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Bill McKibben | Exxon's Never-Ending Big Dig
Bill McKibben, Reader Supported News
McKibben writes: "Exxon's deceit - its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years - may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet's geological history. It's in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, 'hottest year ever recorded' has become a tired cliche."
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Bill McKibben, Reader Supported News
McKibben writes: "Exxon's deceit - its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years - may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet's geological history. It's in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, 'hottest year ever recorded' has become a tired cliche."
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Flooding the Earth With Fossil Fuels
ere’s the story so far. We have the chief legal representatives of the eighth and 16th largest economies on Earth (California and New York) probing the biggest fossil fuel company on Earth (ExxonMobil), while both Democratic presidential candidates are demanding that the federal Department of Justice join the investigation of what may prove to be one of the biggest corporate scandals in American history. And that’s just the beginning. As bad as Exxon has been in the past, what it’s doing now -- entirely legally -- is helping push the planet over the edge and into the biggest crisis in the entire span of the human story.
Back in the fall, you might have heard something about how Exxon had covered up what it knew early on about climate change. Maybe you even thought to yourself: that doesn’t surprise me. But it should have. Even as someone who has spent his life engaged in the bottomless pit of greed that is global warming, the news and its meaning came as a shock: we could have avoided, it turns out, the last quarter century of pointless climate debate.
As a start, investigations by the Pulitzer-Prize winning Inside Climate News, the Los Angeles Times,and Columbia Journalism School revealed in extraordinary detail that Exxon’s top officials had known everything there was to know about climate change back in the 1980s. Even earlier, actually. Here’s what senior company scientist James Black told Exxon’s management committee in 1977: "In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.” To determine if this was so, the company outfitted an oil tanker with carbon dioxide sensors to measure concentrations of the gas over the ocean, and then funded elaborate computer models to help predict what temperatures would do in the future.
The results of all that work were unequivocal. By 1982, in an internal “corporate primer,” Exxon’s leaders were told that, despite lingering unknowns, dealing with climate change "would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion." Unless that happened, the primer said, citing independent experts, "there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered... Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." But that document, “given wide circulation” within Exxon, was also stamped “Not to be distributed externally.”
So here’s what happened. Exxon used its knowledge of climate change to plan its own future. The company, for instance, leased large tracts of the Arctic for oil exploration, territory where, as a company scientist pointed out in 1990, “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs.” Not only that but, “from the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic,” Exxon and its affiliates set about“raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic.” In other words, the company started climate-proofing its facilities to head off a future its own scientists knew was inevitable.
But in public? There, Exxon didn’t own up to any of this. In fact, it did precisely the opposite. In the 1990s, it started to put money and muscle into obscuring the science around climate change. It funded think tanks that spread climate denial and even recruited lobbying talent from the tobacco industry. It also followedthe tobacco playbook when it came to the defense of cigarettes by highlighting “uncertainty” about the science of global warming. And it spent lavishly to back political candidates who were ready to downplay global warming.
Its CEO, Lee Raymond, even traveled to China in 1997 and urged government leaders there to go full steam ahead in developing a fossil fuel economy. The globe was cooling, not warming, he insisted, while his engineers were raising drilling platforms to compensate for rising seas. "It is highly unlikely," he said, "that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now." Which wasn’t just wrong, but completely and overwhelmingly wrong -- as wrong as a man could be.
Sins of Omission
In fact, Exxon’s deceit -- its ability to discourage regulations for 20 years -- may turn out to be absolutely crucial in the planet’s geological history. It’s in those two decades that greenhouse gas emissions soared, as did global temperatures until, in the twenty-first century, “hottest year ever recorded” has becomea tired cliché. And here’s the bottom line: had Exxon told the truth about what it knew back in 1990, we might not have wasted a quarter of a century in a phony debate about the science of climate change, nor would anyone have accused Exxon of being “alarmist.” We would simply have gotten to work.
But Exxon didn’t tell the truth. A Yale study published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that money from Exxon and the Koch Brothers played a key role in polarizing the climate debate in this country.
The company’s sins -- of omission and commission -- may even turn out to be criminal. Whether the company “lied to the public” is the question that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided toinvestigate last fall in a case that could make him the great lawman of our era if his investigation doesn’t languish. There are various consumer fraud statutes that Exxon might have violated and it might have failed to disclose relevant information to investors, which is the main kind of lying that's illegal in this country of ours. Now, Schneiderman's got backup from California Attorney General Kamala Harris, and maybe -- if activists continue to apply pressure -- from the Department of Justice as well, though its highly publicized unwillingness to go after the big banks does not inspire confidence.
Here’s the thing: all that was bad back then, but Exxon and many of its Big Energy peers are behaving at least as badly now when the pace of warming is accelerating. And it’s all legal -- dangerous, stupid, and immoral, but legal.
On the face of things, Exxon has, in fact, changed a little in recent years.
For one thing, it’s stopped denying climate change, at least in a modest way. Rex Tillerson, Raymond’s successor as CEO, stopped telling world leaders that the planet was cooling. Speaking in 2012 at the Council on Foreign Relations, he said, “I'm not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It'll have a warming impact.”
Of course, he immediately went on to say that its impact was uncertain indeed, hard to estimate, and in any event entirely manageable. His language was striking. “We will adapt to this. Changes to weather patterns that move crop production areas around -- we'll adapt to that. It's an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.”
Add to that gem of a comment this one: the real problem, he insisted, was that “we have a society that by and large is illiterate in these areas, science, math, and engineering, what we do is a mystery to them and they find it scary. And because of that, it creates easy opportunities for opponents of development, activist organizations, to manufacture fear.”
Right. This was in 2012, within months of floods across Asia that displaced tens of millions and during the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States, when much of our grain crop failed. Oh yeah, and just before Hurricane Sandy.
He’s continued the same kind of belligerent rhetoric throughout his tenure. At last year’s ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, he said that if the world had to deal with “inclement weather,” which “may or may not be induced by climate change,” we should employ unspecified “new technologies.” Mankind, he explained, “has this enormous capacity to deal with adversity.”
In other words, we’re no longer talking about outright denial, just a denial that much really needs to be done. And even when the company has proposed doing something, its proposals have been strikingly ethereal. Exxon’s PR team, for instance, has discussed supporting a price on carbon, which is only what economists left, right, and center have been recommending since the 1980s. But the minimal price they recommend -- somewhere in the range of $40 to $60 a ton -- wouldn’t do much to slow down their business. After all, they insist that all their reserves are still recoverable in the context of such a price increase, which would serve mainly to make life harder for the already terminal coal industry.
But say you think it’s a great idea to put a price on carbon -- which, in fact, it is, since every signal helps sway investment decisions. In that case, Exxon’s done its best to make sure that what they pretend to support in theory will never happen in practice.
Consider, for instance, their political contributions. The website Dirty Energy Money, organized by Oil Change International, makes it easy to track who gave what to whom. If you look at all of Exxon’s political contributions from 1999 to the present, a huge majority of their political harem of politicians have signed the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform that binds them to vote against any new taxes. Norquist himself wrote Congress in late January that “a carbon tax is a VAT or Value Added Tax on training wheels. Any carbon tax would inevitably be spread out over wider and wider parts of the economy until we had a European Value Added Tax.” As he told a reporter last year, “I don’t see the path to getting a lot of Republican votes” for a carbon tax, and since he’s been called “the most powerful man in American politics,” that seems like a good bet.
The only Democratic senator in Exxon’s top 60 list was former Louisiana solon Mary Landrieu, whomade a great virtue in her last race of the fact that she was “the key vote” in blocking carbon pricing in Congress. Bill Cassidy, the man who defeated her, is also an Exxon favorite, and lost no time in co-sponsoring a bill opposing any carbon taxes. In other words, you could really call Exxon’s supposed concessions on climate change a Shell game. Except it’s Exxon.
The Never-Ending Big Dig
Even that’s not the deepest problem.
The deepest problem is Exxon’s business plan. The company spends huge amounts of money searching for new hydrocarbons. Given the recent plunge in oil prices, its capital spending and exploration budget was indeed cut by 12% in 2015 to $34 billion, and another 25% in 2016 to $23.2 billion. In 2015, that meant Exxon was spending $63 million a day “as it continues to bring new projects on line.” They are still spending a cool $1.57 billion a year looking for new sources of hydrocarbons -- $4 million a day, every day.
As Exxon looks ahead, despite the current bargain basement price of oil, it still boasts of expansion plans in the Gulf of Mexico, eastern Canada, Indonesia, Australia, the Russian far east, Angola, and Nigeria. “The strength of our global organization allows us to explore across all geological and geographical environments, using industry-leading technology and capabilities.” And its willingness to get in bed with just about any regime out there makes it even easier. Somewhere in his trophy case, for instance, Rex Tillerson has an Order of Friendship medal from one Vladimir Putin. All it took was a joint energy venture estimated to be worth $500 billion.
But, you say, that’s what oil companies do, go find new oil, right? Unfortunately, that’s precisely what we can’t have them doing any more. About a decade ago, scientists first began figuring out a “carbon budget” for the planet -- an estimate for how much more carbon we could burn before we completely overheated the Earth. There are potentially many thousands of gigatons of carbon that could be extracted from the planet if we keep exploring. The fossil fuel industry has already identified at least 5,000 gigatons of carbon that it has told regulators, shareholders, and banks it plans to extract. However, we can only burnabout another 900 gigatons of carbon before we disastrously overheat the planet. On our current trajectory, we’d burn through that “budget” in about a couple of decades. The carbon we’ve burned has already raised the planet’s temperature a degree Celsius, and on our present course we’ll burn enough to take us past two degrees in less than 20 years.
At this point, in fact, no climate scientist thinks that even a two-degree rise in temperature is a safe target, since one degree is already melting the ice caps. (Indeed, new data released this month shows that, if we hit the two-degree mark, we’ll be living with drastically raised sea levels for, oh, twice as long as human civilization has existed to date.) That’s why in November world leaders in Paris agreed to try to limit the planet’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or just under three degrees Fahrenheit. If you wanted to meet that target, however, you would need to be done burning fossil fuels by perhaps 2020, which is in technical terms just about now.
That's why it’s wildly irresponsible for a company to be leading the world in oil exploration when, as scientists have carefully explained, we already have access to four or five times as much carbon in the Earth as we can safely burn. We have it, as it were, on the shelf. So why would we go looking for more? Scientists have even done us the useful service of identifying precisely the kinds of fossil fuels we should never dig up, and -- what do you know -- an awful lot of them are on Exxon’s future wish list, including the tar sands of Canada, a particularly carbon-filthy, environmentally destructive fuel to produce and burn.
Even Exxon’s one attempt to profit from stanching global warming has started to come apart. Several years ago, the company began a calculated pivot in the direction of natural gas, which produces less carbon than oil when burned. In 2009, Exxon acquired XTO Energy, a company that had mastered the art of extracting gas from shale via hydraulic fracturing. By now, Exxon has become America’s leading fracker and a pioneer in natural gas markets around the world. The trouble with fracked natural gas -- other than what Tillerson once called “farmer Joe’s lit his faucet on fire” -- is this: in recent years, it’s become clear that the process of fracking for gas releases large amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. As Cornell University scientist Robert Howarth has recently established, burning natural gas to produce electricity probably warms the planet faster than burning coal or crude oil.
Exxon’s insistence on finding and producing ever more fossil fuels certainly benefited its shareholders for a time, even if it cost the Earth dearly. Five of the 10 largest annual profits ever reported by any company belonged to Exxon in these years. Even the financial argument is now, however, weakening. Over the last five years, Exxon has lagged behind many of its competitors as well as the broader market, and a big reason, according to the Carbon Tracker Initiative (CTI), is its heavy investment in particularly expensive, hard-to-recover oil and gas.
In 2007, as CTI reported, Canadian tar sands and similar “heavy oil” deposits accounted for 7.5% of Exxon’s proven reserves. By 2013, that number had risen to 17%. A smart business strategy for the company, according to CTI, would involve shrinking its exploration budget, concentrating on the oil fields it has access to that can still be pumped profitably at low prices, and using the cash flow to buy back shares or otherwise reward investors.
That would, however, mean exchanging Exxon’s Texan-style big-is-good approach for something far more modest. And since we’re speaking about what was the biggest company on the planet for a significant part of the twentieth century, Exxon seems to be set on continuing down that bigger-is-better path. They’re betting that the price of oil will rise in the reasonably near future, that alternative energy won’t develop fast enough, and that the world won’t aggressively tackle climate change. And the company will keep trying to cover those bets by aggressively backing politicians capable of ensuring that nothing happens.
Can Exxon Be Pressured?
Next to that fierce stance on the planet’s future, the mild requests of activists for the last 25 years seem... well, next to pointless. At the 2015 ExxonMobil shareholder meeting, for instance, religious shareholder activists asked for the umpteenth time that the company at least make public its plans for managing climate risks. Even BP, Shell, and Statoil had agreed to that much. Instead, Exxon’s management campaigned against the resolution and it got only 9.6% of shareholder votes, a tally so low it can’t even be brought up again for another three years. By which time we’ll have burned through... oh, never mind.
What we need from Exxon is what they’ll never give: a pledge to keep most of their reserves underground, an end to new exploration, and a promise to stay away from the political system. Don’t hold your breath.
But if Exxon seems hopelessly set in its ways, revulsion is growing. The investigations by the New York and California attorneys general mean that the company will have to turn over lots of documents. If journalists could find out as much as they did about Exxon’s deceit in public archives, think what someone with subpoena power might accomplish. Many other jurisdictions could jump in, too.
At the Paris climate talks in December, a panel of law professors led a well-attended session on the different legal theories that courts around the world might apply to the company’s deceptive behavior. When that begins to happen, count on one thing: the spotlight won’t shine exclusively on Exxon. As with the tobacco companies in the decades when they were covering up the dangers of cigarettes, there’s a good chance that the Big Energy companies were in this together through their trade associations and other front groups. In fact, just before Christmas, Inside Climate News published some revealing new documents about the role that Texaco, Shell, and other majors played in an American Petroleum Institute study of climate change back in the early 1980s. A trial would be a transformative event -- a reckoning for the crime of the millennium.
But while we’re waiting for the various investigations to play out, there’s lots of organizing going at the state and local level when it comes to Exxon, climate change, and fossil fuels -- everything from politely asking more states to join the legal process to politely shutting down gas stations for a few hours to pointing out to New York and California that they might not want to hold millions of dollars of stock in a company they’re investigating. It may even be starting to work.
Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, for instance, singled Exxon out in his state of the state address last month. He called on the legislature to divest the state of its holdings in the company because of its deceptions. “This is a page right out of Big Tobacco,” he said, “which for decades denied the health risks of their product as they were killing people. Owning ExxonMobil stock is not a business Vermont should be in.”
The question is: Why on God’s-not-so-green-Earth-anymore would anyone want to be Exxon’s partner?
Clinton's Nevada Lead Is Gone & Her Backers Are Freaking
Tina Nguyen, Vanity Fair
Nguyen writes: "Allies in Hillary Clinton's orbit are panicking as the campaign prepares for the possibility of losing a state that one Democratic strategist called 'tailor-made' for Clinton."
Tina Nguyen, Vanity Fair
Nguyen writes: "Allies in Hillary Clinton's orbit are panicking as the campaign prepares for the possibility of losing a state that one Democratic strategist called 'tailor-made' for Clinton."
Bernie Sanders rally. (photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
HillaryWorld is feeling the Bern.
or months, pundits have marked Nevada in the “win” column for Hillary Clinton, who was thought to hold an unassailable lead with the state’s large Hispanic population. But according to a new poll, Clinton might not win Nevada in the landslide that everyone predicted. In fact, she might not win it at all.
Somehow, while everyone was focused on the showdown between her and Bernie Sanders scheduled to take place in South Carolina next week, the gap between the two Democratic rivals had quietly narrowed from 23 points in December to a gut-wrenching one point in a CNN/ORC poll released on Wednesday, just three days before the caucus.
Allies in Clinton’s orbit are panicking, according to The Hill, as the campaign prepares for the possibility of losing a state that one Democratic strategist called “tailor-made” for Clinton. Latinos have long been considered a key part of Clinton’s supposed minority firewall against Sanders, whose victories in New Hampshire and Iowa were driven by white voters, but political observers everywhere will now have to revisit that assumption. “I don’t get it. I don’t think anyone expected this race to look like this,” one former Clinton aide said.
No matter how Nevada shakes out on Saturday, anything less than a Clinton blowout could be disastrous for her campaign, especially in a state that was once so obviously one-sided that no one had bothered to poll there since December 2015. Even if Clinton ekes out a narrow win, much like she did in Iowa, the fact that Sanders was even close will prove that his minority outreach is working, giving him added momentum going into the South Carolina Democratic primary one week later. Or, as one friend of the Clintons put it in more colorful, relatable terms to The Hill: “The shit will hit the fan.”
The surprising surge of Sanders in Nevada has only added to speculation that much like Barack Obama in 2008, the crotchety Vermont senator could present a strong challenge to Clinton’s once-inevitable nomination, if not snatch it from her outright. Statistics guru Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has even laid out a numerical path to a Sanders victory, projecting how much he needs to outperform expectations to secure the nomination. In Nevada, assuming she holds a 12-point lead nationally, Hillary should be winning by 15 points. That may not be happening anymore. If it doesn’t, that could mean Clinton is in for one hell of a fight.
High Schooler Roughed Up at Donald Trump's South Carolina Rally Tells His Story
Alice Ollstein, ThinkProgress
Ollstein writes: "When high school senior Thomas Hill learned that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was speaking just across the river from his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, he wanted to take the opportunity to confront the increasingly popular candidate on his rhetoric painting Latino immigrants as criminals. A few hours later, video of his ejection from the rally, and Trump honoring the men who roughed him up, went viral."
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Alice Ollstein, ThinkProgress
Ollstein writes: "When high school senior Thomas Hill learned that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump was speaking just across the river from his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, he wanted to take the opportunity to confront the increasingly popular candidate on his rhetoric painting Latino immigrants as criminals. A few hours later, video of his ejection from the rally, and Trump honoring the men who roughed him up, went viral."
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2 LA Cops Charged With Repeatedly Raping, 'Preying on' Vulnerable Women
Michael E. Miller, The Washington Post
Miller writes: "Prosecutors have charged two L.A. police officers with raping four women over the span of several years."
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Michael E. Miller, The Washington Post
Miller writes: "Prosecutors have charged two L.A. police officers with raping four women over the span of several years."
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Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck. (photo: Nick Ut/AP)
he woman was walking her dog in Hollywood one day in 2009 when the Volkswagen Jetta pulled up alongside her. Two men inside the car allegedly ordered her to climb in.
She complied. She had to.
The men were police officers.
Despite the undercover car, the woman recognized them as veteran Los Angeles Police narcotics officers. They had arrested her before.
Officer Luis Valenzuela allegedly climbed into the back seat with the woman. Then he allegedly handed her dog to his partner, Officer James C. Nichols, who drove the Jetta to a secluded area.
“Why don’t you cut out that tough girl crap,” Valenzuela said as he “unzipped his pants and forced [her] head down toward his lap,” according to a warrant obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
The policeman then “physically held her head down” as he forced the woman to perform oral sex on him — all while his partner acted as a lookout, according to the warrant.
The woman didn’t immediately report the incident because she was scared, humiliated and felt nobody would believe her.
But on Wednesday, prosecutors charged Valenzuela and Nichols with raping the dog-walker and three other women over the span of several years. According to a felony complaint, the officers repeatedly threatened the women — all of whom had previous drug arrests — with a return to jail unless they agreed to oral or vaginal sex.
In at least one case, Valenzuela allegedly pointed a gun at one of the women to get her to go along with his demands.
“You don’t want to go to jail today, do you?” Nichols allegedly told another woman, removing her handcuffs and exposing himself.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck expressed his disgust with the two officers Wednesday.
“These two officers have disgraced themselves, they’ve disgraced this badge, they’ve disgraced their oath of office,” he said during a news conference. “I am extremely troubled by what they’ve done.”
Worst of all was that the two officers “preyed on folks that are sometimes reluctant witnesses, reluctant victims,” Beck said.
“It’s a violation of public trust,” he added. “That’s what makes it so horrific.”
The two officers now face a combined 32 charges. If convicted, they could each face life in prison.
An attorney representing two of the women, who have not been named, hailed the charges as a “wonderful development.”
“It’s a ray of light that these women will finally see some justice,” Dennis Chang told the Los Angeles Times.
But Chang also said the charges were “years overdue.” According to the complaint, the offenses date back to at least 2008. They were reported by multiple women, but the rapes allegedly continued unchecked as an internal investigation floundered for years. It wasn’t until one of the women filed a lawsuit against the officers in 2013 that their fellow LAPD officers moved in, seizing phones and computers belonging to Valenzuela and Nichols. The accused officers have spent the past two years on unpaid leave.
Robert Rico, an attorney representing Nichols in administrative charges of sexual misconduct filed by the LAPD, told CNN that if the criminal charges reflect those in the administrative case, “my client absolutely denies it.”
Bill Seki, a lawyer representing Valenzuela in his own administrative battle, said his client also denied the administrative charges. As for the criminal investigation, Seki said it had dragged on for years and was plagued by “issues of credibility” surrounding the victims, CNN reported.
The allegation that the two officers preyed on vulnerable, easily discreditable women is reminiscent of another high-profile police abuse case.
Last month, former Oklahoma City officer Daniel Holtzclaw was sentenced to 263 years in prison for similar crimes. Holtzclaw, was accused of pulling over and sexually assaulting African American women in low-income neighborhoods in the hope that they would be less likely to report his actions. He was undone, however, when a grandmother of 12 reported him.
In Los Angeles, it is unclear whether race played a factor in how Nichols and Valenzuela chose their victims. The ethnicity of the officers and their alleged victims has not been released.
What is clear, though, is that the two LAPD officers stand accused of sexually preying on women with drug or prostitution habits. Sometimes the officers took turns assaulting the women as the other stood guard, while at other times they acted alone, according to the complaint.
The first alleged rape occurred in 2008, when a woman working as a confidential informant for the police department’s narcotics unit was stopped by Valenzuela and Nichols, who she knew. The cops were dressed in plainclothes and driving a Jetta. Valenzuela threatened to take the woman to jail if she refused to get into the car, according to the warrant obtained by the Times. When she got in, he allegedly exposed himself and made her perform a sex act on him.
When the woman complained to a narcotics unit supervisor in January of 2010, the investigation stalled when a detective was unable to find the woman, according to the Times.
When the woman walking her dog was allegedly assaulted in a similar manner in 2009, she also hesitated to expose the officers. When she finally did come forward, “police noted that the woman displayed erratic behavior while recounting the events,” the Times reported. “Later, she made violent threats while in custody and was transported to the hospital.”
Despite the woman’s erratic behavior, LAPD reopened its investigation into the two officers. This time, an investigator tracked down the dog-walker as well as the woman who said she had been raped in 2008. Both gave statements.
But the investigation into the allegedly crooked cops once again stalled, this time for 18 months. According to the Times, the reason for the delay isn’t clear from the warrant.
During the delay, Valenzuela and Nichols allegedly continued their crimes.
According to the complaint, the two cops were involved in a series of other sexual assaults against two more women from 2009 until 2011. One of the women, identified in the complaint as “Jane Doe #3,” was allegedly assaulted twice in the span of three weeks. Another woman, “Jane Doe #4,” was allegedly raped six times over the span of a year and a half.
One of the women said she had worked as a confidential informant for Valenzuela and Nichols after she was arrested. Valenzuela initially told her that having sex with him would help her avoid jail, according to the warrant. Later, Nichols allegedly told her she could stop informing if she had sex with him. The woman told investigators she had sex with Valenzuela twice for fear or returning to jail if she refused: once when he was off duty at her apartment and a second time in the back seat of his undercover car while he was on duty.
During this time, both officers were reassigned to other divisions, according to the Times.
The internal affairs case against the cops only sprang back to life in July of 2012, when a man left LAPD a phone message saying that he was a member of a neighborhood watch and that a prostitute had told him that cops were picking up working girls and letting them go in exchange for sex, according to the warrant.
When officers belatedly looked into the man’s complaint, they “thought the circumstances and location were very similar” to the previous allegations against Valenzuela and Nichols, according to the warrant.
Even then, the department didn’t act until one of the women filed a lawsuit against the two officers in January of 2013. Fearing that Valenzuela and Nichols would destroy evidence, internal affairs investigators seized their phones and computers and the accused cops were put on unpaid leave, the Times reported.
The woman settled her suit with the city in January of 2014 for $575,000, the Times reported.
“Their power over her was abundantly clear from the get go,” Chang said at the time.
It took more than two additional years for prosecutors to charge the pair of cops. When they finally did Wednesday, Valenzuela and Nichols suffered the ignominy of being arrested by their own colleagues.
The pair are being held on more than $3.5 million bail and are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, according to prosecutors.
An Associated Press investigation published in November found that at least 1,000 U.S. law enforcement officers had lost their badges due to sexual misconduct — including rape, possession of child pornography, propositioning citizens and having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse — between 2009 and 2014.
Although the arrest of Valenzuela and Nichols brought relief to some of their alleged victims, it’s unlikely to satisfy all of them.
Despite the officers’ promises to help her in exchange for sex, one of the four women was sentenced to seven years in April of 2011 for possession of cocaine with the intent to sell, the Times reported.
If she does remain behind bars, then she could soon be joined there by the very men who allegedly abused her.
Minorities and Women Largely Shut out of Encryption Debate
Patrick Howell O'Neill, The Daily Dot
O'Neill writes: "Surveillance in the 21st century deeply impacts minority communities and women in the United States, but they have almost no voice in the debate over spying and encryption compared to wealthy white males."
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Patrick Howell O'Neill, The Daily Dot
O'Neill writes: "Surveillance in the 21st century deeply impacts minority communities and women in the United States, but they have almost no voice in the debate over spying and encryption compared to wealthy white males."
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The Anatomy of an American Airstrike
Abigail Fielding-Smith, Payenda Sargand and Jack Serle, Newsweek
Excerpt: "On June 5, 2015, an American aircraft targeted two pickup trucks as they drove on a rock-strewn track near the village of Bati Tana, close to the border with Pakistan. Fourteen people died. No one survived. NATO says all 14 were insurgents. The U.N. has come to another conclusion: It has classified all the dead as civilians - a view echoed by the Afghan government's lead investigator."
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Abigail Fielding-Smith, Payenda Sargand and Jack Serle, Newsweek
Excerpt: "On June 5, 2015, an American aircraft targeted two pickup trucks as they drove on a rock-strewn track near the village of Bati Tana, close to the border with Pakistan. Fourteen people died. No one survived. NATO says all 14 were insurgents. The U.N. has come to another conclusion: It has classified all the dead as civilians - a view echoed by the Afghan government's lead investigator."
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FDA to Start Testing Monsanto's Glyphosate in Food
Center for Biological Diversity
Excerpt: "The Food and Drug Administration will begin testing food for glyphosate, the world's most commonly used pesticide. This marks the first time that a U.S. agency will routinely test for glyphosate residue in food."
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Center for Biological Diversity
Excerpt: "The Food and Drug Administration will begin testing food for glyphosate, the world's most commonly used pesticide. This marks the first time that a U.S. agency will routinely test for glyphosate residue in food."
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