WolfeNotes.com

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.

Rampant Media Bias – Sickening “Progressive Neoliberalism“

By giving away billions of dollars to nonprofit groups …, Mr. Bloomberg has made allies out of people who might otherwise be vocally against him.  ~~~ NY Times Op-Ed by the author of “The Elite Charade”.

I call this the PSE&G Model to control and co-opt the Green Mafia, but it also applies to Foundation funding.

[Update: less than 24 hours after I mentioned “The PSE&G Model” of corruption, Frank Kummer of the Philadelphia Inquirer  wrote a story that perfectly illustrates the Model. ~~~ end update]

This is my 3,000th post since creating this site in 2009 and it will be short and sweet – my last for a very long while, at least with respect to writing about NJ environmental policy and politics.

I simply can no longer tolerate the incoherence, incompetence, sellouts, influence of Foundation and corporate funding, media bias, political corruption, (and worse) I see every day.

Today’s news brought the straws that broke this camel’s back.

I)  Climate Sellout

The first was a remarkable story – ironically reported by NJBIZ, the media outlet of the business community and NOT written by the self proclaimed premier energy and environmental policy issues outlet NJ Spotlight – about a “2030 Climate Pollutants Letter” from 90 “progressive groups” to Gov. Murphy.

Incredibly, this climate letter – signed by the some of the same individuals and groups that just days ago unconditionally praised and aggressively applauded the release of Gov. Murphy’s Energy Master Plan and Executive Order 100 in the Governor’s own press release – seeks a core climate objective that should have been a basic demand extracted as a political commitment (or deliverable) before supporting Gov. Murphy’s EMP & EO 100.

(see our initial analyses of the Murphy EMP & EO 100, in reverse chronology: here and here and here- it’s likely that this shamed some people into writing this new “letter”)

Equally incredible is the fact that most of the groups that signed on to this climate 2030 letter also are members of the Empower NJ Coalition. That coalition has waged a 2 year political campaign to demand basically one critical thing: that Gov. Murphy impose a moratorium on new fossil infrastructure.

Not only did Gov. Murphy’s EMP and EO 100 reject the moratorium, but the letter ignores the Empower NJ coalition’s moratorium demand! It has evaporated into thin air!

The Empower NJ coalition got screwed. [let me be clear and name names: the moratorium campaign was sabotaged and then the Coalition was sold out by Doug O’Malley, Amy Goldsmith, Tom Gilbert, and Ed Potosnak]

Absurdly, some of Empower NJ’s new “2030 climate letter” coalition colleagues even joined and applauded the Gov. for screwing them, and now the whole mess is just swept under the rug.

This is intolerable political incompetence and betrayal.

[Update: Jeff Tittel forwarded me his recent Op-Ed. Jeff gets it right, echoing many of the same criticisms I’ve made. Jeff is the lone exception, see:

• Governor, we’re in a climate emergency but there’s no urgency in your policies

II)  Cowardice on Corporate Subsidies for Sprawl

The second was a NJ Spotlight story on a legislative proposal sponsored by Senate President Sweeney [D] and Senator Oroho, [R], former NJ representative to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Incredibly, – at a time when corporate subsidies are under attack by Gov. Murphy and finally receiving critical media coverage – this Sweeney/Oroho legislation seeks to provide corporate subsidies to develop the protected Pinelands and Highlands regions of the state. see:

• Sweeney and Oroho Promote Economic Development Plan for Highlands, Pinelands

Let me repeat that: the legislation – “a proposal, unveiled at a press conference in Lafayette in Sussex County” – seeks not only more insane corporate subsidies, but subsidies for development in the protected Pinelands and Highlands, the last relatively undeveloped places in NJ (and no doubt with no consideration at all to the climate or regional implications).

So, how did the so called “leaders” of the two so called “conservation groups” whose exclusive mission is to protect and preserve these last remaining natural regions of NJ react to this insane legislation?

Let me give the full quotes, so you too can get the full stench:

Mixed reaction

The proposal received mostly mixed responses from conservationists who have pushed for greater protections for the Highlands and Pinelands.

“As long as this doesn’t affect the Highlands Act, I think it’s a good idea,’’ said Elliot Ruga, policy director of the New Jersey Highlands Coalition, an organization dedicated to preservation in the region. “It was never intended for these towns to be ghost towns.’’

Carleton Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, noted the proposal doesn’t appear to change any of the Pinelands Commission’s development rules.

Nevertheless, he questioned whether the region needs to promote economic growth. “There is no evidence at all the region falls behind other areas of the state in economic growth,’’ Montgomery said.

Both Montgomery and Ruga should resign.

They are rank cowards – or they are incompetent – and no longer have the credibility required to lead real preservation oriented organizations. (Ruga was always unqualified and incompetent and their organizations are both drunk on Penn and Dodge Foundation money).

(Adding to a long list, Sweeney worked with Gov. Christie to ram the SJG pipeline through the Pinelands, has blocked confirmation of Gov. Murphy’s Pinelands and Highlands appointments, and shilled for the nuclear, chemical and oil & gas polluters in his district. He sponsored the nuke bailout – including placing a cost cap on renewable power – and may even be behind the stealth LNG export plant on the Delaware River. If Montgomery & Ruga and NJ Spotlight can’t call out Sweeney on all that, they are totally pathetic and need to go.)

III)  Spotlight Ignores Progressive Budget Demands While Printing Neoliberal Austerity

Third, NJ Spotlight not only ignored  the progressive “2030 Climate Letter” press release and found the space to publish a horrible story on the Sweeney/Oroho insanity plan, they also ignored a letter from 48 progressive organizations calling on Gov. Murphy to fund various climate, DEP, and public health projects in his upcoming State Budget.

On top of that, instead of writing a story about progressive budget demands from NJ based public interest groups during the run-up to the Gov.’s budget address, NJ Spotlight chose to publish a story about a national technical Report by the allegedly “non-partisan” but clearly Neoliberal austerity finance oriented “Volker Alliance”. (yes, that’s former Fed Chair Paul Volker’s outfit. No bias and ideology operating here, no, none at all!).

The Volker Alliance Report  was Orwellianly titled (with a capital T): “Truth and Integrity In State Budgeting”.

But, that so called “truth” is based on just “five building blocks of budgeting” (page vi).

Despite the fact that a Budget is a fundamental expression of public policy visions, values, priorities, and people, those so called “five building blocks of budgeting” do not include core budgeting objectives, such as:

• fairness and justice – how the budget impacts the huge inequality of wealth & income
• the distribution of benefits and burdens in the budget allocations & revenues
• corporate subsidies, corporate taxes, and corporate profits
• the relationship between public and private interests
• the needs of the people and the natural environment they depend upon
• the needs of the people, as expressed democratically
• the need for investments
• the climate emergency

The Volker Alliance report is a narrow technocratic exercise in what is basically financial accounting. It is based upon a sterile vision of austerity and neoliberal ideology. All that is very far from the “Truth” about a State Budget.

NJ Spotlight tells readers nothing about this broader context.

That Report must not be allowed to displace a public policy driven and normative budgeting process or evaluation criteria.

If all this is what now passes for public interest advocacy and issue driven journalism, I give up. I’m done.

[Full disclosure: I receive a small state pension which does not include health benefits.]

Native Lands And Organ Pipe National Monument Being Savaged

Solemn Protest At US Border Patrol In Why, Arizona

About 25 Native Americans and 50 supporters held a protest and traditional Native American spiritual ceremony today in response to the destruction of sacred lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose ancestral homelands and sacred burial sites are being blasted and desecrated to build Trump’s border wall.

We’ve been camping in the Sonoran desert on the edge of Tohono O’odham lands near Ajo, Arizona, about 40 miles from the Border and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.

So, I was proud to join the protest and stand in solidarity with the indigenous peoples whose lands were stolen to make way for the current militarized US – Mexican border region.

After lining about 1/2 mile of Route 85 just south of the US Border Patrol’s station in Why, Arizona with signs and receiving support from passing motorists, the protesters split into two groups who stood in concentric circles.

The inner ring was comprised of native peoples who participated in a ceremony led by their Medicine Man.

Supporters stood in solidarity and witnessed the ceremony in the outer ring.

I have never witnessed such a ceremony before, and it was very moving.

After the ceremony, the groups recombined and walked up the road to the US Border Patrol station.

Ryan of The Intercept has been doing outstanding reporting here for awhile now. Read his most recent report: (read the whole thing!)

CONTRACTORS WORKING FOR the Trump administration are blowing apart a mountain on protected lands in southern Arizona to make way for the president’s border wall. The blasting is happening on the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a tract of Sonoran Desert wilderness long celebrated as one of the nation’s great ecological treasures, that holds profound spiritual significance to multiple Native American groups.

Scenes:

Murphy DEP “Listening to All Sides”, including polluters, developers, & deniers

DEP Adopts posture of  “Collaboration”, Not Leadership

[See End Note]

I recently wrote that the Murphy DEP was “running away from climate regulations“.

I based that initial assessment on over 35 years of DEP regulatory policy work, the Murphy administration’s climate record thus far, a cursory review of the Murphy Executive Order, and the framing of a NJ Spotlight story, particularly on how the DEP responded to very strong pushback from the business community.

Since then, DEP has formally announced their official climate regulatory rollout.

That regulatory process includes 3 discrete DEP defined topics and public “stakeholder meetings” as follows:

• 02/21/2020 – Periodic monitoring and reporting of New Jersey’s greenhouse gas emissions
• 02/25/2020 – Reducing carbon emissions in New Jersey
• 03/02/2020 – Adapting land use regulations to climate change impacts, including sea-level rise, extreme weather, and chronic flooding

I) Monitoring and Reporting

At the outset, let me note that “monitoring and reporting” on greenhouse gas emissions was mandated 13 years ago by the 2007 global Warming Response Act.

Prior to passage of the GWRA, in 2005, DEP adopted regulations that defined greenhouse gases as regulated “air contaminants” (i.e. “pollutants”) under the NJ State Air Pollution Control Act and required monitoring and reporting of emissions.

Additionally, in the 2007 RGGI law, a subset of major GHG polluters in the energy sector were required to monitor and report emissions.

And prior to all that, in the mid 1990’s, Whitman administration DEP Commissioner Shinn established the first DEP greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

So, DEP has been involved in GHG monitoring and reporting for almost 30 years. DEP should be managing a robust GHG emissions monitoring and reporting program. If that’s not the case, then we’re really in trouble. And if it is the case, then Gov. Murphy and DEP Commissioner McCabe, by creating the public appearance that this program is something new and important is totally misleading.

Instead, DEP should be reporting to the public about the strengths and weakness of the GHG monitoring and reporting program, including making specific recommendations to make it more comprehensive, transparent, accurate, and reliable – and be able to be integrated with and technically support a GHG emissions reduction regulatory program, which the structure of current monitoring and reporting can not do.  

II) Reducing Carbon Emissions

The DEP’s public announcement lacks any specifics about the numeric emissions reductions and timetables that must be met to reflect “best available science”, or even define what “best available science” is.

That is a failure of leadership and it makes it appear that the fundamental GHG emission reduction goals and timetables are negotiable.

At a minimum, DEP should advise the public that the “best available” science includes the 2018 IPCC Special Report, that warned we must reduce emissions by 45% or more over the next decade.

Instead, the public must scroll through DEP’s rollout website to find a vague and weak “fact sheet”.

III) “Adapting Land Use Regulations to climate change”

By framing the issue this way, DEP has made and masks a HUGE policy concession.

DEP effectively has limited the scope of the land use climate program to adaptation, and not emissions reductions.

Development subject to DEP land use permit requirements not only must adapt to climate change, but that DEP regulated infrastructure, development and redevelopment also emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases that must be reduced.

The DEP land use programs must integrate missions reduction requirements.

New DEP permit requirements could mandate that developments subject to DEP land use permit requirements are:

1) zero carbon or carbon neutral;

2) offset any new carbon emissions;

3) planned, designed and constructed with energy in mind, from passive solar development layouts, preservation and planting of trees on and of-site, energy efficient insulation, building materials, and appliances, rooftop solar, smart metering, connectivity to micro-grids, off-grid storage, and accommodate electric vehicles at al.

But the DEP has defined that all away be restricting the scope of land use regulations to “adaptation”.

IV) “Stakeholder meetings” versus formal public hearings or negotiated rule-making

The DEP has chosen to develop the climate regulatory program via informal “stakeholder meetings”. That means that these meetings are not subject to the NJ Administrative Procedures Act or Gov. Murphy’s own troubling Executive Order on regulatory policy.

That decision has procedural and substantive consequences.

Procedurally, these meetings are informal. That means that the public is not guaranteed the protections that would be provided by “formal” procedures, like formal public hearings, where DEP is required to widely publish and publicize the public notices of the hearings. At these hearings, no one can be excluded and all voices must be heard on an equal basis. DEP is required to maintain a transcript of all public comments, DEP is required to respond to public comment, and the contents of the hearing form the “official record” of the rule making are transparent to the public and are subject to judicial and legislative review.

In contrast, DEP is under no such obligations in informal “stakeholder meetings”. That means that DEP can erect barriers that limit public involvement, like mandatory registration, limits on the duration of meetings and limited public notice of the meetings.

In addition to the above troubling DEP presentation of the regulatory framework, here’s how Murphy DEP Commissioner McCabe described the DEP climate regulation program: (emphases mine)

“As we work to modernize our environmental regulations to reflect the best available science, DEP is committed to a thoughtful and collaborative approach that engages stakeholders from across all sectors of our economy, non-governmental organizations, academia and local government. We are all in this together.”

There are a number of rhetorical and procedural red flags that tend to confirm my initial assessment.

First of all, the DEP is stressing problematic policy concepts, specifically “modernization“, “stakeholder meetings“,”collaboration“, and individual DEP defined topics (AKA regulatory “silos”).

And here’s another troubling one:

Due to space limitations, the DEP is requesting attendees to RSVP. …To attend, you MUST RSVP to the event using the RSVP For This EVENT link on below right.

Let’s discuss these problems one by one.

I) “Modernization”

Modernization is a policy neutral concept. Modern is in the eye of the beholder: does it mean “efficient”? Does it mean “least cost”? Does it mean least regulatory burden? Does it mean deepest and fastest greenhouse gas emissions”?

For an example of the dangers of modernization”, consider that President Bill Clinton “modernized” financial regulation via the “Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

Those “modernization” laws deregulated Wall Street and led to the 2008 financial collapse.

Gov. Murphy was making his fortune on Wall Street and benefited hugely from this “modernization”.

So, beware whenever a Wall Street Neoliberal Democrat pursues a policy of “modernization”.

II) Stakeholder meetings

(see above)

III) Collaboration

This is going to be a fight with powerful economic interests and their friends in the legislature and media. The Murphy DEP needs tremendous public support, which can only be generated by a bold proposal.

But the concept of collaboration is troubling and it undermines the concept of leadership.

With DEP setting out seeking “collaboration”, that is a very soft stance and invites all kinds of compromise, even capitulation.

IV) DEP’s definition of the issues and structure of the regulatory framework

See the above discussion of how DEP narrowed the scope of the land use regulatory program.

DEP also has done this by breaking the public sessions into discrete topics, thereby perpetuating a “silo” based approach and undermining effective public involvement.

By doing this, DEP is avoiding and undermining a more compressive and synthetic approach that could integrate both emission reductions and climate adaption in a unified regulatory framework.

V) Discouraging public involvement

(see above).

There’s no reason why the public should be required to register to participate.

DEP has stated that there are “space limitations” (capacity). That is unacceptable.

I assume DEP also will impose time limits on the meetings and the length of people’s testimony.

All of the above are more troubling signs. Often, the process dictates the outcome.

If so, there are many signs that we’re headed for the rocks.

[End Note: the comment function doesn’t work, so an informed reader sent me an email criticizing this post, as follows:

The standards for all that are already predetermined by the EMP . RGGI  etc. Clean energy is incinerators , bio gas , bio mass subsidies nukes , CHP, and sequestration and off sets – the reduction electrical sector 30% 2030 by RGGI – 80% net reductions 2050 with offsets, carbon sequestration and bio gas.

I replied thusly:

I understand that – the post about all that substance is being written in my head. It’s coming. This is a series.

The point I’m trying to make in this post is that at the outset, DEP and the Gov. won’t talk about all that precisely BECAUSE the standards suck. They don’t mention lots of other stuff – like STATUTORY RGGI allowance caps, solar caps, et al that create barriers to even the Gov.’s weak emission reduction goals and timetables.

Failure to even MENTION all this substance in the Gov. Ex. Order 100 and at the outset of a DEP public process for regulatory development can only result in them getting even WEAKER in response to strong pushback by the business community and legislature – and with no fingerprints or even ability for the public to know what the hell went on.