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US Should Legalize Mexican and Central American Migrants Now! |
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Monday, 04 January 2016 15:10 |
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Russell writes: "Legalize the 10 million, now. This is the only practical, fair and just solution to millions of Mexicans and Central Americans living and working in legal limbo in the United States."
Immigrants arrive for a rest stop after a 15 hour ride atop a freight train headed north in Ixtepec, Mexico. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Immigration Crackdown on Central Americans in US Begins With 1st Arrests
US Should Legalize Mexican and Central American Migrants Now!
By Grahame Russell, teleSUR
04 January 16
It is important to understand why people are forced to flee Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, year after year, decade after decade.
 egalize the 10 million, now. This is the only practical, fair and just solution to millions of Mexicans and Central Americans living and working in legal limbo in the United States.
As authorities prepare for ever more round-ups and deportations of “illegals” in early 2016, now is the time to continue pushing back across the country, demanding the government provide a legal path to permanent residency for millions of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans living and working in the United States.
For practical purposes, this is necessary to enable people already living and working in the U.S. to begin to normalize their lives after being forced to flee their countries and then live in legal limbo and fear, even as they work hard just to get by, let alone support families back in their home countries.
Legalization will also provide increased tax revenues and decrease the unnecessary, wasteful burden on police and border security agents, attorney generals’ offices, and state and federal detention centers and jails.
But more than practical, this is the fair and just thing to do. The vast majority of the millions in the U.S., and the tens of thousands trying to cross Mexico into the U.S. now, are refugees in the clearest meaning of the word. Furthermore, the U.S. and Canada - both governments and private sectors - are contributing to and profiting from the very conditions that so many are forced to flee from, year after year, decade after decade.
It is time to put an end to the legal and political uncertainty of millions of families and it is long past time to put an end to the underlying causes of why they flee in the first place.
Underlying Causes
There are two dominant positions vis-à-vis the undocumented millions from Mexico and Central America, from “kick them all out, arm more border guards and build more jails and bigger walls,” to “treat them humanely, de-criminalize and provide due legal process.” As work and struggle continues to build on this latter position, we must keep in mind there are at least four significant and desperate phases of this forced migrant/refugee reality.
The phase that gets most of the (albeit narrowly focused) attention is the battle over what to do with people now in the U.S. As stated, the just, fair and practical position is to legalize them all, now.
Receiving less attention are the dangerous and deadly conditions people face when fleeing north across Mexico. Recently, there has been a small amount of reporting on the conditions of poverty and destitution, general and sexualized violence, drought and heat, and repression that people are victimized by as they cross Mexico into the U.S.
Receiving even less attention are the deadly situations refugees face when forcibly deported back to their home countries. There is documentation that many have being killed when deported back into the very situations they had desperately fled.
And then there are the two elephants in the room: the societal conditions in Honduras and Guatemala, and to varying degrees in Mexico – chronic exploitation and poverty, chronic violence and repression, weak democratic institutions, chronic impunity and corruption – that force tens of thousands to flee year after year, decade after decade; and the roles played by the governments of the U.S. and Canada, by the U.S. military and by North American corporations in helping cause and benefit from the unjust, violent conditions that force people to flee.
We are stuck in a mean-spirited, deadly cycle, wherein the U.S. (and to a lesser degree Canada) contribute to and benefit from the conditions that force so many to flee. Then, the refugees are criminalized, attacked and demonized if they can cross Mexico into the “safe haven” of the U.S.
Cold War Refugees
In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. received millions of refugees from Central America (Canada also received a significant number), even as the U.S. government was funding, training, and arming military regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras that were carrying out systemic repression (including massacres, disappearance, torture, and, in Guatemala, genocide) against their own people; even as the U.S.-Contras paramilitary group was trying to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua.
Central America was burning. Close to 500,000 civilians were killed or disappeared, millions displaced, many of whom fled to the U.S. and Canada - some as refugees, some as “illegals.” Over the years, many were able to legally normalize their situations.
Even as the U.S. and Canadian governments received a good number of people as legal refugees, there was no acknowledgement of how U.S. Cold War economic and military policies were – in partnership with military-backed oligarchies – the underlying cause of the repression, destruction and death, and the forced displacement of millions.
No Democracy To Return To
The 1990s were to usher in a “return to democracy.” This did not happen. Part of the charade is that there was no history of democracy to return to. Secondly, “the bad guys had won.” No one in the U.S. government had been held accountable for their role in decades of State repression and terrorism in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, let alone unleashing the Contras on the people of Nicaragua. Neither was anyone held accountable in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
With as little interest in democracy, human rights and the rule of law as they had exhibited during the previous decades, the Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran governments – dominated by the same elites that had carried out decades of Cold War repression - spent the 1990s and early 2000s opening their countries to global corporations and investors, particularly in the areas of mining, African palm and sugarcane production, maquiladora sweatshops, tourism, and privatized hydroelectric dams.
Through the 2000s and currently, repression has spiked again, as police, soldiers and corporate private security guards regularly used violence (illegal evictions, burning villages to the ground, shootings, killings, rapes) against indigenous and non-indigenous communities on behalf of transnational corporations invested in the aforementioned industries.
By the late 2000s, any hope of respect for the “peace agreements” of the 1990s was gone. The majority populations in these three countries, particularly Honduras and Guatemala, were confronted with the fact that little had changed, that their governments and societies remained dominated by racist, repressive economic elites involved in repressive business activities, usually in partnership with the governments of the U.S. and Canada, the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, and North American companies.
When Honduras tried to implement minor reforms to address the chronic exploitation and poverty, landlessness, repression, corruption and impunity, the U.S. and Canadian governments back the June 2009 military coup that ousted the government of President Manuel Zelaya. The coup was carried out by the same elites the U.S. had supported during the years of Cold War repression.
War On Drugs
And just when it seemed things could not be worse, the U.S. “war on drugs” that had been devastating Mexico since 2006, resulting in the killing and disappearances of more than 100,000 people spilled into Central America, particularly Guatemala and Honduras (which, not coincidentally, are the strongest business and political partners of the U.S. and Canada).
By the late 2000s, Honduras and Guatemala had become major drug shipment places. Narco-trafficking cartels from South America and mainly from Mexico spread into Honduras and Guatemala and corrupted and infiltrated the executive and legislative branches of government, the judiciary, police and military.
Refugees Fleeing Abusive States
Today, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have the highest murder rates in the world; Honduras and Guatemala have the highest repression, impunity and corruption rates in the Americas. Mexico continues to be dominated by drug war repression and violence committed by the State and the drug cartels. Institutions of the State are corrupted by narco-trafficking money.
Central Americans and Mexicans are not fleeing “failed states.” They flee countries characterized by decades of violence and repression, impunity and corruption, exploitation and despair.
As U.S. authorities prepare for another year of roundups and deportations – amid shrill rhetoric about “what do to about the ‘illegals,’” we must push back and demand a legal path to permanent residency for all people in legal limbo in the U.S. now, and we must expose and change the historic and underlying causes of so much violence and death, desperation and flight.
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Story of a Disaster Foretold |
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Monday, 04 January 2016 15:03 |
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Steinman writes: "The costs of corporate mining cleanup and long-term economic and environmental damage are never fully borne by the company, but instead are passed on."
The devastation in Minas Gerais, Brazil. (photo: Bruno Alencastro)
Story of a Disaster Foretold
By Ian Steinman, Jacobin
04 January 16
What the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history tells us about the real cost of privatization.
 n November 5, a dam used as a waste dump owned by the mining company Samarco broke, causing a flood of toxic mud and water which killed twelve, injured many more, and completely destroyed the nearby town of Bento Rodriguez in Brazil. The waste from the spill has gone on to poison the Rio Doce, a major river linking the interior of Brazil’s Minas Gerais State to the eastern coast of Espirito Santo.
60 million cubic meters of waste water has choked off life in and around the river. More than a quarter of a million people have been left without usable water. Entire communities, towns, and cities spread along the Rio Doce and in the waters nearby find their livelihoods and futures threatened.
The exact causes of the breach are still under investigation, however recently released information points towards a construction project that was meant to connect the dam with another nearby dam, quintupling the size of the facility. Samarco has maintained that the waters have not been contaminated with toxic material and that it represents no threat to people or the environment. The government has largely supported those claims.
Nevertheless a recent test showed levels of arsenic and mercury over ten times the legal limit. The United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has also criticized the reports by Samarco and has declared the company’s and the federal government´s responses so far to be inadequate.
While the true scale of the disaster is still unknown, the devastating effects will be felt for years to come. Responsibility for this disaster lies not only with Samarco but also the destructive economic trends of the last few decades, the privatization of Samarco’s co-owner Vale, and widespread collusion between the ruling political class and mining corporations.
A Global Trend Towards Disaster
The disaster comes in the middle of a major economic crisis in Brazil which acutely affected the mining industry. The global drop in the value of raw resources like iron has contributed to Brazil’s economic downturn.
Mining companies have responded to the crisis by laying off workers and focusing on cost-cutting measures. 2,097 workers in the mining industry of the state of Minas Gerais were fired in the first semester of 2015. In Espirito Santo, one of the states through which the Rio Doce passes on the way to the coast, Samarco’s parent company Vale fired more than four thousand workers.
While Samarco maintains that the dams passed a government inspection in July and were considered safe, the method they are using to deposit waste in dammed local waters is a cheap — and risky — solution. In Chile, where earthquakes are a consistent threat, many mining companies rely on dry storage techniques which cost ten times as much.
The construction of water-based storage areas from scratch on virgin land would also be safer but cost twice as much. This is nothing compared to the death, displacement, and devastation visiting the environment and communities along the river. Yet for a capitalist business, especially under recessionary pressures, the cheapest method possible will always prevail.
This kind of disaster is not exclusive to Brazil and the developing world. It is in fact part of a global trend in the mining industry towards more and more catastrophic failures of water-based waste storage techniques. A report by Lindsay Bowker and David Chambers shows a growing trend towards more “serious” and “very serious” failures starting in the sixties and increasing up to the present.
When companies refuse to opt for costly overhauls, safer storage techniques, and repairs they turn towards makeshift solutions which often expand the storage dumps far beyond their originally intended and designed limits. Targeting the industry’s financial markets and investment trends, the report concludes that there is “a clear and irrefutable relationship between the mega trends that squeeze cash flows for all miners at all locations, and this indisputably clear trend toward failures of ever greater environmental consequence.”
The crisis of waste dump failures looks much like the general crisis of capitalist investment in production. It is not profitable to invest in major overhauls, safe storage techniques, or new, more technically advanced mines.
Facing the crisis of over-production triggered by the fall in global ore prices, private companies are attempting to cut costs, raise productivity, and extract as much as possible from existing mining facilities. Yet pushing extraction to the breaking point has dire consequences for entire communities, regions, and ecosystems.
The costs of cleanup and long-term economic and environmental damage are never fully borne by the company — often itself a subsidiary used by larger corporations to evade liability — but instead are passed on to local and national governments.
In Brazil this is exacerbated as the costs of adopting safety measures or even operating legally often far outweigh the token fines imposed on companies which violate the law. Fees imposed on Samarco are so far some of the largest but still fall far short of the overwhelming economic, environmental, and human cost of this man-made disaster.
Vale was once a national mining company and seen as central to the development of the Brazilian economy and national independence. But the state company was privatized in 1997 under the neoliberal administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in a sale widely considered to have substantially undervalued the company.
Its $3.14 billion price tag glaringly omitted the value of its patents, mineral rights, reserves, and stock in other companies. Though it accounted for infrastructure, many mines were still missing from the assessment. On the day the sale was finalized thousands of protesters clashed with police in front of the headquarters in Rio de Janeiro with similar protests across Brazil.
Today the company has an estimated value of over $53 billion and has established itself as a global multinational with a reputation to match. Behind the illusion of South-South solidarity the international operations of the company are just as bad as and often even worse than the practices of European and American multinationals.
Samarco, the company formally responsible for the disaster, is itself is a joint venture owned by Vale and the Anglo-Australian multinational BHP Bilton.
The PT’s Complicity
While Vale may have been privatized under the neoliberal leadership of Cardoso and the right-wing PSDB the new owners of the company quickly found willing partners in the Workers Party of former President Lula da Silva and current President Dilma Rousseff. Legal efforts to challenge the privatization over irregularities in the sale received no support from the PT, who instead embraced Vale, the mining industry, and the banks that own and finance much of industry.
In 2014 alone Vale invested r$8.25 million in the electoral campaigns of the PT and r$23.55 million to the PMDB — a PT ally which controls the Ministry of Mines and Energy as well as the National Department of Mineral Production. Dilma Rousseff’s reelection campaign counted on r$14 million in donations from Vale – far outstripping the r$2.7 million that went to right-wing opposition candidate Aecio Neves — as well as another r$14 million from a variety of other mining companies.
One of the largest stockholders in the privatized Vale is Bradesco Bank. Joaquim Levy, Rousseff’s main economic minister and architect of recently implemented austerity programs, formerly worked as a director for Bradesco. Bradesco recorded record profits of r$4.47 billion in the second trimester of 2015, an 18 percent growth compared to the previous year. The banking sector as a whole has seen unprecedented growth and rates of profit under the PT’s administration and has been a willing partner of the government.
In Minas Gerais, the disaster’s epicenter, the PT’s Fernando Pimental is serving as governor. Far from using the crisis as an opportunity to impose tougher regulations, he and the PT legislatures have instead rushed a bill once championed by the PSDB’s Aecio Neves that speeds up environmental licensing for mining companies. What emerges at the state and national level is a web of complicity and support in which the PT has often been Vale’s party of choice to ensure its economic interests are defended.
Additionally, under pressure from the economic crisis and deeply affected by the corruption scandals, there is now a major proposal to privatize huge sections of Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company. Petrobras has been moving forward with a plan to sell $15 billion in assets by the end of this year with more sales to come in 2016 and beyond. The estimated cost of the Lava Jato corruption scandal has been as much as $6 billion and along with the fall in oil prices has left the company heavily indebted and facing a serious crisis.
Workers at Petrobras have attempted to resist this trend towards privatization. Petrobras workers recently ended one of the largest strikes in recent history in which workers in many locals occupied platforms and workplaces as well as defied the union bureaucracy’s attempts to end the strike early. Opposition to the privatization plan was a major demand of the strike and a source of rank-and-file disillusionment with the PT government.
However, the main trade union responsible for representing Petrobras workers is deeply linked to the PT and Petrobas management. The discontent expressed in the strike was substantial but still far short of the kind of mass workers movement which would be needed to block the proposed assets sale.
The threat of both ongoing and future privatization represents not only a major issue for Petrobras workers but potentially poses a substantial environmental threat. If privatized sectors of the oil and gas industry follow the same path as Vale the likely consequence will be even more environmental disasters.
Fighting Back
The disaster shows the irreparable damage which capitalist businesses wreck upon the environment and the growing trends across the mining industry towards ever more risky and damaging techniques. Corporate models in environmentally risky industries like mining socialize the dire risks of extraction while privatizing the financial benefits.
Yet while defending state ownership is important, it is far from enough. The crisis of Petrobras and its growing trend towards privatization has itself been driven by the looting of its assets by the governing PT party and its allies. The ability of the ruling and allied parties to steal from Petrobras in league with private business and company management is a weakness of its state-owned and state-controlled character.
The right opposition has until now been able to use the corruption scandals to push for further privatization. Rousseff and the PT have themselves advanced the partial privatization of Petrobras by asset sales as a solution to the immense costs of corruption and the deepening economic crisis.
In the aftermath of the disaster there is a political opportunity to strike a blow against the whole project of privatization. The only alternative which the ruling parties have to offer Brazil is more privatization at a slower or faster rate with more environmental disasters sure to follow.
Against both state and corporate corruption, the Left must retake the old slogan of nationalization under workers’ control — not just as a labor demand but also an environmental necessity. With a crisis at Petrobras and growing popular hatred of Vale, workers’ management represents the only real alternative to a future of private profit and socialized devastation.
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FOCUS: Saudi Arabia's Mad Head-Choppers |
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Monday, 04 January 2016 12:54 |
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Fisk writes: "Saudi Arabia's binge of head-choppings - 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions - was worthy of Isis."
Saudi Arabia executed 47 people on Saturday. Some were beheaded while others were shot by firing squad. (photo: BBC)
Saudi Arabia's Mad Head-Choppers
By Robert Fisk, CounterPunch
04 January 16
 audi Arabia’s binge of head-choppings – 47 in all, including the learned Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, followed by a Koranic justification for the executions – was worthy of Isis. Perhaps that was the point. For this extraordinary bloodbath in the land of the Sunni Muslim al-Saud monarchy – clearly intended to infuriate the Iranians and the entire Shia world – re-sectarianised a religious conflict which Isis has itself done so much to promote.
All that was missing was the video of the decapitations – although the Kingdom’s 158 beheadings last year were perfectly in tune with the Wahabi teachings of the ‘Islamic State’. Macbeth’s ‘blood will have blood’ certainly applies to the Saudis, whose ‘war on terror’, it seems, now justifies any amount of blood, both Sunni and Shia. But how often do the angels of God the Most Merciful appear to the present Saudi interior minister, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef?
For Sheikh Nimr was not just any old divine. He spent years as a scholar in Tehran and Syria, was a revered Shia leader of Friday prayers in the Saudi Eastern Province, and a man who stayed clear of political parties but demanded free elections, and was regularly detained and tortured – by his own account – for opposing the Sunni Wahabi Saudi government. Sheikh Nimr said that words were more powerful than violence. The authorities’ whimsical suggestion that there was nothing sectarian about this most recent bloodbath – on the grounds that they beheaded Sunnis as well as Shias – was classic Isis rhetoric.
After all, Isis cuts the heads of Sunni ‘apostates’ and Sunni Syrian and Iraqi soldiers just as readily as it slaughters Shias. Sheikh Nimr would have got precisely the same treatment from the thugs of the ‘Islamic State’ as he got from the Saudis – though without the mockery of a pseudo-legal trial which Sheikh Nimr was afforded and of which Amnesty complained.
But the killings represent far more than just Saudi hatred for a cleric who rejoiced at the death of the former Saudi interior minister – Mohamed bin Nayef’s father, Crown Prince Nayef Abdul-Aziz al-Saud – with the hope that he would be “eaten by worms and will suffer the torments of hell in his grave”. Nimr’s execution will reinvigorate the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, which the Saudis invaded and bombed this year in an attempt to destroy Shia power there. It has enraged the Shia majority in Sunni-rules Bahrain. And Iran’s own clerics have already claimed that the beheading will cause the overthrow of the Saudi royal family.
It will also present the West with that most embarrassing of Middle Eastern problems: the continuing need to cringe and grovel to the rich and autocratic monarchs of the Gulf while gently expressing their unease at the grotesque butchery which the Saudi courts have just dished out to the Kingdom’s enemies. Had Isis chopped off the heads of Sunnis and Shias in Raqqa – especially that of a troublesome Shia priest like Sheikh Nimr – we can be sure that Dave Cameron would have been tweeting his disgust at so loathsome an act. But the man who lowered the British flag on the death of the last king of this preposterous Wahabi state will be using weasel words to address this bit of head-chopping.
However many Sunni al-Qaeda men have also just lost their heads – literally – to Saudi executioners, the question will be asked in both Washington and European capitals: are the Saudis trying to destroy the Iranian nuclear agreement by forcing their Western allies to support even these latest outrages? In the obtuse world in which they live – in which the youthful defence minister who invaded Yemen intensely dislikes the interior minister – the Saudis are still glorying in the ‘anti-terror’ coalition of 34 largely Sunni nations which supposedly form a legion of Muslims opposed to ‘terror’.
The executions were certainly an unprecedented Saudi way of welcoming in the New Year – if not quite as publicly spectacular as the firework display in Dubai which went ahead alongside the burning of one of the emirate’s finest hotels. Outside the political implications, however, there is also an obvious question to be asked – in the Arab world itself — of the self-perpetuating House of Saud: have the Kingdom’s rulers gone bonkers?
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At Stake in 2016: Ending the Vicious Cycle of Wealth and Power |
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Monday, 04 January 2016 09:32 |
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Reich writes: "What’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can. America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power."
Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
At Stake in 2016: Ending the Vicious Cycle of Wealth and Power
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
04 January 16
 hat’s at stake this election year? Let me put as directly as I can.
America has succumbed to a vicious cycle in which great wealth translates into political power, which generates even more wealth, and even more power.
This spiral is most apparent is declining tax rates on corporations and on top personal incomes (much in the form of wider tax loopholes), along with a profusion of government bailouts and subsidies (to Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund partners, oil companies, casino tycoons, and giant agribusiness owners, among others).
The vicious cycle of wealth and power is less apparent, but even more significant, in economic rules that now favor the wealthy.
Billionaires like Donald Trump can use bankruptcy to escape debts but average people can’t get relief from burdensome mortgage or student debt payments.
Giant corporations can amass market power without facing antitrust lawsuits (think Internet cable companies, Monsanto, Big Pharma, consolidations of health insurers and of health care corporations, Dow and DuPont, and the growing dominance of Amazon, Apple, and Google, for example).
But average workers have lost the market power that came from joining together in unions.
It’s now easier for Wall Street insiders to profit from confidential information unavailable to small investors.
It’s also easier for giant firms to extend the length of patents and copyrights, thereby pushing up prices on everything from pharmaceuticals to Walt Disney merchandise.
And easier for big corporations to wangle trade treaties that protect their foreign assets but not the jobs or incomes of American workers.
It’s easier for giant military contractors to secure huge appropriations for unnecessary weapons, and to keep the war machine going.
The result of this vicious cycle is a disenfranchisement of most Americans, and a giant upward distribution of income from the middle class and poor to the wealthy and powerful.
Another consequence is growing anger and frustration felt by people who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, accompanied by deepening cynicism about our democracy.
The way to end this vicious cycle is to reduce the huge accumulations of wealth that fuel it, and get big money out of politics.
But it’s chicken-and-egg problem. How can this be accomplished when wealth and power are compounding at the top?
Only through a political movement such as America had a century ago when progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age.
That was when Wisconsin’s “fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum wage law; presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies; and President Teddy Roosevelt busted up the giant trusts.
When suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote, reformers like Jane Addams got laws protecting children and the public’s health, and organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions.
America enacted a progressive income tax, limited corporate campaign contributions, ensured the safety and purity of food and drugs, and even invented the public high school.
The progressive era welled up in the last decade of the nineteenth century because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.
We may have reached that tipping point again.
Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party grew out of revulsion at the Wall Street bailout. Consider, more recently, the fight for a higher minimum wage (“Fight for 15”).
Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign is part of this mobilization. (Donald Trump bastardized version draws on the same anger and frustration but has descended into bigotry and xenophobia.)
Surely 2016 is a critical year. But, as the reformers of the Progressive Era understood more than a century ago, no single president or any other politician can accomplish what’s needed because a system caught in the spiral of wealth and power cannot be reformed from within. It can be changed only by a mass movement of citizens pushing from the outside.
So regardless of who wins the presidency in November and which party dominates the next Congress, it is up to the rest of us to continue to organize and mobilize. Real reform will require many years of hard work from millions of us.
As we learned in the last progressive era, this is the only way the vicious cycle of wealth and power can be reversed.
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ou have to give Captain Daniel Shays this: When he launched his armed sedition against lawful authority, he at least was invited in. Overnight on Saturday, in an obscure corner of the Oregon wilderness, and contrary to the law, and in defiance of democratic authority, both federal and local, 
