Protest outside the ALEC Headquarters in Washington DC March 29, 2012. Against ALEC, the NRA, and "Stand Your Ground" laws. Credit: LaDawna Howard/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
PORTLAND, Oregon, Jun 28 2016 (IPS)

For many years, as a reporter, including for IPS, I wrote about the dominance of a giant, corporate-funded lobbying organization called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), on public policy in the United States.

In recent years, public uproar about the influence of ALEC resulted in campaigns for major corporations to divest from ALEC.  Several major corporations did pull out, although the wealthy Koch brothers and many corporations still provide ALEC with millions of dollars every year.

ALEC takes some of the most regressive, harmful ideas and puts them into the form of draft laws, or model bills, for Republican-led State Legislatures to adopt – one after another, after another.

Whether laws to make it harder to vote, or to privatize education and privatize prisons, or require U.S. families receiving food assistance to take drug tests, ALEC has provided the templates for one U.S. state after another to replicate these ideas into law.

Well, in 2013, I began to study law at Gonzaga University, and in 2014, I wrote a Model Bill for something called Affordable Housing Impact Statements.

Specifically, the bill requires cities and counties to prepare an “Impact Statement” every time they consider any decision that would have an impact on the amount of affordable housing in that city or county.

This Model Ordinance took an idea that had been successful in two cities–San Diego, California; and Austin, Texas–and added some new features, including a Scorecard to keep track of how many housing units would be added or subtracted at each income level.

I worked with the City of Atlanta, Georgia, which adopted it in November 2015, and am now working with four other cities–New Orleans, Louisiana; Los Angeles, California; Albany, New York; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania–which are also considering it.

With the rapid success of the model bill in so many cities, it occurred to me that this was the work of a progressive alternative to ALEC – and wouldn’t it be funny if we called it SMART ALEC?

It is supposed to be a “smart” alternative to ALEC.  [In the U.S., the term “smart aleck” refers comically to someone who behaves as if they know everything – so the name SMART ALEC has a double meaning that amuses people.]

SMART ALEC stands for State and Municipal Action for Results Today / Agenda for Legislative Empowerment and Collaboration.

So, in March 2016, I created the new nonprofit organization, and am serving as CEO.  The Board of Directors now includes Dr. Dwanda Farmer, one of the nation’s few PhDs in Community Development; Barbara Payne, former director of the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation; and Christian Seppa, an activist.

Not only do we intend to promote progressive policies around the environment and affordable housing–basically the opposite of what ALEC promotes–we intend to do it in a way that is completely transparent and participatory.

We want to take back “lobbying” as a positive word.

In the United States, where vast concentration of wealth and corporate power has caused the average citizen to feel disempowered, as if they cannot make a difference in democracy, the word “lobbyist” has become a synonym for “devil.”

But we cannot let them have this word!  Just because corporations have become so adept at pushing their regressive, conservative proposals using the democratic process, so must we citizens become adept as doing the same.

SMART ALEC’s goal is to empower low-income, homeless, and marginalized people to make a meaningful difference in shaping, and advocating for, policy solutions.

The urgency of our environmental crises and affordable housing crises require that we work quickly to take the best solutions at the local levels of cities and states, and quickly replicate them.

Every day we are looking at the solutions being produced by civil society from all regions of the country; and we are inspired also by the bold solutions being pursued by our fellow “smart alecks” on every continent.

There is great experimentation happening, but we cannot experiment forever – so, let’s copy; paste; repeat.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Caden Clark has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a catastrophic form of epilepsy that causes him to have seizures from 10 to 20 times a day. Courtesy of the Clark Family.

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
SPOKANE, Washington, Mar 14 2014 (IPS)

Beth Collins recently picked up and moved from Virginia to Colorado, but it wasn’t for the typical reasons: new job, better schools, nicer weather. Collins’ 14-year-old daughter, Jennifer, has intractable epilepsy. Medical cannibis eases her frequent seizures. But it’s illegal in their home state.

“We got here the first week in December [2013]. She has been on THCA [a strain of cannabis],” Collins told IPS. “She takes it three times a day. We are seeing a 70 to 90 percent decrease in seizures. She’s been on the medication now for close to two months.”"It's just a huge gift and a trauma. Coming here and sort of ripping away, it was horrible and it was so hard." -- Kim Clark

Prior to the THCA, Jennifer tried a variety of drugs and diets, but they all had bad side effects, her mother says.

“She’s feeling better but she misses her dad, she misses her sister, she misses her friends. When you have a sick kid, we have a network of people it takes a long time to [build]. You have to start over again finding that support system when you move,” she said.

“Just she and I came. We want to make sure it works before we sell the house,” Collins said, adding that her family will probably be forced to permanently relocate to Colorado.

“I can’t leave with the medicine – we’ll be criminals if we do. They have pretty harsh fines [in Virginia]. I’d rather not be a criminal – it’s not how I want my daughter to see things, that if things don’t go your way, you’d commit a crime. I’d rather have her see us fighting,” Collins said, crying. “It’s emotional, it’s a hard thing. My family’s split.”

The Collins family is just one of hundreds that have migrated to the states of Colorado and Washington to access medical cannabis, or marijuana, to treat their children or other relatives, since voters in those states legalised the drug in the November 2012 elections.

An estimated 36,284 people moved to Colorado in 2013, almost 8,000 more than the year before, according to the Daily Beast. A good part of this increase is believed to be due to families migrating for medical cannabis, legal recreational cannabis, and cannabis-related business opportunities.

Caden and his mother, Kim Clark. The 10-year-old has been through numerous surgeries, including a partial lobotomy, which failed to stop his seizures. Courtesy of the Clark Family.

At least 200 families moved after cannibis oil was featured in a documentary called “Weed” by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of the cable television news station CNN.

One is the Clarks, whose 10-year-old son Caden has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a catastrophic form of epilepsy that causes him to have seizures from 10 to 20 times a day.

“He’s never had a seizure-free day in his life, ever,” said Caden’s mother, Kim Clark.

Kim moved with Caden from Georgia to Colorado after trying everything the legal medical community had to offer: prescription medications with severe side effects; a starvation diet; severing the brain hemispheres; even a partial lobotomy.

“We are not anti-science people. We are very pro-science people. Our child has had a lobotomy per science. It just didn’t work for him,” she told IPS.

The Clarks are on a waiting list for cannabis oil and said they had just received a phone call that their medicine might be ready as early as next week.

“We saw the special that Sanjay Gupta did on CNN about Charlotte Figi [a child whose epilepsy was cured by cannabis oil]. I took it to my husband, who is a narcotics officer in Atlanta, Georgia,” Clark said. “He’s the guardian of the drug vault, so there’s a bit of a conflict of interest there.

“When I approached him, my husband is highly anti-drug. He was like ‘not happening, anywhere’. I had to bring the science hard and heavy, with of course our son dying in front of us. It had to be really convincing,” she recalled. “We packed up everything. It’s very hard.”

Clark’s husband and other son stayed in Georgia. “We’re living in separate states. It’s what we have to do. Our older son actually said it. He looked at us, and he said, how can we not do it if we love him [Caden]? That became our mantra, our resounding call to Colorado,” Clark said.

Caden (right) and his brother, Jackson, who stayed in Georgia with their father. HB 885 is a bill currently pending in the state that would allow for medical cannabis to be administered to patients like Caden suffering from seizure disorders. Courtesy of the Clark Family.

An eighth-generation Georgian, she is bitter that her home state has not yet legalised medical cannabis and considers her and Caden to be “refugees”.

“My grandma taught me to grow vegetables and love God. I knew what county I’d raise my children in when I was 10 years old,” she said. “Do I feel disenfranchised and unwelcome [in Georgia]? Yes, you bet your ass I do,” she said.

“This is such a huge emotional screw. It’s a trauma. It’s just a huge gift and a trauma. Coming here and sort of ripping away, it was horrible and it was so hard,” Clark said.

Clark said eventually her family will run out of savings and will have to sell their house in Georgia in order to support a split household that is half living in Colorado.

Helping with the huge expenses involved in uprooting a family from one state to another are grassroots organisations like the Undergreen Railroad (a twist on the historic “Underground Railroad,” which during the 1800s helped slaves escape the U.S. South).

Another charity, Ride to Give, has raised 12,000 dollars for one family, the Coxes, who relocated from Georgia to Colorado to access medical cannabis for an ailing child, Haleigh, who also suffers from Lennox-Gastaut.

Nicole Mattison tells a similar story. “We moved in January from Tennessee to Colorado for our two-year-old daughter,” she told IPS.

“It’s been a bit of an undertaking, but so far it’s been well worth it,” she said. “Our daughter is diagnosed with intractable infantile spasms.”

Like other parents, Mattison had tried everything, including the starvation diet, which had the side effect of causing kidney failure in her daughter, Millie.

Mattison has been giving Millie THCA, with amazing results. “She’s been on it for six weeks now. We’ve seen a 75 to 90 percent decrease. She hasn’t had any infantile spasms.”

Mattison’s whole family made the move. “My husband owned a landscape company in Tennessee. We sold that to help fund the move. Currently, neither one of us have a job. It’s been really tough. We have two other children,” she said. “We left our church, our established support group.”

But Mattison does not regret her decision. “I would take the hardships any day for the possibility that Millie could one day have an improved quality of life.”

Moral Monday, the populist movement in North Carolina that saw a diverse coalition of thousands of progressive activists descend upon the state legislature, is now spreading throughout the U.S. South.

“I think it’s a sign the body politic is healthy in the U.S. One of the cheap benefits of U.S. citizenship is the right to petition your government and protest unjust laws. I think it’s a sign of health, I expect that it will spread,” Janice Mathis, vice president of the Citizenship Education Fund, told IPS.

Protesters attempt to deliver a letter to Gov. Nathan Deal on Jan. 28 that explains the consequences of not expanding Medicaid, a social healthcare programme for low-income people, in the state of Georgia. Credit: Courtesy of Gloria Tatum, Atlanta Progressive News

Moral Monday was first formed in North Carolina in April 2013. More than 800 people have been arrested in Moral Monday protests that have involved entering the State Capitol. Weekly attendance in North Carolina has been estimated at around 2,500 people.

North Carolina’s Moral Mondays have focused on opposing Republican redistricting and other voting changes, cuts to public education and social programmes, proposed changes that would increase the sales tax, challenges to abortion rights, and other issues.

So far this year, Moral Monday protests have started in Georgia, and “Truthful Tuesday” protests have been formed in South Carolina.

In Georgia’s second Moral Monday protest on Jan. 28, 10 activists were arrested for demanding to speak to the Republican governor, Nathan Deal, about expanding Medicaid in Georgia.

When Gov. Deal did not show up to receive the letter, the 10 quietly sat and waited for him. After 5pm, the Capitol police came in and informed the group that if they did not leave, they would be arrested. They refused to leave without giving the letter to the governor. Credit: Courtesy of Gloria Tatum, Atlanta Progressive News

Under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as “Obamacare,” the federal government has offered billions of dollars to U.S. states to expand Medicaid to a larger category of low-income families.

However, in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the states do not have to accept this money and the federal government cannot punish them for it by withholding other funds.

About half of U.S. states, mostly under Republican governors, have refused to accept the funding. As a result, millions of U.S. citizens are going without access to non-emergency health care, and thousands of deaths each year can be attributed to this lack of health care, according to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

Many of the states that have refused to accept federal Medicaid dollars are in the U.S. South.

“I think it’s very encouraging 10 people were arrested this Monday,” Mathis said. “We’re at a crossroads I think in the U.S. Shall we go forward as one nation committed to a basic standard of living as an American, or are we content with the worst income disparity in our history?

The police then handcuffed and arrested Democratic State Senator Vincent Fort, Reverend Alan Jenkins, Kevin Moran, Kathy Acker, Megan Harrison, Brittany Gray, Marguerite S. Casey, Karen Reagle, Michael Sehumm, and Daniel Hanley. Credit: Courtesy of Gloria Tatum, Atlanta Progressive News

A 2011 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top earning one percent of households increased their income by about 275 percent after federal taxes and income transfers between 1979 and 2007, compared to a gain of just under 40 percent for the 60 percent in the middle of the country’s income distribution.

Overall, in 2012, the gap between the richest one percent and the remaining 99 percent was the widest it’s been since the 1920s, with the incomes of the top one percent rising nearly 20 percent compared with a one percent increase for the remaining 99 percent.

“It’s nice to see a movement birthed in the South,” Mathis said. “Southern states still have peculiar ways of viewing issues that is unique. It is no coincidence voter ID, [lack of] Medicaid expansion, overincarceration were ground zero in the Southern states.”

Repressive policies have “spread to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and that’s unfortunate, but it has its roots in the South,” she said.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Truthful Tuesday activists held their first rally at the State Capitol there, and are hoping to begin weekly rallies soon.

“We did a rally that opened the session, Tuesday the 14th [of January], something that’s hard to pull off: middle-of-the-week, workday and it was raining. We had a thousand people,” Burt Bursey, executive director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, told IPS.

“Since then, we’ve had some meetings. We’re going back to the governor’s office Tuesday the 4th [of February],” he said.

As for why there is better turnout at the South Carolina rallies than in Atlanta, Georgia, he said, “it’s easier to organise in a small, backward state.”

One of the benefits of having protests on the same day every week is that everyone always knows when the next protest is.

Another benefit is that rather than protesting on days when the legislature is about to vote on a bill, which allows the legislature to set the pace, “We’re going to set the agenda here,” Bursey said.

Mathis said she is not worried about the smaller turnout in Atlanta thus far, because North Carolina’s Moral Monday started out small as well.

“We’re also at the beginning. We’ve got to continue to grow and expand it, bring in other groups, to expand it beyond the sort of usual suspects. It needs to expand beyond the activist core. It also needs to expand geographically, to all of Georgia’s 159 counties,” she said.

Activists say the coal trains lose one pound of toxic dust per car per mile. Credit: Scott Granneman/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
SPOKANE, Washington, Dec 27 2013 (IPS)

Citizens and activists in the U.S. Pacific Northwest are fighting three different proposed coal terminals, including one in Oregon and two in Washington.

Meanwhile, three formerly proposed coal terminals have already been defeated. Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign recently cited these defeats as signs of progress in the broader campaign to retire the use of coal plants across the U.S. altogether."If we allow corporations to export… it undercuts all the work that we’ve done to address the climate crisis." -- Trip Jennings

“There are three main reasons we oppose coal exports,” Trip Jennings, organiser for Portland Rising Tide, told IPS.

“The first reason – I think the most important for us – is the fact that we’re closing down power plants in the U.S.,” he said. “Oregon and Washington will be totally coal-free in a number of years. We as a community and as citizens decided we didn’t want to burn coal. If we allow corporations to export… it undercuts all the work that we’ve done to address the climate crisis.”

“Second, this has a huge impact on the number of trains that are coming through this area. It creates a situation where we’re committed to shipping highly destructive commodities, rather than shipping people or clean resources on our rails,” Jennings said.

“Third is the dust that is created when these cars lose one pound of dust per car per mile. They’re sprinkling the countryside, the rivers, streams, and communities with toxic, dirty coal dust [leading to asthma and lung disease].”

On May 8, energy company Kinder-Morgan abandoned plans to build a massive export terminal near Clatskanie, Oregon along the Columbia River, which would have exported 15 to 30 million tonnes of coal overseas each year from the Powder River Basin.

On Apr. 1, energy company Metro Ports, the last remaining investor in a proposed Coos Bay Terminal, in Coos Bay, Oregon, allowed its negotiating contract to expire.

International investors Mitsui & Co. of Japan and the Korean Electric Power Corporation had already withdrawn from negotiations. This terminal would have allowed for the shipment of eight to 10 million tonnes of coal each year.

The third victory for activists occurred last August, when Rail America withdrew plans for a coal terminal at the Port of Greys Harbor in Hoquiam, Washington, that would have transported about five million tonnes of coal each year.

The terminals still pending include a two-port plan called Morrow Pacific, in Morrow and St. Helens, Oregon; the Millennium Bulk Terminal at the Port of Longview, Washington; and the Gateway Pacific Terminal in Bellingham, Washington.

The Power Past Coal coalition, Portland Rising Tide and Idaho Rising Tide, the Backbone Campaign, Occupy Spokane, Spokane Riverkeeper, and the Sierra Club, are groups that have been involved in opposing these projects.

Portland Rising Tide, founded in 2007, is part of an international network of groups that works to address the root causes of climate change. It started in Europe and expanded to the U.S. in 2006.

According to Jennings, “[The coal dust from the trains] also blankets the rivers and streams with toxic dust, killing salmon, preventing salmon from continuing to spawn where they’ve spawned for millions of years. We’ve spent so many resources in the Northwest rehabilitating and protecting our salmon runs. These trains come in and they’ll be blanketing our salmon spawning beds with toxic coal dust.”

The coal would come from mines at the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming and the Tongue River Basin in eastern Montana. The proposed trains would bring the coal through the Columbia River Gorge, to boats. It would then be brought by train south through Portland and Vancouver, Washington, where the trains would turn north or continue west to one of the proposed port terminals.

Spokane, Washington would be impacted by any one of the three current coal train proposals, because they would all come through the city. Many residents there are concerned the increased train traffic will increase the number of times each day that traffic is stopped, meaning that emergency vehicles will not be able to get through.

Over 400 people attended a public hearing regarding the Millennium Bulk Terminal proposal in September 2013; most who attended were in opposition to the train.

At the hearing, Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart held up a bag of coal that he and other residents have collected, containing whole pieces of coal that had fallen off previous coal train shipments. The trains can lose up to one tonne of coal during their journey, advocates say.

Overall, the Millennium Bulk Terminal galvanised some 164,000 citizens to submit comments to the Washington State Department of Ecology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers prior to the end of the comment period last month.

Meanwhile, the Power Past Coal coalition, which itself is a coalition of groups, has largely spent its time focusing on the regulatory and permitting processes.

One victory from their participation in the environmental impact statement process is that the county and state agreed to consider the environmental impact not only of the carbon emissions in transporting the coal, but also the emissions that will result when the coal is consumed, for the Gateway Pacific Terminal proposal.

However, no government agency has agreed to include in its environmental impact study “what kind of pollutants are going to occur in cities that have no other connection other than that they’re a pass-through city to the ports,” Cullen Gatten, who participated as a legal observer of the protests outside the recent hearing in Spokane, on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS.

“China is also slowly moving away from using coal. They’re looking at clean energy, too. They [China] may use it now, but… there is some concern they are going to move on before we excavate all the coal,” Gatten said.

The most significant international investor, involved in two out of three of the proposals, is Ambre Energy, an Australian firm.

At the beginning of this week, Liz Fuller, a spokeswoman for Ambre Energy, asked IPS to email a list of questions, but the company did not respond to them.

Recently, the coal terminal proposals became an issue in the elections for county commissioners in Whatcom County, Oregon, where anti-terminal candidates won a majority of the seats on the board.

As a result, the Gateway Pacific Terminal proposal may be doomed, Gatten said.

In a lawsuit that could have nationwide implications for ballot-box access for tribes across the United States, Native Americans from Montana are pushing for early voting precincts to be placed closer to the locations of three tribal reservations – the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, and Fort Belknap reservations.   

“I live in the most isolated area of the reservation. There are no services at all. This is the smallest community of the reservation. We have to drive 21 miles just to go to post office, go to store, go to clinic, gas station, stuff like that,” Mark Wandering Medicine, 66, of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and the lead plaintiff in the suit,  told IPS.

He and others filed on Oct. 10, 2012, with the hope of obtaining emergency relief in time for the November 2012 election, as well as permanent relief going forward.

The case recently headed back to the U.S. District Court of Montana, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit voided an earlier ruling by the district court.“Everyone [in the tribes] is aware of the importance of voting, because it means progress for us when we exercise our vote.” -- Mark Wandering Medicine

On Nov. 6, 2012, the district court ruled against Wandering Medicine on the request for emergency relief, arguing that there was already sufficient evidence that Native Americans in Montana had sufficient political power to elect candidates of their choice.

Wandering Medicine appealed, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that any relief related to the 2012 election – now in the past – was a moot point. However, in vacating without comment the lower court’s ruling, Wandering Medicine can now have a full hearing on the merits of the claims for permanent relief, which have remained pending in the lower court.

The state of Montana allows early voting state-wide for the 20 days leading up to each election; however, the early voting locations are all at the county seats, which are often far away from the reservations.

“When they organised these counties there was no Native American involvement – back then, we were probably still at war… and they put them [the county seats] pretty far away from actual reservations,” O.J. Semans, executive director at Four Directions, a Native American advocacy organisation, told IPS.

Wandering Medicine lives in an area called Birney Village, Montana, about 33 kilometres away from Lame Deer, where the tribe has an office. Birney Village does have a voting precinct, but only on election day; not during early voting.

The problem is Wandering Medicine and others often have difficulties getting to their polling locations on election day itself, so the early voting period becomes very important.

“There’s a hardship of getting back and forth to Lame Deer,” Wandering Medicine said, noting he missed the November 2012 election day due to a vehicle problem.

“The weather being a factor also. If somebody lives in outlying districts and we get one of these Montana winter storms on election day, you can’t make it,” he said.

The distance from Birney Village to Forsyth, the county seat for Rosebud County, Montana – where early voting is held for the county – is about 140 kilometres.

“It’s a little over a two-hour trip one way. We don’t have transportation services with the tribe here,” Wandering Medicine said.

Wandering Medicine said voter turnout helps determine where services go in the different counties.

“If you don’t get the proper numbers of the people that can be registered to vote and they don’t make it because of hardship conditions, then the numbers appear to be less at the county, and then we don’t get that much revenue sharing,” he said.

“Everyone [in the tribes] is aware of the importance of voting, because it means progress for us when we exercise our vote,” he said.

Semans said that they were fighting for equality.

“If you look at the [U.S.] Census, in a house [on the reservations], it’s usually two to three families, and probably one car to every one family, so transportation really doesn’t exist on the reservation where they could take advantage of this early registering to vote,” Semans said.

He said that what a lot of people did not realise was that the elections were held on the first Tuesday in November, explaining that it was around the time of the month when people did not have money and were just struggling to survive until their next social security payment.

“If you look at the social programmes that happen in Indian Country to help people survive – you have people that get Social Security or disability cheques – they only get paid once a month. For the 30 days in between, they have charge accounts,” Semans said.

“On election day, a lot of the poor people have to take care of business to survive for the next 30 days,” Semans said.

Four Directions has been working to promote equal access to early voting for tribes across the U.S.  He said that after early voting was established in Mission, South Dakota, Native American turnout increased by 140 percent.

“Every study has showed that if you are not involved in the electoral process of elected officials, your social and economic development will be non-existent. These plaintiffs are trying to get equality because they know if they’re able to do this, they can improve their schools, their businesses, any type of social programme,” Semans said.

David Bradley Olsen, attorney for the plaintiffs with the Henson Efron law firm, told IPS: “Native Americans have less opportunity to participate in the political process because they’re denied the same rights to late registration and early voting that are afforded to non-Indians.”

“The original district judge [Richard Sebell] picked up on a couple of words in the Voting Rights Act, and concluded [that because] it has been showed that Indian candidates and Indian-preferred candidates, meaning Democrats, had been elected… that’s good enough, that’s the end of the inquiry, no violation,” Olsen said.

“We argued, that’s not the law, that the law is: do they have an equal opportunity to vote, to participate in the political process?” Olsen said.

If not, “there’s a denial of their right to vote, their right to vote has been abridged.”

In an interesting twist of events, Sebell was forced to retire in April 2013 while the case was on appeal, for sending racist emails concerning President Barack Obama.

Olsen said the case would be assigned to a new federal judge, and that he was pushing for the case to be expedited in time for the November 2014 election.

If the plaintiffs are successful, it will likely increase Native American early voting access throughout the federal Ninth Circuit, which includes most of the Western U.S., where the ruling would be controlling. The ruling could also influence courts throughout the nation, Olsen said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana and the U.S. Department of Justice have filed briefs on behalf of the Native Americans in this case.

The lawsuit could potentially determine the balance of the U.S. Senate because U.S. Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, is retiring, leaving an open seat.

Protesters outside the offices of agriculture giant Monsanto who were rallying as part of a "national day of solidarity." Credit: Daniel Lobo/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
SEATTLE, Washington, U.S., Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

The northwestern state of Washington could become the first in the U.S. to require labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on foods and food packages, after a similar measure in California failed last year.

Over 353,000 Washingtonians signed on to a petition creating Initiative 522, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot statewide. It notes that such labeling is fast becoming the international norm."The 'no' side has corporations that are all bankrolling their campaign." -- Elizabeth Larter of Yes on 522

“Forty-nine countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Russia, the European Union member states, and other key United States trading partners, have laws mandating disclosure of genetically engineered foods on food labels,” the text of the initiative states. “Many countries have restrictions or bans against foods produced with genetic engineering.”

Last year, Washington and Colorado voted to legalise marijuana altogether. Washington also legalised same-sex marriage.

“We have a history of leading on issues. We were first to label fish if they’re farm-raised,” Elizabeth Larter, a spokeswoman for Yes on 522, told IPS. “We really like to have the freedom to do what we want to do, when we want to do it. We believe in having those freedoms.”

Since the initiative was written, the number of countries with GMO labeling has grown to 64. Some are now bypassing U.S. markets because of concerns about genetic engineering, supporters of the measure warn.

However, Dana Bieber of the No on 522 campaign told IPS there are several differences between the initiative and GMO labeling requirements overseas.

“Proponents are talking about entire countries or continents,” she said. “With 522, it’s one-fiftieth of the country. Under 522 our farmers [in Washington] would have to live under a regulatory system and in a litigation climate that no other farmer in the entire U.S. would have to comply with – that puts them at a huge competitive disadvantage.”

While gridlock on the issue continues at the federal level, states are increasingly becoming more independent in terms of public policy.

The Yes on 522 campaign is seeing widespread support, with over 12,000 donors and hundreds of volunteers making phone calls every week. Donations are averaging 25 dollars each.

Support for the initiative has come from across the state, not only the progressive city of Seattle, Larter said. “This is a bipartisan effort,” she said.

However, the labeling campaign faces the same challenge that California did: millions of dollars in corporate money to pay for advertising aiming at convincing voters to reject the measure.

Corporate opposition

Corporations spent 46 million dollars last year to defeat California’s labeling referendum. So far, they have raised 17.1 million to defeat I-522 in Washington.

“The ‘no’ side has… corporations that are all bankrolling their campaign. Washingtonians… don’t want to be kept in the dark by these… out of state corporations,” Larter said.

The biggest donor to the No on 522 campaign is the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), which includes such members as Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft, McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Starbucks. It is not immediately clear which of these companies are funneling money through the GMA to the campaign.

The Yes on 522 campaign also has some smaller corporate donors, including Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Organic Consumer Fund Committee to Label GMOs in WA State, Mercola.com Health Resources LLC, Presence Marketing Inc, and Nature’s Path Foods USA Inc.

“The ‘no’ side is desperate right now, in a desperate scramble to raise funds. The GMA plowed in five million dollars,” Dave Murphy, founder of Food Democracy Now, and a member of the Yes on 522 steering committee, told IPS.

“They have to drown us out with negative ads to add to voter confusion on the issue. They’re really concerned how this is impacting their brand now,” Murphy said.

He expects the measure to pass in Washington, noting that it is a smaller media market than California, and thus easier for the Yes on 522 campaign to deal with. He notes that agriculture and fishing are important to the economy, and that GMO wheat recently mysteriously appeared in nearby Oregon, causing damage to some of the region’s main exports.

Pending applications for GMO apples and salmon have increased public alarm, he notes.

Additionally, Larter notes that the popular health food market Whole Foods has pledged to phase in a GMO labeling requirement at its stores, further raising public awareness.

The most recent poll shows 66 percent of likely voters in Washington support the measure, 21 percent against, and 13 percent undecided, according to Murphy.

“We had high numbers last year [in California]. The other side knows – this really is a marketing campaign. They know labeling, agriculture, and genetic engineering is a complex issue. They’re spending millions of dollars to confuse voters about what’s really at stake,” Murphy said.

Bieber told IPS that  even though I-522 only requires labeling and does not ban GMOs outright, the stigma will force companies to switch from GMOs to what she says are more expensive natural ingredients, thus causing consumers’ grocery bills to go up by hundreds of dollars.

Murphy says the No campaign is lying. He notes that this increase did not happen in other countries where labeling has been required.

The No campaign also argues the bill is poorly written and confusing, and that it unfairly exempts meat from animals who consumed GMOs from having to be labeled.

Larter says it’s not a loophole. She says that an animal which consumes a GMO is not a GMO.

“I think ultimately the ‘no’ side is false in their claims. They’re completely misleading voters. They need to do that in order to be successful,” Larter said.

After more than two years of fighting to prevent their release, the Department of Justice has released numerous documents related to domestic spying on U.S. citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the previously-secret court opinions that authorised the NSA’s controversial programmes to go forward.

On the evening of Sep. 10, the Justice Department released the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which had sued to force their release. Both organisations also have separate litigation against the NSA challenging its domestic spying programmes altogether.“They fought tooth and nail to keep this information from getting out to the public." -- Trevor Timm of EFF

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has also published the documents on the DNI website.

At issue is a telephony metadata programme, through which the NSA collects so-called “metadata” regarding every U.S. phonecall. The programme was revealed earlier this year by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is currently living in Russia under the status of political asylum.

Some of the most significant documents that are part of the release are rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that authorised the telephony metadata programme to move forward over the last several years.

The document release “reveals a few things”, Trevor Timm, a policy analyst for EFF, told IPS.

“First the NSA admitted to the court [FISC] in 2009 it had not a single person in the NSA who was able to adequately understand their surveillance system, which is an extraordinary admission because… the surveillance system exists solely because the court authorised it based on the NSA’s explanations,” he said.

“This shows NSA is in charge of itself. They could get away with anything and not tell the court and there would be no repercussions or way for anybody to find out it,” Timm said.

On Jul. 19, the court ordered the Justice Department to meet with the parties seeking access to the FISC records and other records, to negotiate the voluntary release of as many records as possible.

According to EFF, some records have still not been released, but at least this has narrowed the scope of the records dispute remaining before the courts.

EFF is still waiting on at least one crucial FISC opinion that has yet to be released, specifically regarding the court’s interpretation of the word “relevant”. The word “relevant” appears in Section 215 of the amended Patriot Act and is the NSA’s justification for collecting all U.S. telephony metadata. The NSA argues every citizens’ metadata is relevant to national security.

“We still think we’re going to get that [document]. That will have the most direct effect on the lawsuit [challenging the programme],” Timm said.

In responding to the Jul. 19 court order, the Justice Department said it was able to release more records than it had been previously because of an Aug. 9 directive by President Barack Obama to release “as much information about these programmes as possible”.

However, EFF disputes the notion that the government has released the information voluntarily.

“The presidential directive was not the reason they started releasing information. It’s because the Court ordered them to start releasing information,” Timm said. “Because of the presidential directive, those negotiations turned out better than they normally would have.”

“They fought tooth and nail to keep this information from getting out to the public. They wouldn’t even tell us the number of pages involved. They said if we release even one word of this, it would cause significant and articulable harm to national security,” Timm said.

“Since the Snowden revelations, that’s been… [revealed] as ridiculous. Basically they’re just implementing public laws and explaining the legal standards for which they carry out these laws – this stuff should’ve been public years ago,” Timm said.

In January 2009, the NSA revealed to the court that it had failed to follow its own procedures to minimise the use of citizens’ constitutionally protected private information. The NSA had violated court orders on numerous occasions in which it queried citizens’ information without any suspicion of a connection to terrorism.

The NSA had a list of approximately 18,000 phone numbers that they had been not just collecting but using, but they only had reasonable suspicion of terrorist links for around 2,000 of them.

A Mar. 3, 2009 order, by FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton, obtained by the organisations, describes a federal agency run amok.

“The court at first authorised the collection of bulk metadata in 2006,” Patrick Toomey, attorney and national security fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told IPS.

“In 2009 it describes the restrictions, the very rigorous restrictions that the court imposed on the use of this phone record metadata, and it describes the ways the government had defied or failed to comply with those restrictions.

“The most disturbing point probably that came out of these documents was the extent of the government’s failure to comply with the court order,” Toomey said.

The NSA argues there is no expectation of privacy for metadata under the Fourth Amendment because it is owned by the phone companies.

“They’ve clung to a case from 1970s that allowed law enforcement to collect one phone call for one person,” Timm said, referring to Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 case decided by the Supreme Court.

Collecting the telephony metadata of all U.S. residents is “not exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court intended or knew could happen when that decision was made,” Timm said.

The NSA has also argued that it is not violating citizens’ rights by merely collecting and storing citizens’ telephone metadata because it only uses the information when it needs to.

But the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees with that logic. “It doesn’t matter what the government does with the information. For Fourth Amendment and privacy purposes, the government has taken for itself information that discloses personal details, political, religious, even medical,” Toomey said.

“If the government took your diary and promised not to read it, it would still be a search, and not just because of your property interest in the paper,” Toomey said.

The Athabasca River from Icefields Parkway in Alberta, Canada. Credit: dicktay2000/CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
SPOKANE, Washington, Sep 1 2013 (IPS)

Native American tribes in the United States have taken the lead in opposing the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands in Alberta, Canada, engaging in civil disobedience to the point of arrest and attempting to physically block shipments of construction equipment from passing through their native lands.

Native opposition is based on concern over the environmental destruction associated with the expansion and with the related Keystone XL Pipeline. The pipeline would convey oil from the tar sands through Canada and the United States to southeastern Texas.

As previously reported by IPS, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation says the expansion of the world’s third largest crude oil deposit so far has caused significant damage to the ecosystem, including the disappearance of bugs, decline in the numbers of migratory birds, elevated rates of certain types of cancers, and the possible extinction of caribou herds. "They're trying to conquer Mother Nature, and they're not going to do it."
-- Silas Whitman

The Nez Perce tribe are also concerned about the Megaload shipments coming through their tribal lands, without their permission, and the ecological damage these shipments might cause. The most recent, a Megaload shipment, contains a 322-tonne, 225-foot-long evaporator to be used in the oil refining process in connection with the Tar Sands expansion.

“What it really amounts to is our association [with] our surroundings, our environment,” Tony Smith, a member of the Nez Perce tribe, told IPS in an interview at the recent Spokane Falls Northwest Indian Market, Encampment and Pow Wow.

“Outsiders believe they’re apart from the environment, that we’re above it, that we can control it,” Smith said. “But we believe we’re a part of the environment; it’s a symbiotic relationship. Whatever we do to our environment we do to ourselves.”

“The issue is really hot,” he added. “A lot of emotions are flowing over, with the protests that happened.”

Protests and arrests

Nineteen members of the Nez Perce tribe, including eight members of the tribal council, were arrested for disorderly conduct on Aug. 6, 2013, near downtown Lewiston, Idaho. They were released shortly thereafter. About 200 protesters had gathered beginning the night before, according to the Spokesman Review newspaper. They chanted and banged drums until the Megaload shipment approached in the early morning hours on Aug. 6.

The protest delayed the Megaload shipment by about four hours. About three quarters of the protesters were estimated to be Native Americans. Others included activists with an environmental group, Wild Idaho Rising Tide. A video of the protest has been posted to Youtube.

The protesters continued to block the shipment at four different points over four different days as the Megaload shipment attempted to move through tribal lands.

Other tribes, however, have received advance payments from TransCanada for allowing the Keystone Pipeline to come through their tribal lands, according to Silas Whitman, chairman of the executive committee of the Nez Perce Tribal Government.

Whitman also said he was concerned about how companies were shipping equipment “without any consultation with the tribe or without any impact study”.

“Corporate Canada has been used to rolling over indigenous populations for quite some time. We thought the only way to get their attention is to conduct civil disobedience. We tried diplomacy, we tried outreach,” Whitman said.

“They’re using our wilderness corridor, where our treaty rights are still intact. They’re using us to further more misery and exploitation of Native resources in Canada. We’re taking a stand for those who can’t speak for themselves – the fish, the wildlife, the cultural resources, including our brothers in Canada who are having a tough time,” Whitman said.

Going to court

The Nez Perce tribe has joined with other Native tribes in opposing the Keystone XL Pipeline, noting that such efforts begin with the Megaload protests.

“It starts with us. They’re trying to ship…through our corridor, to Canada. That’s where the Native first nations have their lands destroyed for tar sands,” Whitman said.

In February, a federal court mandated approval from the tribe and the U.S. Forest Service before the Megaload shipments could come through the Nez Perce tribal lands. The state of Idaho, however, approved the shipment, despite the court order, and without tribal approval.

“The judge told them the first time they [the Forest Service] had the authority to do [block the shipment]. Now we’re taking them back to court to enforce that authority,” Whitman said.

“They have staff here conducting interviews. We’re saying the Forest Service has to uphold its duties and obligations. The Forest Service said they are afraid of losing a court battle because there’s no federal regulation that allows them to stop it,” Whitman said.

“General Electric has now decided to intervene. They think they can beat us in court,” Whitman said. Delays of the shipments could cost General Electric millions of dollars.

“Sep. 9 we’re going back to court [to see] if we can get a cease and desist on [the basis of] the order,” Whitman said.

With the ongoing litigation pending, Omega Morgan, the company responsible for the shipments, has said it will not move forward on any more shipments until at least Sep. 18.

“We’re gaining more support every day. The newspaper poll was two-thirds against [the protests]. Now, it’s 50/50. We’re standing up to the corporate giants and we’re doing it on a shoestring,” Whitman said.

Potential problems with the shipment include the truck or shipment falling into the wilderness river, which could block fish passage during the critical migration season, breaking roads and river banks, and causing soil to accumulate on the campgrounds.

Whitman says the trucks are going about 50 miles per hour on a “two lane road next wilderness river through high mountains in Idaho. They’re trying to conquer Mother Nature, and they’re not going to do it.”

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.

In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government’s effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens’ constitutional rights.“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information." -- former prosecutor Patrick Nightingale

“None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source,” Patrick Nightingale, a former prosecutor for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told IPS.

“My oath as an attorney and as a prosecutor was as an officer of the constitution, and not to win at all costs. This [programme] is a win at all costs mentality: whether it’s constitutional or not we’re going to use it and we can conceal it,” he said.

Called the Special Operations Division (SOD), it is comprised of some two dozen federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.

Everything about the SOD is secret, including the size of its budget and the location of its offices.

Reuters has also identified the IRS as a recipient of the information, pointing to a former IRS training manual that referenced the SOD programme.

As a routine practice, the SOD secretly provides the information to local authorities across the U.S., allowing them to start investigations against U.S. citizens under false pretenses, in a practice known as “parallel construction”.

For example, under parallel construction, local law enforcement will be instructed to find a reason to stop a particular vehicle – for example, through a routine traffic stop – and then once the drugs are found, the government will falsely state the drugs were found in the traffic stop.

The IRS training document details how government officials are instructed to conceal – from prosecutors, defence attorneys, and even the courts – the methods by which a suspected drug criminal is identified and then targeted for apprehension.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the 2005 and 2006 IRS training manual says, according to Reuters.

“SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations,” the document states.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that defends free speech and privacy issues, calls it “intelligence laundering“.

Since the revelations on Aug. 5, the Justice Department has said it is reviewing the programme, according to reports. But such a review does not address the constitutional violations that appear to have already occurred.

“Our criminal justice system is based on the presumption of innocence and our constitution demands fair play in criminal proceedings. It demands that prosecutors reveal to the defence both the good and the bad,” Nightingale said.

“If the source of this information is so sensitive that a law enforcement agency is told to keep the information from its own team [including federal and local prosecutors] because it knows members of its team are required to divulge it to the other side [the defence], then it’s a problem,” he said.

Nightingale told IPS he had no awareness of the programme as a prosecutor, even though he worked on many cases where he sought court approval for a Title 3 wiretap based on certain evidence. Now he does not know – nor does he have any way of knowing – how many of those cases originated from a secret SOD tip.

“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information, depriving… defence attorneys and defendants from being able to have a fair trial as defined by the Constitution,” he said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with EFF, told IPS, “The NSA data is being gathered on purpose, and then directed to a different purpose.” He said the information being gathered by the NSA “should” be something that the FISA Court has been approving, although there is no way to know.

“Those orders have a broad scope. The orders aren’t public, there isn’t insight into what the orders look like, or how the court operates really,” Fakhoury said.

“The big concern is they’re not being forthright about the fact that they’re using the information directed toward a purpose not related to national security, and they’re not telling the court or the defendants the true source of that information.

“It’s yet more proof what is being said publicly [by the NSA] is not all entirely accurate,” he said. “It’s another reason why we have to very carefully scrutinise the government’s justification for these types of programmes.”

Fakhouri says the SOD programme is unconstitutional because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments combined.

Full and fair disclosure is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Sixth Amendment, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The revelations also raise the possibility that individuals who have been convicted over the last 20 years on drug charges, or perhaps IRS-related charges, will challenge those convictions in court on the basis that secret evidence may have been used in the investigative process.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of those types of arguments. How successful those will be – will be a tough sell. I think it will be an interesting thing to watch,” Fakhoury said.

A honey bee in a willow tree. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Two Congressional Democrats have co-sponsored new legislation called the Save America’s Pollinators Act of 2013 to take emergency action to save the remaining bees in the U.S., and in turn, the U.S. food supply.

At issue is the use of toxic insecticides called neonicotinoids. Recent studies suggest that at least four types of these insecticides are a primary cause of the massive decline in bee populations seen in the U.S. in recent years.“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on foods that rely on pollination." -- Scott Hoffman Black of the Xerxes Society

It is estimated over 10 million beehives been wiped out since 2007, as part of a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

“Given that EPA allowed many of these insecticides on the market without adequate safety assessments and without adequate field studies on their impact to pollinator health, we feel it’s time that Congress support a bill like the Conyers-Blumenauer bill, which would suspend the use of the neonicotinoids until EPA does the adequate science to prove that these neonicotinoids… are not harmful – and if they are harmful, to keep them off the market,” Colin O’Neil, director for government affairs for the Centre for Food Safety, told IPS.

“One-third of food that’s reliant on the honeybee pollination is really under threat, and threats to pollinators concern the entire food system,” O’Neil said.

During the last winter alone, which began in 2012 and ended early this year, U.S. beekeepers lost 45.1 percent of the colonies they operate, with some beekeepers losing 100 percent, according to a government-sponsored study.

The European Union has already imposed a two-year moratorium on several types of neonicotinoids, after the European Food Safety Authority found in January 2013 that certain neonicotinoids were threatening Europe’s bee populations.

In May 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a joint study noting that, “Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern.”

The proposed legislation, by Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, would require the EPA to suspend the use of at least four neonicotinoids, including imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and dinotafuran.

The legislation would prevent the EPA from re-authorising the use of the chemicals as pesticides until the agency conducts a full review of the scientific evidence. It would have to determine there are no unreasonable adverse effects on bees or other pollinators or beneficial insects before allowing them back on the market.

Through their pollination activities, by which bees allow plants to reproduce, bees are responsible for over 125 billion dollars in global food production, including over 20 billion dollars in the U.S., according to the legislation’s findings.

“Neonicotinoids cause sublethal effects including impaired foraging and feeding behavior, disorientation, weakened immunity, delayed larval development, and increased susceptibility to viruses, diseases, and parasites and numerous studies have also demonstrated acute, lethal effects from the application of neonicotinoid insecticides,” the legislation states.

“Recent science has demonstrated that a single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid is toxic enough to kill a songbird,” it says.

In June 2013, over 50,000 bumblebees were killed in Wilsonville, Oregon, as a direct result of exposure to a neonicotinoid that was used not as a pesticide, but to cosmetically improve the appearance of certain trees.

So many bees have already died in the U.S. that just one more bad winter here could cause a major food crisis, one U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist said in the recent report.

O’Neil notes the U.S. House recently approved an amendment to the Farm Bill that would establish an interagency consultation process on pollinator protection, and would establish a task force to address bee decline.

“Passage of that was the first indicator this summer that members of congress were really waking up to this issue,” O’Neil said.

“We feel this bill [Conyers-Blumenauer] is necessary because the bees are dying now, and we can’t wait four years down the road to come to the conclusion that pesticides are killing bees,” he said.

The Centre for Food Safety recently sent an email to their members asking them to contact Gina McCarthy, the new head of the EPA, to encourage her to take action to benefit bees. McCarthy is believed to be a strong proponent of environmental stewardship.

“We’re hoping she’s going to be a better steward of bee health at the EPA than her predecessor was,” O’Neil said.

One of the neonicotinoids was conditionally registered for agricultural uses by the EPA in 2003, based on the fact that it was already registered as an insecticide for non-agricultural uses.

“So they allowed it to be conditionally registered without a field study on the condition this field study would still be received. Ten years later this requirement has never been met and the EPA continues to allow the use,” O’Neil said.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerxes Society, an organisation that advocates on behalf of invertebrates, told IPS, “The important fact about [neonicotinoids], they’re systemic, they’re inside the plant. Others go straight on the plant, and the rain would wash it off after. It’s [the neonicotinoids] in the roots, it’s in the stem, it’s in the flower, it’s in the flower nectar.”

When asked what would happen to te U.S. diet if there was a bee collapse large enough to eliminate pollination across the nation, Hoffman Black said that crops like wheat and corn, which do not require pollination, would still be available.

“Vegetables, fruits, nuts, all things that are highly nutritious and taste really good,” would be eliminated, Hoffman Black said. “We would have rice and wheat.

“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on food that rely on pollination,” he said.

The U.S. government argues there is no expectation of privacy for so-called metadata collected by the NSA. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

A wide variety of individuals and organisations have filed lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency (NSA) and other federal agencies and officials for conducting a massive, dragnet spying operation on U.S. citizens that was recently confirmed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

At least three ongoing lawsuits are challenging the NSA’s practice of indiscriminately collecting and storing information related to all phone calls to and from U.S. citizens – referred to as “telephony metadata” by the government – as in violation of several protections guaranteed under the constitution."Metadata is extraordinarily important. You could make a pretty clear map of your political views, your religious affiliations." -- Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

In addition, at least one lawsuit challenges the NSA’s PRISM programme, which collects a variety of multimedia communications of non-U.S. citizens that are handled by U.S.-based companies such as Facebook, Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Snowden, a former contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, a computer technology consulting firm that works with the NSA, revealed the NSA programmes in interviews with several publications, including the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, which was the first to begin publishing related documents on Jun. 6.

Snowden has been stuck at an airport terminal in Russia for several weeks and is currently seeking asylum there, as he has said he fears he would be wrongfully prosecuted, tortured, or even killed by the U.S. government.

One of the latest lawsuits to challenge the telephonic spying programme, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, et al., v. National Security Agency, et al., was filed on Tuesday.

The plaintiffs “are organisations with members with First Amendment rights to freedom of association,” Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told IPS. “CALGUNS [a California-based gun rights advocacy group] is scared people won’t call their hotline.

“We have the First Unitarian Church as a plaintiff. They are concerned people won’t use the services they have, because they’re afraid they’re going to be associated with other services they have. Metadata is extraordinarily important. You could make a pretty clear map of your political views, your religious affiliations,” Jeschke said.

The government admits the telephonic spying programme collects the phone numbers, time and date, and durations of all U.S. phonecalls.

The plaintiffs argue the programme is a violation of the First Amendment because it has a chilling effect on the rights to free speech, assembly, practice of religion, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances; the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; the Fifth Amendment right to due process; and various federal statutes related to electronic surveillance.

The federal government has said it collects and stores the metadata for several years – in order to preserve it – but only uses it when it decides there is a national security reason to search the information.

The government also argues there is no expectation of privacy for metadata under the Fourth Amendment because it is owned by the phone companies.

“The Fourth Amendment question is in part going to turn on the scope of search and the reasonableness. Accessing metadata for persons for which some level of suspicion [exists] is one thing, accessing metadata for everybody is a different matter,” Prof. Gerry Weber, an adjunct professor at Emory School of Law specialising in constitutional law, told IPS.

“This is all an evolving technology area, where the Supreme Court has generally been hit or miss. They’re dealing with new electronic technologies as they come,” Weber said.

On Jun. 9, Larry Klayman, the former chairman of Judicial Watch, and two other citizens filed a federal class action lawsuit challenging the telephonic surveillance programme.

On Jun. 11, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also sued over the telephonic spying programme.

The ACLU had previously sued the NSA in 2008, challenging the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 – which the government has used as part of its secret legal justification for its programme – but their complaint was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2013 on the grounds that the ACLU could not prove it had been monitored by the government.

However, given the recent revelations, and given that the ACLU is a Verizon subscriber, the organisation should now have standing.

Verizon, a phone service provider, was subject to a previously-secret court order dated Apr. 25 by U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Roger Vinson compelling it to turn over customers’ phone records to the NSA.

But advocates are confident that Verizon is not the only participant.

“The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged the Verizon order was part of a large programme from the NSA. It would be surprising if it were only Verizon. That’s [just] the document that’s leaked. We do have intelligence officials saying it was a wide-ranging programme… ‘broad in scope,’” Jeschke said.

Klayman has also sued over the multi-media eavesdropping programme, PRISM.

In addition, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Petition for a Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition, or a Writ of Certiorari, with the Supreme Court on Jul. 8. The petition asks the court to vacate the Apr. 25 order by the FISA Court that had compelled Verizon to send telephony metadata to the NSA.

In addition to arguments similar to those made in the other cases, the petition also argues the NSA telephonic spying programme violates attorney-client privilege, and is a violation of separation of powers because the NSA is also collecting phone records of Congress and the judiciary.

Meanwhile, in separate, ongoing class action litigation the EFF has had against the NSA since 2008, Jewel v. NSA, a federal judge last week rejected a motion by the federal government to dismiss the suit. That case alleged ongoing, dragnet surveillance by the NSA on millions of U.S. citizens, even years prior to Snowden’s revelations.

“We’ve asked this case to be associated with Jewel v. NSA. There were other leaks. The fact that this programme was ongoing was something that many people were aware of before these leaks came out – it’s just the documents from the FISA Court confirmed it,” Jeschke said.

A whistleblower with AT&T, who had wired a room that he believed was for the government to track U.S. citizens’ phonecalls, came to EFF in 2006.

“He realised he was wiring up Big Brother and came to us,” Jeschke said.

Meanwhile, in a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing this week on the NSA spying programmes, members of Congress of both parties told representatives of the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that they believe the administration has abused the authority granted to it by Congress.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a powerful Republican from Wisconsin, warned that if the administration did not stop collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens indiscriminately, that a provision, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, known as the business records provision, will expire, and that there will not be enough votes in Congress to renew it.

Some believe the U.S. nuclear industry is starting to deteriorate. Above, a nuclear power plant. Credit: Bigstock

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

With the announced closures of four nuclear reactors in the United States so far this year and the cancellation of proposed facilities elsewhere in the country, some activists believe the U.S. nuclear industry is beginning to crumble.

Earlier this month, Southern California Edison (SCE) announced it would close the troubled San Onofre Plant, which has two reactors and is located on the beaches of San Diego, California.

The reactors were shut down in 2012 when they were discovered to be leaking larger than normal amounts of radioactive pollution.

SCE’s announcement came after a local television news station in April 2013 published photographs and testimony showing that SCE had been using tape, plastic bags and a broomstick to fix a leaky pipe at the San Onofre Plant.

SCE had asked the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reopen the reactors, but the company ultimately announced their decision to retire them.

In May, the utility company Dominion closed the one small nuclear reactor at the Kewaunee Plant in Carlton, Wisconsin, not because of known problems with the plant but because the company decided it was not economical to keep it open.

And Duke Energy announced in February that it would close the Crystal River 3 Nuclear Plant, located in Crystal River, Florida, which has one small reactor.

According to Glenn Carroll, coordinator of Nuclear Watch South, a grassroots organisation that raises awareness about nuclear issues, the four closures bring the total number of nuclear reactors in the United States down to an even hundred, from 104 at the beginning of the year and 114 at the industry’s peak."[The nuclear industry] is crumbling under its own weight."
-- Glenn Carroll

“There haven’t been any new reactors built in over 30 years. A small number of them are under construction, and none of them are going well,” Carroll told IPS. “They’re expensive…and meanwhile, solar and wind are…garnering small wins every day.”

“[The nuclear industry] is crumbling under its own weight,” Carroll said.

A gradual deterioration

Just a few years ago, dozens of proposals for possible new nuclear reactors existed. Today, two nuclear projects in Georgia and South Carolina are the only ones still going forward, Carroll noted.

“If there are four reactors being built instead of 44, your economy of scale has just evaporated,” Carroll pointed out, adding that Georgia would be “strapping itself” to rising costs for parts for the plant.

“They’re going to be essentially hand-crafted. No company is going to be set up to create these parts,” she said.

Carroll predicted that other reactors would soon be slated for closure, including those at Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vermont and at Indian Point in Buchanan, New York. In both cases, state governments have sought to shut down the plants.

Meanwhile, billionaire investor Warren Buffett has completely divested from the nuclear industry. Earlier this month, one company owned by Buffett, MidAmerican Energy, has abandoned a proposal to open a new nuclear facility in Iowa.

The costs of nuclear power

According to Mark Cooper, a senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, history has proved that nuclear power is not economical.

“The industry likes to say once you build them, they just hum along and they’re cash cows, producing low cost electricity, and then the industry takes that claim and uses that as a pillar [on which] they try to build the case for new nuclear reactors,” Cooper told IPS.

The nuclear industry maintains that once construction is complete, plants are inexpensive to operate and “last forever”, according to Cooper.

“The reality of old reactors does not support those claims,” he argued, and “the construction costs for new nuclear reactors go through the roof.”

He said one-fifth of reactors built before 2013 that received commercial licenses have retired early and called the 60-year life span of reactors “inconsistent with reality”.

“When [reactors] age, they have the tendency of being more and more costly to keep online,” he added. “When they break, they are too expensive to fix,” he said, citing over two dozen reactors that have closed down for those reasons.

Subsidised construction

In his speech on global warming earlier this week, U.S. President Barack Obama pointed to nuclear reactors under construction in Georgia and South Carolina as examples of new clean energy supported by his administration.

As reported by IPS in 2008, Obama has long been supportive of – and received campaign contributions from – the nuclear industry, beginning with his term in the U.S. Senate.

However, through charges applied to their monthly energy bills, taxpayers in Georgia and South Carolina are shelling out in advance to heavily subsidise nuclear projects in those states, even as Georgia Power and Scana are guaranteed profits because of decisions made by their legislatures and public service commissions.

“At the great pain imposed on ratepayers in Georgia and South Carolina, they can finish those reactors,” Cooper said, but “those reactors will tell us nothing about building another one because they are so incredibly subsidised.”

He believed that other states would not adopt such an approach that shifts risk to taxpayers, predicting, “Summer in South Carolina and Vogtle in Georgia will be monuments for folly, not launch points for the future.”

The Supreme Court of the United States. Credit: Mark Fischer/CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jun 25 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision, Section 4, of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 in a five to four ruling today, halting enforcement of Section 5 of the act.

One of the key achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, the act was intended to address historical, entrenched racial discrimination in voting policies and practises.

Even though black people in the United States have ostensibly possessed the right to vote since 1870, under the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, multiple federal civil rights acts were enacted in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965 to address discriminatory practises at state and local levels, including in elections.

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito ruled to strike down the Section 4(b) of the 1965 act. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.

Section 5 of the VRA of 1965 is one of the strongest enforcement provisions of the act. It requires that the U.S. Department of Justice pre-clear any changes to “any standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting”, including district maps, in any of the “covered jurisdictions”, which include all or part of 16 states in the United States, mainly in the South. Section 4 defines what areas Section 5 covers."Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA."
-- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Equal sovereignty”

The case, Shelby County, Alabama v. Attorney General Robert Holder, argued that, on its face, the 2006 Congressional reauthorisation of sections of the act was unconstitutional because it was based on historical data of racial discrimination in election practises that are no longer relevant.

A majority of the court agreed with Shelby County, arguing there is a “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” between states that requires the federal government to treat states equally.

Section 5, the court wrote, “requires States to beseech the Federal Government for permission to implement laws that they would otherwise have the right to enact and execute on their own. And despite the tradition of equal sovereignty, the Act applies to only nine States (and additional counties)”.

The court also ruled the criteria defined in Section 4 – a history of discriminatory practises, along with a low level of voter turnout – were antiquated and no longer justified by current conditions, because of the very success of the act.

Voter turnout and registration rates in covered jurisdictions “now approach parity”, the court wrote, and minorities hold elected office “at unprecedented levels”. It added that discriminatory practises like literacy tests have disappeared and that blatant discrimination is rare.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg blasted the majority opinion in her dissent, writing, “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA.”

“In the Court’s view, the very success of [Section] 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy… Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” she wrote.

“The question this case presents is who decides whether, as currently operative, Section 5 remains justifiable, this Court, or a Congress charged with the obligation to enforce the post-Civil War Amendments ‘by appropriate legislation,'” she wrote.

Ginsburg noted an current, ongoing problem of a second generation of tactics designed to dilute black voting strength, including redistricting practises and a move to change some elections to at-large voting.

Ginsburg wrote that the Congressional record showed that covered jurisdictions were more likely to be the subject of prevailing discrimination complaints and that there was a procedure for covered jurisdictions to apply to be bailed out of Section 5, and for non-covered jurisdictions to be bailed in, if necessary.

Further, she argued that because Shelby County, the actual plaintiff in the case, clearly qualified for Section 5 coverage, that the court had overreached. “The Court’s opinion can hardly be described as an exemplar of restrained and moderate decisionmaking.”

“Congress approached the 2006 reauthorization of the VRA with great care and seriousness. The same cannot be said of the Court’s opinion today,” she wrote.

Fury from civil rights advocates

Voting rights and civil rights advocates are infuriated at the ruling and are scrambling to take action.

Some activists are urging Congress to enact a new Section 4 based on modern-day criteria to identify which states and other jurisdictions should require preclearance for any election-related changes

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) already has a petition on its website calling on Congress to act.

Justin Levitt, associate professor of law at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, told IPS that such a move may be more complicated and politically challenging than it sounds.

“The court… certainly left the door open. If Congress chooses to return to ‘where’ question [where preclearance should be required], it would have to articulate a set of jurisdictions and the reason for including those and not others responsive to facts on the ground,” Levitt said. “That’s really hard to do.”

“It’s like asking Congress to try to figure out and come up with…current measures for places that are most sick even though they’re taking medicine. Now we’re taking the medicine away and now Congress needs to show it needs the medicine,” he said.

Possible new criteria that have been discussed so far include a history of other voting rights litigation under other provisions of the VRA, the degree to which an electorate is racially polarised or levels of prejudice, he said.

As for the court’s disregard for Congress’s renewal of the act in 2006, “there is not a tremendous amount of consistency in the amount of deference other branches of government get,” Levitt said.

Other activists are looking for a more radical and fundamental change. Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorofChange.org, said his organisation is pushing for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote.

“The right to vote is not enshrined in our Constitution. There’s a host of different requirements and laws, everything from registration to ballot access, in different states,” Robinson said.

“We can continue to be on the defensive, or we can sort of advance a new framework for how elections should be run in this country, and that’s what we’re doing here,” Robinson told IPS.

“We’ve got to be more aspirational,” he said. “We’ve got to think bigger.”

The Partnership for Southern Equity defines energy equity as "the fair distribution of the burdens and benefits from energy production and consumption". Credit: Bigstock

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

Advocates of the concept of “energy equity” have begun employing it in the southern United States to create a diverse coalition of citizens who might otherwise approach energy policy issues differently.

It started when the Partnership for Southern Equity (PSE), an organisation that has looked at issues of equity in other areas, such as housing, economic opportunity and transportation, realised that equity was also a key issue in energy policy."Communities of colour and low-income communities...stand to benefit the most from energy efficiency."
-- Partnership for Southern Equity

On its website, the organisation defines energy equity as “the fair distribution of the burdens and benefits from energy production and consumption”.

“Communities of colour and low-income communities are more likely to be exposed to air pollution from coal plants, are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and stand to benefit the most from energy efficiency and employment programs that help lower bills,” it added.

With these facts in mind, a coalition of organisations has formed including PSE, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), GreenLaw, the Centre for Sustainable Communities, Georgia Watch, the Fulton-Atlanta Community Action Authority and Concerned Black Clergy of Metropolitan Atlanta.

The coalition looks to what its see as more equitable energy policies that have been achieved through citizen engagement in other places such as San Francisco, California, where a coalition including Our City and other environmental and social justice organisations came together to support an initiative called Clean Power SF.

Clean Power SF was a policy proposal to decrease reliance on for-profit utility companies and to create instead a new entity to provide energy for San Francisco, with at least 50 percent of it coming from renewable sources.

In 2007, the coalition won approval for Clean Power SF from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 2007, although the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission at first refused to close a fossil fuel plant in an area called Potrero Hill.

By 2011, however, the coalition succeeded in closing Potrero Hill and stopping a proposed natural gas plant.

Inspiration and vision

Earlier this month, the new energy equity coalition in Georgia invited Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of the power enterprise for the San Francisco Public Utility Commission, to address their group at a forum.

“They were able to provide a visionary story. They have done a lot more than Georgia was ready to do,” Dwayne Patterson, director of regional organising and civic engagement for PSE, told IPS.

“The main reason why the collaboration has come together is so that we can create the space of working together. We know through the workings of the progressive movement in Georgia and throughout the South there is a culture of folks not working together. Folks have been very successful at working in silos,” Patterson said.

PSE is “about changing the old paradigm”, he said, “where collaboration is the new normal, and working smarter rather than working harder is the new normal”.

One of the first actions for the coalition has been to increase citizen attendance at recent hearings of the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC), which is considering a long-term plan by Georgia Power for energy provision to the state’s residents.

One activist not connected with the coalition who attended the PSC hearings confirmed to IPS that in recent days they had saw a marked increase in citizen participation that appeared, at least in part, to be due to the new energy equity coalition.

“We have to put the concept of power back on the table. There are situations where we can fight and lose, not because it’s the wrong issue, but because we haven’t amassed the right amount of power in order to be effective,” Patterson said.

Amelia Shenstone, southeast energy organiser for SACE, has a big picture idea of the meaning of energy equity: “When we produce energy, we’re not doing it at disproportionate costs to certain communities,” she described. “We would shift energy production to types that don’t have negative consequences,” she told IPS, citing solar and wind power as examples of such energy.

“The sources we use now are risky and have a lot of side effects…from the communities where it’s mined, to the communities where it’s burned, and where the residue that’s left over gets stored,” she said.

“I don’t want anyone to have to deal with that burden, I’d rather we reduce the consumption of coal. Imagine if it happened it your backyard, and how about we don’t do that to anybody?” she said

Shenstone insisted that citizens showing up to publicly comment when government bodies formulate public policy that affects them is key to achieving energy equity.

“People don’t know how decisions are made regarding where their energy comes from, and how they can participate. Look at who’s on the PSC and their politics… the diversity in our population is not represented there,” she said.

The U.S. Congress is on the brink of making billions of dollars in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, which provides direct benefits to individuals and families in poverty.

SNAP benefits are already set to decrease in November 2013, when increased benefits that were included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, or federal stimulus package, expire.

A selection of foods available on a food stamp budget. Credit: Miss Karen/cc by 2.0

Benefits – which currently represent a “bare bones diet” prepared by the federal government – will already decrease between eight and 25 dollars per month, depending on household size. The average benefit is already as low as one dollar and 46 cents per person per meal.

But that is not enough for the current Congress, which is seeking to squeeze even more money out of the emergency food programme.

Groups like the Progressive Democrats of America have been circulating an online petition to oppose the cuts.

“There is a push to end entitlements, and if you‘ve got a push to end entitlements, no matter what formula they use, people will be hurting,” Dr. Joyce Dorsey, first vice chair for the National Community Action Partnership, told IPS.

“Food is a major issue for people who really just can’t afford groceries. What we realise is the average low-income person is on minimum wage or a fixed income. Most poor people do work. They may not work full-time jobs,” Dorsey said.

“There are no other income sources to turn to – the jobs are still hard to find, or jobs are not paying wages that allow a person to live at the standard level in their region, then naturally they’re going to need their assistance.”

Today, a record 47.5 million U.S. citizens receive emergency food assistance through the SNAP programme, according to the most recent data from the Department of Agriculture, making up more than 15 percent of all U.S. residents.

The debate is centring around the Agriculture, Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2013 – commonly known as the Farm Bill – which Congress typically reenacts every five years to set national policies for agriculture, nutrition, conservation, and forestry.

On May 15, the Republican-led House Agriculture Committee voted to approve nearly 21 billion dollars in cuts to SNAP. The cuts would represent a loss of benefits to nearly two million people, including children, by changing the eligibility requirements.

These are people who are currently eligible to receive food stamps because they have disposable incomes below the poverty line, even if they have assets or gross incomes that push them above the SNAP eligibility threshold.

Currently, federal law allows these people to be deemed eligible for SNAP if they are deemed eligible for another state-run programme under the Temporary Aid for Needy Families block grant.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), many low-income U.S. households that own a modest car would be impacted. It may also include working families with high childcare costs, or seniors with high medical bills.

The House bill also would eliminate SNAP incentive payments to states that have improved payment accuracy and service delivery; would cut nutrition education funding; and would curtail an option that allows states to approve families for SNAP benefits if they already qualify for low income heating assistance – something the Senate version of the Farm Bill also does.

On May 14, the Democratic-led Senate Agriculture Committee voted during a hearing to approve 4.1 billion dollars in cuts to SNAP.

“It stops overpayments to a small number of individuals in the programme… A small number can claim a heating bill they don’t have, on food assistance, to get additional benefits above and beyond,” Cullin Schwarz, a spokesman for the Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan who chairs the Committee, told IPS.

Schwarz claims states are using administrative tactics – qualifying people for separate energy assistance payments of under 10 dollars per year – purportedly for the sole purpose of increasing their food stamp eligibility.

“Fifteen states are providing a very small amount of home heating assistance, as little as one dollar or 10 cents per year. There are some folks who don’t have a heating bill, it’s included in their rent. That [dollar] doesn’t really help someone pay heating – what it does, they can claim both rent and a heating bill they don’t have on their application,” he said.

If enacted, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 500,000 people will receive on average 90 dollars less under the Senate bill.

But Stabenow’s office insists this is not a cut to the benefit structure. “They’re going to get exactly what they’re supposed to get on the programme based on their real expenses,” Schwarz said.

When asked what would likely come out of House and Senate negotiations, Schwarz said, “If Republicans can up with additional ways to reduce spending that does not reduce standard benefits or harm truly needy families… we’re open to discussing those.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, offered an amendment to strike the SNAP cuts from the Farm Bill, and to offset the costs by limiting crop insurance reimbursements to providers.

Congress is encouraging farmers to purchase crop insurance, and Congress is subsidising the crop insurance companies, as it is also ending a longstanding policy of direct payments to farmers. This switch saves 16.5 billion dollars from the federal budget.

Gillibrand contends the reimbursements, however, are corporate welfare, in some cases for overseas companies.

“Families who are living in poverty, our children, our veterans, our seniors, some of our active duty personnel are going to suffer if we cut food stamps. I believe we should not be balancing the debt or the deficit on the backs of these hardworking Americans who are just hungry,” Gillibrand said during the hearing.

“And I think it is a moral statement, and obviously I will fight against any cuts to the food stamp programme and I want people to think about what they’re actually doing when they offer, the nature of these amendments,” Gillibrand said.

Gillibrand brought the amendment to the Senate floor debate on the Farm Bill.

The amendment failed in a vote of 26 to 70, with more than half of the Democratic caucus joining nearly all Republicans in voting no.

However, an amendment by Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, to end SNAP eligibility for convicted violent rapists, pedophiles, and murderers, passed by unanimous consent.

President Obama with Sen. Tom Harkin at the door of the Oval Office. Harkin introduced the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, which currently has 29 co-sponsors. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, May 29 2013 (IPS)

During his State of the Union address earlier this year, U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about the need to increase the federal minimum wage, which Congress has not voted to raise since 2007.

But while several legislative proposals have been introduced to raise the federal minimum wage, they have not gone anywhere."Inequality in the U.S. has been growing for decades and those at the very top are getting most of the rewards for growing productivity in this economy." -- Roger Hickey of the Campaign for America’s Future

In the U.S. Senate, where federal minimum wage increase legislation is more likely to pass because it is majority Democratic, one committee hearing has been held but no vote as of yet.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2013, introduced by retiring Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, has 29 co-sponsors.  Its House counterpart, introduced by Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from California, has 140 co-sponsors.

On Mar. 15, the House considered the legislation indirectly, when a motion was made to add the federal minimum wage increase to unrelated workforce development legislation. That motion failed 184 to 233, with not a single Republican voting yes, and a few Democrats joining nearly all Republicans in voting no.

“We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.  But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns 14,500 dollars a year.  Even with the tax relief we put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line.  That’s wrong,” Obama said during his Feb. 12 remarks to the nation.

“Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to nine dollars an hour.  We should be able to get that done,” he said.

“When I heard that, I nearly jumped through the TV and kissed him,” Rev. Harriet Bradley, co-chair of the Atlanta chapter of 9to5, an advocacy organisation that promotes the policy concerns of working class women, told IPS. “He was telling the truth.”

The current federal minimum wage is seven dollars and 25 cents per hour.  This is what Rev. Bradley makes in her full-time job as a caregiver.  She provides home-based health care for people who qualify under Medicare.

Bradley also receives a two-dollar per hour mileage reimbursement, but no healthcare or any other benefit from her job. She lives in an extended stay hotel – where she pays rent by the week, rather than by the month – because she finds it to be more economical than an efficiency apartment.

When asked how she survives on such a wage, she cites “the Lord.  Jesus Christ does this every day.”

The most recent minimum wage increase was in 2009, the last increase implemented pursuant to Congress’s 2007 vote.

The federal minimum wage today is worth 31 percent less than what it was at its peak in 1968, even as productivity has increased.  If the federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since 1960, today it would be more than 10 dollars per hour.  If it had actually kept pace with the increased productivity of U.S. workers, it would be 22 dollars per hour.

Because the federal minimum wage is below the poverty line, many workers are forced to rely on safety net programmes such as public or subsidised housing, food stamps, and the like.

On Mar. 14, the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee held a hearing regarding increasing the federal minimum wage, and, for what would be the first time in U.S. history, requiring future increases to be tied to inflation.

Only three senators attended the hearing: Sen. Harkin; Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee; and Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

A strong advocate for working class people, Harkin is retiring at the end of this term. However, passing the federal minimum wage increase before then is a top priority for him.

At the hearing, Warren was very critical and aggressive in her questioning of two small business owners who claimed that forcing them to raise their wages would also force them to lay off workers.

Nineteen of the 50 U.S. states have state minimum wages that are higher than the federal minimum wage, meaning that people who live in those states earn those higher wages; and 10 of them have minimum wages that are indexed to inflation.

At the hearing, Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, testified that in states that had raised the minimum wage at the state level, there had been few or no job losses as a result.

Raising the federal minimum wage is “important because inequality in the U.S. has been growing for decades and those at the very top are getting most of the rewards for growing productivity in this economy,” Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, told IPS.

“An increase in the minimum wage, which hasn’t happened in many years, would not only be good for those families that are trying to put bread on the table… It would be good for economic growth if more low-wage people had a wage increase,” he said.

“You would suddenly have more demand in the economy for the goods and services that corporations produce and we’d have more growth, and therefore, more jobs, so it’s a win, win, win. I think generally it’s accepted that will be acted upon after the immigration bill is debated and hopefully passed. ..If Republicans stall or defeat a vote in the House, it will certainly become an election year issue.”

Under CISPA, anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus - meaning most, if not all, computers - would be subject to having their information released. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, activists have successfully defeated a proposal to allow Internet companies to provide customers’ private information to government agencies and each other without risking violation of privacy laws and agreements.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), HR 624, passed the U.S. House on Apr. 18 in a 288-127 vote. Most Republicans and just under half of Democrats supported the measure."While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader." -- ACLU's Michelle Richardson

CISPA had been referred to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but the Senate was unable to support the House version and had yet to come up with its own proposal.

CISPA is not expected to resurface again as a single comprehensive bill on cybersecurity, but will likely be taken up as multiple pieces of legislation dealing with different aspects of cybersecurity.

President Barack Obama announced his opposition to, and threatened to veto, CISPA, both before the House Committee vote and again after it.

“The Administration still seeks additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” the White House wrote in a policy statement dated Apr. 16.

“Importantly, the Committee removed the broad national security exemption, which significantly weakened the restrictions on how this information could be used by the government,” the White House wrote.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that is one of several improvements – although, in the group’s opinion, still inadequate – that were made to the bill in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

As for the purposes for which the information could be released or used, “They had this catch-all, for national security purposes, that wasn’t defined. Based on how the government has defined national security in the past, with the Patriot Act, we thought that was a very big loophole, so they sort of struck that out altogether,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, told IPS.

The White House echoed many of the same concerns raised by such advocacy groups as the ACLU, the Campaign for Liberty, Demand Progress, Democrats.com, a progressive organisation not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the Libertarian Party of the U.S.

Demand Progress sent out a petition to its 1.5 million members and around 200,000 signed a petition opposing CISPA, co-founder David Segal told IPS. Demand Progress is a civil liberties advocacy group co-founded in 2010 by Segal and the late Aaron Swartz.

Swartz is an Internet activist who committed suicide in January 2013 after being threatened with federal prison time for releasing copywrite-protected academic journal articles from the website JSTOR to the public for free.

Demand Progress first began organising in 2010 around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), two other bills dealing with government regulation of online freedom that were defeated in January 2012.

However, Segal says there has been a crucial difference between the organising efforts around SOPA and PIPA, which had to do with the government’s ability to block certain websites, and CISPA, which has to do with the government’s ability to obtain private information.

“The opposition to SOPA was so severe, we haven’t had to worry for the last year. This one [CISPA], the military-industrial complex, corporations, including web platforms that were against SOPA, are for CISPA, explicitly or tacitly,” Segal said, referring to companies like Amazon.com and Google.

“Those platforms, for the most part, are not opposing CISPA, or are supporting it. It gives them greater immunity from users if they share users’ information with the government,” he said.

The ACLU noted additional improvements were made to the bill in House committee, but still called it “scary”.

“They did say that the government does need to promulgate minimisation procedures, the idea that there would be an overarching set of rules to limit the sharing and use of personal data,” Richardson said.

“It’s also fixed to say as far as private is concerned, if you receive information from another company, you can only use it for cybersecurity purposes. They could have used it for marketing, or sold it to data-brokers,” she said.

Even with the changes, the CISPA proposal was “really scary because cybersecurity truly does affect us all. While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader and encompassing bad acts on the Internet, phishing scams, and malware,” she said.

Anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus – meaning most, if not all, computers – would be subject to having their information released.

“I have started those Viagra [spam] emails, I keep getting through my work account. You could get a Nigerian Prince [scam] email. You’re on Facebook and there’s those viruses that say, ‘Oh my God, you have to watch these videos.’ All of these are everyday, just basic crimes, all of those things also implicated by this bill,” she said.

Richardson said that because the proposed law did not mandate that private companies turn over the information – and instead only provided legal protections for companies that would choose to voluntarily do so – the bill was an attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, which protects U.S. citizens from warrantless searches and seizures.

The ACLU further outlines their concerns regarding CISPA in a series of blog posts.

Segal also has raised concerns about the recent bombing in Boston, Massachusetts, being used by some as a backdrop to rush CISPA through Congress with little or no public debate.

“Some number of people who supported the legislation were invoking the bombings. It was up for a vote anyway, it was pre-scheduled. Some people were swayed to vote for it, because of the atmospherics of the bombing and they were called by other people in Congress,” Segal said.

A new act will require the USDA to issue temporary permits allowing farmers to continue planting genetically modified organisms. Credit: Peter Blanchard/CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 28 2013 (IPS)

Food safety advocates are outraged over revelations that U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama approved an act that includes a provision purporting to strip federal courts of the ability to prevent the spread of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The provision in the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture to issue temporary permits allowing the continued planting of GMOs by farmers, even when a court rules that the agency erred in its environmental impact review of the GMOs.

The provision, which activists call the Monsanto Protection Act, is one for which the multinational corporation Monsanto has been lobbying Congress for at least a year. The legislation passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Mar. 6, 2013 and the Senate on Mar. 21, with Obama signing the legislation five days later on Mar. 26.

Revelations of the provision, which was buried in the 587-page spending bill (HR 933, under Division A, Title VI, Section 735), have increased public awareness and interest in the issue of GMOs in the United States.

The provision states that if “a determination of non-regulated status…is or has been invalidated or vacated, the Secretary of Agriculture shall, notwithstanding any other provision of law, upon request by a farmer, grower, farm operator, or producer, immediately grant temporary permit(s) or temporary deregulation in part”.

Industry control

U.S. Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana and one of the only family farmers in Congress, spoke out against the provision on the floor on the Senate. Once again, agribusiness multinational corporations [are] putting farmers as serfs

“The United States Congress is telling the Agricultural Department that even if a court tells you that you’ve failed to follow the right process and tells you to start over, you must disregard the court’s ruling and allow the crop to be planted anyway,” Tester said.

“Not only does this ignore the constitutional idea of separation of powers, but it also lets genetically modified crops take hold across this country, even when a judge finds it violates the law,” Tester said, describing the issue as “once again, agribusiness multinational corporations putting farmers as serfs”.

Meanwhile, activists are holding Senator Barbara Milkulski, a Democrat from Maryland, partially responsible, as she was the committee chair who allowed the amendment and could have addressed the provision in Congressional hearings

In a statement, Mikulski’s spokeswoman, Rachel MacKnight, defended her. “Senator Mikulski understands the anger over this provision. She didn’t put the language in the bill and doesn’t support it either.”

“As Chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Mikulski’s first responsibility was to prevent a government shutdown. That meant she had to compromise on many of her own priorities to get a bill through the Senate that the House would pass,” MacKnight said.

Because the provision is temporary, it will likely come up for reauthorisation in September 2013, an opportunity for public opposition that activists are relishing.

“The USDA has working mechanisms in place to allow for partial deregulation for those crops,” Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs for the Centre for Food Safety, noted in an interview with IPS.

“At best, it’s unnecessary and duplicative. At worst, it takes oversight away from the USDA and puts it in the hands of the industry,” O’Neil said of the provision.

The centre has concerns about how the USDA has used temporary deregulation in the past, such as with genetically modified sugar beets. Both genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets have been held up in court in the past over National Environmental Policy Act challenges.

“While we have argued that the USDA isn’t adequately protecting farmers and the environment, the rider will essentially prevent the USDA from safeguarding farmers and the environment because it forces the agency to comply with industry demands,” O’Neil said.

Future benefits

Monsanto has proposals for numerous GMO crops in the pipeline that could be affected by this rider.

“I think the Monsanto Protection Act and how it was passed and how it was slipped into law is just another example of how this company operates, how they manipulate our democracy, and they buy off our elected officials,” Dave Murphy, founder of Food Democracy Now, told IPS.

“This is another example of how…they choose to operate within the rules of a democratic society. They’re like the mafia, they go in and write the rules the way they want them to be,” Murphy said.

“Monsanto really did themselves a major disservice by slipping this into a continuing resolution,” he said.

Monsanto, which does derive benefit from the provision, responded in a statement, saying its critics have an “interesting narrative, worthy of a B grade movie script”.

“Virtually none of the people protesting actually read the provision itself. Those who did, found a surprise: It contains no reference to Monsanto, protection of Monsanto, or benefit to Monsanto. It does seek to protect farmers, and we supported the provision,” Monsanto wrote.

Senator Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, inserted the provision, or “rider”, into the spending bill, according to Politico. Monsanto is based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Strike Debt action on medical debt, held in New York in March. Credit: The Eyes of New York/ CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 14 2013 (IPS)

Strike Debt, an affiliate of the Occupy movement, has devised a legal and what some consider ingenious way to abolish millions of dollars in consumer debt.

The project is called Rolling Jubilee, and by raising money from other citizen activists to purchase debt on the secondary market, Rolling Jubilee has purchased millions of dollars in unpaid medical debt that is – or, was – owed by consumers.

The secondary market is where companies go to sell bad debts, often for pennies on the dollar, to other companies who then try to collect the debts.

These debt collectors often engage in relentless phone calls, letters, negative credit reporting, legal threats, actual litigation and other tactics to attempt to collect the debts. Sometimes these additional tactics involve breaking laws intended to protect consumers, media reports have shown.

But instead of trying to collect the debts through practises that range from threatening letters to lawsuits, Rolling Jubilee is mailing letters to families saying that their debts have been forgiven. Thus the debt is actually being abolished for pennies on the dollar – a fraction of what it would have cost for the families to pay off the debts.

So far Rolling Jubilee has raised 578,795 U.S. dollars. With that they were able to purchase some 11.5 million dollars in medical debt owed on the secondary market by families who either live or once lived in Kentucky or Indiana.

They also previously made a small debt purchase of medical debt from upstate New York.

“The point of Rolling Jubilee was to tunnel under Wall Street to help the 99 percent,” Aleks Perisic, a member of Rolling Jubilee, told IPS.

Illegitimate debt

Most, if not all, of the money in the United States lent by banks is money that the banks never originally had in the first place, as previously reported by IPS.

In other words, most of the money that U.S. banks lend out is conjured into existence through a stroke on a keyboard, by way of a practise called fractional reserve lending, where banks are allowed to create and lend a certain multiple of funds that they have on deposit with the Federal Reserve.

That method is just one of the reasons Strike Debt believes that so much bank debt is illegitimate.

“Money is really created out of thin air,” Perisic said, who said the group had done extensive research on the matter. “This debt is really illegitimate, and it never should have existed in the first all place,” she added.

“The first thing is they [the families] should never had gone into debt for basic necessities in the first place. Beyond that, the fact that banks get a write-off when they discharge the debt, yet people are pursued to pay the full amount,” Perisic said.

Economist Ellen Brown said she thought the idea was interesting and noted that bankruptcy is the “original debt jubilee”. However, U.S. Congress and former President George W. Bush in 2005 made it more difficult for families who are not in poverty to discharge their debts through bankruptcy.

Brown suggested there is an easier way to forgive debts in the United States.

“The Federal Reserve could just step in and buy the debt. Let’s say they bought a trillion dollars in debt. When they rip it up, they add money into the money supply anyway,” Brown told IPS. “When you forgive the debt, it’s the same as giving them money, which creates demand, and the stores put in more orders to make the stuff – that’s how you stimulate the economy.”

The Federal Reserve has actually engaged in three rounds of quantitative easing, known as QE1, QE2 and QE3, purchasing bad debts from banks with the intent of freeing those banks to lend to consumers. However, the strategy has largely not succeeded, Brown said, because the banks have not used those funds to make new loans to small businesses or consumers.

“What they [the Federal Reserve] are buying now is mortgage-backed securities and government debt. Instead of mortgage-backed securities, they could buy student debt and rip it up, but they’re not there to serve the people,” Brown said.

Brown said she believed U.S. Congress and the President could authorise the Federal Reserve to buy and forgive student loan debt.

The purchases would not be inflationary because the U.S. monetary supply lost four trillion dollars since 2008, so it would take at least four trillion dollars in debt forgiveness to get the money supply back to where it was in 2008.

‘It won’t make a dent’

Not all, however, are convinced by Rolling Jubilee’s strategy.

“The Rolling Jubilee increases the profitability of [a] bad system by providing more revenues to the incumbents, while the debt purchases are unlikely to do more than help a few random people,” according to Naked Capitalism, a blog. “It might make for feel-good PR, but it won’t make a dent in the problem.”

Naked Capitalism also raised questions about the tax treatment of the forgiven debt and whether it would be viewed as income for tax purposes. However, Rolling Jubilee insists they have consulted with attorneys and that forgiven debt is not income.

“The Rolling Jubilee is just one of the projects of Strike Debt, so it’s part of a bigger picture, one of the big strategies we’re using to attack the debt system,” Perisic said.

“We started by holding different Debt Assemblies. It was really to just create a space where people can come and tell their debt stories…making that leap where people start envisioning, instead of something personal, it’s a systematic problem. I think that’s part of any organising around debt,” Perisic said.

Strike Debt has also put together a Debt Resistance Operations Manual.

As for what is next, Rolling Jubilee is hoping to go national with its debt purchases.  “We’d really like to have a national portfolio.  Whether it’s one large national portfolio, or several regional portfolios, depends on what we find,” Perisic said.

Currently, there are more than 300,000 solar installations in the U.S. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Mar 29 2013 (IPS)

A U.S. company called Mosaic has unveiled a new way for citizens to use the Internet to invest in specific solar energy projects around the country.

In the style of such websites as Kiva, which raises money for microloans for small businesses in the developing world, Kickstarter, which raises money for creative projects, and 40billion.com, which raises money for entrepreneurs, Mosaic is beginning to empower ordinary citizens to invest in solar energy with a click of a button.

The low minimum investment amount of 25 dollars makes it easier for middle class people and even some working class people to invest. The company brings a 4.5 to 6.5 percent return on investment, which is a good rate in today’s economy.

“Mosaic is an online marketplace for people to invest into high quality solar projects,” Lisa Curtis, communications director for Mosaic, told IPS. “It’s a pretty new phenomenon.”

Asked what makes the concept behind Mosaic unique, since people can already invest in solar energy using the stock market, Curtis replied that there are two typical options.

First, she said, you could perform “a solar installation on your home. That assumes you own a home, you meet the credit criteria necessary to get a solar installation, you have enough money to pay for financing, and that your roof is suitable. Seventy-five percent of roof space in the U.S. does not” meet the necessary criteria, Curtis said.

The second option is, “You can invest in a stock of a solar company. That is a very different experience than investing in a solar project,” Curtis said.

Mosaic sold out its first four projects in less than 24 hours with over 400 investors putting in between 25 and 30,000 dollars, the company said.

Today, the company boasts an investment of over 1.1 million dollars from over 700 investors, and a record of 100 percent on-time payments to investors.

Mosaic’s fully-funded past projects include a 487 kilowatt (kW) installation on the Wildwoods Convention Center in Wildwood, New Jersey; 1.5 kW on the Navajo Project of the Navajo Nation in Arizona; 9kW on the Murdoch Community Center in Flagstaff, Arizona; four installations on affordable housing complexes in California; and several installations in Oakland.

The Oakland installations include 9kW on the People’s Grocery; 29kW on the Asian Resource Center; 47 kW on the Youth Employment Partnership in Oakland, California; and 26kW on St. Vincent de Paul in Oakland, California.

It will take a few years for the organisations to pay the investors back. However, they are seeing an immediate savings on their electricity bills.

“We see a massive transition coming from fossil fuels to clean energy, and we think people should be able to profit from that transition,” Billy Parish, president of Mosaic, said in a statement.

Previously, Parish, 31, dropped out of Yale University in 2002 to found the Energy Action Coalition.

“Mosaic is creating the architecture for mass participation in the clean energy economy,” Parish said.

Due to regulatory restrictions, Curtis said, investment opportunities in Mosaic’s latest projects are currently only available to residents of California and New York, as well as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)-accredited investors from around the country. However, the company hopes to expand its investment opportunities to other states soon.

The Department of Energy (DOE) explains on its website why those limitations are currently in place.

“This geographic restriction on investment in Solar Mosaic appears to be a product of how the company has chosen to comply with applicable regulations of the… SEC. Investments in Solar Mosaic projects are represented by ‘Solar Power Notes,’,” the DOE states.

“For public offerings… [the Securities Act of 1933] generally requires the company file a registration statement containing information about itself, the securities it is offering, and the offering. Registration can be a burdensome and costly process, and it is therefore in a company’s interest to avoid it when they can,” the DOE states.

While there are other organisations in the U.S. that are using a crowdfunding model to fund solar projects, they use a donation-based or zero-interest model.

“We’re the only one in the U.S. that is providing a return on investment,” Curtis said.

Internationally, there are already at least two other companies using a profitable crowdfunding model for solar energy: Crowd Energy, a company in Germany, and Abundance Generation in the United Kingdom.

Currently, there are more than 300,000 solar installations in the U.S., according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2012 Year in Review. This may sound like a lot; however, solar energy makes up only approximately one-tenth of one percent of the total U.S. energy portfolio.

But even this proportion represents progress, according to Charlie Coggershall, renewable energy manager for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

“The biggest obstacle with solar energy is cost. The big reason Mosaic could be good it allows people to invest in it and benefit from it, without making big up-front investment,” Coggershall told IPS.

“Also, if you live in an apartment building, or are renting a house, or if your house wasn’t conditioned well or wasn’t structurally sound enough to put a solar installation on the roof, you would be unable to reap the benefits of solar energy,” without a programme such as Mosaic, Coggershall said.

“Mosaic’s an interesting development, it’s sort of coupled with some things Congress has done for crowdfunding generally, that loosens SEC restrictions on small investors,” Scott Thomasson, a solar energy consultant with NewBuild Strategies, told IPS.

“That certainly opens the door to a lot of solar projects,” he said.

“The real model that’s breaking through is sort of a big party financing model, big companies like Solar City, with power purchase agreements or leases to do the financing for solar and put it monthly payment model for you. That seems to be more of the breakthrough approach rather than the crowdfunding,” he said.

“It seems like it [the Mosaic model] could be useful for individual solar projects that need community funding to get started – some local initiative that isn’t attracting finance because it doesn’t have the players that can finance itself, or it wants to have the buy-in of the community,” Thomasson said.

Colorado's Jared Polis became the first “out” gay man in Congress when he was elected in 2008. Credit: Jeffrey Beall/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Mar 26 2013 (IPS)

Even as the issue of gay marriage continues to make waves in the U.S., change is inexorably arriving in the halls of power, with a record seven openly homosexual or bisexual members of the new U.S. Congress.

While still small, the number represents a significant gain since the previous congress, which had only four.To be clear, our Congress has never looked like America.

“In 2012, we nearly doubled the number of members in congress who were LGBT, including the first U.S. senator, so 2012 was a really important moment for the normalisation of having LGBT people in the federal legislature,” Denis Dison, vice president of communications for the Victory Fund, an organisation that raises funds for “out” or openly LGBT candidates, told IPS.

The four from the previous Congress were Reps. Barney Frank from Massachusetts, Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, Jared Polis from Colorado, and David Cicilline from Rhode Island.

Things were looking bleak last year when Frank, a progressive in Congress who had served since 1980, decided to retire, and Baldwin decided to run for the U.S. Senate. This could have left Polis and Cicilline as the only gay voices in the House of Representatives.

However, voters in House districts across the country elected three new openly homosexual members – Sean Patrick Maloney from New York, Mark Pocan from Wisconsin, and Mark Takano from California – as well as Kyrsten Sinema, Congress’s first openly bisexual representative, from Arizona.

The current seven are Cicilline, Maloney, Pocan, Polis, Sinema and Takano in the House, and Baldwin in the Senate.

“I’m very excited this Congress [House] has six LGBT members, which is a record. While it doesn’t represent parity with the general population, at least it’s movement in the right direction,” Polis told IPS.

Asked what parity might be, Polis said that about five percent of the U.S. population is part of the LGBT community.

“You’d be talking about 20 to 30 members from the LGBT community,” out of the 435 members of Congress, Polis said.

“We also don’t have parity of representation of women. We’re also making progress but not yet there with other democratic minority groups,” he added.

“To be clear, our Congress has never looked like America,” Dison said. “Women have never been [adequately] represented, neither have people of colour. Parity would be an achievement for a minority population.

“White, straight [heterosexual] men are absolutely over-represented in politics and have been for many, many years,” he said.

The first openly homosexual member of congress, Gerry Studds of Massachusetts, was essentially forced to come out in 1983 due to an ongoing scandal involving his relationship with a 17-year-old male Congressional page.

When Barney Frank was first elected in 1980, it would be seven more years before he came out publicly. Yet times have changed. Baldwin became the first “out” elected Congressperson, when she was elected to the House in 1998. Polis became the first “out” gay man in Congress when was elected in 2008. He came out to his parents at the age of 21 and they were not only supportive, but enthusiastically supportive, he told the Metro Weekly magazine in 2009.

Polis served as an out gay businessman who helped start several charter schools in Colorado before running for congress. He and his partner, Marlon Reis, have a son, Caspian Julius, who was born in 2011. They have declined to comment on whether their child was adopted or born from a surrogate pregnancy.

Polis tells IPS that since he went to congress he has experienced no open discrimination or homophobia there from other members.

“No, I don’t think so. They all come from different backgrounds. There’s never been any issues. Everyone understands everyone is duly elected,” Polis said. “The issue is, we still don’t have benefits for our spouses. That’s a great frustration.”

Indeed, the government still does not recognise same-sex partners for any federal employees. Baldwin introduced legislation in the last session to extend federal benefits to partners of federal employees, including members of vongress, but the legislation stalled in the House.

But that may change.

“Having six members enables members of our community to be present in many different committees. It’s a different discussion when there’s an LGBT person in the room,” Polis said.

Asked whether his sexual orientation shapes his perspective, Polis replied, “Every member brings a unique perspective informed by their life experiences.

“Our body is best when we’re represented by America as a whole, the types of jobs people have, the types of families they have, in terms of their ethnic background and faith,” Polis said.

“You do see LGBT members of congress interested in other issues of discrimination, whether racial discrimination or sex discrimination, and see them part of coalitions as well, that is part of a shared experience of being in a minority,” Dison said.

Currently, there are no LGBT members of congress who are Republicans. They are all Democrats.

However, in the past, there have been two Republican members, who both came out while serving their terms – Jim Kolbe of Arizona and Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin.

And the LGBT caucus in Congress is beginning to become more diverse politically, at least within the spectrum of ideas represented by the Democratic Party. Two of the newly elected members, Takano and Sinema, were both elected in swing districts that are not solidly progressive districts, and Maloney unseated a Republican.

“I would characterise most of the caucus as progressive, I’m not sure they would characterise themselves that way right now,” Dison said. “They would probably say they’re speaking for the mainstream concerns of constituents.”

The changes in U.S. culture with respect to sexual orientation are perhaps best captured by the recent campaign speech of Mazie Hirono, a progressive congresswoman from Hawaii, who was elected to the Senate in November 2012.

“I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said at a rally. “I’m a woman. I’ll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.'”

Jack Abramoff. Credit: Madeleine Ball/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Feb 28 2013 (IPS)

Notorious former Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who spent more than three years in federal prison for tax evasion, conspiracy to bribe public officials and fraud, is now touring the U.S. urging ethics reform at the federal level.

During a visit Wednesday to the Georgia State Capitol, Abramoff spoke with lawmakers and citizens about his many years of experience corrupting lawmakers as a lobbyist.

Asked by IPS why, after spending three years in prison, he did not just go home, he replied “I wanted to. [But] I got upset with fake reform.”

The “fake reform” Abramoff is referring to includes various measures passed in the wake of the 2005 scandal.

“Congress believes it took its medicine when it passed the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act in 2007,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Reform and Ethics in Government.

“[But] a lot of the kinds of events that were banned were just moved,” she told IPS. “You couldn’t take a member of congress or staff off to lunch, but you can have a campaign event. [And] It’s a much more expensive event.

“There’s not a lot of incentive for them [Congress] to change the rules – they want lobbying campaign cash, and they want to become lobbyists when they leave,” Sloan said.

In 2006, Abramoff pled guilty in connection with his lobbying on behalf of Native American tribes and his dealings with SunCruz Casinos.

Abramoff, along with a partner, Michael Scanlon, was found to have defrauded six Native American tribes out of 66 million dollars by overcharging them for lobbying fees, then keeping nearly half of it himself in kickbacks.

“I did violate the trust of my clients. I brought Scanlon to them. I had a deal with Scanlon, if there was a profit we would split it. I didn’t inform them,” Abramoff said.

As a result of the various federal investigations into Abramoff’s lobbying activities, 21 people either pled guilty or were found guilty of numerous crimes, including senior George W. Bush administration officials, Congressional staffers, and one U.S. congressman, Bob Ney, a once high-ranking Republican from Ohio.

In 2006, former U.S. House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, a Republican from Texas, resigned as a result of investigations into his close ties to Abramoff.

Abramoff was an expert at showering members of Congress and their staffs with gifts, donations, and sometimes promises of job opportunities, in exchange for their support of legislation favourable to his clients.

After his release from federal prison, Abramoff told CBS’s 60 Minutes programme that he at one time had wielded significant influence in over 100 Congressional offices.

Gifts included private jet rides; free meals at his restaurant, Signatures, in Washington, DC; and junkets including stops at St. Andrews golf resort in Scotland.

He spent more than one million dollars per year on ticket sales for sporting events for members of Congress and their staff, including two skyboxes at Washington Redskins Games.

In 2011, he wrote a book called “Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist.”

He told IPS he is now working on a series of legislative proposals regarding ethics reform, acknowledging that, in a sense, he is becoming a lobbyist again, this time on the other side.

He joked that perhaps it would not be the best idea for members of congress to hear, “Mr. Abramoff the lobbyist is here to see you.”

Abramoff said there are four key aspects to ethics laws that he believes should be in place in any democratic society.

First, “If you’re lobbying Congress and you get paid, you’re a lobbyist and you have to register,” he said.

Sloan agrees with that proposal. “I think it’s reasonable to require a lot more registration. The current standards are not strong enough. There should be more people who should have to register… [such as] the people like [former Congressmen] Newt Gingrich and Tom Daschle who often call themselves consultants but seem to be involved in strategies that involve lobbying,” she said.

Abramoff also argues that lobbyists should be banned from giving more than a small total amount of campaign contributions to members of congress each year.

This means, “No lobbyist involved in any aspect of federal fundraising, no bundling, no events; this includes campaigns, political parties, any SuperPACs.”

Third, he believes that for any business or nonprofit entity that wants a grant or loan from the federal government, the directors and key officials of those entities should be prohibited from making campaign contributions to congress.

“These [the second and third] proposals may run into constitutional problems, since money is speech,” Sloan said, referring to recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Making limitations on the amounts of contributions you can make, there are constitutional issues. It’s possible you can write [legislation] around it, but it’s not 100 percent clear you could write a bill and it would work,” she said.

Lastly, he argues that federal employees should be barred from becoming lobbyists for 10 years after leaving their government jobs. In his book, he describes recruiting congressional staffers:

“After a number of meetings with them, possibly including meals or rounds of golf, I would say a few magic words: ‘When you are done working for the Congressman, you should come work for me at my firm.’

“With that, assuming the staffer had any interest in leaving Capitol Hill for K Street – and almost 90 percent of them do – I would own him and, consequently, that entire office. No rules had been broken, at least not yet. No one even knew what was happening, but suddenly, every move that staffer made, he made with his future at my firm in mind.”

“Jack’s stories really sum it up,” William Perry, executive director of Common Cause Georgia (CCGA), told IPS.

CCGA is one of the organisations sponsoring Abramoff’s events in Atlanta.

“This is somebody who was able to manipulate the system so well, he was the best at it. The core of his message is, money from special interests is corrupting the process. That’s what we’re trying to articulate,” Perry said.

“There’s not bad people in these halls,” Perry said, referring to the Georgia State Legislature. “[But] what they do is they trade money for outcomes. That’s bribery.”

Conservative consultant and former Republican congressman Newt Gingrich visits charter school students in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: American Solutions/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Feb 27 2013 (IPS)

The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and private education management firms are pushing for new “parent trigger” laws in states across the U.S. by lobbying many Republican and some Democratic legislators to make it easier to convert more traditional public schools to charter schools.

Charter schools are a fairly new phenomenon in the U.S., with the first charter schools opening in the 1990s. The founders of a charter school are able to create a charter that defines the purpose and mission of the school, which does not have to necessarily follow the purpose and mission of a traditional public school.

Charter schools are considered public schools and typically receive some public funds. However, at the same time, they have a private charter and are not part of the public school system.You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour.

“The choice for parents is, are you going to trust a corporation where the CEO and the board are unaccountable, or are you going to trust the government?” said Kim Kahwach, an Atlanta parent who took an active role when the city’s public school system faced a recent accreditation crisis, and said she has concerns about the parent trigger proposal.

“Those are the choices that are being put in front of you. You go charter or you go government. You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour,” Kahwach told IPS.

In a traditional school, parents can voice their concerns to their school board members, who have some influence to potentially address their concerns. This is not always the case with charter schools.

“Some charter schools give parents a greater role, many do not. They let the parents work there or raise money,” said John Rogers, an associate professor at the University of California-Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

“That’s different than acting as civic agents to shape that school,” he told IPS. “There’s no promise that they will (engage parents).”

Charter schools are the latest scheme to privatise public education in the U.S., and are seen as more politically feasible than “voucher” proposals that would give students vouchers to purchase private schooling.

Many charter schools are operated by for-profit educational management firms, which receive sometimes lucrative contracts to operate the schools.

Critics note that one consequence of this is to shift teachers and other school employees away from being public sector, unionised workers who receive decent pay and benefits and who have some job protections, to being private, non-unionised workers who may not receive the same pay, benefits, and protections.

In recent years there has been increasing conversion of U.S. public schools to charter schools, as new charter schools have opened and traditional public schools have closed.

For example, Atlanta recently closed several public schools due to under-enrollment of students. However, the decrease in the student population of those schools was caused largely by the transfer of many students to new, nearby charter schools.

After Hurricane Katrina, pro-charter school advocates capitalised on the crisis to convert most of the schools in the Orleans Parish School System to charter schools.

The parent trigger legislation being pushed by ALEC and other pro-charter lobbyists creates a petition process, whereby a majority of dissatisfied parents at a school could force the school to take one of several actions. Often the preferred action is to convert to a charter school to be managed by a private company.

Another type of legislation being pushed by ALEC is to create a statewide charter school commission that could override the decisions of local school boards. Such a commission has been established in Georgia.

As of June 2012, seven U.S. states had enacted parent trigger legislation, beginning with California in 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The other six states are Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, and Texas.

In California, a group called Parent Revolution was founded with more than one million dollars from foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to push for the parent trigger law.

“An integral part of improving education in Georgia is greater parent buy-in to their children’s education. The parent trigger proposal will assist parents with this,” State Rep. Ed Lindsey, a Republican from Atlanta, said in a statement.

According to Rogers, however, Parent Revolution has not been so revolutionary.

“The approach taken by Parent Revolution has been to send in paid organisers to local communities to try to gather parent petitions. Once the trigger is pulled so to speak – that is an unfortunate metaphor, I would add – and the traditional public school changes over to a charter school, parents arguably have less power than they did before,” Rogers told IPS.

That is because once the school system enters into a contract with the charter school, the school system – and the parents and students – are bound to the terms of the charter.

Rogers argues that Parent Revolution mobilises, but does not organise, parents. An organising approach would build capacity among parents and build relationships between parents, “versus a one-time single shot effort that tries to get signatures and is going to be on to the next campaign.”

Parents are often frustrated about the lack of quality of their child’s education, especially if their school does not receive enough support from local property taxes. However, converting the school to a charter school does not address the resource issue.

As a whole, charter schools perform little or no better than traditional public schools in terms of educating students, test scores and other data show.

In addition, charter schools often further segregation. A 2009 study by the UCLA Civil Rights Project showed that “charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.”

“Across the board, in many cases, charter schools are doing worse than some schools,” Kahwach said. “In some cases, they are better. It’s not such an overwhelming choice to jump ship over. You don’t have control over how the charter school spends its money – they are a business.

“People need to take a stand and make their schools what they want them to be,” she said.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a challenge to the constitutionality of key sections of the historic Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.

Numerous organisations are rallying in support of the VRA. Activists across the nation, including Dr. Charles Steele, CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), are traveling to Washington, DC to protest outside of the court.

“Everything has changed, but nothing has changed,” Dr. Steele told IPS.We’ve got folks in our generation who think we have arrived. I tell you, you think you have arrived, but you got off at the wrong station.

“Everything has really gone backwards in terms of our successes. If we let this go, if we sit idly by, then we’re destined for failure. We’re not going to rest on our laurels because we have a black president. We’re going to take to the streets and that’s where we’re heading,” he said.

“We’ve got folks in our generation who think we have arrived. I tell you, you think you have arrived, but you got off at the wrong station – you got to get back on the bus,” he said.

Even though black people in the U.S. have ostensibly had the right to vote since 1870 under the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution, several federal Voting Rights Acts were enacted in 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1965 to address discriminatory election practices at the state and local levels.

Section 5 of the VRA of 1965 is one of the strongest enforcement provisions of the Act. It requires that the justice department preclear any changes to “any standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting”, including district maps, in any of the “covered jurisdictions”, which include all or part of 16 U.S. states, mainly in the U.S. south.

The case, known as Shelby County, Alabama v. Attorney General Robert Holder, argues that, on its face, the 2006 Congressional reauthorisation of sections of the Act was unconstitutional because it was based on historical data of racial discrimination in election practices that are no longer relevant.

“That’s actually not true,” Lisa Bornstein, senior counsel and senior policy analyst for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told IPS. “We have loads of examples, continuing to this day, there are voting discriminatory practices happening in covered jurisdictions.”

The justice department recently blocked voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas that, if not blocked, would have been in place during the November 2012 elections.

“Also, there are redistricting efforts. In Texas there was an attempt to redistrict so that Hispanics, who are now 65 percent of the growth, to limit that voting power by the way of redistricting,” Bornstein said.

“Then there’s examples like changing the date of an election, changing the place of an election.
Some of them are done to have a discriminatory impact,” she said.

Examples of modern-day discrimination in covered jurisdictions are in the thousands.

In 2008, the City of Calera, Alabama redrew one of its City Council districts to reduce the black voting population from 69 percent to 29 percent, leading to an incumbent black councilmember, Ernest Montgomery, losing his seat.

The justice department intervened, requiring the city to redraw the lines and hold a new election, in which he was reelected. That action led to the current Supreme Court challenge by Shelby County, in which Calera is located.

In another example, in 2001, the justice department objected after the all-white town government in Kilmichael, Mississippi tried to cancel an election shortly after black citizens had become a majority. When the citizens of Kilmichael finally voted, they elected the town’s first black mayor and three black aldermen.

The Act also provides that covered jurisdictions can petition to “bail out” of Section 5. Beginning in 1982, jurisdictions could bail out if they could prove they had complied with a list of nondiscrimination requirements for 10 years.

In addition, the Act provides that the new jurisdictions can be “bailed in”.

Congress reauthorised the VRA of 1965 in 1970, 1975, 1982, and in 2006.

In 1975, Congress expanded Section 5’s reach to cover jurisdictions that had engaged in widespread discrimination against “language minority” groups.

In 2006, Congress held extensive hearings on the VRA and the continued need for Section 5 today, considering some 15,000 pages of legislative record.

The 2006 reauthorisation was approved 98 to zero in the Senate, and 390 to 33 in the House of Representatives.

The Supreme Court has upheld Section 5 of the VRA several times, including in 1966, in a landmark case, South Carolina v. Katzenbach; and again in 1973, 1980, and 1999.

More recently, in 2009, in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey, the Supreme Court issued a ruling expanding the types of jurisdictions that could bail out of Section 5 coverage. The Municipal Utility District had not been previously been considered an independent enough district to be eligible to bail out.

Since that decision, 127 additional jurisdictions have bailed out. “It’s not a particularly onerous process,” Bornstein said.

“That’s part of the beauty of this law and why we believe it’s constitutional. This law allows for flexibility in case there’s overinclusiveness or underinclusiveness, to make sure the law as a whole functions properly,” she said.

In the Northwest Austin ruling, the court acknowledged the progress made in covered jurisdictions since 1965, attributing this progress to the VRA itself, noting that the progress may be “insufficient and that conditions [may] continue to warrant preclearance under the Act.”

The court added that “the Act imposes current burdens and must be justified by cur­rent needs.” This language has led some legal scholars and pundits to predict that Section 5 of the VRA might be in danger altogether, especially given the fact that the Supreme Court chose to hear the current case.

But advocates do not believe the section is in danger because they believe the current burdens are met by current needs.

“It would be a big step for the Court to determine that [the reauthorisation was unconstitutional]. Congress has the authority to make this determination. The court cannot second guess if what Congress has done was reasonable,” she said.

As previously reported by IPS, there were numerous voter suppression laws and tactics in place during the November 2012 elections, representing a new generation of Jim Crow laws.

Some of these activities occurred in jurisdictions not covered by Section 5 and did not require preclearance by the justice department. However, Section 2 of the VRA of 1965 allows the justice department to bring case-by-case litigation in non-covered jurisdictions, something Section 5 attempts to avoid in historically discriminatory jurisdictions.

Various strains of medical marijuana. Credit: scpr.kpcc/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jan 30 2013 (IPS)

Since the U.S. states of Colorado and Washington fully legalised marijuana via ballot initiatives in the November 2012 elections, efforts to medicalise, decriminalise, or legalise marijuana at the state level are sprouting up like so many hemp stalks on a sunny day.

Eighteen out of 50 U.S. states now allow medical marijuana, used to help cancer patients and others, and 15 others have decriminalised it, meaning that possession is a civil offence that carries no jail time.

“In terms of getting federal law change, we need to get maybe half of the states before we get congress to take some action,” Keith Stroup, founder and legal counsel of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), told IPS.

“We tend to focus primarily on full legalisation, regardless of why one smokes,” he added. “The primary reason people smoke, 99 percent of them, is because they enjoy getting high. We’re not going to eliminate the high number of arrests until we completely legalise marijuana.”

In 2006, the group notes, more than 829,000 people were arrested in the United States for marijuana-related offences alone.

National organisations like the Marijuana Policy Project and NORML have both short and long-term strategies to press for continued policy change at the state level.

In the short term, MPP seeks to make New Hampshire the 19th medical marijuana state in the U.S., and to make Vermont the 16th state to decriminalise it.

Illinois is also believed to be on the verge of enacting medical marijuana legislation this year.

In the longer-term, MPP is eyeing ballot initiatives where citizens will have the opportunity to vote on whether to legalise marijuana like alcohol in 2016, including in such states as California and Oregon, two states which have declined to legalise marijuana in previous years.

MPP and NORML believe that it is better to wait until 2016 to attempt to pass these full legalisation initiatives because marijuana-related initiatives tend to do better in presidential election years, which also drive more young voters – who tend to support marijuana legalisation – to the polls.

In the meantime, bills to allow medical use of marijuana have already been introduced in 10 U.S. states, including Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, according to a list provided to IPS by MPP.

Legislators have already announced their intent to introduce medical marijuana bills in another six states, including Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.

In the last Congressional Session, US Reps. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas, introduced legislation to legalise marijuana at the federal level – meaning that states will get to decide their own policies altogether – but it only received 19 additional co-sponsors.

Frank and Paul both retired from the U.S. House at the end of last year. Numerous bills dealing with marijuana policy at the federal level have been introduced over the years.

“We’ve never had a hearing, or got them out of committee. This year we may get some hearings,” Stroup said.

“Every time a state supports medical use, it puts pressure on Congress to legalise it federally,” he said.

Stroup predicts that medical marijuana will be legal federally within three to four years, by the end of the Barack Obama presidency.

NORML expects to see between eight and 10 full legalisation bills in state legislatures this year as well, although it is not clear whether they will pass as soon as this year.

States where full legalisation is expected to easily pass include Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Rhode Island. In California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Oregon, the plan is to seek ballot initiatives for 2016.

“We’re waiting to see whether a bill will be introduced in Alaska, but if not we’re going to do a ballot initiative there,” Morgan Fox, communications director for MPP, told IPS.

In Hawaii, legislation to completely legalise marijuana at the state level has already been introduced in the State House by the House Speaker Joseph Souki.

In Rhode Island, MPP is lobbying the State Legislature to legalise marijuana, which it believes could happen as soon as 2014 or 2015.

A federal court ruling on Jan. 22 against Americans for Safe Access (ASA) presents a minor setback on the issue of federal policy and medical marijuana, but will have no impact on the various state and federal legalisation initiatives from going forward.

ASA had appealed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s refusal to grant its petition to recognise marijuana’s medical value and federally reclassify it from a “Schedule 1 substance” – which includes drugs like heroin and LSD – to a Schedule 3, 4, or 5 substance.

ASA can still appeal to a full appellate court panel and then to the Supreme Court of the United States.

The DEA also has the discretion to reschedule voluntarily at any time, even without congressional action or court order.

And if the U.S. congress passes legislation to legalise marijuana for medical purposes, removing it from the Controlled Substances Act altogether, it would make the ASA case and the other rescheduling petitions moot.

A rally by Move to Amend Ohio, the state chapter of the national coalition seeking to amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate constitutional rights. Credit: Progress Ohio/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jan 28 2013 (IPS)

There is a growing national movement to establish a 28th amendment to the constitution of the United States to address the issue of unlimited corporate spending in elections, although the groups working on the issue diverge on what exactly the amendment should say.

One national coalition called Move to Amend (MTA) is led by David Cobb. A Green Party candidate for president in 2006, Cobb has been touring the country calling for a constitutional amendment to “clearly establish that money is not speech, a corporation is not a person, all corporations are subject to regulation, all campaign contributions will be disclosed, and (that) allows for no loopholes,” according to the MTA website.

But passing a constitutional amendment is a daunting task, requiring the support of two-thirds of the U.S. House and Senate, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures.

Cobb believes that it will take about 10 years to build a grassroots movement to successfully lobby for the enactment of the amendment, but that it can be accomplished eventually.

“It’s a lot of work, but so was the Civil Rights Movement, so was women’s suffrage,” Cobb told IPS.

“A small group of ruling elites has hijacked every one of the institutions in this country – the media and both political parties. There’s a corporatised culture and we have to change the power structure. The only way we see is to build a mass, multiracial movement,” he said.

“Move to Amend is a coalition coming together specifically to work together for (abolishing) corporate personhood. We’ve got 258,000 people who are participating with us specifically on this project. There’s lots of work going on now, and it’s coalescing.”

The effort to amend the U.S. constitution has in part been a reaction to the controversial ruling of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, which found that the first amendment to the U.S. constitution, on freedom of speech, prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.

In the ruling, corporations were essentially viewed as having the same rights as people, thus coining the term corporate personhood.

Activists held rallies across the U.S. earlier this month to protest the third anniversary of the Citizens United ruling. 

Data from the 2012 national elections have begun to reveal an unprecedented amount of spending in the elections, about six billion dollars, much of which is untraceable due to a new phenomenon called SuperPACs, political action committees that have literally no limit to how much they can spend, as well as shadow corporations, which are created for the sole purpose of funneling money into elections.

One of the main organising strategies by MTA and other groups to support an eventual constitutional amendment is to get local councils and commissions at the city and county levels to adopt resolutions in support of such an amendment.

According to the MTA website, there are at least 183 municipal government resolutions, 19 local ordinances, and three state-level resolutions in Hawaii, Montana, and Vermont that have passed to ban corporate personhood.

In addition, there are 79 local resolutions and 10 state resolutions that have also passed, but that MTA considers partial resolutions because they do not completely address the issue of corporate constitutional rights.

Most recently, on Jan. 22, the city council in Conway, Arkansas, passed a resolution with unanimous support.

MTA is itself a coalition of hundreds of organisations, and MTA has dozens of affiliates in cities throughout the U.S.

Other organisations that are working on this issue nationally include United for the People, which is also a coalition and which also has affiliates; in addition to Free Speech for the People, People for the American Way, and Public Citizen.

There has been some disagreement, though, among members of congress and various advocacy groups as to what the exact language of the constitutional amendment should be.

At least six different members of congress introduced legislation in 2011 to amend the constitution to in one way or another address the issue of unlimited corporate spending in U.S. elections.

Meanwhile, different organisations are supporting different versions of the bill. For example, Free Speech for the People is supporting the Edwards proposal and the McGovern proposal. People for the American Way is supporting the Udall proposal. And Public Citizen is supporting the Deutch proposal, which is the counterpart in the House to the Sanders proposal in the Senate.

Move to Amend presents on its website what it believes to be the strongest version of the proposed amendment, adding, “It is our belief that we need to operate on the assumption that once an Amendment comes out of Congress we won’t get another shot. So we MUST get it right!”

“I work on many issues. When you get to the bottom of just about every issue, you come up against the wall of the unholy alliance of money, corporate interest, and politicians,” Stacey Hopkins, lead organiser for United for the People Georgia and council organiser for MoveOn Atlanta, told IPS.

“I was active in doing voter registration, and we saw where dark money groups were backing voter suppression efforts around the country,” Hopkins said.

“We’ve also seen groups backing efforts to repeal Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, and as an African American, this is something that I take very personally,” Hopkins said.

Georgia Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, one of the largest utilities in the U.S. south, plans to retire 15 coal and oil-fired energy generating units at four different plants, in the latest sign that a national campaign against coal is gaining traction.

The latest announcement by Georgia Power brings to 129 the total of plant retirements announced for closure – either in whole or in part – since Sierra Club launched the Beyond Coal Campaign in 2002. Credit: public domain

The 15 units comprise a total of 2,061 megawatts, one quarter of Georgia Power’s coal fleet.

Georgia Power will seek permission from Georgia’s Public Service Commission (PSC) to close the units, and there is no reason to expect that the PSC will refuse.

“The economics of coal are changing, and we’re seeing massive changes in terms of how the U.S. generates its power,” Jenna Garland, associate press secretary for the Sierra Club, a major U.S. environmental lobby group, told IPS.

“In the next few years, we hope Georgia Power will make plans to phase out more of their coal plants and replace them with energy efficiency and clean energy,” she added.

A November 2012 report by the Union for Concerned Scientists titled “Ripe for Retirement: The Case for Closing America’s Costliest Coal Plants” reported that Georgia has the most coal-fired plants that should be considered for closure out of any U.S. state.

“As many as 353 coal-fired power generators in 31 states – representing up to 59 GW of power capacity – are no longer economically viable compared with cleaner, more affordable energy sources,” UCS said in a statement.

In 2011, approximately 42 percent of all electricity in the U.S. was produced by burning coal, the report stated.

“But today, more than three-quarters of U.S. coal-fired power plants have outlived their 30-year lifespan – with 17 percent being older than half a century,” the report stated.

UCS has recommended that Georgia Power switch to wind power and burning natural gas, although there are numerous environmental and health problems associated with hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, the process by which natural gas is removed from the ground.

Still, UCS felt vindicated by the company’s announcement. In a press statement, the organisation said the “announcement… reaffirms the recent Union of Concerned Scientists analysis… which showed all of the named coal-fired units should be considered for closure.”

“It is a significant move in the right direction definitely,” agreed Amelia Shenstone, southeast energy organiser for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

“We have been encouraging them to consider retiring some of these plants. As early as 2011, 2012, Georgia Power’s own studies found that some of these units would be most economical to retire. They retired two units, Branch 1 and 2, at that time,” Shenstone told IPS.

She emphasised that the plants that are closing are well beyond their expected life cycle.

“I think it’s possible the EPA regulations have helped dictate the schedule (of the closures)… but these plants really are getting old. They have a life expectancy of 30 years. These units are 44 to 63 years old. The oldest plants now are 60 to 70 years old. These plants don’t have a precedent for what the maintenance costs are,” Shenstone said.

Some coal units identified in the UCS report in Georgia, and in other U.S. states, remain open.

“We will be analysing those in the coming weeks,” Shenstone said.

According to Sierra Club, the latest announcement by Georgia Power brings to 129 the total of plant retirements announced for closure – either in whole or in part – since Sierra Club launched the Beyond Coal Campaign in 2002.

The 15 units to be shuttered in Georgia include two remaining coal units at Plant Branch in central Georgia, and three coal units and one oil unit at Plant Kraft, near Savannah; this will likely lead to the closure of these two plants. Georgia Power also seeks to close five coal units at Plant Yates in Coweta County, south of Atlanta, and two coal-powered units at Plant McManus, on the Georgia Coast.

The company will also request that the two remaining units at Plant Yates switch from coal to natural gas.

“Several factors, including the cost to comply with existing and future environmental regulations, recent and forecasted economic conditions, and lower natural gas prices contributed to the decision to close these units,” the company said in a statement.

“We still have a commitment to 21st century coal. The units with coal are still part of our mix and will still be part our mix,” John Kraft, a spokesman for Georgia Power, told IPS.

It is not immediately clear how the company plans to make up for lost capacity from the closed plants. When asked, Kraft said the company will file a report with the PSC later this month.

“All that will come under the Integrated Resource Plan, a plan we file under Georgia law that is a 20-year outlook on all the resources that will be needed to meet demand. We will file at the end of this month, taking into account the retirement dates that we’re requesting here,” Kraft said.

Last month, the PSC approved a plan by Georgia Power, that, as reported by IPS, sought to add a relatively small amount – 210 megawatts – of solar power to its energy mix over the next three years. This additional energy, which will come online around the same time that the coal plants are retired, will more than triple Georgia Power’s existing solar capacity.

The company expects that two new nuclear power reactors at Plant Vogtle, also in Georgia, will come online by 2017, one year later than expected. However, the plant has gotten bogged down in construction delays and disputes between contractors.

The company has also made a significant investment by purchasing long-term contracts for natural gas, something that Garland says is a cause for concern.

“We are certainly very pleased that Georgia Power made this decision. The plants were too expensive to operate and lack the pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act,” she said. “(But) Sierra Club does not just want to see coal replaced by natural gas across the board. We know about problems with hydraulic fracturing. That’s not our vision.”

Air monitoring equipment near the beach on Grand Isle, Louisiana. Credit: US EPA photo by Eric Vance

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Dec 19 2012 (IPS)

With Barack Obama’s re-election last month as U.S. president, key environmental protections escaped a likely Republican chopping block, and new regulations are expected when his second term begins in January.

Environmentalists say the situation would be much different had former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the Republican nominee, been elected president. Romney had sworn to roll back many, if not all, of the regulations enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during Obama’s first term.

Asked which of those EPA rules Romney would have likely overturned, Jenna Garland, associate press secretary for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign, responded: “All of them.”

Romney’s attitude towards the environment was perhaps epitomised during his speech accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention in August 2012.

Romney mocked Obama for wanting to address climate change warming: “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans. And to heal the planet,” Romney said, pausing to allow laughter from the audience.

“My promise is to help you and your family,” he said.

On Dec. 14, the EPA strengthened the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particles, or soot pollution, to 12 microgrammes per cubic metre. The previous limit, which had been in place since 1997, was 15 microgrammes per cubic metre.

Sources of soot pollution include power plants, diesel trucks, and buses.

Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, executive director of the non-profit group GreenLaw, considers the rule to be the first environmental victory of Obama’s reelection.

“They (fine particles) are deadly. Any amount is bad. But this is a good step in the right direction,” Benfield told IPS.

Upon request by IPS, the EPA prepared a document outlining the agency’s major accomplishments for clean air and water covering the years 2009 to 2012.

“If Romney had been elected, he was on record during the campaign saying he would roll back critical clean air and clean water protections, and politicise public health by giving Congress more power over Clean Air and Clean Water Act standards. That would be one of the most damaging things we have seen for public health and environment in decades,” Garland said.

“For instance, certain (Republican) Congressional leaders have gone after… the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. Just recently, this is the first time the federal government has regulated one of the most potent neurotoxins known to man… Congressional leaders and Mitt Romney wanted to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate neurotoxins like mercury, even though courts including the Supreme Court have upheld the EPA’s right and duty to regulate,” she said.

The EPA proposed its new carbon pollution standard for new coal and gas plants on Apr. 13, 2012.

That rule is currently undergoing a one-year public comment period, and is expected to go into effect on or around Apr. 13, 2013. That too would have likely been cancelled under a Romney administration.

“This is really important because carbon pollution threatens our climate, it does threaten our health and well-being. This is a critical step, if we’re going to address carbon pollution head-on instead of always responding. It means coal plants will no longer have a blank cheque,” Garland said.

“Mitt Romney denies that human activity contributes to climate destruction,” she added.

Activists also pointed to Obama’s selection of Lisa Jackson as EPA administrator as a crucial part of his governance as it relates to the environment.

“A lot of it has to do with who gets appointed to the EPA, the overall tone over there. The overall climate of the EPA is definitely a lot more supportive of pro-environment issues,” Benfield said.

“Appointing the EPA administrator is pretty political. Mitt Romney could have easily appointed someone to the EPA who does not take seriously human health, and could have instructed that administrator not to enforce” various recent EPA standards, Garland said.

But Obama has his shortcomings on the environment too, said the activists.

“We certainly have our problems with the Obama Department of Energy supporting nuclear and so-called clean coal projects that aren’t doing so well,” Garland said, noting that, still, “under the Obama administration we have seen tremendous growth of renewable energy.”

Obama has supported so-called clean coal, something that environmental advocates warn does not exist; in addition to nuclear power.

Garland also criticised Obama for shelving a proposed ozone standard during his first term because, she believes, it was found to be too political. However, the ozone standard is something that she hopes will be revisited now that he was won reelection.

“We would like for Obama to be a lot stronger on these issues,” Benfield said.

“You have to look at the dynamics. He’s not perfect, a lot of environmentalists would like to see him be a lot stronger. A lot of us are hoping, it’s his second term and he’s not concerned about being elected, that he’ll be proactive, and now he’s looking at leaving his legacy. A second term is a time to reflect on his legacy. What does he want his legacy to be? And climate change has to be part of that, I’m hopeful,” Benfield said.

Sierra Club anticipates that several new EPA rules will come out over the next four years, including a NAAQS rule for sulfur dioxide; a carbon pollution rule for existing pollution sources; and a Clean Water Act standard to address toxic discharge from power plants in waterways.

In New Orleans, which was struck by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, residents are planning strategies to prepare for the next natural disaster. Above, a house damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Credit: Steve Wilson/ CC by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Dec 14 2012 (IPS)

Many residents are still rebuilding their lives seven years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region of the United States. Those who are able are looking ahead and organising so that they will be better prepared for future natural disasters.

Although at a recent conference in Doha, Qatar, the international community failed to reach meaningful agreement on preventing more global warming, disaster preparedness will become an increasingly important topic for communities, especially those near water, around the world.

A new book, “Not Meant to Live Like This: Weathering the Storm of Our Lives in New Orleans”, by the members of the All Together in Dignity (ATD) Fourth World Movement living in New Orleans, addresses the topic of community organising for disaster preparedness.

A symposium at the Carter Center in Atlanta on Dec. 13 addressed the same issues. Both the book and the symposium received support from the Southern Partners Fund, a philanthropic group that promotes social change in the American South and which launched a Justice Fund for Disaster Relief and Renewal shortly after Katrina.

New Orleans still recovering

Martin Luther King III, the son of Martin Luther King Jr., emphasised in an interview with IPS that some parts of New Orleans have not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina.

In the Ninth Ward, he said, “homes were torn town and not rebuilt”, adding, “I am not saying it was intentional…but somebody must have made the decision.”

Even the parts of New Orleans that have been rebuilt have changed dramatically. Public housing communities that served low-income residents were torn down. Public schools have been privatised. Even the homes and businesses that have been rebuilt simply do not look quite the same.

“That happens in every community,” Marilyn Self, manager of the Disaster Readiness programme at the American Red Cross of Greater Atlanta, said during a panel at the symposium. “It’s never the same again. Even if every home is rebuilt and everyone comes back – which they don’t – it’s not the same church spire. The high school has a different look. It’s not the one you have a treasured memory in.”

Sharing responsibilities

“You have a personal responsibility to prepare for yourself in an emergency,” Winston Minor, chair of the Public Safety Committee for the Concerned Black Clergy of Atlanta, said during the panel, advising people to always have at least three days of food, water and medical supplies on hand in case disaster strikes.

“FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] expects you to be able to make it for three days,” Minor said.

But, Minor pointed out, “the community has a responsibility to make sure the community can respond,” and so “everyone in the system needs to be educated”. He said churches should be a vital component of that effort.

The Red Cross has been chartered by Congress since 1881 to help respond to disasters across the United States. Its ability to provide help, however, depends in part on partnerships it establishes at the local level, Self remarked.

One of the biggest problems faced by the Red Cross during and immediately after disasters is shelter. “We need spaces to hold several thousand people. We’ve been bickering with the mega-churches, but there is no agreement in place yet. It’s always, ‘We’ll get back to you.  Let’s talk to our lawyer,'” Self said.

Transportation is also an issue. Local workers who drive public buses or school buses are often relied upon to help transport people out of harm’s way when a storm is coming.

“That has to be communicated down to the person who drives the bus. Public employees need to know there’s a role for them in the disaster plan,” Self said.

Local organisations should have partnerships in place before disasters occur to determine how to cooperate in responding to them.

Housing problems

One key issue after Hurricane Katrina was the drastic decrease in affordable housing units.

In New Orleans today, “affordable housing is very scarce and the rent is very high,” Marie Victoire, co-author of “Not Meant to Live Like This”, told IPS. These factors make it “difficult for low-income people to come back”.

Public housing communities were demolished and replaced with so-called mixed-income housing. Four developments with nearly 5,000 units were demolished after Katrina. Replacement housing has not yet been built, but fewer than a thousand affordable units are planned, with the rest of the units at or near market rate.

“There was no right of return for former residents. They have a million ways to keep people out,” Jay Arena, assistant professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, who lived in New Orleans at the time, told IPS. Arena is the author of a book called “Driven from New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization”.

“The political and economic elite saw Katrina as a grand opportunity to deepen their neo-liberal privatisation agenda, change the racial and class demographic of the city, and that’s what they did, by closing down thousands of units of badly needed but hardly damaged public housing units, clearly in violation of international law,” Arena said.

Many low-income families paid 200 to 400 dollars per month on run-down housing before Katrina. After those homes were renovated following the hurricane, prices went up to 700 or 800 per month.

Arena believed that other countries should learn many lessons from what has happened in New Orleans. Above all, he argued, the likelihood of future disasters is another reason to greatly expand the public sector. He added that policies must be put in place to promote the right of return, including rent control and the rights of renters to return to their housing.

“They closed most of the public schools, they closed down the public hospital, Charity Hospital – that probably caused more deaths than even Katrina,” Arena concluded.

Robert Brewster, 74, a long-term survivor with HIV from New York City. Credit: Image courtesy of www.grayingofaids.org

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

When HIV/AIDS first emerged in the 1980s, the stereotypical image of a person living with the disease in the United States was a young or middle-aged white homosexual male.

For decades, that stigma has persisted, although today it includes people of colour.

In reality, though, a near-majority of those in the U.S. with the disease are much older, including those who have had HIV or AIDS for as long as 20 or 30 years; those who contracted the disease later in life; and those who may have had HIV for a long time but simply were not aware of it.

New studies show that more than half of U.S. residents with HIV or AIDS will be 50 years of age or older by 2015.

“So many traditional HIV prevention efforts are targeted at younger adults and adolescents,” Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality, told IPS. “They (older people) may not see themselves as at risk even though they’re being sexually active.”

A number of factors contributed to this demographic shift: improvements in AIDS medications that are allowing people with the disease to live longer; improvements in education efforts geared towards younger people in the U.S. about the disease and how to prevent it, for example, through safer sex; and the aging of the U.S. population in general.

“In certain parts in Florida, they have seen an increase in people testing HIV-positive for the first time who are retirees, who don’t think of themselves as at risk for any sort of sexually transmitted disease or HIV,” Graham said.

A 2006 study of 1,000 people over the age of 50 living with HIV in New York City helped to inspire an art project called the Graying of AIDS, which examines, through photography and interviews, first-person accounts of being an older person in the U.S. with HIV or AIDS.

The Graying of AIDS began as an essay by Katja Heinemann in Time magazine, and evolved into a website and exhibit that was featured at the last global HIV/AIDS conference in Washington. Today, Naomi Schegloff serves as co-director.

One reason older people tend not to see themselves at risk for HIV and AIDS is because a lot of public health campaigns are targeted at younger people, both in the U.S. and globally, Schegloff told IPS.

“Cross-culturally, people don’t want to admit older people are having sex,” she said.

The bias towards, and invisibility of, older people with HIV is even reflected in the way data is collected about people with HIV throughout the world.

“It’s very uneven how the age ranges are collected. In many places the statistics only go up to 49,” Schegloff said.

“It’s true at the beginning of the epidemic people would never had dreamed that people would live so long, that we could think of people living 30 years, aging with HIV,” she said. “People are living much longer – it’s a wonderful thing. Some of the people we’ve talked to have had HIV since almost the beginning.”

One of the unique challenges facing older adults with HIV or AIDS is that they may also be on medications for other diseases, which are often associated with age.

“A lot of studies on medications are based on (the premise that) that’s the only medicine they’re on,” Schegloff said.

“Certainly one of the challenges that older people living with HIV are going to have is they’re more likely to have a variety of other medical conditions – diabetes, heart disease, diseases of the lung, other conditions and diseases that tend to strike the elderly. That means more medications to take, needing to be aware of side effects, how different medications interact, because there haven’t been a lot of studies done,” Graham said.

“And primary medical providers who have experience treating older patients (may) have no experience treating HIV,” he said.

“You’ve got the added stigma, if you are living in a retirement community of some sort, and feeling additionally isolated and stigmatised because of your HIV status. There may not be the same types of support networks available for older folks as there are for middle aged folks and young adults,” Graham said.

Doctors who serve older patients may not even think to test for HIV, even if the patients have symptoms that in a younger person might prompt a doctor to do so.

For example, if an older woman complains of fatigue and hot flashes, the doctor may assume it is probably due to menopause.

There is also a category of older adults who are not practicing safer sex. If they are no longer at risk of pregnancy, they may not be using condoms, Schegloff said. In fact, older women of colour are one of the groups with the most rapidly increasing rate of HIV in the U.S.

Another factor contributing to the graying of AIDS is “condom fatigue among older gay men who’ve been practicing safe sex for many years and are finally over it with the condom,” Schegloff said.

One theme that came out of the art projects is the fear older people have of dying alone and how that can be exacerbated by HIV and AIDS, if people’s partners or friends have died from the disease.

Many older people in the U.S. also lack the financial resources to cope well with the disease, living on Social Security with little or no savings.

Asked what should be done to address the graying of AIDS, Schegloff replied, “One obvious recommendation to get rid of the age cap on who should receive education and testing services.

“I would love to see more education among health care and social services providers around ageism and HIV-related stigma, as people constantly send messages that can be hurtful to older adults,” she said.

Close-up of cluster of female cannabis plant. Credit: Bokske/cc by 3.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Nov 7 2012 (IPS)

In addition to the victories of the Democratic Party in retaining the presidency and the U.S. Senate, and of the Republican Party in retaining the U.S. House, there were major issue-related victories in Tuesday’s election whose common threads are personal liberty and human rights.

Chief among these was the approval of state-level referendums for the complete legalisation of marijuana and in support of same-sex marriage.

Comparisons to  alcohol prohibition

Colorado and Washington made history by being the first two states to completely legalise marijuana since the prohibition of marijuana began in the U.S. in 1937.

In Colorado, voters approved Amendment 64, with 55 percent of voters in favour. In Washington, voters approved Initiative Measure No. 202, with 55 percent of voters in favour.

Both measures legalise up to one ounce of marijuana for personal use for adults 21 and over, and allow for marijuana to be taxed and regulated in the same manner as alcohol.

Colorado’s measure allows for the licensing of cultivation and product-manufacturing facilities.

Colorado estimates the measure will raise between four million and 22 million dollars in sales tax revenue and licensing fees annually for the state. The first 40 million dollars of any such funds each year will now go towards school construction.

Oregon voters, however, rejected a similar measure, with only 44 percent in favour.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts became the eighteenth U.S. state, in addition to the District of Columbia, to allow medical marijuana.

Arkansas voters, however, narrowly rejected a similar medical marijuana measure, with only 48 percent in favour. Had the measure passed, Arkansas would have been the first state in the U.S. South to allow for medical marijuana.

The victories in Colorado and Washington are “very similar to when New York repealed their state alcohol prohibition and they did that prior to the federal government lifting their prohibition as well,” Robert Capecchi, legislative policy analyst with the Marijuana Policy Project, told IPS.

Capecchi attributed the shift in public opinion to “a shift in the electorate”, noting that older voters tend to oppose marijuana legalisation. “Older voters, and not to put it too darkly, but they die off,” Capecchi said.

“We got lots of support from younger voters and we’ve seen the Baby Boom generation as well, they’ve grown up with it in the 1960s, 1970s. In the grand scheme of things, people are deciding marijuana is not as injurious as federal and state governments want them to believe. It’s safer than alcohol. You cannot overdose on marijuana,” he said.

“The first states to change their laws are always the hardest. Now we’ve got two states whose voters have pretty overwhelmingly supported reform. I think a lot of other states will see that and have the political courage to change their laws as well,” Capecchi said.

One possibility might be that newly-reelected President Barack Obama will instruct the U.S. Department of Justice to enjoin Colorado and Washington from implementing the distribution components of its legislation.

However, if that happens, individuals in Colorado and Washington will still be protected from civil or criminal penalties under their respective state laws for possessing up to an ounce of marijuana. The vast majority of marijuana-related prosecutions occur at the state, not the federal level, meaning that most citizens of Colorado and Washington will be protected.

The 18 states with medical marijuana now include Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.

Fourteen states also have decriminalised marijuana, which means marijuana possession in those states still carries of a civil penalty, not a criminal penalty.

Going forward, MPP is continuing to push towards its 25 by 2014 plan, which is to have medical marijuana in at least half of U.S. states by 2014.

Next year, MPP plans to focus on promoting legislative initiatives to provide for legalisation of marijuana in Rhode Island; to decriminalise marijuana in Vermont; and to provide for medical marijuana in Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New York.

A “slam-dunk” for gay rights

Also during Tuesday’s election, Maine, Maryland and Washington became the first three states to pass ballot initiatives approving same-sex marriage. And Minnesota rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

“This is a slam dunk for the LGBT movement, for marriage equality. We had four significant measures on ballots in four states across the country, and we won every single one of them. They mean different things, but the reality is we won every single one of them,” Darlene Nipper, deputy executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, told IPS.

“This is such a historic moment – I don’t think we can fully grasp the impact right now. The ballot measures is just one aspect. There’s the most pro-LGBT president reelected, we’ve got the first lesbian [U.S.] senator in Tammy Baldwin,” Nipper said, referring to the newly reelected Democrat from Wisconsin.

Maine, Maryland, and Washington are the first states to use the ballot initiative process to affirmatively approve of same-sex marriage.

Maine voters approved Question 1, with 53 percent in favour. The question asked voters, “Do you want to allow the State of Maine to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples?”

Maryland voters approved Question 6, with 52 percent in favour. And Washington approved Referendum 74, with 52 percent in favour. Unlike in Maine, the referendums in both Maryland and Washington were to affirm previous legislative approval of same-sex marriage.

Maine, Maryland, and Washington now join six other states – Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont – in allowing same-sex couples to marry. In those states, same-sex marriage has become legal as a result of court rulings or legislative action.

Hydroelectric installations, like this one on the Niagara River, remain the largest source of clean energy in the United States and the U.S. South. Credit: B. Gilliard/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Oct 29 2012 (IPS)

With the U.S. East Coast virtually shutting down Monday with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, the broader debate over transitioning to cleaner energy sources and slowing, if not halting, climate change is taking on ever greater urgency.

While some parts of the U.S. have been made significant strides towards such a shift, the south has generally lagged behind. That remains the case, but recent signs suggest that utility companies and even Republican officials are beginning to change their tune.

For example, Georgia Power recently announced a proposal to provide 210 megawatts of solar power, which they will likely purchase from other sources, by 2015. This is on top of an additional 50 megawatts of solar energy they announced in June 2011.

If approved, this will mean that altogether, solar power will make up one percent of Georgia’s total energy portfolio.

Prior to this, as previously reported by IPS, Georgia Power’s only solar initiative was to allow customers to purchase green energy units at a higher cost than non-green energy units. Georgia Power would use these green energy credits to purchase green energy. However, the programme has a limit of 4.4 megawatts, which it has currently met, and is not accepting new customers.

Meanwhile, Alabama Power just announced that it is making a considerable investment in wind energy. It will purchase 404 megawatts of electricity generated at wind farms in Kansas and Oklahoma, one of which will be completed this year and another that is expected to come on line in 2014.

This is the equivalent of three percent of the company’s total energy portfolio. Alabama Power services all but the northern one-third of Alabama, which is serviced by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Both Georgia Power and Alabama Power are owned by Southern Company, a parent corporation that owns four utility companies throughout the U.S. South. Southern Company also owns Gulf Power, which services northwest Florida; and Mississippi Power.

Georgia Power uses other types of renewable energy in its total energy mix, including hydroelectric, biomass, and landfill gas.

“We’re always looking for better, environmentally friendly ways that we can provide energy to meet demand for our customers that also makes economic sense,” Michael Sznajderman, a spokesperson for Alabama Power, told IPS.

“We’re purchasing this energy at what we call below avoided cost, at a price that’s below the price that we can produce power ourselves. What that means is, we can use this energy – because it’s wind and it’s erratic, it’s only available when the wind’s blowing – we can use it to supplant some other energy that we would produce here or purchase that’s at a higher price. It made economic sense for us, that’s the primary driver for us,” Sznajderman said.

Alabama is the only state in the U.S. South to stand among the top 10 states in the country in terms of annual production of renewable energy, according to a recent report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Mostly, Alabama’s high ranking is due to its use of hydroelectric power, which makes up seven to 10 percent of Alabama Power’s energy mix; and some biomass.

A little over 14 percent of the total energy mix in the U.S. derived from renewable sources like solar, wind, hydroelectric power, and biofuels in 2011, according to the EIA. The other 86 percent comes from fossil fuels like coal, as well as nuclear power, pumped storage, and other sources.

Most of the nation’s renewable energy comes from hydroelectric power, making up almost 6.3 percent of the nation’s total mix for 2010. Wind accounts for 2.3 percent, while solar still makes up less than one-twentieth of one percent of the nation’s total energy mix.

By comparison, other nations have made much greater strides towards solar power, with Germany having launched a 100,000 Roofs Programme, which put solar panels on the roofs of 100,000 homes between 1991 and 2004; and with Japan on target to have solar panels on 30 percent of its homes by 2030.

Another ranking of states in terms of clean energy is the U.S. Clean Energy Leadership Index. This ranking is based on prevalence of green technology; human, financial, and intellectual capital; and policies providing regulation and incentives to promote clean energy, across all 50 U.S. states.

Not a single state in the U.S. South is on the list. In fact, Georgia rates 34th and Alabama rates 46th.

Asked what is the major obstacle to promoting renewable energy in the U.S. South, Stephanie Benfield, executive director of GreenLaw and a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives, pointed to the utility companies.

“Georgia Power clings to coal and nuclear, and they are the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Georgia Power controls the majority of electric supply in Georgia and in our region. They are a regional player… they have incredible influence over national policy as well,” Benfield told IPS.

“Georgia Power is reluctant to change. Nuclear and coal has been the base of their power for decades,” she said.

According to Sznajderman, the low price of non-green power in this area of the country has also made green power less attractive compared to places like California, where for various reasons, non-green power costs are higher.

“We have drawbacks too, typically Alabama doesn’t have commercial grade wind. There’s limited ability to do wind here, but that’s why we’re buying it from the Great Plains. Same thing with solar,” he said.

“One other reason I will tell you from our perspective is, our position has been, in some other areas of the country, they have made a policy decision, by the Public Service Commission or Legislature, to subsidize renewables, to spread the cost across their customer base… so customers pay for it whether they want it or not,” Sznajderman said.

“We’re opposed to any forced subsidy, we offer a renewable energy rate,” Sznajderman said, noting that Alabama Power customers who wish to pay more for renewable energy may choose to do so.

Thirty 30 U.S. states and the District of Columbia had enforceable Renewable Performance Standards or other mandated renewable capacity policies as of January 2012, according to the EIA. In addition, seven U.S. states have voluntary goals for renewable generation.

The majority of remaining U.S. states with no renewable energy target, whether voluntary or mandatory, are strikingly clustered in the U.S. South.

Electric cars reduce urban air pollution. Credit: Tinus de Jager/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Aug 29 2012 (IPS)

A 120-million-dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to the nationwide Electric Vehicle (EV) Project aims to promote and expand the use of electric vehicles in the United States.

The EV Project has a goal of handing out 14,000 free electric vehicle chargers, including commercial host stations as well as home smart chargers, that households can use to charge electric vehicles at home.

The programme is currently being run by a company called Ecotality in nine states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Washington.

The grant is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress to invest government dollars in programmes to create jobs, and, among other things, make green investments.

Free smart chargers are available to anybody who purchases a Nissan LEAF or Chevy Volt, the two most common models of electric vehicles, while businesses can host commercial chargers for free.

Shifting towards renewable energy

Proponents of the programme point out that increasing the use of electric vehicles in the United States will reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

However, the electricity still must be produced somehow, and in many cases still, it is done through coal and nuclear power plants.

A recent report by Environment Georgia has found that nevertheless, switching from gasoline-powered cars to electric ones still has benefits in reducing global warming, even in a state such as Georgia, which is far behind other states in moving to renewable energy.

According to the report, over 30,000 electric vehicles are already on the road in the United States. If national projected electric vehicle sales are met, 628,773 metric tonnes of global-warming emissions will be prevented each year, based on the current energy grid across the United States.

And if the vehicles are powered solely with renewable energy, the report projects that these emissions could be reduced by more than 1.9 million metric tonnes each year.

“There are still (pollution) savings. Obviously you would see greater savings if the grid mix were to change and improve,” Jennette Gayer, executive director of Environment Georgia, told IPS.

“The great benefit to electric cars is…that they’re the only vehicle that over time gets cleaner,” Ben Echols, electric transportation program manager for Georgia Power, told IPS.

“A normal internal combustion vehicle – the cleanest it’s going to be is the day you drive off the lot….The older it gets, the dirtier it gets,” Echols said.

“The electric vehicle is going to get cleaner. We are, as a company, going to continue to lower our emissions. We’re required by federal regulations to add cleaner generation to our mix. Our mix is going to get cleaner over time,” Echols said.

Partnering to save

Georgia Power is one of the industry groups that is partnering with Ecotality. The company is offering a reduced energy rate for customers who use most of their energy at night; the rate is designed for customers with electric vehicles who are charging their cars between the hours of 11 pm and 7 am, which are considered extremely off-peak hours.

Utility companies undoubtedly stand to gain by promoting electric vehicles, which, after all, boost demand for electricity. But even though consumers must pay for electricity, the cost must also be compared to the prospect of paying for gasoline instead.

The Environment Georgia report pointed out some of the many costs of relying on oil, recalling the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 along the Gulf of Mexico. Electric cars have the potential to reduce such costs by shifting the reliance onto renewable energy.

“I think that electric vehicles actually help the deployment of renewables,” Gayer explained. “If we go to electric vehicles, it will be easier to go later on to renewables.”

Cleaning up the grid

Yet there are risks. “If you do a huge roll-out of electric vehicles and don’t change the grid, Georgia Power and companies can use it as excuse to push really dirty proposals. But we’re headed as a country overall – not necessarily in Georgia – we’re heading in the right direction,” Gayer said. “There are (Environmental Protection Agency) rules coming down the pike that will continue to push towards cleaning up our grid.”

Electric vehicles are indeed making a comeback. A 2006 documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car,” shows how the oil and automobile industry conspired to prevent an electric car model, the General Motors EV1, from becoming popular in the mid-1990’s.

By comparison, the success of electric vehicles today is a stark turnabout from nearly twenty years ago, when the EV1 died young. Environment Georgia reported that in 2011, the first year electric vehicles came back on the market in the United States, over 17,000 were purchased.

Georgia's Vogtle nuclear power station. Its permit is already facing legal challenges. Credit: Public domain

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug 9 2012 (IPS)

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial nuclear power enterprises, has halted the issuance of all new nuclear reactor licensing decisions after a court ruling citing the failure of industry and government to identify an acceptable solution for the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

Nineteen final reactor licensing decisions are affected, including nine Construction and Operating Licenses (COLS), eight license renewals, one operating license, and one early site permit.

The NRC issued the order on Tuesday in response to a petition filed by numerous environmental groups, as well as individual petitioners.

The petition followed a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit dated Jun. 8, which stated that the way that the NRC deals with nuclear waste issues in its review process for new or existing nuclear power plants is unacceptable.

At issue is something called the Waste Confidence Ruling of the NRC.

“What we call Waste Confidence was an environmental finding by the commission, what we call a generic finding, meaning it applies universally (to all permit applications), that the spent waste, high level fuel can be stored for several decades beyond the life for the reactor,” Dave McIntyre, an NRC spokesman, explained to IPS.

“The US Circuit Court of Appeals… agreed with the challengers and remanded that waste confidence rule to us, and said basically, the main thing is the NRC should have looked at the possibility, what if there is no repository (for the nuclear waste)?” McIntyre said.

“Yucca Mountain (a proposed waste storage site in Nevada) has been cancelled, and there are no plans as of now. What if Congress continues to be divided and the nation doesn’t choose a direction to go and find a different site?” he said.

The NRC rule at issue assumes “(a) the NRC will find a way to dispose of spent reactor fuel to be generated by reactors at some time in the future when it becomes ‘necessary’ and (b) in the meantime, spent fuel can be stored safely at reactor sites,” according to a joint press release from the environmental groups.

“I think this is very significant,” Louis Zeller, executive director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, told IPS.”It upsets the NRC Commission and the nuclear industry’s apple cart because it’s something they did not expect.

“They expected us to challenge new reactors in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia, in many of the places we have, but I don’t think they expected one of the foundational tenets of their nuclear paradigm to be upended like this. I think this struck them by surprise.

“I try to be optimistic about these things. I do think it is important enough and at this point the judges of the DC circuit court of appeals have basically agreed – the NRC was whistling past a graveyard on nuclear waste issues,” Zeller said.

He noted that nuclear waste is highly radioactive, poisonous, and deadly.

Each storage site has different amounts and compositions of radioactive waste depending on how long each site’s operator decides to burn the fuel.

“It’s called burn-up, how long do you leave the uranium fuel in, which creates a different range of radionuclides, radioactive poisons,” such as iodine and strontium, Zeller said.

McIntyre said he does not yet know whether the NRC will appeal the recent court ruling, but that this is not stopping the agency from addressing some of the concerns raised in that ruling.

“Because of the recent court ruling striking down our current waste confidence provisions, we are now considering all available options for resolving the waste confidence issue, which could include generic or site-specific NRC actions, or some combination of both,” said the NRC Order, dated Aug. 7.

McIntyre said the agency staff is currently busy preparing a list of recommendations to present to the five NRC commissioners within a few weeks.

“We have not yet determined a course of action. But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue licenses dependent upon the Waste Confidence Decision or the Temporary Storage Rule until the court’s remand is appropriately addressed,” the NRC stated.

McIntyre noted that neither the NRC decision nor the court ruling impacts any final licensing decisions that have already been granted, for example, Plant Vogtle in Georgia. However, the Vogtle permit is already facing legal challenges related to post-Fukushima nuclear safety issues, as previously reported by IPS.

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, sent out an email to constituents Wednesday asking, “Are we witnessing the end of nuclear power?”

“We have had half a century to find a good solution to the problem of nuclear waste, and we are no closer now than we were in the 1960s. That is because there is no ‘good solution.’ We will never be able to find a risk-free method of storing nuclear waste,” Kucinich wrote.

Zeller said that it may possibly be the least unsafe option to leave the nuclear waste where it is, because the risks involved in transporting the waste, even if a new site could be found, would be too high.

He also noted that there is an underlying problem with trying to find a storage site for the nation’s nuclear waste when the U.S. is still producing more and more waste every day. Thus, it is not clear how much waste ultimately needs to be stored and it is not a finite amount.

Proposed new reactors impacted by the NRC decision include Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, Fermi in Michigan, William States Lee III in South Carolina, Grand Gulf in Mississippi, Victoria County in Texas, Turkey Point in Florida, Comanche Peak in Texas, South Texas in Texas, Bell Bend in Pennsylvania, Shearon Harris in North Carolina, Levy County in Florida, Bellefonte in Alabama, Watts Bar in Tennessee, and North Anna in Virginia.

Many families whose homes were foreclosed upon have been forced into the rental market. Credit: CC By 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug 7 2012 (IPS)

Even as thousands of families in the United States remain homeless due to a lack of affordable housing, millions of units are sitting empty across the country, including foreclosed single-family homes, foreclosed or vacant condominium units or entire condo buildings, and vacant high-priced apartments.

Large cities like New York and Chicago, which have been grappling with a lack of affordable apartments combined with an abundance of vacant, unaffordable condos, are now trying to turn some of those empty condo units into rentals, with varying levels of affordability.

Recent changes in the U.S. economy and the housing market have presented challenges for low-income renters.

Many families whose homes were foreclosed upon have been forced into the rental market. While some efforts, like those going on in Atlanta, Georgia, are providing downpayment assistance to get new families into these empty homes, the new families are not necessarily low-income families.

Of course, many low-income families do not have the credit or the income to qualify for a mortgage to purchase a home, and therefore are forced to rent.

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), low-income families face the greatest shortage of affordable rental units among any income bracket.

“In 2010, there were 9.8 million extremely low income renter households in the United States, and only 3 million rental homes affordable and available to these households,” the organisation states in a recent report.

Approximately 14 percent of all housing units in the U.S., or over 18.8 million units, were vacant at the end of June 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This figure includes vacant rentals and single-family homes as well as seasonal units and units that are held off the market for various reasons.

In response, Chicago and New York have set up programmes to convert empty condos into rental units.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) also recently announced a programme to convert empty single-family homes currently owned by the government-sponsored enterprise Sallie Mae into rental units.

Denise Dunckal, a spokeswoman for FHFA, told IPS that the agency will soon be announcing its decision regarding proposals submitted by investors to participate in the pilot programme.

NLIHC submitted comments to FHFA prior to the beginning of the pilot programme asking for some units to be set aside for low-income families. However, that does not appear to have happened.

“The available details of the pilot sale do not indicate that there will be an affordability component to this first stage of the programme. It is possible that affordability will be a component of future pilots or stages of the programme, although there has been no indication from FHFA that this will be the case,” the NLIHC wrote on its website.

Other than the reports from Chicago and New York and the FHFA programme, the NLIHC does not see any national trend towards dealing with the juxtaposition of vacant housing and unhoused people, in terms of providing affordable rentals, spokeswoman Amy Clark told IPS.

In Chicago, an organisation called Community Investment Corporation (CIC) noticed a problem with entire condominium buildings being foreclosed and vacant. CIC suspects that many of the condo buildings were the victims of condo fraud.

“In the course of going out on behalf of the City, looking at troubled buildings, we discovered this whole issue of condo fraud. There were buildings – it would be an empty building, trashed and totally destroyed inside, open to the elements,” Jack Markowski, CEO of CIC, told IPS.

“And then when we did a little research, say it’s a six-unit building, last year all these units were converted to condos and sold for 300,000 dollars a piece,” Markowski said. “The owner – he’s just gone – somebody walked away with 1.8 million dollars.”
Markowski says that condo fraud was made possible by banks which would give mortgage loans without proper documentation from the person applying for them. Markowski refers to them as “phony straw buyers”, who he believes may get a cut of the profits and then allow the unit to foreclose.

CIC identified over 260 condo buildings in Chicago where this appeared to have happened.

CIC and the city of Chicago worked with the Illinois legislature to pass a law in 2009 called the Distressed Condo Act, which went into effect in 2010. The Act allows courts to reassemble a condominium building – which is legally listed as multiple separate condo units with multiple owners – into a single building.

Then the CIC works to find developers who are willing to rehabilitate the building into rental units.

Markowski acknowledges that none of the units they are producing are set aside for low-income families, but points out that this still adds more rental units to the total rental housing stock of the city. This could, in turn, relieve some of the pressure on low-income families to compete with middle-income families for affordable rental units in Chicago, by at least providing more rental options for the middle-income families.

Markowski says the new Illinois law is unique in the U.S., and that so far CIC has used the law to successfully petition the courts for the deconversion of 33 vacant, foreclosed condo buildings, which, when the new units come online, will produce 372 units of rental housing in Chicago, with more likely to come.

Markowski adds that the banks who own the vacant condo units typically do not object in court because they realise that what they currently own – a condo unit in a vacant, foreclosed building – does not have any value but actually costs the banks in terms of tax liabilities.

Meanwhile, the city of New York in 2009 embarked upon its own pilot programme, called the Housing Asset Renewal Program (HARP), which invested 20 million dollars in city funds to turn stalled or vacant condominium developments into units affordable for middle-income families.

However, the programme got off to a slow start. According to a 2010 report in the Architect’s Newspaper, after the first year of HARP, not a single developer had expressed interest in the funding being offered by the City. In part this is because of lenders’ unwillingness to accept deep discounts required by the programme.

In March 2011, New York finally announced the first closing under HARP to convert 26 stalled condo units on Lefferts Avenue in Brooklyn into 46 rental units. The units had never been completed or sold on the market in the first place. All units will be affordable to middle-income, but not low-income, families.