Category Archives: Illegal Immigration

Border Walls and Pipelines, Unacceptable with Exceptions

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So, the most immediate Executive Order signed by President Biden was to shutter the Keystone XL pipeline project. It has devastated the energy industry and the true costs to Americans are still growing outside the scope of higher prices of gasoline and the loss of jobs. The effects include revenues to states that provide funding the public education, tax increases, alterations in foreign policy and relations, slowing economic recovery across many industry sectors and destabilizing power sources for businesses and homes. For some finer points and financial context, go here. 

But, did you know the United States is actually funding a pipeline across Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India? Yes, in all the peace talks with the Taliban, we have for decades been providing financial aid, the amount is too convoluted to determine but this goes back to collaboration between the United States and the Taliban and even Russia.

A Taliban delegation has paid a surprise visit to Turkmenistan to pledge support for a planned natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan, providing welcome reassurance for a project whose viability has long been rendered doubtful by security concerns.

Signs point to the trip having been brokered by the U.S. government, which has long championed what is known as TAPI, named after the four countries the pipeline would cross: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Other projects alluded to by the Taliban spokesman are the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan high-voltage power transmission lines, or TAP, and railways from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan.

Should such reassurances hold, the main hurdle facing TAPI’s developers would be raising the necessary funds. Estimated costs for the project have been placed at anywhere up to $10 billion, although the chief executive of the TAPI Pipeline company, Muhammetmyrat Amanov, stated in 2018 that he was forecasting outlays closer to $7 billion.

Global energy majors have latterly shown no enthusiasm for TAPI, but that was not always the way. In 1997, a consortium comprised of six companies and the government of Turkmenistan was formed with the goal of building a 1,271-kilometer pipeline to Pakistan. India was not yet part of the plan. The largest share in that consortium, 54 percent, was held by California-based Unocal Corporation. In 1997, the American company even arranged travel to Texas for a senior Taliban delegation for negotiations. Deadly terrorist attacks in 1998 against U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya organized by Al-Qaeda, whose leader Osama bin Laden had been provided safe haven by the Taliban, put paid to all that.

The Taliban was not entirely deterred, though. In 1999, the militant group, which had by then extended its control to almost all of Afghanistan, entered into talks on the route with Turkmenistan and Pakistan. Lack of cash and the rapidly evolving geopolitical landscape made it all pointless. By the end of that year, Turkmenistan had reached an agreement with Russia’s Gazprom on the delivery of 20 billion cubic meters of gas in 2000.Geofinancial: Turkmenistan Pushing TAPI, the Original ... source

Breakthroughs on the Afghan and Caspian fronts come at an extremely propitious time for Turkmenistan, which has struggled to find viable buyers for its vast gas reserves.

Turkmenistan is currently almost entirely reliant on China. Russia buys paltry amounts of gas.

Since the launch of the Central Asia-China pipeline in 2009, Turkmenistan has pumped 290 billion cubic meters of gas to China. But whereas it was once predicted that the Beijing-funded pipeline would be carrying 65 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas annually by 2020, the entire route still only has capacity for 55 billion cubic meters per annum, and both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also use the pipeline.

Considering Turkmenistan has the fourth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world – an estimated 19.5 trillion cubic meters, nearly 10 percent of the world’s total – current export figures nowhere near reflect its potential. source

Crazy huh?

But hold on…there is the matter of Biden cancelling the border wall construction between the United States and Mexico.

Border walls around the world is a sign of the times and the Unites States also provides some foreign funding for walls far away. Someone ask Joe, Jen or Kamala about this…

Going back to 2016, Donald Trump promoted the construction of the border wall while the rest of the critics attacked the whole mission. The Atlantic in part included some of the top complaints. Clinton is suggesting that walls are useless against today’s borderless threats. Obama is suggesting that the world is marching toward ever-more interconnectedness, trampling the walls in its way. Both seem to present walls as a thing of the past. In fact, though, border walls and fences are currently going up around the world at the fastest rate since the Cold War

Ramo, a former journalist and the co-CEO and vice chairman of the consulting firm Kissinger Associates, applies network theory to international affairs. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War helped usher in unfettered globalization, he argues, but now a backlash is underway. Globalization has gradually produced a desire in certain parts of the world for separation—particularly after a series of traumas, including the 9/11 attacks and the global financial crisis, exposed the hazards of freewheeling integration. And separation is increasingly being achieved through physical barriers.

The statistic Ramo cites about the spread of walls comes from a study by the political scientists Ron Hassner and Jason Wittenberg: Of the 51 fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War II, around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014. Hassner and Wittenberg found that such boundaries—structures like the existing U.S.-Mexico border fence, the Israel-West Bank barrier, and the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border fence—tend to be constructed by wealthy countries seeking to keep out the citizens of poorer countries, and that many of these fortifications have been built between states in the Muslim world.

“The walls, fences, and trenches of the modern world seem to be getting longer, more ambitious, and better defended with each passing year,” Ramo writes. “The creation of gates is … the corollary of connection.”

Recently, many of those fences have been appearing in Europe, as countries there struggle to process an influx of migrants and refugees. (The chart above doesn’t account for all of these new barriers, a number of which have been constructed since 2014.) The Economist observed in January that, as a result of the refugee crisis and the conflict in Ukraine, “Europe will soon have more physical barriers on its national borders than it did during the Cold War.” New border controls and barriers, including Austria’s proposed fence along the border with Italy, are threatening the viability of the European Union’s passport-free Schengen zone.

“Talking about walls or no walls is not the right discussion,” Ramo added. He would rather the discussion be about how gatekeeping should work, including questions like “what kind of immigration do we want to encourage and how do we want to structure that process.”

One of the reasons these trends are important is that they reframe the 2016 election from a contest between the past and the future, as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama imply, to one between two plausible futures. Ramo might call it a divide over the relative wisdom of more open versus more closed networks.

For an interactive migrant map for recent years go here. 

Hypocrisy right? The Daily Mail of the UK did a piece in 2015 of 65 countries that have erected walls and fences. 

California, the Incubation State for Federal Policy/Law

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  1. There are 20 counties in California that are sanctuaries for illegal aliens.
  2. Lawmakers passed SB10 abolishing cash bail, and then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law in August 2018. It was supposed to take effect in October 2019, but a challenge from the bail industry blocked it pending the results of Proposition 25, a referendum to uphold the new law. The measure failed.
  3. California’s high speed rail is bankrupt and it is years away from completion. ($9.98 Billion)
  4. California paid inmates $1 Billion in fraudulent unemployment claims.
  5. California bans gas-powered passenger cars and trucks beginning in 2035. Now Massachusetts is doing the same.

There is a several lack of housing options throughout the state. Of course there is the major homeless epidemic. We cannot begin to understand the full consequence of the fires much less the fact that there are brown outs and scheduled blackouts was Pacific Gas and Electric is bankrupt.

Op-Ed: Southern California has the resources to solve ...

Did we mention water shortages? Oh, there is the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) is faced with a $100 billion shortfall.

California Power Provider PG&E Files For Bankruptcy In ...

See where this is going? Now with the Biden/Harris administration….the predictions are there as spelled out the a recent LA Times op-ed.

***

WASHINGTON — 

After four years of being relentlessly targeted by a Republican president who worked overtime to bait, punish and marginalize California and everything it represents, the state is suddenly center stage again in Washington’s policy arena.

California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. That’s rekindling past cliches about the state — incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas — even as it struggles with surging COVID-19 infections, a safety net frayed by the pandemic’s toll, crushing housing costs and wildfires, all fueling an exodus of residents.

There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda.

The revival in Washington of the California model of governance was cemented by Democrats’ recent recapture of the Senate majority, and comes after a Trump-era hiatus during which the state was road-testing ambitious new policies. Another factor: California Sen. Kamala Harris is about to become vice president.

“California has never had a Democrat on a national ticket, much less a ticket that won,” said former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. “Kamala Harris will be in all the meetings and have the last word with the president after they are over. She’ll be sharing ideas, innovations and breakthroughs from California that might help solve problems on the national level.”

Other Californians will be doing the same from Biden’s Cabinet. Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra is nominated to run the massive Health and Human Services Department. The nominee for Treasury secretary, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, is a professor at UC Berkeley, as is the nominee for Energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. Longtime California resident Alejandro Mayorkas is the nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security.

And in Congress, of course, San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi will be running point on the California agenda as House speaker.

Not that Biden needs the nudge. He’s been pushing to nationalize some of the state’s pioneering efforts on climate action, workers’ rights, law enforcement and criminal justice, healthcare and economic empowerment since he was vice president in the Obama era. He continued to champion the cause while he and Harris were still rivals in the 2020 presidential race.

The incoming administration is embracing some of California’s most pioneering initiatives, such as programs for rapidly decarbonizing the electricity grid and tuition-free college, as well as more obscure, incremental policies. Also on the new White House agenda will be measures to ban mandatory arbitration clauses in employee contracts and a revival of a “Cash for Clunkers” program aimed at providing incentives to get polluting cars off the road — signature California policies.

Even some ideas that haven’t worked out so well in California are on the national agenda now. Biden is a fierce proponent of high-speed rail, as well as new protections for gig economy workers that California voters diluted in November.

“California has this mantle of leadership, but along with that can come the stumbles of being the first adopter,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael). “It’s an innovative and imaginative place that tends to set trends and blaze trails. It’s too big and too influential not to inform our country’s policy direction going forward.”

California’s influence will be felt in how Americans power their homes and cars, and even in how they save for retirement.

“California is not just about pushing the envelope, it is about tearing it apart,” said former state Senate leader Kevin de León, who helped the state implement some of the innovative ideas the incoming administration wants to pursue. “The state is full of disruptors and malcontents who are impatient and have no problem challenging the status quo.”

De León worked for years to enroll all California workers in an “auto-IRA” program that would automatically direct a small share of their earnings to a 401(k)-style savings account. He was motivated by the experience of his aunt, a housekeeper and one of the millions of Californians who was toiling in a low-wage job without any retirement safety net beyond Social Security.

“This was a woman, salt of the earth, who always worked fingers to bone,” De León said. “Yet I am her IRA, I am her pension plan. Her story is not unique. You have millions of Californians and tens of millions of Americans who are retiring into poverty.” The CalSavers program that De León was able to help create in California is a template for Biden’s agenda on retirement security.

California’s plan to remove carbon-emitting power sources from its electricity grid entirely by 2045 also inspired the incoming administration. Biden is proposing an even more aggressive timeline, looking to move the grid to zero emissions nationwide by 2035.

The state’s plan was the most ambitious of its kind when it was approved in 2018, a snub at Trump’s unrelenting push to revive demand for fossil fuels. It moved several other states to push up their decarbonization timelines. “My thinking was we had to be a beacon of hope and opportunity while Trump was trying to undo all of our policies at the national level,” De León said.

When Trump moved to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, California committed to meeting its objectives regardless, and launched a successful crusade to persuade 23 other states to do the same. Biden is now preparing to reenter the accord. California’s landmark tailpipe emissions standards that the Trump administration worked furiously to erode are again central to that effort, helping to push the nation’s vehicle fleet toward electrification.

An environmental task force set up last year with members across the Democratic Party’s spectrum — co-chaired by former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, since appointed to Biden’s Cabinet as climate envoy — urged the incoming administration to seek counsel from California. “Immediately convene California, due to its unique authority, and other states with labor, auto industry, and environmental leaders to inform ambitious actions,” the group’s report advised.

Biden’s agenda will also be informed by California’s setbacks.

The rolling blackouts the state recently endured pointed to the need for more innovation, public investment and oversight to keep pace with green-energy goals. The state’s cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gases fell short in curbing pollution in marginalized communities, triggering protests that may have cost California’s chief air regulator a post in Biden’s Cabinet as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Likewise, the disastrous delays in delivering unemployment relief checks during the pandemic, and associated rampant levels of fraud, scuttled the Cabinet prospects of California’s labor secretary. (Biden did pick an official from the state government, Isabel Guzman, to run the Small Business Administration.)

The national movement to protect gig economy workers was dealt a damaging blow when California voters in November sided with ride-hailing companies and other technology firms, which were eager to carve big loopholes into the state’s landmark law meant to protect those workers.

Supporters of the policies say the setbacks in California are part of the road-testing. They signal to federal leaders what tweaks are needed before a national rollout.

One California policy Biden promises to replicate aims to reduce the high rate of Black women who die while giving birth or within a year of it. Though the program helped the state make significant progress driving down the overall maternal mortality rate, it didn’t narrow the racial gap. Black women still account for 40% of deaths. The Biden camp says it will propose additional actions to confront racial inequities in healthcare.

In the case of the gig worker rules California created — and which Biden favors — activists in the state are looking to the president-elect to revive protections like those undermined by Proposition 22. Robert Reich, Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, said in an email that Biden could potentially preempt California’s industry-backed initiative with federal action, a move he said would be “vitally important.”

Whether Biden will go that far is unknown. Either way, the incoming administration has made clear it is looking to California as it moves to overhaul labor rules. The state has “the nation’s foremost set of laws to protect workers,” Reich wrote. Those laws, he said, give employees more rights than anywhere else in the country on issues that include overtime, employer retaliation, wage theft, discrimination and protection from sexual harassment.

“We’ve shown you can have progressive policies and enjoy economic growth,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from Silicon Valley.

Khanna recently touted those policies on a podcast hosted by progressive filmmaker Michael Moore. The title of the episode was notable considering that Moore savaged the Bay Area in his 1989 film “Roger and Me” as a hornet’s nest of self-indulgent liberals.

He called last month’s show “Make America California Again!”

 

Los Angeles Deputy District Attorneys Suing Their Boss, DA Gascón

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Primer – Officers of the Court: any person who has an obligation to promote justice and effective operation of the judicial system, including judges, the attorneys who appear in court, bailiffs, clerks, and other personnel. As officers of the court lawyers have an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion about reasons the attorney or his/her client is not appearing, the location of documents and other matters related to conduct of the courts.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón Resigns | KQED

DA George Gascon is and was supported by BLM along with more than $19 million has been pumped into the contentious Los Angeles County district attorney race, with donors lining up on opposing sides of a stark ideological divide between incumbent Jackie Lacey and challenger George Gascón.

Spending in the race intensified a few weeks before Election Day, when New York billionaire George Soros and Bay Area philanthropist Patty Quillin combined to put millions of dollars behind Gascón. Quillin’s husband, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, has also helped Gascón maintain a commanding fundraising lead over Lacey, who has support from law enforcement unions up and down the state.

In the weeks before the general election, donations from Gascón’s supporters – including $3.4 million from the criminal justice reform group Color Of Change – helped the challenger take a large fundraising lead.

LATimes:The union representing Los Angeles County deputy district attorneys on Wednesday sued Dist. Atty. George Gascón, alleging that the dramatic changes he has brought to the nation’s largest prosecutorial office have defied state law and forced rank-and-file prosecutors to violate their oaths of office.

The lawsuit is the most public expression yet of the pushback Gascón has fielded from within his own office since being sworn in Dec. 7. It focuses on his so-called special directives that ordered his deputies to forgo sentencing enhancements.

The union, which represents about 800 prosecutors, is seeking a court order that would compel Gascón to rescind the directives and declare them “invalid and illegal,” as well as a temporary restraining order that would bar Gascón and his administration from enforcing the directives.

Gascón’s policies have “placed line prosecutors in an ethical dilemma — follow the law, their oath, and their ethical obligations, or follow their superior’s orders,” wrote the union’s lawyer, Eric M. George.A spokesman for Gascón had no immediate comment on the lawsuit.

On his first day in office, Gascón announced his deputies would no longer seek enhancements that — if proved — lengthen defendants’ prison sentences under certain circumstances, such as if they committed a crime to a gang’s benefit or if they had a criminal history.

Initially, the prohibition extended to enhancements for hate crimes, sex trafficking, financial crimes and elder and child abuse, but Gascón has since modified his directives to allow such enhancements. His deputies are still barred from seeking enhancements for prior strikes, committing a crime that benefits a gang, using a firearm and any special circumstance allegation that would send a defendant to prison for life without parole.

The union argues that prosecutors should pursue or forgo sentencing enhancements using “case-by-case discretion,” basing their decisions on the circumstances of a crime and a defendant, not “rubber stamp blanket prosecutorial policies barring the wholesale enforcement of criminal laws.”

The union asserts that Gascón’s prohibition on enhancements for prior strikes violates the state’s three strikes law, which, in the union’s view, requires prosecutors to seek longer sentences for defendants with previous convictions. Gascón “enjoys wide — but not limitless — discretion,” George wrote; he may believe such enhancements do not protect public safety, but he has no authority to circumvent lawmakers and legislate “by fiat,” the lawsuit says.

Gascón has said he was elected with a mandate to overhaul an outdated, heavy-handed approach to law and order that hasn’t proved effective in protecting the public. He promised during the campaign to no longer charge gang enhancements, which have come under scrutiny after several Los Angeles Police Department officers were charged over the summer with falsifying records that misrepresented people they had stopped as gang members and associates.

In a statement released by Stanford’s Three Strikes Project, the program’s director, Michael Romano, and two other law professors said the California Supreme Court has held that district attorneys have “complete authority” to enforce state laws within their jurisdiction.

Romano, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley Law School, and David Mills, a professor at Stanford Law School, said in the statement that Gascón’s policies will make Los Angeles safer and reduce “epidemic” levels of incarceration. The union’s lawsuit, they added, “is more reflective of their longstanding opposition to reform and the will of millions of Angelenos than it is the legality of DA Gascón’s directives.”

The union also contends that Gascón, a local executive branch official, is encroaching on the authority of the courts in ordering his deputies to move to withdraw enhancement allegations. If a judge refuses those motions — as several have in recent weeks — line prosecutors have been instructed to file new charging documents without the enhancements. In doing so, the union argues, the district attorney’s office is making an end-run around the courts’ authority.

This scenario played out in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Monday. A deputy district attorney, reading from a script, said he was seeking to dismiss enhancement allegations in a murder case against a defendant for belonging to a gang and using a firearm. When the judge denied the motion, the prosecutor said he would file new charges without the enhancements.

“I’m not going to accept an amended information,” Judge Mark S. Arnold said. “Legally, there’s no justification. There’s no defect.”

Could Crimea Soon be Free of Russian Occupation/Annexation?

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Just a few days ago…

Crimea | History, Map, Geography, & People | Britannica

France24: The UN General Assembly on Monday adopted a resolution urging Russia to end its “temporary occupation” of Crimea, which Moscow took over in 2014, “without delay.”

The resolution on the militarization of the peninsula of Crimea, the port of Sevastopol and parts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov was adopted by 63 countries, with 17 voting against and 62 abstaining.

The resolution is non-binding but has political significance. It was put forward by 40 countries, including Britain, France, Germany and the Baltic states, as well the United States, Australia, Canada and Turkey.

The resolution “urges the Russian Federation, as the occupying Power, immediately, completely and unconditionally to withdraw its military forces from Crimea and end its temporary occupation of the territory of Ukraine without delay.”

Facing the “continuing destabilization of Crimea owing to transfers by the Russian Federation of advanced weapon systems, including nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles, weapons, ammunition and military personnel to the territory of Ukraine,” the resolution called on Russia to stop all such transfers “without delay.”

Fighting between Ukrainian troops and forces backed by Russia has left more than 13,000 dead since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian forces in the east of Ukraine rebelled against Kiev.

At the UN Security Council, tensions between Russia and western countries over the conflict remain in sharp focus, as was shown by an informal meeting last week by Moscow on the 2015 Minsk accords between Ukraine and Russia, which were sponsored by France and Germany.

Berlin and Paris sparked Russian fury by boycotting the meeting, described by European countries as an international platform offered to the Donbass separatists, several of whom had been invited to speak by Moscow.

*** Analysis: Why Russia's Crimea move fails legal test - BBC News  source

Is Crimea Now Costing Russia More Than It Is Worth?

Paul Goble
In the euphoria that surrounded Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea six years ago, most Russians were more than willing to spend money to integrate that region into the Russian Federation. But at that time, they had little idea just how much that process would cost. Not only did that aggressive breach of international law trigger Western sanctions against Russia, but the authorities in Moscow also never gave the public an honest estimate of just how much money would need to be spent, nor for how long, even after the Kremlin proclaimed the peninsula’s absorption an accomplished fact. Were the Russian economy doing well, that might not matter; but it is not (see EDM, May 6, 12, 18, November 30), and the subsidies going to Crimea are, of course, unavailable to support the domestic needs of the increasingly hard-pressed Russian people in Russia proper. That contradiction could, therefore, encourage Putin to try to launch a new military advance to cover these losses.

Russian regional affairs analyst Anton Chablin points out that the recently released budget figures for 2021 show enormous spending on Crimea is set to continue. Moscow plans to channel no less than 102 billion rubles ($1.5 billion) to support 68 percent of the budget of Crimea. That figure is larger than the subsidies going to Dagestan and Chechnya: 96.7 billion rubles ($1.4 billion) and 78.8 billion rubles ($1.1 billion), respectively. When the Russian economy was somewhat healthier, Russians generally ignored those costs as the generous outlays to the country’s newest imperial possession were not considered a serious problem. But now, the situation has changed; and the numbers Chablin cites will likely lead an increasing number of Russians to ask whether Crimea is worth it. Although such a mental shift may not push Moscow to return Crimea to Ukraine, it could certainly further undermine Russian support for Putin and make it more likely he will launch some new offensive to rebuild “patriotic” fervor around himself (Akcent.site, December 7).

The first signs of popular unhappiness about this spending are likely to emerge as the State Duma (lower chamber of parliament) considers the budget, Chablin writes. Deputies almost certainly will focus on three things: 1) the growth in Moscow’s subsidies rather than the declines the Kremlin had promised in earlier years; 2) the overly optimistic predictions about tax collection made by the Russian regime in Crimea that are unlikely to be met and that will force Moscow to pay out even more than it is budgeting; and, especially offensive to many in the current environment, 3) the fact that the administration on the peninsula continues to spend ever more money on itself rather than on things like vacation resorts that might benefit average Russians (Akcent.site, December 7).

From the beginning of the annexation, independent Russian observers did point out that the direct costs associated with integrating Crimea would be far larger than and last longer than the Kremlin promised. Historian Arkady Popov, for example, said that the Kremlin’s pledge to end subsidies amounting to a trillion rubles ($160 billion) after only five or six years was absurd. Not only was that amount, in fact, more than Moscow could possibly afford—it exceeded the projected subsidies to the North Caucasus and the Russian Far East over the same period—but it was actually far less than would be needed given the collapse of the economy in Crimea since Russia occupied it (Ej.ru, September 28, 2015). And even then, there were Russians complaining that Moscow had “billions” for Crimea but no money to refurbish their decaying housing
(Forum-msk.org, March 26, 2014).

In the intervening years, various experts have attempted to put a price on Moscow’s assistance to Crimea; however, the Russian government has done what it can to obscure what it has been spending. Perhaps the best estimate came last year. It was prepared by economist Sergei Aleksashenko, who, in a book-length study, asserts that Crimea had by then cost Russia 1.5 trillion rubles ($23.5 billion). That figure, he points out in the piece, equals approximately 10,000 rubles ($160) for every man, woman and child in the Russian Federation. Or put another way, Aleksashenko continues, Moscow is now spending on Crimea 357 times the amount it is spending on the Russian Academy of Sciences, even though he concedes that a majority of Russians, as of 2019, did not think that the annexation was having a negative impact on their lives (Forbes.ru, March 24, 2019).

That passive acceptance may now be changing. For one thing, these budget figures are coming to light at a time of pandemic-induced suffering. And for another, Russians are increasingly aware of the collateral financial costs associated with Crimea that are not being counted in those base subsidy amounts. Among the largest of these associated costs, which has attracted significant attention recently, is what Moscow may be forced to spend in the coming months to ensure that the peninsula has enough drinking water (see EDM, February 26, August 12). Those estimated expenses are sufficiently great that Putin might decide on an alternative solution: launching a new military campaign against Ukraine to gain control of water supplies that Crimea lost access to when Russia occupied it (see EDM, May 21). If that were to happen, what may seem like a minor budgetary dispute could reignite the military conflict between Moscow and Kyiv, with all the far-reaching consequences that would involve.

 

 

We Have Another Soros DA in Los Angeles County

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No more deportations…..

As part of the Los Angeles City Charter:

Sec. 215. Oath of Office.

Every officer provided for in the Charter shall, before entering upon the discharge of the duties of office, take the following oath or affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California and the Charter of the City of Los Angeles, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of (here inserting the name of the office) according to the best of my ability.”

On first day, L.A. County D.A. George Gascón eliminates bail - Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES (CN) — On his first day on the job as Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor, George Gascón says the district attorney’s office will no longer ask for cash bail for nonviolent felony charges, seek the death penalty or charge children as adults.

Gascón, the former San Francisco DA, unseated Jackie Lacey last month in a closely watched race that pitted an incumbent prosecutor against a reform challenger.

He was sworn in Monday and promised to “change course and implement a system of justice that will enhance our safety and humanity” as he takes the helm of one of the nation’s largest prosecutor’s offices.

“Today we are confronting the lie that stripping entire communities of their liberties somehow made us safer — and we’re doing it with science, research, and data,” Gascón said in a statement. “For decades those who profit off incarceration have used their enormous political influence — cloaked in the false veil of safety — to scare the public and our elected officials into backing racist policies that created more victims, destroyed budgets and shattered our moral compass. That lie and the harm it caused ends now.”

The turning tide promised by Gascón garnered an immediate reaction from law enforcement representatives. The LA Police Protective League, a union representing local police officers, called Gascón’s ending of cash bail “disturbing” and said pushing LA County into the progressive direction San Francisco followed would be “disastrous.”

“The new DA talks a good game, but his plans will do nothing but further victimize” LA County residents including people of color, the police union said in a statement.

The police union did not immediately respond to news that the DA’s office will form a board to review deadly police shootings going back to 2012, which is when Lacey first took office. The University of California, Irvine, criminal justice clinic said it assist the board.

Gascón, a Cuban-born immigrant, served as an assistant police chief with the LAPD and then police chief in Mesa, Arizona, before serving as police chief in San Francisco from 2009 to 2011.

He was appointed as San Francisco DA by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom to fill the vacancy left by Kamala Harris when she was elected as California attorney general.

Gascón’s pull toward LA County was in part encouraged by local activists who sought a candidate to challenge Lacey, including the Black Lives Matter-LA chapter.

The DA race played out amidst a backdrop of demands across the country for criminal justice reform over the murder of unarmed Black people.

For the last three years, local activists rallied outside Lacey’s downtown offices to demand an audience with her to discuss the killing of unarmed Black and brown civilians by police. Families whose loved ones were killed by police also wanted to know why the DA’s office was unwilling to bring charges against police over the shootings of unarmed people.

Under Lacey’s command, the DA office only brought charges against one police officer in the shooting death of a driver who fled during a traffic stop.

In a letter addressed to LA County police officers, Gascón said during his career as a police officer and then DA he’s “become a fierce advocate for good policing for largely the same reasons I seek to hold bad police accountable. It’s not simply because I believe Black Lives Matter, or because of the oath I will take today to uphold the Constitution and ensure equal justice under the law.”

He said problem officers severely hinder law enforcement’s standing in the community.

“We are all scarred by their misdeeds, leading many in our communities to perceive police as persecutors instead of protectors,” said Gascón.

In a tweet Gascón wrote, “40 years ago I walked my first beat as a young police officer. Today, I was sworn in as the 43rd District Attorney of Los Angeles.”

His campaign and win is widely viewed as an indictment of Lacey’s role as a prosecutor who did not change fast enough for a county of 10 million that sought a more progressive approach to criminal justice.

Lacey, the first Black prosecutor and first woman to hold the office, conceded the race to Gascón last month. He won roughly 2 million votes to Lacey’s 1.7 million, according to the county’s election results.

Along with doing away cash bail, Gascón said his office would ensure a better response to reach out to victims of sexual assault, will stop charging low-level offenses connected to poverty, addiction, mental illness and homelessness, according to a statement from his transition team.

His office will also emphasize resentencing for people convicted of nonviolent crimes and are deemed low risk or those with records of rehabilitation.

***

In October, Gascon’s campaign released a detailed plan that would use the power of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to help criminal illegal aliens avoid arrest and deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

As part of the plan, Gascon has proposed factoring in “severe collateral consequences in charging decisions, plea negotiations, and use of diversion programs” for criminal illegal aliens so as to avoid arrest and deportation by ICE.

“Local criminal justice actors must be careful not to become part of a pipeline to deportation in a dysfunctional immigration system … the DA must also strive to limit unnecessary exposure to immigration enforcement,” Gascon’s plan continues:

Immigration status can have a disproportionate adverse impact on noncitizen defendants because of federal immigration law implications. A core duty of prosecutors is to ensure that the punishment fits the crime. As such, it is incumbent upon the prosecutor to be aware of and mitigate collateral consequences, particularly when they are more severe than the punishment for the crime itself. Indeed, in Padilla v. Kentucky 130 S.Ct. 1473 (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigration consequences of a conviction for immigrants can be profound and warrant consideration by the prosecution as well as the defense. [Emphasis added]

…

An immigration-informed approach includes working with defense attorneys to obtain a defendant’s immigration status–without requiring onerous proof or documentation – and implementing training programs to increase awareness of immigration law, with the goal of equipping prosecutors to exercise discretion in achieving immigration-neutral charges and plea bargaining. The basic principle guiding this approach is that the full range of punitive consequences – both direct and collateral–should be roughly equivalent for citizen and noncitizen offenders. [Emphasis added]

Likewise, Gascon has proposed reducing “prosecution of low-level, ‘quality of life’ offenses” such as drug possession, driving without a license, and public urination, so that illegal aliens who are arrested for these crimes do not face what Gascon deems “outsized immigration ramifications, due to the booking and fingerprint sharing between local law enforcement and immigration authorities following an arrest.”

Even further, Gascon plans to “limit exposure to immigration enforcement” for criminal illegal aliens by reducing jail-time so that suspects are booked and almost immediately released. More here from Breitbart.