Julia Conley at Common Dreams writes—US Government Lists Non-Violent 'Valve Turner' Climate Activists as Threat on Par With Murderous Neo-Nazis:
Climate action advocates on Monday condemned reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has placed non-violent environmental activists on a list of domestic terrorists alongside white supremacists and mass murderers.
Citingdocuments received by the non-profit group Property of the People, The Guardian reports how the Climate Direct Action members who shut off tar sands pipeline operations in an act of civil disobedience in October 2016, were called "suspected environmental rights extremists" by DHS.
In the document, the department detailed domestic terror threats and said "racial and environmentally themed ideologies" are the biggest threats facing Americans today.
The file and its equal treatment of climate campaigners and violent racists was called "highly misleading" by Brennan Center for Justice fellow Mike German, a former FBI agent.
"There is little evidence that environmentalists have engaged in the types of deadly violence that would meet the statutory definition of domestic terrorism, as codified by Congress," German told The Guardian.
Critics on social media denounced the federal government's apparent effort to "criminalize and suppress dissent."
In the largest action of its kind, campaigners Michael Foster, Ken Ward, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Leonard Higgins shut down the delivery of about 15% of U.S. crude oil imports for several hours in October 2016 when they turned the valves on five pipelines across the country which carry the oil from Canadian tar sands.
The group, known as the Valve Turners, were prepared to be arrested for their action, and were charged with felony conspiracy. Charges for three of them have since been dropped; Foster, who turned a valve in North Dakota, spent six months in jail and is now serving probation. During his trial, prosecutors compared Foster to the Unabomber and the 9/11 attackers. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though … betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope.”
~~Steven Deitz, Dracula (1996)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2016—Republicans to Jeb! Bush: You're a loser. Just don't drag Marco Rubio down with you:
You could almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn't Jeb! Bush. His presidential campaign is so pathetic that establishment Republicans are telling him to get out of the way of Marco Rubio.
On Monday, the Right to Rise PAC hit the early state airwaves with an ad skewering Bush’s former protégé for flipping on immigration—an issue on which he and Bush actually agree. And on Tuesday, the group unleashed a second ad that portrayed Rubio as a flip-flopper and mocked his heeled boots.
These attacks aim to clear some space for Bush in the establishment lane of this sprawling primary fight with the Iowa caucuses just weeks away. But to those who no longer believe Bush can win the Republican nomination, his super PAC, with tens of millions of dollars left to spend, looks more like a wrecking ball meant to lay waste to the one contender many Bush donors see as the last remaining mainstream alternative to Trump or Cruz.
"This is something Jeb Bush has to decide. Does he want his legacy to be that he elected Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?" said Stuart Stevens, the GOP strategist who ran Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. "He can't control that super PAC but he ought to call on the super PAC to stop and stop attacking people with whom he mostly agrees."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Trump spent the weekend lying, and Greg Dworkin spent Monday rounding those lies up. Is the model for the 2020 election actually 1856? It’s time for the worst thing about the primaries to heat up. AOC better learn DC works! What? She did? Hypocrite!
RadioPublic|LibSyn|YouTube|Patreon|Square Cash (Share code: Send $5, get $5!)