Storm Warnings: Extreme Weather Is a Product of Climate Change

Scientific American
June 28, 2011

More violent and frequent storms, once merely a prediction of climate models, are now a matter of observation.

Part 1 of a three-part series

souris-river-flood-minot-north-dakota

DROWNING: The Souris River overflowed levees in Minot, N.D., as seen here on June 23. Image: Patrick Moes/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

In North Dakota the waters kept rising. Swollen by more than a month of record rains in Saskatchewan, the Souris River topped its all time record high, set back in 1881. The floodwaters poured into Minot, North Dakota’s fourth-largest city, and spread across thousands of acres of farms and forests. More than 12,000 people were forced to evacuate. Many lost their homes to the floodwaters.

Yet the disaster unfolding in North Dakota might be bringing even bigger headlines if such extreme events hadn’t suddenly seemed more common. In this year alone massive blizzards have struck the U.S. Northeast, tornadoes have ripped through the nation, mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri have flowed over their banks, and floodwaters have covered huge swaths of Australia as well as displaced more than five million people in China and devastated Colombia. And this year’s natural disasters follow on the heels of a staggering litany of extreme weather in 2010, from record floods in Nashville, Tenn., and Pakistan, to Russia’s crippling heat wave.

These patterns have caught the attention of scientists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). They’ve been following the recent deluges’ stunning radar pictures and growing rainfall totals with concern and intense interest. Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?

Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

Extreme signals

There are two key lines of evidence. First, it’s not just that we’ve become more aware of disasters like North Dakota or last year’s Nashville flood, which caused $13 billion in damage, or the massive 2010 summer monsoon in Pakistan that killed 1,500 people and left 20 million more homeless. The data show that the number of such events is rising. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, has compiled the world’s most comprehensive database of natural disasters, reaching all the way back to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Researchers at the company, which obviously has a keen financial interest in trends that increase insurance risks, add 700 to 1,000 natural catastrophes to the database each year, explains Mark Bove, senior research meteorologist in Munich Re’s catastrophe risk management office in Princeton, N.J. The data indicate a small increase in geologic events like earthquakes since 1980 because of better reporting. But the increase in the number of climate disasters is far larger. “Our figures indicate a trend towards an increase in extreme weather events that can only be fully explained by climate change,” says Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Center: “It’s as if the weather machine had changed up a gear.

The second line of evidence comes from a nascent branch of science called climate attribution. The idea is to examine individual events like a detective investigating a crime, searching for telltale fingerprints of climate change. Those fingerprints are showing up—in the autumn floods of 2000 in England and Wales that were the worst on record, in the 2003 European heat wave that caused 14,000 deaths in France, in Hurricane Katrina—and, yes, probably even in Nashville. This doesn’t mean that the storms or hot spells wouldn’t have happened at all without climate change, but as scientists like Trenberth say, they wouldn’t have been as severe if humankind hadn’t already altered the planet’s climate.This new science is still controversial. There’s an active debate among researchers about whether the Russian heat wave bears the characteristic signature of climate change or whether it was just natural variability, for instance. Some scientists worry that trying to attribute individual events to climate change is counterproductive in the larger political debate, because it’s so easy to dismiss the claim by saying that the planet has always experienced extreme weather. And some researchers who privately are convinced of the link are reluctant to say so publicly, because global warming has become such a target of many in Congress.

But the evidence is growing for a link between the emissions of modern civilization and extreme weather events. And that has the potential to profoundly alter the perception of the threats posed by climate change. No longer is global warming an abstract concept, affecting faraway species, distant lands or generations far in the future. Instead, climate change becomes personal. Its hand can be seen in the corn crop of a Maryland farmer ruined when soaring temperatures shut down pollination or the $13 billion in damage in Nashville, with the Grand Ole Opry flooded and sodden homes reeking of rot. “All of a sudden we’re not talking about polar bears or the Maldives any more,” says Nashville-based author and environmental journalist Amanda Little. “Climate change translates into mold on my baby’s crib. We’re talking about homes and schools and churches and all the places that got hit.”

Drenched in Nashville

Indeed, the record floods in Nashville in May 2010 shows how quickly extreme weather can turn ordinary life into a nightmare. The weekend began innocuously. The forecast was a 50 percent chance of rain. Musician Eric Normand and his wife Kelly were grateful that the weather event they feared, a tornado, wasn’t anticipated. Eric’s Saturday concert in a town south of Nashville should go off without a hitch, he figured.

He was wrong. On Saturday, it rained—and rained. “It was a different kind of rain than any I had experienced in my whole life,” says Nashville resident Rich Hays. Imagine the torrent from an intense summer thunderstorm, the sort of deluge that prompts you to duck under an underpass for a few minutes until the rain stops and it’s safe to go on, Little says. It was like that, she recalls—except that on this weekend in May 2010 it didn’t stop. Riding in the bus with his fellow musicians, Normand “looked through a window at a rain-soaked canopy of green and gray,” he wrote later. Scores of cars were underwater on the roads they had just traveled. A short 14-hour bus gig turned out to be “one of the most stressful and terrifying we had ever experienced,” Normand says.

And still it rained—more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) that weekend. The water rose in Little’s basement—one foot, two feet, three feet (one meter) deep. “You get this panicky feeling that things are out of control,” she says. Over at Hays’s home, fissures appeared in the basement floor, and streams of water turned into a “full-on river,” Hays recalls. Then in the middle of night, “I heard this massive crack, almost like an explosion,” he says. The force of the water had fractured the house’s concrete foundation. He and his wife spent the rest of the night in fear that the house might collapse.

Sunday morning, Normand went out in the deluge to ask his neighbor if he knew when the power might go back on—it was then he realized that his normal world had vanished. A small creek at the bottom of the hill was now a lake one-half mile (0.8 kilometer) wide, submerging homes almost up to their second stories. “My first reaction was disbelief,” Normand says. He and his family were trapped, without power and surrounded by flooded roads. “We were just freaked out,” he recalls.

And all across the flooded city the scenes were surreal, almost hallucinatory, Little says. “There were absurdities heaped upon absurdities. Churches lifted off foundations and floating down streets. Cars floating in a herd down highways.” In her own basement her family’s belongings bobbed like debris in a pond.

By time the deluge ended, more than 13 inches (33 centimeters) of rain had fallen, as recorded at Nashville’s airport. The toll: 31 people dead, more than $3 billion in damage—and an end to the cherished perception that Nashville was safe from major weather disasters. “A community that had never been vulnerable to this incredible force of nature was literally taken by storm,” Little says.

But can the Nashville deluge, the North Dakota floods and the many other extreme weather events around the world be connected with the greenhouse gases that humans have spewed into the atmosphere? Increasingly the answer seems to be yes. Whereas it will never be possible to say that any particular event was caused by climate change, new science is teasing out both the contributions that it makes to individual events—and the increase in the odds of extreme weather occurring as a result of climate change.

Tomorrow: Part 2, the science of extreme weather.

Reporting for this story was funded by Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

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Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show

Documents obtained by Greenpeace show prominent opponent of climate change was funded by ExxonMobil, among others

John Vidal, environment editor

It is now revealed the man sold himself to the petroleum industry lobby.

Willie Soon received over $1m from oil companies including ExxonMobil, documents reveal. Photograph: Donna Williams/AP

One of the world’s most prominent scientific figures to be sceptical about climate change has admitted to being paid more than $1m in the past decade by major US oil and coal companies.

Dr Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, is known for his view that global warming and the melting of the arctic sea ice is caused by solar variation rather than human-caused CO2 emissions, and that polar bears are not primarily threatened by climate change.

But according to a Greenpeace US investigation, he has been heavily funded by coal and oil industry interests since 2001, receiving money from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Insitute and Koch Industries along with Southern, one of the world’s largest coal-burning utility companies. Since 2002, it is alleged, every new grant he has received has been from either oil or coal interests.

In addition, freedom of information documents suggest that Soon corresponded in 2003 with other prominent climate sceptics to try to weaken a major assessment of global warming being conducted by the UN’s leading climate science body, the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Soon, who had previously disclosed corporate funding he received in the 1990s, was today reportely unapologetic, telling Reuters that he agreed that he had received money from all of the groups and companies named in the report but denied that any group would have influenced his studies.

“I have never been motivated by financial reward in any of my scientific research,” he said. “I would have accepted money from Greenpeace if they had offered it to do my research.” He did not respond to a request from the Guardian to comment.

Documents provided to Greenpeace by the Smithsonian under the US Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) show that the Charles G Koch Foundation, a leading provider of funds for climate sceptic groups, gave Soon two grants totalling $175,000 (then roughly £102,000) in 2005/6 and again in 2010. In addition the American Petroleum insitute (API), which represents the US petroleum and natural gas industries, gave him multiple grants between 2001 and 2007 totalling $274,000, oil company Exxon Mobil provided $335,000 between 2005 and 2010, and Soon received other grants from coal and oil industry sources including the Mobil Foundation, the Texaco Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute.

As one of very few scientists to publish in peer-reviewed literature denying climate change, Soon is widely regarded as one of the leading sceptical voices. His scientific position and the vehemence of his views has made him a central figure in a heated political debate that has informed the US right wing and helped to undermine public trust in the science of global warming and UN negotiations.

“A campaign of climate change denial has been waged for over 20 years by big oil and big coal,” said Kert Davies, a research director at Greenpeace US. “Scientists like Dr Soon, who take fossil fuel money and pretend to be independent scientists, are pawns.”

Soon has strongly argued that the 20th century was not a uniquely extreme climatic period. His most famous work challenged the “hockey stick” graph of temperature records published by Michael Mann, which showed a relatively sharp rise in temperatures during the second half of the 20th century. A paper published with Sallie Baliunas in 2003 in the journal Climate Research which attacked the hockey stick on flimsy evidence led to a group of leading climate scientists including Mann deciding to boycott the journal. In a letter to the Guardian in February 2004, Soon wrote that the authors had been open about their sources of funding. “All sources of funding for our research were fully disclosed in our manuscript. Most of our funding came from federal agencies, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Nasa,” he wrote.

He has also questioned the health risks of mercury emissions from coal and in 2007 co-wrote a paper that down-played the idea that polar bears are threatened by human-caused climate change

The investigation is likely to embarrass Exxon, the world’s largest oil company, which for many years funded climate sceptics but in 2008 declared it would cut funds to lobby groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy. According to the documents, Exxon provided $55,000 for Soon to study Arctic climate change in 2007 and 2008, and another $76,106 for research into solar variability between 2008 and 2010.

Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said this week the company did not fund Soon last year, and that it funds hundreds of organisations to do research on climate and the environment.

Southern gave Soon $120,000 starting in 2008 to study the Sun’s relation to climate change, according to the FIA documents. Spokeswoman Stephanie Kirijan said the company has spent about $500m on funding environmental research and development ,and that it did not fund Soon last year.

In one 2003 email released to Greenpeace, that Soon sent, it is believed, to four other leading sceptics, he writes: “Clearly [the fourth assessment report] chapters may be too much for any one of us to tackle them all … But as a team, we may give it our best shot to try to anticipate and counter some of the chapters …” He adds: “I hope we can … see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report.”

In 2003 Soon said at a US senate hearing that he had “not knowingly been hired by, nor employed by, nor received grants from any organisation that had taken advocacy positions with respect to the Kyoto protocol or the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Originally at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-sceptic-willie-soon

The Guardian

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Freedom Rider: Gay Is Not the New Black

By BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Gays showing their satisfaction with New York's new marriage law.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is touted as a progressive favorite for passing a gay marriage bill, while his record on civil liberties and bread and butter issues is more like a Republican. The super-rich men that rule the political game in New York appear to find gay rights non-threatening, but insist that their favored politicians hold the line on Black and Latino concerns. “Gay rights have now usurped the progressive agenda to such an extent that the inaction on rent protections and police state malfeasance will be seen as irrelevant.”

“Marriage equality now exists in New York because enough rich people wanted it.”

On June 24, 2011, the New York state legislature passed a bill that legalized gay marriage. This legislation is indeed ground breaking, making New York one of only six states in the country which permit same sex couples to marry. Marriage equality legislation was introduced on a yearly basis and was defeated with regularity, albeit by small margins. This year the Democratically controlled Assembly supported the legislation as it had in the past. It is the Republican controlled Senate whose support was new and significant.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg were both staunch supporters of the bill. More importantly, so were the wealthy Wall Street donors who run New York politics and decide who will and won’t serve in office and under what conditions.

According to a report in the New York Times, history was made because these financial heavy hitters [5] donors made it so. They worked hand in hand with Cuomo to assure the Republicans willing to change their votes that they would be protected from opposition and not pay a political price for their actions. Marriage equality now exists in New York because enough rich people wanted it.

These same donors made certain that the state’s millionaire’s tax also made history, by disappearing. The same Democratic governor who forced wage and pension concessions from public employee unions was adamant that rich people would not pay their fair share in a time of growing budget deficits. He refused to even consider raising the income threshold and allowing the tax to exist in some form. The result is that wealthy New Yorkers now pay less in taxes than working people do.

“History was made because these financial heavy hitters donors made it so.”

The marriage equality outcome is right both morally and politically, but it is not the only item on the progressive agenda which New York legislators need to address. New York City continues its draconian practice of rounding up blacks and Latinos through marijuana arrests [6] and state legislative action which would make this misdemeanor a violation and therefore not subject to arrests, languishes. Rent regulations [7] which allow apartments to be lost to so-called “vacancy decontrol” have not been addressed, pushing more and more working people out of New York City because they cannot find affordable housing.

Cuomo, the marriage equality victor, is already being lionized as a progressive leader when he is in fact nothing of the sort. Black and Latino legislators essentially came up empty handed in this session, having nothing to give their constituents which improves their lives or brings them any measure of justice. Gay rights have now usurped the progressive agenda to such an extent that the inaction on rent protections and police state malfeasance will be seen as irrelevant.

Too many progressives shy away from the harder work of fighting the good fight against tough opponents like the hedge fund chieftains who demand that laws work for them and against working people. This is the most troubling aspect of this vote. Its success depended entirely on the largesse of people who have no interest in promoting legal and economic justice. Quite the opposite, they profit by undermining democracy and making their needs paramount and the needs of most citizens inconsequential.

“Black and Latino legislators essentially came up empty handed.”

Governor Cuomo should not be allowed to be seen as a paragon of great virtue after he spent his first legislative session acting like a Democrat in name only. The money driven politics presents clear disincentives to him or to any other governor who wants to represent the needs of most citizens. A candidate for governor in New York is not considered viable unless he or she raises a minimum of $25 million. Like the presidency, the office is for sale, and the winner is automatically beholden to the people who put him there.

Overly enthusiastic pundits are claiming that Cuomo has launched himself into front-runner status for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. In addition to being premature, the wishful thinking is based upon very little that Democrats ought to endorse. Democratic governors who attack public workers and refuse to address unjust regulations and legislation should not force amnesia upon the rest of us because of one victory.

Then again, Cuomo’s strategy of currying favor with rich people comes right out of the Obama playbook. Perhaps he will be a good presidential candidate after all.

http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [8] Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.com

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Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-gay-not-new-black

Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/gay-rights
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/rent-control
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/category/african-america/stop-and-frisk
[4] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/not_the_new_black.jpg
[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/nyregion/the-road-to-gay-marriage-in-new-york.html?_r=1
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/nyregion/push-for-marijuana-arrests-in-ny-has-side-effects.html?_r=1
[7] http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2011/06/rent-regs-framework-deal-not-winning-accolades-from-minority-lawmakers
[8] http://freedomrider.blogspot.com/
[9] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Ffreedom-rider-gay-not-new-black&linkname=Freedom%20Rider%3A%20Gay%20Is%20Not%20the%20New%20Black

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Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

Prosecutions Up, Transparency Down

By LINDA GREENE

Teresa Chambers is the luckiest whistleblower in the United States. She lost her job as the first woman chief of the U.S. Park Police after she told the media in 2004 that the department was below the number required to perform the job adequately. She sued, and in January 2011 won her case.

But her victory is a rarity in the 21st century as President Barack Obama, who as an Illinois senator was instrumental in passing legislation to protect government whistleblowers, has effectively criminalized public servants who risk their jobs to speak out and expose waste, corruption and unethical behavior among their colleagues.

When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled,” ABC News’ Megan Chuchmach and Rhonda Schwartz reported on Aug. 4, 2009.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer agreed in a May 23, 2011. “When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as ‘often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government,'” she wrote. “But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.”

Since he became president, Obama, acting under the Espionage Act, has indicted five whistleblowers who allegedly leaked sensitive government information, the New York Times reported on June 11. “In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.”

In an April 27 e-mail, Paula Dinerstein, an attorney with the Washington-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a nonprofit, public interest law firm, said whistleblower in federal law “includes one who discloses substantial and specific dangers to public health or safety.”

The most famous case is that of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an army intelligence analyst who allegedly revealed confidential government documents to Wikileaks. Before Manning had a trial or was convicted of a crime, Obama declared him guilty. “He broke the law,” the president said in April at a fundraising event in San Francisco. The Department of Defense has since charged Manning with “aiding the enemy,” a crime punishable by death.

A lesser-known case is that of Thomas Drake, a senior executive at the National Security Agency, who was indicted in 2007 for leaking top secret defense documents to a Baltimore Sun reporter. Mayer’s New Yorker article is titled “The Secret Sharer: Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?”

The effect of these cases has been to criminalize whistleblowing and dissent.

***

As chief of the U.S. Park Police, she was responsible for the safety and security of some of America’s most significant symbols of freedom — including such sites as the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge area and the area surrounding the White House.

Chambers’s troubles began in 2004, when she spoke frankly to the media, as her superiors had instructed her to do. In response to a Washington Post reporter’s question about Park Police staffing, she said her department was below the number required to perform the job adequately.

As reported in an editorial in the Jan. 11 issue of the Post, the department “had been forced to cut back on patrols beyond the Mall, she said, because of Interior Department orders requiring more officers to guard downtown monuments in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Traffic accidents … have increased on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which now often has two officers on patrol instead of the recommended four.”

Chambers was only stating the facts. According to the Post editorial, “She did not breach federal law by revealing classified information. Nor did her statements put lives at stake; if anything, her honest appraisal served to alert the public and lawmakers to real dangers.”

Chambers’s bosses in the Interior Department confiscated her gun and badge and placed her on administrative leave immediately thereafter, eventually firing her.

“That’s unfortunate,” Chambers said, “when we’re taught as little kids [to] speak up for what’s right, make sure [that] harm doesn’t fall on anyone else. When we try to do that, we find ourselves on the losing end.”

After a legal battle fought in administrative agencies and federal courts, Chambers won her case in January 2011 and was reinstated in her job. The resolution of the case was a long time coming — seven years, to be exact. But her victory was complete.

“The thorough and thoroughly convincing opinion by the Merit Systems Protection Board [MSPB] concluded that Ms. Chambers was improperly fired in a classic act of retaliation against a whistleblower,” the Post said in the editorial. “The Interior Department pointed to other infractions allegedly committed by Ms. Chambers that it said justified the disciplinary action, but the board concluded that the department probably would not have moved against the chief absent her protected whistleblowing comments to the media.”

As Chambers said, “It was so blatant that [firing me] was retaliatory, that it had happened right after I had spoken to the press, and then they drug up old incidents that had happened. Tried to convince the court that [I] was a bad employee and would have been fired or disciplined otherwise. And finally the MSPB saw through that and threw out everything not on a technicality but the fact that there was never any evidence to support those charges.”

When asked whether she thought gender discrimination played a part in her case, Chambers replied, “I believe in my heart that gender may have played a role in this. We would never be able to prove it. … There were men who had done things that were much more assertive as far as talking to the press about resource needs. A former Park Police chief [had] gone to the Washington Post with [a report of] staffing shortages. He was never so much as criticized, much less ostracized or disciplined in any way.”

***

What really made her case unique wasn’t what happened in the courtroom, but what happened outside the courtroom, Chambers said.

“We made this a very public battle,” she said. “I was under an illegal gag order and couldn’t engage in conversations and interviews about what was going on, but my husband was certainly free to exercise his First Amendment rights. He took this to the public.”

Chambers said she’ll ever know the entire impact that the Web site had. It was a place for people to point to and hopefully give them help. One of her favorite aspects were comments left by visitors. “It’s humbling to read this and realize that there are so many people out there who have been harmed,” she said.

Or that there are so many whistleblowers who tried to do the right thing but, because they didn’t have the financial means or retirement packages, attorneys that believed in them, or the physical and mental stamina needed to pursue a whistleblower case, they were unable to fight back.

The Web site has drawn over 215,000 visitors.

Of her seven-year ordeal Chambers said, “My case shows the kind of perseverance one has to have if you have a chance of prevailing. … Not many whistleblowers are going to be able to stick to it as long as we have all these years.”

***

After 21 years in policing, Chambers became chief of police in Durham, N.C., in January 1998. She went to work for the Park Police in 2002. Her husband, a retired police officer, and she both had retirement incomes, so they had time to pursue the case.

However, in a year they used up most of their retirement savings fighting for her job. If it hadn’t been for PEER working pro bono to represent her and the fact that some of her lawyers (including Bloomington’s Mick Harrison) worked for a “greatly reduced fee,” she might well have lost the case.

According to PEER attorney Dinerstein, the Chambers case results were significant.

“The case was groundbreaking legally,” she wrote in an e-mail. “First it established that federal employees are entitled to whistleblower protection for disclosing specific dangers to public health or safety, even if those dangers emanate from budget or policy decisions concerning the funding of certain government activities or programs. In Chambers’s case, she claimed that understaffing and underfunding of the Park Police was leading to specific dangers to public safety.

“The second is that even where the employee is found to have engaged in some misconduct, they cannot be punished for it if that punishment is really a pretext for retaliating against the employee for whistleblower disclosures. Once an employee is found to be a whistleblower, the agency has a heavy burden of proof to show that the action taken against the employee was not retaliation.”

The final MSPB decision implemented the law and the standards of proof the way that the whistleblower community has long advocated, Dinerstein wrote.

“The MSPB examined the record of the case in depth to see whether the charges brought against Chambers which were not directly premised on her protected whistleblowing (the only ones that could possibly stand) had strong evidence behind them. Even though the court above them had previously upheld those charges on a preponderance of the evidence standard, the board found the evidence was weak for purposes of meeting the government’s heavy burden in a whistleblower case.”

The MSPB also looked at the government’s motivation and concluded the charges would not have been brought at all if Chambers had not been a whistleblower, Dinerstein wrote.

“This left no legitimate charges against her, and she was reinstated. So the decision, while not actually changing existing law, is a model of how whistleblower cases should be analyzed.”

Linda Greene writes for the Bloomington Alternative. She can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us.

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Obama backs trillions in “painful spending cuts”

By Patrick Martin, WSWS.ORG

30 June 2011

BO: Easily one of the most accomplished demagogs in modern history.

At a press conference Wednesday, US President Barack Obama reiterated his determination to impose trillions of dollars of spending cuts on the elderly, the sick, school children and college students. He appealed to congressional Republicans to agree to a handful of minor tax increases on the wealthy to provide the fig leaf of what he called a “balanced” program of deficit reduction.

In his opening statement and on several occasions during the 70-minute appearance before media representatives, Obama embraced deficit reduction as the central priority of his administration. He described budget-cutting in the same terms as the Republicans, calling it, “part of an overall package for job growth over the long term. It’s not the only part of it, but it’s an important part of it.”

The claim that deficit reduction creates jobs is an absurdity that until recently would have found support only among the free market ideologues of the ultra-right. The practical effect of slashing federal spending will be to further contract the US economy, adding to the impact of the destruction of 535,000 jobs through state and local government budget cuts over the last two years.

The social impact of the budget cuts will be even worse: undermining and ultimately destroying social programs on which tens of millions of people depend, including health care, education, environmental protection and a secure retirement.

The scale of the cuts already agreed to in bipartisan talks led by Vice President Joseph Biden makes nonsense of Obama’s claims about “fairness” and “balance” in deficit reduction.

According to press reports in Washington, the Biden-led group has already identified between $1.6 trillion and $1.7 trillion in spending cuts over a ten-year period, two-thirds of the total demanded by congressional Republican leaders. According to the newsletter Politico, this figure “reflects considerable movement by the White House.”

The Politico account continues: “Savings are anticipated from non-health care benefits such as farm subsidies, college aid, spectrum auctions and federal worker retirement plans. Democrats have also put on the table hundreds of billions in health care-related savings, including what would be a new ‘blended’ rate to cover the federal share of Medicaid. The biggest single piece remains the 10-year savings attributed to scaling back discretionary spending governed by annual appropriations bills. It’s estimated that these reductions are close to $1.1 trillion,” an increase of $350 billion from the cuts proposed by Obama in April.

The Medicaid cuts alone, as detailed in the Washington Post, come to more than $100 billion, reducing the federal government’s share of the joint federal-state program. Medicaid pays for healthcare for the poor and the disabled, as well as nursing home care for the poor elderly. The effect of such major federal cuts would be to worsen dramatically the already perilous financial position of the 50 state governments, forcing them to cut Medicaid benefits even further or slash other state services.

While the exact Medicare cuts discussed in the Biden talks have not been disclosed, a bipartisan proposal issued Tuesday by Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman and Republican Tom Coburn is suggestive. It would cut $600 billion from Medicare by raising the age of eligibility from 65 to 67 and imposing a wide range of additional co-pays on the elderly.

From the onset of the talks on raising the debt ceiling, the Obama administration has accepted the framework set by House Speaker John Boehner, that a $2.4 trillion increase in the federal debt ceiling be accompanied by deficit reduction of the same amount.

The talks broke down temporarily last week when Democrats proposed that the balance of the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction—some $700 billion—come from military spending and tax increases. Republican negotiators walked out, demanding that all tax increases be taken off the table.

Obama met with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Monday, with no reported movement in the talks. Speaker Boehner, the top Republican in the House of Representatives, issued a statement reiterating the demand for “zero” tax increases in any budget deal. The immediate purpose of Wednesday’s press conference was to appeal to the Republicans to shift that stance.

Press coverage on the television networks and major newspaper web sites portrayed Obama’s appearance as confrontational towards the Republicans, and even “blistering” in his supposed criticism of Congress. This is a farcical distortion of the real political relationship, in which the president is on his knees before the ultra-right.

Obama repeatedly pledged his willingness to slash spending for the elderly, the poor and children, while begging the Republicans to close a few tax loopholes for the super-rich so that he could get on with the sales job of portraying the resulting agreement as one of “balance” and “equal sacrifice.”

While the budget cuts already agreed to in the Biden talks are equivalent, on a per capita basis, to the austerity plan that has provoked mass opposition in Greece, the tax increases outlined by Obama at the press conference are a drop in the bucket for the financial aristocracy that dominates America.

Obama repeatedly referred to ending tax breaks for corporate jets, but such a measure would cost CEOs only $3 billion over ten years. The other tax increases he proposed include limiting deductions for hedge fund speculators ($20 billion), ending tax subsidies for big oil companies ($72 billion), and restricting tax deductions for the highest-income households ($100 billion).

In other words, even if all these impositions on the wealthy were to be adopted—a more than unlikely event—the total would come to a little under $200 billion, less than half the amount proposed by the Democrats the week before, and less than one-tenth of the total deficit reduction package. So much for balance!

Obama never sought to justify his decision that the elderly and school children should be targeted to bear any burden at all from austerity policies, let alone explain why they should account for the bulk of the cost-cutting, while the wealthy elite pays only a token.

“We can’t get to the $4 trillion in savings that we need by just cutting the 12 percent of the budget that pays for things like medical research and education funding and food inspectors and the weather service,” Obama said. “And we can’t just do it by making seniors pay more for Medicare.”

In addition to such cuts, he suggests, “I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up a tax break that no other business enjoys. I don’t think that’s real radical.”

The language is remarkable. Obama advocates “making seniors pay more for Medicare”—a clear exercise of compulsion towards a vulnerable population—but in the most cringing fashion suggests that “it’s only fair to ask” millionaires to “give up a tax break.” There’s little question who is calling the shots here.

Nowhere in his press conference did Obama attempt to explain the source of the frenzied opposition to tax increases by the Republicans, since this would have involved an acknowledgement of the selfishness and maniac greed of the dominant social layer in American society.

Obama is just as much a political front man for these financial parasites as the Republicans. Last week his reelection campaign staged a Wall Street fundraiser, which as the New York Times noted, “raised $2.3 million, outpacing an original projection of $1.5 million.”

“Mr. Obama’s campaign set a goal of getting 400 individuals to each help raise $350,000 by year’s end,” the newspaper noted, and “early indications suggest the effort is on track, according to people involved in the campaign.”

First Obama grovels before the investment bankers and hedge fund speculators, seeking—and getting—their cash. Then he postures as the protagonist of “equal sacrifice,” demanding that billionaires forego a tax deduction, while school teachers lose their jobs, students their scholarships, and the elderly are forced to choose between paying for prescriptions and heating their homes.

All sections of the ruling elite, Democratic and Republican, conservative and liberal, understand the game that is being played. They all chuckle when Obama pretends to berate the wealthy, knowing full well where his real class loyalties lie.

Working people must develop an equally clear-eyed understanding of the class interests underlying the political fictions of the two-party system, and act accordingly.

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Created By CrankyBeagle for The Greanville Post
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