The 2014 U.S. congressional mid-term elections are now complete, and the Republican Party controls both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some have forecasted that this could have catastrophic impacts for progress on climate change and environmental protection in general.
But below the radar in Washington DC — little noticed by the media or public — a major change on energy policy has already been long in the making. Corporate lobbyists have helped to engineer a transformative shift with little scrutiny or meaningful debate: plans to extract U.S. natural gas and export the gas overseas to more lucrative markets.
Exploring this development is our new investigative report, titled “,” published jointly on DeSmogBlog and on Republic Report. This report will act as launching pad for an ongoing investigation and a prelude to an extensive series of articles by both websites uncovering the LNG exports influence peddling machine.
The investigative series will track this shift towards fossil fuels exports that — if fully realized — will continue to transition the U.S. into a resource colony, where our communities, homes, air, and water are exploited and polluted so that large multinational corporations can pursue ever-higher profits by selling U.S. fossil fuels abroad.
The rise of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” oil and gas wells has resulted in an excess of oil and gas in the United States, lowering prices and clogging markets.
Natural Gas Exports: Key Findings
Natural Gas Exports: Introduction
Natural Gas Exports: Democrats and the Obama Administration
Natural Gas Exports: Our Energy Moment
Natural Gas Exports: Bush Administration Aides and LNG
Natural Gas Exports: Congress
Natural Gas Exports: Koch Brothers and the Conservative Echo Chamber
Natural Gas Exports: Conclusion
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Fracking also poses well-known threats to water supplies, the environment, and public health for local communities, and contributes to climate disruption by leaking vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere, making so called “clean burning natural gas” not so clean.
As a December 2012 report commissioned by the Department of Energy confirmed, exporting natural gas will contribute to higher energy prices for U.S. consumers because it will deplete domestic gas reserves.
Federal agencies have expedited permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, with four already approved and many more lined up waiting for approval. There is little doubt that this maneuver will lock in demand to accelerate hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to obtain more natural gas to support the export market.
Big oil and gas companies have engineered this policy outcome through shrewd hiring of Washington insider lobbyists and public relations professionals: Obama and Bush Administration veterans, as well as former Capitol Hill staffers, who have moved through Washington’s revolving door to high-paying influence peddling jobs.
If the Obama Administration and the GOP-led Congress, prodded by industry lobbyists, pick LNG export acceleration as an area for bipartisan cooperation, they will hurt U.S. consumers and our environment and make global warming worse.
This report explores the people and companies involved in the influence-peddling lobbying apparatus dominating the LNG export process.
Honoring the legacy of the late campaign finance reform crusader known as Granny D, 81-year-old Rhana Bazzini on Wednesday completed an over 400-mile trek from Sarasota to the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee in a crusade calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
“There seems to be general agreement that money has corrupted our system,” said Bazzini. “I’m walking to call attention to the propositions that 1) Money is not free speech and 2) Corporations are not people.”
Supporters joined Bazzini throughout the walk and dozens of others marked her arrival with a rally on the Capitol steps, during which law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig spoke.
The widow and cancer survivor’s walk began on October 13, months after the passing of her spouse of 56 years. “With a lot of time on my hands and being in good health, I decided I wanted to do something to make the world a better place before I ‘bought the farm,'” Bazzini said.
“What I needed was a project. After much thought, Granny D (Doris Haddock) kept popping into my mind,” she added, referring to the notorious grandmother and activist, who at the age of 89 walked across the country for campaign finance reform.
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Bazzini is hoping to recruit other women over 80 to take up the call and march to their own state Capitols. “I am not naïve enough to think this is the solution, but I do think it is a step in the right direction,” she writes.
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The White House announced late Tuesday that President Obama will sign into a law a provocative, yet largely ignored, bill passed by both chambers of Congress last week that critics say increases the chances of a future military confrontation with Russia.
Despite some reservations voiced by the president, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said Obama will sign the bill by the end of the week, making law a bill that calls for new economic sanctions against Russia while also authorizing the sale of military equipment to the Kiev government in Ukraine and hundreds of millions of dollars in other support.
As The Hill reports:
Critics, including former congressman from Ohio Dennis Kucinich, have raised serious objections to both the contents of the bill and how it was rushed through Congress with little debate. In a scathing op-ed warning that his former colleauges may be recklessly laying the groundwork for a new and deeper Cold War between the U.S./NATO alliance and Russia, Kucinich called the sanctions bill “a hydra-headed incubator of poisonous conflict.”
In his argument against the bill, Kucinich enumerated its contents as he pointed out, based on his own experience in the House, that few members of Congress likely read its content nor fully understand the implications of what they have approved. According to his summary the new law will include:
The law received wide bipartisan support, but as Kucinich indicates, the dangers of further isolating and provoking Russia could result in serious future backlash.
Though Russia has been consistently characterized in the western media as the aggressor throughout this year’s crisis in Ukraine, many experts on the situation point out that the U.S. and NATO played an essential role in fomenting the uprising that resulted in a coup and that ongoing support for the new government in Kiev, alongside persistent demonization of Putin’s role, has placed eastern Europe back on the verge of a conflated military conflict.
“Under the guise of democratizing,” Kucinich argues, “the West stripped Ukraine of its sovereignty with a U.S.-backed coup, employed it as a foil to advance NATO to the Russian border and reignited the Cold War, complete with another nuclear showdown.”
Now, he continued, the new sanctions and shipment of new weapons to Ukraine will have predictable results. “Each Western incitement creates a Russian response,” he continued, “which is then given as further proof that the West must prepare for the very conflict it has created.”
The result, he warns, is obvious. “War as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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Now available online and airing on PBS stations across the country over the weekend, the final episode of the weekly commentary and news show Moyers & Company will mark the official television retirement (though not the career) of veteran journalist Bill Moyers.
In the fall of last year, Moyers announced with little fanfare that the show would be ending and he would retire from television (yes, this time he means it) after more than forty years working in print and broadcast media. Though Moyers will end his near- weekly appearance in the homes of millions of Americans, the website which he created in 2012, BillMoyers.com will continue to operate—creating both familiar and new kinds of content.
“Democracy is a public trust – a reciprocal agreement between generations to keep it in good repair and pass along… So to this new generation I say: over to you, welcome to the fight.” —Bill MoyersCelebrating his long career but lamenting the impact of his departure, historian Peter Dreier, in a piece posted to Common Dreams this week, argues that Moyers’ retirement from the airwaves will “leave a huge hole” not easily filled by others. “No other program has journalistic breadth and depth, as well as the progressive viewpoint, that Moyers’ show has provided viewers for over four decades,” Dreier wrote.
John Nichols, who in addition to writing for The Nation magazine has written several books on the history and current state of U.S. journalism, told Common Dreams that though Moyers “cannot be replaced, his legacy must be maintained.”
What has made Moyers’ presence on television so unique, explained Nichols, was the creation of a journalistic forum that largely lacking across the U.S. media landscape, especially in broadcast news.
“At a point when broadcast media tends increasingly to narrow rather than expand the discourse,” Nichols explained, “Bill Moyers has been virtually alone in recognizing the possibility and the necessity of a broader debate on economic and social issues —and on the critical questions of war and peace. It is not too much to say that his show kept the democratic flame lit for tens of millions of Americans. I do not know what we will do without him, but I recognize that his departure from the airwaves lays down a challenge for all of us.”
Profiled in the Washington Post on Friday, Moyers told the paper’s media reporter Paul Farhi via email there was a conscious decision not to produce a retrospective episode or otherwise make “a big deal” of his retirement. “If my work doesn’t speak for itself after all these years,” Moyers reportedly said as he turned down an offer for an in-depth interview, “I have failed and no amount of interpretation can help.”
Still, Farhi was able to summarize Moyers’ brand of journalism in recent years as being driven by various “passions”—delivered in an “avuncular and Texas-inflicted” style—which focused largely on exploring the political and cultural battles surrounding “the corrupting influence of money in politics… the environment and civil rights… [and] against growing economic inequality.”
In the final episode, titled , Moyers spends most of his half-hour in conversation with law professor Mary Christina Wood—an author and founder of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law program at the University of Oregon—talking about a series of lawsuits brought by young people who charge that government officials are betraying future generations by not aggressively addressing the threat of global warming and climate change.
Though he consciously refused to make the final M&C episode about himself, it was hard to mistake Moyers’ final remarks as anything other than a parting—if not final—missive to his many viewers about the foundational importance of democratic principles and the necessary struggle that defending such principles demands.
“Democracy,” he says during the show’s final minutes, “is a public trust – a reciprocal agreement between generations to keep it in good repair and pass it along. Our country’s DNA carries an inherent promise for every citizen of an equal opportunity at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our history resonates with the hallowed idea – hallowed by blood – of government of, by, and for the people. Our great progressive struggles have been waged to make sure ordinary citizens, and not just the rich and privileged, share in the benefits of a free society. In the words of Louis Brandeis, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court justices, ‘We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.'”
And finally, signing-off on this televised chapter of life, Moyers concludes:
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The GOP-controlled U.S. Senate admitted on Wednesday night that climate change is not—as some Republicans have claimed in the past—”a hoax,” but stopped short of attributing its causes to human activity, as scientists have done for close to 30 years.
In fact, the Senate’s most ardent climate denier, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), explicitly stated during the course of debate: “Man can’t change climate.”
The Senate voted on three symbolic, non-binding measures, all attached to controversial Keystone XL legislation.
As the Wall Street Journal explains:
One amendment, drafted by Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, read simply: “To express the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.”
“After 49 Senators voted against a mountain of climate change science today, we wouldn’t be shocked if the Senate decides to vote against gravity, amend the periodic table, or express its sense that two plus two might actually equal five.” Jason Kowalski, 350.org
It passed 98-1, with Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, as the sole “no” vote.
The language of the measure was, according to Slate, “intended to take a swipe” at Inhofe, who is the new chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and a longtime climate change denier. His 2012 book is titled, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.
But because the Whitehouse amendment did not explicitly say climate change was caused by humans, Inhofe had an excuse to vote for it.
“Climate is changing, and climate has always changed, and always will, there’s archeological evidence of that, there’s biblical evidence of that, there’s historic evidence of that, it will always change,” Inhofe said on the Senate floor. “The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can’t change climate.”
Another amendment, introduced by North Dakota Republican and Keystone XL bill sponsor John Hoeven, attributed climate change to human activity, but said the pipeline would have no significant impacts. Fifteen Republicans voted in favor, but the measure still failed by one vote, 59-40.
The most strongly worded amendment came from Hawai’i Democrat Brian Schatz, stating that climate change is real and that human activity—such as burning coal and oil—significantly contributes to it.
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In remarks Tuesday on the Senate floor, Schatz said, “the purpose of this amendment is simply to acknowledge and restate a set of facts. It is not intended to place a value judgment on those facts or to suggest a specific course of action in response to those facts. It’s just a set of facts, derived from decades of careful study of our land, our air, and our water.”
In the same speech, Schatz declared: “Climate change is real and human activity significantly contributes to climate change. It also states that a warmer planet causes large-scale changes, including higher sea levels, changes in precipitation, and altered weather patterns such as increases in more extreme weather events.”
Five Republicans—Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Mark Kirk of Illinois, and Susan Collins of Maine—joined all Democrats in voting 50-49 for Schatz’s measure, which needed 60 votes to pass.
Green groups expressed outrage at the blatant disregard for science.
“After 49 Senators voted against a mountain of climate change science today, we wouldn’t be shocked if the Senate decides to vote against gravity, amend the periodic table, or express its sense that two plus two might actually equal five,” said 350 Action Policy Director Jason Kowalski.
“While it’s certainly clear from today’s vote that these Senators are not scientists, it’s also clear that they have no interest in science as a basis for public policy—choosing instead to be guided by the fossil fuel industry’s campaign contributions” Kowlaski added. “That’s why no one is surprised that climate deniers have made it their mission to shill for Keystone XL. Acknowledging the basic facts of climate science would make it much harder to justify tar sands extraction and ignore the promise of clean energy.”
Politico described the machinations behind the series of votes:
A related amendment put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), could reportedly see a vote as early as Thursday. Sanders’ measure states that human-caused climate change is causing “devastating problems in the United States and around the world.”
But some said the symbolic measures only go so far.
“In the Senate today, some Republicans finally went on record saying that man-made climate change is real,” said Franz Matzner, associate director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “But what’s their plan to do something about it? Republican leaders still are trying to block any and all solutions, and putting our children’s health at risk.”
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Thousands of people took to the streets of Berlin on Tuesday to say “no” to Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment in the wake of last week’s attacks in Paris.
“We stand together for a Germany that is open to the world, with a big heart, which honors freedom of opinion, of the press and of religion,” said Aiman Mazyek, head of the German Council of Muslims, addressing the crowd.
The roster of speakers included Chancellor Angela Merkel, who declared: “To exclude groups of people because of their faith, this isn’t worthy of the free state in which we live. It isn’t compatible with our essential values. And it’s humanly reprehensible. Xenophobia, racism, extremism have no place here.”
The demonstration came a day after more than 100,000 people across Germany staged anti-racist rallies as a direct counter to simultaneous marches by a far-right group, which includes neo-Nazi elements, was founded on Facebook in October, and calls itself Pegida: “Patriotic Europeans against Islamization of the West.”
In Munich, a crowd of at least 20,000 people mobilized to take part in an anti-Pegida rally on Monday, and at least 30,000 people took part in a similar march in Leipzig. At least 4,000 people marched in Berlin, and thousands took to the streets in Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Hanover, and Saarbrücken.
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Media reports reveal that, nationwide, the number of people marching against Pegida vastly outnumbered the organization’s supporters. Dresden, however, saw its largest Pegida protest yet at 25,000 people.
Recent weeks have seen the size of Pegida’s regular marches grow, and a November poll of non-Muslims in Germany found that 57 percent regard Muslims as a threat, up from 53 percent in 2012.
But Dresden’s Pegida crowd on Monday was smaller than the estimated 35,000 people who marched through the city on Saturday to voice their opposition to Islamophobia and racism, part of Germany-wide demonstrations for tolerance that took place over the weekend.
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A federal judge on Friday struck down Alabama’s gay marriage ban.
U.S. District Court Judge Callie Granade wrote in her ruling: “Those children currently being raised by same-sex parents in Alabama are just as worthy of protection and recognition by the State as are the children being raised by opposite-sex parents. Yet Alabama’s Sanctity laws harms the children of same-sex couples for the same reasons that the Supreme Court found that the Defense of Marriage Act harmed the children of same-sex couples.”
Adam Polaski explains at Freedom to Marry’s blog that “the decision in Alabama was in Searcy v. Strange, filed by Cari Searcy and Kim McKeand and private counsel. Cari and Kim have been working for nearly a decade to legally adopt their son, but because of Alabama’s marriage laws, the couple has been confronted with roadblock after roadblock.”
Following the ruling, plaintiff Searcy said, “Love did win.”
Hours after Judge Granade’s ruling, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange filed a motion to stay that ruling until the U.S. Supreme Curt makes its decision on gay marriages nationwide.
“A stay will serve the public interest by avoiding the confusion and inconsistency that will result from an on-again, off-again enforcement of marriage laws,” AP reports state lawyers as writing.
Evan Wolfson, president of the advocacy group Freedom to Marry, said the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case was the start of “what we hope will be the last chapter in our campaign to win marriage nationwide.”
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Len Rossi, one of the most popular wrestlers in the history of Tennessee wrestling, passed away earlier today from cancer at the age of 91.
Rossi, born Len Rositano, was originally from Utica, New York, but settled in Tennessee in 1958 and became a fixture of the Nashville community. He was one of the area’s biggest stars for the next 15 years, and then opened Len Rossi’s Health Foods in Brentwood, Tennessee, which has been in operation for more than 40 years.
Rossi was, along with Jackie Fargo, the most popular wrestler in the area during most of the 1960s. He held more than 45 championships. He was a journeyman wrestler when he came to Tennessee, mostly working smaller circuits. Tennessee was expected to be no different, but he formed a tag team with a young babyface named Dick Beyer, who later became The Destroyer.
At the same time, with his son Joey, who later wrestled, ready to start school, he decided to make a home in the Nashville area. while he did work in other territories, the Tennessee and Alabama circuit run by Nick Gulas was his base and the place he was truly a headliner..
Rossi held the Southern Junior Heavyweight title seven times, which is the same title that was renamed the Southern Heavyweight title in the 70s and was the cornerstone of Jerry Lawler’s career.
Rossi was a constant tag team champion, holding Southern, Mid American, and World Tag Team titles with partners like Beyer, Tex Riley, Fargo, Mario Milano and Bearcat Brown. Rossi & Brown were considered a landmark tag team in their run from 1969 to 1972, as they were the first major babyface team that paired a black man and a white man together, and had a legendary feud with Dr. Ken Ramey and The Masked Interns that set box office records.
Rossi had to overcome the fact people knew he was from upstate New York, as opposed to being local, but in time, he was considered as the local babyface star. He was not charismatic in the manner of Fargo or Jerry Lawler, but was like a normal person, whose job was a pro wrestler but was on the side of good.
Rossi & Brown were going strong as a tag team in 1972, when he was involved in a bad auto accident that left him with a broken arm, broken ribs, a broken ankle and broken feet. The injuries had a major effect on him and while he wrestled some until 1979, he was no longer a regular headliner after the accident.
Later he regularly teamed with his son, who wrestled from 1971 to 1979.
Rossi’s role was as your typical guy next door babyface, who the fans respected because they had seen him weekly in their cities for so long. After the accident,he got heavily into health food and opened up his shop, and was believed to have been the oldest living merchant in his city.
Rossi was inducted into the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame in 2004 and the NWA Hall of Fame in 2016.
Aside from Cowboy Bob Ellis, Rossi was believed to have been the oldest living major star in American pro wrestling.
A years-long legal battle to compel the Department of Defense to release over 2,000 photos depicting abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody may have reached a critical moment on Wednesday.
Some of the photos have been described as being possibly more disturbing than those from Abu Ghraib. The Telegraph previously reported that they “were largely taken by U.S. troops themselves as they posed with prisoners or corpses and were gathered during the course of 203 military investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
At the Manhattan hearing, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein issued the DoD a one-week deadline to submit its reasons for suppressing each of the photos, as the court had ordered last year, according to reporting by Newsweek and the Guardian.
Hellerstein said the case had reached “a line in the sand,” and said, “I could give you more time to satisfy my ruling…but I am not changing my view,” Newsweek reports.
The Guardian summarizes the ACLU’s decade of efforts at transparency:
While the government has pushed against the release of the photos, saying it would threaten national security, the ACLU has argued that the transparency and full reckoning of post-9/11 transgressions are necessary for a democracy.
Following a legal bid by the Bush administration in 2008 to block release of the photos, Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU, stated: “These photographs demonstrate that the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational and not confined to Abu Ghraib, but the result of policies adopted by the highest-ranking officials in the administration.
And Steven R. Shapiro, Legal Director of the ACLU, stated in 2009: “No democracy has ever been made stronger by suppressing evidence of its own misconduct.”
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A U.S.-backed militia in Syria, touted by the Obama administration as a trusted “moderate” group and armed with American anti-tank missiles, is reportedly dissolving following a series of defeats by al-Qaeda aligned Jabhat al-Nusra—leaving the U.S.-led war on ISIS in further disarray.
The combatant group, Harakat al-Hazm, had been engaged in fierce clashes with Jabhat al-Nusra for months. The U.S.-allied militia was initially pushed from its northern Syrian headquarters in Idlib and suffered another defeat on Sunday at its new center of operations in Aleppo.
“Given what is happening on the Syrian front, offenses by the criminal regime with its cronies against Syria as a whole, and Aleppo specifically, and in an effort to stem the bloodshed of the fighters, the Hazm movement announces its dissolution,” declared a statement from the group, cited by Daily Beast writer Jamie Dettmer.
The militia announced that its members would join a new coalition—the Shamiah Front—which is engaged in fighting against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and, according to Dettmer, is “distrusted by Washington.” According to the Guardian‘s Middle East Editor Ian Black, the front includes “hardline Salafist factions as well as more moderate brigades like the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Mujahideen Army and another U.S.-backed outfit.”
Harakat al-Hazm is one of many Syrian militias that have received U.S. training and support, including shipments of anti-tank Tow missiles. Unverified reports are emerging on Twitter that their Tow missiles have been seized by al-Nusra fighters:
The announcement of Harakat al-Hazm’s collapse coincides with the launch of a new U.S.-led program to train and arm Syrian combatants in Turkey. U.S. support for “moderate” fighters has been a centerpiece of war on ISIS, nearing its seventh month.
However, this support dates back further than the war on ISIS. As Adam Johnson reported in FAIR last week, “That the US is arming and training Syrian rebels has been well-documented for over two years, yet Western media have historically suffered from a strange collective amnesia when reporting this fact.”
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