From
the Tar Pits of Alberta to the Blasted Hills of Appalachia to the
Stump-strewn Mountains of Oregon
Activist
Malpractice
by
MICHAEL DONNELLY
26
January, 2013
“I
will say it again: the marketing of hope and change Obama is THE most
brilliant ad campaign ever perpetrated on USians. And, like in many
other ‘campaigns,’ desperate people cling to an illusion…cuz
the reality is so seriously effed up that ‘seeing’ it demands
either total melt down or revolution.”
Martha
Odom
Green
Eggs and Spam
Alberta
tar sands extraction zone.
Not
a day goes by without revelations of some new environmental rollback
out of the Obama administration; all of them
chickens-coming-home-to-roost results of the last few decades of what
Michael Colby labeled Activist Malpractice back
in 1994. The term has come into common use and recently was used by
Dr. Guy McPherson to describe what has become the business-as-usual
reality in the elite, Corporate Foundation-fed/pro-Democrat “green”
circles. McPherson took
Bill McKibben, James Hansen and other “climate campaigners”
(indeed, the entire Climate movement) to task for the
all-eggs-in-one-basket absurdity of 350.org’s “Stop the Keystone
Pipeline.”
If
a doctor determines that you have a deadly disease and fails to fully
inform you, that’s Medical Malpractice. If a green activist knows
full well the seriousness of an issue and fails to address it head on
and instead comes up with a plan that diverts movement energy to
useless efforts that merely prop up bad politicians instead of
noting, much less seriously challenging, the underlying causes of the
eco-threats – all the while cashing substantial foundation grants
and selling books – that’s Activist Malpractice.
“Bucket
list item checked off: share a paddy wagon with Julian Bond. This is
a broad movement,” Bill McKibben tweeted after his misdemeanor
arrest for protesting the Keystone Pipeline outside the White House,
February 13, 2013
While
wasting the past few critical years spewing massive amounts of carbon
traveling around the planet; collecting mailing lists; engaging
in vanity
protests ;
sending out narcissistic tweets; endlessly spamming inboxes with “the
sky is falling/send us money” missives; and, most importantly,
never bringing up Northern Hemisphere consumption levels or
challenging the true bad actors (especially, if Democrats), McKibben
et al. intentionally avoided any mention, much less protested,
Obama’s decision a
week before reelection, to approve the construction of the Southern
leg of the Keystone from Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas. That Obama
also delayed any decision on the alternative, new Northern leg was
all that mattered; keeping alive the true intent of the entire 350
campaign – to provide the Democrats with an election year “victory”
when Obama cancels the Northern leg which is now made unnecessary
given that the Southern link is complete and Tar Sands bitumen will
flow all the way from Alberta to Texas any day now.
Given
this, it was no surprise to me yesterday when Obama
approved
another major pipeline from Texas to Alberta’s
Mordor-like landscape Tar Sands extraction zone. This pipeline will
ship fracked natural gas to the pits-of-hell there as the gas will be
mixed with the goo, and called “dilbit – diluted bitumen, which
makes it more amenable to flowing thru pipes.
Climate
Ground Zero
Mountain-top
removal coal mining zone.
It’s
heartening that many folks are finally catching on to the
Foundation/Dem/Big Green Keystone scam. As a result of this
awareness, the hollow KXL “victory” next year will likely do
little to burnish the tarnished Democrat green credibility. And
speaking of green cred, Big Green has been conspicuously AWOL in one
of the most important climate/carbon/public health issues of all –
Mountaintop Removal (MTR) coal extraction. That monumental insult has
been left to be challenged by an underfunded grassroots collection of
front-line (dragline?) Appalachian activists themselves.
A
few years ago, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the Sierra Club,
Appalachian Voices and other green groups signed on and sent staff to
help the locals win what they called the “iconic placed-based Coal
River Campaign”
to end MTR. They spent $50,000 on a meeting where they literally sang
Kumbaya! Suddenly without telling anyone local, they simply packed up
and left. They now have no offices or staff in the area. Yet, they
continue to raise funds based on their “successful” MTR campaign
while providing no funds whatsoever to send the under-siege
“hillbilly” locals to lobby in DC. They continue to pump money
and efforts into a clean water bill that doesn’t even end MTR!
As
if blasting mountains away, extracting the coal and dumping the
“overburden” waste into nearby streams killing species and
poisoning the entire state isn’t criminal enough, the entire
operation has led to massive cancer, asthma and other sickness.
Climate Ground Zero (CGZ) teamed up with locals Bo Webb and Maria
Gunnoe to push for and organize the first public health studies on
the impacts of breathing the blasting dust below MTR sites on
Cumberland Plateau. The results showed that this area has the highest
mortality rate in the USA. Counties that don’t have MTR mines don’t
have anywhere near the birth defects, lung disease, cancer and a host
of other diseases, including the highest rates of mental depression
in America.
CGZ
and others have taken the studies’ results and responded to the
public health catastrophe by pushing for the Appalachian Communities
Health Emergency Act or ACHE which
was introduced in Congress by the heroic Rep. John A. Yarmuth (D-KY).
The ACHE would require the Director of the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences to conduct or support comprehensive
studies on the health impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining on
individuals in the surrounding communities.
In
support of ACHE and an end to MTR, CGZ has mounted a vigil/fast at
the West Virginia Capitol. Legendary activist Mike Roselle,
co-founder of Earth First!, RAN and The Ruckus Society, who lives in
Rock Creek, WV (Ground Zero) and another local, James Guin McGuiness
have bundled up, dumped toxic coal blasting dust on the Capitol steps
and vowed to remain on the Capitol steps until the issue is addressed
- a moratorium on the blasting and investigation of the
Health Emergency being the essential demand . (Send monetary support
to CGZ.)
Chainsaw
Déjà Vu
If
these green derelictions weren’t enough, in addition, it is another
Democrat eco-assault that was trotted out yesterday on the steps of
another Capitol; one that clearly shows that all the Administration’s
talk Climate and Carbon is just that – “talk” and one that
should put an end to that Big Green/Democrat myth once and for all.
The
renewed assault on our Northwest Ancient Forests announced yesterday
at the Oregon Capitol by Democrat Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley is
the ultimate chickens-home-to-roost. The Oregon
and California Land
Grant Act of 2013 would double the cut on 1.6 million acres of O &
C public-owned forest managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM –
bovines, minerals and logs) over the next 20 years. It also purports
to “permanently preserve 1 million acres” of O & C lands
(though there are only 2.4 million acres total). The 1.6 million
acres would be put in a Timber Trust (can’t make up) run by timber
interests (maybe with a token or two pliable “greens,” of course)
under the terms of Oregon’s shoddy Forest Practices Act, rather
than the applicable more stringent Federal laws.
Roosting
chickens? Well, the reality is that we were told by the Big Greens
that Clinton
“permanently preserved” these
same acres back in 1993, when, in reality, he resumed old growth
logging on NW Public forests which had been completely stopped by an
Injunction during the Pappy Bush era. Big Greens crowed “our
greatest victory;” cashed their grants checks and left it to the
local grassroots folks who had raised the issue to national
prominence in the first place to fight off the resulting decades of
new timber sales in old growth habitat and quickly went on to setting
up the next Democrat Greenwash – the 2000 election-year Roadless
Rule scam.
(How many times can the same forests be “saved?”)
And,
now even the minimal protections of Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan
are shown to be the mirage they always were. The plan is commonly
known as Option 9, as the scientists who developed the plan first
came up with eight options and none of them was rapacious enough, so
Clinton sequestered them all in a Portland hotel until they came up
with Options 9 and 10 which allowed for far more stumps.
Rep.
Peter DeFazio (D-OR) has also introduced similar legislation to
Wyden’s in the House. DeFazio’s bill, which Obama has vowed to
veto (right!), cuts even more. DeFazio, the Congress’
weakest/phoniest “progressive” was first elected 26 years ago
with overwhelming environmentalist support. He even told a DC paper
that he owed his election to forest activists! – (mainly the Oregon
Natural Resources Council (ONRC). It didn’t take long
for him to calculate that the biggest industry in his District was
Big Timber and so he flipped. His predecessor, Jim Weaver, was never
intimidated by Big Timber and challenged their hegemony all the time,
introducing Wilderness bills I hios own District and generally
calling them out on their self-serving lies all the time. DeFazio, on
the other hand, has never gotten a single acre of designated
Wilderness in his District and he even first opposed efforts to
create the magnificent Opal Creek Wilderness Area. In exchange for
his until now under-the-radar support, Big Timber does the usual
corporate shadow dance a la the Right and Obama – savage DeFazio
publicly, while regularly running an unelectable GOP nitwit against
him.
Eugene,
Oregon, the central town in DeFazio’s District, is famous as an
activist hot-bed. Yet all the blow-hard Defazio has been able to
bring home in 26 years is a foot bridge named after…himself. (Rep.
Mike Kopetski from the adjacent District was in office but four years
and he is the person most responsible for ending Nuclear Testing and
he garnered Wilderness protection for nearby Opal Creek’s
magnificent Ancient Forest watershed.) The continual free pass given
DeFazio by Eugene residents amounts to Community-wide Activist
Malpractice.
Wyden.
DeFazio, Merkley et al. are all on board with the increased logging,
as they note that southern Oregon counties that once wallowed in
federal money from past massive, unsustainable timber cuts are now
broke and forced to cut public services. They also claim that it’s,
of course, a “jobs issue” as timber industry jobs have declined
precipitously over time. The trend started long before any
(temporary) logging rollbacks due to environmental protections.
Automation and raw, unprocessed log exports have the largest hand in
the job losses.
Big
Timber cares about jobs so much that they are now behind an effort to
roll back Public employee unions in the state. Rob Freres, heir
of Freres Brothers Logging and the guy
who vowed “to cut Opal Creek” sent $30,000 to the anti-union
effort and
astoundingly said, “I believe that if Oregon is going to be a place
where our children and grandchildren can get a good education, it’s
important that the public employees’ unions do not dominate the
politics of this state.”
If
Freres really cared about our children and grandchildren’s
education, then he’d pay his taxes on an equitable basis with all
other Oregon residents. The reality is that Big Timber always has and
continues to “dominate the politics of this state.”
Passing
the Bucks
Therein
lays the truth here: the southern Oregon counties that are “broke”
all are dominated by their largest land-owners – Big Timber. Big
Timber has thus used their considerable clout to carve out
preferential tax rates – the average tax rate in those counties is
around $.70 per thousand dollars of assessed valuation (which itself
is pegged at only around 60% of Real Market Value). In Eugene, Salem
and Portland, the rate is closer to $2.00. On top of that, almost
100% of logs cut on Big Timber’s severely-undertaxed lands are
exported unprocessed to Asia…again with little in the way of tax or
tariff.
So,
the Oregon Democrats (and we have had one-party rule here for
decades) first hit up the Federal
Treasury for
billions over the past 20 years to the counties to make up for loss
of timber revenue from Federal forests, while the counties
systematically rejected any attempts to bring their tax rates into
anything resembling equitable.
Finally,
the rest of the country’s Representatives caught on and ended the
subsidies. So, this latest logging scheme is the Democrats’ attempt
to stick it to the federal ecosystems, as the Treasury is no longer
in play. And why? Well, if said counties do go broke, the State has
an obligation to step in and provide essential services, which means
that the Democrats’ base in the Willamette Valley cities would end
up seeing their taxes go up to pay for it all and
that might shine a long-overdue light on it all. Oregon
Governor-for-life John Kitzhaber, another corporate Democrat, has
also pushed for and succeeded in upping the cut on State Forests for
all the same false reasons.
Since
the Democrats don’t have the backbone to take on Big Timber; end
the ridiculous pro-timber tax rates or challenge raw log exports,
they have calculated that the best way for them to deal with it is to
up the cut rather than risk alienating their urban base, pure and
simple. Since the foundation-dependent “greens” don’t have the
courage to call out bad Democrats and are paid to not call them out,
this is the result.
Where
do we go from here?
“We
fund reform; not revolution,” – Tom Wathan, Pew Charitable Trusts
Many
of the same players who greenwashed Clinton’s Option 9 and
cashed handsome six-figure foundation grants as their pay-off are
still at it. They, directed – like McKibben – by what their Big
Oil-based Foundation handlers (Pew, Rockefeller, et al.) demand, are
seeking to merely minimize the damage of Wyden’s plan; instead of
calling for complete rejection of it and mounting challenges to all
of the proponents’ reelections. In fact, professional greens have
been all in favor of the Democrat-produced many massive “thinning”
projects and Biomass schemes that are already supposedly providing
jobs, logs for local mills and “clean, renewable energy” to the
grid. Wyden also has a green-blessed plan to thin over 7 million
acres of Oregon’s dry eastside forests for Biomass for electricity
generation, under the guise of creating/d fire-proofing “Healthy
Forests” with chainsaws.
McKibben
et al. are already on board for the Democrats’ 2104 campaigns;
demanding that the entire 350 cabal never speak the truth about
Obama; never speaking the truth about the many other pipelines, nor
about Warren Buffett’s recent purchase of thousands of new rail
tank cars to ship the tar sands crud across the continent.
Roselle,
McGuiness and their allies have the right response to such threats:
bring the fight to the centers of power and mount Direct Action
campaigns at the Tar Pits, blasted mountains and the Stump Fields. No
more mindless sycophantic indulging in the Hopium of the Democrats.
No more sucking up to Big Oil foundations. No more narcissists
self-selecting as representatives of the grassroots and cutting
deals. Climate Ground Zero , the grassroots Tar
Sands Blockade and
local forest protection groups like the Cascadia Forest
Defenders are
leading the way.
The
carbon from coal and Tar Sands must stay in the
ground. The trees must remain standing; sequestering
carbon. Northern hemisphere CONSUMPTION must drastically
lower – already, sans the Keystone northern leg, 90% of all retail
gasoline in the Midwest comes from Alberta’s tar sands. 100%
of all jet fuel likewise comes from the same toxic source.
“Renewables” are yet another dose of hopium. We could run the
grid on unicorn farts, but if consumption levels remain the same,
Gaia will still lose the ability to support many species, including
hominids.
The
Democrats must get on board or support for
them must end. The Big Green cabal of ineffective
narcissists must be replaced or the entire Green
lobby must go. Kick the Hopium. There are enough
points on the data line. Us clever apes and numerous innocent
species’ very survival is on the line. It’s now or never.
MICHAEL
DONNELLY is
one of the grassroots co-founders of the Ancient Forest movement and
former VP of the ONRC. He was appalled when other activists proposed
to trade off 55,000 acres of Ancient Forest for logging in exchange
for protection of Opal Creek. He and others resisted the sell-out.
But in the end, 5000 acres of stumps were the cost of Opal Creek’s
35,000 acres of protection. He, unlike those who self-selectively
brokered to the deal, visited the now clearcut 5000 acres. He
can be reached at Pahtoo@aol.com
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