WolfeNotes.com

Forests Store Carbon – So Why Is The Murphy DEP Logging Them?

What Ever Became Of The DEP “Policy Review” On Forest Management?

In disgust, I recently pledged to no longer write about NJ environmental issues, see:

• NJ Environmental Leaders Are Incoherent And Incompetent

But it’s the so called leaders who are co-opted, collaborators, and compromised, not their members and local activists.

Proving that point, my friends from Sparta Mountain just reached out, sent me some photos, and urged that I write about the outrageous DEP logging now underway on Sparta Mountain, a core Highlands Preservation Area and designated “High Conservation Value” forest. Look:

Perhaps you might recall that, upon assuming office and pending Senate confirmation, Murphy DEP Acting Commissioner McCabe publicly announced a “pause” in Christie DEP logging projects in Highlands forests. see:

• Murphy DEP Halts Proposed Logging Of Public Forests – Policy Review Pending

The Sparta Independent reported:

SPARTA — The state Department of Environmental Protection announced last week that the Sparta Mountain forest management plan has been halted pending a review from the new commissioner.

Forestry activities at two different sites on the Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area were set to begin in February and end in April, but new Acting Commissioner Catherine McCabe wants to review the project before it proceeds any further.

“We’re going through a change of administrations,” said NJDEP Spokesperson Larry Hajna. “We have a new acting commissioner and so she is getting up to speed on various issues across the state and this is one that she wants to review. So we’ve decided just to hit the pause button and allow her to review the plan and then we’ll take it from there.”

This “pause” concession by McCabe was made in response to huge criticism by local residents, regional conservation groups, scientists, and State environmental groups of DEP’s logging on Sparta Mountain.

Before Murphy was elected, that DEP logging even prompted legislative oversight and legislation by former longtime Senate leader Senator Lesniak (D) to stop DEP logging of all public lands, see:

• Lesniak’s Bill Would Preent Logging On Sparta Mountain

So, what ever became of DEP Commissioner McCabe’s “policy review” of DEP’s logging and forest management practices? Were public hearings ever held? Was a Technical Report ever issued? Were policy reforms publicly announced? Were rules ever proposed? What ever became of the Lesniak bill? Has some other brave Senator sponsored it? Is there no NJ legislator willing to conduct oversight and hold DEP accountable for how they mismanage public lands?

How can DEP resume logging after McCabe’s “pause” without having listened to the public, fully considered current science, especially climate science, provided a public justification for logging, and adopted new rules to close current loopholes and govern logging practices?

McCabe has repeatedly pledged to make policy decisions based on science and law, and DEP’s logging projects are an example of bad public policy that contradicts science, ignores climate change, and exploits egregious legal and regulatory loopholes.

In addition to all those flaws, DEP’s logging partner, NJ Audubon, is notoriously corrupted.

NJ Audubon was paid over $140,000 by Wall Street billionaire Peter Kellogg to develop the Sparta Mountain logging plan. Worse, NJA entered into a partnership with another billionaire – Donald Trump! – on a sham “corporate stewardship” golf course project. I guess NJA CEO Eric Stiles needs to raise a lot of money to pay his 6 figure salary!

NJ Audubon has misrepresented basic data, DEP regulations, and science. Under the guise of “stewardship”, NJ Audubon has mis-stated the science and ignored negative environmental impacts of logging, including on interior forest birds, water quality and climate! Their mismanagement was so bad that they were rebuked and humiliated by losing certification by the Forest Stewardship Council. (Note: and even from a very narrow single bird species conservation perspective (i.e. Golden Wing Warbler, the original main justification for the logging), the NJ Audubon logging scheme is fatally flawed. Check this out: DEP’s Sparta Mountain Logging Scheme Conflicts With Golden Wing Warbler Recovery Plan It Allegedly Is Based On

Recently, the local press outlet – The NJ Herald – has been writing a series of stories that amount to DEP propaganda. I’ve commented on them about their flaws and biases and even written to the reporter, Bruce Scruton, but to no avail. Local residents share similar frustrations.

Hi Bruce – I read your story today on Sparta Mt. WMA logging and was disappointed by how one sided it was. It read like a DEP promotion. DEP continues to ignore the forestry and related objectives of the Highlands Act, which are scientifically and policy-wise directly relevant to the logging scheme.

The Highlands Act was based on a 2002 US Forest Service Report, which highlighted the threats to and loss of intact forest and canopy. DEP is also ignoring the issue of climate change, both in terms of sequestration of carbon and climate changes that impact forest health and habitat (e.g. golden wing warbler habitat is migrating  north and will no longer be present on Sparta Mt. in the near future. As creation go GWW habitat was NJ Audubon and DEP’s primary objective of the “young forest” habitat creation, the fact that DEP is ignoring climate undermines the entire rational for the logging there.) 

Did DEP ever produce a report or analysis about the policy review that they suggested was going to happen as part of the “halt” last year? I had hope that that could be the forum for all these forestry issues to be discussed publicly based on real science.

[PS Bruce -Here is the relevant US Forest Service Highlands Report “Stewardship Goal”:

Conserve contiguous forests using management practices that are consistent with private property rights and regional resources;

Here is the US Forest Service key finding that contradicts NJ Audubon & DEP claims about a lack of diversity and habitat due to “single age class forests” and the need to log to create “young forest habitat” – all while ignoring the needs of interior forest species (see p.78):

So, without rehashing all the details of all that is so wrong with DEP’s forest management and climate policies and Sparta Mountain logging operations – something I’ve written about many, many times (e.g. see part 8 of a series, which includes links to pars 1-7)) – let me put those critiques in context in the Cours of making two larger political points.

In contrast to the constant drumbeat of favorable press about Gov. Murphy’s various climate  commitments, his Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is not only making very little progress on the regulatory front to actually implement the Gov.’s Executive Order, and is, as I wrote, “Already Running Away From Climate Regulations“.

Recently, they’ve taken two huge steps backwards that actually make the current situation even worse.

Incredibly, this backtracking comes at a time when DEP is holding meetings – mandated by Gov. Murphy’s Executive Order #100 – to seek public input on specifically how DEP should strengthen their current regulations to produce deep and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.

So, in the first example of climate backtracking, why is the Murphy DEP logging forests and actually reducing the ability of NJ forest to store carbon?

The second example I offer as evidence that demonstrates this backtracking was the recent DEP adoption of a regulatory proposal on stormwater that not only ignored climate change and missed huge opportunities to strengthen current rules, it actually weakened and rolled back existing standards.

This rule proposal was so bad, it was not only condemned by virtually all environmental groups – a difficult task in these days of the co-opted and compromised Green Mafia – but it prompted public opposition by the Trump Federal Emergency Management Agency, see:

• FEMA FLAYS MURPHY DEP STORMWATER PROPOSAL

So, particularly in light of Gov. Murphy’s Executive Order #100, why in hell did DEP adopt this fatally flawed proposal, instead of simply letting it expire?

The adoption of that proposal by McCabe exposes the fraud of the Murphy climate commitments – lots of nice rhetoric and no follow through.

Since I’m out west, let me close by saying: The Gov. is all hat and not cattle.

[End Note: In case folks want to press the Gov. and DEP, here’s an email I sent to the Gov.’s Office of Constituent Relations back on March 4, with a copy to sponsors of the Highlands Act, including Senators Smith, Senator Greenstein, Senator Bateman, and Assemblyman McKeon:

Dear Gov. Murphy: Your DEP is abusing public lands by logging them. You must stop this destruction, which is happening right now on Sparta Mountain and involves other State owned public lands in the Highlands (that DEP classifies as “Wildlife management Areas”).

DEP’s logging contradicts your commitments to a serious climate change program, because it’s rationale ignores climate science (e.g. the “young forest”habitat DEP claims to be creating is for a single bird species that will no longer be there due to climate change), because it ignores the carbon sequestration forests provide, and because it will increase carbon emissions.

DEP’s logging contradicts the fundamental objectives of the Highlands Act, which were to preserve large blocks of intact forest, maximize canopy cover, minimize disturbance of forest soils and vegetation, and protect water quality.

This logging is exempt from DEP regulations, so natural resources, water quality and flood protects are absent from the DEP’s logging scheme.

These abuses must stop!

Bill Wolfe

A 13 year career DEP policy analyst, which included drafting the introduced version of the Highlands Act (i.e. Senate bill #1, sponsored by Senator Smith)

Super-Tuesday Shows How Liberal Fear Dominates Hope and Vision

Corporate Democrat and Media Sabotage of Sanders Will Backfire

[Updates below]

In his famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among many other things, expressed frustration and a clear understanding of white liberals. King wrote:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The abject Liberal fear behind the cowardly Super Tuesday support of Joe Biden is sickening:

the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice;

In that sense, after an unprecedented sustained assault and smear campaign against Sanders, the corporate media’s 24/7 exaggeration of the new Coronavirus threat greatly magnified the pre-existing fear of 4 more years of Trump. Heckofajob media!

[Update 3/18/20 – Looks like we were out front on highlighting the role of the virus:

Why is Joe Biden enjoying such tremendous, consistent success against Bernie Sanders after spending the entire race up to South Carolina as a third-place laggard? […]

I suspect, however, that COVID-19 stands as the most plausible explanation. ~~~ End Update]

In a cruel irony, the liberal corporate Clinton-Obama Democrats – in their fearful and self interested sabotage of Bernie Sanders – have virtually assured a Trump second term, exactly the thing they claim to have been so fearful of.

But while the rank and file liberal was driven by fear, the DNC and media leadership were corruptly stoking and manipulating this fear to protect their power, privilege, and wealth. They actually would prefer 4 more years of Trump to a Sanders Presidency and Sanders controlled Democratic Party.

I fully understand the liberal cowardice and corruption and lack of vision at play because I’ve worked with these people for decades.

But what I do not understand is the strong support of Biden by black voters, given Biden’s awful record on core black issues and Sanders longtime leadership on civil rights, including putting his own ass on the line as a college student. My guess is that is a cultural and political amalgam of what Glen Ford termed “the black mis-leadership class”; exploitation by heretical “Prosperity Gospel” hustlers and ideologues; manipulation by Neoliberal corporate Democrats and their Foundation friends (that’s where we got politicians like Cory Booker and the charter school project, a faux “community driven” scam created by right wing billionaire’s and their Foundations); and, because the black community has the most to lose from 4 more years of Trump, a fearful conservatism that rejects Bernie and embraces a “vote blue no matter who” mindset.

[Update: Adolph Reed schools me on “the mystique of the black vote”

The black political class, to put it bluntly, uses the status of “representing” black people to accrue benefits for themselves and elite strata among black Americans. In pursuing such interests, it is not unusual for them to advocate anti-democratic positions. […]

Since 2016 the black punditry has converged around a narrative that Sanders has difficulty appealing to black voters, even as polls have shown repeatedly that his program is more popular among black Americans than any other group. This effort recently hit a comic plateau when the The Root produced a report purporting to evaluate the Democratic candidates in relation to a “Black Agenda.” The report, based on criteria crafted by anonymous “experts,” ranked Warren first with Biden, Buttigieg, and Steyer also ahead of Sanders. Tellingly, Buttigieg and Steyer offered decidedly class-skewed racial programs centering on entrepreneurship and business development, and Sanders was graded down for having had the temerity to consider mobilizing a primary challenge to “the first black president.” 

Another facet of this black politics is that, in reducing all of black Americans’ concerns to race, it undermines our abilities to organize the majoritarian social movement response we need to combat the ever more naked assertion of ruling-class power against all working people in the United States. ~~~ end update]

Biden’s longtime anti-black record includes, and this list is off the top of my head, without research:

1) support of legislation that expanded corporate/banking/credit card/financial abuses that effectively echo racist policies like “red lining” (they go way beyond pay day loans, limits on consumer protections, and making it harder to declare bankruptcy);

2) the Obama-Biden 2008 Wall Street bank bailout that ignored people and Main Street and disproportionately devastated the black community and black home ownership and equity;

3) the New Jim Crow prison industrial complex criminal justice policies that are just as racist as Hillary Clinton’s “super-predator” and Bloomberg’s Stop & Frisk;

4) his political exploitation of suburban white racist fears of bussing and school integration;

5) his use of his Senate power in support for wars and the military industrial complex budgets that drain resources from domestic social programs;

6) his Senate role in the confirmation of right wing judges (and who can forget the dissing of Anita Hill?);

7) his embrace of notoriously racist republican southern senators;

8) Biden’s Neoliberal austerity ideology that threatened social security and Medicare and starved domestic social programs (remember it was Bill Clinton who cynically “ended welfare as we know it”, greatly expanded the racist war on drugs and prison industry complex that has destroyed millions of black lives, and deregulated Wall Street that led to the 2008 financial crash); and

9) Biden’s outright fabrication of multiple lies about his alleged personal involvement as a civil rights activist (the lie on getting arrested while visiting Mandela is just the tip of a large iceberg of lies – read THIS for Biden’s remarkable pattern of deceit:

• 2 Truths and 31 Lies Joe Biden Has Told About His Work in the Civil Rights Movement

How could a black voter vote for a man who looked them in the eye and lied like this?

Sanders supporters can see exactly what is going on and – as Glen Greenwald recently brilliantly wrote, read “Democrats Craving A Brokered Convention” – it replicates the corruption of Chicago ’68 and will produce similar results.

There are tectonic forces gathering and they need a time and place to discharge the energy generated by the DNC & media’s betrayal.

I’m sure that the National Security State apparatus fully understands this and is already gearing up for “The Mugging In Milwaukee” – preparing their pre-Convention surveillance of progressives and left individuals and groups, planting spies and agents provocateur, and planning a military lockdown of the city, a project which is sure to make Bloomberg’s police state tactics in the 2004 Republican Convention in NY City look like a Boy Scout camp.

The only good that can come of this is the decline – or death – of the Democratic Party and the emergence of a true alternative left – labor – climate – progressive – democratic Socialist – “Green New Deal” party.

As Adolph Reed writes:

However, the South Carolina results, as well as those of several—e.g., Virginia, where Biden bested Sanders  53-23, and 53% of voters indicated preference for Medicare for All—of the Super Tuesday states, underscore the need to dig in and build on the potential the Sanders moment has provided us to take up the slow, unglamorous work of building organically rooted working-class politics around issues that connect directly with people’s lives and concerns all over the United States.

Amen, Bro!

[Update: 3/7/20 – based on Biden’s record, – which is hidden in plain sight – Norman Solomon  and several others are right about Joe Biden:

• Joe Biden Is a Fraud, Plain and Simple

Bernie should have been beating the shit out of Biden for MONTHS about all this. It will be very difficult to make this argument now, from Sanders’ position off weakness.

Political lies kill – just look what Obama and Clinton did under the lie of liberal progressive democrats.

The US media has been lying about “lunch bucket Joe” Biden’s record for decades. Those lies are coming home to roost right now.  ~~~ end update]

 [Update: 3/9/20 – Chris Hedges – a real writer (something I do not even prentend to be) – in his Truthdig column today makes exactly the same points as I, but of course it is written a lot better:

The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.

Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump another term in office.

[Update: 3/9/20 – We’re on a roll! Another of my favorite writers, Paul Street at Counterpunch opens with an honest assessment of the black vote for Biden:

I suppose the politically correct thing is to pretend that corporate-imperialist Joe Biden winning the Black vote isn’t like the late Jeffrey Epstein being hailed as a mentor of teenage girls.

[Update 3/10/20 – the Joe beatdown goes on!

• Listen to Jeremy Scahill destroy Biden: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT JOE
• Megan Day at Jacobin goes there too: Joe Biden Is Not All There Mentally. Running Him for President Is Incredibly Dangerous 
• Glen Greenwald at The Intercept nails it: Democrats and Their Media Allies Impugned Biden’s Cognitive Fitness. Now They Feign Outrage.

end updates]

South Carolina’s Black Leaders Couldn’t Even Stand Up To Steve Bannon

I make no pretense of knowledge or understanding of southern and South Carolina culture and politics.

But, I did have one engagement with it and came away baffled by the accommodationist, lame, and anti-conflictual political culture and the failure of leadership in the black community. Let me explain.

I was in Charleston SC in November of 2017. It just so happened that Steve Bannon was speaking at the Citadel there on 11/10/17, so of course I showed up for the protest.

The local black leadership who organized the protest event at The Citadel was extremely deferential to officials from The Citadel, who was sponsoring Bannon’s speech.

Those same leaders, at the request of Citadel officials,  not only actively led their people away from a location where they could be seen and heard by and thereby shame the attendees of Bannon’s speech, but they discouraged any such “aggressive” or “disrespectful” or “rude” behavior (as if protest was an aggressive or rude form of disrespect and as if Bannon deserved respect).

I found the failure of black leadership and their Citadel ass kissing so lame that I actually got into a heated argument with the local black minister who organized the event.  See the below excerpt of that encounter – and you can read my full report and photos on that here).

We also toured lovely cities – like Charleston South Carolina – where architectural beauty and history stood side by side with the ugliest forms of ignorance and hatred imaginable (e.g. Steve Bannon’s speech at The Citadel, where, in the wake of Dylann Roof, he was warmly welcomed by virtually the entire South Carolina political establishment and lots of the young men and women training at The Citadel for US military leadership positions who “whooped and hollered” their support. See if you can read this lede from the local page 1 coverage without vomiting:

Steve Bannon tells Republicans in South Carolina: ‘It’s time for us to get angry again’

When former White House adviser Steve Bannon walked onstage Friday night to address a sold-out crowd at the Citadel Republican Society’s annual Patriot Dinner, he was welcomed like a rock-star.

Cadets whooped and hollered in their woolen dress uniforms. A man wearing a coat and tie pulled out a red towel, waving it high in the air. Even the three Republicans in the room who are hoping to be the next governor of South Carolina tripped over themselves to align their campaigns with Bannon and his populist message that propelled Donald Trump into the White House.

I stood with a disappointingly small group of protesters:

 

The Citadel Bannon protesters were manipulated and poorly led by a local black minister – the epitome of what Glen Ford calls “the black misleadership class”.

The minister voluntarily agreed to a protest permit that located the event in a parking lot a few hundred yards away from the building where Bannon spoke and the press tent was located, thereby further marginalizing his own protesters in a classic “protest zone”.

When protesters arrived early – the police had closed all the roads in an approximately 1 square mile perimeter, making it very difficult to even get there – they all converged on what was obviously  the most strategic and effective location – at the barricades directly across the street from the building where Bannon was speaking and the press tent stood.

They began chants and had creative and highly visible signs.  They were in a place to directly confront and shame Bannon and the attendees as they arrived at the event. The press began to take note.

Almost immediately, a PR official from The Citadel and the local black minister arrived.Look at the photo, as the minister tells the Citadel’s PR flack that he’s moving his people away:

The minister directed his protesters to move away from that prime location and relocate 300 yards away at his small stage.

I loudly urged protesters to stay where they were and the minister immediately got in my face – chest to chest – and told me to shut up and get my own protest if I didn’t like his. I got into a shouting match with him and yelled that he was being manipulated and was weak.

Afterwards, a few protesters came over to talk and agreed with me, attributing the problem to a conservative southern political culture that avoids overt conflicts with power and aggressive “rude” tactics.

NY Times Empties Iconic Depression Era Art of Political Content

History Helps Bernie!

The NYT has to lie.

Because an honest discussion of history, art and politics would put Bernie in the mainstream tradition of an FDR New Deal liberal Democrat, just while they are trying to paint him as a revolutionary totalitarian Communist amalgam of Stalin, Castro and Che.

[Updates below]

A New York Times feature on Depression Era photographer Dorothea Lange illustrates another important reason for supporting Bernie Sanders: his “Green New Deal” program could include restoration of the Federal Art Project (FAP) (see my 2009 post: Bring Back The Federal Art Project. Sadly, the news outlet NJ.Com deleted the photos from that post, which I try to reconstruct below.)

The significance of Depression Era art to the politics of the moment can not be over-stated. That era’s cultural, economic, and political history is instructive.

We are approaching depression era economic conditions; migrants, the homeless, poor people, workers, liberty, and government programs all are under attack; tent cities are exploding, especially in California; and the leading candidate for President – Bernie Sanders – is running based largely on revitalizing New Deal Programs, implicitly including the Federal Art Project.

So – especially in light of how the NY Times has attacked and even smeared Bernie Sanders – – including along cultural lines – how did the NY Times’ feature on Dorothea Lange engage these pregnant political issues?

They avoided and basically ignored them:

When I arrive in April 2019, Donald Trump has just visited Imperial County to stump for his wall. But I’m not here to talk politics, exactly. Instead, I’m on a pilgrimage to visit as many of the places Dorothea Lange photographed in California as I can.

That is a lie by omission.

But, the NYT has to lie.

Because an honest discussion of history, art and politics would put Bernie in the mainstream tradition of an FDR New Deal liberal Democrat, just while they are trying to paint him as a revolutionary totalitarian Communist amalgam of Stalin, Castro and Che.

But aside from politics, how did they address the sources of Ms. Lange’s work – including the financial sources?

Again, by basically ignoring the fact that Lange was a New Deal artist employed by a New Deal government agency (and they buried mention of that agency and provided no link to educate readers about the Farm Security Administration);

Ms. Lange, best known for her Depression-era photographs of migrant laborers, began photographing bread lines and labor strikes near her San Francisco studio in 1932….

As the Great Depression worsened, she began photographing people she saw on the streets: men curled up sleeping or in line for food. In 1935, she married the economist Paul Taylor; they left San Francisco together to photograph the living conditions of agricultural laborers up and down the state, from Davis and Marysville all the way to Imperial County. The Farm Security Administration supported their work.

Of course, the NY Times piece included the famous iconic photo of “Migrant Mother”.

But here’s another take  – and it is even more beautiful and honest – on the classic Depression Era photo by Dorothea Lange:

Obviously, that photo was way too far ahead of its time to be published in 1935 –

Remarkably, today it would suffer exactly the same fate – censorship – given the political power of right wing Christians and the censorious and misogynistic Trump/Pence White House.

[Update – 3/8/20 – I just happened upon this essay, which provides important context of for the photo that I’d like to make a few points about. Here’s the author’s take:

Another photo shows her breastfeeding, revealing a white breast in contrast to her darker, sun-exposed skin. Thompson’s face reveals a kind of pleasure and almost peace in the activity — again, a picture that might have been rejected later for its lack of consonance with assumptions about the starkness and hardship of poverty. In terms of their interactions, the woman might have been asked by Lange to breastfeed the baby. The duration of the encounter — the supposed quick snaps leading to the iconic photograph — had to have been longer than 10 minutes, in order to allow the baby (who is sleeping in all the other pictures) to wake up and begin feeding.

First of all, again note – in this excerpt and throughout the essay (with the exception of one jab at “the left”) – how the analysis is emptied of any political meaning. The author’s essay discusses the photo almost exclusively in the context of its impact on this specific woman, concluding that it provided no benefits. That is misleading, because this photo did impact public opinion and government decisions. The workers camp at this site was later provided with food and other benefits (but these came after the woman and her children in the photo had left the camp).

In contrast, note how I immediately framed the context at the social and political level (as opposed to the individual and aesthetic) and directly linked it to misogyny, censorship, and religious power in the US and Trump administration. The author would be terrified to and never make that kind of blunt – but honest – assessment. Such is the courage of the good professor, who wrote narrowly and won he did widen the scope to the social, he only alluded to public opinions about the “starkness and hardship of poverty.” This is a surprising Neoliberal framework for a student of Edward Said.

Second, the author is a male. I am too. Knowing little of a woman’s experience (my X breastfed our kids) I found the scene beautiful and honest. I would never speculate about the woman’s actual feelings – but if I did, I certainly would not have audacity to presume and speculate that the photo “reveals a kind of pleasure and almost peace in the activity”. Is that a form of literary “mansplaining”? If anything, the expression on the woman’s face looks like either drudgery or that she’s a little pissed off at having had her privacy invaded by the photographer.

Third, does this author have children? Why would he think it takes more than 10 minutes for a child to awaken and begin nursing? I seem to recall our kids waking up hungry and going for the beast and being fed almost immediately!   ~~~ end update]

But, Trump/Pence are not the only censors in town.

As we can tell from reading the NY Times narrative of the Lange photos, NYT writers and editors steer clear of any references to politics and history, especially those that would benefit Bernie Sanders!

George Biddle, the founder of the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935, said that because of the FAP, the Depression exerted, “a more invigorating effect on American art than any past event in the country’s history.” … For American art, it was a vital period that invigorated the entire country’s perception of what art could be and brought American art into the international forefront

The FAP created thousands of murals (scroll down for Coit Tower murals) in public buildings all across the country. Artist such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Louise Nevelson, all left a moment of their creativity to posterity because of this program. As art historian Francis O’Connor said, “Something very vital indeed, something revolutionary happened to American culture during the 1930’s.”

One of the FAP’s major activities was the index of American Design. The project helped popularizing American folk art by documenting the countries “usable past” of over 20,000 photographic records of American art, painting, sculpture, handicraft and folk art.

By 1943, unemployment –the primary reason for the programs creation –dipped to the point that the program was canceled. The Library of Congress is the largest single holder of WPA posters, having over 900 in its collection.

[End Note: here’s a list of my favorite Federal Art Project photos that I included in that 2009 post. Unfortunately, the links don’t work, but if you word search the Library of Congress, they are easily found:

Matanuska Colonists : A couple with child

Wall Street

FBI and the Statue of Liberty

Farmer and Sons Walking in Face of Dust Storm

Country Store on a Sunday Afternoon

Eat more fish

Smiling Girls from Utuado

Commuters

Railroad Women Having Lunch

Itinerant Photographer, Columbus, Ohio

Children in the tenement district, Brockton, Mass.

black neighborhood, New Orleans

[Update: 3/1/20 – Pure coincidence: Announcement of this interesting Exhibition just hit my email: March 6 Canessa Gallery Exhibit – Art and Activism: From the New Deal to the Green New Deal – so glad to see this!!!!!

 

Sanders’ “Socialism” Would Realize FDR’s “Economic Bill of Rights”

While some alternative media outlets are having some fun reporting on the corporate media’s Nevada win meltdown and repeated attacks on the Sanders campaign, I must have missed this one. Check it out.

First of all, consider the fact that this polling is coming from Democrats, not right wing Republicans.

I’d guess it was coming from the Buttigieg campaign, not Bloomberg.

Yes, Bloomberg did call Sanders a Communist on national TeeVee, but the Bloomer campaign seems too dim witted to pull this off.

In contrast, given the express red baiting, Cold War revival ideology, and harsh attack on socialism, the messaging fits very well within the Buttigieg camp’s ideological affinity and personal relationships with the National Security State (he’s former Navy Intelligence): (Source)

“The Post reported that a private poll “paid for by a rival presidential candidate,” likely Bloomberg, had tested the following negative message: “Bernie Sanders is a socialist who supports un-American, big government plans that will spend trillions of dollars, lead to higher taxes, and destroy our way of life.”

Like all good propaganda, there’s some truth in there.

Yes, Sanders would try to “destroy” the corporate Billionaire dominance of  “our [anti-democratic]  way of life” and the power of climate deniers and corporate polluters to block real action on the climate emergency.

Yes, Sanders does propose “big government plans that will spend trillions of dollars” – I am particularly impressed by his Green New Deal plan. Medicare for all, free college tuition and massive jobs and public housing programs are hugely popular as well.

Yes, Sanders’ Medicare For All plan would “lead to higher taxes” – mostly on the wealthy and corporations – while eliminating insurance premiums, co-pays, deductibles and out of pocket expenses for working families (averaging over $12,000/year) and saving over 68,000 lives and $450 billion/year, according to a Yale study published in the Lancet.

But no, none of this is “un-American” – in fact, it is the fulfillment of FDR’s original New Deal promise of an “economic bill of rights”:

[FDR’s] remedy was to declare an “economic bill of rights” to guarantee these specific rights:

• Employment (right to work^{[notes 1]}), food, clothing and leisure with enough income to support them
• Farmers’ rights to a fair income
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• Housing
• Medical care
• Social security
• Education

All that, my friends, is as American as Apple Pie.

And thank goodness young people overwhelmingly understand that.