Rebecca Moss, - ProPublica
Stephan: I don't know whether it is fear, stupidity, racism, or something else, but Republicans just can't seem to grasp the reality that to their party they don't really matter. When it comes to them or corporate interest, corporate interest wins almost every time, and the Trump administration, the most corrupt, incompetent, and cruel administration in American history brings this into full focus. Here's an example of what I mean.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — The Trump administration has quietly taken steps that may inhibit independent oversight of its most high-risk nuclear facilities, including some buildings at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Department of Energy document shows.
An order published on the department’s website in mid-May outlines new limits on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board — including preventing the board from accessing sensitive information, imposing additional legal hurdles on board staff, and mandating that Energy Department officials speak “with one voice” when communicating with the board.
The board has, by statute, operated independently and has been provided largely unfettered access to the nation’s nuclear weapons complexes in order to assess accidents or safety concerns that could pose a grave risk to workers and the public. The main exception has been access to the nuclear weapons themselves.
For many years, the board asked the Department of Energy to provide annual reviews of how well facilities handled nuclear materials vulnerable to a runaway chain reaction — and required federal officials to brief the board on the findings. It also has urged the energy […]
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Stephan: And here is yet another example demonstrating that the Republican Party cares nothing for ordinary Americans. You like your national monument? Sorry, we have to give a big part of it to a few rich people, who just don't feel they're rich enough, so you'll have to tell your kids they can't come here anymore. Oh, and those Native Americans. Well, they're not White so who cares what they want.
Part of the original Bears Ears National Monument before Pr*sident Trump moved to shrink it, a matter being fought over in court.
Credit: Flickr/Bureau of the Land Management
Incompetence has given environmentalists and other public lands advocates confirmation that the Interior Department’s review of national monuments carried out last year was no balanced affair but a move intent on advancing the interests of loggers and drillers. As reported by The Washington Post on Monday and Tuesday, the incompetence came in the form of a release of unedited email documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Dino Grandoni reported that these “show more candid conversations than ordinary FOIA releases because the Interior Department sent out the unredacted correspondence by accident.” Officials there removed the email documents from the Interior website and urged anyone who had downloaded them to hit delete.
What the correspondence shows is that Interior officials were focusing their attention on what could be extracted from public lands if these lost their designation as national monuments or were shrunken: timber, fish, minerals and fossil fuels. What was circumstantial before is now […]
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Robert Reich, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: All day while I have been working I listened to cable news and Republican congress people telling the world how wonderful the American economy is, and it made me increasingly irritated. It's true the economy is great if you are a large stockholder or a top corporate executive. If you're an average working America the situation is quite otherwise, although almost no one will say it on these shows. Robert Reich will and, in this piece, he does. I agree with him, because this is the reality I see and my readers write me about.
Workers protest for more money outside a McDonald’s in Miami, Florida.
Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty
The official rate of unemployment in America has plunged to a remarkably low 3.8%. The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will reach 3.5% by the end of the year.
But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.
Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits. The typical American worker now earns around
$44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively […]
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Nick Turse, - The Interecept
Stephan: Did you know that the United States is involved in at least eight wars on the Africa continent and that, as this article lays out, "more U.S. commandos are deployed to Africa than to any other region of the world except the Middle East." What! You didn't know that?
Don't be surprised almost no one in America does. The media rarely mentions them. I wouldn't even bet that Trump knows about them. But they affect the lives of millions of Africans and are very profitable for the military-intelligence-industrial complex. Since the late 80s, one of America's principal international activities has been destroying developing world societies to try and shape them into what we want. Unfortunately, it rarely ends well. Look at Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.
An American Special Forces soldier trains Nigerien troops during an exercise on the Air Base 201 compound, in Agadez, Niger, on April 14, 2018.
Credit: The Intercept
Last October four U.S. soldiers – including two commandos – were killed in an ambush in Niger. Since then, talk of U.S. special operations in Africa has centered on missions being curtailed and troop levels cut.
Press accounts have suggested that the number of special operators on the front lines has been reduced, with the head of U.S. Special Operations forces in Africa directing his troops to take fewer risks. At the same time, a “sweeping Pentagon review” of special ops missions on the continent may result in drastic cuts in the number of commandos operating there. U.S. Africa Command has apparently been asked to consider the impact on counterterrorism operations of cutting the number of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other commandos by 25 percent over 18 months and 50 percent over three years.
Analysts have already stepped forward to question or criticize the proposed cuts. […]
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Jillian S. Ambroz, - DC Report
Stephan: Thanks to Citizens United, arguably the worst and most damaging Supreme Court decision in American history, a decision made by five aging conservative Republican men, American democracy has been on the auction block now for eight years. The results have been catastrophic. We are now learning about how the NRA in league with Putin funded christofascists, and we already know about the Koch brothers, the DeVos family and other plutocrats of like-mind. As this report spells out we have reached a point where an ordinary American can't really know who owns their representative or senator. Here's the story.
Vladimir Putin
Call it Déjà GRU.
The U.S. Treasury Sec. Steve Mnuchin’s recent decision to remove the already limited government oversight on dark money groups could open the doors for foreign donors. Add to that the FEC’s inability to regulate online advertising, which is expected to see $2 billion flood the digital platforms such as Facebook and Google this mid-term season. And then there’s Vladimir V. Putin’s generous offer to help us with our cybersecurity problem at the Helsinki Summit. And it feels like 2016 all over again.
But let’s take a closer look at the Treasury’s recent move to loosen donor disclosure requirements.
It means groups like the National Rifle Association and the Koch Brothers’ Super PAC Americans for Prosperity don’t have to disclose their donors to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), because they are not pure political organizations. Under the new requirements, only charities and political organizations must continue to report donor information to the IRS.
That means less transparency for campaign financing and less information for voters.
So far this election cycle, outside spending has accounted for […]
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