Top 10 Things You Should Know About The Farm Bill | Environmental Working Group

With all of the discussion discussion in Washington about cutting costs, it is really disgusting that they have not taken the Farm Bill into account. I guess that the fact Representative Ryan is from a farm state makes a difference. The Environmental Working Group has provided a concise list of what we mostly don't know about the cost of our food and why our taxes are so high.

Here is just one item from their list.

1) The farm bill doles out billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to the largest five commodity crops: corn, cotton, rice, wheat and soybeans. Those payments go out, regardless of need, and they mostly fail to help the nation’s real working farm and ranch families. In fact, since 1995, just 10 percent of American farms – the largest and wealthiest operations – have raked in 74 percent of all subsidy payments.

The last time the farm subsidies came up for review, both our Democratic Senators, Feinstein and Boxer, supported the continuation of business as usual. Guess they know which side of the aisle is buttered.

My enemy's enemy is ????

My first introduction to the politics of the middle east was from the pages ofr a Leon Uris novel. That was not an unbiased source. I was much older before I read Revolt in the Desert by T. E. Lawrence. From that, I got a real understanding of the idea that my enemy's enemy is my friend and how that works in tribal cultures. As I now read what some Progressives are saying about middle easter politics, I think that they too are following that line of reasoning.

The United States has a long history of supporting some very bad people for a similar reason. The name of Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi comes to mind, not to mention Indonesia's Sukarno or Cuba's Fulgencia Batista or Egypt's Mubarak. It is a lesson that we never seem to learn, because, eventually, the stability we seek always breaks down and those we supported can only maintain their position through violent repression of dissent.

One would think that progressives would not make the same mistake, but they seem to always find a way to make heroes out of some very bad people just because they offer opposition to another "enemy". Oh, what evils we perpetuate just to make a powerful friend. Such actions should garner the derision of all Greens. Especially in the Middle East where the perpetuation of power means continues the suppression of the rights of women in many countries, denying them the right to education, the freedome to travel as they please or even to drive a car.

Cynthia McKinney's was applauded by many for taking part in the Gaza flotilla. Her words were definitely anti-Israel, but in the name of peace and the recognition of the rights of the Palestinians.

Her subsequent actions, participating in an Iranian show Conference, issuing press releases that in support of Lybia, have squandered much of any good will she might have gained. Now, I read a post calling for Greens to distance themselves from McKinney. Rather, it seems to me, that in her search for anti-Israel support she has chosen to align herself with the wrong people.

In a search for a possible Presidential candidate for 2012, I hope that Greens realize McKinney has left us, no longer standing up for woman's rights in oppressive societies with dictatorial leadership. Be it Iran, Lybia or Syria, there is little doubt that the Arab Spring will turn into a Winter of our Discontent when seeming progresswives align with the likes of Ahmadinejad, Qadaffi or Asad.

Population and Water Uses

Agricultural and urban water uses exist side-by-side in any pie graph of water uses for any region. As users address issues of the water resource supplies and demands, the debates focus on one user’s efficiency over the others. When taken out of the regional context, the debate quickly degenerates into accusations where everyone can point at the others for various behaviors that disproportionately impact on efficiency or consumptive uses. When taken within the context of regional uses, it enables everyone to ask: What is important to us all and how do we prioritize our use of limited regional resources?

Often farmers are blamed for raising alfalfa or other high water use crops. Other times they are told by academics or urban advocates how the size (or the business model) of their farms are responsible for corporate domination. Or the type of irrigation used and whether their land has been laser-leveled lies at the root of depleted water supplies. Everyone knows how to farm, just like everyone knows how to teach. When met across a regional planning table, farmers can address the many factors required to maintain a stable business that are beyond the control of them as individuals. It is worth saying here that our agricultural produce supplies have never been tested to the point of famines, as has been seen in nations around the world.

The factor of population is often used to address the issue of water efficiency. Developers and land attorneys actively engaged in the water planning process focus on the efficiency of urban uses without referencing their own financial interests in so doing. Agribusinesses can do so as well. As Greens, sustainability is our own critical factor, but it is NOT an excuse to invite disaster upon the world’s peoples. In regional planning, the discussions incorporate quantity and quality, and necessarily include effective AND efficient water use by our communities and our neighbors. The recent release of the PPIC Report MANAGING CALIFORNIA’S WATER: FROM CONFLICT TO RECONCILIATION has recently been juxtaposed with the release of the report MUNICIPAL DELIVERIES OF COLORADO RIVER BASIN WATER by the Pacific Institute. Both include the impacts of population on urban water use.

Increase in population is inherent in reviewing water management issues and if it is disregarded it is done so at the risk of our well-being. “This population growth has serious implications for food and energy production and urban expansion, all of which will place increasing pressure on available fresh water supplies.” (QUENCHING URBAN THIRST: GROWING CITIES AND THEIR IMPACTS ON FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS, by Thomas W. Fitzhugh and Brian D. Richter, Bioscience, August 2004, Vol. 54, No. 8; page 741). It is worth saying for the uninitiated water advocates that river returns are more often credited to users even when they come from the depletion of underground aquifers, as a result of interstate river compacts. The result of this is that a microchip manufacturer can project an image as highly “efficient” water users in Albuquerque, even while they daily withdraw millions of gallons of water from local users. Rarely, do farmers have water appropriations adjusted when they are returned to surface supplies or when recharged to aquifers by percolation. Municipalities along the Colorado River studied by the Pacific Institute are credited for such return flows. http://www.snwa.com/html/wr_colrvr_credits.html This gives cities a much greener projection than their reality may in fact prove to be and benefits them in the paper water world of accounting.

The use of diversions in California has impacted not only regional supplies, but also impacted on urban water uses. When the water supplies sent to Los Angeles from the Owens River and the Mono basin were reduced, they were “replaced by water from MWD sources, and the city also began to emphasize water conservation”. (QUENCHING URBAN THIRST, p. 744) As Greens, we project a political agenda that planning addresses preservation of the planet’s ecosystems, as well as, the supplies needed in the face of population growth. http://www.cagreens.org/platform/platform_ecology.shtml#water We can certainly agree with the writers of QUENCHING URBAN WATER SUPPLIES when they emphasize: “Thus, it is important that water planners move swiftly to implement ecosystem water allocations before water supplies become overtaxed.” (QUENCHING URBAN THIRST, page 751)

Population growth has often been understated as a contributing factor to diminishing water supplies and reducing Delta water exports. (page 264, PPIC Report) The PPIC report focuses on urban conservation as a critical strategy in reducing urban water use. (see page 265, PPIC Report) Conservation is one technique to lower demand of water for urban regions. It does not address saltwater intrusion. The Pacific Institute Report states: “The total volume of water withdrawn nationwide in 2005 was lower than it was in 1975, despite substantial economic and population growth. This is a significant achievement, demonstrating that water demand can be successfully delinked from growth.” MUNICIPAL DELIVERIES OF COLORADO RIVER BASIN WATER, page 2-3 at http://www.pacinst.org/reports/co_river_municipal_deliveries . Per capita use is one measure of water accounting. It does not measure: impacts on ecosystems, impacts on existing economies of scale, groundwater depletions, carrying capacity of existing water infrastructure, impacts on public services, healthcare and education systems or other consequences of urban sprawl and development. It is unfortunate that the Pacific Institute proposes to encourage public officials to “promote conservation and efficiency” (MUNICIPAL DELIVERIES, page iv.) when, absent an open and transparent regional planning process, the result could very well lead to exacerbation of tensions in regards to water supplies predicted by the Department of the Interior in WATER 2025. http://biodiversity.ca.gov/Meetings/archive/water03/water2025.pdf

Water politics on a statewide level is a continual battle over freshwater supplies between one region and another. Urban users rarely bat an eyelash as water continues to flow from our spigots. But farmers are in crisis every time there is a drought. This political paradigm is manifested in the State Legislature by the partisan divides between Democrats and Republicans. Sustainability will never be brought in to balance the decisions until there is a countervailing force brought into the State Legislature through the elections of Greens. Sustainability is in the interests of all water users, as well as the environment. Regional planning needs to limit diversions and establish concrete objectives in defining sustainable water use by balancing growth with renewable supplies. As a state we will not get there traveling the road that we have chosen to-date. There are better alternatives. We can work together. We can plan together.

California Water Politics: Balancing Growth with Renewable Supplies

Any study of water management report in the state of California that fails to analyze California water politics leaves a significant gap in grasping the decisions that have been made in the past and those that will be made in the future. In addressing California water politics we find profound disparities in power and influence. There are many advocacy groups that represent users and stakeholders throughout the state who are engaged in issues of water quality, water allocations and water diversions. There are lines drawn between coastal municipalities and inland users. There are lines drawn between North and South. There are environmentalists and agribusinesses that project their ritual oppositions in the media. Liberals in San Francisco raise the banner of the Delta smelt, while conservatives on talk shows mock the prioritization of a minnow-like fish ahead of the farm owners and farm workers of the Central Valley.

The irony is that with all the smoke inherent in these conflicts, how do we ever find the fire of the real interests of users in California? One thing is clear, no one lacks the appropriate science and policy advocates in the public arena to plead their case. Here in California its called "combat science". The real substantive political questions remain obscured by the white noise of the advocacy groups.

The essence of sustainability in water politics is working regionally to integrate the objective: balancing growth with renewable supplies. Defining the common needs and mechanisms to accomplish this is a common objective of our neighbors and friends and not a battlefield of the future. If we can make sacrifices in these decisions, our neighbors can do so as well. If we can establish priorities recognizing our neighbors and surrounding communities’ needs, they can as well. But we need to do with without taking from others. And we need to be cognizant of what it is we are expecting of others.

California has manipulated its water law so that it means all things to all people. Public Trust Doctrine has been used to promote private interests receiving takings from other users as a result of state actions. Beneficial uses are so inclusive as to lack any real meaning in regards to distinguishing consumptive use. In California water law doctrine is inclusive of pueblo rights, riparian, prior appropriation and a separate one for groundwater. Fourteen Federal agencies and 15 state agencies (table 2.10, page 129, PPIC Report) put their hands in the waters of California and local authorities exist in nine distinct jurisdictional governmental entities (ranging from municipalities to flood control, sanitation and water districts).

This is the face of California water management and administration but no where is there a body that presents the distinct voices of regional water users and stakeholders at the same table. No where do neighbors and community people plan their common destiny in regards to the common resource. No where are the particular interests of water users and stakeholders represented AS users and stakeholders within a shared political entity.

The decisions being made within the California State Legislature are NOT the product of the expressions of the concerns and needs of all those impacted by its decisions. The process within the California State Legislature obscures the incorporation of the science and the metrics needed for an accurate assessment of the existing regional uses and supplies of the water resource and/or the impact of the decisions being made on others. The funding mechanisms bear no relation between those benefiting from and those not impacted by the authorizations needed to implement recommendations. As a result, the politics in the State Legislature quickly degenerate into the “art of the deal”.

If we are not talking about talk show polemics or the partisan kabuki fights of FOX vs. MSNBC, what do we mean by water politics? Why are we trying to get out of the current arenas in order to come up with substantive solutions to the issues of water as they impact on our neighbors and our communities?

Other Western states do manage their state water supplies without the reliance on diversions that dominate the California aquascape or dependence on massive state bonds having to be approved. In NM, the Office of the State Engineer recently ruled against a 150 mile diversion Santa Fe from another region on the premise of a regions because it was "vague and overbroad." other states such as Texas and New Mexico manage to withstand the direct confrontations of regional users working together to define their water allocations and establish sound priorities for them.

Substantive issues such as population growth, decline of freshwater resources, and increasing public health concerns need to be addressed where they are taxing the very resources we need to survive on this planet. And they need to be in a scope and scale that they will change the direction that we are currently headed. “The relationship among water, growth and land use is a global problem that will be resolved most effectively at the local and regional level.”

MANAGING CALIFORNIA'S WATER - Breaking from the Past

It is time for California to realize it is no longer on the cusp of change and that it is no longer the Best of the West. The issue of water management is just one example of California’s inability to forthrightly address significant issues with clarity and decisiveness. The theme of our discussion today seeks to ask the question of all Californians: What is the priority for water use in California: the economy or the environment? Two factors stand evident in the question: One is that regions do not agree on priorities, and two is that there are often situations where the environmental uses are consistent with economic development.

If we are to address the issues of water planning for the future, we need to empower the regions to make their own decisions for their own futures. But we need to stop enabling addictive water uses by diversion and transfers. Texas has regional planning processes that enable their state plan to project their state priorities given their drought. They have compiled statistics on water use in the state that even the PPIC indicates is NOT possible to do in California (see the note under Table 2.2 (page 86 in the MANAGING CALIFORNIA’S WATER PPIC Report). California needs to stop financing mega-projects through state bonds and begin to establish a Trust Fund for water dedicated projects as exists in Colorado. California needs regional planning processes and regional Public Welfare Statements that define their water budgets, establish priority uses and engage stakeholders and users, as was seen in the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico.

It is not true that we can have it all. But neither is it true that public trust requires regions to divert their water resource to other regions of the state. When people who are not impacted by water allocation decisions get to make them in the State Legislature, you establish a disconnect between government and those being governed. Political partisanship has replaced administrative responsibility for wise use and efficiency. Both rural and urban users in California have increasingly demonstrated greater political leverage and less wisdom in regards to water supplies and uses. Why bother? There are no inputs from competing users. And there are no parameters for uses that bear a real relation to the carrying capacity of the regional water supply.

California has gone past the stage of turning rivers into pipelines and prefers to build aqueducts without ever bothering to recognize the inherent conflict with the concept of sustainability in so doing. As a coastal state this situation is an inherent contradiction. Sustainability is a valid criterion for water management. Sources of supply can be developed on a large scale without competing with the environment. The state of Texas has put on line a desal plant in El Paso in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert and is converting it to solar. The state of Israel is looking to implement desal for 65% of its water supply. The PPIC admits that desal remains “a small proportion of statewide water supplies” (MANAGING CALIFORNIA’S WATER, p. 267). The point is NOT to promote desalination. The point is to propose there are greater sources of supply for regions than simply transfers and diversions. These sources can be defined by the regions themselves.

Precedents have been created that presume the entitlement of particular regions to benefit from the resources of other at great cost. But, one needs to only recall the water war from the Owens Lake diversion to recognize that it has not been done equitably and fairly. It is better to establish new precedents than to rely on the negative experiences of the past.

Economics or the environment? How can the residents of our city of San Francisco learn the impact of diverting Hetch-Hetchy when there is no real cost to them? Why are the commercial fishermen of the Delta required to sacrifice their living so that the farmers of the Central Valley are able to be provided to protect theirs? The real choices are for us to make ourselves. The shared sacrifices must be founded on the common good. Those who make the decisions need to be the ones who have to live with the consequences of them.

PPIC Report: MANAGING CALIFORNIA'S WATER- THE DOWNSIDE

As I continue to review the PPIC Report on MANAGING CALIFORNIA’S WATER:FROM CONFLICT TO RECONCILIATION, I continue to consider its recommendations and the impact of them. In my previous article: “PPIC Report Moves the California Water Debate Forward” I emphasized a need to utilize the report’s support of regional planning as a lever for political action by the Green Party of California and our supporters. Being such a comprehensive work, there are recommendations within it that have not been vetted through the process of public input, as a regional plan could be. Of particular concern, is Chapter 7 “Managing Water as a Public Commodity” and the section in it STRENGTHENING WATER TRANSFER LAW and the section MODERNIZING CALIFORNIA’S WATER GRID.

The intention of the writer and the PPIC in the section STRENGTHENING WATER TRANSFER LAW is to encourage “transfers from relatively inefficient or lower-value uses to higher value uses” p. 332. The issue of water efficiency is one that is often the focal point of those on both sides of the water use debate. Commercial developers join conservationists in promoting efficiency of water use. There is much to be said for this, but one thing that I discovered is that sometimes we really work against ourselves when efficiency is taken as a criterion for prioritizing water use. One example of this is when planners in the Middle Rio Grande of New Mexico measured water use from the implementation of water re-use with the computer model developed by Sandia National Laboratories, we found that the result was that there was a loss of water sent to downstream users that impacted on the Rio Grande Compact. In another scenario, it was shown that the lining of irrigation ditches resulted in a loss of groundwater recharge percolating to the aquifer. It was also instructive in observing that the biggest advocate of using water as an economic unit and focusing on efficiency as a determinant in prioritizing allocations was a commercial developer. It figures when one considers the economic use and per capita use in commercial development would be considerably more efficient than agricultural use or residential use.

The issue of transfers between regions is fundamental if California is ever to address the issue of sustainability in regional water plans. It was so important in New Mexico that the planning template of the Interstate Stream Commission used by the 16 planning regions in the state were premised on the condition that regions HAD to rely solely on their own surface flows, as defined by the Compact, and their own supplies of groundwater. This enabled the regions to develop sustainable water budgets and sound Public Welfare Statements, but it also drew the line in how the regions addressed matching water supplies in the region with water uses. California has attempted to enable regions to benefit from diversions and transfers from out of the regions. Further, private water banks could very well work against regional plans. Water rights sold or leased to them from outside the region are not consistent with the planning template. Further, this “paper water” in regions, where water rights have not been adjudicated, is often not substantiated with “wet” water and work against a sustainable and balanced regional water budget.

Sustainable water use and planning is inherently linked to reducing the number of diversions and restricting the transfers of water rights. Our savings accounts of regional water need to be reflected in our aquifers and our coastal waters. Our uses need to be defined by the management of those supplies effectively, and not necessarily efficiently. Our regions deserve the empowerment to make decisions based on their supplies, and their supplies only. When bad decisions are made by regions, bad consequences will result to those regions. When droughts reduce regional supplies, the regions need to adapt to the change with new priorities in THEIR water use. The argument applies to Los Angeles as well as Modesto. As it stands now, diversions are the accepted premise in implementing the “public trust doctrine”. This needs to change.

There are other issues in Chapter 7 that need to be addressed. I hope to alternate entries into alternating positive-negative aspects of the PPIC report and how we can move forward together in the state of California. As we explore the report it is incumbent upon Greens and our supporters to develop forums for discussion and begin the organizing tasks in the water sensitive regions, such as the Delta and the Central Valley. Our candidates need to begin to focus their campaigns on water planning issues and begin to mobilize public opinion around sound water management for California. Our water is our life. Every decision we make today will affect our children’s generation.

PPIC Report Moves the California Water Debate Forward

The recent publication, MANAGING CALIFORNIA’S WATER: FROM CONFLICT TO RECONCILIATION by the Public Policy Institute of California has created a stir of late. There are concerns expressed in regards to the role of Bechtel Corporation in funding the process that brought the report together. Recently, a forum for discussion by PPIC being held in San Francisco was denounced as a “Greenwashing Event”. The writer, Dan Bacher chooses to dismiss the PPIC with accusations of “elitism” and “institutional racism”. This was based on the lack of representation on the presentation panel of Delta residents, tribal members or fishermen. In point of fact, there is no real representation anywhere in California’s water management system of users, advocates and stakeholders.

What Mr. Bacher omits is the significance of the structural reforms being proposed by the PPIC in the MANAGING Report. It is one thing to criticize Bechtel for its record in Cochabamba and elsewhere around the world. It is quite another thing to summarily dismiss the PPIC report with its proposals in regards to California water. The Report constitutes a change in direction and proposes significant structural reforms long overdue in California. (see MANAGING CALIFORNIA'S WATER, FROM CONFLICT TO RECONCILIATION, Chapter 8, Effective and adaptive Governance, p. 365 "To further encourage integration of water resource planning, the California legislature could create an affirmative structure for regional integrated planning and management. We propose creating nine regional stewardship authorities, coinciding with the jurisdictions of existing regional water quality control boards. As discussed below, the authorities would develop and manage integrated basin plans.")


As things stand, the plain fact is that California’s water politics are polarized and the main arena of battle is the State Legislature. The politics of water are rural (Republican) vs. urban (Democrat) with the result that localities are isolated in regards to diversions from one region to another. Further, the political landscape is skewed towards the urban users in the context of the large metropolitan areas in the state and the resulting Democratic majority in the State Legislature. This was seen in the debate around the peripheral canal in the Delta, in the Hetch-Hetchy diversion and in the Owens Lake diversion.

The point is that this is NOT simply a function of the Democratic Urban Machines that dominate the cities of California. It is a product of a water system that is diffuse and not designed to function in the context of sustainable regional uses. This is a point brought out in the PPIC Report as well. Two key elements remain unaddressed in regards to the future of water management in California:

1. How can sustainable water allocations in California’s regions be planned and implemented without depending on diversions; and

2. How can regional planning processes assure the open input and transparency needed to make fair and equitable decisions.

When one reads the PPIC Report one cannot help but be impressed with its recognition of the need for restructuring water management in California. The dilemma is: California has disregarded the consequences of actions that have increased the stressors on public infrastructure throughout California. The peripheral canal proposal is one more log on that fire. Big Ag and Big Urban are fighting over Big Water. Now that the drought is over everyone has some breathing space to re-structure the entities making the decisions. The water management system of California is a fundamentally flawed process, and the PPIC report is premised on this. This alone makes it a report worthy of consideration.

Climate Change: How bad can it be?

It is easy to become lulled into intellectual somnolence by the seemingly gradual changes we are incurring in our weather. After all, just how bad can a couple of degrees be?

Oh, we wake up every once in a while when our catastrophe leads media reports on some hurricane, flood or tornado, especially if the event is half-a-world away. We all thought that the outbreak of tornadoes that struck the Southease this spring was bad enough It truly was in Tuscaloosa. Then, we had to live vicariously through Joplin again. I remember May, 1971 tornado that hit Joplin. But we need to pay more attention to the facts of what is happening rather than jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions.

Heidi Cullen give a good summary of what we know about climate change and tornadoes in this post at Huffington Post and then repeated, with comments, by Joe Romm at Climate Progres. I give you that link as Joe's bracketed comments point to additional information

Still, we need more understanding than that and this Mother Jones summary of a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists does just that, bringing attention to the relationship between climate (temperature), ozone and health. There is a lot to piece together and the collage is not a pretty picture or a wonderful future.

The report, published yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, concludes that CO2-induced temperature increases will worsen ground-level ozone concentrations (the kind coming from power plants and exhaust pipes, not the kind that shields the Earth from UV rays). Higher concentrations of ground-level ozone threaten the health of millions of Americans, an impact that could cost the US $5.4 billion in 2020.

As someone who suffered with asthma as a child, and that was long before we had inhalers or corticosteroids to deal with the symptoms. Asthma is not what I would wish on any child but that is what we are doing.

There are two recent takes on the effects of this. One is a post at Climate Progress that recognizes asthma as an environmental justice issue facing, primarily, people of color. The other is a rather straight forward determination that Californians will be the most affected and shows up on the KQED (SF) blog: Climate Watch. They both read the same report, just framed it differently.

This is going to be additive to the problems that we already have in California. A 2006 report from CSU Fullerton found that air pollution was costing California's some $3 billion annually. Included in this finding were:

• 23,300 asthma attacks
• 188,000 days of school absences
• 3,230 cases of acute bronchitis in children 

The authors updated and expanded that study in 2008. This time they included the corridor leading away from the port at Long Beach and all that diesel traffic. Now the cost to California was $28 Billion annually and the costs to our children, in terms of health and education were more striking;

• Asthma attacks: 141,370
• Days of school absence: 1,259,840
• Cases of acute bronchitis in children: 16,110
• Days of respiratory symptoms in children: 2,078,300

This is the base problem to which we are adding an additional load from increase pollution.
While the current economic conditions will alter the monetary value, the number of events do not change. Even with school funding being cut and cut, those lost school days deprive our education system of what it really needs to do its job as funding formulas use average daily attendance.

If Greens want to work for better education, if we want to lower the cost of health care, if we want a better future for our children, then we had better be spending a lot of time on the battle for a rational climate policy. It is as important as anything else we do, since it deal with everything at once: energy, the economy, health care, education. The economic cost for California would be as high as $1.8 billion / yr by 2020 if we do nothing. The cost to our children can not be so easily calculated.

Managing our views of California's Water Wars

Rain all day today, strange weather for June around San Jose, gives me some more time to write longer posts. It is also appropriate that I focus on the Water Ware that threatens to overtop the facts that should guide our common sense perception as the melt of this winter's snow pack will threaten to overtop the Delta's levees.

One current battle is being fought in Washington, where Congressman Devin Nunes (R - CA 21) has introduced The San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act (HR 1837). This clearly positions the needs of the farmers on the West side of the San Joaquin Valley as paramount, contrasting them to environmental protections for a "little minnow." It is enough to have Representative John Garamendi (D - CA 10) warn of an all out water war.

This legislation threatens the Delta, jeopardizes drinking water for California cities, and puts the interests of a select well-connected few above the entire state."

"In 1997, we were one signature away from agreeing to an 'all California' water policy solution – until the Westlands Water District walked away at the signing ceremony. I said they would regret it, and today they admitted it, even as they continue to demand a one-sided water grab that is not in the interests of California.

It is every much in the interest of Nunes, and the Westlands Water District, if everyone thinks of this as farmers fighting for their livelihood, and the jobs of their workers, vs the "environmental craziness" that would think a little minnow is more important. But this is only their way to spin the facts. Dan Bacher provides another set of facts... that the nuSplittails and very close to 15,000 chinook salmon. They have been doing this for a long time. I have previously taken issue with this framing of the story, most clearly here in criticizing Leslie Stahl and 60 Minutes.

Now, we find the just plain good investigative work shows just how much Nenues has shaped this story. A recent article in the Central Valley Business Times cites Deirdre Des Jardins,a researcher with California Water Research Associates.

Mapping imagery points toward soil and groundwater salinity as the primary cause of land fallowing near Mendota. This evidence, along with record of previous legal settlements, indicates that high levels of unemployment in the Mendota area are more likely the result of land fallowing that occurred prior to the most recent drought than any type of protections set in place for Delta fisheries.

Green Party policies have always focused on community involvement in determining resource use policies, especially regarding Water. Yet, time and again, government listens to those with the most highly paid lawyers and lobbyists, shutting out the citizenry, depending on spinning the story to disinterested voters who seldom wake up to what is happening until it is too late. That is what is happening with ironically named Bay Delta Conservation Plan. Once again, Governor Brown has named a fox to guard the hen house and the results are predictable. Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla has an OpEd in the Stockton Record where she makes it clear just how well the deck has been stacked in this game.

Under the past governor, the BDCP process was run by a steering committee of export contractors. They failed to meet their deadline in the fall for producing a document for environmental review. Now the process is firmly under the control of Meral and the California Natural Resources Agency.

Local counties, water agencies, farmers and fishermen criticized the BDCP for denying them a meaningful role in planning for the Delta's future. Meral's response has been to create 13 working groups and to give non-exporters four days' formal notice to let him know which ones they want to join. The deadline for this formal notice was May

Meral expects some of the groups to complete their work by the end of June.

Those opposing a peripheral canal are already spread thin and facing tight budgets. For all intents and purposes, this fragmented process with its telescoped timing excludes them.

The GPCA helped start Restore the Delta, at least in co-sponsoring it's first public meeting. Still we should be doing more: educating friend, pointing out truths when we can, working to dislodge those like Nunes who distort the truth for their masters.

The real future of California is going to be determined by how we meet the ecological challenges of the coming decade. Climate, water, health care and the economy are so closely intertwined that only the Green approach can possibly find the right solution.

Challenging Presidential Leadership

Earlier this year, a group of environmental organization leaders sent a letter to both President Obama and China's President Hu. It highlighted the current state of climate change inaction and concluded with the following:

Nature tells us time is running out, but we can’t see the clock. As we blindly reach critical climate “tipping points,” things promise to get worse, much worse. Central to the solution is a wartime-like mobilization by the governments of the United States and China to cut carbon emissions 80 percent (based on 2006 levels) by 2020. This is required if we are to reduce carbon emissions to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere, the level top climate scientists say is safe for humanity.

There is no more important measure of presidential leadership than living up to the expectations of our children to protect their future. Every day our respective governments fail to act, their future grows more perilous. We await your response.

I firmly believe that the same criteria of leadership needs to be applied to the selection of a Green Party presidential candidate. I will not vote for any candidate who does not make this the central issue. For the sake of our our children, we must find a voice who will speak for the future.

Strategy and Structural reform, NOT Language is key to Moving Forward

I would take issue with Scott's premise in regards to a "new language for a new paradigm". More than that I would take issue with the continued definition of the primary policy debates being structured along the bipolar fault lines, that Scott continues to demonstrate. This requires more than the response below. It also requires an internal review of who we are as Greens and how we can escape the marginalization of irrelevancy.

First, the Tea Party is right about spending and the budget;
Second, the Green Party has NO fight with Tea Party supporters, but we are NOT the same as Tea Party;
Third, the issue of ecological democracy demands we address the structure of American government and not simply the policies of American government;
Fourth, working towards structural reform also means we redefine the constituencies as they are represented in political parties, this is NOT simply a matter of changing the language;
Fifth, if any third or fourth parties are to establish viability there is a greater need to address the role and character of non-profits and advocacy groups in the political process. Failure to do this will simply result in one party systems as is seen in American cities and rural states;
Sixth, public employees are civil servants and the issue of organization of labor is NOT bound to the future of public employee pensions, they are distinct matters;
Seventh, the debate within the Green Party and elsewhere, needs to be presented with a strategy capable of unifying people beyond the existing identity politics of the “faux left” or the anti-government politics of the Tea Party.

The change in language is simply the result of the change in agenda and the change in strategy. Cities, like Detroit, are withering on the vine. It is not fair or even-handed to deny the impact of the Democratic Urban Machines. We see it and we know it. But Greens have NOT shown the ability to move beyond the fundamental Democratic Party constructs of either agenda or structure. And, as a party it remains bound to progressivism because of its deep-rooted ideological foundation that has NOT broken out of the “paradigm”, Scott’s protestations to the contrary.

Scott McLarty: New Language for a New Paradigm

Editor's Note:  See reposted below an important article on the Common Dreams Web Site by Scott McLarty, media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States,on the need for new language in political discourse in the U.S.

Editor's Update: Scott McLarty's article is Number 20 in this week's list of most viewed articles on Common Dreams.

Posted on Common Dreams, Thursday, May 19, 2011


Which Side Are You On? New Language for a New Political Reality
by Scott McLarty

"Everybody pulled his weight, Didn't need no welfare state... Those were the days!"

Those are some of the lyrics from the theme song to the popular 1970s TV sitcom 'All in the Family', considered controversial in its day, about a working-class bigot named Archie Bunker, who sang it at the top of the show with his wife Edith. Archie's nostalgia for pre-1960s America informed much of the show, which satirized small-minded conservativism, paranoid patriotism, contempt for youth culture, and racism.

One of the ironies of Archie Bunker's worldview is that the 1930s, 40s, and 50s weren't nearly as conservative as he remembered them. The same faulty nostalgia drives the so-called conservatives of today's Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, who imagine those decades as a time when hard-working Americans pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.

It's true that Americans worked hard during these years. But the bootstraps stuff is nonsense. The 30s through 50s were the time of the New Deal, low-cost loans from the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill, huge subsidies for defense contractors during the Cold War and other industries that employed millions of people, massive transfer of funding from cities to the burgeoning suburbs, federal projects like interstate highway construction and the space program, generous investment in public schools, record union membership, high tax rates for corporations and the wealthy, good job benefits, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which ensured financial stability in old age and medical crises.

These things softened the trauma of the Great Depression and gave us the greatest period of prosperity in US history. Middle-aged Tea Partiers and Republicans, born in the 1940s through the 1970s, reaped the benefits of the kind of progressive 'big government' and 'socialist' ideas they now condemn. By their own standards, Tea Partiers are practically red diaper babies.

The irony of the Cold War's capitalism vs. communism paradigm is that capitalism in the US and other western countries required generous helpings of socialism to make it work. Conservative politicians like Eisenhower and Nixon seemed to understand this and generally supported the social programs listed above.

Since the Reagan Administration, Republicans, with help from Democrats, have worked to dismantle such programs and policies. Since 2008, the conservative movement has been galvanized by President Barack Obama's victory (although Mr. Obama's actions in office hardly place him on the left), leading to the formation of the Tea Party and igniting the conflict in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker's plan to cut benefits for public-sector employees and abolish collective bargaining rights.

The economic principles of today's GOP and the Tea Party don't come from any period of time within their own memory, so it's difficult to identify what kind of values they're trying to preserve or restore. But if we look further back in American history, to the late 19th century, we can find a match in the Robber Baron Era.

The Robber Baron Era was a period of misery for the millions of Americans who worked in factories before child labor laws, the eight-hour day and 40-hour work week, workplace safety laws (think of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire), or recognition of collective bargaining rights. It was a time of widespread political corruption, with officeholders in cahoots with the chiefs of monopolies and near-monopolies. Laissez-faire capitalism was mostly unchecked by the power of unions or by government regulation. It ended with a period of widespread labor unrest and the reforms of the Progressive Era (1890s through the 1920s).

William Cronon recounted some further history in a recent New York Times column:

"Republicans in Wisconsin are seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.... [W]hile Americans are aware of this progressive tradition, they probably don't know that many of the innovations on behalf of working people were at least as much the work of Republicans as of Democrats.... When Gov. Gaylord A. Nelson, a Democrat, sought to extend collective bargaining rights to municipal workers in 1959, he did so in partnership with a Legislature in which one house was controlled by the Republicans. Both sides believed the normalization of labor-management relations would increase efficiency and avoid crippling strikes like those of the Milwaukee garbage collectors during the 1950s. Later, in 1967, when collective bargaining was extended to state workers for the same reasons, the reform was promoted by a Republican governor, Warren P. Knowles, with a Republican Legislature. The policies that the current governor, Scott Walker, has sought to overturn, in other words, are legacies of his own party."

("Wisconsin's Radical Break," March 21, 2011)

On the evidence of history, calling today's Republican Party and their Tea Party supporters 'conservative' is as absurd as calling supporters of civil rights and racial justice 'reactionary' because they invoke the values of the Reconstruction Era.

Radical Ideology for a New Century

"I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other." -- Pete Seeger

Gov. Scott Walker is not a conservative, nor is Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Neither are Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or any of their fellow corporate royalists and faux populists.

They are radicals. The GOP and the Tea Party are inspired by a vision that's partly reactionary (revival of Robber Baron Era economics) and partly innovative, with world-changing ideas that would have astounded JP Morgan and John D Rockefeller.

The innovative parts of their agenda include the embrace of globalization and the international power of major corporations through pacts like NAFTA and bodies like the World Bank and IMF; the neocon doctrine of preemptive military aggression; 'public-private partnerships' such as cash-cow contracts for the homeland security industry; huge taxpayer-funded handouts for favored corporate elites, the most obvious of example of which is the TARP bailout that funneled hundreds of billions of dollars to reckless Wall Street firms after the 2008 economic collapse that the latter caused. (Many Tea Partiers, to their credit, opposed the Wall Street bailouts.)

It's worth noting here that such agenda are bipartisan, supported by mainstream Democrats.

One of the top claims of 'conservative' activists is their devotion to the US Constitution and the ideals of our Founding Fathers, which motivated the reading aloud of the Constitution in the US House of Representatives in January when Republicans took over as the majority.

For Republicans and Tea Partiers, the Constitution might as well be written in hieroglyphs. Except for the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, they decline to apply the Constitution to the denial of habeas corpus, warrantless surveillance of US citizens, torture, disregard for international treaties signed by the US, and other abuses that are clearly outlawed.

On the other hand, they enthusiastically defend the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United ruling, which upheld 'corporate personhood' and exacerbated the widespread corruption of our election system, even though the Constitution grants no rights to corporations and the Founding Fathers warned against the excessive power of the monied interests. Corporate personhood was enshrined by a series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, which extended the 14th Amendment's equal protect clause to cover corporations. The rulings coincided with the post-Reconstruction passage of the first Jim Crow laws in the South and the beginning of the Robber Baron Era. In effect, legal rights and protections were transferred from black people to corporations.

All of this gives us a clue about the real ideology motivating today's conservative (and many liberal) politicians, media pundits, and activists: corporate power, profit, and privilege.

All other principles are subservient to corporatism. The GOP isn't opposed to socialism when it satisfies corporate lobbies, as the Wall Street bailouts prove.

Consider Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, currently on a mission to overturn the Democrats' health care reform bill. Does Gov. Scott really oppose public spending for health care? In 1997, he was forced to resign as CEO of Columbia/HCA after the company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600-plus million fine in the largest fraud settlement in US history, for fraud involving Medicare and other public health programs. For bilking taxpayers out of hundreds of millions, Rick Scott was paid $9.88 million and allowed to keep 10 million shares of stock worth over $350 million.

Republican politicians might be gunning for Medicare and Medicaid, but they're not above making a killing from such programs, on behalf of themselves and the corporations they're connected with via the public service/private business revolving door. The same ideology informs the granting of no-bid contracts, tax breaks and loopholes, and other forms of subsidies to favored firms.

George Lakoff notes that "The wealthy have, to a large extent, amassed that wealth through indirect contributions to them by governments -- governments build roads corporations use, fund schools that train their workers, subsidize their energy costs, do research they capitalize on, subsidize their access to resources, promote trade for them, and on and on."

Dedication to corporate interests overwhelms all other concerns. It turns the conflict between free-market capitalism and socialism into a quaint relic from another century, rather like the conflict between the German princes and the Roman Catholic Church during the Reformation. It makes the free market into a myth for the gullible who believe that locally owned Main Street shops can compete with WalMart or Old McDonald's family farm has a chance against Monsanto.

Conservatism means, or should mean, emphasis on entrepreneurialism (as opposed to corporate capitalism), self-reliant local economies (small businesses and farms, rather than big chain stores and agriconglomerates), economic security for Americans (freedom from destitution because of unemployment, old age, or the cost of medical emergencies), democratic sovereignty (rather than subordination to international trade cabals), observance of the US Constitution and international laws and treaties that the US has signed (Article VI), and deployment of the US armed forces solely for immediate self-defense.

Today's conservative leaders have abandoned these ideas and replaced them with a scheme to manipulate government for a radical redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. For these politicians, government is only a threat to America when it benefits working people or the poor or public health or the environment. Big government for big business is perfectly acceptable.

The amassing of wealth and power for the corporate sector has become the major project of the GOP in the 21st century, with the Democratic Party's cooperation.

New Language for a New Paradigm

We need terminology that more accurately describes political tendencies in the US and world in the 21st century, placing the rule of corporate elites and militarism on one side and democracy, human rights and freedoms, and the health of the planet on the other.

The evolution of two-party politics in the US, with politicians from both parties under the influence of corporate lobbies and campaign checks, made it inevitable that both Democrats and Republicans would veer away from their stated principles. Such influence has always been evident, but began to push politicians into extremist territory with the beginning of the Reagan Revolution. (And even Reagan left Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone.)

Progressives are as deluded in hoping for a progressive rehabilitation of the Democratic Party as true conservatives are in believing the GOP upholds their values:

"Money's conquest of American politics has therefore rendered impotent the well-worn prescriptions of the left and the right, which now deliver only scapegoats rather than solutions... Today, government can be 'big' in terms of spending while handing all its work over to contractors. In the twentieth century, business and government were adversaries. Today, the wall between the two that may have once existed has become a revolving door and both share common interests."

('One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy' by Allison Stanger, quoted in Harper's)

The traditional spectrum of Republican-conservative on the right and Democrat-liberal at the left, with a gray area for moderates in the middle, belongs in the trash. The 'centrist' gap between the two parties is really an overlap where Republican and Democrat politicians are most enthusiastically loyal to corporate lobbies, with euphemisms like "Republican moderate," "Democratic Leadership Council," "blue dog," and "triangulation" to describe them.

A more accurate spectrum would find most Republicans at the furthest extreme and most of the Democratic Party next to them. This is the side that serves corporate power, profit, and privilege. It embraces the ideology that underpins state capitalism, a condition in which major corporations have grown so powerful that government's chief purpose is to take marching orders from them.

Think of government as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, Monsanto, Wall Street, the insurance and pharmaceutical cartels, and other top industries. (China, which now provides cheap labor for corporations, has shown us that both communism and capitalism can be subsumed into the state capitalist system.)

What's on the other side of the new spectrum? In the US, not much, if we're talking about political clout. Some Democrats like Dennis Kucinich, Greens, environmental and community activists, socialists, unions that haven't placed allegiance to Democratic politicians ahead of their members' needs, even some libertarians and traditional conservatives who recognize that unrestrained corporate power is as much a menace as state power.

The retreat of the Democratic Party from its traditional constituencies has enabled Republicans to move towards even greater fanaticism. When Democrats co-opted the health care mandate idea from Republicans, who had introduced it in the 1990s, they drove the GOP into a frenzy of opposition to reform, further marginalizing single-payer (Medicare For All), the one proposal that would have provided universal medical care and dramatically lowered costs. The health care reform debate turned out to be a factional dispute over which party best served insurance and other medical industries. (For a more thorough description of "liberal disintegration," see Sam Smith's "The death of liberalism and what to do about it" in The Progressive Review, May 9, 2011.)

Progressivism has nearly collapsed as a political force, even though progressives still exist and sometimes get elected. We can begin digging ourselves out of this hole by adopting a new model to replace the Republic/conservative/right vs. Democrat/liberal/left paradigm. We can declare our independence from the bipartisan consensus. We can reject the "active propaganda machinery controlled by the world's largest corporations [that] constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause of our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species" (David C. Korten, 'When Corporations Rule the World'). .

Doing so will bust open the narrow political debate offered daily in the mainstream media. It will give us a revolutionary chance to reverse the dangerous direction of the US in the 21st century, which now promises decades of perpetual war, undiminished fossil fuel consumption as the climate heats up, privatization of dwindling resources like fresh water, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the collapse of financial security for working Americans, concentration of power and wealth among a small number of 'too big to fail' firms, and growing government and corporate intrusion into our private lives.

Call it Corporate America vs. We the People. Globalization vs. Mother Earth. Privatization vs. the Public Good. Wall Street vs. Main Street. Plutocracy vs. Democracy. Which side are you on?



Scott McLarty serves as media coordinator for the Green Party of the United States and for the DC Statehood Green Party. He can be reached at mclarty@greens.org.

Corruption never has been compulsoruy

I recently re-read Carmel's Robinson Jeffers's Shine Perishing Republic. One fragment of that poem resonated with me to the point that I tweeted about the need for "dead white poets" to remind us that "corruption is not compulsory…" and it still haunts me. It seems so necessary as corruption seems to be just part of the landscape on Washington. I should have put a couple of explanatory hashtags in that tweet: #ensign would have been appropriate and probably #coburn. That the Sen. from Oklahoma can face the public after using his influence to help out a colleague who can't keep his pecker in his pants is really an example of just how cynical the public has become… like we seem to expect this of our electeds.

This made me go back to check the Anticorruption Republican, a blog that was once a reliable source of info on all of those Republicans slimed by association with Jack Abramoff. Alas, since most of them are gone, so is public access to that blog. But then, personal proclivities was not their main target anyway.

Now, I read that ex-Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold (maybe going to run for the seat of retiring Sen. Kohl) with a blast at the ties some Congressional Democrats have with big business. If Wisconsin does send him back, it would make an interesting show.

What it obvious out of all of this is that Jeffers was right. Corruption is truly not compulsory. It is the result of a series of decision made consciously over time. Whether to use one's power to help a friend hide is problem, as Coburn did, or to become the lapdog for corporate interests most of the decisions seemed to be "logical" at the time. But as one decision follow another, at some point, it just become the way they do business.

When will the assault of public education end?

The national media has covered the Republican Assault on public employee unions in Wisconsin. It has not paid as much attention to California sine the Republicans do not have the capability of passing such legislation here. So, the assault comes with a different tactic, the ghost of Howard Jarvis reminding us to continue cutting taxes even though our schools get worse every year.

Joe Navarro sent me the following note and I would ask you to read it and his blog post that it mentions. Joe is a San Benito County Green, a published poet and a member of his local school board.

Dear Friends,

As you know I am a school board trustee and have to grapple with a deficit and budget crisis. The state underfunds schools and the Republicans and media blame public school employees for the economic problems of school districts. The burden of the problems are placed on the backs of working people and children, yet no one with any authority wants to force the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. Please take a moment to read my blog article. Let me know what you think. Thank you

.

GPCA poised for gains… or not

The General Assembly of the Green Party of California takes place this weekend. For those who will attend, there are a few things I hope you consider while deciding the next steps we will take.

Never before has money played such a key role in politics. Greens have been taking steps to counteract the effect of the Citizen's United decision. However, it does not appear that any great gains have been made on that front, even with key people spending a significant amount of time in the Move to Amend effort.

While washing dishes last night, I listened to the Rachel Maddow show. She was making a very important point regarding the now nearly infamous Paul Ryan budget that passed the House. Republican Congress Critters, including Wisconsin's Ryan, are not being warmly received while back in their districts over the Easter Recess. In fact, they are being confronted with almost as much rancor as was directed at the Obama Health Care plan last summer. Her key point is that, while Progressive organizations have contracted for $106,000 in media buys now, just 4 organizations with ties Corporate Cash, have put up over $2 Mil to support Ryan's budget… the one that would, among other things, end Medicare as we know it.

I introduce this point about money in order to underscore just how uneven the playing filed is. The GPCA has not been so successful raising money. We managed to have a mini-fundraising drive that netted $7,000 just before the General Assembly.

So, what are we going to do if we can't compete on money. Greens back a set of policies that make a lot more sense than those embodied in the Ryan Budget,but who knows what they are.

In a speech given at Occidental College of few years back, Bill Moyers made the statement that "The only answer for organized money is organized people." In fact, this was important enough that he repeated it several time: "The only answer…" and then "is organized people."

It is clear to some that the wheels are coming off the American version of Capitalism. Even Alan Greenspan acknowledged that he did not truly understand just that organizations, like banks and insurance companies, do not act in their own long term best interest, but are tilling to take excessive risks in order to get immediate profit for the executives of these companies. Greenspan was a devotee of Ayn Rand, the same Ayn Rand whose selfish version of living in the world inspires many Republican leaders today.

It is a given that we don't have the money top play the corporate media game. I note the number of people who actually participate in our social media, and it does not yet add up.

If we are to take the next step, and the world needs us to do so, then I think we need to consider just how we can accomplish it. Look around the General Assembly. How many students do you see? If these are the future of the Party, what are we doing to build that future? If we can't answer the question of how many Campus Green chapters exist and who those leader are, it does not speak well for our future.

Maybe it does come back to money, and how we choose to spend what resources we have. We need, at a minimum&hellip' and need to keep it to a minimum… to have full time fundraising that is not dependent on another full time job to live on.

We need to be able to more nimble in how we deal with the media. It is not just that smart cell phones, Android aps and social media have expanded the range of possibilities, they have fundamentally changed the expectation of just how quickly a political organization can respond. This is one more aspect of being a political party that needs full time attention and, once more, there is a need to professionalize it so that no one has to give up making a living in order to do that work.

The real question for this General Assembly is whether we are going to be a player in the political arena, or will we just play at it.

It isn't nice to fool Mother Nature.

I am sure that we are all concerned about magnitude of the storm system that has devastated the South over the past 36 hrs. The latest number of fatalities that I have seen on CNN was 230+.

I think that it is important to put this all in perspective. These storms, and the earlier ones that went from Arkansas North Carolina, are being fed by record, or near record sea surface temperatures (SST) in the Gulf of Mexico. Check the data at Jeff Masters' Weather Underground sit, from which I linked this image:

May 1861: Hampton, Virginia, My Hometown

Adam Goodheart's new Civil War history highlights important characters and stories of significant impact, but nowadays forgotten. One story is that of three slaves -- Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend -- who rowed across a river at night from Confederate lines to Union Fortress Monroe, near my home town, Hampton, Virginia. General Benjamin Butler declared the men "contraband of war" and refused to send them back, thus, opening the gates to a migration of runaway slaves, including my mother's family -- Jacksons, Bardens, and Drummonds -- who still live around the Hampton - Newport News - Norfolk area of Virginia to this day. This was a milestone on the road to Emancipation and also to the founding of my alma mater, Hampton University, in 1868.

Published in The New York Times, April 1, 2011
How Slavery Really Ended in America
by Adam Goodheart


Old Picture of Fortress Monroe in the 1860s

On May 23, 1861, little more than a month into the Civil War, three young black men rowed across the James River in Virginia and claimed asylum in a Union-held citadel. Fort Monroe, Va., a fishhook-shaped spit of land near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a military post since the time of the first Jamestown settlers. This spot where the slaves took refuge was also, by remarkable coincidence, the spot where slavery first took root, one summer day in 1619, when a Dutch ship landed with some 20 African captives for the fledgling Virginia Colony.

Two and half centuries later, in the first spring of the Civil War, Fort Monroe was a lonely Union redoubt in the heart of newly Confederate territory. Its defenders stood on constant guard. Frigates and armed steamers crowded the nearby waters known as Hampton Roads, one of the world’s great natural harbors. Perspiring squads of soldiers hauled giant columbiad cannons from the fort’s wharf up to its stone parapets. Yet history would come to Fort Monroe not amid the thunder of guns and the clash of fleets, but stealthily, under cover of darkness, in a stolen boat.

Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend were field hands who — like hundreds of other local slaves — had been pressed into service by the Confederates, compelled to build an artillery emplacement amid the dunes across the harbor. They labored beneath the banner of the 115th Virginia Militia, a blue flag bearing a motto in golden letters: “Give me liberty or give me death.”

After a week or so of this, they learned some deeply unsettling news. Their master, a rebel colonel named Charles Mallory, was planning to send them even farther from home, to help build fortifications in North Carolina. That was when the three slaves decided to leave the Confederacy and try their luck, just across the water, with the Union.

It cannot have been an easy decision for the men. What kind of treatment would they meet with at the fort? If the federal officers sent them back, would they be punished as runaways — perhaps even as traitors? But they took their chances. Rowing toward the wharf that night in May, they hailed a guard and were admitted to the fort.

The next morning they were summoned to see the commanding general. The fugitives could not have taken this as an encouraging sign. Having lived their whole lives near the fort, they probably knew many of its peacetime officers by sight, but the man who awaited them behind a cluttered desk was someone whose face they had never seen. Worse still, as far as faces went, his was not — to put it mildly — a pleasant one. It was the face of a man whom many people, in the years ahead, would call a brute, a beast, a cold-blooded murderer. It was a face that could easily make you believe such things: a low, balding forehead, slack jowls and a tight, mean little mouth beneath a drooping mustache. It would have seemed a face of almost animal-like stupidity had it not been for the eyes. These glittered shrewdly, almost hidden amid crinkled folds of flesh. One of them had an odd sideways cast, as if its owner were always considering something else besides the thing in front of him. These were the eyes that now surveyed Baker, Mallory and Townsend.

The general began asking them questions: Who was their master? Was he a rebel or a Union man? Were they field hands or house servants? Did they have families? Why had they run away? Could they tell him anything about the Confederate fortifications they had been working on? Their response to this last question — that the battery was still far from completion — seemed to please him. At last he dismissed the three brusquely, offering no indication of their fate.

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler arrived at the fort only a day ahead of the fugitive slaves, greeted at the esplanade by a 13-gun salute. That morning, Butler sat down to compose an important initial report. When an adjutant interrupted to inform him of the fugitives, Butler set down his pen. The War Department could wait. The three ragged black men waiting outside were a more pressing matter.

Butler was no abolitionist, but the three slaves presented a problem. True, the laws of the United States were clear: all fugitives must be returned to their masters. The founding fathers enshrined this in the Constitution; Congress reinforced it in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act; and it was still the law of the land — including, as far as the federal government was concerned, within the so-called Confederate states. The war had done nothing to change it. Most important, noninterference with slavery was the very cornerstone of the Union’s war policy. President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

Yet to Fort Monroe’s new commander, the fugitives who turned up at his own front gate seemed like a novel case. The enemy had been deploying them to construct a battery aimed directly at his fort — and no doubt would put them straight back to work if recaptured, with time off only for a sound beating. They had just offered him some highly useful military intelligence. And Virginia, as of 12 or so hours ago, was officially in rebellion against the federal government, having just ratified the secession ordinance passed a month before. Butler had not invited the fugitives in or engineered their escape, but here they were, literally at his doorstep: a conundrum with political and military implications, at the very least. He could not have known — not yet — that his response that day might change the course of the national drama that was then just beginning. Yet it was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that an unanticipated bureaucratic dilemma would force the hand of history.

Despite his rank, General Butler had been a professional soldier barely four weeks. In private life, back in Massachusetts, he was a lawyer, and a very successful one — although he grew up poor, the swamp Yankee son of a widow who kept a boardinghouse in Lowell, the textile-mill town. Unable to attract clients through social connections or charm, he became an expert quibbler: a man who knew every loose thread in the great tangled skein of common law and who could unravel an opponent’s entire case with the gentlest of tugs. By his early 40s, he had also built a successful career as a state legislator and harbored larger political ambitions.

A fellow officer once called Butler “less like a major general than like a politician who is coaxing for votes.” Race-baiting was red meat to many of his working-class constituents in Lowell, and he had always been glad to toss morsels in their direction. But after barely 24 hours at Fort Monroe, the new commander had already sized up his new constituency. The garrison was made up predominantly of eager volunteers from New England, many with antislavery sympathies. How was Butler to win the confidence — or even obedience — of such men if his first act as their commander was to send three poor blacks back into bondage?

Butler’s features may have been brutish and his manners coarse, but inwardly, he nursed the outsize vanity of certain physically ugly men — vanity often manifest in a craving for approval and adulation. He also possessed a sympathetic, even occasionally sentimental, heart.

Still . . . sentiment was a fine thing; so was the admiration of one’s subordinates. Ultimately, though, his duty was to his commander in chief. With a few strokes of his pen, Lincoln had made Butler a major general; the president could just as easily unmake him, sending him back to Lowell in disgrace — and with another stroke, for that matter, send the blacks back to their master as slaves.

Whatever Butler’s decision on the three fugitives’ fate, he would have to reach it quickly. He had barely picked up his pen to finally begin that report before an adjutant interrupted with another message: a rebel officer, under flag of truce, had approached the causeway of Fort Monroe. The Virginians wanted their slaves back.

Waiting before the front gate was a man on horseback: Maj. John Baytop Cary of the 115th. With his silver gray whiskers and haughtily tilted chin, he appeared every inch the Southern cavalier.

Butler, also on horseback, went out to meet him. The men rode, side by side, off federal property and into rebel Virginia. They must have seemed an odd pair: the dumpy Yankee, unaccustomed to the saddle, slouching along like a sack of potatoes; the trim, upright Virginian, in perfect control of himself and his mount.

Cary got down to business. “I am informed,” he said, “that three Negroes belonging to Colonel Mallory have escaped within your lines. I am Colonel Mallory’s agent and have charge of his property. What do you mean to do with those Negroes?”

“I intend to hold them,” Butler said.

“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”

Even the dour Butler must have found it hard to suppress a smile. This was, of course, a question he had expected. And he had prepared what he thought was a fairly clever answer.

“I mean to take Virginia at her word,” he said. “I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”

“But you say we cannot secede,” Cary retorted, “and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”

“But you say you have seceded,” Butler said, “so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”

Ever the diligent litigator, Butler had been reading up on his military law. In time of war, he knew, a commander had a right to seize any enemy property that was being used for hostile purposes. The three fugitive slaves, before their escape, were helping build a Confederate gun emplacement. Very well, then — if the Southerners insisted on treating blacks as property, this Yankee lawyer would treat them as property, too. Legally speaking, he had as much justification to confiscate Baker, Mallory and Townsend as to intercept a shipment of muskets or swords.

Cary, frustrated, rode back to the Confederate lines. Butler, for his part, returned to Fort Monroe feeling rather pleased with himself. Still, he knew that vanquishing the rebel officer was only a minor victory, and perhaps a momentary one if his superiors in Washington frowned on what he had done.

The following day, a Saturday, Butler picked up his pen and resumed his twice-interrupted dispatch to Washington. Certain questions had arisen, he began, “of very considerable importance both in a military and political aspect, and which I beg leave to herewith submit.”

But before this missive reached its destination, matters would become even more complicated. On Sunday morning, eight more fugitives turned up at Union lines outside the fort. On Monday, there were 47 — and not just young men now, but women, old people, entire families. There was a mother with a 3-month-old infant in her arms. There was an aged slave who had been born in the year of America’s independence.

By Wednesday, a Massachusetts soldier would write home: “Slaves are brought in here hourly.”

“What’s to Be Done With the Blacks?” asked a headline in The Chicago Tribune. That was the question now facing the Lincoln administration. Within days after the three fugitive slaves crossed the river, their exploits — and their fate — were being discussed throughout the nation. At first the newspapers played it more or less as a comic sketch in a minstrel show: a Yankee shyster outwits a drawling Southern aristocrat. But Lincoln saw things in a more serious light. The president realized he might now be forced to make a signal verdict about matters he previously tried to avoid: slavery, race and emancipation.

Lincoln and his cabinet gathered to address Butler’s decision — and ended up punting. While reminding Butler that “the business you are sent upon . . . is war, not emancipation,” they left the general to decide what to do with fugitive slaves — including whether or not to continue declaring them contraband of war. Unfortunately, no detailed account of the deliberations survives. But a letter from one cabinet secretary, Montgomery Blair, suggests they were driven by a motive as common in Washington then as it is now: “a desire to escape responsibility for acting at all at this time.” By that point, the administration had already received a second dispatch from Butler, describing the influx of women and children. With this in mind, Blair — a member of a slaveholding Maryland family — suggested one pragmatic “modification” to Butler’s policy. “You can . . . take your pick of the lot and let the rest go so as not to be required to feed unproductive laborers or indeed any that you do not require,” he urged. As to the slaves’ eventual fate, Blair wrote, of course no one was suggesting that they be set free. Perhaps at the end of the war, those who belonged to men convicted of treason could be legally confiscated and sent off to Haiti or Central America. (The New York Herald, meanwhile, proposed that the federal government should wait until the war ended and sell all the slaves back to their owners, at half-price, to finance its cost.)

Yet Butler realized what Blair did not: events were unfolding far too quickly for any of that. Despite the counsels from Washington, Butler was not turning away “unproductive” fugitives. He replied: “If I take the able-bodied only, the young must die. If I take the mother, must I not take the child?” By early June, some 500 fugitives were within the Union lines at Fort Monroe.

“Stampede Among the Negroes in Virginia,” proclaimed Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with a double-page spread of dramatic woodcuts showing black men, women and children crossing a creek under a full moon, then being welcomed heartily into the fort by General Butler himself (or rather, by the artist’s trimmer, handsomer version of him). One correspondent estimated that “this species of property under Gen. Butler’s protection [is] worth $500,000, at a fair average of $1,000 apiece in the Southern human flesh market.”

Journalists throughout the Union quipped relentlessly about the “shipments of contraband goods” or, in the words of The Times, “contraband property having legs to run away with, and intelligence to guide its flight” — until, within a week or two after Butler’s initial decision, the fugitives had a new name: contrabands. It was a perfectly composed bit of slang, a minor triumph of Yankee ingenuity.

Were these blacks people or property? Free or slave? Such questions were, as yet, unanswerable — for answering them would have raised a host of other questions that few white Americans were ready to address. Contrabands let the speaker or writer off the hook by letting the escapees be all those things at once. “Never was a word so speedily adopted by so many people in so short a time,” one Union officer wrote. Within a few weeks, the average Northern newspaper reader could scan, without blinking, a sentence like this one: “Several contrabands came into the camp of the First Connecticut Regiment today.”

As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision, too: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery — and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had acknowledged no meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with dark skin. Eventually, even black leaders adopted it.

Back at Monroe — dubbed “the freedom fort” — fugitives continued arriving daily. Each morning, dozens lined up to pitch in with manual labor. Soon they seemed almost like members of the garrison. A Times correspondent wrote: “Their shovels and their other implements of labor, they handle and carry as soldiers do their guns. . . . I have no doubt they would make fair or even excellent soldiers.” Moreover, as the garrison’s medical chief remarked, “they are the pleasantest faces to be seen at the post.”

Many of the Union soldiers had never really spoken with a black person before; the Vermont farmboys had perhaps never even seen one before leaving home. Now they were conversing with actual men and women who had been (and perhaps still were) slaves: people who had previously figured only as a political abstraction. Some fugitives shared horrific accounts; one man described “bucking,” a practice in which a slave, before being beaten, had his wrists and ankles tied and slipped over a wooden stake. Almost all spoke of loved ones sold away; the most chilling thing was that they said it matter-of-factly, as if their wives or children had simply died.

Perhaps most surprising of all — for Northerners accustomed to Southern tales of contentedly dependent slaves — was this, in the words of one soldier: “There is a universal desire among the slaves to be free. . . . Even old men and women, with crooked backs, who could hardly walk or see, shared the same feeling.”

General Butler grew ever more adamant in the defense of “his” contrabands, to a degree that must have shocked his old associates. By July, he began pressing the Lincoln administration to admit that the contrabands were not really contraband: that they had become free. Indeed, that they were — in a legal sense — no longer things but people: “Have they not by their master’s acts, and the state of war, assumed the condition, which we hold to be the normal one, of those made in God’s image? . . . I confess that my own mind is compelled by this reasoning to look upon them as men and women.”

It would take another 14 months — and tens of thousands more Union casualties — before the Lincoln administration was ready to endorse such a view.

“Shall we now end the war and not eradicate the cause?” the general wrote to a friend in August. “Will not God demand this of us now [that] he has taken away all excuse for not pursuing the right?” (During the rest of the war, Butler’s support for black civil rights — and harsh treatment of rebel sympathizers — made him hated throughout most of the South, where he won the nickname Beast Butler.)

More and more people had begun to share Butler’s conviction that the fugitives at Monroe stood in the vanguard of a larger revolution. “I have watched them with deep interest, as they filed off to their work, or labored steadily through the long, hot day,” a Northern visitor to the fort wrote. “Somehow there was to my eye a weird, solemn aspect to them, as they walked slowly along, as if they, the victims, had become the judges in this awful contest, or as if they were . . . spinning, unknown to all, the destinies of the great Republic.”

Earthshaking events are sometimes set in motion by small decisions. Perhaps the most famous example was when Rosa Parks boarded a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. More recently, a Tunisian fruit vendor’s refusal to pay a bribe set off a revolution that continues to sweep across the Arab world. But in some ways, the moment most like the flight of fugitive slaves to Fort Monroe came two decades ago, when a minor East German bureaucratic foul-up loosed a tide of liberation across half of Europe. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, a tumultuous throng of people pressed against the Berlin Wall at Checkpoint Charlie, in response to an erroneous announcement that the ban on travel to the West would be lifted immediately. The captain in charge of the befuddled East German border guards dialed and redialed headquarters to find some higher-up who could give him definitive orders. None could. He put the phone down and stood still for a moment, pondering. “Perhaps he came to his own decision,” Michael Meyer of Newsweek would write. “Whatever the case, at 11:17 p.m. precisely, he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘Why not?’ . . . ‘Alles auf!’ he ordered. ‘Open ’em up,’ and the gates swung wide.”

The Iron Curtain did not unravel at that moment, but that night the possibility of cautious, incremental change ceased to exist, if it had ever really existed at all. The wall fell because of those thousands of pressing bodies, and because of that border guard’s shrug.

In the very first months of the Civil War — after Baker, Mallory and Townsend breached their own wall, and Butler shrugged — slavery’s iron curtain began falling all across the South. Lincoln’s secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, in their biography of the president, would say of the three slaves’ escape, “Out of this incident seems to have grown one of the most sudden and important revolutions in popular thought which took place during the whole war.”

Within weeks after the first contrabands’ arrival at Fort Monroe, slaves were reported flocking to the Union lines just about anywhere there were Union lines: in Northern Virginia, on the Mississippi, in Florida. It is unclear how many of these escapees knew of Butler’s decision, but probably quite a few did. Edward Pierce, a Union soldier who worked closely with the contrabands, marveled at “the mysterious spiritual telegraph which runs through the slave population,” though he most likely exaggerated just a bit when he continued, “Proclaim an edict of emancipation in the hearing of a single slave on the Potomac, and in a few days it will be known by his brethren on the gulf.”

In August, Lincoln’s War Department tried to bring some clarity to the chaos by asking Union commanders to collect detailed information on each fugitive: not just name and physical description but “the name and the character, as loyal or disloyal, of the master” — since whether the master supported the Union or the Confederacy was, of course, essential to determining whether the particular man or woman counted as legitimate contraband. Such a system would let the federal government assure slaveholders that their “rights” were protected, and possibly return the slaves to their proper owners once the rebel states had rejoined the Union.

But how were officers supposed to tell whether a master they had never laid eyes on was loyal or disloyal — even assuming that the slave was telling the truth in identifying him? Besides, didn’t the military have more pressing business at the moment, like fighting the war? The new contraband doctrine was utterly unenforceable almost from the moment it was devised, but it became hugely influential precisely because it was so unenforceable: it did not open the floodgates in theory, but it did so in practice.

And it did so with very little political risk to the Lincoln administration. Indeed, preposterous as the contraband doctrine was as a piece of law, it was also — albeit inadvertently — a masterstroke of politics; indeed, it satisfied nearly every potential theoretical and political objection while being completely unworkable in the long run. “There is often great virtue in such technical phrases in shaping public opinion,” Pierce observed. “The venerable gentleman, who wears gold spectacles and reads a conservative daily, prefers confiscation to emancipation. He is reluctant to have slaves declared freemen but has no objection to their being declared contrabands.”

The system was eminently practical in other terms. Regiments needed labor: extra hands to cook meals, wash clothes and dig latrines. When black men and women were willing to do these things, whites were happy not to ask inconvenient questions — not the first or the last time that the allure of cheap labor would trump political principles in America.

Blacks were contributing to the Union cause in larger ways. Not just at Fort Monroe but also throughout the South they provided Northerners with valuable intelligence and expert guidance. When Lincoln’s master spy, Allan Pinkerton, traveled undercover through the Confederacy, he wrote, “My best source of information was the colored men. . . . I mingled freely with them, and found them ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” They were often the only friends the Yankees encountered as they groped their way anxiously through hostile territory.

Just as influential was what did not happen: the terrible moment — long feared among whites — when slaves would rise up and slaughter their masters. It soon became apparent from the behavior of the contrabands that the vast majority of slaves did not want vengeance: they simply wanted to be free and to enjoy the same rights and opportunities as other Americans. Many were even ready to share in the hardships and dangers of the war. Millions of white Americans realized they did not actually have to fear a bloodbath if the slaves were suddenly set free. This awareness in itself was a revolution.

Most important, though, was the revolution in the minds of the slaves themselves. Within little more than a year, the stream of a few hundred contrabands at Fort Monroe became a river of tens — probably even hundreds — of thousands. They “flocked in vast numbers — an army in themselves — to the camps of the Yankees,” a Union chaplain wrote. “The arrival among us of these hordes was like the oncoming of cities.”

When Lincoln finally unveiled the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1862, he framed it in Butleresque terms, not as a humanitarian gesture but as a stratagem of war.On the September day of Lincoln’s edict, a Union colonel ran into William Seward, the president’s canny secretary of state, on the street in Washington and took the opportunity to congratulate him on the administration’s epochal act.

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
This article is adapted from "1861: The Civil War Awakening," by Adam Goodheart (agoodheart2@washcoll.edu), published by Knopf this month.


Posted on the Hampton University Web Site
Emancipation Oak

The Emancipation Oak stands near the entrance of the Hampton University campus and is a lasting symbol of the university’s rich heritage and perseverance.

During the Civil War, Union General Benjamin F. Butler’s “contraband of war” decision at Fort Monroe in 1861 changed the fates of many African-American slaves, enabling hundreds to reach freedom behind Union lines. Although previously forbidden an education by Virginia law, the rising number of “contrabands” camped in the area prompted the establishment of schools for those freedmen who exhibited “a great thirst for knowledge”.

The peaceful shade of the young oak served as the first classroom for newly freed men and women, eager for an education. Mrs. Mary Peake, daughter of a freed colored woman and a Frenchman, conducted the first lessons taught under the oak located on the University’s campus. Classes continued with the The Butler School, which was constructed in 1863 next to the oak.

One day in 1863, the members of the Virginia Peninsula’s black community gathered to hear a prayer answered. The Emancipation Oak was the site of the first Southern reading of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, an act which accelerated the demand for African-American education.

With limbs sprawling over a hundred feet in diameter, the Emancipation oak is designated as one of the 10 Great Trees of the World by the National Geographic Society.