Trump’s shambolic Japan visit and America’s decline

The age of the United States dominating in Asia is drawing to a close, and the president is leading the way

By JONATHAN MANTHORPE

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/trumps-shambolic-japan-visit-and-americas-decline/

Donald Trump’s shambolic and divisive visit to Japan last weekend was yet another highlight in the growing picture of America’s decline as a nation of power and influence in Asia.

For Washington’s competitors and potential enemies, especially China, Trump’s four days in Japan were a huge encouragement.

For the United States’ allies, the visit was an even more intense wake-up call than past demonstrations that Trump is an ignorant and untrustworthy partner.

More than that, the context of the visit shows that the idea is now firmly rooted in Asia that Trump is only a symptom of America’s relative decline. Even when the Trump nightmare has passed, the growing internal social and conflicts fostering isolationism in the US will continue.

On the road in Japan, Trump gave an Oscar-worthy performance of a self-obsessed, but fundamentally insecure fantasist whose only concern is to be seen as a winner.

Abe ahead of the game

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was well ahead of other world leaders in understanding that flattery could get him everywhere with Trump. In the hours after Trump’s election in 2016, Abe rushed to Trump Tower in New York to be the first to congratulate the incoming president.

Abe continued the fawning in this latest visit to Japan by Trump. The US leader was the first foreign head of state to meet the new Japanese emperor as “guest of honor.” And Abe pandered to Trump’s passion for having his name on things by facilitating the creation of a new sumo wrestling prize called “The President’s Cup.”

But there has always been a hint of contempt behind Abe’s courting of Trump. One can almost hear Japanese officials telling Abe: “We know he’s a fool, but we need his support both in trade and national security. So it is necessary to be nice to him, however distasteful that may be.”

Trump has been a con artist since boyhood. So he probably knows, even if only instinctively, he’s being played by Abe.

Perhaps that is why Trump went out of his way to be thoroughly rude to his host during the Japanese visit, although one cannot ignore the view that Trump always acts as a bore without any social graces.    

Missiles ‘standard stuff’    

The American president dismissed Abe’s concerns when North Korea conducted short-range missile tests during the visit. Trump said the tests were “standard stuff” that did nothing to undermine his “friendship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, or erode his confidence that Pyongyang will give up its nuclear weapons.

But many credible analysts say the enhanced capabilities of these weapons can penetrate even top-of-the-line missile defense systems and are a real threat to Japan and South Korea.

In siding with Kim on this, Trump not only dismissed his supposed ally Abe, but also his national security advisor John Bolton, who publicly railed against the North Korean tests.

But the young North Korean leader seems to have a better fix on how to manipulate Trump than do either Abe or Bolton. 

Ahead of Trump’s Japan visit, North Korea’s state-controlled media attacked former Democrat Vice-President Joe Biden as a “fool of low IQ.”

Biden is a leading contender to be the Democrats’ candidate for the presidency against Trump in 2020. So in one of his Twitter storms while in Japan, Trump embraced this apparent endorsement by the Kim regime.

In a tweet last Sunday, Trump said he had “smiled when he (Kim) called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse.”

Winning at all costs

Kim clearly understands that ultimately Trump is only concerned about being seen as a winner at home in the US. All the pomp and ceremony laid on by Abe over the emperor and the sumo trophy are fine and dandy, but what really counts with Trump is being hailed as a winner in New York.

Abe has done all he can to butter up Trump, but the Japanese leader has understood, since well before the arrival of the Trump regime, that the age of American dominance in Asia is drawing to a close.

China overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy in 2010, and is set to take the top spot from the US within a few years. More than that, Beijing has invested in a modernized military that appears to be capable of projecting power across the Pacific and Indian ocean regions to defend China’s economic and political interests.

In a hugely significant gesture, Abe’s finale for the Trump tour was a visit to a major Japanese naval base at Yokosuka. Here Trump was shown the Japanese warship Kaga, which has hitherto been called a “destroyer.” It is equipped only with helicopters to respond to humanitarian crises, such as the 2005 tsunami in Southeast Asia, and other non-military activities.

However, the “destroyer” Kaga is, in reality, an aircraft carrier, one of two possessed by the Japanese navy and the largest warships in what is a potent maritime force.

The Kaga is making a dramatic change of character and is being fitted out as a true aircraft carrier. It will be equipped with American-made F35-B stealth fighters, part of an order of 105 of the state-of-the-art US warplanes Japan is buying.

Responding to China

It is not only Japan that feels compelled to respond to China’s growing naval might in an age when Washington’s intervention at times of crisis is increasingly doubtful.

Tokyo’s military and political co-operation with Australia and, particularly, India have grown in response to Beijing’s imperial expansion.

New Delhi has modernized and expanded its own naval forces as Beijing has moved into India’s neighborhood. China has established civilian port facilities in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, but made a major military statement in 2017 when it acquired a naval outpost in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa.

This “string of pearls” is an important element in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. This massive project aims to invest trillions of dollars modernizing the transportation and associated infrastructures between China, its sources of raw materials and its markets for manufactured goods in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

At the political level, relations between Beijing and New Delhi are better now than they have been for decades. On Wednesday, freshly re-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced he will try to extend this rapprochement by holding a second informal summit with Chinese President Xi later this year.

However, military trust has not yet caught up with the diplomatic advances, and probably never will. Generals are paid to prepare against security disasters.

Earlier this year India announced it has set up a fourth airbase on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which facilitate monitoring Chinese naval activity in the approaches to the choke point Straits of Malacca between Singapore and Indonesia.

India also plans to set up military facilities in Mauritius and the Seychelles. These are to enhance its own naval operations in the Indian Ocean and to prevent Beijing from using those island nations as bases for its own ambitions.

Thus the balance and construction of political, economic and military power in the Indo-Pacific is changing almost by the day. But when future historians come to tell this story, they may well point at Trump’s May visit to Japan as a milestone along that road where the geography visibly changed.

Washington is wrong about China’s economy

The US economy is weaker, and China’s stronger, than analysts believe

By DAVID P. GOLDMAN

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/05/article/washington-is-wrong-about-chinas-economy/

Americans want to believe that their economy is doing well and that China’s economy is doing badly, as President Trump keeps saying. One shouldn’t blame Trump for this – underestimating competitors is America’s national pastime.

A recent embarrassing example was a report by Wells Fargo analyst Roger Read featured on CNBC, claiming that a fall in the growth rate in China’s diesel consumption “is most likely tied to economic factors and the effects of the tariff ‘war’ with the US.”

As physicist Wolfgang Pauli once said, this isn’t even wrong. The fellow from Wells Fargo failed to observe that China’s rail traffic is growing 10%, year-on-year, which is also the rate of expansion of China’s rail network. The more China ships by rail, the less dependent it is on diesel trucks.

The relationship is robust statistically (I’ll spare you the econometrics, which show that lagged values for changes in diesel demand predict changes in rail traffic). The analyst also failed to observe that heavy truck sales reached an all-time record in March 2019, driven by vehicles powered by natural gas.

China’s economy is becoming more efficient, shifting away from costly (and polluting) diesel fuel to more energy-efficient and cleaner railways and natural-gas-powered trucks. The notion that the tariff war might have caused diesel demand to drop in China is silly. Only 5% of China’s manufacturing is sold to the US, and most of that is consumer electronics and similar goods with a very low ratio of weight to value.

This sort of thing hardly would be worth the mention, except for the sad fact that a distorted view of China’s economic vulnerability contributes to American miscalculation in the present trade war. I am an American, and if there is a trade war, I want America to win it – but this sort of self-consoling delusion leads to humiliation rather than triumph.

By the same token, President Trump, and the China hawks in general, point to supposedly strong economic performance in the United States as evidence that Washington has the upper hand in trade negotiations. Again, that is a self-consoling delusion with dangerous consequences.

The final US GDP report for the first quarter shows the weakest growth since 2013. Final sales to private domestic purchasers at an annual rate of just 1.2%. That measures what Americans sold to other Americans. The headline GDP growth number of 3.1% is inflated by quirks of national income accounting.

How do we get from a 3.1% headline number to an underlying growth rate of just 1.2%? Of the 3.1% headline growth, 1% came from a reduced trade deficit. Imports fell sharply in the first quarter, and the deficit fell, but imports were lower because growth in retail sales fell sharply. The rate of change of imports to the US depends on retail sales.

Another 0.6% of the 3.1% came from an increase in private inventories. That’s not necessarily good news either; inventories might be rising because demand is weaker. And another 0.4% came from higher government consumption.

That begs the question: Why are retail sales barely growing despite robust increases in employment?

The first reason is that although more people are working, they are working fewer hours. Year-on-year growth in total hours worked (total employment X average weekly hours) shows the same decline that we observe in the purchasing managers’ index.

The second reason is that banks are tightening conditions for consumer credit. Credit card interest rates are at an all-time high although term yields are close to all-time lows. That simply means that banks are rationing credit.

Total credit to consumers (apart from home mortgages) is shrinking in real terms, if we take into account the shrinkage in home equity loan balances outstanding. During 2018 the combined rate of increase of revolving credit (mainly credit cards) and home equity stood at around 4.5%, but now has fallen to about 1.5%, or less than the inflation rate.

It matters little in the big picture whether China grows at 6% or 4% this year, to be sure. More important than the tariff war is the tech war. Washington doesn’t appear to have considered that the leading US chip designers depend on the Asian market. Intel makes 20% of its revenue in each of China, Singapore and Taiwan. Qualcomm makes 52% of its revenues in China and another 16% in South Korea. Nvidia makes 38% of its sales in Taiwan, 16% in China and a further 15% in the rest of Asia.

Huawei has not only leapfrogged its competitors in 5G broadband technology. It has designed its own line of Artificial-Intelligence enabled processors that compete with America’s best products. It very well may have the capacity to price its American competitors out of the critical Asian market. In a full-blown tech war, the US cannot be sure that China would not emerge with a dominant position in semiconductors.

Every indicator we examine – gross domestic product, purchasing managers’ indices, retail sales, consumer credit, total hours worked, and capital investment – points to an economy growing at slightly over 1%, not the 3.2% that the US administration has bragged about.

If the Administration places a 25% tariff on $570 billion of imported Chinese goods, that will take another substantial bite out of consumer demand. In that case, slow growth might turn into recession, imperiling Trump’s re-election prospects for 2020.

Julian Assange Must Never Be Extradited

The second indictment of the Wikileaks co-founder seems designed to force the British to deny extradition. If not, it’s madness

MATT TAIBBI

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/wikileaks-julian-assange-extradited-taibbi-842292/

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange today sits in the Belmarsh High Security prison in southeast London. Not just for his sake but for everyone’s, we now have to hope he’s never moved from there to America.

The United States filed charges against Assange early last month. The case seemed to have been designed to assuage fears that speech freedoms or the press were being targeted.

That specific offense was “computer hacking conspiracy” from back in 2010. The “crime” was absurdly thin, a claim that Assange agreed (but failed, apparently) to try to help Chelsea Manning develop an administrative password that could have helped her conceal identity as she downloaded secrets. One typewritten phrase, “No luck so far,” was the damning piece of evidence.

The troubling parts of that case lurked in the rest of the indictment, which seemed to sell normal journalistic activity as part of the offense. The government complained that Assange “took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure.”

Prosecutors likewise said, “Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records from departments and agencies of the United States.”

The indictment stressed Assange/Manning were seeking “national defense information” that could be “used to the injury of the United States.” The indictment likewise noted that the pair had been guilty of transmitting such information to “any person not entitled to receive it.”

It was these passages that made me nervous a month and a half ago, because they seemed to speak to a larger ambition. Use of phrases like “national defense information” given to persons “not entitled to receive it” gave off a strong whiff of Britain’s Official Secrets Acts, America’s Defense Secrets Act of 1911 (which prohibited “national defense” information going to “those not entitled to receive it”) and our Espionage Act of 1917, which retained many of the same concepts.

All of these laws were written in a way that plainly contradicted basic free speech protections. The Espionage Act was revised in 1950 by the McCarran Internal Security Act, sponsored by Nevada Senator Pat McCarran (who incidentally was said to be the inspiration for the corrupt “Senator Pat Geary” character in The Godfather). The change potentially removed a requirement that the person obtaining classified information had to have intent to harm the country.

There was a way to read the new law that criminalized what the Columbia Law Review back in 1973 (during the Pentagon Papers controversy) called the “mere retention” of classified material.

This provision buried in subsection 793 of the Espionage Law has, since passage, been a ticking time bomb for journalism. The law seems clearly to permit the government to prosecute anyone who simply obtains or receives “national defense” information. This would place not only sources who steal and deliver such information at risk of prosecution, but also the journalists who receive and publish it.

If the government ever decided to start using this tool to successfully prosecute reporters and publishers, we’d pretty quickly have no reporters and publishers.

I’m not exaggerating when I say virtually every reporter who’s ever done national security reporting has at some time or another looked at, or been told, or actually received copies of, “national defense” information they were technically “not entitled to receive.”

Anyone who covers the military, the intelligence community, or certain congressional committees, will eventually stumble – even just by accident – into this terrain sooner or later. Even I’ve been there, and I’ve barely done any reporting in that space.

This is why the latest indictment handed down in the Assange case has been met with almost universal horror across the media, even by outlets that spent much of the last two years denouncing Assange as a Russian cutout who handed Trump the presidency.

The 18-count indictment is an authoritarian’s dream, the work of attorneys who probably thought the Sedition Act was good law and the Red Scare era Palmer raids a good start. The “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” is there again, as the 18th count. But counts 1-17 are all subsection 793 charges, and all are worst-case-scenario interpretations of the Espionage Act as pertains to both the receipt and publication of secrets.

Look at the language:

Count 1: Conspiracy to Receive National Defense Information.

Counts 2-4: Obtaining National Defense Information.

Counts 5-8: Obtaining National Defense Information. And so on.

The indictment is an insane tautology. It literally charges Assange with conspiracy to obtain secrets for the purpose of obtaining them. It lists the following “offense”:

To obtain documents, writings, and notes connected with the national defense, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense…

Slowly – it’s incredible how slowly – it is dawning on much of the press that this case is not just an effort to punish a Russiagate villain, but instead a deadly serious effort to use Assange as a pawn in a broad authoritarian crackdown.

The very news outlets that have long blasted Donald Trump for his hostility to press freedoms are finally coming around to realize that this case is the ultimate example of all of their fears.

Hence even the Washington Post, no friend of Assange’s of late, is now writing this indictment could “criminalize investigative journalism.” CNN wrote, “What is at stake is journalism as we know it.”

This indictment is so awful, in fact, that CNN’s contributor, lawyer Alexander Urbelis, seemed convinced it was written to give the British an out, “designed to ensure that Assange is not extradited to the United States.”

His thesis is that Assange at trial would be able to embarrass the Trump administration. It would do this by highlighting the fact that Trump was saying salutary things about WikiLeaks in 2016, and perhaps also by disclosing other matters pertaining to the DNC leaks.

“Seen in this light,” he wrote, “the damage to the freedom of the press may be the foreseeable but unintentional collateral damage of squashing the chances of an Assange trial.”

I’m not sure I buy this. This seems to me like another example of outside observers giving the Trump White House credit for playing 4D chess when it isn’t. It seems more likely this is a genuine effort to expand the ability of the U.S. government to put a vice-grip on classified information, scare whistleblowers into silence, and scare the pants off editors across the planet.

The Assange case is more than the narrow prosecution of one controversial person. This is a crossroads moment for the whole world, for speech, reporting, and transparent governance.

It is happening in an era when the hegemonic U.S. government has been rapidly expanding a kind of oversight-free zone within its federal bureaucracy, with whole ranges of activities – from drone killings to intelligence budgets to surveillance – often placed outside the scope of either congress or the courts.

One of the few outlets left that offered any hope of penetrating this widening veil of secrecy was the press, working in conjunction with the whistleblower. If that relationship is criminalized, self-censorship will become the norm, and abuses will surely multiply as a result.

Add to this the crazy fact that the Assange indictment targets a foreigner whose “crimes” were committed on foreign soil, and the British government now bears a very heavy responsibility. If it turns Assange over to the United States and he is successfully prosecuted, we’ll now reserve the right to snatch up anyone, anywhere on the planet, who dares to even try to learn about our secret activities. Think of all the ways that precedent could be misused.

Britain is in a box. On the one hand, thanks to Brexit, it’s isolated itself and needs the United States more than ever. On the other hand, it needs to grow some stones and stand up to America for once, if it doesn’t want to see the CIA as the World’s Editor-in-Chief for a generation. This case is bigger than Assange now, and let’s hope British leaders realize it.

Julian Assange shows psychological torture symptoms, says UN expert

UK government urged not to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder to US where he faces decades in prison

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/31/julian-assange-shows-psychological-torture-symptoms-says-un-expert

Julian Assange is showing all the symptoms associated with prolonged exposure to psychological torture and should not be extradited to the US, according to a senior UN expert who visited him in prison.

Nils Melzer, UN’s special rapporteur on torture, is expected to make his appeal to the UK government on Friday. It comes after Assange, the co-founder of WikiLeaks, was said by his lawyers to be too ill to appear by video link for the latest court hearing of the case on Thursday.

Assange has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison, London, where he has been serving a 50-week sentence for skipping bail while fighting extradition to the US. He is accused of violating the Espionage Act by publishing secret documents containing the names of confidential US military and diplomatic sources.

After meeting Assange earlier this month in the company of medical experts who examined him, Melzer will say on Friday that he fears the Australian’s human rights could be seriously violated if he is extradited to the US and will condemn what he describes as the “deliberate and concerted abuse inflicted for years” on him.

Assange was arrested in April after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and invited police inside the country’s Knightsbridge diplomatic premises, where he had sought refuge in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, which he has denied.

“Physically there were ailments but that side of things are being addressed by the prison health service and there was nothing urgent or dangerous in that way,” Melzer said.

“What was worrying was the psychological side and his constant anxiety. It was perceptible that he had a sense of being under threat from everyone. He understood what my function was but it’s more that he was extremely agitated and busy with his own thoughts. It was difficult to have a very structured conversation with him.”

Melzer said that Belmarsh was an old prison and had issues about that but he described it as well maintained, adding that characterisations of it as a “supermax” or “the Guantanamo of Britain” were unhelpful. While it does have a high-security wing Melzer said that Assange was not in that section.

The lawyer, who receives 10 to 15 requests each day from sources asking for him to get involved, said that his office had been approached by Assange’s lawyers in December. But he said that he was initially reluctant to do so, admitting he was affected by what he called the “prejudice” around the case.

However, he began looking into the case again in March and, earlier this week, wrote letters to the foreign ministers of the US, the UK and Sweden.

“In the course of the past nine years, Mr Assange has been exposed to persistent, progressively severe abuse ranging from systematic judicial persecution and arbitrary confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy, to his oppressive isolation, harassment and surveillance inside the embassy, and from deliberate collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination,” Melzer will say on Friday.

He added the UK authorities had contacted his Geneva office to indicate that the British government would be issuing a point-by-point rebuttal of the assertions made in his letter.

Melzer, who is urging the UK government not to extradite Assange to the US or to any other state failing to provide reliable guarantees against his onward transfer to the US, criticised the way in which Assange’s case was handled after police took him from the embassy.

“I was surprised, for example, to see that on the date he was arrested he was immediately brought to court after six years in the embassy and then convicted. Under the normal rule of law you would expect someone to be arrested and then given a couple of weeks to prepare his defence at least.”

The former legal adviser to the Red Cross will say on Friday: “In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

Assange could face decades in a US prison after being charged with violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks.

Prosecutors earlier this month announced 17 additional charges against him for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The 47-year-old was previously charged with working to hack a Pentagon computer system, in a secret indictment that was unveiled soon after his arrest at Ecuador’s embassy in London.

“He’s in fact far from well,” Assange’s lawyer, Gareth Peirce told the hearing on Thursday at the Westminster magistrates court. The next hearing on the extradition request was set for 12 June.

A UK government spokesperson said: “The UK has a close working relationship with UN bodies and is committed to upholding the rule of law. We support the important work of the special rapporteur’s mandate and will respond to his letter in due course, but we disagree with a number of his observations.

“Judges are impartial and independent from government, with any judgment based solely on the facts of the case and the applicable law. The law provides all those convicted with a right of appeal.”

Assange words from Belmarsh Prison

Trump Admin’s Latest Rail Safety Rollback Sets up Industry to Make Its Own Rules

Read time: 8 mins

By Justin Mikulka • Thursday, May 30, 2019 - 10:42

https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/05/30/trump-federal-railroad-administration-crew-staffing-self-regulation-rail-industry

This week, the Trump administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) withdrew another rail safety recommendation originally proposed during the Obama administration. In the process, the agency made quite clear that it has no plans to further regulate the rail industry, especially the dangerous and continued transportation of oil and ethanol in unsafe tank cars.

The latest proposed rule to be withdrawn would have required two-person crews on trains. Supporters of this rule argue that two-person crews are safer because the job of operating a train is too demanding for one person, new technologies are making the job more complex, and fatigue becomes a more serious issue with only one crew member. Since 2017, the Trump administration has already repealed a regulation requiring modern brakes for oil trains and canceled a plan requiring train operators to be tested for sleep apnea.

In announcing this decision, the DOT's Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) stated it was “providing notice of its affirmative decision that no regulation of train crew staffing is necessary or appropriate for railroad operations to be conducted safely at this time.”

Buried on page 21 of the 25 page document explaining the decision, the FRA spells out the broader department attitude toward rail safety:

“DOT’s approach to achieving safety improvements begins with a focus on removing unnecessary barriers and issuing voluntary guidance, rather than regulations that could stifle innovation.”

As we've documented on DeSmog before, that translates to removing existing safety requirements and allowing the rail industry to volunteer when and how to improve safety. When the head of the FRA is a former rail company CEO, corporate capture of the U.S. regulatory system should come as no surprise. The rail industry's main opposition to this rule is that it will increase costs while claiming it will not improve safety. This is the same basic argument used to support the industry's opposition to other safety regulations.

FRA Overriding States' Rights to Regulate Rail Safety

In addition, this FRA memo contained several statements clarifying that not only will the agency back off of regulating rail safety, it also will use the power of “pre-emption” to make sure states can’t fill the resulting regulatory gaps either.

As we have explained before, rail companies are essentially only accountable to federal regulators (should they choose to regulate) due to a legal doctrine known as “pre-emption,” which exempts interstate rail companies from observing local or state laws where they operate.

This is important in this instance because several states have passed laws regarding train crew staffing, and other states are considering such regulation. The FRA notes in detail these state efforts and then says that its decision not to regulate crew size preempts any such rules at the state level: 

“FRA intends this notice of withdrawal to cover the same subject matter as the state laws regulating crew size and therefore expects it will have preemptive effect.”

The document goes on to cite Supreme Court case law in an attempt to justify this approach and then reiterates the point in its final line, saying that “no regulation of train crew staffing is appropriate and that FRA intends to negatively preempt any state laws concerning that subject matter.”

With this document, the FRA likely is setting up a precedent to follow for regulating the volatility and vapor pressure of crude oil transported by rail. DeSmog has covered in detail the issue of oil volatility, which appears to be the key for turning oil trains into “bomb trains,” as rail operators have dubbed them.

The last remaining rail safety proposal on the books from the Obama administration concerns the vapor pressure of oil in rail tank cars, but that was proposed in 2017 and the DOT website lists the status of this proposed rule as “undetermined.”  

Meanwhile, the state of Washington has passed a law regulating the vapor pressure of oil for rail transport. This law is being challenged by North Dakota — the source of many of the bomb trains involved in fiery accidents, including the Lac-Mégantic, Canada, disaster that killed 47 people in 2013 and helped inspire the proposed rule requiring two-person crews that the Trump adminstration just withdrew this week.

Based on the FRA's strategy with the rail staffing rule, expect to see the Trump administration withdraw the proposed regulation on oil vapor pressure and say this move preempts Washington state's law.

A Case Study in the Corporate Capture of American Regulation

The FRA's decision to withdraw the train crew rule is a great case study of a failed regulatory system in America.

The public is supposed to have a say in the regulatory process via the public comment process. In this case, approximately 1,500 comments supported the regulation — including comments from members of Congress — and 39 opposed it. The opposition highlighted by the DOT was from rail lobbying groups the Association of American Railroads and the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association. While the public can have its say, it may not have any impact in the current regulatory process.

The FRA document also notes that the Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC) reviewed the issue but “was unable to reach consensus on any recommendation.” RSAC was established by the FRA but is dominated by industry members, including the Association of American Railroads and the American Petroleum Institute, the latter of which is the nation's largest oil lobby and has repeatedly misrepresented basic facts about crude oil volatility and rail transport.

This advisory committee doesn't have the membership to make an independent recommendation that goes against its members' interests.

Another key point in the FRA's withdrawal decision is that it claims there is no evidence that two-person crews are safer than single-person crews on trains. The agency cites industry-funded studies, which make this claim and say the regulation would “greatly reduce U.S. railroads’ ability to control operating costs.” Because the FRA itself does not collect data on the use and safety of single-person crews versus two-person crews, it can’t provide any information one way or the other.

The one clear scenario where two-person crews increase safety is in accident situations, a point made by many commenters and acknowledged by the FRA.  In the 2013 BNSF oil train derailment and explosion in Casselton, North Dakota, crew members were able to separate many of the oil tank cars from the rest of the train, likely preventing a much larger oil spill and fire (which were still large). The FRA argues that while this is true, the same role can be played by first responders:

“While FRA acknowledges the BNSF key train crew performed well, potentially saving each other’s lives, it is possible that one properly trained crewmember, technology, and/or additional railroad emergency planning could have achieved similar mitigating actions.”

Despite making this assertion, the agency provided no evidence of how these alternatives are possible. In the case of oil train accidents, there are no examples of first responders arriving in time to do anything other than back away from the often-explosive trains and let them burn.

In the case of Casselton, the city fire chief Tim McLean said, “I’m glad the crew made it out of the engine because I don’t know if we would have been able to get in there and get them.” Casselton's first responders were working to evacuate the city, not deal with the exploding train cars.

'Keeping their Profits'

Two years ago, I wrote about the Trump administration's and Congress's plans to de-regulate the oil-by-rail industry, and featured a quote from Rep. Bill Shuster, who championed finding ways to “allow the railroad industry to keep more of their profits” at a hearing on pipeline and rail regulations.

With rail companies now comfortably positioned to self-regulate under the Trump administration, the industry can continue its long (and, at times, bloody) history of putting profits over safety. The Department of Transportation's latest move makes this approach official government policy.

Oil Train Derailment - Casselton North Dakota

Published on Jun 22, 2016







https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLfOQcmD868