In Wired - In a small town in Eastern Kentucky, which has high poverty levels, there is a warehouse purchased by Brandon Smith, a former Kentucky State Senator. He envisioned a plan that would heal the landscape post coal mining and provide jobs.

Smith entered into partnership with HBTPower, a Chinese crypto exchange company. However, the facility, now occupied by computers, lay dormant.

HBT Power sued Mohwak. A key reason was Mohawk's failure to deliver an appropriate power structure to handle a bitcoin operation. There are other suits happening around the country against smaller operators in partnership with China.

Large bitcoin operations have cornered the market. Companies like Mohawk are discovering the hard way that they are way over their heads.

COP City update

The story of COP City in Atlanta Georgia remains a seminal example of a disappearing democracy in the US and supressive tactics aided by an unaccountable broken legal system.

The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center construction is almost completed. It has spawned many similar institutions across the country.

COP City has been defended by militarized police, large corporate interests, ad hoc and constitutionally offensive adjustments to state law, and broad interpretations of terms such as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), claiming activists, whatever their innocence, to be criminal conspirators.

As reported in Truthout state and federal investigators continue to hunt down members of the Cop City movement. Issuing grand jury summons is one strategy; a fishing expedition where the option is to be either a witness or a possible co-conspirator. This is a venue where procedural protections are lost, defense attorneys are barred from the room, there is no judge, and the rules of evidence don't apply nor do actual facts. Some activists are resisting the subpoenas.

Inside Climate News, In an unprecedented law suit, the owner of the Antina Ranch in Texas, Ashley Watt, is battling multi-national, multi-billion dollar oil companies over leaky oil and gas wells. She filed a lawsuit in the 109th District Court in Crane County against Chevron and other oil companies in December 2022 alleging that the multinational and smaller companies failed to properly plug and abandon wells on the property. She argued that old wells are now leaking, contaminating the groundwater and surface of her ranch. The evidence has shown that scale of the issue involves many hundreds of leaking wells. The trial is expected to start in mid-2025.

/health care/Chevron - In The National Law Review, contributors to a round table discussion offer some legal analyses regarding a post-Chevron world.

There are several important observations. First, overturning the Chevron Doctrine represents a seismic change to the current regulatory structure where in the case of ambiguities Congress deferred to the expertise guiding the formulation administrative laws. The post-Chevron world now cedes this authority to the courts.

As the most regulated agencies in the country the health care sector might be particularly impacted. The round table contributors note that overturning Chevron will potentially have good and bad effects on health care . This particularly applies to the Department of Health and Human series (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which has exercised a broad authority to regulate health care.

Round table participants cite some potential outcomes.

With certainty, there will be an increase in litigation. While some regulatory health care rules with clear language will be less affected, HHS and CMS are ripe for attack in a post-Chevron world.

Some vulnerable areas of health care are open to greater litigation, e.g., mental health parity, surprise billings, or anti discrimination laws. Challenges in these areas might end up delayed for a short term or longer term time and/or changed.

Areas like the codified HIPPA decisions and long term care are less likely to change.

On the other hand, changes to long term care might bring some benefits to consumers and health care organizations.

It is also possible that in the post-Chevron world of increased litigation Congress will be forced to write less ambiguous and to produce legislation that contain more prescriptive laws. CMS will become more diligent in uncovering areas where the law is ambiguous toward clearer policy making with greater engagement and advocacy power. However it is expected that this will slow down the process of rule making with varying long and short term effects.

While a post-Chevron world might allow more effective policy making and better assessments of statutes and rule making, there remains a fundamental reality that overturning Chevron takes the agency authority out of the hands of experts and into the hands of non-experts serving different courts which could lead to chaos.

How much disruption this represents to administrative law remains to be seen. Some litigation has already begun following the Chevron decision.

Stalling by the state of Georgia while construction continues on Cop City is a common practice working against the defense of protesters accused of criminal conspiracy by the state. In The Guardian, lawyers for the accused waited for months for permission to enter the forest. Underscoring why a visit was critical to the defense, the indictment mentions the word, "forest" 310 times in its 109 pages.

On July 23 the lawyers were finally allowed into the forest area only to find that the state could not or would not define where any criminal activities took place in the public park and surrounding area of the alleged crime scene..
While the defense lawyers were not allowed to visit the Cop City construction site, they did observe first hand  the critical loss of  a now lifeless portion of the forest,  which once was a public park that benefited the region.