Trump Demands Poem on Statue of Liberty Be Revised to Exclude Shithole Countries
By Andy Borowitz, January 11, 2018
Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump demanded on Thursday that the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty be revised immediately to exclude nations he considered “shithole countries.”
Speaking to reporters, Trump said that the poem as it currently stands “is basically an open invitation that says, like, if you come from a shithole country, welcome aboard.”
“I don’t know the entire poem, but it’s something like ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your yadda yadda yadda,’ ” he said. “We could keep all that but then put in, right at the end, in big letters, maybe, ‘except if you’re from a shithole country.’ ”
“I think if a boat from a shithole country came and saw that poem with those words at the end, they would turn around and go right back to wherever they came from,” he said.
Shortly after Trump made his remarks about “shithole” countries, representatives of the countries he designated as such released a joint response.
“We do not understand President Trump’s aversion to so-called ‘shithole countries,’ since he is doing his best to turn the United States into one,” the statement read.
The Trump Admin’s Misleading Justifications for Repealing This Oil Train Safety Rule
By Justin Mikulka • Sunday, December 10, 2017 – 05:02
Image: Justin Mikulka
On December 4, the Department of Transportation (DOT) announced it would repeal a critical safety regulation for modern braking systems on the same oil trains which have derailed, spilled oil, caught fire, exploded, and even killed dozens in multiple high profile accidents in recent years.
The regulation, released by the DOT‘s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in mid 2015, required that oil trains have modern electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) braking systems by 2021. However, in the latest iteration of its review process for this rule, the DOT is now doing an about-face.
Why would the DOT, as the regulator responsible for protecting 25 million people who live along railroad tracks carrying oil trains, reverse course on a technology hailed as “the greatest safety improvement” for modern trains? Let’s take a look at corporate influence on the regulatory process.
In 2015, shortly after these regulations were announced, Matthew Rose, CEO of oil-by-rail leader BNSF, stated that the rail industry would not accept the requirement for ECP brakes, telling an audience at the annual Energy Information Administration conference that “the only thing we don’t like about [the new regulation] is the electronic braking” and “this rule will have to be changed in the future.”
Two years later, Rose appears to have been granted his wish.
The Congressional Cop Out
The first stop for CEOs who don’t like regulations is their friends in Congress. After an initial failed attempt to get the Senate to repeal the ECP brake requirement on oil trains, the groundwork to repeal this regulation was laid in the research requirements in the FAST Act of 2015. The FAST Act was a massive transportation bill, and within its thousands of pages, it said this:
The Secretary [of Transportation] shall enter into an agreement with the National Academy of Sciences to–
(A) complete testing of ECP brake systems during emergency braking application, including more than one scenario involving the uncoupling of a train with 70 or more DOT-117 specification or DOT-117R specification tank cars
Testing framework.–In completing the testing under paragraph (1), the National Academy of Sciences and each contractor described in paragraph (2) shall ensure that the testing objectively, accurately, and reliably measures the performance of ECP brake systems relative to other braking technologies or systems, such as distributed power and 2-way end-of-train devices. [Emphasis added.]
While this sounds like a good starting point, it fails to acknowledge the large body of existing research which has already answered these questions. ECP brakes perform much better than other, older braking systems.
It’s only recently that the railroads and their lobbyists at the AAR have changed their minds. However, that doesn’t change the existing science that shows ECP brakes are superior — and safer.
However, even pushing aside previous studies — such as the 2006 FRA funded one which calls ECP brakes “a tested technology that offers major benefits in freight train handling, car maintenance, fuel savings, and network capacity” which “could significantly enhance rail safety and efficiency” — perhaps the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) could provide valuable confirmation of these safety benefits with its own study.
Perhaps performing yet another review of ECP brakes would convince industry and its lobbyists of this technology’s value?
But rather than having the DOT base its final decision to require ECP brakes on a larger body of existing evidence, Congress called on the NAS to perform a single study to determine if ECP brakes were safer than the brakes currently in use on oil trains. That is already a highly suspect approach, but one which provides the appearance of integrity.
So, what did the NAS conclude?
It wouldn’t do the study, because, as the academy said in a March 2016 letter to the FRA, it would be too expensive. This is the DOT’s explanation:
“In the letter, NAS referred to a preliminary cost estimate of more than $100 million provided by the Association of American Railroads (AAR) to perform the testing … Additionally, NAS believed it was ‘highly unlikely’ that the schedule [for performing the study] … could be met.”
The one and only study that would determine the fate of this regulation was never performed, but make note of who provided the extremely high cost estimate: the AAR. This is the same trade group whose CEO said, “Industry research and years of experimenting in real-world operating environments show ECP brakes are unreliable and have a minimal safety impact over conventional braking systems currently in place.”
In other words, lobbyists for the railroad industry were charged with estimating the cost of conducting a test to evaluate a safety technology they were on record of opposing and their price tag was so high that the testing never happened. They also apparently told the NAS that the testing couldn’t meet the required timeline. Coincidence?
Furthermore, the only facility where the testing apparently could have taken place is run by an organization fully funded by the AAR.
However, the DOT had a solution for this apparent crisis. First, they determined testing was impossible “because the specific party that DOT was required to contract with declined to do the testing as described in the FAST Act and such testing was not otherwise feasible from both a budgetary and time perspective.”
Next, the agency needed a backup plan which made it appear as if the congressionally mandated study were completed and which could also use the National Academy of Sciences to verify that plan.
As an alternative, DOT proposed to “meet the intent of the FAST Act by contracting with NAS to review and monitor a test plan” that was intended to accomplish the same goal as the study that would now not happen.
Everything was in place to “meet the intent” of the FAST Act although the intent was starting to become suspect.
National Academy of Sciences Does Not Live Up to Its Name
When the DOT announced the repeal of the ECP brake regulation, it gave the NAS plenty of credit for the decision, saying in its press release:
“The National Academy of Sciences determined it was unable to make a conclusive statement regarding the emergency performance of ECP brakes relative to other braking systems.”
However, the NAS did not actually test the performance of ECP brakes, calling into question the robustness of this statement. However, the academy was going to “review and monitor a test plan,” which it did.
While it is technically accurate to say that the NAS was unable “to make a conclusive statement” on this issue, the reality is that the academy wasn’t asked to do that. How do we know? Because the NAS was very clear about what it was not doing now that its scientists wouldn’t be studying ECP braking performance against other systems.
In the NAS report provided to the DOT as part of the backup plan, the academy said:
“This report is not intended to be a comprehensive consideration of the performance of ECP brakes relative to that of other braking systems, nor is it intended to analyze the maximum capabilities of a brake system in dissipating energy during an emergency braking event and reducing the incidence and severity of spills from derailments.”
What the NAS did instead was examine the DOT’s own research and testing on ECP braking and conclude it was lacking in several areas.
The DOT statement makes it appear that NAS performed original research or reviewed the breadth of existing research and was unable to reach a conclusion. Neither of those are true.
And in an NAS letter, Louis J. Lanzerotti, the chair of the NAScommittee giving its blessing to all this, went out of his way to clarify what the committee was not doing in a slide titled, “Aspects Outside of the Statement of Task.”
Now, remember what the DOT said about the national academy’s role in the decision to repeal the regulation.
Yet the chair of the NAS committee charged with this task specifically said a conclusion on the emergency performance of ECP brakes versus other braking systems was outside its purview. This makes the DOT statement seem more than a bit misleading. But it worked as major media outlets made the mistake of believing the DOT and so the public got messages like this from the media:
However, Lanzerotti’s presentation makes clear the NAS did not consider costs or benefits. Yet the academy is credited with a study supposedly making such a conclusion about costs and benefits.
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Theoretically, the regulators are supposed to be the ones keeping the public safe. But what happens when the system has been corrupted and they no longer play that role?
In theory, that is why we have the Government Accountability Office (GAO). In addition to the NAS “study,” the DOT is now relying heavily on a 2016 GAO audit to back up the safety rule’s repeal (which coincidentally was ripped apart by the agency in its initial comments on the audit).
What exactly did the GAO find? Not much. It said that the DOT could benefit from “additional data and transparency.” This GAO conclusion has been used to attack the regulation by a member of the Senate and the CEO of the AAR, and was repeated in a trade publication.
However, this is where the situation gets a bit shady. Was the DOT intentionally withholding data to try to influence the regulation? No.
The issue the GAO found was that the rail industry refused to share the data it had on ECP braking with the DOT. And yet the GAO turned a failure by the rail industry into a criticism of the DOT, even going as far as putting this in the title of its audit.
Why would the industry fail to share this information? Perhaps the reason is that its leaders know the data doesn’t help them.
The other major problem with the GAO report is that it accepted without question industry estimates for many other parts of the analysis while at the same time questioning DOT’s methods. This refusal to question any of industry’s claims is something DOT pointed out in its own highly critical comments included in the final report.
DOT asserts that the agency even provided information challenging industry claims on ECP brakes, but the GAO refused to include this information in the audit’s final report, which was then touted by critics of the regulation as reason to repeal it.
And what was the result of all this? The industry got exactly what it wanted. Under the Trump administration, the DOT now cited the accountability office’s work (of which it had been previously quite critical) as one of the deciding factors for rolling back the safety regulation.
Reality vs. Repeal
As we have been documenting here at DeSmog, there is a wealth of research and real world experience showing ECP brakes as a superior train technology. Much of that information is available in our reports from 2017, 2015, and 2014. A former head of the FRA even said ECP braking “offers a quantum improvement in rail safety.”
At a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) hearing in April of 2014, Richard Connor, safety specialist for the FRA, which is part of DOT, gave a presentation comparing the conventional air brake system used on most freight trains to the ECP brakes.
“I’m not sure with the audience if you all understand how the current air brake systems on our freight trains out there operate today, but it’s basically 19th century technology,” said Connor.
Connor went on to describe the performance of traditional brakes in an emergency situation as “painfully slow” when compared to ECP braking response times.
“One of the biggest advantages of ECP is that signal to apply your brakes … is going at the speed of light … it’s a much quicker signal,” he said.
That was a safety specialist for the Department of Transportation. But three years later, somehow the DOT and FRA have decided that going with “19th century technology” is the best approach.
What has changed from two years ago when the FRA told DeSmog that these brakes “could significantly enhance rail safety and efficiency”?
John Risch has some insight into that. Risch has 40 years of experience in the rail industry and is a national legislative director for SMART–TD, a labor union that represents employees on every Class I railroad, Amtrak, and on many regional and shortline railroads. As recently as 2009, Risch was operating trains hauling coal.
Commenting on the recent repeal, Risch said:
“Clearly the railroad industry’s overwhelming influence over the Trump administration is paying off in repealing the ECP brake rule. ECP brakes are the safest, most advanced braking systems in the world and without some government requirement we will continue to use our current, outdated 150 year old braking technology for the foreseeable future.”
[Editor: Our times are increasingly dangerous. Every day, the “Trump Show” entertains, but this joke is deadly serious, dividing us, standing apart from world order, threatening the health and safety of our nation, tearing down environmental protections, and modeling self glorification and meanness for our children. Watch Tom Steyer’s video, and sign the petition at NeedToImpeach.com. – RS]
Hartnett-White, as previously reported by DeSmog, is a prominent climate change denier and former Chairman and Commissioner of the Texas Council on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) under then-Texas Governor Rick Perry. Perry now heads up the U.S. Department of Energy and is reported to have advocated for her to run CEQ. She is also an outspoken advocate of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and of exporting oil and gas to the global market.
Long seen as the presumptive front-runner to take the CEQ role, Hartnett-White also worked on President Trump’s presidential campaign on his Economic Advisory Team. And her name was once floated to head up the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well, currently led by Scott Pruitt.
The head of the CEQ coordinates interagency science, climate, and environmental policy, and is tasked to oversee things like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process and agencies’ compliance with that law. The CEQ as an entity itself was actually a creation of NEPA, mandated by that law.
Though CEQ oversees the NEPA process, it remains unclear how seriously Hartnett-White will take the NEPA review process, for decades seen as a bedrock of U.S. environmental regulation since NEPA became law in 1970.
Hartnett-White has long positioned herself as an opponent of environmental and climate actions taken by regulatory agencies. She currently works as a fellow-in-residence at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which receives fundingfrom ExxonMobil, the Heartland Institute, Koch Industries and others. White also helped head up the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Fueling Freedom Project, which had among its stated goals to “explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels” and “end the regulation of CO2 as a pollutant.”
In September 2016 during campaign season, Politico’s Morning Energy reported that Hartnett-White was “among a small group of people who have Donald Trump’s ear on energy policy.” Hartnett-White and Stephen Moore, who also worked on Trump’s campaign, co-authored a 2016 book titled, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. The book promoted fracking and said the U.S. shale gas bounty could be worth $50 trillion, a statement which has been called false by an energy analyst who crunched the numbers.
The book also claimed that all of the net jobs gained in the U.S. between 2007-2012 can be linked to the fracking revolution, which they wrote has spawned “millions of new jobs in the energy sector.”
But according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during that time period, the number of oil and gas industry workers ranged from a low of about 140,700 jobs in 2007 to a high of 194,700 in 2012.
Not only a fracking promoter, Hartnett-White has also called carbon dioxide in the atmosphere a major benefit for society.
“No matter how many times, the President [Obama], EPA and the media rant about ‘dirty carbon pollution,’ there is no pollution about carbon itself! As a dictionary will tell you, carbon is the chemical basis of all life,” White wrote in September 2015.
“Our flesh, blood and bones are built of carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas of life on this planet, an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends. How craftily our government has masked these fundamental realities and the environmental benefits of fossil fuels!”
In a September 2016 interview with Politico, Hartnett-White advocated for the creation of a ”blue ribbon commission” on climate change, similar to the “red team-blue team” one being floated by Pruitt’s EPA. The commission, Hartnett-White told Politico, would create an “alternative scientific methodology” to the one used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She has also stated on the record that the UN has “revealed themselves” as advocating for communism.
Under the presidency of George W. Bush, someone with similarly pro-fossil fuels views also ran CEQ. Before taking over the helm at CEQ in the Bush White House, Philip Cooney served as a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute (API), which itself has a long track record of funding climate change denial.
Cooney came under a cloud of scandal and resigned when it was revealed that he had heavily edited scientific data showing a link between carbon emissions and global warming in official U.S. governmental reports.
“In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved,” reported The New York Times. “In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.”
Soon after he resigned, Cooney was hired by ExxonMobil, another key funder of climate change denial.
Harnett-White, too, has some instructive history to look back upon. In 2007, she came under fire for lack of climate and environmental action while chairing TCEQ. This motivated the watchdog group Public Citizen to create a billboard image near the TCEQ headquarters demanding to “Get White Out” and also build a website by the same name.
Public Citizen said she had not done enough to halt issues such as climate change or slow mercury and air pollution. They also stated that she had tried to erode democracy by eliminating the right to comment publicly on a proposed project unless one lived within two miles of its proposed site.
“Chairman White has failed to lead our environmental agency in the right direction. Instead of acting to curb the serious threat from global warming, the TCEQ buried its head in the sand, and determined that global warming impacts would not have to be considered in the contested case hearings for any of the coal plant permits,” Get White Out’s website said of her tenure.
The paper of record in Dallas, Texas, The Dallas Morning News, agreed with this sentiment in a July 2007 editorial written at the end of Harnett-White’s tenure at TCEQ, chiding her track-record in harsh terms.
“She has been an apologist for polluters, consistently siding with business interests instead of protecting public health,” wrote the paper. “Ms. White worked to set a low bar as she lobbied for lax ozone standards and pushed through an inadequate anti-pollution plan.”
In an example perhaps paralleling the Cooney situation most closely, during Harnett-White’s tenure at TCEQ, the agency regularly lowered the statistical data — as compared to federal EPA data — for the amount of alpha radiation traceable in drinking water in places such as Harris County, Texas.
“For years, tests performed by the Texas Department of State Health Services showed the utility provided water that exceeded the EPA legal limit for exposure to alpha radiation,” reported the broadcast news outlet KHOU, based out of Houston, in 2011. “However, the TCEQ would consistently subtract off each test’s margin of error from those results, making the actual testing results appear lower than they actually were.”
In her interview with KHOU, Hartnett-White defended TCEQ‘s actions on this issue during her tenure there.
“As memory serves me, that made incredibly good sense,” said Hartnett-White. “We did not believe the science of health effects justified EPA setting the standard where they did. I have far more trust in the vigor of the science that TCEQ assess, than I do EPA.”
As mandated by the U.S. Constitution’s “advise and consent” clause, Hartnett-White will go through a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing process, during which she will likely face questions about her past record of denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels. The Environmental Working Group says it is dismayed by the choice.
“At least Butch and Sundance had to put some effort into robbing banks and trains,” Ken Cook, EWG‘s president, said in a press statement. “If Hartnett-White joins Administrator Pruitt, polluters will stroll through the front doors of both the EPA and the White House, no questions asked, as the rampant looting of environmental and public health protection policies continues.”
