Scott Pruitt has spent much of his short tenure as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) working at a “dizzying” speed to dismantle Obama-era regulations that restrain major polluters. His most recent target: a rule designed to protect the drinking water of millions of Americans.

“The Clean Water Act makes it plain that science should lead policy, not the other way around, and Pruitt’s actions this week shows that he doesn’t care about either.” 
—Dalal Aboulhosn, Sierra Club

The Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule—also called the Clean Water Rule—was put forth by the Obama administration in 2015 as part of an effort to clearly define which bodies of water are protected by the 1972 Clean Water Act.

As Politico noted shortly after the regulation was announced, “powerhouse industries like agriculture, oil, and home-building” mounted a “fierce counterattack.” This backlash yielded some success: the WOTUS rule was never implemented in its entirety, as multiple states sued and ultimately a federal appeals court stayed the rule, pending litigation. 

But with Pruitt—who as Oklahoma Attorney General sued the EPA over the WOTUS rule—in charge, the oil and gas industry appears to be on the verge of a more complete victory.

As Greenwire‘s Ariel Wittenberg reported on Friday, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers has released a report in which they “disput[ed] their own economic analysis” of the WOTUS rule. Their new analysis, Wittenberg notes, “maintains the previously calculated costs of implementing the rule but reduces the regulation’s benefits by 85 to 90 percent.”

“The Trump administration’s economic analysis echoes criticisms lobbed against [the] EPA and the Army Corps three years ago by the Waters Advocacy Coalition, an organization of more than 60 industry groups that seeks to limit federal water regulations,” Wittenberg observes.

Anthony Scaramucci, the newly-appointed communications director for President Donald Trump, wants the world to know he’s only selectively deleting old tweets so his past public statements won’t be “distraction” as he assumes his new role at the White House.

And so we wrote this headline about it.

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Though countless astute observers and journalists had already pointed out Friday that Scaramucci was clearly deleting tweets that might be perceived as problematic for his new role, on Saturday morning he tweeted:

The reactions—with many noting his strange interpretation of the word “transparency” and others offering screenshots of deleted posts—were swift… and hilariously distracting:

Offering a sample of the kind of postings Scaramucci was scraping from his account, many people shared archived versions:

Pervasive and growing inequality is corroding American democracy, and only ambitious solutions—including healthcare for all, a living wage, and the elimination of corporate money from the political process—will be sufficient to remedy the crisis.

That is the conclusion of a new report published Monday by the Next System Project and the Institute for Policy Studies. Their analysis makes overwhelmingly clear that despite the Trump administration’s self-serving celebrations of the stock market boom and recent monthly job data, the vast majority of Americans remain locked out of America’s tremendous wealth.

“After decades of stagnant wages, most low-income workers are now struggling to get by on poverty wages.”
—Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy StudiesBuilding on the research of economists Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, and Emmanuel Saez—who recently found that the bottom half of the income distribution has been “completely shut off from economic growth” for the past several decades—the new report  highlights the systemic causes of America’s vast inequities, including the concentration of political power at the very top, systemic racism, and the dwindling power of organized labor in the face of sustained corporate attacks.

All of these factors, combined with the changes wrought by globalization and technological change, have converged to produce inequities that are vast and ultimately unsustainable.

“After decades of stagnant wages, most low-income workers are now struggling to get by on poverty wages,” the report—titled Reversing Inequality: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of an Equitable Economy—notes. “Nearly half of the workforce is stuck in jobs paying less than $15 an hour. According to Oxfam USA, 43.7 percent of workers—58.3 million people—earn less than $15 an hour, including 53 percent of black workers and 60 percent of Latino workers. Over 41 million of these workers earn under $12 an hour.”

Meanwhile, the richest Americans continue to accumulate exorbitant wealth. The report highlights several data points that underscore this fact:

• “The top one-tenth of 1 percent (an estimated 160,000 households with net worth that starts at $20 million) now own more than 22 percent of all US household wealth in 2012, up from 7 percent in the 1978.”
• “This tiny subgroup—the true American elite—now owns as much as the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households combined.”
• The combined wealth of the Forbes 400 amounts to around $2.3 trillion. “Together, this small group has more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the US population combined.”
• “The net worth of the wealthiest 20 billionaires—all of whom could sit in one Gulfsteam 650 luxury jet— exceeds that of the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.”

This vast chasm between the wealthiest and everyone else has ramifications that reach far beyond the economic sphere, notes Chuck Collins, the author of the report and the director of the Program on Inequality at IPS.

“Public health, education, racism, and environmental degradation all have roots in the systemic inequalities deeply ingrained in our economic model,” Collins observes.

Additionally, the report highlights inequality’s corrosive effects on the democratic process.

As President Donald Trump expands the war in Afghanistan, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday is partly inspired by “successful” tactics used in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), Reuters reports that in the past week alone, more than 170 civilians were killed by U.S.-led airstrikes in Raqqa, a Syrian city ISIS considers its capitol.

“The monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 42 people, including 19 children and 12 women, were killed on Monday in strikes that destroyed buildings where families were sheltering,” Reuters reports. The observatory claims this marks the single largest daily death toll since the U.S.-backed Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of Kurdish and Arab militias, began their mission to capture Raqqa in June.

Following the Monday night speech in which Trump confirmed he will expand the war in Afghanistan, Tillerson said tactics being used in Syria and Iraq will now be brought to Afghanistan.

“I think we’re taking a lot of lessons learned from our success there, and we’ll translate those to Afghanistan,” Tillerson added.

Considering estimates that civilian casualties will double under Trump in the U.S.-led war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, activists and commentators argue the president’s decision to “expand authority for American armed forces” in Afghanistan—which reportedly includes sending 4,000 more troops—”will only continue this upward trend of civilian casualties,” as Common Dreams reported Tuesday.

Shortly after the U.S.-led coalition launched its offensive to capture Raqqa, a United Nations investigator said that intensified airstrikes by the coalition were responsible for a “staggering loss of civilian life” in the city, Common Dreams reported in June.

“The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria,” Laura Gottesdiener wrote for TomDispatch last month. Citing reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from family members of Raqqa civilians, Gottesdiener observed that the American offensive “looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.”

Summarizing coalition action as it prepared to launch its “much-anticipated offensive,” Gottesdiener wrote:

“Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently,” a citizen journalist group, told Reuters that since the Raqqa offensive began, at least 946 civilians have been killed. Tuesday, the group tweeted recent details and photos documenting the carnage of the U.S.-backed bombing:

As the northern Caribbean islands brace for impact and evacuations are ordered in south Florida, Hurricane Irma became one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever recorded on Tuesday afternoon with sustained winds of over 185mph and an intensity that was “redefining the rules” of what a storm in this part of the world could be.

“One of the most incredible things I have ever seen on satellite.” —Eric Blake, National Hurricane Center

“Wow,” tweeted meteorologist Eric Holthaus, “Hurricane # is now expected to *exceed* the theoretical maximum intensity for a storm in its environment. Redefining the rules.”

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The National Hurricance Center, in an afternoon advisory, warned that Irma was a “potentially catastrophic category 5 hurricane” that would bring “life-threatening wind, storm surge, and rainfall hazards” to the Leeward Islands beginning on Tuesday night, with Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, the Dominic Republic, and Haiti also in danger in the days ahead.  The Florida Keys and southern coastal areas of the mainland, including Miami, could face a direct hit this weekend.

With NOAA providing images of the “monster eye” of the storm taken from space, Eric Blake, a scientist at the National Hurricane Center, remarked that it was “one of the most incredible things I have ever seen on satellite”:

The National Weather Service urged everyone within Irma’s potential path to prepare for an emergency as it provided updates on the “extremely dangerous” Category 5 storm:

According to a mid-afternoon update from the Weather Underground’s Jeff Master:

Subsequent to Master’s analysis, the storm did continue to intensify with its pressure continuing to drop and predictions that sustained winds could reach a jaw-dropping 200mph.

With the city of Houston and other communities along the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana just beginning to recover from the damage left by Hurricane Harvey last week, another major storm about to make landfall only serves to highlight the warnings from climate scientists and weather experts that powerful storms, fueled by warmer ocean temperatures, would become more frequent and more dangerous due to the effects of global warming.