The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) announced yesterday that the Amway Corporation is the recipient of $1.6 million in corporate welfare.
The $1.6 million will be used to build a new manufacturing facility to expand their vitamin production capacity. The MEDC said that the Ada-based corporation chose to build the new facility in Ada, despite looking at other locations around the country. No doubt the $1.6 million in corporate welfare was a major incentive to expand in Ada.
So, the company that is based on a pyramid scheme and rabidly embraces a free market ideology, is once again the beneficiary of public funds so they can expand. The DeVos funded Mackinac Center for Public Policy is constantly beating the drum of government deregulation, privatization of public services and the current austerity measures being implemented by Gov. Snyder. While Amway doesn’t want tax money to support public services and public employees, they don’t hesitate to hold their hand out to get public money for their private gain.
The MEDC announcement includes comments from Amway executives as well as comments from Birgit Klohs, President and CEO, The Right Place, Inc. Klohs states, “Amway’s investment is very encouraging to The Right Place, and to the region as well, as this announcement demonstrates that manufacturing remains strong and growing in West Michigan.”
Of course The Right Place would salute more corporate welfare going to a West Michigan company, since that is one of its major functions, to assist the business community to become more profitable. Not surprising, the Chairman of the Board for The Right Place is Doug DeVos, the President of Amway.
Imagine a People’s Media in Chicago
This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.
Imagine that a democratic and popular media – a people’s media – had been on the beat in Chicago during the NATO summit and protests that concluded in that city two days ago to explain why many thousands had come downtown to demonstrate against the summit and why a significantly larger number of heavily equipped city, county, state, federal, and private police and security forces had been assembled to protect NATO’s delegates, that media would have noted from the outset that NATO is an aggressive and imperial killing machine. As the antiwar activist John La Farge noted on ZNet last week, “A look at some of [NATO’s] crimes might spark some indignation.” Further:
“Desecration of corpses, indiscriminate attacks, bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners and unaccountable drone war are a few of NATO’s outrages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere…While bombing Libya last March,” NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift in the Mediterranean. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as criminal by the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog….”
“NATO jets bombed and rocketed a Pakistani military base for two hours Nov. 26, 2011—the Salala Incident—killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to apologize, so the Pakistani regime has kept military supply routes into Afghanistan closed since November.”
“…the US-led unprovoked 2003 bombing, invasion and military take-over of Iraq—which NATO officially joined in 2004 in a ‘training’ capacity—resulted in over 665,000 civilian deaths by 2006, and 200,000 in the UN-authorized, 1991 Desert Storm massacre led primarily by the US with several NATO allies.”
NATO’s criminal record goes back to the last century, including the deadly NATO bombings of a Serbian passenger train and a Serbian television station in April of 1999.
Noting the absurdity of NATO’s claim to be a defensive and “humanitarian” alliance, a people’s media would have observed that NATO has served as a spear pointed by the world’s richest nations – the U.S. above all – at the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the world’s strategic energy heartland. It would have reported how NATO is threatening to create deadly future conflicts with nuclear Russia and China in pursuit of increased U.S. and Western control of petroleum resources. It would have reported the provocative nature (from a Russian perspective) of NATO’s new missile shield in and around Eastern Europe. And a people’s media would have reported how the U.S. and the West will clearly be retaining a central military presence – a de facto indefinite occupation – in Afghanistan long after 2014, when Barack Obama claims that the U.S. and NATO will have “withdrawn” from that nation. 
A people’s media would also have reported that NATO is a poverty and social injustice machine. It would have noted the massive global social opportunity cost of the massive taxpayer sums spent on so-called defense by the NATO powers. It would have reported on the absurdity of those nations accounting for more than three-fourths of the world’s massive military budget (U.S.$1.630 trillion in 2010) in a time of savage austerity and misery for billions of world citizens, including many millions even in the rich states. It would have noted that NATO militarism takes hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and Euros away from potential investment in meeting human needs each year and grants them instead to corporate masters of death and destruction like Chicago’s own Boeing Corporation, maker of the Muslim-killing Black Hawk Helicopter, the Predator Drone, and the B2 Stealth Bomber. Noting (perhaps) Martin Luther King’s observation that a nation courts “spiritual death” when it spends “more on military defense than on a social uplift,” a people’s media would have noted the tragic and outrageous nature of this misdirection of resources in a world in a “world’s richest nation” – the United States – where:
- a record-setting 1 in 15 citizens now live in “deep poverty” – at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty measure (less than $11,157 for a family of four).
- the total number of citizens living in official poverty recently reached a historic high of 46.2 million
- over 15 percent of the population (1 in 7 Americans) lives below the poverty line
- 1 in 6 citizens (50 million, a population twice the size of Texas) have no health insurance
- 14.5% of the citizen households are defined as “food insecure” (as facing difficulties putting enough food on the table)
- 1 in 3 citizens live either in official poverty or in “near poverty”: either officially poor or at less than 150 percent of the poverty level
Bringing it to the local level, a people’s media would have noted that the City of Chicago spent 14 million taxpayer dollars to host and celebrate a global killing machine in a city that was already home, even before the onset of the Great Recession, to 15 predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods with child poverty rates ranging from 55 to 71 percent and to 6 predominantly black neighborhoods where more than 4 in 10 children were mired in “deep poverty.”
A people’s media would have reported and reflected critically on the excessive, surreal level of militarized policing in Chicago. From at least Friday May 18th through Monday, May 21st, 2012, that media would have noted, the downtown and South Loop of Chicago were placed under proto-totalitarian multi-dimensional para-militarized police-state occupation. (I’ll report from the scene that heavily armed, high-tech federal, state, county, city and private security forces were omnipresent and ubiquitous in the gleaming center of “global Chicago.” At almost every step in and around the city’s downtown and South Loop, I beheld black-clad, baton-wielding and vest-wearing agents of repression, high-speed police vans and cars speeding around corners and occasionally into crowds – an intimidating, vast “security” presence that seemed more than vaguely dystopian. Except for many thousands of militarized police, the Loop was nearly a ghost town by Friday morning. City, federal, state, and media helicopters hovered above the central business, hotel and restaurant district and swept the lakefront, monitoring real and potential protest. Police cars and vans swept around corners with sirens blaring to descend on real or imagined dissenters. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, men in paramilitary black were getting out of shining white vans and black SUVs.)
A people’s media would have noted how Chicago police repeatedly and needlessly initiated violence by clubbing protesters on Saturday and Sunday. That media would have reported and condemned how police vans dangerously brushed past and bumped protestors, sending one (Jacob Amico) to a local hospital. It would have reported how the police pulled over, harassed, and arrested a handful of live streamers trying to cover the protests.
A people’s media would have questioned and ridiculed the Chicago Police Department’s claim on the eve of the summit to have discovered horrible plots by a handful of “terrorist” anarchists to make and set off explosives in the city. It would have focused on the role that FBI infiltrators and agents provocateur played in trumping up the charges. It would have denounced the blatant violation of the alleged terrorists’ civil liberties by police, who broke down doors with guns drawn and searched residences without warrants and physically and verbally abused suspects, who were denied food, water and access to bathrooms. A people’s media would have noted that federal and local officials commonly manufacture these sorts of fabricated charges and conduct these kinds of pre-emptive raids prior to national security events in order (to quote an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild) “to spread fear and intimidation so you have fewer people our on the streets willing to protest and willing to risk violation of their constitutional rights.”
A people’s media would have commented with grave democratic concern on the chilling militarization of the domestic metropolitan policing demonstrated in a great American city. It would have noted the great lengths to which the city’s militaristic and corporatist mayor (President Barack Obama’s former right-wing chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel) went to prevent protesters from assembling in Chicago in the first place – the endless permit hurdles and protest penalties City Hall placed in the way of those who wished to express their Free Speech rights during the summit.
On the afternoon of Friday, May 18th, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to broadcast live coverage of a remarkable rally in Chicago’s downtown. In Daley Plaza, that media would have shown, 5,000 people crowded in to support the implementation of a “Robin Hood tax” on financial speculators in order to more adequately fund social programs that have come under relentless assault in recent years and decades.
The following day, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to broadcast live from the block in front of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s house on the city’s Northwest Side. Eight hundred marchers assembled there to demand that Emmanuel rescind his closing down of numerous mental health clinics across the city. Speakers drew a powerful connection between the dwindling of city services and the money that “Mayor 1%” was spending to wine, dine, guard, and chauffer NATO war-makers.
On Sunday afternoon, May 20th, a people’s media would have interrupted normally scheduled programming to give extensive and appreciate coverage to the vast scale, rich diversity, brilliant pageantry, and splendid egalitarian and solidaristic spirit of the giant protest march that wound its way down Michigan Avenue to the heavily guarded hard perimeter of the summit at Michigan and Cermak Street (2200 South) on the afternoon of Sunday, May 21st. By my estimate, the march was at least 15,000 to 20,000 strong.
A people’s media would have observed that Sunday’s turnout reflected the futility of the authorities’ attempt to scare people away from the streets.
A people’s media would have given voice to dozens of marchers, letting activists tell readers and viewers why they opposed the summit and what positive developments they wanted to help create in Chicago, the U.S., and the world. Among other things, that media would have noted the wondrous and welcome nature of two interrelated developments: (i) a reinvigorated antiwar movement that (in accord with last year’s Madison rebellion and the Occupy Movement) speaks the language of class, connecting opposition to specific imperial wars and campaigns to the broader problem of Western militarism and connecting both to inequality and the profits system – to the domestic and global rule of “the 1%”; (ii) a reinvigorated left peace and anti-austerity movement that can (among other things) put large numbers of active citizens on the streets when the White House is occupied by fake-progressive/faux-populist (in fact militantly corporate and militaristic) Democratic Party – this in a solidly Democratic-run city.
A people’s media would have given extensive live coverage to the remarkable moment at the end of the massive Sunday march when 40 U.S. military veterans stood on a flatbed truck in a packed intersection several blocks from the summit site (McCormick Place). One by one, each ex-soldier told stories of their service, spoke passionately of their disillusionment with “the global war on [of] terror,” and then tossed the medals they had received into an empty street. One soldier blamed himself for “not doing my homework” on the U.S. imperial project before enlisting in the Armed Services. Another veteran tearfully apologized to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Another shouted that “our real enemies aren’t 7000 miles away with foreign sounding names. They are right here at home. They are the CEOs who take our jobs and homes away.” More than one ex-soldier at Michigan and Cermak dedicated the repudiation of their medals to “the 99 percent.” It was a moving and eloquent display.
A people’s media would have broadcast every word live of this remarkable demonstration on every channel available to it. It would have moved back and forth from the ardent faces and language of the courageous young ex-warriors to the cold and indifferent visages of the police, many of them mounted on horses. The people’s media would have showed how the silent, stoic agents of repression did not glance at the powerful scene on the makeshift stage and instead stared back at the crowd from behind their visors, gigantic batons (as big as baseball bats) in their hands, ready and eager to implement the order to disperse. A people’s media would have noted that two dangerous Long Range Acoustic Devices (each costing the city’s taxpayers $20,000) stood three blocks away, ready to unleash ear-splitting sonic screams against those taking too long to depart (fortunately the police did not use the LRADs for anything other than ordering dispersal). With the cameras panning out across the ominous face off at Michigan and Cermak, people’s media commentators would have noted the chilling proto-totalitarianism of it all and highlighted the contradiction between (a) NATO’s claim to be spreading and defending democracy and freedom and (b) NATO’s apparent need to be defended from the citizenry (including veterans of its bloody neo-colonial wars) with a militarized police presence that turned a major U.S. city center into an occupation zone.
Now, imagine how an authoritarian or even totalitarian corporate war media would have covered the NATO summit and related protests. It would have portrayed NATO as a noble defensive alliance dedicated to peace, freedom, prosperity and partnership. It would have brought in NATO officials and friendly, power-serving “experts” to praise to the body in precisely such preposterous terms. It would have mindlessly replicated policymakers claims that that the U.S. is “leaving Afghanistan” by 2014. Having depicted NATO (and the Afghan strategy) in such an Orwellian way as to make the protestors look like deluded, neurotic, and inherently dissatisfied n’eer-do-wells who just like to march around and make noise – to “be heard” – the authoritarian war media would have claimed that the city was being open, welcoming, and respectful towards protestors and their free speech rights. It would have given dutiful, fear-mongering headline coverage (replete with menacing front page mug shots of the falsely accused havoc-wreakers) to the FBI and police department’s fabricated anarcho-terrorist bomb scare (shades of Haymarket) and warning Chicagoans in advance to be on guard for dangerous anarchists. It would have had nothing of substance to say about the social inequality and opportunity cost of U.S. and NATO militarism and the domestic police state. It would have downplayed and even ridiculed the size of the demonstrations, mindlessly reproducing the CPD’s preposterous claim that the Sunday march was only 2,000 strong (!) and crowing that protest numbers were far less than anti-NATO organizers had hoped. Praising the police for being sensitive and keeping the city safe and under control, it would have had little to say about the content of protestors’ chants, banners, literature, issues, demands, analyses, and perspectives. It would have given wildly disproportionate attention to moments when the cops and the more volatile protestors tussled. It would have largely ignored the moving and striking medal-returning scene at Michigan and Cermak while spending long periods of live television and radio time on periods when cops and a relatively small number of black-clad anarchists battled physically at the end of the march.
Of course, you don’t really have to imagine these differences between (i) how a people’s media and (ii) how an authoritarian state-capitalist war media would have covered and commented on the NATO summit and protests. During the summit, you could in fact find some considerable amount of the first (people’s) sort of coverage and commentary on such relatively marginal and small, major resource-deprived Left and progressive outlets as Democracy Now!, Truthout, ZNet, AlterNet, FiredogLake In These Times, Counterpunch, Socialistworker.org and Pacifica Radio. You could also find vast amounts of the second (authoritarian/Orwellian) sort of coverage and commentary in Chicago’s two corporate newspapers (the Sun Times and the Tribune) and on the radio stations WBBM (Chicago News Radio) and the city’s TV stations WBBM/CBS2, WMAQ/NBC5, WLS/ABC7 and WGN and in various national media outlets like CNN and the New York Times, which actually reported last Monday that only “hundreds of protestors took to the streets of Chicago on Sunday in opposition to the war [on Afghanistan] and to NATO” (Helene Cooper and Matthew Rosenberg, “Pakistan Rift Casts a Shadow on NATO Meeting,” New York Times, May 21, 2012, A6). There’s nothing speculative about my paragraph (two above) on how an authoritarian/totalitarian/ Orwellian/corporate/war media would have handled the NATO summit and protests. As some readers can probably tell, I constructed that paragraph precisely on the basis of a review of the sources mentioned in this paragraph.
Sadly, at present, “the 1%’s” authoritarian corporate media dwarfs people’s media in terms of audience, resources, and influence. This is a key component of the rising totalitarian peril in “democratic” America, where the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire hold power through control of information and opinion as well as the massive deployment of raw force and surveillance.
This Media Alert is re-posted from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.
PBS deserves tons of awards. But not for selling kids on fast food.
Last year, the popular PBS Kids show Martha Speaks entered into a 4-year agreement to promote fast food purveyor Chick-fil-A. The multi-pronged campaign, whose stated goals include to “reach children” and “drive brand preference and restaurant traffic,” includes 15-second ads for Chick-fil-A before and after Martha Speaks TV episodes; advertising on the PBS Kids’ website; and in-store promotions at more than 1600 Chick-fil-A locations. In 2011, an astounding 56 million Chick-fil-A Kids’ Meals were distributed in Martha Speaks co-branded bags. PBS executives refuse to say what they have planned for the 30 months left in the promotion.
Tell PBS: Stop selling kids on fast food.
You might think that PBS would be ashamed of using a highly-regarded children’s show to lure kids to Chick-fil-A, especially since a kids’ meal can contain as much as 670 calories, 29 grams of fat, and 25 grams of sugar. Instead, PBS is using the “success” of its fast food campaign to attract other sponsors looking to target children. The Sponsorship Group for Public Television features a case study on the Chick-fil-A campaign to convince companies that sponsoring kids’ shows on PBS can help meet their marketing goals. And PBS member station WGBH—which produces Martha Speaks—actually nominated its Chick-fil-A campaign for a kids marketing award. On June 7 in New York City, the Chick-fil-A/Martha Speaks promotions are competing for a Cynopsis Kids Imagination Award for “Best Promotional Campaign.”
We support public broadcasting and abhor the ongoing political attacks on funding PBS’s excellent programming. But public television has an obligation to put the wellbeing of children first. Campaigns like the Chick-fil-A/Martha Speaks partnership make it difficult to distinguish PBS from corporate networks generating profits by selling kids on junk.
Children deserve better. Using a beloved children’s character to entice kids to eat fast food is nothing to celebrate. So let’s tell PBS and WGBH to end their Chick-fil-A promotion and withdraw from the Cynopsis Awards.
Within the last 24 hours, numerous West Michigan news sources have reported on the newly released government documents related to the 2010 Enbridge oil disaster that caused nearly 1 million gallons of oil to contaminate the Kalamazoo River.
The Mlive reporter out of Kalamazoo states, “The 158 documents and 58 photos will provide the factual basis for the National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion of what caused the spill.”
The Mlive story goes on to cite a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who made reference to what this new information could mean as it relates to the pipeline system that Enbridge will be responsible for in the Keystone Tar Sands Project.
Despite the limited discussion around the Keystone Tar Sands Project, much of the coverage was focused on the release of the documents, but not what they concluded.
In addition, the MLive story also includes a response from Enbridge, as did most of the other major media sources in West Michigan. The WOOD TV 8 story quoted an Enbridge executive who stated, “Safety has always been core to our operations. We have reviewed our processes and procedures since the Line 6B incident, and we have enhanced our focus on the safety and integrity of our operations even further.”
The only major news agency in West Michigan that framed the story differently was the Battle Creek Enquire. Their headline had a different tone with, Documents shed light on Enbridge spill response. The Battle Creek Enquire article just does a better job of framing the story, by reporting on what some of the documents say. The documents reveal that the response time by Enbridge was faulty and the alarm designed to go off when pipeline breaks occurred, wasn’t working.
The documents released are worth reading and they reveal other useful bits of information as well.
Lastly, it is important to point out that in none of the West Michigan news coverage of these new documents was their any reference to the company’s track record on oil spills and pipeline leaks. According to a report from the group Tar Sands Watch,
Between 1999 and 2010, across all of Enbridge’s operations there have been 804 spills that have released 168,645 barrels (approximately 26.81 million litres, or 7.08 million gallons) of hydrocarbons into the environment.159 This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1988.
Reporting the track record of Enbridge on oil spills and pipeline leaks should have been a priority for reporters, but we have come to learn that such reporting has not been consisted with how they have covered this issue from the very beginning.
In 1830, the US government passed what was called the Indian Removal Act, as one of the first formal means of displacing Native Americans from land that the government and the wealthy White sectors had plans for.
Native communities had been outright attacked in many cases before this, particularly in the northeastern part of the country, but Congress and Democratic President Andrew Jackson decided to take a different tactic.
The land, in what is now Georgia, South Carolina and Florida was inhabited by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw nations, who lived in relative harmony with each other. However, the growing slave labor plantation system was in need of expansion and the last thing that plantation owners wanted was any kind of alliance between Black slaves and Native communities, an alliance that some military strategist had seen before.
During the Seminole Wars in Florida, Andrew Jackson had seen the danger of runaway slaves finding sanctuary in Native communities, as several of the bravest Seminole fighters were Black Indian, as is well documented in Black Indians, by William Loren Katz.
Jackson wanted no part of any kind of a repeat with Black and Native resistance to the US plans for expansion, so his administration devised a plan of forced removal of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw people to Oklahoma, a campaign, which began as early as 1831.
The pretext of this forced removal, according to Jackson administration, was to provide greater separation between Whites and Native people in order to avoid future conflicts. The White-owned newspapers in the area fed the perception that Native people were dangerous, based on how they were portrayed. In the book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, the authors demonstrate that not only was there a disproportionate amount of news stories about Native people at that time, most of the stories framed Natives as violent and a danger to White settler communities.
The forced removal of what was known as the Trail of Tears began on May 23rd, 1838, but the Cherokee were rounded up by US troops months before and interned in camps, where they were held until the long march west began.
Native men, women, children and their elders were forced to march by US troops who held them at bayonet point throughout. Most accounts note that there were inadequate provisions of food, clothing and medical care for the thousands that were forcibly removed.
The forced removal of the Cherokee Nation took them 1,000 miles west to Oklahoma, but along the way thousands died from starvation, disease or freezing to death during the winter months of the forced removal. Some estimates say that 55% of the Cherokee Nation died as a direct result of the Trail of Tears. (A Little Matter of Genocide, Churchill)
However, to those in power in the US, the loss of this many Native people was of little concern, especially considering the amount of land that was then appropriated by the federal government. The amount of land appropriated from the Indian removal of Native Nations in the southeast part of the country was roughly 25 million acres, which was then used by White Settlers.
In recent years the Trail of Tears has become a mild embarrassment to the US government, but much of the official landmarks have been sanitized in order to diminish the brutality of what is known as the Trail of Tears. Excellent examples of the misinformation of this history on those landmarks are well documented in James Loewen’s book, Lies Across America.
After World War II, the Genocide Convention laid out a legal framework for how we currently define genocide. Often, people think that genocide is only the outright killing of a people, but the legal definition includes the theft of a people’s culture, preventing a group of people to reproduce or the forced removal of people from their traditional lands. We know that thousands died in the process of the Trail of Tears, but we should never forget the loss of land, culture and heritage that came with this heinous campaign of violence against Native people in US history.
Many Native people resisted the forced removal and died in the process. It is important that we honor their resistance and never forget crimes committed like the Trail of Tears.
Repealing the Wilderness Act?
This article by Matthew Koehler is re-posted from CounterPunch.
“The purpose of the Wilderness Act is to preserve the wilderness character of the areas to be included in the wilderness system, not to establish any particular use.”
– Howard Zahniser, chief author of the Wilderness Act
One of the activities I enjoy more than any other is waking up before dawn on a crisp, late-fall morning, loading up my backpack, grabbing my 30-06 and walking deep into a USFS Wilderness area in search of elk and deer. Because of this, and many other reasons, as a backcountry hunter I’m adamantly opposed to HR 4089, the so-called “Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012.
The folks at Wilderness Watch have put together a very detailed analysis of HR 4089 titled, “How the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012 (HR 4089) Would Effectively Repeal the Wilderness Act.” The analysis describes in detail how the incredibly destructive provisions of HR 4089 would effectively repeal the Wilderness Act of 1964. Make no mistake about it, if HR 4089 becomes law – and it has already passed the House with all but two Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats voting for it – Wilderness as envisioned in the Wilderness Act will cease to exist. Here’s the intro to that analysis:
Introduction
On April 17, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 4089, the Sportsmen’s Heritage Act, supposedly “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.” But the bill is a thinly disguised measure to gut the 1964 Wilderness Act and protections for every unit of the National Wilderness Preservation System.
HR 4089 would give hunting, fishing, recreational shooting, and fish and wildlife management top priority in Wilderness, rather than protecting the areas’ wilderness character, as has been the case for nearly 50 years. This bill would allow endless, extensive habitat manipulations in Wilderness under the guise of “wildlife conservation” and for providing hunting, fishing, and recreational shooting experiences. It would allow the construction of roads to facilitate such uses and would allow the construction of dams, buildings, or other structures within Wildernesses. It would exempt all of these actions from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review. Finally, HR 4089 would remove Wilderness Act prohibitions against motor vehicle use for fishing, hunting, or recreational shooting, or for wildlife conservation measures.
According to some news reports, Senator Tester (D-Montana) is the guy the NRA and Safari Club are hoping will sponsor the bill in the Senate. They’ll need Democrat support and Tester is a target for obvious reasons, since he’s locked in a tight re-election campaign with Congressman Denny Rehberg (R-Montana). In addition to the detailed analysis from Wilderness Watch more info concerning HR 4089 from the Animal Welfare Institute is contained in this action alert, where you can quickly send a note to your two US Senators. According to the Animal Welfare Institute, other extreme provisions within HR 4089 include:
Amending the Marine Mammal Protection Act to permit the importation of polar bear hunting trophies from Canada for bears killed before May 15, 2008 — the date when polar bears were designated as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. This would reward 41 hunters for bad behavior: they either killed bears who were off limits or wanted to get their kills in knowing the bears were about to be listed;
Requiring the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Department of the Interior to open nearly all public lands (including National Wildlife Refuges!) to recreational hunting, and directing them to do so without following the environmental review processes required under the National Environmental Policy Act; and
Eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect wildlife, habitat, and people from lead and other toxic substances released by ammunition waste under the Toxic Substances Control Act, thereby undermining the ability of the Agency to fulfill its obligation to protect public health and the environment.
During a recent interview on C-SPAN, the head lobbyist for the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, one of the groups pushing the bill, admitted that most federal land is already accessible to hunters and anglers, and that this bill was simply a proactive measure in case something happens at a later date. That just reaffirms what Representative Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) correctly noted during his speech against the bill: “The problem this bill claims to solve actually does not exist.”
As an avid backcountry hunter, I couldn’t agree more.
How Rural America Got Fracked
This article by Ellen Cantarow is re-posted from TomDispatch. Editor’s Note: While this story deals with the consequences of fracking in Wisconsin and Minnesota, it should be of concern for people who live in West Michigan, where recent land auctions took place that could result in hydraulic fracking.
If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand — and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.
March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees — bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.
In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.
Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.
Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica. Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”
That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere. Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas. Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.
“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level”
Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.
“It’s huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.” That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand — about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs. Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.
By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).
Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”
Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace. They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”
It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.
When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”
Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”
Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”
Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”
Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”
Jamie and Kevin Gregar — both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans — lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous — the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”
Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.
Less than a year later, they know all too well. The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.
When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.
For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.
There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.
There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”
Town-Busting Tactics
Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues. Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals. That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.
On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village. Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.
Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.
For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare. Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.
Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”
That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.
So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.
The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that — contrary to its own study’s findings — current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee. Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”
In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as “anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes,” was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”
As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”
Frac-Sand vs. Food
Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky. It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.
“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch. She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”
Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck — that’s a much nicer word than what he used — off the farm. Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”
Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan — the first step in the permitting process — with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.
He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real. The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”
Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”
“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”
“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”
Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers. These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.
In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.
“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”
Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made — largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.” Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough — when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.
While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.
Facebook and the 100 Billion
This article by Binoy Kampmark is re-posted from Counter Punch.
“Investors that shoot for IPO allocations needn’t worry that a high stock price overvalues the company if they are confident they can find a ‘greater fool’ willing to pay more.” Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2012.
With cult-like projections, Mark Zuckerberg’s face was beamed across a screen at Hacker Square. Facebook was, after all, having its heralded float as a public company, though the occasion could not cease but be a social event of some magnitude. That, and the fact of its founder’s marriage, which received the usual empty adulation that such a network facilitates.
The shares in the company’s shares finished at $38.37, though at one point stocks were trading at $42 a share. The value of the company is now $104 billion. That value places Facebook, in terms of the corporate giant stakes, in the 24th position in the US. The pundits did end up with egg on their beaming faces, predicting rises of 5 to 10 percent, though this was based on the oversubscribing of the IPO by 25 times, notably in the Asian tranche (Business Spectator, May 19). Behind the scenes, however, underwriters had to step in after an initially promising rise which touched 11 percent. Morgan Stanley managed to keep the stock price above $38 by tapping its emergency reserve, and the bean counters are claiming that the performance was a disappointing one.
The question then is whether such a value is not just a touch exaggerated, something which might be said of the entire social media experiment. Social media remains a treacherous form of investment, highly competitive, and entirely liquid. The fall of MySpace suggested an automatic obsolescence – in time, hidden shallows will be exposed. Once the bang goes off, the whimper and ultimate end will set in.
With Facebook, we are in a curious situation of producing what we consume in one act. The Facebook generation is self-serving, self-referencing and self-contained, all interiorised by means of updates, connections, invitations. There, the virtual and ‘actual’ mingle. This is Zuckerberg’s cult of false intimacy, though one can hardly claim his own earnings to have been false.
Its value, like its functionality, is fictitious or better still, virtual. The same argument might be made about company values in general, but Facebook combines this in neat fashion. While it would be too extreme to call it, as some have, a ‘juvenile business’ model, the pressure to maintain its enormous value will be monumental. Zuckerberg’s own value – a princely sum of $19 billion – suggests that he would not be averse to the challenge. And challenges they shall be.
One of those lies in the world of advertising. Companies such as GM feel that the AdSense run by Google is more efficient. It is also worth noting that GM is entirely absent from Facebook’s list of customers (Business Spectator, May 19). Its base of users has grown astronomically, but that has not kept pace with the advertising feature of the business. The way users employ Facebook is also a problem of sorts, notably in the realm of mobile usage (Crikey, May 18). A huge revenue base is essentially going untapped.
The hunt for more revenue, however, will bring the company into conflict with a world of privacy it seeks to both undermine and preserve. Facebook ventures into inner worlds of intimacy, however genuine they might seem. Users surrender details to Facebook as if it were a Mephistophelian bargain, though they are told that those details can be controlled in terms of access. That very data, however, is the premise that the company might use to assist advertisers to sharpen their focus.
Besides, Zuckerberg has shown that privacy is a moot point for him, a mutable formality. His antics in hacking the website of the Harvard University’s student newspaper when he was 19 suggest a certain mania at work. That mania has paid off even if it wasn’t as spectacular as market analysts would have it.
Occupy the PGA protests planned for this week
Made up of a coalition of community groups and residents of Benton Harbor, Occupy the PGA is inviting people to participate in protest this week, from May 23 – 27.
The group issued a letter today asking the 2012 Senior PGA to transfer 25% of its profits to the city of Benton Harbor. The group plans a demonstration from May 23 to 27, concurrent with the golf championship in Benton Harbor.
The group also demanded a public acknowledgement at the tournament of the “theft of public park land for private profit”, referring to the lease of 22 acres of dunes on Jean Klock Park for transformation into three holes of the Harbor Shores golf course at which the Senior PGA Championship plays later this month. The letter links the transfer of parklands to the “complete undermining of democratic structures” via the installment of the Emergency Financial Manager in Benton Harbor in December 2010.
Accompanying the demand letter is a lengthy summation of community grievances against the Harbor Shores development, ranging from the taking of the park land to unfulfilled promises of significant jobs and tax revenue for Benton Harbor residents. The packet, including maps illustrating the transformation of Jean Klock Park, also analyzes the failures of state and federal agencies to protect the public interest, the unpermitted use of public water resources by the private development, and the origin of the Emergency Financial Manager bill. The group also demands that the packet be distributed to all 2012 Senior PGA participants.
Spokesperson Rev. Edward Pinkney of the local community group BANCO said, “Benton Harbor continues to be a city under siege. The mishandling of public trust couldn’t be more massive, unjust, inhumane, and unconstitutional. The Senior PGA needs to hear our voice. It’s time to stand up and fight for what’s right.”
If anyone from West Michigan is interested in going to the Occupy the PGA protests this week, you can contact Occupy GR about getting a ride or the Bloom Collective, which is also organizing a car pool on Saturday, May 26.
On Thursday, the Kent County Health Department, Healthy Kent 2020 and the Strong Beginnings Program hosted a forum to explore the root causes of health inequality in Kent County.
Quite often the focus of health care forums is about access or looking at just individual behavior as determinants of people’s poor health. At this forum, the focus was an investigation into the structural or systemic causes of poor health.
To facilitate this conversation, the Kent County Health Department invited two staff members of the Ingham County Health Department, Dr. Renee Canady and Doak Bloss. Canady and Bloss have been doing social justice focused health analysis at their health department and facilitating workshops across the state in recent years.
The presenters expressed the importance of finding new language when talking about health inequality in America. They defined health inequity as:
Differences in population health status and mortality rates that are systemic, patterned, unfair, unjust, and actionable, as opposed to random or caused by those who become ill.
The co-facilitators then looked at the various determinants of health inequality in the US and said that things like housing, transportation, education, job security, access to health foods and a living wage were some of the determinants.
The presenters said that this was a radical departure from the traditional view of public health, which is often limited to individual behavior. However, they emphasized that class, gender and racial privilege often prevent people from seeing the systemic causes of health inequity.
It was quite refreshing to hear presenters talk about class oppression and globalization as major factors in determining people’s health. The presenters even used the language of the Occupy movement and referred to the 1% versus the 99%.
After the main presenters discussed social justice and health inequity, a staff member of the Kent County Health Department then presented data on health disparities in Kent County.
The data presented information on how many adults and children were living in poverty in Kent County, with a breakdown along racial lines. There was also data on infant mortality rates, morbidity and geographical significance.
It was clear from the data presented that there were large pockets of poor neighborhoods that were disproportionately Black and Hispanic that had greater health inequality. Blacks and Hispanics children have a higher rate of living in poverty and infant mortality rates are higher than for White children. The data also showed that poor & minority communities are 6 times more likely to report 14 or more days a year of poor health, 3 times more likely to have diabetes and 8 times more likely to have heart disease.
The social justice and health inequity forum concluded with individual tables having discussion about the information presented and how those in the health care community need to respond to the systemic injustice that exists in Kent County. However, it was recognized that the organizations in the room needed to begin with the recognition of systemic and root causes of health disparities and then develop strategies to confront the systems that maintain these disparities.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 