Dickinson writes: “Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt – who at times appeared to be competing in a personal decathalon of corruption – finally resigned Thursday.”
Scott Pruitt. (photo: Getty Images)
Scott Pruitt: Requiem for a Grifter
By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
07 July 18
Donald Trump’s former EPA administrator was a beacon of corruption and scandal from Day 1
nvironmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt – who at times appeared to be competing in a personal decathalon of corruption – finally resigned Thursday.
The former Oklahoma attorney general arrived in Washington, D.C. zealous to fulfill President Trump’s vow to dismantle the EPA and leave only “tidbits” behind. And Pruitt, a climate denier with a “biblical worldview,” departs having done grave damage to the agency and the country, chiefly convincing Trump to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.
Pruitt had his sights set on grander posts: He angled to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general and reportedly harbored presidential ambitions. But the administrator’s rising star was eclipsed by seemingly non-stop scandal. Pruitt’s noxious blend of greed, paranoia and entitlement invited more than a dozen federal probes – including one that concluded he violated the law. His gift for grift left even his fellow Republicans fuming. In June, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa blasted Pruitt as “about as swampy as you get”; this week, Fox News star Laura Ingraham tweeted: “Pruitt is the swamp. Drain it.”
Accepting the EPA administrator’s resignation, Trump continued to praise Pruitt, tweeting: “Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him.”
As EPA chief, Pruitt boasted of taking “22 deregulatory actions” that will save polluters and other special interests “more than $1 billion in regulatory costs.” Pruitt also attempted to undermine the EPA’s role in enforcing environmental justice, protecting children against lead poisoning and regulating industrial and coal pollutants. On Pruitt’s watch, the EPA cooked up math only the Koch Brothers could love – slashing the federal estimate of the harmful “social cost” of carbon pollution from $36-a-ton to just $5.
Despite his headline-generating crusade, much of Pruitt’s environmental legacy is unfinished, unsettled – and may yet be thwarted. Richard Lazarus, a Harvard environmental law professor, told reporters that Pruitt’s tenure produced a long list of “short, poorly crafted rulemakings that are not likely to hold up in court.”
Pruitt’s record of personal and political scandal, by contrast, is indelible.
- Rented a condo from the wife of a D.C. lobbyist, who did business before the EPA, for a mere $50 a night. (The scandal caused the lobbyist to resign.)
- Tasked a staffer to procure him a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel.
- Spent more than $4.6 million on a 24/7 security detail, including billing taxpayers more than $3,000 for “tactical pants” and polo shirts.
- Used EPA funds to repair a door his security team broke down to enter the infamous condo, after the administrator stopped answering his cell phone. (He was napping.)
- Spent more than $100,000 on first class travel, citing fear of confrontation by politically “toxic” coach passengers.
- Sought to lease a private jet for $100,000 a month.
- Fired the EPA staffer who debunked Pruitt’s claims of peril with a report stating: “EPA Intelligence has not identified any specific, credible, direct threat to the EPA administrator.”
- Tasked staffers to collect his dry cleaning, provision snacks at Dean & Deluca and drive him in search of a special moisturizer carried only at select Ritz Carlton hotels.
- Spent more than $1,500 on fountain pens.
- Took a $100,000 trip, orchestrated by a lobbyist, to Morocco to promote liquefied natural gas imports, decidedly not the job of the EPA chief.
- Demanded his security detail drive him, lights flashing, to chic French dinners at Le Diplomate and the to airport.
- Leased a Chevy Suburban with bulletproof seats and run-flat wheels.
- Stiffed young staffers who booked and paid for his hotel rooms on their personal credit cards.
- Called the CEO of Chik-fil-A seeking a franchise for his wife, Marylin.
- Kept a secret calendar to avoid disclosures of meetings with top Trump donors and executives of fossil-fuel polluters.
For months, as these scandals mounted, Pruitt somehow rolled on (as if on run-flat tires). But his joyride finally ended this week. With his resignation, the tragicomic cavalcade of Scott Pruitt’s EPA tenure has come to an end. But the Trump administration’s assault on the environment continues apace.
Indeed, Pruitt’s interim replacement is his EPA deputy, Andrew Wheeler. A former coal lobbyist, Wheeler is now poised do the fossil fuel lobby’s bidding from within the agency that taxpayers fund to protect our climate, air, water and our children’s health.
'You Better Shoot Straight': How Maxine Waters Became Trump's Public Enemy Number 1
Saturday, 07 July 2018 14:12
Carroll writes: “Amid threats to assassinate, hang, lynch, expel and otherwise silence her, Maxine Waters clambered on to a stage in Los Angeles last week and did what comes naturally: hurl defiance.”
Maxine Waters. (photo: Emma McIntire)
'You Better Shoot Straight': How Maxine Waters Became Trump's Public Enemy Number 1
By Rory Carroll, Guardian UK
07 July 18
Opponents’ death threats haven’t slowed the outspoken California congresswoman in her crusade against Trump
mid threats to assassinate, hang, lynch, expel and otherwise silence her, Maxine Waters clambered on to a stage in Los Angeles last week and did what comes naturally: hurl defiance.
“All I have to say is this: if you shoot me, you better shoot straight,” she told cheering supporters. “There’s nothing like a wounded animal.”
It was typical audacity from one of the most outspoken members of Congress, a 79-year-old political veteran from California who is leading the charge against Donald Trump and now finds herself at the heart of a debate about civility – or the lack of it - in political discourse.
Waters was one of the first Democrats in Washington to call for Trump’s impeachment after his inauguration in 2016, calling him a scumbag, immoral, indecent and inhumane. She branded his staff the “Kremlin Klan”.
The former factory worker now leads calls to confront and shame his cabinet members over the separation of immigrant families. People are going to “harass” and “turn on them”, be it in stores, restaurants or gas stations, she declared last month. “We’ve got to push back.”
Remember when I said Trump & his allies are scumbags? Trump is an immoral, indecent, & inhumane thug. He loves Putin, genuflects for Kim Jong-un, loves killer Duterte, wants to be in power for life like Pres. Xi, & is willing to sacrifice children. He needs 2B stopped. Impeach45
To progressive supporters, Waters is “Auntie Maxine”, a matriarchal rebel who inspires resistance to tyranny. Millennial fans have taught the grandmother terms like “woke” and “throwing shade”. Her soundbites go viral, become memes and end up on T-shirts.
To rightwing foes, she is Kerosene Maxine, Crazy Maxie, Dirty Waters and worse – Twitter spews slurs by the hour. Trump has set the tone by calling her an “extraordinarily low IQ person” and making a veiled threat: “Be careful what you wish for Max!”
The backlash reached new intensity this week.
Death threats deemed credible prompted Waters to suspend scheduled appearances in Texas and Alabama until security can be beefed up.
A conservative group, Judicial Watch, filed an ethics complaint with the House of Representatives, claiming Waters had incited mob violence against Trump supporters (she denies that and says Trump is the inciter of violence). Social media spread a fake report, purportedly from CNN, claiming Waters wanted an undocumented migrant appointed to the supreme court.
In a renewed attack, Trump called her corrupt, crazy and, along with the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, the face of the Democratic party. “Her ranting and raving, even referring to herself as a wounded animal, will make people flee the Democrats!” he tweeted.
It wasn’t just Republicans piling on. Some Democratic leaders also rebuked Waters for advocating harassment of Trump officials. “Unacceptable,” said Pelosi, without naming her colleague. “Not American,” said Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader.
This prompted a counter-blast from nearly 200 black female leaders – activists, pastors, academics, elected officials – who accused the Democrats of failing to protect Waters.
Whatever clouds hovered over her in Washington, this week it was only sun – with a looming heatwave - in Waters’ 43rd congressional district, a Democratic bastion of African American, Latino, white and Asian communities in south LA.
“She’s a headstrong woman and that’s always a positive,” said Alvarette Valley, 45, a healthcare worker, seeking shade in Inglewood, near the LAX airport. “We’re at a point where we are so far beneath being civil. Trump can spew his evil and she can spew truth about that.”
Illya Brantley, 36, a salesman, called Waters a beacon. “We have a racist-ass president. We have policies that are helping the top 1%. If you sit back and say nothing, nothing changes. A closed mouth don’t get fed. She’s harnessing energy and directing feelings.”
Locals and tourists alike at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, a soul food restaurant, echoed the support. “She’s doing things a lot of politicians wish they could do,” said Denzel Gordon, 24, a social worker from New York. “She has the balls.”
Death threats, Trump taunts, Democratic leadership rebukes, love from the base – quite a few days, then, for Maxine Moore Waters. Those who know her well aren’t surprised. It’s been quite a life.
“She has been consistent and persistent,” said Carolyn Fowler, a member of the Black Women’s Forum, which Waters founded. A regimen of swimming and fasting keeps her going – “that and the injustice she sees on a daily basis”.
The fifth of 13 children, Waters was raised by a single mother in St Louis, Missouri. Ambition appeared to burn early – her high school yearbook reportedly predicted she would become speaker of the House.
After moving to Los Angeles in 1961, she worked in a clothing factory before qualifying as a teacher, obtaining a sociology degree and winning a state assembly seat in 1976.
She took strong, sometimes controversial positions: divesting state pension funds from businesses linked to apartheid-era South Africa; calling the 1992 Rodney King riots a “rebellion”; assailing the invasion of Iraq; accusing Barack Obama of neglecting African Americans. The Tea Party, she said, could go “straight to hell”.
Being nicknamed Kerosene Maxine – that dates from a 1994 contretemps in Congress - did not dent her rise up the ranks: chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, ranking member of the committee on financial services.
“She’s not just some liberal firebrand who doesn’t get things done,” said Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “She’s an incredibly experienced legislator and tactician. I believe she is the most senior elected official in the whole region at the federal, state or local level. She’s an icon.”
Corruption allegations, however, have cast a shadow.
Close relatives made more than $1m through business ties to companies and individuals that Waters aided, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2004.
Perceived conflicts of interest and nepotism prompted a liberal watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to include Waters on a list of corrupt members of Congress.
In 2008, Waters helped a bank, OneUnited, seek federal aid. Her husband, Sidney Williams, a former NFL player and ambassador to the Bahamas, risked losing $350,000 if it collapsed. After a three-year investigation, the House ethics committee exonerated Waters in 2012.
Her softening towards the financial services industry, which she used to assail, gave progressives further pause.
Come Trump, such concerns evaporated.
Waters, with her impregnable political base in LA, let rip during the primaries and never stopped. Trump, she said, was a “bully, an egotistical maniac, a liar”. She boycotted his inauguration, telling MSNBC: “I don’t honor him. I don’t respect him. And I don’t want to be involved with him.”
The more Trump policies caused outrage – the travel ban, dismantled environmental protections, deportations, family separations – the louder progressives cheered Auntie Maxine.
The more Trump supporters hit back – Bill O’Reilly compared her hair to a “James Brown wig” and a conservative magazine called her the “poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome” – the more Waters’ supporters had the same thought: pass the kerosene.
“She won’t back down and she shouldn’t back down,” said Jewett Walker, a Baptist pastor who ran local political campaigns in and around Waters’ district. “Because she has dared to criticise Trump, he has demonised her in the worst way and made her a target for zealots.”
James Fugate, who runs a bookshop in south LA, said Trump’s “low IQ” taunts showed the need for vigorous opposition. “He’s figured out a way to come close, without actually saying it: ‘Oh, she’s a monkey out of the tree.’”
The concern for Democrats is whether Auntie Maxine’s recipes, such as publicly shaming Trump officials, will backfire by alienating swing voters and galvanising Republicans in November’s midterm elections.
Guerra, the political analyst, played down that risk, saying the challenge for Democrats was to fire up their own base. “If you turn out Democrats, they win. Without Maxine Waters and people like her, the Democrats cannot recapture the House.”
Fighting Back in the Shadow of Risk and Environmental Injustice in Louisiana
Saturday, 07 July 2018 14:00
Reid writes: “If you’ve ever been to the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, you’ll find yourself wandering through its largest exhibit — showcasing the vast, teeming marine life one would expect to find in the Gulf of Mexico.”
View of construction crew backfilling the trench burying the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, next to Melinda Tillies's house in Youngsville, Louisiana from her kitchen. The pipeline was installed about 25 feet from her home on her neighbors land. There are no federal rules about how close a pipeline can be built next to a home. (photo: Julie Dermansky/Greenpeace)
Fighting Back in the Shadow of Risk and Environmental Injustice in Louisiana
By Lauren Reid, Greenpeace
07 July 18
The fossil fuel industry has a long and problematic history in Louisiana, particularly when it comes to building refineries and petrochemical plants in predominately African American, Indigenous, and minority communities. And now, with the intrusion of even more infrastructure — the Bayou Bridge Pipeline — it feels like another case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"... except this construction isn't going down without a real fight.
f you’ve ever been to the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, you’ll find yourself wandering through its largest exhibit — showcasing the vast, teeming marine life one would expect to find in the Gulf of Mexico. The animals are truly glorious to behold. Sharks, sea turtles, and schools of fish pulse in and out of a carefully built structure within the tank — finding sanctuary and protection from the world at large.
Yes, this is the same Gulf that, in 2010, was the site of the largest marine oil spill in history. This is a place where thousands of livelihoods were profoundly disrupted — if not destroyed — by the estimated 210 million barrels of oil that poured into their water. This is the same region that loses a football field size of land every hour due to coastal erosion, which is directly linked to extensive drilling and dredging of canals by the oil industry. How you might ask, did no one question this setup?
Understanding the enormous grip the fossil fuel industry has on the state is one place to start.
Louisiana has the single highest concentration of oil, natural gas, and petrochemical facilities in the Western hemisphere, and It’s also why it’s nearly impossible to meet someone that isn’t intimately affected in some way by it. I would know, I live here. If you’ve heard of Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, then you can start to get a sense of the peril many face by simply growing up and living here.
While an industrial corridor of more than 150 plants and refineries rapidly grew in that area over the last century, its placement significantly intruded into predominantly African American, Indigenous and minority communities who lived in the path — whose rights and safety were all but invisible to developers, the state, and local government. Towns like Freetown — a community established almost 150 years ago by freed slaves — were given no consideration when the industry moved in. The only say our communities were allowed was in choosing which new awful reality they’d prefer: either continue living in one of the most prominent zones of chemical plant explosions in the U.S, with the second highest rate of toxic releases in the country, or have your land bought-out as part of a ‘buffer zone’ — protecting the industry from future lawsuits, while vastly displacing century-old communities in its wake.
You would think these neighborhoods and communities had suffered enough from the intrusion. Yet unfortunately, many of these same people are facing another critical threat to their home — the Bayou Bridge Pipeline.
If this 163-mile line completed, it’s route will carve up 11 parishes in Louisiana and cross 700 bodies of water including Bayou LaFourche, a critical reservoir that supplies the United Houma Nation and 300,000 residents with drinking water. This is particularly dangerous considering that Bayou Bridge Pipeline is an Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) project — that’s the same fossil fuel company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and along with all its joint ventures, has spilled over 3.6 million gallons of hazardous liquids over the last 15 years. Louisiana has a fragile ecosystem, and it would only take one spill to potentially destroy the drinking water for thousands of people along with the livelihoods of those surviving off the bayou.
Yet none of this is going down without a fight.
Communities all across the region are resisting against these practices, and one of the most dedicated forces of resistance is the L’eau Est La Vie Camp — a group of activists working to directly prevent the final stop of the Dakota Access Pipeline route from being built. It is a community without leaders who raise up the voices of the Indigenous, black, and femme activists who are fiercely protecting their home, the bayous, and the Houma, Chitimacha, Chata, and Atakapaw territory in southern Louisiana.
This. is. so. f**ked. If you need a better example of how (in many places) there is NO separation of Oil and State, you would be hard pressed to find one! #noBBP#StopETPhttps://t.co/2KcdYfInAr
— Dallas Goldtooth (@dallasgoldtooth) June 7, 2018
— Leau Est La Vie Camp (@NoBayouBridge) June 5, 2018
Despite all of this, the activists of L’eau Est La Vie Camp continue to put their bodies and lives on the line to protect their home. And while ETP forges ahead with its dangerous pipeline, continuing to paint a convoluted story of protestors as some type of radical eco-terrorists who should be “removed from the gene pool” — the reality is truly the opposite. Those here who stand up to ETP are local Indigenous leaders. They’re crawfishermen and women. They’re African American communities, landowners, and environmental justice advocates. They are the ones fighting day and night protect themselves from a society and an industry that hasn’t ceased extracting everything it can from them in the name of profit.
Whether that’s to protect their land, physical health, or the communities who never asked, nor were frankly ever considered when yet another industrial construction site took over their neighborhood — many of those who protest these pipelines are doing so because the oil and gas industry as yet again left them no other choice.
Volunteers went door-to-door last weekend talking with communities along the route of the Bayou Bridge pipeline. Here are some of the highlights from the Water Protector Caravan. #NoBBP#StopETPpic.twitter.com/4FoSyv02hb
Call Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and demand that construction of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline stop in St. James parish until an evacuation route is put in place and the community has an adequate emergency response plan.
Lastly, you can help stand up to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Sign this petition to tell banks around the world to stop funding ETP because of their violations of human rights, including egregious violations of Indigenous rights.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=13834"><span class="small">Greg Palast, GregPalast.com</span></a>
Saturday, 07 July 2018 11:58
Palast writes: “I’m writing minutes after the victory of the Bernie Sanders of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Everyone calls him, “AMLO.” This is actually AMLO’s re-election: He first won the presidency in 2006. But back then the thieving, scheming, blood-stained criminal gang that rules Mexico (and I’m being polite), declared AMLO’s dissolute opponent the winner.”
Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador gestures as his supporters cheer in Zocalo Square after his general election victory, Mexico City, July 1, 2018. (photo: Getty Images)
How Andrés Manuel López Obrador, The "Bernie of Mexico", Won the Presidency
By Greg Palast, GregPalast.com
07 July 18
’m writing minutes after the victory of the Bernie Sanders of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Everyone calls him, “AMLO.” This is actually AMLO’s re-election: He first won the presidency in 2006. But back then the thieving, scheming, blood-stained criminal gang that rules Mexico (and I’m being polite), declared AMLO’s dissolute opponent the winner.
This is Trump’s nightmare.
In 2006, rather than concede to vote thievery, lick his wounds and toddle off on a book tour, AMLO took his supporters into the streets, raised hell, blocked the capital’s central square for months, held a People’s Inaugural, and vowed to never, ever concede.
And tonight, twelve years later, AMLO has won a crushing, too-big-to-steal victory in Mexico’s presidential election.
And while the Good and Great told him he’d be finished if he kept protesting the stolen election, he made counting every vote the very first of his five-point campaign platform. He understands that even those with empty stomachs also hunger for democracy.
And there’s a lesson here. Are you listening, Al Gore? Mr. Kerry and Mrs. Clinton?
Bernie or Hugo?
And AMLO gave the people something to vote for. The rest of his platform included expanding free college education, raising the minimum wage, fighting income inequality and creating a massive infrastructure-fixing jobs program.
If that sounds like Bernie Sanders, that’s no accident. AMLO, like Bernie, said he is taking his program from that great Mexican hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Nevertheless, Mexican media blared apoplectic prophesies that AMLO would be the Second Coming of Hugo Chavez, with mass nationalizations to follow. (The hysteria was parroted in the New York Times, not coincidentally, owned by Mexico’s richest man.)
I can tell you, AMLO is way more Bernie Sanders than Hugo Chavez, and I’ve known all three. (That’s not to knock Chavez who rightly shifted the nation’s oil wealth from the pampered to the impoverished.)
Both AMLO and Sanders were mayors who ran their cities as what I’d call, “Pothole Populists.” It’s get-the-job-done socialism with the emphasis on social not –ism.
AMLO proved he could tamp down corruption, keep a stingy hold on budgets while increasing pensions and providing education grants. Mayor AMLO, unlike a certain Mr. Trump, completed major city infrastructure projects—all out of the savings from cutting waste and corruption.
But unlike Bernie, who did his good works in the mean streets of Burlington, Vermont, AMLO worked nothing less than a miracle in Mexico City, which is bigger than New York and ten times as ungovernable.
(And like Bernie, AMLO is a working class kid who worked in the social movement trenches: Sanders as a SNCC organizer in Chicago, while López Obrador spent six years living with, sharing the lives of and fighting for the poorest Mayan families.)
But they are stealing it right now
Let’s not get carried away with our democracy high. This election is being stolen as I write.
Not the presidency. AMLO’s poll lead of 52% to 25% for his nearest competitor, is just too much to steal. But every seat of the Mexican Congress is up for grabs, and the Powers that Be, the laughably named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) are fighting for their lives – and sometimes they fight with bullets.
So, far, 132 officials and candidates have been murdered in this election cycle. I spoke with voting rights activist (and movie star) Yareli Arizmendi in Mexico City, who told me that the old guard politicians were tied up with drug gangs.
In all fairness, I should note that many victims were not just AMLO allies but also PRI, Green Party and independents who challenged the control of their cities and states by narco-traficantes.
Indeed, AMLO’s campaign gained fuel when, in 2014, the public learned of the disappearance of 43 students (and 3 investigating journalists). Evidence now indicates they were hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid by the Guerreros Unidos gang – on orders from a politician connected to the ruling parties.
Arizmendi reports that ballots have been burnt in gang- and ruling-party controlled districts. She sent me a video of a woman pre-marking a stack of ballots.
I saw this game up close in 2006 when I was sent by the Guardian and Democracy Now to investigate AMLO’s shock loss by just half a percent of the vote.
On election night, AMLO was way ahead when the official count was halted—then resumed with a massive reversal in the final count. Our investigators found massive ballot-box stuffing, ballot box dumping and intimidation of voters at gunpoint. There were games with electoral rolls apparently orchestrated by the Bush Administration which, I found, had used the same company that helped Katherine Harris rig the 2000 election in Florida, ChoicePoint, to steal Mexico’s entire voter roll! (Watch this Democracy Now! report, “Florida con Salsa,” from Mexico City.)
This time, the incumbent PRI hired Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s social-media manipulators and data thieves were paid $7.2 million on their promise—I can’t make this up—to repeat a Mexican variant of their “Corrupt Hillary” campaign to smear AMLO.
It was a hard sell, especially as the wife of the current President, PRI man Enrique Peña Nieto, was caught taking a $7 million condo from a government contractor.
As I write, it looks like AMLO has crushed the second-highest candidate by a vote of two-to-one and swept the House of Deputies. However, his coalition of parties is, as of the moment, showing poorly in the Senate race, way below pre-election polling data.
AMLO: Arrest Trump
Mexicans have had enough of the Trump-ito grifters who have held the Mexican presidency, usually by theft, for decades.
President Peña Nieto made his nation cringe with his invitation to Trump during the US Presidential campaign, boosting Trump’s candidacy. And he’s not had much to say about the caging of children on the border.
Although Trump’s child prisoners and their families detained at the border are not Mexican citizens (most come from Central America), AMLO has called for Trump’s arrest for the kidnappings as violating international law.
That’s just one indication AMLO’s victory is Trump’s nightmare. AMLO has shown he is not afraid of privileged pricks, even if they try to make themselves look fierce by staining themselves orange.
NAFTA
Weirdly, López Obrador has also been called “The Trump of Mexico,” simply because they both speak to the desperation of their nation’s working classes. And both have few good words for NAFTA.
But Trump’s act, the billionaire turned class warrior, was always a fake. AMLO is for real.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has demanded that Mexico raise the wages of all auto workers so that the US can better compete within NAFTA.
AMLO is calling Trump’s bluff: he said, “yes” – which may come as a shock to Secretary Ross… Ross owns eight of those auto factories.
Hope and Danger
The slogan of AMLO’s coalition is, Juntos Haremos Historia. Together, we’ll make history. But history has a way of bleeding to death in Mexico.
In March 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio was on the cusp of winning Mexico’s presidency. But his political turn to the Left infuriated his PRI bosses. At a public rally where he supposedly had government protection, one assassin, and possibly a second, put two bullets in his head.
FOCUS: NY Times Editorial Board | Democrats: Do Not Surrender the Judiciary
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43297"><span class="small">The New York Times Editorial Board</span></a>
Saturday, 07 July 2018 10:35
Excerpt: “With Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.”
Activists in front of the US Supreme Court. (photo: Getty Images)
NY Times Editorial Board | Democrats: Do Not Surrender the Judiciary
By The New York Times Editorial Board
07 July 18
ith Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.
This is all the more reason for Democrats and progressives to take a page from “The Godfather” and go to the mattresses on this issue. Because this battle is about more than a single seat on the nation’s highest court. With public attention focused on all that is at stake with this alignment, this is the moment for Democrats to drive home to voters the crucial role that the judiciary plays in shaping this nation, and why the courts should be a key voting concern in Every. Single. Election.
This call to arms may sound overly dramatic. It’s not. As hyperpartisanship, gridlock and a general abdication of responsibility have rendered Congress increasingly dysfunctional, the judiciary is taking an ever-greater hand in policy areas ranging from immigration to guns to ballot access to worker rights. As John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, mused in 2016: “The legislative process, the political process in Washington, is at a standstill and will be regardless of who wins. The only thing that really matters over the next four years or eight years is who is going to appoint the next Supreme Court nominees.”
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nvironmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt – who at times appeared to be competing in a personal decathalon of corruption – 
mid threats to assassinate, hang, lynch, expel and otherwise silence her, Maxine Waters clambered on to a stage in Los Angeles last week and did what comes naturally: hurl defiance.
f you’ve ever been to the Audubon Aquarium in New Orleans, you’ll find yourself wandering through its largest exhibit — showcasing the vast, teeming marine life one would expect to find in the Gulf of Mexico. The animals are truly glorious to behold. Sharks, sea turtles, and schools of fish pulse in and out of a carefully built structure within the tank — finding sanctuary and protection from the world at large.
ith Republicans controlling the Senate and the judicial filibuster dead, the Democrats’ odds of denying President Trump a second Supreme Court appointment are slim. Barring some unforeseen development, the president will lock in a 5-to-4 conservative majority, shifting the court solidly to the right for a generation.
