reform efficiency streamline

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god-term (free mkt invis hand bs)

DOGE COUP DISMANTLE GOVT IN THE NAME OF EFFICIENCY [note devil term opposite waste fraud and abuse]

see CTT

pvtization

deregulation

Turns out letting ‘efficient’ monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea

Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly

For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce…

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gop is for effic in theory, or when it can be used to beat up on someone; "reform" ditto when they wabnt to sneak something harmful thru;

but actual effic is bad if it takes $ from fossil fools:

https://earther.gizmodo.com/trump-wages-war-against-the-true-enemy-of-the-state-le-1840611817

Upgrading lightbulbs is one of the easiest, straightforward ways consumers can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. And yet the president of the United States is determined to do everything in his power to ensure our individual emissions remain as high as they can possibly be. And that means finishing his war on lightbulbs.

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420 COVID FAIL

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-the-pandemic-pulled-back-the-curtain-on-the-flawed-global-economic-system/

no lnx

How the pandemic pulled back the curtain on the flawed global economic system

Written by Marshall Auerback, Jan Ritch-Frel April 2, 2020

When the wealthiest country in the world is unable to produce basic medical gear to cope with a rampaging pandemic, it is dealing with a strategic vulnerability by depending on multinational supply chains to produce manufactured goods. Absent sufficient redundancies and physical reserves of resources, “just-in-time” lean supply systems can’t cope with sudden disruptions. The global pandemic of 2020 is a case in point.

This pandemic continues to unfold, but it will serve as the D-Day equivalent of a new predominating economic model for the world, and which in many ways was beginning to take shape before COVID-19. At its core, developed and mixed market economies will factor in the health risk and growing military cost of sustaining international supply chains against investing in high-tech production closer to their markets, and increasingly export their goods to the rest of the world.

Dozens of economies that developed in the past 50 years by enmeshing themselves in the international supply chain on the basis of their labor price advantage will find themselves increasingly cut out of the new process. The contest for global power will increasingly pivot to the extraction and refinement of minerals and component materials that are critical to sustaining the high-tech economy model, away from carbon energy resources. We will be hearing much more about “national stockpiling” and “strategic reserves” beyond oil in the months and years ahead.

Not only has COVID-19 exposed potential health risks and costs involved (as globalized trade routes become vectors of contagion), but the champions of the offshoring phenomenon increasingly resort to myths and misconceptions that are irrelevant to a 21st-century economy. They are as obsolete as spending trillions annually on managing the supply and price of Middle East oil, which American foreign policy figures, including Martin Indyk, are beginning to openly say “isn’t worth it.”

Before we get into the details on thefuture economy, let’s quickly review how the U.S. saw a massive decline in its industrial capacity. Bad ideas and pernicious orthodoxies grew like barnacles over the decades on what was once the world’s leading manufacturer. First was the idea that offshoring is essential to preserving profitability. Often this assertion has been more apparent than real. As far as profitability goes, many companies have made choices to move manufacturing offshore despite continuing domestic profits on home shores. For example,the five North American plants that General Motors (GM) shut down in 2019 were still profitable, but the company, which had received a government bailout in 2009, chose to refocus on the higher-margin operations in China.

Of course, capitalism controlled by bankers and speculators gives free rein to companies to make profits on how they see fit.The consequences are that for decades, Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers have consistently underperformed their German and Japanese counterparts because of their decision to embrace a Wall Street-driven culture that has prioritized short-term quarterly earnings, massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases over productive investment in innovation. And as GM’s 2019 experience illustrates, the resultant profits did not go to spur domestic reinvestment, which in turn creates domestic employment, but abroad to expand China’s manufacturing base. GM is but one example of the hundreds of major corporate actors that have denuded the country’s industrial ecosystem, creating gaps in the U.S. workforce and shortages of vital skilled labor.

There are also multiple examples of companies acquiring smaller innovative companies “solely to discontinue the target’s innovation projects and preempt future competition,” according to researchers Colleen Cunningham, from London Business School, and Florian Ederer and Song Ma, both from Yale. A particularly poignant example of these “killer acquisitions,” given today’s ongoing ventilator shortage, is Covidien’s attempted 2012 purchase of California-based Newport Medical Instruments,  a smaller competing medical device company that had secured a contract from the federal government in 2010 to produce up to40,000 mobile ventilators.But as David Dayen of The American Prospect observed, the purported rationale for the acquisition was bogus: It had nothing to do with expanding Covidien’s product base and everything to do with destroying a competitor whose product “could cut into its existing profits.”

For years, the political economist Seymour Melman argued that companies that embraced the soft option of downsizing/offshoring labor would ultimately create grave production weaknesses in the U.S. economy and stifle innovation. Higher domestic wages, by contrast, would induce competent managers to compensate by using and investing in more and better machinery, which in turn would lead to a virtuous cycle of production: higher profits, which can lead to higher wages, leading to better machinery and organization of work.

While American companies may think they are improving their individual competitiveness in the short term by shifting operations to low-cost labor economies, the current pandemic illustrates that they collectively undermined America’s (and their own) competitiveness over the long haul.

Intuitively, Melman’s forecasts make sense. A modern manufacturing “ecosystem” makes it much easier to redeploy and pivot to new priorities when there are shortages in vital areas. China, for example, has a sufficiently deep and robust industrial infrastructure to adjust production lines quickly, even as the U.S. continues to struggle with ventilator shortages. And in Germany, a flagship company likeSiemens, for example, announced that it is “making its Additive Manufacturing (AM) Network along with its 3D printers, available to the global medical community to speed design and production of medical components … to enable faster and less complicated production of spare parts for machines like ventilators.”

The Next Economy

A combination of existing technologies and capacities that are already in business application and on the rise will enable the new era of production and global economic overhaul and develop in motion with Melman’s thinking. These include artificial intelligence computing, automated manufacturing and increasingly universal and portable manufacturing equipment, innovations in energy production and storage, high-speed data transfer, and nanotechnology. Some of these technologies are mature, profitable and business-ready. Others are still in an early phase but will be seen as more economically viable or worthy of state investment and subsidy in light of a growing awareness among policy planners that the consequences of running global supply chains are potentially more expensive.

All of these technologies are revolutionary. Their concomitant rise will create a new economic era dominated by the countries that fully integrate them into their economies:

AI computing has the capacity to introduce game-changing efficiencies in the production process, quality control in terms of production and blueprints for new models of production and consumption. It can handle huge volumes of administration and management of automated systems. This industry is estimated to be growing at an annual rate of over 45 percent.

Automated manufacturing can be expensive and requires skilled labor to maintain, but it can produce goods at precision levels beyond what people can make, as well as at increasing volumes. 3D manufacturing is a universalizing process: one machine capable of producing a dizzying number of products that already competes with some products from global supply chains. Many companies are locating back in deindustrialized New York and other U.S. cities on the back of 3D manufacturing.

Recent major advances in energy production—from solar and wind to geothermal and energy storage—are the holy grail of non-carbon energy sources, permitting solar and wind industries to compete on a 24-hour basis with carbon-based fuels, giving more weight for policy planners to minimize fuel imports and revisit dormant energy alternatives.

High-speed data transfer—enabled through satellites and huge server farms—is necessary for the multi-location management and logistical coordination of the segments of the new supply chain: the means of information transfer and the capacity of one hand to know what the other is doing.

The rise of nanotechnology—the capacity to engage in precision design and manufacture at a molecular scale—presents humanity with a new frontier of materials and products that have capabilities beyond what we currently know in terms of materials, products, medicines and much more. Products ranging from glass to suntan lotion are already vastly enhanced by nanotechnology production. Qualities of human-made materials such as those designed for fireproofing, bulletproofing, insulation and space travel are in the midst of being revolutionized. Medicines can be deployed through nanotechnology at the molecular level, vastly improving their effectiveness.

The collective strength of these technologies will diminish the appeal of finding cheaper labor outside a country’s borders or common market—and the costs they entail. Countries that are advanced along these lines and have access to the minerals required to engage in this form of production will prosper, plugging into their existing consumer market and building up a head of steam that will eventually lead to a new chain of international exports and imports. These trend lines will accelerate the decline of brick-and-mortar retail and service industries.

Export-led economies that grew on the back of a labor price advantage will find themselves in a role reversal of having the option of importing better goods from the markets they once exported to or paying intellectual property (IP) licensing fees to produce them domestically. The geopolitical advantages that went with offering a developing country a labor role in a global supply chain will be replaced with discounts on IP licenses or imports.

The past phases of industrialization saw an ongoing contest among wealthy countries for control of petroleum, minerals and shipping lanes, using all their available powers to obtain them. The historical pattern is that residents of the resource-rich and undeveloped countries suffer far more than prosper in the mineral extraction and export process to wealthy markets. Barring a major shift in attitudes to wealth distribution or successful political resistance to exploitation, the pattern will likely continue, with the wealthy countries’ preoccupations pivoting increasingly from carbon energy resources to the components of the new economy: cobalt, lithium and rare metals. Resources that sustain the present and future economies, like iron, copper and gold, will continue to retain their strategic value.

Much of Europe and Asian countries like China, South Korea and Japan are poised for the transition. Based on their traditions of rigid state-driven capitalism, these nations instinctively grasp how state capacity and direction can help drive further industrial development. It remains to be seen if the U.S. is fully capable of it. That is unlikely, if the prevailing neoliberal ideology persists, limiting the role of the U.S. government to be, at best, a neutral umpire that sustains efficient, rent-free markets able to supervise the delivery of an increasingly narrow set of public goods (as opposed to an active participant in industrial policy).

The U.S., with thousands of advanced research institutions, is certainly capable of the next stage of economic development. It has a developed market and a partial manufacturing base. But it also has a long history of wage-avoidance for its workforces and an utterly dysfunctional political process. You need nation-state competence and highly skilled labor in this new world, as well as a willingness to expand ownership and dividend models to workers and the governments that funded the research for this advanced economy.

The coronavirus pandemic will force the U.S. and other countries to stop making distinctions between low-tech business (supposedly fine to offshore) versus high value-added industry. Not only can production lines be altered to cope with shortages (as China is doing), but there is often a continuum in the industrial ecosystem.

Consider the case of surgical masks. Even though their production is ostensibly a low-tech commodified business, the critical inner filtration layer of a mask, which allows the wearer to breathe while reducing the inflow of possible infectious particles, is a high-end business: Costing “upward of [$4.23 million] apiece, the machine that creates this fabric melts down plastic material and blows it out in strands, like cotton candy, into flat sheets of melt-blown fabric for face masks and other filtration products. A similar line of machines can create a related kind of fabric, called spun-bond fabric, also used in face masks and in medical protection suits worn by health-care workers,” according to a report carried by National Public Radio.

The point is that there is a continuum. One creates the demand for the other. Eliminate one industry and another potentially dies, much like a biological ecosystem. We now know that when forests are cut down, at some point if the surviving forest is too small, the whole ecosystem collapses. The ecosystem has to be large enough to encompass all of the niches that make it work.

If the machine tool industry is allocated in one country, the textile industry in another, the steel industry in another, the whole thing becomes much more delicate and inefficient, depending on a greater range of variables to succeed. Crucially, the speed with which innovations can ricochet around the system decreases significantly. When Japanese auto manufacturers have access to Japanese machine tool makers, they can get at the machine tool advances before GM and Ford. Proximity becomes a competitive advantage.

All of which helps to explain why the distinction between offshoring hardware while retaining software is not only fatuous but damaging to long-term economic welfare.

Offshoring left the U.S. unprepared for COVID-19. It has also occasioned a widespread reassessment of globalization: What was once seen as the heretical refuge of economic nationalists has now become respectable again. Even without this pandemic, the foundations of America’s economic model were failing and becoming rapidly obsolete.

The question is: As the world moves to a post-carbon future, can the U.S. economy take away the primacy of rent-extracting sectors like finance, insurance and real estate; Hollywood films, smartphone apps, or increasingly irrelevant sectors like oil and natural gas exports, and join the leaders of the pack? Or is coronavirus merely the pandemic that presages a more terminal disease?

Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/a-consulting-firm-advised-ice-to-cut-migrants-food-and-medical-care-to-save-costs-worrying-agency-officials/

no lnx many

A consulting firm advised ICE to cut migrants’ food and medical care to save costs — worrying agency officials

Written by Ian MacDougall / ProPublica December 3, 2019

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Just days after he took office in 2017, President Donald Trump set out to make good on his campaign pledge to halt illegal immigration. In a pair of executive orders, he ordered “all legally available resources” to be shifted to border detention facilities and called for hiring 10,000 new immigration officers.

The logistical challenges were daunting, but as luck would have it, Immigration and Customs Enforcement already had a partner on its payroll: McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm brought on under the Obama administration to help engineer an “organizational transformation” in the ICE division charged with deporting migrants who are in the United States unlawfully.

ICE quickly redirected McKinsey toward helping the agency figure out how to execute the White House’s clampdown on illegal immigration.

But the money-saving recommendations the consultants came up with made some career ICE staff uncomfortable. They proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees, according to interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

McKinsey’s team also looked for ways to accelerate the deportation process, provoking worries among some ICE staff members that the recommendations risked short-circuiting due process protections for migrants fighting removal from the United States. The consultants, three people who worked on the project said, seemed focused solely on cutting costs and speeding up deportations — activities whose success could be measured in numbers — with little acknowledgment that these policies affected thousands of human beings.

In what one former official described as “heated meetings” with McKinsey consultants, agency staff members questioned whether saving pennies on food and medical care for detainees justified the potential human cost.

But the consulting firm’s sway at ICE grew to the point that McKinsey’s staff even ghostwrote a government contracting document that defined the consulting team’s own responsibilities and justified the firm’s retention, a contract extension worth $2.2 million. “Can they do that?” an ICE official wrote to a contracting officer in May 2017.

The response reflects how deeply ICE had come to rely on McKinsey’s assistance. “Well it obviously isn’t ideal to have a contractor tell us what we want to ask them to do,” the contracting officer replied. But unless someone from the government could articulate the agency’s objectives, the officer added, “what other option is there?” ICE extended the contract.

The New York Times reported last year that McKinsey ultimately did more than $20 million in consulting work for ICE, a commitment to one of the Trump administration’s most controversial endeavors that raised concerns among some of McKinsey’s employees and former partners.The firm’s global managing partner, Kevin Sneader, assured them in a 2018 email that the firm had never focused on developing, advising or implementing immigration policies. He said McKinsey “will not, under any circumstances, engage in work, anywhere in the world, that advances or assists policies that are at odds with our values.”

But the new documents and interviews reveal that the firm was deeply involved in executing policies fundamental to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. McKinsey’s recommendations for spending cuts went too far for some career ICE employees, and a number of the proposals were never implemented.

McKinsey has faced mounting scrutiny over the past two years, as reports by The New York Times, ProPublica and others have raised questions about whether the firm has crossed ethical and legal lines in pursuit of profit. The consultancy returned millions of dollars in fees after South African authorities implicated it in a profiteering scheme. The exposure of its history advising opioid makers on ways to bolster sales induced the usually secretive firm to declare publicly that its opioid work had ended. Last month, the Times reported that McKinsey’s bankruptcy practice is the subject of a federal criminal investigation. The firm has denied wrongdoing in each case, but it apologized for missteps in South Africa.

“The scope of our work, contractually agreed to during the Obama administration, was designed to help the agency find ways to operate more effectively and cost-efficiently,” a McKinsey spokesman said of the firm’s consulting for ICE. “The focus of our work did not change as a result of these executive orders.”

In a statement, ICE spokesman Bryan D. Cox said McKinsey’s work “yielded measurable improvements in mission outcomes, including a notable decrease in the time to remove aliens with a final order of removal.”...

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https://weather.com/en-CA/canada/science/news/2017-12-20-epa-scott-pruitt-lean-superfund-sites

Superfund Cleanup Process Raises Questions

By Marcus Stern  

December 20, 2017  

TWC Canada

The Environmental Protection Agency is hoping a business management system can help accelerate cleanup at toxic waste sites across America, but some agency insiders are worried it might also help polluting companies avoid a full cleanup.

Last summer, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt hired governmentefficiency expert Henry Darwin to instill across the agency a management philosophy called “lean,” pioneered by Toyota to minimize waste on the factory floor. 

Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey credits Darwin’s “lean” with transforming his state government by getting it to think of itself as a company focused on its customer.

A training video for Arizona government workers makes clear just who that customer is, and it could raise some eyebrows.

“Let’s say, for example, your job is to write environmental permits,” explains the video’s narrator. “So your widget is a written permit. Who’s your customer? If you think it’s the general public because they benefit from clean air or water you’d be wrong. Who actually needs and uses the permit? It’s the industrial facility that can’t legally operate its business until the permit has been approved.”

Taxpayers might expect agencies such as the EPA to unreservedly safeguard the environment and public health. Nicole Darnall, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, believes the general public is shortchanged when state or federal agencies view themselves as businesses and the industries they regulate as their customers.

“Government’s mission is bigger than delivering a product at the lowest possible price,” she said. “Investors benefit when more products are sold. However, taxpayers do not always benefit when more environmental permits are issued. Some may, but others may not, especially those with autoimmune or respiratory sensitivities.”

The shift in emphasis toward industry concerns has already surfaced at an open-pit sulphur mine in California called Leviathan. The EPA’s remediation project manager there left the agency last summer after she was told that “lean” principles were going to be instilled at the site, requiring her to curb her demands for more access to data about the extent of the pollution, she said.

“I just felt sick to my stomach,” said the former remediation scientist, Lynda Deschambault, who eventually became one of hundreds of EPA employees accepting early retirement packages this year.

BP, the parent of the company responsible for the cleanup, acknowledged that it had proposed “leaning” Leviathan to the EPA in hopes of accelerating progress there.

It is unclear how extensively or quickly “lean” will be implemented at some 1,300 sites that are part of a cleanup program known informally as Superfund. They were placed in the program because they pose a threat to public health and nature. An EPA official in Region 8, which includes the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, said, “We anticipate that this will be rolled down to us next year with some expectations to use 'lean' within the EPA Region 8 Superfund program.” Officials at other regions did not respond to questions about whether there are plans to use “lean” at any of their sites.

The EPA public affairs office repeatedly declined to answer questions for this story. Nor would it provide information or allow interviews of agency employees. Agency officials were approached privately; some agreed to talk on the condition their identities not be disclosed because they do not have permission to speak publicly.

“The No. 1 thing we’re all watching out for is ‘lean’ just a means for them to short circuit health protection,” one employee said.

Darwin didn’t respond to numerous attempts to reach him by email and phone. Under Darwin’s approach, however, the public is viewed as an investor who expects a return on investment in the form of positive outcomes.

Jumpstarting Superfund Cleanups

During the campaign, President Trump vowed to “get rid of” the EPA in almost every form. By selecting Pruitt as its administrator, Trump put the EPA into the hands of a bitter critic who has sued the agency more than a dozen times. Pruitt’s sympathies for the industries the EPA regulates has highlighted a tension inherent in many government activities: how to keep the public safe without unduly disrupting industry.

Pruitt prefers a softer approach to enforcement than former President Obama. Pruitt prefers to guide violators back into compliance rather than hammering them with investigations and fines. He also is considering shifting some of the agency’s enforcement responsibilities to the states, where thin regulator ranks are already overburdened.

Pruitt has also vowed to jumpstart cleanup at many of the more than 1,300 Superfund sites, which include some of the nation’s most toxic landfills, mines and chemical plants posing an immediate threat to public health and the environment. Cleanup at many has been delayed for decades by sharp disagreements over how clean is clean, litigious arguments that pit the bottom line of corporations against the health and well-being of communities.

The promise of an end to decades-long delays might cause many to cheer, environmentalists included. However, Pruitt’s approach – “lean” management practices designed to streamline the drag on businesses and playing a more direct role himself in settling long-running disputes – may give them pause.

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At a Glance

• EPA insiders are concerned that the streamlining process called "lean" is a cover for polluting companies.
• The customer in this process isn’t who you might think.

For one thing, money won’t be a factor in how Pruitt reinvigorates Superfund. The Trump administration wants to cut the program’s budget by almost a quarter next year from $1 billion to $762 million.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s call for the EPA’s overall budget to be slashed by 30 percent. The EPA recently announced it would not require mining companies to demonstrate they can pay for the cleanup before digging. And in October, Pruitt vowed to repeal a rule limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, assuring Kentucky coal miners, “The war against coal is over.”

These actions have stoked mistrust among stalwarts of environmental protection who believe the EPA is abandoning science in its rush to downsize and deregulate the agency.

“You don’t have EPA anymore,” said Rena Steinzor, a University of Maryland law professor who helped reauthorize Superfund as an aide to a New Jersey congressman in 1986. “You have an occupied country, like Poland and France in World War II.”

But the EPA’s new focus on efficiency and streamlining – everything from permits to Superfund sites – has given hope to the industries the EPA regulates.

Jeffrey A. Bolin has been with Michigan-based Dragun Corporation for 28 of its 29 years. The company was founded in 1988 by the-late James Dragun (rhymes with ray gun) after he left his job as a soil chemist with the EPA “because he thought it was shifting from science to being more of a political arm,” according to Bolin.

“Dr. Dragun pushed us that the data and the science drive the decisions and outcomes,” Bolin said. “We’ve been a company that gets in and gets out and lets companies get on with their business. Our clients are the regulated community.”

The EPA’s primary customer is the public, he said, but that industry also is a customer and its needs should be considered, too. “Thus, approval by the EPA is protective of ‘the public’ and serves the ‘other customer’ as well,” he wrote in a follow-up email.

A 2012 report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company said “lean” techniques can help government agencies eliminate “unnecessary touch points and wait times,” improve coordination and standardize work “to reduce variations in processes and performance.”

Bolin is heartened by Pruitt’s vow to break the impasse at Superfund sites.

“My understanding is that Scott Pruitt will have direct involvement with those sites,” said Bolin.

Under the current system, he added, actual cleanup is delayed until there is a final plan in place, which in many cases takes decades because of litigation, the lengthy regulatory process and the EPA’s tendency to get bogged down in minutiae. The EPA is very “process-obsessed,” he added.

Pruitt’s “direct engagement” can resolve these conflicts, Bolin believes.

“That should be a good thing in the big picture of cleaning up the environment and taking care of the most important exposure to human health and the environment,” he said.

It could also mean picking winners and losers in fierce battles over how far contamination extends from a toxic-waste site; frequency, type and duration of monitoring; and how clean a site ultimately must be before it’s deemed to be clean enough.

“If you get a senior person involved from the agency, you get a compromise and more common-sense thinking to get resolutions,” said Matthew Schroeder, a senior environmental engineer at Dragun. “Having Pruitt involved in the decision-making would bring that to some of these sites on the priority list.”

Earlier this month, Pruitt released a list of 21 toxic waste sites in need of “immediate and intense action.” (The Leviathan Mine in California was not among them.) In announcing the list, the EPA said, “The administrator decided his engagement on these specific sites can facilitate substantial progress in the near-term and move the site closer to completion of cleanup.”

Earlier this year, he created a Superfund task force to streamline the cleanup process.

"I have charged the Superfund Task Force staff to immediately and intently develop plans for each of these sites to ensure they are thoughtfully addressed with urgency," Pruitt said in a statement.

After releasing a34-page report with recommendations in July, the task force was turned over to Henry Darwin’s wife, Veronica Garcia, whom Pruitt also hired. Since then, she has been schooling the task force in principles of “lean” management, according to sources within the agency.

'Lean' at Leviathan

One of those Superfund sites is the Leviathan Mine, a 250-acre, open-pit sulfur mine nestled in the bucolic eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range about 20 miles south of Lake Tahoe. Mining activities there date to 1863 but ceased in the early 1960s after sulfuric acid oozing from the pit caused substantial ecological damage downstream to tribal and federal lands in Nevada, including recurring fish kills.

In 1977, Atlantic Richfield Company bought the mine. It’s since been turned over to the state of California. But because of ARCO’s prior ownership, it is liable for the cleanup costs of Leviathan. In 2000, BP bought ARCO, acquiring the responsibility for Leviathan as part of the deal. That same year, the EPA made Leviathan a Superfund site, partly at the behest of the Washoe tribe, whose lands in Nevada were contaminated by acid runoff from the mine.

For the past 17 years, Atlantic Richfield – under BP’s management – has been underwriting much of the cleanup effort at Leviathan. Water treatment systems have been installed, reducing much of the acid runoff. But the systems can’t operate during winter because Leviathan is at an elevation of 7,200 feet and subject to the cold and snow. Heavy rain events and snow melts can overwhelm the systems, resulting in sulfuric acid runoff.

Meanwhile, EPA, the tribe and Atlantic Richfield have been haggling over a long-term plan to manage the pollution generated by the site. After 17 years, they are still two years away from coming up with a permanent plan.

A key issue in the final cleanup plan is how far the contamination extends downstream from the mine. The farther it extends, the costlier the ultimate cleanup will be for Atlantic Richfield.

In 2014, the EPA assigned Lynda Deschambault, a chemist with a strong commitment to environmental protection, to be the remediation site manager at Leviathan. Science and a love of nature have guided her work, she said, citing the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy, “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generation.”

When she took over the site, she was a 17-year veteran of the EPA. Before that, she had spent 17 years as a chemist and lab director in the environmental laboratory industry.

As part of her duties, she organized meetings with stakeholders, such as the Washoe tribe, and pressed ARCO to share environmental data it was gathering to ensure testing was being done in places of concern to the tribe and other local stakeholders.

This past June, Deschambault went on vacation. When she returned she found her professional world turned upside down, she said, explaining that her supervisor at EPA’s southwestern regional offices told her ARCO had asked the EPA to “lean” cleanup activities at Leviathan.

As part of the “lean” process, her supervisor wanted her to curtail her efforts to get Atlantic Richfield to do additional testing, she said. The supervisor urged her to stop scheduling meetings and requesting information from ARCO workers, she added, and quizzed about her willingness to be more conciliatory toward Atlantic Richfield with an eye toward reaching a quicker final remediation plan.

Fueled by her commitment to science and the land, Deschambault pushed back.

“After a little research, I said, ‘Whoa, this is not appropriate for the scientific risk part that we’re in the middle of. How about if we do that during the remedial design?’ And they were, like, ‘No, we have to do this now.’”

Deschambault argued that Atlantic Richfield needed to collect more data and provide quicker access to the data. To her, that’s the part of the process that needed to be “leaned” – getting the data necessary for a decision and making it available for scrutiny as quickly as possible.

She believed Atlantic Richfield wasn’t testing some areas to keep costs down. She also felt Atlantic Richfield was slow-walking requests to share data.

Now, she felt like her bosses were telling her to roll over for Atlantic Richfield in the name of “lean” management principles.

“I told them I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to cut corners on the scientific assessment part,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘It’s already been decided. And we’re going to bring in another (remediation site manager) with some “lean” experience and have a meeting with you and she’s going to take over.’”

Details of these conversations could not be corroborated. Public affairs officers at the agency’s regional headquarters in San Francisco declined to discuss the matter and officials involved in the conversations did not respond to attempts to reach them.

Instead of rolling over, Deschambault said, she became one of some 400 EPA employees who accepted an early retirement package offered to more than 1,228 senior career agency employees in an effort to slash the agency's workforce. She was replaced, she said, by someone who had worked for 19 years at an environmental engineering consulting firm whose clients included mining companies. That official didn’t respond to inquiries.

BP, in an email reply, said, “We are confident that applying LEAN strategies at Leviathan would accelerate progress on the site and would provide important learnings that could be applied to other sites around the country. Atlantic Richfield is eager to work with the EPA to demonstrate the benefits of a LEAN approach to reach a final remedy that is protective of human health and the environment.”

In early November, Dana Barton, EPA’s regional supervisor for the Leviathan site, traveled from her offices in San Francisco to Gardnerville, Nevada, to meet with representatives of the tribe in its council chambers to explain the “lean” process.

According to several people who participated in the meeting, Barton portrayed the “lean” initiative at Leviathan as arising from an earlier meeting in Washington between Pruitt and representatives of BP. The company wanted to “lean” the site in an effort to facilitate final remedies and Pruitt had agreed, Barton was quoted as saying. Barton didn’t respond to inquiries.

“They weren’t ramming it down our throats,” said one of the local stakeholders. “I was getting ready for that to happen but it didn’t sound like that.” He questioned whether the southwestern regional officials themselves really believed in the approach, saying it sounded like they were being forced to adopt it by officials in Washington.

Nonetheless, he added, he told them “lean” is “a waste of time when we don’t have time to waste.”

In an emailed statement, BP wrote of its subsidiary, “Atlantic Richfield did not discuss the LEAN concept with Administrator Pruitt,” adding instead that “it was initially proposed for Leviathan during a discussion with Region 9” EPA officials, a reference to the southwestern region. BP stressed that ARCO isn’t trying to “avoid or minimize any of the substantive requirements” of the Superfund law.

“The LEAN approach does not result in an outcome that is less protective,” BP said in the statement. “LEAN is about improving process, not changing outcomes. The purpose of LEAN is to streamline activities that are unnecessarily complex or cumbersome in order to reach a beneficial outcome more effectively and efficiently.”

Apparently, that’s not a problem at BP. The company doesn’t use “lean” in its own operations, the company acknowledged in its statement.

Marcus Stern is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported for Copley News Service, ProPublica and The Weather Channel, among other news organizations. He can be reached at marcus.stern@comcast.net.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/forest-service-weighs-plan-to-lay-waste-to-tens-of-thousands-of-acres-of-old-growth-trees/

no lnx

Forest Service weighs plan to lay waste to tens of thousands of acres of old-growth trees

Written by David Cay Johnston / DC Report August 15, 2019

The evil genius of the people Donald Trump brought into our government so America could become a polluter’s paradise is really something to behold.

The latest Team Trump move would turn our national forests into polluter playgrounds. Companies that want to mow down old-growth trees so they can get at pockets of oil, coal or uranium are about to get pretty much everything they’ve always dreamed about. And roadless areas are marked for new roads extending miles into wilderness areas.

The way it’s being done is, in a perverse sort of way, admirably clever.

They call their plan to re-interpret how the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act applies to our national forests “streamlining” to make government more efficient. Their abuse of language is working, too. Many of the more than 29,000 people and organizations that have filed comments on the proposal embrace the Trumpian language.

Few of the comments I reviewed pushed back on “streamlining.” The proposal is better described as “steamrolling” the National Environmental Policy Act, the first federal law to require consideration of Earth and its bounty in governmental decisions.

Forestry, farming and other groups that favor the new policy refer to it as a plan to “modernize how” government complies with the law.

Powerful is the advantage of setting the agenda and with it the language of debate.

You, fellow citizens and owners of our government, now have until Aug. 26 to tell our hired help in the White House and the Forest Service what you think or forever suffer the consequences of idly standing by. Stand up for America’s natural resources.

Virtually No Public Review

The Trump administration, by its own estimate, wants to exempt 93% of forest service decisions from public review.

Currently, about 60% or perhaps 70% of these decisions are left to the discretion of agency professionals and managers without public comment for review. That’s entirely reasonable. A well-functioning government agency can’t be running off to get public input every time its managers want to put up a new sign for a parking lot, replace the toilets at a trailhead or change the color and fabric of ranger uniforms.

The issue is where to draw the line. Let’s look at the clear-cutting of forests, which has a devastating effect on birds, mammals and other wildlife, can cause severe soil erosion that may wipe out salmon runs and even bury houses in mudslides.

Using agency discretion should the Forest Service be allowed to let loggers clear cut a small hillside before pests ruin the wood? What about 500 acres? How about 7,300 acres?

What the Trumpers want is freedom to clear up to 7,300 acres of our forest lands under rules that could hide the action from the public until the deed is done or at least well underway. That is 11.4 square miles or half the size of Manhattan.

That’s just one example of the mischief that would be allowed under the proposed new rules.

One-Day Notice

There would still have to be notices published in the Forest Service’s quarterly Schedule of Proposed Action or SOPA reports.  Under the proposed rules, however, officials could authorize logging the day after SOPA comes out, giving loggers three months to cut before anyone not in the forest or noticing an increase in logging trucks would be clued in.

SOPA reports have long been designed to help hide Forest Service plans, a subtle but valuable benefit of the timber industry. Team Trump wants to tilt the existing rules almost entirely to the benefit of its industrial allies.

Go to the SOPA web page and notice that it is not a single report you could breeze through, perhaps using a Control F search for a keyword.

Instead you must click one-by-one on each of 176 forests, grasslands, prairies or recreational areas. Then you must navigate your way through 10 quarterly SOPA reports since Trump took office, each of which may go on for page after page in dense bureaucratese.

Just look at the SOPAs for the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which lists numerous actions like those here.

Rube Goldberg may be dead, but his progeny seem to have found plenty of related work helping make ridiculously complex what should be simple interactions between us and our government.

What happens to forests and the like matters because they provide us with a rich bounty of life and wealth. Natural forests have many kinds of trees and other plants providing food and shelter to a robust array of animals. Clear cut lands are deserts with little life. When Farmer McGregor levels a woodlot to grow carrots he’s not helping Peter Rabbit, he’s killing whole families of rabbits by destroying their natural food sources.

What of wetlands? They are nature’s filters, storm barriers and nurseries and crucial to some forests. Fill marshes and swamps in and the populations of birds, fish and amphibians decline. When there are not enough wetlands to harbor young life that grows up to move on to rivers, lakes and the ocean there are other consequences. Sharks, for example, finding too few fish to sustain their numbers start looking at beachgoers as their next dinner.

The proposed new Forest Service “regulations are designed to dramatically reduce public involvement in federal land management decisions,” Susan Jane Brown of the Western Environmental Law Center in Oregon wrote in a memo detailing the issues.

Logging and mining will likely increase, but “without the benefit of scientific input.”

Team Trump justifies reducing disclosures and radically reducing when the American people can comment to increase efficiency. Since it’s our government – we own it – this is really a ploy to make government a power unto itself, part of the overall Trump desire to replace a government that derives its powers from the consent of the people to a power onto itself.

He has mused at least six times in public about being “president for life” and he often refers to how he wants to rule over what Trump calls “my people.”

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