Is Global Warming Causing Extreme Weather? Not in Trump World

The lethality and destruction of two monstrous hurricanes with Maria in their wake has brought the subject of climate change to the fore, bolstering the argument that global warming is the cause of these storms and man is the major contributor to global warming.

That’s not what climate scientists say, however, although many may privately
think so. James Hansen, formerly NASA, now at Columbia University, and who sounded the early warning in the 1980s calls them out for the “scientific reticence” that gives the more outspoken skeptics the upper hand in persuading the America public. No one storm can be linked to warming as its cause, scientists prudently say, because there is no proof. But the believers find it imprudent to wait for proof.

But then came Harvey, adjudged to be the most extreme rain event in America’s experience — 51.9 inches in one area of Texas. Irma, with winds at sea of 175 miles an hour, was the most powerful storm ever measured at sea. And Maria has followed suit.

Understandably fixated on the non-stop coverage of the catastrophic storms, most Americans may have missed what has been happening elsewhere which can only add to the belief that something is very much amiss.

Wildfires in Montana have burned for months in the wake of a severe drought. June through August were the hottest and driest in the state’s history. A week ago, 21 fires were still active, covering 438,000 acres. Wildfires in Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Utah have blanketed areas of those states in smoke and ash. Northern Idaho residents have been breathing some of the worst air in the U.S. with a quality rating over 460 in some parts. A rating above 150 is considered unhealthy and above 300 hazardous, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

At least 1,200 have died in India during the summer monsoons, with rainfall reported to be 10-times the normal volume. In Nepal, elephants had to be deployed to wade through flood waters to rescue people.

In May in southwestern Pakistan, the mercury rose to 129.2 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest ever recorded in Asia. That same temperature was recorded in Kuwait last year.

A summer heat wave, in some places accompanied by violent storms, has been scorching Europe, stretching from Spain to the Balkans with temperatures in the low 100s Fahrenheit. The mercury reached 107 degrees in Greece, 108 in Romania. Train tracks buckled in Serbia. Spain recorded a record high of 117.1 degrees.

taboo

But climate change is a forbidden subject in the Trump administration. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, took offense that voices were linking the Texas and Florida storms to planetary warming.

“To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced…To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this [sic] people in Florida”.

He’d best not tell that to the Republican mayor of Miami, a city that may become unsustainable as it faces rising sea waters. Tomás Regalado does not have the luxury of denying reality. He told the Miami Herald:

“This is the time to talk about climate change. This is the time that the president and the EPA and whoever makes decisions needs to talk about climate change.”

Asked if hurricanes Harvey and Irma made him rethink his views on climate change, the president downplayed:

“We’ve had bigger storms than this,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We did have two horrific storms, epic storms. But if you go back into the ’30s and ’40s, and you go back into the Teens, you’ll see storms that were very similar and even bigger, OK?”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, researches and monitors temperature readings of the atmosphere and the oceans worldwide, tracking dangerous weather and storms, yet Trump’s budget would cut $250 million from the very agency program that researches how coastal communities need to prepare for rising seas and the more intense storms predicted for the future.

alternate facts

In Pruitt, Trump chose to run the EPA the former Attorney General of Oklahoma who had sued the agency he was about to lead 14 times to block air and water regulations. Pruitt was his choice because Trump has said he would like to see the EPA dismantled. “It’s almost a parody”, said David Goldston of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If you just put ‘not’ in front of everything in the job description, you’d get Scott Pruitt”. All Republican senators except Susan Collins of Maine voted to confirm him.

Pruitt had been an unfailing champion of oil and gas interests, benefiting from more than $300,000 in contributions to his elections from PACs or employees of the industry. In all but one of the 14 lawsuits against the EPA, co-parties in the suits had contributed to his campaigns. He had become notorious for transferring almost verbatim letters written by industry lobbyists onto the state letterhead and sending them to regulatory agencies and even President Obama. He has even backed coal, fighting to extend the life of coal-fired power plants in Oklahoma, a state with almost no coal to mine but plenty of wind and sun power potential. Job #1 at the EPA would be to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan which aimed to shutter coal plants.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Trump had nearly all mention of climate change removed from the White House website, except on the page where he pledged to eliminate all of Obama’s climate change policies. Right after his election, some 50 scientists at universities around the country had volunteered to download data stored on the websites of the EPA, NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey out of fear that the incoming Trump administration would destroy them.

At the Department of Agriculture, staffers were instructed to avoid bywords like “greenhouses gases” and “climate change” and come up with substitutes such as “extreme weather”. At EPA, Pruitt has initiated a search to weed out all grants that contain “the double-C word”.

Pruitt thinks each state knows its needs best, should be its own custodian of air and water, and of deciding whether anything need be done about climate change. His is the Republican ideology of states’ rights that would split the country into 50 different sets of laws and regulations. It is a position particularly unsuited to environmental protection because polluted air and water don’t stop at state borders. (He is rather flexible in practicing the doctrine of each state tending to its own, though, as when he joined 20 other state attorneys general to block cleaning up Chesapeake Bay, half the country distant from Oklahoma.)

Pruitt has been replacing members of advisory boards throughout the EPA with those who agree with the administration’s beliefs. In March, out went five scientists from its Board of Scientific Counselors and in their place were seated five who are sympathetic to industry’s objections to regulations. He has unveiled a plan to take a blue team vs. red team approach to the climate change debate, except apparently he’ll skip the blue team and just have a red team issuing the contrarian view to confound the public and override the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and the knowledge acquired over decades. This would be a totally political subversion of the agency’s mission to engage in the impartial application of science.

The red team would be comprised of deniers such as David Dilley, a former NOAA meteorologist celebrated at NoTrickZone for predicting that the 2017 hurricane season would be “the most dangerous and costliest in 12 years for the United States”, and that there was the potential for six named storms to make landfall, the most since 2005, Katrina’s year. He made this spot-on prediction in February based on water temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean that were running warmer. But he insists “it’s all cyclical …nothing to do with global warming”.

But what made the Atlantic and Caribbean warmer? And how is that long slow build cyclical? Mr. Dilley pays no attention to the root cause. Scientists at NOAA contend that over 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gions to his elections from PACs or employees of the industry. In all but one of the 14 lawsuits against the EPA, co-parties in the suits had contributed to his campaigns. He had become notorious for transferring almost verbatim letters written by industry lobbyists onto the state letterhead and sending them to regulatory agencies and even President Obama. He has even backed coal, fighting to extend the life of coal-fired power plants in Oklahoma, a state with almost no coal to mine but plenty of wind and sun power potential. Job #1 at the EPA would be to halt Obama’s Clean Power Plan which aimed to shutter coal plants.

Almost immediately after his inauguration, Trump had nearly all mention of climate change removed from the White House website, except on the page where he pledged to eliminate all of Obama’s climate change policies. Right after his election, some 50 scientists at universities around the country had volunteered to download data stored on the websites of the EPA, NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey out of fear that the incoming Trump administration would destroy them.

At the Department of Agriculture, staffers were instructed to avoid bywords like “greenhouses gases” and “climate change” and come up with substitutes such as “extreme weather”. At EPA, Pruitt has initiated a search to weed out all grants that contain “the double-C word”.

Pruitt thinks each state knows its needs best, should be its own custodian of air and water, and of deciding whether anything need be done about climate change. His is the Republican ideology of states’ rights that would split the country into 50 different sets of laws and regulations. It is a position particularly unsuited to environmental protection because polluted air and water don’t stop at state borders. (He is rather flexible in practicing the doctrine of each state tending to its own, though, as when he joined 20 other state attorneys general to block cleaning up Chesapeake Bay, half the country distant from Oklahoma.)

Pruitt has been replacing members of advisory boards throughout the EPA with those who agree with the administration’s beliefs. In March, out went five scientists from its Board of Scientific Counselors and in their place were seated five who are sympathetic to industry’s objections to regulations. He has unveiled a plan to take a blue team vs. red team approach to the climate change debate, except apparently he’ll skip the blue team and just have a red team issuing the contrarian view to confound the public and override the conclusions of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists and the knowledge acquired over decades. This would be a totally political subversion of the agency’s mission to engage in the impartial application of science.

The red team would be comprised of deniers such as David Dilley, a former NOAA meteorologist celebrated at NoTrickZone for predicting that the 2017 hurricane season would be “the most dangerous and costliest in 12 years for the United States”, and that there was the potential for six named storms to make landfall, the most since 2005, Katrina’s year. He made this spot-on prediction in February based on water temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean that were running warmer. But he insists “it’s all cyclical …nothing to do with global warming”.

But what made the Atlantic and Caribbean warmer? And how is that long slow build cyclical? Mr. Dilley pays no attention to the root cause. Scientists at NOAA contend that over 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases have been absorbed by the oceans. Warmer oceans fuel more powerful hurricanes and monsoons, warmer air holds more moisture leading to heavier rainfall. Increased warming may not directly cause weather events, but it makes them more powerful.

bury the truth

Presidents are required by law to issue every four years the National Climate Assessment, which appraises the risks that climate change poses so as to warn federal agencies and state governments and advise them of precautions to take. It is compiled across 13 federal agencies. Due this fall, it exists in a draft that has been endorsed by the National Academy of Science. It says “evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans”.

The authors need permission to publish from the Trump administration. But given a president who has called climate change a hoax created by the Chinese and an EPA director who believes climate change will go away if all mention of it is suppressed, there is the question of whether Trump will order its conclusions edited or will bury it outright.

The Center for Biological Diversity has said it is poised to sue, much as it had to sue the George W. Bush administration, which had held back from releasing the document.

alarmists are alarmed for a reason

While Scott Pruitt was putting an end to climate change by banishing all mention of it, readers were setting a record in July at New York magazine for the greatest number ever to read an article in the publication’s 50-year history. Titled “The Uninhabitable Earth“, author David Wallace-Wells, a journalist, says it is based on “dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields”.

The goal of all the signatories to the Paris Accord is to prevent the planet from warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) beyond the fairly constant pre-industrial level. Since then, or since the late-19th century, the average global surface temperature has risen half that — about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit). The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on projections of temperatures between now and 2100 made by scientists around the world using computer-based climate models. Their findings are arrayed between best and worst cases. Mr. Wallace-Wells asks what would happen to life on the planet at these different outcomes?

He paints a terrifying picture. Samples:

The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as 8 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7 degrees, the air will no longer be able to dr

Why Always the Red Cross with Its Poor Track Record?

When calamity strikes, it is ritual for every newscast to urge us to give generously to the American Red Cross. What about other charities? For them “there is a list on our website”. Corporations pile into the media with ads urging the same. We just saw this appeal after Houston. We’ll see it again when the still more terrifying Category Five Irma rips into Florida or the eastern seaboard. The Red Cross automatically gets top billing to the near exclusion of all other aid groups.

This goes on in spite of a very dicey record across the years which should have caused those news purveyors do their homework and instead promote others charities — local food banks in Houston, Corpus Chrisiti and Beaumont for example, or operations that will help remediate houses.

unaccountable

After Katrina in 2005, the Red Cross collected $1.2 billion, 70% of all the donations by Americans for hurricane relief. Contributing to this lopsided skew, FEMA released to the media a list containing the Red Cross — as if it needed further promotion — 19 faith-based charities, the sort favored by the Bush administration, and almost no other established relief organizations.

The huge, long-term undertaking of rebuilding houses and businesses for hundreds of thousands of displaced Americans was Job #1, yet the Red Cross grabbed most of the money. It defines itself only as a first-responder. It said it would spend only on the short-term needs of emergency shelter, food, and financial assistance, but wouldn’t be participating in the larger, ongoing costs of rebuilding. But it never told America to stop sending it money.

An op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by the head of Operation USA, a 26-year-old international disaster relief agency based in Los Angeles, told us that the Red Cross’ avarice was even worse:

“FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under pre-existing contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. [Red Cross] fundraising vastly outruns its programs because it does very little or nothing to rescue survivors, provide direct medical care or rebuild houses.”

Even in these limited roles there were complaints of disorganization and invisibility in some Gulf areas, reported The Chicago Sun-Times (and the mention by one church pastor that, whereas his congregation was serving full meals to evacuees, the Red Cross was handing out doughnuts and coffee).

By contrast, Habitat for Humanity was in New Orleans for the long term. It devoted its funds to housing and launched “Operation Home Delivery”. Volunteers all over the U.S. built sections of houses to be shipped to afflicted areas for assembly. The Red Cross did not participate.

Nothing New

Katrina was not the first time the Red Cross went long on money and short on services. After 9/11 it was revealed that only 30% of the $547 million collected for the specific benefit of victims had been paid out to them, forcing the resignation of Red Cross president Bernadine Healy. Similarly, after the 1989 San Francisco Bay Area earthquake, it was found that, of $50 million collected for victims’ relief, $40 million was held back for future calamities. Holding back money is what the Red Cross must do to provide assistance when lower-key trouble strikes that doesn’t inspire donations. But that’s not what people who thought they were helping San Francisco were told. The Red Cross never reports transparently about what it’s done — or not done — with everyone’s money.

six houses

In January of 2010, Haiti was ripped by an earthquake that killed an estimated 160,000 people and left the housing stock in a shambles. The Red Cross, which is designed only to provide the immediate assistance of food,
Port au Prince, Haiti, after 2010 earthquake.
hygiene kits, blankets and temporary shelter, was showered with $488 million, far more than such aid called for. “There’s only so much money that can be forced through the emergency phase,” an Red Cross spokeswoman told an Associated Press reporter. Faced in Haiti with what to do with so much money, the charity undertook to build houses. ProPublica found that after five years the Red Cross had only built six permanent houses. Other charitable organizations had built 9,000.

The charity “funded dozens of projects to improve schools, hospitals and infrastructure”, said a New York Times editorial, by handing off some of its surplus to other organizations (after taking their customary 9% cut for “administrative costs”, one the $517,364 currently paid to CEO Gail McGovern). But the ProPublica report prompted a Senate investigation (the American Red Cross was chartered by Congress in 1905) which revealed that after five years only 25% of the Red Cross’ total take for Haiti had been spent by them or others.

A year ago March, when four days of rain in Louisiana caused record-breaking floods that damaged 5,000 homes, the Red Cross’ performance was met with universal condemnation.

“Most of the parishes who reached out to the American Red Cross were not happy with the assistance they received or did not get some or any assistance”,

was the assessment of a FEMA manager, reviewing complaints from around the area. Red Cross staffers didn’t answer phone calls requesting assistance. They brought too few shelters. They made commitments they didn’t keep. “‘Red Cross’ was a nasty word around here,” said a pastor from Calcasieu Parish, who had organized religious groups that had been feeding evacuees and first responders up to 800 meals a day for most of two weeks. When he asked the Red Cross for a mobile kitchen to help out, he was told they could not until they got a “voucher”. When it came, only three days of food was supplied.

Give generously, but go to those website lists to make different choices. They need money; the Red Cross doesn’t.

DACA Youths Betrayed, and With So Many Lies

In a singularly cruel act that so befits this cold-hearted man, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, giving some 800,000 young people notice that they must leave the country beginning six months from now unless Congress passes a law allowing them to stay.

Speaking at the Justice Department, Sessions made the announcement, Breakthrough Broken: Oct 11: This update space earlier reported that the President had reached a deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, minority leaders of the Senate and House respectively, whereby the DACA youth would stay in return for tightened border security — but not the wall, not yet.
Now Trump has gone back on his word, under the howls of the anti-immigrant bigots of his base and, we’ll assume, Stephen Miller, dreaming up so many conditions as to make any deal impossible. So the 800,000 are now hostage to these White House sociopaths; there is not other word for them.
    

fulfilling his cherished anti-immigrant dream by destroying that of the “dreamers”, so called for the Dream Act, the bill that never made it through Congress that would have given the 800,000 mostly young people the right to stay in the U.S. The president ducked making the announcement, handing it off to Sessions, who took on the job with relish and righteousness. His remarks betrayed a mind so fixated on his rigid interpretation of law that it bore no relevance to the 800,000:

“The nation must set and enforce a limit on how many immigrants we admit each year and that means all cannot be accepted…We cannot admit everyone who would like to come here. It’s just that simple.”

Mr. Sessions, the so-called “dreamers” are not applying to be admitted. They’re here. And they’ve been here for 10 years or more. The program requires its applicants to have maintained continuous residency in the U.S. since 2007. Does Sessions prefer not to know that?

The lies continued. The White House and the attorney general tried to cover up the shameful cruelty of their action by cloaking it in falsehoods. In his DACA announcement, Sessions left the public to think that the dreamers are dangerous and steeped in crime:

“Enforcing the law saves lives, protects communities and taxpayers, and prevents human suffering. Failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism.

Sessions labeled the program that President Obama instituted as “unilateral executive amnesty”. Trump called it an “amnesty-first approach”. Both catered to the ignorance of Trump’s hard-line, white-male base. The lie is that DACA is not amnesty, which Sessions knows from merely unpacking the “Deferred Action” of the DACA acronym. It does not grant amnesty nor any legal status; it only postpones deportation in the hopes that a humane alternative can be worked out.

It’s a compound lie. Amnesty pertains to a defined class of people; DACA recipients have to apply individually for their deferral. The third and biggest point is that amnesty means forgiveness for some past offense. What was the offense of children brought here by their parents when they were, on average according to a University of California San Diego study, 6-and-a- half years old?

There were more lies in the same sentence. Sessions went on that the “executive amnesty”

“…contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences”.

That surge of unaccompanied minors, fleeing from the murderous countries of Central America, began before Obama started DACA. And while those minors could seek asylum, they were not eligible for DACA because of the continuous residency since 2007 requirement.

That average age of arrival tells us that Trump will send the 800,000 back to survive in countries they mostly never knew, where many of them will not even speak the language. Yet he finds justification in protecting “the millions of Americans victimized by this unfair system”, emphasis added to his outlandish choice of a word. How do 800,000 displace millions?

In defense of a policy denounced as immoral, Sessions retorted, “There is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws”, by which he seems to believe he is bestowing great benefit on native Americans by ruining the lives of immigrants. In his thinking the program had “denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs”. There is no proof of that. The inconvenient fact is that hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. go wanting because there aren’t Americans with the skills to fill them. Claiming that the dreamers have taken away those jobs is demagoguery.

not my job

“It is now time for Congress to act!”, is how Trump ended his statement, giving them six months to pass a law allowing the dreamers to stay on. He and Sessions have passed Congress the hot potato. “The president wants to see responsible immigration reform, and he wants that to be part of it”, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders said, “Something needs to be done. It’s Congress’s job to do that”. Pushing the problem away from the White House, she repeated that several times.

That sends the matter into the mosh pit of 535 members of Congress . That across 16 years they couldn’t muster the votes in repeated attempts to pass the Dream Act — with Jeff Sessions leading the opposition in 2010 — is why President Obama stepped in five years ago. Exasperated by the feckless Congress, he signed an executive order that allowed immigrants brought here as children to apply to stay in two-year renewable increments to pursue their education, to work and pay taxes, to serve in the military. Much as Trump impulsively banned transgenders from serving in the military, absent any investigation that would have told him there are several thousand transgenders who will be forced out of the military, Trump now will senselessly deport several thousand DACA deferees who are serving their country. Close to a thousand are enrolled in the Pentagon’s MAVNI program (Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest) because they have special skills.

Having made it someone else’s problem, Trump said “I think it’s going to work out very well and long term it’s going to be the right solution”. Ms Sanders said Mr. Trump would sign legislation to “fix” the DACA program, provided it included broader immigration overhaul to strengthen the border. What does that say? That Trump will hostage 800,000 lives to get the money for his wall?

Sessions is probably confident Congress will fail and he will have spared America of the infestation of the 800,000. Trump will tell us it is Congress that is heartless, not him for having created the problem.

our over-interpreted constitution

What Obama did was an “unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch”, said Sessions. Ms Sanders echoed this on behalf of the president, saying it was both “unconstitutional” and “in clear violation of federal law”. Where in the Constitution is the violation found?

Presidents have long been given discretionary powers in denying entry to the U.S. But Sessions is making up his own constitution about Obama, as the subject of immigration is entirely absent from the real Constitution. Section 8 of Article I gives Congress the right “To establish an [sic] uniform Rule of Naturalization”. That’s all they wrote. The Constitution wades no further into these waters.

But Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen, who had “developed a reputation as an outspoken judicial critic of the Obama administration’s immigration policies”, said The Los Angeles Times, halted further expansion of DACA and its parental counterpart, DAPA. On appeal, the 5th circuit appeals court in New Orleans went along, blocking expansion — but not on constitutional grounds. In June 2016, the Supreme Court split 4-to-4, deadlocked because of the Senate’s year-long Republican refusal to consider Merrick Garland as the ninth justice. That left Obama’s 2012 executive order standing.

If the high court returns to the case, now that ultra-right Neil Gorsuch (and fifth Catholic) is on the bench, we might see a compassionate verdict…no, forget that. Political ideology tops the teachings of religion. But they will need a hairball of logic to base their ruling on the Constitution.

of two minds

Trump is something of a wild card. He seems genuinely troubled by having to deport almost a million young. Because they had to apply for deferral, these people are known to the government. They are students, they are in college, they have jobs, they have started businesses. The earliest arrivals are as old as 36, which means many are married, and with children. So Trump and Sessions will be splitting families with their ill-considered action, deporting parents who will take with them their American citizen children who were born here.

In February, the president said,

“DACA Is a very very difficult subject for me….because you have these incredible kids… you have some absolutely incredible kids…we have to deal with DACA with heart. It’s a very difficult thing for me, because I love these kids”.

And he now says much the same:

“I have a great heart for the folks we’re talking about, a great love for them. And people think in terms of children, but they’re really young adults. I have a love for these people and hopefully now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly”.

And yet, he said this after sentencing 800,000 people to likely deportation, so is he just taking steps to exonerate himself from whatever the outcome.

Possibly coming to the realization of what a humanitarian and poltical disaster deportation will be — Politico reports that 76% of Americans want to allow the dreamers to stay versus 15% who do not — he seemed to immediately reverse field from making it Congress’ problem, with a tweet that baffled everyone:

Perhaps in reconsidering he might learn that the DACA applicants were told that they could trust government, that they would be safe coming out of the shadows to reveal their identity and whereabouts in order to register. How dishonorable that the government is using that same information to find and betray them.

Of the estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, people who Trump thinks are “bringing crime” and “they’re rapists” and only “some, I assume, are good people”, Trump chose to give the boot to the best of them, given that the 800,000 applied to stay here to strive, and are the most American of them all, given the percentage of their lives spent here. Ending DACA is brutally inhumane. It is also clearly right up there with the stupidest and most muddled of this administration’s actions.

With Trump Agenda Stalled, the Justice Department Is Where the Action Is

Each day we worriedly turn to the news to follow the president’s latest Twitter outburst, but the one we should be watching is Jeff Sessions over at the Justice Department doing the most to execute the administration’s agenda but going largely unnoticed. Badgered by President Trump in the hopes that he would quit to be replaced by someone who will subserviently fire Special

Counsel Robert Mueller, the attorney general has nevertheless stayed on his course of reversing what he would call the lenient Obama administration’s policies with his own harsh vision of law and order.

Criminal justice practices in the U.S. have led to the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world, exacting a toll on families and ruining lives with years-long sentences when so many are imprisoned for only minor drug offences. A strong movement had been building for reform that had won agreement from both conservatives and liberals in Congress. Legislators were on the verge of cutting mandatory minimum sentences and creating programs to help offenders adjust to life after prison when along came Sessions to flip the movement on its back. He is renowned for a career-long fight against reducing long mandatory sentences.

But there is pronounced disagreement with Sessions’ reversion to longer sentencing. Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration is an organization of close to 200 police officials and prosecutors. It includes such heavyweights as Charlie Beck, Los Angeles’s police chief and the city’s former chief, William Bratton, who had before that been New York City’s police commissioner. The group finds the Sessions policy out of step with the new emphasis on alternatives to prosecution and incarceration. It has issued a report — written by former police chiefs of Nashville, New Orleans and Dallas — that promotes mental health and drug addiction treatment and says, “We need not use arrest, conviction and prison as the default response for every broken law”. Practices such as jailing people before trial on minor offenses and the insurmountable cost of cash bail that keeps them there have been under widespread review in law enforcement circles.

don’t be too nice

Trump signaled strongly that his would be a law and order administration, ending the “American carnage” of his dark inauguration address and what Sessions spoke of at his swearing-in as a “dangerous, permanent trend”. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end”, said Trump, who would “liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities”.

Trump referred presumably to spikes in homicides in more than two dozen major U.S. cities in the previous year, but disregarded that crime in the U.S. is still at historic lows. He and Sessions needed a dramatic backdrop, however distorted, to justify the reversals they plan. Police across the nation certainly appreciate the two having their back — 84% were for Trump in a survey by Police Magazine — after what for them was the Obama’s administration’s greater attention to civil rights abuses and police shootings of unarmed civilians. In Trump they have the opposite: such incidents have been met with silence and, speaking at a police event on Long Island (NY),
he urged them not to be “too nice” with suspects “like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head… and they’ve just killed somebody…I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”.

Police agencies across the country condemned Trump’s comments. The International Association of Chiefs of Police weighed in with

“Law enforcement officers are trained to treat all individuals, whether they are a complainant, suspect, or defendant, with dignity and respect. This is the bedrock principle behind the concepts of procedural justice and police legitimacy.”

For his part, Sessions is likely to cancel the consent decrees that Obama’s Justice Department pressed upon certain police jurisdictions — Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland and others — to force them to reform. Sessions is evidently untroubled by the abusive practices that led to the decrees such as excessive use of force and racial discrimination. Instead, he calls the decrees “one of the most dangerous…exercises of raw power”. He vows that “This Department of Justice will not sign consent decrees that will cost more lives by handcuffing the police rather than handcuffing the criminals”.

How fitting therefore for Sessions to announce that President Trump just signed an executive order allowing local police forces to resume deep-discount buying of military equipment — the personnel carriers, armored Humvees, 50-caliber machine guns, etc. — that had been distributed to them and then withheld by Obama after outcries that America began to look like a police state. But now, per Sessions, this is “the life-saving gear that you need to do your job”.

Clearly, under Trump, everything Obama must be eradicated. Sessions has reversed Obama’s executive order to phase out private prisons. There was more than one reason for the cutback, but one was that changes in criminal justice were reducing the prison population. Sessions evidently intends to increase it again. He says he is re-opening those prisons “to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.”

The Obama administration of course said the federal civil rights law that prohibits employment discrimination applies to the LGBT among us. Yet Sessions has even gone to the extent of court filings to say that the law does not apply to them. It therefore probably goes without saying that he supports Trump’s transgender military ban.

Sessions did fervidly support getting rid of the senseless and hugely unfair disparities between the penalties for use of crack cocaine and powdered. The long mandatory sentences for the former — the form sold on city streets — so penalized African-Americans as to make reasonable a charge of racism on the part of legislators. Before the difference was reduced (it was not eliminated) all it took was 5 grams of crack to earn a five-year prison sentence, whereas it took 500 grams of powdered cocaine to be sent in for that long.

But for Jeff Sessions, marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin. For him it’s not recreational. “Recreational is a bike ride, a swim, going to the beach. Using a drug to put your brain in an altered state is not recreation. That is self-destructive behavior and escapism”, he says. He once supported legislation to make a second marijuana trafficking conviction a capital crime. He has assembled a task force to try to find links between violent crime and marijuana. He wants to do away with medical marijuana, and lobbies the Senate to removed from the federal budget the provision that prohibits the Justice Department from spending to challenge states that permit it. That has senators wielding the Republican credo of states’ rights to protect their new multi-billion dollar industry.

democrats go home!

In a 5-4 decision in 2013, the Supreme Court crippled the 1965 Voting Rights Act which had given the Justice Department the right to review for approval any change in voting laws in states, most in the South, that historically had used them to discriminate. Republican-controlled states immediately took advantage of the court’s decision, with extreme gerrymandering and restrictive laws meant to make voting difficult for groups likely to be Democratic — blacks, latins and students.

The Obama Justice Department successfully moved against Texas and North Carolina, the latter for “the most restrictive voting laws…since the era of Jim Crow”, said the federal court, and “these new provisions target African-Americans with almost surgical precision”.

But state oversight won’t happen now that Sessions runs Justice. He is in league with the president, who believes he would have won the popular vote had it not been for 3 million illegals voting for Hillary Clinton and has formed a commission to comb through the voting roles of the states to disenfranchise undesirables. (Read “Are We Headed Toward a Permanent Republican Majority?” for a full account).

Sessions has already reversed his department’s position in law suits that limit voting. Supported by the Obama administration, the ACLU sued Ohio’s secretary of state for removing thousands of voters from its rolls in 2016. A federal court called the action unconstitutional. It now goes to the Supreme Court, but Sessions has flipped his agency’s support to favor the state.

He has done the same in Texas, asking a federal court to dismiss the Justice Department’s earlier claim that Texas had enacted overly strict voter identification requirements aimed to discriminate against minority voters.

We can count on Session’s department to at the very least stay on the sidelines as Republican states enact still more laws — 46 new bills in 21 states according to the Brennan Center for Justice — to disenfranchise Americans in our so-called democracy.

keeping America white

When in the Senate, Sessions was its most fervent opponent of legislation to fix the immigration problem. He fell in with with Steve Bannon, read Breitbart daily for what he said was its “cutting edge information. Together with Stephen Miller, now in the White House but at the time one of Sessions’ aides, the trio spent “an enormous amount of time” to devise strategy” to defeat a bipartisan bill in 2015 that held out hope for providing some of the undocumented a path to citizenship. Close to the vote, thousands of children began pouring across the border, fleeing from the carnage in Central America. Breitbart made that its big story and was instrumental in defeating the bill . Now attorney general, Sessions is in strong support of the travel ban blocking entry of people from six Muslim countries.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) is under the United States Department of Homeland Security but as the president’s chief law enforcer, Sessions has inserted himself into the conflict against sanctuary cities. The Trump government threatens to withhold federal funds from cities that refuse to check the immigration status of people and to detain those who may be in the country illegally for transfer to ICE. Cities balk because they will lose the cooperation of immigrant communities, who fear that deportation could result from their coming forward with information and evidence to help police fight crime cases.

Despite statistics that say the immigrant population commits less crime per capita than the native population, Sessions thinks shutting down sanctuaries accounts for a decline in violent crime. He went to Miami to deliver a congratulatory speech for that city’s renouncing its sanctuary policy. In it he blamed Chicago’s sanctuary policies for an increase in violent crimes, a nonsensical claim for a city known for the horrific death toll at the hands of gangs in black districts. That falsehood drew four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact-checkers.

Stemming illegal immigration has long been a subject of concern, but in 2013 Sessions came up with a proposal to limit legal immigration. Donald Trump has accommodated, announcing his intention to cut immigration in half, as well as change to skill-based criteria.

press pressure

Acceding to the president wanting ways to quiet media reporting of the Russia probe, Sessions has tripled leak investigations. But leaks generally arise from civil servants enraged by reversals of what had become long established policy. Thus was a document leaked from Sessions%the president, who believes he would have won the popular vote had it not been for 3 million illegals voting for Hillary Clinton and has formed a commission to comb through the voting roles of the states to disenfranchise undesirables. (Read “Are We Headed Toward a Permanent Republican Majority?” for a full account).

Sessions has already reversed his department’s position in law suits that limit voting. Supported by the Obama administration, the ACLU sued Ohio’s secretary of state for removing thousands of voters from its rolls in 2016. A federal court called the action unconstitutional. It now goes to the Supreme Court, but Sessions has flipped his agency’s support to favor the state.

He has done the same in Texas, asking a federal court to dismiss the Justice Department’s earlier claim that Texas had enacted overly strict voter identification requirements aimed to discriminate against minority voters.

We can count on Session’s department to at the very least stay on the sidelines as Republican states enact still more laws — 46 new bills in 21 states according to the Brennan Center for Justice — to disenfranchise Americans in our so-called democracy.

keeping America white

When in the Senate, Sessions was its most fervent opponent of legislation to fix the immigration problem. He fell in with with Steve Bannon, read Breitbart daily for what he said was its “cutting edge information. Together with Stephen Miller, now in the White House but at the time one of Sessions’ aides, the trio spent “an enormous amount of time” to devise strategy” to defeat a bipartisan bill in 2015 that held out hope for providing some of the undocumented a path to citizenship. Close to the vote, thousands of children began pouring across the border, fleeing from the carnage in Central America. Breitbart made that its big story and was instrumental in defeating the bill . Now attorney general, Sessions is in strong support of the travel ban blocking entry of people from six Muslim countries.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) is under the United States Department of Homeland Security but as the president’s chief law enforcer, Sessions has inserted himself into the conflict against sanctuary cities. The Trump government threatens to withhold federal funds from cities that refuse to check the immigration status of people and to detain those who may be in the country illegally for transfer to ICE. Cities balk because they will lose the cooperation of immigrant communities, who fear that deportation could result from their coming forward with information and evidence to help police fight crime cases.

Despite statistics that say the immigrant population commits less crime per capita than the native population, Sessions thinks shutting down sanctuaries accounts for a decline in violent crime. He went to Miami to deliver a congratulatory speech for that city’s renouncing its sanctuary policy. In it he blamed Chicago’s sanctuary policies for an increase in violent crimes, a nonsensical claim for a city known for the horrific death toll at the hands of gangs in black districts. That falsehood drew four Pinocchios from the Washington Post fact-chec

Police Can Take Your Stuff Again

For Jeff Sessions, who seems to have a heightened suspicion that ordinary citizens are breaking the law, their rights would seem to be an impediment to his law and order crusade, judging from his reinstatement of the program of
“civil asset forfeiture”, a move that has drawn stunned criticism across the political spectrum. Hadn’t Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, finally stepped in and at least gotten the government out of that practice in 2015?

Without any due process or even charges, civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to confiscate property and money from anyone suspected of a crime, with the burden on the victim to prove innocence to recover the assets. The program was established as a powerful weapon against organized crime, relieving suspected crooks of their cars, boats, even houses — bought until proven otherwise with the proceeds from drug trafficking. But post 9/11, when the terrorism threat was added to policing, the Justice Department wanted to secure the assistance of local law enforcement, so it offered them its “equitable sharing” plan — they could keep 80% of taken property to spend as they chose. That immediately gave police out on the roads of America a perverse incentive to invent reasons to nab people’s money and whatever other assets were in their cars. A busted tail light would do as an offense.

To get their property back — often the car itself — could take months. The cost of lawyers often exceeded the theft, so many were forced to give up the stolen possessions. Police had found a new way to fund their departments. So-called forfeiture became a budget item, a profit center, especially across the South. By “policing for profit”, cops and robbers became as one.

Note what happened in reaction to New Mexico passing a model law that requires conviction before the state can take title to assets and requiring that they be deposited with the state, not the local police department that impounded the goods. When other states began to consider adopting the New Mexico model, prosecutor and police associations launched a lobbying campaign warning that laws preventing taking property from people would create a hole in law enforcement budgets. Most measures failed to pass. Only 10 states require a conviction before property is taken.

Sessions can’t pretend not to know all about this abuse. His Alabama, where he was first a prosecutor and then the state’s attorney general, is not very populous, yet ranked 31st highest in the value of assets taken. He thinks “taking and seizing and forfeiting, through a government judicial process, illegal gains from criminal enterprises is not wrong” and was “very unhappy” with criticism of a program that mostly took money from people who have “done nothing in their lives but sell dope”. This is an attorney general of the United States who is telling us he assumes before the fact that anyone the police pull over to relieve of their possessions cannot be other than “from criminal enterprises” who does nothing but sell drugs.

A second component of forfeiture that Sessions has reinstated is the seizure of bank accounts, ostensibly to root out money laundering, but authorities seem to prefer the money itself in many notorious cases of theft from innocent people. Banks must report deposits of $10,000 or over, but it is also against the law to “structure” deposits just below $10,000 to evade this reporting. There are swarms of government agents combing through bank records looking for suspicious transaction patterns. So someone with a heavily cash business that reliably yields nearly $10,000 a week, say, or a business with insurance that covers no more than a $10,000 cash theft, goes to the bank every time cash accumulation nears that level. In swoop the feds. They just take all the money, and people have to hire lawyers to try to get it back.

The media has reported a welter of shameful governmental abuse. A few of the cash seizures as examples:

 A 67-year-old grandmother in Arnolds Park, Iowa has for almost 40 years operated a cash-only business dishing out Mexican food specialties and depositing her earnings at a bank a block away. IRS agents seized $33,000 in her account. Her crime? Deposits consistently amounting to under $10,000.

 Police on Long Island (NY) swept up a year’s worth of deposits ranging from $5,550 to $9,910 with the insupportable claim that it looked like structuring. The total of $447,000 was taken from a family candy and nut business in its 27th year.

 Cops at a Cincinnati airport took $11,000 from a student — his life savings — because they claimed his suitcase smelled of marijuana. It took him two years to get the money back.

That’s what Sessions has brought back. You didn’t think anything like this happens in the United States probably, but we covered it fully three years ago in “http://letsfixthiscountry.org/2014/11/28/law-enforcements-license-to-steal/Law Enforcement Has a License to Steal from You”.

Sep 4 2017 | Posted in Law | Read More »