Washington Post Staff Reports Pay Gap After Sonmez Suspension
hmmm
Category: Money, Class, and Poverty,
UNH plans layoffs, paid $600K to find savings
UNH plans layoffs, paid $600K to find savings – News – fosters.com – Dover, NH
Here’s an idea, dipshits. No golden more parachutes and shave $300k off the President’s salary. Still leaves the Preident a six figure salary and you save $600k+ right there with no layoffs. Assholes.
Trump’s EPA re-approves key Roundup chemical
EPA re-approves key Roundup chemical | TheHill
For F’s sake. He’s like a comic book villian.
Porn mogul Larry Flynt offers $10M for any video that could help impeach Donald Trump
Well, he did get rid of Livingston.
Plus the whole, “No, you resign!!” thing…
Those Foreign Business Ties? The Trump Sons Have More Than Hunter Biden
The Trump family business received approval from a local government in Scotland for a major expansion of its golf resort near Aberdeen, marking the largest real estate development financed by the Trump Organization since the 2016 election.
…Both sons have operated and promoted the Trump family business overseas during their father’s presidency, even as he retains ownership. And while the Trump and Biden father-son relationships differ in many ways, the business dealings have set up a simple parallel.
“They are criticizing the vice president’s son for doing exactly what they are doing themselves,” said Martin Ford, a member of the Aberdeenshire Council in Scotland, which voted last month to approve a proposal by the Trumps to build a 500-unit housing development. “They are conducting international business here in Scotland.”
…International dealings have become far more complicated since Mr. Trump took office and his sons took leadership of the business, especially when foreign governments have been involved to the company’s benefit.
…When the Trump Organization tangled with the majority owner of a property in Panama, for example, its local lawyers at one point called on the Panamanian president for an assist.
In Indonesia, the government is helping to build a major new highway that will make a new Trump development more accessible.
…Revenues coming to the Trump family in the United States have drawn scrutiny too, including at the Trump International Hotel in Washington — a property, opened in the final stages of the 2016 campaign, that has flourished while Donald Trump Jr. and Eric have run the company.
The hotel has been a magnet for Republican lobbyists and political fund-raisers, and companies and foreign officials with business before the Trump administration have thrown parties there, including the Kuwait embassy and the government of Azerbaijan.
…In 2017, Mr. Kushner met privately at the White House with top executives from Citibank and the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Those meetings came as the firms were contemplating sizable loans to his family’s business, Kushner Companies, which they did eventually make.
And since Mr. Kushner entered the White House, his family has courted state-connected investors in China and the Middle East — both regions that were in Mr. Kushner’s government portfolio — to bail out the firm’s headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Those Foreign Business Ties? The Trump Sons Have Plenty Too – The New York Times
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Some of the Ways the Trump Kids Have Profited Off Their Dad’s Presidency
During their father’s tenure as president, Don Jr. and Eric have repeatedly managed to cash in on their newfound positions of political privilege in their business dealings. So, too, have their sister Ivanka and brother-in-law Jared Kushner, both of whom hold senior positions in the administration and whose companies and investment portfolios netted them anywhere between $29 million and $135 million last year, per their financial disclosure forms.
…“No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office,” [trump] promised.
Since then, Forbes says, the brothers have sold off more than $100 million worth of Trump Organization real estate. That figure includes a $33 million sale of the company’s stake in a federally subsidized housing complex—a transaction Secretary of House & Urban Development Ben Carson had to approve—and a $3.2 million sale of land in the Dominican Republic last year, which Forbes called “the clearest violation of their father’s pledge to do no new foreign deals while in office.” Taxpayers cover the security costs of each business trip the pair makes—in the first two months of 2017 alone that included $97,830 for a trip to Uruguay, $53,155.25 for a trip to Vancouver, and $16,738.36 for a trip to Dubai, according to NBC News.
In February 2017, the Trump Organization unloaded a $15.8 million Trump Park Avenue penthouse—a home formerly occupied by Jared and Ivanka—to Angela Chen, who runs a consulting firm with ties to Chinese government officials and (allegedly) Chinese military intelligence, says Mother Jones. A Forbes analysis found that this price was 13 percent more than that paid for a comparable unit a year earlier, and that it sold at a time when the building’s other units, on average, were selling for 25 percent less.
…Both Jared and Ivanka, who took a “formal leave of absence” from her eponymous fashion label to serve in her father’s White House, have taken full advantage of the benefits of their new jobs. In April, on the same day she and Kushner sat next to Chinese president Xi Jinping at a White House state dinner, the Chinese government gave its conditional approval for three trademarks granting Ivanka what the AP called “monopoly rights” to sell Ivanka-branded jewelry, bags, and spa services. China approved two more rounds of trademarks in May and June, according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan government watchdog.
…Last fall, in the midst of her father’s trade war with China and his efforts to strike a new trade agreement between the two global superpowers, she won initial approval for 16 trademarks, and added five more to her portfolio earlier this year.
…For years, 666 Fifth Avenue was the most vexing line-item on the Kushner real estate ledger—a Midtown skyscraper purchased for $1.8 billion, most of which the family borrowed, right before the 2008 recession. A mammoth mortgage of about $1.4 billion was due in February of this year. …Multiple foreign governments seized on this uncertainty, privately discussing ways to take advantage of his business entanglements and financial difficulties when dealing with the United States, the Washington Post reported.
…In April 2017, a real estate firm tied to the Kushner family made a direct appeal to the government of Qatar to invest in the troubled building.
…Brookfield Asset Management, which acquired a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue for about $1 billion in April 2018. This miraculous timing allowed the Kushners to pay off its existing mortgage and buy out its partner in the venture, Vornado Realty Trust. The buyer was a semi-familiar face in this drama: One of Brookfield Asset Management’s largest investors is the government of Qatar.
…Cadre, a real estate investment company owned in part by Kushner, has taken in some $90 million in offshore funding via an ominously-described “opaque offshore vehicle” in the Cayman Islands since he joined the White House. Some of the money, the Guardian says, came from other tax shelters; some of it came from unidentified sources in—you guessed it—Saudi Arabia.
…The president’s daughter was instrumental in the effort to include in the 2017 tax reform bill an “Opportunity Zones” program, which extends lucrative tax breaks to rich people who invest capital in designated less-developed areas. According to the AP, Cadre is raising funds from investors to build Opportunity Zone projects, and the Kushner family already owns at least 13 properties in opportunity zones that could qualify for special tax treatment.
…Trump International Hotel, located in D.C.’s Old Post Office building leased in 2013 to one of Donald Trump’s holding companies for development as a luxury hotel….The property has become notorious for attracting members of Congress, lobbyists, Cabinet officials, interest groups, foreign heads of state, and anyone else looking to curry [Trump]’s favor.
…Each of the three eldest Trump kids, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka, owns a 7.425-percent interest in the holding company that leases the building. Because Ivanka Trump fills out an annual financial disclosure as a White House employee, we know a bit more about how the that stake is paying off these days: Her most recent filing listed almost $4 million in annual revenue from the hotel.
…In February 2018, Don Jr. traveled to India in an effort to sell more than $1 billion worth of luxury residential units built there by the Trump Organization and its partners.
How the Trump Kids Have Profited Off Their Dad’s Presidency | GQ
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Throwback: This is what it looks like when a losing candidate does not support other candidates
The fact that many of the names on the list aren’t traditional Democrats ― or self-identified Democrats at all ― makes it all the more valuable.
And yet, since he dropped out of the primary, Sanders has steadfastly refused to hand over his list to the Democratic Party, much to the chagrin of those who say it could be crucial to help build opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency.
Bernie Sanders’ Team Explains Why He Won’t Hand Over His Donor List | HuffPost
Also, the tone his team uses is one reason people don’t like them.
Avigilon’s appearance search tool isn’t technically facial recognition, but it still invades students’ privacy
Appearance Search can find people based on their age, gender, clothing, and facial characteristics, and it scans through videos like facial recognition tech — though the company that makes it, Avigilon, says it doesn’t technically count as a full-fledged facial recognition tool.
Even so, privacy experts told Recode that, for students, the distinction doesn’t necessarily matter. Appearance Search allows school administrators to review where a person has traveled throughout campus — anywhere there’s a camera — using data the system collects about that person’s clothing, shape, size, and potentially their facial characteristics, among other factors. It also allows security officials to search through camera feeds using certain physical descriptions, like a person’s age, gender, and hair color.
…“People don’t behave the same when they’re being watched,” warns Brenda Leong, the director of AI and ethics at the Future of Privacy Forum. “Do we really want both young students and high schoolers, and anybody else, feeling like they’re operating in that environment all the time?”
Adding to privacy concerns surrounding a tool like Appearance Search is the fact that it’s not exclusively being used to address violence in schools. School administrators are already using the system to try to intercept bullying, to deter code of conduct violations, and to assist in investigations of school employees.
…Avigilon would not share how many schools are using Appearance Search. While Recode identified at least nine public school districts that have acquired or have access to the software, it’s likely many more schools are using the tool.
For instance, the New York Civil Liberties Union says that more than a dozen school districts in New York State have purchased Avigilon equipment. While the NYCLU doesn’t know for certain how many have access to or have used the Appearance Search tool, technology strategist Daniel Schwarz said in an email that “given its inclusion into the main [Avigilon Control Center] software it is likely that a high percentage of schools will have the feature at their fingertips.”
At the schools that have gotten the tool, we already have a sense of how it can be used.
…Appearance Search has been used to locate children lost in schools, to investigate complaints against staff, and to deter violations of codes of conduct. He says the software has also made the school security staff aware of disciplinary infractions they otherwise would not have known about.
…As Kai Koerber, a recent graduate of MSD, told Recode about the technology: “I don’t think [students] should have to — by going to school — volunteer to accept this kind of new social contract where you’re going to be recorded and traced through your every move. I do think people have the right to be able to walk to the next class without being identified.”
…“Yes, it may work in terms of, ‘we can identify people who don’t belong on the campus.’ At the same time, we are invading the privacy of each and every student,” he said.
Koerber’s concerns are echoed by student privacy advocates, who say the tool could be used to track and surveil students. “It is surveillance technology, and it is tracking technology, and any school implementing any variation of those is potentially creating more harms and risks than they’re solving,” said Leong.
Avigilon’s appearance search tool isn’t facial recognition, but it still has privacy risks. – Vox
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How and why private equity keeps wrecking retail chains like Fairway.
Last year, a group of progressive nonprofits reported that of the 14 largest retail bankruptcies since 2012, 10 had involved companies owned by private equity. The thud of corporate failures has become so constant that it’s essentially become a meme in the financial press.
…Private equity investors have a reputation for being corporate looters that buy and pillage businesses for profit before moving on to raid the next unsuspecting office park. Sometimes, it’s undeserved. But often, it’s entirely earned.
…They’re often criticized for laying off workers and even cutting pay in the name of improving efficiency. But the much bigger problem is that they sometimes cripple previously functioning businesses by loading them up with unsustainable amounts of debt. They do this in a few ways.
First, the industry revolves around deals known as leveraged buyouts, where investors put up a small amount of their own money to purchase a company and borrow the rest. The business being acquired then becomes responsible for paying the debt, which increases its risk of going bust. Private equity shops are also notorious for extracting cash using “dividend recapitalizations,” a charming tactic in which they force companies to borrow even more money and use it to pay investors. Beyond that, they often charge the businesses they own millions in management fees.
Thanks to all of these tactics, private equity can often make money off a company even if its business fails.
… Sometimes, firms just dial up investment in the businesses they acquire and try to expand them. Recent research has shown, for instance, that consumer product companies that get bought out tend to increase their sales by jumping into new product lines and markets.
…Economists debate how often private equity deals actually end with businesses filing for bankruptcy, but one recent paper looking at public companies taken private pegged it at 20 percent, compared with just 2 percent for similar businesses that weren’t targeted for buyouts. Sometimes, even well-intentioned deals devolve into the high-finance version of shoplifting. When Sterling Investment Partners bought out Fairway in 2007, it intended to turn the local, family-owned chain into a national brand. But it badly botched the effort, in part because it picked terrible locations for expansion and loaded it with debt in the process. Eventually, it resorted to taking the unsteady company public and extracting a giant dividend payment in the process. A few years later, Fairway would enter bankruptcy.
…Take Toys R Us, which ended up shouldering billions of dollars in new debt after it was poached by a group including KKR. The company was stuck paying hundreds of millions every year toward interest, which insiders say made it impossible to invest properly in the business and compete as Jeff Bezos’ kraken devoured the toy business.
… for the most part, mixing private equity and troubled industries like retail seems to be a recipe for trouble. (For another sad example of what happens when private equity shops invade a sector with a fundamentally dying business model, see metro journalism.)
…Private equity has boomed over the past couple of decades in large part because borrowing has been incredibly inexpensive. More deals are inevitably going to lead to more disasters. But free-flowing credit may also be encouraging the industry’s worst habits.
Why private equity keeps wrecking retail chains like Fairway.
hmm
New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits
At every turn, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell fought tooth and nail against the wave of lawsuits, arguing that the plaintiffs should look to the federal government, not the private sector, for financial assistance related to climate change. Now, a new investigation from InsideClimate News has revealed that the federal government has been working with some of those oil companies to oppose the wave of lawsuits.
Some 178 pages of emails between U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and industry lawyers — obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council — show the government has been planning to come to the aid of these lawsuit-afflicted companies since early 2018. Not only did the DOJ work on an amicus — “friend of the court” — brief in support of major oil companies shortly after the San Francisco and Oakland lawsuits were filed, but the department was also working with Republican attorneys generals from 15 states to come up with a plan to help those companies. Department of Justice attorneys had several phone calls with lawyers defending BP, Chevron, Exxon, and other oil companies, and even met some of them in person.
Curiously, the Department of Justice did not reach out to the plaintiffs in the cases, like the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, to collaborate. The department’s environmental division, which bills itself as “the nation’s environmental lawyer,” opted to covertly work with industry groups rather than the communities it’s supposed to represent.
…“It’s very unusual for the federal government to be so aligned with industry on a damages case,” he said, particularly when the government isn’t implicated in the case. If the lawsuits were successful, oil companies, not the federal government, would be compelled to pay the damages.
New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits | Grist
CBO: U.S. budget deficit to eclipse $1 trillion in 2020 as fiscal imbalance continues to widen
The deficit in 2016, President Barack Obama’s last full year in office, was $585 billion. CBO now projects that the deficit will be at least $1 trillion each year in perpetuity unless policymakers make changes.
…The U.S. government’s budget deficit is projected to reach $1.02 trillion in 2020, according to a report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as the federal government continues to spend much more than it collects in tax revenue.
A combination of the 2017 tax cuts and a surge in new spending has pushed the deficit wider. This year would mark the first time since 2012 that the deficit breached $1 trillion, a threshold that has alarmed some budget experts because deficits typically contract — not expand — during periods of sustained economic growth.
…Trump, asked about the rising deficit following the tax cuts, told CNBC last year: “We’ve taken in more revenue substantially than we did when the taxes were high. Nobody can even believe it,” [because it’s not true.]
…The CBO report shows that tax collections are weaker than they would be without the 2017 Republican tax law, which permanently locked in lower rates for many corporations while creating temporary reductions for households. Tax revenue remained roughly flat the first year the law was in effect, despite economic growth of nearly 3 percent. It rose slightly in 2019 but not enough to compensate for flatlining the year before.
…In January 2017, before the tax law, the CBO projected corporate tax revenue would represent 1.8 percent of gross domestic product. Now, they are expected to represent only 1.1 percent of GDP.
…Combined with an increase in spending, the deficit has ballooned, forcing the Treasury Department to borrow more money to cover the balance.
…With rising annual deficits, the total debt held by the government is also projected to grow dramatically, from about $18 trillion in 2020 to $31 trillion in 2030, according to the CBO’s projections. The U.S. government must pay interest on this debt to keep borrowing money.
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Trump says to supporters, ‘Who the hell cares about the budget?’
Trump campaigned in 2016 on eliminating the federal debt in eight years and reining in the deficit, a key concern of Republicans throughout President Obama’s two terms in office. They often accused Democrats of being excessive spenders, which racked up the deficit.
…The freewheeling comments offer remarkable insights into the president’s approach on federal spending and the debt, which barreled past $23 trillion late last year.
…The 2017 tax cuts blew up the federal deficit, which neared $1 trillion in fiscal year 2019 – a 26% jump from the year before as it steadily increased every year in office.
…The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will cost $1.9 trillion over the next decade.
…The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, estimated earlier this month that Trump’s spending priorities will pile an additional $4.7 trillion onto the debt through 2029.
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Blame $1 Trillion Federal Deficit on Trump Tax Cuts and Spending
In a growing economy, both tax revenue and spending tend to rise over time in real terms. In good times, tax revenue usually goes up faster than spending; during recessions, revenue falls and spending jumps.
…In the two years since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the annual U.S. federal deficit has grown from $681 billion to a bit over $1 trillion.
…There’s not much evidence yet that the incentive effects of the tax cuts will contribute significantly to future growth.
…Put the two calendar years since the tax cut together and compare them with the “normal” of the previous 35 years, and it’s clear that recent revenue growth and spending growth have both been out of the ordinary.
…The rise in the deficit since 2017 has so far been accompanied by solid if unspectacular economic growth
…Real outlays grew 1.7 percentage points a year faster than the historical average since the end of 2017; real receipts grew 1.8 percentage points slower. Both thus seem about equally to blame for the rise in the deficit.
…Net interest on the debt accounted for the biggest part of the spending rise from fiscal year 2017 to FY 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office. …The rise in net interest payments has thus far been kept somewhat in check by extremely low interest rates, which may or may not continue in the future.
Blame $1 Trillion Federal Deficit on Trump Tax Cuts and Spending – Bloomberg
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Worried Reporters Make a Plea: Please Buy Our Paper
Journalists are wary of Alden because of its cut-to-the-bone management strategy. In 2018, a group of writers and editors at the Alden-owned Denver Post published a special package devoted to attacking the company, which had enacted deep staff cuts at the paper.
…Their attempts to woo new investors are unusual in an industry that has traditionally tried to keep business and journalism separate.
…After having bought up roughly 32 percent of Tribune Publishing in recent years, Alden is the company’s largest shareholder. It can buy more Tribune Publishing stock as soon as July. This month, the company asked journalists at newspapers across the country to volunteer for buyouts.
…In 2018, Tribune Publishing cut the newsroom staff of The Daily News in New York in half. The layoffs at the formerly brawny tabloid, which once had the highest circulation of any daily newspaper in the country, came a year after Tribune Publishing bought it.
…“The days of journalism being held publicly by Wall Street should be over,” said Rebekah L. Sanders, the consumer protection reporter at The Republic who helped lead the union drive. “We have a public service mission, which used to be propped up by crazy ad margins. That’s all gone, so we need to make a transition in our business model.”
Worried Reporters Make a Plea: Please Buy Our Paper – The New York Times
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How Virginia’s $3.7 billion rail plan fits Amtrak’s long-term vision
With new routes and faster and more efficient service, the number of Amtrak trains operating in Virginia is expected to double by 2030.
…The state exemplifies Amtrak’s growth strategy of focusing on adding short-haul trips that compete with car rides and flights in dense urban corridors, they say.
…In recent years, Amtrak has been beefing up short-distance service across the country, advancing its vision to connect major metropolitan areas in regions undergoing significant growth and where there is little to no rail service, while fulfilling Americans’ growing desire for cost-efficient and more environmentally friendly travel options.
…Virginia, one of 18 states that sponsors Amtrak service, has some of the best-performing routes, officials said. Combined ridership for the four routes connecting Richmond and other major cities to Washington and the Northeast grew to 971,415 in 2019, from 844,698 the previous year — a 15 percent increase. That’s well above the average 2.4 percent increase among all state-supported lines and the 2.5 percent growth of Amtrak’s entire network.
“In just the 10 years since 2009, ridership has more than doubled on our Virginia corridors,” Anderson told members of Congress at a Nov. 13 hearing. “What these and our other very successful state-supported corridors have in common is that they offer multiple daily frequencies with trip times that are competitive with driving and flying.”
…In 2011, Virginia became one of only a few states to create a dedicated funding source for rail projects. The Virginia Intercity Passenger Rail Operating and Capital Fund gets .005 percent of the state’s retail sales and use tax, which equals about $50 million to $60 million annually.
…Increasing train service in the state makes sense, both for reducing traffic congestion and from an economic standpoint, officials and transportation experts say. A recent state study of the I-95 corridor estimates it would cost $12.5 billion to build one additional travel lane in each direction for 50 miles in the corridor.
How Virginia’s $3.7 billion rail plan fits Amtrak’s long-term vision – The Washington Post
cool
Trump Administration Dismantles Clean Water Rule Days After Gutting National Environmental Policy Act, Putting Park Waters Further at Risk
The revised water rule eliminates protections for more than half of America’s wetlands, along with many rivers and streams that were once protected under the Clean Water Act — threatening drinking water for millions of people and national park waterways across the country.
The administration’s revised water rule paves the way for more pollution from mining, manufacturing and large farms to flow into waterways, which will ultimately impact water that we all depend on for drinking, fishing and swimming. Today’s announcement comes just two weeks after the administration’s rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that requires government agencies to carefully consider public health and our environment before permitting proposed projects on federal lands, while also giving the public a voice in the process.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr
Trump and the closed loop of news in the GOP
Asked to name media companies in which they have trust, 65% of Republicans named Fox News. One in 3 named ABC. And that’s it. Not a single other news source was trusted by even 33% of self-identified Republicans in the Pew poll.
…A majority of Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents) don’t trust ANY media company other than Fox News. And two thirds don’t trust ANY media companies other than Fox News and ABC.
…Combine those numbers with Fox News’s overwhelming viewership numbers among Republicans (60% get their election news from Fox; no other outlet gets above 30%), and the marked difference between its content and that of all the other mainstream media outlets, and you see a major reason for why we are where we are, politically speaking.
If you only trust one news outlet and that news outlet is telling a very different …version of current events, a massive disconnect is created.
…And it is into that disconnect, that information void, that Trump has leaped — and now resides. …Trump regularly tweets and retweets Fox News segments to his 71+ million Twitter followers. He often directly quotes from Fox personalities. He works to create a totally closed information ecosystem for his supporters — and largely succeeds.
This 1 chart explains how bad Fox News is for our politics – CNNPolitics
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This is why the US still doesn’t have high-speed trains
The FRA should never have been asked to oversee the project, said Thomas Hart Jr, president of the pro-rail consulting group Rail Forward. It was inexperienced, needlessly bureaucratic, and had “neither the experience, the staff, nor the regulations” in place to make high-speed rail work. To Hart’s mind, the largest problems were strategic: The FRA “tried to do too much with too little” by spreading the money across the nation rather than targeting the best possible projects, while simultaneously shutting out small or minority-owned businesses. He also believes the federal government made a fatal misstep in allowing Amtrak to run the projects, rather than opening it up to more experienced foreign competitors.
…“The question really is, for us as an industry and as a company, in being pragmatic,” he said. All over the country, there are underserved segments of around 300 miles which are ripe for high-quality rail, he added. “We don’t even need to spend money on necessarily expensive high-speed trains—just getting what we have today working well at a hundred miles an hour, which is very feasible, is really viable.”
Europe might have some of the world’s best high-speed rail, but it also had a great network of slower, 80-mile-per-hour trains, said Harris. “We should aspire to that first. We can deliver that and make a lot of people happy, without spending $100 million.”
This is why the US still doesn’t have high-speed trains — Quartz
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Trump Removes Pollution Controls on Streams and Wetlands
The Trump administration on Thursday will finalize a rule to strip away environmental protections for streams, wetlands and other water bodies.
…The Obama rule protected about 60 percent of the nation’s waterways, including large bodies of water such as the Chesapeake Bay, Mississippi River and Puget Sound, and smaller headwaters, wetlands, seasonal streams and streams that run temporarily underground. It limited the discharge of pollutants such as fertilizers, pesticides and industrial chemicals into those waters.
…This is not just undoing the Obama rule. This is stripping away protections that were put in place in the ’70s and ’80s that Americans have relied on for their health.”
…The new water rule will remove federal protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands, and hundreds of thousands of small waterways. That would for the first time in decades allow landowners and property developers to dump pollutants such as pesticides and fertilizers directly into many of those waterways, and to destroy or fill in wetlands for construction projects.
…[The changes] on Thursday will complete the process, not only rolling back 2015 rules that guaranteed protections under the 1972 Clean Water Act to certain wetlands and streams that run intermittently or run temporarily underground, but also relieves landowners of the need to seek permits that the Environmental Protection Agency had considered on a case-by-case basis before the Obama rule.
…That could open millions of acres of pristine wetlands to pollution or destruction, and allow chemicals and other pollutants to be discharged into smaller headland waters that eventually drain into larger water bodies, experts in water management said. Wetlands play key roles in filtering surface water and protecting against floods, while also providing wildlife habitat.
… The E.P.A.’s Scientific Advisory Board, a panel of 41 scientists responsible for evaluating the scientific integrity of the agency’s regulations, concluded that the new Trump water rule ignores science by “failing to acknowledge watershed systems.” They found “no scientific justification” for excluding certain bodies of water from protection under the new regulations, concluding that pollutants from those smaller and seasonal bodies of water can still have a significant impact on the health of larger water systems.
Trump Removes Pollution Controls on Streams and Wetlands – The New York Times
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US drinking water contamination with ‘forever chemicals’ far worse than scientists thought
The contamination of US drinking water with manmade “forever chemicals” is far worse than previously estimated with some of the highest levels found in Miami, Philadelphia, and New Orleans.
…The chemicals were used in products like Teflon and Scotchguard and in firefighting foam. Some are used in a variety of other products and industrial processes, and their replacements also pose risks.
…The chemicals, resistant to breaking down in the environment, are known as perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. Some have been linked to cancers, liver damage, low birth weight and other health problems.
…Of tap water samples taken by EWG from 44 sites in 31 states and Washington DC, only one location, Meridian, Mississippi, which relies on 700ft (215m) deep wells, had no detectable PFAS. Only Seattle and Tuscaloosa, Alabama had levels below 1 part per trillion (PPT), the limit EWG recommends.
In addition, EWG found that on average six to seven PFAS compounds were found at the tested sites.
sigh…
Trump inaugural committee improperly paid president’s hotel $1 million
Trump’s inaugural committee …violated its nonprofit status by spending more than $1 million to book a ballroom at Trump’s D.C. hotel that its staff knew was overpriced and that it barely used.
During the lead-up to Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, the committee booked the hotel ballroom for $175,000 a day, plus more than $300,000 in food and beverage costs, over the objections of its own event planner.
…Hotel management emailed the committee in November 2016 saying an eight-day package of meeting rooms, food and drinks would cost $3.6 million — an enormous number even by the standards of luxury hotels during the inauguration.
Rick Gates, a lobbyist and the committee’s deputy chairman, then emailed Ivanka Trump to say that cost “seems quite high compared to other properties.”
…Racine’s lawsuit specifically targets a $1 million deal made between the committee and the Trump Organization for the ballroom during four days around the inaugural, which he alleges was a knowing waste of the nonprofit’s resources to benefit the Trumps.
…After hotel management agreed to charge $175,000 per day for meeting space and to charge separately for food and beverage, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a friend of first lady Melania Trump who had previously produced the Met gala and New York’s Fashion Week, expressed alarm, writing that other properties had been offered to the committee at little or no cost.
…Wolkoff said the meeting space should cost a maximum of $85,000 per day. Even that was pricey compared to offers from other hotels.
…D.C. law requires that nonprofit organizations not operate for the purpose of generating profits for private individuals.
…Trump’s company is now trying to sell its lease to the hotel. Initial bids are due Thursday for the property.
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Comments From The Peanut Gallery 