Uncommon Hours

Sierra Club Applauds President Obama for Rejecting the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

2012-01-18T14:48:00.001-06:00

State Dept. Determines Project is Not in the National Interest

Washington, D.C. – Today, the Obama Administration determined that the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is not in the national interest and announced that it will formally deny a federal permit for the proposed pipeline put forth by Canadian oil giant TransCanada. The 1,700-mile pipeline would run through six states, carrying toxic, highly corrosive tar sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries and ports in Texas.

In response, Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, issued the following statement:

“The Sierra Club and our 1.4 million members and supporters applaud the President today for delivering a decisive victory to Americans who want clean air to breathe and safe water to drink. Today’s decision represents another down payment on the Administration’s plan to move our country beyond oil. To paraphrase Vice President Biden, today’s news is a Big…Deal.

“President Obama’s announcement is an outright rejection of Speaker Boehner’s cynical attempt to play political football with Americans’ health. Unfortunately, we know that Big Oil and their cronies in Congress will not give up their endless pursuit of profits at the cost of Americans’ health and prosperity.

“We thank the President for listening to the concerns of American farmers, landowners and people who care about clean air, clean water and our climate future."

Paul Rieckhoff: Our Troops Aren’t Political Props

2012-01-10T10:51:00.001-06:00

A Message to All Candidates: Our Troops Aren’t Props
By Paul Rieckhoff

Paul Rieckhoff

Our troops are many things to many people. Heroes, parents, diplomats, victims, villains, victors. But as the GOP Primary races roll through New Hampshire this week, there is one thing that all of America must understand they're not: political props.

And that's not just my opinion, it's the law.

This is why so many of us in the military and veterans community were so shocked and outraged last Tuesday night when we saw Corporal Jesse Thorsen step up to the microphone in uniform and endorse Ron Paul for President. We know the law—the military law under the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). We know Article 88 of UCMJ prohibits contemptuous speech by commissioned officers against the President and certain elected officials at penalty of court-martial. We also know that service members are only allowed to attend political rallies as spectators, according to Department of Defense Directive 1344.10, which states, “In keeping with the traditional concept that members on active duty should not engage in partisan political activity, and that members not on active duty should avoid inferences that their political activities imply or appear to imply official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement…” And we troops and veterans understand why this directive exists.

It exists, like most laws, to protect the common good. It exists to protect our troops, our politics, and our democracy. It is what makes America different. It is what protects our political system from being hijacked by our military—and it's what keeps us from becoming a junta.

Since I first commented on this issue on Twitter on the night of the Iowa Caucus, the conversation has been intense. And healthy. Primarily because it underscores how little much of the civilian public understands about our military, and it reveals a dangerous, unprecedented civilian-military divide in which less than one half of 1% of our nation has served in combat. Many well-intentioned people have fired back at me saying things like, "He's a soldier! He risked his life! He's entitled to free speech! He’s entitled to his views as much, if not maybe more, than anyone else!"

Actually, he's not.

Every one of us who has worn the uniform understands that you give up certain freedoms when you sign your contract with Uncle Sam. You give up the freedom to choose where you work, when you have time off, and what you can wear. And, you also give up what you can say. It's part of the deal. And we're okay with that. Like Christmas or missing the birth of our children, it’s another sacrifice we make in service to our nation. Maybe one of the biggest. And we definitely understand it.

We are taught in basic training, and often reminded by senior leaders, about the rules governing political activity. As Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 2008 for Joint Forces Quarterly, “Keeping our politics private is a good first step. The only things we should be wearing on our sleeves are our military insignia.”

It's not that we aren’t passionate about candidates like the rest of America. It’s all about the rules. Want to donate to your favorite candidate? Great. Want to go to a political event or rally? Sure. Just don't do it in uniform, use your rank, or identify yourself (overtly or implied) as a representative or spokesperson of the military. You can get your politics on, just don’t cross the line. Afghanistan veteran Rajiv Srinivasan wrote an even more emotional explanation in TIME last week, writing that Corporal Thorsen’s actions were “disgraceful … [and] soil the American military uniform, one of the few icons that is still good in our country.”

Still not convinced?

Okay. So if you're all right with this soldier's decision to endorse the candidate of his choosing in Iowa, then I assume you'd be okay with General Martin Dempsey, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, standing up and endorsing president Obama’s reelection, or the candidacy of Mitt Romney—or any other candidate that catches his fancy?

Negative.

As we say in the military, that's a no-go. It can't happen. And that's why thankfully, it doesn't.

Now, there are plenty of times politicians push the limits of rules to get the “strong-on-defense” optics of a wall of uniforms behind them at a podium. Presidents do it often, and legally they can, provided it's not a campaign speech or a political convention. Bush did it. Obama has done it, too. But hopefully, the President won’t do it again. And if he does, after reading this piece, I hope you will call him and his campaign out on it.

Candidates can also sneakily push the limit. Last October 7th, Mitt Romney gave his Afghanistan speech at The Citadel before a group of cadets (most of whom are not yet officially military personnel). He pushed the limits, but legally. And most Americans didn't know the difference.

But Corporal Jesse Thorsen should have known better. And Ron Paul and his campaign definitely should have known better.

The soldier will likely be punished by his chain of command. However, outside of a few tough questions from the media, and maybe losing a few votes, Ron Paul won’t get much blowback on this. The lowly soldier will take the hit, and the real source of the problem will get off basically scot-free. Pretty awful. But unfortunately, after ten years of war in this country, we're all kind of used to that. After all, it’s the same thing we saw happen after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

So in this big election year, if politicians (at every level of elected office nationwide) really respect our military and veterans, they won't just use them as political props or patronizingly applaud them at rallies. Instead, they'll ensure they have a robust, aggressive veteran-specific platform to invest in this New Greatest Generation and their families. A platform where they commit to protecting VA funding and the Post-9/11 GI Bill from budget cuts. One that includes a plan to get vets jobs as veteran unemployment hit 13% last week. They should commit to small business loans for vet entrepreneurs starting their own businesses. They should pledge to rapidly improve the VA, and to combating the skyrocketing suicide rate. They should promise to fight any changes to the DoD budget that nickel-and-dime our service members and their families by increasing fees and co-pays on troops and retirees as a way of cutting costs. And finally, they can support up-and-coming young veterans within either party (or no party) running for office at a time with the lowest percentage of veterans serving in Congress since World War II. That’s how the candidates can really support our troops—and invest in America’s future.

The next eleven months of the Presidential campaign are sure to be full of attacks, debates, political posturing and excessive pandering. But one thing that it should not be filled with is politicians using our troops for their own partisan political agenda. Our service members have been used in more than enough political debates in the last few years, by both parties. And they've definitely had their fill of fighting.

So consider this is a warning and a plea to every single candidate this election year: let's respect our troops and our democracy, and keep them out of this one—especially, if you want to be our Commander-in-Chief. If you want that job for the next four years (or eight), you should know whether it's on the battlefields of Fallujah or Helmand, or the primaries of New Hampshire and South Carolina, our troops aren’t a prop.

And they’re nobody’s toys.

Paul Rieckhoff is the Executive Director and Founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).

Cross-posted from iava.org/

Collateral Damage: ‘Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan’

2011-12-29T14:15:00.016-06:00

Collateral Damage: ‘Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan’
By Bob Sommer
(also posted at counterpunch.org)

Mural art tends toward bluntness. Its images are large, its imagery thick with meaning. The nature of the medium—walls!—lends itself best to simplicity, directness. The audience for walls is, after all, everyone passing by. Walls with murals ask us to stop and look and think. They tell stories about people we know, about our communities. Mural art is surely the best medium for “Windows and Mirrors: Reflections on the War in Afghanistan,” an exhibit assembled by the American Friends Service Committee and now touring the country. The exhibit brings together more than forty-five mural paintings in what the AFSC catalogue describes as “a traveling memorial to Afghan civilians who have died in the war.”

"Salima," by Nanna Tanier

America’s longest war has also been its most invisible. After visiting the exhibit in Kansas City, my wife and I pondered a hypothetical question: What if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had only been covered by the news media with Vietnam-era communications technology? In other words, what if there were no social media now, no internet, no 24/7 cable, no embedded cheerleaders in Kevlar vests and oversized helmets clamoring like underage groupies on a rock tour and posing as journalists; what if we only had the evening news, the local paper, and maybe the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, to cover these wars—what would we know about them?

After Walter Cronkite took off his glasses on camera and gave the lie to the notion that America was “winning” in Vietnam, and after Life Magazine published a large black-and-white photo of a terrified naked child running from the nightmare of napalm, America began to get it. That war was no longer about whose military casualty count was worse, but about the millions of innocent civilians suffering and dying as bombs fell and war crashed into their lives. And it was also about the tragic waste of sending young men to die for reasons that defied any moral explanation, and throwing billions of dollars at the effort.

Yet now, despite all the information we have at our fingertips and in our pockets, a medium that traces its beginnings to some ancient and remote caves in France may offer the best way for those of us who will never visit Afghanistan to understand these wars and their consequences.

“Windows and Mirrors” is a tour through the civilian cost of the war in Afghanistan. It is a gallery of windows into an Afghanistan we rarely see, a place whose people we don’t tend to think of with empathy. In turn the exhibit becomes a hall of mirrors reflecting who Americans are in the bitter images of what we are doing there. An untitled panel by Jessica Munguia illustrates the evolution of ever-changing rationales for waging this war in a collage of texts in military-speak, images of weaponry and flowers, and the faces of a woman and child weeping in despair and grief.

The question of our purpose in Afghanistan pervades the exhibit, as does the issue of complicity. The invisibility of this war is the result of a willingness, even an eagerness, on the part of Americans to choose shopping as the prime strategy for fighting the so-called “war on terror”—the bizarre and weirdly ironic notion (brilliantly marketed by the Bush administration) that pretending there were no wars was how we’d win them: Rationing and Victory Gardens turned inside out. And it worked! Such patriotism was easily sold to a nationalistic public that confused the reality of war with video games like “Call of Duty” and patriotism with shedding tears as “God Bless America” rang out in every sports stadium in the country and bone-rattling flyovers filled us with wonder and awe. Meanwhile, actual war continues even now in places we choose not to see, or are prevented from seeing by a corporate media complex that fills the airwaves with pablum.

Michael Schwartz’s painting, “Eternal Scream,” goes straight to the theme of complicity. It depicts a grief-stricken man crying out as he clutches the body of his dead child. The unusual descriptive text that accompanies the painting takes the form of a letter from the artist to the anonymous taxi driver who inspired the work: “Dear Taxi Driver: Thank you for sharing your story. I asked. Nothing I can say to you will bring back your brother's children, your cousins' store, your sister. I can weep with you, get angry, try to organize, but nothing will bring back the people who you loved, killed by bombs, made with dollars that should have gone to teach kids about empathy, compassion, science, history, art, math, and yes, poetry….”

"Learning to Walk Again,"
by John Pitman Weber

Children are the most vulnerable victims of this war and figure in many of the paintings. “Learning to Walk Again,” by John Pitman Weber, depicts the disturbing image of a child wearing a prosthetic leg and pushing a walker past a rack of prosthetic limbs. “Unknown Loss” by Christine Moss positions a madonna and child against the black-and-white backdrop of a refugee camp. Ann Northrup’s “Mountain Kites” portrays children flying kites in an open field. Her accompanying text describes the painting best: “I wanted to show the beautiful Afghanistan that still survives the violent incursions of war, and show ordinary Americans that here is life and value that must be respected and loved. I wanted an image that people could identify with, a child that they could fall in love with and that they would want to cherish and protect.”

"Mountain Kites,"
by Ann Northrup

Ashley Scribner’s untitled work points out that three children died every day in Afghanistan in 2009 as a result of war-related incidents. A set of textual panels catalogues the weddings bombed during the course of the war and cites reports from international press coverage of innocents killed: In one incident, five women, three children, and an elderly man were killed in their mud hut when a 2,000 pound bomb was dropped on their village. In another, a man who could neither hear nor speak did not know CIA paramilitaries were shouting at him to stop running, so they shot him. In yet another, a man was shot dead by occupation forces as he drove to the hospital to inquire about his ailing sister.

The texts give substance to the paintings. They remove the temptation to find subjectivity in the stark imagery and unsettling themes that surround viewers. They reinforce the vastness of these tragedies across time—this is our longest war—and place. This exhibit is both visceral and evocative, a submersion in human tragedy and the responsibility Americans share in creating it.

“Windows and Mirrors” closes this week in Kansas City and moves on to Pittsburgh. The full schedule and more information are available at http://windowsandmirrors.org/

Postscript: I contacted Ira Harritt, Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee in Kansas City, for a comment about the exhibit for this post. I was in a hurry because my wife Heather and I viewed the exhibit on Wednesday and I wanted to submit the essay to Counterpunch in time for a weekend posting, which meant getting it to them by Thursday afternoon. Ira was out of town at the time, but he did get back to me later, offering this comment: “While proponents of the Afghan war ignore its horrors and camouflage it as a humanitarian effort, the Windows and Mirrors exhibit exposes the war’s tragic human costs and offers hope for a different future, which rejects the myth that war can bring peace and well-being for the Afghan people.”

'I'll Occupy' recruitment song: 'The 99 is pissed and we will not be dismissed!'

2011-12-28T09:41:00.000-06:00

Ron Paul Undiluted

2011-12-24T11:13:00.004-06:00

Ron Paul, Undiluted
By Bob Sommer

It would be easy to get the impression that the issue of Ron Paul’s past newsletter articles is little more than a dust-up over old news from another age and time. To hear Paul tell it, as he did in a recent interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger, the incendiary and racist articles that appeared in The Ron Paul Political Report and The Ron Paul Survival Report from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s were not only written by others but he had no knowledge of their content. Notably, he walked out of the CNN interview rather than respond to Borger’s questions about his role in the newsletter’s production.

The sheer quantity of these vile screeds is enough to make any reasonable person who's not infected by the paranoia and racist poison Paul's newsletters serve up question his credibility. The really scary thing is that in the current Republican campaign Paul has taken on the persona of a folk hero to young voters. He’s the “revolutionary” candidate, “challenging the status quo,” as he told CNN. Never has libertarianism looked so benign—such a clear-headed, answer-for-everything, simple solution to the mess Republicans have made with encouragement from their Tea-Party overlords and a dose of help from their co-dependent enablers among the Democrats. If nothing else, the libertarian credo is easily summarized: "You get yours and I'll get mine!"

College students can’t seem to get enough of Paul. Even Jon Stewart regularly touts his grandfatherly persona on The Daily Show, lauding the specious, oh-so-appealing notion that remaining true to your beliefs is somehow admirable no matter how misguided or just plain dangerous they may be.

The New Republic began challenging Paul’s articles back in the 1980s and in turn became a target of the newsletter. The current issue of TNR catalogues some of the most egregious excerpts and provides PDF links for all of them, as well as attributions for many. Reading through these articles it’s impossible to avoid concluding that Paul is either a liar regarding his culpability for this body of work or that he’s so ignorant of what his own newsletters were publishing that he shouldn't be running for dogcatcher. Either way, the idea that anyone believes he belongs in the White House should be enough to frighten the rest of us out of sleeping through the night until the election is over.

Here are a few nuggets from TNR of how Ron Paul really sees the world:

An October 1990 edition of the Political Report ridicules black activists, led by Al Sharpton, for demonstrating at the Statue of Liberty in favor of renaming New York City after Martin Luther King. The newsletter suggests that “Welfaria,” “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,”and “Lazyopolis ” would be better alternatives—and says, “Next time, hold that demonstration at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.”
The July 1992 Ron Paul Political Report declares, “Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems,”
The September 1994 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report states that “those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get blood a transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.”
The January 1995 issue of the Survival Report—released just three months before the Oklahoma City bombing—cites an anti-government militia’s advice to other militias, including, “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
The October 1992 issue of the Political Report paraphrases an “ex-cop” who offers this strategy for protecting against “urban youth”: “If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”

Here's the full article: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98883/ron-paul-incendiary-newsletters-exclusive

Caveat Iowa voters!

Michael Brune: The Keystone XL Pipeline Scam

2011-12-21T07:32:00.001-06:00

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune

The Keystone XL Pipeline Scam

By Michael Brune

With all the political posturing in Congress over the Keystone XL tar-sands oil pipeline, it’s easy to lose sight of the real issue: This pipeline is dangerous, unnecessary, and would cost the American people far more than we can afford. What we're watching unfold in Washington, DC, is more than just a high-stakes political power play -- it's a scam undertaken by Big Oil’s congressional puppets on the orders of oil companies that have billions of dollars at stake.

The politicians pushing the pipeline are (how can I put this politely?) lying to the American people and pandering for dirty oil money. What do we really stand to gain if this thing is rammed down our throats? Higher gas prices, more air pollution, the threat of poisoned water, and enough carbon pollution to make stopping climate disruption next to impossible -- but few of the jobs and none of the huge profits that Big Oil would reap.

Exaggerated job numbers play well to public concern about unemployment and the economy, but they are a hollow promise. The numbers from TransCanada -- the company behind the pipeline -- have already been discredited as fuzzy math for using tricks like double counting and incidental employment for dancers, choreographers, and speech therapists. Here's some non-fuzzy math: The pipeline would raise gas prices across the Midwest -- hurting both consumers and businesses. Ironically, the pipeline could actually destroy more jobs than it generates.

Meanwhile, our nation’s largest aquifer, which supplies one-third of U.S. irrigated farmland and the drinking water for millions, would be put at imminent risk. Although that risk most directly affects the farmers and ranchers whose livelihoods hang in the balance, every American would feel the effect of an oil-spill catastrophe in the nation’s agricultural heartland.

TransCanada has a dismal record of cutting corners, ignoring the law, and spilling oil. The company's Keystone 1 pipeline spilled more than 12 times in its first year of operation, including a 21,000-gallon spill in North Dakota in May 2011 that shot a 60-foot geyser of oil into the air. Last year, the U.S. EPA determined that sections of the Keystone 1 pipeline were constructed using inferior steel and defective welds.

That means we have an irresponsible company asking for permission to build a kind of pipeline that is already far riskier than normal. Unrefined tar sands crude is both thicker and more toxic than conventional crude oil. Sand in the mixture scours the inside of a pipe, and highly reactive chemicals in the crude corrode the steel. Making things even worse, the heavy, gooey tar sands has to be pumped at far higher temperatures and pressures than conventional oil.

The riskiness of piping this toxic crude all the way across America is bad enough, but on top of that, this pipeline would actually make the U.S. less secure. Retired Brigadier General Steven Anderson said it plainly:

The Keystone XL pipeline will not reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil, or do anything to get us off oil completely, which is key to America’s national security future. Much of the oil produced by Keystone won’t go right to American gas-tanks - it is to be exported, meaning we will need to import oil the same as before.

But pipeline advocates aren't really concerned about what's best for the U.S. At least one oil company backing the pipeline, Valero, has made it clear that its main goal is to reach growing foreign diesel fuel markets. Port Arthur, TX, where the Keystone XL would end, is a Foreign Trade Zone. That means oil companies would avoid paying U.S. taxes on oil that is imported from Canada, refined in Texas, and then exported to China, Latin America, or Europe. The American people get to assume all of the risk, but would see none of the benefits, not even the tax revenues.

This pipeline is a bad deal that would generate billions in profits for oil companies while leaving Americans to pay the price in higher fuel costs, energy insecurity, and polluted air and water. At a time when we need to be doing everything we can to get off oil and reduce global-warming pollution, the Keystone XL would take us in exactly the wrong direction. Tar sands oil is a gigantic climate disaster waiting to happen.

President Obama did the right and responsible thing by deciding to reevaluate this project. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is dangerous, unnecessary, and would cost the American people far more than we can afford. We cannot -- we must not -- let Big Oil and its minions in Congress force it upon us against our will.

Michael Brune is the Sierra Club's executive director.

Feds Link Water Contamination to Fracking for the First Time

2011-12-11T10:46:00.000-06:00

By Abrahm Lustgarten and Nicholas Kusnetz
ProPublica, Dec. 8, 2011

In a first, federal environment officials today scientifically linked underground water pollution with hydraulic fracturing, concluding that contaminants found in central Wyoming were likely caused by the gas drilling process.

The findings by the Environmental Protection Agency come partway through a separate national study by the agency to determine whether fracking presents a risk to water resources.

In the 121-page draft report released today, EPA officials said that the contamination near the town of Pavillion, Wyo., had most likely seeped up from gas wells and contained at least 10 compounds known to be used in frack fluids.

“The presence of synthetic compounds such as glycol ethers … and the assortment of other organic components is explained as the result of direct mixing of hydraulic fracturing fluids with ground water in the Pavillion gas field,” the draft report states. “Alternative explanations were carefully considered.”

The agency’s findings could be a turning point in the heated national debate about whether contamination from fracking is happening, and are likely to shape how the country regulates and develops natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale and across the Eastern Appalachian states.

Some of the findings in the report also directly contradict longstanding arguments by the drilling industry for why the fracking process is safe: that hydrologic pressure would naturally force fluids down, not up; that deep geologic layers provide a watertight barrier preventing the movement of chemicals towards the surface; and that the problems with the cement and steel barriers around gas wells aren’t connected to fracking.

Environmental advocates greeted today’s report with a sense of vindication and seized the opportunity to argue for stronger federal regulation of fracking.

“No one can accurately say that there is ‘no risk’ where fracking is concerned,” wrote Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, on her blog. “This draft report makes obvious that there are many factors at play, any one of which can go wrong. Much stronger rules are needed to ensure that well construction standards are stronger and reduce threats to drinking water.”

A spokesman for EnCana, the gas company that owns the Pavillion wells, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an email exchange after the EPA released preliminary water test data two weeks ago, the spokesman, Doug Hock, denied that the company’s actions were to blame for the pollution and suggested it was naturally caused.

“Nothing EPA presented suggests anything has changed since August of last year– the science remains inconclusive in terms of data, impact, and source,” Hock wrote. “It is also important to recognize the importance of hydrology and geology with regard to the sampling results in the Pavillion Field. The field consists of gas-bearing zones in the near subsurface, poor general water quality parameters and discontinuous water-bearing zones.”

The EPA’s findings immediately triggered what is sure to become a heated political debate as members of Congress consider afresh proposals to regulate fracking. After a phone call with EPA chief Lisa Jackson this morning, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., told a Senate panel that he found the agency’s report on the Pavillion-area contamination “offensive.” Inhofe’s office had challenged the EPA’s investigation in Wyoming last year, accusing the agency of bias.

Residents began complaining of fouled water near Pavillion in the mid-1990s, and the problems appeared to get worse around 2004. Several residents complained that their well water turned brown shortly after gas wells were fracked nearby, and, for a time, gas companies operating in the area supplied replacement drinking water to residents.

Beginning in 2008, the EPA took water samples from resident’s drinking water wells, finding hydrocarbons and traces of contaminants that seemed like they could be related to fracking. In 2010, another round of sampling confirmed the contamination, and the EPA, along with federal health officials, cautioned residents not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes when they bathed because the methane in the water could cause an explosion.

To confirm their findings, EPA investigators drilled two water monitoring wells to 1,000 feet. The agency released data from these test wells in November that confirmed high levels of carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene, and a chemical compound called 2 Butoxyethanol, which is known to be used in fracking.

Still, the EPA had not drawn conclusions based on the tests and took pains to separate its groundwater investigation in Wyoming from the national controversy around hydraulic fracturing. Agriculture, drilling, and old pollution from waste pits left by the oil and gas industry were all considered possible causes of the contamination.

In the report released today, the EPA said that pollution from 33 abandoned oil and gas waste pits – which are the subject of a separate cleanup program – are indeed responsible for some degree of shallow groundwater pollution in the area. Those pits may be the source of contamination affecting at least 42 private water wells in Pavillion. But the pits could not be blamed for contamination detected in the water monitoring wells 1,000 feet underground.

That contamination, the agency concluded, had to have been caused by fracking.

The EPA’s findings in Wyoming are specific to the region’s geology; the Pavillion-area gas wells were fracked at shallower depths than many of the wells in the Marcellus shale and elsewhere.

Investigators tested the cement and casing of the gas wells and found what they described as “sporadic bonding” of the cement in areas immediately above where fracking took place. The cement barrier meant to protect the well bore and isolate the chemicals in their intended zone had been weakened and separated from the well, the EPA concluded.

The report also found that hydrologic pressure in the Pavillion area had pushed fluids from deeper geologic layers towards the surface. Those layers were not sufficient to provide a reliable barrier to contaminants moving upward, the report says.

Throughout its investigation in Wyoming, The EPA was hamstrung by a lack of disclosure about exactly what chemicals had been used to frack the wells near Pavillion. EnCana declined to give federal officials a detailed breakdown of every compound used underground. The agency relied instead on more general information supplied by the company to protect workers’ health.

Hock would not say whether EnCana had used 2 BE, one of the first chemicals identified in Pavillion and known to be used in fracking, at its wells in Pavillion. But he was dismissive of its importance in the EPA’s findings. “There was a single detection of 2-BE among all the samples collected in the deep monitoring wells. It was found in one sample by only one of three labs,” he wrote in his reply to ProPublica two weeks ago. “Inconsistency in detection and non-repeatability shouldn't be construed as fact.”

The EPA’s draft report will undergo a public review and peer review process, and is expected to be finalized by spring.

Chris Martenson: “Our job is not to grow as fast as possible…”

2011-11-30T10:34:00.000-06:00

The exponential growth of civilization is unsustainable, according to Chris Martenson, author of The Crash Course. In this recent lecture at the Gold and Silver Meeting in Madrid, Martenson synthesizes the relationship of the three E’s – economy, energy, and environment – in a single model, demonstrating how quickly resources are exhausted at the end of an exponential curve. “We live in a world surrounded by exponential curves,” he points out.

Grab a notebook and set aside an hour to view this provocative and thoughtful lecture.

Fair and balanced, but not so much news

2011-11-27T06:00:00.015-06:00

Fox News viewers tend to be more ignorant about current events not only than people who get their news elsewhere, but those who don’t watch the news at all, according to a new poll.

Researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll queried a cross-section of New Jersey residents about current events and where they got their information. Among the results, they found that Fox News leads “people to be even less informed than those who say they don’t watch any news at all.”

Many Fox viewers did not know, for example, that Egyptians had overthrown their government in the historic and widely-covered Arab Spring earlier this year. Nor did they know that Syrians have not yet succeeded in doing so in the current uprising. Surprisingly, they also were not able to identify who was leading in the current field of Republican candidates for President.

The poll was controlled for partisanship, so the results don’t suggest that merely being a Republican makes you less informed.

“Rather,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll, “the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

Hmm, could it be that Fox News isn’t really a news network at all? Well, that’s hardly news.

Happy Thanksgiving from Team Francis!

2011-11-24T11:23:00.002-06:00

Team Francis dedicated the runLawrence 2011 Thanksgiving Day 5K to the memory of our beloved son and brother, Francis D. Sommer. From left: Alex, Raina, Bob, Heather, Erin, and Aaron in Lawrence, Kan., Nov. 24, 2011.

Remembering homeless vets on Veterans Day

2011-11-10T17:25:00.001-06:00

Fund helps homeless veterans, remembers their sacrifice
By Bob Sommer

(Published in The Kansas City Star, Nov. 9, 2011)

My son Francis was one of the lucky ones. He knew it, too. Many of the soldiers he served with in Iraq and Afghanistan had no one to write to them or send packages. In these wars, a “Dear John” letter may come as an email or simply a drained bank account, while soldiers are posted to some of the worst places on Earth.

My wife and I saw this for ourselves — soldiers at Francis’s homecomings who had no one to greet them, nowhere to go, and then later, nowhere to go when they left the service. A report issued jointly by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that veterans account for 13 percent of America’s homeless population — nearly 145,000 men and women.

The unsettling numbers don’t stop there. The Department of Defense estimates that some 400,000 veterans have sustained traumatic brain injuries. Further, according to the VA, 20 percent of the suicides in the U.S. are veterans.

After he left the service, Francis struggled with health issues, cognitive problems and PTSD. He told us once that he’d be dead in six months if he didn’t live with us at home. Tragically, we did lose him about six months later in a car accident, one of the leading causes of death among returning vets.

He was being treated at the Kansas City VA, where he also served as a volunteer. He helped distribute clothing to homeless vets and served them his own recipe for chili. He’d become an exceptional chef and was near completion of the Johnson County Community College Culinary Arts program.

When he passed away, my wife and I contacted the VA to set up a fund for homeless veterans in his name. We thought a few hundred dollars might land there in lieu of money spent on flowers. Melissa Jacobson, Chief of Voluntary Services, told me that funds were needed for basic items like driver’s license fees or safety shoes for a new job.

But something unexpected happened. Melissa called several weeks after Francis’s funeral to tell me that thousands had poured in — from friends, family, soldiers, even strangers. She became choked up on the phone. So did I, but that happens often to me these days.

About 100 homeless veterans had recently been placed in housing through a program funded by the VA and HUD. But Melissa said these vets still needed food and the means to prepare it. Her idea: cooking kits, with utensils, pots, pans, and food, to help jumpstart them in their new homes. She thought this would be a good way to honor Francis. I couldn’t have agreed more.

These vets struggle with poor health, mental illness, addiction, unemployment, and more. Through this program, they have a chance for a fresh start, and their progress is monitored through the Kansas City VA.

My wife and I received dozens of very moving letters from veterans who benefited from these gifts. Their expressions of gratitude are overwhelming, but I can’t imagine they’re more grateful than we are, as we see Francis remembered so well.

To share in the gift of aiding homeless veterans in Kansas City, please send your donation to Kansas City VA Voluntary Services 135, 4801 Linwood Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64128. Make checks payable to the KCVA.

If you wish, please mention the Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund on the memo line.

For more information, including photos and excerpts from letters written by veterans, go to http://uncommon-hours.blogspot.com/p/fds-memorial-fund.html.

State Dept. to reevaluate Keystone XL tarsands pipeline

2011-11-10T14:47:00.001-06:00

Washington, D.C. - The State Department announced today that it is reevaluating the environmental review of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline project. The reevaluation will include consideration of rerouting the pipeline to avoid sensitive ecological areas in Nebraska. An alternative route would require a new environmental impact statement and would delay a final decision on the tar sands pipeline for as long as 18 months.

In response, Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, issued the following statement:

“The mere fact that the State Department is slowing down and taking a look at the dirty Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is hugely encouraging. We commend President Obama for listening to the American people and putting the brakes on what would have been a disaster for millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water and good health for their families.

“The Sierra Club is confident that when the State Dept. evaluates the true costs of this dirty project – threats to water supplies and ecologically sensitive areas, destruction of the boreal forest, dangerous carbon emissions, unsafe pipelines, and increased cancer and respiratory illnesses in communities like Port Arthur and Houston, Texas – they will reject this pipeline.

“Today’s announcement is a death knell for the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline and lands a considerable blow to Big Oil, their lobbyists, and their campaign of lies to keep Americans addicted to oil.

“Our continued addiction to oil will only destroy our land, air, water and health while keeping Americans shackled to the gas pump and beholden to Big Oil. That's why it's imperative that we invest in American innovation and 21st Century transportation solutions like smarter, more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, electric vehicles and transit to truly achieve energy security and a clean energy economy beyond oil.”

Bill Moyers: 'Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy'

2011-11-06T10:57:00.000-06:00

'My Water's On Fire Tonight' (The Fracking Song)

2011-11-05T07:46:00.001-05:00

Michael Brune: 'The Keystone XL Pipeline is about whether right and wrong still matter'

2011-11-04T16:24:00.000-05:00

'Let's Build the Future We Want to See'
By Michael Brune

One bus is coming from Maine. Another from Asheville, North Carolina -- one of several from that state. From points up and down the eastern seaboard, busloads of Sierra Club members and volunteers will travel to the White House this weekend. We won't be mingling in the Rose Garden. Instead, we'll stand, shoulder to shoulder, with thousands of Americans from across the environmental movement in a circle that stretches clear around the president's house to send this message:

Stop the Keystone XL pipeline and the dirty tar-sands oil it would carry from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

A year ago, few people had heard of the Keystone XL or even knew what tar-sands oil was. Today, thanks to lots of hard work and grassroots actions, the decision of whether to permit this pipeline -- a decision that Obama has acknowledged is his alone to make -- is a flashpoint issue not just for environmentalists but for anyone who believes our leaders should still be capable of making critical decisions based, not on some political calculus, but on right versus wrong.

There's no question the Keystone XL pipeline would be wrong.

Wrong because all the risks of the pipeline would be borne by the American people, while the profits further enrich the wealthiest corporations on the planet -- Big Oil.

Wrong because the inevitable toxic oil spills could contaminate the Ogallala aquifer-- which provides irrigation for 27 percent of U.S. croplands as well as drinking water for millions of people.

Wrong because extracting tar sands oil is the petroleum equivalent of mountaintop-removal mining -- a scorched-earth, wholesale destruction of North America's boreal forest.

Wrong because digging up and then burning Canada's tar-sands oil would create enough carbon pollution to make stopping runaway climate disruption nearly impossible.

Wrong because the refining of dirty tar sands oil dumps even more cancer-causing chemicals, particulate matter and other toxics into the air, further poisoning communities where the air is unsafe to breathe.

And wrong because to bury our heads in the tar sands would be to pretend we don't have what it takes to move our country Beyond Oil and build a clean-energy economy based on renewable energy and efficiency.

These moral stakes compel us to bring our message directly to the president's doorstep.

One of my favorite insights about public policy comes from my friend Bill Barclay, an energy analyst with Rainforest Action Network. Bill once told me, "You want to know the best way to tell the future? Look at our investments in energy infrastructure. What we're building now will be around for the next half-century."

Our energy future is determined by the decisions we make today. If we want a future where our country's economy is based on clean, safe, and secure energy, then we need to work for it. Because we can indeed break our dependence on oil -- one car, plane, and pipeline at a time. The alternative is more pipelines (and thus more spills), fouled water, dirty air, and an increasingly unstable climate.

The Keystone XL decision is not just about a pipeline. If it were, nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates would not have publically urged President Obama to reject it. This is about whether right and wrong still matter. Thousands of us will be at the White House Sunday because we believe they do. (And if you can't, here's how you can still help.)

Michael Brune is the Sierra Club's executive director.

Amy Goodman on Occupy Wall Street: 'Pundits know so little about so much...'

2011-10-30T11:08:00.000-05:00

Obama Administration: No Uranium Mining Near Grand Canyon

2011-10-27T10:17:00.000-05:00

Sierra Club Praises Decision to Protect National Park, Southwest Drinking Water

Washington, DC -- The Obama Administration today took a critical step in finalizing protections to keep more than a million acres of public land around Grand Canyon National Park free from mineral exploration and new mining. The decision comes as the lands around the Grand Canyon are threatened by thousands of new uranium mining claims.

"The Sierra Club applauds the decision to protect these precious public lands. The Grand Canyon is a crown jewel of our national park system, and an important piece of American history, culture and economy," said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. "These public lands are no place for destructive energy and mineral development."

Each year, nearly 4.4 million people come to experience Grand Canyon National Park, contributing over $680 million to the Northern Arizona economy. These visitors come from across the nation and around the world to enjoy the grand scenery and outdoor recreation opportunities, and to see a wide array of wildlife, including the desert tortoise, the California condor, the northern goshawk, and the Kaibab squirrel--found no place else.

Extensive uranium mining in the plateaus surrounding the Grand Canyon would industrialize wild lands and Native American sacred sites, destroy areas important to dozens of rare plants and wildlife and permanently pollute groundwater and springs. The Colorado River watershed provides water to millions of acres of farmland and people living throughout the Southwest.

"Today's decision protects drinking water for millions of people in southern California, Arizona and Nevada who rely on the Colorado River. Radioactive uranium mining should not happen near our water or next to Grand Canyon National Park," said Sandy Bahr, Director of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter.

The Administration's announcement follows efforts by Congressman Grijalva (D-AZ), scientists, tribal and local government leaders, businesses and hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens to secure protections for the region and its waters. The federal protections granted today respect permanent uranium mining bans put in place by the Hualapai, Havasupai, Kaibab-Paiute, and Hopi tribes, as well as the and Navajo nation on their lands in northern Arizona and near the park.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is expected to formally finalize today's decision in 30 days.

A victory for our wilderness: Federal court reinstates Roadless Rule

2011-10-24T15:11:00.000-05:00

Landmark Ruling on Wild National Forest Protections

DENVER – The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a long-awaited, landmark decision today, securing critical legal protections for nearly 50 million acres of pristine National Forest lands. These forests offer outstanding opportunities for hunting, fishing, and hiking, produce clean water for thousands of communities nationwide, and provide irreplaceable habitat for imperiled wildlife species including grizzly bears, lynx, and Pacific salmon. The appellate court reversed a lower court decision and affirmed the validity of the Roadless Rule – a 2001 federal rule that protects wild national forests and grasslands from new road building, logging, and development.

The appellate court ruled against the State of Wyoming and industry intervenors and in favor of conservation groups, the Forest Service, and the States of California, Oregon, and Washington. This decision formally ends an injunction against the Rule’s enforcement imposed by a Wyoming federal district court in 2008.

“The public forests we’ve fought so hard to protect are now safe,” said Tim Preso, an Earthjustice attorney representing the conservation groups. “All Americans can now know that a key part of our nation’s natural heritage won’t be destroyed.”

The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule was the product of the most comprehensive rulemaking process in the nation’s history, including more than 2 million comments from members of the public, hundreds of public hearings and open houses, and a detailed environmental review. The rule came under relentless attack by logging and resource extraction interests, certain states, and the Bush administration.

“This is a great victory for the American people who have spoken out, time and again and in record numbers, for protection of these wild public lands,” said Mike Francis with The Wilderness Society.

“Roadless areas protect our rivers and streams – protect our salmon, trout, drinking water,” said Mary Scurlock of Pacific Rivers Council. “The Roadless Rule is common-sense, and finally the question of its legality is settled.”

“Roadless areas are valuable and irreplaceable places for hikers, campers, hunters, anglers, and families; they protect our water supplies; they provide room for wildlife to live and raise their young; and they will be increasingly important as safe havens for plants and animals in the face of rising temperatures and other impacts of climate change,” said Frances Hunt, Director of the Sierra Club's Resilient Habitats Campaign.

“Roadless Areas represent the last of our wild and natural National Forest lands, providing multiple benefits including outstanding wildlife habitat, important supplies of clean water, and some of the best recreation lands in the country," said Erik Molvar, Wildlife Biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance of Laramie, Wyoming.

Lisa McGee of Wyoming Outdoor Council stressed the importance of this decision to her state. “The people of Wyoming love the outdoors – we’re hunters, fishermen, hikers, and campers -- and roadless areas give us the best recreation anywhere. This decision ensures that our outdoor heritage will be safeguarded.”

Earthjustice has led the legal defense of the Roadless Rule since the first attacks under the Bush/Cheney administration. Against all odds, this critical legal work has kept the Roadless Rule alive and prevented destruction of our national forests’ last great wild places.

Now, conservation, faith, and recreation groups trust that the Obama administration will support and enforce the 2001 Roadless Rule as the law of the land, including defending its protections for all 58.5 million acres of roadless lands in the country. That includes national forests in Alaska, currently subject to a separate legal challenge and national forests in Idaho, whose roadless area protections were weakened in 2008.

As a candidate, President Obama said:

“Road construction in national forests can harm fish and wildlife habitats while polluting local lakes, rivers, and streams. The Roadless Area Conservation Rule—which was made on the basis of extensive citizen input—protects 58.5 million acres of national forest from such harmful building. I will be proud to support and defend it.”

Background on today’s decision

In 2008, the State of Wyoming sued the Forest Service for a second time to invalidate the Roadless Rule (the rule had been reinstated by a federal court in California in 2006). A Wyoming federal district court enjoined the Rule; Earthjustice and the Forest Service appealed that injunction to the 10th Circuit. The 10th Circuit today joins the 9th Circuit in finding the Roadless Rule legal.

In this appeal to the 10th Circuit, Earthjustice represented Wyoming Outdoor Council, The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Pacific Rivers Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Audubon Society, and Defenders of Wildlife. The States of California, Oregon, and Washington submitted legal papers in support of the Roadless Rule and the conservation groups’ appeal.

Two other legal actions to protect roadless areas remain pending: (1) a lawsuit challenging application of the Roadless Rule to national forests in Alaska, and (2) a lawsuit challenging a separate, less protective rule that applies only to federal roadless areas in Idaho.

Koch Industries and Cancer: 'Koch Brothers Exposed'

2011-10-19T10:47:00.000-05:00

"Koch is using natural streams to transport waste, and this is not allowed by the Clean Water Act. And they can do it because the EPA lets them do it."

--Cheryl Slavant, Ouachita Riverkeeper,

President of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network

"Koch Industries not only manipulates the political process, but more importantly...they manipulate the public into believing that the EPA is killing jobs."

--Dr. Melissa Jarrell,

Environmental Criminologist,

Texas A&M University

Take action: http://kochbrothersexposed.com/
Discuss: http://facebook.com/kochbrothers

Europe’s Top Doctors On Climate Change: ‘Prevention Is The Best Solution’

2011-10-19T09:09:00.000-05:00

By Brad Johnson

“Climate change poses an immediate, growing and grave threat to the health and security of people in both developed and developing countries around the globe,” Europe’s top medical leaders concluded at an international conference on the risks of global warming. At London’s Health and Security Perspectives on Climate Change conference, participants discussed how the destabilization of the global climate system is already hurting people’s health and security, with much greater threats to come:

Climate change leads to more frequent and extreme weather events and to conditions that favor the spread of infectious diseases. Rising sea levels, floods and droughts cause loss of habitat, water and food shortages, and threats to livelihood. These trigger conflict within and between countries. Humanitarian crises will further burden military resources through the need for rescue missions and aid. Mass migration will also increase, triggered by both environmental stress and conflict, thus leading to serious further security issues. It will often not be possible to adapt meaningfully to these changes, and the economic cost will be enormous. As in medicine, prevention is the best solution.

Signatories include the editors-in-chief of the British Medical Journal and Lancet, the chairman of the British Medical Association, the president of the Norwegian Medical Association, and the executive director of Greenpeace International.

In their statement, they call on the European Union to unilaterally adopt the climate target of a 30 percent reduction from 1990 levels in greenhouse pollution by 2020, and the rapid phasing out of coal plants.

This article was created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Rick Perry’s Energy Plan: 'Wheeze, baby, wheeze!'

2011-10-14T12:08:00.000-05:00

Plan Would Poison Water and Air; Ratchet Up Rates of Asthma, Heart Disease, Birth Defects

Pittsburgh – Today, Texas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry unveiled his energy plan for America. The plan, if implemented, will poison our air and water with toxic pollutants like soot, smog, arsenic, cadmium, dioxin, lead, and formaldehyde. It would also undercut safeguards from mercury, which is a neurotoxin and is known to harm developing fetuses.

“Rick Perry’s energy plan reads like a roadmap for making America’s kids sick,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. "Under this plan, we can expect to see much higher rates of asthma among children, and risk to pregnant women from mercury exposure. Republicans like Perry are putting polluters’ profits first and our kids’ health last. The Republican mantra should be 'wheeze, baby, wheeze.'"

Perry’s plan calls for scaling back basic EPA safeguards that protect our clean air and water. It would simultaneously expand development of dirty energy like coal, oil, and natural gas amounting to a one-two punch to Americans’ health.

“American families have enough to worry about,” Brune said. “They don’t need to spend more time taking their kids to the doctor or more money on hospital bills. The only people who stand to profit from this plan are overpaid oil, coal and natural gas CEOs.”
“Dismantling the EPA and assuming that states are properly watching over natural gas drilling is dangerous and puts the health of our families and communities at risk.”

Perry’s plan would also undercut the expansion of jobs in industries like solar—the fastest-growing industry in the energy sector.

“There’s a solution to the current epidemic of pollution-related illness that will also create good, lasting local jobs, and secure America’s energy independence,” said Brune. “It’s clean energy. America’s clean energy industry is strong and thriving, even in this down economy. Rick Perry’s plan would stifle that growth and return our country to a dirty, antiquated energy system. Under his plan, we’ll see asthma rates among American kids soar, while countries like China surpass us in reaping the benefits from clean energy like solar and wind."

In fact, America is predicted to become the world’s leader in solar energy by 2014, and in 2010, the U.S. was a net exporter of solar by $2 billion. Solar energy creates seven times more jobs than coal, nuclear and natural gas.

Pollutors Win: House blocks toxic mercury protections for industrial boilers

2011-10-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. House of Representatives tonight passed legislation that would block critical protections against toxic mercury and other dangerous chemicals and metals emitted by industrial boilers, which are among the nation’s biggest and dirtiest sources of mercury pollution. Boilers exist in and around hospitals, schools and communities across the country, exposing Americans to toxic mercury pollution, a known brain poison that threatens the development of young children. The bill is the latest in a series of dangerous attacks waged by House Leadership on public health protections and the Clean Air Act.

In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune issued the following statement:

“By passing H.R. 2250, the U.S. House has again voted to put polluter interests over the public's health. H.R. 2250 blocks toxic mercury protections that have already been delayed more than two decades and allows industrial boilers, some of the nation’s biggest, dirtiest sources of mercury pollution, to continue spewing toxic mercury into our air and water without limits.

“To be clear, the House’s actions tonight will create zero jobs, and serve only to advance the House Leadership’s pro-polluter, anti-public health agenda.

“The Sierra Club applauds President Obama’s commitment to veto these reckless bills and we urge the Senate to reject these polluter-led attacks on public health.”

National Peace Action director to speak in Kansas City

2011-10-13T08:52:00.004-05:00

Kevin Martin

Kansas City, Mo. ― Kevin Martin, the Executive Director of Peace Action and Peace Action Education Fund, will appear at All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church in Kansas City on Oct. 16, at 1:00 p.m.

His address is entitled “Endless War, Endless Costs, Endless Nuclear Weapons: The Crying Need to Change America’s Flawed Military and Economic Priorities.”

Martin has appeared on CNN, National Public Radio, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC-TV and radio, and many other local, national and international radio and television outlets.

Peace Action is the nation's largest grassroots peace network, with chapters and affiliates across the country, including PeaceWorks, its Kansas City-based chapter.

According to Henry Stoever, Chair of the PeaceWorks Board of Directors, “We are bringing Kevin Martin to Kansas City to call attention to what our city has done—sold up to $815 million in municipal bonds to private investors to finance the new nuclear weapons plant.”

“Kansas City,” Stoever said, “is the only city in the world so involved in creating and financing a nuclear bomb production plant.”

Members of PeaceWorks and Kansas City Peace Planters, a coalition of regional groups, are petitioning to place two initiatives on the April ballot. One measure calls for development of a plan to create alternative jobs for the plant’s workers, while the other seeks an end to Kansas City’s role in financing the production of parts for nuclear weapons. For more information on these petitions, go to http://www.peaceworkskc.org/.

Peace Action was founded in 1957 through the merger of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.

Michael Brune: "...the hypocrisy of the Koch brothers pales in comparison to the State Department's role in the Keystone XL debacle"

2011-10-12T16:56:00.002-05:00

What's that Smell? Keystone XL
By Michael Brune

Michael Brune,
Executive Director of the Sierra Club

Three months ago, I wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times that listed the "Koch brothers-backed" Keystone XL pipeline for dirty tar-sands oil as one of the most important environmental issues confronting President Obama. That prompted a stern missive from the Legal Department at Koch Industries, which even got the Times to run a correction saying that Koch Industries "says it has no involvement in the project."

Only problem: It now turns out that three years ago a Canadian subsidiary of Koch Industries said exactly the opposite: That it had "a direct and substantial interest" in seeing the Keystone XL pipeline approved. Whoops.

But, really, I feel like I've been vindicated for observing that "the sun rises in the east." Let’s get real here. No reasonable person could have doubted that the Koch brothers, who are in the tar-sands business up to their Windsor-knotted neckties, could possibly not have been in favor of the Keystone XL. (Note to the good folks at Koch Industries Legal Dept: This is called poetic license. I humbly confess that I have no idea how Charles and David knot their ties, so please don’t come seize my house.)

Unfortunately, the hypocrisy of the Koch brothers pales in comparison to the State Department's role in the Keystone XL debacle. Last summer, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that her department would leave "no stone unturned" as it prepared its environmental impact report. But when the report appeared, there were unturned stones everywhere:

No study of the consequences of a raw tar-sands oil spills or the difficulties of cleaning up the inevitable spills was done.
No analysis of the clean-energy alternatives to the pipeline or of how extracting Canadian tar sands oil would affect their development.
No serious assessment of alternatives to a route that crosses the Ogallala Aquifer (which underlies more than a quarter of our country's irrigated land).
No study of how more pollution would affect Gulf refinery towns like Port Arthur, TX, which is already one of our country's most polluted communities.
No analysis of the impact on wildlife, such as the lesser sandhill cranes that use Nebraska's central Platte River valley as a stopover on their migration north.
An incomplete and faulty analysis of how extracting and burning tar-sands oil will affect climate disruption.

There's more, but you get the gist. How could the Department of State have gotten it so wrong? Keystone XL, after all, is a 1,700-mile pipeline that will do nothing for Americans except seize their land through eminent domain, expose them to catastrophic oil spills and toxic pollution, and make domestic gas more expensive -- all so a foreign oil company, TransCanada, can ship its tar-sands oil overseas from our ports. It's such a bad idea that, in Texas, the Sierra Club and the Tea Party actually allied to oppose it (I think the sun actually did rise in the west on that day).

Sorry to say, the answer is that this was government at its most tawdry. The Department of State allowed a former Clinton campaign staff member, working as a TransCanada lobbyist, inappropriate access to high level officials within the Department and hired a biased pro-oil contracting firm to do the actual evaluation and run public hearings.

The more Americans learn about Keystone XL and the big-money campaign behind it, the worse the whole thing smells. Whether or not to permit this travesty is still one of the most important decisions facing President Obama. It's time for him to clear the air, kill this Koch brothers-backed pipeline, and let the State Department get back to issuing passports and visas.

Michael Brune is the Sierra Club's executive director.

Sierra Club releases clean water voting record

2011-10-10T11:51:00.000-05:00

View the Report Card: http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/reportcard/

U.S. House Anti-Clean Water Vote Expected This Week

Washington, D.C. – Today the Sierra Club released a clean water voting record for the U.S. House of Representatives, in time for an expected floor vote this week on a bill that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting communities from toxic coal ash. Coal ash is a dangerous solid waste by-product of burning coal, containing mercury, arsenic, hexavalent chromium and lead. There are more than 130 cases of coal ash contaminating communities across the country.

The interactive, online report card issues letter grades for U.S. Representatives’ voting records on clean water issues.

“Coal ash is toxic and harms public health,” said Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. “Unbelievably, toxic coal ash currently has no federal safeguards, but the health and environmental risks from coal ash dumping include cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive failure, asthma and other serious illnesses. This anti-clean water bill from Rep. McKinley would perpetuate the status quo by putting a scheme in place that is less protective than standards for disposing of household garbage, leaving our communities in danger of toxic coal ash pollution.”

The Coal Residuals Reuse and Management Act (H.R. 2273), introduced by W. Va. Congressman David McKinley, would endanger the health and safety of thousands of communities. The bill, which is expected for a floor this week, would:

Allow indefinite operation of dangerous ash ponds like the one that dumped more than a billion gallons of coal ash sludge in Tennessee in December of 2008;
Deny citizens who live near coal ash dump sites any federal right to notice, comment, and a public hearing when new sites are proposed for construction or old ones are expanded; and
Handcuff the EPA from enforcing disposal standards, even at contaminated coal ash sites.

This latest threat is part of an unprecedented attack on clean water from this Congress. Instead of protecting communities from well-known and dangerous contaminates in our waters, some members of Congress have chosen to rollback or completely stop common sense safeguards.

View the Sierra Club’s new Clean Water Report Card here:

http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/reportcard/

U.S. House continues assault on clean air

2011-10-06T14:37:00.001-05:00

Latest Vote Blocks Toxic Mercury Protections

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. House of Representatives today passed legislation that would block critical protections against toxic mercury emitted by cement plants. The chamber is expected to vote on a similar bill to block toxic mercury protections for industrial boilers next week. Cement plants and industrial boilers are among the nation’s biggest and dirtiest sources of mercury pollution.

In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune issued the following statement:

“Members of the U.S. House Leadership have outdone themselves again, with their continued, all-out assault on commonsense public health protections.

“By passing H.R. 2681, the U.S. House has voted to allow cement plants, some of the nation’s biggest, dirtiest sources of mercury pollution, to continue spewing toxic mercury – a known brain poison that threatens the development of young children – into our air and water without limits.

“These cement plants exist in communities across the country, exposing Americans to toxic mercury pollution and making commonsense pollution protections all the more important for the health and well-being of American families.

“House Leadership claims that the costs of the basic pollution protections that have served Americans for four decades are too high, but their actions today will not create more jobs or economic growth. Instead, it will mean more children in the hospital, harder times for families trying to make ends meet and billions of dollars in health bills for American taxpayers.

“Now more than ever, the American people need their members of Congress to stop the political gamesmanship and work together to solve the nation’s problems.

“The Sierra Club applauds President Obama for his vow to veto these dangerous bills that undermine public health protections. We urge Congress to reject these polluter-led attacks on public health and focus on real solutions that grow the economy without costing lives.”

Students Take Action to Move Campuses Beyond Coal

2011-10-05T09:45:00.000-05:00

Over 100 Actions Planned Demanding Schools Switch to 100% Clean Energy

Washington, DC – This week students at Virginia Tech, Purdue University, Bates College in Maine and the University of Illinois kicked off a nationwide month of creative actions focused on moving America’s campus’ beyond coal. The coordinated effort called 100% Clean: 100 Actions for Clean Energy aims to unite local efforts into a nationwide movement to retire university coal plants, cut university ties with the coal industry and move the nation’s institutions of higher education to clean energy solutions.

“We have students on our campus who are getting sick from breathing coal dust coming from the campus coal plant across the street from their dorm. This is unacceptable. We want Virginia Tech and universities nation-wide to be leading the way towards an innovative, healthy and clean energy future, not stuck in the past relying on dirty coal,” said Kara Dodson, a senior at Virginia Tech and Coordinator of the Campuses Beyond Coal campaign on campus.

Since the Sierra Club launched the national Campuses Beyond Coal campaign 16 schools have already committed to retiring their coal-fired plants on campus. Pollution from these plants is responsible for dangerous pollution including mercury, carbon dioxide, arsenic and lead and can lead to more severe asthma attacks, bronchial infections and cancer.

More than 150 students from across Virginia rallied at Virginia Tech wearing face masks and green hard hats at the Virginia Power Shift summit on Sunday. They called on the university administration to live up to their motto, “Invent the Future” by retiring the campus coal plant that poses a health hazard to students.

Speakers included a student who lived in Thomas Hall, a dorm next door to the Virginia Tech coal plant, showing off a black soot covered towel she used to wipe down her window sill. Other students keep air filters in their windows to keep the coal dust out of their homes, but still struggle with the light and noise from the plant on a daily basis that can make it difficult to sleep or study.

“Every year a new group of students are subject to the pollution from this plant and others like it on campuses across the country. It’s time for our universities to step up and lead the way to moving our nation beyond coal and dirty energy to real clean energy solutions,” said Madeline Rigatti a sophomore at Virginia Tech and former Thomas Hall resident. “Students like me have had to live with being sick because we had the bad luck of living near this plant and it’s simply wrong.”

“Students are leading the way pushing their universities to invest in innovative clean energy solutions. This month of action demonstrates the growing momentum on college campuses to move our nation off dirty, 19th century, fuels that are making people sick. Coal, and the soot, smog and other pollution that comes from it impacts Americans across the country. We think that students can help reinvent the American economy by pressuring our administrations to invest in clean, safe and reliable energy on campuses from California to Connecticut” said Kim Teplitzky, Campuses Beyond Coal Campaign Coordinator for the Sierra Club.

Over the next four weeks students will be hosting flash mobs, 60’s dance parties, camp outs, rallies, art builds, call-in days and more to call attention the public health risk of depending on dirty energy in their campuses and communities. At the end of the month student leaders will bring the stories and photos from these events to Washington, D.C. to deliver to the Obama Administration demanding further action to protect public health.

For more information visit wearepowershift.org/100actions

Sierra Club Books to release updated edition of Nukespeak

2011-10-04T08:17:00.001-05:00

Critically acclaimed Nukespeak updated to include events through the still unfolding Fukushima disaster

The 30th anniversary edition of Nukespeak examines critical events of the last three decades and the language used to shape and distort public discourse on nuclear issues.

On October 4, 2011, Sierra Club Books will publish the 30th anniversary edition of Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima exclusively in e-book format. First published in 1982 in the wake of the first great nuclear plant accident at Three Mile Island, the original edition, written by Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O’Connor, examined the turbulent history of the nuclear industry, documenting the extraordinary public relations campaign that developers undertook to sell nuclear technology.

This new edition, updated by original authors Richard C. Bell and Rory O’Connor, brings the book fully up-to-date, exploring the critical events of the last three decades—including the disaster at Chernobyl, the campaign to re-brand nuclear energy as a “clean, green” solution to global warming, and the still unfolding disaster at Japan’s Fukushima power plant. In addition, the authors argue persuasively that a language of euphemism and distraction continues to dominate public debate about nuclear weapons and nuclear power around the world. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune adds an insightful foreword to the new edition.

In Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima, you will find:

The full text of the 1982 edition, which explored the history of nuclear development up to and just beyond the Three Mile Island accident, as well as four new chapters covering the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons and the catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011.
An analysis of the language used to shape and distort political discourse and thinking on nuclear issues, supported by an index of “Nukespeak” words, and a look at how public relations campaigns have influenced the debate.
Fresh perspectives on the failed economics of nuclear power and the continuing plans for a “nuclear renaissance” in the United States.
A historical foundation to create arguments and political movements necessary to alter the nuclear mindset.

One of the fundamental arguments the authors make is that the there is no difference between atoms for peace and atoms for war—that the atoms don’t know the difference. In addition to focusing on the problems with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, Nukespeak examines how the industry has misrepresented its assumptions as facts and employed “information management” (in the form of secrecy, suppression, and propaganda) in shaping public opinion.

For more information and links to purchase the book, visit http://www.sierraclub.org/nukespeak/ or http://www.nukespeak.org/.

About the authors

Richard C. Bell is an author, editor, and political consultant who pioneered the use of online communications and social media in national electoral politics. He served as research director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, new media director at the Democratic National Committee, vice president for communications at the Worldwatch Institute, and blogmaster for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Rory O'Connor is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and journalist based in New York. Co-founder and president of the international media firm Globalvision and board chair of The Global Center, an affiliated nonprofit foundation, he is also the author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio and the forthcoming The Feed Is My Friend: Social Media, Politics, and Trust.

Stephen Hilgartner co-authored the 1982 edition of Nukespeak with Richard C. Bell and Rory O’Connor. He is now on the faculty of Cornell University and writes on science and society.

Bell, Hilgartner, and O’Connor won the National Council of Teachers of English 1982 George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language for the original edition of Nukespeak. Recent recipients of this award include Michael Pollan, Amy Goodman, Jon Stewart, Seymour Hersh, Arundhati Roy, and Garry Trudeau.

SAT reading scores hit an all-time low

2011-09-15T09:10:00.003-05:00

A few months ago I posted an article entitled “The Decline of Reading and Who Benefits from It.” This week the College Board released more hard evidence of that decline.

SAT reading scores among college-bound seniors have now hit an all-time low:

Still, in the warped alternate universe of the Republican/Tea Party, the best thing to do in times like this is to cut education programs, even ones with names like "Striving Readers" and "Reading is Fundamental" and "Improving Literacy Through School Libraries." But then, an educated public would not be healthy for a corporate state in which people are "consumers" and corporations are "people."

Bush 2.0? Obama Delays Smog Protections until at least 2013

2011-09-02T11:01:00.002-05:00

Polluters win, kids with asthma lose

Washington, D.C. – Today, President Obama announced that he has requested that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards that would have protected Americans from air pollution.

In response, Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, issued the following statement:

"The Sierra Club condemns the Obama administration's decision to delay critical, long-overdue protections from smog, an acidic air pollutant that when inhaled is like getting a sunburn on your lungs. By putting the interest of coal and oil polluters first, the White House seems to be saying that 'clean air will have to wait.'

"A healthy economy requires clean air and healthy people, and these protections from smog would have improved our communities and saved billions of dollars in health costs. Half of U.S. families live in places where it is literally unsafe to breathe the air, and kicking the inhaler down the road will do nothing to protect our children.

"We thank the scientists and public health professionals at the EPA for their commitment to science, and we look forward to the day when strong clean air protections will prevent thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of asthma attacks. The Sierra Club and the millions of Americans who have suffered through orange and red-alert air quality days this record-breaking summer will continue to push the Obama Administration to improve this protection in order to save lives and clean up our air."

Al Gore: The Dirtiest Fuel on the Planet

2011-09-01T08:41:00.001-05:00

The leaders of the top environmental groups in the country, the Republican Governor of Nebraska, and millions of people around the country—including hundreds of people who have bravely participated in civil disobedience at the White House—all agree on one thing: President Obama should block a planned pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.

The tar sands are the dirtiest source of fuel on the planet. As I wrote in Our Choice two years ago, gasoline made from the tar sands gives a Toyota Prius the same impact on climate as a Hummer using gasoline made from oil. This pipeline would be an enormous mistake. The answer to our climate, energy and economic challenges does not lie in burning more dirty fossil fuels —instead, we must continue to press for much more rapid development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies and cuts in the pollution that causes global warming.

Cross posted from Al Gore's Journal.

State Dept. Endorses Dirty Tar Sands Monstrosity

2011-08-27T06:53:00.000-05:00

Washington, D.C. – Today the Obama Administration released its final Environmental Impact Statement on foreign oil corporation TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport high corrosive and toxic tar sands oil through America’s heartland.

In response, Michael Brune, Sierra Club Executive Director, issued the following statement:

“The U.S. State Department’s final report on the Keystone XL today is an insult to anyone who expects government to work for the interests of the American people.

“Americans don't want a 2,000 mile-long toxic crude oil pipeline running through our heartland for the benefit of a foreign oil corporation and they don’t want another oil spill. TransCanada's proposed tar sands pipeline would threaten our most productive farmlands and the drinking water of millions of Americans. It would expose more Americans to cancer-causing carcinogens, and open the gates on the biggest source of carbon pollution in the northern hemisphere.
“The mathematics are simple but the stakes are incredibly high—the United States has nothing to gain from Keystone XL, and everything to lose.

“American innovation and technology are poised to deliver clean and safe energy solutions to power our economy, but we need corporate polluters like TransCanada to get out of our way. The Sierra Club and our 1.4 million members and supporters are looking to President Obama for bold action and we urge him to reject this abomination.”

The State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement (EIS):

Fails to examine threats to the Ogallala Aquifer – a drinking water source for millions of Americans – and the Sandhills of South Dakota, despite numerous requests from U.S. Senators;
Ignores the effects of toxic pollution from corrosive tar sands refineries – cancer, asthma and heavy metal poisoning – on the millions of residents in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas and other cities;
Disregards the fact that there are no existing federal safeguards in place for the safe transport of tar sands crude oil, known as bitumen, one of the dirtiest and most dangerous forms of oil on Earth.

Groups Ask Kansas Supreme Court to Overturn Sunflower Coal Plant Permit

2011-08-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

Topeka, Kan. - Earthjustice, representing the Sierra Club, filed a brief in the Kansas Supreme Court to overturn the air pollution permit granted to Sunflower Electric to build a new coal-fired power plant near Holcomb, KS.

The coal plant has been the subject of a multi-year controversy after being denied a permit in the fall of 2007. On December 16, 2010, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) issued a new permit to Sunflower.

Read the brief here: http://earthjustice.org/sites/default/files/Sunflowerbrief.pdf

“When the federal Clean Air Act is violated, as is the case with the Sunflower permit, citizens can go to court to make things right,” said Stephanie Cole, representing the Kansas Sierra Club. “The Sunflower permit process was so completely hijacked by coal plant supporters that a citizen lawsuit became necessary.”

This proposed plant, that will largely serve Colorado, will emit massive amounts of air pollutants, including mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter on downwind Kansans. The plant will also rely on water from the declining Ogallala Aquifer.

The final permit was rammed through largely due to political pressure by the legislature and governor’s office even after KDHE received an unprecedented amount of public comments - nearly 6,000 public comments, many opposed to the project.

Todd True of Earthjustice said, “Kansans deserve clean energy and clean air. Despite numerous attempts by coal-boosters to push through this project, we believe the permit will not withstand the scrutiny of judicial review.”

The lawsuit claims that KDHE:

· Issued a permit that falls short of the minimum requirements of the Clean Air Act and will not adequately protect human health and the environment.
· Engaged in an improper procedure in the granting of the permit.
· Denied the public a fair opportunity to participate in the process by rushing through review of comments to allow the project to be permitted prior to new greenhouse gas regulations taking effect.
· Issued a permit without enforceable limits on nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide pollution.
· Did not require “best available control technology” be used, as required by law.
· Allowed weak pollution limits even on hazardous toxic air pollutants - the most harmful to human health - in order to save costs.

Long-term Health and Financial Consequences

The proposed Holcomb II coal-fired power plant would emit millions of tons of pollutants each year over the 50+ year life of the project, posing substantial risks to human health and the environment. The pollutants emitted by the plant will include fine particulates, ozone forming constituents, and hazardous pollutants such as mercury, all of which EPA has found pose serious risks to human health.

Sunflower has itself admitted that there is no need in Kansas for the vast majority of the electricity from this massive new polluting plant—instead, Tri-State, a Colorado utility, is slated to receive the majority of the power. But Tri-State’s recent long-term resource plan, which it presented to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, shows that Tri-State has no need for the capacity either.

Sunflower also owes the federal government millions of dollars for loans taken out to build the existing coal plant at Holcomb. Given Sunflower’s massive debt and precarious financial situation, it can’t possibly finance this new coal plant itself without putting Kansas ratepayers and American taxpayers at further risk. In a separate lawsuit, a federal court in Washington, DC recently held that the U.S. government violated the law by allowing Sunflower to proceed with this financially risky plant without first examining its environmental effects and alternative actions.

Despite having been issued a permit, the Sunflower coal plant has continued to stir controversy. Earlier this summer the Kansas City Star reported on a cozy relationship KDHE enjoyed with Sunflower during the permitting process. The KC Star analyzed hundreds of emails that revealed that Sunflower was allowed inappropriate influence over the permitting procedure. Further, Sunflower was allowed to draft responses to public comments for KDHE and influence the terms of its own permit, among other things. The emails obtained by the KC Star were not initially submitted to the Court by KDHE. Earthjustice filed a motion to ensure these documents were included in Court records.

Bloomberg Philanthropies commits $50 million to Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign to move America toward cleaner energy

2011-07-21T10:17:00.000-05:00

Grant a 'game changer' that will effectively retire one-third of the nation's aging coal fleet by 2020

Alexandria, VA. Today the Sierra Club announced a partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies that will effectively retire one-third of the nation's aging coal fleet by 2020, replacing it with clean energy. The partnership includes a $50 million commitment over four years to the Beyond Coal Campaign that will fuel the Sierra Club's effort to clean the air, end the coal era, and accelerate the transition to cleaner, cost-effective energy sources.

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune was joined for today’s announcement by Michael R. Bloomberg. They appeared outside a coal-fired plant in Alexandria, Virginia.

In the U.S., coal is the leading cause of greenhouse-gas emissions, and coal’s pollution contributes to four out of the five leading causes of mortality -- heart disease, cancer, stroke, and respiratory illness. Coal emits almost half of all U.S. mercury pollution, which causes developmental problems in babies and young children, as well as being a major contributor to asthma attacks. Coal pollution causes $100 billion in health costs annually.

"If we are going to get serious about reducing our carbon footprint in the United States, we have to get serious about coal. Ending coal power production is the right thing to do, because, while it may seem to be an inexpensive energy source, the impact on our environment and the impact on public health is significant," said Bloomberg. "Coal is a self-inflicted public health risk, polluting the air we breathe, adding mercury to our water, and the leading cause of climate disruption."

Bloomberg added: "The Beyond Coal Campaign has had great success in stopping more than 150 new coal-fired power plants over the past few years and is empowering local communities to lead from the front while Congress continues to watch from the back. That is why I'm pleased to support the Sierra Club and its allies, and I encourage others to do the same."

The $50 million grant will fill a significant portion of the campaign's projected $150 million four-year budget and will have a significant impact in advancing the efforts of the Beyond Coal campaign.

The partnership will play a key role in helping the Sierra Club achieve their impact goals of:

Cutting 30% of coal production by 2020
Reducing mercury pollution from coal by 90% by 2020
Replacing a majority of coal with clean energy

From an organizational perspective it will:

Increase the number of Sierra Club campaign states from 15 to 45
Increase the active member base from 1.4 million to 2.4 million people
Double the size of full-time Sierra Club staff working on the campaign from 100 to 200

Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune thanked Bloomberg for the grant, calling it a "game changer" in the fight against coal. He also praised Bloomber's farsighted vision and understanding of how protecting public health, developing innovative energy sources, and addressing climate change are all inextricably linked. He also welcomed his business savvy and track record for success to the campaign.

"This partnership will help the Sierra Club to work with communities nationwide as they tell one coal plant after another that inflicting asthma and other diseases on their children is unacceptable and that they will not accept coal pollution in their neighborhoods.

"Coal relentlessly dirties our water, air, and lungs and fixing the problem cannot be left to Washington," said Brune. "Nor can coal's contributions to climate disruption be left to international bodies. Mike Bloomberg's strong clean air agenda as Mayor of New York, and his Chairmanship of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, shows that he understands that actions are being taken, and that the most significant ongoing successes will be won city by city, by dedicated people across America."

Beyond Coal campaign successes to date include:

The campaign has stopped 153 new coal-fired power plants from being built, preserving market space for clean energy.

Nearly 10% of the current coal fleet is now slated for retirement.

New mountaintop removal mining permits have slowed to a trickle.

Victories at 16 colleges and universities, where Sierra Student Coalition members have won fights to shut down coal plants on their campuses.

Hundreds of thousands of people mobilized in support of strong clean air and water protections

The biggest clean air agreement in the history of the Southeast with the TVA settlement.

Studies show that replacing coal's pollution with clean energy is possible and as coal prices are going up, wind and solar are coming down. Iowa already gets more than 15% of its energy from wind power, and San Antonio recently decided to shut down one of its dirty coal plants and install over 400 MW of solar power, what will be one of the largest solar installations in the world. Meanwhile, the green job sector is growing -- the wind industry already provides more jobs in the U.S. than the coal industry.

The Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign started as a three-person campaign in 2002 and has quickly grown into a powerhouse effort that is changing the way America produces energy. In 2001, the Administration at the time met with coal industry representatives as part of a closed-door energy task force, to craft plans for a new "coal rush" -- the construction of 150 new coal-fired power plants. Had the industry prevailed in building these plants, the nation would have been locked into the use of 19th-century dirty fuels for the foreseeable future. The potential for entrepreneurs to develop wind, solar and other clean technologies would have been crippled. Working with local people in neighborhoods across the country, Sierra Club organizers began fighting Big Coal’s efforts to push through these plants. Together, they achieved one victory after another.

Mary Anne Hitt, Director of the Beyond Coal Campaign, called coal "an outdated fuel that is making our kids sick and has no place in a modern energy economy."

"We're already winning in cities across the country. Community by community, people are standing up and saying no to coal, saying that they are ready for the clean energy economy. Now we’re ready to take this campaign to a whole new level."

This is the second major climate initiative by Bloomberg Philanthropies following the recent involvement and investment in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40). Bloomberg Philanthropies is focused on climate action, taking a realistic view that progress will come not from national governments and international bodies, but instead by driving action at the city and local level.

###

Note: The press conference took place today on the Potomac River in front of the GenOn coal-fired power plant in Alexandria, Virginia. The Alexandria community has rallied around the need to end the plant’s burning of coal and is one of many localities across the country that are active partners in the Beyond Coal Campaign.

For More Information Please Contact:
Orli Cotel (646) 522 7751 orli.cotel@sierraclub.org
Mike Marinello, 425-894-1781, mikem@bloomberg.org

The EPA should revoke Sunflower's permit for Holcomb II

2011-07-16T12:45:00.001-05:00

The EPA should revoke Sunflower's permit for Holcomb II
Bob Sommer

By now it should be clear to anyone who has followed the five-year saga of Sunflower Electric’s efforts to build a second coal-fired utility plant in Holcomb, Kan., that the public has been misled and misinformed by supporters of this project.

From the outset, Sunflower campaigned for this coal plant—originally three coal plants—on the grounds that Kansas needed the energy and it would bring new jobs. In reality, most, if not all, of the energy would be sold to companies outside of Kansas, leaving the pollution here while the electricity went elsewhere. The promise of new jobs amounted to relatively few permanent jobs that could easily be provided by building renewable energy facilities.

Proponents of Holcomb II usually neglect to mention that Sunflower’s primary financial backer, Colorado-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, has investments in coal mines that produce some 20 million tons per year. Additionally, Tri-State is a member of the Western Fuels Association, which operates a fleet of 1,600 rail cars, delivering coal throughout the Midwest, including to Sunflower’s existing plant in Holcomb. Coincidentally, Sunflower’s outgoing CEO, Earl Watkins, is also on WFA’s Board of Directors.

What incentive could anyone have to disrupt the chain of profit—or to slow its growth? Better yet, Tri-State gets a downwind state to host the new coal plant, even as the co-op touts its investments in wind energy in Colorado.

As a friend of mine succinctly put it, “Kansas will be Colorado’s coal bitch.”

Recent revelations of collusion between Sunflower and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment make it clear that the public has unknowingly been playing with loaded dice. At every stage of this long debate information has been slanted and even corrupted by supporters of this plant.

KDHE is supposed to be a watchdog for Kansans, protecting health and environment. But when former Gov. Mark Parkinson didn’t get the support he wanted for this project from KDHE Secretary Rod Bremby, he fired him.

In February, at Bremby’s first public appearance following his dismissal, he said the review of Sunflower’s permit application “was not a benign, routine, pristine, pure process. Unfortunately, there were abuses.”

“Look at the lobbying dollars in this process,” he added. “It’s staggering.”

A recent investigation by Kansas City Star reporter Karen Dillon revealed that emails between Sunflower employees and KDHE officials demonstrate a pattern of collusion in marketing this unnecessary and dangerous project to an unwitting public. Such collusion did not begin recently.

Parkinson’s 2009 backroom deal with Sunflower undermined years of efforts to stop this plant by those of us concerned with the environmental damage and health risks it posed. He sidestepped the legislature just as it was on the brink of supporting then-Gov. Sebelius’s veto of a bill that would have permitted two plants. His meeting with Sunflower executives was not public, nor was it disclosed until after the deal was done, and emails demonstrate that even KDHE’s own staff questioned the “green provisions” of the agreement.

The damage and growing danger to our environment from noxious gasses emitted by coal plants have been well documented and accepted by an overwhelming majority of the scientific community. As NASA scientist James Hansen has pointed out, “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”

The battle to deny this reality has nothing to do with science or any other diversionary issues that often find their way into the argument. It’s about money. The fossil fuel industry has a large stake in keeping America dependent on coal and oil. Exxon, Peabody, Koch Industries, and other energy companies continue bankrolling “think tanks” and junk science to make the case for more digging and drilling and burning.

Given the collusion between Sunflower and KDHE in fast-tracking this permit, the Environmental Protection Agency should deny Sunflower’s request to build a new coal plant. Additionally, the Kansas Attorney General’s office should begin an investigation into corruption in the permitting process for this plant. To do less would risk leaving Kansas with the hazardous legacy of this tainted process.

A version of this essay appeared previously at the Kansas City Star's Midwest Voices Blog.

A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never.

2011-06-12T07:55:00.000-05:00

'Your Memorial Day weekend'

2011-05-29T07:10:00.003-05:00

'Your Memorial Day weekend'
by Bob Sommer

A few minutes of TV news tells you all you need to know for “your Memorial Day weekend”—travel tips, barbeque tips, weather forecasts. Then follows the sign-off with a maudlin voiceover accompanied by low-angle shots of headstones. “Taps” plays in the background as the visual fades to a fluttering flag, which instantly gives way to a brassy commercial for beer or trucks or toothpaste.

Memorial Day became a fixture to round out a three-day weekend when the National Holiday Act became law in 1971. Previously it was commemorated on May 30th. Some feared that just what happened would happen, as the day got smothered in ketchup and sunscreen.

The 2002 VFW Memorial Day address noted, “Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt, this has contributed greatly to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.”

Efforts in both the House and Senate to restore Memorial Day to a fixed date have failed. It’s not difficult to understand why. Just imagine the lost revenues. There’s too much money to be made. Summertime unofficially kicks off this weekend. Swimsuit sales would plummet if Memorial Day went back to May 30th. If that sounds cynical, recall that candy companies successfully lobbied to move daylight savings so Halloween candy sales would get a boost.

“A foolish consistency,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” How we regard Memorial Day is nothing if not foolishly consistent. Over 6,000 American service members have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past decade while America shopped and amused itself into a stupor. War is lttle more than a distant cloud on the horizon for most, though it’s always there. A generation of children has reached middle-school age with no living memory of America not being at war.

But they’re also growing up with a sense that war doesn’t matter because it affects so few of them. Just one-half of one percent of Americans carry the burden of these wars. We obsess over politicians’ sex lives, the president’s birth certificate, the newest phone gadgets, and the imminent Rapture, but how many can cite the number of American casualties from Iraq and Afganistan, or even find those countries on a map?

And our military casualties are just part of the story of these wars. Conservative estimates put civilian casualties in Iraq at nearly 1 million, while in Afghanistan over 48,000 lives have been lost, including NATO and Afghan soldiers, civilians, journalists, aid-workers, and contractors, as well as the more than 1,500 American service members who’ve died there.

Meditating too much on Memorial Day may be hazardous to war. We might begin to wonder why the men and women we’re honoring from these recent wars had to die, whether the wars in which they fought were just and the sacrifices they were asked to make justified. We might ponder war’s meaning and its consequences. Better to unfurl the beach umbrella and stoke up the coals. Wipe away a tear as the fluttering TV flag fades to commercial. It’s a three-day weekend.

Bob Sommer blogs at Uncommon Hours.

Court TV

2011-05-21T15:25:00.005-05:00

My Day Not in Court

Bob Sommer

A clean, well-lighted place. You’d have to say that about the jury waiting room at the Federal Courthouse. Lots of daylight from the broad windows. Free coffee in the kitchen. Seating for a large group neatly arranged in rows. Over in the corner a cluster of reading chairs and lamps. I decided to claim a chair before the place filled up. I’d heard that waiting was often the biggest part of jury duty. I’d brought a book. I was ready.

Unlike many, I looked forward to jury duty. Well, maybe that’s not fair. Others do too, I’m sure. Maybe days like the one ahead just wring the enthusiasm out of you. This was my first time. Close to a hundred people were to report, and I was the first one there. Our pool would last for a month. Every Friday we’d call a phone number and find out if we had to report on the following Monday. This was our first day.

A couple of techs were working on the projection system, which I assumed would show an orientation video. At the moment a morning talk show filled the huge screen in front of the room. Loudly too, but the techs were checking things out, plugging in plugs, doing whatever they did. The TV talkers jabbered on.

People drifted into the waiting room. The woman in charge told us nothing would happen for a while, so I settled into a chair and opened my book. The techs were gone, but the TV stayed on. Loud, chattering, insipid.

Later we watched a video. Several sitting and retired U.S. Supreme Court justices described the importance of our role in the judicial system. A brief orientation followed. We got a brochure. I was ready. Call me up to court. I will be impartial, engaged; I will serve Justice.

But Justice didn’t need me yet, and now the big screen flipped back to network TV. “The Price is Right” was on. People wore costumes and screamed hysterically when they were chosen; they cried when they won furniture, computers, a car. The volume was loud and reading difficult. A few other jurors had brought books or newspapers too. Some visited and got acquainted. Still others watched TV—perhaps regretting they didn’t have books.

Our pool was divided into two groups for different trials starting that day. One group was soon chosen to go upstairs, while mine had to wait. “The Young and the Restless” came on now. Some in the forgot-their-books group seemed familiar with the TV story. I just knew I was getting older and restless as morning became noon. Surely we’d get called after lunch.

But alas, all that awaited us back in the waiting room was “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Actors paused heavily between lines and exchanged foreboding glances. Melodrama and bad acting filled the room. I was two-thirds through my book. Still no sign of action.

The soap opera gave way to a talk show. A group of women discussed whether they preferred spontaneous or planned sex. Planned sex won out because that way the women could make sure their men showered. Also, the Superbowl had just been played that weekend. The show’s special guests were the child actors who played little Darth Vaders in everyone’s favorite TV commercial.

The forgot-their-books folks had by now broken off into small groups to enjoy the program. They found the little Darth Vaders as adorable as the talk show hosts did.

Other jurors-in-waiting poured over sections of newspapers they probably never read, while one or two had brought office paperwork. Cell phones, mercifully, were not permitted here, though this was for security reasons and not to improve the ambience.

By the time “Let’s Make a Deal” came on I was worried I’d finish my book before the day was out. I recalled this show from when I had measles as a kid. Imagine that—still on TV! I wondered whatever happened to Monty Hall.

“Ellen” filled the big screen late in the afternoon. The woman-in-charge’s phone now rang a couple of times, and it appeared that something was happening. She was up and down at her desk. I moved up closer so I could hear over Ellen.

A judge soon entered the room in robes. She stepped in front of the screen filled by Ellen’s very large face and began talking, but Ellen’s chatter swallowed up whatever she was saying. Abruptly the sound went off but not the visual, and now the judge, who seemed a little dazed, realized that a TV show was on the screen behind her, indeed, that she was blocking the view. She stepped aside so everyone could still watch TV as she spoke.

The defendants had pled out, she said. That was thanks to us, she added, because we were here, ready to serve the court. She looked spent. It had been a long day upstairs. The case was a big one—drug dealers, multiple charges and defendants. Sounded exciting. The judge gave us the credit for not having to go to trial. The jury was working even when it wasn’t working—just watching TV.

I’d finished my book just before the judge arrived—Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I recommend it, though you might want to find a quieter place to read. It was hard to concentrate as I waited to serve Justice.

Bob Sommer blogs at Uncommon Hours.

'A funeral pyre for American thought': The Decline of Reading and Who Benefits from It

2011-05-16T17:13:00.020-05:00

The stacks at Prospero's Books
Photo by Bob Sommer

‘A funeral pyre for American thought’:

The Decline of Reading and Who Benefits from It

by Bob Sommer

[Caveat lector: This excerpt from a work-in-progress is a long piece for a blog post. I do hope you find the time invested in reading it worth your while. Comments welcome. Best wishes, Bob S]

Victory Gin

“Read! Reading is the most important thing you can do.”

This was former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser responding to the question of what advice he would offer aspiring poets.

He sat onstage in a wingback chair following a reading at the University of Kansas, looking somewhat as if he was about to introduce Masterpiece Theater. He’s a congenial man with thick hands and, I discovered later, a surprisingly firm grip. His demeanor is easy and calm, like his poems, but also like his poems, there was a sharpness and clarity in his comments, and in this one, you could even say, a subtle barb. He conducts many writing workshops, so doubtless he had good reason for thinking aspiring poets needed to be told to read, which, apparently, some do.

Consider another instance.

A provocative column in The Huffington Post last summer by literary critic Anis Shivani, entitled “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers,” inspired over 1,700 comments.(1) Carrion eaters swarmed. Fresh carcasses littered the digital Serengeti plains. Shivani’s prey included such major literary figures as John Ashbery, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Amy Tan. His critical judgments don’t much concern us here, but the comments posted by people who admit to having little or no acquaintance with these writers do.

Here’s an unvarnished, unedited sampling:

I've only heard of two, though I never read them.

So happy to say I haven't read anything from these writers, not even heard of them, ever. Which makes me wonder, how come they are they overrated?

Haven't read any of these writers but love the 'hit-job' style of the article.

Can`t judge, I have not read most of them, Jhumpa I don`t read, she is good but always so sad and depressing , I don`t need that. We don`t need a fiction to be sad and depressed …

Never heard of any of them.

Never heard of any of these writers except Amy Tan (who I've not read), but then, I don't travel in those circles.

I don't read much, I admit. But I have read Jhumpa Lahiri's books―all of them and must ask who is Shivani to pass judgment on her ?

Never heard of any of them or any of their books.

The only one I've heard of is Amy Tan.

Funny, I've never heard of any of these people, and I read novels every day.

I have never read any of these writers, well, one, Amy Tan many years ago and was not terribly impressed—now, thanks to your entertaining article I have no intention or desire to read any of them.

When I was in college, not having done the reading was generally a good reason to keep your mouth shut in class. You’d also slouch low to avoid the professor’s gaze. But here, well … whatever. Several commentors simply announce, without gloss, that they’ve never heard of these writers, as if this free-standing fact had significance: Never heard of them so they can’t matter. A couple liked Shivani’s snarky style, his “hit job,” as one put it. What’s more entertaining than malice? Well, public executions maybe. None of these people, nor many others besides, wonder or care if the body of work by these writers deserves more scrutiny than Shivani’s dismissive blurbs. Similar remarks fill the numbing forty-odd pages that follow the article. Some commentors are happy to accept Shivani’s judgment rather than read the books themselves. Shivani may be right or he may not. They’ll never know.

How little are we reading if aspiring poets need to be told to read and bloggers chattering about books don’t connect reading them with chattering about them? And importantly, what are the political and social implications of America’s decline in reading? It’s not much of a leap to suggest that a country whose reading is mostly limited to tweets, text messages, blogs, and snippets of news or sports or celebrity gossip will find itself immobilized, as we seem to be, in the face of great challenges like climate change, poverty, and unending war―or that it will even recognize their magnitude. In past times, apocalyptic events from the Black Plague to the Holocaust may have given many good reason to believe that the end of civilization itself was upon them, but our new millennium has arrived with a clock ticking. Ignorance, stupidity, and superstition are indeed the real threats to civilization and the natural world.

Climate scientists have been warning for decades that unless we drastically curtail greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide and methane, catastrophic change on a global scale is imminent. By the end of this century oceans levels could rise as much as three meters; coastlines will be reshaped; ocean acidification will increase; food supplies will dwindle; weather patterns will become increasingly violent; drought will consume large areas of the planet due to the disappearance of glaciers.

The success of the human species over the past ten thousand years has come at a large cost. The natural world has been plundered; thousands of species have gone extinct; forests have disappeared―all servicing our requirements for fuel, living space, and agriculture. The end of the century may seem far off, but so did 2011 to those who were alive when World War I ended and Albert Einstein won the Nobel Peace Prize. Some of them still are.

Species adaptation occurs in eons, not ninety years. Animal and plant life will continue to disappear even if we act now. Environmental writer Bill McKibben describes the consequences of our inertia this way:

… chemistry and physics work. We don't just live in a suburb, or in a free-market democracy; we live on an earth that has certain rules. Physics and chemistry don't care what John Boehner thinks, they're unmoved by what will make Barack Obama's re-election easier. More carbon means more heat means more trouble―and the trouble has barely begun. So far we've raised the temperature of the planet about a degree, which has been enough to melt the Arctic. The consensus prediction for the century is that without dramatic action to stem the use of fossil fuel―far more quickly than is politically or economically convenient―we'll see temperatures climb five degrees this century. Given that one degree melts the Arctic, just how lucky are we feeling? (3)

Our ability to respond to this challenge has been further crippled by two exhaustive and expensive wars, unprecedented budget deficits, unemployment numbers that mask the true unemployment of millions of workers, and a willful denial that some of these realities even exist.

Can a society that does not value reading undertake such challenges? The question may seem superfluous. All that calamity at hand, and I’m worried about what’s on your nightstand!? A reductionist response would say just that. Such cant from bloggers and talk-radio shock jocks resonates easily in our imaginations because it surrounds us. In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman describes how jettisoning reading and exchanging it for various entertainment media has changed our ability to sustain ideas of any complexity, or even to think they matter.

Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; and abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. (4)

Delayed response? This was published over twenty-five years ago. Twitter makes that notion laughable. But consider how much energy is wasted re-litigating arguments that are settled―how many letters appear in newspaper editorial pages or comments at news blogs every day claiming such startling insights as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is just a theory or global warming isn’t real because we had a lot of snow this winter. For that matter, how many professional columnists and pundits and even school board members make those same claims? Would such ignorance have the political clout it does in a nation that valued its literature, or demanded intellectual rigor in its discourse, or developed the imaginative and critical and language skills necessary to work through complex problems like climate change? The question of how much and how well we read quickly takes on political overtones―indeed it becomes practical and utilitarian. How can we expect to survive without the tools to help us understand our world and ourselves?

There is nothing new in the argument that language development is interwoven with critical and imaginative thinking ability, or that reading and literature play important roles in that process. But even among many who accept that premise, there’s a tendency to believe that the reading of challenging literary works is something to be set aside once the diploma is in hand, and for a majority, even well before that. Thomas Jefferson notably commented (and not on any blog), “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” (5)

Literature is not a source of national pride to Americans. Name recognition for poets and writers pales before that of sports and movie celebrities. As Chris Hedges writes in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, “in American society our gods are celebrities.” (6) Poets have no ranking in that sphere. Entertainment and spectacle have displaced engagement and thought while simultaneously depriving viewers of the necessary language and thinking skills even to distinguish reality from fantasy. Writes Hedges:

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are bombarded with the cant and spectacle pumped out over the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-paid pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks. And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read. (7)

The American writer with the most name recognition, and with whom we most identify our national character, Mark Twain, was not educated beyond grade school himself and based much of his humor on undercutting the pretensions of those who were formally educated. He is often cited for the memorable quote, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” It is a notion that appeals to us―school just messes up the real learning of life experience. Unfortunately for the many who live by Twain’s dictum, he didn’t say it. That remark has never been verified as authentic, and while his humor may be popularly regarded as attacking the benefits of education, it rather focused with laser-like precision on the hypocrisy of parading learning as a means of class distinction, as characters like the Duke and King in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn illustrate. (Coincidentally, this very book is under assault once again, now with an effort to strip the word “nigger” from its pages and substitute the word “slave”―an effort that can only be explained by the lack of ironic sensibility and historical perspective that comes from limited exposure to literature.) In “The United States of Lyncherdom,” Twain’s 1901 essay in response to a lynching in Missouri, he did write, “…the world will not stop and think―it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample.” (8) Who knew he was watching Fox News back then?

For most Americans, literature is an ever-shrinking classroom requirement, a chore, an appendage, not part of the fabric of life. Moby Dick is onerous, Dickinson’s poems a faint high school memory for some, non-existent for many. Stop anyone on the street and ask who the current Poet Laureate is―or even to name one past Poet Laureate, or even to name one major contemporary poet, laureate or not, and the result is predictable. (W.S. Merwin is the current Poet Laureate.) Literature is largely something writers do―for other writers. Who besides writers and MFA candidates in creative writing programs make up the readership of most literary magazines, hard copy or digital? Literary magazines are almost nonexistent in most bookstores, while literature takes up only a small corner. Non-book items fill much of the floor space, while the prominent display racks up front are stocked with celebrity memoirs, self-help and inspirational books, manuals of various sorts, and genre novels—oh, and with almost no irony, books for dummies. Curiously though, racks filled with blank books for journals, diaries, and the like have multiplied. Journaling has become a big-time industry. So many writers, so few readers.

How few?

The last major study of Americans’ reading habits was conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and published in 2007 under the title “To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence.” While the study found, unsurprisingly, that reading has generally declined among American teenagers and adults, an equally alarming trend is the decline of “both reading ability and the habit of regular reading … among college graduates” (my emphasis) (9). Among young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, nearly half never open a book for pleasure. Over one-third of college seniors read little or nothing beyond their course requirements, while a recent study revealed that the same number graduate without taking even one course that requires more than forty pages of reading for an entire semester.

According to the NEA report, there are “demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications” for this decline in reading, including lower wages and limited career opportunities. Non-reading also correlated with a decline in cultural activities such as attending classical and jazz concerts and visiting museums. Nonreaders are also probably less healthy, as they don’t participate in outdoor activities and exercise as often as readers. Reading regularly and well, then, is woven into the fabric of a vibrant and healthy society. (10)

In the year preceding the NEA study, fewer than half of all adults in the U.S. had read a single work of literature, such as a novel, short story, or play. A Pew Center telephone survey found that only one third of respondents had spent any time the previous day reading a book. In a 2005 survey by Mediamark Research, only 35 percent of respondents said they had read anything for pleasure in the last twelve months. (11)

Dana Gioia, Chair of the NEA, described the consequences of these trends in an interview on National Public Radio.

“As they read less, they read less well,” Gioia said. “And when they read less well, this has very serious consequences, not just to their academic performance, but to their economic performance and ultimately to their ability to connect with a civic life and political life.” (12)

Reading ability has declined exponentially. During the decade that ended in 2003, the reading proficiency of high school graduates fell by 20 percent, while among college graduates the decline was 22 percent. Perhaps most disturbing is the revelation that proficiency among those with advanced degrees dropped by 20 percent. The most educated people in our society are falling behind not only in how much they read, but in their ability to read!

How surprised should we be, then, to learn that some 55 percent of Americans believe guardian angels are looking out for them, while only 36 percent recognize that humankind has had an impact on the earth’s atmosphere? Or that more people can name the Three Stooges than can name the three branches of the federal government? Or that more than one-fourth of Americans don’t know from what country we declared independence in 1776? (13)

Distrust of education has a long tradition in America. Democracy grew in part from resentment of class distinctions represented and to a large degree reinforced by education. Hostility toward tradition―of which literature is a consummate emblem―is, both for better and worse, woven into the fabric of this country’s culture. Practical and folk wisdom have long been deemed superior to the benefits of education, while the myth of the self-made and self-educated man has assumed, well, mythic proportions―even if instances of such success are vastly outnumbered by the benefits of formal education to most. Twain once again offers some perspective here. “The self taught man,” he wrote in his essay “Taming the Bicycle,” “seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.” (14)

As Richard Hofstadter has shown, the myth of self-made success also has political legs and serves the interests of conservatives and business leaders, who have the financial and political influence to keep the delusion shimmering before masses of people who in turn buy into the belief that enriching the richest among us will somehow benefit them too—or perhaps that taxing the wealthiest one percent of Americans may infringe on their own prospects when they too become billionaires. Further, this myth aligns well with a larger, and also false, perception that education comes at the expense of practical ability and emotional capacity―the simplistic notion that good, clean water has to be poured out of the bucket before you can pour other water (in this case the poisoned water of education) in. Hofstadter describes these false dichotomies:

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the ‘purely’ theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous? (15)

What Hofstadter describes here is easily recognizable in the most recent incarnation of the early nineteenth-century nativist movement, the Tea Party. More about that later.

Even attributing this much engagement may be giving too much credit to an American populace that only accepts its politics and even, as the Shivani example above suggests, its literature, condensed into the kind of blood-sport trash talk that precedes professional wrestling matches. Comparisons over the past decade between the Bush Administration and the fictional dictatorship of George Orwell’s 1984 usually focused on the actions of the government while overlooking the ways in which the people of Orwell’s Oceania were responsible for their own plight. As the story’s main character, Winston Smith, burrows down inside the population, trying to escape the watchfulness of Big Brother, he discovers a world that has numbed itself into indifference. In the pubs and neighborhoods he explores, people spend their days consuming Victory Gin and amusing themselves with shallow entertainments, all provided by their leaders. When the proles are told that the country’s long-time war with Eurasia will now be redirected to Eastasia, they unquestioningly switch loyalties and cheers from one side to the other in the course of a single political speech. Booze and TV have so numbed them that they can’t imagine any other world than the one they have. Smith’s torturer smugly describes how little threat they pose to the dictatorship:

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. (16)

How far is Oceania from here? Well, if you take the New Jersey Turnpike from Walt Whitman’s one-time home in Camden, where underfunded public libraries are being forced to close (17), to the new 750-acre, $1.5 billion Meadowlands sports complex, where the Giants and Jets play, it’s about a ninety-minute drive. About that far.

“Come on, baby, light my fire!”

Prospero’s Books occupies an old, two-story brick building on a busy street corner near Kansas City’s Stateline Road, where Missouri meets Kansas. Nearby are several restaurants and bars and a laundromat. A couple of blocks west is the bustling University of Kansas Medical Center. The narrow one-way streets in this neighborhood may require an extra trip around the block before you find a parking spot―and then you have to limber up some calcified parallel parking muscles. Prospero’s is decidedly not in a suburban shopping mall. Parking your Chevy Suburban here would be a hassle if you owned one, which I don’t.

Prospero's Books
Kansas City, MO
Photo by Bob Sommer

Prospero’s sells mostly used books and music―on trade, for cash, and you can even work for credits to buy books here. Shops like this are disappearing. Ten years ago, according to co-owner Will Leathem, there were a dozen or so bookstores like his in the area. Now there are two―his store and Spivie’s Books, over in the nearby Westport district. You can lose a half hour at the counter in Prospero’s chatting politics and books with Leathem and his partner, Tom Wayne, instead of having your rewards card swiped while the clerk looks over your shoulder and calls, “Next!” Age-darkened wood plank floors creak under your feet. The thick, musty scent of books surrounds you. Jazz fills the air. There are no kiosks with headphones to sample music or computer terminals for customers to search out DVD titles. The world of harsh noise, cable news, and shock jocks; of sound-bite, bumper-sticker politics; of religious zealotry and jingoism and nationalism fades into an oasis of sanity here. When Henry Ward Beecher asked, “Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” he probably had places like Prospero’s in mind.

I’d be a hypocrite to grumble about Amazon and the rise of on-line bookselling as I write about the decline of places like Prospero’s. I buy books from Amazon too, and I also own a Kindle, which turns out to be a handy tool for reading. Its pages don’t fly up when I’m eating or exercising. It stores a lot of books. It helps me read more, not less. The Hofstadter book cited above is stored on my Kindle, so are many other books. The question of whether using a Kindle inhibits reading is moot―non-readers are non-readers, no matter how or what they’re not reading. But what is missing with both on-line shopping at Amazon and in-person at big-box stores like Borders is the sense of community you find in places like Prospero’s, the sensory experience I described above, the serendipity of browsing book shelves and finding something unique or hearing about a book from someone who works there and also reads the books on the shelves. Borders has sanitized that experience with its homogeneity and generic stock, and its convenient computer terminals, which don’t even require a clerk to find your item. Borders adds some of the veneer and trappings of old bookstores―a few strategically placed armchairs, oak shelving in some (not all) of the book sections―just enough to give you the flavor of old bookcases, but scratch the surface by asking about a title and all you’re likely to get is an indifferent clerk staring at a computer screen and clicking a mouse.

And the disappearance of places like Prospero’s can’t either be blamed solely on the transfer of book-trading to the internet, though that has undoubtedly played a significant role, but rather to the decline of reading altogether, because if a lot of people were reading books―good books, not romance novels and celebrity tell-alls―stores like Prospero’s would still thrive. Readers need places like Prospero’s to provide not only the books they can’t find or won’t discover anywhere else but the sense of participating in a community, of arriving at a haven for books, of being among others who speak the language. Readers need geography; they need destinations; they need surprise and adventure. Upon retiring after thirty-five years in the business, one independent bookstore owner in Minnesota observed that he would miss the “camaraderie of people coming by, meeting their friends here and talking. I’m just not sure that small bookstores can do what they used to do: be neat places that people develop an emotional relationship with.” (18)

Curiously, while Prospero’s struggles and other independent bookstores disappear altogether, Borders is bankrupt, and not just spiritually but literally. Selling non-book stuff, stocking and promoting only what’s most likely to sell to a market that demands the lowest common denominator, and buying most of that from China and other exporting nations where labor is cheap is how it tried to survive. Borders is big, but not too big to fail. Much of the junk it sells, from coffee canisters to fitness DVDs, can just as easily be bought at Target or Wal-Mart. And books? Well, they’re just loss-leaders for those stores. Commodities, like socks.

Faced with a shrinking market and a mounting inventory of used books, Prospero’s owners finally decided to burn the books they could neither sell nor give away―publicly. What began in early 2007 as an idle thought, a whimsical What-we-oughta-do-is-… kind of moment, turned into a street-side celebration five months later that attracted not only the Kansas City Fire Department but also the Associated Press, The New York Times, and The Colbert Report.

Will Leathem and Tom Wayne,
owners of Prospero's Books
Photo by Bob Sommer

On the day I visited the store to get Leathem and Wayne’s take on the meaning and impact of this event three years later, Wayne was wearing a t-shirt that quoted the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.” He’s the more animated of the two. His conversation reminds you of jazz, a sort of caffeine-laced verbal riffing. The book-burning idea came to him in what he called an “epiphanic moment” as he tossed a book into the dumpster out behind the store. Every bookstore has one, he said, “the book industry’s dirty little secret”―a green dumpster where unsold and unread books unceremoniously disappear.

The store’s warehouse had accumulated some 20,000 books, and by then Wayne and Leathem were even willing to give them away. They’d tried stationing a walk-in storage bin outside their store where books were free for the taking. Wayne also spent hours driving from libraries to shelters to prisons trying to give away books, but these efforts barely dented the inventory.

How many books is 20,000?

Wayne pointed to a section of his bookcases that measured about three feet wide and a little over six feet high and said it held about 250 books.

In his warehouse, the mother lode took up a space measuring six feet wide, six feet high, and twenty feet long, “solid books, no air.”

“Twenty-thousand books takes three guys a half-day to move,” he said, with the unmistakable conviction of someone who’d done it.

Guys you have to pay, gas you have to burn, time you have to spend.

But there was something sordid, if not outright sacrilegious, about unloading them into a dumpster. There’d be no witnesses; the act would have no meaning. And it seemed as if it should.

Wayne and Leathem believe that even a society that has devalued books and reading has a vestigial sense that dumping books into a dumpster is just wrong.

“Nobody reads anymore,” Leathem said, “but they still have a gut feeling that books should matter, but they can’t remember why. Even non-readers have an instinctive non-religious idolatry for books.”

There’s a long history of what it means to burn books, a history of terror against both authors and readers. Wayne and Leathem would turn that history on its head, Abbie Hoffman-style. Performance art. Guerilla theater―the logical consequence of America’s waning interest in reading: don’t steal the books or burn the money―burn the books!

A YouTube video of the book burning, which took place on Memorial Day weekend in 2007, depicts a block party atmosphere on the sidewalks around Prospero’s. (19)

“This is a funeral pyre for thought in America!” Wayne declares in the opening sequence. “We are couching this as a statement on a culture that doesn’t appreciate the word …. By not reading [books], they’re essentially burning them.”

Wayne presides over a caldron-like barbeque pit, prodding books like meat on a grill. The Doors’ “Light My Fire” plays over the chatter of people balancing stacks of books like plates of potato salad and burgers.

Mischief and gleeful wit salt the comments from people at the event.

“They’re out of brats, man. I’m really pissed,” quips one book-buyer. Then he grins and adds, “I’ll have a little My Friend Flicka in lieu of a brat.”

A close-up shows Fred J. MacDonald’s One Nation under Television just before it succumbs to the flames. Another shot zooms in on a t-shirt silk-screened with the words of the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky: “There are worse crimes than burning books, one is not reading them.”

Then comes the metallic blip of a Kansas City Fire Department vehicle. A pumper truck soon follows, ominous, large, red. Firemen in heavy jump suits stand around as the inevitable confrontation ensues over whether Wayne and Leathem have a fire permit. Wayne refuses to put out the fire, which the firemen unceremoniously do with a hose intended for much bigger game than the paltry campfire flames in the caldron―an appropriately absurd ending to the street theater performance, as the massive hose overwhelms the meager fire and smoke fills the air.

Leathem and Wayne received over 3,000 emails in response to their event. They estimate that some 40,000 blog postings and 600 news stories appeared. CNN, The New York Times, and Stephen Colbert all covered it. (20) Most responses were supportive, but not all. Criticism ranged from inventory mismanagement to accusations that it was just a publicity stunt. Also, just as Leathem predicted, sacrilege.

Wrote one blogger: "I want those books. I cry for those goddamn books. I have never, ever been able to bear to throw a book away, and the thought of burning people's thoughts and words and fucking lifetime works just makes me want to scream." (21)

From another blogger: “He can ship them to me, and I’ll take them off his hands!” (22)

Of course, who would pay to pack and ship the books was not mentioned.

Prospero’s owners welcomed the hostility.

“I’m happy they were mad,” Leathem said. “We were pretty mad too! Why the hell can’t you buy a book?! We’re forced by law to support various industries in this country. You have to have insurance to drive. Why don’t we have intellectual insurance so everyone is required by law to prove that they read one thing that wasn’t required by school or work in a week?”

“Or a year,” Wayne added.

“Let’s have cultural insurance!” Leathem said.

Wayne continued, “We were holding up the mirror to society to show the disconnect between action and rhetoric. People don’t like burning books, but the way they treat them is essentially burning them. They’re doing the same thing on a daily basis.”

“The Nazis burned books so you couldn’t read them,” Leathem said. “We burned them in hopes that you will.”

Spared from the fire
Photo by Bob Sommer

Prospero’s book burning was literally symbolic. A couple of hours of tossing books into a flaming caldron before the KCFD showed up hardly dented the inventory. They still had most of the books, so they held another event a few months later which garnered enough attention to deplete the stash of free books in the walk-in bin. Also, because of the publicity, the Department of Corrections in nearby Johnson County, Kansas, as well as several local charities and shelters, took a large number of books off their hands.

One batch, however, was spared from the flames, which you can still see in the store, stacked and impaled on a pipe that rises about ten feet over the front counter and capped with a globe of planet Earth.

“Elites”

Caliban figures this is how you strip Prospero of his magic and power:

Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a sot, as I am…
(The Tempest, III, ii, 99-101)

“Burn but his books,” he beseeches Stephano.

Once Prospero is powerless―just “a sot,” like him―Caliban will be free. Whether he deserves freedom is another matter.

Book burnings both before and since Shakespeare’s time have typically lacked the irony and wit of Tom Wayne and Will Leathem’s guerilla theater. Michael Servetus, for example, whose writings crossed John Calvin the wrong way in the sixteenth century, died a long and horrific death at the stake with one of his books chained to his leg. (23) In third century B.C. China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang infamously ordered the burning of scholarly and historical writings not to his liking, followed by an order to put nearly five hundred scholars found in possession of forbidden books to a ghastly death by burying them alive in a mass grave. Such examples, unfortunately, are countless.

As Caliban recognized, book burning asserts power and authority. Arguments are won in the flames. Syllogisms completed. Fire gives firestarters the last word, so to speak. A single emblematic gesture gathers words and ideas, art and artifacts, past and future into the blaze. Book burning is traditionally so bound with terror that the act itself resonates with violence even when no one is physically hurt. The homophobes who burned copies of the teen novel Annie on My Mind on the steps of a Kansas school district office just fifteen years ago share in that tradition of violence. So does Terry Jones, the mustache-challenged Gainesville, Florida, minister who burned the Qur’ān to protest construction of an Islamic civic center a few blocks from Ground Zero in New York.

Violence against people follows violence against books. The Soviet authorities who torched Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s books condemned him to years in the gulag. Islamic extremists burned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and then issued a fatwa against him, essentially an open contract to kill him, while bookstores carrying his works were firebombed and trashed throughout the U.K. and U.S. Violence against readers and writers, or the threat of it, is as inseparable from book burning as the symbolic acts of leaving an empty noose on a professor’s door or hanging one from a tree limb in front of a school are from the terrible history of lynching. (24) How else should one interpret book burning? If writers keep writing and readers keep reading, violence is the only recourse of tyrants and mobs.

Of course, if they don’t, the tyrants and mobs win.

In Shakespeare’s time, Caliban would not have been seen as a victim of social injustice; the idea that learning to read Prospero’s books would offer him a better pathway to freedom than burning them is absurd in the play’s historical and dramatic context. Still, it is more than obvious that the frustration of ignorance feeds his resentment. If anything, his ignorance is the basis for dramatic irony and comedy. The only clear path to power for Caliban is to destroy the books.

Sinclair Lewis’s emblematic character George Babbitt is also a Caliban of sorts―perhaps still at a pre-pyrotechnic stage, but his direction is clear, and the outcome equally certain, to him, at least. As he addresses his fellow realtors, exhorting them to build a dream world for his ideal of the “Standardized Citizen,” he identifies the true enemy within―and he’s clear that he doesn’t mean “liberals” and “communists.” They are presumably transparent enough to keep out of public office because the growing population of “Standardized Citizens” in Zenith and elsewhere won’t be fooled into voting for them. No, he has a more insidious threat in mind:

And when it come to these blab-mouth, fault-finding, pessimistic, cynical University teachers, let me tell you that during this golden coming year it’s just as much our duty to bring influence to have those cusses fired as it is to sell all the real estate and gather in all the good shekels we can. (25)

Lewis published this scathing indictment of middle-class American philistinism in 1922. It’s difficult to say, most of a century later, that Babbitt didn’t win. I have to inject a personal anecdote here. I recently interviewed for a college teaching position only to discover that one reason I may have been talking at cross-purposes with the search committee was because the chair himself, I learned, “specialized” in “writing” video games. Another of my resumes fell into the black hole of an English Department chaired by a “specialist” in “Harry Potter Studies.” I began to feel like a character in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. I have other similar anecdotes. No doubt, anyone who’s read this far does too. Please insert yours here: ______________________, etc. (Or better yet, send them to my blog.)

Neil Postman suggests a dichotomy between the worlds of Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. (We keep landing back in The Tempest, don’t we?) While the former represents a terror-state enforced from above by a despotic government, the latter depicts a society entirely given over to sensory pleasure. Its citizens embrace oppression in a world that satisfies their appetites through technology and mass production.

“What Orwell feared,” Postman writes, “were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book.” (26)

Yet Orwell and Huxley, I would suggest, are not polar opposites, but rather points on the same historical trajectory.

Here is Orwell describing how the Party gained and secured power:

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening, By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird. (27)

Similarly, in yet another Orwellian take on a world oppressed by a ruthless dictator on a jumbo screen, the movie V for Vendetta depicts a society that gradually, in exchange for the illusion of security, traded away its rights and liberties through the manipulation of fear by its leaders and the ignorance and apathy of its citizenry. Huxley’s Brave New World is one possible outcome of Babbitt’s vision, which, in his speech to the realtors convention, remarkably anticipates much of the recent political cant from the extreme right, while 1984 and V are alternative outcomes. Back in our current reality, still another outcome, as I’ve suggested, is the degradation of the natural world into a barren and uninhabitable wasteland. Organizations with missions as diverse as the U.S. military and the United Nations take climate change seriously enough to have drawn up some very dire scenarios. (28) Coincidentally, the time since Babbitt was published is also about the same as remains until the end of this century, when the tipping point will have long past, if it hasn’t already.

George Babbitt has his own political movement now―the Tea Party―and the codeword for not only Babbitt’s university professors but for anyone who reads anything deeper than romance novels or uses facts and reasoning and complete sentences rather than bumper-sticker slogans to discuss the issues is elites. To frame a suitable analogy, we might say that the Tea Party is to neoliberalism what crude oil is to gasoline—the pure, undiluted, unfiltered, unprocessed expression of the libertarian, free-market fundamentalism that has boiled and rumbled for decades within traditional conservatism. Its various hypocrisies don’t much concern us here. Rather, what is of interest is how the Tea Party has fully realized and expressed a traditional suspicion of reading, learning, and education that’s been long embedded in American culture, but whose renaissance began with the landslide election that brought the country its first movie-star president: The Gipper, Ronald Reagan. One of Reagan’s first acts as president, we recall, was to remove the solar panels from the White House roof that Jimmy Carter had put there. (It’s taken thirty years, but President Obama finally had new panels installed.) Reagan, of course, gave us such memorable environmental insights as, "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do” and if “you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.” (29) Reagan’s disastrous environmental record is worth its own book, but the point here is the appeal of his simplistic language and thinking. Trivialization is how you undercut elites. “There you go again!”

It is an effective way to redirect discourse away from the issue and onto the individual. It distracts and entertains at once. It invites us to focus on Al Gore’s weight, John Kerry’s speech patterns, Barack Obama’s race or religion or anything besides what he said. Literary critic Geoffrey H. Hartman connects such tactics to our overexposure to media, which degrades our ability to conduct meaningful discourse. The media, according to Hartman, has so surrounded us that we live in “a modern form of claustrophobia,” which he describes as “an antipastoral world, where no one is allowed to be at rest and the idea of home (or of a homeland) is exploited by reactive political nostalgias impossible to satisfy.” (30)

Just such nostalgias are a near obsession of the Tea Party and other groups on the extreme right, who often evoke an idealized and fictional American past that, fittingly enough, bears a closer resemblance to the Reaganesque television programming and movies of the 1940s and 50s than it does to reality. And where it does resemble reality, it is the reality of pre-civil rights and pre-women’s rights America, when unfettered corporate growth was oblivious to environmental consequences and an ever-expanding global military presence was supported by the almost universally unchallenged belief that America’s “goodness” and “interests” trumped self-determination by other nations and peoples.

For the creators of the current nostalgia myth anti-intellectualism is a mainstay of their tenets. Success and moral certitude have no required reading list. If anything, too much reading will just undermine them. Rush Limbaugh, the voice of conservatism and the undisputed leader of the Republican Party, failed out of college after two semesters yet he has attained the status of an intellectual icon among his listeners and followers. Sarah Palin thought Katie Couric’s inquiry about what she reads was a “trick question.” One of Palin’s gambits as mayor of Wasilla was to solicit a loyalty statement from the town’s librarian declaring her readiness to remove books from the shelves at Palin’s request. The courageous librarian refused, and Palin tried unsuccessfully to fire her.

As Maureen Dowd recently pointed out, “Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable”:

You struggle to name Supreme Court cases, newspapers you read and even founding fathers you admire? No problem. You endorse a candidate for the Pennsylvania Senate seat who is the nominee in West Virginia? Oh, well.

At least you’re not one of those ‘spineless’ elites with an Ivy League education, like President Obama, who can’t feel anything. It’s news to Christine O’Donnell that the Constitution guarantees separation of church and state. It’s news to Joe Miller, whose guards handcuffed a journalist, and to Carl Paladino, who threatened The New York Post’s Fred Dicker, that the First Amendment exists, even in Tea Party Land. Michele Bachmann calls Smoot-Hawley Hoot-Smalley. (31)

The Tea Party has been touted for attracting “educated” participants. But the hard numbers make that claim suspect. Among those who identified themselves as Tea Partiers in a recent New York Times/CBS poll, only 37 percent graduated from college, just 12 points higher than the average of 25 percent for Americans overall (i.e., not just those identifying themselves as members of a political party). (32) Additionally, we’ve already seen what that means about their reading habits: less than half of the “educated” group have even opened a book recently, or to put it another way, only 18 percent of Tea Party members, less than one-fifth, are likely to have read a book in the last twelve months. Even author Sarah Palin can’t entice the other 82 percent into reading her ghost-written book! And among those who have read at least one book in the past year, the most popular choices are religious books and romance and genre novels. (33)

Self-described “rodeo clown” and college dropout, Glenn Beck offers a unique educational opportunity for those Tea Partiers and others who may find “elite” schools too difficult, or too full of liberal professors, or, according to his website, who would simply like to “head back to the classroom – from the comfort of your own home.” (34)

Per the website, here’s what prospective students can expect:

Beck University is a unique academic experience bringing together experts in the fields of religion, American history and economics. Through captivating lectures and interactive online discussions, these experts will explore the concepts of Faith, Hope and Charity and show you how they influence America’s past, her present and most importantly her future.

On his TV show, Beck often playacts the role of a professor at a chalk board free-associating his way through bizarre deconstructions of various historical moments or tracing weird etymologies of his own invention.

Last year he initiated the so-called 912 Project, whose goal is (sic passim) “to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.” (35) The project was based on a set of “principles” drawn from quotations by the Founders, which Beck rephrased to his own liking or just plain dumbed down. Here’s a sampling:

• America Is Good
• I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life
• I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results

Caps are sprinkled like coarse pepper throughout the nine principles.

The 912 Project tapped the nostalgia theme twice over, first invoking the idealized and imagined past (and words) of the Founding Fathers and then the more recent and also idealized past of the post-9/11 days. Another of Beck’s recent projects was to mock Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by staging a so-called “Restoring the Honor” rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the forty-seventh anniversary of King’s speech. Participants interviewed at the nearly all-white event showcased the paranoid misinformation Beck and others like him peddle, from questioning President Obama’s citizenship and religion to claiming that it’s now illegal to pray at national monuments.

Beck’s followers are as likely to burn books as read them. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of an exchange among participants at another Beck event:

Woman: [Shouts] “Burn the books!” [applause]
Man: “I don't think you were serious about that, were you?”
Woman: “I am too.”
Man: “Burn all the books?!”
Woman: “The ones in college, those, those brainwashing books.”
Man: [laughs] “Brainwashing books?”
Woman: “Yes.”
Man: “Which ones are those?”
Woman: “Like, the evolution crap, and, yeah...” (36)

Underestimating the power and political savvy of Beck, Palin, Limbaugh and the hordes who follow them would be a dangerous mistake. They may be clowns, but only in the eyes of some beholders. Real clowns know what they are, while these clowns are busily accumulating campaign war chests and exhorting people into the streets and voting booths in growing numbers and often in frightening ways. Openly armed people showed up when President Obama appeared at a healthcare forum in 2009. A suicidal maniac crashed his plane into an IRS building in Texas and won posthumous praise in some conservative quarters. Inflamed mobs spat on a black U.S. congressman in front of the Capitol building, yet no Republican leader condemned the act.

Death threats against Democratic senators and representatives have increased exponentially since Obama was inaugurated, while the 2010 mid-term election campaigns included a call for armed rebellion by one Republican candidate for the House. Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate nominee in Nevada, called for “Second Amendment remedies” as “the cure for the Harry Reid problems.” (37) It is difficult to separate the horrific shootings in Tucson earlier this year from such rhetoric and the climate it has created.

Will Leathem, who in a past life was a political operative on a national level, points out that our “political views are a mirror of the culture.” George W. Bush―faux populist, frat boy, ‘C’ student, diplomatic prankster, fear-mongerer, starter of wars, and mangler of the English language―was what the country wanted, twice, slightly more than half of it anyway. Beck made $32 million last year from his combined salary at Fox News and his radio and publishing ventures. Limbaugh signed an eight-year deal with Clear Channel Communications worth over $400 million. (38)

At stake for all of them is the preservation of a free-market fundamentalism that regards biodiversity as an obstacle to growth and treats the abundance of the planet as nothing more than a storehouse of resources to be mined, burned, cut, and consumed. They all promote the beliefs that challenging problems have simple solutions, that the give-and-take of informed argument is evidence of weakness, and that complexity masks deception. They are not the reason Americans read less: they are the result, and their power depends on keeping ignorance in ascendancy. And if they succeed, future book burnings in America won’t be characterized by the mischievous spirit and ironic wit that Tom Wayne and Will Leathem brought to theirs, but rather by more sinister and threatening tones, and they will not end well.

Bob Sommer is the author of Where the Wind Blew and the forthcoming novel, A Great Fullness. He blogs at Uncommon Hours. His email is bobsommer09@gmail.com.

This essay is excerpted from a longer work-in-progress.

Notes

(1) Anis Shivani, “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers,” Huffington Post, August 7, 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/the-15-most-overrated-con_b_672974.html#s123717&title=undefined

(2) Juliette Jowit and Christine Ottery, “Global Emissions Targets Will Lead to 4C Temperature Rise, Say Studies predict major extinctions and collapse of Greenland ice sheet with temperatures rising well above UN targets,” The Guardian/UK, July 6, 2010 (see: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/06-0
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/05/ipcc-rising-temperature-targets-greenland-ice-sheet).

(3) Bill McKibben, “Catastrophic Weather Events Are Becoming the New Normal -- Are You Ready for Life on Our Planet Circa 2011?” AlterNet, February 2, 2011 (see: http://www.alternet.org/environment/149774/catastrophic_weather_events_are_becoming_the_new_normal_--_are_you_ready_for_life_on_our_planet_circa_2011/).

(4) Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 63.

(5) Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 300.

(6) Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, 2009), p. 17.

(7) Hedges, p. 45.

(8) Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” full text available at http://people.virginia.edu/~sfr/enam482e/lyncherdom.html.

(9) “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence,” National Endowment for the Arts, Research Report No. 47, November 2007, p. 5. Available in PDF at http://www.arts.gov/research/ResearchReports_chrono.html.

(10) Ibid. See also, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, “Your So-Called Education,” New York Times, May 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1.

(11) “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence,” p. 45.

(12) Interview by Lynn Neary, “Reading Study Shows Remarkable Decline in U.S.,” National Public Radio, November 19, 2007. Available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16435529.

(13) “Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming,” Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, October 22, 2009 (see: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1386/cap-and-trade-global-warming-opinion) and Jacqueline L. Salmon, “Most Americans Believe in Higher Power, Poll Finds,” Washington Post, June 24, 2008 (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062300813_pf.html). “Dwarfs better-known than US justices: poll,” ABC News On-Line, Tuesday, August 15, 2006 (see: http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200608/s1715009.htm). “Don’t Know Much About History?” Marist Poll, July 2, 2010 (see: http://maristpoll.marist.edu/72-don%E2%80%99t-know-much-about-history/).

(14) Mark Twain, “Taming the Bicycle,” full text available at http://www.classicauthors.net/twain/whatisman/whatisman35.html.

(15) Hofstadter, pp. 45-6.

(16) George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949, Signet reprint. 1961), p. 129.

(17) Matt Katz, “Camden preparing to close its libraries, destroy books,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 06, 2010 (see: http://articles.philly.com/2010-08-06/news/24972581_1_library-board-three-libraries-library-book).

(18) Ross Currier, “The Future of Books and Bookstores,” May 30, 2007, http://locallygrownnorthfield.org/post/1462/.

(19) “The Book Burning,” YouTube.com, posted May 28, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiXJ_jIvb6Y.

(20) David Twiddy, “Mo. man burns books as act of protest,” USA Today, May 28, 2007 (see: http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-05-28-mo-book-burning_N.htm?csp=34); Dan Barry, “A Requiem for Reading in a Smoldering Pyre of Books,” New York Times, June 3, 2007 (see: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9506E6DD1030F930A35755C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all); The Colbert Report, June 6, 2007 (see: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/183016/june-06-2007/tip-wag---deep-purple).

(21) “Burning Books?!” Metachat.org, May 28, 2007 (see: http://metachat.org/index.php/2007/05/28/p23514).

(22) Dawn Papuga, “More Book Burning at Prospero’s Books,” dawnpapuga.com, September 3, 2007 (see: http://dawnpapuga.com/?p=41).

(23) “Detail on the Trial and Execution of Servetus at Geneva,” Servetus International Society, servetus.org (see: http://www.servetus.org/en/michael-servetus/biography/bio7.htm).

(24) “Columbia Professor Says She ‘Will Not Be Silenced,’ Police Continue Hate Crime Investigation,” http://gothamist.com/2007/10/11/columbia.php; Bill Quigley, “Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang From the ‘White Tree,’” truth-out.org, July 3, 2007 (see: http://www.truth-out.org/article/bill-quigley-injustice-jena-nooses-hang-from-white-tree).

(25) Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), p. 188.

(26) Postman, p. vii.

(27) Orwell, p. 129.

(28) The website for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is http://www.ipcc.ch/. Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, “Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us Secret Report Warns of Rioting and Nuclear War; Threat to the World is Greater than Terrorism,” Observer/UK, February 22, 2004 (see: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0222-01.htm). Timothy Gardner, “U.S. military leads climate change combat: Pew,” Reuters, April 20, 2010 (see: http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/20/us-climate-defense-idUSTRE63J4EJ20100420).

(29) Amanda Little, “A look back at Reagan’s environmental record,” Grist.org, June 10, 2004 (see: http://www.grist.org/article/griscom-reagan).

(30) Geoffrey H. Hartmann, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 158.

(31) Maureen Dowd, “Making Ignorance Chic,” New York Times, October 20, 2010 (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/opinion/20dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion).

(32) Brian Montopoli, “Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe,” CBS News.com, April 14, 2010 (see: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html).

(33) “One in four read no books last year,” USA Today.com, August 21, 2007 (see: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-21-reading_N.htm).

(34) “Announcing Beck University,” glennbeck.com, July 6, 2010 (see: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/42502), passim.

(35) See: http://the912-project.com/test/, passim.

(36) “A Very Special Book-Burning Glenn Beck Tea Party,” gawker.com, April 2010 (the video has been disabled by the transcript is still available here: http://gawker.com/5207368/a-very-special-book+burning-glenn-beck-tea-party).

(37) “Republican advocates armed rebellion in campaign ad,” The Richmonder, June 15, 2010 (see: http://www.the-richmonder.com/2010/06/republican-advocates-armed-rebellion-in.html); Sam Stein, “Sharron Angle Floated ‘2nd Amendment Remedies’ As ‘Cure’ For ‘The Harry Reid Problems,’” The Huffington Post, June 16, 2010 (see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/16/sharron-angle-floated-2nd_n_614003.html).

(38) Brad Trechak, “Glenn Beck Made $32 Million in Past Year, But Not Much from Fox,” TV Squad.com, April 8, 2010 (see: http://www.tvsquad.com/2010/04/08/glenn-beck-made-32-million-in-past-year-but-not-much-from-fox). “Right wing radio host Rush Limbaugh signs 400 million dollar deal,” monstersandcritics.com, July 2, 2008 (see: http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/usa/news/article_1414676.php/Right_wing_radio_host_Rush_Limbaugh_signs_400_million_dollar_deal).

A Mother's Day Poem

2011-05-08T13:07:00.004-05:00

On Mother’s Day
by
Bob Sommer

For Heather
May 8, 2011

Motherhood is optimism in the extreme,

hope that won’t be extinguished,

stubborn faith,

unlimited compassion.

And love,

always love.

Motherhood is memory fulfilled,

like the migrations of birds and whales,

who find their way

over continents and through oceans,

Not knowing why―

or asking

―but only that this is their path, their way.

And that arrival completes the memory

in flutterings and chirpings,

in submarine pleasures of return,

in ancient knowledge that needs neither

history nor language.

Memory lives in motherhood,

unfading, unstained,

like the clarity of cloudless full-moon nights,

resonant with quiet life,

with meaning in the immanent stillness.

Motherhood is always with you―

and with it: constant and reliable memory,

unbound to the phyics of time,

its truth in stories,

in images no photo ever captures,

in a shiver, a motion, a sound,

in a garden plaque or the visit of a hummingbird.

Memories are life,

we still live them and live into them.

They complete us,

and motherhood completes you.

(c) Copyright Bob Sommer 2011. All rights reserved.

2011-02-20T08:08:00.013-06:00

Francis David Sommer

May 12, 1983 - February 11, 2011

“Attitude toward Death”
From The Teaching of Tecumseh

Live your life that the fear of death
can never enter your heart.
Trouble no one about his religion.
Respect others in their views
and demand that they respect yours.
Love your life, perfect your life,
beautify all things in your life.
Seek to make your life long
and of service to your people.
Prepare a noble death song for the day
when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting
or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light,
for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks,
the fault lies in yourself.
Touch not the poisonous firewater that makes wise ones turn to fools
and robs the spirit of its vision.
When your time comes to die, be not like those
whose hearts are filled with fear of death,
so that when their time comes they weep and pray
for a little more time to live their lives over again
in a different way.
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

Kansas City VA Voluntary Services 135
4801 Linwood Blvd.
Kansas City, MO 64128
Checks payable to the KCVA.
Reference the Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund on the memo line.

or

Fisher House Foundation
111 Rockville Pike, Ste. 420
Rockville, MD 20850
Checks payable to Fisher House Foundation.
Reference the Francis D. Sommer Memorial Fund on the memo line.

Obituary, photos, tributes

Hightower: 'Obama, Inc.'

2011-02-08T08:57:00.001-06:00

With Daley and Immelt on board, our president is waltzing with the devil.

By Jim Hightower
(Posted Feb. 7, 2011, at otherwords.org)

When you dance with the devil, never fool yourself into thinking that you're leading.

That would be my 50-cents-worth of advice to President Barack Obama as he remakes his presidency into a Clintonesque corporate enterprise. Following last fall's congressional elections, he immediately began blowing kisses to CEOs and big business lobbyists, and he's now filled his White House dance card with them.

First came Bill Daley, the Wall Street banker and longtime corporate lobbyist. In early January, Obama brought him to the White House ball to be his chief-of-staff, gatekeeper, and policy coordinator.

Then Obama tapped Jeffery Immelt to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is supposed to "encourage the private sector to hire [Americans] and invest in American competitiveness." This is a bizarre coupling, for as General Electric's CEO, Immelt was a leader in shipping American factories and jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Today, fewer than half of GE's workers are in our country.

As an AFL-CIO official notes, "Highly globalized companies don't have the same interests as the United States. There is no company more emblematic of this than GE."

In his recent State of the Union speech, Obama offered only cold comfort to the millions of Americans who are unemployed or barely employed, saying blandly that "The rules have changed." Well, yes--and who changed them? Self-serving CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, that's who.

America's working families--our endangered middle class--have a right to expect Obama to fight for rules that are fair to them and our country, not meekly accept rules that have been skewed by an elite corporate class to profit them alone. Instead, our president is waltzing with the devil.

He's rebranding his presidency, all right. It's becoming Obama, Inc.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He's also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown.

Sierra Club Moves to Intervene in Justice Department Case Against BP

2011-02-08T05:19:00.000-06:00

Group Seeks $21 Billion in Civil Penalties,

Restoration of Gulf Coast Communities, Water, Wildlife

NEW ORLEANS- Today, the Sierra Club filed a motion to intervene in the U.S. Justice Department’s civil suit against BP, arising from last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest offshore drilling disaster in American history. The Justice Department suit, filed on December 15, 2010, seeks to recoup costs and damages under the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, well in excess of $75 million, and to impose additional fines under the Clean Water Act that could reach $21 billion. The motion was filed in the U.S. District Court in New Orleans.

“Our goal is to ensure that BP and other responsible parties are held fully accountable for the damage they’ve done to the Gulf Coast. These companies acted recklessly. They damaged families, wildlife, and coastal communities, and they need to be held responsible,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune.

As party to the litigation, the Sierra Club will have a seat at the table in any potential settlement and will be able to ensure that communities hurt by the disaster are fairly represented and compensated. By seeking maximum penalties, the group also hopes to deter oil companies from engaging in conduct that could lead to future disasters.

The federal Clean Water Act provides for civil penalties for oil spills to punish polluters and deter similar conduct in the future, with the greatest penalties provided for “gross negligence.” The Sierra Club can make arguments in support of the penalties that the Justice Department will not make because doing so would implicate the federal government in the disaster. The federal government is under scrutiny for approving BP’s grossly inadequate oil spill response plan, which resulted in oil spewing unchecked for four months, and for allowing the company to over use damaging oil dispersants following the spill.

The Sierra Club also seeks to ensure that funds recovered by the government from BP go directly to Gulf Coast restoration. Mismanagement of similar funds plagued Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

“For too long, American taxpayers have footed the bill for polluters who destroy our water and air. We can’t let that happen here,” Brune said. “The road to restoration for the Gulf Coast will be long and hard. We need to make sure BP and the other responsible parties pay for the damage they’ve done. The oil industry must learn a lesson from this tragedy.”

The Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast campaign is working actively to restore the area’s wildlife, waters, and communities. Following the BP disaster, Sierra Club launched a national “Beyond Oil” campaign, aimed at directing resources to the Gulf Coast, preventing future spills, and promoting solutions to oil dependence.

“Oil is a dangerous business,” Brune said. “The oil industry needs to begin to take our safety and health seriously. As a nation, we need to end our dependence on dirty fuels that have already damaged too many communities. Solutions like efficiency and clean energy will get us off of oil and protect our coasts from future drilling disasters.”

http://www.beyondoil.org/
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201101/beyondoil.aspx

Greenpeace delivers a message to the Koch brothers

2011-01-30T22:05:00.000-06:00

Sierra Club Launches Effort to Expose the Koch Brothers

2011-01-28T14:12:00.000-06:00

Billionaire Family Blocks Protection of Air, Water

PALM SPRINGS – In anticipation of a “secret” meeting to be hosted in Palm Springs this weekend by two infamously anti-environmental billionaire brothers, the Sierra Club will launch a social media campaign with its 1.4 million members and supporters to expose the Koch brothers’ planned assault on public health.

Charles and David Koch are billionaire oil tycoons who were featured in a recent New Yorker piece and are funding an enormous effort to roll back clean water and air protections. The brothers are expected to meet with wealthy friends and corporate CEOs in the Southern California desert this weekend to plan their agenda for the coming year – at the top of that list will be new efforts to gut environmental safeguards and clean air and water protections.

The Sierra Club is reaching out to its 1.4 million members and supporters using social media tools including Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about how the Koch brothers' agenda could increase cases of asthma, hinder children’s brain development with toxic mercury and threaten lives nationwide.

“Koch Industries is one of the biggest polluters in America, so it’s not surprising that they’ve spent millions blocking measures to protect our air and water,” said Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “The Kochs have also served as one of the biggest obstacles to our transition to a clean energy economy. You can thank the Koch brothers for standing in the way of new jobs in the wind, solar and efficiency industries. They have a lot of money, and they’re not afraid to spend it to influence politicians, fight public health safeguards and spread misinformation about pollution and climate disruption.”

The Koch brothers own a firm with revenues estimated at $100 billion and they are out to expand their profits at the cost of Americans’ health. A University of Massachusetts study identified Koch Industries as one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. From 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outspent even ExxonMobil in funding efforts against clean energy legislation.

“We can’t allow corporate polluters and oil tycoons to buy our government,” Brune said. “Americans need to know what the Koch brothers are up to, and we need to let our lawmakers know that we won’t allow these two billionaires to undermine environmental and public health safeguards for profit.”

Sunflower Coal-Fired Power Plant Expansion Faces Legal Challenge

2011-01-14T19:58:00.003-06:00

Lawsuit cites failure to meet Clean Air Act standards,
improper permitting process

Topeka, Kan—Today, Earthjustice, representing the Sierra Club of Kansas, filed an appeal to a permit the Kansas Department of Health and Environment issued to Sunflower Electric in December 2010. The permit is for the controversial 895 megawatt coal-fired power plant near Holcomb.

Read the petition filed today, here:
http://earthjustice.org/documents/legal-document/pdf/sunflower11411

“As the mother of two sons with asthma, I am aware of the correlation between respiratory health and air quality. Nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates and other hazardous pollutants threaten the health of those with respiratory illness, children and the elderly in particular,” said concerned Kansan, Jennifer Byer. “When the debate centers on the quality of the air our children breathe, how clean is clean enough?”

The proposed coal plant was the most intensely contested coal plant in Kansas history, as well as one of the most debated permits KDHE has ever considered. The permit was rushed through and undermined by outside influences, which was well-documented by Kansas media.

“Kansans who expected to receive a fair and objective review of this permit will take the issue to court,” said Stephanie Cole of the Kansas Sierra Club.

The appeal challenges deficiencies in the permit that could expose Kansans to unnecessary levels of harmful air pollutants including mercury, acid gases, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter. For instance, the permit fails to set appropriate limits on Hazardous Air Pollutants, such as mercury, which are the most harmful to human health – even in small amounts.

“KDHE let Sunflower take shortcuts and ignore available pollution control technology; as a result, this is one of the dirtiest plants that has been permitted in recent years. Public health and pollution controls cannot be brushed aside under federal law, the Clean Air Act is quite clear on this,” said Amanda Goodin, an attorney with Earthjustice.

“When it comes to millions of tons of pollution for a coal plant that is not needed for Kansas, there is no place for mistakes or misconduct,” said Cole. “The weak emissions standards in the permit mean that Kansans will be exposed to unnecessarily high levels of pollutants that we know cause serious health problems.”

Coal Plant is for Colorado,
Other States Planning to Shut Down Coal Plants

The majority of the power from the Holcomb II expansion would serve Colorado, a state that committed last month to retiring 902 megawatts of existing coal capacity. It is highly unlikely a new coal plant would ever get built in Colorado, and by agreeing to do Colorado’s dirty work, Kansas will be using billions of gallons of our water annually to operate the coal plant - despite having fought Colorado for water for over two decades.

While Kansas rushed to permit a new coal plant for Colorado before the year’s end, the rest of the country spent 2010 planning to retire existing coal plants.

· For the second straight year, not a single new coal plant broke ground for construction in 2010.

· A total of 48 existing coal plants were announced for retirement in 2010, which is likely the most coal plant retirements announced in a single year. They will be replaced with cleaner burning fuels, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

· Colorado, where most of the electricity from the Holcomb II coal plant will go, established a plan to shut down 902 megawatts of existing coal capacity.

· Announced coal plant retirements in 2010 in Colorado, Arizona, Utah and Oregon will result in the retirement of nearly 10% of the entire Western coal fleet.

· The Energy Information Agency now projects that no new coal plants will be built in 2011 without significant incentives.

· The University of North Carolina, University of Illinois, Western Kentucky University, Cornell and University of Louisville all made coal-free commitments. Kansans Agree: Coal Plant Not Needed, Lawsuit is Necessary to Protect Public Health

“Jobs for a few years, pollution forever. As someone who lives near the site of the new coal plant, I am not willing to sacrifice my family’s health and welfare so a Colorado company can build a coal plant in Kansas they are not willing to build in their own backyard,” said Barb Percival, who lives only a few miles from the Holcomb coal plant site.

“Sunflower is so far in debt, I question who is going to pay for this project. If Tri-State wants the electricity, let them build the coal plant in Colorado,” said Lee Messenger of Garden City.

"Claims by project supporters that this will be the ’cleanest coal plant in the nation’ are simply not true. According to 2010 EPA data, there are many other coal plants in the country that have lower sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions than the proposed Holcomb plant. Similarly, particulate matter and mercury emissions from this plant will exceed what many other coal plants are emitting. Under the KDHE permit, the Holcomb unit will not be using state of the art processes that are already in place at dozens of existing coal plants," said Scott Allegrucci of GPACE.

“I worked hard to participate in the process, and I expected KDHE would consider my input. I was disappointed with the outcome. While organizing citizens to attend hearings, I saw firsthand strong opposition to this coal plant,” said Stephen Collins, a University of Missouri- Kansas City student.

Chuck Gillam, chairman of the Advocacy Committee of the theological based Sustainable Sanctuary Coalition, said “The state has sold out the health of Kansans, and those who were interested in protecting public health, like Secretary Bremby, have been quietly eliminated.”

“Former Secretary Bremby’s decision to reject this permit set Kansas apart as a national leader in addressing climate change, said Margaret Tran, a recent Kansas University graduate. “I cannot see how my generation and generations to follow will be encouraged to stay and work in Kansas with a coal plant that does not create long-term jobs but instead, creates unhealthy pollution.”

Wikileaks: Sea Shepherd up against more than Japanese whalers

2011-01-03T14:11:00.003-06:00

If Sea Shepherd didn’t have enough to battle, with Japanese whalers turning water-cannon on their zodiacs in the Southern Ocean, a new cache of cables from Wikileaks reveals that U.S. and Japanese officials colluded to undermine the anti-whaling group by going after its tax-exempt status.

Japanese negotiators actually had the cajones to suggest that Sea Shepherd was impeding efforts to reduce whaling, which they would somehow achieve by slaughtering and eating whales.

In November 2009 (and notably, under the Obama administration), a U.S. representative discussed with officials from the Fisheries Agency of Japan the prospect of having Sea Shepherd’s tax-exempt status revoked .

Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and U.S. representative to the International Whaling Commission Monica Medina suggested to Japanese negotiators her belief that “the USG [U.S. government] can demonstrate the group does not deserve tax exempt status based on their aggressive and harmful actions."

Read more excerpts from the cables here.

Sea Shepherd activists confront Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean (whenever the whalers are chasing Sea Shepherd, they're not killing whales--looks like a good day!):

Early success for Sea Shepherd in the Southern Ocean

2011-01-02T08:36:00.000-06:00

Sea Shepherd’s first clashes with Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean took place on New Year’s Day.

A day earlier Sea Shepherd’s fleet caught up with Japanese whaling vessels.

The crew of the Yushin Maru #3 using their water cannons against Sea Shepherd’s Delta team in the Zodiac boat. Photo by Gary Stokes.

“We’ve got them before they were able to kill a single whale. They are not whaling today and our challenge now is to make sure they don’t kill any whales in the coming days,” said Sea Shepherd campaign leader Captain Paul Watson.

Clashes between the Japanese whalers and Sea Shepherd involved several high-speed chases and near collisions as the ships dodged boulders of ice in the jagged ice floes. The whalers turned their high-powered water cannons on Sea Shepherd’s crew, which responded with rancid butter and other foul-smelling substances. There were no injuries.

"What an awesome way to begin the New Year," said Locky MacLean, captain of the Gojira. "Our three vessels dancing dangerously through the ice packs locked in confrontation with the three harpoon ships of the Japanese whaling fleet. It was both deadly and beautiful. Deadly because of the ice and the hostility of the whalers and beautiful because of the ice, and the fact that these three killer ships are not killing whales while clashing with us."

The whaling season runs from December through February.

Sea Shepherd crews are still trying to locate the Nisshin Maru factory ship.

A new documentary film about New York's Colony Records!

2010-12-16T14:58:00.000-06:00

This sounds cool! A new documentary film is being made about New York City's fabled Colony Records in Times Square. Located in the historic Brill Building, the family-owned store has been a mecca for stars from every corner of the music business since 1948. One of the last remaining independent music stores in the country, Colony is battling to stay alive. The film celebrates both the rich tradition and present day story of this landmark of New York's cultural identity. Check out a trailer, read more about the film, and donate to the production at:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1386333480/manhattan-lullaby-a-documentary-about-colony-recor

Sen. Bernie Sanders: Obama's tax deal is a 'moral outrage'

2010-12-07T16:00:00.000-06:00

Washington - Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued a statement in response to President Obama's deal to continue deficit funding the Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthiest of the wealthy:

"In my view, it is a moral outrage that at a time when this country has a $13.8 trillion national debt, a collapsing middle class and a growing gap between the very rich and everybody else that the Republicans would deny extended unemployment benefits to 2 million workers who are desperately struggling to pay their bills and maintain their dignity. It is also beyond comprehension that the Republicans would hold hostage the entire middle class of this country so that millionaires and billionaires would receive huge tax breaks. In my view, that is not what this country is about and it is not what the American people want to see. Our job is to save the disappearing middle class, not lower taxes for people who are already extraordinarily wealthy and increase the national debt that our children and grandchildren would have to pay.

"The immediate political task in front of us is to rally the American people so that in the next several weeks we can find at least a few Republicans who will join us in saying no to increasing the deficit by giving tax breaks to the wealthy and no to holding the unemployed and the middle class hostage.

"I believe that we have the American people on our side on this issue. My office, and I come from a small state, has received more than 600 calls today, 99 percent of them in opposition to this so-called compromise that the president negotiated with the Republicans.

"I will do everything in my power to stand up for the American middle class and defeat this agreement."

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/12/07-12

Will President Obama prevent the NEXT oil spill disaster?

2010-12-06T18:54:00.000-06:00

Eric Weltman: 'A Wasted Crisis'

2010-12-05T09:32:00.001-06:00

How the environmental movement missed the moment on climate change.

By Eric Weltman
In These Times
December 1, 2010

"The solution ... is building a movement that can play hardball."

When BP's Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers, the ensuing environmental crisis could have been a transformative moment for our nation's energy policy. It was not.

In the midst of widespread public outrage against the oil industry, years of effort by environmental organizations culminated in the Senate's failure to vote on a bill to combat climate change and spark a transition to renewable energy. Nor did the Senate approve needed reforms to the Oil Pollution Act that would eliminate the liability cap on oil companies.

The lack of results revealed tensions within the movement--differences revealed in climate change legislation that many environmentalists were glad to see die.

The environmental 'enthusiasm gap'

In 2006, Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, forged a coalition with business leaders to break the logjam on climate change legislation. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership included Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the nation's largest electric utilities, as well as BP, General Electric and DuPont. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Nature Conservancy also joined the coalition but industry's influence was such that, as Eric Pooley reported in Bloomberg Businessweek, at one point Rogers was "basically negotiating with himself."

Then in 2008, a newly elected Barack Obama declared that "delay is no longer an option" on climate change, making energy legislation one of his top domestic priorities. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, environmentalists saw a "golden opportunity," said one funder, and poured resources into Washington, D.C. to pass a climate change bill.

The resulting legislation reflected this insider approach. The House narrowly approved the Waxman-Markey bill in June 2009, while a Senate version didn't emerge until May of this year. When it did, it was loaded with giveaways, including subsidies for nuclear power and expanded offshore drilling.

To the ire of many environmentalists, the Senate bill eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency's authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. This was, in effect, says Kyle Ash, a Greenpeace lobbyist, "giving away existing tools that work in exchange for policies we don't know work." The biggest handout of all, though, came in the form of pollution credits that Obama had proposed auctioning off but that the Senate bill would have provided to industry free of charge.

Krupp had assured Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in October 2009 that environmentalists would be flexible on most other energy issues as long as the Senate legislation maintained the House emission reduction targets, according to Ryan Lizza, writing in The New Yorker. It was a spirit of generosity toward industry reflected by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), one of the bill's chief sponsors, who announced in June, "We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further."

However, some in the movement took sharp aim at industry's heavy hand in crafting the legislation.

Moreover, activists charged that neither the House nor Senate bills would prevent climate catastrophe. "It wasn't in line with what science is telling us we have to do," says May Boeve of 350.org, a grassroots organization founded by author Bill McKibben. Climate Reality Check, a coalition including Greenpeace, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth, faulted the legislation for falling "very short" of what is necessary to reduce greenhouse gasses to safe levels.

The legislation was the product of a strategy "to get the bill across the finish line by putting something in that takes care of every part of the opposition," says Betsy Taylor, co-founder of 1Sky, a climate change advocacy group.

The insider approach, charged some critics, also led advocates to take too much of their lead from the White House, particularly around messaging. At an April 2009 meeting, Carol Browner, Obama's energy czar, told environmentalists not to publicly discuss climate change but to focus on green jobs and energy independence. An Obama campaign operative, Paul Tewes, was brought in to run Clean Energy Works, a coalition created to coordinate advocacy around the bill, adopting the slogan "More Jobs. Less Pollution. Greater Security."

The result was an "enthusiasm gap" among environmental activists. "It wasn't the kind of policy that would motivate the base of the climate change movement to really fight for it," says Boeve.

On March 31, Obama announced plans to expand offshore drilling, part of a grand bargain to get the bill through the Senate, according to Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil and director of Global Exchange's energy program.

Disaster in the Gulf and the Beltway

Three weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon exploded.

Environmental organizations quickly mobilized. Greenpeace and NRDC sent staff to the Gulf to conduct independent assessments and provide media commentary. The Sierra Club organized rallies at dozens of BP stations across the country, while more than 180,000 members emailed Obama, urging his leadership in reducing the nation's reliance on oil--their largest-ever response to a call to action.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the disaster made things "a little more complicated," says Ash.

In the midst of the nation's largest oil spill, environmentalists had a weak climate change bill that promoted oil drilling. At the same time, polls showed that the public didn't understand the bill's "cap-and-trade" system for reducing emissions--a system that was "too complex to explain," as Brent Blackwelder, former president of Friends of the Earth, put it.

"The public anger was there, the frustration was there" to achieve a sweeping change in energy policy, claims John Hocevar of Greenpeace, but what the environmental movement didn't do "was adequately give people constructive outlets for their anger and outrage."

In the wake of the disaster, energy was the top issue among Democracy for America members, political director Charles Chamberlain told The Hill, a Washington newsletter. "But we polled our members about whether we should be fighting for the bill and it wasn't even close. The answer was no."

Juhasz notes the bill's advocates had accepted expanded offshore drilling in exchange for oil industry support.

Consequently, Boeve says, "Environmental groups weren't ready to vilify the oil companies and the senators who love them."

"They made a deal with the devil, and the devil walked away from the table," Juhasz says. Lacking sufficient votes, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced on July 22 that the Senate wouldn't take up the bill. With Republicans in control of the House after the Nov. 2 election, prospects for passing climate legislation have only worsened.

Post-mortem?

"After five years, fewer Americans now believe that man-made climate change is real," says Denis Hayes, president of the Bullitt Foundation and organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. "You have to have a post-mortem after that."

Some in the movement have concluded that it would be better not to have to rely on the fossil fuels industries to pass a climate change bill. The basic problem is a lack of political power. Blackwelder puts it this way, "We are not posing a threat to oust members of Congress."

The solution, he believes, is building a movement that can play hardball.

The Sierra Club has been radicalized, some say, under new Executive Director Michael Brune, who took the helm in March with a greater focus on corporate power. The Sierra Club, with 64 local chapters, is the most grassroots-based of the national organizations and responded to the BP disaster by calling on Obama to create a plan to move the nation off oil within 20 years.

McKibben's 350.org is also mobilizing the grassroots. On October 10, the organization sponsored a "Global Work Party," with 7,347 events in 188 countries--from film-screenings to letter-writing--calling for political action on climate change.

It is work that may benefit from a shift from focusing funds inside the Beltway toward a broadening of the base beyond green activists. "This is not an environmental issue," says Kelsey Wirth, board member of the Winslow Foundation. "It's a societal challenge. This is about the future of the world." Ash agrees: "There's a general consensus that the climate change issue cannot be dominated by environmentalists."

This article was first posted at In These Times

Alan Grayson:Why tax cuts for the rich are so important to right-wing pundits

2010-12-04T15:18:00.001-06:00

World Meteorological Organization: Greenhouse gases hit record levels in 2009

2010-11-24T12:40:00.000-06:00

WMO Highlights Concerns about Global Warming and Methane

24 November 2010 (WMO), Greenhouse gases have reached their highest levels recorded since preindustrial times, according to the World Meteorological Organization’s 2009 Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

The report also highlights concerns that global warming may lead to even greater emissions of methane from Arctic areas. According to the Bulletin, total radiative forcing of all long-lived greenhouse gases increased by
27.5% from 1990 to 2009 and by 1.0% from 2008 to 2009, reflecting the rising atmospheric burdens of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

“Greenhouse gas concentrations have reached record levels despite the economic slowdown. They would have been even higher without the international action taken to reduce them,” said WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud. “In addition, potential methane release from northern permafrost, and wetlands, under future climate change is of great concern and is becoming a focus of intensive research and observations.”

Read the complete report here.

Ray McGovern: In His Own Words: Bush a Warmonger

2010-11-23T17:43:00.001-06:00

U.S. Intelligence Thwarted Attack on Iran
By Ray McGovern

Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the “high-confidence” unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather than curse under his breath.

Nowhere in his memoir, Decision Points, is Bush’s bizarre relationship with truth so manifest as when he describes his dismay at learning that the intelligence community had redeemed itself for its lies about Iraq by preparing an honest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. As the Bush-book makes abundantly clear, that NIE rammed an iron rod through the wheels of the juggernaut rolling toward war.

Nowhere is Bush’s abiding conviction clearer, now as then, that his role as “decider” include the option to create his own reality.

The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) has missed that part of the book. And hundreds of Dallas “sheriffs,” assembled to ensure decorum at the Bush library groundbreaking last week, kept us hoi polloi well out of presidential earshot.

But someone should ask Bush why he was not relieved, rather than angered, to learn from U.S. intelligence that Iran had had no active nuclear weapons program since 2003. And would someone dare ask why Bush thought Israel should have been “furious with the United States over the NIE?”

It seems likely that Bush actually dictated this part of the book himself. For, in setting down his reaction to the NIE on Iran, he unwittingly confirmed an insight that Dr. Justin Frank, M.D., who teaches psychiatry at George Washington University Hospital, gave us veteran intelligence officers into how Bush comes at reality — or doesn’t.

“His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth... He lies — not just to us, but to himself as well... What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt — for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him.... So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.” [See Consortiumnews.com “Dangers of a Cornered Bush.”]

Not Enough Sycophants

When the NIE on Iran came out in late 2007, Bush may have pined for his sycophant-in-chief, former CIA Director George Tenet and his co-conspirator deputy, John McLaughlin, who had shepherded the bogus Iraq-WMD analysis through the process in 2002 but had resigned in 2004 when their role in the deceptions became so obvious that it shamed even them.

Tenet and his CIA cronies had been expert at preparing estimates-to-go — to go to war, that is. They had proved themselves worthy rivals of the other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, in cooking intelligence to the White House menu.

On Iraq, they had distinguished themselves by their willingness to conjure up “intelligence” that Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller described as “uncorroborated, unconfirmed, and nonexistent,” after a five-year review by his panel. (That finding was no news to any attentive observer, despite Herculean — and largely successful — efforts by the FCM to promote drinking the White House Kool-Aid.)

What is surprising in the case of Iran is the candor with which George W. Bush explains his chagrin at learning of the unanimous judgment of the intelligence community that Iran had not been working on a nuclear weapon since late 2003. [There is even new doubt about reports that the Iranians were working on a nuclear warhead before 2003. See Consortiumnews.com’s “Iranian Nuke Documents May Be Fake.”]

The Estimate’s findings were certainly not what the Israelis and their neoconservative allies in Washington had been telling the White House — and not what President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were dutifully proclaiming to the rest of us.

Shocked at Honesty

Bush lets it all hang out in Decision Points. He complains bitterly that the NIE “tied my hands on the military side.” He notes that the Estimate opened with this “eye-popping” finding of the intelligence community:

“We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

The former president adds, “The NIE’s conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press.” He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings “so that we could shape the news stories with the facts.” Facts?

The mind boggles at the thought that Bush actually thought the White House, even with de rigueur help from an ever-obliging FCM, could put a positive spin on intelligence conclusions that let a meretricious cat out of the bag—that showed that the Bush administration’s case for war against Iran was as flimsy as its bogus case for invading Iraq.

How painful it was to watch the contortions the hapless Stephen Hadley, national security adviser at the time, went through in trying to square that circle. His task was the more difficult since, unlike the experience with the dishonestly edited/declassified version of what some refer to as the Whore of Babylon — the Oct. 1, 2002 NIE on WMD in Iraq, this time the managers of the Estimate made sure that the declassified version of the key judgments presented a faithful rendering of the main points in the classified Estimate.

A disappointed Bush writes, “The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a ‘great victory.’” Bush’s apparent “logic” here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e. whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false.

But can you blame Bush for his chagrin? Alas, the NIE had knocked out the props from under the anti-Iran propaganda machine, imported duty-free from Israel and tuned up by neoconservatives here at home.

How embarrassing. Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence analysis, unanimously approved “with high confidence” by16 agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney were lying about the “Iranian nuclear threat.”

It is inconceivable that as the drafting of the Estimate on Iran proceeded during 2007, the intelligence community would have kept the White House in the dark about the emerging tenor of its conclusions. And yet, just a month before the Estimate was issued, Bush was claiming that the threat from Iran could lead to “World War III.”

The Russians More Honest?

Ironically, Russian President Vladimir Putin, unencumbered by special pleading and faux intelligence, had come to the same conclusions as the NIE.

Putin told French President Nicolas Sarkozy in early October 2007:

“We don’t have information showing that Iran is striving to produce nuclear weapons. That’s why we’re proceeding on the basis that Iran does not have such plans.”

In a mocking tone, Putin asked what evidence the U.S. and France had for asserting that Iran intends to make nuclear weapons. And, adding insult to injury, during a visit to Tehran on Oct. 16, 2007, Putin warned: “Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility."

This brought an interesting outburst by President Bush the next day at a press conference, a bizarre reaction complete with his famously tortured syntax:

Q. “Mr. President, I'd like to follow on Mr.--on President Putin's visit to Tehran … about the words that Vladimir Putin said there. He issued a stern warning against potential U.S. military action against Tehran. …Were you disappointed with [Putin’s] message?”

Bush: “I -- as I say, I look forward to -- if those are, in fact, his comments, I look forward to having him clarify those … And so I will visit with him about it.”

Q. “But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?”

Bush: “I think so long -- until they suspend and/or make it clear that they -- that their statements aren't real, yes, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian -- if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace.

“But this is -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding world war III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously, and we'll continue to work with all nations about the seriousness of this threat.”

Can’t Handle the Truth

In his memoir, Bush laments: “I don’t know why the NIE was written the way it was. … Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact — and not a good one.” Spelling out how the Estimate had tied his hands “on the military side,” Bush included this (apparently unedited) kicker:

“But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”

Thankfully, not even Dick Cheney could persuade Bush to repair the juggernaut and let it loose for war on Iran. The avuncular Vice President has made it clear that he was very disappointed in his protégé. On Aug. 30, 2009, he told “Fox News Sunday” that he was isolated among Bush advisers in his enthusiasm for war with Iran.

“I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,” Cheney said when asked whether the Bush administration should have launched a pre-emptive attack on Iran before leaving office.

Bush briefed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before the NIE was released. Bush later said publicly that he did not agree with his own intelligence agencies. [For more on the Bush memoir’s conflicts with the truth, see Consortiumnews.com’s “George W. Bush: Dupe or Deceiver?”]

And it is entirely possible that the Iran-war juggernaut would have been repaired and turned loose anyway, were it not for strong opposition by the top military brass who convinced Bush that Cheney, his neocon friends and Olmert had no idea of the chaos that war with Iran would unleash.

There’s lots of evidence that this is precisely what Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and then-CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon told Bush, in no uncertain terms. And it is a safe bet that these two were among those hinting broadly to Bush that the NIE was likely to “leak,” if he did not himself make its key judgments public.

Whew!

What About Now?

The good news is that Cheney is gone and that Adm. Mullen is still around.

The bad news is that Adm. Fallon was sacked for making it explicitly clear that, “We’re not going to do Iran on my watch,” and there are few flag officers with Fallon’s guts and honesty. Moreover, President Barack Obama continues to show himself to be an invertebrate vis-à-vis Israel and its neocon disciples.

Meanwhile, a draft NIE update on Iran’s nuclear program, completed earlier this year, is dead in its tracks, apparently because anti-Iran hawks inside the Obama administration are afraid it will leak. It is said to repeat pretty much the same conclusions as the NIE from 2007.

There are other ominous signs. The new Director of National Intelligence, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is a subscriber to the Tenet school of malleability. It was Clapper whom former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put in charge of imagery analysis to ensure that no one would cast serious doubt on all those neocon and Iraqi “defector” reports of WMD in Iraq.

And, when no WMD caches were found, it was Clapper who blithely suggested, without a shred of good evidence, that Saddam Hussein had sent them to Syria. This was a theory also being pushed by neocons both to deflect criticism of their false assurances about WMD in Iraq and to open a new military front against another Israeli nemesis, Syria.

In these circumstances, there may be some value in keeping the NIE update bottled up. At least that way, Clapper and other malleable managers won’t have the chance to play chef to another “cooked-to-order” analysis.

On the other hand, the neocons and our invertebrate President may well decide to order Clapper to “fix” the updated Estimate to fit in better with a policy of confrontation toward Iran. In that case, the new Director of National Intelligence might want to think twice. For Clapper could come a cropper. How?

The experience of 2007 showed that there are still some honest intelligence analysts around with integrity and guts—and with a strong aversion to managers who prostitute their work. This time around, such truth-tellers could opt for speedy, anonymous ways of getting the truth out—like, say, WikiLeaks.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27 years as a CIA intelligence analyst, his duties included chairing NIEs and preparing The President’s Daily Brief. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

This article appeared first on Consortiumnews.com.

Hundreds of Concerned Citizens Protest Poison Tar Sands Oil Pipeline

2010-11-18T08:36:00.001-06:00

Sierra Club National Week of Action Reveals Public Outcry against Keystone XL Pipeline

On Thursday, November 18, the Sierra Club released a new report, "Toxic Tar Sands: Profiles from the Front Lines," exposing the risks Americans face from expanded imports of Canada’s dirty tar sands oil. The State Department is currently considering approval for the massive Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry toxic tar sands oil across the United States.

Coinciding with the report release, hundreds of concerned citizens attended town hall meetings and demonstrations calling on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to stop the pipeline.

"As our nation’s worst-ever economic recession drags on, creating jobs in the clean energy sector should be priority number one," said Kate Collarulli, Director of the Sierra Club Dirty Fuels campaign. "Building the poisonous Keystone XL pipeline would put the brakes on clean energy, and exacerbate the pollution and public health problems that come with America’s dependence on dirty, dangerous oil."

The Sierra Club report details how the Keystone XL pipeline project would damage America’s health and clean energy economy, from start to finish:

Extraction of tar sands oil the pipeline would carry requires clearcutting ancient forest and using huge amounts of water and energy, then leaving behind toxic lakes linked to cancer

An oil spill from the pipeline could devastate aquifers that supply water to 30 percent of America’s irrigated farmland. More than 2,554 oil pipeline spills occurred in the U.S. between the years 2000-2009.

The pipeline would exacerbate air pollution and cancer, respiratory illness, and other health problems in communities surrounding oil refineries in Houston, Detroit, and Chicago.

Sierra Club members and concerned citizens from Montana to Texas spoke out this week against the pipeline, calling and emailing the State Department to ask Secretary Clinton to fully examine the pipeline’s impacts on public health and the environment before issuing permits for the project to move forward.

Tar Sands Frontlines Events:

On Thursday in Detroit, MI, dozens of residents of an African American community in southeast Detroit gathered next to the Marathon Oil refinery which is currently being expanded to accept tar sands oil from the Keystone XL pipeline. Detroit demonstrators held signs saying: 'Secretary Clinton: our Bodies are not Toxic Waste Zones!' and 'Clean Energy Jobs, Not Poison Pipelines!' Dr. Dolores Leonard, a retired professor who lives a few blocks from the Marathon refinery and was featured in the Sierra Club report, spoke at the event, saying, "there are so many health and quality-of-life problems resulting from all the heavy industry – and now tar sands – in the neighborhood, and we live with it every day. This tar sands refinery brings illness for miles around, along with stress for residents who are watching it being built… [We feel] trapped and helpless."
On Thursday in Lincoln, NE, ranchers and farmers whose land would be traversed by the Keystone XL pipeline met for a Town Hall Meeting to educate themselves about risks of the pipeline and thank their U.S. Senators Ben Nelson and Mike Johanns for expressing concerns about the pipeline to Secretary Clinton.
On Friday in downtown Chicago, IL, protestors with Rainforest Action Network will demonstrate outside of a conference of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, of which TransCanada – owner of the Keystone XL pipeline – is a member.
On Friday in Houston, TX, the Sierra Club will hold a press conference on the steps of City Hall, calling on Houston Mayor Annise Parker and Secretary Clinton to protect them from the polluting pipeline. Juan Parras, a resident of the Ship Channel neighborhood, will be joined by public health experts in speaking about Houston air pollution and increased likelihood of childhood leukemia, asthma, lung disease, cancer, and other diseases that would come from refining toxic tar sands oil. "Houstonians need more time to weigh in on the harmful effects of the Keystone XL pipeline," said Parras. "We are asking Secretary Clinton and Mayor Parker to fully evaluate the impacts of toxic tar sands oil before they bring it into our backyard."
On Friday in Missoula, MT, activists with the Indigenous Environmental Network and Northern Rockies Rising Tide will convene for an 'International Tar Sands Resistance Summit' to strategize about aiding communities negatively impacted by the Alberta tar sands excavation, the Keystone XL pipeline, and massive equipment shipments connected to pipeline construction.
Anti-pipeline activities also stretch into next week. Concerned citizens in Sioux Falls, SD, plan to hold a press conference featuring Carolyn Harkness and Ed Cable, whose rural community would be destroyed by a proposed new tar sands oil refinery, Hyperion.
In Topeka, KS, public officials and Sierra Club members will meet to express concerns about economically-strained municipalities granting massive tax breaks for TransCanada’s 'Keystone Cushing extension' pipeline, which has already been completed through a wide swath of Kansas farmland. Kansans will hear from Harry Bennett, a grain marketer and family farmer whose well-water supply is threatened by the pipeline. "This [tar sands oil] pipeline is a ticking time bomb," Bennett says. "A leak would take seconds to poison the land I’ve lived off for thirty-two years." [Note to Kansans: details for the Topeka event have not yet been announced.]

In the coming weeks, citizens will continue to organize and speak out against the Keystone XL pipeline and urge Secretary Clinton to support moving America beyond oil, towards a clean energy economy that creates new jobs, increases efficiency and grows domestic clean energy sources like wind and solar.

"This pipeline is not in our national interest. Fortunately, Secretary Clinton can still stop this dangerous project from moving forward," said Collarulli. "The last thing we need is more contamination of American air, water, and land from toxic Canadian tar sands oil."

Naomi Oreskes: 'Merchants of Doubt'

2010-10-30T14:17:00.001-05:00

False Equivalencies and Selling Doubt: Naomi Oreskes at the University of Kansas

By
Bob Sommer
Uncommon Hours

One of the principal rhetorical devices of the reactionary right is the false equivalency. Creationism deserves an equal hearing to the science of evolution. The hate speech and violence of Tea Partiers (both actual and threatened) are somehow comparable to criticism of W by progressives during the long national nightmare of his presidency.

False equivalencies simplify arguments – for the media, for elections, for cable talk shows. They create doubt. They appeal to our sense of fairness. They’re easy.

But what they’re usually not is accurate or truthful. They’re also not organic to the logic or facts of a given argument. Fox News, Limbaugh, Beck, et al are the greatest current purveyors of false equivalencies, but the ease with which they use them owes much to the long history of pseudo-science used to disrupt efforts to address the dangers of tobacco use, the ozone hole, acid rain, and DDT. Now there’s climate change to deny.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have traced this history in a new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press).

Oreskes spoke recently at the University of Kansas. She described the institutional and corporate roots of the sham science used to promote opposition to addressing the threat of climate change and the greenhouse gas effect. Dr. James Hansen raised concerns about the rate of global warming in 1988, which resulted in the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The initial source of doubts about Hansen’s findings came from the George C. Marshall Institute, one of the original conservative “think tanks.”

The Marshall Institute and others like it (e.g., the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute) succeed not so much by debunking the science of climate change as by creating enough doubt about its validity through innuendo, suggestion, faulty logic and data, and false equivalencies to obstruct any progress toward addressing the problem.

The Marshall Institute’s air of gravitas is no fluke. Its founders included scientists Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow, both internationally recognized physicists but neither of them climate scientists. Yet, as Oreskes pointed out, they were willing to risk their reputations in order to take a stand against scientific concerns about the effects of acid rain and DDT, the health risks of tobacco, and finally climate change.

Why?

Not money, Oreskes said. Rather, “free market fundamentalism.”

Seitz, Jastrow, and others had taken up the ideology of the free market as developed by Milton Friedman and the so-called Chicago School of Economics, based at the University of Chicago.* The threats posed by climate science, anti-smoking campaigns, or prohibiting the use of DDT are threats against business and economic expansion, and by implication, against freedom itself. Notably, climate change is a global challenge. Coal-burning is a problem for the planet, not just for one country or region. Thus governmental solutions are needed – and thus, it’s an easy leap for conservatives and libertarians to raise the specters of socialism and communism, which are ready-made to instill fear in a largely uninformed electorate.

During the question period, Oreskes noted the complicity of journalists in spreading doubt by treating the Marshall Institute and similar organizations as sources of “scientific” information without questioning the validity of the data or the motives of the organization. Thus, a false equivalency is spread. “Both sides” get a hearing, and doubt takes root.

* Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a compelling and thorough study of Friedman’s impact on global politics. Klein demonstrates the fallacy of the so-called “free market,” which, in instances she describes all over the globe, is supported by government intervention and sanctioned violence.

There's more! Maher's 3rd clip: O'Donnell's Dabblings (or should we say babblings!)

2010-10-02T09:40:00.001-05:00

e say

Christine O'Donnell: "Evolution is a myth!"

2010-09-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

Watchdog Faults FBI for ‘Factually Weak’ Basis for Investigating Activists

2010-09-22T00:01:00.003-05:00

By Marian Wang
ProPublica

The FBI in recent years opened investigations into some U.S. activists with little basis, unjustifiably extended the duration of the probes, improperly retained information about activist groups in its files, and classified its investigations of “nonviolent civil disobedience” as investigations into “acts of terrorism,” according to a report released today [1] (PDF) by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

The FBI activities reviewed by the Justice Department took place from 2001 to 2006, and involved groups including the Thomas Merton Center (a Pittsburgh social justice center), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Greenpeace, The Catholic Worker (communities of religious pacifists) and a Quaker peace activist.

The report by the Justice Department watchdog didn’t find that the FBI targeted these groups on the basis of their free speech activities — which would be a serious violation [2] of FBI guidelines — but did fault the agency for other reasons, most notably a “factually weak” basis for opening investigations.

“FBI agents and supervisors sometimes provided the [Office of the Inspector General] with speculative, after-the-fact rationalizations for their prior decisions to open investigations that we did not find persuasive,” the report said.

The report also found that that the FBI unnecessarily classified its probes as domestic terrorism investigations, even though some of the potential crimes were trespassing or vandalism — acts not normally considered to be terrorism. This classification resulted in several individuals improperly being placed on terrorism watchlists.

The Inspector General also found that the FBI gave “inaccurate and misleading” explanations to justify its attendance at a 2002 rally against the Iraq war organized by the Merton Center.

The FBI’s director, Robert Mueller, told a Senate committee in 2006 that his agents at the antiwar rally “were not concerned about the political dissent,” but were attempting to identify “persons of interest” expected to attend the rally.

That testimony wasn’t supported by an “extremely troubling” FBI document about the incident, the report noted. The document “described no legitimate purpose for the FBI to attend the event” and “supplied no evidence or even suspicion that any criminal or terrorist element was associated with the Merton Center or likely to be present at the event,” the report said.

The FBI, responding in an appendix to the report, acknowledged the inaccuracies. It said that incorrect information was provided to the FBI director, who then testified inaccurately before Congress.

“The FBI regrets that incorrect information was provided regarding this matter,” Deputy Director Timothy P. Murphy wrote in a letter to Inspector General Glenn Fine.

The surveillance of activists — both on the state level as well as the federal level — has been a recent topic of concern. As we’ve noted, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, apologized last week for a state contract [3] with an anti-terrorism consulting firm, which produced a document calling opponents to gas drilling “environmental extremists” and flagged these and other activists as potential threats to the state’s security.

The document’s section about environmental extremism, as we’ve noted [4], cited an FBI bulletin as the source of the information. In the document, the FBI assessed with “medium confidence” the threat that environmental extremists posed to the energy sector. (FBI “assessments,” under 2008 guidelines from the attorney general, are the agency’s “lowest level of investigative activity,” the Inspector General report said.)

The FBI has not responded to ProPublica's request for comment.

Rand Paul: In His Own Words

2010-09-21T09:17:00.000-05:00

Rand Paul in His Own Extreme Words: "I don't think anybody's gonna be missing a hill or two here and there."

2010-09-21T08:54:00.000-05:00

First Video Shows Senate Candidate Rand Paul’s Over-the Top Views

WASHINGTON, DC- Today the Sierra Club released a video it will be sending to members highlighting one of 2010’s most extreme political candidates, Rand Paul and urging Americans who voted for change in 2008 to vote again this November.

The video can be viewed at http://www.sierraclub.org/randpaul

"Tea Party Candidates like Rand Paul, Sharon Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, and Pat Toomey are trying to make Americans scared of even what little progress our country has made on clean energy, and global warming," said Cathy Duvall, Sierra Club's Political Director. "We are working to get the word out that we can't let these extremists run our government."

The campaign’s first video features clips from Senate candidate Rand Paul from Kentucky in which he supports destructive coal mining, mocks environment protection, dismisses global warming, and more. The video highlights some of his most outrageous quips, including his classic, "I don’t think anybody will be missing a hill or two here and there" dismissal of the destructive and controversial practice of exploding mountaintops for coal mining.

"We are telling our members and the public about the stark choices this election," said Duvall. "Do candidates support rebuilding America through a clean energy economy, or are they knee-jerk global warming deniers? Do they believe in responsible energy choices or the drill, baby, drill chant that led to the BP Disaster? Do they support giving Big Oil and corporations another bailout, or do they want to hold corporations accountable for the pollution they create?"

Michael Moore: Liberals & the 'New York Times' are to blame for the Iraq War

2010-09-16T08:45:00.002-05:00

Never Forget: Bad Wars Aren't Possible Unless Good People Back Them

By Michael Moore

I know we've been "free" of the Iraq War for two weeks now and our minds have turned to the new football season and Fashion Week in New York. And how exciting that the new fall TV season is just days away!

But before we get too far away from something we would all just like to forget, will you please allow me to just say something plain and blunt and necessary:

We invaded Iraq because most Americans -- including good liberals like Al Franken, Nicholas Kristof & Bill Keller of the New York Times, David Remnick of the New Yorker, the editors of the Atlantic and the New Republic, Harvey Weinstein, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and John Kerry -- wanted to.

Of course the actual blame for the war goes to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz because they ordered the "precision" bombing, the invasion, the occupation, and the theft of our national treasury. I have no doubt that history will record that they committed the undisputed Crime of the (young) Century.

But how did they get away with it, considering they'd lost the presidential election by 543,895 votes? They also knew that the majority of the country probably wouldn't back them in such a war (a Newsweek poll in October 2002 showed 61% thought it was "very important" for Bush to get formal approval from the United Nations for war -- but that never happened). So how did they pull it off?

They did it by getting liberal voices to support their war. They did it by creating the look of bipartisanship. And they convinced other countries' leaders like Tony Blair to get on board and make it look like it wasn't just our intelligence agencies cooking the evidence.

But most importantly, they made this war (and its public support) happen because Bush & Co. had brilliantly conned the New York Times into running a bunch of phony front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had all these "weapons of mass destruction." The administration gleefully fed this false information not to Fox News or the Washington Times. They gave it to America's leading liberal newspaper. They must have had a laugh riot each morning when they'd pick up the New York Times and read the nearly word-for-word scenarios and talking points that they had concocted in the Vice President's office.

I blame the New York Times more for this war than Bush. I expected Bush and Cheney to try and get away with what they did. But the Times -- and the rest of the press -- was supposed to STOP them by doing their job: Be a relentless watchdog of government and business -- and then inform the public so we can take action.

Instead, the New York Times gave the Bush administration the cover they needed. They could -- and did -- say, 'Hey, look, even the Times says Saddam has WMD!'

With this groundwork laid, the Bush crowd ended up convincing a whopping 70% of the public to support the war -- a public that had given him less than 48% of its vote in 2000.

Early liberal support for this war was the key ingredient in selling it to a majority of the public. I realize this is something that no one in the media -- nor most of us -- really wants to discuss. Who among us wants to feel the pain of having to remember that liberals, by joining with Bush, made this war happen?

Please, before our collective memory fades, I just want us to be honest with ourselves and present an unsanitized version of how they pulled off this war. I can guarantee you the revisionists will make sure the real truth will not enter the history books.

Children born when the war began started second grade this month.

Kids who were eleven in 2003 are now old enough to join up and get killed in Iraq in a "non-combat capacity."

They'll never understand how we got here if we don't.

So let me state this clearly: This war was aided and abetted by a) liberals who were afraid to stick their necks out and thus remained silent; and b) liberals who actually said they believed Colin Powell's cartoon presentation at the U.N. and then went against their better judgment by publicly offering their support for the invasion of Iraq.

First, there were those 29 (turncoat) Democratic senators who voted for the war. Then there was the embarrassing display of reporters who couldn't wait to be "embedded" and go for a joy ride on a Bradley tank.

But my real despair lies with the people I counted on for strong opposition to this madness -- but who left the rest of us alone, out on a limb, as we tried to stop the war.

In March of 2003, to be a public figure speaking out against the war was considered instant career suicide. Take the Dixie Chicks as Exhibit A. Their lead singer, Natalie Maines, uttered just one sentence of criticism -- and their career was effectively dead and buried at that moment. Bruce Springsteen spoke out in their defense, and a Colorado DJ was fired for refusing to not play their songs. That was about it. Crickets everywhere else.

Then MSNBC fired the only nightly critic of the war -- the television legend, Phil Donahue. No one at the network -- or any network -- spoke up on his behalf. There would never again be a Phil Donahue show. (Little did GE know that, when they soon filled that 8pm hour with a sports guy by the name of Keith Olbermann, they would end up with the war's most brilliant and fiercest critic, night after night after night.) There were a few others -- Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, Tim Robbins and Seymour Hersh -- who weren't afraid to speak the truth. But where was everyone else? Where were all those supposed liberal voices in the media?

Instead, this is what we were treated to back in 2003 and 2004:

Al Franken, who said he "reluctantly" was "a supporter of the war against Saddam." And six months into the war Al was still saying, "There were reasons to go to war against Iraq ... I was very ambivalent about it but I still don't know if it was necessarily wrong (to go to war)."
Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times, who attacked me and wrote a column comparing me to the nutty right-wingers who claimed Hillary had Vince Foster killed. He said people like me were "polarizing the political cesspool," and he chastised anyone who dared call Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq "lies."
Howell Raines, editor-in-chief of the "liberal" New York Times, who was, according to former Times editor Doug Frantz, "eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington ... He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaeda." The book Hard News reported that "according to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs..."
Bill Keller, at the time a columnist, who wrote: "We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war -- protecting America, relieving oppressed Iraqis or reforming the Middle East -- but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. ... we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking." (The New York Times is so left-wing that when Raines retired, they replaced him with... Keller.)
The New Yorker, the magazine for really smart liberals, found its editor-in-chief, David Remnick, supporting the war on its pages: "History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them. ... a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all." (To cover its ass, the New Yorker had another editor, Rick Hertzberg, write an anti-war editorial as a rebuttal.)

Some of the above have recanted their early support of the war. The Times fired its WMD correspondent and apologized to its readers. Al Franken has been a great Senator. Kristof now writes nice columns (check out last Sunday's).

But the support of the war by these leading liberals and the majority of the Democrats in the Senate made it safe for the Right to let loose a vicious and unchecked tirade of hate and threats on anyone (including myself) who dared to step out of line. It was not uncommon to hear the media describe me as "un-American," "anti-American," "aiding the terrorists," and being a "traitor."

Here are just a couple of examples of what was said about me over the airwaves by two of the nation's leading conservative commentators:

"Let me just tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my 'What Would Jesus Do' band, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, 'Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,' and then I'd see the little band: 'What Would Jesus Do?' And then I'd realize, 'Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.' And you know, well, I'm not sure." (Glenn Beck)

And:

"Well, I want to kill Michael Moore. Is that all right? All right. And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's just a joke on Moore." (Bill O'Reilly)

(Ironically, O'Reilly made his threat/joke the night after Janet Jackson's breast was bared at the Super Bowl -- which got CBS fined over half a million dollars because, you know, nipples are far more frightening than death threats.)

So that's how I'll personally remember the early war years: living with a real and present danger caused by the hate whipped up by right-wing radio and TV. (I've been advised not to recount certain specific incidents that happened to me, as it would only encourage other crazy people.)

So I dealt with it. And I'm still here. And I know many of you went through your own crap, standing up against the war at school, or work, or at Thanksgiving dinner, taking your own blows for simply saying what was the truth.

But how much easier it would have been for all of us if the liberal establishment had stood with us? We didn't own a daily newspaper, or a magazine with a circulation in the millions. We didn't have our own TV show or network. We weren't invited on shows like Meet the Press, because they simply could not allow our voice to be heard.

The media watchdog group FAIR reported that in the three weeks after the war started, the CBS Evening News allowed only one anti-war voice on their show -- and that was on one night in one soundbite (and that was four seconds of me in a line from my Oscar speech) -- even though in March of 2003 our anti-war numbers were in the millions (remember the huge demonstrations in hundreds of cities?). We were around 30% of the country according to most polls (that's nearly 100 million Americans!) and yet we had no way to communicate with each other aside from through the Nation and a few websites like CommonDreams.org and Truth-Out.org.

But that was no way to build a huge mass movement of Middle Americans to oppose the war. Unless you had just lucked out and been handed an Oscar on live television in front of a gazillion people where you had 45 seconds to say something before they cut you off and booed you off the stage (hahahaha), you had no public platform. (Jeez, I sure did get booed a lot that year: simply walking through an airport, or eating dinner in a restaurant, or sitting at a Laker game where they suddenly put me up on the Jumbotron and the place went so angry-crazy that Larry David, who was sitting next to me, felt that maybe for his own safety he should perhaps slide a few seats down or go get us a couple of wieners. Instead, he stuck by my side -- and his skillful ninja moves got us out of there alive after the game.)

I know it's hard to remember, but when this war started, there was no YouTube, no Facebook, no Twitter, no way for you to bypass the media lords so you could have your own friggin' say.

Too bad for the bastards, those days are over.

The next time around, it won't be so easy to shut up a country girl band or try to silence someone while he accepts his little gold statue -- or completely ignore the millions of citizens in the streets.

So now we can hope that one of our wars is over. Too bad we lost. I hate to lose, don't you? But the fact is, we lost the very day we invaded a sovereign nation that posed absolutely no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11. We lost lives (over 4,400 of ours, hundreds of thousands of theirs), we lost limbs (a total of 35,000 troops came back with various wounds and disabilities and God knows how many more with mental problems). We lost the money our grandchildren were supposed to live on.

And we lost our soul, who we were, what we stood for as a once-great country -- lost it all. Can we now ask for redemption -- for forgiveness? Can we be... "America" again?

I guess we'll see. The vast majority of the country eventually came around to the Dixie Chicks' position. And we elected an anti-Iraq-war guy by the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

But, please, promise yourselves never to forget how our country went crazy 7 1/2 years ago -- even though, to many people at the time, it seemed completely normal. And I'm here to tell you, no matter how much better it's gotten, no matter how normal you may think things are now, we're still halfway nuts. Just listen to the new batch of "sensible pundits" as they start to beat the drums about what we should do to Iran. One war down, one (or two or three) to go.

C'mon, Mr. President, not one more kid needs to die overseas wearing a uniform with our flag on it. We can't win like this. Let's dig a few thousand wells in Afghanistan, build a few free mosques, leave behind some food and clothing, fix their electrical grid, issue an apology and set up a Facebook page so they can stay in touch with us -- and then let's get the hell out. Your own National Security Advisor and your CIA Director have told you there are less than 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country. 100???

100,000 U.S. troops going after 100 al-Qaeda? Is this a Looney Tunes presentation? "A-ba-dee-a-ba-dee-a-ba-dee -- That's All Folks!" Let's get real. I'm glad one war is "over." But I know how we got there -- and I'm willing now to fight just as hard to stop these other wars if you won't, Mr. Obama.

Your call.

Yours,

Michael Moore

Mike@MichaelMoore.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Just a thought, Mr. President. Can I ask that you go back and watch this movie I made -- Fahrenheit 9/11. There might be some answers there. I give you my permission to download it for free by going to this site: TorrentHound.com. Don't tell the studio I said it was ok! They've only made a half a billion $$ on it so far.

P.P.S. To everyone on my list: Thanks to your thousands of generous donations, we've raised over $60,000 for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero. This has made news around the world, that there are Americans who believe in our stated American principles.

Dave Eggers tells the story of one man's ordeal in Hurricane Katrina

2010-09-16T01:00:00.001-05:00

Zeitoun, by novelist Dave Eggers, is the story of one man’s ordeal in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

By Leela Yellesetty

DAVE EGGERS' Zeitoun has been accumulating readers and awards for over a year now, but if you haven't picked it up yet, there could be no better time.

As we mark five years since the government's horrendous mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, and witness the disturbing Islamophobia accompanying the ninth anniversary of the "war on terror," Zeitoun offers an illuminating microcosm of both.
Zeitoun is the true story of how one immigrant's "American Dream" turned into a living nightmare. In 2005, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, known to most by his last name, ran a successful painting and contracting business with his wife Kathy in New Orleans, where they lived with their four children.

In the first part of the book we get to know and love the Zeitoun family. As Eggers said in an interview:

I was seeking to just tell a story about an all-American family that happens to be a Muslim. I wanted to sort of "de-exoticize" the idea of the Muslim-American family--to allow readers to learn about Kathy's conversion [to Islam] and see the functioning of a family that is exactly like their own. So a Christian reader can say, "Pretty much everything about that family is exactly like mine except I go to church and they go to a mosque."

I think storytelling has the power to sort of walk you through it, and put yourself in the shoes of another person...I think it's kind of startling that even though after 9/11 there has been this constant examination of Islam in the American media--"Who are Muslims? What do they want?"--and yet I think there is still an incredible amount of ignorance and misunderstanding.

It is this intimate connection to the family the author so effortlessly establishes that makes what happens to them all the more unbearable.

AS THE hurricane approached, Kathy and the kids left the city but Zeitoun stayed behind, as he had through countless other storms, to take care of his own property and that of friends and clients who had entrusted him with their keys.

When the levees broke, submerging the city in water, Zeitoun found another calling: being a hero. In the days following the storm, he paddled around the city in an aluminum canoe, rescuing stranded residents, feeding abandoned animals, and offering supplies and assistance to those in need.

The camaraderie and generosity shown by Zeitoun and other storm survivors was in marked contrast to the actions of government at all levels. Instead of aid, they sent guns: police, National Guard, Army, snipers, private mercenaries. Media reports fueled the hysteria with unsubstantiated claims of rape, looting and the general "animalistic tendencies" of (the mostly Black and poor) residents left behind.

Add to this the fact that FEMA was subsumed under the department of Homeland Security, and you begin to understand the toxic mix of circumstances for a man picked up for alleged looting who happened to be a Syrian immigrant.

Camp Greyhound, the Guantánamo-style open-air prison where Zeitoun was first held, is a perfect symbol of the twisted priorities which prevailed after the storm. It was built by prisoners from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Eggers writes:

This complex and exceedingly efficient government operation was completed while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and highway overpasses. The portable toilets were available and working at Camp Greyhound while there were no working bathrooms at the Convention Center and Superdome a few blocks away. Hundreds of cases of water and MREs were readily available for the guards and prisoners, while those stranded nearby were fighting for food and water.

I'll let readers discover for themselves the Kafkaesque chain of events that unfolded for the Zeitoun family. If it doesn't make your blood boil, then you probably don't have a pulse. Many reading this book will doubtless be shocked that such a thing could happen in America.

Unfortunately, as many on the left know all too well, this is far from an isolated incident. The tragedy continues for countless others--from New Orleans residents still locked up or too poor to return home, to the countless innocent lives caught up in the racist "war on terror," to the victims of hate crimes stoked by the latest round of anti-mosque hysteria. The response to this year's earthquake in Haiti was, if anything, a more exaggerated horror show than that of Katrina.

Despite the tragic subject matter, the message of Zeitoun is ultimately a hopeful one, and a call to action. All of Eggers' proceeds from the book are being donated to the Zeitoun Foundation, which divides the money to various causes working to promote understanding of Muslim communities, exoneration of the unjustly incarcerated and the rebuilding of New Orleans.

Zeitoun's canoe perhaps provides an apt metaphor for the intersection of these causes: we are truly all in the same boat. Against a world in which fear, prejudice and militarism are paramount, the Zeitouns assert a common humanity.

We get a glimpse of this early on in the book, when the family receives a complaint about the implications of their company's rainbow logo:

Kathy wondered if her husband, who did not at that point have any gay friends or family members, might want to change the logo, to keep their message from being misconstrued. But Zeitoun barely gave it a thought...

"Think about it," Zeitoun laughed. "We're a Muslim couple running a painting company in Louisiana. Not such a good idea to turn away clients." Anyone who had a problem with rainbows, he said, would surely have trouble with Islam.

So the rainbow remained.

Originally posted at http://socialistworker.org/2010/09/15/hope-amid-katrinas-horrors

Tar Sands soon coming to the U.S.

2010-09-15T05:30:00.001-05:00

From itsgettinghotinhere.org:

By Juliana Williams

Today, the Utah Governor’s Energy Initiative Task Force will hold a public hearing to gather input on Utah’s 10-year energy plan. This hearing comes one day after the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining (DOGM) gave final approval for a tar sands mine in Eastern Utah, the first tar sands mine in the country.

“Approving tar sands one day, then asking for public input on the state’s energy future the next is either dishonest or dysfunctional,” said Ashley Anderson, coordinator for Peaceful Uprising, a US climate action organization based in Utah.

The PR Springs mine, to be operated by Canadian-based Earth Energy Resources, would occupy 213 acres in Grand and Uintah Counties in Eastern Utah. The site is within the Colorado River watershed, which supports 30 million people across the region. Earth Energy Resources expects to produce 2,000 barrels of crude bitumen per day, 350 days per year for 7 years.

“This project has no real value or contribution to society,” said John Weisheit, Colorado Riverkeeper and Conservation Director of Living Rivers. “The total amount of oil produced by this mine over seven years of operation would cover just 7 hours of American oil demand – a tiny blip on the radar. However, it will take millennia to restore the watershed they are about to destroy.”

Tar sands, also called oil sands or heavy oil, produce one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. On average, each barrel of tar sands oil generates three times the greenhouse gases as conventional fuel, consumes or contaminates two to four barrels of water, and exposes ground water to toxic pollutants such as arsenic, lead, mercury, nickel and cyanide. DOGM refused to consider the climate impacts of tar sands in the permitting process. Extraction of tar sands in Canada has already devastated an area the size of Florida.

Although DOGM issued tentative approval of the mine in September 2009, they failed to notify Grand County until March 2010. In response, Peaceful Uprising and Living Rivers requested a hearing with DOGM held in July to review the environmental impacts of the mine.

“No one in the government is asking whether or not tar sands development is good for Utah,” said Anderson. “Instead, DOGM is simply rubber-stamping the project while the State pretends to care about renewable energy development at these hearings.”

Despite approval from DOGM, Earth Energy Resources must still apply for one final permit from Grand County and raise up to $35 million dollars from investors before it can begin construction of the mine. This means we still have two small windows of opportunity to stop this mine, but it will definitely be an uphill struggle.

If you are from Utah, please send comments about the State’s 10-year energy vision to Ashlee Buchholze at abuchholz@utah.gov.

Sen. Baucus Calls for Hasty Approval of Dangerous Oil Pipeline

2010-09-14T13:08:00.000-05:00

Proposed Tar Sands Pipeline Threatens Water, Air, Farmland, Health

This week, Montana Senator Max Baucus asked the U.S. State Department to speed a decision on whether or not to approve a massive new pipeline designed to carry the world's dirtiest oil from Canada into the United States.

The Keystone XL pipeline would crisscross Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, putting drinking water at risk for thousands of Americans and threatening one of the most important sources of agricultural water in the United States. The U.S. State Department is currently considering whether or not to grant a permit for the pipeline, and has received tens of thousands of comments from Americans urging that it not be built.

Senator Baucus' letter to the State Department falls in the midst of a series of oil pipeline disasters that underscore the risks the Keystone XL project would bring.

Kate Colarulli, Campaign Coordinator for Sierra Club Dirty Fuels, said, "It's disappointing to see Senator Baucus stand on the side of Canadian oil companies rather than protect the health and well-being of Americans."

Pipelines are dangerous. Disasters in Michigan and Illinois have polluted rivers and soil with more than one million gallons of oil and have put American families at risk.

According to Colarulli, a Canadian oil company wants to build a massive pipeline that would carry the world's dirtiest oil into America, jeopardizing the health of millions of residents.
"The Keystone XL pipeline," she said, "would bring toxic tar sands oil into America's heartland, putting drinking water and farming at risk. Worse, dirty oil from the pipeline would end up in refineries in American cities, ratcheting up cancer-causing air pollution."

American communities are at risk from toxic pipelines because the oil industry is eager to turn a profit.

"The State Department needs to take a good hard look at the facts about pipeline safety and tar sands oil," Colarulli said. "This summer's oil disasters have taught us just how high the cost of oil can be."

Rather than put communities in harm's way from a toxic pipeline, we should be investing in the kind of clean energy that will end our dependence on oil, create good, safe jobs, and infuse new life into our economy.

Tell the EPA to regulate Toxic Coal Ash Emissions

2010-09-13T10:31:00.000-05:00

Sierra Club Launches New Facebook Tool, Ads, Video

2010-09-13T10:30:00.000-05:00

Washington, DC: As the Environmental Protection Agency continues a series of hearings across the country on how to regulate toxic coal ash, the Sierra Club is launching new efforts to educate and engage citizens, many of whom are unaware that they may live near a toxic coal ash site.

The Sierra Club's new Facebook application, the Toxic Coal Ash Site Locator, seeks to remedy that problem, allowing you to find out how close you, your friends and family live to these toxic dumps.

Left over after coal is burned, coal ash contains a dangerous mix of arsenic, mercury, lead and other pollution, pollution known to cause cancer and other serious illnesses. Living near some coal ash sites can be more dangerous than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

Already hundreds of residents from 16 states have traveled to hearings held in Virginia, Colorado, and Texas to speak out against this toxic threat. College students, tribal members, faith leaders, physicians and moms have been among those to voice their support for strong protections from dangerous coal ash.

Buses and carpools of concerned citizens from other parts of the country are expected at the EPA's remaining hearings. The Sierra Club will be arranging flights over massive coal ash dumps, holding rallies and even a human reenactment of the tragic coal ash disaster in Tennessee that turned the nation's attention to the problem of coal ash.

Print ads highlighting the cost of inaction on our children's future will run in several of the hearing cities including the Denver, Dallas, Charlotte and Pittsburgh. The print ads are part of an ongoing advertising campaign which also includes online ads on sites like Facebook, Red, Green and Blue, and Science Daily, online videos and a radio tour of the affected states.

Remaining hearings include:
- Charlotte, NC on September 14
- Chicago, IL on September 16
- Pittsburgh, PA on September 21
- Louisville, KY on September 28
- Knoxville, TN, week of October 25

For details visit www.sierraclub.org/coalash

Contact:
Virginia Cramer, 804-225-9113 x 102

Americans Call For Tighter Regulation of Hydraulic 'Fracking' in Oil and Gas Drilling

2010-09-10T13:39:00.000-05:00

Overflow Crowds of Concerned Residents Attend EPA Public Meetings across the Country

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. – Thousands of Americans are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a comprehensive study of the environmental and health threats of natural gas fracturing. Pollution from this drilling technique – commonly known as fracking – has been the focus of three heavily attended public meetings in Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania this summer. The final meetings, next week in Binghamton, N.Y., drew so much interest that the EPA was initially forced to reschedule them.

"Natural gas companies should welcome additional scrutiny and embrace regulation that will protect public health and the environment," said Sierra Club Deputy Executive Director Bruce Hamilton. "Indeed some of them have already called for greater disclosure. EPA’s proposed scope of study is a good first step but it can and should go much further. This hydraulic fracturing study must be fully funded to allow an in-depth analysis of the data. We also need changes in federal and state regulations requiring this industry to protect our air, water, and communities."

Fracking involves the high pressure injection of enormous amounts of water, sand and chemicals into drilling sites to force gas deposits to the surface. Estimates vary, but anywhere from 30% to 85% of fracking fluids remain underground and could potentially harm underground water resources. Most wells are fracked several times over the life of the well. The EPA should also study threats to geological formations from drilling and fracking to identify ground fractures that have the potential to carry fracking fluids to domestic drinking water supplies.

"Oil and gas drilling is spreading across the American landscape with little regulation, putting our air, water and health at risk," says Gwen Lachelt, Director of EARTHWORKS’ Oil & Gas Accountability Project. "This industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and most other environmental laws. Hopefully this new EPA study will provide a scientifically reliable, independent analysis of the impacts of fracking."

Improperly sealed drilling wells can also contaminate groundwater. The industry claims that less than 1 percent of fracking fluids are comprised of chemical agents but EARTHWORKS' research shows that companies can use as much as 40 tons of chemicals for every million gallons of water used in fracking. There are no requirements at the federal level to compel industry to disclose what chemicals it is injecting into the ground, although just this week the EPA announced that it is asking natural gas companies to voluntarily disclose this information.

The EPA proposes to study the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and its potential drinking water pollution. The EPA’s Science Advisory Board -- an independent, external federal advisory committee -- recently recommended that EPA’s study look at the entire life cycle of fracturing operations.

Oil and gas is produced in 34 states from an estimated 800,000 wells, according to the Energy Information Agency. Under the 2005 Energy Policy Act, fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Oil and gas producers are also exempted from part of the Clean Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) governing hazardous waste, the federal Superfund law, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (which requires companies to report their toxic releases), and part of the Clean Air Act. These exemptions threaten the air, water and health of communities affected by natural gas.

The final public meetings on the proposed EPA study are September 13 and 15, 2010 in Binghamton, NY, in the heart of the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation. For more information on these meetings, contact Roger Downs at roger.downs@sierraclub.org or Nadia Steinzor at nsteinzor@earthworksaction.org.

For more information visit
http://sierraclub.org/naturalgas/
http://hfmeeting.cadmusweb.com/
http://www.earthworksaction.org/hydfracking.cfm

Sebastian Junger's 'War,' reviewed in Rain Taxi

2010-08-02T06:51:00.002-05:00

War
Sebastian Junger
Twelve ($26.99)

by Bob Sommer

In April of this year, U.S. military forces abandoned the five-year effort to control Afghanistan’s notorious and remote Korengal Valley. It wasn’t necessarily surprising that few Americans noticed; a brief and unceremonious NATO press release euphemistically described the move as a “realignment.” But then, this war has gone on for years without much attention paid by many, though Dancing with the Stars got a ratings boost that same month as Kate Gosselin kicked up her heels in living rooms throughout the land.

My son spent fifteen months in the so-called “Valley of Death” with a company from the 10th Mountain Division—the predecessors of the soldiers depicted in Sebastian Junger’s new book, War—so this quiet retreat from the Korengal, following an exhaustive and costly effort, seemed to me emblematic of how inconspicuously the war in Afghanistan has been waged.

Read the complete review at Rain Taxi Review of Books

To see what 'clean coal' energy from Holcomb II is really all about, Kansans need only look to the 'costly nightmare' in Illinois

2010-07-14T07:00:00.002-05:00

A Tale of Two Coal-Fired Utility Plants
By
Bob Sommer

As public hearings begin on the question of whether to allow construction of an 895 megawatt coal-fired utility plant in southwest Kansas, it’s worthwhile to consider the consequences for Illinois residents who agreed to a similar plan long ago. While most plans for coal plants have been shelved in recent years due to financial risks, one plant slipped by in Illinois, which is now causing many to second guess the decision to invest in such a risky energy source. Notably, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich played a significant role in promoting the project.

Promised cheap energy from so-called “clean coal,” communities throughout Illinois and the Midwest may find themselves with higher utility bills after costs for plant construction more than doubled from the original estimates, according to a report in The Chicago Tribune. Additionally, the 800 megawatt Prairie State Energy Campus plant will be anything but “clean.” Pumping millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, it will be the single largest contributor to greenhouse gases built in the U.S. in the last 25 years.

Further, most of the new jobs associated with the plant will not be at the utility, but rather at the nearby Peabody Energy coal mining operation. For Kansans this is important for a couple of reasons. There are no similar prospects for mining jobs in Kansas, and the estimated 200 new long-term jobs promised by Sunflower Electric pale before the possibility of thousands of jobs that a clear cut focus on wind and other renewable energy sources might bring to the state. But, if we fill the grid with coal-fired electrons, we impair our ability to develop fully clean energy resources by cutting into wind’s market share.

The close links between mining and energy production are hardly limited to Illinois. Big coal has a big interest in seeing a new Sunflower plant built in Kansas. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a Colorado-based energy consortium that has promised to purchase electricity from Kansas and numbers Sunflower among its members, also belongs to the Western Fuels Association, which owns mines in Wyoming—where coal would be purchased for Holcomb II. And the last time Sunflower attempted to gain approval for this plant through lobbying efforts in the legislature, Peabody Energy, which operates coal mines in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Southwest, underwrote some of the advertising to promote the plant. The takeaways here are that the economic benefits will leave the state, along with most of the electricity, while the costs and environmental damage will remain, and the parties who most tout the plant’s benefits to Kansans have multiple interests in promoting coal over other energy options.

Which suggests another lesson from the Illinois morality tale—namely, that building vast coal-burning energy plants is an investment in the past, not the future. As awareness has grown of the imminent threat that carbon emissions on this scale pose to our environment and way of life, similar construction plans have been scrapped all over the country. A recent survey also revealed that a majority of Kansans favor developing clean energy sources.

The estimates for building new coal-burning utility plants usually fail to include the environmental costs. For example, with diminishing water resources in the Midwest, do we preserve water to grow food in Kansas, or do we use scarce water resources to produce power for Colorado, who will get most of the electricity produced and whom we have fought for years over water? Air quality may also be affected throughout central and eastern Kansas and beyond. And what effect will particulate matter, mercury, and other noxious elements have on soil and crops throughout the state? Finally, with all that we now know about the threat of greenhouse gases to the planet’s health, does it make sense to pursue this backward-looking course when so many alternatives are available, and when the project is not needed in Kansas?

The public comment period for Sunflower's Holcomb Station coal plant runs from July 1 through August 15.

Public comments can be submitted at the KDHE website at any time during that period.

For the time and location of public hearings, click the following links:
• August 2, 2010 in Overland Park, Kansas
• August 4, 2010 in Salina, Kansas
• August 5, 2010 in Garden City, Kansas

Helpful information on the potential impact of the proposed Sunflower plant can be found at these sites:
• http://www.blogger.com/“http://www.gpace.org/”
• http://www.blogger.com/“http://rethinkrepowerks.com/”
• http://www.blogger.com/“http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/ks/#”
• http://www.350.org/

Bob Sommer is the Political Chair of the Kansas Sierra Club.

Pfc. Bradley Manning could go to prison for half a century for the 'crime' of revealing the truth

2010-07-09T21:25:00.001-05:00

Charged for revealing the truth
By
Alan Maass

First posted at socialistworker.org
July 9, 2010

THE U.S. military is pressing criminal charges against a whistleblower for allegedly leaking information to the watchdog Web site WikiLeaks.org, including the video of an Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed at least 12 civilians and caused a scandal for the Pentagon.

Pfc. Bradley Manning faces eight charges, including espionage, and could go to jail for more than half a century if found guilty.

All for the "crime" of exposing the unacknowledged crimes of the American military.

Manning has also been accused of turning over at least 150,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department to WikiLeaks--as well as encrypted video of another air strike, this one in Granai, Afghanistan, which killed 140 civilians. WikiLeaks has so far published only one such embarrassing cable, and it has not released the Granai video.

The 22-year-old Manning, who was stationed at a U.S. base east of Baghdad, was arrested by military authorities in May and has been in detention in Kuwait since. He was fingered to the military by a computer hacker named Adrian Lamo. Lamo claims that Manning started communicating with him online, and admitted to being the source of the WikiLeaks exposé.

But there's reason to doubt Lamo's story--not least because he was convicted of hacking into news and corporate Web sites and served a sentence of house arrest and probation that could leave him vulnerable to pressure by authorities.

The attempts to convict Manning in the press are bound up with the military's ongoing campaign against WikiLeaks, a Web site founded three years ago to expose government and corporate wrongdoing by publishing information from whistleblowers. In addition to the explosive video of the Baghdad massacre, the site has published documents about toxic waste dumping in Africa and the military's practices at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a Democracy Now! interview, the U.S. Army's counterintelligence division prepared a report in 2008 identifying WikiLeaks as a "threat to national security" and detailing possible ways to silence the Web site.

The main thrust was that if WikiLeaks' sources were exposed--and the perception created that it was dangerous to associate with the site--whistleblowers could be intimidated from turning over information. As Greenwald said:

That's exactly what has happened here. Suddenly, a 22-year-old private, who supposedly has access to vast amounts of classified information, contacts someone who's a complete stranger and over the Internet...[and] confesses to crimes that could send him to prison for the rest of his life...It's exactly what the U.S. military described it wanted to do in order to destroy WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange drew similar conclusions about the Pentagon campaign in an April interview on Democracy Now!. Assange pointed out that the 2008 report specifically uses the term "whistleblowers"--that is, people who leak classified information to expose an injustice--in identifying targets to investigate and prosecute. The aim, according to Assange, is to "destabilize us and destroy what [the Pentagon report] calls our 'center of gravity'--the trust that the public and sources have in us."

Amid the speculation about Manning since his arrest and indictment--not to mention what he did and didn't say to hacker Adrian Lamo via Internet chat--the video of the massacre itself has tended to fade into the background of mainstream news reports.

It shouldn't. The footage is a chilling--and undeniable--indictment of the brutality of the U.S. military machine and its occupation of Iraq. As Eric Ruder described it in a report for SocialistWorker.org:

The video shows U.S. troops circling in a helicopter and focusing on a group of about 10 men, certain that the cameras slung over the reporters' shoulders are AK-47s and a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher. "Fucking prick," one soldier says of the men with the camera.

After obtaining permission from commanding officers, one of the soldiers exclaims, "Light 'em all up," and the men are cut to pieces with a burst from the helicopter's 30mm machine gun. On the video, they disappear in a cloud of dust and smoke. "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," responds another.

The helicopter continues to circle, watching as a van arrives, and a man jumps out to help the injured...to safety. One soldier remarks that the man from the van looks to be "picking up the wounded." But a few moments later, the troops again request--and receive--permission to open fire.

This is clearly a war crime--a violation of international law that forbids firing on people aiding the wounded.

After obliterating the van, ground troops are called in and quickly discover the camera belonging to the journalist, as well as two wounded children in the van. Their father, the van's driver, had just been killed by the soldiers in the Apache.

When they hear the report of children in the van, one of the soldiers renders a quick verdict: "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle." Another replies, "That's right."

The July 12, 2007, attack wasn't the massacre committed by U.S. forces in Iraq. But it stayed in the spotlight at least in part because two Reuters reporters were killed in the attack, and the news agency spent several years trying to obtain the footage from the helicopter gunship. The military claimed it had "lost" its copy--and then "Collateral Murder" appeared via WikiLeaks.

Pentagon officials continue to claim that the video misrepresents what happened--and that U.S. forces were justified in responding to hostile forces. But the leaked video shows no combat at all.

In fact, when WikiLeaks published the video, two members of the company that was involved in the assault--one of them the man who rescued two wounded children from the vehicle that the gunship was attack--came forward and said that massacres like these were a regular occurrence of the Iraq occupation.

George W. Bush and his administration were notorious for their efforts to stop leaks of embarrassing information and silence whistleblowers--for example, the smear campaign, personally directed by Vice President Dick Cheney, against CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But the Obama administration has proven to be at least as aggressive against whistleblowers, if not more so.

In May, Shamai Leibowitz, a former linguist for the FBI, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for giving classified documents to an unidentified blogger--the longest sentence for any convicted leaker in U.S. history, according to the Politico Web site. One month earlier, Thomas Drake, a National Security Agency whistleblower, was charged by the Obama Justice Department with disclosing classified information that exposed details of a domestic spy program carried out by the Bush administration.

As Democracy Now! pointed out, the Obama White House has also targeted journalists who get classified information--for example, subpoenaing New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal the sources for parts of his book State of War.

Millions of people voted for Barack Obama because they hoped a Democrat in the White House would restore respect for civil liberties and curb the runaway powers of the federal government's executive branch. Those hopes have been disappointed. As Glenn Greenwald summarized the double standards for Salon.com:

If you torture people or eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by the criminal law, you receive "look-forward imperial immunity."
If you shoot and kill unarmed rescuers of the wounded while occupying their country and severely wound their unarmed children sitting in a van--or if you authorize that conduct--your actions are commended.
If you help wreck the world economy with fraud and cause hundreds of millions of people untold suffering, you collect tens of millions of dollars in bonuses.
If you disclose to the world evidence of war crimes, government lawbreaking or serious corruption, or otherwise embarrass the U.S., you will be swiftly prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and face decades in prison.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/09/revealing-the-truth

'Cries From The Gulf,' by Lea Morris

2010-07-04T21:41:00.001-05:00

'Fugitive Days,' by Bill Ayers

2010-07-01T11:37:00.002-05:00

Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist, by Bill Ayers

Reviewed by Bob Sommer
(Originally published in the Spring 2009 print issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books, this review appears here on-line for the first time.)

The first edition of Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days had about as untimely a release as a book by someone who participated in planting a bomb inside the Pentagon could have: September 10, 2001. The following morning, a feature article about Ayers appeared in the New York Times under the stark headline, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” Ayers would soon refute the article, but few New Yorkers spent much time with the papers that morning. Whatever benefit of the doubt readers might have given this compelling memoir vaporized in the day’s events. The Times book review of Sept. 30, 2001, typified much of the commentary that followed: “In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, readers will find this playacting with violence very difficult to forgive.”

From the wingnuts on the right, to left-leaning publications like Slate and The Nation, to the scores of comments at Amazon.com, the single question that most readers ask is whether Ayers expressed remorse for his role in the Weather Underground, which is the political and literary equivalent of judging a gymnast solely on whether she “sticks” the landing. Many assume that everything he did was morally wrong. During last year’s election, Ayers was downright radioactive; few in either party doubted his guilt, only the extent of Barack Obama’s connection to him. But any marketing wizard will tell you that bad publicity is better than no publicity, so the publisher took advantage of the unwanted attention, releasing Fugitive Days in paperback the day after the election, with a new subtitle, a new afterword by Ayers, and perhaps new hope for a fresh hearing.

This is an extraordinary story told by a writer of exceptional skill, a tour through a world that few people know, rendered sensitively, candidly, and often with a self-deprecating wit that Ayers turns on himself and his group with surgical skill. The book’s effectiveness, too, resides in an easy narrative flow that draws on the traditions of picaresque and bildungsroman novels. It is a story of Ayers’s kinship with many activists of that time. It is also a love story, rooted in Ayers’s grief for the loss of Diana Oughton (who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970) and for Bernadine Dohrn, with whom he lived underground and eventually married.

The book’s first sentence—“Memory is a motherfucker”—evokes the well-known opening line of Homer’s Odyssey—“Speak, memory”—with a self-effacing irony that pervades the narrative. Set in italics throughout the book, chorus-like asides question memory’s trustworthiness: “Memory is feeling, not fact, ghosts and fears that haunt us, floating desires and falsifying dreams more powerful and more compelling than hard reality will ever be.” Some claim that Ayers camouflages his own evasions behind selective memory and fictionalized scenes, but it’s not only his memory that he questions, it’s ours—any who would render easy judgment, whose politicized views of the past prevent them from understanding history. “Memory is a mortuary, a dead space” he writes. “Worse, memory can become the black slate monument hiding the bodies, silencing the sounds of longing, the chords of warning.”

Ayers’s prose has life. He shows great sensitivity to language, engaging in meta-commentary about his own narrative and how language arbitrates our political discourse: “Metaphors matter…. we function on the metaphors we ourselves fashion….Metaphors set us in motion.” His strong, lively imagery serves him well to recreate the stakes of that discourse:

There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm.

On the receiving end of those bombs:

Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit….Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever. Their names obliterated.

Ayers is candid and often witty. He questions his own judgment and that of his comrades as events and the apparent futility of peaceful efforts to end the war carry them forward until they find themselves trapped in their own logic:

Ideology became an appealing alternative in so many ways … ideology cloaked itself in confidence….I didn’t know yet how domesticating and cruel and stupid ideology could become, or the inevitable dependency it would foster in all of us.

The Weather Underground did not target people, a trademark of terrorist organizations like the I.R.A. and al Qaeda, and the few bombings it undertook were measured responses to what it considered to be acts of terror by the U.S. government, such as the Kent State shootings and the bombing of Cambodia. Weather took great care to avoid loss of life. The only casualties for which it was responsible were three of its own. Many who then denounced the Freedom Riders as troublemakers and Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers, as a traitor now recognize their courage. Most Americans prefer to think they’d be among the mere 116 raging Bostonians who threw tea into the harbor rather than among the 20 percent of Bostonians who owned slaves. The Weather Underground has been more difficult to appropriate, especially in a post-9/11 world, but the question remains: how much longer would the Viet Nam War have continued without the efforts of those, including Ayers, who finally made American policies impossible to ignore?

'Hands Across the Sand': Kansas City

2010-06-27T10:56:00.011-05:00

Opponents of offshore drilling line the International Bridge

in Kansas City as part of Hands Across the Sand.

On Saturday, June 26th, activists, environmentalists, and people who’d never attended a public protest rally of any kind formed symbolic human chains at 750 locations worldwide to demonstrate their opposition to offshore drilling for oil and their support for clean energy policies.

Hands Across the Sand began in Florida as a statewide effort to oppose lifting the ban on drilling in Florida waters months before the Deepwater Horizon sank in the Gulf of Mexico .

In Kansas City, about sixty people participated in Hands Across the Sand, lining Ward Parkway and later marching across the International Bridge in a show of solidarity with opponents of offshore drilling.

I asked a number of participants two questions: Why are you here today? And do you have any message for Judge Martin L.C. Feldman of the United States District Court in New Orleans, who lifted the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Here are some responses:

“The point of being out here today is to say that we have to change the way we live. We have to stop using so much oil if we’re going to stop future gushers. The only solution to a disaster like this is phasing out oil and getting on to clean energy as quickly as we can.”

"We fool ourselves if think judges are above politics and above self interest. I think [Judge Feldman] was acting on his own self interest, however subconsciously, with this ruling. The government should have the power to put a moratorium on this deep water drilling because they’re proving every day that they don’t know how to stop a gusher this deep.”
―John Kurmann, 350KC

“That’s a good question: Why is Kansas out protesting offshore oil drilling since we don’t have any shores in Kansas? We’re standing here in solidarity with those on the coast who are protesting, and we want them to stand up with us when we talk about clean energy in Kansas, and together we’ll all have a safe green energy and economy.”

―Steve Baru, Chair of the Sierra Club’s Kanza Group

“Because I realize that there’s power in numbers and because we want to relay a message to people who may not think about this even though it’s in the news every day, and just make a statement, a peaceful statement.”

―Robbie Meyer, first-time protester

“I’m here because the nation needs to understand the seriousness of this problem and needs to act for stronger and better regulations for this kind of drilling, if it’s going to continue at all.”

―Elaine Giessel, marine biologist and Sierra Club member

“It’s gone too far. If we don’t stop it now we’re doomed.”
―Barbara Wallin

“I’m here because I’m concerned about what’s happening in the Gulf and about the environment in general and America’s lack of action to help resolve global climate change.”
―Susan Pavlakis, Sierra Club member

Emily Hatcher, Eric Page, Felicia Drury, and Mike Drury

"I'm here because we need to quit our dependence on oil and move to greener and cleaner energies. There’s no reason we should be dependent on oil in this day and age and we just need to stop.”
―Felicia Drury

“We can’t keep going like we are now and keep this planet as it is.”
―Mike Drury

“Stop offshore drilling! We have many cleaner energy options that we’re choosing not to use. We’re putting profit over our environment, and that needs to end.”
―Emily Hatcher

“Accountability. We’re killing the earth and the future. It’s the most important issue we face.”
―Brent Almasi

“The thing is that we are responsible. It’s not just BP. It’s us. When you use a plastic bag, when you go to the store and buy something plastic made in China, you are just as responsible for what’s happened in the Gulf as BP, and we have to take responsibility, and to do that, we’ve got to stop consuming crap.”
―Vicki Walker

“Clean energy now! Right now!” ―Lori Wohlschlaeger

“I’m here because it’s obvious that we need to get off oil and other fossil fuels. We should have done that decades ago, and now we’ve got a big accident that just shows the true cost of using oil. Gasoline should cost ten dollars a gallon, but we subsidize it so heavily.”

“I think President Obama was correct in trying to get a ban on deepwater drilling because obviously this accident shows that they don’t know what they’re doing. This thing is almost as dangerous as a nuclear plant and yet it’s regulated much more weakly.”
―Craig Volland, Sierra Club member

“We have solutions. There are really good solutions to get us off oil. If we all work together we can get it done and move to a clean energy society.”

“[Judge Feldman and supporters of offshore drilling] have to understand that they don’t realize the damage this has done to us, and not just to the people in Louisiana but to people all across the country. The people of the United States get it, and we can’t allow them to continue this very damaging process. It’s going to destroy our environment forever. The ecosystems and the ocean are all connected, and we have to tell that judge, ‘No, sit down, shut up!’ We can solve the problem if can stop people like him from allowing the damage to continue.”
―Joe Spease, Sierra Club member

“I’m a labor person. I’m for strong unions and better wages, but I’m also for good jobs, clean jobs good green jobs.”

“Divest!”
―Molly Madden, labor organizer

:

“We need to finally take steps to get away from gas and oil.”
―Diane Ranum

"What she said!" ―Rick Ranum

Bob Sommer
Uncommon Hours

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Satellite Timelapse April 20 - May 24 2010

2010-06-26T14:32:00.000-05:00