I. EPA Runs Amok
#Despite the coronavirus outbreak, the Trump administration speeds up wall construction on the US-Mexico border.
#The Environmental Protection Agency stops enforcing environmental regulations for polluting industries during the pandemic.
#Trump's EPA wants to allow more than fine-particulate air pollution even though it appears to be a key contributor to mortality from COVID -19.
#The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program and partners win a major court victory against the Keystone XL pipeline and other oil and gas pipelines regarding crossings of rivers, streams, and wetlands.
#In revising the Waters of the United States rule, the EPA drastically narrows the scope of the Clean Water Act.
#The EPA also loosens regulations on mercury and other toxic emissions by coal-fired power plants in a way that will make it difficult to tighten them in the future.
#The Sierra Club and other organizations challenge the EPA's plan to allow dirty industrial plants in Texas to pollute neighboring communities during startups, shutdowns, and plant malfunctions.
#The Trump administration rolls back Obama-era clean-car standards, allowing cars and trucks to emit 900 million tons of greenhouse gases over their lifetimes. The Sierra Club and others join states in challenging this rollback.
#Amid an enormous oil glut, Trump orders the Department of Energy to buy 30 million barrels of domestic crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Source: Paul Rauber, "Trump Watch: EPA Runs Amok," Sierra, July/August 2020.)
II. Giving Israel Everything It Wants
"Donald Trump's 'deal of the century' between Israel and Palestine essentially gives Israel's far right coalition government everything it wanted. This Middle East 'peace' deal allows Israel to annex vast stretches of the Palestinian West Bank (which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967) to Israel, including all of the illegal Jewish-only settlements in areas colonized by Israeli settlers as well as Arab East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley. Palestinians would be granted limited autonomy in a series of largely urban enclaves surrounded by the expanded borders of Israel still controlling Palestinian borders,immigration, security, airspace, aquifers and the electromagnetic spectrum. [1]
Indeed, Trump's proposal for Israel and Palestine bears remarkable resemblance to the notorious Bantustan system of apartheid South Africa.
The United Nations Charter and UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which previous U.S. administrations insisted were to the basis of a peace settlement -- explicitly forbid any nation from expanding its territory by military force. But Trump's proposal allows Israel to do just that.
In addition, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits any occupying power from transferring its civilian population onto territories seized by military force. United Nations Security Council resolutions 446 and 2234 have explicitly recognized the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention to Israeli-occupied territories, as does a landmark 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice. Trump now insists that Israel's illegal occupation of these territories is, in fact, legal."
"Trump's plan essential gives the green light to unilateral Israeli annexation of large swathes of occupied territory, which would bring worldwide condemnation, but the Trump administration has promised to veto any initiatives at the United Nations to criticize such a flagrant violation of the UN Charter."
III. Cops Released from Federal Oversight
"The civil unrest rocking the country in the wake of George Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has many catalysts. Among the more immediate is President Donald Trump and his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who freed local police departments from federal oversight and signaled that police brutality was no longer a problem that the federal government had an interest in solving. For police officers and departments with histories of terrorizing people rather than building relationships with communities they are supposed to protect, that message was heard loud and clear. [2]
After the police officers who beat Rodney King in March 1991 in Los Angeles were acquitted,leading to the Los Angeles riots, Congress took action by giving the federal government oversight of local police departments. As 'Mother Jones' reported in 2017, on the 25th anniversary of those riots: 'Since then, the Justice Department has launched 70 investigations into state and local law enforcement agencies and has negotiated 40 reform agreements, half of which are court-enforced consent decrees. The Obama administration was particularly active with this policy, enforcing 14 consent decrees for troubled police agencies,from Ferguson,Missouri,to Baltimore' "
"When Trump finally fired Sessions in November 2018,the outgoing attorney general had one final trick up his sleeve. Before leaving the Justice Department, he quietly signed a memorandum in one of his last official acts, all but ending the department's oversight of police departments. The memorandum made the Trump administration's de facto policy against new consent decrees official, while extending the same hands-off policy to other areas of federal enforcement involving state responsibilities in areas like pollution and voting rights. Experts predicted that even departments already under current federal oversight might once again act with impunity because the memo undercut the authority of civil rights attorneys to enforce them. Sessions' memo set policy, but it also sent a message to police departments that they would no longer have to answer to the federal government -- not even when officer shootings draw national attention.
This message was sent not just in order to pare back enforcement but in the states' rights language framing the 7-page document that has historically signaled support for state repression over the rights of black people. Sessions' memo also takes pains to emphasize that states are 'sovereign' with 'special and protected roles' and that, when investigating them, the Justice Department must afford states the 'respect and comity deserving of a separate sovereign.'
Christy Lopez, who oversaw investigations by the department into local police agencies during the Obama administration, predicted that: "As has so often been the case with the administration, we will have to look to the courts, to local governments and to grass-roots political protest, and pressure to protect our civil rights from police abuse. Because, as the Sessions' memo confirms, this Justice Department has no intention of letting its civil rights division protect us from abuse by the state."
Footnotes:
[1] Article written by Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco: https:/truthout.org/articles.trumps-israel-palestine-peace-plan-violates-international- law.
[2] Pema Levy, "Trump and Sessions Released Cops From Federal Oversight. Now We See the Results," Crime and Justice, June 2, 2020.
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