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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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How the James Beard Foundation Failed the Most Prestigious Restaurant Awards in the Country

James Beard Foundation CEO Clare Reichenbach at the 2018 James Beard Media Awards | Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images

The foundation violated its own ethics rules to ensure that award winners fit into its new narrative of progress and social justice

Finalists had been announced. A virtual ceremony had been planned. Acceptance speeches had been filmed.

Then, in late August, the James Beard Foundation abruptly announced that it was effectively canceling its Restaurant and Chef Awards, widely considered the most prestigious accolades in the American restaurant industry, not just this year, but until 2022.

The annual black-tie gala for these awards — a multimillion-dollar production that some have referred to as the Oscars of the restaurant industry, with big-name sponsors like San Pellegrino, All-Clad, American Airlines, and Capital One — had already been delayed and moved online due to the coronavirus pandemic. The foundation blamed this dramatic pullback on the pandemic as well. “Considering anyone to have won or lost within the current tumultuous hospitality ecosystem does not in fact feel like the right thing to do,” CEO Clare Reichenbach stated in a press release.

A few days later, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells reported that the James Beard Foundation had not been entirely forthcoming about the reasons for its decision. Around the time of the announcement, the foundation had quietly appended a note to the nominee list, claiming that several nominees had “withdrawn their nominations for personal reasons.” But, according to Wells, the foundation had in fact deemed some too “controversial” and asked them to withdraw “because new allegations about their personal or professional behavior had surfaced over the summer.”

Most striking, however, was the revelation that “no Black people had won in any of the 23 categories on the ballot,” despite multiple Black nominees and semifinalists — a result that, as Wells noted, “would not have been a first for the James Beard awards.”

Over the decades of their existence, the awards have struggled to be inclusive and representative of the diversity of America’s restaurants and chefs, and the foundation has only recently begun to address and rectify these issues.

In short, according to Wells, the James Beard Foundation found itself with a list of award winners that was incompatible with its recent attempt to reposition itself as a vanguard for social justice causes within the restaurant industry. This seemed particularly untenable in the wake of this summer’s Black Lives Matter movement — which has sparked an ongoing reckoning, not only across the restaurant industry and food media, but among the foundation’s own staff. Instead of being transparent about these issues, the foundation decided to sidestep them by canceling the awards.

As someone who has been involved in the James Beard awards process for more than a decade, I was shaken by these allegations, and undertook my own inquiry. A series of correspondences with members of foundation’s leadership, as well as conversations with others within the award process and restaurant industry, seem to confirm Wells’s reporting — namely, that the foundation tried to take a shortcut to virtue by manipulating the results of this year’s awards, and has been trying to cover it up.

I believe that, motivated by the desire to keep sponsorship and donor money flowing, employees of the foundation violated its own longstanding ethics and procedures to avoid a possible public backlash over the award winners. Rather than trying to devise an equitable path forward, these employees attempted to manipulate the results after the fact, hoping to create a superficial appearance of diversity and wholesomeness without doing the work of achieving this in a meaningful way.

As a result, the foundation disenfranchised committee members, voters, and restaurants — many of which desperately needed the boost that an award might have given their businesses during a pandemic — and corrupted the integrity of the awards. This threatens to render what is widely considered America’s most respected measure of culinary excellence — one that can be a platform for greater equity — meaningless. To let that happen would not merely be a professional failing on the part of an organization that is ostensibly a beacon and guardian of the hospitality industry, but a profoundly moral and ethical one.

Established in 1983 to honor the “dean of American cookery,” the James Beard Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to “celebrate, nurture, and honor chefs and other leaders” in America. Over the years, it has added initiatives that focus on sustainability, scholarship, and inclusion in the restaurant industry.

Despite its issues-driven programming, the foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards have become both its crown jewel and cash cow. Perhaps because of this, many believe the selection process is a conclave of cloistered agreements, favoritism, and pay-for-play among industry cardinals. It was not designed that way. Though the system may seem convoluted, it was in fact devised to ensure as much transparency and impartiality as possible, largely in response to a prior scandal.

In the mid-aughts, the foundation was left in disarray after gross mismanagement by then-president Leonard F. Pickell Jr. He was caught embezzling foundation funds, pled guilty to larceny, and served time in federal prison. The cleanup was expensive — at least $750,000 in attorneys and accountant fees — and the nonprofit found itself in a financial free fall as donations, its primary source of revenue, quickly dried up.

The foundation realized that in order to regain the trust of the public — and its donors — it needed to reform. Among numerous policy changes, a key component of its rehabilitation required divorcing the award process from the foundation’s operations. The committee overseeing the awards, which is composed of unpaid volunteers, was hermetically sealed off to guard against undue influence from the foundation and its employees.

One of the chief fears was that chefs and restaurateurs might feel pressured to perform favors for the foundation to increase their chances of winning an award. For instance, a centerpiece of the foundation’s programming is the dinner series it hosts at the James Beard House throughout the year, which features guest chefs from across the nation. Being invited to cook at one of these pricey, ticketed events is generally perceived to be an honor, but it requires the visiting chef to shoulder much of the associated costs (the food they’re cooking, as well as travel to the event, among other expenses), making participation tantamount to donating thousands of dollars to the foundation, and therefore a privilege accessible only to the best-capitalized chefs. (If it’s unclear which way the largesse flows, while the chefs gain exposure and a measure of pride, the information page for guest chefs helpfully points out that “events such as yours are an important source of revenue for the Foundation.”)

Given the obvious potential for quid pro quo, it was deemed vital to the integrity of the awards that foundation employees had no part in the award process. To underscore this imperative, the foundation agreed to a set of policies and procedures that removed the awards from its reach, and placed them under the management of an independent committee of financially disinterested volunteers.

This umbrella awards committee oversees six separate subcommittees, each one responsible for a different set of awards: Leadership, Books, Restaurant Design, Broadcast Media, Journalism, and the best known, the Restaurant and Chef Awards. It is the annual gala for this last set of awards, traditionally held in May, that is the glittering, red-carpet ceremony that most associate with the James Beard Foundation’s awards.

The committee that oversees the Restaurant and Chef Awards is composed of 20 members: eight at-large members and 12 regional representatives, each representing one of the committee’s 12 geographic regions. To ensure a degree of impartiality, these committee members do not work in the restaurant industry; many are journalists. Each regional representative on the committee impanels 25 judges in their region to provide perspective on and knowledge of America’s restaurant community at the local level. Like all committee members, judges serve voluntarily and are not paid. (The sole perks of monetary value are an annual membership in the foundation — normally $150 — and a ticket to the awards ceremony, which was valued at $500 in 2019.) Here is where you will find me, at the bottom of the awards pyramid, where I have served as a judge in the Midwest region for 14 years.

The award process is initiated by the committee late in the preceding year, when judges are solicited for nominations and input. Over the following months, the committee holds a series of closed-door sessions to determine the semifinalists for that year’s awards. The resulting list of 20 candidates in each award category is usually published in February. These semifinalists are balloted and sent to the voting body, which consists of the committee members, regional judges, and all past Restaurant and Chef Award winners. The initial round of voting whittles the nominees down to five finalists per category, who are usually announced by late March. A second, final vote is conducted to determine the winners.

The results of this voting process are tabulated by Lutz & Carr, a third-party accounting firm that represents over 400 nonprofit organizations. According to foundation policy, Lutz & Carr is required to keep the results of the first vote confidential until the second ballot; the results of the final vote must remain confidential until they are announced at the award ceremony. To prevent tampering, vote manipulation, or the results from leaking, no one within the foundation is supposed to be privy to this information before it is made public. For similar reasons, the committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements.

This year, it appears that the foundation violated these policies by illicitly obtaining the results of the final round of voting before they were announced. Dissatisfied with the slate of prospective winners, according to a follow-up story by Wells, the foundation tried to change the outcome by proposing to alter the composition of the voting body and holding an unprecedented revote. By removing past winners — a voting bloc that is traditionally dominated by white, male chefs — from the revote, the foundation hoped that a revote might yield a set of awards more compatible with the narrative of inclusion it has been trying to tell about the awards.

This raised red flags within the committee, which pushed back on the foundation’s proposal, saying, according to Wells, that it “compromised the integrity of the awards.” A revote never happened. But the foundation did not let this aborted revote go to waste: In the following weeks, it relied on the proposal of a revote to claim that it had no knowledge of the winners.

In public statements, as well as in emails to the committee, nominees, and me, members of the foundation’s leadership have adamantly denied knowing who the winners are. However, through my correspondence with foundation employees (which can be viewed in full here), it became clear that these denials have been purposely misleading.

In an email to me, Alison Tozzi Liu, the foundation’s vice president of marketing, communications, and content, wrote, “In reality, the lack of diversity in the original vote in May, and the eventual decision not to hand out individual Awards in August were not related. As previously mentioned, there was to be a revote with eligible nominees and therefore no-one had knowledge of the ultimate winners.”

This statement reveals a number of things. First, it suggests that the foundation did know who the winners were, because Tozzi Liu is claiming that the lack of diversity among them did not affect the decision to cancel the awards. Second, her wording indicates that these denials, thus far, have been cleverly worded to appear as denials of knowing the original outcome, when in fact, they are denials of knowing who would have won had there been a revote.

This sleight of hand relies on a revote having been considered, which Tozzi Liu attempts to legitimize by claiming that “the full Restaurant and Chef Subcommittee had agreed to the revote.” However, it is clear from Wells’s reporting that this is false.

Obtaining the list of winners and trying to manipulate a revote are just part of the foundation’s interference with a process that was designed to prevent that from happening. In addition to asking some nominees to withdraw due to allegations of wrongdoing, the foundation allegedly offered to help at least one of the chefs withdraw in a way that might have evaded public notice or implied a different reason for the withdrawal. If true, this flies in the face of the foundation’s narrative that it is trying to clean up improper behavior in the restaurant industry. Rather, this suggests the foundation violated its own policies to obscure such behavior.

The chaos swirling around this year’s awards is the result of talking about systemic problems, but doing little to understand or resolve their underlying causes. In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in concern that the restaurant industry, as a whole, is an uneven field, which heavily favors some — again, traditionally white and male — while disadvantaging others. Meanwhile, far from the glamour of the foundation’s awards, everyday restaurant workers face pay inequality, hostile work conditions, a gender gap, and a lack of representation among those who hold the levers of power.

The current award process is a maze of compromises, to which many in the restaurant and dining community have tacitly agreed. But many now find it somewhere on the spectrum between unsatisfactory and unacceptable, and haven’t figured out exactly what to do about it — or are afraid to speak openly about their frustrations with the process for fear of reprisal from the foundation, especially with regard to their own award prospects. Even a past winner I know has expressed reluctance to question the foundation or how the awards work.

Certainly, one way to make the awards more inclusive is to redistrict the boundaries of achievement. For instance, the awards currently focus heavily on geographic diversity, but categories don’t distinguish between casual and fine dining restaurants, or different types of cuisines. Perhaps they should.

I don’t believe that correcting course requires canceling the past. But we need to stop clamoring for fairness before clarifying what that means and what it requires. The James Beard Foundation awards are a reflection of the restaurant industry they celebrate, and fixing them will require a far deeper and more honest examination of the underlying issues than the one that many in the restaurant community have been openly having. This will require, at a minimum, an acknowledgment that the industry is a complex ecosystem of symbiotic relationships that can’t be easily untangled.

Roughly half of the voting body is now composed of chefs, whose vast network of colleagues and friends present a minefield of conflicts. Or take my conflicts of interest, for instance: Like many in the voting body, I have working relationships with people who are eligible for awards — I’m a photographer who works with restaurants and hotels, and I’ve co-written a cookbook with chefs. I’ve also solicited personalities and restaurants to raise money for James Beard Foundation causes. I’ve always disclosed these professional relationships, as judges are required to do, and I’ve tried to remain faithful to the award process. But this should illustrate the difficulty of completely eliminating bias from the process, and I recognize that I have ultimately been complicit in perpetuating a systemic preference for those with access to resources.

Beyond the voting body, there are powerful external forces. Media and public relations firms play an enormous role in helping chefs and restaurants maneuver into advantageous positions, and in directing voters to the right tables. Chefs and restaurateurs have told me that they spend tens of thousands of dollars annually to make and keep themselves visible to the right groups of people. And in all of this, the dining public is the real apex of the food chain — a silent majority that votes with its dollars.

I have struggled to reconcile this tangle of conflicts, especially when there have been financial interests at stake. But I believe in what the awards can represent, and in the importance of recognizing excellence, so I have continued to participate in the process for years, wringing my hands and pushing as much as I could to make it better from my position. However, I can no longer be a part of it as things stand, especially because it is attached to an organization that I increasingly mistrust.

The foundation is using the issues of equity and representation to distract from what it has done: It wants the hospitality community to believe that it is suddenly and deeply troubled by the award process and its outcomes. In a scramble to respond to Wells’s reporting, the foundation issued a statement saying, in part, that it has “begun a comprehensive audit of every aspect of the Awards process.” But how meaningful can it possibly be if the foundation won’t be transparent about its shambolic mishandling of its awards this year?

The foundation’s repeated refusals to explain what actually happened that led to its decision to cancel the awards for two years continue to exacerbate the problem. While the awards committee has demanded answers and accountability, committee members are bound by nondisclosure agreements, the scope of which may need to be reconsidered. I fear that any answers the foundation provides them will likely disappear into a gagged group in a locked room.

Last week, Mitchell Davis, the foundation’s chief strategy officer — who never replied to a single email or question I posed to him about his involvement in this year’s awards debacle — unexpectedly announced that he is leaving the foundation. In his farewell post on his Instagram account, he wrote that he looks forward to “seeing how the Foundation evolves to meet the challenges & opportunities of the future.” But what about the challenges the foundation faces now — the ones that Davis is leaving behind for others to clean up? I believe that, until there is significant public pressure on the foundation and its financial sponsors, the foundation will have little incentive to be forthcoming.

The foundation must realize that the best path forward is transparency at a minimum, atonement if required, and reform at every level. Patching over the problems with platitudes and rigged votes isn’t just a woefully inadequate solution to systemic issues — at a moment when there is a demand for a more just and equitable hospitality ecosystem, it is unacceptable.

Bonjwing Lee is a photographer and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been a judge in the Midwest region for the James Beard Foundation awards since 2007.

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards.

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James Beard Foundation CEO Clare Reichenbach at the 2018 James Beard Media Awards | Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images

The foundation violated its own ethics rules to ensure that award winners fit into its new narrative of progress and social justice

Finalists had been announced. A virtual ceremony had been planned. Acceptance speeches had been filmed.

Bonjwing Lee is a photographer and writer based in Kansas City, Missouri. He has been a judge in the Midwest region for the James Beard Foundation awards since 2007.

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2GYlI6W via Blogger https://ift.tt/3dnJvZQ

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years ago

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Prop. 65 warns of cancer and birth defects. Do shoppers care?

Confused? So was Larry Plesent, who founded his soap company in presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ liberal home state on the notion of replacing “yucky” chemicals with “yummy” natural ones.

That was exactly what Proposition 65’s architects had in mind when they convinced California voters to approve the ballot initiative in 1986 — to coerce companies into replacing toxic chemicals with safe ones rather than bear the burden of a Scarlet Letter stamped on their products.

More than three decades later, Plesent and many other manufacturers find themselves at odds with a lawsuit mill that has grown around Proposition 65, which gave citizens the right to prosecute companies through the same county courts that handle divorces and fender-benders.

“I think the original intent was very positive,” Plesent said. “But political forces became involved to make Proposition 65 overwhelming, overreaching, overdone and overblown.”

In Plesent’s case, he feared he could be sued over those same “yummy” natural replacements. One of them, a compound found in carrots, hops, lemongrass and cannabis, had been linked to cancerous renal tumors in male rats that were force-fed large quantities of it, five days a week, for up to two years. That earned it a place on the Proposition 65 list in 2015, over objections from the makers of sustainable products and carrot growers.

Plesent made a strictly business decision: “We do not wish to fight against California.” He added a warning.

Plesent is not alone. Companies in every sector of the consumer economy now routinely attach warnings for any of the more than 900 chemicals and elements covered by Proposition 65, without testing for them or attempting to reformulate products. They fear citizen-enforcer lawsuits more than they fear freaking out customers.

That profusion of warnings has subverted Proposition 65 and left Californians, and increasingly anyone who shops online, overwarned, underinformed and potentially unprotected, a Times investigation has found. And it has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of attorneys and their repeat clients.

Proposition 65 warnings now greet guests at Disneyland, drivers at California parking garages, visitors at hotels, shoppers at car dealerships and lunchgoers in fast-food lines.

A Proposition 65 sign warns visitors to Disneyland that they may be exposed to chemicals that can cause cancer or reproductive harm.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Where Proposition 65 prosecutions once targeted notoriously hazardous toxins such as mercury found in hemorrhoid suppositories and lead in spiced Mexican candies, they now claim that cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm might arise from dalliances with bondage tape or from opening a Bible; from grasping a pair of pliers with bare hands, or donning polyurethane-coated safety gloves. From chewing on the plastic frames of glasses, leaving them on your nose, or touching the zipper pull of their carrying case. From smoking pot, and burning the rolling papers used to twist it up. From casting a plastic lure on a lake.

In the early years of Proposition 65, state attorneys general filed actions against industrial polluters and makers of widely used products with high concentrations of toxins — it won agreements limiting lead in ceramics and acrylamide in French fries, for example.

These days, the attorney general’s office files few cases. More commonly, it pushes back against abuses by the primary enforcer empowered by the fine print of Proposition 65 — citizen prosecutors who have filed more than 30,000 violation notices under the measure since it went into effect in 1988.

Four consecutive attorneys general have accused these citizen enforcers and their attorneys of preying on companies that can ill afford to defend themselves, of filing weak or frivolous cases, collecting unreasonable fees, and offering illusory remedies in settlements that vaccinate companies from further accountability for their products.

One $100,000 settlement over lead in salsa didn’t eliminate lead and didn’t result in a printed warning, either; it changed fine print on the label — the “portion” went from a tablespoon to a teaspoon. Another settlement for $40,000 tried to resolve an acrylamide exposure case by changing the preheating instructions for frozen organic potatoes before the attorney general declared the settlement contrary to the law, against public policy and unenforceable. A plumbing company in 2017 agreed to confidentially pay one San Diego plaintiff’s lawyer nearly $15,000 without promising to change anything about phthalates in dryer hoses. The accord was withdrawn after the attorney general said it “appears simply to be a payment to the enforcer and her counsel in exchange for the agreement not to sue.”

Legislative attempts to curb such behavior temporarily slowed the rise in Proposition 65 prosecutions, reined in their costs and limited the shares collected by perpetual plaintiffs and their attorneys. But 2018 saw a record of 829 settlements totaling $35 million, according to the most recent data from the California attorney general’s office.

Litigating Proposition 65 enforcement has cost businesses more than $370 million in settlements since 2000, according to the state. New labeling requirements alone are expected to cost California companies between $410 million and $818 million over the next decade, the California Chamber of Commerce estimates.

No public agency verifies how many warnings get posted, nor whether all the promises companies have made to private enforcers are kept.

More than three decades into California’s right-to-know revolution, consumers today don’t know much about the health risks posed by consumer goods. It’s nearly impossible to tell whether to put down a product bearing a warning and choose one without it — either one may present a high risk, a low risk or no risk. The deepest internet dive is unlikely to surface an answer before consumers reach the checkout or finalize their order online.

That kind of information is buried in the back pages of civil court settlements that horse-trade consumer safety and business costs. None of those legal battles goes to a jury. Few go all the way to a judge’s ruling. Millions of dollars change hands. A tiny portion goes to the state agency charged with protecting consumers from toxic exposure.

Attorney fees account for nearly three-quarters of the more than $300 million that has been paid out in Proposition 65 settlements since 2000, according to state data. The lion’s share of that goes to a handful of habitual litigants, several of which amount to opaque front groups with closer ties to attorneys than to California consumers, The Times has found. Meanwhile, shoppers have grown inured to the warnings.

This was not what Bay Area environmental attorney David Roe had in mind when he drafted Proposition 65 as a market-driven alternative to government mandates that would persuade companies to clean up to avoid having to “fess up.”

“From my perspective, every warning is a failure,” said Roe, who believes that meaningful compliance still predominates over abuses. Proposition 65 permanently changed the way companies assess risk and choose ingredients, and took tons of toxic chemicals out of production. Most companies quietly clean up their act, he said.

But the process, he said, isn’t perfect.

“The thing about private enforcement is that everybody can do it,” Roe said. “You get the good, the bad and the ugly.”

Born to fail

Political strategists in 1986 hoped Proposition 65 would draw liberal-leaning voters to the polls and help Democratic L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, left, unseat Republican Gov. George Deukmejian. Californians ended up backing the proposition but not Bradley.

(Rick Meyer / Los Angeles Times)

Not even Roe thought Proposition 65 would pass in 1986. Few sweeping environmental ballot measures had survived vigorous industry-funded counter-campaigns.

But Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a Democrat, needed help in his gubernatorial rematch race with Republican incumbent George Deukmejian. Political strategists such as Tom Hayden, then a state assemblyman, and his wife at the time, Jane Fonda, saw toxic pollution as a way to draw liberal-leaning voters to the polls and exploit a political weak point for Deukmejian, who had vetoed several toxic cleanup bills. Hayden, among others, bankrolled the measure. But it fell to others to write it.

“What was in it — the content — didn’t really matter to that strategy at all,” said Roe. “It was about the headline, not the fine print.”

Details fell largely to Roe and a couple of other environmental attorneys. “It’s a very unusual design,” Roe said. “You would never have been able to draft, by committee, anything as innovative as Prop. 65.”

Bradley lost. Proposition 65 won, by a 2-1 margin.

The fine print suddenly mattered. And in that fine print were the seeds of Proposition 65’s successes and excesses.

The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, as Proposition 65 was formally known, said that “no person in the course of doing business shall knowingly discharge or release a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity into water” or anywhere else where it might lead to a drinking water source. It also said that “no person in the course of doing business shall knowingly and intentionally expose” anyone to those chemicals “without first giving clear and reasonable warning.”

The usual people would enforce it — the state attorney general and local district attorneys. But so could “any person in the public interest.” Those words deputized citizens to sue anyone exposing Californians to toxins in the products they used.

Determining what constituted a toxin — and how much was unsafe — fell to the state, which listed scores of chemicals already identified in existing law or by other agencies. Two panels of appointed experts also could add chemicals based on the expertise of reputable agencies, or look at the science and decide for themselves.

Lawsuits eventually forced the state to also consider toxins linked only to cancer in animals. The list has since grown to more than 900 chemicals and elements.

That broad and cautious view of what’s considered risky for Californians is why Plesent, of Vermont Soap, opted to issue a warning with his products in 2015, over a flavor and fragrance compound called beta-myrcene, which had been linked to renal cancers in rodents.

“That doesn’t mean that if you wash with lemon grass soap you [will] be in danger,” said Plesent. “There’s a difference between 2% to 3% essential oils in a wash-off product and 100% essential oils being force-fed down your little mouse throat.”

Telling that to a judge can be prohibitively expensive — Proposition 65 places the burden of proof on the defendant, a reversal of the “presumption of innocence” principle that otherwise underpins the U.S. justice system.

So Plesent surrendered without a fight. “We can’t test everything.… So we’re going to put this warning on,” he said.

One customer then demanded a refund for $7,000 worth of goods she had bought to start her own private-label line of “nontoxic” bath goods. Plesent complied. Vermont Soap now refers customers to a five-page explainer on risks associated with essential oils published by the American Herbal Products Assn. industry group.

“The issue kind of went away,” Plesent said.

If the issue doesn’t go away, companies turn to Mike Easter.

Easter is an environmental toxicologist and attorney who has helped companies win state-sanctioned “safe use” concentrations for Proposition 65 chemicals, protecting them from prosecution. That remedy is so strictly limited that the state has granted only nine of these in 32 years, out of the more than 100,000 products that have been targeted by citizen prosecutors.

Two years ago, the sports fishing industry hired Easter after citizen enforcers accused member companies of exposing the lure-fishing public to illegal doses of phthalates, common plasticizers that can rub off their barbed versions of squid, shad and frogs.

Among other facts, Easter dug out how many times sport license holders fished (18.3 times a year, according to the American Sportsfishing Assn.), for how long (six hours), how many times they might touch a lure during that time, how much of the phthalates might transfer to their fingers, how often those fingers might touch their mouth area when they ate or smoked, and how all that would play out over years of recreational fishing.

He used the results to figure out the maximum concentration of phthalates that could be on lure makers’ ersatz baits before they exceeded the daily dose set by the state — a level that is set 1,000 times lower than the conventional zero-effect threshold used in toxicology. A judge approved a $90,000 consent agreement last year.

The seven companies signing the settlement know how much phthalates they can use before warning anglers. Other lure makers can join the agreement for $2,150 to $59,150, depending on their size.

That kind of science-driven accord is time-consuming and expensive. Plaintiff attorneys have sought more than a million dollars in fees in each of several long-running cases, according to court records.

Most times, attorneys just work out a less expensive compromise. That’s what happened in the case of companies selling tea.

A tempest over tea

Over the course of two years, dozens of tea companies shelled out more than $1 million to one citizen enforcer and her attorney.

They walked away without having to do much of anything about lead allegedly found in their tea.

They also did not submit as evidence anything like the analysis Easter does. Figuring that out was too risky for either side, the plaintiff attorney told a judge. So they horse-traded.

The cases show how Proposition 65 can leave the consumers with the right to know almost nothing, including whether a pregnant woman might be condemning her future child to learning disabilities brought on by lead exposure.

Here’s how that happened.

In 2016, Sacramento environmental engineer Whitney Leeman served violation notices to more than three dozen tea companies, alleging their infusions exceeded Proposition 65’s lead exposure standards. The notices warn companies that they have 60 days to work out a deal or face a lawsuit. That waiting period gives public prosecutors such as the attorney general and county district attorneys a shot at taking over the case on behalf of the public. None did.

Tea companies including Starbucks-owned Teavana paid over $1 million to settle one Proposition 65 case — with little effect on the lead allegedly found in their teas.

(Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press)

Among the most prolific citizen prosecutors using Proposition 65, Leeman has collected more than $550,000 in bounties (a 25% share of civil penalties) since 2001, attorney general records show. The Berkeley-based firm that has represented her, the Chanler Group, has collected more than $7 million in fees from those cases — part of the more than $55 million the firm has collected in Proposition 65 fees over 20 years, according to state records. Along the way, Clifford Chanler, the firm’s founder, has drawn the ire of multiple attorneys general and members of Congress, one of whom likened him to the extortionate troll under the bridge from the fairy tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Chanler calls that a “cheap shot” and defends his record.

“Our work was the undisputed catalyst in large settlements brought by public enforcers that mandated chemicals such as lead being removed from the inside and outside of bottles of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, among other items,” he wrote in an email response to questions from The Times.

Small tea companies quickly settled the accusations by promising to keep lead to a barely measurable level — effectively zero — or warn consumers. The settlements drew no public attention from the attorney general.

Everyone benefits, including the public, from having a standard.

Michele Corash, an attorney hired by Starbucks

Nineteen companies banded together and went to court to defend themselves, led by Starbucks, maker of Teavana. Starbucks hired a top gun who knew Leeman, Chanler and Proposition 65 well — Michele Corash, who had advised opponents of the ballot measure back in 1986 and had won a milestone exemption for the meat industry, nullifying cases Leeman and the Chanler firm had filed against meat companies.

Within months, though, the two rival litigants found themselves on the same side, trying to persuade a judge to accept a compromise settlement. First, though, they had to fight an unusual adversary — the state’s highest law enforcement officer, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra.

Even glassware at Williams Sonoma on Beverly Drive is displayed with a Proposition 65 warning.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Becerra’s office had ended its silence on the cases with a rare intervention and bombshell disclosure in court: Based on what both parties were now offering as a “safe” level, almost none of the companies had ever violated Proposition 65.

Becerra based that on the confidential product tests Leeman had submitted to his office — and that by law, only his office sees. The tests showed that 15 of the 19 companies had never brewed tea with lead above the newly bargained standard both parties were asking the judge to approve, Becerra’s office revealed. That would leave most of the defendants free to serve the public the same old tea, he said. That might suit the parties to the lawsuit, but it didn’t serve the public interest, Becerra’s office argued.

Corash, the attorney for Starbucks, came to Chanler’s defense.

“Everyone benefits, including the public, from having a standard,” she told San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Harold E. Kahn. Besides, the state stood to collect substantial penalties as part of the settlement, she reminded him.

Kahn approved the accord, along with fees for Chanler Law Group: $480,000. Leeman collected her 25% bounty from the penalty, or $26,250. The state got the rest: $78,750.

Chanler told the judge his expenses far exceeded what he collected.

Other companies that had quietly settled before the Starbucks case benefited retroactively. Agreements in 13 of those early cases included a clause that allowed the companies to adhere to any future standard set by Leeman — and the Starbucks agreement now set it 10 times higher than the “all-but-zero” level to which they had agreed, according to court records.

Leeman and Chanler were not done with the tea aisle. Four months after the Starbucks settlement, they filed violation notices against three more tea companies: Bigelow, Hain Celestial and a distributor, Walong Marketing.

Becerra’s office publicly demanded the pair withdraw those cases — they had “no merit” based on what he knew about their test results, he wrote. Such public demands amount to scolding — they hold no consequences if they’re ignored, and Chanler ignored them. Deputy Atty. Gen. Harrison Pollak met them in court, before the same judge who had rejected Chanler’s arguments in the Starbucks case.

Pollak argued that the cases were “an abuse of Proposition 65.” How could Leeman and Chanler prosecute companies whose teas never exceeded the standard they had just fought to establish a year earlier, before the same judge, in the Starbucks cases?

Again, it was the attorney for the tea companies who fought the attorney general. The defendants, attorney Trenton Norris argued, wanted an even playing field — the same lead limit their competitors had won in the Starbucks case. Even though they hadn’t failed that Starbucks standard, they were willing to pay $58,500 apiece ($19,500 for Walong) to settle the dispute and keep from being sued over it again.

This toasted nori at Lassens Natural Foods & Vitamins in Echo Park is certified organic — but also stuck with a Proposition 65 warning.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Kahn would have none of it this time. He threw out the settlement and dismissed the three cases.

Fighting for a settlement, despite no evidence of a violation, was not as unusual as it might seem, said lead attorney Norris, representing tea companies Bigelow and Hain.

“We look at cases all the time that are completely without merit but are too expensive to litigate,” Norris said. “You have to explain all the science to a judge who maybe last studied chemistry in 1968.”

Chanler told The Times that he was prepared to do the science at trial, and show that lead concentrations at or below the eventual compromise standard — 10 parts per billion — would still have exposed consumers to a dose of lead above the Proposition 65 limit. He also said he had additional tests showing even higher lead concentrations.

His client, Leeman, suggested that the attorney general could have taken a stronger role in the case — the office has taken over citizen prosecutions in the past, reaching several milestone agreements on products such as ceramics, candy, jewelry and toys.

A Starbucks spokesperson said the company is “committed to providing safe, quality products for our customers.“ The company declined to respond to detailed questions about the case.

Tea seller Bigelow has said the most lead it has detected in its brewed teas was one-fifth the amount of lead allowed in federal drinking water standards. Hain Celestial representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A Proposition 65 warning greets customers at the door at Trader Joe’s in Glendale.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

So is tea safe?

Not enough for Gerry Schwalfenberg, a University of Alberta doctor whose toxicology study helped draw attention to heavy metals absorbed from soils by tea trees. He avoids any tea from industrialized areas of China.

“I would say it’s still beneficial to drink tea, but don’t drink it from places that have excess lead,” Schwalfenberg said.

By comparison, Proposition 65 settlements have allowed 30 times more lead in chocolate, 10 times more lead in spicy Mexican tamarindo candies, six times more lead in the Mexican salsa whose serving size was reset to a teaspoon, over five times more in rice, and three times more in Nabisco Ginger Snaps cookies.

Consumers in the tea aisles of major grocery chains are none the wiser about lead in tea — none of the companies that settled with Leeman has printed a Proposition 65 warning on its tea packages.

That’s not the case online. Sellers who watched from the sidelines now routinely include Proposition 65 warnings on their orders. Like Plesent, they just don’t want to fight California.

“It would be virtually impossible to test every herb and every product we have for all 800 substances on the California Proposition 65 list,” online seller Tea Haven said. “For this reason, out of an abundance of caution, we have opted to place the Proposition 65 warning on every order we ship to California.”

A package of Chinese black teas The Times ordered from Tea Haven came with a Proposition 65 sticker and a slip of paper warning about “one or more hazardous chemicals.”

There was no mention of lead.

(Lorena Elebee / Los Angeles Times)

Fear and loathing online

Online shopping, Twitter, fast fashion and Cardi B weren’t around when Proposition 65 was passed.

They collided last May over a Proposition 65 warning on bikinis. California did not come out well on a national stage.

“How can clothes cause cancer?” tweeted Azia Ani, of Atlanta, above a photo of the neon green zippered bikini she purchased from Fashion Nova, the Vernon-based brand made famous by rapper Cardi B.

The tiny white tag warned about lead, cadmium and phthalates.

Some 7,000 retweets later, Ani’s post accumulated a long string of out-of-state comments about Proposition 65 warnings on eyewear, Christmas lights, work boots, sofa cushions and gun parts.

“I’m like 90% certain that a lot of clothes expose you to the same harmful things but California requires you by law to inform the consumer,” said a user from Boston.

“Don’t eat it lol,” wrote another.

“This tag is literally on the McDonald’s drive thru window lmao it’s everywhere,” another user commented.

Ani eventually concluded Fashion Nova was “not getting anymore of my coins.”

Fashion Nova declined to comment about the incident or its reasons for posting the warning.

The apparel industry has been a growing target for lawsuits over lead and phthalates in metallic fibers, faux skins, zippers, clasps and buttons. Apparel and accessories are the focus of hundreds of Proposition 65 notices annually, according to a Times review of state data.

The Twitter bikini panic shows how deeply Proposition 65’s legal requirements and psychology have penetrated the national market, particularly for companies that peddle their products online.

Gardeners might struggle to glean whether the Proposition 65 warning on this potted plant pertains to the pot, the plant or the soil.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

Some sellers warn every online shopper. Others wait until a customer enters a California ZIP Code. Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones, whose Infowars Life dietary supplements were tagged with a $135,000 settlement in 2018 over lead content, warns only Californians on its website, but warns everyone on Amazon, which holds its independent sellers responsible for Proposition 65 compliance.

Online reaction to warnings support what Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi predicted at the law’s genesis. His tests three decades ago showed consumers overreacted at first, equating the notices with the surgeon general’s warnings on tobacco products.

“The problem is the Proposition 65 warnings pick up a huge range of risk,” Viscusi said. “Very risky products such as chewing tobacco, which was among the early Proposition 65 warnings — that is clearly in a different league than something that poses a 1-in-100,000 lifetime risk of cancer.”

Because fast fashion is generally designed to last for a season, the bikini’s cancer risk could be as low as about 1 in 7 million, by Viscusi’s calculations.

It’s not even clear whether the bikini contains a hazardous chemical — Fashion Nova, like other companies, may have posted it without even testing.

So, buyers of the green bikini can’t know enough to know what risk, if any, it poses.

But Michael Barsa, co-director of the environmental law concentration at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, said a consumer doesn’t really have to calculate risk for Proposition 65 to accomplish its aim of making cleaner products. They only have to be afraid to buy it.

“Does this give the consumer enough information to make an informed risk-benefit trade-off? The answer is very clearly no,” said Barsa. “But that would be an impossible world to live in. Can you imagine you go to the supermarket and literally every item you buy you’re having to read through reams of data and exposure analysis? It would be crazy-making.”

Consumer fear “is really just what gets the ball rolling for everybody else to make the right decisions — even if that initial consumer impact is not itself rational,” Barsa said. “If you look at the whole law and what happens with it, there may be a sort of crazy genius to it.”

Dining establishments like Il Fornaio Italian restaurant warn of potential chemicals in beverages and a variety of dishes, including fried and baked foods.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

At least one seller, BJ’s Wholesale Club, a membership discount outlet based in Massachusetts, decided not to bother selling to Californians because of Proposition 65.

“At this time we are not confident that our products are consistently labeled to meet these requirements,” the company said on its website. “As such, the company has opted to temporarily stop selling merchandise to consumers in California. We do not have an ETA on when shipping to California will be turned back on.”

Shipping to California is what pushed Grass Family Hemp out of business. The owner and sole employee, Frank Grass, sold hemp powder to Kenneth Randolph Moore of San Jose in August 2017. Months later, Moore received an ominous Proposition 65 Notice of Violation from the San Jose office of “Safe Products for Californians.”

Like Grass Family Hemp, Safe Products for Californians also is a family operation. It is registered as a for-profit corporation run by Kenneth Moore from the office of his ex-wife, attorney Tanya Moore, according to state records. He has been her only client in more than 100 cases, about half of them against Amazon sellers. The pair have netted her nearly $700,000 in lawyer fees, according to attorney general records.

Grass reached out to the Moores to explain that he was exempt from Proposition 65, which applies only to companies with 10 or more employees. He was a one-man shop operating from his home in Aurora, Colo., selling via Amazon, he said.

Industrial sites like Aerocraft Heat Treating in Paramount require Proposition 65 notices in addition to other warning signs.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“She didn’t care,” Grass said of Tanya Moore. “She just skipped over it like it wasn’t even said.”

A judge didn’t rule on that defense — both parties agreed to mediation, after which Moore requested that the case be dismissed.

Reached by The Times, Tanya Moore declined to talk about the case, her client or where he conducts business, citing attorney-client privilege. (Proposition 65 settlements are public, and are posted to the attorney general’s website.)

“I cannot discuss any specific cases,” Moore told The Times. “I cannot discuss any of our settlements.”

The legal tangle cost Grass $5,000, and his company — he opted to dissolve it.

“I’m not going to be selling on Amazon anytime soon,” he said.

And certainly not to California.

Mohan is a former Times staff writer. Staff writer Ryan Menezes contributed to this report.

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

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Obama State Department’s Meeting on ‘Russia Matter’ in 2016 JULY 19, 2019

Obama State Department Officials Set Meeting on ‘Russian Matter’ in 2016

The Obama State Department was central to the effort to target President Trump with the Russia smear. We have obtained new emails showing that senior Obama State Department officials advanced the Russiagate hoax just before the 2016 presidential election.

With The Daily Caller News Foundation we have released 84 pages of documents, including a September 2016 email exchange between then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer, a close associate of dossier author Christopher Steele, discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”

(In June 2016 Nuland permitted a meeting between Steele and the FBI’s legal attaché in Rome. Nuland told CBS News that the State Department knew about the Steele dossier by July 2016.)

According to an op-ed Winer wrote for The Washington Post in 2018, also in September 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the “dossier … I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”

The documents we obtained also show that State Department officials continued to use unsecure BlackBerry devices for the transmission of classified material more than a year after Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system was revealed.

We obtained the documents in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on April 25, 2018, on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation against the State Department after it failed to respond to three separate FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:18-cv- 00968)). The lawsuit seeks:

All records of communications between State Department officials, including former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, on the one hand, and British National Christopher Steele and/or employees or contractors of Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, on the other hand. All records and/or memoranda provided by Christopher Steele and/or his firm Orbis Business Intelligence or by others acting on Steele’s/Orbis’s behalf, to State Department officials.

Any and all records in the custody of the State Department related to the provision of documents to British national Christopher Steele and/or his firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, or the receipt of documents from Steele or his firm. Time period is January 20, 2009 through the present. All records created in 2016 by Jonathan M. Winer relating to research compiled by Christopher Steele.

A September 17, 2016, email exchange between Nuland and Winer – which was classified in the interest of national defense or foreign policy – discusses the political situation in Libya, but also brings up a “Russian matter:”

From: Winer, Jonathan Sent: September 17, 2016 at 12:40:00 PM EDT To: Nuland, Victoria J Subject: Re: Libya Update

Would like to discuss this and a Russian matter.

From: Nuland, Victoria J Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 1:31 PM To: Winer, Jonathan Subject: Re. Libya Update

In ny face to face?

From: Winer, Jonathan Sent: September 17, 2016 at 1:56:05 PM EDT To: Nuland, Victoria J Subject: Re: Libya Update

Yes that was [sic] be good.

From: Nuland, Victoria J Sent: Saturday, September 17, 2016 1:58 PM To: Winer, Jonathan Subject: Re. Libya Update

Good. I’ll reach out when im there Sunday. [Redacted]

Other emails show senior State Department personnel using unsecure BlackBerrys to transmit classified information even after the Clinton email scandal became public.

Here is some background on these characters.

We recently released 16 pages of documents revealing that Nuland and Winer coordinated with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s (D-MD) national security advisor Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele.

In December 2018, we released documents revealing that Nuland was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.

In a related lawsuit, we are suing the State Department communications between Ambassador Nuland and employees of Fusion GPS, as well as top ranking Department of Justice, FBI, and State Department officials.

We recently released 41 pages of documents from the State Department revealing that Winer, played a key role in facilitating Steele’s access to other top government officials, prominent international business executives. Winer was even approached by a movie producer about making a movie about the Russiagate targeting of President Trump.

Winer was implicated in working with Steele and Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal to circulate the anti-Trump dossier.

I talked about the dossier-linked State Department officials with Hannity last night. See the interview here.

Kentucky to Remove Inactive Voters Names in Agreement with Judicial Watch

I am pleased to tell you of another success in our campaign to clean up voter rolls around the country. Kentucky recently mailed address confirmation notices to 250,000 voters who are believed to have moved, thanks to a consent judgment agreed to by the Commonwealth. These registrations are probably outdated and will be cancelled if the voters fail to vote in future elections or to confirm their current addresses.

Our victory in Kentucky is in addition to California, where up to 1.6 million inactive names are set to be removed from voter registration rolls in Los Angeles County.

We previously filed a successful NVRA lawsuit against Indiana, causing it to voluntarily clean up its voting rolls, and we have an ongoing lawsuit with the State of Maryland.

In the consent judgment, Kentucky acknowledges that the state is not in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA): “[T]he practices currently in place in Kentucky do not comply with the NVRA’s requirement that states conduct a general voter registration list maintenance program that makes a reasonable effort to remove ineligible persons from the voter rolls due to a change in residence outside of the jurisdiction …”

The address confirmation notices were sent to about 7% of the names currently on Kentucky’s voter rolls.

As part of the consent judgment, the Kentucky State Board of Elections is to proceed with a canvass mailing “to identify registrants through mail returned as undeliverable who may have unreported moves since 2009.” Voters who do not respond to the notices sent by Kentucky and who do not vote in the next two federal elections must be removed from the voting rolls. Despite the consent judgment being signed a year ago, Democrat Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes’s office has been accused of improperly delaying the processing of previous mailings through 2018, delaying the final clean up of Kentucky’s voting rolls by at least two years.

The consent judgment results from our lawsuit under the NVRA (Judicial Watch, Inc. and the United States of America v. Alison Lundergan Grimes, et al. (No. 3:17-cv-00094)). In June 2018, with our agreement, the Justice Department moved to intervene in the lawsuit against Kentucky. During the course of the litigation, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Husted that the removal of old voter registrations is mandatory under the NVRA, something the Kentucky State Board of Elections had failed to do.

Our lawsuit against Kentucky alleged that 48 counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18. The suit noted that Kentucky was one of only three states in which the statewide active registration rate is greater than 100 percent of the age-eligible citizen population.

Because of our work, Kentucky is taking action to ensure cleaner elections in the Bluegrass State. Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, so it is essential that dead and long-gone voters be removed from voter registration lists.

We are the national leader in enforcing the provisions of the NVRA. In June, we announced that Los Angeles County had sent notices to 1.6 million inactive voters on its voter rolls pursuant to a settlement agreement. Prior to the California settlement agreement, we estimated that national census data and voter-roll information showed that there were 3.5 million more names on various county voter rolls nationwide than there were citizens of voting age. This settlement could cut this number in half.

In addition, the California secretary of state has alerted other California counties to clean up their voter registration lists to comply with the NVRA. Our lawsuit to force the cleanup of California’s voter rolls, which resulted in the settlement agreement (Judicial Watch, Inc., et al. v. Dean C. Logan, et al. (No. 2:17-cv-08948)), uncovered the fact that neither the State of California nor Los Angeles County had been properly removing inactive voters from the voter-registration rolls for the past 20 years.

The California agreement is only the third statewide settlement achieved by private plaintiffs under the NVRA – and we were the plaintiff in each of those cases. The other statewide settlements were with Ohio (in 2014) and with Kentucky.

We can’t rest, and we won’t.

No Surprise: Illegal Aliens Released from Custody Commit More Crimes

It is rather astonishing that public officials we elect to ensure our safety instead throw roadblocks in the way of law enforcement officers. Our Corruption Chronicles blog describes one small victory in efforts to have federal and local police work together.

Following a Judicial Watch lawsuit, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reinstated a reporting system that informs the public about illegal immigrants who commit crimes after being released from state or local custody. The offenders are shielded by sanctuary policies that ban local law enforcement from honoring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers placed on illegal aliens who have been arrested on local criminal charges. If the detainer is honored, ICE takes custody and deports the criminal rather than release him or her back into the community. When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines the federal government’s duty to protect public safety.

To pressure municipalities that protect illegal aliens, the Trump administration published weekly Declined Detainer Outcome Reports highlighting state and local governments that did not comply with ICE’s detainer program. The troublesome logs included details of illegal aliens who committed all sorts of atrocious crimes after local authorities let them go and identified the law enforcement agency that released them.

Published on ICE’s website, the reports ignited outrage among open borders groups and their mainstream media allies, who complained that the information was controversial and discriminatory. One mainstream media outlet actually reported that “immigration advocates also criticized the list for singling out the criminals among undocumented immigrants without acknowledging the contributions of the broader population to their communities.”

DHS caved into the pressure and temporarily suspended the informative weekly Declined Detainer Outcome Reports. Judicial Watch immediately launched an investigation, requesting records from the agency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and subsequently suing for the information. Sanctuary cities violate federal law and put the public at risk. In the last decade Judicial Watch has also gone to court to fight sanctuary policies nationwide, including in Arizona, California, Illinois, the District of Columbia and Texas, to name a few. In California alone, Judicial Watch has sued several municipalities for protecting illegal immigrant criminals. Among them are San Francisco, Los Angeles and Pasadena, though practically the entire state shields illegal immigrants from the feds, including serious criminals.

In fact, the reinstatement of the Declined Detainer Report includes a small sample from just the Golden State. ICE recently announced the report’s comeback and revealed it will be issued on a quarterly basis. “In order to increase transparency surrounding the immigration enforcement process, ICE will produce the Declined Detainer Report on a quarterly basis, beginning in the second quarter of Fiscal Year (FY) 2018,” the agency announced recently. “The report will highlight cases where ICE issued a detainer, the detainer was declined, and the alien subsequently committed a crime after being released from state or local custody.

Because ICE is often not alerted by uncooperative jurisdictions when a detainer has been declined, and because ICE may only learn of the detainer having been declined after an alien is arrested for a subsequent offense, the cases contained in this report are examples of a broader public safety issue and are not exhaustive.”

The comeback report offers alarming details involving 16 illegal immigrants who committed crimes after being released by various California law enforcement agencies during a three-month period. Some were arrested and released multiple times by the same local law enforcement agency after committing felonies. In all of the cases, ICE issued detainers but local police ignored the federal agency to protect the illegal alien from deportation, instead freeing the perpetrator back into the community.

Offenders include Mexican, Honduran and Salvadoran nationals charged with murder, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, spousal abuse, driving under the influence of alcohol, possession of illegal drugs and other serious crimes. One 23-year-old Honduran man was booked and released in San Francisco ten times in less than a year for crimes ranging from burglary, vehicle theft and driving without a license. In each of the arrests, ICE issued a detainer but the San Francisco Police Department disregarded it and let the man go.

Chris Crane, a veteran ICE agent who serves as president of the union that represents some 7,600 officers, reminds that this is only a tiny snippet of a national public safety crisis, because the agency doesn’t have the manpower to track everyone released. “If I was working in a sanctuary city, my released criminal aliens that would reoffend would be more than five a year,” Crane said.

The political and ideological imperatives of the Left have created this state of affairs.

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thefabulousfulcrum · 6 years ago

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Georgia cancels registration of more than 591,500 voters

By Kristina Torres - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia canceled the registration of more than a half-million voters over the weekend, part of an ongoing round of maintenance to clean up the state’s voting rolls.

Each of the 591,548 voters affected by the move had already been on the state’s “inactive” registration list. That means they had not voted, updated their voter registration information, filed a change of name or address, signed a petition or responded to attempts to confirm their last known address for at least the past three years.

None of the voters had had any contact with local election officials or the state since at least Sept. 16, 2014, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

The date coincides with the early-voting period leading up to the midterm Nov. 4, 2014, general election. State and federal law requires that Georgia give voters at least two federal general election cycles before it can take action to remove voters from the rolls, as it did starting overnight Friday.

“Voter list maintenance is both a statutory obligation and critical safeguard for the integrity of the ballot box,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office. “By regularly updating our rolls, we prevent fraud and ensure that all votes are cast by eligible Georgia voters.”

The effort was part of the state’s regular off-year maintenance of the rolls, which up until this weekend included about 6.9 million voters.

Georgia removed almost 732,800 voters in its previous round of rolls cleanup between 2014 and 2016, according to a recent report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Three-quarters of these voters were dropped because they had moved away.

This year’s effort, however, is coming at a fraught time for some civil rights advocates.

Georgia’s work to clean up its rolls unintentionally coincides with a request from the U.S. Justice Department to 44 states including Georgia asking how they remove voters from the rolls who should no longer be eligible to vote.

At the same time, a separate federal commission created by President Donald Trump to investigate unsubstantiated claims of “millions” of illegal votes cast in last year’s presidential election has also drawn ire over a query seeking personal information on state voters themselves, such as their addresses, dates of birth, party affiliations and voting histories.

Several weeks ago, the state through local county election offices also sent out address confirmation notices to more than 383,400 voters as part of its biennial cleanup effort. Such notices are used across the country to confirm whether a voter has moved outside a registrar’s jurisdiction.

Voters who receive them are told they have 30 days to respond, either to confirm their address or to indicate their new one, and risk being moved to the state’s “inactive” registration list if they don’t.

Being declared “inactive” would then start the clock ticking on the years-long process that culminates in being cut from registration rolls, although an “inactive” voter in Georgia is still legally registered to vote and by law has full access to a ballot.

“Being made an ‘inactive’ voter has consequence,” said Sean Young, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, which on Friday sued Fulton County over the fact that some of the address confirmation notices went to voters who had moved within the same county.

The group says those voters should not face the possibility of being declared “inactive” because state law doesn’t mandate such an action for that particular group of voters. The ACLU said it also believes that goes beyond what’s federally allowed.

“Intimidating and confusing voters with bureaucratic nonsense,” Young said, “is classic voter suppression.”

Fulton County officials have said they did nothing wrong by sending the notices, which are supplied by the state but mailed by local counties.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia destroyed election data right after a lawsuit alleged its voting system might have been hacked.

Millions of Black Voters Are Being Purged From Voter Rolls, Often Illegally: Report

Georgia Governor - Cagle vs. Abrams

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nhlabornews · 7 years ago

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Trump's Sham Commission On Voting Integrity Meets In New Hampshire

Yesterday, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Voting Integrity convened their second official meeting at St. Anslem College, in Manchester, New Hampshire. The group, led by right-wing extremist Kris Kobach, who is currently the Kansas Secretary of State, continued to take aim at our voting rights.

Kobach gained local notoriety over the past week as he made the claim that Senator Maggie Hassan only won because of thousands of illegal votes from out of state residents. He claimed that because 3,000 people voted in NH with out of state licenses that their votes were examples of voter fraud. The claim was quickly debunked due to the fact that NH does not require voters to have NH drivers license or to register their automobile with the state in order to legally vote.

“It’s alarming to see New Hampshire being singled out by the national voter suppression movement,” said Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter. “This Commission has no claim to credibility after failing to condemn last week’s out-and-out lies from Vice Chair Kris Kobach about our state’s voters. Granite Staters should consider any claims made during this meeting with extreme skepticism.”

“Study after study, report and report, and even previous commissions have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare and always very isolated,” said Alex Padilla, California Secretary of State. “That is proof that the current protections are working, but we have policies and technologies in place to allow us to facilitate the participation in the political process to more and more citizens. We have a moral obligation to do that.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who is currently serving the people of New Hampshire in the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C, submitted written testimony to the commission.

In her testimony, Senator Shaheen condemns the commission’s clear intention to make it more difficult for Granite Staters to vote, writing, “The truth is that, here in New Hampshire and across the nation, voter fraud is extremely rare. I am deeply concerned that falsehoods about illegal voting are being spread as a pretext for restricting access to the ballot box. This risks disenfranchising eligible voters and undermining faith in our democracy.”

“Granite Staters take pride in our state’s brand of open and direct democracy, which encourages maximum participation, including by college students and active-duty members of the military who live in our state. It is not the New Hampshire way to make voting unnecessarily difficult or to target specific groups of voters with deliberately onerous ID laws,” Shaheen wrote.

Senator Maggie Hassan joined Senator Shaheen in submitting legislation to disband the commission.

“I am deeply concerned that since its inception President Trump’s voting commission has attempted to mislead voters and erode trust in the voting process by pushing misleading claims that have been debunked time and again. It is clear that this commission is simply a partisan exercise to lay the groundwork for new attempts at voter suppression, which is why I joined Senator Shaheen in cosponsoring a bill to disband the commission.”

“President Trump’s voter commission has been formed with the predetermined conclusion that voter fraud is a widespread problem and that restrictive voter ID laws are necessary to safeguard our democracy,” said Congresswoman Annie Kuster. “This is despite the fact there is no evidence of such fraud. Rather than protecting our democracy, voter suppression efforts threaten to undermine the legitimate right of people to exercise their self-determination at the ballot box.”

Kuster added, “The accusations levied by Secretary Kobach are an insult to thousands of local officials and volunteers, both Republican and Democrat, who ensure our free and fair elections in New Hampshire and make the Granite State worthy of being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary.”

“Our elected officials should be working to facilitate civic involvement and build voter participation, especially amongst college students and younger voters,” said St. Anselm student Olivia Teixeira on behalf of the NH Young Democrats. “Instead, with sham commissions like the one meeting today on my campus and through bills like SB 3, Republican’s are using baseless lies of voter fraud in an attempt to suppress voter turnout.”

“If we want to attract and retain young people to our state, we should be working to empower younger voters to take part in our state’s proud democratic process by advocating for modernizing our voting systems and registration,” Teixeira added.

Aside from the continued discussion on the non-existent voter fraud problem the commission also discussed possible solutions to “strengthen” the integrity of the election process.

At one point, John Lott, a right-wing shill, proposed the idea of using the same background check system we currently use to buy firearms to verify a voters’ eligibility. Lott is new to “voting rights” advocates however he is well know in “gun rights” circles. Even before Lott presented his skewed testimony, the Brennan Center for Justice issued a warning, not to believe Lott’s “fuzzy math.”

“Lott’s statistical analysis includes far too many variables and controls – a tell-tale sign of statistical chicanery,” wrote the Brennan Center for Justice.

John Lott says voter background checks at ballot places — like gun checks — is a system that could "please both sides.” pic.twitter.com/lP16lcp1sO

— Dominic Holden (@dominicholden) September 12, 2017

Additionally, Commission member and former Ohio Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, suggested that long lines at the polls were a “good strategy.” This is the same man who “distributed voter lists with the Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters.”

“Today, we met the various characters who decorate Trump’s sham commission. Unfortunately, their fringe conspiratorial thinking is not a caricature but an understatement,” said NH Democratic Party Chair, Ray Buckley. “From absurd proposals to run registered voters through background checks to one commission member calling the creation of long voting lines a ‘good strategy’ to Kobach re-asserting his claim of voter fraud in New Hampshire, it’s clear this commission has an agenda, the focus of which is voter suppression. Kobach showed he was willing to lie to the Granite Staters’ faces about New Hampshire law and embarrass Secretary Gardner in his own state by delegitimizing election results.”

“This is a commission that welcomes, absorbs, and operates in conspiracy. President Trump is getting his way when this commission entertains baseless voter fraud claims, muddying the waters and creating uncertainty and distrust in our election system.” Buckley added.

Outside, over a hundred people gathered to protest Trump’s “sham commission.” Among the protesters were members of the NH Chapter of the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of New Hampshire, America Votes, the NAACP, Granite State Progress, Mayday.US, and the national group Let America Vote.

This Morning: Protest organized by @letamericavote @ACLU_NH @NAACP outside @POTUS election commission hearing at @nhiop #nhpoliltics #fitn pic.twitter.com/HVmO1fWEY2

— Paul Steinhauser (@steinhauserNH1) September 12, 2017

The protests also garnered a special appearance from Cleanup Carl. “Cleanup Carl is a 12 ft tall superhero for democracy. Committed to taking on the dirty villains trying to destroy our democracy with their toxic anti-voter influence.” Cleanup Carl is project of grassroots democracy organization MAYDAY America.

Here with @JasonKander @NHDems & NH ACLU to stop Trump's sham commission and say hands off our ballot! #dontmesswithourvote pic.twitter.com/3BhkPVhDgH

— Cleanup Carl (@CleanupCarl) September 12, 2017

“This commission is the real threat. It’s a toxic mix for our democracy!” said Cleanup Carl through his spokesperson MAYDAY National Campaign Director Chris Tallent. “New Hampshire residents and Americans should take caution! Some of the most dangerous contaminants known to democracy, Kris Kobach, Mike Pence, and the rest of the sham ‘election integrity’ commission will be in New Hampshire this morning to try to advance their dirty agenda. That’s a volatile mix for democracy! Time to clean ‘em out of our democracy and uphold the right for everyone’s voice to be heard!”

Many of the people outside were also calling on NH’s Secretary of State, Bill Gardner, to resign from this “sham” commission.

Standing strong against the sham commission! #nhpolitics pic.twitter.com/BvA6zIJVKj

— NH Voting Rights ⚖️ (@NHVotingRights) September 12, 2017

“One thing is clear: New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner doesn’t belong with this cast of conspiratorial misfits,” said Buckley. “He has carried out free and fair elections for over four decades and any suggestion to the contrary is offensive, incorrect and dangerous. Gardner cannot risk sullying New Hampshire’s sterling reputation by remaining on a commission that is willing to travel to our state to insult us in service of a baseless conspiracy designed to suppress votes.”

Gardner, who is currently the longest serving Secretary of State, is “being used by the Trump/Pence sham commission,” said a group of New Hampshire Voters who recently started a petition calling for Gardner to resign his position in the commission.

In response to Trump’s Election Integrity Commission, the Democratic National Committee joined with allies and created the Commission to Protect American Democracy from the Trump Administration. The DNC held a press call to explain how the Trump administration’s voter fraud commission is working to suppress the fundamental democratic rights of Americans and to lay out the steps that Democrats are taking to fight back.

“Make no mistake: this isn’t a war on voter fraud, it’s a war on voters. And it’s only being waged by Republicans, and we will not let our guard down for a moment. As Democrats, our goal is the engage every eligible American voter as an active participant in our democracy,” said Tom Perez, Chair of the DNC. “We want to make it easier for people who are eligible to vote, not harder for them to vote. And that means fighting voter suppression tactics to create free, fair, and accessible elections. We must protect the one right that preserves all others—the right to vote.”

“Instead of building themselves around policies that reach out to communities like minorities and low incomes folks and the elderly and the disabled, instead of doing that, they’re just going to exclude those folks from democracy. That’s their solution. And it’s cynical, and it’s wrong, and it’s un-American,” Jason Kander, Chair of the DNC commission, former Missouri Secretary of State, and President of Let America Vote. “We’ve had this argument before in America. Folks marched across a bridge, American heroes did, in Selma. And they faced batons, they faced down dogs and hoses, and it was all for the simple idea that in America everybody counts. We shouldn’t go backward. We should only go forward on these issues.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed public comments outlining the glaring problems with the Commission including its lack of ideological diversity or commitment to transparency in accordance with federal law.

“Today’s Commission meeting in New Hampshire lacked diversity, facts, or actual solutions to support our democracy and combat voting discrimination that we know prevents racial minorities from voting,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Instead, Kris Kobach and his colleagues continued marshaling data in misleading ways to continue building a false narrative that voter fraud exists. This myth has been widely discredited, and yet we listened to commissioners reiterate these claims in ways that proved truly irresponsible.”

“Today’s Commission meeting must be viewed in the context of a Justice Department that has all but abandoned its obligation to enforce laws that would eliminate voting discrimination. The Commission is part of the administration’s broader agenda to promote national policies that would make it harder for minority communities to vote,” Clarke concluded.

Trump’s Sham Commission On Voting Integrity Meets In New Hampshire was originally published on NH LABOR NEWS

#Bill Gardner #Kris Kobach #NH Campaign for Voting Rights #Presidential Advisory Commission on Voting Integrity #voter suppression #Voting Rights

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Vermont Soap’s feel-good natural products came with everything a California consumer had come to expect: an organic certification, a non-GMO seal of approval, a “cruelty free” bunny silhouette. And a warning that it harbored a “chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm.” Confused? So was Larry Plesent, who founded his soap company in presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ liberal home state on the notion of replacing “yucky” chemicals with “yummy” natural ones. That was exactly what Proposition 65’s architects had in mind when they convinced California voters to approve the ballot initiative in 1986 — to coerce companies into replacing toxic chemicals with safe ones rather than bear the burden of a Scarlet Letter stamped on their products. More than three decades later, Plesent and many other manufacturers find themselves at odds with a lawsuit mill that has grown around Proposition 65, which gave citizens the right to prosecute companies through the same county courts that handle divorces and fender-benders. “I think the original intent was very positive,” Plesent said. “But political forces became involved to make Proposition 65 overwhelming, overreaching, overdone and overblown.” In Plesent’s case, he feared he could be sued over those same “yummy” natural replacements. One of them, a compound found in carrots, hops, lemongrass and cannabis, had been linked to cancerous renal tumors in male rats that were force-fed large quantities of it, five days a week, for up to two years. That earned it a place on the Proposition 65 list in 2015, over objections from the makers of sustainable products and carrot growers. Plesent made a strictly business decision: “We do not wish to fight against California.” He added a warning. Plesent is not alone. Companies in every sector of the consumer economy now routinely attach warnings for any of the more than 900 chemicals and elements covered by Proposition 65, without testing for them or attempting to reformulate products. They fear citizen-enforcer lawsuits more than they fear freaking out customers. That profusion of warnings has subverted Proposition 65 and left Californians, and increasingly anyone who shops online, overwarned, underinformed and potentially unprotected, a Times investigation has found. And it has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to a handful of attorneys and their repeat clients. Proposition 65 warnings now greet guests at Disneyland, drivers at California parking garages, visitors at hotels, shoppers at car dealerships and lunchgoers in fast-food lines. A Proposition 65 sign warns visitors to Disneyland that they may be exposed to chemicals that can cause cancer or reproductive harm. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times) Where Proposition 65 prosecutions once targeted notoriously hazardous toxins such as mercury found in hemorrhoid suppositories and lead in spiced Mexican candies, they now claim that cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm might arise from dalliances with bondage tape or from opening a Bible; from grasping a pair of pliers with bare hands, or donning polyurethane-coated safety gloves. From chewing on the plastic frames of glasses, leaving them on your nose, or touching the zipper pull of their carrying case. From smoking pot, and burning the rolling papers used to twist it up. From casting a plastic lure on a lake. In the early years of Proposition 65, state attorneys general filed actions against industrial polluters and makers of widely used products with high concentrations of toxins — it won agreements limiting lead in ceramics and acrylamide in French fries, for example. These days, the attorney general’s office files few cases. More commonly, it pushes back against abuses by the primary enforcer empowered by the fine print of Proposition 65 — citizen prosecutors who have filed more than 30,000 violation notices under the measure since it went into effect in 1988. Four consecutive attorneys general have accused these citizen enforcers and their attorneys of preying on companies that can ill afford to defend themselves, of filing weak or frivolous cases, collecting unreasonable fees, and offering illusory remedies in settlements that vaccinate companies from further accountability for their products. One $100,000 settlement over lead in salsa didn’t eliminate lead and didn’t result in a printed warning, either; it changed fine print on the label — the “portion” went from a tablespoon to a teaspoon. Another settlement for $40,000 tried to resolve an acrylamide exposure case by changing the preheating instructions for frozen organic potatoes before the attorney general declared the settlement contrary to the law, against public policy and unenforceable. A plumbing company in 2017 agreed to confidentially pay one San Diego plaintiff’s lawyer nearly $15,000 without promising to change anything about phthalates in dryer hoses. The accord was withdrawn after the attorney general said it “appears simply to be a payment to the enforcer and her counsel in exchange for the agreement not to sue.” Legislative attempts to curb such behavior temporarily slowed the rise in Proposition 65 prosecutions, reined in their costs and limited the shares collected by perpetual plaintiffs and their attorneys. But 2018 saw a record of 829 settlements totaling $35 million, according to the most recent data from the California attorney general’s office. Litigating Proposition 65 enforcement has cost businesses more than $370 million in settlements since 2000, according to the state. New labeling requirements alone are expected to cost California companies between $410 million and $818 million over the next decade, the California Chamber of Commerce estimates. No public agency verifies how many warnings get posted, nor whether all the promises companies have made to private enforcers are kept. More than three decades into California’s right-to-know revolution, consumers today don’t know much about the health risks posed by consumer goods. It’s nearly impossible to tell whether to put down a product bearing a warning and choose one without it — either one may present a high risk, a low risk or no risk. The deepest internet dive is unlikely to surface an answer before consumers reach the checkout or finalize their order online. That kind of information is buried in the back pages of civil court settlements that horse-trade consumer safety and business costs. None of those legal battles goes to a jury. Few go all the way to a judge’s ruling. Millions of dollars change hands. A tiny portion goes to the state agency charged with protecting consumers from toxic exposure. Attorney fees account for nearly three-quarters of the more than $300 million that has been paid out in Proposition 65 settlements since 2000, according to state data. The lion’s share of that goes to a handful of habitual litigants, several of which amount to opaque front groups with closer ties to attorneys than to California consumers, The Times has found. Meanwhile, shoppers have grown inured to the warnings. This was not what Bay Area environmental attorney David Roe had in mind when he drafted Proposition 65 as a market-driven alternative to government mandates that would persuade companies to clean up to avoid having to “fess up.” “From my perspective, every warning is a failure,” said Roe, who believes that meaningful compliance still predominates over abuses. Proposition 65 permanently changed the way companies assess risk and choose ingredients, and took tons of toxic chemicals out of production. Most companies quietly clean up their act, he said. But the process, he said, isn’t perfect. “The thing about private enforcement is that everybody can do it,” Roe said. “You get the good, the bad and the ugly.” Born to fail Political strategists in 1986 hoped Proposition 65 would draw liberal-leaning voters to the polls and help Democratic L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, left, unseat Republican Gov. George Deukmejian. Californians ended up backing the proposition but not Bradley. (Rick Meyer / Los Angeles Times) Not even Roe thought Proposition 65 would pass in 1986. Few sweeping environmental ballot measures had survived vigorous industry-funded counter-campaigns. But Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a Democrat, needed help in his gubernatorial rematch race with Republican incumbent George Deukmejian. Political strategists such as Tom Hayden, then a state assemblyman, and his wife at the time, Jane Fonda, saw toxic pollution as a way to draw liberal-leaning voters to the polls and exploit a political weak point for Deukmejian, who had vetoed several toxic cleanup bills. Hayden, among others, bankrolled the measure. But it fell to others to write it. “What was in it — the content — didn’t really matter to that strategy at all,” said Roe. “It was about the headline, not the fine print.” Details fell largely to Roe and a couple of other environmental attorneys. “It’s a very unusual design,” Roe said. “You would never have been able to draft, by committee, anything as innovative as Prop. 65.” Bradley lost. Proposition 65 won, by a 2-1 margin. The fine print suddenly mattered. And in that fine print were the seeds of Proposition 65’s successes and excesses. The Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, as Proposition 65 was formally known, said that “no person in the course of doing business shall knowingly discharge or release a chemical known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity into water” or anywhere else where it might lead to a drinking water source. It also said that “no person in the course of doing business shall knowingly and intentionally expose” anyone to those chemicals “without first giving clear and reasonable warning.” The usual people would enforce it — the state attorney general and local district attorneys. But so could “any person in the public interest.” Those words deputized citizens to sue anyone exposing Californians to toxins in the products they used. Determining what constituted a toxin — and how much was unsafe — fell to the state, which listed scores of chemicals already identified in existing law or by other agencies. Two panels of appointed experts also could add chemicals based on the expertise of reputable agencies, or look at the science and decide for themselves. Lawsuits eventually forced the state to also consider toxins linked only to cancer in animals. The list has since grown to more than 900 chemicals and elements. That broad and cautious view of what’s considered risky for Californians is why Plesent, of Vermont Soap, opted to issue a warning with his products in 2015, over a flavor and fragrance compound called beta-myrcene, which had been linked to renal cancers in rodents. “That doesn’t mean that if you wash with lemon grass soap you [will] be in danger,” said Plesent. “There’s a difference between 2% to 3% essential oils in a wash-off product and 100% essential oils being force-fed down your little mouse throat.” Telling that to a judge can be prohibitively expensive — Proposition 65 places the burden of proof on the defendant, a reversal of the “presumption of innocence” principle that otherwise underpins the U.S. justice system. So Plesent surrendered without a fight. “We can’t test everything.… So we’re going to put this warning on,” he said. One customer then demanded a refund for $7,000 worth of goods she had bought to start her own private-label line of “nontoxic” bath goods. Plesent complied. Vermont Soap now refers customers to a five-page explainer on risks associated with essential oils published by the American Herbal Products Assn. industry group. “The issue kind of went away,” Plesent said. If the issue doesn’t go away, companies turn to Mike Easter. Easter is an environmental toxicologist and attorney who has helped companies win state-sanctioned “safe use” concentrations for Proposition 65 chemicals, protecting them from prosecution. That remedy is so strictly limited that the state has granted only nine of these in 32 years, out of the more than 100,000 products that have been targeted by citizen prosecutors. Two years ago, the sports fishing industry hired Easter after citizen enforcers accused member companies of exposing the lure-fishing public to illegal doses of phthalates, common plasticizers that can rub off their barbed versions of squid, shad and frogs. Among other facts, Easter dug out how many times sport license holders fished (18.3 times a year, according to the American Sportsfishing Assn.), for how long (six hours), how many times they might touch a lure during that time, how much of the phthalates might transfer to their fingers, how often those fingers might touch their mouth area when they ate or smoked, and how all that would play out over years of recreational fishing. He used the results to figure out the maximum concentration of phthalates that could be on lure makers’ ersatz baits before they exceeded the daily dose set by the state — a level that is set 1,000 times lower than the conventional zero-effect threshold used in toxicology. A judge approved a $90,000 consent agreement last year. The seven companies signing the settlement know how much phthalates they can use before warning anglers. Other lure makers can join the agreement for $2,150 to $59,150, depending on their size. That kind of science-driven accord is time-consuming and expensive. Plaintiff attorneys have sought more than a million dollars in fees in each of several long-running cases, according to court records. Most times, attorneys just work out a less expensive compromise. That’s what happened in the case of companies selling tea. A tempest over tea Over the course of two years, dozens of tea companies shelled out more than $1 million to one citizen enforcer and her attorney. They walked away without having to do much of anything about lead allegedly found in their tea. They also did not submit as evidence anything like the analysis Easter does. Figuring that out was too risky for either side, the plaintiff attorney told a judge. So they horse-traded. The cases show how Proposition 65 can leave the consumers with the right to know almost nothing, including whether a pregnant woman might be condemning her future child to learning disabilities brought on by lead exposure. Here’s how that happened. In 2016, Sacramento environmental engineer Whitney Leeman served violation notices to more than three dozen tea companies, alleging their infusions exceeded Proposition 65’s lead exposure standards. The notices warn companies that they have 60 days to work out a deal or face a lawsuit. That waiting period gives public prosecutors such as the attorney general and county district attorneys a shot at taking over the case on behalf of the public. None did. Tea companies including Starbucks-owned Teavana paid over $1 million to settle one Proposition 65 case — with little effect on the lead allegedly found in their teas. (Damian Dovarganes / Associated Press) Among the most prolific citizen prosecutors using Proposition 65, Leeman has collected more than $550,000 in bounties (a 25% share of civil penalties) since 2001, attorney general records show. The Berkeley-based firm that has represented her, the Chanler Group, has collected more than $7 million in fees from those cases — part of the more than $55 million the firm has collected in Proposition 65 fees over 20 years, according to state records. Along the way, Clifford Chanler, the firm’s founder, has drawn the ire of multiple attorneys general and members of Congress, one of whom likened him to the extortionate troll under the bridge from the fairy tale “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Chanler calls that a “cheap shot” and defends his record. “Our work was the undisputed catalyst in large settlements brought by public enforcers that mandated chemicals such as lead being removed from the inside and outside of bottles of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, among other items,” he wrote in an email response to questions from The Times. Small tea companies quickly settled the accusations by promising to keep lead to a barely measurable level — effectively zero — or warn consumers. The settlements drew no public attention from the attorney general. Everyone benefits, including the public, from having a standard. Michele Corash, an attorney hired by Starbucks Nineteen companies banded together and went to court to defend themselves, led by Starbucks, maker of Teavana. Starbucks hired a top gun who knew Leeman, Chanler and Proposition 65 well — Michele Corash, who had advised opponents of the ballot measure back in 1986 and had won a milestone exemption for the meat industry, nullifying cases Leeman and the Chanler firm had filed against meat companies. Within months, though, the two rival litigants found themselves on the same side, trying to persuade a judge to accept a compromise settlement. First, though, they had to fight an unusual adversary — the state’s highest law enforcement officer, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra. Even glassware at Williams Sonoma on Beverly Drive is displayed with a Proposition 65 warning. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Becerra’s office had ended its silence on the cases with a rare intervention and bombshell disclosure in court: Based on what both parties were now offering as a “safe” level, almost none of the companies had ever violated Proposition 65. Becerra based that on the confidential product tests Leeman had submitted to his office — and that by law, only his office sees. The tests showed that 15 of the 19 companies had never brewed tea with lead above the newly bargained standard both parties were asking the judge to approve, Becerra’s office revealed. That would leave most of the defendants free to serve the public the same old tea, he said. That might suit the parties to the lawsuit, but it didn’t serve the public interest, Becerra’s office argued. Corash, the attorney for Starbucks, came to Chanler’s defense. “Everyone benefits, including the public, from having a standard,” she told San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Harold E. Kahn. Besides, the state stood to collect substantial penalties as part of the settlement, she reminded him. Kahn approved the accord, along with fees for Chanler Law Group: $480,000. Leeman collected her 25% bounty from the penalty, or $26,250. The state got the rest: $78,750. Chanler told the judge his expenses far exceeded what he collected. Other companies that had quietly settled before the Starbucks case benefited retroactively. Agreements in 13 of those early cases included a clause that allowed the companies to adhere to any future standard set by Leeman — and the Starbucks agreement now set it 10 times higher than the “all-but-zero” level to which they had agreed, according to court records. Leeman and Chanler were not done with the tea aisle. Four months after the Starbucks settlement, they filed violation notices against three more tea companies: Bigelow, Hain Celestial and a distributor, Walong Marketing. Becerra’s office publicly demanded the pair withdraw those cases — they had “no merit” based on what he knew about their test results, he wrote. Such public demands amount to scolding — they hold no consequences if they’re ignored, and Chanler ignored them. Deputy Atty. Gen. Harrison Pollak met them in court, before the same judge who had rejected Chanler’s arguments in the Starbucks case. Pollak argued that the cases were “an abuse of Proposition 65.” How could Leeman and Chanler prosecute companies whose teas never exceeded the standard they had just fought to establish a year earlier, before the same judge, in the Starbucks cases? Again, it was the attorney for the tea companies who fought the attorney general. The defendants, attorney Trenton Norris argued, wanted an even playing field — the same lead limit their competitors had won in the Starbucks case. Even though they hadn’t failed that Starbucks standard, they were willing to pay $58,500 apiece ($19,500 for Walong) to settle the dispute and keep from being sued over it again. This toasted nori at Lassens Natural Foods & Vitamins in Echo Park is certified organic — but also stuck with a Proposition 65 warning. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Kahn would have none of it this time. He threw out the settlement and dismissed the three cases. Fighting for a settlement, despite no evidence of a violation, was not as unusual as it might seem, said lead attorney Norris, representing tea companies Bigelow and Hain. “We look at cases all the time that are completely without merit but are too expensive to litigate,” Norris said. “You have to explain all the science to a judge who maybe last studied chemistry in 1968.” Chanler told The Times that he was prepared to do the science at trial, and show that lead concentrations at or below the eventual compromise standard — 10 parts per billion — would still have exposed consumers to a dose of lead above the Proposition 65 limit. He also said he had additional tests showing even higher lead concentrations. His client, Leeman, suggested that the attorney general could have taken a stronger role in the case — the office has taken over citizen prosecutions in the past, reaching several milestone agreements on products such as ceramics, candy, jewelry and toys. A Starbucks spokesperson said the company is “committed to providing safe, quality products for our customers.“ The company declined to respond to detailed questions about the case. Tea seller Bigelow has said the most lead it has detected in its brewed teas was one-fifth the amount of lead allowed in federal drinking water standards. Hain Celestial representatives didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Proposition 65 warning greets customers at the door at Trader Joe’s in Glendale. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) So is tea safe? Not enough for Gerry Schwalfenberg, a University of Alberta doctor whose toxicology study helped draw attention to heavy metals absorbed from soils by tea trees. He avoids any tea from industrialized areas of China. “I would say it’s still beneficial to drink tea, but don’t drink it from places that have excess lead,” Schwalfenberg said. By comparison, Proposition 65 settlements have allowed 30 times more lead in chocolate, 10 times more lead in spicy Mexican tamarindo candies, six times more lead in the Mexican salsa whose serving size was reset to a teaspoon, over five times more in rice, and three times more in Nabisco Ginger Snaps cookies. Consumers in the tea aisles of major grocery chains are none the wiser about lead in tea — none of the companies that settled with Leeman has printed a Proposition 65 warning on its tea packages. That’s not the case online. Sellers who watched from the sidelines now routinely include Proposition 65 warnings on their orders. Like Plesent, they just don’t want to fight California. “It would be virtually impossible to test every herb and every product we have for all 800 substances on the California Proposition 65 list,” online seller Tea Haven said. “For this reason, out of an abundance of caution, we have opted to place the Proposition 65 warning on every order we ship to California.” A package of Chinese black teas The Times ordered from Tea Haven came with a Proposition 65 sticker and a slip of paper warning about “one or more hazardous chemicals.” There was no mention of lead. (Lorena Elebee / Los Angeles Times) Fear and loathing online Online shopping, Twitter, fast fashion and Cardi B weren’t around when Proposition 65 was passed. They collided last May over a Proposition 65 warning on bikinis. California did not come out well on a national stage. “How can clothes cause cancer?” tweeted Azia Ani, of Atlanta, above a photo of the neon green zippered bikini she purchased from Fashion Nova, the Vernon-based brand made famous by rapper Cardi B. The tiny white tag warned about lead, cadmium and phthalates. Some 7,000 retweets later, Ani’s post accumulated a long string of out-of-state comments about Proposition 65 warnings on eyewear, Christmas lights, work boots, sofa cushions and gun parts. “I’m like 90% certain that a lot of clothes expose you to the same harmful things but California requires you by law to inform the consumer,” said a user from Boston. “Don’t eat it lol,” wrote another. “This tag is literally on the McDonald’s drive thru window lmao it’s everywhere,” another user commented. Ani eventually concluded Fashion Nova was “not getting anymore of my coins.” Fashion Nova declined to comment about the incident or its reasons for posting the warning. The apparel industry has been a growing target for lawsuits over lead and phthalates in metallic fibers, faux skins, zippers, clasps and buttons. Apparel and accessories are the focus of hundreds of Proposition 65 notices annually, according to a Times review of state data. The Twitter bikini panic shows how deeply Proposition 65’s legal requirements and psychology have penetrated the national market, particularly for companies that peddle their products online. Gardeners might struggle to glean whether the Proposition 65 warning on this potted plant pertains to the pot, the plant or the soil. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) Some sellers warn every online shopper. Others wait until a customer enters a California ZIP Code. Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones, whose Infowars Life dietary supplements were tagged with a $135,000 settlement in 2018 over lead content, warns only Californians on its website, but warns everyone on Amazon, which holds its independent sellers responsible for Proposition 65 compliance. Online reaction to warnings support what Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi predicted at the law’s genesis. His tests three decades ago showed consumers overreacted at first, equating the notices with the surgeon general’s warnings on tobacco products. “The problem is the Proposition 65 warnings pick up a huge range of risk,” Viscusi said. “Very risky products such as chewing tobacco, which was among the early Proposition 65 warnings — that is clearly in a different league than something that poses a 1-in-100,000 lifetime risk of cancer.” Because fast fashion is generally designed to last for a season, the bikini’s cancer risk could be as low as about 1 in 7 million, by Viscusi’s calculations. It’s not even clear whether the bikini contains a hazardous chemical — Fashion Nova, like other companies, may have posted it without even testing. So, buyers of the green bikini can’t know enough to know what risk, if any, it poses. But Michael Barsa, co-director of the environmental law concentration at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, said a consumer doesn’t really have to calculate risk for Proposition 65 to accomplish its aim of making cleaner products. They only have to be afraid to buy it. “Does this give the consumer enough information to make an informed risk-benefit trade-off? The answer is very clearly no,” said Barsa. “But that would be an impossible world to live in. Can you imagine you go to the supermarket and literally every item you buy you’re having to read through reams of data and exposure analysis? It would be crazy-making.” Consumer fear “is really just what gets the ball rolling for everybody else to make the right decisions — even if that initial consumer impact is not itself rational,” Barsa said. “If you look at the whole law and what happens with it, there may be a sort of crazy genius to it.” Dining establishments like Il Fornaio Italian restaurant warn of potential chemicals in beverages and a variety of dishes, including fried and baked foods. (Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times) At least one seller, BJ’s Wholesale Club, a membership discount outlet based in Massachusetts, decided not to bother selling to Californians because of Proposition 65. “At this time we are not confident that our products are consistently labeled to meet these requirements,” the company said on its website. “As such, the company has opted to temporarily stop selling merchandise to consumers in California. We do not have an ETA on when shipping to California will be turned back on.” Shipping to California is what pushed Grass Family Hemp out of business. The owner and sole employee, Frank Grass, sold hemp powder to Kenneth Randolph Moore of San Jose in August 2017. Months later, Moore received an ominous Proposition 65 Notice of Violation from the San Jose office of “Safe Products for Californians.” Like Grass Family Hemp, Safe Products for Californians also is a family operation. It is registered as a for-profit corporation run by Kenneth Moore from the office of his ex-wife, attorney Tanya Moore, according to state records. He has been her only client in more than 100 cases, about half of them against Amazon sellers. The pair have netted her nearly $700,000 in lawyer fees, according to attorney general records. Grass reached out to the Moores to explain that he was exempt from Proposition 65, which applies only to companies with 10 or more employees. He was a one-man shop operating from his home in Aurora, Colo., selling via Amazon, he said. Industrial sites like Aerocraft Heat Treating in Paramount require Proposition 65 notices in addition to other warning signs. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) “She didn’t care,” Grass said of Tanya Moore. “She just skipped over it like it wasn’t even said.” A judge didn’t rule on that defense — both parties agreed to mediation, after which Moore requested that the case be dismissed. Reached by The Times, Tanya Moore declined to talk about the case, her client or where he conducts business, citing attorney-client privilege. (Proposition 65 settlements are public, and are posted to the attorney general’s website.) “I cannot discuss any specific cases,” Moore told The Times. “I cannot discuss any of our settlements.” The legal tangle cost Grass $5,000, and his company — he opted to dissolve it. “I’m not going to be selling on Amazon anytime soon,” he said. And certainly not to California. Mohan is a former Times staff writer. Staff writer Ryan Menezes contributed to this report. window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '119932621434123', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://ift.tt/1sGOfhN"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); The post Prop. 65 warns of cancer and birth defects. Do shoppers care? appeared first on Shri Times.

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