Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Whistleblower Retaliation Alive and Well at Hanford
It's getting real out at Hanford in eastern
Washington, the site of the most expensive (and likely dangerous)
environmental clean-up in the world.
By: Joshua Frank
By: Joshua Frank
SPOKANE, Washington (TIF)
- On July 21, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, along
with watchdog group Hanford Challenge and UA Local Union 598 Plumbers
and Steamfitters, filed an emergency legal motion asking US Judge Thomas
Rice to intervene and force the US Department of Energy and federal
contractor Washington River Protection Solutions to protect their
workers from toxic vapor exposure at the site.
"[It's] as serious as it gets," Ferguson told King 5 News. "At Hanford there's a culture of indifference by the federal government and their contractors. Frankly, we're not going to put up with it anymore.... So right now we're trying to get before the judge immediately asking for immediate steps required from the federal government to protect workers. That's the bottom line."
Allegedly, that "culture of indifference" is what got Sandra Black, an employee concerns program manager (ECP), fired in January 2015. Black, who worked for DOE contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was in charge of hearing out grievances raised by workers who have safety concerns, such as those working at Hanford. Black claims that she was terminated after speaking to investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
"I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do," Black said at a news conference, where she, along with three US senators presented the GAO report. "My disclosures included describing numerous incidents in which an SRNS corporate lawyer interfered with an ECP investigation, directed an ECP investigator to change findings or substantiated retaliation to not substantiated."
SRNS strongly denies firing Black for her cooperation with the GAO. Nonetheless, the GAO report, which was released in July, was damning in what it revealed.
The report claimed that the DOE had "taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment — in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable."
In other words, the buck stops with nobody.
"Our problems are with the way the Energy Department allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is," Diane LoFaro, who worked on the GAO report, told the Center for Public Integrity. "Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors' cultures."
So what happens when over 100 workers are exposed to toxic vapors while working to remediate Hanford's 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste? According to Dave Lee, an instrument technician at Hanford, when issues are raised that may help prevent such exposures, the DOE and their contractors fight back.
Lee recently told King 5 News that he was assigned to cleaning tasks after raising safety concerns. "Retaliation and harassment is very, very real at Hanford and that's a fact…. I'm cleaning closets and I'm replacing filters and if that's not degrading and retaliatory, explain to me what is."
Lee, who works in Hanford's 222-S Lab, analyzes chemical vapors that are in underground storage tanks. At one point Lee noticed oil leaking from one of the lab's testing instruments, which he got on his hand. Shortly after the incident Lee claims he broke out in a rash on his arms, neck and face. After a little digging through an employee manual Lee learned more about what he was dealing with — the oil was likely contaminated and ought to be treated as toxic waste.
"I can't sleep at night. After my exposure I had a metallic taste in my mouth and I had a super bad headache … and I forget things a lot," Lee told King 5 News. Soon after his exposure to the oil, he issued a "stop work" action, which Hanford employees are technically allowed to do if they feel they are working in an unsafe environment. Lee demanded the lab be shut down so the oil could be tested. One day later Lee was sent home by his superiors after being placed on "investigative removal" for "extremely serious misconduct."
"Why would we deliberately use taxpayer money to endanger public safety and discourage whistleblowers from coming forward to report security or safety violations or fraudulent activity?" Sen. Edward Markey asked during the GAO press conference. "This make no sense."
To answer Markey's question, could it be that the DOE simply can't get the job done because they lack the staff to do so? That's what Dr. Donald Alexander, who is a high-level DOE physical chemist working at Hanford, told me a few years back.
"One of the main problems at Hanford is that DOE is understaffed and overtasked," Alexander explained. "As such, we cannot conduct in-depth reviews of each of the individual systems in the facilities. Therefore there is a high likelihood that several systems will be found to be inoperable or not perform to expectations."
Looks like certain things haven't changed much at Hanford. Taxpayers will continue to be stuck with the projected $100 billion clean-up tab while employees endure dangerous working conditions with little to no recourse when shit hits the fan.
As for the emergency stop motion filed by Washington state AG and others, Judge Rice has set the preliminary injunction hearing to be held on October 12 in Spokane, Washington. No doubt Hanford workers are eager for the outcome.
"[It's] as serious as it gets," Ferguson told King 5 News. "At Hanford there's a culture of indifference by the federal government and their contractors. Frankly, we're not going to put up with it anymore.... So right now we're trying to get before the judge immediately asking for immediate steps required from the federal government to protect workers. That's the bottom line."
Allegedly, that "culture of indifference" is what got Sandra Black, an employee concerns program manager (ECP), fired in January 2015. Black, who worked for DOE contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), was in charge of hearing out grievances raised by workers who have safety concerns, such as those working at Hanford. Black claims that she was terminated after speaking to investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
"I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do," Black said at a news conference, where she, along with three US senators presented the GAO report. "My disclosures included describing numerous incidents in which an SRNS corporate lawyer interfered with an ECP investigation, directed an ECP investigator to change findings or substantiated retaliation to not substantiated."
SRNS strongly denies firing Black for her cooperation with the GAO. Nonetheless, the GAO report, which was released in July, was damning in what it revealed.
The report claimed that the DOE had "taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment — in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable."
In other words, the buck stops with nobody.
"Our problems are with the way the Energy Department allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is," Diane LoFaro, who worked on the GAO report, told the Center for Public Integrity. "Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors' cultures."
So what happens when over 100 workers are exposed to toxic vapors while working to remediate Hanford's 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste? According to Dave Lee, an instrument technician at Hanford, when issues are raised that may help prevent such exposures, the DOE and their contractors fight back.
Lee recently told King 5 News that he was assigned to cleaning tasks after raising safety concerns. "Retaliation and harassment is very, very real at Hanford and that's a fact…. I'm cleaning closets and I'm replacing filters and if that's not degrading and retaliatory, explain to me what is."
Lee, who works in Hanford's 222-S Lab, analyzes chemical vapors that are in underground storage tanks. At one point Lee noticed oil leaking from one of the lab's testing instruments, which he got on his hand. Shortly after the incident Lee claims he broke out in a rash on his arms, neck and face. After a little digging through an employee manual Lee learned more about what he was dealing with — the oil was likely contaminated and ought to be treated as toxic waste.
"I can't sleep at night. After my exposure I had a metallic taste in my mouth and I had a super bad headache … and I forget things a lot," Lee told King 5 News. Soon after his exposure to the oil, he issued a "stop work" action, which Hanford employees are technically allowed to do if they feel they are working in an unsafe environment. Lee demanded the lab be shut down so the oil could be tested. One day later Lee was sent home by his superiors after being placed on "investigative removal" for "extremely serious misconduct."
"Why would we deliberately use taxpayer money to endanger public safety and discourage whistleblowers from coming forward to report security or safety violations or fraudulent activity?" Sen. Edward Markey asked during the GAO press conference. "This make no sense."
To answer Markey's question, could it be that the DOE simply can't get the job done because they lack the staff to do so? That's what Dr. Donald Alexander, who is a high-level DOE physical chemist working at Hanford, told me a few years back.
"One of the main problems at Hanford is that DOE is understaffed and overtasked," Alexander explained. "As such, we cannot conduct in-depth reviews of each of the individual systems in the facilities. Therefore there is a high likelihood that several systems will be found to be inoperable or not perform to expectations."
Looks like certain things haven't changed much at Hanford. Taxpayers will continue to be stuck with the projected $100 billion clean-up tab while employees endure dangerous working conditions with little to no recourse when shit hits the fan.
As for the emergency stop motion filed by Washington state AG and others, Judge Rice has set the preliminary injunction hearing to be held on October 12 in Spokane, Washington. No doubt Hanford workers are eager for the outcome.
Gimme a Break! IRS Tax Loophole Can Reward Excessive Water Use in Drought-stricken West
Experts fear tax deductions for water use as a
“depleted asset” could actually worsen the crisis as rivers and
reservoirs dry up.
By: Abrahm Lustgarten
By: Abrahm Lustgarten
This is part of an ongoing investigation Killing the Colorado
LEVELLAND, Texas (Propublica) - ProPublica’s reporting on the water crisis in the American West has highlighted any number of confounding contradictions worsening the problem: Farmers are encouraged to waste water so as to protect their legal rights to its dwindling supply in the years ahead; Las Vegas sought to impose restrictions on water use while placing no checks on its explosive population growth; the federal government has encouraged farmers to improve efficiency in watering crops, but continues to subsidize the growing of thirsty crops such as cotton in desert states like Arizona.
Today, we offer another installment in the contradictions amid a crisis.
In parts of the western U.S., wracked by historic drought, you can get a tax break for using an abundance of water.
That’s a typo, right? A joke?
Ah, no. But we understand your bafflement. The Colorado River has been trickling, its largest reservoirs less than half full. As recently as 2014 parts of Texas literally almost dried up. The National Academy of Sciences predicts the Southwest may be on the cusp of its worst dry spell in 1,000 years. Scientists are warning that the backup plan — groundwater aquifers from California to Nebraska — are all being sucked dry.
But, yes, the tax break exists — in parts of eight High Plains states.
Here’s how it works: Farmers — or anyone who uses water in a business — can ask the Internal Revenue Service for a tax write-off for what’s called a “depleted asset.” In certain places, water counts as an asset, just like oil, or minerals like copper. The more water gets used, the more cash credit farmers can claim against their income tax. And that’s just what almost 3,000 Texas landowners in just one water district appear to have done last year — a year in which nearly half of Texas was in a state of “severe” or “extreme” drought.”
Yikes. How much can they write off?
A bunch it seems, especially if you’re a big farm and own a lot of land. We talked to an accountant in Levelland, Texas. He had a client who wrote off $10,000. “Whenever you buy land, you’re getting the dirt … and of course you are getting the water,” said Sham Myatt, the accountant. And the idea is that that water is part of what you paid for in the land deal. If the aquifer was 50 feet deep at the time of the land sale, and it drops 10 feet in a dry year, then the farmer can deduct one-fifth of the value, and so on, until all the water is gone.
That’s not going to do much to conserve water, is it?
No. It’s not. In fact it’s an incentive to do the exact opposite. A farmer who tries to use less water because of the drought, say, by switching to really efficient irrigation techniques, could actually make less money. His water might last longer, but producing his crop would get a lot more expensive.
We called Nicholas Brozovic, an associate professor of agricultural economics and director of policy at the University of Nebraska’s Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute. He’d actually never heard of the water deduction; it’s that obscure. But he laid out some textbook economics: If you’re overusing your water, then you are depreciating it, he said. And if the government pays for that, they are subsidizing that depreciation. “The more you deplete your groundwater, the higher your tax exemption and that must create an incentive not to conserve,” he said.
Hasn’t the federal government spent billions subsidizing conservation and the protection of the West’s groundwater, in part by building dams and encouraging people to use the water in rivers instead? Why would they forfeit federal tax dollars to do the opposite?
We called the IRS, and they initially shared our doubts. Not because they cared much about groundwater (it’s a tax agency!) but because they said they were pretty sure no such deduction was legal. They pointed us to section 613 of the tax code, and it couldn’t be more explicit: For the purposes of deducting the depreciating value of minerals, the definition “does not include soil, sod, dirt, turf, water, or mosses.” Ok, who would ever have thought of deducting mosses or sod? But anyway. That left us really confused.
Right, there were, after all, those farmers in Texas who seemed to have benefited from what the IRS said was not possible.
We encouraged the IRS to check again. They did. And then they found the provision they thought didn’t exist — right there in the text for Revenue Rule 65–296. An IRS spokesperson laid out for us the specifics: “Taxpayers are entitled to a cost depletion deduction for the exhaustion of their capital investment in the ground water extracted and disposed of by them in their business of irrigation farming specifically from the Ogallala Formation.”
Seems like some follow-up questions were in order.
For sure. We asked for clarification. The IRS said it would try to explain. Most importantly, they wanted to say it wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounded. The deduction is only available for one small part of the country — an area that includes parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado. And it should only apply if people are using water from a source that is running dry anyway.
But wait, what? You get a break when you use resources that are already in danger of vanishing?
Yes, that’s why it is what’s called a depleted asset. It’s of less and less value with every day. Your car is worth less the moment you drive it off the lot. Or, more similarly, oil companies track the falling value of their reserves the more they pump out from underground. In fact, energy companies have been taking oil depletion breaks for decades. Texas landowners would say their property is getting less valuable the less water there is to use on it.
Okay, okay, but water isn’t oil. It’s not a commodity. Access to it is a basic right. Yes? Please say that’s right.
Wrong. Ouch. I know, it hurts. But ProPublica last year wrote about all the ways water is coveted and controlled — and then often wasted — by just a few powerful groups. In most of the West, only some people and businesses have rights to it, depending on who showed up to claim it first. One big trend is that water is increasingly being bought and sold — including by hedge funds and big Wall Street investors, and the less water there is, the more the price is going up.
That’s a little scary. Let’s get back to depleted assets. So when did this tax break start?
About 50 years ago. A farmer in the Texas panhandle — along with his local water district — successfully sued the IRS, arguing that the roughly 200 million gallons he drew from his groundwater each year was no different than the depletion of the state’s other great natural resource, oil. He won, and the IRS was obliged to create rule 65–296 — the special allowance for tax credits that the IRS almost forgot about.
Again, it was supposed to be limited — just to a slice of Texas and eastern New Mexico. The court even went so far as to warn that the case shouldn’t become a precedent for groundwater tax claims elsewhere, saying the conditions in that area of the country were unique. But it didn’t take long for the rule to be expanded, albeit just a little bit. By the mid 1980’s any landowner overlying the sprawling Ogallala aquifer — a giant underground vault of precious but dwindling water — was eligible to file for the deductions, not just in North Texas and New Mexico.
That still doesn’t sound like much of a big deal … why does it matter?
Well, the Ogallala, which spans from central Texas north to Nebraska and South Dakota is the nation’s largest groundwater reserve and is one of the most important, and (famously) threatened water supplies in the country. Its heavy overuse and plummeting water levels rang alarms among policymakers more than half a century ago. So this is no insignificant place to be even indirectly encouraging overuse. Texas’ High Plains are one of the most intensely irrigated and productive farming regions in the country. Hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton and corn, among other staple commodities, are grown there using this Ogallala water.
So, do we know what’s happening to the Ogallala where all this farming is taking place?
We looked at recent water level changes in just one district — the one with thousands of tax credit claims — and found a disturbing trend. Underground water levels in the 16 counties of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District have dropped nearly 10 feet over the last 10 years. Some parts of Castro County saw water levels drop more than five feet over the course of 2015 alone. The federal government estimates nearly 100 cubic miles of water have been withdrawn from the Ogallala in that part of Texas. That doesn’t automatically mean the tax credits are responsible — water levels are dropping in most places thanks to overuse and it would take a lot more research to link up the cause and effect. But it certainly isn’t a portrait of sustainability.
Aquifers are at risk across Arizona, California and other states as well, right? At least people can’t claim tax breaks there?
Not yet. But that could change, as water supplies worsen and word of the tax break circulates more widely. Almost no one we spoke with had heard of it — not water lawyers in Arizona or groundwater conservation scientists in California. Armed with the knowledge, there’s a pretty good chance farmers and businesses across the West could seek tax relief.
Because there is precedent?
Exactly.
What does the IRS say to that?
They say it’s very unlikely, mostly because they think the conditions in the Ogallala are rare, and that the agency’s policy is to reject water allowance claims anywhere outside of the places covered in the original lawsuit. But if more landowners, in more places, were to file suits challenging the IRS to allow them to deduct for their water, or if they were to petition the IRS directly, the agency says it would undertake a review to consider it on a case by case basis. Landowners would have to present extensive scientific evidence that showed their situation was more or less the same as in North Texas.
Is the IRS equipped to make such judgments?
Fair question. John Leshy, professor emeritus at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and a former solicitor for the U.S. Department of Interior, isn’t persuaded. “The IRS has really created a can of worms for itself,” he said. “It doesn’t have any hydrological expertise.”
Hmmm. Not ideal. But what’s the bottom line? Are these tax breaks going to make any real difference in how quickly we use up the water supply?
It’s hard to tell, partly because no one appears to have examined that question. We asked the IRS for data on the number of claims and it hasn’t responded. Folks in Texas dismiss the suggestion that the tax benefits are incentivizing water use as ludicrous. Myatt, the accountant, points out that only about one-third of the deducted value translates to cash in hand, and says for many smaller farmers that amounts to just a few hundred dollars. Jason Coleman, manager of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, says his members are as concerned about conserving their water for the future as anyone. “Its already a declining resource,” he said. “I just can’t imagine someone saying I’m going to depreciate our resource any more because of a tax claim.”
But the academic consensus is that incentives encourage use, even overuse. And if the effect of depletion allowances on oil production are any guide — Leshy says they have spurred overproduction and led to artificially cheap, subsidized fuel prices — any significant expansion of the groundwater tax credit to other states could have lasting impacts on the way groundwater is used across the country.
So is anyone trying to do anything about this?
Not really, which is why people like Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, which has long been involved in rooting out tax policy disincentives to conservation, are fuming. “It’s a pretty major outrage that we would so stupidly reward the over extraction and non-sustainable use of groundwater,” he told me. Blackwelder helped push to purge the tax code of perverse anti-conservation incentives like this one way back in the Reagan administration, with the 1986 Tax Reform Act. They were largely successful, weeding out several other odd loopholes. But the groundwater depletion allowance persisted. And since then, apparently, it’s been forgotten about by all but the farmers who rely on it.
LEVELLAND, Texas (Propublica) - ProPublica’s reporting on the water crisis in the American West has highlighted any number of confounding contradictions worsening the problem: Farmers are encouraged to waste water so as to protect their legal rights to its dwindling supply in the years ahead; Las Vegas sought to impose restrictions on water use while placing no checks on its explosive population growth; the federal government has encouraged farmers to improve efficiency in watering crops, but continues to subsidize the growing of thirsty crops such as cotton in desert states like Arizona.
Today, we offer another installment in the contradictions amid a crisis.
In parts of the western U.S., wracked by historic drought, you can get a tax break for using an abundance of water.
That’s a typo, right? A joke?
Ah, no. But we understand your bafflement. The Colorado River has been trickling, its largest reservoirs less than half full. As recently as 2014 parts of Texas literally almost dried up. The National Academy of Sciences predicts the Southwest may be on the cusp of its worst dry spell in 1,000 years. Scientists are warning that the backup plan — groundwater aquifers from California to Nebraska — are all being sucked dry.
But, yes, the tax break exists — in parts of eight High Plains states.
Here’s how it works: Farmers — or anyone who uses water in a business — can ask the Internal Revenue Service for a tax write-off for what’s called a “depleted asset.” In certain places, water counts as an asset, just like oil, or minerals like copper. The more water gets used, the more cash credit farmers can claim against their income tax. And that’s just what almost 3,000 Texas landowners in just one water district appear to have done last year — a year in which nearly half of Texas was in a state of “severe” or “extreme” drought.”
Yikes. How much can they write off?
A bunch it seems, especially if you’re a big farm and own a lot of land. We talked to an accountant in Levelland, Texas. He had a client who wrote off $10,000. “Whenever you buy land, you’re getting the dirt … and of course you are getting the water,” said Sham Myatt, the accountant. And the idea is that that water is part of what you paid for in the land deal. If the aquifer was 50 feet deep at the time of the land sale, and it drops 10 feet in a dry year, then the farmer can deduct one-fifth of the value, and so on, until all the water is gone.
That’s not going to do much to conserve water, is it?
No. It’s not. In fact it’s an incentive to do the exact opposite. A farmer who tries to use less water because of the drought, say, by switching to really efficient irrigation techniques, could actually make less money. His water might last longer, but producing his crop would get a lot more expensive.
We called Nicholas Brozovic, an associate professor of agricultural economics and director of policy at the University of Nebraska’s Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute. He’d actually never heard of the water deduction; it’s that obscure. But he laid out some textbook economics: If you’re overusing your water, then you are depreciating it, he said. And if the government pays for that, they are subsidizing that depreciation. “The more you deplete your groundwater, the higher your tax exemption and that must create an incentive not to conserve,” he said.
Hasn’t the federal government spent billions subsidizing conservation and the protection of the West’s groundwater, in part by building dams and encouraging people to use the water in rivers instead? Why would they forfeit federal tax dollars to do the opposite?
We called the IRS, and they initially shared our doubts. Not because they cared much about groundwater (it’s a tax agency!) but because they said they were pretty sure no such deduction was legal. They pointed us to section 613 of the tax code, and it couldn’t be more explicit: For the purposes of deducting the depreciating value of minerals, the definition “does not include soil, sod, dirt, turf, water, or mosses.” Ok, who would ever have thought of deducting mosses or sod? But anyway. That left us really confused.
Right, there were, after all, those farmers in Texas who seemed to have benefited from what the IRS said was not possible.
We encouraged the IRS to check again. They did. And then they found the provision they thought didn’t exist — right there in the text for Revenue Rule 65–296. An IRS spokesperson laid out for us the specifics: “Taxpayers are entitled to a cost depletion deduction for the exhaustion of their capital investment in the ground water extracted and disposed of by them in their business of irrigation farming specifically from the Ogallala Formation.”
Seems like some follow-up questions were in order.
For sure. We asked for clarification. The IRS said it would try to explain. Most importantly, they wanted to say it wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounded. The deduction is only available for one small part of the country — an area that includes parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado. And it should only apply if people are using water from a source that is running dry anyway.
But wait, what? You get a break when you use resources that are already in danger of vanishing?
Yes, that’s why it is what’s called a depleted asset. It’s of less and less value with every day. Your car is worth less the moment you drive it off the lot. Or, more similarly, oil companies track the falling value of their reserves the more they pump out from underground. In fact, energy companies have been taking oil depletion breaks for decades. Texas landowners would say their property is getting less valuable the less water there is to use on it.
Okay, okay, but water isn’t oil. It’s not a commodity. Access to it is a basic right. Yes? Please say that’s right.
Wrong. Ouch. I know, it hurts. But ProPublica last year wrote about all the ways water is coveted and controlled — and then often wasted — by just a few powerful groups. In most of the West, only some people and businesses have rights to it, depending on who showed up to claim it first. One big trend is that water is increasingly being bought and sold — including by hedge funds and big Wall Street investors, and the less water there is, the more the price is going up.
That’s a little scary. Let’s get back to depleted assets. So when did this tax break start?
About 50 years ago. A farmer in the Texas panhandle — along with his local water district — successfully sued the IRS, arguing that the roughly 200 million gallons he drew from his groundwater each year was no different than the depletion of the state’s other great natural resource, oil. He won, and the IRS was obliged to create rule 65–296 — the special allowance for tax credits that the IRS almost forgot about.
Again, it was supposed to be limited — just to a slice of Texas and eastern New Mexico. The court even went so far as to warn that the case shouldn’t become a precedent for groundwater tax claims elsewhere, saying the conditions in that area of the country were unique. But it didn’t take long for the rule to be expanded, albeit just a little bit. By the mid 1980’s any landowner overlying the sprawling Ogallala aquifer — a giant underground vault of precious but dwindling water — was eligible to file for the deductions, not just in North Texas and New Mexico.
That still doesn’t sound like much of a big deal … why does it matter?
Well, the Ogallala, which spans from central Texas north to Nebraska and South Dakota is the nation’s largest groundwater reserve and is one of the most important, and (famously) threatened water supplies in the country. Its heavy overuse and plummeting water levels rang alarms among policymakers more than half a century ago. So this is no insignificant place to be even indirectly encouraging overuse. Texas’ High Plains are one of the most intensely irrigated and productive farming regions in the country. Hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton and corn, among other staple commodities, are grown there using this Ogallala water.
So, do we know what’s happening to the Ogallala where all this farming is taking place?
We looked at recent water level changes in just one district — the one with thousands of tax credit claims — and found a disturbing trend. Underground water levels in the 16 counties of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District have dropped nearly 10 feet over the last 10 years. Some parts of Castro County saw water levels drop more than five feet over the course of 2015 alone. The federal government estimates nearly 100 cubic miles of water have been withdrawn from the Ogallala in that part of Texas. That doesn’t automatically mean the tax credits are responsible — water levels are dropping in most places thanks to overuse and it would take a lot more research to link up the cause and effect. But it certainly isn’t a portrait of sustainability.
Aquifers are at risk across Arizona, California and other states as well, right? At least people can’t claim tax breaks there?
Not yet. But that could change, as water supplies worsen and word of the tax break circulates more widely. Almost no one we spoke with had heard of it — not water lawyers in Arizona or groundwater conservation scientists in California. Armed with the knowledge, there’s a pretty good chance farmers and businesses across the West could seek tax relief.
Because there is precedent?
Exactly.
What does the IRS say to that?
They say it’s very unlikely, mostly because they think the conditions in the Ogallala are rare, and that the agency’s policy is to reject water allowance claims anywhere outside of the places covered in the original lawsuit. But if more landowners, in more places, were to file suits challenging the IRS to allow them to deduct for their water, or if they were to petition the IRS directly, the agency says it would undertake a review to consider it on a case by case basis. Landowners would have to present extensive scientific evidence that showed their situation was more or less the same as in North Texas.
Is the IRS equipped to make such judgments?
Fair question. John Leshy, professor emeritus at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and a former solicitor for the U.S. Department of Interior, isn’t persuaded. “The IRS has really created a can of worms for itself,” he said. “It doesn’t have any hydrological expertise.”
Hmmm. Not ideal. But what’s the bottom line? Are these tax breaks going to make any real difference in how quickly we use up the water supply?
It’s hard to tell, partly because no one appears to have examined that question. We asked the IRS for data on the number of claims and it hasn’t responded. Folks in Texas dismiss the suggestion that the tax benefits are incentivizing water use as ludicrous. Myatt, the accountant, points out that only about one-third of the deducted value translates to cash in hand, and says for many smaller farmers that amounts to just a few hundred dollars. Jason Coleman, manager of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, says his members are as concerned about conserving their water for the future as anyone. “Its already a declining resource,” he said. “I just can’t imagine someone saying I’m going to depreciate our resource any more because of a tax claim.”
But the academic consensus is that incentives encourage use, even overuse. And if the effect of depletion allowances on oil production are any guide — Leshy says they have spurred overproduction and led to artificially cheap, subsidized fuel prices — any significant expansion of the groundwater tax credit to other states could have lasting impacts on the way groundwater is used across the country.
So is anyone trying to do anything about this?
Not really, which is why people like Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, which has long been involved in rooting out tax policy disincentives to conservation, are fuming. “It’s a pretty major outrage that we would so stupidly reward the over extraction and non-sustainable use of groundwater,” he told me. Blackwelder helped push to purge the tax code of perverse anti-conservation incentives like this one way back in the Reagan administration, with the 1986 Tax Reform Act. They were largely successful, weeding out several other odd loopholes. But the groundwater depletion allowance persisted. And since then, apparently, it’s been forgotten about by all but the farmers who rely on it.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
House Committee Chairmen Lay Out Case For Perjury Against Hillary
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic nominee
for president of the United States, may have committed perjury in
testimony before Congress, two separate U.S. House committee chairmen
detailed late Monday.
WASHINGTON (Breitbart)
- In a letter from House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and House Judiciary Committee
chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to U.S. Attorney for the District of
Columbia Channing Phillips, the two top House Republicans made their
case that Clinton committed perjury.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote to Phillips:
On August 2, 2016, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik confirmed that you received the Committees’ request for an investigation regarding certain statements made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her testimony before Congress and will ‘take appropriate action as necessary. To assist the investigation, this letter identifies several pieces of Secretary Clinton’s testimony that appear to implicate 18 U.S.C. §§1621 and 1001 the criminal statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements, respectively. The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony, which are described in greater detail below.
Before detailing at least four specific instances in which Clinton allegedly committed perjury, the House Republicans explained the matter a bit further:
During a House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing on October 22, 2015, Secretary Clinton testified with respect to (1) whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time; (2) whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system; (3) whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during her time as Secretary of State; and (4) whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of State. Although there may be other aspects of Secretary Clinton’s sworn testimony that are at odds with the FBI’s findings, her testimony in those four areas bears specific scrutiny in light of the facts and evidence FBI Director James Comey described in his public statement on July 5, 2016 and in testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016.
The first of four main areas where Hillary Clinton allegedly perjured herself before the U.S. Congress was with her claim in sworn testimony that she never sent or received emails on her illicit home-brew email server—which was in violation of State Department guidelines, and according to FBI director James Comey “extremely careless.”
The first of four main areas where Hillary Clinton allegedly perjured herself before the U.S. Congress was with her claim in sworn testimony that she never sent or received emails on her illicit home-brew email server—which was in violation of State Department guidelines, and according to FBI director James Comey “extremely careless.”
“With respect to whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time, Secretary Clinton testified under oath to the Select Committee that she did not,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote to the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. “Specifically, during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, Secretary Clinton stated ‘there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.’”
Chaffetz and Goodlatte further quoted from Clinton’s testimony by including this quote:
[M]any Americans have no idea how the classification process works. And therefore I wanted to make it clear that there is a system within our government, certainly within the State Department . . . where material that is thought to be classified is marked such, so that people have the opportunity to know how they are supposed to be handling those materials . . . and that’s why it became clearer, I believe, to say that nothing was marked classified at the time I sent or received it.
The two House Committee chairmen detail in the letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. that Clinton, according to the FBI Director, was not telling the truth in that testimony before Congress:
The FBI, however, found several of Secretary Clinton’s emails did in fact contain markings that identified classified information therein. In Director Comey’s public statement on July 5, 2016, he said, ‘a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information.’ When Director Comey testified on July 7, 2016, he specifically addressed this issue. Rep. Trey Gowdy asked, ‘Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified either sent or received. Was it true?’ He said it was not. Director Comey also stated, ‘There was classified material emailed.’ Specifically, he stated that three documents on Secretary Clinton’s private server contained classified information clearly marked ‘Confidential.’ He further testified, ‘In the one involving ‘top secret’ information, Secretary Clinton not only received but also sent emails that talked about the same subject.’
The second claim on which Hillary Clinton appears to have been caught perjuring herself according to the two top House Republicans was with regard to her statements that her lawyers read all of her emails.
“With respect to whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system, Secretary Clinton testified that her attorneys used search terms and reviewed every single email to identify any that were work-related and should therefore be returned to the Department of State,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before quoting directly from Clinton’s transcript from when she testified under oath:
Rep. Jordan: But I’m asking how — I’m asking how it was done. Was
— did someone physically look at the 62,000 e-mails, or did you use search terms, date parameters? I want to know the specifics.
Mrs. Clinton: They did all of that, and I did not look over their shoulders, because I thought it would be appropriate for them to conduct that search, and they did.
Rep. Jordan: Will you provide this committee — or can you answer today, what were the search terms?
Mrs. Clinton: The search terms were everything you could imagine that might be related to anything, but they also went through every single e-mail.
“The FBI found, however, that Secretary Clinton’s lawyers did not in fact read all of her emails—they relied exclusively on a set of search terms to identify work-related messages,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before quoting from Comey’s July 5 testimony:
The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server. It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.
The third area where Hillary Clinton seems to have perjured herself according to the two House Committee chairmen is when she testified that she only used one server or device.
“With respect to whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during her time as Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton testified there was only one server,” Goodlatte and Chaffetz wrote to the D.C. U.S. Attorney, before pulling another transcript of congressional testimony:
Rep. Jordan: In March, you also said this: your server was physically located on your property, which is protected by the Secret Service. I’m having a hard time figuring this out, because this story’s been all over the place. But — there was one server on your property in New York, and a second server hosted by a Colorado company in — housed in New Jersey. Is that right? There were two servers?
Mrs. Clinton: No.
Rep. Jordan: OK.
Mrs. Clinton: There was a — there was a server…
Rep. Jordan: Just one?
Mrs. Clinton: . . . that was already being used by my husband’s team. An existing system in our home that I used, and then later, again, my husband’s office decided that they wanted to change their arrangements, and that’s when they contracted with the company in Colorado.
Rep. Jordan: And so there’s only one server? Is that what you’re telling me? And it’s the one server that the FBI has?
Mrs. Clinton: The FBI has the server that was used during the tenure of my State Department service.
Goodlatte and Chaffetz also wrote:
The FBI, however, found Secretary Clinton stored work-related emails on several servers. In Director Comey’s public statement, he said, ‘Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.’ In Director Comey’s testimony on July 7, 2016, he stated that Secretary Clinton used several devices to send and receive work-related emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. He testified, ‘She used multiple devices during her four years as secretary of state.’
The fourth and final area where Clinton seems to have, according to Chaffetz and Goodlatte, perjured herself while under oath was during her claim that she provided all of her work-related emails to the Department of State.
“Finally, with respect to whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of State, Secretary Clinton testified to the Select Committee that she had,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before again pulling a transcript of Clinton’s testimony before Congress.
Mrs. Clinton: Well, Congressman, I have said repeatedly that I take responsibility for my use of personal e-mail. I’ve said it was a mistake. I’ve said that it was allowed, but it was not a good choice. When I got to the department, we were faced with a global financial crisis, major troop decisions on Afghanistan, the imperative to rebuild our alliances in Europe and Asia, an ongoing war in Iraq, and so much else. E-mail was not my primary means of communication, as I have said earlier. I did not have a computer on my desk. I’ve described how I did work: in meetings, secure and unsecured phone calls, reviewing many, many pages of materials every day, attending . . .
Rep. Jordan: I — I — I appreciate (inaudible).
Mrs. Clinton: . . . a great deal of meetings, and I provided the department, which has been providing you, with all of my work-related e-mails, all that I had. Approximately 55,000 pages. And they are being publicly released.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote:
The FBI found, however, ‘several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.’ In the course of its investigation, the FBI recovered ‘still others . . . from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.’ When Director Comey appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016, he confirmed that Secretary Clinton did not turn over all work-related emails to the FBI. He stated, ‘We found work-related emails, thousands, that were not returned.’
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrapped their letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. by noting that the FBI’s findings prove Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she testified under oath before Congress.
“The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with the FBI’s findings,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote to Phillips:
On August 2, 2016, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik confirmed that you received the Committees’ request for an investigation regarding certain statements made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her testimony before Congress and will ‘take appropriate action as necessary. To assist the investigation, this letter identifies several pieces of Secretary Clinton’s testimony that appear to implicate 18 U.S.C. §§1621 and 1001 the criminal statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements, respectively. The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony, which are described in greater detail below.
Before detailing at least four specific instances in which Clinton allegedly committed perjury, the House Republicans explained the matter a bit further:
During a House Select Committee on Benghazi hearing on October 22, 2015, Secretary Clinton testified with respect to (1) whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time; (2) whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system; (3) whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during her time as Secretary of State; and (4) whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of State. Although there may be other aspects of Secretary Clinton’s sworn testimony that are at odds with the FBI’s findings, her testimony in those four areas bears specific scrutiny in light of the facts and evidence FBI Director James Comey described in his public statement on July 5, 2016 and in testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016.
The first of four main areas where Hillary Clinton allegedly perjured herself before the U.S. Congress was with her claim in sworn testimony that she never sent or received emails on her illicit home-brew email server—which was in violation of State Department guidelines, and according to FBI director James Comey “extremely careless.”
The first of four main areas where Hillary Clinton allegedly perjured herself before the U.S. Congress was with her claim in sworn testimony that she never sent or received emails on her illicit home-brew email server—which was in violation of State Department guidelines, and according to FBI director James Comey “extremely careless.”
“With respect to whether she sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time, Secretary Clinton testified under oath to the Select Committee that she did not,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote to the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. “Specifically, during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, Secretary Clinton stated ‘there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.’”
Chaffetz and Goodlatte further quoted from Clinton’s testimony by including this quote:
[M]any Americans have no idea how the classification process works. And therefore I wanted to make it clear that there is a system within our government, certainly within the State Department . . . where material that is thought to be classified is marked such, so that people have the opportunity to know how they are supposed to be handling those materials . . . and that’s why it became clearer, I believe, to say that nothing was marked classified at the time I sent or received it.
The two House Committee chairmen detail in the letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. that Clinton, according to the FBI Director, was not telling the truth in that testimony before Congress:
The FBI, however, found several of Secretary Clinton’s emails did in fact contain markings that identified classified information therein. In Director Comey’s public statement on July 5, 2016, he said, ‘a very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information.’ When Director Comey testified on July 7, 2016, he specifically addressed this issue. Rep. Trey Gowdy asked, ‘Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified either sent or received. Was it true?’ He said it was not. Director Comey also stated, ‘There was classified material emailed.’ Specifically, he stated that three documents on Secretary Clinton’s private server contained classified information clearly marked ‘Confidential.’ He further testified, ‘In the one involving ‘top secret’ information, Secretary Clinton not only received but also sent emails that talked about the same subject.’
The second claim on which Hillary Clinton appears to have been caught perjuring herself according to the two top House Republicans was with regard to her statements that her lawyers read all of her emails.
“With respect to whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system, Secretary Clinton testified that her attorneys used search terms and reviewed every single email to identify any that were work-related and should therefore be returned to the Department of State,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before quoting directly from Clinton’s transcript from when she testified under oath:
Rep. Jordan: But I’m asking how — I’m asking how it was done. Was
— did someone physically look at the 62,000 e-mails, or did you use search terms, date parameters? I want to know the specifics.
Mrs. Clinton: They did all of that, and I did not look over their shoulders, because I thought it would be appropriate for them to conduct that search, and they did.
Rep. Jordan: Will you provide this committee — or can you answer today, what were the search terms?
Mrs. Clinton: The search terms were everything you could imagine that might be related to anything, but they also went through every single e-mail.
“The FBI found, however, that Secretary Clinton’s lawyers did not in fact read all of her emails—they relied exclusively on a set of search terms to identify work-related messages,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before quoting from Comey’s July 5 testimony:
The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all of her e-mails, as we did for those available to us; instead, they relied on header information and used search terms to try to find all work-related e-mails among the reportedly more than 60,000 total e-mails remaining on Secretary Clinton’s personal system in 2014. It is highly likely their search terms missed some work-related e-mails, and that we later found them, for example, in the mailboxes of other officials or in the slack space of a server. It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all e-mails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.
The third area where Hillary Clinton seems to have perjured herself according to the two House Committee chairmen is when she testified that she only used one server or device.
“With respect to whether there was one, or more servers that stored work-related emails during her time as Secretary of State, Secretary Clinton testified there was only one server,” Goodlatte and Chaffetz wrote to the D.C. U.S. Attorney, before pulling another transcript of congressional testimony:
Rep. Jordan: In March, you also said this: your server was physically located on your property, which is protected by the Secret Service. I’m having a hard time figuring this out, because this story’s been all over the place. But — there was one server on your property in New York, and a second server hosted by a Colorado company in — housed in New Jersey. Is that right? There were two servers?
Mrs. Clinton: No.
Rep. Jordan: OK.
Mrs. Clinton: There was a — there was a server…
Rep. Jordan: Just one?
Mrs. Clinton: . . . that was already being used by my husband’s team. An existing system in our home that I used, and then later, again, my husband’s office decided that they wanted to change their arrangements, and that’s when they contracted with the company in Colorado.
Rep. Jordan: And so there’s only one server? Is that what you’re telling me? And it’s the one server that the FBI has?
Mrs. Clinton: The FBI has the server that was used during the tenure of my State Department service.
Goodlatte and Chaffetz also wrote:
The FBI, however, found Secretary Clinton stored work-related emails on several servers. In Director Comey’s public statement, he said, ‘Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain.’ In Director Comey’s testimony on July 7, 2016, he stated that Secretary Clinton used several devices to send and receive work-related emails during her tenure as Secretary of State. He testified, ‘She used multiple devices during her four years as secretary of state.’
The fourth and final area where Clinton seems to have, according to Chaffetz and Goodlatte, perjured herself while under oath was during her claim that she provided all of her work-related emails to the Department of State.
“Finally, with respect to whether she provided all her work-related emails to the Department of State, Secretary Clinton testified to the Select Committee that she had,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote, before again pulling a transcript of Clinton’s testimony before Congress.
Mrs. Clinton: Well, Congressman, I have said repeatedly that I take responsibility for my use of personal e-mail. I’ve said it was a mistake. I’ve said that it was allowed, but it was not a good choice. When I got to the department, we were faced with a global financial crisis, major troop decisions on Afghanistan, the imperative to rebuild our alliances in Europe and Asia, an ongoing war in Iraq, and so much else. E-mail was not my primary means of communication, as I have said earlier. I did not have a computer on my desk. I’ve described how I did work: in meetings, secure and unsecured phone calls, reviewing many, many pages of materials every day, attending . . .
Rep. Jordan: I — I — I appreciate (inaudible).
Mrs. Clinton: . . . a great deal of meetings, and I provided the department, which has been providing you, with all of my work-related e-mails, all that I had. Approximately 55,000 pages. And they are being publicly released.
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote:
The FBI found, however, ‘several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.’ In the course of its investigation, the FBI recovered ‘still others . . . from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013.’ When Director Comey appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 7, 2016, he confirmed that Secretary Clinton did not turn over all work-related emails to the FBI. He stated, ‘We found work-related emails, thousands, that were not returned.’
Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrapped their letter to the U.S. Attorney for D.C. by noting that the FBI’s findings prove Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she testified under oath before Congress.
“The four pieces of sworn testimony by Secretary Clinton described herein are incompatible with the FBI’s findings,” Chaffetz and Goodlatte wrote
Hillary’s VP: Whites Must Become a “Minority” to Atone For Racism
In little noticed comments, Hillary’s running
mate Tim Kaine told a black audience in New Orleans that white people
must become a “minority” in order to properly atone for racism and
oppression suffered by blacks.
By: Paul Joseph Watson
Hispanics are growing in number at a pace of around 2.1 percent a year, with blacks growing at 1.3 percent, while whites are only growing at 0.5 percent.
95% of the U.S. population increase is accounted for by minority births and immigration. Five jurisdictions – Hawaii (77 percent), the District of Columbia (64.2 percent), California (61.5 percent), New Mexico (61.1 percent) and Texas (56.5 percent) already have non-white majority populations.
As Edmund Kozak explains, the Democratic Party’s policies have negatively impacted white communities in the United States.
“The ever-increasing rate at which good-paying, blue-collar jobs are being offshored by bad trade deals — something to which the modern Democratic Party appears committed fully — will continue to have a devastating effect on working-class white communities. The disproportionately negative effect globalization has had on blue-collar whites was a large factor in GOP nominee Donald Trump’s success in the GOP primaries,” he writes.
According to Alicia Powe, Kaine’s comments emphasize how the left has employed “toxic identity politics” to “perpetuate class warfare and the narrative of an unjust America,” with whites demonized as the scapegoats.
Watch the video below to understand why “white privilege” is a complete myth.
By: Paul Joseph Watson
NEW ORLEANS (IW)
- “I’ve never been treated badly in life because of my skin color or my
gender,” Kaine told a group of black Baptists in New Orleans. “I think
the burden is on those of us who are in the majority — Caucasians. We
have to put ourselves in a place where we are the minority.”
The “burden” that Kaine mentions obviously means taking on “white guilt,” despite the fact that – even at the height of slavery – only 1.4% of whites in America owned slaves. White people were also victims of far more brutal and longer lasting oppression under the Barbary slave trade.
Kaine’s desire to see whites become a minority in America is set to be realized in around 30 years because white people are the only group with a higher death rate than birth rate.
The “burden” that Kaine mentions obviously means taking on “white guilt,” despite the fact that – even at the height of slavery – only 1.4% of whites in America owned slaves. White people were also victims of far more brutal and longer lasting oppression under the Barbary slave trade.
Kaine’s desire to see whites become a minority in America is set to be realized in around 30 years because white people are the only group with a higher death rate than birth rate.
Hispanics are growing in number at a pace of around 2.1 percent a year, with blacks growing at 1.3 percent, while whites are only growing at 0.5 percent.
95% of the U.S. population increase is accounted for by minority births and immigration. Five jurisdictions – Hawaii (77 percent), the District of Columbia (64.2 percent), California (61.5 percent), New Mexico (61.1 percent) and Texas (56.5 percent) already have non-white majority populations.
As Edmund Kozak explains, the Democratic Party’s policies have negatively impacted white communities in the United States.
“The ever-increasing rate at which good-paying, blue-collar jobs are being offshored by bad trade deals — something to which the modern Democratic Party appears committed fully — will continue to have a devastating effect on working-class white communities. The disproportionately negative effect globalization has had on blue-collar whites was a large factor in GOP nominee Donald Trump’s success in the GOP primaries,” he writes.
According to Alicia Powe, Kaine’s comments emphasize how the left has employed “toxic identity politics” to “perpetuate class warfare and the narrative of an unjust America,” with whites demonized as the scapegoats.
Watch the video below to understand why “white privilege” is a complete myth.
Leaked Soros Memo: Refugee Crisis ‘New Normal,’ Gives ‘New Opportunities’ For Global Influence
A leaked memo from left-wing financier George
Soros’s Open Society Foundations argues that Europe’s refugee crisis
should be accepted as a “new normal,” and that the refugee crisis means
“new opportunities” for Soros’ organization to influence immigration
policies on a global scale.
By: Peter Hasson
By: Peter Hasson
BRUSSELS (DC)
- OSF program officer Anna Crowley and program specialist Katin Rosin
co-authored the May 12 memo, titled “Migration Governance and
Enforcement Portfolio Review.” The memo focuses on an OSF program called
the International Migration Initiative, which aims to influence
immigration policy.
The nine-page review makes three key points: OSF — which doles out millions to left-wing causes — has been successful at influencing global immigration policy; Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for the organization to influence global immigration policy; and the refugee crisis is the “new normal.”
Open Society Foundations is successfully influencing global immigration policy
One of the purposes of the review, Crowley and Rosin write in the introduction, is to “consider the effectiveness of the approaches we have used to achieve change at the international level.”
A section of the review titled “Our Work” describes how America’s least transparent think tank has worked with “leaders in the field” to “shape migration policymaking and influence regional and global processes affecting the way migration is governed and enforced.”
In a section titled, “Our Ambitions,” the authors explain: “Our premise for engaging in work related to governance was that, in addition to mitigating the negative effects of enforcement, we should also be supporting actors in the field proactively seeking to change the policies, rules, and regulations that govern migration.”
“We also believed that advances at the regional or international levels could create impetus for policy change or implementation of existing norms at the national level. We deliberately avoided the term ‘global governance’ because there is no single system at the global level for managing migration.”
The same section later states that IMI “has had to be selective and opportunistic, particularly at the global level, in supporting leaders in the field to push thinking on migration and better coordinate advocacy and reform efforts. We have supported initiatives, organizations, and networks whose work ties directly to our aims in the corridors.”
“Early on, IMI identified a handful of organizations able to engage on migration globally and transnationally, elevating IMI’s corridor work beyond the national level,” reads another section of the memo, entitled “Our Place.”
“These included key think tanks such as the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and advocacy networks such as the International Detention Coalition (IDC).” (The authors later note that MPI, a strong advocate of amnesty for illegal immigrants in America, “is sometimes criticized for its closeness to governments, [but] flexible funding from OSF has allowed it to maintain some independence from the governments it advises.”)
The memo also notes that “IMI played a central role in establishing and influencing the goals of two new [European Programme for Integration and Migration] sub-funds on the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and immigration detention.”
Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for OSF
The memo explains how Europe’s refugee crisis is opening doors for Soros’ organization to further influence global immigration policy.
The authors note that “the current refugee crisis is creating space to reconsider the governance of migration and the international refugee regime.”
One reason for this is that the developing countries that make up the Group of 77 at the United Nations were motivated by the refugee crisis to keep immigration issues on the “global agenda,” the memo states.
“The refugee crisis and the fear that the interests of migrants fleeing poverty, climate change, generalized violence, or natural disaster would be overlooked at these fora have generated a push from G77 countries to ensure other migration issues remain on the global agenda.”
They later explain that the current crisis provides “new opportunities” for influencing immigration policy on a global scale.
“The current climate presents new opportunities for reforming migration governance at the global level, whether through the existing multi-lateral system, or by bringing together a range of actors to think more innovatively. Our long-standing interest and investment in global work means we have many of the right partners and are positioned to help others navigate this space.”
Additionally, the review states, “The refugee crisis is opening new opportunities” for “coordination and collaboration” with other wealthy donors.
Europe’s refugee crisis: the new normal
According to the review, immigration policy-makers need to accept the refugee crisis as a “new normal.”
One of the conclusions listed in the memo is, “Accepting the current crisis as the new normal and moving beyond the need to react.”
SorosNewNormal
“Observing our partners as they respond and adjust to the new reality in light of the crisis in Europe and the Mediterranean, we see little attention given to long-term planning or fundamentally new approaches to advocacy.” The conclusion also stresses the need to fight back against “growing intolerance toward migrants.
The nine-page review makes three key points: OSF — which doles out millions to left-wing causes — has been successful at influencing global immigration policy; Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for the organization to influence global immigration policy; and the refugee crisis is the “new normal.”
Open Society Foundations is successfully influencing global immigration policy
One of the purposes of the review, Crowley and Rosin write in the introduction, is to “consider the effectiveness of the approaches we have used to achieve change at the international level.”
A section of the review titled “Our Work” describes how America’s least transparent think tank has worked with “leaders in the field” to “shape migration policymaking and influence regional and global processes affecting the way migration is governed and enforced.”
In a section titled, “Our Ambitions,” the authors explain: “Our premise for engaging in work related to governance was that, in addition to mitigating the negative effects of enforcement, we should also be supporting actors in the field proactively seeking to change the policies, rules, and regulations that govern migration.”
“We also believed that advances at the regional or international levels could create impetus for policy change or implementation of existing norms at the national level. We deliberately avoided the term ‘global governance’ because there is no single system at the global level for managing migration.”
The same section later states that IMI “has had to be selective and opportunistic, particularly at the global level, in supporting leaders in the field to push thinking on migration and better coordinate advocacy and reform efforts. We have supported initiatives, organizations, and networks whose work ties directly to our aims in the corridors.”
“Early on, IMI identified a handful of organizations able to engage on migration globally and transnationally, elevating IMI’s corridor work beyond the national level,” reads another section of the memo, entitled “Our Place.”
“These included key think tanks such as the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and advocacy networks such as the International Detention Coalition (IDC).” (The authors later note that MPI, a strong advocate of amnesty for illegal immigrants in America, “is sometimes criticized for its closeness to governments, [but] flexible funding from OSF has allowed it to maintain some independence from the governments it advises.”)
The memo also notes that “IMI played a central role in establishing and influencing the goals of two new [European Programme for Integration and Migration] sub-funds on the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and immigration detention.”
Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for OSF
The memo explains how Europe’s refugee crisis is opening doors for Soros’ organization to further influence global immigration policy.
The authors note that “the current refugee crisis is creating space to reconsider the governance of migration and the international refugee regime.”
One reason for this is that the developing countries that make up the Group of 77 at the United Nations were motivated by the refugee crisis to keep immigration issues on the “global agenda,” the memo states.
“The refugee crisis and the fear that the interests of migrants fleeing poverty, climate change, generalized violence, or natural disaster would be overlooked at these fora have generated a push from G77 countries to ensure other migration issues remain on the global agenda.”
They later explain that the current crisis provides “new opportunities” for influencing immigration policy on a global scale.
“The current climate presents new opportunities for reforming migration governance at the global level, whether through the existing multi-lateral system, or by bringing together a range of actors to think more innovatively. Our long-standing interest and investment in global work means we have many of the right partners and are positioned to help others navigate this space.”
Additionally, the review states, “The refugee crisis is opening new opportunities” for “coordination and collaboration” with other wealthy donors.
Europe’s refugee crisis: the new normal
According to the review, immigration policy-makers need to accept the refugee crisis as a “new normal.”
One of the conclusions listed in the memo is, “Accepting the current crisis as the new normal and moving beyond the need to react.”
SorosNewNormal
“Observing our partners as they respond and adjust to the new reality in light of the crisis in Europe and the Mediterranean, we see little attention given to long-term planning or fundamentally new approaches to advocacy.” The conclusion also stresses the need to fight back against “growing intolerance toward migrants.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Secret Service Whistleblower: Hillary Has Major Neurological Problems
Source says big announcement from Clinton campaign about her health coming soon
By: Paul Joseph Watson
By: Paul Joseph Watson
WASHINGTON (IW)
- A Secret Service source has told Infowars that Hillary Clinton has
major neurological health problems and that a big announcement regarding
her medical situation is coming soon.
The Secret Service source reached out to Infowars reporter Joe Biggs during the recent Republican National Convention in Cleveland and confirmed the following information;
– Hillary has a very serious neurological degeneration which could be Parkinson’s disease;
– Around half a million dollars has been spent to specially adapt three SUVs in which Hillary travels to provide lowered floors and disabled access to prevent Hillary from tripping.
– Hillary’s staff is so intent on keeping reporters away from Clinton because she is at risk of petit mal seizures that can be triggered by camera flashes;
– Hillary has major problems with balance, difficulties with walking and keeps falling down;
– Hillary’s campaign will be forced into making a big announcement soon regarding her medical condition;
– The source told us that this information was relayed to the press by others, but they were too afraid to run it, so Infowars was reached out to directly by the Secret Service in Cleveland three weeks ago because they trusted us to run this news unfiltered.
The revelations correlate with other information provided by federal agents and police officers who have worked security at Hillary events.
John Cardillo, a former officer who provided VIP security details for the New York Police Department (NYPD), said he was told by a federal agent and another NYPD officer who worked security at Hillary events that Hillary had major heath problems and was often dizzy and disoriented.
Questions about Hillary’s health are intensifying following the release of our viral video which asked why Clinton has been behaving strangely in recent weeks and months.
Despite leftist media outlets attempting to portray the entire issue as a baseless “conspiracy theory,” a Rasmussen poll released last week found that 59% of Americans would like to see the Clinton campaign release Hillary’s medical records.
Watch the clip below in which Alex Jones discusses the revelations made by the Secret Service whistleblower.
The Secret Service source reached out to Infowars reporter Joe Biggs during the recent Republican National Convention in Cleveland and confirmed the following information;
– Hillary has a very serious neurological degeneration which could be Parkinson’s disease;
– Around half a million dollars has been spent to specially adapt three SUVs in which Hillary travels to provide lowered floors and disabled access to prevent Hillary from tripping.
– Hillary’s staff is so intent on keeping reporters away from Clinton because she is at risk of petit mal seizures that can be triggered by camera flashes;
– Hillary has major problems with balance, difficulties with walking and keeps falling down;
– Hillary’s campaign will be forced into making a big announcement soon regarding her medical condition;
– The source told us that this information was relayed to the press by others, but they were too afraid to run it, so Infowars was reached out to directly by the Secret Service in Cleveland three weeks ago because they trusted us to run this news unfiltered.
The revelations correlate with other information provided by federal agents and police officers who have worked security at Hillary events.
John Cardillo, a former officer who provided VIP security details for the New York Police Department (NYPD), said he was told by a federal agent and another NYPD officer who worked security at Hillary events that Hillary had major heath problems and was often dizzy and disoriented.
Questions about Hillary’s health are intensifying following the release of our viral video which asked why Clinton has been behaving strangely in recent weeks and months.
Despite leftist media outlets attempting to portray the entire issue as a baseless “conspiracy theory,” a Rasmussen poll released last week found that 59% of Americans would like to see the Clinton campaign release Hillary’s medical records.
Watch the clip below in which Alex Jones discusses the revelations made by the Secret Service whistleblower.
Monday, August 8, 2016
White House Releases Its “Playbook” For Killing and Capturing Terror Suspects
The Obama administration has released its
internal guidelines for how it decides to kill or capture alleged
terrorists around the globe, three years after they came into effect.
By: Cora Currier
By: Cora Currier
WASHINGTON (TheIntercept)
- They provide a look at the drone war bureaucracy behind hundreds of
strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere, a system President
Obama will hand off to his successor.
The guidelines show the process is concentrated at the White House, specifically in the National Security Council. They also describe the process for approving so-called signature strikes, where the target of the strike is not a known “high value terrorist,” but rather some other “terrorist target,” which could be a group of people exhibiting suspect behavior, or a vehicle, building or other infrastructure.
Amid all these procedural details, however, the presidential policy guidance, or “playbook,” as it has been called, does not provide new insight into when, where, and under what authorities someone can be killed, or what kind of intelligence is necessary to make that decision.
Much of the document, which is dated May 22, 2013, echoes public statements by administration officials over the past several years and previously-released material. The general standards for killing terrorist targets away from active battlefields were made public that May, when the president gave a speech and issued an abbreviated version of the guidance, promising that the United States would only undertake lethal action against a terrorist if they posed a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons, and if capture was not feasible.
It took a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union to get the full 18-page version of the guidance declassified, with some redactions.
“This document doesn’t tell us anything new about the substantive standards that they use to determine if someone can be targeted,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU. “We’d hope that they’d fill out what they mean by ‘continuing’ and ‘imminent,’ or ‘feasible’ or ‘unfeasible.’”
In a statement, the ACLU also questioned how the document’s “relatively stringent standards can be reconciled with the accounts of eye witnesses, journalists, and human rights researches who have documented large numbers of bystander casualties” from drone strikes.
According to the guidance, each operating agency – the CIA or the Defense Department – prepares “operational plans for taking direct actions,” whether strikes or captures, in different situations. Those plans undergo a legal review by the agencies’ general counsels and a legal adviser to the National Security Council, and then are considered by a circle of advisers at the White House known as the Principals and Principals’ Deputies Committees, made up of the heads or deputy heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, as well as the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Counterterrorism Center.
The plans must include legal, tactical and policy rationale for undertaking the strike, what kind of “strike and surveillance assets” would be used, and how long the authority to take action would remain in place. Once the committee arrives at its decision on the plan, it is communicated to the president for his final approval.
The guidance indicates that the president does not have to sign off on individual names of high-value targets to be killed, unless there is disagreement within the National Security Council. If the individual is a U.S. person, the Justice Department needs to weigh in.
If an agency wants to nominate an individual to be killed, they make a profile of them based on intelligence reporting, which is reviewed by an interagency panel led by the White House counterterrorism adviser, currently Lisa Monaco. Again, the profile passes through lawyers at the agency and at the National Security Council before going to the Deputies Committee and ultimately the Principals Committee for a final decision.
Although the process indicates a high degree of control in the White House, generally speaking, the actual operation is still carried out under the command of the military or CIA.
A similar process is followed for approving plans for strikes against “terrorist targets other than high-value terrorists.” The section seems to address “signature strikes,” in which the United States has attacked people without knowing their identity. The examples given in the policy guidance include vehicles carrying improvised explosive devices, or “infrastructure, including explosives storage facilities.” For an actual strike, it appears from the guidance that the Principals Committee and the president get involved only when there is disagreement about the operation.
If the suspect is to be captured, a rare occurrence under Obama, the president also approves the plan. Among the various considerations going into a decision to capture someone, such as how and where they would be detained and interrogated, and if they could be tried in civilian court or military commission, one thing is spelled out clearly: “In no event will detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.”
The process laid out in the guidance is more detailed but does not differ substantially from the one described in a 2013 Defense Department Power Point presentation published by The Intercept last fall, although that document included additional information on how the military carried out its strikes in Yemen and Somalia at the time. For instance, the presentation included the detail that once a target was approved by the White House, the military had a 60-day window to pursue the operation.
The newly-issued guidance does not specify how long authorities for given operations last, although it mentions that the case against individuals on the list for lethal strikes must be reviewed each year. It also notes that if “a capture option” becomes possible at any point, there should be an expedited reevaluation of the authority to kill them.
The Defense Department also released two heavily redacted documents describing its implementation of the policy guidance, along with a letter to the Senate from 2014, stating that the Pentagon considers the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and other groups fighting alongside them against U.S. forces in Afghanistan to be “associated forces” of Al Qaeda, along with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which operates in Yemen. Some portions of the list of associated forces and all the groups considered “affiliates” of Al Qaeda are blacked out.
Associated forces would fall under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which became law just a week after 9/11, and which the administration has used to justify 15 years of lethal operations in many countries. Yet the White House process, the Pentagon document notes, involves a “target-by-target analysis” of legal authorities, and groups not currently identified as associated forces could still be targeted if a new situation arose. The guidance also includes a large waiver for the president to disregard it in cases of “national self-defense,” “fleeting opportunities,” or even to authorize a strike against someone who posed a threat “to another country’s persons.”
The guidance does not apply to operations in “areas of active hostilities,” which the administration currently defines as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. A White House spokesman, Ned Price, pushed back on reports that strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, along the border, are not covered by the guidance, but would not clarify whether in some instances strikes in the border region might fall into the administration’s definition of active hostilities.
The guidance is one more exhibit in the Obama administration’s institutionalization of counterterrorism strikes, by drones and other means, far from conventional battlefields. Last month, the White House released casualty figures for such strikes during Obama’s presidency, stating that as many as 2,600 people had been killed in 473 strikes in 7 years. The administration believed that between 64 and 116 of them were civilians – a number disputed by outside observers, who put the total number of civilians harmed between 200 and 1000.
Even as the frequency of drone strikes, especially by the CIA, has declined markedly in the last years of Obama’s presidency, the practice has not ended. The U.S. military hit a Taliban leader in a strike in Pakistan in May, also killing a taxi driver. Strikes in Yemen have been more frequent, and there were two massive attacks in Yemen and Somalia in March killed dozens of alleged fighters.
The guidelines show the process is concentrated at the White House, specifically in the National Security Council. They also describe the process for approving so-called signature strikes, where the target of the strike is not a known “high value terrorist,” but rather some other “terrorist target,” which could be a group of people exhibiting suspect behavior, or a vehicle, building or other infrastructure.
Amid all these procedural details, however, the presidential policy guidance, or “playbook,” as it has been called, does not provide new insight into when, where, and under what authorities someone can be killed, or what kind of intelligence is necessary to make that decision.
Much of the document, which is dated May 22, 2013, echoes public statements by administration officials over the past several years and previously-released material. The general standards for killing terrorist targets away from active battlefields were made public that May, when the president gave a speech and issued an abbreviated version of the guidance, promising that the United States would only undertake lethal action against a terrorist if they posed a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons, and if capture was not feasible.
It took a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union to get the full 18-page version of the guidance declassified, with some redactions.
“This document doesn’t tell us anything new about the substantive standards that they use to determine if someone can be targeted,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU. “We’d hope that they’d fill out what they mean by ‘continuing’ and ‘imminent,’ or ‘feasible’ or ‘unfeasible.’”
In a statement, the ACLU also questioned how the document’s “relatively stringent standards can be reconciled with the accounts of eye witnesses, journalists, and human rights researches who have documented large numbers of bystander casualties” from drone strikes.
According to the guidance, each operating agency – the CIA or the Defense Department – prepares “operational plans for taking direct actions,” whether strikes or captures, in different situations. Those plans undergo a legal review by the agencies’ general counsels and a legal adviser to the National Security Council, and then are considered by a circle of advisers at the White House known as the Principals and Principals’ Deputies Committees, made up of the heads or deputy heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, as well as the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Counterterrorism Center.
The plans must include legal, tactical and policy rationale for undertaking the strike, what kind of “strike and surveillance assets” would be used, and how long the authority to take action would remain in place. Once the committee arrives at its decision on the plan, it is communicated to the president for his final approval.
The guidance indicates that the president does not have to sign off on individual names of high-value targets to be killed, unless there is disagreement within the National Security Council. If the individual is a U.S. person, the Justice Department needs to weigh in.
If an agency wants to nominate an individual to be killed, they make a profile of them based on intelligence reporting, which is reviewed by an interagency panel led by the White House counterterrorism adviser, currently Lisa Monaco. Again, the profile passes through lawyers at the agency and at the National Security Council before going to the Deputies Committee and ultimately the Principals Committee for a final decision.
Although the process indicates a high degree of control in the White House, generally speaking, the actual operation is still carried out under the command of the military or CIA.
A similar process is followed for approving plans for strikes against “terrorist targets other than high-value terrorists.” The section seems to address “signature strikes,” in which the United States has attacked people without knowing their identity. The examples given in the policy guidance include vehicles carrying improvised explosive devices, or “infrastructure, including explosives storage facilities.” For an actual strike, it appears from the guidance that the Principals Committee and the president get involved only when there is disagreement about the operation.
If the suspect is to be captured, a rare occurrence under Obama, the president also approves the plan. Among the various considerations going into a decision to capture someone, such as how and where they would be detained and interrogated, and if they could be tried in civilian court or military commission, one thing is spelled out clearly: “In no event will detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.”
The process laid out in the guidance is more detailed but does not differ substantially from the one described in a 2013 Defense Department Power Point presentation published by The Intercept last fall, although that document included additional information on how the military carried out its strikes in Yemen and Somalia at the time. For instance, the presentation included the detail that once a target was approved by the White House, the military had a 60-day window to pursue the operation.
The newly-issued guidance does not specify how long authorities for given operations last, although it mentions that the case against individuals on the list for lethal strikes must be reviewed each year. It also notes that if “a capture option” becomes possible at any point, there should be an expedited reevaluation of the authority to kill them.
The Defense Department also released two heavily redacted documents describing its implementation of the policy guidance, along with a letter to the Senate from 2014, stating that the Pentagon considers the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and other groups fighting alongside them against U.S. forces in Afghanistan to be “associated forces” of Al Qaeda, along with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which operates in Yemen. Some portions of the list of associated forces and all the groups considered “affiliates” of Al Qaeda are blacked out.
Associated forces would fall under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which became law just a week after 9/11, and which the administration has used to justify 15 years of lethal operations in many countries. Yet the White House process, the Pentagon document notes, involves a “target-by-target analysis” of legal authorities, and groups not currently identified as associated forces could still be targeted if a new situation arose. The guidance also includes a large waiver for the president to disregard it in cases of “national self-defense,” “fleeting opportunities,” or even to authorize a strike against someone who posed a threat “to another country’s persons.”
The guidance does not apply to operations in “areas of active hostilities,” which the administration currently defines as Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. A White House spokesman, Ned Price, pushed back on reports that strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, along the border, are not covered by the guidance, but would not clarify whether in some instances strikes in the border region might fall into the administration’s definition of active hostilities.
The guidance is one more exhibit in the Obama administration’s institutionalization of counterterrorism strikes, by drones and other means, far from conventional battlefields. Last month, the White House released casualty figures for such strikes during Obama’s presidency, stating that as many as 2,600 people had been killed in 473 strikes in 7 years. The administration believed that between 64 and 116 of them were civilians – a number disputed by outside observers, who put the total number of civilians harmed between 200 and 1000.
Even as the frequency of drone strikes, especially by the CIA, has declined markedly in the last years of Obama’s presidency, the practice has not ended. The U.S. military hit a Taliban leader in a strike in Pakistan in May, also killing a taxi driver. Strikes in Yemen have been more frequent, and there were two massive attacks in Yemen and Somalia in March killed dozens of alleged fighters.
At Risk: 'Massive' breach exposes hundreds of questions for upcoming SAT exams
Part Five: Experts say the failure to protect
test items may be among the worst security lapses in college-admissions
testing history. It’s not clear how widely the material has spread, but
the exam’s owner, the College Board, is taking steps to minimize the
impact.
By: Renee Dudley
BOSTON (Reuters) – Shortly after David
Coleman took over as CEO in 2012, the College Board began redesigning
its signature product, the SAT college entrance exam. The testing
company also hired a consultancy to identify the risks associated with
the monumental undertaking.
Among the red flags that consultant Gartner Inc raised in an October 2013 report: The not-for-profit College Board needed to better protect the material being developed for the new SAT.
Plans to secure the new test from leaks or theft had “not been developed” by the organization, the consultancy wrote in the report, reviewed by Reuters. At risk were thousands of items, or questions, that were being prepared for the redesigned SAT.
In 2014, employees at the New York-based College Board also raised concerns, arguing for limits on who could access items and answer keys for the revamped SAT, an email shows.
They were right to be worried.
Just months after the College Board unveiled the new SAT this March, a person with access to material for upcoming versions of the redesigned exam provided Reuters with hundreds of confidential test items. The questions and answers include 21 reading passages – each with about a dozen questions – and about 160 math problems.
Reuters doesn’t know how widely the items have circulated. The news agency has no evidence that the material has fallen into the hands of what the College Board calls “bad actors” – groups that the organization says “will lie, cheat and steal for personal gain.” But independent testing specialists briefed on the matter said the breach represents one of the most serious security lapses that’s come to light in the history of college-admissions testing.
To ensure the materials were authentic, Reuters provided copies to the College Board. In a subsequent letter to the news agency, an attorney for the College Board said publishing any of the items would have a dire impact, “destroying their value, rendering them unusable, and inflicting other injuries on the College Board and test takers.”
College Board spokeswoman Sandra Riley said in a statement that the organization was moving to contain any damage from the leak. The College Board is “taking the test forms with stolen content off of the SAT administration schedule while we continue to monitor and analyze the situation,” she said.
Riley declined to say whether those steps would involve cancelling or delaying upcoming tests. The next sitting of the SAT is October 1.
The breach is “a serious criminal matter,” Riley wrote. “A thorough investigation is ongoing, therefore our comments must be limited.” The College Board did not grant requests for interviews with CEO Coleman and other employees named in this article.
The SAT is used by U.S. universities to help evaluate more than a million college applicants a year, and so a major security lapse could cause havoc for admissions officers and students alike.
That College Board security was breached is “a problem of a massive level,” one that could “put into question the credibility of the exam,” said Neal Kingston, who heads the Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas.
If unscrupulous test-preparation centers were to obtain the items, the impact on the SAT would be “devastating,” said James Wollack, director of the Center for Placement Testing at the University of Wisconsin.
“Everyone will pull out all stops to try to compromise this test,” Wollack said. That items for upcoming exams have leaked is “very alarming, very concerning indeed.”
It’s too soon to know what damage the leak could cause. Harm can be minimized if the items aren’t widely distributed. But Wollack and Kingston noted that the latest incident is more serious than the widespread SAT cheating reported in East Asia during the past few years.
As Reuters reported in March, the College Board has been unable to prevent foreign test-preparation operators from giving their clients an advance look at exam questions. Those problems were primarily a result of the organization’s reuse of previously administered exams. This breakdown involves test items that have never been given.
The materials provided to Reuters contain a wealth of items for upcoming tests: reading passages drawn from novels, historical documents, scientific journals, essays and other texts, each accompanied by questions. Also among the materials were math problems involving geometry and quadratic equations.
The security breach comes as the College Board already faces pressure from U.S. universities to better protect its marquee test.
The Reuters reports earlier this year detailed how an East Asian industry is exploiting the College Board’s routine practice of recycling items from past tests. Cram schools drill their students on questions harvested from previous tests, conferring an enormous advantage over students who see the items for the first time when the exam is given.
In a statement at the time, the College Board pledged to do more to protect the exam. University admissions officers, however, continue to voice concerns to College Board officials about reuse of exams. If the College Board can’t keep test material secure, schools are left with the impossible task of determining whether an applicant saw questions before taking the exam and therefore gained an unfair edge.
UNEXPLAINED LEAKS
Questions about security inside the College Board emerged earlier this year. Internal documents reviewed by this news agency showed that material for past exams had been “compromised,” a term the College Board uses to describe tests whose contents have leaked outside the organization.
In February, Reuters asked the College Board how it went about protecting exam materials. Spokesman Zach Goldberg described the organization’s use of lock boxes to help prevent the theft of SAT booklets sent to international testing locations.
But lock boxes, he acknowledged, “would not preclude a leak that originated earlier in the content development and distribution cycle.”
The question related to a confidential June 2013 PowerPoint presentation the College Board prepared after a major security breach in South Korea. After local test-prep operators obtained the test in advance, the College Board canceled the May 2013 sitting in South Korea. The PowerPoint also noted a type of breach that differed from the exploitation of recycled tests: outright leaks of new test booklets.
According to the PowerPoint, SAT tests on specialized subjects – two in Mathematics Level II and one in biology – had been compromised. These were “new forms” – that is, tests that had never been administered in the United States or abroad.
The PowerPoint gave no explanation for how those subject tests leaked. The College Board has cautioned that “cartel-like companies” in China and other countries “will stop at nothing to enrich themselves.”
EXAM INSECURITY
Historically, the development of questions to be used on the SAT was primarily handled by the non-profit Educational Testing Service, or ETS. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, ETS also oversees security for the College Board when exams are administered.
After Coleman took over, however, the College Board began handling many aspects of the SAT redesign in-house rather than through contractor ETS, documents reviewed by Reuters show. The College Board also began managing the “Item Bank,” the repository of questions created for the SAT. In the past, that responsibility had belonged to ETS.
Taking on these roles gave the College Board greater control over the material, internal documents show. Developing a single version of the SAT typically takes about 18 to 30 months and costs about $1 million.
The College Board knew that assuming those roles presented challenges.
As its staff worked on the new exam in 2013, the outside consultant was brought in to evaluate the risks the organization faced as it worked to finish the redesign.
In an internal report from October 2013 labeled “FINAL DRAFT,” Gartner advised the College Board to “develop and document a program security plan” to handle test materials. The plan should address not only the physical security of printed exam booklets but also the safeguarding of the College Board’s network, servers, storage and data, the consultant recommended.
The security issues, the consultant concluded, presented a “medium” risk to the College Board. A “medium” risk was defined as having “a potential material impact...on program success that needs to be addressed proactively at this time.”
Risks considered “high” included the issues related to the schedule and budget for redesigning the test.
The report also recommended appointing a manager to protect the new exam. It suggested the College Board “explicitly assign a Security Lead to the Program with overall responsibility for all aspects of security related to the Assessment Redesign Program and the redesigned assessments.” Officials should “clearly document the responsibilities and mandate of this role.”
It’s unclear whether the College Board named a security chief or what steps, if any, it took to protect exam materials stored digitally. In a statement, spokeswoman Riley said the consultant later assessed how the College Board responded to the recommendations and determined “we made significant progress in every area, including our security policies and procedures.”
A spokesman for consultant Gartner declined to comment about its findings or recommendations.
An internal email shows that security concerns about access to test items remained months after the consultant’s October 2013 report.
In a June 16, 2014 email to a College Board official, test development team member Daming Zhu wrote that he and his colleagues were concerned that too many people inside College Board had “access to such secure data.” Zhu helped manage the digital repository of items being developed for the new SAT. The subject line of his email reads, “Secure Item/Test Information Sharing.”
Zhu sent the email to Sherral Miller, vice president of assessment design and development for the College Board.
Zhu’s worries were wide-ranging. “We are very concerned that IT is duplicating key information of our items and test in a parallel system,” he wrote. Another College Board unit also wanted exam information, Zhu explained. He told Miller that “storing such important secure test data in more than one place...is hard for us to understand.”
Zhu said the item bank team “believes that we ought to limit the access to the secure item/test data, especially the [answer] keys, to the minimum possible,” according to the email.
“Nowadays system hacking is not a surprise anymore,” Zhu wrote. “Expanding the sources for secure test data will not help the security of test information of high stake programs such as SAT…”
Zhu said the team “would appreciate some policies/guidelines from the department or division upper management.”
Miller replied the same day, June 16. “You are right to be leery of them at this time,” she said of the requests Zhu mentioned. Miller said she would be discussing the matter with her boss “and will then get back to you so we can set guidelines and policy.”
College Board spokeswoman Riley said the “reference to several internal inquiries to access test item information” in Zhu’s email were “potential scenarios that never manifested.” Riley said Zhu asked Miller “to confirm College Board’s policies and guidelines in order to respond to these inquiries, which Dr. Miller subsequently provided.”
Riley declined to share the guidelines, or to say how many College Board employees and contractors had access to the test items.
Testing specialists said damage from the current breach can be limited so long as the items aren’t widely distributed. They cautioned, however, that major breaches have the potential to jeopardize the very existence of a standardized exam.
“A test like the SAT … is so important and so consequential and is taken by people all over the world,” Wollack said. The “College Board, especially for this program, needs to be leading the industry in terms of security.”
Among the red flags that consultant Gartner Inc raised in an October 2013 report: The not-for-profit College Board needed to better protect the material being developed for the new SAT.
Plans to secure the new test from leaks or theft had “not been developed” by the organization, the consultancy wrote in the report, reviewed by Reuters. At risk were thousands of items, or questions, that were being prepared for the redesigned SAT.
In 2014, employees at the New York-based College Board also raised concerns, arguing for limits on who could access items and answer keys for the revamped SAT, an email shows.
They were right to be worried.
Just months after the College Board unveiled the new SAT this March, a person with access to material for upcoming versions of the redesigned exam provided Reuters with hundreds of confidential test items. The questions and answers include 21 reading passages – each with about a dozen questions – and about 160 math problems.
Reuters doesn’t know how widely the items have circulated. The news agency has no evidence that the material has fallen into the hands of what the College Board calls “bad actors” – groups that the organization says “will lie, cheat and steal for personal gain.” But independent testing specialists briefed on the matter said the breach represents one of the most serious security lapses that’s come to light in the history of college-admissions testing.
To ensure the materials were authentic, Reuters provided copies to the College Board. In a subsequent letter to the news agency, an attorney for the College Board said publishing any of the items would have a dire impact, “destroying their value, rendering them unusable, and inflicting other injuries on the College Board and test takers.”
College Board spokeswoman Sandra Riley said in a statement that the organization was moving to contain any damage from the leak. The College Board is “taking the test forms with stolen content off of the SAT administration schedule while we continue to monitor and analyze the situation,” she said.
Riley declined to say whether those steps would involve cancelling or delaying upcoming tests. The next sitting of the SAT is October 1.
The breach is “a serious criminal matter,” Riley wrote. “A thorough investigation is ongoing, therefore our comments must be limited.” The College Board did not grant requests for interviews with CEO Coleman and other employees named in this article.
The SAT is used by U.S. universities to help evaluate more than a million college applicants a year, and so a major security lapse could cause havoc for admissions officers and students alike.
That College Board security was breached is “a problem of a massive level,” one that could “put into question the credibility of the exam,” said Neal Kingston, who heads the Achievement and Assessment Institute at the University of Kansas.
If unscrupulous test-preparation centers were to obtain the items, the impact on the SAT would be “devastating,” said James Wollack, director of the Center for Placement Testing at the University of Wisconsin.
“Everyone will pull out all stops to try to compromise this test,” Wollack said. That items for upcoming exams have leaked is “very alarming, very concerning indeed.”
It’s too soon to know what damage the leak could cause. Harm can be minimized if the items aren’t widely distributed. But Wollack and Kingston noted that the latest incident is more serious than the widespread SAT cheating reported in East Asia during the past few years.
As Reuters reported in March, the College Board has been unable to prevent foreign test-preparation operators from giving their clients an advance look at exam questions. Those problems were primarily a result of the organization’s reuse of previously administered exams. This breakdown involves test items that have never been given.
The materials provided to Reuters contain a wealth of items for upcoming tests: reading passages drawn from novels, historical documents, scientific journals, essays and other texts, each accompanied by questions. Also among the materials were math problems involving geometry and quadratic equations.
The security breach comes as the College Board already faces pressure from U.S. universities to better protect its marquee test.
The Reuters reports earlier this year detailed how an East Asian industry is exploiting the College Board’s routine practice of recycling items from past tests. Cram schools drill their students on questions harvested from previous tests, conferring an enormous advantage over students who see the items for the first time when the exam is given.
In a statement at the time, the College Board pledged to do more to protect the exam. University admissions officers, however, continue to voice concerns to College Board officials about reuse of exams. If the College Board can’t keep test material secure, schools are left with the impossible task of determining whether an applicant saw questions before taking the exam and therefore gained an unfair edge.
UNEXPLAINED LEAKS
Questions about security inside the College Board emerged earlier this year. Internal documents reviewed by this news agency showed that material for past exams had been “compromised,” a term the College Board uses to describe tests whose contents have leaked outside the organization.
In February, Reuters asked the College Board how it went about protecting exam materials. Spokesman Zach Goldberg described the organization’s use of lock boxes to help prevent the theft of SAT booklets sent to international testing locations.
But lock boxes, he acknowledged, “would not preclude a leak that originated earlier in the content development and distribution cycle.”
The question related to a confidential June 2013 PowerPoint presentation the College Board prepared after a major security breach in South Korea. After local test-prep operators obtained the test in advance, the College Board canceled the May 2013 sitting in South Korea. The PowerPoint also noted a type of breach that differed from the exploitation of recycled tests: outright leaks of new test booklets.
According to the PowerPoint, SAT tests on specialized subjects – two in Mathematics Level II and one in biology – had been compromised. These were “new forms” – that is, tests that had never been administered in the United States or abroad.
The PowerPoint gave no explanation for how those subject tests leaked. The College Board has cautioned that “cartel-like companies” in China and other countries “will stop at nothing to enrich themselves.”
EXAM INSECURITY
Historically, the development of questions to be used on the SAT was primarily handled by the non-profit Educational Testing Service, or ETS. Based in Princeton, New Jersey, ETS also oversees security for the College Board when exams are administered.
After Coleman took over, however, the College Board began handling many aspects of the SAT redesign in-house rather than through contractor ETS, documents reviewed by Reuters show. The College Board also began managing the “Item Bank,” the repository of questions created for the SAT. In the past, that responsibility had belonged to ETS.
Taking on these roles gave the College Board greater control over the material, internal documents show. Developing a single version of the SAT typically takes about 18 to 30 months and costs about $1 million.
The College Board knew that assuming those roles presented challenges.
As its staff worked on the new exam in 2013, the outside consultant was brought in to evaluate the risks the organization faced as it worked to finish the redesign.
In an internal report from October 2013 labeled “FINAL DRAFT,” Gartner advised the College Board to “develop and document a program security plan” to handle test materials. The plan should address not only the physical security of printed exam booklets but also the safeguarding of the College Board’s network, servers, storage and data, the consultant recommended.
The security issues, the consultant concluded, presented a “medium” risk to the College Board. A “medium” risk was defined as having “a potential material impact...on program success that needs to be addressed proactively at this time.”
Risks considered “high” included the issues related to the schedule and budget for redesigning the test.
The report also recommended appointing a manager to protect the new exam. It suggested the College Board “explicitly assign a Security Lead to the Program with overall responsibility for all aspects of security related to the Assessment Redesign Program and the redesigned assessments.” Officials should “clearly document the responsibilities and mandate of this role.”
It’s unclear whether the College Board named a security chief or what steps, if any, it took to protect exam materials stored digitally. In a statement, spokeswoman Riley said the consultant later assessed how the College Board responded to the recommendations and determined “we made significant progress in every area, including our security policies and procedures.”
A spokesman for consultant Gartner declined to comment about its findings or recommendations.
An internal email shows that security concerns about access to test items remained months after the consultant’s October 2013 report.
In a June 16, 2014 email to a College Board official, test development team member Daming Zhu wrote that he and his colleagues were concerned that too many people inside College Board had “access to such secure data.” Zhu helped manage the digital repository of items being developed for the new SAT. The subject line of his email reads, “Secure Item/Test Information Sharing.”
Zhu sent the email to Sherral Miller, vice president of assessment design and development for the College Board.
Zhu’s worries were wide-ranging. “We are very concerned that IT is duplicating key information of our items and test in a parallel system,” he wrote. Another College Board unit also wanted exam information, Zhu explained. He told Miller that “storing such important secure test data in more than one place...is hard for us to understand.”
Zhu said the item bank team “believes that we ought to limit the access to the secure item/test data, especially the [answer] keys, to the minimum possible,” according to the email.
“Nowadays system hacking is not a surprise anymore,” Zhu wrote. “Expanding the sources for secure test data will not help the security of test information of high stake programs such as SAT…”
Zhu said the team “would appreciate some policies/guidelines from the department or division upper management.”
Miller replied the same day, June 16. “You are right to be leery of them at this time,” she said of the requests Zhu mentioned. Miller said she would be discussing the matter with her boss “and will then get back to you so we can set guidelines and policy.”
College Board spokeswoman Riley said the “reference to several internal inquiries to access test item information” in Zhu’s email were “potential scenarios that never manifested.” Riley said Zhu asked Miller “to confirm College Board’s policies and guidelines in order to respond to these inquiries, which Dr. Miller subsequently provided.”
Riley declined to share the guidelines, or to say how many College Board employees and contractors had access to the test items.
Testing specialists said damage from the current breach can be limited so long as the items aren’t widely distributed. They cautioned, however, that major breaches have the potential to jeopardize the very existence of a standardized exam.
“A test like the SAT … is so important and so consequential and is taken by people all over the world,” Wollack said. The “College Board, especially for this program, needs to be leading the industry in terms of security.”
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