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NJ Supreme Court overturns $375K award in dunes case; couple sued after losing ocean view

The Karans' home.

The Karans’ home.

  • Article by: WAYNE PARRY , Associated Press 
  • Updated: July 8, 2013
  • VIDEO STORY BY CBS NEWS

This case highlights the old malignant tension in the fabric of US society, between the unlimited rights of property issuing from a repugnant form of individualism still rampant in American society, and the common good. Even in what would seem as obvious situations, like a community and ecosystem’s protection from storms, in which everyone wins, the old libertarian reflex kicks in to throw a monkey wrench in the works.  This despite the fact that climate change and other realities have made existing laws and governmental arrangements substantially obsolete. [/pullquote]

The sand dune in question saved the couple’s home from destruction in Superstorm Sandy in October.

The 5-year-old case is being closely watched at the Jersey shore, which was battered by Sandy. Officials want to build protective dune systems along the state’s entire 127-mile coastline, but towns fear they won’t be able to if many homeowners hold out for large payouts as compensation for lost views.

“Had we lost this case, I think beach replenishment would have been (over) in New Jersey,” Harvey Cedars Mayor Jonathan Oldham said. “We’re very pleased with the court’s ruling and look forward to competing with a fair set of rules. I’m happy for the whole island.”

The homeowners, Harvey and Phyllis Karan, had rejected the town’s offer of $300 in compensation for their lost views and insisted on a trial. Their Long Beach Island home is worth close to $2 million.

“Although the jury found that the Karans’ property decreased in value because the dune obstructed their view, a buyer would likely also consider the value provided by the dune in shielding the property from destruction,” the court wrote in its opinion. “The court did not allow the jury to consider evidence that the dunes — constructed at public expense to protect the island’s homes from minor and catastrophic storms— enhanced the value of the Karans’ property.

“The jury awarded the Karans $375,000 in damages, premised mostly on the loss of their oceanfront view,” the justices wrote. “Homeowners are entitled to the fair market value of their loss, not to a windfall, not to a payout that disregards the home’s enhanced value resulting from a public project.”

The court said a new trial is needed where jurors would be told to also consider the dune’s benefits. There was no immediate indication when a new trial might be held.

Gov. Chris Christie has repeatedly ridiculed homeowners’ complaints about dunes blocking their views and called the Karans’ and others in their circumstances “knuckleheads” during a recent public meeting on Long Beach Island. The state is trying to get oceanfront property owners all along the coast to sign easements allowing the government access to small strips of their land to carry out the dune projects.

“The Supreme Court’s decision embraces what Gov. Christie has been arguing ever since Sandy: that oceanfront properties protected from destruction are safer and more valuable than those that are not,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said.

Government-funded dune systems “benefit everyone, including holdouts who selfishly refuse to provide easements to protect not just their own homes but the homes and businesses inland of them as well,” Drewniak said. “Those holdouts are the greatest beneficiaries of dune systems and are not entitled to a windfall at the public’s expense.”

Peter Wegener, an attorney for the Karans, argued before the court that the view is a valuable commodity that figures prominently in the selling prices of homes near the beach. He said he was not surprised at the outcome, given the skepticism several of the justices voiced toward the Karans’ legal position during oral arguments in May.

“It seems to sweep away 150 years of jurisprudence in an attempt to reach a solution to a political problem,” he said of the ruling. “Obviously the impact of the storm had a big impact on the court’s opinion.”

Neither Wegener nor Oldham, the Harvey Cedars mayor, could say whether the ruling might help or harm the chances of a negotiated settlement in the case.

Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, hailed the ruling as an important step toward safeguarding the Jersey shore, parts of which remain vulnerable to future storms.

“Many of the areas without dunes got devastated, with these areas now wanting money to rebuild, but still do not want to put in dunes,” he said. “We cannot rebuild the shore smarter and better without building dunes, so this decision is important on how we rebuild our coast and natural systems.”

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Previous posting on this topic—
Note: Captions below by the Staff of WSJ. Pullquotes by TGP editors.

Homeowners Draw a Line in the Sand Over Dunes

Some Homeowners Are Fighting Plan to Protect Jersey Shore

    By JOSH DAWSEY, WSJ
[image]
Emile Wamsteker for The Wall Street JournalDeveloper John McDonough, in front of dunes in Ocean Beach.

Many coastal New Jersey residents are resisting a $1 billion state plan to shield shore-front towns from storms with towering dunes and a mix of protective measures.

[pullquote] Unwittingly, John McDonough represents the stubborn attachment to extensive private privileges in a deeply unequal society. That’s part of the didactic aspect of this seemingly unimportant “local” story. [/pullquote]

Gov. Chris Christie wants to gird New Jersey’s beaches against future storms, installing dunes and other protective measures that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. But almost 2,000 coastal homeowners have declined to sign easements giving the government authority to use their land. Joshua Dawsey reports. Photo: Getty Images.

As some cite fears the sand-replenishment projects would drag down their property values, about 1,800 landowners have declined to sign agreements to allow construction on their property, said Larry Ragonese, a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection. The state Supreme Court last week heard arguments on a resident’s lawsuit seeking more money for the agreement, known as an easement, and Gov. Chris Christie called dune opponents “knuckleheads.”

“It’s what everyone is talking about along the coast,” said Peter Reinhart, director of the Kislak Real Estate Institute at Monmouth University.

Emile Wamsteker for The Wall Street JournalToms River Mayor Tom Kelaher standing in front of pilings that will be used to support a boardwalk.

Superstorm Sandy highlighted the vulnerability of New Jersey’s coast, with tens of thousands of oceanfront homes either destroyed or heavily damaged. Efforts to replace the lost sand are already under way up and down the coastline, and Mr. Christie has vowed extensive projects to protect every beach.

“In the past, if we could not get easements from a town, the Army Corps of Engineers would not do a replenishment project,” said Mr. Ragonese. This time, “we will get the easements from everyone. We aren’t skipping any areas.”

Some property owners, however, said they fear the easements could encourage development in front of their homes, including commercial businesses and boardwalks. Others say they are simply opposed to the government operating on their land and want to make their own decisions about how to protect it.

The most common argument is that the dunes will obscure ocean views and reduce property values—for which some homeowners want to be compensated.

State officials said dunes would guard shore-front areas from severe flooding. They cite towns such as Seaside Park, which had 20-foot high dunes and was far less damaged during Sandy than nearby Seaside Heights and Mantoloking. State officials said protective approaches would be tailored to each town, but dunes would be a widely used option.

The issue’s course could shift depending on the outcome of a case heard last week in Supreme Court. Harvey and Phyllis Karan, who own a beachfront house in Harvey Cedars, have sued New Jersey for a 2010 project that put 22-foot dunes in front of their home. They were awarded $375,000 by a local jury in 2012, but the town has appealed. The Karans said the dunes blocked their ocean views and lowered their property’s value.

They were offered $300 by officials who pointed out that the project directly benefited them.

“God forbid we can spend billions on the project and not give the property owners a dime,” said the Karans’ attorney, Peter Wegener. “It’s a significant loss for private property and owners when government can come in and take what they want and not pay for it.”

The state said many people who haven’t signed easements are awaiting the case’s outcome. Mr. Ragonese said that paying every property owner would “bankrupt” the state, and that property owners should give up easements without money or concessions because they are protecting the property. The state Legislature is weighing a bill to require judges to consider dunes’ benefits.

The state Supreme Court is expected to rule this year on the Karans’ case. Mr. Wegener isn’t hopeful. “I would say the tenor of the argument did not suggest there was much respect for private property owners from the Supreme Court,” he said. “But the road to hell is lined with the bones of attorneys who thought they knew what judges were going to do.”

In Toms River Township, the fight has taken on a nasty edge. Town officials sent a news release May 7 blasting a resident, John McDonough, by name for refusing to sign easements. Mr. McDonough is a partial owner and a spokesman for owners of a stretch of beach that fronts hundreds of homes.

The release, sent to local and national media, said Mr. McDonough had fear of “big brother” government and called him obstinate.

“I’ve gotten a lot of letters thanking us for that news release,” said Debbie Winogracki, a town spokeswoman. “We’re not backing down. We’re not giving up. I promise, it will be worse for him if he doesn’t sign.”

Mr. McDonough said he wasn’t against dunes and agreed the beach needed more protection. But the beach has long been a private beach, maintained by private citizens. Once government begins working on the beach, he said he feared onerous rules would come. The town said it doesn’t trust his protections for the shore would be adequate.

“If you invite the federal government in, they will ultimately decide what you can do with the beach, whether or not you have to build bathrooms, whether you can charge people,” Mr. McDonough said. “We are then beholden to the state and the federal government.”

Mr. McDonough said he voted for Mr. Christie and would vote for him again, but he said the state would only get to erect dunes or other shore-front protection projects on his land if it used eminent domain and condemned the property.

“All I will say is we will do whatever it takes,” Mr. Ragonese, the state spokesman, said. “You can interpret that.”

Several residents who live behind the private beach are torn. While they support Mr. McDonough’s desire for privacy, they worry about future storms.

“We do like having a private beach,” said Shirley Combee, a resident of 50 years. “But I think the dunes are absolutely necessary, that’s my bottom line.”

—Ricardo Kaulessar contributed to this article.A version of this article appeared May 20, 2013, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Line in the Sand.



A letter from Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, liberal advocate of a police state

By Tom Carter, wsws.org

G.S. Stone, typical of corporatist liberals.

G.R. Stone, corporatist liberal through and through.

We invited Professor Geoffrey R. Stone to respond to the article, “Liberal advocates of a police state turn savagely against Edward Snowden,” by David North and Eric London, posted on the World Socialist Web Site on June 14. In the article, the authors condemned those erstwhile liberal commentators who had jumped on the reactionary campaign to label NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor” and a “criminal.” Specifically, North and London observed that Professor Stone’s recent anti-Snowden article in the Huffington Post “advances arguments in support of authoritarian rule that totally contradict positions” he previously advanced.

Professor Stone responded by email to Eric London on June 19. His letter, in its entirety, reads as follows:

“Thanks for sharing. What you seem not to understand is that situations are different and not everything is or should be on one side of the line or the other. Everything I’ve said about Snowden is perfectly consistent with everything I’ve ever said on this subject. Although I think we need a healthy distrust of our public officials, I also oppose the arrogance of a single, unelected individual who takes it upon himself, with no lawful authority or justification, to disclose properly classified information to persons unauthorized to receive it just because HE thinks the information shouldn’t be classified. The plain and simple fact is that Snowden betrayed the rule of law and the trust of the American people when he decided, without any legal authority, to disregard the judgments of the executive branch, the Congress and the judiciary in a way that put the security of the nation at risk. Even if what he did has beneficial consequences, he had no legal or moral right to do it. He is a criminal.”

The WSWS takes the opportunity presented by Professor Stone’s response to reply to his letter and explain its significance. From the first line to the last, Professor Stone’s letter confirms the WSWS’s frequent warning that the entire political establishment—including its “liberal” sections—is openly hostile to the democratic principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and in the later Civil War amendments. Professor Stone speaks for a significant section of academic intellectuals who are repudiating their previous commitment to democratic rights and advancing positions that would legitimize the establishment of a military-police dictatorship in the United States.

Let us proceed to an examination of Stone’s condemnation of Edward Snowden.

1. The Rule of Law

Despite being written by an American law professor, Professor Stone’s letter consists of conceptions that are utterly alien to the democratic legal tradition of the United States.

Reiterating his previous statements, Professor Stone announces that it is contrary to the “rule of law” for a “single, unelected individual” to take it upon himself “to disclose properly classified information to persons unauthorized to receive it.” In the context of Snowden’s revelations, this formulation inverts the “rule of law,” turning it upside down and transforming it into its opposite. For Professor Stone, the “rule of law” becomes the duty of unquestioning obedience to superiors.

This is not what the “rule of law” means. As Thomas Paine wrote in his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense (1776), “in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

The “rule of law” means that the acts of every person, up to and including the highest public official, are beneath the law. The Constitution provides that even the “President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States” may be impeached for violating the law. This is the essence of the phrase, “a government of laws not of men.” In other words, the “rule of law” means that public officials who engage in illegal conduct run the risk of having their behavior exposed, their orders disregarded, and their official powers terminated.

If a citizen is ordered by a public official to participate in illegal conduct, then the “rule of law” does not mean that citizen should obey the order without question. On the contrary, the “rule of law” means that going along with the illegal conduct of one’s superiors, even when ordered to do so, may itself be illegal.

In American history, this principle found perhaps its fullest expression in the arguments of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, which took place from November 1945 to October 1946. The Nazi defendants famously asserted that they were merely “following orders,” and that they did not have any legal or moral right to question the orders they were given or to refuse to carry them out. Rejecting these arguments with contempt, Justice Jackson declared that modern civilization “cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility.”

Nuremberg Principle IV reads, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility. .. provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

Professor Stone’s phrases such as “no lawful authority” and “ properlyclassified information” simply beg the question. Can a criminal conspiracy to violate the fundamental rights of hundreds of millions of innocent people be “properly” classified, or “lawfully” kept secret?

Professor Stone’s letter does not actually address the substance of Snowden’s revelations. Nor could it. Edward Snowden brought to light what is perhaps the most spectacular breakdown of the “rule of law” in American history. The pervasive illegal spying on Americans revealed by Snowden makes the criminal conduct of figures such as Richard Nixon seem petty and trivial by comparison.

If all the criminals in the Obama administration who deserved to be actually were impeached, the White House, the West Wing, and the rest of the Washington executive office buildings would resemble a ghost town.

Figures such as Professor Stone who are invoking the “rule of law” in their condemnations of Snowden have nothing to say about the “rule of law” in relation to the gigantic, unprecedented criminal spying operation Snowden revealed. The words Justice Jackson used to describe the hypocritical posturing of the Nuremberg defendants applies in full force to Snowden’s persecutors. These men, Jackson declared, “are surprised that there is any such thing as law. These defendants did not rely on any law at all. Their program ignored and defied all law.. .. International Law, natural law, German law, any law at all, was to these men simply a propaganda device to be invoked when it helped and to be ignored when it would condemn what they wanted to do.”

2. The Pentagon Papers and “national security”

Professor Stone announces, as though it was an established fact, that Snowden’s revelations “put the security of the nation at risk.” This argument, which is also made in relation to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, is false and misleading.

Similar arguments were made in the case of the Pentagon Papers, famously leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and published on the front page of the New York Times in 1971. The Pentagon Papers consist of 47 volumes cataloguing the dirty and bloody history of US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. The papers revealed systematic deceit and lying by successive American administrations, from which the trust of the American population for the government has never fully recovered.

Seeking to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers, the government sued the New York Times. Government lawyers argued that “national security” required the papers to remain secret. The argument was even made that, as a direct and foreseeable result of publication, thousands of American soldiers overseas would be killed.

In its defense of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the New York Timesinsisted that it was not sufficient for the government to invoke a general and abstract connection between publication and a subsequent event injurious to security. It had to demonstrate a clear, unambiguous, and virtually immediate threat to the lives of citizens or soldiers. In other words, the causal connection between the exposure of government secrets and a specific bad event had to be irrefutably direct.

The Nixon administration’s argument was rejected by the Supreme Court in the case of New York Times Co. v. United States (1971). It is worth quoting at some length from the concurring opinion by Justice Hugo L. Black:

“The word ’security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged. This thought was eloquently expressed in 1937 by Mr. Chief Justice Hughes… when the Court held a man could not be punished for attending a meeting run by Communists.

“The greater the importance of safeguarding the community from incitements to the overthrow of our institutions by force and violence, the more imperative is the need to preserve inviolate the constitutional rights of free speech, free press and free assembly in order to maintain the opportunity for free political discussion, to the end that government may be responsive to the will of the people and that changes, if desired, may be obtained by peaceful means. Therein lies the security of the Republic, the very foundation of constitutional government.”

Justice Black and Professor Stone are both titled as experts in US law, but that is where the similarities end. Justice’s Black’s writing is recognizable as the language of bourgeois democracy. Professor Stone writes in the language of a police state: “authority,” “security,” “betrayal,” the “judgments of the executive.”

In the final analysis, the only “security” put at risk by Snowden’s disclosures is that which shields government officials from the public exposure of their criminal and unconstitutional practices.

3. What Professor Stone does not say

The WSWS article by North and London took issue with Professor Stone’s emphatic declaration that there was “no reason on earth” that anyone in Snowden’s position could ever disclose classified information to the public.

North and London wrote: “This is an astonishing declaration! ‘No reason on earth… ’? In other words, an employee of the state must keep his mouth shut and refrain from exposing criminal activity no matter how injurious it may be to the rights of the American people. ‘No reason on earth ’! What if a civil servant uncovers a secret memorandum authorizing the assassination of a citizen? Or plans for the mass incarceration of political dissidents?”

Professor Stone does not reply to these questions. The conclusion can be reasonably drawn that that Stone meant what he wrote: There is “no reason on earth” that justifies the exposure of classified information, even when the information exposes blatantly criminal activity.

4. “Elected” officials and the Führer principle

Professor Stone, in his initial comment on the Huffington Post as well as in his reply to the WSWS, goes out of his way to declare that Snowden is “unelected” and that he is disregarding the orders of “elected” officials, presumably such as Obama. This is a tendentious and deceitful argument. In effect, it endows an election with the character of a plebiscite—that is, an empty ritual which serves only to provide a pseudo-democratic veneer for dictatorial rule. Those who carried out the American Revolution never conceived of an election as a blank check for those who win office. Once elected, officials have no right to expect the obedience of the citizenry, let alone unquestioned submission to their will. They confront constitutional restraints on the exercise of their limited powers, and violations of the law expose them to impeachment and prosecution.

President Obama, for the record, won a tightly controlled, heavily manipulated, and closely scripted election in 2012. His campaign, as with his Republican opponent, was funded to the hilt with unprecedented contributions from corporate and financial backers, while third parties were systematically excluded from the ballot. As Snowden has pointed out, moreover, Obama’s election victories were the result of lies.

According to the latest polls, a majority of Americans disapprove of this “elected” president’s handling of issues affecting democratic rights. The NSA spying program, in particular, is profoundly unpopular. Despite being “unelected,” Snowden enjoys a base of support far broader than Obama.

More importantly, there is a strong whiff of fascism in this emphasis on the powers of “elected” versus “unelected” individuals. According to fascist logic, the dictator is elected, therefore he represents the “will of the nation.” Further, because the dictator represents the national will, he is above the law, and it is “undemocratic” to oppose him or to disobey his directives. In Germany this was known as the Führerprinzip (“the Führer principle”). Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in one infamous speech, declared: “The Führer is always right!”

According to the democratic legal tradition, the law applies in full force to both elected and unelected individuals without making any distinction among them. If a person is charged with a crime, it is no defense to say, “But I was elected!” If an elected person ignores the law, is it is the duty of everyone who finds out about such illegal conduct to disclose it to the public. This, it is hoped, will facilitate the impeachment of the crook who was elected.

5. A few words about morality

It is one thing to argue, however flimsy the argument may be, that Snowden had no legal right to disclose the NSA’s spying programs to the public. It is quite another to argue, as Professor Stone does in his letter, that Snowden had no moral right to do so. Since Professor Stone raises the issue of morality, we include a few words of our own on the subject.

Professor Stone does not comment on whether the Obama administration has a “legal or moral right” to all of the information it is gathering about hundreds of millions of innocent people around the world, including innocent Americans. He does not comment on the morality of government agents snooping into intimate phone calls between lovers and spouses, private medical records, internet browsing activity, emails, text messages, and so forth.

We submit that from a moral standpoint, the NSA spying program revealed by Snowden is disturbing, depraved, and repulsive.

With respect to the actions of Snowden, on the other hand, there is a long tradition in American history of deliberately disobeying the law on the grounds that the law is wrong and disobedience is the morally right thing to do. A hundred examples come to mind: Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience; the Fugitive Slave Act and the Underground Railroad; conscription and its dissenters; segregated train cars, buses, and schools.

From a Birmingham jail, where he was imprisoned for violating a lawful injunction, Martin Luther King, Jr. famously wrote, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Would Professor Stone call this the “arrogance of a single, unelected individual” who was acting “without any legal authority?”

If what Snowden did is not moral, then nothing is moral. If Snowden had no moral right to disclose the most far-reaching criminal conspiracy against the American public in history, then nobody ever has a moral right to disclose anything.

Professor Stone includes, in a concessive clause, the phrase, “I think we need a healthy distrust of our public officials.” However, the rest of Professor Stone’s letter, including his admonition that Snowden had “no legal or moral right” to disobey orders, reveals this “healthy distrust” to be an impotent, wispy, passive sort of distrust: a professed mental state that is never connected in any way with real, living activity. This certainly is not the vigilant distrust championed by the revolutionaries from whom the American legal system originated.

Conclusion

The revelation by Snowden that the US government is engaged in flagrant and unprecedented violations of fundamental democratic rights does not carry any weight in Professor Stone’s analysis. This underscores the extent to which Professor Stone and the social layer he represents has become detached from and even hostile to basic democratic principles and traditions.

The Declaration of Independence—the document from which Lincoln said all of his political thinking flowed—announces the principle that when a government becomes destructive of fundamental, “unalienable” rights, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government …”

This principle is firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the Enlightenment. John Locke wrote in 1690, “Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.”

Among the basic rights set forth in the Bill of Rights is the Fourth Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” To anyone with an ounce of democratic consciousness, when Snowden discovered a massive government conspiracy to violate the Fourth Amendment, he was “absolved from any further obedience.” It was his legal and moral duty to disclose it to the world.

American democracy is breaking down under the weight of staggering levels of social inequality and a decade of bloody imperialist warfare. The capitalists and financial aristocrats who have profited from the crisis and plundered the economy look to a police state as a means of further entrenching their wealth and power.

No significant constituency remains anywhere in the political establishment for democracy. Not a single figure within the establishment has stepped forward to defend Snowden. The debate is instead over whether Snowden should be imprisoned or whether he should be executed.

While he has no support in the political establishment, Snowden enjoys extremely broad support within the working class, including in the US and internationally. In contrast to the opportunism and pragmatism of the more privileged sections of the middle class, the working class is not so quick to trade away its hard-won rights. Workers instinctively recognize in Snowden a courageous man who has risked everything to tell the truth.

It is in the working class that democratic consciousness is deeply rooted. The struggle to defend and expand basic democratic protections thus requires an orientation to the proletariat. While figures such as Professor Stone line up to call for Snowden’s incarceration or liquidation, the Socialist Equality Party is mounting a campaign in his defense.

The World Socialist Web Site recently marked the anniversary of both the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Gettysburg. “To halt and reverse the drive toward dictatorship,” we wrote, “a movement must be built in the working class, a movement that begins with the understanding that democracy is incompatible with capitalism, and that true freedom must be rooted in social equality. All that was progressive in the history of the United States can be carried forward only through a revolutionary struggle for socialism.”

We therefore conclude our response to Professor Stone with the words of Samuel Adams (1722-1803), revolutionary, philosopher, statesman, and possible organizer of the Boston Tea Party:

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; may your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

* * *

The World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party are waging a campaign to defend Edward Snowden. For more information and to get involved, click here .



In Obamaland, ‘Rule of Law’ is for the Other Suckers

US (and French) Courts Have Ruled Head-of-State Immunity is Absolute
by DAVE LINDORFF

The chickens hit "Socialist" president, Francois Hollande. A stain on the honor of every child, woman and man in France. De Gaulle would have never caved in so ignominiously.

Chickenshit “Socialist” president, Francois Hollande. A stain on the honor of every child, woman and man in France. De Gaulle would have never caved in so ignominiously. But what can we ever expect from social democrats except artful betrayal?

It is clear that the entrapment and forced landing in Austria of the official airplane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was the work of the US, which was obviously behind the decision by France and Portugal to deny air rights to the flight, and which also was obviously behind the Austrian government’s demand to be allowed to search the jet after it landed. After all, those countries have no interest themselves in capturing US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is only Obama’s and the NSA’s quarry.

So it is worth examining at how the US views the legal status of heads of state under international law and custom.

In 2004, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (New York) ruled that Robert Mugabe, the corrupt and brutal leader of Zimbabwe, enjoyed “absolute immunity” while inside the US on a visit to New York. The decision stemmed from 2001, when a group of citizens of Zimbabwe sought to have Mugabe arrested in New York on charges of “extrajudicial killing, torture, terrorism, rape, beatings and other acts of violence and destruction.” A month earlier, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (Chicago), reached a similar conclusion in a case involving then Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

[pullquote] Snowden and Syria have shown the cowardice of many powers, including Russia, which has yet to utter a peep of protest over the outrage organized by Washington on the person of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, a legitimate and sovereign president. This is a disgraceful world, indeed. [/pullquote]

The US government had filed briefs in both those cases arguing that both Jiang and Mugabe (as well as Mugabe’s foreign minister, who was traveling with him), had absolute immunity as traveling heads of state.

No surprise that, given that the head of state of the US at the time of the court proceedings and the Appellate Court hearing, George W. Bush, and his vice president Dick Cheney, were already themselves guilty of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity for their illegal invasion of Iraq, their authorization of kidnappings, extrajudicial killings and torture, and their financing of acts of terrorism.

Given that it was the French who first caved in to US pressure to block the flight home from Russia to Bolivia of President Morales, it is interesting to note too that a the French Supreme Court, in 2001, ruled in a case involving an effort to charge Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafy with the downing of a US civilian aircraft over Lockerbee, Scotland, that heads of state have absolute immunity from prosecution while in office, except for universally accepted crime of genocide.

This makes the treatment of Bolivia’s President Morales, and the behavior of the European countries involved — France, Portugal and Spain initially for trapping Morales in mid-air and forcing him to land in Austria, Austria and Italy for trapping him in Austria and Austria for insisting on searching his presidential plane, and Russia for not protesting in the most forceful way the insulting treatment of a head of state that Russia had just hosted in a summit meeting — so outrageous.

Far from being guilty of any crime, Morales was detained by the actions of the US, France, Portugal, Spain and Austria simply because the US wants to capture Snowden, and thought Morales might be transporting him on his plane back to asylum in Bolivia. But had he been doing so, it would have been entirely within the rights of the president of Bolivia, who as a head of state could legally carry anything he wanted in his plane, whether a petitioner for sanctuary or a load of cocaine. (The US has long abused diplomatic immunity to ship contraband like weapons for use in various coup attempts in so-called “diplomatic pouches,” which are exempt from customs searches.)

The US of course, is the most egregious offender in this latest saga. In its desperate effort to capture Snowden, it is trashing the Vienna Convention of 1961 and a tradition of diplomatic immunity for heads of state that is of much more ancient origin.

The US does this not because it is legal, but because it can. American military and economic power allow the US government to brazenly ignore international law and custom because at least for the present no foreign power would dare to arrest or detain a US leader in the manner that Morales was detained and forced to allow his aircraft to be searched like a common criminal suspect. That situation could, of course change in future years, at which point Washington’s role in this incident will surely be brought up in some court.

Meanwhile, though, the leaders of smaller states with less clout than the US, from France and Germany to the likes of Austria, Italy, Spain, and the nations of South America, need to contemplate a new world in which their leaders could be summarily detained, humiliated, served with criminal or civil complaints or otherwise harassed while on official state visits, with the Morales case cited as an example.

Little wonder that the leaders of many Latin American countries, long used to being humiliated by the US, have been belatedly rising to the defense of Bolivia’s president, only days after they had accommodatingly declined to offer Snowden asylum.

One has to hope that they will rethink their earlier cowardice in refusing to offer asylum to Snowden, who is still trapped in the stateless limbo of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, because of Russia’s own chickenshit cowardice about granting him some kind of at least temporary residency permit while he seeks some permanent asylum from US prosecution as a “traitor.”

The latest news is that little Iceland (pop.: 320,000), may by showing the way. The Left-Green Party there has introduced a bill in the country’s parliament, the Althing, which would offer Snowden Icelandic citizenship (and of course a passport). The odds may be long, with that party only having six seats out of 63, but Snowden is popular in that country, so pressure could be brought to bear on other members of the body.

Meanwhile, France, Germany. Italy, Spain, and Austria, which have so shamelessly caved in to US pressure, should be ashamed of themselves. So should countries like Ireland, Finland, and other European countries which have pretended that they “might” consider an offer of asylum, but for the “difficulty” that poor Snowden’s US passport has been cancelled by Washington, so he cannot travel to their soil to make an application.

What rot! First off, as I wrote earlier, the mere fact that the US, violating its own laws, cancelled the citizenship and passport of a native-born American by executive decree without even a court hearing, doesn’t mean his passport, which he still possesses, cannot be recognized as a valid travel document by another country. It still has his photo identity as before. It still has blank pages able to accept a visa application, and it still has an expiration date that shows it to be valid. Since there is no international data base for passports, which are the property of each state that issues them, there would be no international file at a nation’s border stating whether a passport from another nation is currently valid. Snowden would certainly be stopped were he to try to use his cancelled passport to attempt, for some crazy reason, to re-enter the US, but as far as going to another country, it should work fine. Unless, that is, the country in question is under the thumb of the US.

Here’s hoping that Iceland’s Althing (parliament) does the correct and courageous thing and grants citizenship to Snowden, who has said all along that he hoped to settle in that country, which he said most closely adheres to his own values of freedom, freedom of information, and support for whistleblowers. It would be a beautiful act of conscience by a tiny nation against the official hypocrisy and gutlessness of Europe’s and most of Latin America’s leaders, and the lazy unconcern of the peoples of supposedly democratic Europe and the US, to see him welcomed there.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).



The Servility of the Satellites

The Snowden Affair and the Destruction of Effective Democracy in Europe

by DIANA JOHNSTONE

plutonomy-federal-reserve-puppeting-obama

Paris, France.

The Snowden affair has revealed even more about Europe than about the United States.

Certainly, the facts of NSA spying are significant. But many people suspected that something of the sort was going on.  The refusal of France, Italy and Portugal to allow the private aircraft of the President of Bolivia to cross their airspace on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be aboard is rather more astonishing.

Together, these revelations confirm the completion of the transformation of the “Western democracies” into something else, an entity that as yet has no recognized name.

The outrage against the Bolivian President confirmed that this trans-Atlantic entity has absolutely no respect for international law, even though its leaders will make use of it when it suits them.  But respect it, allow it to impede their actions in any way?  Certainly not.

[pullquote] The result is an ever-wider gap between “the political class”, which includes both politicians and the mass media, on one hand, and the general population on the other.  The principal remaining task of the political class is to entertain the general population with the illusion that they are still living in a democracy, and that the officials they elect are acting in their interests…” [/pullquote]

And this disrespect for the law is linked to a more basic institutional change: the destruction of effective democracy at the national level.  This has been done by the power of money in the United States, where candidates are comparable to race horses owned by billionaires. In Europe, it has been done by the European Union, whose bureaucracy has gradually taken over the critical economic functions of independent states, leaving national governments to concoct huge controversies around private matters, such as marriage, while public policy is dictated from the EU Commission in Brussels.

But behind that Commission, and behind the US electoral game, lies the identical anonymous power that dictates its desires to this trans-Atlantic entity: financial capital.

This power is scheduled to be formally extended in the near future by the establishment of a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.  This development is the culmination of the so-called “European construction” that over several decades has transferred powers of sovereign European states to the EU, which in turn will transfer its power to trans-Atlantic institutions, all under the decisive control of “the Markets” – euphemism for financial capital.

The citizenry is informed of the latest stage of this ongoing de-democratization process only when it is well under way. The result is an ever-wider gap between “the political class”, which includes both politicians and the mass media, on one hand, and the general population on the other.  The principal remaining task of the political class is to entertain the general population with the illusion that they are still living in a democracy, and that the officials they elect are acting in their interests.

When something like the grotesque incident of the Bolivian presidential plane occurs to expose the servility of the country’s officials, the mainstream media can be counted on to spin it out of sight. French television largely ignored the event – a negligence made easier by the latest Egyptian upheaval.  One big international story per day is all the media consider suitable for a public whose basic news diet is centered on weather, sports and sex crimes.

To measure the surrender of French independence in recent decades, one can recall that in the 1970s, the government of center right President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing readily granted asylum to Black Panthers fleeing the United States. Today, the minister of the interior in a supposedly “center left” government rules out granting asylum to any citizen of the United States, on grounds that the U.S. is a “friend”, a “democracy” with an independent judicial system.

In Germany, anti-communist propaganda having used constant denunciations of Stasi prying to bury any recollection of the lost benefits of the East German regime, such as full employment, child care and
foolsjohnstonesocial equality for women, the revelations of NSA prying could not be overlooked.  Even leading politicians in Germany seemed genuinely indignant.

In France, political leaders made faint sounds of disapproval and rapidly changed the subject. Insofar as the incident was mentioned at all, the line was that there was no point in making a big fuss about practices that we sophisticated Great Powers know all about anyway and practice ourselves. The smug “we do it too” self-incrimination is a way to claim that France is still a big bad power, and not a mere satellite of the United States.

During a TV interview yesterday, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius was shown a video of President Obama repeatedly referring to French president François Hollande as “President Houlon”. Fabius rapidly changed the subject to praise France’s important role in fostering war in Syria.  The fact that the French president is considered so insignificant that Obama need not bother to learn his name was not worth noticing.

Obama’s disregard for Hollande, Hollande’s disregard for the President of Bolivia, are all part of this new world order ruled not by human concerns at all, but by “the markets”.  It is not that the markets give direct orders in such matters. But the reduction of government to “governance” whose primary function is to keep the people quiet while institutions, laws and armed forces pursue the task of making the world safe for investment capital to reap its maximum profits, people are disempowered and politics becomes an empty exercise in conformity.

The explanation for this surrender lies in the ideology that has dominated Europe, and France perhaps most of all, for the past half century.  A particular interpretation of the history of the mid-twentieth century has undermined confidence in popular sovereignty, (wrongly) accused of leading to “totalitarianism”. This ideology has prepared elites to abdicate in favor of technical institutions and “markets” that seem innocent of all political sins.  The power of financial capital and its US champion is less the cause than the result of this political abdication.

Only this can explain the extraordinary rush of European governments to obey the slightest whim of the American master, on the eve of the negotiations for a trans-Atlantic free trade zone which European leaders will portray to their populations as compensation for the ongoing destruction of the European social welfare model. Principles, diplomatic decency, Edward Snowden, must all be sacrificed to this desperate last attempt to put Europe out of reach of the influence of its people.

A couple of commentators have gone so far as to suggest that Edward Snowden must be some sort of plant, supposedly to show people that the US government is all powerful. The affront to the Bolivian President illustrates this even more strikingly. But in the long run, awareness of the scope of this power is the first step toward liberation.

DIANA JOHNSTONE is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She can be reached at  diana.josto@yahoo.fr



How We Can Wrench Independence from the Corporate State

ClimateStoryTellers.org / By Subhankar Banerjee
This week we learned what “extreme” in climate changed extreme weather means for human loss — so what are we doing about it?

The Prescott (AZ) "Hotshot" firefighters. Noble men sacrificed by political corruption and popular ignorance. It's sadly ironic that the Southwest is a Republican bulwark, a hotbed of climate deniers.

The Prescott (AZ) “Hotshot” firefighters. Brave men sacrificed by political corruption and massive public ignorance. It’s sadly ironic that the Southwest is a Republican bulwark, a hotbed of climate deniers.

“Within a few years we are going to have more people off the surface of this planet more often, and we’ll have to determine value in that new environment.” —Jill Tarter, chairwoman of the SETI Institute, CNN Money, June 27, 2013

Do we write words of mourning? Or, do we write words of resistance? Those two braids have joined and from now on will flow together—in our age of the Antropocene.

On October 11, 2012 I participated as a panelist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in what was perhaps the first public symposium on the Anthropocene. “A consensus has been reached that the tremendous scope of transformations now occurring on the Earth, with profound effects on plants, animals, and natural habitats, is primarily the result of human activities. Geologists have proposed the term Anthropocene, or the ‘Age of Man,’ for this new period in the history of the planet, which follows the relatively stable Holocene period. On a geological scale the planet has entered a new era,” the Smithsonian press release stated. Climate change and ocean acidification—the evil twins—are the two most destructive forces of this geologic era.

[pullquote] Many unsung victims of these fires are subterranean animals—gophers, snakes, and similar species—all of which are burnt alive by rapidly advancing fires. [/pullquote]

Two recent disasters: one in Uttarakhand, India and the other in Arizona, US show us—that not only ecological devastation but also human casualty—arise from climate change. In both cases, those who tried to save lives—lost their lives. On June 25 an Indian air force helicopter crashed on a steep hillside in Uttarakhand “while on a mission to rescue people stranded in monsoon floods,” the Times of India reported. Twenty people died in that crash. And last Sunday nineteen firefighters died in Arizona “as they were overcome … by the swift, erratic Yarnell Hill Fire,” the USA Today reported.

According to one estimate the flood in Uttarakhand has claimed more than 10,000 lives. If that indeed were true, then it would be the largest human casualty in a single climate change event. Two recent scientific studies: here and here make the connection between climate change and—erratic monsoon and extreme floods in India. And if you have any doubt about the connection between climate change and—extreme drought and fires in the desert southwest of America, take a look at William deBuys’ remarkable book, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford University Press).

I have a personal connection with both places: last November I visited Uttarakhand, and I lived on two separate occasions, a total of eleven years in the desert southwest, in New Mexico. I’m now mourning the deaths in Arizona and Uttarakhand.

For sometime now we have been using the word “extreme” when talking about climate change disasters. We’ve known what it means for ecological loss (see forest death from bark beetles infestation hereand coral graveyards here). Now we know what “extreme” in climate changed extreme weather means for human loss also.

I know less about recent floods in India than I do about fires in the American southwest. So I’ll share a few words about the latter.

In 2011 the Las Conchas Fire burned 156,593 acres and became the largest fire in New Mexico history. As the fire started I wrote an article “New Mexico is burning with potential for nuclear contamination.” I wrote:

I live inside a small old true adobe home. … since Sunday June 26 I’ve had to keep all windows closed to avoid toxic ash from wildfires from entering the breathing space inside the house. The result—I’m hot as hell inside my home and can’t sleep properly.

Large fires send a lot of toxic pollutants in the air. The previous year NASA reported that the “raging forest fires in central Russia, Siberia and western Canada have created an enormous cloud of pollutants covering the northern hemisphere.” Furthermore, many of us were concerned that the smoke from the Las Conchas Fire might contain nuclear material due to previous unregulated dumping of nuclear waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

But our main concern was—the entire southwest could have been nuked. There were some 20,000 55-gallon drums filled with plutonium-contaminated waste that sat on the surface underneath fabric tents in Area G at LANL. The fire was about 3.5 miles from Area G when I wrote the piece. Unsurprisingly the government lied: “Lab spokesman Steve Sandoval declined to confirm that there were any such drums now on the property,” the Associated Press reported on June 27. Three days later another lab spokesperson told the same AP writer that there were 10,000 drums stored on the property—belching out a half-truth. New Mexico and the neighboring states got saved from nuclear contamination not because of human ingenuity but Nature came to the rescue—wind started to blow in a north-south direction, away from Area G.

To understand the ecological impact of the fire, I sat down with New Mexico state land commissioner Ray Powell and his team of nearly a dozen staff that included many ecologists. I never wrote about what I learned from that meeting until now. They told me that the Las Conchas Fire was burning so hot and was moving so fast that the firefighters reported to them that they had “never seen a fire like this before.” The heat was so intense that it was burning all the way down to the roots of trees. The sub-surface desert dwellers—gophers, mice and reptiles—surely got burnt alive. And the speed of spread was astonishing—“averaging an acre of forest burned every 1.17 seconds for 14 straight hours.” To give you a linear perspective: say the acre is a square with four equal sides; then each side would be about 209 feet. No animal could ever move 209 feet in 1.17 seconds. I came to realize then what “extreme” means in extreme weather events.

Following year the Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire that started in the Gila Wilderness burned 289,478 acres and became the largest fire in New Mexico history.

Last month the Black Forest Fire in Colorado destroyed more than 500 homes and was called, “the most destructive fire in Colorado history.” Then the came the news: nineteen firefighters died in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. The change of wind direction (that saved New Mexico in 2011) it seems might have been the cause that killed the Arizona firefighters. “The sole survivor of the blaze … warned his fellow firefighters … when he saw [from the lookout] the wildfire switch directions and head straight for them,” the Associated Press reported on July 3. As I write this, the Silver Fire in New Mexico has grown “to 137,326 acres with 59% containment” as of July 2.

So what are the Beltway politicians doing about climate change?

***

On June 25 President Obama gave a much-anticipated climate change speech. The day before, in an email Bill McKibben wrote: “Well, some good news: five years in, we’re starting to see at least the outlines of a strategy from President Obama to deal with climate change.”

Each time golden words arrive from Obama—supporters cheer, opponents sneer, apologists veer, while critics use spear—to expose his peace with terror. I’ll take a closer look, not at what he said, but just a few of the responses that resulted from the speech.

Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most respected environmental journalists working today. She writes environmental articles and op-eds for The New Yorker and is author of the widely acclaimed book on climate change, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006). So it is all the more troubling that she wrote what I’d call—a patla sorbot (roughly translates from Bengali to English—seriously diluted Kool-Aid) op-ed after Obama’s speech. She avoided the thorny issues (more on that soon) and instead focused on two things: a Democrat-Republican ping-pong match and regulating emissions from coal fired power plants.

What Obama’s “aides had billed as a major initiative to fight climate change,” Kolbert correctly observed “was not really news, since it had already been widely reported—was that the Administration will impose rules limiting carbon emissions from both new and existing power plants.” But if you take climate scientist Dr. James Hansen’s words literally: he says Washington is “coal-fired.” So the conundrum before us is: how could one coal-fired enterprise honestly regulate another coal-fired enterprise? It cannot. The issue here is not emission regulation but burning coal itself. A few days later Lauren McCauley pointed out on Common Dreams, “Energy Chief Confirms Critics’ Fears: Obama Still Loves Coal.”

In 2011 Obama sold the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to Big Coal. In a fantastic piece, Jeff Biggers had dug up the poop and released the stink: “President Obama needs to be called out for his less than transparent catering to his long-time billionaire and coal-profiteering friends.” Biggers wrote that Obama’s buddies on this lucrative affair were—Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Precisely because of this greedy decision two years ago, today the activists in the Pacific Northwest are fighting the coal-port through which (if built) Wyoming coal would go to Asia. In an Earth Day op-ed Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Joel Connelly wrote: “[T]he anti-coal-port movement in the Northwest is growing in leaps and bounds.  It’s a grassroots effort based in towns through which mile-and-a-half-long coal trains would pass.  It has far outclassed an industry campaign consisting typically of TV commercials, an ‘astroturf’ front group and legions of flack-mercenaries.”

“But if the President deserves to be congratulated for finally taking action—and he does—then he also deserves to be admonished for having waited so long,” Kolbert continues. There are two serious problems with this statement. The use of “admonished” isn’t criticism but affectionate scolding that we do to a child (more on this below). The second issue is that it gives an impression that Obama indeed has finally taken action on climate change. That’s very misleading to put it politely.

Kolbert points out that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denounced the speech, even before it was delivered. McConnell wrote that Obama’s “climate change plan is a ‘war on coal’ and on jobs” (an example of ‘opponents sneer’). Referring to McConnell’s words, Kolbert wrote: “That reflexive political reaction goes a long way toward explaining why it took Obama so long.” This is what I’d call Democrat-Republican ping-pong while life on Earth races toward oblivion.

Kolbert’s op-ed is an example of—‘apologists veer.’

If you want to see an example of ‘supporters cheer’—take a look at 350.org executive director May Boeve’s response to Obama’s speech here.

The reason I focused on Kolbert’s op-ed is to show the rot in mainstream American environmental journalism. Few journalists can be courageous like Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, but at a minimum a journalist’s job is to tell the truth and not become the mouthpiece of a particular political party.

Democrats are scared that if the Republicans take over the government all hope of climate change legislations would be doomed. Bill McKibben wrote earlier this yearon TomDispatch: “The movement is what matters; the Democrats are, at best, the eventual vehicle for closing the deal.” This too is hiding the truth and is an illusion (more below). A climate movement that is a mirror image of MoveOn.org is not honest and will not succeed.

What I just discussed is the political reason why ‘supporters cheer’ and ‘apologists veer,’ but there is a larger insidious reason, and it is—sociological.

It is easy to criticize the other. It is much more difficult to criticize one’s own. This is true at a macroscopic level (nation to nation) and also at a microscopic level (one family to another).

Take for example, domestic violence: it is easy to say that domestic violence “is going on in my neighbor’s house” than to acknowledge “is happening in my own home.” Similarly, it is easy for the US government to announce: “China is spying on the US” than to acknowledge “US is spying on its own citizens and everyone else.” This issue is particularly pronounced in the US.

In her concise yet immensely thought-provoking book, Regarding the Pain of OthersSusan Sontag wrote:

Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States—a unique nation, one without any certifiably wicked leaders throughout its entire history—is exempt. That this country, like every other country, has its tragic past does not sit well with the founding, and still all-powerful, belief in American exceptionalism.

Climate change is not a Democrat or Republican issue and its solution (if there ever will be one) does not involve cheeringleading of Democrats.

Now I’ll turn to critics’ spear.

***

To understand the true intent of Obama’s speech I begin with AlterNet senior environmental editor Tara Lohan’s article, “Obama Uses Major Climate Speech to Cheerlead for Natural Gas Industry; Keystone XL Fate Still Undecided.” She recognizes that “Obama’s speech will likely be met with cheers and jeers, even in the environmental community.” She first acknowledges the “cheer” part and then throws a solid 400-lb punch and points out the “hypocrisy of Obama’s allegiance to the gas industry and his pledge to fight climate change”:

It’s hard to imagine that Obama has ever visited with communities who are in the crosshairs of natural gas extraction—a process that has proven already to be anything but clean and safe. And yet Obama promised to “strengthen our position as a top natural gas producer” and even to use our private sector to help other countries “transition to natural gas.” This translates to exporting fracking worldwide—a process already underway in Poland, South Africa, Australia and other countries.

It’s all the more remarkable, because these words didn’t come from a writer/editor sitting in her ergonomically uncomfortable chair and throwing out some angry words. It came from someone who is reporting from the field now. Tara is traveling across North America documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project, Hitting Home. This is what I’d call—good environmental journalism that includes honest criticism.

Next, if you’re looking for an in-depth socio-ecological analysis of Obama’s speech, take a look at Professor Chris Williams’ essay “Mass Protest, Not A Speech, Is Needed To Address Climate Change” that I published on ClimateStoryTellers.org. About the Democrat-Republican ping-pong match, Williams wrote:

And on the ground, where people are forced to deal with the growing ramifications of climate change and the disruption and cost to their lives, the picture is very different. As reported in a recent survey of self–described Republicans and Republican–leaning independents, 62 percent said the U.S. should address climate change, and 77 percent said that the U.S. should use more renewable energy sources. This is all the more remarkable given that virtually no political representative from either party has been arguing for these things, and they have certainly not appeared on the TV screens or in the newspapers of the mainstream media.

And about relying on politicians to solve the climate crisis, Williams wrote:

The biosphere of which humans are a part cannot afford half measures or rely on dubious “friends” in high places. Nor can we set our sights any lower than the swift dismantling of the fossil–fuel infrastructure of death and its replacement with publicly owned and democratically controlled clean energy systems.

Lastly, if you’re looking for a good example of thoughtful criticism of the environmental policies being perpetuated by a head of state, look no further than Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk’s most biting critique of Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper’s devastating energy policy. In his essay, “Oh, Canada: How America’s Friendly Northern Neighbor Became a Rogue, Reckless Petrostate,” in the July/August issue of Foreign Policy Nikiforuk wrote:

More than a decade ago, American political scientist Terry Lynn Karl crudely summed up the dysfunction of petrostates: Countries that become too dependent on oil and gas riches behave like plantation economies that rely on “an unsustainable development trajectory fueled by an exhaustible resource” whose revenue streams form “an implacable barrier to change.” And that’s what happened to Canada while you weren’t looking. Shackled to the hubris of a leader who dreams of building a new global energy superpower, the Boy Scout is now slave to his own greed.

I have repeatedly pointed out over the past three years (see my interview last year with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! here) that Obama too is turning the US into a “rogue, reckless petrostate.” While Kolbert thinks that Obama “deserves to be admonished” (like you would do to a Boy Scout), Williams on the other hand thinks that a “swift dismantling of the fossil–fuel infrastructure of death” is what is needed.

As you can see environmental journalism is far from dead. On the contrary, it is vibrant like a gushing mountain stream about to flood climate change activism with new energy and ideas. We need it because climate change is here and a lot of people are beginning to die from its devastation.

***

Often people ask me: Aren’t the super-rich worried about climate change? I cannot provide a good answer. Instead all I can do is make a wild-ass guess that may sound to you like sci-fi—but it isn’t—like climate change it too is here.

Would the gassed-up “well-oiled” “coal-fired” (last two are Hansen’s words) rogue, petrostates (US, Canada, and add your favorites to the list) ravage the whole Earth to a point where it is useful only for extraction of natural resources. Earth as an extraction of natural resources resources. You might wonder where will the super-rich escape to then? To space.

On June 27 the Yahoo! Finance reported:

PayPal today announced the launch of PayPal Galactic, an initiative that addresses the issues to help make universal space payments a reality. PayPal Galactic brings together leaders in the scientific community, including the SETI Institute and Space Tourism Society, to prepare and support the future of space commerce.

Furthermore, Yahoo! Finance quotes John Spencer, founder and president of the Space Tourism Society: “Within five to ten years the earliest types of ‘space hotels’ and orbital and lunar commerce will be operational and in need of a payment system.” Leaders are now working “on the big questions”:

  • What will our standard currency look like in a truly cash-free interplanetary society?
  • How will the banking systems have to adapt?
  • How will risk and fraud management systems need to evolve?
  • What regulations will we have to conform with?
  • How will our customer support need to develop?

And CNN Money included a wise quote from PayPal president David Marcus:

“It’s easy to perceive this as kind of gee-whiz, even silly, if you just read the headline [“PayPal to launch inter-planetary payment system]. But these are real, difficult, important problems that need to be sorted out.”

Pack your bags and get ready for your new job—no longer on this Earth, but out there, working in a ‘space hotel’ finally getting paid $10.70 per hour that Ralph Nader has been advocating for.

We are screwed. The Earth is doomed.

Do you have any idea how we can find independence from the corporate-state terror?

Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer, writer, activist, and founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org.