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Archive for January, 2011

DEP Says New Walmart Will Improve Threatened Species Habitat

January 13th, 2011 3 comments

DEP Does U-Turn and Approves A Twice Denied CAFRA Permit

[Update: 1/14/11 – good story by Kirk Moore: Walmart store on Route 37 West in Toms River nears settlement.

Dave Pringle, whose shame and sycophancy know no bounds (and doesn’t know a pine snake mitigation plan from a snake in the grass), it at it again:

“The devil is in the details,” said David Pringle of the New Jersey Environmental Federation. “We have to take a close look at these acres to see how they would have been preserved otherwise.”

But Carleton Montgomery [PPA] and conservation biology expert Emile Devito [NJCF] know better:

“They’re taking land that is not good pine snake habitat now . . . and hoping they can do things to make it attractive to pine snakes,” Carleton Montgomery of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, said after he and Emile DeVito, the science manager for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, took their first look at the DEP proposal.

At a broader level, Montgomery said, the settlement appears to go against the coastal rules’ imperative of saving habitat, and the Christie administration’s plans for reducing runoff pollution in the Barnegat Bay watershed.

“This is going to be another case of where Barnegat Bay will lose,” with the addition of a new impervious surface in the watershed, said Montgomery, whose group advocated redeveloping one of Toms River’s obsolete shopping centers. [end update]

Gotta say, I thought DEP’s claim (since retracted) that landfill leachate was “natural” was hitting rock bottom, but, guess I’m wrong again.

Today, in a press release with a whole series of over the top claims, DEP hits the Trifecta and says that a new Walmart is “conscientiously planned“, provides a “net environmental gain“, and”enhances the local habitat“of state threatened northern pine snake:

“This agreement represents a common sense approach that allows this forested land to remain without any development potential whatsoever, and enhances the local habitat of the northern pine snake while allowing reasonable, conscientiously planned development along a major transportation route to move forward and create economic growth,” Commissioner Bob Martin said. “This agreement will result in a net environmental gain by permanently preserving 10 acres for every acre that would be developed.”

The DEP encouraged Jaylin to search for a location for the development project on previously developed land, but the firm was unable to find a suitable alternative.

No alternative site? Anywhere? Really?

And how is it mathematically possible to provide a NET gain when land is developed (i.e. according to DEP, “21 acres of habitat that will be lost during construction of the store and parking areas“)?

New land is not being made – once it is developed it is gone.

I am not familiar with this project, so here is the full DEP press release.

Read it and decide for yourself if the approval is consistent with DEP’ recent decision to reject the NJ Builders Association delisting petition and protect northern pine snake

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Hopewell Citizens Group Wins NJ Supreme Court Victory

January 13th, 2011 No comments

Yesterday, the NJ Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Hopewell Valley citizens group which is challenging land use approvals of a massive 800,000 square foot corporate office park expansion by the Berwind Development Group on rural and environmentally sensitive lands (for the Syllabus pending publication of the decision, hit this link). The case was well argued by Katherine V. Dresdner, Esq.

The citizen group’s lawsuit had been thrown out of court by Mercer County Superior Court Judge Feinberg because it was filed 6 days late.

It was filed late because the group’s lawyer relied in good faith on incorrect information provided by the Planning Board clerk. The group appealed the Mercer County Superior Court dismissal to the Supreme Court.

We wrote about this case following oral arguments held on October 26, 2010 – for details, see: NJ Supreme Court Hears Challenge to Massive Berwind Development in Hopewell Township. I summarized the issue:

So the argument boiled down to whether an innocent mistake by plaintiff HV Citizens, based on local government error and resulting in only 6 days, should result in the entire case being thrown out of court.

Was that a “manifest injustice”? …

My prediction is that the Supreme Court will reverse the Appellate Division and find in favor of the Plaintiff HV Citizens, particulalry on the “public interests” at play, as distinguished from garden variety private interests.

As we predicted, the Court’s decision, by a 6-1 vote, sends the case back to the Mercer County Superior Court for hearing on the merits.

The Supreme Court found the citizens group reasonably relied on the Planning Board clerk and that the Hopewell clerk was negligent.

As we expected, the Court ruled on the manifest injustice issue:

2. The methodology employed when this Court interprets one of its rules mirrors the manner in which statutes are construed. In accordance with that interpretative scheme, the analysis in this case begins with the plain language of Rule 4:69-6(c), which language suggests that a court has discretion to enlarge a Rule 4:69-6(a) or (b) timeframe when it perceives a clear potential for injustice. …  In Cohen v. Thoft, supra, the trial court dismissed the case, strictly applying both the deadlines imposed by Rule 4:69-6(b)(3) and the three categories of exceptions enunciated in Brunetti. The Appellate Division reversed, concluding that the plaintiff had not slumbered on his rights, “but instead reasonably relied on his communications with [the borough official] . . . .” Ibid. The panel also found no prejudice in the three-day delay, and directed that the case be remanded to the trial court because “it would be a miscarriage of justice to deprive plaintiff of a hearing on the merits of his challenge . . ..” Ibid. (Pp. 12-21)

3. Cohen v. Thoft is the paradigm for this case. (emphases supplied)

I didn’t get involved in the details during the Planning Board’s review of this development.

But, late in the game, I was asked to testify to the Planning Board about DEP Category One (C1) regulations.

I attempted to testify about the impact of DEP proposed Category One stream upgrades and the effect of new 300 buffers on the project.

I thought it was important that the Planning Board should know that the developer (Berwind) had submitted written comments to DEP opposing those proposed C1 rules. The Berwind comments focused on the negative impact those new C1 rules – if adopted – would have on the project.

Berwind lawyers wrote DEP to oppose the proposed new C1 rules. Berwind’s lawyers claimed that the DEP C1 designation rules would have a “devastating affect” (sic) on their ability to develop the property.

My written testimony sought to put the Berwind C1 comments to DEP on the Planning Board’s record – here’s what I tried to say:

On August 20, 2007, Pepper Hamilton, LLP, attorneys for the applicant BPG, submitted comments on the DEP May 21, 2007 proposed Category One amendments (see Exhibit 2). BPG counsel stated that the impact of the proposed regulation to designate portions of the Stony Brook as a C1 water:

“If adopted, the [C1] rule would have a devastating affect on BPG’s ability to redevelop its property because of the imposition of a 300 foot special water resource protection area (and riparian zone if the proposed amendments to the Flood Hazard Control Act rules are enacted) (collectively, “buffers”) adjacent to the Stony Brook and its tributaries. Such buffers will prevent BPG from implementing the 1999 [Hopewell] Township approved plan, possibly including BPG’s ability to discharge from its wastewater treatment plant.

But the developer opposed allowing me to testify on the grounds that no new issues could be introduced during what was supposed to be summary arguments.

I found it extremely odd that the Planning Board attorney agreed with the developer (Berwind) and advised the Planning Board to block my testimony.

Based on this guidance from Counsel, there followed an extended debate about whether I could testify or not (not whether I was qualified as an expert witness, but whether I could even testify at the final public hearing on the project). I’ve never experienced that before and could not understand why the Board would not want to know about such important information about the project.

The Planning Board agreed with the developer and blocked my testimony.

The Board then rushed approval of the project just days before new DEP C1 stream rules legally took effect.

I don’t know what the issues are in the case that will be heard in Mercer Superior Court. But I hope that this issue of the application of the new C1 rules to the project is part of it.

(Note: a quick Google reveals – as expected – that the typically shallow and vapid media ignores the issues and reports the case only as a platform for petty personal controversies and political intrigue on the Court).

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“Waving the Bloody Shirt”

January 12th, 2011 No comments

I steer clear of national political issues, but the hypocrisy of the right wing bullshit on the Arizona assassination is too much to take, especially after years of violent rhetoric, terroristic threats, and murder.

In light of all the false equivalencies by media and the all too typical hand wringing by progressives sharing responsibility, I thought I’d post the below (h/t Digby).

I was aware of the murderous racism of the Reconstruction period and knew what “waving the bloody shirt” meant, but I never knew the specific historical story behind that phrase.

This book tells that story. It also has a message for our times, where right wing spokesmen and some in the Faux media are basically repeating the rhetorical strategy that reactionary southern racist whites employed during the reconstruction period – here’s the prologue:

January 30, 2008

“The Bloody Shirt”
First Chapter
By STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

PROLOGUE

The title of this book refers to a small footnote to the brutal war of terrorist violence that was waged in the American South in the years immediately following the Civil War.

The terror began almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865; it lasted until 1876, when the last of the governments of the Southern states freely elected through universal manhood suffrage was toppled in a well-orchestrated campaign of violence, fraud, and intimidation, thereby putting an end to Reconstruction, erasing the freedmen’s newly won political rights, and securing white conservative home rule to the South for a hundred years to come.

In some ways the small incident in question was no different from thousands of others like it that took place in those years. At ten o’clock on the night of March 9, 1871, a band of one hundred and twenty men on horseback, disguised, heavily armed, even their horses cloaked in white sheets to conceal any identifiable markings, surrounded the house of one George R. Ross deep in the river-cut country southeast of the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County, Mississippi. Allen P. Huggins, a Northern man who had settled in Mississippi after the war, was staying the night there, and he was awakened by a loud voice calling upon Ross to bring out “the man who was in the house.”

Huggins looked out the window and, by the bright moonlight, saw the porch crowded with men in white hoods and robes. They told him that, unless he came out to receive their “warning” they would burn the place down.

Ross’,”a good, respectable Democrat” pleaded with Huggins to do as they asked and spare his frightened wife and children. So after securing a promise that “not a hair of your head shall be injured”, Huggins agreed to go down to the gate to hear what the men had come to tell him. It was just this. The men whom Huggins would later describe as “gentlemanly fellows, men of cultivation, well educated, a much different class of men than I ever supposed I would meet in a Ku-Klux gang”did not like his “radical ways”, they said. As superintendent of schools for the county, Huggins had instituted public schooling, was trying to “educate the negroes”, they said. They had stood it just as long as they were going to. Now he had ten days to leave ”leave the county, leave the state altogether”or be killed.

Huggins replied that he would go when he was good and ready to go.

So the men marched him down the road, and when they reached a small hill a quarter of a mile away, one of them came toward him from where the horses were being held, and in his hand was a stout stirrup leather. And without any further ceremony, he began beating Huggins with the stirrup, with all his might.

Then the men took turns, each eager to get their licks in. “They said they all wanted to get a chance at me”, Huggins recalled afterward, “that I was stubborn, and just such a man as they liked to pound”. Counting aloud each stroke, they stopped after twenty-five and again asked him if he would leave and again he refused; and so after fifty, and so after seventy-five, until he was left senseless, more dead than alive. When he came to, the men trained their pistols on him and repeated their warning that if any of them laid eyes upon him in ten days’ time, he was a dead man.

The sequel was this, or at least this was the story everyone in Monroe County believed, and in time everyone in Mississippi and the whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered the bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, and he carried it to Washington, D.C., and there he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, and in a fiery speech on the floor of the United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Southern outrages and called for passage of a bill to give the federal government the power to break the Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Northern man’s suffering at the hand of the Ku Klux. And so was born the memorable phrase, “waving the bloody shirt.”

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.

That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

Most astonishing of all was the fact that the whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington and waved on the House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.

The story about Huggins being whipped by the Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress and then returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge and a determination to arrest every man he could lay his hands on who had been a part of the reign of Ku Klux murder and terror in those parts. And Benjamin Butler “Beast Butler”, as he was invariably called in the Southern press, the man who had committed the unpardonable insult against Southern womanhood as the Union occupation commander in New Orleans during the war with his order that the next Southern woman who insulted his troops on the street would be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation” this nemesis of the South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about the Ku Klux outrages on the House floor that April, and did tell the story of Huggins’s brutal beating in the course of it.

But nowhere in the Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on the House floor is there any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in the press accounts of the leading papers of the time is there any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on the floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s appearances before Congress does such a story appear. That part never happened.

What was more, this was not the first time that Southerners had invented the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of blood-stained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands. The same story had cropped up fifteen years earlier in connection with another Massachusetts politician equally reviled in the South, Senator Charles Sumner.

Once again the beating was a fact, the alleged Northern reaction to it a fantasy. Furious at the insult to Southern honor Sumner had committed in a speech attacking slavery and the morality of the slave owner, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks had approached Sumner in the Senate chamber, stood over his desk, and beat him on the head thirty times with his gold-headed cane until Sumner crumpled to the floor in a pool of his own blood.

And sure enough, Southerners were soon saying that Sumner’s bloody coat had become a revered “holy relic”  in Yankee and abolitionist circles. Sumner, they said, had carried his own blood-encrusted garment to England to show the Duchess of Argyle, when she invited him to dinner; had placed it in the hands of an awe-struck John Brown, before his fateful raid on Harper’s Ferry; had put it on public display in Exeter Hall.  “All the abject whines of Mr. Sumner, for being well whipped”, wrote one Southerner in 1856, a few months after the event, “all the exhibitions of his bloody shirt to stale Boston virgins who, in vexation of having failed to secure a man, would now wed a Sumner, have proved futile.” Years later, years after the Civil War, scornful stories about Northerners exhibiting Sumner’s bloody shirt were still being circulated in the South. Not a scrap of it was true.

A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish”, declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner’s Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

If it was incomprehensible to many Northerners, it made perfect sense to those same white Southerners who, on more than one occasion, blamed the “cowardly negroes” for their unmanliness in having permitted themselves to be massacred by bands of armed white men: it only showed, they argued in complete earnest, that black men lacked the Anglo Saxon virtues indispensable to free men who would exercise the lofty privilege of self-government. Any people who allowed their vote to be taken from them at gunpoint didn’t deserve to keep it. (Of course, when African Americans did fight back, the fury of their white assailants knew no bounds.)

One white South Carolinian, of an old aristocratic family, uttered the truth in 1877. From the safety of anonymity, this voice in the wilderness spoke plainly:

The most horrible tales of negro murders that have ever appeared in radical sheets at the North would pale before the relation of incidents known to every white man in the South. The intimidation of the negroes is a stern and awful fact. Yet what do Southerners say about it? It is the bloody shirt, the lying inventions of unscrupulous politicians, the last gasp of carpet-baggery and radical deviltry. So bitterly do Southerners hate to have the truth come out that it is at the risk of his life that any man dares to speak it. When a political crime is committed, they palliate it, smooth over everything, charge the blame on the murdered victims.

A generation later, a few elder statesmen of the South uttered the truth too.”We had to shoot negroes to get relief from the galling tyranny to which we had been subjected”, baldly declared South Carolina’s “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, former governor, current United States senator. He was speaking at a 1909 reunion of the ageing “Red Shirts” and white “rifle club” members who had roamed the state as young men in “76, sixteen-shooter Winchester rifles at their sides and a couple of huge navy pistols stuck in their belts; assassinating African American legislators and town constables, seizing ballot boxes, firing potshots at field hands as a general warning they’d better behave themselves.” It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men”, Tillman went on, to “teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpet bag rule.”

Another generation on, in the 1920s, one conservative Southern white historian dared break ranks with the lockstep judgment of his peers, and let a bit more of the truth slip out: the 1876 election that had “redeemed” South Carolina, he wrote, “was little more than a ratification of the seizure of power by the rifle clubs in the previous month”

Such gasps of truth were as rare in the South as polar bears, and as out of place. So thoroughly did Southern myth-making bury the bald facts, turn the blame on the victims, pass off a terrorist coup’detat as an affair of honor, a restoration “redemption” of the South by its “natural leaders”, that even today, even after a half century of relentless revision by historians determined to bring out what had been repressed, the truth remains furtive, a sly and scared animal skulking through thickets of deception.

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the”oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Lose, the nation undeniably did. In 1879, an exhausted Albion Tourg, an Ohio-born man who as a state judge in North Carolina had fearlessly defended the rights of the common man, colored and white; who had defied Ku Klux threats and the sneers of the conservative bar when he empanelled African Americans on juries and fined lawyers for saying “nigger” in his courtroom, gave a rueful and weary interview to the New York Tribune:

In all except the actual results of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. I am filled with admiration and amazement at the masterly way in which they have brought about these results. The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.

Amazement: because such an outcome was not inevitable or foreordained; because, in the end, Reconstruction did not fail, but was overthrown, with impunity and audacity, in one of the bloodiest, darkest, and still least known chapters of American history.

This book tells the stories of a few of the people who lived through that chapter. It does not purport to be anything like a complete history of Reconstruction. It does not pretend to explore, much less analyze, all the political and economic nuances that came to bear on the events of this exceedingly complex period in our nation’s history. It does aim to challenge the palliative stereotypes, the exculpatory myths, and the outright bald-faced lies that still characterize far too much of what passes for common knowledge of this era.

As much as possible I have tried to tell the stories of these people through their own words, through the letters they wrote to friends and lovers, the reports they dutifully filed, the testimony they gave, the remembered conversations they set down in their diaries and memoirs—and through other contemporary sources such as newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches which give voice to the mood and spirit of the times. For helping me find these original sources I am deeply indebted to the women and men who staff the archives of this great nation; their unfailing professionalism, courtesy, eagerness to assist, and love of history and the truth remains an inspiration to us all. I would like to thank in particular the staffs of the South Caroliniana Library, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the Duke University Special Collections Library, the National Archives, the University of Virginia Special Collections Library, and the South Carolina State Library.

My research of the papers of Adelbert and Blanche Butler Ames at Smith College was supported by the Caroline D. Bain scholar-in-residence fellowship, for which I would like to formally express my sincere gratitude here. I would also like to express my special thanks to an extraordinary local historian, Peter Hughes, who showed me around the lost site of Hamburg, South Carolina, and could not have been more generous with his time and expertise.

In the letters I have quoted I have frequently made excisions for conciseness and clarity. In doing so I have been extremely careful never to alter the original meaning, but have also refrained from burdening the printed page with ellipsis marks that are more appropriate to a scholarly journal than to a work of popular history. I have provided full references to the originals for anyone who wishes to consult them. I know some will object to this practice, but I was guided in part by the words of Carl Sandburg, who, in the introduction to his still wonderful biography of Abraham Lincoln, said he still sometimes regretted including all those three dots. The quoted dialogue that appears is all taken directly from contemporary sources; I have not attempted any reconstructions myself.

In the milieu of the 1860s and 1870s that I have attempted to bring to life in the following pages, “black” could be as offensive a term as “nigger”, and  “African American” was a term as yet unknown. “Negro” and “colored” were the standard and respectful terms then, and though they may sound quaint or even patronizing to our ears today, I have chosen to employ them as being true to the spirit of the day.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from THE BLOODY SHIRT by Stephen Budiansky. Copyright © Stephen Budiansky, 2008.

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This Garden Universe

January 11th, 2011 No comments

This garden universe vibrates complete,
Some, we get a sound so sweet.
Vibrations, reach on up to become light,
And then through gamma, out of sight.
Between the eyes and ears there lie,
The sounds of color and the light of a sigh.
And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe,
But it’s all around if we could but perceive.
To know ultra-violet, infra-red, and x-rays,
Beauty to find in so may ways.
Two notes of the chord, that’s our poor scope,
And to reach the chord is our life’s hope.
And to name the chord is important to some,
So they give it a word, and the word is OM.
~~~ Moody Blues (1968)

utah

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“A Justifiable Impression That The Public Trust Is Being Violated”

January 7th, 2011 1 comment

DEP Commissioner Bob Martin Needs to Answer His Mail

DEP Commissioner Bob Martin

DEP Commissioner Bob Martin

[Update: 5/31/11: Today’s Bergen Record story documents the abuse: “Polluters rewriting cleanup rules

The Headline is the standard under NJ’s ethics laws.

The legal test of whether there is an ethics violation is based on appearance – a “justifiable impression” – not the actual underlying conduct, which might be completely honorable, yet still create a “justifiable impression”.

On December 30, 2010, a Star Ledger story exposed the “Reform NJ” pay-to-play scandal, documenting that:

Langan Engineering & Environmental [donated] $25,000. The firm received about $2 million from various state government departments last year. Jorge Berkowitz, a senior associate with the company, is on the state’s Site Remediation Professional Licensing Board.

Subsequently, we documented that Langan has nine (9) staff, selected by DEP, that serve on an industry dominated “stakeholder” group that is now rewriting toxic site cleanup  requirements.

These facts facially create a “justifiable impression” that “the public trust is being violated”. Supporting that conclusion, a January 2, 2011 Star Ledger editorial concluded that “Reform NJ” and Langan engaged in

a sleazy practice that puts both parties within winking distance of a bribe, and that it engenders widespread mistrust.

See our most recent letter to Bob which demands a response.

Because Bob repeatedly has stressed a need to “transform the culture” at DEP and make it more “responsive” – and given the fact that Martin has arrogantly refused to respond to several prior letters – at a minimum, we strongly suggest that Bob needs to lead by example, hold himself to the same standards he advocates for his Department, change his ways, and start answering his mail.

Martin also needs to respond to protect the integrity of DEP and restore the public trust and confidence in DEP’s objectivity (hit the links below for more info).

News Releases

For Immediate Release: January 6, 2011
Contact: Bill Wolfe (609) 397-4861; Kirsten Stade (202) 265-7337

PAY-TO-PLAYERS TAKE OVER JERSEY ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCY – Corporate Political Donors Control DEP Toxic Clean-Up Oversight and Rulemaking

Trenton – Key figures in a corporate pay-for-play scandal also occupy controlling positions on state “Stakeholder” committees setting toxic clean-up standards which affect their business dealings, potentially saving them significant sums while effectively shielding them from enforcement actions from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). PEER is calling for removal of participating corporations from DEP “technical committees” and for an audit of their cases before DEP.

Corporations with millions in state contracts have donated large sums to an ironically named”Reform New Jersey” group that pushed for the privatization agenda of Governor Chris Christie. Run by key Christie advisors, Reform New Jersey appeared to violate state pay-to-play prohibitions which bar contributions in connection with award of public contracts. In late December, the group was disbanded after its contributors were revealed. Gov. Christie has denied any knowledge of its activities, despite being the keynote speaker at Reform New Jersey fundraisers.

Some of those same corporations and redevelopment consultants also sit on DEP stakeholder committees charged with re-writing regulations governing toxic site clean-up. For example, Langan Engineering (which gave $25,000 to Reform New Jersey) has a dominating delegation of nine representatives. One of its senior associates, tapped by Gov. Christie, serves on the DEP Site Remediation Professional Licensing Board, which oversees newly authorized privatized clean-ups of contaminated sites.

These slots give these firms inside access and influence that can work to shield them from oversight or enforcement by DEP. As one DEP employee recently wrote:

Langan has been given unprecedented access to DEP records and computer databases that their competitors do not have. The big joke at DEP is that we work for them. This despite the fact that everyone in the Site Remediation Program (hundreds of scientists and engineers) can give examples of shoddy, unprofessional, inaccurate, and even unethical product from Langan over the years.

“At DEP, the Christie streamlining agenda is a facade for hollowing out health safeguards and filling them in with self-regulation by the polluting corporations and their paid consultants,” stated New Jersey PEER Director Bill Wolfe. “This is the foxes running a chicken take-out restaurant from the henhouse.”

In a December 31 letter, PEER asked DEP Commissioner Bob Martin to remove the Reform New Jersey participants from agency boards and committees and to audit how the firms’ cases were being handled by DEP. Martin has yet to reply to the letter.

Not coincidentally, New Jersey DEP is in the process of lowering standards for privatized clean-ups of toxic sites, including relaxation of vapor intrusion protections and requirements for complete remediation. At the same time, the state is reeling from health problems arising at former toxic sites, such as most recently Pompton Lakes, that have been inadequately cleaned up.

“How is New Jersey’s economy helped by more toxic clean-ups that leave neighbors and future residents at risk” asked Wolfe.

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See the corporate who’s who on DEP technical committees

Read the PEER letter calling for removal and audits

View the agenda for lowered toxic clean-up standards

Look at Pompton Lakes mess

Revisit DEP role in 2009 pay-to-play corruption scandals

New Jersey PEER is a state chapter of a national alliance of state and federal agency resource professionals working to ensure environmental ethics and government accountability

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