Opinion
Artilleryj
"Usurped powers cannot withstand the
artillery of opinion." William Godwin
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NATIONAL
Click
on a headline from the archive or scroll down through the stories below
it.
December,
2008
November,
2008
October,
2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Oil industry: slick, dirty
From
Foreign
Polic In Focus
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Markets down,
but not suicides
From TomDispatch
Friday, October 3, 2008
It's back to unpopularity
for Wall
Street
From TomDispatch
Bush busy cementing legacy
From
Foreign Policy In Focus
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Drinking at the public fountain
From TomDispatch
Economic smoke and mirrors
September,
2008
|
August,
2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Are
we making
progress? Yes
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Questions remain
about anthrax scare
From TomDispatch
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Not mainstream,
but progressively
current TV
Monday, August 18, 2008
Have Bush and Putin
decided to split up
world's energy supply?
Monday, August 11, 2008
U.S.
military over-rated?
From TomDispatch
July,
2008
Thursday, July 31, 2008
McCain, media
place
high value
on
"values voters"
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
U.S. intelligence
becoming more
mercenary
From
TomDispatch
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Chess vs.
checkers:
Obama
is the winner
From Foreign Policy In Focus
Thursday, July 24, 2008
While
Congress fiddles,
our
wetlands deteriorate
From
TomDispatch
Tuesday,
July 1, 2008
How stupid are we?
You don't
want to know
From
TomDispatch
|
June, 2008
Tuesday, June 24,
2008
End
of the lines for
a
great American comedian
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Gas prices,
Alaskan drilling
and the (Almost) Daily
Monday, June 9, 2008
High prices
at the pump?
Just part of the cost
of war
Friday, June 6, 2008
Cluster bombs? Wiretaps?
War? We're all for 'em
Monday,
June 2, 2008
McClellan comes clean
-- years too late
April, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Be strong. Army strong.
Felony strong.
|
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Economic smoke
and mirrors
John
Beckett, Opinion Artillery
I’m no economist. But maybe you don’t have to
be to understand the bailout plan our “leaders” in Washington are
trying to foist upon us. Basically, they’re asking American taxpayers
to not only continue believing in Santa Claus but to pay nearly $1
trillion for that belief.
DO SOMETHING:
Endorse ‘Mike's Rescue Plan’
for Fixing the Wall Street Mess!
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Wall Street has become a corridor of smoke
and mirrors. CEOs make hundreds of times what an “average” person
makes, even while (and after) running their companies into the ground.
Corporate boards are nothing but rubber stamps. Lenders with the morals
of sharks and legislators who look no farther ahead than the next
election have been complicit in taking a mortgage system that was the
envy of the world and turning it into a disaster.
And now they want us to give them more money – much, much more money –
so that they can restore our confidence.
Huh? Isn't this a little like your landlord asking you to pay him for
the privilege of being able to keep paying him high rent?
Here's something you might not have heard or seen in the mainstream
media: Last week, 200 economists from colleges around the country wrote
to the House and Senate, telling them
the bailout plan is doomed to fail for three reasons:
1) Its fairness. The
plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’
expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the
losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The
government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to
make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out
particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.
2)
Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its
oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets
from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such
purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored
afterwards.
3)
Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will
be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, America's
dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation
unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order
to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.
For
these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate
hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to
wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S.
economy for years to come.
Yet Charles
Widger, chief executive of Brinker Capital, told
the Associated Press the
bailout “will help to restore confidence and confidence is the No. 1
issue now.”
Maybe I’m missing something here, but having to pay the government to
buy a bunch of over-valued mortgages from banks so they can have more
money to loan me doesn’t restore my confidence in either the government
or the banks.
It’s one enormous shell game, children, and the ones being played for
suckers are us.
Generally, I sympathize with people who lose their jobs. But in Indiana
and Michigan, nearly a half-million manufacturing jobs have vanished
since 2000. A
new report says that North Carolina lost 220,000 jobs in the last
year. Maybe losing a few thousand banking jobs would wake up the
banking industry and the government that should be regulating it.
America is facing a reality check that has been due for a while now.
Compared to most of the rest of the world, we have for the last 60
years enjoyed a very high standard of living. Somewhere along the way,
the American dream morphed into the American nightmare. It was no
longer enough to pursue the dream the simple, patient way: save for a
while, buy a small starter home, sell it at a profit in a few years,
and slowly work your way up the ladder. And the ladder kept getting
higher, and people got increasingly impatient with starting on the
first rung.
So we borrowed more to buy bigger houses on bigger lots. But we
couldn’t even be satisfied with them. Prompted by TV shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
and commercials from the Home Depots of the world, we went on a
redecorating and landscaping binge. We sprawled our communities all
over the place, disdaining the economies of scale in favor of “country
living” that becomes less desirable as the price of gasoline moves
upward.
Whites abandoned the cities, blacks and affordable housing, which
became a code phrase for either people of color or people of little
money. Allow someone to build smaller houses in our area? No thanks,
that would only lower our property values. And that’s really why we
bought the place anyway. We hope to flip this house into an even bigger
one that we can afford even less.
It’s been as if many Americans collectively lost all perspective on
what home ownership really is. And home sellers and bankers went along
for the ride. When banks realized they could make money selling
mortgages to even larger banks in bulk, like a bunch of a bananas, they
didn’t worry if a few bad ones turned up. It wasn’t their problem
anymore. And if it wasn’t going to be their problem – if they were just
passing along the paper for a quick profit – why bother to care if the
new owners really looked like good bets to pay off those mortgages?
Fannie and Freddie and Wachovia were huge, they could take a few losses
here and there. It wasn’t like they were going to be driven out of
business or anything.
Congress, meanwhile, goes about its business like a horse trader with
Attention Deficit Disorder on speed. Take a proposal, defeat it in the
House, let the Senate add some “sweeteners” like extension of tax
breaks for businesses and individuals, and longer tax breaks for
alternative energy, and expect the House to cave in.
But some Democrats, like Michigan
Senator Debbie Stabenow and some House progressives, would prefer
to see a “trickle-up” bailout that would include relief for those
closer to the bottom of the heap. Rep. Gene Green of Texas wants the
bankruptcy code changed to let judges restructure the terms of a home
loan in bankruptcy proceedings.
Naturally, Republicans and the White House oppose this. If you’re going
to give out $700 billion – just before an election, by the way – why
bother giving it to people who really need it, most of them probably
Democrats, when you can hand it out to Republicans who might donate
some of it back to you?
Rich Lowry of the National Review
says
a bailout is a necessity: “(John) McCain talks of the honest
laboring man as the strength of America. No doubt he is, but he wants
to buy a house (which requires a mortgage), not pay for everything with
cash (which requires credit cards), have a job (which requires a
business that is very likely dependent on loans) and buy big-ticket
consumer items he can’t pay for upfront (which requires car loans,
etc.). Freeze up all those sources of credit, and economic life as we
know it ends.”
This view represents some of the mindset that has gotten the economy in
trouble. Yes, credit and loans are important, both to businesses and
individuals. But there is also value in living within a budget and
saving, neither of which Lowry mentions. As for credit cards, using
them simply to avoid carrying cash is neither necessary nor prudent.
And notice his linking of jobs to borrowing. Americans want to have
jobs and those jobs, he says, require “a business that is very likely
dependent on loans.” I would suggest that businesses that are dependent
on loans aren’t very good businesses. How about a business that depends
on success? Or have they gone out of fashion?
I am reminded of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the beginning of
World War II in 1941, when the economy had only partially recovered
from the Great Depression. To paraphrase, he said that one day no one
had any money to buy anything new, but the next day every young man in
the country was being given clothes, weapons, three meals a day,
shelter, some education or training, and tanks, ships and airplanes to
play with.
It’s all smoke and mirrors, children, and it does not benefit you or me.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Charges
dropped against
Democracy Now! journalists
John
Beckett, Opinion Artillery
Journalists arrested at the Republican National Convention, including
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar,
have had their charges dropped, the St. Paul City Attorney’s office
announced Friday. St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman also issued a statement
Friday that “the city will decline to prosecute misdemeanor charges for
presence at an unlawful assembly for journalists arrested during the
Republican National Convention.”
Some 40 journalists were arrested while reporting on protests taking
place outside the convention center, according to Democracy Now!
“It’s good that these false charges have finally been dropped, but we
never should have been arrested to begin with,” said Goodman,
award-winning anchor of Democracy Now! Newscasts. “These violent and
unlawful arrests disrupted our work and had a chilling effect on the
reporting of dissent. Freedom of the press is also about the public’s
right to know what is happening on their streets. There needs to be a
full investigation of law enforcement activities during the convention.”
Goodman was arrested while asking police to release Kouddous and
Salazar, who had been arrested while reporting on street
demonstrations. After being handcuffed and pushed to the ground,
Goodman reiterated that she was was a credentialed reporter. Secret
Service then ripped the credential from around her neck.
Also arrested was a photographer for the Associated Press. He was
detained after snapping a picture of a policeman kneeling on a
protester’s back. Like the Democracy New! Journalists, he was released
after being held for a few hours.
John Lundquist, attorney for the Democracy Now! journalists, said, “The
most notable lapse by law enforcement during the RNC was the
record-breaking number of journalists indiscriminately arrested and
detained for doing nothing more than performing in the best tradition
of reporters who gather the news.”
In the weeks after the journalist arrests, tens of thousands of members
of the public contacted St. Paul officials to protest the unlawful
arrests of working journalists. Goodman said, “We were deeply moved by
the outpouring of support. We thank everyone who called and wrote first
to have us freed and then to have the charges dropped. We thank
everyone who stood up for press freedom and the First Amendment.”
The YouTube video of Goodman’s arrest was the most watched YouTube
video during the convention week. It has now been viewed over 830,000
times.
If you watch the video, you’ll see that Goodman’s arrest was
unjustified. The decision to drop all charges would seem to indicate
that all the arrests of journalists during the Republican Convention
were without merit.
During and after the convention, these arrests went almost unmentioned
by the mainstream media. The only reports I could find came from the AP
and ABC. I e-mailed several TV networks, including MSNBC, asking why
this story was not being covered, and received no replies.
This lack of coverage is a sad commentary on the performance of our
supposedly free press. One would think that TV newscasters certainly
would want to cover a story that involved their peers, especially a
story that came with ready-made video.
On the other hand, to cover the story they would have had to
acknowledge the existence of Democracy Now! I suspect that CNN and the
like are reluctant to do this. They’d prefer that you don’t know
there’s a high-quality, non-corporate, progressive newscast out there –
in more than 700 North American markets.
But we know. And you can watch Democracy Now! TV by clicking on the
icon on Opinion Artillery’s home page.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Lower
drinking age isn't answer to colleges' problems
John
Beckett, Opinion Artillery
You may have noticed a number of stories lately about a new push to
lower the drinking age to 18 – a push orchestrated by, of all people,
college presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known
universities, including Duke, Dartmouth, Ohio State, and Syracuse.
The movement is called the Amethyst Initiative. It began recruiting
college presidents more than a year ago, and in mid-August went public
with an effort to have lawmakers consider lowering the drinking age
from 21 to 18. These presidents say current laws do more harm than good
and encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus.
A recent Associated Press analysis of federal records found that 157
college-age people, 18 to 23, drank themselves to death from 1999
through 2005.
According to the AP, “Research has found more than 40 percent of
college students reported at least one symptom of alcohol abuse or
dependence. One study has estimated more than 500,000 full-time
students at four-year colleges suffer injuries each year related in
some way to drinking, and about 1,700 die in such accidents.”
You have to empathize with college officials. College life offers
students a chance to explore alternatives away from the guidance of
their parents. It also mixes together a variety of ages that makes
drinking easier. Not being legally old enough to buy alcohol is less of
a deterrent when there are so many people close to your age who are old
enough to do the buying, and when there are more unsupervised parties
to attend, parties where alcohol is easily available and no one is
checking identifications. If they wanted to, police at any college
campus where there is a Saturday football game could easily fill their
cells with under-age drinkers.
“This is a law that is routinely evaded,” said John McCardell, former
president of Middlebury College in Vermont, who started the presidents’
organization. “It is a law that the people at whom it is directed
believe is unjust and unfair and discriminatory.”
It’s also a law with far-reaching ramifications. Enacted in 1984, the
National Minimum Drinking Age Act forced states to conform or risk
losing federal highway funds.
“No state dares consider anything other than the current law because
they can't afford to lose that funding,” said McCardell. “They can
think out of the box, but they can't act on those thoughts.”
But is lowering the drinking age to 18 the answer?
Mothers Against Drunk Driving doesn’t think so. “It's very clear the
21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses,” MADD
national president Laura Dean-Mooney said of the schools whose
presidents have signed on with the Amethyst Initiative.
MADD says lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car
crashes, and it accuses the presidents of looking for an easy way out
of an inconvenient problem.
There’s another problem with lowering the drinking age, as opponents
quickly pointed out: Just as being around 21-year-olds makes it easier
for younger college students to obtain alcohol, lowering the age to 18
would make it easier for high-school age youngsters to get it.
Some proponents of a lower drinking age argue that if people are old
enough to serve in the military at 18, they should be able to drink at
that age. I’m old enough to have lived through a somewhat similar
debate in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when people contended that if
you’re old enough to fight for your country, you should be old enough
to vote. That argument made a lot more sense.
McCardell proposes making some types of alcohol legal for younger
people and lowering the age for those in the military. The latter
proposal strikes me as pandering, rather like John McCain’s selection
of a thoroughly untested vice-presidential candidate in hopes of
picking up disappointed Hillary Clinton supporters.
As for the former idea, I grew up in Ohio at a time when 18-to-21
year-olds weren’t allowed to buy wine or liquor but could buy 3.2
percent beer while those over 21 could buy the real stuff. We called it
3.2 versus 7 percent, until my father – who knew a thing or two about
beer – set me straight. Seven percent was the limit for adult beer, he
explained, but no one really sold it because no one really made it. The
alcohol content of adult beer was more like 5 percent – not really that
much more than what 18-year-olds could buy. The bottom line was – and
is – that you can get drunk on either.
What should be done? I’ve heard one sensible proposal, made by Richard
Salmi, vice president of student affairs at Loyola University in
Chicago. He suggested the creation of a “drinking license,” similar to
a driver's license, for students ages 18 to 21. To obtain a drinking
license, a person would have to take an alcohol education class and
pass an exam. The penalty for violating any law involving alcohol would
involve suspending or revoking a person's license.
This idea, similar to a learner’s permit for new drivers, might work.
In fact, why limit it to 18 to 21? Maybe if all adults were required to
have drinking licenses that could be suspended, our children would
learn more about responsible drinking while they’re still young and
impressionable.
And while we’re at it, let’s require a similar license to become a
parent. Then we might really get somewhere.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Are we making progress? Yes
One of the pitfalls of being a journalist is that when you practice a
craft that requires you to employ healthy skepticism as a daily working
tool, it’s easy for that healthy skepticism to turn into unhealthy
pessimism. So it is good to write something positive every now and then
-- and something that begins “I’m positive this country is screwed up”
doesn’t count.
There’s another reason that writing from the positive side of the plate
is good. As someone once said, “You’re either part of the solution or
you’re part of the problem.” Criticism has its place, but to merely
criticize without ever suggesting solutions, or at least alternatives,
eventually becomes an empty exercise, if for no other reason than that
people stop listening to you.
I wrote the other day about the new Washington Post-ABC News poll
that found that 78% of Americans think this country is headed in the
wrong direction. I don’t doubt this one bit. I think so myself. But
there also are encouraging things going on in the United States, and
some of these things are happening in areas where they’re needed most.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve reached the ripe old age of 58, but at some
point you realize that the evolution of anything – the U.S., democracy
in general, more enlightened attitudes, the ability to pitch
softball – doesn’t happen in a neat, steady, upward arc. There
are fits and starts and setbacks, and there is straying off-course. But
as long as the general trend is upward, there is reason for hope.
For most of the last eight years, Americans have had ample reason to
doubt that this was the case.
But I believe the general trend is upward, despite all the problems
with illicit war, an imploding economy, rights curtailment, and a
warming globe. The general trend is still upward, at least among the
American people if not among their politicians and policy-makers.
On what do I base this statement?
This spring, my youngest son graduated from high school. I did the same
thing in 1968. Simply compare how things are today with how things were
40 years ago.
Race / Gender – Barack
Obama will be nominated for president Thursday night, after barely
beating a woman for the Democratic Party nod. To say this could not
have happened in 1968, or 1978, or 1988, would be correct, but it would
be to paint a very limited picture of how far we’ve come. In 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and riots broke out in
American cities. Yet, even that misses the point. The fact is that in
1968, blacks were still very much second-class citizens, confined for
the most part to menial jobs, segregated housing and schools, with very
little chance to pursue professional careers outside of sports or
music.
Women weren’t much better off. Their strong areas were still considered
the kitchen and the bedroom, and for most women the best professions to
follow were teaching and nursing. Not only were corporate boardrooms or
executive suites closed to women, so were fire halls and police
stations, construction sites, most media jobs, and the military.
Domestic violence existed, but no one talked about it. Colorado was the
only state where an abortion could be obtained legally. To be divorced
was to be stigmatized, to be an unwed mother shameful. For the vast
majority of girls, there were no school sports programs. If a woman had
gone jogging in 1968, the police probably would have stopped her to ask
what was wrong.
Then there were homosexuals. They weren’t even a topic of conversation
in 1968, unless the talk was malicious and/or in jest.
Today, Americans are much more color-blind. Women are seen – and see
themselves – as equals to men. Homosexuality is accepted by many, and
tolerated by more. Things aren’t perfect. But we have come a long way,
baby.
Communications – I
grew up in a small town in Ohio. Starting in about 1960, one of my
duties in the springs and summers was to call the players on my
baseball team, which my father coached, when they had to be informed
about practice times or cancellations. Every year, there were a couple
of kids who had party lines – telephone lines that they shared with
other people – and there always was at least one boy whose family
didn’t have a telephone. Calling long-distance was an adventure and a
luxury rarely indulged.
You might argue that today’s phone-centric culture has gone too far the
other way, and in some ways it has. But there’s also no arguing that we
live in a safer, more convenient world today because of communications
advances. The reporting of emergencies and the response to them have
been streamlined. Doctors in different parts of the world can talk to
each other via teleconference. Implanted heart devices can be monitored
from afar.
And I haven’t even mentioned the personal computer or the Internet.
The media –
OK, if you insist, I’ll mention the Internet. I’m not impressed by much
on it, but I do believe that the surface of its potential is being
scratched by Democracy Now! TV,
the REAL News Network,
and various websites. More than anything on the Internet, it is the
nature of the medium itself that is so revolutionary. As Thomas
Friedman wrote in his book The World
Is Flat, the wealth of information, the speed with which it can
be accessed, and the ease with which it can be manipulated and shared,
is what makes the Internet so powerful. Having this rich source develop
now is terribly important and timely, because what is called the
mainstream media or the corporate media – think almost all commercial
TV and radio, and the vast majority of newspapers and magazines – has
deteriorated into the sort of crap Paddy Chayevsky predicted in his
brilliant 1977 movie, “Network.”
The search for a
sustainable lifestyle – People aren’t turning on, tuning in and
dropping out like they were in 1968, but there is a similar motivation
shared by the commune hippies and today’s Green movement. They were,
and are, people who think our planet is a resource to be treasured and
used wisely, not abused and sold to the highest bidder. Their numbers
and influence is slowly growing, sparked by global warming, rising
energy prices, and the realization that we can’t go on doing things
this way.
Our young people are increasingly drawn to the vibrancy and convenience
that can be city life. It couldn’t happen at a much better time. Denser
housing is more energy-efficient housing, and our cities can use more
young, talented people to help them out of a long, downward spiral that
more or less began, ironically enough, in the summer of 1968, when
black unrest triggered white flight to the suburbs that has continued
ever since. Of course, whether this return to cities is a long-term
trend remains to be seen. But if movement back to cities continues,
especially if the people moving in become politically involved, these
cities could become revitalized, and at the least should be improved.
In the fall of 1968, America was bogged down in an unpopular war in
Vietnam. The incumbent president wasn’t seeking re-election. I was 18,
and I saw things with the eyes of an 18-year-old. To my parents’
generation, things must have seemed more threatening. There were
hippies and Yippies and endless protests. There were race riots. Kids
were burning draft cards and the American flag. King and Bobby Kennedy
were cut down by bullets. At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, two
black American medal-winners raised gloved fists in a Black Power
salute on the medals platform, shocking the world and prompting Olympic
officials to send them home. And somewhere over the horizon, there were
always the Russians to worry about.
Have things improved in the 40 years since then? Undoubtedly. Just ask
someone who lived in Poland, or what was East Germany. Or China,
Ireland, or countless other places.
If you had a heart attack in the mid-1960s, as my father did, the main
treatment was to get you to a hospital, keep you there for a month of
rest, proper diet, etc. – and hope you didn’t have another one. There
really wasn’t much more they could do. And if you had cancer? Forget
it. Cancer was so dreaded that people didn’t even mention it, except
perhaps as a whispered reference to “The Big C.”
Special education? Didn’t have it. Handicap access? Didn’t exist.
Neither did recycling, except for some bottles in some places. Ovens
that cooked food in minutes or seconds instead of hours, or beaming
light rays into people’s eyes to correct their vision? The stuff of
science fiction. Tiny, portable telephones that could also take
pictures and serve as computers? Maybe on Star Trek or in the Dick
Tracy cartoon strip.
Unfortunately, there also are a great many things that haven’t changed
much in the last 40 years. The Israeli-Palestinian situation, and in
fact, the entire Middle East dynamic is a prime example. The
military-industrial complex still rides too high, and our limited
two-party political system still rides too low. But as in 1968, what
the great majority of Americans still wants is peace and a bit of
prosperity. The question seems to be, as it was 40 years ago, can we
find a way to tie the two together?
Based on what’s happened since 1968, I think we can. I just hope it
doesn’t take another 40 years.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Not mainstream, but
progressively current TV
Founded in 1996, Democracy
Now! TV just
may be the sort of news program you've wanted but never thought you'd
find. It is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news
program that airs on 700 stations in North America via the Pacifica Network, National
Public Radio, community and college radio stations, on public access,
the Public Broadcasting Service, satellite television, and on the
internet.
Hosted by
journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now! TV has the
production values of CBS or CNN but the political values of
progressives.
As Wkipedia describes it, "The program focuses, from a decidedly
left-of-center perspective, on issues its producers consider
under-reported or ignored by mainstream news
coverage, including global news and reporting on antiwar activism."
 The program itself
describes its War and Peace Report as providing "our audience
with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the
U.S.corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international
journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly
affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace
activists, artists, academics and independent analysts."
Goodman likes
to refer to the program as "The Exception to the Rulers".
Democracy
Now! is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization funded
entirely through individual donations and grants from foundations. It
receives no corporate underwriting or government support. Democracy
Now! and its staff have received dozens of
journalism awards, including the Pinnacle Award for American Women in
Radio & Television; the George Polk Award
for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and
Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of
two Nigerian
villagers protesting an oil spill. Goodman won the Robert
F. Kennedy Memorial's First Prize in International Radio with
Allan Nairn for their 1993 report, Massacre:
The Story of East Timor which involved first-hand coverage of
genocide in East Timor.
The program has
had some pretty impressive guests,
including former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis
Kucinich, Bolivian President Evo Morales, PBS commentator Bill Moyers,
and Yoko Ono. Its roster of
"recurring guests" is no less impressive. It includes political analyst
and linguistics professor Noam Chomsky, British journalist Robert Fisk,
actor and activist Danny Glover, former UN weapons inspector Scott
Ritter, and Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy.
 Goodman is the host
and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which Time Magazine named its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along
with NBC’s Meet the Press.
Goodman is the
co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New
York
Times bestsellers, Standing Up to the
Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008),
Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and
the People Who Fight Goodman
Back (2006) and The
Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and
the Media That Love Them
(2004). She writes a weekly column (also produced as an audio podcast)
syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with
the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.
Goodman is
the winner of the 2007 Gracie Award for Individual Achievement for a
Public Broadcasting Host, from American Women in Radio and Television,
and is a 2007 honoree with the Paley Center/Museum of Television and
Radio’s She Made It Collection, which “celebrates the achievements and
preserves the legacy of great women writers, directors, producers,
journalists, sportscasters, and executives.” She was the 2006 recipient
of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her daily
reporting and groundbreaking work from Nigeria and East Timor has won
numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy
Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia
Award. She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United
Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and
Project Censored.
Gonzalez has been a columnist at the New York Daily News since 1988. He
has won numerous awards for his investigative reporting including the
George Polk Award in 1998 and was recently elected President of the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Juan’s most recent book Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of
the World Trade Center Collapse
documents cover-ups by Environmental Protection Agency and government
officials Gonzalez about health hazards at Ground Zero in New
York. He is also
the author of the book, Harvest
of Empire: The History of Latinos in America.
Tuesday,
August 5, 2008
Has MIT made the energy
discovery of the century?
If so, the mainstream media is missing the
story
There must be a major flaw somewhere, either in the mainstream media or
in a solar energy discovery announced July 31 by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. I hope the flaw is in the media. Not because I
wish it ill but because if it is, and MIT’s discovery truly is what one
scientist called “a major discovery with enormous implications
for the future prosperity of humankind,” it could make all our futures
brighter.
One of the factors
limiting the development of solar as an energy source has been the
difficulty in storing solar energy for use when it’s needed – at night,
for instance, or on cloudy days.
As Wired explains:
“Solar energy currently makes less than one percent of the world’s
electricity. The main drawback of the technology, preventing wider
adoption, is that solar systems only make power while the sun is
shining. ... So storage of electrical energy has been a long-sought
after technological advance. Batteries work but they’re too big and
expensive. Fuels, fossil or renewable, are different: They act as their
own storage, allowing for easy transport and usage. That’s one reason
that coal and oil have such a dominant hold on the world’s energy
market.”
What Daniel Nocera,
a chemistry professor at MIT, and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow
in Nocera’s lab, have done is figure out how to turn solar power into
energy that can be stored easily and perhaps inexpensively.
A press release
from MIT explains how it works:
“The key component
in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces
oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas.
The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode,
placed in water. When electricity – whether from a photovoltaic cell, a
wind turbine or any other source – runs through the electrode, the
cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas
is produced.
“Combined with
another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from
water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that
occurs during photosynthesis. At night, the hydrogen and oxygen can be
recombined into a fuel cell to produce a carbon-free electric current
that can power your home or charge an electric car.”
Of course, it will
take time to turn this discovery into reality. But Nocera thinks
commercial-scale products can be developed within a decade and Thomas
Moore, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State
University, says, “The beauty of this system is, it's so simple that
many people can immediately jump on it and make it better.”
“This is the
nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” Nocera said.
“Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can
seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”
CSM Bright Green
Blog
http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/08/01/mit-researchers-attain-solar-nirvana
As the Christian
Science Monitor Bright Green Blog says, “Scientists don’t normally talk
like this, and Nocera is not alone in his robust claims. The MIT press
release quotes James Barber, a biochemist at Imperial College London
who was not involved in this research, (as saying), “This is a major
discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of
humankind. The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated ... “
Forbes.com is more
guarded in its assessment:
http://www.forbes.com/energy/2008/07/30/nocera-solar-power-biz-energy-cz_jf_0731solar.html
“Nocera's discovery
is still a science experiment. It needs plenty of engineering before it
can be a useful device. The cobalt and phosphate at the center of
Nocera's work is cheap and plentiful, but the hydrogen reaction uses
platinum, which is rare and expensive. The electrode needs to be
improved so the oxygen-making process can speed up. And the system
needs to be integrated into some kind of electricity-producing device,
ideally powered by solar or wind on one end and a fuel cell on the
other.
“But splitting the
oxygen away from the water was the hard part, and Nocera has done it.
‘Now we can start thinking about a totally distributed solar
[photovoltaic] system,’ he said. ‘We couldn't have a solar economy
unless it could produce energy 24/7. Now we can.’”
A “solar economy”
would indeed be revolutionary. Imagine being able to buy something that
captures energy from the sun and turns it into enough electricity to
power all your home’s lights and appliances, with enough left over to
recharge your electric car’s fuel cell. Imagine being able to tell your
local power company, “Send somebody over to unhook us, and stop sending
those monthly bills. We don’t need you anymore.”
Even if you live in
areas like Michigan, where the sun only does cameo roles from November
until March, you should be able to cut electricity use – and costs –
significantly with such a device. Multiplying that reduction around the
world could, as Barber says, “open up the door for developing new
technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for
fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”
Addressing the
intertwined issues of fossil fuels and climate change would have
dramatic political consequences, not to mention the impact that cheap,
abundant electricity would have on Africa and other poor areas. The
Middle East, including Israel, would become much less strategically
significant to the United States and other large powers. So would
emerging oil suppliers like Sudan. This does not mean we could – or
should – ignore them. But with oil supplies removed from the picture –
or even if oil supplies are only reduced in importance – perhaps
rationality can enter it, or at least play a large role.
Which brings us to
the mainstream media. I stumbled on this story at Informed Comment,
where Juan Cole wrote only a couple of lines about it. Googling the
discovery resulted in a startling paucity of coverage. While it was
widely mentioned on technical and environmental sites, ABC was the only
major American news outlet reporting it (unless you count the Christian
Science Monitor as major).
So, is this the
discovery of our lifetimes, and perhaps even of our children’s
lifetimes? Or does most of the mainstream media know something we
don’t?
The latter seems
unlikely, the former too good to be true. I guess, to borrow one of my
late father’s preferred phrases, “We shall see.”
Tuesday,
June 24, 2008
End of the
lines for a great
American comedian
“I have as much authority as the Pope,” George Carlin once said. “I
just don't have as many people who believe it.”
Well,
I believed it. And so did millions of other people who are in mourning
today because after 71 years that included some of the most provocative
moments in American comic history, Carlin’s battered heart finally
stopped beating Sunday.
The first host of “Saturday Night
Live,” Carlin won four Grammys, did 14 HBO specials, appeared on Johnny
Carson 130 times, recorded 23 albums, wrote five best sellers, appeared
in 16 movies, abused and then overcame cocaine, alcohol and Vicodin,
survived three heart attacks and two open-heart surgeries, and was a
nation’s class clown right up until the end, performing what turned out
to be his final show over the weekend in Las Vegas.
Like
fellow comedian Lenny Bruce, Carlin was a cultural critic who was
arrested numerous times for obscenity (although unlike Bruce, Carlin --
working a decade later -- was never convicted). His routine about the
“seven words you can’t say on television” took Carlin all the way to
the Supreme Court, where a 1978 ruling upheld the Federal Communication
Commission’s right to control what can be said over the airwaves. He
later told the Associated Press, “My name is a footnote in American
legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of.”
Perversity
was a Carlin trademark. But it was generally a kinder, gentler,
profound and progressive perversity that never tired of challenging
conventional wisdom and the establishment. As he told a cheering
audience during his 14th HBO special, “I'm tired of being told who to
admire in this country.”
It was Carlin who “really made stand-up comedy relevant to a new
generation,” said Richard Zoglin, author of Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the
1970s Changed America. “He showed that a stand-up comedian could
be a social commentator and not just a guy getting laughs.”
Today, many obituaries and articles refer to his famous “seven words”
routine, which an article
in The Guardian correctly describes as “a thoughtful, illuminating
routine about swearing, censorship and semantics.” But as The Gua | | |