25. February 2010 by admin.

Usually, the Federal Reserve (which is a private bank run by both U.S. and foreign national bankers) sells our debt to third parties, like other countries.  However, in 2009, there weren’t enough—by far—entities willing to buy our debt.  So what do you do when you’re having a sale and only 20% of your items are purchased?

If you’re the Federal Reserve, you buy it (80% of our T-Bonds) from yourself.  This way, you provide the illusion to citizens that the economy is actually working and not simply a larger version of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.  But it is an illusion, nonetheless, and that’s what’s depressing as Hell.

Here’s a CNBC clip where this was actually discussed and called a “Ponzi Scheme”.

Here’s the article where I found out about this depressing state of affairs.

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24. February 2010 by admin.

Here’s a great post on why our current economic system is failing and why we need to find a better way….

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9. February 2010 by admin.

This is a photograph I shot at the Farmer’s Market not too far from where I live.  It was a rare sunny day, which might partially account for this woman’s look of bliss.

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9. February 2010 by admin.

“Collapse”:  a documentary about Michael Ruppert.  Ruppert’s story itself is interesting enough (former star LAPD Narcotics Detective who was asked to join the CIA and help smuggle drugs into the U.S., refused and became a journalist instead), but his views on the coming collapse of the age of oil and our way of life based on oil are the most compelling part of the documentary.  Don’t dismiss it as the rantings of some whack-job. 

Ruppert predicted the 2008 financial collapse 3 years in advance.  “It’s not that Bernie Madoff is a pyramid scheme…the whole economy is a pyramid scheme!”

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8. February 2010 by admin.

Here’s a photo from my upcoming photography book on classic American cars.  I’ll post details on where you can purchase the book, as well as more advance photos as I get closer to finishing in 03/2010.

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5. February 2010 by admin.

I predict this is going to be a big hit…a different kind of comic-book-based movie.

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2. February 2010 by admin.

Read this and ask yourself…’how much are we willing to give up in police, fire, social services, infrastructure, so that the U.S. can keep spending $600 BILLION a year on weapons, wars, and equipment we don’t need?

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/01/massive-layoffs-coming-in-nyc-nevada.html

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2. February 2010 by admin.

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2. February 2010 by admin.

Thin line between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-less’.

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19. December 2009 by admin.

Jonathan Pilger is an outstanding journalist who, like Amy Goodman, Greg Palast, and Naomi Klein, works to bring popular attention to the reality of what our politicians are doing in our names.

War is peace. Ignorance is strength

15 Oct 2009

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger draws on George Orwell’s inspiration to describe the Call of Obama: "attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills".

Barack Obama, winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, is planning another war to add to his impressive record. In Afghanistan, his agents routinely extinguish wedding parties, farmers and construction workers with weapons such as the innovative Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of your lungs. According to the UN, 338,000 Afghan infants are dying under the Obama-led alliance, which permits only $29 per head annually to be spent on medical care.

Within weeks of his inauguration, Obama started a new war in Pakistan, causing more than a million people to flee their homes. In threatening Iran – which his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said she was prepared to “obliterate” – Obama lied that the Iranians were covering up a “secret nuclear facility”, knowing that it had already been reported to the International Atomic Energy Authority. In colluding with the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, he bribed the Palestinian Authority to suppress a UN judgment that Israel had committed crimes against humanity in its assault on Gaza – crimes made possible with US weapons whose shipment Obama secretly approved before his inauguration.

At home, the man of peace has approved a military budget exceeding that of any year since the end of the Second World War while presiding over a new kind of domestic repression. During the recent G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, hosted by Obama, militarised police attacked peaceful protesters with something called the Long-Range Acoustic Device, not seen before on US streets. Mounted in the turret of a small tank, it blasted a piercing noise as tear gas and pepper gas were fired indiscriminately. It is part of a new arsenal of “crowd-control munitions” supplied by military contractors such as Ray­theon. In Obama’s Pentagon-controlled “national security state”, the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, which he promised to close, remains open, and “rendition”, secret assassinations and torture continue.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations… nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.

Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. Although Obama has called for Zelaya’s reinstatement, he refuses to condemn the coup-makers and to recall the US ambassador or the US troops who train the Honduran forces determined to crush a popular resistance. Zelaya has been repeatedly refused a meeting with Obama, who has approved an IMF loan of $164m to the illegal regime. The message is clear and familiar: thugs can act with impunity on behalf of the US.

Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills. This is the Call of Obama. It is not unlike a dog whistle: inaudible to most, irresistible to the besotted and boneheaded. “When Obama walks into a room,” gushed George Clooney, “you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere.”

The great voice of black liberation Frantz Fanon understood this. In The Wretched of the Earth, he described the “intermediary [whose] mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation: it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged”. Because political debate has become so debased in our media monoculture – Blair or Brown; Brown or Cameron – race, gender and class can be used as seductive tools of propaganda and diversion. In Obama’s case, what matters, as Fanon pointed out in an earlier era, is not the intermediary’s “historic” elevation, but the class he serves. After all, Bush’s inner circle was probably the most multiracial in presidential history. There was Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, all dutifully serving an extreme and dangerous power.

Britain has seen its own Obama-like mysticism. The day after Blair was elected in 1997, the Observer predicted that he would create “new worldwide rules on human rights” while the Guardian rejoiced at the “breathless pace [as] the floodgates of change burst open”. When Obama was elected last November, Denis MacShane MP, a devotee of Blair’s bloodbaths, unwittingly warned us: “I shut my eyes when I listen to this guy and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.”

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11. December 2009 by admin.

This is from a report created by UC San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center and reported on in the NY Times recently.

Executive Summary
In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

We defined "information" as flows of data delivered to people and we measured the bytes, words, and hours of consumer information. Video sources (moving pictures) dominate bytes of information, with 1.3 zettabytes from television and approximately 2 zettabytes of computer games. If hours or words are used as the measurement, information sources are more widely distributed, with substantial amounts from radio, Internet browsing, and others. All of our results are estimates.

Previous studies of information have reported much lower quantities. Two previous How Much Information? studies, by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian in 2000 and 2003, analyzed the quantity of original content created, rather than what was consumed. A more recent study measured consumption, but estimated that only .3 zettabytes were consumed worldwide in 2007.

Hours of information consumption grew at 2.6 percent per year from 1980 to 2008, due to a combination of population growth and increasing hours per capita, from 7.4 to 11.8. More surprising is that information consumption in bytes increased at only 5.4 percent per year. Yet the capacity to process data has been driven by Moore’s Law, rising at least 30 percent per year. One reason for the slow growth in bytes is that color TV changed little over that period. High-definition TV is increasing the number of bytes in TV programs, but slowly.

The traditional media of radio and TV still dominate our consumption per day, with a total of 60 percent of the hours. In total, more than three-quarters of U.S. households’ information time is spent with non-computer sources.

Despite this, computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively.Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet.

You can access the full report here.

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11. December 2009 by admin.

Maybe not the best name, but hey, it’s free to view…

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11. December 2009 by admin.

What can you really say that the picture itself doesn’t?

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3. December 2009 by admin.

If you haven’t already read this Huffington Post article, read it—a great post about how we are being betrayed economically by the Kleptocracy that runs the United States…whenever you think that our system works well, look at these statistics and the trends that Warren cites over the last 30+ years.

Can you imagine an America without a strong middle class? If you can, would it still be America as we know it?

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

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1. December 2009 by admin.

Much to my (and I hope many others’) chagrin and disappointment, President Obama has indicated he will be sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Prior to the announcement, the Obama administration’s fiscal 2010 budget for the Pentagon, released in May, asked for $65 billion for Afghanistan and $61 billion for Iraq.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the additional 30,000 troops would cost an additional $15-30 Billion a year.  This means that the total war budget—exclusive of weapons development and military operations outside of the war zones—for 2010 will be between $140 and $155 Billion.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost the United States taxpayers close to $1 Trillion dollars.

Of course, the insanity of this is staggering on many levels not the least being the most basic one: you can’t eradicate terrorism or the possibility of terrorism no matter how many troops you send over to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Terrorist groups can form at any time in any place if there are people who have the will to action—the Oklahoma Federal Building was destroyed by American terrorists.  If we kill all of the current generation of adults who might commit acts of terrorism (unlikely no matter how much we spend or how many troops we send over) , there are still future generations who can grow up to become terrorists either in Afghanistan and Iraq or other countries where we’re not presently engaged in military action. And, in fact, there are empirical studies that show that by killing many Iraqis and Afghans, we are actually increasing the likelihood of terrorist groups forming and doing violence to United States citizens.

Moreover, the country that has shown the greatest ideological/religious hostility towards the U.S. is Saudi Arabia—but for many reasons (virtually all economic), we don’t even try to wage war against militant Wahabi sect members, despite the majority of the terrorists who caused the tragedies of 9/11 being Saudis and the architects of this attack being Saudis.

And, if as I (and many others) suspect, that the real and most obvious reason for the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has to do with the control of oil and natural gas resources, why is it that, since the war began, the price of oil has actually risen and that oil companies have made record profits? 

But even if the buildup of troops and the war itself actually made sense, there is still the issue of the U.S. economy and the impact of the downturn on our citizens.  How can we or the government (in prior years, I might have been tempted to write ‘OUR’ government, but the government is no longer OF the people, BY the people, or FOR the people—it’s of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation), in good conscience, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year waging a war when 1 in 6 of our own citizens are either starving or are chronically malnourished?  Is the threat of a bomb being detonated worse than almost 17 million children going to bed hungry every night, not to mention the 50,000,000 Americans who can’t afford proper health care?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA) reported today that 49 million Americans, including nearly 17 million children, are food insecure. The 2009 report on Household Food Insecurity in the United States paints an alarming picture of the pervasiveness of hunger in our nation. 

This is an increase of 36 percent over the numbers released one year by the USDA, which found that 36.2 million American were at risk of hunger.“It is tragic that so many people in this nation of plenty don’t have access to adequate amounts of nutritious food,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America.  “Although these new numbers are staggering, it should be noted that these numbers reflect the state of the nation one year ago, in 2008.  Since then, the economy has significantly weakened, and there are likely many more people struggling with hunger than this report states.

We need to let the politicians (again, not OUR politicians because they don’t work for us—they work for Wall Street, the HMOs, and for the Oil Companies) know that this is ridiculous and unconscionable—the richest country in the world shouldn’t tolerate around 1/6th of its population being chronically malnourished.

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29. November 2009 by admin.

Now that Black Friday has come and gone and the official commerce-countdown-to-Christmas has started, I feel it’s appropriate to offer some holiday music.

I discovered that a band I am a big fan of, “The Dandy Warhols”, has done their own version of “The Little Drummer Boy” in 1994, and I’ve included the video below in case you’re looking for some Christmas music that rocks (and who isn’t?).  You can download the mp3 file of the performance for free from their site.  Next to the version by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, I think it’s hard to beat.

And here’s another great video by the group, “Godless (Massive Attack Remix)” that rocks pretty hard all year ‘round.

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26. November 2009 by admin.

File in the ‘things I didn’t know I needed to know’ file.

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Leeds and reported on by the London Telegraph here…

Women who revealed around 40 per cent of their skin attracted twice as many men as those who covered up.

However, those who exposed any more than this also fared worse. Experts believe that showing too much flesh puts men off because it suggests they might be unfaithful.

Psychologist Dr Colin Hendrie, who led the study, told the Daily Mail: “Any more than 40 per cent and the signal changes from ‘allure’ to one indicating general availability and future infidelity.

“Show some leg, show some arm, but not any more than that.”

The study, published in the journal Behaviour, found that the most popular women combined the 40 per cent rule with tight clothing and provocative dancing. The 15 per cent that combined all three criteria were approached by 40 men each.

Now, if it were up to me,  the next study should focus on what constitutes ‘provocative dancing’ and how much of it is too much?

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25. November 2009 by admin.

It’s a “HeadTime” head massager from Kinatech, a South Korean company (thought it might be more interesting if it were a NORTH Korean company—neuro-enslavement of Western Infidels etc.). 

IHeadTime is a gigantic silver helmet equipped with 29 silicon balls, 34 ceramic balls, and speakers.  It can give you a robotic head message (with heat, if you’d like) and soothe you with the sound of birds chirping and waves crashing piped into your Headtime hat (to quote Huffington Post’s piece on this).

Anyway, if you saw the picture posted some time ago and were wondering what the picture was of…now you know.

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24. November 2009 by admin.

It would be funny to run this ad now, post a URL as part of the message, and see how people responded…

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24. November 2009 by admin.

I came across this picture of a Magnavox “Odyssey 2” game console from 1980.  Quite an evolution to today’s Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, no?  Look at the controllers off to either side…

and, of course, Atari’s…

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16. November 2009 by admin.

I could tell you, but it’s probably not as interesting as what you could come up with…

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16. November 2009 by admin.

You have to wonder what our society has come to when the ad council advertises for kids to go out and play for an hour a day.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid no one had to tell us to go out and play—the questionn was if I would be home in time for dinner and not whether I would find something to do outside for an hour or two or 5…but that was also before there were video game consoles, the consumer Internet, mobile phones, etc.

Anyway, here’s the ad…

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13. November 2009 by admin.

Fight the Power.

This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing…or a Liberal or Conservative thing…this is a survival and common sense thing.   We need to change the way our food is manufactured (and I use that word purposely, because ‘growing’ is only a marginal part of the food creation and delivery process in our country today), and go back to actually eating things that come out of the ground and don’t first go through a factory.  We need to stop subsidizing corn production to enrich large food processors, and start subsidizing (if we are going to subsidize at all) organically grown produce that can give nutrition to our children who need it.

There are only a handful of companies that manufacture food in this country on any scale and they basically control the supermarkets’ 40,000+ products.

Monsanto has patented corn that it has genetically modified, and has succeeeded in getting virtually every farmer in the U.S. to grow corn using its seed.

U.S. taxpayers subsidize farmers to grow and sell corn and soy at below-market prices to food producers who in turn sell the food relatively cheaply (but still make a nice spread at the taxpayers’ expense) to the consumer.   Unfortunately for all of the kids heading towards type II diabetes, the corn-rich food (and that’s most mass produced food and drinks, by the way) is high in empty calories, sugar, etc. and is cheaper than fruits and vegetables, which are not subsidized by the taxpayer.

Poor families often have to choose between the dollar menu at a fast food restaurant that can feed a family of four and produce at the grocery store that can barely feed them for the same money…guess which they choose?

Watch the movie “Food, Inc.” and then tell others about it so they will watch it  It’s not a very pleasant film to watch and it will make you mad, but important if you care about what you put in your mouth. 

It will show you what’s really going on with food production in the U.S. You can see all of the factory-raised chickens, pigs and cows living their whole lives standing in their own excrement, and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics so that they can grow more rapidly and be slaughtered more rapidly.

If you’re already buying food locally and eating organic, then you’re already on the right path.  If you’re buying processed foods and meat, watch this and then change what you do—but only if the idea of eating Frankenfood is repellent to you.

Here’s the trailer.

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13. November 2009 by admin.

Here’s some music I’ve been liking lately…

You’ve probably heard this already so it’s not a new discovery, but I still can’t get it out of my head.  I heard Chris Martin play it live at the Bridge School Benefit Concert at Shoreline late last month and I haven’t got it out of my head since…

“Stranger” by Hooverphonic, a great Belgian band…a little slower in this version than on the album, but still worth checking out…

The always-reliable Dandy Warhols, with “Godless (Massive Attack remix)

One of the greatest rappers/Hip-hop stars, Lyrics Born with Lateef, dropping “Last Trumpet”—listen to the lyrics of the song—definitely relevant to what’s going on in the world…

And, finally, one of my favorite bands, The Crystal Method, with “Blunts and Robots”—only one of many great tunes…no video but you can hear it here…

http://hypem.com/track/848453/The+Crystal+Method+featuring+Peter+Hook+-+Blunts+Robots

and this by the Crystal Method as well—“Divided by Night” the title track from their last album…

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22. October 2009 by admin.

It’s easy with all of the domestic trouble we are experiencing to forget about the wars that are continuing now for many years in Iraq and Afghanistan and the many lives—combatants and civilians—that have been lost because of the need to control natural resources (and if you believe that the wars the U.S. is waging truly have anything to do with ending Terrorism, perhaps you’d be interested in joining the Richard Cheney Fan Club) in foreign lands.

But we must not forget that our government in the United States is conducting these wars with more than 50% of the U.S. population in strong opposition.  This opposition continues to exist despite the need for many Americans to focus on their economic survival and preserving the health and well-being of their families.

There’s a site that monitors the ongoing cost of the wars to the U.S. citizenry—appropriate since it is the citizens of the U.S. who pay for the bulk of the wars.  The site is CostofWar.com.

Here’s a snapshot of the ever-increasing war costs in dollars:

Take a long look at these numbers  and think about how much better this money could be spent on food and healthcare for poor families, particularly poor American children—60,000,000+ children are considered ‘food insecure’, either not having enough food to maintain baseline health, or severely undernourished.  We could alternatively provide healthcare to all Americans with that money.

Keep in mind, this is not the military budget per se, so getting rid of these costs would not impact our ability to defend the United States…

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10. October 2009 by admin.

Jonathan Pilger is a fearless journalist who, like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and others, tries to uncover the linkages between American policy and big business and separate what politicians say from what they do.   You can find some excellent documentaries by Pilger on Amazon and Netflix—I strongly encourage you to watch them if you can.

There’s  no question in my mind that President Obama is much more literate, verbally proficient, and intelligent than Bush II is.  And I much prefer Joe Biden to Dick Cheney—in fact I would prefer Spiro Agnew to Dick Cheney. 

However, as I predicted to friends and family before Obama took office, our president doesn’t appear to be doing anything that a centrist Republican (like Clinton—and if you don’t think Clinton was a centrist Republican, take a look at what he did while in office) wouldn’t do.  Obama is backed by the same business, energy sector, and financial interests as Bush was, and has taken a pretty conservative approach in action if not words, as Pilger points out in this brief video below.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

This is a nice picture, entitled “The Anger of Zeus” by a photographer named Pedro Pais.

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9. October 2009 by admin.

Here’s a video of Yamaha singing female she-bot.  While still not photorealistic, the robots are getting ever closer to lifelike.  It makes you wonder if Dick Cheney wasn’t made by Yamaha too.

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29. September 2009 by admin.

This was covered in a great site called “Ghawar Guzzler”.

Potentially Game-Changing Battery May Make Smart Grid Unnecessary

(Hat tip: Peak Oil Debunked)
Now this is a paradigm shift: instead of blowing a wad remolding our antiquated grid system, gearing it to become "smart," perhaps, instead, we should let individual homes become their own power stations, generating and storing their own power. That’s the fantastic idea behind this new battery. Great article.

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.
The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.
It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this
time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to
personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

[…]

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it "smart."
The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.
Solar energy has been around, of course, but it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.
The convergence of these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — has profound implications for oil-strapped America.
"These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables," said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. "They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward."

[…]

Inside Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The embrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.
This may not startle you, but it should. It’s amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.
The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.
Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.
Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That’s a pretty exciting place to live.
And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles — one per day for a decade — you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they’re kaput in a year or so.
A small three-bedroom home in Provo might average, say, 18 kWh of electric consumption per day in the summer — that’s 1,000 watts for 18 hours. A much larger home, say five bedrooms in the Grandview area, might average 80 kWh,
according to Provo Power.;Either way, a supplement of 20 to 40 kWh per day is
substantial. If you could produce that much power in a day — for example through solar cells on the roof — your power bills would
plummet.

Ceramatec’s battery breakthrough now makes that possible.
Clyde Shepherd of Alpine is floored by the prospect. He recently installed the second of two windmills on his property that are each rated at 2.4 kilowatts continuous output. He’s searching for a battery system that can capture and store some of that for later use when it’s calm outside, but he hasn’t found a good solution.
"This changes the whole scope of things and would have a major impact on what we’re trying to do," Shepherd said. "Something that would provide 20 kilowatts would put us near 100 percent of what we would need to be completely independent. It would save literally thousands of dollars a year."
Shepherd is connected to the grid through Rocky Mountain Power, which charges a variable rate for power depending on demand during a given 24-hour period. With his windmill setup, Shepherd has what’s called "net metering" — an electric meter that spins both ways. He pays for electricity coming in, but gets a credit from Rocky Mountain for any excess power generated by his windmills that flows back onto the grid. Already, he’s cut his power bills in half, and with good storage batteries he thinks he could reduce the bill to zero.
While Shepherd opted for windmills over solar at the time he was planning his alternative energy installation, he said he would reconsider that decision today as the bottom continues to fall out of the cost of solar cells.
"Batteries and PV are about to merge," said MIT’s Nocera, using the shorthand for "photovoltaics" or solar power. "First Solar is now saying that it takes $1 a peak watt to manufacture, and another 80 cents for installation. So they’re saying that you can get PV for under $2 a watt. That’s a reduction of cost by a factor of four. Only a few years ago, it was $8. If CoorsTek and Ceramatec come up with a good battery, the market will develop quickly."

[…]

In 2000 Ashok Joshi, a native of India, took the helm at Ceramatec. His international reputation in ion technology and fuel cells kept the company among the first rank of innovators.
Joshi (he prefers A.J.) looked to the potent combination of sodium and sulphur for the basic components of a new battery. That was known chemistry. But while he wanted to achieve a high energy density offered by those elements, he also wanted to get rid of the extreme heat, corrosion and toxicity of liquid sodium batteries.
The key would be found in a paper-thin, yet strong and highly conductive, electrolyte material — an advanced ceramic — to serve as the barrier between the battery’s sodium and sulphur. The thinner the barrier, the cooler the battery can operate. If you can get below the melting point of 98 C, sodium stays in its solid state, and you’ve got enough energy to run a house with safety.Charged particles of sodium and sulphur — ions — now scoot so effortlessly through the new ceramic wafer that the sodium doesn’t even approach 98 C, let alone 350.

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27. September 2009 by admin.

Hello, it’s been a long time since I last posted anything at Wetshadows.  I am going to start to do more regular posts.

Here are some pictures I shot during my recent trip to Italy.  I went to Rome, Positano, Ravello, Capri, Amalfi, Praiano, Sorrento and Pompeii.

View Full Album

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4. June 2009 by admin.

This is an image I shot some time ago but only recently revisited…

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23. May 2009 by admin.

I believe strongly in a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, as I’ve written about before in covering here the interview of Dr. Quentin Young by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now.

Though I don’t know how much good it will do, I wrote a letter to Pres. Obama  to urge him not to take the single-payer option off the table in his current discussions.  Paul Krugman has a great op-ed piece at the NYT, that you can read here.

I urge you and your friends and family to send similar letters on health care reform to the President if you share my beliefs that we need a single-payer system.

Here’s the letter I sent to our President today:

President Obama,
I voted for you and convinced others to vote for you.  Your intelligence and oratory abilities are very welcome after 8 years with your predecessor.  Since I understand that you do actually read some of the mail sent to you as time permits, I hope this e-mail gets passed on to you.

As happy as I am to have you as my President and as much as I admire your considerable talents and abilities, I (and many many others I know) am profoundly disappointed by what appears to be your current position on healthcare reform.  Earlier in your career, you supported a single-payer system (and had views on healthcare which seemed much more in keeping with those of many Americans who in survey after survey have indicated a strong preference for a single-payer system) but now appear to have completely regressed on that position, to the extent that you now are not even inviting your former advisor on healthcare reform, Dr. Quentin Young, to your White House discussions on the subject. 

I don’t understand why you have taken the discussion of single-payer system entirely off the table.  I don’t buy your public statements that we can’t start over from scratch and have to work with what we have.  FDR made major changes when the times called for it–so can you, with the help of Congress.

Please don’t cave into the HMO, Insurance and Pharmaceutical lobbies and end up with a solution which only appears to solve the problem and in reality is just a bad compromise that merely preserves the existing broken system to the benefit of the business interests behind it!  A majority of doctors and nurses support a single-payer system…if it’s not an option, why are so many healthcare professionals like Dr. Quentin Young so strongly behind it?

The current healthcare system is crippling private business, crippling hard-working Americans who play by the rules, and more than anything, is a big waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Your legacy ultimately will derive from what you do for the environment, (so that your children and mine can survive), what you do to reform healthcare, and what you do to restore sanity to American Foreign Policy.  Please don’t let this leg of the tripod remain ‘business as usual".

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17. May 2009 by admin.

I don’t know about you, but I was getting at least 2 calls a day on my mobile phone from this extended auto warranty telemarketing outfit.  It is a recorded message, and if you try to call back, you usually get a recording or no answer.

Well, some enterprising people have figured out how to access this company’s voicemail and fill up the inboxes with messages. If you have been harassed by this company, as I have, you might consider looking at the following for advice on how you can give the company a little of its own medicine. 

To be clear, I’m not advocating doing anything illegal or destroying existing voicemail messages, or using the company’s information for any illicit purpose.  However, I see no harm in leaving the company voicemails on its own system and waste their time the way they waste ours.

You can access info about the company’s phone number and how to leave voicemail here.

Also, here’s a hilarious (at least to me) video of a guy who is messing with a telemarketer from this venal organization:

Extended Car Warranty from Adrian Chen on Vimeo.

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1. May 2009 by admin.

Researchers at UCLA have come up with "…serial time-encoded amplified microscopy (STEAM) technology enables continuous real-time imaging at a frame rate of more than 6 MHz, a shutter speed of less than 450 ps and an optical image gain of more than 300 — the world’s fastest continuously running camera, useful for studying rapid phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology…".

You can read more here.

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1. May 2009 by admin.

Some enterprising young whipper-snappers have come up with a Theremin-like virtual interface you can use to interface with various applications using gestures.  For instance, you can ’scratch records’ without actually having any turntables or records.  And it’s all done with sensors that track your movements in 3 dimensions.

Watch the video below:

3D Computer Interface from Free Flow on Vimeo.

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23. April 2009 by admin.

I watch a lot of movies on DVD, and very few in the theater.  I bought a blu-ray player (see January post on this) over Christmas Holiday, and, coupled with my Pioneer Elite 50" plasma,  have found that the home theater experience brings me even closer to that of the movie theater, but without the noisy people and possible projector or sound issues.

So, here’s what I recommend and don’t recommend you see:

Mongol: a great film about the early years of Genghis Khan, first in a planned trilogy of films.  The film is beautifully acted (by people I guarantee you haven’t seen before), photographed, and directed, by Sergei Bodrov. There isn’t a tremendous amount of dialog, so the fact that there are subtitles isn’t a big deal.  The young boy who plays Genghis Khan as a child is truly amazing.  I look forward to seeing more films from this very talented director and his equally talented cinematographer.

Cadillac Records: I know a few things about the history of music in the United States, but rarely have seen any focus on some of the greatest American blues musicians who ever lived, Muddy Waters or one of the greatest harmonica-players, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf.  This film makes these three musicians its central narrative figures and the actors who play them all do a good job, as does Adrian Brody, who plays the founder of Chess Records.

Beyonce plays Etta James, and I think she sounds really good singing these older tunes than she does singing the crap that is written for her.  She should talk to Mark Ronson (who produced "Back to Black" for Amy Winehouse) about producing her next album and sing songs that really showcase her voice. 

The film isn’t flawless by any means; it becomes a formulaic biopic in places, particularly towards the end, though it is redeemed from being a ‘movie of the week’ with good editing and pacing in the first 3/4 of the film.  Also, Cedric the Entertainer is the wrong guy to be doing the narrative voiceover (or at least uses the wrong voice to do it); it sounds more like an educational exhibit at Disneyland than a film narrator.

Twilight: I will save you a lot of time, time that I wished I had back: don’t see this movie. 

If you are not a teenage girl (and even then, the appeal is tenuous IMO), you will find this film badly acted (in some cases laughably so), badly directed, with a mediocre script and–most mystifying of all–bad makeup that at one turn makes the vampires look green and at other times makes them look reasonably healthy, with no discernible logic to the changes.

Yes, this film has and will continue to make boatloads of money and there will be sequels until Obama’s daughter is running for President against Chelsea, but, trust me, you have better things to do than watch this.

Australia: Another movie you shouldn’t see.  You may think, seeing that the movie stars Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, and is directed by Baz Luhrmann (who directed Moulin Rouge, another film I didn’t get, but a lot of people loved) and is about a scenic and interesting country (want to guess which one?), that the film would have a lot going for it.

Well, guess again. The film seems to be played like an early 1960s historical comedy and is over the top.  I made it through the first 20 minutes and then gave up on it.  Again, you must have better things to do.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua:  now you’re going to say to yourself, if you’ve read this far, that if I didn’t like ‘Twilight’ and ‘Australia’, I certainly wouldn’t like this film.  But, surprisingly enough, I really liked this film.  This is especially surprising since I dislike even the concept of Chihuahuas in real life.

This film really worked for me for a couple of reasons: the voice talent was excellent, esp. Drew Barrymore as the heroine of the film–she did a great job, as did her German Shepherd friend, her boyfriend Chihuahua and the leader of the wild Chihuahuas.  I’m too lazy to remember the actors’ names, but they were good; the script was actually pretty funny consistently but at the same time straddled the line between telling a story and poking fun at itself pretty well.  Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a Jean Luc Godard film by any means, but it was much better than I was thinking it would be.  I actually look forward to seeing a sequel.

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23. April 2009 by admin.

Another one from a little village in Provence shot last year…

Here’s a picture I shot last Fall in Moss Landing, CA:

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22. April 2009 by admin.

Here are a couple of images I’ve been working on for your viewing pleasure…

This is an image I shot in a seaside town in the South of France almost exactly a year ago. I’m only now getting around to editing it and reviewing the images I shot there…better late than never.

Here’s another image I shot in Provence from the same trip last year:

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22. April 2009 by admin.

I am an avid amateur photographer.  So, not surprisingly, I appreciate great photography when I see it.  I came across Patrick Smith’s work in a photography magazine, and proceeded to check out his online gallery.  It turns out he’s one of the most popular photographers on Flickr, and it’s not hard to see why.

Smith creates truly stunning (and I don’t use that word liberally) seascapes.  He shoots other landscapes and buildings as well, but it’s his seascapes that truly stand out.  What’s really amazing is that, so far as I can tell, he’s not a full-time professional photographer, but rather a database programmer who shoots pictures as an increasingly remnunerative side business.

He shoots with a Canon 5D Mk II usually with a 17-40L lens, and one or more graduated Neutral Density filters (that’s for you photo geeks out there).

You can view his work at his site here and I strongly suggest you do.  I think you’ll also find his work beautiful.  I particularly like his photograph of Isla Mujeres at sunset.  I now use it as my desktop wallpaper.  I haven’t inserted any of his images here because I’m not sure that he permits it.

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21. April 2009 by admin.

In case you don’t already know who she is, Canadian Naomi Klein is one of the few real heirs to Chomsky’s legacy of social/political/economic activism and criticism.  She combines great intelligence with great communication skills and delivers economic and political critiques that matter.  Her latest book is "Shock Doctrine", a book I strongly recommend that everyone read. Her thesis, that ‘free-market’ economists use major natural or man-made upheavals to put in place radical economic theories and privatization, is being played out before our eyes. I have written about it before in this blog.

One of my favorite all-time quotations is one she said in a speech she gave several years ago: "By think tanks I mean the people who get paid to think by the people who make the tanks".

Here is a piece by her on Larry Summers from the latest edition of her newsletter.  You can subscribe at www.naomiklein.org.  You can buy her book "Shock Doctrine" via the link below:

Vote Out Larry Summers

Note from Naomi:  The Sunday Outlook section of the Washington Post has a "Spring Cleaning Special" in which ten writers make the case for something that deserves to be tossed out this spring. On the trash heap is everything from academic tenure to the White House press corps to the phrase "Muslim world." I chose to argue for the elimination of Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. The good news is that Washington Post readers seem to agree. Last I checked, readers were voting to toss out Summers more than anyone or anything else on the list. So add your voice and vote out Summers here.
Why We Should Banish Larry Summers From Public Life
By Naomi Klein, Washington Post, April 19, 2009
I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn’t be nice. Just from public life.
The criticisms of President Obama’s chief economic adviser are well known. He’s too close to Wall Street. And he’s a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we’re told we shouldn’t care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.
And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we’ve got.
Brain Bubbles start with an innocuous "whiz kid" moniker in undergrad, which later escalates to "wunderkind." Next comes the requisite foray as an economic adviser to a small crisis-wracked country, where the kid is declared a "savior." By 30, our Bubble Boy is tenured and officially a "genius." By 40, he’s a "guru," by 50 an "oracle." After a few drinks: "messiah."
The superhuman powers bestowed upon these men — and yes, they are all men — shield them from the scrutiny that might have prevented the current crisis. Alan Greenspan’s Brain Bubble allowed him to put the economy at great risk: When he made no sense, people assumed that it was their own fault. Brain Bubbles also formed the key argument Greenspan and Summers used to explain why lawmakers couldn’t regulate the derivatives market: The wizards on Wall Street were too brilliant, their models too complex, for mere mortals to understand.
Back in 1991, Summers argued that the subject of economics was no longer up for debate: The answers had all been found by men like him. "The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering," he said. "One set of laws works everywhere." Summers subsequently laid out those laws as the three "-ations": privatization, stabilization and liberalization. Some "kinds of ideas," he explained a few years later in a PBS interview, have already become too "passé" for discussion. Like "the idea that a huge spending program is the way to stimulate the economy."
And that’s the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.
Word is that Summers’s current post may be a pit stop on the way to the big prize, Federal Reserve chairman. That means he could actually make "maestro."
Mr. President, please: Pop this bubble before it’s too late.

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16. April 2009 by admin.

While the media cannot spend enough time talking about Lindsay, Paris, Britney, Jessica, etc., there are people like Susan Boyle who have none of their outward appeal, but are orders of magnitude more talented.  I had no idea when I started watching this video that I would hear what I heard, and apparently neither did the judges nor the 12 million people who’ve downloaded and watched this video.

Check it out for yourself and prepare to be amazed…

EMBED-Susan Boyle Stuns Crowd with Epic Singing - Watch more free videos

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15. April 2009 by admin.

I don’t know about you, but I kept reading about Somali pirates, and I kept wondering, ‘why are the Somalis becoming pirates?’ and ‘why are Somalis in particular becoming pirates and not people from other coastal nations?’  Certainly if piracy (which is deplorable, as is killing innocent Afghanis with American-operated UAVs or the Chinese torturing Tibetan Buddhist monks and taking over Tibet ) is profitable in these hard economic times,  when over 1 Billion people worldwide are slowly or quickly starving to death, you might expect it to spread virally among impoverished maritime groups.

Well, as with all things under- or mis-reported by the American corporate media, it turns out there may be a reason why the Somalis in particular are practicing piracy of the maritime variety–1st world nations dumping toxic waste (including nuclear radioactive waste) off the Somali Coast ever since the regime collapsed in 1991/92, and international rapacious over-fishing off the coast of Somali for years now. 

Yet again there is no moral equivalency in many Western Countries’ practices.  If we do it to Somalia it’s ‘economic development’ and ‘fair trade’; if Somalia does it to us it’s ‘piracy’. 

Couple this unwillingness to practice the Golden Rule with the fact that Somalia still has valuable natural resources that we would like to ‘access’ via an invasion (see Bolton’s quote at the beginning of the excerpt below), and it’s clear that we care about Africa primarily when there’s some resource to be extracted.

DemocracyNow has an interview with Mohamed Abshir Waldo about this issue.

Analysis: Somalia Piracy Began in Response to Illegal Fishing and Toxic Dumping by Western Ships off Somali Coast

President Obama vowed an international crackdown to halt piracy off the coast of Somalia Monday soon after the freeing of US cargo ship captain Richard Phillips, who had been held hostage by Somali pirates since last Wednesday. While the pirates story has dominated the corporate media, there has been little to no discussion of the root causes driving piracy. We speak with consultant and analyst Mohamed Abshir Waldo. In January, he wrote a paper titled “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?” [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Mohamed Abshir Waldo, a consultant and analyst. He joins us on the line from Mombasa. He is Kenyan of Somali origin. He wrote a piece in January titled “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?”

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama vowed an international crackdown to halt piracy off the coast of Somalia Monday soon after the freeing of US cargo ship captain Richard Phillips, who had been held hostage by Somali pirates since last Wednesday. Three Somali pirates were killed in the US operation.

While some military analysts are considering attacks on pirate bases inside Somalia in addition to expanding US Navy gunships along the Somali coastline, others are strongly opposed to a land invasion. US Congress member Donald Payne of New Jersey made a brief visit to the Somali capital of Mogadishu Monday and said piracy was, quote, a “symptom of the decades of instability.” His plane was targeted by mortar fire as he was leaving Somalia, soon after a pirate vowed revenge against the United States for killing his men.

Former US ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton told Fox News over the weekend that the US should assemble a, quote, “coalition of the willing” to invade Somalia.

Meanwhile, local fishing and business communities along the Somali coast are suffering as a result of the increased American and international naval presence in their waters.

SOMALI FISHERMAN: [translated] American Marine forces always arrest us as we continue fishing. We meet their warships, and at times they send helicopters to take photos of us, as they suspect we are pirates. And we are not.

SOMALI BUSINESSMAN: [translated] People are worried about the troops, as it is becoming more and more difficult to do business. There’s a lot of warships patrolling the sea, and merchant ships are getting more and more checked, thinking they are operated by pirates.

AMY GOODMAN: While the pirates story has dominated the corporate media, there has been little to no discussion of the root causes driving piracy.

Mohamed Abshir Waldo is a consultant and analyst in Kenya. He is Kenyan of Somali origin. In January, he wrote a paper called “The Two Piracies in Somalia: Why the World Ignores the Other?” He joins us on the phone right now from Mombasa.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Hello. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Can you talk about what you think the two piracies are?

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Well, the two piracies are the original one, which was foreign fishing piracy by foreign trawlers and vessels, who at the same time were dumping industrial waste, toxic waste and, it also has been reported, nuclear waste. Most of the time, we feel it’s the same fishing vessels, foreign fishing vessels, that are doing both. That was the piracy that started all these problems.

And the other piracy is the shipping piracy. When the marine resources of Somalia was pillaged, when the waters were poisoned, when the fish was stolen, and in a poverty situation in the whole country, the fishermen felt that they had no other possibilities or other recourse but to fight with, you know, the properties and the shipping of the same countries that have been doing and carrying on the fishing piracy and toxic dumping.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what IUUs are?

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: IUUs are—I don’t remember now, but it’s uninterrupted an unreported fishing, unlicensed, unreported, uncontrolled, practically, fishing. Without [inaudible]—

AMY GOODMAN: In your article, you say—in your article, you say it stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing fleets from Europe—

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Correct.

AMY GOODMAN: —and Arabia and the Far East.

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Correct, correct. And this has been known to both the countries in the West that had these fishing fleets, which included Spain, Italy, Greece, and eventually UK and others who joined later, as well as Russian. And, of course, there were many more from the East. And this problem has been going on since 1991. And the fishing communities and fishermen reported and complained and appealed to the international community through the United Nations, through the European Union, with no, actually, response in any form at all. They were totally ignored.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohamed Abshir Waldo, explain how what you call “fishing piracy” began.

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Fishing piracy means fishing without license, fishing by force, even though the community complains, even though whatever authorities are there complain, even though they ask these foreign fishing fleets and trawlers and vessels that have no license, that have no permit whatsoever, when they tell them, “Stop fishing and get out of the area,” they refuse, and instead, in fact, they fight. They fought with the fishermen and coastal communities, pouring boiling water on them and even shooting at them, running over their canoes and fishing boats. These were the problems that had been going on for so long, until the community organized themselves and empowered, actually, what they call the National Volunteer Coast Guard, what you would call and what others call today as “pirates.”

AMY GOODMAN: So you’re saying illegal fishing is happening off the coast of Somalia. What countries are engaged in it?

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: The countries engaged include practically all of southern Europe, France, Spain, Greece, UK. Nowadays I hear even Norway. There were not many Scandinavians before, but Norwegian fishing now is involved in this, you know, very profitable fishing business. So, there are others, of course. There are Russian. There are Taiwanese. There are Philippines. There are Koreans. There are Chinese. You know, it’s a free-for-all coast.

And to make things worse, we learned that now that the navies and the warships are there; every country is protecting their own illegal fishing piracies—vessels. They have come back. They ran away from the Somali volunteer guards, coast guards, but now they are back. And they are being protected by their navies. In fact, they are coming close to the territorial waters to harass again the fishermen, who no longer have opportunity or possibility to fish on the coast because of the fear of being called pirates and apprehended by the navy, who are at the same time protecting the other side.

So the issue is really a matter of tremendous injustice, international community only attending and talking and coming to the rescue of the—of their interests and not at all considering or looking from the Somalis’ side. This does not mean I am condoning or anyone is condoning piracy or endangering the life of innocent sailors and crews or damaging the property of others, but these people, these fishermen-turned-pirates, had no alternative but to protect themselves, to protect their turf, to—you know, an act of desperation, you might call it.

AMY GOODMAN: What do people in Somalia feel about the pirates, the issue of pirates off the coast?

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: A mixed reaction, I think, in Somalia. The people do not want the innocent sailors to be harmed. They don’t want any major environmental disasters to happen by blowing up chemical- or oil-carrying vessels. And they urge the pirates, or fishermen pirates, they urge them not to do any such things.

On the other hand, since there’s no sympathy, there’s no understanding, there is no readiness for dialogue with the coastal community, with the community in general, with the Somali authorities or the regional government or the national government on a joint action for solving these problems, then it’s each for his own way of doing. But the people are very concerned. On the one hand, they would like this to be resolved peacefully; on the other, they feel very sad for injustice being done by the international community.

AMY GOODMAN: A little more on the issue of toxic dumping, if you would, Mohamed Abshir Waldo. I don’t think people in the United States understand exactly what it is you’re referring to and how it affects people.

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Well, toxic dumping, industrial waste dumping, nuclear dumping, as you are probably aware and have heard and many people know, for quite some time, in the ’70s mainly, in the ’80s, in the ’90s, there was a lot of waste of all these kinds that companies wanted to get rid of, following very strict environmental rules in their countries. So where else to take but in countries in conflict or weak countries who could not prevent them or who could be bought? So these wastes have been carried to Somalia. It’s been in the papers. It has been reported by media organizations like Al Jazeera, I think, like CNN. Many had reported about the Mafia, Italian Mafia, who admitted it, dumping it in Somalia for quite some time, for quite a long time.

And as we speak now, I heard yesterday, in fact, another vessel was captured in the Gulf of Aden by community—this time not pirates, by the community, when the suspected it, and it was carrying two huge containers, which it dumped into the sea when they saw these people coming to them. They have been apprehended. The vessel had been apprehended. Fortunately, the containers did not sink into the sea, but they are being towed to the coast. And this community has invited the international community to come and investigate this matter. So far, we don’t have action. So this dumping, waste dumping, toxic dumping, nuclear waste dumping has been ongoing in Somalia since 1992.

AMY GOODMAN: When I read your article, Mohamed Abshir Waldo, it reminded me of a controversial memo that was leaked from the World Bank—this was when Lawrence Summers, now the chief economic adviser, was the chief economist at the World Bank—in which it said, “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted.” He said he was being sarcastic.

MOHAMED ABSHIR WALDO: Actually, the more formal official concerned with this UN habitat has also confirmed in various reports that this has been dumped in Somalia. The special representative of the Secretary-General, Ould-Abdullah, who is now working with the Somali authorities, has also, I think, made a statement to that effect. So it is very well known. It’s not something hidden. It’s not something we are making up. The world knows, but it doesn’t do anything about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Mohamed Abshir Waldo, thank you for joining us, a consultant in Kenya, speaking to us from Mombasa.

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14. April 2009 by admin.

Yet another piece from the only independent, non-corporate news site that matters: Democracynow.Org. 

Following is an interview with Noam Chomsky on domestic and foreign affairs and on how advertisers awarded the Obama campaign with the award for best marketing campaign of 2008. It’s long but well-worth reading.  Unless, of course, you prefer to stay in the Matrix…:

Noam Chomsky on the Global Economic Crisis, Healthcare, US Foreign Policy and Resistance to American Empire

Part II of our conversation with MIT professor and author Noam Chomsky on the global economic crisis, healthcare, the media, US foreign policy, the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire, and more.

“As far as policy is concerned, unless [Obama] is under a lot of pressure from activist sectors, he’s not going to go beyond what he’s presented himself as in actual policy statements or cabinet choices and so on: a centrist Democrat [who’s] going to basically continue Bush’s polices, maybe in a more modulated way,” says Chomsky. [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Noam Chomsky, author and Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for over half a century. Among his many dozens of books are Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Manufacturing Consent, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, a conversation with one of the most important dissident intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky, on the global economic crisis, healthcare, the media, US foreign policy, the expanding wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resistance to American empire. Noam Chomsky is a world-renowned linguist, philosopher, social critic, and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Among his many books over the past few decades are Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and Human Rights and American Foreign Policy. There’s a great collection of his work, just out now, edited by Anthony Arnove, called The Essential Chomsky.

I spoke to Noam Chomsky earlier this month when we were on the road in Boston. This is Part II of our conversation. I began by asking him to talk about the current economic meltdown.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, let’s start with G20. If you look at the Financial Times, the world’s major business journal, the day before the G20 meeting, they had a section on it, and they pointed out, I think correctly, that the main purpose is to present a picture of harmony and agreement. It doesn’t matter what you do, but make it look as if we’re all together on this. Now, there are sharp splits about how to approach the issue, but you have to make it look as if we’re all together. That’s pretty much what happened.

Now, in the communiqué, which you read before, the crucial word was “voluntary.” So, the countries there are supposed to voluntarily choose to do x, y and z. Well, that means we couldn’t make an agreement. So we’ll call it voluntary agreement.

Now, there was one point on which they agreed: a sharp recapitalization of the International Monetary Fund; pour a lot of money into the IMF. That’s a pretty dubious move. I mean, the record of the IMF has—the IMF is more or less a branch of the US Treasury, even though it has a European director. Its past role has been extremely destructive. In fact, its American US executive director captured its role when she described it as “the credit community’s enforcer,” meaning if a third world dictator incurs a huge debt—people didn’t, but the dictator did; say, Suharto in Indonesia—and then the debt defaults, the lenders, who have made plenty of money because it was a risky loan so they get high interest and so on, they have to be protected, meaning not by the dictator, by the people of Indonesia, who are subjected to harsh structural adjustment programs so that they can pay back the debt, which they didn’t incur, so that we can be compensated, rich Westerners can be compensated. So that’s the IMF, the credit community’s enforcer, a very destructive role in the third world. Now it’s to be recapitalized.

Now, there’s discussion about this, and it’s interesting. You can read it in the financial pages. The supporters of the recapitalization say, “Well, the IMF has changed its spots. It’s going to be different from now on. We realize that it had this terrible role, but now it’s going to be different.” Well, is there any reason to believe it will be different? In fact, if you look today, it’s quite striking to see the advice that the Western powers are following, the programs that they’re following, and compare them to the instructions given to the third world.

So, say, take Indonesia again. Indonesia had a huge financial crisis about ten years ago, and the instructions were the standard ones: “Here is what you have to do. First, pay off your debts to us. Second, privatize, so that we can then pick up your assets on the cheap. Third, raise interest rates to slow down the economy and force the population to suffer, you know, to pay us back.” Those are the regular instructions the IMF is still giving them.

What do we do? Exactly the opposite. We forget about the debt, let it explode. We reduce interest rates to zero to stimulate the economy. We pour money into the economy to get even bigger debts. We don’t privatize; we nationalize, except we don’t call it nationalization. We give it some other name, like “bailout” or something. It’s essentially nationalization without control. So we pour money into the institutions. We lectured the third world that they must accept free trade, though we accept protectionism.

Take the “too big to fail” principle, which the House committee is discussing today. But what does “too big to fail” mean? “Too big to fail” is an insurance policy. It’s a government insurance policy. Government means the public pays, which says, “You can take huge risks and make plenty of profit, and if anything goes wrong, we’ll bail you out.” That’s “too big to fail.” Well, that’s extreme protectionism. It gives US corporations like Citigroup an enormous advantage over others, like any other kind of protection.

But we don’t allow the third world to do that. I mean, they’ve got to privatize, so that we can pick up their assets. Now, these are happening side by side. Now, here’s the instructions for you, the poor people; here’s the policies for us, the rich people. Exactly the opposite. Is there any reason to think the IMF is going to change it?

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think President Obama is any different than President Bush when it comes to the economy? And if you were in the Congress, would you have voted for the bailouts and the stimulus packages?

NOAM CHOMSKY: He’s different. I mean, first of all, there’s a rhetorical difference. But we have to distinguish the first and the second Bush terms. They were different. I mean, the first Bush term was so arrogant and abrasive and militaristic and dismissive of everyone that they offended, they antagonized even allies, close allies, and US prestige in the world plummeted to zero. Now, the second Bush administration was more—moved more toward the center in that respect, not entirely, but more, so some of the worst offenders, like Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, were thrown out. I mean, they couldn’t throw out Dick Cheney, because he was the administration, so they couldn’t get rid of him. He stayed, but the others, a lot of them, left. And they moved towards a somewhat more normal position.

And Obama is carrying that forward. He’s a centrist Democrat. He never really pretended to be anything else. And he’s moving towards a kind of a centrist position. He’s very popular in Europe, not so much because of him, but because he’s not Bush. So there is the kind of rhetoric that the European leaders and, in fact, the European population tend to accept. In fact, you know, even in the Middle East, where you’d think people would know better, they accept the illusions. And they are illusions, because there’s nothing to back them up. So, yes, he is different from Bush.

Same—on the economy, well, you know, the current Obama-Geithner plan is not very different from the Bush-Paulson plan. I mean, somewhat different, but circumstances have changed. So, of course, it’s somewhat different. But it’s still based on the principle that we have to—somehow, the taxpayer has to rescue the institutions intact. They have to remain intact, including the people who, you know, destroyed the economy. In fact, they are the ones who Obama picked to fix it up.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Like Larry Summers, for example, who is now his chief economic adviser. I mean, he was Secretary of Treasury under Bill Clinton. His great achievement was to prevent Congress from regulating derivatives, exotic financial instruments. Well, that’s one of the main factors that led to the crisis.

His kind of senior adviser, one of the first, was Robert Rubin, who was Secretary of Treasury right before Summers. His main achievement—many achievements, like what he did to Indonesia and the third world, but here, his main achievement was to lead the way to revoke the Glass-Steagall legislation from the New Deal, which protected commercial banks from risky investments. It broke down those barriers. Immediately after having done this, he left the government, joined Citigroup as a director, and they began to make huge profits, including him, from picking up insurance companies and so on and making very risky loans, relying on the “too big to fail” doctrine, meaning if we get in trouble, the taxpayer will bail us out, which is just what’s happening, taxpayers now pouring tens of billions of dollars into rescuing Citigroup.

Well, these are the advisers who were supposed to fix up the system. Tim Geithner was right in the middle of this. He was head of the New York Federal Reserve, so, yes, he was supervising these actions. Now, you know, you can argue about whether they’re doing the right thing or the wrong thing, but are these the people who should be fixing up the system?

Actually, the business press just had some interesting things to say about this. Bloomberg News, you know, main business press, had an article in which they reviewed the records of the people who Obama invited to his economic summit. I think it must have been last November or December. They just reviewed the record. I think there were a couple dozen of them. People on the—you know, people like, say, Stiglitz, Krugman, they were never even allowed close to it, let alone anyone from the left or labor and so on, given token representation. So they went through the records, and they concluded that these people should not be invited to fix up the economy. Most of them should be getting subpoenas because of their record of accounting fraud, malpractice and so on, and helping bring about the current crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Noam Chomsky. We’ll continue the conversation in a minute. If you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to my conversation with Noam Chomsky about the economic crisis and how the Obama administration is handling it.

AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think Obama chose to surround himself?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Because those are his beliefs. I mean, his support comes from the—his constituency is basically the financial institutions. Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are the main funders for both—you know, I mean, core funders for both parties, but considerably more to Obama than McCain.

You can learn a lot from campaign contributions. In fact, one of the best predictors of policy around is Thomas Ferguson’s investment theory of politics, as he calls it—very outstanding political economist—which essentially—I mean, to say it in a sentence, he describes elections as occasions in which groups of investors coalesce and invest to control the state. And he takes a look at the formation of campaign contributors, and it gives you a surprisingly good prediction of what policies are going to be. It goes back a century, New Deal and so on. So, yeah, it can predict pretty well what Obama is going to do. There’s nothing surprising about this. It’s the norm in what’s called political democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you have let Citibank, would you have let Citigroup, would do have let the AIG fail?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are other possibilities. So, the government could just take over the viable parts. And parts of them are functioning; parts are dysfunctional, like the toxic—what they call the toxic asset parts, you know, the financial manipulations.

Well, one thing you could do, which has been suggested by a number of economists like Dean Baker, just take over the good parts, essentially nationalize them, put them under public control. And “nationalize” means public control, at least if you have a democracy. Not here, but if you had a functioning democracy, it would mean let them be under public control, and the parts that are responsible for the huge losses, just let them go off by themselves. In fact, that would be the way of taking care of the AIG bonuses that everyone’s screaming about. In fact, as Baker pointed out, just spin off the parts that were involved in financial manipulations and caused the crisis, let them go bankrupt and let the executives try to get the bonuses from a bankrupt firm, OK, with no legislation necessary. That’s what should be done with Citigroup.

And in fact, it’s interesting, it’s kind of happening. You know, after the breakdown of Glass-Steagall, they did bring in—they made use of it, under Rubin’s direction, among others, to take—bring in insurance companies and other risky investors. Now they’re divesting them. And they’re going in the direction of becoming, you know, commercial bank.

Now, incidentally, this is not the first time this has happened. Paul Volcker is on the news today, you know, saying, “Let’s slow down,” and so on. Well, he’s the one who, under Reagan, who helped bail out Citigroup last time they crashed. At that time they were Citibank. They had followed World Bank and IMF instructions and lent huge amounts of money to Latin America and were assured by the World Bank that it’s all fine, you know, markets will take care of it, etc. Well, in a crash, Paul Volcker came in. He raised interest rates very sharply. Third world countries, whose payments are tied to US interest rates, couldn’t pay their debts. The IMF moved in, took care of it, and essentially recapitalized Citibank. That’s the way the system works: you make risky loans, you make a lot of money, and if you get into trouble, we’re here to bail you out, namely the taxpayer.

AMY GOODMAN: And how do the Republicans differ from the Democrats in this? What do you make of—do you see it as just a minor footnote that Republicans, or some of the governors like Palin, like Jindal—

NOAM CHOMSKY: There’s a difference.

AMY GOODMAN: —are saying they’re not going to take stimulus money?

NOAM CHOMSKY: There’s a difference. I mean, we basically are a kind of a one-party state. I think C. Wright Mills must have pointed this out fifty years ago. It’s a business party, but it has factions—Democrats and Republicans—and they’re different. They have somewhat different constituencies and different policies. And if you look over the years, the population has—the majority of the population has tended to make out better under Democrats than Republicans; the very wealthy have tended to make out better under Republicans than Democrats. So they’re business parties, but they’re somewhat different, and the differences can have an effect. However, fundamentally, they’re pretty much along the same lines.

So take, say, the current financial crisis. Actually, it began under Carter. The late Carter administration is the one that began—was pushing for financialization of the economy, you know, huge growth of speculative financial capital, deregulation, and so on. Reagan carried it much further, and Clinton continued it. And then, with Bush, it kind of went off the rails.

So there are differences, but differences within a pretty narrow spectrum. And anyone who’s a little off the spectrum, like Nobel laureates in economics who are a couple of millimeters off the spectrum, they’re basically on the outside. You can interview them, but they don’t show up at the economic summit.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the global economy and our own economy relate to the issue of war and US foreign policy?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, actually, you had a pretty good interview with Joseph Stiglitz about that a couple of months ago, in which he discussed the relationship of—he was talking about the Iraq war. And as you’ll recall, he pointed out correctly that the Iraq war, which, first of all, is going to cost trillions of dollars, also had the effect of sharply increasing the price of oil, predictably. And as he pointed out, we could sort of paper that over for a while by a housing bubble, so there was a huge housing bubble which anyone with eyes open could see. I mean, for a century, housing prices had sort of tracked the economy, GDP; then, all of a sudden, they shot way beyond the trend line, which means there’s a bubble, and it’s going to burst, and you get into trouble. But the housing bubble, which was supervised by Alan Greenspan and with the Democrats—actually, it started under Clinton—it replaced the tech bubble under Clinton, and it gave an illusion of prosperity, which—so you didn’t see the effects of the rise in oil prices, which went very high. But if you trace all the connections, yes, there’s a clear connection, as he pointed out, between the war and the economic crisis.

And in fact, it’s deeper than that. The US is just in a class by itself in military expenses. It basically matches the rest of the world, and it’s far more advanced. Well, that’s drawn from somewhere. You know, that’s money that’s not being used to develop the economy.

Now, in fact, you have to add a footnote here, because part of the very high level of US violation of free trade principles is that the economy itself is based on military spending to a substantial extent. So the modern information revolution—computers, the internet, fancy software and so on—most of that comes straight out of the Pentagon. My own university, MIT, was one of the places where all of this was developed under Pentagon contracts in the 1950s and the 1960s.

In fact, that’s another critical part of the way the economy works. The public pays the costs and takes the risk of economic development, and if anything works, maybe decades later, it’s handed over to private enterprise to make the profits. And that’s a core element of the economy. Of course, we don’t permit the third world to do that. That’s considered a violation of free trade when they do it. But it’s the way our economy works. And it’s kind of complementary to the “too big to fail” doctrine of protectionism for financial institutions. But the general—we do not have a capitalist economy. We have kind of a state capitalist economy in which the public has a role: pay the costs, take the risks, bail out if they get into trouble. And the private sector has a role: make profit, and then turn to the public if you get into trouble.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you extend that to healthcare?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, healthcare is a dramatic case. I mean, for decades, the healthcare issue has been right at the top of domestic concerns, for very good reasons. The US has the most dysfunctional healthcare system in the industrial world, has about twice the per capita costs and some of the worst outcomes. It’s also the only privatized system. And if you look closely, those two things are related. And the privatized system is highly inefficient: a huge amount of administration, bureaucracy, supervision, you know, all kinds of things. It’s been studied pretty carefully.

Now, the public has had an opinion about this for decades. A considerable majority want a national healthcare system, like other industrial countries have. They usually say a Canadian-style system, not because Canada is the best, but at least you know that Canada exists. Nobody says an Australian-style system, which is much better, because who knows anything about that? But something like what’s sometimes called Medicare Plus, like extend Medicare to the population.

Well, up until—it’s interesting. Up until the year 2004, that idea was described, for example, by the New York Times as politically impossible and lacking political support. So, maybe the public wants it, but that’s not what counts as political support. The financial institutions are opposed, the pharmaceutical institutions are opposed, so it’s not—no political support. Well, in 2008, for the first time, the Democratic candidates—first Edwards, then the others—began to move in the direction of what the public has wanted, not there, but in that direction.

So what happened between 2004 and 2008? Well, public opinion didn’t change. It’s been this way for decades. What changed is that manufacturing industry, a big sector of the economy, has recognized that it’s being severely harmed by the highly inefficient privatized health system. So, General Motors said that it costs them over a thousand dollars more to produce a car in Detroit than across the border in Windsor, Canada. And, you know, when manufacturing industry becomes concerned, then things become politically possible, and they begin to have political support. So, yes, in 2008, there’s some discussion of it.

Now, you know, this is very revealing insight into how American democracy functions and what is meant by the term “political support” and “politically possible.” Again, this should be headlines. Will a proposal come that approaches what the public wants? Well, we’re already getting the backlash, strong backlash. And what private healthcare systems are claiming is that this is unfair. The government is so much more efficient that they’ll be driven—there’s no level playing field if the government gets into it, which is true.

AMY GOODMAN: If you had a public and a private plan.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: If it were like Medicare.

NOAM CHOMSKY: If you had them side by side—

AMY GOODMAN: Most people go for Medicare—

NOAM CHOMSKY: —they will.

AMY GOODMAN: —but if you wanted to go for a private plan, you could.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, if you could. But they’re not—they say, “Well, we can’t compete.” For good reasons. I mean, in every country except—industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That’s one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries. Well, they could—the Pentagon can use purchasing power to negotiate prices for, you know, paper clips or something, but, by law, the government is not permitted to do that in the case of healthcare. Well, if you had Medicare Plus, they would, and that would drive down drug prices, and the private industries can’t compete.

AMY GOODMAN: FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, did a study of the week leading up to the White House healthcare summit of the networks and how they were covering single payer, the issue of like Medicare Plus, and I think they found that absolutely—that almost—there was almost no representation in the media of a single-payer advocate—

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —and almost the only mention was someone blasting single payer.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, yeah. That’s because it has no political support; only the majority of the public. It’s the same as the media commentary in 2004. In fact, if you take a look back at the end of the last electoral campaign, Kerry-Bush campaign, in October 2004, right before the election, there was a debate on domestic issues. I think it was maybe October 28th or so. Just take a look—read the New York Times report of it the next day. It was very dramatic. It said Kerry never brought up the idea of any government involvement in healthcare, not, you know, Medicare Plus, but any government involvement, because it is not politically possible and lacks political support—just the population. Well, that—

AMY GOODMAN: What studies show you the population wants this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I mean, there’s been poll after poll, goes back, in fact—

AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you think is going to break through?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s a problem of the general dysfunction of formal democracy. I mean, there’s a very substantial gap between public opinion and public policy on a host of major issues. And on many of these issues, both parties are well to the right of the public, international and domestic.

Incidentally, that’s one reason why elections are run the way they are. Elections are run as marketing extravaganzas, and that’s not kept secret. So the advertising industry gives an award every year for best marketing campaign of the year. For 2008, they gave it to Obama. He beat out, I think, Apple Computer. And if you look at the comments of financial—of advertising executives, PR executives, they were euphoric. In fact, they said—you can read it in the Financial Times, business press—they said, you know, “We’ve been marketing candidates like commodities ever since Reagan, but this is the best we’ve ever done. It’s going to change the atmosphere in corporate boardrooms. We have a new style of selling things, you know, the Obama style, you know, soaring rhetoric, hope and change, and so on.” Yeah, that’s true.

And if you look at the campaigns themselves, they’re designed essentially by the advertising industry to sell the commodity—it happens to be a candidate—and they’re pretty carefully designed so that you marginalize issues and you focus on what are called “qualities.” In Obama’s case, you know, soaring rhetoric and so on; in Bush’s case, a nice guy and like to have a beer with him and so on. That’s the kind of thing you focus on. Where do they stand on issues? Well, the public is mostly uninformed. I haven’t seen current polls on 2008, but the 2004 election, where there were polls shortly after, showed the public had almost no idea what Bush’s stand was. In fact, a majority of Bush voters thought that he supported the Kyoto Protocol, because they support it, and he’s a nice guy, so he must support it.

And elections are designed that way, and it makes good sense. I mean, the people who run the elections, they read the polls, and very carefully, in fact. In fact, they mostly the design them for their own interest. And they know that the parties are to the right of the public, so you better—on a large number of issues, including crucial ones like Iran and others—so you better keep issues off the table, which is what’s done. So what the—healthcare is a dramatic case of it, but it’s only one instance.

AMY GOODMAN: Renowned linguist Noam Chomsky, speaking to me in Boston last week. We will return to the last part of our conversation after this break. You can get a copy of the full two parts by going to democracynow.org. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: We return now to the last part of my conversation with leading American intellectual and anti-imperialist critic Noam Chomsky.

AMY GOODMAN: The whole issue of populist rage, Noam Chomsky, actually, do you think that this rage is going to boil over as the unemployment figures rise?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very hard to predict those things. I mean, it has a potentially positive side, like it could be like the activism of the 1930s or the 1960s, which ended up making it a more civilized society in many ways, or it could be like an unfortunate precedent that quickly comes to mind. I’ve written about it.

Take a look at Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the absolute peak of Western civilization, in the arts and the sciences. It was regarded as a model of democracy and so on. I mean, ten years later, it was the depths of barbarism. That was a quick transition. “The descent into barbarism” it’s sometimes called in the scholarly literature.

Now, if you listen to early Nazi propaganda, you know, end of the Weimar Republic and so on, and you listen to talk radio in the United States, which I often do—it’s interesting—there’s a resemblance. And in both cases, you have a lot of demagogues appealing to people with real grievances.

Grievances aren’t invented. I mean, for the American population, the last thirty years have been some of the worst in economic history. It’s a rich country, but real wages have stagnated or declined, working hours have shot up, benefits have gone down, and people are in real trouble and now in very real trouble after the bubbles burst. And they’re angry. And they want to know, “What happened to me? You know, I’m a hard-working, white, God-fearing American. You know, how come this is happening to me?”

That’s pretty much the Nazi appeal. The grievances were real. And one of the possibilities is what Rush Limbaugh tells you: “Well, it’s happening to you because of those bad guys out there.” OK, in the Nazi case, it was the Jews and the Bolsheviks. Here, it’s the rich Democrats who run Wall Street and run the media and give everything away to illegal immigrants, and so on and so forth. It sort of peaked during the Sarah Palin period. And it’s kind of interesting. It’s been pointed out that of all the candidates, Sarah Palin is the only one who used the phrase “working class.” She was talking to the working people. And yeah, they’re the ones who are suffering. So, there are models that are not very attractive.

AMY GOODMAN: And she very much is being talked about as a leader, really, of the Republican Party.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, she was kind of a model. You know, the talk radio mob went crazy over her. And one shouldn’t demean it. You know, they describe themselves—it’s really worth listening to: “We’re fly-by country. You know, they don’t care about us, those rich Democrats on the East Coast and the West Coast who are all, you know, interested in gay rights and giving things away to illegal immigrants and so on. They don’t care about us, the hard-working, God-fearing people, so we’ve got to somehow rise up and take over and elect Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh or someone like that.”

As I say, the precedents are not attractive. Now, if—now even before the next presidential, if in the next congressional election the economy has not begun to recover, this kind of populist rage could boil over and could have very dangerous consequences. This country has a long history of being kind of ridden by fear. It’s a very frightened country. This goes back to colonial times.

I mean, we’re very lucky that we have never had an honest demagogue. I mean, the demagogues we’ve had are so corrupt that they never got anywhere—you know, Nixon, McCarthy, you know, Jimmy Swaggart and others. So they were kind of destroyed by their own corruption.

But suppose we had an honest demagogue, you know, a Hitler type, who was not corrupt. There’s probably—it could be unpleasant. There’s a background of concern and fear, tremendous fear, and searching for some answer, which they’re not getting from the establishment. “Who’s responsible for my plight?” You know, and that can be exploited. And unless there’s active, effective organizing and education, it’s dangerous.

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama so far?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Frankly, I never had any expectations. I wrote about it over a year ago. I thought then, and I think it’s been confirmed, that he’s essentially a centrist Democrat. He’s moving back—I mean, the Bush administration was kind of off the spectrum, especially the first term. So he’s moving things back toward the center with a kind of a public posture, which was recognized by the advertising industry. That’s why they gave him the award for best marketing campaign, which—but as far as policy is concerned, unless he’s under a lot of pressure from activist sectors, he’s not going to go beyond what he’s presented himself as in actual policy statements or cabinet choices and so on: a centrist Democrat, going to basically continue Bush’s policies, maybe in a more modulated way.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see Afghanistan becoming an ever-expanded war in the next decade or so? Do you—now we’re talking about doubling the US troops there.

NOAM CHOMSKY: No, that’s the way Obama and the Pentagon see it. In fact, they say so: this is going to be a long war, it’s going to be extended, the US is going to take over the military side, and it’s going to expand it, it’s going to expand into Pakistan. And, I mean, we’ll talk about development, but the focus will be on the military. Obama, right now, is trying to get NATO to cooperate, but recognizing that they’re not going to send military forces. The populations are opposed.

AMY GOODMAN: Canada is pulling out.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, Canada’s pulling out, and the others—maybe Holland has made a termination date, but we’ll at least ask them to come in and sort of help out on the civilian side. That’s their job. It’s the famous line of, I guess it was Robert Kagan: you know, “they’re Venus, we’re Mars.” So we’ll move in like Mars and take care of the military side. You know, we’re good at killing people. And they can come in and sort of put on the band-aids and make it look like something good is happening. It’s not the right direction.

AMY GOODMAN: The unmanned drones bombing Pakistan?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, drones. And that has effects. So a lot of the worst fighting recently has been in the Bajaur province, right on the border. It’s in Pakistan’s side. And militants in the area have reported to the press that part of the reason is that an American drone attack hit a madrasa, a school, and killed about eighty people. Well, you know, they’re “uncivilized barbarians”; they sort of don’t like that. So they reacted. And now, one of the militants has said, “OK, we’re going to bomb the White House,” which is considered totally outrageous. But, you know, if we kill as we like, there’s going to be a reaction.

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you see American empire in ten, twenty, thirty years?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Prediction in human affairs is a very low—has very little success, too many complications. The United States, I think, will come out of the economic crisis, very likely, as the dominant superpower. There’s a lot of talk about China and India, and it’s real, they’re changing, but they’re just not in the same league. I mean, both China and India have enormous internal problems that the West doesn’t face.

You get kind of a picture of this by looking at the Human Development Index of the United Nations. The last time I looked, India was about 125th or something. And I think China was about eightieth. And China would be worse, I think, if it wasn’t such a closed society. In India, you sort of get better data, so you can see what’s happening. China is kind of closed. You don’t see what’s going on in the peasant areas, which are in turmoil, you know. They have environmental problems. They have huge—hundreds of millions of people are kind of like at the edge of starvation.

We don’t have—you know, we have problems, but not those problems. And even the industrial growth, which is there—you know, for part of the population, there’s been improvement. But when you take, say, India, where we know more, in the areas where high-tech industries developed—and it’s pretty impressive. I’ve visited some of the labs in Hyderabad. You know, it’s as good or better than MIT. But right nearby, the rate of peasant suicides is going up, very sharply, in fact. And it’s the same source. It’s the neoliberal policies, which privilege a certain sector of the population and a certain—and let the rest take care of themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the rise of progressives in Latin America?

NOAM CHOMSKY: That’s important. I mean, Latin America, for the first time in 500 years, is moving towards a degree of independence and a kind of integration, which is a prerequisite for independence, and also at least is beginning to face some of its massive internal problems. I mean, Latin America has probably the worst inequality in the world. There’s a wealthy sector, small wealthy sector, which is extremely rich, but they have—their tradition is that they have no responsibility to the country, so they send their capital to Zurich. You know, they have their second homes in the Riviera, and their children study in Oxford or whatever. This is beginning to be faced in different ways, but it’s sort of happening all over the continent. And they are beginning to integrate. The United States obviously doesn’t like it. In fact, it’s barely reported most of the time.

So there was a very interesting case last September, when President Morales in Bolivia—Bolivia is, in my opinion at least, probably the most democratic country in the world. Nobody says that, but if you look at what happened in the last couple of years, there were huge, popular, mass organizations of the most repressed population in the hemisphere, the indigenous population, which for the first time ever has entered the political arena significantly and were able to elect a president from their own ranks and one who doesn’t give instructions to his army, but who’s following policies that were largely produced by the population. So he’s their representative, in a sense in which democracy is supposed to work.

And they know the issues. It’s not like our elections. They know the issues. They’re serious issues: control over resources, economic justice, cultural rights, and so on. You can say they’re right or wrong, but at least it’s functioning.

Now, the elites that have traditionally ruled the country, of course, don’t like it. And they’re threatening virtual secession. And, of course, the United States is backing them, as the media are. And it got to the point last summer, I suppose, where it led to real violence.

Well, there was a meeting of UNASUR, the Union of South American Republics—that’s all of South America—a meeting in Chile, Santiago, Chile. And it came out with a declaration, important declaration, in which it supported President Morales and opposed the—condemned the violence being led by the quasi-secessionist forces. And Morales responded, thanking them for their gesture of support, but also saying, correctly, that this is the first time in 500 years that South America is beginning to take its affairs in its own hands without the intervention of foreign powers, primarily the US.

Well, that was so important that I don’t think it was even reported here. I mean, the meeting was known, so you see vague references to it. But it’s an indication of developments that are taking place in various ways.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, you’ve just hit eighty. We just have a few minutes to go. And how does it feel?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I have a few years to go. I don’t think about it much.

AMY GOODMAN: But as you reflect, talking about these huge social movements, cataclysmic times in the world, your life experience, what gives you hope?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there’s both hope and fear. I mean, I’m old enough to have grown up in the Depression. And some of my memories—I didn’t understand that much at the time—childhood memories, are listening to Hitler’s speeches. I didn’t understand them, but I could sense the reaction of my parents, you know, and had a feeling of fear, you know, a tremendous fear. In fact, the first article I wrote was in 1939, when I was in fourth grade, and it was about the expansion of fascism over Europe, a kind of a dark cloud that may envelop everything. And as I mentioned before, I have some of those same concerns now.

On the other hand, there’s been tremendous progress. The country is far more civilized than it was, say, forty years ago, thanks to the activism of the ’60s and its aftermath. And some of the most important developments were after the ’60s, like, say, the feminist movement, which has probably had more of an impact on this society than any other. It’s mostly post-’60s. The solidarity movements, which are unique in the history of imperialism, there’s never been anything like them. That’s from the ’80s. The global justice movements, what’s called anti-globalization—shouldn’t be—that’s, you know, the ’90s and this century. These were all very positive developments.

They haven’t changed the institutions. In fact, the institutions have reacted by becoming harsher, not surprisingly. But they’ve changed the culture. I mean, take, say, the 2008 election. I mean, I didn’t like the candidates, as I’ve made clear. On the other hand, forty years ago, or maybe ten years ago, you couldn’t have imagined that the Democratic Party would have two candidates, an African American and a woman. OK, that’s a sign of the civilizing effect of the activism of the ’60s and everything that followed.

Well, that can be mobilized. In fact, it’s already. If you count the number of activists in the country, it’s, I suspect, well beyond the ’60s, except maybe for a very brief moment at the peak of the antiwar movement. OK, that can be a basis for proceeding onward. So, that’s a reason for hope.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, our condolences on the loss of Carol.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Your life partner, someone you knew—well, you’re eighty—what, for seventy-seven years?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, actually. Not easy to face.

AMY GOODMAN: What gives you the strength to go on after Carol?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the kind of thing you do, for example. That makes a difference.

AMY GOODMAN: And you have a wonderful family.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, our condolences to you—

NOAM CHOMSKY: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: —and your kids. Noam Chomsky, thanks so much.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at MIT, leading public intellectual of our day. If you’d like to get a copy of the full interview, part one and today’s part two, with Noam Chomsky, you can go to our website at democracynow.org.

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13. April 2009 by admin.

Democracy Now is, in my opinion the best source for unbiased news and the best alternative I’ve yet come across to the corporate media.

Below is a great 03/11/08 interview between Amy Goodman, the host of DemocracyNow, and Dr. Quentin Young, a great supporter of transforming our current private health care system into a single payer government run system.  Though he is a friend of President Obama, he has not been invited to Obama’s summit on health care transformation.  Obama is not in favor of a single payer health care system, apparently, despite doctors and nurses and most of the American public being supportive of such a system.

His statistics, if true (and I have no reason to believe they are not) are stunning:

Over a million Americans go bankrupt due to medical bills each year, and there’s a new study, incidentally, that will show that 50 percent of the bankruptcies are due to health costs; it will be 60 percent.

It’s definitely worth reading–I’ve bolded some of what i think are key sections:

Dr. Quentin Young, Longtime Obama Confidante and Physician to MLK, Criticizes Admin’s Rejection of Single-Payer Healthcare

While the Obama administration claims “all options are on the table” for healthcare reform, it’s already rejected the solution favored by most Americans, including doctors: single-payer universal healthcare. We speak with Dr. Quentin Young, perhaps the most well-known single-payer advocate in America. He was the Rev. Martin Luther King’s doctor when he lived in Chicago and a longtime friend and ally of Barack Obama. But he was noticeably not invited to Obama’s White House healthcare summit last week. [includes rush transcript]

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Guest:

Dr. Quentin Young, National Coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program.

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• Physicians for a National Health Program
• "Put Single-Payer on the Table" (Amy Goodman’s column)

AMY GOODMAN: The chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Montana Democrat Max Baucus, has also plainly said single payer is off the table. I want to play a clip of what he had to say at an event recently. He was asked why single payer was not being considered as an option.

UNIDENTIFIED: I know that in the Helena Independent Record, you were quoted as saying that single-payer healthcare is off the table. I’d like to know your reasons for putting single-payer healthcare off the table and intending instead to a mandatory insurance payment—or, I’m sorry, purchase by Americans, which is an inefficient way of guaranteeing healthcare to everyone.

SEN. MAX BAUCUS: Well, I just have to make a judgment. And I think at this time in this country, single payer is not going to get even to first base in the Congress. I just—and we’re also—we’re a big—we’re a big country. It’s—you know, we’re a battleship. We’re an ocean liner. We’re not a PT boat. We’re not a speedboat. It takes time to turn those big, big ships. You just can’t just turn them overnight. And we are—United States of America, we’re a different country. We’re constituted differently than European countries, than Canada and other countries. We’re a younger country, where there’s more of an entrepreneurial sense in America than in those other countries. It’s kind of “go west, young man” in, you know, America and so forth.

So we’ve got to come up with our uniquely American result. An uniquely American result will be a combination of public and private insurance, but one in which everyone is covered. And just my judgment—and every member of Congress agrees with me, I think, at least those I’ve spoken with, that this is not the time to push for single payer. It may come down—it may come later. But it’s not going to happen in America, in my view. So I’m not going to waste my time pushing on something that isn’t going to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, seen as the most important figure on Capitol Hill around the issue of healthcare right now, the most powerful force with Senator Kennedy being ill.

Dr. Quentin is with us now from Chicago, national coordinator for Physicians for a National Health Program. He was Reverend Martin Luther King’s doctor when King was organizing in Chicago. He was a close ally of Barack Obama in Chicago. He wasn’t invited to the White House healthcare summit last week, but he is going to Washington tomorrow. Dr. Quentin Young, your response to Senator Baucus? And welcome.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, greetings, Amy.

He was naming the ways in which our country is supposedly different from other countries. He neglected one huge one: the millions of dollars that people like him receive from these huge vested interests in the health industry and how somehow that influences their certitude that America is not ready for decent healthcare guaranteed by the national government. It’s really a major tragedy, because time has run out, if even without the economic downturn, which is a very polite way to describe our present plight, we would have to have this reform; but with it, we will not economically, let alone medically, survive.

And it’s painful to have people in high places, like Senator Baucus, deny the democratic method of debating the pros and cons even of these various proposals. It is pitiful. And we have to, as has already been pointed out, get the American people outraged at this taking away of the right to decent healthcare in this richest, still richest, of all countries. So I have no pity for Senator Baucus’s position. It’s wrong, and we’re going to have to overcome it.

AMY GOODMAN: First, I want to congratulate you, Dr. Young. This past weekend, hundreds of people turned out for a big celebration. You’re eighty-five now. You had the Illinois governor, the new Illinois governor, there. You had three Congress members celebrating your life.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been a longtime friend of Barack Obama.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: How has he changed over the years?

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, Barack Obama, as we know, was a community organizer, a very lofty calling, in my book, and he made the decision, when the opportunity came, that he could get more done politically, and he accepted the nomination for the seat in the State Senate. It’s not that long ago, really. It’s about a six, eight years ago.

Barack Obama, in those early days—influenced, I hope, by me and others—categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got. And he said that on more than one occasion, and it represented the very high-grade intelligence we all know Barack has.

However, as his political fortunes went upward, including the campaign for presidency, the nomination and, finally, the election, he qualified his position from saying it’s the best system, but that given the past American history with employment-based healthcare, he would have a plan that—and he has put one forward—that encompasses other incremental approaches.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play what President Obama himself said about single payer and how his position appears to have changed. This is what he said back in June of 2003, before he was elected even to the US Senate.

STATE SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I happen to be a proponent of single-payer universal healthcare coverage. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent—14 percent—of its gross national product on healthcare, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim’s talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out: a single-payer healthcare plan, universal healthcare plan.

AMY GOODMAN: That was State Senator Obama. This is Senator Obama. He’s speaking more recently, when he was on the presidential campaign trail.

UNIDENTIFIED: …on what you were just addressing.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED: And why not single payer? Why not get the corporate—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED: —battling and the lobbyists out of the way—

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Right.

UNIDENTIFIED: —and just go to a single payer?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I’ve said this before. If I were designing a system from scratch, then I’d probably set up a single-payer system. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the terminology, single payer basically means that you’ve got one government-funded program. It doesn’t have to all be government-run, but it’s government-funded. Everybody—Medicare would be an example of a single-payer system, if everybody was in Medicare.

But the problem is we’re not starting from scratch. We’ve got a system in which most people have become accustomed to getting their health insurance through their employer. And for us to immediately transition from that, and given that a lot of people work for insurance companies, a lot of people work for HMOs—you’ve got a whole system of institutions that have been set up—making that transition in a rapid way, I think, would be very difficult. And people don’t have time to wait. They need relief now.

So, my attitude is, let’s build off the system that we’ve got. Let’s make it more efficient. We may be, over time, as we make the system more efficient and everybody is covered, decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Senator Obama on the presidential campaign trail. Dr. Quentin Young, what’s wrong with that?

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, it’s one of the few times when Barack has been dishonest. He knows and all America knows that our experience with employment-based insurance and these other Mickey Mouse things have been increasingly a total disaster. You have a $2.5 trillion industry with vested interests—the private hospitals that are for profit, the HMOs, the health insurance industry—making billions upon billions, and things getting worse. He knows and should act on the fact that time is running out.

The American people are hurting. Over a million Americans go bankrupt due to medical bills each year, and there’s a new study, incidentally, that will show that 50 percent of the bankruptcies are due to health costs; it will be 60 percent. So we have a worsening situation. And a man who wants to lead a country which is in great peril had best do some courageous things.

I really feel that we have to mount a national concern about this. As a doctor, up until a year ago, after sixty years of practice, I can testify that this system is—well, “broken” is a gross understatement. It’s wrecked. And it’s ruining people, and the public can’t put up with it anymore.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Quentin Young, explain. Over and over, you hear Senator Baucus, you hear President Obama, saying it’s not that they’re against this—at least Obama certainly was saying this—it’s that it’s impractical, and people won’t support it. What is the polling—what are the polling figures on single payer? We almost never see it discussed on television, unless an opponent brings it up.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, let me say, we have single payer in this country. It was enacted in 1965. It’s called Medicare. And it was put through the Congress by Lyndon Johnson. And then, overnight—overnight, in one year, the system was put in place, and it’s probably the best insurance program in the whole country. The seniors of this country are highly dependent on Medicare. It’s kept them from penury, and that’s—it was done in one year, Amy. No drag-out, no problems. All the things that people worried about just didn’t happen.

Now we’re talking about—somewhat more complicated, but not much—giving single payer to everybody in the country. It’s its simplicity that’s its virtue. It entails one source of payment. Doctors don’t have to wait, as they do so often presently. There’s no hassles. There’s people who will be unemployed; let’s concede, the vast army of people that are dedicated to denying care in the present insurance system will be no longer needed.

And we—our bill, House bill 676, sponsored, first of all, by Congressman Conyers, but with ninety-two supporters in the last Congress—we’re up to sixty in this. It’s extremely popular. This bill will, once enacted, will take a year at the most to fully implement, and then the huge burden of fear of getting sick, which is the plight of almost all America—it’s not a poor person’s problem any longer; it’s middle-class America. And it has to be changed. I wish somehow Barack could see this as the thing that will give dignity and grace to his tenure at the very beginning. It’s very important that this be enacted.

AMY GOODMAN: It seems that the single most important word that people are using is “choice,” that people want choice.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Yes. Indeed, they do. And indeed, they’re entitled to it. That choice is all but disappeared under the burden of private insurance schemes, which gives you limited panels. An employer, which has been vaunted minutes ago by President Obama—these employers change plans, and then you have to get brand new doctors. Continuity is lost. It’s a zoo.

The choice, under single payer, is total. The only limiting factor is the number of people a doctor may see. And that apart, your card is good for any program you approach, and it’s—choice is total. And it really is the only way to go.

Let me mention something that’s important enough to be underlined. Under the weight of this private insurance system, doctors have finished training with huge debts, $150,000 on average, and the specialties, as it’s worked out under a private system, are paying on average two to three times what primary care doctors get. Primary care is very simple. It’s family practitioners, pediatricians and general internists. You need about 60 percent of your doctors in that category to have a balanced system. Well, that’s been slipping away, and now we’re well under 50 percent of primary care doctors. And that has to be reversed, or no system will work. And increasingly, there’s large areas in this country where people cannot find a primary care doctor. And in almost every, certainly metropolitan area, there’s an excess of specialists. That has to be done with—

AMY GOODMAN: You say now, Dr. Young, that although the AMA during Roosevelt’s time prevented national health insurance from being passed, that the majority of doctors in America today are for single payer?

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Yes, and I’m saying that emphatically, Amy. A study, April 2008, a refereed study published in the very prestigious Annals of Internal Medicine had the very—for me, very happy return that 59 percent of America’s doctors now support a government-run national health insurance to pay for healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Dr. Young, because we just have a minute—

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: This brouhaha over the last week with the White House healthcare summit, 120 people, there were going to be no single-payer advocates. Congressman Conyers asked to go. At first, he was told no. He directly asked President Obama at a Congressional Black Caucus hearing. He asked to bring you and Marcia Angell—

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. You weren’t allowed to go. Do you have President Obama’s ear anymore? You have been an ally of his for years, for decades.

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, it’s mixed. I think we’re friends, certainly. At this gala that you mentioned, which was embarrassing, he did send a very complimentary letter. And I appreciate that, but I’d much rather have him enact single payer, to tell the truth. And we did—it’s fair to say, after a good deal of protest, I think we were told there was a—phones rang off the hook. They did allow our national president, Dr. Oliver Fein, to attend with Dr. Conyers—Congressman Conyers. That’s fine, but we need many more people representative of the American people at large to get this thing through the Congress, and Baucus, notwithstanding, be overruled.

AMY GOODMAN: There, tomorrow, you’re headed to Congress. You’re going to be meeting with a Senate group on this issue?

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: I am, indeed. I was invited. And there, let’s be candid. They don’t want a lot of single payer presence, but they can’t keep it out. Trade unions across the country, by the hundreds, have endorsed it. There are lay groups. By that, I mean non-professional groups. Nurses, the California Nurses/National Nurses Organizing Committee, are for it. It’s a very formidable list, Amy, of popularity. The American people understand it, and they want it, and we have to make it happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Quentin Young, I want to thank you for being with us, Physicians for a National Health—your group is called?

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Program.

AMY GOODMAN: Physicians for a National Health Program, pnhp.org. Russell Mokhiber, I want to thank him, Corporate Crime Reporter, his group, singlepayeraction.org. And Geri Jenkins, with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, nnoc.net. We’ll link to all of those sites. These are the voices that are not being heard in the media, and we’ll see how much they get heard on Capitol Hill.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

I submitted t-shirt slogans at Threadless. If you like them, please vote for them.

Slogan 1 — Capitalism = privatize profit + socialize debt

Slogan 2 — I’m an unreliable witness to my own existenceIf you have any you’d like to submit, go to Threadless.com (which has great t-shirts) and register. You can submit your own slogans and if picked, you win $500.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

WallStreetWatch.org is a great site that is trying to inform you, the public, about what is going on in Washington in regard to Wall Street, and what is going on on Wall Street itself. 

WSW has issued a great report, "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America" that you can access here as 3MB .pdf file that goes into great detail about what politicians did to enable the current collapse to happen (including many of the things that Bill Clinton did–unfortunately, many Democrats seem to think that the problems didn’t start until W. came to power, but nothing could be further from the truth), what Wall Street did to make it happen, and, perhaps most interestingly of all, which FiServs, Banks, Insurance companies, etc. contributed how much to which politicians over the last 10 years.

I spent a fair bit of time looking at the contributions by these companies to Obama, and it’s not hard to understand why his team is going relatively easy on these guys (and if you think that the banks are getting rough treatment from the gov’t, just look at the UK, where things are being done much more sensibly) when you see how beholdened Obama et al. are to these institutions.

Definitely try to read this report and support WallStreetWatch.  It’s doing a great job in its efforts to keep the light focused on these nefarious financiers and it needs to continue doing so on our behalf.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

I alluded to the fictitious company, ‘Cyberdyne’, in my earlier post about the HAL bionic suit.  For those of you who are Sci-Fi geeks or who just like the ‘Terminator’ film franchise, this is prior knowledge, but for the rest of my vast audience ; ) allow me to explain:  Cyberdyne Systems is a company that comes up with an AI that can manage the U.S. defenses.  It becomes sentient (never explained how, since circuit complexity by itself can’t induce consciousness, but oh well) and decides to wipe out all the people.  Since it controls missile launching systems, it fires nuclear missiles and wipes out most of humanity.  For those it can’t otherwise kill, it starts building ‘Terminator’ cyborgs (which have flesh on the outside and hard metals and circuits on the inside) and using these and ‘Hunter-killer’ machines to wipe out the remaining survivors.

Sounds like a great premise for a science fiction film franchise, right? You got it, and there have been 3 previous Terminator films and a new one about to be released, starting Christian Bale–you know, the guy who played Batman recently. 

Okay, you say, but what’s your point?  Well, the Navy is concerned that its computer systems may go rogue and turn on their masters, unless they are taught a warrior code.

If the idea of amoral super-intelligent machines destroying you and your city without a second thought makes you nervous (and it should) then just hope Microsoft isn’t programming these robots.

I tried to access the report itself but the Cal Poly server isn’t letting me for some reason.

Here’s the article:

From The London Times online:

February 16, 2009

Military’s killer robots must learn warrior code

Automatons revolt to form a dictatorship over humans in Asimov’s I, Robot

Leo Lewis

Read the report in full

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans. Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

Any sense of haste among designers may have been heightened by a US congressional mandate that by 2010 a third of all operational “deep-strike” aircraft must be unmanned, and that by 2015 one third of all ground combat vehicles must be unmanned.

“A rush to market increases the risk for inadequate design or programming. Worse, without a sustained and significant effort to build in ethical controls in autonomous systems . . . there is little hope that the early generations of such systems and robots will be adequate, making mistakes that may cost human lives,” the report noted.

A simple ethical code along the lines of the “Three Laws of Robotics” postulated in 1950 by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, will not be sufficient to ensure the ethical behaviour of autonomous military machines.

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics

1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

2 A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

Introduced in his 1942 short story Runaround

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12. April 2009 by admin.

While we hopefully won’t be hearing again about Sarah Palin, at least on the national stage, until 2012 (and hopefully not even then), she still continues to be governor of Alaska. and is featured in an article in this month’s Portfolio Magazine. As an aside, Conde Nast’s Portfolio Magazine is equivalent to the Vanity Fair of finance publications.  I enjoy reading it because, while it’s not as hard-core as The Economist or The Wall Street Journal it also is more entertaining.

The article focuses upon the natural gas pipelines, actually two of them, that are being built–one by the oil/gas companies themselves, the other by the pipeline builder but without cooperation from the actual suppliers of the gas–you know, the companies that would fill up the 2,000 mile long pipe with the actual revenue-generating substance.  Guess which one Palin backs? You got it, the one that Alaska has paid $500,000,000 to do a feasibility study for, but which lacks cooperation from any of the big 3 oil/gas companies.  Meanwhile, the big 3 oil companies are moving forward with plans for their own pipeline.

Palin claims that she has stared the oil companies down and is moving forward with the $40B (yes that’s $40 BILLION with a ‘B’) pipeline, yet the article indicates that she is living in a reality distortion field, because in interviews she claimed that the pipeline was underway, and yet it is not even close to being designed, much less built.

You can read the article at this URL.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

I think this video (which apparently was shot using a video camera looking through a broken Nikon digital still camera) does a good job of showing a photographer’s eye-view, so to speak. It was shot by Karen Abad.  Don’t know who she is other than via this video and some others she shot.  Her blog page is here.  Good work, Karen.

The Last Home Recording Upon Eager Eyes from Karen Abad loves Dinosaurs. on Vimeo.

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12. April 2009 by admin.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism is a great book by an economist, Cambridge  Professor Ha-Joon Chang, who can actually write well…meaning that he combines substantive discussions of economic principles with comprehensible prose that, while not electrifying, is clear and to the point.

Why is the book great? Because he exposes myths about capitalist free market systems which are so ingrained (at least in the United States), that they aren’t even questioned.  He does this in a relatively objective and dispassionate way.  For instance, he discusses the myth that businesses which are run as private enterprises are inherently better than those which are State-Owned Enterprises.  I don’t know how many so-called "Free-market capitalists" will say, reflexively, that government is incapable of running anything effectively.  Chang makes a solid case as to why some types of businesses should only be run by the State.

Also, he discusses what actually happened in history with respect to ‘free trade’ vs. what we’re now told happened. For instance, in his discussion of ‘gunboat diplomacy’, he discusses how British businesses used to deal heroin to China, even though it was illegal in China and this was known to the British.  When the Chinese seized heroin shipments in protest, the British navy came in and made war with China, at the request of the affected British businesses.  In the resulting settlement, as reparation, China gave Britain Hong Kong. 

You can buy this book via the portal below.  If you buy it here, I get 4% of the purchase price, and it costs you nothing extra.

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