 19 November 19 No We Can’t Slash the Budget Any Further
“Can’t you make do with less.” Another astonishing reader comment. WE ARE MAKING DO WITH LESS! and it hasn’t been working. That’s the point.
We have been slashing the budget wherever possible for 2 years now. Enough.
Now we fight back.
Marc Ash
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18 November 19
Andy Borowitz | Trump Warns Republicans That if They Vote to Impeach He Will Campaign for Them Like He Did in Louisiana
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Delivering an ominous threat to members of his own party, Donald J. Trump warned congressional Republicans on Monday that if they vote for impeachment he would come to their states and campaign for their reelection."
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Robert Mueller. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Delivering an ominous threat to members of his own party, Donald J. Trump warned congressional Republicans on Monday that if they vote for impeachment he would come to their states and campaign for their reelection."
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Robert Mueller. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
House Investigating Whether Trump Lied to Robert Mueller
Olivia Messer, The Daily Beast
Messer writes: "The House of Representatives is reportedly investigating whether President Donald Trump lied to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the written answers he provided in the Russia investigation, the House's general counsel, Douglas Letter, said in federal court Monday."
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Ruben Martinez and his wife Maria in Los Angeles. Ruben was recently exonerated of all crimes. (photo: Dan Tuffs/Guardian UK)
Olivia Messer, The Daily Beast
Messer writes: "The House of Representatives is reportedly investigating whether President Donald Trump lied to former Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the written answers he provided in the Russia investigation, the House's general counsel, Douglas Letter, said in federal court Monday."
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Ruben Martinez and his wife Maria in Los Angeles. Ruben was recently exonerated of all crimes. (photo: Dan Tuffs/Guardian UK)
Sam Levin, Guardian UK
Levin writes: "Ruben Martinez was released from prison on Tuesday after 12 years. Now he and his wife can finally start their life together."
In 2015, Maria learned she had one final option. The district attorney (DA), Jackie Lacey, had established a new conviction review unit. Without the help of an attorney, Maria put together a claim for Lacey’s office. Maria also had the support of a close friend and retired homicide detective, Catherine Wills, who had become a mother figure to her and twice directly appealed to the prosecutor.
And for the first time in a decade, the system took Maria’s binder of evidence seriously. DA investigators interviewed witnesses and alibis and concluded it was not possible that Ruben committed any of the robberies.
‘They never gave up hope’
Ruben’s exoneration is an anomaly in LA county. Since the creation of Lacey’s review unit, he is only the third person to have a conviction reversed – and the first to successfully bring a claim without an attorney. The unit has received more than 1,900 claims during that time.
Colin Kaepernick. (photo: Jake Roth/Reuters)
Michael Harriot, The Root
Harriot writes: "While NFL insiders have said that Kaepernick looks as good or better than many of the 115 quarterbacks who have signed contracts to play in the NFL since Kaepernick was whiteballed, the signal-caller remains unsigned."
Aside from the suspicious timing, ESPN’s Howard Bryant notes that the league also prohibited Kaepernick’s team from filming the workout, a stipulation that is almost unheard of.
1) The Kaepernick camp was upset that the NFL told them about the tryout on such short notice, that it was occurring on a Saturday, instead of a customary Tuesday when workouts usually take place. A Saturday tryout would guarantee no high-level personnel would attend.
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2) The Kaepernick team and the NFL had not formally spoken since February, after the two sides had agreed to settle his and Eric Reid’s collusion lawsuit, so to have a sudden Saturday workout did not ease the trust issues.
3) The NFL told the Kaepernick team there would be no media access to the workout, which the team agreed to. Kaepernick arrived in Atlanta Thursday. He was told it was unclear who his receivers would be. Uncomfortable, he agreed to fly in his own receivers at his own expense.
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4) On Friday, in addition to not having media access, the NFL suggested that Kaepernick’s own team would be prohibited from filming the workout, thus leaving the NFL as the only entity with access to the video being sent to the 32 teams.
5) This was especially delicate because the Kaepernick team did not trust the footage the league would send out would be flattering. The fear was a 60-pass program might be edited down to his worst throws. The Kaepernick camp Friday night began preparing an alternate plan.
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7) By Saturday, the issues remained unresolved. The NFL refused to allow Kaepernick to film his own workout, media access, and did not budge from his waiver of rights. Around late morning the Kaepernick team formally asked the NFL to reconsider or it would hold its own workout.
8) By 2:30 pm, the NFL officially rejected their requests. With the issues unresolved, the NFL workout collapsed and Kaepernick’s team proceeded to host its own workout, which after an hour at Charles Drew HS in Riverdale, just concluded. It appears 6 teams attended, from 24.
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The issue that led to the impasse was the NFL’s insistence that Kaepernick sign an “unusual” waiver. Kaepernick has reportedly been mulling a collusion lawsuit against the NFL. Contrary to popular belief, Kaepernick has never challenged the NFL in a court of law. While news outlets have called Kaepernick’s previous settlement a “lawsuit,” it was technically an NFL Players Association grievance that was settled through arbitration, as required by the NFLPA union contract.
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio, who is also a lawyer, reports:
The three-page, 13-paragraph documents contains several specific provisions that could be relevant to the question of whether the NFL was trying to parlay the waiver into a release of any claims for collusion/retaliation that Kaepernick could make as a result of his ongoing unemployment by the league since settling his first collusion case in February…
If I were representing Kaepernick, and if the goal were to have a genuine workout aimed at enhancing his chances of being signed by an NFL team, I would have asked immediately for the document to be revised to specifically clarify that any and all potential employment rights would be preserved. If the league had refused, I wouldn’t have signed it, because the language leaves the door sufficiently ajar for a subsequent defense to a collusion/retaliation case that signing the waiver extinguished the claims.
According to Sports Illustrated, rapper, NFL partner and heralded capitalist, Jay-Z was “disappointed with Colin’s actions and believes he turned a legitimate workout into a publicity stunt.” Of course, Sports Illustrated didn’t name its “sources” but some have speculated that the quote came from the Official Entertainment Minstrel of the National Football League: Shawn Corey Carter.
While NFL insiders have said that Kaepernick looks as good or better than many of the 115 quarterbacks who have signed contracts to play in the NFL since Kaepernick was whiteballed, the signal-caller remains unsigned.
Senior members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attend the weekly Friday prayer at Tehran University on Nov. 2, 2007. (photo: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
James Risen, The Intercept
Risen writes: "They were hardly kindred spirits. In fact, they stood on opposite sides of one of the world's fiercest geopolitical divides. Yet in a secret effort at detente, two of the most formidable organizations in the Middle East held a previously undisclosed summit at a Turkish hotel to seek common ground at a time of sectarian war.
The Quds Force represents the world’s most powerful Shia-dominated nation, while the Muslim Brotherhood is a stateless but influential political and religious force in the Sunni Muslim world. The Trump administration designated the Revolutionary Guards a foreign terrorist organization in April, and the White House has reportedly been lobbying to add the Muslim Brotherhood to the list as well.
The disclosure that two such polarizing organizations on either side of the Sunni-Shia divide held a summit is included in a leaked archive of secret Iranian intelligence reports obtained by The Intercept.
There were public meetings and contacts between Iranian and Egyptian officials while Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi was president of Egypt from 2012 to 2013. But Morsi was forced from power in a coup supported by the Egyptian Army in July 2013 and later arrested. The regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi launched a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and many of its leaders have since been imprisoned in Egypt or are living in exile.
An Iranian intelligence cable about the 2014 meeting provides an intriguing glimpse at a secret effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian officials to maintain contact — and determine whether they could still work together — after Morsi was removed from power.
The cable about the summit, from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, reveals the fraught political dynamics that separate powerful Sunni and Shia organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Quds Force. Above all, the cable and the story of the summit expose the maddening complexities of the political landscape in the Middle East and show how difficult it is for outsiders, including U.S. officials, to understand what’s really going on in the region.
Students from the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly School of the Americas) and students from the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School conduct a joint assault on a simulated narcotics camp during a field training exercise. (photo: US Navy)
Dévora González and Azadeh Shahshahani, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The School of the Americas/WHINSEC in Fort Benning, Georgia, has become notorious for training and enabling torturers, dictators, and massacres throughout the Western Hemisphere. But the SOA's crimes aren't a thing of the past - the school is still training the human rights abusers of today, especially through ICE and the Border Patrol."
The SOA has trained more than 83,000 Latin American security forces since its founding. Notorious graduates of the SOA — including nearly a dozen dictators and some of the worst human rights violators in the continent — are guilty of using torture, rape, assassination, forced disappearance, massacres, and forced displacement of communities to wage war against their own people. Former Panamanian president Jorge Illueca stated that the School of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.” US-led and supported state violence abroad has ravaged and devastated communities in Central and South America, many of whose people are forced to migrate north.
On September 20, 1996, under intense public scrutiny, the Pentagon released the SOA training manuals, which advocated torture, extortion, blackmail, and the targeting of civilian populations. The release of these manuals proved that US taxpayer money was used to teach Latin American state forces how to torture and repress civilian populations.
A US congressional task force reported that those responsible for the 1989 UCA massacre in El Salvador were trained at the US Army School of the Americas, and as public pressure mounted to close the SOA, the Department of Defense responded by replacing the School of the Americas with the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in January 2001. The measure passed when the House of Representatives defeated a bipartisan amendment to close the school and conduct a congressional investigation by a narrow ten-vote margin. The opening of WHINSEC is not grounded in any critical assessment of the training, procedures, performance, or consequences of the training program it copies. Further, it ignores congressional concerns and the public outcry over the SOA’s past and present links to human rights atrocities.
To this day, WHINSEC continues to train Latin American security officers — including immigration officials.
In 2015, the first US Border Patrol agent graduated from the infamous training facility. On October 24 of this year, a contract between Border Patrol and Winchester Ammunition became public, confirming that Border Patrol purchased 33 million rounds of bullets and could purchase more than 330 million additional rounds over the next five years. Training of Border Patrol staff at Fort Benning coupled with their increased firepower is setting the stage for US state agents to wage war against undocumented migrants and refugees at border crossings and within the United States.
Over the past fifteen years, nearly one hundred people have been killed by US Border Patrol as a direct result of their excessive use of force, including the cross-border killings of fifteen-year-old Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca in 2010 and sixteen-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez in 2012. Both teenagers were on Mexican soil when they were shot at and killed by US Border Patrol agents located on US soil. Not a single Border Patrol agent has ever been held legally accountable for these crimes. According to a recent internal government report obtained by Quartz, criminal misconduct by border officers is at a five-year high.
In addition to US Border Patrol agents now being trained at the location notorious for instructing Latin American security forces in civilian-targeted warfare, on September 9 of this year, an unredacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report revealed that ICE agents will also begin training there. The report divulged that ICE contracted New Mexico training systems company Strategic Operations for almost $1 million to build realistic models of US cities at Fort Benning. This will be a training facility meant to simulate raids that ICE teams would carry out in places like Chicago and Arizona, and the ICE Special Response Teams will be trained to deal with immigrants crossing the border.
The proposed Rosemont Mine threatened Cienega Creek, where these children are playing. (photo: Thomas Wiewandt)
Tribes Halt Major Copper Mine on Ancestral Lands in Arizona
Alison Cagle, Earthjustice
Cagle writes: "Rising above the Arizona desert, the Santa Rita Mountains cradle 10,000 years of Indigenous history. The Tohono O'odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among numerous other tribes, have worshipped, foraged, hunted and laid their ancestors to rest in the mountains for generations."
Alison Cagle, Earthjustice
Cagle writes: "Rising above the Arizona desert, the Santa Rita Mountains cradle 10,000 years of Indigenous history. The Tohono O'odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe, among numerous other tribes, have worshipped, foraged, hunted and laid their ancestors to rest in the mountains for generations."
Mining corporation Hudbay Minerals proposed to dig a mile-wide open-pit copper mine in the Santa Ritas, burying dozens of sites sacred to the tribes under 1.8 billion tons of toxic waste. The mine's construction would raze ancestral Hohokam burial grounds, a historic Hohokam village and vital mountain springs.
Represented by Earthjustice, the Tohono O'odham fought Hudbay's ill-conceived mine in court, joined by the Hopi and Pascua Yaqui tribes. This summer, a judge ruled in favor of the three tribes, halting the mine in its tracks and directing the Forest Service to protect these public lands from the devastating impacts of the mine.
"Our relationship to the land is first and foremost," said Austin G. Nuñez, chairman of the Tohono O'odham Nation's San Xavier District in Tucson. "When our Hohokam ancestors' laid their loved ones in their final resting place, they never envisioned having them disturbed. We make every effort to not disturb them. We still feel their spirits today."
Tohono O'odham families gather at the sacred sites to reinforce their connection to the desert that has sheltered them for generations. During these gatherings, tribal members will collect yucca, acorns, wild onion, plants for medicinal purposes, or bear grass for basket making.
"When our children were younger, we'd take them to the proposed Rosemont site and the desert to be with nature," said Nuñez. He laughs, remembering the calming effect of the environment. "It's amazing. When they were out there, the children wouldn't fight. They'd enjoy it. It's so peaceful."
The Santa Rita Mountains are one of Arizona's most biodiverse regions, with flora and fauna endemic to the Southwest. Undulating mountain ranges, part of the Sky Islands, frame a desert floor spotted with spiky yucca plants. The Santa Ritas are home to several endangered species, including the jaguar and southwestern willow flycatcher.
Critical to this desert ecosystem are freshwater streams, which nourish the land like capillaries through a body. The streams were the lifeblood of the Tohono O'odham's ancestors, and are considered holy by the tribe — making Hudbay's plans to pollute them with heavy metals and deplete the water table especially devastating.
The only way Hudbay could get away with creating a colossal mine on public lands was by an industry sleight-of-hand using an antiquated mining law.
The Mining Law of 1872 grants companies a right to use public lands on mining claims — if the land is discovered to contain a valuable mineral deposit. Hudbay filed patented claims overlying the proposed mine pit, which contained valuable minerals, including copper. They also filed hundreds of unpatented claims on adjacent lands with no mining value, where they intended to dump over a billion tons of toxic waste rock and tailings. The Forest Service acquiesced to this land grab, assuming Hudbay had a right to these unpatented claims without bothering to check whether Hudbay had discovered the requisite valuable mineral deposit on those claims.
This is a common abuse of the Mining Law, especially for gigantic open-pit mines like Rosemont. As mining companies began building massive industrial-scale operations in the 20th century, they twisted the law to fit their need for thousands of acres of additional public lands for waste dumps. The Forest Service has simply turned a blind eye on these baseless rights, letting companies run roughshod over our public lands.
In 2017, the Tohono O'odham turned to Earthjustice for help, after being sidelined by the Forest Service during the mine's development. Through this partnership, the tribe imparted the deep importance of the Santa Ritas to attorney Stu Gillespie.
"One of the most fulfilling parts of this case was sharing food with the Tohono O'odham leaders, [and] understanding their cultural ways of life and how important the sacred springs are," said Gillespie. People of all backgrounds can relate to the importance of preserving burial grounds, he noted, adding, "We wouldn't want someone building a mine in Arlington Cemetery."
The case moved slowly in the courts, but the company was moving quickly to start excavation. As Hudbay brazenly challenged the tribes by bringing machinery to the mine site, Gillespie could see that he needed to take the bold step of seeking a preliminary injunction to stop any digging from starting. Preliminary injunctions often aren't granted, because they're an exceptional remedy of last resort and parties must prove that they face immediate irreparable harm.
Adding to the urgency, Hudbay planned to hastily clear all of the lands that are burial grounds for the Tohono O'odham Nation's ancestors – the Hohokam. In the 1980s, another company prepared to mine the same site and encountered the burial grounds. The Anamax Mining Company soon went bankrupt and abandoned the site, leaving graves and the ancient village grounds open to the elements. Some of the tribes' ancestral remains were shipped to the University of Arizona, where they were warehoused for thirty years while the tribes fought to repatriate them. They were only returned to the Tohono O'odham Nation several years ago. The tribes were adamant about preventing a repeat of history.
Instead of granting a preliminary injunction, the judge went a step further and definitively ruled on the merits of the tribes' case itself. The Court held that the Forest Service made a "crucial error" by assuming Hudbay had a right to use public lands without any evidence of a valuable mineral deposit, and that this error "tainted the Forest Service's evaluation of the Rosemont Mine from the start." With this argument, he prevented any mining activities from going forward, and called out the Forest Service for abdicating its duty to protect our public lands.
The judge in the case "identified the fatal flaw in the Forest Service's reasoning," said Gillespie. "He laid out an unbroken line of Supreme Court decisions, saying, 'No, you don't have rights under the Mining Law to pollute this land under billions of tons of waste rock, without evidence of valuable minerals.'"
The judge's ruling could set a precedent among similar mining claims that abuse the Mining Law. By clearly identifying the Forest Service's obligation to regulate unpatented mining claims, this victory could make it harder for giant mining companies to exploit ancestral lands for Native American tribes and pollute precious ecosystems.
"The federal government and Hudbay tried to put up as many arguments as possible, but it was all smoke and mirrors," said Gillespie. "The judge cut through that really clearly. It's a powerful decision that stands for the proposition that nobody should get a free pass to wreak havoc on our public lands."
The victory is deeply felt among the Tohono O'odham, who see in this ruling a validation of Indigenous sovereignty over corporate schemes to desecrate their ancestral land.
"The judge's ruling shows that there is hope in the system," said Chairman Nuñez. "There are good people who believe in the sovereignty of Native nations, and their fundamental, inherent right to land and water. It has reinforced our vow to protect and enhance the lands we do have. We prayed that that mine would never be built. So it felt like our prayers had been answered."
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