Fellow Steven Rosenfeld issued three recent reports on the upcoming elections and why it’s crucial to America’s future for voters to maintain faith in the democratic system—and dangerous to spread information to the contrary, without evidence.
As a key deadline approaches next week on updating statewide voter rolls before the November election, it appears a controversial data-mining operation mostly used by red states to purge legitimate voters is withering, or at least dormant, in 2018.
Dear Michael Harriot: Your latest article in The Root—arguing that Russia hijacked the 2016 presidential vote count and the “updated” essay attempting to clean up those errors but not backing down—isn’t merely another edgy musing with dots that don’t that connect, or substituting your gut feeling for proof.
A curious dichotomy has appeared in the American political world when it comes to preventing a repeat in 2018’s elections. While there’s been muchado andaction from officials to prevent hacking the computer systems that comprise the voting process—one of Russia’s 2016 tactics, there’s also a corresponding absence of federal action when it comes to proactive efforts to stop online propaganda, which was Russia’s other major focus.
Rosenfeld’s reporting underscores how a rising tide of alarmist reporting about voter trends isn’t reflecting what’s new in 2018 nor will encourage Americans to believe their vote matters, will be counted, and that they can have confidence in the process. As the 2018 midterms approach, Americans of every political persuasion need to know what’s being done to safeguard voting from cyber threats, which is a lot, compared to the federal government’s hands-off approach allowing freewheeling online propaganda to continue largely unabated from 2016.
IMI Deep State project Fellow Jeff Morley got first-hand insight into the jurist philosophy of Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh just hours before Trump nominated him. Kavanaugh issued a majority opinion from the D.C. Supreme Court of Appeals that exhibits his penchant for “unbridled executive branch power,” as Morley argues. Writing for The Intercept, Morley explains:
ON A MONDAY AFTERNOON, on July 9, the D.C. Court of Appeals handed down a 2-1 decision against me and in favor of the CIA in a long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. At 4:20 p.m., Judges Brett Kavanaugh and Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, filed a 14-page opinion with the clerk of the court in Washington. They ruled that the CIA had acted “reasonably” in responding to my request for certain ancient files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Appended to their decision was a 17-page dissent from their colleague Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson who strongly objected to their decision.
That evening, President Donald Trump announced to the world that Kavanaugh was his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his remarks at the White House event, Kavanaugh touted his “Female Relationship Resume” and declared, “My judicial philosophy is straightforward: A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law.” …
Kavanaugh’s ruling in Morley v. CIA was of a piece with his record as an advocate of unbridled executive branch power. His view that a sitting president cannot be indicted, or even subpoenaed, is well known. Less known is his permissive treatment of the CIA. In my case, as in another key FOIA case from 2014, Kavanaugh ruled that the agency could not be held publicly accountable for its actions — even ones that occurred more than 50 years ago.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (credit: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia)
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt may have resigned in shame, but the agency still needs to be fixed.
The following op-ed is by Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and was produced byEarth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Insitute.
The Environmental Protection Agency has never been an institution whose primary allegiance was to the public interest. How do I know this? I have the agency’s own words for it. In late 2017 my organization, the Bioscience Resource Project, along with the Center for Media and Democracy, made available a vast trove of documents called the Poison Papers. These documents are two and a half tons of internal minutes, correspondence, reports, unsealed court documents, and more from the chemical industry and its regulators. Many of them originate from the EPA and date back to its inception in 1970.
The papers show many things, but one of them is that the agency has repeatedly overlooked strong evidence that independent chemical toxicity testing was fraudulent. EPA has known that laboratories skewed results in favor of applicants’ products. Sometimes, the agency has actively covered up such fraud.
EPA’s internal procedures for evaluating chemical safety were no better. Staff “cut and pasted” industry text into their reviews, failed to share evidence with external reviewers, and told applicants that products would be approved before applications had been fully evaluated. The agency also adopted reviewing procedures that make it highly unlikely that hazardous products would be identified as such. For example, data evidencing carcinogenic activity in test animals were repeatedly subjected to review and re-review until ways, as one employee wrote, “calculated to impress the uninitiated and the gullible” were found to disregard them. Meanwhile, evidence of non-carcinogenic toxicity was simply ignored. The situation was so bad in its Office of Pesticides that one EPA official accused his superior of having “downright contempt for the health of the American people.”
Having studied the documents as well as the agency itself, I would like to offer a diagnosis and propose some solutions. The inappropriate activities described in the documents are highly noteworthy on several counts. One is that they span a long time period; second, they occur across much of the agency; third, they are extremely diverse, spanning numerous procedural and scientific aspects; and fourth, they are spread across many complicit individuals. In other words, these derelictions do not demonstrate local branches gone rogue nor specific corrupted individuals, nor even specific situations. Rather, they reflect a deep conflict at the agency that is vastly more powerful than its written mandate to protect the public.
To understand why, it is necessary to get inside the head of the EPA. Imagine that zealous action on the part of EPA to protect human health from chemical toxicity or corporate malfeasance will engender strong feedback from the affected corporation, its lobbyists, and its other friends in Washington. The affected parties and its powerful friends will appeal to the president at whose “pleasure” the chief administrator of EPA serves. If that administrator does not have the president’s support for strong action, which he or she likely does not, then the best possible outcome for that agency—to avoid it suffering a damaging and embarrassing public humiliation—is for that evidence to never come to light. It should either be lost or buried, preferably as early in the evaluation process as possible.
This is the primary—unwritten—rule that has guided EPA from the beginning. The rule, known to every agency official, is that every finding of toxicity or corporate malfeasance is an institutional problem. The inevitable result is an institutional culture that regards findings of chemical toxicity as mistakes and aberrations.
The following represent some simple suggestions that, taking the above into account, would vastly improve the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency.
First, divide EPA into two agencies. One half should be responsible for lawmaking and the other for enforcement. This removes what is at present a confusion of responsibilities in which the rule makers at EPA are incentivized to create loopholes so that no successful prosecutions will occur and result in conflicts such as described above.
Secondly, the leaders of each of these separate agencies should be responsible to Congress and not, as EPA’s chief administrator is now, to the president. The reason is that presently EPA can enforce environmental laws only if the president agrees. Under such circumstances the agency can never be a better environmental and health advocate than the person in the White House. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House the danger of this should be immediately clear.
The third proposal is to protect and reward whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are potential assets to society. They are individuals courageous enough and independent enough to bring the misdeeds of colleagues and other officials to public attention. Supposing they can prove that the performance of their colleagues is truly inappropriate or illegal, then whistleblowers should be positively rewarded, which at present they are not.
Public health and the environment need effective and independent advocates, for the sake of the climate, the oceans, and communities. These changes can make EPA into an agency that truly advocates for them, rather than one that merely pretends to act in their interest.
Jonathan R. Latham, PhD, is the co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, director of the Poison Papers Project, and editor of the Independent Science News website. He holds a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology.
Make It Right Project Billboards Boost Activist Campaigns to Remove ‘Silent Sam’ Confederate Monument
July 4, 2018
Raleigh, N.C. — The Make It Right Project has put up two Raleigh-area billboards that support the removal of UNC-Chapel Hill Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam.” The signs, which include a photo of the statue covered by a red “X,” display the message “North Carolina needs a monumental change.” UNC students and Chapel Hill activists have been demonstrating against Silent Sam since 1968. The billboards are part of a larger campaign by the Make It Right Project to elevate and bolster protests by those who have put their lives and livelihoods on the line to remove Confederate monuments.
“For five decades, UNC administrators have ignored students’ requests to remove an homage to an army that fought to defend black chattel slavery,” said Kali Holloway, Director of the Make It Right Project. “From the moment Silent Sam was erected in 1913, when Julian Carr thanked Confederates who ‘saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race’ and bragged about how he once ‘horse-whipped a Negro wench’ near the site of the statue, it’s been clear the message Silent Sam was meant to send.”
Make It Right’s billboards are echoing broad public sentiment. Chapel Hill activists have appealed to the North Carolina Historic Commission to remove Silent Sam from the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Members of the N.C,. Historical Commission are reviewing the status of the state’s Confederate monuments. The Commission is currently considering a petition by Governor Roy Cooper to relocate three Raleigh Confederate monuments.
“The North Carolina Historical Commission has an historic opportunity to stand on the right side of history and to declare what the state’s values really are,” added Holloway. “Silent Sam pays homage to a traitorous army and nation willing to go to war to keep black people enslaved in one of history’s most brutally dehumanizing systems. He is a visible manifestation of white supremacy, and every entity that is complicit in keeping Silent Sam standing has essentially declared its support of white power and disregard for black lives.”
Local media noted that the billboards are an indicator that the battle to take down Silent Sam is being waged beyond the borders of Chapel Hill. “Silent Sam isn’t just at UNC-Chapel Hill anymore,” WTVD-TV, a local ABC affiliate, wrote. “The controversy about the Confederate monument is now plastered on two billboards in Raleigh.”
“The fact that Silent Sam has garnered attention from the Make It Right Project shows that this is a racial justice issue that affects everyone, not just North Carolinians,” said Heather Redding, a Chapel Hill activist. “If a racist Jim Crow era monument can’t be easily removed from a public university in 2018, and we are still having to tease out Lost Cause propaganda from an honest account of this country’s racial history, then we have a lot of work to do as a nation. The removal of symbolism that venerates an era of lawful white supremacy is a critical first step.”
The Make It Right Project is dedicated to working with multiple groups—activists, artists, historians and media outlets—to remove Confederate monuments and develop post-removal protocols to properly historicize and contextualize these markers. It is a project of the progressive media and advocacy organization the Independent Media Institute. To learn more about the project, or the 10 Confederate monuments it is targeting for removal, visit the project website.
Rising temperatures are pushing species into new territory, which could endanger fisheries around the world.
by Amy McDermott
Gloomy octopuses used to blend in. They were just another cephalopod, drab-gray and medium-bodied, living in the ocean off east-central Australia—until a few decades ago, when the octopuses started to spread.
They crept south, establishing populations down Australia’s East Coast, a climate change hotspot where seawater temperatures are rising almost four times faster than the global average. Gloomies love the heat—and chowing down on shellfish. If the newcomers’ appetites disrupt existing fisheries, researchers say, it could spell trouble.
In Australia and around the world, ocean animals are relocating because of climate change, often with consequences for fisheries. Gloomy octopuses are just one of many marine species on the move. Their expansion is a harbinger of what’s to come in places warming more slowly than Australia. Forget blending in: Climate consequences have arrived.
Gloomy octopuses have expanded down the East Coast of Australia in recent years. Above, one recovers after genetic sampling in Cape Conran, Australia. (image credit: Colin Silvey)
Lives in Motion
It happened fast.
Named for their ghostly white eyes, gloomy octopuses spread steadily south in the last two decades, said fisheries scientist Brad Moore of the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Gloomies are naturally found in central-eastern Australia, but appeared hundreds of miles south in Victoria after 2000, and even further down, off the island of Tasmania, in 2006. Three years later, Moore said, the species was included in Tasmania’s fisheries guidebook.
Recreational fishermen and divers also noticed gloomies out of place, and reported sightings as part of an Australian citizen science project called Redmap, which tracks marine species on the move.
“People send in photo observations,” said marine ecologist Gretta Pecl, who started Redmap as part of her research at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania. “We get an early indication of what species might be shifting, and then we initiate a more targeted research study.”
In the gloomy’s case, commercial fishermen and citizen scientist observations tipped off Pecl’s team, and inspired a forthcoming genetic study, led by marine biologist Jorge Ramos, which confirms a rapid and recent expansion south.
Tentacled Tides
Gloomies can thank climate change for their new digs. Global warming affects ocean currents, including one that runs down the East Coast of Australia. The East Australian Current has extended farther and farther south over the last 50 years.
“We believe it’s moving species into Tasmanian waters,” Ramos said. Warm, strong flows act like a southerly conveyor belt for marine creatures, including the octopuses.
While gloomies are thriving, their arrival in Tasmania has some experts worried. Abalone and rock lobster are the two largest commercial wild fisheries for the island, making up more than 75 percent of landings by weight. Both could suffer, Ramos said, if the octopus eats too many of the shellfish. Abalone and oysters are already struggling through marine heat waves, caused by the growing warm current. Another problem is the last thing they need.
A gloomy octopus rests after scientist Jorge Ramos collected a small tissue sample from one of its arms for genetic analysis. Octopuses can regrow lost limbs, “so the piece of arm will grow back,” Ramos said. (image credit: Colin Silvey)
Not everyone is so worried. Craig Hardy is an octopus fisherman in Stanley, Tasmania, where he’s seen gloomies off the island’s northern tip for about 10 years—as long as he’s been fishing up there. Hardy was the first to hunt octopus in the area, he said, and suspects the gloomies were around all along; people just hadn’t seen them.
That’s possible, Ramos agreed, but he thinks the current swept more octopuses down in the last decade. Based on his forthcoming genetic work, Ramos would “guess the species was there, but in low numbers, and now it’s becoming more common.”
Octopus fishing is decent business in Tasmania. After abalone and lobster, it accounts for 11 percent of remaining landings by weight. Fishermen like Hardy haven’t historically caught gloomies. Most of their catch is a smaller, native species. But the newcomer is becoming an attractive target, Hardy said, because of its size. Gloomies are common in markets on the mainland up north, and Hardy’s found them “a good species to sell.”
The gloomy octopus isn’t the only stranger in Tasmanian waters. The East Australian Current has washed more than 70 species south in recent years. Some, like the long-spined sea urchin, have wrought havoc upon arrival. Others have been less damaging, but they all bring new considerations. Critters will keep coming down the coast in the next 50 years, fisheries scientist Moore expects, making Tasmania’s coast more like the eastern mainland’s as time goes by.
Australia and its gloomy octopus are a parable of things to come in many slower-warming places. Along the West Coast of North America, for example, some fish could shift more than 900 miles this century under a high emissions scenario. Even if change hasn’t come yet, “there’s a lot of evidence to say things will change,” Moore said. “It’s about getting ready.”
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Amy McDermott is a science writer and web editor at Oceana, where she covers marine conservation. Previously, her work has appeared in Grist, Discover and The Atlantic, among others. Follow her on Twitter @amygmcdermott.
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