Environmental Warrior : Remembering Judi Bari

Judi Bari celebrates March 3, 1995, outside the Oakland Federal Courthouse after winning a round in her civil rights lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland Police. Photo by Xiang Xing Zhou / San Francisco Daily Journal.
Earth First! and the FBI:
The bombing of Judi Bari

By Penelope Rosemont / The Rag Blog / May 17, 2010

Twenty years ago -- on the 24th of May, 1990 -- sensationalist headlines across the country announced the arrest of two leading environmentalists, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. Their car had been bombed -- but it was they who were arrested, charged with their own bombing! The environmental activist movement and Earth First! in particular were branded as terrorist organizations.

This incident fell just after the very successful Earth First! campaign to save the old growth Redwoods, labeled "Redwood Summer," that brought in young people from all over the country. They sang, they sat down in the roads, and they filled the jails like the old time Wobbly organizers, like Civil Rights activists, like the Peace Movement. It looked like the timber industry was in for big trouble.

But then the car bombing. What followed was an interesting and frightening revelation of political intrigue, collusion among the police, the FBI, and the timber companies.

This remarkable history is being observed with a series of "Revolutionary Ecology" activities and an historical exhibit in Berkeley on May 23, 2010, and with an anniversary observance in Oakland on May 24.

Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney filed a civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland police officers, and in a landmark decision on June 11, 2002, a federal jury found unanimously against six of the seven defendants, saying they had attempted to frame the defendants in an effort to stop their political activities. The jury awarded $4.4 million in damages.

In an editorial on June 13, 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle said that the verdict "reminds law enforcement advocates that Americans are not panicked by the threat of terrorism into abandoning their civil rights... The overzealous pursuit of [Bari and Cherney] was unacceptable -- and unconstitutional -- regardless of what one thinks of the activists' politics."

Attorney Dennis Cunningham of the People's Law Office in Chicago was interviewed by Michael James on "Live from the Heartland," at Chicago's Heartland Cafe, June 6, 2004.

James asks Cunningham about the outcome of the Judi Bari case, and for "background on who she was and what the case was about?"

Dennis Cunningham replies,

Judi Bari was an environmentalist organizer with Earth First!. She and Darryl Cherney, another EF! Organizer, were bombed in their car in Oakland. A pipe bomb was put under the driver's seat and rigged with a motion device that would ignite on the motion of the car. When the bomb went off the cops came -- the FBI came right away -- and they told the cops 'we know these people, they are terrorist suspects, we've been investigating them, and we believe this was their own bomb and they were on their way to plant it someplace -- you should bust them.' Oakland cops say 'okay boss' and did.

They arrested them and charged them with possession and transportation of an illegal explosive device -- it made headlines all over the country -- the front page of The New York Times, and everywhere else -- it was the top of the news around the country. They were vilified as terrorists by virtue of those headlines and by connecting them to the bomb, which in fact had been used to try to kill them or kill her. Judi Bari was a leading voice and an amazingly skilled, experienced, and persuasive organizer and public speaker -- those who planted the bomb were out to shut her up.

The bombed car. Photo from Judi Bari Web Photo Gallery.

Michael James asked Cunningham why he thought Earth First! was the main environmental organization getting headlines at that time, and added that he heard they "had been chaining themselves to trees to trying to stop the cutting of the redwoods."

Cunningham replied,

True, true. They were organizing for a summer project. They called it Redwood Summer. They modeled it after the 1960s Civil Rights Project, Mississippi Summer -- they were trying to bring people, students, and activists from all over the country to the redwood region to do direct action in the summer of 1990. They wanted to try to slow down the timber harvest and protect the old-growth redwoods.

A big local timber company in Humboldt County had been bought up by corporate raiders with junk bonds, to pay off the junk bonds, they tripled the timber harvest. There was an initiative put on the ballot for November that would have limited the clear cutting and the kind of destructive logging that they do now, which fills up the streams with silt and kills the fish, and kills the fishing industry, and leaves the hillsides unstable and prone to mud slides -- a disaster. After the bombing, the timber companies hired a Washington public relations firm, Hill and Knowlton, to fight the ballot initiative.

Cunningham continued,

And then as soon as the bombing had taken place Timber Companies labeled the bill 'the bomber initiative... terrorists want to pass this thing, it's too radical. Earth First! shouldn't be allowed to dictate public policy.' The Initiative ultimately lost by a point and a half.

A researcher concluded that there was more than three billion dollars in timber revenues that the companies had been able to realize in the 12 years since the bombing, that they wouldn't have got if the initiative had passed. So there was a big motivation to shut Judi up, besides that she and EF! were reaching out to the timber workers.

Judi was trying to make common cause between the environmentalists and the workers, saying, 'where you gonna work when the trees are gone?' The timber industry is clear cutting as fast as they can. In Mendocino County at that time 95% of big trees were already gone, and they closed mills.

Judi led an Earth First! contingent and with a group of workers went to a county board meeting right after the big timber company in Mendocino announced it was closing the mills. They got up at the county board meeting and said that the board should take over the mill, preserve the jobs, keep the economy stable. For the timber companies that was pretty much the last straw. But they didn't want to make a martyr out of her.

They hoped to shut her up for good. They thought they did, but she didn't die in the bombing. It was a miracle she didn't die. But then they had her accused of the bombing. Within three hours and five minutes of the explosion, they were under arrest.

James asked Cunningham when he got involved with the case. He replied that "Bill Simpich, a lawyer in San Francisco and Oakland, had started a suit against the FBI and the Oakland Police for false arrest, but that after he joined the group of defense attorneys they were able to reverse the charges so, in fact, they were able to accuse the Oakland police and the FBI of arresting Bari and Cherney on purpose in order to discredit them in a COINTELPRO type operation.

Cunningham explained that "COINTELPRO stands for Counter Intelligence Program -- a J. Edgar Hoover undercover dirty operation that the cops used and that the FBI used against the Black Panthers, against the anti-war movement, against the Communist Party, against who knows..."

James commented that it was often used against anyone who challenged them.

Cunningham added,

Yes, everyone who seemed to present a popular threat against the status quo, they did what they could to mess up their work; and they didn't have any boundaries of legality on what they allowed themselves to do. So there were frame-ups... the murder of Fred Hampton arose out of COINTELPRO operations...

We had a lawsuit that lasted 10 years and went to trial in 2002, in trial for about six weeks, and we were waiting for the jury for another three weeks. The jury came back with a 4.4 million total award for the two of them. It was half punitive damages and half what they call compensatory damages.

About 80% of the total of the money was assigned to the First Amendment cause -- meaning that the claim that it had been done on purpose to mess up their political work was the thing that most appealed to that jury, and they gave the most damages for that. It was going to be appealed, and then we started talking about settling and getting it over with since by then it was 12 years of litigation.

James pointed out that Judi had since died of cancer, and never got to see this victory.

Cunningham added that she had endured incredible suffering,

Judi died in 1997 from breast cancer. She had been horribly injured in the bombing. She was crippled, and she had a lot of pain. She kept right on doing her political work and got deeply involved in the case because she felt it was really important to fight back against the FBI attack on the environmental movement.

The FBI were so intent on creating the effect they wanted -- headlines of the arrest of the victims as the perpetrators -- that they really didn't bother to cover their tracks very well...

Michael James' interview with James Cunningham will be excerpted in a book now under development by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company.

Today it seems everybody is an "environmentalist" -- but it doesn’t seem to mean anything except that they want a car with better mileage, and may have a recycle bin. That’s it, they fill up the world with more and more junk and the oceans with plastic bottles. Even capitalism has adopted "green" as the new thing since the financial and real estate crash, trying to exploit what minimal interest people have in preserving the planet.

The great tragedy of the Gulf Oil Spill has not yet been felt. The spill is still going on! Why aren’t BP officials being arrested and charged with reckless homicide? The ocean is being killed, so why aren't the army, the navy, young unemployed kids, being mobilized to do some good for a change and try to clean this thing up. Oil, like water and air, should belong to the people, it should be used wisely, not wasted.

Such actions would honor the legacy of Judi Bari.

Here is more about the upcoming activities in the Bay Area:

On Sunday, May 23, an event dubbed "Revolutionary Ecology" (the title of one of Judi's best essay collections) will take place at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, with a panel of speakers, music, film and an exciting historical exhibit.

On Monday, May 24, the actual anniversary, people from near and far will gather at the site where a motion-triggered bomb exploded under Judi's car seat, nearly killing her and forever changing the Earth First! movement. The location is on Park Blvd. in Oakland just south of the MacArthur Freeway.

[Penelope Rosemont is a writer, editor, publisher, radical activist, and surrealist artist. She is the author of Dreams and Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS and the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the editor of Surrealist Women : An International Anthology.]

Go to:

• Remembering Judi Bari on the Earth First Journal
• www.judibari.org

Judi Bari always livened up rallies with her fiddle. Photo from Judi Bari Web Photo Gallery.
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BOOKS / Mike Roselle and Jeffrey St. Clair : Two From the Green Hard Core

Mike Roselle and Jeffrey St. Clair:
Green activism from the front lines

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 24, 2010

[Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action by Mike Roselle. Published by St. Martin's Press, Sept. 29, 2009; hardcover; 272 pp. Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth by Jeffrey St. Clair. Published by CounterPunch/AK Press, Dec. 1, 2007; trade paperback, 460 pp.]

On rare and welcome occasion we meet uncompromised green activists and writers completely focused on winning, and utterly void of bullshit.

Two such specimens are Mike Roselle and Jeffrey St. Clair. Not surprisingly, their recent books are pleasures to behold.

My long-time Greenpeace co-conspirator, Roselle is a “legend in his own crime” who exceeds his advance billing and then some. His Tree Spiker (St. Martin’s Press) tells of a hard-scrabble Louisville childhood well-suited to the gritty green activism required to save forests and stop nukes. From a race along the edge of juvenile delinquency to some of the funniest jail tales you’ll ever read, Roselle constantly amuses and inspires.

From the wrong side of the logging camps to the tops of tripods meant to save those very trees, Roselle sings a song of guts and glory without pomp or guile. Like all good organizers, Mike knows Rule One is “never be boring.” Then there’s the one about knowing you can win -- and doing it.

Tree Spiker is a quick, riveting read with all the self-effacing warmth and humor one would expect from a guy who co-founded Earth First! and felt honored by being thrown out of it.

With co-writer Josh Mahan he welcomes you into the world of a pretty big dude known to share (many) beers with various nefarious roughnecks and ideologues while totally outsmarting them all when it comes time to cut the crap and win the victory.

Push really comes to shove at one point when Roselle confronts the vanguard of the Earth First! organization he helped form to establish a Cove/Mallard Coalition aimed at saving some of the most pristine and least known forest stands in the lower 48. “No matter how much we advocated stopping the road” that would kill the region, he complained, “no one would arrest us.”

Camped with little cover or support in the violent wilds of right wing Idaho, Roselle and his hardy cohorts hang on for dear life -- the forest’s, and their own. Against all odds, as months of brutal campaigning turn to years, “the chain saws and bulldozers have been silenced in Cove/Mallard, and you can once again hear the howl of a wolf float through the stillness of the night.”

Typically, for Roselle, the lessons of the Cove/Mallard campaign were “opposite of what one might think.” In this remote Idaho backwater, “we weren’t even allowed into local stores or restaurants. Media coverage, with the exception of the alternative press, was universally negative. No foundation would give us funding. No self-respecting environmental group would join our coalition. Yet through tenacity, audacity, and a strong belief that, win or lose, we were all doing the right thing, we outlasted them.”

Mike is now based in the West Virginia boonies, focused on stopping mountaintop removal. He’s the quintessential grassroots activist. When you read Tree Spiker you’ll realize that amidst the horrible devastation being wrecked on these mountains by King Coal, sooner or later, the momentum must turn toward Mother Earth.

And as soon as that happens, Mike will be inundated with requests to spearhead some other campaign, which he will undoubtedly get going, then get booted from, then rally to victory against ridiculous odds, many of them self-imposed by the circular green firing squad which loves to put the hard-core, uncompromised organizers like him in the middle.

My advice, if you still have legs and really want to help save the Earth, would be to read Tree Spiker, then track Mike down in the bar of the town where he’s organizing [roselle@lowbagger.org, Climate Ground Zero , PO Box 166, Rock Creek, West Virginia 25174; (304) 854-7372]. Stand there till he tells you all the stories you can handle. You’ll emerge with the ultimate green education. With consummate charm, Mike will then -- before you know what's happening -- put you to righteous use. Together, you will win… as will we all.

Likewise the writings of Jeffrey St. Clair [sitka@comcast.net]. Raised in a rural Indiana now buried under lethal sprawl, he bemoans the fact that “my grandfather’s farm is now a shopping mall. The black soil, milled to such fine fertility by the Wisconsin glaciations, now buried under a black sea of asphalt.”


Anthologized most recently in his Born Under a Bad Sky (CounterPunch/AK Press), St. Clair writes with the incisive precision and wit of a gifted green surgeon going straight for the corporate jugular. Like Peter Mattheissen and very few others, his ability to describe nature in its virginal glory can be deeply compelling. “Destruction of the wild sparks militancy in the heart,” he writes. “Wild places communicate their own passion and power, sensations that are the antithesis of political abstractions.”

Like Roselle, St. Clair’s faith lies in the grassroots, Mother Earth’s army of last resort. “The power of the people can still overwhelm the influence of big money,” he proclaims. “Anything is possible. Find your place, take a stand. People will join you.”

An editor of the uncompromised, infamously acerbic CounterPunch website, St. Clair is at his bitter best bursting the bubbles of greenwashed hypocrites. Senator John Kerry and his fellow Democrats “never aligned themselves in opposition to the interest of the oil cartels,” he writes. “Far from it. In Clintontime, oil industry lobbyists flowed through the White House as easily as crude through the Alaskan pipeline, leaving behind campaign loot and wish lists.”

St. Clair is unique among environmental writers in the scope of what he covers. His superbly informed reportage spans the horizon from forests and water to energy and the chemical industry. He is meticulous, careful and credible. He cuts to the core with gusto and glee, especially when skewering those who most deserve it.

Among much else, St. Clair was one of the very few to grasp the complicity of “Gang Green” mainstream environmental groups in perpetrating the $100 billion scam of utility deregulation, beginning with Ralph Cavanagh of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

With Enron poised to rape and pillage California rate payers, Cavanagh sang Ken Lay’s praises. “With a warble in his throat," St. Clair reports, "Cavanagh moved into rhetorical high gear” for a panel of state regulators contemplating deregulation.

“Can you trust Enron?” Cavanagh asked. “On stewardship issues and public benefit issues I’ve dealt with this company for a decade, often in the most contentious circumstances, and the answer is, yes.”

Not until George W. Bush would praise those who held New Orleans’s head underwater would such hype be heaped on those who did so much harm. As St. Clair shows, NRDC Founder John Bryson, perched atop southern California’s largest utility, scammed billions from ratepayers to prop up defective nuclear plants, siphoning countless public dollars away from decentralized green energy projects while painting himself as a vanguard environmentalist.

Taken together, Roselle and St. Clair are as good as it gets for a green one-two punch. Tree Spiker Mike takes you into the boondock byroads of some of the toughest forest fights our emerging green nation has won. In his articles at CounterPunch and Born Under a Bad Sky, Jeff cuts to the core of who is bought and who is not.

Both these amazing guys have produced books that are great to read and utterly void of filler or fluff. Imbibe them each. Then go kick some corporate butt. Mother Earth will love you for it.

[Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com , as is Passions of the Pot Smoking Patriots by “Thomas Paine.” He has been reading Jeffrey St. Clair’s articles for years, and has known Mike Roselle even longer.]

Find:

• Tree Spiker by Mike Roselle at Amazon.com.
• Born Under a Bad Sky by Jeffrey St. Clair at Amazon.com.

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After Copenhagen : Lighting a Candle for Climate Change

Hundreds of climate activists gathered in Copenhagen December 17, in a candlelight vigil. Photo from tcktcktck.org.
After Copenhagen:
Vigils shine a light on emerging movement

By Rabbi Arthur Waskow / The Rag Blog / December 22, 2009

I am writing from the midst of a great winter storm. It is at moments like this that it is hard to convince our kishkes, our innards, that global "warming" is dangerous. That's one of the reasons I insist on talking about "global scorching" -- more honest to the geological reality and more evocative of the emotional reality.

Copenhagen is over: At the official leadership level, it was a dismal failure. At the grassroots level, it brought another stage of growth.

Which narrative controls the future -- top-down failure or grassroots growth -- depends on us.

What went wrong in Copenhagen? The officials came up with a vague agreement among five major nations, no binding decisions, a too slowly approached process toward a too-limited target for even the non-binding decisions, anger among many other nations about both being ignored in the process and short-changed in the results, and a very tentative possible success in beginning the creation of a world fund to aid poor nations make the shift into non-fossil economic development.

Four major culprits: Big Oil and Big Coal, which have blocked effective action by the U.S.; the U.S. government (President and Congress), which has kowtowed to them and failed to commit a serious level of money to meet the needs of poor nations; and the Chinese government, which rejected effective outside verification of its promised cuts in CO2 emissions.

Pressure for deeper commitment, coming from African and Latin American nations and small countries most vulnerable to global scorching through drought and flood, fell short because they had too little power to force the rich and large nations to meet the world's needs.

On the streets in Copenhagen and around the world, however, the summit sparked much more action and much more coherent connection. A true transnational movement is emerging, as will have to happen if the human race is to prevent utter disaster.

In the U.S., attention now turns to the Senate where debate continues on the Kerry-Baker cap-and-trade climate bill and the pressures to water it down. Perhaps most crucial: Will the bill allow the Environmental Protection Administration to establish strong regulations on emitting CO2? If the Senate strips EPA of that power, as some senators are trying to do, it will be better to defeat the bill and get EPA to act.

There will have to be many more people going beyond their own households to address public policy, with much greater effort from those people. In the U.S. especially, climate activists will have to make much closer alliances with health-care, anti-war, and pro-jobs activists if climate healing is to prevail.

One example of grassroots energy that brought together people of different religions and generations: Last Saturday night (12/12), was both the second night of Hanukkah and the night 350.org, a transnational climate-activist network, had urged worldwide candle-lighting vigils to impact Copenhagen.

Around the world, there were more than 3,000 such vigils. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the bitterly cold streets of Copenhagen in night after night of nonviolent demonstrations.

In Philadelphia that evening, about 60 people from various Jewish congregations, some interfaith environmental groups, the local climate-crisis 350.org, and the Philadelphia (high school] Student Union gathered at Independence Hall to light Hanukkah menorahs and other candles as a message to Copenhagen to get serious about a fair, strong, and binding agreement to stop the worsening of the climate crisis.

[Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and is co-author of The Tent of Abraham; author of Godwrestling, Round 2, Down-to-Earth Judaism and a dozen other books on Jewish thought and practice, as well as books on U.S. public policy.]

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Changing Climate : Denmark Becoming Police State?

Above, a Danish policeman arrests a demonstrator at Copenhagen climate change summit. Photo from AP. Below, detained demonstrators are seen lined up on a street during mass arrests. Photo by Thibault Camus / AP.
Changing winds in Denmark:
Preventive detention and the UN climate conference

By David Rovics / December 15, 2009

COPENHAGEN -- The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Copenhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media has been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first place, can get lost.

Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the U.S., Australia and others are leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries.

The center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of small NGOs and other riffraff. Many of the folks involved with the process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on elsewhere in town.

Denmark: social democracy to police state?

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish empire brought some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy. It is this check on Danish capitalism that has allowed this wealth to be so impressively distributed, bringing Denmark a quality of life that is the envy of most anyone who knows about it.

Of course, as in any society, there are different forces at work in Denmark. Most Danes would identify much more with those peasants who rebelled in the 17th century and helped pave the way for modern Denmark, not with the soldiers who massacred them, but those soldiers were also Danes. Most Danes would prefer to remember the heroic stories of resistance during the occupation of Denmark in the 1940's, but there were also many enthusiastic collaborators.

At so many points in history there are pivotal moments when things can go different ways, and something pushes events in a certain direction. The direction of social democracy has been the ascendant one in Denmark for quite some time, but this was able to happen for a variety of reasons -- the strength and purpose of the Danish labor movement, the fear on the part of the rich of the specter of communism, the moral bankruptcy of the leaders of society who collaborated with the Nazis after the war, and so on.

If people know anything about this most southerly of the Scandinavian countries they know it's full of windmills. Germany actually has lots more windmills than Denmark, but many of them are made in Denmark anyway, at the Vespas factories in Jutland (where they recently laid off thousands of workers).

There's a reason Denmark has been a pioneer in windmill technology, and it is, to a large extent, the Danish environmental movement. In the early 70's the Danish government was thinking about building its first nuclear reactor, following the example of Sweden, which has one right across the water, upwind.

People inspired by ideas of communal living and experiential learning formed a community centered around a Free School near the little village of Ulfborg and began making plans to build the world's largest windmill. Over the course of three years, working with scientists, artisans and large numbers of hippies, they built the world's largest windmill. They refused to patent any of their ground-breaking technology, making it all available for anybody to use. Their windmill, still standing and providing power to the community 35 years later, is the prototype for the big windmills you'll see scattered around Denmark and the world.

This windmill provided more than just energy -- it and the movement that built it provided political capital. Those in parliament arguing for a nuclear reactor lost the fight, and Denmark became a nation of windmills.

For the past decade or so, however, Denmark has been run by a coalition led by the neoliberal, xenophobic Vestre party. They have been privatizing hospitals and passing some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in the world. They have had troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have been forcibly deporting refugees back to these war-torn countries.

Fueled by the changes to Danish society wrought by membership in the European Union (EU), this conservative coalition keeps winning elections. Along with a love of capitalism and a fear of foreigners, these people also can't stand hippies or punks or other dissenting elements, and they are on a quest to “normalize” the 900-person intentional community in the heart of Copenhagen known as Christiania. To that end they conducted a police raid early one morning in 2007 and destroyed a house they deemed to have been illegally constructed. (I got my first taste of Danish tear gas there a couple hours later.)

Thousands protest in Copenhagen May 3, 2007, in support of Ungdomshuset youth house. Photo from de.indymedia.
Shortly before this home demolition in Christiania, hundreds of Danish police had landed on the five-story squatted social center known as Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) by helicopter early one morning. They fumigated the place with tear gas, arrested those inside, jailed them for several months, and proceeded to follow the new government policy of destruction of the house. Masked construction workers from Poland did the dirty work, since Danish unions forbid their members from doing work that requires police protection.

Over the course of the next year and a half, however, the government was forced to backtrack on their plan to "civilize" Denmark. The movement to support Ungdomshuset grew dramatically, involving a number of fairly significant riots and probably more important, a weekly drill of marches every Thursday for a year and a half, involving many hundreds and often thousands every week.

Eventually the chief of police and the mayor of Copenhagen had to admit that their policies had been a mistake and they gave the movement what it was demanding, a new house, bought and paid for by the city. (Left wing foundations had offered to buy a new building for the movement but these offers were refused on principle -- the line was that the government destroyed Ungdomshuset and they should replace it with something comparable.)

In the course of the riots and demonstrations around Ungdomshuset the police preemptively arrested hundreds of people on a few occasions. They weren't technically allowed to do this, but they came up with excuses. One eyewitness told me that the police started arresting people, claiming some of them were throwing rocks at them, although the rock-throwing had clearly started only after the police began arresting the assembled crowd.

Preemptive arrests at climate summit

A new law was passed in preparation for the climate summit which makes this kind of mass preemptive arrest perfectly legal -- all the police need to do is arbitrarily determine that an area is designated as a “riot zone” and then they can arrest whoever they want. Any non-Danes arrested can be held for 40 days (including people who were born in Denmark but are not citizens, a reality for many here that may seem surprising to those in the U.S. reading this). It went into effect a week before last Thursday, and since then the Danish police have carried out mass preemptive arrests that dwarf anything they've done before. They don't even need to pretend they have any justification for what is essentially collective punishment.

Those of you in the United States should be familiar with preemptive mass arrests. If you haven't had your head in the sand for the past few decades then you know this happens regularly at demonstrations throughout our great democracy. But it's new for Denmark, and it is a serious step in the direction of the Americanization, you could say, of the country.

Being an American, I can say first-hand that emulating U.S. policies in the areas of law enforcement or the privatization and outsourcing of industry is all a very bad idea, at least as far as the vast majority of people are concerned -- but the interests of a privileged minority are what moves people like the Danish Prime Minister, not the interests of society as a whole.

Protesters at climate summit. Photo from Monsters and Critics.
The policies and concerns of the new Danish government were represented eloquently by the kettling and mass arrest of a small march that was en route to commit acts of civil disobedience at the docks run by the Maersk corporation. Maersk owner A.P. Mø11er is one of the world's richest men and runs one of the world's biggest shipping companies (look for his name, it's everywhere).

Blockading docks is illegal, of course, and under the normal legal procedures in a democratic society people committing such acts would be told to stop and after a certain amount of time would be arrested, fined, brought to trial or whatever. Yesterday, however, as with the day before, hundreds of people were preemptively arrested, including many who had no intention of committing any illegal acts, such as one reporter for the Times of London.

I narrowly avoided being arrested two days ago. Of those arrested the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the rock-throwing incident at the stock exchange that apparently set off the police action. The overwhelming majority didn't even know anything had happened at the stock exchange. All they knew was they were suddenly, randomly being arrested while taking part in a permitted march organized in part by the very mainstream Social Democratic Party. This was a family march involving tens of thousands of people with no civil disobedience or other illegal acts planned as part of it.

The new law may allow for mass preemptive arrests, but international treaties which Denmark has signed called the Geneva Conventions outline certain guidelines for the treatment of detainees which were clearly violated by the Danish police. People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavement, not allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, adding to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures.

Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. Anne Feeney's husband Juli, a 66-year-old Swede who had been slowly walking beside a carriage, was handcuffed and made to sit on the frozen ground. Among the marchers from Tvind, the Free School movement with whom I was walking, those arrested include headmasters and teachers from throughout Europe and Africa. Every one of the Norwegians I had just been hanging out with the day before from Trondheim were arrested.

I participated in a march that was very quickly thrown together involving several hundred people, starting near the Valby train station and going to the prison to which most detainees had been brought. The police surrounded (escorted?) us and seemed to be thinking about arresting all of us, but apparently ultimately thought better of it. Instead they informed us as we were marching towards the prison that most of those detained had just been released, and that we were welcome to march to the prison but no further.

Outside the prison -- a temporary prison that used to be a brewery -- I heard more stories of how the Anarchist Black Cross representatives who had been attempting to provide soup and solace to people as they were being released were told to leave the premises. When they attempted to set up at the train station a kilometer away they were again told to leave. So as most people left the prison there wasn't even anyone to meet them and tell them where to find the train station. Most detainees were at no point given any food by the police. After six hours some had been given water.

Tonight after Naomi Klein, Lisa Fithian, and others from Climate Justice Action held a meeting at the Big Tent in Christiania, hundreds of police and dozens of police vehicles were involved in more or less laying siege to Christiania, which was defended, as in the past, by hundreds of masked, black-clad young people making burning barricades and throwing large numbers of bottles at the police, who then fired lots of tear gas. Tonight the police reportedly used a water cannon to extinguish the main burning barricade and arrested 200. Most of this happened while Anne Feeney and I were playing a concert in the Opera House, not far from the main entrance.

The future is not written. There was nothing inevitable about Denmark building a nuclear reactor, and because of the environmental movement it built windmills instead. Equally, there is nothing inevitable about Denmark becoming a neoliberal police state. The years ahead in Denmark -- and more broadly in the rest of Europe, run increasingly by pro-business and xenophobic governments -- will determine in which direction things will go. And perhaps the next few days will be a particularly important moment in that process.

[David Rovics is an indie singer-songwriter and political activist.]

Source / AfterDowningStreet

Thanks to David Swanson / The Rag Blog

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Thirty Years and Counting : Radioactive News from Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island. Graphic from The Infrastructurist.
The new nuke media machine:
Fluff, lies and radiation from TMI

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / November 25, 2009

Yet another "perfectly safe" release at Three Mile Island has irradiated yet another puff of hype about alleged "green" support for new reactors.

The two are inseparable.

In 1979, when TMI's brand new Unit Two melted, stack monitors and other critical safeguards crashed in tandem. Nobody knows how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it harmed. Cancers, leukemia, stillbirths, malformations, asthma, sterility, skin lesions and other radiation-related diseases erupted throughout central Pennsylvania. Some 2400 families sued, but never got a full public hearing in federal court.

Unit Two had operated just three months when it melted. By a 3-1 margin, three central Pennsylvania counties then voted that TMI-One, which opened in 1974, stay shut. But Ronald Reagan tore down that wall.

This week TMI's owners were forced to evacuate 150 workers when radioactive dust "unexpectedly blew out of a pipe being cut by workers." Exelon was "trying to determine exactly how and why it happened."

As always, official announcements emphasize that the public was "in no danger." That was an epic lie in 1979. This time Exelon's Ralph DeSantis said things were rapidly "back to normal."

DeSantis then said radiation could be quickly wiped off protective outfits, while "it takes two to three days for radiation to naturally leave the body of anyone who breathed it in."

This is a ghastly lie. Among other isotopes, alpha and beta emitters -- especially from radioactive dust -- can easily lodge in the lungs and other internal organs long enough to damage cells and cause numerous forms of cancer, often lethal.

Ditto the hype about alleged green support for new reactors. Latest is a carefully contrived piece of industry fluff from one Anthony Faiola, whose "Nuclear Power Regains Support" has just been featured atop the Washington Post. This wafer thin installment in the "former environmentalists deem nukes green" series features a Brit named Stephen Tindale who recently left Greenpeace under strained circumstances.

Greenpeace is as anti-nuke as ever. Like Patrick Moore, another former Greenpeacer now hiring out to the nuclear industry, Tindale's tenure with the organization was stormy, and his defection unsurprising to many still with the group.

But once again the turn of a single activist was a sufficient hook on which to hang a breathless feature.

Faiola cites "only muted opposition" to new reactors in the U.S. while ignoring the inconvenient reality that none are yet licensed for construction. The thousands of "no nukes" arrests in the 1970s and ‘80s came at reactor sites like Seabrook, New Hampshire and Diablo Canyon, California, where construction was already under way.

In fact, today's safe energy opposition is far beyond corresponding stages when the first reactors were just being proposed. Its decisive advantage comes from true green renewable and efficiency technologies that are four decades further along, and that have all but priced atomic energy wholly out of the marketplace. Only this media-based stab at federal handouts keeps the prospect of new reactors on life support.

Faiola crows that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission "is reviewing applications for 22 new nuclear plants from coast to coast." Unmentioned is Toshiba-Westinghouse's flagship AP-1000 design, which the NRC says can't withstand an earthquake, hurricane or tornado. Also missing are devastating safety critiques from regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain of the "standardized" reactor being pushed by France's taxpayer-financed AREVA.

Failoa does cover Al Gore's harsh assaults on the economic and proliferation problems of atomic energy. He briefly mentions the catastrophic AREVA fiasco at Finland's Olkiluoto, where construction costs have soared by at least $3 billion. That project is also more than three years behind schedule, with no firm completion date in sight.

Failoa omits the escalating Texas-sized turmoil in San Antonio, whose city council was set to sign on to the construction of a new nuke when it learned the price had jumped by $4 billion -- long before the license has been granted.

The story completely skips the DC-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, which sponsored a statement signed by more than 850 other environmental groups opposing new reactor construction as a proposed means of addressing the climate crisis.

Like this vast core of green groups, Moody's, Standard & Poor, Citibank and a powerful cohort of financial analysts see atomic power as a horrific investment that can only be described as, well, radioactive. The risks of building a new reactor, says a recent Citibank report, "are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees."

But as sure as radiation continues to pour from Three Mile Island, the hype about "green" support for atomic power will continue to spew, while the core of the environmental movement remains staunchly anti-nuke, especially as the price of Solartopian technologies continues to plummet.

"We can meet climate goals with efficiency and renewable technologies that are cheaper and much less risky than new reactors," says Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Nuclear power, adds Anna Aurilio of Environment America, "takes us backward."

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, is at www.harveywasserman.com along with Harvey Wasserman's History of the U.S. He is senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article also appears.]

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Roger Baker : Transportation Politics and the Austin Road Lobby

I-35 in downtown Austin. Photo by noname 77065.
Part 2:
The Austin Road Lobby

Texas transportation politics, the developers and those pesky populist reformers

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / June 22, 2009

[This is the second part of a series on transportation in Austin. In the first installment, Baker debunked the myth of growth in Austin traffic congestion. Here he examines the politics of the highway establishment. This was to be a two-part series, but Roger tells us there's more to come.]

How it got to be that way

The Author has been an observer of transportation politics in Austin since about 1979, beginning as a transit advocate, and then observing the sad failure of the Austin Tomorrow Plan; this is still official Austin growth policy but is mostly ignored due to the political influence of special interests tied to land development. While it is convenient to use the term "Road Lobby", in many ways locally it is actually a land development lobby.

Given the strong historical role of real estate in Texas politics, it was almost inevitable that a politically powerful road lobby would evolve. Political corruption involving roads in Texas is a matter of long tradition, dating back to the period soon after the Texas Highway Department was established in 1916. After Texas Gov. James "Pa" Ferguson was impeached for corruption in 1918, his wife "Ma" Ferguson ran and won in 1924 and she became Texas' first woman Governor. Subsequently, road contracting scandals kept her from being reelected in 1926. Here are some details about these early days of Texas road politics:

"...Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the department remained a focal point of Texas politics. The 1924 gubernatorial election of Miriam Amanda Fergusonqv placed the state road agency in a politically precarious situation, since control of construction and maintenance contracts meant potentially lucrative patronage to Ferguson supporters. A legislative enactment passed a year before Ma Ferguson's election staggered the terms of the highway commissioners, and she appointed all three members of the reorganized highway commission. Her appointees soon took political and monetary advantage of a vulnerable road program..."

Later, the road scandals and a relative lack of road money during the depression years caused the Texas Highway Dept to clean up its political act. Dewitt Greer, a celebrated TxDOT director, kept TxDOT politics clean for decades.

The 1950s saw easy federal money for new interstate highways under President Eisenhower, and lots of new road contracts; roads were apparently a permanent growth industry. With the advent of the federal highway trust fund, roads came to be considered a sort of permanent land developer entitlement. See the Texas Monthly link to Griffin Smith's story in Part 1 of this series.

Increasingly since the Carter Administration, notably under Reagan, and up until only a few years ago, most of the federal “social economic and environmental” regulations governing roads became increasingly lax and weakly enforced. As one telling example, CAMPO is self-certified; the feds let CAMPO vote to proclaim they are complying with all the federal law. In effect the foxes get to vote on whether they steal chickens.

Road privatization plus easy credit under lax rules led to new suburban roads being generously proposed to meet future land development projections supplied by the developers themselves. The road lobby thus flourished as a special interest coalition with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate loans at stake. Increasingly TxDOT formed political alliances with the interests that benefited from road-based growth. Rarely if ever have TxDOT Commissioners been appointed on the basis of transportation expertise rather than political or business connections. Meanwhile, in the mid-1980's, public transportation got only about 1% of TxDOT's funds.

The fading of the Sharpstown era building bubble in Houston sent a lot of cash trapped in Texas by intrastate banking law to Austin. The Savings and Loan bubble especially contributed to making Austin a hot growth area in the mid-1980s. It seemed easy to recruit an endless supply of high tech jobs. Some of the land development politics of that era is detailed in Harvy Katz's book Shadow on the Alamo.

These factors all helped to stimulate a big new development boom in the Austin area. Developer lobbyist Ed Wendler Sr. was notably active in lining up political support and votes on the ATS for the "Outer Loop,” or SH 45, a giant ring road proposed to circle Austin. The SH 45 ring road was favored by an influential group of suburban land developers. Soon the road ran into trouble as part of the fallout after the Texas Savings and Loan bust killed off the construction boom. Key developers who had promised to donate free right of way for the Outer Loop went broke in numbers sufficient to delay its construction. Here is how the author reported the situation in July 1986. The end of the mid-1980s Austin growth boom caught nearly everyone who benefited from it completely by surprise. Go here, here, here, and here.

Austin has since seen several boom and bust cycles. Here is how the Austin region land development lobby, tied closely to roads, looked to the author in 1994, in terms of regional growth policy:

Not a lot has changed since the mid-1980s in the way the politics operates, except nowadays the road lobby is now much better organized to resist populist meddling in the affairs of those promoting roads. And the public money is running out fast.

Now, almost a quarter century later, this same Outer Loop, SH 45, has been largely built as pieces under different names. The west side of the loop was always to be the existing Ranch Road 620 and US 71. The east side of the Outer Loop has been constructed as the SH 130 toll road. Two more sections, SH 45 N and SH 45 SE are now open as toll roads. Meanwhile, the road lobby is still trying to build a remaining portion of the loop, SH 45 SW, as a new road over the Edwards Aquifer, but nobody knows where to get the money to build it. Travel demand on the existing segment of SH 45 SW is about flat, but the road lobby hasn't given up. Here is the business media pitch to encourage this SH 45 SW in January 2009, which still assumes the politics can overcome the money problem.

The Austin road lobby now

Texas transportation infrastructure is obviously of key importance to the Texas economy and the TxDOT budget reflects that. TxDOT had learned to depend on a continually growing budget of about $8 billion a year, but that is shrinking and TxDOT is under broad political attack. The major road building decisions in Texas are in essence almost totally political. This is because the governor appoints the TxDOT board that then channels most of the state and federal gas tax money down to the local level; predictably, TxDOT Commission appointments by the Governor have become a traditional political reward.

Meanwhile, TxDOT's gas tax dollars have been falling increasingly short of traditional expectations for more than a decade. TxDOT now usually requires new roads to be "leveraged" by seeking local matching contributions including toll road bonds from those who seek roads. Given this situation, it is understandable that transportation lobbying has become an important part of Texas politics.

Local Austin area lobby groups revolving around real estate now complement TxDOT's old traditional state level allies tied to state road contracts. Between sporadic populist uprisings opposing toll roads, etc., CAMPO's Austin meetings tend to be dominated by well-dressed businessmen representing the many interests that stand to benefit from roads.

The road lobby, sometimes called the highway establishment, is a sort of constellation of allied special interests, with TxDOT at the center. A leading example of a powerful statewide TxDOT-associated lobby is Associated General Contractors, or AGC, a politically active coalition, with many offices across the state.

Texas Good Roads Association. Spend more on roads.
The Texas Good Roads Association tends to focus more on organizing local Texas political support among community leaders and politicians to support spending on roads. It has not been too difficult for a powerful state agency like TxDOT to have its friends line up political support for spending on local roads. Since road funding is a discretionary political decision of the TTC, local governments have learned to either play ball with TxDOT, or lose favor and get no roads:

Always politically active in the background, but ordinarily trying to keep a low profile is the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. When exploring groups like this, one should study the memberships of the various boards and committees and subcommittees. Then google the important individuals to get an idea of the many common ties among the lobby groups, hinting at the political dynamics below the surface.

The Real Estate Council of Austin, RECA, has long been active in promoting roads, generally to the exclusion of rail. Dependable and profitable new home construction has been thriving in the suburbs, with the help of publicly funded roads, for the last thirty years in the Austin area. It is how much of the private money is and has been made in the Austin area. As a group representing many of those who depend on and closely represent suburban sprawl growth beneficiaries, RECA can be depended on to turn out its realtors and home builders for contentious road hearings at CAMPO to weigh in on the side of lots of public funds money for roads and toll roads to serve future sprawl development.

There are sometimes road lobby efforts that seem to arise from nowhere. "Take on Traffic" is a local road lobby group funded by none other than the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, as you can see from the fine print at the bottom of the following link. This site closely reflects the recent position taken by Sen. Watson in the current legislative session, to support a local option (ten cent gas tax) funding. This is thought to be the best of the politically unpopular options as the state money runs out. What this potential local revenue is intended for is not clear:

"...With troubling news of shortfalls from the federal government and the Texas Department of Transportation, the time has come to allow communities the option to generate additional funding locally for transportation projects to help meet our increasing mobility needs."

The Capital Area Transportation Coalition, pronounced "kat-see,” is a primarily road lobby headed by Bruce Byron who comes to nearly every CAMPO meeting, often to urge more road funds. CATC, like the other branches of the road lobby, actively promotes roads that serve suburban real estate interests, often with the help of the drowning-in-traffic argument:

…More cars, more driving. Right now, there are about four cars for every five people in Central Texas. In five years, there will be at least another 130,000 cars on the road. And those cars are driving farther and longer as the region expands into the surrounding counties. Right now, Central Texans are spending nearly an hour every week -- 51 hours a year -- stuck in traffic, and that figure is rising. And our roads are becoming less safe. Our rate of traffic fatalities is 45% above the national average...

The local business press works hard to perpetuate the ever-increasing-traffic myth, usually also focusing on roads. The Austin Statesman newspaper has had an obvious incentive to be supportive of car-centric transportation solutions, since a large portion of its ad money has historically come from cars and suburban real estate. The local business press like Neighborhood Impact News and the Austin Business Journal have been historically supportive of spending public money on roads to serve proposed low density development.

Here is another example:

...Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) calculates travel delay (the amount of extra time spent traveling due to congestion) in Austin at an index of 1.22, meaning peak hour travel takes an average of 22 percent longer than free flow travel as of June 2004. Today, Central Texas residents spend an additional 52 hours each year in their vehicles because of congestion on our jam-packed roadways. That extra time in our cars, trucks and SUVs costs each of the travelers about $1,000 during the year, which is a higher cost than those commuters in Seattle, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix and San Antonio -- all cities much larger in square mile and in population than we are -- endure. We are stuck like Chuck in traffic, and the motors are all running...

Recently, while conspicuously avoiding the funding shortfalls, a common position of the Austin area business press is trending increasingly toward advocating BOTH roads and rail:

Money Problems

Until about 2006, with the help of leveraging such as Texas Mobility Fund borrowing, the road contracting money flowed freely, and TxDOT kept building. Under TxDOT Commission Chair Ric Williamson, TxDOT got pretty sloppy about its finances. Due largely to the Trans Texas Corridor, TxDOT had gotten a reputation for arrogance from rural landowners who saw no benefit from a huge new $185 billion network of roads a quarter mile wide crisscrossing the state. Then TxDOT got wide and unfavorable attention for double counting over a billion dollars in revenue.

District 14 of TxDOT, which handles the Austin area, finally had to admit to CAMPO in late 2007 that its accumulated Austin area road commitments were so great that it was being forced to turn over responsibility for building a bundle of promised new toll roads to the CTRMA, and henceforth concentrate on maintenance.

As Texas Transportation chair Ric Williamson said in May, 2004: "It's either toll roads, slow roads or no roads." TxDOT coordinated closely to help the CTRMA to contract and build its first and only toll road, US 183A. In fact, Regional Mobility Authorities like the CTRMA were being actively promoted and groomed by TxDOT statewide to shoulder the responsibility of funding and building regional toll roads without being subject to the usual state and federal laws applying to TxDOT.

In the case of Austin, TxDOT has used a TxDOT subagency called the Texas Turnpike Authority to build a group of toll roads including SH 130, SH 45 N and SW, and MoPac North. This raises the following question. If TxDOT can build and operate these existing toll roads, then why can't they also build the same ones that they are now expecting the CTRMA to build? Probably this is because the CTRMA can wheel and deal on financing and avoid a lot of existing state law that TxDOT finds burdensome. In fact, the CTRMA appears to coordinate closely with TxDOT on projects like US 290 E. The CTRMA offers legal advantages plus a financial firewall that protects the big dog with deep pockets in the road game, which is TxDOT, from bond holders.

Trains (literally) arrive in Austin.
Rail becomes a factor

Recently, local business interests and politicians (previously anti-rail former Rep. Mike Krusee being one example) have begun to recognize that roads alone cannot meet the anticipated future travel demand, leading them to now support passenger rail. Dallas-area support for expanded rail transit through Sen. Carona was one of the main reasons for Texas Senate support of the local option transportation tax, which failed when HB 300 died in the Texas legislature.

The Central Texas transportation lobby is not a pure road lobby anymore. The ASA rail lobby group now has the favor of key elements of the Austin-San Antonio political establishment, although they don't have much money because TxDOT, under the Texas Constitution, and due to the road lobby, has to spend most of its gas tax money on roads. Furthermore, ASA lives under the thumb of TxDOT, which now regulates rail. ASA managed to get about $8.7 million in new rail planning money from the Texas legislature to keep the doors open, but this is far short of the $1.8 billion or so it will take to move rail freight to the east of IH 35 and unclog the existing line UP line for passenger service.

Nowadays, there is even an Austin-area wing of the political establishment supporting transit; the Alliance for Public Transportation or A4PT (here and here), has joined forces with the road lobby as we can see below. A4PT chair Joe Coffee, is also the Elgin city planner. He was appointed by Sen. Kirk Watson, incidentally an Elgin Frontier Bank co-owner, to CAMPO's Transit Working Group. The Green line is meant to serve transit oriented development in the Elgin area. Coffee seeks to promote rail projects like the Green line to Elgin.

"CATC and RECA have joined with the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Austin Alliance, and the Alliance for Public Transportation for something more important than the old ‘road verse rail’ battle lines… more local funding and the chance to fight over that later."

Pesky Persistent Populist Reformers

Austin has always had a lot of environmentalists and they decided pretty early, through the Austin Tomorrow Plan, that they did not want any new roads over the Edwards Aquifer. By about 1980 CAMPO's earlier incarnation, the Austin Transportation Study (ATS), had already become a focus of the developer versus environmentalist conflict. When (later Governor) Ann Richards became Travis County Commissioner, she publicly sided with the environmentalists fighting to keep TxDOT, and interested land developers like Gary Bradley, from making MoPac into a second crowded version of the IH 35 now leading to the Edwards Aquifer. Since that era there has been a more or less constant string of battles going on between environmentalists and the increasingly organized road lobby, trying to keep building roads to serve expanding rings of sprawl development.

The road lobby and TxDOT have always been more than happy to blame environmentalists for stopping roads. The truth is that any fair appraisal of the Austin area situation would show that over-optimistic road planning, blind to funding limits, has been a much more important factor. Road opposition has now widened from the early liberal environmentalists, even Earth First! in the early 1990s, to a much broader political spectrum of transportation reform advocates, now active statewide. Everyone can see the existing system is corrupt and badly needs reform, although not everyone can agree on how to fix it.

There is even a documentary video, "Truth Be Tolled.” Lots of rural conservative Republican property owners, Libertarians, and grass roots environmentalists opposed the Trans-Texas Corridor, largely on the basis of opposition organized and supported by web activists David and Linda Stall.

In Austin there is still a strong anti-toll road coalition, partly due to reform politics and Libertarian influence. Muckraker/anti-toll road and skilled media activist Sal Costello played a major role in organizing Austin toll road opposition in 2006 and 2007.

Currently, Terri Hall's TURF group in San Antonio is probably the most active group fighting TxDOT, the road lobby, road taxes, and toll roads:

And the environmentalists remain active, especially in the Austin San Antonio area. As one example, SH 45 SW has been actively promoted as a new road over the Edwards Aquifer to serve new commuters in Hays County who face a lot of congestion getting onto Southern MoPac. But roads like this to serve development over the Edwards Aquifer have always attracted strong opposition from Austin environmentalists. As of now, SH 45 SW is on hold, remaining a magnet for environmentalist opposition, and without a plausible funding source.

Likewise, US 290 W at the "Y" at Oak Hill in Austin is stalled partly by some federally required studies, but more seriously from a lack of money from the CTRMA that has accepted responsibility for rebuilding this road as a toll road. This road is now on the back burner. Likewise the CTRMA's US 290 E toll road is under attack from a swarm of activists. TxDOT approved stimulus funds for building an interchange at US 183, but this toll road would cost about $620 million and most of the funds to build this road are hypothetical. Actual travel demand on both these roads has been flat for years.

Statewide, the opposition to the Trans Texas Corridor became heated enough to make the TransTexas Corridor a campaign issue for former Comptroller Carol Strayhorn. She also wrote an exposé about the politics behind the CTRMA.

Now Perry's big TTC toll road network has even become a prime political target for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is expected to run for governor. United citizen opposition to TxDOT's traditionally heavy handed policies have thus taken a heavy political toll on that agency. TxDOT is now widely unpopular across the state,

In fact, TxDOT came under heavy political attack in the recent session of the legislature, and TxDOT got abolished as a state agency, although a special session will fix that. And they are out of money, unable to issue the $5 billion in bonds authorized by voters. Sen. Carona, promoting a local option fuel tax as part of the ill fated HB 300, held a press conference announcing that TxDOT may have to quit building ALL new roads by 2013. But it gets worse. Austin and San Antonio are both strapped for transportation cash. There is the matter of $5 billion in unissued bonds authorized by Texas voters, That amount was shrunk to $2 billion to make it more politically appealing, but even this did not pass the Texas legislature. Lots more problens detailed here.

The bad news for TxDOT just keeps on coming, and with it much of the future that The Texas road lobby had mapped out before the recent legislative session, much of which was tied to HB 300. If there is any good news for TxDOT and the road lobby, it is probably that Gov. Rick Perry has called a special session of the legislature to save TxDOT from being permanently "sunsetted" into oblivion. Also TxDOT's political clout in the legislature prevented serious reforms called for by the Texas Sunset Commission, like an elected transportation Commission, from being passed with strong support from the Texas House of Representatives. See the Sunset Advisory Commission Staff Report, here:

TxDOT is at this point quite unlikely to regain anything like its former political clout. This is because it is now so politically unpopular, together with the fact that it is essentially broke. Locally the CTRMA's toll road bonds are almost certain to default within a decade or so, due to rising fuel prices due to peak oil.

If the problem facing TxDOT was peak oil alone, it would be bad enough, but now the United States faces complex interacting economic factors tied to peak oil (see here, and here; trying to solve one problem only tends to worsens others, like reducing the strength of the dollar.

See Part 1 of this series: Roger Baker: Austin Drowning in Traffic Growth? Think Again by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / June 7, 2009

See Roger Baker's earlier Rag Blog articles on Austin transportation here, here, and here.

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Maryland State Police Spying: One Victim's Story

The most telling fact concerning this story is that it appeared in the UK Guardian and on a quiet Web site for an environmental group in Seattle, Grist.org. This entire matter of the Maryland State Police spying has been routinely suppressed by the mainstream press, not terribly surprising given the ownership of more than 80% of the MSM. Ahhhhh, life in America, land of the free ...

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

Terrorist Activist Mike Tidwell (at podium) exhibiting clearly threatening behavior. Photo: chesapeakeclimate
Police spy on climate activist while global warming goes unarrested
By Mike Tidwell / November 21, 2008

Police spied on activist Mike Tidwell for months as a 'suspected terrorist'.

I'm not sure what's more shocking: the news that the Maryland State Police wrongfully spied on me for months as a "suspected terrorist," or that, despite surveillance of me, officers apparently wouldn't recognize me if I walked into their police headquarters tomorrow.

I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer, an Eagle Scout, church member, youth baseball coach, and dedicated father. I also happen to be director of one of the largest environmental groups in Maryland, a nonprofit that promotes windmills and solar panels in the fight against global warming. So imagine my shock to get a police letter last month saying I was one of 53 Maryland activists on a terrorist watch list that has been discontinued because — can you believe it? — there's "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime."

Matters turned especially Soviet-esque on October 14 when I called the police requesting a full copy of my surveillance file. A spokeswoman told me I could visually inspect the file, but I couldn't make photocopies, I couldn't bring an attorney, and the police would be destroying the entire file after I read it.

And bring a valid photo ID, she said, to make sure you're who you say you are.

A what? Really? You spied on me, for God's sake.

The mess all began last summer when astonishing evidence surfaced revealing that the Maryland State Police — under former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich — posed as activists and infiltrated an anti-death-penalty group, attending the organization's meetings and taking secret notes to send back to HQ. But what were they doing to me and my organization — the Chesapeake Climate Action Network — during this surveillance program in 2005 and 2006? Bugging our phones? Reading our emails? Monitoring me as I walked my kid to the bus stop?

I still don't know for sure. Yielding to public pressure, the police finally gave me a printed copy of my "file" on October 29. It raised more questions than it answered. Seven of the 12 pages were withheld without full explanation. And of the pages I did receive, at least half the words were redacted — blacked out with a marker.

There was a photo of me on the last page, lifted from my website. And on the first page, there were these words: "Crime: Terrorism, environmental extremists."

What terrorism would that be? My file — what little of it I have — makes reference to a morning speech given in Bethesda, Md., by then-governor Robert Ehrlich on November 17, 2005. A small audience of invited guests and journalists attended inside a classroom at Walt Whitman High School. Ehrlich wasn't doing enough to fight global warming, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network believed, and several of my staff arrived to peacefully demonstrate and hold up signs that said things like, "It's Getting Hot in Here, Gov!" But troopers with the governor's "Executive Protection Division" believed this was extreme, according to my file. For example, CCAN staffers invited high school students to hold up protest signs during the governor's speech. Pretty extreme, huh?

There was no civil disobedience at this event. No one was arrested. No county, state, or federal laws were breached. The entire affair was utterly peaceful, above board, and appropriate. Political demonstrations exactly like this happen a thousand times a day in America. There were no media reports of anything unusual.

Yet Ehrlich's security team considered this "aggressive protesting." Afterward, the troopers contacted the Maryland State Police's Homeland Security and Investigation Bureau. The result was creation of intelligence files on me and three of my staff under the crime category of "terrorism, environmental extremists." The real motivation, however, appears to be political spying. We were opponents of the governor's policies. We were organized and vocal about it. We wound up on an intelligence list along with dozens of other innocent, nonviolent opponents of the governor's policies.

Ironically, I wasn't even present at the protest in question. I've never been to Walt Whitman High School. But a case file was launched on me nonetheless, on November 28, 2005, with my name, photo, job title, "no SMTs" (scars, marks, or tattoos), and the declaration that no charges had been brought against me. Strangely, according to the police papers, there's no record of any intelligence-gathering related to me after the file was created, just a narrative describing my staff's protest at the Ehrlich speech.

Meanwhile, the state police say they've released everything to me that's relevant to me, but I don't believe them. Since July, the state police have made numerous public statements related to this spying controversy that have proved to be factually untrue. They initially said, for example, that the entire surveillance program was limited to anti-death-penalty activists. But we now know activists for peace, immigration, and the environment were spied on too. I believe more of the spying story is yet to come out, however. With the help of a heroic Maryland attorney, David Rocah of the American Civil Liberties Union, and an equally heroic Maryland state senator, Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, I believe all the facts will soon surface and we'll see legislation in the state General Assembly in 2009 specifically banning police abuses like this.

The final tragedy here, of course, is how much this whole episode has been a distraction to the public. The real threat of terror to Maryland and the nation is the prospect of up to 23 feet of sea-level rise as the Greenland ice sheet continues to implode from rapid global warming. The violent activity behind this threat is our astonishing over-reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal, to power our economy while suicidally saturating the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. For all our declarations of "never again," the ground-zero site of the World Trade Center will itself be literally under water from sea-level rise if we don't switch quickly to 100-mile-per-gallon cars and clean electricity from wind power.

But you can't have strong and lasting environmental protections without a strong democracy. Most of the transformative, positive change experienced in American history has happened only after significant citizen engagement at a noisy grassroots level. That's why, ultimately, the objective of almost all environmental groups — from the more liberal Greenpeace to the more conservative Nature Conservancy — is inspiring average citizens to care enough to take action, to make their desires known, to get involved in the system.

But who's going to get involved and get noisy — in Maryland or elsewhere — if citizens fear that the police are secretly attending the same rallies and meetings, secretly watching and taking notes and keeping lists? Thank God that outraged Marylanders from Ocean City to Cumberland continue to demand full disclosure and reform in the face of this tawdry police spying affair.

The national economy is tanking, we're bogged down in two wars, and the accelerating impacts of global warming could soon get so severe that Pentagon planners already anticipate security challenges worldwide from the inevitable social unrest spawned by biblical droughts, floods, wildfires, and the rest. History shows that it is precisely during times of war and want that governments tend to overreach and trample liberties. And it's only in resisting these temptations that certain kinds of governments — democracies — grow stronger.

With a climate disaster looming, I've worked very hard for many years to promote clean, renewable energy. But perhaps the greatest contribution I'll ever make to this cause is the action I'm taking right now: standing up and working hard to keep government itself clean.

[Mike Tidwell is director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast.]

Source / The Guardian

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Endangered Species : Angered Scientists, Green Groups Confront Administration

Interior secretary Dirk Kempthorne, winner of the 2007 Rubber Dodo Award, is drawing the wrath of scientists and green groups.
Environmental groups plea for public comment on endangered species law changes
By Elana Schor / August 22, 2008

A coalition of scientists and advocates from 105 environmental groups across the US is pressing the Bush administration to allow more public input before it restructures the country's endangered species law.

Environmentalists got a shock to the system 10 days ago when the Bush administration revealed it would end the 35-year-old requirement that government agencies consult with independent scientists before building roads, dams or mines that could harm threatened species.

The interior secretary who proposed the rule, Dirk Kempthorne, defended the move as necessary to make sure climate change is not used to justify more endangered species protections. Activists cried foul, accusing the Bush administration of launching a "sneak attack" on wildlife during its last days in office.

But what made the Bush administration's plans even more alarming to environmentalists was the limited outreach that Kempthorne's department plans to do before changing the endangered species law.

Every US government agency must seek public comment on a rules change before making it. Comments are generally accepted for several months -- but the species protections are scheduled to pass after only 30 days of discussion.

"It appears as if the [Bush] administration is doing whatever it can to discourage participation in the democratic process," National Wildlife Federation executive director John Kostyack said.

"I think we can expect more sneaky assaults like this on our public land and wildlife laws as this administration heads for the exits."

In addition, public comments will only be accepted by mail or through a government website that automatically shares one's personal information. The limited comments could prevent green groups from generating mass opposition to the new rule via fax and email.

While they battle to prevent the species law from being changed, environmental groups are also pushing for Kempthorne to open up the process and allow the public greater say over wildlife protections.

"The abbreviated timeline and restrictive commenting options raise serious concerns that the department of the interior is attempting to rewrite a bedrock environmental statute without allowing for adequate public involvement," 105 environmental groups wrote in a letter to Kempthorne yesterday.

The groups also urged Kempthorne to hold public hearings on the new rule where advocates from both sides of the endangered species debate could exchange views.

Signers of the letter hail from nearly every state in America and a cornucopia of scientific institutions, from the Gulf Restoration Network to the Missouri Botanical Garden to California Trout Incorporated.

Source / Guardian, U.K.

Also see Bush officials sneak-attack nation's wildlife / salon.com

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