Origins of the Church Key

 

 

 

 

 CHURCH KEY

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q From Stan Kid: Do you know how the term church key came to be used as a slang for a bottle opener? The best info I could find dates the usage to 1951 in the United States, but I can find no specifics.

A This one is getting a little long in the tooth, like its users (such as me), who can remember when beer always came in bottles fitted with caps that needed a special tool to open them (though the more macho or foolish would show off by opening them with their teeth; gripping bottle tops in a vice between door and doorframe was a trick for emergencies, but only when the door belonged to somebody else). The standard bottle opener was made of metal, with a roughly round, oval or triangular open shape at one end to grip the cap.

The shape of the business end of the tool reminded people of the often ornate handles to big, old-fashioned door keys. The link with churches in particular was surely because in the experience of most people such big keys opened church doors. It’s also more than probable that an irreverent joke was attached as well, in that drinking beer was an unchurchly thing to do.

Before the messages start to be written, let me rapidly move on to a further stage in the development of the term. As you say, the phrase church key is only recorded in print from 1951, though there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest it is rather older in the spoken language, perhaps from the late 1930s. This was around the time at which beer began to be sold in cans rather than bottles.
These early cans also needed a tool to open them, since the pull tabs of today were not to be introduced until about 1962. The tool was a stout flat strip of metal with a sharp point, which you pressed into the top of the can to puncture a triangular hole (two were needed on opposite sides, I recall, to let air in so the beer would flow easily). By an obvious analogy, these also came to be called church keys, even though they were a completely different shape.

The cap on these beer bottles, by the way, is a crown cork, named after a fanciful view of the ring of crinkled points around the edge of the metal closure before it was clamped on the neck of the bottle. It was invented in 1898 by William Painter, and his firm, the Crown Cork and Seal Company of Baltimore, is still very much around, though these days it spends most of its time making aluminium cans and other packaging products. (Please forgive an enthusiast’s digression: I used to run a museum of cidermaking and would demonstrate a hand crown corker to visiting parties. A good operator could do 15 a minute but I never managed so many.)

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Churchkey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

History

A churchkey initially referred to a simple hand-operated device for prying the cap (called a "crown cork") off a glass bottle; this kind of closure was invented in 1898, although there is no evidence that the opener was called a "church key" at that time.^[1] The shape and design of some of these openers did resemble a large simple key.^[2]

In 1935, beer cans with flat tops were marketed, and a device to puncture the lids was needed. The same term, "church key", came to be used for this new invention: made from a single piece of pressed metal, with a pointed end used for piercing cans — devised by D.F. Sampson^[3][4] for the American Can Company, who depicted operating instructions on the cans themselves,^[5] and typically gave away free "quick and easy" openers with their beer cans.^[6]
 

Three Things to Know About the NSA Verizon Surveillance Scandal

FindLaw  FOR LEGAL PROFESSIONALS

Three Things to Know About the NSA Verizon Surveillance Scandal

By William Peacock, Esq. on June 6, 2013 11:11 AM

 

 

 

When the news of the latest, and some might argue greatest, overreaching surveillance effort by the U.S. government broke, my initial response was a half-yawn. Phone records? Whoo-hooo. The NSA will now know exactly how lonely my life is.

Actually, they won't. Verizon is too dang expensive.

Then we learned that more than phone numbers were involved. The NSA has been subpoenaing metadata, from phone serial numbers to GPS locations. This is more than "how many times did he call Pizza My Heart?" This is every call, every GPS location, and even every cell tower that your phone connects to, transferred to the government's computers daily.

This isn't 1984. This is Enemy of the State.

1. The Data is Not Simply Numbers

In U.S. v. Maynard, the D.C. Circuit addressed what one might be able to discern from GPS tracking:

"A person who knows all of another travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

The metadata sought by the government explicitly excludes personal identification, except, how many public records don't have your phone number? Applied for federal benefits, a driver's license, or a student loan lately? You probably included your phone number.

If the NSA computers are powerful enough to dig through every cell in America's metadata, they can certainly handle a little cross-referencing to public records databases.

2. Bush Did it First

Senator Diane Feinstein told the Guardian, "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."

Unfortunately, saying, "the Republicans did it too" doesn't make it right, nor does "Judge OK'd it" ensure legality.

3. It May Not be Legal

The statute allowing such intrusions into Americans' privacy, 50 USC § 1861, requires "reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation... to ... protect against international terrorism ..."

Relevance, most would agree, is amongst the vaguest terms of legal art. Anything could be arguably relevant to a terrorism investigation. That is why discretion is generally vested in judges to make reasoned decisions. We'd be curious to know if there was any reasoning used at all when the judge approved tracking every Verizon-serviced cell phone in America.

Finally, note that the statute requires "minimization procedures" to be adopted by the Attorney General. These are supposed to detail retention and dissemination of information concerning "unconsenting United States persons" and presumably would limit the amount of time the NSA can store the data (though there is no specific time limit in the statute).
Related Resources:

• Verizon court order: telephone call metadata and what it can show (The Guardian)
• Verizon's Internal Memo On The NSA Surveillance Snafu (BuzzFeed)
• Should You Be Scared of FBI Spyware? (FindLaw's Technologist)

Is Prism Really a Scandal?

The Surveillance Scandals

Content Section
 

Is Prism Really a Scandal?

 
by Alan M. Dershowitz Jun 9, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

 

Pundits are ranting about it, but what we really need is a discussion about privacy vs. security.

Half a century ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about “the paranoid style in American politics.” He discussed the influence of conspiracy theories and extremism in our collective mindset.

Mark Lennihan/AP

Since that time, two phenomena have become apparent. The first is that we may indeed have much to be paranoid about. Or put another way, “Even paranoids have real enemies.” Watergate, and the Nixon Administration in general, demonstrated even to the least paranoid among us that government officials are fully capable of misusing the IRS against political enemies, breaking into psychiatric records of perceived traitors, burglarizing the political opposition, and all other manner of dirty tricks that cross the line from politics as usual to felonies.

The second phenomenon is that the first phenomenon has caused many Americans to become even more paranoid, to seek conspiracies where none exist, to confuse overzealousness with evil intentions, and to assume malevolence rather than incompetence or laziness. The reality is that over the past 50 years, while we have somewhat less to be paranoid about, the paranoid streak in American politics has broadened considerably.

The most recent revelations regarding the mining of phone and internet data provide a case in point. The initial revelation was made by a man named Glenn Greenwald, who wrote about them in the Guardian and who has been all over the media taking a victory lap. Greenwald is the personification of the paranoid streak in American politics. He is more of an ideologue than a reporter. He has long been an apologist for terrorism—a word he believes serves only as an excuse for violence and oppression by America and its allies. He has pushed false stories that his paper was forced to backpedal on, such as an AP report blaming the incendiary video “The Innocence of Islam” on an Israeli Jew living in California. He is Chomsky-like in his willingness to blame most of the world’s ills on the United States, Israel, the Obama Administration and liberals who do not buy into his radical worldview. He viciously opposed Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Greenwald would not understand the word “nuance” if he tripped over it, which he often does.

Now he is pushing the view that the Obama Administration’s surveillance program is not really designed to prevent terrorism but rather to gather information for less salutary purposes. Greenwald’s hard-left conspiracy theories are attractive to far-right talk show hosts and bloggers who share a common suspicion of liberal government. This suspicion has been nurtured by the recent IRS scandal and the Justice Department’s overzealous pursuit of journalists. The result has been a debate dominated by the extremes, with little patience for nuance, calibration, or balancing. The reality may be less exciting (and less suited for talk show dialogue) than the paranoid narrative, but the boring reality is what must be addressed if necessary reform is to be implemented.

There is an enormous difference between listening to the content of people’s phone calls and creating a database of telephone numbers.

And reform of the current excesses of surveillance is indeed necessary. There is too much secrecy, too little accountability, too much classification, not enough information, too much speculation. This all feeds into the paranoid streak because we don’t know what we don’t know. For those who trust the government this informational lacunae is an excuse for inaction. For those who do not trust the government, it is an excuse for ranting and raving instead of legislating compromised reform.

It is important not to lump all forms of intrusion together, but rather to consider them category by category.

There is an enormous difference between listening to the content of people’s phone calls and creating a database of telephone numbers used to make and receive calls and their duration. Creating the meta-database is a fairly debatable issue and should be the subject of hearings at which non-classified information can be discussed. I, for one, would like to hear the arguments for and against such a database before deciding whether on balance the benefits of the intrusion outweigh their obvious costs. For decades, the Supreme Court has permitted what are called mail watches, under which postal authorities have the power to maintain data based on the outsides of envelopes—the address to and from which the letter is sent. We no longer send letters. Now we use quicker and more efficient forms of communication. As technology changes, so must the law.

I also want to hear both sides of the debate concerning the far more serious intrusions into e-mails and other forms of modern electronic communication. Although the Obama Administration assures us that these more intrusive techniques are not used against Americans, there is every reason to believe that at least some Americans are caught up in the electronic net, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

So let the debate begin, but don’t let it be dominated by the extremes or fueled by paranoia. We need reform, not revolution—improvement, not impeachment.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Alan Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard and author of The Case For Peace and The Trials of Zion.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

Tags:

• Terror networks,
• Barack Obama,
• U.S. News

How Come It's Not Terrorism When a White Guy from the South Does It?

Consortium News / By Nima Shirazi

How Come It's Not Terrorism When a White Guy from the South Does It?

 

The terror double standard continues to be exploited by law enforcement authorities. 

 

 

 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pictured in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on February 14, 2013. Bloomberg said Sunday he will invest $12 million in a nationwide ad campaign to counter the powerful US gun lobby and rally support for background 

June 5, 2013  |  

 

In late May, a threatening letter laced with the deadly chemical ricin was sent from Shreveport, Louisiana, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a response to the mayor’s outspoken support for stricter gun control laws. Two identical letters, also containing the lethal substance, were addressed to both President Barack Obama and the head of the Washington D.C. lobbying group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which is managed and funded by Bloomberg himself.

The contents of the letters are clearly the work of a right-wing gun nut and readas follows: “You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, god-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What’s in this letter is nothing compared to what I’ve got planned for you.”

Despite lethally targeting civilians and non-military officials far from any active battlefield, no one is referring to these acts as terrorism. Not the press, not political pundits, not the intended victims. No one.

In fact, Bloomberg himself was nonplussed by the whole ordeal, tellingreporters on May 30, “I’m not angry. There are people who I would argue do things that may be irrational, do things that are wrong, but it’s a very complex world out there and we just have to deal with that.”

Yes, Mike, it is a very complex world. This world is so complex, in fact, that an easily identifiable act of terrorism isn’t considered terrorism for one simple reason: it probably wasn’t committed by a Muslim, but rather by some white guy in the South.

Clearly, while white guys who send murderous mail are merely acting irrationally and doing something wrong, potential violence by members of the Muslim faith present a singular threat to our civilized society. So much so, in fact, that Michael Bloomberg himself believes our own laws and the bedrock of that very society are not good enough to defend against such a scourge to humanity.

In April, following the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, Bloomberg declared that the American obsession with privacy, civil rights and basic freedoms were antiquated and trite when compared to the dire threat posed by hypothetical barbarian hordes of “Islamists.”

At a press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, Bloomberg said, “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Yes, how complex it is. So complex that, although a 2010 study by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found that Islamic terrorism accounted for only six percent of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 while a 2012 analysis by the Center for American Progress reported that a whopping“[f]ifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists,” Michael Bloomberg has made it his duty to illegally spy on and harass Muslim communities in the New York Metro area.

Bloomberg has presided over a massive, illegal covert domestic surveillance and ethno-religious profiling program that have targeted, alienated and traumatized Muslims throughout the Northeast, despite the fact that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, more Americans have been killed in right-wing terrorist plots than byIslamic terrorists.

“NYPD surveillance has impacted every facet of American Muslim life,” explains Nermeen Arastu, a volunteer attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), which co-authored a March 2013report entitled, “Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims.”

“The program has stifled speech, communal life and religious practice and criminalized a broad segment of American Muslims,” Arastu added, “The isolationism that comes with being a ‘spied on’ community means that American Muslims are getting a fundamentally inferior opportunity to exercise their constitutional rights.”

But, for Mayor Mike, just because a white guy tries to kill you by post doesn’t mean white people in general deserve to be spied on, rounded up, marginalized, and profiled. Keep calm and carry on, he says. These things happen.

Last week, on Chris Jansing’s MSNBC show, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said it was “probably not fair to taint the entire gun rights movement with the actions of this disturbing letter because there is a serious debate and two sides to it when it comes to the issue of guns.” Jansing agreed. “Yeah, and it’s unfortunate that, for a few, it comes to this,” she said.
Not fair, she said. Unfortunate, she said.

Just last year, Bloomberg defended his Muslim surveillance program, claiming, “Everything the NYPD has done is legal, it is appropriate, it is constitutional,” and, unsurprisingly, by invoking that sacred strawman: 9/11. “We have not forgotten the lesson of that terrible day on 9/11,” he insisted, sanctimoniously adding, “We have to keep this country safe. … Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”

Bloomberg’s insistence that, “We don’t target individuals based on race or religion. We follow leads,” is fascinating because, just six months after he said this, an Associated Press report on court testimony by the NYPD stated, “In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department’s secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.”

But Bloomberg’s targeting of Muslims isn’t his only method of rooting out the evil that lurks in the hearts of brown and black men. A month ago, the billionaire mayor defended his racistStop-and-Frisk policy by invoking – what else? – the ever-looming conversation-ender: the constant scourge and fear of terrorism.

“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” he said. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”

Again he even claimed that our own laws and efforts not to discriminate against certain communities are making us less safe. “God forbid terrorists succeed in striking our city because of a politically driven law that undermines the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence-gathering efforts,” he said.

Even the editors of the New York Times were unmoved by Bloomberg’s fear-mongering defense of racial profiling. “Mayor Michael Bloomberg trotted out shopworn, discredited arguments this week,” they wrote, “while defending the constitutionally suspect police program under which hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers have been detained and questioned on the streets every year.”

They note, “[G]uns were seized in only 0.15 percent of all stops. In addition, only 5.4 percent of all stops resulted in an arrest, and about 6 percent led to a summons. This means that in nearly 90 percent of cases, the citizens who were stopped were doing nothing illegal. In some cases, prosecutors declined to automatically prosecute arrests made in connection with the program because they knew that the stops were illegal.”

In 2011, 84 percent of all those stopped under the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk rampage were black and Hispanic, despite respectively representing 23 and 29 percent of New York City’s total population.

Under Michael Bloomberg’s reign, minority communities have been collectively punished for the criminal actions of a few. In his complex world, blacks and Latinos are all potential gun-toting killers, while all Muslims are jihadists-in-training. Yet, an actual gun-toting lunatic who actually tries to murder Bloomberg is an anomaly, an aberration, nothing to be concerned with. Simply something “we just have to deal with.”

But call it terrorism? No, never. Not if the perpetrator is white and not Muslim.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer and currently a columnist for The Guardian, has been addressingthis double standard for years.
“Terrorism,” he writes, “is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: ‘a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.’”

So while the NYPD continues to terrorize minority communities and the FBI continues to foil phony Muslim terror plots that it itself devises, plans and funds, rest assured that all the well-armed and well-represented white folks in our noble nation will continue to live free from suspicion, scrutiny and surveillance no matter how muchpostal poison some of them send and how many mass shootings some of them carry out.

Maybe it’s not complex after all, maybe it’s just complexion. Remember that when you turn off the light tonight.

Nima Shirazi is co-editor of the Iran, Iraq and Turkey pages for the online magazine Muftah. His political analysis can be found on his blog, Wide Asleep in America. He tweets @WideAsleepNima.

Nima Shirazi is a political commentator from New York City. His analysis of United States foreign policy and Middle East issues is published on his website, WideAsleepInAmerica.com

5 ways Congress wants to tackle the military’s sexual assault problem

5 ways Congress wants to tackle the military’s sexual assault problem

By Pro Publica

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 13:02 EDT

Topics: air force

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica



When the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the U.S. military’s sexual assault crisis, lawmakers grilled Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine officials on the alarmingly high number of rapes and other sexual abuses in their ranks.

Political momentum to address the problem has been building since the Pentagon released statistics last month showing that sexual assault increased by 35 percent between 2010 and 2012. The outcry grew louder when a string of scandals came to light, including alleged sexual assaults by Army and Air Force officials who were in charge of preventing sexual abuse.

Senators have rushed to draft legislation to hold attackers accountable and provide support for victims. But at the Senate hearing, officials steadfastly opposed most major changes in the way sexual assault cases are prosecuted. “It will undermine the readiness of the force … [and] will hamper the timely delivery of justice,” said Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno.

Here’s a rundown of key congressional proposals and what the military is saying about them.

1. Stop giving military commanders the final say on rape convictions

Under the military’s criminal procedures, commanders have clemency powers, which means they can dismiss military court convictions “for any reason or no reason.” The policy came under fire this spring when Air Force Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin overturned a jury’s ruling that Lt. Col. James Wilkerson, a fighter pilot, was guilty of aggravated sexual assault. Another official, Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms, was blocked from a promotion in May for throwing out a captain’s sexual assault conviction without any public explanation.

In April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel voiced support for stripping commanders of this power. Under Hagel’s proposal, commanders could still reduce someone’s sentence but would have to submit a reason in writing. Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., have called for similar changes. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., introduced a House bill that goes further, removing a commander’s authority to overturn or reduce a judge’s sentence.
Military officials are open to reforming the policy, though they say the Wilkerson case inflated outrage over a rarely-used power. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Armed Services Committee and former Air Force lawyer, has been the only lawmaker to speak out against the proposed change in policy.

2. Have lawyers determine which assault cases are credible 2014 not the defendant’s boss

 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has called for the most major shift in how the military tries sexual assault cases. Now, commanders decide which cases are investigated and prosecuted, and which are thrown out. Gillibrand’s bill proposes giving independent military prosecutors that power for sex crimes and other serious charges. Commanders have an incentive to ignore rape allegations, advocates of the change say, because it reflects poorly on their leadership.

Military officials are strongly opposed to such a change in authority. “The consequences of such a decision would be … extraordinarily damaging to the nation’s security,” Army Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote in a letter to the Armed Services Committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. The change would “undermine good order and discipline” by sending a message that commanders “cannot be trusted,” Dempsey said.

3. Make sure a sex crime conviction means losing your job

Sen. McCaskill has led a bipartisan effort to require that anyone convicted of “rape, sexual assault, forcible sodomy, or an attempt to commit any of those offenses” be dismissed or given a dishonorable discharge.

At the hearing, McCaskill argued that a soldier’s job performance shouldn’t be a factor in deciding whether to move forward with sexual assault cases. Currently, commanders may consider it when deciding whether to prosecute. “The facts of a felony are the facts of a felony,” McCaskill said. “I don’t care how good a pilot it is.”

Lt. Gen. Richard C. Harding of the Air Force argued during the hearing that a defendant’s character should be relevant in determining the case but should not have “overriding weight.”

4. Scrutinize officers appointed to prevent sexual assault

In the past month, there have been not one but two instances of soldiers working in Sexual Assault Prevention and Response offices charged with sexual assault. The chief of the Air Force’s prevention office was arrested last month for groping a woman. A week later, an Army sergeant working as a sexual assault program coordinator was arrested on multiple accusations of sexual abuse and for running a prostitution ring.

Hagel immediately demanded that all officers in the services’ Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branches be retrained, rescreened, and recredentialed. Since then, Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb., have introduced a bill that would elevate those jobs to a higher status, requiring stricter screening and more certification. In a letter to Secretary Hagel, Shaheen and McCaskill wrote that “In many cases, no interviews are required, and the commander plays a hands-off role in choosing who will perform those duties.” The bill would require a commander to pick someone for the post.

5. Make it easier for sexual assault victims to access disability benefits

While the Senate was hearing testimonies by military officials, the House unanimously passed legislation to increase access to disability benefits for sexual assault victims in the military. Veterans battling military sexual trauma face a higher burden of proof than those with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And because most sexual assaults go unreported, there is often little evidence available. Under the proposed law, veterans would only have to show they were diagnosed with a mental health condition that stems from military sexual assault.

Read our Muckreads roundup of the most important reporting on sexual assault in the military.

Is Enbridge Building a Secret Keystone Pipeline?

Published on Monday, June 3, 2013 by Common Dreams

Is Enbridge Building a Secret Keystone Pipeline?

While TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline gets scrutinized, Enbridge is quietly readying its own tar-sands carrying pipeline system

- Andrea Germanos, staff writer 

 

 

Is Enbridge building its own version of the tar sands-carrying Keystone XL pipeline?

 
(Photo: Environmental Defence Canada/cc/flickr)  


InsideClimate News' Lisa Song reports on Monday that the Calgary-based energy giant is putting together plans for 5,000-mile pipeline network that would bring tar sands crude to the U.S., but, unlike TransCanada's Keystone XL, Enbridge's project has thus far escaped the same kind of debate.
The company's piecemeal approach—the expansion would include both new and existing pipelines—has allowed the project to move forward under the radar, Song reports.

Like TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, Enbridge's project would need State Department approval because it crosses the U.S./Canada border.
Al Monaco, Enbridge's CEO and president, laid out the company's expansion plans to shareholders at a meeting in Calgary last month.
In a press release from Enbridge dated May 8, 2013, the company wrote:

While reporting another year of strong corporate performance, Mr. Monaco said Enbridge is poised to connect growing energy supply with key North American markets by expanding its network of liquids pipelines infrastructure in the near future.
Existing pipeline bottlenecks, and the resulting Canadian crude oil discounts, "can be solved by a reconfiguration of the North American pipeline grid, where crude moves from inland markets to coastal markets - and Enbridge is right in the middle of this transformation," said Mr. Monaco.
Between now and 2016, Enbridge expects to roll out a series of major projects that will expand what is already the most complex crude oil pipeline system in the world - Enbridge's Eastern Access program to the U.S. Midwest and eastern Canada; the U.S. Gulf Coast Access program with 585,000 bpd of incremental capacity from the Chicago area; additional capacity to the U.S. Midwest and eastern Canada as part of the Light Oil Access initiative; and development of the Eastern Gulf project from the U.S. Midwest to the eastern Gulf Coast.

A key part of this secretive pipeline push is the company's Alberta Clipper pipeline, Song reports.  Enbridge describes the Alberta Clipper as a 1,000-mile crude oil pipeline between Hardisty, Alberta, and Superior, Wisconsin, and, while its current capacity is 450,000 barrels per day, it has an "ultimate capacity of up to 800,000 barrels per day."

This amount, Song points out, is "larger than the Keystone XL's proposed daily capacity of 830,000 barrels."

Enbridge was dealt a blow on Friday when the government of British Columbia formally rejected its proposed  Northern Gateway pipeline.

The company is also still mired in its disastrous tar sands spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River three years ago, a spill, the National Transportation Safety Board reported, that happened after the company ignored warning signs for five years.

___________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Scam Alert! Press Sleeps Through the Great Post Office Fire Sale

News & Politics  

AlterNet / By Gray Brechin

Scam Alert! Press Sleeps Through the Great Post Office Fire Sale

 

How much of our public domain will turn into private fortunes?

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 28, 2013  |  

 

 

In 1906, surveyor Stephen Puter wrote a tell-all book from prison, Looters of the Public Domain, which details how Puter transferred thousands of acres of prime timberlands in Oregon and Washington from public to private owners. This sort of hustle was common in the 19th century, when much of the public domain was enclosed and converted into private fortunes with congressional help.

History is repeating itself today with the nation's postal service, and much of the press is asleep at the wheel.

The public in 1906 became aware of frauds like Puter's because the U.S. then had a diverse and competitive media environment willing to support gumshoe journalists as well as a president willing to investigate and prosecute criminal activity at the highest level — even U.S. senators of his own party. How times have changed as we now watch the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) looted like prime timberland. A venerable institution that helped build the country is being gutted. This is not, as the mainstream media slothfully claims, because the Internet has rendered it obsolete, but because it represents lumber ripe for the taking while what’s left of the press takes an extended holiday from curiosity.

Last July, the USPS succeeded in uniting a famously fractious town when it announced plans to sell Berkeley’s century-old downtown post office. Berkeley has, ever since, proved a public relations migraine for USPS management. USPS occasionally meets its legal obligation to take public comment on pending sales, and it did so in Berkeley on February 26 at a meeting where USPS representatives endured hours of abuse and outrage from an overflow crowd at the old City Hall. The city council and mayor unanimously condemned the proposed sale. Activists demonstrated at the historic post office, gathered petition signatures, and — in lieu of local press — leafletted town residents about what they were about to lose.

Perhaps because of that unprecedented resistance, Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe paid Mayor Bates the courtesy of a letter he said would “clarify the facts about the Postal Service’s financial crisis.”

That crisis, Donohoe claimed, has forced him to radically shrink his agency while selling properties paid for by U.S. taxpayers for over a century. Among those properties are architecturally distinguished, landmarked and centrally located post offices like Berkeley’s, many of them containing a gallery of unique New Deal murals and sculpture intended for and belonging to the American people. The handsome buildings marked by flagpoles are often the only federal presence in small towns where they double as community centers — and those public venues are vanishing under Donohoe’s watch.

The Postmaster General insisted that his agency’s nearly $16 billion deficit is not the result of a “manufactured crisis.” He neglected to mention the Republican Party’s stated intention to “modernize” the 238-year-old agency by privatizing it. Nor did he cite the pro-privatization white papers churned out by right-wing and libertarian think tanks like Cato and American Enterprise, or the political contributions lavished on congressional representatives by private carriers lusting for the USPS profit centers, or that some of those representatives and their spouses would like to “reform” the USPS right out of existence.

Absent, too, was any mention of the ruinous Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act passed by Congress in 2006 that requires the USPS, within 10 years, to fully fund its retiree health benefit fund 75 years into the future while simultaneously barring it from offering services that would compete with the private sector. Donohoe instead fell back on the “Internet-made-us-do-it” meme so often parroted by the U.S. press when it bestirs itself to report on the postal crisis at all. He explained that in order to put the USPS back onto a sound financial footing, he had slashed the size of its workforce by 193,000 employees through attrition, pared some 21,000 delivery routes, and reduced operating expenses by $15 billion. Despite all this and his recent effort to eliminate Saturday delivery, he clamed that the leaner and meaner USPS had “provided increased access to postal products and services.” Tell that to postal customers and workers these days.

The Postmaster General concluded his letter by insisting that “the Postal Service is the first to acknowledge how important it is to preserve our historic buildings, which,” he said, “is why we are going through a lengthy and transparent process to assure their protection before they are sold.” That lengthy and transparent process includes a minimum15-day comment period following a public meeting that it might hold. Those two weeks give citizens faced with the loss of their post office an opportunity to vent in writing to a USPS which displays all of the transparency of Kafka’s Castle.

Without addressing any of the city’s concerns, the agency responded to Berkeley’s storm of opposition a week after the mayor received Donohoe’s letter with a tart Notice of Approval to proceed with the sale.

The announcement came as little surprise to those who follow the website savethepostoffice.com, for Berkeley’s experience repeats that of dozens of other communities around the U.S from Ukiah, California to the Bronx. Postal customers find their wishes ignored and their historic downtown post offices locked and thrown onto the market. Soon thereafter, the once-public buildings if not demolished are converted to condominiums, real estate offices and restaurants while the services they provided “relocate” to cheesy leased spaces often less accessible to customers. The art they hold falls into limbo or itself becomes inaccessible.

One doesn’t need an MBA to understand that selling a tax-exempt building one owns to lease space one doesn’t is not a good long-range business model —  unless one is the real estate broker that has scored an exclusive contract to sell the public’s property and advise on what to sell. That makes a very good business model indeed.

Although the USPS has a nation-spanning real estate portfolio estimated to be worth as much as $110 billion, the press has, with few exceptions, taken little interest in how it is being flogged and by whom. The USPS gave that remarkably favorable contract to the giant commercial real estate firm CBRE in 2011. That CBRE is chaired and largely owned by the private equity billionaire Richard C. Blum has likewise failed to elicit much curiosity from the press; that Blum is married to one of the most powerful U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein, even less so.
Where such august institutions as the New York Times and Feinstein’s hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, would not go the La Jolla Light went. The Light has given extensive coverage to the pending sale of that town’s downtown post office with its exquisite mural of the coastal landscape. In one article reporter Pat Sherman linked La Jolla’s resistance to Berkeley's, where Blum is well known as the Alpha Regent restructuring the University of California. Sherman furthermore broached allegations of Senator Feinstein’s conflicts of interest past and present. Her office responded with its boilerplate disclaimer that “Senator Feinstein is not involved with and does not discuss any of her husband’s business discussions with him.” Ignoring California’s community property laws, the senator’s office told the Light that “Her husband’s holdings are his separate personal property.” That has satisfied most press outlets.

Despite the failure of the U.S. press to report on or investigate the fire sale of historic post offices and the uncertain fate of the art they contain, resistance is nonetheless growing. Angry customers from Redlands to Chelsea in New York City have been confronting postal representatives. One activist group in Berkeley continues to fight the sale of that town’s post office, while another — the National Post Office Collaborate — has been forging an alliance with other affected communities while engaging the legal firm of Ford & Huff to appeal individual sales and explore further legal actions. The California Legislature has passed a measure urging the USPS to rescind the sale of the Berkeley post office and is considering further action since the Golden State has been disproportionately hit with post office closures and sales.

The dismantling of the nation’s postal service and the sale of the public’s property is yet another facet of Grover Norquist’s famous pledge to so shrink the federal government that he can drown it. Norquist has also expressed his admiration for another Gilded Age when men such as Stephen Puter transferred the public domain into private fortunes. Senator Jennings Randolph once remarked that “When the post office is closed, the flag comes down. When the human side of government closes its doors, we’re all in trouble.”

That is just the kind of trouble Norquist and his congressional marionettes want. That we are getting it has as much to say about the dereliction of the U.S. press as it does about what Postmaster General Dohohoe is doing to liquidate the agency he commands.

Gray Brechin is the founder and project scholar of the California Living New Deal Project.