WolfeNotes.com

The Powell Memo 2.0

The billionaire backed corporate Right wing think tanks have generated a new long game plan for the next Republican administration.

The Plan is explicitly designed to “dismantle the administrative state”.

It’s name is “Project 2025”.

Back on July 28, I wrote Murphy DEP Commissioner LaTourette and legislative environmental leaders and NJ press corps a warning note regarding this plan. I assume they thought it was an exaggerated conspiracy theory.

Once again, we were way out in front of the issue. Once again, NJ “leaders” fail to lead.

Now, I see that The NY Times wrote about this plan last, week, see:

• A Republican 2024 Climate Strategy: More Drilling, Less Clean Energy

         Project 2025, a conservative “battle plan” for the next Republican president, would stop attempts to cut the pollution that is heating the planet and encourage more emissions.

Of course, the NY Times story omits a lot of context and history, which we made very clear in our warning note, see:

———- Original Message ———-

From: Bill WOLFE <>

To: “shawn.latourette@dep.nj.gov” <shawn.latourette@dep.nj.gov>, “Sean.Moriarty@dep.nj.gov” <Sean.Moriarty@dep.nj.gov>, senbsmith <SenBSmith@njleg.org>, “tmoran@starledger.com” <tmoran@starledger.com>, “fkummer@inquirer.com” <fkummer@inquirer.com>, “wparry@ap.org” <wparry@ap.org>, “jonhurdle@gmail.com” <jonhurdle@gmail.com>, sengreenstein <sengreenstein@njleg.org>, “kduhon@njleg.org” <kduhon@njleg.org>, asmmckeon <asmmckeon@njleg.org>, Robert Hennelly <rhennelly55@gmail.com>, “jpillets@icloud.com” <jpillets@icloud.com>

Date: 07/28/2023 9:39 AM PDT

Subject: “Project 2025”

Dear Commissioner LaTourette:

I write to give you a heads up and urge you to read the Heritage Foundation’s recent initiative called “Project 2025”. It is explicitly designed to “dismantle the administrative State”. FULL REPORT HERE:

Chapter 13 provides a radical agenda to dismantle EPA and virtually all regulatory, science, and climate programs – read it here:

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-13.pdf

I strongly urge you to get out in front of and do everything within your power to derail this freight train. This includes a strong public defense and expansion of regulatory programs, which is something both you and Gov. Murphy consistently either fail to defend or overtly run away from (“we’re not mandating ….” et al).

The Heritage Report is the radical right’s second long game strategic plan.

The first was outlined in the 1971 Powell Memo. The Powell memo was not taken seriously at the time it was released and the radical ideological and policy threats it posed were ignored. That abdication by people and professionals who support effective government and environmental protection contributed to the dire straights were are now in.

You know what they say about those who fail to learn from history.

Bill Wolfe

[Update: Project 2025 is an ideological-attack:

Science and Law Based Grassroots Public Interest Accountability Activism Is Dead

Corporate Neoliberal Policy & Partnerships, Co-Optation, And Identity Politics Prevail

The empty handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
The sky too is fallin’ in over you
And it’s all over now, baby blue. ~~~ It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Bob Dylan, 1965)

I want to expand upon key points I very briefly touched upon in yesterday’s tribute to Ed Lloyd:

That was when NJPIRG, the Ralph Nader outfit, still had balls and ran hard hitting corporate and government accountability campaigns, like the one that produced the NJ Clean Water Enforcement Act, the strongest clean water law in the country.

That criticism is made explicit in today’s NJ Spotlight’s story – and explicit, right there in the headline:

• Tribute: End of an environmental era

Aspects of this “end of an era” argument also are implicit in the under-reported fact that Ed Lloyd received a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Princeton – he epitomized the integration of science and law and the role of expertise.

Although I rarely agree with veteran reporter Tom Johnson and NJ Spotlight, yes that era is over. And Tom Johnson and his Spotlight editors know that very well, but lack the stones to tell readers why.

So let’s drill down of the reasons why that era is over: It’s all over now, baby blue.

1. Grassroots and unified Statewide campaigns

Environmental groups used to unite, prioritize, and focus on joint statewide campaigns, all oars rowing in the same direction.

Local activists groups were integrated into Statewide campaigns, using local controversies to generate media and political support for Statewide reforms.

None of that happens today, as environmental and conservation groups are fragmented, disorganized, focused on narrow single issues, work at cross purposes, and undermine aggressive local activists.

Some groups, like NJ Future and Sustainable NJ, are astro-turf operations masking corporate control. Others have little if any real grassroots or membership activism backing them up.

2. Aggressive and hard hitting tactics

One of my favorite NJ PIRG campaigns was Curtis Fisher’s attack on Gov. Whitman’s energy deregulation legislative initiative (late 1990’s).

He toured the state with a flatbed truck that had a giant 20 foot high screw, with banners “You’re being screwed”.

Today, so called activists are totally lame – and think a joint press conference with the Gov. is how to communicate a message to the public.

3. Campaigns target government and corporate accountability

Instead of unconditionally praising Governors and DEP Commissioners and forming partnerships with and taking corporate money, environmental groups used to focus on accountability, harshly criticize, and extract concessions from the Gov. and DEP.

Not any more.

4. Activism is science based

Ralph Nader crafted the model (see his book “Unsafe At Any Speed”).

It’s totally broken.

5. Activists seek enforcement of laws (via permits and regulations and lawsuits)

Back in the day, environmental groups used to staff campaigns that used DEP permits and regulations as platforms to promote accountability.

This involved real work: monitoring the DEP Bulletin and the NJ Register. Analyzing and commenting on draft permits, enforcement documents, Annual Reports and DEP Program plans, and proposed regulations. Filing rulemaking petitions. Strategically using the required public hearings to generate local activism and media coverage.

Very little of that is done anymore and what little is done is done very poorly.

6. Activists seek to expand laws – they set a high bar

Environmental groups used to conduct policy research that led to campaigns seeking aggressive new laws with stringent and enforceable standards, with mandatory deadlines and adequate funding to implement them.

That’s gone, as activist now are oblivious to policy innovation and settle for very little in the legislative arena.

7. There was no cooptation: No dirty deals or “partnerships” or “stakeholder” inside games

DEP has been able to co-opt environmental groups via grant funding and/or invitations to Stakeholder meetings. Foundations have promoted a similar non-adversarial and cooperative model of engagement.

That began under Whitman and it has gone steeply downhill since.

I’ll accept some responsibility for this in drafting the Corporate Business Tax DEP dedication and the Watershed Management Act, which provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for DEP to issue grants to various groups.

In hindsight, this was a very bad idea. I was totally naive and never even suspected how corrupt both DEP and environmental, watershed, and conservation groups could the.

8. Activists respect and apply expertise

I can recall science based Reports and advocacy (e.g. Dr. Peter Montague) – that’s gone too.

Today, identity politics has largely displaced the substance of environmental activism. Feelings and opinions, often fact free, regardless of their content, have displaced expertise.

9. A very limited strategic role for Foundation money

Foundations used to fund campaigns and programs that were crafted independently by environmental groups – they didn’t use financial leverage to shape and select campaigns, political targets, message, strategy and tactics like they now do

10. No corporate partnerships

Environmental groups used to understand that corporate interests were adverse to environmental interests and that there was an inherently adversarial relationship between corporations and environmental groups.

Today, there is not only a lot of corporate money in environmental groups, they openly brag about it and form corporate partnership.

Today, environmental groups openly support “market based tools”, and privatization, and deregulation, and forms of voluntary compliance and self certification and individual behavior, and consumer models. It’s Neoliberalism 24/7.

Now go and plant milkweed in your private backyard garden and buy recycled products! Drive an EV!

11. The Public Interest Is Dead

NJ PIRG had “public” in its organizational name.

Today, the public interest is invisible.

Environmental and conservation groups openly promote their own selfish narrow organizational interests with either no regard for or even at odds with the public interest.

Look no further than the Keep It Green Coalition for an example of this.

The lack of an effective Statewide Climate Coalition is another example of this kind of failure.

Senator Smith’s Forestry Task Force is another good example of incoherent co-optation.

12. A Vibrant Press Corps

In the 1980’s, when I began at DEP, every major NJ newspaper had a least one environmental reporter and there were several environmental stories printed every day.

There also was a well staffed State House press corps that wrote environmental stories on legislation and regulation and budgets and the environmental policies of the Governor.

That’s all long gone. So is the democratic accountability that the media coverage provided.

So, yes, Ed Lloyd’s death does symbolize the end of an era.

Ed Was A Friend, Public Servant, And Leader With Courage And Integrity

Fitting that its a gray cool foggy dank day here on the Salish Sea, as I just learned that longtime friend, colleague and environmental lawyer Ed Lloyd died – for the facts, see David Wildstein’s obituary. [Update – Pinelands Commission statement. [Update: Murphy DEP Commissioner LaTourette issued a statement. [Update – Columbia law school statement.]

Ed was a friend, colleague, and had a long history of leadership and work on virtually every environmental issue, campaign, and battle in NJ for the last 40 years. Ed’s wife, Janine Bauer, was also a lawyer and activist deeply involved in transportation, housing, environmental, and land use issues. My heart goes out to Janine and the family.

Ed left Trenton the same year as I joined NJ DEP, 1985, when I immediately became aware of his kick ass work as Director of the NJ Public Interest Research Group (NJ PIRG). From 1974 to 1985, Ed was executive director and staff attorney of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group. That was when NJPIRG, the Ralph Nader outfit, still had balls and ran hard hitting corporate and government accountability campaigns, like the one that produced the NJ Clean Water Enforcement Act, the strongest clean water law in the Country.

Under Ed’s leadership, PIRG ran hugely successful grassroots issue campaigns as well as traditional litigation, like the one that convinced Gov. Florio to terminate garbage incinerators and transform NJ’s solid waste policy to an emphasis on source reduction, recycling and composting, again the leading policy and program in the nation.

Ed’s work helped produce the NJ Pollution Prevention Act, again the leading national program that pioneered policies of toxics use reduction and the concept of pollution prevention.

When I was forced out of DEP by Gov. Whitman in 1994 for whistleblowing and joined the NJ environmental community, Ed was hugely supportive. Ed became a friend and colleague and I can’t exaggerate how supportive he was to me personally at a very difficult time in my life.

Shortly thereafter, I worked closely with Ed in drafting legal briefs challenging Gov. Whitman’s DEP massive rollbacks of DEP’s clean water regulations, dubbed the “Mega-Rule”. We lost that legal case, but we won the war and stopped that rollback.

Ed’s lawsuit to block the Ciba-Geigy ocean outfall toxic discharge established groundbreaking legal precedent for the “anti degradation” provisions of the Clean Water Act that had systemic and longstanding impacts to NJ DEP’s clean water programs.

The list of Ed’s huge accomplishments is too long to write.

Most importantly, on top of being an excellent lawyer and tireless activist and professional mentor, Ed was a decent human being.

He was committed to public service.

He had integrity and the courage to take controversial public positions and stand by his principles and beliefs. Ed would stick his neck out and take risks.

It’s extremely rare to find so many virtues in one man.

I’ll mention just two more personal examples that illustrate those virtues.

1. During the at times angry debate over a proposed gas pipeline through the NJ Pinelands, Ed opposed the pipeline as a Pinelands Commissioner. That courage brought retribution and disgraceful attacks by Gov. Christie.

But behind the scenes, Ed’s leadership and integrity were even more important to me personally than his public stance in opposition to the pipeline.

Specifically, I publicly testified to the Commission and strongly criticized the regulatory review practices of the Commission’s staff, including the conduct of multiple secret “pre-application” meetings as creating bias and “agency capture”. For that testimony, I was severely criticized personally by the Commission’s Executive Director Nancy Wittenberg in the Commission’s off the record Executive Session.

Someone at the Commission leaked a tape recording of that Executive session discussion to me.

Ed was the only Commissioner who stood up and openly disagreed with ED Wittenberg’s attack and explicitly said that he agreed with what Bill Wolfe said (paraphrase, but close to verbatim quote: “I wish I could have multiple meetings with the Judge before I try a case. The pre-application meetings, at best, create bias and put the public at a disadvantage”.). Thank you Ed, for sticking your neck out and telling the truth!

2. Ed did something very similar, and I’ll close with this example of Ed’s leadership and integrity.

I wrote about it in October 2015:

Climate Change

At the conclusion of the meeting, Pinelands Commissioner Lloyd urged the Commission to step up and play a role in climate change and consider the climate implications of fossil infrastructure like pipelines: (Ed Lloyd said:

I’d like to followup on an issue Mr. Wolfe raised with respect to climate change … I think that there’s nothing more important for us as an agency to do to protect this planet. I agree with Mr. Wolfe. I don’t have a full legal analysis  but I think we have the opportunity and the jurisdiction to do that…. This effort is related to the other discussion we had this morning with respect to pipeline infrastructure. … In my view we shouldn’t be investing in pipelines, we should be investing in renewables.  ~~~~  Commissioner Ed Lloyd (watch at the very end, at time 1:32:30)

Rest in peace Ed, you were a good man who did many good things.

Your irreplaceable work lives on.

Police Are Targeting Old People

This study caught my eye:

• The aging prison population: Causes, costs, and consequences

Policing

Policing disproportionately targets populations that often include many older adults: unhoused people, people who use drugs or alcohol, and people with cognitive disabilities. Nationally, the unhoused population is growing older. From 2007 to 2014, the number of unhoused people over age 50 expanded by 20%, and in 2014, this age group accounted for more than 30% of people experiencing homelessness. Given that unhoused people are up to 11 times more likely to be arrested than housed people, the likelihood of arrest for older, unhoused people is undoubtedly growing over time. Drug-related arrests among people aged 50 and older nearly doubled from 2000 to 2018, indicating a dramatic increase in criminal legal system involvement.

I know these results are true by first hand experience.

I live in a Skoolie, and therefore am by definition “unhoused” or “homeless”. I’m 66 years old.

I’ve been targeted many times by police for various sorts of harassment for years now.

In the most egregious example, I was arrested by a Coconino County, Arizona Sheriff and spent a night in jail in Flagstaff, facing felony charges!

These felony charges came with a mandatory minimum sentence of a minimum of 1 and up to 2 years in prison. No fucking joke.

My alleged crime was felony “disorderly conduct” in trying to prevent a vehicle from running over my dog, while we were camping in a National Forest.

The driver of that vehicle – after engaging in multiple lurching vehicle/jam on the brakes episodes and near misses in almost running over my dog, who was blocking his way on the national forest road – apparently felt threatened by my frantic efforts to make him stop until I could get my dog on a leash.

Seriously.

(I admit that I was guilty of having my dog off leash – which is a discretionary ticketable administrative violation in certain parts of some National Forests. Prior to this incident, I had received 3 dog off leash tickets and pled guilty for these violations, which averaged about $80 – $100 per ticket. I don’t think I am any different than any other dog owning visitor to a National Forest, other that I drive a Skoolie with politically controversial “Green New Deal” and “Drop the Charges” against those that provide water to desert immigrant logos.)

This felony charge was lodged in Arizona, a State that amounts to an insane asylum as a result of open carry and stand your ground laws, and out of control criminal Sheriff’s like Joe Arpaio.

In the course of prosecuting this trumped up “felony”, the Sheriff’s Office – with the presumed knowledge and approval of the County Prosecutor’s office – violated my rights, lied, filed false police reports and court documents, and doctored video and audio evidence. All crimes.

And they did this just to manufacture a “felony” charge against an old man defending his dog.

If they did this to me – who has the knowledge and verbal skills and tenacity to fight back – can you imagine what they do to homeless old people with all sorts of deficits?

[Post Script: I was held overnight in a tiny jail cell, packed like sardines with 13 other prisoners. It was the worst night of my life. The next morning, we were frog marched into a “courthouse” (a cinder block room in the county jail) to face the judge on a video screen. I counted over 100 people in this “courthouse”, over 95% of whom were black, Mexican or native American. The judge openly shook her head and audibly laughed as she was reviewing my charges. Welcome to Arizona, folks. Travel at your own risk.]

I took this photo on Point Wilson because as I walked by I was struck by the juxtaposition of the rusted metal jutting out of the earth amidst lovely dune trees.

I thought that was a perfect image of the classic “machine in the garden” motif:

• The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America .

[Leo] Marx identifies a major theme in literature of the nineteenth century—the dialectical tension between the pastoral ideal in America and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by machine technology. This tension is expressed “everywhere” in literature by the recurring image of the machine in the garden—that is, the sudden and shocking intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene. “Within the lifetime of a single generation,” Marx writes, “a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world’s most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine’s sudden entrance onto the landscape.”^[2]

A “sudden and shocking intrusion of technology into a pastoral scene” indeed!

The area was closed off (dune restoration project) so I couldn’t get in closer to try to figure out what the metal pipe was all about, but it obviously was part of the gun emplacements at Fort Worden.

As I stood there taking pictures, a young woman walked by. I sensed she may have been concerned that I was about to trample the dune restoration project.

I made some comment, like “I couldn’t help myself”, given the gorgeous contrast.

She agreed, but pointed out something just as stunning that I didn’t even see.

She noted the amazing orange color of the madrone tree on the left and the rusted metal.

They are very, very similar, no?

Two sets of eyes are always better than one:

While popular culture traded on “puerile” and sentimental pastoralism—that is, the simple and unreflective urge to find a “middle ground” between the over-civilization of the city and the “violent uncertainties of nature” (28)—serious literature took a hard, careful look at the contradictions in American culture, and particularly at the conflict between the old bucolic image of America and its new image as an industrial power (26). It is the “role” of literature, argues Marx, to show us the “contradiction” of our commitments to both rural happiness and “productivity, wealth, and power.”^[3]