The Woodpecker

1.  In 2001, President Bush met with Russian President Putin and declared that he had “looked him in the eye” and seen into his soul, finding that “we share a lot of values.” He called President Putin “an honest, straightforward man” and “a remarkable leader.” Yesterday, this same Putin holds a more than four-hour press conference laying out his plans to lead Russia indefinitely as its (as yet unelected) “premier,” railing against the possibility of an independent Kosovo, and threatening again to aim nuclear missiles at Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Ukraine if they get any cozier with NATO. He has gradually restored authoritarian rule to his country and ordered the imprisonment, intimidation, and murder of his political adversaries. Every month, it seems, he emerges a bit more from his sheep’s clothing to reveal himself as the KGB wolf he clearly is. I know there are a lot to choose from, but isn’t history going to judge this as one of the Top Five most egregious and costly failures of the Bush Administration?

2. A school shooting spree in Illinois by a nutjob who legally purchased at least one of the guns in his arsenal, and the junior Senator from that state – who is incidentally seeking the nomination of his own left-leaning party loyalists for president — responds in measured tones, calling for gun control and the enforcement of existing gun laws, but also reasserting his longstanding view that the Second Amendment categorically protects individual gun ownership.   That’s leadership, folks.

3. Two years of rolling over for the Bush Administration, particularly on any measure that has the slightest whiff of national security about it, and this week the Democrats in Congress refuse to extend the “Protect America Act” (the law that legalized the warrantless wiretapping that the Administration had already been doing), refused to grant the telephone companies immunity for their illegal cooperation with overzealous government investigators, and approved contempt citations for John Bolton and Harriet Miers for their refusal to cooperate with Congress’ investigation into the US Attorney firings.  To what can we attribute this sudden and unlikely display of reason and courage in the face of the same irrational fear-mongering from the Administration?  Where did all these spineless Demmies suddenly get the idea that Americans might actually appreciate strong, principled leadership and good judgment more than pandering and demagoguery?  Is it too early to call it “the Obama Effect”? 

4. They’re trying to shut down Rock City Coffee Roasters in Rockland, ME for giving off too much coffee smell.  I love that place. 

5. “On issue after issue, he is out of the mainstream of the Republican Party,” Romney said of McCain eleven days ago.  Yesterday he said “This is a man capable of leading our country at a dangerous hour.”   On the one hand, you kind of have to hand it to these Republicans – they are an amazingly disciplined bunch.   This has been an incredible week, watching one GOP leader after another betray his principles to line up behind the guy he has spent the last 5-10 years beating on.  Democrats could never be so orderly and straightforwardly-loyal to their party.  On the other hand, what kind of an idiot rushes (rushes!) to do a full 180 on his two-year long primary campaign after spending 80% of that campaign answering the criticism that everything he says is rooted in cynical expediency?   Does Romney think that he can say whatever he wants with a straight face and a confident bearing and no one will notice that it (once again) betrays a complete lack of personal substance?  Does he think people will see this reversal as an act of strength, rather than a final punch line to a duplicitous political career?  Who knows — but in the end it does make me think Romney may be not so much cleverly calculating as genuinely self-delusional.

 6.  Pitchers and catchers reported yesterday - 39 days to Game 1 in Tokyo.

Not too many people are questioning the Fed’s decision yesterday morning to cut the federal funds rate by an unprecedented .75%, but they should be. Amidst historically low unemployment, modest inflation, low interest rates, and unsurprising earnings reports from many companies in sectors other than banking and housing, there seems to be no very compelling reason for the central bank to have taken such a desperate risk with the broader economy, drawing up and injecting a full syringe of HGH before the first pitch was thrown. But that’s not what the investment bankers think, and they’re apparently the only fans the Fed cares about.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to have its eye on the entire U.S. economy – which includes mostly service personnel and laborers and other folks with limited direct exposure to the stock market. Yet these people – working people – routinely get the “invisible hand” treatment when markets dry up, investors go south, or assets are suddenly devalued. There is no cry for “greater liquidity” when the auto industry leaves Michigan or nationwide unemployment rises above ten percent. Nor are their cheers for combating inflation when the overheated housing market finally softens, giving first-time homebuyers a long-awaited chance to buy in. The Fed takes these kinds of market gyrations mostly in stride – they can have painful, even devastating consequences for broad sectors of the economy, but they are seen as part of the natural economic cycle and as a necessary (if unfortunate) by-product of our rough and tumble free-market system. And yet it seems that the Fed finds the idea of financial losses absolutely intolerable when its wealthy patrons in the financial sector are the ones who are suffering.

More than any other single factor, it was the jarring down-days in the international stock exchanges that prompted the Fed to take drastic action in cutting rates yesterday morning. With the news we get every day about every hiccup in the Dow and the S&P 500, it can be easy to forget that the stock market actually is not the same as the U.S. economy, but only a part of it, and by no means the most important part. Increasingly, with margin investing, mutual funds, electronic traded funds, and a hundred flavors of derivatives, much of the money that flows into the financial markets is never invested in U.S. corporations, or indeed hard assets of any kind. Corporations use the stock market as a source of investment and liquidity, but the money that is said to be gained and lost “in the market” day-to-day often has nothing to do with the value of particular corporations and everything to do with private wagers the players in the market make with each other about how various companies or segments of the economy are going to perform. These market wagerers are not the U.S. economy – the Dow goes one way while GDP, the deficit, the trade deficit, the dollar, and unemployment often go another – they are merely the big players in the financial sector. And, like every other sector in our economy, the only way the financial sector can be expected to make efficient, sensible, forward-looking investment decisions is if its participants are allowed to fail and die when they make moves that are bad, greedy, shortsighted, or merely unlucky.

We’ve already learned this lesson, but apparently we have to learn it again. In the 1980s, President Reagan deregulated the savings and loan industry, opening the door to the same kind of reckless indiscipline (particularly in real estate lending) that we’re seeing today. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_Loan_crisis#Causes. In the 80s, the federal government “solved” this problem by simply writing a check from the taxpayers directly to the private lending houses, rewarding them for their lack of ordinary prudence and virtually guaranteeing that the lucrative, irresponsible practice of high-risk, quick turnover lending would continue. In light of the S&L scandals of the late 80s, which many say led to the recession of early 1990s, one would think that the heads of the major financial institutions would be carted away in handcuffs for once again draining every penny of profit from their shaky loan portfolios, knowing that these assets would crumble at the first ordinary and predictable downturn in the market. But instead, the bankers have once again been rewarded, this time with one mark-down after another in the MSRP of money, virtually guaranteeing steady demand and reliable profits. The rest of the stock market got clobbered yesterday, but Bank of America was up 4%, even after announcing a 95% drop in earnings last quarter.

Americans who suffer when the stock market falls, or when the large lending institutions come on hard times, look a lot more like Ben Bernanke’s golf buddies than those who suffer when manufacturing plants close, when housing is unaffordable, or when inflation puts the price of consumer goods out of reach. Also, they look a lot more like Republicans. But the point of an independent Fed chair is supposed to be to keep the central bank from adopting an ideologically-based economic policy – such as the Bush Administration’s version of “trickle down” economics – and thereby taking experimental risks with the fundamentals of the U.S. economy. I think we’ve seen enough of Bernanke after yesterday to know that he is far from independent. And, in electing to protect the financial sector and the wealthiest interests in the economy from risk, the Fed’s policies under Bernanke may well prove to be highly risky for the broader economy.

That’s what I think, but you already know I’m one of those “up with people,” wage slave-loving liberals. So it might surprise you (as it surprised me) to see those market-worshippers at The Motley Fool saying pretty much the same thing today.

Public financing is the only constitutional way to reform the corruption of politics and stop our elected officials from becoming full-time fundraisers and part-time public servants.  Listen to our discussion with Stuart Comstock Gay of the National Voting Rights Institute.  Then sign this MoveOn petition and get involved:

Top Democrats and Republicans just announced a groundbreaking bill to make our elections more democratic with public financing.

Can you imagine if people could be elected to Congress without massive wealth and without begging for campaign cash from big donors? Congress wouldn’t owe corporate lobbyists any favors. That’s why those very lobbyists will work overtime to kill this exciting reform.

Let’s work to make Congress answer to the people. The first step is to gather 200,000 signatures for this petition: “Congress must pass public financing to make our elections fair.”

Can you help out by signing this petition to Congress? It’s really easy—just click the link below:

http://pol.moveon.org/fairelections/?referring_id=10059-3997066-qtRwTd

Thanks!

Professor Lawrence Friedman returns as our guest this week for an intensive short-course in the major decisions from the Supreme Court’s 2005-2006 term. In the first half of the program, we focus on the Court’s major criminal law decisions, including a troubling majority opinion by Justice Scalia in Hudson v. Michigan that threatens to overwhelm nearly a hundred years of precedent defining the “exclusionary rule” - the fundamental rule of evidence that prohibits prosecutors from using unlawfully-obtained evidence to secure criminal convictions. We also follow up on our April discussion with Stuart Comstock-Gay of the National Voting Rights Institute regarding the Vermont campaign finance reform case, Randall v. Sorrel. In Randall, as expected, the Court declined to revisit its widely-criticized decision in Buckley v. Valeo, instead striking down Vermont’s effort to enact meaningful campaign finance reform by holding that any restrictions on campaign spending (and the state’s particular restrictions on campaign contributions) violate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.Â

In the second half, we spend some time analyzing the Court’s decision (announced on the last day of the term) in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the Court once again handed the Bush administration a stunning rebuke in response to the president’s insistence that enemy combatants imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay must be tried by special military tribunals created by the DOD without Congressional authorization. The Hamdan case marks the third time in as many years that the president has been directly overruled by the Court in his efforts to create a special status for alleged al-Qaeda combatants or terrorists that exempts these prisoners from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and general democratic principles of due process of law.Â

With Professor Friedman’s help, we look closely at the Court’s reasoning in these major cases from the recently-concluded Supreme Court term, try to find clues as to the jurisprudence of new Justices Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, and begin to envision a mmore conservative Supreme Court in which the role of moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy is likely to remain critical in important cases in which the Court is otherwise divided 4-4.

Professor Friedman is a Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure scholar at the New England School of Law. We are very grateful to him for his time and insight.

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

 

 Woodpecker#20 - Part 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Woodpecker#20 - Part 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Woodpecker this week discusses competing Democratic proposals for troop withdrawal in Iraq, and tries (again, and without success) to find strategic honesty in the arguments of those both who propose immediate withdrawal and those who insist that it is essential to stay the course.  We also discuss Operation Mountain Thrust in Afghanistan.

In the second half, we look at the triumph of Islamist forces in Mogadishu, Somalia, and wonder how far the United States will push the “domino theory” approach to populist revolutions that are, incidentally, Islamist.  We also update our discussion of the immigration reform saga in the U.S. Congress, look at the Democrats “New Direction for America” platform, and take a quick look at Karl Rove’s non-indictment, the meaning of Ann Coulter’s war against America, the significance of the threatened North Korean missile test, and the failure of the Republicans to convince anyone in the fundamentalist, Buchananite wing of their party that the recent English-language/gay marriage/flag burning initiatives are anything more than the most cynical form of election-year bullshit.

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

The Woodpecker “PoliTalking” webcasts this week as part of the First Annual WorldBridges Webcastathon, celebrating the first full year of global webcasting from http://www.worldbridges.com/.  In the first half of the program, we discuss the president’s appointment of General Michael Hayden to the position of CIA Director, as well as the revelations this week that the president’s (and Hayden’s) domestic spying program at the NSA was assisted by the voluntary submission of massive call databases to the NSA by three of the four largest United States telecommunications companies: AT&T, Bellsouth, and Verizon.   

In the second half, we discuss Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush.  We also take comments and questions from listeners Dave C and Alex on Iraq, Iran, Net Neutrality, and Immigration Reform.

In keeping with the “webcastathon” theme of the weekend, the programs runs about thirty minutes longer than our usual hour.

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

On The Woodpecker this week, we focus on three issues that are grabbing headlines (or at least our attention).  In the first half, we discuss “net neutrality” and the effort by Congressman Ed Markey and other Democrats to introduce legislation that would keep ISPs and telco companies from charging users and content-providers for “preferred access” to bandwidth.  The companies that provide your access to the Internet would very much like to classify the websites you visit (and devices you connect) by whether the owner of that website (or device) has paid them to be available to you.  They would also like to classify you as a bronze, silver, or gold customer who has paid for access (or faster access) to certain websites or content.  As the CEO of SBC/AT&T said last year in response to a question about Google, Vonage, and MSN, “How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. . . . So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”  Congressman Markey points out that this complaint is right out of the Little Red Hen – telcos did next to nothing to help build the world wide web, but now they seek to profit from the range of content and services available through an internet connection for which you already pay them.  Put aside the profit motive, and you quickly get to the related problem of censorship and the stratification of content on the web (who is going to pay for you to access a political blog like this one?).  And why would Verizon ever allow you to access Vonage (with anything like enough bandwidth) when they start to offer “VerizOIP”?  The threat to net neutrality is a real one, and it is a slippery slope that could quickly degrade and commoditize the web to nothing more than a virtual strip mall.  Become a “citizen co-sponsor” of Congressman Markey’s Net Neutrality Bill by going here. 

In the second half, we discuss the situation in Darfur and the prospects for a negotiated end to the genocide (which we view as dim, no matter how many times the deadline for a peace accord is extended this week).  The rallies across the country last Sunday gave voice to a growing coalition of peace groups, religious groups, and others who are demanding a more active role for the U.S. and the United Nations in ending the conflict in Darfur (and surrounding areas of Sudan and Chad) and bringing relief to the millions of civilians who are daily imperiled by the ongoing hostilities in that region.  Hundreds of thousands of people have died since the Sudanese government began its proxy-war against the various rebel groups in Darfur, and years have gone by since the United States labeled the mass slaughter and displacement of civilians “genocide.”  The situation creating the bloodshed is a complex and dangerous one, and it has proven to be beyond the capacity of the African Union to handle.  If 40,000 international troops are what is required to keep the peace in Darfur, why isn’t the international community (and particularly the West) finally stepping in and putting an end to the slaughter? 

Also in the second half of the program, we discuss the current “gasoline crisis” in the United States, taking some time to ridicule the quick-fix solutions proposed by Congressional Republicans (and, to a lesser extent, Democrats) and reflecting on the pointlessness of focusing on gas prices – rather than corporate profiteering, a host of tax incentives and other sweetheart deals Republicans have doled out to the petroleum industry over the years, the “peak oil” problem, and, yes, excessive consumption –  when high prices are merely an unpleasant symptom of real and complex (and growing) problems facing our nation and our world.  If a patient came into a doctor’s office with measles, would the doctor give her a bottle of Calamine lotion and send her on her way?  He would if he were Dr. Bill Frist and there were elections coming up.

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

Our guest this week on The Woodpecker is Stuart Comstock-Gay, the Executive Director of the National Voting Rights Institute and a former Vice-President and COO of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.  Stuart is also a former Executive Director of the Maryland ACLU in Baltimore.  As Executive Director of the National Voting Rights Institute, Stuart was present at the Supreme Court arguments last month over the Vermont campaign finance reform initiative, “Act 64”, and our discussion with him focuses on the urgent need for such measures in the fundraising-dominated world of electoral politics (and, increasingly, the broader world of public leadership), the prospects of the Vermont initiative before the Supreme Court, and the state of campaign finance law and campaign finance reform generally. 

In 1976, the Supreme Court decided Buckley v. Valeo, a case that ruled on the Congress’ and the nation’s first comprehensive effort in the immediate aftermath of Watergate to rein-in the corrupting influence of money and influence-seeking donors in electoral politics.  Given the laudatory scope of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act and the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley was a disappointment.  In Buckley, the Court upheld the restrictions in the Federal Election Campaign Act on individual contributions to certain federal election campaigns, but it overruled major provisions of that Act and the Presidential Election Campaign Fund Act that placed limits on campaign expenses and certain other kinds of so-called “independent” expenditures made by private entities on behalf of a particular candidate for office.  In making this ruling, the Court advanced a novel legal construction that equated campaign election spending (though, improbably, not campaign contributions) with speech under the First Amendment, holding that any effort to restrict amounts candidates or donor groups could spend in a political fight amounted to an unconstitutional encroachment on the “quantity” of free speech such persons enjoy. 

Thirty years later, we have the Abramoff scandal, the Delay indictments, and campaign spending that is by any measure wildly excessive and continuing to grow unchecked with each election cycle.  Congressional candidate fundraising has increased by 476% according to a friend of the court brief filed jointly in the Vermont initiative case, Randall v. Sorrell, by former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson.   Senators Simpson and Bradley observe in their brief that “[w]ithout limits on campaign expenditures, campaign costs have escalated and fundraising has become an inordinately time-consuming job for candidates and officeholders fearful of being out-matched by their opponents’ spending.  As a result, the ability of elected officials to perform their duties has diminished, the quality of representation has declined, and the integrity of elected office has been undermined.” 

Add to the well-documented culture of corruption and influence-peddling that has grown unchecked over the past thirty years the fact that many well-respected jurists and legal scholars have come to the conclusion that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley was wrong as a matter of constitutional law, and that there is no legal or rational need to treat campaign money as analytically indistinguishable from the political message it is sometimes used to convey.   Against that backdrop, many advocates for campaign finance reform see Randall v. Sorrell as the first genuine chance since Buckley was decided to revisit the Court’s wrong-headed reasoning in that case and create a rational constitutional standard with which the money that daily corrupts democracy and the democratic process can finally be brought under control.  But with the new conservative additions to the bench, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, the chance to see the analytical mistakes of the Buckley Court finally set right may have come too late.

These and other issues related to campaign finance reform are discussed with our guest Stuart Comstock-Gay of NVRI in the first half of our program.  In the second half, we continue this discussion, and also broaden our inquiry into other state and federal campaign finance reform initiatives, potential future challenges to the 2002 McCain-Feingold Reform Act, and NVRI’s other election-reform priorities, including paperless voting and the pressing need to ensure accuracy and accountability in election results, particularly in close races. 

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

The ink was barely dry on Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker this week before it was being picked up and elaborated on by MSM and alternative media sources around the world.  The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even took the time to respond to the allegations in the report, which he dismissed as deliberate posturing by the U.S. at the same time as our own president dismissed them as “wild speculation.”  Seymour Hersh has been warning us about the Bush administration’s plans for war in Iran for some time, but his sources in this week’s article have an even more terrifying message — that the United States has been contemplating the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a potential air assault on Iran designed to take out its uranium-enrichment capability.  The fact that the tactical nuclear option is categorically opposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff is of only limited comfort when one considers the number of high-level administration officials, as detailed in the Hersh piece, who are on record as supporting the idea of overcoming U.S. reluctance to use small-scale nuclear weapons in an “appropriate” conflict and context (in the case of Iran, destroying key nuclear sites that may be constructed many feet below ground). 

The Woodpecker struggles this week with the complexity of the defense and foreign policy challenges posed by Iran – a situation largely of the U.S.’s own creation in which there appear to be few if any good options.  Is Senator John McCain right to assert that “the only thing worse than an armed conflict is the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran”, or is the United States once again failing to consider the full range of foreseeable but unintended consequences of its military adventurism in the Arab world?  Are Americans (and the U.S. military) really ready to adopt the administration’s apparent policy of “regime change” in Iran, particularly in light of Ahmadinejad’s nationalist popularity, the enormous cost in blood and treasure of the wars the U.S. is already fighting in the region, and the emerging consensus among our allies that any form of direct military engagement in Iran would be “nuts”?  

In the second half of the program, we also discuss the ongoing debate (and unprecedented nationwide demonstrations) in the United States over immigration reform, updating our detailed discussion last time of the legislative options on the table and the prospects for meaningful reform.    

First half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Second half hour (download)

Or stream it now!

Please post comments here, and send feedback on podcast (ideas, questions to take up next time, etc.) to “the woodpecker” via Skype voicemail. Or send The Woodpecker a regular email at this address.

I know, this is a local New England issue, which we try to avoid out here on The Woodpecker.  But I’m hopping (hopping!) mad about the shady, back-room dealings this evening that could result (and may have already resulted) in the U.S. Congress granting a one-time only, one-project only veto to the governor of Massachusetts over a proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound that has been stalled for many years by various self-styled “citizens’ groups” (actually uber-wealthy individuals with vacation homes in Nantucket) who are worried about the impact of this project on their ocean views and property values.  The windmills and other portions of this project are to be located about five miles offshore.  The company who is proposing the project, Cape Wind, has generated some computer simulations to show how the project will look from the veranda. 

What’s so disheartening about this issue is that so many of the project’s opponents on the Cape and Nantucket identify themselves as politically “liberal” and supportive of alternative energy proposals generally.  As a progressive myself (with libertarian overtones), their duplicity on the proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound brings to mind a favorite quotation by Phil Ochs: ”In any community, there are varying shades of political opinion.  One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. . . . Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right when it affects them personally.”  Here’s an excerpt from The Woodpecker’s letter to one such group, Save Our Sound.  Senator Kennedy (a liberal champion of the anti-Cape Wind cause and, naturally, a frequent vacationer at his family’s Hyannisport compound) also received a copy. 

“What I want to know is, how are you people able to live with yourselves?  It is really quite offensive to see such unrelenting hypocrisy on the part of a neighboring “citizens’ group” from New England.  All the nonsense you’ve pushed on us over the years about protecting birds and our “sacred waters,” when you’ve known all along what you were really up to, and that wind-power operations like the one proposed by Cape Wind are essential to the sustainability of our state and our planet.  It is frankly repulsive to see the way your organization and its spokespeople cloak their naked NIMBY politics in the language of environmentalism and social concern.  I have been revolted by it for years, and now – with today’s letter in the [Boston] Globe by your president, Charles Vinick, and tonight’s shady and secret dealings in the Congressional conference committee – your self-serving hypocrisy has reached another new low. 

“You have become the type of people who will literally say anything, raise any objection, distort any scientific finding, and co-opt or simply thwart any otherwise legitimate citizens’ concern simply so that you do not have to revise your sailing charts, or so that your gorgeous view at cocktail hour is not marred by white flecks on the horizon.  It is despicable what you’re doing, and I wish for your own sake that there were some way you could begin to feel some shame for it.

“If you circulate this message to anyone internally, which you likely won’t, it will be with a denigrating cover-message, “another disgruntled Cape Wind shareholder!”  But you will be wrong about that, just as you are deeply wrong to intentionally miscast your NIMBY initiative as good, ordinary citizens struggling against a profiteering developer.  Cape Wind is a company – that much is true.  But where is the evidence of detachment, manipulation, steam-rolling, and deception that might cause anyone without an ipe deck overlooking Nantucket Sound to conclude that it is a company that is doing anything more “dangerous” than pioneering an industry that is essential to our nation’s future and to the long-term viability of our planetary ecosystem? 

“Every citizen in this country is consoled (falsely) when they learn the risks of global climate change to hear our political leaders talk reassuringly about the “emerging alternative fuel industry” that will, through the familiar mechanisms of innovation and profit, lead us to a brighter future of clean and less-toxic energy production.  Yet real-world examples of such a strong and growing industry are rare, while each quarter brings greater and greater profits for the environmentally-devastating petroleum industry.  And here is Cape Wind – an actual, true-life example of a company that is trying to make money from the production of alternative sources of energy, and a company that quite prudently chose to locate its facility in one of the best and most reliable areas for harnessing wind energy – Nantucket Sound.  Where is the deception and heartless greed in that?  Why on earth would your Mr. Vinick expect the citizens of Massachusetts to view Cape Wind’s actions as anything other than those of a responsible corporate citizen in a vital (but fledgling) industry? 

“And then consider, on the other hand, the self-styled (and shockingly well-funded) “citizens’ groups” that oppose the Cape Wind project — powerful, monied, politically-connected, and with an ever-lengthening track record for shading the truth and changing their story as to why on earth they would seek to destroy such an important and pioneering project (hint: it’s about everything except what it’s actually about – personal greed and NIMBY politics).  When the fishing impact is shown to be minimal, your group says it’s really about the birds.  When no reputable agency or scientist sees a major impact on migrating birds, your group says it’s really about the oil that will be necessary to run the project.  When no one is much impressed by the risk of 41,000 gallons of oil in an ocean that has already suffered hundreds of incalculably larger spills in the service of the oil industry, your group turns to the dark and sleazy world of backroom politics, hopping eagerly into bed with two Alaska Republicans, a Senator (Stevens) and Congressman (Young), who have demonstrated at every opportunity their abject fealty to the petroleum industry and their protectionist desire to destroy all potential competition to this industry from nascent alternative-energy companies.  Did you pay these two politicians directly, or did you cleverly support a more palatable, less-directly anti-environment Congressman to line them up for you?  Are you proud of all the new friends you’ve made for yourselves in government?  Is it worth the support you’ve so eagerly given to the enemies of our global environment, burnishing their political reputations as they seek to destroy more habitat, slaughter more wildlife, and poison more air and water through unfettered petroleum exploration and refining than the Cape Wind project could cause in a billion years of operation? 

“If you secure your victory today, will you at least lower your masks and show yourselves for the selfish and calculating enemies of our environment that you are, or will that take all of the devilish pleasure out of it?  At least, do your fellow residents of Massachusetts a favor, and never call yourself “concerned citizens” again.  It is frankly nauseating to those of us who genuinely want what is best for our Commonwealth and our world.”