Why Take Action at FERC?

  [Ted Glick, who wrote this article, is a co-founder and member of the steering committees of Beyond Extreme Energy and of IMAC -- Interfaith Moral Action on Climate. In the '70s he was an antiwar organizer, spending 11 months in prison as a draft resister. Beginning in 2003, he turned his energies to  preventing climate chaos. He has been arrested nineteen times for acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, including six times on climate issues between October 2006 and April 2011,  His spiritual roots are in the Church of the Brethren. His website is at <https://tedglick.com> --   AW, ed.]

By Ted  Glick

Over the last several years a new, growing and increasingly connected grassroots-based movement has emerged onto the national scene. This is the movement in opposition to the expansion of oil and gas pipelines and new fossil fuel infrastructure.

This movement includes landowners whose land is in the crosshairs of oil, gas and pipeline companies looking to put new pipelines on their land. It includes people who are deeply concerned about the heating up of the earth, leading to climate disruption, and who understand that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause. It includes Indigenous peoples whose land, water, sacred burial grounds and sovereignty rights are at risk from these companies. And it includes progressive-minded people who appreciate the unjust and harmful impacts of the rush to build out new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Beyond Extreme Energy, since its founding in the summer of 2014, has been deeply involved with and an important part of this movement.

The primary focus of BXE's work has been to expose and put pressure on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a little-known but very powerful federal regulatory agency in Washington, DC. FERC’s primary responsibility is to regulate the US electrical grid, but it also is tasked with the responsibility of overseeing the permitting of interstate fracked-gas and conventional gas pipelines, infrastructure and export terminals.

Although it was established by Congress and its commissioners are appointed by the President, FERC's $300 million budget relies entirely on industry fees. Furthermore, many of its 1,500 employees have strong personal ties to the energy industry. People move readily through the revolving door that connects FERC to the industry, working first for FERC and then the industry, or vice-versa. All of this has turned FERC into industry’s rubber stamp, as the agency approves virtually every permit that crosses its desk. Research indicates that there have been only two pipeline permits turned down out of approximately 500 applied for over the last 30 years.

Although FERC refuses to listen to concerns from communities threatened by gas infrastructure, the agency provides free multiday workshops for the industry on how best, in essence, to overcome community opposition.  With each permit, FERC demonstrates that it is the easily manipulated enabler for projects that are upending communities all over the country. Left unchecked, this agency, captured by industry, will usher in an all-out switch not to clean energy but to decades of climate-disrupting fracked gas.

Nine-Point FERC Reform Plan

The following nine-point plan for FERC reform has been put together by groups actively resisting the fossil fuel infrastructure buildout and which are working together within a network called VOICES. The nine points delineate more specifically the major problems with the way FERC operates and what needs to be done to change it. It was put together in response to a FERC announcement that it is going to review the way it which it makes decisions about pipeline permit applications and has been endorsed by about 150 organizations.

 1) It is Time that FERC Implement a Pipeline Review Process that Prioritizes the Public Interest Over the Goals of the Pipeline Industry. This Means Giving Proper Priority (i.e. Highest Priority) to People, the Environment, Protection Against Climate Changing Emissions and Protection of Future Generations in Both the FERC Review and Decision-making.

2) Review and Reform of FERC’s Pipeline Review Process Must Begin with a Series of No Less than Six Public Hearings Held in Affected Communities, and 90 Days for Written Comment, So FERC Can Learn How the Current Process Is Failing and the Public Interest Reforms that Are Needed.

3) FERC Must Mandate a Legitimate Demonstration of “Need” for a Proposed Pipeline/Infrastructure Project that is Verified by Unbiased Experts, Is Not Comprised of Contracts to Supply Gas to the Pipeline Company Itself or Any of Its Business Counterparts, and Is Not/Cannot be Supplied by Renewable or Existing Energy Sources.

4) There Must Be a Prohibition on FERC Issuing (a) Certificates of Public Convenience or Necessity, (b) Notices to Proceed with Any Aspect of Construction, Including Tree Felling, and/or (c) Approval for Exercise of Eminent Domain, Until Such Time as an Infrastructure Project Has Secured All State, Federal and/or Regional Permits, Dockets and/or Approvals. This Includes a Prohibition on Conditional FERC Certificates.

5) FERC Must End Its Strategic Practice of Failing to Affirmatively Grant or Deny Legally Required Rehearing Requests (Administrative Appeals of FERC Decisions), Instead Issuing Responses that Provide FERC More Time for Consideration (i.e. a Tolling Order). FERC Never Rules in Favor of Those Appealing, and the Result is to Prevent Pipeline Challengers from Bringing a Legal Challenge in the Courts while FERC Grants the Pipeline Company the Power of Eminent Domain and Approval for Construction. Groups Have Had to Wait Over a Year Before They Are Able to Go to Court While Construction Takes Place.

6) FERC Must Prohibit the Practice of Hiring Third-Party Consultants to Assist in the FERC Review Process who Have Any Business Contracts (Past, Present or Future) with a Pipeline Company Seeking FERC Approval, and Must Prohibit FERC Commissioners or FERC Staff from Working on or Deciding upon Any Pipeline or Infrastructure Project in which They or a Family Member Have a Direct or Indirect Financial or Employment Interest.

7) FERC Must End the Practice of Using Segmentation, Allowing Pipeline Companies to Break Up Projects into Smaller Segments, in Order to Undermine a Full and Accurate Review of Community and Environmental Impacts.

8) FERC Must Commit to a Full and Fair Implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, Including Full and Fair Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts; Induced Fracking/Drilling Operations; Costs of Construction, Operation and Maintenance (not Just Benefits); Health and Safety Impacts; the Full Array of Community, Business and Environmental Impacts that Will Result; and that All Inaccurate, Missing, False or Misleading Data and/or Information Identified by FERC and/or Public Commenters Are Fully, Completely and Accurately Addressed.

9) FERC Must End the Practice of Allowing Pipeline Companies to Secure a 14% Rate of Return on Equity on All New Pipeline Projects In Order to Ensure the Public Does Not Bear the Burden of Flawed Projects and to Ensure that FERC Does not Incentivize Inappropriate and/or Unwarranted Pipeline/Infrastructure Construction.

The growing movement demanding an end to FERC’s pro-industry bias is a critical component of the overall movement for justice and for effective action to stop global heating. FERC must not continue to rubber-stamp gas pipeline and infrastructure proposals, and as the federal agency empowered to regulate the US electrical grid, it is essential that a very different FERC, or a replacement for it, be created which has as its number one priority to lead the needed, rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

Those wishing to learn more can go to https://beyondextremeenergy.org. People can also sign up to take part in the June 23-25 actions in DC which will include both participation in the last day of the Poor Peoples Campaign’s 40 days of action on June 23 and, on June 25, action at FERC and a World Gas Conference being held that week in DC.

The Shalom  Center is a National Partner of the Poor Peoples Campaign and an endorsing supporter of the BXE actions June 23-25. If you decide to come to Washington for the June 23-25 actions, please also write The Shalom Center at <Pipelines@theshalomcenter.org> with the subject line "June 23" and your name, email, and a phone number.

Thanks! 

The Shalom Center is initiating a program called --

Share Sukkot: Grow the Vote

The Jewish Harvest Festival of Sukkot this year begins the evening of Sunday, September 23, and ends the evening of Sunday, September 30. It comes five weeks before the crucial Congressional elections in November. We are prepared to provide you with materials that apply the values of Sukkot to the issues that face us today.

We are suggesting that congregations, families, friends, and local organizations hold Share Sukkot parties to address the issues of planetary and neighborhood life and death that will arise in the election campaigns and that Sukkot speaks to.

Tax-exempt organizations like The Shalom Center, synagogues, and churches, etc., are not legally permitted as a body to support or oppose a political party or a candidate for office.

But at a “Share Sukkot” gathering, any organization can espouse the religious, spiritual, and ethical values that may distinguish candidates or parties from each other.  Families with a sukkah, of course, could say what they like at Sukkah Parties that they host. So can members of a synagogue, church, etc, so long as it is clear they are not speaking for the organization.  And helping people to get out the vote is absolutely legal for all organizations to do.

What does it mean to learn and share the sacred values that underlie Sukkot?

First of all, there is an ancient tradition that Sukkot celebrates the harvest of abundance and justice not for Jews alone but for all “the 70 nations of the world.” There is an ancient tradition to invite into the Sukkah guests – called ushpizin – from all these communities. 

This fall, we could invite as ushpizin into the Sukkah and into Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote some great activists and spiritual leaders who have struggled for the right to vote:

• Michael  Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andy Goodman – two Jews and a Black who were murdered during “Mississippi Summer” in 1964 for working to make sure Blacks could register to vote.

• The sharecropper and eloquent organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, who led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that in the summer of 1964 brought national attention to the denial of the vote to Blacks in the Deep South.

• Dr. Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched side by side in the Selma March of 1965, which helped inspire the massive public demand to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

• And the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which worked to shape the legal structure of the Voting Rights Act, had as key leaders A. Philip Randolph, founder and long-time leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black union, who from that base became a crucial civil-rights organizer; Roy Wilkins, long-time leader of the NAACP; and  Arnold Aronson, program director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC). 

All these – and others -- could be invited as ushpizin into Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote.

 What other values arise in the Sukkot festival?

The sukkah itself -- a fragile hut with a leafy, leaky roof ---is the house of the poor just as matzah is the bread of the poor, Only by sharing them can we turn them into the home and bread of freedom .

And the sukkah is open to our Mother Earth, reminding us to heal her from the wounds of modern Carbon Pharaohs.

These  “homes of the homeless,” according to tradition, were the first homes of the Exodus band of runaway slaves who created a community of freedom. So they remind us to learn and share the sacred practice of empowering disempowered and marginal people.

In our lives, that includes making sure that the poor, the disabled, the young, and the old get to vote. So Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote should include drawing on state and local laws for early voting, helping voters make sure they have ID ready where it is required, providing drivers for those who are infirm, etc.

The Shalom Center stands ready to share with you the teachings that can make Share Sukkot – Grow the Vote  into a powerful energizer of  eco-social justice.  If you write us at Sukkot@theshalomceneter.org, to describe your own plan for Share Sukkot –- Grow the Vote, we will respond.

Freedom Seders Old & New

By Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin

[Rabbi Salkin is the  spiritual leader of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Fla., and the author of numerous books on Jewish spirituality and ethics, published by Jewish Lights Publishing and Jewish Publication Society.He writes a column for Religion News Service. This article (and the photo, which RNS chose) appeared there on March 29, 2018. For the original, click here. In the photo, Rabbi Waskow speaks in support of a proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque Park51 in New York on August 25, 2010. Photo couresy of REUTERS/Lucas Jackson. Republished with RNS-PAPAL-FANS, originally transmitted on June 18, 2015.--  Ed.]

Remember the Maxwell House haggadah?

How about Bartons’ Candies Haggadah?

Those were the haggadot of my childhood – and, if you are of a certain age, yours as well.

I don’t remember anything about those haggadot, other than some of the illustrations, and the matzah crumbs and the wine stains that gave silent testimony to the family seders of the past.

I certainly don’t remember the texts being particularly meaningful. They were not intended to be; you brought your own meaning to the seder.

No one thought about “meaning” in those days, anyway.

That is – until the creation of what might be called the first “meaningful,” “relevant” haggadah – the Freedom Seder, written almost fifty years ago by Arthur Waskow.

Arthur Waskow is a true American Jewish original – the alte zeyde (sorry, Arthur – the old grandpa!) of radical Jewish social activism.

It remains a powerful witness to turbulent times.

Think of it: the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968 – which, that year, was only five days before Pesach.

Waskow’s Freedom Seder was originally published a year after Dr. King’s assasination (and the subsequent urban riots).

It came out in 1969, in Ramparts Magazine (of blessed memory; I would love to find some copies on Ebay) – to coincide with Dr. King’s first yahrzeit.

The Freedom Seder successfully connected the original story of the Exodus with the social issues that were gripping American during those dark days.

Many of which — racism, materialism, militarism, and sexism – continue unabated.

To thumb through the original Freedom Seder is to encounter the voices of Dr. King, Thoreau, Gandhi, Emanuel Ringelblum of the Warsaw Ghetto, Nat Turner, among others.

Today, some of the haggadah’s voices, such as Eldridge Cleaver and Allen Ginsberg, would be considered problematic.

Arthur could not have known that he was creating a whole new Jewish cottage industry.

In the wake of the Freedom Seder, there was a spate of new haggadot and new rituals: anti-Viet Nam war seders, Soviet Jewry seders, feminist seders, environmental seders, LGBT seders, etc.

Arthur, undaunted and unfaded at 84 years old, has just come out with a new version of the Freedom Seder. 

It is a worthy successor to the original version –- if only because the issues, half a century later, are no less urgent.

Because the plagues are no less pervasive. Consider the plague of climate change and sea level rise – which this reading addresses.

Let us leap forward for a moment to our own generation:

The stones are crying out.

The icebergs are groaning as they melt.

The mountains of West Virginia are moaning as they are destroyed in order to produce more coal.

The Coral Reefs are wailing as they blanch and die.

As the planet scorches and the corn parches, the price of food climbs.

Those who were hungry, starve.

The children whose bellies swelled from hunger, whose voices wailed from famine, grow silent.

Dying. Dead.

And all these silent, silenced voices call on us to speak.

Not only to speak but to act…

 

They are the Caesars of our day, the Pharaohs of our day.

The Pontius Pilates and Abu-Jahls of our day—

The Empires of Oil, Tar, Coal, Unnatural Gas.

The Pharaohs of Pharma, Fracking, and Banking.

Granted: this might not be everyone’s taste. We sometimes flee from an overdose of relevance, which some people call “political.”

But (and this is key):

• Do we really think that God liberating a nation from the grip of oppression — and creating a covenant with that nation — saying, in essence: “You work for Me, not for Pharaoh!” — can that be anything other than political?
• And — if we fail to update the texts, words, and ideas that originally animated Pesach for our ancestors, we will have petrified the tradition.

That is simply not what our sacred texts are supposed to be. Neither are they what those texts have ever been.

We are not the frozen chosen.

Personally, I would risk pushing the envelope and bringing our festival of freedom into the present, and making it relevant. If people want to yell and scream and argue about those texts at the seder table — well, that’s what Jews do.

The alternative?

The seder goes forth without any meaning. Oh, maybe the four questions — to give the children something to do.

The seder becomes a mere Jewish spring time Thanksgiving meal – a nice dinner with family, but with no real content.

Because these are two passages that Waskow includes in the new haggadah – and they speak to me, deeply.

First, Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, 1970)

And, Dr. King:

 We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people,  are incapable of being conquered. (Dr. Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967)

 Yasher koach, Arthur.

In the words of Rabbi Bob Dylan: “May you stay forever young.”

And may we continue to keep Pesach — forever young.

The Shalom Center has created a new MLK+50 Interfaith Freedom Seder, to reawaken and renew the wisdom of Martin Luther Ling – who was murdered 50 years ago. This new Freedom Seder –- connects Dr. King's teaching both with the ancient story of resistance to Pharaoh and the continuing story of resistance to racism, materialism, militarism, and sexism in America right now.

We welcome you-all to make the new Freedom Seder a family or communal Seder of your own. We welcome you to

<mlk50_freedom_seder_pdf_2-26-18._copy.pdf> where you can read it, see its graphics, sing its songs. You can use the whole Telling or draw on passages.

And we will be delighted for you to send us photos of your Seder, a description of what you did, perhaps a brief tape-recording of your memories of how it felt. Send them to  <Seder@theshalomcenter.org>.  We will share them with our friends and members, noting your name and home town.

 Why did we create this new Freedom Seder? It is the legitimate heir of the original Freedom Seder that I wrote fifty years ago. (Here are its front and back covers:)

 In 1968, American democracy was in crisis – caused by its inability to go beyond “civil rights” to cure ourselves from the “original sin” of racism, and its inability to end the Vietnam War that was convulsing the country.

 One result of that crisis, and one cause of the worsening of the crisis, was the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King a week before Passover. The original Freedom Seder was actually celebrated on the first anniversary of his death, April 4, 1969.

  Now, 50 years later, the crisis of American democracy is even deeper than it was in 1968 -- perhaps the deepest since the Civil War. We are living through an anti-democratic power grab by the Hyper-Wealthy and modern Corporate Pharaohs. This power grab is being made politically possible by whipping up rank racism, hatred toward foreigners and “strange” religions, hostility toward women, and contempt toward the Earth.

This power grab by the modern Pharaohs is much like the power grab by the ancient Pharaoh – who incited fear and hatred toward foreigners and a “strange” religion, and through his egomania and cruelty brought plagues upon the Earth and famine and death on his own people.

 And we are also living through the sprouting of an amazingly broad and deep grass-roots Resistance movement.

 We face new pharaohs.  When the Jews living under Roman tyranny saw that they were facing new pharaohs, some of them in several different generations chose Passover-time to lift up their resistance.

Rabbi Jesus chose the days before Passover for a demonstration against the Imperial regime and its local puppet government. His supporters marched from the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, waving palms and chanting psalms of transformation. A few days later, the inner leadership celebrated the Passover Seder in what Christians have named the Last Supper.

Several generations later, Rabbi Akiba led a Seder that according to oral tradition may have been a conversation about the rebellion against Rome led by Bar Kochba -- a Seder that lasted till morning and according to some,  ended with a warning that Roman troops were scouting out the neighborhood.

These Seders were themselves moments of freedom, where old and young could learn from and with each other, where they could talk freely about how to win and shape their freedom. They were moments of living in what Dr. King called the "Beloved Community" --  a "Promised Land" beyond all boundaries. And along with many other forms of struggle in concert with the Spirit, they helped give birth to new spiritual communities – embodied in Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity.

So now is again the time to celebrate anew the archetypal moment of resistance to Pharaoh: Passover --- and the Christian Holy Week that began as intimately intertwined with Passover.

 When tyranny threatens, the Passovers of the past remind us to draw on their wisdom and their passion. It is time for a new Freedom Seder. So The Shalom Center has woven the new “MLK+50 Interfaith Freedom Seder.” You can access the new Seder here.

On April 4 we will live through the 50^th anniversary of the murder of Dr. King.  So the new Seder draws on Dr. King’s wisdom as it connects with