Worse Than Clear-Cutting? Yes.

Logging for Water

by Will Parrish - CounterPunch

Aug 1, 2106

The day after an unseasonal June rain swelled the streams of the northern Sierra Nevada, Marily Woodhouse steered her 2003 Dodge Dakota through 65 miles of winding mountain roads near Mount Lassen. Woodhouse first traversed the area on horseback shortly after moving here 25 years ago.

Back then, the land was lush with life, and its towering conifer forests furnished refreshingly cool air on days that were blistering hot beyond the canopy’s shade.

Now, acre after acre of land of the Battle Creek Watershed is parched as far as the eye can see. Nonnative plants like star thistle and mullein compete to cover bare ground that was once studded with pines, firs, and cedars. Rather than finding sanctuary in the forests, Woodhouse now collects data that she says demonstrates the epic damage that has been wrought by the state’s largest timber corporation, Sierra Pacific Industries, or SPI.

Nearly every week, for more than seven years, Woodhouse has stopped at the same 13 stream locations in the watershed. At each spot, the founder of the environmental group Battle Creek Alliance uses specialized equipment to examine and record water temperature, water pH, soil temperature, and “turbidity”: a measure of individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye, similar to smoke in the air.

In 2012, the Ponderosa Fire torched 27,234 acres in the watershed. But Woodhouse says SPI inflicted much greater harm through post-fire “salvage logging,” which involved removing virtually every large- and medium-sized tree in the burned area—both living and dead—and deep-ripping the denuded soil to a depth of three feet with heavy machinery in order to accelerate the growth of newly planted trees.

“I used to think clear-cutting was the worst thing, but it’s not,” Woodhouse said regarding the salvage logging.

“They took everything down to bare dirt. The water quality went crazy bad.”

SPI officials have repeatedly defended their logging practices in Battle Creek and elsewhere, and have even argued that they eventually improve the health of forests and streams.

For decades, environmentalists have countered that industrial logging, in fact, damages watersheds because it involves removing vegetation that anchors hillsides and constructing logging roads that cause chronic erosion that chokes streams and rivers with sediment.

However, during the past year, a growing chorus of academics and conservationists has given comfort to the state’s logging industry by arguing that California would actually benefit from more logging, especially after years of punishing drought.

At the heart of the debate is the increasing realization that forests throughout the Sierra, Klamath, Siskiyou, and Coast mountain ranges—like the forests that once stood in Battle Creek—are important components of California’s water system. Not only do the trees store and filter huge amounts of water, but they also provide shade for the mountain snowpack so that it will melt gradually to fill the state’s reservoirs with a steady, year-round supply of water.

And an expanding number of scientists and environmental groups are now arguing that many of California’s forests, because of years of fire suppression and other unsound ecological practices, have become overcrowded with trees and that these forests are holding too much water in the soil. Cutting or thinning the trees, they say, will release the groundwater into streams and rivers so that California’s dams and reservoirs can capture it.

A leading proponent of this thinking is UC Merced chemical engineering professor Roger Bales, chairman of UC’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute. The institute operates 1,300 sensors that measure the geochemical balance of water in the Sierra Nevada’s forests, meadows, and streams. “Our groundwater is our largest storage reservoir,” Bales noted in a May presentation at Yosemite National Park. Given that 60 percent of the water supply used in California comes

from the Sierra Nevada alone, Bales encourages people to think of the iconic mountain range as “California’s water tower.”

Another proponent of logging for water is the environmental group the Nature Conservancy, which is helping to bankroll Bales’ work. Last year, the group caused a stir in the state’s environmental community when it published a report called “Estimating the Water Supply Benefits from Forest Restoration in the Northern Sierras.” The report mainly focused on how thinning national forests impacts the forest’s ability to store snow and use water more efficiently.

“The broad point we are making is that the Sierra Nevada and other forested watersheds are the source of most of California’s water,” said David Edelson, co-author of the report and the Nature Conservancy’s Sierra Nevada project director, in an interview. 

The report concluded that, if the current rate of forest thinning in the Sierra Nevada increases three-fold, there could be up to a 6 percent increase in the average annual streamflow for some watersheds that supply the state’s reservoirs.

But many environmentalists reject the idea of cutting down more trees in order to increase water supplies. While some do not oppose thinning forests that are dense with young trees, many agree that the claims of increased water runoff via more logging are greatly exaggerated, and that such an approach could wreak havoc on forests and river systems alike.

“Saying that more logging produces more water is Orwellian ‘lies are truth’ speak,” Woodhouse said.

“It’s amazing that this idea has cropped up again,” said veteran hydrologist Jonathan Rhodes, referring to logging for water.

“I’ve seen it come and go throughout my career, and it always ends up thoroughly debunked.”

Earlier this year, Rhodes and fisheries biologist Christopher Frissell released a comprehensive study that found the Nature Conservancy’s report to be deeply flawed. Rhodes and Frissell’s study—which was commissioned by the private environmental foundation Environment Now and drew on roughly 230 scientific research citations—concluded that in order to substantially increase the state’s water supplies, California would have to do much more than thin forests. “If people really want to take the approach of creating more water runoff through logging, we will be looking at draconian levels of forest removal in this state,” Rhodes warned in an interview.

Nonetheless, the logging-for-water idea has recently gained traction in Sacramento and among some other environmental organizations. The conservation group Pacific Forest Trust is currently sponsoring legislation, Assembly Bill 2480, written by Assemblymember Richard Bloom, D-Hollywood, that could increase forest thinning in certain watersheds to release more water for the state’s reservoirs.

The state Assembly has approved AB 2480, and it’s scheduled for another hearing in the state Senate later this summer. It if passes, it would head to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

Many of the state’s municipal water agencies oppose the bill, however, because it could require ratepayers—California consumers—to pick up the tab for forest thinning. “Our principal concern is the financing methods,” San Diego County Water Authority representative Glen Farrell noted at a June 28 state Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee meeting.

Environment Now director Doug Bevington said in an interview that it’s crucial for municipal ratepayers to scrutinize claims being made by logging-for-water proponents.

“Bay Area water users are being asked to subsidize damaging logging to the Sierra Nevada and won’t see any supply benefits,” he said.

“They may even have to pay more later on to address the damage to watersheds from all that logging.”

***

The theory of thinning or clearing forested areas in order to significantly increase water supplies has been around since at least the 1950s, and has always enjoyed timber industry backing, environmentalists say. Bevington, the author of the 2009 book, The Rebirth of Environmentalism, compares the logging-for-water theory to the logic used by deer hunters as they contributed to the extinction of wolves in the American West.

“The claim that cutting more trees would get us more water is similar to the old idea of slaughtering wolves to improve deer hunting, which actually wound up messing up deer populations,” he said. “In both notions, a simplistic mindset ignores natural complexity, leading to harmful results.”

Over the years, the logging-for-water arguments never gained widespread acceptance, in part because of the deepening recognition of logging’s monumental impacts on watersheds.

A case in point is the primary watershed serving the East Bay. The Mokelumne River is the main water source for 1.4 million East Bay residents, including those in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, and Alameda. The river’s headwaters are in the Stanislaus National Forest in the central Sierra Nevada, and a major reservoir—the Pardee—traps the Mokelumne’s water before releasing up to 325 million gallons per day into the 95-mile-long Mokelumne Aqueduct, which conveys it to the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s distribution system. Research suggests that 60 percent of the Mokelumne’s flow comes from water stored in the Sierra soil, as opposed to snowmelt.

According to Katherine Evatt, one of the state’s leading experts on the Mokelumne, historic logging has damaged the watershed through road-building and soil compaction. Logging roads are the main source of soil erosion and landslides in disturbed forests, and they also alter runoff patterns and permanently disrupt subsurface water flows. Further damage comes from the use of heavy logging machinery, the cutting of trees, and then dragging them out of the forest. Burning leftover brush and applying herbicides create even more havoc.

In the late-1990s, Sierra Pacific Industries purchased approximately 78,000 acres in the Mokelumne watershed. And SPI has conducted a considerable amount of clear-cutting in the area, which Evatt said has greatly increased the amount of sedimentation in EBMUD’s reservoirs—a cost that is ultimately passed onto utility ratepayers, because it reduces the reservoirs’ storage capacity.

But it’s not just the Mokelumne and Battle Creek watersheds that have experienced these impacts. From 1997 to 2014, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection approved more than 512,000 acres of clear-cutting in the state, or about 800 square miles: an area approximately as large as Alameda County. And SPI has completed most of these clear-cuts.

From overhead images, such as those from Google Earth, the checkerboard pattern of clear-cuts in watersheds like the Mokelumne gives the land a disturbed appearance reminiscent of leprosy on human skin. Other large timber firms, such as Seattle-based Green Diamond Resources Company, which owns more than 400,000 acres of mainly redwood and Douglas fir forestland in Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity counties, also rely heavily on clear-cutting.

“If you walk in a more natural forest, you’ll hear birds, insects, see evidence of small mammals, feel moisture in the soil—it looks, feels, sounds, and smells like a forest,” said Evatt. She is also president of the environmental group Foothill Conservancy, which is dedicated to protecting the Mokelumne River and its watershed.

“But when you walk into a clear-cut or young plantation, it’s nearly devoid of life—dry and hot.”

The main architect of SPI’s success is Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson, who, according to Forbes magazine, is worth $3.6 billion. Emmerson’s son, Mark Emmerson, argued during a 2011 presentation to the UC Berkeley School of Forestry that his company’s techniques are helping restore forests over the long run and are essential in the fight against climate change.

“In the next 70 years, we will triple the inventory in our forest,” he said.

“Our tree size will go up from 17 to 30 inches in diameter. We will have pulled 500 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

But critics say SPI’s claims are based on scientific models that are calculated to put a happy face on the company’s activities, which they say are permanently degrading the forests through converting them to plantations. Healthy forests are layered, with multiple canopies, small openings where the sun shines through, and darkened hollows where it does not. Different plants and animals thrive in the different habitats.

“SPI is very good at growing trees,” said Calaveras County resident Susan Robinson of the conservation group Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch.

“But they are also very good at turning forests into something more like cornfields or almond orchards.”

SPI is the state’s largest private landowner and controls more than 1.8 million acres of forestland. Roughly 80 percent of California’s timber production currently comes from logging on private lands, with 20 percent of logs sourced from national forests. Thirty years ago, however, it was the reverse: 80 percent of logging occurred in national forests.

The timber industry has relentlessly lobbied to open up more logging on public lands. According to critics, that is partly because of the pace at which many logging companies are decreasing forest stocks on property they own.

***

Currently, there is little disagreement over the fact that national and private forestlands have sustained enormous damage from logging practices and from a century of fire suppression. Numerous forests today are more crowded with trees than ever before. And many of the trees are approximately the same age, an unnatural condition resulting from clear-cutting and other harvesting methods known as “even-aged management.”

Some proponents of forest thinning, including UC Merced’s Bales, see a synergy between removing trees to guard against fire and extracting more water from mountain runoff.

“From a water-resources perspective, there is a sweet spot in between too many and too few trees,” Bales wrote to The East Bay Monthly in an email.

The ideal forest pattern, Bales argues, involves creating openings in the forest that are big enough to allow snow to pile deeply, while leaving a sufficient number of large trees to shade the snow and extend the melting season until late summer.

In June, during a presentation to the California Senate Committee on Water and Natural Resources concerning AB 2480, Laurie Wayburn, president of the Pacific Forest Trust, made a similar assertion to that of Bales. She argued that “overly dense, even, closed-canopy forests” had altered runoff patterns in the national forests, and that thinning—followed by the reintroduction of prescribed fires—would be a means of restoring “more water-rich forests.”

At the June 28 meeting, committee chairwoman state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-LA, said Wayburn had given a “fantastic presentation” showing that increasing water supply through improved forest management would be a cost-effective measure.

But the Center for Biological Diversity’s Justin Augustine contends that such claims are fodder for “a get-rich-quick scheme” that will ultimately benefit timber companies like SPI, rather than watersheds and downstream water users. And Hydrologist Rhodes and fisheries biologist Frissell, who wrote the Environment Now report, say the benefits of logging for water are vastly overstated, and that proponents are omitting its enormous downsides.

“The idea is that if you aggressively cut timber, then you’ll have a bigger timber supply, more water, and less fires,” Rhodes said in an interview.

“Well, only one of those things is true.”

Overall, Rhodes and Frissell’s report found that “the effects of logging on water flows are often negligible, nonexistent, or negative, and even in the more optimistic scenarios, the potential effects are small, transient, and ill-timed.” The report concluded that during drought years, water supply increases from logging would be minuscule.

In addition, logging produces substantial environmental harms: Rhodes and Frissell identified nine types of damage that result from logging-for-water projects, such as increased water pollution from logging and erosion from logging roads.

These effects can also be expensive to the downstream communities using the water, Frissell and Rhodes wrote. According to their report, numerous scientific studies have also concluded over the years that sustaining increased runoff through tree removal would mean clearing large areas of forest at a high frequency—as much as 25 percent of a watershed area every 10 years. The physical principle involved is straightforward: When forests are thinned, the trees that remain tend to consume whatever water becomes available. As a result, loggers would have to fell large numbers of trees in order to substantially increase water runoff, Rhodes noted, and that runoff would invariably be heavily polluted with sediment because of the amount of logging involved.

Many environmentalists have a mixed view of the ideas touted by the Pacific Forest Trust and the Nature Conservancy, as well as of AB 2480. The bill, for example, calls for reducing the number of rural roads through forests, a move that all involved agree would be beneficial to watersheds. But it also includes language that could pave the way for logging-for-water projects.

Environmental groups’ divided positions on the bill are reminiscent of the political battles concerning the 2014 state water bond, Proposition 1, which earmarked hundreds of million of dollars for environmental restoration projects but also furnished $2.7 billion for new water storage projects, a compromise that many fear will lead to the construction of new dams in California.

Izzy Martin, CEO of the Nevada City-based Sierra Fund, supports the ideas on which AB 2480 based. She labels it a great starting point for restoring forests through thinning, though her organization has not taken a position on the bill due to concerns that it may finance ineffective projects.

John Buckley, executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, said he is withholding support from AB 2480 because it focuses only on five watersheds, rather than addressing the totality of California’s forests, and also because the bill doesn’t address logging practices or other impacts to watersheds. He supports the idea of thinning to enhance watersheds, but said he would rather the bill create incentives for selective logging practices that thin out overly crowded forests, resulting in “lower levels of bare soil, greater protection for watersheds, and significant other ecological benefits.”

Martha Davis, who helped lead the campaign to restore Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra in the 1980s and ’90s, has promoted stronger links between forest restoration and water supply planning as an adviser to state agencies during the last decade. But while she has not taken a public stance on AB 2480, she said that some of the ideas about increased water yield through logging are far too one-dimensional. “Some of the studies I’ve seen so far are treating watersheds like a dam, such that if you just tweak the knob, there could be more water coming out of these systems,” said Davis, now the policy director for the Inland Empire Water Agency in Riverside County. “That’s not the way it works at all.”

Evatt of the Foothill Conservancy has supported a new collaboration by the U.S. Forest Service and the Amador Water Agency to thin forests to reduce wildfire risk, protect water quality, and improve water yield. But she says legislation like AB 2480 is dangerous, because it would fund forest-thinning projects specifically for a single purpose: increasing water yield. “Watershed management and restoration approaches should be more holistic, not focused on a single output or commodity, whether that’s timber products, recreation, or more water,” she said.

Given what opponents describe as AB 2480’s vague language, which promises funding for projects that improve watersheds, some fear that companies like SPI may receive public financing for damaging projects that they claim are beneficial. The Feather River is one of five watersheds that would get special attention under AB 2480. Others are the Trinity, Pit, McCloud, and Sacramento river watersheds.

In total, these watersheds encompass some 7 million acres, about 62 percent of which is publicly owned, mainly by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. SPI also owns a considerable amount of land in the watersheds, and the company is the largest purchaser of logs from logging on public forests in those areas.

***

Battle Creek is a 350-square-mile drainage fed by water from melting snow that drips down the western slope of Mount Lassen. It’s also one of the most critical watersheds of the northern Sierra. Because of the creek’s ample year-round flow of cold water, state and federal wildlife managers have deemed it the most welcoming area in California for the reintroduction of endangered Sacramento River winter-run Chinook salmon. Baby Chinook must have cold water to survive.

As a result, Battle Creek is the focus of an ongoing $128 million state and federal restoration effort that involves dynamiting hydroelectric dams and constructing fish ladders. The Battle Creek Salmon and Steelhead Restoration Project is one of the most expensive aquatic species restoration programs ever undertaken on the West Coast. Only the removal of two dams on Washington’s Elhwa River in 2014 entailed a bigger investment.

But critics say the fisheries agencies’ progress in restoring the winter-run Chinook has been persistently undermined by SPI’s destructive logging practices upstream. In addition to the salvage logging, the company has clear-cut thousands of acres of Battle Creek’s forests in 20-to-40-acre swaths since the 1990s.

The impacts from erosion in the area have been dramatic. Jim Smith, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is one of numerous state and federal agency employees administering the Battle Creek Salmon and Steelhead Restoration Project. “Since the fire, we’ve seen an extremely high level of sediment input into the watershed,” he said. “Some of our deep pools in the south fork, which were some of the best areas for the salmon, just aren’t deep anymore.”

The question is how much of it has to do with the 2012 Ponderosa Fire versus SPI’s logging practices. Smith, as with other state and federal employees, pins most of the blame on the fire. And SPI Research and Monitoring Manager Cajun James asserted in a report that her company’s salvage logging actually reduced soil erosion, contending that sites in Battle Creek “disturbed only by fire produced substantially more water runoff and soil erosion than did sites that received post-wildfire salvage logging.”

However, most studies of fire-induced erosion show that it dramatically declines a year later, once grasses and forbs grow back. By contrast, the use of heavy equipment in post-fire logging compacts the soil, and the application of post-fire herbicides prevents vegetation from re-establishing itself. Without adequate vegetation to anchor them, hillsides erode into roads, ditches, and culverts for years afterward.

Woodhouse has hired Jack Lewis, a retired statistical hydrologist from the U.S. Forest Service, to analyze the data that she collects on her weekly trips through the watershed. His findings strongly support her claims, pointing to significantly increased erosion in areas impacted by salvage logging and clear-cutting.

Following a 2011 Sacramento Bee investigation of SPI’s logging in Battle Creek, the California Natural Resources Agency directed four state agencies, including the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, to study the impact of clear-cutting on creating sediment-filled runoff, but reported finding “only one instance of low-magnitude sediment delivery (less than 1 cubic yard) directly associated with a clearcut.”

Woodhouse said the study’s participants failed to find any evidence of logging-induced erosion because they conducted their study at the worst possible time: early fall, before winter rains that would have begun washing sediment into the creek basin. In an email, which was obtained via the California Public Records Act, Cal Fire forester Duane Shintaku later wrote to SPI executive staff members asking permission to conduct further studies, which, he said, “would provide the evidence we need if anyone questions the validity of the Task Force’s findings.” Despite the friendly nature of this entreaty, the SPI staff turned down the request.

The 1973 California Forest Practice Act was designed to strengthen protections against streamside logging and compel timber companies to harvest selectively. And in a 2009 letter to the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, a nine-member governor-appointed board that is the policymaking branch of state forestry, Deputy Attorney General Anita E. Rudd opined that the 1973 law “requires the [b]oard to adopt regulations that include . . . measures for soil erosion control, water quality and watershed control, [and] flood control.”

But many environmentalists say this isn’t really happening in California, and the main reason is the pro-timber bias of the state Board of Forestry. The board includes three representatives of the timber industry, and over the years, a majority of the board’s members have had some association with logging. Currently, two of the seven members of the board have worked for SPI—company forester Richard Wade and Stuart Farber, now of the timber consulting firm Beatty & Associates—while two other members currently or formerly have worked for other timber companies

Under California law, a lumber company must submit a timber harvest plan—a sort of scaled-down version of an environmental impact report—to the state before logging a forest. The so-called “lead agency” for reviewing timber harvest plans is Cal Fire. In an interview, Russ Henly, assistant secretary of Forest Resources Management for the California Natural Resources Agency, said he thinks Cal Fire staffers are “doing a very good job” with their timber harvest plan review responsibilities.

“I know they give a hard look to the cumulative impacts of logging as part of the harvesting plans,” he said.

But critics contend that Cal Fire is uniquely favorable to the industry it regulates and that it routinely rubber stamps logging companies’ plans. The agency’s approvals also greatly aid the industry when environmentalists attempt to challenge timber plans through litigation.

“In court, it’s not about who gave the better argument, but rather about whether an agency—in this case, Cal Fire—simply has some basis in evidence for their conclusion,” said Augustine of the Center for Biological Diversity. Augustine has been involved in several lawsuits against SPI timber harvest plans.

“That’s a very low bar, unfortunately, that allows agencies to do bad things and still get away with it.”

If organizations like the Nature Conservancy are keen on protecting the state’s water supply, some say, they should be advocating for reforms of the Board of Forestry and Cal Fire. Instead, the Conservancy has teamed up with the state’s main timber-lobbying firm—the California Forestry Association, or CalForests—to promote logging-for-water proposals.

Shortly after the release of the Conservancy’s 2015 report, CalForests Chairman David Bischel and the Nature Conservancy’s Edelson co-authored an op-ed in the Mercury News, calling for an increase in “the pace and scale of fuels reduction in [national] forests as an important part of the state’s water strategy.”

The fact that SPI also claims that clear-cutting helps restore forests—and, thus, improves the health of watersheds—worries opponents of logging for water, like Environment Now’s Bevington: “SPI’s promotion of clear-cutting is a particularly audacious example of a disturbing trend in which harmful logging projects get repackaged to seem like they are somehow beneficial to forests, when, in fact, they are not.”

He says that the Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with CalForests is roughly akin to collaborating with SPI itself. SPI CEO Mark Emmerson is the board chairman of CalForests. And according to CalForests’ financial statements, SPI gave $71,500 to the organization from 2011 to 2015, more than any other company.

***

Given that avenues for increased forest protection are largely blocked at the state level, environmental activists have sought other options to build momentum for change, including an effort to create a groundswell for reform in cities and counties. In 2015, the city of Berkeley became one of seven California cities to call on the state Legislature to enact a ban on clear-cutting, joining San Francisco, Daly City, Davis, Menlo Park, Monte Sereno, and Brisbane. The resolution cited Berkeley’s desire to protect its water supply from sedimentation and pollution caused by SPI.

“We’ve talked to lots of legislators,” said Sierra Club volunteer Karen Maki, who is an organizer of the campaign for a statewide clear-cutting ban and a resident of Los Gatos.

“They’re sympathetic, but they aren’t doing much yet. We figured if we got a lot of cities to pass the resolutions, it would start to have some influence.”

Maki acknowledges that a ban on clear-cutting is not a cure-all. But it is an important step, she said, in terms of protecting California’s water supply and quality alike, and one that most environmentalists should be able to rally around. In 1990, a ballot initiative called Forests Forever that would have banned clear-cutting throughout the state lost by only three percentage points.

Menlo Park City Councilmember Catherine Carlton presented her city’s resolution calling for a clear-cutting ban to the League of California Cities annual convention in 2014, and she said she received a strongly favorable response from other city councilmembers and mayors. “It’s an idea that makes sense, so I’m sure it will keep coming up,” she said.

The municipal resolutions call attention to another aspect of forest degradation: climate change. The Berkeley version asserts that the timber industry accounts for roughly 10 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

According to scientific predictions, global warming is causing more variability in California’s climate, with more intense storms, longer dry periods, and less snowpack, with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow.

Hydrologist Rhodes says the renewal of logging-for-water claims is particularly frustrating given that there are lower-cost ways of restoring these watersheds on public lands that don’t involve logging. Three of these methods include the reduction or cessation of livestock grazing near streams and meadows in headwaters, reductions in the extensive network of logging roads in national forests, and the restoration of beaver populations, which helps to slow water on its course downstream so that it trickles into the ground.

But Bevington said it’s not surprising that the logging-for-water claim has gained renewed attention in California during the recent intense drought.

“In desperate times, people are more susceptible to believing promises of easy water, rather than looking closely at the problems with those claims,” he continued.

“But if EBMUD or other utilities end up subsidizing logging in the Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges, Bay Area residents are likely to see no significant benefits in terms of water flows.”

This article originally appeared in East Bay Monthly.
 

Will Parrish is an environmental journalist living in northern California.

More articles by:Will Parrish

Shepherd, Sailor, Farmer, Fish: Operation Virus Hunter Weighs Anchor

Sea Shepherd's Presence

by Ray Grigg - Shades of Green

July 31, 2016

Sea Shepherd, a world-famous environmental organization, has arrived in BC waters. One of it's ships, the RV Martin Sheen, left Vancouver on July 19th to sail northward into the plethora of salmon farms that populate the province's coast, many on the routes of migrating wild salmon.

On board is biologist Alexandra Morton who confessed the environmental group's usual tactics were outside her comfort zone.

But, unlike the radical actions used by Sea Shepherd to halt illegal whaling in southern oceans, this is essentially a scientific expedition — “Operation Virus Hunter”.

The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, explained its presence here.

“It is very satisfying to me to send one of our vessels to my home province of British Columbia, to address one of the most insidious threats to biodiversity on the West Coast — salmon farms. Our mission is to investigate, document and expose an industry that is spreading disease, parasites and destroying the natural habitat of our wild salmon — the coho, the sockeye and the chinook. [Their] exotic Atlantic salmon simply do not belong in these waters.” (Island Tides, July 28/16).

Sea Shepherd's presence here is highly symbolic, an unmistakable signal that an internationally recognized environmental organization, known for functioning with a passionate dedication to principle, has declared that BC's salmon farming industry is a major threat to the marine ecology of the region.

The industry, of course, thinks otherwise. But, ecologically, the open net-pens where they rear their fish couldn't be located in a worse place. The West Coast is a wilderness paradise, teeming with nature's bounty of animals, fish and forests. Here, wild salmon are a keystone species, the life-blood that pulses through the ocean, rivers and streams to nourish orcas, bears, birds, insects, trees and people. The open net-pens of the salmon farms, distribution centres for feces, parasites and diseases, are in fundamental conflict with the health of this wild ecology.

The history of this conflict began with wildlife such as orcas, seals, sea-lions, otters, eagles, herons, and anything unfenced that liked to eat fish. Then it expanded to wild salmon when sea lice, flourishing in densely packed net-pens of farmed fish, became incubation sites for the parasites to spread, en masse, to maim and kill millions of hapless migrating wild smolts. Viral diseases followed, the latest in a series being the ubiquitous piscine reovirus, the causative infection for the debilitating condition of heart and skeletal muscle inflammation.

The successive and cumulative effects of all these farm-based impacts continue to jeopardize the health of wild salmon and impair their crucial role in supporting the West Coast's entire marine ecosystem. As in Norway, where the lice are becoming resistant to pesticides and the viruses are also out of control, the longer fish farms remain in BC's open net-pens, the worse the ecological consequences will be.

This is what has attracted the attention of Sea Shepherd. It volunteers its ships where the environmental threat is immanent and serious. The sheep it is protecting are the wildlife of the world's oceans, and its message to those who offend the integrity of nature is in the shepherd's crook and Neptune's triton crossed beneath a skull.

The mission to British Columbia is unambiguous. And it will be profiled around the world.

Born to Shoot, Shoot: Homicidal Playthings and the Children Who Play with Them

“Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!” Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing

by Frida Berrigan - TomDispatch

July 30, 2016

It was a beautiful evening and the kids -- Madeline, two; Seamus, almost four; and Rosena, nine -- were running across a well-tended town green. Seamus pointed his rainbow flag with the feather handle at his sisters and “pow-powed” them, calling out, “Yous are dead now, guys. I shot yous.”

Madeline and Rosena laughed and just kept on running, with Seamus at their heels. I hid my face in my hands. It wasn’t just that he was playing guns, but that he was using a Pride flag as his gun at a vigil to mourn those killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. My pacifist husband Patrick ran to redirect their activities, replacing the flag with a ball and glove and beginning a game of catch.

Vigil organizers were taking turns reading the names of those killed into a microphone.

“... Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22
Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36
Luis S. Vielma, 22...”

Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, Guns for Tots

I remember well going to the rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York City with my six-guns proudly strapped to my hips. I was probably eight or nine years old and those two ivory-handled -- okay, undoubtedly plastic -- revolvers were probably from a Hopalong Cassidy line of toys. That cowboy character was a favorite of mine on TV and, of course, with my friends I regularly played “cowboys and Indians.” But far more of my war play -- we’re talking the early 1950s -- came out of World War II, my father’s war, even though the country was then involved in a bloody stalemate of a conflict in Korea.

Imagine me, an eight or nine year old, running through the potato fields behind a friend’s house on Long Island. The year is probably 1952. America is enmeshed in its second Asian war of the century, this time against -- to a child -- a horrific but blurry enemy. Fortunately, the fighting that goes on and on in a faraway land called Korea is unimaginably distant from this moment. My friend and I crouch down, furrowed dirt and leafy potato plants as far as the eye can see. The two of us scan the horizon. Somewhere out there the enemy is approaching -- not the one in Korea, but a real enemy, the “Japs” or Nazis (“Japanazis,” as World War II comic books sometimes called them) or maybe even those Indians. The choice is ours. No parents nearby to tell us what to do, no teachers to instruct us, and we’re armed. I grip a stick. I can feel the curve where it fits into my palm, and what more do I need than a good eye, the ability to make battle sounds -- the sharp rat-a-tat of a machine gun, the budda-budda of ack-ack fire, or the long whistle of incoming artillery? We’ve been at this for an hour already, beating back attack after attack, then diving for our “foxholes” between the rows of plants. “Watch out!” my friend shouts as loud as he wants, because no one cares that we, and the invisible but palpable enemy, are here at war in these fields. Yes, I notice it now, too: the faint motion of leaves that might pass for the wind. It’s them! A banzai charge! We leap up, firing madly, but with deadly accuracy. The enemy begins to fall.

It was all so obvious to us then, millions of kids whose fathers had come home, often grim and silent, from a terrible world war. Films glorifying that war were a commonplace of our lives. The good guys and the bad guys were clear. We could be left to our own devices because who should die and why seemed so obvious, not only to us but to the adults around us. The world of American war was, in fact, already growing increasingly complicated and, more than a decade later, many of us would find ourselves in the streets in opposition to just such a war, but we didn’t have to worry about such things then. What, I wonder now, thinking about TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan’s latest essay on her children and our world, goes on in the junior version of gun culture these days? What script or scripts are today’s children playing off of? How do zombies, terrorists, space aliens, and god knows who or what else sort themselves out at the point of a gun when kids begin to go pow-pow in 2016? What exactly are they powing in a world too strange for words, one armed to the teeth and ready to kill right here at home in ways inconceivable in 1952? In a world littered with dead bodies from Orlando and St. Paul to Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Nice, not to speak of Baghdad, Kabul, Tripoli, and Istanbul, in a world of drone assassinations and god knows what else, what can they possibly be playing? Tom 

“Pow, Pow, Yous Are Dead!” 

Children, Toy Guns, and the Real Thing

by Frida Berrigan

 

Those three men and 46 others were massacred on June 12th. Another 50 people were wounded. Omar Mateen, who killed them, was armed with a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle and a Glock 17 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He bought those two weapons legally in the days leading up to the attack.

The carnage brought politicians and pundits out in force, using all the usual arguments for and against guns. Because the victims were mostly gay and mostly Latino, and because the attack was carried out by an American citizen with an ethnic last name who may have been enthralled by Islamic terrorism, or a closeted, self-hating homosexual (or both), the commentary quickly became muddled. Was it a hate crime, Islamic terrorism, or a strange double-bonus hit for the haters? Mateen was killed in a shootout with police and so can't speak to his motives. Investigators were left to sift through the material evidence and a dizzying compilation of online comments, Facebook likes, and recollections from old co-workers, family members, and possible lovers in their search for answers.

The most essential facts are, however, not that complicated: Mateen had a license to carry a gun, training as a private security guard, and hatreds to act upon. He armed himself and he killed.

And all over the country, since that fateful day that elicited the usual cries of “never again,” the killing continues: Alton Sterling and Philando Castille by the police; Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police Officer Brent Thompson and four Dallas Police officers, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith, Michael Krol, and Patrick Zamarripa, by a lone sniper, Micah Johnson, who himself was then killed by an armed police robot; three more police officers in Baton Rouge on July 17th.

“... Montrell Jackson, 32
Matthew Gerald, 41
Brad Garafola, 45...”

And the killing continues. Using the Gun Violence Archive, I counted another 306 deaths by guns throughout the United States in the first eight days of July alone. Most of them weren’t high-profile police shootings or mass tragedies, but in a small-scale and localized way, the grief and outrage of Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas were replicated in every corner of this country, including Ticfaw, Louisiana; Woodland, California; Tabernacle, New Jersey; and Harvey, Illinois. More than 300 deaths by gun in just eight days.

“Stabbin’ My Bunny”: Teaching Kids About Guns and Violence

And then, of course, there were my kids, my husband, and those “guns.” As a boy, Patrick wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns. Instead, he, his parents, and their friends would go to the mall during the Christmas buying spree to put “Stop War Toys” stickers on Rambo and G.I. Joe action figures. When he went to his friends’ houses, he had to tell them that war toys were verboten.

I grew up in a similar family of activists. We, too, were forbidden toy guns and other war toys. My brother and I were more likely to play games like “protester at the Pentagon” than cops and robbers. I’ve been thinking recently about why toy guns didn’t have a grip on our imaginations as kids. I suspect it was because we understood -- were made to understand -- what the big gun of U.S. militarism had done in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Indochina, and throughout Central America. Our dad had seen the big gun of war up close and personal. His finger -- the same one he pointed at us when we were in trouble -- had pulled the trigger again and again in France during World War II. He was decorated there, but had zero nostalgia for the experience. He was, in fact, deeply ashamed of the dashing figure he had once cut when home from the front. And so, dad screwed up a new kind of courage to say no to war and violence, to killing of any kind. His knowledge of war imbued his nonviolent peace activist mission with a genuine, badass, superhero style swagger.

Our parents -- our community of ragtag, countercultural Catholic peace activists -- made that no-violence, no-killing, no-matter-what point again and again. In fact, my early experience of guns was the chilling fear of knowing that, in protest, my father, mother, and their friends were walking into what they called “free fire zones” on military bases, where well-armed, well-trained soldiers were licensed to kill intruders. So we didn’t point toy guns at each other. We didn’t pow-pow with our fingers or sticks. We crossed those fingers and hoped that the people we loved would be safe.

Our inner city Baltimore neighborhood, where crack cocaine madness was just taking hold, drove that point home on a micro level. Our house was robbed at gunpoint more than once -- and we had so little worth taking. We watched a man across the street bleed to death after being stabbed repeatedly in a fight over nothing. People from our house ran to help and were there for far too long before an ambulance even arrived. We knew as little kids that violence was no laughing matter, nor child’s play. It was serious business and was to be resisted.

As parents tend to do, Patrick and I are passing this tradition on to our kids, hopefully without the emotional scarring that went with our childhoods of resistance. They don’t have guns or action figures or any other toy implements of death. Still, we’ve been watching Seamus, our Team Elsa (from the Disney blockbuster Frozen) son, as he’s recently begun turning every stick into an imaginary gun. This is, of course, happening just as, in the headlines of the moment, actual guns are turning so many previously real people into statistics. Under the circumstances, how could I not find myself thinking about toy guns, real guns, the nature of play, the role of imagination, the place of parents, and how to (or whether to) police (ha!) that imaginary play?

When my stepdaughter Rosena was about four, she found a toy dagger at the playground, somehow smuggled it home, and was stabbing one of her beloved stuffed animals, a bunny, repeatedly with it.

In the other room, I could hear the thumps on the bedroom floor and called out, “What are you doing?”

“Stabbin’ my bunny. I kilt her,” she responded matter-of-factly.

Seizing a “teaching moment” and undoubtedly gripped by my own childhood experiences and memories of my parents, I blustered into the bedroom with a shoebox. “Now, your bunny is dead,” I announced in my version of over-the-top momism. “You know what happens when living things die, right? It’s forever, right? Now, we have to bury her.” Rosena and I then “buried” the doll on a high shelf in her closet. I told her that we cannot hurt or kill the things (or people) we love. I told her that, because she had “killed” that bunny, she could never play with it again.

About a week later, I slipped it back into her toy basket and, when she asked why, assured her that I thought she wouldn’t hurt her toys like that again. She agreed. I recall that episode now with a certain embarrassment, but when I recently heard Rosena explaining death and loss to her little brother and sister, I thought: oh, maybe the drama of the shoebox burial was actually helpful in some fashion.

Toys matter. We’ve put a fair amount of thought into what might be called toy curation in our household. We’ve bought nothing new and little used. Mostly, we’ve accepted shipments of hand-me-downs from friends who just wanted “this crap” out of their houses. No guns came with them, thankfully. After all, even toy guns can mean death under the wrong circumstances.

A year ago, I visited the Cuddell Recreation Center in Cleveland with my daughter Madeline and a group of friends. That broad stretch of ball fields and paths, anchored by a gazebo and a playground, was where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann in November 2014. Rice, an African American, was playing with an Airsoft pellet gun that a friend’s Dad had bought at Walmart. A replica of an actual Colt pistol, it shot plastic pellets and looked pretty real, since the orange tip signifying “toy” was missing. However, Officer Loehmann, investigating a report that a man was carrying a gun in the park, was moving too fast to notice much. He sped up and began shooting even before his squad car stopped moving. Rice’s hands were still reportedly in his pockets.

Though Loehmann was not indicted, the city of Cleveland paid a $6 million settlement to the Rice family and demolished the gazebo where the boy was shot. In the park that day, local activists described the shooting and its aftermath to our group. Half listening, I followed Madeline as she toddled into the playground. I tried to imagine Samaria Rice’s pain in this unremarkable place made part shrine, part soapbox by a police officer’s quick trigger finger, racism, and her son’s blood.

I thought about that toy gun in Tamir Rice’s hand and what might have been going through his head as he pointed it and played with it. Despite the age difference, it couldn’t have been that far from what regularly goes through my son’s head when he picks up a stick and points it: pop, boom, wow! The difference, of course, is that Seamus, blond and freckled and unmistakably white, would run little risk of being shot down by a policeman, even eight years from now with a replica toy gun in his hands.

Blasters, Blasters, Everywhere

Toys are a big business in this country, raking in $19.4 billion in 2015, according to the retail tracking firm NPD Group. Our family is not responsible for even a dime of this.

Not surprisingly, then, my announcement that we were all going to spend a rainy afternoon at a local Toys “R” Us store came like a bolt from the blue for the kids.

I wanted to see what kind of toy weaponry was for sale there. I was curious, among other things, about whether the boys at school who had taught Seamus about superheroes, bad guys, and Star Wars had ignited in my son a love of weaponry; I was curious, that is, as to how he would react to the walls of guns I imagined Toys “R” Us displaying.

We got into our car as if it were Christmas Eve, Seamus beside himself with excitement, Madeline on a contact high from her brother. I was experiencing my own contact high, taking my kids on their first research trip.

What we found was not exactly what I expected -- on many levels.

Seamus was quickly overwhelmed by the glut of everything -- lots of pictures of toys on boxes, but not a lot to pick up. (It was, in that sense, the very opposite of our visits to the Goodwill store, where you can sit on the floor and play with all those second-hand toys as long as you put them back afterwards.) Not so surprisingly, in retrospect, he went straight for what was familiar, what he could grab in his hand and actually look at: the books. It took some effort to wrestle him away from Five Stories About Princesses and enlist him in my quest for bad toys. (Madeline had, by then, fallen asleep.)

I had finally found the Nerf “blasters,” but he wasn’t interested. “Let’s not go down this aisle, okay, Mom?”

I was, of course, looking for the worst of the worst when it came to weaponry, but it proved remarkably hard to find. The aisle did, admittedly, have the Nerf Zombie Strike Doominator and the Nerf Modulus Recon MKII for $34.99 each. Those certainly sounded grim, given the eternal war against the undead, but the bright orange, cartoonish, completely unrealistic “blasters” on display and marketed to kids “eight and up” seemed distant indeed from American gun carnage (and our wars in distant lands), nor was there anything on the packaging that even hinted at real people getting shot in real encounters or real wars. I must admit that I don’t like the idea of Seamus shooting anything at anyone -- even a brain-hungry zombie -- but as it turned out, I needn’t have worried, not this time around anyway. Zombie-killing wasn’t in his wheelhouse.

Still, I kept looking for the real gun aisle, and I did come across more blasters, dart shooters, and the like, none with the word “gun” on them. Of course, we do live in Connecticut, less than 100 miles from Newtown where, in 2012, Adam Lanza, a devotee of violent video games who grew up in a gun-filled house, killed 20 kids just a little older than Seamus along with six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. So maybe our local toy outlet was being sensitive, but I doubt it. There was the Halo UNSC SMG Blaster (the initials make it sound extra tough but stand for nothing) for $19.99, and the NERF Star Wars Episode VII First Order Stormtrooper Deluxe Blaster, which fires 12 darts up to 65 feet without reloading, for $41.99. The worst thing I could find was the Xploderz Mayhem, with “more distance, more ammo,” which shoots easy-to-wash off mini-water pellets. It was on clearance for $18.89.

By then, Seamus was pulling me frantically toward the aisle with the full Frozen franchise on display. Madeline was now awake and in heaven.

So I left them there briefly and snuck off to do a last check for “real” toy guns. No such luck. I didn’t find the kind of Airsoft gun Tamir Rice was playing with when he was killed. I didn’t find an ersatz Sig Sauer either.

It turns out that most brick-and-mortar toy stores don’t seem to offer realistic-looking toy weaponry anymore, nor is there the toy store equivalent of the curtained-off area in the old neighborhood video rental shop where the porn was available. For such toys, you have to turn to an online world of websites like Kids-Army.com, where you can indeed buy realistic-looking toy rifles, shotguns, and pistols, or even to Amazon, where you can find an Airsoft version of the Sig Sauer rifle for $249.99.

“Start Them Young”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) would undoubtedly have been disappointed by my local Toys “R” Us outlet -- just as its officials undoubtedly are by the way most big toy merchants seem to have left their more realistic guns for the online world. This happened, in part, in response to the sort of social pressure that my husband engaged in when in high school and -- more critically -- the almost routine horror of the blurred line between toy guns and real ones. You know we’re a quirky, gun-crazy nation when Cleveland could ban toy guns and umbrellas with pointy tips from the area around the Republican Convention in the name of security, but couldn't keep out the real guns in open-carry Ohio.

The NRA wants kids to play with realistic toy guns and BB guns, since they believe that such toys are part of a child’s initiation into the future ownership of perfectly real guns. At the moment, the gun lobby is concerned that not enough people have guns -- even though the 270 million to 310 million of them already amassed around this country (according to the Pew Research Center) could arm just about every man, woman, transgendered person, and child around. Still, despite the fact that Americans can now carry guns in all 50 states and the NRA continues to win most of the big political fights, the number of households with guns is actually down from its peak in the late 1960s (though those that are armed have more and deadlier weapons than ever before). No wonder the gun industry and the gun lobby are fighting to produce an army of toddlers.

“Start Them Young,” a February 2016 report from the Violence Policy Center, details how gun manufacturers and the NRA are eager to market real guns to younger and younger consumers. The report starts with a selection of quotes from the industry: including this gem from Craig Cushman, marketing director for Thompson/Center Arms, about their Hot Shot rifle for kids: “[We’re] talking about a tiny gun intended for the very youngest shooters -- the ultimate first gun. We’re targeting the six- to 12-year-old range.” In other words, kids are literally in their sights.

It’s a strange world we live in. The toy industry has puffed up and candy-colored its play guns, turned up the volume on the violence online and in video games, and wrapped everything in plastic and safety warnings. At the same time, the gun industry is making its guns smaller and cuter for kids, while putting its energy into the all-important junior market.

Can we be safe -- any of us -- in a nation awash in guns? The gun-and-ammo industry boasted $16 billion in revenue for 2015. Gun stores -- from brick-and-mortar shops to online retailers – had $3.1 billion in revenue that same year. The industry as a whole claimed responsibility for nearly $50 billion in “economic activity” in 2015 alone. That represents a fair number of jobs, but here is the number that really goes boom: $229 billion. That’s the annual cost of fatal and non-fatal gun violence in this country, according to Mother Jones and analyst Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation who teamed up to crunch the numbers. That figure includes both the direct costs of gun injuries and deaths -- police investigations, emergency personnel, hospital bills, long-term care for the injured, funeral expenses for the dead, and the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning the perpetrators. As the report concludes: “Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence... the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.”

We are awash in guns. Where does it end? Gun violence is imbedded in our national mythology, our foreign policy, our notions of masculinity, our entertainment industry, and our children’s play. We see violence solving problems on every screen -- from the zombie apocalypse to the rise of ISIS. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s maxim still applies: “One should not put a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Sooner or later, that rifle is sure to go off. It might be an accident; it might be terrorism; it might be hate. But it will go off. Somewhere, as you read this, it’s going off right now.

I don’t want to police my kids’ imagination. And there is a whole strain of parenting literature that assures me I don’t have to. It says don’t interfere with your kid’s play, even if it includes guns and shooting and killing. Imagination is imagination and the violence isn’t real. It might even, so this line of thinking goes, be a healthy way for them to process feelings of aggression.

I get what they're saying, but it seems like a cop-out to me. To my mind, nonintervention is often a missed opportunity to be a parent. Sure, the violence isn’t real. The pow-pows don’t actually rip skin and tendon or stop hearts from beating, but the United States, which has been fighting distant wars nonstop for 15 years now, does have a violence problem and a man problem and a gun problem.

We know where that problem ends, but it starts somewhere, too. One place to begin to look, at least, is at how our kids -- particularly our boys -- play, and how they are nurtured (or not), and taught to express their emotions (or not). It is, at least in part, up to us, their parents, to decide whether they are going to be the ones who help repair our society and reorient us (or not). And it begins with the kinds of care and love they receive, the kinds of conversations they are invited into, the kinds of expectations they are given about behavior and relationships.

I don’t want to raise Seamus, Madeline, or Rosena in the austere, ripped from the headlines of horror, polemical atmosphere that was the essence of my own childhood. But I don’t want them to get comfortable with killing either.

I want so much more for, and from, my little boy than “Pow, pow, yous are dead now!” And that starts with taking the gun or the stick or the rainbow flag out of his hands, sitting him down, and having a hard conversation about what guns actually do to people-- and how much killing hurts us all.

Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Frida Berrigan

Site-C Dam and Trudeau's Energy Flip

Trudeau’s strange non-battle with fossil fuels (and Site C rubber stamp)

by Rafe Mair -  The Common Sense Canadian

July 29, 2016

I am writing today about the Trudeau government’s increasingly bizarre policy on fossil fuels, which essentially amounts wanting to have its cake and eat it too. But first, I must note that the same can be said for the government’s dealings with First Nations and myriad environmental issues surrounding Site C Dam – as yesterday’s quiet approval by DFO of key permits for the project shows.

Treaty 8 First Nations are going to federal court in September to challenge a lack of consultation regarding a project with massive implications for their territory and rights.

Aboriginal Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould has publicly acknowledged this project would violate treaty rights, while the Trudeau government made a big deal recently about backing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And yet, where the rubber meets the road, we have the swift, closed-door approval to damage important fish habitat, with no meaningful consultation of First Nations and local landowners. What are we doing in this day and age destroying any fish habitat at all? Moreover, the latest research shows that big dams are actually destructive to the climate, not “green” or “clean”. It’s getting harder and harder to square Justin’s campaign promises with his actions in government.

Forget Paris

The federal government’s ever-evolving oil and gas policy isn’t much different. I am puzzled by Prime Minister Trudeau’s attitude towards fossil fuels for, not to put too fine a point on it, he simply does not seem to have the courage to follow through on his peerless stage performance in Paris, where he became the darling of the world’s glamour puss fans. I hate to think that the fossil fuel industry, which mostly controls the media, controls him too and has frightened him off course.

Without descending into the world of science, where I admit I am instantly lost, my understanding was that he and Canada would take the lead in fighting climate change and that we would begin to wean ourselves off the extraction, use, transport and export of fossil fuels.

It doesn’t take a highly developed understanding of these issues to know that climate change is mainly caused by fossil fuels in the atmosphere and that despite the customary and convenient ignorance of Premier Christy Clark, LNG would be a terrible offender.

Two steps back with Woodfibre LNG approval

And what does Mr. Trudeau do by way of setting an example?

With indecent haste, no warning and without appropriate environmental assessments, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna approved Woodfibre LNG in Squamish saying that the project underwent “a thorough, science-based environmental assessment that considered public and indigenous input and views.”

Well, not quite, because the project was assessed under the post-C-38 regulations — after the Harper government had gutted traditional safeguards for the environment and transferred the task of environmental review to the provinces which, in this case, had already committed to it!

As Michael Harris of iPolitics put it:

Under the former regulatory regime, the public process was far more rigorous. Opponents were allowed to express alternate opinions, stakeholders could submit briefs and cross-examine witnesses at the hearings. With Bill C-38, the environmental review process was emasculated, weakening the protection of the public interest. It can hardly be invoked now by the federal government to vindicate this dubious decision.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go, for, on March 1, 2016, on CBC National TV, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, in reference to developments, “governments grant permits, communities grant permission”.

Then on March 18, 2016, a mere 17 days later, even though every Council in the constituency, including the City of West Vancouver, stood unanimously opposed to the project, the Trudeau government gave the go-ahead to Woodfibre LNG!

As mentioned, one partial, shabby, discredited Environmental Process had been carried out by the Province of BC, after BC had already approved the project, and Trudeau, in the 2015 election, heavily badmouthed the National Energy Board process and procedures and promised radical changes.
A dangerous idea, approved

But that’s not all – there was no proper assessment of the impact of noxious discharges of the plant itself into the atmosphere or the impact of poisonous discharges into Howe Sound and their impact on recently restored salmon and herring runs.

Think that’s all?

Not on your tintype!

By internationally accepted standards, as determined by world renowned Sandia Laboratories and set by the industry organization itself, The Society of International Gas Tanker and Terminal Operators (SIGTTO), Howe Sound and its channels are far too narrow for LNG tankers, creating a very serious safety risk. The Trudeau government has refused to take this seriously.

In fact, the Prime Minister, far from weaning us off them, is committed to more pipelines, more oil, more coal and more LNG.

You may be thinking that there’s a wee bit of hypocrisy here. Well, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

Lip service

Our Liberal MP, Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, who told us during the election that she opposed WLNG, now finds herself Parliamentary Secretary to Stephane Dion, the Foreign Minister, thus on the cusp of Cabinet. I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that this converted Pam to an LNG enthusiast but she now supports WLNG.

Now, you ready for this? Pam has arranged for public hearings for her constituents not on the merits of WLNG – that is strictly off limits and not to be mentioned – but to help us all understand climate change and tell us what we can do about it, such as buy solar panels and that sort of thing.

I hardly need to remind you, I’m sure, that the best way to avoid Climate Change would be to tube WLNG and forego any other LNG production and export. That’s where the biggest increase to our carbon footprint would come from (Petronas’s Lelu Island plant alone would boost BC’s entire carbon footprint by 8.5%). So here we have the Trudeau government and MP coming to tell us how to find solutions to climate change, which they are causing and plan to cause more of, and could end with the stroke of a pen!
Saskatchewan spill worst yet

Let me close with pipelines.

Pipelines, as we know, carry noxious fossil fuels through our wild forests and salmon-spawning rivers to narrow passages on our pristine coast, from where they are tankered to faraway places. The Industry, supported by the media and Prime Minister, pooh pooh their unfortunate propensity to burst with disastrous results and irreparable damage. At this moment, when Trudeau is patiently waiting to approve two major pipelines, there has been a major fracture in Northern Saskatchewan threatening, amongst other things, major domestic water supply. We’re told this spill is worse than that into the Kalamazoo River 6 years ago, the worst modern spill, which Enbridge plays down almost as if it never happened even though it’s not been cleaned up yet and likely never will be.

You would think that Mr. Trudeau, based upon his flowery words in Paris would be deeply concerned but, au contraire, he can’t wait to get on with them.

The “Tidewater” myth

Interestingly enough, J. David Hughes, a retired senior geologist for the Geological Survey of Canada and author of the report “Can Canada Expand Oil and Gas Production, Build Pipelines and Keep its Climate Commitments?” makes a strong case that the pipelines planned are going to the wrong place. He states the following:

The widely recited rhetoric that new pipelines must be built to oceans — or “tidewater” — to capture a significant price premium by selling on international markets is likewise not supported by the facts.

Although oil is a globally priced commodity, between 2011 and 2014 the international price (“Brent”) was considerably higher than the North American price (“WTI”). In September 2011 the differential reached $25.26 per barrel. However, the average differential in the six months ending May 2016 was 88 cents per barrel and recently Brent has been trading below WTI.

Not only has the international price advantage evaporated, but Canada’s primary oil export, Western Canada Select, sells at a discount to WTI. That’s because it is a lower grade heavy oil and will sell at a discount whether sold internationally or to North American markets.

Thus the premium that fuelled the rhetoric on the need for new pipelines to “tidewater” has disappeared and is unlikely to return.

Developing a climate plan to meet Canada’s Paris Agreement commitments is a challenging but achievable task for the federal government. Doing so while meeting Alberta’s and BC’s oil and gas production growth aspirations, however, will be virtually impossible.

The oil and gas industry is certainly not going away any time soon, but if Canada is serious about meeting its climate commitments it is time for the prime minister and premiers to do the math and stop telling us we can have it all.

This is a bit of the history of the actions of prime minister Justin Trudeau since he did his dog and pony show in Paris and wowed us all with his commitment to the environment and, particularly, in reducing climate change, which has the potential to do no less than destroy the world.

Somehow I don’t think my prime minister has been telling the truth and I’ve lost faith in his commitment to do what he promises. Can anyone help me understand why I feel this way?

Russian/Turk Alliance Fears Stoke Cold Warriors in the West

Strengthening Russo-Turkish Alliance Stokes US-Russian Cold War 

by TRNN

July 31, 2016


A possible new alliance between Russia and Turkey must be unsettling for the U.S. and for NATO. The presidents of Russia and Turkey have agreed to meet in St. Petersburg on August 9 to repair relations at a time when tensions between Turkey and NATO are increasing.

John Helmer, Russian-based Anglo-American journalist says that Russia feels threatened by US, NATO, Turkey, and the turbulence at its borders 

The other day, U.S. General Curtis Scaparotti, who is the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, said, and I quote:

"We will watch closely how the relationship develops, and I would be concerned if they were departing from the values that are the bedrock of the Washington treaty,(meaning NATO) the rule of law."

The budding Russia-Turkey alliance represents an important development, because until now, Turkey has always been a steadfast member of NATO. However, following the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, President Erdogan's and his allied politicians have suggested that the U.S. might have been involved in the coup attempt, while that is hard to verify at this time.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry has criticized Erdogan's post-coup crackdown, which has led to over 1,000 arrests of officers, tens of thousands of dismissals of government employees, and the shutdown of over 130 media outlets.

Now that Russia and Turkey might become allies, it could signal an important geopolitical shift in the region, if Russia succeeds in peeling away Turkey from NATO. It would change the regional dynamics of the war in Syria, and of course, geopolitics altogether.

With us to discuss this development is John Helmer. John is the longest continuous serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only Western journalist to conduct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. An American who has served in Jimmy Carter's White House, and then as an adviser to Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, he publishes his own widely-syndicated website, Dances With Bears. He joins us today from Moscow.

Black and White Voter Suppression: Mike Pence and Indiana's Voter ID Laws

Mike Pence walks 10 Nuns out of the Voting Booth

by Greg Palast with Dennis J Bernstein for Reader Supported News

July 30, 2016

Mike Pence is the poster boy for voter ID laws. No one has benefited more from this legalized form of vote theft than the Republican nominee for VP.

In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last Wednesday, Pence said he “wants every American to succeed and prosper” — however he certainly doesn’t want every American to vote. Indeed it was thanks to Indiana’s voter ID laws — the first of their kind in the nation — that he squeaked into the governor’s office.

These seemingly benign laws, requiring voters to show approved photo ID, have a sinister and very deliberate effect: they suppress black, brown, young, old, poor — and, above all, blue votes.

In this week’s Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Election Crimes Bulletin, Flashpoints’ Dennis J. Bernstein gets the lowdown on the sleazy practice of vote-rigging-by-ID-law from political hanky-panky expert Greg Palast. They also discuss how these racist-by-design laws tap dance around voting rights and discrimination protections, and could ultimately help Pence and Trump waltz into the White House.

TRANSCRIPT (Originally broadcast on July 20, 2016)

Dennis J. Bernstein: Today Mike Pence is front and center. He’s out there on his proverbial knees to greet the Trump helicopter. He’s getting ready to accept his party’s nomination. But also, as you point out, he’s a vote bandit… Tell us the joke about the nuns trying to vote.

Greg Palast: Ten nuns walk into a voting booth. I know that Mike Pence says he’s a Christian, but he also stopped 10 nuns from voting — and that’s very important. Mike Pence would not be governor of Indiana if he didn’t figure out a way to knock out black voters, nun voters, student voters, and poor voters.

DB: You are serious about the nuns?

Palast: Yes. Here’s the story:

In 2008, 10 nuns walked into a voting station, a place where they had been voting for decades, and they were told “Scram sisters” because Indiana had just passed its voter ID law. It was the first state in the nation that said you had to have a photo voter ID. So the nuns proudly showed their drivers licenses, except that the licenses had expired because they were all in their eighties and nineties. But they hadn’t expired.

Nevertheless, they were told they couldn’t vote because they needed a current state ID, even though there’s no reason why.

09 Oct 1962, Akron, Ohio, USA - Sister John Bosco of St. Sebastian School - Image by © Bettmann/ Corbis

There’s no logic for any voter ID because in the 100 years in which records have been kept, not one single person in a 100 year history of voting in Indiana — not one — was found to have used someone else’s identity.

In other words, using identify theft to cast a vote. Because you are going to the hoosegow for a very long time, at least 5 years under federal law and more under state law. But, nevertheless, this was the first voter ID law. This is the voter ID law that Justice Scalia provided the fifth and deadly vote in favor of, saying that it was constitutional and okay under the Voting Rights Act. Now, the Voting Rights Act itself has been killed by the former Scalia court.

(GET MY FREE COMIC BOOK DOWNLOAD WHICH INCLUDES THE NUNS TALE)

But here’s where Mike Pence comes into the story: we wouldn’t have a Governor Pence except for this. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU hired Matt Barreto, who’s a great statistician. He calculated that about 72,000 black people in Indiana would be barred from voting by this ID law. Furthermore, students would be barred from voting. You can’t use a student ID. You can use a gun ID, but not a University of Indiana ID. Students would be barred, and obviously people who don’t drive tend to be poor people, whether they are white or black.

Poor people tend to vote Democratic. Black people vote Democratic. Hispanic people vote Democratic — we’re not even counting those yet. Students vote Democratic. So if you add a few more of the blocked voters to the 72,000 African-Americans who are blocked from voting in Indiana, that more than accounts for Mike Pence’s very, very slim 80,000 vote margin when he ran for governor of Indiana. So Pence just sneaked by the Democrat, congressman John Gregg, and he sneaked by simply by blocking voters through this racist ID law.

DB: And the lower courts found it to be a real problem. Justice Terence Evans was not all that impressed was he?

Palast: No. His ruling was that this was just a clear, bold attempt at partisan manipulation of voter rolls by the Republican Party, knowing that they are knocking out their adversaries. But Scalia, being the 5th vote, said, “I don’t care.” Scalia famously said, “You can always get a non-voter ID.” Well, it’s kind of a catch 22 — you need ID to get a non-voter ID. But even if you do, it’s an average three bus, all day trip back and forth from a county office — on average a 17 mile trip. And, as Scalia infamously said, “Seventeen miles is 17 miles, whether you are black or white.”

But, of course, he had a black Beemer, for which he got a speeding ticket. But whether it’s a black Beemer or a white Beemer, 17 miles is nothing for him. But if you actually have to take a bus, and most people who don’t have licenses have to take a bus, it’s a major hardship. He knew that.

And while it’s racist, that’s only secondary to their plan. It’s partisan, and the interesting thing is that the Republicans in the court say a plan which knocks out your opponents, that’s perfectly fine. It just can’t be clearly and overtly intended to be racist. Now there was a glimmer of hope, because the devil needed his advocate early and took Scalia from us. And the Texas court of appeals is changing and the Texas ID law, which is also a nasty piece of work, that ruling just came out yesterday.

DB: That was not thrown out. It’s thrown back to the lower court, so that could show its ugly face again. Now, Karl Rove thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks, if you gotta go get groceries, they check your ID, so if you gotta go to vote, they check your ID too.

Palast: Yeah, can you imagine Karl Rove trying to cash a check at the grocery store? But the difference is that cashing a check at a grocery store is not the key to American democracy, but we like to think of voting as part of it. By the way, most Americans don’t realize voting is not a constitutional right. I want to repeat that: There is nothing in the Constitution which gives you the right to vote. That silence in the Constitution was what allowed the Supreme Court to pick George Bush as our president in Bush v. Gore. There is no right to vote in the Constitution. The one thing the Constitution has is the 14th Amendment that says if you allow the people to vote, you can’t stop them from voting because they were once slaves or their great-grandparents were slaves. And, of course, the 19th Amendment said if you allow people to vote, you can’t stop them from voting based on their genitals. That was the suffrage amendment. But you don’t have a right to vote — that’s what makes it possible to have these nasty laws.

DB: Mike Pence, you said, was a recipient of this kind of draconian, and I guess we can call it racist, on its face, behavior?

Palast: There’s this big back and forth — and we see this in Texas — about whether something is racist by intent or racist in effect. Those have two different meanings under the law. If it’s racist in intent, then the law has to be thrown out. In fact, in places like Wisconsin, one of the Republicans confessed that when the voter ID law was passed there was absolute jubilation among the Republicans. And Charlie Crist said that in Florida. He was the Republican governor and he said the Republican party specifically did that to knock out black voters. When he revealed that, he was basically tossed out of the Republican Party. But even if it’s not intended, if it has a racial effect, the law must be modified. That’s what’s happening in Texas. They have to modify the law to try to remove some of the overt racial effects. I don’t know how they’re going to do that though.

DB: The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has weighed in on this as well, haven’t they?

Palast: Yes. Here’s a breakdown from the Brennan Center: 6 million senior citizens don’t have their legal ID, mostly poor senior citizens.

DB: 6 million?

Palast: 6 million. 5.5 million African-Americans, 4.5 million 18 to 24 year olds, and 15% of voters with household incomes under $35,000 a year — that is the poor… If you’re on food stamps these days, what they now call SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, in most states you get an official government ID card with your photo on it. Well, Texas allows you to use your gun permit with your photo on it, but does not allow you to use your food stamp card with your photo ID on it. That’s one thing that the court did latch onto.

By the way, they are saying that’s not racist. And you know what? They may be right. It’s really class war. I want to emphasize this. In all my research, while we see that most of the victims of election thefts are voters of color, it’s really class war by other means. Upper-middle class, wealthy Hispanics and wealthy African-Americans tend not to have trouble voting. They have passports. Vernon Jordan and Andy Young had no problem at all with the voter ID law. They said, “That’s a good idea. People should have ID.” Well, of course, they’ve got passports — and their chauffeurs to vouch for them!

But a lot of white people are caught up in these things too. Elderly, poor white people who are barely getting by on social security. Because 15% of the voters are under the poverty line, and that’s white and black. Most poor people in America, remember, are white. People tend to forget that because of the way things are portrayed on TV. Most people who are poor are white, and they don’t stand much of a chance if all they have to show is their food stamp cards. It’s really class war.

DB: Broaden this out at the national level. We’ve been talking about Mike Pence because he’s going to accept the Republican nomination tonight and he was an offender in Indiana. But this is a national program.

Palast: Understand the republic lasted two centuries without photo ID. We founded the republic before there were photographs without any problem. We haven’t had hoards of identify thieves voting. But it’s been marvelously excellent at knocking out literally hundreds of thousands of poor people, especially voters of color.

We’ve gone from one state having a photo voter ID program in 2000 — Pence was the beneficiary. He would not be governor if it weren’t for that law. Since Indiana, it’s gone like a virus. Once the Supreme Court said Indiana was okay, it was both constitutional and not violating the Voting Rights Act, 20 states adopted some type of ID requirement. And there’s no case in which it doesn’t have a very smelly racial aroma.

* * * * * * *

Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which will be released as a feature documentary movie this fall. Get your name in the movie credits! The deadline has been extended to July 30, 2016.

Palast’s film will screen in Philadelphia this Wednesday

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Dennis J. Bernstein is the executive producer of Flashpoints, syndicated on Pacifica Radio, and is the recipient of a 2015 Pillar Award for his work as a journalist whistleblower. He is most recently the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.


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Trump's GOP Hitman Who's Stealing Your Vote – The Best Democracy Money Can Buy Podcast
May 8, 2016 In "Articles"

Myth Underlies America's New Cold War Policy

Rep. Rick Larsen Bases Russia Policy on Myths

by David Swanson - Let's Try Democracy

July 24, 2016

Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government.

She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and an occasional writer at Consortiumnews.com which has covered recent U.S. propaganda re Russia as well as any media outlet out there.

Murray has recently returned from a trip to Russia organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives which has resumed the sort of U.S.-Russia cultural exchanges that it organized during a previous peak in the cold war.

Murray was invited by Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (WPSR) to attend and speak at a small meeting in Everett, Washington, with Congressman Rick Larsen on Friday, July 22nd. Here is an account from Murray of how it went:

"I mentioned to Rep. Larsen that I had just returned from Russia with a U.S. delegation, and that all the people in Russia I had spoken with — including teachers, students, journalists, medical doctors, entrepreneurs and war veterans — had no desire for a nuclear war with the United States, but instead expressed the wish for peaceful, normalized relations...

During our time in Yalta, I had organized a 'swim for peace' with Americans and Russian war vets swimming together in the Black Sea, which had caused quite a stir in local Russian language media.

 I explained to Rep. Larsen my understanding of why the Russian public is suspicious about U.S. moves in the region (based on what I heard from people there), and why they would expect the United States to be the first to make a unilateral confidence-building measure in the direction of nuclear disarmament.

Russians were savvy to the Nuland 'Yats' youtube recording (in which Victoria Nuland is distinctly heard telling U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt that 'Yats is the guy' just prior to the regime change in which Arseniy Yatsenyuk became prime minister, and which directly implicated the U.S. in the Ukrainian coup), felt threatened by the recent NATO/Operation Anakonda maneuvers that took place during our delegation's visit, and were extremely concerned about other provocative U.S. moves in the region, including economic sanctions on Russia and Crimea, the latter enacted after a majority of Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia in response to what they saw as outside interference in the affairs of Ukraine."

How did Larsen respond to learning such significant and generally unknown information? 

"Larsen immediately responded with rebuttals, stating flat-out he didn't believe there was a U.S. role in the Ukrainian events — that what I'd just told him was 'not what I've been hearing' - and he went on to talk about how the Baltic states felt threatened by Russia, etc. He didn't know what 'Operation Anakonda' was and seemed unaware that the largest-ever NATO military maneuvers since WWII had just taken place on Russia's borders. I offered to send his office additional information about that and the Ukrainian events - an offer he ignored."

Let's be clear. The conflict in the Ukrainian government was between an EU/IMF economic alliance and a Russian one. Robert Parry describes what happened:

"[U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and Hillary Clinton ally Victoria] Nuland saw her big chance on Feb. 20, 2014, when a mysterious sniper apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor shot and killed both police and protesters, escalating the crisis. On Feb. 21, in a desperate bid to avert more violence, Yanukovych agreed to a European-guaranteed plan in which he accepted reduced powers and called for early elections so he could be voted out of office. But that wasn't enough for the anti-Yanukovych forces who led by Right Sektor and neo-Nazi militias overran government buildings on Feb. 22, forcing Yanukovych and many of his officials to flee for their lives. With armed thugs patrolling the corridors of power, the final path to 'regime change' was clear.

 Instead of trying to salvage the Feb. 21 agreement, Nuland and European officials arranged for an unconstitutional procedure to strip Yanukovych of the presidency and declared the new regime 'legitimate.' Nuland’s 'guy' Yatsenyuk became prime minister. While Nuland and her neocon cohorts celebrated, their 'regime change' prompted an obvious reaction from Putin, who recognized the strategic threat that this hostile new regime posed to the historic Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea. On Feb. 23, he began to take steps to protect those Russian interests."

That Yatsenyuk was Nuland's "guy" is a reference to a phone call in which, pre-coup, she designated him as her chosen future leader of Ukraine. Here's the audio of the call. Not only does Nuland not dispute the authenticity of the audio, but she has apologized for cursing the European Union in it.

You can also watch a video of Nuland in front of Chevron and ExxonMobil banners stating that the United States invested $5 billion over some period of years in democratizing / Europeanizing Ukraine. In fact, at the time of the coup, the National Endowment for Democracy had 65 projects in Ukraine, training activists, journalists, and others to advance a European alliance, not counting Nuland's handing out cookies to protesters in the square. The U.S. role was discussed in Ukraine's parliament pre-coup.

The United States Congress has officially acknowledged what is beyond dispute: the role of neo-Nazis in the coup government. According to widespread allegations, coup snipers were trained in Poland on behalf of the United States.

President Obama took credit for the U.S. role in the regime change on CNN:

"And since Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine - not because of some grand strategy, but essentially because he was caught off-balance by the protests in the Maidan and Yanukovych then fleeing after we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine - since that time, this improvisation that he's been doing has getting - has gotten him deeper and deeper into a situation that is a violation of international law, that violates the integrity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine." 

As if facilitating a neo-Nazi coup doesn't do that!

Renee Parsons adds this:

"What Nuland did not reveal on December 13 was that her meetings with ‘key Ukrainian stakeholders’ included neo-Nazi Svoboda party leader Oleh Tyahnybok and prime minister wannabe Arsenly Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party. At about the same time Nuland was wooing fascist extremists, Sen. John McCain (R-Az) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D- Conn) shared the stage in Kiev with Tyahnybok offering their support and opposition to the sitting government. The Svoboda party which has roots with extreme vigilante and anti-Semitic groups has since received at least three high level cabinet posts in the interim government including deputy prime minister. There is no doubt that the progenies of west Ukraine's historic neo-fascist thugs that fought with Hitler are now aligned with the U.S. as represented by Victoria Nuland...

"... January 30, 2014 – The State Department's website Media Note announced Nuland's upcoming travel plans that 'In Kyiv, Assistant Secretary Nuland will meet with government officials, opposition leaders, civil society and business leaders to encourage agreement on a new government and plan of action.' In other words, almost a month before President Yanukovych was ousted, the U.S. was planning to rid the world of another independently elected President."

Here's some background to put this incident into historical context.

Even imagining that the United States did not play a role in the coup, the fact of the coup would still render what Crimea and Russia did in response very different from the "aggression" alleged by U.S. media, the resulting myth permeating U.S. understanding, and the worldview of Congress members acting on that mythical basis.