September, 28 2010, 01:43pm EDT

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Email:,info@peer.org
Court Throws Out National Bison Range Tribal Pact
Failure to Consider Potential Negative Effects on Iconic Refuge Was Fatal Flaw
WASHINGTON
A federal court today rescinded an agreement awarding control over
the National Bison Range to a Montana tribe for violating a key
environmental statute in a lawsuit brought by Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result, employees of the U.S.
Fish & Wildlife Service will resume operation of the Bison Range, a
century-old preserve called the crown jewel of the National Wildlife
Refuge System.
Today's court order is just the latest twist in the troubled
history of Indian-Interior Department relations on National Bison
Range. The Bison Range agreement which Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of
the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia invalidated today
had transferred all Bison Range jobs, except for a Refuge Manager and
deputy, to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). This
pact is a successor to a more limited FY 2005 agreement which the Fish
& Wildlife Service summarily rescinded in December 2006 citing a
host of performance-related issues on the part of the Tribe, as well as
reported mistreatment of FWS employees by the CSKT.
Indeed, it was the failure by the Interior Department to analyze
the potential for a repetition of these earlier problems under the
latest agreement that led to a finding that the pact violated the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Among the issues the court
found were improperly overlooked were inadequate care and feeding of the
bison and a host of critical tasks left undone or improperly performed.
Currently, the Interior Office of Inspector General is
investigating a PEER complaint detailing tribal management at the Bison
Range, including poaching and other hunting violations, bison deaths and
injuries from inadequate staff training, improper fencing and illegal
pesticide applications.
"We are most gratified that this agreement has been rescinded,"
stated PEER Senior Counsel Paula Dinerstein, who filed the lawsuit on
behalf of four former Bison Range refuge managers whose tenures span 40
years, a former Chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System and
Nathaniel Reed, former Assistant Interior Secretary during the Nixon and
Ford administrations, as well as a current Bison Range employee whose
job is being displaced. "We expect the government to act quickly to put
Fish & Wildlife Service staff back in place to repair the ongoing
damage to the Bison Range."
Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered that the current funding agreement
for the CSKT, which runs through September 30, 2011, "be set aside and
rescinded," thus directing CSKT personnel to vacate the refuge to be
replaced by FWS employees. The government could seek to stay this order
if it appeals or it could undertake NEPA review in order to salvage the
current pact. Left undecided by the court, however, were contentions
that the CSKT agreement also violated the Refuge Improvement Act, the
Endangered Species Act, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act and the
Freedom of Information Act.
"The Interior Department should go back to the drawing board
rather than try to resurrect this flawed agreement," Dinerstein said,
noting that this precedent-setting arrangement has big repercussions.
Another 18 refuges in 8 states, constituting 80% of the entire National
Wildlife Refuge System, are eligible for similar tribal agreements, as
are 57 National Parks in 19 states, including parks such as Redwood,
Glacier, Voyageurs, Olympic and the Cape Cod National Seashore. "For
these tribal-federal agreements we need a model agreement that protects
core resources and the integrity of our national parks and refuges. The
Bison Range experience underlines the flaws of an ad hoc approach to
what requires a national strategy."
###
View court order rescinding the Bison Range agreement
Read the court opinion
Look at the PEER suit
See the slew of current problems afflicting the agreement
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals. PEER's environmental work is solely directed by the needs of its members. As a consequence, we have the distinct honor of serving resource professionals who daily cast profiles in courage in cubicles across the country.
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Warren Demands Probe Into Bank Failures, Urges Biden to Fire Powell
Jerome Powell "has failed," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "I don't think he should be Chairman of the Federal Reserve."
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren this weekend called on federal officials to investigate the causes of recent bank failures and urged President Joe Biden to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom she has criticized for intensifying financial deregulation and imposing job- and wage-destroying interest rate hikes.
Asked on Sunday by Chuck Todd of NBC's "Meet the Press" about the possibility of Powell imposing yet another interest rate hike despite ongoing market turmoil, Warren (D-Mass.) said, "I've been in the camp for a long time that these extraordinary rate increases that he has taken on, these extreme rate increases, are something that he should not be doing."
Powell "has a dual mandate," said Warren. "Yes, he is responsible for dealing with inflation, but he is also responsible for employment. And what Chair Powell is trying to do, and he has said fairly explicitly, is that they are trying to, in effect, slow down the economy so that, this is by the Fed's own estimate, two million people will lose their jobs. And I believe that is not what the chair of the Federal Reserve should be doing."
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"Jay Powell... has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both."
Powell, an ex-investment banker, was first appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018 and reappointed by Biden in 2021. Warren noted that she opposed Powell's nomination in both cases "because of his views on regulation and what he was already doing to weaken regulation."
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Asked by Todd if Biden should fire Powell, Warren said: "My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy, one is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both."
"Would you advise President Biden to replace him?" Todd inquired.
"I don't think he should be Chairman of the Federal Reserve," the Massachusetts Democrat responded. "I have said it as publicly as I know how to say it. I've said it to everyone."
Meanwhile, in a Saturday letter, Warren asked Richard Delmar, Tyler Smith, and Mark Bialek—respectively the deputy inspector general of the Treasury Department, acting inspector general of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and inspector general of the Fed's board of governors—to "immediately open a thorough, independent investigation of the causes of the bank management and regulatory and supervisory problems that resulted in this month's failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank (Signature) and deliver preliminary results within 30 days."
Until the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the FDIC "intervened to guarantee billions of dollars of deposits," the second- and third-biggest bank failures in U.S. history "threatened economic contagion and severe damage to the banking and financial systems," Warren noted. "The bank's executives, who took unnecessary risks or failed to hedge against entirely foreseeable threats, must be held accountable for these failures."
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It is "critical that your investigation be completely independent and free of influence from the bank executives or regulators that were responsible for action that led to these bank failures," Warren stressed. "I am particularly concerned that you avoid any interference from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who bears direct responsibility for—and has a long record of failure involving—regulatory and supervisory matters involving these two banks."
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In appearances on three Sunday morning talk shows, Warren doubled down on her demands for an independent investigation into recent bank failures, stronger financial regulations, and punishing those responsible.
After lawmakers from both parties helped Trump fulfill his campaign promise to weaken federal oversight of the banking system, Powell "took a flamethrower to the regulations, saying, 'I'm doing this because Congress let me do it,'" Warren toldABC's "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl. "And what happened was exactly what we should have predicted, and that is the banks, these big, multi-billion-dollar banks, loaded up on risk; they boosted their short-term profits; they gave themselves huge bonuses and big salaries; and they exploded their banks."
"When you explode a bank, you ought to be banned from banking forever."
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McCarthy on Saturday described Bragg's probe as "an outrageous abuse of power by a radical D.A. who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump."
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According toMSNBC's Hayes Brown:
By the time he fired off his own tweet, McCarthy had presumably seen Trump calling his supporters into the streets, echoing the incitement of violence against Congress two years ago. The speaker lived through that experience and witnessed firsthand the effect of Trump's words. And yet he opted to pretend otherwise in the weeks and months after the January 6 attack as he flew to Mar-a-Lago in supplication. In handing over unvetted security footage from the attack to a far-right propagandist last month, McCarthy is once again complicit in trying to whitewash the assault. If a new round of political violence occurs, McCarthy should absolutely shoulder some of the blame.
McCarthy was far from alone. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), for example, baselessly declared: "If they can come for Trump, they will come for you. This type of stuff only occurs in third world authoritarian countries."
The GOP's current framing of ongoing investigations into Trump as political "witch hunts" is not new. McCarthy and others reacted in a similar manner when the FBI in early August searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort and removed boxes of documents as part of a federal probe into the ex-president's handling of classified materials.
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