A new book by Doris "Granny D" Haddock details a full-tilt citizen's "American Century."

Here's a book you should check out...thanks to Carol Wyndham, who works on public funding for elections and other democracy issues in New Hampshire, for sending us the good news about its publication.

Those of us who felt close to Doris "Granny D" Haddock wondered what the world would be like without the stunning moral clarity of her voice and her brave efforts to represent our highest values during politically dark times. Remarkably, we can put off for awhile that idea of being without her voice. In the last few winters of her life, she worked on a book to help us keep going. She has always helped us feel young and able to make a meaningful difference in the world, and this new book, released this week, "Granny D's American Century," gives us that gift again.

It is not a book of political speeches or essays, but a wild, colorful telling of stories from her life as a young drama student in Boston during the Depression, with a fast forward to her final years after her long walk across America––final years that included taking over the jobs of water park mermaids and alligator feeders and New Orleans bartenders long enough for those women to go register to vote. Her final act was to run for the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, not because she thought she could win (or even wanted to), but so that she could bring her home state back into the blue, which she helped to do that year.

When the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court came down just before her death, she saw it as an opportunity for truer, deeper reform, once the evils of the coming flood of money horrified a majority of Americans. By seeing ahead, by thinking wisely, she saw how every turn of fortune can be a victory, if we use it well.

The book, published by University Press of New England (which includes Dartmouth, Univ. of N.H., Univ. of Vermont, Brandeis and Northeastern), is available on Amazon, or, (please) your local bookstore, including the Toadstool.

“Democracy is not something we have, it’s something we do.” --Granny D.

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Video: Community Forum on the Trans Pacific FTA

A recent community forum on the proposed Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement explored the local impacts of past free trade agreements as well as what might be coming for workers and communities here and across the Pacific if this new FTA is passed.

Elizabeth Swager of Oregon Oregon Fair Trade Campaign opened the forum, focusing on working conditions overseas, the "race to the bottom" and the probable impact of the Trans-Pacific FTA on health care and jobs. She was followed by Greg Pallesen, Vice President of AWPPW Local 5 on trade related job loss; Kim Marks, a grassroots organizer with the Rising Tide North America Collective and former board member of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and BARK, who spoke on the impact of trade on labor and the environment, and Ted Gleichman, active within the Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club, on trade and climate change.

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Outlawing dissent: Rahm Emanuel's new regime

Emanuel seems to have been an early adopter of new restrictions on the First Amendment (as it applies to human beings, that is). With G8 and NATO summits planned in Chicago, he pushed a batch of new restrictions, powers, and privatization moves through the City Council in January. This is an old article, but good background on the bipartisan nature of keeping protestors out of sight of the public and mainstream media.

by Bernard Harcourt. Posted on the Guardian Thursday January 19

It's almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman's "Chicago Boys" as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn't a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:

"Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function … until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."

Today, it's more than mere ideas that are lying around; for several decades now, and especially since 9/11, there are blueprints scattered all around us.

Step 1: hype a crisis or create one if there isn't a real one available. Easily done:with images from London, Toronto, Genoa, and Seattle of the most violent anti-G8 protesters streaming on Fox News and repeated references to anarchists and rioters, the pump is primed. Rather than discuss the peaceful Occupy Chicago protests over the past three months, city officials and the media focus on what Fraternal Order of Police President Michael Shields calls "people who travel around the world as professional anarchists and rioters" and a "bunch of wild, anti-globalist anarchists". The looming crisis headlines Rahm Emanuel's draft legislation, now passed: "Whereas, Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ("Nato") and the Group of Eight ("G8") summits will be held in the spring of 2012 in the City of Chicago" and "whereas, the Nato and G8 Summits continue to evolve in terms of the size and scope, thereby creating unanticipated or extraordinary support and security needs …" The crisis calls for immediate action.

Step 2: rapidly deploy excessive force. Again, easily done: Emanuel just gave himself the power to marshal and deputize – I kid you not, look at page 3 – the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Department of Justice's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the entire United States Department of Justice (DOJ); as well as state police (the Illinois department of state police and the Illinois attorney general), county law enforcement (State's Attorney of Cook County), and any "other law enforcement agencies determined by the superintendent of police to be necessary for the fulfillment of law enforcement functions".

As one commentator suggests, the final catch-all allows Emanuel to hire "anyone he wants, be they rent-a-cops, Blackwater goons on domestic duty, or whatever. For a city that has great problems keeping its directly sworn officers in check, this looser authority is an even greater license for abuse." Thanks to the coming G8 meeting, the Chicago police department has just gotten a lot bigger! According to Fox News, "there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of federal agents here."

Not just that, but Emanuel has also given himself the power to install additional surveillance, including video, audio and telecommunications equipment. And not just for the period of the G8 and Nato summits, but permanently. These new provisions of the substitute ordinance apply "permanently": there is no sunset provision on either the police expansion or the surveillance. On this second, the new ordinance reads:

"The superintendent is also authorized to enter into agreements with public or private entities concerning placement, installation, maintenance or use of video, audio, telecommunications or other similar equipment. The location of any camera or antenna permanently installed pursuant to any such agreement shall be determined pursuant to joint review and approval with the executive director of emergency management and communications." [my emphasis]

Thanks to the mobilization of the Occupy movement (including their funeral for the Bill of Rights) and other groups like the ACLU, some of Emanuel's other draconian provisions were scaled back. Emanuel dropped his proposals to increase seven-fold the minimum fine for resisting arrest (including for passive resistance) from $25 to $200, to double the maximum fine for resisting arrest from $500 to $1,000, and to double the maximum fine for violations of the parade ordinance from $1,000 to $2,000. But the rest of his proposals – including the three-fold increase in the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance – passed the City Council Thursday.

Step 3: privatize the profits and socialize the costs. In Chicago, that translates into Emanuel outsourcing city services to private enterprises, but making sure the public will indemnify those private companies from future law suits. This is a two-part dance with which we have become all too familiar.

First, city services are outsourced, often to circumvent labor and other regulations, and the income side of the public expenditures are shifted over to private enterprise and employees. Under the ordinance (see page 4):

"The mayor or his designees are authorized to negotiate and execute agreements with public and private entities for good, work or services regarding planning, security, logistics, and other aspects of hosting the Nato and G8 summits in the city in the Spring of 2012 … and to provide such assurances, execute such other documents and take such other actions, on behalf of the city, as may be necessary or desirable to host these summits."

Second, the agreements can be entered "on such terms and conditions as the mayor or such designees deem appropriate" and these terms include, importantly, "indemnification by the city". In other words, any lawsuits will fall on the city taxpayers. The public will be left holding the bag if there is, for instance, police abuse or other mismanagement by private employers.

Step 4: use the crisis to expand executive power permanently and repress political dissent. Most of the ordinance revisions, it turns out, do not sunset with the departure of the G8 or Nato delegates. To be sure, there's a sunset provision for those contracts that specifically involve "hosting the Nato and G8 summits." That provision expires on 31 July 2012; but not the expanded police powers, nor the increased video surveillance, nor the other changes to the protest permit requirements.

The new rules affecting permits for protests and marches include details that impose onerous demands on dissent. As noted earlier, the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance will increase from $50 to $200. On the parade permit applications, the protest organizers now must provide a general description of any sound amplification equipment that is on wheels or too large for one person to carry and/or any signs or banners that are too large for one person to carry. These may sound like small details, but they are precisely the kinds of nitpicking regulations that empower and expand police discretion to arrest and fine, and that make it harder to express political opinions.

It's another glaring example of what I have called The Illusion of Free Markets and the paradox of "neoliberal penality": the purported liberalization of the economy (here, the privatization of city services) goes hand-in-hand with massive policing. Scott Horton captured the idea well in Harper's, under the rubric "The Despotism of Natural Law". Notice the neoliberal paradox: the fact that the city claims to be incompetent or unable to performs its ordinary functions implies that we need to both outsource city services and augment city police powers.

It was accomplished so quickly and seamlessly – passed practically overnight – that few seem to have noticed or had time to think through the long-term implications. There's not a mention in the New York Times and only a small story in the Chicago Tribune. The crisis and fear of outside agitators, professional anarchists and rioters – splashed on the TV screens direct from London, Toronto, Genoa, Rome, or Seattle – is enough to create a permanent state of exception.

To make matters worse, this cookbook implementation of mini shock treatment follows on the heels of a severe crackdown on the Occupy Chicago movement that resulted in the arrest of over 300 Occupy protesters in Grant Park in October 2011. The prosecutions are still ongoing today and the effect on political dissent has been chilling.

In those 300 arrests, Rahm Emanuel and his police chief rigidly enforced a park curfew without finding reasonable ways to accommodate the political speech interests of the protesters, and beyond any semblance of a legitimate governmental interest. The massive arrests raise a clear first amendment problem – one that has been raised by the Occupy protesters and will be heard en masse at the Daley Center on 15 February. (Ironically, Emanuel and his police will effectively "Occupy the Daley Center".)

The first amendment argument is compelling, especially when you consider the disparate treatment that political expression receives in Chicago. Recall, for instance, how different things were in Grant Park on election night 2008. Huge tents were pitched, commercial sound systems pounded rhythms and political discourse, enormous TVs streamed political imagery. More than 150,000 people blocked the streets and "occupied" Grant Park – congregating, celebrating, debating and discussing politics. That evening, President-elect Barack Obama would address the crowds late into the night and the assembled masses swarmed the park to the early morning hours. It was a memorable moment, perhaps a high point in political expression in Chicago.

Well, that was then. The low point would come three years later, almost to the day. On the evening of 15 October 2011, thousands of Occupy protesters marched to Grant Park and assembled at the entrance to the park to engage, once again, in political expression. But this time, the assembled group found itself surrounded by an intimidating police force, as police wagons began lining up around the political assembly. The police presence grew continually as the clock approached midnight.

Within hours, at the direction, ironically, of President Obama's former chief-of-staff (was Rahm Emanuel at Grant Park after hours, a few years earlier?), the Chicago Police Department began to arrest the protesters for staying in Grant Park beyond the 11pm curfew in violation of a mere park ordinance.

Emanuel could have ordered his police officers to issue written citations and move the protesters to the sidewalk. In fact, that's precisely what the police would do a few weeks later at a more obstreperous protest by senior citizens at Occupy Chicago. On that occasion, 43 senior citizens who stopped traffic by standing or sitting in the middle of a downtown street were escorted by police officers off the street without being handcuffed, and were merely issued citations to appear in the department of administrative hearings. (Those arrests, however, took place under the watchful eye of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Democratic Representatives Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley.)

But not on 15 October or the following Saturday night. Instead of issuing citations, the Chicago police arrested over 300 protesters, placed them in handcuffs, treating the municipal park infractions as quasi-criminal charges, booked them, fingerprinted them and detained them overnight in police holding cells, some for as many as 17 hours. They are now aggressively prosecuting these cases in criminal court.

That's precisely the type of practice that chills political expression. The inconsistent treatment of political dissent in Grant Park or at the Chicago board of trade reflects the colossal amount of discretion that mayors and police chiefs have over political discourse today. Police discretion is wide, political expression is fragile.

Rahm Emanuel's message on the G8 and Nato meetings has been loud and clear – and chilling: the DEA, FBI, ATF, DOJ, state police and many other law enforcement agencies will be out in force; it will be harder to comply with the protest laws; and any deviations or errors will be costlier and punished. What's really troubling is that the G8 and Nato will come and go, but these reforms are with us in Chicago to stay. Chicago's mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of other municipal officials (recall Rudy Giuliani's idea of staying on as mayor for an extra three months), who, with a touch of Potus-envy and perhaps a small Napoleonic complex, begin to act like minor tyrants.

It'll be interesting to follow the first amendment litigation brought by the Occupy protesters. Their cases have been joined – there are about 100 of them in the challenge now – and their free speech claims will be heard by the chief judge at the Daley Center on 15 February 2012.

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US Congress passes authoritarian anti-protest law

H.R. 347, the so-called "Equal Access to Public Property Act of 2012" is designed to keep we unruly masses out of public spaces or any area vaguely designated as "restricted." Penalties for those convicted under the law are severe, and peaceful, constitutional protests at upcoming major party conventions and economic summits will likely be affected if the law stands, as will any recurrence of occupy protests. To read Bruce Gagnon's take on HR 347, see this post. Also, one consequence of the bill, unintended or not, is criminalization of homelessness, say housing activists.

by Tom Carter. Posted March 3 on World Socialist Web Site

H.R. 347, the so-called "Equal Access to Public Property Act of 2012" is designed to keep we unruly masses out of public spaces or any area vaguely designated as "restricted." To read Bruce Gagnon's take on HR 347, see this post http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/h-r-347-the-federal-restricted-buildings-and-grounds-improvement-act-of-2011-the-anti-occupy-law-by-bruce-gagnon/comment-page-1/. Also, one consequence, unintended or not, is criminalization of homelessness, say housing activists http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/29/10530383-criminalizing-homelessness-fallout-feared-from-anti-occupy-bill

A bill passed last Monday in the US House of Representatives and last Thursday in the Senate would make it a felony—a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration—to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader.

The bill—H.R. 347, or the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011”—was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, while only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill.

The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 starkly exposes the fact that, despite all the posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy, which regarded last year’s popular protests against social inequality with a mixture of fear and hostility.

Among the central provisions of H.R. 347 is a section that would make it a criminal offense to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.”
The bill defines the areas that qualify as “restricted” in extremely vague and broad terms. Restricted areas can include “a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.”

The Secret Service provides bodyguards not just to the US president, but to a broad layer of top figures in the political establishment, including presidential candidates and foreign dignitaries.

Even more sinister is the provision regarding events of “national significance.” What circumstances constitute events of “national significance” is left to the unbridled discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. The occasion for virtually any large protest could be designated by the Department of Homeland Security as an event of “national significance,” making any demonstrations in the vicinity illegal.
For certain, included among such events would be the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, which have been classified as National Special Security Events (NSSE), a category created under the Clinton administration. These conventions have been the occasion for protests that have been subjected to ever increasing police restrictions and repression. Under H.R. 347, future protests at such events could be outright criminalized.

The standard punishment under the new law is a fine and up to one year in prison. If a weapon or serious physical injury is involved, the penalty may be increased to up to ten years.

Also criminalized by the bill is conduct “that impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions” and “obstructs or impedes ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds.” These provisions, even more so than the provisions creating “restricted areas,” threaten to criminalize a broad range of protest activities that were previously perfectly legal.
In order to appreciate the unprecedented sweep of H.R. 347, it is necessary to consider a few examples:

● A wide area around the next G-20 meeting or other global summit could be designated “restricted” by the Secret Service, such that any person who “enters” that area can be subject to a fine and a year in jail under Section 1752(a)(1) (making it a felony to enter any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so).

● Senator Rick Santorum, the ultra-right Republican presidential candidate, enjoys the protection of the Secret Service. Accordingly, a person who shouts “boo!” during a speech by Santorum could be subject to arrest and a year of imprisonment under Section 1752(a)(2) (making it a felony to “engag[e] in disorderly or disruptive conduct in” a restricted area).

● Striking government workers who form a picket line near any event of “national significance” can be locked up under Section 1752(a)(3) (making it a crime to imped[e] ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds).

Under the ancien regime in France, steps were taken to ensure that the “unwashed masses” were kept out of sight whenever a carriage containing an important aristocrat or church official was passing through. Similarly, H.R. 347 creates for the US president and other top officials a protest-free bubble or “no-free-speech zone” that follows them wherever they go, making sure the discontented multitude is kept out of the picture.
The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act is plainly in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which was passed in 1791 in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The First Amendment provides: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (The arrogance of the Democratic and Republican politicians is staggering—what part of “Congress shall make no law” do they not understand?)
H.R. 347 comes on the heels of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed by President Obama into law on December 31, 2011. The NDAA gives the president the power to order the assassination and incarceration of any person—including a US citizen—anywhere in the world without charge or trial.

The passage of H.R. 347 has been the subject of a virtual blackout in the media. In light of the unprecedented nature of the bill, which would effectively overturn the First Amendment, this blackout cannot be innocent. The media silence therefore represents a conscious effort to keep the American population in the dark as to the government’s efforts to eviscerate the Bill of Rights.

The bill would vastly expand a previous law making it misdemeanor to trespass on the grounds of the White House. An earlier version of the bill would have made it a felony just to “conspire” to engage in any of the conduct described above. The bill now awaits President Obama’s signature before it becomes the law of the land.

What lies behind the unprecedented attack underway on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is a growing understanding in the ruling class that the protests that took place around the world against social inequality in 2011 will inevitably re-emerge in more and more powerful forms in 2012 and beyond, as austerity measures and the crashing economy make the conditions of life more and more impossible for the working class. The virtually unanimous support in Congress H.R. 347, among Democrats as well as Republicans, reflects overriding sentiment within the ruling establishment for scrapping all existing democratic rights in favor of dictatorial methods of rule.

This sentiment was most directly expressed this week by Wyoming Republican legislator David Miller, who recently introduced a bill into the state legislature that would give the state the power, in an “emergency,” to create its own standing army through conscription, print its own currency, acquire military aircraft, suspend the legislature, and establish martial law. “Things happen quickly sometimes—look at Libya, look at Egypt, look at those situations,” Miller told the Star-Tribune in Casper, Wyoming. Repeating arguments employed by every military dictatorship over the past century, Miller declared, “We wouldn’t have time to meet as a Legislature or even in special session to do anything to respond.” Miller’s so-called “doomsday law” was defeated in the Wyoming legislature Tuesday by the narrow margin of 30-27.

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Kiobel v. Shell tests corporate personhood

More on the Kiobel v. Shell case. Will Supreme Court justices decide that corporations--who are persons when influencing elections--are not persons when they conspire with government to torture, murder, and enslave people overseas?

by Katie Redford. Posted February 28 on the Huffington Post

If corporations have rights then surely they have responsibilities too. Yet in a case before the Supreme Court Feb. 28, lawyers for petroleum giant Shell will argue that corporations are immune from laws that prohibit complicity in human rights violations and crimes against humanity. As a human rights lawyer who has helped survivors of torture, rape and slavery sue their corporate abusers for over 15 years, I thought I had heard every defense in the book. But this morning, I'll be sitting in the Supreme Court listening to Shell's lawyers argue to our nation's highest court that companies should get to have it both ways: rights when it benefits them, but no responsibilities for abuse.

Is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with this picture?

The case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, arises out of allegations of Shell's complicity in torture and extrajudicial killing in Nigeria during the 1990s. The lead Plaintiff is the wife of the late Dr. Barinem Kiobel, one of the "Ogoni Nine" who, along with renowned environmentalist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, were hanged by the Nigerian military junta in November 1995. Mrs. Kiobel and others are simply asking for a chance to present their evidence that Shell conspired with the Nigerian military to arrest, torture and kill their family members so as to silence their opposition to Shell's destructive activities in the oil-rich Niger Delta. They have brought their suit under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a law that has allowed victims and survivors of human rights abuses to seek justice in U.S. courts for some 30 years.

I was one of the lawyers who helped bring the first successful ATS case against a corporation when my organization, EarthRights International, sued Unocal (now Chevron) in 1996 for its complicity in rape, torture, killing and forced labor in Burma (Myanmar). My clients included men and women who were forced by the Burmese army to work on roads, helipads and other infrastructure for Unocal's gas pipeline there; who were raped and tortured by Burmese soldiers providing "security" for the pipeline; whose family members were killed by army units hired by Unocal to procure labor and protect the pipeline. Since that case, known as Doe v. Unocal, victims and survivors have used the ATS to seek justice from corporations allegedly involved in terrorist attacks, torture, genocide, slavery and abusive child labor, among many other egregious harms that no corporation governed by the rule of law would ever condone.

Or would they? How anyone could argue with a straight face that they shouldn't be held responsible for such abhorrent behavior is almost beyond comprehension. Yet that's precisely what Shell and their corporate supporters have been insisting in their legal briefs and what they will argue to the court today. Not surprisingly, there has been quite a bit of media attention in the lead up to today's case, and the arguments from both sides are striking in their difference. On the human rights side are stories of real people who have suffered painful abuses, such as my Jane Doe I; or the story of young Joelito Filartiga, whose family sued the Paraguayan police officer who tortured their son to death. On the other side are the corporations who raise arguments about the extraterritorial application of U.S. laws and the ways in which such cases interfere with the Executive Branch's diplomatic efforts abroad. These arguments are especially unconvincing, as the Obama administration will be arguing today in favor of ATS cases against corporations, and submitted a brief to that extent as well.

EarthRights International also submitted an amicus brief in this case and we certainly have a deep interest in its outcome. From our clients in Colombia, who are suing Chiquita for financing terrorist death squads, to our clients from Burma whose bravery offered hope to people all over the world that business could no longer operate with impunity, many will be waiting to hear what the Court decides. What if we have to tell these people that no U.S. Court will ever punish corporations for genocide, slavery, torture or killing again?

It would be profoundly ironic if the Supreme Court were to remove corporations from the threat of ATS lawsuits on grounds that they are not individuals when just two years ago, that same court ruled that corporations could enjoy free speech rights as persons in the Citizens United case. Can it really be the case that in 2012 corporations can go anywhere in the world and engage in such abuses as torture, killing and slavery, and yet be nowhere when it comes to facing their accusers and answering their calls for justice? That's precisely what Shell will argue to our nation's highest court today.

Katie Redford, Esq. is co-founder and US office director of EarthRights International

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Would the East-West Highway also be used to connect Canadian fracking fields and the proposed Searsport LPG tank?

by Chris Buchanan, Defending Water for Life in Maine

With Canada developing natural gas fracking fields in Quebec and New Brunswick and a LPG (liquid petroleum gas) tank proposed for Searsport, serious questions have arisen as to whether the proposed East-West Highway might be destined to become a super-corridor to transport LPG in trucks to Canada and natural gas by pipeline along the highway to the Maritime Provinces for export. Here’s why we are concerned.

The East-West Highway route through Maine connects both the Canadian fracking fields directly adjacent to Maine so it could be highly profitable for the investors in the East-West Highway to run a natural gas pipeline along the highway from the Canadian natural gas fracking fields to the Canadian Maritimes. This would provide even greater returns for highway investors, in addition to tolls they would receive from Canadian transport trucks.

The proposed Searsport LPG storage facility comes into the picture because of new fracking technology developed by GasFrac, a Canadian energy company, which uses a thick gel made from propane, rather than water, to force the natural gas out of the shale rock. LPG is a mixture of propane and butane.

“This is a game changer for the industry,” says Don LeBlanc in a November 15, 2011 article in Chemistry World. LeBlanc is the “principal consultant at Eastex Petroleum Consultants in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has been involved in shale gas trials with gelled propane in New Brunswick, Canada.” So far gelled propane has been used about 1,000 times mostly in Canada.

From an investor’s prospective, under this scenario a LPG tank in Searsport is a great idea. From there, they can truck the propane to Canada via the East-West highway to use for fracking shale gas. Then the natural gas produced by the fracking could be transported to the Canadian Maritimes via a pipeline built along the East-West Highway.

Indeed, Peter Vigue of Cianbro announced his vision to use the highway as a multi-use corridor during his presentation to the Maine Legislature’s Transportation Committee during the public hearing on Valentine’s Day.

This larger energy scheme would benefit private investors, but lead to further exploitation of Maine as a supercorridor throughway with only two proposed exits for the whole state. Yet the people of Maine would have no voice in how this private toll road was built or managed. Nor would the state and federal regulatory agencies be concerned with the environmental impacts of fracking or the safety of the new technology using highly flammable propane.

This is a highly organized energy triad, poised to make a few people very wealthy at the cost of Maine’s people and the land we need to survive. We were confused why Searsport selectmen were supporting the East-West highway, but now it is clear how the pieces can fit together in a highly profitable way.

Instead of locking Mainers into a supercorridor dissecting the state for foreign profit, our legislators need to step back and identify what the people of Maine need to thrive over the long haul. Prioritizing Canadian businesses and multinational corporations that do raw resource extraction, is not the way. Public funding for private investment, at the added cost of individual rights and local control, is not the way. We need to create a long-term vision that values Maine’s strengths—how we can benefit from our priceless ecological beauty and how best to use Mainers creativity, work ethic and passion to create lasting jobs for the people and families of Maine.

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New Obama campaign co-chair: ‘The President is wrong’

Rush Feingold, one of 35 Obama re-election campaign co-chairs, calls the president's decision to accept Super PAC campaign funds "dancing with the devil."

by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan. Posted on Feb 23, 2012 on Truthdig

“The president is wrong.” So says one of the newly appointed co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign.

Those four words headline the website of the organization Progressives United, founded by former U.S. senator and now Obama campaign adviser Russ Feingold. He is referring to Obama’s recent announcement that he will accept super PAC funds for his re-election campaign. Feingold writes: “The President is wrong to embrace the corrupt corporate politics of Citizens United through the use of Super PACs—organizations that raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and the richest individuals, sometimes in total secrecy. It’s not just bad policy; it’s also dumb strategy.” And, he says, it’s “dancing with the devil.”

In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt said to Congress, “All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.” He signed a bill into law banning such contributions in 1907. In 2012, this hundred-year history of campaign-finance controls died, thanks to five U.S. Supreme Court justices who decided, in the 2010 Citizens United case, that corporations can use their money to express free speech, most notably in their efforts to influence federal elections.

After 18 years representing Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, Feingold lost his re-election to self-funded Republican multimillionaire and tea party favorite Ron Johnson. Since then, Feingold has been teaching law, started Progressives United and, while supporting the effort to recall Wisconsin’s embattled Gov. Scott Walker, has steadfastly refused to run against him or for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl.

Feingold was the sole member of the U.S. Senate to vote against the USA Patriot Act. He was a fierce critic of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Although Obama, as a senator, originally threatened to filibuster any legislation that would grant retroactive immunity to the telecom corporations involved with the wiretapping, he reversed himself on the eve of the Democratic Convention in 2008 and voted for the bill. Feingold remained adamantly opposed. On the war in Afghanistan, Feingold told me: “I was the first member of the Senate to call for a timeline to get us out of Afghanistan. Even before Obama was elected, when it was between [John] McCain and Obama, I said, ‘Why are we talking about a surge?’ ... Sending our troops over there, spending billions and billions of dollars in Afghanistan, makes no sense. And I think it was a mistake for the president to do the surge, and I think he’s beginning to realize we need to get out of there.”

Feingold opposed Obama’s Wall Street reform bill, saying it was too weak, and supported the state attorneys general, like New York’s Eric Schneiderman and another of the new campaign co-chairs, California’s Kamala Harris, who, at first, opposed the proposed settlement with the five largest banks over allegations of mortgage-service fraud and “robo-signing.” Feingold’s reaction to the $25 billion settlement that the White House pushed through? “We were among the few that refused to do a little dance after this announcement ... whenever it ends up being Wall Street, somehow there’s always a clunker in there.”

As I interviewed Feingold, just hours after he was named one of the 35 Obama campaign co-chairs, I asked him if he was an odd choice for the position. Feingold responded: “How about a co-chair that’s proud of him for bringing us health care for the first time in 70 years? How about a co-chair who thinks that he has actually done a good thing with the economy and helped with the stimulus package, and we’ve had 22 months of positive job growth? How about a co-chair for a president that has the best reputation overseas of any president in memory, that has reversed the awful damage of the Bush administration, who in places like Cairo and in India and Indonesia has reached out to the rest of the world. Believe me, on balance, there’s no question. And finally, how about a co-chair of a president who I believe will help us appoint justices who will overturn Citizens United?”

Until then, as the Obama campaign “dances with the devil” of super PACs, perhaps campaign co-chair Russ Feingold will help us follow the money.


Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

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Should corporations have more leeway to kill than people do?

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which has been used to prosecute foreigners in the US for human rights crimes committed in other countries. SCOTUS has decided that corporations are people as far as First Amendment political campaigning goes--we'll have to see if the majority of justices consistently hold corporate "persons" to the same standard as human beings when violations of human rights are alleged.

by Peter Weiss. Posted February 24 in The New York Times

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.

The story behind the case begins in 1980, when my colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights and I helped obtain the first semblance of justice to the family of a slain 17-year-old Paraguayan youth named Joelito Filártiga.

A police inspector general in Asunción, the capital, had tortured the boy to death in retaliation for his father’s opposition to Paraguay’s brutal dictatorship. But the case was decided in New York, far from Paraguay, where the crime had occurred and where justice had proven impossible for the Filártiga family; the boy’s murderer was ultimately ordered to pay the family $10.4 million in damages.

The precedent-setting case was made possible by a remarkable decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which allowed it to be brought under a long-obscure law enacted by Congress in 1789. Known as the Alien Tort Statute, the law has been interpreted to mean that foreigners who commit heinous crimes abroad in violation of international law can be held accountable in the United States if they are present or do business here; the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 2004.

Since that decision, dozens of successful alien tort claims have been brought in American courts — at first against individuals, and eventually against corporations. As a result, many foreign victims of egregious crimes — ranging from torture and slave labor to the execution of loved ones — that were sanctioned, endorsed or commissioned by corporations have found justice in our courts.

Yet in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit — the very court that had rendered the Filártiga decision — held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute.

That ruling, in a case known as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, came less than a year after the much more famous — and criticized — Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which removed restrictions on political spending by contributions and wildly expanded the concept of corporate personhood.

Together, these decisions have triggered a wave of outrage among advocates for human rights, which see in them a signal from the courts that corporations have extensive rights but few responsibilities under American law.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the alien torts ruling, which could produce its first decision regarding corporate personhood since Citizens United.

The question of whether foreign corporations doing business in the United States can be sued here for crimes committed elsewhere has arrayed international businesses against human rights advocates, with many “friend of the court” briefs filed on both sides. Four governments have also chimed in: Britain, the Netherlands and Germany for the corporate defendant and the United States on the side of the Nigerian plaintiffs.

The story behind the Kiobel case is compelling: The plaintiffs are members of the Ogoni people in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where Royal Dutch Shell had extensive oil operations in the 1990s through contracts with the brutal military dictatorship that held power at the time. The region is widely considered a zone of calamity, in terms of both environmental and human rights. In the suit, Royal Dutch Shell was accused of assisting the Nigerian government in torturing and, through sham trials, executing Ogoni activists who had threatened to disrupt Shell’s operations because of the devastating health and environmental effects of unregulated drilling practices. The plaintiffs are either victims of torture themselves or had relatives who were executed. Esther Kiobel, the plaintiff after whom the suit is named, is the widow of a victim.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Royal Dutch Shell and against the plaintiffs, multinational corporations — particularly in mining and other extractive industries — could draw the lesson that it is now safer to forge alliances with autocratic regimes that have poor human rights records because they will not be judged culpable in the way individuals can be.

In fact, many “friend of the court” briefs filed by corporations in this case contend that the companies are committed to voluntarily complying with human rights norms — but that standards set by the United Nations and other public and private organizations are mere guidelines that are not enforceable as legal norms. What they are really saying is that there are legal norms against torture and such, but that they can’t be enforced against corporations because they have never been enforced under international law — a claim the plaintiffs strongly contest.

This leaves the Supreme Court with an extraordinary choice to make, in juxtaposition to its previous ruling in Citizens United: whether to accept an argument that, in effect, leaves corporations less culpable than individuals are for human rights violations committed abroad — or whether to hold that if a 200-year-old law can be used to hold individual violators to account, it can be used against corporate violators as well.

A decision affirming that Shell should go unpunished in the Niger Delta case would leave us with a Supreme Court that seems of two minds: in the words of Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent from Citizens United, it threatens “to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation” by treating corporations as people to let them make unlimited political contributions, even as it treats corporations as if they are not people to immunize them from prosecution for the most grievous human rights violations.

A more startling paradox is difficult to imagine.

Peter Weiss, a retired lawyer, is a vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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