Activists mount last stand against Asian trade agreement

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 21, 2016

The sing-song cadence of activist chants insinuate like a jingle. At the Showbox in Sodo on Friday, it was “hell no, TPP!” chanted to a beat, referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposed trade agreement between the United States and 11 Pacific Rim countries, and the centerpiece of President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” strategy. It was “no more NAFTAs!” a cry echoed by young people, many born after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Trade-deal dissenters trumpeting anti-trade slogans in the most trade-dependent state in the country: This is Seattle, mind you.

A time squeeze has ratcheted up the volume and urgency for opponents of TPP, which include many environmental groups. Both sides predict that Obama will elbow for its passage during the fall lame-duck session of Congress, saving his potential presidential successors (both of whom have said they oppose the deal) from having it on their plate.

In 2015, Washington’s U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell — along with seven out of ten of the state’s U.S. House members — voted to approve “fast track” trade-promotion authority, which gives Obama more power to implement the deal. Local dissenters included Democrats Jim McDermott, Adam Smith and Denny Heck.

If last year’s vote foreshadows the outcome, TPP opponents face a heavy lift. Fast-track authority passed through Congress with votes to spare.

“Trade policy and climate policy shouldn’t be in conflict,” Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, said in an interview with Crosscut. Brune flew up from San Francisco to participate in the club’s “Rock Against the TPP” teach-in and concert. The concert tour includes stops in Portland and San Francisco, a number of progressive organizations as co-sponsors, as well as local alt-weekly The Stranger.

He points to one of the agreement’s primary sins of omission.

“In all of TPP, there is no mention of climate,” he said. “Zero.” For Brune, tweaking the trade deal is a non-starter. “It needs to be scrapped.”

Brune doesn’t see a problem with a trade-centric state bucking an agreement that promises to goose the amount of trade that North America does with Asia.

“I’m very confident our message is resonating in Washington,” he said. “Our country thrives on trade, which is why we need to strengthen climate. But that’s not how [TPP] currently works. It should help.”

In mobilizing trade-deal skeptics, the Sierra Club hopes to capitalize on recent wins, such as the attention given to the area’s “kayaktivists’” when they pushed to halt oil drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea. The anti-TPP campaign also piggybacks on the club’s successful anti-coal train campaign in the Northwest, which targeted coal-export facilities such as the Gateway Pacific Terminal at Cherry Point. Unlike the current anti-TPP effort, coal exports divided organized labor, with several heavyweights such as the Pierce and Snohomish County Labor Councils and Seattle/King County Building Trades supporting Gateway.

On Friday, the push took the form of an eclectic concert featuring a mix of musicians and performers, including a former star of the TV series “Lost” and the talented but inartfully named punk band Anti-Flag, took the stage.

“We care about trade deals for the many, not for the few!” shouted actress Evangeline Lilly, recently seen in the “Hobbit” movies. The crowd roared, hands heavenward.

Nothing quite says “cognitive dissonance” than a protest that pulls in Teamsters and members of the Sierra Club, groups that have not always seen eye to eye.

While sponsors billed the event as a “nationwide uprising and concert tour to stop the biggest corporate power grab in history,” it didn’t draw the kind uprise-adoring anarchists who hijacked the 1999 WTO protests. The crowd was a peaceable mix of millennials, the occasional Gus Hall lookalike, and Baby Boomer activists of the Ecclesiastes, nothing-new-under-the-sun breed.

In anticipation of the concert, the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) issued a statement from its president Eric Schinfeld.

“The truth is the TPP makes pioneering leaps toward high-standard trade, ironically addressing many of the TPP protesters’ concerns,” Schinfeld said. “For instance, the TPP will raise labor and environmental standards in participating countries and will protect the U.S. right to regulate in the public interest for the environment, health and safety.”

To underline the pro-TPP narrative, the WCIT produced a report with the Association of Washington Business forecasting up to 26,000 new jobs in the state with TPP. And as the WCIT’s Ashley Dutta said in an interview, a country such as Vietnam will finally be required to adhere to minimum-wage laws, eradicate child labor, and open the door to collective bargaining.

The Sierra Club and other TPP opponents showcase the failures of NAFTA, including domestic job losses and the demand by TransCanada that the United States pony up $15 billion for the cancelled Keystone XL pipeline. Supporters counter that the TPP’s public-interest exception gives the agreement more teeth, and that NAFTA’s shortcomings have informed American negotiators on what not to allow in it.

There’s a lot to absorb. The TPP is hugely complex, took years to negotiate and, much to the chagrin of transparency-partial activists, mostly got hammered out in secret. The upsides include jettisoning quotas and tariffs, dealing with the challenge of state-owned businesses, and addressing nationality requirements in software, finance and other services.

One of the bigger sticking points is the proposed use of tribunals for companies to fire back at government regulations and court actions. There are concerns that these tribunals will undermine national sovereignty, as well as environmental and labor standards.

Obama’s TPP imperative is summed up by the New York Times. “It is seen as a way to bind Pacific trading partners closer to the United States while raising a challenge to Asia’s rising power, China, which has pointedly been excluded from the deal, at least for now.”

Push-pull dilemmas from the 1970s and ‘80s presage what often happens when Northwest activists take on the national government’s agenda. Seattle Catholic Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen vigorously opposed the Trident nuclear submarine base in Bangor, for example, calling it “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound,” just as Washington communities embraced nuclear-free zones. But Bangor, along with Joint Base Lewis-McChord, grew and new military facilities, such as Naval Station Everett, were constructed.

Brune is unbowed. And he takes an expansive, coalition-building approach that either would have amused or pained past Sierra Club presidents such as David Brower, who were focused like a microscope on environmental issues alone.

“How many here are ‘Fight for 15?’” Brune asked the crowd, referring to the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. “Our fight also is about reproductive rights and human rights everywhere.”

As he continued, caught in the moment, Brune made his pitch. “Organizing, organizing [old Anglo-Saxonism explicative] organizing every day.”

It may be the last, best hope for TPP opponents.

Pro: We need a modern lands commissioner

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 28, 2016

Every four years, at the height of the presidential circus, voters scan a list of unfamiliar, down-ballot names and elect the chief environmental officer for seven million Washingtonians.

The independently elected public lands commissioner, who runs the state Department of Natural Resources, has a big role in the health the state’s waters, forests and open spaces — (though it’s not an exclusive role: there’s also an Ecology Department reporting to the governor).

You can also imagine the office of public lands commissioner as the office of cognitive dissonance.

In the age of climate change and species extinction, Washington’s lands commissioner is required to maximize harvesting of public timberlands. The non-tax revenue (revenue that is “non-tax” is oddly popular) gooses K-12 school construction, the capitol campus in Olympia, state universities, and even the Department of Corrections, to the tune of $200 million annually.

“It’s actually a minor part of school funding,” said former state Rep. Hans Dunshee. “But it always gets waived as a flag for cutting more trees.”

The commissioner, who also chairs the Forest Practices Board and the Natural Resources Board, is a legacy of Washington’s progressive, 19th century constitution. Bust up concentrated power and give the people a voice.

One-hundred and twenty-seven years ago, the state’s leadership was Bernie Sanders in a Victorian bowler, sticking it to big timber, big railroads, and big-business. In 1889, at the time of Washington statehood, the federal government forked over 3 million acres of public land, with the primary goal of educating children here.

The mandate also places Washington’s elected Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Natural Resources Board, with the Superintendent voting on trust-land timber sales that supplement K-12 coffers. As the Department of Natural Resources’ website reminds readers, “Free public education was seen then, as it is now, as essential to American freedom, prosperity and happiness.”

The unsubtle subtext: Don’t decouple school funding from public timber sales unless you’re averse to freedom and the American way.

Separately, many of the state’s forest trust lands were forfeited to counties by financially strapped private owners during the Great Depression. These lands are also overseen by the DNR to boost largely rural counties.

Today, the office manages around 5.6 million acres, including more than 2 million acres of state forests and all of Washington’s saltwater tidelands. The commissioner also leases 2 million acres of state lands for grazing, agriculture and mineral extraction. There are wonky, science-based duties, such as regulating navigable river bottoms, along with the labor-centric mandate of regulating 8 million acres of private forestland.

To crystallize the burdens of the job, add “chief firefighter” to all of the above.

The frustration of hitting-up a hidebound Legislature for adequate funding to fight forest fires may have pushed current Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark not to seek a third term.

Goldmark, a Democrat, has been a conscientious, if enigmatic leader. First elected in 2008 with the help of Washington’s conservation community, Goldmark seemed superbly qualified with a Berkeley Ph.D (in molecular biology) and decades of experience as a rancher in the Okanogan Highlands. (He hails from a distinguished public-service family, which includes his father, John, a state legislator unfairly smeared as a communist in the early 1960s, an injustice that culminated in a famous court case, with Bill Dwyer representing the Goldmarks.)

Peter Goldmark’s opponent in 2008, Republican incumbent Doug Sutherland, was branded as too cozy with the timber industry, a charge that stuck and led to his defeat.

By 2012, however, Goldmark had alienated many of the same advocates who helped elect him, a split given expression when he back-pedaled on a promise not to accept campaign donations from timber interests. Ultimately, Goldmark didn’t evolve into the gadfly reformer that his supporters envisioned, and his defensive, politically tone-deaf leadership style magnified the schism.

For enviro purists in particular, Goldmark committed sins of omission. He didn’t cotton to prescribed burns, for example, because of blowback from rural residents. He also didn’t boost timber certification by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a sustainable-forestry indicator, which was within his purview as commissioner.

Peter Goldman, an environmental attorney and former Goldmark supporter-turned-critic, was especially furious at Goldmark’s unprecedented insistence that state timber sales be exempt from environmental review under the state Environmental Protection Act.

“He’s repeatedly failed to bring state forest management into a more 21st century mode,” Goldman said.

This year’s race has attracted a handful of competitive candidates.

Democrat Hillary Franz, an attorney and former Bainbridge Island city councilmember, is the executive director of Futurewise, a left-leaning enviro-advocacy group. Endorsed by Washington Conservation Voters, Franz has raised the most money at $179,000, and earned a top-rookie nod from the Seattlepi.com’s Joel Connelly. Democratic King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove, a former chair of the state House Environment Committee, is a more established contender, with a lengthy political resume and backing from the Washington State Labor Council and former Gov. Chris Gregoire.

Other high-profile candidates include two more Democrats, management consultant Karen Porterfield, whose campaign is co-chaired by Lt. Gov. Brad Owen, and who has raised the second-highest amount of dough; and Mary Verner, a former Democratic mayor of Spokane, who holds a masters’ degree from the Yale School of Forestry.

And there’s one Republican, retired U.S. Navy Commander Steve McLaughlin of Seabeck. McLaughlin, who hopes to “restore balance” to the office, underlines the commissioner’s core responsibility to bolster school funding. He says he was galvanized to run by the record-setting wildfires. He has raised less than other candidates attracting big attention, but he could be a sleeper who does very well in the primary.

The list rounds out with a lower-profile Democrat, John Stillings, and a Libertarian, aeronautics engineer Steven M. Nielson, who has held state leadership positions for his party.

Today, the question is whether meaningful policy reform is tenable. The next lands commissioner could be a confluence of John Muir and Rachel Carson — with an undercurrent of Al Gore — but they’re still saddled with a public-good mandate for raising money that flows against other public benefits.

“All things are possible politically,” said Denis Hayes, the organizer of Earth Day and the longtime executive director of the Bullitt Foundation.

Hayes notes that the office was conceived when Washington was still something of an American colony, dependent upon resource extraction. The new tech, clean-energy economy centers on making Washington a more attractive place.

Hayes, Goldman and others are vigorous advocates of cross-laminated timber, a more innovative wood product that can be manufactured in economically depressed rural areas. Other reforms include integrating the realities of climate change into forest practices, advancing FSC certification, and ending short-rotation, clear-cut forestry.

Hans Dunshee, now a Snohomish County Councilmember, points out that the office is, “much more than timber.”  The commissioner can sharpen the regulatory end over fish and aquatic lands, for example.

For decades, Olympia has witnessed reformers swing but strike out, laboring to modernize the scope and mission of the office.

In 2016, in the era of rising sea levels and climate change, all the reformist sound and fury will need to signify (and translate) into something real.

Court orders feds to clean up World War II era nuclear site

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 17, 2016

The news slipped into the vacuum of Friday happy hour.

Late on March 11, a U.S. District judge quietly issued a novella-length ruling, which may reshape the way the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) manages the 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

“It’s a big deal,” said Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in an interview. “The court specifically said that the Department of Energy must meet its deadlines.”

Northwesterners have watched this movie enough times to parrot the dialogue. The feds heel-drag on Hanford cleanup, as lawmakers harrumph and scold the Department of Energy secretary. Time passes; there are new lawmakers and a new DOE secretary. Press repeat.

Now, enforceable milestones should rewrite the narrative. In addition to increased transparency, there will be earlier, set-in-cement deadlines, and the state will have the option to race back to court whenever DOE experiences a procrastination relapse.

In her 102-page ruling, Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson notes, “Granting DOE the unilateral, virtually unbounded freedom to extend any consent decree [regarding any Waste Treatment Plant] scheduling milestone would result in the opposite of accountability. … These milestones should be viewed as enforceable legal duties rather than optimal, idealistic goals.”

Under the judge’s ruling, phase one, a treatment plant to process low-activity radioactive waste, must be up and running by 2023; then a pretreatment facility has until 2033, and the full-waste treatment plant for high-level waste must begin operations by 2032.

In the slow-motion universe of nuke-waste politics, this registers as light speed.

The ruling underscored Ferguson’s concern that when it comes to the most contaminated place in North America, DOE exhibits a kind of accountability avoidance.

Peterson’s decision traces back to former Attorney General Rob McKenna, who filed suit against DOE in 2008 when the department continued to ho-hum deadlines set by the Tri-Party Agreement. The 1989 Tri-Party Agreement dates to former Gov. Booth Gardner and was intended as the final word on cleanup.

McKenna’s lawsuit culminated in a consent decree — which is considered an enforceable, legally binding order — to govern the retrieval of tank waste and to build a permanent waste treatment plant. But by October 2014, Ferguson, who had become attorney general the year before, and the Washington Department of Ecology had become so frustrated with the Energy Department’s insistence it couldn’t meet the consent decree’s timelines that Ferguson filed a petition to enforce the decree.

The new ruling is not a complete victory. The court will not compel DOE to produce more double-shelled tanks right away. That’s upsetting to Hanford watchdogs because the expected life span of many of the leaking single-shell tanks expired around the time that the Beatles parted ways.

The ruling allows the state to return to court to demand the feds build more double-shell tanks, but only if DOE misses an interim 2020 milestone under the consent decree.

Peterson’s ruling could mark the before-and-after point in the Hanford-cleanup saga. “I’d like to think it’s a turning point,” said Andy Fitz, Senior Counsel with the Washington Attorney General’s office. Fitz has labored on Hanford cleanup under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

So why, on the federal level, does the urgency of leaking underground tanks fall away?

Since the end of the Cold War, Hanford has been sidelined as a costly, over-there abstraction. It also doesn’t have a galvanizing symbol; there’s no Mr. Yuk, no drowning polar bear, no radioactive rabbit. Even the word “cleanup” illustrates the limits of language to convey problems like plutonium 239’s half-life of 24,100 years. Progress is measured in geologic time.

The onus is on U. S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who has the visage and hairstyle of a Colonial War general to match an equally outdated mindset — at least regarding Hanford.

Moniz may be a dapper and brilliant defender of the Iran nuclear agreement. He also exhibits sufficient sway to change the department’s culture of arrogance. Nevertheless, when the Peterson ruling came down, DOE didn’t bother to issue a statement.

It seems like a wish-it-away strategy for managing an abstraction. Now, thanks to the state and Ferguson’s office, the feds may have a harder time wishing Hanford away.

FDR’s mixed legacy for NW environment

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 29, 2016

“There is no such thing as an ex-conservationist,” Franklin Roosevelt said. Conservation was the through-line of FDR’s public legacy, a narrative given new life in Douglas Brinkley’s brilliant, engaging history, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.

FDR, for all his political smarts, is rarely cast as an environmental leader, a seemingly poor rival to his distant, wilderness-embracing cousin, Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, the Roosevelt presidents complement each other, with TR laying the foundation and FDR enlarging that legacy with his bold use of tools such as the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives a president the authority to designate national monuments.

FDR, an honorary Northwesterner with a daughter and son-in-law in Seattle, defied big timber by advocating for Olympic National Park. Dr. Willard Van Name of the American Museum of Natural History and other conservationists from the right coast advanced the park idea. Proponents worried about a rapacious National Forest Service using the national monument for commercial logging (and for good reason — it was doing just that). FDR’s friend, Yakima native William O. Douglas, subsequently appointed in 1939 to the U.S. Supreme Court, also elbowed for a park.

It took a visit to Port Angeles in the fall of 1937 to cement FDR’s resolve. As Brinkley recounts, the Forest Service blocked the Park Service from participating in FDR’s trip to a disputed area of interest to timber lobbyists. Someone had moved the sign marking the forest boundary, and the president passed a massive clear-cut that actually sat on federal land.

“I hope the son-of-a-bitch who logged that is roasting in hell,” FDR said.

The paradox of FDR’s conservation vision was the notion of “managed” nature, a value that alienated environmental purists. Examples of farsightedness include the appointment of FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, to lead the National Planning Board. The administration’s land-use noodling ultimately gave birth to the smart-growth movement of the 1970s, and in Washington, to the Growth Management Act of 1990.

But a policy of engineered nature also degraded the environment, with colossal public works projects such as the salmon-killing Grand Coulee Dam (one reason FDR was an avatar of fish hatcheries).

New Deal conservation was hitched to economic recovery, which sometimes demanded unpleasant tradeoffs.

As Brinkley writes, “Even though FDR had saved the Olympics, the one-two punch of the Grand Coulee and Site W [the Hanford Nuclear Reservation] has prevented many from ever venerating him as a true environmental hero.”

Hanford notwithstanding, FDR was willing to one-up the military, blocking the relocation of an army base that would have imperiled a trumpeter swan wintering ground at Henry’s Lake, Idaho. And it took political backbone to finagle Jackson Hole National Monument, a move Wyoming Rep. Frank Barrett likened to Hitler’s “fascist tactics.” (Most of the monument was later incorporated Grand Teton National Park.)

Roosevelt celebrated hydropower as the clean alternative to coal, and the Columbia River Valley was a favorite showpiece. FDR could harmonize (or “juggle” as he called it) a Tennessee Valley Authority or dredging the Mississippi by the Army Corps of Engineers with his “tree army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted 3 billion trees between 1933 and 1942 and employed 5 percent of the male population before World War II.

Brinkley teases out the conservation thread that seamed FDR’s entire career. The president labored to restore migratory waterfowl across the country at the same time he tackled the banking crisis and record unemployment. He goosed the economy with public works, just as he established national wildlife refuges and preserved delicate ecosystems such as the Joshua Tree and Organ Pipe Cactus national monuments. Every year, but particularly during his first two terms, FDR was tireless, surveying maps and visiting flyways and soon-to-be-protected national seashores.

Brinkley throws light on FDR’s consistent, naturalist worldview. FDR was a cradle enviro, rooted in the Hudson River Valley and Springwood, his Hyde Park estate. As a child, Roosevelt’s passion revolved around birding and natural history and, later, “scientific” forestry and landscape architecture.

As a New York state legislator, he chaired the Forest, Fish and Game Committee, concentrating on the need for reforestation along with expanding and improving state parks.  Who knew that early in his public career, FDR developed a brain trust of agronomists and forestry nerds or that every month he devoured American Forests magazine?

FDR was influenced by Gifford Pinchot’s wise-use theory of forestry, but the real driver was his mentor and friend, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Ickes had a more difficult time harmonizing FDR’s contradictions. In a 1938 speech to the Northwest Conservation League in Seattle, Ickes celebrated the effort to create Olympic National Park, but he downplayed the need for additional roads and better access. Nevertheless, for FDR, confined to a wheelchair, access was a touchstone.

Timberline Lodge at Mount Hood was emblematic of FDR’s vision, mixing natural architecture, recreation and access. What’s the matter with roads if they contour and blend with the landscape?

A couple of hypotheticals still linger: What if Nebraska Sen. George Norris and others hadn’t blocked Ickes’ effort to move the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior, establishing a Department of Conservation? And what if FDR’s dream of a post-World War II global conservation conference had come to pass?

Brinkley vividly captures the paradox of Northwest conservation, a contradiction very much alive at least through the era of the 1980 Northwest Power Act, which sought a fish-wildlife-public power balance. Older Northwesterners have seen the paradox, and it is us.

Welcome, President Xi. Now about those dissidents…

originally published on Crosscut.com on September 21, 2015

In Seattle, it’s déjà Henry Kissinger all over again. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Kissinger is the omnipresent figure who inserts himself into historic grip-and-grin photos, shape-shifting to the times.

The former Secretary of State, then 55, met in Seattle with Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping in February, 1979, during the first Northwest visit by a Chinese head of state. A 2008 HistoryLink essay notes that Deng cancelled a Port of Seattle boat tour to meet privately with Kissinger, the architect of President Nixon’s 1972 opening to China.

Tuesday evening, Kissinger, now 92, will bookend history, attending a Seattle dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Kissinger’s presence gives expression to sturdy genes and, a wee ominously, the triumph of realpolitik. It was the Kissinger-Nixon era of realpolitik that jettisoned ethical considerations and embraced international politics as it is—messy injustice and all.

No one is more emblematic of power politics or at odds with idealism in foreign affairs. For Kissinger, human rights are ancillary.

As Kissinger said to Nixon when freedom for Soviet Jewry became a concern in the early 1970s, “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

During Deng’s ’79 visit to Seattle, Chinese human rights didn’t register. It was the apex of the Cold War, and the enemy of America’s enemy was our friend. Deng had personally suffered during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-’76, and was a captivating figure. It was still 10 years before the horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the crackdown on pro-democracy activists.

Northwesterners were giddy. As the Everett Herald reported at the time, Deng “was the hottest celebrity Seattle has seen since the departure of King Tut, and the best draw until the coming of Neil Diamond.”

A lot has changed in Sino-Northwest relations over the past 36 years. Trade has flourished, with Washington exporting more than $20 billion in goods to China in 2014. During Xi’s visit to Everett’s Boeing plant, the company is set to announce the opening of a Chinese factory to complete production of 737s. Rumors of a pending deal quickly triggered an angry response from at least one state legislator who believes the deal violates the spirit of the Legislature’s $8.7 billion keep-the-jobs-here tax break for Boeing.

Over time, the higher ed sphere also has grown. In ’79, the University of Washington’s then-School of International Studies felt the influence of longtime Professor George Taylor, a committed anti-Communist who taught in China during the 1930s and launched the UW’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies. Fast-forward to today, as the UW partners with one of China’s leading research institutions, Tsinghua University, to offer a masters degree in technology innovation—greased with a $40 million donation from Microsoft.

If only technology and the Internet advanced political liberty, as nearly everyone assumed it would. Journalist Evgeny Morozov noted in his 2011 book, The Net Delusion, that, in practice, bad-guy governments harness the web to squash free speech and propagandize. Freedom is inverted, sometimes with the willing or implicit assist of Western companies.

While high-tech honchos bearing gifts meet with Xi in Seattle this week, they might recall the infuriating case of Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, whose cooperation with the Chinese government led to the arrest and 10-year prison sentence of Shi Tao, a dissident journalist and poet.

So, what happens when Northwest passive-aggressives confront an authoritarian from a massive country with cultural ties extending from British Columbia to Oregon?

As the Sunday Seattle Times headline declared, “The nice Washington has welcome mat out.”

Bill Gates and Gov. Jay Inslee can be welcoming and nice, but also hand Xi a list of political dissidents such as Ilham Tohti and Liu Xiaobo, and demand their release. Consider former Washington Gov. and Ambassador to China Gary Locke, who exhibited backbone standing up for blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng. Locke was critical in corralling Xi to visit Seattle in the first place.

Make no mistake: Microsoft has leverage. Boeing has leverage. Northwesterners have leverage. Or are we all Kissingerian realists now?

Death-by-inertia for top conservation fund

originally published on Crosscut.com on July 21, 2015

In Congress, it’s death-by-inertia. Rip an institution down to its studs and allow the clock to run out. Voila!

On July 1, the federal Export-Import Bank, a boon to Boeing and other Northwest employers, went gentle into that good night. (The Ex-Im homepage reads like a Depression-era sign: AUTHORITY HAS LAPSED).

And in less than seventy days, Congress’ make-policy-by-not-making policy may halt reauthorization of the country’s bipartisan, wildly popular Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF).

“Of course there is a real chance they will snuff the LWCF,” says U.S. Rep. Denny Heck, D-Olympia. “Why wouldn’t you believe that possible? This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”

The gang may want to improve its aim. For half a century, the LWCF has been the nation’s trademark outdoor recreation and conservation program. The formula is basic: Apply a portion of lease royalties from offshore oil development to pay for wildlife habitat, parks, trails and sustainable forests. No need for taxpayer dinero.

Royalties from public resources owned by all Americans are looped back into places such as Deception Pass State Park, the Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and the Mountains to Sound Greenway. Since President Kennedy requested its passage, the LWCF has helped 600 projects in Washington to the tune of $600 million.

So what gives?

“The Ex-Im comparison is perfectly valid (with LWCF),” Heck says. “Both are long-standing programs, which traditionally enjoyed broad, bipartisan support. And the termination of both was considered unthinkable until a short time ago. I don’t know what is going to happen, but if inertia is on the side of the anti’s—such as an affirmative requirement for reenactment—then they are advantaged.”

Gobsmacked greens never figured on death-by-inertia. And so, the scramble.

Fund supporters set up an online clock, a sort of fluid version of the doomsday timepiece in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Wilderness Society developed a comprehensive map of all the LWCF projects nationwide. And congressional advocates, Republicans and Democrats alike, are sounding the alarm.

For years, the focus has been on full-LWCF funding. Despite the uptick in offshore development and increased conservation needs, 55 percent of the fund’s revenues have been siphoned to other interests. For 49 out of 50 years, Congress played the shift-money shell game, creating more project backlog.

Heck, who has championed revival the Ex-Im Bank (“It may live to see another day,” he said) credits lawmakers such as Republican Rep. Dave Reichert and Democrat Rep. Derek Kilmer with keeping LWCF’s hopes alive.

In June, Reichert and Kilmer joined with Sen. Maria Cantwell to call for permanent LWCF reauthorization. In a conference call, Reichert, co-chair of the House National Parks Caucus, said that last year’s passage of the Pratt River additions to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness was his proudest achievement. He also noted that permanent reauthorization includes set-asides for sportsmen and public access.

The LWCF is more than Gary Snyder-ish landscapes where the Skagit River rises to meet you. Four million dollars from the fund’s Forest Legacy Program, for example, was recently green-lighted to underwrite a conservation easement on 20,000 acres of working forestland in Mason County. It’s phase one of a three-phase process to keep the forest in production. That translates into timber jobs, recreational access, and decent water quality.

Much of the LWCF narrative revolves around economics. In Washington, recreation generates $1.6 billion in state and local tax revenue, $7.1 billion in salaries and wages, and 227,000 direct jobs, according to a 2013 Outdoor Industry Association report. But the aesthetic, can’t-be-recreated-online windfall isn’t so bad either.

Cynics love to quote now-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that, “you never let a serious crisis go to waste.” But it’s the second part of the quote that resonates. “It’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

As politicians game-out various scenarios, the best case may be to hitch the LWCF to must-have legislation. It’s a strategy that also could resurrect the Ex-Im Bank.

With future political monkeying, lawmakers might consider the Emanuel mantra, and do those things that they thought they couldn’t do before, such as fully fund and permanently reauthorize the LWCF.

Obama’s executive order to beef up defense of our cyber domain

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 23, 2105

There’s new language for a new kind of arms race.

President Barack Obama punctuated his speech at a summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection by signing an executive order to boost America’s defense against cyber attack. Billed as a White House summit, the event was held at Stanford, with the title “consumer protection” wisely appended as a way to blunt unease over a sleuthing NSA safeguarding individual privacy.

“It’s one of the great paradoxes of our time that the very technologies that empower us to do great good can also be used to undermine us and inflict great harm,” Obama said. “The same information technologies that help make our military the most advanced in the world are targeted by hackers from China and Russia who go after our defense contractors and systems that are built for our troops.”

Like the atom bomb, cyber warfare has become a can’t-be-wished-away evil.

The challenge was flagged earlier by two key members of the 9/11 Commission, former Washington Sen. Slade Gorton and former U.S. Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.

“The middle is just about gone,” said Gorelick, lamenting the lack of bipartisanship in American security policy in a recent speech at the National Bureau of Asian Research’s Slade Gorton International Policy Center in Seattle.  Gorelick and Gorton, along with their fellow Democrat and Republican 9/11 commissioners, defied partisan odds and worked in common cause on the original 2004 report. Ten years later, they again came together to underscore evolving threats and Congressional inertia.

Their to-do list includes centralizing Congressional oversight of the Department of Homeland Security. Congress currently has 92 committees and subcommittees that noodle DHS funding and operations. “With 92 bosses, you can’t have a unified strategy,” Gorelick said.

Other priorities include giving the Director of National Intelligence budget authority so he or she can shift funding when necessary, as well as ending budget sequestration, which arbitrarily pinches resources and morale.

And there’s the big kahuna, defending the “cyber domain.” Much of the battle, according to a 2014 compendium of 9/11 Commission recommendations, is communicating the magnitude of the threat to the public and private sector. It’s a humungous undertaking.

“In 2014 the government planned to spend more than $13 billion on cyber defense programs, mostly to protect government computers and networks, and to share threat intelligence with private industry,” writes Shane Harris in @War, his superb history of the Internet-military tangle.

In contrast, Harris notes that the government budgeted $11.6 billion to address climate change. All the while, political leadership is largely absent.

“Congress has repeatedly failed to pass critical cybersecurity legislation needed to solve even small problems, such as information sharing,” writes Slade Gorton in a 2014 NBR commentary. “The administration has apparently done what it can within the existing legal framework, but it is also clear that cybersecurity reform is not an agenda priority for the president.”

Gorton also recommends revising the authorization for the use of military force to incorporate cyber threats. The latest authorization draft, targeting the Islamic State, doesn’t prioritize cyber readiness.

Will Obama’s executive order move the needle?

“The president’s action was a modest step in the right direction,” Gorton said last Tuesday. “It needs to be supplemented by his recommendation to Congress to allow for aggressive counterattacks against cyber attackers by both the public and private sectors and authority to impose trade sanctions against countries that sponsor cyber attacks.”

Bipartisan leadership, the kind exemplified by Gorton, Gorelick and the 9/11 Commission, is the best vehicle to navigate the narrow line separating civil liberties and cybersecurity. “Don’t cede politics to the wings,” Gorelick said, noting how both parties are handcuffed by ideology.

If ever there was a need for a vital center in American politics, it’s now.

Washington’s wilderness expansion: devilish dealing

originally published on Crosscut.com

It has an incongruous feel about it, like a diamond pressed in a phonebook.

It’s the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and Pratt and Middle Fork Snoqualmie Rivers Protection Act: Title XXX, Subtitle E, Sec. 3060, p.1330 tucked in a 1,648-page doorstop, the Carl Levin and Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Act, which President Barack Obama signed Dec. 22.

Rejoice at the 22,173 acres added to Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness. It took more than seven years of yeoman organizing by the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, Washington Wild and independent activists such as Rick McGuire.

But pity the political scientist diagramming the Levin/McKeon goliath. There are dozens of unrelated sections: All-things national security; giveaways to logging and mining interests; conservation for future generations, a la Alpine Lakes; and keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison’s concertina wire in place. Everything was heaped into a catchall bill that no member of Congress had time to thoroughly read in advance.

Alpine Lakes figures as a sweet capstone to the 50th anniversary of the National Wilderness Act, and a testament to the legislative finesse of Sen. Patty Murray and members of Washington’s Congressional delegation, including Reps. Dave Reichert, Suzan DelBene and Rick Larsen.

Add to the Northwest’s first new wilderness since Wild Sky in 2009, another section of the bill (Subtitle F, Sec. 3071) assures that Illabot Creek in Skagit County will forever run free. Even Manhattan Project history buffs get their due, thank you very much (Sec. 3039, p. 1245).

The good stuff pop out like passages from John Muir grafted to a Pentagon inventory.

But what about the many not-so-good things, the giveaways and watering down of wilderness study areas?

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How Washington state fed America’s torture beast

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 15, 2014

Spokane, the lilac city, gave us Bing Crosby and poet Carolyn Kizer.

It also gave us John Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the alleged merchants of torture, “learned helplessness,” and practices that cannot be un-thought (read: forced rectal feeding.)

As the Spokesman Review reported, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a company hatched by the two Washington psychologists, raked in $81 million from the CIA to impart wisdom on Marquis de Sade-style interrogation.

Anal-hydration consulting is nice work if you can get it.

It’s a sad juxtaposition: The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee‘s torture report, tortured by CIA doublespeak, was released on the eve of last Wednesday’s Human Rights Day.

Add to it Eric Garner, extinguished by a chokehold, and the Ferguson non-indictment. 

So much for Human Rights Day’s sepia-toned pics of Eleanor Roosevelt and streams of social media quoting the sacralized language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies,” Sen. John McCain said the afternoon of the report’s release. “Our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights.”

Most Americans apparently don’t share McCain’s notion. A 2011 Pew survey found 53 percent of respondents favor G-men torturing alleged terrorists who may possess critical info. Will the Senate report, which makes plain torture’s savagery and ineffectiveness, move the needle?

On Wednesday, the Seattle Human Rights Commission hosted its annual human rights celebration at Town Hall. There was mention of the report, but the moment of silence was reserved for Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.   

In its report takeaway, the Washington State Religious Campaign Against Torture reduced the question of torture to its moral core. “We reject that ‘effectiveness’ should be the ultimate value by ?which we judge the use of torture. We hold that each human being is sacred. All human beings have the right not to be tortured. Global society calls that right a human right. If torture is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”

The group’s ecumenical message centers on truth, reconciliation and accountability. The challenge is identifying a vehicle to ferret out the truth — such as a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission — and also ensure accountability. That seems like a non-starter: The U.S. Justice Department quickly announced it won’t pursue prosecutions of torturers or torture’s desk-jockey architects. 

“Our country is at a crossroad,” said the Religious Campaign’s president, Rob Crawford.

The multiplier effect of the Senate report, Ferguson, and Garner throws that idea of “our country at a crossroad” into bold relief.

The United States could seize the moment. Modernize and put teeth into a human rights agenda; transcend soft clichés and concentrate on outcomes.

Lawmakers could demonstrate moral imagination, at home and abroad, by hitching human rights to the “radical center.”

Yes, it sounds like an oxymoron. (Know any steely-eyed moderates navigating Congress’ ideological halls?) In fact, radical centrism involves re-evaluating systems and radically transforming institutions. It’s also married to a pragmatic politics that shuns utopian naïvete as much as amorality in the pursuit of geopolitical power. The approach was encapsulated by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (purportedly President Obama’s favorite philosopher) to embrace idealism without illusions.

The key elements of any radical reforms from the center would be: What works, what’s consistent with American values and universal human rights, and where is the dinero going? Ideally, the money is not going into the pockets of Spokane interrogation consultants.

Encouragingly, human rights are an increasingly popular area of study at Northwest colleges. It’s an almost inverse relationship: The diffusion of human rights scholarship — and a swelling of what constitutes a human right — and the reality of a violent, rights-stomping world. 

New human rights scholarship includes a chorus of naysayers, with arguments from the University of Chicago’s Eric Posner, Harvard’s Samuel Moyn and the University of London’s Stephen Hopgood over the toothlessness of many human rights institutions.  

But there are also institutions that illustrate promise, such as the European Court of Human Rights. Emulate it, and avoid the cynical Kissinger-ian road that drop-kicks the principle of universal rights. 

In a 1975 memo to Kissinger to encourage a General Assembly speech on human rights, then-UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, “Ours is a culture based on the primacy of the individual — the rights of the individual, the welfare of the individual, the claims of the individual against those of the state.”

Moynihan continued. “We will insist on broadening the definition of welfare to include not only the economic conditions of the individual, but his political condition as well.”

Lawmakers can seize the Moynihan vision and update it for a new century. Remake Congressional oversight of the intelligence community so it aligns with the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Be bold and join the International Criminal Court. Hold rights-abusing nations such as Syria accountable by establishing no-fly zones.    

Coherence and accountability demand other actions too: Abolish solitary confinement at home, breathe life into restorative justice, de-militarize domestic policing. Think big. Humans are sacred; institutions are not.   

“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.” Wallace Stegner wrote in “All the Little Live Things.” The post-9/11 torture narrative is knit together by a Northwest thread. We’re all responsible.

Sept. 11 and the forever war: An anniversary and a presidential address

originally published in The Herald

Americans mark the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the backdrop of last night’s on-the-offensive ISIS address by President Obama.

Thirteen. When today’s seniors at Everett High School fumbled in kindergarten, panic flickered on a screen.

History takes years to come into focus.

That week in September, Gov. Gary Locke reassured Washingtonians that the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the Columbia and Snake River dams were secure. Secure? After 9/11, we could suddenly conjure worst-case images. Fear migrated from the ruins of the World Trade Center to Naval Station Everett.

This was no ordinary attack, presaging no ordinary war. In his 2014 documentary “The Unknown Known,” Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris asks former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about Dora Farms. That’s the forgettable place in Iraq where the U.S. tried but failed to kill Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 invasion. Would Hussein’s death have averted war?

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