blackagendareport.com - Holding Barack Obama Accountable
Presidential Politics 2008 - Obama
Thursday, 14 February 2008
montage069by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has become a media parade on its way to a coronation. Journalists and leading Democrats have done shockingly little to pin Obama down, to hold him specifically responsible for anything beyond his slogans of "yes we can" and "change we can believe in". Prominent Black Democrats, many ministers and the traditional Black leadership class are doing less than anybody to hold Obama accountable, peddling instead a supposed racial obligation among African Americans to support this second coming of Joshua and his campaign as "the movement" itself. What would holding Barack Obama accountable on war and peace, on social security, health care and other issues look like, and is it possible to hold a political "rock star" accountable at all?
Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will others. The stakes are too high not to.
How We Held Obama's Feet to the Fire in 2003
Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for national office since the early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and political organizer, had worked with Obama in 1992's highly successful Project VOTE Illinois registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch with events at home, and was well aware of Obama's run for the US Senate.
While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the DLC's “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently featured as one of the DLC's favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news because the DLC was and still is the right wing's Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party.
The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who make large campaign donations have more say in the Democratic party than do flesh and blood Democratic voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining and questioning the records, the policy stands and the persons of officeholders and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy recipients of elite largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right wing policy advisers beholden to those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money donors.
Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars, wholesale privatization of government functions including social security, and in so-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor rights agreements. Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely examined and vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing.
I revisited Obama's primary election campaign web site, something I had not done for a month or two. To my dismay I found the 2002 antiwar speech, the same one which Barack Obama touts to this day as evidence of his antiwar backbone and prescience, which had been prominently featured before, had vanished from his web site, along with all other evidence that Obama had ever taken a plain spoken stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the president riding high in the polls, and Illinois' Black and antiwar vote safely in his pocket, Obama appeared to be running away from his opposition to the war, and from the Democratic party's base. Free, at last.
After calls to Obama's campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its "100 to Watch" that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do --- fact check candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.
Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator's June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three "bright line" issues that clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama's response on June 26, 2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles can be found here.
It was our June 2003 exchange with candidate Obama that prompted him to restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as before, the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and consistent opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him to distinguish himself as an authentic progressive on single payer national health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA. And it was our public exposure of the fact and implications of the DLC's embrace of Obama's career which caused him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership Council. We didn't do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as agitators.
Holding Barack Obama Accountable in 2008
That was then. This is now.
The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated marketing machine in memory. That's not a good thing. Marketing is not even distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience. From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln's tomb to the tens of millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the establishment media, the campaign's deft manipulation of hopeful themes and emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to Obama, whether he endorses them or not.
To cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself as “the movement”, the continuation and fulfillment of Dr. King's legacy. But the speeches of its candidate carefully limit the application of all his troop withdrawal statements to “combat troops” and “combat brigades”, omitting the six figure number of armed mercenary contractors in Iraq, along with “training”, “counterinsurgency” and other kinds of troops. Obama also presses for an expansion of the US Army and Marines by more than 100,000 troops and a larger military budget even than the Bush regime. The fact that both these stands fly in the face of the legacy of Martin Luther King, and flatly contradict the wishes of most Democratic voters is utterly invisible in the establishment media, and in the discourse of established Black leaders on the Obama campaign. The average voter is ill-equipped to read Obama's statements on these and other issues as closely as one might read a predatory loan application or a jacked up insurance policy, trying to determine exactly what is covered.
As we pointed out back in December
The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases like "new leadership," "new ideas," "a politics of hope," and "let's dream America again" calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as "the candidate of hope," and anointed representative of the "Joshua generation." There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say "change we can believe in" instead of "stop the war --- vote Obama" or "repeal NAFTA - Barack in '08." The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.
Who Will Speak Truth to Power? And When?
No less a luminary than Dr. Michael Eric Dyson last month asserted that the time to pressure Obama to cut the military budget would not come till after the election when, as he said “we have a seat at the table.” We think this is transparently wrong. Obama responded to our calling him out in 2003 because he was still in an election campaign, and needed every vote he could get. The day after the election, he could have ignored us with relative safety, just as Cheney and Bush ignore their approval ratings in the twenty and thirty percent range the last three years and more.
But in 2003 Obama was a mere mortal. Now corporate media have made him a rock star, Joshua, a prince on his way to a coronation. Those who raise questions about Obama's commitment to a progressive agenda will have to struggle to be heard. That's just the way it is. They may even have to be impolite at times. That's just the way it is too. Rock stars, royalty and the uncritical adulation they require make little room for polite criticism or democratic discussion.
Third party runs for the presidency have sometimes succeeded in exerting leftward pressure on Democratic presidential candidates. The best example is 1948, when Henry Wallace campaigned for president on the Progressive Party ticket with Paul Robeson at his side defying Jim Crow laws in dozens of states. It was this credible threat on the part of the Progressive Party to peel Black voters away from the Democratic party which led Truman to issue his election year executive order de-segregating the armed forces. This year, Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have both declared their intention to explore presidential candidacies this year outside the Democratic party. Both have exemplary records of public service. Neither is a hater. Both are agitators in the best sense of that word. If Barack Obama, or for that matter Hillary Clinton is to be the Democratic presidential nominee, it's time they felt the heat to line up with Democratic voters, rather than with the DLC and the party's biggest donors.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton, also a corporate DLC candidate to the core, may have been more responsive to some heat from the party's grassroots on a few questions than Barack Obama. Clinton has at least promised to repeal No Child Left Behind, the legislation that has forced an unproven and unworkable "teach to the test" regime upon public schools nationwide, and carved tens of billions nationwide from the budgets of schools to foster a privatized, for-profit education industry. By contrast, Obama is still mumbling about "adequately funding" this failed and malevolent educational experiment. Similarly, in a California debate which showed the tiny differences between the Democratic front runners, it was Hillary Clinton who broke the corporate taboo by at least mentioning single payer, the workable universal health care system implemented by every other advanced industrial country on earth and favored by most American voters. Clinton didn't do this because she loves us, or because she is innately more progressive than Obama. She did it because she hard pressed and because activists are less confused and less likely to he silenced by the pernicious notion that her campaign is "the movement" itself.
It's time for a little less respect for the high and mighty of either party, and a little more action. It's high time for activists inside and outside the Democratic party to look for creative, innovative, sometimes impolite and civilly disobedient ways to reach larger audiences as they speak truth to the powerful. Even and especially when those in power are nominal Democrats.
Below are links to the original pages in which we called Barack Obama out for apparently running away from his early opposition to the war, and his ties with the DLC
This is the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator, with the story "In Search of the Real Barack Obama"
http://www.blackcommentator.com/45/issue_45.html
This is the June 12, 2003 issue of Black Commentator with the DLC story
http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/issue_46.html
On June 19, 2003 we printed Obama's response and his reason for eliminating the speech from his web site. He said the web site was for current stuff implied with the "formal" end to hostilities in Iraq it was "outdated" and removed by his staff to make room for more current stuff. Yeah. Right.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/47/issue_47.html
And we wrapped it up by printing Obama's response to our three follow-up questions, intended to delineate the "bright line" between being an authentic progressive and being something else. We wrung from him an explicit renunciation of the DLC at this time.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/48/issue_48.html
Bruce Dixon can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The President's Speech
from Food for Thought
"The President's Speech" from
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, 1985:
What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking...
There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal - and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving - but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?
It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.
This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak 'naturally', naturally.
Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave un-naturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues - tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one's person, and total depersonalisation of one's voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour' (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation'. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech - somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek - that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.
Why all this? Because speech - natural speech - does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) 'propositions' alone. It consists of utterance - an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being - the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs' understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with 'tone', embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal - and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved - and often more: preternaturally enhanced...
This too becomes clear - often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way - to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true - but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that - at least with emotionally-laden utterance - the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to 'tone' and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of 'feeling-tone' in his (1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs.*
* 'Feeling-tone' is a favourite term of Head's, which he uses in regard not only to aphasia but to the affective quality of sensation, as it may be altered by thalmic or peripheral disorders. Our impression, indeed, is that Head is continually half-unconsciously drawn towards the exploration of 'feeling-tone' - towards, so to speak, a neurology of feeling-tone, in contrast or complementarity to a classical neurology of proposition and process. It is, incidentally, a common term in the U.S.A., at least among blacks in the South: a common, earthy and indispensable term. 'You see, there's such a thing as a feeling tone...And if you don't have this, baby, you've had it' (cited by Studs Terkel as epigraph to his 1967 oral history Division Street: America).
Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily...
We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose - to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we - so susceptible to words - cannot trust our own instincts.
And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.' To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one - this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs - they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give - or remove - verisimilitude to or from a man's voice.
In this, then, lies their power of understanding - understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.
This is why they laughed at the President's speech.
If one cannot lie to an aphasiac, in view of his special sensitivity to expression and 'tone', how is it, we might ask, with patients - if there are such - who lack any sense of expression and 'tone', while preserving, unchanged, their comprehension for words: patients of an exactly opposite kind? We have a number of such patients, also on the aphasia ward, although, technically, they do not have aphasia, but, instead, a form of agnosia, in particular a so-called 'tonal' agnosia. For such patients, typically, the expressive qualities of voices disappear - their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character - while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood. Such tonal agnosias (or 'atonias') are associated with disorders of the right temporal lobe of the brain, whereas the aphasias go with disorders of the left temporal lobe.
Among the patients with tonal agnosia on our aphasia ward who also listened to the President's speech was Emily D. , with a glioma in her right temporal lobe. A former English teacher, and poetess of some repute, with an exceptional feeling for language, and strong powers of analysis and expression, Emily D. was able to articulate the opposite situation - how the President's speech sounded to someone with tonal agnosia. Emily D. could no longer tell if a voice was angry, cheerful, sad - whatever. Since voices now lacked expression, she had to look at people's faces, their postures and movements when they talked, and found herself doing so with a care, an intensity , she had never shown before. But this, it so happened, was also limited, because she had a malignant glaucoma, and was rapidly losing her sight too.
What she then found she had to do was to pay extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same. She could less and less follow loose speech or slang - speech of an allusive or emotional kind - and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose - 'proper words in proper places'. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree; for lack of perceived tone or feeling.
In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of 'expressive' speech - in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words - despite being more and more lost with 'evocative' speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).
Emily D. also listened, stony-faced, to the President's speech, bringing to it a strange mixture of enhanced and defective perceptions - precisely the opposite mixture to those of our aphasiacs. It did not move her - no speech now moved her - and all that was evocative, genuine or false completely passed her by. Deprived of emotional reaction, was she then (like the rest of us) transported or taken in? By no means. 'He is not cogent,' she said. 'He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain- damaged, or he has something to conceal.' Thus the President's speech did not work for Emily D. either, due to her enhanced sense of formal language use, propriety as prose, any more than it worked for our aphasiacs, with their word-deafness but enhanced sense of tone.
Here then was the paradox of the President's speech. We normals - aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled ('Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur'). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.
"The President's Speech" from
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, 1985:
What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking...
There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal - and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving - but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?
It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.
This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak 'naturally', naturally.
Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave un-naturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues - tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one's person, and total depersonalisation of one's voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour' (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation'. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech - somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek - that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.
Why all this? Because speech - natural speech - does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) 'propositions' alone. It consists of utterance - an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being - the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs' understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with 'tone', embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal - and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved - and often more: preternaturally enhanced...
This too becomes clear - often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way - to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true - but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that - at least with emotionally-laden utterance - the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to 'tone' and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of 'feeling-tone' in his (1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs.*
* 'Feeling-tone' is a favourite term of Head's, which he uses in regard not only to aphasia but to the affective quality of sensation, as it may be altered by thalmic or peripheral disorders. Our impression, indeed, is that Head is continually half-unconsciously drawn towards the exploration of 'feeling-tone' - towards, so to speak, a neurology of feeling-tone, in contrast or complementarity to a classical neurology of proposition and process. It is, incidentally, a common term in the U.S.A., at least among blacks in the South: a common, earthy and indispensable term. 'You see, there's such a thing as a feeling tone...And if you don't have this, baby, you've had it' (cited by Studs Terkel as epigraph to his 1967 oral history Division Street: America).
Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily...
We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose - to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we - so susceptible to words - cannot trust our own instincts.
And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.' To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one - this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs - they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give - or remove - verisimilitude to or from a man's voice.
In this, then, lies their power of understanding - understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.
This is why they laughed at the President's speech.
If one cannot lie to an aphasiac, in view of his special sensitivity to expression and 'tone', how is it, we might ask, with patients - if there are such - who lack any sense of expression and 'tone', while preserving, unchanged, their comprehension for words: patients of an exactly opposite kind? We have a number of such patients, also on the aphasia ward, although, technically, they do not have aphasia, but, instead, a form of agnosia, in particular a so-called 'tonal' agnosia. For such patients, typically, the expressive qualities of voices disappear - their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character - while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood. Such tonal agnosias (or 'atonias') are associated with disorders of the right temporal lobe of the brain, whereas the aphasias go with disorders of the left temporal lobe.
Among the patients with tonal agnosia on our aphasia ward who also listened to the President's speech was Emily D. , with a glioma in her right temporal lobe. A former English teacher, and poetess of some repute, with an exceptional feeling for language, and strong powers of analysis and expression, Emily D. was able to articulate the opposite situation - how the President's speech sounded to someone with tonal agnosia. Emily D. could no longer tell if a voice was angry, cheerful, sad - whatever. Since voices now lacked expression, she had to look at people's faces, their postures and movements when they talked, and found herself doing so with a care, an intensity , she had never shown before. But this, it so happened, was also limited, because she had a malignant glaucoma, and was rapidly losing her sight too.
What she then found she had to do was to pay extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same. She could less and less follow loose speech or slang - speech of an allusive or emotional kind - and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose - 'proper words in proper places'. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree; for lack of perceived tone or feeling.
In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of 'expressive' speech - in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words - despite being more and more lost with 'evocative' speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).
Emily D. also listened, stony-faced, to the President's speech, bringing to it a strange mixture of enhanced and defective perceptions - precisely the opposite mixture to those of our aphasiacs. It did not move her - no speech now moved her - and all that was evocative, genuine or false completely passed her by. Deprived of emotional reaction, was she then (like the rest of us) transported or taken in? By no means. 'He is not cogent,' she said. 'He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain- damaged, or he has something to conceal.' Thus the President's speech did not work for Emily D. either, due to her enhanced sense of formal language use, propriety as prose, any more than it worked for our aphasiacs, with their word-deafness but enhanced sense of tone.
Here then was the paradox of the President's speech. We normals - aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled ('Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur'). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
the pc "progressive's" nuclear hero
from suchoon mo:
here is one by NYT. Usually, small mis-rpint or mis-statement has the tendency to let a cat out of bag.
"let one who never sinned cast the first stone."
Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
By MIKE McINTIRE
Published: February 3, 2008
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon and also of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group, has been an Obama donor.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.
Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.
“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”
The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.
Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.
Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.
In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.
The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time.
“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a perfect bill.”
Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.
Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a reaction from the industry.”
“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say where things will be a few years from now?”
And here is another piece from a different direction.
Another Automaton of the Atomic Lobby
Barack Obama's Nuclear Ambitions
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
and JOSHUA FRANK
It is fast becoming one of the most important issues of the 2008 presidential campaign. Oil prices are expected to rise to even higher levels as the United States dependence on foreign crude is becoming increasingly unstable. And the perceived threat of global warming is making even the most skeptical of politicians nervous. The future of planet Earth, they claim, is more perilous than ever. Al Gore has made an impact.
But the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache no buzz. The purported solution to the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry's most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation's outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company's Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.
The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power, not only in the US, but all over the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin's 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called "full scope safeguards" spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act. The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of "dual use" technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the President that "China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction" worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be "a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants" and will be "a great opportunity for American vendors" -- that is, Westinghouse.
A day later Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.
In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made "a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies." Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as "a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future." Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way "to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development."
The atom lobby during the 1990s had a stranglehold on the Clinton administration and now they seem to have the same suffocating grip around the neck of the brightest star in the Democratic field today: Barack Obama.
Barack, for the second quarter in a row, has surpassed the fundraising prowess of Hillary Clinton. To be sure small online donations have propelled the young senator to the top, but so too have his connections to big industry. The Obama campaign, as of late March 2007, has accepted $159,800 from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power plant operator.
The Illinois-based company also helped Obama's 2004 senatorial campaign. As Ken Silverstein reported in the November 2006 issue of Harper's, "[Exelon] is Obama's fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default."
"Senator Obama has all the necessary leadership skills required to be president,'' says Frank M. Clark, chairman of Exelon's Commonwealth Edison utility.
These gracious accolades come from one of Exelon's top executives, despite the fact that Obama proposed legislation in 2006 that would require nuclear plant operators to report any hazardous leaks. While introducing the legislation Obama noted the failure of Exelon to report a leak of radioactive tritium into groundwater near one of their Illinois plants. But the senator's criticism of nuclear power goes only so far.
During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of CO2 emissions "on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable -- and realistic -- for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration." Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry's top trade publication, praised the senator. "Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of 'common sense solutions.' And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind."
Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of their more eye-grabbing numbers don't check out. For example, as noted in a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuke industry claims that the world's 447 nuclear plants reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent. But the true villain behind global warming is carbon. Existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total CO2 emissions, hardly a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather than renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, atomic power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that "even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem."
Clearly Senator Obama recognizes the inherent dangers of nuclear technology and knows of the disastrous failures that plagued Chernobyl, Mayak and Three Mile Island. Yet, despite his attempts to alert the public of future toxic nuclear leaks, Obama still considers atomic power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants. The atom lobby must certainly be pleased.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. St. Clair's new book on the environment, Born Under a Bad Sky, will be published in December.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008.
They can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net
Now, little has been mentioned about "greeder reactor" which literally creates more nuclear fuel as it produces energy. The reactor was initially created at Arco, Idaho.
It is being tested in France and Japan.
The US has the coal supply of about 300 years. So, coal trains are are dumping at power plants and carbon dioxide is spewed out in the manner of giant volcanos. Here is another article about political side of energy issue.
Obama Very Cozy with Nuclear-power and Coal Industries
by Enviro, Mon Feb 04, 2008 at 10:57:46 AM EST
Obama is tight with the nuclear power industry and coal. He has accepted $159,800 in contributions from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power-plant operator, for his presidential campaign as of late March 2007, and received notable support from Exelon in his previous political campaigns.
He wants FutureGen's "clean" coal-fired power plant in Illinois. The group doesn't count the energy used before and after the coal is burned. With net energy gain reduced by these processes, you're better off with wind and solar.
Plus he voted FOR Bush 2005 Energy Policy Act, a sweeping, oil-friendly energy bill that gave lots of presents to Bushes friend's in the oil industry. Environmentalist strong opposed it. Hillary voted AGAINST it.
He opposes the House-passed bill that would reform the 1872 Mining Law. That law lets companies mine public lands without paying royalties and doesn't hold them responsible for mine cleanup.
Looks like if Obama wins the presidency , the US will be replacing an oil president with a nuclear-power and coal president.
Musical Landscape
her name is elizabethelizabethelizabethelizabeth
a coal train is coming
a long snaking coal train is coming
a coaltraincoaltraincoaltrainicoaltraiin is coming
elizabeth is watching a coaltrain
elizabeth is watching a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
elizabethelizabethelizabethelizabeth is watching
a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
where is barbara?
barbara is in a coal train
barbara is in a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
barbarabarbarbarabarbarabarbara is in a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
here is one by NYT. Usually, small mis-rpint or mis-statement has the tendency to let a cat out of bag.
"let one who never sinned cast the first stone."
Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate
By MIKE McINTIRE
Published: February 3, 2008
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon and also of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group, has been an Obama donor.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.
Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.
“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”
The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.
Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.
Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.
In addition, Mr. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, has worked as a consultant to Exelon. A spokeswoman for Exelon said Mr. Axelrod’s company had helped an Exelon subsidiary, Commonwealth Edison, with communications strategy periodically since 2002, but had no involvement in the leak controversy or other nuclear issues.
The Obama campaign said in written responses to questions that Mr. Obama “never discussed this issue or this bill” with Mr. Axelrod. The campaign acknowledged that Exelon executives had met with Mr. Obama’s staff about the bill, as had concerned residents, environmentalists and regulators. It said the revisions resulted not from any influence by Exelon, but as a necessary response to a legislative roadblock put up by Republicans, who controlled the Senate at the time.
“If Senator Obama had listened to industry demands, he wouldn’t have repeatedly criticized Exelon in the press, introduced the bill and then fought for months to get action on it,” the campaign said. “Since he has over a decade of legislative experience, Senator Obama knows that it’s very difficult to pass a perfect bill.”
Asked why Mr. Obama had cited it as an accomplishment while campaigning for president, the campaign noted that after the senator introduced his bill, nuclear plants started making such reports on a voluntary basis. The campaign did not directly address the question of why Mr. Obama had told Iowa voters that the legislation had passed.
Nuclear safety advocates are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s efforts yielded any lasting benefits. David A. Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists agreed that “it took the introduction of the bill in the first place to get a reaction from the industry.”
“But of course because it is all voluntary,” Mr. Lochbaum said, “who’s to say where things will be a few years from now?”
And here is another piece from a different direction.
Another Automaton of the Atomic Lobby
Barack Obama's Nuclear Ambitions
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
and JOSHUA FRANK
It is fast becoming one of the most important issues of the 2008 presidential campaign. Oil prices are expected to rise to even higher levels as the United States dependence on foreign crude is becoming increasingly unstable. And the perceived threat of global warming is making even the most skeptical of politicians nervous. The future of planet Earth, they claim, is more perilous than ever. Al Gore has made an impact.
But the Gore effect is like a bad hangover: all headache no buzz. The purported solution to the imminent warming crisis, nuclear technology, is just as hazardous as our current methods of energy procurement. Al Gore, who wrote of the potential green virtues of nuclear power in his book Earth in the Balance, earned his stripes as a congressman protecting the interests of two of the nuclear industry's most problematic enterprises, the TVA and the Oak Ridge Labs. And, of course, Bill Clinton backed the Entergy Corporation's outrageous plan to soak Arkansas ratepayers with the cost overruns on the company's Grand Gulf reactor which provided power to electricity consumers in Louisiana.
The Clinton years indeed saw an all-out expansion of nuclear power, not only in the US, but all over the globe. First came the deal to begin selling nuclear reactors to China, announced during Jiang Zemin's 1997 visit Washington, even though Zemin brazenly vowed at the time not to abide by the so-called "full scope safeguards" spelled out in the International Atomic Energy Act. The move was apparently made over the objections of Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, who cited repeated exports by China of "dual use" technologies to Iran, Pakistan and Iraq. The CIA also weighed in against the deal, pointing out in a report to the President that "China was the single most import supplier of equipment and technology for weapons of mass destruction" worldwide. In a press conference on the deal, Mike McCurry said these nuclear reactors will be "a lot better for the planet than a bunch of dirty coal-fired plants" and will be "a great opportunity for American vendors" -- that is, Westinghouse.
A day later Clinton signed an agreement to begin selling nuclear technology to Brazil and Argentina for the first time since 1978, when Jimmy Carter canceled a previous deal after repeated violations of safety guidelines and nonproliferation agreements.
In a letter to congress, Clinton vouched for the South American countries, saying they had made "a definitive break with earlier ambivalent nuclear policies." Deputy National Security Advisor Jim Steinberg justified the nuclear pact with Brazil and Argentina as "a partnership in developing clean and reliable energy supplies for the future." Steinberg noted that both countries had opposed binding limits on greenhouse emissions and that new nuclear plants would be one way "to take advantage of the fact that today we have technologies available for energy use which were not available at the time that the United States and other developed countries were going through their periods of development."
The atom lobby during the 1990s had a stranglehold on the Clinton administration and now they seem to have the same suffocating grip around the neck of the brightest star in the Democratic field today: Barack Obama.
Barack, for the second quarter in a row, has surpassed the fundraising prowess of Hillary Clinton. To be sure small online donations have propelled the young senator to the top, but so too have his connections to big industry. The Obama campaign, as of late March 2007, has accepted $159,800 from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power plant operator.
The Illinois-based company also helped Obama's 2004 senatorial campaign. As Ken Silverstein reported in the November 2006 issue of Harper's, "[Exelon] is Obama's fourth largest patron, having donated a total of $74,350 to his campaigns. During debate on the 2005 energy bill, Obama helped to vote down an amendment that would have killed vast loan guarantees for power-plant operators to develop new energy projects the public will not only pay millions of dollars in loan costs but will risk losing billions of dollars if the companies default."
"Senator Obama has all the necessary leadership skills required to be president,'' says Frank M. Clark, chairman of Exelon's Commonwealth Edison utility.
These gracious accolades come from one of Exelon's top executives, despite the fact that Obama proposed legislation in 2006 that would require nuclear plant operators to report any hazardous leaks. While introducing the legislation Obama noted the failure of Exelon to report a leak of radioactive tritium into groundwater near one of their Illinois plants. But the senator's criticism of nuclear power goes only so far.
During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of CO2 emissions "on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable -- and realistic -- for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration." Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry's top trade publication, praised the senator. "Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of 'common sense solutions.' And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind."
Sadly for the credibility of the atom lobby, some of their more eye-grabbing numbers don't check out. For example, as noted in a report by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuke industry claims that the world's 447 nuclear plants reduce CO2 emissions by 30 percent. But the true villain behind global warming is carbon. Existing nuclear plants save only about 5 percent of total CO2 emissions, hardly a bargain given the costs and risks associated with nuclear power. Moreover, the nuclear lobby likes to compare its record to coal-fired plants, rather than renewables such as solar, wind, and geothermal. Even when compared to coal, atomic power fails the test if investments are made to increase the efficient use of the existing energy supply. One recent study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that "even under the most optimistic cost projections for future nuclear electricity, efficiency is found to be 2.5 to 10 times more cost effective for CO2-abatement. Thus, to the extent that investments in nuclear power divert funds away from efficiency, the pursuit of a nuclear response to global warming would effectively exacerbate the problem."
Clearly Senator Obama recognizes the inherent dangers of nuclear technology and knows of the disastrous failures that plagued Chernobyl, Mayak and Three Mile Island. Yet, despite his attempts to alert the public of future toxic nuclear leaks, Obama still considers atomic power a viable alternative to coal-fired plants. The atom lobby must certainly be pleased.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. St. Clair's new book on the environment, Born Under a Bad Sky, will be published in December.
Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the forthcoming Red State Rebels, to be published by AK Press in March 2008.
They can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net
Now, little has been mentioned about "greeder reactor" which literally creates more nuclear fuel as it produces energy. The reactor was initially created at Arco, Idaho.
It is being tested in France and Japan.
The US has the coal supply of about 300 years. So, coal trains are are dumping at power plants and carbon dioxide is spewed out in the manner of giant volcanos. Here is another article about political side of energy issue.
Obama Very Cozy with Nuclear-power and Coal Industries
by Enviro, Mon Feb 04, 2008 at 10:57:46 AM EST
Obama is tight with the nuclear power industry and coal. He has accepted $159,800 in contributions from executives and employees of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power-plant operator, for his presidential campaign as of late March 2007, and received notable support from Exelon in his previous political campaigns.
He wants FutureGen's "clean" coal-fired power plant in Illinois. The group doesn't count the energy used before and after the coal is burned. With net energy gain reduced by these processes, you're better off with wind and solar.
Plus he voted FOR Bush 2005 Energy Policy Act, a sweeping, oil-friendly energy bill that gave lots of presents to Bushes friend's in the oil industry. Environmentalist strong opposed it. Hillary voted AGAINST it.
He opposes the House-passed bill that would reform the 1872 Mining Law. That law lets companies mine public lands without paying royalties and doesn't hold them responsible for mine cleanup.
Looks like if Obama wins the presidency , the US will be replacing an oil president with a nuclear-power and coal president.
Musical Landscape
her name is elizabethelizabethelizabethelizabeth
a coal train is coming
a long snaking coal train is coming
a coaltraincoaltraincoaltrainicoaltraiin is coming
elizabeth is watching a coaltrain
elizabeth is watching a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
elizabethelizabethelizabethelizabeth is watching
a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
where is barbara?
barbara is in a coal train
barbara is in a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
barbarabarbarbarabarbarabarbara is in a coaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltraincoaltrain
Why Paul Volcker loves Obama
To all Obama Worshippers: Take this as denigration if you will. Keep your blinders on and think I'm a gungho Hillary supporter. I'm not. But this guy is such a fraud I can't stand it.
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
The two faces of Barack Obama
By Bill Van Auken
14 February 2008
Appearing before a packed auditorium at the University of Wisconsin Tuesday on the night of his victories in the "Potomac primaries," held in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a speech that was notable for its populist demagogy, not only on the war in Iraq but also social conditions in America.
The Wisconsin rally is the latest in a series of campaign events that have drawn large and predominantly younger crowds--20,000 at the University of Maryland and 17,000 in Virginia Beach on the eve of Tuesday's primaries--and which have seen Obama adopt a more "left"
public face.
The Illinois senator has the instincts of an agitator and seeks to give the crowds what he senses they want. In Wisconsin, he linked "record profits" for Exxon to the rising "price at the pump," provoking enthusiastic applause. He spoke of trade agreements that "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart." And he pledged to be a "president who will listen to Main Street--not just Wall Street; a president who will stand with workers not just when it's easy, but when it's hard."
Turning to the question of Iraq, he declared that "our troops are sent to fight tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged," and derided those who "use 9/11 to scare up votes."
He continued by citing deteriorating social conditions facing average Americans: "the father who goes to work before dawn and then lies awake at night wondering how he's going to pay the bills;" "the woman who told me she works the night shift after a full day at college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill;" the retiree "who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt;" and "the teacher who works at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet."
He responded with promises of tax cuts for working people, health care reform, better pay and a government that would "protect pensions, not CEO bonuses."
Echoing the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, he concluded his speech with the vow that "our dream will not be deferred, our future will not be denied, and our time for change has come."
There is an element in these speeches that would seem to give pause to the Democratic Party establishment and the big business interests it represents. Obama's rhetorical excursions could be seen as leading into dangerous territory. After all, the Democratic Party has served as an indispensable partner in the Bush administration's policies of war abroad and social reaction at home.
But this populist primary rhetoric is only one face of Obama. There is another, and it is turned firmly towards the very corporate interests he publicly criticizes, which have poured tens of millions of dollars into his campaign.
On the day after the Potomac primaries, BusinessWeek ran a special report entitled, "Is Obama Good for Business?" While the piece provided no direct answer to this question, the attitude taken by the business magazine appeared to be a qualified "yes," based in large part on the private discussions that the Illinois senator is holding with top Wall Street and corporate insiders even as he is delivering his public appeals for "change."
Thus, BusinessWeek noted, last Sunday, after learning of his victory in the Maine Democratic caucuses, Obama sat down at his computer to exchange emails with Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS America, one of his major Wall Street "bundlers," responsible for bringing in millions in donations from fellow multi-millionaires to finance what Obama refers to as his "movement." According to estimates made by the Center for Responsive Politics, 80 percent of the money raised by the Obama campaign last year came from donors affiliated with business, with Wall Street leading the pack.
More than half of the money came in the form of donations totaling $2,300 or more.
In addition to Wolf, Obama stays in regular touch with Warren Buffett, the second-wealthiest individual in America, with a net worth of some $52 billion. Among his leading economic advisors is Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor and prominent advocate of free market policies.
The Volcker endorsement
Perhaps most significant was last month's little reported endorsement of Obama by Paul Volcker, who was appointed Federal Reserve Board chairman by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and remained in charge of the US central bank for nearly seven years under the right-wing Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.
Volcker was responsible for inaugurating a high-interest-rate regime demanded by the dominant sections of finance capital in the name of the battle against inflation. His monetary policy was inextricably linked to the offensive against the working class begun with the firing of the air traffic controllers and the breaking of the PATCO strike and continued with the shutdown of large sections of basic industry and the unleashing of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The ultimate effect of these policies was a vast transfer of wealth from the mass of working people to a narrow financial elite, a process that has continued to this day.
In a statement announcing his backing for Obama, Volcker noted that he had previously avoided involvement in partisan politics. He said that he was moved to intervene now not "by the current turmoil in markets," but because of "the breadth and depth of challenges that face our nation at home and abroad." He added, "Those challenges demand a new leadership and a fresh approach." Obama's leadership, he concluded, would be able to "restore needed confidence in our vision, our strength and our purposes right around the world."
Larry Kudlow, the right-wing pundit and former Reagan administration economic advisor, commented on the endorsement earlier this month, noting that he had once worked as a speechwriter for Volcker and describing him as "a great American... a classic conservative... a man of fiscal and monetary rectitude."
Volcker, Kudlow wrote, "would not have made this endorsement on a whim. Believe me. He never gets involved in these kinds of political decisions." He concluded by asking: "Is Volcker the new Robert Rubin [the Wall Street insider who directed the Clinton administration's economic policy]? Is it possible that Mr. Volcker is somehow tutoring Obama? Is it possible that Obama is more financially conservative than originally believed?"
These are the real relations that are being forged behind the scenes as Obama delivers left phrases from the podium. Those like Volcker see the Illinois senator as a useful vehicle for effecting major changes aimed not at ameliorating the conditions of life for masses of working people, but rather at securing the global interests of American finance capital.
No doubt, they believe Obama, who would be America's first African-American president, is best suited to confront the dangers posed by continuing economic crisis and rising social tensions. Who better to demand even greater sacrifices from the working class, all in the name of national unity and "change?" At the same time, he would present a fresh face to the world, which they hope would help extricate US imperialism from the foreign policy debacles and growing global isolation that are the legacy of the Bush administration.
Given these big business ties, Obama's campaign rhetoric about confronting poverty and social inequality involve a level of cynicism and demagogy that is truly staggering. His incessant promises of change are not tied to any radical economic program that fundamentally challenges the profit interests of the giant corporations and Wall Street.
On the contrary, Obama has advanced a conservative fiscal policy, pledging himself to a "pay as you go" approach and stressing the need to reduce debt and deficits. Given that he would take office with a near-record $400 billion deficit inherited from the Bush administration, this already determines an agenda of austerity measures.
On Wednesday, the candidate toured a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and put forward a so-called jobs program involving investments in infrastructure and alternative energy that would total $210 billion over 10 years. In the face of the deep-going crisis confronting American capitalism, this is less than a drop in the bucket--and even this drop would quickly evaporate in the face of demands for deficit reduction.
Those who don't want to talk about capitalism should by rights keep their mouths shut when it comes to poverty and unemployment. One cannot deal with either seriously without confronting the private ownership of society's productive forces and the immense social inequality that it has created. The defense of jobs and living standards, the right to decent housing, health care and education for hundreds of millions of Americans can be advanced only through a far-reaching redistribution of wealth from the super rich to the broad mass of working people.
Clearly, the likes of Wolf, Buffett and Volcker are backing Obama because they know that he has no intention of going anywhere near such a policy.
As for the question of war, those looking to the Obama campaign as a means of ending American militarism will be sorely disappointed. The Illinois Senator has vowed not to reduce the ballooning US military budget--which consumes an estimated $700 billion annually--but rather to increase it. He has called for the recruitment of another 65,000 soldiers for the Army as well as 27,000 more Marines. He has vowed to put "more boots on the ground" in the "war on terror," the pretext invented by the Bush administration to justify "preemptive war," i.e., military aggression aimed at asserting US hegemony over the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.
As for Iraq itself, his promises to end the war are belied by his pledge to keep American forces in Iraq to defend "US interests" and conduct "counterterrorism operations," a formula that would see tens of thousands of US soldiers and Marines continuing to occupy Iraq and repress its population for many years to come.
To the extent that Obama's rhetoric arouses popular expectations--and there are indications that it does--these will inevitably be dashed. In all probability, this will happen once the primary season is over and Obama is confronted by the Republican right as well as elements within the Democratic Party itself with the demand that he clarify his program. Should he capture the White House in November, he will head an administration committed to defending the interests of the American oligarchy both at home and abroad.
Those turning towards the Obama campaign as a means of effecting progressive social change in the US and bringing an end to US militarism abroad will find that the Democratic Party and the corporate and financial interests it represents will allow neither.
These necessary goals can be achieved only through a decisive break with the Democrats and the entire two-party system and the independent mobilization of the working class through the building of a mass socialist movement.
Copyright 1998-2007
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
The two faces of Barack Obama
By Bill Van Auken
14 February 2008
Appearing before a packed auditorium at the University of Wisconsin Tuesday on the night of his victories in the "Potomac primaries," held in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a speech that was notable for its populist demagogy, not only on the war in Iraq but also social conditions in America.
The Wisconsin rally is the latest in a series of campaign events that have drawn large and predominantly younger crowds--20,000 at the University of Maryland and 17,000 in Virginia Beach on the eve of Tuesday's primaries--and which have seen Obama adopt a more "left"
public face.
The Illinois senator has the instincts of an agitator and seeks to give the crowds what he senses they want. In Wisconsin, he linked "record profits" for Exxon to the rising "price at the pump," provoking enthusiastic applause. He spoke of trade agreements that "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart." And he pledged to be a "president who will listen to Main Street--not just Wall Street; a president who will stand with workers not just when it's easy, but when it's hard."
Turning to the question of Iraq, he declared that "our troops are sent to fight tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and should've never been waged," and derided those who "use 9/11 to scare up votes."
He continued by citing deteriorating social conditions facing average Americans: "the father who goes to work before dawn and then lies awake at night wondering how he's going to pay the bills;" "the woman who told me she works the night shift after a full day at college and still can't afford health care for a sister who's ill;" the retiree "who lost his pension when the company he gave his life to went bankrupt;" and "the teacher who works at Dunkin Donuts after school just to make ends meet."
He responded with promises of tax cuts for working people, health care reform, better pay and a government that would "protect pensions, not CEO bonuses."
Echoing the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, he concluded his speech with the vow that "our dream will not be deferred, our future will not be denied, and our time for change has come."
There is an element in these speeches that would seem to give pause to the Democratic Party establishment and the big business interests it represents. Obama's rhetorical excursions could be seen as leading into dangerous territory. After all, the Democratic Party has served as an indispensable partner in the Bush administration's policies of war abroad and social reaction at home.
But this populist primary rhetoric is only one face of Obama. There is another, and it is turned firmly towards the very corporate interests he publicly criticizes, which have poured tens of millions of dollars into his campaign.
On the day after the Potomac primaries, BusinessWeek ran a special report entitled, "Is Obama Good for Business?" While the piece provided no direct answer to this question, the attitude taken by the business magazine appeared to be a qualified "yes," based in large part on the private discussions that the Illinois senator is holding with top Wall Street and corporate insiders even as he is delivering his public appeals for "change."
Thus, BusinessWeek noted, last Sunday, after learning of his victory in the Maine Democratic caucuses, Obama sat down at his computer to exchange emails with Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS America, one of his major Wall Street "bundlers," responsible for bringing in millions in donations from fellow multi-millionaires to finance what Obama refers to as his "movement." According to estimates made by the Center for Responsive Politics, 80 percent of the money raised by the Obama campaign last year came from donors affiliated with business, with Wall Street leading the pack.
More than half of the money came in the form of donations totaling $2,300 or more.
In addition to Wolf, Obama stays in regular touch with Warren Buffett, the second-wealthiest individual in America, with a net worth of some $52 billion. Among his leading economic advisors is Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor and prominent advocate of free market policies.
The Volcker endorsement
Perhaps most significant was last month's little reported endorsement of Obama by Paul Volcker, who was appointed Federal Reserve Board chairman by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and remained in charge of the US central bank for nearly seven years under the right-wing Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.
Volcker was responsible for inaugurating a high-interest-rate regime demanded by the dominant sections of finance capital in the name of the battle against inflation. His monetary policy was inextricably linked to the offensive against the working class begun with the firing of the air traffic controllers and the breaking of the PATCO strike and continued with the shutdown of large sections of basic industry and the unleashing of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The ultimate effect of these policies was a vast transfer of wealth from the mass of working people to a narrow financial elite, a process that has continued to this day.
In a statement announcing his backing for Obama, Volcker noted that he had previously avoided involvement in partisan politics. He said that he was moved to intervene now not "by the current turmoil in markets," but because of "the breadth and depth of challenges that face our nation at home and abroad." He added, "Those challenges demand a new leadership and a fresh approach." Obama's leadership, he concluded, would be able to "restore needed confidence in our vision, our strength and our purposes right around the world."
Larry Kudlow, the right-wing pundit and former Reagan administration economic advisor, commented on the endorsement earlier this month, noting that he had once worked as a speechwriter for Volcker and describing him as "a great American... a classic conservative... a man of fiscal and monetary rectitude."
Volcker, Kudlow wrote, "would not have made this endorsement on a whim. Believe me. He never gets involved in these kinds of political decisions." He concluded by asking: "Is Volcker the new Robert Rubin [the Wall Street insider who directed the Clinton administration's economic policy]? Is it possible that Mr. Volcker is somehow tutoring Obama? Is it possible that Obama is more financially conservative than originally believed?"
These are the real relations that are being forged behind the scenes as Obama delivers left phrases from the podium. Those like Volcker see the Illinois senator as a useful vehicle for effecting major changes aimed not at ameliorating the conditions of life for masses of working people, but rather at securing the global interests of American finance capital.
No doubt, they believe Obama, who would be America's first African-American president, is best suited to confront the dangers posed by continuing economic crisis and rising social tensions. Who better to demand even greater sacrifices from the working class, all in the name of national unity and "change?" At the same time, he would present a fresh face to the world, which they hope would help extricate US imperialism from the foreign policy debacles and growing global isolation that are the legacy of the Bush administration.
Given these big business ties, Obama's campaign rhetoric about confronting poverty and social inequality involve a level of cynicism and demagogy that is truly staggering. His incessant promises of change are not tied to any radical economic program that fundamentally challenges the profit interests of the giant corporations and Wall Street.
On the contrary, Obama has advanced a conservative fiscal policy, pledging himself to a "pay as you go" approach and stressing the need to reduce debt and deficits. Given that he would take office with a near-record $400 billion deficit inherited from the Bush administration, this already determines an agenda of austerity measures.
On Wednesday, the candidate toured a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin and put forward a so-called jobs program involving investments in infrastructure and alternative energy that would total $210 billion over 10 years. In the face of the deep-going crisis confronting American capitalism, this is less than a drop in the bucket--and even this drop would quickly evaporate in the face of demands for deficit reduction.
Those who don't want to talk about capitalism should by rights keep their mouths shut when it comes to poverty and unemployment. One cannot deal with either seriously without confronting the private ownership of society's productive forces and the immense social inequality that it has created. The defense of jobs and living standards, the right to decent housing, health care and education for hundreds of millions of Americans can be advanced only through a far-reaching redistribution of wealth from the super rich to the broad mass of working people.
Clearly, the likes of Wolf, Buffett and Volcker are backing Obama because they know that he has no intention of going anywhere near such a policy.
As for the question of war, those looking to the Obama campaign as a means of ending American militarism will be sorely disappointed. The Illinois Senator has vowed not to reduce the ballooning US military budget--which consumes an estimated $700 billion annually--but rather to increase it. He has called for the recruitment of another 65,000 soldiers for the Army as well as 27,000 more Marines. He has vowed to put "more boots on the ground" in the "war on terror," the pretext invented by the Bush administration to justify "preemptive war," i.e., military aggression aimed at asserting US hegemony over the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.
As for Iraq itself, his promises to end the war are belied by his pledge to keep American forces in Iraq to defend "US interests" and conduct "counterterrorism operations," a formula that would see tens of thousands of US soldiers and Marines continuing to occupy Iraq and repress its population for many years to come.
To the extent that Obama's rhetoric arouses popular expectations--and there are indications that it does--these will inevitably be dashed. In all probability, this will happen once the primary season is over and Obama is confronted by the Republican right as well as elements within the Democratic Party itself with the demand that he clarify his program. Should he capture the White House in November, he will head an administration committed to defending the interests of the American oligarchy both at home and abroad.
Those turning towards the Obama campaign as a means of effecting progressive social change in the US and bringing an end to US militarism abroad will find that the Democratic Party and the corporate and financial interests it represents will allow neither.
These necessary goals can be achieved only through a decisive break with the Democrats and the entire two-party system and the independent mobilization of the working class through the building of a mass socialist movement.
Copyright 1998-2007
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Reading on March 20th
5th Big CLWN WR Event
Thursday, March 20, 2008
7:00 - 10:00 pm
SAFE-T-GALLERY
Gallery 214
111 Front Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
FREE ADMISSION!!!
featuring
Carol Novack
Liza Wolsky
with special guests
R. Nemo Hill
Sheila Lanham
Richard Loranger
Mindy Levokove
Jane Ormerod
Adriana Scopino
Moira T. Smith
Joanne Pagano Weber
Nathan Whiting
Francine Witte
hosted by Bob Heman
editor of CLWN WR since 1971
Take the F train to York Street, walk downhill to Front and turn left under the Manhattan Bridge. For more information, maps, and directions from other subway lines please check the Gallery website at http://www.safetgallery.com
Thursday, March 20, 2008
7:00 - 10:00 pm
SAFE-T-GALLERY
Gallery 214
111 Front Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
FREE ADMISSION!!!
featuring
Carol Novack
Liza Wolsky
with special guests
R. Nemo Hill
Sheila Lanham
Richard Loranger
Mindy Levokove
Jane Ormerod
Adriana Scopino
Moira T. Smith
Joanne Pagano Weber
Nathan Whiting
Francine Witte
hosted by Bob Heman
editor of CLWN WR since 1971
Take the F train to York Street, walk downhill to Front and turn left under the Manhattan Bridge. For more information, maps, and directions from other subway lines please check the Gallery website at http://www.safetgallery.com
Friday, February 15, 2008
Ok. I'm supporting Hillary Clinton: I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!
After listening to/watching PBS Channel 13 - Tom's hour, with commentaries by a few male journalists, I've decided this is it. One guy, Shield, who thinks it's appropriate that Congress hear evidence re that baseball player's alleged crimes - referred to H. Clinton as: "her claim to fame is her husband." (or substantially similar words). Well, hey, I realize that all of my so-called "progressive" friends are going for Obama, with his empty rhetoric, his messianic messages and little if anything to show substance and record. Who cares that neither he nor Hillary voted on water torture? Who cares that Lieberman's his mentor? Who cares that he voted for the Patriot Act? Who cares that he's pro death penalty and anti same sex marriage? Who cares that his pals are telecommunications bigwigs? Who cares that he's wigwagged on many issues? Who cares that he's got more money than H Clinton ... poured into wooing the super delegates? (hey, where's he getting the dough?) Who cares he's a corporate tool without a cogent healthcare plan? I do. If I have to choose between being a p.c. so-called progressive to back some inexperienced yet charismatic half-black guy, whose ancestors weren't slaves but who's playing the race card big time and duping progressives into thinking he's going to be more effective as a change agent than Hillary, who's been maligned by the big press cause she's an assertive woman, guess whom I'm going to support? This entire campaign makes me ill. We're going to end up with McCain, who knows how to dupe people into thinking he's a liberal. Ha. Good match with Obama, who's duped progressives into thinking he's a progressive. He knows little, yet speaks eloquently. Style without substance. The kiddies love him. MoveOn loves him.
So as much as it makes me not quite ecstatic to support a moderate Democrat who should send her ridiculous husband to an island for the duration of the campaign, I'm resigning myself to doing so, for many reasons, including those already enumerated on this blog --- principally, I don't buy the rhetoric and like a good lawyer, I scrutinize the evidence. This is not a choice between progressives. Face it. Be wary. I've been wary of the Obama PC Cult hype since the getgo. You should be too.
So as much as it makes me not quite ecstatic to support a moderate Democrat who should send her ridiculous husband to an island for the duration of the campaign, I'm resigning myself to doing so, for many reasons, including those already enumerated on this blog --- principally, I don't buy the rhetoric and like a good lawyer, I scrutinize the evidence. This is not a choice between progressives. Face it. Be wary. I've been wary of the Obama PC Cult hype since the getgo. You should be too.
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