Criminals Hate Regulations-- Who'da Thunk?

 

You know who hates rules and regulations? Criminals-- and not just the Mafia. It includes the exploitative class and the conservative political parties that represent that class' interests. It's why I've never voted for a Republican. And it's why I've never identified as a Republican... despite knowing how corrupt and worthless the Democratic Party has become over the course of my lifetime, especially since Bill Clinton helped usher in a take-over by the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in 1992.

But even most of the worst of the conservaDems tend to back at least some regulatory protections for workers and the environment. Republicans don't. Many of them will drown in an anti-Trump tsunami in two weeks but they were willing to make that bargain with the devil in order to wreck the American regulatory infrastructure and to pack the courts with the kinds of right-wing zealots who will uphold that for the aforementioned exploitative class.

Last week, The NY Times published a look at the GOP wrecking ball by Eric Lipton. Don't forget, he morons who attend Trump rallies may love chanting "lock her up"-- whether about Hillary, Kamala or Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer-- but those with the money and power behind the GOP are more concerned with allowing their criminal proclivities to run rampant without government interference than with the theatrics of Trumpism. Lipton clearly laid out how desperate the handmaidens of America's criminal class are "scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges... In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis. Some cases, like a new rule to allow railroads to move highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains, have led to warnings of public safety threats.

Every administration pushes to complete as much of its agenda as possible when a president’s term is coming to an end, seeking not just to secure its own legacy but also to tie the hands of any successor who tries to undo its work.

But as Mr. Trump completes four years marked by an extensive deregulatory push, the administration’s accelerated effort to put a further stamp on federal rules is drawing questions even from some former top officials who served under Republican presidents.

...If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump’s tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration.

But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making.

...The Environmental Protection Agency, which since the start of the Trump administration has been moving at a high speed to rewrite federal regulations, is expected to complete work in the weeks that remain in Mr. Trump’s term on two of the nation’s most important air pollution rules: standards that regulate particulates and ozone that is formed based on emissions from power plants, car exhaust and other sources.

These two pollutants are blamed for bronchitis, asthma, lung cancer and other ailments, causing an estimated 7,140 premature deaths a year in the United States, according to one recent study. The agency is proposing to keep these standards at their current levels, provoking protests from certain health experts and environmentalists who argue that the agency is obligated to lower the limits after new evidence emerged about the harm the pollutants cause.

Scott Pruitt, who served as the E.P.A. administrator in the first 17 months of Mr. Trump’s tenure, set as a goal before he left office to get these new standards adopted by December 2020, even though the agency had previously expected they would not be finished until 2022.

The agency also is rushing to complete a series of regulations that will almost certainly make it harder for future administrations to tighten air pollution and other environmental standards, including a limit on how science is used in rule making and a change to the way costs and benefits are evaluated to justify new rules.

Mr. Trump has played a direct role in pushing to accelerate some regulations. Among them is a provision finished this summer, nicknamed “bomb trains” by its critics, that allows railroads to move highly flammable loads of liquefied natural gas on freight trains. Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year directing the Transportation Department to enact the rule within 13 months-- even before it had been formally proposed.

The change was backed by the railroad and natural gas industry, which has donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, after construction of pipelines had been blocked or slowed after protests by environmentalists.

But the proposal provoked an intense backlash from a diverse array of prominent public safety officials. Among them were groups representing thousands of mayors, firefighters and fire marshals nationwide and even the federal government’s own National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates fatal transportation accidents.

The gas is stored in 30,000-gallon rail tanks at minus 260 degrees to keep it compressed. But if accidentally released during an accident, it would rapidly expand by nearly 600 times as the temperature rises and cause what is known as a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion” that if ignited could not be quickly extinguished, potentially resulting in widespread injury or death if it occurs in a populated area, the firefighters warned.

“It is nearly certain any accident involving a train consisting of multiple rail cars loaded with L.N.G. will place vast numbers of the public at risk while fully depleting all local emergency response forces,” Harold A. Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, wrote in a letter opposing the proposal.

The Transportation Department still adopted the rule and rejected proposed speed limits for the trains, generating a petition for a court review by 14 states and the District of Columbia.

“Studies on how to safely transport liquefied natural gas by rail are still ongoing, and this administration has rushed to implement a rule that will needlessly endanger people’s lives and threaten our environment,” Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, said.

Even while the challenge is underway, the Transportation Department has moved to enact another rule easing safety standards, in this case removing a requirement intended to limit the number of hours truck drivers are allowed behind the wheel and to mandate rest periods.

Certain drivers who carry agricultural products would now be exempt from this federal mandate in a standard that would again be adopted as an “interim final rule,” meaning it would be put in place before any public comment is accepted, under the plan announced by the agency.

“Fatigued truck drivers remain a stubbornly high cause of fatal highway accidents,” said James Goodwin, a lawyer at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit group that tracks regulatory actions. “The law permits agencies to take short cuts when there are extraordinary circumstances that call for them. That is not present here.”

Earlier today, progressive state Rep. Jon Hoadley, a congressional candidate who appears to be beating Trump lackey Fred Upton, told us that Upton "continues to tout his supposed victories for the Great Lakes while also enabling corporate polluters to contaminate them along with our groundwater. As Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, he held one of the most powerful positions in Congress and due to his inaction or enacted obstacles, at one point he was deemed 'the worst threat to planet Earth on Earth.' Michiganders need a leader who will actually fight to protect our precious natural resources and hold polluters accountable."

Beth Doglio is in a hot D vs D contest in Washington. Beth is the environmentalist and workers' champion in the race and her opponent, Marilyn Strickland, is an establishment Dem who was president of the Chamber of Commerce and supported... well all the kinds of anti-environment and anti-worker policies conservative and the Chamber support. Not quite as bad as a Republican of course, but... close. Beth told me that "We have to draw a line in the sand when it comes to large new fossil fuel infrastructure that locks in emission for decades to come. I was standing firm leading the fight to stop the seven coal export terminals dead in their tracks, while my opponent openly supported a proposal to site the largest methanol plant in the world in urban Tacoma before it was vetted. Residents of Pierce County rejected it." Both of these women have track records. Beth's is golden; Stickland's is... a lump of coal.

Julie Oliver is rewriting the political history of Texas with her amazing run in a gerrymandered R+11 congressional seat. This morning she told me that her opponent, "Roger Williams consistently toes the party line that he favors limited governmental regulation, unless it benefits his own business, one of the most protected industries by regulation in the state of Texas-- automobile dealerships. But unless Williams or his donors are the beneficiaries of regulations, he fights hard to ensure laws and regulations lose their potency or are eliminated altogether. Williams filed what has to be the shortest bill introduced in Congress, 'This bill terminates the EPA effective 12/31/2018.' He doesn't care that his constituents in Johnson County are fighting for clean water or that his constituents in Burnet County are fighting for clean air; Williams is a loot-the-coffers kind of Republican who is using his position of public trust to enrich himself and his donors. Last week, the Houston Chronicle reported that Williams used his position on the Financial Services Committee to strongarm banks into meetings with his wealthy donors, while ignoring the pleas for help from constituents who have been laid off due to the pandemic."

Adam Christensen, a progressive running against a crumbling GOP power structure in north-central Florida, is aiming at replacing Trump lickspittle Ted Yoho. Earlier he told us that "The Trump administration has constantly attempted to deregulate guidelines that save people’s lives. They actively attempt to deregulate safety standards for railways, pollutants and more. Representative Ted Yoho and my opponent Kat Cammack want to continue these deregulations to help their wealthy donors even if they result in harm and even death to our people. Pollutants are causing Americans to develop dangerous diseases such as asthma and lung cancer. Americans are dying because Republicans like the current administration, Mr. Yoho and Ms. Cammack refuse to stand up for our planet and our people. They will only stand up for power, greed, their donors and their wealth. They are standing by and allowing phosphate mines to sue Union into oblivion. It’s time we stand up and fight people and greed like this. I know that when we win we will stand up and fight for our planet, our people and our future."

Today, Trump Is Scaling Back Rules Restricting Air And Water Pollution

Last week, Roland made an announcement: we're done with India. I've been there at least half a dozen times since 1970-- once for over a year-- so I wasn't especially disturbed by the proclamation but I asked why. He said that the air pollution is so deadly in the major cities that it was absolutely unsafe. He has some app he uses that measures air pollution around the world. Last week when the fires in California had driven L.A.'s pollution levels into "unhealthy" (150 was the number and we were supposed to not go outside), the Delhi number was 999, and would have been higher had the app gone into 4 digits. Over the weekend, The Economist backed Roland up. "As part of a 'public-health emergency' declared on November 1st in Delhi, millions of face-masks are being distributed to children. Schools will shut until at least November 5th. The cause is polluted air, which Delhi’s chief minister says has turned the city into a 'gas chamber'. The measures are severe but not unusual. In the past year, schools around the world-- in Thailand and Malaysia, Mexico and America-- have cancelled classes on bad-air days. Air pollution does indeed do terrible things to schoolchildren. Globally, says the World Health Organisation, more than 90% of children under 15 breathe air that puts their health at serious risk. The young are especially susceptible, because their lungs are still developing and their breathing is faster than adults’, so they take in more pollutants relative to their body weight. A British study found that on school-runs young children were exposed to 30% more pollutants than the adults accompanying them, because their height puts them closer to exhaust pipes. One of the most common ailments that results is asthma. Poorer children are still more vulnerable, since their schools tend to be near busy roads."

Children’s brains are also at risk. This is not because pollution confines them to home. Assiduous teachers in Malaysia and China may instruct students online on days when the smog keeps them away from school. In any case, research in 2014 by the Harvard Kennedy School into the effect of shutting schools because of snow shows that missing a few days does not appear to impair learning.

Much more dangerous is the toll that pollution takes on cognitive development and mental health. Research, also conducted in 2014, found that air pollution harmed Israeli students' exam performance. A study in Cincinnati, Ohio, showed an increase in pollution to be correlated with a higher number of psychiatric-hospital visits by children troubled by anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Even very young students are aware of the pollution problem: in a survey by Sustrans, a charity that aims to reduce car use, 45% of British pupils aged four to 11 said they were worried about air quality. Such “eco-anxiety” is the reason that some American school boards are riven by disagreements between environmentalists, who maintain that children need to understand climate change, and administrators who say studying it will traumatise them.

Clean-air campaigners have tried to stem the damage. In Britain, for example, they have, besides encouraging student pick-ups and drop-offs on foot or by bicycle, recommended imposing no-car zones around schools in Birmingham, or, in Sheffield, placing hedges between roads and playgrounds. Such measures are no substitute for bigger changes, though. If trends persist, warns the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, air pollution will cut 1% from global GDP by 2060, in large part from lost agricultural yield, lower worker productivity and higher health costs. Apart from choking on the fumes, today’s school children can look forward to bearing those burdens, too.

None of that bothers Señor Trumpanzee in the least. He has an election to win and he believes there's a constituency that demands deadly air pollution, particularly coal burning pollution. Yesterday, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis, reported for Washington Post readers on how Trump is working diligently to hamper cognitive development among children and worsen mental health in our own country. Today, the EPA is relaxing "rules that govern how power plants store waste from burning coal and release water containing toxic metals into nearby waterways. The proposals, which scale back two rules adopted in 2015, affect the disposal of fine powder and sludge known as 'coal ash,' as well as contaminated water that power plants produce while burning coal. Both forms of waste can contain mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals that pose risks to human health and the environment." Take that, Obama!

The new Trumpist rules reflect Trumpanzee’s "broader goal of bolstering America’s coal industry at a time when natural gas and renewable energy provide more affordable sources of electricity for consumers. Under the Obama-era rule, coal ash ponds leaking contaminants into groundwater that exceeded federal protection standards had to close by April 2019. The Trump administration extended that deadline until October 2020 in a rule it finalized last year. In August 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit instructed the EPA to require that companies overhaul ponds, including those lined with clay and compacted soil, even if there was no evidence that sludge was leaking into groundwater.

In a statement, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the Obama-era rules “placed heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country.”

Andrew Wheeler by Nancy Ohanian

“These proposed revisions support the Trump administration’s commitment to responsible, reasonable regulations,” Wheeler said, “by taking a common-sense approach that will provide more certainty to U.S. industry while also protecting public health and the environment.”

... [I]f a company can demonstrate that it is shutting down a coal boiler, it can petition to keep its storage ponds open for as long as eight years, depending on their size. Slurry ponds smaller than 40 acres could get approval to stay in place until Oct. 15, 2023, officials said, while larger ones could remain open until Oct. 15, 2028.

Environmentalists have sharply criticized the proposals, arguing these containment sites pose serious risks to the public at a time when more frequent and intense flooding, fueled in part by climate change, could destabilize them and contaminate drinking water supplies that serve millions of people. The rules will be subject to public comment for 60 days.

During the past decade, Tennessee and North Carolina have experienced major coal ash spills that have destroyed homes and contaminated rivers, resulting in sickened cleanup workers and massive lawsuits.

The question of how to handle coal waste, which is stored in roughly 450 sites across the country, has vexed regulators for decades. The Obama administration negotiated for years with environmental groups, electric utilities and other affected industries about how to address the waste, which can poison wildlife and poses health risks to people living near storage sites.

Lisa Evans, an attorney specializing in hazardous waste law for the environmental group Earthjustice, said allowing the electric industry to extend the life of coal ash pits represents a particular threat to low-income and minority Americans, who often live near such installations.

“Allowing plants to continue to dump toxic waste into leaking coal ash ponds for another 10 years will cause irreversible damage to drinking water sources, human health and the nation’s waters,” Evans said in an email. She added it was not surprising the coal industry had lobbied against closing these storage sites. “Operating ponds is cheap. Closing them costs the utilities money,” she said.

It is also likely to add to ordinary consumers’ costs. Last year, for example, a member of the Virginia State Corporation Commission estimated it could cost ratepayers as much as $3.30 a month over 20 years-- between $2.4 billion and $5.6 billion-- to clean up Virginia-based Dominion Energy’s 11 coal ash ponds and six coal ash landfills in the state.

The Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, which lobbies on coal ash issues on behalf of electric utilities, said in its 2017 petition that the Obama-era rules were “burdensome, inflexible, and often impracticable” and that they “created a monolithic, one-size-fits-all regulatory regime.”

Delia Patterson, general counsel of the American Public Power Association, said the proposed rules would “bring more certainty to the industry and facilitate the safe management” of waste ponds.

...The vast majority of ponds and landfills holding coal waste at hundreds of power plants across the country have leaked toxic chemicals into nearby groundwater at facilities from Texas to Pennsylvania to Maryland, according to that analysis. The report acknowledged, however, that the groundwater data alone does not prove drinking-water supplies near the coal waste facilities have been contaminated. Power companies are not routinely required to test nearby drinking water wells. “So the scope of the threat is largely undefined,” the report stated.

The EPA on Monday will also revise requirements for how power plants discharge wastewater, which contain some of the same kind of contaminants. Under the Obama administration, EPA staff had concluded it was feasible to prohibit any releases of such toxic materials by having the units continually recycle their water. The agency has now concluded this is far more costly than originally anticipated, and technological advances have made it cheaper to filter and capture the waste through a membrane system, officials said.

Under the new rule, plants would be allowed to discharge 10 percent of their water each day, on a 30-day rolling average. The administration projects that the regulation would prevent 105 million pounds of pollutants from being released compared with the old standards because 18 affected plants would voluntarily adopt a more advanced filtration system. The administration also estimated it would save the industry $175 million each year in compliance costs and yield an additional $15 million to $69 million in annual public health and environmental benefits.

However, even if the 18 plants voluntarily adopted more advanced filtration techniques, they represent a minority of the nation’s total number of plants.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland, former director of science and technology at the EPA’s Office of Water, said the proposed rule “relaxes the 2015 treatment requirements allowing increased selenium discharges and [the] release of contaminated water from coal ash handling. Even worse, it exempts a large number of plants from these relaxed requirements, allowing them to discharge more pollutants and continue disposing of ash in leaking ponds.”

Evans said environmentalists are likely to challenge the new rule on coal ash storage and the federal government could again reverse course if a Democrat wins the presidency next year. She noted that, because 95 percent of coal ash ponds remain unlined, two-thirds lie within five feet of groundwater and 92 percent leak more than federal health standards allow, they could pose a risk to the public even as litigation winds its way through the federal courts.

“We have to hope that no wells are poisoned and no toxic waste is spilled in the interim,” she said. “Crossing your fingers is not a legal or sane way to regulate toxic waste.”

ScienceAlert warned last month that air pollution had gotten significantly worse in the U.S. since Trump occupied the White House, "a reversal after years of sustained improvement with significant implications for public health. In 2018 alone, eroding air quality was linked to nearly 10,000 additional deaths in the US relative to the 2016 benchmark, the year in which small-particle pollution reached a two-decade low, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University... Last year, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler disbanded the expert academic panel that reviewed and advised the agency on its standards for small-particle air pollution. In its place, the administration has hired consultants with links to the fossil fuel, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries... One thing that's clear at the moment is the effect that rising pollution is having on mortality and life expectancy."

Two congressional candidates from Chicago had a lot to say about Trump's-- and conservatives' in general-- love affair with pollution-for-profit and how it impacts the families in their neighborhoods. Kina Collins: "In the predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods in IL-07, we see food deserts with a lack of fresh produce, industrial corridors pumping toxins into the air, and some areas that have higher levels of lead in the water than Flint, Michigan. In Chicago, there are hotspots where Black children are dying from asthma attacks at eight times the rate of white children because of the air quality and healthcare inequities. This is an environmental crisis. We need to be increasing funding for the EPA and other agencies to immediately and aggressively combat the causes of climate change, not cutting back on regulations and giving tax breaks to polluters. We cannot separate environmental justice from economic justice, and I plan to bring training and opportunities for green jobs into the south and west sides of Chicago so that they do not get left behind as we push to become the world leaders in the green industry. And we need leaders who are at the forefront of Congress pushing for the Green New Deal, who are actually fighting for Generation GND. We can afford to invest in the infrastructure and clean technology needed to end problems like lead in the water, we just need to have the moral authority to put the money where it is needed most. We don't need a Congressman who sits on the sidelines, because our planet doesn't have 20 more years to 'wait and see.' I will be fighting for environmental justice policies from Day One like my life depends on it-- because the future matters to me and to millions of other young Americans who are ready for bold action."

Marie Newman is also running for a seat held by a Democrat who doesn't seem to give a damn about corporate pollution. "With the undeniable amount of rebuilding and work we will have to do to address the climate crisis, my opponent’s lack of understanding and dismissal of the climate crisis alongside the amount of funding he is getting from the fossil fuel industries is truly disturbing. We must push past dinosaurs like Lipinski and get progressives elected ASAP. It is why I’m running."

Trumpist Regime Is Riven With Corruption That Few Are Paying Attention To During The Impeachment Process

While everyone is watching everything impeachment-related, the ordinary business of Trumpist destruction continues unabated. Let me give you two examples: air quality and education quality, although all of Trump's cabinet secretaries are working towards destruction of everything we cherish about our country. CBS reporter Kate Gibson wrote that while Obama was president air quality kept improving, But after the catastrophe in 2016, we've had two years of increases in the amount of pollutants in the air "with potentially deadly ramifications." Two analysts working for the EPA, Karen Clay and Nicholas Muller, "found that particulate matter air pollution fell 24% in the U.S. from 2009 to 2016, but it increased 5.5% the following two years. 'That increase was associated with 9,700 premature deaths in 2018'... [they wrote] in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research."

"The chemical composition of particulates point to increased use of natural gas and to vehicle miles traveled as likely contributors to the increase" in pollution, the economists wrote. "We conclude that the effect is due to diesel vehicles as well as some industrial boilers."

The findings could bolster theories advanced by experts such as Oxford University economist Kate Raworth who argue that unrestrained economic growth is contributing to climate change.

...The researchers also point to a decline in EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act as a factor that could explain worsening air quality. The law, established in 1970, is responsible for preventing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of millions of cases of respiratory and heart disease, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. 

But that's not an anomaly; that's how the Trumpets Regime works. Yesterday Danielle Douglas-Gabriel wrote for the Washington Post how Betsy DeVos has been spending millions of taxpayer dollars on unaccredited for-profit fake "colleges," many of them scams like Trump "University." She reported that "A trove of documents released Tuesday by the House Education and Labor Committee shows the Education Department provided $10.7 million in federal loans and grants to students at the Illinois Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Colorado even though officials knew the for-profit colleges were not accredited and ineligible to receive such aid."

Barr, Pompeo, Trump, Pence by Nancy Ohanian

The documents build on prior reports from the committee describing efforts by Education Department officials to shield Dream Center Education Holdings, owner of the Art Institutes and Argosy University, from the consequences of lying to students about the accreditation of its since-closed schools. Now it appears the Education Department tried to shield itself from an ill-fated decision to allow millions of dollars to flow to those schools. Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-VA), chairman of the House Education Committee, is threatening to subpoena Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for more documents related to the department’s role in Dream Center’s actions. Scott says the agency has obstructed the committee’s investigation and refused to answer questions, as emails and letters paint a picture of a federal agency complicit in an effort to place profits before students.

...By law, for-profit colleges must be fully accredited to participate in federal student aid programs. Neither the Art Institute of Colorado, the Art Institute of Michigan or the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago and Schaumburg held that seal of approval from their accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission, in the 2018 spring semester. In reviewing Dream Center’s 2017 acquisition of the chain, the accrediting commission raised concerns about the quality of education at the campuses and downgraded their status for up to four years.

The accreditor issued a public notice in January 2018 and instructed Dream Center to inform students, but the Los Angeles company continued to advertise that the schools were accredited. Students kept enrolling, and the Education Department kept giving them federal loans, despite the schools’ ineligibility. Dream Center, which has since folded, could not be reached for comment.

Letters from senior Education Department official Michael Frola to the presidents of the two Art Institute campuses were among the documents made public Tuesday by House Democrats. Frola acknowledges in the May 2018 letters that the schools’ accreditation status made them ineligible to receive federal loans and grants through their students.

The for-profit schools’ downgraded designation as “preaccredited” institutions prohibited the receipt of federal student aid, although nonprofit schools with the same status can receive aid. To rectify the problem, Frola said, the department would retroactively-- and temporarily-- designate the Art Institutes as nonprofits effective Jan. 20, 2018, the date they lost their accreditation.

At the time, Dream Center was seeking approval from the Education Department, the accrediting commission and the Internal Revenue Service to turn the chain of for-profit colleges it purchased in 2016 into nonprofit schools. That designation would shield the company from having to report whether graduates were earning enough to repay their student loans.

The conversion was still in the works when Frola sent the letters. The timing and scope of the temporary conversion by the Education Department are causing alarm among House Democrats.

“The grant of temporary nonprofit status was directed at what had at that time, been a five-month lapse in eligibility, and five months where Dream Center was receiving funds in violation of [the Higher Education Act] and accompanying regulations,” Scott wrote in a letter Tuesday to DeVos. “This special treatment allowed more students to become entangled in Dream Center, magnifying the abrupt closure of the schools and the displacement of thousands of students.”

Former Art Institute of Colorado and Illinois Institute of Art students are suing DeVos and the Education Department, accusing them of unlawfully issuing loans the students say they should not be forced to repay. The National Student Legal Defense Network, a legal aid group representing the students, used many of the documents unearthed by House Democrats as evidence in the complaint.

“We’ve known for a long time that the Art Institutes lied to students about losing accreditation. Now, we know that the Department of Education misled them, too,” said Eric Rothschild, an attorney at the National Student Legal Defense Network who is representing the students.

Robert J. Infusino, one of the students involved in the case, was pursuing a degree in audio production at the Illinois Institute of Art when the school announced in summer 2018 it would be closing at the end of the year. Infusino, 23, was livid when he learned during a meeting about the imminent closing that the school had lost accreditation six months earlier but had not informed students.

He was $28,000 in debt for a degree he was a few months shy of completing. But transferring his credits to another school became a nightmare because few were willing to accept classes from an unaccredited institution. When Infusino finally found an online school willing to give him a chance, he had to retake classes, spend more money and take more time to complete his education.

“Had I known what was going on, I would have had time to evaluate the situation, maybe transfer before wasting time and money,” Infusino said. “I thought the government was supposed to look out for students. I feel betrayed.”

Is there are solution-- aside from just getting rid of DeVos, something that is dependent on getting rid of Trump, of course. Well even beyond that, Bernie has a good idea. His message to young Americans and their parents: "We want you to get the best education that you can, regardless of the income of your family. Good jobs require a good education. That is why we are going to make public colleges and universities tuition free, and cancel all student debt. Just 30 years ago, tuition and fees at a public, four-year university totaled $3,360 per year in today’s dollars. That same degree today costs more than $10,000 per year in tuition and fees and more than $21,000 per year including room and board. Meanwhile, median hourly wages for college graduates have risen by less than $1 since 2001, when adjusted for inflation. The promise of higher pay has not materialized for recent college graduates, who have been taking out more and more in student loans to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of tuition. This has led to a generation of young people unable to start families, buy homes, and follow their dreams... You are not truly free when you graduate college with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt. You are not truly free when you cannot pursue your dream of becoming a teacher, environmentalist, journalist or nurse because you cannot make enough money to cover your monthly student loan payments. And you are not truly free when the vast majority of good-paying jobs require a degree that requires taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to obtain. We are going to end the racial and class disparities that persist throughout higher education. We will close these gaps and ensure all Americans, no matter their race, income, zip code, or immigration status receive a high quality education. Not only will we guarantee the right to a good, public education for all-- from childcare and pre-kindergarten through college-- we will free generations of Americans from the outrageous burden of student loans by canceling all existing student debt."

The Shutdown Has Been Further Damaging An Already Damaged EPA

Andrew Wheeler by Nancy Ohanian

Even before the outrageous Trump-McConnell shutdown began, Trump's America-- which is also, don't forget, our America-- was getting more polluted, dangerously polluted. It is, after all, what the Republican Party stands for more than almost anything else: Pollution For Profit. It's no coincidence that the EPA’s enforcement division has lost at least 80 people since Trump entered office.

On Thursday, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis reported that "Civil penalties for polluters under the Trump administration plummeted during the past fiscal year to the lowest average level since 1994, according to a new analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data. In the two decades before President Trump took office, EPA civil fines averaged more than $500 million a year, when adjusted for inflation. Last year’s total was 85 percent below that amount-- $72 million."

Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s enforcement office in the Obama administration and conducted the analysis, said the inflation-adjusted figures were the lowest since the agency’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established.

The decline in civil penalties could undermine the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing, some former agency officials said, because they help ensure it is more expensive to violate the law than to comply with it. But Trump administration officials have said they are focusing much of their effort on working with companies ahead of time so they don’t run afoul of the law, rather than punishing them after the fact. That approach, they say, will ensure business operations can thrive without harming the environment.

Giles, now a guest fellow at the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program, questioned whether the new approach can achieve what administration officials promise.

“The public expects EPA to protect them from the worst polluters,” she said. “The Trump EPA is not doing that. What worries me is how industry will respond to EPA’s abandonment of tough enforcement.”

During his confirmation hearing last week, EPA acting administrator Andrew Wheeler told lawmakers that there had been “a lot of misleading information” suggesting that the agency had gone easier on polluters under Trump. He cited recent reports from environmental and governance groups that said the EPA’s enforcement had sagged.

...Civil penalties, which the EPA applies for a range of violations, including water contamination and air pollution, aim to recover the financial benefit a company has reaped by breaking the law and to impose additional costs so that firms are deterred from doing it in the future.

The root of the problem is a conservative world view and how the market will fix everything. But Trump's singular ignorance and psychosis has fully weaponized that socially destructive GOP anti-regulatory perspective. At the very end of November, New York Magazine published a report by Adam Raymond, Trump Says He’s Too Intelligent to Believe Climate Change Report, that goes to the heart of the problem normal Americans are facing today when it comes to the environment and to Climate Change. The toxic, swampy Regime's own efforts to delegitimize its own climate change report culminated in Trump doing an interview with Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post. Raymond reprinted a piece of what he called a "rambling, hardly coherent digression." Below is that and more:

DAWSEY: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you’re skeptical of that report?

TRUMP: One of the problems that a lot of people like myself-- we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including-- just many other places-- the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it-- not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light-- you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.

DAWSEY: So you’re saying you don’t see the...

TRUMP: Josh, you go to other places where they have denser trees-- it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable-- they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen, and they’re raking brush-- you know the tumbleweed and brush, and all this stuff that’s growing underneath. It’s on fire, and they’re raking it, working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire. It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it.

One of the first 2020 declared candidates, Audrey Denney, up in very rural northeast California, was incensed by Trump's comments which she said "make it clear that he does not have a grasp on the science of climate change, the complexities of forest ecosystems, or the basics of fire prevention. Last November we were experiencing weather patterns and dryness levels that mirrored peak fire season (July). High winds and these extraordinarily dry conditions led to a creating the most devastating fire in California’s history. Our changing climate will continue to threaten lives and property in Northern California and across our country. Many of California’s forests are overgrown and need to be restored to healthy forested ecosystems. It is complex and important work that must to be done. However, nearly 60% of the forests in California are under federal control-- it is the federal government who has chosen to divert resources away from forest management-- not California. As we look ahead to increased risks for people who live in urban-wildland interface areas, we need to devote resources to proper community planning, emergency preparedness, and innovative solutions for minimizing risks. We need leaders that understand the complexity, nuance, and science surrounding these issues."

Can More Trump Enablers In The House Be Beaten In 2020? Oh Yes

An Associated Press story on Friday, Trump's Presidency has Changed Washington, Defied Convention, sounds kind of good-- but is kind of horrible. The ignoramus Putin left, like a stinking pile of manure, on the White House steps, has blundered his way through 2 years of chaos and dysfunction. Jonathan Lemire wrote that he "has rewritten the rules of the presidency and the norms of the nation’s capital, casting aside codes of conduct and traditions that have held for generations." Trump has written or rewritten anything. A Republican-controlled Congress enabled him to behave in a way that should have resulted in impeachment and removal after a month in office. Trump is a TV clown. The Republican Congress wanted a pawn to sign their tax cuts and nominate their unqualified neo-fascist judges and remove regulatory safeguards that keep Big Business from exploiting--and even killing-- the rest of us, for the sake of profits, from which politicians get a cut.

Yesterday Reuters reported that Trump's EPA has decided that limits on coal plant mercury emissions are too expensive and "unnecessary" anyway. That's what Republicans like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell wanted-- and were willing to trade for tolerating-- and enabling a farting, windup Destructo Robot in the Oval Office.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants were required to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems. The Environmental Protection Agency left the 2011 emission standards in place but proposed using a different cost analysis to evaluate whether the regulation is needed, a move that paves the way for looser rules going forward. Its statement was issued on Friday during a partial government shutdown.

Since August, the Environmental Protection Agency has been reconsidering the justification for the rule. A coalition of electric utilities had said the looser rules were not needed since they have already invested billions of dollars in technology to cut emissions of the pollutant and comply.

EPA said it was “proposing that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate HAP (Hazardous Air Pollution) emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants... because the costs of such regulation grossly outweigh the quantified HAP benefits.”

It said its reassessment showed the cost of compliance with MATS was between $7.4 billion to $9.6 billion annually, while the monetized benefits were between $4 million to $6 million.

It also said the identification of unquantified benefits was not enough to support the standards. Among such benefits, environmentalists say are reduced healthcare costs, breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water.

“The policy (Acting EPA Administrator) Andrew Wheeler and Donald Trump proposed today means more pregnant women, young children, and the elderly will be exposed to deadly neurotoxins and poisons, just so wealthy coal and oil barons can make a few extra bucks,” Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign Director Mary Anne Hitt said in a statement. Wheeler is a former coal industry lobbyist.

“Virtually every coal plant in the U.S. has already met this lifesaving standard, and now Trump is recklessly trying to roll it back,” she said.

A study published this month by Harvard University’s School of Public Health said coal-fired power plants are the top source of mercury in the United States, accounting for nearly half of mercury emissions in 2015. It said the standards have markedly reduced mercury in the environment and improved public health.

...In July, electric utilities and utility groups favoring the rule asked the administration to keep it in place. They noted that billions of dollars in investments for anti-pollution equipment have already been made, and costs are being recovered from electricity customers through regulated pricing.

“This is like when your four-year-old kid tries to clean up your kitchen-- it actually makes things worse. Please stop helping,” said a utility industry lobbyist based in Washington, who asked not to be named. “The rule itself forced coal plant shutdowns, but they aren’t coming back.”

As Lemire emphasized, "In Trump’s Washington, facts are less relevant. Insults and highly personal attacks are increasingly employed by members of both parties... Taking a wrecking ball to decorum and institutions, Trump has changed, in ways both subtle and profound, how Washington works and how it is viewed by the rest of the nation and world.

“He’s dynamited the institution of the presidency,” said Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian at Rice University. “He doesn’t see himself as being part of a long litany of presidents who will hand a baton to a successor. Instead, he uses the presidency as an extension of his own personality.”

Is this a one-president aberration? Or has the White House forever changed? Whether the trends will outlast Trump’s presidency is a question that won’t be answered until there is a new occupant in the Oval Office, but Brinkley predicts “no future president will model themselves on him.”

...Trump brought to the White House the same fact-challenged, convention-defying style that got him elected. From his first days in office, Trump pushed falsehoods about the size of the inaugural crowd and unfounded allegations about millions of illegal voters. He has not let up since.

The inaccuracies have been big and small: Trump repeatedly claimed in 2018 that he passed the biggest tax cut in history (he didn’t), that the U.S. economy is the best in history (it’s not) and that his Supreme Court choice Brett Kavanaugh finished atop his class at Yale Law School (the school doesn’t rank students). Just last week, after making an abrupt, unilateral decision to pull U.S. troops from Syria, Trump tweeted that Russia was “not happy” about the decision. Hours earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had cheered the move.

The cumulative effect has been to diminish the authority with which White House pronouncements are received.

...He has eschewed sweeping diplomacy in favor of transactional relationships. He has strained longtime alliances-- including with Canada, of all places-- and befriended global strongmen. He has skipped summits, including a gathering in Asia in November, that have long been fixtures on presidential itineraries. And world leaders have taken to heart that flattery, pageantry, golf and maybe some business at a Trump-owned hotel are the pathway to a good relationship with the president.

“He is a sui generis president,” said Brinkley, using the Latin for “unique.” ″Trump doesn’t know history and doesn’t model himself on any president ... but he’s all we can talk about.”

Voters sensed that in November and registered their displeasure with the biggest pounding a Republican president has received in generations. The GOP saw a net of 40 House seats flip-- and 2 red Senate seats, one each in Nevada and Arizona, are now blue. Are congressional Republicans going to continue enabling him? 2020 is coming. This is a list of Republicans still in the House who have voted most ardenty in lockstep with Trump-- between 98.9% and 100% of the time. Next to each of their names is the win percentage from November. I might add, that had they not been forced into retirement or defeated last month, Peter Sessions (R-TX), David Valadao (R-CA), Mike Bishop (R-MI), John Culberson (R-TX), Jeff Denham (R-CA), Ed Royce (R-CA), Karen Handel (R-GA), David Trott (R-MI), Mimi Walters (R-CA), Stephen Knight (R-CA) and David Young (R-IA) would all be on the list of congressmen whose voting records are most closely tied to Trump.

• Troy Balderson (R-OH)- 51.4%
• Steve Scalise (R-LA)- 71.5%
• Michael McCaul (R-TX)- 51.1%
• Susan Brooks (R-IN)- 56.8%
• Ken Calvert (R-CA)- 56.5%
• Tim Walberg (R-MI)- 53.8%
• Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)- 59.1%
• Greg Walden (R-OR)- 56.3%
• John Moolenaar (R-MI)- 62.6%
• Glenn Thompson (R-PA)- 67.8%
• Austin Scott (R-GA)- unoppoded
• Steve Womack (R-AR)- 64.8%
• Michael Conaway (R-TX)- 80.1%
• Frank Lucas (R-OK)- 73.9%
• Kevin Brady (R-TX)- 73.4%
• Brett Guthrie (R-KY)- 66.7%
• Mike Bost (R-IL)- 51.6%
• Bill Flores (R-TX)- 56.8%
• Bill Johnson (R-OH)- 69.3%
• Neal Dunn (R-FL)- 67.4%
• Mark Amodei (R-NV)- 58.2%
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- 63.7%
• Chris Collins (R-NY)- 49.1%
• Patrick McHenry (R-NC)- 59.3%
• Tom Cole (R-OK)- 63.1%
• John Shimkus (R-IL)- 70.9%
• Devin Nunes (R-CA)- 52.7%
• Steve Stivers (R-OH)- 58.3%
• Michael Simpson (R-ID)- 60.7%
• John Rutherford (R-FL)- 65.2%
• Harold Rogers (R-KY)- 78.9%
• Don Bacon (R-NE)- 51.0%
• Rob Woodall (R-GA)- 50.1%
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)- 54.8%

The Republicans in the list above whose names are in bold, are some of the obvious targets for 2020. Kara Eastman is running for the Omaha congressional seat again-- and against one of them-- Don Bacon-- and she's the first candidate Blue America endorsed for the 2020 cycle. Today she told us that "Congressman Bacon’s voting record has remained lock-step with Trump and Paul Ryan. Considering the make-up of NE-02 being split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with a quarter being registered Independents, he is out of step and out of touch with the district. Bacon does not represent working class Nebraskans, but rather monied interests and corporations who have reaped the benefits of his votes that have actually harmed the rest of us." Please consider giving her an end of the year contribution by tapping on the Blue America thermometer on the right. We hope to have it filled up more progressive like her soon. For now... it's just Kara.

We're hoping Mike Siegel will be one of the next couple of candidates we endorse. I'm betting he's just days or weeks away from announcing his 2020 candidacy. Remember, McCaul (TX-10) was considered "safe" until 2018, when Mike's strong and compelling grassroots campaign narrowed an R+19 congressional seat to an R+4. McCaul's voting record has him at a "99% Trump Score" and makes him increasingly vulnerable in a diverse, well-informed and educated district.

"McCaul hitched himself to the Trump wagon all the way," Siegel told us this morning. "He chaired Homeland Security and did nothing to stop family separation and inhumane 'icebox' detention centers. Now he backs the government shutdown, denying paychecks to federal workers during Christmas holidays, even though in 2016 he said a Border Wall will not improve border security. As much as anyone, McCaul sold his soul to stay relevant in a Trump America. As Trump falls, so will McCaul and many like him."

Lobbyists Have Convinced Trump To Allow Industry To Poison Our Water-- Just Like In The Bad Old Days

Yesterday and today, 13 more members of Congress signed onto the #GreenNewDeal proposal, bringing the total in the House to 35. The latest backers:

• Barbara Lee (D-CA)
• Judy Chu (D-CA)
• Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC)
• Mike Quigley (D-IL)
• Jim McGovern (D-MA)
• Joe Kennedy III (D-MA)
• Chris Pappas (D-NH)
• Ann Kuster (D-NH)
• David Cicilline (D-RI)
• Steve Cohen (D-TN)
• Peter Welch (D-VT)
• Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)
• Mark Pocan (D-WI)

Pocan and Jayapal are the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and there are hopes that the proposal-- which includes just about every progressive priority anyone is talking about-- will lead to even greater support in that caucus. But, while progressives were celebrating their progress on the GreenNewDeal, Republicans and K Street lobbyists were popping champaign corks all over DC. Trump kept another promise: to poison our water. Annie Snider had the story at Politico, "Trump Proposes To Roll Back Decades Of Water Protections." The massive rollback of Clean Water Act protections would "remove federal pollution safeguards for tens of thousands of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands."

The EPA’s proposed rule would overwrite a stricter Obama-era regulation, in yet another attack on the legacy of President Donald Trump’s predecessor. But the rollback would go much further than just erasing Barack Obama's work.

The Trump proposal represents the latest front in a decades-long battle over the scope of the landmark environmental law, whose requirements can impose major costs on energy companies, farmers, ranchers and real estate developers. Reversing Obama’s water regulation was one of Trump’s top environmental priorities-- he signed an executive order directing the new rule barely a month after taking office, even as he repeatedly said he wanted "crystal clear water."

Geoff Gisler, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called the proposal a “sledgehammer to the Clean Water Act.”

“Out of all the anti-environmental attacks we have seen from this administration, this may be the most far-reaching and destructive,” he said in a statement.

The new proposal embraces a view that industry groups have pushed for years: that the law should cover only major rivers, their primary tributaries and wetlands along their banks. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said this will save regulatory costs for industries such as mining and homebuilding, while arguing it will have little impact on the health of the country’s waters.

At a ceremony unveiling the proposal, Wheeler criticized the Obama administration for contending that its version of the rule was about water quality. “It was really about power-- power in the hands of the federal government over farmers, developers and landowners," he said.

...A cavalcade of Republican lawmakers also attended the ceremony at EPA headquarters to praise the rule. Among them were Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)-- who noted that her state's wetlands are larger than all of Texas-- as well as Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) and House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT).

The scale of the proposal‘s changes could be felt acutely across the country.

In the arid West, where the majority of streams flow only after rainfall or for part of the year, entire watersheds would be left unprotected from pollution. In Arizona, for instance, as much as 94 percent of its waters could lose federal protection under the new definition, depending on the how the agencies interpret key terms. Meanwhile, Arizona state law also prevents it from regulating waterways more stringently than the federal government requires.

...But environmentalists say a narrower federal regulation will create a race to the bottom and leave downstream states to bear the brunt of the harm.

Thirty-six states have laws on the books like Arizona’s, which prevent them from implementing stricter regulations than the federal government’s, according to a 2013 report by the Environmental Law Institute, meaning any waterways denied federal protection under the Trump administration proposal would be exempt from state regulation as well, unless state legislatures amend their laws.

State lawmakers have been trending in the opposite direction, though. In Wisconsin, one of a handful of states with more stringent wetland protections than the federal government’s, Gov. Scott Walker signed a law this spring dramatically reining in the additional protections.

Today, most of the country’s waterways are overburdened by pollution from farm fields, city streets and industrial facilities. More than two-thirds of the country’s lakes and ponds and more than half of the country’s rivers and streams are impaired, according to EPA’s latest figures. That includes roughly 1 in 4 of the rivers that serve as drinking water sources.

The new proposal to retract protections faces months of public comment and interagency review before it can be finalized, at which point it would likely face numerous lawsuits.

Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) is about to take over as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. I can't imagine he's going to allow the Trumpist Regime and its corporate allies to get away with this outrage without doing everything in his power to stop it. This morning he told me that "Clean water is a basic necessity for us all. It’s not just a treat you get to enjoy if you know the right people. Unfortunately the Trump administration thinks everything is for sale, including public health and environmental quality. And the only way to prevent the selloff is to get active and stop them. The alternative might be drinking oil-tainted water."