A new post about the merger of two Upper Peninsula environmental organizations on Keweenaw Now includes this short video excerpt of the talk I gave in Marquette, Michigan a while back about the power and responsibility we have to protect water and wild places from unsustainable development.
You can read the full text of my remarks here.
At an anti-austerity event at the Emmanuel Centre in London yesterday evening, former Greek Minister of Finance Yanis Varoufakis offered a few remarks on the period in which we are now living. Here is my transcript of the part of his talk describing the zombie state of “bankruptocracy” that arose after “capitalism died” in 2008.
When the bank of England prints billions and billions and billions to buy these paper assets — which are mortgages, which are private debts of the banks, which are public debts and so on and so forth — what happens is two things.
Firstly, house prices increase, in the parts of the country where wealth is concentrated, the wealthy people spend more, their income increases, so there is this sensation among the ruling class that they’ve stabilized the economy because their bottom line has been stabilized.
At the very same time, you have a situation where companies have access to cheap money, courtesy of QE. The tragedy however is, what do they do with this money? Now they’re not dumb. They know that the rest of you cannot afford their goods and services, so they’re not going to invest in productive activity, in order to produce more of them. So what do they do?
They borrow the money that the QE program is producing, giving it to the banks; the banks pass it on to the corporations; and what do the corporates do? They buy back their own shares. They borrow money to buy back their own shares because that way, they push the share price up, and guess what the bonuses of the CEOs are connected to? The share price. So they have more income, and all this money creation, liquidity creation, does not find itself not only in the pockets of working men and women; but it doesn’t even find itself into productive investment into capital.
So we have a capitalism without capital. We have a capitalism with financial capital.
We don’t live in capitalism.
In 1991 socialism collapsed; and the socialist camp and the left worldwide suffered a major defeat, both a political and a moral defeat. And we’re culpable for that, but that’s another story.
In 2008, capitalism died. I describe the new system we live in as “bankruptocracy”: the rule by bankrupt banks that have the political power to effect a transfer — a constant tsunami of money coming from the financial sector and from working people into the bankrupt banks, which remain bankrupt even though they are profitable, because the black holes created during the years of Ponzi growth prior to 2008 remain.
You can watch the whole speech here, on Varoufakis’ site.
Fourth In A Series
A still from a Tom Casperson campaign spot, in which Casperson (left) says the UP is “truly someplace special…now facing truly special challenges,” among them, “standing against the EPA and the unreasonable overreach of other agencies.”
Michigan State Senator Tom Casperson is the most visible political figure associated with the MCRC v. EPA lawsuit, the agent if not the author of its political project. We don’t know exactly what or how much he did to encourage members of the Marquette County Road Commission to take the EPA to court, what assurances were given and what expectations were put in place, as at least some of those meetings appear to have been conducted on the down low (and in violation of the Open Meetings Act). But the Escanaba Republican has never been shy about his support for CR 595 or his hostility toward the EPA.
Brian Cabell is stating what seems obvious when he links Casperson’s support for CR 595 to his business associations with timber and trucking in the Upper Peninsula, and it’s reasonable to believe that timber interests are among the donors to Stand U.P., the 501c4 dark money association funding the Road Commission’s lawsuit against the EPA. Before entering public life, Casperson succeeded his father as owner and operator of Casperson & Son Trucking, a log-trucking business started by his grandfather and based in Escanaba, Michigan. Associations like the Michigan Forest Products Council, the Great Lakes Timber Professionals and the Michigan Association of Timbermen support and celebrate the Senator’s achievements.
But those relatively direct and straightforward business associations are probably not the only ones in play here, and in supporting CR 595 and encouraging the CR 595 lawsuit, Casperson appears to be doing more than a little favor for himself and his friends back home in the timber and trucking industries. While a 2013 tally of Casperson’s supporters shows — not surprisingly for a Republican politician in the UP — that Michigan mining, timber and fossil-fuel PACs have been among his biggest backers, I suspect the MCRC lawsuit will serve an even deeper and more shadowy entanglement of alliances and alignments.
In parts 1, 2, and 3 of this series, I’ve described the formation of a political authority, or power bloc, that now pretends to direct economic development in the UP and decide what’s in the region’s best interests. That project is closely bound up with Casperson’s own political ambitions, and those ambitions are hardly limited to advocating for this haul road. Tom Casperson covets a seat above his current station, a role on the national stage; or at least he once coveted that bigger role, and politicians don’t often reconcile themselves to less power than they think they deserve. In 2008, Casperson ran against Bart Stupak to represent Michigan’s first district in the U.S. Congress. He made a pretty good showing, with nearly 33% of the vote against the incumbent’s 65%. With Stupak’s successor Dan Benishek announcing in March that in 2016 he’s running for a fourth term (after pledging to serve only three terms), Casperson will have to cool his heels until 2018. In the meantime, however Senator Casperson has a constructive role to play.
Casperson gained a certain notoriety in 2013 when he expressed doubts during a radio interview about whether President Obama was born in the United States, but he never found his footing as a birther, at least not in public. He’s spent most of his political career fighting the EPA and the regulation of industry in Michigan. That’s apparently where his heart is. Back in 2008, when he ran against Stupak, Casperson represented oil drilling as “lining up with my core beliefs.” At the time, he also claimed that the National Environmental Protection Act (passed in 1970) has regulators “walking around looking for amoebae on the ground so that they can find something to block timber sales,” and whined that environmentalism was “bringing the country to its knees.”
In 2011, Senator Casperson introduced a resolution (SR-10) “to impose a moratorium on greenhouse gas, air quality, and other regulatory actions by the Environmental Protection Agency” and require the EPA to account for the cumulative economic effect of “all regulatory activity” on climate change, air quality, water use, and coal ash. He recently joined Dan Benishek in opposing the Obama administration’s modifications of the Clean Water Act as “regulatory overreach” — echoing the point urged by other conservative opponents of the rule, who lined up obediently behind mining, fossil-fuel and energy producers, big agriculture and fertilizer companies like Koch.
Blaming the “war on coal” — the phrase itself is borrowed from the lexicon of climate change denial — for the closing of Marquette’s Presque Isle coal plant, Casperson warns that “there is no bigger threat to affordable, reliable electrical service to our districts than the EPA.” He grandstands about the EPA at every opportunity: “At some point,” he said back in March, “somebody’s got to take a stand here or they will take our way of life away from us. Clearly, they don’t like mining, clearly they don’t like timbering and quite frankly it appears they don’t really care much for us using the great outdoors unless they give us their permission and I think that’s unacceptable.”
For Tom Casperson, any and every environmental regulation poses an existential threat. Against this ever present danger, he is out to protect what he frequently calls the UP “way of life” and force a David and Goliath standoff with the federal government. “The burdensome regulations proposed by the EPA,” he said when introducing a bill calling for a halt to the regulation of wood-burning stoves, “are an overreach of government and need to be stopped to protect our way of life.” “If we don’t pay attention,” he warned in a recent interview, “we’re going to get run over here.” On that occasion, he wasn’t talking about the danger of ore trucks barreling through downtown Marquette; he was rising to the defense of barbecue grills.
The barbecue resolution Casperson introduced this year with State Senator Phil Pavlov (and which passed the Michigan legislature unanimously) is an unabashed exercise in demagoguery. “Barbecues are an American tradition enjoyed by families from all walks of life across the country,” it begins, “whether tailgating for a football game, hosting a backyard get-together, or just grilling a summer meal, barbecues are a quintessentially American experience and an opportunity to eat and socialize with family and friends.” What prompted this noble defense of American tradition and the quintessentially American experience of barbecue? Of football, get togethers, and families from all walks of life across the country? Nothing much.
In an EPA-sponsored competition, students at the University of California, Riverside were awarded a grant of $15,000 for proposing “to perform research and develop preventative technology that will reduce fine particulate emissions from residential barbecues.” That’s all there was to it. But those prize-winning students and their particulate emission preventing technology posed enough danger for Casperson — along with Missouri State Senator Eric Schmitt, Richard Hudson of North Carolina, Allen West and others of their ilk — to start hyperventilating about Obama and the EPA “coming after” our backyard barbecues. It looks like a loosely coordinated effort, with all the shills singing from the same sheet.
It’s a common tactic used to stir up popular sentiment against the regulation of polluters: when big pesticide users don’t like a new rule clarifying which waters are protected by the Clean Water Act, the demagogues tell small farmers that even a little ditch on their property will be counted among the “Waters of the US”; when regulators take aim at the fossil-fuel industry, the demagogues make dark predictions about the end of s’mores and campfires.
This is, by the way, the second time the Michigan legislature has fallen for this particular barbecue canard; the last time was back in 1997, when the Michigan House unanimously approved a resolution protecting barbecue grills against over-reaching federal bureaucrats. Casperson’s resolution was a reboot. Back in the 90s, and again in 2014 when Texas Senator Pete Olson demanded the Clean Air Act had to be amended if Texas-style barbecue were to be saved, the phony patriotism around Americans and their barbecue grills was a flag-waving effort to thwart the EPA’s proposal of stricter ozone limits. This time? Maybe rallying the troops around their barbecues helped to galvanize anti-EPA sentiment in the fight against the new Clean Water Act rule, or capitalize on the Pyrrhic victory the Supreme Court handed to industry in Michigan v. EPA.
A watchdog blog notes that Casperson’s “legislative record directly reflects the money trail,” but the equally important point — the one that I want to emphasize here — is that Tom Casperson’s efforts in the Michigan legislature appear to be connected and aligned with other legislative and extra-legislative efforts to ease environmental regulation and advance extractive projects and industrial development. The MCRC complaint presents a sterling opportunity for Casperson to strengthen these connections and forge new alliances. He would be a fool to pass it up.
Clark Hill, the attorneys who prepared and filed the complaint, already support Dan Benishek through their federal PAC; so Casperson may be able to jockey for a position in line behind him. But the law firm also gave more to Michigan Democrats than Republicans, and their real power and political influence does not depend on the nominal contributions they make to various political campaigns. Those are just goodwill gestures. Their political law practice, on the other hand, is a true nexus of political power, and at the head of it sits none other than Charles R. Spies. In 2012, Spies was Chief Financial Officer and Counsel for Restore our Future, the largest super PAC in history, formed to elect the unelectable Mitt Romney. Nowadays, Spies is supporting Jeb Bush, with a new Super PAC called Right to Rise.
These are the big leagues — much bigger than Casperson could ever dream of playing in. But the national success of Right to Rise will depend on thousands of coordinated local and regional efforts. If the MCRC lawsuit continues to go forward, it could easily have a place in that scheme, while raising Casperson’s profile and burnishing his conservative credentials. For its part, Stand U.P. can continue to raise all the money the MCRC needs for its lawsuit and whatever other political projects Tom Casperson and his cronies may be planning, and never have to disclose the sources of those funds. Its 501c4 “public welfare” status affords that protection.
In the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Rio Tinto shareholder meeting, I mentioned a woman who spoke on behalf of the Mongolian herders whose livelihood is threatened by the Oyu Tolgoi mining project. Her name is Sukhgerel Dugersuren, and she is the Executive Director of the Mongolian NGO Oyu Tolgoi Watch. In her remarks, Dugersuren asked the company to recognize the herders as “indigenous” people (as the IFC does). That isn’t just a gesture of recognition or respect, a way of acknowledging that the herders were there first, or that they have a centuries-old claim to the land and the scarce water sources of the Gobi; it means that before moving ahead, the Oyu Tolgoi project would require – to use the language of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Article 32, paragraph 2) — their free, prior and informed consent.
I was reminded of Dugersuren and the case of the herders when I read yesterday morning that the Humala government in Peru now intends to exclude the Quechua people of the Peruvian highlands from “prior consultation” on mining projects.
President Ollanta Humala campaigned in 2011 on the idea of “social inclusion” and specifically on giving indigenous communities a voice in the consultation period before big mining projects begin. Prior consultation — the first law Humala signed upon taking office — codified into Peruvian law the idea of free, prior and informed consent. But only two years later, with $50 billion in mining projects over the next five years at stake, and with Canadian mining giant Newmont scaling back its investments and announcing a delay in its controversial Minas Conga project, it looks as if Humala wishes he could take it all back.
Apparently Mines and Energy Minister Jorge Merino has prevailed; Deputy Minister of Culture Ivan Lanegra, who was in charge of administering the prior consultation law, is now making noises about resigning.
I haven’t yet seen anything like an official statement on the matter, but Humala and other Peruvian officials have already started offering reasons – if they can be called that — for excluding the Quechua from prior consultation. They read like a bizarre exercise in bad anthropology.
Attempting to legitimize its betrayal of the Quechua, the government resorts to revisionist history, crude caricatures and discredited ideas. So, we are told, the Quechua-speaking people of the Andes can’t be indigenous, because over the centuries, they mixed with Spanish colonizers (whose abuses the law of prior consultation was supposed to help remedy). To be indigenous would seem to require a weird exemption from history – to be at once the victim of colonial abuse in need of redress and yet to live in complete isolation or perpetual flight, and never to have had any contact with the Spanish.
The people of the Andes can’t be indigenous: they practice agriculture, we are told, which makes them not indigenous people but campesinos. “In the highlands,” said Humala, parsing the difference, “there are mostly agrarian communities … indigenous communities are mostly in the jungle.” The indigenous are not farmers, but jungle dwellers, presumably hunters and gatherers who have never cultivated the land. If they till the soil or produce, it seems, they must give up all claims to their heritage, or at least their legal status.
A third and final absurdity: the people of the Andes can’t be indigenous, because they “meet in public assembly” or, as Humala has noted elsewhere, they have “mayors” who represent them, and so they are not without a “voice.” To be indigenous is to be without representation, then — silent. It goes even deeper than that: it is to be without politics, or at least without the plaza or the public square. We are, I suppose, to imagine the indigenous living in an archaic and pre-political world, where assembly is unnecessary or the public world unknown.
You can see where all this is heading. It is virtually impossible to be indigenous, unless you live in a small foraging band of jungle dwellers without any political power, or even any idea of politics. Placing these restrictions on the law of prior consultation in Peru makes a travesty of free, prior and informed consent, which requires that states deal “in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions”; the very existence of such institutions would appear to be grounds for exclusion from the law.
Even with a law in place and gestures of good will at the start, the “indigenous” in Peru now risk being defined out of existence, or of having their right to consent sacrificed for the sake of big mining and continued growth. That is why it was especially curious and telling, in ways that are not yet wholly apparent to me, when I read this morning that just yesterday Peruvian ambassador Gonzalo Gutierrez Reinel and the Mongolian Minister of Foreign Affairs L. Bold “met to exchange views on mutual partnerships, particular[ly] in the sectors of culture and mining”: it is not at all clear that “culture” will survive the incursion of big mining in either country.
lvgaldieri 