Kiley Kroh

News Investigation

As the Obama administration’s decision regarding whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline draws nearer, the latest disaster is raising serious concerns about the safety of Canada’s rapidly expanding pipeline network.A massive toxic waste spill from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta is being called one of the largest recent environmental disasters in North America. First reported on June 1, the Texas-based Apache Corp. didn’t reveal the size of the spill until June 12, which is said to cover more than 1,000 acres.Members of the Dene Tha First Nation tribe are outraged that it took several days before they were informed that 9.5 million liters of salt and heavy-metal-laced wastewater had leaked onto wetlands they use for hunting and trapping.“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha.As the Globe and Mail reports, the Apache disaster is not an anomaly:

Buzz Off, Monsanto
Paul Towers
News Analysis

Last week, the term “bee-washing” emerged in public conversation. It doesn’t refer to some new bee cleaning service, but to the insidious efforts of Monsanto and other pesticide corporations to discredit science about the impacts of pesticides on bees—especially neonicotinoids—by creating public relations tours, new research centers and new marketing strategies.This week, pesticide makers are showcasing these tactics during National Pollinator Week with offers of free seed packets to people who take their poorly named “pollinator pledge.” The “bee-washing” term has gained traction as scientists and groups like Pesticide Action Network (PAN) continue to cut through the misinformation and point to the emerging body of science that point to pesticides as a critical factor in bee declines.Monsanto hosted their first so-called Honey Bee Health Summit last week, a gathering at the company’s headquarters in Missouri. Without question, some truly smart, dedicated scientists attended Monsanto’s bee summit and are participating in these efforts.And a similarly committed group of beekeepers who care about bees, beekeeping and our food system have also participated. What’s increasingly clear, though, is that the credibility of these individuals is being used to shield the agenda of a handful of pesticide corporations and their bee-harming insecticide products. The corporate public relation gymnastics on display are truly impressive.Unfortunately, Monsanto is not alone in its efforts.  Just this spring, Bayer sponsored a tour of its “specially-wrapped beehicle” and hosted a talk at Ohio State University in March, over loud objections from local beekeepers. Industry has largely set its sights on one issue to blame for bee declines. While lack of sufficient forage and diseases are a challenge to bee health and beekeeping, challenges exacerbated by the weakening effect of pesticides on bees, the pesticide industry has focused a large proportion of its attention on the varroa mite. And it’s an easy distraction that places the burden of unprecedented bee losses on beekeepers—while subverting any blame for the widespread pesticide products.

Nick Turse
Op-Ed

The Gulf of Guinea. He said it without a hint of irony or embarrassment. This was one of U.S. Africa Command’s big success stories. The Gulf... of Guinea.   Never mind that most Americans couldn’t find it on a map and haven’t heard of the nations on its shores like Gabon, Benin, and Togo. Never mind that just five days before I talked with AFRICOM’s chief spokesman, the Economist had asked if the Gulf of Guinea was on the verge of becoming “another Somalia,” because piracy there had jumped 41% from 2011 to 2012 and was on track to be even worse in 2013. The Gulf of Guinea was one of the primary areas in Africa where “stability,” the command spokesman assured me, had “improved significantly,” and the U.S. military had played a major role in bringing it about. But what did that say about so many other areas of the continent that, since AFRICOM was set up, had been wracked by coups, insurgencies, violence, and volatility? A careful examination of the security situation in Africa suggests that it is in the process of becoming Ground Zero for a veritable terror diaspora set in motion in the wake of 9/11 that has only accelerated in the Obama years.  Recent history indicates that as U.S. “stability” operations in Africa have increased, militancy has spread, insurgent groups have proliferated, allies have faltered or committed abuses, terrorism has increased, the number of failed states has risen, and the continent has become more unsettled.   The signal event in this tsunami of blowback was the U.S. participation in a war to fell Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi that helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, prompting the intervention of the French military with U.S. ...

Repeal the Patriot Act
Jim Hightower
Op-Ed

It's back. The Patriot Act — that grotesque, ever-mutating, hydra-headed monstrosity from the Bush-Cheney Little Shop of Horrors — has risen again, this time with an added twist of Orwellian intrusiveness from the Obamacans.Since 2006, Team Bush, and then Team Obama, have allowed the little-known, hugely powerful National Security Agency to run a daily dragnet through your and my phone calls — all on the hush-hush, of course, not informing us spyees. Now exposed, leaders of both parties are piously pointing to the Patriot Act, saying that it legalized this wholesale, everyday invasion of our privacy, so we shouldn't be surprised, much less upset by NSA's surreptitious peek-a-boo program.When the story broke, Obama quickly began dissembling, calling these massive and routine violations of the Fourth Amendment "modest encroachments on privacy" that are "worth us doing" to make us more secure. He added disingenuously that Congress is regularly briefed about the program. In fact, however, only a handful of members are briefed, and even they have been lied to by Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who flatly denied in Senate testimony in March that NSA was gathering information on hundreds of millions of our citizens' phone calls. Yet, Sen. Diane Feinstein, chairwoman of the intelligence committee, loyally defends spying on Americans, claiming it protects us from terrorists. But she then admitted she really doesn't know how the mountains of data are being used.This is nothing but the "Great Bottomless Trust-Us Swamp," created by the panicky passage and irresponsible reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Secretly seizing everyone's phone records is, as the ACLU put it, "beyond Orwellian." A New York Times editorial rightly says, "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue." But no administration can be trusted to restrain itself from abusing the unlimited power of the Patriot Act.It's not enough to fight NSA's outrageously invasive spying on us — the Patriot Act itself is a shameful betrayal of America's ideals, and it must be repealed.When whistleblower Eric Snowden literally blew the lid off NSA's seven-year, super-snooper program of rummaging electronically through about a ...

Ashley Curtin
News Report

Despite the increasing hunger strike, widening protests and a plea from President Obama, Guantanamo Bay will remain open. After a vote in the House of Representatives denied a bill to close the prison, the House instead added a restriction to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 making it all that much harder to transfer prisoners.   More than 56 prisoners, who were cleared by U.S. military and intelligence officials to be transferred to Yemen, and about 30 others waiting to be released from the U.S. prison located in Cuba, will instead remain prisoners at Guantanamo Bay with the rest of the 166 inmates after an amendment, which blocks the use of federal funds for inmate transfers, passed, 236 to 188, on Friday, according to The Huffington Post. Rep. Jackie Walorski, R, Ind., who sponsored the amendment to the 2014 NDAA said that “the Defense Department should not transfer detainees to Yemen because they represent some of the most dangerous terrorists known in the world,” according to The Huffington Post. But contrary to Walorski’s and many republican’s beliefs, democrats said that not all the prisoners who were taken into custody turned out to be dangerous. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. said that holding these prisoners in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely because of some belief that they might be of “some risk” is against the U.S. Constitution. Smith added that the prison offers no benefit and, when originally set up, the government believed it could hold these prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due process of law, but the Supreme Court ruled against that possibility saying it was against the Constitution. Not only does Guantanamo Bay suppress American values, democrats also argued that continuing to operate the prison is expensive and there is absolutely no need for it. But the House’s vote was contrary to President Obama’s plea for the NDAA “to ease restrictions on transferring prisoners” and democrats’ argument against Guantanamo Bay. Instead, republicans said in order to protect the country, the transfer of “terrorists” into the U.S must be blockaded. While President Obama and his administration are trying to close Guantanamo Bay, which was a goal he set during his 2008 presidential campaign, things just got even harder for the President.

VOICES FOR CHANGE

Repeal the Patriot Act
Jim Hightower
"

It's back. The Patriot Act — that grotesque, ever-mutating, hydra-headed monstrosity from the Bush-Cheney Little Shop of Horrors — has risen again, this time with an added twist of Orwellian intrusiveness from the Obamacans.

" ::
Another Way We Overpay for Health Care
Froma Harrop
"

Little victories in curbing health care costs can add up. In truth, they seem little only next to the titanic $2.6 trillion Americans spend a year on health care. So let us salute them.Case in point, the ...

" ::
S&P Debt Ratings: The Search for Meaning
Dean Baker
"

S&P announced last week that it was upgrading its assessment of U.S. debt, shifting its outlook to neutral from negative, suggesting that it may restore its highest Aaa rating in the not-too-distant future. While we may all want to celebrate S&P’s vote of confidence in the financial health of the U.S. government, this might be a good time to again ask what S&P was ...

" ::
The Making of a Global Security State
Tom Engelhardt
"

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a ...

" ::
Elizabeth Warren’s QE for Students: Populist Demagoguery or Economic Breakthrough?
Ellen Brown
"

On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on ...

" ::
Permanent Washington’s Backlash to Edward Snowden
David Sirota
"

Whether in celebrity culture or in our Facebook-mediated interactions, we live in the age of the human being as a public brand. So there's nothing surprising about the reaction to this week's disclosures about the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program. In our cult-of-personality society, that reaction has ...

" ::
On Civil Liberties, Comparing Obama With Bush is Easy, and Mostly Wrong
Joe Conason
"

 Nearly a dozen years after the passage of the Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, informed debate over the balance between liberty and security is long overdue. That includes a public examination of how widely and deeply the National Security Agency (and other elements of the ...

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High Heels and Workers’ Rights
Froma Harrop
"

 One of the strangest artifacts of American culture is the spiked heel as a symbol of female power. Many waitresses at America's casinos feel otherwise.From Las Vegas ...

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The Two Centers of Unaccountable Power in America, and Their Consequences
Robert Reich
"

 There are two great centers of unaccountable power in the American political-economic system today — places where decisions that significantly affect large numbers of Americans are made in secret, and are unchecked either by effective ...

" ::
The Trade Deal Scam
Dean Baker
"

As part of its overall economic strategy the Obama administration is rushing full speed ahead with two major trade deals. On the one hand it has the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes Japan and Australia and several other countries in East Asia and Latin America. On the other side there is an effort to craft a U.S.-EU trade agreement.

" ::

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FROM AROUND THE WEB

Obama Administration

On Wednesday, the President pledged to reduce the amount of nuclear weapons by one-third in both Russia and the U.S.

IRS

According to a GOP Senator, nearly $70 million will go toward employee bonuses despite President Obama’s directive to cancel such payments.

NASA

“The new batch of astronauts represents the highest percentage of female candidates ever selected by NASA.”

National Security Agency

The controversial surveillance programs are now under investigation in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks.

Dark-Money Groups

Last week, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow US banks to get out of new financial regulations by operating through their overseas arms.

Abortion Issues

House Republicans on Tuesday make their most concerted effort of the year to change federal abortion law with legislation that would ban almost all abortions after a fetus reaches the age of 20 weeks.

IRS

An Internal Revenue Service supervisor in Washington says she was personally involved in scrutinizing some of the earliest applications from tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Gay Marriage

A new study from the Pew Research Center found coverage in support of gay marriage outweighed negative coverage.

Voter ID Laws

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down an Arizona state law that requires people registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of citizenship.

Father’s Day

A recent poll found more than 8 in 10 men said they have always wanted to be fathers or think they’d like to be one someday.

Spy Leak

The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012.

Workers’ Rights

Today, women today still earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Health

The common chemical, Bisphenol-A, which is used in food packaging and has been for years, might be linked to potential health risks.

National Security Agency

Facebook and Microsoft have struck agreements with the U.S. government to release limited information about the number of surveillance requests they receive.

Gay Rights

Grace University in Omaha, Nebraska questioned the woman’s relationship and then expelled her from school leaving her with a bill of $6,000.

FROM THE BLOGS

The National Security Agency Part I - Shifting Historical Context Context One: It is 1971 and the...
Blog Two: Deadly Arguments--The Role of Guns There are few issues in U.S. society that are as...
So far, the biggest revelation of the NSA spying story is…that anyone actually thinks this story is...
Concluding Remarks This blog has introduced the major tool that underlies all of the arguments we...
The records of our phone calls being entered into computers at the NSA is a typical Patriot Act...
Last month, I argued why "America Must Intervene In Syria, Despite Lack of National Security...
In the wake of the Skagit River bridge collapse, which thankfully did not result in any deaths,...
Blog One: TAF--The Toulmin Argumentation Framework In 1958, the distinguished historian and...
At a recent DNC fundraiser 56- year old LGBTQ advocate Ellen Sturt heckled Michelle Obama  to ask...
Neal Boortz Part I - Some Background Information My wife and I have family in Barcelona, Spain,...
We information renegades have been fighting for free information and an open net free of censorship...
Breaking the Tyranny of “Either/Or Thinking” While I certainly do not believe that all...
What our presidents tell our young people In this season of college graduations, let us pause to...
A Native American boy asked his grandfather, “What do you think about the world today?...
As a linguist studying politics, I usually refrain from sharing any of my politic views in my...