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The Citadel – location of Steve Bannon speech on 11/10/17

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest. ~~~ To Dream The Impossible Dream (1965)

We’re now in the gorgeous southern Arizona desert and I haven’t posted since Thanksgiving, so I thought I’d try to give a brief update and in the next post summarize the southern portion of the trip.

The silence and vast expanse of the desert can prompt the mind to recall and reflect on some strange places, thus the title of this post, which is not irony or snark.

Out of nowhere, in the silence of one cold night, I somehow became focused on fond childhood memories – highlights of my grade school experience, most especially two peak moments:

1) sitting next to and holding Cathy Rosenthal’s hand on a 4th grade class trip to the Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow (1967) (I apparently mistakenly recalled it as “Finnegan’s Rainbow”, but Wikipedia tells me otherwise!).

Cathy was my first “girlfriend” and I haven’t done better since! She was awesome – smart, pretty, athletic, sweet, and very competitive. I used to skip out of school (on Wednesday afternoons, the early release day for religious ed) to walk her to the bus stop when she went to a ballet class. I gave her a silver ID bracelet (and never got it back after we “broke up” a few years later at a summer party at Lisa Cohen’s house.) Last I can recall, she seemed to disappear in 9th grade. Wonder what became of her?

2) another class trip (5th grade) to the Broadway production of “Man of La Mancha” (1968) – thus the opening quote, which had a huge impact on my life.

I was born three months before Sputnik – which shaped my education and love of science and math – and my Mom was a huge fan of JFK and the idealism and public service spirit of the “Camelot” mythology.

[Note: for a deeply disturbing, well researched, documented, and written – and all too plausible – take on the JFK legacy, read “JFK and The Unspeakable – Why He Died and Why It Matters” by Jim Douglass. I just read that, which may explain the youthful recollections.]

I can recall my first grade teacher, Ms. Vera Vradenberg, crying as school was dismissed abruptly the day JFK was murdered. Amazingly, I now note that that same song from Man of La Mancha was one of Robert Kennedy’s favorites too – and that he was murdered in 1968, the year I saw the play.

Well enough of my nostalgia.

Our current journey has taken us to some amazing places this year (2017) – where we witnessed many incredible things, including the damage from climate change induced extreme weather, e.g. record setting hurricanes (Florida, Texas Gulf coast), wildfires (Washington, Oregon, California), droughts, floods, heatwaves (in many places, including San Francisco, no less!) and tornadoes (golf ball sized hail in Little Rock, Arkansas).

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:

Protest against Steve Bannon’s speech at The Citadel (Charleston, SC) (11/10/17)

Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, SC

We’ll post more pics and commentary from the southern portion soon – can’t do so now because I forgot to bring the wire that downloads photos from the camera to the computer.

Peace out!

[Update: 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. ~~~ end update]

Happy Thanksgiving – don’t read this before the meal.

Read the whole thing – here’s the conclusion from the essay: The Great American Sex Panic of 2017

Something surpassingly strange is at work here—a wrong-headed authoritarian ire over the spasmodic misfires of the human comedy combined with some primal meltdown of a besieged and increasingly desperate ruling class and its longstanding winking sexual hypocrisies. It is a moral panic that is, ironically, immoral at its core: repressive and diversionary, an identity-politics orgy of misdirected moral energies that breeds a chilling conformity of word and deed and, in so doing, cripples the critical faculties and independence of spirit needed to challenge the status quo the PC monitors profess to abhor. In reality, their speech and conduct codes foster a spirit of regimentation rather than rebellion, thereby shoring up the power of the repressive elites that are leading the human race to social, economic, and ecological disaster.

So this is not just a moral panic—but a bizarre inversion of values in which Bill Clinton can murder 500,000 Iraqi children, throw millions of poor women and their children off welfare, and instigate the global rule of transnational corporations with NAFTA, but he is not impeached or stigmatized for any of those atrocities but rather for a workplace blowjob; in which Hillary Clinton can lead the charge for the destruction of Libya, reducing that country to primeval rubble, and is not only not fired or ostracized but is rewarded with the Democrats’ presidential nomination and lauded by corporate feminists as a champion of “inclusiveness”; in which Barack Obama pushed fraudulent health-care reform that leaves a barbaric 27 million people with zero coverage and millions more with crippling premiums and deductibles that render their “coverage” all but unusable, thus sentencing tens of thousands of people to death every year because they cannot afford timely medical care, and dropped 26,171 pounds of bombs in 2016 alone, and yet he is not only not reviled and abominated as a con artist but is worshipped as an icon of enlightened governance; in which the entire ruling elite and its associates in the corporate media are chronically underplaying—indeed, scarcely mentioning—the gravity of the climate change crisis, which would merely spell the end of the human species within a hundred years, yet no copycat 24/7 umbrage or five-alarm indignation on the part of anyone in those elite circles or their acolytes over this unprecedented planetary emergency.

Hence the long-buried, freshly unearthed ego bruises of the privileged identity-politics crowd eclipse mass murder and ecocide on the outrage meters of this country’s opinion shapers.  The same solemn cohort—mostly white and middle-class, many of them ardent McResistance DNC partisans (or, in the case of Leean Tweeden, Franken’s tongue-kiss accuser, a movement conservative who twice voted for George W. Bush)—is so easily roused to near-apoplexy about a naughty lunge of the hand or tongue yet discreetly ignores or openly cheers on unparalleled crimes against humanity: endless debilitating wars against nameless enemies abroad, the toxic mercenary corruption and annihilation of democracy, staggering political/social inequality (the top one percent of the world’s population now owns half of the world’s wealth), and ecocide everywhere—committed and abetted with impunity by the PC brigades’ culture heroes like the Clintons and Obama and their cohorts in the media and the corporate/political elites.

So yes—prosecute the rapists and pedophiles and let them suffer in jail. But you will excuse me if I stand aside from the stampede of outrage about Al Franken’s wayward tongue or even Donald Trump’s juvenile frat-house boasts while the world teeters on the brink. The scale of values of this country’s liberal elites, and the issues that fuel and exhaust their capacity for outrage, border on moral dementia. Their vaunted “values” lead us not to virtue and to spiritual renewal, but to the nauseating sanctimony of the custodians of a charnel house—to the abyss.

DEP Just Eliminated Current Requirements To Publish Notices In The Newspaper

A quick note and a few sincere questions for my media and environmentalist friends.

Governor Christie sparked outrage when he proposed to eliminate current requirements that legal notices be published in the newspaper. That was widely perceived as revenge for critical coverage of Christie’s “Bridgegate” scandal and an attack on the media by depriving it of a major source of revenue.

Christie’s move generated favorable attention in national Republican and business circles, e.g. see Forbes story

• Christie Revives ‘Newspaper Revenge Bill,’ Cost Estimates Of Legal Notices Are $60M Apart

But POLITICO (sic) reports today that Governor Christie has lost the “newspaper revenge bill” legislative battle – giving Senate President Sweeney credit.

I do not have a POLITICO subscription, so can only post their excerpt:

NEWSPAPER REVENGE BILL – “With Christie on the way out, newspapers appear to have won legal notice fight,” by POLITICO’s Matt Friedman: “New Jersey newspapers that have fended off attempts by Gov. Chris Christie and legislative leaders to cut them off from a vital source of revenue won’t have to fight that battle during Phil Murphy’s administration. Senate President Stephen Sweeney says the legislation, which would no longer require local governments to post legal notices in newspapers, isn’t going anywhere once Murphy takes office in January. ‘We are done with legal ads,”‘ Sweeney said in an email to POLITICO New Jersey. Asked if he was certain a bill wouldn’t resurface over the next four years, Sweeney, who’s all but secured another term as Senate president, said ‘I’m sure.’ Read the report ” Read the report

Christie lost the legislative battle, but he is using executive power to implement it anyway.

Specifically, just this past Monday November 20, 2017, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) adopted new regulations that eliminate current requirements to publish public notice on air pollution control permits in the newspaper. Interestingly, the new rules were proposed on July 3, 2017 – an unusually fast 4 month adoption process.

This change effects thousands of air pollution control permits across the state and reduces not only media revenue, but the ability for the public to participate in DEP permit decisions that impact human health and air quality

I have no estimate of the revenue involved – DEP provided no economic impact or cost benefit analysis in the proposal – but it could be significant.

Here is how DEP justified the proposed elimination of newspaper publication in the July 3, 2017 proposal:

In adopting the proposal, DEP summarily wrote:

Corporate Event Arranged By Commissioner’s Office – DEP Experts Had No Role

US Fish and Wildlife Service Was Invited But Did Not Show

William Penn Foundation Involved In Poorly Attended Event

DEP Commissioner Bob Martin – Gov. Christie’s attack dog is shown to be a puppet of NJ Audubon!

I recently filed an Open Public Records Act (OPRA) request for documents related to the NJ Audubon’s Corporate Stewardship Council meeting at DEP headquarters (see this post for background on that meeting).

DEP requested an extension of the 7 day OPRA response deadline. When I asked for the justification for the extension request, as I suspected, DEP basically confirmed the pure political nature of the meeting.

Check this out, DEP experts had no role and the event was arranged by DEP Commissioner Martin’s office (source: 11/16/17 email from Matt Coefer, DEP Chief Records Custodian):

Bill:

The request was originally assigned to the NJDEP’s Natural & Historic Resources (NHR) Program as the interests seem in line with their activities. However, they investigated and responded that they had no involvement with the meeting.  It was later identified that the meeting was coordinated by the Commissioner’s Office. 

But even worse, the documents DEP provided today show that not only were DEP experts cut out of the Commissioner’s political meeting with corporate cronies, but that DEP Commissioner Martin’s remarks at the meeting were written by John Parke of NJ Audubon.

Take a look at this September 27, 2016 email from Jim Schissias of PSEG to Parke, asking him to draft Commissioner Martin’s remarks:
Get that?

First, DEP Commissioner Martin ignores his own staff; Second, he meets with corporate cronies behind closed doors; Third his DEP professional staff do not attend the event; and Fourth, his remarks are written by NJ Audubon.

That is pathetic – the DEP Commissioner a puppet of NJ Audubon, speaking to a group of corporate cronies.

But it is even worse than that.

NJ Audubon – basically working for Jim Shissias of PSEG and corporate cronies – was sure to invite a deep pocketed Foundation to the event – Andrew W. Johnson of the William Penn Foundation.

Presumably, this was part of a funding pitch, a manipulative set up of Wm Penn’s Johnson, as he listens as NJ Audubon basks in DEP Commissioner Martin’s praise – which they wrote – of the wonders of their sham corporate greenwash program.

Totally corrupt. Totally.

Significantly, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was invited to attend the meeting but did not show up.

NJ Audubon has stressed the involvement of US FWS, in a transparent attempt to: 1) mislead the public that this is a bona fide conservation program and 2) to deflect their role in forming a partnership with Donald Trump and the other so called “corporate stewards”.

US FWS had the good sense to stay away and did not attend the event.

Actually, the event was a bust, as the 11 NJ Audubon staff in attendance outnumbered the corporate “stewards” who showed up.

OPRA documents show that 34 corporate representatives were invited to the meeting and “expected” to attend.

But the meeting sign in sheets show that just a small fraction of that showed up – just 11:

PSEG sent 3 people; Waste Management 1; Suez 1; Mannington Mills 1; JCP&L 1; J&J 1; Verizon 1; Chemours (Dupont) 1; South Jersey Gas 1; Crystal Springs 1.

As I previously wrote, all those corporations had regulatory matters pending before DEP and had significant economic interests in maintaining a good relationship with DEP Commissioner Martin.

But the OPRA documents show what really went down: A self serving and poorly attended political stunt with little conservation value or scientific basis – but lavishly funded by government and private foundations.

Meet your NJ Audubon, Christie DEP Commissioner, and “corporate stewards!

(all DEP documents will be provided on request to validate the above).

Bill would preclude more aggressive mandates required to avoid climate chaos

The NJ Senate Environment Committee, on Monday November 20, 2017, will hear proposed legislation (S3129 -Smith, Greenstein) that would provide incentives to “green buildings”, specifically the bill:

“Provides for priority consideration, by DCA, DEP, DOT, and municipalities, of permit applications for green building projects”

The building sector is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions.

If we are to meet the aggressive science based goals of the NJ Global Warming Response Act, the Paris Accords, and avoid catastrophic climate change, we need to get deep and swift reductions in emissions from this sector.

The DEP’s 2009 Global Warming Response Act implementation recommendations Report includes this set of recommendations on the building sector: (Table ES-1, p.5)

Note especially the recommendations that compliance with standards be required and the existing buildings be retrofit.

In contrast  the Voluntary measures and regulatory review “incentives” in the bill are woefully inadequate policy tools to achieve these necessary emissions reductions. 

I just wrote the below letter to the sponsors of the bill – Chairman Smith and Senator Greenstein – to urge that they rethink the overall voluntary incentive based approach in favor of an enforceable science based model. I urge readers to do the same:

Dear Chairman Smith and Senator Greenstein:

I’ve read your bill, S3129, which “Provides for priority consideration, by DCA, DEP, DOT, and municipalities, of permit applications for green building projects”

While I appreciate your efforts to promote more environmentally friendly building practices, unfortunately I must strongly differ with the overall approach of the proposed legislation and encourage you to revise and amend the bill:

1) to establish enforceable regulatory requirements in terms of local and state building codes and DEP permit requirements, and;

2) to link the standards to a science based DEP plan or legislative policy goals (e.g. the greenhouse emissions reductions from the building sector necessary to attain the goals of the Global Warming Response Act or water conservation measures of the Water Supply Master Plan, etc)

It is my understanding that the proposed voluntary incentive based private standards in the bill (LEED, ASHRAE, et al) are not tied in any way to attainment of science based public policies or numeric planning goals or regulatory standards – nor has there been any assessment or demonstration of whether implementation of the standards in the bill would make progress towards various NJ legislative goals and regulatory standards.

Additionally, it appears that the bill would grandfather existing development and thereby miss huge opportunities to retrofit the existing built environment.

Furthermore, all new development should be zero net emissions and leverage investments in renewable energy infrastructure, much like off-site impact fees are designed to finance necessary upgrades in infrastructure.

In contrast, as drafted, the bill would actually provide a perverse preemptive shield against real enforceable standards and codes and impact fees necessary to meet urgent policy objectives, like GHG emissions, water quality and water conservation and renewable energy infrastructure.

I urge you to table this bill pending reconsideration of a more aggressive and enforceable approach.

Sincerely,

Bill Wolfe