an independent bipartisan commission” and shifting responsibility for environmental regulation to the states. This would remove the federal government’s ability to study the effects of pollution and establish safe standards. In a particularly Orwellian touch, the Republicans promise that a kneecapped EPA would adhere to “structural safeguards against politicized science.” That actually means safeguards against scientific findings they don’t like. In other words, they would politicize the science.

Stop environmental regulatory agencies from settling lawsuits out of court. Huh? Republicans have been pushing this for a while. Here’s what it’s about: When an agency doesn’t do its job of enforcing a law like the Clean Air Act—often the case, especially under Republican administrations—environmental groups sue to force it to. If the agency thinks it will lose, it may then reach a settlement and agree to do its job going forward. That’s what the platform aims to prevent. Fighting in court until every last appeal is dead can make cases drag on for years, and Republicans want to get away with not regulating polluters for as long as possible.

“Forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide.” This one pretty much speaks for itself. It would wipe out the agency’s ability to reduce emissions and slow climate change.

Turn federal lands over to states. “Congress should give authority to state regulators to manage energy resources on federally controlled public lands within their respective borders,” the platform declares. The federal government controls huge swaths of land in the West and already leases much of it for oil, gas, and coal extraction. The platform is quite open about the fact that Republicans think states will extract more rapaciously. That’s precisely the point. And ultimately they want the land entirely under state control: “Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing for a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states.” It’s unclear which lands they are talking about, but it’s a safe bet that they mean those that could generate the most money through their despoiling.

Revoke the ability of the president to designate national monuments. The platform calls for amending the Antiquities Act of 1906 to require congressional approval for new national monuments, and it also calls for state approval of new monuments or national parks. So there would be no more Democratic presidents protecting a sensitive, beautiful, or historically significant area from development if Republicans control Congress or the state where it is located.

Halt funding for the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UNFCCC is the treaty system through which the world’s 195 nations work together to avoid catastrophic climate change. To defund it would undermine the Paris Agreement that was struck last December and throw a huge wrench into global climate progress. That’s the point. The platform explicitly states, “We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”

There’s also some random small-bore stuff, like opposition to listing the gray wolf or the lesser prairie chicken as endangered species. There are a ton of right-wing talking points, like declaring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” And there are additional paeans to the virtues of increased fossil fuel extraction.

In one particularly impressive rhetorical backflip, after the platform calls for virtually eliminating all environmental protections, it then says, “The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists.” But most Americans support regulations for clean air, clean water, and reducing climate pollution. The real radicals are the anti-government extremists who would reverse 45 years of environmental progress.

This is a document aimed squarely at appeasing the party’s base. If nothing else, you have to credit the Republicans for their audacity. No wonder most of the GOP members of Congress who accept climate science are skipping the convention this year.

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11 Things the Republican Party Just Promised to Do to the Environment

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

by ToniaR25ivfco Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Amid a resurgence of nationwide protests sparked by smartphone videos of police shootings of black men, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed into law on Monday a bill that will severely restrict public access to footage from police body camera and dash cams.

House Bill 972 requires a court order before any such footage may be released to journalists or members of the public, which also means that police departments cannot voluntarily release footage without a judge’s approval. Under the new law, police chiefs get the final say on whether or not people caught on camera—or their lawyers—will be allowed to view the relevant footage. If the chief says no, the subject will have to successfully sue the department to gain access.

The law’s passage is sure to rankle some Black Lives Matter activists, who have repeatedly called for even greater access to police video footage in the wake of disputed police shootings of black subjects. Gov. McCrory said he signed the bill to “ensure transparency,” and that while recordings of police interactions with the community could be helpful, they can also “mislead and misinform.” In drafting the bill, McCrory added, lawmakers grappled with how technology “can help us, and how can we work with it so it doesn’t also work against our police officers.”

Susanna Birdsong, director of the North Carolina ACLU, believes the new law will hurt—not help—transparency in policing. “There really should be some minimum guarantee of access to the recordings by someone other than the police,” she told me.

People involved in incidents recorded by the police, as well as their attorneys, should be able to view the footage without exception, Birdsong says. And law enforcement agencies should have protocols in place for the timely release of footage when it’s in the public interest—for example, in cases in which officers use physical force to subdue a person. The process, she adds, should not require any court’s approval.

The law, Birdsong adds, could have consequences for reporting on law enforcement. Before, a news organization could go directly to a local police department to request access to footage or put pressure on city officials to make it happen, but now “that avenue is foreclosed.”

The bill’s primary sponsors were Reps. John Faircloth, Allen McNeil, and Pat Hurley. (Faircloth is a former police chief while McNeil was once a sheriff’s deputy.) The legislation was crafted at the urging of the Legislative Committee on Justice and Public Safety, a bipartisan panel convened earlier this year to consider criminal justice issues. The committee heard from civil rights groups, community organizers, and law enforcement before announcing its findings in June. Among the recommendations: The state should pass an act providing that police camera footage is not part of the public record.

The bill’s authors, according to Birdsong, were lobbied by law enforcement groups, including the North Carolina Sheriffs Association and the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. And while the advisory committee heard from the ACLU and others who opposed such a recommendation, the authors consulted with few nonpolice stakeholders on their bill’s language. “The language in the bill very much reflects that,” Birdsong says. (None of the bill’s key sponsors responded to requests for comment.)

New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Louisiana also recently passed laws restricting public access to police body-cam footage. But many jurisdictions provide reasonable access to such recordings, Birdsong told me. Consider Chicago’s new effort in transparent policing, created in the wake of heavy criticism of city officials for their handling of police videos. In May, the city’s police review board launched a database of audio and video recordings, police reports, and other documents related to more than 100 open investigations into misconduct by officers. The database, which is accessible to the public, includes more than 300 videos from body cameras, police dash cams, and cellphones.

At least one North Carolina police chief thinks his state’s new law is a bad idea. “I would rather let our video tell the story—good, bad or indifferent—than someone who has a cellphone who has the opportunity to edit it,” Fayettevile police chief Harold Medlock told the Charlotte Observer. “Sometimes we do ourselves a great disservice by not disclosing as much information as we can.”

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North Carolina Doesn’t Want You to See Footage From Its Police Body Cameras

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Where DC Lobbyists Love to See and Be Seen

by ElveraLowe03281 Posted on July 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Although it’s difficult to remember those days eight years ago when Democrats seemed to represent something idealistic and hopeful and brave, let’s take a moment and try to recall the stand Barack Obama once took against lobbyists. Those were the days when the nation was learning that George W. Bush’s Washington was, essentially, just a big playground for those lobbyists and that every government operation had been opened to the power of money. Righteous disgust filled the air. “Special interests” were much denounced. And a certain inspiring senator from Illinois promised that, should he be elected president, his administration would contain no lobbyists at all. The revolving door between government and K Street, he assured us, would turn no more.

Instead, the nation got a lesson in all the other ways that “special interests” can get what they want—like simple class solidarity between the Ivy Leaguers who advise the president and the Ivy Leaguers who sell derivative securities to unsuspecting foreigners. As that inspiring young president filled his administration with Wall Street personnel, we learned that the revolving door still works, even if the people passing through it aren’t registered lobbyists.

But whatever became of lobbying itself, which once seemed to exemplify everything wrong with Washington, DC? Perhaps it won’t surprise you to learn that lobbying remains one of the nation’s persistently prosperous industries, and that, since 2011, it has been the focus of Influence, one of the daily email newsletters published by Politico, that great chronicler of the Obama years. Influence was to be, as its very first edition declared, “the must-read crib sheet for Washington’s influence class,” with news of developments on K Street done up in tones of sycophantic smugness. For my money, it is one of the quintessential journalistic artifacts of our time: the constantly unfolding tale of power-for-hire, told always with a discreet sympathy for the man on top.

It is true that Americans are more cynical about Washington than ever. To gripe that “the system is rigged” is to utter the catchphrase of the year. But to read Influence every afternoon is to understand how little difference such attitudes make here in the nation’s capital. With each installment, the reader encounters a cast of contented and well-groomed knowledge workers, the sort of people for whom there are never enough suburban mansions or craft cocktails. One imagines them living together in a happy community of favors-for-hire where everyone knows everyone else, the restaurant greeters smile, the senators lie down with the contractors, and the sun shines brilliantly every day. This community’s labors in the influence trade have made the economy of the Washington metro area the envy of the world.

The newsletter describes every squeaking turn of the revolving door with a certain admiration. Influence is where you can read about all the smart former assistants to prominent members of Congress and the new K Street jobs they’ve landed. There are short but meaningful hiring notices—like the recent one announcing that the blue-ribbon lobby firm K&L Gates has snagged its fourth former congressional “member.” There are accounts of prizes that lobbyists give to one another and of rooftop parties for clients and ritual roll calls of Ivy League degrees to be acknowledged and respected. And wherever you look at Influence, it seems like people associated with this or that Podesta can be found registering new clients, holding fundraisers, and “bundling” cash for Hillary Clinton.

As with other entries in the Politico family of tip sheets, Influence is itself sponsored from time to time—for one exciting week last month by the Federation of American Hospitals, which announced to the newsletter’s readers that, for the last 50 years, the FAH “has had a seat at the table.” Appropriately enough for a publication whose beat is venality, Influence also took care to report on the FAH’s 50th-anniversary party, thrown in an important room in the Capitol building, and carefully listed the many similarly important people who attended: the important lobbyists, the important members of Congress, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the Obama administration’s important former health care czar and one of this city’s all-time revolving-door champions.

Describing parties like this is a standard theme in Influence, since the influence trade is by nature a happy one, a flattering one, a business eager to serve you up a bracing Negroni and encourage you to gorge yourself on fancy hors d’oeuvres. And so the newsletter tells us about the city’s many sponsored revelries—who gives them, who attends them, the establishment where the transaction takes place, and whose legislative agenda is advanced by the resulting exchange of booze and bonhomie.

The regular reader of Influence knows, for example, about the big reception scheduled to be hosted by Squire Patton Boggs, one of the most storied names in the influence-for-hire trade, at a certain office in Cleveland during the Republican Convention…about how current and former personnel of the Department of Homeland Security recently enjoyed a gathering thrown for them by a prestigious law firm…about a group called “PAC Pals” and the long list of staffers and lobbying types who attended their recent revelry…about how the Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the gang got together at a much-talked-about bar to sip artisanal cocktails.

There’s a poignant note to the story of former Congressional representative Melissa Bean—once the toast of New Democrats everywhere, now the “Midwest chair of JPMorgan”—who recently returned to DC to get together with her old staff. They had also moved on to boldface jobs in lobbying, television, and elsewhere. And there’s a note of the fabulous to the story of the Democratic member who has announced plans to throw a fundraiser at a Beyoncé concert. (“A pair of tickets go for $3,500 for PACs,” Influence notes.)

Bittersweet is the flavor of the recent story about the closing of Johnny’s Half Shell, a Capitol Hill restaurant renowned for the countless fundraisers it has hosted over the years. On hearing the news of the restaurant’s imminent demise, Influence gave over its pixels to tales from Johnny’s glory days. One reader fondly recounted a tale in which Occupy protesters supposedly interrupted a Johnny’s fundraiser being enjoyed by Sen. Lindsey Graham and a bunch of defense contractors. In classic DC-style, the story was meant to underscore the stouthearted stoicism of the men of power who reportedly did not flinch at the menacing antics of the lowly ones.

Influence is typically written in an abbreviated, matter-of-fact style, but its brief items speak volumes about the realities of American politics. There is, for example, little here about the high-profile battle over how transgender Americans are to be granted access to public restrooms. However, the adventures of dark money in our capital are breathlessly recounted, as the eternal drama of plutocracy plays itself out and mysterious moneymen try to pass their desires off as bona fide democratic demands.

“A group claiming to lobby on behalf of ordinary citizens against large insurance companies is in fact orchestrated by the hospital industry itself,” begins a typical item. The regular reader also knows about the many hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by unknown parties to stop Puerto Rican debt relief and about the mysterious group that has blown vast sums to assail the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but whose protesters, when questioned outside a CFPB hearing, reportedly admitted that they were “day laborers paid to be there.”

You will have noticed, reader, the curiously bipartisan nature of the items mentioned here. But it really shouldn’t surprise you. After all, for this part of Washington, the only real ideology around is based on money—how much and how quickly you get paid.

Money is divine in this industry, and perhaps that is why Influence is fascinated with libertarianism, a fringe free-market faith that (thanks to its popularity among America’s hard-working billionaires) is massively overrepresented in Washington. Readers of Influence know about the Competitive Enterprise Institute and its “Night in Casablanca” party, about the R Street Institute’s “Alice in Wonderland” party, about how former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli came to sign up with FreedomWorks, and how certain libertarians have flown from their former perches in the vast, subsidized free-market coop to the fashionable new Niskanen Center.

There are also plenty of small-bore lobbying embarrassments to report on, as when a currently serving congressional representative sent a mean note to a former senator who is now an official at the American Motorcyclist Association. Or that time two expert witnesses gave “nearly identical written statements” when testifying on Capitol Hill. Oops!

But what most impresses the regular reader of Influence is the brazenness of it all. To say that the people described here appear to feel no shame in the contracting-out of the democratic process is to miss the point. Their doings are a matter of pride, with all the important names gathering at some overpriced eatery to toast one another and get their picture taken and advance some initiative that will always, of course, turn out to be good for money and terrible for everyone else.

This is not an industry, Influence‘s upbeat and name-dropping style suggests. It is a community—a community of corruption, perhaps, but a community nevertheless: happy, prosperous, and joyously oblivious to the plight of the country once known as the land of the middle class.

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? To receive the latest from TomDispatch.com, sign up here.

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Where DC Lobbyists Love to See and Be Seen

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Donald Trump’s Son-In-Law Gets Blasted in Open Letter

by Dustin7008 Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest controversy to envelop Donald Trump has spurred furious critics to accuse the presidential candidate of anti-Semitism and to blast Trump’s son-in-law, who is Jewish, for refusing to condemn him.

Trump sparked outrage over the weekend when he tweeted—and later deleted—an image of Hillary Clinton that many have called anti-Semitic: a photo of Clinton against a background of cash, with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” emblazoned on a six-pointed star. Critics said the tweet drew on stereotypes of Jews and the star resembled the Star of David. Mic reported that the meme had originally been created on an internet forum for neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and white supremacists.

Trump deleted the tweet and replaced it with a new image, using a circle instead of a star.

In response to the tweet and the Trump campaign’s response, a New York Observer reporter, Dana Schwartz, penned an open letter to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and an owner of the Observer. A New York Times profile of Kushner on Monday described him as Trump’s “de facto campaign manager,” “involved in virtually every facet of the Trump presidential operation.”

Schwartz laid out the problems with Trump’s tweet and called out Kushner for not doing anything in response to Trump’s anti-Semitism:

You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a “gotcha” journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval.

Schwartz also pointed out that Trump failed to apologize for the tweet, instead blaming “dishonest media” for trying to depict the star as the star of David, rather than a sheriff’s star, or, in his words, a “plain star.”

And now, Mr. Kushner, I ask you: What are you going to do about this? Look at those tweets I got again, the ones calling me out for my Jewish last name, insulting my nose, evoking the holocaust, and tell me I’m being too sensitive. Read about the origins of that image and see the type of people it attracted like a flies to human waste and tell me this whole story is just the work of the “dishonest media.” Look at that image and tell me, honestly, that you just saw a “Sheriff’s Star.” I didn’t see a sheriff star, Mr. Kushner, and I’m a smart person. After all, I work for your paper.

The reporter’s open letter is in stark contrast to the Observer‘s editorial board’s stance on the presidential race. In April, the Observer published an editorial endorsing Trump that also acknowledged that Kushner, the paper’s publisher, was Trump’s son-in-law. The publication’s ties to the GOP presidential candidate played a role in at least two reporters’ resignations from the paper, according to Politico.

The Observer‘s editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson, told Politico that he supported publishing the letter but personally disagreed with Schwartz’s criticism of Kushner.

“All presidential candidates attract people whose support makes them uncomfortable,” said Kurson, who said that his mother had fled the Holocaust. “I think the effort to paint Donald Trump as an anti-Semite because some of his supporters are is like saying that Bernie Sanders hates the US because some of his supporters spit on American flags at his rallies.

He added, “In my opinion, Donald Trump is not a Jew hater.”

Read Schwartz’s full letter here.

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Donald Trump’s Son-In-Law Gets Blasted in Open Letter

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Does Exxon Have a Constitutional Right to Deny Climate Change?

by TammaraDaddario Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Does Exxon Mobil have a constitutional right to sow doubt about climate science? That’s the subject of a high-stakes legal battle playing out between dozens of state attorneys general, members of Congress, corporate executives, and activists.

Last fall, investigations by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that the oil giant has decades of internal documents showing that its own scientists and executives knew fossil fuels contributed to climate change. Publicly, the company argued that the threats posed by global warming were far from certain, presumably as part of an effort to fight off regulations.

A March 2000 Exxon Mobil ad about climate science. (Click here for a larger image.) Greenpeace

The revelations have sparked a barrage of legal actions. The attorney generals of Massachusetts, California, and New York launched investigations of Exxon, while Democratic AGs from other states have expressed their support. Some have drawn parallels to the tobacco industry’s deception on the dangers of smoking. Exxon has countered that the investigations are unconstitutional and has filed motions asking courts to block the subpoenas. “This…is about freedom of political speech,” the company recently argued in the Massachusetts case.

In March, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker served the company with a subpoena seeking records that he claimed might prove that Exxon had defrauded consumers and the government by “misrepresenting its knowledge” that its fossil fuels contribute to climate change. Walker specifically pointed to a state racketeering statute that prohibits obtaining money by false pretenses. He demanded any documents detailing Exxon’s knowledge of climate change and its strategies to address it, including research studies, publications, statements, and communications with outside groups. Exxon responded by filing a lawsuit against Walker to block the subpoena. Exxon prevailed on Wednesday, when Walker agreed to withdraw the subpoena.

Exxon received some unusual assistance in its victory in the Virgin Islands case. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea-party-aligned Republican, went so far as to formally intervene—that is, he asked the court to allow the state of Texas to become a party to the case. Exxon, he wrote, had a First Amendment right to withhold the documents Walker was seeking. The brief was also signed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (R). (Paxton and Strange also objected to Walker’s use of a private law firm to help conduct the investigation.)

In a press conference in May, Paxton had called Walker’s investigation “a fishing expedition of the worst kind” and said it represented “an effort to punish Exxon for daring to hold opinions on climate change that differ from theirs.”

“This is about the criminalization of speech and the criminalization of thought,” he said.

Two days later, Republican members of the House Science Committee sent letters to Walker and 16 Democratic attorneys general requesting documents related to the various Exxon investigations. They followed up with additional letters in June.

On June 15, Paxton and 12 other GOP attorneys general signed a letter criticizing the Exxon investigations. The letter laid out a free-speech argument in stark terms, saying, “Actions indicating that one side of the climate change debate should fear prosecution chills speech in violation of a formerly bi-partisan First Amendment consensus.”

Exxon, which is headquartered in Texas and is a major employer in the state, did not respond to a request for comment. The company’s former vice president of public and government affairs, Kenneth P. Cohen, previously told the New York Times, “We unequivocally reject the allegations that Exxon Mobil has suppressed climate change research.”

Paxton’s involvement in the case alarmed some environmentalists, who note that attorneys general are charged with enforcing state laws and regulations. It’s unusual for a state to intervene in support of a company that is under investigation, said Stacey Geis, managing attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization.

It’s as if Paxton were trying to act as Exxon’s lawyer, she said.

Paxton’s deputy Brantley Starr disputed that allegation.

“If we were intervening on behalf of someone, it would be the Constitution,” he said in a phone interview.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor and senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, agreed that Paxton’s intervention was “highly unusual.” Nevertheless, he added in an email that Walker’s subpoena was “quite possibly unconstitutional.” Exxon, he said, has “a right to have a position on global warming.”

Other scholars and activists reject that argument. Naomi Ages, a project leader at environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, called the Virgin Islands investigation “legitimate” and said Paxton’s intervention was “unprecedented” and based on “pretty specious legal grounds.”

Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School, argues that it is “irresponsible to invoke the First Amendment” to defend Exxon. “There are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories,” wrote Post in a Washington Post op-ed last week. “Public debate must be protected, but fraud must also be suppressed.”

Starr counters that the Texas AG’s office was not claiming corporations can never be investigated for fraud, but rather that an investigation cannot be based on a public policy debate. “What we shouldn’t do is investigate public debate and say that there’s only one side of the public debate that we’re investigating,” he said.

Paxton has received nearly $1 million dollars in contributions from the oil and gas industry during his seven runs for public office, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. During a recent event at the conservative Heritage Foundation, he warned that the investigation of Exxon could have resulted in job losses in his state, though he declined to provide a specific estimate of how many jobs were in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, Paxton is facing legal challenges of his own. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against him in April, alleging that he had recruited investors for a company without disclosing that he was receiving compensation in the form of stock in the company. This complaint followed three state criminal indictments on charges of securities fraud and failing to register as an investment adviser.

In a video released by his campaign in May, Paxton called the charges “false” and “politically motivated.”

When asked for comment on the SEC investigation at the Heritage Foundation event, Paxton declined to answer.

On Thursday, Paxton released a statement hailing the withdrawal of Walker’s Exxon subpoena as a triumph for free speech.

“The so-called ‘investigation’ by Walker was a constitutionally improper attempt to suppress the freedom of speech based only on the content being communicated. In America, we have the freedom to disagree, and we do not legally prosecute people just because their opinion is different from ours.”

This article has been updated.

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Does Exxon Have a Constitutional Right to Deny Climate Change?

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Watch: What It’s Like to Earn $9 an Hour as a Prison Guard

by JoyTNYEomnagic Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Read Bauer’s gripping firsthand account here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of a six-part video series produced by Mother Jones senior digital editor James West. In the second episode, Bauer learns about an escape finds out that a guard’s $9 an hour wage doesn’t stretch very far.

Also: Watch episode one.

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Watch: What It’s Like to Earn $9 an Hour as a Prison Guard

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The Lawyers Who Helped Make Gay Marriage the Law of the Land Are Just Getting Started

by LourdesWilhite Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last June, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. A year later, President Obama has christened Stonewall Inn the first national monument to LGBT rights, and the nation is engaged in a conversation—and new legal battles—involving transgender equality, another piece of the puzzle. I caught up with Memphis-based civil rights attorney Maureen Holland, part of the winning legal team in Obergfell, to discuss the eventful past year, the Pulse massacre, and her next big legal project.

Maureen Holland

Mother Jones: After the Obergefell ruling, there was substantial resistance, including Kim Davis the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to grant marriage licenses. Several states proposed bills that would let businesses deny services to LGBT customers on religious grounds. Were you surprised by the level of pushback?

Maureen Holland: It did not surprise me. Many southern states pushed back after the Loving 1967 interracial marriage case was decided, so we recognized there might be resistance. But I think the pushback was overshadowed by the overwhelming support for the decision. For some time, I was continually getting comments about how many lives were positively affected.

MJ: Since then, there’s been a growing number of federal lawsuits by people alleging their civil rights were violated when they were denied marriage benefits, or fired after coming out to their employers as gay.

MH: Employment protections are the next step in the gay-rights fight. In February 2015, before Obergefell, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that its offices would accept claims from people alleging sexual orientation-based discrimination in the workplace. After Obergefell, many people believed their cases would finally be heard if they filed claims—so they did. But the EEOC has to review the claims, decide which ones it wants to take action on, deny the claim, or tell the claimant they can sue in federal court. In recent months, we’ve seen people filing lawsuits who finally got their right-to-sue letters for claims they filed right after Obergefell. I don’t know if any organization is keeping track of the number of cases.

MJ: You’re now working on a case on behalf of a gay cop in Memphis who says he was harassed while working as his department’s LGBT liaison. You argue that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is covered under the Civil Rights Act’s ban on gender discrimination in the workplace. Can you explain the logic?

MH: Sexual orientation discrimination is essentially discriminating against somebody because they’re not conforming to the norms of their sex. Men should talk a certain way. Women should wear a certain attire at work. That kind of discrimination is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. And discriminating against someone because they’re a man dating a man but you think they should date women is the same type of discrimination. So we think it is illegal as well. That argument would also extend to discrimination based on gender identity.

MJ: Which brings me to my next question: In Obergefell the Supreme Court found that gay marriage is a protected right under the Constitution, but it didn’t say sexual orientation is a protected class, like race and gender. Is there any language in that opinion that suggests your strategy will succeed?

MH: There’s language in any court opinion—called dicta—that you can draw implications from and use to extend the finding to other contexts. The dicta in Obergefell is clear: The Court adopts the idea that “psychologists and others recognize that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.” In my complaint for the Memphis officer, I use this and other quotes as the framework for the argument that the Obergefell ruling was not just about marriage.

MJ: This notion that sexual orientation is immutable sounds like a clear indication that it should be a protected class. The Constitution’s equal protection clause was meant to protect people from discrimination based on attributes they can’t change.

MH: Exactly. But we don’t have case law that says it with that level of clarity in regard to sexual orientation. That’s why people are bringing these cases.

MJ: Let’s pivot to transgender rights. We’re in the midst of a big national debate about that. Why now?

MH: It’s the next conversation we had to have about LGBT rights. Gender identity—what is that? What does it mean? How do our laws apply to individuals who transition? The Obergefell decision opened up space for a more national conversation.

MJ: President Obama repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. His Department of Justice stopped enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act before the Obergefell decision. And 11 states are now suing his administration over bathroom guidelines it issued for transgender students.

MH: I think President Obama has become a great advocate for LGBT rights. He’s talked about his transition in thinking on same-sex marriage, and the fact that we got to see him do that openly and honestly has been helpful. He has issued executive orders that give protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to public-sector employees. All these things speak well to his willingness to not just say it, but to do things that are meaningful to protect LGBT people.

MJ: When might the Supreme Court take up the question of whether sexual orientation and gender identity are constitutionally protected?

MH: It could happen the year after next. They have to accept a case that asks the question, first. But there are a number of those moving into the Court of Appeals. It also depends on the decisions of the Courts of Appeal. The Supreme Court tends to take cases when there’s a difference in opinion in the circuits—not just because they think a case is interesting. That’s what happened in Obergefell.

MJ: I’m curious about your thoughts on what happened in Orlando.

MH: I was heartbroken. It was hard to see—as a member of the LGBT community myself—people targeted because of their identity, when a year prior we had celebrated Obergefell. No one should be targeted because of who they love, and that message needs to continue to be said, and protections need to be in place. I spoke at a vigil for Orlando here in Memphis the day it happened. The crowd came out, and I think they were afraid to be who they are because they knew they could be targeted. You want to live in a community where you don’t have to be afraid to go outside or go to work and be who you are. And that’s what I hope the future will be. We’re not there yet.

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The Lawyers Who Helped Make Gay Marriage the Law of the Land Are Just Getting Started

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Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

by FletchePipkin Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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For four months in late 2014 and early 2015, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer worked as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. Read his gripping firsthand account of his experience here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of the latest episode of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. Listen to “The Man Inside” below.

Reveal can be heard on public radio stations across the country and on the Reveal podcast.

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Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

by StacyCadejiqw Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started work as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second largest private-prison company. Here, he talks about what he saw during his four months on the job and what it taught him about life inside a for-profit prison. Read his full story here.

Mother Jones: How did you get the idea for this project?

Shane Bauer: The first time I thought about it was while talking to another reporter about writing about prisons. We were talking about Ted Conover’s Newjack, about his experience working as a guard at Sing Sing. I thought, “I should try that at a private prison.” There isn’t a lot of reporting on private prisons because they are not subject to the same public records laws as publicly run prisons and it’s pretty hard for journalists to get inside them. They’re a corner of the American prison system that we don’t know a lot about.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard

MJ: You got a job as a guard at the Corrections Corporation of America’s Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. How hard was it to get the position?

SB: Not hard. I filled out an application online. I filled it out honestly with my real information. There was a list of prisons around the country that they needed people for. I clicked a handful of them, and within a couple weeks I was doing phone interviews and getting job offers. One reason I picked Winn was because it was in Louisiana. Louisiana has more prisoners per capita than anywhere in the world. It seemed like killing two birds with one stone, getting inside a Louisiana prison and a CCA prison. Winn was also the oldest medium-security private prison in the country.

MJ: When you got to Winn, what was your training like?

SB: I went through four weeks of training. We did some physical training, very little, and watched some videos. We were tear-gassed. Generally, somebody would get in front of the class and read from a book on policies like the use of force. A lot of it was spent sitting in the classroom doing nothing because there often weren’t teachers. There were whole days where the cadets would just sit and talk to each other. Maybe we’d have an hour or two of training. I really began learning the job once I started work.

MJ: You were assigned to a unit called Ash. What was your job there?

SB: Ash was a unit of eight dorms. Each dorm had up to 44 men in beds lined up right next to each other in one giant room. The inmates would go out to eat, and sometimes they would go out to a small yard for recreation. But most of the prisoners were in there almost the whole day. So there was a lot tension. A lot of people were frustrated at being stuck in there all day. I was a floor guard. It was just me and one other guard managing these 350 prisoners.

MJ: Shortly after you got to Winn, one prisoner told you that “Inmates run this bitch.” What did he mean by that?

SB: I think he meant that the prison administration didn’t have control over the prison. He and other inmates talked about the way Winn was run like it was a joke. I would ask prisoners who’d been to public state prisons how it compared and they would commonly say there’s was no structure there compared to other places.

MJ: What kinds of things did guards do to get by and make the best of the situation?

SB: Guards would rely on inmates to fill in the gaps since there weren’t enough guards to do all the things that we needed to do. Sometimes inmates would stand outside of a unit and warn us if higher-ups were coming. There was one corrections counselor who had a couple of inmates that she would use as bodyguards because she worked in an office where there weren’t security cameras. Sometimes we had to give out call-out passes—passes for prisoners to go places like school or the gym—and a lot times we would just give them to a prisoner to hand out.

MJ: How did Winn handle medical care and mental health care for prisoners?

SB: Prisoners regularly complained about medical care at Winn. I met a prisoner who had no legs and no fingers. He had lost them within the past year to gangrene. His medical records showed that he had made at least nine requests to see a doctor in that time. He would go to the infirmary and get sent back; the staff was suggesting that he was faking it. He said he showed the warden his feet, which were turning black and dripping with pus. But CCA had to pay to take a prisoner to the hospital, which costs a lot of money, especially when you consider it made $34 a day for each prisoner.

There was one full-time social worker for 1,500 inmates at Winn, and a part-time psychiatrist and part-time psychologist. The social worker said they typically would get to see any given inmate once a month. Another option available for prisoners with serious problems was suicide watch. If a prisoner said he was suicidal, he would get put on suicide watch, which essentially is a solitary cell.

MJ: Toward the end of your time at Winn, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) stepped in and temporarily took over the prison. Why’d that happen and how did things change when the state came in?

SB: Right about when I started working there, a prisoner escaped. Then there were a lot of stabbings and the state started paying attention to what was happening at Winn. Then there was another rash of stabbings. Some buses showed up one day with guards and wardens from public prisons around Louisiana, and they took over. The message seemed to be, “We’re gonna need to show you how to run this prison.” Everything felt different when they were there. The prisoners reacted really differently to them. Normally there was a constant testing of boundaries with the guards, but when these DOC guards came in, they’d say something and everyone did it.

MJ: Why did you quit your job as a guard?

SB: I had recently been offered a promotion. Shortly after that, my colleague James West came down to shoot some video for the story. One night he was filming the prison and he was spotted by a guard. A checkpoint was set up and he was arrested. When he got out about 24 hours later, we packed up and took off right away, and a few days later I called in and resigned.

MJ: After you left, you obtained some documents from the DOC that mentioned the concerns they had asked CCA to address at Winn. Did those echo what you had seen there?

SB: Yeah. The DOC outlined many things that I saw and wrote about—about there not being enough staff, either security staff or medical staff. There were also some things that surprised me: The state said CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste and even charged them to use toenail clippers.

MJ: What happened at Winn after you left?

SB: A few weeks after I left, CCA said it would be giving up its contract for Winn. Then it was taken over by another company called LaSalle Corrections. A lot of the same prisoners and staff are still there.

MJ: A big part of your story is how being a prison guard affected you. What did your experience teach you about what it’s like to be a corrections officer?

SB: Even though I went there as a journalist and my main intention was to report on the prison, I got swept up in the mentality of being a guard. I felt in danger a lot of the time, so I was constantly trying to figure out how to manage prisoners. At first I tried to be on good terms with them. Later, I tried to show them they couldn’t push me around. I quickly felt like I was hardening.

As far as what it taught me about being a guard, it’s hard to generalize because you have guards in places like California who are unionized and make a lot more money and have more power in their facilities. Winn was the other extreme, where guards were making nine bucks an hour and didn’t have anything but a radio to protect themselves or break up fights. From what I experienced, it was a pretty crazy job, especially if you’re living off of $9 an hour.

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

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What We Know About Violence in America’s Prisons

by Trista8531 Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

Safety is an issue in all prisons, but accurate data on violence in prisons can be hard to come by. Here’s a look at what we know about physical and sexual assault in America’s prisons—and what was reported at the private prison in Louisiana where Shane Bauer worked.

Physical Assault Behind Bars

19% of all male inmates in US prisons say they’ve been physically assaulted by other inmates.
21% say they’ve been assaulted by prison staff.

Sexual Assault Behind Bars

Officials reported fewer than 8,800 incidents of rape and other sexual victimization in all American prisons and jails in 2011.
Yet between 3 percent and 9 percent of male inmates say they have been sexually assaulted behind bars, which suggests more than 180,000 current prisoners may have been victimized.
Former inmates of private state prisons are half as likely to say they have been sexually victimized by another inmate as those who were in public state prisons. However, they are nearly twice as likely to report being sexually victimized by staff.
66% of incidents of sexual misconduct by prison staff involve sexual relationships with inmates who “appeared to be willing,” according to authorities.

Women are…

7% of the total prison population
22% of all victims of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization
33% of all victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization

Private vs. Public prisons

There is no current data on how violence in public prisons compares with violence in private ones. The last study released by the Department of Justice, in 2001, found that the rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults was 38 percent higher at private prisons than at public prisons.

Violence at Winn Correctional Center

While working as a guard at the Corrections Corporation of America’s Winn Correctional Center in early 2015, Shane Bauer noted 12 stabbings over two months. Yet records from Louisiana’s Department of Corrections show that Winn reported just five stabbings during the first 10 months of the year. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the doc may have classified incidents differently.)

During those 10 months, Winn reported finding 114 inmate weapons—nearly 3 times what was found at the GEO-run Allen Correctional Center, a medium-security prison of roughly the same size.
Winn’s rate of uses of “immediate” force by staff at Winn was 40 times greater than that of the similarly sized state-run prison in Avoyelles Parish.
The rate of incidents where Winn inmates were sprayed with pepper spray or other chemical agents was 3 times the rate of such incidents at Allen and Avoyelles.

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What We Know About Violence in America’s Prisons

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