EnviroPolitics Blog

Amy Kennedy primary win stuns South Jersey political machine

BY Michael Hill, NJTV News Correspondent | July 8, 2020, 5PM EST

Amy Kennedy, the daughter-in-law of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, stunned some of the state’s top Democrats in the 2nd Congressional District race. But not Gov. Phil Murphy, who endorsed Kennedy and introduced her on election night.

Kennedy upset the South Jersey political machine of George Norcross. Minutes after the polls closed Tuesday night, Norcross was the first to project Kennedy’s victory and to congratulate her. He had supported her opponent, college political science professor Brigid Callahan Harrison.

“Well, this is a tough moment for me. Tonight is a great moment for the Democratic Party,” Harrison said in her concession speech Tuesday night.

One observer says Kennedy’s TV campaign was so smart that if she walked down the street you’d know who she was.

Political analyst Micah Rasmussen speculates about the voters.

“There was probably some backlash against Norcross, against the South Jersey machine. The disaffected Democrats in South Jersey resented the fact that Norcross and the county Democratic leaders throughout South Jersey were trying to dictate to them, probably right after they dictated to them and pushed Van Drew down their throats,” said Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.

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Kennedy will challenge incumbent and former Democrat Jeff Van Drew. He switched to the Republican Party during the impeachment proceedings, pledging his “undying support” to the President Donald Trump.

Both national parties have taken a keen interest in the fall showdown and plan to spend millions on it.

In the 3rd Congressional District – outspent entrepreneur David Richter put $600,000 of his own money in a projected win over Kate Gibbs, who’s conceded.

NJ Spotlight Editor At Large Colleen O’Dea says Richter used highway tolls to drive Gibbs to defeat.

“Some have said that her union affiliation and that union’s backing of the Turnpike and Parkway toll hikes that are coming in September may have really done her in,” O’Dea said.

Richter overcame Gibbs’ Republican Party endorsement in Burlington County.

“We absolutely outperformed in Burlington County and I’m really happy about that. It positions us very well in the general,” Richter said.

Richter will challenge who he calls the well-funded incumbent, Democrat Andy Kim in a race the Cook Political Report calls a toss-up.

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Climate fights moving into the courtroom. Lawyers are getting creative

Climate change may be having its day in court

*File photo:* A climate change activist holds a sign during a demonstration of the Fridays for Future movement in Lausanne, Switzerland on January 17, 2020. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

By Matthew Green, Valerie Volcovici, Emma Farge Reuters

With the slow pace of international climate negotiations, lawyers from Switzerland to San Francisco are increasingly filing lawsuits demanding action.

And they are getting creative — using new legal arguments to challenge companies and governments before a judge.

Two decades ago, only a handful of climate-related lawsuits had ever been filed worldwide. Today, that number is 1,600, including 1,200 lawsuits in the United States alone, according to data reported Friday by the London School of Economics.

“The courts are an increasingly important place for addressing the problem of climate change,” said Hari Osofsky, the dean of Penn State Law and the School of International Affairs.

Already, climate campaigners are seeing glimmers of success.

In the Netherlands in December, the country’s Supreme Court upheld a ruling in favour of the Urgenda campaign group’s demand that the Dutch government move faster to cut carbon emissions.

And in January, a judge in Switzerland acquitted a dozen climate protesters from trespassing charges, filed after the group staged a tennis match within a branch of Credit Suisse in 2018 to draw attention to the bank’s fossil fuel loans. Defence lawyers had argued that the protesters’ actions were necessitated by the “imminent danger” posed by climate change. The ruling was met in court with a standing ovation.

“It was an exceptional ruling,” one of the defence lawyers, Aline Bonard, told Reuters. Given that the protesters admitted to trespassing, “the infraction is undeniable.”

But cases like these suggest a shift in how people are understanding the role of the judiciary in mediating cases related to the warming climate. Now, “there is bound to be a new wave of legal proceedings using a similar line of argument,” Bonard said.

NEW LEGAL TACTICS

As rulings that compel governments to cut emissions remain rare, lawyers still see promise in targeting large, polluting companies. Such cases in the past tended to accuse coal-fired power stations or government of failing to limit emissions. Cases now are being fought on arguments such as consumer protections and human rights.

This shift been especially pronounced in the United States, where more than a dozen cases filed by states, cities and other parties are challenging the fossil fuel industry for its role in causing climate change and not informing the public of its harms.

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Coronavirus deaths increase to 15,423 in New Jersey. As infection rate keeps rising, Gov Murphy mandates masks outdoors

By Brent Johnson and Len Melisurgo NJ.com

New Jersey on Wednesday reported 53 new deaths attributed to the coronavirus and 335 new positive tests, while the rate of transmission — a statistic that has state officials worried of late — rose slightly again.

The new numbers come as Gov. Phil Murphy announced the state will now require people to wear masks outdoors in public when they can’t practice social distancing.

Murphy also announced that restaurants and bars in the Garden State that are able to open 50% of their wall space can allow indoor dining, saying the air flow is better there than in closed spaces.

New Jersey has now reported 15,423 known deaths related to COVID-19 — 13,476 lab-confirmed and 1,947 probable — with 174,039 known cases in the little more than four months since the the state’s first case was announced March 4.

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This comes as the U.S. has surpassed 3 million cases, with about 1 million coming in the last 28 days as numerous states have seen a surge in new positive tests.

New Jersey — once a coronavirus hotspot — has seen its number of daily new cases and deaths, as well as hospitalizations, fall significantly since peaking in April and remain relatively steady in recent days.

But officials are concerned the Garden State’s transmission rate recently jumped past the critical mark of 1 after falling below it for 10 weeks. That means, on average, every newly infected resident is now passing COVID-19 to at least one other person.

Officials said Wednesday the rate of transmission had climbed from 1.05 to 1.10.

“This is, again, why we are taking the steps today to require everyone to wear masks and face coverings when outside,” Murphy said during his latest coronavirus briefing in Trenton. “We have to have both a lower daily positivity and a rate below one. This is not either/or, this is and/both. It’s the only way we can meaningfully slow the rate of spread of COVID-19 to save lives and not see our progress backslide.”

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Philly area law firms rake in millions in PPP cash

By Erin Arvedlund, Jacob Adelman and Chris A. Williams Philadelphia Inquirer

Law firms are the Philadelphia region’s biggest recipients of cash from the Paycheck Protection Program, which is aimed at helping small businesses through the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 2,100 of the loans in the region went to law offices in Philadelphia and surrounding Pennsylvania and South Jersey counties, comprising at least $228 million, according to an Inquirer analysis of data released this week by the Trump administration. Of the total, 426 law firms borrowed more than $150,000 each.

Among business sectors, the legal profession was followed by about 2,600 restaurant firms that borrowed $220 million across the eight-county region .

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The gap between the legal business and others was most pronounced in Philadelphia, where law firms took in $110 million, compared with $75 million for the restaurant sector.

Although there is some dispute about the accuracy of the job-retention figures, the numbers released by the Trump administration for the $660 billion national program suggest that taxpayer funding saved far more jobs in the Philadelphia area by helping restaurants than law firms.

Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a left-leaning nonprofit based in Washington, said he was not surprised to see restaurants as big recipients because of how badly they were affected by the pandemic.

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Unlike cooks and waiters, however, many employees at law offices can work remotely, so those businesses wouldn’t seem to have needed as much public support to stay afloat, said Stanley, whose group advocates for tighter financial regulations.

“This money is intended for businesses to maintain the wages of their workers, so we need oversight and information from the people handing out that money,” he said.

Paycheck Protection Program loans can be forgiven if at least 60% of the money is used on payroll. Even if a firm chooses to spend the money on other than job retention, the loans remain a very good deal: Interest was set at only 1 percent.

Under the rules, only businesses with as many as 500 employees could apply. Moreover, the rules specified that a maximum of $100,000 of program money could be used to pay any one employee.

Two firms applied for the maximum amount, between $5 million and $10 million. (The Treasury Department provided only ranges, and not specific amounts for recipients it named). They were White and Williams, based in Philadelphia; and Archer, headquartered in Haddonfield.

The White and Williams firm said the loan money helped it retain more than 400 jobs, while Archer said it kept 330 jobs.

Andrea Malone, chief marketing officer at White and Williams, said in an e-mail that the money permitted the firm to “work seamlessly and without interruption in the service of our clients.”

“White and Williams, like many businesses across the country, has been negatively impacted by COVID-19. In the face of such economic uncertainty, the PPP loan enabled us to retain and pay employees as well as rent and utilities,” she said.

Community Legal Services, the nonprofit that helps those too poor to afford a lawyer, received a loan, borrowing an amount between $1 million and $2 million.

Another nonprofit recipient was the Law School Admission Council, which received a loan of between $5 million and $10 million. The company administers the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, for admission to law school. The Newtown company left blank the number of jobs retained.

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Stradley Ronon chairman William Sasso said the firm is using its loan money on “exactly what it’s meant for, to keep our employees employed. We used it mostly for payroll, and that’s all I can say right now. We’re pretty good about keeping all our people.”

The Center City law firm listed itself as retaining 268 jobs after applying for a loan of between $2 million and $5 million.

Among other law firms that received loans of between $2 million and $5 million were Bennett Bricklin & Saltzburg; Chartwell Law Offices; Cohen Seglias Pallas Greenhall; Dilworth Paxson; Flaster Greenberg; Klehr Harrison; and Kline & Specter.

Also, KML Law Group; Marks O’Neill; Margolis Edelstein; Mid-Atlantic Solutions; Mintzer Sarowitz; Obermayer Rebmann; Post and Schell; Rawle & Henderson; Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis; and Weber Gallagher Simpson Stapleton Fires & Newby.

Philadelphia follows the national trend of law firms applying for PPP money. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that 45 top law firms in the United States got at least $210 million in PPP loans, including the firms of David Boies; Marc Kasowitz, a longtime Trump lawyer; class-action firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein; and securities law firm Labaton Sucharow.

The data weren’t perfect, and some lawyers disputed the figures.

At least one Philadelphia law firm, Zarwin Baum, said the government shared inaccurate data about its loan. Zarwin Baum was listed as receiving between $1 million to $2 million while retaining no jobs. In fact, the firm kept nearly all of its employees through the crisis, Zarwin Baum marketing director Valerie Burns said.

The data, released on Monday, provided the most detailed picture to date on the businesses and industries that received funding from the program, which lawmakers passed in haste this spring to help companies survive the pandemic.

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The lives upended around a $20 cheeseburger

A cash-strapped rancher, a virus-stricken meatpacker, an underpaid chef, a hungry engineer: The journey of a single burger during a pandemic

Maximiliano Solano grills burgers at Le Diplomate. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

By Jessica Contrera The Washington Post

Before the pandemic, the most popular French bistro in the nation’s capital didn’t offer to-go orders. Le Diplomate was the kind of place where reservations were bragging rights, special occasions were nightly occurrences and a double-patty cheeseburger was a $20 menu item, the Burger Américain. Since April, the restaurant has gone through more than 3,500 pounds of beef to meet the demand for the burger, sometimes selling 450 of them in a day — the equivalent of almost a burger a minute. When the mayor declared in late May that Le Diplomate could serve diners again, first at tables six feet apart outside and then, in June, at a reduced capacity inside, the to-go burger orders kept coming.

The burger met Maximiliano Solano in the middle of its journey. Solano plucked it from a chilled drawer and plunked it onto a griddle. He breathed in its greasy smoke through his now-mandated mask. He sprinkled it with salt using a gloved hand. He had made dozens of burgers already on a Friday evening and had hundreds more to go. This part of the burger’s story hadn’t changed. Fat bubbled. Edges crisped. It was going to be delicious.

But for months, the burger had been traveling through a complex supply chain crippled by the novel coronavirus. Now it was about to end up in a takeout box.

Solano pressed the patty with the back of his spatula and watched it ooze. This particular burger was on its way to an engineer who’d just finished another day of working from home — an option Solano and his nearly 200 laid-off co-workers never had. Instead, the 26-year-old took a pay cut and a demotion from sous chef to line cook just to be one of the few dozen employees able to return to Le Diplomate’s kitchen.

On the burger’s journey from a Kansas farm to the engineer’s dinner plate, every person had a story like Solano’s. A rancher with five children who lost thousands every week. A factory worker who brought the virus home to her son. A courier who calculated the true cost of every delivery not in profit, but in the risk it required her to take.

To follow the burger is to glimpse the lasting toll of this pandemic: on the beef supply chain, on the restaurant industry, on the people who were struggling before this catastrophe began, kept going to work throughout it and are still waiting to see what their lives will become when it ends.

Solano tucked the spatula under the patty. It spiraled into the air, one moment closer to a destiny that was set in motion two years ago.Cattle commingle at Tiffany Cattle Co. in Herington, Kan. (Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)

Before the burger was a burger, or a slab of beef, or an animal that mooed, there was a frozen plastic straw of sperm on a sprawling pasture outside of Eureka, Kan. Matt Perrier thawed it in a water bath for 45 seconds and examined the cow that would become a mother.

His great-grandfather bred cattle starting in 1904, then his grandfather and his father took over the ranch, and in the spring of 2018, Perrier was carrying on the family business. Science had transformed the breeding process, but the result was just the same:

The arrival nine months later of a Black Angus calf, weighing as much as an 8-year-old child.

The calf grew fast, but not fast enough to become one of the bulls (a father, in cattle-speak) that Perrier, 46, sells to other ranchers who are breeding their own herds. Instead, the calf would become a steer, and then, dinner. And though the supply chain leading to Le Diplomate is really more of a supply web, with each burger composed of multiple cuts of meat from multiple parts of the country, one thread leads back to the place where Perrier’s steers often ended up: Tiffany Cattle Co.

Tiffany Cattle Co. co-owners Shane, left, and Shawn Tiffany. ABOVE: Travis Burns and Seth Bieler move Tiffany cattle to a truck to be transported for processing at National Beef. (Photos by Christopher Smith for The Washington Post)

Some 60,000 cattle come to the Tiffany ranch every year to “finish,” to eat and drink and grow for four to six months until they are ready for their grisly end. This particular hoofed purgatory is for what co-owner Shawn Tiffany calls “white tablecloth” cattle — beef that ends up with pricey stickers on grocery store shelves, or on plates at expensive restaurants like Le Diplomate.

The steer arrived in the fall of 2019, riding on a truck with around 60 of his 700-pound-and-growing brethren. The ranch, built on a World War II-era base for Army Air Corps bombers, was a destination for top-dollar cattle from across the country.

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Air Quality Health Advisory Issued for NYC and Long Island

In Effect for Sunday, July 5, 2020

New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos and State Department of Health (DOH) Commissioner Howard Zucker, M.D., J.D. issued an Air Quality Health Advisory for the areas of Long Island and New York City Metro for Sunday, July 5, 2020.

The pollutant of concern is: Ozone

The advisory will be in effect 11 a.m. through 11 p.m.

DEC and DOH issue Air Quality Health Advisories when DEC meteorologists predict levels of pollution, either ozone or fine particulate matter are expected to exceed an Air Quality Index (AQI) value of 100. The AQI was created as an easy way to correlate levels of different pollutants to one scale, with a higher AQI value indicating a greater health concern.

Summer heat can lead to the formation of ground-level ozone, a major component of photochemical smog. Automobile exhaust and out-of-state emission sources are the primary sources of ground-level ozone and are the most serious air pollution problems in the northeast. This surface pollutant should not be confused with the protective layer of ozone in the upper atmosphere.

People, especially young children, those who exercise outdoors, those involved in vigorous outdoor work and those who have respiratory disease (such as asthma) should consider limiting strenuous outdoor physical activity when ozone levels are the highest (generally afternoon to early evening). When outdoor levels of ozone are elevated, going indoors will usually reduce your exposure. Individuals experiencing symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain or coughing should consider consulting their doctor.

Ozone levels generally decrease at night and can be minimized during daylight hours by curtailment of automobile travel and the use of public transportation where available.

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