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Glenn Greenwald | Meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz's First-Ever Primary Challenger: Tim Canova 
 
Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept 
Greenwald writes: "In general, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted and corrupt about the Democratic Party: a corporatist who overwhelmingly relies on corporate money to keep her job, a hawk who supports the most bellicose aspects of U.S. foreign policy." 
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ebbie Wasserman Schultz, the six-term congresswoman from South Florida and chair of the Democratic National Committee, has been embroiled in numerous significant controversies lately. As the Washington Post put it just today: “DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s list of enemies just keeps growing.”

She is widely perceived to have breached her duty of neutrality as DNC chair by taking multiple steps to advance the Clinton campaign, including severely limiting the number of Democratic debates and scheduling them so as to ensure low viewership (she was co-chair of Clinton’s 2008 campaign). Even her own DNC vice chairs have publicly excoriated her after she punished them for dissenting from her Hillary-protecting debate limitations. She recently told Ana Marie Cox in a New York Times interview that she favors ongoing criminalization of marijuana (as she receives large financial support from the alcohol industry). She denied opposing medical marijuana even though she was one of a handful of Democratic legislators to vote against a bill to allow states to legalize it, and in her interview with Cox, she boasted that her “criminal-justice record is perhaps not as progressive as some of my fellow progressives.” She also excoriated “young women” — who largely back Bernie Sanders rather than Clinton — for “complacency” over reproductive rights.

In general, Wasserman Schultz is the living, breathing embodiment of everything rotted and corrupt about the Democratic Party: a corporatist who overwhelmingly relies on corporate money to keep her job, a hawk who supports the most bellicose aspects of U.S. foreign policy, a key member of the “centrist” and “moderate” pro-growth New Democrat coalition, a co-sponsor of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA),which was “heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries” and which, if enacted, would have allowed extreme government and corporate control over the internet.

In 2012, at the height of the controversy over the “kill list” that the New York Times revealed Obama had compiled for execution by drone, she said in an interview she had never heard of it and mocked the interviewer for suggesting such a thing existed. In 2013, she demanded that Edward Snowden “be extradited, arrested, and prosecuted” because he supposedly “jeopardized millions of Americans” and then called him a “coward.” “The progressive wing of the party base is volubly getting fed up with her,” declared the American Prospect last week.

This year, however, Democrats nationwide, and in her district, have a choice. For the first time in her long congressional career, she faces a primary challenger for the Democratic nomination. He’s Tim Canova, a smart, articulate, sophisticated lawyer with a history of activism both with the Occupy movement (he’s against the Wall Street bailout for which Wasserman Schultz voted and the general excesses of big banks and crony capitalism) as well as a steadfast opponent of the Patriot Act (for which Wasserman Schultz repeatedly voted).

He has worked with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson against the drug war and private prisons; worked with the Sanders campaigns of the past; and was a former aide to the late Sen. Paul Tsongas. He is an outspoken advocate of the Ron Paul/Alan Grayson-sponsored Audit the Fed bill, and a vehement opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. And he has vowed to run a campaign based on small-donor support, calling Wasserman Schultz “the quintessential corporate machine politician.”

As David Dayen reported last week in the New Republic, the widespread dislike for Wasserman Schultz around the country has already triggered substantial support and donations for Canova. To compete, he will need much more. You can visit his website here. But beyond that, I spoke with him late last week to explore his views, his motives for running, and what he believes are the greatest contrasts between him and the incumbent he is challenging:

GREENWALD: My guest today is Tim Canova, who recently announced a primary challenge in Florida’s 23rd congressional district to the Democratic incumbent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, in addition to representing that district, is the chair of the Democratic National Committee. It is the congresswoman’s first primary challenge ever.

Tim is a former aide to the late Sen. Paul Tsongas and currently a professor at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law. Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I want to begin by asking you:

It’s one of the most difficult things in American politics to challenge an entrenched incumbent, and in this case, Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz is sort of the embodiment of an entrenched incumbent. It’s her sixth term that she’s currently serving. She hasn’t really been challenged very successfully in the past, and she’s also the chair of the DNC and has that whole apparatus behind her. What are the motivators that led you to take on this challenge?

CANOVA: If we had spoken a year ago, this wouldn’t have been on my radar. Last summer, I was very active with a bunch of grassroots organizations here in South Florida, lobbying against the fast track vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and we were lobbying her office, trying to make contact with her or her top aides, and we got nowhere. And it was frustrating. She was one of the only Democrats in the House in the country to vote for fast track and she was the only Democrat in Florida’s delegation to vote for fast track. She had voted for the Korean Free Trade Agreement. She’s been taking lots of corporate money.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she took $300,000 in just a two-year period, 2012 to 2014, from groups that support the TPP, and only about $23,000 from groups opposed to it. The Citizens Trade Campaign that I’ve been working with, it consists of a lot of organized labor, a lot of union people, and a lot of progressive Democrats. And these are constituencies that she’s been taking for granted, precisely because she’s run unopposed all of these years. She’s been able to take working folks for granted.

And the TPP was really a lightning rod issue. I think it should be. We saw how just a week or two ago, TransCanada, the big Canadian energy giant, announced it was going to sue the U.S. government for $15 billion for not going forward with the Keystone XL pipeline. And that’s under NAFTA’s investment protection provisions. The TPP has very similar provisions. So now we’re going to open up these types of challenges to another half-dozen to dozen countries that are not in NAFTA who will be able to challenge the sovereignty of U.S. law. And when I say “challenge it,” you probably have read up on this enough to know that these companies are not going to be able to overturn the laws, but they will be able to get the taxpayer to have to pay for their compliance with the laws. So it really shifts the cost of compliance from corporations to taxpayers.

It’s a way to enshrine in international law what these corporations could not get through in constitutional jurisprudence, which is the regulatory takings approach, the idea that whenever the government regulates in a way that impedes the value of an investment, it should be considered a taking of property requiring just compensation. They couldn’t get that line of analysis through the Supreme Court, they go around it and they enshrine this in multilateral trade and investment agreements, bilateral investment treaties. And it’s become a litmus test at this point, and deservedly so. It’s environmental laws, it’s health and safety, it’s labeling laws. It really puts an awful lot of the kinds of protections that we’ve come to rely on and need up for sale, in a way.

GREENWALD: The TPP is obviously controversial in certain policy and intellectual circles. My guess is that a small percentage of Americans have even heard of that agreement, let alone have strong opinions about it, although they probably are a lot more informed and opinionated about trade issues generally because of the effect it’s had on jobs and the NAFTA controversy.

Do you have a strategy for communicating why a seemingly esoteric conflict like the TPP is something that moved you and ought to move voters to reject their incumbent representative?

CANOVA: Well, my friends in labor who are very supportive of this candidacy, and are really like-minded in that somebody should step up and challenge her — they make the argument that it’s going to lead directly to a lot of job losses, and they’ve got the statistics about just how many job losses came about from the Korean Free Trade Agreement. I’ve been trying to link these discussions about TPP to what every Floridian should see as an existential threat, and that is climate change. In 20 or 30 years down the road, big parts of South Florida could be underwater.

It’s not just the tourist industry, it’s people’s homes and businesses that could be in danger. And if we’re going to start confronting climate change, either through regulating carbon emissions or finding funds for infrastructure investments to mitigate the effects of climate change, TPP just gets in the way right down the line. Now I hear you, and I agree with you, that most people don’t understand those connections and many people have never heard of the TPP. I’m hoping this campaign starts elevating the discussion and informing people and helping to educate voters. I think it’s already beginning to happen a little bit.

But I’ve also got to say the TPP is not the only issue we’re running on. Wasserman Schultz has been taking — and you know this, The Intercept published a piece about the kind of money she’s been taking from big alcohol PACs. She’s for private prisons.

GREENWALD: While she’s been a hardcore drug war warrior and in favor of the penal state for putting people in cages for consuming drugs.

CANOVA: Exactly. And, you know, that’s not popular in this district. In 2014 there was a statewide referendum on medical marijuana. Fifty-eight-and-a-half percent of the voters in this state voted for it, for medical marijuana. It needed 60 percent to pass, so it came close. She was against it. Her votes in Congress have been against medical marijuana. I say, allow states to decide these issues on medical marijuana and recreational marijuana. We should not be locking people up, for what? Using the same drugs that apparently the last three American presidents, and, by some surveys, a majority of the American people have tried.

GREENWALD: One of the things that I do think people understand relating to the TPP and some of the other critiques you’ve voiced is the idea that there are a lot of people who go to Washington, take lots of money from corporate interests, and end up serving those interests at the expense of the ordinary voter, often contrary to the rhetoric they like to spout. That’s probably part of the reason for Donald Trump’s success, who has sold himself as a self-funder and therefore immune to those influences, and it’s definitely a big part of Bernie Sanders’ success as well, critiquing this kind of systemic, legalized corruption.

Where does Debbie Wasserman Schultz fall on the spectrum of political officials with respect to how much corporate money she relies on, and then how much corporate interest she serves?

CANOVA: OK. First, let me say, your first question was what animated me to jump in, and I started with the TPP. But this question really gets to the thematic heart of the campaign. Across the board, whether it’s the TPP or the drug war, she’s taking a lot of corporate money, and she’s been taking it for years. She talks the talk about campaign finance reform — she will say she’s for campaign finance reform — but she’s not walking the walk.

She voted recently the way most of Congress did on this latest omnibus spending bill. There were a couple of terrible provisions that allowed dark money to remain in our politics. One provision that she voted for in this omnibus package was to prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from writing rules for transparency — to require corporations to disclose to their shareholders the extent of their campaign contributions; their political spending. Another ties the hands of the Internal Revenue Service from creating rules to curb special interest donors from forming these sham social welfare organizations that hide political spending.

She’s been raising corporate money for herself; she’s been giving it away to other candidates. She is the quintessential corporate machine politician. She really is, across the board. And then it influences her votes. And it’s not just TPP and the drug war, it’s Wall Street issues, and this is really what I’ve been teaching and writing about for many years. Just in the past few months — the past year or two — she has voted to prevent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to write rules to regulate payday lending, to prevent racial discrimination in car loans.

In December 2014, she voted to eliminate the part of Dodd-Frank that had prevented big banks from using deposits to speculate in financial derivatives. So she doesn’t have any real vision for public finance other than lining the pockets of her donors.

GREENWALD: So, one of the issues that has arisen over the past few years, most prominently with regard to the Federal Reserve, is this movement to subject the Fed to comprehensive, probing audits. And what I’ve always found interesting about that debate is that it had lots of support from people on the left like Dennis Kucinich and Alan Grayson, who were prime movers of that in the House, and then also from elements on the right. People like Ron Paul, this sort of libertarian faction who sees the dangers of crony capitalism.

Where do you stand specifically on the question of auditing the Fed, and more generally, do you see this potential for — on economic issues and on issues regarding Wall Street and the Fed — for there to be some kind of a union between ordinary people on the left and the right who are both being victimized in the same way by these kind of systemic corruptions?

CANOVA: Absolutely. In 2010, I worked with Alan Grayson’s staff, and with Bernie Sanders’ staff, and with Ron Paul’s staff, on the transparency and provisions that went into Dodd-Frank. The transparency of the Fed — the two GAO audits. That I’m sure you know about. The GAO had one audit that dealt with the governance of the Fed and their conflicts of interest, and the second one dealt with the Fed’s emergency lending facilities, which lo and behold, rewarded those big banks that dominated and continue to dominate the Fed’s governance.

So I am very much in favor of auditing the Fed on a regular basis and reforming the Fed so that its governing boards more reflect the diverse interests of society, and not just bankers.

This is a tradition that goes back to John Commons, the great institutional economist of the 1930s and 1940s, [and] Leon Keyserling, the head of Harry Truman’s council of economic advisers. This used to be, some decades ago, part of the discussion as far as reforming the governance structure of the Fed. It needs to be part of the conversation again. And, you’re hitting it on the head when you say this is a discussion — this is an agenda — that spans the spectrum from right to left.

I saw it when I was involved in Occupy Wall Street, at the Occupy Los Angeles encampment. There were plenty of tents and banners, you name it, saying “End the Fed.” I taught at the People’s Collective University at Occupy LA, and I taught a workshop on the Federal Reserve, and I was making the case: “Let’s not end the Fed, let’s mend the Fed. Let’s reform the Fed.” And it’s a discussion that people on the right and people on the left can get engaged in very quickly. Unfortunately, in Washington, it’s the mainstream establishment center of both parties that resist this kind of reform.

GREENWALD: Speaking of the mainstream establishment center in both parties resisting reform, obviously a lot of the topics I write about and that The Intercept covers center on surveillance policy and foreign policy, where there is an enormous amount of agreement between Republican and Democratic establishment wings.

Can you just sort of give me your general perspective on where Debbie Wasserman Schultz is in those areas, and how you differ from the standard Democratic orthodoxy and the Republican orthodoxy on those questions as well?

CANOVA: The Patriot Act is probably the original starting point in this discussion, and I was not a proponent of the Patriot Act at the time, and Wasserman Schultz is. So I’m very skeptical of concentrated power in this national security state. Dismantling that power and exposing it to the light of day is a job and a half, as you know personally, and how to do that? Congress is a place where you can start doing it.

I certainly hope if I’m elected and if I serve in Congress, that I would be a critic of this concentration of state power that’s being used for surveillance. And not just surveillance, I’ve got to say, it really goes to a lot of the United States’ approaches in its foreign policy abroad. I think the drone war has been a disaster. It’s a way that the president and the administration can talk tough and look tough, but in my estimation, it is creating far more enemies than it is killing. It’s not serving our long-term interests.

We should be looking for a general disarmament in this part of the world, instead of the United States leading this race among major powers in arms sales to these regimes. The conflicts that exist between Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Sunnis, Shiites are centuries old — decades old, centuries old — and arming these countries to the teeth is not a solution. At all. For foreign policy. At least not in a way that’s going to serve the interests of humanity and try to bring peace to that part of the world. It used to be, 100 years ago, the world would have disarmament conferences. How effective they were, the history books can write about. But it’s not even discussed at this point.    

GREENWALD: Yeah, even Reagan and Gorbachev and Nixon and Brezhnev had incredibly successful disarmament conferences as well, and ultimately, treaties, and you’re right — it’s essentially off the agenda.

CANOVA: That’s right. And with Reagan and Nixon, the arms treaties [we] are talking about are thermonuclear weapons. In our day and age, yes, we have to have disarmament of thermonuclear weapons, but we also have to have disarmament of all other kinds of weapons that we see being used in these proxy wars throughout the Middle East.

The proxy wars have been a disaster. There’s something to be said for the critique that I’ve heard Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump actually make, that we should have left “well enough” alone in Syria. And this policy of trying to continue with regime change — you know, Bush was criticized for regime change; it’s continued under the Obama administration, and all it has done is created vacuums for more radical groups like ISIS to gain greater influence, greater strength.

It’s led to all kinds of — not just destabilization, but massive death, dislocations of people. It’s a horror show. It’s got to stop, and disarmament and talking through peacefully to resolve disputes has got to be put on the agenda, and I don’t see it on the agenda from most of these candidates, and certainly Wasserman Schultz doesn’t talk like that.

GREENWALD: Absolutely, she does not. Let me just ask you a couple of last questions here. People are just now for the first time hearing about your primary challenge, and becoming familiar with you, and who you are, and what your positions are, so could you just talk a little bit about your history of political activism and your professional background as well?

CANOVA: Sure. I am a lawyer by training. I studied at Georgetown University, and then was a Swedish Institute visiting scholar at the University of Stockholm. I practiced law in Manhattan for a large firm for a few years, and then went into teaching, and really my entire legal career was animated by the study of, you can say, making our institutions more democratically accountable. The thesis I wrote as a Swedish Institute visiting scholar was a comparison of Swedish and American labor law and corporate law, and comparing how in Sweden and in other European countries, labor had a seat at the table. Fifty percent of the board members were labor. And in the United States, labor doesn’t have a seat at the table. They get run over. So that is the orientation — more democracy — that has animated me throughout my career.

I served on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the early 1980s. A lot of this is on my campaign website, on the About Tim page — that I was an opponent of financial deregulation very early. I was writing in the early 1980s that the Garn-St. Germain Act, deregulation of depository interest rates and lending standards, would be a disaster, that it was a repeat of what had happened in the 1920s. It opened the door to predatory lending and sub-prime mortgages. I was calling that decades before that actually came to a crisis stage, you could say. In the 1990s, both as a lawyer and as a law professor, I was warning against getting rid of Glass-Steagall — Brooklyn Law Review article in the mid 1990s, 1995. I warned against financial derivatives. So I’ve been a constant critic of Wall Street deregulation. I’m for Main Street; I always have been. I believe in the New Deal. I believe in bottom-up economics.

My activism has manifested itself in many ways, in many forms: certainly the anti-corporate globalization movement during the time of Seattle, against the Free Trade Area of the Americas Agreement. When I was a professor at the University of New Mexico, I threw myself into a grassroots campaign to get rid of felony disenfranchisement, and it was one of the great grassroots movements I’ve ever been involved in. It’s a small state and we were able to see change come real fast. It was right after the 2000 deadlock in Florida. There was a deadlock in New Mexico also, and we woke up to find that there weren’t enough electoral votes to count in New Mexico compared to Florida, but New Mexico was one of, I think, nine states at the time where someone who was convicted of a felony was barred for the rest of his or her life from voting. And we had an opportunity because we had, even though he was a Republican governor, he was a libertarian governor, Gary Johnson, who was trying to end the war on drugs.

We got a grassroots movement that lit a fire underneath him. We got Democrats in the state house, in the legislature, to pass legislation within two months, and Gary Johnson signed it. And that’s all it took, was two months of good organization and a lot of grassroots lobbying and New Mexico was no longer a felony disenfranchisement state.

And then there’s the Occupy movement, so I’ve been engaged really my whole life. I know some people have said, “Well, you haven’t run for political office.” No, but I’ve been engaged in grassroots lobbying and activism, and the focus of my mind, my heart, my soul, has really been on public policy issues and trying to create a better world.

GREENWALD: The last question. The critique that you’re making of how Debbie Wasserman Schultz funds her political career and her reliance on big corporate money is one that resounds to a lot of ears. The problem, however, is the reason politicians go in and feed at that trough, is that it’s a really potent weapon. It helps them buy ads, it helps them build campaign staff and get re-elected.

What is your strategy for being able to be competitive with someone so well-funded by large corporate interests, and how can people who want to see her subjected to a real competitive challenge, and even lose, how can they get involved in your campaign and support it and help? 

CANOVA: Well, I’m not taking any corporate money, and I think that that is resonating with folks. In the first three days after I launched the campaign, we got over 1,000 individual contributions. It’s now been a week and I’ve lost track; it’s somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 individual contributions. You don’t see that at most campaigns. I know in some ways we’re fortunate compared to other first-time insurgent challengers, because Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the poster child of a lot of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. We’re attracting donors from all over the country.

We’re igniting the grassroots here in Florida. So we are raising money. We need to raise a lot more to compete with her, and I would just urge folks to go to timcanovaforcongress.com, to give what they can. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but it adds up with people power. It has been adding up, so that’s our strategy, and we’re fortunate that we’ve gotten so much good attention so quickly.

GREENWALD: Well, I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I think it’s been super enlightening, and I wish you the best of luck.

CANOVA: Well, Glenn, thank you. I really appreciate you having me, and I want to thank you for your lifetime of work. You’re an inspiration to me and to a lot of other people, and it’s an honor to be interviewed by you.

GREENWALD: Thank you so much.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34726-meet-debbie-wasserman-schultzs-first-ever-primary-challenger-tim-canova

David Sirota | General Motors CEO Mary Barra Defends Marketing Cars That Do Not Include Airbags 
David Sirota, International Business Times 
Sirota writes: "General Motors CEO Mary Barra on Wednesday said her company was acting in the interest of consumers as it markets automobiles in some parts of the world that do not necessarily include the same safety technology that are mandated in many industrialized countries." 
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Watch Killer Mike, Cornel West Chat With Bernie Sanders About MLK's Legacy 
Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone 
Stuart writes: "On Sunday, hours before Bernie Sanders took the stage to debate Democratic primary rivals Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley, the candidate sat down with Killer Mike, Cornel West and Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner to discuss the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and how it dovetails with the message of Sanders' presidential campaign." 
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The Lynching of a Madison Lesbian: Wisconsin's Wrongful Conviction of Penny Brummer 
Michael Leon, CounterPunch 
Leon writes: "Madison police and the Dane County Sheriff's detectives decided Penny Brummer, 24-years-old, was the perpetrator of her friend's murder. No physical evidence, no weapon, no motive, no determined crime scene, just a theory-what is known as police 'tunnel vision,' disregarding all exculpatory facts and evidence that would not support or disconfirm the theory." 
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Ursula K. Le Guin Obliterates the Bundy Militia - and Oregon's Largest Newspaper - in 194 Words 
Ryan Koronowski, Think Progress 
Koronowski writes: "Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin has lived in Oregon for more than half a century, and has regularly visited the region surrounding the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 45 years. Ever since armed militants took over the refuge in a dispute over ranching fees on public lands, Le Guin has 'been following the situation very closely.'" 
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Ursula K. Le Guin. (Photo: Jack Liu)

ward-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin has lived in Oregon for more than half a century, and has regularly visited the region surrounding the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for 45 years. Ever since armed militants took over the refuge in a dispute over ranching fees on public lands, Le Guin has “been following the situation very closely,” she said in an email to ThinkProgress.

So when she saw an article titled “Effort to free federal lands” in the Sunday Oregonian, she did what any self-respecting, world-renowned author would do.

Oregonian headline. (photo: ThinkProgress.org)

She wrote an epic Letter to the Editor that was a spirited defense of American public lands:

The Oregonian’s A1 headline on Sunday, Jan. 17, “Effort to free federal lands,” is inaccurate and irresponsible. The article that follows it is a mere mouthpiece for the scofflaws illegally occupying public buildings and land, repeating their lies and distortions of history and law.

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren’t trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can’t go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That’s what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding American. The people it doesn’t belong to and who don’t belong there are those who grabbed it by force of arms, flaunting their contempt for the local citizens.

Those citizens of Harney County have carefully hammered out agreements to manage the refuge in the best interest of landowners, scientists, visitors, tourists, livestock and wildlife. They’re suffering more every day, economically and otherwise, from this invasion by outsiders.

Instead of parroting the meaningless rants of a flock of Right-Winged Loonybirds infesting the refuge, why doesn’t The Oregonian talk to the people who live there?

Ursula K. Le Guin

Northwest Portland

Le Guin told ThinkProgress that the letter was printed unchanged, and she “got a pleasant note informing me it was to be published,” but nothing more from the paper or the author. A request for comment to the Oregonian’s public editor went unanswered as of publication.

The science fiction author is not alone in wanting the ranchers to return Malhuer to the public. Most Western voters, according to a recent poll, disagree with Bundy and do not want the states to take over public lands.

“We have been going out to the Steens Mountain area, on and near the Wildlife Refuge, for 45 years — first to teach summer classes at the field station, later just to be there in the grand high desert country,” she said. “We spend a week every summer on a cattle ranch very close to Refuge lands. I am proud to consider the family who own the ranch and the local hotel as friends, and I have learned a great deal from them. The Refuge Headquarters is a quiet, fragile, beautiful little oasis that is particularly dear to us.”

Le Guin, the Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author of such sci-fi and fantasy classics as A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, often writes about political organization and environmentalism.

She believes the state and federal government “should speak up loud and clear in support and defense of the law-abiding citizens of Burns and the whole region.”

“They should make it clear — by words first, then by deliberate actions — that ranting about the Constitution does not get you a permit to break the law, fail to pay your grazing fees, cut a rancher’s fences, steal government cars, misuse public property, and keep a lot of good American citizens under a stupid, brutal reign of terror for (now) 18 days,” she said. “How much longer? Enough is enough!”

The daily cost of the illegal occupation totals $133,400 per day, according to a ThinkProgress estimate.

Le Guin said the standoff would go on as long as the government allows it to, “unless they choose to leave it up to the Bundy boys and their daddy and their buddies.”

Asked if she thought Bundy and his “bullyboys” would take their spare time in the refuge to write any good fiction, Le Guin replied, “Yep. When pigs fly.”

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34722-ursula-k-le-guin-obliterates-the-bundy-militia-and-oregons-largest-newspaper-in-194-words

Pakistan Attack: Gunmen Kill 19 at Bacha Khan University 
BBC News 
Excerpt: "Security forces have ended a gun and bomb attack on a university in north-west Pakistan in which 19 people were killed and 17 injured." 
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Plastic to Outweigh Ocean's Fish by 2050 
Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post 
Kaplan writes: "Plastic litter in the ocean is projected to outweigh fish in 2050, according to new documents released by the World Economic Forum." 
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RSN: Bernie Sanders Calls for an End to Mass Deportation Raids of Central American Immigrants, The Unseen Slaughter Under the Sea, Armed Militia in Oregon Part of Long-Running, Right-Wing Fight Against Public Lands

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Andy Borowitz | Poll: Republicans Would Rather Actually Be Shot by Gun Than Agree With Obama

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "A day after President Obama held a nationally televised town hall about guns in America, a new poll shows that a majority of Republicans would rather actually be shot by a firearm than agree with him."
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Armed Militia in Oregon Part of Long-Running, Right-Wing Fight Against Public Lands
Randi Spivak, The Center for Biological Diversity
Spivak writes: "There's been a growing movement among politicians in the West to seize control of federal lands and hand them over to state and local government, where they're more likely to be logged, mined and drilled for profit."
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n armed militia has taken over a federal building in southeastern Oregon as part of a long-running campaign of violence, intimidation and right-wing paranoia that has festered for decades in the West, most recently with the standoff with Cliven Bundy in Nevada in 2014. Among the demands at the latest standoff is to shut down Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which provides crucial protections for wildlife, especially birds that migrate through the area.

“This is the latest in a long string of armed, right-wing thugs attempting to seize America’s public lands and enact their paranoid, anti-government dream bought by guns and intimidation,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve seen it with pipebombs planted on wilderness trails and sent to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. We saw in 2014 with Cliven Bundy and his racist and violent rhetoric in Nevada and now we’re seeing it with his sons in Oregon.”

Cliven Bundy stopped paying the federal government for the privilege of grazing his cows on public lands in Nevada and owes about $1 million to taxpayers. Bundy, who was quoted in an interview with The New York Times wondering whether black people were better off as slaves, was the center of an armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management in April 2014 that ended with the BLM backing away and Bundy’s continued trespass on federal land. Among the anti-federal government militia who were defending Bundy at his ranch was Jared Miller, who just three months after the standoff at the ranch went on a shooting spree with his wife that included the ambush-murder of two Las Vegas police officers as they ate at a restaurant. They draped the officers with a Gadsden flag — a symbol of liberty used by both the antigovernment “Patriot” movement and members of the Tea Party movement.

The latest standoff near Burns, Ore., followed a judge’s call for additional prison time for a father and son — 73-year-old Dwight Hammond and 46-year-old Steven Hammond — whom prosecutors say lit a fire on federal land in 2001 to cover up the illegal slaughter of a deer herd. Both were convicted of arson and are scheduled to report to federal prison on Monday.

The wildlife refuge’s headquarters was seized by Bundy’s sons and others on Saturday. The men are armed and say they are willing to occupy the building for years if needed. According to The Oregonian, Ryan Bundy said they are willing to kill and be killed if necessary. Also among the armed occupiers of the wildlife refuge building is Jon Ritzheimer, an infamous anti-Muslim activist who has repeatedly threatened violence.

“Despite their flags and patriotic overtures, don’t mistake this standoff for anything than what it is: An attempt to use guns to seize control over what taxpayers own and bully the government into acquiescing to their demands,” Suckling said. “But there’s a larger context here. What’s happening in Oregon is a logical outgrowth of right-wing rhetoric that demonizes even the concept of federal land — places like national parks and forests — and villainizes those who believe that publicly owned land should be more than just a source of profit for ranchers and corporations.”

There’s been a growing movement among politicians in the West to seize control of federal lands and hand them over to state and local government, where they’re more likely to be logged, mined and drilled for profit.

“These are special places that deserve protection for values that we all hold dear: clean air, water and refuge for wildlife,” Suckling said. “Americans, collectively, have decided that these public lands need and deserve protection. That shouldn’t be undone at the behest of men with guns and a dangerous view of how a government should be run.”

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I found this Olive Ridley Sea Turtle stuck in a net a few miles off shore of the Kona Coast. The net 
was wrapped around both front flippers and its neck. It was also missing its left rear flipper. 
I was with a group of spear fishermen and we were able to cut the turtle free of the net or it would 
have surely met an untimely death. (photo: Deron Verbeck)

Ocean Defenders Alliance is on a mission to stop abandoned "ghost nets" from killing dolphins, sea turtles, and millions of other marine animals.

s we set off for our destination off the Southern California coast, Captain Rex Levi weaves Mr. Barker’s LegaSea, a 55-foot Chris Craft yacht, between the massive cargo ships plying Los Angeles Harbor. The dockworkers’ strike of the past winter is over but still reverberates at sea as the behemoths queue 35 deep, waiting their turn to offload cars, clothes, and other merchandise at the Port of Los Angeles.

Mr. Barker’s LegaSea belongs to environmental group Ocean Defenders Alliance and is named for Bob Barker, the game-show host and animal rights activist who donated $150,000—the price was right—toward the boat’s purchase. As we set out on a one-hour cruise, two gray whales on our left are also navigating a path amid the 1,000-foot-long ships—an ever-present danger during the marine mammals’ annual migrations. “We brake for whales,” says ODA founder Kurt Lieber.

A 50-foot-long boat called the African Queen, sunk in 90 feet of water, poses perhaps as great a threat to whales as to dolphins, seals, and sharks that can become entangled in derelict fishing gear snagged by the shipwreck. So on this spring day we’re on a mission to liberate them from these “ghost nets,” among the thousands around the world silently killing marine mammals and other ocean animals.

Killing Without a Cause

Imagine there's a fence running through the wilderness and that each animal that passes by—deer, bear, bison—is in danger of getting its head stuck in the chain link and starving to death. That happens every day in the world’s oceans as lost, abandoned, and derelict fishing gear trap countless numbers of marine animals for years, decades, and perhaps even centuries.

“There are no borders in the ocean,” says Dianna Parker, communications coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s marine debris program. “This is a global problem.”

The African Queen happens to be a local ghost fishing hot spot. Its resting place is just outside the boundary of California’s ban on gill nets—huge vertical nets that hang in the water—within three nautical miles of the coast. Boats that deploy gill nets, which have been blamed for inadvertently catching dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals, often cross over the African Queen.

“They go by and drag their nets along the sandy bottom here. They don’t know the wreck is down there and get their nets caught,” said Walter Marti, a volunteer diver for ODA. “The boats leave their nets behind, but those nets just keep on fishing and killing, perpetually.”

The mission today: dive to the wreck, remove some of the nets, and free trapped animals.

For Lieber, a Chicago native, these expeditions have become a life mission. Since 2002, he has embarked on more than 180 trips with his crew of volunteer divers and deckhands, recovering more than 32,000 pounds of fishing nets and 12,000 pounds of lobster and crab traps just along California’s coast.

Over the years, he’s seen just about every kind of critter caught in ghost nets—sharks, sea lions, lobster, eels, sea turtles, and even whales.

“I really didn’t expect this to become a long-term thing, but this fishing gear never stops, so we don’t stop,” Lieber says.

On this day’s dive, the team gets a glimpse of a global catastrophe.

“Just nets on top of nets down there,” Marti said in between the team’s first and second dive on the wreck.

For Marti and the dive team, the African Queen is a familiar foe. Over the years they’ve rescued nurse sharks, wolf eels, and lobsters from its web of nets and also seen the remains of sea lions, fish, and other animals they weren’t able to save.

“It’s an interesting yet depressing dive,” Marti says of the African Queen. “Interesting due to all the fish life, especially the wolf eels. Depressing due to the nets and other fishing gear snagged all about her.”

Diver Kim Cardenas has been down to the site before. On this trip she sees just how much work is left.

“It could take five or six more trips down there before it’s all removed,” Cardenas says. “You think you see all of it, but it’s buried too. You follow it down, and there’s just more and more—it never ends.”

Ghost Fishing’s Global Reach

A frustrating endeavor, but not unique, says NOAA’s Parker. She has worked for the agency’smarine debris program for the past four years, researching derelict fishing gear hot spots and participating in marine debris cleanups along the United States’ East and West coasts, the Great Lakes, and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Just as ocean currents are pushing plastics to convergence zones, also called gyres, abandoned nets often end up funneled into the same spots.

NOAA’s 244-foot research vessel, The Sette, last year recovered 57 tons of fishing nets and plastic garbage in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. The archipelago is home to the critically endangeredHawaiian monk seal, which has been found to be highly susceptible to entanglements with ghost gear.

“We didn’t even finish,” says Parker. “We just ran out of room to store it on deck.”

Like a fine-tooth comb, the reefs along the 1,200-mile chain of atolls sift and snag drifting gill nets, trawl nets, longline fishing gear, and other ghost gear. An estimated 57 tons of derelict nets end up in the 139,000-square-mile Northwestern Hawaiian Islands region every year.

The global reach of ghost nets remains mostly unknown as few studies have looked at the worldwide consequences of abandoned fishing nets. But World Animal Protection, a Europe-based conservation group, estimates as much as 640,000 tons of fishing gear is lost or abandoned every year.

In the U.S., NOAA researchers recently looked at seven fisheries and found that derelict fishing gear affected all of them. They discovered that 85,000 abandoned lobster and crab traps are ghost fishing in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, while in the Chesapeake Bay, more than 913,000 crabs are caught by derelict traps each year.

And more than 1,500 marine animals—including seals, sea lions, dolphins, sharks, 22 species of fish, and 15 species of birds—were found dead among 870 derelict nets discovered in the Puget Sound over the course of one year.

But help is on the way. ODA is just one of several volunteer teams that have joined a global nonprofit network called Ghost Fishing. Together, teams from Italy, Iceland, Australia, the U.S., and other countries have pulled up thousands of nets over the past decade, saving countless marine animals in the process.

In Washington state, more than $7 million from federal wildlife agencies is paying for the removal of more than 4,000 nets and nearly 3,000 traps from waterways. That has saved more than 3.2 million animals from entanglement, according to the Northwest Straits Foundation.

The problem of ghost nets is global. It's estimated that
as much as 640,000 tons
of fishing gear is lost every year.
(photo: NOAA/Takepart.com)

Centuries of Needless Nets

Still, the problem is ever growing. Before 1950, there were no reports of turtles stuck in marine fishing gear. By 1970, all six species of sea turtles had been reported entangled in ghost gear. Today, more than 200 marine species worldwide are impacted by derelict fishing gear.

What’s changed?

First, technological advances have allowed much of the commercial fishing operations to move further into the open ocean, where retrieval of lost nets is rarely an option. But the biggest change has come in the materials used to make fishing gear. Long-lasting synthetics used in today’s nets keep derelict gear fishing for years, if not centuries.

“We’ve got nets out there that will go on catching fish for 450 years,” Lieber says “It used to be hemp nets and rope that would biodegrade, but this stuff stays.”

Parker also noted the lack of national, not to mention international, regulation of ghost fishing.

“Each fishery is different, and the rules have to make sense to be put in place,” she says.

One of the biggest challenges is getting both the conservationists and the commercial fishing operators to fully understand the issue.

“Fishermen aren’t out there trying to lose their nets—that’s a lot of money to replace,” Parker says. “At the same time, we need to get fishermen to understand that those abandoned nets are hurting them economically too.”

One fish caught by a ghost net is one less for a fisher to catch and sell.

Zeke Grader, a 40-year industry veteran and executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, says the fishing industry has a stake in keeping vessels from losing their gear.

“Our first venture into derelict gear was in San Francisco Bay and the herring gillnet fishery,” says Grader, whose association represents fishing interests along the West Coast. “It’s really the last urban commercial fishery in the country, not many places you can look out a skyscraper and see commercial fishing taking place, so we wanted to maintain a good image in the community.”

By fishing only on weekdays, herring gillnet boats avoided entanglements with recreational sailboats over weekends and spent that time retrieving nets they had lost while fishing.

“The most important aspect is figuring out how to minimize gear loss for whatever fishery you’re looking at, whether it’s gillnets, trawl, drift nets, or traps, and second, when gear is lost, you’ve got to ensure a way to recover it,” Grader says.

For fishers, recovery of just one lost net can mean savings of thousands of dollars.

“Any way we can give fishermen the opportunity to go back and retrieve their fishing gear is good regulation,” Grader notes.

Worldwide, efforts are under way to prevent the loss of fishing gear.

• Better Nets, Fewer Ghost Nets: Improved fishing gear attachments and designs are limiting unwanted disconnects and snagging incidents.


• Zoning Laws: Keeping fishing nets out of areas where crab and lobster traps are in place can limit the number of conflicts and entanglements.


• Curfews on Catching: Restricting the time a net can “soak” or stay in the water without being attached to a boat can limit the chances of losing nets.


• Biodegradable Trapdoors: Using biodegradable materials in fishing gear can shorten the duration of ghost fishing. In Maine, all lobster traps are required to come equipped with a biodegradable hatch, so if the trap is lost, the hatch will disintegrate and animals won’t get stuck inside.


• Location, Location, Location: Placing GPS tags on individual nets, as many European fisheries do, is leading to much higher recovery rates of ghost gear.


• Recovery Compensation: It’s not just conservation; money can be a good incentive too. Fishing boats in Northern California’s Dungeness crab fishery are heading out in the off-season to retrieve the thousands of lost and abandoned traps. The program sponsored by the University of California, Davis, lets the boaters sell the traps back to their original owners—saving crab fishermen money, compensating other local fishermen, and saving marine life from being trapped in ghost gear.


• Recycling Program: Getting rid of old fishing gear can cost a pretty penny, and that price can deter fishers from properly disposing of nets. For over a decade, South Korea has offered awaste fishing gear buyback program, where fishers receive cash for every 100-liter bag of net they bring back.

Parker believes the tide is changing on ghost fishing.

“People are really starting to recognize that this is a problem,” she says. “Now, these solutions that are being implemented on the local levels need to start coming online as global initiatives.”

Grader agrees, but cautions against painting the fishing industry as rapacious ravagers of the sea.

“It’s like the marine protected areas set up along the West Coast here,” Grader said. “We were in support of the MPAs, but they were implemented wrong. It doesn’t matter the hell area you’re carving out, ocean acidification and warming water temperatures know no boundaries. You’re not going to really save the ocean without stopping pollution and getting aggressive on climate change.”

Back aboard the LegaSea, Lieber is busy hauling in the nets surfaced by the dive team. He’s also musing on how much more good could be done if he could just get the local fishing fleet to have him on speed dial.

“When they lose their nets, I just want them to report it, so I can go get it,” Lieber said. “I don’t want them to be put out of business, I just want them to stop facilitating these senseless deaths.”

The divers make their way back to the vessels’ swim step after cutting and successfully floating a few hundred yards of gill net and squid net wrapped around the African Queen.

But instead of a deckhand, an unexpected guest greets the divers: A sea lion pup has hopped aboard for a quick rest. The pinniped looks young, confused, and scared—shivering and emaciated.

A massive decline in Pacific sardines—one of the sea lion’s primary food sources—has created an epidemic of starving sea lions stranded on California’s shoreline. Just this year, more than 1,450 animals have been admitted to marine mammal rehabilitation centers up and down the coast.  

Lieber calls the local marine mammal center to get tips on what to do with the new crew member.

“So don’t even let her warm up here? She’s shivering,” Lieber asks. But while he’s still on the phone, the pup rolls off the swim step, darting back into the water as the first diver climbs the ladder and onto the boat.

“She’s who we’re trying to keep alive,” Lieber says. “There’s enough for them to worry about without having to deal with invisible nets that kill.”

VIDEO ON LINK:  

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34500-the-unseen-slaughter-under-the-sea



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