The Nation
How the Climate Reform Effort Was Poisoned From the Inside [EDITORS' NOTE ADDED ON 4/30/13]
Editors' Note: After a review, we've determined that this blog post overstates the role Blue Line Strategic Communications and its founders, Michael Meehan and David DiMartino, played in Clean Energy Works. A coalition comprised of dozens of NGOs, Clean Energy Works was founded in 2009 to campaign for the passage of climate change legislation. The organization was led by Democratic strategist Paul Tewes and a managing committee comprised of representatives from each of the participating groups, which collectively determined the coalition's priorities and strategies. Clean Energy Works subsequently hired several firms to work on the campaign, including Blue Line, which handled strategic communications. While Blue Line played a role in shaping the campaign's messaging, it neither managed Clean Energy Works nor was it in a position to unilaterally determine strategy, as the post suggests.
The post also leaves the impression that Michael Meehan worked for Clean Energy Works. While Meehan worked for groups that were part of the broader coalition, he did not work directly with Clean Energy Works. That account was handled by his partner David DiMartino. As Fang reported, Meehan was a vice president at Virilion, the digital media company that held a $19 million contract from American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Meehan maintains, however, that he never worked directly on the ACCCE account, which preceded his arrangement with Virilion, and had no financial stake in it. Both Meehan and DiMartino, who were not interviewed before publication, contacted The Nation to say that neither of them are registered lobbyists, as the post describes them, but rather communications professionals. They previously worked at BGR Public Relations, part of the BGR Group, which has lobbied on behalf of fossil fuel companies, although both Meehan and DiMartino maintain that they had no role in those efforts.
We stand by the post's contention that Meehan's work for Blue Line and Virilion—while Blue Line was coordinating communications strategy for Clean Energy Works in favor of climate legislation and Virilion was working to block the same bill—created an apparent conflict of interest. What is not supported by the evidence is that this conflict influenced Clean Energy Works' strategic decisions and ultimately contributed to the failure of the bill. We apologize for the errors.
The Village Green Preservation Society
Regular readers of this blog should remember über-talented filmmaker/producer/musician/progressive impresario Sarah Sophie Flickr’s recent rad projects like her Get Out the Vote PSA set to Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” and her anti-fracking ad, “Don’t Frack My Mother.”
This Earth Day, Flickr joined forces with the Rainforest Alliance and convened some of her fabulous friends to exhume The Kinks’ classic tune “Village Green Preservation Society” in a catchy lip-synching medley featuring Sean Lennon, Alexa Chung, Tennessee Thomas, Karen Elson and many others. The song, beyond getting you to bop your head and hum along, effectively promotes the idea that small daily actions can make big change.
It’s a fun sing-along with a deadly serious goal: to boost the ranks of the more than 35,000-strong member Rainforest Alliance, which has a goal of improving lives, livelihoods and lands in more than 100 countries around the globe. So enjoy and share the song and find out more about the Rainforest Alliance this Earth Day.
Tom Brokaw Asks the Media to Cover Drone Warfare as a Factor in Terror Attacks
I’m still working on this week’s column, but didn’t want this to pass. Amid all of the millions of words of criticism of the media written or uttered in the past few days (including my own), the vast majority of them have focused on active missteps, errors, faux expertise, laughable pontificating and the rest, but little on serious omissions. So let’s note that Tom Brokaw, of all people, yesterday stepped in, if briefly, to provide some badly needed scene-setting, sounding more like Glenn Greenwald than a reasonable impression of himself.
Here’s the transcript, with video below:
I think that there’s something else that goes beyond the event that we’ve all been riveted by in the last week. We have to work a lot harder as a motivation here. What prompts a young man to come to this country and still feel alienated from it, to go back to Russia and do whatever he did—and I don’t think we’ve examined that enough? I mean, there was 24/7 coverage on television, a lot of newspaper print and so on, but we have got to look at the roots of all of this because it exists across the whole subcontinent, and the—and the Islamic world around the world. And I think we also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved—and there are a lot of civilians who are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. And I can tell you having spent a lot of time over there, young people will come up to me on the streets and say, we love America, but if you harm one hair on the head of my sister, I will fight you forever and there is this enormous rage against what they see in that part of the world as a presumptuousness of the United States.
The US, Russia and Chechnya After Boston
Vladimir Putin first won political popularity by cracking down on separatist movements in the Northern Caucasus. (Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti.)
When President Obama meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in September, they’ll have a lot to talk about. Some things on the agenda will have prime importance: the crisis in Syria, talks with Iran, disarmament and nuclear weapons among them. Far less important are issues on the fringe, including the deplorable state of human rights in Russia and now, after the Boston bombings, terrorism.
Let's Not Normalize This Thing Called 'Terrorism': A Conversation With Sohail Daulatzai
Last Tuesday, I was looking forward to a lecture at Riverside Church featuring Sohail Daulatzai on black, Muslim, South Asian, Latino and Third World international movements. Daulatzai teaches at UC Irvine, and his new book, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America, frames the black freedom movement in an international context, deeply linked with what he terms the Muslim Third World. The Boston bombing had happened the day previously, and by Tuesday, the media were spinning in high gear and demonizing Muslims—and I could think of no better time to hear Daulatzai respond to the moment with a historical analysis. But regrettably, the event was postponed to quell any potential backlash. Since I couldn’t hear Daulatzai speak, I decided to engage him in a conversation that might help us understand why it’s critical for people of color to remain vigilant of all that’s transpired the past week.
Aura Bogado: First of all, I wanted to talk to you about the postponement of Tuesday’s event. It’s not at all isolated; I suspect we’ll start to hear more about the ways in which Muslims have had to take cover, and even think twice about attending prayer service, for example. Can you talk about the climate that essentially demands that some of us modify our behavior—which is really another way of demanding we modify our politics?
Sohail Daulatzai: The postponement of Tuesday’s event here in New York was deeply unfortunate, but it reflects how for many of us, for Muslims, immigrants, black folk, communities of color doing grassroots work and trying to make global connections, the pressures that we’ve been feeling have been very real, and they serve to silence debate. Just at the moment when we need to be having these conversations, we’re silenced once again, whether it’s those doing work in the mainstream, or others doing more critical work. It’s deeply disturbing, but unfortunately it’s not new, because the root sources of violence endure.
Chrissy Amphlett's Pleasure Anthem
Chrissy Amphlett performs as Judy Garland in the musical “The Boy From Oz” in 2006. (Reuters/Will Burgess.)
Decades before Britney Spears danced through the hallways of a high school in a little plaid skirt, Chrissy Amphlett was making a scene on stage in a school uniform and fishnet stockings. Long before Rihanna sang about the appeals of S&M, Amphlett was crooning about the fine line between pleasure and pain, asking us to please not ask her how she’s been getting off. And years before rappers like Missy Elliott and Nicki Minaj were rhyming about taking their sexual pleasure into their own hands, Amphlett was serenading the object of her affection with “when I think about you, I touch myself.”
This Earth Day, Stop the Appalachian Health Crisis Caused by Mountain Top Removal
A year ago this week, Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) hosted four leading scientists for Senate and House briefings on the environmental and health impacts of mountain top removal (MTR) mining in Appalachia.
The scientists’ peer reviewed research was damning: mountain top removal, the practice of clearing mountaintops of trees and topsoil and then blasting them with explosives to reveal the coal seams underneath, is polluting the Appalachian watershed decreasing organism diversity, increasing flooding and contaminating ground water. The air’s in trouble too, leading to high rates of cancer, heart and respiratory disease:
Preliminary laboratory tests, using air samples from areas where people are living in Appalachia, show mountain top removal mining dust kills heart cells and impairs vascular function.
Elites May Finally Realize Austerity Isn't the Answer
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, at the European Development Days in Brussels, October 16, 2012. (Flickr/EU Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection)
In the past week, political officials and economic experts in several countries have indicated they believe austerity is not, and indeed never has been, the answer to pulling the world’s economies out of recession. First, everyone found out Paul Ryan is super bad at math (shocker). As it turns out, the paper the House Budget Committee chairman has been using to make the case for austerity was discredited after it became known that essential data was excluded from the study, leading to “serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth.”
Boston, West, Newtown: For Whom the Bells Toll, For Whom the Alarms Ring
At least fourteen people died in the chemical plant explosion in West, Texas, just a few of the 4,500-plus Americans killed each year on the job. (AP Photo/LM Otero.)
Ask yourself this: Do you know the name of any one of the victims killed in the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company disaster? Do you know how many of them there were? Their ages, aspirations, what they looked like, whether they left behind children or what messages they last posted on Facebook? Do you know if there is an explanation yet for what caused the explosion? Or if investigators are still searching for one?
What 'The Boston Globe' Got Right and Why It Should Change How Papers Think
The Boston Globe’s online homepage. (www.bostonglobe.com)
When editors at The Boston Globe recognized that their city had been bombed by suspected terrorists who were still at large, they immediately mustered a substantial and experienced newsgathering team to cover one of the most tragic, frightening and unsettling moments in the long history of a great American city.
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