Freeport LNG, Texas

Friday is the proverbial “take out the trash day” for the release of bad news among public relations practitioners and this Friday was no different.

In that vein, yesterday the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) announced a conditional approval of the second-ever LNG (liquefied natural gas) export terminal.

LNG is the super-chilled final product of gas obtained – predominantly in today’s context – via the controversial hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process taking place within shale deposits located throughout the U.S. Fracked gas is shipped from the multitude of domestic shale basins in pipelines to various coastal LNG terminals, and then sent on LNG tankers to the global market.

The name of the terminal: Freeport LNG.

Freeport LNG is 50-percent owned by ConocoPhillips and located in Freeport, Texas, an hour-long car ride south of Houston. The export facility is the second one approved by the Obama DOE, with the first one – the Sabine Pass terminal, owned by Cheniereand located in Sabine Pass, Louisiana - approved in May 2011.

DOE gave its rubber stamp of approval to Freeport LNG to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of LNG per day from its terminal.

Moniz’s DOE is Dept. of LNG Exports

The announcement comes in the aftermath of an April DeSmogBlog investigation revealing that recently confirmed Energy Department Secretary Ernest Moniz - a former member of the Board of Directors of ICF International – has a binder full of conflicts-of-interest in any decision the DOE makes to export the U.S. shale gas bounty.

As we explained in that investigation, a Feb. 2013 “study” published by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and conducted on its behalf by ICF International concluded exporting shale gas was on the economically sound up-and-up.

ICF is a consulting firm that teams up with oil and gas industry corporations and was one of three firms that did the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on behalf of the U.S. State Department for the northern half of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline. The SEIS was published in March 2013.

Furthermore, among the members of the Obama Administration’s industry-stacked DOE Fracking Subcommittee formed in May 2011 was Kathleen “Katie” McGinty. McGinty formerly served as Vice President Al Gore’s top climate aide during the Clinton Administration, segueing from that position into one as chair of the Clinton Council on Environmental Quality from 1993-1998. Her husband is Karl Hausker, the Vice President of ICF International.

In Dec. 2012, the DOE – like API/ICF - said exporting LNG was economically sound. The DOE’s LNG exports economics study itself was published by another industry-tied firm, NERA (National Economic Research Associates) Economic Consulting.

Given the myriad ties that bind, it’s tough to fathom any other decision being made by the DOE on Freeport or any other LNG export terminal from here on out. And the ecological consequences of that will be disastrous.

“Exporting LNG will lead to more drilling — and more drilling means more fracking, more air and water pollution, and more climate fueled weather disasters like last year’s record fires, droughts, and superstorms,” Deb Nardone, Director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas campaign said in a press release in response to the DOE announcement.

“Once environmental impacts are evaluated, it becomes clear that the additional fracking and gas production exports would induce is unacceptable.”

Eric Minh Swenson with Mana producers Couwenberg and Campognone

On Monday, May 20th, FDL Movie Night interviews director/photographer Eric Minh Swenson about his work chronicling art and artists in Southern California.  Swenson has gained unprecedented access to artists, collectors, curators, gallerists, and art world denizens from San Diego to Ventura. His photos and interviews are revealing portraits of both the Southland and the artistic impulses–shaped by the area’s geography, climate, history, and cultures–that express themselves here. His growing body of work–over 200 short film about Southern California art to date, and thousands of photos– is unique, far ranging and in depth. The art scene in any city has yet to be documented this extensively.

The short documentaries Swenson creates are fluid and evocative, pieces of art themselves. This summer, he begins work on Mana, his ambitious feature-length documentary about a group of Southern California artists, produced by Andi Campognone, curator at Lancaster’s Museum of Art and History, and artist Alex Couwenberg, whose doc is shown below.

Join us Monday at 5pm West Coast time on the front page of Firedoglake.com.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

We’ve had three big stories this week, each showing how the right plays the scandal game better than the left. Of the three, one is a non-scandal (Benghazi), one is a minor scandal with the potential to turn into more (IRS),¹ and one is an honest-to-God scandal right now (AP). Republicans don’t bother with such fine distinctions though, and that’s why they are better at playing it than Democrats: when they get something they can run with, they do.

Fainting Couch

The targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS is a good example.² It was wrong of the IRS to target them, but at the end of the day what it all amounted to was more paperwork and delay. It’s much less onerous – and much less overtly political – than the actual audit the IRS did of the NAACP when it was critical of George Bush.

Yet the Democrats basically sat on their hands for that, and the best they can muster now is a weaksauce “oh yeah? Well why weren’t you outraged back then, GOP?” Republicans stand up for their allies in real time – they don’t sit back and watch them get pummeled. They don’t quietly file those episodes away, holding them as examples to be thrown back as countercharges down the road if need be. They seize the moment and take as many swings as they can.

Similarly, the business with the AP has Republicans once again schooling Democrats on this not-difficult-to-grasp aspect of politics. Any Democrats tempted to decry some Republicans’ newfound concern over the surveillance state should reflect instead on why their own party declined to weigh in as forcefully during the Bush years.³

It isn’t even worth pointing out that all these trips to the fainting couch are hypocrisy because the right was silent on it during the Bush years. They don’t pretend to adhere to a logically consistent set of principles; they just want to go after Obama. He wasn’t president in 2004, so they weren’t concerned then. Now he is, so they are.

The righteous indignation of media outlets, on the other hand, is a bit hard to take. There’s been a great deal of hyperventilating about how this is such a big deal because of its chilling effect on the press, and in case you hadn’t noticed the press is singled out in the First Amendment for protection!. Of course, in that very same clause – and before the press is mentioned, incidentally – the First Amendment prohibits abridging freedom of speech for anyone.⁴

And there’s certainly been a lot of free speech abridgement going on for the last twelve years! It isn’t hard to find, say, a catalog of sins produced by the Patriot Act (personal favorite), or reports on the wholesale seizure of ordinary citizens’ phone records (and by the way, Congress would have to grant retroactive immunity to the phone companies who cooperated with the AP seizure for the current episode to sink to the lows of the FISA Amendments Act), or the indiscriminate collection of Internet traffic, or the thuggish repression of media outlets that are not the right kind of nice, respectable media outlets.⁵

These kinds of outrageous abuses have been going on for years, yet the national press corps never bothered to rouse itself to the kind of adversarial pushback we are now seeing.⁶ It’s one thing to spy on the common rabble or disreputable operations like WikiLeaks, evidently, but when that treatment gets turned on reporters who thought they were comfortably embedded with government officials: First Amendment!

I’ve been reading The Operators by Michael Hastings, and one passage towards the end has a striking relevance in the current situation. He describes the fallout in Washington over his Rolling Stone article on Stanley McChrystal which resulted in McChrystal’s dismissal. He refers to a “schmoozy relationship” between the political and media class and the icy reception he received from journalists in the capitol. Apparently he violated some vague but powerful etiquette that requires journalists to not report anything newsworthy (extended excerpt here.)

The rule of thumb is: don’t make waves. You’ll have a good gig as long as you don’t rock the boat. But that is exactly what the phone record seizure does. It’s a rude awakening for any reporters who thought they were on the same team as the officials they cover. The bureaucratic inertia of an ever-expanding intelligence gathering apparatus has combined with this administration’s maniacal pursuit of leakers to produce a very serious breach of etiquette in the village. It may have been illegal, who knows, but it was unquestionably gauche. It upset some very comfortable relations. That, in the end, may be a greater transgression among media elites than any violation of the Constitution.

Today, 5pm ET, 2pm PT

Little Red: Three Passionate Lives Through the Sixties and Beyond [Angela Davis, Tom Hurwitz, Elliott Abrams]

Chat with Dina Hampton about her new book. Hosted by David Farber.

The compelling, interwoven life stories of three remarkable schoolmates illuminate the rise, demise, and long-lasting impact of the radical political movements of the 1960s

In the 1960s, a remarkable crop of students graduated from a small, New York City school renowned for progressive pedagogy and left-wing politics: Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School.

Entering college at the peak of the transformative era we now call The Sixties, three of these “Little Redders” would go on to change the course of American history: Angela Davis, African American intellectual activist and Communist Party member; SDS activist and filmmaker Tom Hurwitz; and Elliott Abrams, who would play a key role in the Republican Neoconservative movement.

Based on extensive original interviews and archival research, Little Red follows these characters’ divergent, occasionally intersecting, public and private paths through the seminal events and political struggles of the second half of the twentieth century, from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam War; the Summer of Love to radical feminism; Iran-Contra to Occupy Wall Street.

Dina Hampton is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has worked for more than a decade as a reporter and editor for publications including the New York Times and the Daily News. She is a late 1970s graduate of Little Red and also later served as its alumni director and archivist. She lives in New York City. (Public Affairs Books)

Visa

The mainstream media was exceptionally quiet this week about immigration reform.  Summaries last Friday and over the weekend about immigration reform by the usual talking heads conveniently omitted any discussion of high skill visas (H-1B).  Usually, they at least included a sentence about how H-1B visas are necessary to growing our economy, omitting any supporting evidence.   For example, they do not talk to The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) which generally supports a path to citizenship, but opposes some of the H-1B proposals that could import non-citizens comparable to 10% of the US engineering workforce.

Recently,  US Senator Amy Klobuchar chaired hearings on long-term unemployment for which she received well deserved respect.  Yet, she is the same senator who first introduced the provision to greatly increase the number of H-1B visas which compete with existing US workers for jobs.  Any discussion of immigration reform before this proposal was about DREAM Act Youth and poor Mexicans crossing the Arizona desert.  The competition from H-1B visas for good middle-class jobs is especially noticeable for older workers over 50 years old, but even for those 35 years old in Silicon Valley.   There was recent news coverage about the sharp increase in rates of long-term unemployment and rates of suicide among those over 50 years old.

The situation is a lot like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership which promise jobs, but mostly deliver hardship and more corporate control.  It’s unfortunate that celebrated progressives like US Senators Amy Klobuchar, Tammy Baldwin, and Patty Murray are all advocates of more H-1B visas and more austerity in government (bipartisan debt reduction).  Is that what Emily’s List means now?  As posted before:  “Dear Left, Enjoy Your Pot and Gay Marriage Because That’s All You’re Getting”

After years of mismanagement, the Tribune Company newspapers — including the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times – are up for sale.  And one of the potential buyers? The Koch brothers.  And wow are people outraged!

Yes, it’s those Koch brothers:the billionaire businessmen who run Koch Industries, a sprawling multinational corporation involved in everything from oil to fertilizer to paper towels.  But you probably know the Koch brothers for how they spend their considerable wealth: bankrolling right-wing political causes like the Tea Party movement, and funneling millions of dollars to front groups and politicians devoted to their anti-regulatory, anti-labor, and pro-corporate ideology.  The Kochs have spent millions propping up climate-change deniers, and have been instrumental in funding ALEC, the powerful business lobby that pushes corporate-friendly policies at the state level.

What would the Kochs do with a few major newspapers?  They would push public opinion and public despair further to the right and further into the depths.  This is why taxing billionaires is not a policy driven by greed or jealousy or even the desire to put vast sums of riches to good use.  Taxing billionaires is necessary if we are going to have representative government.  We talk about “freedom of the press.”  Never mind government surveillance of reporters’ phone records.  Never mind the prosecutions of whistleblowers and journalists.  If billionaires can dominate our communications system with what to them amounts to pocket change, while we blog dissent to people who believe nothing that doesn’t appear on Tee-Vee or in a corporate paper, whose freedom of the press is it?

Some recent reports indicate that many L.A. Times staffers would consider leaving the paper if it were purchased by the Kochs — which is probably music to their cost-cutting ears.  Better than staff promising to quit is subscribers promising to unsubscribe:

“I will cancel my subscription and so will family members. We have no need for propaganda dictated by far right-wing spoiled billionaires with an anti-citizenry, pro 1% agenda.  This will be the death of your struggling paper in a town that once had a proud history of journalism.  It’s a disgrace.”

That comment was posted with a signature on this petition.  Here are some more:

“If you want to increase the circulation of the New York TIMES in Los Angeles, let the Koch brothers buy the Los Angeles TIMES.”

“No Koch news!!!”

“If the Koch brothers get their hands on your paper, it will only be useful as tp.”

“Don’t give up the integrity of your company for a measley few bucks.”

“I refuse to continue my newspaper subscription if the Koch Brothers buy the Tribune. I boycott their other products so I will do the same if they buy the Tribune.”

“If you sell to the Koch brothers, you can remove us from your subscription list!!”

“Don’t let your long tradition of fair reporting be purchased away.”

“Koch purchase is a bad deal for our nation!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“Keep the corporate greed off of our free press!”

“Selling out to the Koch’s will pretty much put the kabosh on the 4th Estate’s duty to afflict the comfortable.”

“If the Koch Brothers take over, you’ll lose this loyal reader of the Chicago Tribune forever.”

“What an ignoble end to two fine papers known for excellence it would be if the Koch Bros. became the new owner. Forget about fairness and accuracy; the papers would simply become the latest bullhorn from which Charles and David would spew their propaganda. Has it come to this? Please don’t sell.”

“I am producer/director of Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press.  Seldes worked 10 years for the Chi Tribune as a foreign correspondent when their foreign press corps was one of the best in the world!  Remember with pride that high-quality journalism of the early Twentieth Century and don’t sell out!”

“This country is going in the wrong direction, don’t help it.”

“As a Chicago Tribune subscriber, I can say we will no longer subscribe to either the print or online version of the Trib if this sale goes through. The reputation and standing of the Tribune organization is on the line, and it will suffer irreparable harm if the sale occurs.”

“I have subscribed for 36 years and will cancel.”

“As the son of a former Editor on the Chicago Tribune I urge you to remember the Colonel and stand for something.  Don’t turn the Trib over to men that care only for this country for what they can dredge out of it for their own personal wealth.”

“I am an LA Times reader, my parents are Chicago Tribune readers.  We will do everything we can to make sure everyone we know never reads another edition of these papers if sold to the Kochs.”

Add your own comments for the Tribune Company to read.