WolfeNotes.com

An Appeal to OWS Movement To Shame Chemical Industry Abuses

Today, Occupy Wall Street holds a national day of action to occupy our homes, focusing their huge spotlight on home foreclosure.

In Pompton Lakes NJ, chemical giant Dupont corporation has occupied over 450 homes with toxic chemical gases, poisoning people and effectively creating toxic hostages.

This is an open letter proposal to the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly and their many supporters in the greater NY/NJ metropolitan region.

Dear OWS:

I applaud your efforts to expose and shame the corporate criminals on Wall Street and their cronies in government who have greedily enriched themselves at the expense of the lives of the 99% and the health of the planet.

You have created a model community and practiced democracy in action.

You have raised fundamental questions about our economy, government, and culture, and created political space to explore alternatives for a better future for all people and the planet.

You have shown courage and dignity in non-violent protest and direct action civil disobedience, as militarized police forces have illegally and brutally repressed and violently assaulted you.

You have provided hope and inspired and empowered millions of people across the globe.

Your recent targeted direct community based actions have exposed and shamed all forms of corporate crime, while standing in support and solidarity with the victims of that crime.

Perhaps the most vivid example of this is your effort to resist the disgraceful practice of foreclosure and eviction of people from their homes.

It is with those glorious principles and effective tactics in mind that I urge your support for the toxic hostages who live in Pompton Lakes, NJ.

Families there in over 450 homes have been poisoned by chemicals dumped by the Dupont corporation.

Dupont has occupied these homes and held families as toxic hostages.

For almost 100 years, the war profiteering Dupont corporation dumped poisonous toxic chemicals on the land, water and air at their Pompton Lakes explosives manufacturing facility.

For 30 years, they have used raw political power and corrupt influence on government to avoid, delay, and minimize cleanup of the mess they created.

As a result of that criminal legacy, the soil, water and wildlife remain poisoned, including toxic gas seeping into over 450 homes.

People are toxic hostages in their own homes. Children and mothers live in fear. Lives have been destroyed.

Those poisons are associated with elevated levels of cancers and other diseases in workers and the community.

PEOPE ARE DYING!

Dupont is one of the world’s worst toxic polluters, and has a shameful history of poisoning and killing workers and communities across the globe. (see: Dupont – Too Big to Jail)

Enough is enough – chemical giants like Dupont must be held accountable and cease destructive production of poisons, cleanup the toxic mess they made, and compensate the communities and people lives they have destroyed.

After 100 years of toxic abuse and 25 years of government neglect by keeping the community in the dark and protecting Dupont, finally, on January 5, 2012, the US Environmental Protection Agency will hold the first ever public hearing in Pompton Lakes on Dupont’s proposed cleanup plan.

We ask the OWS Movement to target Dupont Pompton Lakes as ground zero for corporate toxic chemical pollution abuse and lax government oversight.

On January 5, voyage across the might Hudson River!

Come show solidarity with the people of Pompton Lakes – Occupy Dupont!

Free the toxic hostages! Pilgrimage against Poison!

On Thursday, the Senate Environment Committee heard a bill intended to close loopholes and prevent “Fake Farmer” abuses of NJ’s “Farmland Assessment Act of 1964” (see: last year’s Asbury Park Press investigation:  “Fake Farmers cost NJ taxpayers millions”).

The bipartisan bill,  S744 is sponsored by Senator Beck – R Monmouth; and Senate President Sweeney D- Salem, Cumberland, Gloucester.

Here is the beginning of the bill’s statement:

STATEMENT

This bill would make various revisions to the “Farmland Assessment Act of 1964″ that would help ensure that its provisions benefit true farmers and thereby help preserve and promote agriculture as an industry and way of life in the Garden State to the benefit of all citizens.

This bill would raise from $500 to $1,000 the minimum gross sales and payments qualifying standard for farmland assessment on the first five acres of land.

I generally don’t get involved in these farmland issues, but because of the apparent lack of understanding of basic math involved in the proposed new $1,000 minimum, I thought I should reach out and advise the sponsors that the bill is actually FAR WEAKER than the original 1964 law.

Additionally, there is a glaring loophole because the bill does NOT include the severe abuse by corporate “Fake Farmers”, who  enjoy farmland assessment tax breaks at scores of NJ corporate office parks.

It seems that unless these two issues are addressed, the “Fake Farmer” bill itself may be a fraud.

Here’s my note to the sponsors requesting that those flaws be fixed:

Dear Senator Beck:

Just a brief note on your bill’s revision of the current $500 minimum to $1,000.

That actually is 3.6 TIMES weaker than the original 1964 law.

Specifically, using US Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index (CPI)adjustment methods, $500 in 1964 has the same buying power now (year 2011) as $3,651.95

Accordingly, I suggest you amend the bill to AT LEAST account for inflation.

An even more relevant index than the CPI, would be the actual rate of increase in land values or local property taxes – both far surpass the CPI.

Of course, any real reform bill would capture the numerous corporate “Fake Farmers” out there as well.

Sincerely,

NJ is Open For Business – We are competing to import toxic waste!

Last week, the Assembly and Senate environment committees heard lame duck legislation purporting to ban the treatment and disposal of fracking wastewater at NJ facilities (see: A4231[1R] and S3049).

The moves were reported favorably and received praise by environmental lobbyists.

But the truth is, leading NJ Democrats quietly have derailed efforts to prohibit the treatment of toxic fracking wastewater at NJ facilities and disposal of treated effluent in NJ rivers, most of which are used for public water supply.

Shockingly, the NJ Business and Industry Association wants to turn the clock back 50 years, and return NJ to the waste importation capital of the Eastern seaboard – and more absurdly, do so on the basis of Republican political talking points: “job creation” (conveniently just presented to the Republican Governors Assc.).

Talk about a race to the bottom! NJ is Open For Business – we are competing to import toxic waste from Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, West Virginia…!

Yes, we know you just read the opposite in the press, who report that Democrats are seeking severe restrictions (see: Committee says NJ won’t treat wastewater from hydraulic fracking.

But you gotta read more than the headlines – and note this:

The legislation, narrowly approved by the Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee, is unlikely to win final legislative approval in the lame duck session

What you didn’t read in the press is that the bill is DOA in the Senate (making it easy to move out of an Assembly Committee).

What you didn’t read in the press is that the bill is opposed by Assembly Democratic leaders and thus would never be posted for a full Assembly floor vote (again making it easy to release from Committee).

Last week’s Assembly and Senate Committee hearings were just the latest in the Democrats’ political Kabuki and environmentalists’ disarray on the fracking issue. [Note: activists are engaged and organized, but Trenton political strategy is in disarray.]

Instead of banning the treatment/disposal of tracking wastewater, Democrats want to import toxic fracking wastewater from nearby states so that Dupont can treat it at their Delaware River Chambersworks plant in Salem County and discharge it to the Delaware River (and in the process, make a boatload of money).

(Oh BTW, did the press tell you that the Dupont Chambersworks plant just happens to be located in Waldo’s District?).

These are the same craven Democrats who passed a symbolic bill to BAN fracking in NJ in order to to protect NJ’s precious water supplies(see S2576). How can Dems credibly claim to want to BAN fracking in NJ, and yet promote the importation of  fracking wastewater?

The legislation was Conditionally Vetoed by Governor Christie and Dems are unlikely to mount an over-ride effort. But it really doesn’t matter because the law is purely symbolic and would have no impact in NJ, so I’ve advised the ENGO’s not to waste bullets seeking an over-ride vote, and in the process, further praise Democrats for Kabuki.

These are the same cynical Democrats who basked in praise heaped on them by environmentalists, despite the fact that the ban bill was purely symbolic and would have NO IMPACT on NJ because there are no economically viable gas deposits to frack in NJ.

These are the same cowardly Democrats who abandoned legislation that would have established a State policy in opposition to fracking that would bind the discretion of the NJ representative on the Delaware River Basin Commission (see A3314 andS2575.  I provide the bill statement here, because these bills won’t be reintroduced into the next session and otherwise would go down the memory hole):

This bill prohibits any New Jersey member of the Delaware River Basin Commission from supporting or voting to support the issuance, by the commission or any other entity, of any permit or other kind of approval to withdraw water for the purposes of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas exploration or production.

The bill defines “hydraulic fracturing” as the drilling technique of expanding existing fractures or creating new fractures in rock by injecting water and chemicals, sand, or other substances under pressure into or underneath the surface of the rock for the purpose of well drilling or natural gas exploration.  It includes fracking, hydrofracking, hydrofracturing, and other colloquial terms for this drilling technique.

Recently, drilling connected with natural gas exploration along the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania caused concern and a moratorium on such drilling in Pennsylvania and New York.  The Marcellus Shale formation reaches beneath the southern tier of New York State, into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and touches the edge of northwestern New Jersey.  It is one of the largest untapped fossil fuel reserves in the Western Hemisphere and there have been estimates for the area to yield as much as 20 times the current nationwide output of natural gas, but the gas is not easy to extract.  On June 5, 2010, hydraulic fracturing in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania caused an explosion and the release of many gallons of contaminated water and uncontrolled natural gas from the drill site.

The excuse?

The cover story the Dems used to abandon that DRBC legislation was that the bill would unconstitutionally  encroach upon Executive Power – but they never produced a legal opinion from OLS to support that political decision.

These are the same Democrats who last year quietly killed amendments to the symbolic fracking ban bill that would have prohibited treatment disposal of tracking wastewater in NJ (what at the time I called a “u-turn in favor of aspirational bills that will not work”).

Specifically, almost a year ago, on December 9, 2010, I testified and provided written amendments regarding restrictions on treating fracking wastewater.

Those amendments were designed to avoid any interstate commerce Clause restrictions that would result from a flat out ban on importation. (I worked in DEP’s solid waste planning program in the 1980’s, the period after NJ moved to block garbage imports from New York and Philadelphia, a controversy that went to the US Supreme Court.)

The amendments I sought were supported at the time by the Assembly bill sponsor and the Committee Chairman McKeon, who directed OLS staff to work with me on drafting them. I conveyed the amendments to OLS staff and wrote about that testimony and hearing:

I suggested amendments to strengthen the bill, as follows:

• Amend Section 2 a at line 33 to include “or any other DRBC approval”. The objective here is to expand the restriction to DRBC activities that are broader than individual project specific water withdrawals;
• In light of yesterday’s DRBC releases of draft regulations, the bill also should prohibit voting to approve those regulations;
• New Section 3 -“The Department of Environmental Protection shall not issue any approval pursuant to the Water Quality Planning Act (cite) for amendments to areawide wastewater or water quality management plans related to wastewater generated by fracking”.
• New Section 4 -“The Department of Environmental Protection shall not issue any approval pursuant to the Water Pollution Control Act (cite) or delegated federal Clean Water Act  (cite) NJPDES/NPDES permits to authorize the treatment of wastewater generated by fracking or the discharge  of pollutants to NJ waters from treated fracking wastewater.” 
• New Section 5 –  impose a temporary moratorium pending EPA study and  adoption of national regulations under the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act – “No state agency or authority shall act to issue any state approval, permit, or financial support for any activity related to fracking unless and until the US EPA finalizes the national Hydraulic Hyrdofracturing Study and promulgates final regulations pursuant to the Clean Water Act and the Safe Driking Water Act that govern fracking.”
• In addition to DRBC compact powers, there also are protections for downriver states under inter-state provisions of the Clean Water Act. I think they were used informally to coordinate water quality related activities with NY regarding the Ramapo and Walkill rivers, but this requires additional research.

Getting back to last week’s action.

On Thursday, we were told that south jersey Democratic leader Lou Greenwald openly told environmental lobbyists that he wants to see fracking wastewater treated at the Dupont facility.

This time, the Constitutional cover story to avoid accountability for the pro-facking faction in Dem leadership, created by Senate Environment Committee Chair Bob Smith – who just happens to report to Waldo – is the so called Commerce Clause, which prohibits certain restrictions on interstate commerce (recall that last time it was separation of powers. Those constitutional limits just keep on comin’!).

We are not now fooled by the Kabuki and we never were.

And Assemblyman Greenwald now provides confirmation about why proposed amendments to ban the processing and disposal of toxic fracking wastewater at NJ facilities in NJ were not incorporated into the “fracking ban” legislation passed earlier this year and conditionally vetoed by Governor Christie.

We also must seriously question either the competence , judgement, or the courage of environmental leaders, who either got duped or caved.

Why would they praise Dems for doing nothing in passing the fracking ban bill?

Why didn’t they insist on including the substantive treatment and disposal ban amendments in the symbolic fracking ban bill?

Why are they now focused on supporting Democrats to over-ride Christie’s conditional veto of a symbolic piece of legislation, instead of blasting Dems for the dirty Dupont deal?

More to follow.

[Update: 12/7/11: check out both a remarkable resonance and a remarkable moment. Philip Glass spoke to the OWS at Lincoln Center. There is an echo of themes from the below post. The moral of the below post was about literature, sounds, and our discovery of virtue.The “machine” can “occupy” the “garden”, and encroach on intellectual and artistic space (i.e the pastoral ideal). I believe in the need to restore notions of republican virtue and the public interest. Here is what Glass said, the closing lines in the play Satyagrapha: watch the episode:

“When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.”

Of Chainsaws and Virtue – My “Sleepy Hollow Moment”

I often have “Sleepy Hollow moments” – and am sure you do too.

What the hell is a “Sleepy Hollow moment” you say?

Bear with me as I explain and we explore the meaning.

I’m sure you’ll agree that there’s some powerful and important stuff going on here.

The Sleepy Hollow Moment defined

I hate chainsaws.

They are loud, destructive, and dangerous. Operating one absolutely terrifies me.

Following in the footsteps of the axe, chainsaws – by orders of magnitude – have aided the destruction of countless acres of magnificent forests.

Nothing –  save an all terrain vehicle or the blast of a shotgun – can more completely destroy a tranquil walk in the woods.

Chainsaws are an almost perfect symbol of what Leo Marx wrote about in his masterpiece on the technological sublime and the pastoral ideal: The Machine in the Garden – Technology and the Pastoral Ideal.

Marx (no relation to Karl), prefaces that superb book with a quote from Washington Irving’s 1820 tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (I’m an Irving homeboy, from Tarrytown NY, a graduate of Sleepy Hollow High School):

I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud; for it is in such little retired valleys that population, manners and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant change in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream (Irving – 1820)

At the outset of the book, Marx distinguishes two very different forms of American pastoralism – the first he calls “popular and sentimental”, the second “imaginative and complex”.

The sentimental version is nostalgic: “a flight from the city”:

An inchoate longing for a more “natural” environment” enters into the contemptuous attitude that many Americans adopt toward urban life (with the result that we neglect our cities and desert them for the suburbs). Whenever people turn away from the hard social and technological realities, this obscure sentiment is likely to be at work. We see it in our politics, in the “localism” invoked to oppose an adequate system of national education, in the power of the farm block in Congress, in the special economic favor shown to “farming” through government subsidies. It manifest itself in our leisure activities, in the piety towards the out-of-doors expressed in the wilderness cult, and in our devotion to camping, hunting, fishing, picnicking, gardening, and so on.

Marx concludes that this sentimental form is:

generated by an urge to withdraw from civilization’s growing power and complexity. What is attractive in pastoralism is the felicity represented by an image of a natural landscape, a terrain either unspoiled or, if cultivated, rural. Movement towards such a symbolic landscape also may be understood as a movement away from an “artificial” world -¦ away from sophistication towards simplicity – away from the city towards the country – a vehicle of escape from reality.

Marx then contrasts this sentimental form of the pastoral with his “imaginative and complex” form. But he doesn’t use a specific definition or criteria, instead he relies on an illustration from a passage by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Marx develops what he calls “the Sleepy Hollow moment” or motif. To do this, he refers to Hawthorne’s own experience of a place called “Sleepy Hollow“.

The signal event transpires on the morning of July 27, 1844 in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts.

Hawthorne’s notes of that day set out to describe a tranquil moment. Marx interprets the larger significance:

he [Hawthorne] sat in solitude and silence and tried to record his every impression. One incident dominates his impressions. Around this “little event” a certain formal – one might say almost dramatic – pattern takes shape. It is to this pattern that I want to call attention.[..]

Hawthorn is using natural facts metaphorically to convey something about the human situation. From several pages in this vein, we get an impression of a man in almost perfect repose, idly brooding upon the minutia of nature, and now and then permitting his imagination a brief flight. Hawthorne is satisfied to set down unadorned sense impressions, especially sounds – sounds made by birds, squirrels, insects, and moving leaves.

But then, after a time, the scope of his observations widens. Another kind of sound comes through. He hears the village clock strike, a cowbell tinkle, and mowers whetting their scythes.

Without any perceptible change of mood or tone, he shifts from images of nature to images of man and society. He insists that “these sounds of labor” do not “disturb the repose of the scene” … He is describing a state of being where there is no tension either within the self or between the self and its environment. Much of this harmonious effect is evoked by the delicate interlacing of sounds that seem to unify society, landscape, and mind. What lends most interest, however, to this sense of all encompassing harmony and peace is a vivid contrast:[Marx excerpts excerpts Hawthorne]

But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive – the long shriek, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; … and no wonder that is gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace. [end Hawthorne]

[..]

There is something arresting about the episode: the writer sitting in his green retreat dutifully attaching words to natural facts, trying to tap the subterranean flow of thought and feeling and then, suddenly, the startling shriek of the train whistle bearing in upon him, forcing him to acknowledge the existence of a reality alien to his pastoral dream.  What begins as a conventional tribute to the pleasures of withdrawal from the world – a simple pleasure fantasy – is transformed by the interruption of the machine into a farm more complex state of mind.

Our sense of its evocative power is borne out by the fact that variants of the Sleepy Hollow episode have appeared everywhere in American writing since the 1840’s. We recall the scene from Walden where Thoreau is sitting rapt in a revery and then, penetrating the woods like the scream of a hawk, the whistle of the locomotive is heard; or the erie passage in Moby Dick where Ishmael is exploring the innermost recesses of a beached whale and suddenly the image shifts and the leviathan’s skeleton is a New England textile mill; or the dramatic moment in Huckleberrry Finn when Huck and Jim are floating along peacefully and a monstrous steamboat suddenly bulges out of the night and smashes straight through their raft. More often than not, the machine is made to appear with startling suddenness.

[…]

What I am saying – is that Hawthorne’s notes mark the shaping of a metaphorical design which recurs everywhere in our literature. They are a paradigm of the second kind of pastoralism mentioned at the outset. By looking closely at the way these notes are composed we can begin to account for the symbolic power  of the “little event” in Sleepy Hollow”

[…]

Since Jefferson’s time the forces of industrialization have been the chief threat to the bucolic image of America. The tensions between the two systems of value had the greatest literary impact in the period between 1840 and 1860, when the nation reached that decisive stage in its economic development which W.W. Rostow calls the “take-off”… In America, according to Rostow, the take-off began about 1844 – the year of the Sleepy Hollow episode – just at they time our first significant literary generation was coming to maturity.  … The locomotive appears in the woods, suddenly shattering the harmony of the green hollow, like a presentiment of history bearing down on the Amercian asylum. The noise of the train… is a cause of alienation …. and so it estranges [Hawthorne] from the immediate source of meaning and value in Sleepy Hollow. In truth, the “little event” is a miniature of a great – in any ways the greatest -event in out history.

That Hawthorne was fully aware of the symbolic properties of the railroad is beyond question. Only the year before he had published “The Celestial Railroad”, a wonderfully compact satire on the prevailing faith in progress.

[…]

In its simplest, archetypal form, the myth affirms that Europeans experience a regeneration in the New World. They become new, better, happier men – they are reborn. In most versions the regenerative power is located in the natural terrain: access to undefiled, bountiful, sublime Nature is what accounts for the virtue and special good fortune of Americans. It enables them to design a community in the image of a garden, an ideal fusion of nature with art. The landscape thus becomes the symbolic repository of value of all kinds – economic, political, aesthetic, religious.

The sudden appearance of the machine in the garden is an arresting, endlessly evocative image. It causes the instantaneous clash of opposed states of mind: a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as a counterforce to the myth.

My Sleepy Hollow Moment

So, with Marx’s observations in mind, let me rehash my own recent “Sleepy Hollow moment”, and suggest productive avenues of future pursuit.

As I sat on the porch with a contented dog and sipping coffee, it was the incessant whine of the chainsaw that broke the moment and drew me to the woods behind my house on an otherwise fine Saturday morning.

Those woods are preserved and adjacent to a State Wildlife Management Area.

So, could my disruptor of the peace be so bold as to be poaching wood too?

My mind ran wild and my blood began to boil, as I set out into the woods, in the direction of the racket.

Upon arrival, I met “Mr. G”.

No confrontation – after a brief conversation, it was clear that he was no defiler of nature or poacher of wood, but a gentle man of virtue.

I immediately discovered that Mr. G. was a volunteer trail builder.

When I asked Mr. G about his volunteer work, he began by noting that although not many people now hiked in these recently preserved woods.

But he quickly emphasized that “people 50 years from now sure will appreciate this trail“.

Yes, surely Mr. G: “these sounds of labor” do not “disturb the repose of the scene” –  “sounds that seem to unify society, landscape, and mind”.

And therein lies the moral of our tale of our Sleepy Hollow moment:

Our discovery of virtue: consideration for the future, the wellbeing of the landscape and natural world, and selfless work in the public interest.

So what went so wrong historically?

Why is the relation between technology and the garden so screwed up today?

To probe those questions, next time, we being that exploration, based on the work of historian Joyce Appleby (“Capitalism and a new social order“).

We focus on Appleby’s analysis of how the concept of virtue was redefined and perverted in the 1790’s.

Virtue was redefined: from Classical republic virtue defined as selfless public service, to one based on individual private gain.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

A very unfortunate scene went down in Trenton today, and it was over-heard by several people, including members of the press, which compels me to write this.

I have praised NJ Spotlight here as “the only game in town“ when it comes to solid journalistic coverage of Trenton public policy issues, especially complex energy and environmental stories.

I often link to and discuss NJ Spotlight stories and I often comment on their stories as a reader.

I love NJ Spotlight’s motto: “Where issues matter” and strongly support their mission:

We are nonpartisan, independent, policy-centered and community-minded.

I view them as a much needed new model of alternative journalism, a State level policy oriented outlet along the lines of the public interest investigative journalism of ProPublica.

I have high regard for Tom Johnson, a veteran reporter whom I’ve known and sporadically worked with as a source for almost 20years.

(full disclosure: Tom doesn’t know it and probably would not even recall it, but his Star Ledger page 1 March 1994 story on then pending legislation to create a new household hazardous waste management program (A973 – Ogden) at DEP put me irrevocably on the path to career destruction at DEP.

Long story short: Powerful NJ based consumer product industry interests strongly opposed the bill. Of particular concern to them was their interpretation that DEP would be involved in marketing alternative non-toxic household products, which would compete with their products and reduce market share and profits. I was quoted in Tom’s story to the affect that DEP had no intentions of “becoming Madison Avenue” (I still recall the phrase). That quote directly contradicted new DEP Commissioner Bob Shinn, who was quoted as saying DEP would make it a priority to educate consumers about alternatives. Lesson Learned: It’s not good to contradict your new boss on page 1 in the Star Ledger.)

Anyway, I digress.

The reason I write is caused by an email I sent to a list serve yesterday. I now need to expand upon and clarify that email.

I was responding to a discussion post by my friend Scott Olson.

Scott was seeking dialogue on his concern about recent NJ Spotlight policy forums, which he viewed as biased and composed exclusively of industry, with no enviro or public interest representatives.

I agreed. Here is the exchange in full:

Scott: FYI – Much like water “roundtable” – no anti-fossil fuel advocates or environmentalist. A lot one-sided and biased towards energy industry. You think NJ Spotlight would have learned by now. Of course it IS sponsored by Gas Industry…Hmmmm. Am I the only one seeing a problem here?

Wolfe: You’re right Scott.

Just before the start of Monday’s water panel, Tom Johnson grabbed me and asked me too submit a question. He started the conversation off defensively by saying he was aware of criticism of the composition of the panel w/no enviro’s.

So, I assumed it was a aberration – but I guess not.

In addition, NJ Spotlight provided a questionnaire for attendees to fill out – one of the questions was whether your would pay a fee to attend.

So, I smell money issues!

So I hope this corporate sponsorship crap and panel imbalance doesn’t spill over into their coverage of issues!

Apparently, this email exchange got back to Tom Johnson and perhaps others at NJ Spotlight. Oops!

So, Tom pulled me aside this morning during a Senate Environment Committee hearing to take exception to what I wrote. Tom said:

“What, do you have a problem with free enterprise? Why are you opposed to us making money”? What’s all that about imbalanced panels and questionaire about money?”

I tried to explain that I expected better of NJ Spotlight, that I was actually working to protect their integrity, and that I had left the question of impact of paid policy panel interests on news coverage an open question.

Plus, the Trenton special interests have plenty of private communication resources and platforms, the main stream media, and extensive inside access to policymakers to inject their concerns into the policy process – they don’t need NJ Spotlight to serve as their shill.

Anyway, I want NJ Spotlight to thrive and serve s an alernative public oriented voice.

It would be a serious loss if they fell victim to the traditional journalistic model – that sacrifices integrity to the advertising revenues. Even the appearance or perception of corporate influence on a journalistic entity can taint their credibility.

I understand the need for revenues and the ability to separate panel policy fora from news coverage, but it should not be difficult to find diverse and credible alternative viewpoints to serve on policy panels.

I hope my friends at NJ Spotlight can understand this principled stance.