Paul Thomas Richards SUPERCONGRESS–THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST,
CIRCA 21ST CENTURY:
“ACCIDENTAL DEMOCRAT” BAUCUS
RUNS THE PARTY AGROUND
AND BANKRUPTS THE COUNTRY
On June 7, 2001, as the Marine Corps Band played “Hail to the Chief,” President George W. Bush strutted into the White House East Room to sign the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001,” effectively robbing $1.35 trillion from governmental treasuries to hand out, reverse-Robin-Hood-style, to multimillionaires and billionaires.
The unelected president signed every letter in his name with a different pen, each given to key Congressional supporters as mementos. One of the first pens went to U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate’s powerful Finance Committee, who betrayed his own party by carrying Republican tax cuts for the UltraRich through the Senate, then split 50-50. It was the proudest and most significant achievement in Baucus’ then-27-year Congressional career.
IF PHOTO DOES NOT APPEAR ON THIS PAGE, PLEASE: CLICK HERE.
President George W. Bush signing the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001” in the White House East Room, June 7, 2001.
U.S. Sen. Max Baucus (Corporate Democrat-Mont.), smiling, is at far right.
(“Public domain” photo courtesy of “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States,” a service of the U.S. Government Printing Office)
“Every day it looks like a better and better decision,” Baucus said at the June 2001 White House ceremony, referring to the onslaught of class warfare that he, Bush, and Cheney had so successfully unleashed. “In many respects, I think, politically, I helped the party. We Democrats would have been in trouble in 2002 just saying ‘no’ to every one of the president’s proposals.”
Political observers cringed when Baucus, from a wealthy preeminent Republican family whose members heretofore had all run for state and federal offices as Republicans, claimed the Democratic Party as his own.
Never involved in the party before first attaining elected office, Baucus was an accidental Democrat at best, heeding advisors who bluntly told him he would not be elected to a state legislative seat in 1972 from Missoula, Montana’s most progressive city, unless he ran as a Democrat.
When the U.S. Supreme Court (zero percent jurisdiction over Florida’s state election laws) relied on John Ellis, George W. Bush’s cousin, paid by Fox (Faux) “News” to arbitrarily, but officially, “call” the election for Bush before votes had been counted; ordered the State of Florida (100 percent jurisdiction over Florida’s election law) to stop counting votes in the 2000 general election; forced the State of Florida to declare George W. Bush had somehow won in Florida, despite the wholesale absence of accurate vote tabulations; and then unConstitutionally appointed George W. Bush, the loser, as president, and Dick Cheney, the loser, as vice-president:
Most Americans hoped and prayed that, since Bush and Cheney were never elected, they would extend olive branches to Democrats, who held the evenly-divided Senate.
But, with Corporate Democrat Baucus–now the fourth most powerful person in Washington, D.C.–firmly in the Bush/Cheney camp, chopping Bush’s firewood, and carrying Bush’s tax subsidies for billionaires–those hopes were dashed.
“As President-elect (sic) Bush has made very clear, he ran on a particular platform that was very carefully developed,” said vice-president appointee Dick Cheney.
“It’s his program, it’s his agenda, and we have no intention at all of backing off of it. It’s why we got elected (sic). So, we’re going to aggressively pursue tax changes, tax reform, tax cuts, because it’s important to do so. The suggestion that somehow, because this was a close election, we should fundamentally change our beliefs; I just think is silly,” Cheney concluded.
As non-Baucus Democrats predicted, the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax cuts eviscerated budget surpluses from the Clinton era, eliminated the entire $5.6 trillion surplus predicted for the next eight years, and burgeoned the federal deficit by 51 percent.
In early 2007, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found tax rates for middle-income Americans climbed upwards in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, while tax rates for higher-income Americans declined under the Bush/Baucus tax cuts.
“TOO BIG TO FAIL:”
With SO MANY massive taxpayer-funded “Bailouts” and “Subsidies”—ALL Paramountly Antithetical to “Free Market Capitalism”—so generously provided by low and middle income taxpayers to SO MANY “Too Big to Fail” Wall Street firms; bankers; insurers; inside traders; hedge funders; debt-to-equity leveragers; short-sellers; sub-prime mortgagers; GSE (“Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” such as “Fannie Mae” and “Freddie Mac” ) housing “bubblers” (bubble blowers and bubble bursters; sometimes in tandem, sometimes at each other’s throats); tax dodgers; collateralized-debt-obligation con artists; ill-informed boosters; speculating swindlers; corrupt loophole-creating lawyers and loophole-exploiting lobbyists; worthless “credit derivatives” promoters; toxic “assets” peddlers; default bettors; Ponzi schemers; offshore “investment” banksters; money launderers; amazingly creative and immoral bookkeepers with “accounting” pliable enough to fit any intent or circumstance; insurance, banking, savings and loans, and auto industry CEOs, CFOs, COOs; and unethical officers and board members that collectively comprise “The Richest One Percent Club:” What follows could be questioned.
But, careful review of data shows the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax subsidies for the UltraRich as perhaps the greatest transfer of wealth and power in the shortest amount of time, from low-to-middle income Americans to multimillionaires and billionaires, ever accomplished in America; possibly excluding the Congressional land grants (giveaways) in the second half of the 1800s of 200 million acres of public land to railroads, the then-largest corporate powers with the most clout in Congress.
THE RICHEST ONE PERCENT GET RICHER:
Those earning more than $1 million a year saw their taxes drop the most, with the largest subsidies going to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who reaped averages of $100,000 a year.
The rich clearly get richer, especially those lucky and so very elusive “Job Creators.” This carefully-chosen moniker is purposeful: Fundamentalists and Apocalyptic Christians now leading the Republican Party just LOVE iconic God-like imagery.
Far-right strategists understand that strong so-called “Christian values” messaging and consistent utilization of such “sanctified” language ultimately mean far less resistance from spineless Democrats.
WHILE 99 PERCENT GET POORER:
The fact that low and middle income taxpayers further subsidizing the richest one percent of Americans does NOT create ANY new jobs doesn’t matter a whit. What matters is public perception!
BUSH AND BAUCUS TANK THE NATION’S ECONOMY:
In 2010, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service projected 10-year revenue losses from the Bush/Cheney/Baucus tax subsidies to One Percenters at $2.9 trillion, with an additional $606 billion in interest, for a combined total of $3.5 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office in 2010 estimated extending the Bush/Baucus tax subsidies for the wealthy from 2011 to 2020 would add $3.3 trillion to the national debt, comprising of $2.65 trillion in foregone tax revenue plus another $660 billion for interest and debt service costs.
BAUCUS REAPS THE DIVIDENDS:
While the nation foundered under the enormous losses incurred by Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Baucus’ tax subsidies for multimillionaires and billionaires; Baucus’ gambit paid off handsomely for himself. The Senate isn’t called “The Millionaires’ Club” for nothing. Every Senator getting backdoor pay increases of $100,000 a year is peachy keen! That’s another hundred grand “spending around town” cash, about which taxpayers and other suckers will never know, into each Senator’s already-bulging wallet or purse.
Beyond personal enrichment, as the federal budget surplus began disappearing and the deficit steadily climbed, Baucus raked in more special-interest cash than any other senator, according to a 2006 Public Citizen report that reviewed the years 1999 to 2005.
“WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS”–BAUCUS SPENDS $34.46 PER VOTE!
For his 2008 reelection, Baucus extracted an astounding $12 million from K Street lobbyists for Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Finance, and other industries Baucus “regulates,” as chairman of the canonical U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Actual Montanans (remember them?) shelled out a full 5 percent of “their” U.S. Senate candidate’s funding. After all was said and done, Baucus had spent a mind-boggling $34.46 per vote!
Before the “batshit crazy” U.S. Supreme Court appointments of Bush and Cheney; Democrats represented people, while Republicans represented money. That all changed with Baucus, the raised-rich-and-Republican accidental Democrat holding the fourth most powerful position in Bush’s and Cheney’s Washington, D.C.
Baucus lowered the bar to where pro-corporate alleged “Democrats” now represent money just as obsessively and venally as Republicans. Forget Democracy. Now, it’s strictly “Pay to Play.” Should they protest, The People be damned! Let them eat cake…
CAN YOU SAY: COUP D’ÉTAT?
To ensure deification of plutocracy, the increasingly “activist” U.S. Supreme Court pushed Democracy off the precipice: UnConstitutionally interfering with a state’s election laws; stopping that state from counting its votes for president; and, then, unilaterally appointing the loser of the 2000 election as president was as blatant as a brass knuckled sucker-punching groin-kicking coup d’état can get.
A truer gentleman, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote, in mourning: “What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.”
BUSH THE UNELECTED’S PERMANENT STATE OF WAR:
With the nonelected “chickenhawks” Bush, Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, their erratic recycled “Cold Warrior” Secretary of Defense/War, promoting wars everywhere at all times against everybody, bills piled up big-time.
It costs a lot to train, install, and then continually bribe every dictator! Just ask our past carefully-recruited and extensively funded CIA “assets:” Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
As for American military forces occupying between 130 and 140 foreign countries; damn straight these countries have the oil and gas, pipelines, forests, water, minerals, and other amenities we need to pay for our eternally carrying the “White Man’s Burden”!
If you dared question the panicked Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Fox/Murdoch insanity/inanity of the day—If you dared represent Truth: The United States regularly recruits, hires, trains, funds, and arms the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden worldwide; there were no WMDs, no al-Qaeda links, and no enriched uranium in Iraq; Osama bin Laden was not in Afghanistan; the planned invasions of Columbia and Iran were as overtly stupid and unwinnable as invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan; you were harshly and publicly judged an “enemy,” even a “terrorist,” to be attacked, censored, censured, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered; all with no arraignment, counsel or trial.
BUSH THE UNELECTED REPEALS 900 YEARS OF CIVILIZED LAW:
Bush the Unelected revoked civilized law, when he repealed habeas corpus, guaranteed by the Magna Carta 900 years ago: “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”
BUSH THE UNELECTED VIOLATES GENEVA CONVENTIONS.
BUSH THE UNELECTED PROMOTES WIDESPREAD TORTURE AND ABUSE OF WAR VICTIMS AND PRISONERS:
Bush the Uneleced desecrated nearly-unanimous worldwide sympathy extended to the United States after the tragedies of September 11, 2001; by authorizing routine torture and abuse of prisoners–most of them noncombatants–in direct violation of four Geneva Convention Treaties signed by the United States and of three other Geneva Protocols that govern treatment of war victims and prisoners.
BUSH THE UNELECTED REJECTS 235 YEARS OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE:
Bush the Unelected insulted every independent-thinking person in the World when, on September 20, 2001, he told a joint session of the U.S. Congress: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Bush the Unelected shocked every man and woman in uniform by ordering the terrorists to “bring it on!”
NONELECTED “CHICKENHAWK” COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF INVITES ENEMIES TO ATTACK U.S. TROOPS!
U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey) said he couldn’t believe Bush’s “irresponsible and inciteful” (inciting) language.
“I am shaking my head in disbelief,” Lautenberg said. “When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander—let alone the Commander-in-Chief—invite enemies to attack U.S. Troops!”
As for the closest chain of command, how could brave soldiers NOT be stirred into battle by Chickenhawk Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld’s inspirational, lucid, and motivational eloquence? “There are known knowns,” Rumsfeld carefully explained on February 12, 2002. “There are things we know we know,” he continued. “We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don’t know, we don’t know.” 4
OBAMA AND DEMOCRATS EMBRACE BUSH’S AND CHENEY’S INFAMOUS “DARK SIDE”:
Aerial bombardments of anything; tortures and black ops everywhere; black budgets and black bases anywhere; targeted assassinations against whomever we don’t like at the moment; massive prisons out in the middle of nowhere holding thousands of people proven guilty of nothing; and other perversities conjured by Dick Cheney’s infamous “Dark Side” are now the norm.
The change in administrations from Bush/Cheney to Barack Obama/Joe Biden has meant nothing. Contrary to oft-declared and much-appreciated campaign promises; Guantanamo remains open, torture continues unabated worldwide, and wars, up a couple more in Africa, continue, with Afghanistan now the U.S.A.’s longest war, costing half a trillion dollars.5
President Obama’s Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex now captures and stores two billion of Americans’ private e-mails and telephone calls a day, reports the New Yorker.
NO DEMOCRACY ABROAD EQUALS NO DEMOCRACY AT HOME:
Do Indigenous Peoples particularly enjoy being militarily occupied by ham-handed Americans determined to steal their resources?
If not, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Obama, and Baucus are right: To ensure resources for the One Percenters to maintain their coveted livestyle; low-to-middle income Americans must forever finance endless wars against infinite enemies abroad–Not only with their hard-earned money, but with their crimson blood; because military enlistment is the ONLY way most low-income and middle-income folks can get access to decent health care and post-high school educations.
As for the needy back in the “HomeLand”–Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Rumsfeld’s Nazi-esque jargon, so heartwarming for them, so heartrending for us—Obama, his henchmen Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina, Baucus, and other pro-Corporate weak-kneed “Democrats” apparently believe the public must quit “whining” (yes, that’s the word they use) and appreciate unAmerican Corporate personhood, ultimate Corporate dictatorships, and a domestic police state enforced by heavily-armed right-wing paramilitary “SWAT Teams” and clandestine “Drug Task Forces” controlling every American community.
EMPIRE AND DEMOCRACY ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
So, now we have a “SuperCongress”6 of dubious Constitutionality, comprised of “SuperPeople,” (aka: Severely-compromised out of touch “Entitled Aristocrats,” like Baucus and Congress’ many other multimillionaires), that is meeting in secret behind closed doors, cutting deals, and setting things right.
Will the “SuperCongress:”
1. Defund the Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex’s endless countless overseas wars against civilian populations and infrastructures; and restore all of these so-very-desperately-needed funds back to domestic U.S. priorities, such as: Education, nutrition, health care, clean air, pure water, and mass transit?
2. Most importantly: Restore civilian rule back to the United States of America, by reasserting Congress’ Constitutional powers to stop illegal presidential and bureaucratic war-making and to impeach Big Money’s disastrous “bought-and-paid-for” “activist” U.S. Supreme Court for halting a general election; unConstitutionally appointing a favored family friend, far too stupid to earn the position, as President; subverting our Constitution and slogging ever-deeper into dead-end Corporate fascism; a paramilitary police state FAR more invasive than anything previously imagined by even the most paranoid?
Will Washington D.C. politicians “Do the Right Thing,” just as DC comics’ heroes or even stars in Spike Lee films? Does former Nazi and Inquisition leader, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, now calling himself Pope Benedict XVI, shit in the woods?
FEDERAL BUDGET/SUPERCONGRESS SPOILER ALERT:
FORGET ALL BIBLICAL NONSENSE ABOUT “PLOWSHARES!” 7
THE SMART MONEY IS INTO “SWORDS!” 7
The United States of America spend more money on war than all other countries combined.
Don’t expect Baucus, Obama, or any “SuperCongress”6 to address the two-thirds (66 percent) of our federal budget devoted to killing people; occupying their countries with 1,000 military bases; and protecting Big Oil, the rich Corporatocracy, Big Media, and their wholly-owned subsidiaries— Congress, Supreme Court, President, and their farcical Tweedledum-Tweedledee Democrat-Republican duopoly.
It should be noted that, in their federal budget analyses, the fiercest Berserkers against government deficits and federal debt–Tea Partiers, Fox “News,” and other far right wingers–REFUSE to acknowledge paying off massive interest, continually accruing from expenditures on prior wars, killings, invasions, and occupations; as part of the federal budget.
So, their “heads-permanently-stuck-in-the-sand” figures run closer to 60 percent of the budget for present and future killings. The most dishonest, like Fox, cook the books even further, jimmying down the costs of so many wars-without-end, by tossing Social Security, an entirely separate budget, into the mix. (Adding unconceivable hypocrisy, the most Patriarchal right-wing Americans: War-demanding Apocalyptic Christians and war-loving Fundamentalist Christians consider themselves strongly “pro-life.”)
On the other hand, well-informed experts in the field peg war and military expenditures at about 70 percent of the total federal budget; when interest past due and “black operations” are factored.
In truth, there is no definitive percentage, as Congress is not informed on black operations and black operations’ costs are never exposed. The public never knows where we are building dozens of top secret black ops bases. These black ops bases never appear on maps and their budgets are never subjected to Congressional approval.
In general, once a country is occupied with covert black ops bases, the chances are minimal those bases will ever close and maximal that overt warfare against that country’s and/or adjacent countries’ civilian populations and infrastructures will soon commence.
THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:
As for early-20th Century American labor organizers’ cries for “Bread and Roses,” both are most certainly “off the table,” to use the odious term with which “Big Pharma Baucus” Imperially and immediately dismissed public health care options preferred by most Americans.
Baucus’ years-long arrogance against the public; his so-extremely-painful-to-witness public fumbling and bungling of health care; his steadfast devotion to subsidizing billionaires and TOTAL public revulsion against Baucus’ last-second desperate attempts to force a 1,900-plus-page bill containing $1.27 trillion of pure adulterated “pork” (well, “lard,” actually) through the final days of the 2010 Democratic Congress were everything the Republicans needed to take over the U.S. House in 2011, capture the Democrats’ now- rudderless, meaningless, and dysfunctional U.S. Senate; and even the White House in the 2012 elections; with Baucus, the $12-million man himself, biting the dust in November 2014.
SO, GUNS GALORE “ARMAMENTS ‘R US” U.S.A. HAS NO BREAD AND NO ROSES.
Just bereaved pensioners; homeless vets; disabled and elderly Medicare and Medicaid patients; countless millions suffering from joblessness, depression and mental illness, poor education, no mass transit, no health care, minimal nutrition with 45 million Americans relying on Food Stamps (now called “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” or “SNAP”), and upon winter heating assistance for their very survival; desperately clawing and fighting amongst themselves for the crumbs from the One Percenters’ tables, as if their very lives depended upon it. For, they do.
EXPECT NO RELIEF FROM ACTIVIST U.S. SUPREME COURT:
Relief is nowhere in sight. The now alarmingly “activist” U.S. Supreme Court remains permanently stuck in “batshit crazy” mode, ruling that: Whoever has the most money has the most “ free speech;” Big Government owns and controls every female American’s womb; Big Government has the right to dictate IF fully-informed, consenting adult Americans can love, WHO we love, and HOW we love. Under the falangist Scalia Court, Big Government even proscribes if we marry and who we must choose as spouses!
According to today’s “activist” U.S. Supreme Court, the miracle of Life itself can now be patented, owned, and exploited by Big Corporations–taking both immorality and slavery to extremes not seen since 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled, seven-to-two, that Americans of discernible African descent were ineligible for citizenship in the United States of America, “the Land of the Free.”
To notorious One Percenters like Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, that creepy brain-dead black guy, and their ilk: Americans of color are not people; but Corporations of any stripe ARE people!
Yes, these decadent off-shores-based transnational unAmerican Corporations sucking the life’s blood from our dying American Empire and our own polluted, corrupted nation; are somehow actual living, breathing “people,” with all inherent Constitutional privileges of “personhood;” BUT―quite conveniently―NO accompanying unsavory liabilities of us mere mortals, such as paying taxes or dying!
BIG NEWS—DEMOCRATS HAVE GIVEN UP REPRESENTING THE PEOPLE!
It is hardly news that inmates have taken over the asylum on the Potomac.
But, it is indeed news that Democrats, so perfectly bovine in blissful and wholesale denial of the inevitable butchering sure to ensue, have now given up representing the People; instead preferring corpulence, so generously proffered at copious corporate feedlots.
CRY, MY BELOVED COUNTRY:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Robert Francis Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have no clue who these corporate-shilling so-called “Democrat” Pretenders are; spending an obscene $34.46 for every single vote!
FDR, JFK, RFK, and MLK would never believe their beloved America, in the greatly-anticipated 21st Century, is now a country where poor people starve, can’t get homes or jobs, can’t receive good educations or medical care, and ultimately die; due to so many, many, many resources diverted to endless overseas invasions, wars, and military occupations; all loyally facilitated by cheerleading and obfuscation from Big Media–directly owned by defense contractors or fully controlled through interlocking boards and staffs from the Military/Industrial/Surveillance Complex’s perpetual war machine.
BAUCUS DILIGENTLY MAINTAINS THE STATUS QUO:
But, hey, inside the Beltway, the rich are just fine, thank you very much.
U.S. Sen. Baucus (Corporate D-Mont.) is now ranked by GQ Magazine as the fourth most powerful person in Washington, D.C.
“He may represent a state populated by only 967,000 people,” writes GQ, “but as chairman of the committee that controls the money and as the recipient of very large amounts of lobbying dollars per citizen represented, Baucus controls the fate of every bill to affect all 300 million Americans.
“Health care? Cap and trade? Light rail? All roads lead through Baucus. Although he has a reputation for not playing nice with fellow senators, when the White House hires staff partly because of their close ties to him, he has all the friends he needs,” concluded GQ, referring to Jim Messina, who GQ ranked as 25th most powerful; served as Baucus’ Chief of Staff, President Barack Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and, ominously, is now campaign manager for Obama’s 2012 reelection bid.
In an “only-inside-the-Beltway” absurdity comparable to Obama’s hiring Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner to straighten out economic chaos they created; corporate Democrat Baucus, still doling out $3.3 trillion to $3.5 trillion of taxpayer-provided subsidies to America’s multimillionaires and billionaires, is now the key player in the 12-member “Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction,” or “SuperCongress,”6 charged with cutting at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years.
PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY?
To date, Baucus has expressed no regrets or apologies for his pivotal role in defunding local, state, and federal governments; limitless funding for the One Percenters, with all their “Too Big to Fail” scams; and other lobbyists-concocted schemes that bankrupted the country and caused economic tailspins worldwide.
PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY?
As for public accountability for what Bush, Cheney, and Baucus did in 2001: Forget it. Experienced reporters with the prerequisite skills to handle this story were fired, laid off, or bought out years ago.
With extremely few exceptions; Corporate media, purposefully preoccupied with cheap, tawdry, mind-numbing “McNews,” “LifeStyles,” unbridled celebrity gossip, ad nauseam; have left this whole sordid story of the enormous costs of subsidizing the Wealthy and enforcing their Corporate Imperialism and dictatorships across the globe uncovered.
Why stir a hornet’s nest? It will just upset their Big Media/Big Military/Big Everything bosses; considerably enriched by and quite grateful for the grandiose “cover” provided by Bush’s, Cheney’s, and Baucus’ trillions in tax subsidies and resultant “Class Wars,” for which Corporate Media happily blame America’s 99 Percenters; hapless victims all.
BIG MEDIA ARE THE ONE PERCENTERS!
There is no more “news” in Big Corporate Media; just as there are no more “beats,” with no more well-informed “reporters” covering them.
Instead, “talking points” are established by Big Media, big advertisers, and the anti-democratic “military-industrial complex” so accurately described by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his phenomenally prescient “Farewell Address,” delivered January 17, 1961, during his final days as President.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” warned President Eisenhower, the only military general elected president during the 20th Century.
“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
“We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together,” concluded Eisenhower in his final statement as president. 8
GENERAL ELECTRIC’S NEWS DIVISION:
For example, do you really think General Electric’s Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, or any other interchangeable GE Talking Head (GE’s first prominent Talking Head was a washed-up 1930s broadcaster and 1940s B movie actor named Ronald Reagan, who morphed into GE’s highly-paid bunkum huckster from 1954 to 1962), is going to tell you that GE, a principle “defense” contractor, nuclear weapons builder, and arms exporter that receives billions from our government, paid NO taxes in 2010 on $5 billion in U.S. profits and $14.2 billion in worldwide profits?
How about GE/NBC flacks Brokaw or Williams disclosing that, even though it paid no taxes, GE milked $4.7 billion in tax subsidies in 2008, 2009, and 2010; from actual U.S. taxpayers. Attention 99 Percenters: That’s US!
Or, can we count on GE’s “news” sycophants letting us know that five top GE executives paid themselves annual salaries totaling $75.9 million in 2010? Or, will GE’s “news” division even let us know how much it pays Williams to spin the news (approximated at $10 million annually)?
Some news outlets (not GE’s NBC, of course) did point out that, more than 40 years ago, GE was alerted by its own in-house engineers about severe dangers posed by the six nuclear power plants GE designed for the coastline of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. As experts so accurately predicted, in March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear reactors exploded and experienced core meltdowns, in the world’s greatest nuclear power disaster since the spring 1986 fires, explosions, and reactor meltdowns at Chernobyl, Ukraine.
To summarize: Can you say the word: “Meltdown”? Brokaw and Williams can’t. Or, won’t. You get the idea.
TALKING HEADS’ TALKING POINTS:
President Eisenhower’s stern warnings notwithstanding, Big Media’s “talking point” edicts are sent down the food chain to poorly-paid and badly-treated minions, with strict orders to stay “on message.” Those that don’t or who occasionally lapse into vestigial ethics are summarily fired.
As a result, the young and preciously naïve MBAs now running corporate newsrooms actually consider nuclear power safe. They are one in believing, as the delusional Cheney (refer to above quotes), that Bush and Cheney were actually elected or that Afghanistan can actually be conquered.
VELVEETA NEWS:
These purposefully ill-informed publishers and editors quaintly refer to their totally-demoralized and highly-transient reporters-converted-into-stenographers as: “content providers.”
Instead of working what-used-to-be-their “beats,” Big Media’s absurdly few surviving “content providers” haunt increasingly smaller and ever-more-cloistered newsrooms; cynically keeping each other “on message;” eternally copying, cutting, pasting, and “processing” their corporate “product,” “content,” “filler,” or whatever other trash is so generously tossed their way by extravagantly-compensated corporate flacks; back-stabbing pundits; other Beltway insiders and lobbyists; Big Media’s soothsayers; Big Military’s current and retired Top Brass; “embedded” (in-bedded) so-called “journalists;” unAmerican Corporations with whom Big Media and Big Military incestuously merge; celebrities’ public relations personnel; and politicians’ myriad spin doctors.
DEMOCRATS FRAUDULENTLY BLAME “TEA PARTY” FOR ECONOMIC DISASTER―NOT BAUCUS!
Democrats now fraudulently blame the nascent Big Oil-f unded “Tea Party,” which didn’t even exist when Baucus carried Bush’s tax subsidies for billionaires through the U.S. Senate, for the country’s financial meltdown and resultant downgrading of the U.S.A.’s credit rating!
In a September 26, 2011, fund-raising letter that fails entirely to mention the radical economic shifts and exponential rippling that Bush and Baucus are bringing down upon us all with their 2001 tax breaks for billionaires, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), reproves: “The recent ‘Tea Party downgrade’ of our credit rating is the last straw!”
“No matter what they say, the Republican plan is just George W. Bush all over again,” claims Reid, as he asks for even more money from loyal but ever-so-ignorant Democrats to stop “the GOP’s radical agenda. More wasteful tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, more special giveaways to special interests, and still no help for working families.”
BIG MEDIA’S ECHO CHAMBER:
Media stenographers, sans Fox of course, dutifully report Democrats’ false allegations that everything is the “Tea Party’s” fault, with no reference to corporate Democrat Baucus’ seminal persona.
After work, Corporate Media’s ever-diminishing staffers, clinging by their very fingernails to miserable always-on-the-chopping-block corporate jobs, partake in enough alcohol or THC to temporarily anesthetize their complicities.
If it were only 20 years earlier, they could tune into The Tonight Show on NBC and watch Johnny Carson’s late night comedic character “Carnac the Magnificent,” who answered questions before even seeing or hearing them, utilize his amazing psychic abilities to predict the following, come late-November:
LOOT AND BOUNTY APLENTY SPELL MUNIFICENT THANKSGIVINGS FOR BILLIONAIRES AND, OF COURSE, CONGRESS;
LUMPS OF COAL FOR THE LUCKIEST YOUNG, JOBLESS, POOR, SICK, HOMELESS, ELDERLY, AND DISABLED AMERICANS;
NADA FOR THE REST; AND
EVERMORE BLANK CHECKS FOR WARS, BOMBS, INVASIONS, OCCUPATIONS, AND KILLINGS.
Baucus’ “SuperCongress”6 must report to both House and Senate by November 23, 2011, with both houses constrained to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” and no filibusters or amendments allowed.
©2011, Paul Thomas Richards
EDITOR’S NOTES:
1. Please stay tuned for future installments of “The Best and the Brightest, Circa 21st Century” and Dispatches from the Wildlands™, when we begin exploring Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’ favorite “pork.” Having undergone 11 surgeries in recent years, I need financial help to conduct this needed research. I welcome any and all support from inquisitive fans and readers, editors, agents, and publishers committed to accountability for public officials and government. Please contact me at: Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com .
2. RE: “The Best and the Brightest.” In 2001, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter David Halberstam (1934 – 2007) said he named his 1972 classic about the United States’ wars against Southeast Asia, “The Best and the Brightest,” to refer to military, industry, and political insiders who, instead of diplomacy, insisted on “brilliant policies that defied common sense.” (These policies included: Massacres; “carpet bombings;” killing entire forests, forest inhabitants, and watersheds throughout Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos with deadly toxins; destroying most agricultural, civilian and religious infrastructures, including vital dikes and waterways thousands of years in the making; draining and mining rice paddies and other agricultural lands; slaughtering water buffaloes (the Vietnamese “tractors”); forcing farmers and other rural Vietnamese into concentration camps (or, in CIA-speak: “strategic hamlets”); drug running; tortures; assassinations; and other terrorism against civilian populations).
3. A significantly shorter version of this piece appeared in the monthly news magazine, In These Times.
4. Slate has compiled a collection of what Slate calls Rumsfeld’s “Poems,” containing Rumsfeld’s exact quotes, every bit as lucid as the above, from official transcripts. Political masochists CLICK HERE for more of Rumsfeld’s imaginative wisdom.
5. For up-to-the-minute costs of American wars since 2001, go to: http://costofwar.com/en/.
6. Since no amendments will be allowed and all other publicly-elected senators and congressional representatives are excluded from all decision-making; this possibly unConstitutional, or, at the very least, extraConstitutional “SuperCongress,” or “Super Congress” is far more powerful than any type of Congressional “committee,” “SuperCommittee,” or “Super Committee” —All terms preferred by Big Corporate Media, since their use of “Committee” conveys false impressions of public participation and accountability.
7. “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah II: Verse IV).
8. Not only were Gen. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961, “Farewell Address” forewarnings about the Military/Industrial Complex prescient, they were extremely significant historically.
Almost 166 years earlier, America’s first great military leader, General George Washington, named President by unanimous consent from both the Constitutional Convention and Electoral College, had also warned Congress against “Pretended Patriotism,” Foreign Wars, and “Mischiefs of Foreign Intrigue.”
Gen. Washington, the American Colonies’ most prominent leader in their successful Revolution against the monopolistic and dictatorial “British East India Company,” then one of the world’s largest “mega-corporations,” knew, from a lifetime of first-hand experiences, the extreme dangers of war.
So, on September 19, 1796, as the new United States of America’s first retiring President, Gen. Washington, in his own seminal “Farewell Address” also cautioned Congress about ill-advised foreign wars:
“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican Government.
“But that jealousy, to be useful, must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it.
“Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other.
“Real Patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favourite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.
“Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances, with any portion of the foreign world;—so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it;—for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements.
“I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy.—I repeat it therefore let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense.—But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.
“In offering to you, my Countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression, I could wish,—that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our Nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of Nations.
“But if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit; some occasional good, that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism, this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.”
9. A journalist with more than 44 years’ experience, Paul Thomas Richards has covered politics and resource issues in the American West since 1968, serving as editor or co-editor of three newspapers, newsman and editor for The Associated Press, and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC. Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers; and authored a syndicated political column.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968™, near the community of Boulder, Mont.; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located on-line at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
More Dispatches from the Wildlands™ at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/
Biographical information at: http://www.PRMediaConsultants.com
More biographical information at: http://www.Richards2006.us
COMING SOON! Watch for: http://www.DispatchesfromtheWildlands.info
“In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.”
Henry David Thoreau
April 23, 1851; Concord, Massachusetts
Paul Thomas Richards Sixteen Major Errors of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill
Analysis by Paul Richards, PR Media Consultants®
Sixteen Major Errors of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill:
All of the sixteen following errors, flaws, and weaknesses of S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill, were covered in my July 2009 in-depth analysis posted the day that Tester announced this legislation at a Townsend, Montana, sawmill at: www.NewWest.net.
On July 17, 2009, NewWest.Net offered Sen. Jon Tester an opportunity to rebut all of these points. As of this writing (January 7, 2010), he is still “considering it.”
It should be noted that, on July 17, 2009, Peter Aengst of the Wilderness Society did issue statements calling this analysis and the resultant NewWest.Net investigative piece a “rant.” Aengst refrained from addressing any specifics.
1. The public was completely shut out of the drafting of S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill. The bill was drafted in an underhanded manner by a handful of insiders, sworn to secrecy. Rather than incorporating meaningful public involvement, Tester chose the path of “fait accompli.” This has created enormous resentment from all quarters.
DETAILS: I, for example, am a member of the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association. I served on the board of the Montana Wilderness Association and have received the organization’s “Brass Lantern” Award.
Years ago, when these three conservation groups and the timber industry first formed the “Beaverhead-Deerlodge Partnership,” I approached the players. As one who had been involved at the grassroots level with the Deerlodge National Forest for over 27 years, and as an official member of the Deerlodge National Forest Technical Advisory Committee, I thought my presence might be an asset during negotiations. I had been involved with the successful appeal and resultant “Settlement Agreement” of the Deerlodge Forest Plan, which had been heralded region-wide as a model for citizen participation.
Over a two-year period, I sent numerous e-mails and made numerous phone calls, trying to get into the negotiations or at least monitor them. All my attempts were rebuffed, as were all attempts by many other members of the public. We, as members of the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association, were kept entirely in the dark as our organizations’ staffs compromised away our public wildlands.
I have also been a member of the Wilderness Society for 40 years. At NO time were Wilderness Society members ever appraised as to deals, trade-offs, and The Wilderness Society’s staff actually supporting the removal of current administrative and Congressional protections for our public wildlands.
Wildlands proponents weren’t the only ones excluded. People in favor of resource development, county officials, and state legislators were also kept in the dark. U.S. Forest Service officials, scientists, biologists, botanists, silviculturalists, and public information specialists were purposefully excluded from participation and denied access to all drafts of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.
In short: There was NO public information and NO public discussion. Countless interest groups and individuals were surgically removed from every major decision regarding their own public lands.
Instead being forged by well-informed public debate, reviewed by U.S. Forest Service scientists and experts, and exposed to the healing properties of disinfecting sunlight, Tester’s bill was clandestinely and sloppily cobbled together behind-the-scenes.
2. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, violates Tester’s 2006 campaign promise “to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.”
DETAILS: With only a week to go, polls showed State Sen. Jon Tester and State Auditor John Morrison at a dead heat in the June 2006 Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate. Tester operative Missoula attorney Pat Smith directly contacted former state Rep. Paul Richards (me), who was running third of five candidates in the race, concerning Richards’ possible endorsement of Tester.
Richards agreed to meet twice with Tester in Helena, Montana, on Tuesday, May 30, 2006, to see if terms could be worked out for this endorsement.
As a result of these two negotiating sessions, Tester agreed to terms detailed at: www.Richards2006.us, including the specific promise that: “If elected, Jon Tester will work to protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas.”
In exchange for these mutually-agreed-upon-with-witnesses (including Tester’s wife, Shar, and Tester’s son, Shon) terms, Paul Richards agreed to withdraw from the race for U.S. Senate and publicly ask his supporters to vote for Jon Tester. After the agreement was reached, Richards personally contacted his extensive network of environmental advocates throughout the state, detailed Tester’s commitment to “protect all of Montana’s remaining roadless areas,” and asked his supporters to vote for Tester in the June 2006 Democratic primary election, rather than Richards.
News of Richards’ endorsement appeared on front pages of most Montana daily newspapers and was prominent in all other media the final week before the election. Tester and Richards celebrated the win jointly at a June 6, 2006, election night party in Missoula, MT.
3. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, alienates Tester’s main supporters from the 2006 election.
DETAILS: Conservationists provided the margin of victory that allowed Tester to defeat incumbent Sen. Conrad Burns in the general election of 2006. In tacking solely towards the timber industry, moneyed corporations that never previously supported him in any fashion, Tester has abandoned his true constituency.
To date, due to interminable efforts by countless pro-logging public relations specialists, reporters and editors that know better have been forced into states of profound stupor. As a result of this lethargy, Montana’s corporate media have largely bought into the “spin” created by timber corporations, Tester, Baucus, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, Montana Wilderness Association, and Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Instead of raising necessary questions concerning potential loss of our public wildlands legacy and expenditures of well over $100 million in taxpayer timber subsidies, corporate media in Montana have cast legitimate public debate aside and joined the spinmasters’ choir, making Tester’s bill the “feel good” legislation of the year!
National media, on the other hand, will likely see through the smoke and mirrors, no matter how numerous and gregarious the spinmasters, how “nice” the legislation’s sponsor, or how desperately the sawmills crave even more taxpayer subsidies.
As the actual implications of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill become known to public lands stakeholders throughout the nation, Tester’s credibility among public lands advocates and true conservationists will suffer accordingly. Ultimately, this will become reflected in his in-state standing. Instead of longtime dedicated conservationist like the esteemed Senator Lee Metcalf representing the long-term interests of our public lands legacy, Montanans are now looking at a one-term flash in the pan.
4. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, “undesignates” S 393 wildlands and loots the wildlands legacy of former Senator Lee Metcalf – Montana’s greatest conservationist.
DETAILS: Tester’s bill is a full-scale pillaging of the legacy of Montana’s greatest conservationist and my mentor, U.S. Senator Lee Metcalf. In 1977, Sen. Metcalf, only a year before he died, worked tirelessly to pass Senate Bill 393, the Montana Wilderness Study Act.
Sen. Metcalf’s magnificent legacy protected nine roadless wildland areas, while they were studied for official designation as wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964, a bill which Sen. Metcalf had earlier personally shepherded through Congress, with the conscientious advocacy of Wilderness Society Executive Director Stewart Brandborg and Wilderness Society Field Director Clif Merritt, both Montana natives.
Tester’s bill removes the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area and the West Pioneers Wilderness Study Area from the Congressional protection of Sen. Metcalf’s Senate Bill 393 and opens more than two-thirds of these priceless and irretrievable roadless wildlands to logging.
Only high-elevation “rocks and ice” non-timber producing tracts would be designated wilderness. Of the 94,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area, only 53,000 acres would be protected from development. Of the 151,000 acres of public roadless wildlands currently in the West Pioneers Wilderness Study Area, only 26,000 acres would be protected from development.
Tester’s bill “undesignates” the Axolotl Lakes Wilderness Study Area, Bell/Limekiln Canyons Wilderness Study Area, East Fork Blacktail Wilderness Study Area, Henneberry Ridge Wilderness Study Area, and Hidden Pasture Wilderness Study Area. These roadless wildlands would be subjected to “logging without laws,” as Tester’s bill excludes logging them from protective provisions of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
5. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, pulls roadless areas out from the protection of the Clinton Roadless Rule and the Obama Roadless Initiative.
DETAILS: Tester’s bill withdraws around one million acres of public roadless wildlands on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest from the protection of the Clinton Roadless Rule and the Obama Roadless Initiative and opens them to roading and logging.
You won’t find this in the bill. You have to go to the maps that accompany the bill, maps to which courts will undoubtedly refer, if this misguided legislation actually passes. The maps (located at: http://tester.senate.gov/Legislation/upload/Proposed-Land-Designations.pdf ) are very specific in reclassifying the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s currently protected roadless wildlands to a new category, officially designated “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”
6. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, Congressionally overrides legitimate forest planning processes that involve full public information and participation.
DETAILS: Tester’s bill circumvents National Forest planning laws, procedures, and regulations. Currently, the U.S. Forest Service is required to honestly evaluate “site-specific impacts” of proposed logging.
Under Tester’s bill, these requirements would be supplanted by a new system of “Landscape Scale Restoration Projects” where mandated logging takes place in the total absence of well-established forest planning procedures that require state-of-the art science, public information, and public involvement.
Tester’s bill Congressionally mandates cut levels, damn the environmental and financial costs. Instead of decisions being made at local levels by informed forest science professionals, Tester’s bill dictates a one-size-fits-all prescription that prioritizes logging above all other uses.
Under Tester’s bill, taxpayer subsidies to timber corporations are more important than anything, be it elk hunting (which would diminish as elk security is logged away by mandated timber cutting), fishing (drastically debilitated by inevitable water degradation caused by unsustainable logging), steady supplies of clean irrigation water (logging causes much faster watershed runoffs and increased sedimentation), pure community water supplies (most western Montana cities get their water from our public roadless wildlands), diminished wildlife habitat, you name it.
7. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, promotes “logging without laws.”
DETAILS: By mandating timber cuts be placed above all other concerns, Tester’s bill could statutorily exempt timber cutting from the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (which Tester’s bill mistakenly calls the “National Environmental Protection Act”), Wilderness Act, National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. This is a point of contention. Tester claims environmental laws will be adhered to. To the uninitiated, that sounds just great! However, the initiated know full well that when Congress mandates timber cutting quotas, federal courts have consistently held that the Congressional mandate to cut down the public’s trees trumps federal environmental and land use laws.
We’ve been through all this before. For over 20 years, politicians have claimed environmental laws would be followed, at the same time that they have imposed mandatory cutting quotas on public lands. While Tester’s public relations have lulled gullible “conservationists” into believing we can get the cut out and follow environmental laws, the courts consistently rule that the mandated cuts are paramount and that environmental laws don’t have to be respected.
The legal track record is available to anyone that can Google. The court precedents have already been established: If you have a conflict in law, “the specific overrides the general.” That is, Congressionally-mandated cutting quotas preempt such laws as the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Wilderness Act, National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act, and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
Thus, despite proclamations to the contrary from Tester’s “conservation” collaborationists, if the Tester bill’s forced cutting quotas are approved by Congress, environmental laws would likely fall helplessly by the wayside.
8. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates a cut of 7,000 acres a year for 10 years on a forest that sustainably produces, according to Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest officials, only between 500 and 2800 acres a year.
DETAILS: As a lifelong resident of the area and as a long-time member of the U.S. Forest Service’s Technical Advisory Committee, I know full well that the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest is not productive timberland. Much of the forest is east of the Continental Divide, receives little precipitation, and has an extremely short growing season, due to its high altitude. Due to these limiting factors, it costs the public at least $1,400 per acre to log in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
Tester claims the mandated cut will come from the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s suitable timber base and that inventoried roadless areas are not threatened. But, Tester is ignoring reality. In recent years, logging professionals with the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest have established the Forest’s sustainable yearly harvest at 500 acres. The most they’ve cut, even during the years of the housing boom, is 2,800 acres a year.
Can Tester mandate a cut of 70,000 acres (7,000 acres a year for 10 years) on a forest that is not productive timberland, without entering and developing undeveloped (roadless) lands? For a clue, review the maps located at: http://tester.senate.gov/Legislation/upload/Proposed-Land-Designations.pdf and note that, under the Tester bill, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest’s inventoried roadless wildlands are officially re-designated as “Timber Suitable or Open to Harvest.”
9. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates a cut of 30,000 acres of grizzly bear habitat on the Kootenai National Forest, causing distress and disturbance that some biologists say will force the dwindling Yaak grizzly bears into insecure habitat and ultimately extinction.
DETAILS: Wildlife consultant Brian Peck reports, “I have worked for 15 years to try and save the imperiled 30-40 grizzlies in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem in a landscape where the “Cores” are too small, the “Buffers” are over-logged and roaded, and the “Linkages” are non-existent.
Tester’s bill mandates the cutting of 3,000 acres per year for ten years on the Kootenai National Forest, a forest that already looks like a moonscape in many areas from decades of U.S. Forest Service abuse. How is another 30,000 acres of logging not going to be the last nail in these bear’s coffin?”
10. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, could have a severe adverse impact upon rare, threatened, and endangered species.
DETAILS: Since the Tester bill Congressionally-mandates timber cuts, curtails forest planning, and severely restricts the U.S. Forest Service from accurately assessing logging’s impacts; environmental protections provided by the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (mistakenly called the “National Environmental Protection Act” by Tester’s bill), National Forest Management Act, Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and Wilderness Act will likely be preempted.
If this scenario plays out, the public will never know the full extent to which secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted, particularly in the Kootenai National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our public lands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitat of species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, elk, arctic grayling, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
11. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, ignores the scientific need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species.
DETAILS: Conservation biologists have long understood the need to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species, with core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors, or linkages.
More recently, scientists have documented that forest habitats are changing radically, due to global climate change. The species depending on our National Forests for survival are increasingly stressed by climate change and are increasingly in need of broader migration opportunities.
The “conservation” collaborationists (Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, Montana Wilderness Association, and Greater Yellowstone Coalition) publicly boast that, by supporting Tester’s bill, they are “creating” new wilderness areas.
These areas fail to pass scientific muster. A handful of nonproductive, high-altitude, limited-habitat “rocks and ice” wilderness areas, allocated to human recreational enjoyment does nothing for the vast majority of forest species. Unconnected islands of “rocks and ice” provide no biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity.
12. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, costs over $100 million for taxpayer-subsidized timber sales and lavish new sawmill power plants.
DETAILS: It costs the public at least $1,400 per acre to log in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. Mandating logging of 7,000 acres will cost the public $9,800,000 a year. Mandating this level of cutting for 10 years, as Tester proposes, will cost taxpayers at least $98 million dollars.
In fact, the cost of these timber industry subsidies will be considerably higher, as the above economic figures date from the housing boom, three-to-four years ago. Now, that we are in economic depression, there is no housing construction and hardly anyone is buying timber.
In today’s depressed market for timber, the “hard money” subsidies for loggers that the Tester bill mandates will likely reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years.
In addition to these taxpayer subsidies, Tester wants additional untold millions in taxpayer subsidies to build costly on-site power plants for the timber corporations promoting his bill. The taxpayer-financed power plants will only serve the timber corporations, not the communities of western Montana.
It is more corporate pork, plain and simple.
Tester’s power plants also make absolutely no sense. Trucking biomass to large, centralized power plants is grossly inefficient, when compared to utilizing numerous small-scale portable decentralized facilities.
It is far more practical to truck numerous inexpensive portable generators to the biomass, than to truck the biomass increasingly long distances to expensive and instantaneously obsolete centralized power facilities at sawmills.
13. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, negligently ignores the fact that there is no current demand for timber.
DETAILS: Since there is no demand for sawmills’ lumber, Tester’s bill defies basic common sense. The legislation is blatantly undisguised in its privatization of public resources and its forcing the public assumption of lumber mills’ private debt.
A mere four corporations: Pyramid Mountain Lumber (Seeley Lake), Roseburg Lumber (Missoula), RY Timber (Townsend and Livingston), and Sun Mountain Lumber (Deerlodge) will receive well over $100 million courtesy of the kind Senator, with taxpayers picking up the tab in tax dollars spent, watersheds degraded, habitat lost, and public wildlands destroyed.
14. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, mandates timber cutting, while leaving ensuing forest restoration optional.
DETAILS: This is the elephant in the living room. If Tester’s bill passes, by Congressional mandate, public wildlands will be roaded and their trees cut down. Then, after the trees are long gone, there will be no forest restoration.
Tester’s bill contains absolutely NO restoration mandates.
National Forests are littered with giant messes of logging restoration left unfunded and undone. It’s the U.S. Forest Service’s dirtiest secret: After the public’s trees are cut down and the logs hauled out, somehow, the agency just never seems to be able to find the money to honor its once-so-earnest promises of restoration.
There isn’t a national forest in the country that has actually delivered on its past commitments to restore public lands and watersheds wounded by logging. When it comes to budget priorities, post-logging forest reclamation and restoration has always been the U.S. Forest Service’s neglected and unwanted step-child.
Maintaining a brave posture in the face of this undeniable track record, Tester claims that revenues from mandated logging will pay for forest restoration projects. But, inconvenient truth again rears its ugly head: In lodgepole pine-dominant forests, there simply won’t be any revenues! At taxpayer-subsidies of $1,400 for every acre logged, just how will Tester’s restoration funds be magically generated?
This giant Ponzi scheme will likely be the undoing of the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill.
15. “Conservation” collaborationists supporting S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, have all received massive funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, which works to “confine wilderness legislation to rocks-and-ice regions by co-opting gullible or calculating people in the wilderness movement.”
DETAILS: The Pew Charitable Trusts are an independent nonprofit organization–the sole beneficiary of seven individual charitable funds, with assets of $5.2 billion at the end of June 2008, established by two sons and two daughters of Sun Oil Company founder, Joseph N. Pew, and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew.
Pew works to “confine wilderness legislation to rocks-and-ice regions by co-opting gullible or calculating people in the wilderness movement,” according to former Montana Wilderness Association President Elaine Snyder and former MWA Board Member Ross Titus.
“Organizations that have gained access to Pew money are expected to show short-term gains in wilderness protection regardless of the cost to other public resources and political efforts,” according to Snyder and Titus.
The Montana Wilderness Association has received tens of thousands of dollars of Pew money. The National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and the Wilderness Society have each received many millions of dollars from the Pew Charitable Trusts. National Wildlife Federation staffers are even housed at Pew’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.
Pew tipped its hand concerning the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill with a preemptive Thursday, July 9, 2009, e-mail “Alert” entitled “Sen. Tester Leads on Wilderness” from Mike Matz, executive director of the Pew-funded “Campaign for America’s Wilderness” (formerly known as the “Pew Wilderness Center”). “We need to THANK Senator Tester for showing positive leadership to protect the best of Montana’s pristine national forests,” Matz wrote.
“His bill would add the first new wilderness in Montana in more than a quarter of a century,” Matz continued. “Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife. Please take a moment to call Senator Tester today and make a difference for Montana’s wilderness. Dial the nearest local office now and tell them you appreciate Sen. Tester’s leadership on wilderness,” Matz concluded. Matz then listed the telephone number for each of Tester’s eight Montana field offices.
Matz was asking well-intentioned wilderness advocates, who don’t know the funding sources of the “Campaign for America’s Wilderness,” to praise Tester for a wildlands logging bill that Tester refused to allow the public to see!
On the same afternoon, the Wilderness Society, sent out its own “Wild Alert,” under the name of Kathy Kilmer. “Montana’s Sen. Jon Tester is considering legislation that would give Montana its first new wilderness designations in decades,” Kilmer wrote. “Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife. Please call Sen. Tester and thank him for showing positive leadership to protect the best of Montana’s pristine national forests,” Kilmer concluded. The Wilderness Society used the exact same non-alphabetical listing of Tester’s eight Montana field offices as Matz.
Besides the eeriness of identical non-alphabetical listings and the same language (“Sen. Tester needs to hear that Montanans want to protect their special places as wilderness, for Montana families, clean water and wildlife.”), the incredible thing about the preemptive Pew-funded e-mail campaigns of July 9, 2009, was that no one anywhere had actually seen the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, other than the timber industry and its collaborationists! Yet, we grassroots wildlands supporters were supposed to sign a blank check, call Tester, and thank him for drafting a public lands bill in secret!
When I first reported on the Pew-orchestrated campaign, Peter Aengst of the Wilderness Society wrote the following to Jared White of the Wilderness Society: “Can you check with Kathy Kilmer and see if it is possible to remove certain unsupportive people from our Wild Alert lists? Like Paul Richards (see his direct quoting of our alert).”
How dramatically have millions of Pew dollars caused the Wilderness Society to stray from its original mission, once pursued so faithfully by such courageous stalwarts as Robert Sterling Yard, Benton MacKaye, Robert and George Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Howard Zahniser, Stewart Brandborg, and Clif Merritt?
How could today’s Pew-funded Wilderness Society take me, a member of 40-years-standing, OFF of its mailing lists for being pro-wildlands and pro-wilderness?
How could today’s Pew-funded Wilderness Society exclude the public from public land decisions; support throwing away untold millions of dollars of pork for taxpayer-subsidized timber sales and lavish new sawmill power plants; exempting public wildlands from federal laws and the protection of a new earnest President; “undesignating” the legacy of Montana’s greatest conservationist; and destroying an irretrievable portion of Montana’s priceless roadless wildlands heritage?
16. S. 1470, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, fragments the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the ONLY functioning ecosystem in the lower 49 states where all native species still reside.
DETAILS: Northern Rockies wildlands are the only place in the lower 49 states where all native species and wildlife remain!
These are our public wildlands, belonging to all Americans.
The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill strips away the protection of these public wildlands currently provided by the Clinton Roadless Rule, the Obama Roadless Initiative, and Sen. Lee Metcalf’s incredibly farsighted Senate Bill 393.
By fragmenting the Northern Rockies Ecosystem, the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill is a direct assault on the scientific principles of biodiversity and biological integrity for which so many dedicated citizens have worked so hard for the last quarter century. If Tester’s bill passes: Secluded, rare, threatened, and endangered species will be adversely impacted, particularly in the Kootenai National Forest and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
By forcing unsustainable industrial-scale logging upon our public lands, Tester’s bill would irrevocably harm essential habitat of species that characterize the wild nature of the northern Rockies, such as the gray wolf, otter, mountain goat, mountain sheep, pika, elk, northern goshawk, boreal owl, pileated woodpecker, ferruginous hawk, sage grouse, Montana vole, sage thrasher, wild bison, peregrine falcon, bald eagle, pine marten, fisher, lynx, wolverine, arctic grayling, bull trout, cutthroat trout (Montana’s official state fish), and grizzly bear (Montana’s official state animal).
The “wilderness” areas in the Tester bill are fragmented and unconnected islands of largely “rocks and ice,” with no biological integrity and no potential for sustaining biodiversity.
These minimal “wilderness” designations in Tester’s bill fail entirely to protect different elevation habitats and their dependent species with core areas, buffer zones, and connecting biological corridors.
The Tester Wildlands Logging Bill promotes numerous abuses and violations that are clearly incompatible with the 1964 Wilderness Act, including motorized access into and through “wilderness,” low-level military overflights of “wilderness,” military aircraft landings in “wilderness,” possible “wilderness” logging, and other intrusions that violate the intrinsic principles of Wilderness.
As Montana State Rep. Francis Bardanouve used to say: “This is a BAD, BAD bill”:
As my very dear friend and companion, the late Rep. Francis Bardanouve, the highly-respected Dean of the Montana Legislature, sometimes proclaimed, when I served with him in the Montana House of Representatives, “This is a BAD, BAD bill!”
Francis rarely said this. But, the few times he did say it, legislators paid attention. They knew Francis did his homework.
House members understood that Rep. Francis Bardanouve ALWAYS researched exhaustively and deliberated studiously, before arriving at his opinion. As a result, Francis’s peers in the House of Representatives listened carefully and consistently heeded Francis’s warning that “This is a BAD, BAD bill.” They always voted the bad, bad bill down.
For all the errors, flaws, and weaknesses detailed above and for many other reasons raised by countless groups, officials, and citizens: S. 1470, Sen. Jon Tester’s Wildlands Logging Bill, is a BAD, BAD bill. It needs to die a quick death.
In support of lasting protection for our Nation’s priceless and irretrievable public wildlands legacy,
Respectfully submitted,
Paul Richards
PR Media Consultants®
Public Interest Media Since 1968
30 Brown’s Gulch Road
Boulder, MT 59632
Paul@PRMediaConsultants.com
www.PRMediaConsultants.com
www.Richards2006.us
http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/
(Editor’s Note: For further extensive in-depth analyses and commentary about the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill and for information about The Last Best Place Wildlands Campaign, a coalition of 55 conservation groups opposed to the Tester Wildlands Logging Bill, go to: http://testerloggingbilltruths.wordpress.com/ ).
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Richards
Paul Thomas Richards
PAUL THOMAS RICHARDS
A journalist with more than 43 years’ experience in Western politics and resource issues, Paul Thomas Richards has served as editor or co-editor of three newspapers; newsman and editor for The Associated Press; and elections manager for The AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC.
Richards founded and produced a successful radio news network; founded and hosted a political television interview program; founded and managed a news service for weekly newspapers, and authored a syndicated statewide political column.
Richards is a voluntarily-retired member of the Montana House of Representatives and a former candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Richards owns a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations and Indigenous Peoples, PR Media Consultants®, Public Interest Media Since 1968™, www.PRMediaConsultants.com , in the Boulder Valley, near the community of Boulder, Montana; works as a professional writer and editor; and contributes Dispatches from the Wildlands™, located at: http://blogs.alternet.org/paulrichards/ to AlterNet.
Paul Thomas Richards, Dispatches from the Wildlands™
DISPATCHES FROM THE WILDLANDS™
Every day, more Americans realize what the Corporatocracy and its puppet media and corporate-funded nonprofit organizations tell us to believe is usually a very far cry from reality.
As a reporter with more than 43 years’ experience in Montana politics and Western resource issues, through Dispatches from the Wildlands™, I bring viewpoints and information otherwise unavailable to readers, listeners, and viewers of corporate media in Montana; the Northern Rockies Ecosystem; and the West.
The Northern Rockies Ecosystem, comprised of northwestern Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington, is the LAST surviving ecosystem in the lower 49 states with all its Native species.
My Maxim as an Investigative Reporter, Journalist, and Editor:
“Obscenely overpaid corporate CEOs, CFOs, apologists, PR flacks, lobbyists, and their ilk are fleet-footed enough to dash in and steal what we let them from our national treasury; environmental commons of air, land, and water; or our Nation’s priceless public lands Legacy.
But, Democracy is a Marathon, not a sprint! My job as a writing professional is to help farsightedness prevail against short-term greed. I’ve been on this beat for 43 years, and I’m hoping for another 43.”
My Maxim as an Organism on a Living, Breathing Planet:
“Stupid parasites kill their hosts. As we become smarter, or as we recognize and adhere to the inherent intelligence of Indigenous Peoples, and of our host planet; we can again coevolve with our living Mother Earth in cooperative, respectful, and reverent symbiosis.”
My Maxim as an Activist:
“Water Wears Away Stone. This is the undisputed, irrefutable LAW of NATURE. If you (or, “Water”) are tired from recurrently encountering “Stone”―The lies, deceit, and pile after pile after pile of steaming fresh bullshit from the same transnational corporations, thieves, banksters, con artists, promoters, lobbyists, cronies, and self-serving politicians of the Corporatocracy; simply visit Hell’s Canyon or the Grand Canyon.
“Just stand on the edges and look down. Take all the time you need: Hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, or eons.
Gaze far, far down and appreciate every one of these 8,000 feet of pure Truth. Look down upon 8,000 feet that precisely chronicle Nature’s Law: Water Wears Away Stone! Then: Celebrate! We Can Do This!”
More Information about Paul Thomas Richards:
For more information about Paul Richards, go to: www.PRMediaConsultants.com® (Business Web Site) and www.Richards2006.us (U.S. Senate Campaign Web Site).
Dispatches from the Wildlands™ ©2010, Paul Thomas Richards
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