private property rights

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promote 2nd 921

see bunch of wacko RW wise use types

merri ok

marx not against it? no commie country eliminated it? wolff vs art brooks says it's profit that is problem?

see main property concept

see takings 5th cedar pts

see legal foundations pac leg

BLM "riots" vs human/civil rights} crm calls property damage violence:}:

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aha land is wealth, mine me vs we and it is class/status; pharma keeps vax from world/ poor ppl b/c proprietary IP

xian nat'l prop over HUMAN rights:

2 26

National Today

The 'Land and Liberty Conference' held on February 13-14 in Fort Worth, Texas brought together around 150 property rights activists from across ...

CFACT co-sponsors 'Land and Liberty' gathering in Texas

Around 150 property rights leaders convened in Fort Worth to discuss strategies and listen to speakers like former Trump Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Published on Feb. 16, 2026

Got story updates?Submit your updates here. ›

The 'Land and Liberty Conference' held on February 13-14 in Fort Worth, Texas brought together around 150 property rights activists from across the country. The event, co-sponsored by CFACT, featured panels, workshops, and Texas hospitality including barbecue and a rodeo. Speakers included former Trump Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Congressman Harriett Hageman, and Texas Agriculture Secretary Sid Miller.

Why it matters

The conference highlighted the growing movement of property rights advocates who are pushing back against what they see as an overreach of environmental regulations and a 'far-Left political agenda that is decidedly anti-human and anti-freedom.' The gathering aimed to reclaim the mantle of 'wise stewardship' of natural resources.

The details

The two-day conference covered topics such as energy security, financial exploitation of natural resources, reopening federal lands, and defending landowner rights. CFACT, a prominent co-sponsor, hosted a panel featuring its president Craig Rucker and communications director Marc Morano, as well as representatives from the Heartland Institute.

The 'Land and Liberty Conference' took place on February 13-14, 2026 in Fort Worth, Texas.
This was the third time in recent years the event has been held.

The players

CFACT

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) is a nonprofit organization that promotes free market environmentalism and opposes what it sees as excessive environmental regulation.

Craig Rucker

The president of CFACT.

Marc Morano

The director of communications for CFACT.

Brooke Rollins

The former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under President Trump.

Harriett Hageman

A U.S. Congressman.

Sid Miller

The Texas Secretary of Agriculture.

Got photos?Submit your photos here. ›

What they’re saying

“The Green movement has undergone a transition, one that moved from wise conservation and stewardship of the land, a position held by everyone a 100 years ago, to one that now promotes a far-Left political agenda that is decidedly anti-human and anti-freedom. We need to reclaim the mantle of 'wise stewardship' and save the environmental movement from itself.”

— Craig Rucker, President, CFACT (CFACT.org)

“I can feel the momentum building since our first gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska. President Trump's influence is clearly energizing the movement. I can't wait for next year!”

— Marc Morano, Director of Communications, CFACT (CFACT.org)

What’s next

The organizers plan to host the 'Land and Liberty Conference' again next year, building on the momentum from this year's event.

The takeaway

The 'Land and Liberty Conference' highlights the growing influence of property rights advocates who are pushing back against what they view as excessive environmental regulations and a political agenda that is 'anti-human and anti-freedom.' The conference aimed to reclaim the mantle of 'wise stewardship' of natural resources.

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omg npi

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/extremist-christians/

paul r salon

progressive policies and positions are supposed to be rooted in reality and hard evidence. But that's not always the case when it comes to the culture wars that have such an enormous impact on our politics — especially not since the unexpected evangelical embrace of Donald Trump in 2016, culminating in the "pro-life" death cult of anti-vaccine, COVID-denying religious leaders. If this development perplexed many on the left, it was less surprising to a small group of researchers who have been studying the hardcore anti-democratic theology known as dominionism that lies behind the contemporary Christian right, and its far-reaching influence over the last several decades.

One leading figure within that small group, Rachel Tabachnick, was featured in a recent webinar hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (archived on YouTube here /maxresdefault.jpg)), as part of its Religion and Repro Learning Series program, overseen by the Rev. Dr. Cari Jackson. Tabachnick's writing on dominionism can be found at Talk2Action and Political Research Associates, and she's been interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.

Her presentation sheds important light on at least three things: First of all, the vigilante element of the Texas anti-abortion law SB 8. Second, the largerpattern of disrupting or undermining governance, including the "constitutional sheriffs" movement, the installation of overtly partisan election officials and the red-state revolt against national COVID public health policies. While Donald Trump has exploited that pattern ruthlessly, he did not create it. And third, the seemingly baffling fact that an anti-democratic minority feels entitled to accuse its opponents — including democratically elected officials — of "tyranny."

Some dominionist ideas — such as the biblical penalty of death by stoning — are so extreme they can easily be dismissed as fringe, others have been foundational to the modern religious right, and still more have become increasingly influential in recent years. Those latter two categories are what we need to understand most, say both Tabachnick and Jackson.

"One of the things that struck me, as a relative newcomer," said Jackson, a former Congregationalist minister, "was that there was not sufficient understanding about the theological frames used by many individuals who are opposed to abortion." She continued, "I'm a strategist in a lot of ways, and one important strategy, I believe, must be to understand what the teachings and the theological frames are" on the other side. Which links directly to the question of what progressive activists need to do differently in this changed environment.

This failure to understand the nature of dominionism has hampered activists, not just in the realm of reproductive justice, but across an entire spectrum of political issues, both cultural and economic.Jackson discussed her own background, raised within a conservative Christian worldview.

"I was taught a very individualistic approach," she said, "taught that we shouldn't pay taxes, because doing so enabled people who were not working, and enables people whose lifestyle we don't agree with." There's nothing new about such views, but dominionism provides believers with an even stronger foundation for them.

Jackson describes her current understanding of religious faith as highly intersectional: "We believe that to understand the attacks on abortion also invites us — or even requires us — to look at attacks on voting, to look at attacks on immigrants, attacks on prison reform, attacks on equal pay and on and on," she said. "It's all of the same cloth: They are all attacks on humans flourishing. That's my language. The God of my understanding wants all of us to flourish in who we are."

the language of dominionism is strikingly different, to put it mildly. In her webinar, Tabachnick played a clip of one of the movement's leading figures, C. Peter Wagner, providing a definition:

Dominion has to do with control. Dominion has to do with rulership. Dominion has to do with authority and subduing. And it relates to society — in other words what is talked about, what the values are in heaven [that] need to be made manifest here on earth. Dominion means being the head and not the tail. Dominion means ruling as kings. It says in Revelation chapter 1:6 that "he has made us kings and priests," and check the rest of that verse, it says "for dominion." So we are kings for dominion.

Later she provided a definition from Frederick Clarkson, author of the 1997 book, "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy":

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological view, means, or timetable, Christians are called by God to exercise dominion over every aspect of society by taking control of political and cultural institutions.

Wagner, who died in 2016, is known as the founding father of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), one of the two main branches of dominionism, which grew out of the Pentecostal and charismatic traditions within evangelical Christianity. Dominionists in the other branch, known as "Christian reconstructionism," come out of conservative Calvinism, with a focus on bringing government and society under biblical law. They tend to be more circumspect, often obfuscating their true intentions and avoiding the word "theocracy" in favor of "theonomy," for example. But not Wagner, as can be seen in the title of his 2011 book, "Dominion!: Your Role in Bringing Heaven to Earth." The NAR talks constantly about taking dominion over the "seven mountains" of society: education, religion, family, business, government, arts and the media.

But it's the other branch, the Christian reconstructionists, who have excelled at strategic organizing and providing blueprints across different right-wing constituencies for almost 50 years. They are the ones Tabachnick focused most of her presentation on, specifically two key figures: Rousas John Rushdoony, the movement's master theologian, and his son-in-law Gary North, a prolific strategist, propagandist and networker who was once a staffer for Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian hero.[ayn radical indiv ~ jesus charity]

Christian reconstructionism, Tabachnick explained, is "about bringing government in all areas of life under biblical law, a continuation of the Mosaic law in the Old Testament, with some exceptions." This dispensation would include, "according to Gary North, public execution of women who have abortions and those who advise them to have an abortion."

In a recent private presentation, Frederick Clarkson asked a rhetorical question: "People have long said that there should be Christian government, but if you had one, what would it look like? What would it do? Rushdoony was the first to create a systematic theology of what Christian governance should be like, based on the Ten Commandments, and all of the judicial applications he could find in the Old Testament — including about 35 capital offenses."

But the "Handmaid's Tale"-style extremism of dominionists' ultimate vision shouldn't really be our focus, Tabachnick told Salon. "Nobody cares about the theocratic, draconian future envisioned by reconstructionists because they don't believe it will happen," she said.

What's happening right now, however, is that this ideology has had tremendous impact on more immediate politics. "Christian reconstructionism is the merger of a distinct brand of Calvinism with Austrian School economics," Tabachnick said. "In other words, it's an interpretation of the Bible grounded in property rights." The results have been far-reaching:

For more than 40 years, its prolific writers have provided the foundations and strategic blueprints for the attacks on liberation theology and the social gospel, as well as many other streams of Christianity which do not share the Reconstructionists' belief in unfettered capitalism as ordained by God and its fierce anti-statism.

The larger religious right's attack on public education, thesocial safety netand most government functions are largely grounded in the writings, strategies and tactics formulated by reconstructionist writers. Reconstructionism is not the only (and certainly not the first) source of interposition and nullification in this country. However, much of what is currently being taught today about using interposition to undermine the legitimacy of government is sourced in reconstructionism.

This idea of "interposition" comes through what's known as the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," which we'll return to below. But its significance — especially in the post-2020 Republican Party — has only recently become apparent. Reconstructionism's initial appeal was more immediately, as Tabachnick explained in the seminar:

What Rushdoony provided is a package that included attacking what these fundamentalists hated and feared most in society, often expressed in terms of "This is communist. This is socialist." But Rushdoony provided a way to sacralize these ideas, and at the same time not just tear down the old order, but provide a blueprint for the new order.

Everyone didn't have to agree on the blueprint, she said: "Rushdoony's ideas went out in bits and pieces. The Christian right leaders took what they wanted and discarded what they didn't."

"Christian reconstructionism, as articulated by Rushdoony, provided a standard by which everyone else had to measure themselves," Clarkson told Salon. "Not everyone on the Christian right agreed with Rushdoony and his fellow Reconstructionist thinkers on, for example, the contemporary application of capital crimes listed in the Old Testament. And followers were often at pains to distinguish themselves."

Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."

The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.

There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slavery and continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."

As detailed by Randall Balmer in "Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions,most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.

Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.

"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."

As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" — defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.

"Many violent anti-abortionists have justified their actions in reconstructionist teachings," she said. "One of these was Paul Hill, who studied under one of the major reconstructionist leaders and corresponded with others." Hill went on to murder Dr. John Britton, a physician who performed abortions, as well as Britton's personal bodyguard, in 1994. Hill was executed in 2003, but the reconstructionist movement sought to cast him out well before that.

"Gary North responded, after the murders had taken place, in a book called 'Lone Gunners for Jesus,'" Tabachnick said. His message to Hill was, "You're going to burn in hell, you've been excommunicated. This was because Paul Hill stepped outside the bounds of the guidelines set by the movement."

To explain this, she quoted a passage from another book by North that offered qualified support for Operation Rescue: "We need a statement that under no circumstances will Operation Rescue or any of its official representatives call for armed resistance to civil authority without public support from a lesser magistrate."

"On the basis of their belief of what the law or the word of God is, they are allowed — on the advice, on the interposition, of a lesser magistrate — to commit acts of violence," Tabachnick continued. North was seeking to control or curb anti-abortion terrorism, but without rejecting it in principle. Murdering abortion providers — or even murdering women seeking abortions — could be morally justified, with the blessing of a lesser magistrate.

This is relevant to SB 8 in Texas in at least two ways. That bill bans abortions after six weeks and is enforced not by state officials, but by deputizing private individuals to sue anyone who performs the procedure or "aids and abets" it. First of all, giving private individuals these vigilante-style rights seems a lot like making them into "lesser magistrates," however narrowly constrained.

Second, the Supreme Court's refusal to stay the law — which clearly violates the Constitution and existing precedent, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in her dissent — can be seen as an example of the doctrine in action. In more normal circumstances, the court would have stayed the law pending consideration on the merits, even if a majority of justices intended to overturn precedent. That's how common law has worked for centuries.

But biblical law isn't common law, especially as reconstructionists understand it. Under the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," Roe is not precedent but an instance of tyranny — and the justices have aduty to Godto resist it. Of course, not even Amy Coney Barrett or Clarence Thomas has said anything like that, but it's entirely consistent with their behavior — as well as with their silence, since openly making such an argument would clarify just how radicalized they have become.But adherents of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate must surely appreciate the drift in direction.

Nor is the doctrine limited to abortion cases, as already noted. Matthew Trewhella is a pastor who was a prominent leader of violence-prone wing of the anti-abortion movement in 1990s, and author of the 2013 book, "The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates," which greatly heightened its visibility.

"Trewhella is now all over radio and the internet," Tabachnick said in her webinar, "claiming to meet with state legislators and attorney generals at the moment, with the cause of fighting the 'tyranny of mask mandates' and vaccination for COVID. So you can see how this is a concept that is not just limited to abortion. It is a concept that can be used in resistance of government authority all over the country in all different kinds of ways — FEMA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management and so forth."

Trewhella isn't breaking new ground here. Clarkson's 1997 book "Eternal Hostility" describes him making similar arguments in a speech to an anti-tax group in Wisconsin. He was just one figure among many spreading the seeds of reconstructionist resistance to federal authority among militia members, "freemen" and anti-abortion activists at the time.

"This movement believes that rights come from God and not from any government," Tabachnick told Salon. "Therefore, any 'rights' that conflict with their interpretation of God's law are not actually rights. They are 'humanist' or a product of man's laws and not God's laws. This theme of 'human rights' versus inalienable rights from God has been at the center of the Christian Reconstructionist movement since its beginnings."

She pointed to "What's Wrong With Human Rights," an excerpt from a book of the same name by the Rev. T. Robert Ingram published in "The Theology of Christian Resistance," a collection edited by North. Ingram sweeps aside the Bill of Rights as "a statement of sovereign powers of states withheld from the federal authority of the Union," and turns instead to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, authored by George Masonin 1776.

The first section of the Virginia Declaration, beginning "That all Men are by Nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent Rights," is dismissed by Ingram for omitting any mention of God, as an "error of unbelief which falsifies all the rest that is said about human life." The second, beginning "That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the People; that Magistrates are their Trustees and Servants, and at all Times amenable to them," he dismisses as well: "The meaning could not be more clear, nor more opposite Biblical thought. The ruling proposition of Scripture and Christian doctrine is that 'power belongeth unto God.'" In short, there are no human rights.

The connection to the doctrine of the lesser magistrate is clear: Power comes from God, not the people. Whatever the people want is irrelevant. Whatever laws they may pass are irrelevant, too, if they go against God. "Tyranny" is whatever the Christian reconstructionist decides he doesn't like.

Elsewhere, Ingram denigrates freedom of speech and the press:

Freedom of speech and freedom of press are, in fact, applied seriously only to giving government protection to instigators of riot and rebellion, as well as those who would undermine human order by more subtle attacks on morals and customs.

As for the right to dissent, he calls it "not a lawful claim to own or to do something, which is the true right," but "a turning upside down of right and wrong, calling good evil and evil good." Similarly, there is no scriptural right to "resist authority," only that granted by the false doctrine of "human rights."

Ingram's interpretation of the Civil War is that "Yankee radicals inflamed the Northern peoples to mount the Civil War in the name of a 'human right'to be free ... if they did not destroy the whole Southern Order, they did at least dismantle its vast and efficient plantation economy." The civil rights movement, unsurprisingly, is understood as a defiance of "Tradition, law, and custom, which preserved public peace and order in the bi-racial state of the union, both North and South," and became "the target of the right to resist in the 60's, the supposedhuman rights justifying the violent means."

Tabachnick didn't dig into this text in her webinar, but it serves to illustrate her central principle: "This attack on the very concept of 'human rights' can be found throughout today's religious right."

Jackson told Salon that the most important part of Tabachnick's presentation came "when she talked about humanism and the humanistic frame, from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those who are within the dominionist camp see that as contrary to God. I read those same documents and I say, this is pointing us toward the direction that God wants for us. They look at it and see that as counter to God, because humanism from their perspective is something very contrary to God."

If we take such arguments seriously, then we understand why for dominionists there is nothing wrong with breaking any law at all, so long as "God wills it" and you have the blessing of a so-called lesser magistrate. This is the reconstructionist argument supporting a whole range of chaotic right-wing activity today, including baseless claims that the 2020 election was a fraud. After all, the fundamental reconstructionist argument is that all such democratic government is illegitimate.

"The goal of reconstructionism is to tear down the existing order and reconstruct a new society based on biblical law," Tabachnick said. "Even if we assume that this vision of a theocratic America will never come to fruition, it's important to recognize the movement's impact on the ideas, strategies and tactics of the larger religious right and its role in sacralizing the actions of other anti-statist fellow travelers.

"As I wrote almost a decade ago, the theocratic libertarianism of Christian reconstructionism has been surprisingly seductive to Tea Partiers and young libertarians— many of whom may not realize what is supposed to happen after the government is stripped of its regulatory powers."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Supreme Court Decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid May Provide Businesses New Opportunity to Challenge Regulations

On June 23, 2021, the Supreme Court decided Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a case involving a California regulation that requires employers to allow union organizers to enter their property to solicit members. In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the Court stood with property owners and held these unwanted intrusions constituted a “taking” under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts explained in his majority opinion that allowing unions to freely come onto privately held land was a violation of property owners’ constitutional rights, even if unions “only” had fleeting access to the land. But this seemingly sweeping ruling declines to extend this logic to things like regulatory inspections overseen by state workers.This should serve as a powerful reminder that a conservative court is not a panacea to bureaucratic overreach, and regulatory reform must come through legislative and executive processes. This advisory breaks down the Court’s opinion and explores how the ruling might provide grounds for challenging other regulations.

Majority Opinion

The central issue in Cedar Point Nursery was the constitutionality of a California “access regulation” that requires farm owners to allow labor union organizers to access their property in order to “solicit support for unionization.” The regulation provides that union organizers can access an employer’s property for up to three hours a day and 120 days per year. The farmers claimed the regulation amounted to the government taking their property without compensation, which is a violation of the Fifth Amendment.

The Fifth Amendment prohibits property from being “taken for public use, without just compensation.” A typical example of a taking occurs when the government uses its power of eminent domain to seize someone’s land for the purpose of building an airport or widening a road. The Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay for that land. Government regulations can also count as takings. For example, in one famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that a New York regulation requiring a landlord to install TV cables on her apartment building was a taking, since the regulation caused a “permanent physical occupation” of her property.

In Cedar Point Nursery, the Supreme Court ruled that the California access regulation is a taking because it forces farmers to give union organizers physical access to their property. The Court explained that any regulation that physically “invades” a person’s property automatically counts as a taking. The Court also stressed that “the right to exclude is ‘universally held to be a fundamental element of the property right’” in land. Since the access regulation limits the farmers’ “right to exclude” and forces them to give union organizers physical access, it takes away enough of the farmers’ property rights to require compensation under the Fifth Amendment.

How Much Should The Government Pay?

One question that Cedar Point Nursery leaves open is what courts should do if they determine that a regulation is a taking. Since the Fifth Amendment requires the government to compensate an owner for a taking, courts usually direct the government to pay the value of the land the government took. When a taking is temporary, compensation usually equals the rental value of the property while it was taken. But in cases like Cedar Point Nursery, where the government limited the farmers’ property rights without taking their property altogether, proving the appropriate amount of compensation is difficult.Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that the compensation could total as little as $50 for a union site visit. But the majority did not address this issue, leaving it to lower courts to apply different approaches.

New Path To Challenging Regulations?

The Court’s holding that some temporary physical invasions are per se takings could make it easier for businesses to challenge other regulations that give the government or others access to private property. Indeed, one commentator called the Cedar Point Nursery ruling “acrushing blow to organized labor, which often relies on workplace access to safeguard workers’ rights.” In reality, the case is less about the right to bar unions from one’s property than about the taking of one’s property without the “just compensation” demanded by the Fifth Amendment. That right to compensation could be extended to other regulations.Examples include the Occupational and Safety Health Act (“OSHA”), which requires employers to give a government inspector and employee representative (often designated by a union) access to their premises.See29 C.F.R. § 1903.3 (2021). However, the Court’s ruling identified some important caveats that could complicate efforts to challenge OSHA and other regulations.

First, the Court said that a regulation will not rise to the level of a taking unless an owner’s property is accessed multiple times. Unlike the access regulation, where union organizers entered the farmers’ property year after year, one or two instances of property access will not suffice. Second, the Court clarified that the government may always access private property in exceptional circumstances, such as “in the event of public or private necessity.” Finally, the government may require an owner to allow access to his land in exchange for some benefit, like a building permit. The Court explained that as long as the government’s access to the property has a reasonable connection to the benefit offered, the access is not a taking. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts seems to have no problem with this course of action. He wrote: “[T]he government may require property owners to cede a right of access as a condition of receiving certain benefits, without causing a taking . . . . [G]overnment health and safety inspection regimes will generally not constitute takings.” This comports with longstanding precedent upholding the government’s broad discretion to place reasonable restrictions on a business’s activity. Litigants who hope to use the Cedar Point Nurserydecision to challenge other regulations will need to explain why none of these three exceptions applies.

Businesses may have an opening to challenge certain regulations following the Cedar Point Nursery decision. Still, the exceptions in the Supreme Court’s ruling will likely limit its impact, as will the challenge of proving how much compensation the government owes.

Summer associate Micah Allred assisted in the preparation of this advisory.

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oops but liabilty shield for corps]

AFP and CoC in covid corp liability and cedar pt taking case, both major anti-union/worker safety?

...In a memo to its members last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the most powerful business lobbying group in the nation—said that legal action from workers who are infected by Covid-19 on the job is “perhaps the largest area of concern for the overall business community.”

The Chamber of Commerce “argues the sheer number of lawsuits could overwhelm businesses,” Roll Call reported.

“Businesses say they keep their workplaces safe,” Roll Call noted, “but the memo indicates that major corporations privately acknowledge that many so-called essential employees will get sick or die.”

Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed organization, is also urging lawmakers to protect corporations from responsibility for exposing their workers to the coronavirus.

As Common Dreams reported last week, theOccupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been flooded with thousands of complaints from workers in recent weeks accusing employers of violating federal coronavirus guidelines and failing to provide adequate protective equipment.

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a series of tweets last week that “the whole point of making employers liable for risking the lives of their staff is to prevent them from exposing their staff to undue risk.”

“Businesses are asking for the right to expose their workers to fatal risks with no consequences. It’s bad economics and bad policy,”said Wolfers. “If this tweet sounds to you at all anti-business, let me be clear: I am absolutely against businesses profiting by exposing their workers to unconscionable risks of death.”...

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521 raw an

Some members of a rural Wisconsin community wanted to demonstrate a commitment to inclusion during the racial protests last year, but the debate over how to express that has ripped the town apart.

Older white conservatives in Marathon County, whose 135,000 residents are 91 percent white and backed Donald Trump by more than 56 percent in each election, objected to naming theresolution "No Place for Hate," which they found too inflammatory, and the county board's executive committee shot down "A Community For All" last week with a 6-2 vote, reported the *New York Times*.

"They're creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we're white," said supervisor Arnold Schlei, a 73-year-old retired veal farmer and longtime board member. "You can't come around and tell people that work their tails off from daylight to dark and tell them that they got white privilege and they're racist and they've got to treat the Hmongs and the coloreds and the gays better because they're racist. People are sick of it."

The proposed resolution grew out of the protests over George Floyd's police killing, with the county's people of color wanting an acknowledgement that they faced some disparities based on race -- but conservatives have been whipped into a froth by local GOP chairman Jack Hoogendyk, who claims it would "end" private property and lead to "race-based redistribution of wealth."

The resolution, of course, would not do those things, but even acknowledging the existence of racism in the community is too much for some residents.

"[Systemic racism] doesn't exist here," said dairy farmer James Juedes, a public opponent of the resolution who's also organized counter protests against Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

"I have yet to recall any type of racial instances that has been reported in this community that has caused any type of stress," Juedes said.

La'Tanya Campbell, a 39-year-old Black social worker who was at the meeting last week, related a different experience. Ms. Campbell works as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking, and said she sometimes had to enlist white colleagues to help clients find apartments to rent in Wausau.

"Typically, the racism you experience is behind closed doors, but since I've started on this resolution I can't believe some of the things that I'm hearing," Campbell said. "You feel unsafe being a woman, I feel unsafe being a Black woman, and doing anti-oppression work, it adds up."

The experience has been crushing to non-white residents, who say they're disappointed in their conservative neighbors for seemingly turning their backs -- or worse.

"I don't have the same type of confidence or faith in the community like I used to," said supervisor Ka Lo, a 39-year-old of Hmong descent who fielded death threats during the debate. "I was born and raised here, and I don't recognize the community that I grew up in right now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The Elusive “Environmental Extremist”

“Environmental extremism” is among a handful of categories of so-called domestic extremism — including “racially motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government extremism,” “animal rights extremism,” and “abortion extremism” — that the FBI monitors closely.

Who exactly are these eco-extremists? Under a section titled “environmental rights extremism,” a November 2019reference guide to “violent extremism” published by the Colorado Information Analysis Center, a fusion center, and other state security agencies, which was released as part of BlueLeaks, lists a range of groups. Among others, they listed the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, which has removed animals from factory farms in rescue actions, and the Earth Liberation Front, which had its heyday committing arsons in the ’90s. Also listed were East Boulder County United, a grassroots organization that promotes community consultation on oil and gas development; and 350 Colorado, the local chapter of a well-known national climate organization. Both groups have participated in and promoted nonviolent civil disobedience as a tactic to force public officials to appropriately address the climate crisis.

In a statement,Colorado Information Analysis Center spokesperson Micki Trost provided a justification for the labels, “We want to ensure that individuals have the opportunity to exercise their First Amendment rights in a safe and impactful manner,” Trost said. “We believe that information sharing on groups that have perpetrated crimes and disrupted peaceful protests helps local law enforcement better protect those that are lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

According to an FBI and Department of Homeland Securitydocument, “environmental extremists” primarily target the “extraction, use, and transportation of fossil fuels.” BlueLeaks documents from various regional fusion and homeland security centers, as well as other federal agencies, point to an array of fossil fuel industry opponents, including the climate direct action group Extinction Rebellion; the Oglala Lakota opponent of the Dakota Access pipeline Red Fawn Fallis, who remains imprisoned after being accused of firing gunshots during a struggle with law enforcement at a Standing Rock protest; Arctic drilling protesters who chained themselves to a ship in Washington; and anti-oil industry activists, who shut off a pipeline by turning a valve.

the only recent U.S. incident listed in the documents that resulted in loss of life involved Rory Gunderman, who, according to the South Dakota Fusion Center and Wyoming Criminal Intelligence Center, wasassociated with the movement Deep Green Resistancebefore he allegedly attempted to carry out a plot in 2015 to shut down the power grid. After police attempted to apprehend Gunderman, he took his own life.

Indeed, in various documents law enforcement agencies underline something that many environmental activists have themselves pointed out: Unlike other types of extremism, “environmental extremism” is aimed at property, not people. One bulletin published by the FBI and DHS noted the threat that such activists pose has decreased over the years and is lower than other types of extremism. However, their “desire” to commit crime “has not waned.”

Nevertheless, authorities are keen to view “environmental extremists” as a major threat. An FBI memo urges partner law enforcement agencies to coordinate with the Bureau on any incident involving environmental extremism. Federal agents, the memo says, are interested in who is training “environmental extremists,” in addition to knowing which purported extremists are involved in domestic or international criminal organizations, where they have traveled, and how they communicate.

Protesters gather in front of San Francisco City Hall during a protest in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on March 10, 2017.

Photo: Joel Angel Juarez/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

And so law enforcement has continued to monitor activists’ activity, including through an online discussion forum, an environmental organization’s web site, and a bulletin that described how tactics utilized in the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline could be repurposed against the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline in Minnesota, documents show.

To prepare law enforcement for encountering such alleged extremists, police attended trainings, including one offered in October 2019 by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. According to one of the documents, a flyer, the training would be led by Steven Stanley, a “certified anti-terrorism specialist” working for the Sigma Group who planned to cover a remarkable range of “domestic terrorism topics.” His focus would be on ideologically left-leaning viewpoints, including “Global Anarchist Activity, Social and Global Justice Groups, Anti-War Activists/Militants, Anti-Nuclear Activists/Militants, Anti-Pipeline Activists/Militants, Anti-Police Movement, AntifaMovement (Antifascists), Animal Liberation Activists/Militants, Eco-Terrorism, Radical Environmental Groups, Radical Unions, [and] Protests Protest Activity/Dynamics.” Stanley also promised to show attendees a “private collection consisting of 40 years of radical books, magazines, patches, stickers, clothing, pictures, videos, DVD’S and much more.” Fifty-eight people registered for the course.

German, the former FBI agent, said that the result of so much attention on environmental activists is visible in police’s response to protests. “We’ve had a variety of unruly protests by armed, far-right militia groups that the police react to in a very calm manner,” he said. “And yet when you see a group of environmentalists or people who might look similar to the way environmentalists at a protest look, you see a hyper-aggressive police response, even though the level of violence coming from those groups is significantly lower.”

Comparing Pipeline Activists to Al Qaeda

In most of the fusion center documents revealed by BlueLeaks, it’s the language of “extremism” that suggests that law enforcement officers perceive a common thread between environmental activists and violent militants. One document, though, explicitly applied the lens the U.S. military used on groups like Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq to community members opposing two natural gas pipelines in Virginia.

In September 2019, the Virginia Fusion Center issued a briefing titled “Criminal Environmental Groups Study and Adopt Militant Insurgent Strategiesto Advance Goals in Virginia.” The Atlantic Coast and Mountain Valley pipeline projects were in the midst of approval processes and under construction in the state at the time. A range of activists, environmental experts, and neighbors had organized to observe construction, file lawsuits, voice their dissent at public meetings, and hold protests — including a series of tree sits, where project opponents camped out in trees in the pathway of the pipeline.

The document concluded that “criminal environmental groups” organizing against pipeline construction would likely use the same four tactics as Al Qaeda: provocation, intimidation, protraction, and exhaustion.

Asked for comment, Virginia State Police Public Relations Director Corinne Geller explained to The Intercept: “This particular report was designed to provide regional law enforcement with an enhanced awareness of criminal activity that has been associated with various groups protesting environmental interests nationwide and worldwide. Sharing common tactics and strategies associated with criminal activity is invaluable to law enforcement agencies’ efforts to engage with and for the protection of local citizens/communities, as well as for the purpose of officer safety.”

How a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat

Provocation was used by Al Qaeda, the fusion center report claimed, when militants destroyed the Al-Askari Mosque in Karbala, Iraq, in 2004 in an effort to set off a violent response in the majority Shia country toward the Sunni minority. (The mosque bombing actually took place in Samarra in 2006.) In turn, provocation, the document claimed, was also used by “criminal environmental groups” in 2016 in North Dakota, when private security contractors unleashed their dogs on Dakota Access pipeline opponents —the suggestion being that the Indigenous water protectors strategically incited the dog attacks to stir up conflict.

Insurgent groups use the tactic of intimidation, the document continued, by threatening violence against local community members who don’t submit to their cause. An individual associated with a “criminal environmental group” deployed a comparable tactic in Virginia, the document suggests, when they posted a comment on the Facebook page of a hotel that provided rooms to pipeline construction workers. “I hope that money lasts you for a lifetime because the people will be there every day making sure you never earn another dollar for the rest of your existence,” the comment said. The threat of protest was apparently comparable to a threat of physical violence.

The fusion center even quoted 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden describing his goal of exhausting the U.S. government by “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” Then it went on to note that “criminal environmental groups” would likely try to exhaust law enforcement and private businesses’ resources by building camps and distributing “extremist propaganda” to residents impacted by construction. Although the document title suggested activists were studying these tactics, the fusion center provided no evidence that was so.

In small print at the bottom, the fusion center wrote, “This document is not designed to compare criminal environmental groups to al-Qa’ida and associated movements” — despite the fact that it did exactly that.

The report repeatedly cited the book “The Accidental Guerrilla,” by David Kilcullen, a senior counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a source. “Overall, in terms of content, the document doesn’t strike me as objectionable,” Kilcullen said when asked to comment on the document. “I am sure if they knew it was going to be leaked the authors might have framed the language differently, but it is an accurate reflection of how things work in these kinds of situations.”

In a recent article for theFoundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative Washington think tank where he is an adviser, Kilcullen argued that, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the U.S. might considered as being amid an “incipient insurgency.” He told the Intercept, “What’s perhaps a bit confronting is that people are now applying that logic to the United States — but the shocking thing is not that this is inaccurate, but rather that it’s now an increasingly accurate way of thinking about what’s happening on our streets and elsewhere.”

McQuade, the University of Southern Maine sociologist, said that, although this document was distinct from other fusion center documents he’s reviewed throughout his research, it shouldn’t be viewed as an aberration. “This is an insight into how security professionals view politics,” he said. “When your job is to defend the status quo at all costs, it isn’t a ridiculous overreach to apply a theory for defeating an armed movement in a developing country that has been in a civil war for decades against a protest movement in a country that isn’t at civil war.”

The danger, German said, was that law enforcement officers might unthinkingly take the document seriously. “I would put myself in the place of a brand-new police officer trying to protect his or her community, and not having a deep background in terrorism research, receiving this document,” German said. “Now anybody doing any activism in my community, I would automatically perceive as a threat — not just a threat of engaging in civil disobedience or vandalism but actually a terrorist threat.”

The fusion center claimed some individuals would be recruited into Virginia’s “criminal environmental groups” through what the unnamed author called “accidental guerrilla syndrome,” a process that leads someone who normally would not join an insurgent group to fight alongside one.

State and local law enforcement monitor an anti-pipeline protest site to make sure that no attempts are made to give protesters food or water. The pipeline opponents are occupying trees high above the ground outside Roanoke, Va., to protest the Mountain Valley Pipeline Project on April 2, 2018.

Photo: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The proliferation of tree sits were signs that “accidental guerrilla syndrome” was already in the “contagion phase,” the document says. The memo pointed to Giles County, where tree-sitters with Appalachians Against Pipelines had gained support from neighbors, and Montgomery County, where a tree sit called Yellow Finch has been in place for two years. “If tree sits like these continue to develop, it may become more difficult for pipeline construction to continue and support for it may decrease,” the fusion center document concluded.

“If they can compare us to Al Qaeda, they can do anything to us,” said Dustie Pinesap, commenting from atop the Yellow Finch tree sit. “Last I checked we never picked up a Kalashnikov. We tend to see property damage or denial of use of property or any sort of damage or impeding of property rights as violent.”

Indeed, the document makes crystal clear that the fusion center conflated support for the projects with security. “Collaborative relationships between law enforcement and businesses, working with contractors or the energy companies may help identify criminal actors before violence or property destruction takes place,” the fusion center document says. It points to a suite of “counter insurgency strategies,” drawn from a Kunar Province road-building project in Afghanistan, that police — as well as the pipeline companies — could deploy to build community support.

“Organizations involved in pipeline construction” should consider “contracting local restaurants to provide lunch to pipeline workers each day,” the fusion center advises, in order to “spread economic engagement across the community.” Similarly, implementing the Kunar road’s “10 kilometer rule,” hiring workers within a certain radius of the construction zone, could “provide local residents a sense of pride and connection to the project.”

The pipeline companies might even consider a “youth employment campaign,” the publicly funded fusion center suggested. “If such a project was implemented in local Virginia communities, families would not support outside groups, individuals, or local opposition groups that hinder their children’s economic and skill gaining opportunities, much like the Afghan communities that rejected the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in their attempts to delay and disrupt the Kunar Road project because it directly affected their livelihood.”

“The constituency is clearly the private sector,” said McQuade, highlighting that the document’s goal did note even seem to be to protect the broader community that may be ambivalent about pipeline construction. “Those people are just pawns whose support needs to be won.”

German sees the fusion centers as captured by corporate PR campaigns seeking to portray themselves as victims of extremist violence. “Many of these are multinational corporations —they’re not even necessarily U.S. corporations — yet law enforcement seems to favor protecting them over their own communities,” German pointed out. “How many fusion center reports have we seen that document environmental damage done by criminal actions or negligent actions of corporations? Those are also criminal — those are within the jurisdiction of these law enforcement agencies — and arguably cost a whole lot more in economic damage to these communities than somebody turning a valve on a pipeline. Yet that’s not where we see law enforcement resources being spent.”

Law Enforcement Goes Don Quixote

Despite the comparisons to Al Qaeda and the descriptions of widespread monitoring of activists, several fusion center documents acknowledge that environmental defenders pose little threat to people — or even property. But intelligence analysts still had plenty of guesses about what might spark “environmental extremists” to commit so-called violence, defined to include property damage.

“Media attention given to related issues, such as exotic game hunting, may compel some individuals who had not been associated with the extremist movements to make threats of violence or commit other crimes,” a 2016 FBI report suggests.

The arrests of high-profile activists could also push people over the edge. When Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek were arrested last October for using a welding torch to poke holes in the Dakota Access Pipeline, the FBI and DHS assessed that “it is possible environmental extremists may commit criminal acts potentially destructive of critical infrastructure, such as property damage, to express solidarity with those arrested in the near term.” However, the document adds, there existed “no specific targeting or threat information” suggesting that this was actually true.

In the eyes of some intelligence analysts, even Covid-19 provided potential spark for environmental extremism. A daily intelligence briefing by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Interagency Counterterrorism Task Force provided analysis about how “Europe’s terrorists” might take advantage of the pandemic. “The Covid-19 outbreak could also lead to a rise of violent actions by the hands of environmental extremists. Economic difficulties, a lack of public support, and more urgent needs might thwart advances in the global warming agenda and interrupt green investments by national governments,” the document states. “Moreover, having witnessed the immediate environmental benefits due to radical actions like a global lockdown and economic disruption, eco-activists could be triggered to resort to violence.”

German framed much of the speculation as noise. “One of the problems with the buildup of these intelligence reporting platforms and the information sharing environment that was built after 9/11 was that they hired all these analysts who aren’t given a very specific mandate on what to report,” he explained. “They’re measured by the number of reports. After you’ve written about one problem in the criminal justice system, you run out of things to write about.”

Ultimately, the wind energy exercise in Iowa was inconclusive. The attacks might happen, or they might not: “Based on the Red Hat exercise, FBI Omaha and the Iowa DOI/FC estimated that, as wind energy projects become more common, there is a roughly even chance that attacks against wind energy assets in Iowa by environmental extremists will occur.” Even in the face of that analysis, though, the FBI declined to back down from its hypothesis: “The FBI’s official assessment is environmental extremists possibly will increase their criminal activity against the industrial wind industry.”

If anything, Germain said, the FBI’s foray into attacking windmills was counterproductive. “It is just dangerous for the FBI to be brainstorming ways for groups to attack private companies, putting that on paper, and then putting it in systems where it can leak out,” he said. “They created a security situation. This is a blueprint for how to attack wind turbines, and it doesn’t come from any terrorist group, it comes from the FBI.”

Down the road, police learning to view environmentalists as saboteurs could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It’s creating a likelihood that when there are more confrontations over energy infrastructure,” McQuade said, “that the response will be extremely punitive and will escalate the struggle.”

aha: pvt property sacred unless a pipeline and/or esp both native american rez

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/07/21/three-percenters-militia-bakken-oil-oneok-domestic-terrorism

no lnx pix twt quite long

Whose Allegiance? Three Percenters Militia Working in Bakken Oil Patch Raises Concerns of Domestic Terrorism Risk

By Justin Nobel • Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The Three Percenters, a loosely organized group of far-right militants, appear to have established a significant presence in North Dakota’s Bakken oilfield, one of the most productive oilfields in the nation. “There is a lot of membership in the oil and gas industry up there,” says Matt Marshall, a Three Percenter running for state legislature in Washington. “The fact that you have a lot of Three Percenters working in the oilfields of North Dakota is not surprising.”

The Three Percenters are so named for the dubious historical claim that only three percent of American colonists took up arms in the Revolutionary War. Their adherents have frequently been involved with incidents of ?armed protests, hate speech, and ?threatening behavior across the U.S., and the group’s members have shown up prominently at recent protests related to both pandemic response measures and police brutality.

In April, Marshall, wearing a colonial tricorn hat with bullets strapped to the side, and a Hawaiian shirt, helped lead a coronavirus stay-home order protest at his state’s capitol in Olympia, Washington. Hawaiian shirts are described by the Anti-Defamation League as a coded reference to coming civil war, although Marshall denies the link.

He says he is aware of Three Percenters who are working in oilfields in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska. And also according to Marshall, top officials with two North Dakota chapters, the North Dakota United Patriots Three Percenters and North Dakota Three Percenter Originals, work in the oil and gas industry.

“We are mostly blue-collar workers who want to put in a hard day’s labor, support our family, pay a limited amount of taxes to get the services we require and at the end of the day be left alone,” says Marshall. “I don’t think there is any concern about having a bunch of threepersworking in that industry,” referring to an alternate name for the group.

But points of significant concern emerged in a multi-month DeSmog investigation that involved interviews with former Department of Homeland Security and FBI officials, and local residents of North Dakota, who live in a state still pumping out more than a million barrels of oil a day.

According to a whistleblower who contacted DeSmog, Three Percenters have established a prominent presence at a Bakken oil and gas facility regarded as critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security. Militia-related patches, flags, and artwork have popped up across the Bakken oil patch, and a thriving gun culture among its workers has led to a Mad Max-mentality of chaos plaguing residents of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

While federal security agencies and their partners have prioritized focus on the energy industry and produced a raft of reports in the past two decades on other risks to the nation’s critical infrastructure, such as cyber security, natural disasters, and environmental activism, right-wing militia groups appear to be escaping close scrutiny.

“It certainly seems like a security vacuum,” Michael German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice, told DeSmog when informed about our reporting. German is a former FBI special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations. “The FBI characterizes itself as a domestic terrorism agency and has been outspoken about prioritizing ecoterrorism as a threat, which is ridiculous because there are no deaths with any of the environmental threats,” he said. “Yet somehow there does not appear to be an attempt to find out what the infiltration is of anti-government militia groups, and that is problematic.”

At the same time, state legislators across the country, backed by the notoriously ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, have been devising laws to target environmental activists as terrorists.

“The FBI’s approach of de-emphasizing investigations of white supremacist and right-wing militia violence while targeting resources at social justice movements and calling that extremism has existed for some time,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project.

“What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’”

It’s an approach that continues to play out at this very moment. In the midst of protests against the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, President Trump has fanned the flames with tweets about “shooting” looters, calling MAGA supporters into action, and saying he intends to designate the amorphous leftwing anti-fascism movement Antifa as a terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, reports of right-wing militia members bringing weapons to protests allegedly in order to transform this moment into civil war have surfaced online. On May 31, Marshall’s group sent perhaps a dozen members to a small town north of Seattle in response to rumors of an Antifa threat that never materialized. And neo-Nazis, through online networks, have suggested to followers that with police forces spread thin, the present moment would be an ideal one to strike energy infrastructure targets.

DeSmog’s investigation indicates a culture of guns and paranoia has worked its way deep into the heart of America’s third richest oilfield.

Domestic Terrorism Experts Troubled by Militia’s Oilfield Presence

Paul Lehto is a 54-year-old former plant operator at the Lonesome Creek Gas Processing Plant, outside Watford City, North Dakota. During his tenure there in 2016, he says coworkers would “talk about automatic weapons all the time,” gather in common spaces to watch social media videos that featured demonstrations of people firing sub-automatic machine guns, leave articles of clothing with Three Percenter insignia lying around the workplace, and regularly wear the militia’s notorious patches, which typically contain the Roman numeral III, sometimes placed over a darkened American flag. During one conversation, he says a coworker spoke about hijacking a commercial jet.

Although Lehto says the comment may well have been in jest, it conveyed a “habit of thinking” that was worrisome and was part of his decision to eventually leave his job at the natural gas processing plant. “The constellation of issues around being a Three Percenter was probably the number one topic of conversation at work,” says Lehto. “These guys are basically supportive of the idea of some sort of eventual civil war in the United States of America.”

Paul Lehto

Paul Lehto, a ONEOK gas plant employee from 2015 to 2016, shown in 2019. Credit: DeSmog]

Daryl Johnson, an expert on right-wing militia groups who from 2004 to 2010 served as the Department of Homeland Security’s senior domestic terrorism analyst, told DeSmog that this was the first information he has received of right-wing militia presence in the oil and gas industry. He was deeply alarmed.

“These are operationally minded people with a paranoid worldview that believe at some point there is going to be a societal collapse,” said Johnson, who authored the 2012 book, Right-Wing Resurgence: How A Domestic Terrorist Threat Is Being Ignored. “What militias like this do is conduct surveillance and find facilities they will either need to take over or attack when ‘shit hits the fan.’ When they are working, they are also thinking about what else they would need to do to bring the plant to its knees. They may follow the order of their commander or act on a lone wolf instinct, and their allegiance lies not with their employer but with the militia, although they might think they are doing something righteous and good for the country.”

Lehto says that during the day shift, more than half of the 20 to 25 workers stationed at Lonesome Creek would either be wearing Three Percenter regalia and openly supportive of the militia, or be workers that he considered to be sympathizers. Three Percenters came to work there from North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Texas, says Lehto.

“I heard one Three Percenter expressing frustration and astonishment that HR did not hire his recommendation for a fellow Three Percenter, saying, ‘He is qualified, he has a great resume, and he is a Three Percenter, I just don’t understand why they turned him down,’” says Lehto. “Implied was that he had prior success with this.”

On the night shift Lehto managed the $600 million plant with just two other workers, one of whom was an active Three Percenter, the other a sympathizer. “I was just being constantly reminded of the Three Percenter presence,” says Lehto.

Protester at a confederate memorial in Louisiana waves a Three Percenter flag]

New Orleans, August 19, 2017. A man waves a Three Percenter flag as counter-protesters and protesters clash at the conclusion of the march organized by Take ‘Em Down NOLA,” an event held in solidarity with Charlottesville, days after the deadly Unite the Right rally. Credit: ©2020 Julie Dermanksy]

“I find it concerning that it is not just one, or two, or three, it is more like half the plant that are Three Percenters or supporting them rhetorically,” says Johnson. “There is a threat capability calculation we use in intelligence —capability plus intent equals threat,”he continued. “The Three Percenters definitely have capability, and they definitely have made their intent known, and the fact that they have access is even more concerning. Having the insider knowledge of how that plant operates, where that gas comes from and where it is going is all information an adversary can use for maximum threat and maximum damage. They can sabotage the plant or pipelines running from it, which may not cause a lot of deaths but can disrupt the energy supply.”

Furthermore, added Johnson, “There is also a counterintelligence threat. They have intel on critical infrastructure that, shall the need arise, they can share with people who don’t need to know.”

A 2008 Department of Homeland Security report on insider threats to critical infrastructure says insider motivations can come from, “some combination of: revenge for a perceived wrong; radicalization for advancement of religious or ideological objectives; or simple illicit financial gain.” Companies who run infrastructure like energy pipelines may misunderstand insider risks and have a financial incentive to downplay them. “Insider incidents can cause lost credibility with shareholders, employees, and customers, and negatively effect to [sic] shareholder values,” the report states. “It appears corporate leadership neither completely appreciates the risk nor realizes the potential consequences.”

The Lonesome Creek plant is operated by the Oklahoma-based oil and gas service company, ONEOK, and came online in 2015 to process the growing surge of natural gas and natural gas liquids being pumped from the booming Bakken oilfields. The plant, like all gas processing plants, is considered “critical infrastructure” by the Department of Homeland Security.

This designation goes back to the Patriot Act of 2001, which defines the term as “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.”

ONEOK headquarters in Tulsa, OK

ONEOK is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Credit: Joseph Wingenfeld, CC BY 2.0]

A risk assessment of the Lonesome Creek Plant by ONEOK says a “worst-case scenario” would involve “a release of 368,536 pounds of flammable mixture” from a large storage tank and generate a wave of destruction more than a half-mile in radius.

While the risk assessment states that ONEOK has “numerous controls to prevent such releases and to manage their consequences,” they are not described in the document. Silverio Caggiano, an Ohio Fire Chief who works regularly with the oil and gas industry and has more than two decades of experience related to Hazardous Materials and Weapons of Mass Destruction, laid out reasons for continued concern. “You would need to have a pretty good background in chemistry to do something specific with a certain gas based on its properties, but if you’ve got a bunch of guys there that are all in cahoots and they decide they want to take shit out, they can pretty much do anything they want,” said Caggiano. “A person working within the system knows how the system runs.”

“From a security standpoint the Three Percenters are probably among the most worrisome groups … it is not whether there will be a right-wing attack, it is when.”

In replies to specific questions by DeSmog, ONEOK did not describe what the “numerous controls” were at the Lonesome Creek facility intended to prevent a “worst-case scenario,” nor did the company respond to requests to speak with present workers at the plant. “ONEOK expects all of our employees to know and abide by our company policies and to embrace the company’s core values of Ethics, Quality, Diversity, Value and Service,” the company explained, in a statement to DeSmog. “ONEOK’s Violence-Free Workplace Policy prohibits violence, violent acts, and threats of violence. ONEOK has implemented numerous safety and security practices to safeguard our facilities and to comply with applicable law. Clearly, the scope and nature of many of these practices and safeguards must remain confidential. We support, cooperate, and frequently coordinate with federal, state, and local law enforcement to anticipate and plan for potential security events. Furthermore, ONEOK has worked with several state legislatures to enact legislation to protect energy infrastructure from hostile actions.”

But Michael German, the Brennan Center for Justice fellow and former FBI special agent, pointed out that this legislation is typically enacted with environmentalist protest groups in mind, not militia-minded employees.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has crafted a “model” bill based on Oklahoma’s HB 1123, which calls for citizens to receive a felony sentencing, $100,000 fine, and/or 10 years in prison if their actions “willfully damage, destroy, vandalize, deface, or tamper with equipment in a critical infrastructure facility.” The bill has been replicated across the country including in Ohio, Alabama, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Iowa, where reporting by DeSmog in 2018 revealed that corporate backers included Koch Industries, the American Petroleum Institute, and many other oil and gas and pipeline companies.

People opposing the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016.

Opponents of the Dakota Access pipeline gather at Standing Rock in North Dakota, December 4, 2016. Credit: Joe Brusky, CC BY-NC 2.0]

The FBI told DeSmog that the agency meets frequently with members of the private sector to make them aware of potential threats and to provide information on how to enhance their security.

“We have no comment on threats to specific industries or any groups,” said an FBI spokesperson. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on individuals who commit violence and criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

However such statements go against research done by the ACLU, which unearthed records indicating that in the early 2000s the FBI targeted environmental groups, animal rights groups, and anti-war groups in a way that violated their First Amendment rights. A review of these episodes, published in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, concluded that while the FBI did not target groups for investigation based on First Amendment activities, the basis for opening some of the investigations for certain individuals was “factually weak,” the FBI “extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis,” and “in a few instances the FBI improperly retained information.”...

The government’s apparent lack of attention on the issue is of concern to other watchdogs. “The U.S. government increasingly acts like a tool of fossil fuel companies and oligarchs,” Basav Sen, Director of the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington, D.C. think tank, wrote last October. He added, “the slide into extractivist authoritarianism in the U.S. is part of a worldwide trend.”

Sen pointed to a number of issues that promoted a linkup between the fossil fuels industry and the far right. Each group favors a hands-off approach to government meddling and regulation. And in a trend that has become more pronounced under the Trump administration, with its constant mention of the nation’s newfound fracking-led oil and gas dominance, support of the fossil fuels industry has been promoted as patriotic duty. Oil and gas industry workers are made to feel they are part of a great mission, says Sen, and those who critique them, such as pipeline protesters or climate marchers, are sworn enemies, or even terrorists. This enables the federal government to place individuals on watchlists and, as seen with Indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock and elsewhere has helped to encourage a dangerous operating environment in which federal law enforcement has relied on outside groups, including actual militia members, to help with security work and law enforcement.

“As we head toward a renewable world and fossil fuels become less competitive, it makes perfect sense that the global elite and fossil fuels industry will turn to the far right, whether indirectly or directly, for protection,” says Sen. “The fossil fuels industry is going to need escalating levels of subsidies to survive, and one form of subsidy is this massive tax-funded private security force.”

Perhaps nowhere has the use of mercenary-like private security forces been more heavily employed than against Indigenous communities in the United States.

“If you throw a Three Percenter patch on you can stand in a government building with an assault rifle all damn day and nobody will bother you.”

Michael German, the former FBI agent and security expert, says this is already occurring.

“What we saw in North Dakota during Standing Rock is groups organized as professional companies doing security work for law enforcement agencies,” says German. “This is quite troubling. Furthermore, there have been situations, such as happened at a rally in 2017 in Portland, where militia members have actually been caught on film helping Department of Homeland Security officials arresting counter protesters.”

Tensions with Oilfield Workers at the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation...

trespass w/ weapons]

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720

desmog

Louisiana state appeals court has ruled that the Bayou Bridge Pipeline Company illegally “trampled” on the rights of landowners by starting pipeline construction without the landowners’ permission. The pipeline company must pay the landowners $10,000 each plus attorneys fees.

“This is a victory not only for us but for all landowners,” said Theda Larson Wright, one of the three Louisiana landowners who sued Bayou Bridge Pipeline Company (BBP) in September 2018. “All over the country, pipeline companies have destroyed people's land, often without even attempting to get permission, and dared the landowners to speak up. Well, we did. I hope this victory will encourage many others to as well.”

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identity too

data on community [sorta like green maps?) vs encroaching miners/logging

https://medium.com/positive-returns/why-we-continue-to-support-cadasta-foundation-e6fe00a832cc

amy regas dir

In today’s rapidly advancing world, technology and human ingenuity are improving lives across the globe. However, millions of people are being left behind by lack of access to these innovations and the benefits they create. Founded in 2015, Cadasta Foundation recognizes this gap and aims to fill it throughprovision of land expertise and technology, enabling individuals, organizations, vulnerable communities, and governments to document property and resource rights and make data-driven decisions.

Using GPS-enabled smartphones and tablets in remote field locations coupled with state-of-the-art ESRI mapping and analytics software, Cadasta makes the most advanced technology and data sets available to groups that may otherwise find it inaccessible and unaffordable. Cadasta puts communities and their assets on the map and ultimately aims to create a world where even the most marginalized can benefit from the opportunities afforded by secure property rights.

That’s why Omidyar Network invested in Cadasta four years ago, and we are proud to continue supporting their important work with our latest investment as the organization launches its "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">new platform and strategy. We see great value in technology innovations that can be applied universally across geographies and which provide rapid and affordable ways to secure property rights — for everyone.

The data collected on the Cadasta platform often represents the first time vulnerable communities have digitally documented information on occupants, their properties, and the surrounding resources and features. People can use this data to move from being invisible to being visible in the eyes of their government, the formal economy, and global development organizations. They are empowered to make planning and investment decisions and to advocate for their property and resource rights.

A few examplesof the communities impacted by Cadasta’s lifechanging technology:

In Odisha, India, the state government recognized that the absence of accurate data on an estimated "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">1 million urban slum inhabitants impeded property rights and access to basic services. Cadasta partnered with the government and Tata Trusts to gather critical data and help 350,000 slum residents become formally documented occupants. By 2020, an estimated 1 million people will be documented thanks to this partnership, unlocking new levels of social and economic opportunity in Odisha.
In an Afro-Colombian community in the country’s remote Pacific region, "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">a group of women leaders sought to gain a better understanding of their community resources and economic activities. By working with Cadasta, the group was able to document missing community boundary and resource data in order to prevent encroachment and protect against illegal mining and other illicit activities.
In Kenya, "); background-size: 1px 1px; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px);">the indigenous Ogiek tribe lacked data and formal rights to their traditional territory within the Mau Forest Complex, resulting in repeated government evictions without consultation or compensation. Through their partnership with Cadasta, they efficiently documented and mapped their territory boundaries as evidence to support and defend their claims to their ancestral lands. Since working with Cadasta, the Ogiek tribe was able to successfully defend their claims in a landmark case at the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

While Cadasta has positively impacted communities around the world, they have also learned many lessons throughout their startup phase that can be helpful for other organizations. Perhaps most significant has been their decision to use available technology after attempting to build out their own. When Cadasta launched in 2015, they aimed to design and build an open-source platform for partners to collect, analyze, store, and share data on land and resource needs. However, based on feedback they received from practitioners in the field, it became clear that open sources alone would not provide the level of accuracy and security necessary when dealing with property rights and corresponding private information. They also realized that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution — that the technology must be customizable and flexible to adapt to various use cases. Cadasta pivoted and selected the GIS mapping software ESRI to provide more robust, scalable, and flexible tools and services to its partners, all while maintaining their commitment to accessibility, security, and privacy.

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What your data is really worth to Facebook

ROBERT J. SHAPIRO / WASHINGTON MONTHLY

28 JUN 2019 AT 16:02 ET

Americans who use the internet—85.5 percent of us—have made a tacit bargain with Facebook, Google, MasterCard, Verizon, and most other sites and products we use regularly. We get access to these companies’ services, and they get to scoop up, analyze, and sell our personal information. Few people question this setup, perhaps because most of us assume that our data isn’t worth much.

But that assumption is wrong.

Earlier this year, my colleague Siddhartha Aneja and I published a deep-dive study into the value of the personal information that every major website sells access to. It’s a complicated problem. Much of the value comes from advertising revenue, disclosed in annual reports and SEC filings by public companies. But we also had to determine how much of that ad revenue is derived specifically from the micro-targeting that user data makes possible, as well as how much the companies spent to gather, analyze, and market user profiles. In the end, we calculated that internet companies earned an average of $202 per American internet user in 2018 from personal data. We believe that’s a conservative estimate.

The value reflects the extraordinarily varied and detailed data that companies collect. Google collects not only the personal information you reveal when you use its search engine, but also the data that comes from whatever you do when you visit or use any of its dozens of properties—YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, Google Pay—or apps accessed by logging in through Google. Similarly, Facebook gathers all the data crumbs you leave whenever you visit the site itself or use its Messenger service, plus whatever you do on subsidiaries like Instagram and on apps accessed by logging in through Facebook.

Amazon is newer to this business, and unlike Facebook and Google, its basic business model doesn’t rely on data-derived profits. But Amazon’s public records show that its earnings from user data likely more than doubled between 2016 and 2018. Beyond the major platforms, hundreds of other companies take part in the burgeoning personal data business. Our study also explored the revenues from digital advertising earned by smaller internet services, ranging from Snapchat and Spotify to internet media holding companies such as IAC, which owns Match.com, the Daily Beast, and Investopedia.

For a general sense of the value of people’s personal data to these companies, we started with digital advertising revenue. In 2018, Facebook earned an average of roughly $110 in ad revenue per American user. This calculation, however, ignores what it costs to collect, analyze, and market user data. According to the balance sheet on file with the SEC, Facebook earned $55.8 billion worldwide in 2018, virtually all of it from targeted advertising. Facebook also reported that relevant costs came to $20.6 billion. That implies that the value of its users’ personal information was equivalent to $35.2 billion, or 63 percent of Facebook’s earnings.

In other cases, determining a company’s data-related costs is less straightforward. Google’s cost data, for example, is embedded in the balance sheets for Alphabet, the holding company that also includes Google Fiber, GV (former Google Ventures), CapitalG, Waymo, and Google Deep Mind, as well as the suite of Google-branded internet services.

Given these issues, we developed a proxy to distinguish the value of personal information to the online platforms and the costs to gather and monetize those data. We relied on a careful study by three business school economists who analyzed certain aspects of the Ad-Choices program created by the online advertising industry. In 2010, AdChoices announced that anyone could opt out of all targeted online ads by registering at a special website. While relatively few internet users opted out, the researchers found that those non-targeted ads produced 52 percent less revenue than comparable targeted ones. This suggests that 52 percent of digital advertising revenue is derived from the personal information used to target those ads to particular individuals.

Since targeted online advertising generated $108.6 billion in overall revenue in 2018, on this basis we estimate that the profits derived from American internet users’ personal data totaled $56.5 billion. Some 279.7 million Americans used the internet last year, so the value of their personal data to these online operations, after costs, came to an average of $202 per American internet user.

Our personal information is worth so much because the profiles created from it are remarkably probing and detailed. Algorithms track and save data on what we search for, what we write in emails and messages, what we buy, and everything else we do online, whether on our phones or laptops. Not only do the algorithms then build up a basic profile based on gender, age, ethnicity, and so on; they also determine our individual interests, likes and dislikes, family background, political leanings, sexual orientation, and much more. Everything we reveal online is fair game.

As the software for data mining and targeting has advanced, the revenue from digital ads and the consequent value of the data used to target them have risen rapidly. Our study found that from 2016 to 2018, the value of the information Google mined from Americans grew 40 percent; for Facebook, 85 percent; and for the latecomer Amazon, 312 percent. Overall, the value internet companies derive from Americans’ personal data increased almost 54 percent. At that rate, the number will reach $127.9 billion in four years. Adjusting for the estimated increase in the number of Americans using the internet, people’s personal data will be worth an average of $434 per American user in 2022.

Given how profitable these data operations are, the practice is sure to spread, and the commercial, social, and other uses of our personal data—and the related side effects—will proliferate. In response, we can try to regulate it, but we shouldn’t be surprised when tech companies figure out how to deflect or defeat such regulation.

Instead of regulation, then, we should consider a more direct economic response. Imagine the profits General Motors could achieve if it didn’t have to pay for the steel it uses to build cars. Like GM, online companies should pay their users for the valuable raw materials they provide.

Behind this proposal is the principle that people have a property interest in their personal information, or at least in the wealth generated by that information. This theory does not depend on any particular position on privacy. Rather, it comes directly from John Locke’s analysis of the origins of property, which are embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Locke said that a person can create property by mixing his or her labor with materials from nature, because each of us has personal ownership of our own bodies and minds and, therefore, of whatever we produce by using our minds to direct our bodies. Every piece of personal information online companies gather, analyze, and sell is the result of that very same process, so it meets Locke’s test for personal property. Someone can persuade you to give it away—but if they mislead you about its value to them, either you’re a sucker or they’re a fraud.

Congress should recognize people’s property rights over their personal information and direct that internet companies do so as well. It’s true that the structure of the internet complicates the analysis, because the value of one person’s personal information to an online platform is bound up in the platform’s access to the personal information from many millions of other people. Economists call this a “network effect.” Just as Facebook’s value to any individual increases as more people use it, so the value of any individual’s personal data to Facebook and its advertisers increases as Facebook gathers and analyzes data from millions of other users.

In other words, internet companies and their users both contribute to the commercial value of the personal profiles that drive digital advertising. A straightforward solution is thus to require the companies to share the profits from those operations with users on a fifty-fifty basis. Of course, asking internet companies to write a check to every individual user would be impossibly inefficient. Instead, each company could write a single check to the government, and the government could distribute the proceeds to every household based on the number of its internet users. So, in 2022, a family of four internet users would receive $868 in payment for their personal data. The era of free riding for online companies would be over. Corporations have gotten rich by exploiting our data. It’s time for them to share the wealth.

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