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Scott Walker May Have Just Scored 2016’s Biggest Sugar Daddies

by SarahTKTmunrv Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Charles and David Koch have already made it clear that they plan to do everything in their power to prevent Hillary Clinton (or, in case she stumbles, any other Democrat) from winning the presidency. The moguls hope to garner $889 million for the 2016 election from their networks, much of it bound to be channeled through their favorite Dark Money organizations. At one single summit in late January they managed to raise $249 million from friends and allies.

And now, it looks like the Koch brothers may have landed on their standardbearer for all that spending. As the New York Times reported:

On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker would be the Republican nominee.

“When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” Mr. Koch told the crowd, the billionaire brothers would support him, according to a spokeswoman. The remark drew laughter and applause from the audience of fellow donors and Republican activists, who had come to hear Mr. Walker speak earlier at the event, held at the Union League Club.

If the Kochs do decide to back Scott Walker, according to the Times, the money would come from them personally, rather than their network of affiliated groups. But with a combined net worth of over $85 billion, Charles and David could set up a vehicle that would outspend nearly anyone while barely tapping into their bank accounts. Seeing the brothers get behind Walker isn’t terribly surprising. The pair invested heavily in his initial gubernatorial campaign and have aided him in his subsequent elections.

Not so fast, though, Politico‘s Mike Allen cautioned this morning. Despite David Koch’s remarks, he provided Politico a statement disavowing any endorsement. As Allen wrote, the brothers say they are undecided and still plan to hold “auditions” at their summer donor conference. In addition to Walker, the lineup of people under consideration reportedly includes Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and, most surprisingly, Jeb Bush.

Whoever ends up gaining the Kochs’ support would have unparalleled fundraising might, and would have to be considered a favorite for the Republican nomination. And their ascent would be the latest example of the power of the ultrarich in the age of the super PAC: Winning broad support from small donors doesn’t matter when the affections of two individuals willing to spend astronomically could upend the entire campaign.

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Scott Walker May Have Just Scored 2016’s Biggest Sugar Daddies

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71 Years Ago FDR Dropped a Truthbomb That Still Resonates Today

by SarahBaskervill Posted on April 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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When was the last time you heard an American politician invoke Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies as models to be emulated? Democrats avoid him because his New Deal policies seem to embody the tax-and-spend, overbearing, and intrusive central government that always puts them on the defensive. And why would a Republican bother with Roosevelt when they believe that Obama is so much worse?

Sunday is the seventieth anniversary of FDR’s death on April 12, 1945. Since anniversaries are always good opportunities to reflect on the past, I reread one of Roosevelt’s speeches that I somehow still remember studying in college. It was his penultimate State of the Union Address, which he delivered on January 11, 1944, and the one in which he outlined a “second Bill of Rights”—a list of what should constitute basic economic security for Americans.

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71 Years Ago FDR Dropped a Truthbomb That Still Resonates Today

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Mexico just shamed the rest of the world with its climate plan

by SyreetaLawyer Posted on March 30, 2015

Mexico just shamed the rest of the world with its climate plan

By on 30 Mar 2015commentsShare

Mexico is the first developing country to formally make its climate action pledge ahead of U.N. negotiations to be held in Paris later this year. And its plan is actually pretty ambitious, analysts say.

Mexico on Friday said it intends to have its greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2026 and then begin to decline. It will cut its “black carbon” emissions — particulate pollution generated by burning fuels like wood and diesel — in half by 2030. The net effect is that, by 2030, Mexico’s emissions will be 25 percent lower than if the country had continued without making any changes, and by 2050, emissions will be 50 percent below 2000 levels. The country is also working on reducing its “carbon intensity” — the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP.

“That would make Mexico’s announcement a bit more ambitious than what is expected from China, but not as ambitious as what the U.S. will offer,” InsideClimate News’s John Cushman notes, referring to the November 2014 agreement between the Obama administration and China. Developing countries like China and Mexico are expected to allow their emissions to keep rising for a few years while their economies grow and their people rise out of poverty, whereas rich nations like the U.S., which have done most of the polluting in the past, are expected to start cutting emissions right away.

“While the devil is in the details, Mexico’s plan to peak its emissions by 2026 is particularly encouraging and should inspire others to follow a similar course,” said Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute, a think tank that’s tracking progress toward a 2015 climate deal.

As part of the process of working toward a climate pact, 190 countries are each submitting their own plan for how they intend to voluntarily reduce emissions (in wonk speak, the plans are known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs). In the years ahead, the U.N. will monitor each country’s progress toward realizing its plan, though the international body won’t have much power to penalize countries that don’t meet their goals. Developing countries and the European Union had pushed for a binding treaty that would punish nations that don’t curb emissions as agreed, but Obama would never be able to get that sort of treaty by the current U.S. Senate, so, in order to keep the U.S. in the game, the U.N. is now working toward a nonbinding agreement.

The U.S. is expected to submit its plan by the U.N.’s deadline, the end of the first quarter of 2015 (that’s tomorrow!), but other nations are not on track to do so. Still, not everyone is dragging their feet: The E.U., Switzerland, and Norway have outlined their INDCs, representing more than 10 percent of global emissions. And once the U.S. submits its plan, a third of world emissions will be accounted for.

Analysts tracking the process say many countries’ delays are probably at least partially strategic: If a country gets its commitment in at the last minute, the world has less of a chance to ask it to commit more. China and India, the world’s first and third biggest polluters, plan to submit their INDCs this summer.

Mexico’s contribution — and China’s anticipated contribution, based on last November’s joint announcement with America — set the reductions for the developing world on a fairly ambitious path. That’s encouraging, given that differences between rich and poor nations have scuttled past attempts at a climate deal. But some developing countries (India, notably) have been difficult to pin down on their likely commitments.

It will take commitments from all of the world’s major polluters, rich and poor alike, to put us on something even resembling a sustainable path — and with so many INDCs as yet undeclared, it’s impossible to determine if 2015 will be the year that the U.N. finally pulls off the climate deal its been attempting for decades. And even under a best-case scenario, diplomats have repeatedly warned that any deal likely won’t be enough to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists say we must meet to fend off the worst climate impacts.

Still, gotta start somewhere, and Mexico’s announcement is an encouraging step. Olé!

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Mexico just shamed the rest of the world with its climate plan

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Netanyahu and Obama Agree: Global Warming Is a Huge Threat

by Chadwick15O Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, at the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). The speech has caused a considerable flap, with Democrats criticizing it as an unprecedented affront to President Barack Obama.

But while the president and Netanyahu might have vastly different visions for how to deal with the threat posed by Iran, they do seem to agree on one thing: the threat posed by climate change. Over the past few months Obama has repeatedly emphasized the dangers associated with global warming. In his State of the Union address in January, he said that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations” than climate change. And in a recent national security document, Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat.” Despite GOP protestations to the contrary, Obama’s concerns are legitimate: New research released yesterday, for example, found that man-made climate change was a key factor in the Syrian civil war.

It seems Bibi had the same thought as early as 2010, when his cabinet approved a wide-reaching plan to reduce Israel’s carbon footprint. At the time, the prime minister said that “the threat of climate change is no less menacing than the security threats that we face.” From the Jerusalem Post:

At the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009, Israel pledged to reduce emissions by 20 percent from a “business as usual” scenario by 2020.

“The recent dry months, including the driest November in the history of the state, are a warning light to us all that the threat of climate change is no less menacing than the security threats that we face. I intend to act determinedly in this field. In a country that suffers from a severe water shortage, this is an existential struggle,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said at the cabinet meeting.

Israel doesn’t face the kind of political resistance from climate change deniers that is all too common in the United States, said Gidon Bromberg, Israel director of EcoPeace Middle East. But the country is struggling to meet its carbon emission and renewable energy targets because government spending is so heavily concentrated on defense, he said.

“They’ve given the issue a great deal of lip service,” he said, “but in practice none of these targets have been met.”

Still, Israel has been at the forefront of developing seawater desalination technology to confront drought. The country has the biggest desal plant in the world, and last year Netanyahu signed a deal with California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) to share research and technology for dealing with water scarcity.

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Netanyahu and Obama Agree: Global Warming Is a Huge Threat

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The Science of Why Republicans Are Dead Wrong About Climate Change and National Security

by GustavoA76 Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, GOP chairman Reince Priebus had some strong words about how President Barack Obama prioritizes threats to national security.

“Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security,” he said. “Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.”

The comment came after the president, in a lengthy interview with Vox, said that the media often overplays the danger of terrorism relative to climate change. It’s not the first time Obama has made a point along those lines. In his State of the Union address in January, he said that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations” than climate change. A few weeks later, in his 2015 national security strategy, the president referred to global warming as an “urgent and growing threat” to national security.

But while Priebus’s jab earned him a hearty round of applause at CPAC, new research indicates that his iceberg comment doesn’t hold water.

For the last couple years, Middle East experts have pointed to the ongoing civil war in Syria as a prime example of how climate change can contribute to violent conflict. The country’s worst drought on record arrived just as widespread outrage with President Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime was reaching critical mass; as crops failed, an estimated 1.5 million people were driven off rural farms and into cities. While grievances with the Assad regime are many, from economic stagnation to violent crackdowns on protesters, the impacts of the drought were likely the final straw.

The narrative in Syria fit perfectly with what many top military leaders, including at the Pentagon, were beginning to project: In parts of the world where tensions are already high, the impacts of natural disasters and competition for resources are increasingly likely to ignite violence. A 2013 study by analysts at Princeton found that in some parts of the world, global warming could lead to a 50 percent increase in conflict by mid-century.

But in Syria, there was some uncertainty about whether that drought in particular was a product of man-made climate change. In other words, is the climate-driven conflict there merely representative of what might happen more often in the future, or is it an actual consequence of burning fossil fuels?

An answer to that question was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Colin Kelley, a geographer at the University of California-Santa Barbara, found that a multiyear drought as severe as the one that hit Syria from 2007 to 2010 was made two to three times more likely because of climate change, compared to natural variability alone.

The study is the first to examine a century’s worth of precipitation and temperature data for the Fertile Crescent (the lush region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that was hit hardest by the drought) for clues about a possible human fingerprint on the recent drought. Sure enough, the data shows that “three of the four most severe multiyear droughts have occurred in the last 25 years, the period during which external anthropogenic forcing has seen its largest increase.” Here’s the relevant data from the study:

Kelley et al, PNAS 2015

The lines in both charts proceed chronologically, starting at 1900, with a tick mark every 20 years. In the top chart, a regional warming trend is clearly visible, with the red box highlighting the recent period where temperatures were consistently above the long-term average. The bottom chart shows the Palmer Drought Severity Index, a standard metric for measuring drought in agricultural areas that combines temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture data (lower numbers are more severe). The brown boxes show droughts (where the PDSI is below the long-term trend) of at least three years.

The study also includes data from a model that compared two sets of projected temperatures in the Fertile Crescent, one with greenhouse gas influence and one without. The observed record matches closely with the greenhouse gas model, suggesting that climate change played a critical role in shaping conditions in the region.

“The bottom line is, what we’re trying to show is that these trends are due to the climate change signal,” Kelley said of the charts above. “There’s no natural signal for that.”

In other words, Kelley said, there’s a clear line of causation from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions to the deaths of 200,000 Syrians in the civil war.

With that said, Kelley added that there are a number of other factors at play here. The impact of the most recent drought was made worse by the fact that it came on the heels of two other severe droughts, so groundwater supplies were already low and farmers already struggling. Moreover, Assad’s predecessor and father, Hafez al-Assad, instituted a system of agricultural policies that encouraged farming in water-scarce areas, setting farmers there up to be highly vulnerable to future drought. And it’s impossible to know how the drought would have affected the political climate in the absence of Assad’s other unpopular practices; it’s possible that a more stable government would have been able to better weather the drought.

Still, the study carries important implications for the future of the region, said Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security. The climate trends highlighted in this study indicate that replacing Assad won’t be enough to secure stability in the region.

“If or when the conflict in Syria comes to an end, will its farmers and herders be able to regain their livelihoods?” Femia said. “Given the continued instability and a forecast of increased drying in the region, this issue should be better integrated into the international security agenda.”

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The Science of Why Republicans Are Dead Wrong About Climate Change and National Security

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Natural gas drilling is causing earthquakes in Europe too

by Clement62M Posted on February 19, 2015

Natural gas drilling is causing earthquakes in Europe too

By on 19 Feb 2015commentsShare

Shell and ExxonMobil, as well as the Dutch government, ignored for decades that drilling in Europe’s largest gas field was causing earthquakes that put human lives and property at risk. That’s the takeaway of a new report out this week from an independent group advising the Dutch government.

As the natural gas beneath the Netherlands has dwindled in recent years, residents of Groningen County have experienced an increasing number of earthquakes. Last year, the area was hit with 84. The New York Times summarized what’s going on in a feature last summer:

A half-century of extraction has reduced the field’s natural pressure in recent years, and seismic shifts from geological settling have set off increasingly frequent earthquakes — more than 120 last year, and at least 40 this year. Though most of the tremors have been small, and resulted in no reported deaths or serious injuries, they have caused widespread damage to buildings, endangered nearby dikes and frightened and angered local residents.

Though the quakes started in the 1990s, the strongest came in 2012 when a 3.6 magnitude quake caused widespread damage to buildings in a region where structures were not designed to withstand seismic activity.

It was only after that quake that the government and the drilling company started taking the welfare of residents into account, according to the recently released findings of a year-long inquiry by the Dutch Safety Board, a government-funded but non-governmental organization.

“The Dutch Safety Board concludes that the safety of citizens in Groningen with regard to induced earthquakes had no influence on decision-making on the exploitation of the Groningen gas field until 2013. Until that time, the parties viewed the impact of earthquakes as limited: a risk of damage that could be compensated,” the report concluded.

Residents have been putting pressure on the Dutch government to force production cuts at the gas field, and it has responded; most recently, the government ordered a 16 percent cut for the first half of 2015 on top of cuts already in place. The field is a major source of revenue for the Dutch government, bringing in billions of euros each year. It also accounts for one third of the natural gas produced by the European Union.

The government and the joint venture between Shell and Exxon (NAM, short for Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij, of course) are also trying to win over Groningen residents by paying for damages. From the Times:

The company and various government authorities have also agreed on a five-year, €1.2 billion package to repair and reinforce homes and other buildings, including more than 20 of the medieval churches in the region that have sustained substantial damage.

This all raises questions about U.S. natural gas production and earthquakes. In recent years, wastewater disposal from fracking has caused a dramatic uptick in earthquakes in a number of states; Oklahoma has been hit particularly hard. Though the geological processes involved with the Dutch quakes are different — and Groningen was developed using traditional drilling, not fracking — some of the policy questions are the same. Namely: How bad do earthquakes have to get before the state or federal government considers limiting production?

At the moment, the more business-friendly U.S. government isn’t looking at curtailing fracking. In fact, one state hit by a recent spate of earthquakes, Ohio, is making sure that local authorities don’t interfere with state decisions about when and where drilling is allowed.

In Groningen, the relationship between the gas company and local residents got quite bad before things started to turn around. And at this point it might be too late. “NAM has spoiled trust over the last 20 to 30 years,” Jacques Wallage, a former member of the Dutch cabinet and a former mayor of Groningen, told the Times last summer. “The main question is, Can you rebuild trust?”

Oil and gas drillers across America may someday be forced to cough up an answer to the same question. But for now, fracking in the U.S. just continues — and Americans can only dream of getting more than a billion bucks to compensate for quake damage.

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Earthquake Dangers in Dutch Gas Field Were Ignored for Years, Safety Board Says

, The New York Times.

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Natural gas drilling is causing earthquakes in Europe too

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "I Wasn’t 100 Percent Sober" During SOTU Address

by ArnetteSoderste Posted on February 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Contrary to earlier speculation that she had power-napped through last month’s State of the Union Address because it was just so damn dull, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed on Thursday it was actually due to the fact she wasn’t exactly “100 percent sober.”

The 81-year-old justice told a crowd of George Washington University students:

The audience for the most part is awake, because they’re bobbing up and down, and we sit there, stone-faced, sober judges. But we’re not, at least I wasn’t, 100 percent sober. Because before we went to the State of the Union, we had dinner together… Justice Kennedy brought in… it was an Opus something or other, very fine California wine, and I vowed this year, just sparkling water, stay away from the wine, but in the end, the dinner was so delicious, it needed wine.

According to Ginsburg, she was thankfully flanked by colleagues, who, like any good friends, casually nudged her awake when they noticed her dozing off. Watch below:

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "I Wasn’t 100 Percent Sober" During SOTU Address

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What you should know about this week’s U.N. climate talks

by GabrielMcginnis Posted on February 9, 2015

The road to Paris

What you should know about this week’s U.N. climate talks

By on 9 Feb 2015commentsShare

There’s another U.N. climate confab this week in Geneva. Maybe you have some questions about it. Maybe they are the questions below. If they are, good, because we’ve answered them.

We just had a climate conference in December. Now we’re having another?

Yes we sure are. In December 2014, world leaders met in Lima and agreed on a rough outline of what a global climate deal should look. But there’s a long way to go before next December, when the leaders are supposed to meet up in Paris to sign that agreement. The ideas expressed in Lima — summed up in a 40-page document detailing “elements for a draft negotiating text” — have to be turned into an actual draft negotiating text, which countries with varying interests will then use to come up with a final agreement. There will be at least four major meetings to work on this document before the Paris meeting in December.

The last time the U.N. tried to hammer out a big agreement like this one — back in 2009, in Copenhagen — the effort more or less fell apart. Bitter rifts between developed and developing countries kept anything much from happening. Things look (slightly) more promising this time around, although the U.N. diplomats in charge aren’t encouraging us to set our hopes too high.

What will diplomats talk about at these meetings?

The agreement that leaders will sign next December will let each country set its own target for emission reductions. Ideally, the U.N. will review each of these targets ahead of time. The hope is that countries will submit their plans by March. The European Union is pushing major economies to at least get their plans in by June. But the actual deadline from the U.N. is Oct. 1 (and some countries may not even meet that).

That leaves a lot still to be worked out. How will the U.N. decide if a country’s target is ambitious enough? What will it do if key countries (like, perhaps, India) refuse to submit a target by the deadline? And because the agreement won’t be legally binding, what recourse will the U.N. have if countries don’t meet their targets? These are a few of the big questions.

Another is climate financing. Poorer countries will need a lot of money to green their developing energy economies, and rich countries have not been forthcoming. Diplomats are increasingly expecting a large part of those funds to come from the private sector. But companies and investors aren’t part of the negotiating process — diplomats will have to figure out the best way to facilitate the flow of money to poor countries, responsibly and with oversight, on their own.

How effective will the deal be? Will we stay within 2 degrees C?

The U.N. has used a number of targets for limiting climate change, but the most common one is to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, a somewhat arbitrary temperature at which many scientists hope the worst effects can be avoided.

But the chances of staying below that target are looking increasingly slim, as continued research shows just how dramatically we would have to alter our economies to do so. Meanwhile, our economies continue to chug forward, changing very, very gradually.

In December, in Lima, U.N. chief climate diplomat Christiana Figueres said that a plan to hit the 2-degree target won’t come out of the current negotiating process leading up to Paris. “We already know, because we have a pretty good sense of what countries will be able to do in the short run, that the sum total of efforts [in Paris] will not be able to put us on the path for two degrees,” she said. “We are not going to get there with the Paris agreement … We will get there over time.”

And on a conference call with reporters last week, Figueres reiterated those thoughts. She said she backed eventually hitting carbon neutrality — that means no emissions by a set year, maybe 2050 or 2100. But she also said that a deal to do so wouldn’t be coming this year. “What we are doing this year — the role of Paris — is actually to set the pathway for an orderly planned transition over time to a low-carbon society,” she said.

So is there any point to this process?

That’s up for debate. Even U.N. officials aren’t enthusiastic, as 20 years of very slow-moving negotiations haven’t produced much so far. “We are also not convinced it’s the most effective and efficient way,” Figueres said last week. Eric Holthaus of Slate recently argued that “when it comes to the climate, the U.N. process is irreparably broken. If we at last write off the U.N. process, it may help the world finally make progress on climate by instead turning to local, tangible actions that could energize people and bring about real change.”

Maybe. But even if the U.N. process won’t keep us below 2 degrees, it could aim for a less-ambitious target, like 3 degrees. That’s worse than 2 but better than the 4, 5, 6 degrees of warming we could see if governments do nothing and allow climate change to keep intensifying.

Furthermore, there are many poor countries that see the U.N. process as their best hope to get developed nations, and big developing polluters like China, to pay attention to the threats they face. Throwing out the U.N. process throws out what is currently a key forum for those voices.

The U.S. and China, which together account for about 40 percent of the world’s emissions, have already sketched out their goals, and the European Union has outlined its aims and intends to formally submit its plan to the U.N. by March. Now it’s up to developing countries, from giants like India to small countries responsible for much less pollution, to make their own ambitious commitments. And they’re more likely to do that at the request of the U.N. than at the request of any specific country or world leader.

It would be nice if we had the revolution that some have called for, tossing out the broken diplomatic process entirely as citizens pressure their governments to take dramatic action. And we may have it, someday. But, for better or worse, today we have a few hundred diplomats in a room in Geneva.

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What you should know about this week’s U.N. climate talks

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LA Is Adopting Bodycams For Its Police Force. But Who Gets to See the Footage?

by Elisabe0997 Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Los Angeles is gearing up to equip its entire police force with body cameras, but Chief Charlie Beck says he doesn’t plan to routinely release bodycam footage to the public. “I don’t think that transparency means we post every interaction on YouTube,” he said yesterday. Plus this:

The chief said he felt there was a “moral prohibition” as well.

“People invite us into their homes on their worst possible day, and I don’t think they invite us with the intention of having that interaction made public,” he said. “Families call us when they’re in crisis. Victims call us when they’ve had horrific things done to them by evil people. And to make those things public revictimizes them, doesn’t serve justice. And I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.”

This may be self-serving on Beck’s part, but the truth is that he has a point. And the ACLU agrees:

The Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has indicated support for the cameras but is demanding strong policies to protect civilian privacy. The organization wrote to the Police Commission, recommending it make public video of high-profile incidents, such as police shootings, “if not while an investigation is pending, then as soon as it is concluded.”

I’m still struggling with the right answer to this, and I think it’s going to be a while before we figure out the right balance. In the meantime, as I continue to noodle over what rules should govern release of bodycam footage, I’ll toss out a few thoughts:

The police department itself should not be allowed to decide what footage to make public.
In fact, the police department probably shouldn’t even be involved in these decisions.
However, civilians caught in police videos should have some say. If they don’t want footage of their encounter made public, that should be given some weight.
But how much weight? In the case of, say, a routine domestic dispute, I’d give it a lot of weight. But in a matter of serious public interest—especially those involving allegations of police misconduct—civilian desires for privacy will have to take a back seat.
There should be different guidelines for footage taken in public places vs. footage from people’s homes.
We also need rules that govern generic research requests. It’s in the public interest, for example, to know whether traffic stops of white drivers seem more motivated by probable cause than stops of black drivers. A review of bodycam footage could provide valuable evidence on that score. But what are the regulations governing this?

The fundamental question underlying all of this, of course, is: Who decides? Not the police themselves. Maybe judges? An independent agency? But if it’s an agency, how do you prevent it from becoming captured by the police department? These are really knotty issues, and I wouldn’t be surprised if several of them end up in front of the Supreme Court over the next few years.

At yesterday’s meeting, Police Commission President Steve Soboroff said “This is not for YouTube. This is not for TMZ. This is for maintaining the city’s safety.” Maybe so. But what it’s for doesn’t matter. Once this stuff is public, it will end up on TMZ and YouTube whether anyone likes it or not.

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LA Is Adopting Bodycams For Its Police Force. But Who Gets to See the Footage?

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Greens get behind striking oil workers

by ConcepcEyler Posted on February 3, 2015

Greens get behind striking oil workers

By on 3 Feb 2015commentsShare

U.S. oil workers have launched a strike that has the potential to spread as the United Steelworkers union works to negotiate a new contract with the industry. Some environmental groups are signalling their support for the strikers, describing them as “highly skilled professionals that do their best to prevent the worst” while employed in an industry that is “high-risk … from cradle-to-grave.”

The strike, which USW called on Sunday, is the largest in 35 years. Workers at nine refineries and chemical plants — which process about 10 percent of U.S. gasoline — have walked off the job, shutting down one California refinery entirely. Union leadership is hoping for a new contract with companies that would cover workers at 63 plants. The union represents about 30,000 oil workers across the country; if all of those workers were to strike, it could, according to Bloomberg, disrupt 64 percent of U.S. oil processing.

USW Vice President Gary Beevers explained the reasons for the strike in a statement: “This work stoppage is about onerous overtime; unsafe staffing levels; dangerous conditions the industry continues to ignore; the daily occurrences of fires, emissions, leaks, and explosions that threaten local communities without the industry doing much about it; the industry’s refusal to make opportunities for workers in the trade crafts; the flagrant contracting out that impacts health and safety on the job; and the erosion of our workplace, where qualified and experienced union workers are replaced by contractors when they leave or retire.” The union has so far rejected five offers from Shell, which is leading the talks on behalf of other companies, including big ones like ExxonMobil and Chevron, since negotiations began on Jan. 21.

The anti-fossil fuel advocacy group Oil Change International weighed in yesterday. “On behalf of more than 100,000 supporters, the Board and Staff of Oil Change International stand in solidarity with these striking refinery workers, and the important issues they have raised,” wrote David Turnbull, the organization’s campaigns director. “So often as we fight Big Oil it can be hard to remember that the impacts of the industry and the fight for safer communities extend both inside and outside the fence lines.”

Environmentalist Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org (and a board member at Grist), also tweeted his support:

This round of negotiations comes as the oil industry seeks to cut costs as oil prices fall and domestic drilling becomes less and less economical. Prices at the pump could increase as a result of the strike — they already have a little bit for unrelated reasons. But America’s got so much cheap oil floating around that consumers probably won’t notice anything anytime soon.

Shell has been telling reporters it wants to resume negotiations “as early as possible.” The union met with the company yesterday, but said that no progress was made. The last big oil worker strike, in 1980, lasted three months.

Source:
U.S. refinery strike nears third day as Shell, union meet

, Reuters.

In Major Walkout, U.S. Oil Workers Demand Safety, Fair Treatment

, ThinkProgress.

Refinery Shuts as U.S. Oil Workers Strike Reaches Second Day

, Bloomberg.

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Greens get behind striking oil workers

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