MORE GOP RACISM 

Senate Republicans say Interior pick Deb Haaland has “radical views” on Big Oil

Rachel Ramirez 

“I acknowledge that we are on the ancestral homelands of the Nacotchtank, Anacostan, and Piscataway people,” Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico said in her opening remarks on the first day of her Senate confirmation hearing to lead the Interior Department

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© Jim Watson-Pool/Getty Images Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM) speaks during the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing on her nomination to lead the Interior Department on February 23, 2021, in Washington, DC.

It’s likely the first time a Cabinet nominee acknowledged tribal lands upon testifying before the Senate. If confirmed, Haaland — a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe — would also be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in history.

But it is her pledge to protect the environment and tribal communities that has some in the Republican Party up in arms. In the days leading up to Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana, both of whom have financial ties to the oil industry, have attacked Haaland’s plans to transition away from fossil fuels and have threatened to block her nomination.

Barrasso, the top Republican official of the committee holding Haaland’s confirmation, said he is “troubled by many of [Haaland’s] radical views,” such as opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and supporting the Green New Deal, both of which are supported by the majority of Democratic voters. The Wyoming senator, who has taken $1.7 million from Big Oil since becoming senator in 2007, went on to press Haaland on questions about her personal views on Biden’s executive actions on temporarily pausing new oil and gas drilling leases on public lands, in addition to demands that she provide evidence that fracking actually contributes to the climate crisis.

The “radical” nature they are referring to is Haaland having spent her career committed to protecting the environment and Indigenous communities by challenging the status quo that relying on the fossil fuel industry is needed to bolster the economy. During the hearing, she repeatedly emphasized that, if confirmed as Interior secretary, she will work hard to bridge party lines and take Congress members’ concerns into consideration — but that she was not going to push aside environmental concerns or Biden’s climate agenda.

“As I’ve learned in this role, there’s no question that fossil energy does and will continue to play a major role in America for years to come. I know how important oil and gas revenues are to fund critical services,” Haaland said in her opening remarks. “But we must also recognize that the energy industry is innovating, and our climate challenge must be addressed.”

The US Interior Department oversees the country’s 500 million acres of public lands, which are set to play a crucial role in Biden’s sweeping climate agenda to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But over the past few decades, the lands have instead been major contributors to the climate crisis because they hold massive reserves of fossil fuels, which are extracted and burned by oil and gas companies, thus releasing planet-warming emissions.

President Biden has promised a climate-focused agenda, and spent his first hours in office dismantling energy policies that catered to the fossil fuel industry and centering environmental justice throughout the federal government. One of the major concerns from Republicans is that a pause on new fossil fuel activities would negatively affect American jobs — a theme that served as the backdrop of their line of questioning during Haaland’s hearing.

But Haaland said she is committed to finding the right balance between economic growth and saving the planet. “As part of this balance, the Department has a role in harnessing the clean energy potential of our public lands to create jobs and new economic opportunities,” she said. “The President’s agenda demonstrates that America’s public lands can and should be engines for clean energy production.”

Despite GOP pushback, Haaland’s confirmation is still set to go through since the Republican Party is now in the congressional minority, according to the HuffPost. Haaland could even gain the support of Alaskan Republican moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski, whose home state is 18 percent Alaska Native. Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska even stopped by Tuesday’s hearing to give a bipartisan introduction of Haaland and encouraged his GOP colleagues to confirm Haaland for the role.

“She has worked with me. She has crossed the aisle, and as a member of this administration, I know she will do a good job,” Young said. “Respectfully, I want you to listen to her. Understand that there’s a broad picture.”
Democrats note the historic nature of Haaland possibly overseeing tribal lands

Beyond overseeing public lands, the Interior Department also manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees roughly 55 million acres of tribal land. Set to be the first Native American cabinet secretary nominee in history, Haaland has first-hand knowledge of how to improve tribal communities, as she has done as the vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and the chair of the subcommittee on national parks, forests, and public lands.

Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico pointed out at the beginning of the hearing that having a Native American secretary for the Interior is “frankly something that should have happened a long time ago.”

“How can we help make Indian lives better?” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont asked Haaland, who listed numerous issues such as the lack of education funding, not having clean air and water, the missing Native Americans, and severe health care disparities.

“It’s the job of the federal government to live up to its tribal trust promises,” Haaland said. “The pandemic has highlighted these disparities. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”

Haaland, who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline before joining Congress as one of the first two Native American women, also received several questions from Republican senators, including possibly recusing herself in decisions related to the oil pipeline. But Haaland’s opposition of the pipeline, which sparked the months-long Standing Rock protests, stems from the fact that it cuts through tribal lands posing the potential to contaminate the primary source of drinking water for nearby tribes.

In her opening remarks, Haaland said one of her utmost priorities, if confirmed as Interior secretary, is to “honor the sovereignty of tribal nations and recognize their part in America’s story.”

When senators return on Wednesday for a second round of questioning before their vote, she could be one step closer to holding that honor.

Pollution decreased but the planet warmed during COVID-19 lockdowns

Isabella O'Malley 

Last year, within a matter of weeks, hundreds of millions of people shuttered down at home and many of the biggest corporations on Earth halted operations at their facilities during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in a staggering decline in greenhouse gas emissions, which caused months of below-average pollution levels.

Yet, despite this temporary decline in emissions, researchers say aerosols such as soot, black carbon, and sulfate, caused a counterintuitive effect that deserves some explaining: The planet actually warmed up.

This observation comes from a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which found that reduction of aerosols during the COVID-19 lockdowns “caused a small net warming during the spring months in 2020.” The study says that these changes in aerosol levels had a bigger impact on temperatures than the effects from varying levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and contrail cooling effects. However, the researchers predict the peak impact on global temperatures from the aerosol decline will not be felt until 2022.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkCredit: Ed Freeman. Stone. Getty Images.

While it might be confusing that lower greenhouse gas emissions had a temporary warming effect, some aerosols naturally occur in the atmosphere from forest fire smoke and volcanic ash and play a significant role in shaping the climate because these gases actually have a cooling effect. Aerosols reflect sunlight away from the Earth’s surface and make clouds brighter and more reflective, so heat that would otherwise get trapped in our atmosphere travels out to space.

Daily greenhouse gas emissions had the most severe decline in March 2020 when many lockdowns began. Data revealed that clouds became dimmer between March and June, which caused more energy from the Sun to be absorbed by the Earth instead of being reflected out to space. The study reports that temperatures over some land areas were between 0.1-0.3°C warmer than usual and the largest warming of 0.37°C occurred over the United States and Russia, which are countries that release some of the highest levels of aerosols.

Despite this temporary warming, the researchers say that the long term impact from the COVID-19 lockdowns could “slightly slow climate change because of reduced emissions of carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for decades and has a more gradual influence on climate,” as stated in NCAR’s press release. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere anywhere between 300 to 1,000 years after being released, the impact that aerosols have on the Earth’s temperature diminishes within a few years.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkCredit: Martin Puddy. Stone. Getty Images.

Even though aerosols are capable of creating a cooling effect, researchers say that they are dangerous to human health and not a viable solution that could combat global warming.

A study from the Carnegie Institution for Science investigated the potential of aerosol-induced cooling to improve conditions for agricultural productivity and human labour around the world. The researchers found that the public health benefits of removing aerosols from the atmosphere significantly outweighed the economic benefits of releasing them because of their risk to human health—aerosols are tiny particles that can be inhaled or absorbed by the skin that cause damage to respiratory and cardiovascular organs.

"Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7°C, or about 1.3°F, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions," said Yixuan Zheng, the lead author in a press release from Carnegie Institution for Science. "This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change. Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970."

Even though aerosols have offset some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases, Zheng says it is clear that aerosols have “profound harm far outweighs their meager benefits” and reducing greenhouse gas emissions is essential for improved public health and addressing climate change.

Thumbnail credit: Michael Sugrue. Stone. Getty Images.

Indigenous people had some of the highest rates of ER visits during 2014 Yellowknife wildfires: study

 Feb. 23, 2021

Melaine Simba will never forget the months she spent inside her home on Ka’a’gee Tu First Nation, south of Yellowknife, with her windows tightly shut to prevent wildfire smoke from seeping in. It was the summer of 2014 and she was following public health orders to stay inside during the Northwest Territories’ worst wildfire season on record.

“There were fires all around us,” Simba told The Narwhal. “I couldn’t go outside, and I couldn’t take my son outside.”

“It was just so hard to breathe in that smoke with all the falling ash.”

According to a new study published in the journal BMJ Open, the wildfires caused extremely poor air quality during the more than two months of unrelenting smoke exposure. This led to a sharp increase in respiratory illnesses, with vulnerable populations, such as children and Indigenous people, disproportionately affected.

The study also found that public health advisories asking people to stay inside during the wildfires were “inadequately protective,” possibly because people grew tired of the long period of isolation. With climate change contributing to longer and more intense wildfire seasons, the study authors say there’s an urgent need to be far more prepared in the future.

“A really big take home of this study is that climate change is bad, and it is going to get worse,” Courtney Howard, the lead author of the study and an emergency physician in Yellowknife, told The Narwhal, adding that smoke exposure levels during the wildfires were believed to be some of the worst ever studied globally.

“We are going to need new, proactive approaches as we go into a warmer, smokier state on this planet.”

Warmer temperatures caused by climate change can spur drier conditions, increasing the risk of wildfires. In 2014, moderate to severe drought conditions and lightning strikes were the catalyst for 385 fires that impacted 3.4 million hectares of forest in the Northwest Territories.

According to the federal government, temperatures across the North are warming more than twice as fast as the global rate. In Yellowknife, between 1943 and 2011, the annual average temperature in the city increased by 2.5 C.

The average level of particulate matter (PM 2.5) in the air was five times higher than normal during the 2014 wildfires, compared with the two previous years and 2015. PM 2.5 — inhalable particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter — is associated with a range of respiratory conditions.

The study found this increase in particulate matter was associated with an increase in visits to the hospital for asthma, pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Asthma-related emergency room visits doubled, with the highest rates found in women, people older than 40 and Dene. Visits for pneumonia increased by 57 per cent, with men, children and Inuit particularly affected. And visits for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease increased by 11 per cent, with men, the Inuit and Dene populations and people over 60 showing the greatest risk.

While the results suggest that Indigenous people were more affected, Howard said it’s difficult to say for sure because they may have been more likely to go to the ER due to lack of access to medical clinics.

The demand for medicine that helps alleviate the symptoms of asthma surged, too. The dispensation of salbutamol, the agent found in puffers, increased by 48 per cent.

“In fact, one of the pharmacies ran out over the course of the summer,” Howard said.

Supply chain problems “demonstrated a lack of resilience,” she added.

The study also sheds light on systemic issues that contribute to worse health outcomes in vulnerable populations, including Indigenous people.

“Climate-related health effects impact all populations but are likely to disproportionately affect communities living at the frontlines of rapid climate change, as well as those experiencing systemic racism, socioeconomic and health disparities, and/or the enduring effects of colonization,” the study states.

Protracted periods of isolation, a lack of exercise, fear and stress during the wildfires also had negative impacts on people’s mental health and way of life, according to a 2018 report that Howard was also involved with.

“Livelihood and land-based activities were disrupted for some interviewees, which had negative consequences for mental, emotional and physical well-being,” the report states.

During the summer, Indigenous people across the territory fish, hunt and visit old villages and the gravesites of relatives, Jason Snaggs, the chief executive officer of Yellowknives Dene First Nation, told The Narwhal. The wildfires prevented people from taking part in these cultural activities, he added.

“This leads to depression, and you have sort of a compounding effect, in terms of colonialism, the effects of residential schools, intergenerational trauma,” Snaggs said.

“Some people were visibly traumatized by this event.”

Sheltering in place can lead to increased rates of family violence, including violence against Indigenous women, Snaggs added.

During the 2016 wildfires that tore through Fort McMurray, Alta., calls to a local family crisis centre increased by upward of 300 per cent, according to Michele Taylor, executive director of Waypoints, an emergency shelter for women and children.

Howard said the 2014 wildfires were a seminal event in people’s understanding of climate change in the region.

“At the time, ecological grief and eco-anxiety hadn’t really shown up in the evidence base,” she said. “Looking back at our analysis, I think we can easily apply those terms to what we found and say it was a trigger for ecological grief and anxiety for a lot of people.”

Howard said communities — particularly Indigenous communities — need to be better equipped to withstand wildfires.

Some homes in Indigenous communities are overcrowded and aren’t built to the same standards as those elsewhere in the territory. Howard emphasized the need to address this problem first and foremost.

The BMJ study recommends governments install ventilation systems in old and new homes ahead of wildfire season. Doing so would ensure residents have access to clean air without having to leave the house.

“Our infrastructure decisions need to be based on the temperature and precipitation patterns that we’re anticipating for the coming century as opposed to the ones we had in the last one,” Howard said.

The study also recommends primary health-care practitioners identify people who may grapple with respiratory illnesses and ensure that air filters and puffers are readily available prior to wildfire season.

“That will allow people to manage their symptoms at home and never get to the point where they’re stuck in the emergency department,” Howard said. “The sooner particularly vulnerable people have access [to air filters and puffers], the better.”

In 2014, the City of Yellowknife waived user fees for a multi-purpose recreation facility so residents could go there to breathe clean, filtered air and exercise, Howard said. But not everyone in Yellowknife is afforded the same level of access. N’Dilo, which is part of Yellowknives Dene First Nation and is located in Yellowknife proper, only has one space people can gather in during a wildfire — a 45-year-old gym that isn’t equipped with a filtration system to keep air clean.

The study suggests that public health practitioners use satellite-based smoke forecasting to determine whether clean air shelters are needed in advance of wildfire season and, if necessary, make more available.

The 2018 report — which documented the experiences of 30 community members from Yellowknife, Dettah, N’Dilo and Kakisa who lived through the wildfires — found there was a consensus among participants about the need for improved communication and coordination at the community and territorial levels as wildfires intensify.

Howard said residents and health-care providers need to proactively prepare for wildfire season every year.

“We need to be viewing wildfire season the same way we view cold and flu season.”

Julien Gignac, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Narwhal

 

Parks, not pills: B.C. health program prescribes healing power of nature

Duration: 02:22

Going outside could be just what the doctor ordered. British Columbia has launched a new program that has doctors prescribing the great outdoors to help people with mental health issues or chronic illnesses

. Robin Gill explains the science behind it.

 

REST IN POWER

Beat poet, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti dies at 101 -

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, bookseller and activist who helped launch the Beat movement in the 1950s and embodied its curious and rebellious spirit well into the 21st century, has died at age 101.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco institution, died Monday at his home, his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said. A month shy of his 102nd birthday, Ferlinghetti died “in his own room,” holding the hands of his son and his son’s girlfriend, “as he took his last breath." The cause of death was lung disease. Ferlinghetti had received the first dose of the COVID vaccine last week, his son said Tuesday.

Few poets of the past 60 years were so well known, or so influential. His books sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, a fantasy for virtually any of his peers, and he ran one of the world’s most famous and distinctive bookstores, City Lights. Although he never considered himself one of the Beats, he was a patron and soul mate and, for many, a lasting symbol — preaching a nobler and more ecstatic American dream.

“Am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America?” he asked in “Little Boy,” a stream of consciousness novel published around the time of his 100th birthday

He made history. Through the City Lights publishing arm, books by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and many others came out and the release of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl” led to a 1957 obscenity case that broke new ground for freedom of expression.

He also defied history. The Internet, superstore chains and high rents shut down numerous booksellers in the Bay Area and beyond, but City Lights remained a thriving political and cultural outlet, where one section was devoted to books enabling “revolutionary competence,” where employees could get the day off to attend an anti-war protest.

“Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical,” Ferlinghetti told Interview magazine in 2013. “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.”

The store even endured during the coronavirus outbreak, when it was forced to close and required $300,000 to stay in business. A GoFundMe campaign quickly raised $400,000.

Ferlinghetti, tall and bearded, with sharp blue eyes, could be soft-spoken, even introverted and reticent in unfamiliar situations. But he was the most public of poets and his work wasn’t intended for solitary contemplation. It was meant to be recited or chanted out loud, whether in coffee houses, bookstores or at campus gatherings.

His 1958 compilation, “A Coney Island of the Mind,” sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the U.S. alone. Long an outsider from the poetry community, Ferlinghetti once joked that he had “committed the sin of too much clarity.” He called his style “wide open” and his work, influenced in part by e.e. cummings, was often lyrical and childlike: “Peacocks walked/under the night trees/in the lost moon/light/when I went out/looking for love,” he wrote in “Coney Island.”

Ferlinghetti also was a playwright, novelist, translator and painter and had many admirers among musicians. In 1976, he recited “The Lord’s Prayer” at the Band’s farewell concert, immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz.” The folk-rock band Aztec Two-Step lifted its name from a line in the title poem of Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island” book: “A couple of Papish cats/is doing an Aztec two-step.” Ferlinghetti also published some of the earliest film reviews by Pauline Kael, who with The New Yorker became one of the country’s most influential critics.

He lived long and well despite a traumatic childhood. His father died five months before Lawrence was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, leaving behind a sense of loss that haunted him, yet provided much of the creative tension that drove his art. His mother, unable to cope, had a nervous breakdown two years after his father’s death. She eventually disappeared and died in a state hospital.

Ferlinghetti spent years moving among relatives, boarding homes and an orphanage before he was taken in by a wealthy New York family, the Bislands, for whom his mother had worked as a governess. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received a master’s in literature from Columbia University, and a doctorate degree from the Sorbonne in Paris. His early influences included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and Ezra Pound.

Ferlinghetti hated war, because he was in one. In 1945, he was a Navy commander stationed in Japan and remembered visiting Nagasaki a few weeks after the U.S. had dropped an atom bomb. The carnage, he would recall, made him an “instant pacifist.”

In the early 1950s, he settled in San Francisco and married Selden Kirby-Smith, whom he divorced in 1976. (They had two children). Ferlinghetti also became a member of the city’s rising literary movement, the so-called San Francisco Renaissance, and soon helped establish a gathering place. Peter D, Martin, a sociologist, had opened a paperback store in the city’s North Beach section and named it after a recent Charlie Chaplin film, “City Lights.” When Ferlinghetti saw the storefront, in 1953, he suggested he and Martin become partners. Each contributed $500.

Ferlinghetti later told The New York Times: “City Lights became about the only place around where you could go in, sit down, and read books without being pestered to buy something.”

The Beats, who had met in New York in the 1940s, now had a new base. One project was City Lights’ Pocket Poets series, which offered low-cost editions of verse, notably Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Ferlinghetti had heard Ginsberg read a version in 1955 and wrote him: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?” a humorous take on the message sent from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman upon reading “Leaves of Grass.”

Ferlinghetti published “Howl and Other Poems” in 1956, but customs officials seized copies of the book that were being shipped from London, and Ferlinghetti was arrested on obscenity charges. After a highly publicized court battle, a judge in 1957 ruled that “Howl” was not obscene, despite its sexual themes, citing the poem’s relevance as a criticism of modern society. A 2010 film about the case, “Howl,” starred James Franco as Ginsberg and Andrew Rogers as Ferlinghetti.

Ferlinghetti would also release Kerouac’s “Book of Dreams,” prison writings by Timothy Leary and Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems.” Ferlinghetti risked prison for “Howl,” but rejected Burrough’s classic “Naked Lunch,” worrying that publication would lead to “sure premeditated legal lunacy.”

Ferlinghetti’s eyesight was poor in recent years, but he continued to write and to keep regular hours at City Lights. The establishment, meanwhile, warmed to him, even if the affection wasn’t always returned. He was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate, in 1998, and City Lights was granted landmark status three years later. He received an honorary prize from the National Book Critics Circle in 2000 and five years later was given a National Book Award medal for “his tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary community.”

“The dominant American mercantile culture may globalize the world, but it is not the mainstream culture of our civilization,” Ferlinghetti said upon receiving the award. “The true mainstream is made, not of oil, but of literarians, publishers, bookstores, editors, libraries, writers and readers, universities and all the institutions that support them.”

In 2012, Ferlinghetti won the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club. When he learned the country’s right-wing government was a sponsor, he turned the award down.

A Coney Island of the Mind, 28 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti ...

https://poets.org/poem/coney-island-mind-28

A Coney Island of the Mind, 11. The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves is not the same wild west the white man found It is a land that Buddha came upon from a different direction It is a wild white nest in the true mad north of introspection where ‘falcons of the inner eye’ dive and die glimpsing in their dying fall all life’s memory of existence and with grave chalk wing draw upon 

___

Italie reported from New York.

Janie Har And Hillel Italie, The Associated Press

SEE

OBIT REDUX

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

I WAS A REGULAR VISITOR TO SF IN THE EIGHTIES, VISITING FRIENDS, DOING INTERVIEWS IN THE SCI FI COMMUNITY, HANGING OUT WITH THE OTO AND VISITING CITY LIGHTS BOOKS THEN DRINKING BEER  TOKING ACROSS THE LANE AT THE VESUVIUS BAR. I WAS IN CONTACT WITH THE FOLKS PUTTING OUT RESEARCH MAGAZINE OUT OF CITY LIGHTS, A PAL FROM EDMONTON TOOK ME TO THE JAZZ CELLAR WHICH WAS STILL GOING AT THAT TIME. 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: HOWL (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

OBIT REDUX

San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights bookstore founder, has died aged 101

Oscar Holland, CNN

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Beat poet, publisher and founder of San Francisco's beloved City Lights bookstore, has died aged 101

.

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his home in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, March 1, 2018. (Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

He passed away from lung disease on Monday evening, confirmed the store's vice president and director of marketing and publicity, Stacey Lewis.

One of the last surviving members of the Beat Generation, Ferlinghetti played a key role in expanding the literary movement's focus to the West Coast. An online tribute, posted to City Lights' website on Tuesday, said that Ferlinghetti had been "instrumental in democratizing American literature."

"For over 60 years, those of us who have worked with him at City Lights have been inspired by his knowledge and love of literature, his courage in defense of the right to freedom of expression, and his vital role as an American cultural ambassador," the post read. "His curiosity was unbounded and his enthusiasm was infectious, and we will miss him greatly."

Born in New York in 1919, he co-founded the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood in 1953. In 1955, he would buy out fellow co-founder Peter D. Martin, and expand the business to include a publishing house of the same name.

Launching with the hugely influential Pocket Poets Series, Ferlinghetti went on to publish works by some of the postwar period's most important literary figures, including fellow Beat poets William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. But it was a poem by Allen Ginsberg, "Howl," that would further thrust him into the spotlight.

San Francisco authorities seized copies of Ginsberg's collection "Howl and Other Poems" in 1957, published by City Lights the year before. Ferlinghetti was arrested and tried on obscenity charges due to the book's references to sex and drugs. The case garnered nationwide attention and provoked huge debate over censorship. Ferlinghetti was eventually cleared, with the judge ruling that the book had "redeeming social importance" -- a decision that would more broadly change the US courts' approach to creative free speech.

While continuing to provide a meeting place for San Francisco's literati, Ferlinghetti was a distinguished poet in his own right. His celebrated 1958 collection "A Coney Island of the Mind" was a big commercial success, and contained some of his best-known poems, including "I Am Waiting" and "Autobiography."

Ferlinghetti was prolific thereafter, with his accessible and witty style captured in celebrated poems like "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes" and "Euphoria." ("As I approach the state of pure euphoria," he memorably started the latter, "I find I need a large size typewriter case to carry my underwear in.")

He authored more than 30 collections of poetry, tackling themes such as social ills and mass corruption. He continued writing well into his later years, publishing his latest novel "Little Boy" in 2019. Upon his 100th birthday that year, San Francisco made March 24, his birthday, "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day."

City Lights also continued to serve as a meeting place for the city's creative and literary communities, hosting regular readings, talks and book signings. The store and its publishing arm had, however, struggled with the financial challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Last April, CEO and publisher Elaine Katzenberger started a GoFundMe campaign to raise the $300,000 she said was needed to keep the business afloat.

Nonetheless, in its online tribute, the company said it hoped to "build on Ferlinghetti's vision and honor his memory by sustaining City Lights into the future as a center for open intellectual inquiry and commitment to literary culture and progressive politics."

A Coney Island of the Mind, 28 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti ...

https://poets.org/poem/coney-island-mind-28

A Coney Island of the Mind, 11. The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves is not the same wild west the white man found It is a land that Buddha came upon from a different direction It is a wild white nest in the true mad north of introspection where ‘falcons of the inner eye’ dive and die glimpsing in their dying fall all life’s memory of existence and with grave chalk wing draw upon 

Top image: Lawrence Ferlinghetti at his home in San Francisco, California on March 1, 2018.

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti gives a poetry reading at San Francisco's Jazz Cellar nightclub in 1957.

 

FERLENGETTI, ALLEN GINSGURG, BELLA ABZUG


REST IN POWER FERLENGETTI

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

I WAS A REGULAR VISITOR TO SF IN THE EIGHTIES, VISITING FRIENDS, DOING INTERVIEWS IN THE SCI FI COMMUNITY, HANGING OUT WITH THE OTO AND VISITING CITY LIGHTS BOOKS THEN DRINKING BEER  TOKING ACROSS THE LANE AT THE VESUVIUS BAR. I WAS IN CONTACT WITH THE FOLKS PUTTING OUT RESEARCH MAGAZINE OUT OF CITY LIGHTS, A PAL FROM EDMONTON TOOK ME TO THE JAZZ CELLAR WHICH WAS STILL GOING AT THAT TIME. 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: HOWL (plawiuk.blogspot.com)

The four horsemen of US green energy development

Frank T. Manheim, Opinion Contributor 


Energy is the indispensable core resource for every advanced nation. The Biden administration's urgent goal of moving the U.S. to 100 percent renewable or carbon-free energy will require major infrastructural and industrial development while maintaining energy supply in the transition. Potential obstacles to green transformation in the U.S. are currently disputed or underestimated. They are suggested to need serious attention because the stakes are high. The "Four Horsemen" (potential problems) posed here are: 1) Conflict and polarization over environmental and energy policy, 2) bureaucratization and politization of federal aid to state and local infrastructure projects, 3) the regulatory/permitting labyrinth and 4) difficulty in engaging visionary leaders to achieve breakthroughs in manufacturing and infrastructure.

© iStock The four horsemen of US green energy development

Conflict and polarization: A recent historical review shows that U.S. environmentalists and industry have been locked in battle for the last 40 years. No nation can expect success in the demanding task of transforming energy use if major forces like the environmental movement and the industrial-business sector stay at loggerheads. The dilemma is confirmed in the title of a recent book by environmental scientist Michael Mann, "The New Climate War." Mann openly labels U.S. corporations as "the enemy."


Guided by former Norwegian Environmental Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, European nations deliberately avoided the risk of societal conflict by adopting cooperative environmental policies rather than the U.S.'s command and control system. Mann may be right in describing industry's sins, but environmentalists have also embraced unrealistic and damaging positions. For example, leading environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) continue to oppose nuclear energy, biomass and even hydropower, which together dominate current U.S. renewable and non-carbon energy supply. Biomass has been the fastest growing energy source for Sweden, a leading environmental nation. In 2015 Sweden had already exceeded its target of 50 percent renewable energy as a percent of total energy supply, whereas the U.S. percentage was at the bottom of those for European nations, at 8.7 percent.

Federal funding for state and local infrastructure projects: Requirements involve five subtitles of the federal administrative code with a total of 270 categories. Each category can run to dozens of pages. Only large and well-connected organizations can navigate this formidable system. Further, the system's labor and contract requirements stipulate regional stakeholder representation that complicates and diffuses decisionmaking and management authority. In the Washington, D.C. area, a superior underground plan for extending subway lines to the Dulles Airport was changed to a surface option in order to save money and gain federal support. It is now seriously delayed, and its outlays are far greater than the original plan. The Purple Line, conceived in 1996 to extend rapid transit to the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C., collapsed in 2020 after litigation, delays and deferred payments.

Regulatory/permitting problems: Notwithstanding passage of the FAST Act in 2015 (designed to streamline federal highway construction approvals), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimated that average NEPA Act approvals take 4.5 years. Without reducing such rates, major Biden initiatives would not even get permits during the administration's tenure. The Chrysler building, still a jewel in the Manhattan skyline, was completed in 1930 after 20 months of construction. Boston's Big Dig was planned in 1982 and 1983 but didn't get full federal permits until 1991. Its huge federal subsidies made it a milch cow for local communities, and the project ended with a 500 percent cost overrun. Permitting problems and NIMBY have crippled U.S. offshore wind turbine development. A single offshore wind turbine field operates in the U.S.'s most wind energy-rich Atlantic corridor, while 5,000 wind turbines operate in European waters. New offshore wind proposals are exclusively in federal waters (whose greater distance from shore can double cost) because riparian owners don't want to look at wind turbines in coastal waters.

Talent and entrepreneurship: Throughout U.S. history, breakthroughs like inventions, bridges and skyscrapers have required visionary leaders. The U.S.'s current breakthrough achievements are in information technology (the internet, Google, Facebook, Twitter), or marketing (Amazon and eBay), areas of activity with few legal and permitting barriers compared with industrial or infrastructure projects. With exceptions like Apple's products (produced in China) and Elon Musk's initiatives, there are few breakthroughs in manufacturing, and none in infrastructure.

What to do? President Biden's first address recognized the seriousness of U.S. polarization by emphasizing his administration's intention to promote national unity and cooperation. His green energy plan called for "100 percent American manufacturing for energy-related products." But continued congressional gridlock can encourage unilateral policies. Neither such strategies nor the academicized recent National Academy of Science book on decarbonization offer promise to avoid the four horsemen. They could potentially leave more areas of economic decay as happened with the economic decline in the 1970s.

A more positive approach would involve systematic inclusion of industry in planning, as is standard policy in Germany and Sweden. At the least, the administration would be fully informed of industry positions and concerns. The latter would not be left with only an oppositional role or support to the political party out of power.

The final need is to modernize existing U.S. environmental law that was enacted in response to earlier crises and is no longer adequate to the needs of the nation (see books by Fiorino and Schoenbrod). EU policies offer practical models that have shown stability across countries and political administrations. The current Congress is in political paralysis and unlikely to be able to undertake meaningful efforts of this type. But a nonpartisan approach to reform was suggested in my earlier book. Like the Fed chairman or FBI chief, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator's term of office would be extended and the nominee would be chosen from a short list prepared by a bipartisan task group. New duties of the office would include drafting proposed reform legislation. It would seek to professionalize environmental management, removing it from the swings and pressures of politics. Empowered to draw on the best expertise, domestic and foreign, it could move environmental management toward true sustainability.

Frank T. Manheim is an affiliate professor and distinguished research fellow at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. Manheim is a former senior ocean and earth scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

These Cities Are Seeing Surges In Vaccinations — But Only In The Wealthiest Neighborhoods

Sarah Midkiff 

Over the past couple of weeks, some states have expanded eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines to certain age-specific and at-risk groups. The light at the end of the coronavirus tunnel is beginning to feel closer. But while early data is incomplete, a clear divide is already emerging: People in wealthy — often white — communities are getting vaccinated at disproportionately higher rates.

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So far, data has shown that low-income communities of color have been hit hardest by coronavirus, so why is it that largely white neighborhoods have been able to flood vaccination appointment systems — or get around them entirely — taking up a considerably outsized share of already limited resources?

According to data released last weekend for New York City, white people have received nearly half of the available doses of the vaccine. Meanwhile, Black and Latinx residents were greatly underrepresented given their respective share of the city’s population. In Colorado, 1 of 16 white residents has received the vaccine so far. In comparison, only 1 of 50 Latinx residents have, despite making up 20% of the state’s population, reports Colorado Springs’ The Gazette. These are just a couple of examples of unequal access nationwide. Furthermore, there are countless examples of wealthy people using connections and creatively skirting requirements to jump the line.

In Florida, board members of a West Palm Beach nursing home showed up to get COVID-19 shots meant for their residents. A SoulCycle instructor in New York publicized getting the vaccine on social media claiming she was an “educator.” Had she not, she would not have been qualified to receive the vaccine yet.

Perhaps the clearest example of this inequity, though, is in California. Data shows that of the state’s 40 million residents, those in wealthy areas are receiving far more vaccinations than those in poorer neighborhoods. In a study released by the L.A. County Department of Public Health, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, and Pacific Palisades — some of the area’s wealthiest neighborhoods — report some of the highest vaccination rates, with 25% or more residents receiving at least one dose. In comparison, neighborhoods reporting vaccination rates under 9% are among those considered less affluent.

This is in some part due to the appointment registration process. Whoever can devote the most time to getting an appointment is often the one who gets the appointment. It is also affected by a region’s ease of distribution. Regions like the San Francisco Bay Area were able to distribute vaccinations more easily by leveraging ample resources, whereas overburdened communities have had to scale back vaccination efforts, according to NBC News, because they simply do not have the power to do more.

“The findings clearly indicate very significant inequities in the distribution of vaccine to date,” Dr. Paul Simon, chief science officer for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health told The Los Angeles Times. “These inequities are unjust and unacceptable and demand renewed efforts to address them.”

It’s impossible to deny that the vaccine rollout has been slow and uneven. Public patience has worn thin, but for some, additional time and expense mean nothing in terms of getting a vaccine that is being treated as a commodity. For most, however, spending additional resources is simply not an option. They are at the mercy of the convoluted system. Some of this, according to The New York Times, is due to a confluence of obstacles like registration phone lines and websites taking hours to navigate lack of transportation, and difficulty getting time off to get to appointments.

In an interview with Insider, Arthur Caplan, founder of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine, described the vaccine rollout process as “a screwed-up mess.” Caplan said he believed wealthy people were incentivized to use their status and influence to cut the line, in part, because of a lack of trust in the system. Regulations have not been consistent from state to state and appointments have been difficult to come by. “People began to say, ‘To hell with it, I’m going to use my money or my connections and see what I could do,’” he said.

Privileged peoples’ ability to manipulate access is not the only factor at play. For some, it is about information. A tracking poll published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in January found that the overall share of people who wanted to get the vaccine as soon as it was available to them had increased since December. However, 43% of Black adults and 37% of Hispanic adults claimed they wanted to “wait and see how it’s working.” In comparison, only 26% of white adults who participated in the poll felt the same.

Some state officials are trying to remedy the problem to varying success. Washington, D.C., pivoted its approach, offering the first day of new appointments to people in zip codes with the highest rates of infection and deaths from coronavirus. After that, more appointments were made available to people from other neighborhoods. Other cities, like Dallas, have attempted to implement similar policies, but have been met with resistance from state officials. Some fear that singling out neighborhoods for priority access could invite lawsuits in the future.

Inequity has been a distressing feature of the pandemic since the start. What makes it worse is that, even before the pandemic, this divide was nothing new. Coronavirus has already pointed a glaring spotlight on who is able to work remotely, who can afford to get weeks’ worth of groceries delivered in advance, and more — and now, it’s laying bare the ugly truth about who has access to the vaccine.

Secret Nazi 'killing lab' was gassing Jews a year before mass deportations began, author says

Shari Kulha 

  

© Provided by National Post An unknown German soldier captured a series of 21 photos of the raids in Amsterdam on Feb. 22, 1941.

The Nazis operated what was essentially a training camp for gassing people as much as a year before they began the large-scale expulsions of Jews to gas chambers, historian Wally de Lang says in a new book.

It began, de Lang told the BBC, when hundreds of Dutchmen were rounded up, in what is known as a razzia, from the streets of Amsterdam in early 1941 — the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. Germany had overtaken the Netherlands the previous spring and the razzia was revenge for the killing of a Dutch Nazi collaborator.

“We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that’s much earlier,” De Lang said.

The last stop for the Dutchmen was the 17th century Hartheim Castle in Upper Austria. In 1940, it had been turned into a killing centre, with a gas chamber retrofitted to a specially adapted room.

De Lang said the Nazis were using gas on prisoners of war at Hartheim in 1941, months before Hitler created the Final Solution in January 1942.

“It was a kind of laboratory (for the Nazis) to improve their knowledge of everything that we see at Auschwitz on a much, much bigger scale.”

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De Lang learned that of the group of 340 Jews who had been transported from Amsterdam, 108 were murdered at Hartheim between Aug. 11 and 14, 1941. False causes of death were sent to their families.

The castle had been donated decades earlier to the local welfare society for the care of mentally and physically afflicted people. By 1940, some 30,000 of them were actually euthanized at this “hospital” under the German eugenics program. This program was stopped in 1940 after a public outcry, but 12,000 prisoners of war died there from 1941 to 1944 under Action 14f13, the Nazi program to eliminate concentration camp prisoners unable to work. The gassing technology had been adapted and applied in wartime to many national and ethnic groups, including Poles and Spaniards but Jews were the primary target.

During the war, Hartheim was used only for executions, while the staff at the concentration camps associated with it — Mauthausen, Dachau and Gusen — handled its logistics and administration. Mauthausen, housing mainly the intelligentsia, was one of the most brutal of the Nazi concentration camps. Its complex included about 100 sub-camps throughout Austria and by 1945, it held 85,000 people.

In her book, ‘The Raids of 22 and 23 February 1941 in Amsterdam’ (published in Dutch), de Lang said those in command at Mauthausen, where the Dutchmen were temporarily incarcerated, could choose whether to gas people “during the bus ride, halfway to the castle — and then at Hartheim there was a kind of place where no one could see what was going on.”

© NIOD Jewish men are rounded up and put on trucks in Amsterdam on Feb. 22, 1941.

De Long researched the names and fates of the Dutch killed at Hartheim and detailed a series of relocations in which members of the group were murdered at each stop.

She found that the Dutch Jews were first taken from Amsterdam to Camp Schoorl, a prison camp in the Dutch dunes. Of the 425 seized, 388 were sent to Buchenwald, where dozens died. From there, 340 were sent on to Mauthausen on May 22, where many subsequently perished, and then, three months later, the 108 Dutchmen were killed at Hartheim.

DICTATORSHIP OF THE PARTY NOT THE PROLETARIAT

Lam backs Hong Kong electoral changes excluding opponents

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam gave her clear support Tuesday to electoral reforms that would likely further exclude opposition voices and cement Beijing’s control over the semi-autonomous Chinese city’s politics.

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Her comments came a day after a top Beijing official signalled major changes would be coming to ensure Hong Kong is run by “patriots," a sign that China intends to no longer tolerate dissenting voices, 23 years after the former British colony was handed over to Chinese rule with a promise it could maintain its own rights and freedoms for 50 years.

Following China’s imposition of a sweeping national security law on the city last year, authorities have moved to expel members of the city’s Legislative Council deemed insufficiently loyal and rounded up veteran opposition leaders on charges including illegal assembly and colluding with foreign forces. Government critics and Western governments accuse Beijing of going back on its word and effectively ending the “one country, two systems” framework for governing the dynamic Asian financial hub.

Lam said political strife and unrest in the city, including anti-government protests in 2019 as well as protests in 2014, showed there were always some people who are “rather hostile” to the central authorities in China.

“I can understand that the central authorities are very concerned, they do not want the situation to deteriorate further in such a way that ‘one country, two systems’ cannot be implemented,” Lam said at a regular news briefing.

The Hong Kong government on Tuesday also said it plans to require district councillors — many of whom are directly elected by their constituents and tend to be more politically independent — to pledge allegiance to Hong Kong as a special region of China. Currently, only the chief executive, high officials, executive council members, lawmakers and judges are required to take an oath of office.

Those who are found to take the oath improperly or who do not uphold the city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law, will be disqualified and barred from running for office for five years, according to the Secretary for constitutional and Mainland Affairs, Erick Tsang.

Opposition figures swept district council elections following the 2019 protests and the Beijing authorities have since sought to prevent them from exerting influence on other aspects of the political system.

The move comes after an oath-taking controversy in 2016 ion which six pro-democracy lawmakers were expelled from the legislature after court rulings that they had not properly pledged allegiance because they mispronounced words, added words or read the oath extremely slowly.

Hong Kong's legislature is expected to deliberate the draft legal amendments on March 17.

On Monday, Xia Baolong, director of Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, said Hong Kong could only be ruled by “patriots,” which exclude those who lobby other countries for foreign sanctions and “troublemakers.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin added to those assertions Tuesday, saying that “people in important positions, holding important powers and shouldering important administration responsibilities must be staunch patriots. It is a matter of course."

The electoral changes are expected to be discussed and possibly passed at next month’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature, and its advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

They will likely take the form of a redistribution of votes in the 1,200-member electoral commission that selects Hong Kong’s chief executive, subject to Beijing’s veto. The commission is composed of voting blocs intended to represent Hong Kong's various economic, educational and social sectors, along with its largely Beijing-dominated political institutions. The one exception is the 117 commission members drawn from among the city's 458 local district councillors.

With all other commission members deemed to be firmly under Beijing's control, speculation has risen that the 117 district council votes will be transferred to another bloc, possibly that of Hong Kong’s representatives to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, ensuring that they will follow Beijing’s directives.

It remains unclear whether Lam, who is deeply unpopular among Hong Kong's population, will seek a second five-year term in next year’s poll.

Another possibility is that China will close what it calls “loopholes” in the election for members of the Legislative Council, now entirely dominated by pro-Beijing legislators since opposition deputies resigned en masse last year after four were expelled for being insufficiently loyal to the government. Lam postponed elections for the council last year, citing concerns over COVID-19, in a move largely seen as designed to prevent an opposition victory.

Of the 70 members of the council, half are directly elected from geographic constituencies while the rest are drawn from trade and other special interest groups. Changes could include preventing district counsellors from also sitting in the body or simply raising the requirements for loyalty and patriotism above the already stringent levels they are set at now.

Zen Soo, The Associated Press