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Posts published in “Day: December 30, 2021”

Critical theory

jones

Originally published in The Hill.

As the 2020 election entered its final stretch, Donald Trump was searching for a means of blunting the Black Lives Matter (BLM) fervor that threatened his electoral chances in some swing states. He’d had some success with claims that Democrats supported lawlessness and wanted to defund the police but, understanding that the best defense is a strong offense, he apparently felt the need to mount a vigorous counterattack.

Trump discovered the perfect weapon on the September 1 episode of Tucker Carlson’s show. A far-right activist, Christopher Rufo, was expounding about the dangers of critical race theory (CRT), claiming it promoted the belief that America is an irredeemably racist society. Rufo’s presentation must have struck a responsive chord because Trump immediately picked up the theme. Just 22 days later he churned out an executive order prohibiting the promotion of CRT, as well as sexism, in federal programs.

Although Trump lost the presidential race, he planted a seed that has been vigorously nourished by the extreme right ever since. CRT has become the weapon of choice in the Republican culture wars. Attacking CRT and claiming that kids from pre-K to the university level are being indoctrinated in the pernicious doctrine has become commonplace across the country.

While Fox news has been the primary purveyor of CRT hysteria on a national scale, a large network of right-wing organizations has taken the fight to the state and local levels. These include the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange and the Social Policy Network (SPN), which has affiliates in every state.

The SPN entity in Idaho bears the ill-fitting name, Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF). The organization has developed significant clout in the Idaho Legislature in recent years with its hard-edged culture war tactics. Legislators defy the IFF’s wishes at their peril. They therefore paid close attention when IFF called for legislation this year banning CRT “indoctrination” in Idaho public schools.

Idaho’s State Board of Education and teachers were dumbfounded by the allegations that CRT existed in the public schools and that kids were being indoctrinated. Local school boards, which oversee educational operations, were equally mystified by the charges. Even the legislators being urged on by IFF to put a stop to CRT could not produce any credible evidence that it existed in the state.

Nevertheless, IFF minions in the Legislature killed one school funding bill, stopped others in their tracks and made it known that nothing more would be done to fund education until a bill to combat CRT was passed. A bill drawing some wording from the Trump executive order was cobbled together and passed so that the Legislature could get back to work.

Organizations like IFF have spawned legislative battles in other states to stamp out non-existent CRT indoctrination as a means of winning elections and growing their power. Texas enacted a far-reaching CRT bill on June 17. The bill was strongly supported by IFF’s Texas counterpart and the national ultra-conservative network that has pushed such legislation in Idaho and across the nation.

The Texas concern about indoctrination is hard to square with the state’s long-standing use of textbooks having a definite racist slant. Indeed, school children in Texas and other former Confederate states were for many years fed a skewed racial history of the South. Between 1889 and 1969, almost 70 million kids in southern states were taught the “Lost Cause” version of history where plantation owners had good relations with their slaves, generally treated them kindly, and fought the Civil War on the principle of state’s rights, not slavery.

The CRT culture warfare has also infected governmental bodies at the local level across the country. Local school boards have found themselves beseeched with unfounded claims that their schools are promoting the theory, resulting in heated confrontations, contested races for board positions and recall elections. According to an analysis of recent media reports, at least 165 groups have been formed “to disrupt lessons on race and gender.”

The fight over CRT was percolating before Trump embraced it as his own political weapon last September. His adoption of the divisive issue supercharged it on the national stage. It is not just a struggle over the curriculum at state-supported schools across the nation, but a potent weapon of far-right candidates to stir division and win local, state and national elections.

And for some ultra-right organizations, like IFF and its national affiliates, it is also a tool to discredit and bring about the dismantlement of the public education system. The President of IFF disclosed the organization’s ultimate objective in a February 2019 op-ed: “I don’t think government should be in the education business. It is the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today.”

The upshot is that CRT is virtually non-existent in public schools across the nation, is misunderstood or misrepresented by those using it as a political weapon, and has the distinct possibility of doing extreme damage to the system of free public schools that has brought America to greatness.
 

Jordan Cove and the snap decision

stapiluslogo2

This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle on December 29.

Snap decisions, so often prized, are not always the best. Sometimes the inefficiencies of government and regulation can lead to the right result.

Consider the recently defunct - after half a year of suspended animation, and a dozen years of regulatory limbo - the Jordan Cove Energy Project.

Go back a generation or slightly more and you’ll encounter a lot of discussion about the energy crisis in the Northwest, how our accelerating use of energy is outstripping our production of it. News stories were full of plans for development of nuclear plants (with attendant financial catastrophe) and coal-fired production operations. A new federal agency, the Northwest Power Planning Council, was set up (based at Portland) to develop strategies for coping with the power gap and developing more.

Times change. There’s a good case now for scrapping the council (now called the Northwest Power and Conservation Council ans which, okay, just got a new member from Oregon, long-time legislator Ginny Burdick). And the region is floating along quite well with existing power sources.

We don’t need to do, in other words, what we once thought we needed to.

In 2007 two Canadian groups, Jordan Cove Energy Project and the Pacific Connector Gas Pipeline, started regulatory applications to import natural gas, which was then in short supply, from Asia. (The controlling partner most recently has been the firm Pembina.) The plan was to ship compressed gas across the Pacific Ocean to a terminal at Coos Bay, and then send it by pipeline to points east. Natural gas prices then were high enough that the business model appeared to work.

The region would get new jobs, as always much appreciated at Coos Bay. The downsides were partly environmental and partly the result of running the pipeline through private as well as public lands: Property owners were hit with the prospect of eminent domain proceedings seizing land and houses.

All of that might have happened if regulation had been super-efficient. It was not.

Initial federal approval did come in 2009, and the wheels started to turn, but opposition grew and proceedings thickened. During that time, natural gas production in the United States picked up, and prices fell.

The market changed so much that not only did the original business model no longer work, but the backers of the project in 2013 asked for permission not to import but rather export natural gas. The energy needs of Americans were no longer a driving consideration, and fewer jobs probably would have been opened.

The project refused to die until the wheels came off this year. After the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave its permission to go ahead, subject to Oregon state approval, Oregon turned thumbs down. Last month, when FERC asked whether the company still planned to pursue the pipeline, the Jordan Cove consortium threw in the towel and said it would withdraw its application.

Jordan Cove has advocates. Scott Lauermann of the American Petroleum Institute said the withdrawal was “yet another unfortunate example of a much needed U.S. energy infrastructure project being terminated due to unnecessary regulatory delays.”

A commonplace line of argument these days - and yet. Imagine that, back in 2007, the project had been hurriedly approved. What would have been the end result?

We wouldn’t have any more natural gas, not in the United States, since by the time construction was done the market would have forced export of the product (the direction Pembina turned toward anyway).

But we would have had more environmental damage and, a number of people (including Representative Peter DeFazio) said, it would have been one of the biggest carbon emitters in Oregon, putting more pressure on everyone else to meet carbon goals.

Others have pointed out additional environmental problems: “Dozens of animals and plants listed under the Endangered Species Act are threatened by this proposal, including iconic coho salmon. The pipeline would have to cross steep mountainous terrain that poses excessive landslide risks, while the terminal is proposed in an area at-risk of severe earthquake and tsunami damage.”

Property owners in and near the planned pipeline routes haven’t easily been able to sell or improve their property. Close to a third of homeowners in the planned pipeline area refused entreaties to an agreement to sell, a strong protest. Today, those owners are in better shape.

Sometimes when we move too fast we can jump too far ahead of our needs, and be bitten by the solutions we adopt.