Kit Stolz

Obama delays Keystone XL pipeline decision

The Obama administration, in a major concession to climate activists, is putting off the Keystone XL pipeline decision.

“Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment, and because a number of concerns have been raised through a public process,” President Obama said in a statement Thursday, “we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”

It's a big win for the indefatiguable climate writer/organizer Bill McKibben, but Brian Beutler for TPM notes that the only reason the pipeline was rejected was because of political pressure. If OBama wins re-election, and the review process isn't a bureaucratic trainwreck, approval could still happen.

Before activists turned Keystone into a national story, the project was mostly considered a done deal. There’s a lot of institutional pressure on the administration to see it through. And base voter clamor won’t have the same impact if and when Obama’s a second term president.

True, but the planet will accept partial victories and disasters avoided.

The writer who fired the producer: Brett Radner

Yesterday Mark Harris at Grantland eviscerated Brett Radner, the man chosen to produce the Oscar telecast this year, for his "rehearsal is for fags" comment, and lame subsequent apology.

Harris wrote:

I’ve had to listen to versions of every one of these mea-not-quite-culpas over the years and seriously, I’m no longer interested in patiently witnessing the slow arc of a public figure’s learning curve. What I do care about is what the Academy does, which should be either to ask for and receive his resignation from the show or to drop him as the producer of a show that is supposed to represent the best the industry has to offer. There’s not really a long, nuanced debate to be had about this. If he had used an equivalent racial or religious slur, the discussion would go something like, “You’re fired.” Apology or not. The same rule applies here. You don’t get a mulligan on homophobia. Not in 2011.

Tuesday — Ratner is fired! Er, resigns. Whatever.

Fruits and vegetables a “specialty crop”: U.S. Congress

Mark Bittman, the brilliant food fundamentalist at the New York Times, has been writing the most amazing occasional editorials the last couple of years. Here's the latest, on the negotiations to reduce farm subsidies, and the group of four heavy-weight representatives from the Midwest on the so-called supercommittee who will negotiate the final numbers on what some are calling the "secret farm bill.":

The group of four is aiming at $23 billion in cuts, with around $14 billion coming from commodity subsidies, $6 billion from conservation programs, and the rest from nutrition programs like food stamps, now more important than ever. Everyone (almost literally) wants the restructuring of subsidies, but it sounds as ifdirect payments would be replaced by a new “shallow-loss” protection plan, essentially free insurance that would cover revenue losses before the also heavily subsidized paid insurance kicks in. Replacing direct payments with shallow-loss protection may save some money, but does nothing to change the fact that the wrong people will get it.

And the devil is in the details. Will small and medium farms raising what are outrageously called “specialty crops” (fruits and vegetables!) be covered by shallow-loss? Will programs supporting new farms, local farms, organic food, access to real food by real people, be boosted? Probably not.

Few are privy to discussions of either the group of four or the supercommittee. Those in Congress who appear most concerned about the process are led by Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, who, with 26 other members of Congress, sent a letter to the supercommittee urging it to reject the creation of new farm programs outside the normal legislative order. Meanwhile, Congress was flooded by 27,000 phone calls — encouraged by the excellentFood Democracy Now — protesting the secret farm bill.

Scores of legislators, farm and advocacy groups, individuals and other organizations have crafted proposals to be considered for the next farm bill (here are just a few), and at least some are slipping notes under the door of the group of four, hoping to influence their recommendations. Among the best of these is the Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act, a title that would strengthen local and regional agriculture and increase access to healthy food, introduced by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, and Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio.

I spoke with Pingree by phone on Monday. The title, she said, “looks at existing programs and tries to find ways to make them work for the small to medium-sized family farm, which is the side of agriculture that’s actually growing.” It would make it easier for small and new farmers to borrow money, get small grants and secure crop insurance. It would make it easier to use food stamps at farmers’ markets and buy local food for school lunches. In short, it would be a huge step in the right direction, and asking your Congress representative to co-sponsor this title is worth five minutes of your time.

Pingree “was looking forward to a public hearing on those things that should be eliminated or encouraged, and re-evaluating how we treat food and agriculture in this country.” But with the farm bill headed for a quick (and secret) trip thought the supercommittee, large-scale reforms like hers may not get the consideration they deserve. Although Pingree is optimistic that she’ll get at least some of her proposals included in the supercommittee report, without an out-in-the-open process real change will be shut out of the debate, as will entire states like California, whose gigantic agricultural industry produces the bulk of our “specialty crops.” (Fruits and vegetables, remember?)

Long, I know, but necessary. Pic below comes from a innovative cost-saving-small-farm-promoting program mentioned in passing in Bittman's full column. This is a program in which low-income women, infants and children are eligible to receive fruits and vegetables with WIC vouchers.

Bank Transfer Day: The Insta-Protest Pays Off

From The Daily Beast, the best story I've seen on the remarkably successful Bank Transfer Day action, which went from an idea to billions of dollars in accounts transferred in a matter of weeks:

Kristen Christian was feeling more than a little fed up with the county’s big banks when a month ago today she logged on to Facebook to share an idea with friends: withdraw your money from the likes of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, and instead open an account with a credit union. She even chose a deadline for taking action: this Saturday, Nov. 5.

“Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will always remember the 5th of November,” Christian, then a 27-year-old art-gallery owner living in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook. “If we shift our funds from the for-profit banking institutions in favor of not-for-profit credit unions before this date, we will send a clear message that conscious consumers won’t support companies with unethical business practices.”

[edit]

More than a few people seem to agree. The Credit Union National Association, a D.C.-based advocacy group, recently surveyed 5,000 credit unions across the country. The vast majority reported a surge in membership and a surge in deposits. The association estimated that credit unions across the country have picked up at least 650,000 new customers over the past month and collectively added $4.5 billion in savings accounts, whether from new members or from existing members shifting funds.

It's an amazing start for a protest action, fueled by pent-up resentment at ginormous banks who see fit to charge their customers pretty much whatever they wish.

Ted Rall finds the humor in that: Rallbanktransferday

But it's so so true! Why do we tolerate the self-serving of huge financial institutions? When we would scoff at an ordinary citizen who took the same stand? What are we — masochists?

Prediction fulfilled: Keystone probably delayed indefinitely

As predicted a couple of days ago: Obama administration "considering a move" to delay decision on the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The hope, apparent in this Los Angeles Times story, is that the pipeline proves too controversial to survive a transparent vetting.

From Neela Banerjee's story, which should make the front page.

"The tar sands are awful and they need to stay in the ground," said Courtney Hight, 32, a former Obama organizer and former staff member for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "Building the pipeline is not the way to break free from oil."

Hight was joined by several thousand peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park, just north of the White House.

Aretha Franklin's song "Respect" played over loudspeakers, and demonstrators, including a farmer from Kansas and townspeople from Nebraska, walked onto streets east and west of the White House and completed the encirclement just south of it.

The permit process for the $7-billion pipeline has already taken more than three years.

Further delays could make the pipeline financially unfeasible for TransCanada and the companies that plan to ship crude through it. The oil industry has argued that if Keystone XL does not get a permit, TransCanada and its clients would develop the oil sands anyway and ship the crude west in a pipeline to the Pacific Coast. But environmentalists contend that there is far too much local resistance in Canada for that to occur.

"My guess is, if there is a delay, it could very well kill the pipeline of its own weight," said John H. Adams, founding director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, at Sunday's rally.

From a photo feed of the protesters surrounding the White House today, an inspiring young activist refusing to accept the tar sands pipeline disaster.

Glee: Best TV show ever? A neuroscientific perspective

About ten years ago, while pursuing a story on the roots of depression, I tracked down the great scientist Jaak Panksepp, originator of the field of affective — that is, emotional — neuroscience, and he kindly let me interview him over the phone for half an hour.

Panksepp has spent years studying the physiology of emotion in the brain, from autism to sleep, but his central breakthrough, in the early 1970's, was his focus on physiological similarity in the brain between opiates and brain-created (endogenous) chemicals linked to friendship and love.

In an interview, he explained:

Our guiding central idea was that there was a remarkable family resemblance between social bonding and narcotic addiction–from the initial attachment-dependence phase to the eventual tolerance-withdrawal phases.

I was interested in the connection between music, its apparent power to confront depression; and, possibly, to induce it. And, if possible, to further look at the curious fact that so many great musicians (Billie Holliday, Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, to name a few) were opiate addicts.

Does listening to sad songs help us overcome depression, or help us wallow in it?

And what about a band like Nirvana, who uses the raw, roaring power of punk rock to drive depression back, with the likes of Stay Away?

In his long and dazzling career, Panksepp has weighed in on my topics, but a sad twist in his own life led him to an interest in music, specifically, in music that has the power to bring on chills.

Panksepp lost his beloved daughter, a teenager, who was killed in a crash with a drunk driver. He struggled to cope with her death, but discovered over time that certain songs would bring her back to his mind. Specifically, Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You.

[Panksepp] argues that chills may emerge from brain dynamics associated with the perception of social loss, specifically with separation calls. Separation calls are cries by young animals that inform parents of the whereabouts of offspring that have become lost. The “coldness” of chills may provide increased motivation for social reunion in the parents. So certain kinds of sad and bittersweet music may achieve its beauty and its chilling effect through a symbolic rendition of the separation call.

In our discussion, Panksepp forcefully argued that the power of this kind of music, the way we know it is working on us at an endogenous opiate level, are those chills. That "Dionysian response," he said, is the sign of art at its most powerful. Art that makes us want to go crazy.

Watching Glee a week ago, I felt chills during this:

The fact that the joyful, unashamed, deliciously gay Darren Criss sings the song (It's Not Unusual) Tom Jones made famous only adds to the universality of the scene, and helps drive the crowd wild.

Never before in my life has a taped television show sent chills up my spine, and I've been watching TV in America for fifty years, give or take.

That's why, personally, I think Glee may well be the best television show ever.

But wait, there's more! Variety critic David Benedict argues cogently that musicals have been disrespected by critics and the Academy because they focus on dramatizations of happiness.

Specifically, the happiness of love, which is what they do best — better than any other medium.

Complaining that musicals are not “realistic” (as if, for example, action pictures are) completely misses the point, although it is one that, of all people, tractor-driving farmer Judy Garland asks in Summer Stock. Bewildered by performers who are going to “put the show on right here” in her barn, she asks Gene Kelly to explain. In the wings of the makeshift stage he says, “If the boy tells the girl that he loves her, he doesn’t just say it: he sings it.” To which, reasonably enough, she responds, “Why doesn’t he just say it?” The number that follows makes his and the wider point. It is not that musicals cannot work through narrative, it is that they choose a richer, more expressively full-blooded route consciously abandoning realism for idealistic fantasy.

Add to this, the fact that the 21st century may well prove to be the century where we expect media experiences to be repeatable, and musicals — which can be played again and again, like songs, without dimunition, indeed, with augmentation — and it's no surprise that Glee, surely the most replayable show on TV, is a sensation.

I wonder if they'll ever take on Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Now with the forecast tonight, our new weatherman — Tennessee Williams!

True story: In an attempt to stir up interest in Small Craft Warnings, one of his best late plays, in the l970's Tennessee Williams not only resorted to playing a character on stage, but made appearances around the New York, to attract attention and spread the word.

This didn't always go well.

[From Dotson Rader's deeply loving Tennessee: Cry of the Heart]:

[Williams] had taken the role of Doc in Small Craft Warnings. He had taken on the part because the box office had slumped and he thought people who wouldn’t come to see the play would come to see him. He was right. It was also during the run of Small Craft Warnings that he did a stint as a local television weatherman as a way to drum up publicity for the play. It was one of the most humiliating of his public appearances. On the news he was introduced as the station’s new weatherman. He stood, looking furious, beside a weather chart with its temperatures, storm fronts, and the rest. Holding a long pointed in his hand, he proceeded to read the weather forecast. However, he couldn’t see the cue cards, was blinded by the studio lights, and so spent a minute or two trying to fake the weather report, banging the pointer at the chart in a futile attempt to demonstrate professional authority. Finally, he said to hell with this, and declared that he was an artist and not a performing seal! He then tried to walk off the set with as much dignity as possible only to get his feet tanglied in the floor cables and nearly topple on his face, his humiliation bring peals of laughter from the television anchor people and crew.

It was not a happy time for him.

Why Occupy Wall Street made Francine cry

Francine Prose explains:

As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf. I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it. In Zuccotti Park I felt a kind of lightening of a weight, a lessening of the awful isolation and powerlessness of knowing we’re being lied to and robbed on a daily basis and that everyone knows it and keeps quiet and endures it; the terror of thinking that my own grandchildren will suffer for whatever has been paralyzing us until just now. I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.

From the Occupy Writers project. Today Pro Publica unleashed a fascinating database tool that allows you to see how inequal income in your county is, compared to the rest of the nation. Ventura County, where I live now, is not so bad — right around the fifty percent mark.

But the Upper West Side, where I once lived, and which in my time was actually kind of poor, has become absurdly unequal: richer than 99% of the nation. That number sounds familiar…

Obama takes responsibility for Keystone XL: Why?

Maybe Obama isn't as calculating as he sometimes appears.

Or maybe he's fighting for his political life.

This impressive story by a reporter for Huffpo relates how the Keystone pipleline became a trainwreck inside the administration after the State department screwed up the environmental review.

Hillary Clinton's State Department has now spent more than three years considering whether to greenlight Keystone, far longer than any previous similar projects. From the start, the process has been driven more by haste than cautious study, numerous government officials who participated in the process say. Officials there took far too long to recognize that Keystone XL would become a touchstone for so much controversy, choosing to focus on diplomatic reasons why the pipeline was 'in the national interest,' while overlooking environmental reasons why it might not be. Indeed, the department initially passed responsibility for the environmental review, now the focus of most of the uproar, into the hands of a single, inexperienced staffer and a contractor with ties to the energy industry, while — as the meeting at CEQ showed — disregarding other, more experienced agencies.

And this Reuters story relates how the administration is bracing itself from blowback from its base over the approval that is expected. Again the story restates the nearly universal belief among insiders, apparently, that the Obama administration will approve the massively destructive tar sands pipeline.

Some administration policy advisers expect the pipeline will be approved because of the energy security and jobs it would create, according to one source who met with two White House staffers about the subject recently.

"Everything I heard suggests there's no change in the sentiment that this will go forward," the source said.

Another source, who said he discussed the issue with senior officials from Obama's 2012 campaign operation, said a delay in the decision seemed increasingly likely.

But here's the puzzling recent turn in the controversy. President Obama has gone out of his way to take responsibility for the decision:

Obama has indicated he will make the final call. In a television interview on Tuesday, he outlined the economic and health criteria he would consider when the State Department's recommendations come his way.

Why take responsibility if you expect to make an unpopular decision? Doesn't make sense for a politician, does it? Especially since State will advocate the pipeline, and approval is expected. You'll get no credit, and all the blame.

What am I missing?

Could Obama possibly be considering demanding a fuller review, and is taking responsibility to make clear in advance to Hillary that he is not happy with the way State handled the question?

A third-rate cartoonist we just can’t forget: James Thurber

From Roger Ebert's spectacular Twitter feed, in memory of the incomparable James Thurber, classic essay/set of drawings, via the Library of America, called Lady on the Bookcase.

Goes something like this…

One day twelve years ago an outraged cartoonist, four of whose drawings had been rejected in a clump by The New Yorker, stormed into the office of Harold Ross, editor of the magazine. “Why is it,” demanded the cartoonist, “that you reject my work and publish drawings by a fifth-rate artist like Thurber?” Ross came quickly to my defense like the true friend and devoted employer he is. “You mean third-rate,” he said quietly, but there was a warning glint in his steady gray eyes that caused the discomfited cartoonist to beat a hasty retreat.

With the exception of Ross, the interest of editors in what I draw has been rather more journalistic than critical. They want to know if it is true that I draw by moonlight, or under water, and when I say no, they lose interest until they hear the rumor that I found the drawings in an old trunk, or that I do the sketches while my nephew makes the sketches.

If you like American humor, you really should read it, if you haven't already.