Month: January 2016

by William Skink

Montana Democrats just don’t want to quit coal. 30 years ago Democrat Governor Ted Schwinden slashed the severance tax to make Montana coal more competitive with Wyoming. More recently, Governor Schweitzer, the coal cowboy, touted the pipe-dream of clean coal. And now, facing new rules over emissions, Governor Bullock is hemming and hawing about his disappointment, demanding the Obama administration fund research to make coal clean so Montana can keep peddling this dirty energy supply for decades:

Bullock also called upon the Obama administration to immediately dedicate more funding to low-carbon coal research, saying: “If we are to address climate change, we need to do so in a common sense way. There is no practical path forward that doesn’t rely on coal for the next several decades and we need to invest now in ways to make coal generation cleaner.”

Earlier this month, Pete Talbot pointed out how the Governor is stacking his “citizen council”, tasked with reducing emissions to comply with the EPA, with industry loyalists:

Governor Steve Bullock announced his picks for the citizen council that will draft an energy emissions plan. Montana must cut its carbon emissions by 47 percent by 2030 to meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules. A plan for doing so needs to be submitted to the EPA by midsummer.

As MTN’s Mike Dennison notes, the council isn’t lacking in members from the energy industry. I would have liked to have seen more people from environmental groups and the climate sciences (Nobel Peace Prize recipient and UM Professor Steve Running?) but as usual, the administration didn’t consult me. I wish the council the best of luck in coming to a solution.

I don’t know, does this count as criticism? You would think that before an election would be an ideal time to try and pressure a leader of your political party to actually lead the state away from destructive energy policies. Or maybe winning the election is more important than standing up for one’s values.

George Ochenski offers some better criticism of Bullock as he joins forces with Republicans to sue the Federal government:

One of the big stories from last week was Arch Coal, one of the nation’s largest coal producers, following a handful of other large coal companies into bankruptcy. Then China, one of the primary markets for export coal, announced it would no longer issue new coal mining permits. On Friday Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said her agency is halting new coal leases on federal lands until it conducts a comprehensive review of fees on mining and coal’s impact on the environment. Toss in a precipitous drop in oil prices to less than $30 a barrel and it appears King Coal isn’t just sick, it’s dang near dead.

What’s strange, especially here in Montana, is the reaction of our politicians from both parties to what seems the inescapable conclusion that coal’s big day on the energy stage is over. Instead, faced with upcoming moves by both the Oregon and Washington state legislatures to reduce reliance on coal-fired energy, politicians from Gov. Steve Bullock on down are digging in their heels in a futile attempt to derail the inevitable shutdown of Colstrip’s oldest and dirtiest power plants.

Point in case is the industry-dominated committee Bullock appointed to push back against the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Why any “leader” in the era of global climate change and its increasingly disastrous consequences would want to defend coal energy is a good question. But that’s just what Montana’s politicians are doing.

Republican Attorney General Tim Fox has tossed his hat – and taxpayer-funded lawyers – into the fray by joining 27 other states in a lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan. Bullock has previously indicated support for Fox’s intervention on behalf of coal while saying Montana cannot let the federal government dictate what happens in Montana. Really? What’s next, secession?

Yeah Bullock, don’t let the federal government dictate what happens in Montana. If you need some allies, I hear there’s some dudes in Oregon who feel the same away about the Feds.

by William Skink

In less than 24 hours of implementation, the Obama regime has done significant damage to the Iran nuclear deal, providing hardliners in the upcoming parliamentary elections in Iran with the perfect reason to vote for them. New sanctions over the testing of ballistic missiles is also in line with the sociopath Neocon, Hillary Clinton.

While the Democrat-controlled White House and White House aspirant do the bidding of foreign interests like Israel, revelations that an unelected emergency manager in Flint, MI has done irreparable harm to around 100,000 mostly poor, mostly black residents by literally poisoning drinking water with a cheaper, lead-poluted water source, should greatly disturb everyone in this downward-spiraling nation.

Ethnic cleansing isn’t a term one usually applies domestically in the states, but I am struggling to find a more accurate term. Maybe Russia should appeal to the UN Security Council and invoke R2P in order to deploy a peace-keeping UN force to Michigan. If the Federal Government continues enabling the complicit head of state, Rick Snyder, with money instead of immediately indicting him for crimes against humanity, then Russia can establish a no-fly zone to keep more harm from befalling the permanently poisoned population of Flint.

Is that what needs to happen?

Lead is incredibly toxic, especially for children. Tens of thousands of kids will now grow up with damaged brains because of this exposure. Juvenile delinquency will rise because of this exposure. If you don’t believe the latter, read this Mother Jones article by Kevin Drum from 2013 about the correlation between removing lead from gasoline and paint and the drop in crime rates a generation later. It’s compelling.

So, will there be criminal indictments? And will the insane scope of the emergency powers Michigan politicians grabbed amidst a state fiscal crisis finally be reversed? That last link is an article in The Nation from 2012 and it opens with this:

On January 20 the progressive think tank Michigan Forward and the Detroit branch of the NAACP sent a joint letter to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder expressing concern over Public Act 4, the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act. Signed into law in March 2011, it granted unprecedented new powers to the state’s emergency managers (EMs), including breaking union contracts, taking over pension systems, setting school curriculums and even dissolving or disincorporating municipalities. Under PA 4, EMs, who are appointed by the governor, can “exercise any power or authority of any officer, employee, department, board, commission or other similar entity of the local government whether elected or appointed.”

What are the qualifications for such a powerful office and the six-figure salary that accompanies it? Not much: PA 4 requires “a minimum of 5 years’ experience and demonstrable expertise in business, financial, or local or state budgetary matters.” Last year the state held a pair of two-day training sessions for EMs, both run primarily by companies that provide outsourcing services to municipalities and school districts. Yet PA 4 made the emergency manager the single most powerful person in the city.

This country has allowed unelected municipal dictatorships to take over little fiefdoms in places like Flint, and now we are starting to see the results.

by William Skink

I haven’t written anything this past week because I’ve been too engrossed in David Talbot’s new book The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. It’s enlightening, to say the least.

I haven’t gotten to the juicy parts about the Kennedy assassination yet, but Talbot does an exhaustive job showing how the Dulles Brothers established a Nazi-friendly, communist-obsessed post-WWII environment in America where foreign leaders were deposed to benefit corporate interests under a rigid, paranoid ideological umbrella singularly focused on countering Soviet communism across the globe.

Reading about this critical time period puts everything that comes after in disturbing context. The opportunity to move past Cold War paranoia died with Kennedy, perpetuating the consequences (and, for the Military/Industrial complext, benefits) into a 21st century that America is still trying desperately to dominate.

Reading reactions to the armed standoff in Oregon, one of the valid criticisms is that the Bundy clan was emboldened after the Feds failed to deal with their lawlessness in Nevada.

I apply that same criticism to the seditious actions of operators like Allen Dulles. This country failed to hold those within America’s government accountable for enacting a coup on American soil, and that failure has continued to metastasize.

Politics in America is now totally captured by the plutocrats, which is one reason why party identification is near historic lows:

In 2015, for the fifth consecutive year, at least four in 10 U.S. adults identified as political independents. The 42% identifying as independents in 2015 was down slightly from the record 43% in 2014. This elevated percentage of political independents leaves Democratic (29%) and Republican (26%) identification at or near recent low points, with the modest Democratic advantage roughly where it has been over the past five years.

Those who continue to labor under the illusion that America is a democracy need to wake the fuck up.

by William Skink

There is an interesting Democratic primary for Senate District 40 in Helena getting some attention from blogs like Flathead Memo. While the initial framing of this political primary is more generational than ideological, with the younger Joshua Manning challenging “old school” Democrat Jacobson, some interesting things stood out.

Joshua Manning has expressed his political opinions on the National Democratic primary, writing a post at MT Cowgirl under the pseudonym “Secret Squirrel”. The post’s title–Please, Don’t Get Bern(T)–hints at the Hillary shilling about to drop. While there is a lot of crap in that post, this fecal matter stood out to me:

Watch the Benghazi hearings or just the highlights. Tell me that is not a president who would stand up against the far right. Imagine Sanders in the same chair, what would he be doing and saying? Maybe he would not have taken action in Libya. Maybe Qadaffi would have wiped out the eastern half of Libya’s population. Imagine that hearing.

Could she turn in the general election to the triangulating Clinton we all fear? Sure. The passion for Sanders is real and understandable for just that reason. But he will not sustain it. Clinton has made so many promises short of what Sanders has said, and in some cases to his left, that she would have a hard time turning back on them, I trust her, I trust the team around her. As president, I cannot think of anyone more qualified to take on the risks of running an imperial presidency against Congress to do the right things despite the risks. I think she, more than anyone else, would love the challenge and risks associated with doing whatever is good and necessary to spite the right.

I find it utterly disgusting that, once again, Libya is positively referenced as an example of Hillary’s decisiveness without the harsh reality intruding. And what is the harsh reality you ask? The pesky fact that Hillary’s exploitation of a R2P “humanitarian intervention” in Libya has transformed this nation into a safe haven for ISIS.

Joshua Manning can’t claim ignorance about this reality because, according to this glowing post from Cowgirl, Manning is a (former?) spook:

Manning has been a civil rights investigator for the Department of Labor and Industry’s Human Rights Bureau for the past two years. He returned to Montana after spending four years analyzing counterterrorism with a Washington D.C. intelligence agency and providing strategic support to leadership and staff at the White House, Congress, Pentagon, and military special operations forces. Before that he served seven years overseas leading soldiers as a U.S. Army non-commissioned officer and military intelligence analyst in Europe. He deployed to Middle Eastern combat zones on three occasions. He is a graduate of the Evergreen State College and was a reporter in eastern Idaho before joining the military. He grew up in Missoula.

Joshua Manning is one of those duplicitous Democrats that will claim he is against the oligarchs from one side of his mouth while shilling for one of the biggest corporate whores Democrats have ever produced. I like this depiction of Hillary from Glenn Greenwald:

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power.

I hope Joshua Manning loses and Democrats come to their senses regarding Hillary Clinton, but I’m not holding my breath. Democrats have ceded substance to symbolism, and Manning’s cheerleading for a sociopath who celebrates the execution of a head of state exposes how vacuous party politics have become in this country.

by William Skink

If one is concerned about the proliferation of guns domestically, it would make sense to extend that concern to weapon sales abroad. Democrats have the former issue in the partisan cross-hairs (see what I did there?) with the impending executive action coming from the White House, but the latter is a more difficult issue to tackle.

Weapons dealers–Merchants of Death, really–are making a killing selling things built for killing, and that has this local blogger upset:

It has been a very good year for weapons dealers, reports the New York Times, with a $10 billion dollar increase in 2014 (latest available figures). That’s a 35 percent jump over the previous year.

Here are some of our biggest customers: our Saudi Arabian friends (who recently shot or beheaded 47 “terrorists”) and Qatar (ranked first in wealth and 166th in size). We also sell a lot of arms to South Korea to help offset all the Kia, Samsung and Hyundai products we buy.

Anyway, this story came out earlier in the month but has been gnawing at me, so much so that instead of my usual Montana political fodder, I’m tackling this worldly issue.

I am more than happy to see some attention being directed by a local Democrat to the glut of weaponry being peddled to head-chopping theocrats and psychopathic sultans, but I can’t help thinking the would-be tackler got suckered by a play-action pass that sailed over his head.

Not that this issue isn’t worth taking on, but what would it actually take? First, how to deal with the track-record of the next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton:

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom’s troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

The Saudi transaction is just one example of nations and companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation seeing an increase in arms deals while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department. IBT found that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries—a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses.

Should one who is ashamed of American arms dealers make Hillary’s corruption a point of contention in the primary, or does partisan consideration for lesser-evilism trump criticism of the heir-elect?

But what about Bernie Sanders? Alas, even the wild-haired socialist has a compromised relationship with weapons manufacturers:

In January 2010, Sanders led a delegation to Sandia’s New Mexico lab for a closer look. The group included the CEO of Green Mountain Power, the state’s leading private utility; the vice president for research at the University of Vermont; the co-founder of successful alternative energy companies; and the head of the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, which runs Efficiency Vermont.

At the end of the same year, ten days after the mini-filibuster that jump-started the “draft Bernie” for president campaign, Mayor Bob Kiss announced the results of his own Lockheed negotiations, begun at billionaire Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room. It took the form of a “letter of cooperation” to address climate change by developing local green-energy solutions.

Lockheed’s proposal to the city focused on “the economic and strategic challenges posed by our dependence on foreign oil and the potential destabilizing effects of climate change.” Their partnership would “demonstrate a model for sustainability that can be replicated across the nation.” Meanwhile, the Vermont Sandia lab, simultaneously being developed at UVM with Sanders help, would focus on cyber security and “smart grid” technology. Yet Kiss and Sanders denied knowing about the partnership being negotiated by the other. Both Burlington’s Progressive mayor and its famous former mayor-turned-Senator apparently saw no need to consult. Yet somehow everyone was on the same page.

By 2011, Sanders was also supporting the Pentagon’s proposal to base Lockheed-built F-35 fight jets at the Burlington International Airport. Despite his past criticisms of the corporation’s serial misconduct and excess, he joined with Vermont’s most enthusiastic booster, Senator Patrick Leahy, signing on to a joint statement of support. If the fighter jet, widely considered a massive military boondoggle, was going to be built and deployed anyway, Sanders argued that some of the work ought to done by Vermonters, while Vermont National Guard jobs should certainly be protected. Noise impacts and neighborhood dislocation were minimized, while criticism of corporate exploitation had given way to pork barrel politics and a justification based on protecting military jobs.

And that’s where the merchants of death win: jobs.

I know, reality can be a total bummer. But if you want to tackle something, it’s probably smart to take a look at just how big a beast you’re fixin’ to take down.