#867 – Dick Bernard: The Tar Sands Pipeline and other matters of the environment

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A relevant and current addendum to this post is the 2014 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change accessible here.
Last Sunday after church I stopped by a table staffed by two members of the environmental organization MN350.
This day they were encouraging action against a proposed expansion of the Alberta Clipper Pipeline of Enbridge Energy, a Canadian Corporation. The planned demonstration was Thursday April 3 in St. Paul. The essential information about the contested project is here: Stop Alberta Clipper001.
I was interested in this issue, and Thursday afternoon came, with icy rain preliminary to a predicted 6-10 inches of snow overnight.
After some hemming and hawing, I arrived late at the demo, walked a few blocks in the march and came home.
I was glad I went. There was a good attendance, especially given the weather. My two favorite photos are these.
(click to enlarge photos)

April 3 Tar Sands Pipeline demo St. Paul MN

April 3 Tar Sands Pipeline demo St. Paul MN


April 3, 2014

April 3, 2014


Often I wonder if the whole climate change situation is hopeless. Are the people who walked in this demonstration wasting their time? As friends in the peace and justice movement know, I am no particular fan of protests simply for the sake of protesting.
But every now and then, there is encouragement, and Thursday was such a day, coming from an unusual direction. I picked up a little hope that the quiet majority is generally getting it – that there is a problem, despite the scoffers at ” the very words Global Warming”.
Before driving into St. Paul I had stopped at the Post Office to mail some items, and while I was affixing stamps a guy in my age range started to chat.
Of course, the threatening weather came up.
He said, “guess I’ll have to go and talk to God about it”. I answered, “I’ll check what happens and see what God had to say about your talk”.
We both chuckled.
We compared notes a bit, in the way that strangers do, dancing into uncharted waters. The deadly mudslide in Washington came up; the drought in California; less predictable and more severe weather generally….
The guy said, “maybe Al Gore knew something back then. Even my wife is starting to think so.”
The demonstrators probably won’t stop the pipeline but maybe they’ll encourage one or two more conversations like the one this fellow and I were having.
Games like this – making change – are played by the inch, not the mile. Dramatic change happens so slowly as to not even be noticed.
I’m thankful those two women caught my eye on Sunday, and that I picked up their literature.
Enroute home I got to thinking about two years ago at almost exactly this date in my town: the temperature was in the low 70s, and the trees were budding….
There was a frost that messed up the budding a few days later, but the difference between two years ago and now was indeed dramatic.
April 2, 2012, Woodbury (suburban St. Paul) MN

April 2, 2012, Woodbury (suburban St. Paul) MN


Native Americans from Red Lake MN used their banner as a windshield in downtown St. Paul April 3, 2014

Native Americans from Red Lake MN used their banner as a windshield in downtown St. Paul April 3, 2014

#866 – Dick Bernard: The meaning of Mary Burke

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Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court gave even more political power to Big Wealth. My in-box was full of talk about what this means for the country. Since I’d be described, correctly, as “leaning Left”, you can guess where my chatter comes from. I often rely on Alan at Just Above Sunset to summarize what the Big People (the pundit class) are saying about what National Stuff means. So, if you’re interested, here’s his overnight post on McCutcheon and what people are saying it means.
I prefer to take a different tack on this.
The only way the overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans can be defeated by Big Money is by voting against their own interests in November (which includes not voting at all, or voting for candidates who have not even a tiny chance of winning). There will be an abundance of both behaviors in November, 2014, and lots of inaction between now and November, including endless flailing away in counter-productive ways that will make a negative difference.
So, what about this “Mary Burke”?
She was the first face of the attack from the right I’ve seen this year. She’s only the first.
Early last month, we were treated to a seemingly endless series of political ads during the evening news on the local CBS affiliate, WCCO-TV.
They were short, sinister, and identical attack ads against someone I’d never heard of: Mary Burke.
They were also, likely, false by use of selective “facts”, headlines, etc. They might have been 15-30 seconds at most….
The ads didn’t even mention what office this Mary Burke was running for. Since we border on Wisconsin, just to the east, I figured that she might be running for something over there.
Turned out, she’s apparently a scary (for supporters of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker) presumed candidate for Wisconsin Governor in a few months.
(click to enlarge)

Emily's List newsletter Vol 20 Nr 4 Spring 2014 p 3

Emily’s List newsletter Vol 20 Nr 4 Spring 2014 p 3


The ads, apparently paid for by a front group funded by the Koch Brothers billions, were intended to soften her up to the amorphous masses across the border.
Maybe the the ads will work. But only if the body politic are, in aggregate, damned fools and believe them….
Mary Burke seems a perfectly respectable candidate, successful businesswoman and all. Here’s the comment that followed the above photo: Mary Burke002
Apparently she’s scary to the opposition.
The Burke ad-buy has ended, for now.
Saturday we went to hear a succession of Democratic politicians speak at the annual Humphrey-Mondale dinner in Minneapolis. I wrote about that here.
At the dinner, popular U.S. Senator Al Franken spoke, predicting that he would soon be the subject of the same kind of attack ads, funded by the Koch machine.
Indeed, already it is so.
The same kind of dark, nebulous, identical attacks now greet us on TV at night, in this case tying Franken to President Obama, the IRS and the ACLU…similar to the formula utilized against Burke.
In both, the Team of Big Money paying Big Media is at work.
Will the tactic work?
We, the people, will decide that in a few months.
What is frightening to the Big Money interests is that there truly is no power like the power of the people.
Money, or Media, in and of themselves have no power at all. Neither can vote.
But the rest of the “people” have to figure that out within the next few months that their power doesn’t come from being fragmented, or insisting on purity of their particular essential position. And that Big Money has no interest in the little guys and gals, except its own greater wealth….
Someone said on Saturday night that 400 Americans now control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans (there are over 310,000,000 Americans).
If true, (it seems to be, according to the respected PolitiFact), the rich are slowly destroying themselves, a fact they are blind to.
The rest of still have the right to vote, regardless of the efforts being made to erode that right in some places.
Vote.
Well informed.
Pass the word.

#865 – Dick Bernard: Uncle Vince, Aunt Edith and Dr. Borlaug

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A week ago, out at LaMoure ND, I asked Uncle Vince if he’d like to go for a ride.
I knew what his answer would be: “yes”. As long as I’ve known him, a ride in the country is like ice cream to a kid. Farmers like to take a gander at the countryside, regardless of the season, and comment on what they see, which is lots more than city slickers like myself can hope to observe. The actions of land, water and sky are very important in their daily lives.
That’s the essence of being a farmer: having a feel for ones environment.
Along with me, I had a three-CD set of Benny Goodman’s 1935-39 small group recordings, a recent gift from an 84 year old elder neighbor. Vince was 10 years old in 1935, and sometime in his youth he had learned a bit about the clarinet.
He loves music, so Benny Goodman and clarinet was an additional treat on a pleasant early spring afternoon.
I mentioned that I had seen Goodman and his band in person, in Carrington ND, sometime in 1957-58. In that era, somebody in tiny Carrington managed to book famed national acts like Goodman, and Louis Armstrong and ensemble, who I also saw there in September 1957.
We chatted a bit about that, and then Vince said he’d once met Norman Borlaug. “The Nobel Peace Prize winner?” “How did this happen?”
Vince recalled a time he and Edith were driving on Highway 11 west of Hankinson ND and they saw somebody at roads edge. They stopped, and the guy said he was out of gas. So they gave him a ride back into Hankinson, helped him with the gas, and were on their way again.
In the conversation, it came up that their passenger that day was Norman Borlaug, and that he was out in ND checking on some field work on barley, if I recall correctly.
Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and Vince knew about him. It seems Borlaug has become controversial. There are assorted opinions about him. You can take your choice.
If you didn’t know the name, “Norman Borlaug”, you would be forgiven. Few outside of the agricultural community probably do.
But the conversation with my Uncle, long retired farmer, now in the twilight of his life, was fascinating to me, in part because through him I have gotten to know common farmers on their farms: how they live, how they think.
Vince was a small farmer by ND standards, but he had a lot of pride in what he did.
And while only high school educated, to this day he reads voraciously, and, if he could, he’d attend this or that farm meeting in his area of the state. He may have been “ordinary”, but ordinary meant extraordinary in so many ways.
He was well read, well educated. He remembered Norman Borlaug from that one brief encounter years ago. I had no doubt that the event happened as described, where described.
There’s the old saw about “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and it applies to my Uncle and to a great many others in all sorts of ways.
The 84-year old man, Don, who gave me that Benny Goodman CD spent much of his work career keeping track of the location of box cars for the Great Northern Railway – this was before computers. This same man, in his small home across the street from us, has an autographed photo of Elizabeth Taylor, dating from the time he was a dinner guest at her home during his days of involvement in the movie industry.
We all have our stories, to be remembered, and celebrated.
Thanks, Uncle Vince, for yours. And Don, as well.

Grain Elevators, Berlin ND, March 27. 2014

Grain Elevators, Berlin ND, March 27. 2014