Keystone Name Not Doing So Well These Days

The Keystone Pipeline has been the target of environmentalists for a while now because of the particularly dirty tar sands oil it will carry, the environmental damage necessary to get that oil, and the concern for spills along the route through the US.   TransCanada, the company building the pipeline, of course, touts the line as

"the safest and most advanced pipeline operation in North America. It will not only bring essential infrastructure to North American oil producers, but it will also provide jobs, long-term energy independence and an economic boost to Americans."

Meanwhile, in Alaska, the Keystone Canyon on the Richardson Highway, the only road into the town of Valdez, has been shut off by a massive avalanche.

Alaska Department of Transportation Photo

 Here are two videos from the Alaska Department of Transportation:








 For those who are just thinking of the names here and not the meaning of the word, from the Oxford Dictionary:

• 1a central stone at the summit of an arch, locking the whole together.
  More example sentences

  1.1 [usually in singular] the central principle or part of a policy, system, etc., on which all else depends:
  cooperation remains the keystone of the government’s security policyMore example sentences

So, when there's problems with the keystone, everything else it holds up is in danger too.  


Should other 'keystones' worry?  Not because their name is Keystone.  The title here is to point out how easy it is to generalize from two examples to the universe.  If any of the other organizations named Keystone have problems, I'm sure it's not related to the name.  Though, if there is some terrible scandal related to a particular name, people will think about that name differently when they encounter it.  The name Monica, for example, took a beating in 1998.

There's enough organizations named Keystone that you could probably set up a town and be self-sufficient.  And only a few on this list are in  The Keystone State.  Here is a sampling:  

Keystone Cinemas
Keystone Technologies
Keystone Resort
Keystone Industries
Keystone College
Keystone Electronics
Keystone Symposia
Keystone Credit Union  and Keystone Bank
Keystone Substance Abuse Services (does that include oil?)
Keystone Sporting Arms
Keystone Realty
Keystone Cement
Camp Keystone  and Keystone Camp
Keystone Cafe   (There are lots of these)
Feeney-Hornak Keystone Funeral Homes
Keystone Rugby Club
Keystone Chiropractic
Keystone Church

Sunday Beach Bike Ride - Five Blog Posts In One: Heermann History, Chevron Prop Taxes, Hermosa Beach Oil, And More

B and I biked Saturday from the Marina del Rey along the beach path to the end near Palos Verdes.  What a wonderful ride.  Above are surfers from the Manhattan Beach pier.

I took this picture to show the surf board racks people have on their bikes.  When I was growing up here, the boards were much bigger and heavier and if people had bike racks, they were trailers behind the bike.  Another thing I noticed in this shot was how pale the surfers are.  Wearing wetsuits definitely blocks the sun.  These guys look like Alaskans under their wetsuits.

I liked the blue wave bike racks at the Manhattan Beach pier.  But when we got back from walking on the pier about ten minutes, a lot more bikes were parked.

Here's the pier itself.  There's a cafe and aquarium at the end.  The round house aquarium can't be very big, and even though the website calls it "Roundhouse Marine Studies Lab and Aquarium"  it seems more like a tourist attraction than a science center.  The website doesn't mention any research, but it does have a link for parties.

Further down was the Redondo Beach pier.  It's full of tacky looking tourist shops and restaurants.  I took the top picture on the way down.  On the way back it was obscured a bit by fog.  Strangely it was sunny the whole time, but if you looked ahead or back it was foggy.  I think there was just light fog all the way and sometimes it got a little thicker then dissipated.  It was probably in the high 60s. 


Based on the Seattle area's Audubon Birdweb  pictures and description, this is a Heermann's Gull.  I was eating a granola bar and it was clearly hoping I'd share.

The black feet and black tip of the orange beak give it away.  ABCBirds says:

"Close to 95% of the entire world’s population of Heermann’s Gull nests in a single location: Isla Rasa, in the Gulf of California, Mexico, which supports
300,000 breeding birds. The island is protected by the Government of Mexico as a seabird sanctuary. The other nesting locations are islands along the coast of western Mexico; there are no sites where the species has successfully bred within the U.S. The bird undertakes a reverse migration, beginning in May, when non-breeders appear off the California coast, later to be joined by breeders. It moves as far north as Vancouver Island, British Columbia, before all but a few individuals head back south during the fall and winter."

Adolphus L. Herman from here

I was curious about who Heermann was and finally found a photocopy of seven pages of Cassinia - Proceedings of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, 1907, by Witmer Stone.   Today it's posted on the Club's website, 106 years later.

He was born about 1818 in South Carolina, according to the text, and was trained as a medical doctor, but seems to have been more interested in ornithology.  He came to California in 1849.

"Upon the organization of the Pacific Railroad survey parties Dr. Heermann obtained the appointment of surgeon and naturalist to Lieut. Williamson's party, which was to explore southern California with the object of finding available passes through the mountains by which the routes along the 32d and 35th parallels might reach the coast."

The proceedings say the gull is named after him and so is a song sparrow (Melospiza melodia heermanni).  I found a Heermann's Kangaroo Rat while I was looking too that lives in California, but I couldn't document a connection to Heermann, but it's likely.  Do look at the proceedings of the Ornithological Club for the whole story on Heermann.  The author who tracked down the notes would have made a great blogger.  And his piece on Heermann has made it on line now.

And if you want to know even more, I found that Dr. Joel Weintraub

"will explore the life and accomplishments of 19th-century California naturalist Adolphus L. Heermann. You will learn about the impact Adolphus had on the natural history of California"

at Cal State University Fullerton, at Mackey Auditorium, on Feb. 24, 2014 from 10 am to 11:30 am.   I think calling him "California naturalist" is a bit of a stretch.  He did important work in California, but from the Delaware Club's publication, it seems he only spent a relatively short part of his life in California.

Moving along on our bike ride - not necessarily in chronological order - we also rode by the Chevron refinery in El Segundo. [Note:  as you go through the following on Chevron's property taxes, you'll see I missed a key point, then found it.  I leave it in so you can see the process of my thinking and writing on this, not just the cleaned up (and possible still erroneous) final version.]

I wouldn't have known it was Chevron - there was nothing that said it was - except that B pointed it out to me.  He said the massive wall with spikes on top was new.

From Chevron's El Segundo website:

"We've been a part of this community since 1911 when the main product produced was kerosene for lamps. In fact, the City of El Segundo (Spanish for "the Second") was named after the refinery, then Standard Oil's second in California. Today, the El Segundo Refinery provides jobs for more than 1,100 Chevron employees and 500 contractors, covers approximately 1,000 acres, has more than 1,100 miles of pipelines, and is capable of refining 290 thousand barrels of crude oil per day. Transportation fuels -- gasoline, jet and diesel -- are the primary products refined from the crude oil. We are responsible caretakers of our land and the environment, we operate our own electricity, steam, and water treatment facilities, and even maintain one of the only two remaining preserves in the world for the endangered  El Segundo Blue Butterfly. "

Previously it only had a chain link fence, he said.  And eventually the medieval fortress wall ended and the old fence began.




From KOLO 8 TV, April 18, 2013:

 SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Tests of pipe samples from Chevron Corp.'s refinery in El Segundo found corrosion to an extent similar to the pipe that failed and caused a large fire at the company's Richmond facility.

The federal Chemical Safety Board and California Division of Occupational Safety and Health issued a report Thursday that found up to 60-percent wall loss in a pipe at Chevron's El Segundo refinery that processes the same type of crude.

Chevron voluntarily inspected pipes at its El Segundo crude unit after the Aug. 6 fire in Richmond caused by a corroded old pipe.

There's also a lawsuit over Chevron's tax deal with the city of El Segundo.  One can imagine the kind of influence Chevron has on this town.  Here's a snippet from a Daily Breeze article in October  14, 2012:

A county civil grand jury is looking into El Segundo's decision to negotiate tax deals with the Chevron oil refinery, including a 1994 pact over utility-users' taxes that has come under scrutiny in recent months.

Members of the grand jury last month interviewed former City Manager Doug Willmore, who was fired in February and alleges his ouster came in retaliation for proposing that Chevron pay higher taxes. Willmore said he met for more than two hours with five members of the volunteer grand jury.

A followup article on April 23, 2013 article says they negotiated a deal:

"El Segundo city leaders this week finalized a deal with the Chevron oil refinery that will yield an estimated $128 million in net new revenues over the next 15 years, bringing negotiations over the company's tax payments to a close.

The City Council on Tuesday passed the so-called tax resolution agreement on a 4-1 vote, with little discussion. Councilman Dave Atkinson was opposed. .  ."

Look at the dates.  This deal was reported April 23, 2013 as having happened "this week."  Above, the KOLO report on the pipeline corrosion was on April 18, 2013, just a few days before.  But KOLO is in Reno.  I can't find any coverage in the Daily Breeze on that until July 15, 2013.  (That doesn't mean it wasn't reported, only that I can't find it.  But I did several google searches and searched the Daily Breeze website.)  Just find it curious they didn't report it when many other outlets far from them did.  And the July 15 article was from the Contra Costa newspaper which is in the San Francisco Bay area.


And $128 million over a 15 year period?   That comes to a little less than $1.9 million a year for 1000 acres (according to Chevron's website, cited above) of prime Southern California waterfront property.  When you get to Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach just past the refinery, the beachfront is lined with million dollar houses.

From eConsultant, we get this:

Place: Hermosa Beach, CA
Population: 129,251
Median Home Price: $1,200,000
Average Property Taxes: $5,884 (2006)

Assuming four properties per acre - just a for a rough estimate - that would be over $20,000 of taxes per acre.  Chevron has 1000 acres.  That would come to $20,000,000 in property taxes per year.  Times 15 years, it would $300,000,000.  And they worked out a deal for $28,000,000 over 15 years.

One could argue that the Chevron land wouldn't be worth that much.  Who would want to build on top of a former oil refinery?  But that only tells us how much Chevron has cost this area.  What would it cost to clean up the land?

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but it sounds like Chevron's got a great deal going.   This is just a quick and dirty calculation, but if I lived in El Segundo, I'd want to check this out further.

As I looked more carefully, there was something I was missing - the $128 million is "net new revenues,"  but the article isn't totally clear on how much this will be.  There's this sentence later on in the piece:

"Chevron's first-year base payment totals $11.1 million - a figure that reflects its 2012 taxes with more than $5 million in added funding. "

Does that mean it's $11 million including the added $5 million?  That's still lower than the $20 million a year I estimated - but my numbers are just back of the envelope calculations and I'm sure people in El Segundo could explain the difference.  

And in Hermosa Beach, there were lots of those million dollar homes with these banners on them. 

Here's a snipped from the StopHermosaBeachOil website:

A few facts: The proposed drill site is located four blocks from the beach on Valley Drive, surrounded by family homes, small businesses, beautiful South Park and our iconic Green Belt. From this site, the oil company seeks to drill, produce, and process up to 8,000 barrels of oil and 2.5 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. The company plans to directionally drill in all directions under homes and below the sea floor to the one-mile boundary of tideland that the City holds in trust for the benefit of the People of California. The oil company’s proposition is, essentially, to plant an “offshore” oil rig four blocks inland from the beach.

Our website provides well-researched information, citing source documents, which we view as fundamental to helping our community reach a well-informed and educated decision about the prospect of drilling in Hermosa Beach.

It is our belief that the City’s ban on oil drilling, which voters studied and wisely adopted in 1932, 1958, and once again in 1995, and which the California Court of Appeals unanimously upheld in 2001, remains our best assurance to secure the welfare of our community and avoid the grave risks inherent in any oil drilling operation.

The company that wants to drill the oil is privately owned  E&B Natural Resources and here's what Business Week says about their President. 

Mr. Steve Layton has been the President at E&B Natural Resources Management Corporation since 2000. Mr. Layton joined E & B Natural Resource Management Corporation in 1983. In 1983, he Layton co-founded Alma Energy and Equinox Oil. He served as President of Alma and Equinox from 1997 to 2000. In November 2000, he purchased the Alma and Equinox assets out of bankruptcy and formed E & B Natural Resource Management Corporation. Mr. Layton has been active in the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Louisiana Independent Oil and Gas Association, and the California Independent Producers Association. He served as President of the National Stripper Well Association and a member of the National Petroleum Council. He has been appointed to the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission by Texas Governors Richards, Bush and Perry. Mr. Layton holds BS and MBA from University Of Tulsa.

And as we were getting back to the Marina where B parked the car - it was about a 25 mile round trip bike ride and B didn't want to push his back more than that - we got to the rise where people were taking beginning hang gliding classes.  Fortunately - given how long this post is already - I thought I pushed the button to video tape the flight, but it didn't go on until I 'stopped' the video which got a picture of dirt before I shut off the camera.

 

 If you click on the picture, you can read the poster on the hang gliding classes.  And, if the lessons don't go well, at the end of the trail, where we saw the Heermann's gull, you can get a beach wheel chair.

This post got way out of hand.  But I think it also is revealing about how much we don't see when we wander around places.  Just trying to get a little background about the things we saw led me to all sorts of (I would say interesting, but you can fill in your own adjectives) things.  It's a reminder to me that everything is more than it seems on the surface.

Oil, Power, And Three Books

A story on NPR Friday talked about petcoke dust from refining tar sands crude oil.

Crude oil from Canada's tar sands is providing a booming business for American refineries, but residents of one Chicago neighborhood complain that a byproduct of that business has become a health hazard. They want towering mounds of a dusty substance known as petroleum coke, or petcoke, moved out of the city. And as NPR's Cheryl Corley reports, Chicago is now requiring one company storing the substance to do just that.

I'd note that it mentioned that the plants were owned by the Koch brothers - a good reason for them to try to make people believe that global warming isn't caused by human use of carbon based fuel.

I posted the other day about Keystone pipeline protesters in Oklahoma City against bringing tar sands oil through their state and being arrested on anti-terrorists grounds.sting

I also checked out the new books section at the UAA library this week.  There are lots of interesting books on important subjects.  But too many folks get all they know these days from sound bites and sketchy internet posts.  Good books that focus on a topic can give someone a reasonably comprehensive understanding of an issue.  Good books that is.  Or a couple, just to make sure the book is reasonably balanced.

Here are three I found that are related to these stories.

The first, Cold, Hungry, and In The Dark,  challenges 'common knowledge' about fracking and the belief that our oil shortage days are over. Keystone and fracking are different things, but they are brought to you by the same industry.  From Art Berman's forward to the book:

"When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  This is particularly true about shale gas.  Shale gas is a commercial failure.  That is not what the exploration and production companies that produce gas or the mainstream media and sell-side brokerage companies that help promote the plays tell the public.
Over the past 5 years, I have evaluated, published and spoken about shale gas plays.  I am a petroleum geologist and I make my living evaluating prospects and plays based on fundamental geology and economics.  Shale gas does not pass the test.
I have written about a phenomenon that I cal "magical thinking."  Magical thinking focuses on gas production volumes but does not consider cost.  This is its catechism:  because the volume of shale gas production is great, it must therefore be a commercial success;"

Author Bill Powers is a Canadian investment manager.  Is he badmouthing shale oil to promote Canadian tar sands?  I couldn't find evidence either way, though it seems like his bias is finding good investments, in which case he should be seeking 'truth.'

Putting things into another context is From Enron to Evo:  Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia.   Evo refers to the indigenous Bolivian president.  Derrick Hindery argues that despite the green and indigenous rights image, Evo has sold out to big oil.

Watching how oil takes over a place like Bolivia gives us a sense of what they are doing in Alaska and other places.  And the influence they have on our officials.  But we know that already. 







 Putting things into an even bigger perspective is this huge book that looks at our modern day issues as they played on in the 17th Century.  This book is huge - 902 pages - which means not too many are likely to read much of it.  The publisher's blurb says:

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides – the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread.  A global crisis extended from England to Japan, and from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. North and South America, too, suffered turbulence. The distinguished historian Geoffrey Parker examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s. Parker also deploys scientific evidence concerning climate conditions of the period, and his use of ‘natural’ as well as ‘human’ archives transforms our understanding of the World Crisis. Changes in the prevailing weather patterns during the 1640s and 1650s – longer and harsher winters, and cooler and wetter summers – disrupted growing seasons, causing dearth, malnutrition, and disease, along with more deaths and fewer births. Some contemporaries estimated that one-third of the world died, and much of the surviving historical evidence supports their pessimism.

Parker’s demonstration of the link between climate change and worldwide catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement.  And the contemporary implications of his study are equally important: are we at all prepared today for the catastrophes that climate change could bring tomorrow?  [emphasis added] 

Charging Environmental Protesters With Terrorism - The Potential Dangers of Glitter

A group of protesters from locked themselves to the entrance of Devon Towers in Oklahoma City.

Tulsa's Channel 9 report focused on the protesters.  The target, other than Devon Towers, is never mentioned.  The closest they come to explaining the reason for the protest was the term "anti-fracking protesters" and giving the names of the organizations sponsoring the protest:  "Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance and Cross Timbers Earth First."

The reporter, Lisa Monahan, says,

"although they had nothing to say to authorities, the protestors had plenty to say about their agenda."

What did we hear about their agenda?

"I don't know if I was scared, but I was angry."

That's it.  That's the plenty they had to say about their agenda.  Was the agenda in the original piece cut by the station editors?  It sure makes Monahan look bad. 

Channel 9 concludes the report with a list of charges that included:

"Biological attack by throwing an agent or substance"


According to one of the protesters,  Eric Whelan,

"the black substance was simply glitter,  it was just to make good pictures and video and to make it pretty."

The Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance website gives us more explanation about the protesters' target and agenda: 

Devon Energy is a key player in the deadly tar sands industry. And though Devon Energy has been touted as practicing the safest and greenest form of tar sands extraction, the form of extraction that Devon practices, steam assisted gravity drainage, emits 2.5x the greenhouse emissions as open mining according to the Pembina Institute. Additionally, since 80% of tar sands reserves lie too deep within the earth to mine, this type of extraction will utilize 30x more land area than open mining.
“I’m opposed to the industry’s blatant disregard for human wellbeing in the pursuit of profit,” said Cory Mathis of Austin, TX—one of the activists locked down inside Devon. “These industries poison countless communities, often deceive and coerce folks into signing contracts, and when that doesn’t work, they use eminent domain to steal the land. Texas and Oklahoma have long been considered sacrifice zones for the oil and gas industry, and people have for the most part learned to roll over and accept the sicknesses and health issues that come with the temporary and unsustainable boost in employment.”

TransCanada Teaching Police and FBI how to use Terrorism laws to prosecute protesters

Vice.com puts this into a larger context of TransCanada training police and FBI on how to use anti-terrorism laws to prosecute environmental protestors.

When they got to jail, they found out they were being charged with a "terrorism hoax," a state felony punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Their attorney, Doug Parr, has been involved in dozens of protest cases like this one in Oklahoma and Texas. In other arrests, protesters have faced trumped-up charges, but this is a radical escalation. "I've been practicing law since the 1970s. Quite frankly, I've been expecting this," Parr said. "Based upon the historical work I've been involved in, I know that when popular movements that confront the power structure start gaining traction, the government ups the tactics they employ in order to disrupt and take down those movements."
TransCanada has been putting pressure on law enforcement to do exactly that. In documents obtained by Bold Nebraska, the company was shown briefing police and the FBI on how to prosecute anti-pipeline protesters as terrorists.
In Ohio, the Athens County Emergency Management Agency recently held a training drill that involved a fake anti-fracking group. The scenario was meant to prepare emergency first responders for a terrorist attack. Focusing the training on non-violent environmentalists caused such an uproar that the county had to issue a public apology.

Image from KWTV

Look at Sarah Totten as she was interviewed by KWTV channel 9 Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Image from KWTV

And here's Eric Whalen interviewed by KWTV.










Above are two of the protesters from tv news screenshots.  They looked terribly normal and non threatening.  But here is another set of pictures that Channel 9 says were the four who were arrested.  It takes these clean cut white kids (yeah, we're profiling here) and makes them look a lot edgier.  I'm not sure if this image was from the television station or from the police. In both cases, it's problematic. 

Image from KWTV

I'd note that before I wrote this post, I did a bit of googling to be sure I was getting the story reasonably correctly.  I do this when responding to stories I find online to be sure I'm not responsible for spreading hoax stories like the one the Anchorage Daily News reported about a SF school that was reported to having suspended a kid for wishing an atheist teacher a Merry Christmas.  That story quotes a psychologist on how we tend to believe what we want to believe:

"We tend to apply lower standards of evidence to information that confirms our predispositions," said Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. "What that means in practice is people seize onto these online nuggets that confirm what they believe.
"They're certainly unlikely to seek out information to see if it's true."
Yet research shows that even if confronted with a correction to false information, it won't change people's minds, he said.
"Even in the case where someone accepts that this story is false, it isn't clear that they'll accept an actual 'war on Christmas' is false," Nyhan said. "No one thinks they're misinformed."

 This doesn't just apply to conservatives who seemed to have been the major group that keep this atheist story spreading.  Liberals can be just as vulnerable.  So constantly check your crap detectors and make sure they are working.   

Today's Apartheids

Intro

1. The Anchorage International Film Festival is getting all my attention this week, at least here on the blog, and I haven't commented on other important issues or events.  I think good art (even bad art)  tells us about everything that's important, so covering the festival isn't trivial, but still I feel pulled in different directions.
2. This blog covers a wide array of topics, because, as I told someone this week, "everything is related."  And I hope that's clear below

The Boycott

The Boycott of South Africa is getting lots of attention this week in the wake of all the memorials for Nelson Mandela.  But at the time a boycott was considered completely radical, anti-business, anti-American, harmful to the US economy, and it wouldn't have the desired effect anyway.

People knew that Aparteid was fundamentally wrong and they persisted - mainly younger folks who got their universities to divest from companies doing business in South Africa.  Legislation was passed and the conservatives' hero Ronald Reagan vetoed it.  But the Boycott movement had worked hard and effectively and Reagan's veto was overridden.  

Why Divest?

The basic point is that companies should not be making money by supporting oppression or other things that cause serious harm to humans or to the planet they live on.   We have laws against prostitution and drugs basically for the same reason - some moral values trumps the capitalist goal of making as much money as possible.  Even conservatives in the US have pushed hard to get a boycott against doing business with Iran and in Alaska very conservative legislators wanted to divest the state's funds - like the Permanent Fund - of companies doing business with Iran.

The underlying principle is that we value certain things above money.  Slavery was abolished even though it hurt slave owners economically (not to mention morally and spiritually.)

Corporations' appropriate goals, according to an old Michigan Supreme Court decision and supported by Milton Friedman, and quite probably today's US Supreme Court, but challenged by others, is to maximize shareholder profit.

They do this by taking resources and creating products or services they can sell.  Degradation of the environment - so long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line - is acceptable.  Exploitation of workers is not an issue as long as it doesn't hurt their bottom line.  The same with exploiting customers.  (Think banking late fees and punishing interest rates or airline fees for changing reservations.  Think of 'pre-existing conditions' clauses in health insurance policies. Think the housing crisis.)

When companies make big profits while violating more important human values, they have to pay their employees well to keep them doing their damaging work.  'Well' is a relative term.  They don't have to pay much to get very poor people to work, even in jobs that put the employees at risk.  Much higher salaries and benefits than the prevailing salaries get professionals to sell their souls for morally questionable business. 

We know that people are able to believe any stories that justify their right to get what they want, even when it is morally reprehensible.  German soldiers justified their work at concentration camps with stories of Jews undermining pure German culture.  Slaveowners used the bible and their beliefs that Africans werea lesser form of human.  Roosevelt allowed internment camps for Japanese-Americans because American prejudices saw them as threats to our security.  Communists tolerated, at first, Stalin's purges because they were necessary for the revolution.  Civil Rights leaders discriminated against women in their movement. Often short term benefits and costs are cited as trumping long term and uncertain benefits. 

Today's Apartheids

In hindsight, it's relatively easy to see who was right and who was wrong (though there are still Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the US.)   To figure out where action needs to be taken today, we should look at situations where important values are being compromised  to make money.

1.  Future human survival as global climate change causes more severe weather events, shifts in geographic ranges of flora and fauna leading to diseases to spread to new areas and crop destabilization and drought.  Those are just a few of the impacts we are already starting to see. 

Fighting this with the same sort of arguments used to fight the Aparteid boycotts are the biggest traditional energy corporations - mainly oil, gas, and coal.  Alternative energy sources can't fill our energy needs, they tell us.  Business would be crippled.  If we don't produce these fuels, others will.  And, by the way, there is no such thing as global warming, and if there were, it wouldn't be caused by humans, just natural climate cycles.  In Alaska, their well paid employees, somehow justify their contribution to the future degradation of the planet, by buying into those specious arguments    When we have public  hearings on oil taxes in Alaska, nearly all the people testifying for the oil companies are people working for the industry, claiming their livelihoods and standard of living would be gone if the oil companies were taxed at current levels. The standard of living of the next generation must take care of itself is the implication. 

2.  Privatization and Chemicalization of Our Food.   Large corporations destroy our long term food growing environments through factory agriculture - high fertilizer and pesticide use - in the name of shareholder profit.  They systematically destroy small local farmers, introduce GMO food, and fight against labeling because GMO's are perfectly safe and labeling them would harm their business.  And patent seeds to gain a monopoly on food. 

3  Continued Manufacture and Profiting From Weapons.  Why are we responsible to bring peace around the world?  As humans, we have an obligation to help those who can't help themselves.  We help babies and children, we help victims of storms and earthquakes, it's a basic value of every religion.  But there's yet another reason - much of the death around the world is caused by weapons manufactured by the US and other nations, for war and acquired by anyone with money and connections.  If Second Amendment extremists feel they need protection, then we need to raise a society where people have fulfilling lives and don't need to steal from others to live decently.  And then if people persist with personal arsenals, we can give them the mental health care they obviously need. 

4.  Corporatized media, used not as watchdogs, but as attack dogs.  Our ability to know about and understand how well or poorly governments, corporations, and other institutions of great power operate, is dependent on getting accurate information about their performance.  It also requires an ability to understand what they report.  So education that raises free and thinking citizens needs to replace education that produces obedient consumers and employees.  Instead our media and corporate culture distract us from the real problems with sports, celebrities, and other trivia. Even movies, some, but not all.  Not film festival movies.:)


Everything is Related

American consumerism fuels our need for oil that is destroying our environment and making the pursuit of money or credit our paramount reason for living.  Our failures to earn enough to feed this insatiable consumption leads to crime, addictions (besides consumption), family break ups, and the justification to work for companies and industries we should all be boycotting.  It's all related.


And the film festival gives us a different way to see how these things interact.  Films take us into the lives of people we otherwise would never know.  Here is a list of just a few films at the festival that raise the issues to greater or lesser degrees.  All give us one more piece of the puzzle to understand the interconnections among us all.  OK, I realize that each of us will see these movies with our own filters and many will come away with far different conclusions than do I.

• Tales of the Organ Trade looks at the illegal buying and selling of human kidneys. 
• Fatigued was filmed by soldiers in Afghanistan who told us they were there for different reasons, but mostly to get things like health insurance or to escape unemployment and poverty. All they could think about, they tell us, is  'getting out of this shithole and back home." (I'm not sure what message they intended to send, but I was closer in reaction to a contractor quoted in the movie, "They are a bunch of whiners."  But the movie didn't mention the huge disparity in pay between the soldiers and the contract employees which allowed this contractor to pay off her house, car, and all other debts.)  
• Gold Star Children talked about the tens of thousands of US children who have lost a parent in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, and how little attention is given to their huge losses.  
• Lion Ark looks at the mistreatment of animals in illegal Bolivian circuses and the rescue of 27 lions.   
• We Can't Eat Gold - looks at the tradeoff between the Pebble Mine and the great salmon runs.
•  Not By Sight - looks at how one woman's group takes offshore oil to task.
• Backyard - looks at how the world view of a conservative couple was changed when their neighborhood was fracked. 
• De Nieuwe Wereld (The New World) looks at one tiny part of the human disruption caused by economic exploitation and the arms industry, by looking at asylum seekers in a detention center in Amsterdam.
• Detroit Unleaded shows us the deadening life running a gas station/store in a high crime neighborhood in Detroit. 
• Everything Is Fine Here - shows us the impact of rape on a young Iranian woman. 

We will never have perfect, problem-free societies.  But I believe we can do significantly better than what we have now.  Go see a movie at the film festival - not to be distracted from the world's problems - but to be energized into taking them on. 

American Petroleum Institute Thanks Sen. Begich for Keystone Vote

I got this postcard in the mail the other day.

Was I supposed to be happy about this?  I understand having a Democratic Senator in a state where red voters tend to turn out better than blue voters means we have a hybrid Senator who thinks (and probably is right) that he has to support big oil to get reelected.

But who sent it?  The other side gave that info on the bottom.

 

The American Petroleum Institute uses pictures of  pristine snowy mountains on both sides of the postcard.  No pipeline pictures.  No Kulluk oil rigs.  No oil company profit statements.  Just the beautiful Alaskan landscapes.  (Or something that looks like an Alaskan landscape.)  You'd think though they could have found a second Begich picture.   

I'd love to have been an invisible observer at the meeting where they decided to send this out.  What were there motives?  To piss off Begich's Democratic supporters?  To let Mark know this is what he gets when he votes right, but if he votes wrong . . .  

What's the message to his Republican opponents?  

On the simplest level, it's just asking Alaskans to call an thank Mark for his vote.  

Of course, the large coporations give money to everyone who might get elected.  They've got plenty and want that door to open when they come knocking. 

The American Petroleum Institute gave more money to the Democratic Governor's Association, according to Open Secrets, than to anyone else.  Given current disclosure laws post Citizens United, I'm not sure how much money is given, but not identified.  They list political contributions which I'm guessing are for 2012:

"CONTRIBUTIONS: $931,706

Contributions to candidates: $235,970
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $9,500
Contributions to parties: $128,226
Contributions to 527 committees: $558,010
Contributions to outside spending groups: $0"

But you'll notice they gave almost four times as much to 527 committees (that can fund campaigns without disclosing donors, if I understand it right)  than they gave to parties.


And the contributions pale compared to the $6 +  million they spend annually on lobbyists.

TSA Fast Lane, Arctic Prof Calls For Arctic Oil Moratorium; 34 Years In Prison On False Testimony - Back In LA

We're back to be with my mom in LA.  We were on the pre-screened list at the airport yesterday so we didn't have to take off our shoes, show our plastic bags, or take off our shoes.  The ADN had an article on this program last December.

TSA spokeswoman Lorie Dankers, up from Seattle for the occasion, said there are two ways for travelers to join the program. Five U.S. airlines are authorized by TSA to invite selected frequent flyers into PreCheck. Or a person can apply through one of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Trusted Traveler programs like Global Entry.
All five of the select airlines serve Anchorage: Alaska, Delta, American, United and U.S. Airways. Bobbie Egan, spokeswoman for Alaska Airlines, said a batch of invitations went out over the weekend by email. If you didn't get one, it won't do any good to call up the airline to complain, she said.
"We don't set the criteria -- the TSA sets the criteria for who's invited to participate," Egan said. "It's a TSA program solely."

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/12/04/2713439/tsa-opens-fast-lane-for-prescreened.html#storylink=cpy

I'm not sure what 'invite' means in this case.  No one told us until we got to the security line and they scanned our boarding pass and told us to go in that lane.  And it's the first time it happened.  Is there a little racial profiling mixed up in this?  Older white male and female?  I'm sure that didn't do any harm.  Or maybe NSA has told TSA that we haven't talked to any terrorists lately.  Who knows?

The LA Times has an interview today with Professor Sergei Medvedev, an Arctic specialist who is calling for an oil moratorium in the Arctic and who Putin called "a moron." [I'm sure Putin used a Russian word.  It would be interesting to know how it translates substantively and emotionally into English.]

"Political science professor Sergei Medvedev, a longtime lover and explorer of the Arctic, drew the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he recently called for international protection of the icy northern region in the face of economic development plans.
Last month, Putin called Medvedev, who teaches at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, "a moron."
The incident prompted a nationwide discussion of the Arctic and coincided with the arrest of 30 Greenpeace activists protesting a Russian oil drilling project in the region.
Medvedev, 46, who anchors popular television shows and studied and worked for 15 years in the West, spoke to The Times last month at the Architecture Museum in downtown Moscow."

LA Times story about man in prison for 34 years, convicted on eye witness testimony.  The witnesses sister has now testified that she told police back then that her sister was lying.  Finally it comes out and judge agrees he was falsely convicted.

Prosecutors had argued that about 12:30 p.m. on April 6, 1979, Register shot Jack Sasson five times in the carport of his West Los Angeles home. Sasson, 78, died three weeks later.
At trial, the physical evidence against Register was scant, court papers said. None of the seven fingerprints found on Sasson's car matched Register's. Police never recovered the murder weapon.
They did seize a pair of pinstriped pants from Register's closet, which had a speck of blood smaller than a pencil eraser. But it was of little value — the blood type, O, matched Sasson and Register.
Instead, the prosecution relied on eyewitness testimony, notably that of Brenda Anderson. Then 19, Anderson said she was at home when she heard gunfire, looked out the window and saw an African American man sprinting from the Sassons' carport, court papers said. She identified him as Register, though Register's girlfriend testified that he was with her at the time of the shooting.
Register was convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison. Each time he appeared before the parole board, he refused to admit guilt.
"It appears that the only reason that I have been consistently denied parole is because I have maintained my innocence," he once told the board, court papers said.
Register might have remained behind bars, his attorneys said, if not for a stroke of luck. In late 2011, another of Brenda Anderson's sisters, Sheila Vanderkam, found a website that locates convicted felons. "I typed in the name Kash Register out of curiosity," she said in a declaration, "and learned, to my horror, that Mr. Register was still in prison."

Another example of police and prosecutors apparently more interested in convicting somebody than convicting the right person.

I biked down to Venice Beach just before sunset.  

[Feedburner notes: This one seems to have taken about seven hours to be seen on blogrolls. I posted it at 7:28pm and the first hits from blogrolls came at 4:30am the next day.]

"so oily I was thinking his nickname should be Valdez."

Twitter offers me to tidbits I might not otherwise see.  And mostly I wouldn't have missed much.  But every now and then there is something juicy that has an Alaskan angle.    I couldn't pass up this quote from a comment on a Washington Post article about Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler.  Here's the whole comment:

Well-said. I met him when he was an instructor at my law school, so oily I was thinking his nickname should be Valdez. He is is the liberal version of Rubio, another sociopath I have had the misfortune of meeting. Both are solely about themselves. Stay far away from both.

This is from a Washington Post article - Maryland Politics section - based on memos the State Police had about Gansler.  Here's the beginning of the article:

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler regularly ordered state troopers assigned to drive him to turn on the lights and sirens on the way to routine appointments, directing them to speed, run red lights and bypass traffic jams by using the shoulder, according to written accounts by the Maryland State Police.
When troopers refused to activate the emergency equipment, Gansler, now a Democratic candidate for governor, often flipped the switches himself, according to the police accounts. And on occasion, he became so impatient that he insisted on driving, directing the trooper to the passenger’s seat. Gansler once ran four red lights with sirens blaring, a trooper wrote. Another account said he “brags” about driving the vehicle unaccompanied on weekends with the sirens on.

“This extremely irresponsible behavior is non-stop and occurs on a daily basis,” Lt. Charles Ardolini, commander of the state police executive protection section, wrote in a December 2011 memo that said the problem had existed for five years. “Attorney General Gansler has consistently acted in a way that disregards public safety, our Troopers safety and even the law.”

The links in the text go to the memos.


I don't know the internal politics of Maryland.  Gansler is a Democrat.  He sounds like the kind of politician who likes being important and having power that ordinary people don't have.  And abuses it.  We have those here too.   But, as I say, I don't know Lt. Charles Ardolini and his motives.  But from the tone of things, he seems a lot more solid than Gansler. 


Azerbaijan Election Results

And while we're at it, another Washington Post story reported on the elections in Azerbaijan. 

The vote counts – spoiler alert: Aliyev was shown as winning by a landslide – were pushed out on an official smartphone app run by the Central Election Commission. It showed Aliyev as "winning" with 72.76 percent of the vote. That's on track with his official vote counts in previous elections: he won ("won"?) 76.84 percent of the vote in 2003 and 87 percent in 2008.

But the newsworthy part of this report is that these election results were published the day BEFORE the election was held.  And we in the west who pride ourselves on how much more efficient and effective we are than other nations, we can take at least a few hours and sometimes weeks before we know the results.   


OK, this is not the kind of posts I want to be doing.  I put in the first one mainly because it had an Alaskan reference.  But normally I'd want to use stories like this to illustrate a larger point.  For a newspaper that wants to pull in the latest stories, using Twitter feeds can be helpful.  But it isn't real reporting - it's just second hand news.  The recent twitter based post I did was on copyrights, but that was a post with much value added on my part.  That's how I hope to use Twitter in the future.  Not like this post.

I don't plan on making a habit of this.  I don't want my readers to start calling me Valdez.

(Do you think he pronounced it Spanish way "ValDEZ" or the true Alaskan way "ValDEEZ"?)

Gov Cited Jobs in Oil Tax Relief, Now Cuts Job Preference For Alaskans

From the Anchorage Daily News:

The Parnell administration, in an unprecedented move, has ruled that Alaska hire requirements for state and local public works contracts won't apply to the entire state but only to limited, mainly rural areas.
No longer covered as of Friday: Anchorage, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su, Juneau and the Kenai Peninsula.

The Juneau Empire reported a Parnell speech in June where he defended HB 21 which cut oil taxes drastically:

“If we can garner more investment from the tax changes we made with the More Alaska Production Act,” Parnell said, “Alaskans will benefit immensely from the jobs and opportunities that are created.”

But with this new policy change it's clear that the Governor doesn't care all that much if those jobs go to Alaskans.  And anyone who has flown to Anchorage regularly notices the planes have a lot of folks flying in from Outside for their shift on the North Slope.

Parnell talks about jobs and benefits to Alaskans, but the record seems to indicate that his true purpose is benefit to large corporations such as the oil company he lobbied for before becoming Lt. Governor and then Governor when Palin resigned. 

While his administration argues that DC doesn't understand Alaska's problems and thus shouldn't have power over the state, they see no reason why local governments and communities or the general Alaska public should have any say over what the State does.  They overturned the guts of the people's initiative to regulate the cruise industry and they destroyed the state's Coastal Zone Management structure making Alaska the only coastal state in the country without a Coastal Zone Management program.  Despite the fact that our coast is larger than all the others.

The purpose of all this?  The pattern we see would appear to give large corporations (as well as smaller businesses) free run in the state of Alaska with little or no interference from the Federal government, from the State government, from local governments, or from Alaskan people in general.  People's rights to protect their own communities have been cut drastically by Parnell's administration in moves like the gutting of the Coastal Zone Management program. 

Federal Overreach is a buzz ward in the Parnell Administration.  But not State Overreach. 

The language may be about "Alaska's economy" and "jobs"  but behind the facade is the real purpose:  making life easier for large corporations and business in general.  No one should hold up their projects for any reason, whether it destroys local neighborhoods and communities, pollutes, or threatens endangered species, or salmon streams.  Business gets an automatic green light at all intersections between their interests and the people's interests. 

I'm sure people like the governor and his supporters also believe that making life easier for large corporations makes life better for everyone.  Fundamentalist capitalism is just as blind and intolerant as fundamentalism in any other religion.  They forget that the reasons they dislike government - its potential power over others - is the same reason that many people dislike multinational corporations.  And as those corporations have gained increased power over government through election contributions and lobbyists, they have gotten larger and larger.  In most industries - media, airlines, food,  mining, oil, defense,  fishing, cruise lines, etc. -  consolidation has decreased the number of competing companies, giving fewer companies more control over people's lives.  Many corporations have larger budgets than many countries.  Government is the only viable counterbalance to their power. 

Of course the governor's new policy raises the question about whether local hire is even legal in the first place.  Back in the late 70s or early 80s Alaska local hire laws were ruled unconstitutional, so I did some checking to see if things had changed.  There are localities - like San Francisco - that have local hire laws.  For now, I'm just raising the point, and saying it appears that there are circumstances when local hire appears to be legal.  Here's a place to start reading about the law on this.

Places and Times To Sign The SB 21 Oil Tax Repeal Referendum Petition

The 2012 election finally gave our governor, former Conoco Phillips lobbyist, Sean Parnell, the votes he needed in the Alaska Senate to pass Senate Bill 21 that changed the taxes on the companies that extract Alaska's oil.  The impact on the state has been said to be around $2 billion a year, though the number varies.  The rationale was that it would stir companies to invest more in Alaska, but there were no requirements put on the oil companies and they've made no promises.

The Democrats have called this a giveaway to the oil companies at time when education and health care and other important services that Alaskans rely on are being cut.  Republicans say it is needed.

A referendum is gathering signatures and needs a few more before the deadline July 13.  I just got a notice saying where people can sign the petition.

Alaskans wanting to sign should go to one of the following two locations in Anchorage between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.:

·       The Loussac Library at 3600 Denali Street, off 36^th Street

·       Barnes and Noble bookstore at 200 E Northern Lights Blvd, near A Street

In Wasilla:  Post Office, 410 Main St.

In Fairbanks, Alaskans can go to:

·       The Noel Wien Library at 1215 Cowles Street, from 11:30 to 4 p.m.

·       The IBEW Hall at 2000 Airport Way at Wilbur Street during business hours

·       Denali Chiropractic at 1018 College Road

Given the wide difference in opinions, it seems to me that getting the referendum on the ballot will give people time to sift through the facts and better consider this decision.  There will, of course, be a lot of propaganda, but unless there are enough signatures, there will be no debate.  

Fracking California

I took this picture in a Turkish restaurant where we stopped for a snack as we arrived in San Francisco Thursday. 

Today's New York Times gives some context to it.  

". . . By all accounts, oilmen and farmers — often shortened to “oil and ag” here — have coexisted peacefully for decades in this conservative, business friendly part of California about 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. But oil’s push into new areas and its increasing reliance on fracking, which uses vast amounts of water and chemicals that critics say could contaminate groundwater, are testing that relationship and complicating the continuing debate over how to regulate fracking in California. . ."

I've got lots of processing to do from the PATNet conference, so I'm just going to give you a snippet of the Times article and you can read the rest at the link if you like.  And here's  SF Bay Guardian article takes a stronger stand (and has a map).  It begins:

Fracking changes everything

It's toxic. It's contributing to climate change. And it's happening all over California — with little regulation

Permanent Fund's Future Looking Dim - "It's Our Oil" Rally: The Movie

From a PR standpoint, probably the most effective signs at yesterday's rally to prevent Republicans from transferring billions of Alaska's oil revenues to oil companies, are the ones that predicted the demise of the Permanent Fund.  That's a cause all Alaskans will fight.   But it only makes sense - if our oil revenues plummet, so will the Permanent Fund*.  


If a journalist is watching a mugging, should she just take notes or try to intervene?  When does once humanity take precedence over one's profession?  I've heard photojournalists argue that they've been in terrible situations where intervening might not have helped, but their photos calling attention to atrocities can help in the long run.   In this post I can't quite help myself.  I don't see two valid sides to this story.  I'd like to think I'm being both a human being and a reasonable journalist here.  But I'm sure others will disagree.

Despite what Republicans may have talked themselves into believing, all their rationales are just cover for transferring billions of dollars from the State of Alaska to the oil companies.  These 'incentives' by the state are matched by absolutely no commitments on the part of the oil companies.  Remember this is brought to us by the party that includes not a few members who think global climate change is a hoax, that the world is only 6000 years old, and who take their marching orders on gay rights from Deuteronomy.   There is a reason Republicans want to gut the public schools - education hurts their election chances. 


Right now, the State of Alaska is being fleeced by Republican legislators lowering the taxes on oil companies in the vague hope that this will stimulate production.  Our Governor was a lobbyist for Conoco-Phillips before becoming Sarah Palin's Lt. Governor and then, when she quit, Governor.  Two of the Senators who voted for Senate Bill 21are currently employees of oil companies when they aren't on leave to be in the legislature.  Without those two votes, the bill would not have passed.  The Senate majority voted they didn't have a conflict of interest.  If they had been members of the Sierra Club and their votes would have stopped the bill, do you think they would have been allowed to vote?  I don't think so.

So, the legislature is emptying the Bank of Alaska and taking the loot to the getaway cars driven by the  big three oil companies.  We are like a third world nation, except that this seems to have become standard operating procedure in the US now as well.  (I don't understand how Alaskan Tea Party folks who fume over the bank bailouts aren't equally upset about their legislators actions on oil (yeah the most conservative supporters of this were elected by Tea Party supporters).

The sequester will strongly weaken government's ability to not only maintain vital infrastructure - transportation, health and safety, education, crime prevention, etc. - but also makes it much harder for the government to regulate industry.  Exactly what the Koch brothers, who have funded much of this, want.  I do have to admire their ability to get ardent support from some of the people who will be hurt most.

Facts and reason have had little effect at all against the power of the oil companies.  Six years after the FBI video taped VECO executives bribing Republican legislators over oil taxes in the Baranof Hotel's Suite 602, and with most if not all of those convicted back on the streets, they've returned to business as usual. 

In any case, here's a video that shows those who mustered 9 votes to the Republicans' 11 votes in the Senate,  on 4th Avenue yesterday in front of the Legislative Information Office.

[Update April 7, 2013: Whoops, the video wasn't there. It should be now.]

The speakers include a number of former legislators, Wally Hickel's long time aide and biographer Malcolm Roberts, two people - Katie Hurley and Vic Fischer - who were participants in the Alaska Constitutional Convention, and Anchorage Assembly write-in  candidate, Nick Moe, who's challenge to Assembly Chair Ernie Hall is still too close to call. 


*We have in recent years, gotten more income from investments than oil revenue, which is how things were originally projected when people thought the oil would be almost depleted by now.  However, it appears that last year's oil revenue was greater than our investment revenue.  The Annual Report (p. 6) shows that investment gains were less than the drop in the overall portfolio value, meaning the real gain was from oil revenue.  Oil revenue last year was $915 million, about what the Governor's bill proposes to cut each year.

Drastically reducing our oil revenue like this will keep the Permanent Fund from growing as it should.  Our $45 billion Permanent Fund is dwarfed by Norway's $700 billion oil fund which started much later and is supported by smaller oil reserves.

"It's Our Oil" Rally Against Giving Billions To Oil Companies

Backbone formed back in the 1999 to stop the state from signing itself over to BP.  It's come back to life recently as the Corrupt Bastards Club reappeared in Juneau and started the process to drastically lower taxes on oil companies over again,.  Ex(?) Conoco-Phillips lobbyist Governor Sean Parnell says SB 21 is needed to get the oil companies to produce more oil.  But there is nothing in the legislation that requires anything from the oil companies.  It's just a straight transfer from the State treasury to the oil companies.  (OK, not exactly.  It's money we now get through our tax system which we won't get if this passes.)  Is this a whole new Republican philosophy?  Hmmm, maybe we should pay drunks on the hope that they become sober and crooks on the hopes it will cause them to be honest.  (Sorry, do you think I have an opinion here?  Some issues are just so black and white that pretending there are two equally valid sides is the deceptive way to report it.)

So, here are some pictures from the noon rally in downtown Anchorage at the Legislative Information Office on a sunny, but definitely wind-chilled day.  Here are some photos of the demonstration.  I'll try to get some video up later.